While Leigh, Rose, Sean, Jo and others are just kicking off the future of learning in a networked world in NZ, exploring Informal Learning and other online adventures, I’ve been plugging away at my I.T. Docs and MP3s project, putting a couple of hundred I.T. related word documents online. I’ve converted them to MP3s. and created a searchable full text index of the collection, with an RSS feed for any given search string so the results can easily be integrated into a wiki or blog. It’s been a satisfying project (enough to keep me going in the face of a rather apathetic bunch of students), but I still wish I was with my good friends over in Dunedin – perhaps I could get someone to make me a dorodango as a sort of consolation.
Of course, I don’t have the spare time for a conference, the only reason I’ve had time for my document and mp3 project is that I’ve dropped my study to just 2 subjects this semester (and pretty well ignored those subjects too), but I know I’m going to have to attend to the formal study soon, and have tagged Zotero to see if it can help there (and perhaps for blogging too, though the del.iciou.us links seem to be pushing me along quite well enough on this front). Zotero’s a research tool for firefox that allows you to capture citation, screendumps, notes etc. and ferret through them in a variety of ways. Currently it’s in private beta, but will be launching for public beta soon.
It’s funny how much I dislike being a student, as opposed to the enjoyment I get from inflicting the learning experience on my poor students – but more than both, I enjoy creating tools. I think the key word here is ‘creation’, and the three areas seem to lie along a continuum of opportunity for this act.
(tags: teaching elearning audio resouces it search ica05 edublogs TALO onlinelearning learning education informal poster presentation image media art howto mud tutorial ball dorodango japanese dirt fun todo toread firefox research tools citation reference opensource bibliographic knowledge metadata plugins tool)
