EDUCAUSE | Podcasts

Podcast: Do I Need a Second Life? (ELI '08 Poster)

cclark2 — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 11:59:17 -0600

Attached is a very brief overview of a project to be presented in a poster session at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. If you would like more information after listening, please see the poster session page, visit the home page of Notre Dame's faculty learning community on virtual worlds. or go to the island of Sophia in Second Lfe.

Video for ELI: Net Gen Students at University of Minnesota

cohenb — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:24:38 -0500

Here is a video we produced just for the recent ELI focus session on being net savvy. We interviewed a number of students on campus and pulled together a video that echoes our findings from our ongoing study of UMN student experiences with, perceptions of, and attitudes towards educational technology.

http://xserve.uvs.umn.edu/umnstream/elivideo.mov

Details about our faculty and student surveys are available on our web site at:

http://dmc.umn.edu/surveys/

EDUCAUSE Audio Available for Download and Subscription

lgesner — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:15:38 -0500

EDUCAUSE audio content is now easier than ever to access in EDUCAUSE Connect. Listen to EDUCAUSE podcasts to hear experts, visionaries, and peers speak about current best practices, emerging trends, helpful strategies, and new ideas in higher education and technology. Recent podcasts include:

Choose your own way to listen:

Listen online with the built-in audio player.
Download the files to your own computer or MP3 player.
Subscribe for automatic updates on new podcasts.

2007 Policy Conference: Identity Crisis

Carie417 — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:56:34 -0500

The opening keynote speech at the 2007 Educause Policy Conference was delivered by Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Through public policy debate, forums, and publications, the Cato Institute strives to broaden public access to government policy with particular emphasis on the role of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets. This speech, entitled "Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood", uses the REAL ID Act as a springboard for discussion about the need for competitive, responsive identification that protects individual privacy and civil liberties. This podcast has a runtime of approximately 40 minutes.

EDUCAUSE Western Regional: On the Cutting Edge with Social Software in the Learning Process

llarsen — Wed, 16 May 2007 21:42:53 -0500

Summary:

On the Cutting Edge with Social Software in the Learning Process

Panelist(s)

Peter Beyersdorf, Assistant Professor, San Jose State University

BJ Fogg, Director, Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford University

Nancy Mackin, Adjunct Professor, The University of British Columbia

Sandra Rotenberg, Access Services Librarian, Solano Community College

Session moderator: John C. Ittelson, Professor, Director, California State University, Monterey Bay.

2007 EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference
Wednesday, May 09, 2007

San Francisco, CA

Abstract:

Social software has created exciting new dynamic possibilities for teaching and learning. What are the uses of wikis, blogs, podcasts, Facebook, and the like, and how is academia incorporating them into teaching? This faculty panel will address social software and pedagogy while sharing their experiences from the point of choosing a software, implementing it, and assessing its value to the learning process.

Session Notes:

John Ittelson began by saying that the future is coming faster now and it is harder to predict the future. He recommended that attendees review the NMC/ELI Horizon Report which can be downloaded from http://www.nmc.org/horizon.

Peter Beyersdorf

Peter is a physics professor who podcasts all of his classes and is responsible for helping other faculty use podcasts to enhance their courses. He is always trying to find ways to get content to students 24X7. Students do attend the classes and the podcasts are used to enrich the class. The podcasts are engaging and the students appreciate their ability to interact with the topics. The enhanced audio files have drawbacks such as still images and the fact that pointing to points on the slide can’t be done so he supplements with small videos on experiments and lab work. Peter has been using podcasts for the past year. A student survey indicates that they rate the podcast above the value of the textbook and just slightly below the face-to-face.

BJ Fogg

BJ is the director of the Persuasive technology lab at Stanford and is a psychologist

He is most interested in how computers can change what we can do and how people interact emotionally with the computers. BJ has invented “YackPack” that has a widget-like intercom on the webpage via a wiki page. The walkie-talkie channel has a push-to-talk feature. His students use the “YackPack” to communicate 24X7 rather than email. BJ believes in the power of voice in connecting people.

Nancy Mackin

Nancy teaches in the First Nations Studies program where she has a tremendous amount of information that is oral or visual based. She finds students are more and more interested in anything “not print” and so found that teaching with a 3D open source metaverse has been ideal is engaging her students. With her course content and interviews with tribal elders, the students create buildings in the metaverse. The students are more engaged and their work captures more content throughout the course which is shared via the metaverse development. Students had a wide range of technical capabilities but the “ancient spaces” software allows different expertise levels and supports the interdisciplinary aspects of the course. In addition, there is a strong inter-generational aspect with the tribal elders sharing with newer generations. (http://ancient.arts.ubc.ca/features2.html)

Sandra Rotenberg

Sandra is a community college librarian who has been teaching online for six years in an asynchronous environment. She and her students missed face-to-face interactive and so she added synchronous spaces such as chat space and conference meeting rooms. She described her experience with CyberOne, where Second life was used as a teaching tool. The whole class was online in Second Life. (It was aimed at law school students, extension students, and anyone else – Sandra was one of the “anyone elses”) Describing herself as a generation past ‘gaming,’ she was surprised by her experience in Second Life. It was intimate and seemed to work as a tool to replace the usual face-to-face interaction. Sandra began to do her “office hours” in Second Life and found that as many students came to office hours in Second Life as come in person – about 25%. Her surveys show that students are excited about the Second Life component and the ongoing interactivity via it.

Sandra did indicate that there are some negatives. There are students who don’t participate because they “don’t have time,” the learning curve is steep for many, and they need a good computer and good broadband and graphics card that they may not have. The college has a 60 seat commons where they can use an appropriate computer but many of the online students do not come to the campus.

John Ittelson

John talked about the wide–range of technology and the use of it in the classroom.

He felt that, as educators, what are we trying to do is to take the class outside the room and work towards life-long learning. Much may have started as entertainment but has been found quite useful for education.

Q&A

Question:

The way students can have an experience in a different time means that we’ve made geography less important. Is there a way that these tools can give students an experience that they can’t get otherwise?

Responses:

Nancy Mackin responded that the intergenerational aspect is supported in her situation is a way better than the traditional classroom.

Peter Beyersdorf responded that they can recreate experiences they have in the real world

Question

Accessibility, in the use of YackPack and other technologies, how do you integrate a deaf student? Also, 40% of the adult population in the US is illiterate/semi-illiterate so one has to make anything/everything simple.

Responses:

Sorenson Media (translation tool) is helpful

A student with disabilities loved Second Life because he could do everything anyone else could do.

Peter mentioned that all of his videos had to have text and that it became very useful for others as well.

It was agreed that addressing access issues helps everyone.

Question:

Re: podcasting and augmented classes – why do the students still come to class?

Responses:

Classes are more engaging with these tools. How do you motivate students to come to class and, if they aren’t coming to class, how do you motivate them to use other resources?

Re: Second Life allows Sandra to have office hours 35 hours a week when she’s at her desk and there is a real sense of community among the students who meet with her there.

Question:

What kind of overhead do you have doing the podcasts?

Response:

Peter wrote scripts to ‘alarm’ 5 min before class so the software automatically launches. It does take time. The first semester he recorded but didn’t tell them he was doing so. If they missed a class he’d send them a link. That was the start – then he built up

Question

Most faculty think technology gets in the way. How do you communicate the power of social software technologies to faculty directly? How to help them experiment and use them?

Response:

Faculty should remember that teaching is about curiosity (life long learning), collaboration (let the students help build the systems), and critical thinking. Students put their work on the web and others critique it.

The overhead can be heavy as was the case in building the metaverse space. Both faculty and students need to acclimate to the technology. Faculty might meet the students in Second Life and walk into walls together with them in the beginning. Faculty should start small and build from there. It is important to expose both faculty and students to the new technologies and prepare them for the new and constantly changing world.

Question:

How do you way process what you are doing with the social networking technologies? Which part is the important part of the learning?

Response:

Critical thinking skills are the most important – over content.

Re-assess what you want students to get out of the class – and teach them how to learn. Show them the process for how to do it.

Content is really important – but at the same time the process is important and faculty should look to their IT partners for significant support.

Teaching life long learning and critical learning and IT fluency.

Question:

Regarding social spaces: learning is a very social thing. Where is the social aspect of technology going? web2? Free tools?

Response:

There is a lot more coming in the next 6 months.

There is excitement about seeing the newest technologies and cooperatively/collaboratively finding the best solutions for learning.

International collaboration and looking at bigger issues across the world and across time is more and more important.

Students will be able to choose materials to match their learning styles and needs and that will make them more successful which is our collective goal.

Unanticipated things will make a difference. We don’t know what will happen in the space so we are obligated to be working with our students in these spaces.

Resources are available at http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=WRC07012

The session was recorded for podcast as well.

ELI 2007 Spring Focus Session: Immersive Learning Environments

jcummings — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:17:53 -0500

The ELI 2007 Spring Focus Session, Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, is scheduled for March 27-28 at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Speaker interviews and presentation audio for this event will be posted to the Connect site under the following tag:

ELI_07_SpringFocusSession

Any participants who blog or podcast the focus session are asked to use this tag when posting to the Connect site so we can aggregate all of the posts from the session and provide easy access to them.

Two new Learnitology podcasts

cclark2 — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:12:53 -0600

The Learnitology Podcast is in its second year and there are two new programs. Episode 201 asks a "burning question," about blogs, summarizes an article on gaming, reviews a PhotoShop tutorial web site, and reports on news of clicker use. In Episode 202, there are reviews of two handy recording devices, an introduction into Yahoo! Pipes, and a review of a website for engineering education. We plan to release a third new episode around March 2. There are follow-up links at the accompanying blog.

Art museum podcasts by students

cclark2 — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 11:21:30 -0600

The Snitecasts are student-produced programs about works in the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. In one of five required projects for my course "Applied Multimedia Technology," students were assigned an artwork and received a printed description. They then had to come up with a personal commentary and podsafe background music. Students captured the voice segments on high quality digital recorders, transferred the recordings to a computer, and used "Audacity" software to mix the material together. There's more on a web page or you can listen at iTunes.

Kate Wittenberg on How Students Are Transforming the World of Information

jcummings — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:11:10 -0600

As part of my continuing series of interviews leading up to the ELI 2007 Annual Meeting, I talked with Kate Wittenberg, Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University, or EPIC. She will hold a featured session at the annual meeting on Wed., Jan. 24, from 8:00-9:00 AM entitled “While You Were Out: How Students Are Transforming the World of Information and What It Means for Publishing.”

In the interview, Wittenberg provides a brief overview of the new ways in which students are developing content and using information, and what that means for the development and management of information resources within the university. She also describes EPIC and how its efforts in digital content development reflect current and emerging trends in student creation and use of online content.

Carie Windham on the Net Generation Perspective

jcummings — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:45:18 -0600

In preparation for the ELI 2007 Annual Meeting, I interviewed recent North Carolina State University graduate Carie Windham on the issues behind her upcoming annual meeting featured session, "Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner," scheduled for Tuesday, January 23, from 1:30-2:30 PM, Eastern.

Windham's session will take a look at how the Net Generation views and uses technology, and what those views and uses mean for higher education. In addition to summarizing some of the key points in her presentation, the interview allowed Windham to discuss relevant issues she won't get a chance to cover during her session.

ELI will post the full audio from keynote and featured sessions after the conference, so check back to hear more from this Net Gen learner about teaching, learning, technology, and the Net Generation.