Webcollaborator

I have some presentations to make with people from different parts of the world and was trying to find a light, easy, no frills free environment to get together, brainstorm and outline a project.

I discovered Webcollaborator , which has just been launched, and I feel that until now it has satisfied my needs. It is a mixture of blog and wiki (which can be public or restricted) and allows you to to keep backups of every revision made, letting you see who made the changes and when. There is also an RSS feed built in ... so you just add it to your news aggregator and are instantly notified when changes or updates have been made.

Best of all...it is absolutely free for all uses and Lucas Carlson, the young creator, unfailingly helps you with immediate feedback whenever you get stuck. Way to go Lucas! Thanks for such a useful tool and your kind attention. Spreading the word around.

Multiliteracies & Collaborative Learning

Vance Stevens is leading a TESOL Certificate Program course: Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments from September 13 until October 10.

It's an online course providing experiential training in the technological skills required to develop effective strategies for utilizing video, web cam, image, and voice technologies in communities of practice as enhancements to collaborative learning settings.

Some articles and papers on multiliteracy and collaborative learning definitely worth reading can be found on Phil Agre's page and in two interesting articles I got this morning via George Siemens' eLearning Resources and News:
Enabling Distributed Learning Communities Via Emerging Technologies
and
The New Literacy

Enjoy!

Hearing Every Voice - with the help of the Internet

This is the title of the workshop given my Michael Coghlan for Clesol2004, taking place in Christchurch, New Zealand from September24th- 27th.

More than 10 webheads from different parts of the world (Brazil, Colombia, Taiwan, Kuwait, USA, Japan) were online to greet and interact with the participants or left their messages in the various environments visited: Wimba Voice, Yahoo Messenger (voice and webcam enabled), Tappedin, Learning Times and Alado.

I have taken a screenshot to illustrate what this type of meeting looks like :-)
New literacies!
Buthaina Alothman's (Kuwait) page on the event explains it in more detail.

This wonderful drawing called "My Spirit Helpers" was done by Reg Davidson (Haida). Although it is online, I had saved it in my image folder as I am very much attracted to this art. I have just posted it using BloggerBot, a tool by Hello, which allows you to store images online. It automatically sends and posts the images from your folders onto Blogger for free. Worth trying!

Using LiveJournal for Authentic Communication in EFL Classes

Aaron Patric Campbell ( The New Tanuki) has just published a short paper on the use of Live Journal in his EFL classes in the Internet TESL Journal for Teachers of English.

"This paper describes a way for teachers to set-up and facilitate authentic international communication in the EFL classroom using LiveJournal.com: a free, hosted weblog tool with a 1.9 million-member-strong community of active users and built-in social networking features. It also highlights the potential that social software, like LiveJournal, has for encouraging greater autonomy and self-direction in foreign language learning."

A community of practice for EFL learners is an excellent idea and blogs are a tool to maintain the contact and record the interactions and reflection.

Another great initiative to facilitate learning and increase the students' contact with teachers can be found at Study.com /EFI (English for Internet) led by David Winet (University of California at Berkeley) which can be coupled with Writing for Webheads (Vance Stevens, Michael Coghlan and Maggie Dott).

Transatlantic Howl! A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg

Retrieved from a posting on CETEFL List ... a world- wide transatlantic poetic happening ... but only available to those with an Internet 2 connection or who are living in Paris and London, unfortunately :-(

Thursday 14 October 2004 2:00 pm EDT (additional times listed below)

In this history-making transatlantic poetic happening, celebrating Allen Ginsberg and his epic poem HOWL, poets will perform at venues in London, Paris, and across the United States. Theselive poetry readings and poetic theatre pieces will be simultaneously streamed across JANET, Renater, and Internet2 advanced networks.

Streaming video and audio will allow audiences at each site to not only observe readings on location, but will provide the ability to experience the art of poetry in remote theaters as well. While Transatlantic Howl! A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg is streamed, anyone from Calcutta to Caracas with broadband access will be able to watch the entire poetry reading as it happens.

Featured readers include Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Anne Carson, Robert Glück, Ken Mikolowski, Danny Karlin, JoanneKyger, Bob Rosenthal, Steven Taylor, Ed Sanders, JosephGuglielmi, The Allen Ginsberg Greek Chorus, composer and musician BillDouglas, Stephen Mooney, visual artist Maurice Benayoun, students from London, and surprise special guests.

Anne Waldman of Naropa University and Internet2's Ann Doyle will serveas MCs for this event.Universities who are assisting in producing this poetry reading are:University College London; Birkbeck College, University of London;University of Paris VIII; San Francisco State University; University ofColorado, Boulder; University of Michigan; and New Jersey Institute ofTechnology. Technical support is provided by Ohio State University with additional assistance by Naropa University's Summer Writing Program.

Program :
The program for Transatlantic Howl! A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg is still being formulated. Watch this space for details.The program will take place at the following time:
Paris, Lodz, Osnabrueck, 20:00
London, 19:00
New York, 14:00
Boulder, noon
San Francisco, 11:00
To calculate the time for watching this live event from your time zone, refer to the World Clock web page.
If you have any questions about Transatlantic Howl!A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg, contact Ann Doyle<adoyle@internet2.edu>, phone (734) 352-7011 or Mary Kite<mckite@indra.com>, phone (303) 444-9856.

Staying connected: sustaining an online learning community

Set my alarm clock to the wee hours of the morning (2:30 am here) to hear Michael Coghlan's (a.k.a The Voice) directly from Noah's on the Beach in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. This audio-conference , recorded on Learning Times (http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=530396) , was part of the 3rd Australian Learning Communities Conference: Be Shaken - Learning for Change.

Michael introduced his f2f participants to us , the Webheads (an international online community of teachers and students of English) and explained why the Webheads community, which was established in 1998, is still active and growing.

This very lively presentation outlined the key features of the Webheads community, and highlighted the reasons for its success and longevity.
Some of the webheads present at the conference: Teresa Almeida d´Eça, in Portugal; Buthaina Alothman, from Kuwait but in NY presently; David Winet and Chris Jones- in the USA, among others.

Congrats Michael - I did not regret for a single minute missing 1 hour of my sleep :-)

From 8th to 11th September, Geneva hosted the international conference on education organized by Unesco. Theme: "Quality education for all young people: Challenges, trends and priorities".
The official site has full reports on educational systems of about a hundred countries, in French and Spanish as well.

Sychronous Collaboration Tools for the Academic World

Listen to Robin's Good (Masternewmedia and Kolabora)
Sychronous Collaboration Tools for the Academic World , a 30-minute voice presentation of 45 slides using Macromedia Breeze.

Clear and informative as usual, a must hear for people interested in using new, easy-to use and cost-effective breed of tools for classes, presentations and training.

Also by Robin Good, the Official Guide ToWeb Conferencing And Live Presentation Tools, with free access the Overview section of any tool reviewed inside the Guide.