Some great resources are being made available to support learning about space which I think will be of real value in the classroom.

NASA has produced a great set of freely available video resources. The NASA eClips are short relevant educational video segments designed to inspire and engage students and help them see real world connections. New video segments are produced weekly exploring current applications of science, technology, engineering and mathematics topics. The clips are organised to cater for primary, intermediate and secondary students, and a section for the general public.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment developed by Microsoft Research. The WWT enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe. Imagine Google Earth - but with the cameras pointing out into space!

Unfortunately the WWT is only designed to run on Windows-based machines, so I miss out on my Mac, but Roy Gould’s  public demo of the World Wide Telescope captured on Ted Talks provides a good insight:

Of course, if you’re like me and don’t have a Windows machine, or the memory required to run WWT, there’s always Google Sky or Celestia, the free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Whatever suits you best, the options available for really engaging with the “final frontier” are certainly much more advanced that the days when I sat browsing books in the library, or waiting for days before images of the moon landing appeared on the black and white TV we had back in 1969!

The transfer of my entire blog from Movable Type to Wordpress is complete, and here I am blogging again! Thought the best way of getting back into it would be to list some of the cool tools and applications that I’ve been exploring and playing with during my absence…

Project View - Mobile story telling - Using simple and available technology (such as camera phones or webcams in community computer centers) to create and express individual points of view in story form

GoAnimate - Free site for creating simple animations

Scratch for Second Life - it is what is says - integrate the characters created in Scratch into Second Life

Qrowd - Another PLE option based on RSS feeds from all your favourite sites and create your personal mash-up of the web!

Tag Galaxy - (I wasted hours on this one!) - great application for searching photos on a theme from flickr and viewing them on a sphere!

So - feels good to have my blog back. Now to ponder some more thoughtful posts

‘Inanimate Alice’ tells the story of Alice, growing up in the early years of the 21st century. Written and directed by writer Kate Pullinger and digital artist Chris Joseph, this series of multimedia, interactive episodes uses a combination of text, sound, images, and games as Alice takes us on a journey through her life from the age of eight through to her twenties. Alice becomes a games animator; not just any animator, but a creator of characters for the most successful games company in the world.

And one character stands out: Brad, Alice’s only true friend in life. The ten episodes of ‘Inanimate Alice’ become increasingly interactive and game-like, reflecting Alice’s own developing skills as a game designer and animator. ‘Inanimate Alice’ is a study of human/computer relations in a world where having friends means never having to meet them.

I was contacted by Ian about this project recently - and I thought it worth passing on. He draws attention to episode 4: Hometown” (http://inanimatealice.com)in which Alice previews a software tool that she has created, called iStories. A supremely simple storytelling tool, iStories enables students and staff to choose photos, add words, music and sound effects and BOOM! you have your own interactive story in minutes. Check it out at http://www.iStori.es

I’d love to hear from any teachers how have the chance to try this with students.

Following my recent post about Software as a Service I’ve had several discussions with teachers about the use of Google Docs by staff and students in schools. many are finding that these applications provide pretty much everything they need on a day to day basis. So it was with interest that I took a look at the Interactive Tutorials that Google have developed to explain concepts within all of the current GoogleApps (including the GoogleDocs suite).

I’d love to know how they’ve developed these tutorials - they’re easy to follow and are a great example of how instructional material can be presented online - both pedagogically and technically. I wonder when this service will be provided as one of the Google Apps??

Recently published by the Commonwealth of Learning is this edited e-book titled Education for a Digital World - advice, guidelines and effective practice from around the globe. This 500-page volume contains a comprehensive collection of proven strategies and tools for effective online teaching, based on the principles of learning as a social process. It offers practical, contemporary guidance to support e-learning decision-making, instructional choices, as well as program and course planning, and development.

There are five sections in the book, with contributed chapters under the headings of:

• The impact of Instructional technologies

• Preparing Online Courses
• Implementing Technology
• eLearning in Action
• Engagement and Communication

The book itself has been designed in such a way that it could be used as a handbook for a course on the topic - with each of the 31 very informative chapters introduced with a list of learning outcomes that should be achieved as the reader works his/her way through the chapter.

There’s simply too much in this book for me to do it justice with a brief mention here - suffice to say that there is something of value in here for everyone, from the newcomers to the topic to those who are well down the track.

I found chapter 30,”Supporting eLearning through Communities of Practice” of particular interest having just attended an all day seminar yesterday with Etienne Wenger, whose work gets quoted in this chapter. There are some very useful models and frameworks explained in the chapter, as well as some informative case studies that illustrate the nature and operation of some of these communities of practice - including one that I’ve been a part of for a while, namely the SCoPE online community hosted Simon Fraser University in Australia which brings together individuals who share an interest in educational research and practice.

Another excellent piece of work from the Commonwealth of Learning!

Terry Anderson has released the second edition of his popular “Theory and Practice of Online Learning”. The book is available for purchase or as a free download (click here to download the entire book in .pdf format). Topics include social media, philosophies of technology, mobile learning, cost decisions about technology, libraries, learner support and more.

I was particularly interested in the chapter titled “Towards a Theory of Online Learning” which had me thinking back to the work I did in the field of distance education with theorists such as Holmberg, Keegan, Moore etc. Anderson has a background that comes from these same traditions, and like these theorists before him, he begins with a general assessment of how people learn, using as a framework the work of Bransford, Brown, and Cocking’s (1999). He goes on to assess the unique characteristics or affordances of the Web to enhance these generalized learning contexts and discusses the six forms of interaction and their critical role in engaging and supporting both learners and teachers. He then presents a model of e-learning, a first step towards a theory, in which the two predominate forms of e-learning - collaborative and independent study modes - are presented with a brief discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each. Anderson ends with a discussion of the emerging tools of the Semantic Web, and the way they will affect future developments of theory and practice of online learning.

Separate chapters are devoted to exploring infrastructure and support (including chapters on social software and the use of mobile technologies); the design and development of online courses, and on the delivery, quality control and student support of online courses. The broad range of subjects, both theoretical and practical, should be of immense interest to researchers and practitioners in the field of online education and eLearning.

With a long weekend coming up in New Zealand here’s a bit of reading that may be of interest to some. The eLearning Guild have released the latest in their series of free e-books, this one titled 144 Tips on Synchronous e-Learning.

As is usual in previous ELG publications, the tips range in length from one-sentence ideas all the way up to multi-page discourses. You will find tips in these categories…

• Blending Synchronous Learning with Other Learning Modalities

• Designers of Synchronous Presentations, Courses, and Webinars
• Managers Who Lead Synchronous Learning Efforts
• Synchronous Speakers and Instructors
• Technical Production, Planning, and Preparation

All of the tips have been submitted by practitioners, and there’s a lot of very useful stuff here - particularly for those who are entering the field, or for those who may be in a position of creating manuals or staff development activities to support those working in your school or institution. There’s quite a bit of advertising included from Adobe about their synchronous eLearning product - but even this is informative and usefully presented.

I came across this wonderfully easy to use search tool today after reading Jane’s Blog. Boolify provides a simple, yet effective way of introducing students to the complexities of Boolean searching.

Librarians, teachers and parents have told us how hard it is for students to understand web searching. Boolify makes it easier to for students to understand their web search by illustrating the logic of their search, and by showing them how each change to their search instantly changes their results.

It’s simple, immediate and is easy and flexible to use with your class, no matter the subject matter.

Search results are presented through Google’s “Safe Search STRICT” technology, so we’re confident that the results your students receive are safe.

While checking our the Boolify Site I also came across this video clip that explains a little of what Boolean search is all about. Useful stuff.

| View | Upload your own

There has been discussion for years about the fact that there’s a lot more information on the Web than is accessed when we do a search using one of the common search engines such as Google. Experts consider that there may be up to 500 times the information available in the ‘invisible web’ than there is in the ’searchable web’.

One way of addressing this is to consider the federated search approach - the powerpoint above is my humble attempt to illustrate how this works from a couple of years ago.

Another way is to use specialised search engines that are designed to search the deep or invisible web - usually within a particular field or discipline. About a week ago I received a note from Amy Quinn from an oganisation called College Degree, alerting me to a wonderful list of 99 Resources to Research & Mine the Invisible Web. I’ve had a play with several of these now, and can imagine they’d be pretty useful in particular contexts. A number of them are examples of the repository-specific search engines that I refer to in my slide-show, while others are more subject specific and search multiple repositories.

In addition to the links to search engines, the list also contains examples of specific directories, catalogues and databases etc, and has a useful section on social media also. It’s worth scrolling right to the bottom for some articles and guides about the ‘deep’ or ‘invisible’ web.

Just in time for Christmas, another free e-book from the eLearning Guild titled 162 Tips and Tricks for working with eLearning Tools. this book is for those who are serious about eLearning, and who are responsible for preparing and presenting online courses, or for the selection of tools and applications used by those who are.

A few months ago the eLearning Guild asked members for their favorite tips for using software for the creation of e-Learning. Members could submit tips in any or all of the following five categories:

• Courseware authoring and e-Learning development tools

• Rapid e-Learning tools
• Simulation tools
• Media tools
• Combining and deploying authoring tools

The result is this collection of tips and tricks as they have been contributed, with only a minimum of editing.

I’ve found a number of links to applications and ideas that I hadn’t previously considered - and was very pleased to note the inclusion of the NZ-developed eXeLearning in the section on Courseware Authoring / e-Learning Development Tools (see page 23).