I have moved my blog to http://mattlingard.wordpress.com Pretty painless (touch wood!).  The new feed is http://mattlingard.wordpress.com/feed/ All the old posts and comments have moved too!

I’m writing this as I listen to an interesting talk by Martin Weller,  How digital technologies are impacting higher education which is part of the From Courses to Dis / Course event.  As you can tell I’m multi-tasking…  a few minutes ago I dipped out and when I dropped back in I really wanted to flick back thru’ Martin’s presentation slides but wasn’t able to.  The session is in Elluminate and for all I know it may be possible but I don’t think so.  Nor is it possible with the equivalent tool that we use Wimba Classroom.  What I’d like is the ability for participants to be able to control which slides they see with a one-click option to jump back to the presenter’s current slide.  Perhaps Elluminate allows this or perhaps other web conferencing tools do?  Now, back to viewing as well as listening to the discussion…

I’ve been preparing for another Twitter workshop this morning and spent part of the time looking for examples of people who Twitter.  As Twitter is all about your network,  if you don’t build one then you are unlikely to see the benefits and stick with it.  My last Twitter workshop was at the Plymouth E-Learning conference (pictured) and ’selling’ Twitter to elearning folk is fairly straight-forward as there are lots of educational technology types to follow  (BTW – There are over 1000 Twitter updates related to the Plymouth conference!).

My workshop on Wednesday is for staff at the LSE who are not educational technologists so I wanted to have a list of ‘people’ to follow that might be more relevant to them.  Finding people is quite difficult when you are looking beyond your own network so below are a few starting point I’ll be highlighting on Wednesday.  If you’ve any more social science related twitterers, let me know!

For politics there’s a lot of potential, Tweetminster is a good site bringing together the feeds of MPs who Twitter, as well as @DowningStreet, @UKParliament and @guidofawkes to keep you in touch with goings-on in Westminster. According to sourcewatch there are 19 Senators and 50 Representatives in the US Congress twittering away.  Other examples i’ll be highlighting are @intuteeconomics,@IntutePsychUK, @policynetwork, @HEFCE, @GuardianEdu, as well as a handful at LSE @lsepublicevents, @lsecareers, @lsesummerschool & @charliebeckett

And I’ll be encouraging the use of searching via both Find People & Twitter Advanced Search.  I’ll also highlight sites such as wefollow.com which have lists such as academics who Twitter.  Once you have a small network it gets easier and I found browsing friends of my followers the best way to widen my network.

Slides from my Plymouth workshop:

My annotated Twitter handouts are also on slideshare.

I’ve never been one for gadgets – the Franklin Rex-3 I bought back in 1997 being the only one I ever owned!  My mobile phones have always been bog standard (free)  models and I’ve never really made much use of the camera or web access:  the odd pic that rarely left the phone, the footy results when I’m out and about.

This year my habits seem to be changing and it is strongly connected to my ever increasing use of Twitter.  A few months ago I discovered that my mobile had  the Opera Mini web browser (it had never occurred to me to look!!).  Since then I’ve found myself reading & twittering more and more on the move which in turn has led to a lot more general browsing.

At the same time I’ve been enjoying an increase in the number of pictures appearing in my twitter stream from services such as twitpic.   And now I’ve joined in thanks to my discovery that I can update Twitter with photos via MMS (multimedia texts) from my phone.  I send the MMS to Mobypicture via an email address (I didn’t know this was possible!) and they automatically update Twitter.  Despite the name, Mobypicture can also be used for audio & video and there are many service integrations including facebook, youtube, flickr & wordpress.

Of course I’m still a long way from being a gadget boy as I discovered at James Clay’s great Mobile Learning workshop at the Plymouth E-learning conference last month where there was a whole suitcase of gadgets!  One of the mobile applications James showed that I really liked was audioBoo  At the moment it’s restricted to the i-Phone but I’m sure they’ll be alternatives soon.  AudioBoo allows you to make & publish an audio recording, with a photo and an automatic Google map location.  Great potential for fieldtrips.   Here’s an example audioBoo James made with me at the conference dinner.

I read this morning that 99% of blogs are unread.  Does this matter?  There are quite a few blogs out there… surely the important number here is the 1% not the 99%.  There are about 1.1 million blogs that are being read. That’s a lot of people writing and being read that probably weren’t 5 or so years ago.

The stat came from a special Technology Issue of the New Statesman.  Some of the articles made we wonder if it should have been called the Anti-Technology issue, “technology isolates us and makes us stupid”… but always good to get a different viewpoint!

This morning I spotted a couple of tools that I thought I should try and I’m glad I did because I quite like them both, although with some reservations.  The two services are Amplify & Jing.  Watch this video created with Jing for a brief intro to both. (Sorry, WordPress won’t let me embed, so click the image!)

Jing is a free service from techsmith.com, the makers of the popular screen capture software Camtasia.  Capturing and publishing are pretty straightforward, once you know how – I did struggle to find things initially!  The free service (not suprisingly I guess) restricts your storage (2GB) and your monthly bandwidth (how much you upload, also 2GB) so there are limits.  The above 2-min recording used up 7.5MB of my allowance (not quite 1%). I will definitely be using it again for videoing and will be interested to see whether storage becomes an issue.   For images I imagine I’ll stick with my long time friend MWSnap

Amplify uses the WordPress blogging platform and is a spin-off from Clipmarks. On the whole it worked well for me, although it can be a bit fiddly clipping the bit you want, especially if there is a link involved – it’s easy to click the link rather than clip the link!! The blogging side of it was great (it’s wordpress!) and it’s very easy to tweet what you clog…  oh dear.  I used my Amplify Clip Blog today to create a collection of posts on e-Learning coverage on various HEA Subject Centres that are relevant to the LSE.  I don’t think I’ll be using Amplify again as a personal tool (except to review today’s work!) but I can see it could make a great tool for a digital literacy or other teaching activity.  For now, I’ll be sticking with Diigo / Delicious and my memory of what I liked on the page!

Both worth some of your time.

I’ve been neglecting this blog and today is the first step on the road to revitalising it… I think twitter has got in the way to a certain extent but I need to blog more, both here and on CLT @ LSE as I do find the reflective aspect of blogging really useful.  I’ve spent the last 30-mins or so revising my categories, especially dumping the catch-all “Emerging Technologies” but also a few other tweaks and a new theme.  But that’s it for today… blogging reconvenes in earnest next week…

This post was made on my crappy mobile on the bus on my way home. That’s why it’s so short… Works though!

Not quite sure where I’m going with this one but the issue of storing stuff has cropped up a few times in the last week.

• Eportfolios – a place to store stuff and make it available to different audiences – yourself, your peers, your teacher, your employer, the world. At work we’re looking at Mahara & Pebblepad
• Repositories – see my earlier post on Language Box, a place for teachers to store, organise, share  teaching material
• A course team needing to share material for developing a new module – we’ve been looking at delicious, Google sites & our VLE, Moodle

So lots of people with similar requirements, storing and sharing stuff online…. still no idea where this is going so will need to return to it…

This morning I delivered a talk on the future of e-learning!   I was unusually apprehensive before I started – no familiar faces in the audience, a sector I have limited knowledge of (schools) and a topic that took me slightly out of my comfort zone.  I felt it went well though and received some complementary feedback and one offer of work, so not all bad!

My slides are below and along with the presentation links you’ll get a flavour of my themes: open education, participation (communication, collaboration & creation), mobile learning and personalisation. Of course you are missing the real meat, mine & the participants’ voices – but you’ll get the idea.  And you can ignore the govt strategy stuff… paid it lip service!

The technology in the room looked state of the art but unfortunately failed to deliver… my attempt to show the Google video below was prevented (I think) by a slow Internet connection, youtube was blocked completely! The room layout, presenter podium and the dual-projection interactive whiteboard were a big let down:

• Dual-projection – absolute overkill for a room the size of double garage.
• Interactive whiteboard – I have little time for them so didn’t go there but as the next presenter discovered it wasn’t configured/orientated correctly so ultimately unusable.
• Podium – too small for the keyboard & mouse to sit side-by-side. No monitor on it, making it impossible to face my audience while doing the demonstration bits and because of the dual projection / room layout I couldn’t actually see the right-hand side of the screen.

It’s such a shame when the technology gets in the way but today it really didn’t need to… a simple PC / data projector with decent, un-filtered Internet access was all I wanted.  Oh well, take some inspiration from Buckingham Primary School…