As I said at the time:

The patterns workshop (which Dan and Ed ran for us) gave us a way of thinking about what we wanted to build that neatly bridged the gap between vague hand waving about ‘community’ and getting sucked down into the nitty gritty of interface design.

If you think you could use some similar help I highly recommend getting in touch with them.

Recently I have been thinking about how we can apply the techniques of collaborative filtering to people search and recommendation. Indeed we have built Beanbag Learning as a research testbed to allow us to explore possible approaches in this space. There are a number of threads which are starting to come together: collaborative filtering, the social graph, peer to peer, Whuffie and solar magnitude, openness and mutability. I’ll outline them below and try to link to some of the wide range of conversations going on which link these seemingly disparate areas.

Read the rest over on the Scrump blog »

The DCSF campaign to get teachers working outside of the classroom has been boosted this week with the launch of the Teaching Outside of the Classroom website. The aim is for trainee teachers to go on placements during their training at non-school educational sites, such as adventure centres and museums. The manifesto for this was launched about 6 months ago and the website is intended as a mechanism to allow interested organisations etc to sign up to be involved.

Via Ben Williamson on the Flux blog.

The first two of the seven points which make up the manifesto give a good flavour of what it’s all about:

1. We will provide all young people with a wide range of experiences outside the classroom, including extended school activities and one or more residential visits.

2. We will make a strong case for learning outside the classroom, so there is widespread appreciation of the unique contribution these experiences make to young people’s lives.

but the one which really struck me is the last, but hopefully by no means least:

7. We will identify ways of engaging parents, carers and the wider community in learning outside the classroom.

Spore has been gestating for several years, Will Wright the creator first talked publicly about at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. You can watch a 35min video of his talk on YouTube, below.

So what does all of this have to do with e-learning? Well nothing directly, but it was announced while I was working on Ecolibrium with Futurelab. Ecolibrium was always designed first and foremost as a tool to learn about evolution, the dynamics of predator–prey populations and systems thinking. When I first heard about Spore I thought that it would be great to leverage it’s undoubted popularity by making Ecolibrium a place where Spore creatures could be left to run wild.

ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

Although a US-based project, they do say: This is an international project, and we will be working with open educational sites and resources from around the world. They are part of the wider Open Educational resources Initiative, which also seems to include the Open University’s OpenLearn initiative.

See also: Sanako mobilizes class management with Nokia.

They seem to be making good use of social software tools themselves, including a wiki and a blog. And the site itself is built using Ning.

A partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to create a forum for comments and discussion about articles from the Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List and about general issues concerning higher education.

The blog and the associated mailing list seems to be aimed at science and engineering graduates embarking on an academic career, and tends more towards the longer ‘editorial’ type posts than some of the more conversational blogs or ‘tumblelogs‘ (like this one).