Audio Feedback (@jisc_rsc_se)

Live notes from the session:

Information is on the Moodle site.
Research that has been done is wholly positive about the effects of audio feedback.

Portsmouth University. Find it personable, absorb information in different ways (skim read otherwise), listen to it on mobile devices on the move, shareable, can go through feedback in tutorials/agree targets.

Negatives seem to be all from the tutors side – about getting on board. Ultimately should be saving you time in the long run… Where it has been embedded evidence is that it saves time.

Negatives from students – some felt tutor was ‘cheating,, not a replacement, no visuals, can be too personal for comfort, can’t answer back/engage in dialogue. Some thought the novelty helped with success.

Range of tools that can be used for audio feedback. MP3 recorders (£8-20), record to iPhone (add http://www.ipadio.com/… A bit like audioboo). Particularly good for formative assessment. Screenr and Jing also useful. Example of staff member who does feedback into the device in class and then bluetooths it to student phones in class.

No eportfolio system? Try Posterous? [issues with privacy?]

Also podcasts useful, so e.g. Mike into an iPod. Recorded – placed into iTunes – so then becomes public data. Look at small microphones (£2ish – usually adequate).

Material will be on: http://www.jiscrsc.ac.uk/southeast/courses-and-resources/moodle-courses.aspx?

Tutors often prefer to record to PC as they have control over the file names. Most of these other ones don’t have meaningful names.

Microsoft sound recorder or audacity – can be provided portable style to be plugged into laptops.

Impressive. Tweeted about ipadio – had response from @ipadio with a link to http://ipadio.com/page.asp?section=99&sectionTitle=ipadio+in+Education.

Return assignments via Moodle. Most are uploaded individually via advanced assignment. Others put in folders online but are privacy issues there.

Conversation – run it in a ‘test’ assignment. Get students involved. Describe it like the Director’s Commentary … Talk as you read… Finding people’s way in. Efficient way to save time, and distributing it … Everything takes so long on Moodle. People more comfortable with audio than video (even a level/BTEC level – particularly self conscious).

Don’t get too hung up on scripting, etc — they are used to our voices, more engaging if not scripted. Expect effort in first stages, find what works for you – e.g. A list of repeated errors?

Care with quality of editing – too hi, the files will be too large. Compress audio, e.g. Lossless = like zip for audio. Much higher compression = lossy compression, most use MP3 – but it’s a licensed format hence why often a cost involved. Firefox doesn’t support MP3 as not an open source format. 96kbitspersecond about lowest can go to be usable – fine for text. 10 minutes about 1MB. Most 2-3 minutes, although exam paper can be 10-15 minutes – quicker than doing smaller bits – the file saving more of a complex process.

Cloud storage can be quite expensive. 365live – can give a lot of access control.. Could use something like Dragon to produce a text file – but would then have to proofread it. Could possibly ask students to bring in USB sticks that they keep just for feedback // need to take a backup copy .. Not ideal but an option.

Look also at – http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/audio/.

Care with recording straight to apple devices – uses AIF files by default – have to go into recording format settings to MP3 – most widely used format.

http://moodle-rsc.ukc.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=154

Nanogong… http://gong.ust.hk/nanogong/ – can speed up & slow down, embeddable in Moodle. Have choice via (grade book) to give individual or general. Doesn’t yet work for Moodle 2. Can preset text to go into the text box… Then add file. If already pre-recorded quick to upload, but hoping for a neater way of doing it.

Asked students to write in the notes to give feedback and got v. Good feedback. As always, has to be one method out of several for feedback.

Office 2007 – can embed the audio directly into the Word doc http://www.howtogeek.com/80016/insert-audio-into-word-2007-documents-2. Office 2010 – not so good… More clunky? Not seen add-ins that make it better… powerPoint works well.
Oo
http://www.knovio.com/ … Uses JPEGs & PPTs only. Can’t use live, but prerecord – audio feedback with video. Student has control over whether text or tutor appears large on their screen. Useful for diagrams, art, etc – can put multiple pics in so can talk through several images. Link can be emailed to any number of students – if not appropriate – copy link & share. Embed code & social media buttons. Querying if a plugin allowing material to be downloaded.

What about http://keepvid.com/ to retain files? What about using the annotate features in YouTube – allows students to deconstruct a video. Staff could also write video comments as feedback. Can only annotate ones you’ve uploaded – but can give rights. Look for edit/annotate. Could set up e.g. A programme channel – give passwords so all can upload. Cn turn the annotations off.

Plagiarism detection – Turnitin. Farnham – made it part of HE policy that all assignments submitted. Students really like it – linked into Grademark so works well… Now picks up on Google translate re-translations – which students were using as a getaround. Avoids collusion. Leave up to professional judgement as to whether deal as ‘catch out’ or ‘teaching’. More effective if student uploadsn self. Need a policy to deal with it afterwards.

Other options a cut & paste suspect sections into Google.

Screen capture: Jing. screenr (no software required – also 5 min limit). Camtasia. http://www.yawcam.com/.

e-assessment showcase (eastern region 30 – March).

Adam etc happy to come for a 1-2 hour kick start session if can get small group (e.g. 10) together. Useful to collect case studies applicable to particular programmes… Are linked from the Moodle site.

Digital killing the lecturing stars

I have a sneaking suspicion that we university lecturers are so good at incorporating new media into our work that we may do ourselves out of a job.

When I was an undergraduate student, the only technology a lecturer had was a microphone. That was, of course, about 300 years ago – well, it was the 1980s, but that was before most of my current students were born, so for them it might as well have been the 1700s.

There was no such thing as taking the register at classes. As a colleague put it recently: “If you had a lecture or a tutorial, you just went.” No roll call was needed, because you had to attend classes in order to get the information.

If you missed a lecture, you hoped a kind friend would give you their notes – and prayed that they had paid attention and written down the right thing.

I don’t remember any photocopied sheets, handouts with the basic material you needed or even unit guides, unless you were doing distance courses (off-campus or extramural). University learning was about attending lectures and furiously taking notes, applying that knowledge at tutorials, and reading widely about the subject from the reading list and beyond. You had to think about and source material for yourself.

With the wonders of digital technology, university learning has become high-tech. In my lectures, I love to use PowerPoint slides with links to YouTube clips and other material. My slides are posted on the unit’s website each week, and my lectures are recorded and made available via the library website.

Read full article, and think whether we’re doing ourselves out of a job, or whether we now have a bigger audience, and that we need to be thinking of new ways to capture that audience.

Hey, you, get off of my cloud: are scholars too selfish to share IT?

Academics must change to get the best from technology, Jisc hears. Hannah Fearn reports

Academics are failing to make the most of universities’ cloud computing services because of their lack of technical expertise and their reluctance to share resources, a conference has heard.

Speaking in Liverpool last week at Jisc’s annual conference, Paul Watson, professor of computer science at Newcastle University, said that universities must change to realise the huge benefits of the technology. They would have to invest in it as a way to encourage research innovation, not simply as a cost-saving measure, he argued.

Cloud computing allows users to access servers or applications remotely, with the result that universities can share services rather than having to invest in technology separately.

But most providers, including Google and Microsoft, offer very basic cloud computing services, and these require a high level of technical skill to adapt for academic use, the conference heard.

“One of the things we’ve found is that working researchers don’t have (the necessary) IT skills,” Professor Watson said.

“They’re very good at using computing to transform what they do, but don’t have the skills themselves” to take full advantage of cloud computing, he added.

Read full story, and check out what the University of Salford are doing in ‘World Wide What’.

Facebook for Academics

One of my ex-students asked me a few questions about another project, as to what I think about the use of Facebook between staff/students:

Here’s what I said (.wav file, 5.5MB)

Creating a PLN, by @corinnew

Thanks to @hopkinsdavid for bringing this awesome presentation to my attention. I follow @corinnew but as Twitter streams pass the eyes, I must have missed it. It was picked up by “my daily paper“.

Academics Online?

“Who is the online you – hand-coded pages of hobbies and family photos, terse departmental entries or slickly branded media portals? Zoe Corbyn surveys the world of academics’ personal websites

Like countless other academics, David Gauntlett has a perfectly functional departmental home page. Buried inside his university’s web presence, you can find the University of Westminster professor of media and communications’ biography, contact details and list of publications next to a semi-smiling headshot. His institution’s logo appears in the top left corner.

But go to his personal website , located firmly outside the university sphere, and he comes alive. Here you can peruse his current projects, check his Twitter feed and blog posts or view his latest drawings. If you happen to click on a mention of his son, you can even watch a video of the toddler interacting with a passing train.

“It seems only natural and rational that an active academic would want to have a website and to make it as full and as interesting as possible,” Gauntlett says.

He is part of a growing global band of academics who supplement their standard departmental online profiles with web presences outside the university domain. Despite the rise of Twitter, Facebook and blogs, such personal/professional websites are an important avenue for scholars to showcase their work and themselves in the digital world.

“It is not the case for everybody, but there certainly is a growing tranche of people who are actively making sure that they have their own domain name and complete control over their own digital identity,” says Melissa Terras, a senior lecturer in electronic communication at University College London who studies how academics use the web.”

See full story in Times Higher Ed.

Students ‘let down’ by the academic Luddites

Survey finds that academy is failing to capitalise on new technology. Sarah Cunnane reports

Research from the US Department of Education suggests that students studying online tend to outperform those receiving face-to-face tuition; The Open University in the UK has topped 20 million downloads on iTunes U; and, worldwide, social media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the web.

However, recent statistics from the US show that the academy may be failing to capitalise on the potential offered by new technology.

The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, conducted annually by academics at Indiana University, Bloomington, last year included questions on the use of technology by lecturers for the first time.

The results show that while 72 per cent of respondents used course- management systems such as Blackboard, many did not use any other technology in their academic lives.

Some 70 per cent did not use plagiarism-detection software and 84 per cent did not use blogs. In each case, a small percentage claimed not to know that such things existed.

Read full story in Times Higher Ed.

Twitter for the University of Winchester

This 2 hour session is just starting… not sure whether half of it should be in the “Advanced Twitter” session… maybe I don’t need both!

Blended Learning for PhD Students

The presentation that I gave this evening to Postgraduate Research Students. My brief was ‘Blended Learning’, so I thought, I don’t know who this group is, but I’m sure they’ll want a mix of theory and practice – and something that they can potentially put to use as a new tool! So, I covered the new developments in Blended Learning, and some of the debates surrounding the students who are up-and-coming (working on the assumption that many of these students will end up doing some teaching!), before having a go at The Virtual Revolution web animals test. It was so interesting watching the students engaging with the test in different ways, and that I only took 10 minutes to do the test, whereas the group took around 25 minutes in total… clearly a web fox trait. An interesting mix of animals – ‘Web Leopard’ and ‘Web Elk’ I think in the forefront! My initial plan had been to get the group to set up the initial Twitter account, but I sensed that they weren’t too keen on setting up another account, and we were running out of time, so we went through some of the tools available, and I expect that next year I will offer a series of Web 2.0 events at the University!!

I’m a celebrity academic… in the blogosphere

British universities have been encouraged to embrace the concept of the “celebrity academic” and follow in the footsteps of their “shamelessly” self-promoting peers in North America.

Chris Brauer, lecturer in online journalism at City University London, said academics should be encouraged to use the blogosphere to raise their profiles.

“There has always been a culture of the celebrity academic in North America,” he said, adding that famous faculty members were a major weapon in recruitment strategies across the Atlantic.

“A particular academic can make a big difference. They are encouraged to get their name out there, and in many cases shamelessly self-promote. The blog provides an excellent vehicle to do that.”

Read full story. I find having an academic blog useful in raising my profile, but agree it may not be for everyone. we have to recognise the different purposes of diffent kinds of writing.