December 11, 2007
Great Free Online Video Conversion Tool
I have finished preparing my keynote on Enterprise Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse for the eLearning Guild on Friday and found that I needed to convert my .wmv virtual world videos to Flash to upload into Adobe Connect. No problem! Just used the online tool Media Convert which can rip video from URLs or files for free. Just too easy! So if you want any of the videos on this site 'to go', you can just provide the URL from YouTube.
Works to rip video to mobile too!
Posted by Ron Edwards at 09:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 06, 2007
RSS 4 Learning Articles
The article I wrote for Learning magazine about RSS applications for learning was published this month. They don't have an online version so I've posted it below and if you want a print friendly version, use this: Download file
I noticed Brent Shlenker is speaking at the eLearning Guild about RSS next week from his blog where he gave the heads up on a good article about how RSS works and where it may be going from the Read/Write Web blog - 60k subscribers!
Brent will be joining us live via virtual world at the Seriously Mobile Summit April 20.
RSS, LMS, PSP?
Subscribing for Success
Blogging and Podcasting are grabbing the headlines these days and it’s encouraging that learning professionals are beginning to use them to keep themselves informed while exploring how they might support informal and formal learning in their organisations. Yet only a few people are talking about applying the power of the underlying technology which makes receiving automatic updates to blogs and podcasts possible – RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
RSS feeds can be found almost everywhere now including news sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, online calendars (Google Calendar) photo sharing (Flickr), video sharing (You Tube), social bookmarking sites and more. This enables subscribing to content one finds of interest and aggregating these into one viewer (a feed reader) so anytime there is an update the headline becomes visible. Feed readers are web-based or installed on computers or mobiles. Many people are using the Google personalised home page to subscribe to RSS feeds and Microsoft’s Live.com page supports this as well. Subscribing to several feeds gives one a sense of being “on top of it” as always the most recent postings are visible. The latest Podcast available is listed as a headline which provides a choice of when to listen or if to download, saving storage and time.
Extending RSS into Your Enterprise
Subscribing to feeds to stay informed of industry and professional news is just one of many applications. Projects can also be tracked with a feed reader enabling viewing updates from team wikis, calendars and blogs in real time and these can be combined with other news so everything of interest and importance is combined onto one page, creating a high performance personal portal for free. Studies show how using collaborative wikis shorten production time to help teams reach consensus while reducing email inefficiency on everything from policies, procedures, presentations to new product ideas so why not propose their use for projects within your organisation? Team members would benefit from more efficient practices over email updates and employees could be kept in the loop of proposed changes or just when the new information is available. Finding project applications where staying informed through the use of RSS would build acceptance in the value of subscribing to feeds. This in turn helps open the door for using them in learning and development programmes.
RSS & Learning
RSS is helpful to learning managers in a variety of ways as well. Keeping colleagues informed of new programmes via RSS feeds instead of relying on a website not enough people visit, or surfing through an LMS which may not highlight what’s new, or relying on often ignored email is an automated way to ensure the latest developments are always at the forefront. If your organisation is one of the few that already has an internal feed reader established, you should ask your IT department how to enable RSS feeds on your departmental portal. If your primary tool for communicating learning programmes is the LMS, you should enquire as to how (and when!) their platform will support RSS.
Blended learning programmes which happen over time are another good place to look for opportunities to improve information flow by using RSS. Many leadership development programmes utilise posting comments and reflections in online communities or blogs. Course facilitators would benefit from having an RSS feed of these aggregated in one place so as to always be up to date with postings, especially when working with several groups simultaneously. Learners would benefit as well by knowing when each other had commented or when the facilitator had news for the group. Keeping the group constantly and automatically informed may help delegates stay focused and keep up with the learning process. Information from a variety of sources are often used in blended learning programmes so using RSS to subscribe to certain sites to guide learning and discussion could often be more efficient and may introduce people to using RSS feeds that could have a follow on benefit.
RSS Goes Mobile
People are increasingly mobile and it’s no surprise that we want to stay informed on the move as well. News feeds on PDAs have been around for years through free tools such as AvantGo, which now enables subscribing to RSS feeds in addition to their news, entertainment and education resources and is also available on BlackBerrys. Smart Phones which support Internet access enable use of the same Google or Microsoft home pages used on the desktop to subscribe to feeds and many have RSS readers already built in (or can be downloaded). The Sony PSP game and entertainment device also supports RSS to enable subscribing to video podcasts or viewing and contributing to blogs. It’s clear that up to the minute content is now available on a wide range of mobile devices.
Subscribing to RSS feeds and making it easy for others to subscribe to key information which constantly changes is growing in both interest and application. Aggregating information using RSS helps us stay informed, engaged and learning!
About the Author
Ron Edwards is the Managing Director of Ambient Performance, Ltd., a UK based firm specializing in helping organisations apply mobile, Web 2.0 and Virtual World technologies for better performance. You can subscribe to Ron’s blog at www.ambientperformance.com/connection
Posted by Ron Edwards at 07:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 20, 2006
Blogging for Learning Professionals Article
The article I wrote for Learning Magazine on the value of blogging for learning managers was published last week and distributed at the World of Learning Conference. I've had some nice feedback on the article so thought I'd share it with the world here as the magazine doesn't have an online version. Printable version
Blogging is Good for You
Learning professionals are increasingly joining the Blogosphere and benefiting from a global community of kindred minds as they explore new approaches to engage with their colleagues, learners and each other. While bloggers are writing about a variety of topics including learning trends and tools and the use of blogging itself as a development approach, their readership is growing with more people subscribing to and commenting on blogs than ever before.
Technorati, a web-based service which tracks and helps users organise over 57 million weblogs (blogs) defines blogs simply as a personal journal on the web. With over 75,000 new blogs created a day and more than 1 million posts daily, it is likely that one can find breaking news and valuable commentary on subjects of interest. Searching Technorati for the terms 'learning', 'education', and 'eLearning' returns 1,000, 4,400, and 300 blogs respectively, with rankings of 'authority' (most linked-to), links to and from the blogs, traffic, etc. While this method of finding learning related blogs works, it can be more efficient to explore the links on a few blogs of interest to see who the authors are linking to or if the comment authors have blogs.
The Learning Circuits blog posed the question in October, 2006 'Should all Learning professionals be blogging?' and encouraged readers to post their answers on their own blogs and link back to the original question. There were dozens of responses which contained a range of opinions, of course - many of which were thoroughly written with compelling points backed up with references and links to more information. More than 50 comments were added to viewpoints which gave a sense of community and conversation as well as revealing previously unknown bloggers. It seems like there are more people commenting on learning related blogs than just a few months ago which suggests momentum towards openly participative online dialogue benefiting the ecosystem of readers and writers, a much different model from the read-only web of yesterday. As Dick Davies states when describing this Web 2.0 trend, 'the web is shifting from Take to Make'.
Blogging has benefits beyond being just a simple and inexpensive publishing mechanism. While educational uses directed at supporting training administration (course information publishing) and learning processes (students using blogs to complete coursework) are growing rapidly with an increase in 'buzz' as well as tools (have a look at Elgg.net for examples and practitioners), blogging benefits for learning professionals themselves are under-realised. Bloggers often find themselves considering how they will articulate what they are learning from other blogs, media, experiences and events while synthesizing what they already know or have heard, making new connections in real time. This process encourages active reflection whether or not the insight actually gets blogged. Learning professionals benefit this way too, of course, and also benefit from experiencing first hand what they are promoting for others.
The summary of responses from the Learning Circuits blog question articulates, 'it seems most everyone agrees that blogs are great tool for achieving some of the vital professional development characteristics that every learning professional should have: being self-reflective, being collaborative, being rigorous in supporting our positions, open to feedback, understanding our point of view and learning to share it, having working knowledge of new technologies'. It is clear that blogging (and commenting on blogs) has benefits. It might even be good for you.
About the Author:
Ron Edwards is the Managing Director of Ambient Performance, Ltd., specialists in helping organisations apply emerging technologies for better results. Ron blogs at ambientperformance.com/connection and runs blogging workshops.
Posted by Ron Edwards at 09:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 20, 2005
Instructional Design for eLearning
I presented a few tips on instructional design strategy and examples of learning innovation (podcasting, blogs, games, mobile) today at eLearning Age's Instructional Design for eLearning event in London. As an example of rapid content development, produced 'JGE' - Just Good Enough, I recorded my comments using my iPod with the iTalk microphone attachment and synched up the audio with my slides using Breeze and uploaded it here. Note that the audio quality would be much better had I used wireless microphone gear (next time!) That would also have enabled me to record directly to my laptop into Breeze/Powerpoint and I wouln't have had to spend the half hour synching it up afterwards.
Thanks to the participants for their interest, questions and comments!
Posted by Ron Edwards at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)