I must admit, I don’t remember ever hearing the word metalepsis before. And when I google its meaning, I then have to google the meaning of the words used to define it. ‘Trope’ and ‘extradiagetic’ aren’t part of my day-to-day vocabulary – though they might have been if I’d stuck with language and literature instead […]
Another set of notes from Handheld Learning finally making it into my blog. This is from a talk by James Clay. He argues that Twitter is about the community having coffee together and having a conversation. Like coffee-break chat, it’s a stream you dip into and it’s a leveller that can improve efficeincy within an […]
An exceedingly late write-up of a talk I went to on Moshi Monsters at Handheld Learning earlier this year. At that point, Moshi had seven million registered users and was adding over a million a month. About a third of these were based in the UK, a third in the US and a third in […]
While at the Virtual Worlds JISC day up in Stirling, I saw a demonstration of in-world chatbots. The Daden Prime sim has a chatbot avatar, Abi Carver. You can visit her in world, or talk to her on their chatbots.co.uk website. Like most chatbots, she’s fairly limited as a conversational partner. However, I’m told she’s […]
More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/conf/?q=en/content/abstracts Astrid Ensslin, one of the organisers of the conference, reported on a very interesting piece of research, adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from the real world to the virtual world. Maslow identified that people have to prioritise their physical suvival needs and their need […]
You learn the strangest things at academic conferences. Not only can you now zoom around the real world via Google Maps, but you can now also view a Google Map of the World of Warcraft. Apparently, by combining information about the measurement of significant features on this map, and the distance you can cast certain […]
My original proposal for my PhD was about virtual international communities in primary schools. Why? Well, apart from the excellent, and convincing, reasons I gave at my initial interview, it was what I thought I was most likely to be accepted for. With a 25-year-old degree in English, and a 20-year-old masters in history I […]
Well, I’m working on my literature review, so I’m bound to tinker with my research questions, aren’t I? Also, an initial pass over my data showed me that if I just look at the skills and resources that people use to learn together online, I’m going to end up with a list. And not a […]
I’ve run into a real problem with the idea of ‘comunity of practice’. What is the difference between a CoP and a community? Lots of people just take the CoP idea as is, and run with it. People who critique the ideas seem to do so in terms of thinking the model through – do […]
John Lanchester, Guardian Weekend, 4 Nov 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html ‘Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, “email’s main function […]