Making money out of paper

Source: www.newspaperclub.co.uk

I rather like this idea - give individuals, groups, companies, anyone with a shared interest, in fact, the chance to make their own newspapers. Not some crummy 'I read a Dummies' guide to DTP' output, but something rather elegant and delightful to read and hold.

The brains behind Newspaper Club are British and they're aiming to start up and be operational within 60 days. Their trials and tribulations can be read on their blog. It's a cracking read, especially for Business Studies students.

You can sign up for the Beta at their main website which is here.

At a time when media mogul Rupert Murdoch is claiming all his newspaper titles will be charging for online content within a year it's refreshing to see a consumer led model appearing too. You see, despite the fact that much of what I read is done so on an LCD screen, I still like the simplicity and tactile experience of reading a paper. I also like the way Newspaper Club is proposing taking online ease of design and transforming it into something that can be held, stored and shared in person.

It's an ambitious plan and it will be interesting to see what the pricing is. Newspaper Club offers a new dimension in terms of social networking and user control over content production. I hope they succeed and wish them well.

Sharing the musical love

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

One of the areas that interests me is the point where informal and formal learning overlap in the digital domain. It's something I've been studying as part of my MA in Online Education at the Open University, and it's an area where there's plenty of scope for research and innovation.

With that in mind I was interested to read the findings of a report from the University of Hertfordshire, showing that there's been a slight shift in the attitudes of teenagers towards illegal music downloading using peer-to-peer services. You can read the full facts here.

What is relevant from my point of view is that teens are beginning to accept that there can be a value placed on content and intellectual property. If that change is beginning to occur then we might also see a shift in teens' approaches to greater learning and interaction taking place online.

When Berkhamsted had to shut for a week due to heavy snow in February, we used a Facebook group to keep parents and students in touch with what assignments needed to be done. I was interested to see the degree of antipathy this created - students felt that their space was being invaded by adults. This is one of the problems in bridging the divide between formal and informal learning. There are no explicit ground rules or guidelines for what language to use, which metaphors to apply to the process of online interactions and so on. Perhaps it is the vehicle or technology that's used that's created the tension we experienced?

This is something I'm reading up about at the moment for my MA - and in particular the ideas of social theorist Etienne Wenger. He proposed the idea of communities of practice and maybe what's needed is education for teachers and students alike into how online learning communities should function. Certainly, it's an area I intend to explore from a practical purpose when the new academic year begins in September.

There is a chasm at present between the walled gardens of Virtual Learning Environments, and the free-to-all Web 2.0 open source options that exist in the ever expanding online Cloud that the WWW has become. How educators span that space between what is taught in school and what is learnt elsewhere remains, I believe, one of the great challenges for the near future.

One number to Phone them all...

One of the biggest challenges facing users of digital media in both professional and private areas of their lives is the difficulty in joining the dots.

By that I mean it's hard to let people know what you're about when so many online services are available. For example, I can be found on Facebook, Blogger, Skype, Twitter, Delicious, Issuu and Flickr. Each service fulfils a different need, ranging from reflective blog postings here to timely observations on Twitter, and a range of personal and professional photos on Flickr.

In the past I've tried to harmonise my digital footprint by using the same moniker - svanstraten - but even that fails to show interested parties the holistic view of what I'm doing.

So, there are two services that have grabbed my attentions recently. The first is Lifestream.fm which collects all your online streams of information and bundles it into one place. It's an excellent service and from it I've discovered that historically I've made over 631,000 online postings!

The other development comes from Google, which is trialling a one number fits all service. Basically, users get one number for friends and colleagues to dial. This one number then sends the call through to every phone device owned by the subscriber. The subscriber can decide where calls are diverted, so for example, business calls might go to your business desk and mobile phones only, while family calls go to every number that's been entered. In an age of VOIP calling, increasing mobile ownership and the growing expectation that we can be contacted whenever/wherever, it's a fascinating development, and one that could make it easier for schools to keep in touch with busy parents and digital native students. Read more here.

All in all, we're beginning to see online developers address the need to provide a range of services that link the disparate elements of online life. And that can only be a positive outcome.

Using Flickr to teach colour in Art

I've come across some fantastic tools for searching through photos on Flickr, where remarkably my own photostream passed the 90,000 views today.

First up is a great tool for searching for photos using a colour picker wheel.

You slide your way through to a colour you like and hey presto!, the colour you chose suddenly appears from the millions of photos on Flickr, which, if you don't already know, is one of the largest online photo sharing sites in the world. Give it a go here.

Next up is a wonderful tool for making up mosaic walls based on search terms. From this you can create your own badge, as I've done here, to display my own work. Of course, art teachers could use it to create embeds into school webpages or blogs that focus on particular themes.

It's called Photo to Wall and you can try it here.

Future roadmaps for ICT in schools

As part of my MA in Online and Distance Education at the Open University we've been looking at policy and research into the use of ICT in education. Understandably, most of the course we're studying, entitled Technology Enhanced Learning: Practices and Debates, focuses on higher education. At the moment we're investigating the bigger framework for technology enhanced learning (what some are calling cyberlearning) and my colleague John Haren, who's based in Ireland, came across an excellent framework for ICT deployment, set out by the Irish government.

Rather than re-hash John's post, I'm going to point you to his blog. The main thrust from this policy document is that investment in teacher training and maintaining educators' knowledge and understanding of why we should include ICT into our teaching and how it can help, are key to the success of ICT within a school environment. I couldn't agree more and that's something I and the rest of the ICT team at school will be doing next term - going into classrooms, talking with teachers and offering hands-on training and support, so that ICT isn't seen as a lurking monster, but rather as an effective tool for enhanced learning opportunities.

Here's the link to John's post.