Today Stephanie and I have planned our course in HUMlab next Thursday a little more. I have written about this course before I think, it’s on constructivist learning on the Internet. Anyway, we have created a group blog, and are going to let the participants blog during the seminar, and then they will get to create their own blog at the end… We’ll see how it works out. I’m lucky to get to work with Stephanie – it’s fun to work collaboratively, and she knows a lot about blogging.

We also talked a bit about the constructivism blog that I have started, and about ways to turn it into a more collaborative blog by inviting co-authors. I’ll start by inviting Stephanie, and then we’ll se where it goes from there…

I’ve found information about a conference that looks interesting, and which, believe it or not, will take place in Sweden next summer. It’s the Catac04 conference, on “cultural attitudes towards technology and communication”. One of the topics they are proposing is on “ICTs and intercultural communication”, one of my areas of interest. I hope I can go… It would be great if I could find the time to write and submit a paper of my own, but even if I can only attend and listen I’m sure I’ll find lots of interesting people and presentations there.

I just got back from a sonic art performance – a completely new experience for me. Interactive Institute in Ume had rigged a huge installation with sorround sound and lighting. I have to admit that I almost felt sick at times when the “music” and the flimmering lights got too intense, but the more calm parts I really enjoyed. A piece called “Noise” in which focus was on ‘movement’ and ’space’ was especially enjoyable (at least the first, calm part of it). According to the organizers, the composer of another piece had made use of his own vocal expressions only. Some of the sounds he produced sounded nothing like vocal expressions, as for instance rainfall and bird song, but I guess that’s where technology has come into the picture.

Last night we had our meeting in Traveler with some members of ITAS. We had a few technical problems from the beginning (people having problems with sound etc.) but other than that I think it went very well. Paola Eklund Braconi who is running the distance course which is making use of Traveler this semester had many interesting ideas to share. Her experience of teaching Swedish students had shown that they are quite shy and don’t want to speak much in the target language. In this environment it is very different. Being able to “hide” behind the computer screen seems to make the students more confident. That’s very interesting from a pedagogical point-of-view! In a way, this relates to one of the presentations at the net culture conference. Marie Psse och Maria Scharffenberg, teachers from Trollh‰ttan in Sweden, talked about a project in which they had let their students discuss in a FirstClass conference anonymously. This had worked especially well in a sex-ed course, where students are normally to shy to share their thoughts and questions.

esterday I had the opportunity to listen to a very interesting presentation by Ylva Hrd af Segerstad-Hasselgren from Gˆteborgs universitet. She has written a very interesting dissertation on the adaption of our language to new media (close to what I’m working on), and yesterday she focused on one of the parts of her thesis: the language of text messaging. Among other things she talked about how we as humans have a great way of adapting to new conditions, which for instance can be seen in the way that we adapt our language to fit the new conditions of text messaging (limited space, time consuming to type etc.), by innovating new ways of reducing expressions that nonetheless are understandable to the receiver of the message. I also got a chance to talk to her afterwards and tell her how much I appreciate the hard work she has put into the theory part of her thesis. I have found lots of interesting resources there.

I am sitting at the conference on net cultures at the moment, and thought I would try to blog through the wireless connection.

The presentation I’m attending right now is quite interesting, not least from a technical point-of-view. The person giving the talk had misunderstood what time he was supposed to be here (the term ‘middag’ – ‘mid day’ appearantly has different meanings here in North Sweden than it has in the south) and is giving it over speaker phone. His powerpoint is running on the big screen, and the moderator of the event goes to the next slide on the command of the speaker (”Pling”). Never seen anything like it before…

In about two hours it’s time for the event in ActiveWorlds. I hope that everyone will make it there, and that it will be a successful event.

Right now I am trying to read for my course on the role and the development of the humanities, but instead I find myself captured in virtual environments. Next Thursday we are having a meeting with the network ITAS in Traveler (3D environment with synchronous speech), and last night we did a test in there. It worked fine, and everyone seemed excited. Today I am trying to rebuild HUMlab in AWEDU (ActiveWorlds Educational Universe: 3D environment with text chat) to make it suitable for a discussion with international professors that will take place on Wednesday next week. Some of the participants are Sandy Stone and Sandra Calvert. This is all part of a conference on net cultures and youth that is taking place here in Ume next week (Nätkulturer). Both of these events need a lot of preparation, steeling time from my studies. But I have to admit that I do enjoy it!

I have turned my degree assignment (draft) at the teachers’ program into a blog on constructivist learning. In this inital state I have mainly taken parts from my original paper and put them into the blog, but I hope that it will develop and that the development will lead to discussion (feel free to comment on stuff that you find there). The blog will also be used for an educational purpose, in that participants in a course on constructivist learning will get to create their own blogs and comment on this one (at least that’s an idea that I have at the moment).

Stephanie, who is doing research on blog talk, has initiated an interesting discussion on comments vs. trackbacks in her blog. Among other things she states that trackbacks create more dynamic conversations than comments do. With this in mind I set off to create a dynamic conversation… Let’s see how/if it developes…

Thanks to Stephanie I now have a working list of recent comments. I have experimented on my own quite a bit, but I couldn’t quite get it to work, so luckily Stephanie helped me out before I went completely mad…