EdTech

by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, EdTech

Hi Tech Cheating – Do Your Kids Do It?

Note: this is a cross post from my Dad blog, but I thought the topic would be of interest to you as well.

Is this cheating?

Does your teenager have a cell phone? If they do, there is a good chance they are using it to cheat at school according to a new report by Common Sense Media.

Key findings from the report say that more than 1/3 of teens with cell phones admit to having used them to cheat at school, while over 1/2 of all teens admitted to using some form of cheating involving the Internet.

According to the report, we parents are living in denial. Not that this practice exists in schools – 76% of us believe that cell phone cheating is happening in school – but only 3% of us believe our kids are doing it.

Hmmmm, 35% of kids admit to doing it, but only 3% of their parents believe they are doing it. That is a big digital denial divide.

But really the question we as parents need to be asking is not whether our kids are cheating or not (although that is a very important question), but rather what is cheating? Perhaps it is time to take a long hard look at what we think cheating is in the digital age. If we do, then we might come to the conclusion that how we define cheating may actually be hurting our kids.

For example, is it cheating for students to collaborate with their peers to find the answer to problems? 1 in 4 of the students in the survey don’t think so and I tend to agree with them. After all, is this not what we “grownups” do in real life? When we need to figure out a problem, what do we do? We tap into our personal networks and fire up the web. Isn’t collaborating to figure out a solution to a problem something we want to foster in our kids?

And is it so wrong for students to use the most game changing educational tool called the Internet to find answers? I mean, why do we ask kids to pretend that this massively useful tool does not exist? Why do we insist that they need to be able to work inside a bubble to solve problems?

What I do have a problem with is a student taking someone else’s work and turning it in as their own. That, to me, is my moral threshold. But collaborating with their peers using technology to solve problems? That is something we should be rewarding, not punishing.

I realize this may seem like an extreme position to take, and it is fraught with a whole can of worms that educators have to deal with (not the least of which is how do teachers really assess learning), but I think we need to take a long hard look at how we define cheating in a digital age. If we do then we might just discover that what we think of as cheating is actually an essential skill our kids are going to need to thrive in a digital world.

Photo: Poor Marc Has No Idea She CHEATS! by Mr_Stein used under Creative Commons license.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

North Island College Remote Science Lab

I was reading Grant Potters account of the 2009 Canadian eLearning/ETUG Conference held last week in Vancouver and was highly impressed by a robotics project being done by North Island College.

One of the traditional challenges for remote students studying in lab based courses is how do you simulate the lab environment? The Remote Science Lab addresses that problem. A project of Ron Evans aege nd Albert Balbon from North Island College and funded by BCcampus and Inukshuk, the lab allows students to remotely control lab equipment by robotic arm through their web browser.

North Island College – Remote Web-based Science Lab from Devin Clarke on Vimeo.

Because this project was funded in part by BCcampus, the software is being offered to other to all BC post-secondary institutions who wish to explore a similar project.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn, EdTech, Multimedia Tools

4 Free Audio Players to Add Audio to Your Site

Adding audio to your website, blog or online course is pretty easy to do these days. Long gone are the days when we would force students to download and install proprietary players like Real Player or Quicktime. With the ubiquity of Flash and JavaScript, and mp3 we now have more options for delivering audio on the web than ever before.

Here are 4 audio players that I have been working with recently while redeveloping a French language course. All of these players support mp3 and are built using JavaScript and Flash. 2 of the players (Playtagger and  Yahoo Media Player) only require a single line of code to get working on a page. The other 2 (WordPress Audio Plugin and the JW FLV Player) are more complicated, but much more feature rich. All will do the job of playing audio without requiring a software download or install by students and all worked when I tested them in D2L.

The links to the demo of each player will open in a new window since I didn’t want to have multiple players competing with each other on the same mp3 files.

1) Playtagger

The most basic of all the players on this list, the Delicious Playtagger, is minimalism in action. You can start, stop or add the file to Delicious. That’s about it. No pause or volume control. In fact, no audio controls whatsoever.

But what Playtagger lacks in features it makes up for in simplicity of use. Include a single line of JavaScript in your HTML, and any link to an mp3 file in your document automatically becomes playable on the page. A play icon will appear just to the left of the mp3 link.

The one little problem I have with the Playtagger is that if you click on the text link, the mp3 file may either try to load in your default media player or try to download the mp3 file to your computer, depending on your browser. It would be better if the mp3 file played in Playtagger regardless of whether you click on the Playtagger play icon or the actual text link itself.

That one minor problem aside, if you are looking for a simple option to play an mp3 file, you can’t get much simpler than Playtagger.

Playtagger in action.

2) Yahoo Media Player

Like Playtagger, the Yahoo Media Player is added to a page with a single line of JavaScript, which adds the audio player to any mp3 link on your page. Click on the play icon beside the file and the player opens up at the bottom of the screen.

The Yahoo Media Player has more features than Playtagger. There is a pause button, skip forward/back to the next/previous track control, volume control, and track and time information.If you have multiple audio files on a page, the Yahoo Media Player will play the files back to back like a playlist. In fact, there is a playlist option within the media player itself.

The Yahoo Media Player does give you more options to customize the interface and the default behaviour of the player. There are some documented hacks at the media player wiki which come in handy if you want to extend or change the player.

Another resource you will want to check out if you use the Yahoo Media Player is the blog of  Eric Fehrenbacher. Eric has written a number of scripts that extend the player and add extra features. Features like TrackSeek , which adds a slider to give users the ability to move forward and back in a track and TrackLoop which will loop through a playlist after it is finished.

Yahoo Media Player in action.

3) WordPress Audio Player

First off, the WordPress Audio Player is not just for the WordPress blog platform. There is a stand alone version that can be used on any web page.

This audio player is a tad more complicated than Playtagger or the Yahoo Media Player. There is more mucking around with the code to set parameters, but the process is well documented and should be fairly straightforward to get you up and running.

You also have to download and install the scripts for the WordPress Audio Player on your own server, unlike Playtagger and the Yahoo Media Player whose scripts are hosted on external servers. This could be a deal breaker if you don’t have access to a web server. However, if you are using D2L, you can use the file manager in D2L as a place to serve up the files from.

Those negatives aside, I think the WordPress Audio Player has the nicest interface of the lot and packs all you need for features in a compact player. The player itself slides open and closed so it takes up very little screen space and you can change the look and behaviour of the player by changing a few values in the settings.  And unlike the Yahoo Media Player, the WordPress Audio Player comes with a slider enabled out of the box with no need for a third party script.

WordPress Audio Player in action.

4) JW FLV Player

The JW FLV player is by far the most full featured (and hence, the most complicated) of the 4 players here. The JW FLV Player works not only for audio files but for video as well.

Of all the players, JW FLV is the only one capable of doing true media streaming using RTMP as opposed to progressive downloading. True media streaming requires a media server. If you have access to a medai server, then JW FLV Player is your player.

Like the WordPress Audio Player, you need to upload the Javascript and Flash files to your own server.

Configuring the player can be a bit of a frustrating affair if you are not technically inclined. Much of the documentation and tutorials feel like they were written by developers, which is okay if you are a developer but not so if you just want to get the thing working. You should feel comfortable working in JavaScript before diving into the JW FLV Player, especially if you want to customize the features or look and feel beyond the default player.

Speaking of which, the JW FLV Player does have a vibrant developer community and many developers are creating and releasing skins and addons that change the look and functionality of the default player, so you have a lot of pre built interfaces to choose from if the default interface doesn’t toggle your play button.

JW FLV Player in action as an audio only player. This is a streamed mp3 file from our Flash media server.

5) Bonus for the more geek oriented: SoundManager

Okay, if the thought of digging into the JW FLV Player code excites rather than terrifies you, then be sure to check out SoundManager. SoundManager is not a player per se, but rather bills itself as a Javascript Sound API which lets you create some pretty impressive audio players. Check out the page as playlist demo and the still-under-development-so-may-not-be-working-perfectly examples of the 360° Player Demo. However, SoundManager is very JavaScript intensive and I was never able to get it working reliably enough in D2L to use it.

And then there is HTML 5

The chances that most of these players will become obsolete once the WC3 releases HTML 5 to the world are pretty good. HTML 5 promises easier ways to embed audio and video content on web pages with standard HTML tags. The goal is to make adding multimedia content to a web page as easy as adding an image or a table is currently.

But even though HTML 5 got a huge Google boost with the demo of Google Wave, which is a fully functioning  HTML 5 web application, we’re still a few years away from it being available widely enough to rely on it as the sole method of delivering audio and video content. So in the interm we still need players to play multimedia content.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Create virtual worlds using Metaplace

While I am intrigued by virtual worlds like Second Life, I still find there are real barriers to using it.

First, the Second Life learning curve is steep and, in my limited experience with it, intimidating to novice users. You have to invest a lot of time before you can do even the most rudimentary of tasks. Why Second Life needs a credit card when you create an account is off-putting (but this may have changed since I created my account a year and a bit ago). The Griefers on Second Life also seem particularily unpleasent when compared to the Trolls you find in other online communities. And finally, I do not like downloading and installing client-side app’s on my PC. I much prefer to have my virtual experiences in the familiar enclave of the browser.

The browser based virtual world is one of the reasons Metaplace looks promising to me. Similar to the (now defunct) Lively by Google, Metaplace is a browser based virtual environment. While it looks a bit cartoonish, some have already begun to wonder about the possibilities that Metaplace has educational potential as a browser based virtual environment.

I appreciate the user-friendly language Metaplace is using on their website to describe the service: It’s not just for techies anymore — it’s for everyone who uses the Web today. Sounds to me like the goal of the Metaplace developers is to lower that steep learning curve that so many novice Second Lifer’s experience.

While the options for creating your world will be fairly limited when compared to Second Life,  it looks like you will be able to pull and push content from other sources into and out of your Metaworld virtual environment, which leads to all kinds of mashup possibilities.

I have not tried Metaplace as they are currently in private beta right now. I’ve signed up and am now playing the waiting-to-be-asked-to-the-dance game. Hopefully I’ll be able to take Metaplace for a spin because it looks like a promising tool. Here’s the video.

Photo credits: Second Life: For all your WTF moments by Torley. Used under Creative Commons license.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

YouTube launches YouTubeEDU

Brian Eno predicts YouTube

Seems like I have been all about free and open video collections lately. I’ll move onto some other fun tools I have been playing with soon, I promise. But I couldn’t let today’s announcement by YouTube go unblogged.

YouTube launched YouTube EDU, a special section of YouTube dedicated to educational videos from over 100 universities and colleges.  According to the YouTube blog, the task of collecting and organizing the collection was a volunteer project undertaken by a group of YouTube employees who wanted to highlight the educational content being uploaded by college and universities. The result is a subsection of YouTube dedicated to us educational types, complete with a lovely search engine that searches just the EDU section. Nice.

Flickr Photo:  Venezia 042 Tez – Brian Eno predicts YouTube by watz. Creative Commons license.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Academic Earth: free and open video lectures

Open Educational Resources

I am not a big fan of iTunes U. I know there is a lot of great content there, but unless you use iTunes it is inaccessible (and if you do know a way to access iTunes U content without iTunes I would love to hear about it). So, I am always on the lookout for resources like Academic Earth.

Academic Earth is a website featuring video lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton and Yale.

While collections like Academic Earth are not new (you could find many of these lectures on each institutions YouTube channel), what is nice about Academic Earth is that it filters and packages the collections in a very friendly and easy to use way. For example, on the Playlist page you can view thematic collections put together by the site editors that group lectures from different instructors and institutions around certain themes like Love is in the Air, a group of videos on emotion, love, dating, marriage, and sex that cross disciplines and combine lectures from Psychology, English, and Economics.

The site also features all the Web 2.0 goodness you would expect from a video site these days – embedding, the ability to subscribe to specific courses, and user feedback where logged in users can grade the lectures. One added academic feature of the site you don’t normally find on other video sharing sites is the citation feature, which gives you a nicely formatted snippet of citation code that you can cut and paste when referencing the video. There are also links to transcripts and other related resources like PowerPoint slides and (in some cases) captures of blackboard/whiteboard notes, adding further value to the video lecture.

Right now there are over 1500 lectures on the site, which seems to be heavy on Business lectures. But as the site grows I would expect that to change and balance out in terms of subject matter. Still, sites like Academic Earth are nice alternatives to the locked down world of iTunes U.

Image Credits: Open Ed Poster by riacale. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license

Zemanta Pixie
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Social Networks

#gr8t Tweet

For the month of March, educators who use Twitter are being encouraged to share their favorite tweet of the day by retweeting it with the tag #gr8t. The criteria for what you tag as #gr8t is personal. Share whatever you find relevant, insightful, interesting, humorous or useful.

I like this idea, essentially creating a kind of “best of” filter for Twitter where anyone (whether you use Twitter or not) can track valuable conversations, links, resources, whatever being passed around by educators. Plus it is a nice acknowledgment to the people who pass on useful resources.

If you have been hesitant to dip your toes in the Twitter waters and find out if there is substance to the hype, this might be a good time to jump in to see how powerful Twitter and micro-blogging can be. Sue Waters has set up a very good resource page for educators who want to get started using Twitter.

Even if you decide not to join Twitter right now, there are still a number of ways you can follow along with what is being tagged. The easiest is to use the Twitter search engine and search for the tag #gr8t. This will give you a current snapshot of what educators are tagging as #gr8t right now. Or you can see an aggregated list of tweets on the #gr8t wiki homepage coming from a number of different sources. I expect that over the course of this month, both of these resources will yield a bevy of useful information and resources.

Photo credit: My Twitter Class of ’08 by mallix. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Translate feeds with Google Reader

Translate in Google Reader

I had my horizons greatly expanded this week when I discovered a feature of Google Reader I didn’t know existed. Google Reader will translate foreign language feeds into English. To access the translation feature, click on either view settings or folder settings, depending on where you currently are in Google Reader.

Now, if you have ever used Google Translate, then you know what gets spit out at the other end is often a linguistic nightmare. But it is improving and will continue to improve, and it opens up the possibilities for me to follow along with the work of my peers in other languages. Maybe someone can recommend some French speaking edtechies from Quebec I can follow?

Actually, who am I kidding. The biggest benefit for me is now the ability to follow the progress of Canadian soccer players plying their trade in Germany, Spain, Romania and the Netherlands.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Why I like Feedly

Feedly is a Firefox extension that allows you to create a magazine like start page for your Google Reader subscriptions and while the  magazine style does add a nice look and feel to Google Reader, that isn’t what I like about Feedly. What I like about Feedly is that it  allows me to find content I am searching for from my trusted sources (in this case, my Google Reader subscriptions) without changing my current search process. Feedly does this by extending my general Google search to my Google Reader subscriptions, and adds matching results to my Google search results page.

Search results augmented by Feedly

Click to see larger

Let me give you an example.  This morning one of my students emailed me a Globe and Mail article about copyright, bloggers, big media and republishing rights (Gatehouse, NYTimes settle copyright suit). I wasn’t familiar with this story so, after reading it, I wanted to find out a bit more, like who is Gatehouse Media (an aside – if the Globe would have included a link to the company in their article this step wouldn’t have been needed). Over to Google I go and search for GateHouse and get my standard set of results that I can begin sifting though.

But wait – what is this? Because I have Feedly installed, there is a list of matches from my sources showing up. Feedly has searched my Google Reader subscriptions to find matches and is presenting me those results in the regular Google search results page.  Here are incredibly relevant results, vetted by me from my trusted sources. This immediately gives me a much richer and accurate set of search results than if I relied on a standard Google search.

Now, if you are a Google Reader user you might be saying I could do the get the same kind of network result if I just started my search in Google Reader using the built in Google Search engine, which is true. But what is nice about Feedly is that I don’t have to take that extra step of doing my search in 2 places – Google and Google Reader. Feedly slips right into my current workflow unobtrusively and without the need to repeat myself.

This concept of searching your network is something that I touched on briefly in the current SCoPE seminar Scott Leslie is doing on Open Educational Resources. The question posed there is how do you currently find open educational resources?  Increasingly we are going to have to rely on our personal networks. We need to find those sources we trust (which is something we have been doing for a long time) and find simple ways to mine their collective intelligence in order to effectively find what we need. This little feature of Feedly helps me do that.

Related articles by Zemanta
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Zoom and Pan large images with Google map interface

Been playing this morning with Google Maps Image Cutter, an application created by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London. I followed the instructions from this blog post on Digital Inspiration (via a tweet from Scott Leslie) and had the app working in a few minutes.

This little java app will allow you to take a very large photo, slice it up into a number of smaller images and, (with a Google Maps API code) overlay a Google maps interface. This gives you the ability to zoom in and out and pan around your image. Very handy if you have large images (like a widescreen panorama for example) that you want to display on a webpage.

Here is an example of what you can do with the tool. The full image size of the collage below is 2500×1658 pixels.

Photo by Yann!s (License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0)

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

When Chemistry meets YouTube you get reaction

I am no chemistry expert, but I have a strong suspicion that the periodic table has never been this much fun.

Fun you say? Chemistry? Yes, Chemistry.

The Periodic Table of Videos, put together by video journalist Brady Haran and Professor Martyn Poliakoff at the University of Nottingham, is a great example of what you can do with a video camera, some inspiration, a dash of sodium and a group of eager scientists. The result is an interactive periodic table with each element represented by a video. Here’s the sodium video:

In all seriousness, you have to love it when a chemistry professor says that, during the course of making these videos, they discovered new things which they never really realized before. It was through the act of creating this project that learning took place. This is a point that Educause makes in 7 Things You Should Know About YouTube.

Many educators believe that the act of creating content—in virtually any form—is a valuable learning exercise, helping develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter and the tools used to create that content. To the extent that YouTube facilitates such creation, it has the potential to expose students to new insights and skills, as well as link them to various online communities.

The good professor also speaks to that point; the linking to various communities and the value of transparency. Rather than locking this resource away, they made it free and open on the web using a simple website and YouTube as the video delivery platform. This allowed people from anywhere to comment on the videos. And comment they did. In fact, one user asked if they ever considered expanding into molecules, which got the gears turning for Professor Poliakoff and has inspired him to continue on now that all the elements in the periodic table have been covered. Transparency breeds inspiration.

I also love this quote:

I’ve realize that, in the past 5 weeks, I’ve lectured to more people than the whole of the rest of my life.

Okay granted, the dynamic periodic table probably beats the periodic table of videos for information  and functionality (itself compete with a nifty Wikipedia integration that makes me go yum). I can’t say for sure, I am not a chemist. But for sheer learning fun, the periodic table of videos is an excellent example of a very well done open educational resource.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Create video with Picasa 3

Image representing Picasa as depicted in Crunc...

Image by via CrunchBase

I have used Picasa at home to organize my personal photo collection and I have found it is a very useful tool for my personal photos. It managed them well, had some nice browse features, and the basic photo editing fixes were enough for routine tasks – crops, red eye reduction and slight colour modifications. Oh, and it’s free. But I never really found it had any features I needed at work as part of my day to day media production workflow. That might just change with this new release.

Google has added some nice features to Picasa 3 and is turning this photo organizing tool into much more of a multimedia production tool.

Some of the new features include the ability to geotag photos, add text to photos, some beefed up photo editing tools and easier synch to web to transfer your photos to your (free 1 gig) Picasa web space.

But what really has me jazzed about this new release is the video feature. Drop in some photos, a bit of audio, some text and bang, you’ve got yourself a spiffy little animated slideshow. And with a one button upload to YouTube built in, it’s easy to post to the video sharing service.

Granted, the video editing tool is fairly basic. For example, it looks like you can only set a transition style for the entire project and not individual photos. But for ease of use and quality of the final product, this new feature may sway me away from my standard photo story creation tool, Microsoft’s (also free)  Photo Story. But I am not sure the limited video editing options will sway me away from that other MS multimedia freebie MovieMaker.

I have a feeling I am not going to get much done today.

Related articles by Zemanta
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Google's new search results feel more than a bit like social bookmarking

Updated November 22: Since writing this post, Google has turned this feature off and made it an opt-in service through Google Experimental Search.

Update November 24: aaaaaand it’s back.

Last night I noticed a couple of new options on Google search results.

Just to the right of the title of the result are two boxes that allow you to Promote or Remove a result from the search. These choices are then saved and, if you perform the same search in the future, your preferred selections bubble to the top while results you choose to remove as not relevant are removed.

Also new is the ability to annotate the search results, essentially giving you a way to create saved lists of your favorite search results with annotations.

Google calls this new service SearchWiki, but really I think the new features have more in common with social bookmarking sites like delicious or Diigo than wiki’s. Sure, you don’t get the customization or network granularity of  delicious or Diigo when it comes to defining your personal network, but certainly the ability to create a highly relevant lists of annotated links using keyword tags is right up the social bookmarking alley. And I suspect it won’t be very long before you will be able to share your search results and annotations with selected Google users.

Google has said this doesn’t affect the results PageRank rankings, but you have to think it will only be a matter of time before the wisdom of the crowds approach wins out and the data collected as a result of peoples choices will be worked into search results or, most likely, the ads that appear with my search results. Not all think this is a good thing, but ultimately making search results more relevant to me is highly desirable.

I think the feature that will prove to be the most disruptive is annotation. Overnight Google has turned their search engine into one gigantic comment engine. Now anyone can add comments about any web resource and make those comments open for the world to see. Talk about transparency. Now that Google has thrown their collective weight behind annotating the web, and made it dead easy to do so, expect the conversation to get a whole lot more interesting as more people take part.

Related articles by Zemanta
 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

7 things you can do with your video on YouTube that I can't do on my media server

So, the question is – why use YouTube to host your video when the institution has a perfectly good media server sitting in the rack room? The Auricle asked this question recently and came up with 5 good reasons to choose YouTube over an in house media server. In some respects, this post is an extension to that.

Granted, I am pretending here that some of the elephant issues have left the room. I am not discounting these issues as they are vitally important when it comes to using a very public web service like YouTube. But there are more informed educators than me to discuss issues such as opening up your content, transparency, copyright and (gulp) sharing.

Instead, I am going to focus on a few of the killer technical features YouTube has that will enhance your video in ways that would take me, as an educational technologist, hours and hours of time and effort to reproduce – if I could reproduce these at all.

Take embed, for example. Now, our in house Flash server does a decent job of streaming video content from a single location (which, at my institution, is usually Desire2Learn). But beyond that, well, that’s about all we can do with video. If you want to have that content in a second place (say, a blog or website), it requires an EdTech like me with access to server folders and the tools to create a custom video player to do. So for that reason alone, the YouTube embed ability is a killer feature.

But YouTube can do so much more with a video. Here are 7 technical things that you can do with your video on YouTube that I can’t do with my media server.

1) Annotate videos

After you have created and uploaded a video, you can add notes, speech bubbles and highlights to your video. You can even create hyperlink hotspots that, when clicked on, will take users to an external website or another YouTube video.

2) Close caption videos

Looking to make your videos more accessible, or add in a second language to your video? Try adding subtitles or captions to your YouTube video. What’s the difference? Captions are in the same language as the video’s audio track, subtitles are in a different language.

3) Deep link videos

Want to trim a bit off the top of your video? To do this on our media server requires me to edit the clip, a cumbersome process at best. With YouTube, you can create a link to a specific point in a YouTube video. For example, if you’d like the viewer to start watching the video at one minute and fifty-one seconds into the video, you’d add the following time code to the end of the URL: #t=1m51s. So, here is the link in example. This url should take you to a clip from a New Scientist video that is 1:51 seconds in. http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPDbktOyBc#t=1m51s

4) Swap your audio for music

Again, I would need to edit and, probably, reencode your video. But YouTube gives you the ability to turn your video into a music video with a preset music track.

5) Subscribe to feeds

RSS feeds are an area we haven’t even begun to explore with our in house media server, so if you want to replicate anything like a YouTube channel that people can subscribe to, well, you are out of luck unless you happen to catch me at a slow time of the year.

YouTube, on the other hand, does have basic RSS feeds for subscribing to content. If these feeds are too general, find some smart people who can work their way around YouTubes public API and create the most useful YouTube feeds not found in the YouTube interface.

6) Watch a high resolution version

Okay, granted, the quality of YouTube video is bad, and on this point our in house server has YouTube beat.  But that doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with really lousy video when you use YouTube. Add this code &fmt=18 at the end of the video URL on YouTube and see a higher resolution version of the video.

7) Embed that higher resolution version

Here is a simple hack from Make on how to embed that higher quality video in your site. Basically, add the code &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 at the end of your embed and param url’s and embed the high resolution version of the video on a webpage.

Update November 21: Just found out that you can actually view and embed HD quality videos on YouTube.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

5 tips to find the good stuff on YouTube

As of March 2008, there were roughly 73.8 million videos on YouTube, with 200,000 added everyday. That’s a lot of video. And if you are looking for quality, educational video to use in a course, it’s a lot of noise. So how do you separate the educational wheat from the panda sneezing chaff? Here are a couple of strategies you might want to try out when navigating the YouTube waters.

1) Create an account

When you create an account, YouTube will be able to analyze your viewing patterns and find content that it thinks you will be interested in. Looking for videos on Gestalt therapy? View a few and YouTube will recommend similar videos and have those recommendations ready for you the next time you log in.

When you create an account, you also have the ability to mark videos as a Favorite. Very handy when you do find a useful video and don’t want to forget where it is. Videos marked as Favorites are put in a special spot on your account page where you can easily find it again.

An account also gives you the ability to subscribe to other users videos or channels and be notified when new videos are added to those channels. What kind of channels might you like to subscribe to? Well, how about….

2) Sources you already trust and use

Recently I was doing some work with a trades instructor who does a lot of work with students on work place safety. One of the prime sources of content he uses is WorkSafeBC. Imagine how happy we were when we found the WorkPlaceBC channel on YouTube with loads of high quality videos directly related to this instructors specific needs?

Before you start your general search, search the channels for organizations you already know and trust. Chances are, they have a YouTube channel which you can subscribe to (using your newly created account from tip 1).

Oh, did I say general search? Sorry. I meant…

3) Advanced Search is your friend

YouTube advanced search options

YouTube is now the second most popular search engine after Google, so it makes sense to spend a bit of time getting to know the advanced search options.

Doing a general search on a site with close to 100 million resources is going to pull up a lot of irrelevant content, so skip the search bar and go straight to advanced search options.

One of the first search filters you want to use is the category filter. There is an Education category you can choose, but also choose categories that are relevant to your subject area.

If you are looking for English language videos, filter by language, which will also narrow down the results returned.

Finally, if you are looking for geographically specific content, check out the location filter. Click on Show Map and you get a lovely Google interactive map that will let you zero in on videos from a specific location. Looking for videos of volcanic eruptions at Mt. Etna in Italy? Easy with the location filter. Add in some keywords for a specific location and you have a very powerful search option.

Search by location on YouTube

4) Set your country preference

Set your YouTube country preference

Right beside the YouTube logo in the top right corner of the site is a link labeled Worldwide (all). Click on that and choose your default country. This will give videos from your country preferential treatment. This is, of course, providing you want to start locally. If you are looking for videos on, say, British History, then you may want to set your location to the UK. YouTube doesn’t care if your default location is really your default location. Self select a location that works for you and YouTube will begin the filtering process.

5) When you find a video, follow the trail

YouTube Related Videos and Other Videos From User

For every video you find, YouTube will display a list of Related Videos and More From this user videos. Chances are, if you find one video on a subject by that user, they may have more along the same lines. Follow the links and check out their other videos.

Same thing with Related Videos. If you find something you like, check the Related Videos list to the right of the video to see if there are more, or maybe better, examples.

There you go – 5 tips to make finding content on YouTube a bit easier.You may want to add a few of your own in the comments area.

Using content from YouTube is just one way to take educational  advantage of the video sharing site. Now that you have an account, consider creating your own videos and posting your own content. Or explore the possibilities of having students create and post content, turning YouTube into a powerful learning tool for students. I’ll explore these themes in future posts. But for now, happy searching.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Using EdTech tools – where to start?

217 educational technologists and learning professionals from around the world are currently collaboratively to create a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning in 2008.

This list has been compiled for the past few years by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, and is a good jumping off point if you have been thinking of trying out some new tools in your teaching practice, or are looking for new tools to boost your own productivity.

Social bookmarking tool Delicious, web browser FireFox and RSS reader Google Reader currently sit 1, 2 and 3 on the list.

Tools that seem to be gaining traction among educator and educational technologists are the microblogging site Twitter, (although at least one high profile EdTech user has recently abandoned the service). Twitter is up from 43rd to 11th place since last year. Social networking site Ning (31 to 16) and collaborative slideshow tool VoiceThread (101 to 23) are also on the rise.

The Centre is accepting entries and votes for the list until October 31.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

On Free and Open Learning Content

I spent the day in Vancouver yesterday talking content with a great group of EdTechies from around BC. The one day Learning Content Strategies session was organized by Scott Leslie from BCcampus.

Much of the talk revolved around open education resources and some of the common barriers we face when trying to open content to the outside world, beyond the confines of the LMS. Copyright, collective agreements between faculty and institutions, and a reluctance on the part of some faculty to open their content (for a number of reasons) seem to be the major hurdles institutions are facing when it comes to making their content open.

I was thinking about this more last night, and wish now that I would have contributed more to the conversation. Specifically, there are 3 additional issues that I see as potential hurdles to adopting open content practices.

You want me to change this?

Issue one is existing process. Over the past 10 or so years since the LMS emerged as the primary vehicle for delivering content, considerable time and energy has been expended by institutions to establish LMS centered processes for content creation. No wonder talk of inserting a new strategy to make content open is seen as potentially disruptive to established processes – processes that took many people much work to establish. We have to figure out a way to incorporate strategies into our process that allows for open content without making it seem like we want to reinvent the process wheel.

What’s in it for me?

Faculty hesitation was touched on at the session, but much of it revolved around notions of the fear some faculty have that they might lose control of their work, or their effort would somehow be taken advantage of by others.

But for some faculty, I think the reason why they don’t adopt open content policies is a bit more pragmatic – they could view it as extra work.

I think there has to be something in it for them before they contribute. I don’t mean this as an ego bash against faculty, but rather an acknowledgment that they are busy people. They have to see some value in doing this otherwise it becomes just another task. The last thing they probably think about when creating content is the value of sharing it with others, if they even think of it at all. Which leads me to…

What do you mean open?

The last issue is awareness. At my institution there are probably many early adopters who would be happy to contribute their material to the common good if they were even aware this was an option.

This is where I can play an immediate role in my institution. Talking about initiatives like Creative Commons, pointing them to existing OER resources and generally raising awareness of open content on my campus will, hopefully, draw some of them out. I need to keep the conversation going that Brian Lamb started at my institution last spring (zip ahead to 11:50 to see Brian’s presentation, or check out his presentation notes).

Free Learning

One of the tools given to us by BCcampus yesterday to help continue the conversation is a new website called Free Learning. A custom Google search engine that only searches vetted, high quality open education resources, Free Learning allows educators to search for free and openly licensed educational resources that they can then reuse or remix for their courses.

The second resource I have are some of the loosely coupled presentations. Brian Lamb and Novak Rogic’s presentation has some fine examples of how content can live outside the LMS and the advantages to using blogs and wiki’s as content delivery platforms (as well as some super spiffy JSON code for embedding content from one page into another). Grant Potter from UNBC also demonstrated how distributed UNBC faculty are using a wiki to create a course and Richard Smith from SFU gave us the faculty perspective with a look at some of the tools he uses in his class, most notably livestreaming his lectures using uStream.

When it comes to bigger picture issues in educational technology (like Open Educational Resources), I am a neophyte. I haven’t spent nearly the amount of time working on these types of issues as my contemporaries. In the edtech scheme of things I am much more tech than ed. So I truly appreciate events like these that make me stop and critically think beyond the code about the work I do.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

14 Tips for Better Web Surfing

If you’ve been a power user of the web for years, then some of the tips on NY Times writer David Pogue’s list of Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User may seem old hat. But quite often I come across seasoned veterans who haven’t heard about time saving tips, like using the keyboard controls Ctrl-x, Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v to cut, copy and paste.

There are over 1000 comments from readers adding in their technology tips, both common and obscure. That’s a lot of tips, covering a wide range of technology from cell phones to Office. The sheer volume makes it tough to glean out the really useful web ones.

So, to save you having to sift through the list, here are 14 tips that might save you some time, make you more productive, or just generally lower your frustration level when surfing. Some of them are Windows tips that would work in other Windows programs (like the above mentioned cut, copy and paste keyboard commands), others are browser specific. Feel free to add your faves.

  1. Just about every faculty I work with has had this complaint at some point – text on the web is too small. Needless to say, they love this tip when I show them. You can enlarge text on a web page by hitting the Ctrl and plus sign (+). Make text smaller by hitting Ctrl and minus sign (-). Mac users can substitute Command for Ctrl.
  2. Ctrl and mouse scroll will also increase or decrease the size of a web page.
  3. “http://www” is not needed in your browser. The domain name will do. For example, enter camosun.ca instead of http://www.camosun.ca into your Web browser address bar and save yourself a few keystrokes each time.
  4. The space bar will scroll down one screen on a web page. Shift spacebar goes up one screen.
  5. Tab will move you from field to field when you fill out a web form. You don’t have to mouse click in each text box.
  6. Google does math. Type an equation into Google and hit enter. Voila!
  7. Google also does time and weather. Enter the word “time” or “weather” followed by a major city and get the time and weather for that location. For example, “time Vancouver” or “weather Vancouver” gives you the local time or weather forecast for Vancouver, BC.
  8. Alt+D pops your cursor up to the address bar
  9. Alt+left arrow takes you back a page in your browser. Alt+right arrow moves you ahead.
  10. Ctrl+Tab moves you from tab to tab in a browser.
  11. F5 wil refresh/reload a page – handy when you make a change to a page and it isn’t showing up in your browser like you are expecting it to.
  12. Ctrl+F let’s you search for text on a web page.
  13. Ctrl+T opens a new browser tab
  14. F1 opens Help

For more tips, check out the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google.

via tweet from The Clever Sheep

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Posterous is the easiest way to publish content to the web

There is a multitude of ways and methods to post content on the web, but I have never come across one so easy as Posterous. Simply email the content you wanted posted on the web to an email address and, uh, we’ll, that’s about it. A few moments pass and you get an email back with a link to your webpage. You don’t even need to create an account.

For something that is so simple, the application is surprisingly feature rich when it comes to multimedia. Attach photos, documents, video, presentations and MP3’s to your email and they will be converted, resized and embedded into your web page. Include URL’s and they become links. Include a YouTube link, and the video will be embedded in your final page. That is slick.

Here is an example of a page I created. I sent an email to post@posterous.com. Attached to the email was a PDF document and an image. The subject of the email becomes the page title, while the email itself became the post.

There are options once the page is created to then create an account, which then let’s you have a permanent website to post content to. But that isn’t necessary. You can one off publish content quickly and easily just by firing off an email. Doesn’t get much easier than that.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Splicd lets you edit YouTube videos

Video is great, but the linear storytelling format sometimes forces you to watch a lot of irrelevant content before getting to the meat of the clip. Which is where a handy tool like Splicd comes in. Splicd let’s you edit the start and end points of a YouTube video. Enter in the url of the video and a start time and end time.

It feels a bit like a quick and dirty implementation, but it works. Here is an example I took from the recent video of our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, copying word for word a speech given by Australian Prime Minister John Howard on the eve of the Iraq war. The original video is about 3 minutes long (and well worth a look, imho). With Splicd I was able to isolate 30 seconds that really illustrates the the point.

There are limitations. Splicd only works with YouTube videos and there is no method to embed the edited video into a website. Only allowing increments of seconds as opposed to tenths of seconds makes some pretty jagged start and end points. Allowing smaller time increments would make the edits a bit smoother. But this simple little tool does the trick.

via Webware