Sometimes you want to try out a piece of software or obtain a white paper or gain access to some content stored on the web and in exchange for access to this content you are asked to enter your email address. In the cases where you know the company and are sure they will abide by their "no spamming" or "no passing on your email address" policy then by all means enter your email address. For years I have always entered my active email address and have paid the price by now probably appearing on every spam list sold around the world.

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I received a request from a teacher the other day who wanted to upskill in the area of information technology. "Where do you start?" She asked. Surrounded by people who strum keyboards and use applications like a conductor with their orchestra, creating documents here, extracting information there - it must be head spinning to look at that and also have to listen to people rabbiting on about web 2.0, wikis, blogs, facebooks, youtube and iThis and iThat.

It reminds me of when I purchased my first computer - and if you click on the player at the bottom of this entry there is a little audio story about what went wrong that fateful day.

Back on topic... What do you suggest to get someone started with something that is good, fast and cheap (free is even better)

We have courses on offer that provide a formal qualification and can be, in some cases studied externally, these courses are great, but they take time and depending on your budget are not that cheap - they are good value for money though.

So I dug through the kit bag and came up with two suggestions... We could come up with 20 suggestions and I hope you add some via the comments button at the bottom.

read on to find out what mine were...

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Success! Well sort of. Smashwords converted my simple two page chilli recipe into a book, complete with picture. It converted it into several formats and advised me that it was being dispatched to a number of publishers.

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In my previous post I mentioned that eBooks can be published to a variety of platforms and for distribution purposes, the more devices that can read your books the better. An organisation that prepares and distributes your eBooks to channels like Amazon and ITunes store for free is Smashwords. Using their Microsoft Word template (actually a document I edited from one of their books) and AFTER reading and understanding the free how to guide on how to publish on Smashwords.com.

As I am writing this, I hope that smashwords is quietly working in the background converting my small two page book into an eBook. Don't forget that you will need to create a book cover. With the template above, you get a free Mark Christie chilli recipe thrown in - my TLC sauce.

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I know I am being brand specific here, but please think about any portable device like a smartphone that has the ability to display text and pictures on a screen and you actually look cool sitting on the train, plane or bus as you swish your finger and tap away on the non-reflective glass screen.

I have a good friend who is a publications expert. He packages notes created by scientists into fact sheets, reports, how to documents and even books for the general public.

Over the years this home grown library of documents related mainly to primary industries such as cattle, fish and horticultural industries has expanded and transformed from a print only library of paper based documents that are given away to existing farmers or even backyard enthusiasts to a magnificent online library of documents in formats ranging from pdf documents to streaming video presentations.

This friend, Jason, rang me the other day and asked me about how to put some of these documents onto an iPhone. Brilliant I thought. Here is a guy always trying to improve the way he can deliver his service to customers. His observation was that he had attended a number of cattleman's events over recent times and could not get over the fact that every one seemed to have an iPhone. So making the logical assumption that if they have the delivery mechanism or rather reading mechanism in their top pocket, why not offer up the ability to put information in their pocket in the form of eBooks.

My response to Jason's question was - "well you upload it to itunes into a library and then they download it". Sounds simple, but I thought to myself - I haven't done it before so how hard is it really?

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Someone indirectly reported that they were unable to access Adobe Connect using Firefox.

Our Standard Operating Environment promotes IE as the corporate standard with Firefox as a backup for use at home without needing to reset proxy settings

Upon trying Firefox, I encountered a problem as well. The usually cryptic and misleading message said...

-code-

JRun Servlet ErrorI

413 Header Length too Large

-/code-

As it turns out, this person was having the problem in IE not Firefox and with Coldfusion which also uses Jrun - so this problem stretches across applications and browsers.

The fix?

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This post originates from a path and a series of events that has become a life practise over the past number of years. I read the Age and the NT News online and generally from the IT section of the Age find an interesting article and follow links within the article or google a word I don't know. If the interest continues and it is related to eLearning (or flying or family) I might see if the knowledge or idea presented can be applied or reinterpreted into a context for my world. I say "my" because it is a little serendipitous, random and self indulgent.

Which brings me to crowdsourcing.

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Every so often I get asked about where to get music without breaking copyright. Creative Commons tagged music is a good start for me because it tells me immediately what I can do with the music (or video, picture etc) without having to ask the author.

Anyway here are some links to "free" sites. If you have more, please add a comment to this entry. Update:- because of this blog's inbuilt spam filter, posting a comment can sometimes be rejected. The trick appears to be to leave out the http:// part of the url, so just type in www.somewher.com

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Graham from Microsoft sent through a very comprehensive list of software solutions and websites that are aimed at educators. Normally I would forward the list on and hope that teachers and educators would work their way through the list.

Being the first day back at school for them it is probably the very last thing on their mind.

So I have taken some of the pain away and decided to evaluate some of the more interesting ones myself. I have started with Mouse Mischief because it reminds me of a similar solution used in a smart lecture theatre to poll students for answers to questions posed by the lecturer.

Mouse Mischief is an add on to PowerPoint that allows students to control a PowerPoint slideshow. When I first read this, I thought - No way is a teacher going to hand over control of a PowerPoint presentation to one student - let alone 25 of them.

Then I thought how do you connect twenty electronic rodents to a single computer anyway?

Finally I wondered what tools were available to make a lesson like this interactive?

Oh there was one other thing - cost.

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