Google Earth

With the new release of Google Earth (4.2) , it might be worth taking a quick look at how we might use it in teaching and learning. George Siemens argues that this is the sort of inspirational resource that educators and educational institutions should be focussing our resources on developing, rather than focusing on Learning Management Systems.

The easy place to start is looking at what people are already doing with Google Earth, whether in formal education or not.

Brian Romans started a Where on (Google)Earth? Quiz on his blog. This developed into a community effort. People try to work out where the screenshots taken in Google Earth are from. For example here is an example of a question and an answer.

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, USA is an example of an institution who have created a KMZ file which if you open will turn the campus in Google Earth into quite a complete campus map with 3D buildings, photos and annotations. You can learn about creating 3D buildings on the Google Sketchup site if that is of interest to you. Also you can add photos at panoramio.com; see the post on my experiences if you want to know more.

While there might be no reason for creating a campus map from a teaching and learning point of view, you might want to create annotations or use existing resources to bring an issue that you are covering in an academic programme to life. Google Earth Outreach has helped non-profit organisations work on this, for example those raising awareness of deforestation in the Amazon.

For more ideas, have a look at Google Earth Community discussion boards specifically the Educators discussion board.


Frank Taylors 'Google Earth Blog' is a great place to go to keep track of developments and uses for the software in the future. Subscribe to it's RSS Feed with your feed reader. If you don't have one and want to start subscribing to blogs, it is worth getting a Bloglines account.

More technical information can be found at Stefan Geens' Blog 'Ogle Earth' and at 'Google Earth Hacks'.

Sharing RSS Feeds with Bloglines

We've written quite a few posts about sharing information from RSS feeds (see RSS tagged articles) from allowing people to subscribe by email to displaying content of your feeds on your web site.

I think one of the simplest ways has been overlooked - that is creating a Bloglines account containing the feeds that you want to share, and setting the 'Show My Blogroll' option in 'Options/Blog Settings' to 'Yes, publish my Blogroll'. The NHS National electronic Library for Medicines have created a Bloglines account to do this. My own account can be seen too at http://www.bloglines.com/public/pfh.

This gives an easy way to allow people to keep track of a set of feeds by visiting your page. Alternatively they could download the OPML file containing your subscriptions (by clicking on 'Export Subscriptions') and upload it into their own Bloglines account. This would allow them to add and delete feeds to suit themselves.

If you're interested in following peoples thoughts on using technologies in teaching and learning why not download my OPML file, set up your own Bloglines account, upload the OPML file using the 'Import Subscriptions' link and delete the categories and feeds that you don't need. That's a quick way to get started building a library of RSS feeds of your own.

Producing Learning Resources on DVD

When looking at formats for resources that most students could access, DVD would probably be among them. If a module was producing a large amount of video and audio resources, I was wondering how realistic it would be to distribute them this way - or at least have this as an option when students were struggling to download resources.

We have software to burn DVDs and create simple menus - iDVD on the Macs in the LINC Building, Pinnacle Studio, Premiere Pro and Ulead's DVD MovieFactory. We've not got higher end software such as DVD Studio Pro and Adobe Encore anywhere here (as far as I can tell), so we couldn't currently create more professional looking DVDs with things like multiple language support.

The book Designing DVD Menus is available in Edge Hill Library and is a good introduction to the possibilities and challenges involved in creating DVD menus.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The Common Craft Show have released another video in their Technologies in Plain English series, this time highlighting the power of Social Bookmarking.

Click To Play

The short video, (3.25 min) focuses on Del.icio.us, and simply illustrates how to get started and why you should want to. Another really great video - which is definitely worth watching.

The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

I've been having a look at the new issue of IRRODL. This is a peer-reviewed Journal, which "aims to disseminate research, theory, and best practice in open and distance learning worldwide".

It's certainly has an international focus, for example the paper "Integrating Mobile Learning into Nomadic Education Programme in Nigeria: Issues and perspectives". This gives you a different perspective that just reading about stuff in the UK and US HE sector.

I really liked the fact that they've produced MP3 versions of the papers. These are computer generated, but good enough quality to listen to. The audio files are great because I'd never get time to read a journal like this but I've listened to a few papers in the gym this week on my MP3 player. It'd be even better if there was an RSS feed that allowed you subscribe to the MP3s as a podcast in software like iTunes, but there is a feed you can subscribe to that lets you know when each issue is released.

ccLearn: Creative Commons' Open Education Resources Project

Creative Commons is an organisation founded in 2001 with the aim of creating copyright licences that you can use to make it easy for others to share and build on your work. Some videos explaining it are available.

For example, if I has written some music that I wanted people to feel free to listen to and use in their own work (e.g. in videos) I could apply a Creative Commons licence to it. I could then make it available on a site with other music that has been given a similar licence. Examples of Creative Commons music sites are Jamendo and Magnatune.

Recently an educational division - ccLearn - has been started with the same sort of focus. It's mission is "minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers."

My hope is that this and similar projects that we could get involved with, will help us to use and develop resources that would otherwise be too difficult and time consuming to develop, by building on others work. For example the educational potential of games is very interesting (see James Paul Gee's book as a good introduction), but at Edge Hill we cannot really find the time to develop them by ourselves.

For more links and resources about open education resources, have a look at the Wikipedia OER page.

E-portfolios: Update

It's almost a year ago that I posted 'An Overview of E-portfolios' which I hoped would help us think through whether we would want to develop the use of e-portfolios, and if so how and in what areas.

Over the past year, several Academic members of staff have expressed interest in using e-portfolios - as far as I know all who talked to Learning Technology Development wanted to use a specific piece of software to do this, namely PebblePad.

Some of the interested staff had their projects funded by SOLSTICE, purchasing 12 month licences for using PebblePad so that pilots could be done - it will be interesting to see the outputs from these projects and what the staff consider was successful. I'll aim to share those on this blog.

In the 'An Overview of E-portfolios' post I also mentioned the institutional 'PDP Audit' which would affect our long term approach to e-portfolios and portfolios in general. As far as I can tell, this hasn't been completed yet. Again, when we know something we can share it here, along with how it might affect the use of e-portfolios.

Finally, if you're interested in e-portfolios, Graham Attwell (Director of the Wales based research organisation, Pontydysgu) has released a presentation called 'Eportfolio Development and Implementation' which is a good introduction to how and why e-portfolios might be used.

Using Speech Recognition Software to Help Create Accessible Resources

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.

We've just purchased a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, which transcribes audio files in several formats:

.wav
.vox
.mp3
.wma
.sri

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.

Web2.0 Explained

The Machine is Us/ing Us

This is a great video created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

The video introduces the Web 2.0 concept,("..the so-called second wave of Web-based services that enables people to network and aggregate information online"*), and highlights the impact it is having in less than 5 minutes.





*A Lesson in Viral Video, an article written by Elia Powers back in Febuary for Inside Higher Ed, gives some background to Wesch's video.

The Medieval Helpdesk

Introducing new concepts has always been difficult...technology is no different...

This is a great video illustrating this exact point:

SOLSTICE Conference 2007: One Minute Mix

This video is a one-minute encapsulation of the May 2007 SOLSTICE conference.

SOLSTICE is Edge Hill's Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. It's aim is to help develop a method of course delivery that has the use of technology integrated into it, rather than added on to it.

Using YouTube to Host Learning Objects

Some members of staff here have been talking about using video sharing sites like YouTube to host their videos, so I thought that I'd look into this a bit more so see what I could learn.

I've uploaded my 'Screencasting with Camtasia' screencasts to YouTube.

Screencasting Using Camtasia: 01 - Introduction
Screencasting Using Camtasia: 02 - Installing
Screencasting Using Camtasia: 03 - Microphones
Screencasting Using Camtasia: 04 - Starting a Recording
Screencasting Using Camtasia: 05 - After Recording
Screencasting Using Camtasia: 06 - Producing
Screencasting Using Camtasia: 07 - Tips
Screencasting Using Camtasia: 08 - Accessibilty

So, what are the benefits and drawbacks of releasing materials this way, over putting them on the streaming server?

Benefits:
-Should be no access problems because YouTube uses Flash video and almost everyone has the Flash plugin installed.
-Easy to embed the videos in your WebCT area.
-Doesn't use the limited space on the streaming server.

Drawbacks:
-Quality is almost always lower after it has been re-encoded during the upload to YouTube, although the 'What's the best format to upload for high quality?' page will give you advice on the formats to save your video in for the best results.
-YouTube seems to cut the end off my videos - you need to remember to leave a bit extra video at the end to compensate.
-Can't update videos on YouTube without uploading another version and changing the link. We can do that easily on the streaming server.

Anything else I've missed?

Screencasting Using Screencast-O-Matic.com

We use Camtasia Studio to create screencast videos, and I'm quite pleased with it. However at £80 for an educational licence it's not realistic to get licences for everyone who might just want to use it occasionaly.

CamStudio and ZDSoft's Screen Recorder have both been looked at here on Cakes as free alternatives, but the new free online service Screencast-O-Matic looks like it would be a better option for staff here to use.

Firstly it is online, meaning there are no issues getting it installed on people's computers.

Secondly it is even simpler to set up and use. You just need Java installed (the site will test this for you) and then to choose the basic settings.

I've created a quick training video if you'd like help using it - but you probably won't need help, because it is so simple. Go and have a play!

(Via)

Wikis: The Development of a Wikipedia Page

I've heard people criticise Wikipedia a lot, mainly in academic circles because staff don't like the fact Wikipedia pages get referenced by students in essays.

That's fair enough, but I find it incredibly useful as a starting point for looking into topics. Yet I've heard people sitting near me in academic conferences, go into quiet rants when it's been mentioned at the front.

John Udell has created a very interesting screencast about the development of a particular Wikipedia page. I love the way that showing the development of the page puts it in context, and I think that it would help anyone appreciate better how Wikipedia and wikis in general work and should be used.

Before you watch the screencast be aware that 'naughty words' appear on the page from time-to-time :) Wikipedia Screencast (Via: Weblogged)

Wikis in Plain English: The Common Craft Show

The Common Craft Show have released another video in their technologies in plain english series. This time they cover Wikis in their inimitable low-tech style, but you might also want to see their 'RSS in Plain English' video.

This demonstrates a visual engaging way of explaining why people might want to use different technologies. I think that if I was explaining to academic staff how these technologies work and might help their teaching and learning, these videos would be a good place to start.

Creating Screencasting Videos Using Camtasia Studio

I did the 'Creating Re-usable Learning Objects using Camtasia Studio' session today as part of the Learning Services Technology Month. A few people couldn't make it and I said I'd do a screencast version of the training.

Here is the screencast version (16 minutes) - hope it's OK! Let us know if you need any advice or have any comments about anything that's been missed.

Note that there is the free CamStudio software available for those who cannot afford Camtasia Studio, but it requires a bit more technical knowledge to use.

These videos are all in Windows Media Video (WMV) streamed format.

01. Introduction (2:14)
02. Installing the 30-Day Trial Copy (2:15)
03. Choosing a Microphone (1:00)
04. Starting a Recording (2:13)
05. After Recording (1:00)
06. Producing a Sharable File (3:11)
07. Hints and Tips (2:37)
08. Accessibility (1:16)

Organise and Protect Your Bookmarks with Zinkmo

A couple of weeks ago my PC crashed and all Firefox profiles were deleted, including bookmarks. This wasn't a massive problem in this case as I'd backed up the most important ones, but I've heard of other people who have had similar problems when using Firefox.

So I was interested when I saw Jane Hart mention Zinkmo on her blog. This is a piece of software that you install on your PC (not Mac) and it allows you to syncronise your bookmarks across multiple browsers and to access them online if you aren't on your own computer.

Now my bookmarks are the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox and accessible online - so I can't loose them again! However I noticed that the software at times runs quite slow - and other people have noted this too, so you might want to wait for the software to develop before you install it?

Free Sound Effects for your Videos: The Freesound Project

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.

You can search for effects that you need, browse the top 150 tags, browse by location and add your own.

FormLogix - Online form maker

Whilst helping my son who was frantically trying to get all his ICT coursework finished over the weekend, I came across this online form maker.

FormLogix is an online form builder tool for creating web databases and web forms. It allows forms to be built easily using a drag and drop interface and the data collected can be managed using a simple database management tool.

But the best thing about it is that it is completely free!

The forms can be embedded into a website, blog or even be emailed. It enables a user to easily create web forms and web databases such as: Contact us forms, Feedback forms, Events registration forms, Surveys, online Polls, Invitations...

We have looked at a number of survey and poll tools but I think this is by far the most sophisticated and easy to use.

Podcasts: Choosing Podcast Aggregator Software

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 subscribe to 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:

• iTunes (version 7.1.0.59)
• Democracy Player (version 0.9.5.3)
• Juice (version 2.2).

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.