File hosting

Maybe I'm a bit impatient, but kee-ripes it can take a while for a file to finish loading up to a free file hosting site.

I gave up on my first one when it got stuck at 83% for about 10 minutes, so I have lessened the size of the file in the hopes it will upload. This one seems to be stuck at 9% *roll eyes*

I guess that free file hosting can be used for almost anything that we have undertaken thus far in this 'Delivery Technologies' section. MP3's, Office files, images, anything that has a file to be downloaded.

If your school or company website has a ferocious firewall that is too problematic to get around for multiple sites, then maybe one site with permission might be the easier way to go - as well as remembering a log in for a few sites instead of about 20.

However, dedicated sites to a particular function, e.g. Flickr for photosharing, is probably slightly easier and quicker and more intuitive than Mediafire.

Okay - not sure if it likes larger files or not (as in more than 10mb) but I've cancelled the other one, and I'm now uploading individual files, which at least I can see that it is happening, slowly. It's a kind of misleading that the site says "Time remaining: a few seconds" because whilst it may be true that there is only the wait of a few seconds in the timescale of continental drift or the universe, in Internet time it is considerably longer.

I'm pretty sure I've uploaded these pics to my Flickr account, but I'll embed the image and link here.

Google Earth

I haven't really used Google Earth much before. I've downloaded it, had a quick play with it and then kinda forgot about it, and went ahead and used Google Maps.

Well, it is pretty cool, but I don't know that it is way cooler than Google Maps, I mean, the street view is awesome, which Google Maps doesn't have, but then Google Earth seems to have more businesses listed for the area.


View Larger Map

Here is a place I've stayed when visiting family o/s.

Maybe this betrays a lack of imagination - either because I've come down with the 'dreaded lurgi', or because I don't have enough imagination - but I can't readily see how I can use this technology in my given field - teaching information literacy to students.

I guess you could have them evaluate the information given in a street view, but for a foreign country like this one where all the landmarks are in Chinese characters, I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about it.

I can see this working for some other disciplines and subjects - creative writing (write about this scene/town), or some sort of group project where additional information about a region is posted up by the students (photos of local landmarks, business descriptions, school descriptions).

Just in closing, the one thing I thought was pretty cool in Google Earth were that some of the buildings were 3-D. As in, when you moved the map in any direction the building's perspective would move according to that direction. Not entirely sure, but it must be some functionality that some businesses can purchase since in the area of the above image, on Google Earth there are about 6 that have this 3-D perspective function that can be turned on or off.

QR codes - the next big thing?

A couple of years ago, in my web wanderings, I found something called QR Codes.

I got a bit excited when I read about them because I could feel instinctively that there was something new and exciting here that I could harness, if I could only figure out how, and pretty importantly, if people would pick it up and run with it.

This Educause 7 Things You Must Know from 2009 will tell you what QR Codes are, and how you can use them.

Lately (as in the last few weeks) I've been getting information on papers and trials by other university libraries around the world on their use of QR Codes in information literacy. UTS in Sydney is trialling it, this guy has a few links to other sites using QR Codes. Just embedded below is a presentation with some embedded video from an Australian teacher in high school using QR Codes.

QR Codes? on Prezi

So, even though it is not on our mighty list of sites and apps to evaulate and blog about, it maybe of interest to you other educators out there interested in using Web 2.0 technologies in your teaching.

Of course, one of the major drawbacks about QR Codes is the data download charges incurred, but I think it is a good add on to parts of a course. The video can give you some ideas.

What are your thoughts on this?

Podcasting - Redux

My first ever favourite blogger - Librarian in Black - has just published a new entry about how she keeps up to date with technology and libraries. You can jump to the link here to read about all the methods she uses to keep up. She may very well be crazy, but her knowledge in the field makes her a good blogger.

One of the myriad ways she keeps up is through podcasting. If you go through and read her post, she has a very crummy commute every day - close to 2 hours, each way. So podcasting is ideal for her to fill the time with learning as she drives.

Interestingly, she has a little list of criteria for her list of regulars, which I'll paste here.

So why these podcasts and not others? They have the three winning factors:


1.Good, quality content of interest to me


2.Quality audio content


3.Good production quality (show-pacing, musical interludes, regular show segments, interesting guests, etc.)
 
I’ve probably tried out two dozen other podcasts, and unsubscribed because they ended (Boagworld, AdaptivePath), the content was uninteresting, the audio quality was so bad and uneven that my head hurt from listening, or the show production quality was laughable.
 
So dear reader, if you are going to podcast on a regular basis, or if it is going to form an integral part of your course, take the time to find out about how you can produce a good quality recording, with good quality content.
 
I scripted mine out, but really needed to rehearse a few times before recording, I had inadvertantly created a tongue twister in my original script - "seond set of shelves". Try saying that out loud!

Slideshare and Slidecasts

Jeez - don't want to harp on and sound like a broken record, but voice recording sometimes feels unreasonably difficult.

I have recently uploaded a PowerPoint presentation to SlideShare. This is a pretty good site and have been directed to it many times by some of my favourite bloggers who are sharing their presentations from conferences with those who could not attend. Pretty awesome considering that I doubt very much in this current economic climate that work will come at sending me to the US for a conference.

I didn't even realise that I already had an account with them. Actually, truth be told, I really can't remember with who on the Internets I have an account. *shrug* I guess that is a different topic for a different post. :)

So, on to SlideShare. Uploading my pptx was a bit time consuming. In part because I fiddled around with the presentation 3 times trying to 'prettify' it (people could be looking at it y'know), and the other part is that the site converts the file in some way which takes a little bit of time.

I recorded my narration a day or so later - and this, THIS is where the troubles began. I watched the SlideCast on how to create a SlideCast, and it seemed fairly straight forward. Since that was recorded SlideShare have upgraded their site and now have the capacity to host the audio file for you to synch with the slide. 

I uploaded the file, nothing happened, tried again, nothing happened - tried a few more times. Don't know who sang this song but this encapsulates what I was doing perfectly.

Definition Of Madness

One definition of madness is 
Doing the same thing over and over 
For ever and ever 
Expecting a different result 

I tried linking from the Internet Archive - nothing. Went through the help forums and followed their suggestions, which boiled down to something along the lines of 'there is a known problem with IE, try another browser'. So I used IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome. I also tried three different computers running two different OS's. I think I had a reasonable go at it. I've even logged a job with SlideShare.

So please, please tell if you get sound synched with your slide. I want to know how you did it. I don't like being defeated.

Apart from that rant, SlideShare is a good site. Many excellent presentations there, and it is of course a way to share your presentations and possibly get them used by other parties. Students might be encouraged to create slides that are informative and viewable - taking a bit of pride and care in their work (I was using the features in PowerPoint where I could input values for the size and position of the text boxes to get them in same position in for each slide - for a seamless look). For any teachers without an LMS like Moodle, it is a good way to share slides with students who may want them for reference and study purposes.

Anyway, if you want to go and have a look at my presentation, click here for the link.

Music (and passion were always the fashioooon at the Copaaaa)

What a nifty site Incomptech is. Royalty free music for use just about anywhere for anything, as long as the composer gets a credit. What a swell guy.  (^_^)

I chose one called 'Enter the party' - funk, and described as Simple, clean, light-yet-driving funk-type dance. With the tags of Bouncy, Bright, Driving, Grooving.

There was one I liked more 'One eyed maestro' which will apparently make skeletons dance, for the purposes I was considering being able to use music, it didn't seem entirely appropriate to be using creepy music.

In my current situation, the only way I can use this with students is to tell them about it, for their other classes. How I would really use it is to liven up presentations without infringing on copyright.

Wikipedia

I would hazard a guess that only the most remote and/or poorest people on Earth have not heard of Wikipedia.

Created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, it is a free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. It has had it's share of criticism over the years, and I would  be remiss as a librarian in an academic institution not to spout the party line of 'don't trust or cite Wikipedia in your assignments'. In fact their very own 'About Wikipedia' page does warn that the site can be prone to vandalism and misinformation as can newer articles recently created.

However, Wikipedia does have some useful points in its favour, besides being free. One is that articles are continually updated, so the most recent information will be included in a wiki entry. Another is that it is a kind of peer review process - if the information is not of high enough quality, the admin for that page will pull it down. Even the newness of some entries are a mark in its favour.

Anecdotally speaking, I remember not long after a college shooting in the States, people were updating an entry into the shooting as it was happening. [citation needed] (ha ha). Readers were saying it was more up-to-date than the news in reporting the events.

Another anecdote I am unable to cite as it was part of a presentation into teaching I attended last year, a lecturer at Macquarie University related how she used Wikipedia with her students. Their assignment was to get information ONTO Wikipedia by editing a specific entry. There was some sort of prize for anyone who was successful. They almost invariably raged at how they weren't successful.

When I teach classes, I do suggest to my students that if they need background information, then Wikipedia is okay, but to confirm that with other readings. However, there are a few pages that can be used in library instruction, although some of them are more in-depth than I would want to use with neophytes.

These are:
- Library Reference Desk
- Research
- Boolean
- Databases
- Evaluating sources
- Referencing

If I think of any way in particular I could use Wikipedia in my classes, I will update this post.

Quizzes pt. 2

Gahd - I feel like I have spent far too long today messing around with Script-O Pro.

I really really really hope that if you are forking over the dough for the professional membership the help for using the site is more forthcoming, because at this point it is wretched!!!

As per the brief I created a quiz with their online quiz maker. It has some good options
 - Multiple answer - where more than one answer can be correct.
 - Single answer - where only one answer is correct. Handy tip - don't confuse them.
 - True/False - 'nuff said.
 - Matching - where you choose from a term in a drop down box to complete a sentence. 

However, it has some jolly confusing options, either because the resultant page doesn't have the input options the other three did, or it doesn't act they way you thought it might, or it doesn't have any help - AT ALL.
 - Fill Answer - where you  have a word to enter to complete the sentence. To do this you must enclose the word in *asterisks* either side of the word. The page will then have an input box.
 - Short Answer - can't work this one out, the help file for it was inactive.

 - Simple Cloze - tried and tried with this one. It didn't have any help files active. Nothing I tried was really sufficient. I found an HTML cloze exercise and copied and pasted it into the quiz and modified it, but it doesn't really work.

So those are the questions.

Just as painful is the creation of the quiz. Similar to Moodle there are a range of options open to you in the creation of the quiz. Imposing a password for log in, regulating the amount of attempts, show the answers or not upon completion, randomising the questions and answer order. Good stuff there. Not so good is that every time you save the quiz you have to go back to that page, or that you need to use the drop down boxes quite carefully or else you'll have blank questions all over the place.

Something else incredibly painful is the need to know/look up some HTML tags for inserting an image. I needed to upload an image (that's fine), but when I clicked on the link for 'Your Images', it came up with the URL for the image. I had to look up the tags for insertion to include the image.

I can see it is quite a powerful program, and probably quite a boon to the more cash strapped schools out there. However, as someone who is not an HTML code monkey it was a bit painful (I did need to insert some break tags in a couple of questions), as was the lack of substantial available help.

Anyway - if you're interested in having a go of my quiz, it is at this link. Or if you are the website, enter 519 into the course ID student log in.

Will shortly give you an update on my quiz created in Moodle. My students have until the 13th to complete it. So far I've only had 12 try it out of about 60.