Computer animation and learning

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then what of a multi-million pixel, 3D ray-tracing representation? hah!

Well, anyway, one of the aims of this blog is to spread awareness of a range of technologies that can be used in higher education. Whilst school-teachers in Britain are currently campaigning to ban YouTube (I kid you not - but only one of the tiny unions, so far), others are using it to great effect to share materials. One nice example, is the video produced by XVIVO on the 'inner life of a cell'. The YouTube version is of course not full quality, but has the nice aspect that it can be embedded in your web (or Blackboard) pages, as below, and is a nice way of distributing such materials to students. Have a search also for other relevant materials and try your best to avoid the movies of people falling over and cats sleeping in strange places, unless of course you like that sort of thing....

Jing-a-ling

It's the race week madness, and all of Galway has gone to get a bit of jing-a-ling in their pockets from betting on those fair fillies. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I see from Leigh Blackall's blog that Techsmith have a new freeware tool out called Jing. It's pretty neat. I already use Techsmith's SnagIT tool to take screenshots, but Jing sits on the top of the screen as a little yellow orb, just waiting to take a screen grab or video of anything you are working on. And the bonus- it's free (well for the moment at least).

It's worth keeping an eye on all the OSS alternatives out there, such as those Leigh uses, like Camstudio for the screenrecording, ScreenHunter to grab stills out of video for print, Videora or SuperC to compress the video for Internet and Hey!Spread to distribute the video across multiple video hosting services... Leigh is a mine of information on the topic.

For more on Jing, see a pop-up video of Jing in action to see what all the fuss is about.

UCD Library joins Second Life

I just noticed in my UCD Alumni newsletter (eConnections) that the UCD James Joyce library has become the first Irish library in Second Life.

From the UCD news site:
“We’ve had instant messaging and blogs for quite some time now, so we thought that this virtual world might offer another useful compliment to the provision of traditional library services,” says Cathal McCauley from UCD Library Services. McCauley, who is leading the project for UCD Library, explains that Second Life is reminiscent of the internet in the mid-1990s. “We want to investigate the possibilities it might offer.”

See UCD News for the full story.

Maybe we all need a good mash-up?

Now, leaving the mashed potato jokes aside- what I mean is to say is - how about a future of software mash-ups? According to Dion Hinchcliffe we are in for a bumper crop. What a great idea- and a possible solution to those wanting to take those useful features from VLEs, online repositories, e-Porfolios and social software tools... and mash them all up! Is this really possible?

If Dion's pretty diagram is anything to go by, it looks like such a stunningly great concept:

Dion's blog posting outlines 17 mash-up platforms which end-users could use for this purpose. He has lots more ideas for this user-created mash-ups on his own blog.

See also Stephen Downes and Wayne Hodgkins for more on this topic.

Becta report on e-portfolios

A recent British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) report on e-Porfolios describes their use in various educational sectors. The research was conducted by a team of researchers in the Learning Sciences Research Institute at The University of Nottingham led by Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young. Of interest is the eight case study in their report describing the use of e-Porfolios by the NHS Education for Scotland. In this instance, the e-Porfolio was used by 1,600 graduate medical students during their two foundation years’ training. Their e-Porfolio encompassed:

• personal development plans
• supervisors’ reports
• certificate of performance
• multi-source feedback
• workplace assessments
• log entries
• significant event analyses.

The study looked at engagement & motivation, goal setting & reflection, feedback & collaboration, attainment, and generalisability & transferability of the doctors' experience. The initial e-Portfolio was created largely to provide for assessment, but has diversifed to support reflective practice, professional tools and deliver e-learning.

The report states that "E-portfolios benefit learning most effectively when considered as part of a system, rather than as a discrete entity. The system should include online repositories, planning and communication tools, and opportunities for both students and teachers to draw out andpresent e-portfolios at particular times and for particular purposes."

The full research report, which is written for the academic community, is available to download in Word (2.5MB) or PDF (1.8MB).

More References
Becta: e-assessment and e-portfolios : http://becta.org.uk/corporate/publications/documents/e-assessment.pdf
Department for Education and Skills, 2005, Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services, London: DfES.http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/e-strategy
Hartnell-Young E, 2006, E-Portfolios in Australian Schools: Supporting Learners’ Self-esteem, Multiliteracies and Reflectionon Learning. In Mittermeir R T (ed), ISSEP 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4226, pp279-289, Berlin, Heidelberg:Springer-Verlag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11915355_26
JISC: Infonet http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/effective-use-of-VLEs/e-portfolios
QCA, 2004, Blueprint for E-assessment http://www.qca.org.uk/6995.html
Their space: education for a digital generation DEMOS http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/theirspace
Oxford Brookes ProjectRoberts, G, 2006, My World: E-portfolios: Activity and Identity, Brookes eJournal of Learning and Teaching, 1 4). http://www.brookes.ac.uk/publications/bejlt/volume1issue4/perspective/roberts.html

Stephen Heppell's keynote

I'm pleased to announce that Stephen Heppell's keynote is now available for viewing. Sorry about the delay, needed a bit of tidying up and conversion before we could pop it on line. Watch and be stimulated!

http://videostream.nuigalway.ie/stheppell

Noncommercial Isn’t the Problem, ShareAlike Is

Having attended the excellent presentations at the conference, given by Bob Clark and Maureen O'Sullivan, on Intellectual Property Rights and Creative Commons, I thought I was getting to grips with the whole issue of copyright (and even copyleft). But I've just read this blog entry from David Wiley, about licensing and restrictions, and I'm more confused than ever.

He talks about permissible restrictions and license incompatibility. It seems that even those of us who are aware of restrictions and try to do the right thing, are probably getting it wrong. How is any person without legal training supposed to understand the intricacies?

Moreover, and given the current role of CELT in upgrading Blackboard at NUI Galway, what is the responsibility (& liability) of the institution, where staff are making resources available to students through the VLE?

'Write Articles not Blog Postings' says Jakob Nielsen

Interesting article posted in the Guardian a couple of days ago:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2007/07/09/write_articles_not_blog_postings_says_jakob_nielsen.html

Great to see the debate between the pro- and anti-Nielsen camps ongoing in the comments section below this article.

Galway to host a BarCamp!

An open, participatory workshop event, called BarCamp, will be coming to Galway, courtsey of Deri on 22nd of September 2007. These BarCamp events typically focus on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, in 2005. Since then, similar events have been held in over 31 cities around the world. Participants gather and informally present and participate as actively as possible- everyone is encouraged to partake. Current topics already posted on the Galway BarCamp wiki include social networking, RSS, RDF, the mobile web, and the metaverse. This looks to be a very collaborative and creative "unconference", with plenty of scope for contribution... roll up those sleeves and get stuck in!

Update on Elgg Community Site @ Brighton

Katie Piatt, from the University of Brighton has set up an area on the Brighton Elgg Community site to continue any discussions about the Elgg event and to ask any follow up questions: Elgg Jam Weblog. There are also some photos from the event on: Elgg Jam Photo Area. Any available powerpoint slides from speakers which are shared are accessible on: Elgg Jam Files

The Learning Technologies Group at the University of Brighton will also be adding the videos from the conference when they’ve had a chance to edit them together.

Elgg Jam at the University of Brighton

The event was impressively organised, as was the Creativity Room at the Mouslecoomb campus of the University of Brighton. Olfactory smells of Peppermint, and other stimulating spices emerged from their newly installed Smell-o-vision (really- this is no joke), and wafted through the event to keep us concentrated on the keynote and case study speakers. Whiteboards, and no less than seven projectors kept our eyes glued to the images being displayed around the curved, white walls of the main room.
The enthusiasm of Stan Stanier and Katie Piatt from the University of Brighton was infectious, as delegates began gushing about Elgg as a tool for student motivation & engagement, from their own experiences. There was less talk of faculty driven participation, and several of the case studies spoke about the use of the software in non-structured context, on a voluntary basis (or ‘natural uptake’) by students for socialising and communication that transcended the module or course structure. Another interesting application was the use of Elgg in work contexts, in which a publisher's employees used it to share comments and edits of submitted work.

Graham Attwell in his talk raised some of the troubling issues surrounding the use of social software such as:

• Who provides the e-portfolio ? (i.e. the institution, a commercial provider or the government)- by which he means a personal learning portfolio, as opposed to an assessment, presentation or PDP portfolio


• Should it be open or closed (an how to keep ones duty of care, and a space for reflection)?


• What should it contain (i.e. formal, institutionally determined content, or personal content that transcends the institutional contexts)?

George Roberts work on the Emerge project was facinating how how they integrated Moodle, PhpBB and Wikis into Elgg and configuring these components, as required by the community.

Some questions that I have in relation to the use of Elgg in universities, remain outstanding. These include:

• Authorship: Intellectual property implications (who owns the mashed-up content?) and the impact of social networks on plagiarism (does it lead to increased plagiarism?)


• Social rules: Dealing with bullying or lack of social contacts (can you also lack friends in a university social network?). Should this "educational" social network be seperate from other social networks, such as Bebo, and Facebook, etc.? (I would imagine it should be- but does this mean it is a sterile environment?)


• Pedagogy: How useful is a social network in a formal HE learning context, and what type of pedagogies is it amenable or supportive of? Are there groups of users for whom it is more suitable (i.e. postgraduates, undergraduates or learners in a work-based context)? How can it be tightly coupled with course work, or should it be?


• Control: Should participation be voluntary or if this is used in formal structured contexts, how would it become subverted or perceived (i.e. the importance of decentralised control)


• Ownership: What happens to this profile when the student leaves the institution? Are there any other issues around making profiles public? Should non-university staff or students be also allowed to have profiles created on a particular institutions platform? Should the government provide this as a service for all citizens? The provision and ownership of the service are unresolved issues for me.
  

Michael Orey's Wiki Book

Michael Orey, from the Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology, University of Georgia has put together a rather different text book on educational theory and technologies. The book is entitled "Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Technology." Michael started this book in 2001 with a core group of doctoral students. The initial version included 12 chapters with no animations and very few images. Each semester, Michael asks his current students who are using this book as their required text in his class to improve on the book by either making animations, recorded presentations, graphics, editing, or various other contributions (there is no such thing as a completely free book!). It has been in HTML until May 2007 when they converted it to this Wiki.

It has expanded to include over 32 chapters, along with images, animations, videos, narrated presentations, and Powerpoint games as part of the text. Michael is working towards having this book included in the Global Text Project (http://globaltext.org/ ). He is currently inviting contributions to review any of the chapters. Editing of the chapters is controlled- you can only do this through the discussion pages, or by emailing him directly. I'm not sure why, as this does eliminate some of the wiki benefits, but presumably this is due to IP considerations? Still, it's nice to see such a collective initiative.