Monday, September 26, 2005

SETTing Sons

Still working up to giving my thoughts and reflections on the SETT conference, but first I wanted to get some general comments out of the way. I'll start with some of the things I'm scunnered about.

Firstly I'm scunnered that I had to miss the whole of the first day because of teaching commitments. In particular I am scunnered that I missed Andy Carvin's session (although Andy has helpfully posted the presentation he used and a podcast of what he said). I'm scunnered I missed Alan November's video conference (I saw him at SETT a few years ago and thought he was extraordinarily inspirational). But the thing I am most scunnered about is that I missed the Masterclass dinner! (It was my own stupid fault, I had the dates wrong and thought I was going to the dinner on Thursday night. In a bizarre way, it was a double disappointment. I was annoyed I missed the dinner on Wednesday and I was annoyed that I wasn't going to get a dinner on Thursday! Does that make sense?)SETT Logo

So, what were the bits I enjoyed most? Some of the good points will undoubtedly come out in future posts, but here are some of my general impressions. I always think one of the best things about SETT is the free pens... No, sorry, I mean meeting people. :-)

Ewan McIntoshI particularly enjoyed meeting Ewan McIntosh this year. I even had time to have a coffee with him. I think I taught him when he was at Jordanhill but it is because of his blog (where helpfully posts this picture) that I really got to know him - and I do feel I know him. It's one of the things that I think is interesting about this blogging thing - it's about conversation, it's about social interaction - it's about people. It was especially fun to discover that his mum reads my blog - hello Mrs McIntosh. :-)

John JohnstonSpeaking of people, I saw John Johnston in the passing but didn't have a chance for a chat. He and Ewan did however get to meet and recognised each other from the pictures on their blogs. :-) John has already started posting his thoughts on SETT, including one on a round table discussion on podcasting with Ewan and Andy Carvin. Interestingly, he has had a couple of comments on this already. One from David Warlick who says how much he enjoyed SETT last year and that he's sorry he wasn't able to come this time. I really enjoyed David's session last year and he is partly responsible for getting me into blogging. I went to look for his website after his session, and found his blog, and found out about RSS, and found some other blogs by people I know, and... Anyway, as I said above, it's about community. David was at SETT last year and has obviously kept reading some Scottish blogs. Brilliant! It's a conversation. Another comment is from Andy himself. John makes a post about a session and one of the people involved in the session joins in the conversation. I'll say it again... Brilliant!

Finally for this post. I came across a few more Scottish educational blogs. Firstly, searching for Scottish Learning Festival on Technorati turned up an SQA blog! It looks more like a newsletter than a blog, but I'll stick with it a bit longer to see how it goes. For instance, I have already discovered the SQA are working with somebody at the University of Strathclyde about an e-mentoring qualification. I worked on a full Diploma course in this sort of area a few years ago, but it sort of fizzled out and the other people involved moved on to other things. I'll need to try and track this University person down and see if it is too late to get involved. The other blogs I discovered through Ollie Bray. I went to a session he co-presented and he mentioned he had a blog. There are in fact a few at the Exc-el site (an East Lothian site?). Unfortunately (unless I'm missing something obvious) there is no way to leave comments. Is it still a blog if you can't leave comments?

Finally a special prize is available to the first person to explain the origin of title of this post. :-)

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8 comments:

Andy Carvin said...

Hi David,

Sorry we weren't able to touch base as well. It sounds like day two of the conference was a good one; wish I could have attended for the full event. Maybe next year they can figure out a way for Warlick and me to do a dueling keynote or something - that'd be fun. :-)

andy

Anonymous said...

hi David,
Posting about the newly discovered (to me) Scottish blogs you mention, I thought maybe we could tag any Scots Educational blogs we know with scot-edu-blog on del.icio.us. I've made a start. For obscure reasons my del.icio.us username is troutcolor

David said...

Hello Andy

I very much enjoyed day 2 at SETT - I only wish I had more time, I seemed to just rush from one place to another!

As to your suggestion for you and David Warlick to get together - I'd vote for that! More than "fun" as far as I'm concerned. There's a quaint old Scottish phrase that comes closer to describing the idea - It's fan-dabby-dozy. :-)

David said...

Hello John

Good idea. I've now tagged a couple of the "corporate" weblogs that you missed.

Troutcolour!? I think the public has a right to know the story behind that one. :-)

Anonymous said...

Hi David,
Great, I am parsing the scot-edu-blog rss at the side of my blog.

Anonymous said...

You may like to know that for the first time Learning and Teaching Scotland is making downloadable audio available for the majority of SETT 2005 seminar sessions. Tip: visit the http://www.settshow.com website and navigate to an individual seminar webpage via the "Seminars and keynotes" section. If an MP3 is available there'll be a link to it in a section called "audio" towards the bottom of the page.

Also the seminars are being syndicated via a new Learning and Teaching Scotland podcast feed at

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/rss.xml

David said...

Lesley Duff said...
Learning and Teaching Scotland is making downloadable audio available for the majority of SETT 2005 seminar sessions.
...SNIP...
Also the seminars are being syndicated via a new Learning and Teaching Scotland podcast feed at...


Excellent! Does this mean that over the next few weeks/months, all the seminars that you have podcasts for will be syndicated, or will you just feature some of the seminars?

I feel guilty for asking this as it's fantastic that the podcasts are being made available, but are the Powerpoint presentations available too or do the individual speakers have control over them?

Thanks again though, that's brilliant news. :-)

Anonymous said...

David, we hope to release every SETT seminar MP3 file into the feed that we have live on the website, one per weekday...and we have over 90 of those :-)

The powerpoint presentation situation is variable, getting presentations/links from speakers is a bit like herding cats. Many presentations were by external speakers and we don't have direct control over those.
If the speaker was from LT Scotland then we should be able to provide these. Work continues on the site so maybe give it a week or two, use the "contact us" form on the settshow.com site if you still can't find what you want.

For more details about the podcast see the announcement message in the podcasting-education group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Podcasting-Education/message/194