Podcasting

My institution subscribes to ITunesU. Wanting to support learning technologies, I decided to give it a try. Backstory: a year or two ago, I decided to buy myself an IPod in order to learn about it. I have been frustrated with ITunes ever since, as well as with Real Networks and Rhapsody, mainly because they don't play well together (if at all). In order to make it interesting, I decided to try to find various oldies to download to my new player. Real Networks had more oldies available, but they kept annoying me for various reasons, such as lack of support, even after I signed up for a monthly service fee. Plus, of course, I couldn't download the songs I purchased, even though I owned them, into my IPod. ITunes is incredibly annoying in that it kept forcing me to download updated versions, practically every time I logged on, and I had to be careful to uncheck the checked boxes offering to send me regular advertising messages. "Free" is never free. Finally, I don't know how many times I would open up ITunes and plug in my IPod and never be able to exchange things between them - my IPod would be grayed out and downloads not allowed... Something to do with settings?

Now: I go to the Podcasting/ITunes workshop, use Audacity to create my Podcast (which was indeed easy - good tool!), logged in successfully to ITunesU, but am stymied as to how to get my Podcast (7-minute, 6MB .mp3 file) uploaded. Stay tuned for the exciting outcome ...

New Media: Video

I developed and taught a graduate course, totally on-line, for the past two summers. Teaching technical content has its own particular challenges, since you aren't there to help them get through their mistakes in the lab. This summer I overcame my own resistance and managed to create and edit several Camtasia videos. These are screen captures of me demonstrating, on my own computer, hands-on software implementation and application. The first time I tried, I was so uncomfortable and frustrated that I didn't get it right away that I almost gave up. I grumbled to myself that I did not sign on to have to become a video creator and editor! However, initially with help from our wonderful support folks, and finally on my own, I eked out several "lessons", taking the advice of some Sloan-C instructors not to strive for polished perfection, but instead to allow for some rough spots that more accurately simulate what it would be like in the live classroom, and that also reduces the total time one must spend, which is another major obstacle. This gave me a little more confidence to try the next thing, a podcast.

It Really Is a Second Life ...

This week's workshop was an intensive introduction to Second Life. I tried SL out just for fun about a year ago and was absolutely fascinated - surely a sociologist's dream! I spent most of my time wandering around the world, chatted up a few people from other countries, felt guilty dancing with a guy from the UK, got my spouse, another geezer nerd, to join up and showed him a few spots, was extremely uncomfortable when I tried out displaying a male persona, and then classes started again and I haven't been on since then until now. This time, I have been too busy to make it to half these sessions, and am embarassingly behind the rest of the class. I'm impatient that I don't get everything right away, feel like I'm just bumbling around most of the time. Thanks to my excellent instructors Bethany Bovard and Pam Rivers I learned how to be a furry and use the camera.
The truth is that, way fun though it definitely is, SL is a HUGE time sink. Compared to the other Web 2.o tools, it is a major investment in time, energy, and learning, just to get up to speed enough to think about using it with students. It is not something I will be incorporating into my teaching anytime soon. I expect it will be used mainly by institutions that have the resources to own, maintain, and support virtual learning spaces within SL, as the Sloan-C instructors showed us.

My Web 2.0 Sandbox

OK, here's the question. Can a geezer nerd like me, who in the distant past could wrestle with Unix and vi, programmed in Fortran and Pascal, and now teaches database and SQL, learn these fascinating new Web 2.0 / Learning 2.0 technologies? I decided to create this blog to track my efforts at using these new tools, which undoubtedly have huge potential for elearning, especially for connecting with and engaging today's students. So the blog itself represents my initial efforts.

What finally got me going were these Sloan-C workshops. As a result of participating in these, I am now a great admirer of Burks Oakley and Ray Schroeder, who have provided wonderful learning experiences and great resources, along with other Sloan-C teachers, staff, and participants. I hope to use this blog to help further disseminate to colleagues what I have learned from them and others, as well as experiment, which means sometimes it ain't gonna work the way I wanted it to.