Last week I had the pleasure of being at the SocialLearn workshop held for OU students, staff (including many Associate Lecturers - the vital members of staff who act as learning mentors to students) and alumni to discuss and get input for the SocialLearn project (a next-generation educational social network platform, more information can be found in Martin Weller's slideshow). A few of the participants have already written blog posts describing their experience of the event, Jo Badge asked if this is a new OU philosophy, Nigel Gibson reflected that the event was a chance to "an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people", ok I like that quote I have to admit! Martin Weller reflected on the use of Twitter and how it added an extra dimension to the workshop. I've been working with my OU colleagues Nick Freear and Alex Little to produce some add-on applications for the platform, early forms of which were demonstrated. I also got the chance to run a small spin off workshop (for the first time) to explore scenarios for the use of mobile technology with SocialLearn.

Ambient technology is definitely not about mood lighting, instead it is something far more interesting. It is a term which describes an idea that technology will adapt itself to your presence, performing the necessary reconfigurations and integration to meet your needs or simply increase your comfort. Typically it will do this without much of a need for human interaction, instead it just quietly gets on with its job. Such technology can be used for a variety of purposes, one of them being to deliver information to the user in situations where it is appropriate to take in a chunk of information at a glance, think of quickly glancing at a photo rather than looking at a spreadsheet. You could stare at a photo for quite a long time, but you can take in most of the information it has to offer quite quickly, the same is generally not true for a spreadsheet. An ambient information system such as this can be used to get a sense of what a community is up to, a perfect candidate being a community of Twitter users. A system which does just that is Twitterspaces which is now available as a view of OU users on Twitter at: http://eniac.hopto.org/soiaware/twitter_display/planetou.php.

Over the past few weeks for various reasons I have been asked to communicate with people using Skype, the popular program for making calls over the Internet. The chats I have been asked on though are just text chats. I'm slightly wary of Skype after reading a thought provoking entry on the Ubuntu Wiki about the ethics of using the service and because I can't get a version that will work on a 64bit operating system. As it is not interoperable, there is a big risk of lock in, once all of your contacts are on Skype surely you will have to go on Skype too. It seems very backward to me to have such lock in, imagine if you had a mobile phone and you could only call people on the same network, it would be a ridiculous situation. The only interface out of Skype appears to be to the PSTN not to other chat clients.

My OU Story

Details coming soon. 

For some time the same team that brought you Course Profiles has been working on another Facebook application for Open University students and staff and now that application has been released, it is My OU Story. The idea of this application is that it provides a place for people to tell their story related to OU studies. They can (through the preferences page) choose to allow the stories they post to be shared with everybody, people in their network, just their friends or even keep the story to themselves. When you post you story you can also record how you are feeling at the time on a mood slider (which I hope you like as it took ages to get right!). Once a person has submitted a few stories you can see how they are feeling over time by having a look at their mood graph. Being a social application through, the interaction is not just one way. If somebody reads your story they can also provide feedback, maybe to say they are happy for you, or on worse days to "hang on in there".

All sorts of people connected with The Open University are blogging about their interests, experiences and knowledge they want to share with you. These people include not just academics but also librarians, tutors, techies and project managers all putting information out there and discussing ideas, it's a side of the OU that you might not have thought about, one that isn't immediately visible when you deal with the OU, or even work in the place, but it is quite an interesting side. If you put all of these people together you start to get a sense of what this community is talking about, the discussions within it and what is being considered for the future. Enter PlanetOU, the part of this site that tries to bring these voices together in one place.

If you have recently been studying a course on OpenLearn you might have noticed the link to "Knowledge Maps" at the top left. This takes you to a page with resources for a special version of the Compendium software adapted for OpenLearn. The Compendium-OpenLearn software is explained more fully at http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?name=KM. I've been becoming increasingly interested in these sorts of mind mapping programs in the last few months and have found that it has many uses not just for your studies but can be used when you are trying to visualise ideas, or work out structures that help solve problems.

Students and staff of The Open University may be far flung sometimes, but thanks to Web 2.0 new opportunities are arising all the time for them to connect. The latest of these is the chance to share musical tastes and contribute a shared playlist that can be listened to on an online radio player. Many of you may be familiar with last.fm, a service which can recommend and play music you might like based on music you have played previously.

On Monday 25th February I gave an introductory talk on Linux for the TiCREG group here at The Open University. As promised in that presentation and for those of you who could not make it here is the presentation in both OpenOffice and MS PowerPoint formats with a list of references and further reading.

After the relative ease of getting a local Moodle installation going on Kubuntu, is it possible to shrink this whole situation so we can get a few Moodle powered OpenLearn courses onto the Asus EEE PC and then take them with us wherever we go? It could be very handy to those who would like to learn but don't want to take a full sized laptop with them or even to those who are on the other side of education, the people who write the courses and would like the convenience of being able to work on them while out and about.