Digital Directions

Network Learning Hotseat Seminars

The Networked Learning Community will be holding their Seventh International Conference on Networked Learning in Aalborg, Denmark 3rd & 4th May 2010.  In the run-up to the conference, there are several online hotseats using discussion boards to facilitate a week-long debate by some of the leading thinkers in the field.   The first session is due to commence on 28th September 2009, with Caroline Haythornthwaite, a specialist in e-learning  from the University of Illinois.  The schedule is as follows:

• Caroline Haythornthwaite: Learning in Social Networks and Networked Learning – starting September 28th, 2009
• George Siemens and Steve Downes: Impact on Learning of Networked Technologies - starting October 26th, 2009
• Charalambos Vrasidas: Networked Learning and International Development - starting December 7th, 2009
• Grainne Conole: Theories and Methodologies for Research in Networked Learning - starting January 18th, 2010
• Gabriel Salomon and Rupert Wegerif: Globalisation and Interculturality in Networked Learning - starting February 15th, 2010
  And finally during March and April (dates to be announced) there will be hot seats hosted by the conference key note speakers:
• Yrjo Engstrom and Etienne Wenger.

The hot seats are free to attend. All you need to do is sign up at the conference community website and join the online hot seat debates. Social networking sites are becoming increasingly popular for academic conferences.  Last Year, LILAC09 took its first steps using a wiki as I discussed last year in this blog plost, whereas ALT-C used CrowdVine and LT2008 ran a Ning site to promote online social interactions.
In this particular instance, the Network are using the Jomsocial plugin for a Joomla community site to organise pre-conference events and  online discussion.  Typically, conferences have used such sites to facilitate rather than direct discussions, which can lead to very low, or very high uptake depending on the persons registered, their interests and motivation.  The use of 'hotseats' this year gives a bit of scaffolding to organise the discussions.  The conference guidelines for running a hotseat suggest that:

• The chair will present an introduction to the main topic of the seminar and its broader context and relevance to the networked learning conference.
• The chair of the seminar will bring together 2 or more discussants (co-presenters) who will lead a certain perspective on the seminar theme based on their own work/ research.
• The chair will moderate and organise the online seminar discussions.
• The chair is also responsible to bring the various discussion threads together and summarise the findings in relation to the theme of this seminar.

 So, hopefully the online events will not only facilitate and promote discussion, but also generate interest for the actual conference itself for those who can or cannot attend.

2009/10 Conferences

For those with a brand-new academic diary this summer, here are some dates for forthcoming conferences in 2009/10:

LILAC will be from 29-30 January 2010 in Warwick, with a submission deadline coming up very soon on 18 Sept 2009.  This conference will mark the 10th anniversary of the HEA's subject centre network.

The dates for the 25th annual BILETA conference are 29-30 March 2010, the week before Easter.  The University of Vienna are hosting the event in the Austrian capital.

The 45th ALT conference will also be the week before Easter from 29-31 March 2010 at Clare College, Cambridge and the SLSA will be in their 20th year with their conference in Bristol at the University of the West of England (30 March - 1 April) immediately before the Easter weekend, so it promises to be a busy Easter again!

All the law conferences seem to have some significant milestone in 2010, whether this be 10, 20, 25 or 45 years!

Later in the year, ALT-C is to be held on 7-9 September 2010 in Nottingham, shortly followed by SLS in Southampton (13-16 Sept), who already had their centenary conference recently in 2009.

As usual, the UKCLE diary contains many other events and has an RSS feed to keep you up to date.  Listed elow are 10 forthcoming events:

Annual review - who's been reading this blog!?

As term time approaches, I thought I'd take a quick look through the statistics available through Google Analytics and the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog.  The full analytics report is available here, but I'll make some comments in this post, and add some extra grpahs and images not in the automatically generated report.

Visitors

Over the year (1 Aug 08 - 31 Jul 09) there has been 1,881 visits with 3,169 page views coming from a staggering 77 countries, the bulk of which being from the UK, but representing all continents and a vast array of legal systems:

Those of you in the UK may well recognise you're own location in the map below if you're a regular, although I'm suspicious that not every visit is recorded accurately as Analytics uses the visitor IP address, which may well be registered in England, even though the user is in Wales or Northern Ireland etc.

    

Search engine arrivals are overwhelmingly from Google, and from people using Windows, Internet Explorer, with a T1 or DSL connection.  Unsurprisingly over 90% are java supported, yet with a variety of flash versions installed.




Pages

The most popular postings during the year are listed below.  They were all, save the second and the last, written within the review period, yet the most popular page is only 5 months old.

1    23 Apr 09 BILETA 2009 Conference
2    02 Apr 08 UKCLE E-learning Event Videocasts (previous year)
3    26 Nov 08 What McMaster did for medical training, can York do for legal education?
4    18 Feb 09 Legal Education and Technology II: An Annotated Bibliography
5    17 Sep 08 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report
6    21 Oct 08 Does(n't) science meet the law? And does law meet the scientists?!
7    06 Nov 08 Unsuitable Jurors v Unsuitable Students!
8    23 Jan 09 LILAC09: CSI meets Murder, she wrote!
9    23 Jan 09 LILAC09: Going ‘beyond text’, ‘out for a walk’ and ‘telling a couple of stories’
10  07 Nov 07 UKCLE's 1st e-learning seminar (previous year)

Our top referring sites for visitors arriving at Digital Directions are unsurprisingly UKCLE, Google (.co.uk), LILAC09 wiki (now archived) and Google (.com).  Less frequently used links come from a variety of other sites such blogs (cearta.ie, Terranova, and BPP college), other websites and even a few from Twitter!

The top keywords are mainly names, however Digital Directions does review a number of conference presentations, blog posts by other authors and reports/papers etc from individuals, so that is not surprising.  Other common terms are BILETA, Ardcalloch, GIKII, UKCLE, Second Life, LILAC etc, which pretty much represent the blog posts over the year.

RSS Feed

Elsewhere, Feedburner tells me that 46 people subscribe to the RSS feed, mainly using Google Reader:

Let's see how, or if, things change in the coming year.