Tag Archives: del.icio.us

Podcast Workflow

I have been asked about my podcasting workflow. This article outlines how and what equipment I use to record the e-Learning Stuff Podcast. This is only one way in which to record a remote panel based podcast, and I am sure there are numerous other ways in which to do this. I have also changed how I have recorded over the two years I have been publishing the podcast due to changes in equipment and software.

Key lesson is that there is more to podcasting than just the technical stuff…

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100 ways to use a VLE – #82 Collating links

I was once a Business Studies and Economics lecturer and I taught the subject for many years. I use to at that time use a range of learning technologies, which at the time was quite innovative, but today would be considered old hat or even backwards.

One thing though that I did use quite early on was the web and got my learners to use it to find useful news stories and share them in class. I would then collate those links and share them on our “learning platform” which at the time was simply a website I had created…

Now today there are a wealth of social bookmarking sites out there such as Delicious, Diigo which make this really easy. Students can save their website links, tag them and using a shared tag these can be easily seen by others on the course.

However these services are a somewhat dependent on learners creating accounts for these services and not all learners will want to and can you really force learner to create an account on a social bookmarking site just for the course? Unless they use it on a regular basis, they are probably unlikely to use it anyhow, or even remember to use it. That’s a reason why using a single account with a group of learners may not work either…

However if you are using the VLE, then all your learners will have an account for that and the VLE can be used as a place for learners to not only post their links, but also why they think the link is useful and how it helped them.

There is nothing to stop the practitioner taking the links and adding them to a social bookmarking service such as Delicious.

100 ways to use a VLE – #81 Embedding a social bookmarking tag cloud

I was once a Business Studies and Economics lecturer and I taught the subject for many years. I use to at that time use a range of learning technologies, which at the time was quite innovative, but today would be considered old hat or even backwards.

One thing though that I did use quite early on was the web and got my learners to use it to find useful news stories and share them in class. I would then collate those links and share them on our “learning platform” which at the time was simply a website I had created…

Now today there are a wealth of social bookmarking sites out there such as Delicious, Diigo which make this really easy. Students can save their website links, tag them and using a shared tag these can be easily seen by others on the course.

You can also create a tag cloud from these links and embed them into the VLE. This then allows learners to access all those links based on the tags, simply by clicking the tag.

This cloud is a live cloud, so will update automatically as new bookmarks are added, or additional tags added to existing bookmarks.

This also adds a visual hook to learners on the keywords for their course and their studies.

Practitioners can of course create their own bookmarks and tag them accordingly for their learners.

Practitioners across a curriculum area can also bookmark useful websites, tag them and share them.

Practitioners from different institutions could also share their bookmarks and embed the tag cloud in their own respective institutional VLEs.

Tag clouds are a different yet simple way of sharing a series of bookmarks. However they are dependent on users tagging their bookmarks with relevant tags.

e-Learning Stuff Podcast #031: Store it, Tag it, Share it

With David Sugden, Ron Mitchell, Lilian Soon and James Clay.

This is the thirty first e-Learning Stuff Podcast, Store it, Tag it, Share it.

James, David, Ron and Lilian discuss various web tools that can be used to store your stuff; like documents, notes, files. Tools that allow you to tag your stuff and share your stuff. They talk about the tools they use with their stuff and they talk about how these tools can be used for learning. 

Download the podcast in mp3 format: Store it, Tag it, Share it

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

  • Use Evernote to save your ideas, things you see, and things you like. Then find them all on any computer or device you use.
  • Dropbox is a way to store, sync, and, share files online.
  • Etherpad – When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone’s screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.
  • Now that Etherpad is open source, other versions of the service are now available such as iEtherpad
  • Our snow podcast from last week.
  • TinyGrab is a simple yet extremely powerful utility for Mac OS X and Windows. Harnessing the power of pre-existing and new OS screenshot taking capabilities, TinyGrab instantly uploads and allows you to share with a small URL— all in under thirty-seconds.
  • Skitch is a Mac application for  making screen grabs and then annotating them, before uploading them to a web service.
  • Screenr – Instant screencasts for Twitter. Now you can create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet. Just click the record button and you’ll have your ready-to-tweet screencast in seconds.
  • Jing
  • Screencast-O-Matic
  • Format Factory
  • iPadio takes any phone call and streams it live on the web, makes phonecasts and phlogs simple and immediate.
  • Veho USB Microscope
  • Delicious

Photo source.

Microsoft to move into social bookmarking

According to Mashable, Microsoft will be moving into social bookmarking.

According to Microsoft Evangalist John Martin, the company is set to release a product called “Social Bookmarks” this week. The product sounds a whole lot like del.icio.us, and will initially be deployed on MSDN and TechNet, so look for it to be mostly hardcore techie bookmarks for now. Features include bookmarking (presumably via a bookmarklet), tagging, and a web-based account where your bookmarks are stored.

Social bookmarking as seen on sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg and Stumbleupon allow users to collect (or bookmark) their favourite sites online and share those bookmarks with their friends and others.Microsoft to move into social bookmarking

My Top Ten Applications for e-Learning

My top ten applications which I use to create and support the use of e-learning are…

Keynote – a superb presentation package, not matter how many times I start creating a presentation in PowerPoint, I virtually always end up in Keynote. The latest version (iWork ’08) is a real improvement on the previous version and I will admit I do like the audience going “ooh” when I use the cube transition.

Toast – not only a superb disk burning piece of software, but extremely capable of converting a range of video file formats and doing it well. Another useful video conversion tool I have started using is VisualHub.

EyeTV – though Windows Media Centre (and now Vista) has a much better interface, the versatility, the editing and exporting functionality make EyeTV the only real choice when it comes to recording and editing television. Combined with Toast and VisualHub you suddenly can record, edit and watch that video wherever, whenever and on whatever you want.

Dreamweaver – steep learning curve, but if you need to get your hands dirty with HTML and websites then this package is perfect. Though I do like Dreamweaver, I know with web tools such as WordPress and Drupal tools such as Dreamweaver are becoming less essential than they were in the past.

Fireworks – For manipulating images for the web then I go with Fireworks every time. Can also be used to create simple animated gifs. I do use PhotoShop, but for web image editing I always start Fireworks first.

Firefox (with Safari a close second and Flock in third place) – I can’t work with non-tabbed browsers, so on the PC it’s Firefox all the time, on the Mac I mainly use Safari. Safari with it’s .mac integration allows me to share my bookmarks over multiple computers and over the web. Now Safari (in beta) is available for Window and I like how Safari for Windows looks almost exactly like Safari for the Mac. Flock is for me relatively new and I do like the integration with online tools such as Flickr, del.icio.us and WordPress.

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