Some interesting work being done by a team at University Campus Suffolk using AR in learning technology applications. Check out a quick video, also check out this post for further info.
Augmented Reality (AR) in the Learning Environment
17 02 2012Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: andriod, AR, Augmented reality, Education, eLearning, iPad, Learning Technology, smartphones, Technology Enhanced Learning
Categories : Learning Technolgy
Crossing the Analog \ / Digital Gap
17 02 2012
I’ve written several posts about the evolution of education, especially from the analog past to the digital present and future.
My own experience between the two was real a wake-up call. I bought a new car a many thousands of miles ago and had a lot of music I wanted to hear from my cassette tapes (analog). The new car could only play cassettes and not discs.
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Categories : Learning Technolgy
Super slow motion for Adobe After Effects – Using Pixel Motion
15 02 2012Yesterday I was using a plug in for After Effects called Twixtor. Today I have been using After Effects built in functionality to achieve similar results. Its called Pixel motion and is pretty easy to use. Have a look at the below video which will show you more.
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Tags: Adobe, After Effects, Education, eLearning, Learning Technology, video, video editing
Categories : IT Tutorials, Learning Technolgy
Super slow motion with Twixtor plug in for Adobe After Effects
14 02 2012I’ve been getting my head around Adobe’s After Effects programme. After Effects allows you to create sophisticated motion graphics and cinematic visual effects, basically allowing you to do a bunch of cool stuff with video you have shot. One thing that I have been experimenting with is super slow motion. An example of what I mean is the shots you often see on TV of sports such as tennis or cricket when they show an event that takes place in real time very quickly, e.g a tennis ball being hit, and then slow it down so you can see it in very clear detail very smoothly. This is done by using very expensive camera equipment that can shoot at very high frame rates (upwards of a 1000 frames per second). Another way of doing this is to use specialist software to re-engineering existing video footage and make it seem like it was filmed with a super slow motion camera. For a brief explanation and example of how it works see this short video I made.
The plug in, if your interested can be found here:
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Tags: Adobe, After Effects, Education, eLearning, Learning Technology, Twixtor
Categories : IT Tutorials, Learning Technolgy
Fair VAT on e-publications for the academic community
10 02 2012Please could as many people as possible sign this? It has been instigated by Eduserv. No – or lower – VAT on electronic resources would make a HUGE difference to the library budget and thus massively increase its purchasing power to provide the resources that its users want and need.
As you may know universities and colleges are obliged to pay VAT at the full standard rate, which is currently 20%, on their subscriptions to electronic academic journals, books, newspapers and magazines.
There has been an e-petition set-up to urge our Government to do one of two things;
Introduce zero-rated VAT on electronic academic publications
Or, if it is not feasible to add electronic publications to the list of zero-rates goods then to follow other European countries and apply VAT at the reduced rate now and consider reducing this to 0% as soon as possible
100,000 signatures are needed for the topic to be considered for debate in the House of Commons. Anyone can sign, please urge colleagues, academic staff, students, researchers, friends and family to sign the e-petition:
• They will need to provide their name, address and email
• They can choose to receive email updates from the government about the e-petition
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Tags: academic publications, e-publications, Education, eduserv, eLearning, electronic academic journals, electronic publications, Learning Technology, library budget, zero rated vat
Categories : Learning Technolgy
Windows 8 Metro Interface Testing – My thoughts
9 02 2012I have been testing the new Metro desktop I installed about two weeks ago . I must say its been a bit of a mixed bag and the bottom line is I have removed it and gone back to a totally plain background with just a few icons. There were a number of reasons for this, but the main issue was how much of a distraction everything was. I am essentially a minimalist and despite some of the tiles being useful (Twitter, Office and weather) most of them got in my way too much. It may be because I was still using the odd old style icon which annoyingly decided to hide itself behind some of the tiles but it all started to get rather cluttered. The other main reason I have now removed it, was the news feeds. Whilst handy and interesting they proved far to much distraction and I would often start reading through them when I was moving from one programme to another. Maybe on a personal machine they would suitable, but for a work machine they prove far too distracting.
News feeds can be distracting
One positive I must point out is that the this type of interface on a desktop environment was easy and intuitive to use. So if Microsoft does force us to go down this route it won’t take too long to get use to, although I will be disabling any news feeds if I want to get any work done! For the meantime I’m happy to go back to my old desktop no matter how boring it looks.
Back to Black - How my desktop looks now
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Tags: Learning Technology, Metro, Tiles, User Interface, Windows 8
Categories : IT Tip, IT Tutorials, Learning Technolgy
Need to Access Wikipedia Today? You still can.
18 01 2012Without wanting to get political concerning Wikipedia’s blackout today in protest to the SOPA bill here is a quick way to still access Wikipedia articles if you need to today. If you go to the Wikipedia site direct you will be greeted with a black-and-white page with the message: “Imagine a world without free knowledge.” It carries a link to information about the two congressional bills and details about how to reach lawmakers.
However you can still access the site by looking at its cached version through Google. First type the query you want to look up in Wikipedia in Google, then follow the instructions on the below picture.
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Tags: Google, Wikipedia
Categories : IT Tip
