JISC Digital Media on e-Learning Stuff

My first Podcast of the Week over in Fresh and Crispy was James Clay's e-Learning Stuff. The latest episode (episode 61) is a small gem in which ILT & Learning Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College James Clay interviews Zak Mensah of JISC Digital Media about ten new advice publications that have recently been made available on the JISC Digital Media website.

The guides are

1. Introduction to e-Learning
2. Designing Learning Experiences
3. Common Methods for Viewing, Using and Producing Digital Media Resources
4. Considering the delivery of digital media online
5. Organising Digital Media Content in a VLE
6. Mobile Learning for Education
7. Providing Live Support to your Community over the Web
8. Audio Feedback
9. Telling it like it is – a how-to guide on creating audio feedback
10. Using Multimedia in a PDF

In the podcast A Conversation with Zak, James and Zak discuss each of these guides and why you might want to read them. Should be worth a listen if you are interested in the issues around creating and using digital media in your teaching.

Practical Advice for Teaching with Twitter

This interesting post from the Prof Hacker blog in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses how you might use Twitter in your teaching. The assumption is that students will be expected to contribute to an ongoing class discussion, which might not be how you'd want to do things, but for all that it contains useful advice. For example it compares the use of lists versus hashtags, frequency of tweeting, archiving the discussion, and displaying the results.

One idea from the US that I've seen in a couple of times now is the award of a part of the grade, say 10-20%, for class participation. Adoption of this idea might be a good way to encourage engagement with you modules. An alternative to using Twitter is the use of FriendFeed as a discussion channel. Alan Cann at Leicester uses this in a first-year course he gives on Personal Learning Environments. He calls it FriendFolios and sells it as a Facebook for uni.

Postscript

I have created a short collection of related articles on the use of Twitter in HE from ProfHacker and other sources. It's in my delicious collection tagged edutwitter. You can also use a new delicious feature to browse these bookmarks.