Pinterest

I know i've been neglecting the blog recently, it's been a pretty busy summer and for the next 9 months i'm doing a H. Dip in art and design so it's going to be HECTIC.

I'm going to have to start keeping a professional teaching blog as part of the course pretty soon so i've a feeling my personal blog may be even more neglected... :(. The course is already really busy and i'm finding reasons to love Pinterest EVEN MORE! It's so great for pinning images relating to classwork. I'm teaching drawing at the moment and it's really handy for putting together and keeping track of visual aids. I'm teaching perspective next week, where to start?! A friend suggested here.

Lisbon, Elvin Meeting

Last week myself and a colleague, Shane Cronin traveled to Lisbon to attend the third ELVIN (European Languages Virtual Network) project meeting. ELVIN is a European Union (EU) Lifelong Learning Programme Project aimed at creating an informal social network to support and facilitate language learning.

DEIS has developed an online social network which will be opened up for piloting on the 1st of November (stay tuned for a link!). This meeting concentrated on developing pilot action plans for the upcoming usability tests.

In the meantime myself & Shane got to enjoy Lisbon, it's a fantastic city! It reminded me of an Edinburgh in the sun, it's very old with layers and layers of old streets and arches, quite the labyrinth! One of the highlights was spotting the Blu and Os Gemeos murals I blogged about a while back. So exciting to see them in real life! I'd love to know the process behind doing something like that. The black silhouette photo above is on the building next to the Blu and Os one. It's very striking as it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still under development. Here's a few photos from the weekend. More on my flickr.

Visualising ELVIN

I’ve been working today on visualising the ELVIN social networking platform, the different interactions and the different tools etc that will hopefully pair learners and learners as well as learners and content. We have a skype meeting tomorrow with all partners so hopefully these will go a long way in making sure everyone knows what we’re talking about!

There’s a lot to work out but visualising the process really helps!

Here’s an example of one of the diagrams.

Mira Schendel + ELVIN Meeting

I'm just back from the ELVIN tech meeting in Madrid, it went well. We're basically designing, developing and piloting a system that uses social networks to teach language, we're at the very start of the project so loads of work to do yet!

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to have some down time so I went to Reina Sofia, Madrid's modern art museum. It was a great way to spend a morning, stunning building filled with beautiful art. At the moment they have an exhibition of work by Mira Schendel and Leon Ferarri which I LOVED! Here's one of my favourite pieces from it, beautiful sense of light and delicacy, lovely arrangement of shapes/space as well. Letters are fundamentally abstract, but text itself allows very little room for abstraction, ie words have subscribed meanings, the re-abstraction of text here into graphic motifs to create refined and delicate compositions is captivating. It gives me an idea for a new portfolio website, which is typical because I just got a new one up online! It also makes me really want a letraset...

***edit*** Came across this really good post regarding some of the thought processes behind Schendel's work.

ELVIN Kick Off Meeting + Social Networking

I'm just home from the ELVIN kick off meeting, hosted by Escuela de Administración Pública de Castilla y León (ECLAP) in Valladolid. ELVIN is an EU project which aims to leverage open source social networking platforms to faciliate online, collaborative language learning in the vein of social constructivism. Users will enter the system and, depending on their stated skills, goals, occupation and profile information, they will be paired with other learners in order to practice the desired language. Content will be developed at quite a granular level, more to facilitate collaborative, peer-to-peer learning than to act as traditional course content. The platform will be piloted with public administrations in 5 different countries. DEIS are heavily involved in the project as technology partners. We are responsible for developing both the platform and profiling tools in order to pair learners. We are jointly responsible with Salamanca university for developing content tools and a respository. At this early stage we think we'll use either Elgg or Mahara to facilitate the platform and Dspace to develop to repository. This is all subject to change pending further research!

These are two versions of an image I developed for my presentation in Valladolid. It represents a social network and it's components. The image developed from a number of preliminary sketches, particularly one of a tag cloud and a "taking a line for a walk" type image. The first image involves typical social network features, all overlapping and linked together. The second image concentrates on only the links.