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.
As part of my Postgraduate Certificate I'm starting some research into what the barriers/obstacles are to the use of new technology in teaching and learning in HE. To start with I wanted clues as to which areas might be worth exploring. I also wanted a change to play with Google Moderator, as I've not had a chance yet.
Have a look at the Series that I set up and it'd be great if you could add your own suggestions to it.
If you'd like to think about using Google Moderator with your students ktotheb's video gives you an example of how it could be used, and Penn State University have written an overview.
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.
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.
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.
