I have attended and presented at quite a few Handheld Learning Conferences. Last year Handheld Learning 2010 was re-scheduled and evolved into Learning Without Frontiers 2011.
This is a large conference with over 2000 delegates expected on the free first day and a 1000 delegates for the other two days.
I am presenting a LAWRF session on the first day, which is a fringe session, in other words we have full control over what happens and is presented in that session. Last year (well 2009) we did a fringe event called HHECKL in which we did a Top Gear Cool Wall type session.
How this year’s session will work will depend on how many people we have attending! With it running alongside Jason Bradbury’s Dot Robot Show I suspect that we may have very few attendees, hoping to be proved wrong.
Following our session is Steve Wheeler’s EduPunk, hacking education session. Also that afternoon is Tony Vincent’s App Pecha Kucha.
The final session I will probably attend will be the TeachMeet, though probably not going to present.
There is more to the programme than what I have described, but these are the sessions I will probably attend. The next two days of the conference (or is it a festival) are packed and there looks like some interesting speakers.
I have always liked Posterous, I like how it is based around e-mail, how easy it is to send rich media to my Posterous blog. How it handles images and YouTube links and so much more.
Today we’re announcing Posterous Groups, a new service for communicating privately with your friends, family and colleagues.
Sharing privately with groups is broken right now – the default option remains the same as it was 10 years ago: Multi-attachment, inbox-cluttering emails. Other groups services have cropped up, but they are too complicated to set-up, handle rich media poorly and fall way short in the privacy department.
Posterous Groups is the simplest way to communicate with your group.
I am thinking this could be an alternative to Ning type groups that I have been members of for a while. It could also be used for learning groups across multiple institutions. I can also see a use for it for fringe events such as F-ALT or the Pelican Fringe.
Creating a group is as simple as sending an email. Just send an email to newgroup@posterous.com and you are off and running
No account sign up required. This means no more waiting for Mom to complete the signup process; instead, just add her email address and she’s in your group. Every time you post to the group, she’ll receive the full content as an email. She can reply directly to your email and everyone in the group gets her update.
Brilliant handling of rich media. To share photos, a video or audio file, just attach it to your email. All photos are displayed in your emails without attachments and the group’s threaded web view will automatically host and embed videos, audio files . . . any file that you send. Just send it to Posterous Groups and it will do the right thing.
Private is the default option. You have full control over who sees your photos and who participates in your group.
So with the ease of use of Posterous with the capable media capabilities I think that Posterous Groups could be really useful for educational institutions.
I did a similar post to this one last year, and two of the posts in that top ten are also in this year’s top ten!
A little more tricky to calculate this year as I changed hosts a few months back. These are the top ten posts from this blog (according to the stats) in terms of views. In reverse order…
This was a bit of a rant about how many practitioners and managers dismiss the institutional VLE and compare it to web tools and services that have “millions” in funding.
This sparked off a bit of a debate with a consensus that how you use the tool is generally considered more important than the functionality of the tool. Comments also recognised that a VLE does not live in isolation and that Web 2.0 tools and services can be used alongside and plugged into the institutional VLE.
Often practitioners need guidance on how to use the VLE and this blog posting was a summary of the work I had done with practitioners over the years I have been working with VLE technologies.
It was apparent from the comments that I wasn’t alone in doing this and various other models were referred to and linked to in the comments.
One of the key criticisms of the model was stage one and “LearningTechie” wrote an excellent blog post on this.
In April it was announced that Ning was to phase out their free service. I discussed how I thought this was a mistake and offered some other free alternatives.
I don’t have an issue with paying for premium services, I have a Flickr Pro account for example, however a free services does allow you to try and use it and see what you think. Prior to the announcement I was using Ning on an almost daily basis and found it an extremely useful service. Since the summer I have hardly even noticed it been used and haven’t used it myself at all. I suspect unless their business model is working really well, that Ning may at some point disappear.
This post is a key part of my ILT strategy and direction at Gloucestershire College and explains how we are trying a more holistic approach to the embedding of learning technologies and ensuring that all areas are covered by curriculum teams.
I posted this back in February and ten months later I am seeing that it is having an impact in some areas. So the next stage will be ensuring that all areas take it on board and link it in with their self-assessment.
Back in January 2010 we had the worst snow for forty years and I reflected on how ill-prepared we are in education when weather conditions and transport problems cause the physical closure of an institution and despite often having the technology in place, we still have a culture of closure and won’t (or can’t) use these technologies to overcome the problems of snow.
This resulted in many different comments and one result of this post was a symposium that took place at the Plymouth e-Learning Conference.
Back in April 2009 I posted how I thought Twitter would die. The fact that it hasn’t doesn’t mean it won’t. A controversial post that was still popular and resulted it taking its place in my top ten posts in 2010.
Do I still think Twitter will still die? Yes I do!
Posted before the release of the iPad, this video from Penguin books showed them what they thought the iPad would bring to children’s books.
Having now seen what the iPad can actually do, this video shows that the iPad has a lot of potential for the evolvement of the book into a more interactive and engaging experience. Many books and magazines are certainly making the most of some of the potential of the iPad.
This was a follow up piece to Ten reasons why Twitter will eventually wither and die… and I suspect contributed to the popularity of that 2009 post in 2010. I reviewed my top ten reasons and most of them were still a problem and in some cases more of a problem than they were in 2010. However with Twitter keeping on top of them for many, the problems were less of an annoyance and certainly were outweighed by the usefulness of Twitter.
My second top posting of 2010 was in fact posted to the blog in 2009!
Considering this post was originally published in September 2009, the fact it is still one of my most popular posts demonstrates the enduring substance of that debate.
So my top posting of 2010 was about copyright. Back in February I asked the question are you stealing stuff?
It raised the issue of copyright and how practitioners often used stuff for teaching and learning in ways that may infringe copyright. The blog entry was inspired by a blog post by Simon Finch.
My thoughts were that as professionals we should be setting an example to our learners and we shouldn’t be infringing copyright regardless of whether it made our life easier or because we feel that we should be able to. My posting did hit a nerve, with fifty comments to that post.
I also did a follow up piece Have you stopped beating your wife? This I hoped clarified some of the issues about using the word “may” and the importance of asking the right question.
What did disappoint me slightly was that in January I asked my readers and the e-learning community if they wanted to discuss this issue at a symposium at ALT-C 2010 in a post entitled Want to join the conversation? In that post many people expressed an interest in having this discussion at ALT-C… Alas the proposal was rejected by ALT and so I discussed e-books instead!
….
So there are my top ten posts of 2010, any of your favourites in that list?
What will 2011 bring to the blog who knows?
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
