School Of Everything September 3, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, Microjobs, Long Tail, edublog , 2commentsLast night at Channel 4 in Horseferry Road, London The School of Everything launched. I’d heard about school of everything from various places over the past year, and gathered the idea is to encourage informal learning about subjects that people wish to learn more about, rather than agendas to promote qualifications and assessment. So people with a need to learn can be put in touch with people who have some knowledge or skills to share, so it’s a matching service.
Upon arrival at the school of everything homepage, you are greeted with the simple slogan in large bold type “Learn more”
and then you get the chance to either sign up as a person, or as a teacher.
Within the UK, this might provide a vibrant alternative for all sorts of learning which are no longer covered by the run down local authorities’ adult education sectors. The school of everything also has ambitions to become a well populated international website on the global startups scene.
to Wikiversity or not to Wikiversity? Vote now. October 25, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, Wiki , add a commentI noted with interest when the Wikiversity project started up last year some time, wondering how quickly it would develop, and if the emphasis entirely on content rather than process ( roughly an opposite position to that taken by Ultraversity ) would prove problematic. Now it seems there is a need for a vote in order to justify the very existence of the project amongst wikimedians. I haven’t been following the debate and I may be incorrect in surmising that the essential question seems to revolve around whether the wikiversity is a premature distration from the wikibooks project, or a larger project which will encompass wikibooks within it. It’s always interesting to see how people attempt to constitute rules for online voting though.
Voting rules:
1. Voting starts on 15 September 2005 at 00:00 UTC. You can still translate the voting instructions and the proposal page into other languages after the start of voting.
2. To vote, you need a registered account here on Meta with a link on your meta user page to the user page on the wiki you edit most.
3. Voting will end on 1 November 2005 at 00:00 UTC (voting may be extended one week if deemed necessary).
4. The proposal needs a two thirds (2/3) super-majority in favor in order to be passed to the board for consideration to start as a beta project (the higher the support, the shorter the ensuing beta period will be).
5. If, after one week of voting, there is more than 90% of overall agreement, and more than 10 votes, the project can be launched immediately, pending approval of the Foundation board.
6. NOTE: This is a vote to determine if Wikiversity should be started as a Wikimedia project at all in any language. Whether or not Wikiversity will be started in your language will be determined separately if this vote succeeds and if the board approves the project.
You can only vote once. Please read the full Wikiversity proposal before voting. You can ask questions about Wikiversity on the #Wikiversity IRC channel (irc.freenode.net). If this vote is successful and the board approves the creation of this project, then de.wikiversity.org and en.wikiversity.org will be launched as experimental pilots. After 6 months the board will review the progress of these pilots and determine if they should become beta projects, shut down, or if the pilot period should be extended. If the board approves Wikiversity as a beta project, then at that point other language versions could be launched as betas. Existing Wikiversity projects in languages other than English and German will continue on Wikibooks as a temporary home, and development can continue there until after this beta period is over. No new Wikiversity projects should be started in other languages on Wikibooks. During the voting period you may change your vote. If you choose to do so, please remove your previous vote. Voting both yes and no will be removed from both.
Should we launch the Wikiversity project as described on Wikiversity?
Please indicate by your vote if you would be interested in participating in this project
Robots.txt, mediawiki and Google Sitemap October 13, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, internet , add a commentI used to have my ukcider mediawiki excluded from most search engines through a robots.txt file which looked like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /wiki/
but then I decided I’d like to have another go at allowing the Googlebot to index some of the really useful content which has been building up there recently, so I removed the robots.txt file for a few days and monitored carefully.
What appears to be happening is that the googlebot visits about once per day and spiders a little further down into the Wiki each day, but using up an ever increasing amount of bandwidth as it does so - not good. So the list of french cider producers can already be searched for, but the Asturian Campsites - not as yet.
My own webstats and research told me that Googlebot can get caught up in a wiki site, spidering all of the previous versions, page history, user contributions and so on, and if you are paying for the remote hosting then this needs to be avoided. So rather than disallow /wiki/ I’ve disallowed “oldid” and “contributions” for now, and maybe I’ll tweak it a bit later or go fishing for the definitive mediawiki (not pretty URLs) robots.txt configuration. Meanwhile in my travels, I came across a reference to Google sitemaps which should allow me to tame the over eager googlebot some more. I’ve included data to the effect that the site is updated weekly, which should help towards my goal of having deep-linked pages listed on search results without having all the bandwidth used up by spiders.
Googlebot is not the only search engine spider, there are many others ( such as the enigmatically named “inktomi slurp” it’s just that the Gb is probably the most important and also the most resource consuming.
BA (Hons) Busking October 1, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , 6commentsYear Three of Ultraversity’s ground breaking online degree consists of an Action Research project devised by the student based on our own circumstances.
Working Title: Busking for improvement
Context:
It’s two months since my short term contract at Marsdon School wasn’t renewed, and there’s no sign of any fees coming in from my new IT consultancy business yet, so in desperate need of a bit of liquidity, the clock turns back thirty years: I picked up my old guitar and headed down town to work as an itenerant street singer (busker)
The Problem:
Busking in London is hard work so: how can I increase revenue and play less hours while still paying the bills?
Action:
I will make a series of busking expeditions each of a fixed time, trying out different techniques which I think might increase the takings. Based on an assumption that I perform best when I’m enjoying the songs I will also record how I’m feeling about the session every 10 minutes or 3 songs (qualitative) as well as counting the money, both in total and as sets of different denomination coins. (quantitative)
Participation:
In a further cycle of the enquiry I will employ the services of an assistant whose job is to hold the hat and collect the money (a bottler). The bottler will be invited to make suggestions for further cycles and we may make joint decisions on the fly about the playlist according to which songs appear to be going down well (emergent action). With adequate assistance it may be possible to collect video data as well. By convention, the takings will be split 50/50.
Audience:
The exhibition will be presented live to a populous but frequently changing audience of strangers, so I will need to have good mechanisms in place for collecting feedback data from a small self-selected volunteer sample of people who are willing to stop and leave comments.
Literature Review:
None, because “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (Zappa, 1974)
Potential for further cycles.
Plenty. For example the location could be changed to Paris (via Eurostar) or the entire music element could be dropped and replaced with an empty vodka bottle and a dog on a piece of string to see if takings go up or down.
Ethics:
In consideration for audience sensitivities there will be no Simon and Garfunkel.
Tachnorati Tags:
ultraversity,
busking, actionresearch,
music
You and your action research project September 7, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , add a commentYou and Your Action Research Project
by McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead
is recommended by Eve in preference to Robson.
available from Amazon both new and second hand
ALERT e-portfolio problem June 28, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , add a commentThe following needs to be shouted from the rooftops in order to avoid losing students’ work and mistakenly marking incomplete assessment products, which by all accounts has already happend.
“All folders you create in your File Cabinet are ‘ghost’ folders - they don’t really exist. Folders are for you to help you organise your work. If you upload documents with the same name, the latter upload will replace the older.”
[..]
“As I said above, folders are not real items; use different names for your documents otherwise your older work will be overwritten by the newer upload.”
The implications of this may not have sunk in to everybody at Ultraversity yet.
Say you create a folder and call it MODULE-1
then upload some work into waht you think is MODULE-1/intro
MODULE-1/main and MODULE-1/conclusions
You hand that in to be marked, then start work on module 2.
If you create another folder called ACTION_ENQUIRY-1 and then upload a file into it called “intro” it will overwrite the file called “intro” which you thought was all safely tucked away in MODULE-1. You may well not notice this. The person marking your work might not even notice, and you get back a coversheet which says “This work is good in parts, but doesn’t hang together very well”.
Pretty serious, huh? Or maybe the explanation from technical support is all wrong, in which case somebody will let me know and I’ll delete this entry.
hypertext as literacy June 22, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , add a commentI’ve been enjoying Will’s Weblogg-ed a lot recently, and today he speculates about connectivist assessment products:
The other interesting idea in the Open Source show was when Weinberger talked about how even our conception of a document has to change, how for hundreds of years we’ve thought of a report or a story as a container of information. But now, with hypertext, a document’s value comes not so much from what it holds but from where it points out of itself to others. I think the reality is that we’re going to have to start teaching students to give research back to us in a web-ified form, complete with links. In five years when we’ve moved beyond paper, hypertext writing (read “blogging”) is going to be a basic literacy. The final mile will be to publish all of that writing in a public blog/portfolio space. Then we’ll be cranking…
Real World Research June 17, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , 3commentsThis is the book recommended by one Learning Facilitator for Year 3 of the Ultraversity Learning, Research and Technology degree.
It’s called Real World Research by Colin Robson, and you can buy it from Amazon below - they’ve reduced the price to £14.99 now, which is just as well:
School Blogging June 17, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , 2commentsWeblogs are starting to make an appearance in the classroom already, in a limited way. I’ve set up a travel log for one teacher which will be followed and commented on by class 4 children this afternoon, and earlier in the week I used a blog with year 3 children as an introduction to e-communication. That was just a quick method for setting up a many-to-many forum really, not a true blog, but the ideas are creeping in, and the teachers are beginning to appreciate the potential of the new internet.
Here are my notes, copied straight out of my Peanut Butter Wiki.
This afternoon’s year 3 lessons will be particularly interesting to me - I’ve set up a discussion blog for them, as an introduction to the email unit.
So it’ll be the first time that a blog has been incorporated into the formal teaching here - a taste of things to come. I’ll try to observe well and take notes.
What happened:
For the first lesson, the children came in and went straight to the computers. They had already been shown how to navigate to the blog and post a comment using the whiteboard in their classroom. They started off well and didn’t need much technical help. My notes say:
T1 pointed out no need to write “my name is”
some children wanted to jump up and and look at each others computers - they were told off.
They asked how to spell words a lot.
We explained how to have a conversation by mentioning somebody’s name and asking a question.
behaviour and attention (focus) was very good - all on task.
Use of refresh button explained, to read the new comments.
A comment appeared from t2 not in the room, so I went to see if they were using the whiteboard in the classroom - they were following the comments there.
By the end of the lesson there were 114 comments. I asked 1 child ‘how does this compare with Word Processing” answer “wicked”.
—-
I decided to set up a new entry for the second class to comment on, so they can start afresh or join in the prevous class discussion.
2nd class arrived and sat on carpet.
t2 talked about communications, about email, about the advantage of being able to connect to anybody in the world. Then a demo.
Children needed more support to get started
one complained about the writing in the input box “it’s too small”
The 2 teachers interacted from between the two rooms and had fun.
behaviour in this lesson was a bit chaotic, excitement , moving about the room but T2 is ok with that.
by the end of the lesson there were 79 comments posted and 16 additions to the other classes thread.
—what else do I remember?
Thinking ‘this would be good for afterschool literacy club”
asking children what they thought of it - answers - ‘good!”
No behaviour/discipline problems, while the teachers are enjoying themselves.
No problems with the blog host coping with rapid fire commenting, or with people generally understanding the system. No problems with unsuitable language etc either so far, just a slight niggle with having to switch away from registered users comments to ‘other’ in order to simply type in a name and post.
No Smiling Day May 18, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , add a comment
tagged: ultraversity
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
