cakes:learning technology blog

Back in the olden days everyone stored bookmarks in their web browser. In Internet Explorer you’d click on Favourites or in Firefox you’d select Bookmarks.

Many people are now using Social Bookmarking tools to store bookmarks. I use Delicious.com as this allows me to:

• Search through everyone’s bookmarks on a certain topic, to see what other useful sites and articles are out there.
• Access your bookmarks from anywhere, home or work.
• Annotate your bookmarks to remind yourself why you saved them.
• Subscribe to a feed of another person’s bookmarks, if you find that you have similar interests.

To get started with Delicious

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Cakes is 5 years old today! Over those 5 years, it has developed a lot, and I think it is worth taking a closer look at that experience and to ask what new bloggers could learn from it?

Early on, Cakes was just a way for the Learning Technology Development team to share bookmarks. Although now I might use a social bookmarking tool like Delicious to share links, it was worth starting off just doing something simple that gave us the chance to explore the process of blogging. It also gave us an understanding of the blogging software and surrounding technologies like web feeds.

It was only after a few months that we really started adding value in what we were doing. There are many, many blogs that just link to things, but when we started writing up our own knowledge and opinions we began to find what it made sense for our voice to be in the external conversation around elearning. We started becoming more outward looking too.

My advice to new bloggers would be just to start writing about things that interest you. Over time you usually need to develop some sort of focus and identity if you want people to read your work and subscribe to it. However if you need time to find out what this identity is, just find time to write about and properly explore the topic you are interested in. For me this has been a very important activity in my own learning about learning and about technology.

[Image by ?i? Pië]

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

I’ve been using Bloglines for quite a while to subscibe to web feeds, and it has worked wonderfully even with over 1000 subscriptions. Looking around about 18 months ago, nothing else seemed to deal well with that number of feeds.

Google Reader though, has developed and looks like a possible competitor. So in this post I’ll take a quick look at how the two compare.

Browsing

With both services the experience of browsing feeds, marking them as read, and following links is fine. There is no major difference between the two.

Subscribing

Subscribing to feeds is simple in both, but while Bloglines makes it easy to choose what folder the feed with be held in, Google requires you to choose it manually. A small point, but it’s an extra step.

Language translation

With Bloglines I used Yahoo Pipes to translate the feed’s contents into English, which takes 10 minutes to set up, but Google reader allows you to set a feed to be translated into your language by going to ‘Folder settings’ and choosing ‘Translate into my language’. This is much easier.

Other points

If you use lots of Google’s applications, Google Reader would integrate well with them, and save you logging into an extra service. If you like stats, it also keeps track of which feeds you are reading posts from. Bloglines still makes it easier than Google Reader to manage large numbers of feeds, and folders.

In conclusion

Overall there isn’t a major difference between the two services. Because it is easy to try different feed readers, by exporting your OPML file and importing it into another service, it’s easy to give both a go and discover which works best for you.

I’ve never written a “top 5/top 10/top 100…” blog post. I guess I’ve always seen them as a cheep attention grabbing tactic – but nothing wrong with grabbing people’s attention cheeply if you got something you think is worth saying. So in this post I’m going to share with you the 5 elearning related blogs that I never want to miss… in no particular order.

1. elearnspace by George Siemens
Elearnspace is a great collection of links covering a wide variety of educational/technological issues, always with insightful comment from George’s perspective. You could just subscribe to this blog and keep a fairly good grasp of developments and thoughts in elearning.

2. e-portfolios for learning by Helen C. Barrett
If elearnspace covers everything, then this blog details an obsession with e-portfolios and the technologies which could be used to create them. Dr. Barrett has created and recreated her own e-portfolio using almost every imaginable tool. If you are thinking about using e-portfolios with your students this is a good place to start your exploration.

3. apophenia by Dana Boyd
Dana writes about a variety of issues, but her real area of specialisation is on “how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc”. If social networking is an area that interests you then having a look at the Best of Apophenia page will be a good place to start. I’d say that we should be very careful about how we use social network sites in education, but understanding what engages our students in their personal lives can help us a lot.

4. Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
So much of what we do in education is presenting. Whether it be lectures, conferences, or training sessions. This blog gives plenty of ideas about how one can experiment with presentations, and it is always interesting and inspiring.

5. (No Longer) Alone in a Library by Kimberly McCollum
This blog is quite new but so far I’ve found it’s enthusiasm and honesty engaging. If you are interested in using blogs with your students, have a look back at her experiences of undertaking the Comments Challenge and give something similar a go yourself.

These blogs speak to me where I am, and might not be relevant to everyone. But if you’re wanting to subscribe to a comprehensive collection of learning technology feeds I’m sure you want most of these in your OPML file. Other blogs that are great and that you might want to subscribe to are:

Remote Access by Clarence Fisher
Eide Neurolearning Blog by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide
Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold

Always remember that much of the value of blogs is in the interaction in the comments or between blogs, that can create communities. If you’ve got any recomendations, why not share them in our comments.

Lots of people are still confused about what podcasting is, and why they should care.

Common Craft are always worth a look when you need technologies explaining to you in a simple way, and they’ve got round to creating a video about using podcasts. While the best way to get your head round it is to subscribe to some podcasts, this video will introduce some of the concepts to you.

Probably the easiest way to get started consuming podcasts is to install iTunes on your computer, and search the podcast area of their store for podcasts on subjects that you are interested in.

Ask your students if they use podcasts. If they do perhaps you can start a podcast on a subject that you are an expert on, and share it with them and other people around the world? Perhaps you can encourage students to create their own as part of their learning.

Just listening to/watching podcasts alone is unlikely to result in deep learning, but it is a way of getting an introduction to subjects and discussions that are going on around subjects. Personally I listen to them while I’m travelling, doing housework, and in other situations where I might be bored and am glad of something to think about. So for me, well made podcasts are a free and welcome way of learning the basics about a subject, without the pain.

Following on from the post on Converting Text to Audio, there is a fantastic service at spokentext.net.

This service allows you to upload a file (be it .txt, .pdf, .doc or .html) and it converts the file to .mp3 for you. The voices are OK, but it’s the small things that are the best part about the service. You are provided with an RSS feed, meaning that every document that you convert becomes part of a podcast. You can subscribe to this in iTunes for example, and that will sync to your iPod if you use one.

Also there is a Firefox extension for it. Install the extension and you get a tool bar.

Select text in the web page that you are viewing, click the ‘Record Selected Text’ link, and it will add an audio version of the text to your podcast feed.

Using the Firefox extension and the RSS feed make this a very easy way of keeping consuming textual materials on your portable media player while you are on the move. It is free at the moment, but if you’d like to help the development of the service they are asking for donations to help pay for better voices.

A group from Lancashire County Council came this month to learn about new technologies that they could use in their work. As I was asked to do a session on blogs and podcasts, but as I was at ALT-C I recorded a screencast of the presentation for them, and then left some tasks for them to do.

This might be of interest to someone as an introduction to the technologies. I’d like to develop it further as a staff development session, but I’m not sure that most of the academic staff here really want to create podcasts. I’m even less sure that the students want to subscribe to them on a large scale. It might be better to develop staff development sessions about on-line audio and include podcasting as a small section of that.

We’ve written quite a few posts about sharing information from RSS feeds (see RSS tagged articles) from allowing people to subscribe by email to displaying content of your feeds on your web site.

I think one of the simplest ways has been overlooked – that is creating a Bloglines account containing the feeds that you want to share, and setting the ‘Show My Blogroll’ option in ‘Options/Blog Settings’ to ‘Yes, publish my Blogroll’. The NHS National electronic Library for Medicines have created a Bloglines account to do this. My own account can be seen too at http://www.bloglines.com/public/pfh.

This gives an easy way to allow people to keep track of a set of feeds by visiting your page. Alternatively they could download the OPML file containing your subscriptions (by clicking on ‘Export Subscriptions‘) and upload it into their own Bloglines account. This would allow them to add and delete feeds to suit themselves.

If you’re interested in following peoples thoughts on using technologies in teaching and learning why not download my OPML file, set up your own Bloglines account, upload the OPML file using the ‘Import Subscriptions‘ link and delete the categories and feeds that you don’t need. That’s a quick way to get started building a library of RSS feeds of your own.

I’m trying to write a document to introduce staff to Podcasting and it’s possibilities for use in education. Over the next few weeks I’m going to write some posts covering various topics relating to podcasting – before developing them further and putting them together in an easy to distribute document.

If you want to subscribe to a podcast you need software that automatically downloads new episodes of podcasts that you have subscribed to. This is often called podcast ‘aggregator’ software, but you might hear ‘podcatcher’ software too. There are dozens to choose from, but for this post I’ve looked at 3 popular ones:

• iTunes (version 7.1.0.59)
• Democracy Player (version 0.9.5.3)
• Juice (version 2.2).

If you cannot install software on your work computer, or if you use many different computers at your library - you can use a web based service like Bloglines to subscribe, just as you would if you subscribe to blogs. This allows you to access your subscriptions from anywhere. It doesn’t download the files in the background like aggregator software, but it will help you keep track of when new episodes are released.

All the pieces of software have different functions, so you need to choose one that fits in with the way you want to use the podcast files that are downloaded. I have a Samsung MP3 player (512MB) that I listen to audio on and I watch the videos at my PC, so I need a piece of software that organises the files and that makes it easy to copy files into my MP3 player.

While many features are standard between all the choices, the list below details the important functionality that varies:

• Lets me copy and paste files from it’s interface, directly into my MP3 player: iTunes
• Allows organisation of podcasts into folders (useful if you are subscribed to many): Democracy, Bloglines
• Keeps track of the number of unwatched files from each podcast (again useful if you are subscribed to many: Democracy, Bloglines
• Allows import and export of OPML files for transfer or backup: iTunes, Juice, Bloglines
• Web Based: Bloglines

While iTunes doesn’t offer the functionality to organise large number of podcasts, it does everything else well, and I’d recomend this to someone getting started subscribing to podcasts, especially if they own an iPod. Democracy Player is still very new, but looks like it could offer iTunes some competition in the future.

As well as my Blogger blogs, I’ve been using an Edublogs (which used Wordpress software) blog to record how a project was progressing . I’ve also had questions about using Edublogs from staff at Edge Hill, and this post aims to answer all the issues and questions that I’ve come across.

01: How can I filter spam comments?

I’ve had trouble with the amount of spam I get, and it has made it impossible to check through all my comments to moderate them and allow the real comments to be shown. Also the comment notification emails from this blog have filled up my inbox.

However, now the Edublogs Tutorials blog has brought the Akismet spam filter plugin to my attention. It seems to be working well for me.

02: How do I create Tabs at the Top of the Page?

Basically the tabs are links to information pages rather than blog posts. You can choose which you are creating when in your Edublogs admin area by selecting the ‘Write Page’ option under ‘Write’.

Whether the information page that you have created appears as a tab (as with the blog shown below)…

…or just a link (in the blog shown below they are links under the ‘Pages’ title)…

…depends on the theme you choose for your blog. You can choose themes by going to ‘Presentation’ and selecting ‘Themes’.

03: How do I make the blog (or sections of it) private?

All I’ve been able to find regarding this is a plugin called ‘Edublogs only’ that makes your blog only available to people logged into Edublogs.org. Find it in your Edublogs admin area under ‘Plugins’. This obviously doesn’t give you complete privacy, and after trying a few things including setting the Post Status (below)…

…to private I don’t think Edublogs is the way to go if you want complete privacy. Blogger seems to do this well though.

There are a few blogs that I know of being used at Edge Hill, and I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what they are being used for. They are not all official Edge Hill blogs, but they show different ways in which the technology might be used.

Information Resources
The information resources team in Learning Services have a blog which seems to work primarily as internal communication within that team.

Mister Roy’s Musings
Roy in marketing has a blog in which he talks about various things – like marketing. It is interesting as a perspective on Edge Hill University, for example the Are Students Customers? conversation. There are other blogs on blogs.edgehill.ac.uk but the others aren’t currently being used very much.

hi.edgehill.ac.uk
hi.edgehill.ac.uk is a site aimed at those who are thinking of coming to University, and several students are blogging their experiences for the site.

EHU E-learning
There is a blog in the Faculty of Health managed by Brian Smith. It is basically a collection of bookmarks rather than original content.

Cakes: Learning Technology Blog
And while we’re at it – what is this blog for? The aim is to share knowledge and experiences of using technologies in education with other people who are interested in using them.

I’m noticing more services that are enabling people to subscribe to web feeds by email. This is great for people who aren’t following enough sites for it to be worth using an aggregator such as Bloglines.

We’ve already posted about FeedBlitz. Subscribe to Cakes using the form below to see what the user experience would be using this.

Both these services provide extra functionality, such as subscribing to all the feeds in an OPML file, so if you want to do more you might want to explore them. Also there are other services out there that allow this, for example if you use FeedBurner to create your feeds, that supports subscriptions by email too.

As Kate Trgovac says on her blog, you’ve got to deliver content in the form people want to read – otherwise they probably won’t.