Digital Storytelling Workshop - comments

(audio comment about 3 minutes long)

Carole McCulloch
Noarlunga TAFE Campus
Example of digital story in a blog
Another digital story made with Photo Story

Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling
Point of view
Dramatic question
Emotional content
Gift of voice
Power of sound track
Economy
Pacing

The Weekend

Presentation on Audioblogging (in LearningTimes)
Janet McMillan
Sunday Lunch Venue
Alison

Trial with audioblog.com

As you can hear, the first message I recorded with this service was cut short. Not a very auspicious beginnning. I'll let you know how effective their support department is in sorting out the problem!

Postscript: someone from audioblog.com has been in touch and just my luck - they've never seen this problem before. They're working on a solution. I'll report back when and if they provide one.

---

Some weeks later: bummer. The audioblog.com people can't duplicate or solve my problem so we've agreed to cancel my subscription and refund my money. Sad. It looked like a great and affordable tool. At least their help staff were very pleasant to deal with - responsive and understanding. The problem has to be a software conflict I reckon. Never mind. Time to move on!

New Userplane Sample - evonline 2005 Blogging Workshop

A/V Blog
by Userplane

---

It's great of Userplane to make this tool available for free trial. It is in beta version and you can sign up for ten free posts here. I don't know how much it costs after that because it's one of those 'price on application' arrangements - not always a good sign - but it would have to be better than the freebie for me to make regular use of it. It's slow to process your video when you save it, and buffering times are longer than usual for videos of equivalent length when you try and play it from your blog.

Still, it is easy to get it into your blog. Once you have saved your video, userplane gives you the code to paste into your blog. Easy. Instant Audio works the same way. I haven't tried their video (about $30/month) but their audio is excellent.

Visit to Melbourne

bourke_st
Originally uploaded by mikecogh.

I know this is a blog about Adelaide etc, but occasionally Adelaide people go across to our nearest big city - Melbourne!

How to Embed Audio in a Blog

I've been doing it in various ways - one with the help of instantaudio.com, but that's not free. Another way is to record the sound file using your own pc (using something like Audacity), saving it as an mp3 file, and then uploading it to a server somewhere.

Now, if you go to VIEW > SOURCE, or PAGE SOURCE in the menu at the top of your browser you can see the code for this page. Look for the bit of code that starts with 'embed'. Cut and paste that bit of code into your blog, and change the URL so that it points to the sound file that you have uploaded, and you should see your sound file embedded in your page.
Good luck!

Birthdays, Glenelg, Garden and Blogging

I’ve had a lovely day today. It began with breakfast at the Stamford Grand Hotel at Glenelg for my Mum who turned 90 a few weeks ago, and my brother Damien. Mum thoroughly enjoyed herself and announced that she’d like to live in the hotel! She did actually live at Glenelg many years ago and has a real soft spot for the place. So did I once but IMHO Glenelg has been ruined by overdevelopment. Quite a sobering experience after our recent visits to Fremantle in the West where they have capitalized on existing architecture and history rather than bulldoze it all in favour of more modern ‘development.’ Quite sad really.

The rest of the day was spent in the garden in gentle 24 degree sunshine. We’re having very cool weather for February, typically the hottest month of the year around here with temps around 30 or more. And am now finishing the day with a blog post or two with backgound music from Morocco provided by the Rough Guide series.

The Garden in Quicktime

This movie was made with a Nikon digital camera and is in Quicktime or .mov format. The clicking sound you can hear is an annoying feature of movies made with this camera, but I have a hunch you can turn off that sound. I just don't know how to. If you want to see more pix of my garden start here.

Another Day.....

Another day in an Adelaide life. I did something rare for me. I got up early and went for a walk along Tennyson Beach before breakfast. It was beautiful. Just a few early morning walkers and a few dogs to share the sand and views with. Spent much of the morning at my desk planning the next two weeks work, before going to Port Adelaide TAFE to do some admin and see who’s back from holidays. Not many as yet.

Back to my desk for the afternoon writing some introductory notes for distance students who may choose to use the Talking Communities virtual classroom this semester for linking in to on campus lectures. Visited a local shopping centre in the afternoon after that – went to the post office and then bought a couple of lovely plants – Cordyline (one of the attractive tricolour variety), and Scaevola.

So nothing startling. Just another pleasant summer’s day as I ease into the working year.

Myponga - and the road home

sellicks2
Originally uploaded by mikecogh.

Here's an example of using a photo and an audio blog in tandem.

A Day at Myponga

reservoir_view2
Originally uploaded by mikecogh.

Spent a delightfully tranquil afternoon gazing out over Myponga Reservoir from the verandah at the back of Michelle and Rob's. All was right in the world!

PS Am posting this in flickr.com to see if text and photo arrive at Blogger.)

Instant Audio and Reading Transcripts

An example of listening to an audio text and reading the transcript.



Transcript:

An advantage of an audio blog for language learners is that they can read and hear the text at the same time. So as you hear the text you can be following the written text, or transcript. For people with low literacy levels it may be a worthwhile exercise to have students write out their oral text after they have created it, or if that’s too hard, a teacher or fellow students could perform that task.

Wimba has been providing tools that enable these dual language channels (audio and written) for years, so the concept is not new. But this audio blogging feature provided by Instant Audio enables individuals to create these dual texts at little cost. I guess then it might qualify as an LTA, or low threshold application.

Crashing Browsers and Ambience

Mmm. I thought I was pretty clever getting that embedded video to work...until James Farmer told me it crashed his browser. Sorry James. I'm loathe to move it to another page so I'll just have to keep adding new posts so the offending embedded video is pushed down off the front page. Whatever gets me writing I reckon.

I'm thinking of changing browsers actually. IE may have won the battle with Netscape (sadly), but it just gets more and more dangerous. Mozilla and Firefox seem viable and sensible options. Anyone out there care to comment?

I didn't take the digicam to the beach tonight as it didn't like the sunset would be that grand. Wrong. It was an Adelaide classic. Here's where I was.

I had a good chat with Stephan Ridgway today. He has just spent a week at Henley Beach and he raved about Adelaide's ambience. (Stephan's from Sydney.) Nice to hear that. I'm kind of searching for Adelaide gems after the experience of Perth last week. Perth's public spaces are superb - eye-catching and people friendly - and it left me wondering what I would do with them if I had a visitor from Perth. Well Stpehan's solved the problem. Show them the ambience! :) Anyone know where it is?

Monkey Mia Revisited - with embedded video

When I say the sea is the same size as the sky, I mean colour!. It was amazing actually - very hard to see where the sea ended and the sky began. It was like an endless horizon. Also ignore the annotation "Eliz was here" if you don't know Eliz! It may take a minute or three to load, and probably longer over dial up. (sorry)

---

This digital story was made in Microsoft Photo Story.

More Cutting Edge Comment - with MP3 audio

Replying to Bee's blog on the Cutting Edge Presentation:

Monkey Mia

So much to say about this extraordinarily beautiful place, but for now I'll just leave you with a photo.


Dolphins 

Cutting Edge Tools in the ESL/EFL Classroom - Presentation Follow Up

Well that's another Webheads MVP done. I *think* it was OK. Listening to
the archive on playback was interesting as always. I think I sound a little
irritable and bossy at the beginning! This is what happened:

1) the agreement was that I would meet the IT support guy at 8.15 am (45
minutes before start time)
2) he arrived at 8.45
3) I had to load Elluminate (this was supposed to have been done beforehand)
4) we had Elluminate up and running and sound checked
5) I tried to play my movies and found out the laptop did not have a recent
version of Media Player
6) loaded and installed Media Player 10
7) before I could stop him the IT guy found some other problem and rebooted
8) as I was using a temporary log in this meant Elluminate and Media Player
had to be reinstalled!
9) we got started at 9.15 (15 minutes later than scheduled start)

By then I was annoyed and trying desperately not to be but you can hear it
in my voice! (:

Thank you to Christine and Buth for joining the presentation (Buth was up
at 2.00 am her local time in Kuwait!), and especially to Bee and Daf for
their excellent input. (Bee and Daf, sorry again for being such a time
freak! I hate cutting people off but I always seem to be running against
the clock.) Also thanks to Jonathan for keeping the whole thing flowing
online before and after. As is nearly always the case, the conference
audience was blown away by the MVP (multiple venue presentation) aspect of the presentation, and couldn't wait to get into Elluminate in the workshop
after the presentation. I think they were quite amazed too at what Daf has
being doing with guest lecturers and oral presentations.

I have created a page <http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/els/pres.htm>
where all the tools referred to are listed. The archive is at
http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=638193 (slow loading but it does work).
=====================
See Daf's blog on this session HERE.

Types of Student Blogs (with Userplane)

A/V Blog
by Userplane

Instant Audio Mark 2

An example of an Instant Audio recorded directly into the PC.



So you have the option of using the phone or doing it this way. Bravo!

Instant Audio

Amazing - how good is this! Listen to more:



Courtesy of Instant Audio.