<![CDATA[I had a meeting yesterday with teachers and ed teach staff at my university (Iceland University of Education) and I was trying to convince them to take up Elgg as a portfolio system next semester. I will definately use Elgg in my course, I already do (they had to test Elgg) but it would be more interesting if also the instructors who teach first year students would also use Elgg in their courses. Hopefully we will have 7 or 8 teachers to test Elgg. My university has the newerst version of WebCt and is looking into the forthcoming portfolio tool from WebCt but that will not be open source.

I have been trying out esnips.com and I very much like it, it is the kind of portfolio tool student need. My plan now for next semester in my course in to use Elgg and also have all students have folders for their stuff on esnips.com or similiar sites. you can create widget in esnips.com like this:

John - The Auction...

Hosted by eSnips

Esnips offer uploader very similiar to Flickr uploadr.]]>

<![CDATA[

Now the first working version is ready of the $100 laptop. See more about this project at Laptop.org and the following links.

Streaming Video (length 55:23) Nicholas P. Negroponte, Chairman and Co-Founder, MIT Media Laboratory, Wiesner Professor of Media Technology speaking at emerging technology conference:
http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/311/

It is a version of Fedora built for that latpop. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OLPC

Here is the hardware specification from laptop.org
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/Hardware_specification
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There is something wrong - I can not publish directly from Flickr to Elgg. Maybe the settings has been changed. It was:
http://www.elgg.net/_rpc/RPC2.php]]>

<![CDATA[Just testing if there is much difference between the free CamStudio and not free Camtasia
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<![CDATA[

Digg comments, originally uploaded by Salvor.

Sites like digg.com, newsvine.com, reddit.com etc. are showing the way into tomorrows media. Everyone can write news and news are constantly getting voted upon and the most popular move up to the top - to the frontpage. But it is not only the posting but also the comments that are voted upon. I had not payed attention to it but comments that are rude and "undigged" by many will be hidden and you can choose only to watch comments by those you have marked as friends or comments that have over certain number of diggs. Therefore you can be like a herd animal, following the path of those you trust or the path that many others have gone before and found useful. I sure feel like in a ant colony in digg.

I have began to notice that the comments are often more useful than the post.

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<![CDATA[Second try at videotutorial using CamStudio, Moviemaker and YouTube. Now adding music and still picture. I changed the screen recording size to 640X480 from 425 X 350. Another option is to use

This is to small.
320x240
640x480
525x360
426 - 320]]>

Svona aftur prófa ég

<![CDATA[

Here is my experiment making video tutorial using free tools. I use Camstudio as schreen recorder, Microsoft Moviemaker for editing and recording sound and YouTube to upload my video tutorial to the web.

If this works and is easy I will request all my students to do short videotutorials next semester.]]>

<![CDATA[

Now I found out how to play YouTube videos in Wordpress blogs. It is easy. Just go to account setting and turn off the WysiWyg editor.

I just made a short animation in Tales Animator (free rather old fashioned animator from dollysoft.com) and I was not able to input it directly into Youtube so I run it through Microsoft Moviemaker and saved it in wmf format.

The animation is done by some kind of programming storytelling. Here is my story for this video:

Here is the schribt:
Background Floor

Grandma1 Sigga
Sigga appears at (150,550)
Sigga says "Saga um ref"
Sigga goes to (440,600) speed 100
Sigga says "Ég samdi þessa sögu sjálf"

Fox Gunna
Gunna appears at (150,500)
Gunna says "Ég er refurinn"
Gunna goes to (200,600)
Gunna says "Ég er söguhetjan"
Sigga says "Já, ég skrifa þessa sögu um refinn"

Baldman Jon
Jon appears at (680,440)
Jon goes to (680,600)
Jon says "Ég leik líka í þessu leikriti"

Sun Eyglo
Eyglo appears at (100,100)

Sigga goes to (490,500)
meanwhile Eyglo moves to (200,140)
meanwhile Gunna goes to (300,600)
meanwhile Jon says "Eigum við ekki að byrja?"]]>

<![CDATA[

skypecast-vyew  originally uploaded by Salvor.

I have been trying out skypecasts with my students and it is a great success. All my students are already Skype users and we have been using Vyew.com as our whiteboard and a place to put on visuals, powerpoints slides etc. This morning we tried Vyew with skypecast as seen in this screenshot. One of my students gave a mini presentation about pichasa picture software.

Moderating skypecasts
We also practiced turn taking in Skypecasts - were the person hosting the meeting mutes everyone and people have to ask for the microphone. Even if there are only five people in a meeting, it is sometimes difficult to follow who is talking if all can talk at the same time. The students created their own meeting and we joined their meeting. That was easy. By using Skypecasts and Vyew we have very good on-line classroom or meeting room and a shared space both for voice and visuals and we can draw on the Vyew whiteboard.

Voice, text and visuals in Skypecast

I guess most people using Skypecasts in education will not use on-line tools like vyew.com since it might be too complicated for most users to be logged into two systems at the same time but I think skypecasts will be much more useful in education if you have more shared space than the voice. Perhaps the easiest way is for the skypecast host (teacher, presenter etc) to have put up a webpage or blog post before the on-line meeting. It could only be the agenda or some points to be discussed etc. In most cases it is important to have both visual material and  text  to prepare and orient the participants and also for documenting the result of the meeting.

Wikis and skypecasts

• It could also be useful to have a wikipage so all persons who participate in the meeting could write down their contributions/suggestions.

  Now edublogs.org are offering a free wiki without ads at wikispaces.com that is a very easy to use wiki quit good in education.

  I will continue to try out skypecasts as tool in education and elearning. Next I will try skypecast with wiki. I would like a tool like Skypecasts to integrate with tools like wikis og vyew so you could automate the log in process - you will log in with your skype login and password. 

  Networking tools and skypecasts

  I also would like to try out how skypecasts works with social networking tools such as Collectivex

  Links

• http://www.wikispaces.com
• http://skypecasts.skype.com
• http://www.collectivex.com

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