Category Archives: Teach & Research in my discipline

Testing VMWare player in labs with FCA staff

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Been working with Brogan Bunt and Peter Goodall to get an open-source applications pilot up and running. Brogan wants to run his classes in the ITS labs, but with open-source software. The solution has been to install VMWare player in the labs, which allows other operating systems to be used. THen the students bring in a USB specially formatted with Ubuntu (Linux) operating system and a suite of open-source or freeware applications on it. They create a range of sound/media products with them. Then they take it home and use exactly the same software to do their homework and projects. No need for them to purchase expensive proprietory software at home, nor to treck in to uni just to use software. Let’s hope the pilot works well. Cos so far, it sounds fantastic!IMG_4708IMG_4709IMG_4710

Helping your Community of Users

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Some great things are happening with the Edublogs pilot. We can now see great communities breaking out.

One particular Administrator of these communities has made a quick little video to help their users.

Adding comments and posts

What else are you doing to help develop your community of users?

digital voice recorder

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olympus dvr CC Hickey 08obviously not a ‘new’ technology, but if I had to name the one techi thing that changed life in my corner  it was the nifty usb recorder I started using five years ago…. what it means in practice is that the linguistically vulnerable student seeking advice about their writing (those using English as an additional language, for example) can instantly get a copy of the consultation (no cables, just pull it apart, stick it in their laptop) which they can listen to repeatedly at their own pace, and thereby  learn so much more than from a single exposure which they may or may not well recall when back at their desk trying to put into practice the pearls of linguistic wisdom showered upon them… their feedback assures me this was the best investment for teaching I ever made…

xmarks

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For those of you struggling to juggle your digital life between the home office and computer supplied by the workplace (which may not be your first preference of machine, c’est la vie) is so much easier with…. xmarks – which like Dropbox is an add-on to Firefox. And one of our UOW staff users has found that (unlike Dropbox), adding xmarks to your browser doesn’t seem to require admin – you can do it yourself. And it’s great – because it syncs all your bookmarks. So you can have your essential websites at your finger-tips no matter where you’re working today. http://www.xmarks.com/

xmarks-logo

Grad Diploma Education

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 I met with Sharon Tindall-Ford from Faculty of Education today regarding  The Grad Diploma Ed. It’s an intensive 10 month program with about 350 students in each intake ie per year. It is taught across 4 different campus: Wollongong, BB, SH and Bega.

The students spend 55 days in the classroom – about 20% of the total learning time.

Their program consists of core subjects from Wgong in the main plus eduStream for large classes and some video conferencing (vcf). Sharon said they are moving away from co-ordinators in each location, hence they have an ESDF project to harness appropriate technologies for Multi-location teaching, and ongoing professional development for interactive teaching ie 2-way approach even in the large classes. Richard Caladine working on this aspect with Tess Snowball. They are looking to move from eduStream to interactive vcf even for the large classes.

New requirement: Sharon wants to offer scheduled syncronous staff/student consultations to facilitate feedback and reflection on the classroom prac experience. Could be one-on-one, could be scheduled for tutor to whole tutorial, could be opt-in sessions on key topics eg Maths lesson plans, Classroom management. Also good for interventions for students struggling and under strees, to keep them in the program.

Who else wants this kind of facility?

SMART: live streaming of their eSim research

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The  new SMART centre (stilll under construction) will have a number of special simulation rooms in which hi-tech research will be occuring. The would like to have each room fitted with an IP camera and to be constantly recording the activities in the room, and to be able to broadcast this via both high-definition TV eg UoWConnect and digital signage (located in various part of the SMART building and indeed around campus) as well as lower-definition streaming media format for delivery to staff and students via eLearning environment and other websites and also via mobile devices such as iPhones.

To enable multiple streams of the media to be processed and delivered, UoW would need to purchase a new server and locate this in the UoW data centre. I am liaising with vendors regarding quotations. I’ll keep you posted, so watch this space.

For information SMART centre, see their website http://smart.uow.edu.au/index.html

Articulate – an alternative to Adobe Creative Suite?

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I met with Rob Wright from HB&s/Nursing on 29th March and he told me of the success he had been having with creating rich media teaching resources by building on PPT with products from Articulate, see http://www.articulate.com/

Rob said that he can integrate quizzes and output the lot as Flash files (swf) and import these into Equella collection (under development) for sharing and re-use. He said he is starting with some Science Education modules, with the aim of moving from lecture based resources to self-paced online learning materials. He also notes that the product has a strong user support community from both industry training and education sectors with regular blog postings around educational process and practical ‘how to…’ posts.

A screen shot from the Articulate website showing their products

I will contact Rob again and see if he can post some screen shots of the Flash modules that he has been able to output with this software. I am also talking to staff at ITS about the similarities and differences between this suite of products and that being offered by Adobe for media creation.

Brainstorming eLearning tech innovations with John

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I ducked over to the Innovation Campus for lunch with John Glynn, head of the Business School. We talked blogs and collaboration spaces for communities of students, mobile applications and competitive advantage, case and role-based learning and e-simulations, alumni blogs and videos, and busted a few subtly racist myths of international student habits.

I feel the spirit of innovation growing on campus, and it’s a great place to be.