ED-MEDIA 2007

June 26, 2007

So I'm in Vancouver now. Beautiful surroundings - for what I've seen from the airplane. Unfortunately no time to visit them. Thanks to Joe Sant, I found an incredibly nice, good and inexpensive sushi place, called Tsunami (it's at Burrard and Robson). Joe also showed me downtown Vancouver. We had a nice walk on the west part.

I'm here for a conference - ED-MEDIA 2007.

First impression: lot of emphasis on Blogs and Podcasts as educational tools.

Best thing was a two-hours symposium on "Getting beyond centralized technologies in higher education", organized by Sebastian Fiedler.
The main issue was the death of Learning Management Systems (LMS), since they replicate functionalities that already exist on the web in a clumsly and closed way. The idea was that students should be able to use whatever tool they like. No more university-provided e-mail accounts and sites, but aggregation of several heterogeneous sources - see e.g. the concept of mesh-ups in the presentation by ??.
George Siemens made several good points: among them "the LMS should explode into a L + MS" separating the administrative management from the learning.

I learned about ManyEyes, Worldmapper, Quintura, Tagclouds, Elgg, Teqlo. Following that up I found a nice Web 2.0 tools list, and then a second one, then a third... how many are out there?

Learned the concept of "advance organizer" (Ausubel, D.P. (1960). The use of advance organizers in the learning and retention of meaningful verbal material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 51, 267-272.)

Other things:
- Found a neat tool for creating educatonal podcasts: Profcast (shareware for mac). Camstudio can be useful on Windows for recording whatever happens on screen and replay it later, or cerate a podcast out of it.

- A symposium on creating podcasts in courses was held by Li-Ling Chen. It was informative. Tools suggested were Audacity and Garageband to create audio mp3, movieMaker or iMovie to create .mov or .avi, xilisoft (shareware) to convert into mp4 (ffmpegX might do the same). Quicktime professional was also used. feedburn might be useful in the process. During the symposium Damien Koemans mentioned a new service by Amazon to create a transcript of a speech. It is done by a mix of machine and human processing (castingwords.com).

- I also went to a symposium on Second Life as educational tool: too many people, too blah blah. Did not like it.

- Had a chat with German Nemirovskij - he has a project on using Semantic Web techniques to extract info from study module description (Bologna-agreement compliant description of university courses) for automatic comparison. Interesting, maybe overly ambitious?