Blogging as a Personal Learning Environment

I’m making my Digital History students (Hi6018) create and use a blog as the anchor for their assessment portfolio in the the course, and I was hunting around for other courses using blogs, but cannot find as many as I used to be able to see.  Bill Turkel’s class at UWO are doing it, and are about three weeks ahead of mine, but many others have disappeared or closed off. Continue reading Blogging as a Personal Learning Environment

Augmented Reality at home

It really takes a writer to show a vision of how new technologies can change our daily lives, and in Halting State, Charles Stross has done that for me with his version of augmented reality. Standing in my barn this morning, I realised I need CopSpace here, at home. Continue reading Augmented Reality at home

Captivating

I’m playing round with Adobe Captivate, moving slides from 3 old powerpoints on UN Peacekeeping into one Captivate presentation which I’ll use today as a flash movie, and also make available to my class as a .avi movie and  an audio only podcast.  I’m fining it a lot of work, but I think the extra flexibility of Captivate will be worth it in the long run.  This version is very basic, and does not yet take advantage of all the possibilities like quizzes, or branching navigation. You can theoretically do all of those in Powerpoint, but it is much more work – I found my way round the workspace in Captivate very quickly, and find it faster for more advanced work.  Continue reading Captivating

Writing Structured Documents

I promised some people yesterday a link to the current version of my handout on writing structured documents, using examples in Microsoft Word. It shows how to use styles rather than simply plastering bold, 24 point on some text – everyone who does not know how to do this already should read it.   I need [...]

XML editor for students

I spent this wet morning looking at XML editors for my digital history masters students. XML is essential for managing large collections of historical documents, and is part of a family of markup languages which now run the web, and provide the underlying infrastructure for ‘web services’. Once they understand the principles XML is a set of skills which will be useful in many contexts from web design to ontology creation. Continue reading XML editor for students

Slow Night

I finally got the moodle signup screencast uploaded this morning, but it  was still very slow. Last night I was only getting upload speeds of 3k/s, which is slower than dialup, and it never got above 10k/s this morning. The video was shot using Camstudio, which is free, and edited down to a reasonable size using [...]

Web reaches the barn

Whoot! I’ve got network connectivity out to my office in the barn, at last. For some of you this is no big deal, but between digging the trench, locating external grade CAT5 cable and above all, getting all those fiddly little green-white and brown-white striped wires into the right slots on an RJ45 jack, it was [...]

I finally ‘get’ Livejournal

Now that I’ve added a few friends to my LJ, and I can read their LJ posts on my friends page, I can see how it works. Hopping from friends to their friends with similar interests, like science fiction, gaming or neo-techo-paganism, is easier than surfing the ‘blogosphere’, and I think the LJ process of ‘friending’ [...]

A few of my favourite things

Moodle is now a ‘one click install’ on Dreamhost, where mikecosgrave.com is hosted. Moodle is an excellent OpenSource Learning Management System which I like because it has a built in wiki which is handy for collaborative writing exercises. Having it as a one-click install ( and therefore a one-click update ) is very convenient. It is [...]

Yes, I have a Bebo Page

..but I hardly ever bother to update it. I signed up for it because so many of my students have Bebo pages, and I figured I better know what I was talking about. Mostly, It just points to here – I find Bebo flat, and prefer to be able to work with style sheets and raw [...]

 
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