My Technology Addictions

I have been busy working, working over the past 6 months and have not even spent much time online. I have visited twitter a few times in the past month but not much before that.

I mentioned in twitter last night that I was finding it hard to be inspired about updating my blog and couldn’t think of anything to write about. I had a couple of replies. one from diane cordell suggesting I write about having writers block. The other suggestion was from Mo Kargas with a link to the Lazy Bloggers Post Generator

This was fun and here is my result:

OMG! I just remembered I have not updated this since they let me out!… You would not believe how insane my life has become. Please don’t abandon me!.

I am flat out with discovering time doesn’t stand still, personal projects, just generally being a slave to every man and his dog, my day is full to overflowing from sun-up to sun down and beyond. I am totally exhausted. I need some perspective.

I won’t promise anything to you but I will make more of an effort to blog more often. Truly! Until my paycheck dawneth..

So in answer to having writers block I think it is more to do with needing a holiday and working too much. So after a hectic 6 months and as we start second semester I have made a few changes and had some changes thrust upon me.

I have had a fabulous holiday with my family in Melbourne and 7 days in Mt Buller skiing. This was a big change from the beaches we live down the road from in Western Australia. On return from our holiday I came to the conclusion that “Reality Sucks”.

Holiday over and back to work, big changes here also. I don’t have any lecturing work this semester so now need to start getting more work in through my business. This is a bit scary but also exciting.

The thing I like about working for myself is that I get to do the things I love. Programming and I have been also doing some contract work customising documents for businesses. This has involved working on their premises and also from home. I have been making spreadsheets more efficient and in some case instead of having 5 or more different versions of the one document I have managed to work them all into one document with a bit of code. These have all been Microsoft based documents but I am looking at setting myself up to learn some Apple based software also.

So after reading back through this post I don’t think it is so much writers block as the fact that my work has changed and not so education based now and if I do continue with my blog my posts will start to reflect this. So I will probably be back.

Tags: Web 2.0

I seem to have started a few posts saying I can’t believe it is ……. since I posted to my blog and here I go again. Wow haven’t done anything since December ‘07 . I came to have a look at the many many spam comments that have come into my blog and delete them, because of this I have set comments to approval before they are seen. Then I thought I would have a look at what new themes were available and selected one.

After doing this I thought I had better not be so slack and actually create a post so ……. here it is.

I have been so busy over the past term, I have taken on some extra work at TAFE and most of my classes have kids between 16 – 18 who would normally be in the school system but due to one thing or another school has not worked for them. In Western Australia we have a policy where students need to be in full time education or work until the end of the year they turn 17. So if school doesn’t fit they have come to TAFE. Having these kids for 13 hours over three days is full on and this combined with my software development business has not left me much time and as such almost all of my online activities have suffered, until now – school holidays the following images sums things up nicely especially with my recent train trips to Perth and my lack of internet access on my ancient nokia phone.

Geek and Poke Sounds of Silence

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Geek and Poke Twitter Abstinence Syndrome

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I have met some really great people on twitterand facebook and my friends and followers continue to grow. Having these online contacts is good especially when working from home as it stops me feeling isolated. So if you haven’t yet used twitter or facebook have a go and see what you think. As with most things on a computer if you have a use for it whether it is software, online communities or even surfing the internet you will pursue with it if not you may view these things as time wasters but you wont know unless you try them yourself. Anyway enough chat for one night and with lots more thoughts rattling around in my head I will be coming a back a bit more often, hopefully someone will still be reading this.

Tags: CoolStuff, Web 2.0

Five Weeks of Fun

I haven’t written a post for nearly 2 months but have been spending nearly ever day of the past 2 months on my laptop, I have been teaching and developing software. This is a short rundown of my experience with a group of great teenagers that I introduced to the web one day a week over a five week period.
In the last term of school I have had a group of 14, 15 year olds for one day a week over 5 weeks showing them all the wonders of the web. They were a great group of kids from 3 different high schools, they created blogs, added to a class wiki, created iGoogle pages and lastly created podcasts.

I was surprised how little of these technologies they knew or had even heard about. I think the more we use these things like blogs, wiki’s flickr, twitter and facebook ourselves we assume that others, especially the teenagers also know about them. They had a great knowledge of what games they can play online, chat programs and some knew about MySpace and most had an email account and all knew about YouTube, but that was about it. They did not know what Blogs, wiki’s or podcasts were.
The challenge with this group was how to show them how to use these technologies, keep it interesting, relevant and get through the work in the small amount of time we had. They had set tasks to complete each week and this was all detailed for them on a class wiki that I set up, this also contains links to their blogs, del.icio.us accounts and podcasts.

When it came to creating podcasts I had visions of copyright issues spinning around in my head and eventually I thought of using Nursery Rhymes. I decided that the easiest way to get them to create their podcasts was to give them a list of Nursery Rhymes. These are the steps that they followed:

They each picked one Nursery Rhyme and then created a PowerPoint presentation of the Nursery Rhyme.

A new slide was used for each line of the Nursery Rhyme and they had to add appropriate images.

The slides from the Presentation were saved as images, a handy feature of PowerPoint.

Then using Windows Movie Maker they imported the slides, recorded the Rhyme and added transitions and effects.

Once this stage was completed they saved the Movie file.

Then using SUPER © they converted it to a mp4 format.

I created a podomatic site for the class, they uploaded their podcasts and now they can been seen by all.

Most of them created 2 podcasts and really enjoyed it, although some of the recordings don’t sound “too enthusiastic“, as the first thing they said when recording their voices was ” I don’t sound like that!”.

All in all it was a great exercise, exhausting but enjoyable. My adventure into the world of web 2 and more my inspiration and knowledge comes from my friend Sue who introduced and taught me how to use them. She is a wealth of knowledge and shares it with all, thanks Sue

Tags: blogs, iGoogle, ipod, podcasts, Teenagers, Web 2.0, wiki