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)

immortality and impermanence

I found a couple of nice sites highlighting impermanent art today. The first, Scott Wade’s Dirty Car Art is the western equivalent of Tibetan sand mandalas. Scott creates some amazing work on the dusty rear window of his car and then photographs their deterioration. The second, Chalk Drawings is a series of sidewalk chalk drawings (astonishing Escher-like illusions). The interesting thing is that although they espouse the impermanence of their art, each artist has committed them to the web – where they could outlast much more ‘permanent’ artworks committed to canvas or print.

And for those of us without a drawing bent: OurStory looks quite interesting. It’s a site for telling and storing life stories (text, photos, video or audio) – I don’t know that I’d hope for immortality here (it could fold in a month), but it’s got a nice web2.0 interface with some helpful prompts for overcoming writer’s/photographer’s block. In fact, they’ll send you a regular email with a story-building question in each to help you along your way. It’s an interesting approach which could be translated to the classroom without much effort.

For the next level: building your own digital story; you could do worse than download the UNESCO Young Digital Creators CD-ROM kit – a CD-ROM for Digital Creators, teachers and moderators which includes win, mac and linux versions of the GIMP, Audacity, inkscape, tux paint, nvu, abiword, freemind and scribus. This is part of the UNESCO YDC Educator’s Kit, designed to help you generate and manage project-based learning activities with young (and not-so-young) people. A nicely rounded package for image, audio and web page creation/editing with some mind mapping software thrown in for good measure. I must say, I’m very attracted to learning programs on XP that I can later use on Linux (if and when I make the move – I think I might celebrate the release of Windows Vista with another foray into running Linux on my laptop)

And if you need some help with the web side of things, try the Web Developer’s List of Resources – an extensive portal of web development resources with an A-list of sites arranged in helpful categories. For more information, you might try Windows Live. It’s probably not a google crusher, but an extensive test; looking up my domain name ‘abacci’ returned better results on the live site than google (which only managed to find sites that referred to abacci.com, not the actual site itself).

(tags: search microsoft google searchengine GIMP Audacity inkscape tuxpaint nvu abiword freemeind scribus unesco digital education software digitalmedia life story history digitalstorytelling blogging community inspiration images journal memory photography projects publishing sharing storytelling timeline tool todo webdev WebDesign resources 3755a 3756d 3756y 3756x 3755g 3755p 3756z toread ***** art car dirt images Art chalk drawings illustration illusion) thanks to KEmery for the sand mandala pic.

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)