EdTech

by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Why you shouldn't post your PowerPoint slides online (and the alternatives available)

This is not going to be a PowerPoint is Evil rant. Heck, some people have even won Academy Awards and Nobel Prizes with their PowerPoint presentations, so there is no denying that, when used correctly, can be a powerful tool to convey meaning to a live audience.

But that is it’s place – in front of a live audience. PowerPoint is a presentation tool and was never intended to be a web friendly format. So you should avoid putting your PowerPoint presentations online and here is why.

It doesn’t work

There are 3 technical reasons why you don’t want to put your PowerPoint files on the web.

  • The files are big, especially if you use lots of animations and fancy transitions.
  • They require students to have PowerPoint or the PowerPoint viewer installed on their computer.
  • Depending on the browser, how it is configured and the security settings, PowerPoint files can cause strange and unexpected behaviours. One user may have that PowerPoint file open in their browser, another may be prompted to download the file while a third may get a security warning that a potentially malicious file is about to be opened.

These are barriers for students and should be reason enough to shy away from putting your PowerPoint presentations online.

What do these slides mean?

For me, however, the overriding reason to avoid putting your PowerPoint presentation online is that your students are missing a fundamental piece to help them truly understand the content- you.

In order to be a useful methods of delivering information, PowerPoint requires someone at the helm to guide the viewer and fill in the space between the bullet points. Without you, PowerPoint slides are just disjointed bullet points of facts and images with no context as to what those facts and images really mean. You provide the context that is critical to understanding. Take you out of the picture and the presentation is useless.

The design problem

You approach different mediums in different ways. Decisions on how you craft your message needs to factor in the medium you use to deliver that message.

Designing for presenting is completely different than designing for the web, just like designing for print is different than designing for video. In order to effectively communicate meaning, you need to structure your content in a way that correctly uses the medium you are designing for. Each medium requires different strategies to be used effectively.

Solutions

The first solution is the one that takes the most effort, but has the biggest payoff in terms of making sure your content is both understood and technically accessible. Recreate the content in your PowerPoint presentations in a web friendly format. Rewrite your bullet points in HTML, convert your images to jpeg or gif, and build some web friendly pages of content. It fixes all the problems mentioned above. You can do this in Powerpoint by saving your presentation as a web page.

I am not a big fan of this method for a couple of reasons. For one, it is still content that has been designed for Powerpoint and brings with it all the constraints and none of the benefits of that format. The second is the geeky reason – the code is poor and it tends to create whacks of files and folders that all need to be uploaded for the pages to work correctly. For more tech savvy faculty, this may not be a problem. But if you are the type of faculty who can’t find or organize files and folders on your computer, this may be a challenge. It’s better to use other HTML editing tools (like the built in editor and content manager in Desire2Learn) to do this.

If you absolutely must post PowerPoint presentations on the web, at least do your students a favour and don’t force them to download large files or the PowerPoint viewer. Chances are they already have a PDF reader installed on their computer, so convert your PowerPoint to PDF and post that instead. PDF is a much more web friendly format than PowerPoint.

An option that is becoming more popular is using a web service and posting your PowerPoint online. A service like Slideshare works like YouTube for PowerPoint. You can create an account and upload your presentation. The presentation is converted to the (close to) ubiquitous Flash format which you can then embed in a web page, blog post or D2L course content page. No downloads for students.

There are also online presentation tools, like Preezo, SlideRocket and Google Presentations that you can either use as a starting point for creating web friendly presentations, or will convert your existing PowerPoint presentations to something you can easily embed into your course. While not as feature rich as PowerPoint (and who really uses all those features anyway?), these are still powerful tools for creating web friendly presentation that won’t make your students curse you as they wait for your 100 meg PowerPoint file to download.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Using Swurl to aggregate my life

Not surprisingly, I live much of my life online and there are digital artifacts of me floating around all over the place. There is this blog, my other blog, and then my other blog, Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Picasa, Amazon, YouTube – I have accounts with all and I use them all on a (somewhat) regular basis. For someone who may want to follow my life, that’s a lot of content to keep track of. Which is where Swurl comes in.

Swurl is an aggregation service that allows me to pull all the information from the other services I use and display them in a central location. It’s a powerful example of the small pieces, loosely joined philosophy that strongly resonates with me.

Swurl is dead simple to use, thanks to the magic of RSS (which I think should really stand for Radical Societal Shift for it’s massive contribution in reshaping how we interact with information). I created a mini-site pulling in my most recent activity from my blogs, Twitter, del.icious, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Amazon in less than 5 minutes. Swurl displays this information chronologically with my most recent activity first.

I agree with Alan that one of the more interesting features of Swurl is the timeline feature. It’s a nice way to handle the archiving of my digital life (although that Twitter post from December 31, 1969 is quite strange. But then again, it’s Twitter.).

I suspect that services like Swurl will become quite common as more people begin to use more web based services. There is going to be demand for a central place to pull all this information together, and Swurl does this very nicely, without being forced into a walled garden like Facebook.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Imeem – a YouTube for audio?

A few days ago, Alan Levine fired off a tweet looking for a “YouTube-ish” web service for audio. I’ve also wondered if there was also a service out there that would allow users to upload audio and provide something as handy as the embed feature of YouTube to allow that audio to live in a number of locations . Today I discovered imeem, which is an audio sharing site that gives you the ability to embed the audio clips you upload using a flash player.

At it’s heart, imeem is a music sharing social network site. But an mp3 is an mp3, so your audio doesn’t have to be music. Any audio you upload can be embedded into a blog/wiki/LMS page. And the flash player is about as close to a cross platform media format as you get these days.

Here’s what the embedded player looks like.

The Heart Of Saturday Night – Tom Waits

If you head to the page for this song, you’ll see the interface is very YouTube inspired with a lot of YouTube features. Imeem is probably the closest to YouTube for audio that I have seen.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Annotate Jing videos with ZoomIt

I really like Jing. Sure, you could dish out hundreds of dollars for Captivate or Camtasia and get a bit more robust set of features (including the ability to create videos over 5 minutes and post production editing), but in terms of value, it’s hard to beat this free, simple and easy to use piece of software for creating videos of screen captures.

One feature I would like to see in Jing that it currently doesn’t have is the ability annotate content on the screen as I create screenshot videos. Well, this week I came across a free tool called ZoomIt from the Sysinternals group at Microsoft. Here is another handy, free tool that allows you to do simple annotations on the screen, and also allows you to zoom in. Put Jing and ZoomIt together and you’ve got a handy screen video capture that allows you to annotate videos. Here’s a quick example of what you can do with Jing and ZoomIt.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://clintlalonde.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/jingzoomit2.swf” height=”400″ width=”500″ /]

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Podcasting in Plain English

Another gem from Common Craft and their excellent “In Plain English” series, this time about podcasting.

The trouble I tend to experience with faculty, especially faculty who are fairly new users of technology, is explaining the key difference between a podcast and traditional streaming audio, which is subscription. I often find that until people actually see a podcatcher in action, they sometimes can’t wrap their head around what that subscription model looks like, especially if they have never been exposed to RSS feeds before. This video will help.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

3 months of Twitter

I was about to add my name to Alan Levine’s Twitter Life Cycle when I realized I have been using Twitter for 3 months now. Has it really been 3 months since I hopped on board the Twitter train? Wow. Time flies when you are having fun. And Twitter is fun.

But beyond fun, in the past 3 months Twitter has quickly become an indispensable tool for me. It is allowing me to connect with people at a completely different level. Clive Thompson at Wired puts it well when he says Twitter creates a social sixth sense.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

I experienced one of those “feats of coordination” a few days after I signed up for Twitter. Northern Voice was happening in Vancouver. I was unable to attend, but was able to virtually attend as my network kept feeding me information via Twitter. Links to supplemental materials and live videocasts of keynotes were popping up, allowing me watch and listening real time. I followed the backchannel conversations and was able to get a sense of what was happening, from multiple independent sources. People who did not know each other, but happened to be at the same conference in the same room all commenting on the same points. It was incredibly rich – an aha moment for me that convinced me there was something to this Twitter thing.

Since then my delicious account has been filling with Twitter specific content – how academics are using it, both professionally and pedagogically. Tools and mashups to leverage it, and guides and resources I can use to help me convince others to join in.

So, after 3 months with Twitter I can say that there is something there, despite the frequent outages. If you want to find me I’ll be at twitter.com/clintlalonde.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

My morning with Google Sites/Apps

Well, it took a lot of effort this morning, but I’m finally taking a look at Google Sites, which is rising from the ashes of the Jotspot wiki acquisition by Google last year.

I almost bailed on the process before I even started. I couldn’t use my existing Google account to log in. Seems that in order to try out Google Sites I needed to enter an email address of a work or school domain. Huh?

Upon further examination, it looked like I was actually signing up for Google Apps and not just Google Sites. Double huh?

I reread the Google Sites page and realized that Google has bundled Sites with Google Apps. If you want Sites, you need to have an Apps account. I couldn’t find any way to tie Google Sites to my existing single Google account.

So, if my first impression is correct, it doesn’t look like creating a wiki is going to be easy for your average user. I suspect individual users aren’t even on the radar for Google with respect to Sites. By bundling it with Google Apps, Google has sent a clear signal that they are targeting organizational IT departments moreso than individual users.

That’s not a bad thing. But don’t expect Google Sites to compete with PBWiki, Wetpaint or Wikispaces in the “hey I can get a wiki up and running in 5 minutes” department. It appears that’s not the purpose. It looks like Google Sites has become one little piece of a bigger puzzle for Google as they take aim at domain wide collaborative applications like SharePoint.

I did plunge in and sign up for a Google Apps account. I control a domain name so I used an email address from that domain to sign up and have now spent the better part of the morning getting distracted by Google Apps (and getting WAAAAAAY more functionality and services than I wanted). But for many of the people I am trying to convince to use wiki’s as a learning and teaching tool, this won’t be the first one out of my mouth.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Google Docs adds Forms

Google Docs users have a new tool at their disposal – forms. And it looks dead easy to use.

Create a spreadsheet, share it as a form, choose who you want to email that form to and Google Docs will collect and tabulate that information in a spreadsheet.

I created a form in a minute. Fill it out if you would like to give it a try (no personal info or Google account is required). I’ve set it so that responses will be displayed in the form so if you fill it out and go back to the form you’ll see your response. This info also gets added to a spreadsheet that I’ve made public in my Google Docs account.

Dan Schellenberg has created a screencast on how to create a form with Google Docs.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

I just joined Twitter and I'm lonely – wait a sec…Google can fix that!

Google releases Social Graph API

The scenario:
EdTech geek finally joins YASN (Yet Another Social Network), in this case Twitter. Said EdTech geek now needs to find friends also using Twitter (and find a reason to use it) or else see it go the way of other social networks. Fortunately, some folks whom I virtually follow on a regular basis are already using it, so I check out their profiles and follow along. Uploading my Gmail account catches a few more friends, but this all feels pretty clunky.

Soon there will be a better way. Today Google announced their Social Graph API. Using 2 technologies I’ve never heard of – FOAF and XFN – Google will now be able to track my relationships like they track the linked relationships of webpages. They then open this information up to social network developers who can now make it possible for me to, say, find all my Facebook friends who are using Twitter.

Here’s the high level overview.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

"The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10"

The wonderful quote in the title comes from a graduate student at the University of North Carolina and was posted over at one of my favorite blogs about parenting and technology parent.thesis.

The quote comes from a post about an issue that many of us in the classroom deal with. How do we capture our students attention when there are so many distractions around? Do we ban it or embrace it?

Well, one strategy is to take this particular prof’s approach and do both. He does a wonderful job at making his point while still managing to capture his students attention.

Just in case you miss it at the end, he introduces his friend to the class. A joke, but an effective one.

The parent.thesis post mentions a PBS Frontline documentary called Growing Up Online that aired a few weeks ago. They’ve posted the whole show online and it has a great segment featuring 2 high school teachers on both sides of the fence. They have posted the entire doc online. And, if you have kids, you may want to check the whole thing out. As the producers of the documentary point out, we might be facing the greatest generation gap since rock ‘n’ roll.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

MIT Lecture Browser – text search for video content

I just came across the MIT Lecture Browser and am a bit smitten.

Essentially, it’s a combination speech to text converter and search engine for video lectures at MIT. Enter in a word and the search engine will not only find the videos that the word is used in, but it will also take you to the exact spot within the video where that word was used and give you a running transcript.

With more than 100 million videos online and another 100,000 being uploaded each day, there is an awful lot of great content that is, for the most part, hidden away from search engines that do nothing but search on tags, keywords and descriptions.

I imagine this kind of search will be much more common in the next couple of years – in fact, there are already some options emerging in this area.

The speech to text recognition isn’t perfect. I used the example search term of “wine”. one of the videos returned was from Nicholas Negroponte, talking about the hundred dollar laptop at the 2005 MIT Emerging Technologies Conference. I was intrigued. Where in that address did Negroponte talk about wine? Well, here’s the text quote:

show you a few slides so wine doubt laptop it does you could that that creek slips out and see sells word eat else can slip and

And here is Negroponte’s actual quote:

show you a few slides. It’s a wind up laptop. (bit of a stumble) that crank slips out and c cells or d cells could slip in

So the speech to text is a work in progress.

But besides the technology, the ability to access and search the MIT lecture library for content is also very cool. However, it looks like there isn’t a heck of a lot of content there yet. Do a search for “television” in the category “Media” and you only get a single video returned. I suspect the word “television” might be used in a few more classes than that in a Media Studies program.

Maybe part of the reason I am smitten is that it reminded me of a project I was working on about 5 years ago. We have a large collection of digitized audio and I was trying to build a web based application using an XML based language called SMIL that would do something similar with audio clips. That project eventually died, and I was a bit sad that the use of SMIL was never really mainstreamed, despite being a W3C technology. It looks like the MIT site uses some SMIL program and that brought back some warm fuzzies of my bygone project.

Really, how can you not love a programming language called SMIL?

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Teach Collaborative Revision with Google Docs

Google for Educators has partnered with Writing magazine to put together a handy little piece on how to use Google Docs to teach collaborative revision.

The content is aimed at secondary students, but still contains some useful takeaways for post-sec, especially if you are new to Google Docs. There is a step by step how-to guide to using Google Docs (available as a pdf, not a Google Doc?) and a pdf about the revision features of Google Docs.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Learning online: Factors associated with use of the Internet for education purposes

I haven’t been able to fully digest the information here yet, but last week Statistics Canada released the latest version of their online newsletter Education Matters with an article titled Learning online: Factors associated with use of the Internet for education purposes.

This article investigates the use of the Internet for education-related reasons based on findings from the 2005 Canadian Internet Use Survey (CIUS). After providing an overview of Internet use in Canada, the article describes selected social, economic and geographic characteristics of those going online for education-related reasons. It then examines specific reasons for going online for education-related purposes, including distance education, self-directed learning and correspondence courses.

Some points have jumped out at me. As Stephen Downes has noted, 26% of Canadians using the internet for some sort of online learning is impressive.

Some other points from the article:

  • People who use the internet for education tend to be younger and better educated than average internet users.
  • Nearly 80% of all full- and part-time students reported going online for education, training or school work.
  • Residents of Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Quebec reported the lowest rates of Internet use for education, training or school work, at around 20%, and those living in Ontario reported the highest rate (32%).

The report also noted that people who go online for education-related reasons “appear to be more “engaged” Internet users than individuals who did not go online” because they go online more frequently, for longer periods of time and have more varied activities than those who are not using the net for education related purposes.

By far and way the most common activity educational users of the net do when they are online is research (71%), followed by distance education (26%). Interestingly, according to the data, more education related users used the net to communicate with school administration than to communicate with a teacher or instructor.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

A Vision of Students Today

I am going to EDUCAUSE in Seattle next week and some of the sessions I am most looking forward to are the ones based on student data. What technologies are they actually using? Which do they find beneficial and which are over hyped? Most importantly, which ones do they want us to use?

Today I came across a video called “A Vision of Students Today” (via OUseful). It was created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. The video is a snapshot of 200 students in a Cultural Anthropology course and;

summarizes some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.

It’s well done and powerful.

Interesting note that the end of the video seems to hint at something that Scott Leslie recently blogged about regarding the power of live and in person social learning. But the slightly ironic twist here is that the project was done using Google Docs and posted to YouTube, a couple of educational technology poster children applications. The point being that technology is never the end all or be all when it comes to effective teaching and learning. It is simply another tool in an educators arsenal. I look forward to the “…to be continued” piece.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

A walled garden falls

The New York Times is opening up their website, ending a two year experiment in charging for online content.

Despite the fact that they had over 250,000 subscribers and their subscription revenue was over $10 million dollars, in the end The Times decided they could make much more with online advertising than with keeping the lock on the door. Which really says something about the state of online advertising these days.

It was also interesting to read this rather naive quote from Vivian L. Schiller, who is the senior vice president and general manager of the NYTimes.com site.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

Your kidding, right? The senior vice president of a major web property like The Times didn’t realize that search engines drive traffic? Doesn’t that strike you as odd that someone in such a position of authority at a major online property in the media publishing business failed to understand one of the most basic web marketing truisms that search engines drive traffic – lots and lots of traffic – to web sites? I’m missing something in her statement.

For academics and researchers the most exciting part of the announcement might be the fact that they are opening up their archives.

…The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Not sure why the material from 1923 to 1986 is still locked up, but nonetheless the thought of being able to freely access articles and data from The Times via their website should make research a little bit easier.

As a fun little search, I searched the term “internet” from 1981 on to see when the word first appeared in the NY Times and it looks like the date of the first mention of the internet is November 5th, 1988 in an article about a computer virus called “Author of Computer ‘Virus’ Is Son Of N.S.A. Expert on Data Security”. This is really early days as the virus is in quotes and doesn’t even have a name. They simply refer to it as ‘virus’. Fun. And note the number of computers in infected.

The program eventually affected as many as 6,000 computers, or 10 percent of the systems linked through an international group of computer communications networks, the Internet.

Less than 20 years ago there were only 60,000 computers on the internet. Crazy. Today there are probably 60,000 computers in my neighbourhood.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Facebook is not how life works

Following up on a post from a few days ago regarding whether or not students want us in their space, I just came across an interesting article from the Washington Post called An Unmanageable Circle of Friends.

Overall the article is critical of social networks and the seemingly shallow relationships between people that often form. While I agree that many of the relationships are shallow, I also happen to know that the opposite is true and some fairly deep relationships can occur.

It’s also true that social networks don’t build real connections. It’s the people behind the keyboard who are the architects of real connections. I think the technology itself is agnostic when it comes to the level of depth of the relationships it mediates. The users choose how deep or shallow they wish to wade into the social network pond.

The one point that was bang on for me, however, was the point raised by University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman. Wellman really hits the nail on the head with regards to Facebook, MySpace and other social networks.

The bigger problem with Facebook et al., says Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist and founder of INSNA, is that current sites “assume that everyone in your life is on one happy network.” On MySpace, your work colleagues are given the same info as your Halo buddies. That’s not how life works, and pretending it does dilutes the meaning of our more powerful connections.

Essentially, everyone in our network gets the same level of access to personal information, whereas in “real life” we have much more control over what types of information we want to share with the people around us. I don’t necessarily tell my work colleagues all the details of my personal life, although they all know much more about my kids than my banker does. But my banker knows much more about how much I owe on my mortgage than my colleagues. We build these little walled areas in our life and when areas collide it makes us feel uncomfortable. And this is where I believe the friction will occur with students as educators push more into their online social networks.

One other question raised by the article, and one that I’ll be asking more and more, is how many social connections can we have before they begin to lose meaning and effectiveness? I have never heard of Dunbar’s number before, but I’m certainly going to research it a bit more as I continue to look at the effectiveness of social networks as an educational tool.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Do students want us in their space?

Got into an interesting discussion last week with a couple of faculty members who are just coming to Facebook for the first time. They have been receiving notifications from former students who have their email address in their address book when they upload them to Facebook. Usually the invitation to the faculty by the student is an inadvertent side effect of the Facebook bulk email address upload, and the students are often embarrased that the faculty person got a request from them. Which lead us into discussing whether or not students really want us in “their space”?

While there is a lot of excited clamoring in the edtech blogsphere about the potential of Facebook as a personal learning environment (me included), it seems to me there is a reluctance by students to have us that closely entwined in their life. I’m beginning to suspect that students see a real disconnect between their life and their education. Facebook is not where they go to learn. It’s where they go to socialize, relax and throw virtual food at each other.

Earlier today I was doing a Technorati search using my insitution as a search term to see if there were any incoming students blogging about the school and came across this posting on MySpace from an incoming student who is none too impressed that one of our faculty has sent her an invite to join a Facebook.

Granted, her frustration seems to be more of the “this Facebook thing has gone too far” as opposed to “this is an intrusion where I don’t want it”, but you still have to suspect that there will be students who see MySpace as just that- their space. And whether they throw the doors open and invite us educators in with open arms remains to be seen. But I won’t be surprised if some students balk at blurring the lines between “school life” and “personal life”.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Google releases new research API

Some new geeky goodness from Google aimed squarely at researchers. The University Research Program for Google Search is a new API that gives programmers the ability to tap into Google. In their words:

The University Research Program for Google Search is designed to give university faculty and their research teams high-volume programmatic access to Google Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for understanding the structure and contents of the web.

Our aim is to help bootstrap web research by offering basic information about specific search queries. Since the program builds on top of Google’s search technology, you’ll no longer have to operate your own crawl and indexing systems. We hope this will help enable some useful research, and request only that you publish any work you produce through this program for the academic community’s general benefit.

The major restriction is that the program is open only to academic faculty members and their research teams at colleges and universities. However, the flip side of that restriction is that any research results obtained using the API must be made available to the public.

From Programmable Web.