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Technology Mastery Day 2 reset

Simon Robinson — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:22:03 +0000

Big day. Thank you to all presenters who once again did a great job of putting together some interesting and relevant things for people.
Huge thank you to participants in my workshop that assured me I didn’t talk too much. I don’t believe you but thanks all the same! Had an issue with QuickTime plugin for IE7. In the pre-workshop post I embedded my slides as a QT movie with active links to websites I was going to talk about. It was supposed to make it easier for participants but it ended up being a bit of a pain. If people are still having issues contact IT support.
I have reviewed my material and retagged bookmarks in del.icio.us with “techmastery” to make them easier for people to locate. They can be viewed here. Remember, get your friends onto delicious and “share the love”.
For those wishing to review anything we covered I can’t recommend Atomic Learning enough. Great tutorials there. If you can’t remember the username and password drop me an email.
Everyone requested a copy of the “Online research workflow” so here it is in several “flavours” depending on your preference…
Inspiration v8
online-research-steps pdf with notes
online-research-steps MSWord with notes

I was very excited when one of the participants from the workshop met me on the stairs and squealed “I used del.icio.us! Someone wanted a website, I had it bookmarked and there it was!”
Super sweet.
If I have forgotten anything or there is any other feedback don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Technology Mastery Day 2

Simon Robinson — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:27:11 +0000

The presentation slides from the workshop can be viewed below. Follow along during the workshop as there are active links on the slides which will take you to the sites being discussed. Hopefully that will save you a lot of pain. You’ll need QuickTime to view it.

Download

Could we start again please?

Simon Robinson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:46:38 +0000

Had a session with some staff the other day and I think it went a bit over the top. On reflection I introduced way too many things too quickly and missed the target. Well that’s how it felt anyway. I forgot to emphasise the regular “run of the mill” applications that people may wish to know more about or even streamlining current processes (e.g. how you deal with mail) to become more effective. In other words I didn’t keep the main thing the main thing (stupid!) [Thanks must go to DLU here for the timely reminders I rightly received in this area]

If you were at the session, feel free to leave a comment below with your impressions. I’m happy to be told otherwise.
In an effort to make up for the confusion I have caused I will review…

RSS as the “new way” to get information from the web
Social bookmarking to turbocharge your bookmarks and “share the link-love”
Google Docs for collaboration and peace of mind

A couple of people created delicious accounts and a few created blog accounts (thanks Edublogs) which I’m excited about. Unfortunately, with the large group we couldn’t have the in depth conversations with everyone as we would have liked but I will endeavour to pursue some of that one on one. Again I have to thank DLU for generously lending her expertise to assist. (Don’t forget the MyClasses page that DLU created last session.)

I have embedded the Common Craft “in Plain English” videos below so people can watch them again. These guys do some seriously useful stuff and I think are on the money with the explanations. I have also included some links to Atomic Learning (I can’t pimp the site enough really,) where there are short video tutorials on how to get a delicous or Google account, and explanations of RSS and RSS readers. If you can’t remember the school password shoot me an or ask around. For obvious reasons it can’t be published here.

RSS in plain english

Go here to view the Atomic Learning tutorial and learn more about it

Go here to view the Atomic Learning tutorial introducing RSS using IE7

Go here to view the Atomic Learning tutorial about using RSS feeds in IE7

Social bookmarking (with Del.icio.us) in plain english

Go here to view the Atomic Learning tutorial and sign up

Google Docs in plain english

Go here to view the Atomic Learning tutorials and sign up

I think I’ll get people to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog as a learning activity. It would encompass most of the things discussed already. Should have done that the first time really…

I always said Facebook was bad news…

Simon Robinson — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:22:53 +0000

Expulsion threat over Facebook study group | NEWS.com.au: “A CANADIAN university threatened to expel a student for cheating because he set up an online study group on social networking website Facebook.”

Check out the article. Very interesting indeed. According to the article Ryerson lifted the expulsion threat but are giving him zero for the tutorial work. Harsh?

Apparently all students attending Ryerson from now on will be living and working in bubbles. Lecture content etc will be piped to them directly via their mobile phones and small LCD televisions mounted in the bubble. No contact with the outside world will be permitted until the end of semester.

What do you think?