The Blog

Educational Tech Review: Swivl

swivl-1
By On May 23, 2013 In Instructional Design With No Comments Permanent Link to Educational Tech Review: SwivlPermalink

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours evaluating SWIVL for potential use at the University of Houston (UH). I thought I would jot down my early impressions of the potential usability and value of SWIVL for academic institutions.

SWIVL jumped onto the scene as a Kickstarter project in December 2012 and has delivered on its promise to create a multipurpose motion and tracking platform. The company highlights the educational use cases for SWIVL for flipped classrooms, lecture capture, distance education, and collaboration. Educational institutions are the source of 75-80 percent of their business and they have received additional capital to guarantee the launch of the second generation of SWIVL devices.

There is a growing body of data highlighting the urgency for simple, effective video integrations. Over the decade represented below, students selecting distance education courses increased by 150 percent. Projections show that by the end of 2013, 18 percent of undergraduate students will receive 80 percent of their credits through distance education courses.

distancelearning

After conducting a few small focus groups at UH, the data pointed to a common sense conclusion: faculty, staff, and students want a hassle-free way to record and upload course-related video. While enterprise lecture capture systems still have value at large universities, we found that many users want more agile and spontaneous approaches to content creation and distribution. Using our user personas and use cases we identified several requirements for video capture:

1. Simple

Can the device be setup in less than five minutes by someone who has never used it before?

2. Wireless

Whether giving a lecture or creating videos in student groups, the device must enable and even encourage movement and action. With the varied classroom layouts and differences in departmental needs, it’s also important that the device be able to function unplugged.

3. Open

The bottom line is that we want to empower faculty, staff, and students to create, share, and learn using their preferred applications while giving them full control over their content. The device must be easy to integrate with the many applications and services at UH (e.g., WordPress, YouTube, Drupal, Moodle, Blackboard Learn, etc.).

4. Affordable

In order to impact the curriculum and pedagogy, we have to actually get these devices into users’ hands. This means that the device must be affordable and require very little external support.

5. Scalable

The device and supporting applications should be capable of supporting usage that will exceed current rates. Special care should be taken to address the challenge of maintaining efficiency while allowing flexibility.

So how did SWIVL do?

Pros

+simple setup
+easy sharing
+quality audio
+remote activated record
+tripod mount
+battery and AC powered
+speaker tracking

Cons

-uneven tracking
-awkward adjustment wheel
-requires iPhone or iPod Touch to use remote and microphone
-only pans, no tilt

I originally created this video for internal use only but here is the quick overview and demonstration for those of you interested in seeing the performance of SWIVL without audio or video effects with an iPhone 4S in an empty classroom:

Lecture Capture Best Practices

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By On July 31, 2012 In Instructional Design With No Comments Permanent Link to Lecture Capture Best PracticesPermalink

Brief Background

Streaming media technologies allow real-time and asynchronous online dissemination of multimedia. Lecture capture helps deliver educational programs to improve the effectiveness of distance learning. A lingering challenge of turning instructional design and technological processes into sound pedagogical practice is the narrow focus on hardware. The benefits of a technology-rich classroom include increased social interaction, a greater attention to teaching style, and heightened student motivation (Earle, 2002; Tiene & Luft, 2001). By focusing on the interaction between learner, instructor, technology, and spatial context as a dynamic and changing system, it is possible to develop a list of best practices. Below I will focus on best practices for education video streaming.

For Instructors

When designing instructional material for lecture capture, the challenge is to consider the visual aspects of the medium. Presentation design and organization are key to a successful telepresence learning experience.

Instruction & Interaction
  • Alternate between lecture and discussion regularly during the class.
  • Utilize multiple forms of student interaction: polling, discussing, reading, writing.
  • Reinforce the concepts presented with quizzes, games, and group projects.
  • Engage students with direct questions and reward their contributions to the class.
How to Make Your Presentation Great
  • Less is more. Students need to be able to absorb both the information on the slides and the lecture. Instead of complicated single slides, create multiple slides that each contain a distinct idea or concept.
  • Avoid reading your lecture when possible. Talking directly to the audience is more engaging, especially when dealing with distant learners.
  • Hand gestures and body movements, in moderation, can also make for a more dynamic presentation.
  • Vary your tone of voice and the amount of eye contact with the camera.
  • Keep the lecture area clutter free. Book bags, coats, power cables, loose paper, and open folders can be visual distractions.
  • Similarly, avoid wearing neon colors, bold stripes, bright reds, or elaborate patterned clothing.
  • Practice in front of a mirror or camera if possible before the lecture.
Useful Tools for Your Lectures and Presentations
  • You can search and freely download images, audio, and video for your lectures using Creative Commons search.
  • Resize, crop, and edit images and graphics in browser using pixlr.com.
  • Your presentation should use colors that fit the tone and content of the lecture topic. Adobe Kuler is a great color scheme planner.

For Students

Make Connections
  • Introduce yourself to classmates at your location.
  • Often lectures will be supplemented with additional online materials. Check your email and course site regularly for updates, class notes, and handouts.
  • Show up on time. Participate in class discussion.
Communicate
  • It’s important to make the instructor and other students aware early of technical problems or learning challenges presented by the technology. For example, if the instructor or a classmate is speaking too quietly, ask them to speak up or adjust the microphone.
  • When you are asking or answering a question in an education video streaming environment, sometimes the audio can be heard before the video switches to your location. For this reason, you should first state your name and location (e.g., “Prof. Jones, this is Jennifer in Sugar Land, and I was wondering….”).
Be Courteous
  • Cell phones, even when set to mute or vibrate, will cause audio disturbances during the lecture.
  • Be aware that you can be seen by everyone at the connected receive site(s) and not just the instructor.

From Order to Configurability of Books

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By On October 6, 2011 In Conference, Library, Uncategorized With No Comments Permanent Link to From Order to Configurability of BooksPermalink

From Order to Configurability of Books: “Distant Reading” of Foreign Titles in the Woman’s Library at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition

This site follows a collection that began as an exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition’s Woman’s Building Library across the time dimension to its absorption into material collections and integration with the literary and national canons. The project theorizes the bibliographic fact and presents a methodology for reading forms and structures using a digital archive which can be continually configured.

Literary criticism (new criticism in particular) has developed excellent approaches and models over the past forty years that have allowed for the separation and interrogation of individual works, creating an “atomicism” of the works. This atomicism has resulted in the “destruction of any historical sense of literature as a result of its dismemberment” (Guillen, p. 578). What we are attempting with this project is to allow for a supranational ordering and reading of the texts, and a “comparatist’s search” for understanding that extends past “national differences” (Guillen, 1971). We are attempting to realize what Raymond Williams (1981) wanted to pursue when he wrote, “If I had one single ambition in literary studies it would be to rejoin [relations between language use and human physical organization] with experimental science” (p. 341). Moretti (2005) notes that a reconfiguration of literary history requires a prioritization of “explanation (understanding larger structures) over interpretation (reading of individual works).” By creating this open text from the WBL, we are helping reintegrate the “lost 99 percent of the archive” or the “Great Unread” into the “fabric of literary history” (Moretti, 2005). If, as Derrida claimed, no archive can be separated from the “outside” then this distant reading of the 1893 Women’s Library attempts to both reconfigure and resurrect.

- Paper presented at SHARP 2011 in the Library of Congress in DC with Marija Dalbello.

The alpha draft of the site can be found here.

 

Weaving a New ‘Net

newinternet
By On October 6, 2011 In Publications With No Comments Permanent Link to Weaving a New ‘NetPermalink

Weaving a New ‘Net: A Mesh-Based Solution for Democratizing Networked Communications

by Aram Sinnreich, Nathan Graham, & Aaron Trammell

Although the Internet is largely decentralized in its communication and social patterns, its technical and regulatory apparatuses are highly centralized and hierarchical. Consequently, digital communications are vulnerable to a degree of surveillance and censorship that would be unthinkable in traditional social arenas, threatening “Internet freedom” and cyberliberties in both democratic and politically repressed societies. We believe a new architecture is required in order to protect the continuance of civil liberties in networked society.  In this article, we propose 10 “social specifications” describing the requirements of such a network, and outline an architecture called MondoNet that meets these specifications using ad hoc, wireless mesh networking technologies. We also address the legal and technical challenges facing the MondoNet project, and anticipate future developments in this field.

The Information Society 27(5)

Local Interventions: Mobility Shifts

By On October 3, 2011 In Conference, Social Media With No Comments Permanent Link to Local Interventions: Mobility ShiftsPermalink

Local Interventions augments the 2011 Mobility Shifts conference by providing a digital space for presenters, organizers, and attendees to focus discussion around a daily question. These interviews, recorded on mobile devices, will spur real-world interaction, stimulate conversation, and serve as educational record. Join us!

PARTICIPATE


What you need: digital video camera (smartphone, camcorder, webcam, etc), internet connection

How to upload video: 1. email your interviews to 4uhg08wkjvkp@m.youtube.com or 2.follow these instructions to upload your interviews as video responses to this video.

Video title format (subject line for email uploads): Mobility Shifts: Date of Interview, Name of Interviewee

Where to view the videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/localinterventions

Twitter hashtag: #localinterventions

Local Interventions Organizers: Germaine Halegoua, Jessica Lingel, David Gagnon, & Nathan Graham

QUESTION OF THE DAY

Monday, October 10, 2011

What obstacles have you faced in your work as an educator, academic and/or activist in terms of media policies?  What has proven successful in overcoming these obstacles?

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

How do you teach the value of collaboration across cultures?

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

How can mobile media platforms be used for more than the one-way delivery of  content?

Thursday, October 13, 2011

What opportunities for networked teaching and learning might we find in such media-rich, responsive environments?

Friday, October 14, 2011

What are the best examples you’ve seen of schools and school systems opening up their networks to enable Digital Media Learning? (Question via Claudia L’Amoreaux)

PRIZE

Rules: The game is simple – whoever uploads the highest number of interview videos over the course of the conference wins.

Local Interventions: Mobility Shifts