Classes*v2: Media Gallery Pilot

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Trip Kirkpatrick

This week Associate Director David Hirsch and Senior Programmer Peter Liu from CMI2 and Instructional Technologist Matt Regan and Instructional Support Manager Gloria Hardman from ITG spoke about the pilot program they are currently running on the Classes*v2 called, “Media Gallery.” Through Media Gallery, professors, students and teaching fellows are able to upload, organize and present video and audio content on their Classes*v2 course sites. Currently there are about fifteen courses involved in the pilot program, which has begun to reveal some of the benefits (and bugs) of the system. Tracking the pros and cons of the system will allow CMI2 and ITG to better adapt the program to fit Yale’s teaching and learning needs.

Kaltura, the media hosting platform that is being used as the platform for Media Gallery, is an exceptional fit for Yale’s needs for two reasons in particular: the program is open source (providing flexibility for Yale-tailored modifications) and all media is hosted on a dedicated media server (ie not a Yale server).

Basic functions of Media Gallery are easy enough for even the novice user. To upload material off of one’s personal computer, only a few simple steps need to be followed. The first step is to access the course site by logging in classesv2.yale.edu. Instructors or teaching fellows can then select a file, which will be uploaded to the Kaltura server. Once on the Kaltura server, the media files will be transcoded into standard formatting before being stored as links inside the course site library. Any metadata chosen to be associated with the content—title, description, tags—will appear in the course site library with the link to the media file. Tags in particular are especially beneficial as course instructors begin to organize the media files inside the library by creating “collections.”

To explain the capacities and detractors identified during the pilot, Matt oscillated between his real account (the Yale Matt) and account (his alter ego with special powers). Gloria, in turn, channeled Julia Child, whose included “files already sitting on the drive, ready for upload.”

Here are the pros and cons of the program.

PROS

Most video and audio formats are supported, with the notable exception of MP4 audio files. Media files can be easily incorporated into existing functions of Classes*v2, such as tests, quizzes, and even resources. Permission to use the files is done through Classes*v2, allowing for simple access control. While instructors can download files and/or copy the files’ embed codes, students cannot. Like with material currently being uploaded under “Resources,” responsibility lies with the individual professor to abide by copyright terms and restrictions of fair use.

There is a great deal of growth potential within the existing program. Not only does the open source nature of the program enable tailored modifications, but there are programs possible through Kaltura that are not currently implemented but might be incorporated in the future. For insantce, remixing and clip creation through a web-based media editor is possible through Kaltura. This function would allow film studies professors, wanting to teach students about clip order, to upload a number of clips, encouraging students to play with order to consider its effects. Similarly, image uploading is current disabled, though possible.

CONS

The biggest benefit of the pilot program is that the testing process enables many of the program’s bugs to be rendered obsolete for future users. For instance, there is a 2G upload limit, which makes Kaltura more suitable for shorter video clips than full-length films. Communication with Kaltura, however, indicates that the upload limit is likely to change soon. Also, the default option for media files is currently “hidden.” That means, occasionally, uploaded media content will be hidden from student’s page views without the instructor realizing (as the content is not hidden from the instructor’s page). Lastly, there is no “drag and drop” feature for the ordering of files within collections. Instructors who are concerned with order should be conscious of the order in which files are moved into collections files.

THINGS FOR USERS TO KEEP IN MIND

Users, not courses, control media files. Media content is stored in association with the user who uploads it and then shared, by that user, with a course. Once the course has been completed, the media files stay with the individual who uploaded them to be reused for future classes. This does mean, however, that Media files included in a course by a TF will need to be re-uploaded by professors the second time the course is taught. Similarly, language courses using the same video content for multiple courses controlled by multiple professors cannot share the video content, but must instead upload videos separately.
The more files uploaded, the more important metadata becomes. “My Content,” the automatic repository for media files, only shows ten clips at a time. While there is a search function, it’s relatively useless without meaningful tags associated with the content. Unfortunately, international characters are not currently supported in the metadata fields.
Transcoding off of the Kaltura server can take a little while. Instructors can’t expect to upload a file to have it available for class five minutes later, unless the file is very small. That being said, most files are likely to take less than an hour to transcode, so any files uploaded the night before will certainly be readily available for class the next day. The transcoding, Gloria reminded us, “all takes place in Kaltura-land” so if instructors find themselves frustrated by these delays, they’re welcome to take it up with Kaltura. Alternatively, this also means that once the instructor has sent the file he or she is welcome to “go take a nap.”

After Matt and Gloria concluded their demo of the pilot, Martin Kane, Special Assistant for Spanish for Health Care Professionals at the CLS, closed the talk with a demo. His course, “Español for Healthcare Professionals,” is using the webcam capacities to record videos of students doing portions of a patient history in Spanish.

Want more? View their powerpoint presentation.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below (note a slight delay upon initial playback):

Donatello – A Browser-Based Image Annotation Tool

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Trip Kirkpatrick

Instructional Innovation Intern (i3) Marq Jefferson and Ken Panko of ITG lead our first TwTT of the new year, discussing an image annotation tool that Marq created called Donatello. Marq began the talk by telling us a little bit about the history of Donatello. The program was developed in response to archeologist professor Harvey Weiss’s desire to show building plans, excavation field notes and images associated with the Leilan Akkadian palace excavations in Syria. To create a tool that would do this without reinventing the wheel or requiring software like Flash, Marq built the browser-based tool using existing technology: a javascript library called Raphaël. With Donatello, administrators can create shapes in an array of colors with varying opacities on top of the image to which they want to add more information using the square, circle, or polygonal tool.

Donatello keeps all of the data on Yale servers, and is easily customizable to specific needs. The instance created for Professor Weiss’s class shows a map of the dig, with annotations for different parts of the site, both in hoover text and displayed on the side bar with a double-click. Professor Weiss wanted the tool to be a useful reference tool, one that allowed schematics of the site to look more realized by associating them with photographs.

After explaining how Donatello had come about, Marq spoke about other instances of the protype, speaking to the evolution of the tool. A current beta ver sion of the project annotates a painting by Raphael, featuring hot-spots on the image which provide a deeper comprehension of what’s being seen. Sidebar data is shown through double-clicks, and can be edited through html content – anything from a youtube video to plain text. In addition to the data that can be shown in the mouse-over and the sidebar, Donatello allows an administrator of the page to link images to outside links (think: Wikipedia) or other images (such as different images of the same person being depicted). Marq explained that webpages could also be constructed through the site, and linked in to the network of data that an instance of Donatello would contain.

Marq closed by explaining that one of his motivations for working on the project – beyond assisting Harvey Weiss – was to provide a tool that would help students in classes. He felt that the most interesting and memorable classes in which he had participated were those with lots of media; a graphic view helped make information easier to ingest.

Audience members were curious to know more about access to the program. Marq explained that professors could request new instances as they’ve reached a stable version – though the program is “always sort of in development.” [Ken noted that those interested in pursuing use of the program would need to keep in mind that they would be early adopters of the program and should go in with those expectations.] With regards to privileges, as it stands, the program can be used from any web browser, but only the administrator can add content – although use of the site could alternatively be contained through Net ID restrictions.

Ken asked the audience if they had any suggestions, or noticed any functionalities that appeared to be missing. Suggestions included enabling freehand drawing of shapes (or an imported polygonal tool set), adding audio capabilities to the site (a project Marq has already begun work on), providing multi-lingual character support (which lead to a brief demo of Marq’s other project, Rubicon), the capacity to thread together multiple background images and similarly, the capacity to annotate one image on multiple occasions.

Wrapping up the session, Ken wanted to draw attention to the fact that Donatello – and Marq! – are excellent examples of why the i3 program is such a success and awesome opportunity. Anyone with project suggestions (or student suggestions) should get in touch with Robin Ladouceur who is currently in charge of the internship program.

Want to learn more about the i3 projects? Visit the i3 blog here. Or submit an application for faculty projects or student interns.
Interested in exploring the existing Donatello prototypes? Demos can be seen here, on the Donatello webpage.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below (note a slight delay upon initial playback).

Open Educational Resources Panel Discussion

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

For the final Teaching with Technology Tuesdays of the Fall 2010 semester, the Collaborative Learning Center was pleased to host a panel review of Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Representing Yale’s OER production, we welcomed Paul Lawrence and David Hirsch from Yale’s Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, campus home of Open Yale Courses (OYC). With an simultaneous undergraduate and national point of view, we had Adi Kamdar ’12, a member of the Yale chapter of Students for Free Culture and a board member of the national organization. Finally, Nick Bramble provided some legal perspective from his positions as a lecturer at Yale Law School and a postdoctoral resident fellow with the Internet Society Project.

ITG manager Ken Panko gave a brief introduction, delineating the concepts of open as used in institutions such as The Open University and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and as used in FOSS/FLOSS arenas. One of the keys is the distinction between providing material or intellectual property for use or for reuse.

Paul Lawrence gave a similar overview of Yale’s OER efforts, starting with AllLearn in 2000, in partnership with Oxford and Stanford, and continuing with OYC, which began in 2007. In contrast to the ambition of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, begun in 2002) and which posts all MIT courses, OYC is a more modest effort to have public representations of targeted Yale courses. The focus for Yale is on high-quality video, audio, and transcriptions.

David Hirsch walked the attendees through a slightly more detailed history, departing at Stephen Downes’s 1998 piece, The Future of Online Learning (revisited by the author in 2008) and his notion of a heterarchical, less restricted flow of knowledge than a traditional university. Taking its own steps in this direction, OYC tries “to provide as rich and complete” an educational experience as possible. Key to this has been the work of creating robust transcriptions and captioning for the published courses. Though this is the most time-consuming and expensive part of the process, it has borne fruit, evidenced by the highly favorable comments OYC receives and the traffic the site sees. (So far, they have gotten over 2 million unique visitors and continue to receive roughly 250,000 hits monthly.) Other lessons learned include the need to have multiple distribution points for the content (YouTube and iTunes U, in addition to the OYC site) as well as the benefits of licensing the content under the Creative Commons program. Hirsch’s slide set is available on Google Docs.

Yale junior Adi Kamdar gave a tip of the hat to OYC before his words, having made use of it in high school. After a short rundown of Students for Free Culture, including the notable Open Access (OA). While Yale has no program for OA in place, it is an implicit part of the Faculty Handbook [PDF] and Yale Students for Free Culture is working to get one started. Since Yale is not even a signatory to the Open Access Compact, it’s an uphill battle. They’re hoping to build a coalition of faculty, librarians and archivists, administrators, and students to bring this change about. Kamdar’s presentation is available for viewing — and reuse, since it is CC-licensed.

Our last panelist, Nick Bramble, spoke on the benefits that inhere to institutions practicing OA. In his time at Harvard, Bramble saw a transformation of attitude and direction, spearheaded in the faculty ranks by Stuart Shieber and at the university library by renowned historian and University Librarian Robert Darnton. Echoing Kamdar’s coalition-building, Bramble noted that Yale’s OA conversation needs to expand to include more stakeholders. As concerns Yale’s existing OER efforts, Bramble pointed up the limited utility of merely providing lectures as opposed to providing as well (re)use guidelines, suggestions, and examples (as does MIT). In addition, Bramble reflected Hirsch’s closing quote from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks with a few comments about the power of social learning networks. He went on to acknowledge the issue of IP rights and to call on Yale to articulate explicitly the rights and responsibilities of faculty and students as concerns course materials and Fair Use, the latter as exemplified in best practices set forth by the Center for Social Media. By the same token, Bramble called for reform of copyright law, including the TEACH act, to comprehend asynchronous learning environments.

With that and a decent Q & A period, we wrapped up Teaching with Technology Tuesdays for fall 2010 and started looking forward to January 25, 2011, when season 6 of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays kicks off. See you there!

New York Times Series on Digital Humanities

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

The New York Times has just issued the first in a series of articles about “Humanities 2.0: Liberal Arts Meet the Data Revolution.”

The article quotes Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Tom will be speaking to Yale’s Digital Humanities Working Group this Thursday. The session is open to the Yale public. Please join us!

November 18
Tom Scheinfeldt, Assistant Director of the Center for History and New Media
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Whitney Humanities Center, room 208

Teaching Quantitative Reasoning using Technology

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

Frank Robinson, Coordinator of the Yale College Science and QR Center, shared some of the ways that he and others have used technology to teach quantitative reasoning in Yale undergraduate courses.

Frank Robinson gesturing to a screen on which a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is playing.

Frank Robinson describes how his students predicted the force exerted by a catapulted cow by observing a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Professor Robinson has been deeply involved in Yale’s Quantitative Reasoning Initiative. This Yale College initiative established as its chief goal the improvement of undergraduate skills in Quantitative Reasoning. The focus on Quantitative Reasoning [QR] was generated by the CYC committee rulings in 2004 regarding course requirements. In the pre-2008 period, students could completely avoid taking any math courses while at Yale. The new requirements dictate that students must complete 2 QR courses. To satisfy the QR requirement, new courses must demonstrate that the exams and assignments be comprised of 50% QR based questions/equations. It often takes a few months to get a new QR course accepted.

Professor Robinson wanted to find new ways to engage the students in his QR courses. He initially worked with the Instructional Technology Group on making changes to an online QR assessment. Next, a partnership to offer a course on Natural Disasters was formed.

In Spring of 2005, Professor Robinson offered Astronomy 120, Galaxies and the Universe, a course for non-science majors with fewer quantitative reasoning skills. The course introduced two different types of sections: QR intensives sections and Conceptual sections. Wireless Polling devices, otherwise known as “Clickers,” were incorporated into class sessions. Questions focusing on QR and concepts were answered anonymously, thereby providing in-class feedback on general comprehension. The Clickers allowed Professor Robinson to course-correct in class. Pre-class web-based reading quizzes in Classes v2 were also included in the assignment structure for the course. The Reading quizzes also always asked the students whether there were any lingering concepts or quantitative points they didn’t understand. The professor and TFs would read the answers to the reading quizzes before the next class so that they could address gaps in comprehension during the next class. Two online multiple-choice QR assessments were given. These allowed the instructors to weed out the students who did “too well,” meaning they should have been in a higher level QR course, and give more individualized attention to the students who were struggling. Students who were having difficulty were triaged into the appropriate tutoring scenario. Professor Robinson tried to tailor the course to the individual needs of the students as based on their QR assessments.

For his course on Movie Physics, Professor Robinson focused on estimation as the chief QR component to be examined. The Movie Physics course was described in the course catalog as: “A critical evaluation of Hollywood action movies using the laws of physics and back of the envelope estimates to distinguish between fictional and real movie physics. Enrollment limited to freshmen and sophomores. Intended for students with little or no prior exposure to calculus and statistics.” Several contemporary movie clips were used as prompts for a variety of physics estimation assignments. The TwTT audience was treated to a sampling of the clips used in the course: the cow flinging episode from Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” runaway train from Spiderman, and a spaceship’s encounter with an event horizon from Disney’s “Black Hole.”

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below (note a slight delay upon initial playback):

Gaming in the Classroom

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

We were happy to welcome Roger Travis, Associate Professor of Classics to the Bass Library on Tuesday to speak about how and why he uses video games in the classroom. Professor Travis first walked us through his side project, the Video Games and Human Values Initiative. This organization started from a base of doing traditional scholarly work on the connections between adventure video games and the Homeric epic a little over four years ago. They are, as their name suggests, hoping to move the conversation about video games in a more humanistic direction. Roger and his collaborators at the VGHVI find that, unlike studies of other media such as film, video game studies has seen insufficient humanistic discourse. As part of this effort, they and other organizations such as Games, Learning, and Society at Wisconsin and Meaningful Play at Michigan State University are exploring issues around what video games are doing to and for us.

Professor Travis proceeded to structure his talk around his personal narrative, describing how he came to study games and what he has done with them professionally. After casually gaming in childhood and at college, Travis had a breakthrough in playing the Microsoft game Halo for the XBox. His experiences with this game and the kinships he saw with Homeric bard competitions led him to turn a course into an augmented reality game, or, more properly, into a role-playing game in an augmented-reality game wrapper. The 1:1 mapping he used for learning objectives and play objectives led him to coin the term practomime from praxis and mimesis, that is, a doing and representing.

Another important point in Travis’s timeline came when he attended the Game Education Summit and saw James Paul Gee’s 36 learning principles (discussed in Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy) as well as Ian Schreiber’s chemistry–Pkémon comparison. The former lays out in detail the argument in his book’s title, suggesting new directions for learning (or at least new ontologies for learning) based on studying video game players. The latter discussed resistance among students to learning data from the periodic table of the elements when they had already learned a greater amount of data in the Pokémon universe.

Students in Professor Travis’s first iteration of his practomimetic course were taken aback at first, confused by the overlay of a game onto the course with little or no additional explanation. However, by the end of the course, disorientation gave way to engagement; he saw excellent student work in the ARG framework and positive and constructive evaluations. He explained that students in his game-world courses perform equal to their peers on traditional assessments, and motivation in his courses tends to run quite high. As an example of this, he mentioned students expressing a desire to compose in Latin, something he never saw in his traditional courses. Students also appreciate the aggregative grading method Professor Travis uses, in which students earn points for their assignments that build up, in toto, to their final grade. One instructor remarked that this seemed like a more motivating way to grade than the common method, which only allows a decrease in grade standing over a term.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below (note a slight delay upon initial playback):

You can follow the writings of Professor Travis on his blog, Living Epic, and the as well as the latest thoughts of the VGHVI through their podcasts.

Laptops in the Classroom — Graduate Teaching Fellows Panel Discussion

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

The Teaching with Technology Tuesday for 26 October 2010 was held as a panel discussion, a different format for the CLC series. With the special sponsorship of the Graduate Teaching Center, we featured three graduate students discussing their views and policies on laptops in classes they have taught and sections they have led. Our moderator was Jennifer Frederick, Associate Director of the GTC. Our participants were Maureen Canavan from Epidemiology and Public Health, Michael Meadows from Italian, and Alexandra Seggerman from History of Art. (A photo of each is on the GTC site.)

Jennifer set the stage by noting the near- or seeming-ubiquity of laptops and other mobile computing devices in the student population and asked us to consider the pedagogical implications as well as how we can manage their use. First up was the strong con position, taken by Alex, partly on the basis of the distractive power of the network as well as the laptop as physical barrier between the instructor and student. For her there is also a distinct drawback of the rapidity with which students can take notes, resulting perhaps in word-level comprehension without any learning occurring on the part of the students. Michael took a more favorable view, arguing that students can use the network to fill in their knowledge gaps during class discussion or lecture. He acknowledged that some students engage in off-task activities but that this has not been a majority of his students or a majority of the time, and emphasized that the instructor bears the burden of teaching students how to integrate their laptops into the course appropriately. Finally, our middle ground was supported by Maureen, who tries to focus on and foreground the course or section goals for her students and incorporating (or forbidding) laptops as needed.

The bulk of the time was taken up by thoughtful back-and-forth with the audience (though the contributions suggested it was more a group of fellow participants).

One commenter noted that she really only interfaces with education through a laptop. That is, she loses paper notebooks, but always retains her computer and consequently makes better use of class notes on a laptop. Alex responded that she feels students would just the same learn better by taking fewer notes and digesting them after class, implying that paper note-taking acts as an automatic throttle on note-taking speed for most students. Maureen added that she also organizes her education better on a laptop, but that having them in a discussion section pushes the instructor to be a “hall monitor”.

Another brought up lecturecasting as a way to discourage students from feeling pressure to record every word from the instructor’s mouth during a lecture. This, he said, might make it easier to forbid laptops and encourage thoughtfulness during class time. Alex wondered why students would bother going to class in that case. Michael suggested that lecturecasting continues to foster the negative behavior of students trying to record everything that is said during a lecture. Maureen suggested that lecturecasting would end up not serving anyone, since most students would be unlikely to access the recorded lecture later.

The conversation quickly broadened into the role of the instructor in the classroom and the role of the traditional lecture in a Yale education. Participants commented on gaming the undergraduate educational system, on the long tradition of students not paying attention during lectures (reading newspapers, sleeping, thinking about other subjects), and on problematizing lectures in the contemporary environment of multiple alternate avenues to much of the material shared in a lecture. We didn’t solve the problem, but it can be hoped that participants left considering how they will organize their teaching and learning efforts differently in the future.

Ken Panko asked for some closing comments from Michael Farina, an Italian instructor known for frequent and affirmative use of the network in his courses. He strongly feels that it is not an instructor’s responsibility to police students. Rather, it is the instructor’s responsibility to make the class engaging, to ask students to close laptops if there is a particular point in the class session that demands it, but also to encourage the students to take notes collaboratively, thereby contributing to other students’ learning and broadening their own.

Beyond the Blog

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

Professor Sam See, English department, and Alison Kanovsky, graduate student in American Studies, and Robin Ladouceur, Instructional Design Specialist from ITG, presented for today’s lecture.

Robin started with a recap of a NPR segment that pointed out Andrew Sullivan’s blog is 10 years old–blogs have been around for over a decade. She then posed a couple questions to the audience: What are the characteristics of a blog? Chronological reverse order, diary, updates were answers volunteered from audience members. What are some blogging platforms? Blogger, WordPress, etc. What about blogging in higher education? Specifically, using blogs in higher education? For a collection of outakes/b-sides (materials in addition to course work); student responses to readings (apt for English or Literature course that focus on reading and writing), were just a few of the answers blurted out.

WordPress as the blogging platform in courses was implemented at Yale in 2008 (multi-user) and it gained an immediate and sustained traction in English department as faculty used their course blog as a place for students to post reading responses from formal to informal. Robin posited that the ways in which a blog sustains active participation outside the class democratizes the sharing of ideas. She noted that the ease of use of WordPress is why ITG maintains it as their platform for course sites. It is easy to set up, easy to teach and get students set up, involving a 20 minute demo with faculty and an additional 20 minute demo with students. Robin noted that WordPress is a beyond the blog tool because of its flexibility. WordPress is endlessly customizable. She further explained how WordPress allows such such customization, mainly through its commitment to open development of plugins and themes. Hundreds or thousands of developers adding themes and plugins on a daily basis. WordPress sites are really not called blogs anymore, but instead called sites because of the infinite creativity of the developers. Yianni Yessios from ITG develops plugins for specific course site needs. Faculty come to ITG with ideas about what they want to do pedagogically and usually WordPress is the answer/tool to fulfill the learning objectives of the course.

Robin continued to show examples of course sites, some of which Yianni was able to customize for the course. Slavic 210’s site allowed students to provide examples of linguistic moments that they were talking about in class. Sociology 221’s site needed an anonymous forum given the sensitivity of the class topic (sex and romance in adolescence) and ITG developed “Anonymizer,” which allows students to post without their netid attached to the blog post. The “Modern Poetry” course mainly used WordPress as a course site with sections like units, timeline, primary sources. However, it did embed audio files of poems that were discussed in class. Additionally, the “New Directions in Legal Anthropology” course site gave students access to video clips to which they analyzed and responded to all in the same site. Lastly, “Medieval Manuscripts to New Media” course used WordPress as an announcement forum and also a one stop shop for access to course materials. Students additionally had their own blog, set up like an e-portfolio (all assignments were turned in here).

Sam See talked about using WordPress in two courses, “European Literary Tradition” and “Queer Mythologies.” He noted that he has been teaching for 7 years and used WebCT before for gathering student responses, but that WordPress is much more user friendly and aesthetically pleasing. He also mentioned that he is fairly “old-school” in his pedagogical approach. Sam believes in a close reading of text and that class discussion drives the course. He started to use online posting to fulfill the writing requirement for courses, but noticed that it developed into something else. Essentially, it presented a way for students to take writing seriously and as a communicative medium across the disciplines. His assignments require students to post reading responses that moving from subjective posts to objective ones that make an argument as the course develops over time. Evidence and analysis is given through each response and Sam responds to each of them in the first few weeks of class. The public nature of the course blog may ultimately encourage students to write thoughtful responses since their peers can read them. Around the 6th week of the course, the students begin to respond to one another with an argumentative post; respond to argument with an argument. WordPress functions as a public forum for sharing arguments and therefore fulfills a learning objective for the course. Robin suggested the plugin DigressIt as a means to workshop writing in the “Queer Mythologies” course. In DigressIt, students post drafts of essays and he asks the students to comment on each other’s drafts to create an online dialogue. With DigressIt, it is remarkably easy to do this. The students copy paper and paste their paper from Word into the site. it reads their paragraphs from word and creates a mechanism whereby students can insert comments about each paragraph as opposed to only being able to comment on the whole draft. Same noted that the students’ comments are really earnest and was very impressed with the investment of their time to each other. He does provide them with guidelines about what to comment on. Identify the problem statement, for example, is one such guideline. He ended his portion by posing the question: Could it be the technology that inspired the level of commitment to each other as well as how they think of writing as a serious craft?

Allison gave a demo of GalleryPress, developed by Yiannos, by showing a work in progress site. Professor Matthew Jacobson needed a site that could manage and present the thousands of photos that he is taking through a historian’s eyes and also that could take student image contributions and allow for comments. GalleryPress allows one to add a gallery of images with data through the upload of a folder of images and corresponding text file (which could be made from Excel). Essentially, a gallery of images is like making a post. It utilizes Lightbox to display a larger image and a metadata tab and a comment tab are available to show or hide. Allison took us through the back end, how to upload thousands of images in one post. This plugin’s strength is in its ability to match images with data and batch upload.

WordPress allows endless possibilities for your course site. Visit ITG to learn more.

For podcast coverage of this session, please click the video below (note a slight delay upon initial playback):

Library Digital Collections tool

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

Carolyn Caizzi, Technology Specialist for Yale’s Visual Resources Collection, Mike Friscia, Web Developer for the Yale University Library, and Aaron Hyman, graduate student in History of Art presented the new Library Digital Collections tool and how to incorporate it in teaching and learning scenarios.

Carolyn Caizzi chronicled the history of the Digital Collections tool. She indicated that it had undergone two major transformations in the past 2 years. From about 1998 until 2008 there was a unified interface to Yale’s digital collections, but it was only a front door to the separate interfaces of the collections themselves. Searching was really only practical for advanced users, who knew what they wanted, precisely and in some detail. There was no browsing capability. In 2008 there was a reformulation and redesign, creating Metagallery [for a CLC blog entry on Metagallery, click here]. Metagallery was the product of a collaboration by the Library and the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation [CMI2]. The biggest feature addition was the ability for a user to create groups of images and share them with other users. Metagallery, however, only searched the Visual Resources Collection.

The latest tool, the Library Digital Collections tool searches 15 collections with over 600K items (not all of Yale’s current collections, but about half — there are plans to include more collections subsequently). This newest iteration provides for many different ways to search and browse, allowing searches by a broad range of users. The most significant advancement is the ease of creating, annotating, and sharing groups of images with others. The tool also allows a variety of browsing modalities that enable users to maximize relevant finds that they would be unlikely to uncover with standard searches. Site statistics reveal that the tool is being used for at least 20K searches per month. The biggest challenge for users is the lack of standardization of metadata across collections; searching may return skewed results depending on the field(s) used and the values entered. Mike Friscia, the tool developer, is working with the various collections to standardize metadata conventions used to pull in search items.

The major features of the site are convenient browsing (top down, bottom up, lateral); the visual presence of related items fields; tagging (which will become more useful as more students and faculty tag items); the ability to save an entire page of results or a subset of them; searching within a result set; the slideshow presentation mode for a saved group, useful for displaying a small group of images in class; the ease of downloading images singly or from a group, all with a metadata text file; sharing groups publicly or to a specified set of netids; allowing students or colleagues to edit groups (useful for class/section assignments and collaborative work); storing recently viewed items and searches for subsequent logins; and uploading non-Yale collection images to a user’s group.

Aaron Hyman of History of Art has been using the Library Digital Collections tool in his course for the past month. Though an admitted technophobe himself, the tool’s ease of use has made incorporating it into his course a no-brainer. He and his students have found that the tool enhances both in-class discussion and the execution of a wide range of assignments. It helps in History of Art courses to start with a selection of images relevant for a particular section meeting and build the session around the selection. The Digital Collections tool allows users to do exactly this. Aaron would regularly create and save off a group relevant for a particular section and share the link to the group with his students. Students can then be assigned a group of images to evaluate/investigate ahead of class, just like assigned reading. To enhance class discussion with concrete examples, the image group could then be presented during the class/section. Images found in Library Digital Collections searches and grouped together by the section leader are often better examples of the artwork under discussion than poor reproductions of textbook images. Aaron has found that for teaching, the group feature is very useful for preparing for section. The individual image view with metadata can be used like flash cards to help students prepare for an exam. Aaron proposed that graduate students in History of Art, or any other visual media-heavy discipline, could use the Digital Collections tool to prepare for their PhD orals as the group tool allows one to created collections of images relevant to certain overarching topics.

Mike Friscia then ended the session by sharing what’s in store for the Digital Collections tool in the future. Development projects currently include location-based browsing, a mobile version (expected summer 2011), collection-specific browsing methods (e.g. searching a periodical collection by year), and improved language awareness (e.g. in search results sorting and search suggestions).

iPads

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Trip Kirkpatrick

There has been, and continues to be, much speculation about what role Apple’s iPad could play in education. Almost 6 months after the iPad’s release, ambivalence about the iPad’s place in higher education reigns. The device appears best suited to media consumption situations and not media/document creation scenarios. Despite hopes for the tablet to act as a collaborative learning tool, it does not work well as an in-class teaching tool due to the inability to project the screen from within most apps. Given the uncertainty surrounding the iPad as a teaching/learning tool, what plans does Yale currently have for incorporating it in the university’s Educational Technology toolbox?

Barbara Rockenbach kicked-off the session with a welcome and announcement of the new Fall 2010 TwTT series. [Please find the schedule here.] She then introduced the speakers – Scott Matheson, Web Manager for the Yale University Library, and Ken Panko, Manager of the Instructional Technology Group.

Scott Matheson revealed the Library’s plan to use the iPad as an interactive service kiosk as a part of their digital signage campaign. To render the device secure, the Library had a customized lockable case constructed. The case will be bolted to a podium so that library visitors may use it as an interactive touch screen to learn more about the collections. The kiosk has been designed to stand in the nave at Sterling Memorial Library. It will list staff, have an array of collections maps, and provide links to various catalogs. The iPad will connect to Library web pages via a wireless connection. A small charger may be stored in the case to power the iPad. Speakers may also be attached for audio, though at this time, such audio would be unwelcome in the nave of the Library. The iPad is currently using a template system that limits the options available to any user. The template can be altered by “pushing out” a new one to the folder structure for the iPad files. Scott also mentioned that an iPad is currently in use as a video display tool in the corridor in Sterling as part of an East Asian exhibit.

Ken Panko opened his segment of the session by lamenting the fact that not everyone had an iPad to experiment with during the presentation. He then posed a question to the crowd: “Why do we think we are here today? What is it about iPads that garners such curiosity?” Someone in the crowd commented that the iPad represents a fundamental change – in terms of mobility and media consumption. It’s small with a long battery life and thus, eminently portable. It easily and attractively packages a wide variety of media – newspapers, music, images, and movies. Ken reiterated that the iPad is the first truly mobile computer. Of course, any tablet fits this bill, but right now the iPad has the largest market share. It truly is superb for media consumption, but it currently is not a good device for an instructor to take into a classroom. It’s too expensive. Apple should follow Kindle’s lead and push the price point for the iPad way down. There are many other reasons why the iPad is not ideally suited to higher education teaching and learning scenarios than just the price point. At present you can not use the VGA-out cable to mirror your display or project from it. You can only project from a few applications or from a few functions within those applications (ex.: slideshow mode in Photos or in Keynote).

It is great for e-editions of some textbooks. This is a very promising feature as it is far easier to carry one iPad than 3-4 large textbooks. The catch is there are currently very few iPad versions of textbooks available. This will of course change in time, but who knows how long it will take for that market to grow? The other downside is that in e-textbooks, you cannot write in the margins. You can annotate and highlight, but is that function sufficient? There is currently no system available for selling back e-texts as there is for actual textbooks. That, coupled with the higher than one would expect pricepoint for e-textbooks makes them a less economical option. Scroll Motion, an iPad app developer, created the Iceberg Reader that allows one access to e-textbooks with a high resolution graphics-rich experience.

The course management apps developed for learners are more promising for higher education. Blackboard’s CMS app for the iPad is impressive. Itallows you to manage your courses from within your iPad. iStudiez Pro similarly allows students to organize and manage their academic life on their iPads. There are several note-taking apps available as well, but unfortunately, the electrostatic keyboard on the iPad is rather unfriendly. If you want to really explore taking notes with your iPad, you need to carry around an external bluetooth keyboard.

Other apps of interest:

Elements

Papers

Shakespeare Pro

ideaboards

Remote desktop apps:

Logb

SpaceTime

LuxTalks

Ideas at the intersection of teaching, research, technology, and libraries

Category Archives: TWTT