Brad’s Ve-learning project

Theoretically the formal part of the project comes to an end, though I am sure it will continue for a while yet.

A few thoughts…

Have had a better look at Wordpress blog functionality & customisability.  It looks very impressive, had I more time to spare for playing.  Have installed the plugin for Flickr, which enabled the drag /drop exercise in an earlier post.  Also made use of the Blogroll feature to add some of the blogsreferred to herein.

Would also be interested in looking at VOX in more detail.  The more you learn, the more something else interesting comes along…

The Wikispaces wiki seems to work pretty well, but is inadequate for our needs.  The formatting quirks will make it easier for someone to cause problems in there, or leave frustrated.  At present the advertising would also not be acceptable.

As suggested earlier, our own hosted wiki with our badging & increased functionality would be the go.  Anne Bartlett-Braggs suggested that Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ was a wiki “to die for”, & while I’ve never felt quite that enthusiastic (& a lot of people seem to die for a lot less), I would certainly like to give it a try.  Apparently, make the most of the plug-ins.

Thought Google Docs or Zoho Writer with multiple user access & ‘publish’ option might be another alternative for the links, but am not happy about a URL that crosses half the country.

 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.