March 29, 2006
NITLE survey on Instructional Use of Technology

Responses to Midwest NITLE group questions

What are the major areas of opportunity you see in the next year for your campus and the instructional use of technology?

  • Marketing instructional technology. As Kevin Miles advised me, “sell the ‘sizzle’ not the bacon”; that is, find ways of presenting facets of instructional technology that have an appeal to faculty and grab their attention and interest. An example could be use of discussion forum or blogs as Just In Time coverage of subjects causing problems for students. Create a short attention grabbing voice/image shorts in Flash or Quicktime which convey a simple message. Use student & faculty recorded quotes as sound bites. Then provide follow-up material such as workshops.
  • Blogging — either within or outside of Moodle. Getting more interest from faculty in pedagogic advantages of the weblog medium.
  • Podcasting — a number of different faculty are interested in the potential of podcasting — both faculty podcasts (Geology / Chemistry) and student authored
  • Innovative uses of Moodle - wikis for group work, student peer assessment

Are there specific areas of technology or pedagogy the campus is hoping to develop?

Following from my professional development proposal entitled podcasting and pedagogy I am planning some new developments:

  1. create a ‘guide to podcasting in higher education’ site (incorporating perhaps a podcasting news site) as a reference for faculty to find out what podcasting is and is not, and how it might be useful in their courses.
  2. work with a working group of faculty to establish easy to use procedures for creating and disseminating podcasts to students
  3. procedures for creating enhanced podcasts (incorporating still graphics) with Garage Band (a component of the Mac iLife package) and areas of pedagogical use.
  4. podcasting collaboration with Janet Russell from Wooster :
    • blog / podcast commenting between two science courses sharing a common goal to produce a NPR like podcast on a science subject. Meg Streepey is interested in doing this.
    • share remedial math for chemistry students enhanced podcasts on iTunesU. (Both of these projects have potential for funding from external granting bodies)
  5. explore the use of podcasting / VoiP technologies (i.e. Skype) and Moodle quiz with languages faculty (I am presently consulting with Aletha Stahl)
  6. with the Instructional Technology faculty working group test new Moodle modules and finding areas of teaching where they might be relevant.

To enable podcasting by faculty to take off we really need a studio facility. Fortunately ITAM already has a suitable room which will only require a small amount of equipment (and a computer) to make into a podcasting studio and we have taken steps to install network connections. For student produced podcasting to function the plan for upgrading the Media Arts Lab to 10 Macs would need to be carried out.

Are there plans for new initiatives?

Apart from the podcasting/blogging collaboration with Wooster I would like to start a conversation about a strategic collaboration between NITLE colleges to develop the Moodle Learning Environment to better reflect the pedagogical priorities of Liberal Arts Colleges. I outline the rationale for this in A Vision for Online Learning (which I have also posted to the NITLE-IT discussion list). I believe that there’s a window of opportunity in the next year or so for major grant funding for collaborative development of Moodle by colleges in the NITLE organization.

Steps already taken (or about to take):

  • Initiate move to add Moodle development to ECS list of Academic computing programming work
  • Emailed to Bill Doemel Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts regarding Moodle development initiative
  • Have emailed thoughts to NITLE discussion list
  • I have talked with Bryan Alexander about a NITLE sponsored Course Management Summit conference which could form the springboard for a Moodle Development Initiative

What do they see as the major opportunities and challenges in relation to the instructional uses of technology?

Opportunities:
  • Languages. The current system of introductory language instruction is incredibly labour intensive. Some or all of the rote practice and grading could be done online in the Moodle quiz activity. There is considerable scope for Instructional Technology in this field of introductory language instruction. We need to review what other colleges are doing to establish some ‘best practices’ and see whether they could be implemented at Earlham.
  • The blogging / podcasting concepts seem to be catching on in the sciences and I have hopes to write some grant applications for specific project ideas.
Challenges (mainly technical):
  1. Our current blogging system (Movable Type) was set up several years ago to test the concept. It’s an obsolete version (v2.6) of Movable Type which has been superseded by a version (v3.2) which is not open source (we’d need to purchase a one time licence for $1,000). The time is ripe for a new system or an upgrade to the current system so that faculty and student can have a blogging and podcasting platform which is easy to operate and customize. I have compared blogging software systems from the perspective of podcasting and I need to install WordPress and Drupal on my OS testing system for review by the IT working group. Fortunately ECS have already implemented the database server and there is a commitment to providing server capacity for a blogging system.
  2. Moodle v1.6 is in the works and should be available for the Fall semester. We are moving the database back end to MySQL which should provide a much smoother user experience with fewer glitches. I need a faculty working group to help with decisions about whether to move all the current courses into new system or start the new system from scratch importing courses where needed. In addition, there are a host of modules and plugins which could be valuable for faculty but which I need help with assessing usefulness and applicability.
Posted by markp at 01:02 PM
March 24, 2006
Glitter 06 @ Earlham

Interesting pointers from the Spring 06 Glitter Meeting at Earlham
Tom Kirk’s introduction. Exciting things happening on Earlham campus:

  • Increasing # applications. problems with selectivity.
  • Campus internationalisation award.
  • John Iverson teacher of year award
  • ACRL award for library 3 years ago

Interesting stuff from Glitter campuses:

[Phrases to remember: Podcasting without Tears, low friction]

Wabash

homegrown CMS with ColdFusion.
Analysis of web traffic — types of stories and hits. Better use of wabash site with dynamic content & updated news. Link to photos inside the news story got many more click throughs than when link was in side panel.
Learn about traffic patters to web site and adapt site to increase interest.

30 PCs and scanners nicked!. See below:

Ohio Weslyan

  • surveillance cameras!!

Oberlin

Big spenders. transition from Bboard —> Moodle
Next year’s Glitter ?

Posted by markp at 05:58 PM
March 22, 2006
Glitter demo

Suggested things to do:

Demonstrations and Doings

Del.icio.us

Demo:

  1. Go to del.icio.us site, login and show effect of tagging bookmarks
  2. Close but don’t logout and go to an interesting web page
  3. Rt-click and select del.icio.us. show tag list, & description.

To Do :

  1. If you haven’t already got a del.icio.us account sign up for one (click on link).
  2. download and install the del.icio.us extension (as outlined above).
  3. Browse to a good web site and tag it. Apply some tags and a ‘glitter06’ tag.
  4. Go to My Delicious and look for all glitter06 tags.

Scrapbook

Demonstrate

  • Open gmail, find economist / Rojo mailing. Go to link
  • choose printable page to avoid other guff
  • Rt-click : Capture Page -> in folder : Economist
  • Open scrapbook page. Rename.
  • Edit markup page with block and inline comments. Add comment to properties. Save.
  • Optional :
    • Page Setup to print background. Print Preview
    • Print to Adobe PDF and save.
    • Upload into Moodle and create a resource.
    • Now you have actual web page annotated with your notes
Posted by markp at 05:01 PM
Glitter Presentation 06

‘Glitter’ is at Earlham this year and this is my presentation. It’s entitled ‘Firefox Tools for “Jazzing Up” Your Web Research’ in the schedule but I like my title better.

[Does anyone know what the G.L.I.T.T.E.R acronym stands for?]

Stop Faffing, use Firefox :

the Tools you Need for the Research you Do

We’ll cover a host of useful Firefox tools for doing research on the web.

  • Web Research Tools: such as
    • del.icio.us — social bookmarking
    • Scrapbook — capture and annotate web pages
    • Sage — RSS reader
    • mention Quicknote
  • Blogging tools :
    • JustBlogIt! — brings up Movable Type interface with link to site. Easy to add comments and save to blog.
    • Spellbound — excellent spell checker for any web form.
    • Performancing — a sophisticated interface to any blog which supports XMLrpc.
  • Management tools :
    • Adblock — filters ads from within web pages
    • SessionSaver (saves tabbed browsing sessions)
  • Web Development :
    • Web Developer (all you ever need for web work)
    • Colorzilla (get colors from any web page)
    • FireFTP

Also :

  • configuring with Tools ->Options
    • block popup windows — allow Moodle to pop up windows
  • Downloading extensions & configuring
    • Select Tools -> Extensions.
    • Click Get more extensions
    • Search for the extension you want and click install (you may have to enable FF to install from this site)
    • Click install
    • restart ForeFox
  • customizing FireFox toolbars
  • tabbed browsing — ctrl-click to start in new tab.
  • Profiles. All local FF data saved in profile folder:
    • default location : C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.vop
    • can copy this to a more tractable location (eg My Documents\Firefox) and select profile at startup with firefox.exe -P
    • why do this? Easy to copy office desktop configuration to external drive.
    • Public Lab configuration runs FF from local m/c and profile hoicked in from user’s home drive — H:\firefox
  • Can run FF off a USB memory stick.

Writing for the Web

I find Dreamweaver just too cumbersome. I use jedit which is a Java based editor so it’s totally platform independent. But you’ll need the Java client running on your machine: windows java 1.5 , Mac OS X has Java built in. I use the very excellent Xilize version 2.0 which allows you to create xhtml pages without all the associated markup ( download here ). Tables are a cinch, the markup is a superset of Textile2 so I can just paste it straight into a MovableType blog entry and viola valid xhtml is produced. Or you can produce whole pages and web sites.

We all want to avoid death by powerpoint so what better way than to display a slideshow in the browser. Eric Meyer’s S5 is a great way to do this. Here’s an example of an S5 based slideshow.

Web Research

Firefox tools which help you organise your web research:

  • for bookmarking, think del.ico.us — central repository, tagging makes grouping bookmarks easy, social tagging makes finding other associated bookmarks easy
  • for commenting on a number of web sites, think blogging with Performancing or JustBlogIt!
  • for commenting within a web page and marking up, think Scrapbook

How the Firefox browser functions as an almost complete research platform:

new_diagram_500.jpg

Del.icio.us

In a nutshell :

  • Social bookmarking service — save all your bookmarks on the web,
  • tag them for easy retrieval,
  • access or create from any internet connected machine,
  • explore other’s tags to find relevant material

the FF extension makes the whole process a lot more straightforward.

Scrapbook

You want to do more than just bookmark an interesting site. You want to make comments inside the page to reuse.
In a nutshell:

  • capture whole content of important page.
  • mark important passages
  • insert inline comments
  • insert block comments
  • save in folders (in profile)

Blogging

JustBlogIt!

Enables easy commentary on other blog or web sites. Trackbacks are a cinch.

  • open up sage . choose Social Software : E-literate.
  • select a page from right hand pane
  • RT-click and JustBlogIt. Note trackback ping. This will ping the e-Literate site that I have made a blog entry.

Performancing

The Performancing extension Is a powerful blog editor masquerading as a built-in Firefox application. You can set it up to make entries to almost any blog, both commercial ones such as Typepad or Blogger and locally hosted blog systems such as Movable Type, WordPress and Textpattern.

Consult the handbook for how to set it up. The only tricky part is setting up your server ‘API URL’. This is the means by which the editor communicates with the blog s/w to authenticate, bring up a list of categories and posts and allow you to add & delete entries remotely.

  • For Movable Type the default setting looks like : http://myserver.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
  • Earlham’s MT blog server is at http://www.earlham.edu/moveabletype and so the API URL (for both Performacing and JustBlogIt!) becomes http://www.earlham.edu/moveabletype/mt-xmlrpc.cgi.
  • This will obviously vary with you installation and the blog s/w you use.

If you’re not wedded to Textile or trackbacks like what I am, this is probably the best blog editor you could ask for.

Spell checker

Spellbound is still in development and is not on the Firefox extensions site. There is a discussion about it in the MozillaZine Forums and here’s the Install Spellbound Dev

This is only compatible with FF version 1.5 so make sure you have the latest issue.

Management Tools

Adblock

While Firefox handles popup windows Adblock blocks ads from within the browser. You can block any graphic ad, an “iFrame” and flash ad. You can also ‘whitelist’ a page or site to make sure it’s not blocked.

Session Saver

Have you ever had to zoom home to cook the evening meal and so closed off Firefox and lost all the tabs you had open? Session saver to the rescue. It automatically saves all open tabs and reopens them on startup. Not only that, you can sync your saved sessions to a FTP or Webdav host and share them with another machine (I have not tried this)

Web Development

Web Developer

Is simply a must for anyone who creates web sites. Very often you want to figure how a cool web site is constructed or try to suss out glitches on your own site. Dreamweaver is no help here — you need Web Developer. There are so many features that you might want to display it as a toolbar or you can use it via rt-click context menu. Features include :

  • Disable things like javascript on the viewed page
  • CSS — you can load the CSS used by the page and edit it live to change the appearance of the page you’re looking at. You can then save the changes into a local file.
  • Images — find broken images and do all sorts of useful things with images on the page
  • Outline — will outline block level elements on the page. Very useful.
  • Resize — how does my page look at 800×600? 1024 × 768?
  • a multitude of others — Information, Miscellaneous, Tools, View Source etc

Download latest version 1.0.2

Colorzilla

This fills the only remaining niche unoccupied by web developer, that of color sensing. What colours work well together? What background colour did the latest design in css Zen Garden(The Beauty in CSS Design)”http://www.csszengarden.com/ use?

Colorzilla not only gives you the color you’re looking at but can also show the CSS element name and size in pixels. Of course, you can copy the color pointed at.

FireFTP

Is a very useful FTP client application which can operate as a tab or separate window.

RSS editor

Do you have a web site that you maintain and you want to create an RSS feed for it, rather like a blog or CMS site? RSS editor is the best (the only) RSS file generator I have come across. You need to understand something about RSS but the creation of the xml file is wonderfully straightforward.

Posted by markp at 01:31 PM
March 20, 2006
Getting into blogging again

I wanted to get started with serious blogging again. In particular I want an easy to follow user interface for podcasting with a blog. Wordpress came up trumps but the killer is that it’s a single installation per user system! MovableType does podcasting the M.T perl way which involves custom templates and hard coding categories. Podcasting in Drupal seems to be vague at best so I might have to try this out. And Textpattern would be my knee jerk favourite but totally lacks any podcasting support and does not support XMLrpc so that you cannot use a stand alone editor like Zempt or w.bloggar.

Blog Comparisons

Wordpress

Wordpress is basically a single user single blog per installation. This obviously does not scale well for a college blog site. Alternative approaches:

Q: Is Lyceum ready for production use?
A: No. The schema has not been finalized, the import and upgrade infrastructure is not in place, and the code is in need of a security audit.

The Lyceum Project » Frequently Asked Questions has an interesting section on differences with MU:

Q: What is the difference between Lyceum and WordPress MU?
The main difference between Lyceum and MU is the database schema. MU creates a set of tables for each blog in a system. Lyceum uses a fixed number of tables for the entire system.
In WordPress MU, every user must have a blog. In Lyceum, users and blogs are completely unrelated entities. Each blog can have arbitrary users, each with arbitrary permissions, and it is possible for a user to have no permissions on no blogs (this makes sense because a blog administrator may choose to only allow comments from users who are registered on the system).
In Lyceum, each blog can turn (pre-approved, admin-installed) plugins on and off as they like.

MovableType

TextPattern

“Txp’s implementation of Textile is frustrating. I’d like to see it brought to feature-compatibility with Brad Choate’s Textile 2 but my understanding is that this simply isn’t going to happen”.

Rats — This is really depressing. Even MT 2.6 supports Textile 2 and that’s nothing like as powerful as Xilize.

Drupal

  • drupal.org . This does support multiple users and has a number of interesting plugins.
  • Integrates with Gallery : Gallery “It has recently been updated to work with the official release of Gallery 2 (1.0). drupal + gallery 2
  • Podcasting support is confusing. There’s an officially supported Audio module which plays audio in situ but it’s not clear how this enables podcasting. This conversation talks about about a new podcasting module and Narkoba has a beta podcast module but it’s not clear how bug free this is. VoodooStevie uses the Audio Module to create podcasts like so:

I have been using this method for podcasting and it seems to work.

  1. Record podcast
  2. Bring MP3 file into iTunes
    • Change Title, Author and album and place show notes into comments.
    • Add Album Art
    • Use Convert To MP3 to set the settings into a new MP3 file
  3. Upload using Audio Module
  4. In Drupal
    • Add a vocabulary for the Audio Module and add an item called Podcast or a tagline for your show.
    • Use the URL Alias for the feed (/taxonomy/term/whatever to be like podcast.xml for example)
    • Test in iTunes.

Voodoostevie’s site VooDooRadio seems to be quite user friendly. You see the latest podcast episode with an inline player. There are links under it to download the audio file and read more. The third link labelled “The Twisted For Your Pleasure Podcast” merely displays all the individual episodes and then you’re left wondering how you subscribe in iTunes. On the the right column there’s a tiny button labelled “iTunes” which when pressed starts up the iTunes application (if you allow it to) and then goes to the feed on iTunes itself where you can subscribe to the whole thing or get individual episodes. Slick and easy, but would have been better with the button displacing the third link

Blog Design

Blog Design Solutions — Amazon link looks very interesting.

Also see:

Conclusion

Without a doubt WordPress has the best podcasting support and the linkage with Gallery looks really cool. But the single user per installation is a real killer. Drupal seems to be podcast capable and has the potential to solve the podcast upload/locate problem. I need to get this installed on Macarius and do some testing.

Posted by markp at 06:18 PM
March 16, 2006
A Vision for online learning

These thoughts came to me while I was listening to Carol Smith at the Kenyon 06 conference talk about the ‘FITS’ and ‘STARTS’ programmes at Depau which were started up with Lilly funding (361° programme). It occurred to me that there’s a window of opportunity for grant funding to start innovative new approaches but after a while when more institutions are doing these things they are not so innovative any more and the institution then bears the whole cost. With this in mind:

A Vision for Online Learning Environment

A leader in a recent issue of the Economist (March 9th, 2006) entitled “Remember Detroit” starts with this assertion:

“America rules the academic roost. It boasts 17 of the world’s top 20 universities, employs 70% of the world’s Nobel prize winners and attracts the best and the brightest from just about everywhere.”

“Are American universities in this position because they are so good, or because their competition is so bad? The evidence, overwhelmingly, is that the latter is the case—especially when you look at Europe.”

And ends with :

“Put simply, many American universities treat their undergraduates shabbily.”

While this may be true of the Harvards and Yales on the US educational landscape one could argue (and we should be arguing forcefully) that this is not the case for small undergraduate, liberal arts colleges. Quite the contrary. One could argue that liberal arts colleges lead the world in quality of educational experience for undergraduates.

Moreover, I believe that there is currently a window of opportunity for us to establish world leadership in online pedagogy . Rather than following others and picking up scraps of funding, we should be taking the lead with inter-institutional collaboration and pushing the envelope of online pedagogy, all this lubricated by grant funding.

The obvious platform for this effort is the Open Source course management system, or rather Learning Environment , Moodle. Moodle is the pre-eminent unsurpassed vehicle for pedagogical innovation (forget Blackboard, WebCT, uportal, etc Moodle is the platform with a future). We should be putting effort into moulding Moodle in our image, that is, in the way that we see educational processes occurring rather than other agendae such as High School, Community College, large University. Thus far, there has been little in any significant input from the small college sector. We want to shape the Moodle project to be consonant with our core values, with our college missions:

  • student engagement
  • faculty development
  • communities of practice.

We are less interested in control of student behaviour, enforcement of norms, moderating conversations, preventing outside access.
We are interested in a student focused learning environment:

  • collaborative working in peer groups.
  • Social constructivism in a loose sense
  • faculty and student project collaboration as peers. (eg Ford-Knight projects)
  • senior seminars
  • joint research : lab, field, personal
  • research overlap with teaching. Teaching out of classroom and into research lab. Unique ? Enhanced pedagogy is the result. Comes partially under rubric of professional development.
    • course based research
    • individual faculty / individual student / joint peer research.

Moodle has become / is rapidly becoming the default umbrella (portal if you like) for all the user authenticated activities listed above.

Customise Moodle to the needs of small colleges — begs question — what are our pedagogical needs ? Are they qualitatively different from other educational institutions? Needs / areas where Liberal Arts colleges could influence and provide input into the Moodle system:

  1. Proximate:
    • Course archiving
    • course creation
    • archived course access
    • training
  2. Medium term:
    • Classes of user. Expand beyond admin/teacher/student to fine-grained permissions throughout Moodle
  3. Longer Term:
    • Group / social learning interactions. Elgg
      • Blog
      • social networking
      • File repository
      • tagging / meta data
    • Reuse of materials, courses, units, course fragments, resources in one’s own and other’s courses. Copyright stamping via Creative Commons..
      • Learning objects
      • digital repository
      • Metadata / tagging
      • Sharing within institution / groups of institutions / world
    • Digital media issues:
      • faculty / student slide/image/video collections
      • searching within and across collections
      • metadata and tagging
      • fine-grained permissions
    • openness to Web / Google
    • URL handling. Simple permanent URLs.
    • ‘Deep Web’ interface (see Searching Earlham’s ‘Deep Web’ ). One stop, single interface search on proprietary databases eg Academic Search Premier which :
      • integrates with digital repository
      • focussed on ease of use
      • focussed on collaborative research needs
    • Student assessment of courses

Issues:

  • Institutional commitment.
  • Collaboration - NITLE?

Moodle sites at NITLE institutions
 

Albion Collegehttp://courses.albion.edu/cw/
Beloit Collegehttps://pasta.beloit.edu/moodle/
College of Woosterhttps://woodle.wooster.edu/
Colorado Collegehttps://prowl.coloradocollege.edu/
Cornell Collegehttp://webwork.cornellcollege.edu/moodle/
Earlham Collegehttps://moodle.earlham.edu/
Hope Collegehttp://courses.hope.edu/
Lake Forest Collegehttp://moodle.lakeforest.edu/
Lawrence Universityhttp://thor.lawrence.edu/moodle/
Macalester Collegehttp://moodle.macalester.edu/
Pomona Collegehttp://moodle.pomona.edu/
St. Olaf Collegehttp://moodle.stolaf.edu/

Comments?

Posted by markp at 06:03 PM
March 15, 2006
Thoughts from Kenyon Conference

Talks by:

  • Rich Eckman, President CIC
  • President’s Perspectives
  • Faculty Perspectives

Opening Session. Rich Eckman

Distinguish content and tools. Library deals with content, IS tools?
But content moving from physical Library -> Web , and stacks -> Information Commons.

Patterns of information use are changing.

  1. Undergraduate education. No longer faculty -> student. Learner centered. Active learning. Internet based pedagogies. Finding material, assessing quality. drifted into practice.
  2. Library. Changing learning styles Biggest issue is course design. Library holdings in 1990s treated as assets -> 2000s as liabilities . Library cost increases since 1976, salaries > 300% but materials > 600%

Other points :

  • Lessons from recent history about making good decisions about Technology. JSTOR — what if they had stuck with tried and tested microfilm rather than move to OCR full text? Better decision made. Is there an equivalent tipping point today?
  • (Failure to) act to challenge limitations in copyright and fair use — sat of sidelines . Implications of GooglePrint.

Inability to use online information intelligently (why? No user friendly interface!).

Idea:

Copyright Values under Assault

Lawrence Lessig & Siva Vaidhyanathan (author of The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System ) VS

Conversations about copyright:

  • Effect of limitations on fair use
  • Intellectual adventurers hit iron curtain of copyright
  • copyright straitjacket on academic freedom
  • mix and mash —
  • Media domination of copyright debate
  • Is Moodle a solution ? Not in the long term.
  • What about my stuff — Creative Commons

President’s Perspectives

Doug Bennett:

  • Institution = mobilization of bias. Remake institution = remobilize bias.

Georgia Nugent (Kenyon)

  • Collaborative style. redesign way to serve students. drive out fear, build trust, make great things happen.
  • Constituents do not distinguish between knowledge tools and content.
  • Frustrating — lament about student’s use of Google equivalent to the lament of the use of the horseless carriage. Time to cease wringing hands and seize opportunity. Move from information to understanding.
  • Google Library a tremendous advance. Channel into productive ways.
  • Organizational structures -> human relationships. [ Google -> Social s/w. Google is now a verb. ]
  • appropriate use of online resources is not a new issue. Judging quality.

Faculty Perspectives

  1. John Collins. Physics Wheaton. Used Technology Enabled Active Learning in purpose transformed classroom. centre for collaborative learning:
    • teaching space (day)
    • workspace for students and faculty
    • tutoring centre (night)

Comment

Think about intentional structure to bring faculty / Instruct Tech together.
Instructional Tech support group. ITSG

  • Core Moodle testers.
  • Blog testing / podcasting
  • Consultative Ideas -> action
  • Pedagogy ideas
  • What do you want from Moodle
    • Image management
    • Presentation with out Powerpoint
Posted by markp at 04:07 PM
March 13, 2006
Type of user in Moodle

Currently Moodle has only three types of user:

  1. Administrator. Has all-powerful access to everything
  2. Teacher. Can only do things within their own course
  3. Student. No ability to upload material independent of an Activity. So group work is impossible.

There is a ‘teaching assistant’ but this is not a real user type.

This brings up the more general issue of teacher access to each other’s courses. What Moodle needs is a finer grained ‘permissions’ model. For example:

  • Secretaries need permission to upload files but nothing else.
  • Other teachers could be allowed read access without having to log in as guest.
  • Teaching Assistants need fine grained permission to create and grade certain assignments (eg discussion Forums).
  • And perhaps the option for a ‘Reference Shelf’ where Reference Librarians could deposit useful resources and provide a focus for bibliographic assistance.
Posted by markp at 11:20 AM
March 10, 2006
More Podcasting Seminar comments

Some more reflections on the seminar:

  • problems with non-standard ‘chapters’ only readable by iTunes
  • issues with MIME type — OS X Apache not configured to recognise m4b type — audio with graphical ‘chapters’
  • problems with file transfer and upload — drawbacks with client based applications.
  1. Before I rave too much about G’band I want to take a look at the XML it creates.
  2. The big issue is still getting the files onto the server in your local environment — .Mac or Blojsom don’t cut it. It was revealing that when the techie guy uploaded the fancy podcast up to the Blojsom blog he didn’t use FTP, he used drive mapping (the FTP paths can be terrifying). One app I used, ‘ListGarden’ which is actually a perl script asked for file paths in 3 or 4 different places!
    • The confusing thing is that different FTP services work in different ways. With Macromedia Dreamweaver you can just enter www for your default web folder. But other apps such as FireFTP (Firefox extension) and Listgarden (RSS generator) and Profcast (Mac podcaster) you need to provide the absolute path from root to your web folder. So for my web folder on Rahu this would be ‘/homes/employees/markp/www’. This info is very difficult to get hold of — it certain took me some anguish to suss out.
  3. The file had the extension m4b and guess what? The Apache on OS X was not configured with that MIME type so that when he clicked on the obvious link with the file name he got a stream of garbage!

I’m more than ever convinced that what is needed is a server based solution. If Apple want to make real headway they’ll adopt an open source blog like Wordpress and install & configure that on OS X server for podcasting.

Posted by markp at 10:30 AM
March 09, 2006
Apple Podcasting Seminar

Notes from the seminar. On the whole I was very impressed with Garageband 3 especially the way in which you could have a podcasting ‘track’ where you can drag & drop images.

Apple Podcasting seminar , Columbus March 8th 2006

URLs

4 types of podcast according to Apple:

  1. Audio
  2. Enhanced — audio + graphic images
  3. Video
  4. Text

Popular Education podcasts — 912 podcasts K-12

Notes :

  • search for useful podcasts in different subject areas (kind of directory of instructional podcasts) — Reference Librarians should do this
  • What’s the situation with internet wide archiving of podcasted material? Have we lost seminal podcast episodes already?
  • Can MP3 metadata be used from within a podcast? Tagging and collating podcast libraries.
  • grants to get ipod nano into the hands of students?

Gear

Pedagogical — blogs, p’cast, etc

  • staged adding of material to blogs. Clever way to ramp up student’s capabilities.
  • upload photos and do things with them
  • impressive demo of GarageBand 3 — multiple tracks are intuitive. Ideally suited to group work. Start with simple individual p’casts then move up to adding images. Then multi-track with backing music & ‘ducking’.
  • One issue is optimum image size and dimensions. ipod display is 320×240 (4×3) aspect ratio — most digital cameras produce 3×2 sized images. What’s the optimum image size since they can be shrunk (probably 1024×768 px at 72 dpi)
  • Big issue with profcast is that the final playing size is 160 × 160 and almost invisible on a web page. Instead export slides as JPG files and drag these in as chapters to Garageband. More flexible and powerful.
  • Remixing opportunities! Start with prof sound track of lecture then student listens to podcast, creates own slideshow, dumps the slides and adds them at appropriate stages to the podcast.
  • OR provide slideshow and have students create their own commentary either with profcast or Garageband.

ToDo:

  • Create a staged curriculum for Meg Streepey
Posted by markp at 03:31 PM
March 03, 2006
Searching Earlham's 'Deep Web'

Earlham has a host of online databases available to faculty and students via the Library’s Databases page . These resources are only available to Earlham users and only from the earlham internet ‘domain’ , ie from on campus (but by logging in to a ‘proxy server’ we can make them available from outside Earlham). This class of services is generally known as the ‘Deep Web’.

Many of the references you can find are available as full text. However, the procedure for finding and using this information can be hair raisingly complex with up to three different interfaces involved. Let’s look at an example search of the biggest database we have, Academic Search Premier (operated by EBSCO):

Finding the database

Everyone knows how to get to Google. You know you want to search an online database, but how do you find it in the Earlham web site?

  1. Starting on the Earlham home page, selecting Information Services -> Libraries is a logical choice.
  2. Then we’re faced with Find Books & Media, Research and Online Reference. A quick pass of the cursor over these reveals Research -> All Databases as the way to go.
  3. Which gets us to the Databases page in two clicks. Good.
  4. Now we select Academic Search Premier.

The first thing we might be confused about is that page is not called ‘Academic Search Premier’ — this apparently is the name of the database itself — the site is ‘branded’ with the name EBSCO and has a green theme.

Using the search.

The interface we find is a lot more complex than Google’s and the tiny Database Help link does some work of explaining the whole system. But we don’t have time for all this, we just want to do a search. So we type in a unique name and get the first page of results:

and we click on the second title to get the citation.

What do we want to do with this? If it’s of any use in our course then we’d want to get it into Moodle. So we open up Moodle in a separate window and go to our course.

  1. in the week or topic section that we’re doing this poem we pull down the Add Resource : Add link to web site menu
  2. Name is ‘Astral poem’
  3. Then for the Moodle summary box we’re interested in ‘Authors’, ‘Source’ and ‘Abstract’ fields, so we’ll highlight the chunk of text containing these fields from the EBSCO window, copy, and then paste them into the summary box in Moodle. Then we’ll go in and delete the table rows we don’t want.
  4. Finally we want to add the URL link. Normally, the way to do this for most web sites is to take the address of the page from the address bar, and many faculty do this. However, this link will change with time and so should not be used. The URL to use is labelled ‘persistent link to this record’ and so a faculty has to remember this detail. The URL itself is not clickable so one cannot right-click and copy, you have to carefully select the text (including the http://), copy and then paste it into theLocation field in the Moodle resource window.

Full text?

Now we’ve been told that many journals have full text with them. But this one doesn’t seem to do this. However, we vaguely remember a Librarian muttering something about SFX, so we click on the SFX button and a new window pops up (if we haven’t disabled pop-ups for earlham.edu).

Now there’s a new red page with “Ex Libris” and “SFX services for this record”. We may be wondering at this point what ‘SFX’ means. But we notice that there’s a GO for Full Text, a GO for ‘holding information’ (more librarian-speak mumbo jumbo…), and a GO under Reference.

So we GO with the Full Text, and voila, there it is in yet another new window. But how do we make this poem available for students? Do we expect them to know to click on SFX and then the GO with Project Muse Standard Collection? Perhaps not. But we notice that the article is available as a pdf so with a right-click on [access article in PDF] we can save the poem as an acrobat pdf file to our local drive and upload it into Moodle.

URL to full text

But what if we just wanted the URL to the full text in order to paste it in to our Moodle resource? Perhaps the ‘save link for course page, syllabus or notes’ in the SFX window is what we want. However, even though this is in bold red type and looks like a link to click on , it doesn’t work as a link. We have to click the GO button. Yet another window pops ups and this time it’s a selectable link in a text box.

But what a URL; look how long it is!

http://sfx.palni.edu:9003/sfx_ec?genre=article;issn=01612492;isbn=;title=Callaloo;title=Astral.; volume=28;issue=4;date=20050901;spage=894;sid=EBSCO%3Aaph;pid=%3C authors%3ESmith%2C%20Tracy%20K.%3C%2Fauthors%3E%3Cui%3E19776718%3C%2Fui%3E%3C date%3E20050901%3C%2Fdate%3E%3Cdb%3Eaph%3C%2Fdb%3E

Now we have to copy this and paste it in to the Moodle Location field instead of the EBSCO persistent link we used before.

Thoughts

It’s hard to justify complaints that students and faculty use Google to search for full text resources when executing the same process through the Academic Premier Database involves three different user interfaces in three separate windows and a multitude of user decisions and probably false starts. In this search there were three different ‘brands’ to muddy the waters — EBSCO, SFX, Project Muse — and a host of unfamiliar terminology — ‘persistent link’, ‘holding information’, and search terms mostly unfamiliar to non-librarians. Each of these interfaces had usability issues — for example, text that looked clickable but wasn’t a link, and URL which should be selectable and copyable in a single click but wasn’t. It was not clear which was the ‘best’ URL to use to point to the full text and when we finally discovered it the URL text string was so long and convoluted that it was easy to make a mistake in copying and pasting. One character missing or added breaks the URL.

In fact, the process of discovering and using full text resources via Earlham’s deep web facilities has not changed much in complexity since we used Dialog via dial-up modems 15 years ago. One could argue that it’s now more complex.

Posted by markp at 12:34 PM
March 02, 2006
Moving Reference Library into Moodle (MRLM)

In this posting I wrote about some motivations behind converging library services into the premier course management platform of Moodle. And in Comments on the role of Librarians I had some thoughts about the functionality that could go with this.

I want to explore some ideas for tying a Reference Librarian aspect closely into the design and resource base of a Moodle course. Imagine, if you will, the following scenario:

  • In addition to Adminstrator, Teacher and student roles in the Moodle system there is a new role, that of, Reference Librarian, RefLib for short. Arbitrary users can be assigned this role without having to teach a course. The RefLib has write access to a certain Block (let’s call it the Ref Lib block) on every course (though this can be disabled by the Teacher).
  • What could happen in the RefLib block?
    • We could imagine an Electronic Reserve ‘shelf’. This would be where the RefLib would place Resource links (stemming from a central RefLib Files area) that she deemed appropriate for the course.
    • How about an interactive ‘ask a Librarian chat channel’ based on the current message system.
    • other features?

Personal Research

Marginalia web annotation is a plugin for Moodle that enables annotation of Forum postings.

marginalia_80.gif

If you can annotate discussion fourm postings in this way, why not other things? Imagine a personal research module along these lines with a popup window that had:

  • Notepad with multiple sheets
  • drag & drop URLs & page titles
  • save and comment on web pages (rather like the Scrapbook plugin for Firefox)
Posted by markp at 05:43 PM