The Google Monopoly - What Else Do You Need?

It's now just 2 months out from the start of our course and already we have exchanged ideas, resources, tools, blogs, photos and contacts. I have a rapidly expanding portfolio of cutting edge tools I can draw on to make my cyberlife infinitely better. But everything I am trying to do has a common thread.... making it simple and drawing everything together so tools and information are easily accessible.

In my life of flesh and blood, I'm trying to declutter and be less consumeristic, for environmental, ethical and spiritual reasons. I wonder if I have converted my consumeristic behaviour to a kind of online expression where I can just get more and more and more and more. And now, like in "real life" it doesn't serve me well? Just too much stuff?

Well I think I am going to try to harness the power of google, to whom I've already sold my soul, and see if I can just augment it with the things I need, rather than collecting EVERYTHING which will become outmoded in an instant anyhow. I'd rather be getting some exercise and fresh air than servicing my tweets, IFTTT and facebook. So my next few posts are going to explore google.

7 C's of Learning Design

Attended a learning design workshop at the University of Wollongong with Grainne Conole from the University of Leicester. I felt like a gate crasher, it was an in-house event, however, in keeping with Professor Conole's philosophy of adopting open practices of sharing experiences and research, I will feel better about having enjoyed the UOW hospitality and lamingtons if I share some of the resources. I think the most valuable aspects of this workshop for me were the visuals and tools like the activity widget. Links to the widget and other sites are all in the slides.

Prof Conole's Blog: http://e4innovation.com/, is a wonderful resource  in itself.

In January 2013, you can join the Open Learning Design Studio MOOC, which focuses on the theme of curriculum design with OER's.  (Can one participate in 2 MOOCs at once and still have a life?)

Conole learning design_final from Grainne Conole

iF This Then That "iFTTT"

This could be a very useful application. I'm not sure how I will use it yet, but I have in mind something for my business where I can get it to distribute content across several applications. This idea is courtesy of Martin King. I found a very good YouTube tutorial, which is great because the iFTTT site isn't very self explanatory. "If this then that" allows you to select any action, such as post to twitter, and then do something else with it, such as post it to facebook, or whatever else you want to do. It will then carry out that series of steps for you without you having to do anything.Someone in the group wanted to send the tweets to a spreadsheet and this application will do it for you automatically once you have set it up. So I imagine the possibilities could be amazing.

E-Learning and Digital Cultures: How to make a sketch movie

E-Learning and Digital Cultures: How to make a sketch movie: For those of you who have asked how to make a sketch movie like the one in my Initial thoughts and feelings post, here it is: I c...

Thanks to Kyle Bettley for sharing his movie making skills:

Storify, a way to share links in one place?

I've been trying to think of a way to share all EDCMOOC links on one platform. I thought of storify, and I'm not sure this is the best way, however, it does seem to work. If you haven't encountered storify before, its a platform that lets you create a story or narrative using posts from various social networking sites, including images and video. Well worth a look, there are some quite powerful stories on the current outbreak of violence in Gaza/Israel.

Mine is not a story, just a listing of the platforms we have set up for our coursera course, but it is all in the one spot now I guess and in a publishable format that I can share with one click. Funny though, it doesn't seem to appear on the #edcmooc on twitter, even though I have tweeted the link.

eLearning and Digital Culture: Angela's Network of Sites: Storify


I plan to keep adding to it as I sell my soul to the online world, all in the name of digital education, laying bare my life to anyone and everyone who will take me.....twitter, flikr, youtube, tumblr.,storify, blogger, google+ and facebook. I can't imagine we will all be friending each other on facebook, perhaps there will be a edcmooc page. But there, done now.

Tricks of the eTrade! Noticeboards.

This is  new discovery for me linoit, a web sticky note service that lets you create a canvas for post-it type sticky notes. A giant online whiteboard for collaborative planning. I know you can use prezi for similar things, but I think linoit is rather cool.

Here's something else similar: wallwisher. Therse are free or upgradable to pro versions.

I'm already learning about lots of new tools from my new colleagues at #edcmooc, hope to share some of my resources here on my blog.

Lesson 1: Be prepared!

Global warming candle for Earth Hour

Very clever, the course is meant to start at the end of January, and here we all are, engaged and establishing our online community more than two months before we "start"! I'm going to use this blog to keep a record of my personal notes and lessons and perhaps there is something useful here for others as well. New learning means joining the dots yourself, working out how to use tools and information others (both teachers and students) make available through all these different platforms we are exploring. Collaborative social learning for sure! 
This early start is essential if students are expected to utilize a range of online tools. Notes for today:

• Setup of online platforms we will be using in the course. Suddenly twittering, reactivating my much disliked facebook, cranking up google+ and the youtube library and bringing blogger to life. 
• Through the #edcmooc hashtag on twitter, we are all introducing ourselves. There are lots of us and I'm wondering if like my last coursera course (where there were reportedly 26,000 students) I will find the enormity overwhelming and back out of the forums.
• But wait, in the stream of #edcmoocs, we see Chris Swift has set up a google map where we can all pin our locations. So instead of endless scrolling through our tweets, we have a visual representation, linking people to places and pulling the drawstring to make something big and spread out look manageable. Very,very good. Mentally, I can cope with this. eLearning and Digital Cultures MOOC Course Map
• There is a need to update my coursera profile and am wondering at this stage where to park the links to all the different sites we will be using. I see we can do this in the edcmoocs google,  or even on twitter. Perhaps this blog is my personal mothership in this course. 
•