I’ve decided to pack up my blog bag and move permanently over to my wordpress.com blog.

http://margoconnell.wordpress.com

I hope you’ll join me there. Cheers!

Ascilite 2007 – ICT : Providing Choices for Learners and Learning

Get your thinking caps on for ASCILITE 2007! Proposals are due July 23rd.

This conference will be held in Singapore at the Nanyang Technological University.

technorati tags:ASCILITE, 2007, conferences

Blogged with Flock

Well, sometimes its worth revisiting the basics – I learnt this the hard way when teaching computer studies, and had a student leave the class never to return because she had never used a mouse before – something I had neglected to consider covering!

So, here it is, an Introduction to Blogging at WordPress with all manner of things like trackback and pingbacks, syndication, plugins and much more!

Here is WordPress’s ‘blogging tips’ list for you, if you’re keen to get started with blogging:

1:Post regularly, but don’t post if you have nothing worth posting about.

2:Stick with only a few specific genres to talk about.

3:Don’t put ’subscribe’ and ‘vote me’ links all over the front
page until you have people that like your blog enough to ignore them
(they’re usually just in the way).

4:Use a clean and simple theme if at all possible.

5:Enjoy, blog for fun, comment on other peoples’ blogs (as they normally visit back).

technorati tags:weblog, blogging, WordPress

Blogged with Flock

Moving right along now…
This picture was loaded directly from Flickr with the Flickr option in the edit area of Edublogs.

Image: Margoc (the stenciler, Civic, Canberra ACT)

I double-clicked on the image I wanted (this one) and had preset the image size to ’small’. If I drag the image the thumbnail appears instead.

OK, now the editor toolbar is visible, I’ll try some links to video from google video for starters.

This was a short movie I recorded in Wellington as the World of Wearable Art paraded the streets. What fun!

I have just come back into using my edublogs weblog here – I keep another weblog on Blogger because to date I’ve found it easier to edit aspects of the the template than I can using WordPress (my limited skills rather than the tool in this case, cos I love the edublogs set up!). However, with Edublogs new features this is now not the case!
So I’m gonna use this blog more to try things out in a more private sense, rather than in a public sense (and potentially things could get messy as a result!). If all is good, I’ll look to carry my Blogger blog over to Edublogs and support a great Aussie service!
I like the improvements to the editing, and the extra features. I’m still trying to work out Google Analytics, and now I have finished study for the year I hope to have more time to play and learn these new things!

Some initial notes:

a. Flickr isn’t loading – may be due to our firewall at work (although it works via Flock, Flickr that is)…strange!

b. the editor menu doesn’t seem to render fully – not loading completely? May be Flock? I could see the YouTube etc features just a moment ago, but they’ve disappeared now – wierd!

My office space

Here’s a quick pic of my office space (just checking out the image tools). My pondering about using edublogs will now doubt take place here!

P.S. Just published this post then came back and edited it a bit and found the editor links like YouTube etc are now visible – yay!

Download

Download

At the start of N(M)ovember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants known as Mo Bros then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache and along the way raise as much money and awareness about
Download as possible.

Our FLS team are going to participate, starting with Col (onya Col!) – you can
Download and if you feel the urge to sponsor ($$$) him for his mo-tastic efforts during the month of November, then please do!

Ladies, you can also participate –
Download are welcome and can raise awareness of mens health issues too! )

From the Movember site, here are the key men’s health issues for Movember 2006:

Prostate Cancer in partnership with the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (www.prostate.org.au) because every year in Australia 2,700 men die of prostate cancer – more than the number of women who die from breast cancer.

Male Depression in partnership with Beyond Blue (www.beyondblue.org.au) because one in six men suffer from depression at any given time but most don’t seek help.

Testicular Cancer because it?s the second most common cancer in young men aged 18 to 35.

So, here’s a new (follicle) challenge for you… If you feel the urge,
Download and invite your own sponsors for this great initiative!

Blogged with Flock

Hope this works from my mobile!

Margaret O’Connell
- Educational Designer
- 2002 Flexible Learning Leader

We held a rather successful workshop today at CIT all about the Social Web.

The morning began with a provocative talk from our guest speaker Leigh Blackall, webcast from Dunedin in NZ, where he talked about teaching being dead (long live learning!) – well received by the 40 strong bunch of teachers who attended! Thanks Leigh, much appreciated!

We then moved into three workshops run concurrently on

• three ways to blog (plus a moblog documenting the session),
• collaborating with wikis, and
• managing your social web with tags.

All workshops were received with much enthusiasm by the participants who were keen to jump into the tools and give them a red hot go! Our central theme across all three workshops was food (being a key social activity in itself!).

Participants in the blogging workshop

We finished up with a quick few words from Vaughan Croucher, our Dean of Learning Services at CIT (thanks Vaughan!) and launched our new look PD website called Samson.

We also demonstrated the power of aggregation using a visual aggregator, Suprglu, that brought all the workshop activities together. Thanks again participants! It’s only the social web when there are people coming together to use it!

technorati tags:social.web, learning, leigh.blackall, cit, flexible.learning, samson, blogs, wikis, tagging

Blogged with Flock

I’ll be presenting as part of the eLearning Networks Online Events (AFLF) on Blogging for Learning, using Apcala. The events focus on social networking for e-learning.

You can register now and you will be able to access the events online from June 8.

I’ll be encouraging some discussion on my Apcala blog prior to the presentation on June 15 (5.30-6.30pm AEST – time to be confirmed). If you can’t see anything about the blog pilot project on my Apcala then I haven’t made it public yet! ;o) …stay tuned, it’s coming soon!

Come and join the conversation prior to June 15 and share your views about blogging for learning!

technorati tags:networks, online, learning, e-learning, AustralianFlexibleLearningFramework, events, blogging

Blogged with Flock