History from British Pathé movies a treasure trove!

As an avid movie lover and ex-movie critique, I was jumping into the air when I saw the British Pathé journals are opened (while I was on holiday, how dare they!), and are now freely available on their YouTube channel. There is an easy option to subscribe to specific British Pathé channels as well (sportinghistory, vintageFashion). Hopefully innovation will get its own channel soon as well, but fortunately it already has its own collection of movies organized under fantastic innovations.

The movie archive is a treasure trove for any teacher/trainer/history lover. First thing I did was get hold of the copyright on these movies. Because I wondered whether all these movies could be seen as Open Resources, potentially Open Educational Resources (OER). And whether any teacher could use the movies to rehash and make it a rich fit for their own training or teaching purposes. On their Pathé website the copyright is fully reserved, and while looking for YouTube licenses, I do have the impression the standard license is the one used. So it might not be that easy to use footage, or mix it into content that fits your learning goals. I do wonder how much footage can be used for educational purposes (should mail and ask).

Although this is clearly a great set that gives all of us a look into world history, it does come with its own zeitgeist, and its own gatekeepers eye. But then history is always an account of those who have the technology, the knowledge and the vision. The fact that the archive is set free, is like wandering into a movie library ... marvelous, I found 'unused, unissued material' as an anchor point to find fabulous raw movie stuff.
For one: suffragette material: women workers (factory girls) roaming the streets of Camden while being on strike, followed by a 66.000 rich female pageant through London, and of course Emily Davison who jumped onto a horse track and got killed in an attempt to pull down the Kings Horse in 1913, and more (e.g. Taxation without Representation is Tyranny".



And of course a bit of old Belgium, Gallant Little Belgium

Reformatting virtual classroom recordings to publish them in #mobile formats

During the last MobiMOOC we had some synchronous sessions where mLearning experts gave their insights in mLearning. Here you see an example of a session given by David Metcalf:

How to publish a virtual classroom recording into a mobile accessible format?

What I usely do to reformat synchronous virtual classroom sessions into mobile accessible files is record the screen + audio of the sessions via Camtasia (there is a 30 day free trail version: http://www.techsmith.com/download/camtasia/ )

With Camtasia you can record the screen and audio of the virtual classroom session. You can then edit the recording (maybe shorten some points, or skip immediately to where the session starts without the intro). After the editing you can produce the movie into a format of your preference (mp4, mp3 are most common and cross-device mobile standards).

You do have to take into account getting used to Camtasia, but it is an intermediately easy software (btw I am only an eLearning developer, not a Camtasia person :-D

There is a useful tutorial here on how to use Camtasia (14 minutes) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMwAxdMZOnM

After I have produced my virtual classroom session into mobile formats (e.g. mp4 or mp3 for audio podcast), I cut them up into videos no larger than 15 minutes and load them up to youtube (youtube does not allow videos larger than 15 minutes at first). This allows people with a variety of devices to look at the reformatted virtual classroom movies, as YouTube will now offer those recordings in the mobile YouTube format.

Geometrics can be fun in squareland - Flatland the movie

Do you remember the time that you were trying to cope with geometry? I remember my encounter with squares and formulas and well, I was not to enthusiastic about it. But now there is geometry fun coming right to your screen!

Emre Sevinc (who has an astonishing knowledge on eLearning, IT architecture and cognitive sciences amongst others) got me on this great movie which features geometrical characters that speak with the voices from famous actors.

Let me paste the synopsis of the story:
"Flatland: The Movie is an animated film inspired by Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel, Flatland.
Set in a world of only two dimensions inhabited by sentient geometrical shapes, the story follows Arthur Square and his ever-curious granddaughter Hex. When a mysterious visitor arrives from Spaceland, Arthur and Hex must come to terms with the truth of the third dimension, risking dire consequences from the evil Circles that have ruled Flatland for a thousand years."

Does not this look like great fun! And look at the trailor, its simply motivating. And the movie is part of an educational dvd also. Sometimes I wish I was a kid in this age.


Another movie that made my day yesterday (watched it on my mobile while commuting) is 'the history of computers' made in the 20th century, it still gave me great new insights in the computer evolution (new names, economic factors).



I just love these new media.

Instructional Design: What do you get when you mix articulate presenter, with captivate, with camtasia, with webquiz ... you could get THIS

How can you mix all kinds of software's AND social media apps? That is one of the questions I have roaming about in the back of my mind. On the verge of my vacation, I wanted to test a new software (Articulate Presenter) and see if other software that we use to build courses with can be implemented.

If you want to, you can see the result following this link (it is an nice mashup for different educational goals). It works with Flash, so sometimes he preloads to buffer the multimedia files.

The final product was produced by Articulate Presenter, but I mixed in Del.icio.us, Camtasia, phpBB, Captivate, QuickCam pro movies, a Ning community, Articulate Quizmaker quizzes, hotspot quiz and even a Canadian Bear!

If you are interested in the production specifics, you can click on the tab 'notes' inside the articulate presenter course.

The font size of the Articulate Presenter is rather small but at this point you cannot change the font-size, but this is a feature Articulate Presenter's developing team is tackling and hopefully they will program a solution soon.

I really enjoyed the first half of the year and so now.... I am off on my vacation (more specifics in the presentation).

testing video blogging movie

Click To Play

These are most of the participants of the workshop. It is really intens, but great thanks to all the questions all you participants asked!!

preparing for socialMedia training I need to give

In a few weeks time I need to give a training to the teachers and staff at our Institute. For most of them it will be the first time they get in (conscious) contact with social media and the possibilities it offers.

Because of the differences in knowledge on this topic, I am trying to find an easy access to start the training. Get them motivated to learn and jump into the social media water.

I found this one and it seems to hit the spot: getting people thinking about the future.



Thank you to walkinggal for putting me on this track.