March 22, 2010

A grand day out


On the carousel
Originally uploaded by akbandara.
We were victims of the weather on Saturday when we thought of going to Oxford for a day out. My mother-in-law is visiting from Sri Lanka at the moment, so this was an opportunity for her to do some sightseeing as well. But the day was a washout with rain from the moment we set off.

So it was a nice surprise when Sunday turned out to be bright and clear, which gave us a chance to do something I haven't done in ages - go to the Zoo! Kanthika is learning about animals at his kindergaten at the moment, so this outing has the additional benefit of giving him a chance to see some of the creatures he has been learning about in real life. Living in Milton Keynes, we have a choice between Whipsnade and Woburn, and decided on the former. Whipsnade is affiliated with the Zoological Society of London (whose main site is the Regent's Park Zoo in London). It is a mixture of traditional zoo where animals are housed in small habitats and it is possible to walk between the various displays, and an open safari park. An added bonus for Kanthika was that the safari park section could be toured by steam train!

All in all, it was a grand day out. Hopefully the weather co-operates for more fun throughout the coming spring and summer :-)

March 18, 2010

Protecting the digital economy ...

It seems that the UK government is trying to work the system to get the Digital Economy Bill through parliment without allowing a full debate on its provisions (Hansard 15 Mar 2010 : Column 464) - very worrying considering the some of the draconian measures relating to digital copyright protection built into the proposed legislation.

So, following the example of a number of my colleagues (@psychemedia, @liamgh and @blaineprice) I wrote to my MP (for the first time!) to demand that he ensure that the government don't ramrod this legislation through before the general election.  I used the template provided @ 38degrees.org.uk as a starting point and made some amendments, so it didn't take very long to do.  Am interested to see if the 'adapted template' letter gets a response  - and whether it will be different from the one sent to @liamgh :-)

Watch this space!

March 11, 2010

Cloud of Software Engineering Education ...


Pittsburgh Landmark
Originally uploaded by akbandara.
This week I have been on the road, visiting some friends in Boston on my way to attending CSEET 2010 at CMU, Pittsburgh.

The conference has been excellent, with lots of interesting papers and workshops that have given me lots of ideas of could be integrated into our curriculum at the Open University. A particular challenge of many of the techniques (e.g., puzzle-based learning) is that they have been designed for classroom based situations. In order to adapt these into a distance learning delivery mode, there needs to be some careful thought into how the elements of interactivity and student collaboration could be maintained in some useful form.

I have been making notes on the various presentations at Cloudworks - http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2020.

This has been an interesting experience and I am not convinced that the Cloudworks system is optimised for live-blogging of events like these. In particular, it would be better if the content editor did periodic autosaves; and it would be helpful to have a discussion section associated with each content item, so that it is easier to see the context in which a particular conversation is being conducted.

Nevertheless, I think Cloudworks is a great platform for sharing information on learning and teaching ideas.