Mike Keppell is the new president of ASCILITE (that’s the Australasian Society for the use of Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education), an organisation with a long and honorable history of promoting improved uses of technology in higher education down under, and whose most recent conference we have done some coverage of in another forum.

Mike is pretty excited about lots of the devices and systems that were gathered together at Macworld, because they promise to make a massive impact on the way we go about our teaching and learning in universities. In particular, increasing mobility and interoperability mean that we will of necessity become much more learner-centric, especially as learners acquire enhanced capacities to collect content on the fly, and indeed to generate their own content.

In this podcast Mike speaks to an equally excited Allan Carrington, for whom, of course, the question of how we disseminate and implement the visionary ideas inspired by Macworld is never too far away.

The early days of developing digital learning objects were fraught with frustration. Every application had its own file format. Nothing would talk to anything else. And every new program would make the material produced by the old programs look dull and drab by comparison. So every new semester we’d be rewriting the material that we developed last semester. Even now, with radically improved file compatibility, many educators feel that in order to put something fresh and lively in front of their students they need to trash last year’s stuff and start all over again.

David Wallace, a Distinguished Apple Educator based in Webb City, Missouri, says that its time to put a stop to this rampant reinvention, and he showed us how in his IDG Macworld workshop, Garage Band 08 in Education: Remix your Media. David says that we should instead be repurposing and enhancing those learning objects, and he says that Apple’s Garage Band is the perfect application to do it. Garage Band, he says, is both powerful and intuitive; no other application – on any platform – quite matches it in functionality, and just about anyone can use it.

But this, importantly, is not just about saving curriculum development time for educators. As David explains in this interview with Ian Green, giving this ethos of reuse a pivotal place in your educational practice makes for greater engagement and greater empowerment for learner and educator alike. Read more about this interesting work on David’s GarageBand: Recycle, Reuse, Remix pages, which can be found within the Apple Learning Interchange site, a rich source for material on the educational uses of Garage Band and other Apple programs and systems.

Listen to this postscript: The editing obsession
Postscript: I ended the main interview with David with a comment about my amateurish audio editing skills, a throwaway remark that started another conversation about spontaneity, coherence and the dangers of getting obsessed with editing. We thought this conversation was worth sharing, so have also included the audio file here.

At Macworld today Lainie McGann ran a workshop, iMovie 101: Video Production for Educators, based around the Apple video editing application iMovie. No doubt, as Lainie explains in this interview with Allan Carrington, a number of people came along, as they always do, just wanting to know a bit more about how the program works – what buttons do you press when, how do you export to different formats, how do you refrain from overusing all those cute-looking transitions etc? And of course Lainie, as always, helped them to locate the answers to all these questions.

It is important to know what buttons to press, but its equally important to understand the pedagogical context and transformative potential of these technologies, and this is what Lainie focuses on in the interview. This is not just about kids playing around making movies in class, just because they can. This is about a whole new set of concepts, skills and multi-literacies. This is about moving to a more and more student-centred approach to education, and the breaking down of the teacher-as-sage way of doing things, a change in approach that the more traditional educators can find challenging.

Lainie McGann is an educational consultant, and the K-12 Educational Technology Coordinator for Newport-Mesa Unified School District. She is the Orange County CUE Board President, an Apple Distinguished Educator, and has been recognised as a Teacher of the Year. Read more about her at her website.

The favorite book that Lainie refers to in this episode is Daniel Pink’s 2006 best-seller, A Whole New Mind.

Online tutorials for iMovie can be found here. Also all Lainie’s resources used in this excellent workshop can be found on her website here.