Lisa Hill’s EdBlog

Please note that I no longer monitor or add to this blog - I’ve left it here in cyberspace for the time being in case new bloggers find something useful on it.

My new professional blog is called LisaHillSchoolStuff and the url is http://lisahillschoolstuff.wordpress.com .  Please update your bookmarks or favourites.

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Filed under: Learning Web 2.0

Yesterday at school I set up a new student blog at http://mppsliblog.edublogs.org/. I posted to the front page and added 2 tags.
I can’t remember exactly what I did with settings, but I think I chose that it could only be visible to members (for the time being anyway).
Today at home I can see the Home page with its first post and About (unaltered) but I can’t get into site admin even though I am logged in.
If I click on site admin it takes me to http://edublogs.org/wp-admin/ (Manage) where I can also see Lori’s Level 7 & 8 as a page in the background.
There is a very limited dashboard, with the Getting Started page and widgets, and it says I have 111 posts and 14 tags (which is a surprise to me).
If I click on ‘visit site’ it takes me to http://edublogs.org/ and if I click on Lori’s Level 7 & 8 it takes me to the same limited dashboard where ‘visit site’ takes me to her blog at http://lorikeet.edublogs.org/.
What’s going on?
I have posted to the EduBlogs Forum but they seem to be putting out fires all over the place after the WordPress upgrade and (monitoring posts via an RSS feed) I haven’t seen any fixes to any of the problems that people are seeking help with so far. They certainly haven’t fixed the problem with embedding videos, and I’ve had no response re not being able to upload word files either.
I have not the faintest idea how to fix this!

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Filed under: Learning Web 2.0

Today I completed the last activity for Learning Web 2.0, and this is the time and place to say thank you to everyone at Plenty Valley Library and SLAV for the opportunity.
It’s been fantastic. I’ve learned heaps that’s useful, and I feel competent about using the new applications I’ve discovered. I’ve made some new virtual friends, and I think I can find creative ways to use 2.0 in my classroom.
The highlights for me were learning to make and embed my own podcast (which I’m going to use in my current unit at school) and discovering that I too can make simple videos and upload them. When EduBlogs fixes the current problem with embedding videos I’m hoping to get my students making and publishing simple videos as assessment tasks. For that, I’ll need to set up a Student Blog, which I will do at school rather than here at home because I need to be able to circumnavigate the security settings. I’ve learned the hard way that things that work at home don’t always work at school for that reason!
The other aspect that promises ongoing learning for me in this area is the discovery of innovators working in this field, that I can monitor and learn from using RSS. Edna is in this category, and so are the blogs like Cool Cat Teacher Blog, the EduBlogger and Megan Poore’s Blog. Now that I’ve ‘finished’ this course, I’m going to start Megan’s one on how to set up and use wikis because I think there’s enormous potential there.
Thanks to my colleagues at Mossgiel Park too. We’ve done this course together, meeting once a fortnight after school to share progress and troubleshoot, and I suspect that we won’t stop doing that even when we’ve all finished this course – though we might do it through Facebook!

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Filed under: Learning Web 2.0

I’ve been using audio books for a while now, listening to them en route to work, spending an hour a day in the traffic. (If only there were a train I could use instead!) I’ve exhausted all the available titles in the three libraries I belong to, and have just finished listening to For Whom the Bell Tolls read by Scott Campbell for the third time.

So downloading more, if I can find the kind of book I like to read, sounds very appealing. The Archive site, is a useful search engine, but I find browsing more appealing, so I went to the Audio Books and Poetry link offered by Librivox.

Let me say at the outset, that listening to computer voices reading books at Project Gutenberg is definitely not for me. Perhaps if I were visually handicapped and I had to ‘read’ academic texts for study purposes I’d feel differently, but when it comes to ‘reading’ an audio book for pleasure I think it’s essential that the narrator be a skilled reader, and preferably an actor. There are good-hearted people who volunteer to read the classic novels I like, and sometimes they are ok, but sometimes they are not.

In Gulliver’s Travels, for example, the narrator hesitates over the word ‘peruses’ and ‘deducible’; pauses in places obviously not indicated by punctuation, and generally sounds very uncomfortable reading 18th century English. There are crackles and pops when she turns the recorder on and off, or edits the audio file, and some of her breaths are more audible than they should be. I don’t see myself enjoying this text.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain is deceptive. Initially I thought: this one is read by a more confident reader and it’s better to listen to. It’s fluent and expressive – and his voice is warm and attractive. This one I would like to download and put onto my mp3 player, but it’s 394MB, I thought, so I’ll have to stick to streaming it, and play it while I’m doing scrapbooking or the ironing. I even bookmarked it using del.icio.us…

But then, even as I typed this response into my EduBlog, I found my narrator strugglling a bit. As every primary teacher-librarian knows, you need to pre-read anything you’re going to read aloud – and not just the introduction – so that your listeners are treated to a confident and fluent narration. Stumbles, repetitions and incorrect pronunciation ruins the experience for the audience.

So. I thought, are the audience rankings any use? Next I tried Persuasion. It’s read by an American, reasonably fluently, but again, it lacks dramatic emphasis and sounds awkward in some places. I think many would have ranked this with 5 stars because of the story, not the delivery of it. Maybe if I hadn’t already read Persuasion three or four times I’d be more impressed….

I think you get what you pay for. All those sites offering free this-and-that just depress me. Everyone wants stuff for nothing! I used to belong to BookCrossing, and I still share things with BookMooch, but at the end of the day I’d rather savour the joy of browsing in the public library and bookshops. I like the idea of actually supporting my favourite authors by buying their work, regularly, even if sometimes they bring out a dud. Why else would they and their publishers bother, if not to make some money from people like me? I want them, no – I need them – to go on producing the kind of books I like.

So I’m willing to pay for well-read audio books. I love anything read by Michael Kitchen, and especially his world-weary delivery in The End of the Affair. The Talking Book Store allows you to download quality audio books for a lot less than buying them directly, and you can listen to a sample first.

Is there stuff around for children, I wondered? Well, I found Children’s Book Radio which is a commercial site, dedicated to selling the kind of audio books we have in our school library. Librivox has some of the classics, and Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Gables are among the most popular downloads, but I’m not sure how keen kids actually are on the classics so beloved by their parents. I suspect that the kids I teach would rather download the Horror Story Collection!

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Filed under: Learning Web 2.0

I’ve seen ads for Second Life on Telstra’s BigPond page (which I use occasionally to read my email), and I read something about it in one of The Age’s weekend magazines, but hadn’t really considered it anything more than another, rather bizarre, form of entertainment. But according to Wikipedia it’s more serious than that. Because Second Life has its own economy, with a Linden worth about $266USD) people can earn enough to pay for the cost of playing (if ‘playing’ is the right word) and some earn a proper income from it.
This reminds me of something that most parents and teachers don’t know: that kids can earn significant amounts of money as test game players, and that there are seriously well-paid jobs writing scenarios for computer games, which are now much more sophisticated than they used to be. (Me, I’m still playing Sid Meier’s Civilisation 1 (as a Warlord) but Civ is now up to version 4, I think, and many people play it online.) Anyway, the point is, that kids who’ve learned the ancient myths and legends in a well-run library program can use that knowledge to create fantastic digital games and animations, which Australia could export online, no freight costs, and no carbon footprint. Exporting intellectual property is the smart option for Australia and we ought to get into it more, before the resources boom finishes!
Anyway, I now learn that Second Life (and maybe its competitors, which I’d never heard of) has components that go far beyond entertainment. There are embassies there, and religious groups: Muslims can do the hajj in Second Life if they want to! (Wouldn’t it be better to do war there, instead of in the real world?) Universities, including our own University of Queensland and the Australian Film Television and Radio School offer a presence to support distance education students, which sounds like fun. I’ve done a fair bit of distance education, and can see how many students who feel isolated by this form of education could enjoy ‘meeting’ their fellow students in Second Life.
But the biggest surprise is that Libraries are a presence in Second Life! According to Wikipedia, ‘The Illinois’ Alliance Library System and OPAL have teamed up to extend the programs currently offered online to librarians and library users within Second Life. There are numerous libraries within what is referred to as the Info Islands. A virtual reference desk in SL is staffed by real life volunteer librarians for many hours every week. They also teach workshops there to help librarians and educators learn more about Second Life.’ Amazing!
The Murdoch university video is the most interesting. It covers issues that apply to Web 2.0 too: when is interacting in a virtual world work, and when is it not work; why it matters for educators to understand the virtual worlds that students inhabit, and what some of the pitfalls are.
It occurs to me that as we age, Second Life could become a way of maintaining social contact and having adventures. I’m thinking of an elderly friend of mine, marooned in a nursing home and surrounded by senile residents. She couldn’t manage physically at home, but still had an active mind. In Second Life, one can still travel, make music, attend theatre, shop, and get an education but most importantly of all, ‘meet’ people. Loneliness is very common amongst the elderly as friends their own age die off, but it’s hard for them to get out and about to meet new friends. With broadband and a laptop, life in nursing homes could be transformed!
Get a First Life first? Point taken, but I think today’s kids do too. Of course they become initially absorbed in virtual worlds and it looks a bit obsessive, but after a while reality reasserts itself. Losing yourself in a book isn’t morally superior to losing yourself online for a while. It’s just different, and hopefully kids do both.
It is weird, of course, but so was email when I first used it back in 1990 to keep in touch with my son working in Perth. Blogging was weird only a year or so ago, and so was my niece overseas uploading photos and videos to the net so that I can share milestones in my grand niece’s young life.
I think SL has enormous potential for things like languages learning, where one can practise in the virtual environment, and for any kind of learning where demonstrations and experiments help concept formation. I can’t see it in a primary context (it’s not allowed for under 13s anyway) but I wonder where secondary schools will take it?

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Filed under: Learning Web 2.0