Tag Archives: mlearning

iPod v Walkman⤴

from @ eCurriculum Blog

image by RosaPomar form Flickr licenced under Creative Commons State of the art technology in it's day, Sony celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the launch of the Sony Walkman this week. In this article BBC news invited 13 year-old Scott Campbell from Aberdeenshire to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week. It's an amusing stroll down memory lane.

"It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. "

"I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured."

It does remind me that I used to listen to OU tapes on my own Sony Walkman when I was out with the dog without considering it as innovative at the time. It was just the way it was. So, although range of information and the nature of it (latest and up to the minute) may have changed, I guess the notion of considering mobile technologies as something out of the ordinary might be a mistake. It's just the way it is.

Read Scott's article

The Silent Treatment⤴

from @ eCurriculum Blog

Sorry if you're an avid reader of my Friday Blog - I've been really busy initiating some project work and then had a week off in beautiful Ports du Soleil region of the French Alps. Back un-injured I'll try to get back into Blogging mode.

image from chab74 in flickr used under creative commons licence Our mobile technology came into it's own when away. For this first time this year we checked the BBC news web site over some vin chaud (elevenses!) at 2100 meters (almost 7000 ft) on my pal's iPhone. We also booked a restaurant in the village for dinner from the same place. I logged into my work email just to see if I could - and I could. I emailed a picture taken that moment to my email account and of course sent a multimedia message to the team back at the office - life is good!

Text messaging came into it's own for our rendezvous at the pub, I received numerous happy birthday messages to disturb the silence of the mountains (probably a bit annoying for others), and kept in touch with the family. We took short videos on my mobile phone but sadly missed the best moments.

I'll need to get back to applying all this to learning  teaching but here's my message to you all - the technology's there and it's awesome - use it for personal activities and it will help you to get your head around it's application for learning & teaching.

What's your preference – Pull or Push ?⤴

from @ eCurriculum Blog

This week we published our first podcast. It's the first of a series of short podcasts (and in the longer term - vodcasts) that we are planning this session.

The essential difference between a podcast and an audio file is that a podcast is syndicated. This means that, if you subscribe to it, feediconthe podcast is automatically supplied to you when it is published - you don't have to go and "find" the information. You'll have seen the orange feed icon I'm sure. You see it on browser menu bars, on websites and in email clients. It's the new way to manage information. It's now often referred to as "pull technology", where the request for information originates from the client, with the reverse known as "push technology" where servers push data to the client.

Feeds can also be embedded into websites using feed widgets. Therefore it's perfectly feasible to provide dynamic content to course websites using this method. e.g. a feed with local exhibitions for art students, a current affairs feed for journalism & politics or late travel deals for tourism students.

We had a great deal of discussion in the team about the best way to provide access to our new podcast service. Mark would use iTunes, Celeste uses Google reader and I prefer the RSS reader integrated into MS Outlook. So because of the range of alternatives that people use now we've provided a few options.

If you use iTunes simply click on the link; If you use an RSS reader copy and paste the code provided; the final alternative is to open the link and save as a favourite feed (an option in IE7) or a live bookmark (FireFox).

Check out our very first podcast here

The ever reliable Lee and Sachi LeFever from Common Craft have a great short video that describes RSS really well, although as I've already mentioned the reader software they talk of is not the only option now.