What is the obsession (paranoia) with trying to define (exegesis) learning objects (no definitions)? It is certainly useful to have understandable definitions for tightly constrained concepts like triskaidekaphobia, but when trying to introduce faculty new to the concept of learning objects, it seems almost unavoidable to stop them from wanting to labor over finding or […]
There are people, likely those trying to make a buck off of RSS, who would like to measure how much “hit” there is from information syndicated as RSS Feeds, consumed, and hopefully clicked at. Checking your web server log for access of the RSS URL do not mean much, as they are continually hit by […]
Xplana.com is rotting in my aggregator- they used to have a series of education technology blog articles; I cannot say I was a frequent reader, but I monitored them on my regular rounds. But there is a foul, dead skunk smell coming from the aggregator coming from http://www.xplana.com/, and that is the odor of Linkrot, […]
Philosophical question: If a presentation falls in the woods, and there is no one there, does it make a sound? Or for that matter, if you miss a conference presentation, does an abstract, a paper, or even the PowerPoint itself really provide information (worth the weight, er… wait, of the download?)
Like Jay Cross’s recently posted audio narrated ASTD presentation, we had done the same for a keynote presentation by Diana Oblinger at our May 18, 2004 Ocotillo Retreat — it is part of my compulsion to make sure we have materials from our events that can be useful afterward, and for those who were not there.
First of all, it certainly helps to have a compelling speaker, and Oblinger has done that again on a second visit in 2 years to Maricopa (see Into the Future: What is IT?, Feb 2002).
Recently named as a Vice President of EDUCAUSE, Oblinger always brings practical ideas, real examples, research data, and useful strategies tailored to meet the topics of our sessions, and to boot, always manages to deliver them as well balanced (text vs graphics) in PowerPoint as you can get. And she is so personable and enthusiastic.
Her talk for us was The Paradox of Agility and Stability— addressing the issues of the changing demographics of learners, appraches sucvh as games and simulations, trends in assessment, instituional strategies for change….
Knowing ahead of time she would be willing to provide the PowerPoint, we had set her up for the presentation with a microphone to record her audio (we just recorded it into a Canon GL/1 DV camera, just the audio). Afterward, this was digitized quickly into iMovie, and exported as .WAV files. Then it was a jump across the room to my PC to open the presentation in PowerPoint, access the Macromedia Breeze sound editing menus to import the audio, and then synchronize the slide frames with the audio. As an additional bonus, since Oblinger had provided us references for many of the data sources used in the presentation, we were able to add them as hyperlinks.
Back in 1997, 1998 I created a old collection of digital photos from places I’ve been to in the southwest, More Than Just Four Corners. Like Meteor Crater, Havasupai, Chaco Canyon… Every now and then someone emails me asking for permission to use one of them (Google to the rescue), and I always do, unless […]
Serendipity strikes again. Curiosity link from the footer of some forgotten blog landed me here. Give Credit Where Credit is Due apparently began in the lat 1990s as a effort to promote “link back” credits to the sources of images that are used on someone’s web site. It is now a nice set of general, […]
After yesterday’s online audio LearningTimes session with the Australian Flexible Learning folks, I am again impressed with the fluid exchanges possible with the Elluminate Virtual Classroom— I lost count, but there may have been at least 30 participants not only from Australia, but Denmark (it was 2:00 AM for her) and I believe Brazil. The […]
Do you hate registering to read online news from the New York Times, Washington Post, etc? I do think this service may last long, but it is interesting to monitor what BugMeNot causes in terms of disruptive patterns in the technology landscape. Will the lawyers swoop in? Will the Times start trying to block the […]
Diffusing through blogspace, beyond our control, goes an upcoming “presentation” at the June 2004 NMC Conference, what we have cobbled together is called “Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” that I am doing with colleagues Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman.
Here I will talk a bit about what we have in store, and idly speculate on what may happen. But first and foremost, what we are doing is hopefully blowing the sides out of the box labeled “Dull Conference Presentation”– for those there in Vancouver, come and get a seat early because this will be hands on and likely out of control. But you do not need a bus ticket to participate, we have set up a loosely joined set of technologies (wikis+blogs+chat) that will allow anyone online to step up and actively participate, and the gates are open now.
Read on…
Thanks for the comments that have helped identify some minor and not so minor issues with our new Feed to Javascript site. See below for updates! Some updates for folks that have implemented their own versions of this: A few early versions had a typo where the MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR was defined (it said MAGPIE_DIR). Most problems […]
