Arts & the Social Web

At our last session, I introduced the group to a project I've been working on for the last few months - the elearning wiki or, as it's affectionately known, the "Test Tube".

A wiki is a lot like a Google Doc, people can collaborate on each page, adding or editing the contents through their web browser. The main differences are that a) a wiki is made up of many pages, linked together, and b) people collaborating on a wiki can not only add text to or format an existing page, they can even link pages together and even create new pages "on the fly".

The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia. The Test Tube aims to be a sort of local wikipedia where people can share ideas on using web technologies in academic life, especially teaching. The hope is collaboratively express and refine the know-how we collectively build up in the course of experimenting with these technologies.

On Tuesday, I handed out a guide to getting started in the wiki, which (like everything in this course) is a little easier than you might expect. It's available from the link below:

* Getting started with the elearning wiki

At our last session, I introduced the group to a project I've been working on for the last few months - the elearning wiki or, as it's affectionately known, the "Test Tube".

A wiki is a lot like a Google Doc, people can collaborate on each page, adding or editing the contents through their web browser. The main differences are that a) a wiki is made up of many pages, linked together, and b) people collaborating on a wiki can not only add text to or format an existing page, they can even link pages together and even create new pages "on the fly".

The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia. The Test Tube aims to be a sort of local wikipedia where people can share ideas on using web technologies in academic life, especially teaching. The hope is collaboratively express and refine the know-how we collectively build up in the course of experimenting with these technologies.

On Tuesday, I handed out a guide to getting started in the wiki, which (like everything in this course) is a little easier than you might expect. It's available from the link below:

* Getting started with the elearning wiki

Last Tuesday, Charles Humblet from here at the META Centre showed the group how to set up a new podcast series on the Faculty of Arts Podcasting page, and make it possible for students to subscribe to the series.

He also showed us how to add a new podcast "episode" to the series, and showed us some examples of podcasts that have already been created by staff in the faculty for teaching purposes.

Charles distributed step-by-step guides on both these topics which are available from the links below:

* Creating a Podcasting Series (Step by step handout)
* Adding a Podcast Episode to an existing Series (Step by step handout)

At the end of the workshop I referred to an example of a video created from powerpoint slides; this example can be found on the TeacherTube site-What is Podcasting?. You may find that the pace of display of each slide on your computer is a bit too fast for reading. Placing these slides in a podcast constructed through Garageband (or any other podcast creation software) would allow individual allocation of appropriate display time for each slide.

During the workshop we used iTunes to search for, subscribe and listen to/view podcasts. We then used Garageband to create a podcast. See the guide on how to use iTunes and Garageband.

Next Tuesday's workshop will first examine the different types of podcasts and the use of iTunes to view and subscribe to podcasts. We will then use Garageband to develop our first podcast.

There are three types of podcasts:
1. audio podcasts [example: http://www.edupodder.com/podcast/podcastdemo.mp3],
2. enhanced podcasts (audio recording with visuals), and
3. video podcasts.

Garageband comes free with all Macintosh computers. It is primarily a software program that allows everyone to create music (a garage band being a group of amateur musicians). It is a mini audio recording control room, with multiple tracks for different instruments and vocals. These tracks also allow voice recordings, music and/or graphics to be combined to create podcasts.

In the workshop, we will be creating an enhanced podcast.
If there is a specific topic you would like to develop in your podcast, please bring corresponding graphics to the workshop; otherwise, we will create a podcast on a generic topic and musical tracks and images will be available on the lab computers for it.

Several people asked for us to provide a homework exercise to give people a chance to practice what we covered in our last session. So, we've come up with this fairly simple set of tasks for everyone to do before we meet next Tuesday. Altogether, it shouldn't take more than 45mins at most.

This week's workshop was on web documents or "web docs" for short. These are online word-processing documents which can be edited from any computer with just an Internet browser, and enable multiple people to edit the same document at once.

We went through the process of creating a web document with Google Docs, editing it, publishing it to the web and inviting others to collaborate with you in writing or editing it. The guide to using Google Docs is available online.

We also discussed ways in which the technologies we've looked at so far (blogs, social bookmarking and web documents) can be combined and used in teaching, research and administration.