In an effort to kickstart this stalled blog I’m going to take a leaf out of the books of @dajbelshaw, @jukesie and @sboneham and do weeknotes, summaries of what I achieved, learnt, reflected on etc. that week. I’ll hopefully publish it every Friday.

They will get better…promise!

Follow Doug, Steve and Matt’s weeknotes.

Pecha Kucha’s

At the Netskills planning meeting last week we all had to do a 5 minute presentation on a topic of our choice. Particularly enjoyed @carlvincent’s on agile project development (going to use this model to develop my next workshop) and @sboneham’s on the convergence of internet of things, web3.0 and mobile usage, although all of them were interesting and enjoyable. I tried to explain “slicing” as a way of assessing reflective learning through the use of Play-Doh (need a full blog post to demonstrate this). What did I learn?

• It’s liberating doing a presentation without any form of technology other than pens, a flipchart and cutlery.
• Be careful not to rely too much on a quirky visual hook, spend as much time on getting the verbal explanation right as well. It can also be distracting.
• 5 minutes is not a long time, pick a topic that you can comfortably cover in the time.
• If I’m anxious about a presentation it tends to go better than if I’m quietly confident. This is annoying!
• I’m my own worst critic. It probably didn’t go as badly as it did in my brain.

Augmented Reality

Thanks to Steve’s quick presentation I’m going to investigate spatial tools for a possible workshop/set of resources. I had a go using a range of tools over the week:

Hoppala – requires you to set up a  of developer account on Layar and quite fiddly for non-specialists

Junaio – a much quicker route to sharing information about places to a network of friends.

Wikitude – the app I’d heard most about but I’m quite disappointed by, mainly because it doesn’t remember my settings and keeps crashing.

A full blog post will be forthcoming shortly but my overall impression was that the tools are still pretty crude. The second and third generations will be much more interesting especially if Google Goggles is as good as people suggest (please can we have it for the iPhone now!).

New workshops

Netskills is running a season of workshops in Newcastle and London in October and November. I’ve been writing the new one on Digital Storytelling and adapting the workshop on Blogging and Social Networking and Supporting the Student Learner Experience (not advertised yet) so they fit better with where technology is now. Really looking forward to getting these on the road.

Doug Belshaw’s Google Earth site

In preparation for the Google Teacher Academy UK’s launch, Doug asked for help compiling a site with guidance on using Google Earth for education. Being a geographer and interested in the tools I said yes. Doug’s done a huge amount really quickly and I’ve only added a little bit to the Advanced Use section. It’s a really useful resource for anyone interested in making the most of this fantastic application. Please contribute as well.

I had a wee word with myself about signing up to get involved in things and then not actually contributing. With so many collaborative projects and requests for help out there, there’s a risk of getting all keen, signing up and then not following through on commitments. I want to avoid becoming one of those people.

Diigo

As I’m using Diigo much more now for bookmarking and sharing stuff I’ve set it up to auto post new additions to my library on this blog every Sunday. I think this will be a further incentive to use social bookmarking more constructively.

I’ve also been setting up a series of “lists” on different subjects. Here’s my collection of links on Digital Storytelling. Check out the rest of my Diigo Library.

FOTiE 2010

I’ve not been doing a lot of horizon scanning recently so  I signed up to go to the Future of Technology in Education conference in London on 1st October. I’m really looking forward to this as it seems to carry quite a buzz with it.

It’ll be great to finally hear Ollie Bray, James Clay, Miles Berry and Matt Lingard, all of whom I follow on Twitter but have never actually heard speak.

Of particular interest is James Alliban and Miles Metcalffe who are doing 2 20 minutes slots on AR and Geolocation (see above).

Steve and Will from Netskills will also be there. Come say hi!

And on a personal note…

We need a holiday Chez Chalk! It’s 4 months ince we came to Newcastle and we’ve not really had a proper break. Both Chalklets (elder and younger) seem to be at the end of their tether but they’ve been through such a massive change and dealt with all mummy and daddy’s wobbles remarkably well. They’re still my inspiration.

We failed to complete on the purchase of our house on Monday (someone else’s solicitors at fault) but we should be moving next Monday. One week either way isn’t going to make much difference in the grand scheme of things although I was a little repressed ball of fury in the office on Monday. Sorry, m’colleagues!

After all that, I’m still thrilled to be in Newcastle.

Image – Xavier de Jaureguiberry – Att-NC-ND

CC Image - Brendan Wilkinson - A-NC-ND

I’m going all gooey about AudioBoo at the moment. It’s sat around in the perpiphery of my vision for a while now but in the last month or so I’ve started to see it as a really useful addition to my network of tools, especially now I’m a JesusPhone user.

If you’re not familiar with AudioBoo have a look at their site and check out the video intro.

Here’s why I’m gushing:

It’s simple – Using the iPhone you can go from recording to publishing in a matter of clicks. The audio record function allows you to pause during recording and append. It won’t allow you to chop your audio around in an Audacity stylee but adding too much functionality would get in the way of the simplicity. I can live with that.

It’s social – There aren’t as many people using AudioBoo as Twitter, for example, but it still has the same mechanisms for following and you can also comment on Boos bringing your network in on the act.

It’s fun – Sound is overlooked, I think, but still plays a massive part in our lives. I love the idea of taking sound snapshots and sharing them. Listening forces you to take things more slowly and experience the world differently.

It’s mobile – I’m surprised by the quality of the audio you get from recording on an iPhone (none of that compressed MP3 gurgle you get with many online audio recorders). The fact that it’s mobile means that you can record your thoughts regardless of location and allows you to easily bring in other sounds and voices where hulking round large amounts of equipment or dragging someone near a laptop aren’t feasible. I find it really useful for reflecting on conferences or other events where I’m likely to be on the move or in a hotel room immediately after. The iPhoen’s great but trying to type an extended blog post on it would make me want to cry. It also helps you to capture serendipitous bits of discovery or random thought in awkward places bringing informal and formal learning together.

It’s personal – Hearing someone’s voice, especially when they’re speaking conversationally and not off a script is a great way of feeling your getting closer to someone. It gives you more clues about emotion and personality than you would get from written text.

It’s spatial – As a failed geographer I still love the idea of landscape and space and I’ve done work with schools before where students have captured sounds in a location and then mashed them together in Audacity to create soundscapes. AudioBoo geotags your recordings but it will also let you export your recordings as mp3 for use elsewhere (see handy tip)

It’s connected – Boos are public, sharable, embeddable and you can link to other apps like Twitter, Facebook to get your recordings out to your network quickly and easily. Adding a hashtag into an AudioBoo title when you’re linked to Twitter automatically hastags the Tweet which saves retweeting later.

Oh, yes. It’s free!

As a learning tool it’s something powerful to include in the arsenal for capturing formal and informal experiences and introducing a sense of play into things.n I’m going to be investigating more about the possible applications of digital storytelling in FE and HE soon and AudioBoo is likely to figure quite prominently.

You can listen to my Boos here. Also check out Doug Belshaw’s Thinking Digital conference chats here.

Right, I’m off to run through a sunny cornfield hand in hand with AudioBoo while recording the pretty birdsong.

Image - CC from Flickr

Not a hugely inspiring piece of ICT but this data poster has come from New Scientist via Digg. It’s worth a moment of your time.

Things that struck me were the growth in deaths from HIV/AIDS and the relationship between arms spending and number of conflicts among other things.

Thought it might make a nice bit of work in Humanities – ask the group the question at the top of the page to generate a bit of discussion and then give them the data and have a debate to decide whether it’s true or not.

It could be the starting point for a range of ICT activities. e.g. the students creating media resources to back up their conclusions or maybe using your VLE to host an online discussion out of class time.

In the meantime check out their article on “13 more things that don’t make sense“.

Image – venetia joubert sarah oosterveld on Flickr

igot-U Tracker

It’s not often I write about bits of kit but I’ve been having a bit of fun with this wee gem for a few days now. The i-gotU tracker has been around for a little while and has previously featured on MerlinJohn but we got our grubby mitts on one last week.

Briefly, it’s a GPS tracker that is about the size of a memory stick that logs your position at roughly 6 second intervals while it’s running.  Get it back to a laptop, plug in the USB cable and with a few clicks it has mapped your route on a Google Maps background.

The really clever bit happens when you take a camera with you. As long as the clock in the camera is set correctly you can upload the pics to the @trip software at the same time as the GPS data and it will add the pics to your route. Text can be added later.

You can make your trips available online or save them in formats that can be viewed on Google Earth. Have a look at the @Trip site for more examples to download.

Shire Brook Valley

Have a look at this example I did last week. There’s a really good nature reserve near us that we have used for projects before (good for industrial heritage, geography, science) and I strapped my boots on, took our trusty EOS450D and pretended I knew what I was doing. Felt like a proper geographer for the first time since uni!

You can easily see applications for this. For starters…

• Field Trips – either you make one before you go to familiarise students with a location/topic or get them to make one after they’ve been.
• Science – Mapping specimens in an ecosystem (e.g. change in plant species on coasts)
• Local history projects
• Maths  – looking at speed, time and distance relationships. (Graphs are available in the @trip software although I don’t think you can export data).
• PE - tracking a cross-country runner or cyclist, comapring the difficulty of routes (it will also show elevation).
• Art - create a photography walk for an art project.

I had one or two little glitches running the software and lost data from one test trip completely but apart from that it’s a dream to use. I like the idea of any kit where the interface is 2 flashing lights and a dirty great button. After our previous nightmares with GPS it was a relief.

The ability to export to a Google Eart KMZ also means that you can combine it with GE’s audio tour function opening up a whole new avenue that I haven’t explored yet.

Have you used the igot-U? Share your experiences, good or bad…

Image - Adi Setiawan on Flickr

Had an interesting day out on Monday at Nottingham Uni. Nick Mount and Gary Priestnall in the school of geography were hosting a workshop on the uses of immersive technologies in education. It was all a bit out of my remit as we don’t do higher ed in CLC’s but a fascinating day nonetheless.

It was all done under the auspices of the DELVE project (if you want a good example of creative acronym wrangling (CAW) check out how they got to DELVE!) which links Nottingham Uni and the OU.

In a nutshell it was a showcase of some examples of how they have been using immersive technologies (3D sims, Google Earth, Second Life) in teaching their courses. By immersive technologies (and there was considerable debate about the meaning of the term) they mean apps and hardware that allows a learner to become drawn into a virtual or augmented environment which supposedly leads to a deeper form of engagement with the task. There were also presentations from Claire Jarvis at Leicester about her work modelling GPS in a virtual environment.

The majority of the stuff being demo’s was beyond most schools’ capabilities but it was interesting to see what’s going on in other parts of the eductaional world.

Here are some of the mail things I took away from the event…

Google Earth - there was a fascinating demo of an activity to create a 3d wind farm in the Lake District in GE and then assess it’s visual impact from certain key point sround the National Park. Really made me want to investigate GE as a creative tool along with Sketchup rather than just a viewing tool.

Maptube - Brilliant. An excellent resoure for making map mashups. OK, maybe it’s only geographers like me that get excited about that sort of thing but it makes for a really groovy activity for KS4. I’ve just had a go at comparing the distribution of knife crime stats in 2006/7 with post office distribution and mashing up a map of it. Why? BECAUSE I COULD!! (Not strictly immersive technology but I’m not complaining).

Second Life - Nick was showing how they used SL as a discussion tool for a wind farm project. They had created an island in SL and mapped a mini version of the Lake District on it and users were encouraged to place turbines in certainlocations then the students’ avatars could meet and discuss different options. I’m still not convinced that SL is something we could usefully get involved with here. I have too many worries about using it in schools mainly from the e-safety point of view and I’m not sure that the pedagogic benefits are worth pursuing before schools have grasped more basic web2.0 tools.

Does anyone have any experience of using Second Life in schools? Am I missing the point?

3D Screen Technology – This was the first time I’d seen 3d used outside of BETT. They used it as a way of visualizing a wind farm (notice a theme?) in the Lake District. It was veryimpressive (and hugely expensive) but I was left with the same feeling that I had after BETT, namely that the education benefits of immersion are not proven to the extent that schools would want to invest tens of thousands in the necessary resources.

On the whole, this idea of immersion and it’s relation to engagement was fascinating and I never went just because I was trying to pick up new ideas for the classroom. Mind expanding stuff.

A wee shout out to Claire Chambers who was particularly helpful and to Claire Jarvis for possibly having the solution to all our GPS problems!

Image Credit - Forklift on Flickr

The Guardian’s Digital World blog has highlighted the outbreak of map mash-ups tracing the spread of the H1N1 virus currently centred on Mexico. The Guardian have their own site with the raw data available (their Data Store is an interesting development in itself) but also there are a load of others out there (see Google Maps Mania for a good selection).

Could this be the fist global pandemic to have every single case  mapped and online for us all to see within hours?

It obviously makes for a useful science and geography resource. There’s been quite a lot of discussion about using Twitter to follow developments in significant events and this is similar if a little less immediate.

I remember following natural disasters when doing geography at school. The Kobe Hanshin earthquake in 1995 sticks in my mind (mainly as my bro is about to emigrate to Osaka for 4 years and it’s just across the bay from there) but it was always filtered through the traditional journalistic media or later through text books.

Now we have the opportunity to watch events unfold in near enough real-time which is amazing but brings with it a couple of issues:

1) Educationally, these map mash-ups, Twitter feeds etc are the domain of the great unwashed (I count myself in that) so everything that appears has to be viewed critically. We’re used to encouraging students to view the press critically but it’s easier to do with a media institution like Fox News (where you can establish a political/commercial bias) than with a myriad micro-blog entries. It requires a different sort of skill to strip out the subjectivity with stuff on the web as you don’t know where people are starting from.

2) Socially, with all this extra info available to us about the spread of a disease are we going to be better placed to counter it or worse off. Control of information and the associated emotional reactions in society are an important element in disease control. What happens to human behaviour when this info is in the public domain.

I’m not saying that information should be censored. There be dragons! It’s just that the impact on behvaiour is going to be just as interesting as the technological developments themselves.

And before I get carried away with all this sociological guff, I have to keep reminding myself that people are actually dying!