You can help by putting Dean in touch with any 14-35 year old folk who want to get into the local music scene. (Would make a perfect GAP year for kids before Uni or a great way to exit from first year Uni before census date – talk to Dean about options).

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

I was quite impressed with the connections the good Senator made in relation to Gladwell’s tipping point and Winston Churchill’s wrestling with the ‘Black Dog’ of depression. Take a listen for yourself.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

What Happened

A few weeks back I recieved an invitation from Dean Eaton to attend a party for planet muse, supported by the LearnDog foundation. I had noticed that learndog.com has changed and includes reference to this planet muse. So, tonight I attended that party keen to meet Dean, catch up with Mark and find out what is going on.

• I got to catch up with some of the early supporters of LearnDog – Rory, Cathy, Bill, Michael, Bruce, JvR, Janine and many more.
• Dean Eaton introduced us to the plan for planetmuse at the underground during weekdays for the rest of the year. He provided some printed information and an invite to drop into one of the public information sessions over the next four Tuesdays.
• Mark gave us a very moving glimpse into the painful events that continue to drive his enduring passion for LearnDog to continue forward as a living memorial to his son Tom. Reminding us that pain never really goes away, not to sweep awkward issues under the carpet and to keep striving to do what we can to help people who have ‘lost their place’. He then gave his customary ‘pitch’ for support / funding (more on that later).
• Nick Xenophon ‘Senator for South Australia’ then gave a short and insightful talk linking LearnDog and Planet Muse with tipping points and Winston Churchill’s black dog. He then officially launched Planet Muse. (My greatest dream for LearnDog is that through whatever emerges, we will find a ‘tipping point’ on the social web that will enable kids to work out their own cures for depression).
• Finally, I got to meet Andrew from the Underground to tell him how much of an impact his 12 years of tireless work at this great venue has done for my kids (and their parents). We spent many evenings helping our under-age kids start their bands by sneaking them into various pubs and clubs, but they were able to run their own gigs at the Underground. This is where the Milton Experiance truly began to soar and give my son a solid foundation for his musical pursuits. (While waiting around to pack up drums, amps and assorted equipment Dave Sly and I decided to start our own band – the adelaidegeezers).

What Happens Next

• The plan is to run two ten week terms of creative engagement based around music. There will be continuous on line involvement and live sessions at the Underground Mon to Fri 10 am to 4 pm.
• There will be public information sessions at the venue at 10am and 7pm on Tuesday 16, 23, 30 June and 7th July.
• Participants need only a passion for music or the media that supports its creation.
• Enrolments are limited and cost $10k AUD per participant.
• Scholarships and funding support will be provided through the LearnDog foundation (who would dearly love to support and mentor young people who have become dis-connected or who have lost their place).

Some Patterns

• Sen Xenophon’s talk and reference to tipping points (media := newmedia) and the idea of LearnDog chasing away Winston Churchill’s ‘black dog’.
• Being at the Underground (where my kids launched their bands and found their place – 4 doing music tech at uni).
• My early experience with fotopedia and its ‘recognition services’ for photographs – feels very much like the type of infrastructure I thought we should build for LearnDog.
• Networks, connections, and scaling this up globally. Before attenting the launch I wrote this little blog post from LearnDog to Planet Muse suggesting scale could be achieved through digitisation, online publishing with open license and building communities of recognition.
• Music therapy as a starting point and my own ‘retirement plans’ with family therapist wife. Too long to explain here but there is a plan.

How we can get involved

• Attend one of the public information sessions on a Tuesday in June or July 2009.
• Spread the word, encouraged young people who may benefit from this wonderful experience to seek enrollment.
• If you like what you see, help with fundraising for the LearnDog foundation so it can indeed provide the scholarships and sponsorship required to give those who most need a programme like this the chance to participate.

I will keep you posted with my thoughts after I attend one of the public information sessions. If everything checks out and there is at least one deserving candidate, I plan to try an online micro-finance fundraising campaign for that candidate. (If that happens you will definitely be hearing from me ;-)

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Thinking about ways to run ‘competitions’ where the aim is to maximise the amount of recognition for every single ‘contestant’.

You see, recogniton is a key pillar of the LearnDog vision – we have often thought about being more like the Duke of Edinburgh awards or Scout Badges and less like competition ‘winners’ – where every player wins a prize (recognition not some worthless trinket). We also kicked around ways to quantify recognition through schemes similar to Achievements or Points in online games et al.

Beth has based her 50th birthday ‘competition’ on ideas from the Creative Commons ‘Swag’ contest we both entered last year. This competition offered a rather trivial prize but created a strong sense of connection and recognition (at least between Beth and I). The comments that we left on each other’s flickr photos constituted a form of ‘peer recognition’ – something that can be easily scaled. The e/mail I recieved from Prof Lessig was recognition from the ’subject matter expert’ – something that is harder to scale but not impossible.

LearnDog would love to help find ways to dramatically increase the amount of recogntion kids get when they publish digital work – these ‘competitions’ provide some clues on ways this can be done.

Fang – Mike Seyfang – LearnDog

technorati tags:recognition, competition, rewards, points, achievements, birthday, emix

Here is the story as I recall it:

- Read Robert Scoble’s blog post about this cool thing from Demo2005 that he was going to buy for his son’s music practice.

- Listening to this podcast while walking from North Terrace Adelaide to the City – via Hindley Street

- I almost walked through this door to barge in and introduce myself but didn’t

So, naturally, on meeting David I just had to share the story.

While chatting it became obvious to me that there is a lot of synergy between David’s experience and mine. More specifically, the LearnDog vision (of connecting kids via the LongTail of Web2.0) is very complimentary to the target market and vision for inthechair.

Thinking about inthechairs recent links with sibelius caused my mind to reflect to a blog post I did around the time of the podcast coincidence described above. About meeting an interesting chap just before I left Microsoft – Peter Grimshaw of zinfonia.

http://mikese.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A056EA628FAE2BFE!148.entry?_c11_blogpart_blogpart=blogview&_c=blogpart#permalink

zinfonia – I met an interesting fellow today:

Who knows, some dots might join and could possibly bear even more fruit than the VAF / Zune adventure.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

The first part of this post was obviously ‘live-blogged’ by me while watching presentations and trying to make up one of my own! As such it contains plenty of typos, incomplete sentences, broken and/or missing links. I will try to patch those things up over the next day or two so that this post can be a more useful resource to anyone who wishes to refer back to it. My intention was to model the behavior of live blogging, not to create the most definitive ‘textualized’ coverage of the event.  *Don’t for get to try out the del.icio.us ‘Tags’ mentioned at the bottom of this post.
Michael Cowling (Aberfoyle) is giving us an excellent presentation (from a shiny new macbook). Fantastic examples of podcasts and vidcasts from students – including a mobile phone video. Interesting comment that most of the kids already have the technology to make this stuff at home! And YEP – a podcast of his presentation is available. awesome!

Kerrie Mackey-Smith is now talking about her research with Y8 english and Y9 science classes. Broadcasting background gives structures and bones to hang the podcast on. For me, highlights from Kerrie’s international research include: The advanced use of PodCast in education in the UK, equity in todays ‘highly textualised’ classrooms (Dyslexics of the world ‘untie’), and a very interesting point of view based in traditional media.
website: http://lefevrehs.sa.edu.au/

Nathan Grimaldi/Rhys/Jackie Miers/ Carys Holder/ – Magill PS are setting up for their demo of: early podcasts from Year 7 students about the school. The podcasts are all available online via the school website (see below). They are delightful little pieces that begin with nice google earth shot of the school from the air.

www.magillps.sa.edu.au [Navigate to: resource centre -> magill podcast directory ]

Sean Simper – OAC is now talking about his personal interest in podcasting and how that has led to his work in various distance learning and face to face contexts. Teacher devlelopment is a starting point but student development will happen). Sean’s formal work is just about to start (thanks to some grant money) and will begin with literature review, networking with groups such as the trailblazers, involving the ICT folk, delivery & access systems, rss, and secure environments, mobile phones and more.

Carol Cornish – ABC (behind the news).
Carol began telling us that the ABC views PodCasting as something for the future that is happening now. At present, only limited video streams are available, but there are certainly plans for real podcasts with rss feeds – yippee! Even better they are actively seeking user generated content via the /yournews section.

She then gave us a heartwarming tour through http://abc.net.au/btn/ – including a touching story about Veronica a Sudanese refugee who’s story was posted on btn/yournews, seen by a fellow refugee in Perth and resulted in a very ‘LearnDog’ connection.

Finally, yours truly had 10 mintues to present LearnDog, the not for profit new media company that plans to help kids through recognition. Having seen veronica’s story, I tore up my notes and mumbled incoherently about how the connection between veronica and another refugee in Perth is exactly what LearnDog seeks to do – ensure that every kid who publishes something makes at least one connection – (possibly with the only other person in the world who cares about what they say).

I mentioned three ‘musts’ here they are:

- Must Join – the edtechtalk.com community

- Must Read – the FutureLab Social Software and Learning paper

- Must Listen – to this podcast on New Platforms, Economies, Realities

And, thanks to Yvonne we can all ‘Tag’ stuff with podblazers to grow THIS Excellent Resource!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

podblazers

Check his latest
Download.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:animation, josh, bowman, learndog

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