I am currently sat in the workshop working on a locally run (USB stick) WordPress install. Amazing what you are able to do with a little bit of knowledge.
Excellent facilitator and very knowledgeable trainer – Steve Boneham. Great workshop, highly recommend this to all.
I have just signed up to experiment with the Blackboard (Bb) Course Sites feature. It allows you to create your own online course using Blackboard.
It offers a range of styles and technical features which will be of interest to those that are regular users of Bb. I like the broad range of CSS you can choose from, far more than are offered in the production systems offered in Learn and Organization. Will this be avialable in 9.1 later this year? I shall be having a look at this in depth this coming month.
It has a very useful search facility that allows you to attribute resources to the original creator. A great resource for finding and using images and video without fear of copyright infringement.
You can see what XPERT is about and why it is useful by watching this video clip:
Socialising at the ALT-C Gala Dinner
My main thoughts about the 3 days last week are:
Swansea Marina as viewed from the Maritime Museum
The notes listed below are some of my own thoughts regarding the conference. Comments from visitors welcomed as always:
http://www.bbworld.com/2010/TeachingAndLearning/content.asp?id=1621
Detailed Programme: http://bb.blackboard.com/Swansea2010Schedule/
Durham Cathedral as viewed from Durham Castle 05.01.10
Hello all.
What a couple of snowy days this turned out to be! Although weather apart, I thought this was very well attended, even up to the very last session on the second day.
I find that of all the conferences, seminars or symposiums I have attended in the last few years this is without doubt the most useful and relevant to me in terms of my job role and day to day activities. The presenters are of a high standard and knowledgeable about what they do – which helps greatly as most of them are practitioners.
The main pointers I have gleened are:
Many thanks to Malcolm Murray, the LT staff and Durham University for hosting a well run and professional event.
The Tenth Annual Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference will be held on Tuesday the 5th and Wednesday the 6th of January 2010.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/lt.team/blog/?page_id=405
Theme
We are inviting presentations at this conference which explore the opportunities and challenges that social networking tools offer to the more traditional (some might say ‘monolithic’) institutional online learning environments. The following examples are meant to be illustrative rather than definitive:
Now that social networking tools are legion, do we still need institutional VLEs? Should we all follow the lead of Michael Wesch, abandon Blackboard and run our classes using free web-based tools such as netvibes?
Do students want staff to get involved in their use of tools such as facebook, or is this the quickest way to kill it off? Are there educational applications for facebook?
If students want to learn using their mobile phone rather than their laptop, where does that leave Blackboard?
What can you teach someone in 140 characters? Is Twitter just for ‘Twits’ ? – That was the word David Cameron used, wasn’t it? :^)
If we embrace connectivism, should we be assessing who student’s know rather than just what they know? I’m not suggesting you grade people by the number of friends they have in facebook, but could/should we go further than the open book exam? How could we measure this?
Does it matter if student learning is occurring online in places we can’t access, audit or learn from ourselves?
Amid all the excitement, are we forgetting to ask who is excluded from the Web 2.0 world?
We will also consider proposals for Discussions or Papers on any other topics that you think the community would find of interest.
TACCLE, not the snappiest of acronyms but a site worth looking at for information and guides relating to the use, source and creation of learning materials. The TACCLE handbook can be accessed by registering on this site . To give you an idea of the content, here is a list of all of the sections:
Section 1: Getting started Chapter 1: What is e-learning? Chapter 2: Tools that are useful for communicating and creating e-learning content Chapter 3: Weblogs Chapter 4: Wikis Chapter 5: Podcasting Chapter 6: Video sharing Chapter 7: Presentation sharing Chapter 8: Social bookmarking Chapter 9: Voice threads Chapter 10: RSS feed readers Chapter 11: Image sharing Chapter 12: Taxonomies, folksonomies and metadata Section 2: The pedagogy of e-learning Chapter 13: Different sorts of e-learning Chapter 14: The role of the teacher in e-learning Chapter 15: The target group Chapter 16: Assessment Chapter 17: Trends & directions in e-learning pedagogy: social software and web 2.0 Section 3: Learning environments Chapter 18: Learning Management Systems Chapter 19: Personal Learning Environments Section 4: Creating Digital Learning Objects Chapter 20: Learning objects Chapter 21: Designing Learning Objects Chapter 22: Creating text-based content Chapter 23: Creating cartoons and comics Chapter 24: Publishing digital learning objects Chapter 25: Authoring software Chapter 26: Copyright and Open Educational Resources Section 5: Networks and communities Chapter 27: Networked Space Chapter 28: Communities of sharingAlthough the content is aimed at classroom teachers the information is useful for anyone working in the education sector and using a VLE in some form or another.
A colleague of mine recently delivered a presentation using http://prezi.com/. Probably. like you I’ve sat through and delivered many presentations using Powerpoint and I’m probably suffering from ‘PPT fatigue’. It was interesting to see this tool used, It uses Flash, so there are accessibility issues with using it, however it gives you a novel way of presenting and also thinking about how you are going to present. Some examples of presentations from the Prezi website can be seen here:
Not the most catchy title around but an interesting development in the world of information gathering and search.
Can be accessed here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
The tool allows you to ask questions in a usual spoken manner rather than search terms and receive answers in a similar way. For example who was the UK Prime Minister in 1968 would return Harold Wilson. BBC news article here
Taken from the VizEdu web site…what do you think, does it work?
Looks good. Especially the drag and drop feature for Tabs.
Here is a 10 features video clip from YouTube:
Wordle.net is a tool for generating word clouds from text that you submit to it. You can do this via a RSS feed or select text and paste it into a text box on their site. It then generates a word cloud, with the highest repeated words displayed in larger text. You can alter the images that are produced by altering the font, layout and colours.
I’ve seen this used at conferences and during presentations. It gives a useful snapshot for activities like gathering feedback, responses and online discussions.
In true Blue Peter style here is one I created today from the WP blog feed.
WordPress Blog Feed Image from Wordle.net
I attended the ninth annual Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference on January 8th and 9th. This was my second attendance at the conference, however, this time I presented at one of the sessions along with my colleague.
We presented on a project I am involved with at work which is about lecture and event capture implementation and use (ReCap). From the feedback we’ve received it was a successful presentation, with several questions fielded afterwards. I think in the near future we will be welcoming several visits from other HEIs and FEs about our service.
Full details about the conference can be found here.
Here is the PowerPoint presentation of our talk.
The facilities offered by Durham University for the event were first class. The Calman Learning Centre was a great venue, well equiped, spacious and a great vista of Durham City with the Cathedral being the focal point. I look forward to the next one in January 2010.
I stumbled across this site today and thought it might be of interest to some of you?
A comprehensicve PDF guide and tutorial can be viewed at this url:
http://www.labnol.org/software/adobe-pdf-guide-tutorial/6296/
Lots of Q and As on how to use PDF without actually having Adobe Acrobat as well as tips and hints on how to use and manage files. Worth a look in my opinion.
BTW – Happy new Year!
The issue of DRM is a complex one. An alliance has been created (The Digital Watermarking Alliance) to promote the value of digital watermarking to content owners, industry, policy makers and consumers.
From their website:
“With movies, music and photos increasingly being distributed and shared digitally across numerous mediums, and printed value documents such as IDs and financial
instruments at risk to counterfeiting, fraud and theft, protecting therights and integrity of these assets and enabling legitimate uses has become critical.
At the same time, consumers are demanding instant access to entertainment content – any time, any place and in any format.”
For more information visit: http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/default.asp
