Mobile technologies

This week’s activites covered the use of mobile technologies in higher education.  I personally don’t access the web via my mobile phone as the screen is too small.  I did coincidentally have free access to facebook on my mobile this week so I went online and had a look at it.  I found it to be not worth the hassle, it takes ages to type anything and you can only see a tiny portion of the screen.  I do have a netbook which is a much better ‘mobile’ technology and the internet access there is tied into my mobile phone account.  I do make use of text alerts for tube delays so this aspect is quite good and as the articles for this week’s activites showed, libraries send out text messages for books that are overdue etc.

I tried the hands on activity of uploading a photo to my blog but my mobile wouldn’t send it to my email address and I’ve lost the cable to attach it to a computer.

The second activity involves researching one of the areas discussed in the Learning 2.0 blog.  I will write that up in a later blog post.

Wetpaint wiki

This week’s activities involved using wikis, specifically Wepaint.  I did try this last year but couldn’t think of much to put on the wiki.  See last year’s blog at http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/week-2-wikis/.  This year there is more structure to the wiki activity and I can add or amend things.  Sadly my group don’t seem to have added much yet so am not able to use the discussion threads there.  I have posted some comments and will see if anyone adds replies.

Editing text is easily done and you can see all previous versions.  I’m not sure if I will get informed about a change to my edit yet – don’t see where to watch the page.  This is a feature quite easy to spot on Confluence, the wiki used by Acquisitions and Access team.

I added a video to the video gallery and it was very easy to do when using a youtube clip.  However, I don’t seem to be able to make mine the featured video.   It seems that is a privelege for site moderators rather than mere contributors    The layout of the video pages doesn’t seem very good to me, I would prefer to see the video comments closer to where the video is.

Multimedia Cont.

We had a lecture from John Conway, Learning Technologist at Imperial. He showed us how multimedia is used in higher education – I’m quite envious of the technology available to today’s students.

He showed us how lectures can be videotaped and put online with embedded links so that the students can skip to the parts that they are interested in.  The videos can be uploaded to the VLE to be watched whenever it suits the students.  Further links can be embedded in recorded lectures that will take the student to further information about a topic.
We learned that a series of lectures can be made available via RSS/podcasts.  Apparently this will become very useful if there is a Swine flu pandemic according to the article about how universities are preparing for Swine flu – see http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jul/23/universities-prepare-emergency-swine-flu-plans
The videos can have subtitles added for hearing impaired students and also a student can zoom in on one particular area of the video if they are visually impaired.
We saw a virtual oscilloscope that students can practice on before they are let loose on the real thing so this technology can be used to to demonstrate any kind of lab equipment before students are allowed to use the real thing.

A copy of John’s slides are at this link  http://www.slideshare.net/learning20/multimedia-in-higher-education

Multimedia

I covered some of this in the course last year e.g. subscribing to podcasts via iTunes.   Same with searching for videos on YouTube and Google. See last year’s post at http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/week-7-podcasts-and-multimedia/

I did find it useful to search YouTube when researching holiday activities and accommodation.  I would recommend watching a clip as well as reading a review.   See below for one of this week’s tasks – embedding a YouTube clip into my blog entry.

Another part of this week’s tasks is to add audio to our blog post so here is the latest Imperial podcast…

Imperial podcast July09

There are various online lectures available at http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/media/onlinelectures.

Social networking

This week’s activities revolved around using Facebook and Twitter.  I have been using Facebook for some time so have actually already done the suggested activities eg I set up a group to coordinate a trip to Japan with friends which stopped ideas about where to visit being buried in emails (plus you can add photos there).  I like using Facebook to share photos and have  21 albums so far.  Also there are some very good applications which I have mentioned in the learning 2.0 group page on Facebook.

I set up a Twitter account last year but didn’t really use it much throughout the year.  I made more of an effort this year and followed some more people and started sending a few tweets.  However, I am still not a fan.  I followed Jenny, one of our Learning 2.0 trainers who was tweeting from a conference.  I would rather see a conference update in a blog instead of random little sentences popping up in my firefox browser which make it really hard to follow what is going on.  I think Twitter is fine for people/organisations that want to send out a message to the public but for individuals it seems better to use the status updates on Facebook.