LearnShifting

 Australia Day this year was great! I got to take my sister in law Tina and one of her three daughters Cecilia for a flight in my ultralight (next time for Bianka and Ashley when they are a little taller) and then after that we went to the Australia Day celebrations hosted by Gerry Woods, the local member for the area who has been described as a chicken farmer with enough power in our local parliament to turn a rooster into a feather duster.

The kids got to play cricket, run around, go for a ride on a classic fire engine, have a hot dog, a cool drink and fell asleep minutes after we had left the event for home.

In between the trip to the airfield and the Australia Day event I had the radio on in the car and came in part way through a speech being made by the unmistakeable voice of President Obama.

Those who know me will know that I have about as much interest in politics as a vegetarian in a butcher's shop, however I will not shun any valuable offerings that they have. In this case it was Obama's inspirational speech to congress that had me listening to it and reflecting on how I could map some of the talking points to our own situation here in Australia and in the Northern Territory. He spoke of the economic situation, how Americans had fallen behind, how education and health along with infrastructure and unemployment were big issues... and then he went on to describe how it was going to be fixed.

America has been hit hard by the recession. A friend of mine who just returned from the US said that 350k houses in Las Vegas now sell for less than 150k. That must be heartbreaking to find that your house is worth far less than the value of the mortgage you have... and then you lose your job.

Out of this grim set of circumstances, Obama crafted a speech which genuinely gave hope.

Why am I writing about this in an eLearning blog? Four reasons.

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This entry was posted on January 30, 2011 at 9:30 AM and has received 253 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We are strong users of Adobe Connect 7.5 and are very pleased with the value it adds to our eLearning environment in the Northern Territory. Well Adobe has released version 8 of the product and rather than me try to interpret the reviews in great detail, I will provide the links.

http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/584/

When are we planning to migrate? Possibly before the start of term next year depending on a number of factors. Have any readers deployed Adobe Connect 8? Let me know what you experience has been.

This entry was posted on November 18, 2010 at 12:46 PM and has received 198 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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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This entry was posted on July 29, 2010 at 7:07 AM and has received 389 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

There are quite a few situations where we want to engage people in an online social environment to create, sort, edit, share and if required to delete information. The popularity of Facebook and YouTube are evidence that people do engage with this approach. I'd like to use this entry to expand on the journey I have taken with two real uses of this technology and how it can benefit you as an educator, a parent, a club member or someone who needs a combined soapbox and filing cabinet out there in cyberspace - where it appears that now - everybody can hear you scream.

This article talks about about Microsoft's Office Live Workspaces which look uncannily like SharePoint and links to other tools that allow us to communicate and share information.

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This entry was posted on April 8, 2010 at 6:43 AM and has received 283 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Yes, well there are a couple of catches. It is free, but you can only have yourself and two other people in the same room. What is cool is that like Microsoft's live messenger offerings that come with space to store your stuff and tools to edit things, and Google's things that do the same thing, Adobe has glued together its offerings so you can whip up a presentation online, prepare a spreadsheet or convert something to PDF (apparently only 5 times in the free version but that is fine).

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This entry was posted on March 21, 2010 at 9:27 PM and has received 413 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We have a number of exceptional learning assets from the Australian Children Television Foundation. These are distributed on DVD and are in a variety of formats. The most common formats are Adobe PDF, DVD Movie, executable flash, FLV (Flash Video) and some html documents.

The challenge is to convert where required and upload the content into our network in a way that teachers can access and use within our network, but the resources cannot be copied or reused outside of the scope of our license.

The content of the DVDs should be in a format that a teacher in a remote or urban location can play the video on an electronic whiteboard or projector to the class and if a student misses out because they were absent, they can login from school or home to review the content at their convenience.

How did we do it?

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This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at 11:54 AM and has received 279 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We like SharePoint (although we do have our bad days with it) and we like podcasting/vodcasting/blogs. We have established blogs in SharePoint and I have mentioned how impressed I was with the integration of MS Word as the editor and the ease of publishing content to a SharePoint blog.

We had discussed integrating the beta version of the SharePoint Podcasting Kit into our schools environment and although we really want to do it, we needed to make sure that whereever these files are stored we have indexed them, provided enough computer power to deliver them and ensured they have both the quality and clearance for delivery via our networks. This blog entry is a revisitation of this request and options available.

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This entry was posted on December 29, 2009 at 2:46 PM and has received 1065 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.