This has been a busy week. I’ve recently started a short workshop on Video Tools for Teaching and Learning, which I hope will help me step up my game in terms of incorporating videos into online teaching. So far I’ve uploaded a few short video clips from my portable camera into Viddler, which seems to be an alternative to YouTube (without so much traffic–and, if anyone is looking for other YouTube alternatives, I’d venture to recommend TeacherTube, which is educationally focused and safe for use even when YouTube is blocked from users, and dotSUB, which lets users add subtitles and translations for uploaded videos).

Another project that’s been on my mind this week is CoolIris, a 3D web browser that displays images and videos on one large, dizzying panoramic wall. It’s quite dazzling. Of course, one has to download CoolIris to get the full effect, but ideally it can be embedded into other products, such as blogs.

What I’d like to do is work something like this into a presentation. On its own, it doesn’t have much educational impact beyond “Lookee what I can do!” For visually oriented learners, at least, it could provide a useful venue for sharing images and short video clips. One advantage is that it’s easy to scroll past a panorama of thumbnails.

On the CoolIris site there is a section for developers that offers information about embedding a wall into other software. This is the part I’m still messing around with. In the meantime, it seems easier to create an album in Flickr or one of the other dozens of sites that are compatible with CoolIris. As long as you have CI installed on your computer, there is a button on your regular browser that lets you switch into CI mode to view images on multimedia websites. Still, for the sake of that dazzling presentation, it would be sweet to simply click within PowerPoint and launch a wall of content then and there.

Educause article abstract:

“Alternate reality games (ARGs) weave together real-world artifacts with clues and puzzles hidden virtually any place, such as websites, libraries, museums, stores, signs, recorded telephone messages, movies, television programs, or printed materials. ARGs are not computer or video games, but electronic devices are frequently used to access clues. Players can meet and talk with characters in the narrative and use resources like postal mail, e-mail, the web, or the public library to find hints, clues, and various pieces of the puzzle.”

Link to the article via Educause

This could have advantageous possibilities for LIS courses: ARG activities can be used in collaborative learning scenarios and as problem-solving guides. It will be interesting to learn how, if any, LIS instructors incorporate ARGs into their curricula.

Since my last post about Brainify, I’ve been trying it out and testing its usefulness. From my short trial of the network, I get the impression that it’s hoping to replace Delicious as a venue for social bookmarking. The appearance of the pages of links, along with profile photos, makes for an attractive design.

So far, what I’m having trouble with is the lack of cross-referencing capability for sharing links. So far the categories are user-generated, and some of them are very similar without overlapping content. For example, Online Education is a sub-topic under Adult & Higher Education, which is a sub-topic under Education. E-learning, on the other hand, is a sub-topic under Educational Technology, another sub-topic under Education completely separate from Adult & Higher Education. Also under Educational Technology is Distance Education. Neither Online Education nor Distance Education have any links, but E-learning has several. The only way to ensure that you as a user will find new links in a particular field is to “watch” every single category that is created under any imaginable synonym for that field.

Maybe over time, if this site becomes popular enough, the administrators can pare down the categories or just take a more active responsibility for creating new categories rather than leaving that open to users except by special request. In the meantime, I’m still debating whether it’s worth switching from Delicious for Brainify.

eSchool News article:  New site aims to market free online lectures
Academic Earth is in talks with universities about promoting web-based lectures, while some campuses hesitate
By Dennis Carter, Assistant Editor

“A for-profit web site bases its business model on mining the internet for and then posting publicly available lectures from prestigious universities–and officials from at least one campus are reviewing the arrangement and reserving judgment.”

Read the full article

For those of you who have been wanting another social networking medium, now there’s Brainify. An article in the State Hornet (California State University)  describes it as a venue similar to a Facebook group that’s centered on a smaller academic community–as opposed to the whole wide world–with an application to let students and professors bookmark and share links. (Does this remind anyone else of Delicious?)

Read the article by Christina Li

It would be interesting to hear from anyone who’s had experience with this resource, and any opinions about its potential usefulness/lack thereof. Is this going to be the next “big trend” in academic networking, or another Facebook (which began as a student-centered site that has since exploded in usage by everyone else)?

A direct link to the site itself: www.brainify.com

“Progress in multimedia capture, analysis, and delivery, combined with the rapid adoption of broadband communication, have resulted in educational multimedia systems that have advanced traditional forms of teaching and learning. New trends in technology, such as mobile multimedia or advanced approaches for the automatic analysis of multimodal signals, offer novel and exciting opportunities for teaching and learning. However, many scientists have stopped working on the topic because they were disappointed with mediocre results that seemed to have no impact. In this article, we investigate the reasons for this and argue that the question of how multimedia can really make education more exploratory and enjoyable is as yet unanswered, and we are just beginning to understand the real contribution of multimedia to education. Based on a brief overview of the history of educational multimedia systems and a rough analysis of the current situation, we venture a glimpse into the future and argue that educational multimedia is (still) a vivid and relevant area for research.”

Read the full article –>

This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education comes from a survey by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, including over 10,000 faculty from 67 schools. It’s interesting to read how instructors responded, though I wouldn’t argue that it offers an accurate account of effective online learning for all programs everywhere.

Read the article here: http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/02/11232n.htm

This article should be available to the public for another 4-5 days.

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