Monthly Archives: January 2008

Fraud Alert!

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This is bizarre.

Our University is hosting Westcast, a teacher education conference, this year.

However, someone has setup a fraudulent website titled “Westcast University” with direct pieces from our conference website and our University website. This looks like an academic-based 419 scheme.

Conference Fraud

After a few emails to the company hosting the site, it was taken down. I have sitesucked the entire site to use in future presentations. If you would like a copy, let me know.

Here are a few quotes from the fraudulent site. Remember, the real Westcast conference is a Canadian conference focused on Teacher Education.

Regina University is a registered charity whose aims & objectives are to empower individuals world-wide through offering grants for education, economic, business, development, and environmental conservation; to support groups addressing social, economic, tourism and environmental issues and a variety of philanthropic projects through grants to non-profit organizations, to promote the well-being of mankind by strengthening the capacity of charitable organizations to provide effective programs of quality. Regina University is pleased to announce the International Conference on Human and Community Development Summit: – Transforming civil society” that will bring together 314 representatives of NGO/CBO from all over the world is scheduled from 13th to 16th February 2008 in Regina Canada.

Wow, sounds like a great international conference. But, this is not our conference. And we are not “Regina University”, rather, the University of Regina.

Here is what “Regina University” offers:

FINANCIAL SUPPORT:

Apart from the financing of the 8 richest countries of the world (G8), the summit receives financial support from the Mitsubishi Bank of Japan and the Every Johnson Foundation for the participation of civil society members. As a result, Regina University will provide sponsorship for up to (03 – 05) international delegates from selected organization School and Association.

The Regina University sponsoring covers the following charges:

– The means of travel for selected delegates from home country to Regina (Canada), and from Canada to home country

– The accommodation for selected delegates,

– The per diem for selected delegates

– The medical insurance for the entire summit duration

– The displacement of delegated on the spot of conference (by bus)

Wow … what a deal! How generous! So, what do I need to do to sign up? Oh, looks like there is a registration process. It looks pretty simple, but don’t forget, there is just a small registration fee.

Payment Slip of the Registration Fee: The required registration fee of USD 210 $ per selected applicant should be paid through our nearest Legal Representation in your continent through Western Union Money Transfer.

And just to make things really easy, “Regina University” lists a representative in many geographic regions including Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia.

As mentioned before, this could be considered an example of a “419 scheme“, also known as “advance fee fraud“. These schemes typically aim to persuade people to “advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain.” I know that usually 419 schemes promise much more than simple conference travel and accommodation (usually millions of dollars), but I am not sure how else to categorize this other than simple fraud.

Thoughts or comments on this issue? Has anyone else heard of an example like this?

Hitting A Drum & Object-Centred Sociality

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I just watched a beautiful video featuring people aged one through one-hundred hitting a drum. (via BoingBoing)

I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of “object-centered sociality”, coined by Jyri Engeström in 2005. Engeström’s ideas helps to explain in part the success of social sharing websites like Flickr (photos), Delicious (bookmarks) and many others.

Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamics because its notion of sociality is limited to just people.

I think this video could act as a metaphor for this notion, the idea that people from different backgrounds, of different ages, are drawn together by an object, in this case a drum. This is a very powerful idea, yet one that may be foreign to those not familiar with networked learning. This video could be used as a tool to help clarify the concept.

What do you think? Other real-world examples?

Update: It was brought to my attention by others included Stephen that the drum is really not the centre of this community, and people are not drawn by it in any real way. After thinking about this just a little more, I have to agree. I guess I saw the video, and saw an opportunity for a metaphor but didn’t analyze it closely enough. Others did.

At the very least, enjoy the video. I did.

Ripping Through Tools

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This first week of teaching my online Graduate course was as expected, many technical issues, some student frustration, and a few early successes. Here are some highlights (the good and the bad) of the week.

1) Adobe Connect was working fairly well in most of the tests I had with Twitterverse members prior to the beginning of the course. However, I have some criticisms of its performance so far.

    – Audio conferencing performance has been poor.
    – Screensharing features cause crashes.
    – Session recordings are missing significant chunks of audio.
    – Connect needs more granular permissions, if students are able audio/video enabled, then can then do a lot more (e.g., opening, closing Windows which effect all users).

The experience was better as we went along. However, it looks like I will be trying (the much more expensive) Elluminate next week.

Yugma and Yugma Skype. Yugma is a simple and very nice screen-sharing tool. However, Yugma lacks integrated audio. YugmaSkype is a modified version which integrates Skype directly into Yugma. While certainly you can just run both applications at the same time, it is nice to have these tools a bit more integrated, especially for novice users.

I’m thinking about Yugma and how it could be used as a tool for the hands-on sessions in my course. YugmaSkype would work fine for these, with groups under 10 participants. For larger groups, I’d have to find an alternate audio-conferencing tool as there are limitations on Skype conference calls.

Note: Yugma is now giving away free Premium accounts (connect up to 10 people) to bloggers show sign up before Jan 31, 2008.

I tried setting up a Skypecast, but I was never able to get a session running. I have tried Skypecasts from 5-7 times since they’ve been available, and I have yet to have one work. I am not sure what the issues is.

I then tried setting up several audio conferences through highspeedconferencing.com and each conference worked very well, and I connected up to 10 people without a problem. And, the pricing seems reasonable for this type of service. Participants are given the option to call via Skype (free), a toll free number or a toll number.

3) As a sort of personal note, I somehow managed to hit #1 on Tweeterboard.com this week. I am not sure what that means, it’s really more silly than meaningful. I know many people have done so already, but at some points I am going to write something on the importance of Twitter for my own personal learning. Honestly, it has been unbelievable. I love my network, and I have benefited so much from my new and old connections.

Number One Tweeterboarder!

4) Oh, and one last thing. I am having a great time with the 366/2008 photo pool project thingy (inspired by D’Arcy Norman’s very impressive work). Check out my 366/2008 photo set here, or check out the 366/2008 Flickr group with 28 current members. There are some great photos here!

To be continued.

Top Educational Blogs – Aseem Badshah

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Aseem Badshah has put together a list of the top 100 (or so) educational blogs. All blogs have at least a 50 or higher Technorati rating. Of course, with any list like this, there are always excellent blogs missed. Aseem describes himself as “a 19 year old student working to bring technology to schools.”

Here is the list.

What does it mean when you have read or subscribe to virtually every one of these blogs? And hey, cool, I made the list!

Thanks for the list Aseem, this is very useful and I will pass this on to my students this semester.

EC&I 831: Upcoming Ed. Tech Grad Course

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I am really excited about this coming semester. About a year ago, I received a Technology Enhanced Learning grant to begin creation of an online, Graduate-level, educational technology course. The result is EC&I 831, and here are just a few of the details.

    – I am developing the course with the help of Rob Wall who we’ve dubbed the “social capital philanthropist” for this educational experience.
    – We have an enrollment of 30 students, about twice what is usually expected in an online Graduate course, so Rob’s role will be especially important (no pressure, Rob).
    – We are trying our best to use as many free and/or open forms of technology as possible. Blackboard/WebCT were never options for the course. Exposure to and use of open, free, and social tools is a priority.
    – We have a tongue-in-cheek course trailer made up entirely of public domain video footage.
    – There are both synchronous and asynchronous components of the course. The synchronous components will take place Tuesdays (presentations/conversations) and Wednesdays (hands-on sessions).
    – And probably most exciting is our amazing lineup of presenters for the duration of this course. Presenters will include (couple yet to confirm, in order of appearance) Darren Kuropatwa, Richard Schwier, George Siemens, Sharon Peters, Dean Shareski, Clarence Fisher, Stephen Downes, D’Arcy Norman, Brian Lamb, and possibly others. There were many more I wanted to ask, but I know I am so lucky to have these individuals participate.
    – All sessions will be recorded and available. The course will be entirely transparent and open.

Throughout the course, we will be looking for ways to participate within the edublogsphere. If you have an edublog that would be of interest, please add it to the wiki.

To find out more details about the course, check out the course wiki (more info to come soon), subscribe to the course blog, or contact me.

I have very high hopes for this course. Please wish us luck!