Good to see another ed technologist in Oz, even if he’s up in the nice warm end rather than the drab south :O)

Via Stephen, Scott Aldred keeps the blog e-learning and looks like someone who’s keen to blog in a reflective, considered and detailed way, just like me ;o)

Having a quick look through his posts brings up some interesting thoughts on role-play and webquests (personally, I get a bit confused about these, have problems with ‘authenticity’ and ‘point’ but I still design them so am hardly one to talk). Also an interesting paper by the author entitled Addressing the Staff Development needs for Problem-Based Learning at CQU.

Welcome to the ‘sphere Scot, good stuff :O)

[naturally Blogger doesn’t present the feed – why the hell don’t they????? LET IT OUT – and so here it is]

Despite the fact that I fully believe that Bush is the most dangerous person alive at this time and I’ll breath a sigh of relief if Kerry wins next month, I’m just guessing that my inkling that it’s not really appropriate to suggest to people in the US how to vote when I’m a Pom in Australia is probably along the right track… this fantastic Guardian piece containing responses to their ‘write to Ohio’ suggestion kinda, for me, cements that :o)

Via Josie among others comes an new TESOL article, Jason Ward’s Blog Assisted Language Learning (BALL): Push button publishing for the pupils (.pdf) now that could have been BALL for Students or BALL Systems, no?

It’s actually a very good article which gets stuck in straight away with possible benefits of blogging for composition including genuine audience, process driven composition and peer-reviewed writing (for me these things stick out for weblogs more than some of the others – given the other technologies available).

There’s also a small and encouraging study of one classes experience which, like the rest of the article is clearly presented. I like this, it’s very accessible… a shame Jason didn’t blog it :o)

Tom pulls together a couple of decent Kairos posts that on the more negative side of the spectrum in the wide-world-o-weblogs-n-wikis: Falling out of love & Wikis.

The blogging article is just as interesting for it’s comments as the post itself so go and have a look. Personally I’m kind of in agreement with Tom in that if you want to get the kind of discussion that you would get in a discussion board the, ahem, use a discussion board. Blogs are not linear in any respect, you can’t control them, structure them or really do much about them being or not being written and, well, a bit like people really.

Good luck scouting BTW ;o)

On the wiki front, however, while I guess while there are some reasonable criticisms of the semantics employed in relation to wikis I’m afraid I came out more along the lines of Tom’s first response…. there’s somewhat of a wikisnob in it and IMO the more you argue for wikis as a new world order which need their purity and wikinature (says who!) preserved then the less accessible, useful and possible they become.

Now… this S5 alternative-to-powerpoint lightweight-CSS-based presentation tool looks very very nice indeed, now I wonder if you can stream audio with it not too difficultly… hmmmmmm….

It’s a pain having elearnspace at the top of my bloglines subscription stuff (don’t know why… just seems to have gotten there) as I’m only one blog into 147 education focussed posts and I already have two things I wanna read / have a look at: Google Desktop Search & Tracing the Evolution of Social Software. Dammit :o)

This is probably just me but the thing I’ve probably dragged to my taskbar the most times to have then never used is the ‘blog it’ button, as demonstrated in one of it’s many forms by Charlie at Cyberdash.

Perhaps it’s because all of my links seem to come through RSS (when I have my blogging stuff up and running), perhaps it’s because I’m a fool :o)… who knows?

Thanks to Mira who suggested CDex for ripping the .mp3 from the Audacity .wav :o)

So here’s a test .mp3 file, me testing podcasting and talking about a possible use [link removed for anonymity purposes].

And just for luck I’ll try and see if we get some auto enclosure tags too:

Might have worked… still can’t get Doppler working and have to go home, am I on the right track?

Am trying to podcast, desperately trying!

I get the principle: you record .mp3 file, blog it and then other people can aggregate it.

But…

…Audacity has, for some unknown-to-me reason stopped being able to export .mp3s. I’ve tried everything but it just ‘aint a go :o( [does anyone know any other decent open source .mp3 recorders / encoders]

…Once I have my .mp3 and have uploaded it to the web, how the heck do I make it into an ‘enclosure’ for RSS2.0? Do I just pop in a link and it does it for me or do I need tags?

…I’m trying with Doppler as an aggregator but it doesn’t seem to download anything, ipodder doesn’t seem to work :o(

So, am trying, trying, trying. It’s not that I want to broadcast anything myself, but you can imagine the potential of this for lectures & ‘fireside chats’ (as I’m working on with a Law academic) as students just leave their ipods or whatever’s hooked up to the net, pop out in the car, to the gym or wherever and their lectures are all there ready for them… pretty cool no?

But then I have been kinda wrong about the potential level of interest in audio before ;o)

And BTW I think someone should mention Ed Radio to all those shouting about the uniqueness of combining RSS and audio!!!

[I would’ve posted this as a comment to Michael’s piece if the comment login procedures didn’t make me groan so ;o)]

Interesting view on Robodemo over at e-Literate, apparently it’s absolutely pants when it comes to interactivity which doesn’t surprise me as when we’ve tried to do ‘fancy’ things such as mouse movements, scrolling, full motion etc. it’s been rubbish at them too.

The one thing it does do well is make it very easy to put audio to a series of screen shots to simply create a ‘show ‘n tell’ type thing (and thankfully that’s what we’re using it for) but I’d agree with Michael that I’m waiting and hoping for Captivate to fix a lot of things and pop in some new stuff that works well!

One of my theories as to why this hasn’t got the greatest, say, PowerPoint rendition is that Breeze does that so well that Macromedia may not want to shift the attention away from the real $ spinner… could well be wrong there though.