electro-textual

What’s your dream for e-learning?

Have you heard these dreams yet? On a few occasions, beginning with the ACE e-learning showcase this year, people have shared their dreams for e-learning. You can listen to other people’s dreams for e-learning on the voxopop board, and then post your own response.. put your dream into the world!

(The board is open to all your comments and dreams now – i think you need to register.)

You may notice on the Can You Hear Us? wiki, how the “RSS feed” from this voxopop beard can be embedded into a wiki page.. allowing extra access to the recordings. (We don’t think you can embed the whole board, only the RSS feed.)

Plus: take another look at the wonderful work Dale Pobega has been doing with voxopop, via his Free ESL Blog (look for the voxopop link, left-hand side). You could leave a supportive comment for his students.

(Related links: at the ACE e-learning showcase earlier this year, michael coghlan spoke of voxopop in his keynote address, as one of the tools that can add to social connection via the interwaves.)

feedback very welcome ;-]
thanks and kind regards, michael

..and on the topic of electric dreams, have you seen the grooveshark site yet? Embed any song you like, even the bad ones:

The AccessACE classroom practice group recently had a live session looking at Voxopop. (i’ve put the recording link in the ACE e-learning network Ning for members.)

So Tina, one of our amazing English teachers at PRACE, comes in with our box of headsets, “Same question i ask you every Monday.. green is for listening?”

This is one of the things that used to drive me crazy when we were running our Can You Hear Us? projects.. (No, not Tina.. the computers!!)

(Beware: Rant Approaching.)

Most of the windows/pc boxes have a colour coding for the audio sockets (green for listening, pink for speaking), but many headsets use a different colour code for their plugs (orange or black for speakers, pink or blue for microphone).

How mad is that!

On top of this, the windows audio controls have always been terrible. The only way you can access the volume control is via a tiny grey “speaker icon” hiding in the system tray. And sometimes that icon goes missing, if someone’s been experimenting with the control panel.

i’m lucky, because i know how to make volume control easily accessible (eg put it in a Start Menu audio category, as in this image below).. but should we do this for students? If we try to make the windows operating system more accessible, will students find it difficult out there in the real world of windows-in-its-original-form (un-tweaked)?

Fraser and i decided it would be worth putting a Volume Control icon on the desktop for the students logging in on the “English” account.

What about you.. do you try and make the windows operating system easier and more accessible for your learners?

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(PS: leave a comment if you want to know how to do any of this, eg volume control icon on desktop.)

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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

Chris couldn’t do the whole research project, but i still wanted her to be involved; so we talked about how to use audio technologies with her very beginner, low literacy ESL learners.

Filling in forms is a crucial survival skill, but the language is reasonably advanced. Chris’ students find it hard to remember written text or even recognise words on the page.. so we decided to prepare an audio CD allowing the text to be both on the page and on the CD player. She would have them do the activity in class, and then repeat it at home later.

So Chris sat down with the portable mp3 gadget (iRiver T30), and recorded three separate texts. Today i had a go at editing the texts into three tracks for a CD. We decided there needs to be a small “Track #” announcement for each track, eg “Filling in Forms, Track One”.

Then we got more ambitious and thought it would be nice to have some music backing the track .. and to signal the beginning of each new track. So i hunted for a while, and found Jamendo .. a really great music site, where you can download full albums that are licensed under creative commons. We settled on some pieces by Maya Filipic.

ome quick editing in Audacity, and three tracks are ready to go.

Later on, Chris told me that her students really enjoyed the activities and found the whole process very useful. Great!

Afterthought:

A whole CD, for just nine minutes of spoken voice.

Would be great if some of the students have bluetooth phones .. so we can beam the audio through the air for their takeaway convenience (and saving us the 80c cost of a CD). But let’s face it, these people wouldn’t find it easy to play audio tracks from a phone. Even playing a CD on a stereo could be challenging.

photo credit: dorotea… (Thanks!)

Thrills and spills !!

What a lovely group of people we’ve got for the new PRACE research project into audio technologies: “Can You Hear Us?”

We’re building on the successes of the 2007 “Can u hear me?” project, and last Thursday was the launch day. These sessions are always nerve-wracking and you never feel quite prepared enough, but we dived in and the water was warm! Plenty of ideas flowing around the table, and of course everyone is at different levels of knowledge and experience.

First session was about creating some excitement for the journey ahead: we started off by recording conversations directly to the iRiver mp3 recording gadgets .. and i’m about to listen back, to find out how adventurous people were in their conversations.

Now why can’t i get this photo dropper plugin to work!?
No, definitely not working. All my plugins are playing havoc. Grr.

Have recently been working with the Conversations in ACE conference, Eastern Metro Region of "Adult Community and Further Education" (ACFE). Kerrin Pryor was presenting on her research into "New Literacies", where they are using "Squeeze Text" (or mobile SMS language) to explore literacy for young people.