In another experiment in Web 2.0 for learning technologies I recorded a soundtrack for a presentation that I make annually to my first, second and final year students, and put it up on Slideshare. This wonderful site is a social sharing site for PowerPoint files. It allows the usual social networking features. So you can upload a PowerPoint presentation, tag it, share it, and comment on others. You can also link it to an MP3 track, and there’s an easy to use tool for synchronizing the audio track to the slides.
Because I tend to use slides that, because of copyright, may not be publishable in this way and my recorded lectures are recorded and published as podcasts which have to be listened to with a copy of the downloads slides. However, Slideshare has real potential as an alternative presentation medium. It certainly compares favourably with to the expensive desktop tools that do the same sort of thing. It’s also really easy, which desktop tools often aren’t!
Here’s the presentation. Leave your comments here or on the Slideshare site.
A lovely day today (though cold!) so my wife and I took a stroll from Brynmill to Swansea via the seafront and the marina. Nice pint of Tanglefoot in Eli Jenkins on the way back and stiff muscles for the rest of the week! Took a few pictures of which this breaking wave was my favourite. More on Flickr.¶
This is a great post. Of students you ask "Would they engage more if they were able to pursue their passion?" I have been thinking a lot on this subject myself. Not only do we force feed them content but these highly structured curriculums don't lend themselves to learning the latest tools to filter and tame new information ecologies - ecologies which are now flowing in real-time at an unprecedented rate. There seems to exist an artificial silo of information - created by educators and students for educators and students. It is an isolated world that satisfies traditional highly structured research papers in K-12. I'm sure these exercises build neural connections in students so I am not completely opposed to it. But passion - now that could REALLY be effective.
Hi ChrisI would say that most people, young and old have the literacies Will described and use them in their own environment, perhaps not the technological one so much. The challenge is for the institution to reshape their education to deal with and adapt to the new source of information. To ensure that academics are aware of new ways of accessing technology related to their area of interest, their field. Once the coin drops, most people absolutely love the tools and have no problem with adapting.
Hi Rita Thanks for stopping by. I've heard the term "digital literacy" a lot recently. What intrigued me most about Will's presentation were the high level skills expected of high-school students and how those same skills might transfer to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics.
Chris, This is a beautiful capture of the themes we explored. Thank you so much. The one I most want to develop is, "Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally". It's why I'm in the MOOC. I am having trouble knowing how to take this step. Any ideas? I'd like to talk to more of our folks by phone or skype.
Hi Steve Thanks for visiting. I've seen this sort of thing work when a group gets together to produce a podcast. E.g. eLearning stuff. But probably that sort of thing only happens when people already know each other. it's a pity that Elluminate is a commercial product. i could imagine it working quite well for group discussions. I've not tried Second life ... is conversation there real talk or is it typed?
Second Life has both live voice and typed chat, for those of us (me) who can't get the mic to work. Seems it wants a USB mic. But a combination of http://typewith.me/ (an EtherPad) and http://freeconferencecall.com can work. Or Skype allows small conference calls with desktop sharing. I hope to experiment more with these. Want to play?
Once again Tony Hirst’s OUseful Info blog has led me to three new pieces of brilliant web technology. In his blog entry RESTful Image generation – When Text Just Won’t Do, Tony describes how MathTran (a Mathematics rendering service developed by the Open University) could be mashed up with with the Google Charts service to provide an easy way to get mathemattical results onto web pages. Lots of interesting stuff to follow up on but here are the highlights: - Jonathan Fine’s blog entry on MathTrans and Google Charts that inspired Tony’s speculations.
- The Mathematical text rendering system MathTran which uses JavaScript to contact a web service that converts TeX embeded in the *src* attribute of an tag into PNG graphics file. E.g. becomes .
Applied patches suggested by users of my Command Line Interface (CLI) plugin for DokuWiki. This was my first real experience of distributed development in the open source sense. Thanks to Stephane and Andy for the suggestions: it’s nice to know that my minor contribution has been useful enough to someone that they’ve improved it! The new version of the plugin is available here.
Back in June I blogged about Steve Yegge’s port of Ruby on Rails to Rhino (the JavaScript engine for the JVM) and his claim that JavaScript was the Next Big Language (NBL). In related news, Dion Almaer has just posted a new video interview (in the Google Code Blog series) of Steve Yegge himself talking about the Ruby on Rhino project, server-side and client side JavaScript. Its always nice to be able to put faces and voices to the names of people who have interesting ideas, and whose Blogs I am following. It’ll also be interesting to see what comes out of this project which Steve is pursuing at Google.
While visiting InfoQ to read the article on Project Zero that prompted my last blog entry, I noticed that there was a video on Fortress (the new scientific programming language for the Java Virtual Machine that I first blogged about some time ago). In the video, recorded at the JAOO 2006 Conference, Guy Steele’s keynote The Soul of a New Programming Language gives a nice overview to the language and its philosophy. As a former MATLAB power user and ex-Fortran programmer, I find the Fortress language, particularly its use of mathematical notation, very intriguing and worthy of further investigation.
Why prevarication? Because I’m supposed to be marking exams!
While going through my feed-reader today, I came across another potential framework, which I can add to the list mentioned earlier. This is Project Zero, an incubator project being developed by IBM. It uses the Java platform and the scripting languages Groovy and/or PHP and seems to be directly targetted at RESTful services development but with support for traditional web applications, AJAX and mashups. I guess that I am going to have to I develop a data model and evaluate the choices that I have before I get even more confused!
For a web application that I am developing as part of a research project I have decided on using Python for the business logic. The reasons being that the application will use fixed-point binary arithmetic, units, and data output as line-graphs. Python seems to have the libraries that I’ll need for this and is better suited for rapid development than Java.
Part of the requirements that I have been researching this last week have been concerned with the identification of a suitable web application framework for Python. I started out this week assuming that this would be Django and even bought the book! However, because this is research, I have the luxury of time so I’ve done some additional research and decided that the alternative frameworks TurboGears and Pylons were also worth a look. Searching Google for getting started screencasts and videos I discovered a wonderful video of a web application framework comparison presentation by Sean Kelly. In this presentation, Sean uses J2EE (Servlets and JSPs), Rails, DJango, TurboGears, Zope/Plone and even Enterprise Java Beans (JBoss) to develop a simple time-tracker application and reports his experiences. Rails, Django and TurboGears come out (roughly in that order), but the big surprise is that Zope/Plone comes out top! So, maybe I need to rethink!
I’ve embedded the video here as it’s not only a useful and timely comparison of web application frameworks, it’s also an example of just how useful and inspirational a simple presentation can be!
Paulo, for very simple use-cases, for example aggregating some RSS feeds, doing some filtering, removing duplicates, pipes is very simple. For more complex manipulations, I think you do need more expertise and some programming experience. I'm very much a beginner! As I mentioned in my post, Tony Hirst (@psychemedia on twitter) is my mentor in this!
Your screencast was awesome, Chris. I created a dashboard in NetVibes, added it to my Symbaloo homepage and now I'm in the RSS feed business. Thanks so much!
You are very welcome! I have used NetVibes in the past but always went back to Google Reader. Using it to create a dashboard for an on-line course seems a very good idea though and I'll be experimenting further.
Tony One of the problems with the simple pipe I came up with was the OPML parser block itself. Although Stephen Downes' OMPL is available as a URL, and therefore in a sense always up to date, the parsing into feeds seems to take too long and the pipe often times out before it can generate results. I need access to the raw data that is being used to create the PLENK2010 daily I think! But thanks for the tips, I'll follow them up.
Very interesting! I want try to use an aggregator. But to complicated right now. I just added the link to The Daily as a bookmark on my igoogle, to keep the course separated from the rest in the RSS-reader.
This is great work. It is just what I was looking for. I was about to ask you for this kind of help in the plenk moode but got your blog info instead. Much easier to connect here. Thanks much, @chris_saeger
Some new features (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting) were added to my institution’s Blackboard in the last upgrade. It’s very early days but I managed to try some of these out and blog about my first impressions. Here’s my blog entry. It’s hosted on Blackboard so I’m not sure if it will be publicly visible. My apologies if it isn’t! Some of my views are probably influenced by this Slideshare presentation posted by Alan Cann (of Leicester University) which compares *Virtual Learning Environments* (VLEs) and *Personalised Learning Environments* (PLEs).
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