Podcasting in 10 Minutes

I gave a presentation today entitled "Podcasting in 10 Minutes". I spoke very briefly about podcasting, describing exactly what it is and how it works, and then I demonstrated how to create a podcast using audacity. Although the slides are meant to accompany the presentation, I am posting them here in case they will be of interest to anybody.

Selecting the Right Technology Vendor

One of the many challenges for cultural institutions in implementing technology well is knowing how best to approach outside vendors. This document by the NPower Network provides some excellent evaluation tools that are aimed at helping non-profit organizations select and implement vendor technology. NPower offers a seven step model that covers the entire process of implementing vendor technology, from determining organizational needs through to maintaining an implementation. They also offer guidelines on developing a weighted vendor evaluation matrix, which is an excellent tool to have in hand when evaluating competing technologies.

smARThistory blog: effective podcasting and vodcasting

Art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker have an incredible art history blog that features highly effective podcasts and vodcasts. It is easy to identify what makes this a very high quality blog: content. The authors are very knowledgeable and entertaining on the subject of art history. Their podcast on Cezanne (Cezanne Still Life at MoMA) is informative and provocative at the same time, owing to Beth Harris's avowed lack of admiration for Cezanne. Their VODcast on Manet's Olympia is simple (it consists of a still of the painting with a voiceover by Harris and Zucker discussing the work), yet highly effective.

This site is a model for museums and art galleries who would like to use podcasts and vodcasts to feature content from their collections. Those who know me have heard me say (many, many times) within the context of digital cultural heritage that technology is easy -- using it well is the real challenge. The simple effectiveness that Harris and Zucker have employed in their use of technology to power their blog is an example of the effective use of technology to convey a message about cultural artifacts.

Podcast Media Player

I came across this fantastic podcast media player at Podcast Pickle that you can add to your web site for free. You even get to choose the background colour. A very nice feature of this service is that Podcast Pickle also indexes podcasts. I will be adding this feature soon as I am currently working on a podcasting concept which I hope to launch soon.

Using Technology to Facilitate Ongoing Assessment and Feedback

Professor Ilona Kletskin of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology demonstrated how she uses WebCT to obtain feedback on the course on a weekly basis, and MapleTA to provide feedback to students. The polling feature of WebCT is used to obtain feedback; MapleTA allows an instructor to create very sophisticated self-assessment quizzes. These quizzes allow for algorithmic questions (with the algorithms defined by the instructor). MapleTA also provides question banks, and text book publishers are following suit.

The emphasis of the talk was very much on obtaining feedback on a course using any means available -- not necessarily WebCT – throughout that course offering.

I will post the powerpoint from this presentation as soon as it becomes available.

Using Technology to Teach First Year Science

Professor Bob Burk of Carleton University authored the first complete course delivered via vodcast certainly in Canada and perhaps in the world. This was an incredibly engaging session not only because Professor Burk is an innovative instructor, but because he has clear indicators of the success of his approach. He identified – at the very start of his presentation – that everything that he is doing in terms of VOD and vodcasting is possible because his lectures are being captured for CUTV (Carleton’s tv network). Once captured, the video can be encoded for VOD or vodcasts.

I will post a link to the presentation once it is available.

The Emotionally Intelligent Professor - Keynote Presentation

The presenter, Dr. Michael Rock, is a licensed EQ-Coach and Facilitator, teaches at Seneca College and the University of Guelph, and consults to private companies. Dr. Rock spoke about the application of EQ principles to a leadership context. He drew upon the 15 principles of EQ and focused on interpersonal skills and how one deals with others. Dr. Rock identified important characteristics of effective leaders, and provided many examples from his classroom and his consulting practice.

I will link to the presentation when it becomes available.

Efective Writing: An Online Approach to Writing Instruction

Feb. 22, 2006

Facilitator: Jill Singleton-Jackson, University of Windsor

The online course Effective Writing is an alternative to the traditional approach to writing instructions. They use CourseCompass to give this course exclusively online. They tried the blended approach but didn't work well because the student were not minded to traditional course; they were more engaged online!

I will link to his powerpoint presentation as soon as it becomes available.

Building a Better Web for our Students: The Open Source Software potential for courseware

Feb. 21, 2006

Facilitator: Marc Tyrrell, Carleton University.

I was very desappointed by this presentation because they tried to create a course with Moodle and it took 30 minutes instead of 2 minutes... Anyway they use this tool to teach Anthropology at Carleton University. His "3 laws of courseware" are:

• all courseware is not equal
• if it works...use it!
• know what you are teaching

Creating an Interactive Learning Environment with Blackboard

Feb. 21, 2006

Facilitators: Rudi Aksim, Gail Allan, Anne Marie Mackey, Nan Lowe, Kimya Keyhan Rodger, Glenda Montgomery.

By a case study facilitators showed how the use of Blackboard had increase communication and student engagement. They use Blackboard to support face2face training for 4000 students.

Case Study: Pharmacology Nursing Course: students and teachers use this tool in a specific project called "Families". The students create the healt profile for each member of the family; the teacher ask them some questions (eg. what kind of drug would you give to your familiy member who has heart problem?); student do reaserch and share result with all so student and teacher interact. Very engaging!

I will link to his powerpoint presentation as soon as it becomes available.

Educational Community in the Classroom: Using Layers of Technology and an Integrated Team Approach to Enhance Student Communication and Engagement in

Presenters: Tim Pychyl, Flavia Renon & Chris Motz of Carleton University

This seminar described how a team approach to enhancing student communication and engagement was successfully employed in a large class at Carleton. The layers of technology approach involved using various technologies from powerpoint to streaming video to present different pieces of information.

This was an incredibly rich presentation that described a very complex, but ultimately successful implementation of a psychology course at Carleton. One of the many interesting pieces of information that was conveyed in the presentation was the existence of Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education in the United States. We were told that efforts are currently underway for a Canadian version.

I will post a link to this presentation when it becomes available.

Multimedia Stimulates Classroom Learning by Connecting Students and Teachers

Professor Daniel D. Lefebvre of Queen’s University delivered a demonstration of how he uses a variety of multimedia tools to deliver his Biology courses. This was an excellent example of the importance of content over technology. Professor Lefebvre makes heavy use of powerpoint, rather than using higher end multimedia tools. From his analysis of feedback on his courses, short videos are by far the most effective multimedia means to convey information.

I will link to his presentation as soon as it become available. Unfortunately some of the material in this presentation was proprietary and will not be available.

Collaborative Online Knowledge Construction via Web-Based Application Sharing

Professor Geoffrey Roulet of Queen’s University (Faculty of Education) delivered a presentation on his experience using what he calls intellectual support software in the delivery of mixed mode (f2f & distance education) courses at Queen’s. He is using a piece of software called “Elluminate Live!” This allows VoIP, text messaging and even video. It supports multiple users and has a nice white board feature for collaborative work. Other features are polling and “hand raising”. According to Professor Roulet, Elluminate Live’s most powerful feature is application sharing. He very effectively demonstrated just how powerful and flexible a feature this is.

I will link to his powerpoint presentation as soon as it becomes available.

Podcasting and Vodcasting

Patrick Lyons of the instructional technology unit and Timothy Pychyl of the Psychology department, both at Carleton University, gave a very informative overview of podcasting and vodcasting. The session provided information on how to create a podcast and vodcast. Although they did not provide a demonstration, their overview was very informative.

I will post a link to their presentation as soon as it is available.

Educational Technology Conference Day 1: Opening Address

Dr. John Mitterer from Brock University delivered the keynote presentation to kick off the conference. Professor Mitterer delivered a very engaging and informative keynote presentation in which he focused on the effective use of technology in university teaching. He identified four goals for his talk:

To frame teaching as form of communication
Focus on pedagogy
Contextualize technology in service of pedagogy
Not tools themselves, but way that we use them. Rhetoric of media/tool use

He provide a five step process to getting up to speed in terms of teaching effectively with technology which I think could be taken at an institutional level as well as an individual teacher/professor level:

Theorize your teaching as a form of communication
Articulate your pedagogical stance
Reflect on the technologies/tools/media available to you
Develop a rhetoric of your technologies
Relax. Try it and refine it.

My notes are posted here, but I have not attempted to recreate the lecture. I will link to Professor Mitterer’s powerpoint as soon as he posts it. There were some real gems in this address. Something that really interested me, was Professor Mitterer’s depiction of the computer is a “metamachine” or “metamedium”. The example he gave was that the computer is actually an e-mailing maching, word processing machine, presentation machine, etc. The computer is such that one can essentially transform a computer into these different machines. It is essentially a machine for making machines. That is why it is not like chalk. Chalk has a fixed number of uses. Anything that can be thought of precisely enough, can be modeled using a computer.

Educational Technology Conference at Carleton University

For the next two days, I will be at Carleton University right here in Ottawa attending a national conference on educational technologies. The theme of the conference is "Effective Communication with our Students". The potential application of this theme to a museum or cultural context is obvious. I am looking forward to the workshops, which feature many case studies and applied examples of emerging technologies in the classroom.

I will be taking my laptop, and if there is a wireless connection, I will blog from the conference.

Attention PHPers: Free PDF Generator

From the web site: "FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP, that is to say without using the PDFlib library. The advantage is that PDFlib requires a fee for a commercial usage. F from FPDF stands for Free: you may use it for any kind of usage and modify it to suit your needs."

Six Steps to Faster J2EE Apps: Performance Tuning with JSP and Servlets

Java(TM) Boutique - Six Steps to Faster J2EE Apps: Performance Tuning with JSP and Servlets

Interesting article on performance turning JSP and Servlets.

OS Visio Alternative: Network Notepad Homepage

I'm looking for an open source alternative to Visio and came across the Network Notepad Homepage. This is a freeware program that looks promising.

Charting Tool (.net)

Here is a very interesting tool that generates charts from DBs on the fly.
This was designed for the .net environment.

http://www.dotnetcharting.com/home.aspx