Wikis at Conn, Beginnings

In the fall of 2005 I thought it was time to get familiar with wiki technology for the purpose of course support. After evaluating a dozen hosted and locally installed solutions, I decided to go with MediaWiki for our first wikis. The reasons for this were, in no specific ranking:

1. A local install gave us more customization possibilites and software control. For some nice MediaWiki customizations, look at Beagle and Mozilla Developer Central. I wanted the potential to get away from the stock wiki look.
2. The college already had a student-managed wiki on another server, Connwiki, running on MediaWiki.
3. There is a very large user base in Wikipedia, which runs on MediaWiki.
4. There is a large base of developers and tweakers, with lots of helpful support information on-line. Many other sites run on MediaWiki.
5. MediaWiki is open-source, free, and non-proprietary.
6. Although relatively complex compared to some of the other wikis, I thought I would be competent enough to administer it after installation, with enough sources of help online if I needed assistance. There are also tech support staff here familiar with the technologies involved: HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL.
7. If the on-line help and local help was not enough to get me out of trouble, the underlying technologies were popular enough that it would not be hard to find and hire an expert to fix things.
8. I wanted some "under the hood" experience, for my own personal development.

I spent my Christmas vacation in December 2005 learning how to install and configure MediaWiki. I first reformatted my PowerBook hard drive into 2 partitions, put OSX and all my stuff on one, and installed OSX Server on the other. I could boot into either partition, and used the server side for wiki development. I imaged the server side with NetRestore after a basic system configuration, but before installing any software, so I could easily restore it to its pristine state if I messed up. I did end up having to restore and start fresh a few times, due not only to MediaWiki. I was also learning how to customize Apple's Weblog Server for a podcast server in the same partition. So, the restoration option came in real handy.

It took about 40 hours to teach myself how to install MediaWiki and customize it to the state I needed. I had little background in HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL, though I had some programming experience in Director's Lingo, which no-one seems to use much any more. I learned just enough of the technologies that MediaWiki runs on for the job at hand. I have to admit my experience was usually more of a "cookbook" approach than true understanding. Thankfully, there are enough "recipes" around, though spread out a bit.

My biggest concern, on top of having the wiki run reliably, was security. I did not want a hacker getting in and messing up our site. This concern proved to be justified, as looking at the web logs later I determined an average of two hacking intrusion attempts a day, for a considerable amount of time.

After a few successful installs on my PowerBook, I felt confident enough to install the production version on an older but reliable Mac G4 running OSX Server 10.4, and started our first wiki, for our Instructional Technology Team. The computer is automatically backed up every night, with a complete image of the hard drive created weekly. Our wikis are still running on this G4, but will be migrated to a new XServe this spring.

Can Academic Staff Learn Anything from Sports Coaches?

My daughter played competitive sports for many years. I feel she learned many lessons as a player that carry over to general life skills and strategies. Recently I became aware of lessons that athletic coaches can learn, and how these also carry over to leadership in other areas of life.

The December 2006 issue of Fastpitch Delivery, a softball trade journal published by the National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA), has a good article where Jeff Janssen and Greg Dale interviewed some of college sports' top coaches to determine the secrets of their success. They discovered a new style of coaching they call "credible coaching" that focuses on developing solid relationships with athletes based on trust and respect. This is unlike the traditional style of coaching which used fear and intimidation to motivate athletes.

I think many of the characteristics of what they call "credible coaching" can carry over to team building and leadership in the real world. So here are a direct quotes from Jeff Janssen's article on Credible Coaching: "Coaching is about relationships....You have to create an environment of trust among your staff and athletes. Without trust, you have nothing. If you do have trust, you will be able to accomplish great things."

Janssen and Dale identified seven primary components associated with successful coaches. Credible coaches are:

1. Character based
They seek to do the right thing. They are honorable people with high ethical standards and great integrity. They tell the truth to their athletes and never manipulate or play mind games with them. They conduct themselves in a professional manner and take pride in representing their teams and athletes with class.

"A lot of our success in Duke basketball has to do with character. And at the heart of character is honesty and integrity" (Mike Krzyewski)

2. Competent
They have a thorough understanding of the strategies and fundamentals of the game. They know how to make the appropriate adjustments. They are highly inquisitive people who continually look for innovative and improved ways of doing things. Further, they understand that admitting their limitations and mistakes is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. Even though they are highly capable and often revered people, credible coaches tend to remain humble and keep their success in perspective.

"Sometimes the most important listening you do is the listening that comes after you've reached the top, after you've gotten very good and could be susceptible to the idea that you know everything." (Dan Gable)

3. Committed
Credible coaches are highly committed people. They create successful visions for their teams and are more than willing to put in the time required to make them happen. They have a true passion for sport and coaching which fuels their intense drive and enthusiasm. They also have incredible reserves of energy and resiliency which enables them to weather the inevitable storms of adversity.

4. Caring
Credible coaches care about their athletes as people. They sincerely want the best for their athletes in all aspects of their lives and are willing to help them in any way possible. They invest the time to get to know each of their athletes on a personal level, showing an interest in their athlete's families, friends, faith and future goals.

"I know if somebody really cares about me and is really fighting for me, I'll go through a wall for them. The same works in reverse. If somebody knows you don't care about him and aren't really fighting for him, then he won't go through the wall for you" (Mike Shanahan)

5. Confidence-builders
Credible coaches continually build their players' confidence. Credible coaches have a special knack for making people feel good about themselves, capable of achieving almost anything they set their minds to. The are demanding and set high standards, yet are patient enough to help athletes develop and improve. When athletes do fall short, they use a good balance of being challenging and supportive to get people get back on track.

"When people realize that someone has faith in them, productivity usually increases. We have a natural desire not to want to disappoint those who believe in us and trust us" (Tom Osborne)

6. Communicators
Credible coaches are excellent communicators. They are open, honest and direct when communicating with individuals and the team. They continually remind and refocus people on what they need to do to be successful. They seek to involve their athletes as much as possible and value the input they receive from them. They have the remarkable ability to truly listen to their athletes. They take the time to understand where people are coming from and are able to make decisions accordingly. Because of their ability to listen, credible coaches are often aware of concerns and conflicts, and proactively address them before they become major problems or distractions.

"You have to listen to develop meaningful relationships with people....You can't do that by talking. You do that by listening. What I have learned is, coaching is not all about me going into a locker room and telling them everything I know about basketball. It's a matter of knowing how they think and feel and what they want and what's important in their lives. Listening has allowed me to be a better coach" (Pat Summitt)

7. Consistent
Credible coaches develop a sound philosophy of coaching. This philosophy remains stable over time, but they are flexible enough to adapt to changing situations or personnel. They maintain a consistent approach to rules and standards for the team. They tend to be highly organized people who take their practice and game preparation very seriously.

I could not find the article on the NFCA web site, so I have taken the liberty of directly quoting relevant passages for the benefit of the non-softball world.

My opinion is that being a "credible coach" is a big, challenging task, and that it is hard to find a coach that scores high in all the above areas. Naturally, you also need talented players and support staff to be successful. The above principles only provide a successful path to reach a common goal, once you have that talent on your team.

Not all of these components may be relevant to leadership in academic settings, and most IS staff probably do not want clones of Pat Summitt or Mike Krzyzewski yelling at them from the sidelines. And, I'm sure that Pat Summitt teaches as much as she listens. The point, though, is that listening is very important to her.

However, some of the concepts Jeff Janssen and Greg Dale have found can be used by leaders in any field to improve the effectiveness of their teams. All levels of leadership, starting with the staff member that supervises one part-time student assistant, can benefit. It is perfectly justifiable to cherry-pick the components that resonate to individual situations.

One should note that not all good players make good coaches. I remember two players that helped a college win a national championship, and then graduated and made a mess of coaching a summer team of young girls. So, some of us may be happier and better suited to playing on the team than coaching from the sidelines.

A final thought is that in sports there are usually winners and losers. In academia, everyone can be successful, there do not have to be any "losers". Maybe that's one reason why a few slightly-jealous folks claim we "don't live in the real world"!

Education, Blogging and Branding

As we look forward to implementing blogging for the purpose of student curriculum assignments, we are deliberating whether to use a hosted service, such as Blogger, Edublogs, or WordPress.com, or installing, configuring and supporting our own institutional blog server. For this post, I will define a "student blog" as one created to meet the academic requirements of a specific course. And I will use Blogger as the example of a hosted service, though other good ones exist.

The pace of innovation and development is rapid in the blog server area. By using a hosted service we can "ride on the coat tails" of the constant improvements and added features of the service we use, reaping benefits with little additional work. With us hosting our own solution, we have to concern ourselves with never-ending upgrade procedures, migrating old blogs to the new server, etc. This is on top of all the work involved in setting up a secure and full-featured blogging server to beging with, backing it up, and maintaining it. It seems that if you have a critical mass of users, or anticipate one, this work can be justified.

However, what is the "tipping point" of users that makes it more sensible to use a hosted service? Assuming we had only a few classes interested in student blogs next semester, I am tending towards using a hosted service. A major downside to this may appear to be the lack of "branding" of the blog to the institution.

If a student blog is to remain private, with only the student(s) and faculty in the class and support staff seeing it, branding should not be an issue. If a student blog is intended to be a public blog with a "PR" slant to it, we would pass it on to College Relations, which uses a locally installed version of Movable Type. However, in most cases the primary purpose of a student blog is not to make our institution look good. If it does, so much the better, but pedagogical issues should not be shaped by publicity issues. Do we want someone asking a student to change a blog to make it look better on our public web site?

I have tried our slightly older installation of Movable Type, and find that Blogger is much easier and more fun to use. The usability aspect is a major one, I want technology to be as transparent as possible. As Will Richardson recently said: "I’m more and more finding myself without patience for tools that aren’t extremely easy and intuitive, no matter what they claim to offer." I find that faculty and students want and need this transparency in technology, without it few will use whatever technical solutions are offered. Personally, I like to get "under the hood" and tinker, but most people here just want to get in the car and drive. Because of this, I'm currently leaning towards Blogger instead of a local Movable Type, but am concerned about the "branding" issue.

Not sure excactly what "branding" meant, but knowing its importance to some people, I Googled "define branding", and came up with this:

"The process by which a commodity in the marketplace is known primarily for the image it projects rather than any actual quality."

"The process by which the true character and purpose of the company or organization is communicated."

"Is a promise, a pledge of quality. It is the essence of a product, including why it is great, and how it is better than all competiting products. It is an image. It is a combination of words and letters, symbols, and colors"

"The process of building a favorable image for a product or company that differentiates it, in the minds of prospects and end users, from other competitors."

"Selecting and blending tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the product, service or corporation in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way."

It has become more and more apparent to me over the years that branding and PR are big factors in how an educational institution communicates with the outside world, so how important is branding in academic student blogs?

While finishing this post I ran across a timely video, where Glenna Ryan, formerly of Rensselaer Polytechnic University, talks about their admissions student blogging efforts:



The above was pulled from Dan Karleen's recent blog entries on Admissions Blogging.

It's obvious from this that "admissions blogs" are NOT the same as student academic blogs, they are shaped by totally different forces, and have a different purpose. However, we now get into the gray area of student blogs that were private for the purpose of an assignment, but because they are worth sharing, everyone later agrees should be made public.

If they are hosted, there is no college "brand" associated with them. If a public student blog has a little orange "B", does it make any difference in branding the institution? Should we go to the effort of eliminating the top Blogger bar in student blogs by customizing the html template? And what influence and how much control should non-pedagogical forces and non-instructional staff have on the content and style of a student's academic blog?

We will soon be facing those challenges, and it does not hurt to prepare some sensible answers and formulate policies. There are many factors influencing the choice of a local vs. hosted version of a weblog server, not just branding, and unfortunately politics can trump technology. There is no same best way for everyone, and we'll only be deciding what's best for our spring 2007 semester. There are currently too many rapid developments in this area to formulate long-term strategy. Our goal is to stay one step ahead, and keep a close eye on the future.

Although College Relations has supported a few "PR" student blogs, our Instructional Technology Team is new at supporting student academic blogging. I am both impressed and humbled by how far others have gone, such as MIT's Katie Livingston Vale (800k PDF), and Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley. Thankfully, we have a variety of good role models to guide and inspire us.

Web 2.0 day at Wesleyan! BarCampCONN?

Yesterday Bryan Alexander from NITLE came to Wesleyan University, and gave a full-day presentation on Web 2.0, I believe this is his SlideShare presentation, except for the title page of course:



About 40 instructional technologists and librarians from Connecticut College, Trinity College and Wesleyan University attended the full-day workshop. Bryan did a grea job presenting and linking together many concepts and processes in a rapidly-changing area. I don't know where he finds the energy for this, I'm usually out of gas after 90 minutes of teaching. The presentation was structured, but informal in that Bryan graciously allowed interruptions for comments or questions anytime. This worked better than a Q&A a the end, as we moved rapidly through many different Web 2.0 landscapes. Here is a link to the workshop wiki.

It was a day full of information, and probably started a lot of wheels spinning in the attendees' minds. My only regret was not asking Bryan, before the presentations, to explain the term "Long Tail" to the folks. It took me a while to figure out what it means, both socially and economically, and it might have helped others that don't know.

I spoke very briefly with Michael Roy, from Wesleyan, about a possible collaboration between our institutions to bring the first BarCamp to Connecticut next summer. This has been a fantasy of mine for a while, but I don't really have any ideas besides wouldn't it be neat! It obviously requires more than this, starting with it HAS to be successful, so "success" needs to be defined. What would be the goals of BarCampCONN (BarCampCT, or whatever), and why do it at all? After surfing through the post-analyses of a few BarCamps, I think it would be wiser to have a one-day the first time, as attendance often drops off the second day.

The first thing we would need, of course, is a cool logo, such as one of these:






Build an attractive logo and they will come? It reminds me of the early 70's when I was sailing on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. We'd sail from town to town with a bunch of musicians and environmentalists, have a festival, and make Stone Soup. We started with a big pot of boiling water on an open fire ashore, and put a clean stone in it. As people came by, they would throw different vegetables in the pot, with us keeping an eye on things. After a few hours we'd have a great soup for everyone to share, created communally. The soup would simmer and change throughout the day, as people came and went, added and ate different ingredients. Can an eye-catching logo be the cyber equivalent of the stone?

The Story of Stone Soup
Of course, we are not in a famine, we are all soldiers, and you can't buy a magic stone, you have to make one.

One reason to have a BarCampCONN would be that the "We is greater than the Me" (I'm borrowing this from someone else, but I forgot who!). There is something stimulating, reinvigorating and exciting about getting a bunch of people together to talk and do Web 2.0 stuff, and it seems safer than sky-diving. So, I'm going to try and go to one or two BarCamps this winter, and see what it's all about. Amsterdam or Paris would have been nice, but I missed them. Should I spend my team's entire remaining travel budget and put in a travel request to BarCamp Rome? Nah, it will be turned down, so I'll settle for something closer.

Thanks to Bryan and Wesleyan for a great day!

iPods for Audio Commentary, Media Commons

With our support, Prof. Michael Reder is using digitized audio for providing feedback to students in his writing course.
I ran into Susan Sipple's work which seems similar.

Here is a link to another site on Susan's work.
In Michael's case, he is also providing for students to comment on each other's writings, and the use of iPods and iTunes seems to make the process easier than using a computer and sound-editing software.
I have to admit, frankly, that I did not initially think much of Michael's use, it seemed a bit "gimmicky". It just shows how I have to overcome innate prejudices as to what is a worthwhile use of technology. Part of of my initial feelings were due to the fact I did not fully understand his rationale to this approach, so I have to do a better job at inquiry and understanding. I did talk to one student in his class, informally, she told me the technology was easy to understand and use, and that no-one had any problems with it, beyond minor issues they were able to figure out.
She thought the student>student feedback using verbal vs. written communciation was better, and preferred it. Michael comments on every student's papers, I believe, and each student comments on a few peers. We'll obviously need a full and systematic "debriefing" at the end of the course, Susan has done a good job at this it seems, and we will be inspired by her work.

I had posted directions on how to implement the recording/compression in our wiki. However, I find it much more useful, if I want students to learn something, to make a personal presentation. In this case, it was with the iPod, mic, and laptop connected to an LCD projector. Diane and I went to the class, and in 15 minutes showed them how to record to the iPod, import the recording to iTunes, compress it to AAC, and drag the compressed copy to the desktop. I had also printed out the on-line instructions for each student. They expressed satisfaction when I handed them out.

Michael emails his comments to the students, and they email their own feedback to each other. I was concerned about email size limitations, but the comments are not much longer than 5 min. each, so only about 1 MB in size. Our backup plan was to create a shared network folder for the class, with drop folders for each student, however this has not yet been necessary.

making Media Commons is something I plan to investigate.

"MediaCommons is, or rather will be, a new kind of media studies press for the digital age -- a network in which academics, students, and other interested members of the public can forge critical pathways through a mediated world and publish dynamically in a mediated environment.

making MediaCommons is a planning site through which we'll develop the possible directions this might take."

Educational Widgets?

I've been thinking lately if there are any widgets that would be useful in blogs dedicated to educational or pedagogical purposes.
This Posting finally got me to write. Seems there are office/business widgets, why not education-oriented ones?

I'm not talking about OSX dock widgets, but those viral-like critters starting to populate blog sidebars, among other realms.
I am purposely "widgeting out" (there is a less elegant term but I am not using it) my personal blog just for fun.
My favorites right now are the clock and the lava lamp.

So, if anyone knows about a widget designed mainly for pedagogical, curriculum support goals, I'd love to hear about it.
I will do the same.

Apple and Social Software, Part 2

Thanks to everyone that responded to my message on Apple's role in Web 2.0 Social Software on the QuickTime User List.
I don't doubt Apple will stay dominant in the video creation field, and in the iPod/iTunes/iTV/iPhone/etc..ecosystem.
And I received some good suggestions on addressing the challenges in our own intranet, which I am researching.

My already stated concern is that QuickTime use is minimal in the new popular Digital Social Networks: blogs, wikis, mashups, etc. The "blogosphere" alone is big, 57 million blogs tracked by Technorati. As we use QT here for the delivery of course material, we would like to see it succeed also in Web 2.0.

There was a short period, when the video bloggers first started, when QT was actually the most popular format for user-generated video in social networks, the vbloggers were usually producing their snippets using iMovie or on Macs, and it was natural to export to QT. However, YouTube then came along, and we know the rest of the story.

However, I don't think it's too late for Apple to make a move with QuickTime, and I have refined my thinking a bit, so am reposting. Here is my revised thinking.

To be successful in this new web world, QT has to at least be able to do what Flash does now:

1. Make QT web-friendly. Be able to embed a QT movie in a web page, and not have it download until the play button is pushed. QT is track based, it seems a natural for combining a poster movie, audio track, and video track inside one .mov. This creation could be automated with QT Player Pro, giving Apple another reason to sell it. Or a developer could pick this up.

2. Make QT popular (or at least common). Sponsor a video sharing area where you can upload your movies (QT and non-QT), not have them re-compressed if not needed, and if needed, encode to QT (and Flash if deemed necessary). Even Microsoft has started their own video sharing site, Soapbox. MS must have felt it was the only way WMV would retain a presence on the web. Soapbox movies are encoded twice, btw, the Mac version is in Flash, showing you how much confidence MS has in the future of WMV on the Mac.

I know Revver distributes in QT, but only for downloading. If Apple does not want to start its own video-sharing site, maybe partner with a company like Revver, help develop and polish its product, and assist with the back end.

3. Make QT easy to share. Enable easy copy/paste code from the above #2 in QT format to a blog, MySpace, wiki, etc. Apple understood podcasting and syndication, and got a good head start. But that is a totally different model, it's a ONE-TO-MANY model. I publish, you subscribe and experience, with no direct feedback.

A big chunk of the new web is MANY-TO-MANY, with countless links between different people's blogs, video sites, tags, image sites, etc. Right now, QT is an outsider in the Many-to-many social networks, which are much more numerous, and quite different from the rss One-to-many networks.

I think the above "big 3" are all needed, they all work off each other, and 2 out of 3 is not enough. However, then you could add:

4. Make QT movies customizable. Make the skin selectable, kind of like Odeo does, but incorporated as part of the movie itself. Skins could be downloaded, and installed/activated in QT Player Pro, another reason to buy it. Or a developer can pick this up.
People on the web want to customize their own "net space", and create their own unique digital identities.
Blogging and wiki hosting sites have many skins to choose from, bloggers have thousands of free widgets to select, on top of Flash movies, Photobucket/Flickr images, other blogs, etc...etc...
People are furnishing their empty web apartments. Make it easy to hang a nice QT movie on the wall, with that neat frame no-one has seen before.

I have seen some encouraging signs for the future in Leopard server:
a wiki server (many to many, but I don't see any reference to video)
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/wikiserver.html

and a podcast producer/server (one-to-many, but this is a good market Apple is successful in and needs to stay in)
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/podcastproducer.html

I don't know if the above will enable any of the features on my "wish list" at the small end of the scale (education, SMB), but I would like to see those issues also addressed at the large end.

One of my final concerns is that if there isn't a viable audience for QT on the web, this technology is going to lose developers.
We are going to have great podcasters, video editors and compressionists, but who is going to put together neat things like the chattering video wall?

http://www.beet.tv/2006/11/post.html

Apple is finally waking up to social software

A couple of years ago, Apple was at the forefront of "new-web-uses", with the incorporation of syndication, podcasting, and video into iTunes. However, things change fast in internet time, and before long, blogs, wikis, YouTube, and all those other "social software" apps and neat Flash video players started to leave Apple behind in innovation. Even the QT Player Plug-in looks like it needs a bit of a design overhaul, or at least make it easier to skin. And why can't you embed many QT movies in a web page, without having them all dowload at once and freezing the page, unless you hand-tool a separate poster movie? It was actually easier to embed a QuickTime movie in a web page a few years ago, then you could just use the embed tag.

Apple's Weblog Server, included in OSX Server, has been a disappointment to me. It's supposed to be a blogging tool, and a podcasting tool. But it does neither well, from a user interface standpoint, and comment moderation is very poor. As Apple has survived and then thrived by its interfaces, this is surprising to me. Nothing has been done to improve Weblog Server since its inital release. I'm sure the "back end" is very robust, but the front end is poorly thought out. You can actually do more with Blojsom, which it's based on. I have a right to criticize Apple products, by the way, as I use many of them!

After many hours of work, and searching for information scattered at different web sites, I managed to customize the interface to make it usable for podcasting, it's at http://video.conncoll.edu/weblog/
I have to admit that trying to edit those Velocity templates, which I had never heard of before, was not much fun.

We have not really used it yet (still hand-coding podcasts), and I'm afraid if I install a major OS update it will break something. The purpose of our podcast server is to make it as easy as possible for a novice end-user to update a podcast after we create it for them. We are not ready to sign up for iTunesU yet, waiting for the early adopters to pull the arrows out of their backs and help Apple improve the first release. I decided to take my lumps on other new software.

Well, it seems Apple has finally woken up! I had run across iTunes' iMix a while ago, but did not pay much attention. However, this link caught my eye
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304795

It seems that now you have a "Publish to the Web" feature, which creates code that you can paste into your web page or blog, and links you to your or others' iMix. Here is an example of an iMix.. I picked a random one, have not looked at the songs yet.

When I copy-pasted the Apple code Blogger Beta gave me the error "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed..." but I bypassed it and it seems to work anyways.

I think this is a first for Apple: automatically creating copy/paste code for web sites and "social apps", and I hope to see this functionality incorporated in some of their server products, such Weblog Server, which needs a complete interface overhaul and some back-end tweaks, and extended to other media types, such as QuickTime movies.
Another first, I believe, is that the above is in Flash format, I have not seen Apple use Flash in such a prominent role before.

I have to investigate if an iMix, now that it can be published, has any educational uses. One more thing to look at!

Lecture Podcasting Kit

Here's something I put together a month or so ago that seems to work well for recording lectures:

At the top left is the Samson AL1 AirLine Micro wireless transmitter. It has a built-in mic, you can easily clip the whole unit to someon's shirt or lapel (while they are running away from you!). It also has a separate lav mic, which optionally plugs into the transmitter, this can then be clipped to your belt. There is a third way to use the transmitter, with a lanyard that clips on to it and goes around your neck. Then you don't need the lav.

At the bottom left is the small AM1 Wireless Receiver. It has a line out, but is low in volume, so I use the headphone out. The advantage is that you can control its gain with a small screwdriver. Next comes a small adapter, from 1/8" (3.5 mm) to 2.5 mm, the usual line-out is 2.5 and a male-to-male 2.5 to 2.5 mm cable is supplied. I'd like to clean up the system a bit by getting a 3.5 to 3.5 cable. This goes into the Belkin TuneTalk ($70), set to line input, which connects to the bottom of the iPod, and can record over 3 hours at "low" quality, 22.5 KHz 16 bit mono, which is fine for speech.

Street price for the AirLine transmitter/lav/receiver is $270, a good bargain indeed. Here's how it sounds
http://video.conncoll.edu/d/hw/podcast.html

The nice thing about the Belkin is that it comes with a USB cable which plugs into its bottom. This can be used to power the iPod from its AC adapter, you could then record all day long if you wanted.

For important lectures, I have my "backup kit", which I slap on to the podium just before the talk. I used to use the Sony MiniDisc MZ-B10, but once it locked up on me at an important lecture, and I don't trust it any more. So, I went back to using my old iPod Photo, with the Griffin iMic. One of my associates here has never had problems with MiniDisc, and uses them often, but one critical failure is too much for me when there are alternatives.

One of our faculty used the wireless mic kit connected to his laptop, and recorded voice and the laptop's PowerPoint screen with Camtasia. However, he did not match the output of the receiver very well to the laptop input, and got some distortion.
It's important to set these levels beforehand, with a bit of experimenting. I made a podcast out of this at
http://video.conncoll.edu/f/mzim/podcast.xml
The "Glow..." has the distortion, the later "Fluorescence" came out much better, after we tweaked the levels.

All in all, I like my little rig, and plan on using it more in the future. The only improvement I'd want is a way to monitor the audio while I am recording, and a VU meter on the iPod would be REAL nice!

Slideshare Demo

Bryan Alexander is coming to talk to some of the Conn. Coll, Trinity and Wesleyan staff in December, above is one of his presentations in slideshare. This looks like a nifty tool, but what happens when the author takes down his presentation? Any way to save it locally? I had found a nice presentation on blogs and wikis, which was subsequently deleted by the author. Possibly did not want folks to see her presentation beforehand?
What's nice about slideshare is that the url links also work.
I'm also fascinated by the on-line presentation tools in Zoho and ThinkFree Show, these allow you to actually create your presentation on-line, in slideshare you only upload existing PP and can't edit. But what heppens with all the above when you need your presentation, and have not internet access? Need to explore...
On the slideshare web site, type web2, education, wiki, or blog in the search box, it's amazing how many presentations are already posted. There are already over 350 tagged with education. 72 slideshows under "elearning", while Downes
http://slideshare.net/Downes/profile has over 60 shows on learning networks