iPad 2

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones has been trying out the iPad 2 launched today. He demonstrates the new video capability.

Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur

Last week, Paul Lattreille lead a SALT Seminar on Teaching Large Groups. I'm hoping someone from this community will report on that session in more detail, but as an appetizer here's a talk by Harvard Physics Professor Eric Mazur, that gives some justification for one of the ideas, Peer Instruction, that Paul shared with us on that day. It was recorded at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). I hope that, like me, you'll find it inspirational and worth passing on. I've just ordered Erik's book Peer Instruction a User's Manual (Prentice Hall, 1996) because, unfortunately, there isn't a copy in the Library!

Here are some questions to test your understanding of the talk.

1. What is a lecture really about?
2. What is Eric's recommended structure for a "lecture"?
3. What level of improvement can you achieve by using peer instruction rather than traditional lectures?
4. If you use Peer Instruction, how could you gather evidence that peer instruction is working for you?

Incidentally, thanks for Paul for sharing this video via Twitter. More gems from the SALT community are to be found in the sidebar at the right.

Passion in L&T

Kathy Sierra is an inspirational educator who created the excellent "Head First" series of self-learning books for O'Reilly. She famously ended her public blog "Creating Passionate Users" and stopped appearing in public after receiving death threats back in April 2007 ... an incident that made national news at the time.

Thankfully, she's back and has just presented at the O'Reilly Gov 2.0 conference a keynote entitled Creating Passionate Citizens. The video was published on YouTube and though the cameraman was focussed on the speaker rather than the slides, many of which don't make the final cut, there's enough in what was said to start me thinking.



Like Dave Ferguson, who's blog post drew my attention to Kathy's talk, I began to wonder what, if anything, we could do to create a community of passionate teachers and, more importantly, generations of passionate students. I went back to Kathy's blog and a couple of postings on creating and supporting communities struck me as immediately relevant.

• Building a successful on-line community
• How to Build a User Community
• User Community and return on investment

And there's a lot more gold to mine.

Post Script
I highly recommend the Head First books. They are exemplary examples of what learning objects could be and we could learn a lot from them. One of the first head first books that I owned was on Enterprise Java Beans ... a hard topic to get passionate about! The Head First explanation of how interactive web servers work from Head First Servlets and JSP is still used in one of my courses. The Headfirst Labs web site is also a fine learning resource. See for example The Learner's Journey in Practice!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Sue and Bob on Plagiarism

Hmmm.... not sure about these videos. There's a whole series of them. Here's one on plagiarism. What do you think?

Winkball Video wall

I saw this on Click. Winkball is a video sharing site where you can record video messages, sending video messages, create your own video blog, make video walls and have multi-user video chats. The video walls can be both public and private. Useful for modules?

I've set one up with a pre-release of the next 'Tales form the Lab' podcast.
http://www.winkball.com/walls/learninglab/Swansea_Learning_Lab/

What do you think? Maybe you you record a video?

iMovie for the PC?

Well, not really but Microseft have released Windows Live Movie Maker which is a great improvement on the original Movie Maker and is getting close to what iMovie can do. Now maybe those wit out a Mac can get close to to achieving what David Gill does :-)

You can find out more here http://moviemakerpreview.com/

One fly in the ointment is that is needs Vista or Windows 7 to run

Video blogging

Christopher Ming Ryan writes about how to use video blogs (v-blogs): "4 Mistakes Video Bloggers Make and How You Can Avoid Them".

What education will look like in 10 years

From the Reverend on Bava Tuesdays I was grateful to receive notification of this brilliant presentation on the prospects for the future of education from Andre Malan, an undegraduate student at the University of British Columbia. It is so good, I feel that it's worth putting on the learning lab community blog. A key quote (somewhat paraphrased) is "I have a professor who told us that he was going to teach his course in the same way as he taught it twenty years ago, and he plans to teach it the same way in twenty years time" addresses the disconnect between what modern university education is and what it could be.

Here's the video, grab a coffee and set aside 30 minutes, you'll be inspired:

Student Centred Lecturing ?

During a Lunch and Learn session I was doing on Planning and Integrating E-Learning, I mentioned demonstrating and if you were going to do a demonstration you could consider videoing it and uploading the resulting movie for students to access either at their leisure or in future years so you didn't have to repeat the demonstration (unless you really wanted to !)

This then provoked discussion on video in general and how effective it was in getting the point across. For example videoing your own lectures and making them available on a streaming server, or videoing yourself doing worked solutions of maths problems. I only really had anecdotal evidence to back up my very strongly held view that it can be very effective (as long as it is done right - which sadly, much of it isn't), until now.

Deb Lewis of Business and Economics (one of the people most immediately interested in the matter - I think) was looking for something else a few days later and came across this page from the University of Toronto Scarborough.

It describes a new approach they are trying with some courses where the lecture component is offered in the traditional turn up, sit down and listen format but also in an online version. Lectures are filmed as they take place and are quickly uploaded to a streaming server for students to access as they wish. This gives the students the option of attending the physical lecture as it is delivered or they can access the online version whenever it is convenient for them to do so.

To quote from the site:

"While the concept is simple, its implementation has lead to benefits at virtually all levels within the university. Most importantly, the students love the flexibility this option provides both in terms of scheduling but also in terms of allowing them to get more out of the lectures. That is, many students welcome the ability to (a) watch lectures when they are feel alert, (b) control the local distractions that cannot be controlled in a traditional lecture setting, and (c) pause and rewind lectures during their presentation. In fact two thirds of the students we have been surveyed feel that watching lectures online provides a superior learning experience"

They later go on to hail it as "a fantastic success that truly has changed the way we offer post-secondary education at the University of Toronto at Scarborough" and state that its annual growth is fueled by student demand.

This is an excellent example of how a more student centred approach can really pay off. The old chestnut concern of "if I provide my lecture notes and PowerPoints on Blackboard then none of the students will turn up. Maybe if you provide the whole experience (notes, PowerPoints and a video of the actual lecture) it won't really matter if they turn up or not !