Bookings close Friday, 15th August 2008 – book soon to confirm your place!

This conference will explore and extend the debate over the digital divide, providing an opportunity to develop both thinking and practice. The premise to be explored in the conference is that the digital divide is multidimensional, rather than just being a problem of access, and that the divide is, in different ways, prevalent in many settings, and is not limited to the divide between first world and lesser developed countries.   In addition,  several forms of the digital divide manifest themselves in everyday situations encountered by many in the learning technology domain.

Full details of the conference programme can be found here. To book a place to attend the conference.

And come the the Emerge reception, too! 

Come to the Emerge reception at ALT-C to raise a glass (wine, bottle of beer?) to the U&I projects who have a session at this year's ALT conference (hope I haven't missed anyone). Well done! You are invited, and bring colleagues and friends to a brief, live, streaming internet radio show: "Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar", presented by Graham Attwell and (maybe, ok?) featuring sessions from the following JISC U&I/Emerge ALT sessions:

Outtakes streaming in and out of Second Life, parallel chat, twemes, audiographic, serious, digital-storytelling fun.

• 0016  Sounded Good (Sounds Good)
• 0065 Alternate Reality Games (Argosi)
• 0114 Pedagogy or Technology (Preview)
• 0129 The Awesome Dissertation (Awesome) POSTER
• 0159 From Swords to Hairstyles (Habitat)
• 0172 Web 2.0: The digital Divide between the Net Generation Learner, Institution and Practice (Asel)
• 0208 Understanding skills (SkillClouds)
• 0253 3-D Multi-User Virtual Environments for Socialisation of Distance Learners (Moose)
• 0264 Can on-line communities and networks bridge digital divides? (Evolve)

Any more? Let me know.

Yes, there are questions about security, trust, authentication and all that on massively peer-to-peer networks. But, I expect there are solutions in a combination of small to medium-size institutional and civic federations with a trust ranking system like the Google page-rank and ad-rank algorithms (who trusts whom). Rather than striving for a pure binary trust/don't trust, zero/one, access/not in a situation you make it fuzzy 0.0-1.0 and all points between, and decide how tolerant you will be. This, I suggest, will be a new direction of challenge to the institutions of society: public and private. For instance, peer-to-peer, fast, VOIP networks (Skype) constitute at least a disruption to the telcos' markets; now imagine a world of peer-to-peer Skype phones (that work).

Similarly data integrity, provenance and related source criticisms are severely challenged by widely distributed data storage technology. Are there persistent watermarks that can authenticate data? If not, what knowledge can be trusted?

Analysis and synthesis, i.e. teaching and learning, in such a peer-to-peer, distributed-data environment will require fresh approaches a long way beyond the vle.

I enjoyed our discussions.

I look forward to meeting OSSWatch at ALT-C.

Identity, community and policy are closely related issues . We are engaged with the big things when we model and support change as part of the wider evolving context for HE:

• globalisation, in the sense of connectedness but also in the sense of a number of rhetorics: internationalisation of the curriculum; international competitiveness and the knowledge economy
• (neo)liberalisation: everything from student fees through the degree awarding power granted to MacDonalds to outsourcing IT infrastructure to Google or a MS SharePoint provider.
• innovation – usually interpreted as technical innovation, but also embracing new ways of doing things: flatter structures, social networks, peer evaluation and assessment
• participation, in the sense of widening participation in HE in the UK, but also looking at how the money economy is rolling over the non-money economy: GM crops vs. Indian Farmers’ seed-sharing schemes, privatisation of care relationships, and the burgeoning middle classes in the emerging economies.

I do not think we can hide from these.

Identity and community are - for me - multifaceted, complex, and deeply inter-related: on-line and off.

I videoed the full reflection here:

Ray Sims, in his "personal learning journal", ... asks, "in the context of enterprise 2.0, what items potentially demonstrate emergent behavior?" He then helpfully (?) provides a top-of-the-head list of 10 items. So, my question is whether this is helpful? Is everything 2.0 also all in beta? Everything contingent; nothing solid. Has the concept of emergence itself become unproductive?

"... we need a better understanding of how to synthesise and manage the technologies to offer coherent and clear services.  ...managing this communication overload is a problem shared by many if not all projects. We are looking for case studies of the use of social software to manage both internal and external project communication from which we can identify common factors and potential patterns"

It struck me that there were three challenges:

• how to monitor for meaningful familiarity in order to advise - without overload
• how to select an appropriate subset for personal/community use - without becoming isolated in a non-cognate idiolect
• how to manage - without resorting to diktat

For institutions and educational development, in light of the plethora of services, I see two top-level questions:

• what tools should the institution provide and support, whether through own services or SLAs with providers?
• what advice and guidance do we offer to learners (and I include the whole of our institutional community in this: students, teachers, researchers, administrators) about the use of the Internet (particularly Web 1, 2, 3...n) for learning and teaching?

The answers to these need to avoid both Luddism and novophilia. Keep taking the tablets!

I thought this would make an excellent session at the upcoming conference.