Don't say (its over)

Today is the last of the DCLP conferences. Today and yesterday we used iconnect to do a virtual conference.  Colleen setup the curatr site and it worked extremely well for remote collaboration and working together via the web.

Today we used both videolinq VC and iconnect with reasonable success.  Problems with the application sharing in iconnect were a little frustrating and put a number of people off what would have been great presentations otherwise.

I was lucky last and was able to successfully share the final project overview and content examples document using iconnect's application sharing (I think sharing an app rather than whole screen helped.) From previous teaching and technology experience I did create a screencast prior to the start of the day just in case the app sharing failed.

When viewing the word document I did find that the action maps where a little fuzzy, so made the available as well.  The two example action maps I created were for Use Business Technology and for Tests and Assessments in my.TAFE. If you have an ipad you can download the ibook I created as part of the project directly to your device.

Finally, I would ask that if you have looked over the project document and associated resources, participate in the survey about the action mapping templates that I have created.

Its been an intensive program with many options available to all of the participants and from the presentations I saw today its clear that everyone gained valuable knowledge and skills that will benefit themselves, the institutes and the overarching network for far longer than the duration of the program.  Thanks to Colleen for her guidance and support and to Carolyn for allowing me the time to participate.

Another fortnight of limited progress

Haven't devoted a lot of time to the DCLP project this fortnight, though with the completion date looming it isn't far from my mind.

I think that even now I could wrap up the project and have something worthwhile to show:

• A good explanation of the action mapping process
• Adaptation of the action mapping process in conjunction with a series of instructional events 
• This adaptation presented as a word/wimba template that content writers could use
• An action mapping diagram of the unit of competency Use Business Technology
• An example template being used for a few elements of Use Business Technology
• The example turned into an iBook that can be viewed on an ipad
• The start of an action mapping diagram for Tests and Assessments my.TAFE training

We haven't decided how to present our projects as a group yet, I experimented with a HTML5 template in dreamweaver CS6 for a morning, but figured that most of the viewers of the project will probably be using TAFE PC's. This means IE8 and no easy way of applying and testing html5/css3 since most of the work I'm doing for the project is at home on my mac, though I do have a virtual windows, it's windows 8 with ie10, not an ideal test bed.

I'm thinking that my project presentation will be based around audiovisual recordings explaining the project, highlighting important parts of the theories behind the content and of course the content itself.

We have a web conference today so it will be interesting to see what ideas get thrown around.

With the hectic start of semester I've missed the 1st week of the 10 week challenge set by Colleen as part of the DCLP project.

However, the first challenge, Connect with my DCLP colleague was an easy one and something that Tessa and I have been doing anyway.

I thought for the second challenge I'd look at the 100 top tools and analyse what I use and how, some of the tools mentioned I don't use for learning, they are either blocked at work or are frowned upon, or I consider them personal tools rather than work tools.  The last category there, personal tools doesn't mean they can't be used for learning but rather could be considered informal learning tools.

The more tools we are exposed to the more I think we should focus on what is available and what is TAFE approved. I remember when learning about audio editing and processing a statement that has stuck with me. "It's better to know to use a couple of effects really well than have 20 effects that you don't know how to use."

Wikis, blogs, forums are examples.  They are all available in my.tafe, the approved, preferred learning tool of DETE.  Even if they aren't implemented in the best, most attractive way compared to other tools, it's what we ask our students and teachers to work with.  If we as leading practitioners can harness these in the best way possible and learn how to work around the supposed clumsiness then we can provide great examples for others to follow.

I've posted my uses on the my.tafe forum, along with the links.

The resot of the challenge items I'm confident will be done as part of the wrap up for the project.  Creating video presentations of the final product etc.

Now I need to get back into completing the project.......

Slower progress this month

June has been a slow month for progress.... but worthwhile distractions have been the launch of Adobe CS6, Articulate Storyline and Captivate 6. I've been experimenting with the ibooks format and how far I can integrate html created/generated activities into it. HTML5, javascript and css3 have now become flavour of the year with all of the new products having compatible support, export or save as options. 


What I have done is apply the action mapping process to a unit of competency; Use Business Technology, something I taught as part of a Diploma of Event Management.  You may need to be viewing this as a post on blogger to expand the images to full size.

Still to follow is a set of action maps for the Tests and Assessments in my.TAFE training that I delivery to new online teachers.  

Reflections on our workshop (a.k.a isn't hindsight great)

After having the weekend the digest the time spent at the DCLP workshop I thought I'd post a quick reflection.  There were some interesting gems of knowledge, but for me "practice" was the lacking element to make it truly worthwhile, especially with the effort required to get a lot of us released and travel authorised.

The first presenter impressed us with some pdf wizardry, and then went on to show some htlm/js/css examples of other adobe software.  I think that more could have been gained if we had created a couple of pdf's using the techniques shown instead of seeing advanced build and coding examples, especially since most people had work laptops with the necessary pdf software installed but aren't normally involved in high end multimedia creation.

Gary's presentation definitely had the wow factor and I think inspired a lot of us to think about interactive learning resources, but there was also a lot of "my institute will never support me or buy software" conversations.  I think we all missed out on learning that a lot of rapid development software out there is available as a free trial, probably just long enough to create something nifty for our own projects or to help build a business case for the purchase of a full version for work use.

I felt the ebook presentation was another missed opportunity for practice, we could have installed the free software shown and had a go at converting and editing an ebook.  All of the resources shown on the big screen were already available online, we just had to read them and give it a go.

Even our own group presenations lacked practical access, I only managed to get one web address written down (though I'm sure they will all get posted somewhere soon). It would have been great if the first step in each show and tell was to get the group to go to the wiki/blog/online presentation space so we could see the digital content on our own pc's as well as on the projector.

In saying all of that it was great to meet face to face with other participants of the program and I saw lots of  informal learning going on between (and during?) the presentations.  The two days were well organised and run, the presentators passionate about their topics and I am pretty sure we all got valuable information out of it and I'm still looking forward to working on my own project, participating in the webconferences and attending the next two day workshop.

First morning of our F2F conference

Had a couple of guest speakers this morning, one particularly inspirational on assessment.  Bringing back (or forward) the idea of assessment being intrinsically linked with learning. The key statement I took from it was "assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning."

What if my world was iworld

This fortnight the biggest chunk of work I've done is to go over to the dark side of proprietary ebook formats, the apple ibook.  I have started using ibooks author on my mac at home to generate the example content for my DCLP project.

Part of my project was to use the action mapping process for two example units of competency.  The first was Use Business Technology, which I was going to specifically tailor to event management, something that I have taught before but when I did, was very unhappy with the resource that I was using; it was just a generic workbook that the students wrote it.

While the template that I have used to write the content in is a word document formatted using course genie styles, I didn't want to have a standard wimba punch out, or have to bother our multimedia technicians with non-essential work, or spend hours in dreamweaver tweaking css.  When David Drinkall suggested an ebook session at the next conference it inspired me to update my mac with the latest os and download the free ibooks author software.  Yes, I know the output is only good for ipads, but I'm going to guess that when we go to the face to face workshop next week that the ipad will be the dominant (if not only) e-reading that isn't a computer or phone.  Can't say I've ever seen a kindle at a conference and I know that there is a huge amount of users in the iworld.


If you have an Ipad with the latest os and updated ibooks app you should be able to download the current version of my ibook with this link: Use_Business_Technology.ibooks. It's not finished, still a fair bit of content to go in, but the basic layout and some simple interactions are there.

This month I also sent out a copy of my template, action map and a survey.  Got about 33% respondents, with a good mix of feedback.

Something that isn't progressing too much is our April webquest, a group activity Colleen setup which has successfully demonstrated the difficulty of online collaboration, especially with time-poor participants,  though I'm sure it will come together at the last minute. I've got a powerpoint template setup which will use links instead of linear navigation and am going to try an encourage us to record audio to use as narration on image rich slides that will have small amounts of text.  Todays webconference is setup for us to work on the project, hope the whole team shows up.......