In the spirit of owning my own data and keeping everyone up-to-date with when stuff is published elsewhere, this is a heads-up that Andy Stewart, co-kickstarter of Purpos/ed and I were interviewed by the Ed Tech Crew recently. We covered everything from Purpos/ed itself to my doctoral thesis and productivity.

Give it a listen! (Running time: 1 hour 25 mins. Size: 61.9 MB)

I’ve got a backup copy saved locally and have uploaded another to the Internet Archive for safekeeping (in case the link above goes down).

That’s the theory.

A group of us at work meet together every so often to improve our skills in a certain area. On Monday it’s presentations. My first thought was to present using a single image related to a random Wikipedia article. However, this is what came up:

Hence my tweet asking for a random subject and method of presentation for an upcoming (informal) peer review session at work:

(click to enlarge)

I hadn’t come across Juxio before, so have decided to use that. As for the subject, I really like Lou McGill‘s suggestion of dandelions as it had a connection to work (I collaborated with Lou on the OER infoKit for which we used a dandelion motif).

**Update***

Here’s my presentation as I delivered it. You may need to turn the sound up as the Flip camera was quite a distance away from me!

A few weeks ago I posted extracts from an interview with Tim Bradburn of Connected Teaching, the continuing professional development network. Tim’s taken our hour-long chat (whilst I was still Director of E-Learning) and boiled it down into a manageable, focused 11 minutes.

What do you think? Do you agree with what I have to say?

The ideas I discuss in this interview feature in #uppingyourgame: an educator’s guide to productivity

In the extracts below (taken from the interview) I explain my belief that productivity is a learned behaviour based upon serenity, reliability and focus.

(if you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader you may need to click through!)

Over the next three weeks, staff e-learning sessions will focus on getting started with podcasting. This first session starts off with the basics you will need as a teacher before even pressing that ‘record’ button:

1. An understanding of what RSS is.
2. A blog onto which to put MP3 files.

The easiest way to get your head around what RSS is and how it means that audio files can be delivered to interested parties automatically is by watching this excellent explanatory video prepared by CommonCraft:

A podcast differs from simply placing an audio file on the Internet because of RSS. It means that new content can be ‘pushed’ to interested parties rather than them having to manually check for updates. The process of interested parties requesting that podcasts are delivered automatically is known as ‘subscribing’.

Now that you know what RSS is, you need to have a mechanism by which you can generate one. In our case, this is going to be a blog. Anything that you add to a blog post will be automagically turned into a subscribable podcast.

To learn how to set up a blog, check out the elearnr guide entitled:
Creating a homework blog in 3 simple steps using email

If you want to jump ahead and have a go podcasting before the next session, you should visit the Box of Tricks website where José Picardo has put together an excellent short presentation entitled Podcasting in Five Easy Steps.

The resulting discussion was excellent with some great insights and useful information conveyed by a diverse bunch of educators.

You can listen to the podcast and get the del.icio.us links by visiting edtechroundup.com or click on the ‘play’ button below.

EdTechRoundup podcast episode 4 is all about Internet Safety and features Ollie Bray – the man, the myth, the legend. He’s doing some great things up in Scotland that you really should hear about. So head over to the post to get the links and subscribe to the RSS feed, or just listen to us by clicking below!

Oh, and that absolutely rocking music at the start and end is the magnificent guitar solo from Muse‘s Knights of Cydonia. Of course.

The quality music inbetween sections is taken from the first few seconds of Justice’s One Minute To Midnight.