Robin Good's Latest News

How To Remember What You Forgot: Your Internal Google Comes To Rescue

Robin Good — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:58:00 GMT

How to remember what you forgot? Is there a way to instruct your brain to remember those things that are buried under hundreds of layers of memories? Yes there is, and you have it since you were born. Photo credit: ktsdesign edited by Daniele Bazzano How many times did you find yourself in the situation of wanting to remember something, but the more you tried, the less results you achieved? It is like you focus hard to remember a place, a name, but the answer never comes to your head. It is mainly our fault, as generally after a couple of minutes we give up and say: "This is useless, I am not going to remember this". We wrongly think that the answer we need will come to our head immediately, because we do not know how to command our brain.

We often hear how much our intelligence potential is underutilized. The main obstacle here is that we often don’t know how to operate our own bio-computer. Our brain. It’s like we had a powerful switchboard available to us but we were to operate it with our eyes covered. Not easy. But once you learn how you can trigger one of those invisible switches, it becomes a child’s play to do things that earlier may have appeared impossible to achieve.

One of these invisible switches is Google. Not the one you use to search for stuff on your computer though, but an Internal Google, as Robin Good baptized it. This Internal Google can help you get the right information no matter how old it is or how difficult it might be to find what you want to remember. Curious? Want to know how to leverage the power of your brain beyond its limits? Then read how Robin Good explains his idea of the Internal Google and how you can turn this magical tool to your advantage. At the end of this article you can also find a short video (with full text transcription) of a speech Robin gave at Girl Geek Dinner 6 earlier in 2009, explaining how the Internal Google helped him choose "Robin Good" as his pen name. Here all the details:

Internal Search Engine Now Available

by Robin Good
While search engines are really one of the great inventions of our times, helping you find just about any information you need in a matter of seconds, there is a fascinating and powerful search technology that is much closer and accessible to you. Even though you may have not heard about it yet, once you get to know this alternative search tool, you may find it even more useful than your favorite search engine, as this search tool can bring you back results you could not get anywhere else. We often hear how much our intelligence potential is underutilized. The main obstacle here is that we often don’t know how to operate our own bio-computer. Our brain. It’s like we had a powerful switchboard available to us but we were to operate it with our eyes covered. Not easy. But once you learn how you can trigger one of those invisible switches, it becomes a child’s play to do things that earlier may have appeared impossible to achieve. Today I would like to lit up one of these invisible switches for you. Your brain "search" switch.

The Internal Google

I am sure you have been in a situation where while talking with a friend you have tried to remember the name of a person you had recently met but couldn’t easily recall it right away. As you tried to recall that person’s name, you felt like you were close to remembering her name, while simultaneously realizing that your inability to control and act on this desire in a predictable way. In these situations, we often mumble things like: "Gosh, I can’t remember it!" or "...ah, I had it just here on the tip of my tongue!" while hoping to recover somehow that memorable friend’s name. But the forgotten name, doesn’t always pop back up. What we do not realize is how important are the words we inadvertently say while realizing that we are not able to recall a specific name or word to our own conscious memory. When, caught in this memory-fail situations, we can make a world of difference by realizing how effective it can be to voice some kind of positive input-request to your own brain memory department, rather than just a lament, a compliant or a full declaration of defeat. Rather than saying the often spontaneous "Oh, I can’t remember..." muttering some more positive statements can indeed make a difference, at least in my own experience. Try saying something like: "Oh, I’m going to remember it now..." or "It will come to me shortly..." only to see your self-invitation to your own memory banks turn into reality soon after. I must say, that I was quite skeptical myself at first, but after having tried this technique for a few years now, I must say that for me, this approach really works wonders. In fact, it is not only useful to help me remember more easily things I thought I had forgotten, but it is an instrument of creative research and brainstorming that has given me some really memorable results. Try your internal search engine at your next opportunity.
N.B.: Just to make sure I steer clear of any misunderstandings: I am not a doctor nor a neuroscientist and what I am sharing here with you is the fruit of my personal experience and discoveries and not something I have read on a science text. This doesn’t make it less real but you should check and verify your own experience before telling someone else.

How The Internal Google Worked For Me - Robin Good

Duration: 4' 19''
Full English Text Transcription
The second question people generally ask me before I give them the microphone is: "Why did you choose to call yourself Robin Good?" Robin Good! Robin Hood is my uncle. He lived in... did you know where Robin Hood comes from? Sherwood. S-H-E-R-WOOD. The wood of Sher. I'm Robin Hood nephew, and I come from a nearby village that's called Sharewood. But is spelled S-H-A-R-E, the forest where you share stuff. "Robin Good from Sharewood, you're really out of your mind Robin, how did you get all these stuff in your head?" You have to know that each one of us has a little Google engine inside his / her head. Most people don't know, they think that they have bad memory, because they don't know how to use their internal Google. One day I said:

"I want to use my internal Google, and I want to find out how can I make myself some kind of a brand, something that people are going to remember. One because the name is easy, and secondly because my name is going to tell them something."

Because my name, beside "Giggi", is really a lot difficult, kind of aristocratic name that nobody can say correctly, when I travel to other countries, they all reverse it all around. It's really displeasing. By the way, it's Luigi Canali De Rossi. So I get to be, Mr. Du Rossi, Mr. Luigi, Canali Di Rossi. They never get it right! I said to my internal Google:

"Listen, Google, I have to find a name that I can use over and over that it's easy to pronounce wherever I go and that is going to represent me. That when I say it, I feel I'm that one. It didn't choose my mother or my father, it's my choice."

Do you know how this Google works? You know when you say: "Shit, I don't remember that stuff, I have it here... it's not coming to me..." When you say "shit", you're telling Google: "Don't search for it. Forget it, I don't know it", so he just doesn't find it. Pay attention to this. Some of the time you say: "Oh, it's just there, hold it, it's going to come then you're going to say something else, and bang! It comes!" Because you said to the internal Google it's coming, so he's working there! he listens to your commands. "So, Google, I know you can work with my commands. I know it's going to take you some time, just go and do your job." And so he went and did his job, he completely forgot about it. Three months went by. Then one day, I was there on my motorbike, doing my own thing, looking at the red light... bang! "Robin Good from Sharewood." It just came, all done, in the package ready to use. How can you say no to such a great name? It represented me fully! I'm the person who likes to share with a lot of people, that is what gives me satisfaction. I didn't get into the web publishing business to make money, but because I enjoyed the sharing with other people. And Robin Good.. that's fantastic, he's the guy who's stealing from the big guys and giving to the poor, so "What's the correspondence in my world - I said - Maybe who do I still from? Microsoft?" At the time I would give to Google, but now... you don't know anymore who to steal from... but the idea is to get these fantastic ideas that are all over the place, and give them out to people, because to be successful online doesn't really take a lot of money, and a lot of investment, but a lot of good thinking and asking lots of questions, and looking around, and talking to people. That's what it takes.

Originally written by Robin Good for BingTweets, and first published on September 1st, 2009 as "Internal Search Engine Now Available"

Photo credits: Internal Search Engine Now Available - BingTweets The Internal Google - ktsdesign

Future Of Learning: A Video Interview With Curtis Bonk

Robin Good — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:03:00 GMT

What does the future of learning look like? What is going to change in the future of our education systems? What role will new media technologies play in the way you and I will share knowledge and skills in the near future? If you want to see a glimpse of how you can impact the way in which you and your kids are going to learn in the future, check out this video interview. Photo credit: Robin Good My highly qualified interviewee is this time Curtis Bonk, Professor Emeritus of Indiana University, and one of the most celebrated "hot heads" out there looking at the future of education and learning (he has recently published a great new book called "The World is Open"). According to Prof. Bonk, the key issue educators and teachers will face in the near future is how to engage and connect students. Traditional educational venues like schools and universities tend to institutionalize teaching, leaving little or no space to questions, creative initiative, or to sharing and collaboration approaches. How do we overcome these obstacles? Do we need to revolutionize the whole education system altogether? Professor Bonk thinks not. Though this may sound quite a challenge, he says that there are many ways whereby you and I can increasingly foster the adoption of a new learning paradigm. And new media technologies can indeed play a critical role in this process. Social networks, community-building platforms, online learning resources, mobile devices need to be re-purposed as the new tools that students and teachers worldwide will employ to connect with each other, share their skills and analyze data from multiple perspectives.

If [people] can learn from a boat, if Arctic explorers can learn from the ice at the North Pole and South Pole, if people can be learning from trains or on planes, we have taken learning and pushed it out beyond schools to so many non-traditional and informal learning venues. People can no longer ignore it, people can no longer say it is not worthwhile. We have to start exploring where it works and how to get the information out to as many locations as possible. That should be the goal of all politicians, of all educators, to spread beyond schools. Schools are important, but let's push well beyond, where human kind is gone, or wherever all the species are gone, we can learn.

In this video interview with Professor Bonk you can discover what may be really needed for a paradigm shift in education and what are the changes and the new approaches required for our kids to be blessed with a brand new way to discover and learn about the world they live in. Here all the details:

Future of Learning - Curtis Bonk

Duration: 1' 16"
Full English Text Transcription
Robin Good: Good morning Curt. How are you doing? Curtis Bonk: It is a lovely day in Bloomington, Indiana.
Robin Good: Alright then... and The World is Open! Curtis Bonk: It is not closed, it is open!
Robin Good: Fantastic. How is the weather there? Curtis Bonk: Lovely, but I have not been outside yet to really experience it.
Robin Good: But, I mean, are you guys getting into the cold part of the year? Curtis Bonk: It is been a bit chilly, it just got nice today. Trees are changing, all yellow all around me. I have a forest view, and I look this way, a little creek and a forest. But I will look at you for now.
Robin Good: Fantastic. How do you spend most of your time inside that room full of papers? Are you mostly still grading people or are you exploring the new universes of learning? What are you really doing? Curtis Bonk: I print and I put them in a stack, and then I run through them when I want to write a chapter. I just kind look at what I need, I grab something and... here we go!

New Teachers Must Be Social and Entertaining - Curtis Bonk

Duration: 2'
Robin Good: How much the interaction of your students is part of your new learning and discovery process? Curtis Bonk: I teach online. I teach with video conferencing, and I teach blended. All those things. Right now I have an online class, and my second class is actually being changed, so that I am creating videos for faculties to teach online: 27 videos, five to 10 minutes long, on different topics of online teaching and learning.
Robin Good: Fantastic. What are the new skills that are being learned by a teacher who wants to use video, for example, to help his students learn something? Curtis Bonk: Of course social presence: Feedback, how do you engage students, pedagogical stuff. How do you grab something on a remote site and shake it up a little bit. Debates, role-play and all those things. That is not new, but the notion of social presence maybe is. The fixation with our society, here in the US, is about having an instructor available. That is a big thing today. I think eBooks is a big thing today in the US It is being the summer of eBooks, and how we do we use them to engage students and then just flip through content. It is also being the summer of open teaching and open learning. Obama wants community colleges to have free open-source classes.

How is that going to happen?
Who is going to pay for it?
Who is going to assess the skills learned?
What is the digital library of contents going to look like?

Since my book came out, that you just held up, those are the two trends: Opener number one (eBooks) and opener number four (open teaching and learning) have probably being the most prominent. And then number 10: Facebook, social networking.

How Facebook Can Serve Future Educators - Curtis Bonk

Duration: 1' 47"
Robin Good: How is that Facebook becoming relevant to the world of learning? Curtis Bonk: What we see today is that Facebook is spinning out to little games and applications. How can we create educational games that engage kids for one month or two months, not just Farmville, which has millions of users, but how do we create educational games within that? How do we build social ice-breakers for a class, so students get to know each other? Or a community, that is not just a repository of documents? All these papers could be posted into a community, right? But how do we get to engage with other students in the class and beyond the class? I think Facebook is a way to bring people in from the outside into your class for a view, as well as to get students within the class to network with one another: share homework, share their ideas, but homework in particular. What you are learning, where do you want to go and who do you want to learn with. We can extend a peer group today with social networking beyond our four-wall classrooms. I do not have to look here or there, or in front of me, but really the world community comes in using Facebook or Ning, which I like. N-I-N-G of course. Have you used Ning? I am sure you have.
Robin Good: Yeah, I am not actually a great fan of Ning, but it is indeed a nice infrastructure to build communities, and if there are strong vectors of interest around the community it can work really well I think. I am all for that.

Society Can No Longer Ignore Online Learning - Curtis Bonk

Duration: 5' 7"
Robin Good: You just mentioned classrooms and the possibility of going beyond the four walls. But why is then all these technology and new opportunities still converging around putting people inside that box for so many hours? That bugs me a little bit. How do you see that situation changing? Curtis Bonk: We have got to think about new universities, new secondary schools. We have got to move beyond the notion of four walls. There is a book here, is called Learning at the Back Door. Do you see this little Russian kid looking into the school over here? He is not allowed into the school, those four walled rooms. This other individual has resources wrapped around him, he can learn whenever he wants. Today this kid does not have to think about learning from Oxford or Stanford. He can. Whenever he wants to, or she wants to. He does not have to go into the classroom. Today the student can go to a podcast and listen to or something like this, when he or she needs to.
Robin Good: But then in the reality of the day today I am in fact quite forced even at a legal-penal level to bring my kid to a four-wall classroom. I am not allowed, not supported, nor rewarded it if I try to invest the little time left after all those hours and the memorization exercises assigned by the Soviet school to him, to explore this other worlds, to access the professors he wants to be into, the affinity groups of other kids that do not have to belong to his same district to be part of his classroom, but enjoy his same passions. The dream I see is the same one, but the reality of it, for what I see, is still very far and distant, and the culture around me seems also to reject me when I try to pronounce those new thoughts. What is your experience? Curtis Bonk: Here we are. We are at this playing field trying today, where we are all engaging, you and I have gone to these schools. There are few people who are on the fringe areas who are deciding to learn from these online contents when they need them to be re-tooled, who are adults typically. But young people today in the US, like Adora Svitak, the world's youngest teacher, 11 year-old, learns online and teaches online since she was six year-old, these are the early pioneers, like we called them. Sooner those will no longer be the pioneers. Your kids will be jumping into your Soviet state, I think you called it, will be seeing this success story of these kids on the fringes, these fringe people will become the norms who learned from:

Podcast,
eBooks,
wikis,
blogs, or
their own personal learning environments.

This is shaking people up, in the US anyhow, in Korea which I visited recently, in Singapore. Now, today we have got so many options available to us. If universities, colleges, schools, corporate training centers do not take advantage, we are going to have a revolution of the people. Who demanded, you and I, not just us. World is open. How do we take advantage of that? We just see the inclination of this, with people learning on ships and boats. Those guys going around the world at age 17, they were learning all the time they were taking their sail boat around the world. If they can learn from a boat, if Arctic explorers can learn from the ice at the North Pole and South Pole, if people can be learning from trains or on planes, we have taken learning and pushed it out beyond schools to so many non-traditional and informal learning venues. People can no longer ignore it, people can no longer say it is not worthwhile. We have to start exploring where it works and how to get the information out to as many locations as possible. That should be the goal of all politicians, of all educators, to spread beyond schools. Schools are important, but let's push well beyond, where humankind has gone, or wherever all the species are gone, we can learn. That is my notion.

Technology Is a Way To Broaden Learning Perspectives - Curtis Bonk

Duration: 5' 8"
Robin Good: I am receiving this idea that those kids and those pioneers among us pushing the envelope will be the models of this emerging revolution, but the resistance from the existing educational system is very strong. Also what I noticed is that these so-called digital natives are not as schooled as they are painted to be. They are cool because they have those tools as natural tools in front of them, but most of the time they are clueless on the best use of these tools on themselves, out of the very easy superficial social tools that they start to learn right away. Digital natives do not seem to get what are the possibilities in front of them because they do not really have models inside their educational institutions that help them think critically about the opportunities available to them. The education system also makes them think in ways quite opposite in the way of forming them as humans that can have value inside society, that are kind of opposite to the once being offered by those very technologies. I am having some conflicts with all that. Curtis Bonk: Let's think about the Flat Classrooms Project. The Flat Classrooms Project is the only one discussed in my book, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat book, Don Tapscott's WIKINOMICS book and Growing Up Digital. What they do in the flat classrooms, in Digiteen Project, they take a book like mine, or whatever book they might have, my blended book or whatever they have got, and they analyze the book. And in this case, these kids in secondary schools, work with other kids around the world to understand the technologies that make learning open. This semester they are using my book actually, The World is Open book. It is making them aware of what are the technologies for learning. Last year they looked at Growing Up Digital, the book from Don Tapscott, and they analyzed it across the world. You are right, kids today have pretty savvy skills for their mobile devices, they can use them for chats and all this. But they are not for learning. How do we transform the mobile devices or these synchronous conferencing tools? In the Flat Classrooms Project they use Ning to form groups with other kids around the world, wikis to summarize the book across cultures, video conferencing like this to discuss what they have learned and do peer interaction. They use other kinds of tools like Twitter, microblogging and blogs. How can that one-off project become the norm? How can those synchronous as well as asynchronous collaborative technologies push all through all schools? This is the power of technology I have been talking about since 1987. I think that video conference like this can let kids stand in each others shoes. They can see perspectives. That to me can change the whole teaching and learning arena. We have to pushing the global head, international head for perspective taking. I understand people in Italy better, which I do not admittedly, or people in Pakistan or some other places around the world. To me this is the most powerful way to use technology. It is to do cross-cultural collaboration like the ePals projects and others, there is something called the IEARN Project. That will get kids in K-12 schools thinking about collaboration, teaming, these digital skills that you are talking about to critically analyze data. Not just accept what they see, but to analyze it with their peer groups. When they see a group in Italy critiquing a document that they thought was great, they will see that they really were not thinking about the credibility of the sources, the quality of the resources. When I have done any international collaboration with my students, with my teachers, they see that once we go to Finland, Peru or Korea, those students are analyzing the data in a different way, and they are opened up to the fact that they are really not going as in-depth as they need to go. I really think that international collaboration pushes us up to ego-centric points of view to multiple perspectives. That is one way of using technology that can help with this digital teen issue.

No More PowerPoint, Do Carnival Pedagogy Instead - Curtis Bonk

Duration: 5' 52"
Robin Good: Then with the explosion of all these learning opportunities, there must be indeed some work like the one you are preparing to train a little better these supposed teachers to become real communicators, because they have been going up and down the hall in my classroom, and my son and my grandson classrooms forever, telling their memorized stories, but only very few of them are kind of interesting or engaging. We have learned how to do great games while they walk down the other way, and we have those 48 seconds or so in which to prepare another trick for them when they come back. Again, the issue is also to create a new generation of, maybe I do not like to call them teachers, that word gets in my way a little bit, but guides, facilitators, like this concept of samba schools that - who was it - Seymour Papert, I think, brought up. Samba schools in Brazil, where there is a lot of affinity, everybody is passionate about something, there is a unique goal and then there are elders and novices mixing up each other, and sharing their skills. That is the type of learning I am looking for, and I would like it to come to where I am. As you are saying the you learning world, in which everything comes down to my mobile, your indication of preparing a set of lessons that are short and I can look up on my iPod or so, seems to be quite the direction. But the content producers, the teachers seem to be lacking. We got a great deal of PowerPoint makers, but I have a place where you can send them here in Italy. Curtis Bonk: I have two comments right away on that. First of all: I will send you all the PowerPoint people you want. PPPs: Power Point People. Power to the PowerPoint people. It is enough Ps. OK, two things. My friend Inae Kang, in Korea is developing carnival pedagogy. The same notion of Seymour Papert's Play, liveliness, engagement. She is looking at a brand new concept: carnival pedagogy. How do we create a pedagogy teaching platform, which is:

Engaging,
fun,
interactive,
collaborative,
more depth to the experience,
more social connectedness among the people?

She is the first one I have ever heard talking about this notion, and I am trying to support her to be a keynote at a conference. I nominated her many times and people say: "What is this?" "Forget it, this is a bit too extreme" And I feel bad, because this is the kind of extremism that we need to be pushing this edge, we need get people thinking about things like carnival pedagogy or something else, right? How do we get kids engaged in new forms of learning? That maybe might transfer into using digital technologies for learning purposes as well as social purposes. How do we mix the learning and social together? "Soc-learning" or we need a new word for this, because we cannot ignore the social anymore. Social is too important, right? Is the social plain where all thought is displayed and we internalize that. But how do we make these social events an engaging learning event? And I think you are right, short blurbs of knowledge mixed in when they need it from their mobile devices attached to their bodies somewhere. Their teacher is in their pocket, right? My friend Paul Kim has these little pocket school projects. Teachers in my pocket. Kids in Latin America, in Rwanda, in India have literacy training. Our teachers who think they are almighty gods, they are the PowerPoint providers, we do not need them. They are in our pockets. If we can have our teacher in our pocket, what good is a teacher? When we have:

Academic Earth,
YouTube EDU,
SchoolTube for K-12,
BBC video,
CNN video,
NASA TV,
Link TV for National Geographic and Smithsonian specials,

we have all the stuff. All these contents dumped into the web. When we have Stanford, Oxford, and you name the universities in Japan and Vietnam putting their stuff on the web, in India, the Indian Institutes of Technology, all this stuff. The openers number four and five in the book, The World is Open, all these portals. Teachers then have to think: "But how do we use these contents that are available from MIT or the Open University of Malaysia or the UK?" That way they are wrapping around effective teachers... We do not need to replicate these statistics lectures five hundreds times over every semester. How can we utilize these contents and have teachers then get students to listen before they come to class so when they get to class is an interactive, engaging, problem-based, problem-finding activity?

New Teachers Should Become Content Curators - Curtis Bonk

Duration: 5'
Robin Good: It would seem to me that in this painting you just sketched out there is a tremendous opportunity for those who actually act as curators of all this material, because so far so good that you, MIT and everybody else are coming out with these thousands of new files and links. But God knows what it takes to go through them, make sense of your titles and indexes, and put some threads to it, so that I can really navigate through information and learn something. There is a whole universe of work to do to organize this beyond and across the different content repositories that are emerging every hour. Is not there a job for the next 1000 centuries? Curtis Bonk: Oh God. You know Piaget was a curator. When Piaget was 10 year-old he was a curator of a museum. How can teachers be curators? I think they are concierges of a hotel. The hotel is this information hotel. How do we turn information into knowledge? And then how do we get students develop mentally pushed? I think we ignore human development. We have so much potentials as human beings to go well beyond were we are today, if the organization, as you said, if the teachers figure out ways to help get us into the contents, push us through, not just in organize the content in some way, so we are not overwhelmed. There is so much there we can just be unfrustrated. How is the teacher role changing from deliver of this content? I am the teacher. Here is the teacher in this box. How do we now have the box and utilize the box stuff and push kids to new levels of development they have never achieved before?
Robin Good: It would seems that the traditional teacher would not be the appropriate skill-owner to do this type of job, but the person who has skilled themselves to research, analyze, evaluate information and to juxtapose and remix it in new ways. There is an opportunity for a new breed of professional or non-professional independent guides - let's not call them teachers - that can help people make sense of information, outside of the interest of Google, which is the only one that officially is out there to organize this information. We need somebody else beyond Google to do this. Whether it helps Google or not I do not care, but we need to organize information for ourselves and that is the opportunity for a new army of independent great teachers to come out. Curtis Bonk: Two comments there: Google EDU exists today. When we have been doing research on Google, actually Youtube EDU exists. We have being doing research on YouTube. There are professors in California teaching the whole class in YouTube, but they found the problem of that is there is no librarian, there is no-one indexing the stuff, and that is the same problem we have with Google. We do not have people thinking about Google from an educational point of view. One thing we can be doing is, as educators, how do we re-purpose this stuff, remix, as you say. That is one thing. YouTube, curators, librarians. A second thing I want to comment: In my book I have 15 predictions. One prediction is: eMentors and eCoaches. I think we are going to see the rise of super eCoaches, super eMentors. Those people have three skills:

The first skill is a domain expertise, whatever it is, media, social work, teaching, business, architecture, anthropology, they have a domain expertise.
Number two: They understand the Internet for learning.
Number three: They have counseling skills, human development skills.

It is the mix of those three, when you understand human beings, when you understand a domain expertise and you understand technology for learning, you will be golden in the 21st century. This is the learning century, and eMentors, super eMentors will arise to be, I think, as important or more important than teachers. Teacher role will change to concierge or super eMentors for some facilitator guide nudge. What do you think?
Robin Good: This was Curt Bonk, live from Indiana and I am Robin Good from Rome in Italy. There is not a better moment to stop this, so... bye-bye!

Original video interview recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. Article editing by Elia Lombardi and Daniele Bazzano. First published on November 19th, 2009 as "Future Of Learning: A Video Interview With Curtis Bonk".

About Curtis Bonk Curtis Bonk is professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana University and president and founder of both SurveyShare and CourseShare. Drawing on his background as a corporate controller, CPA, educational psychologist, and instructional technologist. Bonk offers insights into the intersection of business, education, psychology, and technology. An expert on emerging technologies for learning, Bonk reflects on his speaking experiences around the world in his blog, TravelinEdMan. He has co-authored several technology books, including The World is Open, Empowering Online Learning, The Handbook of Blended Learning, and Electronic Collaborators.

Convert PowerPoint To Video: Guide To The Best Free Services

Daniele Bazzano — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:55:00 GMT

Looking for a way to convert your PowerPoint presentations to video clips? Want to share your presentations with a broader audience, including those who do not have a copy of PowerPoint installed? Your search is over: in this MasterNewMedia guide you can find all of the best free services to convert your PowerPoint presentations to video. Photo credit: Viktor Gmyria Why would someone want to convert a PowerPoint presentation to video?

PowerPoint-free: Once your presentation is converted into a video, you do not need anymore to have PowerPoint installed to watch it nor do your recipients, regardless of which hardware or operating system they own.
Multi-platform: Presentations converted into videos can be watched while on the move using your mobile phone, iPod, PSP or any other device that plays video.
Distribution: You can distribute your video-converted presentations on YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and other video-sharing sites or social media to reach a broader audience.

Are there any drawbacks when converting a PowerPoint presentation to video? One problem you may encounter is that the PowerPoint to video conversion service you choose to utilize may not retain transitions, animations, soundtracks and other media elements you have inside your slides. This is why if you have a complex presentation with Flash videos or special effects you might want to double check whether the service you select supports preserving such multimedia elements. How do PowerPoint to video conversion services work? The free services that convert PowerPoint presentations to video generally all work the same way: you first import your PowerPoint file, then choose an output video format, set the transitions between slides and you are done. Optionally, you can trim or crop the video to get exactly the result you desire or add an audio track to sync with your slides to create a video tutorial. Here below is a comparative table and a set of individual reviews to help you compare all of these free services to convert PowerPoint presentations to video. Here the selection criteria used to compare the different services:

Supported platforms: Specific operating system needed to run the PowerPoint to video converter.
Video export formats: Output video formats supported (AVI, FLV, WMV, etc.)
Batch conversion: Unattended conversion of multiple presentations
Preserve special effects: Transitions, animations, videos, audio tracks and other media elements are preserved during the PowerPoint to video conversion process.

Here all the details:

Convert PowerPoint To Video Comparative Table

Convert PowerPoint To Video

E.M. Free PowerPoint Video Converter

E.M. Free PowerPoint Video Converter is a software for Windows that converts your PowerPoint presentations to video. Just import your PowerPoint presentation and choose a video output format among AVI, MPG, MKV and WMV. Then choose an audio file to sync with your slides, crop and trim the video to get the result you desire, set the playback interval between the slides and you are done. All converted videos except WMVs will show a watermark using the free version. Original media, transitions and animations inside the original slides will not be preserved during conversion. Batch conversion is supported.
http://www.effectmatrix.com/PowerPoint-Video-Converter/Free-PowerPoint-Video-Converter.htm
Xilisoft PowerPoint to Video Converter Free

Xilisoft PowerPoint to Video Converter Free is a Windows software to convert your PowerPoint slides to video. You just need to import your PowerPoint file and choose one of the supported video formats: AVI, FLV, MOV, MPEG-2, MP4 or WMV. Then customize the resolution of your video, the playback interval between slides and other output options before starting the conversion process. All media, transitions and animations inside the original presentation will be fully preserved during conversion. Batch conversion is not permitted.
http://www.xilisoft.com/powerpoint-to-video-converter-free.html
iSpring Free

iSpring Free is a PowerPoint add-in you can use to convert your PowerPoint presentations to SWF videos. Available for Windows machines only, iSpring Free installs inside your copy of PowerPoint and gives you the option to upload your video directly to YouTube, SlideBoom, or embed your video to your website or blog. All media, animations, music and transitions inside the original presentation file are retained during conversion. No batch conversion is available.
http://www.ispringsolutions.com/products/ispring_free.html
Free Acoolsoft PPT2YouTube

Free Acoolsoft PPT2YouTube allows you to convert your PowerPoint presentations to a MP4 video you can upload to video-sharing sites like YouTube. Available only for Windows machines, PPT2YouTube also allows batch conversions to upload and convert multiple PowerPoint presentations at the same time. Media elements, transitions and animations inside presentation files are not retained during conversion.
http://www.acoolsoft.com/free-powerpoint-to-youtube-overview.html
JODConverter

JODConverter is a free plugin for OpenOffice that allows you to convert PowerPoint presentations to multiple formats, including PDF, MS Office documents and Flash (SWF). Since OpenOffice is available for nearly every operating system you can think of, JODConverter works on all those operating systems as well. Animations, audio tracks, transitions and other media inside your original slides are not retained during conversion. No batch conversion is supported.
http://www.artofsolving.com/opensource/jodconverter
AuthorSTREAM

AuthorSTREAM is a free slide-sharing webservice that allows you to convert PowerPoint presentations to video. The service generates a MP4 video file and the video itself cannot be longer than five minutes. To create videos up to 45 minutes long you can purchase credits ($2 each). All music tracks, animations or media elements inside the original presentation are fully retained during conversion. Batch conversion is not possible. Registration is required to utilize AuthorSTREAM.
http://authorstream.com/
PowerBullet Presenter

PowerBullet Presenter is a free presentation editing software for Windows that you can use to convert your PowerPoint files to Flash (SWF) files. Since the software cannot directly import PPT files, you must save each slide as a JPEG image using PowerPoint, and then import each image file to PowerBullet Presenter to start the conversion. You can also insert transitions, animations, flash videos or add an audio track to personalize your video. All elements you add to the presentation will be preserved inside your converted SWF video. No batch conversion is supported.
http://www.powerbullet.com/
Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is a free video editing software available for Windows XP through Vista that you can use to convert your PowerPoint presentation to video. Just open your presentation in PowerPoint and save each slide as a PNG file, then import all PNG files to Windows Movie Maker and drag them to the timeline. Last, choose the output video format you prefer (AVI or WMV) and you are done. Media elements, animations, and transitions inside your original slides will not be preserved during conversion. No batch conversion is possible.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx
SlideShare

SlideShare is probably the most popular free slide-sharing service on the web. You can use SlideShare to create a slidecast, which is kind of a video podcast that combines slideshow and narration. Just upload your PowerPoint presentation to the service, add an audio track to use as narration, sync slides with audio and publish the slidecast on SlideShare website. All multimedia elements, audio or transitions present inside the original PowerPoint slides will be lost after the upload to SlideShare. No batch conversion is available. Registration is required.
http://www.slideshare.net/

Originally prepared by Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on November 16th, 2009 as "Convert PowerPoint To Video: Guide To The Best Free Services".

Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens - Nov 14 09

George Siemens — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:50:00 GMT

In this week issue of Media Literacy Digest, open education and connectivism advocate George Siemens, explores and reports about his new media technologies discoveries and their possible impact on how we work, learn and communicate together. Photo credit: Ktsdesign Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

LearnTrends - Reminder, next week, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, and I (with support from many others!) are running LearnTrends 2009
Random Social Media Resources - Moving Away from Social Media to Business Focus, Social Learning Examples, Overcoming Obstacles to the Social Business
Learning Management Systems? Or Social Networking? - In a post on my connectivism site, I argue that the future of learning will be in social networking services, not in learning management systems (an assertion not everyone agrees with - see the comments in the post).
TEKRI - Readers of this blog (or newsletter) are likely aware that I recently made a transition from University of Manitoba to Athabasca University. With the joys of geographical moves (I am now located in Edmonton), life is a bit chaotic.
Networking U - Like the rest of society, universities and colleges are reacting to social networking technology - Networking U
Data and Visualization - The one dominant effect of the web is the externalization or giving-shape to aspects of our daily lives that used to vaporize. For example, the ever prominent water cooler provided a space to converse. But, once the conversation was done, it vaporized.
Cloud Computing In Plain English - CommonCraft explains Cloud Computing in Plain English. It is a (very) broad overview of cloud computing, explaining it from the perspective of a business owner.
Turing's Cathedral - I am an advocate for technology use for learning, teaching, and interacting. Not quite at a transhumanist level, but still an advocate. Sometimes, I am enthralled with the limitless potential of the web.

Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens

LearnTrends

Reminder, next week, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, and I (with support from many others!) are running LearnTrends 2009. An outstanding list of presenters and provocative topics. Free to join.

Random Social Media Resources

Moving Away from Social Media to Business Focus - a confused and rambling post, but the underlying point - moving beyond the hype and buzzwords and recognizing impact of what is commonly called social media - is something most organizations are now focusing on. Social Learning Examples - a great listing of technologies compiled by Jane Hart in response to questions about examples: "So here are over 100 ways that different social technologies (and tools) are being used by learning professionals worldwide" Overcoming Obstacles to the Social Business:

"While social media often commands favorable media attention, the less often told story is that successful initiatives are rare to come by and that there are still a number of organizational roadblocks that managers need to overcome in order to make progress."

Learning Management Systems? Or Social Networking?

In a post on my connectivism site, I argue that the future of learning will be in social networking services, not in learning management systems (an assertion not everyone agrees with - see the comments in the post). Additional commentary on Jane Hart's post as well… and Moodle - the wrong tool for the job?

TEKRI

Readers of this blog (or newsletter) are likely aware that I recently made a transition from University of Manitoba to Athabasca University. With the joys of geographical moves (I am now located in Edmonton), life is a bit chaotic. I will write more on this in the future, but I am now with the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute. The institute has three areas of research interest:

Here is a short interview of Terry Anderson by Institute Director, Griff Richards, Social Software Goes to School. The interview explores a social networking research project Terry has been running for over two years at Athabasca (originally titled Me2U) using ELGG. A large scale deployment of ELGG is planned at Athabasca University in early 2010…

Networking U

Like the rest of society, universities and colleges are reacting to social networking technology - Networking U

"The good news is, universities over the past decade have been adapting to meet students at the level of technology they have come to accept. That means not only deploying state-of-the-art hardware and software, but also embracing the concepts of social networking and virtual communities. "Learning is a social activity," says Adams, who is now in the third year of her learning and technology project. "I am trying to use the technology to make the face-to-face contact even richer." There is also the challenge of teaching students themselves how to use these new technologies productively - learning the ropes in university, Adams says, puts her students at a huge advantage."

My experience with universities suggests that this statement is a bit ambitious. Universities are aware of social networking technology, but they are certainly not embracing it yet. Small pockets of innovation exist… and most often faculty pushing for change come up against the tyranny of "we cannot support that, it is not secure" or the normalizing influence of naysayers suggesting social technologies are a fad.

Data and Visualization

The one dominant effect of the web is the externalization or giving-shape to aspects of our daily lives that used to vaporize. For example, the ever prominent water cooler provided a space to converse. But, once the conversation was done, it vaporized. With today's social web and the increased data trails we leave in online interactions, GPS, web search, and so on, we are providing a tremendous data trove for future researchers (and even ourselves). When capturing data, we really do not need to know what we want to do with it in the future. The key is to capture it. Then, as technology progresses and we are better able to analyze and visualize interactions, we can tab the data store and gain new insight into people and activities - years after the data was first made explicit. Two articles on CNN explore this topic: A new way of looking at the world:

"An emerging set of tools is making it easier than ever to track and compile all sorts of "data" and display it in a way that is relatively easy to understand. You can now point your mobile phone at a street and instantly get ratings for restaurants. Or type in your address and find reports of crimes that may have occurred in your neighborhood. It is even possible to track emotions on a national and global scale."

Data Visualization: "But while "we are collecting data like maniacs," he adds, "our ability to gather data is much greater than our ability to make sense of that data".".

Cloud Computing In Plain English

CommonCraft explains Cloud Computing in Plain English. It is a (very) broad overview of cloud computing, explaining it from the perspective of a business owner. But it seems unsatisfying and too simplistic. Most internet users have experienced some aspect of "the cloud" (in some ways, the cloud is a return to mainframe computing where storage and computation are not local) in their daily online interactions. Major software companies are pushing their data and software online - Google Docs is a great example… and Microsoft is releasing an online version of Office in 2010 (I initially thought Live.com would be MS counter to Google Docs, but the service only allowed users to upload and share documents, rather than collaboratively edit). Cloud computing is a nebulous concept - is it a service? A concept? A technology? A series of protocols?. Currently it basically means "whatever our software company is doing right now" - just like Web 2.0 in the mid 2000's.

Turing's Cathedral

I am an advocate for technology use for learning, teaching, and interacting. Not quite at a transhumanist level, but still an advocate. Sometimes, I am enthralled with the limitless potential of the web. Or with the tremendous opportunities that exist when people are able to connect without boundaries. Or the "brave new world" awaiting us once we relinquish to the machine the routine and mundane of human thought. The stuff of dreams. And nightmares. On reading the 2005 article Turing's Cathedral, I came across this startling quote:

"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on November 13th, 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About George Siemens George Siemens is the Associate Director in the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. George blogs at www.elearnspace.org where he shares his vision on the educational landscape and the impact that media technologies have on the educational system. George Siemens is also the author of Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book "Knowing Knowledge" where he develops a learning theory called connectivism which uses a network as the central metaphor for learning and focuses on knowledge as a way to making connections.

Photo credits: LearnTrends - LearnTrends 2009 Random Social Media Resources - Sonicko Learning Management Systems? Or Social Networking? - Vacuum3d TEKRI - TEKRI Networking U - Macleans Data and Visualization - Michael Osterrieder Cloud Computing In Plain English - Marketspace Turing's Cathedral - Pavel Losevsky