What do wiki want?

I'm off to Vancouver, Canada from April 11th - 14th for the Tectonic Shift Think Tank hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning. This event will bring together an international group of educators and technologists to identify the transformative opportunities for MediaWiki and related FLOSS technologies for eLearning. Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytech will be there along with various other and sundry wiki fanatics, tech heads and educators to bash out how the wiki platform, specifically MediaWiki (which runs Wikipedia amongst others) can be transformed to accomodate teaching and learning mo' better. My hastily concocted vision is up here, but I thought i'd extend an invitation for any of the people who actually may read this blog (does anyone read this blog?) to add your vision to my page so that I can present them at the meeting as well. What would you like a wiki to do for you as an educator, as a learner, as a consumer or producer of Open Educational Resources? Let me know and i'll put it on the table and we'll make it happen!

Image: Sedimentary, my dear Watson, by: Sean Stayte

Tags: wikieducator, tectonic shift think tank, COL, Commonwealth of Learning, MediaWiki

iPod ... meet eXe

iPod Video, originally uploaded by Alexandre Van de Sande.

One of the areas we are continuing to explore with the eXe project is making educational resources available in a variety of formats, including mobile content delivery. In the 0.23 release of eXe, we've added a prototype of an export function that writes the Notes format used by the Apple iPod. There are several limitations imposed by this format, including being restricted to unstyled text, a strict page size limit, and a design that makes it difficult to include images or audio. However, even with these severe limitations, certain types of read only resources are still usable and are now very portable.

The File > Export > iPod Notes menu item in eXe will prompt for a folder to be used for the export. Within that folder, it creates a new folder with the current eXe package name that contains the table of contents and all of the pages. Simply copy that new folder to the Notes directory of an iPod to make the resource available on the go.

If you don't own an iPod but have some other kind of mobile device that you'd like to be able to get your eXe content onto, try the Text export under the same menu.

Tags: eXe, iPod, mobile, elearning