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.)

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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?

.

(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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Not sure whether it has audio recording built in yet. (Check: yes it does.)

What also caught my eye (and my similarity radar) was an article on Wired, where the law enforcement agencies are investigating similar options .. a wearable computer, with head-mounted video camera. This gadget is a full computer, running Linux, with enough disk space to store all the video from one day. (double check that, eh?)

Given the Wired headline, “Don’t Tape me Bro“, i’m including the mashup video from ’07: “Don’t Tase me Bro” .. a classic multimedia news remix.

ooh. $590. Perhaps not this week.

.

Extra Link: speaking of mashups: an earlier session: Jo Kay on the MashUp.

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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

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Tina and Jan and i came up with a way to use Skype to develop people’s language skills. Lately the students have been practising their descriptive skills, so we decided that each student would describe themselves over the skype phone, and the other group would guess who was speaking.

Each group had a set of photographs – of the people in the other class.

“I have dark hair, dark skin, and in the photograph i’m wearing a white headscarf.”

“Are you number 7, Maria?”

“Yes!” Applause all round.

There was plenty of laughter .. and not too much confusion; even though there were a few moments of garbled voice sounds, and not everyone remembered to hold the microphone close to their body.

Real listening .. because students were engaged in a real game, with real invisible colleagues. Fun plus success!
photo credit: feelmystic

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We discovered a few more things about this program known as Jing. We already knew that the application would not run without a login. Now we know it’s a challenge to log yourself off the system .. for example when you’re on a public computer.

Lisa’s had a go at recording the in-class on-screen demonstration with Jing. She’s come back to the recording after class, and found she can’t save the file onto her local USB drive, but she can upload to screencast. But the program is logged in under my name, from weeks before ..so she can’t access the file.

Eyes Roll !!!

i thought i’d write up a few “Caveats” for beginners to this seemingly straightforward application. So you can find some new notes on the Can You Hear Us? site.

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

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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!)

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• recording the presentation live in class (audio only)
• recording the screen demonstration live in class (screen and audio)

We thought this might work, and i’d had some fun using “jing” for making a screencast. Looked easy to me.

So i turn up at Lisa’s workplace, laptop at the ready. What could possibly go wrong?

• my laptop can’t connect to the Moreland network, and Jing will not run unless you login to screencast dot com (!!)
• installing Jing on Lisa’s machine takes a long time, because it needs the Dot Net framework (whatever that is)
• after taking a test screen cast, the software will not upload to screencast
• i have to admit that if her students would have trouble playing an MP3 file from their USB stick, then an SWF file will make them savage and wild with frustration.

Lucky we’re used to things not working out technically ..and we keep a good sense of humour. Also fortunately, Lisa remains undaunted, and decides she’ll have a proper go at making it work. Yay Lisa!

Looks like we’ll have to set up a wikispace for her class. The really good thing i discovered earlier, was that you can upload a Jing SWF video file into your wikispace directly. (for example, on the Can You Hear Us? site.)

image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr: Thanks very much: Mark Strozier

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The technology worked!

For our Can You Hear Us? project, we were lucky enough to get Michael Coghlan on our wavelength as guest speaker. He was in Adelaide, and we were in Melbourne. It was all done with the smoke and mirrors of skype.

i love that!

Michael told us about many wonderful tools for getting audio online, from voiceboards to podcasts and live conferencing. His slideshow is online on the project wiki .. and if we can get the recording to work, i’ll post that too.

Actually this was really satisfying; to have a conversation with people in five different locations seemed thoroughly worthwhile. Earlier in the week, michael and i had connected up in skype, to find out whether there was a whiteboard that would suit the skype environment.

We trialled a few, but ended up deciding to give everyone access to his presentation via slideshare, and to just share web links via the text chat. It worked fine; not as excellent as Elluminate, but very workable. In the end, we thought it best to keep things as simple as possible. Good strategy.

Thanks so much mr coghlan!

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Howard gave us all a three minute timer, and because PRACE was close to the end of the day, i finished 5 seconds inside my 3 minutes. Woot. i enjoy talking to a 3 minute timer .. means you just focus on the essential points.

Elluminated? We met in the elluminate live conference room. Always fun to meet that way.

Here are the overheads i took into the session (via slideshare).

Howard has given us the link to the recording .. just trying to extract my bit now to MP3. Unfortunately, had to record via the speakers, so it sounds awful. If you want better quality sound .. i’d recommend the full Elluminate session. Otherwise ..

[audio:http://michalk.id.au/txt/wp-content/uploads/michael-chalk-lo-res-presents-mid-year-report-in-elluminate.mp3]
Audio file: michael-chalk-in-elluminate

around 1mb (where’s the player, i thought wordpress would give us a player?)

kind regards, michael

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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.

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