Tag Archives: Learning

ETC and Randy Pausch (The Masters Degree I want to do!)

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I was watching a TED Talk Talk by Randy Pausch. He based his talk on his childhood dreams, but by about 40mins it in turns into a discussion about ETC. A great University course he helped develop after being a Disney Imagineer. It is so great and he speaks so enthusiastically about it. The course brings together Design, arts and engineering students initially, then opens up to a broader audience.

This guys has had some amazing opportunities, but I really like that someone else has picked up the ball for the ‘Masters Degree’. I really wish we could have something similar to offer students here at UOW.
There is more information about ETC here.

Sharon Robinson award winning video

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I got an email this morning from Sharon Robinson in Biology that she and her team had one first prize in the CholorFilms recent (session 3) content for the best plant videos on YouTube.

Congrats! I loved the video too, and learnt a lot. I’m emailing a link to my son, who is interested in this kind of thing and trying to work out some career/uni options. I wonder if it will impress a 15 year old? I guess he’s right on the money for a potential UOW student. (Bright kid, local high-school, curious by nature.)

Xtranormal

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Xtranormal is a great tool to create a short movie. All you need is a script. That’s right just a script, no cameras, no lights and no actors, it’s all animated on screen before your eyes. The web-based version is quick and easy to use. I made this is about 5mins.

So go ahead and try it yourself at xtranormal.com.

iPad replaces paper, not laptops (from Inside Higher Ed).

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http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/07/12/golub

This was a good read. In a nutshell:

“The crucial question for academics is: What in our current arsenal will the iPad replace? After using the device, the answer surprised me: the iPad makes a lousy computer replacement, but it does a great job of replacing paper.”

The author Alex Golub also discusses the potential for the iPad and iTunes to revolutionalise access to journal articles that we currently rely on our uni’s library to supply, and make it much easier to just get the articles we want (as opposed to the piles of stuff the publishers bundle in to the subscriptions that we never want to wade through, but have to, to get to the stuff we want.)

ScreenR and SnapzPro

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I had our regular monthly catchup today with Rob Wright, to share innovations and eLearning initiatives. We discussed the possibility of doing a pilot for Media Creation Tools in second session, and i mentioned that the Learning Designers were also interested and possibly the Library staff who also create lots of online tutorials. I asked Rob what he used to create the “how to” video on his blog and he said SnapZpro and also mentioned that the Articulate community used and promoted a web-based serviced called ScreenR.

http://screenr.com/

I used it and am very impressed with the ease of use (no account setup/login as i already have a Twitter account) and the quality of the image and audio of the movie it output is great. Here it is:

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…