RSS club meeting 7

The Friday RSS club meeting was well attended again, with participants from computer science, history, the school of business and the school of education.

I started going over our latest procedures for lecture recording. We didn't quite finish going over everything but we can resume next week, depending on participant interest. The conversation moved to other topics like subscribing to RSS feeds using Bloglines, Flickr, open content, blog searching, technical aspects of lecture recording and related issues.

There was also a question about where to search for material by copyright status. It is Yahoo's Creative Commons Search.

Next week will be the last RSS meeting for the term.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast

RSS club meeting 6

We did something a bit different today for the Drexel RSS club. I showed Jay how to:
1) edit an avi generated from a Camtasia recording using Camtasia
2) export that avi to Flash
3) upload the Flash files to a server
4) create a post in Blogger to link to the Flash files

I paused the recording during the conversion processes.
This screencast should be a reference for our faculty who record lectures using Camtasia.
One of the points I make in the conversion to Flash is to use 800x600 resolution so that users with default desktop settings don't have to keep scrolling.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast

Integrating RSS feeds into WebCT

This is Jay's 15 min presentation on integrating RSS feeds into WebCT courses.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast Powerpoint

Michelle Francl and context in education

Michelle Francl from Bryn Mawr College gave an inspiring talk yesterday about the importance of context in education. She showed examples of asking physical chemistry questions within a context that students could relate to, such as determining the age of whales and ostrich eggs.

I think that relevant context is the only information really retained long after a class is over. For example, I still vividly remember learning in a visceral sense that my body is an open system in a thermodynamic sense. My statistical thermodynamics teacher asked if a human body was an open or closed system. I answered that it was closed. He then ate a piece of chalk and I understood why I was wrong. I can't help but think of that example when I try to conceptualize how I remain ordered while the universe steadily increases in entropy.

Contrast that with my Comparative Chordate Anatomy class. The main thing I remember after many years is that extinct fishes had lots and lots of oddly named bones. If the course had been taught within a relevant context, I would not remember that but rather probably something like the mind-blowing Cambrian explosion that gave rise to all the basic body designs in a thin sliver of geological time.

I would also remember if he would have eaten a fish bone.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast Powerpoint resources

Waypoint talk

Andrew McCann was the speaker on May 11 for the Drexel CoAS E-Learning Seminar Series. He talked about using Waypoint to aid in grading essay style papers from students.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint

RSS club meeting 5

Our fifth Drexel RSS club meeting was well attended, with representation from psychology, chemistry, bioscience, the business school and the library. We discussed using Flickr for field trips in bioscience, the adaptation period for faculty starting out to record lectures, advantages and disadvantages of open source class content and some ways to use RSS for business classes.

I thought I had the audio issue solved by putting up 2 mics set across the room through a mixer then into my tablet PC. Unfortunately the tablet recorded a hiss from the mixer. So I went back to using the internal mic in the tablet, which gave some poor quality recording of some of the people in the room. Well, I'll keep looking.

Here is the screencast and mp3 podcast

Karen Goeller on RSS feeds for the classroom

Karen Goeller, the assistant director of Distance Learning at Bucks County Community College, presented a talk at the Drexel WebCT Users conference on May 12, 2005. She described how to bring RSS feeds into WebCT for classroom applications, especially from news services. Her presentation was very practical and the screencast should serve as a great tutorial to get started with these tools.

Here is the screencast and mp3 podcast

WebCT Users Meeting Screencasting/Podcasting talk

I presented at a WebCT users meeting held at Drexel on May 12, 2005. This is basically a compressed version of my earlier talk at Bryn Mawr on Podcasting and Screencasting in Higher Education. With 15 minutes available I definitely was not able to get into as much detail, like specifics of how to use Blogger and Feedburner that I discussed at Bryn Mawr. But this serves pretty well as an overview of the topic.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint

RSS club meeting 4

In our RSS club meeting today we had Jay Bhatt, our Engineering librarian, Aimee from psychology and a new telecom student Anuj.  We created a Blogger account for Anuj and talked about some next steps in blogland.

Here is the screencast and mp3 podcast    

Google Scholar

Jay Bhatt gave a talk today at Drexel about using Google Scholar. This was a thorough analysis of the differences between searching for academic publications through Google Scholar vs. the databases that we have available at Drexel. Lots of useful links in the Powerpoint.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint.

Google Scholar ppt

Powerpoint.