I finally got to play with a Livescribe pen last night, and the possibilities of using look interesting.
The company describe it as a ‘smartpen’, and it records both what you write and the audio in the room at the same time. I’ve mainly heard people talk about students using these tools to take audio enhanced lecture notes, but the Flash based file that you can export could be used in a very similar way to some screencasts.
The pen requires special paper for it to work but you can print that for free, and you also need to install the free software on your PC or Mac.
An important question regarding this tool would be related to the ethical aspects of recording lectures and meetings. Would students have to declare that they were using one of these in a lecture? Then again some students bring other recording devices to lectures already, so perhaps there is already an expectation that these events will be recorded.
There has been some research undertaken over the last few years, about giving audio feedback to students. The 'Sounds Good' project at Leeds Met was one of the more high profile, and I've bookmarked a few other relevant links.
Online audio use now seems mainstream, and several staff at Edge Hill are giving summative feedback now by means other than text (e.g. via audio, videos of the tutor talking, screencast videos showing the piece of work). In the Learning Technologist's office, we were discussing what is required to enable any member of academic staff to feel comfortable using 'technology enhanced feedback'. Is there a really simple way of creating audio feedback that wouldn't cause difficulties to those staff least comfortable and familiar with new technologies?
Something like Vocaroo is wonderfully simple, and while I'm not sure about proposing that as the Edge Hill solution, this level of simplicity is going to be required by some people. However, the most common approach currently seems to be to borrow or buy a voice recorder, and to email the audio feedback to the student. This contains several steps, but helps ensure good quality recordings, and could be achieved in several different ways.
Sue Murrin-Bailey and Shirley Hunter-Barnett are running a SOLSTICE session which describes how and why they gave audio feedback to students, at Edge Hill on the 11th January 2010. You can book through Edge Hill University Staff Development - staffdevelopment@edgehill.ac.uk - and SOLSTICE sessions are even open to people from outside Edge Hill University, so all are welcome.
After this session, it would be good to put together some very simple, technophobe proof advice that anyone could use to do something similar. Has anyone got good ideas about how this might look, and the tools that would be required?
We often get asked to recommend digital voice recorders, and in this post I'll try and describe what the options are for affordable models. We're not going to look at the top end stuff for more professional audio recording.
When choosing a digital voice recorder for recording feedback, lectures, or other learning materials, you are probably looking for a voice recorder that:
Records in a widely used format, so that no time needs to be spent saving between formats. Currently, MP3 is widely supported on people’s computers and portable media players. WMA would probably be OK for most students too.
Allows easy export of files from the voice recorder to the PC.
Records audio at a suitable quality.
Is not going to cost too much to replace batteries.
The two main manuafacturers are Olympusand Sony. Olympus devices tend to record in WMA format and Sony in MP3 or WAV, so if you are set on one format over the other this may direct your search. MP3s will be important if you are wanting the audio files listened to on portable media devices, without you having to convert them before you distribute them. WMA files will work on the current Edge Hill University media server, if you are wanting to use that.
If you want to know the details, Olympus' offerings are divided into Notetakers (the VN and WS series) and Dictation Systems (the DS series). For the VN series you'd be looking at paying between £20 and £40, but with these you'll probably need to convert the file to the format you require. The more expensive devices like the WS (£40-£70) and DS (£90-£250) series are therefore better if you can afford them. In the past in LTD and SOLSTICE we have used DS-30 devices which cost about £85, and I've had the WS-321M (£70) recomended to me too. Sony's ICD series devices include the UX models (£80-£100) which look of interest to us, but which I've never used.
If I was to purchase more devices for academic staff to use, I'd want to spend around £100 and go for the Olympus WS-321M with an external Olympus mic like the ME-51S for office use or a ME-15 tie mic for recording lectures. The WS series seems to me to have a good balance between ease of use, quality of recording and cost. We also know from experience that the DS-30 is a good buy at around £90. If you want to record in MP3 format Sony's ICD-UX80 devices look handy, and they would ideally need an external mic too.
Has anyone else got opinions and advice on digital voice recorders?
The course that I've enjoyed looking at most has been Worlds of Wordcraft that ran at Vanderbilt. This is a first year English module exploring narrative and how it changes moving from novels, to movies or to games.
The technology used to support this course feels so well integrated into the course. Their video 'Narrative forms in the Digital Classroom' explains it well, but from the point of view of looking at these materials after the course has run through the class blog and the recordings available via iTunesU, the wide variety of technologies used, feel like they are being used as an important and relevant part of the course.
Looking at iTunesU, I was wondering what use it could be to us at Edge Hill University. Basically it's wouldn't supply us with anything that we don't already have, as it is just hosting videos and linking to your course blog or web site. I could see it being used for marketing (i.e. look we're using iTunesU), and if management saw that as a positive thing, it could bring the neccesary investment needed to record more teaching sessions.
Been at Blackboard World 08 in Manchester this week, and the food was great. There were also some sessions that I thought brought up important points for people thinking of doing similar projects. I'll try to communicate the content of one here.
Using Blackboard Technology for Student Led Podcasting and Group Assessment:
This session by Christopher Stokes and Paul Wigfield from the University of Sheffield was the story of what happened when they asked the dental students to create group presentations as audio files rather than as classroom presentations.
They were asked to create 5 minute audio files on their topic, where the whole group had to speak. They admitted that these aren't really podcasts, but that's what the students wanted to call them. Submission was by attaching the audio file to a message on the VLE's discussion board.
They gave the students little advice on recording and equipment, and were surprised to find that none of the groups came to them with technical problems. They assume that there must have been someone in all the groups who had the understanding to sort out any issues, and said that it might had been different if the assignments had been individual ones.
They also thought that recording in this format meant that the individuals in the groups worked together more, where in the past the students had split the responsibilities. For example they might have had one person creating the presentation slides for the introduction, one person putting all the slides together and one presenting in class. This was what the presenters were most pleased with.
Other important issues brought up were:
-When feedback was collected on the students' experiences they said that it was good to do this near the start of term when people had more time, meaning that it was easier to get together.
-Some students raised concerns that the assignment was crossing over in to their personal/informal spaces (e.g. Garageband software that they usually use to make their own music rather than University work) and later on when students were offered the audio files as a podcast, they weren't interested in subscribing to it with iTunes for similar reasons. Their MP3 players are seen as being for music and not University stuff. It would be useful to find research or undertake research around these student perceptions of informal online spaces.
-Accessibility. Will Deaf or hard of hearing students be able to participate fully in creation and peer review? Do students need to produce transcripts?
-Students awareness of copyright issues. Home made music is OK, but if some use commercial music are you going to refuse to accept their assignment?
Lots of people are still confused about what podcasting is, and why they should care.
Common Craft are always worth a look when you need technologies explaining to you in a simple way, and they've got round to creating a video about using podcasts. While the best way to get your head round it is to subscribe to some podcasts, this video will introduce some of the concepts to you.
Probably the easiest way to get started consuming podcasts is to install iTunes on your computer, and search the podcast area of their store for podcasts on subjects that you are interested in.
Ask your students if they use podcasts. If they do perhaps you can start a podcast on a subject that you are an expert on, and share it with them and other people around the world? Perhaps you can encourage students to create their own as part of their learning.
Just listening to/watching podcasts alone is unlikely to result in deep learning, but it is a way of getting an introduction to subjects and discussions that are going on around subjects. Personally I listen to them while I'm travelling, doing housework, and in other situations where I might be bored and am glad of something to think about. So for me, well made podcasts are a free and welcome way of learning the basics about a subject, without the pain.
Often Learning Technolgists move into education with a background in technology but not educational theories. For those of with that background Dan Campbell's bi-weekly Learning Theory podcast might be a useful introduction. It is in the form of monologues which isn't as engaging as conversations, but it is very concise and as it is audio you can listen on the way to work, walking round the supermarket or whatever.
It might give you a skeleton of understanding about learning theories and thinkers that will help you explore, and that you can build upon.
Learning Services has been asked several times about how to reference online audio files and podcasts. I guess students are wanting to reference interviews and conversations that are being increasingly made available as audio online.
Looking at what other institutions recommend, Coventry University's 'Harvard Reference Style Guide' advises to "reference the broadcast in the normal way but then add all the information to enable your reader [to] locate this source online".
Full web address of the audio file starting with <>
Date of access in square brackets
The document ‘Citing and Referencing Guide: Harvard Style’ from Imperial College, London gives similar guidelines, but also adds that the access date should include the time and timezone that the file was accessed down to the second. For example. [Accessed 2nd October 2007. GMT 18:11:06]
For a standalone audio file that is not part of a podcast, I would recommend changing the Podcast name to the person who is speaking or organisation who published it.
Obviously this would be adjusted a little to fit our guidelines, but what do people think?
I think that the addition of the time accessed down to the second is important with many of the new Web technologies, as they can be changed on a very regular basis. For example Wikis which usually give you the ability to see how a document looked at any specific date and time. Audio and video files are more difficult to change, so would probably go through less changes, but some podcasts still re-edit and re-post episodes (e.g. GeekBrief).
This service allows you to upload a file (be it .txt, .pdf, .doc or .html) and it converts the file to .mp3 for you. The voices are OK, but it's the small things that are the best part about the service. You are provided with an RSS feed, meaning that every document that you convert becomes part of a podcast. You can subscribe to this in iTunes for example, and that will sync to your iPod if you use one.
Also there is a Firefox extension for it. Install the extension and you get a tool bar.
Select text in the web page that you are viewing, click the 'Record Selected Text' link, and it will add an audio version of the text to your podcast feed.
Using the Firefox extension and the RSS feed make this a very easy way of keeping consuming textual materials on your portable media player while you are on the move. It is free at the moment, but if you'd like to help the development of the service they are asking for donations to help pay for better voices.
And let us know how useful you find these tutorials and if you think there is anything missing - if there is a demand for it, we'll try and develop our own.
I've looked at two pieces of software that can create audio files from text files. NaturalSoft's NaturalReader, and TextAloudfrom nextup.com. It's difficult to compare them completely as NaturalReader doesn't give you a full demo, while TextAloud does, but I can compare:
Quality of voices: Both let you use high quality voices (e.g. AT&T NaturalVoices, VoiceWare's NeoSpeech) which we'd need to use, and both allow you to change the speed of the speech in the recording. NaturalReader allows you to choose which voices you have, including UK English which is nice.
Import Function: Both allow you to import text, PDF, Word and HTML files to convert to audio.
Cost: NaturalReader Professional Basic costs about $40 (£20), including a high quality natural voice, and NaturalReader Enterprise Basic costs $80 (£40) for 4 voices and a batch conversion function. Important if we were going to use it a lot.
TextAloud would cost $55 (£28) with 2 high quality voices.
So really there is not a lot between them as far as I can see. I'd like to test the NaturalReader Professional as this looks best value. If it was used a lot we would perhaps need the NaturalReader Enterprise. There is also a Developer version that can other applications can call on the command line to convert and batch convert files. This would be useful if we tried to put together an automated system, where perhaps staff could send in a text file and automatically receive an audio version back.
We're having more and more people using video and audio files in WebCT. There have been a few issues with student computers reacting differently, and the files not working for some.
The methods of distributing video and audio that seem to work for all students are:
1: Put the file on the streaming server. You'll need to speak to the Learning Technology Development officer that works with your faculty. This is the best solution for video files as they are large, and there is limited space on the WebCT server.
2: Add the file as an attachment in a discussion message. The students can download the file from there and listen to it on their computer or portable media player.
3: Add the file to a .zip file (in Windows right click the file and select 'Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder) and make the file available from an Organiser Page, for example the Homepage. Putting the file in a .zip file means that WebCT won't get confused by the settings on different computers, and will allow the student to download the file before trying to run it.
4: If you don't mind (or like the idea of) files that you've created being available publicly, you could host video files on a video sharing site (e.g. YouTube) and link to them from WebCT. For example Professor Alexandra Juhasz of Pitzer College is using YouTube as a central part of one of her modules.
A group from Lancashire County Council came this month to learn about new technologies that they could use in their work. As I was asked to do a session on blogs and podcasts, but as I was at ALT-C I recorded a screencast of the presentation for them, and then left some tasks for them to do.
This might be of interest to someone as an introduction to the technologies. I'd like to develop it further as a staff development session, but I'm not sure that most of the academic staff here really want to create podcasts. I'm even less sure that the students want to subscribe to them on a large scale. It might be better to develop staff development sessions about on-line audio and include podcasting as a small section of that.
Well it's OK going to a conference and hearing people speak... but how had that affected the way I intend to go about my role as a Learning Technologist?
What we using the potential of the technology for?
I think I've had time to reflect on how we work while at the conference - helped by talking to people in similar role. I see a clearer distinction between the work we do enabling administration using technology, and the work we do enabling learning using technology. I think that is an important distinction to use when talking with academic staff and will help us and academic staff keep away from investing all our time in what is really administrative work. Examples would be putting course booklets online, or using discussion tools for announcements. Even uploading learning resources that would otherwise be photocopied and handed out in class is using the technology for administration, rather than using it's power to aid learning in a way that photocopied documents couldn't.
Formative Feedback
Partly because it is part of the focus of my SOLSTICE research I noticed a lot about formative feedback, both the importance of it and potential ways of using computers to assist with this. I want to do a bit more thinking and reading in this area and then perhaps work with some staff creating learning objects. These might involve creating complex multiple choice questions for use in sessions with voting software, and for use on the VLE. It might involve games that give immediate feedback on actions, like the Traveller IQ Challenge game on Facebook.
Recording Lectures
Regarding recording lectures, I can better see that there is a definite limit to the amount of lectures we can really manage the recording of manually. If the institution wants to record all, or most lectures we'll need a automatic lecture recording system like Lectopia. I'm not sure of my opinions on the benefit of recording all lectures, but it has certainly been beneficial to record some, from an accessibility point of view.
Don't Be Scared!
Talking to people and listening to presentations, I feel a lot more comfortable about trying things on Mobile devices and in Second Life. Small projects might not be as time consuming in development and student support terms as I had thought.
It was well worth attending a conference to help me move these and other projects forward a bit. I hope next year I can perhaps present, and put a little more into the pot of ideas, as it were.
Online Audio and Podcasting Charlynn Miller and Leon Newnham from the University of Ballarat spoke about a project they had been doing related to online audio. This project involved incorporating a 5-8 minute audio recording into the Business Information Systems programme each week. This recording would cover what was to be learned that week and contain a FAQ section.
At the end of week 7, students completed a survey that they were given and it was found that 97% used the audio files and 90% said that they made the lectures easier to understand. From the server stats it looked like perhaps half the students were using the RSS feeds, although they weren't asked directly about this.
Someone from RMIT University spoke about a larger scale project where the audio from lectures were recorded by 6 lecturers in 7 subjects, covering 2100 students.
Their process involved the lectures having voice recorders, recording the lectures, and sending the .wav files to the technical team. The files were then converted to mp3s and made available both via the Blackboard VLE for download and via a podcast.
It was found that 51% of students used the files. Of these only 4% used the podcast feed, 14% downloaded files to Personal Media Players, and 71% downloaded the files to off campus PCs.
43% of students who used the files did so becasue they had missed a lecture, 34% to revise for exams and 23% to review a lecture after class. Interestingly 10% seemed to struggle with the sound quality, and there were issues surrounding the time it took the technical staff to edit the files, sort problems with lost equipment and low batteries... all stuff that we faced when we did something similar (see link)
They are currently looking at the Lectopia (now Echo360) system as something that will be more scalable that that time intensive manual system. I think that if we wanted to record a lot of lectures, we would have to use something similar.
Relating these presentations to us in other ways, it seems that students aren't using RSS feeds to syncronise media files with their portable media players. Perhaps more would if they had a good few podcasts to subscribe to - both produced in the institution and elsewhere?
Introduction to CMALT: Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology CMALT is a scheme to enable professional accreditation for Learning Technologists. It involves a peer-reviewed portfolio of your learning technology related work being submitted, and if it meets their standards you gain accreditation.
This seems straight forward, and it is advised that the process of putting the portfolio together should take about 6-9 hours and be about 8 sides of A4 with hyperlinks.
The cost is quite high though. £95 for each attempted submission and you will be required to pay £80 per year for Certified Membership of ALT. That's where it lost me, otherwise I'd be saying that all the LTD team should go for it and Edge Hill should pay the £95. Perhaps if I start looking for work elsewhere, it might be useful to be a Certified Member of ALT though.
All in all I'm glad I've been to the sessions that Ive been to, but part of the benefit of coming to a conference like this is that you get inspired by the people around you and think of ways to move forward projects that you are already working on. That's definately happened here.
We've been working on creating more audio and video resources recently, and we've wanted to develop a process to allow us easily and quickly create transcriptions of them.
Transcriptions, we think, would be a step towards helping make resources accessible for all potential users. Not only that but it's nice to have a transcription so people can scan the contents to see if they want to spend time watching a video.
This is suitable for us as the software we are using for creating video (Premiere Pro 1.5) and screencasts (Camtasia Studio 3) both allow export of the audio as .wav files.
To test it I transcribed a short (134 second) video manually. This contained 391 words and took me about 20 minutes to transcribe (without any special transcription software or peddles).
Dragon transcribed this (before I trained it to recognise my voice) and it got 296 words right. After 30 minutes general training it got 308 words correct, and adding special words that I used in the videos but which weren't in Dragon's vocabulary pushed that to 311 words.
To correct this final file took about 10 minutes, indicating that this way of creating transcriptions would half the time it has been taking me to create transcriptions.
Spending 30 minutes training Dragon to recognise my voice raised the accuracy from 76% to 80%, which doesn't sound like much but I think would be worth asking staff to train Dragon if they were creating a lot of resources that were to be transcribed.
In conclusion, this doesn't look like it will make transcriptions almost automatic, and that would be important if we were to transcribe everything. However it will help us create transcriptions when we want to.
Looking online at transcription services, they charge from about £0.60 per minute for 1-2 speakers to £1.25 per minute for 5 or more speakers. Outsourcing to these services might be a good solution if we have too much work in this area.
When creating video and audio, you often need access to sound effects - but a complete library can work out as very expensive if you aren't earning money from your videos.
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge library of sound effects available under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus licence. This means that you just have to recognise the author or owner of the work in your work, and the Freesound site makes it easy to put this information on a page that can be linked to.
I'm trying to write a document to introduce staff to Podcasting and it's possibilities for use in education. Over the next few weeks I'm going to write some posts covering various topics relating to podcasting - before developing them further and putting them together in an easy to distribute document.
If you want to subscribeto a podcast you need software that automatically downloads new episodes of podcasts that you have subscribed to. This is often called podcast 'aggregator' software, but you might hear 'podcatcher' software too. There are dozens to choose from, but for this post I've looked at 3 popular ones:
If you cannot install software on your work computer, or if you use many different computers at your library - you can use a web based service like Bloglines to subscribe, just as you would if you subscribe to blogs. This allows you to access your subscriptions from anywhere. It doesn't download the files in the background like aggregator software, but it will help you keep track of when new episodes are released.
All the pieces of software have different functions, so you need to choose one that fits in with the way you want to use the podcast files that are downloaded. I have a Samsung MP3 player (512MB) that I listen to audio on and I watch the videos at my PC, so I need a piece of software that organises the files and that makes it easy to copy files into my MP3 player.
While many features are standard between all the choices, the list below details the important functionality that varies:
Lets me copy and paste files from it's interface, directly into my MP3 player: iTunes
Allows organisation of podcasts into folders (useful if you are subscribed to many): Democracy, Bloglines
Keeps track of the number of unwatched files from each podcast (again useful if you are subscribed to many: Democracy, Bloglines
Allows import and export of OPML files for transfer or backup: iTunes, Juice, Bloglines
Web Based: Bloglines
While iTunes doesn't offer the functionality to organise large number of podcasts, it does everything else well, and I'd recomend this to someone getting started subscribing to podcasts, especially if they own an iPod. Democracy Player is still very new, but looks like it could offer iTunes some competition in the future.
This Semester (Spring 2007) I’ve been working with Deborah Chirrey in the English and History department to record her LNG2104: Analysing Discourse lectures. We recorded them because there was a student in the group who was hard of hearing, and it was thought that she would benefit from being able to listen again to anything that she missed in class.
The lectures were recorded using one of our Olympus DS-2 voice recorders and an attached clip mic. Deborah would return the recorder after each lecture, and I would edit it and save it as an MP3 using the free WavePad software. I’d then upload it to a new ClickCaster podcast that I’d created. The process of editing and uploading took about 10 minutes per lecture.
ClickCaster is an online service that hosts your files, automatically creates feeds for you and keeps tracks of how many subscriptions and views each episode has had. These are publicly available but I decided that no-one who wasn’t on the course would search for LNG2104, and therefore the benefits outweighed the potential issues.
This week I interviewed the student for whom the recordings had been made, to get an understanding of how she used the recordings:
She said that the recordings had been useful for her and she used them every week unless she was too busy with assignments. She had a facilitator taking notes in the lecture, but the recordings still helped.
She listened at her computer (and didn’t have and MP3 player anyway), and was happy listening this way.
I asked her if she would have subscribed to the podcast if she’d known how, and she said that would have made things easier for her, but it wasn’t a problem going looking for new episodes.
Transcripts would have been very useful for her.
So in conclusion:
Positives: Helped student when she missed something in the lecture. Quick to set up. RSS feed available.
Negatives: Recordings and feeds potentially publicly available – might this be an issue for some staff?
To do in the future: Create training for students on how to subscribe to podcasts. Look at transcribing recordings with Dragon NS Pro.
I’ve been involved with a couple of projects recording lectures to make them available online for students. I’ll make some posts as overviews of what we’ve done in the projects, what I feel we learned and how this might feed into future research.
The first project in the 2005/06 year was for Rob Spence’s LIT1000 class. He wanted to see if recording the lectures and making them available online was useful for the students. We made then available in WebCT as files to download or to stream online, as shown in the screenshot below.
I like that the students had a choice about how they could access the materials, but it did take me perhaps 40-50 minutes a week once I’d received the files to get them all online. This wouldn’t be scalable if more than a couple of people were recording lectures each week, so I talked with Rob about him putting the files online himself. We came across issues that prevented this. These included Rob’s PC not really being powerful enough to be converting and editing large audio files and time issues for him.
We didn’t do any organised research on the students’ use of those lectures, and because we housed them in WebCT there were no stats of their use. Robs conversations with individual students suggested to him that they were used, but not that much. He is talking about recording audio materials to support lectures in the future, rather than recording the lectures themselves.
So in conclusion:
Positives: Easy access to resources.
Negatives: Time consuming to prepare. Not widely used. Unsure of educational benefit.
To do in the future: Explore how audio might be used to support learning in other ways than just recording lectures.
