CLT@LSE

Presenting Prezi

Matt Lingard — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:47:01 +0000

I was reminded on Friday by the ever-innovative LSE Careers Service that I never shared my attempt at using Prezi, so here it is. I’d seen it used at a couple of events earlier in the year so when I was preparing for this year’s new academics induction I thought I’d give it a go for my Social Software in Teaching slot.

While it’s nice to sit in a presentation where PowerPoint doesn’t feature I’m not wholly convinced by Prezi. My main gripe is that I found it incredibly fiddly to use. It took me a long time to put this together, OK it was my first attempt, but I’m not sure it was worth it. The main advantage it seems, putting the occasionally sea-sickness inducing animation aside for now, is that it doesn’t need to be a linear presentation. It’s very easy to jump around and as most of my presentation could have been in any order I let the audience decide!

The LSE Careers Service Prezi I saw on Friday is below. (more…)

Screen Recording Made Simple

Matt Lingard — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:10:12 +0000

I’ve just finished testing various free web-based screen recording tools. I’ve been looking at them for a new course at the LSE run by the LSE Careers Service & the Language Centre called English for Career Success. As part of the course students have to give a 5-minute presentation to the class. As a practice exercise before the live event they have to record themselves doing the presentation using a screen recording tool. They then receive feedback on it from the tutors before delivering the real thing.

Here is an example of a screen recording I just made using Screenr and below it you will find notes on it and my other two best finds ScreenToaster & Screenjelly. I recommend watching in full-screen mode.

All 3 tools are web-based, free & require an account. They publish with a unique URLs & can also be embedded elsewhere as I have done above. The quality of the output is good for all three and they can all be viewed full-screen. However there are some important differences between them which may affect which you choose. (more…)

Learning & Teaching Competition Winners

Matt Lingard — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:03:34 +0000

The Jorum* Learning & Teaching awards are given to innovative learning and teaching resources that have been created under a Creative Commons license. You can find out more about all six winners on the Jorum website and below I have highlighted two in particular.

All of the resources are free to use and can be linked to from within Moodle.

Making group work work

This video resource is aimed at giving students and tutors a better understanding of the challenges of group work and how to overcome them! There are 10 episodes such as Managing conflict and Assessing group work which can be used independently or worked thru’ in order.

The website includes help for students and staff.

Reading Skills Tutorial

Produced by the Skills@Library team at the University of Leeds, this is an online tutorial to help students (and staff!) improve their reading skills.

*Jorum is a JISC-funded online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK colleges and universities. It exists to encourage sharing, reuse and re-purposing of learning and teaching materials created by the community for the community

on reading

Sonja Grussendorf — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:24:38 +0000

Last night on Radio4’s Front Row novelist Susan Hill, talking to Mark Lawson about her new book (which charts a year in which she resisted buying new books, instead finally reading or re-reading those from her own collection), revealed that she had also used that year to restrict her use of the internet, in particular her internet reading. She had previously become aware that her concentration was not what it used to be and suggested that “if you use the internet a lot you notice your concentration begins to become fragmented and you don’t have that complete concentration for two or three hours.” With these comments she was not making a moral judgment, she was not condemning the internet for its pernicious, ruinous effects on the human ability to read; rather she was explaining how reading on the internet can embed the habit of skim-reading, of flitting from hyperlink to hyperlink, as most web pages encourage sound-bite (or rather: vision-bite) reading. Skim-reading is of course a useful skill, especially for (budding) academics whose bread & butter is to read – and to read quickly. Students need to be able to scan across pages and articles to quickly decide which material can be safely ignored and which needs to be read more deeply. A problem arises if the habit of skim-reading comes to dominate one’s reading behaviour and affects one’s concentration so that settling down to really immerse oneself in a book becomes difficult. In January 2008 researchers at the UCL published a briefing paper entitled “information behaviour of the researcher of the future”, in which they reported that there is now a tendency towards “shallow, horizontal, ‘flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries.” (They also noted, importantly, that this applied to everyone, from undergraduates to professors, i.e. that it was not something the “google generation” did, but rather all of us).

I have noticed that my reading habits have changed over the last few years now that I spend large amounts of time in front of a computer, for work, research, study, leisure. On the rare occasions that I switch all electronic media off & settle down with a book, be it for pleasure or work, it takes me an alarmingly long time to stop fidgeting, to stop wanting to “just quickly” google this factoid or that half-thought or even just to update my anonymous readers on twitter “wow guess wht- im readn a real book & switched off comp 2 do it. Yay. (only now i switchd bck on 2 tell u)”. The internet is one of the most fabulous things to have come to us, the idea of giving it up seems not only impossible but preposterous: for what reason would one give up *the* research tool? But there has to be equilibrium. Reading on a (networked) computer invites fracturing one’s concentration, or at least it invites the less disciplined amongst us to do so (just quickly checking my email, hey is that a new blogpost, ha ha, failblog! I wonder what’s on at the Picturehouse, what exactly is a guava, etc etc). In order to maintain an equilibrium, perhaps it is good practice to shut down for a few hours a day, to switch the machine off (and the [i]phone), and turn one’s mind to a printed paper, or a physical book. Perhaps even today’s students should not “never be out of touch”.

Picture by pedrosimoes7 on flickr.

CLT has moved to S169

Kris Roger — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:57:00 +0000

At the end of last week CLT left its home of 9 years and moved all the way across the corridor to S169. The main office is a tiny bit bigger and more open plan (and a bit noisier), but we now have a dedicated demonstration/training/meeting room. Watch this space for news of an informal ‘housewarming’ sometime in the near future.

eLearning 2020

Sonja Grussendorf — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:46:09 +0000

On our last away day, the very (!) talented Athina, Jane & Steve came up with a novel way to present their take on the future of elearning: they created a 5 minute sci-fi video.The brief was to come up with a technology which might become the technology that will revolutionise… education, our lives, our society. They chose to explode the premise (& temporality) by offering a historical glance backwards, from a very distant future (in which, intriguingly, Lt. Uhura, and Mr. Spock have teamed up with Princess Leia) addressing the 2020 past. What I liked best was the underlying suggestion that in the distant future in which Stars Trek and Wars conjoin, the concept of learning has given way to (mere) data accumulation and information exchange. Spock, unable to escape his Vulcan psychological make-up, finds it illogical that humans might learn for the sheer enjoyment of understanding, applying and analysing concepts. To us humans (at least of today), information is that about which we will at a final stage be able to make judgments; we learn (by rote) “information”in order to apply our critical thinking in an informed way, ultimately to make sense of the world and us in it. Information has no value for its own sake, and learning is more than merely the acquisition of knowledge. Poor Spock overvalues rationality (or rather: logic) at the cost of creativity. Who’d be a Vulcan, eh…* Watch the video, it’s nicely provocative and entertaining.

*yes, I know he’s half-human.

ALT-C 2009 Highlights

Matt Lingard — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:10:15 +0000

Earlier this month staff from CLT attended ALT-C 2009, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology.

Conferences can be hit-and-miss affairs and I find it’s usually wise not to set one’s expectations too high; however, for the second year running, ALT-C was excellent.

For me the keynotes usually provide the conference ‘edutainment’, you can be fairly sure that they will be humour, some memorable nuggets and an underlying message (although that’s not always clear!). Overall the ALT-C keynotes delivered and I took something away from all of them. I think because I’d seen both Terry Anderson (live) & Mike Wesch (lots of videos) speak before, it is Martin Bean’s keynote, A Journey in Innovation, that particularly sticks in my mind. Martin is the Open University’s Vice Chancellor Designate. He’s an excellent speaker and his keynote is worth a look even if it’s just for the initial stuff on innovation scepticism & his overview of the current (changing) HE landscape. His talk finishes with enthusiasm for the OU’s SocialLearn project which aims to provide students with a personal web platform for their learning; one I’ll be following with interest.

You can watch Matin’s keynote in full below and you’ll find the other keynotes & invited speakers on blip.tv

There appeared to be two hot topics in the parallel sessions. (more…)

New audio recordings: ICA talks & debates

Matt Lingard — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:14:09 +0000

Previously unpublished recordings of ICA talks from the 1980s went online last week on the Britsh Library’s Archival Sound Recordings website.

“Featuring talks and debates with top cultural, artistic and political figures of the day, this latest addition the archive offers a chance to explore in detail cultural directions in the UK from 1981 to 1994.

The talks comprise over 880 recordings, over 1000 hours of audio, on subjects including art, literature, performance, fashion, film, music, philosophy, psychology, biology, feminism, AIDS and politics”

These recordings are publicly accessible and as the LSE Library also subscribes to this collection many are available to download for academic use.

Example recording

From 1987, Politics of Exile: Asia, Caribbean, East Europe A conference on the political situation in Asia, the Caribbeans and Eastern Europe, speakers include Tariq Ali.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtsofan/2232111990/

Staff Survey - lecture capture

Sarah — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:33:08 +0000

Every year we send out a survey to staff to gauge the effect of various technologies, such as Moodle and it’s many components, online readings and lecture capture on their teaching. This year 138 people completed the survey. I was particularly interested to see the feedback on the automatic lecture capture system and this proved to rouse the strongest comments. We wanted to get a general sense of who was using lecture capture and what they thought about it, but more specifically, we wanted to hear from lecturers who might use it in their teaching.

Breaking down the stats and looking at solely the responses from lecturers (59) it was interesting to see a very distinct divide between those who had used the system and those who had never used it. By looking at the stats in this way it was clear that the majority of lecturers who have doubts or fears about the technology have never used the system and those that value lecture capture and think it is a benefit to students are already using it. There were one or two instances where people had used the automatic system in the past and were put off by technical problems etc.

Whatever the case, it seems that lecture capture is polarising opinion and that a number of fears about the technology are adding to this. One of the biggest fears about lecture capture is that it will affect student attendance and although there’s no evidence to back this, there’s little evidence to quash it either! Perhaps we need to do some focus groups with lecturers who have been using the system for a few years to gauge the feeling about class attendance. However, if some courses find that attendance has gone down and others don’t, what then? And is lecture attendance really an issue if you’re giving students the choice? There is also a fear that lecture capture will replace live lectures altogether and that somehow lecture capture is taking the emphasis away from face to face contact via lectures, seminars and office hours. Lecture capture is designed to be a revision tool, a way to help students recap and further understand a lecture, fill out any missing notes from lectures and to help those for whom English is not their first language. These benefits are what students list when they say they like the system. Lecture capture can be recorded and released for a short period of time, such as revision period, and yet there are still fears about students skipping lectures, declining note taking skills and lethargy from students. So, how do we respond to all of these comments? We’re very much aware that a survey can only give a slice of staff opinion, especially as only 138 people responded. Would it help to have a wider debate about this issue?

Symposium at York University: lecture capture, content production & Second Life

Sarah — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:24:32 +0000

Jane and I participated in a one day in-house symposium at the University of York this week. The audience were made up of both academic and support staff interested in learning from other universities about lecture capture, audio and video content production and Second Life. We were asked to talk about audio and video content production and so showcased some of the video & audio that’s produced here. We focused on lecture capture momentarily as although it is the most prolific output of media at the LSE, with 909 lectures having been captured in just one term this year, two other universities: Birmingham and Newcastle had already given extensive presentations on this subject. Instead, we wanted to highlight the idea of audio and video as a part of teaching, not just as a means to capture the teaching that’s already going on. We played examples of interviews & discussions, role playing scenes, groupwork, screencasts, video and audio podcasts as well as highlighting some of the Wimba tools and audio feedback. We also talked about the issue of scaling up to meet increased interest in media, professionally produced video vs the DIY approach and touched on the copyright issues involved.

It was an interesting day with good discussions both formally and over coffee/lunch and it was really nice to meet people in similar roles. The most lively debate came from the lecture capture sessions. It seems that across the board, the majority of students really value lecture capture (no real surprises) and staff are cautious about the educational benefits and fears about attendance. There were certainly many parallels between the student and staff surveys at both Birmingham Medical School and Newcastle university and the LSE. Rob Jones’ findings from Birmingham were particularly interesting because they compared the relationship between usage stats and grades. The findings look promising where the mean rose from 51% to 55% and the failure rate dropped to 2/69. The quality of answers also improved with students indicating a greater breadth of knowledge and looking at a wider set of resources.

The Second Life talks in the afternoon reminded me that Second Life is good for simulation and specifically designed educational activities but that perhaps we should be looking at other virtual worlds for better communication, movement, role play etc. Sheila Webber from Sheffield and Steve Warburton from King’s College agreed that Second life is probably not sophisticated enough for a young gaming audience; the average age of SL users is apparently 33. Steve flagged up MetaPlace, OpenSim (open source) and Blue Mars as potential Virtual World’s to explore, so perhaps another pilot project is due. Read Jane’s Social Software, Libraries and E-learning blog for more information on the lecture capture and Second Life presentations.