Great article which lists the possible uses of video in the classroom. This comes from the school angle but can easily be applied to higher education context.

Some of the suggestions which stand out for me are:

Film students on the first day of school, asking them what their goals are for the school year.
“This is a piece of footage that will be treasured years later, but also can be pulled out throughout the year so the students can self-assess—both struggles and successes.”

In a HE context this could be used to initially populate a students PDP / e-portfolio area with goals, skill aims and expectations. It’s also something to which they could return to and review and reflect on how far they’ve come.

Film the progression of fluency on a weekly and monthly basis
“Several successful ways to assess a student’s fluency is to conduct a running record or a developmental reading assessment using video. These assessments, recorded on video, are an effective permanent record of student growth.”

This is great for language courses but also could be extended to include filming practical skills development (I’m thinking clinical skills here), project key stages and simply a record of the student’s development in presentation skills.

Ask a student to demonstrate how to solve a math problem and capture his exact process (rather than just the answer).
“The student’s thought process is as important (if not more important) as supplying a correct answer is. Not only does capturing the explanation solidify the evidence for understanding, but the skill is also reinforced as the student “teaches” his process to others.”

This could also be used as a resource or created by the student with the intention of teaching their peers. A great learning process but safeguards would have to be built in to ensure the academic quality of the output.

Film questions from the class at the beginning of a unit, then film them answering the same questions at the end of the unit.
“Students will be more interested in watching themselves on video than they would be in revisiting the traditional KWL chart at the end of the unit.”

I think this is great and could be done say at the beginning of a module in which students ask the questions and then by the end of the module provide the answers themselves and are able to view and critique themselves (the film would also be useful as PDP evidence). You could also film students at the beginning of their university course and then ask them to provide answers at the end of their period of study.

Film your own reflections on what happened during the day and e-mail it to parents.
“You can now give up your weekly newsletter (which you were never really sure anyone was reading, anyway). Include students in your reflections and you’ll guarantee that parents will watch it.”

I thinking here this would be useful in terms of placement or WBL in which students film tasks or reflections to share with their tutor and/or peers

Have students create tutorials for next year’s class.
“This will especially save a lot of time at the beginning of the year as students need to learn the routines and the rules of the classroom. Hearing what helped make the previous year’s students successful from the actual students themselves (rather than from the teacher) will have a more convincing impact.”

The article lists some further uses here. Well worth a read.

I’m very much experiencing blogging guilt at the moment. I have a huge list of things to blog about but haven’t had the time recently. Anyway here’s something that caught my eye.

De Montfort University has developed a system which tracks the movemnent of the users eyes and allows them to selct fucntions by gazing at them. The film below shows the software in use during a session on the World of Warcraft (what’s known as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or MMORPG). The film below shows the user being able to move his avatar around, exploring the environment and interacting with objects on the screen without having to use any motor skills.

This goes some way to addressing accessibility issues associated with using virtual worlds, such as Second Life, in teaching and learning.

“Enabling someone to express themselves and engage with people in ways that they can’t do in real life – because they are restricted to a wheelchair or a bed – can have a really positive effect on their self-esteem and motivation,” says Donegan.”

Fantastic stuff.

A great article which looks at how you can represent a persons social graph - a person’s network of friends, family, and acquaintances.

The Blogosphere

Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs, used a search tool, called Blogpulse, to generate visualizations of the blogosphere.

Credit Matthew Hurst (blog) via Technology Review (Web Link)

Hurst describes the cluster at the centre as a core which is basically a group of a few thousand blogs with links to and from other sites. Interestingly you can see other smaller blogging communities connecting to the core. The links are one-way and are produced when an obscure blog links to a well-known blog at the core.

The article also includes another image which shows a core made up of several thousand popular blogs which are heavily connected to one another. What�s really interesting is that the core divides into two regions: one relating to political blogs the other focused on gadgets and technology. The two areas bind together through popular blogs with interests in both subject areas. What�s really fascinating is that Hurst noted a difference in culture between the two areas in that reciprocal two way links are much denser among the political blogs than they are among the technology blogs.

Comment Flow

Correctly the article notes that maps of social networks usually show an the fact that two users have linked to each other’s profiles. And in this sense the maps have little meaning, as the article notes MySpace users can have 100s of such links. However Dietmar �Offenhuber, a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab, together with associate professor Judith �Donath has created a comment flow visualization which traces communication between users rather than links. The visualisation is based on where and how often users left comments for other users. As the article notes �Offenhuber says the tool can help users assess the communication habits of prospective friends at a glance�.

Credit: Dietmar Offenhuber, Judith Donath, MIT Sociable Media Group via Technology Review (Web Link)

Twitter Social Network

This is a great visualisation of the twitter network and it focuses again on communication but also on the TYPE of communication. According to Akshay Java, a member of the eBiquity Research Group at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, communication on the microblogging site Twitter falls into three purposes: finding information, sharing information, and having conversations. Each type of communication results in a different network. One way communication such as news sources form huge nodes while mutual communication based on sharing and receiving information form smaller nodes which are closer together resulting in a tightly knit network. See the article for images.

Atlas

I like this. IBM’s Atlas maps social networks in the workplace. It looks at �users’ connections on the basis of their relative positions within the company and their communications by e-mail and instant messenger�. So the element of frequency of communication is included which means that some contacts appear or vanish over time as communication with them ebbs and flows. . The map shows contacts together with a visualisation of how close they are to you. Close contacts are near the centre while distant ones are toward the perimeter. From a business perspective this can be used for staff to maintain their professional networks. For instance you might see a particular contact drifting toward the perimeter prompting you to contact them before the connection vanishes. See the article for images.

A great article with many more visualisations. Well worth a read (Web Link).

“DAZ 3D, a company based in Draper, UT, that makes software and models for creating 3-D art, recently announced the MogBox, a program that would allow users to design a high-resolution 3-D character and transport it as an avatar to multiple virtual worlds. MogBox is designed to maintain the same look and feel for the character from one location to another, while adjusting for the graphics capabilities and styles of different virtual worlds.”

Web Link

Having said that a few challenges need to be worked out: how do you protect what is private; are we always safe sharing; how do we earn a living if everyone is sharing their ideas and (my favourite) what if is Wikipedia is crap.

“You are what you share”

Well this is an absolute belter. I would suggest playing the video straight away and then reading the text.

A group of researchers and digital artists at the University of Southern California (USC) has been researching into improving the way photos can be placed in Google Earth (a 3-D world map that allow you to virtually “fly” over the surface of the earth and view satellite and aerial imagery). The Viewfinder project (Web Link) is an alternative to Photosynth (here), which was developed in2006 by Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington. Photosynth automates the proper placement of two-dimensional digital photographs in a three-dimensional virtual space, in other words it can take an array of photos taken at a variety of angles and locations, say of the Notre Dame Cathedral, a reconstruct a 3D model of the object in the picture (it’s hard to put into words so here’s a clip on YouTube).

Anyway Viewfinder takes the concept further in that it allows you to manually “pose” photos in Google Earth — to place them in the proper location and at the original angle at which they were taken. The result is that the photos that appear to be perfectly aligned to the underlying 3-D world.

What’s interesting (and the video below shows this) is that you can use old photos as well thus you can see what a particular point on earth looked like at a particular time.

As a former geology student I can see how this would have helped me during the various mapping projects I took part in. This facility would enable me to keep a 3D visualisation of the area to which I could easily return to and find new interpretations. Possible it could even form the end point of my project in which I ‘walk’ the tutor through the area detailing my various observations, judgements etc. Not only that but my peers could add more photos as well. It would then stand as a resource for future students to add their interpretations.

Enough talk. To be honest text cant do it justice:

Form the BBC a lengthy article on the continued rise of social networking. There’s some very interesting stats, for example:

* 49% of children 8-17 have an online profile
* 22% of 16+ have an online profile
* On average adults have profiles on 1.6 sites
* 63% of 8 to 17-year-olds with a profile use Bebo
* 37% of 8 to 17-year-olds with profile use MySpace
* 18% of 8 to 17-year-olds with a profile use Facebook
* 59% of 8 to 17-year-olds use social networks to make new friends
* 16% of parents do not know if their child’s profile is visible to all
* 33% of parents say they set no rules for their children’s use of social networks
* 43% of children say their parents set no rules for use of social networks

The survey performed by Ofcom was based on a sample consisting of 5000 adults and 3000 children.

Sadly the rest of the article overly concentrates on the risks involved with children having a presence on a social networking site. Obviously there are concerns but would a balanced approach in which the benefits of social networking would have been nice . For instance they cite “59% of 8 to 17-year-olds use social networks to make new friends” - well why not? Social networking allows you to make contact and connect with people who are into the same stuff as yourself. It’s not all bad.

Anyway apparently the Home Office has been working with social networking firms and is expected to publish a set of guidelines for the sites around best practice, security and privacy on Friday. Could be interesting.

View the article here

Presented at the eTech Ohio 2008 conference by Alvin Trusty and hosted on TeacherTube (www.teachertube.com).

A very good PowerPoint presentation which manages to make the subject of copyright actually interesting. Half of the talk focus’s on copyright while the other considers how you can create a good PowerPoint presentation. Basically he discusses a particular copyright topic on the slide then briefly shows how he created the visual effects on that slide before moving on to the next copyright topic.

There’s some good stuff here about copyright. Including the issues of putting videos on to YouTube under the Fair Use terms (the bit about the NFL vs. a Professor of Law is amusing and enlightening). Other laws affecting copyright are also looked at including the Teach Act 2001, Time Shifting, Space Shifting, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Creative Commons. Excepting Creative Commons some of theses acts are obviously US centric but I don’t they have international equivalents.

There’s also some pointers to useful resources. For example Flickr (www.flickr.com) hosts images released under Creative Commons. In fact if go to www.flickr.com/creativecommons you can see there are 63 million images you can use without having to contacting the author (but you must citate them – always remember that).

DISCLOSURE: however I’m not a lawyer so please don’t quote me on any of the above.

With regards to designing presentations advice is given on creating simple animations and removing bullet points. He also states that you should avoid reading out your slides as the audience often read faster than you do and reach the end of the slide before you do. So you might as well send the audience the slideshow and not turn up. This is an obvious point but so many speakers are guilty of this, myself included when I have had to little time to practice.

Viewing the presentation I released that many of the slides had very little text and most were images. And as such they sat very well with the speakers voice (recorded at the session). It made me realise that a truly effective PowerPoint slide, if it is really doing it’s job in terms of enabling the speaker to get the points across, should be incapable of acting as stand alone resource, that is without the speaker’s voice.

Download Video: Posted by proftrusty at TeacherTube.com.

However, aside from the detailed satellite images, one of the great things about Google Earth is that anyone can add content in terms of photos, textual information, web links etc. and associate that content with specific areas of interest. Essentially you can create your own ‘layer’ of content which is then superimposed on the satellite imagery. This layer can be private to yourself (and others who have access to the account, say for instance your students) or you can make the layer available everyone. The latter is quite common as you can find a great many subject themed layers out there to view. So this is already being used by schools for history projects which I have talked about in an earlier blog (here).

Anyway because Google owns YouTube (www.youtube.com) they’ve been looking at getting the 2 products to ‘speak’ to each other. In other words getting the videos already loaded on YouTube to display within Google Earth at particular points.

Well they’ve now sorted it out. YouTube allows you to geotag a video when you upload it. Basically you enter the longitude and latitude of where the video was created. This is not as onerous as it sounds because Google includes another product, Google Maps, to help you pin point the exact coordinates by clicking your mouse on a map.

At the same time Google Earth periodically updates itself to include new aerial imagery and other data, now including geotagged YouTube content.

Last year I uploaded to YouTube a short video made by School of Education staff on their experience in using blogs to create learning communities. I used Google Maps to add longitude and latitude coordinates which placed the video exactly at the De Havilland campus. Google Earth has since updated itself and lo and behold the YouTube video can be a seen as a clickable icon at De Havilland.

This means that anyone who uses Google Earth to check out the University of Hertfordshire will see any YouTube videos associated with it. I can see this happening more and more in the future since Google Earth is able to provide the reader with a spatial sense of a particular area – so it’s a great tool for checking out an area with regards to living, working there etc.

So let’s have brief tour of the UH in Google Earth:

So here’s the College Lane campus. Note the detail. You can clearly see the Learning Resources Centre towards the right. See the camera icons? This is one of the great things about the new internet – anyone can add anything. Google Earth lets you attach the photos (or any image) to specific points. In this case someone has been kind enough to upload a photo taken at the front of the LRC.

Pretty good photo eh?

There is a downside. Google Earth only periodically updates the satellite imagery so as you can see the De Havilland Campus has not been build yet! But this has not stopped people from adding photos of the campus as it is now and of course there’s my YouTube video.

Clicking on the YouTube icon open ups the YouTube for you to play.

Incidentally there is another YouTube video associated with eh College Lane site (made by one of the student candidates for a recent election).

So we have a very powerful integration of technologies, Google Earth and YouTube, using content created by a wide community of people (wide because they only have a very loose connection with each other – in this case the university and Hatfield). It’ll be worth watching over time to see how the area develops.

And there are obvious positive implications for educational uses. For example geotagging video and images such that they are associated with specific points on the map as an aid to field trips / school visits. You could add all kinds of historical notes, photos, links and tag them to specific areas of interest, mapping out routes etc. However the real gain is that students will be able to use these tools to develop their own projects and share them with the outside world.

Any comments and ideas and suggestions for use would be welcome.

Via the Bionic Teaching site (here) consider how this might be taken further: “You’ve got lots of room to play with this concept in a variety of subjects - history and English are pretty obvious but you could use it wherever there’s an interaction of objects and create a narrative around it. It’d work in chemistry (enzymes as instigators comes to mind), science (biomes, cell interactions) and government (it’d be a fun way to look at the bill to law process- maybe as a Google Map).”Could be an interesting way of getting students to outline and explore subjects / projects.