thinking of the long white cloud

While Leigh, Rose, Sean, Jo and others are just kicking off the future of learning in a networked world in NZ, exploring Informal Learning and other online adventures, I’ve been plugging away at my I.T. Docs and MP3s project, putting a couple of hundred I.T. related word documents online. I’ve converted them to MP3s. and created a searchable full text index of the collection, with an RSS feed for any given search string so the results can easily be integrated into a wiki or blog. It’s been a satisfying project (enough to keep me going in the face of a rather apathetic bunch of students), but I still wish I was with my good friends over in Dunedin – perhaps I could get someone to make me a dorodango as a sort of consolation.

Of course, I don’t have the spare time for a conference, the only reason I’ve had time for my document and mp3 project is that I’ve dropped my study to just 2 subjects this semester (and pretty well ignored those subjects too), but I know I’m going to have to attend to the formal study soon, and have tagged Zotero to see if it can help there (and perhaps for blogging too, though the del.iciou.us links seem to be pushing me along quite well enough on this front). Zotero’s a research tool for firefox that allows you to capture citation, screendumps, notes etc. and ferret through them in a variety of ways. Currently it’s in private beta, but will be launching for public beta soon.

It’s funny how much I dislike being a student, as opposed to the enjoyment I get from inflicting the learning experience on my poor students – but more than both, I enjoy creating tools. I think the key word here is ‘creation’, and the three areas seem to lie along a continuum of opportunity for this act.

(tags: teaching elearning audio resouces it search ica05 edublogs TALO onlinelearning learning education informal poster presentation image media art howto mud tutorial ball dorodango japanese dirt fun todo toread firefox research tools citation reference opensource bibliographic knowledge metadata plugins tool)

planet TAFE

Another GIMP experiment. This time I took advantage of the cloudy weather to create a panorama of my workplace, Bathurst TAFE, before converting it to a planet (using Polar distortion) and plugging the result into fd’s Flickr Toys. The result: Planet TAFE.

Circling a star in the outer arm of a small spiral galaxy, planet TAFE is searching for intelligent life (’cos there’s bugger all down here)

Notes for future attempts:

1. Take the panorama on an overcast day, or at midday, to minimise variations in aperture/shutter speed. Don’t forget to set the camera to manual mode.
2. Don’t kick the tripod halfway through the panorama shot, or if you do, start over.
3. Make a generous overlap between shots, about 50% seems to work well.
4. Take the shots in an anti-clockwise direction (not essential, but it suits the default options for pandora)
5. Try to take the photos when there aren’t too many students walking around (it’s hard to match them up otherwise)
6. Start the panorama from an organic section (the trees would have been a much easier spot to blur and join the polar distortion than a section of architecture).

(tags: gimp photography tafe bathurst flickrtoys poster planetafe planet)

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On the professional development front, I found an interesting social website for educational bloggers: Popular Stories – EdBloggerNews. This is similar to Digg but for Education Blog posts, good for folks who love to read (and write) EduBlog posts but are finding it difficult to get through all of the articles in their RSS feeds. I’ll be watching it over the next few days to see if it’s got the critical mass necessary to be come a valuable resource.

(tags: aggregator blogging digg edtech education elearning news resources toread edublogs ***** TALO)