Educators' Voices: An ePod Experiment

Bringing Enhanced Podcasts to Life!

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 16:15:00 -0700

Today I had the honor of presenting a workshop for educators at the University of San Francisco. The topic was enhanced podcasting. We learned how to use Garage Band (iLife06) and iMac (iWeb) for enhanced podcasting production and publication. Enjoy a part of the workshop!

You may view the enhanced podcast: How to bring an enhanced podcast to life at:

http://web.mac.com/margaretmaag/iWeb/Site/Podcast/Podcast.html

An Interview With Dr. Patricia Busk: Professor, School of Education, University of San Francisco

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Thu, 9 Mar 2006 12:53:00 -0800

This morning I had the opportunity to go back to the School of Education at the University of San Francisco and meet with my former professor, Dr. Patricia Busk. As a graduate student I had the good fortune to take many courses with Dr. Busk, and it is an honor to interview her today. Listen to Dr. Busk share her views of the challenges facing higher education in the United States and what some of the solutions to the challenges might be during this century.

Thank you Dr. Busk for giving me the opportunity to interview you and share with the audience your ideas!

University of San Francisco Faculty Development Seminar

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Fri, 3 Mar 2006 14:06:00 -0800

On March 2, 2006, Professors Ray Schroeder and Burks Oakley presented the art of podcasting, academic implementation of enhanced podcasting and 'Ed-Cast' (a collaborative grant-funded academic podcast repository: http://www.ed-cast.org). These leaders were so kind to step in on my behalf and present my slides during a period of illness. Thank you Burks and Ray! Your presentation was wonderful!

My PowerPoint slides for this presentation are located at http://onlinelearningupdate.com/enhancedpod2.htm

A Podcast For Anna and Her Friend

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Mon, 6 Feb 2006 21:41:00 -0800

From the University of San Francisco, School of Nursing...a special request from my colleague and friend, Anna Kwong. It has been a few months since my last podcast. What can I say? The holidays and semester break beckoned me to be with family and friends while taking a rest after a long and hectic semester. But, stay tuned...an interview with Dr. Patricia Busk, Professor in the School of Education at the University of San Francisco is right around the corner!

A Skype Interview With Professor Ray Schroeder, Director of OTEL, University of Illinois Springfield

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Fri, 2 Dec 2005 14:33:00 -0800

Ray Schroeder is Professor Emeritus of Communication and Director of the Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning (OTEL) at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Faculty Associate at the University of Illinois Online. He has taught more than two dozen online classes. As Director of Technology-Enhanced Learning he is dedicated to faculty development and pedagogical support of the online initiative. As Faculty Associate, Schroeder is engaged in the formation of online learning policy for the University of Illinois. He is a Sloan Consortium Distinguished Scholar in Online Learning 2002-2003 and the recipient of the 2002 Sloan-C award for the “Most Outstanding Achievement in ALN by an Individual.”

For more information about the Schroeder & Maag collaborative international academic podcast repository, "Ed-Cast," point to the UIS Ed Tech page:
http://www.uis.edu/podcasting/projects/index.html

Podcasting: A New Medium for a New Voice in Healthcare Education

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 07:58:00 -0800

I had the pleasure to present last weekend at the 11th Sloan-C Asynchronous Learning Network meeting in Orlando, Florida. It was a great conference and the awards ceremony was remarkable becuase it honored leaders and visionaries in online education. I am posting the presentation I gave on the use of podcasts in higher education with an emphasis on healthcare.

Dina Silverthornee: Nurse Educator and Doctoral Student at USF School of Education

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:49:00 -0800

Happy Thanksgiving!

Last week I had the good fortune to meet and converse with Dina Silverthorn, Nurse Educator and Doctoral student. Dina attends the University of San Francisco's School of Education while teaching full time in the school of nursing at USF. Dina gives us some special insights into nursing education and the balance she sets out to achieve as teacher, student and wife. Dina, thanks so much for your contributions to this ePod experment.

A Conversation with Dr. Laura Diamondstone: Epidemiologist

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:16:00 -0800

It was a pleasure today to converse with Dr. Laura Diamondstone. Laura is a colleague of mine at the University of San Francisco and she is currently doing research in Avian Influenza. She teaches part time in the School of Nursing and shares with us her experiences as a nurse, epidemilogist and researcher. Welcome Laura!

An Interview With Dr. Coleen Saylor: Professor, School of Nursing, San Jose State University

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:52:00 -0700

Following a long walk with Dr. Coleen Saylor, Professor, School of Nursing, San Jose State University, I had the wonderful opportunity to ask her a few questions about the direction of nursing education and listen to her thoughts about the concepts of critical thinking and reflection. She was my professor some years ago, and she has had a great influence on my current teaching practices and my commitment to high academic standards.
Please excuse the faint sound of children and cars passing by!
Photograph credit: Peter C. Maag

An Interview With Shari McCurdy

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 16:10:00 -0700

Yesterday morning I had the pleasure to speak with Shari McCurdy, Associate Director of the Office of Technology-Enhaced Learning at the University of Illinois, Springfield. Shari is well known for her dedication to examining best practices for technology use in dissolving barriers between universities and enabling online joint courses across institutions. The interview was facilitated by using a mp3 player, iTalk, and a Griffin lapel microphone while we spoke via the voice over internet provider, Skype. Join me in welcoming Shari McCurdy to Educators' Voices.
Photograph credit: Dr. B. Oakley

Open Courseware Talk

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Wed, 5 Oct 2005 10:35:00 -0700

I just came back from the Open Education Conference at Utah State. It was a really enjoyable experience. I talked about using blogs, wikis and games to quickly generate open courseware.

Bobbe Allen is in the process of podcasting the conference. They used iPods with iTalk adaptors to do most of the recordings. The RSS feed is available from the XML icon at the top of the ITSAcast blog, which also includes the proceedings of the conference. The summary for my talk is found here.

There were some very promising opportunities for collaboration with several people at the conference, especially for educational gaming using the educational version of Unreal Tournament. As these projects become concrete I will certainly report our progress in the Edufrag blog.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint of my talk.

The NHS Faculty of Health Informatics

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Tue, 4 Oct 2005 06:59:00 -0700

Please take a moment to visit Rod Ward's post on the NHS
Faculty of Health Informatics. For more information, visit http://www.informatics.nhs.uk/news/faculty.html

This is an exciting initiative that provides a connection to experts and academics in health informatics.

Anna Y Kwong: Nurse Educator and Graduate Student

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Mon, 3 Oct 2005 17:40:00 -0700

Welcome! It is October 3, 2005 and I had the pleasure to meet with Professor Anna Kwong this afternoon to learn more about her teaching practices, research interests, and experiences as a graduate student in the School of Education's Learning and Instruction program at the University of San Francisco.
Photograph credit: University of San Francisco website

Betty Carmack: Nurse, Researcher, Author, and Professor

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:34:00 -0700

Dr. Betty Carmack, Professor of Nursing, University of San Francisco

An interview with an outstanding nurse educator, author, researcher, nurse, and colleague.

Image source: http://www.usfca.edu

Podcasting PDFs with MP3s with iTunes

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 03:54:00 -0700

Looking at the Higher Education category of iTunes, audio recordings of university lectures are starting to be made available to the public by podcast. This is definitely a step in the right direction. However, many lectures are difficult to follow without the visual component of the presentation.

Whenever possible, I have always provided links in my blogs to both PDF or PPT files that accompany the lecture, in addition to streaming screencasts. This was probably fine for students taking my class because their primary resource was the blog. However, people finding my podcast through iTunes will not find the source blog as easily. (It is given in the podcast description but that is not obvious).

To fix this problem, I have reworked my CHEM 241 class podcast to include the corresponding PDF just underneath the MP3. I did this for back episodes by copying the link to the PDF into a new post and changing the date in Blogger. Running the feed through Feedburner then created a podcast with MP3 and PDF files next to each other.

It turns out iTunes does a pretty good job of displaying PDFs. They appear as little book icons that can be left clicked to view or right clicked to save on the desktop.

It would seem that this would be a good way to distribute other files, such as PPT (Powerpoint). However, iTunes is very selective in the file types it allows and PPT does not appear to be supported at this time. Other podcatchers do not have this limitation. For example, iPodder handles PPT. This is an example of why we need to be careful about using iTunes as sole distribution mechanism.

This is what the podcast of my class now looks like in iTunes:

Getting Lectures on iTunes

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:42:00 -0700

With the recent release of iTunes allowing for easy subscription to podcasts, people have started to list lectures. This seems simple but there are several issues that have made things confusing. I’ll point these out here to save you time if you are thinking of doing the same thing. Also if I am missing something please leave me a comment.

iTunes Lecture category. I saw Amy Bellinger’s post on the new category of Courses and Lectures in iTunes and it looked like that was the place to put your lecture podcasts. However that category is not listed in the drop down menu at Feedburner (more on this later), nor is it in the iTunes menu by navigating through Music Store -> Podcasts -> Browse. The only way to get to it is the way Amy did it in her screenshot in her post, on the home page. I have seen it on the home page but it seems to have disappeared in the past few days. From my conversation with Michelle Francl, who did get her course listed under Courses and Lectures, she did not make a special request. So it appears that the iTunes staff is selecting courses to highlight in this ephemeral category. The bottom line is that this is not a reliable way to tell your students how to find your course. What will work is to have it listed under Education->Higher Ed.

Getting your feed ready for iTunes. If you are using Feedburner to create your podcast, they have recently added the capability of formatting your feed under the SmartCast option so that it is compliant with iTunes. If you try to submit your feed without proper formatting it will cause trouble. What happens is that iTunes will take your feed submission and it will never get listed. There is no feedback to tell you there is a problem. Then if you do fix your feed iTunes will refuse it because you already submitted it! I did this for one of my classes and I ended up emailing iTunes. They fixed it after a few days.

You have to use your credit card to submit a feed. I found this one a little counter-intuitive and it took me a while to understand that there is no other way to do it. If you want to submit a feed you have to join iTunes. And that means you have to submit your credit card information. They won’t charge anything on your card but I really hate having to give out that kind of information when I am not buying anything.

Skipped episodes. Some podcasters were complaining that some episodes were being skipped because of the default settings on prior versions of iTunes. However this problem was resolved in version 5.0, which defaults to Check Every Hour and Download All.

Back episodes. If you want your students to not miss any of your lectures, make sure they click on the triangle next to the feed in iTunes and click on every back episode. I have a 30 second screencast showing how to do this.

How to subscribe to unlisted podcasts. If you are using a little orange XML icon to indicate your podcast feed, students can just drag that icon into iTunes and it will subscribe automatically. That is better than having to copy urls and will give you a way of enabling subscriptions while waiting for your course to appear in the iTunes directory.

Sloan Semester: A Mere 16 Days

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 11:19:00 -0700

An update on the Sloan Semester

http://www.electroniccampus.org/sloansemester/

Elena Capella, Nurse Educator

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:57:00 -0700

I had the great pleasure to see Elena Capella today in Palo Alto, California. We discussed her current doctoral research project and her experiences as nurse educator. Elena lives in Santa Cruz, California and teaches at San Jose State University and the University of San Francisco. Welcome, Elena!

Image credit to the New York Times (2005).

Screencasting and Camtasia

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Fri, 9 Sep 2005 16:24:00 -0700

Welcome to Margaret's e-pod, Friday afternoon, September 9, 2005.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jean-Claude Bradley, a chemistry professor at Drexel University, via e-mail this week. He introduced me to "screencasting," the software program, "Camtasia," and his lecture screencasts. In addition, he was kind enough to share with me some tutorials he has produced for novice screencasters.

Here is the link to Jean-Claude's tutorials: http://drexel-coas-elearning.wikispaces.org/
Camtasia link: http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp?CMP=KAC-CGoogle

Image source: Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley

Podcasting Symposium

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Thu, 8 Sep 2005 09:35:00 -0700

Duke University will sponsor a podcasting symposium at the end of this month.
September 27-28, 2005
http://isis.duke.edu/events/podcasting/description.html

Katrina and Education

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Tue, 6 Sep 2005 15:52:00 -0700

Hurricane Katrina has moved educators around the nation to create initiatives to assist displaced college students affected by the devastation. One initiative was developed within a week by R. Schroeder and associates at the University of Illinois Springfield. The Sloan foundation is funding a national offering of online courses that are to begin October 10, 2005. Students from the 26 universities affected by the hurricane may attend online offerings. For more information: http://sloansemester.org/
Spread the word so students may benefit from this wonderful educational opportunity during a time of hardship. Miracles do happen!

IASTED "Computers and Advanced Technology in Education" meeting in Aruba

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Fri, 2 Sep 2005 07:46:00 -0700

Greetings from the 8th IASTED "Computers and Advanced Technology in Education" conference in Aruba. I hope you enjoy the brief synopsis of the conference.

Also, just want to let you know about the upcoming first international conference on mobile communications and learning (MCL 2006) in Tahiti-Moorea, French Polynesia, March 14-16, 2006.

Enjoy the show!

Margaret's E-Pod

mbrs@ania.org (margaret maag) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:25:00 -0700

Hello-

Welcome to Margaret's E-Pod!

A spot for anyone who is interested in learning more about the use of podcasts in teaching and learning.

I hope you enjoy my first non-lecture podcast!

Cheers,
Margaret