A useful article at Open Education – 21st Century Schools – Pedagogy Must Give Way to Andragogy. Nothing new as far as the need to move to a learner centred approach is concerned, but a useful way of framing the arguments for it. But I think a different word is needed – Andragogy always sounds like something unlawful to me

I just recently set up a twitter feed for the Ulearn08 conference currently happening in Christchurch. I looked at a few options for doing this:

• Have people follow a ulearn08 twitter account and then follow everyone that chose to follow this account. The problem with this is the tedious job of monitoring who was following that account and then getting that account to follow them. Also, this would pick up all their tweets, not just conference related ones.

• Use the hashtags bot – only trouble is this seems to have been broken back in June some time.
• Have people enter #ulearn08 on all conference tweets and then get the rss feed of a twitter search for the this string. This worked ok, but the rss feed does not provide links to the user photos, and I didn’t have time to mess around with the twitter api to get this.
• Same as above option but screen scrap the search results page and then wrap a ulearn header around it. I went with this option as it was quick and easy and provided the user photos with each tweet which made the page much nicer than straight text. I used the simple_html_dom php class to pull the search results div out of the page.

Things that would be nice to do for the next conference given a bit more time:

• Have the page refresh with an ajax call in the background rather than with a meta refresh.
• Get the links to show conversation threads in the search results working. These are being stripped out with a regex at the moment as the screen scrapping broke the relative links in the ajax calls.

The current Ulearn08 page is here. Copy of files used.

I have spent a bit of time trying to get the video podcast feed sorted for our new EDtalks service. Getting the RSS feed for phpmotion modified to include the enclosure element was reasonably straight forward, but finding the best format for the mp4 files has taken a bit of time. We wanted an mp4 format that would be reasonable quality, good file size, be ipod compatible, and would also provide reasonable quality flv files when converted through ffmpeg by phpmotion. In the end the following settings are what we are using to export the files from Final Cut:

And here is the flv version of a video with these settings:

and a downloadable mp4 version.