Educators talking blogs, podcasts, phones and virtual worlds.
Mobile Technology in TAFE gathers recorded presentations and conversations about using blogs, podcasts, mobile phones and Second Life in teaching. The speakers talk plainly: one blogger tells anyone short of ideas to go and do something else, and one presenter says writing for phone browsers feels like 1999 again.
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Mobile Technology in TAFE is a collection of recordings in which educators and technologists discuss tools for teaching: blogs, podcasts, virtual worlds and the web on mobile phones. Episode titles mark each recording as audio or video. The recordings take several forms. They include presentations captured at a WA e-learning showcase and a Barcamp, an interview, an evening talk and a group conversation about podcasting. A brief spoken line usually opens each one, naming who is talking and where. Some speakers are blunt. Catherine Greenhill starts her blogging advice by telling anyone with nothing to write to go and do something else. She then talks about matching what a blogger wants to write about with the readers who actually show up. She also lists alternatives to plain text: a scanned drawing, a slidecast on slideshare.net, an audio file, a video, even a post made in Second Life. Her summary fits in a line: find your voice, know the kinds of post, handle blogger's block, and play. Nick Cowie is just as plain about the mobile web. His Barcamp talk covers markup that manufacturers made up for themselves and a crowd of competing phone browsers. On one of his devices, a single browser offers three different views, two screen orientations and five font sizes, so a developer has no idea how a page will look. Writing for phones, he says, feels like 1999 again. Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium appears twice. In an interview, he describes the consortium as a membership body drawn mostly from higher education. He recommends Flickr and digital photography as a first step for people whose real attachment is to their own subject, and he says personal and teaching uses of these tools are slowly merging. His virtual worlds presentation explains that the work centred on Second Life because it had a large, active community to experiment in. Near the end comes the remark that some of the audience probably have whiplash. James Farmer is introduced as coming from Melbourne, running a consultancy and blogging about education for a long time, and as the person who set up edu-blogs on WordPress. He speaks on identity, ownership and online learning, including discussion boards. The podcasting conversation stays closest to the classroom. Its participants find cheap recording devices easier to use than expensive ones. They raise the idea of Indigenous remote communities telling stories into mobile devices. They also weigh letting students choose how to report back against the extra work that creates for lecturers. The recordings show when they were made: one participant dates their own interest in podcasting to early 2005, and virtual worlds are called a hot technology. What a listener gets is specifics: named tools, practical workarounds and educators comparing notes.
Made for: Suits a listener who teaches, or supports teachers, and wants plain, specific talk about using blogs, podcasts, phones and Second Life with students. It also suits someone curious about how educators discussed these tools back when virtual worlds could be called a hot technology.
What sets it apart: Its episodes are recordings of different speakers: talks captured at events, an interview and a group discussion. That gives a range of practitioners, each giving advice about specific tools, from slidecasts on slideshare.net to Opera Mini and Flickr.
Mobile Technology in TAFE websites are all about m-learning, e-learning and mobile technology. I also have more information at Mobile Technology in TAFE wiki and Mobile Technology in TAFE blog. Please use my sites to learn more about how we use these technologies with students.Some of the older episodes do not start when you press play click on download instead!
Sue Waters teaches fish farming, then asks Microsoft's community manager about trolls; your teaching-tech curiosity has company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical, forgiving guide to finding a blog's voice, knowing its audience, and stepping away when ideas stall.
Blogging advice often begins with a demand to publish, but Catherine Greenhill starts from a kinder place: permission to step back. From Liberia Matters Blog, she frames blogger's block as something to diagnose rather than simply push through, with attention to voice, audience,…
A brisk, grounded tour of Second Life as an educational tool, with clear attention to hardware, servers, and practical limits.
Virtual worlds come through here as both a teaching opportunity and a technical strain, with Alan Levine using Second Life to test what communication and collaboration can feel like inside a large, active online community.
Alan Levine frames educational technology as personal, exploratory, and driven by the right hook.
Technology in education gets a human-scale treatment as Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium looks at how a digital tool starts to matter to actual people.
A practical, access-minded discussion of podcasting, mobile devices, and broader ways for students to show their learning.
The episode frames podcasting as a teaching practice shaped by access, voice, and the everyday pressures of assessment. It follows the effort to make the idea legible inside institutions, then moves through the informal networks, listservs, and simple websites that helped…
A grounded conversation about keeping online communities open, useful, and resilient when disruption appears.
Online communities come through as practical working spaces that need attention, judgment, and restraint. Sue Waters's conversation with Sean O'Driscoll starts with an unexpected fish-farming connection, then settles into the harder question of how groups keep conversation open…
A Maine IT firm talks shop, from phishing to hunting.
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Small habit changes meet hands-on AI experiments.
Hope, tested in real conversation.
Everyday English, explained in real conversation.
Practical help for ordinary life friction.
Catherine Greenhill of Liberia Matters Blog treats "blog fodder" as the practical question of what belongs in a post when the blank page is staring back.
Mobile Technology in TAFE carries Alan Levine's talk on virtual worlds, promise and peril, with Second Life as the main example.
Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium says the Horizon project is less about prediction than about forcing higher-education conversations around emerging technologies.
Nick Cowie’s Barcamp talk, “Problems with the Mobile Web,” shows how a 320-by-240 screen limits what a phone browser can display.
Michael Coghlan argues that podcasting only matters when lecturers use it inside a teaching-learning strategy, not as one-way content delivery.
Mobile Technology in TAFE centers a Sue Waters interview with Sean O'Driscoll about online communities, Web 2.0, and Microsoft’s MVP Program.
Becky Saunders argues that professional development must move beyond project funding to become routine practice, or its impact may end with the project.
A discussion about the language used in text messages and online communication, exploring terms like netlingo and the digital divide.