Here’s what Stephen Downes says about this: “MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) has for some reason set up a Second Life site. It looks like stacks of books. All I’m going to do is pass this information on to you ans wash my hand of it.”

Have purchased one Flip Ultra and one Sony Webbie camera for the FDL. So far, I’d say the Flip is far more intuitive to use, but the Sony seems to take better quality videos.

Love that Skype screen view. So far, seems to work pretty good on both my HP Touchscreen Windows Vista and MacBook Pro – Leopard boxes.

This fall, I finally upgraded my three 3-yr-old iMacs to Leopard from Tiger. Aside from the weird way Apple went with wild cats as names and choose to go up quickly to the undisputed top cat in the food chain and then digressed to a lesser cat, the leopard, I have this to say: It was hardly worth the bother. Tiger worked fine up until I found a program that required Leopard. Now Snow Leopard, maybe never Snow Leopard, but Leopard. Does it run any better? Not on those boxes. Maybe on my brand new iMac, with its 64 bit capabilities – but so far, all this upgrading has been kind of a waste of money and feels a bit like Apple extortion. I say once you buy a computer, the operating system upgrades ought to be free forever after, especially if those upgrades get us any security upgrades.

Lots of folks are taking up with Skype these days, which makes this interview on CNN via Skype all the more interesting to me. Big media is using it to interview big culture (WIRED), about a man who tries to disappear from the grid. So much to discuss in this story!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/09/01/dcl.off.the.grid.intv.cnn

In other Skype news, eBay is selling (did you know eBay owned Skype?). eBay somehow thought people would want to sell and buy using Skype, forgetting that auctions are still a bit unnatural for we Americans. We are a bit embarrassed to barter FTF, and besides, Skype doesn’t let us impulse buy. It forces us to slow down and consider what we’re doing.

Looks like we won’t be upgrading from BlackBoard 8 to BlackBoard 9 yet. We don’t have the budget. Drat.

Hey, this could turn out to be pretty neat. Our NITLE consortial use of MIV is now becoming the newer, spiffier Elluminate. I have to learn something new, but I don’t mind if it means we get a better product for small group/individual video conferencing.

We have some enthusiastic faculty doing some very cool things with technology in ther classes on our campus, I am proud to say. We brought a group of them together last week to showcase their work for other faculty in a tech fair. We offered food, prizes, and a fun social atmosphere in a space close to the offices of most faculty on campus. In spite of the many promises I received from folks who said they would come, attendance was disappointing. Some of it is just spring fever, with faculty and students alike goofing off when they should be making work a top priority. I also think some of it is just faculty burnout on new technologies and new teaching methods – they could be doing far more interesting and dynamic things in their classes, but the tried and true, boring as hell traditional lecture method is just easier and safer. What could we do to get faculty motivated to think creatively about teaching and learning, and to really care about how their classes are impacting their student’s lives?

Today I’m sorting through a series of posts Rob sent dealing with the many implementation processes he’s taken on in the past month. We’ve had iTunes U for awhile now and have had minor successes with it so far, including a couple of brave faculty members who have posted interesting content for a language and a sociology of music class. It’s easy enough from the user perspective, I think, but it has been quite a challenge from the admin perspective. For some reason Apple never saw fit to make this easy to adopt, which I see as just plain nuts. Regardless, we are close to a full and proper rollout now with the authentication schemes one would hope to see in place; i.e. we can control access by user, group, class, insitution and world. We have some great stuff going on here at Linfield and it’s time to start bragging about it.

Anybody who appreciates the value of brainstorming will appreciate mind mapping tools such as Inspiration, which allows us to convert our brainstorms to Word outlines at the push of a button. What a great tool for helping to generate ideas, organize thoughts and “see” connections between concepts. Now comes mywebspiration.com, a free Flash tool that allows us to not only brainstorm just like Inspiration, but also to share our creations with others. Way cool! But how long will it remain free?