Cover via Amazon
I was sitting in my (somewhat compact) office at home this morning, preparing for an interview this afternoon, busy making some mental notes about the company and the job specification, etc. when I found myself wandering off on a train of thought whilst looking at the vast array of books and CDs on the shelves.
How, in an age of iPods and Kindles, can you form a cultural opinion of someone? Whenever I’ve been to someone’s house, I quickly scan their bookshelves and CD collections in order to find out what kind of person they are. (I’m sure most of you will have done that at sometime or other)
Will I now have to surreptitiously pick up their Kindle and rummage through it whilst they’re making coffee in the kitchen? Should I add them as a ‘friend’ on Amazon, so I can see their wish lists?
Whilst I’m at it, I may as well check out what they’ve got on Sky+ too.
0.000000
0.000000
Adding audio to a Slideshare presentation
Last year, I uploaded a few presentations that I’d made on to Slideshare. Although I’d been happy with the actual presentation, the slides don’t really stand-alone without the audio. I only really gathered that once I’d uploaded them. In fact – they’re pretty useless without vocal explanation.
To be honest, I’d forgotten all about them until earlier on this evening when I uploaded a Pecha Kucha that I’m going to do at this years JISC RSC NW Annual Event, in June. Pecha Kuchas are supposed to be done live, on-the-fly, so it doesn’t really have any audio at the moment – I’ve got to make it up on the day 
I do have a pre-recorded Pecha Kucha on my Slideshare from last years RSC NW conference – that has audio (though I sound like I’m submerged at one point!)
Anyway – I thought I ought to try to add some audio to one of my slideshares… The technique is called a ’slide-cast’ on Slideshare.
What did I do?
I recorded the audio on my iPhone using iPadio – straight forward just uploaded it to iPadio as usual. Then in Slideshare I edited the existing presentation and chose to create a slide-cast. At this point you can either upload or link to and existing mp3 file. Once the audio has been imported, you can drag out the markers on the audio timeline underneath the slides – just match it up as you want, then preview & save it.
I’m rather pleased with this first effort. 
A lot easier to follow, rather than just looking at a load of slides without really understanding what is going on. Really good presentation slides shouldn’t have too much information on them and are only there to enhance the presenters chat – so having them online without audio is not so good.
#10
Originally uploaded by colhawksworth
OK – 10 photos, taken during the recording of James’ podcast. I took them, they’re photos of ‘me’ and they’re on my Flickr area.
BUT… they’re now in the pubic domain. More importantly – I’ve #tagged them – they can be referenced and used by other people without my knowledge (or consent)?
I’ve always given my online content (where it is originally created by ‘me’) a Creative Commons license to be used for free, for non-commercial use only – so long as I’m attributed as the owner.
Do people pay attention to this license?
Do they even know what it actually means?
Licensing (especially in the UK) is an absolute unfathomable and often tedious process…
Something to think about – what images of yourself/family/friends do you upload? Where to? What privacy do you put on them? Do you give them a license? Do you know how to complain about misuse of your own images?
I eventually got round to trying to create an audio blog on my way home from work tonite. The sound quality is not bad in parts – but there are some awful moments of heavy breathing and white-noise. Sorry about that – it was difficult to get the microphone adjusted under my scarf.
I was on the London – Liverpool train on Tuesday evening, on my way home from the MoLeNET Conference and decided to add a blog entry about the event on our thin.clusion blog.
I copied and pasted notes between aNote (which I’d written at the conference) and WordPress 2, on my iPhone… however – Although the App had been saving a draft copy, a number of times the file did not save and so I ended up losing quite a few minutes worth of copy/paste/update/reformatting. I did get frustrated and gave up after many attempts.
It made me realise that this note-taking and updating process is exactly what we will be asking our learners to do on the thin.clusion project. Now, I’m a patient guy – but even I gave up on the blog entry after about 40 mins. So how will this process work for our learners? Will they give up if the technology lets them down? I would imagine so. In which case, what can we do to address this?
Just been looking thru my iPhone, checking-out some of the apps I use.
At the moment, I’m tending to work between:
Echofon -Tweeting
Wordpress – Blogging
Yammer – Collaborating (work only)
Google Apps
Skype
flickr
slideshare
docs2go
FriendFeed
Safari
email
SMS
These are just a few… I’ve many more Apps on my iPhone – which to be fair, are mainly there as a ‘test’ – I hardly use them really.
Am I utilizing too many Apps? I don’t know – is it just that there isnt a Killer App to let me do everything? or maybe I just like the variety of all the many Apps I use?
To be honest, I find it far easier to use & switch between Apps on my iPhone than I do on any kind of PC. It’s just takes a little more time and concentration to input into the iPhone.
Spent some time over the weekend looking at generating and uploading photos… I use Twitpic directly on my iPhone, to post up to Twitter and automatically thru to Facebook. I sometimes post direct to Facebook, either via Facebook Wall or Facebook exporter for iPhoto.
I have a Flickr account, which has been a little under-used – I think it’s due more to the balance of work and priorities. So, I’ve uploaded some new content from iPhoto using the Flickr exporter. I’m just going to check on a Flickr App to see if I can upload directly from my iPhone (without having to be Pro Flickr user).
0.000000
0.000000
So I’ve spent a few hours today looking round WordPress and creating a couple of posts & pages, added in a photo and embedded a movie. Now Blogging from my iPhone after installing the WordPress App.
Oh and I managed to export my 3 blogs from Blogger. Will attempt to import them into WordPress tomorrow.
So a good blog-day. I’m prefering the wordpress functionality – though not too sure about some aspects of the editing interface – it appears a little over complicated.
Recent Comments