Tag: edutalk

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A couple of weks ago I had posted More Posterous Worries I had tweeted to @posterous and mailed the help to no avail. Then a week ago I tweeted to Sachin Agarwal @agarwal and got this response :

Agarwal Conversation

Sachin was a founder and CEO of @posterous. I had amazing support from him at the start of EDUtalk but was surprised he had time for a few emails. Not only that, the missing player for mp3 urls that was troubling us was fixed. (I still need to update all those post but new ones are fine).

API 2

Happy with this, today I though I’d update the script that posts audioBoo to posterous. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with curl and the current version of php running here. Rather than try to work around that I’ve changed track and created an AppleScript that:

  1. Downloads the rss feed from http://audioboo.fm/tag/edutalk.rss
  2. Loops through it checking for new boos
  3. Posts these to EDUtalk, marking them private.
  4. Keeps a list of published boos so that I’ll later be able to download for the Radio EDUtalk AutoDJ archive.

I plan to have the script running all the time and checking each hour for new boos. It seems to work fine, not that it does anything clever like error checking, but given a bit of time I can fix that.

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I’ve been a big posterous fan since June 29, 2008 since then I’ve blog with and about posterous a lot.

More importantly it is at the heart of EDUtalk where there are over 600 posts of educational podcast episodes of course Radio Edutalk.

Six weeks ago posterous was aquired by twitter and I had some Posterous Worries. I am now more worried as a few things have happened.

  1. The stuff that makes the edutalk.cc domain work with our edutalk posterous site broke. A bit of reading and guess work got it fixed. The real worry was that both a tweet and email to posterous got no response. In the past I have been amazed at the quick reaction by the posterous team to both problems and suggestions, to help with SLFtalk, the precursor to EDUtalk they added a feature to their API overnight.
  2. Over the last couple of weeks the posterous API 1 for posting seems to have broken. AudioBoos tagged edutalk are normally posted to edutalk via the api by a script. This has stopped working, admittedly I am still using the depreciated API 1 rather than the new one, but as far as I know, the old one was just meant to keep working.
  3. When posting audioboos and phlogs to edutalk we relied on the fact that a url to an mp3 file would result in the posterous player being used to allow the audio to be played. This seems to have stopped working.

I know that we have been lucky to have a wonderful tool like posterous for free. I expected it to go pro at some point and would have been more than happy to pay for the service. I pay for hosting for this and other sites, I pay for flickr…

I am not sure where to go for this, in the last Posterous Worries post I listed the features that we need. I’ve asked the question on Quora: Is there another service like posterous which allows anyone to email content and has an API? – Quora. I’ve still not got an idea.

Some of this I guess we could sort with wordpress and some plugins. The disk space for large files will be a problem. The submit audio via email will be a problem. I am open to ideas?

I have found Posterous Backup Tool for Mac and spent the £2.49 in the mac app store. This worked a treat and I now have 600 odd posts and the audio that was posted to edutalk (not audioboo or ipadio files) in a >1GB backup, I just need to figure out what to do with it.

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I’ve been blogging about, and with, posterous since June 2008 it is a service I love. Early on I compared it to the Flip camera:

The Flip camera and posterous are both effortless technology, in education both could help by lowering the bar so that learners can concentrate on the learning and not get caught up in the tech.

We know what happened to the Flip camera after cisco bought it. I am now worried about what happens to posterous now twitter has bought it.

Posterous explain a couple of things:

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service.

These seem slightly contradictory.

There are 3 main ways I use posterous:

  1. John’s posterous – I always did like sending email which I uses for mobile blogging, now mostly iphone photos.
  2. enviable stuff which I use for posting internet finds, posterous sends them on to this blog.
  3. EDUtalk – Audio publishing by educators, using mobile devices, this is of course organised in partnership with David @parslad and is the one I am worrying about.

The first two uses are pretty simple and could easily be done in other way, EDUtalk is different. We use several of posterous features to get things done:

  1. We allow anyone to post audio via email, this goes into the moderation queue. Posterous deals very well with spam, we do not see much at all. Although most other blogging systems have posting via email, I believe that most of them use a secret email address, I’ve not head of any that recommend sharing the email with the world.
  2. The API this allows us to semi automatically pull in posts from AudioBoo and iPadio to the moderation queue. The majority of audio comes from AudioBoo at the moment.
  3. Posting via web, this allows use to upload the Radio ‹EDUtalk archive to the posterous stream, these are fairly large files, each an hour of audio.

Most of this could be done by other means (I think) but it is the ease with which posterous allows this to happen that I love. I can’t think of another service that would allow us to do this so easily.

EDUtalk

Has been going thorough a good spell. We had a great set of Boos for Leon Cych, @eyebeams from the Naace Conference: naace12. Ian Guest @ianinsheffield is continuing his great daily series on Web tools for use in the classroom. David and I have been enjoying the live Radio EDUtalk broadcasting (Radio Archive) and have managed a variety of show types.

The last thing I want to be thinking about is a some sort of sealing wax and string posterous substitute but I am starting to keep my eyes open and am looking for suggestions?

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It was quite a busy week on Radio #EDUtalk on Tuesday David hosted Peter Doran, Chair of the Doran Review, who talked about ‘Strategic Review of Learning Provision for Children and Young People with Complex Additional Support Needs’ (Which can be listed to at: Radio #EDUtalk 6-3-12: Peter Doran). On Wednesday we hosted our most ambitious, in terms or stretching the technology, show so far: A panel discussion on ‘The professional culture of teaching’, with Professor Gordon Kirk, Academic Secretary of UCET, Rosa Murray of the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), David Cameron (independent education consultant), and Joan MacKay of Education Scotland. (Which can be listed to at:Radio #EDUtalk 8-3-12: Panel discussion on ‘the professional culture of teaching’). Later in the evening we broadcast a Trailer for Radio #EDUtalk show on 14-3-12: Professor Ian Menter.

The Panel discussion was a wee bit more complex than usual as I was working, David was at work and the 4 panellists were scattered across Scotland.

Panel Edutalk tn

Interestingly, to me, was the fact that I was in a location where skype is blocked. So Nicecast was set up on a computer where Skype was not blocked and I connected to this one via Apple Remote Desktop.

David pulled the participants into a Skype conference via their landlines, and dialled the remote mac, I picked up the call on Skype via the remote desktop. We used our mobiles to let me know when to start Nicecast broadcasting and for any trouble shooting. David also called me at the end of the conference so that I could stop the broadcast and Radio EDUtalk went back to its Auto DJ. I was busy working with some Trainees and could not listen in.

We are having a lot off fun working with this. Internet Radio has been around for a lot longer than most of the Web 2 tools usually used by Educators an offers a lot of potential. It is inexpensive, skype is free, as this discussion was joined by land lines it cost David 5.6p per minute, whole show cost £2.80. Internet Radio Servers are inexpensive and the posterous site is free. On a mac at least the necessary software, NiceCast is easy to set up.

An invitation to Broadcast

Most of the time Radio EDUtalk is broadcasting random bits of audio from the EDUtalk archive. This is now up to 675MB, well over 200 audio files. We broadcast live regularly on a Wednesday evening but would be delighted if anyone wanted to broadcast at another time.

If you are interested in running an educational Internet Radio show of any kind please get in touch. We would be happy to run this via Skype with you or give you the opportunity to run the whole thing your self.

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chancery knocker

This was the first of the EDUtalk Conversations which are part of EDUtalk. You can read about the plan on the EDUtalk Conversations page. There were half a dozen or so folk signed up to come along but it ended up with just 3 of us: David @parslad, Olivia @owexelstein and myself.

Although we were initially surprised at the low turnout we ended up EDUtalking for four hours. I, for one, had a great time. learnt a lot and came away with some food for thought.

The event was held at the Chaplaincy of Strathclyde University which was a great space. There were sets of couches and easy chairs and given a bigger number it would have been easy to split into sub groups an d use the space flexibly.

I felt there were subtle differences meeting in a neutral space: not some ones school and early in the day: not a pub. I felt that this, and the fact the event was due t run for a couple of hours with expansion time available, made the conversation open ended and relaxed.

This conversation ranged over a lot of topics, circling, ict, glow and challenging behaviour a few times. We were each invited to bring some topic to the table, I am not too sure if we covered Olivia’s or David’s but mine was talked about and I saw linked ideas pop up in other discussions.

Bbc Micro

I was thinking about the way good teaching or classroom ideas bubble up, spread a little and go away again. My example was blogging which I think we are now on the third or fourth wave or bubble. I wonder why something that seems to be a great idea fades and then is rediscovered. Olivia delighted me by recounting using a BBC computer game embedded in her topic work back in 1992 (I was surprised she was old enough to be teaching way back then). I got the picture of the BBC being used as one part of a rich topic. Obviously Olivia’s practice continues to be enriched by here experience (check out here blog) but the question remains why this is not now standard practice? It can’t be lack of hardware as Olivia (I presume) would only have had one BBC for her class.

We also talked about the possibility of other EDUtalk Conversations and wondered if it might be better badging these TeachMeet 365 as well. THe idea share a lot of common ground, especially the idea of avoiding sponsorship. David has collected a few free locations that could be used and we could see all sorts of possibilities.

I certainly hope to see more of these events and am kean the idea spreads.

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We have now had several episodes of Radio EDUtalk since Christmas. I’ve not blogged about it here due to lack of time rather than will. The guests have been lined up from now until the summer holidays by David, @parslad, and he has put together an amazing set of folk from all sorts of educational backgrounds with a very diverse set of interests and focus.

The technology has been behaving itself and the audio quality has not been too bad. We are beginning to build up a wee bit of live chat steam on twitter. Hopefully the podcast recordings will spread the audio even further.

You can see the list of show and listen to the ones that have already taken place on the Radio Edutalk page

Edutalk Conversations

We, and when I say we I mean David, have also organised the first Edutalk Conversation.

At this Edutalk event will be teachers and other educationists who are involved in the education of young people. The event is built around a facilitated conversation between participants, who themselves suggest items for sharing and topics for discussion. This ticket is for one person to take part in Edutalk Glasgow on Saturday, 18th February 2012.

You can sign up for this conversation on Eventbright. We hope to extend the open and friendly feel of Radio EDUtalk to the ‘real’ world.

Broadcast Opportunity

Radio EDUtalk broadcasts from the EDUtalk archive of podcasts the rest of the week. We would be interested in offering the chance to broadcast to other folk involved in education if you would be interested in broadcasting regularly, occasionally or just eonce please get in touch.