Anne Dunn wrote a story called “Red Dog” a few years ago for the PageTurners series of books for beginning adult readers. I don’t know why she’s not getting any royalties from the movie. Apparently someone else wrote the same story for a different audience.

Anyway, both books are based on the true-to-life story of a dog who travelled the highways of Western Australia for many years. This dog would hitch a ride quite regularly. This is one of my favourite PageTurners stories, and i’ve heard the movie is good too.

Technical web design gripe: The whole thing reminded me that i said i would try to find a way to automatically connect the PageTurners blog with the PageTurners website. Hm, so i tried Alan Levine’s old rss2js script (aka feed2js). But i couldn’t make it work for me this time.

Wouldn’t it be great if i could make any “Red Dog” stories from the blog appear as headlines automatically on the PageTurners Red Dog page. Ooooh yes. Even if i could make the latest headlines from the blog appear on the front page of the PageTurners website. That would be good.

But no, i’ve had to do it by hand. Unfortunately re-publishing RSS feeds is one of those irritatingly difficult things to do.

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Somebody bought a set of 5 new Easi-speak recording gadgets for the teachers at PRACE. How exciting!

Early in the term we showed them around the staff meeting, and soon after that i’m in the classroom with Chris and her beginning English as a second language (ESL) group. They’re on the computers working with the AMES “That’s Life” reading and listening software.. so only a few people are open to taking a break to try something new.

But Chris is getting a good feel for how they work, and coming up with some great ideas for using them in her next session. This group is practising descriptions at the moment..

Update: later down the track: someone at PRACE has had the brilliant idea to run a series of morning tea events. The idea is that students come from all classes and mix together, socialising and “educationally networking” across the whole school. Apparently the idea came from students in the first place. So we thought, let’s bring these easy microphones along, and get students using them with a series of vox-POP interview questions.

One guy in the adult literacy class turned out to be really good at interviewing people. Unfortunately he had the mic too close to his mouth a fair bit of the time, but the interaction between him and his colleagues is really good. Currently i’m editing the raw files to put them on a school wiki. That way students will be able to listen, and hopefully add their own comments.

photo credit: teachernz

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According to this talk:

The science is “a little bit freaky”. Recent research shows that while paying more money gets good results for physical labour and simple tasks, for cognitive and advanced tasks it can have the reverse effect. Much more important are things like:

=> autonomy: creative freedom and self-direction,

=> mastery: people love to feel they are learning new skills, gaining knowledge,

=> purpose: meaning the profit motive can get in the way of good things.

The animation was put together by a crowd called RSAnimate, at theRSA.org.

Brilliant stuff.

Is this the same talk, at TED? Unfortunately i’m behind a Great Firewall at the moment, and i can’t access the You Tubes.

photo credit: nemesis91

No related posts.

i should begin by acknowledging that this is a tremendous cultural experience, and i’m thoroughly overwhelmed by the sense of opportunity.

However, sure enough there is no access to
=> facebook or twitter,
=> google docs,
=> anything on blogspot.

(So Dale, if you were thinking of exporting your free ESL club to the good people of Szechuan.. think again. The international blog community only extends so far, ironically blocked by The Internationale.)

i can get my email (both fastmail and gmail), flickr, wikispaces, other google services such as the calendar.

It’s interesting to find out what will work, and what might not. And can we really be sure whether it’s intentionally blocked, or just an unhappy internet connection?

“This must be what it’s like to work in NSW!” i thought.

After hearing Robyn Jay bag the NSW education system so often – for its many blockages – this was the first comparison which sprang to mind. Many times, Robyn would prepare a session to show teachers the benefits of building your Personal Learning Network (PLN) with Web2 tools (or something similar), only to find the authorities had blocked those websites.

(And how reliant i have become on those social networking sites! i feel very isolated, cut off from my networks of friends and colleagues. Probably good to step away from the stream of information for a while.)

photo credit: Ray Yu (Thanks!)

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“Who wants to be a mentor?”

Here’s an audio presentation we’ve put together (using voicethread), with plenty of rich insights into the program, and into the whole process of integrating e-learning into program delivery. Great to see a lot of participation from people in the project.

Currently in a dress rehearsal for the big day. This voicethread is an added resource, with the aim of adding to our live presentation.

Relevant links

• If the voicethread doesn’t work here, you can find the original presentation on the voicethread site
• Victorian ACE e-learning network (Ning)
• Converge10 (Victorian e-learning conference)
• e-learning mentor project (North West chapter)
• information about voicethread, from the Can You Hear Us? project

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i’ve taken some brief notes on what the educators are talking about, but haven’t really commented with my own response. Many people have been saying this kind of thing in recent years:

• Schools are like factories, following models of the industrial age;
• students have more enriched experience outside of schools than in;
• US schools rank lowest out of all industries surveyed for technology integration;
• relationship, community, connectivity and access are keywords here;
• students are inhabiting the “not quite synchronous” space of twitter;
• students learn at home, in libraries, in museums and online;
• people wander around collecting data in the city – that’s learning (???this was a strange point);
• why stick with a classroom system when you could move to a “community system”?
• it’s about connecting students to opportunities that will shift their learning experience;
• here are the tools to connect with teachers around the world, swap ingredients for teaching and learning;
• it’s not about standards – jobs of the future do not call for the “vending machine approach” to education;
• The literacies of the future are about synthesis, understanding context, working with teams, multi-disciplinary – not memorising facts, but how to find information, collaborate and problem-solve with it;
• We are witnessing “the death of education, the dawn of learning” – an exciting and evolutionary time.

What do you think? Does education need a “revolution”.. or will it continue to evolve in its own good time?

[Relevant Links]

• Daniel Pink, a whole new mind,
• video taken from the YouTube – AdobeELearnings Channel,
• oh there are so many links that need to be here,
• for example to the whole employability skills debate in the adult education sector.

photo credit: Marc_Smith

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Afterwards i remembered that i had once made a couple of video screencasts for wikispaces. (Look for the full screen button if you need it, in the video controls).

a) how to embed media (such as video) into your page

b) how to change the heading style colours, using CSS (if you have a premium account). This one is more advanced – don’t attempt it if you’re still at beginner level.

[Relevant links]

• Colors (sic) on the web (a) colour wizard (b) spin wheel for random colour combination.
• e-learning in the Northwest
• michael’s video screencast channel at screencast-o-matic.

Let me know if you think they’re useful (or if they could be improved).

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A Canadian education researcher, Stephen is an incredibly articulate and rigorous thinker who is definitely worth listening to, and i believe he listens to others really well too. In his first Huffington Post article, he gives an overview of the PLENK massive online course, and his perspective on connected and networked learning. (PLENK = Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge.)

“That is not to advocate throwing learners off the bus to fend for themselves. It is hard to be self-reliant, to take charge of one’s own learning, and people shouldn’t have to do it alone.”

Through the article, i found the video below in which Stephen emphasizes the importance of sharing and interaction. Our connected world is about contributing as well as listening. To join your Personal Learning Network (PLN), you need to put your opinions out there, in your genuine voice. It is a challenge. (How often do i blog? Not very often. Stephen puts out 5-7 small posts every day in his OLDaily.)

This talk focuses on 3 principles:

• Interaction: it’s important to connect with other people, and move away from the “broadcast model”. Play a part in the network. Blogging is all about the connections between people, the discussion of ideas.
• Usability is about consistency and simplicity: “summarise everything you come across”. This is really good advice – it was only when i discovered the art of summarising articles that i became capable of literature research. He recommends guerilla tactics in the face of an institutional  content management system (CMS), and offers some good suggestions.
• Relevance: “filter ruthlessly” – students should have access to the relevant information. You can pick and choose “your own information priorities”. Choose your own times to connect, exercise your freedom to turn the internet on or off as you need. This also requires guerilla tactics such as RSS feeds or backchannels that might not be a part of the official channel.

This talk goes back to 2007, but it’s a really good one. Stephen sums up with this message:

1. Put yourself at the centre of your Personal Learning Network (PLN). Make connections with people in your field.
2. This is about self-directed learning – take charge.
3. If you’re teaching, think about how to enable your learners to develop their own learning networks.

[Relevant links]

• Sue Waters has some good resources around the notion of developing a Personal Learning Network (PLN).
• Stephen Downes home base
• A local version of the 23 Things approach to web2 technologies.

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As well as the session itself, one thing i really enjoyed was being fully mobile, so i could join from the beautiful Victorian State Library rooms.

With my tiny msi Wind netbook, plantronics headset, and my Android phone acting as a modem, it was easy to connect.

Yes, the HTC Desire is an Android phone that is based on the mythical “Google phone” – the Nexus One. Google didn’t have much luck selling the original version, but HTC have done pretty well selling their copy. The latest update to the Android OS allows me to use my phone as a wireless modem.. to share the 3G internet connection by setting up a wireless network. They call it “Wireless Tethering”. i think you can do it with other smart phones too.

i like that.

It means i don’t need to get one of those mobile USB modem things.

There are some limitations, yes: the phone gets hot, and the battery drains much faster than usual.

..

Relevant links:

• Search the Victorian ACE network for references to flip, including the recent session (i’m still looking for the recording). [Login required.]
• SMH suggests that the htc desire could be an “iPhone killer” – before iPhone 4 came out, that is.

photo credit: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks: Timmy Toucan.

No related posts.

Jill Koppel and i have been on an adventure trail around the ACE providers involved in this year’s e-mentor projects, finding out what people are already doing.. and what they’d like to be doing. We’ve seen student-created zines and blogs, wikispaces built for course materials, computer labs filled with not only pc-machines but also iMacs.. and mini-projectors that would fit in your handbag.

So far, we’ve met with people at Yooralla in the city, Diamond Valley out in Greensborough, Thornbury Women’s NH, Carlton NLC, Olympic AE and Span in Thornbury.

There’s interest in building online spaces for staff and students, creating online courses to add more flexibility for new and existing courses, and adding more engaging use of technology to classroom situations. People want to learn about interactive whiteboards, online voice tools, wikispaces, organisational e-strategy.. and that big old challenge: how to choose the best technology for your teaching/learning purpose.

Overview and links over on the e-mentor wiki. http://ementors.acfe.vic.edu.au/northwest10
We’ll post more detail soon.

michael

(“North West” means the North West of metropolitan Melbourne – it’s a region for the ACFE board, which is similar to state and local government boundaries.)

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i have to admit i’m terrible at providing help desk assistance over the phone. i really need the visuals, because often i can’t make sense of the way people describe their screen. Maybe it’s my weak listening skills.. maybe it’s because people leave out important details. I think that in order to solve technological issues i need to see every bit of the screen. There’s a huge amount of visual literacy involved in screen-based communication and networking.

So we tried elluminate as a way to share Christine’s screen (it didn’t work). While we were waiting she mentioned she’d just been on skype with her family overseas.

What am i thinking? Skype has screen-sharing these days.

We found out how Christine could reveal her workspace over the skype connection, and as soon as i had the visuals i could be helpful again. We solved the problem together. In fact i think Christine worked it out herself, she just needed the confidence of having someone there to say, “Yes you’re doing the right thing.”

..

[Screen-sharing: how? From memory, it's in Conversation => Video => Share your screen, but i'll have to double-check.]

..

Possibly useful resources

• • • • Interestingly, the mac version of skype had screen-sharing before the windows version. On linux we’re still waiting (or maybe not).
      • All about screen sharing on the skype site.
      • Sue Waters gives a good overview of the basics of skype on the Edublogger.
      • Silvia Tolisano provides a very good set of ideas for using skype in the classroom, as part of her “around the world with 80 schools” project (Langwitches).

..

photo credit: Sean Davis (thanks!)

No related posts.

Several people on the CAE 23 Things project wanted to know how to embed documents in their blog. There are a few ways.

(edublogs allows you to upload documents, but i’m not sure that blogger does. And David made the point that if he’s uploading all the time, he’ll use his storage quota in no time.)

The trick is to use an external service, eg Slideshare, iScribd, youtube, docstocs, yudu or google docs (your choice could depend on the kind of document).

1. sign up to another web service (eg scribd, slideshare, youtube)
2. upload your document to the other service, then
3. embed the document in your blog post, using an “embed code” from that other service.

• Dale Pobega’s Free ESL club (from Duke St Community House in Sunshine) has plenty of examples of embedded content, including the Banana ESL grammar book at the left (via scribd).
• Richard Byrne uses Yudu and Docstocs in this post from his Free technology for teachers blog.

Some other suggestions out there on the web:

• Digital inspiration links to some services, 
• Blogger help files suggest Scribd 
• eHow has more detail on how to do this at Scribd
• (so does Krishna De)
• Slideshare is a great service for sharing powerpoint presentations. They have their own help file for posting directly to blogger.

(digital inspiration goes further too, with a post called “embed almost anything into your blog”)

..okay. i wonder if that helps. We haven’t looked at these “embed codes” yet.. perhaps we need a help video. 

—————————————-
Photo credit: thanks minifig from flickr (creative commons license).

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Win, Lin and Mac:

It’s true that Windows (TM, microsoft corp) occupies nearly all the computers in the known world, but there are other operating systems, and it’s been my side project over the last few years to find out more about all of them.

Thanks to the iPod and the iPhone, Apple mac has bounced back from the lean years to become a major player; everyone knows about apple these days. Their reputation says they care about beauty, elegance and simplicity in their design. The iPod comes with no instruction booklet because it’s designed to never need one.

Linux (GNU/Linux) is now the underdog. Because Linux is a free operating system, with principles of open accessibility and speech-like freedom as well as beer-like free availability, i’ve always thought that people in the community, without much money, should be more aware of it.

.

So anyway: the competition

Now i have access to 4 tired old laptops at home and at work, 2 Windows xp, 1 Apple mac osx, 1 Ubuntu Linux.

3 main areas i need computers to work for me are to manage files, access the web and play sound & video files.

i may write about the first 2 categories later on, but the one that’s interested me lately is getting the laptops to play sound and video files across a network (ie the files are stored on a computer somewhere else in the network, not on the computer in question).

1) Windows on an old Laptop

Laptop A, a clunky old IBM thinkpad that was retired from work. It weighs 2.5 kg i’m sure, a pentium4.

With the magical audio app Winamp, this machine will play all kinds of audio files across a network. Win XP will happily map a network drive for me (remembering the location of the music files), Winamp scans the drive in the background* and plays the music just as i need it. No fuss. If my MP3 tags are out of order, Winamp will search Gracenote and fix them.

This machine will also play video files, but not wirelessly, because it has old style 11kbps speed. Not fast enough for VideoLAN (VLC) to catch up with the frame rate. Need to plug in a long blue cable. Forget about it.

.

Update: July 10: something’s gone wrong with this machine since we upgraded to better security. This old machine now plays music haltingly, even with a long blue cable. Regular pauses are not ok. Fail.

.

2) Windows on a new netbook

The second windows machine is a newish MSI-wind netbook (U100+, bought oct’09), running windows xp.

Plays video and audio beautifully from local drives, using Winamp and VLC**; however across the network, the wireless drops out regularly every 7-8 minutes, making any song or film hang with a repetitious da-da-da-da-da-da-da-. This machine may work better if i can find improved drivers for the wireless.

(I’ve tried running Linux on this machine, via a USB boot, which plays video across the network (using either VLC or Totem movie player). Updating the windows drivers hasn’t fixed the problem.)

Fail with windows. Pass with Linux.

.

Update: July 10:

i was so happy with linux that i installed ubuntu 10 on this machine, but the wireless drivers are broken for the msi-wind (they were fine in version 9). So i went back to ubuntu 9 (full install), and it worked for a while, but then the video player broke.

On windows xp however, the wireless drivers magically fixed themselves.

Linux: Fail.

Windows: Pass.

.

3) Apple mac on an old macbook g3

The Apple mac is also an old machine, a g3.

Connects to the network wirelessly, and will play music through iTunes. iTunes works much better on a mac than on a windows machine, but the application still wants to spend serious time (many hours) getting to know the music before you’re allowed to listen. No scanning folders in the background like winamp. And it won’t play an ogg music file without some plugin help.

For some reason (it’s an old computer) VLC and Quicktime both crash if i try to play a video.

Audio: pass. Video: fail.

.

4) Linux (ubuntu) on an old laptop

The Ubuntu (Linux) machine will not play audio over the network with its main music player (Amarok). It refuses to play MP3 files even locally (MP3 is not a free format).

However there are 2-3 video apps (Dragon player, movie player, totem) that will pick up any kind of music or video file and play it happily. Once i found those program, Linux was the winner in this competition.

Audio: pass. Video: pass.

.

Update: July 10: This machine completely died. Won’t boot.

.

Overall winner:

Originally Linux ubuntu.

Update: July 10: tie between Linux ubuntu and win xp

.

Postscript: this competition was in no way fair or balanced.

Update: October 10: a brand new macbook pro easily matches the msi wind under both ubuntu and windows. It’s now a 3 way tie.

—————————————-

(* unlike iTunes which can take hours to register the files before i’m allowed to play them, and then doesn’t play ogg files)

(** and the screen of the MSI-wind may be small, but windows will let me plug into an external big screen. Perfect.)

Relevant inks:

• VLC is my favourite video player. Free and open source software (foss), you can rely on VLC to play just about any video file. Plus it runs off a USB stick, and has versions for all the major operating systems.
• Winamp is easily my favourite audio player. Quickly scans all your music files (in the background, unlike iTunes which won’t play music until it’s built the library), plays many different formats including video if you want. Will also manage your iPod for you.
• Full list of michael’s preferred software applications on the wiki (ooh it needs updating already).
• Ogg is a free and open source audio format (foss), an alternative to MP3 for people who prefer open standards and higher quality.
• Get the xiph plugin for iTunes so you can play ogg files.
• There are many new ways to install a live Linux system to a portable USB stick, including this one: via windows with the pendrive app. (more in my delicious links.)
• Ubuntu Linux, a free and open source alternative to apple mac and microsoft windows.

photo credit: catzrule99

photo credit: sk8geek

photo credit: giuseppesavo

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