Making it easier to share content

My birthday was 10 days ago and I got a new camera. One of the first photos I took was of a bus at the end of my street.

A week later I joined the Guardian Cardiff Flickr pool. This pool supports the Guardian Cardiff local blog which has been doing great work in recent months. So today when Hannah, who runs the site, was looking for an image to put along side a story on the re-organisation of public transport in the city she used mine. Here is a link to the story.
So what if I took some photos that were relevant to education- lecture theatres, computers, an ipad(!), small groups etc. Which group would I put those in to make it easy for other educators to find and use in their materials? A quick search of Flickr shows that that a general education group- or a specific one for higher education- doesn't seem to exist yet.
So I propose that we start one. We would need to figure out some guidelines. It would seem sensible that images added to the pool should be under a Creative Commons license allowing re-use. What else do you think might be important to specify?
I am sure that there is lots of really useful content out there already. This pool would just make it a little easier to find out about. Martin Weller blogged about the Guardian local project recently and proposed developing something similar for education. I think this could be a first step. I think at this stage in social media we know that there is little point in trying to set up new sites and services. Get people to keep doing what they are doing already- just a little smarter!

I'll not be leaving Facebook yet either...

Below is my Facebook profile. It's a little bit secret. If you google my name you will not find it. And if you search for me in Facebook you will not find it. My privacy settings exclude me from search. So you can only find my profile if you know one of my friends already (or you click on the link in the networked blogs widget at the side!). I've always keep my privacy settings high on Facebook. I get all green lights from the privacy scanner (http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/facebook). And yes, I have no choice but to have a public profile, but I don't mind the level of information it gives about me.

My Facebook Profile

Sarah Stewart has blogged saying that she won't be leaving Facebook on "Quit Facebook Day". She connects with many midwives there that she would not otherwise. My use of Facebooks is more personal. But in the last few days I also decided to start a Facebook page to support my teaching. I was worried that it would come across 'creepy treehouse', so I sent an email to students making clear that it would only aggregate content that they could already find through Blackboard. I don't expect this page to be interactive as I already use the walled garden discussion forums of Blackboard heavily. And this piece of work involves contact with patients so discussion on Facebook would be completely inappropriate. 

As Matt Assay has shrewdly observed, the geek elite may be moving on, but the mainstream (including me) are just settling in.

How I made a Prezicast.

If you are going to share your presentation online then you need audio. A presentation which is not text-heavy, and doesn't cause death by bullet-point, can be hard for others to follow if they can not hear what you are saying to make sense of the images. A few weeks ago I discovered how easy Slideshare makes adding audio to a powerpoint presentation to make a screencast. (And I had quite a lot of help from my twitter support team!)

Last week I gave my first presentation using Prezi and recorded the audio with my trusty Zoom Q3. I then set about trying to figure out how to put the two together. It causes quite a lot of consternation to users but Prezi does not host audio on their site. Allowing a sound file to be synced to the Prezi timeline would seem a very sensible thing for them to introduce so there must be a very good reason why it has not been introduced.  I found some mention of possibly adding a sound file at the start of the presentation which would run throughout. This caused me to spend far too long- several hours- trying to figure out how to convert a .wav file (from ZoomQ3) to .swf (Prezi is flash-driven). I didn't manage it and was about to give up on the task entirely.

Instead I went back to one of the first solutions suggested to me : record a screencast with Camtasia. It's quite an expensive programme so I signed up for a trial. I then played my audio file outside of Camtasia and recorded the screen as I navigated through the Prezi in time. The end result is not perfect but it is good enough! If you are doing this make sure that you do not record sound within Camtasia when making the screencast. 

I produced a video file... I think I chose mp4, which I then uploaded to Vimeo. Why did I choose Vimeo? Well, it was the first time to use this as well and I guess I like the clean interface when embedded.

So, that is how I made a Prezicast You can see the end result here. If you have managed to do this some other way please let me know. I did think about embedding the audio separately but I think that would have been more perplexing for my audience! Do you think any other screencast software would allow me to do this? Maybe even free? 

Integrating Web 2.0 with Blackboard

Untitled from Anne Marie Cunningham on Vimeo.

This is a presentation that I gave yesterday at a Cardiff University conference on Technology-Enhanced Education. You can see the Twitter stream here. It is about my experiences trying to use free social media tools with Blackboard. These are simple tools that any one could use and many of the people who read this blog will be very familiar with them. But I hope you might find it interesting.
The presentation uses Prezi. You can navigate your own way through it here on the Prezi website. I reused a template and you can reuse my presentation as well.
Near the start I mention that Web 2.0 is an old hat term. That refers to a tweet I saw in the last few days saying that social media is rising in popularity on google, as web 2.0 sinks. But I don't have a link to the source! (EDIT: The very helpful @sarahnicholas sent me this link which explains all)
Here are some of the services that I refer to:
Delicious (social bookmarking)
Diigo (social bookmarking)
Screenr (Quick and easy screencasts)
SNAPP (for analysis of networks in discusion forums)
Mindmeister (collaborative mindmapping)

Oh, and if you have any views on how we should model developing PLEs for students please leave a comment.

First Prezi Presentation!

This was my presentation at #cu_tee today. Prezi is a lot of fun to work with and to present with. Ths presentation is based on a template available on the Prezi site which I reused. I recorded audio of my presentation and if I had used Powerpoint you would now be looking at a Slideshare with sound! But Slideshare doesn't support Prezi, and Prezi does not support hosting audio on their own site. This is a BIG drawback.

Integrating Web 2.0 with Blackboard on Prezi

Why Google Scholar has got a lot more useful for me!

Everyone knows the pain of finding an interesting article and then realising that you don't have access to it. It's not fair. If you work for a university there is a good chance that your library does subscribe to the journal but figuring out how to access it will take a few steps. But now if you work in Cardiff University, at least, Google Scholar just got a lot more interesting. It is now easy to know which journals you really will have access to.

This made me think... wouldn't it be great if Google Reader knew which journals I have access to? And is there a search engine which accesses PubMed which knows these journals? If you know the answer to this, let me know!

CiteULike vs. Delicious

On Twitter tonight I was asked how CiteULike was different to Delicious. I recorded this quick screencast to show why a tool like CiteULike is so much more useful for managing academic references.