Spoken Word Services and the Academic Liaison Librarians met on Tuesday 16th January to discuss the issue of podcasting. This posting is an update to a previous post by Iain Wallace that outlined the agenda of the meeting and his general thoughts on podcasting in the setting of the library and can be found by clicking here. Iain started off the meeting by giving a brief introduction about what ingredients were needed to make a podcast and gave some examples of the work that other libraries have done with podcasting such as Glasgow University and Glasgow Metropolitan College. However, it was agreed in the meeting that the Caledonian University Library podcasts would steer clear of the irritating electro music that seems to grace the podcasts of other higher educational institutions in Glasgow.

Aidan Johnston and Ewan MacPhee of Spoken Word then showed the group of librarians the set of Hospitality Video Podcasts that they had made on behalf of the Higher Education Academy.

The Academic Liaison Librarians raised many interesting issues and questions regarding podcasting. They are keen to continue with plans to create a podcast based around using journals and finding appropriate articles in the library. It is thought that this will cut the time that staff have to spend showing students how to use library services without being any less informative or helpful.

The librarians seemed to be very positive about creating a podcast and a follow up meeting has been planned to discuss the issue further.

This is the face that lead one attendee of the Nursing E – Learning Seminar to label David’s presentation there as ‘inspiring’.

Just Before Christmas, David Donald, Spoken Word’s aptly named ‘Principal Investigator’, unexpectedly ended up presenting to the Nursing E – Learning Seminar at Glasgow Caledonian University. Iain Wallace was originally supposed to carry out the presentation but had to step out at the last minute on account of a winter illness, although from the feedback it appears that David was a more than worthy replacement.

David spoke generally about the Spoken Word, including the background of the project and services, the work it is currently involved in and the services it provides in the environment of web 2.0.
One attendee of David’s presentation said: ‘This is exciting. I haven’t replied before as I was trying to remember where I got your address. I suddenly remembered this evening. I know because I am taking the Caledonian module in e – Learning and one of our group just heard an inspiring talk from David and put the address on our VLE’

Next week in Edinburgh there is a Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) seminar on developing research capacity. The seminar ties in with a 2nd call in the EPSRC and ESRC TEL strand. We anticipate that there will be representation there from Glasgow Caledonian University.

The TEL call was intended to support academics and user partners in building substantial and sustainable capacity for further interdisciplinary research on technology-enhanced learning. However, few proposals addressed this directly or provided innovative approaches to this challenge. This seminar should be of interest to all those with development awards, shortlisted for large awards or thinking about submitting proposals to the second round of TEL funding.

Prof. Stephen Baron (TLRP Associate Director for Capacity Building) will provide an introduction to initiatives in this area. Jim McNally (University of Stirling) and Lesley Walker (Forfar Academy) will provide different perspectives as a PI and as a teacher on a TLRP project in which teacher ethnographers conduct research in their own settings. This will be followed by presentation of initial findings from an analysis of all the 120+ proposals submitted to the first round of funding for the TEL programme as well as commentary on the assessors reviews of those proposals. There will then be opportunities to make concrete suggestions for ways in which we can develop capacity in TEL and inform the second round of funding.

More information and registration at http://www.tlrp.org/tel/tel_events.html

I’ve been a bit slow picking up this post from October, but it is still interesting and relevant ….from the blog of Stephen Abram, Vice President of Innovation at SirsiDynix.

It appears that higher ed is undergoing a renaissance of innovation and experimentation.

1. Harvard is trying out Second Life. See more here.

2. “Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.” via Reuters.

3. Duke University continues it’s experiment with iPods in education – now into its third year.

4. Google and the University of California, Berkeley, are going to make available online considerable amounts of videotaped course
content, including lectures, speeches, special events, and, even entire courses. Mercury News, 28 September 2006

5. And, of course, MIT plans to offer many if not most of its courses on the web free. Find it here.

Via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Open Academic looks like it will be worth keeping an eye on.

Here’s the blurb

‘OpenAcademic — supporting learners, teachers, and institutions.

Create an intranet. Blog. Podcast. Manage the school website, and all the club websites. Create a private workspace. Manage a class. Share files. Give students the tools to build portfolios that cross academic years and curricular disciplines. Support teacher professional development. Communicate with parents. Build a safe social networking environment within your school community.’

It uses only Open Source software, namely Moodle, Drupal, Elgg, OpenID and MediaWiki. Still in its early stages but I think the vision is excellent.

Today David gives a presentation at Walton Hall, Milton Keynes in an OU seminar series. Entitled Towards ‘Writing’ on and for the Internet it starts with a brief introduction to the Spoken Word project, Spoken Word Services at the SALTIRE Centre and the most general objectives – our ‘pedagogical pluralism’ – of the learning environment we seek to create. (For an earlier exposition on such an environment see Towards a Communications and Information Technology Learning Environment (Donald et al, 2000)). It then concentrates on our presentation layer tools

Excellent audience!

Weblogg-ed – Using Weblogs and RSS in Education : Video

At this years NECC conference Intel presented a movie about blogging in education. It featured Will Richardson and a few of his students at Hunterdon High School in Flemington New Jersey.

Hunterdon gives a Manila powered blog to some of its students to help them hone their writing skills. Students are encourages to write in their blogs, and solicit feedback from their teachers, peers, and volunteer mentors.

I think this short movie could be a great way to evangelise the use of blogs in education settings. In less than 2 minutes this movie describes bloggings benifits far better than I generally can in 1 hour of conversation.

Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn is an intersting National Public Radio programme which I’ve been listening to in Portland.

In this radio interview Todd Oppenheimer (Journalist and Author) talks about his book (Oppenheimer, Todd. 2003) The flickering mind : The false promise of technology in the classroom, and how learning can be saved. New York: Random House. It is a critical account of the use of the technology in the US high school. Worth listening to and considering our response. And why is this in audio?

More generally we should have a close look at how we might use NPR?

David

Genetic screening

We’ve started to build our first learning and teaching blogs. Click on the link above to visit the genetic screening blog, part of Adrian Pierotti’s Bioethics and Genetic Manipulation module. The username and password are both ‘bioethics’