All of the presentations from the day are online at the Eduserv website. Most of these are in the form of embedded SlideShare presentations – though there is also a (slightly noisy) video of Ralph Schroeder’s presentation there. Hopefully other videos will follow. A wee note tho – if you are looking at John Kirriemuir’s presentation or my own, you’ll find a lot of extra supporting text and notes is only visible when viewing via the SlideShare website itself.

This is a bit of a problem with SlideShare embeds – it isn’t at all obvious when there is a lot of hidden extra content that you can only get via the SlideShare site itself.

(It also took me three attempts to get my slides to load up correctly without blank slides. And I’m not too sure why…)

As to the talks themselves… I enjoyed Ralph’s presentation – some good examples of the differences between high-end video conferencing, immersive virtual reality and virtual worlds and their strengths and weaknesses. His argument that there are two end states got a bit of a picking over on twitter afterwards.

Over on her blog, JISC’s Heather Williamson provides a summary of the day.

I couldn’t dig out all the information on the web-site at first but Dan Pacheco, the founder, explained a little more about how Printcasting works, and some of the issues around what happens if you decide to remove your feed (I had to ask, remembering all the furore in the past about Facebook’s data retention policies). Dan explained:

If you register a feed and give others rights to use your content on Printcasting, your articles may appear in other peoples’ Printcasts.  If you later delete that feed, articles that appeared in other peoples’ publications will not be pulled (that would be incredibly disruptive), but the feed will no longer appear in the directory and publishers will not be able to select the feed and use articles from it after that point.

Which seems fair enough.

I don’t doubt that Printcasting will take off as a useful way to quickly and rapidly turn a blog into a newsletter – the extent to which advertisers will support this remains to be seen (though individual publishers can try and raise their own advertising, and Printcasting have made it a very simple matter for anyone to submit adverts to a publication). And while the whole point of Printcasting is to automate the newsletter publication, it seems to lack the ability to mix up and manually edit your publication – adding a few extra images for example. It is still in Beta (this is web 2.0 after all!), and new features are sure to be added – I hope editing will be one.

Meantime, if you want to download an electronic copy of the first print edition (!!!) of the LearningGames blog, you can find it here: LearningGames Printcast

“In less than two decades, the number of people saying there is no-one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled.”

Dr Sigman says he is “worried about where this is all leading”.

He added: “It’s not that I’m old fashioned in terms of new technology, but the purpose of any new technology should be to provide a tool that enhances our lives.”

And earlier in the month there was a debate in the UK House of Lords (part of our convoluted system of national government – think US Congress without elections and less power…) on social networking. This was reported on the Grauniad’s web site today, here.

In this latter article, I note the degree of similarity between some of Lady Greenfield’s comments on the changes to childrens’ minds brought about by digital technologies – and the changes in childrens’ minds described by e.g. Marc Prensky. Very different interpretation of whether these changes are good or not, however. Personally, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle… TANSTAAFL. I’ll close with a quote from the Grauniad report,but note that the complete text of the debate is available online for any insomniacs out there – occaisional remarks in the debate show that some of the Lords are not completely out of touch with technology. (Baroness Sharp: “Lastly, children must be empowered to manage risk. As in the off-line world, one cannot eliminate risk completely; therefore one must build up resilience in children and educate them about the risks and how to minimise them.”).

Back to Lady Greenfield and the Grauniad:

She also warned against “a much more marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity, a disregard for consequence, can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.

“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction. So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”

Discuss.

You can see Roo’s thoughts on ReLIVE, and links to his keynote presentation, here.

EDIT: Sorry about the noise in the background, I was going to provide a transcript eventually… but Roo beat me to it. See comments!

There, now that the bad people have gone, I can continue… Andy Phippen and colleagues at Plymouth have been studying eSafety, and have noted that children continue to use social networking sites with little regard or awareness of guidelines or apparent common sense.

The opening of this post is inspired directly by a quote they found on a teen’s social networking profile.

First an important message: please no pervs, murderurs, rapists, racists and just plain wierdos off limits,no comments no lukin on my profile.fullstop….f off!

As a protection mechanism, perhaps a touch less effective than taking care over privacy settings and careful selection of what information to post.

Virtual Communities

Across the developed world, in increasing numbers, people now commonly spend large portions of their work and social lives online engaging in virtual communities.From discussing popular culture in web-based forums to building virtual utopias and dystopias in 3D virtual worlds; from using email and web technologies to plan inter-galactic corporate warfare in ‘EVE Online’ to supporting workplace communities of practice with content management systems and social networking applications, internet users today now often find themselves members of multiple, overlapping, virtual communities. For many, virtual communities are as much – or more – a part of the fabric of their daily lives as are their physical neighbours and local communities.In this session we welcome contributions to our understanding of virtual communities, their workings and impact on individuals and on local, national and international societies.

Other strands include one dedicated to social networking and one on education. Keynotes include one Andrew Tanenbaum – a name familiar to many a computer scientist!

“The EU Agency ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Network Agency, launches a report on virtual worlds with 25 safety tips for parents on how to make their children behave safely in online virtual worlds.”

Some commensense guidelines and rules for parents to help support their children play safely and happily in online virtual worlds. Overall a positive review that doesn’t seek to demonise virtual worlds. Instead it argues that:

Parents should be educated, empowered and engaged to ensure truly positive and valuable experiences for their children, while reinforcing safety online habits in these three-dimensional environments.

The final sentence summarises things nicely:

Rather than tweak the environment to force real-world styles of collaboration, more might be gained by improving aspects of collaboration that users find troublesome, such as the permission system which currently prevents objects which have been made by different individuals from being linked together.

There is a full programme of events planned on the Second Life (SL, the virtual world) island Infolit iSchool this autumn, with sessions led by librarians from the US and UK, and an Education professor.

The autumn series starts Thursday 2nd October, 8am SL time (which is 4pm UK time) “Building information literacy” part one.

Come along and contribute ideas and/or your skills in building, to create an information literacy experience around the SCONUL 7 Pillars of Information Literacy. A key aim is to help students understand the value and meaning of each pillar, and this will be an evolving build. If you don’t build, you can contribute ideas on the Pillars’ meaning and test out what others are doing. There is information on the 7 Pillars at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html
The session will be held on Infolit iSchool in Second Life:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit iSchool/95/38/22/

There will be a follow-up session on Wednesday 8th October at noon SL time (which is 8pm UK time). You can see information about previous sessions at http://infolitischool.pbwiki.com/ (this also has a calendar page listing all these events)

Following events are:

Wednesday 22nd October. 12 noon SL time (8pm UK time) Lyn Parker (of Sheffield University Library, UK in RL, Maggie Kohime in SL) will lead a discussion on “Modes of offering library services in SL”.

Thursday 23rd October. 8am SL time. (4pm UK time).Sheila Webber (Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, UK, Sheila Yoshikawa in SL) gives her impressions of the French information literacy conference: International colloquium  “Educational approaches to information culture “.

Thursday 30th October. 11am SL time (8pm UK time) “Information Literacy and employability ” Discussion and exhibit as part of Information Literacy week at Sheffield University, UK.

Thursday 6th November at 8am SL time (4pm UK time).  Children in a virtual world: Professor Jackie Marsh (Department of Education, University of Sheffield, UK in RL, Jackie Darkstone in SL) will talk about her research into schoolchildren’s use of the virtual world Club Penguin.

Thursday November 13th. 12 noon SL time. Robin Ashford (Robin Mochi in SL) talks about her experiences, as an academic librarian at George Fox University (USA) working with academics and students in SL.

Thursday November 27th. 12 noon SL time. “Relive Relived” experiences from the Relive08 conference held at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK,

Wednesday December 3rd. 8am SL time. Patricia Anderson  (Perplexity Peccable in SL; Emerging Technologies Librarian, Health Sciences Libraries, Univertsity of Michigan, USA) gives her perspective on SL skills needed by librarians and their patrons, including information literacy skills in Second Life.

Thursday December 11th 8am SL time. “Information Literacy and libraries: reflections from Milawi” Vicki Cormie (Ishbel Hartmann in SL; St Andrews University, Scotland) gives her impressions, following on from a library project visit to Malawi.

One of these is the Sugata Mitra lecture, below, hosted on GoogleVideo. Despite the failings, the site is a very useful resource – more so for some topics than others.