PennEduTech

Some companies go beyond the norm when they produce tutorials for their products.  More than just basic how-to information, some tutorials provide suggestions for applications and instructions for how to accomplish specific tasks using their products.  Apple Computer is particularly good at this, and their “Productivity Lab” section of the science website offers short videos that suggest an application for their software and then walk you through the process.

The tutorial on “Creating Enhanced Podcasts of Your Research” at http://www.apple.com/science/productivitylab/ is a prime example of this.  More than just showing you how to publicize your research, it provides 10 minutes of detailed instructions on how to create an enhanced podcast.  I could envision this being used in any number of ways in education – from instructors creating such podcasts to deliver mini-lectures that are available to their students on demand, to instructors using this tutorial as a tool when assigning students a project where they create the enhanced podcast.  The students’ podcasts could take their classmates through the details or concordant material related to a text or historical event, or could describe a scientific experiment or debate in history or even in the current journals.  The possibilities seem endless, and we’d be happy to work with any instructors who are interested in pursuing this.

If you know of other good tutorials like this one, please share them via the comments!

Well, this isn’t really a live “report from the symposium”, but it just ended last night, so it’s fresh in my mind!  The Symposium offered a variety of interesting sessions, an it was a great way to learn about other schools’ projects and ‘meet’ others in SecondLife without having to spend money on travel.  More about the SecondLife aspect below, but first I want to talk about 2 sessions that offered content of interest to readers of this blog.

First, Anu Vedantham and Peter Decherney represented Penn admirably with their presentation “Mashup Video Projects for Classroom Creativity”  This ties in with Anu’s most recent post here about the Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards, but the presentation also covered ideas and tips for how to incorporate mashup video projects into courses not directly related to film.  Peter also generated a lot of interest with his part of this well-attended presentation, discussing copyright and related issues in mashups.  I encourage you to check the link above for more information about this great presentation.

The other session that I thought provided a lot of information that would be of interest to readers of this blog was the one titled “Your Video Projects Suck, but That’s OK ’cause So Do Your Papers: Moderating Student Expectations When Teaching New Media” by Jared Bendis of Case Western Reserve.  Anyone who has ever been to an NMC event knows that Jared is always a popular speaker, and this was no exception.  But this time he had a lot of practical tips for instructors who are assigning video projects to students who have never done any such thing before.  Of course he recommended the usual things like having several smaller “due dates” for storyboards, etc. before the completed project is due.  But he also pointed out that the “type A personalities” often end up with incomplete masterpieces, while the “slackers” set realistic expectations and often get the assignment finished with respectable work.  He also had a very interesting perspective on getting signed releases:  everyone must sign a release, including people who appear in a video and the student making the video, because the university has no control over where the video might be posted or shared after it’s submitted.

You can see the rest of Jared’s tips and some good sample videos of what to do and what not to do at http://fc.case.edu/newmedia/video/  The release form that he uses is linked in the middle of that page.

Also, a video of each session will be posted at http://www.nmc.org/2009-nml-symposium/program by March 30th if you’d like to watch it.

Now a word about SecondLife:  I had played with SecondLife briefly, but this was the first time that I ever attended a scheduled event, or even spent more than 10 minutes at a time in this virtual world.  The software has definitely become more stable since I last used it a year ago, but I did have it crash once, when I was attending a session where a video was being shown on a “screen” in SL.  And I use a computer that’s less than a year old and has a lot of RAM.  Other than that, I had a very positive experience.  I admit that I was a skeptic going in, but that’s why I wanted to register for this conference.  And it really was more engaging to watch an avatar on the screen give a talk, and be able to move around the room or change views, than it is to watch a ‘talking head’ in a rectangle of video for the same amount of time.  And I only embarrassed myself once, when I arrived at the “room” and had my avatar sit in what appeared to be an empty seat – but it turned out that the video world hadn’t fully loaded on my screen, and I was sitting on someone’s lap!  But the person was gracious, we both had a good laugh, and I ‘met’ someone I might not have.  

So that’s my report ‘from the field’.  Please let me know if I can answer any questions about it.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) is hosting an online symposium March 24-26, 2009 that looks like it will be very good:

I’m particularly interested in this symposium because it will address “new literacies; and any technology or practice that shows promise for engaging students and supporting teaching and learning using new media”.  NMC events are always very interesting and helpful, and this one is online so you don’t have to travel or disrupt your schedule to attend.  The registration isn’t free, but it’s a lot less expensive than most in-person conferences.  

Check it out at http://www.nmc.org/2009-nml-symposium 

Once the session topics are listed, if you’d like to attend one of them by looking over my shoulder, just let me know and I’ll reserve a room with a large screen and speakers where we can watch together.

Hope to “see” you there!

Talking anyone through using new software can be difficult.  Even explaining the nuances of using an unfamiliar tool or feature in a familiar software package can be difficult unless you’re sitting right next to the person, and one demonstration may not be enough to make a complicated series of clicks and settings “stick” in the other person’s memory.  

In cases like this, pre-recording a short computer demonstration may be the solution.  Using software for PC or Mac, you can create a click-by-click “screen movie” of the demonstration, and add audio narration and/or text captions.  We’ve found this to be very helpful in efficiently disseminating training to users, and we can imagine a wide variety of ways that faculty might use the tool to help their students use applications.

When you’re creating these demos, try to imagine that you haven’t used this particular tool or technique before.  Pause after each click to give the viewer a few seconds to take in what has changed on the page, or any other result of the click.  Point out any significant things to notice or options when you do the narration or text captions.  If you’re taking the viewers through a web page, read out the web address so it’s perfectly clear and there are no confusions between “ell” and “one”, for example.  

In Multi-Media Services’ Resource Room, the software to create screen demonstrations is available on PC and on Mac, and you have access to all of the software that is installed in labs.  Please see their website at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/mms/mmr for details.  If you’d like more tips about how to do this, just contact Elizabeth Scheyder in SAS Computing.

Penn Libraries recently announced a cool new way to explore the image collection at the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library. Here is a Michelangelo Slideshow I made in a few seconds – click the blue arrow at top to start. The CoolIris 3D software may require a plug-in download. You can create a rich browsing experience for images that you choose to include.

To make this show, I started at the image collection page, chose Michelangelo from the Artist box at right and narrowed my search to records with digital images. You can make slideshows for a particular class session and email your students the link, or use PennTags to collect them for later use. The collection also has more than 100,000 high-resolution images you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. I also foresee uses in conference presentations.

Blackboards’s Wiki

I have found that wikis can provide students and teachers with a number of ways to collaborate with each other on written documents. A wiki is frequently an article that has been created, edited and developed by several authors over an extended or limited period of time. One of the prime examples of using a wiki in this way are the articles collaborated on by countless authors in wikipedia.org.  Authors can add information to a text but also edit incorrect information. Most recently, a friend of mine discovered in wikipedia.org an article about the streets of Philadelphia an inaccuracy pertaining to the direction of the numbered and named street. The author supplying the incorrect information wrote that the numbered streets of the city ran in an east-west direction and the named streets ran in a north-south direction. Owing to the nature of the wiki, my friend was able to open the text online, edit it and correct the error, so that the information on the directions of the named and numbered streets was factual and true.

My point with the above example is that students like my friend are able with wikis to engage with texts in a way that actively involves them with vetting, checking, and commenting on the information they read or write. Writing with a wiki can encourage a critical eye for style as well as for the careful construction and veracity of information provided.

Collaboration can take the form of many different scenarios in a wiki, i.e., individual students can collaborate with a large number of students, e.g. with the all members of a particular  class or in much smaller groups involving only pairs. Last year in one wiki project from my German 101 class, each of my students collaborated with me as the instructor (and not with each other) on an extended writing assignment. Each student had their own personal wiki in which they wrote an essay about their reactions to the characters and action in a film based on a novel by Heinrich Böll entitled “Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum.” Basically, my part in the collaboration involved providing each individual student with feedback and suggestions for correcting mistakes and improving the structure and content of their essays, which I did within the wiki environment. This project extended over a period of five weeks and as a result students produced texts with content and grammatical structures that surpassed those in both quality and quantity from my classes in previous years. Research would be needed to adequately explain the reasons for the students’ performance in the wiki but it is clear that the wiki created a different kind of learning environment that was more interactive then more traditional ways of essay writing where students hand-in hard copy versions of their work that the instructor corrects and later returns with hand-written comments. In one instance, a student using the wiki had edited and revised her text 24 times over the 5 week period. I was able to see her revisions by tracing the development of her essay in the “history” which is a feature in the wiki application.

The ongoing feedback and also the fact that the students could read each other’s texts online produced for each student an audience for their writing that may easily have had a motivating effect to write texts, in which students tried harder to accurately communicate their ideas to me and to each other. Ultimately, I believe the wiki environment helped the students to be more conscious of their writing and to focus more on the task of writing as a communicative one.

In subsequent entries to this forum, I will describe other uses for wikis for teaching and learning.