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)

Auto-blog entry from del.icio.us links

Ha, lazy blogger trick #1: create blog entries without actually writing anything. Now I just have to come back every now and then to give a little spiel on why I found these links worthy of inclusion in my del.icio.us stable. Yesterday’s crop:

Scan, copy and fax with your camera phone or digital camera

a service that lets you capture information contained in paper documents or whiteboards. 1) capture the image using your mobile camera phone or digital camera 2) send the image to scanr 3) get back an email which includes a searchable digital PDF file of your image this works best with a high res image (1 to 2 GB), but looked promising for capturing that end-of-lecture mess you’ve created on the whiteboard – ready to post on your blog or something

(tags: scan tools pdf Mobile photo mlearning interesting todo)

artomat

retired cigarette vending machines that have been converted to vend art – pretty obviously, this link came about while writing my last post.

(tags: art artomat art-o-mat vending fun todo)

Vending Machines

Vending machines have been in my mind of late. It all started with a reference I found to an art vending machine in New York – $5 art from a defunct cigarette dispenser. “What a cool idea” I thought, and moved on to other distractions. Shortly thereafter, I spotted an article on book vending machines in Paris.

Thinks: if you wanted to build something like this for yourself, you might start with a search on eBay for vending machines – plenty there to choose from in a range of styles and prices. If you had enough second hand books you might decorate your vending machine in the style of Patrick Hall…

And that’s as far as I’ve come with this project Actually, I’ve looked into where you might plug a book vending machine in, and picked up an industrial strength guillotine for creating the decor, and have actually tossed out about 3 ute loads of paperbacks since then, but it’s still in my head. Why write about it now? Well, another bunch of vending machine pix took my fancy. Originally thunk up my the German employment agency, jobsintown, I thought the TAFE should use this idea for themselves – click on each for an enlargement.

Ah… magic boxes. You put your money in and stuff comes out, but how it happens is anyone’s guess.