Tama’s eLearning Blog

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Sue Waters who produces the Mobile Technology in TAFE podcast, which looks at different eLearning tools in Tertiary and Further Education. It was a fairly wide-ranging conversation, but the two biggest topics (and the subject of the two podcasts) were the use of Lectopia, especially in terms of podcasting, and the use of blogs and other social software (and eLearning tools) more broadly. I won’t be rude and direct-link to the media files, but you can find them here:

• How Universities are using Lectopia of Podcast Lectures [Audio] [Video (mp4 with still images)]
• Using Social Software with Students [Audio]

If you’re interested, please go and have a listen. Feedback is most welcome!

Last week was the Teaching and Learning Forum 2007, held at the University of Western Australia (UWA). The conference theme was Student Engagement, which is a core topic in the coming years for the higher education sector. While there were many interesting (and engaging) papers, I want to draw particular attention to the two fabulous keynote talks, both of which were recorded using Lectopia and are thus available as digital audio and video, either streamed or downloadable.

The first keynote was by UWA’s new Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), Professor Don Markwell. His keynote was given on his second day at UWA, and also serves, I think, as something of a blueprint for his vision for UWA. The talk was entitled “The Challenge of Student Engagement” and you can either listen to it here, or read the PDF version here.

The other keynote speaker was Professor Owen Hicks, who has been a major player in the higher education sector in Australia for some time. Owen’s talk was a far more personal vision of Student Engagement, but despite - or indeed, because of that - it was engaging in a very direct way (especially in Owen’s talk about his experiences in Timor Leste). The talk was entitled “And you will say “What was all that about?” and I will reply “Well, you tell me,”" and can be heard here.

I’m back in Perth after spending most of last week at the Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences conference which was held by the Association of Internet Researchers. It was a great conference and I heard some thought-provoking papers (which I’ll write more about in a day or two when time permits). The “Participatory Pedagogies: Convergence and the Extended Blogosphere” panel I was part of when well despite James Farmer sadly being unable to contribute as originally planned. Adrian Miles and I ended up with a whole panel which actually worked pretty well since his paper, “Networked Knowledge Objects (videographic pedagogy for new knowledges)”, and mine shared a lot of ground, with my focus on podcasting and audio, and his on video more broadly. Partially to record the event, and partially to test the new Belkin TuneTalk microphone for my iPod, I’ve created an mp3 recording of my talk. I’ll be writing up the paper on which the talk was based, but as I’ll be making some changes based on feedback at the conference, that’ll probably take a little to appear. For those interested, for now feel free to listen to a recording of my talk along with the powerpoint slides …

Abstract:

The term podcasting is a combination of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’ and describes type of syndicated digital audio that results in automatically downloadable files which are playable in portable media devices, such as (but not limited to) the iPod. Podcasting has proven extremely popular in the last year and a half, with many online citizens creating their own regular online audio shows. Australian universities have been making lectures available as streaming audio for some years now, but with learners anchored to a computer in order to listen. Podcasting has also allowed students to take lectures and other audio wherever they go, but this ‘coursecasting’ or ‘profcasting’ model still relies on the top-down structure of lectures as academic content for student’s to consume. However, in The University of Western Australia’s Communication Studies course, in an honours-level unit ‘iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture’ the tables have been turned somewhat and students are also podcasting in the tertiary setting. For their major assignments, students were asked to create an innovative audio podcast which engaged with the notion of participatory culture and the results ranged from a ‘pod play’ in the style 1930s RKO radio theatre to an alternative commentary for a Simpsons episode focusing on consumer culture and intertextuality. These podcasts are also cultural output themselves – they will remain downloadable indefinitely, allowing students to use them in future ePortfolios and also providing a resource (or entertainment) for others. Moreover, the same system which enables the creation of streaming and podcasted lectures, the iLecture or Lectopia system, is also been used to host and deliver student podcasts; in effect, students are stepping up to their own iPodium. With student’s having an opportunity utilise the iPodium, student podcasting acts as something of a leveling process, allowing two-way street for teaching and learning.

Extrapolating from the iGeneration experience, this paper argues that student podcasting can be usefully situated as part of a broader range of emerging participatory pedagogies wherein the socially-emergent tools and modes of participatory culture allow a more meaningful traffic between tertiary settings and the broader community. For students, podcasting can be far more than a content-delivery mechanism; it can be part of their ongoing participation in knowledge communities in both tertiary settings and beyond. Student podcasting also levels the playing field in relation to ideas of content-creation and can be part of the processes of helping learners develop the tools of cultural interaction, not just consumption, which are increasingly an essential part of digital literacy. This paper also focuses on student podcasting as something which can easily take place without reliance on institutional infrastructures. As such, student podcasting blurs the boundaries of formal educational settings and points to digitally enabled learning and teaching modes which link educational and social spaces via a nexus of creation, discussion and interaction enabled by digital tools and technologies.

The presentation: mp3 recording (with many other formats available); and the powerpoint slides .

The podcast and powerpoint slides are hosted by the Internet Archive using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Feedback is most welcome!

[Cross-posted from Ponderance.]

I recently received my 60Gb 5G Video iPod which I’ll be using to test out the three new 5G microphone accessories as they’re released (I’ve pre-ordered the xtrememac Micromemo — which should ship late July — and I’m keeping an eye out for the soon-to-be-released TuneTalk and iTalkPro). I’m fascinated to see how these microphones will allow the iPod to actually be used as a decent quality podcast recording device and with any luck they’ll be a nice simple solution for students recording interviews, voice-overs and other audio of their own creation.

However, since there’s at least a month before the first ipod video microphones hit the market, I thought I’d have a look at a how a recorded lecture would look on the iPod’s video screen. I really didn’t expect it to be terribly useful because even though they’re a great idea, the screen it still pretty small. Of course, it’s bigger than many mobile phone screens and I was actually very impressed by the quality of the images on the iPod video screen.

In order to have a play with a recorded video lecture, I downloaded one of the Lectopia-generated quicktime movie files of one of my lectures for Hong Kong last semester and exported it to iPod video format. While an odd sight to see (for me, at least), the resulting image on the iPod screen was actually quite watchable. Here’s a look:

I also tried outputting the video via the AV connector kit (which, I should add, is not bundled with the iPod but rather a separate purchase) and, as you would imagine, the stretched image pixelated a little but was still fairly watchable:

While I don’t think the talking head lectures are really the most pedagogically useful lectures, I think that the quality of these images would allow screen captured or screencast lectures to actually appear in a readable enough format if people respect good powerpoint slide use and have no more than five or six lines of text on each screen.

Now I’m waiting for those microphones to do some quality comparissons …

On Tuesday I gave a brief talk called “iTeach, iLearn: Student Podcasting” [abstract] which described my experience assigning student podcasts as the major form of assessment in my iGeneration unit last year. It was pitched to a generalist audience and thus covers what is a podcast and the sort of thing, but the latter half describes the student podcasting experience, their feedback and what I see as the major pedagogical benefits. I’ve uploaded an mp3 of the audio [downloadable in various formats on this page] [direct link to MP3] and the powerpoint slides [here ], so feel free to download them and listen along.

The most important point, I think, was the Pedagogical Benefits of Student Podcasting and I’ll quickly run through them again here for those who don’t have time to listen to my podcast presentation…

[1] Turning the Digital Podium Around - As ‘coursecasting’ becomes more and more prominent, podcasting becomes the realm of the lecture. The lecture format, for all its benefits, is still one of the least interactive, least engaging education experiences. However, with student podcasts, the digital lecturn or podium becomes a realm where they can participate on fairly equal terms - student podcasts can arrive via the same RSS streams, in the same formats, allowing students to, in effect, take their place at the digital podium. This can serve to equalise the Teaching and Learning experience, giving students a powerful voice that acts in a similar way to educators. Teaching and Learning thus convergence in a meaningful way, making more confident students who are used to creating material for public consumption.

[2] Creating Media = Heightened Critical Awareness of Media - As we all know, the best way to get someone to learn a thing is for them to do that thing. Podcasting is a form of media production and participating in the production process increases a critical awareness of the stages of media production (albeit on a small scale) and organically leads to a heightened critical awareness of media, something integral to media literacy in the information age.

[3] Podcasts are Cultural Artefacts - Creating a podcast means that students have created a tangible media and cultural product that can have utility far beyond the immediate course context. For example, the PodPlay and Alternative Simpsons DVD Commentary created by students in the iGeneration course are useful as media in their own terms, as examples of podcasts, and are a great listen for a more general audience. Moreover, in an era where ePortfolios are of increasing importance, as well as course and university profiles, student podcasts are of immediate value to students as portfolio items, of value to the course as evidence of excellent student outcomes and products, and (at least if they’re good, which I think all of the iGeneration podcasts were), they’re useful as promotion material for universities en masse, showcasing their output by students.

[4] Podcasting is Relatively Easy - Producing media is something students love doing, but the time and effort needed to get students media-savvy enough to produce, for example, videos is quite demanding, especially outside of media-specific courses. However, using Audacity (a free, open source, audio editing program) and their own microphones, students can learning everything needed to record and edit basic audio in a a one or, at most, two hour workshop. Podcasting is thus something that students can do in all sorts of courses without eating up too much course time to provide the generic skills needed. (And those generic skills can be built upon in many, many other contexts…)

So, those are my thoughts. The benefits of podcasting by students is broad in pedagogical terms, and I hope to see more and more student-created podcasts as parts of university courses in the future (secondary and primary schools are already embracing these ideas, but not many universities are as quick off the mark!). Also, do others have other benefits in mind that I could add to the list?

Finally, a request to the edublogosphere: I’d like to sync the slides to the audio BUT I’m working on a PC and the moment and thus most of the tools I know of are of no use as they’re Mac-based. Can anyone recommend a fairly straight-forward way of combining the slides and audio using Windows-based software?

Last week there was a healthy discussion about the pros and cons of iTunes U (here and here for a start) and after a bit of a think over the weekend, I’ve got some further thoughts. D’Arcy Norman in “iTunes U. Critiques - it’s not as simple as that” makes a number of positive points about Apple’s service. Probably the most important part of D’Arcy’s post is the last paragraph:

I just talked with someone at Apple who would know - and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok - you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now).

Having cross-platform playable formats such as mp3 is, in my opinion, a huge plus because it does allow other players and platforms to handle the files (sure, you need iTunes to access those files initially, but having flexibility with them thereafter and no DRM is hugely important). Gardner Campbell, however, remains unconvinced by the service and in a “Postscript on iTunes U” makes the extremely important point that while there won’t be a technical lock-in to the service, financial realities may create a practical lock-in anyway:

Will institutions, especially starved-for-cash public schools, be willing to fund home-grown open alternatives when they can make money on a home-branded, outsourced, turn-key operation like Apple’s? I doubt it. Apple doesn’t need de jure exclusive rights. We’ll essentially give them away, de facto. Much better PR that way, and the company gets to express its astonishment at any dissent, for after all no one forced us to put all our content in iTunes U.

I think after consideration, I’m falling half-way between the two perspectives. I do think iTunes U has potential to be a very useful service, especially for publicly accessible university podcasts because the potential traffic charges could be huge, especially for well respected professors giving public lectures and the like. I also think that iTunes U could be a useful host for course content. However, it should not be the only host. If using iTunes U stops many universities exploring alternative services and developing their own, then Apple is pulling a Blackboard/WebCT. However, having recently learned from those lessons (and almost-done-mergers), I suspect many universities will using both iTunes U and in-house solutions for other formats/options. Along those lines, Burks Oakley pointed me to an important post by Michael Meiser whichs extends a post from Jon Udell both of whom focus on the difficulties of linking to and referencing material via the iTunes interface. As Jon Udell points out:

It was an ironically circular exercise. I started at itunes.stanford.edu, which is just a web placeholder for the JavaScript code that launches iTunes and points it at the special Stanford area of the iTunes Music Store. Then I subscribed to some of the Stanford feeds in iTunes. Capturing the URLs of those feeds was way harder than it should be, because iTunes displays them but won’t let you copy them. Those feed URLs are, of course, extremely nasty-looking, e.g.:

https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/ Subscribe/Feed_StanfordPublic-1770144-1770152–1770196_visitor $40indigo.apple.com_1137336780-95c4e56efabeb87e7982db034895cbd2eb6312de

You’d have to nuts to write something like that down. Well, I guess I am, because I did. My reasons were partly selfish. I want to be able to get directly to the audio URLs contained in those feeds so I can automate conversion to MP3. Why? I like to listen to long lectures while running, and my iPod isn’t the preferred device in that situation. My Creative MUVO is lighter, and when I drop it or get it wet I don’t have to worry so much. More broadly, I want these freely available lectures to be able to spark the sort of web discourse that I’m sure Stanford intends them to. URLs are the currency of that discourse. If I want to refer you to Robert Dunbar’s global warming talk I should be able to link you directly to it. Discussion about the talk should be discoverable on the web by way of that URL. Here’s what shouldn’t have to happen, but currently does:

I heard an interesting talk about global warming by Stanford’s Robert Dunbar. I wonder what you think about it? To listen, make sure you have iTunes installed, and then go to itunes.stanford.edu in a browser. From there, click the link to open iTunes. Then click on Faculty Lectures. Then scan the list for “Is Global Warming Real” or “Robert Dunbar”.

So anyway, after laboriously capturing those feed URLs and posting them to del.icio.us, I turned around and subscribed to them in … wait for it … iTunes. It’s a decent podcatcher, after all, and I’m technology-agnostic. I’ll use anything for its strengths, while working around its weaknesses. The workaround, in this case, was simply to expose the feed URLs, and through them, the individual lecture URLs, to public discourse: linking, tagging, blogging, playlisting.

That is the kind of intellectual activity that Stanford wants to encourage, isn’t it?

iTunes U is thus somewhat at odds with the ease that a lot of social software provides when having conversations across posts, podcasts and other digital flotsam. Sure, that might be a good thing for some people (I know that locking podcasted lectures behind a university-specific interface will ease the concerns of many academics about the intellectual property), but it’s also important for any university podcast system to be linkable and accessible for content that they want to make publicly available (also an important part of good university PR). iTunes U doesn’t cover all our needs, but it can be part of the podcasting solutions. Just not the only part. And, as always, we should be working toward finding/thinking/creating the next step…

Update: Today’s The Age has an article “iTunes offers uni lectures via podcast” but it doesn’t offer much new information, although I think this quote covers the crux of the debate:

Schools and universities have historically been major contributors to Apple’s computer sales. With iTunes U, Apple “is leveraging the ubiquity that we’ve established on campuses with iPods and iTunes,” said Chris Bell, Apple’s director of product marketing for iTunes.

I suspect some universities might not want to feel all that leveraged.

Update 2: Burks Oakley has a great podcast on the ups and downs of iTunes U here. 

Henry E. Schaffer has posted an item called “Online material decreases class attendance” in the Educause blogs.  His intention was to stir debate, so here’s my take:

*Good* lectures will still attract students in a face to face capacity, bad lectures won’t. The technology can’t suddenly make all lectures or lecturers better and, in all fairness, many lecturers only have a crowd in front of them because there’s no other way to access that information. Given the opportunity to sit through 45 or 90 minutes of some lectures, or skim through them as a podcast, I know I’d choose the latter in several cases.

*However*, a good lecture engages the group, often builds a class dynamic, and is both informative and engaging … those lectures will always have good attendance, regardless of which other media the lectures are also available in. The challenge for lecturers is to try and make sure their lectures are as good as they can be and podcasting (or, if we must use the name, coursecasting) forces a level of scrutiny far too many lecturers have managed to avoid for too long. (In my opinion, at least…)

In a nutshell, if having your lectures available as podcasts radidly shrinks your lecture attendence (and you’re not lecturing in a horror spot like 9am on a Monday, or 4pm on a Friday), perhaps it’s time to think about how you give a lecture, rather than trying to blame the technology! (And there endth the rant…) 

Update 2, new voting URL: Voting has commenced! (Please vote! :))

The course blog for “iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture” which I coordinated this semester has been nominated for an Edublog Award under the category of “Best example/case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning“; how flattering for the course, for the students and, naturally, for me! It’s very gratifying considering how much work the students and I put in over the semester. I suspect it’s “case study” value stems from being the first (as far as I’m aware) tertiary course to use podcasts as their major assessment item (and the fact that the whole course is up online for future creatively commons-facilitated reuse far and wide!).

While I’ve yet to explore all the nominees across and the categories, I recognise a few of my favourite blog/ger/s in the lists, so a few pointed shoutouts to:
[X] Edublogs (James Farmer’s wonderful service that brings you, among many other things, this blog; it’s up for “Most innovative edublogging project, service or programme“)
[X] E-learning 2.0 (Stephen Downes on E-learning 2.0 … ’nuff said; “Most influential post, resource or presentation“)
[X] Vlog 3.0 (Adrian Miles was teaching the world to v(l)og long before podcasting became the buzz of 2005! Up for “Best audio and/or visual blog“)

Go and have a look around at the rest of the nominees … there’s many a diamond in that list!

Newsweek has an article “Professor In Your Pocket” which looks at the new technologies allowing university lectures to be podcast (yes, the word can be used as a verb, it’s based on broadcast!). While the article does look at the benefits a little, it dwelsl a lot on the negatives. Some excerpts:

Could ivy-covered lecture halls become as obsolete as the typewriter? This fall, a dozen colleges across the country have introduced a controversial new teaching tool called course casting, aimed at supplementing—and in some cases replacing—large, impersonal lectures. Although it has been around for less than a year, course casting has become as popular as a keg party on homecoming weekend. Students at Purdue University have downloaded 40,000 lectures since the start of the semester—not bad for a school with an enrollment of 38,000. Drexel, Stanford, Duke and American University have begun course-casting programs, too. “So far, we’ve heard mostly positive feedback about it,” says Lynne O’Brien, head of Duke’s Center for Institutional Technology. But critics complain that digital lectures delivered through earphones cut down on the vital interaction between professors and students. And parents, who shell out tens of thousands of dollars for tuition, aren’t convinced that kids who rely on the lectures-to-go are getting their money’s worth.

How many lectures have these people been to? Seminars, workshops, tutorials … that’s the core of interaction … even online discussions and blogs are better than your average lecture! Lectures, while important, still rely on a top-down delivery model. Even creative lecturers stuggle to not just deliver content. Besides which, most studies suggest students start to tune-out after 15-20 minutes (something that might be less problematic with a pause button and quick stretch at 15 minute intervals)!

… some academics worry that much is lost when sophomores scroll between audio files of a philosophy lecture and the latest hit by Franz Ferdinand. Students learn an important skill when they are required to show up for a lecture: creating a schedule and sticking to it. Being in class keeps them in regular contact with professors, which, experts say, is a key to keeping dropout rates low. Lectures, too, force students to focus for long, uninterrupted stretches. Course casting might work, says Lee Knefelkamp, a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University, if a professor is trying to deliver facts and concepts for later regurgitation. “Students can listen to that anywhere.” But a topnotch lecture, says Knefelkamp, “should be provocative, catch you up short and make you think in ways you never have before.” Those kinds of intellectual epiphanies, she says, rarely happen at the laundromat.

If lectures are the only regular contact points, I suspect something might be wrong! I agree a good lecture is a GOOD LECTURE, but flexibility is also extremely important these days.

Even course-casting fans say there are drawbacks. Given the option of not showing up, many students won’t. “We’ve been concerned that it makes it a little too easy not to have the classroom experience,” says Stanford University’s Victoria Szabo. To ensure attendance rates stay high, Stanford professors wait a month before making their lectures available on the Web. Staging can help, too. These days, Purdue criminal-forensics professor David Tate makes sure every one of his live lectures includes key visual components like blood-spatter patterns or bomb-disposal techniques. Students who opt to listen rather than attend, he says, “miss a whole lot.”

Yes, visuals, video and the physical presence of lecturers can be extremely important. That’s why almost no one would ever consider replacing lectures, but rather allowing student the flexibility to re-visit the lecture later, or to hear it if they were sick! At UWA, the iLecture / Lectopia system has been in use recording lectures for years (and cassette tapes before that). The lecture theatres are still full! (Check the research around the iLecture / Lectopia system, and you can see there’s very little dropoff in student numbers!) [Via iLounge]

In a comment on yesterday’s post, Burks Oakley, the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois, pointed out that in his latest podcast produced for his Burks on Learning blog, he did something of a showcase or review of my iGeneration course, focusing on its use of blogs and podcasting. I was extremely flattered on behalf of the course members by the kind words from Burks (and I stress on behalf of the course, since it was the students who brought the vast majority of energy, creativity and critical skill to the course, while I was more like a human signpost to some nifty articles I’ve read!). In his podcast, Burks does raise one important issue which I’ve given a bit more thought to and would like to comment on. From his transcript, Burks says:

One last thought about the iGeneration course, and its emphasis on student posting to such a public environment as a blog. When I shared the iGeneration blog with a few of my colleagues last week, Lanny Arvan, from the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, was very concerned that individual students were identified with this course. In an e-mail note, he wrote: [quote] I think here in Urbana some would find the approach in conflict with FERPA and, beyond identifying the students as a member of the particular class to the rest of the world, there is the issue that Google is the keeper of the content on Blogger.com. One can solve the second issue by having the campus run the blog service, but then there is less of a savings over the CMS. And one can solve both by giving students the ability to post inside the CMS or on the blog, with an opt in for the latter.
[unquote] Lanny is worried that Google is amassing a huge amount of information about individuals and their habits, by people creating blogs on blogger.com and having Google host the blogs on blogspot.com. Maybe he has a point – but until I see differently, I’m going to keep on creating my blogs with Blogger.com and publishing them on Blogspot.com. However, I also note that my colleague, Michael Cheney, who is podcasting for his online class at the University of Illinois at Springfield, also advanced our discussion of the iGeneration blog when he wrote in an e-mail note [quote]
And a follow up concern, for those who do not know Google saves every email message sent through gmail — even if you delete the mail message. The argument is that they use the info for their advertising profiles and content profiles…but at some point privacy issues will become an issue. [unquote]

I completely agree with Lanny Arvan that privacy is one of the biggest possible stumbling blocks in using a public blog as part of a university course. In the case of my iGeneration course, I generally encouraged students to stick with first-names only (after a careful review, I did discover one place where I had accidentally left their full names - which I’ve not corrected).

We used the iLecture/Lectopia system to deliver and store podcasts and since that system has only just been podcast-enabled, following general use, we went with listing full names listed in the “speaker” field because the speaker is generally the lecturer/presenter who is quite happy to be associated with the course they’re lecturing (or, of course, that course, like many, may not be available to the public, only to those enroled in the course). However, the issue of names does become more pressing when students are podcasting - do they want their full names assocaited for future evidence or as part of an ePortfolio (or something similar) or prefer not to have that mp3 file associated with them via google (or any other search engine/portal) for the rest of their lives? In the case of using the iLectures, we can simply set precedent by only listing first names except where students express a desire to list their full names.

(Incidentally, as part of their podcast assignments, students had to get Release Forms signed by anyone, including themselves, who appears in the podcast. These forms explicitly give permission for their voices to appear online, and to be archived or re-used in the future.)

In a broader ethical sense, it’s a tough question. Generally, I’d answer it by asking students to discuss the issue in class. What do they want? (Of course, that depends of knowing you want to ask the question in advance!). In situations like the iGeneration course, I’d prefer to think students can decide themselves - if they want to have their full name associated with their online material from the course, they can sign their assessment, podcast shownotes (and metadata), and seminar readings with their full name; if they’d prefer privacy, they can just use their first name.

As part of a portfolio of their work (or eportfolio), podcasts can be very useful, so students will probably want to take credit. That said, only one of the five podcasters has signed with her full name. However, to keep their options open, since students have access to the course blog, I’m intending to leave that access open indefinitely - they can remove full names at a later time if they desire. Conversely, if they later decide they want to take explicit credit they can add their full names - and since only they (or the course controller if they’re they’re the blog administrator) can change the blog post/shownotes, that leaves the student in charge. That said, it’s probably better to only have first names in the metadata for podcasts as a rule (or if it’s in any way unclear what sutdents want) because changing metadata on a large file can often be a quite painful process.

They’re just some brief thoughts, but I do agree the issue is important. However, from the position of life-long learning, I do think helping students develop their own voice — including their voice online — is an important part of education, and learning to use your full name, and be responsible and accountable for everything you write can certainly assist in encouraging critical self-awareness in students! (And while it’s part of a much longer post another day, the software architecture of the bigs CMSes like WebCT and Blackboard is generally inward-looking, and not really conducive to establishing a public voice, something I’ve written on before).

As to whether Google owns the content of the blogs, the blog content was explicitly placed under a Creative Commons License which is generally thought to legally protect the content of the blogs and allow students and the university to retain whatever ownership that license stipulates. (Creative Commons licenses, incidentally, are a brilliant way to get students talking about the ethics of plaigiarism - they tend to take it more seriously when the discussion begins with their rights to protect or share their content, not someone elses!). Reading over the annoying vague Google Privacy Policy and the additional Blogger elements, I gather that even if they’re amassing huge amounts of data, they can’t do anything with it that explicitly identifies the author without gaining further permission (I think - it’s not really my area of expertise - further comments on this are most welcome!). While I’m sure there’s more to think about regarding public student blogs and podcasts, I think that’ll do for a start! Please post your thoughts!

Links: [Burks' Podcast - 14Mb, Mp3] [Burks' Podcast Transcript] [Burks on Learning Blog]