All posts by James Clay

news

Happy Birthday BBC News Website

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The BBC News website is ten years old.

Happy Birthday.

BBC News

I have been using the site for that long now, so it’s nice to see that not only is it still around and still very popular, more importantly, all the stories I was reading and using for learning back in the late 1990s are still available as well. For example this story about Sainsburys from 1999 is still online and the links still work!

Too often on the web sites will rebrand or rename and all their old links die or change or become redundant. At least with the BBC News it is possible to link stories from nearly ten years ago.

conference, m-learning, mobile

Handheld Learning 2007

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Unfortunately I couldn’t make Handheld Learning this year, it clashed with everything that week.

So it’s nice to know I can catch up online.

Well, the conference was incredibly busy and very exciting. Lots of new product announcements, major addresses by senior government ministers and policy makers and a who’s who of practitioners that are doing amazing and leading edge stuff with mobile and ubiquitous technologies. A couple of major themes emerged; the speed of change, need to involve more students and learners in the conference and I’m sure quite a few, yet to surface, while we sift through the materials.

You’ll now find a lot of media from the conference now online with much more to follow:

Handheld Learning TV is at:
http://handheldlearning.blip.tv

Podcasts are at:
http://tinyurl.com/39fzx4

Presentation slides at:
http://www.slideshare.net/HandheldLearning/slideshows

Pictures at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/handheldlearning/sets/

Tony Vincent provides a review at:
http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/content/view/41/2/

And Bob Harrison at:
http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/content/view/40/2/

A large list of other people’s reviews can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/32u5xy

And to quote Graham, “isn’t the internet wonderful”.

news

Becta complains about Microsoft

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Becta have been complaining to the Office of Fair Trading about Microsoft.

The BBC reports that:

The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices. The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.

Becta is advising schools not to move to Microsoft’s subscription licensing model. They are also advising schools to look at open source solutions as well.

audio, video

Online Video Conversion Tools

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I have mentioned video media conversion tools before, but most of them have been applications. These are fine for example if you have the right computer (you need a Mac for VisualHub) or you have administrative rights to install the software on your Windows computer (which in institutions is generally not the case).

So if you can’t install a conversion tool on your computer, how do you convert video files, well I have been looking at online video conversion tools for a while now.

The one I have used and found the results work well on mobile devices is Media-Convert.

Media Convert

It’s quite simple, you upload a media file from your computer, and an online conversion converts into the file format of your choice. It can handle a large number of file types including text and audio as well as video, and has a range of possible output file types.

It can be used to create PDF files which is handy.

The user interface could be better, it is covered in Google ads, but it is free and they need to make money somehow.

I was impressed with the quality, I took a large Quicktime movie and converted it into an MP4 file that could be used on my Nokia N73, and the conversion was done very well.

I was recently told about another online media conversion tool, Zamzar, however the site is populated with pop-ups and you also need to enter an e-mail address which smacks to me that my e-mail might be harvested and passed onto third parties.

m-learning, mobile

Sidekick Slide

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The Register reports that T-Mobile is launching the Sidekick Side in the UK.

T-Mobile last night unveiled the Sidekick Slide, the first handset in the consumer-friendly email gadget range to appear since T-Mobile cut its ties with Sharp and signed up Motorola as a manufacturer.

Sidekicks (sometimes referred to as Blackberrys for kids) is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge phone aimed at the younger social end of the market.

Sidekick Slide

With a 2.5″ screen and a 1.3MP camera, it allows users to browse the web, send e-mail and use Yahoo Instant Messaging. It also comes with a slide-out qwerty keyboard for text entry.

If this is the sort of device that some of our learners are using, we need to ensure that they can access learning content via it. It  looks like an interesting device for mobile learning.

Read more 

youtube

Helpdesk

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I suspect most people have seen this amusing video about an early helpdesk call.

Of course if YouTube is blocked in your institution you may have a little trouble.

What most people don’t realise is that when this Norwegian comedy skit (not Dutch as was written in the Guardian today) was first uploaded, it was obviously in breach of copyright. The owners, NRK, had not given permission for the clip to be uploaded to YouTube and a take down order was requested.

However how come you can see the clip above, most people who know me will know that I do know a fair bit about copyright.

Well this is the official NRK version, who have their own channel now on YouTube, so NRK uploaded the video and legally I can embed it into my blog above.

Excellent.

NRK are not the only broadcaster who have their own YouTube channel, so do the BBC.  YouTube is becoming more and more useful and less and less problematic as it use to be.

news

Is your college e-enabled?

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There was an interesting article in yesterday’s (Tuesday’s) Guardian about how un-e-enabled a lot of FE colleges are in the UK.

While not unimpressed with these statistics, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) puts a different slant on the overall state of ICT in FE. By its reckoning, barely a quarter of colleges are “e-enabled”, to use the quango’s unlovely jargon. A further quarter, by contrast, are either not convinced about the need to sharpen up their ICT or are late-comers to it.

So where would you put your college?

Are you working in an e-enabled college?

podcast, podcasting

Podcasting Tools and Resources

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At a recent HE Academy event I presented at I offered to provide a series of links relating to resources and tools for digital video and podcasting. Here are some podcasting tools and resources.

microphone

Here are my podcasting resources.

Garageband

Apple’s Garageband is part of the iLife suite which comes pre-installed on every Mac. Though initially designed as a music recording (and creation) application, it can also be used to record (and publish) podcasts. Watch a tutorial on creating a podcast, Quicktime required.

With GarageBand, you can create your own virtual on-stage band and play along on your favourite instrument. You can record, edit and mix a song exactly as you want it, in pristine CD quality. It’s the perfect place to get your act together.

Audacity

This open source software which is available for a range of platforms allows you to both and edit audio. Quite a complicated piece of software it certainly is very powerful.

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

  • Record live audio.
  • Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
  • Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
  • Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
  • Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
  • And more!

Wire Tap Studio

Recently released this audio application makes it not only much easier to capture and record audio on your Mac, it also makes it much easier to strike that balance between quality and file size when sharing your podcast.

Using WireTap Studio, you can record the discrete audio output of any application, as well as all system audio, or record audio input from any microphone, line-in, or audio input hardware. If you can hear it, WireTap Studio can record it. Once you have recorded your audio, you can easily organize your recordings in the convenient Recording Library, and edit them with WireTap Studio’s integrated lossless audio editor. WireTap Studio also boasts full Audio Unit effects support, for adding professional quality effects to your audio.

One of the key issues when recording podcasts is the microphone. Cheap microphones have not been calibrated (it is the calibrating which costs that is what makes a good microphone expensive), you can get good cheap microphones, but you just have to be lucky!

Photo source

learning resources

Sharing

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On a mailing list I frequent, the question was asked what was hindering or helping the sharing of digital learning resources. 

IPR issues aside…

One issue that I wonder about, is are practitioners (and/or colleges) actually creating a wealth of digital learning resources, or are they generally repurposing (third party) resources which exist already.

Second issue, sharing learning resources is only part of the story, the context in which those resources are used and how they are used is equally if not more important and certainly then makes the resources (or even just the ideas) much more transferable, not just between colleges but also internally between courses.

Third issue, storing and finding resources. A folder or hierarchal structure makes filing simpler, but searching more complex.

Fourth issue, compatibility. Here we could be talking about Office 2007 or 2003, Publisher on a Mac, or other resources which require specific software.

Fifth issue, branding, not just from a college perspective but also from a qualificational perspective. One of the things I didn’t like about the NLN materials, was they were branded by subject and level. But as anyone who teaches the subject knows, Level 2 Business materials can be used with Level 3 Tourism students, but sometimes the branding, or qualificational specific nature of materials can put off or confuse learners.

Sharing is good, it saves time, enables practitioners (and learners) to access a wider range of resources.

Despite the issues, these are not reasons to not share, more issues to be aware of.

youtube

YouTube or not YouTube, that is the question…

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Here’s a question…

If a student is spending all day watching YouTube videos on a college machine.

If you block YouTube across your whole college network does this mean:

a) that the student now spends all day studying hard and learning.

b) that the student spends all day trying to find a working proxy server that would then allow him to watch the 30 second video, a proxy server which could incorporate trojans or other internet nasties…

c) that the student spends all day searching other web 2.0 video sites (such as blip.tv, metacafe, revver etc… trying to find that elusive video.

d) the student spends all day doing something else equally fruitless, like playing online solitaire, etc…

At the end of the day it might be better to spend some time looking at the reasons why that learner is not motivated about their learning and why they are doing something else.

What are they stuck on? Do they understand where they need to go next? Are they on the right course?

At my college we lifted the global block on YouTube last December, so nearly a year has passed and what is the result?

Well what we have found is that every learner and every member of staff now spend all day watching YouTube videos!

Well no, that is not what is happening, the reality is that YouTube is like any other site on the internet, it is sometimes used for learning and sometimes it is used for fun or for information. In many ways it is used like the BBC website. Some of our learners are creating and uploading videos.

As for undesirable content, well what our staff can do is control the internet at a classroom level, so if you have a class of fourteen year olds you can block access to all of the internet, or allow access to certain sites or domains, or even just specific pages.

Remember that even news sites like the BBC can have undesirable content on them.

So do we have any global blocks? Yes we don’t have a totally open system, there are a lot of sites on our blacklist, but we do have procedures in place that if a site is blocked (or even a request to block a site) then the decision to unblock the site or block a site is made by a member of the senior management team after discussion if required.

YouTube or not YouTube, that is the question. From our experience, unblocking YouTube has not been as problematic as you might think it would be. We certainly have not had bandwidth issues that are sometimes feared. We have the odd individual here and there, but then if we block YouTube they will only go to a different site instead (you can say the same for social networking sites) and we try and identify and support these students.

I’ll leave you with a way in which YouTube is working really well for us.

Firstly students are watching clips from musical theatre in the dance studio that are on YouTube.

Secondly music technology students are recording themselves and then uploading these recordings to YouTube which can then be embedded into other websites such as MySpace, as can be seen in the following clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY7i1htP7uo

By the way I apologise if you are viewing this from inside an institution which blocks YouTube.