losing focus?

There just don't seem to be enough hours in the day to do some reflection and blogging. Together anyway. I am enjoying exploring the variety of web 2.0 tools out there but have been benefitting on more of a personal level than a professional one. Perhaps because I am at the stragetic level rather than the coal face within my organization? Developing training strategies which could use these tools is more in the realm of some of my colleagues. And it looks like I am staying where I am for the next several years so my work won't see much increase though as our integrated learning environment rolls out, there may be some more opps at my level. TIme will tell. In the meantime, this works for me as student. Perhaps I should post some of my course work on facebook for my friends to see what I have been doing. Is that too boring??!

a pause that refreshes

The past two weeks have been very busy while working on my course assignment. Using Web 2.0 tools to create a presentation on a Web 2.0 tool definitely took me outside my comfort zone. I am more accustomed to writing essays and the like.

For this course, I had to come up with my design concept, then figure out how to execute it by determining the appropriate content and translating that content into the audio, video and slide formats, finally assembling them into the complete presentation. The saving grace, for me anyway, was that we had to post a draft version the week before the final one. That forced me to find out what worked and didn't work in a less threatening fashion, then incorporate the feedback from my peers into improving the final version. A great learning strategy which bears repeating. Thanks everyone.

Now I can relax a bit and continue to work on my concept map.

Cheers

challenges to blogging

This is a challenging exercise for me as I rarely have kept journals and what is a blog if not an electronic journal (with no degree of privacy). I usually prefer to do my learning in an interaction with others, be they in person or through their written and spoken words. I find that it is during the interaction that the sparks of thinking flare into coherent ideas and begin to burn with a lasting flame of knowledge. A case in point - see how my solo reflections are more likely to wax into some kind of poetic eloquence which is too too much.

In any case, this is intended to be my reflections on emerging technologies for learning and at the moment I am struggling with what to put into my slideshare presentation. I feel I have tapped the hobby side of life enough with my various takes from my camping trip to Yellowstone so want to capture material more closely related to this course. I fear it will have more artificiality about it as I try to create extra slides to provide enough against which to sync the voice track. Oh well. The learning continues none the less.
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improvement to my last

I will try a hyperlink to the screen capture to see if it will go directly instead of someone having to paste a long url into a browser.
Mudpot

trying jing

I am starting to figure out how to use jing but it is a slow process. I have made my first screen capture and it looks like this:
http://www.screencast.com/users/amethystcam/folders/Jing/media/be013c92-8cd6-4e67-bc15-2a06a0c52c4b

It is a picture of a mudhole at Yellowstone and my plan is to figure out how to record sound to explain what it is. I also have a 15 sec video of a mudhole burbling away and I assume there must be a way to share that with Jing.
At this point, I am going to read the jing welcome guide to learn how to do this stuff since the intuitive way only garnered this simple screen capture.

importing podcasts Take 2

Okay, can't get the ourmedia.org site to actually retrieve the podcast even though they keep sending an email after each upload attempt to say "your file has been published at....".

So now I am falling back on what everyone else has proven to be effective -Podbean.

http://amethystcam.podbean.com/

I have tried to upload this twice - the first time it kept buffering but on take 2 it works. SIGH!

Cheers
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importing podcasts

Hi, I am exploring the ways to share my first podcast. I googled how to podcast and found a site which recommended several free variations of services. The one for the casual/hobbyist recommended using blogger, which I am already doing, and ourmedia for the podcast. So I have created an ourmedia.org acct and have uploaded my podcast to it here:
http://www.ourmedia.org/ia/details/Yellowstonepodcast

Cheers
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lots of great ideas out there

It is fabulous to take a class with people who are really engaged in learning and who have lots of great ideas to add to the mix. One's Personal Learning Environment is definitely enhanced by taking courses such as Emerging Technologies for Learning at U of M. The PLEs of my classmates help me realize the many ways I learn. And. while I am learning new things everyday in the workplace and community, there is an added rigour to being challenged to think in new ways through formal courses. Let's hear it for workplaces which encourage continuous learning through education reimbursement plans which make it affordable for their employees.

Cheers
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Okay, my initial PLE needs a lot of work. I am trying to learn Gliffy at the same time so that is challenging. I will post this one now so that I have something up as a start. Perhaps I will try my ideas in cmap as I learned a bit more about that in Digital Literacy.

Here is my initial version:
http://www.gliffy.com/pubdoc/1838935/L.jpg

Cheers,
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catching up

I am finally caught up with the posts for this course. There are so many more students and each is more prolific than in my Digital Literacy course so it has been hard to catch up when starting the course late. It is also hard knowing where to comment as the topics have been well discussed already. It is so important in online courses to start dialoguing and getting engaged otherwise it is too easy to fade into the background. Now that I have started this blog, that should help maintain my focus. So that in itself is a good reason to blog, even if others may not be interested in what I have to say. The discussions on blogs vs journalling - public vs private reflections - have been interesting. I guess the next step is to aggregate my classmates' blogs so that I can keep up with their new posts without having to open up each one separately. However, is this possible? Have we all chosen blogging sites which allow for that?? Sounds like I definitely may have to do my first presentation on aggregation so I can find out if this is possible.
Cheers
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New beginning

This marks a new direction in the extension of my digital footprint. Will anyone beyond my courses stumble across this blog and pay it any attention? It's purpose is to afford me a place to reflect on what I am learning about emerging technologies and their application in education. So far, I am learning how many different accounts one must create in order to even start to maximize what Web 2.0 has to offer.

More to follow.
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