12.30.06
Posted in Tools at 9:03 pm by Norm Garrett
I am testing out Windows Live Writer, a free Microsoft tool for posting entries to blogs. Instead of logging onto the blog itself, and then going through the normal editing process, Windows Live Writer is a client that you download to your computer. You create your posting in WLW and then upload it to your blog. Since all of my blogs (including this one) use WordPress, WLW fits nicely with it, as it is preconfigured to work with it (and many other) blogging packages and sites.
The nice thing about WLW is that it is WYSIWYG all the way. It will do all your html formatting behind the scenes, but upload the html file just as if you had edited it directly in your blog. I’ll post more about it here as I put it through its paces (it is currently in beta), but if you are interested in trying it out, go to the Microsoft site.
Other things are also easy to do. For example, numbering, bullets, and block quotes are done with WYSIWYG simplicity just by choosing tools from the toolbar. If you are used to MS Word and other Microsoft software, this couldn’t be easier, and sure beats trying to make things look right by entering your own tags.
Best of all, the software is free and will continue to be so.
Kudos to Microsoft on this one.
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05.20.06
Posted in Conferences, Tools at 9:53 am by Norm Garrett
It is interesting how the concept of RSS feeds is finally beginning to take off. Last week I presented a webinar for the Instructional Technology Council (a community college consortium) and had 30 participants from all over the country. They asked some really good questions at the end of the presentation and we even went 15 minutes over our allotted time trying to answer them. My face-to-face session at their conference in Savannah, Georgia, last February was well-attended and participation from the group was excellent.
Yesterday, I got a call from a writer for Distance Education Report, a scholarly journal on distance education. We talked for 45 minutes as I explained RSS to him, how it works, and how it can be used in the classroom to create learning communities that are peer-to-peer, self-organizing, and easy to use in the classroom setting. We had a wonderful conversation about RSS. Even as a technical writer, he had no idea how it worked and was eager to understand not only how it worked, but how it could be used in education (particularly distance education).
This week I am presenting a double-session hands-on workshop and a 75 minute forum on using RSS, blogs, and wikis in learning communities. Again, these will be well-attended based upon pre-registrations. So it seems that interest in RSS technologies and how they work is rising. At the beginning of 2005, there was a major survey done of Internet users where one of the questions asked was if they had ever heard of RSS and, if so, whether or not they were using it. Only 5% responded that they knew what it was and only 1% were using it. Those figures have to be a lot higher now, as awareness has increased. It would be interesting to see that survey repeated now and to examine the results.
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01.08.06
Posted in wikis at 8:58 pm by Norm Garrett
I am going to attempt to get my students this semester to use a wiki, so I have spent the past few weeks getting things set up for the semester that begins tomorrow. I have identified the software (pmWiki), installed it, configured it, and tested it. In addition to that, I have had to become versed enough in it to be able to guide my students in its use.
My intent is to have each of my classes (each has their own wiki set up) develop content that I will retain for subsequent semesters. The content will revolve around the topic of the class. The classes I teach are undergraduate courses (Internetworking and Tecommunications Programming with VB.NET) and a graduate MBA course in Management Information Systems. As I experiment with this during the semester, with the different levels of students, I will report back here periodically on my progress. My undergraduates are very tech-savvy Computer Information Systems majors, but my MBA students come from lots of different disciplines and tend not to be very technical. The contrast will give me, hopefully, a good idea of how well a wiki tool will work as a collaborative tool. Stay tuned.
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12.14.05
Posted in Tools, wikis at 7:21 am by Norm Garrett
I have been trying to set up some collaborative tools for my MBA course for the spring semester. One of the things I have wanted to do is to set up a course wiki and have the students contribute to it. Unlike what I do with most of my tools, where I erase everything at the end of each semester to give students a fresh start the next semester, I am going to keep the wiki building as an ongoing, long-term project. Each group of students will add to and refine that which has been done previously.
The questions were many as I embarked on this trail. The first was to find a package I could install, given the security restraints of our university’s server. I tried several, but all failed due to various restrictions which we had on the server. Finally, I found one that had both a GNU license and tthat worked on our server. The package I ended up installing was pmWiki. It doesn’t use a database like most wikis. Instead, it uses a flat-file system. While this is not optimal for large wikis, mine is small and it seems to work fine for my use, at least in testing.
Anticipated Problems
I anticipate several problems as I involve the students in this:
The students will have a difficult time posting. Contributing to a wiki is not intuitive, so some training will be required.
The students won’t be sure what kinds of things to contribute. I will have to train them here, too, and give them some good examples.
The students won’t want to participate. Here I’ll be observing the difference between my undergraduate and graduate students, but I have a feeling that students will enjoy participating, since a wiki is a peer-to-peer configuration, rather than a top-down concept.
I’ll report back here as this project matures. A wiki is just one tool in a large toolbox available to us today. In future posts I’ll report on some of the other tools I use, including podcasting, vodcasting, and student-centered RSS feeds.
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