Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Daniel Livingstone on SLOODLE

(meeting up in SL during Daniel's presentation)

Daniel giving us an exposition on education in Second Life and how aspects can be directly used in Moodle.
SLOODLE0.4 released with new functionality, SLOODLE is being used widely by educational groups around the world on both full SL but also on OpenSim ( open source grids) OS Grid and ReactionGrid.
It was great to meet Daniel in SL and RL

SLOODLE :

'Version 0.4 integrates Second Life 3D classrooms with Moodle, the world’s most popular open source e-learning system with over 30 million users (http://www.moodle.org). This latest release allows teachers and students to prepare materials in an easy-to-use, web-based environment and then log into Second Life to put on lectures and student presentations using their avatars.

The new tools also let students send images from inside Second Life directly to their classroom blog. Students are finding this very useful during scavenger hunt exercises where teachers send them to find interesting content and bring it back to report to their classmates.

Tools that cross the web/3D divide are becoming more popular as institutions want to focus on the learning content rather than the technical overhead involved in orienting students into 3D settings and avatars.'

You can install the SLOODLE module onto your Moodle server from here

Martín Langhoff's key note at MoodleMootUk

From Ddraig Goch Blog - The Musings of a Welsh Dragon!

Martin gave an excellent exposition on some of the thinking behind the OLPC. He gave those present an insight into how he has been attempting to simplify systems to run on the OLPC, the main one was how Moodle needs to become more user friendly for 6 and 7 years olds.Martin is actively looking for schools and teachers in the K12 (Primary) sector to let him know if they are using Moodle with primary aged kids.If you are or would like to bug test OLPC contact martin.langhoff@gmail.com - martin@laptop.org

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Diigo Tags 02/28/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Friday, February 13, 2009

IB Continuum Blog Video

The IB recently held a series of continuum presentations for staff in their Cardiff Office news of this appears in the IB continuum blog. Following the presentations a group of (victims*)volunteers were asked if they would be willing to have their responses to the series of presentations recorded......


For further information about the IB Continuum follow this link.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Diigo Tags 02/12/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Friday, February 06, 2009

Diigo Tags 02/06/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Diigo Tags 02/03/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, February 02, 2009

Value your tweets!


An app called TweetValue ( click on the image above) will allow you to enter your Twitter name and will give you a response which is the worth of your Tweets in USD$ based on an apparently secret formula - by taking the number of tweets etc and crunches numbers to give your value ( from TechCrunch 02/02/09) As the article states this is similar to Twittad and also a Twitter Grader (see below) which I like because it gives you some good stats about you, twitter profile info about your blog - plus I love the TweetCloud. You can also check out your rank by local town, county and country...... cool if somewhat chastening!
I am sure that this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as twitter apps are concerned but these are fun starters

UKSnow GoogleMaps mashup

A Twitter mashup called UKSnow enabling twitterers to 'tweet # uksnow followed by the first the first letter and digits of your postcode ( #uksnow np7). The result is that the Google Map mashup designed by Ben Marsh will log your postcode tweet ( and a Twitpic if you can post one) will appear on the overlay snow flakes on the UK map. See below my tweet on snow in NP7
my guess is that this map will build as the snow continues in the UK. It also shows the power of social networking and mashups.


Sunday, February 01, 2009

'Smart Phones'??

Today as we are expecting snow during the week I thought it would be fun to take the Blackberry and G1 phone our with me for a wander around our local lanes and paths planning on using the audio recording and camera facilities of the Blackberry.... the immediate problem with the said 'Obama phone' was that I couldn't upload pictures or audio directly to 'the cloud' , the only option was to MMS or email - as a result I carried on saving pictures onto the phone while MMS'ing the audio captures to the G1.
The incoming audio was in .amr format......... which of course a WinPC cannot read! One download of a .amr converter and then taking each of the emailed clips to the converter and saving the results.
While this was going on I was busy trying to upload the picture file onto the pc ( time taken copying the picture files into one folder on the Blackberry to keep the time down (alternative would be to email them directly I guess)....... this caused the poor phone to slow down of course with the egg timer constantly playing!!!The overall result of this is that I finished my walk 2 hours ago and as yet the above image is the closest yet to having any part of my walk uploaded to the net!...... hold on that 2hours and 15 minutes and I finally have some images ......

However I still have to convert the audio files - so this first version of my walk is one with a commentary recorded here at the laptop on my return....... by the way for all of those currently in warmer parts of the world, the grey snow clouds have finally appeared here and the snow flurries have begun....!
And finally at 5pm with the snow clouds gathering the Blackberry sound files have been edited to the photographs taken earlier and here is the result...


I would humbly suggest that these particular smart phones are in some respects a step back from other less illustrious mobiles which thanks to tie in's to blogger or wordpress allow direct photoblogging and indeed in some cases the direct upload of video - both sadly lacking in the smart phones on show here..... I certainly hope that the next generation of smart phones (Nokia obviously pretty well there already I think!) will get this sorted for the dedicated mobloggers!

Apologies for the delay in completing this post....... our phone line went down earlier today meaning that my final upload of the soundwalk is now at 8.52pm and it has begun to snow here in South Wales suggesting a snowy version of the soundwalk could happen very soon!!!
The final part of what turned out to be a long process was the final podcast being processed and posted on the podomatic site.
I believe that sound posts to Utterli along with uploaded photographs would have been a more efficient way of postingt this story 9.53pm end of process....... good night all!

Diigo Tags 02/01/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

As my colleague Mr James Forbes Keir said....... only in Wales!!!!!! ( from tweet by JFK 28/01/09)


Dear reader please be advised only click on the above link if you are over 18 and not of a nature to be shocked by nudity!

“A Heap of Trouble”, a short film by Steve Sullivan, featured on Future Shorts.
UPDATE: YouTube has removed the video, I guess they don’t like Welsh comedy films featuring full frontal nudity. You can watch it in full on Steve Sullivan’s website.
On his website Steve mentions this titbit:
Interesting fact: - The still image of A Heap Of Trouble is currently banned from being posted within the 5 boroughs of New York, by order of the Staten Island Post Office due to its ‘erotic’ nature.
Originally posted on the laughing squid blog

Diigo Tags 01/28/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Monday, January 26, 2009

Tweet Tweet!

Apologies for this awful post from Monday 26th January - it was posted form the Eeepc and appears to have become a bit garbled!
The post was related to the gradual rise and rise of Twitter and related to 2 BBC News items extolling the virtue of Twitter :
Stephen Fry's interview outside the BBC prior to ( or after) his appearance on the now returned Jonathan 'Wossy' Ross. It was discussed briefly in the programme but not being a fan of Ross I will avoid posting that entry.... Twitter is growing in its usage in the UK.
While it also has impact in the US following major news stories which were 'reported first by 'citizen journalists using Twitter and Twitpic.
The BBC appear very keen on Twitter I guess no surprise when keeping a close eye on Twitter feeds can point to a rising news story amongst the chaff!

This post will now be Tweeted by pj23harry is this irony??

Friday, January 23, 2009

Diigo Tags 01/23/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Are EV’s here to stay?

 I used to play a game while on one of my favourite walks. I would go up onto a footbridge over the nearby A465 and time how long it took fo...