Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Exercise: aggregated blog feed - fresh from CPSQ



After some very profound considerations, there is now an 'official' feed for CPSquare members, carefully prepared by John Smith, LearningAlliances. I'm posting this message to see whether this blog of mine is there; as I've got more experimental blogs developed more or less, over time, this is not hte one & only - but the most often updated lately. I know that I will need to settle down and focus. But there are indeed many mre temptations to try yet another cool web 2.0 tool that might be helpful in education :-)

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Bubbleshare letter from Germany

Dennis,another webhead in Osnabrück is currently a mystery guest visiting Carla's class in Argentina. he prepared this slideshow with voice comments from his home town in North Germany

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Poddy training - a matter of flow

In May, I met with the Danish journalist and podcast expert Karin Hoegh www.podblog.dk for the first time at the Danish Reboot8 conference - just before Ben Hammersley's marvellous show on the 21st century renaissance people. Karin asked where people put their clumsily entangled wires and ear phones, and we were joking a bit about this. I had the utmost pelasure to join a kitchen table chat with same Karin for her very first podcast at www.podjournalen.dk episode#1, as we wanted to figure out where people are placing the ear phones with wires when they do not listen to their iPod. This appears to be a real little problem!

After Karin had challenged me jokingly to find a solution for this and I came up with different ways of using velcro straps, I made a photo session starring my iPod in different cute situations with doll's house furniture and playmates mini sized. I'm blogging a bit (in Danish) about this so called poddy training. In PodJournalen.dk episode#2 I was interviewed in more details and more professionally relevant - about how to motivate and encourage people who are unfamiliar with podcasting, to become listeners. I believe this is a matter of flow learning; if things are to hard to deal with, or too boring, there is no real learning because the learner cannot focus her attention and would probably just start doing something else. If you feel pleasure in a trustful situation, and knowing that you are in a social relation with someone who already knows some more about how to do this and where you could look for help, there's genuine learning happening. In the flow.

EFL bridges world conversation club - fashion and gadgets

In todays skype cast, we had a conversation about fashion; I came in pretty late. During some speculations about young people being much aware of current fashion trends in clothing, and a world wide alikeness of clothes with some recent shopping experiences from different cities, I saw a parallel chat started in the text chat room, about some issues on the new playstation commercial (being accused of racism). And then, we tuned in on what's trendy and fashion in the gadget world, exemplified by the iPod hype, with Levi's jeans made for wearing your iPod, Nike running shoes with a training program for the iPod. We then turned the scope of our conversation from clothes to more generally speaking, electronic gadgets and the fascination of "wearables", containers, protections and extra add-ons for iPods & other mp3 player types, and the functionality issues (or lack of same).

I've blogged this also over at the elfbridges portal where I joined as a member; It is based on drupal and I like to experiment with different formats. Graham Stanley (located in Barcelona) is the manager of this portal and hosting the sessions, but also inviting others to take over. eflbridges.net

Burning my own feed for this very blog

Did you ever hear about "burning your RSS feed" for a blog or podcast, to keep up with new updated posts and casts? One tool for this purpose is called Feedburner. It works quite automated, just register as a member and the basic features are free. Pro users pay $5 or more, depending on the number of feeds they wish to burn. Don't ask me why this code system procedure is called burning; this is part of the insider slag that's so hard to deal with as a non US techie.

The procedure was reall simple; I had a choice between an ATOM feed or an RSS2. As I'm not sure what's teh difference I just marked yes to the RSS feed. And then I get a URL code which I could share. Now, to make this work smoothly I need to copy, cut&paste into my blogger template editor which is so hard to deal with. Let's see how that's going to turn out! Please be patient with me - I'm a beginner with this Feedburner trick.