Serious Virtual Worlds


I’ve just recieved notice of the first European conference dedicated to the professional application of Serious Virtual Worlds.  This will co-incide with the launch of the recently founded Serious Games Institute (SGI) website.  The early bird discount has expired, however, if you’re interested, the conference takes place form 13 – 14 September 2007 @ The Serious Games Institute, Coventry, UK.

The prevailing theme is ‘The Reality of the Virtual World’ taking a close look at how virtual worlds are now being used for ‘serious’, i.e. professional, purposes.

Day 1 – Introducing Virtual Worlds: presentations and conversations introducing virtual worlds and the 3D web from Cisco,  Forterra, Linden Labs, Giunti Labs, Daden, Ambient Performance, TruSim and others, closing with the launch of the Serious Games Institute and Coventry University’s ‘Second Life’ Island.

Day 2  – Serious Virtual Worlds: Action & Potential: live virtual world presentations and conversations from PA Consulting, IBM, Reuters, BP, Trusim, Forterra, and others

For more information go to http://www.seriousvituralworlds.net.

LExDIS


I’ve been invited to join the advisory committee for the LExDIS project at the University of Southampton and am looking forward to contributing.  This has spun out of a brief meeting with Jane K. Seale (whose writings on assistive technologies in higher-education underscore founding elements of my MA) during my ITISCE working group visit in June. 

Lexdis is an important project exploring the e-learning experiences of disabled learners at Southampton.  If you are interested in this area, and/or participatory research methods in higher education do explore the LExDIS website at: http://www.lexdis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/.

Teachers and Machines


Here are some examples of my current reading on machines in the classroom. More to follow!

32 Amongst Many


As the Association of Learning Technology (ALT) Conference approaches, blogging delegates have been approached for their RSS feeds.  The ALT will then be aggregating these into the ‘mother of all feeds’.  They will publish the URL of the aggregated feed on  ALT-C 2007 web site at http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/ .  To ensure you receive a holistic perspective on the event, I’ll add the feed-squared on the right-hand column of your screen for the duration of September, below the BBC Technology news.  Watch that space!

Custom PC


I’m going to be covering the ALT-C conference in early September for Custom PC magazine.  There will be a fairly quick turn around on this work so expect a sign-post from here in mid-september.

Learning Technology for the Social Network Generation


The Association for Learning Technology are holding their 14th International Conference ‘Beyond Control: Technology for the Social Network Generation’ here in Nottingham at the East Midlands Conference Centre (EMCC) from the 4-6 September 2007.

Registration closes on the 10th of August. Research presentations, symposia, workshops and demonstrations are grouped according to strands of interest including Designing Learning Spaces, Large Scale Implementation, Learning and Internationalism and Learning Technology for the Social Network Generation.  Keynote speeches will be delivered by representatives from Cisco, Futurelab and Dr Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

Accessible Blogs


Author’s note: this post was written in 2007.  At time of revision (Aug 2009) far more information is available regarding the accessibility of many blogging services.  For example Wordpress supply a detailed codex relating to accessibility for Bloggers. There are also now excellent services such as Web2Access that provide centralised resources giving advice about accessibility and tools such as blogs.

I was invited to talk to a Young Pioneers group in North Nottinghamshire at the Holocaust Centre, early last month. The group are seeking to create the first British memorial to disabled people killed during the holocaust and are considering accessible ways to get responses and discussion from other disabled people and groups across the UK and internationally.

Finding out about accessibility from blog providers themselves can be difficult, and there doesn’t appear to be a centralised accessibility resource directly concerned with blogs. Many people with disabilities’ own blogs appear to be hosted everywhere and anywhere. Evidently, general accessibility guidelines such as the Web Accessibility Initiative apply to content, but blog servers can be opaque on the subject of the steps they have taken to ensure an accessible interface for users, and accessible results for visitors. So which service should you use? Typepad?!

On what I could find, Google’s ‘Blogger’ is cited as the most friendly blog format. Their blog templates are all CSS based, standards compliant, and usability tested. But this is old information (see stopdesign, 2004). So who currently holds the blogging accessibility crown? In a very-straw poll, stemming from the favourites listed by Ouch, the BBC’s Disability Lifestyle e-Zine, I found that Blogspot is, perhaps, most popular with people with disabilities.  I’ll post more ‘facts’ as I find them.  Please contribute if you have any thoughts…

Modernising Modernity


Here are the books I’m currently reading.  Giddens is currently working on a new edition of Modernity and Self-Identity, so it’ll be interesting to see what is updated come the next publication. 

 

Incase sleeve


IncasesleeveOn the subject of consumables, I recently picked up an Incase neoprene sleeve for my laptop.  These are available all over the place in varying sizes, and are a handy alternative to a specific laptop case.  I can now get my notebook in my NNDR conference satchel, or any other bag, with or without a tonne of papers, it can be carried more covertly on the train, and it makes me long for the time when the surf starts to improve come autumn.  Marvellous.

Talkr


I’m please to announce I’ve now embedded ‘Talkr’ into this blog.
This means that now, for every post I make, an audio version is
available.  This is currently hidden down on the footer of each post
(which you can literally see below) so it still needs a little work to
be fully foregrounded and applied across the archive, but hopefully,
with a little work this should improve my blog for those who would
rather listen than read.  The final format is MP3, so if you want to
put me (or a synthetic female robot voiced version of me) on your Ipod,
you have my blessing!  In fact, I may begin to affect an American
accent from this point forward to allay any incongriguity!

Any comments on how this works or not (particularly in conjunction
or comparison with screen readers), or recommendations for
better/different audio are very welcome.