Thursday, 27 November 2008
Slideshare Slidecast Lectures Weeks 6-8
These are the recorded lectures that I have made as Slideshare slidecasts. I have found this way of making online lectures more satisfying than using Articulate (see my earlier blog post here). I used an Edirol R-09 audio recorder like a dictation machine without a microphone. It felt much more natural than recording the voiceover for one slide at a time. I recorded the lecture where I could in one go, did a bit of editing in Audition and then uploaded the audio to the Internet Archive and the PowerPoint slides to Slideshare in the normal way. You then have to synchronize the audio to each slide which is very easy to do. This create's a number of formats - you have the audio as a podcast, the slides as a slidecast and the slides available to download. The Slideshare service works very well.
Which format do you prefer - Articulate or Slideshare sharecast?
What I haven't addressed is whether or not this is the best way of transferring knowledge - to simply make a recorded lecture. What I think I might have to do is re-think how to communicate the lecture content that best makes use of online communication media and the way that students would like to engage with this content - what do you think?
Monday, 24 November 2008
TECH2002 Lab Week 9: Social Networks
What is the purpose of a social network?
What kind of experience is created by being socially networked through Web 2.0?
You could investigate what social networks are by joining them or creating your own.
You can use social networks as part of your participation project to connect to others and share experiences and find out about other people who might share the same interests as yourself.
You are probably a member of a social network such as Facebook, MySpace or Bebo because they are among the most widely used Web 2.0 sites as part of social media. However, if there is a shared personal interest there is a possibility that that there will be a dedicated social network for it, and if there is no existing social network that satisfies, then there are services that allow you to create your own social network.
Examples of special interest websites
Music
Last.fm ‘The Social Music Revolution'
Blip.fm ‘Create your own music station’
MOG.com ‘WHERE BAD MUSIC COMES TO DIE’
TheSixtyOne.com ‘ a community for people who love new music’
Football
Footbo.com ‘a social network for football lovers worldwide’
Media
Imeem.com ‘a social network that enables users to discover, interact and express themselves with media’
Gaming
Come2Play.com ‘social gaming networks’
Food
Foodari.com ‘recipe search, share and store’
Reading
LibraryThing.com
Shelfari.com ‘social network for people who love books’
Web services that allow you to create your own social network
Ning.com ‘create your own social network for anything’
SocialGo.com ‘social network maker’
WackWall.com ‘how many clicks does it take to build a cool social network?’
Further research links
http://c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/Tools/social.html
http://www.go2web20.net/Gotoweb20 tag search: ‘social’ or ‘network’
What kind of experience is created by being socially networked through Web 2.0?
You could investigate what social networks are by joining them or creating your own.
You can use social networks as part of your participation project to connect to others and share experiences and find out about other people who might share the same interests as yourself.
You are probably a member of a social network such as Facebook, MySpace or Bebo because they are among the most widely used Web 2.0 sites as part of social media. However, if there is a shared personal interest there is a possibility that that there will be a dedicated social network for it, and if there is no existing social network that satisfies, then there are services that allow you to create your own social network.
Examples of special interest websites
Music
Last.fm ‘The Social Music Revolution'
Blip.fm ‘Create your own music station’
MOG.com ‘WHERE BAD MUSIC COMES TO DIE’
TheSixtyOne.com ‘ a community for people who love new music’
Football
Footbo.com ‘a social network for football lovers worldwide’
Media
Imeem.com ‘a social network that enables users to discover, interact and express themselves with media’
Gaming
Come2Play.com ‘social gaming networks’
Food
Foodari.com ‘recipe search, share and store’
Reading
LibraryThing.com
Shelfari.com ‘social network for people who love books’
Web services that allow you to create your own social network
Ning.com ‘create your own social network for anything’
SocialGo.com ‘social network maker’
WackWall.com ‘how many clicks does it take to build a cool social network?’
Further research links
http://c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/Tools/social.html
http://www.go2web20.net/Gotoweb20 tag search: ‘social’ or ‘network’
Friday, 21 November 2008
Cover It Live Experiment 3
Another go at using the live blogging tool Cover It Live this time with the Friday 3-4 group - it's the end of the week folks.
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
Using Scrapblog
Scrapblog is a multimedia scrapbook tool that through any easy to use interface allows you to create pages of text, images, videos and graphics and so on as a slideshow with music. The scrapblogs can then be shared via the website. I used the technology to hold the information for the lab in week 8. I think it has some teething problems and it seems to being used as multimedia family photo albums to be shared online. It is a good example of the DIY media of Web 2.0 where people make their own content and share it with others - but who on earth is going to do this regularly and for what purpose. You might find it useful for recording or reflecting on your participation projects.
Using Cover It Live Experiment 1
If you click on the 'Click Here' link below it will take you to a live blog recording made in the 9-10 Tuesday lab during week 8. This was done using a site called Cover It Live. My first impression is that this technology looks promising. It can be used as a group tool to turn instant messaging into a recorded blog with a lot of hypermedia linking and interactive stuff such as polls. If you are working in a group you could use it to produce a group blog or to record events that are unfolding at the same time as you blog them.
Monday, 10 November 2008
TECH2002 Lab Week 7: Web 2.0 Project: setting up and getting on with things
‘Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises’
(Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler)
In this lab there is nothing new to do – no new tasks to complete. Just use the time to try and get completely up-to-date and moving forward on the tasks that have already been set.
The aim of the lab is to put in place or consolidate all the foundations that have been established on the module and to start taking an active part in the module learning community by running your project and communicating it to others.
Set Up Tasks
1. Web 2.0 tools or services should be set up to document, review and plan the participation part of your project. These tools should link from your Wernicke Wiki avatar page. They are your online communication media tools that link out from the Blackboard wiki.
2. Your participation tools should have been selected and established or at least be in the process of being finalized.
3. Your use of social media for participation should link from a Web 2.0 project homepage in the Wernicke Wiki and there should be a link from the avatar page to the Web 2.0 project page.
4. There should be an entry in the Broca Blog that describes your project idea.
5. You need to complete a project proposal form and give it to Andrew (there is a blank form on the project section of the Wernicke Wiki if you need one).
6. You need to complete a project brief form and upload it to your Web 2.0 project homepage in the Wernicke Wiki (there is a blank form on the project section of the Wernicke Wiki if you need one).
Weekly Tasks
1. Complete your regular planned activities on a daily or weekly basis as appropriate as part of your participation in the social media of Web 2.0. These might include things that you are doing yourself and the observation or investigation of others doing similar activities.
2. Make a step-by-step record of what happened each week of the project using any social media tools that you think are appropriate.
3. Try to reflect on what you are doing on a regular basis and again use appropriate online tools to do this. As you review the situation, make plans about what you might do next and record them.
4. Do some background reading and research to help you understand and think about what you are doing. Use the module’s ‘social media classroom’ (Blackboard and online communication media’) to show what reading and research you have been doing.
5. Put your plans into action and continue your participation in a purposeful way.
6. Gradually build up the content of the Web 2.0 project homepage in the Wernicke Wiki so that it becomes a substantial microsite within the wiki and a portal to the online communication and participation media that you are using elsewhere on the web.
7. Track the progress of other people on the module by looking at their project microsite in the Wernicke Wiki and by following the links to see what they doing.
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Making Recorded Lectures
One of the reasons for not having any 'live lectures' for a few weeks on TECH2002 was to allow me to experiment with some methods of providing recorded lectures that could be used by the students on demand and at personal convenience. We live in a Sky + environment in a few ways. Imagine if you could pause live lectures - well now you can, kinda. And replay or play out of linear order. You can skip - is that a good thing? You can probably think of lots of times when you've wanted to do that in live lectures.
The first three lectures that I have recorded narration for the PowerPoint slides were made using Articulate which is a plug-in for PowerPoint. The software allows you to add other features before converting everything to Flash for presentation such as other multimedia elements, customizable templates, quizzes and learning games. Learning games? Life is a game, isn't that enough?
A live lecture has to start and finish at a particular time, it is timetabled. We have to be there to experience it, in a room at a particular time. But with an online lecture you could be anywhere at anytime. My experience is that quite a few students struggle to be in place on time - and of course to be there at all. Similarly, I think that not all my students will listen to the recorded lecture or maybe not all way through.
If the audience can be flexible, so can I. I suppose the lecture should be online and available at the timetabled day and hour - if I play the game properly, yes, but I have taken advantage of this slippery deadline that is not normally available to me - normally I have to be ready at the appointed time, but I guessed that people would not be logging in at the timetabled hour to view the lecture (is that right?). I don't think this was a deliberate strategy. I found that it took some time to add narration and when I looked at the slides I had to think whether or not they would work in this way, and in week 4 I just felt like I had to do a major re-write to reflect what we were doing - and so the upload became irregular and unpredictable, and that is a downside, since it doesn't replace the lecture at a strictly appointed time and it puts unfair onus on the students to catch up because of my tardiness.
Recorded lectures could be used to supplement live lectures as 'bonus features'. They can become short podcasts that are not 'instead of' lectures but provide summaries about the main points without all the fat and the padding - get down to the nitty gritty. And perhaps I will explore that another time.
My approach to recording the narration for the lecture presentation was to talk to the slides in a similar way that I would have done in the lecture room, but it is a very different experience. In the lecture room I am likely to improvise a bit and try and make a connection with the people in the room. When you record the narration, you focus on the slide and try to make it more understandable. The focus is all on the slide and you notice how sometimes the slide can't work in the same way that it would in the live lecture - such as showing a video or something. The slides were prepared for a live lecture, and not for recorded narration. I have never done this before, and I would like to spend some time reflecting on the possibility of developing more specific ways of using the visual slide and the audio so that it can become a more individual or effective way of communicating. The interactivity of a live and a recorded lecture is different.
At first the recording of the lecture felt very limiting. I decided to take the easiest approach and used a microphone plugged straight into my laptop and recorded one slide at a time. I found the results very stilted. I found myself talking unnaturally slowly and trying not to make slips. I ended up doing quite a few retakes because it didn't seem perfect and sometimes the speech would just dry up and I would have to start again - which doesn't usually ahppen when you are not recording it. By the third attempt I was less bothered about slips and 'ers' and 'ums' - I felt like it was beginning to be more like it would have been in the classroom lecture. The idea of perfection became less important to me - but it still takes longer to record than doing it live.
Is it worth it? I would like to know your views so leave me a comment.
I think it's time to experiment a bit further with a new approach - maybe doing a separate audio podcast and slideshow and then putting them together on Slideshare.
The first three lectures that I have recorded narration for the PowerPoint slides were made using Articulate which is a plug-in for PowerPoint. The software allows you to add other features before converting everything to Flash for presentation such as other multimedia elements, customizable templates, quizzes and learning games. Learning games? Life is a game, isn't that enough?
A live lecture has to start and finish at a particular time, it is timetabled. We have to be there to experience it, in a room at a particular time. But with an online lecture you could be anywhere at anytime. My experience is that quite a few students struggle to be in place on time - and of course to be there at all. Similarly, I think that not all my students will listen to the recorded lecture or maybe not all way through.
If the audience can be flexible, so can I. I suppose the lecture should be online and available at the timetabled day and hour - if I play the game properly, yes, but I have taken advantage of this slippery deadline that is not normally available to me - normally I have to be ready at the appointed time, but I guessed that people would not be logging in at the timetabled hour to view the lecture (is that right?). I don't think this was a deliberate strategy. I found that it took some time to add narration and when I looked at the slides I had to think whether or not they would work in this way, and in week 4 I just felt like I had to do a major re-write to reflect what we were doing - and so the upload became irregular and unpredictable, and that is a downside, since it doesn't replace the lecture at a strictly appointed time and it puts unfair onus on the students to catch up because of my tardiness.
Recorded lectures could be used to supplement live lectures as 'bonus features'. They can become short podcasts that are not 'instead of' lectures but provide summaries about the main points without all the fat and the padding - get down to the nitty gritty. And perhaps I will explore that another time.
My approach to recording the narration for the lecture presentation was to talk to the slides in a similar way that I would have done in the lecture room, but it is a very different experience. In the lecture room I am likely to improvise a bit and try and make a connection with the people in the room. When you record the narration, you focus on the slide and try to make it more understandable. The focus is all on the slide and you notice how sometimes the slide can't work in the same way that it would in the live lecture - such as showing a video or something. The slides were prepared for a live lecture, and not for recorded narration. I have never done this before, and I would like to spend some time reflecting on the possibility of developing more specific ways of using the visual slide and the audio so that it can become a more individual or effective way of communicating. The interactivity of a live and a recorded lecture is different.
At first the recording of the lecture felt very limiting. I decided to take the easiest approach and used a microphone plugged straight into my laptop and recorded one slide at a time. I found the results very stilted. I found myself talking unnaturally slowly and trying not to make slips. I ended up doing quite a few retakes because it didn't seem perfect and sometimes the speech would just dry up and I would have to start again - which doesn't usually ahppen when you are not recording it. By the third attempt I was less bothered about slips and 'ers' and 'ums' - I felt like it was beginning to be more like it would have been in the classroom lecture. The idea of perfection became less important to me - but it still takes longer to record than doing it live.
Is it worth it? I would like to know your views so leave me a comment.
I think it's time to experiment a bit further with a new approach - maybe doing a separate audio podcast and slideshow and then putting them together on Slideshare.
Monday, 3 November 2008
TECH2002 Lab Week 6: Sharing Ideas and Collaborating in the Module Learning Community
‘Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation’
(Charles Leadbeater, http://www.wethinkthebook.net/home.aspx).
In this lab there are two tasks to complete that are about using the module blog and wiki to share ideas and information and open up the possibility of collaborating or acting collectively as you work on the Web 2.0 projects individually or in small groups.
The aim of the lab is to communicate your initial ideas about what your project will be about and to set up a space where your project can be self-organized and monitored by others.
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TASK 1
Create a new entry in the Broca Blog on the module website on Blackboard. This entry can be written individually or as a single joint entry if working in a group.
The entry should be about communicating to the rest of the module learning community what your initial ideas are for your Web 2.0 project – the participation parts and the communication parts, and how they will relate to each other.
Blog your project proposal using the hypermedia and hypertext affordances of blogging technology such as links or embedded media. Make your writing enjoyable to read and encourage comment and feedback from others.
Write about what you will be doing, experiencing, observing, what and how you will be recording or documenting the project and what you intend to reflect upon. What is it that you want to find out or investigate about the way that social media gets brought into everyday life?
Later, as a second stage, when there are several entries that have been written, try to read a few and leave a comment. Blogs need readers as well as writers to be effective communication.
TASK 2
In the Wernicke Wiki on the module website in Blackboard create a new page that will become the homepage for your Web 2.0 project within the wiki. Link to this project homepage from your ‘playing card’ avatar page. If you are working in a group for the project you only need to create one homepage for the whole group (if you like you could have your own personal area linking from the homepage as well). Group members can then link from their individual avatar pages to their group project homepage.
What should this homepage be used for?
The Web 2.0 project homepage can be used to start constructing a mini-site within the wiki where people can find out about your project through the information and links that you put there.
This mini-site within the wiki can be used as part of your project coursework communication portfolio about the participation project. You can use it to co-ordinate your various activities and link outwards to the online communication media that you are using. Importantly, it will be possible for everyone on the module to track the progress of everyone else by sharing this information and allowing the possibility of collaborating across different projects if they have overlapping concerns and interests.
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