Blogging

Best wishes for health and happiness for all for 2009.

See the rest here:
Happy New Year!

This is one of the photos I am most proud of. My beautiful kids

Excerpt from:
My kids on the beach in Manorbier

This is a terrific short video of Johnny Lee’s Nintendo Wii remote controller hacks. The head tracking VR display screen application is particularly amazing and could have some powerful uses in educational games. I know of groups that are using complex technologies to achieve the same effect as this elegantly simple approach. Be sure to check out Johnny’s projects web site.

Go find: wii hacks, head tracking vr

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Simple Wii hacks, powerful applications

I’ve just discovered Wordle, a web application that creates word clouds from any body of text. Word clouds, like tag clouds, are a collection of individual words whose text size reflects the frequency of occurrence in a given body of text. Wordle has some nice layout tools to help you create beautiful word clouds. It’s easy to make your own. Here’s a word map from my weblog’s RSS feed. It’s easy to see the emphasis of words in my recent blog posts.

In the past I’ve used a more formal version of this kind of approach in the battle against plagiarism. For my module’s assessment I get students to write a dissertation and occasionally one student tries to pass someone else’s work off as their own. There are a number of applications that compare text from one source against another to look for blatant copying, but another approach is to use textural analysis that compares the linguistic style and word count of one section of a piece of work with that of another section. If you suspect a student of incorporating someone else’s work you can use this approach to spot a change a style from one chapter to another. This is a useful approach when the plagiarised source cannot be identified.

Anyway, for fun I thought I’d use Wordle to compare the word maps from the recent blog posts of three leading learning technologists. It’s interesting to see the different word emphasis. Can you guess which map belongs to Josie Fraser, Scott Wilson and Stephen Downes?

Go find: copycatch, plagiarism detection, word clouds

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Word clouds with Wordle

I attended a couple of days of the IMS Summit on Interoperability Now and Next in Birmingham, UK last week. Sheila has written up some notes. I have to say I was disappointed by the learning design session. Five years after the learning design spec was finalised it’s still a complex business using the spec and current tools to define and implement a simple interaction. I keep feeling that IMS LD was a solution looking for a problem and haven’t yet seen anything that solves any problems I have in learning & teaching.

Anyhoo I gave a presentation on using lightweight RSS for syndicating learning resources. Old stuff but still new to some. Sorry there’s no commentary to go with the slides. If asked ’so what’ I’d ask you to look at slides 17-20 as these outline a simple approach that uses RSS as a manifest for delivering learning resources (an activities, in fact anything you can point a URL at). It’s lightweight (the ‘manifest’ lists title, description and URL to resources, not the resources themselves), has an implicit sequencing built in (simple linear), with metadata if required, and is in a format understood by many existing applications and content management systems.

Go find: ims global learning consortium, ims learning design, rss

IMS Summit on Interoperability Now and Next