Category: Technology

Cool use of Screencasting (and my own Teaching Online adventures continue)

Via Collin’s blog comes this link to Will at Weblogg-ed about giving student feedback via a screencast. For the time-being, I really just want to link to this so I can come back to it later when I start working more earnestly on my CCCCs presentation. But I guess I’ve got two thoughts for now:

  • I’m not sure I like the idea of screencasting for each student’s essay, but it’s an interesting demonstration.
  • Personally, I’m having enough problems/”challenges” just keeping up on the “basics” for my online class. I’ve whined about this before, so I’m not going to whine about it now, but I guess what I’m getting at/wondering about is the tradeoff between doing things like screencasting or podcasting versus the time it takes to make screencasts and podcasts, not to mention the learning curve.

U of M dentists beat me to my podcasting idea (but not really)

The Ann Arbor News ran a story today in the business section (of all places) titled “iPods help drill U-M students dentists: Lecture ‘podcasts’ now available.” Drill students– get it? get it? Ah, that dental humor….

Actually, this isn’t really what I’m trying to attempt with including audio in my online class, at least not exactly. I’m not even completely sure I’m doing what would be called “podcasting” because I haven’t quite figured out that part of the technology out yet, particularly the RSS stuff. I mean, I know that blogger has an audioblogging feature that is stupid easy to use: just record a message with them with a phone. The sound quality isn’t fantastic, but it is passable and I think I can set that up with RSS, but I want to do something more sophisticated than that.

Of course, the concern/worry I have is that if I build some sort of podcast outside of the class shell, I’m not convinced that my students will use it. And furthermore, I don’t know if I really need to build it outside fo the class eCollege software. As I think I mentioned earlier, I can record sound files with my iPod and a Belkin microphone, save these things as mp3s, and then simply upload them to the eCollege site. They aren’t “podcasts” in the purest sense, but hey, who cares? If they help…

… which brings me back ot the dentists. Basically, they are doing some podcasting of lectures at the U of M dental school, and you can even get them through iTunes (no, I’m not going to try to find a link to them….) The dean of the college is behind it– he says in the article that he’s on his fifth iPod.

But the thing that I thought was interesting for my purposes was this:

[Jared Van Ittersum, who was credited with heading the podcasting concept at U-M] said podcasting lectures evolved from a similar effort at the U-M Medical School, which provides low-resolution video of professors’ lectures for students to download from the Web.

But given the prevalence of the music players among students, podcasting emerged as a more mobile medium, said Trek Glowacki, an employee at the dental school’s informatics department and a student at U-M’s School of Information. Glowacki led the pilot study into whether students preferred podcasting to video. He found most picked the pod, which also involved far fewer university staff hours to deliver.

This interests me for a variety of different reasons, but besides the idea that the technology of the podcast is easier and more mobile for students, I think it is also considerably easier and more mobile for instructors as well. I could record and broadcast video of myself with eCollege, but even with the support I would get from Continuing Education at EMU to do this, it would still be an enormous pain in the ass. I mean, I’d have to go to a studio someplace, they’d have to cut the video together (or I’d have to do it, and that’d be a totally different learning curve), it would take a long time for students to download, etc., etc. Making and delievering a 10 minute mp3 file (albeit a not great sounding one) takes me a total of 20 minutes: 10 for the recording and 10 with the futzing. Not counting-retakes, of course.

A novel approach to podcasting

Now that we are more or less done with the significant unofficial project of the weekend, it’s back to work around the official blog and it’s time to wrap up some lingering textbook work and to get ready for the quickly approaching school year. My son starts third grade tomorrow; my wife starts various new faculty orientations on Wednesday; I have a department “retreat” on Thursday; I’m sure there are various meetings I haven’t remembered that I should attend next week; and classes beging at EMU on September 7.

One of the things on my mind this morning is (once again) podcasting since I’m planning on using at least a version of it for my online class this term. When I brought this up with a few of my English professor colleagues at a party earlier this summer, there was some confusion about my desire to podcast. “Can’t students just read what you write?” these colleagues asked.

Well, I think that this article, “A Novel Approach to Podcasting” in The Book Standard web site, kind of answers that question. To quote from the opening paragraph:

Scott Sigler first published his science-fiction novel EarthCore in 2001 with iPublish, an AOL/Time Warner imprint. When a promotional ebook version came out first, it hit No. 1 on Barnes & Noble’s website, and as plans to release the print version were going full steam ahead, Time Warner decided to scrap the whole imprint. After making sure he held the rights to the book, Sigler started looking for another way to get it an audience. In March, the author began podcasting a serialized version of his novel, which has now been downloaded more than 10,000 times. “When podcasting rolled around, I thought it would be a great way to release a novel,� he says. “I did a lot of research on it. There are 23 million Americans with an MP3 player, and the most popular form of radio is talk radio. So I thought, ‘This is just going to be huge.’ �

In other words: Duh! Books on tape!

This article also mentions a site called Podiobooks, which is aiming to hosts podcasts for books. There’s not much there yet– according to the Book Standard article, they have five titles: four science fiction and one business writing– but you can imagine the potential.

The beginning of the end for my iBook?

I’m a little worried about my iBook.

All of a sudden, the touchpad has started to behave badly. Sometimes it works fine, at other times it has a mind of its own. Of course, this could have something to do with my installation of OS 10.4 (though I really don’t think that’s it), and a mouse plugged into the USB port works just fine.

But I am worried that the end may be near.

It’s not entirely unexpected because this computer will be three years old in November. In my opinion, there are significant advantages to a laptop computer, but one of the disadvantages is they don’t last as long as desktop computers simply because they get abused– moved around a lot, jostled about, etc. And I should point out that this computer is really the computer in my life. Sure, I have a computer in my office at school, but I use this computer literally every single day and often for hours and hours at a time, even in my office and even though I have a perfectly fine computer on my desk there. Anyway, after three years of constant use, you’d start to get a little ratty after three years, too.

I’m not inclined to buy a computer this year, so hopefully I can get this thing to hang on for another 8 or 10 months. I’d really like it to last until the next generation of Apple laptops comes around, but I don’t know if any computer could last that long.

Thumbs up on OS 10.4 (Tiger)

I installed the new mac operating system on my laptop yesterday, 10.4. For fellow mac-folk who are still thinking about the upgrade, I give it a big thumbs up. A couple quick thoughts about it, though you can get the full and real scoop from Apple:

  • Despite the advice out there, I threw caution to the wind and didn’t do a “clean install.” I just didn’t have that kind of time or patience, so I just upgraded. Maybe I’ll need to do it right at some point, but I haven’t run into any problems yet.
  • Spotlight is cool; I’m pretty interested in learning more about what it can actually do, too.
  • The “Dashboard” widgets are really cool. In an interesting way, this seems to be Apple’s way of getting people to get away from browsers and do stuff on the ‘net through the Mac interface. I immediately downloaded widgets for accessing wikipedia, google maps, local yellow pages, local weather, television listings, movie listings, a dictionary, and several more that I’m forgetting right now.
  • Mail is pretty cool, though I haven’t quite figured out how it’s any “better” yet than the previous version, and I had preferred having my mailboxes listed on the right and not the left. There’s probably a way to change that.
  • Safari looks very promising with a built-in RSS feed reader, though I haven’t figured out how to use that yet either. And it the WordPress “quicktags” still don’t work in Safari, though there is a new version of WP I have yet to install, so maybe that’s fixed.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the $70 for the upgrade, but I’d say personally that it is.

Yahoo! versus, well, everyone?

While procrastinating, I stumbled across Yahoo’s new service/interface 360º. I don’t have that much time to goof off and look through this thing right now, but it looks like this is Yahoo’s attempt at taking on the blogging, rss-feed, photo-sharing, Facebook, Xanga, Live-Journal, and everybody else in one web site. I’m skeptical.