Fin de la nuit

I've been pondering about the risks to privacy involved in using social media. Here is one I hadn't come across before, about a platform called Yaari: http://mkaihani.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/yaaricom-the-social-network-that-crossed-the-red-line/

The first week on the ELLS has come to an end, and a requirement is to reflect on learning on this part of the course. This is a great idea, not just to reinforce learning, but also to track what needs to be done or thought about when starting the social media journey. The technical part of it was trivial, which is a mixed blessing. The ease of setting up various facilities (this blog, Flickr and Twitter, and before this, delicious and LinkedIn) obscures the bigger issues of identity and privacy (I haven’t hit copyright yet, but no doubt this will come). The Mason and Rennie book has a lengthy quote from Lou on page 57. This sparked off a number of ideas partly about my reluctance to use Flickr, but most importantly in terms of understanding the reluctance that some students might have in using social media. My reluctance to use Flickr are showing my visual work has several reasons. Because I am new to Flickr I see it as amorphous, or as I said elsewhere, as a kind of uncurated exhibit...

... Connectivism. There's an interesting and well researched essay here: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm There is some follow up on this essay available at: http://www.connectivism.ca/ Here is how Siemens defines constructivism: Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing. Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimpor...

The HEA Subject group for Education has started to blog too! Look up: http://escalatesc.blogspot.com/

A nice example of Twitter use in an undergraduate History course. Look up: >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8

Today I attended a workshop organised by SEDA (the Staff and Educational Development Association) on 'Turning Conference Presentations into Publications' . This was an excellent event, with lots of time to share stories, write things up and get feedback. It was the first time this workshop was run, but if it turns up again I would recommend it to anyone who, like me, doesn't feel brave enough to face a journal editor.

I looked at Helen's Flicker submission and like what she had done to her image very much. Adding captions to various areas is a nice touch, and Flicker definitely has the edge! But I still don't feel ready to 'show' stuff there. The image is here a photo of a watercolour painting that I made for my brother. It's a reference to our summer holidays as children, when people always went fishing shrimp, cockles, or crab, and kids were encouraged to try and do the same - learning by doing... It was a bit scary at times - dark waters, things darting and hiding - but satisfying too when you caught something.

The Oxford Broookes course has a task involving checking out what Google comes up with when typing your name, to find out what our online public profiles are like. This was an interesting exercise, just because it gathered so many fragments. I found the usual and predictable things: university staff page, university research page (out of date!), conference slides, conference programmes, abstracts for some journal articles, a couple of full articles, and references to book chapters. My LinkedIn profile came up too, and so did the MySpace profile that I barely use. I also found my AREC profile which I'd forgot about. Embarassingly, the 'prolific contributor' messages re-surfaced :-( This was when I was on holiday and set up an automatic message to indicate this. This message ended up recurring over and over again in a discussion group I belonged to. I have never used this 'on holiday' facility again! Annoyingly, it would seem that my details got picked up by Zoominfo ...