Efforts to reduce carbon emissions and other waste by organisations generally fit into one of two categories, namely technical or behavioural. For example, you can either design a system which switches of people’s personal computers automatically, or you can increase awareness so that they are more likely to do this themselves. However, at Pembrokeshire College, a more integrated approach has been adopted, as Geoff Elliott told us in an online workshop for RSC Wales yesterday.

The college uses the technology to provide people with an immediate and precise prompt, in the form of an on-screen meter which tells them how much energy you are using. This is enabled by hardware supplied by Enistic.com, which is networked to provide an integrated monitoring service. Once people are aware of their energy usage, they are far more likely to think about their own behaviour. The evidence of the project is that metering of actual usage is more immediate than an average statistic of how much energy is typically used in an average scenario.

This is where the ‘Geen Pledges’ come in. People are offered a menu of pledges to which they can respond by choosing: ‘Already doing this;
Pledge to do this; or ‘Not Applicable’. They then receive prompts and reminders to keep them focused on these pledges. The menu of pledges can be expanded by suggestions, on approval of management.

What problems did the project encounter? Monitoring energy use at an individual level turned out to be far from trivial. Hardware needed to be installed at each workstation, and this needed to be relatively unobtrusive, accounting for all the appropriate equipment, and also networked. Geoff told us that the technology has now moved on considerably, and he would possibly make different decisions if he were to start the process again. Whatever systems are in place, it is of key importance that the people involved have a positive attitude. At Pembrokeshire, they made the induction experience a good social one, and they have also set up an action group on environmental issues.

The plans for the future are to make the software open source, and able to function independently of the college’s Moodle system. This gives the best chance of disseminating the very worthwhile outcomes of this project, and for others to emulate its successes. The vast majority of the delegates attending expressed either a tentative or a definite interest in support an effort to improve the software. Those reading this may like to join them.

You can listen to a recording of the session here: http://bit.ly/irWjxp
You can find out more about the project here: http://www.pembrokeshire.ac.uk/news/general/greening_ict

A video blog about online conferences

Carl offered this very thoughtful comment. I have copied it in full below:

“Many things contribute to the life of a language in complex ways:  parenting, education, state/public sector use, use by companies, adult learning, technology and of course media.

If we just take media on its own, nothing is guaranteed because it depends on use. And high quality use which is comparable to that in the larger language, content which can compete if you like.

I don’t think social media or web 2.0 on their own will necessarily reverse the trend.

I’m certain they often accelerate the dominance of large languages, through network effects.

In Welsh in all the talk of participation and grassroots activity by the gwerin, I think we often underestimate the role that organisations play. Nowadays any organisation can and should be a media organisation, not just the usual suspects but also libraries, museums, universities and so on.

Consider the English language output of the worldwide media and all the organisations and companies which can be considered media – the videos, the posts, the programmes, the lectures, the LOLs and so on. This is phenomenally large and to a great extent helps to feed the amateurs (no disparagement intended, quite the reverse) who then embed videos, remix ideas, remix actual content, who are inspired or offended by politicians enough to write blog posts, small bloggers who take cues from pro-bloggers in the established media, etc. etc. It’s hard to imagine what the English web would be like without all this resourcing, especially if you swim in English every day.

In Welsh this is why we need to dig out more of the orphan works and analogue archive gold that are lying dormant and unloved. We also need to be looking at distributing and sharing of the content which is available – and enabling the gwerin to do it themselves through sensible licensing.”

This is not my phrase – but a great exhortation by Patricia Ryan which closes her TED talk ‘Don’t Insist on English’. It comes as a timely reminder that learning and important ideas do not emerge independently of language, but are intimately associated with it. She gives some great examples where scientists have reached an impasse until someone who had addressed the problem in a different language. Some possible background explanations for this phenomenon are explored in an article by Christine Kenneally in the New Scientist last year (You are what you speak) . Kenneally concludes that: “Every time a language becomes extinct, humanity loses an important piece of diversity”.

The mass media have often been blamed for language extinction. More recently, it has been suggested that more discursive and collaborative media (e.g. Web 2.0) may help to reverse this trend.  This would be very timely and convenient, but do we know whether or not it is true? Fortunately, some interesting methods of research are also coming to light. I have only just come across this very elegant work by Kevin Scannell, which measures the occurrence of minority languages in Twitter. Scannell’s web-crawling software, An Crúbadán, simply inserts common but distinctive words of 500 languages into Twitter’s search engine. This is very elegant, and fully automated research, which reveals some surprising things. Take a look at http://indigenoustweets.com/ and let me know whether or not you are surprised by what languages appear near the top of the list. Personally, I was very surprised.

Meanwhile, http://umap.eu/ is providing a portal for Twitter in Basque, Catalan and Welsh (more languages to follow), potentially enabling users to experience Twitter (interface and content) through the language of their choice, and perhaps greatly enhancing its potential as a tool for language learners. Thanks to Daniel Cunliffe at Datblogu for that link.

A few months ago Helen Hodges blogged about the use of web conferencing technology to participate in events. (Whatever the weather…). I have been taking a leaf out of Helen’s book over the last few days, and attending events in a number of virtual spaces, and all from my own kitchen table. I thought now would be timely to tell you about a coule of these.

Taking place currently is a really useful event put on by RSC Northern called: ‘Going Green: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’. This is bringing people up to date on current ‘green’ issues, initiatives and opportunities. I like the combination of live presentations on Elluminate and asynchronous discussion on the Moodle site, as I think it does much to encourage user participation. I wasn’t sure about Elluminate for the first few times I used it, but I am warming to it now. The text pane and voting tools make it much easier for a speaker (or a moderator) to interact with an audience. Sometimes it is even easier than it would be in a room, as a quick show of (virtual) hands can be instantly turned into a graph for everyone to see.

Increasingly these days, live events are also presented as streamed video. In the past these have varied considerably in quality, but you can now expect excellent quality from the technical conferences. Keynotes from the JISC Conference 2011 (March 14-15^th) will be streamed, and I am looking forward to seeing those. Live streaming is not interactive, but it can be combined with a host of other channels which allow the viewer to feed back, and feel as though they are much more ‘present’. You can even sit at home and do the ‘networking’ which is often a major reason for attending these events. Ten ways of interacting with the JISC event are listed on Grace Owen’s blog called Maximising your online event experience. You would have to be a glutton to try all of these, but it is well worth taking a look to see what is on offer.

A couple of weeks ago a group of delegates assembled at four videoconference suites and countless deskstops throughout Wales, to discuss the benefits of videoconferencing. We heard a number of inspiring case studies, and discussed potential new uses, as well as some of the barriers which inhibit people from using the technology.

The largest users of the Welsh Video Network (http://www.wvn.ac.uk/)  are Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor (now part of Coleg Llandrillo Cymru). Using the technology, the college reaches out to schools and communities across Wales, providing a unique model of teaching and support. Glenda Davies, who is responsible for the provision, explained the importance of training. Staff were often nervous of the equipment before they started, but once they became familiar with it, and knew which buttons to press, then they could concentrate on the teaching. Some schools have the impression that pupils would need to be supervised in each studio, but Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor has shown that this need not  be the case , and a single teacher can manage behaviour effectively across multiple sites.

Delyth Lewis told us about how ‘Telemedicine’ is being used to link Health Service facilities in mid and South Wales, bringing for example specialise diagnostic services within reach of wider groups of patients than would normally benefit. Data such as x-ray results can be transmitted instantaneously, enabling diagnosis to be carried out quickly and at a distance. This brings huge benefits to patients and their families.

Peter James (Bradford) and Geoff Constable (Aberystwyth) explained the background to two sister JISC projects which are helping to demonstrate the environmental benefits of videoconferencing, and to bring videoconferencing to a wider audience: How Green was My Videoconference? and Virtually Sustainable.

Videoconferencing has been with us for two decades and more, and it has been slow to catch on in many cases. However, all that may be changing fast, for a number of reasons.  The tighter financial climate coupled with increasing energy costs is a clear driver, but this is associated with a number of other developments which could accelerate the pace of development. The ‘Transformation’ agenda (see Skills That Work for Wales). This is leading to significant mergers in the FE sector in Wales.  Coupled with this, the Learning Pathways (14-19) programme requires schools and colleges to extend their curriculum to cover a breadth which is often way beyond the capacity of individual organisations to provide.  Videoconferencing has an obvious role to play here in minimising travel costs and carbon emissions, as the Meirion-Dwyfor has shown. Meanwhile, in Higher Education, more recent mergers may (or may not) signal the end of a period of big change (see Dylan Jones-Evans’s blog for comment).

Meanwhile, technical developments are also supporting a more flexible approach. Desktop videoconferencing has grown in importance lately, but a key constraint has often been the lack of integration with the studio system. That is changing now with the establishment of the JVCS pilot , enabling individual users to connect to a conference call from their own desktop. This could prove to be a real ‘threshold technology’ opening the way to much wider participation in videoconferencing from hitherto excluded groups in Adult Community Learning, and perhaps also the Voluntary Sector.

All of these developments point to deeper collaboration, and smarter use of technology. Collaboration between sectors (including the Health Services, Local Government and other public sector elements) can be expected to increase, enhancing efficiency and helping to reduce the infamous North-South divide in Wales. The videoconferencing network was an idea which was ahead of its time, but its time has most certainly now arrived.

Happy Birthday, Wikipedia

Wikipedia has just turned 10, and we should all celebrate.

Of course there are some naysayers. Travelling around the colleges, it is interesting to hear how many teachers and lecturers are telling their students to steer well clear of Wikipedia. Why? Well, it may be a way of making sure that they don’t believe everything they read. But then, it is quite important to read stuff before you find out what you can’t believe. I sometimes ask people to do the following  thought experiment. Remember the world before Wikipedia, and imagine that the idea of Wikipedia was being suggested at a meeting you were at: would you predict that it would take off in the way that it has? Personally, I doubt that anyone could have predicted that.

Of course there are issues. There has been vandalism. Articles are often incomplete, and sometimes poorly referenced. There is an increasingly complex array of rules and policies to counter the problems. However, the bottom line is the ‘ignore all rules’ rule which says simply “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it”.

The value of an encyclopaedia obviously hinges on the reliability of the content. There have been various attempts to test Wikipedia’s content, but the most rigorous and comprehensive is still the paper published in Nature by Giles (2005), comparing  Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica, which found that there was little to choose between them in terms of accuracy.  The findings of the study by Giles have been challenged, but the methodology stands up. However, other research papers have been less favourable to Wikiepdia, and the suspicion is that the academic articles in Wikipedia are excellent, but that articles on people and popular culture are more likely to be subject to editing ‘wars’.

We need to move on from these arguments, and try to find ways to make Wikipedia better, and to get students to use it in a critical and constructive way. As Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia says in an interview for Wired Campus, “We don’t want (students) to cite Wikipedia. What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better.” This is not simply an aspiration; there is a literature out there indicating how this can be, and has been, achieved in practice (e.g. Witzleb, 2009).  These kinds of initiative can potentially yield a whole generation of students with much greater powers of literacy.

I wonder that is holding us back? It may be the culture, or at least the perception, that Wikipedians are predominantly (87%) male, and 20-something. There is a need for a wider cultural spread, and for teachers to become skilled users themselves. Not much chance of that happening, if they feel that their students should stay away from Wikipedia!

There is currently much interest in capturing the learner voice – and rightly so. If we fail to do this, we lose a valuable plank in our methodology for measuring our impact as teachers and technologists. Last week a new study was published under the title “Student perspectives on technology – demand, perceptions and training needs”. This brings with it a new twist on the ‘learner voice’ literature, produced as it has been by students, for teachers. To be more specific, the report was commissioned from the National Union of Students by the Online Learning Taskforce of HEFCE.

Some of the findings are reassuringly familiar. For example, it finds that students prefer a choice in how they learn – ICT is seen as one of many possibilities, alongside part-time and traditional full-time learning, and face-to-face teaching. So far so good, and this definitely supports the current trend in the direction of blended learning.

However, some of the results are more surprising. While students are concerned about the level of ICT skills which their teachers demonstrate, only 21% thought that their lecturers needed additional training. Interestingly, most students saw themselves as self-taught in terms of ICT, and may have assumed that the same applies to their lecturers.

Students seem concerned about a perceived lack of formal research skills instruction, which may suggest that they feel technical skills can be self-taught, but information literacy needs to be taught. This could have profound implications for eLearning specialists. In conjunction with the increased availability of Open Education Resources, it suggests that the role of the educator as ‘guide on the side’ may be increasing in prominence, as has been predicted by a number of observers since well before the turn of the millennium (e.g.  Kerka, 1992).

The ideas are not new, but perhaps the ongoing technological developments throw them into sharp relief. In terms of staff training, perhaps they indicate a shift of emphasis away from teaching technical skills to academic staff, and towards teaching them to model good information literacy skills?

Mae RSC Cymru yn falch iawn i gyhoeddi Blog gan Gareth Jones o Metastwnsh. Mae Gareth yn sgwennu am ‘Pethau Bychain’. Mae cyfieithiad Saesneg gan ‘Google Translate’ yn dilyn.

RSC Wales is very pleased to publish a blog by Gareth Jones of Metastwnsh. Gareth writes about ‘Pethau Bychain’. An English translation by ‘Google Translate’ follows.

 Beth yw Pethau Bychain?

Mae Pethau Bychain yn ddiwrnod i ddathlu’r iaith Gymraeg arlein ac i annog mwy o bobol i gymryd rhan yn y diwylliant Cymraeg digidol.

 Pryd mae Pethau Bychain yn digwydd?

Dydd Gwener, Medi 3ydd, 2010

 Pam gwneud Pethau Bychain?

Rydyn ni’n or ddibynnol ar gyfryngau wedi eu bwydo i ni yn y Gymraeg. Mae’r We yn gyfle i ni ffurfio ein sianeli, ein gorsafoedd a’n diwylliant digidol ein hunain ar ein telerau ni. Os ydyn ni am i’r Gymraeg dyfu a ffynnu yna rhaid i ni greu diwylliant ar-lein Cymraeg annibynnol. Fel y dywedodd Ron Jones, pennaeth Tinopolis, yng nghylchgrawn Barn yn ddiweddar “os na fyddwn yn diogelu’r Gymraeg fel iaith ar-lein, ni all yr iaith hawlio’i lle yn y byd modern.” Drwy wneud un o’r pethau bychain rydych yn chwarae rhan allweddol mewn llusgo’r Gymraeg i’r byd digidol.

 Pam bod lleisiau Cymraeg ar-lein yn bwysig?

Mae’r We yn gyfrwng newydd. Mae’n bwysig iawn i weld yr iaith Gymraeg ar y teledu ac ar y radio. Mae’r un peth yn wir am y We.

 Pa fath o bobol sy’n gwneud pethau ar y diwrnod Pethau Bychain?

Rydyn ni eisiau gwahodd pawb sy’n gallu siarad Cymraeg neu sy’n Dysgu Cymraeg, hen ac  ifanc, dynion a benywod. Does dim angen profiad o flaen llaw. Does gan lawer iawn o bobol greadigol Gymraeg ddim presenoldeb ar-lein. Gallan nhw jest gyhoeddi gwaith maen nhw wedi ei wneud eisoes ar y we.

 Beth yw’r tag?

pethaubychain yw’r tag – ar gyfer gwasanaethau gyda tagiau. Bydd e’n haws ffeindio eich cyfraniad gyda’r tag:

Flickr: pethaubychain

YouTube: pethaubychain

Twitter: #pethaubychain

blogiau: pethaubychain

 Sut mae cael mwy o wybodaeth?

Mae gan Pethau Bychain wefan: http://pethaubychain.com ac App ar gyfer yr iPhone: http://stwnsh.com/pbapp

Rydym hefyd ar Twitter a Facebook.

http://twitter.com/pethaubychain

 http://facebook.com/pethaubychain

 Nodiau

 Prosiect arloesol ar gyfer ehangu’r We Gymraeg yw Pethau Bychain, sy’n cael ei redeg gan wirfoddolwyr.

 Aelodau blaenllaw o’r tîm yw:

Gareth Jones (http://twitter.com/gareth_stwnsh)

Carl Morris (http://twitter.com/carlmorris)

Am ragor o wybodaeth cysylltwch a post@pethaubychain.com

 What is “Pethau Bychain”?

 “Pethau Bychain” is a day to celebrate language and to encourage more people to participate in the digital culture in Welsh.
 

When is ““Pethau Bychain”” happening?

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Why do “Pethau Bychain”?
We are overly dependent on the media have fed us. The Web allows us to create our channels, our stations and our digital culture ourselves on our own terms. If we want the language to grow and prosper then we must create a culture online. Welsh independence. As Ron Jones, head Tinopolis, said in Opinion magazine recently “if we are not taught as a protection Online, the language cannot claim a place in the modern world”. By doing one of the little things you play a key role in bringing the Welsh language into the digital world.

Why are Welsh voices online important?
The Web is a new medium. It is very important to see the language on the TV and radio. The same is true for the Web.

What kind of people do things on the day of “Pethau Bychain”?

We want to invite everyone who can speak Welsh or is learning Welsh, young and old, men and women. No prior experience is necessary. There are very many creative Welsh people, who have no online presence. They can just publish the work they’ve done already on the web.

What are the tags?

pethaubychain the tag – for services with tags. It will be easier to find your input with the tag.
Flickr: pethaubychain
YouTube: pethaubychain
Twitter: # pethaubychain
blogs: pethaubychain
“Pethau Bychain” 2010

How do I get more information?
“Pethau Bychain” has a website: http://pethaubychain.com and App for the iPhone: http://stwnsh.com/pbapp
We’re also on Twitter and Facebook.
http://twitter.com/pethaubychain
http://facebook.com/pethaubychain

Thanks to:

Gareth Jones (http://twitter.com/gareth_stwnsh)
Carl Morris (http://twitter.com/carlmorris)

For more information contact post@pethaubychain.com