Spoken Word has recently acquired its’ 1000th user! This honour was bestowed upon the 23 year old Tracy Walker who is currently in her first year at Glasgow Caledonian University studying Occupational Therapy. In recognition of this event Ewan MacPhee of Spoken Word presented the 23 year old with an i-Pod shuffle in her chosen colour of blue. The above photo shows Ewan and Tracy outside the Saltire Centre. Tracy was thrilled with her prize.
As we mentioned in a previous entry, some of the Spoken Word team attended the inaugural BarCampScotland on Saturday. The slides of our presentation, ‘Connecting Pasts and Futures: Spoken Word Services and the BBC’, are now available on SlideShare (without videos or audio, unfortunately). You can also download the slides as a PDF file directly from us at this link. [3.3MB PDF]
The event went extremely well, and we felt it was a useful chance to deliver our ideas to an audience partially outside, but intersecting with, the higher education community.
Given the volume of interest it’s hard to imagine the event not running again, and we hope that we might see a future BarCamp in the vicinity of GCU…
You can find more presentations from this weekend’s BarCampers on the appropriate SlideShare tag: BarCampScotland. Make sure to check out Andrew Middleton of Sheffield Hallam University’s presentation on pedagogical models for podcasting, which we unfortunately managed to miss at the time. You can also get a flavour of the event from Andrew’s podcast episode on it, featuring an all-too-short interview with our very own star of the show, Aidan Johnston, on our podcasting efforts (at 5:48).
Also, check out the Flickr BarCampScotland photo pool and tag pages.
We’re pleased to announce that Padova, our production finding aid and repository tool, has gone through another major revision as of yesterday (just in time for BarCamp Scotland…). We’ve had this version available in internally for some weeks now, and we think it constitutes an important step forward. Additionally, we’ve pushed out some changes to the rest of this site.
What’s new in Padova?
What’s new on the Spoken Word site?
Please contact us with any comments, suggestions or issues to do with any of these changes.
The Spoken Word web site will be down for approximately 15 minutes at 13:00 UTC today in order to upgrade Padova to a new release.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Update 13:14 UTC: All services now restored, and with 30 seconds to spare 
The inaugural BarCamp Scotland goes ahead this Saturday in Edinburgh (See the Upcoming entry for details). The popular casual geekfests have become an important meet and greet event for academics, web developers, freelance podcasters and new media folks of all descriptions. They’re also an important opportunity for attendees to sample the state of the arts in areas beyond their immediate disciplinary remit.
Spoken Word will be there, represented by Aidan Johnston, Ewan MacPhee, Graeme West and Andrew Gruen.
We’ll be available to discuss the project in general; our repository; connected learning issues and methodologies; our relationship with the BBC; and of course all of the geeky details of running a service like ours. Any prior notification of desired topics would be very helpful (leave a comment).
We’re also, of course, looking forward to learning from other attendees, some of whom are friends of Spoken Word (see the attendee list on the wiki). Major topics look to include podcasting, community software, dynamic web application frameworks, mobile technology and open source projects.
If you’d like to meet with us at BarCamp, please leave a comment here (or use the Contact form) and we’ll get back to you - or simply come and find us on the day. Visit the wiki to add your name to the roster if you plan to drop by.
The Spoken Word website, including this blog and all our publicly-accessible media search tools, will be going offline for upgrade work tomorrow, 25th January, at 11:00 UTC. The expected downtime is approximately forty-five minutes.
For those who are interested, we’re upgrading to WordPress 2.1.
Update (11:53 UTC):
All services are now restored.
This is the face that lead one attendee of the Nursing E - Learning Seminar to label David’s presentation there as ‘inspiring’.
Just Before Christmas, David Donald, Spoken Word’s aptly named ‘Principal Investigator’, unexpectedly ended up presenting to the Nursing E - Learning Seminar at Glasgow Caledonian University. Iain Wallace was originally supposed to carry out the presentation but had to step out at the last minute on account of a winter illness, although from the feedback it appears that David was a more than worthy replacement.
David spoke generally about the Spoken Word, including the background of the project and services, the work it is currently involved in and the services it provides in the environment of web 2.0.
One attendee of David’s presentation said: ‘This is exciting. I haven’t replied before as I was trying to remember where I got your address. I suddenly remembered this evening. I know because I am taking the Caledonian module in e - Learning and one of our group just heard an inspiring talk from David and put the address on our VLE’
Today David gives a presentation at Walton Hall, Milton Keynes in an OU seminar series. Entitled Towards ‘Writing’ on and for the Internet it starts with a brief introduction to the Spoken Word project, Spoken Word Services at the SALTIRE Centre and the most general objectives - our ‘pedagogical pluralism’ - of the learning environment we seek to create. (For an earlier exposition on such an environment see Towards a Communications and Information Technology Learning Environment (Donald et al, 2000)). It then concentrates on our presentation layer tools
Blogging from Ross Priory
The group identified the following benefits of the Technology Enhanced Learning generated on the project that could be disseminated…
ESRC and others are finally adopting a convention (which I like) that has been esatblished in the US for some time and moving from using e-learning to TEL. This refects our estabished Spoken Word dictum that “all contemporary learning is e-learning”.
I hope next on the agenda is the discovery that “the university is the learning environment”. We should always use these conventions?
A Google search demostrates how widely TEL is being used… Caledonian should adopt that convention.
…This Call uses the phrase technology enhanced learning≠to refer to what has recently been termed e-learning≠. The European Commission is currently using the phrase ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’ for Framework VII, and will promote it as a ‘new’ research area. This Call uses the same phrase in order to support that vision, and to ensure alignment with European research groups working in the same field.
