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Sunday, September 30, 2007

Missing in action

I have been reasonably quiet on the blog side of things for about 7 days. Last week was the final week of the term. Year 12 finished up prior to their final examinations. I have been preparing for the NavCon Conference in Gosford which starts on this Tuesday and finishes Friday. On Sunday I fly to Singapore to give a week's worth of Web 2.0 workshops and a presentation. I have to update my materials for that as well tomorrow. I plan to clean the swimming pool, have breakfast with fellow adventurer Diamond and sort out some clothes tomorrow. Plus fix up some photographs for the school magazine. Goodness gracious!

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Podcast workshop updated

The NavCon conference is on this week and I have been updating my Podcast Workshop pages. I modified my presentation and created new documents for GarageBand, Podcast Maker and ProfCast. I also created a detailed document concerned with audio settings on the Macintosh.


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Experimenting with various audio sources

This evening I tested four different methods for obtaining digital audio for podcasting this afternoon and I thought it would be worthwhile to simply publish the results. I used the following devices to record audio on my MacBook Pro.

Logitech Headset
Small stereo microphone
Lapel microphone
MacBook Pro built in microphone

You can see the equipment and hear the results here on my Podcast workshop page. Scroll down the page.

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Monday, September 24, 2007

Mark Pearson and Comic Life

This evening I received a pleasant surprise in my In Box. Mark Pearson of plasq software had written an email asking if plasq, creators of Comic Life, could link to my Comic Life workshop page. They were also after examples and ideas for a future education site focused upon the software. I have promised to supply the Plasq team with some ideas.

Comic Life is an excellent software application. This is not a paid advertisement I should add. What can Comic Life allow you to do? Comic Life allows you to drag and drop your digital photographs, scanned photographs, drawings and even still video captures into a comic book page template. You can drag word and thought balloons on to the template and create as many comic book pages as you wish. There are a diverse range of page templates and styles to draw from in the creation of your project. You can publish to the web, create images and even produce a movie. It exports to iWeb as well.



Personally and professionally, the thing that strikes me about Comic Life is the fact that students can bring inanimate objects, such as a brick, to life. They can give feelings and thoughts to objects as diverse as light bulbs and bullets. This can be a medium for very powerful messages within a framework that is seamless. Comic Life as a tool does not get in the way of the message. Students, and teachers, can begin to express the message rapidly. This software empowers students. Many other software tools are clunky whether they be web development, video or graphic applications. Comic Life is not clunky.

I like to get to know a tool, such as Comic Life, well and then I explore the specific knowledge, skills and attitudinal outcomes of various teaching disciplines to see how the tool can be appropriately matched to specific outcomes. Different tools match different outcomes. Comic Life lends itself to many applications across many teaching and learning disciplines.

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Is education killing creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson is simply a remarkable person. He is a world-renowned speaker on how to inspire creativity and innovation. He is inspirational. He delivers his understandings and wisdom with "warmth, passion and wit". "He was voted Business Speaker of the Year by over 200 global and European companies. In June 2003, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his outstanding achievements as a leader in creativity, education and the arts." [http://www.sirkenrobinson.com/]

In this fifteen minute presentation he delivers a moving and also delightfully witty talk on schooling and creativity. He succinctly points out how education is geared towards ultimately producing university professors. The core subjects dominate the arts and music. There is little room for creativity. An education system that is a by-product of the industrial revolution of the 19th century.



All educators should take the time out to watch this inspiring and thought provoking presentation given at TED Talks in 2006.... "Do schools kill creativity?"

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Saturday, September 22, 2007

Shao Ping is blogging in stereo ~ 好為人師

My wife Shao Ping is blogging in stereo. She has her blog, 好為人師, on both blogspot.com and also blog.pixnet.net. She has been sharing her skills with other teachers of Mandarin and this Tuesday she is conducting a workshop for teachers of Mandarin regarding the techniques of setting up a blog. She works really fast. She had some Chinese Twitter like apps on her blog but they were unreliable. I suggested that Shao Ping try "Jaiku" and in about 5 minutes her Jaiku badge was already up and running on her blogspot blog.



A photograph of my dear wife Shao Ping. She is always looking for alternative uses for objects. Very creative is my wife.

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Technologically Literate Teachers

Recently a mumber of education blogs have been inundated with thoughts regarding the technological literacy of teachers. Some of the authors believe that teachers should proactively adopt technologies. Others disagree. Other commentators blame the system for not encouraging innovation or providing an environment conducive to adopting technology. One commentator proposes a set of guidelines for teachers in relation to technology adoption.

Read this post first followed by these three. 1 | 2 | 3 |

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Google launches presentation tool

Google has launched its online presentation tool via the official Google blog. I shall give the new tool a go. Will not work with Safari on the Mac.

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Monday, September 17, 2007

Ken Ronkowitz and educational technology

Ken Ronkowitz never ceases to amaze me with his excellent posts regarding teaching, learning and technology. During the last week or so he has posted some informative items regarding podcasting, Google Earth and the art of writing itself.

With respect to podcasting he brings up the point that simply repurposing lectures for delivery via podcast is not an ideal use of the medium. Ken illustrates, by way of a positive example, how David Miller at the University of Connecticut is employing the podcasting medium in a proactive manner. Each week David Miller and his students collaborate in an one hour discussion of the course material. The content is discussed and recorded for podcasting. Ken also points out how David precasts and postcasts key material before and after each lecture. Students are attracted to the subject due to this proactive and particpatory approach to the use of podcasting.

Ken also blogged an interesting post about the use of Google Earth to plot and trace the moevements of characters during the course of a novel. This would indeed be a novel approach for teachers of literature seeking to inpsire their students with additional visual cues as they explore each destination on the plotted Google Earth map.

The last gem from Ken that I wish to share is a new podcast set up by NJIT entitled 'The End of the Essay'. This podcast is a project that Ken has been working on with Dr. Norbert Elliot, Professor of English at NJIT. Ken points out that Dr. Elliot had given a presentation called "The End of the Essay: Writing in a Mediated Environment." Ken thought it was something that Dr. Elliot should develop into a book, however he was already involved in another book project, so the concept became a podcast. The blog post makes very interesting reading for educational technologists and teachers alike.

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Sunday, September 16, 2007

Digital Natives or simply Digital Dilettantes?

I have just read a telling post by Sue Waters in her informative Mobile Technology in TAFE blog regarding the skill set of Generation Y or the Digital Natives.

This very point has come up in staff meetings and during IT workshops, etc. Sure there are students who may know a few more keyboard shortcuts and can type much faster than I. Their use of mobile phones is impressive. Yet, there are a wide variety of IT skills lacking.

They can all make an iMovie or Windows Movie Maker project but they exhibit little creativity with their editing, timelines, etc. They do not explore the technology. They may apply special effects but they do not know why they are applying the special effect. They produce a video then what next? Teachers then have to share the technological possibilities that are available to allow online publication or dissemination of the product.

Even use of tools like Word or Powerpoint is quite basic on the whole. Rarely does a student show an eye for good design or layout. These skills need to be taught by a teacher with the necessary skill set.

I am trying to encourage the student population at our school to avoid wasting endless hours with MSN Chat, MySpace and the like and steer their energies towards the construction of blogs and web sites that are beneficial for themselves and the wider community. It is an uphill battle. Some of my students have produced worthy web sites. One is actually earning about $20.00USD per day via Google AdSense on their site. Great way to earn money while still a Year 10 student.

Perhaps they are not Digital Natives at all but simply Digital Dilettantes... they are, and I quote from a dictionary, an amateur or dabbler; especially, one who follows an art or a branch of knowledge sporadically, superficially, or for amusement only.

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Monday, September 10, 2007

Upcoming workshops in Gosford, NSW and Singapore

October is approaching fast and soon I shall be giving some workshops and presentations at two different venues. The first two workshops will be conducted at the NavCon2K7 Conference in Gosford, NSW, Australia. Each of the two workshops I shall be facilitating at the conference are tagged to the eLearning track. The first is Podcasting and Vodcasting. The second is Working Wonders with Comic Life. These workshops will be conducted on the Macintosh platform. The conference finishes on Friday October 5th.



On the Sunday, October 7th, I shall be flying up to Singapore to conduct a week of workshops and presentations at the Centre for Educational Development at Nanyang Technological University. I shall be presenting an updated version of my Web 2.0 Information Sharing Session followed by four days of workshops on Podcasting and Vodcasting, Web 2.0 and managing Web 2.0 applications, in particular RSS feeds. These workshops will be conducted on the Windows platform. I shall fly home to Australia on the Friday night or the next day.



I look forward to the opprtunity to catch up with old friends and to meet new teachers.

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Saturday, September 8, 2007

Why we twitter

Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities. An article authored by Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng. The abstract reads as follows:

"Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other."

Tim Finin of the Ebiquity Group blogged that PhD student Akshay Java collected Twitter data from March 2007 and wrote the paper analyzing the the Twitter data subset from April and May of this year. Tim Finin added that Akshay Java's "dataset included about 1350K posts from over 75K users. The paper covers a lot of the standard statistics you would expect — usage trends, basic network properties, top hubs and authorities, community structure, and geographic distribution. Akshay’s title pays homage to the early paper that asked why we blog, but the title also reflects the paper’s key contribution — an attempt to tease out the user’s intention in writing a tweet, i.e. to analyze why people are using Twitter." The article is available as a pdf via a link below the abstract.

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Placely ~ social networking based on travel

A post on Mashable alerted myself to Placely. Signed in using the invitation code provided by Placely to Mashable.



I registered, added a couple of trips. An easy interface. I shall see if I am contacted. Will check it out further. It incorporates calendars, maps and networking capabilities naturally. Probably not that too useful for myself. I do not travel as frequently as others.

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Friday, September 7, 2007

Web Site and Network Upgrade

This evening I updated 33 pages of my web site. Using the Site Management tool in Macromedia Dreamweaver is quite easy. I was able to alter the various pages quite quickly and ftp the updated pages to the server. My hosting is provided by ICDSoft and I am using their servers in Hong Kong as opposed to the USA. They are on a similar time zone and the occasional email for advice or support is always responded to within minutes. I have been with them for over two years now and the service has been excellent.

I also upgraded the security on the wireless network here at home. I upgraded the base station and the two satellite stations linked to the printer and the two stereos. I reset the wireless access on the MacBook Pro, my wife's Toshiba Satellite (Windows Vista) as well as the two PC laptops (Windows XP) that belong to our two overseas students. Their laptops use the Chinese Language Kit however that presented no problem. Everything is running smoothly and it is good that the network is now more secure.

I feel a little chuffed that I was able to do all this. Not bad for a history teacher.

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Thursday, September 6, 2007

Voice Thread

Voice Thread is an interesting online app that allows you to annotate your photographs with voice and text. Multiple users can annotate a selection of images or a single image. The demo on the web site employs a sequence of historical photographs and drawings by students. As a teacher of history this registered a chord within me. It is a great tool that allows students, and adults too, to record oral histories and to simply tell stories. It is always useful to experiment with alternative forms of expression.





The interface is simple to use. Comments can be moderated. It is very freindly tool to use.

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Merlin Mann ~ Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann presents a practical and down to earth presentation on maintaining an email In Box with zero messages. He speaks of how email can dominate one's life and he presents a commonsense approach to managing your email. He has a web page dedicated to the issue as well with resources that may interest you if you are keen to eliminate, reduce or manage email more effectively.

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Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Neat tools for teachers

You may like to investigate this web based tool...

"Trackstar is your starting point for online lessons and activities. Simply collect Web sites, enter them into TrackStar, add annotations for your students, and you have an interactive, online lesson called a Track. Create your own Track or use one of the hundreds of thousands already made by other educators. Search the database by subject, grade, or theme and standard for a quick and easy activity. There is a fun Track already made for each day of the year, too!"

I have used a nifty little free mind mapping tool called Freemind lately. The download link is further down the page. Mac and Windows.

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Saturday, September 1, 2007

Sootie on the attack

Like many other cats Sootie loves the adventure and sheer excitement of a brown paper bag. He has been playing with such a bag during the last few days and I thought why not make a hole in the bottom of the bag and obtain a different perspective of Sootie as he plays with the bag. The first video is simply Sootie chewing the handles. The second and third video reveal a carnivore in full flight.






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Name: John Larkin
Occupation: Educator
Hometown: Wollongong, NSW.
Favorite Quotes:
"To get what you want you must learn to give up wanting".
Now Reading:

Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton.
The Early Asimov by Isaac Asimov.


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