I hope you all have wonderful holidays and everyone is enjoying the weather. With this post I upload some information concerning your portfolio talk. It is supposed to give you some guidance for your portfolio talk and might be a help in preparing it. If you have questions please send me an eMail or leave a comment.
Please request a date for a meeting via email.

Greetings Ralf

Below you will find the presentation I used for my pecha kucha.

By rob

LMS: WordPress as LMS
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The next step will be to give a presentation of your results in the seminar. In order to avoid long and exhausting presentations I ask you to do your presentation using pecha kucha style.

Pecha Kucha („Éö„ÉÅ„É£„ÇØ„ÉÅ„É£?), usually pronounced in three syllables like “pe-chak-cha”) is a presentation format in which content can be easily, efficiently and informally shown, usually at a public event designed for that purpose. Under the format, a presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, for a total time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds.¹

So everyone should bring a slideshow with 20 slides with herself/himself to give a presentation of 6 minutes 40 seconds in total for our last seminar session on 14th of juli.
To give you an idea how this could work I will give my presentation next week in the seminar and it is my first pecha kucha style presentation as well!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGaCLWaZLI4

You will find more information about pecha kucha in Hamburg on pecha-kucha.org and there are also information for Helsinki, Barcelona and a lot of other cities.

1. Pecha Kucha. (2009, June 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:54, June 12, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pecha_Kucha&oldid=295977278

1. What kind of Problems are you facing with Task #6?
2. Make sure to to get feedback to Task #6 from at least two people. Ask them to comment on your Posts. They don’t have to belong to the seminar. Consider to give feedback to the other students blogs!
3. Please let me know what you want to deal with in the last weeks during the seminar. What do you still want to learn about educational (micro)blogging?
4. Make sure all tasks are done till the end of the semester.

¹

1. Pink Sherbet Photography

In my opinion the collected features might exclude each other sometimes, but it is a first collection and might be improved during the next weeks.

PS: During working with etherpad we discovered that there is a limitation to 8 users working on the document at the same time.

Intermediate Results at the end of the seminar:
(After approx. 40 minutes)

Existing Microblogging Services
- http://twitter.com
- http://laconi.ca / http://identi.ca
- http://edmodo.com
- http://www.cirip.ro/
- http://bleeper.de/
- WordPress P2-Theme: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2

What does an educational Microblogging Service need?
Only prerequisite: 140 Characters per message

Features
- reminder for tasks, calendar
- grading feature
- messaging; possibly with personal messages exceeding 140 characters, or at least with the chance to add files
- viewing/sharing different files
- tagging — maybe offer popular tags like some blogs do
- groups
- contacts following/followers
- post only to groups (only groupmembers can read that)
- connection to facebook, blogs, etc.
- reach a big mass of people in short time
- searching feature
- archive
- Visualization, such as tag clouds or wonder wheels to visualize the knowledge space
- updates sent to your mobile phone

Interface
- easy to use and reliable What makes it easy to use? What makes it reliable?
- Web Interface
-clearly arranged

Else
- custom design so everyone can have their own preferred way of reading things
- many different clients (Twitter), customizable
- you can be the whole time without breaks in connection.
- you are easy to contact
- would make sense to integrate with a wiki or a social network-like platform. Wiki would be great, e.g. having mutual links from tweets to tagged wikipages and automated listings of tweets on that page, or so.
- you can write something what is maby not easy to say in reality
- live collaboration/like twitter wall for feedback on presentations
-free of charge

Limitations
- you need the correct follwers and need to follow the right poeple
–> only makes sense if used by enough people
- only easy to use if you know what you are dealing with
–> Interface is reduced but not easy!
- privacy problems?
- works only when all students take part. But they don’t like to be forced. (e.g. http://books.google.com/books?id=E3z5bfkO4ywC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#PPR14,M1)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_363nBxHU

Task

• Please research which other theorys fit to educational (micro)blogging. Take one of them and develop a small usecase for your future pedagogical field of practice using this theory.
• The Paper “7 things you should know about… Personal Learning Environments” by the Educause Learning Initiative is pretty interesting and might give you some inspiration.
  Download 7 Things you should know about Personal Learning Environments (*.pdf 152kb)
• Maybe it is meaningful to split your results in more than one blogpost e.g. one about the theory and description of the usecase.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

“Create a blog where students describe a typical day at school. Invite other same aged students from different global locations to contribute the same type of information on the same blog. Let students ask questions and leave comments to gain cultural awareness. Students can then begin to share/compare thematic units being learned, novels being read, field trips being taken, etc.”¹

In her opinion this is

“…very interesting for students, because in this manner they have the opportunity to learn a lot about other cultures and the way other students learn at school. The best is to be connected with students all around the world. Because the bigger the distance between the locations of the schools is the more interesting and exciting the project is.”²

That sound nice and interesting for me but iI have to admit that it sounds a bit like theory to me that the students could keep in touch by using the blog – but maybe I am wrong.

³

I think Sabine is asking good questions in her blog:

• How can adults be «taught‚Äù to use the internet not like classical media?
• How do have educational blogs to be changed to increase active participation ‚Äì and I talk only about comments and discussions?
• What are the fears of adults to write a blog? How can they be reduced?
• How does a virtual learning environment look like which motivates adults to write an own blog or even participate at all?
• What does adults motivate to share their thoughts and learning experiences?

After you have some experiences now in educational blogging and as at least some of you also faced problems like the ones named above we should discuss all that. In the seminar and in this Blogentry/Comments/Trackbacks.
What are your answers to the above questions? Have you read anything about barriers and/or resistance in this context?

1. http://web20intheclassroom.blogspot.com/2008/10/ways-to-use-blogs-in-your-classroom-and.html
2. http://caravirtual.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/task-4-one-of-33-ways-on-how-to-use-blogs-in-education/
3. Image Source:http://www.flickr.com/photos/eleaf/2536358399/

So I would ask you to use twitter a little bit more to let us know what are you doing (for the seminar) and please include #41-61.030 to your messages if it might be interesting for the seminar.

1. (CC) Brian Solis. www.briansolis.com | Image found at Lara Kretler