mbogle

This time of year is very significant in Australia – especially the portion I live in. Bush fire season marks the period in the year when heat, dead leaf litter, wind, and difficult terrain combine to produce conditions ripe for fires. This is of particular significance in the Blue Mountains, where I live, where much of the region is blanketed by trees and national parks, and also very inaccessible.
Quite literally the inhabited regions represent an isolated dot in a sea of dried bushland.
At the moment there are ...

For those of you who don’t know, actor Stephen Fry is an avid user of social media (notably blogs and Twitter). In this YouTube clip he discusses his thoughts on why it’s a valuable means of connecting with one another. He also frames the discussion more widely, referencing similar innovations over history that were met with similar arguments by critics and yet proved to be highly influential and valuable in their own right.
Personally I think this clip is a great overview on social media, and is therefore worth ...

GoAnimate.com: Animate Yourself by mikebogleLike it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

Google recently introduced a customisation option to their Google News service that enables you to add custom categories to your personalised page. This is a brief introduction to the service and an overview of how the new custom sections work.

This is just a quick post to jot down an interesting string of connections that Maddie (4 years old) and I just engaged in, which began with music on the radio and ultimately ended with a discussion on the sociology of the 1920s.
To me the moral of the story is to watch for learning opportunities in connections and don’t be afraid to explore them, no matter how obscure their connectedness may appear.
There were a number of YouTube clips that we watched, but this one in particular inspired the most discussion:

The ...

GoAnimate.com: Underdog and the Perilous Flight by mikebogle
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!
Kudos to my colleague, Mark Foster, for discovering this absolute gem of a service. GoAnimate is a site that enables you to easily create your own cartoons and animations, using your own story lines, transitions, speech bubbles and sound effects.
I’ve only just scratched the surface on this tool, so there is a whole lot I don’t know. However having spent an hour or so experimenting with the toolset, and creating ...

Once again this year I’ve informally enrolled in two open online courses – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge ‘09 (CCK09), and Social Media and Open Education (ECI831). Having done this I’ve begun to see a number of people posting clips to YouTube in which they introduce themselves and share a little bit about their professional [...]

Via @timbuckteeth I’ve recently run across a new tool for Twitter seems to have a lot of potential. TweepML is a service that lets you create indices of Twitter users that can made available to others.
The idea of cataloging groups of Twitter users is nothing new certainly, however the additional functionality that TweepML offers [...]

Yesterday was a flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants sort of day.  The Learning and Teaching Forum brought roughly 150 staff together for the purposes of discussing the theme of “Engaging the Learner, Recognising the Teacher.”
My hat goes off to the organisers of the event – of which I was only a marginal contributor. The event ran quite smoothly [...]

Via Lani at Possibilities Abound I’ve just run across an article by NPR that reports on the fact Reading Rainbow has been canceled after 26 years on the air.
“Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children’s show in [...]

I’m finding myself researching the topic of openness in education and research more and more these days, even when I don’t set out to do it. Tonight while watching an episode of Nova on YouTube called “Absolute Zero“, for example, I was struck by a very interesting historical example.
As the name implies, the episode [...]

I have just finished experimenting with Screenr and am so impressed by the quality of the service I wanted to pass along my recommendation in case anyone is interested in taking a look.
Screenr is a web-based screencast tool that enables you to quickly capture tutorials, demonstrations or other videos and have them processed and made [...]

This clip of Kseniya Simonova from “Ukraine’s Got Talent” is absolutely phenomenal. Simonova ultimately won the competition, and in my view it’s clear why she did. The description on the embedded YouTube clip indicates she “uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and “sand painting” skills to interpret Germany’s invasion and occupation [...]

I’m writing this post to document something that’s been frustrating me all morning.
YouTube is in the process of rolling out an update to their user interface in which the player takes centre stage and many other elements can be dynamically navigated without interrupting existing videos, and forcing a page refresh.  It looks pretty schmick in [...]

The stars seem to all be aligning on Connectivism at the moment. A month or so ago I was approached about presenting my experiences with CCK08 to the local group of Educational Developers at UNSW, which I happily agreed to. The presentation isn’t until next week, however given I’ve more or less finished [...]

One of the activities I’m increasingly engaging in at UNSW is working with local academics to help them integrate educational technologies into their courses. Part and parcel to this is the need for support documentation for both academics and students depicting how to actually use them.
A recent request came through concerning the creation of [...]

(Pre-recorded video embedded above)
I just got wind via Mashable of a new live streaming service called Twitcam (formerly known as Mogulus). I had a bit of a play with it and found it exceptionally easy to use. Just login with your Twitter credentials, allow Twitcam to access your webcamera and start broadcasting. [...]

In preparation for his upcoming presentation at the 2009 Open Education Conference in Vancouver this August, Alan Levine has begun to gather individual accounts of what happens when you live and work in the open. As such he is hoping people will come forward to share their personal accounts of what open education and [...]

I’ve seen references to the Society of Geek Advancement for several months but haven’t been motivated to mention it until tonight when I saw Peter Black post this same video on his blog.
Initially I wasn’t really sure what the “I am a Geek” thing was all about, but reading into this a bit further, it [...]

Just in the last two days I’ve decided to make some fairly sweeping changes to the commenting system on this blog and have installed the Disqus Comment System. This video is a basic overview of what Disqus is, how you set it up (primarily from the standpoint of self-hosted WordPress blogs), as well as [...]