On Monday the 3rd of September, fellow Spoken Word colleague Caroline Nokaes and myself attended the Caledonian Academy Learning Communities Forum event here at Caledonian University. The guest speaker was Dr Rob Philips from Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia.

The event was based around Student and Staff Perceptions of Web-based Lecture Recording Technologies, in particular looking at staff and student data figures and examining the difficulties both groups encountered when using such technology.

Studies to date on the use and uptake of web-based lecture technologies have explored the technical and operational issues surrounding access and use. It is well documented that these technologies provide flexible access to lectures for students for a variety of reasons relating to students’ personal circumstances and timetabling arrangements. However, there are changes in usage and attendance patterns which have not been investigated that are thought to impact on the learning environment. Some lecturers report poor attendance, loss of contact with students, disruptions to the continuity of the learning experience and poor results. Others have reported no apparent changes. This raises questions of: Why is this happening? What other changes are taking place in the environment, from both a teaching perspective and a student learning perspective? Are these changes having a negative or positive impact on learning?

The presentation gave Dr Philips a chance to present the findings of the first stage of such research, a survey of students and a survey of staff:

The student survey investigated:
i. changes in lecture attendance;
ii. how lecture recordings are used;
iii. strategies for supporting learning;
iv. perceptions of effectiveness in relation to learning and the achievement of better results.

Significant differences were recorded across several variables for different cohorts: between net generation students and those born prior to 1980; between on-campus and distance students; and between surface and deep learners.

The staff survey investigated:
i. individual approaches to teaching,
ii. the role of lectures,
iii. the ways in which web-based lecture technologies have been used,
iv. their impact on teaching practice.

You can read more about Dr Rob Philips and look at his published papers here.

On 13th March 2007 David and Iain of the Spoken Word joined David Jordan from the BBC’s ‘Future Media and Technology’ department at the JISC Conference 2007 in Birmingham.

The JISC conference provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Spoken Word’s work alongside the other projects involved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme including DialogPlus (University of Southampton and Penn State University), DART (London School of Economics) and DIDET (University of Strathclyde and Stanford University).

All those inviolved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme shared a stand, answered questions and handed out leaflets to others present at the conference.

The conference also provided the backdrop for a 15 minute JISC funded film promoting the work of the digital libraries in the classroom programmes that includes David and Iain of Spoken Word, Alan Hutton, Douglas Chalmers, various Caledonian University students and the Saltire Centre…by popular demand the film will appear on the Spoken Word site shortly!

The conference was also useful for meeting with people that the project had previously collaborated with. Notably David met with Chris Awre from the University of Hull who, like ourselves, is currently part of the Fedora users group. Recently we have started a new collaboration with the University of Hull in the form of the JISC REMAP project.

However the most notable meeting took place with Tom Loosemore who is project director of BBC 2.0 at JISC. He has played a key role in the BBC’s New Media strategy over the past few years and so the meeting was of great interest. The meeting took place after Tom had presented to the conference about the 15 web development principles that the BBC are currently using as a structure to develop their web services and reach out to even more users. A brief outline of his presentation can be found by clicking here. In the coming months we hope to visit the BBC to talk to staff in the Future Media and Technology department and carry out a presentation about the work of the Spoken Word project.

Photo Courtesy of: ClickCLickElectric

On 5^th March 2007 the Spoken Word’s Principal Investigator David Donald will travel to Brussels where he will attend a high level workshop based around the agenda of driving forward the establishment of a European e-Infrastructure for e-Science digital repositories along with other ‘professionals’ in the area of digital repositories.

The conference will revolve around various discussions of the following issues:

• What the major issues are behind the interoperability and widening of access to digital repositories across Europe.
• What are the tools that need to be encouraged in order to move infrastructures, techniques for metadata assignment, and storage management technologies forward?
• What are the key technological limitations inhibiting the growth of repositories?
• How can we reduce the domain-specific knowledge required to access and use these repositories in order to open them up to wider research?
• How can a sustainable technical framework be realised, preserved and maintained across Europe that will ensure continuing accessibility to repositories?
• How can European-level policy initiatives encourage growth and the overcoming of technological barriers?

The findings from the workshop discussions will be used in various EU-funded initiatives concerning repositories.

As we mentioned in a previous entry, some of the Spoken Word team attended the inaugural BarCampScotland on Saturday. The slides of our presentation, ‘Connecting Pasts and Futures: Spoken Word Services and the BBC’, are now available on SlideShare (without videos or audio, unfortunately). You can also download the slides as a PDF file directly from us at this link. [3.3MB PDF]

The event went extremely well, and we felt it was a useful chance to deliver our ideas to an audience partially outside, but intersecting with, the higher education community.

Given the volume of interest it’s hard to imagine the event not running again, and we hope that we might see a future BarCamp in the vicinity of GCU…

You can find more presentations from this weekend’s BarCampers on the appropriate SlideShare tag: BarCampScotland. Make sure to check out Andrew Middleton of Sheffield Hallam University’s presentation on pedagogical models for podcasting, which we unfortunately managed to miss at the time. You can also get a flavour of the event from Andrew’s podcast episode on it, featuring an all-too-short interview with our very own star of the show, Aidan Johnston, on our podcasting efforts (at 5:48).

Also, check out the Flickr BarCampScotland photo pool and tag pages.

More interesting developments from BBC Future Media and Technology …..
BBC Press Release 2nd March 2007

YouTube content to include two BBC-branded entertainment channels showing short-form videos

Dedicated channel for BBC News clips also to be featured on YouTube

The BBC, BBC Worldwide and YouTube today announced the beginning of a partnership to offer Internet users across the world new and innovative ways to experience and enjoy BBC content through YouTube.

This non-exclusive partnership will create branded BBC “Channels” on YouTube operating under separate BBC and BBC Worldwide agreements.

The partnership reflects YouTube’s commitment to work with content owners to make compelling video accessible online, and the BBC’s commitment to increase reach through the partnership, to bring new audiences to the proposed BBC iPlayer service, and to secure commercial revenue via BBC Worldwide, its commercial subsidiary, to supplement the licence fee.

The partnership, which will build over time, comprises three elements:

From the BBC: Clips of new shows and specially commissioned promotional content linked to popular series suchas Doctor Who and Life On Mars. At launch, the YouTube community will be able to enjoy a range of specially- created video diaries including David Tennant and Freema Agyeman, who’ll take viewers around the set of Doctor Who; John Simm going back in time for Life On Mars; and Clive Myrie on the streets of the red zone of Baghdad

From BBC Worldwide: An entertainment channel called “BBC Worldwide” showing clips from material such as Top Gear, Spooks, The Catherine Tate Show, The Mighty Boosh and a range of factual programmes including those presented by David Attenborough. The channel will include a limited amount of advertising.

From BBC World, the BBC’s international commercial television channel: Around 30 news clips per day will be offered, with up-to-the-minute news and analysis from around the world. The advertising-funded clips will be available to users outside the UK only.

Users will be able to comment on clips, rate them, recommend them to friends and post their own video responses to communicate with the BBC and other viewers.

Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, said: “This ground-breaking partnership between the BBC and YouTube is fantastic news for our audiences. YouTube is a key gateway through which to engage new audiences in the UK and abroad.

“The partnership provides both a creative outlet for a range of short-form content from BBC programme makers and the opportunity to learn about new forms of audience behaviour.

“It’s essential that the BBC embraces new ways of reaching wider audiences with non-exclusive partnerships such as these.”

Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of Google, said: “We’re delighted to be joining forces with the BBC to bring the best TV programming available to the YouTube community.

“We will continue to invest in our platforms and technologies to help our partners make the most of the enormous opportunities presented by the billion people now online.”

Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube, said: “We’re constantly looking for innovative ways to bring the best content to our community.

“The BBC is a premier source for quality programming, and we’re excited that they are leading the way in enabling two-way dialogue and real engagement with an entirely new audience. We hope to open up an entirely new audience for their content, while deepening their relationship with their existing viewers.”

Benefits

The non-exclusive partnership reflects the BBC’s commitment to reach audiences in new ways.

The aim is to offer audiences a taste of BBC programming with clips which will (subject to the conclusion of the ongoing PVT process) link them to the BBC’s proposed iPlayer service on bbc.co.uk.

For BBC Worldwide the partnership forms part of a strategy to bring great British content to new audiences around the world through its global TV channels and its proposed new digital businesses - the commercial iPlayer and the commercialisation of international traffic to bbc.co.uk. Increasing levels of funds will be returned to the BBC for investment in new programming.

Clips on BBC News (available to users outside the UK only) and “BBC Worldwide” will benefit from Google and YouTube’s advertising platforms, generating new revenues for investment in BBC programme development and creation. Advertising will be governed by a comprehensive set of guidelines.

Full BBC Press Release

The inaugural BarCamp Scotland goes ahead this Saturday in Edinburgh (See the Upcoming entry for details). The popular casual geekfests have become an important meet and greet event for academics, web developers, freelance podcasters and new media folks of all descriptions. They’re also an important opportunity for attendees to sample the state of the arts in areas beyond their immediate disciplinary remit.

Spoken Word will be there, represented by Aidan Johnston, Ewan MacPhee, Graeme West and Andrew Gruen.

We’ll be available to discuss the project in general; our repository; connected learning issues and methodologies; our relationship with the BBC; and of course all of the geeky details of running a service like ours. Any prior notification of desired topics would be very helpful (leave a comment).

We’re also, of course, looking forward to learning from other attendees, some of whom are friends of Spoken Word (see the attendee list on the wiki). Major topics look to include podcasting, community software, dynamic web application frameworks, mobile technology and open source projects.

If you’d like to meet with us at BarCamp, please leave a comment here (or use the Contact form) and we’ll get back to you - or simply come and find us on the day. Visit the wiki to add your name to the roster if you plan to drop by.

This link is straight from the pages of Ofcom. It highlights an assessment of the market impact of the BBC’s proposals for an on demand service.  Many of the BBC’s commercial rivals are weary of the corporation’s plans and are lobbying for Ofcom to take on the role of regulating BBC activity. The link can be found by clicking here.

The Wordpress team announced the immediate availability of the next major relese of their popular blogging and content management system last night. This site is run partly on WordPress, and other parts of the site have been extensively re-written to take advantage of the WordPress theme system.

We’ll be upgrading very soon, and this should offer some tangible benefits for users: Faster page loading times, more complete feeds and more. It looks like 2.1 also solves some minor problems for us too!

 You can download the new release at WordPress.org. Read on for more information on the release.

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An interesting discussion is going on at this blog over what constitutes, and what should constitute, the standard way of ‘tagging’. It criticises the usual suspect in this area, del.icio.us, which forces users to use contiguous tags by using ’space’ as its tag delimiter. Most other sites employing tagging, such as Flickr, Technorati and also the WordPress tagging system Ultimate Tag Warrior, allow the use of some other delimiter (commas or speech marks mostly).

Read the rest of this entry for a more in-depth discussion of this issue.

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I picked up this useful little application a few weeks ago, but alas I didn’t spend much time trying it out. It’s essentially a volume normaliser with some black-hat code going on in the background to make sure your podcasts and other audio sound consistent and clear.

The aggressively-named Levelator is free for non-commercial use, and available for Mac and Windows.

MAKE magazine seems to like it:

Audio Podcasting Awesomeness - The Levelator:

Unless you are an audio-fiend who likes to spend hours tweaking your podcast, then you need the levelator. You drag your audio file into the app and it levels the whole thing.

Jake says, One of the biggest frustrations of people who record and edit audio is the amount of time it takes to fix volume level issues. If you record two people, one of them is invariably softer than the other in the mix. You might turn your head away from the microphone to look at a distraction or have the microphone pointed away from the source. This even happens to the pros on occasion. To solve this common frustration, Gigavox created The Levelator. Essentially, the software examines a WAV or AIFF file, looks for volume inconsistencies and fixes them. It’s a bit geekier than that under the hood. The Levelator handles both the gain optimization on a file and RMS normalization to make sure the volume level is consistent. The output is a new file, so you can always go back to the original if you need to. The software runs on both Windows and OS X and is free for personal non-commercial use. While The Levelator can’t do anything to make your podcast more interesting, this is the first tool I’ve ever seen that makes almost anyone sound like they hired a top-notch engineer. - Link

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(Via MAKE Magazine).