George’s posterous

However, a bigger concern is for those services where I was able to track usage was that after the course ended, so did student use.

This experience mirrors ours, though I only have anecdote to support it. Courses where PebblePad is used do not seem to engender an extended adoption of the platform for ongoing personal/professional use. We do not expect students to want to take the VLE with them and it isn't designed for that. The wiki has a liminal status. It could be adopted as a personal web-builder if a student were keen to. We do not promote this and there does not seem to be any pent up demand waiting to pile in to Confluence. It gets used when it is designed into the curriculum and not when its not. But my question is does it matter? And, if it does, when and why? It is safe to assume most students have web presence via FaceBook or mySpace or other networks. Similarly many are using IM services and nearly all text.

I think the key issue here is appropriate information (or academic) literacy for a networked, social-media era (not just the "digital age"). This is what I admire about A. J.'s efforts: the focus on critical information seeking and sharing in communities. But will the communities and tools persist after the module ends? Should they? Maybe we could think of each module as a test pilot flight. I suspect - and would be interested to know more - that students do slowly develop habits of information literacy that grows from module to module even if they do not notice it themselves and even if the tools change. Disciplines are reluctant to give up core subject-learning time to the development of explicit but generic "graduate attributes" but I think this is what we have to do if we want to develop practices that cross modules. I have no doubt that a student will be better equipped in year three if they started using a (social) bookmarking tool and a reference manager in year one. I am thinking of focussing on these in the next running of our PCTHE. If we could get students to adopt these two practices and support them across all their modules there should be a positive gain. Then we could throw other tools at them from time to time, all of which should exercise their general ability to use applications and develop digital literacies (see http://rworld2.brookesblogs.net/2009/10/06/digital-literacies-at-brookes-pcthe/ ) even if they do not adopt every tool they are asked to use.

The Federal Government will transform its Information Technology Infrastructure by virtualizing data centers, consolidating data centers and operations, and ultimately adopting a cloud-computing business model.

This article reports a Booz Allen Hamilton report on the cost model being used to drive US Govt data policies towards the adoption of "cloud computing" platforms. They offer three scenarios: Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud (as the US military is doing, see http://rworld2.brookesblogs.net/2009/10/07/us-military-cloud-computing-platform-via-rww/). Where is the UK is this respect? More locally, where is the UK HE sector?

Wi-Fi Direct will connect at existing Wi-Fi speeds-- up to 250 mbps. Wi-Fi Direct devices will also be able to broadcast their availability and seek out other Wi-Fi Direct devices.

Some of you might have heard me witter on about widely distributed databases (e.g. bit torrent) and mesh networks (e.g. OLPC). I made a few comments here: http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/2007/10/more-on-the-mes.html

This post suggests that developments facilitating such a network are continuing. Yes, it may be a long way off but eventually there will be no telcos as we know them: no ISPs. We need to be thinking past the centralised data centres to the far edge: you and me and our various devices. Security will be a big problem: identity, access, spam and fraud. Curation will be a problem. But, if we don't get washed away in a big glacial melt down (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-coming-of-a-new-climate), one day there will be one big network.

European survey data on how young people are using social media.

Either they use it or they don't. Not much middle ground. 25% use the Internet more than 20 hours a week; 30% less than 5 hours. Well, it is more complex than that, of course, but even stronger bimodality is showm with IM. Not sure about the typology of users, but the implications for teaching are challenging. Who do you teach to? Should teachers and institutions adopt one modality? Or, the other? Aim for the middle and hit no-one?

My blog:

• is a place where I think, plan and reflect
• forces me to read in order to gather the input I need for my output
• is a place where I play with technology and ideas
• often surprises me
• is a place where I collaborate
• is currently the most satisfying part of my job
• is slightly dangerous
• is compulsive

This page is a useful compendium of resources for academics who are thinking of introducing blogs into their teaching for collaboration, reflection, assessment, research, community development and just plain old learning. Cann offers his reasons for blogging and links to other key educational bloggers, who give their reasons for blogging. The perspectives are not exactly student-centred in the self-effacing way that some "facilitators of learning" might adopt, but are un-ashamedly learning- and learner-centred, where the blogger is a learner who exposes their learning practices, sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly. And, that is what is slightly dangerous. When we learn we make mistakes. When we blog to learn we make mistakes in public.

Traditional media campaigns have a beginning and end. Social technology fuels conversation. One, five, ten or ten thousand people could all be stirring up and participating in conversations using social media tools. The conversation has a time dimension that just runs on and on. ... this is why social tools adopt a river-of-news style. With such an activity stream, the conversation is endless.

A propos of the need for the JISC Institutional Innovation programme to develop a "benefits realisation community", we need to build a social front end to http://inin.jisc-ssbr.net, displaying the Planet Inin feeds as a "river of news" and allowing comment on the site

ShopSavvy uses a phone's camera to scan an item's bar code and look up prices for it online and at nearby stores.

Now that is the kind of mobile, location aware service that might be useful; but in the end I guess the whole world will be shopping for everything at Confused.com: the internet crushed by the weight of price comparison sites for a limited range of branded consumer - what's the opposite of durables?).

Just because computing is done in the cloud, that doesn't mean it has to be insecure and subject to outages. Or so says the U.S. Defense Department who just put into operation their cloud computing services for military personnel.

Admittedly the missions are different, but higher education really should be looking harder at "the cloud".