electro-textual

Reflections on the session for Can You Hear Us? .. at the Converge08 e-learning conference (5Dec).

The workshop went reasonably well. Really interesting people in the room, and many of the people there had used some kind of audio technologies .. including Skype, language laboratory setup, Wimba voice boards.

i came up with a kind of jigsaw / find your partner activity, that i think went well and was fun. (Each person opens a wiki page with instructions for what to do. Eg some people have to wink .. and then team up with the other people who are winking. Example page on the site.

Each team then discussed the merits of particular technologies, and how they might adapt each one to their own classrooms. (technologies included: voicethread, skype, voki and screencasting)

But we really needed an extra activity .. for example running a quick vox pop through audacity, or testing the Chinswing voiceboard as a whole group. i had the microphone and the long cable all ready, but didn’t think we’d need it. In retrospect i can see exactly where it would have fitted well.

Here’s the presentation from the day:

image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr: Thanks very much: Grant Neufeld

Phew! That was a bit scary.

For months now, we’ve been preparing the new PRACE website, made to run on Wordpress. i even presented at an online conference recently, singing the praises of our in-house collaboration .. before the thing was ready to launch  ;-]

Finally, i attempted the technical switch that lets the site go live from a sub-folder to the top level of the domain. (as this wordpress article).

Panic ensued. The whole thing didn’t work. Themes broke and i couldn’t log in again.

After reading multiple help files and forum articles .. i realised i’d mis-read the instructions and reversed the folder paths for wordpress and the blog. Whoopsie.

Couple of minutes in phpMyAdmin, and it was all fixed and ready to go. Yay.

News from PRACE.

Now i need to work out what’s up with that tag cloud. Not a cloud, it’s a list !! The theme is beautiful in so many ways, but there are little clunky things that make it not perfect.

Anyone out there have some expertise with tag clouds in the wordpress sidebar? What could be the problem?