The Kiwi Workshop Brigade

I’m about halfway through my three week visit to Auckland New Zealand for an ambitious series of workshops at several schools here, and am bouncing between my regular CogDogBlog and its flipped over variant here CogDog(kiwi)Blog as well as two (or more) flickr sites. I may be losing track of where I leave my dribbles of ideas.

One thing that has gone well has been providing all of my workshop materials and presentations in wiki format. For one thing, the “quick quick” comes in handy for producing them minutes before a session starts. But more than that, I have tried to give participants a good amount of hands on in the wiki activities, and from the feedback I overhear, there will be a level of interest/demand for access to wikis after I leave.

I got a chance to dabble more with UseMod settings, and tweaked some to allow me to use better style sheet and image placement. Actually I got clever and have been able to run the same wiki content from the web server and my Powerbook laptop. Nice…

That is often what feels like my job- instigate interest in new technologies and then leave.

Anyhow, for reasons regular CDB readers are aware of, I have been purposefully quiet about the wikis over in this blog. But the scurrying of little roach feet have made their tracks over here. Oh well, it is worthwhile for the support staff here to have the experience of the dark gooey slimy side of wikis.

I did a small test yesterday, and sftp-ed the entire wiki directory to one of my secret servers at Maricopa, and with some path adjustments in the configuration file, I was able to mount the same content on a different server. I made it read only for roachy reasons. This way I will have a mirror copy so I can steal from my own wiki down the line.

For what its worth, we have taken here on the Kiwi Wiki to lock nearly all of my presentation pages and leave no avenue for mucking things up with unwanted roachy URLs. It’s about the best balance I could stomach.

Sooo, workshop materials you will find in (READ-ONLY format- don’t wast your time roachies when there are plenty of other open, ample fields).

WebTools a smorgasboard of examples of web site references, virtual labs, treasure troves, play areas
Hybrid Courses overview, issues, Maricopa efforts, resources/projects outside of Maricopa.
Learning Objects: Toys Or the Real Thing which included my obligatory complaining about definitions and meta data. The activity part is where it happened- we gave participants links to some major repositiories and gave them 20 minutes to find and describe objects that could find- they reported out by creating new wiki pages for their responses (saves the wiki collision issues when multiple people try and edit the same entry.)
Again, an overview of Maricopa and external efforts, but the bulk of the time was spent in creating Maricopa eP content (on a server here that Audree had installed a few weeks ago) in portfolios we pre created for registered participants. We were able to link to s batch of new ePs added just during this session.
RSS and Learning Objects.. or What is RSS (and Why Should I Care?) a quick pass through RSS and on content from the NMC 2003 Online Conference presentation on Connecting Learning Objects with Trackback, RSS, and Weblogs. They also got a spell of using Feed2JS which is alo running “locally” here on a UNITEC server
BlogShop weblog workshop included an over-view, and then we gave them access toi 3 test Blogger.com sites– however 9 of 12 opted to create their own blogs! This was a great session that was very much “cooking”
A general introduction to Digital Stories including watching via DVD about 5 movies form a collection of perhaps 12 created by participants in our August 2004 Digital Storytelling workshop. I also added a collection of DStory “variants” since often the assumpotion is the Digital Storytelling is done only with video. I think much more broadly.
I also ran an excellent digital photo workshop. Here participants took digital cameras out on campus with an assignment to acquire 4 varieties of images. They then transferred thewm to the Macs here, used iPhoto to do quick edits and cropping, and then they posted images to a wiki page. Once they were there, I has able to create a slideshow using our jClicker template. Finally, they got the whole enchilada- uploading (and tagging) images to flickr, and then doing a direct blog post from flickr to Blogger.com.
And today, I did a peudo repeat of a presentation from an online conference last April: Publish and Build Communities Around Digital Images from the Teaching in the Community Colleges 2004 Online Conference.

Well I am forgetting a lot because I am tired. I know some will say it was foolish to post about what might be a roachie target, but I get tired of halting plans because of them.

And more of these are coming….