ALO ALO

Right
time to take a grip, modus operandi has to be the answer, not an easy option for someone who is naturally spontaneous. but... going to try running the blog as a work in progress, lets see how it goes

ALT - its a community thing...
Just Back from ALTC2008 in Leeds
wonderful place to take the pulse of technologies and change in UK higher education.
Flow of consciousness... contacts, back in the loop, people, regret of photos I did not have the presence of mind to take, guilt at photos not yet on Flickr, brilliant keynote from Roth, other inevitable curate's eggs, great community of practice, secret gossip, visible evidenc of power of JISC to transform UK HE's take on technology, testimony to creativity, gap between EdTech specialists and jobbing academics, wonderful insight in the community, disarming naiivity amongst some outsiders (heavy irony and subtext here folks), ALT as an institution, the Fringe F-ALT as another different one, zillions of other interconnecting nets, stunning creativity, the wisdom of crowds, gangs and six gangs, Flickr for remembrance, the one's who are not there, in fact or in Flickr, 700 on the register, more than 400 on CrowdVine.
Special Thanks... Josie and Scott for F-ALT and all the others who made it too, Twitter for helping my virtual meet some sort of reality, Paul Bailey and Laurie for reminding me about my old work, and kickstarting me into LTAGs (coming real soon folks), John, Terry, Mark, Patrick, Malcolm, MarkII;-) and Vania for signing up as seminar speakers, my Hood2.0 discussants, James Clay for Hood2.0, microbloggers and edubloggers at F-ALT, Jill for helping us at the conference dinner, Victoria, Seb and the ALT admin for getting us into the conference dinner... in the end :-) Cape Town lady for reading my work on disciplinary differences and being enthusiastic, Jon Maber for being so admirably clever and inventive ( a breville toaster to make boards indeed!!), FrankyInsultingTom for his cheerfullness, Maggie and Paul for helping us hatch plans, the canal and running for networking with my mind, the college students for their fab meal, especially our own waiter, Hugh for companionship and general schmoozing... and this will be so embarrasing for all those that that I have forgotten just now, but I have you somewhere in my head. Next year its over to Tom and Gilly and our technology dreams....hmmm

ALO
Encountered terminal technology overload at one stage, videoing discussions good idea, post processing to blog, still not happened. Thanks to Emma, Clare and Phil who were in my discussion group during James Clay's Hood2.0 workshop. Seesmic was my undoing, although I did manage photobooth. Multiple personalities in blogger were a micro challenge.
Next up
I have planned a GirlGeek|BarCamp|PlugFest|DigiSlam|Hopper for CompSci women which will be fabulous....
LTAGs (the TA stands for technology affordances) am working on a community wiki to gather and develop.
CSFIC/WWWrong - workshops in the pipeline for all us folks interested in organisational change
Grand Challenges and Technology Enhanced Learning, LSL in Southampton will be joining it, expect Hugh Davis to lead and add to the grand work done so far by the likes of Tom Boyle and Josie Taylor


Recent delights...
the HEA-ICS subject centre have decided to mainstream fund the TOPS competition (teaching over performing students/teaching overtly precocious students) an inter university programming competition designed to motivate and reward some of our programming students who are already fairly skilled when they start their undergraduate studies. We need to look after all of our students and find smart ways of achieving this.


Software List
plugins today
firefox tinyurl creator
FFX free Flickr export from iPhoto
I am disappointed with the quality of the photos on my iPhone compared to the Nokia N95, but I'm getting the hang of posting straight to twitter during my runs, next on the list is to add geotagging.

I guess as far as the gaps are concerned, I guess I will have to wait til I am on my travels to catch up. Currently first priority is to get things sorted before the start of term.

IBWiki Innovation Base - a working semantic wiki

Excellent seminar all about FREMA which became a domain model for the community. I really like the fact that it is an example of a working CoP. The fact that the project is at the interface of two domains make the content of the seminar linguistically interesting as well. 

The ideas and output are the cumulation of a whole range of projects in our Lab here in Southampton, the latest of which come from work funded by the JISC. Yvonne Howard and Dave Millard are the drivers of this development. basically it has grown from our work and expertise in the assessment domain, but beefed up by the particular software engineering strengths which Dave and Yvonne have in spades. 

Interesting use of language during the seminar, software engineers talk about domains, and people working in the domain. Community of Practice belongs way away with the social scientists, even if we are talking about the same thing!

Part of the account revisits the paradox of reuse vs learning (people need to do to learn, but if someone else has already learnt it, do we need to go through all the pain yet again!!). This is a big factor for discussion in the critical success factors, and what went wrong communities. cf "stop people continuously re-inventing the wheel". 

One topic of discussion included the downsides of the semantic wiki compared to the knowledge base. Difficulties of implementing concept maps, lists, networks, it all seems to be about whether you organise before or after. 

Semantic Wikis are more likely to grow, but with the Knowledge Base you alienate the potential/existing Community of Practice; experts are needed to manage the structure. So the challenge is can we couple a KB with a wiki to get the best of both worlds.

Observations (definitions from the domain) inevitably come from different perspectives (think Korzybski here, the map is not the territory). Turns out that Hugh Glaser (also in ECS but in DSSE) has a seminar on work which he is doing in a similar area this very afternoon!

Facts on current work: IBWiki is at Southampton, IBMap is Manchester (modelling and mapping - Hilary Dexter and Tom Franklin) 

There is some considerable mileage in the recognition/analysis of how regular people interact with formal systems (in both senses of the word!!) 

Language notes: domain, artifacts, model, personas, scenarios, reference models ( and the fact that these are not tags, but could be)