PowerPoint as HTML in LMS

Instructors who post their PowerPoint presentations to the the LMS in advance of class do so in anticipation that students will print out the slides and bring to class, so the students can take notes and make annotations directly on those print outs. Indeed this may constitute the single biggest use of the LMS, as an electronic file distribution tool for students to view content offline.

But suppose a course is converted to a blended format where some of what used to be done in live lecture has been moved online. For example, suppose the lecture has been video recorded and the recording is distributed online, either in toto or as a series of clips interspersed with other content. And suppose that some of the online content is PowerPoint presentations. Students might still want to print those out on paper, but now they might want to view online as well. Further, they might want to find the content in a particular PowerPoint presentation via keyword search, rather than via browsing through the presentations themselves. This is more likely when the student is looking for a slide or two in trying to satisfy some query the student has. And if done this way, the student may not know she is looking for some PowerPoint slides. She might be interested in postings on the topic in the class discussion board, an assessment or assignment that deals with the topic, really anything that might be relevant.

These last desiderata suggest that if the course Web site is housed in an LMS then the search tool in the LMS should be utilized to help students perform such queries. And, once the instructor makes a conscious decision to employ the LMS search tool as a way for students to find particular course content quickly and efficiently, then it behooves the instructor to make the PowerPoint content searchable, not just the title of the presentation, but the slide titles and the bullet points as well.

On my campus the LMS is Blackboard (WebCT) Vista. The search tool there is reasonably robust – it indexes all html files that appear in the course site, as well as all content in their tools, such as the discussion or quiz tools. So to make this approach work, the PowerPoint needs to be converted to html and the html version must be inserted into the course site. Below I discuss how to do this with the tool that is built into PowerPoint. This approach may be less desirable than others, because it favors Internet Explorer over other browsers, but surely it is the simplest thing to do. There are some other converters out there that move the PowerPoint to html in a browser-neutral way, but I’ve not yet tried those.

Here is a brief example of output of this sort. This presentation aims at the instructor who teaches with a Tablet PC and might mark up blank PowerPoint slides in the session that is recorded. The idea is that afterwards slide titles can be put in to help the student navigate to the particular slide in question. One wants to put in the slide titles in a way that doesn’t muck up the hand written content.

* * * * *

And here are step by step directions for what to do after the PowerPoint has been created so it can be loaded into WebCT Vista in such a way that keywords within the PowerPoint can be found by the search tool for the course Web site.

1. After completing the PowerPoint, save as Web page (*.htm, *.html). This produces a top level .htm file and a folder full of other stuff.
2. Enable Webdav for the course site. (This should probably be done anyway, quite apart from this example.) Here are the instructions for XP. I’m not sure how to do this in MS Vista but perhaps that translation is not too hard.
a. Under the Build Tab in the course site in Compass (WebCT Vista), go to File Manager.
b. Open the Action Links for the File Manager (the little pull down menu to the right of the words File Manager).
c. Copy the url there.
d. Go to My Network Places on your computer
e. Choose Add a network place
f. In the Wizard choose: Add another network location
g. Paste in the url you copied.
h. On most campuses, it is likely that your login and password to the LMS will be the same as the login and password for WebDav. At Illinois, when you give the authentication info for WebDav, use your Active Directory password. This is not the Bluestem password for Compass.
i. Type in a name you can remember for this WebDav folder.
j. You will have to log in again to access this folder. It will show all the contents of your file manager for the course. You can drag and drop onto this folder.
3. Drag both the top level .htm file and the folder full of stuff from your PowerPoint presentation into your WebDav folder.
4. Go back to your course site in Compass (WebCT Vista). It may take a few moments for the file and the folder to appear in your file manager for the course site.
5. Once they do appear, put the top level .htm file wherever in your site that you want students to access the presentation. Verify that if they do access this way they can get to the entire presentation. Do this by accessing via the Student View.
6. So, for navigation purposes you only have to insert that top level .htm file.
7. But for search, you need to get all the files associated with the presentation that now reside in the File Manager into the course site so the search tool can index them. Therefore make some Compass (WebCT Vista) folder off the homepage (or off some folder that is off the homepage).
8. Select insert file. Navigate to that folder in the File Manager with all the stuff. Select all. Then insert.
9. Afterwards, delete the file called “Outline.” If you don’t do this step it will show up in the search as a second entry. But only delete this file in the folder in the course site. It must remain in the folder in the File Manager.

* * * * *

It seems every tool nowadays comes with its own search. So if you mix and match environments, it seems more and more likely for this to be the case, then you run into the issue of whether you use multiple search tools, in my view a loser from the student perspective though I’m guessing at that rather than knowing so by experience, or you see if you can come up with one search tool that finds all the content. If the content all were on the public Internet that one tool would be Google, and the question then would be how to make the content available in Google while avoiding a lot of false positives. But online quizzes, certainly, and online discussions quite likely will be password protected and not findable by Google. If you want that content to be searchable by those who do have a proper password, then doing something like what is suggested above makes sense. But to do that effectively, the presentation content must also reside inside the LMS. At a time when many learning technologists are preaching openness, this might seem like a move backwards.

My response is to consider the perspective of the individual instructor, the one who has been using the LMS to distribute PowerPoint presentations ahead of time for face-to-face lecture. The discussion about open educational resources is happening entirely outside this instructor’s purview. The move to a blended approach in the teaching is a big jump, one that requires this instructor to make considerable changes in perspective. The way to make a big jump is to break it up into a sequence of little steps, each itself manageable provided the earlier steps have already been taken. Making the course resources open is one of those later steps, after the instructor has thought through and realized that commercializing his own creations is not in the cards but, more importantly, also realizing that he can still make interesting content that he can be proud of showcasing.

We’re taking it one step at at time.

Widgets in LMS

Using a RSS reader widget from SpringWidgets.com, the video below shows how to bring in external feeds with relevant course info that is more convenient for the student than the alternative of using tools within the LMS for this information, because the info is "right there" rather than "only a click away." Also note that particular feeds were chosen because they display well in the Widget. Hence 30Boxes.com is used instead of, for example, Google Calendar. Likewise, Wordpress is used instead of Blogger, because the Wordpress feed shows the time of the post. I don't know why Blogger feeds don't, since the time is a feature of the actual post, but somehow that information doesn't get into the widget.

Absolution

We perpetrators of crimes from afar don’t usually see our victims. Instead we think of self and our own bumps and bruises. We commit folly and wallow in our losses, small as they may be. When the real damage reveals itself we feel shame, for our lack of imagination, for the innocents who go punished when we do not, and for our blame remaining hidden. We can only hope, late to the game as we are, that those innocents don’t suffer too severely and that our humble efforts to atone make some small difference.

Topping the news this morning is the horrific flooding in Iowa, more evidence of Mother Nature gone awry due to global warming. I was to have been in Iowa City today for the Summer Writing Festival. But the campus has suspended normal operations and the workshop was canceled as a result. I had wanted to visit with some colleagues beforehand. In our email back and forth last week they alerted me to the problems with the flooding ahead of time. The Festival itself was at first optimistic that it could go on in spite of the bad weather, but things went from bad to worse.

Last Thursday and Friday I was disappointed that this week at the Festival had been canceled. The workshop was to be a new opportunity and I was looking forward to it. But over the weekend, with the further storms here and there, my attention switched to those who’ve been victimized by the weather and what if anything can we do about it. Directly and immediately, there is probably not much we can do. Indirectly and longer term, I think there are plenty of things to try.

I’m trying to reduce my own personal carbon footprint. Last week, I ordered a Honda Civic Hybrid to replace my Pontiac Aztek. This should double the fuel efficiency when driving. The dealership was back ordered for this model. I’m to take delivery in late August or early September. But I believe it will be worth the wait.

I’ve also taken to turn off the lights and ceiling fans in our house in rooms where nobody is currently located. It’s miserly behavior, to be sure, the kind of thing my father did. But it’s not just for pinching pennies. It feels like the right thing to do.

The hardest thing for me personally, but I’m going to try, is to change my diet and, in particular, eat less meat. I wonder if others are feeling the same sense of obligation.

I don’t really understand the feedback loop by which reductions in consumption such as described above get translated back into reductions in production, particularly if those reductions are small, only at the individual level, not yet at the macroeconomic level. But surely a macroeconomic reduction in consumption is comprised of many individual reductions. Rather than free ride and get on the train only after it has left the station, why not reduce consumption now?

Hallelujah!

Hidden Conversations

Growing up I was very fortunate to have a steady best friend, David, all the way from first grade through high school. David’s house and mine faced 56^th Avenue; we lived diagonally across from each other, each a corner house, his bordering 211^th Street, mine on 212^th Street. Over those years we played a lot of ball games with a Pensie Pinkie. (I could find no image on the Web for Pensie Pinkie but if you have no idea what I’m talking about you can find some info by looking at this page for the prime competitor, the Spaldeen.)

Our favorite game was slapball. The way we played it you needed at least two players in the field, a pitcher and someone else to take the throw at first base. We could accommodate more fielders if there were more kids who wanted to play. When we first played the game David’s older brother Lesley was the permanent pitcher for both teams. As we got older we learned to “pitch” too, in this case a motion similar to throwing a dart where the ball bounces once before it’s ready to be hit. It’s amazing how much spin you could get on one of those Pensie Pinkies by flicking your finger as you tossed the ball.

We had some special ground rules owing to where we played. My family had a one-car garage attached to the house (but you still had to go outside to get into the garage) and the driveway was steeply sloped so it really wasn’t good for anything sports-wise; but we did have a stoop that was perfect for stoopball and David and I played that too when we didn’t have enough kids for slapball. David’s family had a two-car garage, luxurious for the time and the neighborhood, that was unattached to the house and with a flat driveway, which was perfect for our slapball infield.

The heading east lane on 56^th avenue (my side of the street) and the heading west lane (David’s side) were separated by a “mall,” mostly weeds and some trees surrounded by curb, about the same width as one of the lanes. This was well before the Pooper Scooper Law went into effect so the mall was a bit of a minefield and you either tried to avoid it altogether or carefully watch your step while walking in it. The mall was where our outfield started and the ground rule was that if you hit the ball there or beyond on a fly you were out. On offense the goal was to hit it sharply but on the ground and see if you could get it through the infield. If you got a big hit that way with the ball ending up on the mall or, even worse, on the lawn of the Old Lady who lived next to my house and across from David’s, then it was the fielders’ problem and they had to chase it.

Slapball was our main game when we had four or more. When we had three we played Chinese Handball, using the Garage Doors as the wall, and with two apart from stoopball we either played boxball or “errors,” the latter where you threw the ball at the garage above the doors and the other person had to catch the throw on a fly. You’d get an error on the throw if you missed the target and a different type of error if you didn’t make the catch. David killed me at that game. He was a much better ball player. But I learned to passably catch a ball with one hand that way and my hand-eye coordination definitely improved for all ball games as a result.

The simple joys of childhood sometimes mask the valuable lessons from the play. On the emotional front you learn how to compete but still keep it fun, how to keep from being a spoiled sport when you want to win too badly, how to accommodate players of different abilities and temperaments and different ages too. My brother, 20 months my junior, often tagged along. He didn’t have a friend like David who lived close by. Similarly, David’s older sister Julia also tagged along. I was really lucky that way. I never had to feel lonely or out of place. The siblings were not as fortunate.

Probably the most important outcome was to gain a strong core value for friendship. It seems throughout my life I’ve almost always had a best friend and in making choices about my circumstance I’d often be driven to favor that choice where I’d be pretty sure of striking up or resuming a good friendship. The prime cause behind those choices can be found by looking back at those times with David and the happiness in that.

With all this good fortune and David living right across the street, hard for me to miss his playing outside when walking out our front door, you might think this all came about by us finding each other and then moving along from there. But you’d be wrong. It didn’t happen that way. Indeed, we lived in that house for over a year before I met David. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, my mother found the house of another kid who also ended up being a friend, Steven. He lived around the corner and down the block on 211^th Street. My mom took me over to Steven’s house. David was already there. We played upstairs that day. I’m guessing it was Mr. Potato Head, but I was 5 or 6 at the time, so it was 1960 or 1961. Who remembers specifics with accuracy that far back? In any event, I was the one late to the party and the only reason I got there at all is because my mother dragged me.

For several years thereafter it was Steven, David, and I as a threesome at play, with various siblings on hand from time to time. This persisted even though by an odd quirk 56^th avenue became the dividing line for where to go the primary school when a new school opened up in our neighborhood starting in second grade. So Steven and I went to P.S. 203 while David stayed at P.S. 31. By junior high we were all going to the same school, but the trio didn’t survive. Somewhere around that time Steven started to find a different crowd. My friendship with David, based mainly on play outside of school, stayed strong. I don’t believe we took any classes together till perhaps junior year in high school. That didn’t matter.

Thinking about this all these years later, and knowing that I really had it in for my mother for other things she did later on where she pushed me in what I thought was the wrong direction, I’ve really got to hand it to her. I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten into that deep friendship with David without her setting it up at the beginning. For that I’m very grateful.

* * * * *

Last Thursday our four-week summer session concluded. Along with the rest of my eLearning team, I’ve been involved in a project to record video of a small seminar offering of a finance course that is taught in large lecture mode during the fall and the spring. The processed video from the seminar, along with other online content, will replace one hour of live lecture in the fall. In my college, this effort marks our first foray with a “blended learning” format in large classes. The day before the final exam for the summer course I conducted a focus group with the students, right after the regular instruction had concluded. The primary goal going into that conversation was to get the student take about having such seminars as a means to generate fodder for other blended offerings that might be done in the future: Did they like the course? Would they recommend to a friend to participate in such a seminar if given the opportunity? How did the filming (there was a large flat panel at the front of the room to show what was being recorded at any time – front camera shot, rear camera shot, or output from laptop) affect their behavior in class? Were they self-conscious or did they learn to ignore the camera? These were the questions we had going into the session. I was also prepared for the students to go off script and frame the issues as they saw fit. Indeed, they did exactly that.

Reaching this point in the writing, I hit an impasse and am only beginning again after a two-day hiatus. The news from the focus group was good but for some reason that challenged me in the writing. Partly, that’s because everything we’re doing with this summer offering is intermediate product only – input for what will be delivered in the fall, not a true end in itself. We wouldn’t offer a stand-alone small seminar class like this in the absence of recording it for re-use. It would be too expensive in that case. Also, so much of my writing style come from imitating what I read, much of which is in newspapers or magazines. The bulk of those are critiques of misplays in politics. There are fewer pieces written as affirmation of what is happening. So it’s harder for me to structure the argument now because there are fewer models of what a good structure should look like. Then too, I’m really not a dispassionate observer but rather an active participant in the project, so very much want all the news to be good. The makes it tough to use my usual reportorial style in this case. So much for this brief aside, now back to the post.

The students liked the course very much. After a day or two they got comfortable and it became clear during the focus group that they bonded with the professor and with each other. They felt empowered to ask questions because of the small numbers and because the instructor’s friendly tone encouraged that. (Note that the students were actively recruited for the seminar and hence it is far from clear how “typical” students would have reacted to this experience.) And, because they got to know each other more than they would in a typical class, they could better appreciate the contributions of their classmates.

Although the course was set up as a small seminar precisely so we could capture the student contribution and we understood that much of the contribution would come as they posed their questions, I was nevertheless surprised by the results of the focus group. My mental model for the course was a classroom version of the Charlie Rose Show. I like to watch that show on occasion, depending on the guest and the topic, and reasoned that if we could produce something akin to that the students in the fall would like to watch it too. Charlie Rose is often a bit verbose and sometimes he appears to be competing with his guest for who gets to speak. But by the end of the interview a lot has been said by both Rose and his guest. So I was hoping to to reproduce that consequence in the sessions that we recorded.

During the first week, I watched a substantial amount of what was recorded, the raw “footage” before we had processed it. There were questions from the students, to be sure, but mostly it was the instructor talking. The instructor has taught the class many times before and he’s very glib with the content. The students, in contrast, seemed rather shy to me and perhaps were too patient to step in with their questions. During the weekly lunch meetings between the instructor and me, he and I discussed the issue of how to encourage student participation. We had multiple conversations on this topic, before and during the course.

Subsequently, I’ve reached the conclusion that a TV talk show likely does not provide the right norm for us in considering a course like this, especially an intro course where the students are fairly inexperienced in the subject. “What is the right norm?” I wonder. Have we produced something that is noticeably distinct from recording straight lecture? I’m curious about how the students in the fall will react to the processed videos.

There is different lesson to be had from the world of economics. An option has value in advance, even if it is ultimately not exercised. The students felt comfortable in their ability to ask questions and that comfort might be sufficient to make them enjoy the approach – the option value was present. Yet its presence didn’t imply they were asking questions all of the time. Further, when one student would ask a question that would often encourage a follow up from another student, so the questions that are there typically occur in clumps rather than be distributed uniformly through the sessions. After the first couple of days of the course I looked at the recordings less intensively and might very have well passed by an interval of students questions without realizing it was even there, only to find it on a subsequent viewing of the content.

Contrary to this impression formed by looking at the videos, in the focus group the students emphasized the small numbers enabling intensive interaction with the instructor and with each other and they reported the experience was unique, not replicated in other classes they’ve taken. I queried them specifically on this after one student offered up the idea and the rest completely agreed. Further, and this was music to my ears, about midway through the focus group session another student offered up without any prompt from me that the class was kind of like attending office hours. This was the point of departure I mentioned earlier. We talked about office hours extensively and their experience with office hours in other courses. A couple of the students were the type to seek out the instructor on a regular basis, just to have the interaction, not as a last minute thing before an exam. But by the nature of that, it didn’t happen nearly as frequently as in the summer course.

Last Friday, after the course had concluded there was a debrief meeting with the instructor and my staff. We posed the rhetorical question of how to induce the same feeling in the fall when there will be a massive number of students as was achieved in this summer offering. We talked about having the students do group work that would be like the type of problems that were worked in class during the summer. The instructor offered up the suggestion that rather than do all that group work out of class, why not use the face to face discussion section time for some of the group work, and instead of having the TAs spend most of their time in presentation mode, why not instead have them mentor the groups. If there is a need for them to present content, they could do that by producing brief presentation for online delivery. I was delighted with this suggestion and very pleased that the instructor has taken up the spirit of what we’re trying to accomplish. How all of this will be executed in the fall is another matter that we’ll have to research then. For now we’ve passed a crucial milestone. We’re on the same page regarding the general approach we want to take, the mode of behavior we’d like to see from the students, and with similar ideas about how to instrument those outcomes.

* * * * *

I tend to extrapolate a lot from a few small successes. In reflecting on the focus group, I reframed for myself what it was that the students were doing during the summer course – they were engaged in academic play. Play is fun. They enjoyed themselves in the course because it was play. At the heart of academic play is the ability to ask questions and to have follow-up discussion emerging from those questions that have been posed. My inference from the focus group is that there are many other students on campus who would like to participate in academic play (we’ve got around 30,000 undergraduates) but few of them are actually doing it. Then, the questions are why not and what might we as an institution do to reverse matters.

Having introduced the word play into my thinking, it was no stretch at all to remember back to those good times with David and my mother creating the pre-condition for that friendship to develop. (I should write another post, perhaps even a short book, on coming to understand things as an adult by tying them to experiences from childhood.)

Large classes at institutions like mine seemingly have a kind of Gresham’s Law at work where the behavior of those students who are only going through the motions tends to trump the behavior of the more earnest students – ergo the cheating, plagiarism, and sense of nihilism. So, my rational self says it’s very hard to change that and produce something we’re proud of, where the students themselves feel they’re getting a lot out of the experience. But my hopeful self, buoyed with the good reports from the summer offering and seeing the instructor embrace the approach we’d like to pursue, believes it’s not all that hard to get a good outcome. And, doing so should be replicable in other courses.

There is a liberating aspect in producing video for online delivery that is aimed at replacing some parts of the live class session, whether that video is recording of a seminar done as we have done this summer, it’s produced at the instructors desktop such as via a Jing screen capture or a chat in ooVoo, similar such productions done by the students themselves, or yet some other approach. The liberation emerges because the need to spend class time to “cover” the material vanishes. Coverage can be handled via online delivery. Then, using discussion sections for a planned and organized form of office hours starts to make sense. If done that way most students will attend rather than only the few with initiative as happens now. And play via academic conversation appears to be achievable at large scale.

If students do play this way will they interact seriously with the online content, perhaps as a way to get ready for the discussions, alternatively as a way to satisfy their own curiosity? That’s what we need to find out.

Thanks mom.

Information or MisInformation

Polls show Obama-McCain race tight as campaign begins - CNN.com via kwout

As a reader, should I believe stuff like the above or not? Let me point out that most students are out of school now and yet many of them may be registered where they attend. So I'm guessing students are under sampled in this poll and there is sampling bias. Do the reported results correct for the bias or not? I have no clue. I can't get that from the story. If, ultimately, Obama gets a big kick in the polls when students go back to school in the fall, the polls will report that as momentum when all it may be is mis-measurement during the summer.

Veep Peep

Assuming it's not going to be Hillary, my nickel bet is on Barbara Boxer. That choice would help in a remarkable number of demographics. If you want to play the game, here is the list of current U.S. Senators and here's a page to find all the governors. Of course there are those not currently in office (e.g., Sam Nunn) or who hold other office (e.g., Mayor Bloomberg) so the potential pool is quite large. Have fun!

Open Source or Ad Supported Software and Content

The economic storm we’re now in is soon to become a deluge, according to Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times. The source of the problem is state and local government spending. To date in this business cycle, such spending has served as a counter force to the downturn. But tax receipts have lagged and the state governments are building up hefty deficits as a consequence. Surely spending cuts are just around the corner. For the usual Keynesian reasons, this bodes poorly for the economy overall, with the smart money waiting on the sidelines to see if we’ve past the bottomed out phase or not. But it is particularly troublesome for us who work at public institutions of higher education because it looks like serious budget cuts will be coming, if they haven’t hit already.

Within IT at like instiutions, I suspect things are particularly troublesome in this regard. Back in the early part of the decade when my university when through a previous downturn, administrative units were hit more heavily than were academic units and IT tends to be viewed more as as administrative function, even as most of the users are doing so in an academic context. There is the further point, made first by Nicholas Carr, that IT as it has matured has lost the ability to differentiate us as institutions, and hence the non-utility part of IT, if such a part exists, appears as if it can be dispensed with. And there is the still further issue that certain cost increases appear to be unavoidable – heating and cooling are notable in this category; everyone is aware of how the pump price of gasoline has skyrocketed and HVAC costs are obviously highly correlated with gasoline prices. So that is likely to make campus administrators more cautious about any other expense that seemingly is avoidable.

Budget cuts in IT is indeed a dreary subject, so instead of focusing on that let’s consider emerging technology and services, where by use of the term “emerging” I want to take the perspective of our respective institutions rather than the view of developers of such technology. In this sense emerging means there’s not yet institutional lock-in to the service and the future direction still seems remarkably flexible. Social networking in an academic context may be in that category. Likewise, so may video hosting, even at campuses that have supported video streaming for some time. They likely haven’t supported anything akin to YouTube and almost certainly have no mechanism to support student created videos made for an academic purpose.

Now let me take an aside and talk about my “roots” with instructional technology, formed mostly during 1995-96 when I was a grantee of the SCALE project here on campus. I had used the application PacerForum in spring 2005 and then switched to FirstClass thereafter. We referred to these applications as “off-the-shelf” software. First Class, in particular, was a poor man’s alternative to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange and had a clientele both in business and higher education. Such software survives and evolves based on the needs and vicissitudes of the marketplace. Sometimes such software dies out. PacerForum, though quite admired by its users on Campus, didn’t or couldn’t make the switch to TCP-IP. The grantors from SCALE at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, former executives from IBM, had a distinct preference for us to use off-the-shelf software. While they never fully explained “the why” in this stipulation, the consequence was clear enough. It encouraged an approach of adopting pedagogy to the software and seeing what was possible that way, creating an emphasis on the teaching approach rather than on the software development, and demanding a degree of creativity on the part of the instructor to get a successful implementation.

Having also served as sponsor of some ed tech software development projects, wherein the developer’s primary goal, to do well by the users, seemingly trumped concerns about the business sensibility of the development, an admirable but undisciplined approach that oftentimes proved unsustainable after the grant money runs out, I’ve come to appreciate the approach with off-the-shelf software and still favor that approach ceteris paribus.

But, of course, things have changed. Most of the applications we might be interested with nowadays are Web based, accessed by a browser, rather than require a dedicated client as was the case 10 – 15 years ago. And many are “freely available” with a seeming explosion of new offerings in the past year. Many of these fledgling offerings hope to make it commercially. There seem to be two possible alternatives for that. One is to generate revenue directly, mostly likely via ad support, and see whether the operation can sustain in that manner. The other is to not worry so much about revenues up front but instead to focus on the experience of the users and grow based on their word of mouth, with the hope of viral growth and then to be bought out by one of the big players in the future and capitalize in that manner. Of course there can be hybrids of these two forms, such as where there is no sell out to one of the big players but where the ads emerge as a revenue aspect after there has been some substantial growth in usage. If you take those two extremes and allow for all permutations and combinations, that’s my current day analog to off-the-shelf software.

Likewise things have changed with campus software development. Home grown has been supplanted by open source, whether for LMS, ePortfolio, or any number of other applications. And to the extent that these efforts are meant as alternatives or tonics to the commercial provision of these applications, so much the better. But in the previous paragraph I was seemingly making an argument for commercial provision. So what gives?

Let’s consider the split between applications that the campus provides for users and applications that the users select for themselves. When I was getting started in the mid ‘90s, this divided nicely by the distinction between client-server applications on the one hand, and desktop applications on the other. There still is a difference between campus supported and user selected, but the notion of desktop applications is going by the wayside. Unfortunately, in my opinion, our thinking about campus provision of service hasn’t really accommodated that change. And the result is that we in IT take the scope of what should be provided by the campus as more broad than it otherwise might be.

Let me illustrate with a concrete example. I don’t want to make this an advocacy for the product, but I hope discussing it will help to bring out the issues. Consider the social networking application Ning, which is unabashedly ad supported. The feature of Ning that I want to take note of is that, like many other social networking applications, it employs the email address of the user as the login. Suppose that I, wearing my instructor hat, wanted to use Ning for my class and interact with them in that manner. Then I’d spend some time setting up the Social Network to my specifications and after that I’d invite my students to participate. I’d use the class roster that I can get from the grade book in the LMS to issue those invitations. The students would have to opt in and accept my invitation to have access to this class social network.

This is the first issue. Is my invitation coercive? Suppose the students don’t want to be part of that social network. Can they opt out by not accepting the invitation? Note there is no opt out for students in the campus LMS. They are in there by virtue of having enrolled in the course. So the opt out can’t be because they object to the pedagogic approach the software encourages and that I as instructor have embraced. Rather it would have to be because they don’t trust the commercial provider to protect their privacy, even when they can’t get into the social network without a password. The fear is that the vendor will data mine the individual information in such a way that might be detrimental to the student in the future. There may also be fear about copyright appropriation.

It is on these issues that my campus has either blocked or slowed down contracts with a variety of commercial vendors, who don’t seem willing to ensure the security of this information in writing. But I’m not the institution in my current position and in the above discussion I’m acting as an individual instructor. In that role I look to a different set of information to try to attain these type of assurances. Does the software work well? Are there other users more or less in the same boat as I who seem to be using the software successfully? Do I feel safe using the application? If I were a friend of the students rather than their instructor, would I feel ok inviting them to use it? In practice these questions are likely to be asked implicitly. When the answers are in the affirmative, meaning when I feel comfortable with the application, then I might very well embrace the application for my class.

The next issue turns from me the instructor back to the institution. What should the institutional stance be on this sort of instructor behavior? Possible alternatives include: go for it – active encouragement by the institution, don’t ask don’t tell – tacit acceptance of the practice by the institution but instructor beware because the liability might be on you, or you can’t do this – prohibition by the institution because until the institution has gotten the vendor’s promise in writing the students are being put at risk and the institution has in loco parentis. Which of these three we actually do might depend on to whom at the institution you pose the question. For software that has an admission charge (an Island in Second Life costs real dollars) the institution may be able to exercise control over campus dollars being spent on such software. For software that is freely available to the end user, however, there is no mechanism for institutional control up front that I am aware of. So de facto I believe we have don’t ask don’t tell, with the only mechanism for the institution to get involved after the fact being for a student in the class to lodge a complaint. But, if I had my druthers, we’d see an activist promotion by the campus, which would send an explicit message to all instructors to the effect of, “Go ahead with the use of commercial software that is externally hosted for your courses as long as you intend to use that software for legitimate academic purposes. We want to encourage you to innovate in your classes. An important way to maintain quality in the classroom is via your innovation and one way to innovate is for you to embrace emerging technologies. We understand there is some liability risk in doing that and we the campus will bear that risk for you as long as your intent is to promote the learning of your students.”

Now let’s take it another step. We’re in the world of don’t ask don’t tell where there is commercial provision of social network software that might be used for academic purposes. Absent the activist promotion described at the end of the previous paragraph, how does the availability of the commercial software impact the campus decision to host its own social networking software for academic purposes? Consider this question in light that many are arguing something like, “The students spend all their time on Facebook and if we want them to engage in their studies while online we have to provide something equally as compelling.” And with that let me return to how I led off this piece, talking about the economic downturn. How can the campus in good conscience embrace new applications of this sort when there isn’t sufficient budget to support what’s already a production service, when IT spending appears discretionary, and when other clear needs on campus are being given short shrift? Though consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, if you agree with the sentiment expressed in this question, might you reconsider your thinking about instructors choosing to employ externally hosted social networking software for their classes?

* * * * *

Let’s switch gears and now let’s think of the instructor as content creator. In days of yore there was the “textbook model” under which faculty who wrote textbooks would have copyright of that work unless and until they sold that to a publisher, and such work would normally not count for promotion, tenure, or salary review except perhaps if it attained sufficient visibility to have some light pointed at the faculty member’s department and host institution. But textbooks are a dying breed and online content that has resale value is subject to a severe appropriability problem. Where do the incentives come from nowadays to get faculty to write good and interesting online content? Should those incentives be provided by the institution, perhaps in the form of some bonus payment for delivery of such content? Should faculty be marketing themselves much in the same manner as musicians who tour, viewing the online content as in part promotion for the live presentation, which ends up being the revenue generator? What about the alternative of faculty content displayed on Web sites that are ad supported, where some of the ad revenue bounces back to the faculty member, that in lieu of a royalty payment?

Many may feel uncomfortable with that suggestion and I’d be among them. There is an ethical issue regarding instructors making money off their students. I know on my campus there have been cases where the instructor is one of the co-authors of the textbook and in a position to require the textbook for the course and where colleagues of the instructor have viewed the behavior as less than exemplary if not downright uncollegial – it’s ok to make money off of students at other campuses if instructors there willingly embrace the textbook, but for our own students charging them for the content is immoral since so much of the content is an outgrowth of the teaching experience that was had on the campus and hence the instructor should feel a debt to the campus for providing such a productive environment. (A similar argument, attributed to Herb Simon, is made here for why on ethical grounds society should have a 90 percent flat tax, though Simon recognizes the incentives from such tax would be disastrous.)

Nowadays, however, many of the large gateway courses (the ones that would generate enough eyeballs so that ads might actually prove revenue generating) are taught by adjuncts who are on year to year contracts, rather than by faculty on the tenure track. And these folks tend to get paid less salary-wise. In the class system among instructional personnel, the adjuncts are definitely treated as second class. Further, because their teaching is often the main part of the job, the online content they make while teaching might quite possibly be considered “work for hire” and therefore the copyright may be held by the home institution rather than by the instructor himself.

My experience is that such instructors tend to be extremely cautious about their position – they don’t want to do anything to jeopardize their circumstance. Thus in spite of their focus on teaching, that makes them very slow to innovate with technology, especially if any of the innovation appears to be labor saving and hence possibly leading to their own (unplanned) obsolescence. The point is that the incentives are quite different for such adjuncts than they are for tenure track faculty. Might it be ok for adjuncts to produce content on ad supported Web sites? Might that give these instructors incentives to product good content or, at least, incentives to produce content that would attract eyeballs?

If the instructor does produce good content and profits from it as a consequence, what should the institutional stance be? It’s all well and good for the institution to create an open repository for such content for those instructors who decide to contribute there. But when the repository gets few contributions, can the institution look down its nose at commercial alternatives that might rebate some bucks back to the instructor?

The traditional argument against commercial interests sponsoring research is that it leads to bias in the outcomes and ultimately the parochial interest trumps the broader need, producing a perverse outcome. But a substantial aspect of argument is that the sponsorship remains hidden and so others are not able to factor that in when evaluating the results of the research. Ads, by their very nature, are overt. A different sort of argument would have to be made to argue against this incentive for the creation of instructional materials, namely that the students are not mature enough to evaluate the bias and hence that in an environment with ad supported content one is likely to witness a mild form of brainwashing rather than true instruction. Perhaps.

Yet I think the argument either needs to be more subtle or it is simply wrong. Many of us have come to trust Google as a search engine. It produces results quickly and efficiently and most of the time we find what it is that we were looking for. But, depending on what keywords we used in our search, Google might spit out a bunch of sponsored links – ads targeted by the words used in the search. We understand that’s Google’s way to make money. They’ve pioneered the approach. Do we think their search results are skewed as a consequence of the ads? Wouldn’t a widespread belief that the results were skewed kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Likewise, wouldn’t an instructor who has a reputation as a good teacher do much harm to said reputation by deliberately biasing materials in order to generate additional ad revenue? What magnitude of revenue would it take for us to scratch our heads in answering that question?

Let me close with the following observation. We need to talk about this more, a lot more. We’re not ready to provide answers to these questions but the eager beavers among the faculty are ready to embrace commercial ad supported applications, purely because many of these applications are more functional and user friendly than other alternatives. So these faculty will act and then we’ll react, quite possibly inappropriately, meaning not in the best interest of our institutions.

The budget pressures might spur this sort of dialog. Sometimes being in a tough spot causes one to be more pragmatic in approach.

ooVoo Chat with Jim Witte

Jim was nice enough to devote some time for this conversation, some of which covers his own use of desktop video conferencing.

Hosting ooVoo Chats

It would be nice if any technology that we promote for instructor use could also be readily used by students. In that regard, ooVoo only requires Webcam and headset so would seem to fit the bill. But if you want to post the recorded video, that requires fair amount of file space and a server. Students would use up their entire campus allocation with just a few movies, so they'd want some external host. Moreover, ooVoo produces the recording in .flv format. Although YouTube converts uploaded videos to .flv, it doesn't accept videos that are submitted in that format. However, blip.tv does! Further, blip.tv will render the video in the in original resolution rather than in a shrunken version. So for student use (or instructor use in Colleges that don't provide unlimited hosting), I'd recommend blip.tv

Do note that even blip doesn't accept .swf file format (Jing movies) so for that students would have to use some other Web space (sigh!) but those files tend to be smaller so their campus space should suffice.

All over again with Deja Vu

I finished up the last couple of episodes of 24 Season 6 over the long weekend. I need to do the stationary bike on a regular basis - to get some form of aerobic exercise that is not too stressful on the joints - and to keep from cutting out of it early I depend on some DVDs of a TV show sans commercials to keep me company while I'm doing the bike. So, lacking a better alternative, I started back in on 24 Season 1, episode 1. To that narrow mindedness make any snicker that you'd like. But note there is a reason I'm bringing it up.

Since I started watching this series during Winter break, there hasn't been a huge lull for me to forget the plots, a lot of detail in that episode I couldn't recall, true, but the main theme is hard to misplace. Yet it turns out, context is everything.

The big mission for Jack Bauer and crew is to prevent the assassination of David Palmer, who happens to be the first credible Black candidate for President of the United States. This episode first aired in November 2001. At that time, my state of Illinois had had an African American Senator, Carol Moseley Braun, but no longer had one. Bush was less than one year in office. Filming of 24 probably started well before the attacks on the World Trade Center; the timing of the shows initial airing was fortuitous for the producers to build a fan base. Nobody was thinking ahead to the Presidential race in 2008....Nobody!

Yet there it is, the key plot device an assassination attempt on a Black candidate for the Presidency, with the fear that if it is successful then it would throw the entire country into a panic. As the pundits at the New York Times make hay with Hilary Clinton's ill considered remarks about Bobby Kennedy's assassination, here and here and here too, perhaps it's helpful to consider what the screenwriters for this show came up with, recognizing full well that these screenwriters knew how to push the buttons of the audience (the show aired on the Fox Network) and noting further that it's the job of a first episode to pull the audience in. The coup de grace, if you trust the correctness of the trivia on the IMDB site about the series, is the irony in noting that Clarence Thomas is a big fan.

wider blog

By futzing with the xml after doing some investigation of what's required, I was able to make the main part of the blog wider, keeping the sidebar as is. The video with norma in the previous post is no rendered at 600x400 and fits nicely as it is embedded. There were some minor casualties. The title bar looks a little weird and the right gray boundary around the main area seems to have been lost. If I can figure out how to recover those, I will, but in the meantime, now I can post larger videos with impunity.

ooVoo Chat with Norma

ooVoo now video records directly to FLV format. (Pretty big file size - about 5 MB per minute - because they record at high quality.) It took me a little while to figure out the html to get that to play directly in the blog, but having done that I believe this is pretty satisfying as a result. Interviews are much more interesting than individual talking heads and that this can be done without a studio for recording as long as each person has a webcam and headset makes it an attractive option to promote.

Students Should Produce Talking Head Video

I made the movie below with online students in mind, but perhaps it makes sense for on ground students as well. Here's a bit about the logistics in case anyone wants to try it.

The movie is just about 1 minute. It was recorded at 640x480 with a frame rate I'd guess at around 30 frames per second. The resulting file was about 11.5 MB in .wmv format. When that was done I uploaded it to YouTube. I do have a good connection in the office and certainly at school network traffic is lower now that we're in summer session. Your mileage may vary. But the putting in the meta data, the upload, and processing took 7 minutes. Then it spit out the html to embed the video in the blog. It took another 3 minutes for the video to actually be available. From my point of view that's not too bad. Of course, I've done quite a few of these so more or less know what to do. A student doing it for the first time would have a harder time. But my guess is that they'd figure it out quickly --- the skill has alternative uses beyond the class so should be valued.

The only real issue I can see with this is if English is not the first language or the student has some disability that makes speaking difficult. Otherwise, I'd do this if I were teaching now.

no file attchments

If you do embrace email posts to a blog for a class, you can't use file attachments.  But, again, linking works.  So a link to a file that is on a Web site would be ok.

Email Posts to a Blog for Class Use

I'm writing this from one of my test email accounts - one of the free ones given by a vendor. Then I'm sending this to an address meant only for the blog. Blogger tells you to keep that address secret, because anyone with it can post to the blog. I've tested doing this from a variety of different test addresses. It seems to work well. It preserves formatting and linking. And once it reaches the blog it seem to not include any identity information of the sender. Perhaps Google tracks that, but if this is coming from a non-Google account, then how do they identify the address with any other info?

Because there is no identifying info, if there is to be some recognition of who posted this, there would have to be some type of signature at the end of the post. (Blogger will say it comes from Lanny Arvan, the blog owner, regardless of who the sender actually is.) If first name suffices to identify the person, that would be great. Otherwise, first name last initial, or some alias that is for the class would have to be used. Does this satisfy the campus security folks?

And would students go for this approach? I should point out that students could set up their own blog as an archive of their messages by sending the email to two addresses, if they'd like. Alternatively they can archive within their Sent items by simply setting up a filter for the address. Seems pretty good to me.

Clever Student

eLearning and Telecommuting

Last Friday my staff and I drove up to Chicago to do a presentation for the Accountancy Department’s Masters in Tax program – a one-year Friday-Saturday program for professionals in the field. We were introducing them to Adobe Connect, in this case to be used for the group work the students do outside of their face-to-face sessions at the Illini Center. The presentation went reasonably well and I expect to see good uptake of Connect by this cohort of students.

Coincidentally, the day before the trip I had glanced through this piece on Learning Studios where there are tables and chairs arranged in pods, instead of the usual semi-circular rows that one sees in many Business School classrooms. The Masters in Tax program has something similar. Each team sat at it’s own pod. But unlike in the Educause piece, the seating was like a horeshoe, with one end of the table open, the end that faces the front of the room where the projection screens were. This arrangement makes sense to me and I was impressed by the set up. On occasion the students work ensemble with the instructor, in which case eyes face front and the seating enables that. But there is also a lot of group work and then the students face each other and converse among themselves without having to readjust their seating.

I will be curious to learn how effective the group work via Adobe Connect is. As was made clear to me during a lunch conversation before our presentation, the students in this program are extremely busy people. Apart from the instruction itself, the weekend program creates a benefit for the students in forcing them to commit that time to their learning. Something done online during the week has to compete with the other demands placed on these people. When we compare face-to-face with online, it ‘s not just the experience itself but also this time allocation effect that must be considered. But, of course, there is an argument that cuts the other way. Some of the students in the program are coming from as far away as Peoria, about a two hour drive one way when there isn’t much traffic. Meeting online is so much more convenient in light of such a commute.

With this experience fresh in mind I started to scratch my head after reading Paul Krugman’s latest, which argues that in Europe where they have smaller cars and drive less than in the U.S., they may have a better solution in place for the new world we live in, where gasoline prices are likely to continue to go higher and where for environmental rather than economy reasons it would be good to lower our reliance on fossil fuels. Indeed, on the Frye Leadership Institute Alumni listserv there was an interesting discussion last week about reducing the carbon footprint attributable to IT activities on campus. There were a lot of interesting and clever ideas mentioned, such as Climate Savers Computing and the Virtual Computing Lab. But nobody talked about IT as a possible carbon saver via telecommuting. This thought didn’t occur to me till I had read the Krugman piece.

The way commuting works, those costs are typically incurred by the employee rather than the employer, especially in the absence of a COLA. Likewise, on the issue of carbon footprint, the employer typically doesn’t get credit if, for example, the employee drives a more fuel efficient vehicle. But in what I write in the rest of the post, I’m going to assume the savings can be internalized and that we’re interested in producing them, as long as they are real and not some fiction, so I won’t concern myself with how such an internalization would manifest.

Let me proceed by considering Blended Learning in the classroom and promoting a partial telecommuting approach in the workplace. In so doing I’d like to make several points:

1. There is much similarity between the two and we should go out of our way to emphasize that. Thus learning technologists who’ve got some experience in support of Blended Learning should be enlisted to help those on Campus who in the work context want to entertain a telecommuting approach.

2. Universities should take a leadership role in promoting telecommuting. It is something that we in Higher Ed can export to the society at large if we learn how to do it well. The green argument for telecommuting has been made elsewhere, but the uptake has not been great to date except in certain niche areas. There is a need to demonstrate it works more broadly.

3. In towns like Champaign, housing tends to more expensive in town, so many staff making more modest salaries live in the surrounding communities. The recent increases in energy costs hit these staff disproportionately. In a time where budgets are tight, telecommuting is a way to reward such staff where it counts – in the pocketbook.

4. There is learning that needs to happen both for the staff themselves and their supervisors as to whether telecommuting can be efficacious and what practices and technologies might make it more effective. This might be as simple as asking if, for example, there are several co-workers telecommuting in part with some days at the office and other days at home, whether it matters how much they overlap in the office and if one should strive to have them all there at some times or if the goal should be to keep the number at the office as uniform as possible.

5. Because of the previous point there likely should be a phased in approach to telecommuting with some pilots that are carefully evaluated. In other words, start with one day per week at home for a few employees. Work up to more days per week and more employees. Do the pilot with employees who are already doing some work from home, perhaps in the evenings.

6. Where there have been face to face programs for commuting students that have moved to a Blended learning or Fully Online approach, there likely is some relevant experience that would apply for telecommuting (and vice versa). Of particular interest is finding the right mix between synchronous and asynchronous communication, with the former likely better for keeping people on task and committed to the work (as with the Masters in Tax students) and the latter better for flexibility and archiving the work. Also of much interest is how much work should be done ensemble with all staff aware of what is going on versus having very small groups or individual efforts. Here there is a different trade off – making all aware of the activity versus coordinating when the work is being done.

7. There are also questions about the importance of certain technologies and matching them to the participants. For example, Adobe Connect allows users to have talking head video interaction via Webcams. Does the Webcam promote the work, or is an audio presence sufficient? One might be able to get much of the desired functionality with a combination of applications, for example Skye and Google Docs. Does a a single application matter or not?

8. There is a need to allow experiments of this sort enough time so participants can move down the learning curve, but also a need to recognize when “it’s not working” and allow them to call it quits when they’ve reached that point.

9. And it may be that some employees are ripe for this and others not. But I think mostly the question is whether the employees have already “bonded” and have a good working relationship with one another. I believe we know from experiences with eLearning that face to face is very helpful for making such bonds, but it may be less necessary to keep up the same frequency of face to face once the bonds have formed.

I’d like to think there’d be learning the other way too – from telecommuting to eLearning. At present those on Campus who are deeply knowledgeable about eLearning constitute a tiny fraction of the populace. And if the way one learns about eLearning is to have a program or set of programs that are Blended or fully online, then it is likely for the vast majority to persist in their ignorance because because a high threshold must be crossed to justify developing such a program. But telecommuting could become broadly popular – the energy cost and green issues are likely to be with us for quite some time. So it should be possible for the institution to become aware of what eLearning is about through that channel. We can’t get there, however, unless we try it.

Transcribing Voice and Inserting Captions with Screen Capture Movies

This post is a sequel to a recent post called futzing with captioning. Here I want to talk about the “more natural” process of recording the voice first, without a script, and then transcribing that. I have the expression more natural in quotes because that’s the way it is for me. I assume it would be that way most everyone else who has intimate and often quite implicit knowledge of a subject matter, so can talk about it with ease (though whether that talk is intelligible to others might be an issue). If you actually sound more natural by reading a script that you produced ahead of time, by all means do that. It likely will be faster overall and give a cleaner presentation. But as I said in the earlier post, I sound mechanical that way – there is a lack of spontaneity. Recording the audio without a script is much better and I believe will give a better experience for the student. But then making that video accessible is more of a chore.

Here are a few such movies at my blog The Economics Metaphor, those under the label “Cost.” The three movies run less than 9 minutes in total, but with the ancillary spreadsheet, Word doc, and self-test in the last of the movies, I believe this content would be sufficient to replace the hour lecture on Cost that many instructors cover in Principles or even in Intermediate Microeconomics. Others can judge that for themselves. Here I want to talk about the making of these things and what I’ve learned from doing them.

First, each movie recorded a region of the screen that was 640 x 480 in dimension. The bottom 640 x 90 area was deliberately set to have a plain background so the captions could overlay that area and not block out anything of interest. Do note that this is all done so the captions can be turned off if the user wants to do that. One can produce captions that are placed “underneath” the captured video as long as one is willing for those to display all the time. But then the entire captured region is shrunk so to squeeze in the captions, and the shrinking of the video means it will be narrower as well as less wide. So with the captions it will render with some black space on each side of the video. My approach avoids that black space on the sides. Ultimately, the produced movies are rendered somewhat smaller, at a custom size of 596 x 437, so they can fit into the Blog without appearing to overflow the column. They are still large enough to render as if at original size.

For the Cost Table video, I did the screen capture first and then recorded the voice while watching the movie the second time through. That’s my trick for making sure things move along and I don’t go off on too many tangents. But it is more laborious that way and so for the other two I recorded the voice while I did the capture. Even with that I had to rehearse the captures a few times to make sure I knew what I was going to do at each step. Then I set out to produce the transcript.

A lesson learned is to produce the transcript first without worry about the timings, and then use the built in Camtasia tool to put the timings in afterwards – more about that in a bit. After screwing around with various alternatives, I opted for each line to have 45 characters (which includes blank space between words). I don’t really know what is optimal in the tradeoff of having the text change too often, on the one hand, and having too much in any one view on the other. I tried for a reasonable compromise. And with that, I vowed to have two lines of text per caption. Three is possible but I thought that too much.

Once I worked down the routine, this is how I produced the transcript. I’d play a little bit of the video and then hit pause. Then I’d type a line, or two if I was lucky. Then I’d have to figure out if there needed to be a line break or not. If not, I’d play a little bit more of the video to pick up a few more words and proceed again. Some of my sentences are longer than two lines of text and sometimes they are very short. So in going from one caption to the next there had to be a way to signal that. I started each new caption with a capital letter as if it were the start of a sentence, whether that was the case or not.

The creating of the script is laborious and the person doing it would find life much easier if they had some idea for the subject matter, to see if they should make a literal translation or make some small changes in the text to enhance readability. Look at the captions for the Algebra video (the middle one). This will give you some idea of the issues with captioning text when there is technical content. I’m guessing that between writing the script and putting the timings in, it was about a half hour, this for a movie that is under 3 minutes in duration, a good incentive for keeping the videos brief and to the point.

The other thing I’d like to comment on here is just how colloquial the voice is. I thought my writing was informal, but au contraire, at least compared to the speaking. I think that’s necessary when talking about a subject from a technical point of view, for otherwise it will seem impenetrable. Also, my pacing is distinct from the pacing when reading text. I don’t pause much if at all at the end of the sentence. It’s almost as if a period is an excuse to accelerate the speaking. I believe the rapid speech conveys some sense that I’m interested in what I’m talking about, which is likely important to convey for otherwise the students will find this stuff very dry. But it also means that student might not get it in a first pass. One of the benefits from the video is that it can be replayed as often as the student would like.

To sum up, if the only concern was providing good content for the students, this would definitely be the way to go with screen capture movies, producing a capture where there is no audio for the script and then producing a transcript. But this is quite laborious, no doubt about it. So generating a large volume of content of this sort requires the fore knowledge that the videos will have substantial use value to a good number of students. If that condition is satisfied, then it’s likely also worthwhile to hire students (who’ve already taken the course) to create the transcripts and put in the timings.

Asps and Aspirations

Tuesday night I worked late in the office. I didn’t leave for home till after 7. And since for reasons I don’t understand public radio doesn’t come in too well near my home, especially in the evening, I didn’t listen to the radio on the drive and had no clue about the primary results when I got home. So after pouring a glass of wine I plopped on CNN. Lo and behold, there was Donna Brazile really giving it to Paul Bergala. I tuned in too late to know what started it all, but I quickly got the sense that she felt as if she’d been taking it from him for quite a while (they’re part of the show every weekday evening in the slot before Larry King, at least now when the race between Clinton and Obama is news) and with it getting down to the wire, she had had enough. This seemed to me the obvious consequence when one has commentators who have their hearts in particular candidates. Brazile, who is also a superdelegate, had been fairly non-committal as to which candidate she backed on earlier show. But given that African Americans have been turning out in droves in support of Obama, I have to guess that trumps gender in this particular instance. Bergala has been for Clinton from the get go.

In any event, their scuffling was giving me a headache so I switched channels to MSNBC. After a brief update of the then current results, they left the commentary of Chris Matthews and Tim Russert in favor of an interview with Harold Ford Jr., who with due respect argued that, in thinking a step or two ahead, Obama does have problems getting the votes of working class, ethnic, white male voters and to sure up on that front he should seriously consider getting Clinton to be his VP candidate. That was the smartest thing I heard that evening. Much of the rest was just speculation on how the next steps of the campaign will play out, with very little added information content, unless the speculation itself is news. Indeed, we seem to have gotten way beyond the threshold of the observers affecting the events that they watch. The pundits now seem to be telling the candidates how to run their campaigns. I prefer analysis to demagoguery. The best of that I heard from Mark Shields the following evening on the News Hour, who argued that Clinton might bargain with Obama for his campaign to absorb some of her campaign debt. Ask yourself, if that is what’s really going on, what bargaining chips might she have to make that outcome part of the deal?

I watch this stuff in part as an escape from work. But that doesn’t seem to be working now. The lack of analysis aside, there’s another issue. We become what we abhor. I’m seeing a good part of my job as being a pundit, though in this case the problem isn’t that I might influence the outcome in the process – I’m supposed to do that – the problem is reporting on the outcome once it has occurred.

We’re doing a project on Blended Learning with a novel twist. I’ll write about it when it’s a little further along. In the meantime, we have to plan the evaluation of it now and, because it involves human subjects, we’re required to complete IRB forms so they can review our proposed “research.” For some reason, the word research in and of itself set me off. I’ve already got in my head the upside if this first project “works” and we start scaling the approach to other courses. I can see the consequence – for instructors and students, to be sure – but also for me and my office, in terms of how involved we are with the mission of the College and how much we’ll be appreciated for bringing in an innovative approach to instruction. Mine is not the view of a dispassionate geneticist studying her Drosophila. My staff and I are not neutral about what we hope to learn from this implementation. A pundit and his team doing research. Hmmm.

Perhaps for recreation I should stop watching election politics on TV and go back to the Yankees. It’s a lot safer career-wise. I never say “Holy Cow!” and The Scooter is not one of my role models.

Futzing with Captioning in Camtasia

I've been screwing around with Camtasia using their captioning tool to learn how it works. This is my latest movie. It has several serious flaws that I'll describe in a bit. But first let me say some nice things about the Camtasia captioning tool.

There are two ways for captions to appear. They can be under the video as stand alone text. Or they can overlay the video. In the later case, there is an option for closed captioning, so the viewer can turn that on and off. That is slick. (But this option is only available if the video is produced as Flash.) Also, if you have a script for the captions to go along with the movie and you have reasonably short sentences so you know where the breaks should be from the point of view given by the text, then Camtasia has a nice real time tool for putting in the timings of those breaks. I give them high marks for that too.

But the overlay does this by putting in a colored background onto your image and that cuts off about 1/4 of the image from the bottom. That colored background has some transparency, but for all intents it means that part of your image capture will be blocked. That's fine if there is white space or something else neutral. It's not very good, however, if there is information content in that part of the image.

I found myself feeling very awkward reading a script of my own creation aloud. If you watch and listen to the video above, I'm sure that comes through. I'm much more natural without a script. But production-wise, it clearly is less effort overall to write the script first and read it back then to talk through the slides and generate the script as a transcription of the talk through. In fact, I don't really even like PowerPoint if I'm going to be speaking, because I want to go with what moves me at the time and not stick with the preassigned message. (On the other hand, if I simply wrote the text and didn't speak it, then the PowerPoint would be ok to me as a way to deliver the images that are part of the writing activity.) So there seems to be no good way to have it all, including a reasonable time in which to generate an end product.

The other problem with the video is the background music. I don't know if this is completely Kosher, but to avoid copyright infringement issues but to use music that is familiar and whose lyrics one might (not so) subliminally tie to the message in my presentation, I've opted for midi versions of well known tunes. In this case it is a segment from the Wizard of Oz song, "If I Only Had a Brain." And this same segment is repeated over and over. (My music editing skills are also fairly feeble. Through fade in and fade out I was able to get the volume of this segment set at a reasonable level. But I couldn't do that uniformly to the entire song.) But, the midi sound can be grating on one's nerves. It would be much nicer to have the actual instrumental bit from the movie. One could eliminate the background music entirely, for sure. But my sense if that this were well done, then the more one can engage the senses of the viewer, the more effective the video would be, though I must say that there's no analog to the captioning for the background music.

My conclusion from all of this is that for a person without disabilities, we could produce a reasonably interesting show by using text, music, and images as the primary inputs, with spoken words only rarely, accommodate much of the production issues I mentioned above and be satisfied with the result on some grounds. But if we want an experience that is accessible to all, a goal we should aspire towards, then aesthetically it will be limited in a variety of ways. I'm sure someone more skilled than I could improve on what I've produced here. But those limitations are likely there for all of us.

Video is likely to become an increasingly important part of our repertoire. So I'd be curious to know how the rest of you are thinking about captioning and accessibility now. For me, it's something I'm still trying to wrap my arms around.

Renewing Ourselves

Late afternoon yesterday I took a stroll around the development where I live. The park across the street from my house showed dandelions everywhere. We tolerate the weeds where the children play, but not on our own lawns that must be more pristine and well kept up. The air was crisp with the temperature in the high 60s, low humidity and clear views, the sunset still an hour away and a sense of transient perfection punctuating the calendar before return to the hot and muggy summer. The 10-day forecast predicts we’ll have this temperate climate for a while. This is Finals Week here, then Graduation, followed by Summer School. Perhaps the seasons are permuting and we’ll be spared the air conditioning bills till June or later. Spring is our season to start again, even as the conversation coming out of our national politics wants to dampen down our hope.

As I walked along the path near Interstate 57, I saw a rabbit. A while later I saw a couple more, outside the backyards while walking up Duncan Road. There are no squirrels here, perhaps because the trees are still so young and the development still has a feel of space reclaimed from agriculture; I suppose that’s the reason the squirrels haven’t yet made it west from the older neighborhoods in town. The dogs are mostly on a leash or running around inside back yards with fences. With nary a predator in sight, the rabbits are the animal equivalent of the dandelions, spending their time on what they do best.

There are corn fields immediately to the south. The farmers have been getting ready to plant. I saw some tractors in town last week, slowing down traffic. In that setting they seem to be the encroachers because they alter the usual flow. Yesterday I don’t see any farmers but I do see many people puttering in their yards. They have the urge to grow something outside and shape its appearance as it grows. I am jealous of that feeling because I don’t share it.

Though I used to traipse around Buttermilk Falls Park when I was an undergrad and sit on the rocks and stare at Lake Michigan as a grad student, my idyllic spot has always been inside, a coffee house or living room, with reading or conversation or simply staring into space both means and end.

Now it’s technology that pronounces the artificial nature of my existence. Earlier in the afternoon I read out in the back yard with the Kindle, the Sunday Times download and non-reflective screen making it the perfect companion. During my walk I imitate my 15 year old son, wandering around with the ubiquitous iPod, my internal rhythms competing with old Allman Brothers music for my attention.

I have the unmistakable feeling that things are out of wack, the uncontrolled growth of Asteraceae and Leporidae a metaphor for societal ills. Yet there is also much beauty in the varied colors of the leaves and a sense of possibility in seeing how far we’ve come out of the harsh winter. What path should we take to greater harmony?

Students Should Make Web Movies In Doing Homework

Here's a video from me to make the argument for Web Movies made by students as part of the normal transaction for students doing their work. It would be much easier to make the case if students had Tablet PCs, because then they could do it in one step. But in my argument I assumed that the students didn't have Tablets and were just using a regular computer to make the movies.