Within that LO and particularly for my FE colleagues I had another title which was: Why Xerte is the best thing since Lobster! I knew that not all, but some of my colleagues would realise the Lobster reference was actually a reference to an authoring tool piloted by a number of FE colleges in 2004 and then renamed and released in 2005 as Accellerator. It was a tool arguably before it’s time and probably suffered from the lack of widespread broadband access at that time and even constrained by the typical speed of College computers and connections etc. I think it had good intentions including an aim to faciltate easy and efficient authoring and sharing of professional looking learning objects with a range of accessibility features built-in and to enable authoring by teachers rather than limited to specialist developers. This and the menu/icon driven interface arguably had similarities to what we see as key benefits in Xerte Online Toolkits today. I created a simple LO containing one or two screenshots from Lobster which you can view here >>

The main point of this blog post however is to expand on the bullet points I listed in my showcase LO explaining in more detail why I think Xerte and Xerte Online Toolkits (XOT) is the best thing since Lobster. Although I’ve numbered these reasons for easy reference, to borrow a phrase from popular culture these are “in no particular order”…

1. It’s free and open source

The use of Open Source software in education has obviously been increasing dramatically in recent years especially with the popularity of systems such as Moodle and the underlying php and MySql architecture. The fact that XOT works well with this combination on both Linux or Windows servers and is also free and open source is certainly one of the reasons that there really are no excuses for any College or University to not having an XOT installation as part of their armoury. Of course some will say it’s not free because it still needs infrastructure and support, and despite its ease of use, to get the most out of it will need ongoing CPD too. Well arguably that’s all true but the Xerte tools are certainly free of license fee and in fact you can use the Windows application, or even XOT via MAXOS, without needing any additional hardware. In most cases Colleges and Universities will have one or more existing servers (for VLE use etc) on which XOT will quite happily run and once installed requires very little maintenance. There is also a growing bank of free resources, support material, case studies and active communities to support any development or CPD so there really are very few barriers to establishing an installation if any at all and certainly no real financial barriers. Even if the skill-set doesn’t fully exist within an internal team to establish or troubleshoot an installation there is plenty of external support available (see item 8.) and where necessary consultancy support too.

2. Easy to use

The first point of clarifcation I always make here is that the original Xerte (the Windows ‘developer’ application) is primarily aimed at specialist developers and those with coding/actionsscript skills and certainly isn’t the tool we proclaim to be so easy to use for everyone – although it does also contain the same easy to use templates found in Xerte Online Toolkits.  So the distinction here is that it’s XOT that IS really easy to use to author interactive, accessible and professional looking learning objects and I was quoted by one of the expert group members on Twitter with an analogy (and caveat) that I usually make…

#jiscexperts10 If you can buy something online you can use Xerte to create learning objects (with caveats around pedagogic skill)

October 20, 2010 12:29 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@gillferrell

Gill Ferrell

The point is XOT is browser based and presents forms to configure and add content to each page of an LO so if you can complete an online form then technically you can use XOT. However the content still needs to be relevant and the learning design, including decisions about what page types to use and in what order, needs to be underpinned by sound pedagogy. Indeed some of the best examples of current use is where the learners are tasked with constructing the learning objects from a creative brief set by their teacher.

3. Highly accessible output

It’s testament to the skills and dedication of Julian Tenney from the Nottingham team that accessibility and usability features have been considered and built-in from the very beginning of his development of Xerte. Julian, myself and many other members of the Xerte user community were Macromedia Authorware users and although a fantastic tool in its day it never really came close to the accessible output produced by Xerte, and perhaps more importantly, again it was primarily a tool for specialist developers, not teachers or students, and arguably highly expensive too. The built-in accessibility of learning objects created with Xerte and subsequently XOT is one of the reasons TechDis have actively promoted and supported the development and use of Xerte since it’s early beginnings. I’ve been privileged to have been involved with those developments and pleased to have worked with TechDis and the team at Nottingham in the development of the original TechDis Presentation Template which helped inform the requirements and subsequent development of XOT. There are few tools which enable teachers, or indeed learners, to create interactive content with such a high level if accessible interactivity without needing specialist skills to do so. The standard output includes options for users to change colour scheme, font and font size, use the built-in text-to-speech via IE or communicate with other TTS software such as JAWS, to navigate and control media or even drag and drop interactions via keyboard without needing to use a mouse and many other accessibility benefits from the wide range of page types available. To explore these accessibility features for yourself view an early demonstrator or simply try the accessibility features via the page types example.

4. Authoring tool and repository in one

What I mean here probably needs some clarification because although there are rss and syndication features built-in to any XOT installation my reference to XOT being an authoring tool and repository in one is more basic and practical for individual users than that. Put simply XOT is an online authoring tool and if an organisation has a single central installation then all Xerte Learning Objects created with that installation are part of that repository of content. An author (teacher or learner) can make any LO public and link or embed that LO in any number of VLE courses or e-portfolio pages without having to upload to each separately. Clearly there are storage space benefits to this but for me there are two far more important benefits. Firstly, that LO can then be updated/amended/added to in one place and automatically those changes will appear wherever it is linked or embedded. This is very powerful in terms of teaching and learning benefit and also a very real time saver. Secondly there is a problem with the way most VLE’s are used in that content is uploaded to courses where often it’s only the teachers and learners who have access to a particular course who can see that content. This is a real barrier to sharing resources and effective practice especially the benefits of cross-curriculum sharing. The advantage of using XOT for authoring and storing learning content is that you can still have that restricted access course structure guiding learners through a series of learning objects and activities but also automatically provide access to colleagues in other areas, or even outside the organisation, by making the same LO’s public within XOT and perhaps sharing links directly via email or including the LO’s in the RSS or Syndication feeds. This also provides those with a CPD role to easily cascade examples to other colleagues without having to spend lot’s of time locating those examples in different places. For further information about use of XOT with Moodle view the screencasts on my dedicated Xerte page and for guidance on the management and sharing features view the part 1 and 2 guides at http://techdis.ac.uk/getxerte

5. Cross-platform tools for use by teachers, learners & specialists alike

In terms of authoring XOT is accessed via a web browser and so works cross-platform and works with all the main browsers – although it does need Adobe Flash Player to function. iPad users may wish to speak to Steve Jobs about that one! It’s also possible to run XOT via a localhost server on Windows, Mac and Linux based computers including use via a USB stick and MAXOS. However the real power in the suite of tools available is that teachers, learners and specialist developers can use these tools together. So teachers and learners can use XOT and the current templates available for easy use and the skills of specialist developers like designers/animators/coders can more usefully be deployed to develop and include more interactive and bespoke content, or to extend the functionality and templates available for the non-specialists to use. Perhaps more importantly those more experienced in learning design or with specialist subject expertise can work collaboratively with colleagues, or even learners, to improve the content, activities and learning sequences to help get the most out of the tools and content created. So we have a free, cross-platform suite of tools with collaboration and sharing built-in; not many tools offer anywhere near this range of features at least not with the same ease of use.

6. Templating, sharing & repurposing built-in

Some of these benefits and topics clearly overlap but part of the reference here is to the fact that any LO a user creates with XOT can be quickly and easily shared or given to other users of the same system. In addition LO’s can be exported and shared with others as a zip archive either for local consumption or for importing and re-editing/repurposing by another user or even importing into another installation. This export function can also be enabled for particular LO’s making them part of the syndication feed and therefore available to export/download by anyone who accesses that feed. Again the powerful built-in RSS functionality is a topic all of it’s own and was the subject of a recent Xerte Friday webinar. You can access the recording of that webinar and the presentation used online. There are also currently 4 ‘project templates’ with the main Xerte Online Toolkit template being the most popular and that in turn contains 40 or more different page types which make up that template. The other project templates include media interactions, multiple perspectives and the RSS template for creating manual RSS feeds. Each of these provide additional functionality and a more specific purpose to the more general main template but again have all the sharing options available to share and cascade effective use.

7. Customisable, extensible & round trip authoring

For all users the ability to author online and yet be able to export and continue to edit off-line, e.g. when mobile or lacking online access, is an extremely powerful benefit of the Xerte suite. An XOT installation can also be customised perhaps to match an organisations theme and styling but also to link with and integrate with other systems. However the real power lies in the potential for extending the features and functionality. An example is that more advanced users can use Xerte rather than XOT to create custom pages saved as models which can be imported into XOT, or to use Xerte to create additional page types or even whole new project templates for use with XOT as well as Xerte. For those using Xerte rather than XOT there is also an option to use ‘page wizards‘ which offers the rapid authoring benefits of the main XOT template but with much easier opportunities for customisation on a per project basis. This is arguably also a great way to pick-apart and learn the underlying principles of adapting and creating page types and templates. All this together with ’round trip authoring’ between the tools is really powerful stuff and possibly warrants an article all of it’s own so I’ll add that to my todo list for the future. You may also wish to view my screencast about exporting, editing and importing on my dedicated Xerte page.

8. Active technical and academic communities

The Xerte ‘Technical’ mailing list has been an active and expanding community for many years now and the team at Nottingham as well as members of the community do a fantastic job of supporting new and experienced users alike. Anyone can subscribe or search the archives and I would certainly recommend that any organisation planning an XOT installation or already having an installation should have at least one member of staff subscribed to and ideally contributing to that list and community, especially as it’s the main place to hear about new additions and bug fixes or to help troubleshoot your own issues etc. I’ve seen and heard too many people report an issue they’ve already wasted too much time trying to resolve themselves when the cause/solution had been discussed on the list previously and often more than once. However the technical and active nature of the Nottingham list is not for everyone and so to complement that list and particularly to support the teaching and learning community we established the TechDis http://jiscmail.ac.uk/xerteforteachers list. We established this list to discuss pedagogy and to facilitate sharing of examples and effective practice with XOT. We would certainly encourage everyone using the Xerte tools to subscribe and contribute to this list and again it’s a good place to hear about new developments and opportunities. As well as these two mailing lists there are often training events and case studies helping to promote and support the use of XOT in particular and to help grow the community further.

9. Award winning and world wide product

Suffice to say its due reward for all the hard work and many hours invested in developing these tools by the team at Nottingham to be awarded the ALT Learning Technologists of the Year Team Award in 2009 and the top prize at the prestigious IMS Global Learning Consortium’s Learning Impact Awards 2010. The Xerte suite is truly an international and indeed worldwide product and seems certain to continue to grow in popularity and usage. This bodes well for a secure future unlike other tools developed as part of specifc projects which often stagnate or even disappear due to lack of continued support or a diminishing community.

10. Ongoing development and support

It’s often said about open source tools that they should continue to thrive even if the originators of the software stop any further development and sometimes this proves to be the case and other times less so. However it seems likely that the development of the Xerte suite at the University of Nottingham will certainly continue for the foreseeable future and there are already examples of community contribution to those developments with additional page types, page wizards and the beta of Xerte 3 which at the moment at least is a cross-platform tool for developers based on the Adobe Flex Framework. It’s arguably also true to say that even if for some bizarre and unlikely reason development of XOT stopped tomorrow it’s already such a mature and sufficiently powerful tool that effective use could and would continue for many years without any essential need for further development.

If you have your own reasons why you think Xerte is great, or indeed reason you don’t, please post your comments and thoughts via the comments area below.

You may also wish to access this article as an ebook.

One of the core units is the Text to Speech (TTS) unit and part of this is to evaluate at least 3 different utilities or software which provide or include TTS functionality. For my research and completion of this unit I wanted to explore options which work online with blogs and ideally applications which provide additional functionality such as downloading the TTS as an audio file and/or an automatic podcasting feed and where possible other accessibility benefits. I also wanted to focus on solutions which made it easy for a blog visitor to listen to the text from a blog post without having to install any software and ideally not have to download software or have it already installed.

After some research I decided to try three different tools which I could add to my self-hosted WordPress blog to enable listening to at least some of the blog posts and page. I say “at least some” because even without testing I realised that not all posts would work successfully given the range of multimedia content e.g. I’m quite often demonstrating how to email multi-media content and various file attachments to blogs as part of training sessions so the heading of the post will be text but the main content may be a video or document which is unlikely to be converted.

This particular blog post is not only a summary of this testing but also one of the specific posts I used to complete these tests. The results and conclusions were then added after testing.

I added and enabled the plugins or code required to include these options in my blog and the three different tools I selected to test and evaluate are as follows:

TechDis Toolbar
This can be added to any website or blog or vle simply by adding some code and provides many more accessibility benefits than just TTS. Further info and code available at http://access.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ToolBar/

VozMe
This is a free service which again provides the relevant code to add to different blogging tools. It doesn’t provide the additioanl benefits of the TechDis toolbar but does provide a link to download the TTS conversion as a .mp3 file and also the blog owner can choose between male and female voices as well as how the link appears. Further info and code available at http://vozme.com

Odiogo
This is another free service which provides TTS embedded with each blog post as well as an automatically generated podcast feed for subscribing to or download the posts as .mp3 files. Further info and code available at http://www.odiogo.com/

Evaluation and conclusions to be added soon… Now attached: TTS_analysis1

Posted via email from mitchellmedia’s posterous

I have two main objectives for the event:

1. To enable, facilitate and support everyone to contribute to a rich event report and resource everyone can use back in their organisations e.g. if you see and hear about the real impact of a particular technology, strategy, technique that you wish to implement or improve back in your own organisation how useful would it be to have access to everyone’s ideas and reflections regarding the same solution?

2. To demonstrate and disseminate the real impact the 3 years of MoLeNET has achieved and to use similar technologies and techniques throughout the day to evidence how simple and effective the use of m-learning can be.

Ron Mitchell

Posted via email from JISC RSC-London Engaging Learners – Evidencing Impact

Not sure if these flash resources will work on the PSP but worth testing…

  Bloom’s Taxonomy – An Overview tutorial (swf/flash file)

  Bloom’s Taxonomy – Designing Activities tutorial (swf/flash file)

(c) http://faculty.ccconline.org/index.php?title=Blooms_Taxonomy_Tutorial_FLASH

Posted via email from PSP Links

Nice YouTube demo of how to use PhotoStory. Output from PhotStory can be converted to .mp4 to run on the PSP so is an option for converting PowerPoint or PDF files into audiovisual resources…

Posted via web from PSP Links

Typing url’s on a psp is a bit of a pain and so it’s useful to have a quick way of sharing existing and new links with a group and even easier if you can do so by email!

So I’ve set-up this additional posterous site for when I’m delivering training to share links to view on the psp and/or to share links to psp related tools and resources to view on a PC.

Posted via email from PSP Links

Download now or preview on posterous

session4slide.ppt (181 KB)

Dspeech Demo by Dspeech – Tts  
Download now or listen on posterous

DSpeech_demo.mp3 (355 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

5_technologies.doc (1299 KB)

Posted via email from mitchellmedia’s posterous

Posted via email from mitchellmedia’s posterous

Download now or watch on posterous

Uploaded – 12__01__2010-1.mov (7599 KB)

Group asked to consider and discuss what’s working well and what needs strengthening?

Posted via email from mitchellmedia’s posterous

This first example automatically generates QR code and short URL from a link typed or pasted into the editor when authoring. The link could obviously be a link to the learning object itself e.g. displayed on the last page to share details of how to access the LO after a f2f session.

View full size >>

This second example displays the results of a twitter search feed complete with user avatars. Twitter is obviously growing in popularity and awareness of teaching and learning uses so being able to include one or more twitter feeds within an LO is a useful facility.

View full size >>

This third example is a tweak of the existing stimulating question page whereby the user is prompted to type a response to a question or task before clicking the button to compare their own response with a pre-prepared example or list of ideas and suggestions.

View full size >>

Finally this fourth example will only be of interest to those using the xlearn text wall system. It takes the RSS feed from that system and provides an optimised display of the messages for use in a f2f environment.

View full size >>

You can download an export of these templates here and either use that via the Xerte Windows application or add to your own Toolkits installation. The latter will require admin access to the toolkits installation.

I hope to create a guide at some point on how to create new templates and incorporate them into the default Nottingham provided template. Meanwhile I hope the zip is useful but as always you’ll need to use at your own risk etc.

For users of the molenet xerte online toolkits installation the new page types are already available.

I’ve been working with the team at Nottingham to integrate toolkits with Moodle and hopefully this will be available in the 1.0 release. Watch the Xerte site for news! http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/Editor/toolkits.htm

Also sample LO’s here: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/RSS/

1. I bought a new replacement hard drive and had a manufacturer supplied recovery disk which I used to restore the factory image.
2. I bought a SATA to USB cable/kit to view my faulty drive and was able to recover all the data from the D partition
3. That D partition also contained a regular back created by Norton 360 so after re-installing Office I was able to restore my email, calendar, contact, IE favourites etc. The more recent stuff I had via my Apple MobileMe account but certainly not everything.

With competing deadlines and family stuff etc it’s taken me about 11 days to get back to where I was before the crash. Fortunately I didn’t lose too much and may still be able to recover some files from the C partition but I’ve definitely learned from the process. I’ve purchased a second SATA drive and upgraded my copy of Casper to work with my Vista laptop and so now have a current duplicate drive which I intend to keep up-to-date periodically. Suffice to say I’ve also still got Norton 360 backing up my important systems and files on a daily basis and I’m going to be more regimental about backing up my external drives. I’m also going to ensure I have similar solutions for my MacBook and eeePC and already do for my desktop PC.

Now you may already be doing all this or have better solutions but if not please use this as a sobering reminder and think about how you back up your important stuff!

This is a free Windows based RPC tool for WordPress and other blogs. So far it looks like a really useful and fast way of posting including uploading images complete with alt tags and links etc