Well, that was 2007.

I’ve been very busy, mainly working on resources for schools and colleges around using Social Networking Services (to be released soon) and traveling around the UK talking about cyberbullying and the guidence I helped produce for the UK government with school teachers, parents, leaders, local authorities, the police and social services – what it is, how we can prevent it and how to deal with it effectively when cases occur. I just wanted to post a catch up note commenting on a few end of year events.

We held the 4th International Edublog Awards slightly early this year – the most ambitious event to date. I’m really happy to say that the amazing international team – social website and community expert James Farmer (Australia – & the legend who who set up and ran the
first awards, and rejoined us this year) webcasting pioneer and audio supremo Jeff LeBow (US), EdTech luminary Dave
Cormier (Canada) and Second Life guru Jo Kay (Australia) – carried it off with aplomb. Huge huge thanks to them and to everyone else who pitched in.

& if you haven’t already – check out Cormier’s annual top ten EdTech stories of 2007.

What else? The last time I posted was just after the Eduspaces disconnection notice. I’m happy to report that after a flurry of dismayed activity, some kind of agreement was reached with TakingITGlobal.org who have now stepped in to begin the process of (hopefully) fixing the technical issues brought about by the shutdown activities and continuing the community with greater involvement of the members. The threatened closure raised a lot of issues for educators around community development, risk management, data protection and the use of third party web 2.0 services in education.

I also got asked to talk about Social Networking Services at the Bazaar
European Conference on the 14 December 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and I was delighted to be able to hang out and talk shop into the wee hours with such smart and passionate company – including Helen Keegan, Steve Wheeler, and Bazaar supremo Graham Attwell.   

Speakers were asked to encompass the conference themes in their topics: data security, privacy and sustainability; social software,
tools and content creation; Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the
culture of sharing; Interoperability, metadata and OERs; Personal
Learning Environments, ePortfolios and informal learning. For me, one of the huge things to come out was the lack of up-to-speed digital media literacy resources across the UK and Europe, for adults, children, young people and educators (particularly around data protection and management). I’m a huge fan of Henry Jenkins US based New Media Literacies project, and I’d like to see more action from both the UK’s Media Literacy Taskforce, Becta, and Ofcom this year.