Clickers in the Classroom

Today's Inside Higher Ed reports from the Blackboard World conference in Las Vegas about the use of audience response systems in the classroom, and whether it is a fad or a useful educational tool. It points to an interesting report on a study at Ohio State University, where clickers are used to engage and involve Physics students. It was found that students who used clickers earned exam scores that were 10% higher than students who didn't use them. Moreover, it seems that female students in particular benefited from the anonymity that clickers give, allowing them to actively participate in lecture sessions while keeping their involvement private.

the Hidden power of the GPU

Sometimes the sluggishness of this computer becomes really annoying, particularly when it is doing what is a relatively simple task conceptually but is encumbered by 'bloatware'. Despite a fast processor and lots of RAM there are times when it just trundles along. Interesting then to read that programmers are working on unleashing the often underused power of the graphics card. Bristling with processors that lie largely idle (except in the heat of intense gaming) they represent an untapped power that could supercharge a PC's performance. The Guardian, yesterday, carried the story.

Wordle

I've been having fun with Wordle, a little tool that allows you to create word clouds based on text that you enter. It's very easy to use, with a simple set of options for changing font, colours and format. To save locally, you need to install a pdf writer, if you don't already have one, but this took me all of 5 seconds.

My first creation is based on our recent Teaching Awards scheme, and I'm quite pleased with the result.

The European Award for Languages

Congratulations to the NDLR Modern Languages' Community of Practice, which has won a European Award for Languages 2008 for its blog as a Language Community Building Medium. For more information see the entry on the blog, or contact Michelle Tooher or Paul Gormley, both members of the Learning Technologies Team here at CELT.

A second award went to the Italia in Diretta project run by Laura McLoughlin in the Italian Department at NUI Galway. This encourages students to run a website and blog to promote the Italian language aimed at school children.

intro to second life in education

Educause's latest "7 things you should know..." leaflet is about Second Life and its educational potential. It's available here.

Collection of free educational media

The Openculture blog has an expanding listing of open access university course materials and is a handy way of finding some examples rather than being over-reliant on one provider, such as iTunes, for example.

Live Conference Presentations from Princeton

The NMC (New Media Consortium) annual conference is under way in Princeton with over 600 participants. As you might hope for such a technology organisation, the keynote presentations are being made available as live streams. The events (in Princeton time!) are as below and you can access them here.

• Opening Plenary Keynote Presentation: “Technology and the Global Commons” Diana Oblinger, President, EDUCAUSE
  Thursday June 12, 8:30am-9:45am EDT
• Noontime Plenary Presentation: “Motion and Emotion, Multi-media Storytelling on the Web” Bill Frakes, Sports Illustrated
  Thursday June 12, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Keynote Presentation: “New Frontiers in Nanotechnology” Wole Soboyejo, Princeton University
  Friday June 13, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Center of Excellence Awards and Five Minutes of Fame, NMC
  Friday June 13, 2:45pm-5:00pm EDt
• Closing Plenary Keynote Presentation: “What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media” Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Saturday June 14, 10:15am-11:45am EDT
• Note that we are also hoping to have Henry Jenkins' session also streamed into Second Life on Princeton's SL version of the actual venue, Alexander Hall

Trinity College Dublin on iTunes U

As reported today in the Education Guardian and on the BBC website, TCD is now on iTunes U, giving access to audio and video materials, at http://itunes.tcd.ie
At the moment there are some promotional materials and public lectures from distinguished visitors. There are also some recorded lectures in immunology, computer science and education. Together with UCL and the Open University, this marks the first time that European universities have featured on iTunes U.

For more information, see the press release Trinity College Dublin Launches iTunes U Site.

Get into a huddle to collaborate

Huddle is growing as an application for document sharing and group work, paticularly given that is free for charities and relatively low cost for others. It's a simple enough tool and very easy to use. Useful for group projects and collaboration. It links to facebook and blogs and it will be interesting to see how it compares with the various google and yahoo tools that are out there but riddled with ads! Speaking of which, if you are using Firefox, remember that you can clear the commercial clutter on your browser by installing and activating Adblock or Adblock Plus.

Online Engineering Lectures from India

The Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Science have released over 1,650 lectures on YouTube and made them freely available to anyone studying a range of technical and engineering related topics. You can access them here. Be prepared for a couple of minutes theme tunes and titles in some cases. The project arises from the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning and its main website is here.

Microsoft demos 'touch Windows'

The BBC website reports on the next Windows OS, with a multi-touch interface instead of a mouse. With beta testing starting later this year, and a 2009 release scheduled, Windows 7 will have to do better than Vista.

Turnitin and International Students

At the 2nd meeting on Institutional Policies and Procedures for Dealing with Plagiarism at Oxford Brookes University last week, I listened with interest to Dr. Niall Hayes of Lancaster University. Niall is involved in a Student Diversity and Academic Writing project, funded through HEFCE. He challenged the notion that using a Plagiarism Detection Service (PDS), such as Turnitin, in a pro-active screening approach, is fair to all students.

His argument is that students patch write (i.e. pick and copy from different sources) when they are trying to come to terms with a new language, when they are new to a discipline, when they may be inexperienced in new forms of assessment or are uncertain about expectations. Reusing sample language structures and common phrases is natural to international students and, where feedback is constructive, supports their learning of the appropriate academic practices. But these are exactly the practices highlighted by a PDS and labelled as plagiarism.

Here at NUI Galway, we have been piloting Turnitin for almost 2 years and are starting to develop good practice guides for its use. Following Niall's presentation, challenging the neutrality assumption, I'm starting to think about a more formative use, where the Turnitin "originality" reports could be used to guide the students, rather than make plagiarists out of them.