CogBlogged from ‘March, 2006’

Here in Phoenix, we don’t have that old saying about “raining and pouring”, especially since it is now 143 days since any water fell from the sky. But the podcasting flow is pretty good, with my quick and dirty recording with an iRiver, simple Audacity editing (fade in, fade out, bump levels, and take out a few “umms”), and publishing via a scotch tape and rubber band MovableType system. It seems to make sense for many of our projects and events, since not everyone in our geographically far flung system can be there for synchronous events. Just toss the iRiver on a table and record. So recently added to our podcast mix: (1) We have a group trying to look creatively at Learning Space Design. On Wednesday of this week, we visited an Interior Design class at Mesa Community College. The students had completed projects doing a “Post Occupancy Evaluation” [...]

I am working on getting over my podcast malady. For the past few years, two of our faculty that teach a semester-long class in digital storytelling have provided the same experience in compressed form for faculty as a 40 hour “Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Classroom LearnShop”. I started hovering in the August 2004 session and made a lot of appeals for getting permission to share the final stories on our web site, in both streaming QuickTime and Windows media formats. Back when I got an iPod video, I quickly converted the movies to iPod movie format (using QuickTime Pro) but lagged behind in getting a podcast feed set up. Not a big deal, since it only gets updated about once a year, but it does provide an easy way to access the stories at will. The final story examples now also have a download link for the iPod movie [...]

I get lots of comment spam. Or better yet, my SK2 Spam filters do, they fill up and flow over every day. I usually ignore the email notifications and just do a quick dump every few days. But this is the most pathetic attempt (but I am sure there are spam weasels out there that can do worse) effort yet to embed an unwanted link in MY blog: My name is Stephanie i am working on a thesis as a home study i hope it is not a problem with me. I hope you don’t mind me placing a few words on here as my tutor needs to see it. Thanks and you have a great site here. How sweet. Don’t you feel a lot of concern and care for little home schooled Stephanie? The only thing about her that is of deep worry is the URL she listed– which [...]

As previously noted, last Friday we assembled a panel of 7 Maricopa students who shared with out Ocotillo Online Learning Group their experiences in our online courses. This is a rather small sample of the stories that are “out there.” Just the diversity within this group (self selected volunteers who would be willing to stand in front of teachers and, for a $50 honorarium, tell them ‘how things really are”), makes me really ponder how little we really know and how much we take big guesses as to how students operate in online environments. Enough blabber, you can find the audio from our meeting at: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/olg/notes.php?yr=0506&id=7#students1 There are two segments- the first, at an hour and thirteen minutes, moves through the intros, types of classes taken, experiences, technology issues, ideas on different media formats. The second segment, in 26 minutes, moves into the “challenges” students faced, and their recommendations to [...]

flickr foto Shuffle Come Homeavailable on my flickr For weeks I was sure I had lost my iPod Shuffle… and today I found it stuck in the pocket of a pair of pants I had not worn in weeks. Charge up, little iPod, we got some running to do! Lost, now found. I was conviinced I had lost my iPod Shuffle, and was just ready this week to give up and order a replacement (especially since the bottom line one dropped to below $70). But hold the lines, Apple Store, I am back in business. It turned up in pair of slacks I had not worn in a few weeks (and now I give away that I try to get 2 wears out of my dry cleaning bills). Time to touch base, charge up, and hit the road!

Friday was our monthly meeting of the Ocotillo Online Learning Group (OLG) and we had a lot of anticipation, since this was our second annual meeting where we arranged a panel discussion with Maricopa students so they could tell us of their online learning experiences. Last year, it was lively, and packed the room with more than 50 faculty, staff, and administrators. This year, we had seven student on our panel (3 no shows), representing 5 of our 10 colleges. The session was utterly fantastic- these students were honest, and shared some incredible insights about their online classes, the technologies used/abused. What is utterly disappointing is that there were maybe 20 people who showed up (and they all sat in the back, many left early). Perhaps it is one of those things due to the fact we have been recording / podcasting our meetings — just like the philosophical question, [...]

Since not long after the day in October 1993 when a colleague handed my a floppy disk (remember those?) labeled “Mosaic”, our office has had a continuously running web server. We have gone through several iterations of trying to build collections of web resources for educators, and in going through some old files, I got a bit nostalgic. Just a bit. Our latest iteration might be construed as “Web 2.0″, but let’s roll back the decimals… Web 0.9: Old School Hand Spun HTML (1994-1995): World Wide Web News was a the old simple HTML with a few graphics that we published on our site and then advertised by email. The issue above dated September 14, 1994 covers web browsers, our web server running on a Mac SE/30, and some web links to Frog dissection, AskEric Virtual Librarian, The Pompeii Forum Project, etc (links are most likely long gone). In later [...]

Small, insignificant observational note of no consequence: In my two podcasting demos this week for faculty and staff at our colleges, I showed as a video example an episode from the TV show Lost that I had bought on the Apple Store for $1.99. Before I showed a small bit of it, I asked how many in the room watched the show… Any guesses on the response? I had my hand way up in the air, admitting, yes I was hooked on the show. On one day of my demos, I was joined by maybe 2 others in the room, and at another session, no one else in the room indicated a Lost addiction or interest. No conclusions are drawn, no inferences about Digital Natives and Immigrants, no suppositions are made about un-awareness of pop culture. Nope. But the folks at the Dharma Initiative has been informed.

After a second Podcasting, Schmodcasting demo this week, I am getting sick and tired of talking about them ;-) This was for a mostly faculty crowd at Glendale Community College, who managed to all suit in the last two rows of the room. Different from Monday, today I moved more quickly through the variety of demos portion, zoomed through the definitions, and actually got to get all three how-to create demos thought at such a speed, I know there was some whiplash in the crowd. Doing the live recording demo with my iRiver, I must have clicked the wrong button, and lost whatever Scott and John said, so I had to resort to using a clip from Monday’s (there is some funny cut and paste at the end as I was showing how you can move things around in Audacicty). I did fit in a ‘good’ Odea web recording done [...]