Screencasts are a popular alternative to documentation since most people would rather see how something works than search through a manual. Still, some screencasts can be awfully boring (e.g., monotone); others can go over the top with trying to be too funny or sarcastic. The screencast for the task manager Teudeux strikes a nice balance.
TeuxDeux Demo from TeuxDeux on Vimeo.
Even though it’s in vogue to beat up on PowerPoint presentations, and of course, there are plenty of cases where this is justified. Yet, the fact remains that they are still widely used. I don’t know, maybe it’s something about those concisely cordoned title boxes and bullets that make it just irresistible. So if it’s going to stick around for a while, why not sprinkle it with a little added value?
SlideRocket has a backchannel feature that incorporates Twitter and polling among other things. In education circles, there’s been more buzz about backchannelling both in terms of supporters and detractors. Supporters like how it accommodates multiple conversations; detractors are turned off for that very same reason (e.g., lack of cohesion). More on this can be found at places such as Educause and the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. I think, as it goes with lots of these sorts of tools, instructors should pay careful attention to the specific context and purpose, and if the backchannel option seems to be a good fit, then start looking for some tools for some sort of best practices that helps to avoid common pitfalls.
Interesting evolution of instructional technology going on over at Bowling Green State University where one of the instructors introduces the course syllabus by way of a video embedded in a blog post. Behind the scenes, it looks like they’ve made this very easy by combining WordPress as the authoring platform and Screenr as the video (screencast) tool. Especially for those teaching online, this offers yet another way to enrich the level of social presence. Of course, the possibilities are more than one-way, since it would be very easy for students to produce creative, engaging posts as part of any assignment.
Journals like Kairos show some very creative approaches to sharing research. Although, it’s primarily an academic research journal, the creativity of its multimodal publications, recently got me thinking again about the different questions that instructors who read this journal must grapple with when they start brainstorming strategies for moving away from using MSWord (or any other conventional word processing application) as the default publication platform. With all the hubbub surrounding Web 2.0, they want to move away from requiring students to submit formal writing assignments as static text, but find a few uneasy questions along the way.
Blogs offer an option, but it’s more diary-like orientation isn’t really compatible with an assignment that has a definite closing date and essentially constitutes a different genre. One option that shows some intriguing possibilities is Sophie. Developed by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Media Literacy, it offers many of the capabilities that make a mono-modal composition into a multimodal one (image, video, sound). It also comes with a timeline and a reply/comment feature so readers can interact with authors. This is ideal for instructors who want peer discussion of a student work to occur in a more closed environment than the web, but not to be relegated to something as brittle as the comment feature in MSWord or a similar word-processing app. Sophie definitely deserves exploration by any faculty looking to move student writing or publication projects into realms more consistent with 21st century expression.
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Kairos, Institute for Media Literacy
The Unofficial Apple Weblog reports that iTunes U has reached 100 million downloads. Given this number, I’m curious as to what’s happening post-download: how many people are researching how iTunes U resources are being used? What kinds of effects do they seem to have on learning, especially in Distance Ed environments? One interesting example is from Dani McKinney of SUNY-Fredonia who found a positive effect when it came to taking an exam.
Just a little north of my hometown, Seattle, was this year’s OpenEd conference in Vancouver BC and if you weren’t able to make it (like me), they assembled a montage of different attendees’ impressions that include some folks well known in the Open Education community such as Stephen Downes and David Wiley. One interesting detail that was new to me was the Peer-to-Peer University.
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OER, Open Education, conference
Like traditional academic departments, writing and tutoring centers have been exploring and implementing digital options. One of the best known among writing centers is Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab. In last month’s issue of Innovate Online, Mark Rabinovich, of Queensborough Community College, shares some insights about iPass – an online tutoring system that they’ve been working with since 2006.
One of the iPass features is a Writing Clinic. In relaying some details on the design history, he points out that it accommodates visual and auditory learning styles, as well as, of course, textual/verbal. The visual component includes capabilities for both image and video; even more intriguing is the audio integration.
The Writing Clinic includes an audio component that allows students to highlight a part of the text, select a voice type (according to pitch and speed), and click a “Read” button. An advanced text-to-speech engine converts the text to an audio recording, compresses it as an MP3 file (as the compact format greatly improves system response time), and sends the file to an embedded audio player in the student’s browser window.
Providing multiple access points seems particularly relevant for tutoring contexts where students typically struggle with the material, and especially for those whose life and work schedules make it difficult to coordinate face-to-face sessions.
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Innovate_Online, iPass
I first became familiar with Sakai when I was at Virginia Tech, and at that time (around 2004-05), they were doing some very good work with their instance of it. Sakai now has a screencast that previews some upcoming features planned for its next release – version 3.
It’s got a dashboard that runs on Ajax (or something very similar) so you can move around various elements in a way that suits your needs. You can also completely customize your home page by starting with a blank page, or if you like the visual suggestions of templates, you can choose from various options there too. One key component of this next version is widgets (e.g., create a poll). Traditional LMSs can do this too, but what Sakai seems to be stressing is a better user experience — it’s easier, more intuitive and quicker.
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Sakai
A while back, a colleague and I did a workshop on wikis. Although we’ve sampled other wiki tools, we like PBWiki for educational purposes because it’s easy to use and offers quite a solid variety of functions.
Since we wanted to practice what we were preaching, we wanted to display our presentation in the browser-based wiki space, rather than through the traditional, offline route of PowerPoint. This would also answer a question that we anticipated some of those who came to the workshop would likely have (i.e., How do I or my students embed presentation files?
). After all, if the student is required to download it to their local drive, then this kind of works against the philosophy of working within the wiki space since this can already be done very easily with any standard LMS.
PBWiki makes embedding pretty easy to do via either one of two third-party applications (Slideshare or Google Docs/Presentation). Essentially, all you need to do is upload your presentation file (e.g., PPT), publish it, and copy the embed code into your PBWiki page.
Here are a couple of places where you can find more detailed instructions: Slideshare and Google Docs/Presentation.
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GoogleDocs, PBwiki, Slideshare
This year was my first year at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture & American Culture Association (SW TX PCA) conference. I heard about their Technical Writing area through a posting on the ATTW listserv. In the panel I was on, the focus was primarily pedagogical issues and enjoyed some really solid papers on using wikis in the classroom, measuring the time commitment for online teaching, and mine, which looked at scaffolding digital learning environments. Another track I really enjoyed was one that explored genre theory in video games and community building with micro-blogging tools such as Twitter. An added bonus was that the conference was right here in Albuquerque and the weather was wonderfully cooperative (sunny, high 60s, low 70s).