Impressions Scholarcast

Since switching to Google Reader I now read all my RSS feeds via the ‘All’ view. This presents the entries in all my feeds as though from a single source – the river of news. As I mentioned in a previous post I also read the feed entries in oldest first order.

I was reminded of how useful I find the river of news approach by a blog entry from Frank Arrigo. He tells us that a couple of summer interns have implemented a river of news add-on, Feeds Plus, for the RSS reader built into IE7. Feeds Plus also gives you a river of news for each folder holding your RSS feeds as well as an overall aggregated list.

[Note: spending a relaxing Australia Day at an isolated cottage in the mountains near Dorrigo. It even has free wireless broadband!]

Today I became aware of a possible serious competitor to the excellent del.icio.us bookmark sharing site in the form of Blackboard’s Scholar.com. Although it is possible to have public access to the bookmark collections at Scholar.com the appropriate access is through an institution’s Blackboard site, iLearn in our case. Organised into teaching disciplines Scholar.com promises to be a more useful interface for distributing and sharing bookmarks for our teaching subjects. When and if we get access I will certainly give it try.

That’s not to say that del.icio.us is not very useful for teaching. Last semester I very conveniently collected all the Web 2.0 sites discovered by my students and recorded in their blogs. I used a very specific tag, inft232-063, which other users on del.icio.us are unlikely to use. I then used the standard bookmarklet to quickly record the URL on del.icio.us, added the student name and entered the tag (with autocompletion courtesy of del.icio.us). You can see their list at:

http://del.icio.us/mrees/inft232-063

The Windows Server bloggers point you to a humorous set of videos about how to cure “digital amnesia“. However on a more serious note the Channel 9 video on Windows Home Server (WHS) reveals even more cool features, so much so that a couple of excerpts had to be cut. Because WHS is essentially a slightly modified Windows Server the main feature set of this powerful OS is available. WHS will be open to third-party developers (unlike the Apple phone) and we only guess at the likely applications, but home automation and intelligent personal data services spring immediately to mind. It will be a difficult wait before we can get our fingers on a WHS box!

I know we educators join the librarians in condemning our students’ assumption that Google is only search engine worth using. Of course Google can give valuable search results in many circumstances but Google does require a level of proficiency and skill for the search to be effective.

It was not surprising to hear in a Jon Udell post that some people are willing to pay skilled Google searchers $100 per hour to find key results. This sentiment was echoed in a post by Paul Pival. He, like me, was more interested in the meat of Jon Udell’s post on recording the process of successful searches to teach others.

I am sure Jon Udell’s examples are well known to librarians the world over. It would be tremendously useful if a searchable repository of successful search sequence examples could be built for us all to share. If we could persuade the search engines to allow us to record keyword search sequences, rather than just remembering individual keyword searches, this would greatly aid the creation of the repository. Of course the searcher would need to intervene and mark the start and end of the search sequence and whether the search was successful or not. How about it Google?

With a learning management system such as Blackboard that we have here at Bond it is possible to walk into a lecture theatre empty-handed and conduct a perfect lecture. All would-be printed materials are stored in the Blackboard subject web site (notes, handouts, slides, web links, audio and video files, online demos) and can be projected as needed. New or annotated material can be generated in-lecture as it progresses and saved back to the Blackboard site for later consumption by the students.

What’s missing? Several important interactions and much important information:

1. Annotation and visible gestures: keyboard and mouse are only useful for small annotations and amendments to notes and slides during a lecture. A pen and tablet screen are needed to provide the equivalent freedom of a whiteboard. A tablet PC is needed in each lecture room. A major additional benefit is that the annotations, arrows, underlining, circling and drawing are recorded and can be saved up to the web site.
2. Lecturer’s narrative: this should be available as a podcast on the web site. A wireless microphone and readily available podcast recording and editing software is needed on the PC in each lecture room. The saved podcast can be uploaded to the web site after the lecture for editing and/or playback.
3. Lecture room PC screen video: a video recording of the lecture’s use of the PC screen captures the presentation of the lecture material and is of special benefit when displaying web pages, showing media and demonstrating software. A screencasting software package is needed on each lecture room PC. Indeed such software can combine the lecturer’s narrative as well.
4. Student interaction: this is the most difficult of all. Only if students each wear a microphone can their verbal remarks/questions be captured. Passing around radio mics is an interim solution but will disrupt the class and consume extra time. Of course issuing each student with a remote keypad or clicker device provides a very specialised form of feedback which requires special hardware, software and substantial preparation before the class.

I am hoping to progress at least the second and third aspects in the coming months, and since I currently own a tablet PC I may be in a position to test the first aspect in my next teaching semester.