Category Archives: elearning - Page 2

From YouTube to UniTube?

Posted by Tama on November 14, 2007 No comments

It would appear that the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has the dubious honours of being the first Australian university to have their own YouTube channel. In the past couple of months, there have been a number of reports of US universities setting up on YouTube. For example, this article from News.com on UC Berkeley’s channel:

YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.
The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web’s No.1 video-sharing site.
Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.
Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
“UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,” said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.

Similarly excited press has greeted other US universities, this article on the University of Southern California’s channel (Via). However, the I think educational administrator and web 2.0 aficionado Greg Whitby notes probably wins the most excited prize for his take on the UNSW channel (Via):

While it’s a great marketing strategy, it recognises where today’s students are. Although the channel will broadcast some lecturers in an attempt to reach potential students, it captures the ubquitous nature and popularity of Web 2.0.
This is the democratisation of knowledge – no longer contained within lecture theatres or classrooms but shared. Learning becomes accessible, anywhere, anytime. Transportable, transparent, relevant and exciting.
The University of NSW is to be applauded but we still lag behind. iTunes has developed a store dedicated to education called University. It’s ‘the campus that never sleeps’ - allowing universities across the US to upload audio/video lectures, interviews, debates, presentations for students – any age, anywhere. And it’s free. It’s astounding and exciting to think that a cohort of students and teachers from a school western Sydney can watch a biology lecture from MIT.
The challenge for us is to open our K-12 classrooms to a new audience – to share knowledge as professionals and to showcase quality learning and teaching as we move from isolated classrooms to a connected global learning environment.

Readers of any of my blogs will know I’m also an advocate for integrating certain web 2.0 tools into learning and teaching. However, these announcements seem oddly familiar to me – it’s just like the press that came out as pretty much every university in the world embraced podcasting one after another, each pushing out press releases about embracing the future. However, what didn’t happen half as readily was the pedagogical discussion about how podcasting should or could be used in education. Nor, I have to say, are we seeing much interrogation of the use of online video via YouTube or other services. Let me be clear: there is certainly value in using YouTube in particular ways in education. However, as I argued about podcasting in the past, it’s probably more important to focus on working out new ways to engage students (such as having them create content for podcasting or to post on YouTube) rather than primarily just replicating the top-down structures of lecture delivery. (I don’t have a problem with recorded lectures, I should add, I just don’t think that’s all we should worry about.)

It’s also worth keeping in mind that YouTube is a two-way street as demonstrated by clips of teachers at their worst appearing on YouTube.

[Cross-posted from my eLearning blog.]

Learning Futures: Day Two Insights

Posted by Tama on September 11, 2007 1 comment

Insight #3: If ePortfolios and other forms of electronic presence are going to be (or are) a core part of the way graduates ‘sell’ themselves to employers, then identity management needs to be taught at all levels of education. Identity management includes those aspects of identity which we intend employers to see, and those we don’t want seen. If a basic search online for someone’s full name reveals drunken party pictures on Flickr or YouTube clips of bullying antics in their youth, then that is just as likely to be viewed by employers as the intended ePortfolios or other material. Identity management clearly is something of a challenge, especially as many educators aren’t fully aware of how much students can put online (or how to temper that), but the Internet never forgets and we need students to be able to understand that for all sorts of reasons, and future employability is clearly one of them.

Insight #4:The unconference model only works when all the participants have a strong sense of what they are intending to pull apart or critique in advance. If half of a conference is populated by people trying to get a basic understanding of something – in this case Web 2.0 – then the unconference model of primarily relying on informed participants leading all the conference sessions themselves, directed by their conversations and thinking, to the exclusion of traditional papers or presentations, is doomed to disappoint a lot of people attending that form of conference. (This, incidentally, is not a personal gripe, but a clearly articulated sense from a number of my fellow conference delegates).

Learning Futures: Day One Insights

Posted by Tama on September 10, 2007 2 comments

I’m at the Learning Futures Symposium today and tomorrow. I’m not blogging summaries of sessions because, to be fair, that’s often quite dull. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to take the conference discussions to springboard some observations or thoughts that occurred during these interactions…

Insight #1: There is a reasonable amount of critical distance in terms of the ‘digital natives/digital immigrants’ rhetoric, but the same critical perspective doesn’t stretch to critiquing the idea of ‘web 2.0’. Whereas ideas which supposedly encompass an entire generation are easy enough to pull apart, many educators seem wary of software and claims made about software as they acutely feel that this is one of the few areas in which students know more about this area than they do. I suspect that if the same educators were dipping their toes in a little more they’d realise something commonsensical which seems to have entirely escaped these kind of conversations: that while there are many types of web 2.0 software, there are generic skills to be found in using these tools and platforms. The reason that people can move from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook so easily, for example, is that at a basic level there is a lot of similarity between the way these platforms operate and the skills needed to use them. Sure, the rate of new names of software can be overwhelming, but if we remember that a large section of the skills learnt using one social software platform are viable for the next, super-duper, upcoming must-have web 2.0 tool are transferable, that makes taking the time to learn and teach them a whole lot more important and palatable. And social software platforms are just one example; skills in blogging, using wikis and many other forms of ‘web 2.0’ tools are similarly transferable and, at some level, generic. Perhaps we should be focusing more on what those skills are.

Insight #2: Often the people in the driving position for educational policy aren’t confident to make decisions about ICT – nor should they be!

US Tweens and Teens Talk Education while participating in Online Social Networks

Posted by Tama on August 28, 2007 2 comments

JD Lasica points to an interesting new report from the US National School Boards Association entitled Creating & Connecting /Research and Guidelines on Online Social — and Educational — Networking. The report focusing on ‘tweens’ and teens, and has some really important notes about the role of social networking in forming learning communities and even casual connections between online presence and learning.

As this graph shows, more than half US tweens and teens have discussed education in online social networking:

teen_online_edu

Likewise, many tweens and teens are not just discussing and downloading, but also creating, uploading and participating in creative projects:

Again we are reminded that education in the twenty-first century has to think about the digital literacies of students and how to allow those literacies to develop in our curricula.

[Cross-posted from my eLearning blog.]

Australian Politicians … editing Wikipedia and spending big on redundant Internet filters

Posted by Tama on August 24, 2007 4 comments

(I’m back in Perth, and …) All over the world the WikiScanner has been uncovering interesting trails and tails of previously unnamed Wikipedia editors. PerthNow quickly jumped on the bandwagon and discovered the the Office of Australia’s Prime Minister has been busy:

The Prime Minister’s staff has been editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the Government in the lead-up to the election. Staff in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have made 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer Peter Costello, Fairfax reports.

So, too, has Australia’s Department of Defense, although they’ve gone into Wiki lockdown while the Department figures out exactly who was changing what (or working out how to spin that story, at any rate). The PM’s office have supposedly launched an internal inquiry, but I’m sure any interesting findings (whatever that might entail) won’t quite surface until the 07 elections are done, anyway!

At the same time, the long-awaited Federally-funded NetAlert website, which is supposed to educate and arm parents, children and teachers to the dangers of life in a networked culture, has finally been released. Sadly, though, the keystone of NetAlert are free family internet filters, which have been poorly received and for the most part, don’t appear to work.

PS Running WikiScanner past the University of Western Australia IP Address is far less exciting; there is one big Portishead fan, a few rants about masturbation, but that’s the juiciest we’ve got!

Update: Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer takes the cake with his thoughts on Wikipedia:

“My sort of recollection of Wikipedia sites is they are a bit, sort of, a bit anti-government, they are sort of a bit negative about people in the government,” Mr Downer said today. “That is my recollection of them, so maybe we should fire people up to edit them – but I know they have editorial control at Wikipedia so it probably wouldn’t help.”

It’s such a delight to have such informed politicians leading this country. *sigh*

Powerpoint: Learning through Laughing

Posted by Tama on May 21, 2007 2 comments

Using PowerPoint poorly is probably one of the most common sins of academics in the early twenty-first century. Being told how to make slides properly is useful, but so is an eloquent example of bad slides. Thus, comedian Don McMillan makes all of our lives a little easier, as he demonstrates powerpointlessness in his stand-up routine. Check it out:

Life After Death by PowerPoint

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Perhaps this should be mandatory viewing for all teachers?

[Via and Via]

Stop Cyberbullying Day

Posted by Tama on March 30, 2007 3 comments

In the midst of the blog-storm — and increasingly, the mainstream media storm — over cyberbullying and far worse threats made against ‘A-List’ blogger Kathy Sierra, Andy Carvin has taken the initiative and declared today – Friday 30 March – Stop Cyberbullying Day. While Sierra’s situation is horrid and complicated in the same breath, the general principle that any bullying is bad, and cyberbullying seems increase the tendency to be really nasty given supposed anonymity, I think Carvin’s idea is a great one, so I am declaring my absolute for Stop Cyberbullying Day – and my ongoing disdain for bullying in any form, be it cyber or otherwise.

I wish I had more time to write a more detailed and thoughtful post, but as I have no time at all, please have a look at my links post for 28 March points to Kathy Sierra’s post which announced the ongoing threats she received to the blogosphere, and it also contains a number of the initial responses including those from Robert Scoble (who is not blogging this week, in solidarity), danah boyd (who tells her own story about bullying while decrying the abuse of Kathy Sierra) and Doc Searls (who knows a lot of the people said to be involved in abusing Kathy and seems to be doing a pretty balanced job of trying to get to the bottom of it all).

Then read and use these if you can:

[X] Abc7News: Cyber Threats Against Well-Known Blogger has a brief overview of the threats Kathy Sierra received; it also has an unedited audio interview with Kathy Sierra about those threats – it’s well worth listening to.
[X] Andy Carvin’s Stop Cyberbullying Ning (a mini social network for discussing these problems, and work on solutions).
[X] Scott McLeod has created a some images you can use to show your support for Stop Cyberbullying Day (the image at the top of this post is one of Scott’s).
[X] Read and comment on current blog posts in support of Stop Cyberbullying Day.
[X] And, finally, please make your own blog post or other show of support if you can. Bullying hurts everyone.