When: Monday, March 16, 18:00 GMT / 1900 CET

Where: Elluminate (no Password required)

Moderation: Cristina Costa and Steffen Büffel

The guest speakers includes Willms Buhse and Pat Parslow. Isn't that reason enough not to miss it!! ;-)

The discussion will focuses on the following sub-topics:

• How will communication and collaboration change when digital natives are employed in senior positions?
• Changed knowledge management through chats, Twitter and so on?
• How and to what extent will blogs, wikis and so on promote the productivity and creativity of employees?
• Collaboration tools in the social web permit decentralized work. What is the workplace, what are the working places of the future?
• Where is the limit? How far can the boundaries of classic corporate structure in the sense of Enterprise 2.0 be driven?

We have now set up an open wiki to collect people’s story. Do check it here and add your stories to it. We would love to hear from you!

Tuesday at 1230 UK time, join us and tell us your story!

Here is how it works:
Bring your brown bag and join us for a story lunch, this Tuesday (24/02/2009) at 12:30 GMT (check your local time here). The session will happen  in elluminate, and aims to provide you with the opportunity to be a STARR , i.e, to brief tell YOUR story or give an example of how you share. There will also be the chance to explore our learning stories according to the PLANET project's methodology. 

An open wiki has been created for this activity, but we welcome different, creative ways of telling and sharing your story! ;-)

If you haven't had time to create your story, join us all the same.What matters in that we connect!

We really look forward to talking to you in real time!

We'd also like to see pictures of your real lunch at our virtual meeting, but try not to spill your tea on the keyboard. ;-) 

The EXTEND project team, funded by JISC-EMERGE Benefits and Realisation, are holding an asynchronous discussion event from Sunday 15 Feb-Sunday 1 Mar 2009 where we will be exploring the topic Sharing practice: how and where. Along with JISC-EMERGE colleague Janet Finlay from PLANET, we would like to invite you to join us in this conversation around Communities of Practice and Pattern Language.

Just sign in (you might need to sign up too!) to CABWEB and join the conversation! ;-)

The web seminar on Careers and Internet brought together more than 30 people last Monday.

The discussion was extremely interesting and we could have gone on and on with it.

Steven Warburton talked about  ‘fractured digital identities, while Mario Grobholz,presented about his project called  myON-ID

For those who didn’t have a change to attend the live event, please check the recording. It’s worth listening to it.   

There actually a lot of open initiatives going on. 

This week I have two to suggest: 

1.      Today at 6pm UK Time / 7pm CET (check your time zone here ) EVOLVE will be hosting one more live session in Partnership with Educamp.  This month it's about Careers and the Internet and counts with two special guests: Mario Grobholz and Steven Warburton.Join us in Elluminate though this link.                             

Please notice that elluminate does not allow special characters. Make sure to use only regular characters (no ~ or ` , for instance) when adding your name to the Elluminate sign in box.

2.     During the next two weeks, we will be hosting a conversation around Sharing Practice: How and Where in CABWEB, as part of the EXTEND Project!

This is open to everyone who is interested in this topic, so please feel free to invite other people to join us.

We will be focusing on the PLANET project, which aims to develop a Pattern Language for Communities of Practice and the sharing of 'good ' practices.
The project is way interesting, and some of the project partners will be taking part in this conversation too. You can check more about it here.

See you there! 

The “Online Round Table 2009″ are a joint project of the EduCamp and EVOLVE network [These are pre-events of the third German EduCamp in April, 17th-19th 2009 in Ilmenau.] This open session will take place in Elluminate in February, 16 at 6pm GMT / 7 pm CET (check your time zone here )

More info here (scroll down for the English version of the post) This session will have Mario Grobholz and Steven Warburton as Guest speakers, and is open to anyone interested in this topic. And no password is required to join the online event. Simply add your name to the text box, and click ‘go’

Please notice that elluminate does not allow special characters. Make sure to use only regular characters (no ~ or ` , for instance) when adding your name to the Elluminate sign in box.

Question: Why are we doing these online sessions when some of us are already going to meet face to face? Why a partnership between two communities? What do we hope to achieve with this?

Answer: One thing to start with: to create alternative opportunities to network, opportunities to gain access to people’s ideas and to establish learning bonds. Isn't the role of a Network to help people network? And isnt the objective of a community to bring people together so they can learn through conversations and interactive activities?

What we hope to achieve with this is simple: we want to bridge the connection between the people in our different networks. With these opportunities we also aim to provide those who might not be able to join our face to face events, an opportunity to be part of these discussions too. And looks like we have been quite successful with the launch of this initiative, which counted with the participation of multi networks and communities. There were Educampers. Evolve/JISC members, Webheads, EVO2009 - Digifolio participants, The earthcast09 team webcasters, WeDoTEL researchers and twitter followers in the house, as far as I could tell (am I missing someone?).

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the outstanding performance of out two guest speakers, Sieglinde Jakob-Kühn (aka Networking Lady) und Graham Attwell, which we thoroughly enjoyed talking to. But equally important was our great audience. There were more than 60 people in elluminate. This must mean something. Are we connecting?! I think so.  This is just true collaboration. This is pure fun too. Thank you all for coming.

This monthly topic is PLEs and E-Portfolios - is this the future of education?, as our guest speakers so well introduced us to from their personal and distinct points of view. There is nothing like being offered different perspectives. It just sets the mood for a great discussion, which can now continue here.

Your ideas, questions and thoughts you still want to explore can be shared in the discussion thread Thomas Bernardt has just created. Feel free to join and/or create new threads, not only with new related issues, but also in different languages! We do like diversity!

So here is our motto: Stay connected! We sure would like to hear more from you before we launch the next topic in February!  

Related Blog Posts:

• ORT09 | Session #1 - Dank, Aufzeichnung & Ausblick
• PLE und E-Portfolios -Ist das die Zukunft der Bildung?

As part of our Open Learning approach we are also open to suggestions and new ideas.

And to start the year the best way, we will be supporting Educamp, by hosting some online learning conversations prior to the face to face event this coming April in Germany. You will be able to find us there too, if you are up to a face to face get together, where we can only promise pure learning fun!

So to start off with, we will have Graham Attwell (Pontydysgu) as the first special guest. He will host a conversation around PLEs and E-Portfolios - is this the future of education?

The event will take place in Elluminate (click here to enter the room), in January, 19th 2009, at 1900 CET/ 1800 UK time (Check your local time here).

You are welcome to join. Bring a friend too. :-)

To join just type your name to the username text field and leave the password field blank. Then click to enter the room and join for an interesting discussion. ( View tutorial here) Your questions and ideas are needed!

Meanwhile, don't forget we will also be hosting a Thought Fest in March, 5-6 in Salford, Manchester. We need your help to get this show on the road!

Is there any news here? No, indeed there isn’t. We have been arguing that the web as it stands today is about enabling the individual to create and collaborate, to construct and to publish. It is also about participating and being included. And again this is also nothing that new, but what happened last week on Online Educa Berlin 08 surely was.

Sounds of the Bazaar were there and that definitely made a difference in the way these events run. It was practically the only open chance people were offered to join Online Educa online. Sounds of the Bazaar featured two special shows from Berlin (1 and 2) , and that was really one of the highlights of this conference, as far as I am concerned. Sounds of the Bazaar attempted, and succeeded, to bridge between the physical venue and a virtual audience who was as interested in taking part in it as the ones who were lucky enough to be able to be there face to face. And in an event that focus especially on Online Education, it starts to be hard to understand why is it organized solely for a face to face audience.

One of the other interesting aspects I observed while in Berlin, is that twitter, and microblogging in general, is becoming more and more relevant in conferences, as a fast way to feedback one’s experiences and perspectives. It has also proved to be one of the most efficient unofficial channels of communication and blended networking, as it allowed a wider audience to have a peek at what was going on during those tow days. Of course, this does not happen out of the blue. It rather happens as the result of team effort, and community engagement. And that's true magic. :-)

As a last remark, I would just like to refer to my experience at the plenary session. It was my first time at Online Educa Berlin, and also the biggest conference I have ever taken part in. I am aware it’s difficult to accommodate so many people to attend keynote presentations. 'The best way' seems to be to seat people in rows, get the speaker a good microphone and provide high quality speakers, so everyone can listen to the person presenting. Hopefully attendants will concentrate…well, at least, it will keep them quiet. And if we get a room big enough to squeeze a huge number of conference delegates, than there's nothing like using a bit more of technology and broadcast a video inside the room, so the rows at the back can, at least, see the speaker…on the screen. Well, this solution is not bad, but I am not sure how different it was from the keynote videos I access on YouTube. And indeed, I had already seen Mike Wesch in youtube before. :-) And why wasn't this broadcast live to a wider audience? Wouldn't that been a good idea?