Do It Yourself Learning

If your wondering why I’m moving back to blogger read my post below.  My new site is http://diylearning.blogspot.com/

I don’t know if this is a feature of edublogs but it looks like its possible for someone to put advertising on my posts.  Since I can’t embed code to show videos and other stuff on this site I think its about time to switch over to blogger.  I’ll post the address here once I’m up and running

Enjoyed watching Roger Stack’s presentation on avatars live on ustream this afternoon.  You can access it here:

The Tasmanian Flexible Learning Network

I watched this live.  I’m not sure with ustream whether the producers get to trim the video after the event so there might be a bit to skim through to get to the presentation.  The video could be better quality but acceptable at small size.  The sound is ok though.

I didn’t like the video quality of my first attempt at making a youtube video so I borrowed my partner’s Canon Powershot digital camera.  I’m very happy with both the sound and vision on this second attempt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddWjIeuTb10.  I went out twice earlier in the morning to do this but both times the neighbours dog set to barking at me.  I admit to some negative thoughts about that dog.  Happily it must have been inside at lunchtime so I had a free run to do a few rehearsals and get it right – apart from the worms being a bit camera shy – I had to dig down in the compost to find them.  Unfortunately this is getting addictive and I now find myself looking through the catalogues at the new mini-hdd cameras, which are now quite cheap, and pondering what other things I could make videos about.

Professionally I cringe at the quality of the video quality of my first attempt at a youtube video but as all I had handy was my phonecam I thought what the heck – got to start somewhere.  At least I’ll have a baseline to improve on.  If you really want to see my very bad attempt its here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPdF7j5Gtm0 .  At least the sound wasn’t too bad.  What I did was use the vidoe funtion on my motorola phone.  this produced a .3gp file which isn’t useful to anything other than phones.  I googled 3gp file format conversion and found this page which was very helpful http://www.gromkov.com/faq/faq2004-0067.html .  It recommended the oxelon media convetor which I downloaded plus the plugins for it. The conversion was very easy – just tell it what format you want to covert to, where you want to save it, add the file you want to convert and then press the conversion button.  I wasn’t sure what file format youtube would accept so I hunted around on their site for the help files and found this: http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=132460&topic=16612 So mgeg4 it was.  You need an account with Youtube to upload.  You can use your google account sign-in if you have one.  Once you have an account go to http://www.youtube.com/my_videos and in the top left of the screen you see a drop down button entitled “New”.  There is an “upload” option in the drop down list.  Tell it where the converted file is located on your computer.  Give it a meaningful title and description plus a category and some tags.  Save your description changes.  It may take a couple of minutes for the video to become active on their site so be patient.

So now I just need to pinch my partner’s camera and learn how to use the video function on it and see if that produces better quality.  Or wait til I’m off holidays and can borrow the video camera from work.

Now you really can’t do any worse than my first attempt so try it yourself.

I found a website http://acepilots.com/greek/greekblog.html which I’ve added to my Google reader as he gives some bilingual translations of Ancient Greek.  But the really useful thing on his site was this http://www.biblicalgreek.org/links/fonts/keyboard.html which describes how to easily set up alternate language keyboards in Windows.  Still won’t fix the keyboard limitations of my flashcard program but very useful.  Very easy to switch between keyboards.

I’m trying to find a better way to write accent-marked Ancient Greek.  The BYKI flashcard program which I love to use has a modern greek keyboard available but this doesn’t allow me to add a cirumflex of various breathing marks.  To some extent I’ve worked out my own system by typing an open quote for a hard breathing and toggle back to the English keyboard to get some more accented vowels but its cumbersome.

I thought I might have found a solution with Sybilla, a freeware program from the Spanish http://recursos.cnice.mec.es/latingriego/Palladium/5_aps/enplap17.htm which does the job, albeit a little cumbersome.  Its great that you can switch it on to work with any software you using.  Unfortunately my flashcard program doesn’t recognise its output.  Back to square one.

I’ve been asked to comment on the day in the life of a hypothetical online learner but since I am an online learner I’ll comment from my own reality.

Its Thursday, I’m on holidays, I’m about 80km (hour and a half) from the city where the nearest training facilities are. I don’t have kids so I got out of bed late.  Mornings are chilly so I like to go online after breakfast and then again when it gets cold in the evening.  The rest of the time I’m cutting firewood, working in the garden (at the moment picking fruit in the orchard), cooking meals, visiting neighbours or reading.  I have a little craft studio at the back of the house where I can play on a rainy day or when it gets too hot. I’ve only got dial-up here but I have beefed it and the computer up using various accelerators and pruning all the rubbish out of Windows. I even had a skype conversation online this morning.

If you’ve read anything of my earlier blog entries you’ll know I am not a fan of classroom learning.  It has its place for demonstrations and assessments that can’t be done online.  I guess it also has a place for those who want the structure, schedule and cameraderie of a classroom – but that’s not me.

Online learning for me means I can learn in and around the other parts of my life, including my part-time work, learn when my brain is most receptive and make interconnections with other things I’m doing.

Well the Technorati hookup seemed to work.  I’ve now returned to Rollyo which I was looking at the other day and created a search engine for looking up all things ancient greek.  I was going to do a book search one but there are plenty of those so I thought I’d do something else.  To test it out try searching for “homer” and see what comes up. The beauty of these searches is you make them for yourself for your own needs but if someone else can benefit too that great too. http://rollyo.com/dzyanna/ancient_greek/

While I’m off on leave I’m catching up on web 2.0, for instance adding search engines to firefox and seeing if my blog is findable. Checking Technorati, which is a major search engine for blogs, to see if it picked up my last post I found nothing. So I’ve joined up, given them the url for this blog and now I just have to confirm it by pasting this code in here <a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/jbyaeai45r” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>.  So I’ll see if that works.