Durham College Student Vodcasts

I quite like the Vodcasts featured on New College Durham’s website.  The fun, magazine style format works really well. The presentation and camera work is pretty impressive too.

It’s good to have something made by the students for the students available to download easily.

Microsoft’s LCDS

Our e-learning team found and installed Microsoft’s new LCDS application recently (Learning Content Development System). It is a tool that allows you to author your own e-learning course structured with modules and topics and populate it with images, quizzes, interactivities, animations and audio/video.

Once you have created your course, you can publish it to the web or an LMS, as a SCORM ready package. It’s all template based and simple to use.

This would be a great asset for teachers who want to create their own e-learning courses. The only downside is that the software uses Microsoft’s own Silverlight plug-in for a lot of the multimedia elements. I uploaded a .wmv movie file and in order for it to be viewed I had to install Silverlight (without installing this it threw up an error and essentially crashed my course and had to start again from scratch).

From what I can gather, Silverlight is Microsoft’s attempt to halt Adobe’s monopoly on viewing interactive web material which Adobe has had for years with its Flash Player. Sadly, this means that if people want use the LCDS they have to install Silverlight – this might sound simple enough but a nightmare if the LCDS was to be used by College staff for students. Entire IT systems would have be updated with this new plug-in.

Continuing research in Second Life…

I’ve been trying to explore learning in Second Life a bit more with varying results. I visited Learn 4 Life’s offices at Education UK and various UK Colleges and University areas that they have set up. It seems like there’s a big grab for land just to get ‘on the map’ as it were – but it all seems for promotional/marketing purposes. I’ve also tried talking to people there to try and find out more about Second Life and learning but no one really seems keen to talk. There were some people who seemed to be experimenting with Script – they were trying to sit on a box or something. Maybe everyone is still at the experimental stage.

I’ve found some good links though. John Kirriemuir’s Flickr page on UK Universities and Colleges in Second Life is a nice collection of images complete with slurls that you can jump to in Second Life. I discovered John Kirriemuir after reading an article by him on games in education. He keeps an interesting blog about his life living on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. Read all about his own research into Second Life here.

Tasty Technology: Virtual keyboard

There was a nice bit of kit featured on the Guardian’s Dork Talk page recently. It was the LaserKey CL850 Projection Keyboard, a device that projects a virtual keyboard onto your desk and uses light sensors to detect which ‘keys’ your fingers are tapping.

It’s a bit of sci-fi wizardary come to life.

The device is aimed at the handheld technology market and communicates with your PDA or Blackberry via Bluetooth or USB. This would be a great tool for people like me who find using tiny fiddly, plastic buttons to type anything bigger than a simple text message a bit of a nightmare. It would also enable mobile communication and learning to be taken to the next level – increased accessibility, accuracy and speed for typing on screen.

The only downer about this product is that it’s yet another additional bit of hardware that you need to carry around with you along with your mobile device. If your Blackberry itself could beam out the keyboard then we’d truely be in sci-fi business heaven.

On the other hand…

…despite not being sure of Second Life as a learning tool, I found this e-learning company up in Sunderland that specialises in games based simulations using an interactive 3D environment similar to SL and other first-person games. Here, training and learning is provided for sectors such as Pharmaceuticals and Health and Safety. There’s a nice little video that gives a demo of what they do.

Second Life for learning

Our team had a quick look at Second Life yesterday. There’s been a lot of speculation recently that this could be the future of online learning. It was fun getting to grips with the ’strange, new world’ and it’s quirky features but it seemed a bit frustrating trying to communicate with random people and engaging in conversation. You would need to spend a lot of time using it to explore what you can do and undertand it’s potential. And if it takes that much effort then I think a lot of people will just not bother.

My main concern is the amount of people using Second Life for ill-use. I’ve heard some pretty horrible things can or could take place in there. Pretty worrying really, especially for vunerable young people (although there is Teen Second Life available).

Although Second Life holds obvious value for marketing and advertising, I’m still sceptical of the true learning potential it can offer (apart from social networking) but it’s early days yet.

A look at the Eee PC

We have had a few Eee Pc’s delivered to the College recently and I was keen to check them out. They look pretty sweet – small, compact and in a clean mighty white colour. Ultra cool. The start up is pretty snappy, then you’re in the Linux interface which here, is a series of big, click-on-me icons. You can’t go wrong. I was impressed by the ease of use of it all – browsing the internet, using the applications and built-in webcam. I recorded some video from the webcam but it saves it in a .ogg file which I’m not sure transfers that well unless you convert it using an encoder (ie, not sure how easy it is to get footage on the web/blogs etc).

A collegue used one at a conference recently to give an up-to-date account of events using a blog. The webcam was used to interview people, get their opinions and capture their image. It worked really well.

Top 100 tools for e-learning

This link at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies lists the top 100 tools for learning. It’s compiled of tools people listed for personal learning and for creating learning solutions.

It’s interesting to see that nearly all the tools in the top 10 are all available for free.

BBC iPlayer for iPod

It’s great news to hear that the BBC has launched a version of it’s excellent iPlayer for the iPhone/Touch. I regularly use the iPlayer to catch up on tv shows I’ve missed or to check out what goes on on the digital channels (can’t get digital in my flat).

You can stream programs for 6 days after they have been broadcast or choose to download the program and view and keep it for 30 days (although at 600Mb to download, it seems a bit arduous).

I’m all the more tempted to get an ipod Touch now.

The decision minefield of choosing an iPod

I’ve been without an MP3 player for a while now, and while I can’t say I miss it that much, it would be nice to have something to start storing my music on and maybe some video. I don’t really agree with walking round with music blasting in your ears all the time, but it would be handy for train journeys and travel. Inevitably I’d probably go for an iPod, but looking at the range available, it’s a tricky choice to make on selecting the most suitable product.

The new iPod Touch 32Gb is an attractive step up in their Touch range. The 8Gb and 16Gb versions have never offered enough memory, especially as the Touch is designed not only for storing music but photos and video too. The apps were also a bit naff compared to what its big brother—the iPhone—could offer. But now as well as the memory increase, Apple have done the right thing and included improved and increased apps for the Touch. But at £329 for the 32Gb version, that’s a lot of money; you could get a iPhone for £269.

iPod nano is too small in memory and to be honest, a bit too cutesy and girl-orientated for my tastes.

So the iPod Classic is surely the winning contender. At 80Gb it has ample space for music, video and photos. So what’s the problem? Well, the thing about the Classic is that it now all looks rather dated compared to other Apple products such as the Touch and iPhone. It uses a bulky hard drive instead of Flash memory, has a small screen size and uses the famous jog wheel which by today’s standards already seems retro. Let’s face it, touch-screen interfaces are the future along with bigger screens for video and internet and of course wi-fi.

Ideally, my iPod of choice would be an 80Gb Touch (at a reasonable price), which by the rate at which Apple are releasing new products, might come sooner than expected.