Earlier this week I gave the following presentation to a groups of first year Accounting and Finance students:

• Social Media & Networks: How to survive online (or “your [next] employer is watching you”)

and was kindly asked by Pauline Randall of Florizel Media to write up a reflective account of the presentation and what kind of impact it had on the students. You can read my full account on Pauline’s website:

• Florizel Media – Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network

I hope Pauline doesn’t mind but here is a snippet for you to read, but please read the full reflection using the link above.

“What I was not prepared for, when I thought about presenting this, was the students were completely unaware that their activity online could have any bearing on their employability. It was clear from the gasps and shocked faces when I introduced the examples of people losing their jobs because of their online activity that I had hit my mark; I was changing their perception of not only social media and social networks, but also of how they are going to use them.”

I also had the event recorded by the Bournemouth University installation of the Echo360 lecture capture system. Here it is;

Click to view recording of the "Social Media and Social Network" Presentation

It was only after I’d finished that I’d remembered I hadn’t said the “Farmville / I Quit” story turned out to be a hoax, but I’ll remember next time!

Links and YouTube videos played in the lecture are:

• Did You Know 4.0 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8
• United Breaks Guitars (song 1) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
• CBS News Interview – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0ophSWaRSQ
• “Woman publicly outs boss for playing Farmville at Work”  – http://mashable.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-job-farmville-boss/
• The Fully Sick Rapper – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqGLHluDoe0

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The list of colleges and Universities signing up to iTunesU continues to grow. Since I last wrote about it – “Another Success Story (UCL)” – the likes of the OU (for those reading outside of the UK, this is The Open University) have a reported World Record as the first to reach 20 million downloads (source: Bee-It) since starting to use iTunesU in the Summer of 2008!

As reported in the Bee-It post, the OU says that;

“mobile phones are increasingly being used to download their tracks. Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, says that the growth of the iTunesU concept reflects the changing ways that people are learning.”

Martin Bean continues by saying;

“The way people want to learn is changing. Many now actively seek out content they are interested in and which they can watch, read or listen to when it suits them. New channels are helping people to fit learning in with their lifestyles, and the OU has always kept pace with the changing world of technology.”

ReadWriteWeb report that iTunesU is “better than going to class“, but Jim Groom doesn’t think it’s going to make any difference. Jim has some good points (especially the one about “everyone is doing it”) but surely a bigger picture is that it raises the profile of the Institution and (hopefully) the quality and perception of the materials provided to enrolled students?

Personally, I would love to be involved in generating and managing an iTunesU account for the Business School; we have lectures recorded using Echo360, which are automatically created with associated MP3 and M4B iTunes Audiobook format, as well as other material recorded straight to camera tape or memory.

This is the kind of material that reflects the quality of the teaching staff in the Business School. Regarding the question of whether students like it or not, how about student work being (with appropriate permission sought and obtained) loaded that reflects the quality of student in the Business School? I haven’t seen any of that in iTunesU yet (or did I miss it?).

So do students like it? It’s difficult for me to tell as we at Bournemouth are not using it. From reading around the Internet it seems that, on the whole, yes they are, just look at the numbers above. I would like to hear about whether your students (or you, if you’re a student) like or dislike iTunesU, but please say why?

So, it’s worked for the OU … have you had any similar interest or success with your use of iTunesU, or has your Institution opted to not invest the time and effort? Please leave your comments below, or anyone of the ‘related posts’ links also shown below.

Image Source

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Following up on a theme I’ve spoken to a few people about recently is the phrase “eLearning is dead, long live eLearning”.

I’ve long believed that what we have all thought of as eLearning (from the academic perspective, not commercial) has since become part and parcel of the way we teach face-to-face students;

• We use wikis and blogs as part of the classroom activity, as well as for online students who never meet,
• We use social media like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and the rest, to engage the students where they live (and include them in the lecture and seminars),
• We use our presentations in the classroom that are loaded to SlideShare, and the students listen and make notes, then go and read the presentation again online later,
• We are recording lectures and seminars, using tools like Echo360 and Camtasia, to keep a record of both the content but also to make it available for recap and revision purposes – this was originally used as the only way to deliver the materials to online students, and
• We encourage the students to use email for contact with us (personal reasons) and Discussion Boards for support, subject-specific activities, FAQs, etc (again, online and face-to-face students use the same tools now).

These are all tools and activities that were once used solely to engage and encourage geographically disparate  students, but are now being increasingly used for campus-based students, often in a way that can reduce the amount of contact time (especially necessary with large cohorts, even more so when you don’t have the physical room space to accommodate all the students at once, there this reduced the need to repeat the lecture) but increase the quality of tutor-contact time the students have.

So, if eLearning is dead, why do I say long live eLearning? Simple really, all I’m referring to is what we used to think of eLearning is out of date, but we now have a whole new concept of what eLearning is and what we can use it for. It is used in lots of different situations to enhance the student learning experience, to enhance the amount of time a tutor can spend with groups of, or individual, students; this new approach is exciting, innovative, ground-breaking, technologically challenging, and really damn good fun – all you have to do is see what some of the brilliant minds are doing by following some key people on Twitter (there are many – drop me a line if you want some names).

I also found this presentation on SlideShare from Rani H Gill on ‘There’s already an E in eLearning’ which helps to explain where I’m coming from:

View more presentations from Rani H Gill.

I am happy to receive your thought on this idea; have we seen the concept of eLearning become mainstream so there is little to distinguish purely online eLearning techniques from what we do with campus-based and classroom-based students? Please leave comment below and join in the conversation.

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I’ve written previously on using mobile devices in class, and have made reference to quite a few excellent resources in my re-Tweets on Twitter. I thought I’d bring some of the best together in one post as I often find myself forgetting where I put them.

Screen-grab
For those times when you want to display what is on the iPod screen, and you can never get a decent photo or it (room lighting, screen-glare, etc) why not just capture the screen content?

By holding down the ‘Home’ button (1) and clicking the On/Off button quickly (2) the screen will flash briefly, and your image is ready for viewing and downloading (stored in the ‘saved photos’ area).

Here’s one I made earlier:

Save images while browsing
Easily save images while your browsing the Internet by touching the image and holding your finger on it for about 2 seconds, at which point a series of menu items will show asking you to save it (the image below also shows the other menu items that are shown if the image is also a link).

Emails
Nothing is better or easier than setting up your iPod to access emails. It depends on your network/broadband provider as to whether it will work (I cannot access personal email account on network at work) and I cannot send work emails when on network at home!!) but there are plenty of good detailed guides to read with a simple Google search. Here is one of the clearer guides I’ve used in the past -
How To Set Up Email On iPod Touch or iPhone

Apple App Store
Using Apps from the Apple App store is good, but be careful on what you recommend, and how much it is likely to cost.  There are many good examples of freely available apps, but they may not stay free for ever!

Search through the list of Apps loaded to the ‘Education’ section if you like, but often the best ones are flagged as games, or business, or use the search and enter a term and see what you find.

Internet & Surfing
One of the biggest advantages of the iPod (and other mobile devices) is the ability to hook up to a network (open or closed access, if you can) and allow you to surf. Students are able to follow you and the class while looking up resources

Note-taking
While the virtual keyboard is fun, it’s not the best for typing quickly on (especially if you’re fingers are anything but extremely small and thin). Yes, it can be done, but to do it effectively takes time and practice.

Podcasts
Downloading podcasts from iTunes and/or iTunesU is excellent, providing some kindly soul has uploaded them in the first place. You don’t have to rely on iTunes either, you can download from the VLE, save to your PC and transfer across (our installation of Echo360 auto-generates an MP3 file from the video recording).

Documents
Share and download documents (assignment briefs, lecture slides, research material, etc) in and out of class.

Of course, this list is far from exhaustive. Please let me know how you have seen, or heard, or plan to use iPods in class.

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For a while now I’ve been helping several of the academic staff in the Business School to record their lectures. We’ve used a variety of systems ranging from;

• Camcorder recording and PowerPoint slides, produced with Microsoft Producer. This is an extremely labour-intensive method of matching slides to audio/video content, the download times are high, even on a good Internet connection, and the results are not particularly professional or easy to navigate.
• Echo360 lecture capture. This is hugely successful (when the system is working). Set the camera and computer up, set the ‘box’ running and then publish the results. You can top-and-tail the recording and edit sections out if necessary, you don’t need to be a technical person to use but you will need the backing of your Institution to install and run the dedicated server. The result is good quality reproduction and delivery.

The method of production is, by and large, not the issue that we will always come up against. The major issues we come up against are;

• “I don’t like watching myself” – Easy, don’t. It’s only the students that have to.
• “I don’t want my materials copied and distributed across the ‘net” – Very difficult to police, unless it is all held on a secure network and streamed. If everyone did this, then there would be no social networks and no scope for learning from each others’ examples of good/best practice.
• “I own the intellectual property of my lecture” – I’ll leave you all to argue this, but my opinion is that your employer owns the intellectual property, so go take it up with them. Look at the videos from University of New South Wales on YouTube, and what about the audio podcasts from Yale University on iTunesU … they have taken the bold and enviable step of making a lot of material public, and it has had no negative effect on their reputation or quality of courses. In fact, it has had the opposite effect; they are more respected because of their openness!

Jenny Weight comments that

“Nobody is employed to to do the work of publishing our content”.

I would counter this and say that there are mechanisms that can do this automatically and, with a little training, so even the most technically-challenged can produce and upload.

If you are worried about your material being publicly available, and use this as your excuse to ignore the advance of something like iTunesU, then why not make use of their ‘Internal iTunesU site’ …

“If you want to allow access only to members of your campus, you can host your own password-protected iTunes U site. This enables you to create and manage the content available on the site, while controlling who can access and download resources from it. “

I suspect that the issue of the material being available on the ‘net is just a cover for some to hide behind. They are not willing (or perhaps able) to change with the times, and so hide behind an excuse that is no longer valid. The wider the participation, the wider the learning environment.

I have written about Generation Y and Edupunks, changes like the above are being born from the need to engage the new learners in the world they already inhabit. They already live and breath the Internet, blogging, MP3, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook … therefore we must work on a coherent strategy to meet them there.

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