Tama’s eLearning Blog

JD Lasica points to an interesting new report from the US National School Boards Association entitled Creating & Connecting /Research and Guidelines on Online Social - and Educational - Networking. The report focusing on ‘tweens’ and teens, and has some really important notes about the role of social networking in forming learning communities and even casual connections between online presence and learning.

As this graph shows, more than half US tweens and teens have discussed education in online social networking:

Likewise, many tweens and teens are not just discussing and downloading, but also creating, uploading and participating in creative projects:

Again we are reminded that education in the twenty-first century has to think about the digital literacies of students and how to allow those literacies to develop in our curricula.

Typos can really ruin almost anything if you let them.  As they say, a picture paints a thousand words …

As more and more digital videos appear in university and secondary education, finding creative ways to interact with this media is increasingly important. One of the more difficult challenges is translating some of the textual techniques for criticism and engagement into comparable forms for digital video. Being able to annotate video is one thing I’ve always wanted to be able to do quickly and simply without having to resort to using a full-blown video editor. Now, thanks to the mass of videos on YouTube and similar flash-based services, a new option has appeared: BubblePLY.

Using a very simply interface, quick text annotations can be added to any flash-based videos, including those on YouTube, MySpace and Google Video. Check out an example here. The video quality isn’t stunning but for quick projects with minimal training and fuss, I think this could prove a very useful tool indeed!

[Via Jo]

James pointed out today that Higher Ed Blog Con is well under way. All the papers and talks are being posted online throughout April and there are some fantastic things coming up. The first day had a great talk from Mark E. Ott called “Giving the students what they want: Short, to-the-point e-lectures” which compares screencasts and podcasts and looks at the utlity of both (the paper also led me to Mark’s really interested educational technology blog “My Educational Diatribe” which I shall be reading from now on.)

Also of great interest given my podcasting inclinations was a talk by Colette Vogele and Elizabeth Townsend Gard entitled “Legal issues in podcasting the traditional classroom“. Their abstract:

Colette Vogele and Elizabeth Townsend Gard will explore the legal aspects of podcasting in teaching and higher education. Colette is the author of the new Podcasting Legal Guide (soon to be available at Creative Commons and the Center for Internet and Society) and Elizabeth focuses her research on copyright in an academic environment. Colette will explain legal basics surrounding podcasting, and Elizabeth will focus on the higher education environment, particularly podcasting the traditional classroom. The presentation will address copyright, trademark, and right of publicity/privacy questions that arise in the context of podcasting in the teaching scenario. Copyright questions have to do primarily with third-party materials that are used in the podcast, and the rights under which the podcasting teacher wishes to distribute her content. Traditional licensing, Creative Commons licensing, and public domain dedications would be addressed. Questions about ownership of the podcast content (e.g., the institution vs. the teacher?) would also be discussed. Elizabeth will focus the second part on “What questions should we ask when we podcast the traditional classroom?” This will look at at the specifics of Section 110 of the Copyright Act , which includes both exceptions to using copyrighted materials in the traditional face-to-face classroom teaching and the additional recent exceptions added with the TEACH Act. How does podcasting change classroom choices? What choices do podcasters have when podcasting the classroom? This part will also look at the additional issues of ownership of the podcasted lecture and student work that is podcasted.

You can download the entire presentation (with both .mov files and the powerpoint slides) and I recommend you do as the two offer a great primer on thinking through the legalities of podcasting in academia.

I suspect the entire Higher Ed Blog Con will end up being a fantastic resource for those thinking and blogs, podcasts, screencasts and the like and I’m looking forward to the rest of the papers.

Professor “Free Culture”, Lawrence Lessig always gives a powerful and straight-forward arguement when addressing the import legal questions surrounding digital culture. Lessig has been a champion of Google’s Print/Book Search as fair use, and has put together a wonderful (if rather large) quicktime movie (mp4) build using a recent presentation that asked the question: Is Google Book Search Fair Use?
Due to its size you can only download the presentation via bittorrent, but I strongly encourage you so; this is a concise argument about why Google Book Search matters and why it should be supported, not just for Google’s sake, but for the sake of users across the board in our digital culture. Read more at Lessig’s blog.

Oh, and Lessig is also using this presentation as an experiment in ways of putting presentations together … I think it works admirably!

Update: Leon Felipe Sanchez has posted several smaller versions of Lessig’s presentation, including one optimised for the Video iPod and a much smaller download (for those on dialup, especially) of 320×240 (13.5 MB).

EdTech UK points to Feedburner’s RSS & Blogs report which tells an interesting tale, but this telling image reveals most of it:

And I’m swimming head-deep in it! :) 

I just discovered the wonderful Warning Label Generator. While there are occasionally excusable reasons, I’d love to post this as the first slide in my powerpoint presentations … It might be a bit cruel, humour is the best way to make a point sometimes, so I suspect the generator could come in very handy for making some quite poignant images!

Want to find your edubloggers around the world? Then check out the Frappr! powered EduBloggers Map …

You might even be able to find me. :)