I am importing my eduspaces.org blog into edublogs.org. First I tried to import the eduspaces blog into another elgg site but that was not working so I imported the rss file for my blog that I could download from eduspaces to edublogs. The only problem is that most of the time I linke to videos etc. and Wordpress and Elgg do not do that in same way.

I wonde why eduspaces is closing. Maybe it is because the site has changed into beeing a rss feeder, I scanned throught the most recent blogs and most of them where from other sites. Some were blatant advertisments such as these two fake (I guess?) persons. This is spam:

http://eduspaces.net/jgates513/weblog/235248.html

http://eduspaces.net/jamesg/weblog/235247.html

Maybe this kind of rss feeding machine was causing some copywright problems and the site owners feared legal battle.

Testing Elgg 0.9

It is good to be able to add pages in Elgg. That was one of the things I missed. Another thing is that it would be better if you could have a password on blog posts. The staff in my university want students to keep a learning journal documenting study visits etc. This information should be kept private but the instructors have to  view it in the end of the term.  This could also be solved be students able to send files from elgg as submissions to blackboard or moodle.

Comments

1. Why not have students create a ‘group’ with themselves and the instructor in it (under Your Network : Access Controls)? Then assign the learning journal blog post  to this group. That way, only the student plus the instructor can read it. Then at the end of the semester,  have your students put together their learning  journal blog postings into a Presentation where they and their instructor can comment upon what they’ve written. The Presentation plugin is really very powerful for this kind of reflective writing. When it’s all put together in the Presentation the learning journal can become a coherent stream rather than a loose collection of disparate files.

   This sounds like an exciting project!

   Mark Pearson on Tuesday, 18 December 2007, 16:12 UTC # | Delete

This week I have been trying out Operator11.com with my students. Several of the students have video cameras and have managed to upload videos so I can switch between students in the meetings and they can talk or show their videos.

 It is good to be able to add pages in Elgg. That was one of the things I missed. Another thing is that it would be better if you could have a password on blog posts. The staff in my university want students to keep a learning journal documenting study visits etc. This information should be kept private but the instructors have to  view it in the end of the term.  This could also be solved be students able to send files from elgg as submissions to blackboard or moodle.

Comments

1. Why not have students create a ‘group’ with themselves and the instructor in it (under Your Network : Access Controls)? Then assign the learning journal blog post  to this group. That way, only the student plus the instructor can read it. Then at the end of the semester,  have your students put together their learning  journal blog postings into a Presentation where they and their instructor can comment upon what they’ve written. The Presentation plugin is really very powerful for this kind of reflective writing. When it’s all put together in the Presentation the learning journal can become a coherent stream rather than a loose collection of disparate files.

   This sounds like an exciting project!

   Mark Pearson on Tuesday, 18 December 2007, 16:12 UTC # | Delete

<![CDATA[Now we have reached more than one thousend users in our elgg. All our first year students create profiles and some blog entries. Our on campus students use elgg as their on-line portfolio but distance students (more than half of our students) hand in their assignment by uploading to web Ct.

Last weekend students had to hand in their first assignment, their mind maps in mind manager. The initial file space for students 10 mb. is too small, we have increased that to 100 mb for all students.

Now I am trying to translate elgg, we can not use the Icelandic translation right now.]]>

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Now all our first year students set up elgg profiles and they are required to make three blog entries. Tomorrow I will show a group of students how to use elgg for podcasts and how to put media files in your blog.

But now I have forgot how to play mp3 files in blog entries.

Let try, it was embed a file from your file storage

It is not working..

perhaps this feature has been discontinued.

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Now after two days I announce myself a mediawiki specialist. I have set up several experimental mediawikis on my dreamhost account and  scanned through all extentions useful for educations and now I can set up extentions myself. I set up extentions to play Youtube and Googlevideos and to play mp3 sound files and I set up the QUIZ extentions on my http://www.esjan.net/wiki account.

I made this lesson (in Icelandic of course:-):

about gyrfalcons and ptarmigans.

I am now a administrator both on Icelandic wikibooks and Icelandic wikipedia but I do not have time to write many articles now as I am experimenting with my own wiki.

I am now listening to the seminar on Wikis & Emerging Web 2.0 E-learning Communities by Campus Technology, I am listening to the recording because it was on Sept. 6th but the moderator says there were 2000 people present.

I do not understand it. I try very hard to get people interested in wikis and especially the possibility of using the commons-wikibooks-wikipedia as learning objects that link to each other but nobody seem to understand me. Even the administrators on Icelandic wikipedia are pain in the ass. They made a very young and unexperienced boy (he is fourteen year old) administrator on icelandic wikibooks and he immediately started to erase the work of my students... because wikibooks were not link collections he said... he did not have a clue that all the links were linking together between wikibooks and wikipedia. He said noone on English wikibooks is doing this and he say along with most the others admins on wikipedia/wikibooks to hold a very traditional and stagnant view about what is educational material. It took me two days to clean up his mess, I had to argue on every page he deleted or marked for deletion.

I become so frutrated that I am not sure I can work more in icelandic wikibooks with my students and I probably am not good enough in English to work on English wikibooks.

Also all the wikis I have had spamm attacks, it is impossibly to have mediawiki with all pages unprotected.

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It is very important for me - and I guess all the new generation of media users- to be able to embed all kinds of media in my blogs. I always travel  with my small digital camera that can take video clips and I document what I see by adding those clips together. That is a part of my dynamic portfolio, writing is not limited to just text but also expressing oneself in all kinds of media. I try to use low cost and free tools. Small digital cameras that have the option to take videoclips are not expensive and it cost nothing to have account on Youtube or Photobucket. Both these sites offer the possibilities to edit on-line but I prefer to use MovieMaker as sometimes the connection speed is limited. Here are my latest youtube videos, one is from culture night in Reykjavik last Friday and the second is from Gaypride 2007 in Reykjavik one week ago. 

I can see how many watch my videos, the culture night video which I uploaded to youtube yesterday has been watched over 300 times and the Gaypride video has been watched 785 times. Most clicks come from my Icelandic blog salvor.blog.is as I have embedded these videos into blogs, see here:

Menningarnótt 2007

Allt fyrir ástina

This Elgg version has very limited support for embedded media. That is frustrating as I use elgg with my students and I would like them to embed all kinds of media into there blogging posts. 

This is not just for fun that you embed media. This is part of todays education. This is part of the web environment today were you use all kinds of learning objects from varios sources.  An example is my blog post  Jarðskjálftar í heiminum about earthquakes where I embed widget that shows on google maps earthquakes that are now happening in the world.

Right now I am trying to make presentation in Zohow Show and this is a test to see if I can embed presentation in Elgg.

I was not able to use iframe in Elgg. I have used iframes in all kinds of web environments such as on my university Frontpage server. I do not think this poses any kind of security thread.

I paste the code here (it was removed when I tried to paste it as html): 

<iframe height="335" width="450" name="Welcome3" scrolling="no" src="http://show.zoho.com/embed?USER=paulallison&DOC=Old+Wine" frameBorder="0"> 

I wish Elgg would be better in embedded media. 

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The panel session at the end 

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Coffee break in Elggjam07 

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