Twitter the way to Communicate

Just been watching the following link that I came across via twitter http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8113914.stm

basically a house that sends out tweets, to let people know when the lights are on windows are open energy consumption ect. It looked like there was a lot of kit involved an alot of wires. But thinking about this and the IBM advert creating smarter cities and getting devices to talk to each other. I was thinking about starting off a bit smaller than this, and try to mesh up twitter and moodle so that when a new site news article is added a tweet is sent from our moodles tweet account, then maybe expand on the idea maybe creating tweet accounts for the courses we offer so that students could be kept up to date with there course news, assignment hand ins etc as well.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Has it really been that long?

April was the last time I updated my blog. How time flys. Would just like to say thanks to Kate for leaving a comment on my last entry, makes me feel like someone is reading it.
Our move to Moodle is in full swing, both servers are set up and running, with a few pilot groups using it before the summer break, all with good feedback.
Over the next week the servers should be accessible from the outside ready for the big push starting on the 28th June. 9 1.5 hour training sessions to deliver in 10 days, hopefully by then all staff will be on board and preparing there areas for next term.

I am busy writing some programs to help with the creation of student accounts from the MIS system trying to make it as automated as possibly with some user customisation.

Bit of a plee here, anyone know how to render a css footer in the correct place when some of the content is produced by a database. The footer gets put before this dynamic content. Is this due to the page loading time?

Learning in Virtual Worlds Confrence

Attended the Learning in Virtual Worlds conference on Tuesday at the University of Sunderland.
The university is very nice and well set out, The student ambassadors were very helpful.
The conference started off with a Keynote speech from John Kirriemuir, of virtual World Watch. www.virtualworldwatch.net after this smaller seminar was held.We attended the Student Guidance in SL, by Garfield Southall, of the University of Chester, who looked into using second life to enable there students to get anonymous advice from their student guidance team. The main problem was with authenticating users to make sure that that they were really students of the university that was getting the advice, but how would they do this and keep the anonymity? Garfield explained how they had a library of information on there little island to refer the students to and also staff that they could talk to. This solution in my opinion is really over kill, yes the solution works. But theres nothing more been done that putting it in a virtual world. I would have put the library information into a VLE where the students can get access to it anonymously anyways and having a chat room that allows anonymous log ins kind of like the technical help or speak to an adviser app you see on some websites. The solution seamed like using second life for the sake of it and needlessly adding more complications in to the students life’s especially as they are more likely to be more vulnerable as they are seeking help. we need to cut the barriers down not add more
After dinner we attended the Theatron 3 Project by mistake as we should have been looking at the pathology labs, but were in the wrong room. Although I’m not a big art fan I could see some merits in this project. obviously its not feasible to fly the students out to theatres around the world and in some cases they wouldn’t get permission anyways. So to be able to use virtual replicas of the famous acting spaces would give the students an image of what it would really be like to perform there. Then it was on to see NewcastleGateshead SL with Shaun Allan of Vector76 http://vector76.co.uk/ngsl/ who had produced a second life representation of Gateshead and Newcastle. A good presentation on how detailed you can make things in second life, and maybe a way to get students use to there new area before they arrive in person.

The real gem was saved to last though another key note speech but this time from Kate Boardman http://katielou.blog-city.com/ from the University of Teesside. This was a really motivational speech in the way to look at virtual worlds most of the ideas were aimed at second life though taking the ideas and changing them a little would allow for use with VLE's as well. A lot of the session was based on why we do things and how there linked to the learning outcomes. How things are perceived in peoples heads an example was "who is your Mr Darcy?" some people can watch if it’s Colin Firth or visa versa. So in some ways your ideas are different to other peoples, sometimes the way things are designed don’t matter to the learning outcome other times it does. I cant remember much of the speech but it did fill me with ideas and wanted me to implement some new thoughts and ethos at work.

The time as come..

After finding other stuff to do, its time to crack on with the moodle server. I have imported a course across from the test server. I am now trying to get my head around how to administrate the users, to create groups for students and teachers. And then within them groups creating class groups. As courses can contain more than one class.

I dont know if I can transfer my thinking of Fronter across to Moodle using this kind of set up.
Or if theres a better way to do this in Moodle

Blogging taking off

Blogging has taken off, have a few people interested in using these. From using them with students as refelctive learning journals, or to just keep there team of staff upto date with the latest goings on.

Hopefully further down the line this can be intigrated with Moodle.

CPD sessions and Twitter

After the bast few days doing CPD sessions on all kinds of things including blogging and podcasting, I have come to update my blog. And hopefully use it more in 2009.
I have created a twitter account to see what all the fuss is about and attached it to here.
So will be trying that out soon.
Well 2009 is here and were back to work, had JISC in on Moday to provide an introdutory session to moodle for the 2 areas set to pilot it, the session had a few gliches with permissions and such, but all in all it seamed to go ok.
Just need to get Ubuntu to work on the server, something to do with the Dell RAID card.

Yesterday was podcasting and blogging day, the blogging went ok, with staff discovering ways in which they could use blogs with there students, online journals, reflective practices and such like. All very positive.

Then the podcasting which was less sucsesful, as the microphones to be used were locked away in a office and the only person with the key was ill, this lead to some last minute foreging about trying to scrat together some headphones with mics from other areas, which we did. These worked to varying extents during the session with audacity, but they got the idea and some were keen to try it out in there own time.

On a side note over the holidays 3 of us got to gether and were talking about the one red paperclip book and decided to do our own version, and to see how far we get. I shall be setting up a blog on this shortly and will post the link.