PELAGIOS: About PELAGIOS: PELAGIOS stands for 'Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems' - its aim is to help introduce  Linked Open Data  goodness i...

An interesting artical on the use of social learning with students and teachers

Comox Valley Record - Power of social learning can help students, teachers

For all you artists out there, an alternate version of the open source image manipulation application GIMP (similar to Photoshop)which simulate natrual media such as oil paints or watercolours similar to Painter or MyPaint (also Open source)

Gimp Paint Studio 1.5 Final Release

Freezing Moon

A good selection of video tutorials on the use of Blender 3D 2.5. Here is what they have to say about themselves.

We're a group of hobbists from all around the world, that love game development, open source and art. With the help of technology and Internet, we're getting together on a constant basis in order to learn new exciting things, to have fun playing computer games and to work on something greater, our first game project, which some of you will hopefully get to enjoy in the near future or even contribute to.

Find them at http://www.freezingmoon.org

A web link to a list of free eBooks on web design, development and more. Worth taking a look at for anyone interested.

http://designbeep.com/2011/02/24/10-free-e-books-for-web-designersdevelopers-and-freelancers-part-1/

Something which is always a chore is finding the right image for your project especially in education where there often isn't the money to pay for images or the time to get the person with the purse strings to pay for a stock image.

Stock.xchng is a nice online stock photography site which I came across the other day which has a large amount of free (both cost and royalty wise), I've certainly found myself using it for a number of projects which required a quick turnaround.

Stock.xchng can be found at http://www.sxc.hu/

The following 2 links were brought to my attention through the JISC Mailing list: MOODLE-UK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. Someone initially asked a question about the inconsistencies being reported in viewing powerpoint files directly from Moodle. These two links in particular look really interesting.

iSpring Free lets you easily create web-ready Flash presentations preserving every aspect of your original PowerPoint content.
iSpring Free (http://www.ispringfree.com)

EasyView, developed by Richard and the team at VLE Middleware is a free tool that allows you to open and view Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, OpenOffice documents without having any of those software packages installed. It’s an excellent solution for students who need to access content, but may not have the necessary software installed on their own machines.
VLe Middleware (http://www.vlemiddleware.com )

An innovative project using twitter to teach history, Winchester House School in collaboration with other schools and colleges set up a twitter feed where each took on a persona in the gunpowder plot and tweeted in character to unveil the story of the plot and it’s events as a teaching aid for their pupils.

Winchester House School who were running this web page http://winchesterhouse.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/gunpowder-tweeting-and-plot/
The Twitter feed http://twitter.com/#!/chrisleach78/gunpowdertweetingplot

This sort of approach could easily be applied to creative writing or even as part of a performance, a novel way of developing a story plotline and character backgrounds before even a work of the story/script itself is written!

I recently came across this excellent resource on QR Codes by Tom Barrett for those of you not familiar with QR codes here is the Wikipedia definition of them.

A QR Code is a matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera, and smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.

Common in Japan, where it was created by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994, the QR code is one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. QR is the abbreviation for Quick Response, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

They are gaining in popularity in education but as with many new technologies there is much confusion and misunderstanding about them.
Below is a link to a Google Docs' presentation covering 28 uses of QR code in the classroom and I recommend you take a look if you're thinking of using them or just want to know what their all about.

Presentation link: http://goo.gl/Pgq8s
Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code

Hi,

It's always interesting to see a new techie gadget come into the marketplace and even more so when it's something that seems to a) work well and b) be immediately applicable to the HE sector. So, you can imagine my growing delight when I read the following BoingBoing article: Livescribe Pulse Smartpen: It's a Keeper

Basically it's a pen that records digital audio and digital copy of what you write with it. My mind boggles at how much easier my life would have been as a student had I had one of these...

There's a really interesting article here about the use of Twitter for educational purposes, along with examples of its use and perceived benefits, in large class situations.

Mobile Libraries: Engineering Ed > Learning In 140-Character Bites

This post was to demonstrate the use of mobile technology and its application to an educational context, to a group of Kenyan colleagues who are over here for the purpose of exploring the Professional Certificate in Academic Practice (PCAP).

Other resources from the session are listed below.

1. Using mobile technologies

Assessment & Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS)
www.alps-cetl.ac.uk

Mo-blogging
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta_9GjG3NCs

YSJ Mobile Learning Objects
www.yorksj.ac.uk/learnteach/alps/learning_objects

2. Developing Learning Resources with students

English as a Lingua Franca
www.yorksj.ac.uk/learnteach/jorum

3. Web 2.0 technologies

A vision of students today
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Web 2.0 – The machine is using us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Michael Wesch - ALT-C 2009 keynote
http://alt-c.blip.tv/file/2615703/ (40-50 mins)


For those Kenyan colleagues who are visiting this blog, please feel free to add your comments with regards the session or any thoughts you have had since.

As always with Mr Doctorow - some interesting ideas voiced:

I've been looking into a whole pile of future technologies of recent and many of them are years away - real Tomorrow's World stuff. One, though, is just around the corner and being built into currently available applications as we speak (you can even grab one or two for the iPhone and similar devices).

The technology in question goes by the name of Augmented Reality and is, in general, the idea of overlaying virtual space and information over the top of real world. As an example, the iPhone app I've seen working uses the phones camera and screen to overlay markers for London Tube stations on top of the real world. The authors plan to add in adverts (special offers over the top of shops etc) to make the app pay for itself in the long run although for the moment it's just a clean view of where to walk to get the tube.

The interesting thing, for me, is where this sort of thing might go for education - I'm pretty sure I can envision you looking at an academic and seeing a list of papers, modules being taught, available tutorials etc etc. And - overlaid next to a friend, their recent twitter posts, facebook status etc.

It's all very exciting and just around the corner :)

I was going to link to a few specific videos of AR in action but that would really deny the sheer volume and diversity of AR projects underway at the moment so instead I give you the following Youtube search link:

Youtube AR

Oh - I can't resist - just one sneak peak to embed here, a 3D AR Map:

A rather excellent talk by Howard Rheingold on various aspects of information literacy:

If all goes to plan, we will be experimenting with the use of an alternative VLE to Blackboard, called Moodle. We will work on pilots this academic year, with a view to moving towards adoption by September 2010 (all to be approved by Academic Board).

In preparation, we've been playing around with a fresh install of Moodle which Gareth setup on his own server. So far he managed to get LDAP working so we can use our Uni IT accounts to login, but there's a long way to go yet.

Coventry University moving to Moodle
We recently had a chat with Andy Syson, Deputy Director e-learning Unit at Coventry University, who I met at the recent Heads of e-Learning Forum (HeLF). They too are moving from Blackboard to Moodle so we picked Andy's brains about how they were managing the process so far. Here are some key points and links:

This is their Moodle install, called Cuddle. I wonder if we should come up with a name for ours?
http://e-learning.coventry.ac.uk/cuddle/

This is the Coventry Moodle help website, aimed at assisting academic staff with the move over to the new VLE. Andy gave us permission to use and re-use any of the content here, which was fantastic of him:
http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/moodle/

Coventry's Online Help website:
http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/cuonlinehelp/

Some other useful points from our conversation

• Migration of Learning modules from BB to Moodle is annoying because the titles become encrypted on export from BB, when imported into Moodle. Cov are getting around this by working with academic staff who use LM's to re-work them, package them as IMS compliant content and storing them in a digital repository called Equella. Equella is integrated into Moodle, so all the learning modules are then open to import into Moodle. We might be able to do something similar using our digital repository, YSJDigiRep.
  
• Migration in general will be clean. In other words, there is not a simple solution to migrate all content from Blackboard over to Moodle, as there was when we moved from WebCT to Blackboard. This means that tutors will have to create all their courses from scratch in the new Moodle system. Of course this will be time consuming, but on the plus side, it means that tutors can revise their content, get rid of legacy files which are no longer used and become familiar with the Moodle interface and way of working.
  
• It's not feasible for a small team to migrate all the content from a module on behalf of academic staff. This is because the structure of Blackboard (which is deep and has nested elements), does not match with the linear framework of Moodle. This means that Learning Technologists have to work in partnership with academic staff, moving away from the client - service relationship. At YSJ, this is something which the DLD are strategically moving towards in terms of our professional relationship with staff and students.
  
• Quizzes are not migrating well from Blackboard. Coventry have been using a middleware programme called Respondus to move things from BB to Moodle.
  
• Moodle needs the QTi plugin installed in order to get things across, if you want to avoid the scenario above, but Coventry were unable to get the QTI plugin working.
  
• For non-credit or ad-hoc courses within Moodle, there is a Request a Course feature. This allows an academic member of staff to enter a few details which can then be approved by a member of e-Learning. The course then automatically gets created. This is standard Moodle functionality, so defninitely something we will want to enable.
  
• Apparently the latest release of Moodle (V2) is imminent and has a load of improved features, including a much better implementation of the TurnitinUK plugin.
  
• Coventry have established a Flying Squad team of Learning Technologists who are able to go out and visit academic staff members to help them with the move across to Moodle.