Before the re-set, I felt as if I’d plateaued in terms of what I had to offer and where I could go next. In Second Life, whenever I had an idea of what I wanted to do with my plot — someone else was doing it, about to do it or had done it.

Twitter began to feel like a competition to be first with the latest news, tool or gadget.

Flickr is still something I enjoy, but I’ve been hermiting or using it mostly for work.

And doing and planning video at work drained me from planning any projects for myself.

A talk with a good friend and respected educator tonight helped me clarify why I felt so stymied.  The title of this post says it all. We both said the same thing.  Is it worth doing something that might not be earth shattering or that we know is being done elsewhere?

Our thoughts were: yes.  If for no other reason, but our own learning journey and to express our unique voices.  There are oodles of books, videos, web sites and Second Life sims that cover the same or similar topics.  People migrate to the one that is most effective for them.  If I am contributing and attempting to do so in a way unique to my situation — or I build on a thought or idea, isn’t this the way we all move forward?

I won’t reinvent the wheel if there is a good one available that fits.  But I might invent my own unique wheel that helps me and the people I aim to serve get where they want to go.

You find yourself wishing that your life had a dramatic soundtrack to lift the grindy bits of it.

In traffic you wish you could just hit the space bar and dodge around it all. However I was thinking that way BEFORE Warcraft…

You find yourself wishing you could summon up extra mana to get through the day – especially at the after-lunch doldrums portion of your day.

You view food as a necessary way of topping up your energy, and treat that thought like some sort of revelation.

As you clean your house (quickly, or on Tuesday nights if you live in the Southern Hemisphere) – you wonder what level you’d be on if sock gather were a profession.

You check the mail and wish that you could just go out in the woods, pick or skin something and make silver and gold at auctions.

You have daydreams of going down to the basement in your building and finding it’s turned into a labyrinth with hidden treasures.

You cruise for clothing on eBay and try to estimate the value of it in terms of how it will contribute to your strength, professionalism, potential enhancement to your sex appeal, warmth, fashion – mentally awarding it points in each category and thinking it’s a great system.

You make it through a particularly rough day and feel disappointed that at the end there isn’t a bright flash of light, triumphant music and a message saying you’ve levelled up…

Hey – come to think of it, none of these things is really THAT bad…

If you hate reading on-line :  here’s a link to a PDF:
http://kerryj.com/documents/KerryJ-notesfromVWBPEconference.pdf

Just coming down from the Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference. Held Friday, Saturday, Sunday Second Life time there was a great range of sessions, largely in traditional conference settings over several sims. What a helluva lot of planning and effort went into this. Even more impressive considering they had 16 weeks to pull it off.

I was so interested in the subject matter that I pulled an all-nighter over Sunday/Monday Australia time so that I could fit in sessions that I might have otherwise missed.

Unfortunately the conference itself didn’t have a tag – I’m tagging this with vwbpe and will get to my bookmarks and Flickr photos soon I promise.

A personal pet peeve I have to mention (despite the fact with a lowly BSci and one post grad course under my belt, I have fewer formal qualifications than the presenters): I really dislike the whole Digital Natives/Immigrants theory used in relation to age. Stop it.

Age is NOT the dividing line. There are children and teenagers for whom technology is NOT a ubiquitous part of their lives. There are others who use different tech than what you might think or provide (they use mobiles, you’re introducing them to Second Life thinking they MUST be gamers). Plus, you’re giving people who need to get off their buts (but it’s too hard, but I’m not tech savvy) an easy out – but I’m an IMMIGRANT.

On Saturday I attended a session that sparked a frustrated blog post – but also attended two that blew my socks off.

Pedagogical Design of Learning Experiences Within Virtual Worlds

Carina Girvan, a post graduate student and Tim Savage, lecturer in the Center for IT at Trinity College University of Dublin Ireland provided a look at the model of best practice for the design of learning in virtual worlds upon which they are working.

If you decide to use a virtual world, they counsel that you first look at the features/benefits of that environment and allow that to feed into the appropriate teaching methodology for the learning outcomes you want to deliver. Once you’ve hit on the pedagogy, then you build, implement and then evaluate BOTH the effectiveness of the implementation AND the teaching methodology used. It’s not always the fault of the tool or the way it’s implemented or the teaching methodology alone.

Carina did an excellent job of illustrating how to analyse how well mapped pedagogy is to what the environment has to offer and I offer you the screen shot here:

Business use of Virtual worlds

Richard Malterre, Stonfield InWorld; Robin Williams, Sun Microsystems; Eilif Trondse,SRI;
Anders Gronstedt,The Gronstedt Group

Last night – or this morning at 2am or so was a stellar session on the business use of virtual worlds.

Reps from Sun Microsystem were on hand to share what is going on in their localised virtual world platform Wonderland.

Wonderland has ability to work on docs, browse web sites together, dial-in via phone and they are currently trying to create things that can be used across platforms.

Sun and Xerox have written policies regarding how their employees dress and behave in their virtual world. Sun has a human only policy for instance and prefers that employees use Sun avatars for company activities.

IBM says their employees are welcome to come to meetings as fish. I rather like that.

The Sun people use virtual worlds for in-house conferences, for virtual teams to meet and gather, for team building activities and to model problems and solutions. For instance, check out this link to a blog post about a 3D virtualised model of their datacentre in Santa Clara to help analysts understand the need for datacenter consolidation and how a Sun innovation will help the newly consolidated datacenter run more efficiently.

http://blogs.sun.com/vw/entry/is_that_sun_s_santa

EdTech Island – 2 years later

Dr. Lisa Dawley, http://onlineeducators.blogspot.com/ from the Department of Educational Technology at Boise State University delivered what was one of my favourite sessions on how she’s built up EdTech Island http://edtechisland.wetpaint.com/

Started two years go – today the island has generated $US130k in tuition dollars from eight post graduate courses run purely online. I don’t know profit/ROI but I can say that as at this writing, Educational and Not for profit pricing runs $700 for initial set up and then $147.50 per month for the highest performing type of private region. http://secondlife.com/land/privatepricing.php
Of course there are other costs involved – salary for a moderator/island goddess, money for developers/coders. But then back-out costs for face to face delivery. I’ll leave you to do the math, I’m operating on 3 hours sleep!

The island has a 1200-member Group that receives regular in-world notices and also provides free “living” space to 50 educators on a rolling basis. These educators are encouraged to and do give back to the island by mentoring new students, scripting, building, leading informal learning sessions, etc.

There is also a free Sandbox area where anyone can come in and build. This can open one up to griefers (mean-spirited people who try to throw a wrench in the works for users), but Lisa rightly says it is worth the risk and maintenance to provide as open an experience as possible. As a result, the island attracts builders and scripters who can and do contribute by way of saying thank you.

She tied in social networking very nicely – talking about persistent social networking. She has done a webinar https://admin.na3.acrobat.com/_a768376479/p17101188/ that covers this more in depth that I plan on treating my ears and eyes to in the very near future.

I don’t want this post to be any more War and Peace than it already is – so here are my notes from the sessions today from here on out – cleaned up as best I could with my limping brain:

Design of the physical space – can you design a space to more effectively support learning?
Social network communication mechanisms to support learning, connection, engagement, community
Give community members ownership

Persistence in virtual worlds
World continues to develop and change whether or not subscriber logged on Gehorsma 2003
What remains when the games is turned off and on
Active and available 24/7 (according to Wikipedia)
Spaces in which artefacts of others help guide new learners and where users are free to interact where and how they please Jones and Bronack (2003?)

1)Physical design – design to meet needs for
building, living, sharing information, attending events, socialising, experiential learning

Use nodes and pathways to promote persistence Christian (?) Nodes represent where info lies, pathways could be sidewalks, paths between nodes – got interested in using the pathway themselves. Got interested in how and why people went to certain nodes on the island. She put up tutorials along the path to guide them – it did have an impact. Use pathways, nodes, signage – Group notices support persistence in a HUGE way – numbers went up 10-fold!
Maya Realities Heatmap
Offer living spaces to community members – Offer free services to the public – sandbox
Knowing who and when people are participating – for timing of events and keywords – can get info on nationalities

2) Social networking and communications

In-world Social Networks – can be leveraged to support teaching. Chimera Cosmos (an SL friend) says very important for newbies. More like RL than people realise. Takes time and work to build community in SL. Formal and informal events important to build community and relationships.

Teaching people how to build is very important. When you have a 3D space constructed by users and demonstrate knowledge in 3D – it empowers learners to teach them how to build.

Out of world networks
List serv for SL builders
SLOOG HUD – tag inw0orld, on the web you can find locations in world.
http://sloog.org

Social Network Knowledge Construction

Go through the 5 stages where people start off just finding out about networks and could end up being leaders or just more advanced in certain stages. Base the activities/pedagogical framework on how experienced learners are with virtual worlds.

A big part of this that feeds into persistence/sustainability is people building learning artefacts and leaving them for the next “generation” of learners.

3) Community Ownership – What would Google Do? Who owns the network?

Allow community members to contribute – in fact, recruit and encourage leaders. Provide free facilities when and where you can to attract people to your space.

4) Partner with professional associations/organisations

Bring people together around common interests, just as in the real world can form consortiums

5) Include Gaming elements – play

Don’t be afraid to have fun – build in celebrations, allow whimsy and cheekiness and build in activities that will connect learners with each other.

NonPlayerCharacters – Emilia EdTech. Auto bot- with pre-scripted messages.

XD Fusion sells bots.

https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=23134

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Schell/211/169/91/?title=XD Fusion

Mascots – has a created character and he shares on Twitter. Don’t want it to be associated with her – don’t want it to be a person necessarily. Removing identity to provide service – does that help?

Media Literacy – Immersive Education – Ways of knowing and being

This was a three-speaker, facilitated discussion and wow it brought out passion and excitement in the audience. The backchannel was lively and the front of house was insightful.
I unfortunately missed the first panelist’s presentation – Elizabeth Thoman of the Center for Media Literacy in the US http://www.medialit.org/

A presentation prior had overlapped and I got stuck under the ISTE coloseum a few times (as you tend to do when there is lag and the floors haven’t rezzed up properly). ; )

By the way – great tool here to help learners evaluate web sites -

http://21cif.com/tools/evaluate/evalWizard_beta_1.1.html

I managed to grab a seat just as Elizabeth was finishing on:

The revolution that technology is bringing is that teachers need to change their pedagogy and assessment.

When I build, am I just building pretty spaces – or is it about engaging students?

When you look at the environment – you look at what you want to build and what are the learning outcomes.

What do you want them to learn and know when they leave? What will they interact with?
Work, learn and play.

Labelle’s work – I don’t know which Labelle – I’m assuming it’s not Patti or the Labelle who wrote so much about limb dominance. Will have to find her paper.

Then Activity theory – notion of creation and imagination – missed the citation

Next up was Marlene Brooks of Memorial University who talked about setting learning outcomes at the start of a build so that you can evaluate its success, what’s working, what needs to be tweaked/changed.

Learning Outcomes/Objectives

• Decrease challenging, complex and/or difficult concepts
• Demonstrate processes, procedures and or competencies
• Increase engagement with content
• Increase interaction between teachers and learners and between students
• Provide role model examples
• Integrate or apply theory to practice through reflective activities
• Accommodate a variety of learning styles
• Promote active learning and problem solving

The notion of critique can be misunderstood – we have an over determination of we value and transmit knowledge in traditional and constructivist pedagogy.

• In traditional education, knowledge is structured and transmitted. An emphasis on students restating information. Learning is passive. Promotes individualism/isolation and competition as the goal is to do well on tests.
• In constructivism, knowledge is co-constructed and learners engage in the construction of knowledge with an emphasis on critique (although she seriously questions if constructive criticism is fully understood). Promotes connection to others to solve problems.
• In immersive teaching – knowledge is discovered and EXPERIENCED. Emphasis is on creativity and learning is immersive. Promotes engagement and connections with others, transformational learning of self and other.

We need to think about our assessment frameworks in the traditional, constructivist and now immersive streams.

http://www.distance.mun.ca/media/files/secondlife/engi.php

Luyen Chou of School Net whose introduction took several minutes (and he goodnaturedly joined all of us in our giggling) http://www.schoolnet.com/luyen summed up what the others had talked about and the entire audience jumped in enthusiastically.
He is a long-time constructivist progressive education in K-12, especially using new media and technologies – he agrees we need to look at assessment. Too much of construtivist progressive educationis too dependent on the facilitator – authentic assessment needs to be developed and turn those assessments into actionable data.

He is excited about immersive transition because in immersive enviroment dealing with 100% data saturated environment modelling atomic activity. Usually assessment is the other way around.
The importance of both the broadcast model of media literacy and the creative – constructive and deconstructive – very much interconnected.

Take the notion of deconstructive literacy – go to Google and search on Martin Luther King, Jr.
The 4th result is something called martinlutherkingjr.org maintained and run by white supremecists, without tools to understand where those particular producers of content are coming from and how to interpret how Google does it and realise that it isn’t just based on accuracy you’d be fooled into believing you were looking at a site with a balance opinion on the civil rights movement.

We don’t live in a world where streams of info are compartmentalised into different media – as we move into a digitally saturated environment – Americans on computer 8.5 hours per day, he argues as immersive as what we’re doing right now (interacting in SL)– we’re talking information and data literacy – how do we interpret the streams of info coming into our desktops?

In an immersive world where all of our activities translated into digital data – how do we assess that?
Some lamented the session end and begged for ways to continue the conversations started about the literacies needed for the future.

I pointed people to the excellent research my colleagues Pru and Belinda did in 2008 for an edna workshops presentation on the topic:  http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/events/workshops/cache/offonce/pid/2189#goto-5000

What skills do I really need to teach? Developing Training Curriculum for virtual instructors.

Catherine Dutton, Instructional Coordinator, Instructional Support Services, Texas Woman’s University

This was a fantastic session that covered a topic near and dear to my heart – how to arm educators with the skills they need to get started in virtual worlds.
Catherine shared what she learned from a course she helped to develop for her university.

Developed October 2007 – Last session completed November 2008
14 hour course focusing on teaching in SL
13 sessions over the year
115 participants
74 graduates
Goal was to prepare SL residents who may or may not have formal teaching experience to teach in a virtual world.
Co-teachers
Coaches
Focus on learning – NO GRADES.
No voice – all classes delivered using text chat because people said they needed time to process and learning and text allowed them that (you can copy and paste text out of SL chat). This worked well as it eliminated the extra layer of what can go wrong technically (no audio woes to deal with).

ME: Personally, I think this detracts from the immersive quality of a virtual world and could have been of benefit to the educators in giving them experience in troubleshooting.

Made assumptions about students…
Thought that all would have basic grasp of SL skills, could rez a prim and move it around, thought all wanted to teach and were new to teaching

Content of the course

Resources for Educators
Andragogy
IP/Copyright
Mechanical details
Teaching a mini-class
Voice or Text
Troubleshooting issues
Class management

Wanted to introduce teachers to the rich resources in SL and encouraged them to use resources existent rather than re-make them.
Andragogy – the theory of working with adult learners. Malcom Knowles. Their last experience may have been years ago in HS or college. Adults are self-directed, want to learn, not going to a SL skills class.
IP/Copyright – directed all the students to ask for permission before giving things away. Setting SL permissions.
Get the full syllabus here: http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dd9n7gsn_81c9qfn3hs

Lessons learned

• Lectures=boring (the irony of this was not lost on her as she stood and presented)
• Find ways to mix it up – force avatars to move
• Competiona/awards graduation – a MUST
• Application based learning worked well
• First life can and does interfere – be flexible
• Second Life CAN and WILL crash

A really good audience question – how many hours does it take for teachers to be effective?
14 hour class – then partnered them with a mentor for first 6 classes. Most effective after the course finished.

How to write out a lesson plan was a big struggle for people – gave them coaches to help them develop. Even for experienced educators.

You’ll find the links in this blog and PDF along with some not mentioned but related available from my Diigo bookmarks for VWBPE:  http://www.diigo.com/user/kerryj/vwbpe

"no, but you are MY STUPID HUSBAND" CC (by) nayrb7 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nayrb7/3044673793/

The session was about social networks and viral systems (no, not going to name the conference or the session or presenter, this isn’t about dissing).  Because viral content spreads across channels, my first question was – what’s the tag for this session?  The presenter told me to ask a conference organiser.  The organiser said there was no tag.  Okay, some people don’t think of this stuff – but in a session on viral marketing, gotta say I expected it.

The lecture progressed on interactivity and social networking and the instructor failed to engage with the text chat in a constructive way.

Some people in the audience complained that the text chat was distracting them and was blocking the powerpoint on effective interaction.

If you’re not laughing yet — let me explain why this is sadly funny:

• A session on interaction where interaction is discouraged and/or dismissed
• A session dealing with social networking that did not allow for cross-channel seeding via tags
• A session on social networking that compared Facebook and Second Life — two completely different tools – and made judgement calls because one was not like the other.
• People attending a session on social networking who don’t like it happening and find it distracting
• A session on social networks and viral marketing where avatars sat in chairs, faced front and the presenter did not build in any time for interaction and social networking

What if we’d gone to this session on social networking and he’d removed all the chairs and replaced them with rings or platforms with different keywords or interests and asked us to pick one, meet three people, move to two others?

What if he’d canvassed a wider variety of social networking tools, explained there are horses for courses, asked how we used them?

What if he threw out his opinion or findings or whatever they were that Second Life is NOT a valid social network because 1 million people can’t be on at once and we can’t use our real names and asked us to challenge it?

Finally, what if he’d been using a social networking tool during his lecture and invited us to interact with him there as well as in SL?

The thought process this irritation set in motion sort of hooks into a blog post I wrote a while back about people at a tech conference complaining about others who were Tweeting.

There are multiple tools available to us all – for group learning, collaboration, communication.  Viral communication works best when it’s organic.  And as different people are drawn to different tools or communications channels — communications jumps channels. I find out about great YouTube videos via Twitter.  I find out about great web sites via me.edu.au, or Second Life, or Twitter, or Flickr or Diigo. I can start a conversation in Twitter and it will end up in Second Life or Skype.

And it’s easy to find conversations when they are tagged with keywords that would stir my interest or that are unique and shared across networks.

In creating learning modules and sessions on interaction, communication, collaboration, engaging learners — in short, all the faboo ways teaching and learning is being transformed — shouldn’t we ensure that we model those teaching and learning practices in our modules and sessions???

At two other sessions today, presenters standing in front of rows of avatars while standing on stages said we have to get rid of the sage on the stage mentality. *sigh*

Anyone – care to design a conference where PowerPoint, whiteboards, chalkboards, flip boards, butcher’s paper, videos, stages and seating that faces in one direction are outlawed?  Where there are NO presenters or presentations – but facilitators in the truest sense of the word? We could do it in Second Life — I can get us some free space.  We could do simultaneous sessions in Skype.  Maybe Elluminate.

It CAN be done.  It doesn’t mean anarchy.  I worked with Jo Kay and the Jokaydians last year to lead educators through tours of Second Life that taught them a helluva lot more than any PowerPoint could have. Jo shows, tells and offers opportunities to get hands one.  A role model.

Frankie Forsyth of Pelion Consulting, a consutlant from Tasmania, facilitated sessions for educators that drew information out of the participants in a structured way to achieve a common goal using an online classroom. She introduces research summaries, has questions where participants write out free form replies and then presents all the answers given and leads discussion.  She’s another of my role models. Because she takes it out of theory and puts it into practice.

I attended an Elluminate session on Friday sponsored by Edublogs on how to engage audiences using interactive tools and guess what? The presenter used interactive tools and we interacted and fed back what we thought and how we could use those techniques in our own sessions! Wow! Another role model!

So — are you a role model?

Image license is CC (by) – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

So today is an international day of blogging about women in technology that are leading the way.

In Australia this can feel quite awkward — to give praise to someone here has to be low key, as the object of said praise will often feel the necessity to bat it away or deny it. It’s called “tall poppy syndrome” – if you don’t cut yourself down to size first, someone else will.

Today I say stuff it. It’s my birthday and I am going to do things my way.

Therefore, my Ada Lovelace post is about my virtual landlady, Second Life mentor and personal friend – Joanna McKay. Jo – deal with it.

I love the surrealism of virtual worlds and try to bring that “Alice in Wonderland” sense out when I create a machinima.  So I keep the videos brief, use dance music that adds an unusual air and go for sweeping shots and dramatic takes.

But in recording conversations and events, realism has to dominate in order not to distract from the information.

So today I experimented by recording a conversation that took place after Jo Kay and a group of us went exploring some educational resource sims in Second Life.

As I only had the one camera, getting cut away shots was difficult, so I’ll apologise in advance for the camera work.  Also, I found after the shoot that Fraps by default records on-screen cursors.  Oh well.

What I did try to do is to highlight the text conversation that inevitably takes place.  Sometimes this happens because people don’t want to interrupt the main speaker — sometimes because they know there is background noise where they are.

I highlighted the text conversation by duplicating the video track, zooming in on the text portion and then doing a picture in picture/cutaway effect in Sony Vegas video.  I also set the overlay track of the highlighted text at 80% opacity.

If you’re interested in what’s happening on jokaydia, by all means watch all of this.  If you’re interested just in the technique I attempted to highlight the text, just watch the first few minutes.  And please, let me know what you might have done differently — keeping in mind that my goal was the shortest possible turn-around time.

If you’re on RSS — the link to the video is: http://blip.tv/file/1905389

If you’re on my blog, here it is embedded:

I started my work blog because I wanted to write about the projects in which I am involved in at work. That others I work with blog about my projects fired me up. I wanted to instigate conversations. I kept my personal blog for more nuts and bolts, off topic and opinion pieces.

But that line is starting to blur for me and is leaving me in a quandry. I won’t give up this blog or let it go dormant because I own the IP to all that I write here. That is not the case with the company blog.

I think that my company blog is higher profile because the RSS feed appears on the company web page.

Even though I get washed out of the stream fairly quickly by more prolific bloggers, I’ll bet I get traffic from that (as my stats are not hooked up on my company blog, I don’t know for sure.).

And while respected aggregators like Stephen Downes have commented on posts I’ve made on my work blog — he’s never commented on blog posts from this one.

So in the end, I thought I’d publish this morning’s post to the higher profile blog, even though I lose control of ownership on the content so that I could generate the discussion I wanted to start.

But lately I’ve been looking at how I think about social media – including blogs and twittering. I was asked to write up my thoughts on policies around it for the organisation so that everyone had guidelines. And it strikes me that how organisations vs. individuals use these tools is changing the landscape for me.

Do I need to blog as an individual in two places? I don’t think so.

I blog to have conversations and to get my thinking down somewhere where I can easily access it. I’m not chasing stats. So what if Stephen Downes only ever comments on my education.au blog posts — if I want to be noticed, I’ll get off my bum and do more to move my blog out into the world.

Should I keep my company blog to have a voice in what I’m doing for work? I’m leaning toward yes on that because I want to share the mindset and experiences behind what I do for and with my organisation. The question is –would readers want to subscribe to that?

Just as I only read blogs that inspire, amuse or educate me — would someone want to subscribe to the blog of a woman who was just talking about the work she does? I suppose if it were relevant to their interests the answer would be yes.

And what about my Twittering? I’m sometimes silly, sometimes talking about work. Should I keep my personal Twitter account for silliness and have another or create a joint company Twitter account to advise of outages, answer client tech questions and promote events? I’m starting to think yes.

While I don’t openly complain about my place of work on my Twitter account — I express opinions that aren’t in line with the company’s stakeholders’ trains of thought. So by using Twitter to communicate about work issues — am I now a representative of the company on Twitter? It’s hard to write a disclaimer AND express an opinion in 140 characters or less.

And what about my video sharing accounts? Long ago I realised that I can’t post videos with company logos on them to the same site I post machinima with dance music tracks and videos of my cat. So I set up company accounts for that.

Slide sharing? My SlideShare account is about my presentations — no cat content or dance music there, so that was easy.

LinkedIn is about me as a professional so that was easy.

GMail is also all about me.

But when I comment on blogs – what signature do I use and when?

Do I use my “official” signature with my company name and title and contact details? Sometimes I do. Especially when commenting on the company dollar. For more radical sites and opinion pieces, I use my personal signature. But I’m always KerryJ — so does it matter WHICH signature I use? Or do I have an over-inflated sense of my own importance?

Hmmm. The more I look into a an online communications plan for our organisation, the more I realise I need to write one for myself.

How do you handle yourselves? Do you draw an online divide between your professional self and your private self? Do people who whinge about work on their personal accounts deserve to be fired if they are easily traced back to their place of work? Should people using professional accounts use the 2-drink rule after hours?

However, this quest got me thinking about my blog theme — 3 columns seems a bit much.  I tend to use my blog as a testing ground, but over the past year it was resembling not so much a blog as the Las Vegas strip.

So I started the quest for a unique WordPress blog theme – widget-ready, 2 columns, reasonable level of customisation.  I ended up finding inexpensive software that allowed me to create my own.

Artisteer (http://www.artisteer.com), created by Extensoft (http://extensoft.com) , allowed me to create a standards-compliant WordPress theme with a drag and drop interface that was fun and really easy to use.

At this writing, the software cost $US50 for a home/educational version for one user (you can use on one desktop and one laptop computer).  It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the standard version, but will certainly do the trick for me.  Pros can buy the full version for $125 and they company is planning to release an editor for Joomla and Drupal along with Blogger, Sharepoint and other CMS packages.

I had to do a bit of tweaking once I’d uploaded the theme — for me, I have to have the RSS/subscribe info at the top of the page.  I’d also have liked to add my sub page names to the editor and do tweaking on the sub page template, but it’s early days and I can use the theme editor in WordPress to upload header images for sub pages.

This could be a real time saver for you pro-CSS coders – I know that for a complete CSS n00b like me, it has saved me literally DAYS of time.  Even searching for free themes costs time — so this little baby has paid for itself on the first blog for me.

And in the interest of full disclosure — no, I do NOT get a kickback from the company and the links I am providing are NOT via any affiliate program.

All in all – I’m very, very happy with my ROI.

When wanting to record Stereo Mix, make sure mic is turned on in the settings for Playback devices.

When recording direct, mute the mic.

As well, with better quality microphones, Mic Boost = noise. Better to pump up the levels and leave Mic Boost off.