Tuesday 6 March 2007

BarCampScotland - Chaos theory in action

Its taken me a few days to digest this and reflect on it.


Last weekend I was in Edinburgh for Scotland's first BarCamp.


Its a very interesting concept. Get lots of people together and let them go for it. Survival of the fittest. Loudest voices get heard. Please feel free to add other cliche's.


As a naturally reticent person (Yes I am! and stop laughing) its not a position I am fully comfortable with. Having said that I really enjoyed the events.


I say events because really their were 2 events running. One was a Techy one. This had lots of people speaking a fluent language. This is a language which I know the pigeon version of... I speak pigeon Geek. The other event was based around teaching & Learning. This firmly where I placed my talk. I should also apologise to DigitalKatie for over running my part of our shared slot.


The presentation seemed to go down well. Here are my slides



These 2 events did over lap at times. I witnessed this first of all with Robert Jones neatly switching the emphasis of his talk on Scotedublogs to the full language of Geek on Rails.


Another place I witnessed this crossover happen was in Tess Watson's presentation on Glow. Afterwards we got talk with some guy's (Sorry I can't locate them in the Wiki) who are developing access for youths in Glasgow. They instantly saw that Glow could provide that space for them.


One of the most interesting talk was by Dr. Hazel Hall. She was talking about the use of Wiki's in her course's. I enjoyed David Colarusso's idea of using YouTube to share physics films (Phylim!)


One I wish I had seen was Morna Findlay's. On how to interest pupils in Computer Science.


The biggest crossover was in the Bar (Surprise, Surprise).


Talking to lots of individual's and seeing how what we are all doing can crossover. I can see so may uses for Textensor in education.


BarCamp really is chaos in action. Frustrating and exhilarating.



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Ian,
Thanks for sharing your slides, I really enjoyed hearing about the way things are going in Islay, one of the most exciting projects in Scotland.
In passing you mentioned some open source 'comic life' do you have a link?

islayian said...

Just for John
Some sites for creating comics
The best one is http://www.comeeko.com/
http://www.stripcreator.com/make.php
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/sleep/starslp/missionz/comic.htm
http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/comic/index.html
Some software
http://www.mycomicbookcreator.com/products/standard/
and The Tech Savvy educationalist has Comic templates for publisher

Anonymous said...

From what I've seen in a number of blogs your presentation went down very well. It was difficult to avoid reading blog entries about you last weekend (and they were all positive)!

Love the title of your presentation, I just wonder how many people down here would have understood it ;-)

islayian said...

All they have to do is ask Armin ;-)

John said...

Thanks Ian, I will check them out.