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Owen Barritt

Podcasting

Sunday, 11 Jan 2009, 15:53
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Sunday, 11 Jan 2009, 16:03

Podcast

http://www.switchpod.com/users/ob735/feed.xml

http://media.switchpod.com//users/ob735/podcast.mp3Audio player: podcast.mp3

A brief discussion on tagging and sharing, their use in popular websites and how they carry accross into elearning.

Reflection

Installing all the recommended software was straightforward (already had Audacity installed, so only needed to install Juice in the end).

Started with subscribing to a few of the podcasts recommended in the course webpage and the podcasts that were already up from the other students to get an idea of what to record on.

Spent a while trying to figure out why Juice wasn't finding any podcasts to download on any of the RSS feeds I'd added.  It turned out to be that my laptop was trying to go through the proxy server at work, but I was at home.  Switched it off when I realised and everything worked perfectly.

In recording the podcast, as with any presentation, I planned what I was going to say first and then recorded the audio.  I did the recording in stages stopping during the natural pauses, relistening and possibly re-recording each few seconds.

I did wonder whether this would make it a bit jumpy, but listening back to it, it doesn't seem  that noticable and allowed a process of reviewing while creating (as  I would normally use in a blog post).

There is unfortunately a slight hum on the recording, which I suspect is down to the quality of the microphone.  Given more time I would have experimented with audacity to see if there was a way to filter this out, but suspect it would be impossible without cutting some of my vocal sound.

It would probably have been beneficial to have spoken loader and closer to the microphone to make the audio clearer as my voice is quite quiet in places.

Tags: unit 8, reflection, technology, skills, h808, podcast, practice
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Owen Barritt

Week 6

Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:13
Having not really used an eportfolio before this course, it was interesting to look at some of the alternatives to MyStuff.

I looked at PebblePad and FolioLive.

PebblePad looked more user friendly with usability being it's main focus. However, whereas MyStuff seems based on the same principles of tagging and sharing that major social networking sites such as facebook and myspace are, in PebblePad although these features are present they seem to take more of a back seat.

FolioLive seemed to have less features, it didn't appear to offer much in the way of sharing options (other than to the course tutor) and it didn't look like you could tag work against the syllabus. However, as students paid their own subscription to the portfolio it did fit the lifelong webspace model more than the other 2 alternatives.

In all, all 3 had good features the other 2 lacked. However, in general, I like the principles that MyStuff is built on. Tagging, sharing, revision tracking, comments, etc. As has been pointed out my other students, however, it is quite clunky, but it is also fairly new in terms of development.

The online discussion for this task seemed to be minor, however. It seems a shame that full discussions don't seem to be taking place for these activities. There appear to be only a few students contributing to discussions and most of these take place in the course forums where other discussions take place rather than activity discussions where it seems to be more sets of postings with a few comments.

I'm not sure whether it's just that most students don't have time to look at many of the messages in the forums or whether the rest of the students are taking more of a passive role in the forums. Perhaps more discussion based activities are needed to encourage others to take a part in these discussions to make them seem more of a required part of the course.

I also had a look at the Open Source discussions in the supplementary activity. It was interesting that Martin's points on the open source products seemed to mirror what I had found when I first started using Linux as an open source desktop for my home PC. Given how much the desktop software has been developed over the past few years with the development of major products such as openoffice, it would be interesting to see if eportfolio development has mirrored this, if so some of the open source products could have a lot going for them now.

And now this blog is finally up to date with where I am in the course...
Tags: revision tracking, reflection, mystuff, technology, h808, forum, critique, open source, collaboration, pebblepad, foliolive, tagging, sharing
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Owen Barritt

OU URLs

Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 13:22
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:08
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the URLs the OU tools use. Surely, it would be beneficial to make these more user-friendly?

If we didn't have to visit the appropriate item to find out the URL (I can't remember any of the URLs below for example, so if I wanted to post them again I'd have to re-look them up), then it would be easier to share these in blog posts, discussions, etc and might encourage us to do it more.

To highlight this, here's a selection of the URLs I'm currently using for this OU course.

Blog

Main blog page:

http://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=ob735


I already have a unique username given to me by the OU (ob735), why do I need a separate number for the blog? Is the backend for the OU blog really limited to using numbers for usernames?


Surely

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=ob735

would be a lot more obviously mine and easier for others to access.


MyStuff

Item for Activity 2.1:

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/portfolio/index.php/mystuff/itemsview/1/____display/itemId/iddfcf7249ef6f0ec429e81ca29533586a


This isn't very obvious what it is or who it belongs to. There is no way I could post a link to this with going to the item and copying the URL.


This is probably very dependent on the backend, but might be worth feeding back to the developers and bearing in mind when other choose eportfolio platforms.


Wiki

Alan's Tutorial Group Page

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Alan's+group


OK, this is semi-friendly as the pages are referred to by name. Would it not be easier if the id was the course code instead (ie H808+08I). Again is the wiki id really limited to numbers?


http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group



Further Tidying

These could all be further tidied by using something like mod_rewrite (depending on what runs the OU's servers) to tidy up the URLs even further.

eg
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/ob735
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735
wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+group
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group

These would be much easier to work with.


Tags: url, blog, wiki, mystuff, technology, h808, critique
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Owen Barritt

Sharing on MyStuff

Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 12:50
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:51

So far, MyStuff doesn't seem to make getting formative feedback on your work very easy, especially as it's very difficult to know when someone has commented on items.

With regards to sharing, I'm not really sure that this is serving much purpose with H808 at the moment. I'm not sure if anyone other than Alan has looked at any of the items I have shared, and I haven't looked at any one elses items (another thing I will have to make time to do, but where to start? What benefit would it offer?)

If these were referred to in reflections and discussions on blogs, then there would be more incentive to view them. Links could be included in the discussions to help view the items. This would be easier if the URLs were more user-friendly (in general all the OU technology could benefit from reviewing the URLs used, but I'll save this for a separate post).
Tags: critique, mystuff, technology, eportfolio, h808
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Owen Barritt

H808 Week 2

Friday, 3 Oct 2008, 21:11
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Friday, 3 Oct 2008, 21:12
The group discussion task of the drivers for ePortfolios was an interesting experience for week 2.

As I mentioned in my post to the forums reflecting on the activity, I am currently looking into using discussion forums in an online course I administer. I hadn't considered how much extra time you need to allow for online discussion tasks as opposed to their face-to-face equivalents.

John and Mitchell had initially suggested using the wiki to collaborate our efforts on this task. As the task was based around filling in a template, this seemed ideal as it would allow all members of the group to add their thoughts directly to the template.

However, this only highlighted the delays in online discussion, which I feel many of us had not taken into account, as no general concessus was reach over it. In the end as it was getting towards the end of the week and the task would need writing up anyway, I created the wiki page using the contributions on the discussion forum from various members of the group (particularly those of Brian and Colleen).

Mitchell added his additions to the wiki directly later.

As of week 4, the only people who have editted the wiki page for this task are Mitchell and myself. I'm not sure whether this is because the task was essentially done by the time it went on the wiki or whether people are unfamiliar with using a wiki.

Although, it was in some of the introductions, I'm not sure how familiar the rest of the group are with technology. It could be that they are all experts or all complete novices, but assuming there are some people there who are not familiar with wikis, this may have been another factor which slowed getting our work online.

Reflecting on this, I can see that, although it was a useful eye-opener in my experience and so a useful activity for this course, in general, activities using the wiki and discussion forums would benefit, at least in the early stages of a course, from more guidance as to:
  • what is expected
  • how to use the technology
  • how online group tasks differ from face-to-face ones
  • the allowances students need to make as a result
The wiki page containing the drivers template
Tags: proactivity, wiki, reflection, technology, h808, forum, communication
Permalink 1 comment (latest comment by Alan Clarke, Thursday, 9 Oct 2008, 22:26)
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Owen Barritt

H808 Week 1

Thursday, 2 Oct 2008, 21:18
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Thursday, 2 Oct 2008, 21:21
It took a while for me to get started in week 1. Work and issues with having 2 versions of Acrobat preventing me from viewing pdfs via either IE or Firefox slowed the start a bit as I couldn't initially access the course and assessment guides. However, once fixed (I told firefox to open pdfs externally using the latest Acrobat rather than trying to open them in the window) things got started.

The first activity was interesting, in that everyone seemed to approach it from different directions. Some people focused in their posts on the introduction of themselves and why they were taking the course whilst others focused on their thoughts on the team members views on elearning. Not many people went into detail in both aspects. Personally, I was in the former group, but I shall take the opportunity to consider the latter in a separate post shortly.

I found staying focused on the podcast for 30 minutes challenging. My attention drifted off several times. Although the podcast was split into sections it was presented as one file on the website, with no way to easily skip to the next section.

As podcasts historically developed to present radio-style shows, which can be downloaded to mp3 players, I can see that it would seem normally to compile all these pieces into one "show". However, as most mp3 players will happily play a playlist of mp3s and the world wide web has developed to be able to present information non-linearly, there seems no requirement for them to be 1 file.

As it is presented there are 3 ways to access the content of the audio
  • download the mp3
  • listen to the audio on the web
  • download/view the transcription
Having done the later 2, I can see that it would have been a real aid to concentration to have had something to view whilst listening to the audio. Maybe this is an argument for making the streamed content video based, so you could see the person talking in each case also.

Tags: communication, reflection, technology, h808, forum, podcast
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