RSS club meeting 15

We had a small gathering this time, with Rita from the Drexel College of Media Arts and Design and Mike from Chemistry.

I only had one post to discuss - the current state of lecture podcasting in Higher Education and what we might expect as the next step.

This part was fairly short and we then had plenty of time to show Rita how to find and subscribe to a few blogs on fashion using Bloglines and iTunes.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast

RSS club meeting 14

Today we had Lisa from the Drexel College of Nursing, Mike from chemistry and Chris from Information Resources and Technology. In addition, for the first time, we did a conference call with Bobbe from Utah State. As I mentioned previously, the screencast audio was adjusted for all the speakers. This worked fairly well for the lengthier monologged portions that could easily be identifed with Camtasia but in rapid dialogue a few words from the people farther away were not equalized.

We discussed Bobbe's ITSAcast, the podcast of the Open Couseware Conference I attended last month. Chris told us about his use of RSS for updating annoucements and Mike shared his use of RSScalendar. At the end, Lisa created a blog to share information about behavioral and addictions counseling. We'll follow up with her as it develops over the next few weeks.

Hopefully Bobbe and others from Utah State will join us by conference call in upcoming RSS club meetings, which are set for Fridays at noon for the rest of the term.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast

RSS club meeting 13

I summed up recents posts from my Drexel CoAS E-Learning blog, which included:
-recent addition of transcripts to my screencast/podcast class
-making podcast feeds available in iTunes
-including PDFs with MP3s when podcasting
-the Sloan Semester program at Drexel this term

The meeting went on for an hour after I stopped recording, which tells me that there is a passionate desire to learn about and implement these technologies.

Since it had been a while since the last RSS club meeting, there was a backlog of items to go through in my blog. In future meetings this term, I would like to see this develop into more of a workshop where we spend time actually building blogs, podcasts and wikis. It looks like Fridays at noon in 4020 MacAlister is a good time this term. So bring your laptops on Fridays!

I also made an effort to equalize the audio volume of the participants. This should make for a much better podcast.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast

Villanova panel on RSS in education

Update: here is the conference info page with several other recordings.

Yesterday, I led a panel discussion on the use of RSS technologies like blogging and podcasting, wikis and games in education at a WebCT users meeting held at Villanova.

On the panel: Scott Warnock (English faculty at Drexel), Michelle Francl (Chemistry at Bryn Mawr) and Laura Blankenship (IT at Bryn Mawr).

Scott talked about his use of screencasting to grade student essays and comment on them verbally. Michelle updated us on her podcast quantum chemistry class and the wonderful reception it has received on iTunes. Laura discussed her blogging class, involving a lot of student blogging. I summarized my use of podcasting, screencasting and wikis in teaching chemistry. One of the important points I wanted to make is that having an archive of recorded screencast lectures can afford time for more individualized interaction between teacher and student.

There were plenty of questions and based on talks afterwards I think a few people will push forward with experimenting with the technologies. A few people were enthusiastic about using Unreal Tournament in their teaching and I will report what happens on the Edufrag blog.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and
Bradley Powerpoint.
Blankenship Powerpoint.
Francl Powerpoint.

The session was also videotaped - here is the webcast.

Dan Karleen on blogs in marketing

As part of our Drexel College of Arts and Sciences E-Learning Lecture Series, Dan Karleen from Thomson Peterson gave us a nice overview of blogs in general then their use in marketing strategies for both universities and companies.

I really liked that he used a blog instead of a Powerpoint presentation to walk through the material. It makes it easier to create links for people looking to follow up on the content he presented.

We got a good representation from Drexel's Business school, COMAD, computer science, chemistry and Drexel E-Learning. I am hoping that people will leave today's talk with some ideas that they will implement and share at future meetings.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and blog of Dan's talk.

Games in Education Talk

Mark Wagner is putting together an educational gaming workshop and asked me to contribute some material. So I edited my Utah State open courseware talk down to the core 10 minutes where I discussed the use of Unreal Tournament for running chemistry quizzes.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint of my talk.

Chemistry Mini Symposium

Our chemistry department hosted a mini-symposium for graduate students to hear about what the faculty are doing in their research. We were limited to 15 minutes, which is a good way to keep all talks on the big picture. Students can always follow up with individual faculty members later if they are interested.

I divided mine up in two sections. The first part dealt with my nanotechnology work: bipolar electrochemistry on carbon nanotubes, which basically means doing electrochemistry on the tip of very tiny tubes without physically touching them. The second part was a quick summary of using blogs, wikis and games in education. I even had time to do a quick Unreal Tournament demo for a Lewis structure map quiz.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint of my talk.

Open Courseware Talk

I just came back from the Open Education Conference at Utah State. It was a really enjoyable experience. I talked about using blogs, wikis and games to quickly generate open courseware.

Bobbe Allen is in the process of podcasting the conference. They used iPods with iTalk adaptors to do most of the recordings. The RSS feed is available from the XML icon at the top of the ITSAcast blog, which also includes the proceedings of the conference. The summary for my talk is found here.

There were some very promising opportunities for collaboration with several people at the conference, especially for educational gaming using the educational version of Unreal Tournament. As these projects become concrete I will certainly report our progress in the Edufrag blog.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint of my talk.