Speaking

21 July 2008: OSS Watch expert workshop on profiling communities, Oxford

Posted on by Josie Fraser

Speaking at the Expert Workshop on Profiling Communities on Open Source Social Networking Services and and Educational Communities, with an overview of the current state of Open Source social networking platforms and tools. This invitation only workshop was designed to assist OSS Watch in their strategic planning of activities for the next two years.

OSS Watch is the National Advisory Service on open source for UK Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE). It is part of their remit to help FE and HE institutions and projects who want to engage with open source development, and a key factor in that is the development of open source communities.

14 December 2007: Networks, Communities & Learning: Show that you Share! Utrecht, The Netherlands

Posted on by Josie Fraser

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Networks, Communities & Learning: Show that you Share! was a one day European conference organised by the Bazaar project and IVLOS, the Institute of Education of Utrecht University. I was invited to lead round table workshop sessions on Social Networking Services and Social Search.

The conference themes were based on key and emergent issues identified by Bazaar as:

  • Data security, privacy and sustainability
  • Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
  • Open Education Resources (OERs) and the Culture of Sharing
  • Interoperability and Metadata and OERs
  • (Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), ePortfolio’s and Informal learning

4th International Edublog Awards, online

Posted on by Josie Fraser

Preawards

Picture credit: kerryank

The International Edublog Awards is now in it’s fourth year,
celebrating and highlighting excellence in the educational use of
weblogs and social media, drawing attention to the vast amount of
cutting edge educational practice out there and making friends on the
way.

The awards were jointly convened the year by myself and James Farmer, working with a international team of leading educational technology experts: Josie Fraser (UK), James Farmer (Australia – & the man who who set up and ran the first awards, and rejoined us this year) Jeff LeBow (US) and Dave Cormier (Canada). Jo Kay (Australia)  also joined us this year as our Second Life guru.

This year saw our most ambitious awards ceremony to date – thankfully we pulled it off! We introduced some new categories and also expanded the locations of the awards ceremony – putting distributed practice in to action.

One of the ceremony locations this year was the jokaydia in Second Life, and the sim was full to bursting – we also used two additional inworld sites. Participants could join the ceremony Ustream Simulcast and text chat at EdTech Talk
– where they were able to watch and hear all of the action live streamed from the Second Life location (and visa versa). There was also a text based chat room hosted at EdTech Talk. We also used Twitter to read/post about the awards – providing live updates about category winners.

We used a Flickr pool for everyone to contribute their pictures of the awards event and after party, and ran a Facebook event listing.

Huge congratulations to all our 2007 winners and finalists! 

Postawards