http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/03/ms-de

Ms. Dewey - a Flash based search tool … not the fastest, and I suspect not the most accurate, but amusing!

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/03/audio

I’ve looked in the past at setting up audio for this blog, to enhance accessibility. The options, when I first investigated were either to record everything myself - which would have been very slow, or to use a plugin that read it. The first that I tried was Feed2podcast, which I set up, though ultimately decided that I wasn’t that keen on the object that it adds, as it essentially reads the whole RSS feed. I’ve since found Talkr, which puts a podcast button at the end of each post. (It’s still a mechanised voice), but I think that it works better - though it will be interesting to see what others think.

(If you are reading this on the Elgg mirror, then you won’t see the podcast link … I’ve not yet sorted out getting it on there, it’s just on my WordPress blog hosted in the University.)

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/03/web-2

Researchers from Plymouth have a range of ideas for how Web 2.0 tools (predominantly blogs/ wikis/podcasts) might be used for Clinical practice education. They have links to a range of sites (including a FluWiki) This might well tie in with the work we’re looking at in the ExPRET Centre.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/06/perso Mark van Harmelen has a useful set of wiki pages, covering many aspects of PLEs, and other related ideas. Several of the articles are new to me.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/06/a-gui 100+ Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators: A Guide to RSS and More from Quentin D’Souza. I’ve already used (and encouraged others to use) his RSS for Educators - so many thanks for another useful guide, Quentin!
This has a lot of useful suggestions, and covers aspects I’ve thought about, such as the difficulties with tagging, when [...]

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/07/tags/ Just testing using tags - to see if Elgg can import the tags, rather than just the post.

Tags:Blogs, RSS etc Elgg import. Other
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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/09/free-

Zamzar - Free online file conversion. This seems like a useful site - especially for some of the multimedia coursework when students have videos in one format and want them in another.

Via: Mr Belshaw

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/13/histo

Google Earth has just been updated to version 4 … one really fun thing is the inclusion of historical maps - which they don’t mention on the home page. Luckily Ben Werdmuller has blogged about it - and they’re fun. OK, so perhaps not quite as much detail as the current maps - as 18th century aerial photography wasn’t that great…

The “Live WildCams” from the National Geographic seemed promising, but I could only find one, and it wasn’t live. (nice photo though)

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/13/edtec

The nominations for this year’s Edublog Awards have opened. To give you a taste, here are last year’s nominees

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/14/grazr

After John had commented about Grazr in a post about getting RSS into WebCT- reminding me that I’d had a play in the past, but had forgotten about it, I’ve had another look.

I had hoped initially that I’d be able to synchronise Bloglines with Grazr. Initially I thought that I was going to have to use the Export Subscriptions, and then to have to save that file online & link to it.

Luckily I found a post by John Bancroft explaining that he’d just linked to the export link, and that it works. It certainly seems to!

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/14/why-b

Doug Belshaw has got a long post, but one well worth reading, looking at the current state of technology in education.

The point that he brings out throughout is that technology isn’t the answer to all ills in classrooms - that teachers have to not only know how to use it, but how to integrate it into exciting, relevant lessons. He concludes:

I’m not saying school should entertain students, necessarily, but what’s being presented should be at least mildly relevant and interesting. After all, we as teachers get grumpy and fractious when single day in-service training sessions don’t pique our interest. Let’s start selling the benefits of educational technology and lead by example

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/14/mysoc

mySociety I’ve had the this bookmarked for a while, just keep not quite getting round to blogging it.

mySociety was set up to help communities etc., get good web ideas off the ground. The list of sites that have already been developed include Pledge Bank and They Work for you.

The Winner of the most recent competition (which actually closed in September) was to create a searchable archive of requests & responses under the Freedom of Information Act.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/20/scien

Science Photo Library has been around for 25 years. I read about it, and saw some examples, in the Observer at the weekend. They have an amazing collection of photos -well worth having a look at.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/21/test-

Just testing the ability of Elgg to import tags.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/21/think

Nick, one of last year’s MSc students has just sent me a link to thinkature - it seems like an excellent tool for sharing ideas - an improved Gliffy!

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/23/a-16-

Christian Long has a series of posts (this is the fifth so far) about some interactions with a 16 year old who found his blog. Well worth reading.

(I’ve now decided that my “Digital Divide” category should include age as well as the other aspects of a divide!)

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/23/stude

Konrad Glogowski has written a post following up some earlier posts about group working. There are a range of comments from students (I think they are US High School Students), some his, and some others. He includes a quote from a past student of his who says of a group of students she’s currently working with (having left his class)

The three of them tell each other what to do and how to do it, but none of them want to take charge and do the work - they just want to tell people what to do.

How good to have students who are able to see that in a class! So often, I find, students tell me that they are good group leaders. ..

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/23/the-w

The Webcast Academy seems to be a site for educational webcasters. They have a range of information - both “how tos” and recorded webcasts. ONe thing that I found a little frustrating - after registering yet again for yet another site, is that it’s Drupal powered; now, I know that I’ve registered with assorted other Drupal sites in the past, and, in theory, once you’ve registered with one, don’t have to create yet another new login, you just login with username@the.first.drupalsite.you.registered.with.com … however, it wasn’t clear to me that I could; as it hasn’t been with many other sites. Those it has, I can’t actually remember which ones I have, so I still can’t share the same registration!

As a CMS - Drupal seems to be pretty powerful - I think that I’ve read that people are using it for developing VLEs - I can see why.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/24/open-

Josie has got some information about an Early Day Motion (Software in Education: number 179)

The motion reads:

“That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.”

You’ll need to contact your MP within the Week, but it can be made a lot easier by using Writetothem - which enables you to find & email your MP.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/27/wikis

I have to prepare a session on Web 2.0 for some web design students (so, not just “Education 2.0″), so I thought I’d look at what’s already available in Slideshare - with the thought of adding mine to it. Searching for Web2 brought up this presentation Wikis: Do They Need Usability Engineering?, which is looking at the use of Wikis in Higher Education. They’ve not got an audio file (as far as I can tell) and the slide notes aren’t very comprehensive, so I’m not se ure if there was originally more information than I have access to. While the premise of the presentation seems to be that improving the usability would lead to more students using the Wiki, the results that they present seem to point out to me the lack of motivation to use the wiki was the main reason for the low active particpation.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/27/perso

Lilia has been looking at aspects of blogging, how much of work based blogs is personal and personally initiated, and how much is controlled by the work place. I’ve used her excel file to generate an image for mine, though I think that possibly some of the dimensions - that she generated from data gathered from MS employees, aren’t quite what would be generated if you looked purely at academic bloggers - or, indeed, student bloggers.

Here’s mine anyway:

(Via: Scott Wilson)

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/27/ples-

Scott Wilson has yet another set of slides about PLEs - not quite the same set as I’ve seen before - and so has some useful extra additions. There are a few slides comparing VLEs & PLEs (I’d love to know what he said as he presented those slides!). You will, however, need to have QuickTime (not Quick Time Alternative) installed in order to see some of the slides, so I’ll have to check them later on another PC.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/27/splas

A tool to create a slideshow of photos in Flickr. I’ve just been experimenting … (these will open in a new pop-up window)

• Vanuatu
• Egypt

Having carefully added notes to quite a few images, they don’t seem to have transferred across - at least I’d not got too many photos!

Long term though, in terms of the quantities of photos I have sitting at home, I’d still like to experiment with Craig Grannell’s JavaScript ideas - which were in one of the last Internet Advisor mags before it closed.

Found via: Doug Belshaw

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/28/googl

I was watching the ITN news last night, and noticed that they used Google Earth to highlight the different areas of London that Litvinenko had visited. (Unfortunately they’d not got a saved version of the report on their website.)

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/29/conce

I was trying to find the URL for “Hot Potatoes” this morning, and thought that it was from UBC, so, I searched for Hot Pototoes UBC - and found a link to the actual site on a page of the UBCWiki. It was worth going to that site though, as ConceptTutor seems to be a very useful tool for creating small learning objects - in the examples given, I like the fact that they outline both examples of the concept - and point out what it isn’t.

QuizImage looks useful too!

One thing though that is worth noting, is that I couldn’t see the ConceptTutor page from the home page of the wiki - it didn’t seem to be listed in the PageIndex which miakes me wonder what other gems are lurking on their site.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/30/dispe

Had you asked me before this morning about the possibility of putting captions on video designed for an iPod, I’d have thought that the screen would be too small to make it really worth while. However, Joe Clark has posted a very clear description of how it’s entirely possible - mainly because an iPod screen is actually quite high resolution for its size - and you hold them very close to your face. Thinking about it, my phone has a much smaller screen - and I can get several lines of text on it - far more than you’d have at a time in a caption. Have just one or two lines & there’d be plenty of space left to see a video - so on an iPod there clearly is the potential for captioned video.

Now thinking about the language learning potential for that for all users …

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/11/30/inter

International Journal of Education and Development using ICT:  Vol. 2, No. 4 2006. Has some useful looking articles - there is one about WebCT use in Oman, and another which seems good about the use of CAA for diagnostic testing in Science in schools in South Africa, though the actual data was gathered in 1998 & 2001, and the tests developed using QM Designer. (Though with some of the experiences we’ve had with Perception, that might not be such a bad thing!)

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