Tag Archives: Research

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.)

Concepts map links within a blog post.

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Collaboratively or individually produced concept maps included as a link within a blog post… If this sounds interesting read on for a free solution.

This is a link to a test map

It was created online at…http://www.bubbl.us

A link was generated within the online tool that was then added to this post.

– It can be a private mind map or collaboratively authored.

– It can also be exported as an image (.jpg or.png).

– It is free – A map image can be exported without creating an account but to save, share etc a – free – account needs to be created.

If students were using a blog to discuss/respond/reflect they could produce the mind map and then create a post with a link to the mind map image as I have done here.

Similarly it is another option for collaborative brainstorming activities between researchers, co-authors etc.

It’s worth a look 🙂

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.)

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

Dropbox – a cloud with a difference

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Synchronisation of files across multiple computers & mobile devices, web-based access to files, managed sharing of folders with other dropbox users, url creation for public documents for emailing links, web-album generation, event history tracking of your dropbox (file restoration) etc …

Well worth a look and a boon when travelling and you need access to storage or sharing items with international contacts.

Hosted externally, which brings along its own considerations, but this type of thing would have great potential for groups of students working collaboratively on a group assignment, sharing progress between themselves and tutor etc…

Currently free for up to 2GB of storage, plans beyond that.

https://www.dropbox.com/


Dropbox

Presenting student or researchers’ work on laptops over wireless

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In a recent discussion with the group working to get the SMART centre up and running, a situation was discussed  in which guests, researchers and students would like to be able to bring their laptops to the university, and in various meeting rooms and Common Teaching areas to share what is on their screen with other participants by publishing or sharing their screen to Smart/interactive whiteboards over the wireless network. And it would be good to be able to do this when working or meeting in small groups, where each group develops something on their laptop and then at the end of the lesson/meeting they can present their work to all the other groups. There would need to be some kind of interface to allow the different groups to push the work on their laptops to the various public screens in the various rooms.

Is this something you want to be able to do? Please add a comment.

Elluminate VCF screenshots

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This is a screen shot taken from a Camtasia movie of Elluminate VCS fron their website: http://www.elluminate.com/Products/Elluminate_VCS/?id=74/

The shot on the left shows 4 people  having a live session from home on what the website calls “low-end broadband.” Specifically, the video says that each participant is sending 162-200 kilobits of data per second (kb/s) and that they are receiving a total of 700 kb/s in order to see all 4 participants on their screen. This is not a high bandwitch requirement.

The right-hand screen-shot shows 2 people in a virtual class sessions collaborating on an xls file.

ElluminateVCS