#2, 2010: Phlog Me

Was with Michael today up in Ballarat planning sessions and strategies for taking on the Barwon Region as part of the Ementor/Champion project and along the way MG introduced me to "Phlogging" (and it didn't hurt a bit!)

In a nutshell PHLOGGING = phone blogging

Yep, we were just wrapping our heads around creative uses of "Blogs" and now we've got Phlogs to contend with :-o Actually, it's a simple extension of blogging and another easy-to-use voice technology with some wonderful possibilities for teaching and learning.

Stay tuned as Michael and I phlog together as a part of the Ementor/Champion Project. We are building a dialogue over the coming weeks using mobile and conventional telephony via ipadio.com

We have set up a Wordpress blog for our voice journal at: http://yum.vic.edu.au/barwon/

Depending on the results of this experiment we will hopefully be able to draw in our Barwon participants. At the very least we will have yet another very interesting tool to present amongst a kit bag of new and old tricks and techniques for elearning.

It might come as a surprise to you but I actually don't own a mobile phone but that does not deter the use of ipadio for Phlogging.

We discovered the conventional apparatus plugged into the wall works just as well as your Nokia or Apple Thingamejig. You call a 1800 number, key in your pin and start recording! The recording is created and almost instantaneously some very smart voice to text conversion software (SpinVox) is activated creating (an albeit imperfect) script of your verbal input.

This excites me as I can see an immediate and simple use of this technology for my ESL and Adult Lit students who are adept (if not totally addicted and almost physically attached to their mobiles).

The bonus is the voice to text generated script which can be edited and recycled. You can save the script for discourse analysis in the classroom afterwards.

I imagine creating questions on a website or blog and getting my students to "phone in" their answers anywhere, anytime. They could do their oral presentations from a mobile phone, do on the spot commentaries during excursions and I have only just started thinking about what we could do as a group if the Speaker Phone function were turned on.

Have a read of the EDUCATION section on the ipadio site to gauge broader, potential uses. Here's an intereresting snippet:

Mobile technology is playing an increasingly large role in the classroom - most students have a phone of their own, so why not use a device that they're familiar with to engage them with education? ....

... In brief, Ipadio technology links up the telephony networks with the internet, enabling the live broadcast of audio directly to the internet... all from a standard telephone. There's never been an easier way to record oral assessments, create revision podcasts or collect homework.

For more about educational uses click here

It's the potential applications (not the technology per se) which really stirs the imagination. Michael and I talked a lot about this today ...embracing the principle of "applying technology" and developing new techniques as opposed to getting caught up in the worship and hyped-up promotion of applications and technologies for their own sake. It's how you use the tools, not the tools themselves that are important.

Using ipadio.com, the recording can be easily embedded (see the example above) or else if you use Wordpress the file can automatically be fed into your blog and become a posting.

Will keep you posted on further developments.

A brilliant day MG. Enjoyed the exploration and play, the demonstrations, examples of student work from Moodle, the discussion about facilitation techniques and management inside Elluminate. Learnt more in a day than thrashing around on my own at home for weeks.

PS. thanks to you and Erin for the delicious chicken salad and umpteen cafe lattes and cups of tea. Loved YUM headquarters too - very tasteful indeed.

Looking forward to the Barwon Roadshow.

Dale