I just checked the schedule, and I’m going to be part of a panel discussion titled “Social Software for Learning Environments“. The other panelists are Chris Lott, Sylvia Currie and Jon Beasley-Murray, with moderation by Brian Lamb.
It should be a blast. I’ve been following Chris and Jon’s (and of course Brian’s) blogs for a long time now (I’m sorry Sylvia – I don’t think I’ve seen your blog yet, although I’ve seen your tracks on many of the blogs I read). I’m not completely sure what I’ll talk about for my portion of the panel presentation, but I’ll likely share some experiences from weblogs.ucalgary.ca, our incredible success with the student teacher blogging/journal program, and the shared social software hosting environment I’m working on with BCIT for BCCampus.
Hopefully the session is spent mostly on discussion, rather than presentation. I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to talk about.
We’re also working on a cool session for Moose Camp (with Scott Leslie at the helm of that one) on mashups for non-geeks. That should be fun, too. (and I’ve still got a lot of homework to do before that session…)
Northern Voice (and Moose Camp, and anything else we can scrape together) should be another incredible experience this year. To top it off Cole is coming up from Penn State (maybe we’ll get to do an ETS Talk Podcast from Vancouver?), and Chris is flying in from the UK.
Good thing I’ve got a nice, long vacation planned shortly after I return from NV! 🙂
I just checked the schedule, and I’m going to be part of a panel discussion titled “Social Software for Learning Environments“. The other panelists are Chris Lott, Sylvia Currie and Jon Beasley-Murray, with moderation by Brian Lamb.
It should be a blast. I’ve been following Chris and Jon’s (and of course Brian’s) blogs for a long time now (I’m sorry Sylvia – I don’t think I’ve seen your blog yet, although I’ve seen your tracks on many of the blogs I read). I’m not completely sure what I’ll talk about for my portion of the panel presentation, but I’ll likely share some experiences from weblogs.ucalgary.ca, our incredible success with the student teacher blogging/journal program, and the shared social software hosting environment I’m working on with BCIT for BCCampus.
Hopefully the session is spent mostly on discussion, rather than presentation. I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to talk about.
We’re also working on a cool session for Moose Camp (with Scott Leslie at the helm of that one) on mashups for non-geeks. That should be fun, too. (and I’ve still got a lot of homework to do before that session…)
Northern Voice (and Moose Camp, and anything else we can scrape together) should be another incredible experience this year. To top it off Cole is coming up from Penn State (maybe we’ll get to do an ETS Talk Podcast from Vancouver?), and Chris is flying in from the UK.
Good thing I’ve got a nice, long vacation planned shortly after I return from NV! 🙂
I'm sitting in the Comox airport (it's actually quite a nice little airport, with wifi and everything) relaxing after the BCCampus ETUG 2006 workshop/session/mini-conference in Courtenay BC. North Island College was really gorgeous – lush, green, giant trees all over the place, and nicely designed buildings on campus. It even has a cool giant totem pole!
After the morning sessions today, I was arm-twisted into spending the afternoon in the beach (or was I the one doing the arm-twisting?) – had a blast hanging out with Keira and Harry, exploring Goose Spit beach in Comox (nice name, btw). I wound up taking something like 50 photographs, but culled that quite a bit. My faves are online of course…
Apparently, while we were frolicking on the beach, David Porter announced the tentative plan to potentially offer social software hosting for BCCampus members, with the BCIT Drupal initiative serving as the prototype or shakedown cruise.
Between that, and the apparently pending announcement that Drupal has been unanimously selected by the "web content management systems" group for recommendation to be adopted as the officially supported content management system at UCalgary, I'm going to be a very busy Drupal boy for the forseeable future…
I'm sitting in the Comox airport (it's actually quite a nice little airport, with wifi and everything) relaxing after the BCCampus ETUG 2006 workshop/session/mini-conference in Courtenay BC. North Island College was really gorgeous – lush, green, giant trees all over the place, and nicely designed buildings on campus. It even has a cool giant totem pole!
After the morning sessions today, I was arm-twisted into spending the afternoon in the beach (or was I the one doing the arm-twisting?) – had a blast hanging out with Keira and Harry, exploring Goose Spit beach in Comox (nice name, btw). I wound up taking something like 50 photographs, but culled that quite a bit. My faves are online of course…
Apparently, while we were frolicking on the beach, David Porter announced the tentative plan to potentially offer social software hosting for BCCampus members, with the BCIT Drupal initiative serving as the prototype or shakedown cruise.
Between that, and the apparently pending announcement that Drupal has been unanimously selected by the "web content management systems" group for recommendation to be adopted as the officially supported content management system at UCalgary, I'm going to be a very busy Drupal boy for the forseeable future…
Scott is demoing BCCampus ' SOLR application for sharing online learning resources in the province of BC. I'm really liking the tie-ins with Creative Commons licensing, making it easy for content creators to safely share their stuff.
Here's a screenshot of the cool "Browse All Creative Commons Resources" utility, ala Flickrlilli et. al.
BCCampus SOLR Creative Commons Browser: a screenshot taken of the SOLR BCCampus repository 's Creative Commons browsing interface.
They've put a lot of work into making it easy to safely share resources. Many lessons in this… The content submission process is kind of long – lots of linear steps. Some streamlining (maybe ajax loving?) would help. Still, it only takes a minute to submit something…
Scott is demoing BCCampus ' SOLR application for sharing online learning resources in the province of BC. I'm really liking the tie-ins with Creative Commons licensing, making it easy for content creators to safely share their stuff.
Here's a screenshot of the cool "Browse All Creative Commons Resources" utility, ala Flickrlilli et. al.
BCCampus SOLR Creative Commons Browser: a screenshot taken of the SOLR BCCampus repository 's Creative Commons browsing interface.
They've put a lot of work into making it easy to safely share resources. Many lessons in this… The content submission process is kind of long – lots of linear steps. Some streamlining (maybe ajax loving?) would help. Still, it only takes a minute to submit something…
Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.
The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.
I think that Brian and I got into a pretty decent flow, and wound up demonstrating some cool apps and concepts, with participants doing as much hands-on activity as possible (tagging, blogging, playing with Flickr and Flickrlilli, etc…) SocialLearning.ca was used as a concrete example of social software, a tagging and blogging platform, and as a "client" app for a 3rd party tool (receiving photos from Flickr).
It was a blast, as always, riding on Brian's coat tails. I've got to find a way to invite him to UCalgary, assuming Keira is forgiving enough to let Brian keep travelling…
Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.
The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.
I think that Brian and I got into a pretty decent flow, and wound up demonstrating some cool apps and concepts, with participants doing as much hands-on activity as possible (tagging, blogging, playing with Flickr and Flickrlilli, etc…) SocialLearning.ca was used as a concrete example of social software, a tagging and blogging platform, and as a "client" app for a 3rd party tool (receiving photos from Flickr).
It was a blast, as always, riding on Brian's coat tails. I've got to find a way to invite him to UCalgary, assuming Keira is forgiving enough to let Brian keep travelling…
Brian managed to swing me an invite to co-host his Social Software session at the BCCampus Spring Workshop on Educational Technologies 2006, which will be held at North Island College in beautiful downtown Courtenay BC. (actually, I’ve never been to Courtenay/Comox, so am looking forward to seeing the area – I’m flying in on a Beech 1900D, so that leg of the trip should be interesting).
The session should be fun. Brian and I are going to demo a few concepts of social software (Web 2.0 *gack*) and then turn the reigns over to the participants. We’ll be using SocialLearning.ca as the “hub” to bring together activities like tagging, bookmarking, blogging, and commenting. I really like the approach, especially with a concrete piece of the web bringing it together. It should make the freaky concepts of decentralized social aggregate tag clouds a bit easier to grok.
I spent some time this week pimping the SocialLearning.ca instance of Drupal – opening up the tag clouds, tweaking a few bits here and there, so it should work really nicely as a platform for a workshop – as well as supporting the BCCampus community afterwards.
The SocialLearning.ca tag cloud will be on centre stage for the workshop, so the participants can see how their contributions affect it (hopefully in quasi-realtime).
As always, I’m so totally looking forward to working with Brian (and his planted ringers). This should be a great workshop. I’m also really curious to see what the participants come up with…
Brian managed to swing me an invite to co-host his Social Software session at the BCCampus Spring Workshop on Educational Technologies 2006, which will be held at North Island College in beautiful downtown Courtenay BC. (actually, I’ve never been to Courtenay/Comox, so am looking forward to seeing the area – I’m flying in on a Beech 1900D, so that leg of the trip should be interesting).
The session should be fun. Brian and I are going to demo a few concepts of social software (Web 2.0 *gack*) and then turn the reigns over to the participants. We’ll be using SocialLearning.ca as the “hub” to bring together activities like tagging, bookmarking, blogging, and commenting. I really like the approach, especially with a concrete piece of the web bringing it together. It should make the freaky concepts of decentralized social aggregate tag clouds a bit easier to grok.
I spent some time this week pimping the SocialLearning.ca instance of Drupal – opening up the tag clouds, tweaking a few bits here and there, so it should work really nicely as a platform for a workshop – as well as supporting the BCCampus community afterwards.
The SocialLearning.ca tag cloud will be on centre stage for the workshop, so the participants can see how their contributions affect it (hopefully in quasi-realtime).
As always, I’m so totally looking forward to working with Brian (and his planted ringers). This should be a great workshop. I’m also really curious to see what the participants come up with…
