Brad’s Ve-learning project

Here is an audio of the presentation.  The original was pretty disjointed due to activities etc, so this one was done after the event & in accordance with the notes below, plus some elaboration.  Approx 45 mins, another for the insomniacs…

I guess one of the early brushes with this stuff I had was a while back while looking at SirsiDynix Institute’s Web Archive which covers many Web 2ey things at http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/archive.php esp the excellent ideas loaded summary session by Meredith Farkas, titled Wiki: The Ultimate Tool For Online Collaboration .  In this one she makes reference to a wiki for subject resources created by Chad Boeninger of Ohio Uni Library at http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki/index.php/Main_Page . 

I’ve also seen this one referred to by others, so I’m not sure how many good examples are actually out there, or how many academics (with the publishing pressures & the need to appear innovative etc) are writing about a limited number of viable models.

I’ll add this one to the blogroll http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/, but the boss was particularly taken with the diagram on when to use old communications, when to use new ones & why.  Nice blog, nice diag at http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/categories/blogsBlogging/

I also liked some comments:

“What are the reasons we use faulty judgement, and use the wrong technology for communications? …

…these technologies are getting better and cheaper at the same time, and there is a long-overdue trend to more simplicity and intuitiveness in some new tools. Unfortunately, many large organizations remain in the communication stone age, locked into expensive, centrally managed, unfriendly, sub-optimal legacy technologies. The change to decentralized, free, and open tools is just too frightening for many heavily-invested organizations to contemplate”.

Bugger it, I’ll post the whole diagram to pretty things up a bit. Thank you Dave Pollard…

The post below with the PodOmatic graphic showed as code when I loaded it in WYSIWYG mode.  A penny dropped, & I redid it in the HTML mode…& it worked – ah, the learnings !  So I thought I’d try to resurrect the Zoho presentation that appears as code in the post beneath titled ‘Finale- or is it?’.  Unfortunately, there was still a glitch, but there is obviously a difference between uploading the post in WYSIWYG & HTML modes.

So I emailed Zoho.  Quick response back, suggesting that the problem was related to the use of an apostrophe in my show title (they’re working on it), & that a rename/resave should do the trick.  I was also right about the HTML mode.

On trying it appeared that it still had dramas as the code didn’t delete the apostrophe in the code after a resave.  So I manually changed both references in the code & the slideshow worked…but something else meant that lines ran off the bottom of the page.  So I again tinkered & adjusted the vertical margin from 300 to 350, & this is the result. 

The audio of our presentations was recorded with the intention of putting it all on CD/DVD.  Personally, I prefer my own editorial control so, again in keeping with the spirit of this whole exercise, I have started an account with PodOmatic.  Richard (bless his cotton socks) took the original audio (odd format) & initially converted it to WAV, then we used Audacity & the LAME encoder to convert to an MP3.  I’ve just uploaded it, so now to give it a try…

So, dear excited reader, you needn’t bother with the CD as you can download all 54 MB -which plays at about a MB a minute – of MP3.

The other day I filled in a survey – I think the link came via email, & it looked interesting & relevant, being a Flexiblelearning.net project on Social Software for Learning -

“The purpose of this survey is to identify how ‘social software’ or ‘Web 2.0’ technologies are currently being used in teaching and learning today and to gauge how social software can significantly contribute to certain forms of learning”

As usual I can’t help myself with forced choice survey questions & make a welter of the open ended questions.  Soon after I received an email from Val Evans, one of the research team, in response to some of my comments.  A few email exchanges later & the project includes one of my referred readings as a discussion starter, & the following

“your delicious tagging is brilliant! … I would love to include these links in our research wiki as an example of social bookmarking – nobody has offered such well-organised links to-date. Would that be okay? 

Also your horticulture wiki is a great example how a statewide system can collaborate. In fact, you could spread it even wider and make it national. Again, with permission, can I include it as an example on our wiki under Teaching and Learning sites?”

With all due humility (the tagging is a very basic first effort), who am I to refuse?  So this project is now recorded on her Project wiki at http://socialsoftware-research.wikispaces.com/TandLSites  and lo and behold I also have a comment on the post beneath.  Good grief – from initial spam to the CEO of pbWIKI one day, and Val the next – I have a readership !

As noted, there are numerous wikis around, & we basically wanted something free, hosted & relatively WYSIWYG.   Ultimately, looking at the offerings, it would be preferable to have our own, with corporate badging, some pages lockable, & a whole lot more functionality, but at this stage we are just testing the water.

I looked around for some comparisons.  I found the Wikimatrix ( http://www.wikimatrix.org/ ) useful to some extent, cutting the possibilities back to a dozen or so.   A bit of a subjective run & my list came down to four: Seedwiki, Jotspot, pbWiki & Wikispaces.

We’ve used Seedwiki once before in the library.  It was pretty basic, & there was an obvious problem when we were all working on different pages & hit ’save’ - each update resaved all pages, so it had to be updated sequentially.  I’ve also had a play with JotSpot.  It again seemed pretty basic, & what you get as a freebie doesn’t seem well explained.  Suggestions of a limit of 5 users & 10 pages, limited appearance options, & a layout that seemed dominated by nav sidebars & titles didn’t seem to have user appeal (N.B. Jotspot is finding its feet again after having just been bought by Google – so it must have something going for it).   Robyn had given pbWiki a run, but had some usability issues with it.  I set up trials on all of these as well as Wikispaces (via Edublogs) which promised full – functionality & no ads – but it didn’t quite work out that way.  I also had some issues with pbWiki, primarily appearance & a tendency to reformat my layout at each save.  So it ultimately came down to Wikispaces, which had a cleaner layout & readability. 

Ultimately, however, if it is decided to proceed I would consider an upgrade to a paid, domain based corporate item, which would also open up the field considerably.

This one will be at http://horttafe.wikispaces.com/

OK, so Delicious has been a pretty useful tool.  However, it needs some experience to work it.  What we need for this exercise is a manageable, potentially social, resource that sits outside the formal website realms of the bureaucracy’s IT police (it needs to be able to be changed quickly, not in a year’s time after a million forms), & it also needs capability for adding more information than Delicious can handle – some intro, background, explanatory notes, etc.  It would also be useful to be able to lock some pages from public access but also open other pages which might be used as student / staff work spaces.  For example, if the students had a particular project they could use the provided links here, then add a few they discover along the way that might be useful for others.  Once vetted, they could then be added to the secure area.  But this raises problems depending on the WIKI we choose – the freebies – our current restriction – all have different functionality, with numerous roundabouts & swings.

I have been working on populating the Delicious account.  For those in the know there is no great need to have explanatory notes etc, so this might be preferable to a WIKI for in-house use.  It seems useful to keep it running as an open window, & then bounce off each link with a right click ‘open in new window’.

The following email was sent to our staff…

“Further to my earlier email…

There are now 11 of us (as far as I know) with Delicious accounts.

Some of you have imported your favourites. All of these are imported as ‘private’, which means no-one else can view them.

Some of you have even been through & unlocked some of these to make them public, which is the idea behind the sharing thing.

As mentioned, there is now an account for bremertafe. I have pillaged a number of your shared favourites as a basis for building a core Bremer TAFE Delicious collection, & then bounced off these ideas & added quite a few others. Ultimately it would be nice to cover the needs of most of our jobs here (& possibly also be a precedent?). I have left out most ‘article’ type links & tried to keep it to useful practical work based stuff. It has been a work in progress & I’ve changed a few things as I’ve gone along, so as you play with it you may well think of a few obvious issues worth discussing.

It is located at http://del.icio.us/bremertafe

All 181 (so far) links appear in chronological order. The tags on the right of the screen are your search tool - you just click on whatever tag you might be interested in. If you scroll to the bottom of this to ‘tag options’ you will find they can be displayed either as a ‘list’ or a ‘cloud’. In the cloud, the more frequently used tags result in a heavier &/or larger font. You can also fine tune these by using the 1, 2 or 5 to indicate the cut off point for display (how much detail we use is obviously one of the issues). I have also created ‘bundles’ for government & suppliers, & you can display with or without the bundles.

Have a play.  Look at, for example, catalogues, or SearchEngines (the system only allows one word tags, hence the running of terms together), or through the Government sections. All the links we need for work, reference, purchasing, info lit sessions etc could be stored here, & (unlike favourites) stored under any tag/s & accessible from any net connection. Headings can be changed, explanatory notes can be added (e.g. see Zoho), tags changed / amended or whatever – immediately. From one screen we can access all intranet links, off-air recording links, subject links, reference links etc (though we would still need to keep them differently on the website)…You can access it by

• remembering the url,
• Googling ‘delicious’ (no you don’t have to worry about the punctuation) & simply adding bremertafe to the url, or
• even adding it to your favourites (just for use here of course).

Let me know if you want anything added, any explanations of how it works, or want the password to get yourself going.

Suggestions or feedback appreciated…”

As one of the ‘words of the week’, del.icio.us has caused a little confusion.  While I’ve had an account for some time I didn’t know anyone else who had one, so the social side has been non-existent (& for my purposes I’ve preferred to use FURL, & even more Netsnippets, but the latter requires a download & is thus anathema to the bureaucracy’s IT police).  Several of us have been talking about sharing favourites.  As a number of library staff now battle with del.icio.us, here is a chance.  Firstly comes the research – I’ve spent some time in my account to sort out  the finer points of settings, particularly ‘private save’ & ’import existing favourites’.  So I imported those & all seemed well.  And then someone wants to know about sharing, so I research & test ‘networks’.  Problem, however, is that just using one or two people’s individual accounts is not going to do what is needed & even if we were all in there a shared network will have a heap of personal & duplicate dross.  Solution? Start a new account specifically targeted at the library’s needs (thus using a suitable name & the library email) & use the social side to cherry pick everyone’s favourites for the gutsy content (& to identify gaps).  This will hopefully provide a quality linkset to serve as everybody’s first port of call, & continue indefinitely irrespective of staff turnover. So I sent the following email to library staff…

“As part of my Ve-learn involves the word of the week, I guess it also involves some troubleshooting. Everyone seems to have managed pretty well to date, but Delicious seems to be the first one to throw up a few spanners. (If what follows seems too much just grab me in my ’spare’ time)… In order to be able to share links we all need accounts. Go to the delicious site at http://del.icio.us/ & register. At step 2 you will also need to install post / tag buttons, which seems the messiest bit. (N.B. These buttons (it seems) appear as a dropdown under your ‘Links’ on the toolbar (or if you are keen you can unlock toolbars via View>Toolbars> & untick ‘lock the toolbars’, then drag down the links to a new toolbar).Multiple PCs: These buttons will only be available, it appears, on the PC you have put them on though you can install them on others by going back to Step 2, or otherwise do without the buttons by using the posting page http://del.icio.us/post/ . See the FAQ… Multiple accounts on one PC: It appears that the buttons also work on the one PC irrespective of whether you are logged into your personal account or another, though it will only save to the account you are logged into – I haven’t pushed it by logging into two accounts at once…). You can then save any weblink by clicking on ‘post’. You can adjust your settings >bookmarks>’private saving’ to give you the option of whether you want the world in general to be able to view your saved link, or keep it all to yourself.  When you are saving you are given the option of adding tags. A little like your bookmarks folders, this is what is known as ‘Folksonomy’, which is basically user generated make-it-up-as-you-go-along cataloguing. You can also import all of your existing favourites into your account (settings>bookmarks>import/upload), & they will come in by default as private. Utimately, we end up with a mess of links in no particular order, & then use the tags to pull the relevant items. There are a few other tricks with the tags, but I will spare you these at this stage.As we are all likely to have duplicates & personal interest (?) links in our favourites, the tightest way of making a universally useful link collection is to set up a single Bremer library account. Robyn, Max & I were tossing this idea around a while back.We will need to monitor: a) what links go into it &b) what tags we use.Ultimately this will be accessible to all by (oddly enough) adding the single link back into your favourites, storing the link somewhere (e.g. a permanent email to yourself), just remembering the link, or coming in via Delicious & adding bremertafe to the homepage link. Accordingly I have started an account at http://del.icio.us/bremertafe (I have used the bremer.library email address) & have begun populating it with links & tags, though there is plenty more to do. For those of you I have spoken with who have already registered I have also added you as part of the ‘bremertafe’ network, so anything publicly viewable in your personal account is also available to all other members of the network. This is the sharing bit.The ’sharing links’ aspect will probably only be useful here until we get the Bremertafe account populated, but the social logic of it should be obvious if the network was a bunch of people with a particular interest in movies, music etc. Theoretically we could all simply just share the bremertafe account without having your own account. At this stage I think it best if we all have individual accounts just to see how the process / sharing etc works, & I feel it would be best to have limited access to the bremertafe account to avoid messy additions, deletions or even deletion of the entire account. If you feel confident enough to start playing in the bremertafe account, see me for the password. So set up an account, save a few links (anything will do for starters), let me know your account name & I’ll add you to the network.See me when you’ve got that far or if you have any dramas …”… Today we have several new accounts & a total of 8 tinkering in the network (as far as I know).  See how we go from here! Again, in the spirit of the Ve-learning project, this post was composed in & to be sent from Zoho writer, a free online wordprocessor, but neither Zoho supported Wordpress, nor did Wordpress allow for email options.

First efforts were in a support role, devoted to assisting one of the teachers in getting his material up onto a blog.  Accordingly, we used several resources to do so.  We set up a Blog in Blogger.  We set up an account in Flickr.  We uploaded a number of images to Flickr.  One of these was also used to become the image of the Blog author, the others were used in the Blog itself.  As the pix were fairly high resolution, we also used Fireworks to reduce the file sizes to a more managable level given the Flickr upoad limits.  We cut & pasted a logo graphic.  Bingo, it looked pretty good !

 My Boss has been working on the Ve-learning project. This project is sponsored by the Innovative Learning Strategy Group, a subgroup of IMC.The aim of the project is to accelerate the uptake of elearning through action learning, ie learning ‘on the job’. It’s aimed at teachers who are to share their learning and resources with other members of their team. Librarians are in the project to assist in their development as elearning mentors.  The project is an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to new directions in vocational education AND library services. My actions negotiated for the project include, but are not restricted to:

*  evaluate applications and create wiki for Horticulture SPIG,

*  investigate new technologies and create wiki for Bremer,

*  collate information from ‘words of the week’,

*  research,

*  assistance to teachers, etc.

In keeping with the spirit of the Ve-learning project, this post was originally created in & emailed direct from a Writely (now owned by Google & referred to as Google Docs & Spreadsheets) free online Wordprocessor account ( https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=writely&passive=true&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F<mpl=WR_tmp_2_lfty&nui=1 ) – but it didn’t work so I have resorted to direct post!  I also tried using the Zoho online word processor ( http://writer.zoho.com/jsp/home.jsp ) as part of this exercise.  While having limited functionality, they are useful items for basic word processing without a need to carry files with you, & for collaborative efforts.

I’ll  see if this is why – the message from the Department’s ******* content filters: “Because it appears to be spoofed.  The From: address is associated with a local domain, but the message did not originate from an internal email server”.

Further to this, I have also decided to use a Blog for the exercise as the official record.  In the past I have used several Blogger Blogs & one Bloglines.  These are usually seen as entry level blogs & are freebies.  So for this exercise I have noted that Edublogs ( http://edublogs.org/ ) has been offering ‘free fully featured Wordpress‘ blogs: “you can create individual posts in a traditional blog-style, pages of static content indexed in your sidebar and select from any number of themes” and “you can upload up to 25MB of images, audio, documents, powerpoints or other digital material you want to share.”  So I may as well start with an image as well…this one I have edited online via www.pixer.us online photo editor, another first.  I loaded a GIF file, cut, resized, did a sepia makeover & saved as a JPEG.