Events & Meetups

Voting open

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

Heres your JF heads up that the finalists are now posted & the voting is now open for this years International Edublog Awards (aka the Eddies). HUGE thanks to everyone who took the time to publicise we were taking nominations and/or to nominate.

A couple of headlines: Unsurprisingly, Second Life was the platform that swept the virtual worlds category – there has been a lot of investment and interest in exploring the educational potential of SL this year. Slightly less predictably, Ning has swept the Social Networking Sevice category. Well done to all the finalists in that category for their excellent work – I’ll be posting about Ning more shortly. However: is nothing interesting going on on other platforms? Did people defining SNS as just the profile based services, a la boyd, when it came to nominating? I find it hard to believe that there are no noteworthy eduprojects going on over at Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc etc.

 

OMG It’s the all new Edublog Awards!

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

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It’s back! & it’s embiggened!

This years Eddies are up and running. We have a new home, new feed, new logo – and a ton of new categories! I’m also delighted to welcome back James Farmer to the conviner bench. For those of you who don’t know – James pulled the whole thing together back in 2004 & then went off to concentrate on his mighty edublogging empire – I guess having  a community of 100,000 at your back leaves you with a ton of time 🙂

He’ll be joining the rest of the core team – Dave Cormier, Jeff Lebow and me, in pulling together this years edublog extravaganza – the most glamorous event of the edublogging calender. This year you’ll actually get to see our frocks – thanks to the support of the lovely Jo Kay we’ll be hosting the ceremony in Second Life. If you haven’t yet had a look around, why not take advantage of the CSI:NY peoples generosity and check out their easy entry package. If you’re allergic to MUVEs or just don’t have the time, hard drive or inclination to join us there, we’ll be providing off world audio & back channel facilities.

The ceremony is currently scheduled for Saturday 8 December your time, so please put it in your diaries now.

What hasn’t changed is the  awards ethos and aim. We are still an independently run, community-based awards programme which recognizes and promotes excellence in the educational use of social software. We’re committed to  celebrating the achievements of  the international community, and to rounding off another hard working year with  a great excuse for us to all get together and build a fantastic resource to inspire and support educators everywhere.

So what are you waiting for? Start reviewing your blogroll, sending in your nominations  and spreading the word so that we can make this years awards our most successful ever.

Those categories are:

1. Best individual blog

2. Best group blog

3. Best new blog

4. Best resource sharing blog

5. Best designed blog

6. Most influential blog post

7. Best blogged research paper or project

8. Best teacher blog

9. Best higher-education student blog

10. Best librarian / library blog

11 Best educational tech focused blog

12. Best elearning / corporate education blog

13. Best educational use of audio

14. Best educational use of video / visual

15. Best educational wiki

16. Best educational use of a social networking service

17. Best educational use of a virtual world

18. Best educational use of open source

19. Digizen’s 14-19 competition – note, this award is not run by the Edublog Awards, we are  delighted however to be promoting it and supporting young peoples participation.

20. Conveners award

Please get in touch if you or your organisation would be interested in sponsoring any of our categories!

Show that you Share! In Utrecht!

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

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I’m delighted to have been asked to lead a workshop on social networking services and social search at the forthcoming Bazaar European Conference, 14 December 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. For those of you who don’t know, Bazaar is a European funded project seeking to support the development of a community around Open Source Software in education and open content development or Open Educational Resources (OERs).  The line up so far looks excellent – including Helen Keegan, Steve Wheeler, and Bazaar supremo Graham Attwell.

Main themes are data security, privacy and sustainability; social software, tools and content creation; Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the culture of sharing; Interoperability, matadata and OERs; Personal Learning Environments, ePortfolios and informal learning.

The conference has been designed to foster dialog and support the participation of everyone attending – opening with a scoping session so that attendees can decide how best to structure the event (Graham’s taken a semi-structured unconference approach – the best one I think for these kind of events – otherwise every session turns into a debate about structure vs structurlessness. Check out the flyer for further details.)

On top of all this it’s a free event! Blimey. Hope to see some of you there.

Download conference_flyer_bazaar.pdf

The BIMA Facebook debate, & Chris Kelly’s announcement today

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

I had a blast as one of the debate panelists at this week’s BIMA organised Facebook Debate (Yes, I was there, despite not being included on any of the speaker lists) at the BT Center in London. I’m not a huge fan of the debate format – for and against arguments always kick against the pragmatist in me,which is why I love the slam concept, but it was fun to go all out for a specific side. My team (me & the endearingly grumpy Robert Lock) were pitched against Damien Mulley and Sam Sethi on two audience selected topics – Facebook’s decision to open up its interface to all developers was a mistake (we were asked to argue for) and friend requests from your boss are best ignored (against).

I’m not going to run through all of the arguments, although some of them I suspect are well on the way to near legendary status (Sam’s statement that Boss stands for bag of shit, for example) and I’d also like to publicly thank Damien since his arguments were all of huge help to our team  🙂

I’ll call out a couple of points that I made that may be of interest to readers over here. Firstly (and this turned out to be the most contentious thing I said all night) I suggested that one of the problems with opening up the Facebook platform to external apps was that to the extent that third party apps were interesting/useful (& I’d like to think that some are useful, as opposed to just entertaining), many just expanded the Facebook sink into a black hole – eg – more information that I can’t get out. Although the management of distributed presence was clearly a theme that ran across the evening, data portability seemed to be  largely regarded as a matter of choice – in the sense that if you want it – go to another  platform. 

Secondly, I talked about having your boss included in your contact list as a good excuse to finally get to grips with Dante’s 10th circle of hell – aka the peculiar granularity of FB permissions. I asked for an audience hands up on who in the room felt really confident about setting up and using permissions, and about five people did. It’ll be interesting to see whether the introduction of friend categories makes permissions easier, harder, or no different to navigate (& just in case anyone involved in the coding of it for FB is reading this – please make sure you can assign individual friends to multiple groups).

UPDATE: Adam Tinworth has posted a really great report of the event over at One Man & His Blog. I’m sorry he couldn’t stay to the end and talk!

In other related news – so this doesn’t become the FB blog – Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, posted today on a range of e-safety activities, including a commitment to address complaints concerning certain categories (nudity, porn, harassment, unwanted contact) within 24 hours – as far as I know the first social network service to specify a customer service level agreement response time (please do let me know if I’m wrong!).

Burning Life

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

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I don’t post that much about Second Life (SL), despite the fact I’ve been spending an awful lot of time there on the Emerge Island and also gearing up for throwing an SL Edublog Award party with James Farmer in there this year (OMG – we’re into our 4th year already!).

For those of you who haven’t looked around yet, it’s not all shopping and, um, educational technologists. If you’ve got a speedy computer (or at least, patience honed from the days when popular chat rooms would regularly boot you out whenever things got lively), you might want to check out counter cultural festival Burning Life 2007. Promising "another side to the Second Life sims: cultures that counter corporate constraints, and embrace unrestrained creativity", the festival runs today through to October 1st.