Rob Bourne's Blog

by James Paull Gee

After reading his book ‘What Video games have to teach us about language and literacy’ it was fair to say that I was looking forward to this one. Of course not just because of my love of video games…. well maybe that was a big part of it.

I must admit it did feel like an abridged version of the first chapter of his book but that it by no means a negative statement. Very interesting stuff that introduced the key concepts around his work e.g. the creation of affinity groups around game based technology, situated learning, semiotic domains (which I am pretty sure I completely misinterpreted) etc.

Particularly liked his comparison of Yu-gi-oh with PHD level work. Admitedly this was slightly tongue in cheek methinks. This was a comparison in terms of the language and level of comprehension required to access the content of the game. For anyone who has not seen this game it is indeed completely baffling.

I definitely think his work is worth reading. If you want to read more about his work take a look at his profile page on the GLS site.  Take a look at this youtube video which explains what he does a lot clearer than my babble.

Interesting morning listening to a fairly diverse set of speakers at the Tuesday session of handheld learning. None of the keynotes actually addressed handheld learning as such instead they addressed more general issues around education and cultural systems.

Dodgey iphone photo of the porter tun room

Particularly enjoyed Malcolm McLaren’s rant about society in general. Excellent anecodote about his days as  a wine taster. Who would have guessed. Not sure I completely agree that we are culturaly restricted as he made about but perhaps he had a point. He did mention that ‘Holywood consider stupid cool’ personally I think it is going the other way these days. One example that springs to mind is Juno where the protaganist is anything but stupid.  Anyway, to cut a long story short the first three keynotes set a nice tone for the conference with  a mixture of entertainment and optimisim.

Lots of resources available on the handheld learning website, including footage of last years confernce proceedings. Worth a look if you have the time.

http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~csisc17/index.html

Well actually it is my Birkbeck profile page, a fine example of cutting edge web design as I am sure you will agree. Link at the bottom however to some of the resources (actually nothing in there at this pont!) I am going to pull together in terms of search optomization techniques. Mainly however I am just trying to create some links in different places to try and getting it to rank higher. Probably not what this blog was intended for but if you give people free will….

So after the lessons learnt the other week this should be a lot easier this time. The session this week  is with regard to business planning and will be delivered by an external speaker from Striding Out.  Smaller room this week which hopefully will not throw up any logistical problems. Fingers crossed.

Time to check the kit with my trusty checklist, defrag the harddrive of the capture laptop, load up the slidedeck and materials and away we go. Will post the link to the resource at some point tomorrow. Hopefully this time with associated powerpoint presentation and any screen captures (yet to have to cross the screen capture bridge but I am sure there will come a point)

So in my ongoing quest to have no social life, and become incapable of communicating with the general populace,  I am now taking a MSc in Advanced Information Systems. Interesting lecture last night about search engine optomisation. I will not bore everyone with the technical detail although I do think reading google’s search engine optomisation is worth while. Actually it is quite an accessible read. Interesting to note the differing approaches that search engines take with regard to backlinks, content and so on (‘and so on’ meaning that I can’t remember any of the other factors!’). Being goolg of course there is reams of youtube content. The channel can be found at http://www.youtube.com/googlewebmasterhelp#play/all

So what tech boy?

Okay this is all very interesting but how does this relate to learning technology. Well in terms of our isolated web resources not a jott. However it does feel as though we are starting to dip our toes in to the open learning/materials phenomena and as such perhaps we should start to consider our page ranking status. Okay it’s probably going a bit far to think of ALL of our students searching google to find specific module resources. I guess depends on how far this open content initiative goes. I still feel this is something we should at least consider with our publicly available material. Couple of questions that spring to mind are:

• Does this self promotion of our resources produce any educational benefits?
• Is the payoff worth the time and effort?
• How high in the rankings would we want to be?
• Is being searchable enough?

Interesting area methinks.

*Note to self must read the Worldwide window article about open content in this weeks Times Higher.*

Really need to take a look at google wave. Granted access to the sandpit about a month ago but sadly not got round to checking it out yet. Watch the painfully long video. I thought it was interesting though, which probably does not say much.

http://88.208.223.80/CourseCast/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=ebad9714-46ad-40e7-8df2-d208e54ed814

Too high quality at this point hence the woeful loading time. Actually we seem to get a really good download rate on the UEL wireless network in UH. The more observant of you may notice that the lecture capture timeline type stuff is missing. Due afforementioned boo boo that has got to be manually added. Fun three hours of clicking through at the right point ahead! Gives a sense of what we can do though. Certainly helped that the chap (Jeff Dell Mura) was very entertaining and informative. Excellent attendance as well due to about 40 people attending.

* Needs editing

First session of BYOB (Be your own boss) was held on Friday the 25th. Actually went surprisingly well in terms of the day. We were none intrusive, nobody seemed to mind signing the release forms and the guest speaker was very complimentary. Added bonus of one chap asking for our business card as he was interested in getting some filming done. Must have been due to the fact that this was one of my none scruffy days! But I digress. No hitches on the day other than losing the clip for the tie mic. Easily solved by running the mic through a button hole (selotape was the back up plan!)

The hitch

Okay everything was great on the day but it would not be a pilot without a problem. Of course it was technical and of course it was the person setting up the software who caused the ‘issue’ i.e. yours trully. Word to the wise when you buy a dedicated server with 1tb of storage do not use a partition with only 2gb capacity. Especially when you need 3gb for the first capture. Secondly don’t do things late at night when you are likely to delete random things, in a random manner and then randomly forget that you have done so. Basically lost the content that had been uploaded to the server but luckily had a backup on the handycam! Bit more manual work to be done by me though in this case lesson learnt!