ALOP265-Using Emerging Technologies for Learning

Last post for Fall 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:44:24 PST

Thanks for an interesting semester! I will be blogging about a variety of things, including the occasional emerging technology-related post, in my advisee blog. Feel free to check it out (and add it to your blog reader!)

New DRAFT widgets in Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:24:20 PST

According to a recent Blogger for Dummies blog post, there are some new widgets available for you to add to your blog in Blogger draft (including a slideshow, a search box (!), and a way to add some of the many google gadgets).

(when you go to Blogger draft it will open just like your regular Blogger account but you're in the draft version. One way to tell if you forget where you are...the Blogger "B" is blue in draft vs. orange in the regular version of Blogger.)

Please complete the post class assessment

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:03:39 PST

Now that the projects for this class have been completed, it's time to complete the post-class assessment (worth 1 credit). I've posted a link in BB and sent it to your Drake email.

Have a great holiday!
Robin

TWO ways to add audio to your blogger blog

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 09:44:39 PST

OK, we learned in class that you can't add an audio file directly into your blog. That's true, the over all process to getting audio into your blogger blog is:

Create audio file in mp3 format
Upload to some serverspace (we used Googlepages)
Create a link in your Blogger blog to take you to your server space.

When you add audio using Googlepages, it looks like this:

Click here to go to my audio file stored on Googlepages.

(Good news--100GB of storage. Bad news--it's kind of cumbersome for the user; a solution, but not an elegant solution.)

But I did just find another way to do this that is MUCH more elegant for the user, but a bit more complicated for you as the blogger (it involves adding some HTML code. Here's what it looks like: This audio file is linked using FileDen.com

(Good news--it's 1GB free storage and can be direct linked which looks MUCH more elegant. Bad news--you have to continue to PASS on the large number of "special offers" they throw at you before you get to the upload screen.)

The instructions to do this are on the Templates Tips and Tricks blog. It's a bit complicated, but the result is defintely more elegant looking and I'll probably do this from now on even if all the "special offers" drive me crazy.

GREAT Resource for Learning Computer Applications

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:37:48 PST

As Drake students, you have access to a wonderful resource: a library of online tutorials to help you learn a variety of software programs. Check out this post on my advisee blog to learn more.

Charity, Volunteering & Fund-Raising Websites

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:07:09 PST

While not specifically collaborative technologies, this Mashable blog post lists 20 to help you give of your time & money and tools to help you with your fundraising.

Obviously the purpose of these websites are to try to connect the people who want to give with the people who need donations and volunteers. My challenge: how can you take this similar concept of connect those who have (time, skill, knowledge, etc.) with those who need it in your environment?

Collaborative Technologies + Corporate Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:16:57 PDT

October's Chief Learning Officer (CLO) magazine has an article on when Social Networking Meets Corporate Learning. At this point it's not new news to any of you, but you may want to share it with someone who hasn't been in this class! :-)

The November issue of CLO also has an interesting article on where the 2007 organizational learning budget is being spent and on what (according to a survey of the CLO magazine Business Intelligence Board members.) There are some interesting results according to this survey including:

The learning budget growth is slowing in 2007 (continuing a slow down that started in 2006)
The top learning investment areas are e-learning, and then a 3-way tie between leadership/executive development, performance management, and design/development of in-house training.
The top learning technology investment is Learning Management System (LMS) at about 50% response rate compared to the next closest response at a little over 30%.

The November issue of CLO is not yet posted on the website, but you can access the Chief Learning Officer magazine throught the Drake online databases if you want to read this article.

Measures of the Ubiquity of Blogging?

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:19:33 PDT

Certainly some of the tests to check for the ubiquity of blogging might be to see if there exist:

conferences (Blog World Expo),
subspeciality conferences (God Blog Conference-"Helping Christians Engage New Media"),
awards (The Best of the Blogs Award, The Weblog Awards),
professional associations (International Blogging and New Media Association--although just in its infancy),
a journal (Blogger & Podcasting),
a related research organization/thinktank (Society for New Communications Research), or
a $10,000 scholarship for college student bloggers (The Blogging Scholarship)

My point--blogging is here. And not a fringe activity; it's an integrated part of the communication patterns for many people. And we're seeing structure develop around blogging as it becomes even more prominent.

Here are some interesting statistics from the Blog World Expo website:

Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
Over 57 million Americns read blogs.
1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.
89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
9% of internet users say they have created blogs .
6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog .
Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs .
over 120 thousand blogs are created every day .
There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day .
22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs .
120,000 new blogs are created every day .
37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006 .
51% of blog readers shop online .
Blog readers average 23 hours online each week .

Jing (I'm really excited about this)

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:11:30 PDT

I admit I'm a big fan of the company TechSmith. I've used two of their products, SnagIt (screen captures) and Camtasia (video capturing + narration of anything that is happening on your computer screen) for years. They have a new "project," ProjectJing, that I want to mention for two reasons:

(1) it's a great example of a company taking advantage of the collaborative web in a alpha product state. As you can see, they're using collective knowledge to understand how to use this tool, why to use this tool, to determine bugs & enhancements to the tool, as well as anything else they can think of.

(2) I haven't played around with it much but I'm VERY excited about the tool itself. Take a look at the video at ProjectJing to get an idea of what the product it about. It looks like a combination of SnagIt & Camtasia (screen capture and screen video) plus the ability to quickly/easily share with others. Particularly, but not exclusively, for those of you who train people on info on the computer screen, it could be amazing. Take a look!

Three other things:

First, the documents are stored on screencast.com so you'll need to register with them in order to save your Jing docs.
Second, TechSmith has arranged for FREE memberships to screencast.com (there is usually a membership fee), so this means you have 200MB of free online storage you can use for anything.
Finally, at some point TechSmith will likely turn this into a product and shut down the FREE access; so enjoy it while you can!

Images on Wikipedia

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:06:42 PDT

In light of our conversation this weekend on copyright, I thought you might be interested in Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia (from Wikipedia).

Several of the items have to do with the copyright issues related to using their images (#10: "You can use (free) images from Wikipedia on your own site, or anywhere you like..." but don't forget to read the rest of the numbers too!)

Using Photos as Your Blog Background

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:30:07 PDT

I'm not sure if any of you are reading the blogger.com blog, but here's a post on how to modify your blog template to include your own picture in the background.

Robin's Note: Since the whole point of your blog is to have people read what you have to say, please consider readability as you think about which pictures to put in the background of your blog! (and remember, you can change the color of the various fonts if that would help.)

A few new collaborative sites & tools

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:34:09 PDT

Here are a few interesting things I picked up over the last few days from the Mashable blog (blog on social networking, and one of my personal daily "must read" blogs).

Here's a blog post from Mashable on how companies (HP is described here) are using wikis to gather data for market research.

Following in the spirit of our class (all our applications are free), the Mashable blog has a post listing LOTS of no-cost graphic software and a post on a new-ish (free) web-based photo editor.

I also recently read one of their posts on Ask500people. It's a mashup site where users can submit questions and poll the subscribers. Although not really useful (to me, anyway), I did spend a few minutes looking through the old/live questions. (FYI: most people voting believe the egg came before the chicken.) It took me a few minutes to figure out the layout: the questions in the center of the screen are questions that are queued up to be voted on, they don't contain any data yet.

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:47:34 PDT

Thanks for a good (and full!) weekend. (good thing we had chocolate! :-)

Here are the dates we agreed on for the OPTIONAL sessions:

Thursday, Nov 1, 5:00p-7:00-ish: audio working session in the computer lab
Monday, Nov 5, 7:30p-9:30-ish: audio working session in the computer lab

***NOTE: if no one is here after 45 minutes I'm going home. So if you're going to be late call me!

Tuesday, Nov 6, 7:30-9:30-ish: Bonus Learning Session(including: Google documents, creating narrated powerpoint slideshows, delicious, skype)

Homework recap:

Podcast (audio file) posted to your blog: DUE Nov 11
Final paper or other final project: DUE Dec 2(Other project needs to be approved by me)
Post class assessment (I'll send the link to you Dec 3): DUE Dec 10

Of course, feel free to call me with questions.

New Feature in Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:44:56 PDT

Blogger has implemented a new feature that I thought I'd pass on.

The first, is the ability to sign up to get email notification of additional comments on a particular blog post. Here's a blog post describing it. Basically, when you go to comment, you now have the option to click a box and have all the subsequent comments on this post emailed to you. (it's like following the conversation without having to keep checking back to the blog (see left).

For class on Saturday...

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:49:59 PDT

Here's a brief audio file to serve as your introduction to podcasting!

Podcast Directories

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:20:08 PDT

We're going to be talking about podcasting during weekend 2. Here are some podcast directories:

These are clients downloaded to your computer:

These are web-based directories:

(I have to confess, I use iTunes almost exclusively)

Haunted Houses in Second Life (SL)

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:36:22 PDT

OK, not educational, but since I see from your blogs that a few of you are exploring SL, I thought I'd share this list of SL Haunted Houses!

College Fair in Second Life (SL)

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:49:12 PDT

Since at least one of you are working in college administration, I thought you'd be interested to know that last weekend the first ever college fair was held in SL. Here's one review of the college fair, but you can also google it for more news or check flickr for photos.

Research Article: Wikipedia, Quality & Contributor Motivation

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:50:38 PDT

In the last class we were talking about the challenging to accuracy of information in an open system (like wikipedia). Although in theory a self-correcting system, we had at least one example of where incorrect information was spotted on wikipedia and speculated at the various motivations contributors may bring to their contributions.

Although not exactly the same thing...I did come across an interesting study by a couple of professor's at Dartmouth who looked at how contributor motivations affect the quality of contributions to Wikipedia. If you're interested, you can take a look at their study The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia

Blog Directories

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:54:22 PDT

Several of you have mentioned in your posts that you had trouble finding blogs. Here's a list of some blog directories. It's written from blog marketing perspective, but obviously you can use these to find blogs as well!

I have to confess that I don't use most of these. I find most of my blogs by finding a reference to them in something else I'm ready (the electronic version of 'word of mouth'), or else I tend to just use the yahoo or google blog directories. Let us all know if you find any of these particularly useful!

Google Translator

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:51:05 PDT

Since we have several bi/multi-lingual people in our class, I thought you might have fun exploring Google Translator. Not only does it translate words/phrases in eight languages, it also translates webpages (maybe test it on your blog?).

Web 2.0 Summit

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:07:44 PDT

Since it ties in to class, I thought I'd mention that the Web 2.0 Summit is going on right now in San Francisco. It's a conference filled with many of the most innovative thinkers (and productizers) about the internet. This is the conference where they meet with their peers and dare to dream and discuss 'what's next.'

PC Magazine's 100 Favorite Blogs of 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:54:34 PDT

Nope...they're not all geek blogs. Check out the list. While mostly not educational blogs, you'll still probably find a few to add to your reader!

Creating Books Together?

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:45:54 PDT

Some of you may be familar with Blurb (if not, it's a FANTASTIC website that let's you create pretty high quality soft and hard cover 4-color printed books. For moderate prices. You can even easily create a book of your blog! OK, maybe you don't want to print up your blog for this class, but if you were doing a travel blog?...)

Of course, I'm not here to help you think of holiday gifts :-) I recently saw a post that says Blurb is in beta with Community Books which allows groups of people to collaborate on books. Intriguing idea! Applications for learning?

Tokbox

noreply@blogger.com (Robin Lindbeck) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:28:46 PDT

OK, I hate to (once again) pass on a technology I haven't really looked at; but here goes...

Ken (the SOE tech guy) sent me the link to Tokbox. I won't have a chance to play with it before class, but wanted to pass it on because it's pretty intriguing looking. From their website:

Tokbox is a free service that lets you talk with your friends over live video. Here's how it works: you sign up and we give you a link. When you want to talk with anyone, just give them the link - they click and you chat.

Here are a few things that excite me about this so far:

no chat client needed. For example, we'll be looking at Skype in our next class which is VoIP and also just added video conferencing. But when we do this in class, you'll see that we all have to sign up, then the PC people will need to use the macs or download the SKype client on their computers, etc. This sounds SO much easier (although Skype does allow 4-way video conferencing which is pretty dang cool!)

Apparently you can add Tokboxes to your social networking sites, websites, and BLOGS! (if we combine this with ideas of informal, non-classroom-based learning...the mind boggles!)

It's free

So if you get a chance to try it before I do (and I hope you do!) I'd love to see a demo in our next class.

(by the way...macintoshes need USB headset/mics, but PCs can use either headset/mics with either USB or the "stereo" plug connections--like where you plug speakers in to your PC. I have some non-USB headset/mics I can loan out if you want to explore.)