Sunday, May 11, 2008

This week has been interesting following the Networked Learning Conference. I tried to follow it through Google Blogsearch, with mixed results. Maybe people cannot both attend a conference in person and maintain a blog at the same time. But some events, tending towards Web2 or San Francisco, seem to be well reported and gain from the blog aspect. The academics studying networks may gradually adopt these methods, unless their studies convince them that the conditions for dialogue have not yet been established in the design phase.

Malene Charlotte Larsen appeared to be "on holiday" but staying nearby. "Greetings from Halkidiki" was the only post but the comments were answered.

Grainne Conole did some full reports on keynotes and some other presentations. I have started to follow her blog and she was back in London by Thursday. And she was in Canada the week before. Having got as far as Halkidiki, remaining "on holiday" and not blogging too often seems quite sensible. I still like the info from the blogs though so am glad someone keeps it going.

I also found a blog on Information Literacy . Sheila Yoshikawa was not at the recent conference but Google found her anyway. She was on Second Life Thursday evening which worked quite well. The PDF download fell over but the url could be copied to paper and then typed in. These glitches are just down to me I expect. For many people Second Life is becoming natural.

I can't find any news on what was said about "heterotopias". This term comes from Foucault and might describe online spaces. I would like to know more about this, such as how to design one. One suggestion was to read Foucault directly and I have found a text about this. He also mentions "heterochronies" - slices in time. Trying this in Google finds the International Festival, somewhere between a "sort of general archive" of a festival theatre in past events and "time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect". In other words while the drawings are very convincing it is not clear from the website if the project is imagined as having already happened or if there will eventually be some actual news.

Anyway, one method will be to attempt to use the word "heterochronies" in this blog and then observe the comments.

From YouTube it appears that the Theatre no longer exists