Sony Reader: Ebooks made readable

We've mentioned the Sony Reader before, and I think it is going to be released (in the US) soon.

It sounds like it really will make reading onscreen easier, however the £300 price tag will probably prevent it from becoming the 'iPod for text'.

I like it though and I think I'd like to use it when travelling. Visit the Command N podcast #82 and skip to 4 minutes 50 seconds to see it.

Perhaps this sort of thing is going to be important in the future of learning?

Pointing students towards useful resources on a subject

We've looked at a lot of ways that web feeds can be used by yourself and your students to keep track of information on topics. This has included supplying students with OPML reading lists of blogs and web sites that they could quickly and easily subscribe to.

Another way that you could supply students with a selected range of sites to explore would be to create a Google 'Custom Search Engine'.

You'll need to create a Google account, and then you can add a list of sites related to your subject that students might find useful. Of course they could still search the internet in the regular way, but this could help them by focusing their search initially.

Once you have created the search engine, you can add all the sites from an OPML file (perhaps downloaded from your Bloglines account) to it and then delete those that are not relevant.

I created one that searches some useful learning technology sites:



Try searching on a technology like blogs or podcasts, to see if there are any articles that interest you.

New Guides: 'Recording Audio' and 'Linking to Electronic Resources'

We've produced two new guides for Edge Hill staff, available on the Learning Services guides page.

Firstly 'Recording Audio' is a very basic 'demystifying' type guide. It covers the steps that a member of staff would take to record a lecture or session and put it online.

The 'Linking to Electronic Resources' guide details how the electronic resources, available from the Library Catalogue, can be linked to from a WebCT area.

RSS Feeds - Display Tools

Further to Pete's recent posts 'Create Quick Links to Web Feeds' and ‘Visualising Events in Time: SIMILE Timelines’, I have also been experimenting with different RSS display tools:

(I have created a couple of examples which are available to view in the Developers Community WebCT course. )

1/ A Timeline - created with 'My Timelines Beta'
http://www.mytimelines.net/

As their website states, "My Timelines let's you easily add an AJAX based timeline that displays your most recent blog entries."

I really like this tool. The timeline provides a chronological representation of changes that are made and it's interactive too! You can pan the timeline right/left with your mouse, and click on markers for more info.

It is a straightforward process generating the timeline and there are some styling options included at the time of generation such as the size, time display etc. You cannot, (as far as I can tell) restyle the actual timeline but you can embed it into a webpage and style that as you like.

As well as using this tool to create a 'Blog Timeline', I have also created a 'Wiki Timeline'.
Changes to the Wiki appear displayed on the timeline by page title, so multiple changes to the same page make the timeline appear a bit repetitive and messy but the individual markers provide additional info/ specifics of the changes.

It will provide an overview/ history of edits and notification of changes to the wiki. I think it could be a great alternative means of tracking activity on a wiki.

2/ ‘Grazr’ is a tool which allows you to display feeds for browsing (Podcasts can also be listened to within the tool!)
http://www.grazr.com/

At first glance this tool appeared to be suited to large websites which provide multiple feeds - to enable the creation of ‘feedmaps’ which make browsing (or grazing) all the available feeds on a site possible without the hassle of subscribing

For more information read James E. Lee's Blog posting - 'Create a feedmap to help people find, preview, and subscribe to your feeds'.

However…

I like Grazr and think that it has the potential to be very useful in an educational setting.

It is a very easy to use tool.

At a basic level you can use Grazer to display one feed, either as an embedded ‘widget’* or with a link. You just follow 3 simple steps and are then provided with a range of install options.

• According to Wikipedia [Feb 2007]
  “A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.”

With a little more understanding of OPML files you can display multiple feeds with Grazr.

This could be a really good way of providing regular, dynamic and current information within a course as well as introducing students to blogs and podcasts as sources of useful information.

3/ A Basic Text Update - created with 'Feed 2JS Build JavaScript and Preview'
http://slashdemocracy.org/xml/feed2js/build.php

This feed generation allows you to present changes/updates in text form.

Again I like this tool because I think it is really simple to use, it can be styled and the resulting script can be cut and pasted directly into a WebCT text block or HTML page.

To style the resulting feeds I have used the text block editor within WebCT (to create a simple two column layout, one for New Posts and one for Comments). For more sophisticated styling, I have used CSS and then uploaded the files.

This is another great way of introducing dynamic content to your online course area.

Visualising Events in Time: SIMILE Timelines

The SIMILE project is based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of their developments are interactive timelines that you can use to visualise time based events.

This can be used to display historical events. In this example they've displayed the events surrounding the assasination of JFK, and if you have time to play with the code you can create your own variations.

Meg found a web service that uses this technology to help you easily create a timeline for your own web site. The 'My Timelines' service just uses the RSS feed from your web site and supplies you with the code to place a timeline on your own web site. Meg has created one for Cakes, and it allows you to easily view activity on the blog.

It could prove to be a good way of introducing the concept of RSS feeds to people, because it demonstrates how they work in a visual way.

Badger: Create Quick Links to Web Feeds

You can create quick links to web feeds, from relevant websites, very quickly using Badger.

Just add the details of the page, and select the colours and you'll get some code. Copy and paste this into a text block in your WebCT area and you'll get something similar to what you see below.


















It might still have some problems, but it looks like an simpler service to use than we've looked at before (FeedoStyle and FeedJ2S).

(Via Boing Boing)

Lawrie Phipps' Presentation on Emerging Technologies

Last month (25.01.07) Lawrie Phipps from the JISC Users and Innovation Programme came to the SOLSTICE Centre at Edge Hill University to talk about Emerging Web Technologies.

The session was videoed and edited into the 11 sections below. They are currently available as streamed Windows Media (.wmv) files.

01. Introduction - (2:55)
Links:
O'Reilly: What is Web 2.0

02. The Web as a Platform - (2:16)
Links:
Google Docs

03. Participation - (3:25)
Links:
Wikipedia: Edge Hill University
Wikipedia: University of Plymouth

04. Social Networking - (5:38)
Links:
SurfBird.com
ELLG Spaces

05. Data Consumption - (3:23)
Links:
Skibonk.com
also see: Googlemapsmania blog

06. Are These Useful? - (3:28)

07. Real Students and Their Digital Experiences - (8:34)
Links:
Instant Messenger
YouTube
MySpace
Google Mail
Blogger
Skype
Zoomr
del.icio.us
Writeboard
Nuvvo

08. Encouraging the Use of Technologies - (1:59)

09. What Next? A Look at Second Life - (4:08)
Links:
Second Life
What is an Avatar?
Education space in Second Life

10. Assessing Risk - [2:23]
Links:
Yahoo Mail
Flickr

11. Google Homepages - [7:36]
Links:
Google Homepages


In the future I intend to write some posts expanding on some of these topics from our perspective.

Finally, this nicely crafted video from Kansas State University seems to have been linked to by everyone, and it gives an overview of what we have been looking at here, and how the Web is evolving.

Web Cats: Episode Five - Interview with John Davey, SOLSTICE Manager

In Episode Five (10:45 minutes) Peter Beaumont interviews John Davey, SOLTICE Manager, about the role of the SOLSTICE Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Edge Hill University.

Other viewing options:

• Subscribe to itpc://clickcaster.com/clickcast/rss/1163 in iTunes (select 'Advanced' / 'Subscribe to Podcast...')
• Watch .wmv streamed version in Windows Media Player
• Watch online at ClickCaster

You can contact John and the SOLSTICE team via email at solstice@edgehill.ac.uk or telephone on 01695 584744.

A transcription is available.

Web Cats: Episode Four - Anna, Pete and Faculty of HMSAS

Episode Four (7min 36sec) is an introduction to the work that Anna and Pete do with the Faculty of HMSAS.

HMSAS stands for Humanities, Managment, Social and Applied Sciences and it covers the departments of English, Business, History, Law and Criminology, Media, Natural Geographical and Applied Sciences, Performing Arts, Social and Phsycological Sciences and Sport and Physical Activity.

Viewing options:

• Subscribe to itpc://clickcaster.com/clickcast/rss/1163 in iTunes (select 'Advanced' / 'Subscribe to Podcast...')
• Watch online at ClickCaster
• Watch below

Contents:

Lydia Hale introduces the episode.

Meg Juss interviews Anna Connell and Pete Beaumont about what their role is in working with the Faculty of HMSAS and projects and technologies that they are currently working with.

Free Images for your Course

For finding images to use in WebCT areas, I've always used stock.xchng, which has almost always supplied me with the images I need for free. I've only had to mail the creator to let them know I'm using it, and I guess that's only good manners!

However Newman College's Elearning blog brought Yotophoto to my attention. This is the best service I've seen that brings together images from around the web that are, for example, public domain or which use Creative Commons licences. You still have to accredit the image to the creator in some cases, so check the licence for each image.

Yotophoto makes it easier to find images for icons (for example I struggled to find images which worked for WebCT Discussion areas), but you do lose some of the benefits of stock.xchng such as knowing the images will be large enough to use in full screen PowerPoint presentations.

Going beyond finding images, Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) have created quite compreshensive resources around using images in education. These include a quick presentation covering why you might use images and instructions on how to add them to a WebCT area.

Learning Object Libraries

Yesterday Sheena McLeod came to Edge Hill to show us the Intrallect digital library for learning objects. It was interesting to see the system but I personally didn't think that Edge Hill would use it enough justify the price.

Jorum uses Intrallect and as that is publicly open perhaps we could get involved with that, using it and submitting resources to it.

Also Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) is also designed for this sort of storage. Jeff Barr at d.construct talked about this among other of Amazon's web services, and for example the Chicago Crime mashup site uses it for storage. Costs are $0.15 (9 pence) per GB per Month for storage and $0.20 (12 pence) per GB of data transfered, which means that if we were only using it for a few objects we could be paying very little for it.

As I understand it, each object would have a public or private URL and so I imagine that we could integrate the resources easily within the library management system, or a Learning Technology area on the web site.

Web Cats: Episode Three - Adrian, Lisa, Peter and Faculty of Health

Episode Three (6min 55sec) is an introduction to the Adrian, Lisa and Peter and their work with the Faculty of Health.

Viewing options:

• Subscribe to itpc://clickcaster.com/clickcast/rss/1163 in iTunes (select 'Advanced' / 'Subscribe to Podcast...')
• Watch .wmv streamed version in Windows Media Player
• Watch online at ClickCaster

Contents:

Meg Juss introduces the episode.

Peter Beaumont interviews Adrian Cain, Lisa Bushell and Peter Reed about what their role is in working with the Faculty of Health, and projects and technologies that they are currently working with.

RSS Feeds: Tracking with Groupwise

Mark mentioned a little program that you can install which allows you to track RSS feeds through Groupwise (which we use for email here at Edge Hill).

It's available from the Novell site and just adds another folder to Groupwise under Cabinet.










While using Bloglines and Google Reader seem to be the best readers for text based information and I like iTunes for audio and video, integrating email and RSS could be a way of getting staff and students to take their first steps in subscribing to RSS feeds. This in turn could lead to them feeling more inspired and confident regarding creating their own content.

SOLSTICE Forum: Research, Digital Geographies and Online Discussion

The SOLSTICE research forum yesterday was recorded and MP3 and Windows Media files will be available through the SOLSTICE website soon, along with an RSS feed so that people can subscribe to future materials.

But here's a sneek preview!

01 - Mark Schofield - Research

02 - Gerry Lucas - Digital Geographies

03 - Cathy Sherratt - Online Discussion

These Windows Media files are available now and all are worth listening to. I think that the research done on discussion is relevant to many people, as so many are using discussion boards in some way in their WebCT areas.

We've posted before about this ongoing research and I still think that many students need to be taught how to discuss before they are expected to learn through discussion. Lindsey's comment about using screencasting to explain the process, and the need for the tutor to model good practice and make their thought processes explicit are still worth exploring further.

'Top 100 Education Blogs' from Online Education Database

OEDb put together a list of their top 100 Education Blogs which might be of interest to those looking at widening their reading.

To subscribe to these blogs you could:

• Start off by creating an account on Bloglines.
• Subscribe to blogs individually or download my OPML file and use it to instantly subscribe to each of the blogs in the Top 100 list that have web feeds.
• You can import the OPML file to Bloglines by going to the 'Feeds' tab and choosing 'Import Subscriptions' at the bottom of the page.

When you have a lot of blogs in Bloglines, it is worth setting them so that you only initially see the headlines. This will make it easier for you to quickly browse all the blogs for interesting posts. Do this by, near the top left of the screen, selecting 'Options' > Feed Options > Posting Length > Display Headlines Only.

Using Blogs as Databases and for Lecture Notes

Here in LTD we were talking last year about creating a database driven application to keep track of everything we do. For example if we get an email about a course, we could just search the database for notes about what we'd done for that course in the past, and for other details about it.

In the Geekbrief podcast episode 112 you can watch Cali Lewis talk to Leo Laporte about Robert Scoble's idea of using a private blog in this way. She also talks about how students could use a private blog to keep a database of their lecture notes and if they have a laptop, to take notes on their blog the first place.

We've got WordPress installed at Edge Hill so I'll ask IT services for one that we can use in this way, with all LTD members contributing to it. Look at it as a Cakes intranet site perhaps?!

Web Cats: Episode Two - Paul, Meg and Faculty of Education

Episode Two (8min 45sec) is an introduction to the Paul and Meg and their work with the Faculty of Education.

Viewing options:

• Subscribe to itpc://clickcaster.com/clickcast/rss/1163 in iTunes (select 'Advanced' / 'Subscribe to Podcast...')
• Watch .wmv streamed version in Windows Media Player
• Watch online at ClickCaster

Contents:

Peter Beaumont introduces the episode
Peter Beaumont interviews Paul Duvall and Meg Juss about what their role is in working with the Faculty of Education, and projects and technologies that they are currently working with. The research blog mentioned can be is available to view.

podgrunt: Introduction to Podcasting

Craig Syverson at Gruntmedia has created an excellent explanation of how subscribing to podcasts works. Have a look at the video and the basic overview page. I wish I could get my videos to look that good, so I might use this video when explaining what podcasting is to academic staff here at Edge Hill University.

And while we're on the subject of Podcasting, the Learning Technology Development manager here at Edge Hill is running a couple of sessions about the use of audio technologies in academic courses. They'll be called "iPod Therefore iLearn" and "iPod therefore iDo". You'll need to book soon as they are running over the next few weeks, and they are open to everyone, even those who aren't staff at Edge Hill.

Web Cats: LTD's Video Podcast Episode One

We've started developing a podcast both as a way of exploring the technologies and as a way of communicating with the academic staff in a different way.

Episode One (4min 18sec) is an introduction to the Learning Technology Development department.


Viewing options:

• Subscribe to itpc://clickcaster.com/clickcast/rss/1163 in iTunes (select 'Advanced' / 'Subscribe to Podcast...')
• Watch .wmv streamed version in Windows Media Player
• Watch online at ClickCaster

Contents:

• Peter Reed introduces the episode
• Peter Beaumont interviews Mark Roche

As mentioned in the interview LTD contact details are available

Jane Hart's List of Free E-learning Resources

Welcome back to another year of Cakes!

Before you get too busy have a look at Jane Hart's comprehensive list of free tools that can, or are being used in learning and teaching.

She's also written a guide to where each type of tool might be used, which is something I've been thinking about doing, so that will save me some work. However a cut down version covering just the tools that Edge Hill staff are likely to use soon might be worth developing.

If you don't have time to look at the list properly, why not subscribe to Jane's blog where you'll get daily updates. I use the web-based feed aggregator Bloglines to subscribe to blog feeds, so have a look at that if you've not got one.