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sgcollage.com, originally uploaded by Salvor.

I use http://www.sgcollage.com to make collage out of my flickr photos. That is fun and that is easy. It works fine with flickr but you can also upload your photos but that takes much longer. You pick the photos in the collage and what part of photo en how big.

This is a test about the flickr layout in elgg.

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Agla 3 - Vyew
Originally uploaded by Salvor.

I have big success with my students in using Vyew.com with Skype conference. One of my students has access to computer with dual core processor and then we can have 10 people in the meeting at same time. Now it is becaming regular practice for us, we meet twice a week online in such meeting. It has worked realitively smoothly. I gave the assignment that all my students (they are teacher ed students) have to design small interactive student fragment in tool of their choice (skype-vyew, horizon wimba, ellumiate etc.) and all choose skype-vyew. This morning my student Agla was giving a segment about how she would use this with her students (8-10 years old in rural Iceland) and she was quit inuative about how the students (us) should participate. Here is a screenshot.

I am also trying to link flickr directly to elgg

It is easy to set up elgg.net blog in flickr so you can just click on "blog this" above the picture. You log into your flickr account and go to this page:

http://flickr.com/blogs.gne

You press  "Set up a new blog" and choose Wordpress blog. Then you have to input API endpoint, your login and your password. API endpoint at www.elgg.net seem to be:
http:/www.elgnet/_rpc/RPC2.php

You can save your password in flickr and change the template (the size of picture etc.)

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I continue  trying out learning landscape tools. My favorite tool is elgg, it is the tool that is most in tune with my teaching-learning philosophy being learner centered and portfolio based. 

I also like Moodle, even if I think you can design courses in a very traditional instructor led way in Moodle I like that this is open source and has a community of users and developers. 

 I tried recently LAMS and NUVVO. LAMS seems to have a rather steep learning curve and from my experience that means it will not become popular among  instructors. It is a fun playtool for professional instructional designers. NUVVO is very easy to use but limited. Nuvvo is much more limited than Moodle. I also did not understand the underlying instuctional idea - or maybe there is  none - just the view that courses consist of material from teachers chopped down in units and then testing and some kinds of content streams from teacher and from student.

But I like some features in NYVVO. It links nicely with Skype and it is easy, courses have RSS feeds  and it is web service.  It claims to be the first AJAX based learning tool.  

Here is an article in Techcrunch about Moodle and Nuvvo:

http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/Nuvvo/

Actually it is very easy to install and update moodle  if your web hosting service has fantastico. I was able to do that just by clicking one or two buttoms. I have also installed clareline which I like very much because it is so easy to use but that was more difficult since I had no automatic installer for that.

Here are courses in Nuvvo:

http://market.nuvvo.com/learn/

My nuvvo portal

http://salvor.learnhub.net/do/portal

Here is Moodle vs. Nuvvo (from Nuvvo point of view):

http://nuvvo.com/moodle

Here you can test drive LAMS

http://lamsdemo.melcoe.mq.edu.au/demoserver/web/register.php

Here is the list of learning environments:

elgg

moodle

claroline

nuuvo

web ct

blackboard

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