And Emerge will be well represented at the conference.

Amonst others, Emerge members Dai Griffith, Geroge Roberts, Neil Witt, Steven Warburton, Gilly Salmon and Steve Wheeler are all making presentations at the conference. The Open Habitat, Moose and Emerge projects will run demonstrations on the Jisc stand. We will alos be distributing handouts about all of the Emerge supported Users and Innovation projects.

And we are also runing a series of fringe activities and events.

On Wednesday 3 December at 2030 CET is the Edubloggers meetup in the Ambassador lounge bar Sorat Hotel Ambassador Berlin, Bayreuther Straße 42 · D-10787 Berlin (Five minutes walk from InterContinental).

On Thursday 4 December at 11.00 CET we broadcast Sounds of the Bazaar radio LIVE from the conference. ICWE stand B54. If you cannot make it to the conference listen to the programme live - go to http://tinyurl.com/6df6ar in your web browser. The programme will open in your MP3 player of choice.

Thursday 4 December at 19.30 CET we are hosting a Microblogging debate in the Marlene Bar at the Intercontinental Hotel.

On Friday 5 December at 11.00 CET we will broadcast the second Sounds of the Bazaar show, LIVE from the conference. ICWE stand B54. Friday 5 December.

Also on the Friday at 13.00 CET Emerge is hosting two Special Interest Group Lunchs. Th firts with josie Fraser ins on microblogging and teh second hosted by Graham Attwell is on MOOCs. These will be in the Bellevue Room at the InterContinental Hotel Further Special Interest Group Lunches to be announced.

With the exception of the conference presentations and Special Interest Group lunches all these events are free and open to anyone regardless of whether you have registered at the conference. If you are in Berlin just drop in and find us. Between events you will have a good chance of finding one of us on the Jisc Stand. To keep in touch with what we are doing follow the Twitter block on this site. Or join our Sounds of the Baazaar Facebook group.

On Monday we broke new ground with Eneging our Sounds of the Bazaar radio show. We produced a special issue of Emerging Sound of the Bazaar entitled 'Into the Dragons Den'. The programme was a fly on the wall special following the progress of a Dragons Den session organised by the Jisc Emerge project.

The session was organised as part of the Users and Innovation Design Model process. As part of that model, at different times during the project development, project developers get invited to a session where they are quizzed by 'Dragons' on the progress of their project. The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar podcast is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden represented the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler were the dragons.

I'm not sure the Dragons roared. In fact, I think Maggie slayed the Dragons. But judge for yourself. As always many thanks to all those who took part in the programme including our phone in guests. Production and music by Dirk Stieglitz.

You can listen here. Or for more listening options head over to our post on the Wales Wide Web.

The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden will represent the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler wil be the dragons. It is going to be great fun.

This programme will be a litte different in format to previous Sounds of the Bazaar broadcasts. It is a documentary. And we want you to skype us with your reactions to the programme. Our skype line - just search for GrahamAttwell  in skype - wil open at the start of the programme and will remain open until half an hour after the programme. It will also be open from 10.00 - 1300 UK time, 9.00 - 12.00 tomorrow, Tuesday, 25 November. We will record all your reactions and broadcast these as a follow up podcast. Please participate - it is a new experiment for us in broadcasting your views. 

The programme will last about 45 minutes. To listen to the programme just go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u in your browser. The stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And if you'd like to chat during the programme Crsitina Costa will be in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat. Just add your name in the text field (leaving the password field blank) and chat away.

Te Dragons Den sessions are organised as part of the support process has been through the four stage Users and Innovation Development Model. At different times during Users and Innovation sponsored projects, project developers get invited to a session where they are quizzed by 'Dragons' on the progress of their project. The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden will represent the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler wil be the dragons. It is going to be great fun.

The programme will last about 45 minutes. To listen to the programme just go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u in your browser. The stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And if you'd like to chat during the programme Crsitina Costa will be in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat. Just add your name in the text field (leaving the password field blank) and chat away.

If you missed the session - or would like to hear it again - we are providing you with three different versions. You can watch a replay of the event in Elluminate. This provides you with access to the sidebar chat discussion as well as to the audio. Or - if you are short of time you can listen to an MP3 podcast of Dave's introduction. Or you can listen to the full session inline or on your MP3 player.

This is the link to the Elluminate version.

Listen to Dave Cormier's introduction inline (10 minutes).

Listen to the full seminar (45 minutes)

Or if you would like to download a copy of the podcasts just head over to the Wales Wed Web.

This month it's about Moocs and Open Course Models

When: 3rd November 2008, at 1800 UK Time (check your local time here)

Where: Elluminate (enter here)

Speaker: Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada

Dave will be speaking about his experiences, so far, of the CCK MOOC and touch on the technological platforms being used to support participants, the tensions that exist within the course design and the peer support models that are being embraced. Within this discussion he will interweave some of his perspectives and theories around education and attempt to place the course into the context of other open courses being taught around the world.

More about our guest speaker: Dave is well known as an innovative thinker, active researcher and practitioner in the field of the technology enhanced learning. His major research interests include the tracking and development of educational technology, the examination of planned and unplanned online communities, and open-source multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). His most recent work has been the development of the concept of rhizomatic education and the community as curriculum. He is also one of the main discussion leaders on the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - Connectivism and Connected Knowledge (CCK) - with George Siemens and Stephen Downes.

First we had open educational resources. This was a step forward but the resources were variable in quality, hard to find and were often tied to courses which made them hard to use for self study. Those issues haven't gone away but improvements in search technologies and a wider general conciousness about the value of self publishing open resources means it is increasingly easy to find what you want.

And now we are witnessing an explosion in open learning. Of course there are the big publicity happenings like the CCK08 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)  organised by Stephen Downes and George Siemans on connectivism.

But more important is the flowering of opportunties for learning from many, many diverse sources. One of the best things about Twitter is it opens access to many events going on and opportunities to partiucpate at a distance. Last week I dropped in on a TeachMeet session being organised as part of the Scottish Learning Festival. Someone had 'shouted it out" in Twitter, I followed the link and ended up in a broadcast over the UK Open Universities free Flashmeeting service. There was about twenty or so of us particpating online. Whilst the quality of the video sometimes left something to be desired (and I was stuggling to follow Glaswegian accents) this was more than made up for by the quality and humour in the online chat.

Yesterday morning I recieved this in my email: "You have a live session today with cristinacost on 'Connecting Online : Sharing Life's Experiences'. The session will start at 10:00 AM W. Europe Standard Time and is 60 minutes long."  This is a free course being organised in the WizIQ environment. Sadly I am bogged down in administration and had no time to go. But over the last year there has been an explosion of such open courses and seminars. We are organising one such series oursleves through the Jisc Evolve project.

And this morning Cristina Costa showed me her online bookclub "Living Literature though Exploration." This more than anything impresses me as to how we have moved towards real open learning through Web 2.0 tools (in this case as simplle as a shared blog and some bookmarks.

However there remain a number of issues.

The last barrier to open learning - and a very complex one - is that of accreditation. Whilst I am sceptical about the Connectivism MOOC, it is raising a number of central questions about open learning, not least that of accreditation. Under the Connectivism course model, only 34 (I think) sdtudents are offically enrolled for accreditation and therefore pay fees. Their fees pay for the costs of the course which is open and free to everyone else. As part of this they get feedback form tutors on course assignments and accreditation at the end of the course. How important is this for learning? And would it be possible for a student to develop a portfolio based on particpation in the course and then claim accreditation elsewhere? Are we moving to a model where learning is open but institutions have a major role in accrediting that learning (presumably through a portfolio model)? Can we develop a concept of open accreditation? And what would that mean?

How can you join in? Well if you just want to sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) that is absoltuetly fine. Just point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u This should open in your MP3 player of choice and after a few seconds delay start streamin. We will be going live at 17.25 UK Summer time, 18.25 Central European time.

But if you'd like to join in the fun you can come on our conference special chat room and share oyur opinions with others. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. We've asked Jisc for iPhones to keep us in touch with your questions but in case this doesn't happen :) then Cristina Costa who will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds will pass the questions on. I will post up the chat room address in the next 24 hours. OK - look forward to hearing from you next Tuesday.

First up in the show is Edupunk 'poster boy' Jim Groom - the man who first coined the name edupunk.

He is followed by Mike Caulfield from the University of Mary Washington. He talks about edupunks as a metaphor and about change cultures.

Helen Keegan explains how she developed a new 'do it yourself' course at the Univeristy of Salford. Helen explains the need for us to loosen up control.

Kathryn Greenhill from Australia explains that punklib is librarians doing it for themselves. She appeals for libraries to free up data.

Martin Weller, believes edupunk is a metaphor for the zeitgeist of our times. He talks about the tension between the culture of social networking and our instututional course provision. Sounds of the Bazaar resident edu-granny, Leila Gray, reflects on the differences technology has made in her lifetime.

Margarita Perez Garcia wraps up the July edition of Emerging Mondays with three short experimental poems.

The music for this show is from the polish Rock-Punk-Alternative Band Adapters. We feature their album Adapters. You can find this album and a lot more music on the great Creative Commons music site Jamendo.com.

To listen to the programme or to download this edition of Emerging Mondays go to the Pontydysgu web site.

What is Edupunk?

Stephen Downes offers a definition: "edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance." And an anonymous commentator on his post says: "I can't think of anything more punk than education. For the student, learning gives power to the individual. A society full of mindless drones trained to each do a single task doesn't really have the mental ability to rebel in meaningful ways. For the teacher, every day is an exercise in punk. You're almost completely under the control of your coordinator, your principals, your superintendents, your school board, the media. Often, "the man" passes down restrictive rules and decisions that don't seem to align with what's best for you or your students. Often, you're only equipped with sparse resources you're able to scrap together here and there."

Are you into edupuank. Or is this just a ludicrous social construction by white males the wrong side of 40. The next Emerging Monday Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE radio programme on Monday 7 July will explore the edupunk phenomonon. With interviews,music opinion, poetry and more. LIVE. Guests include Kathryn Greenhill, Michael Caulfield and Martin Weller.

And hopefully we will be welcoming resident edupunk granny Leila back to the programme. Make sure the show is in your diary. We will be broadcasting LIVE from 1900 - 2000 UK Summer Time, 2000 - 2100 Central European Summer Time. To access the programme just click on this link or go to http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u and it shoudl open in your favourite MP3 player. And please tell your friends.