bodmas blog

if you can just release some very high quality materials, maybe people will come and use them and start interacting with you, and you build up a whole community of users and that would be something very interesting… I’ve released it for free but they will hopefully give me some feedback on how it works..Richard Treves quoted from the UK MoodleMoot 2006 streamed audio

Richard Treves presented a review of his Google Earth course delivered using video podcasts at the UK MoodleMoot 2006 event. The course was open to anyone, and was organised into 10 screencasts that demonstrated the functionality of Google Earth. The free course was available in three ways..

• Podcast subscribed to via iTunes or by subscribing to the RSS feed
• By visiting the kokae blog page at libsyn
• By visiting the Moodle course either as a guest or by registering as a student

The course organisation was roll-on, roll-off and Richard publicised the course by posting to Google Earth related blogs. When a key blog featured his course, he recorded a doubling in hits. Richard evaluated three screencast or screen cam packages; Camtasia, Captivate and the free Wink. He was using the course as a way of developing his skills with screencasting, and decided to use Captivate because of that program’s ability to add conceptual diagrams, and he can now produce a screencast more quickly than copy/pasting screen grabs into a word processor. We have decided that Camtasia isn’t the package we need, and are looking at Captivate, which has a 30 day evaluation available. Richard has suggested that we set assignments that ask students to produce screencasts using the freeware Wink as an alternative to MS PowerPoint. Wink 2.0 supports sound tracks and this is a very interesting idea!

Richard sees screencasts as a way of reducing ‘learning junk’, a term he coined from Edward Tufte’s ‘chartjunk’. Learning junk is a nice short term for the ‘things students have to learn to do the learning’; especially important for adult students who are having to cope with online course delivery.

Richard structured his talk by means of a ‘refrain’ that included the following general principles (my summary, the presentations have not been posted yet, I have a feeling there was a fourth)

• just becuse we can does not mean we should: an important principle in e-learning, we all get seduced by the technology, but does this particular technology actually help these students?
• process more important than content: a constructivist viewpoint, and in my teaching I am often concerned with process skills
• avoid ‘learning junk’ which Richard describes as ‘the thing you have to learn to do the learning’. You have to learn how the Web site navigation works before you can use the Web site.

The screencasts were published via the libsyn.com podcasting service. Libsyn provides paid hosting and publishes the RSS feed you need to subscribe to a podcast using iTunes. The screen grab above shows the WordPress style template, and each entry has a link to the QuickTime and Flash versions of the screencasts. About 400 people accessed the podcasts through iTunes but as Richard pointed out, there is no guarantee that the people who subscribed actually viewed all the 10 episodes.

The Moodle course has a typical structure. Learningjunk is reduced by using a simple clean theme, and the screencasts are listed in reverse order (most recent at the top) like a blog. My notes are not too clear, but I gather that about 300 people accessed the Moodle course, and 100 or so registered as participants, even though guest access was available. I’ll sharpen up these numbers when the presentations are posted on moodlemoot.

Richard mentioned that the glossary had 193 views, but only 21 people actually looked up a definition! As Richard put it ‘this is rather worrying’.

The forum was only used by two people, despite seeding by Richard. During questioning, one participant pointed out that people may be reluctant to post on the forum as they may feel that they are intruding in some way. I think this is results from the roll-on, roll-off nature of the course, and that there is not a ‘group forming’ process – no boundary with initial exchanges to establish a group identity.

I teach classes in the 15 to 30 range, and I often wonder how University teachers can encourage interaction in larger lecture theatre audiences. Richard Treves presented a review of his video podcasting project about Google Earth at the Moodle Moot 2006, and he added a degree of interactivity to his talk by issuing the audience with an A4 printout of four coloured rectangles to encourage voting on questions he had prepared in the PowerPoint.

Richard cited Keele University and their ‘CommuniCube’ as being the inspiration behind this simple but effective strategy – the foam cube does involve some cost in production but is accessible to blind students by providing braille legends. Richard used the A4 colour printout which we folded into 4. Displaying the appropriate coloured rectangle at each question allowed the presenter to estimate the views held by participants and to modify presentation accordingly.

Colour printing is a vexed issue in many colleges, so my version is even lower tech – just a monochrome A4 sheet with symbols. The symbols have line widths of 36pt or half an inch and I can see them at a glance from 60 feet away. I’ll see how it goes with smaller groups, it will create a bit of a giggle anyway, and I like the idea that everyone has to respond.

• Ian Stimpston’s PowerPoint presentation about the Keele CommuniCube with pictures of the device in use [800Kb, ppt file]
• Link to the Moodle course that Richard used to present the screencasts of Google Earth [log in as guest]
• The Libsyn Web page for the screencasts
• Word File with the voting card symbols
• PowerPoint with the voting symbols copied as drawing objects

“Loop the cable once and hold the loop against the mic with the same hand you are holding the mic with. This will reduce a lot of the handling noise. I let my students hear the mic cable being tapped about 12 inches down from the mic without the loop and it picks up a lot of noise. With the loop, there is very little noise.” Andrew Higginson as quoted by Jonathan Marks in his sporadic Broadcast and Podcast blog

This works! I’m seeing a significant reduction in the sound of light taps on the cable using this simple technique. I have often seen recordists doing this while interviewing with a hand mike but had not realised why until trying this out.

Here is a recording of a suburban train in England pulling out of a station [ mp3, 48kb/s, 670Kb ] taken with the WS-200S dictation recorder and using the Shure VP64L video/radio microphone hand held in the carriage. I did use the Audacity high pass filter to roll off frequencies below 220Hz to reduce the rumble on the track. There is always a geezer who whistles on any train or in any location in a major city in the UK. Can you hear the train going through a narrow cutting around 1:08 into the track?

I attended one day of the UK Moodle Moot 2006 in Milton Keynes, some notes soon when I have had time to digest it all. I’m realising slowly how a Moodle installation on a basic server frees small groups and ‘private teachers’ to just do things. At the other end of the scale, the Open University is investing some serious money and will be using Moodle as a major component of the learning platform for 200,000 students.

• More photos from flickr
• The Berrill theatre has ‘replays’ of the Track 2 presentations and since they are Creative Commons licenced, I have taken the liberty of grabbing the sound for re-mixing.
• Miles Berry’s blog notes on the presentations by Jason Cole and Martin Dougiamas
• Jason Handro’s notes on Martin Dougiamas’ presentation on Moodle.org (log in as guest if you get the challenge)

“If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original” – yes, agreed, and Maths is the subject where you are as good as your last mistake.

“Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchies of subjects… at the top are mathematics and languages, then humanities and at the bottom are the arts everywhere on Earth.” – can’t say I have noticed this, certainly not with funding or facilities, but then I am not as well travelled as Sir Ken.

Seriously, the podcast (get the audio at 7Mb, not the video at 67Mb for a talking head) raises important issues about creativity in education and the extent to which we neglect the psychokinetic dimensions and emotional intelligence in our systems. I’ll be using this one when we cover learning styles on the Resource Based Learning module on next year’s Cert/Ed.

Maths to me however is both sides of the head – creative construction and severe critical analysis – often resonating between the two during an hour’s work. And I have to walk when doing anything serious in Maths.

“It’s becoming ever more clear to me that formal learning materials – interactive self-study materials, papers, etc. provided by so-called experts – are increasingly peripheral to the process of online learning, and in many cases could be unnecessary. Students can and do find the information that they need using Google and by calling on each other’s help and experience. What they come up with is far more precious than a piece of CBT or a handout because it is their own. A course wiki, developed by students themselves, is a tangible output from an online learning activity which students can take great pride in. It’s also likely to be relevant, practical and up-to-date (more than you can say for the average textbook).”

-Clive Shepherd on his
Clive on Learning blog

I’m not so sure this would work in Maths or other heavily discriminated-by-difficulty-of-topic subjects (sciences, engineering, aspects of economics). My experiments with Wikis and level 3 science students were mainly around building lists of usefulWeb sites and trying to become more critical in the selection of Web sites – we never actually got to the depth needed for ‘self-linking’ of wiki pages or using topic search and category wikinames. There was a bit of re-editing and some shift from forum mode to document mode, but only on short bits of writing (less than 300 words final).

I’ll be using wiki pages heavily for the ‘theoretical’ part of a Resource Based Learning module for Cert/Ed participants over the next academic year: we shall see what happens. I’ll need to seed the wiki somehow, but perhaps I’ll keep the seeding light. I would like to introduce the idea of a ‘pattern language’ for learning interventions (like the original wiki did for one style of computer programming) based on the experiences of the participants. Then perhaps we can see how the same patterns could arise with resource based learning.

I think that people who can explain the basic principles of a subject in writing in a structured way will

• Be in demand for some time to come
• Still want to get paid for the sweat that good writing needs
• Won’t be putting large amounts of premium content out onto the Web for a bit

More student discussion about methods and types of argument in Maths (in the classroom as well as online) is definitely something I will be working on next year however.

“In short: Blogs are different keystrokes for different folks. There is no monolithic motive for blogging. And what that really means is that we are approaching the point where measuring what bloggers as bloggers do is pointless, like measuring why typists type or phoners phone or talkers talk. That, to me, is the most valuable insight from the Pew study.”
- Jeff Jarvis in BuzzMachine

Jeff Jarvis is summarising a report on the reasons why people have blogs. Looks to me like the common denominator is the technology used (blog publishing application as opposed to a private wiki or a static Web site). I’m publishing this site using a blogging application because it is quick, can be updated anywhere and suits the calendar based nature of teaching.

Because we have a ‘technology denominator’ I think that it is important not to let the publicity seekers define what most people think of bloggers and blogging. MSN Spaces recently published a brief report on UK blogging, using different categories and without the cross referencing found in the US study.