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.

Fear - by Mark Sun on Flickr (CC)

As part of our MSc we’ve had to read a paper by Guy Merchant (2009) on Web2.0, new literacies and the idea of learning though participation. We were asked to provide a response on it in a form of our choosing. I thought I’d have a go with Audioboo as I haven’t really had a chance to play with it.

You can read the paper here. It’s well worth it if you are interested in web2.0 and social networking for eductaion.

My response was just a quick thing about the relationship between participation and engagement on one hand and fear on the other and how it links to reading I did as an undergrad about fear (informed or otherwise) influences behaviour in real landscapes. The book was by Yi Fu Tuan and can be found here.

I don’t draw any radical conclusions as this was more a way of recording some thoughts.

PS – Sorry about the tag cloud – slight issues following updating the plugin…

CC Flickr image by Rakka

Here’s another entry to the D-Ed Pool and it’s an interesting one as it’s a service I quite liked but also is a good example of one of the main pitfalls of using web2.0 tools for education.

Fliggo was a build-your-own video sharing site which I originally viewed way back here. The applications for education were plentiful. You could in effect create a TV channel for your school or class and protect it the same way you could protect a wordpress blog (controlling who can upload or view, add comments etc) with the added bonus that you could import videos from YouTube thus getting round most education ISPs’ filters.

A few weeks ago it stopped allowing me to upload videos and now it’s not even allowing me to login. In November Fliggo was “rolled into” Vidly a Twitter video service and the create-your-own aspect of the site was quietly put to bed. Have a read of Fliggo’s blog post – it’s quite illuminating.

Why is it important for educators?

It tells us somethings about the nature of the web2.0 at a time when it’s really taking off for teaching and learning.

1. Services like Fliggo take time and resources to build and then maintain. There is a lot of altruism on the web but it’s not limitless. People need to eat. I think I remember @dougbelshaw saying in a blog post that the web2.0 “free lunch” was a but of an illusion (sorry if that’s a misquote, Doug). In Fliggo’s case they needed to make a commercial decision and that didn’t include keeping Fliggo going.
2. The 2nd point is related. In the 11months or so since Fliggo was released the nature of the social web has changed. Twitter seems to be where the people are(and therefore, the money). Fliggo was catering for a need that appears to have vanished with alarming speed.

It’s one of the principle risks of using many web2.0 tools that there is no guarantee that it will be there when you want it. Many services are still in beta. Some may never come out of beta and slowly die a death as the venture capital funding runs out or you’ll find that features that were once free are now charged for.

I talked about this previously and Fliggo is a case in point. The way we as educators use web-based technology needs to take this fragility into account and we have to be more agile and flexible than some people have been used to.

RIP Fliggo (no flowers, please)

Image - Netbook by -eko-

We’ve embarked on a project with some of our primaries recently to investigate using web2.0 applications for teaching and learning.

One thing that has come out even in the first few weeks is that actually, all is not as rosey as it could be. I’m becoming a bit more pragmatic when it comes to a vision of a web2.0 future.

Working in a City Learning Centre means that I’m lucky enough to have time to investigate new technologies and road test them before we use them with schools; not always possible if you teach for a living as well.  This time has been extremely useful when trialling excellent products like Animoto, Voicethread, Xtranormal, Glogster etc. No matter how good some of these apps are they require a bit of work to ensure that they can work well in an educational context.

Some apps make it easy for you. Glogster is a prime example. They have bent over backwards for the education community, creating a separate service that keeps sub-teens away from the more outre elements of their social networking platfom and makes it a cinch to register a class set of logins. They are also really attentive, a few exasperated moans about a glitch on Twitter were speedily met with responses from the Head of Business Development (@andrewconnelly) and their education specialist (@glogstereduman).

Animoto is also a stand out as they have a system for signing up temporary accounts (expire in 6 months) that give full access to the service.

Animoto could do a bit more for education, though. Having time limited accounts is actually a bit of a handicap when you have to keep applying to renew each one indivually. I created about 20 accounts for our various projects 6 months ago and have no way of renewing them as a batch, I have to re-apply for each one separately as far as I can see.

The Glogster model makes an educators life more easy. I can see why Animoto operates the way it does – it has to monetize its offering and having loads of full access, free accounts may sap vital revenue but also put a strain on servers.

But from some teachers’ point of view, these technical hold-ups may make the difference between engaging with this new technology or following the path of lesser resistance.

Given the range of resources available, creating separate accounts for each is likely to take up a huge amount of time. I know one solution is getting the students to choose the apps and get skilled at creating their own logins that they have responsibility. But for teachers who are testing the waters, that’s quite a brave step.

From a commercial point of view, surely getting students hooked on the technology in the classroom is free advertising.

Mind you, that’s an ethical humdinger right there! More thought required, Thomson!

Are you just starting using web2.0 in the classroom. How are you getting on?

York Minster

I was invited last week to support a creative session at the Sheffield Primary Headteachers’ Conference in York on digital imaging. It was run by Rob Walker from Playing for Success with me tagging along and throwing in my tuppence-worth.

I thought I’d share the results with you.

The aim was to demonstrate what could be achieved with a few simple guidelines on taking decent pics and different technologies. It would have been nice to give the Heads that took part a chance to try out the technology but in the end we only had 1.5 hours, enough for a pleasant, sunny walk round York.

We did a rudimentary Photostory of the best images the delegates took for the evening meal but I spent the following morning negotiating with BT Openzone to create the following (they’re just speedy sketches to get the delegates thinking so don’t expect high production values…

Animoto – an quick and easy way of stitching photos and video together with a bit of text to create something really engaging. See my previous post on Animoto for more.

Click here to see the video…

@Trip – we took along a wee GPS tracker mentioned previously so we could log the photos in Google Maps and upload to the @Trip server.
Click here to view (embedding isn’t really effective).

Photosynth – This was the first time I’d tried it and for a Microsoft product I was pleasantly suprised. But as Andy Bush, a colleague pointed out, what’s the educational benefit? Maybe not much by itself but as part of a larger project it makes for a high impact element. All you have to do is take as many pictures as you can of one location from plenty of different angles, upload them and some fancy algorithm stiches them all together. Frightfully clever! You can view it as a slide show or “walk around the semi-3D environment.

Needs Silverlight to run.

Soundscapes – we didn’t get a chance to do this due to time constraints but consider sending students out with sound recorders instead of cameras. When they get back to base, use Audacity, Garageband or Myna to create an abstract soundscape using loops and effects. The results may be a little “out there” but it’s a great way to shift your perspective on a location by thinking aurally, not visually.

Here’s a soundscape created by some Y9 students a while back in a location in Sheffield. I’ll send a Wispa bar to anyone who can correctly identify the location!

Myna from Aviary

Aviary has recently released a web based audio editor called Myna and it’s well wrth a look regardless of what area of the curriculum you’re from.

Aviary already has an established web presence with its fantastic suite of image and graphics tools (all named after birds – go see!) and this is a welcome diversion from them. It’s getting to the stage where they are seriously challenging the likes of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Illustrator for the education market.

Anyway; Myna…

Picture a halfway house between Audacity and Garageband, add in that it’s a web tool and so comes with easy options for sharing and embedding and you have Myna. Here’s the demo video…

The interface is intuitive if you have used loop-based audio editors before and is reasonably straightforward for neophytes as well. It certainly looks more engaging than Audacity which, athough a thoroughly excellent tool, isn’t the friendliest-looking thing.

The Garageband-like functions are interesting. You can create pieces of music quickly and easily without much musical know-how using intro’s, loops and endings. The production values on the original clips are high so the results are highly listenable.

You don’t have as much flexibility to mix instruments as Garageband. Essentially, they’ve chopped up ready-made pieces of music and you just reassemble the chunks in the order you want. For most uses that’s as much flexibility as you need.

I did have problems trying to record audio using a mic because I couldn’t get the server to respond when I tried it. It may be to do with being behind a proxy server at work. I used the feedback tool in Myna to flag it up but haven’t received a reply yet. I’ll update the post when I know more.

At the other end, saving and publishing work is a breeze. You save your work as you go then select Mixdown when you’re ready. It gives you an option to save the MP3 or copy the URL and embed code of the finished audio. A lot more painless than getting a class to export an MP3 using Audacity with it’s Lame encoder complications.

The possibilities are huge with this. It’s easy for a class to create podcasts in the classroom or at home, flex their creative muscles and then share what they’ve done. If you have class blog or use a VLE then htis could make homework very interesting indeed.

There’s no cost to set up an Aviary account but a pro subscription is available for $25 a year and there’s education pricing too which isn’t clarified on the website.

See Danny Nicholson’s earlier blog post for another review…

I was trying to come up with a fun way of explaining web2.0 this summer (a little like our VLE animation from last year – starting to look a little dated now) and came up with a stick men thing but gave up because I was boring myself. This is much better than I would have managed.

I particularly like way she divorces the ideas from the technology and her positive-thinking approach.

Cheers Sacha.

I’d like your help shaping this. I’d even like it if you told me it was a bobbins idea and not to waste our time.

The reasoning behind doing it is that looking for web2.0 tools can be overwhelming, especially for neophytes. There are excellent blogs that share new finds and ideas and great Tweeters. The main problems as I see it are twofold:

• Finding stuff – Searching these when you have a particular requirement is a pain in the backside. It’s really easy to miss a blog post or a tweet and you may have missed that crucial app which may inspire your students. Finding things in retrospect involves hours of searching.
• Evaluating – A blog or tweet recommending a particular app, however well written, can give a narrow view of what an app is capable of or how it can be applied to learning. Much better if there is a place for a community of people the comment, give reommendations/horror stories etc for the benefit of others. 

So, let me give you a sketch of what it might look like…

• Searching – As simple as possible. No searching for subject, key stage etc. Applications and sites are grouped (inclusively) into Make Stuff (tools for creating – maybe Animoto, XtraNormal, CoolIris etc), Share Stuff (tools like Fliggo, Voicethread,  etc) and Chat About Stuff (tools for getting involved in “the conversation” and recommended blog, good tweeters, forums etc). Make and Share then break down into Video, Sound, Images, Numbers, Places, Ideas.
  Questions: Is this too broad brush? Are there any glaring examples that this wouldn’t accommodate?
  
• Community – Anyone can nominate something so long as there’s an email address (like comments on blogs). Nominations would be moderated and all directory entries would be credited. There’s then a facility for people to star rate the tool’s usefulness in education and write a comment about their experience using it (what age groups, subjects, technical hints and tips). Imagine something a bit like the reviews on Amazon.
  Questions: Is this an effective way of sharing experiences? Is it done better in a different forum?

I hope it would be a useful facility but worry that it would become some massive, time consuming beast that misses the whole spirit of web2.0.

I’m a bit too close to it so need the benefit of some other, better brains. Please give me your thoughts…

Image – quinnanya on Flickr

It’s a nifty wee tool for making a collage of images, videos and music presented in a scrolling format. Have a look at this quick example I put together…

The images were all from Flickr on Creative Commons unfortunately I’ve lost the list of where they all came from so if you want an image credit just send me a comment and I’ll update the post. The music is called Bereft by Paul Mottram and come from the Audio Network Production Library (education license – see here for the commercial site).

As far as uses go:

• A gallery of a student’s artwork projects
• Create a collage of abstract images, add music and use it as inspiration for a piece of poetry or creative writing
• A lesson starter for a topic in history, geography, science etc
• For displaying pictures from a school play or activity and linking to it in the school blog or website.

Have a go. It’s really intuitive and there’s some nice image editing tools.Let’s hope they sort out the embedding issues, though.