In March of this year I attended SXSW and tried to focus on presentations and panels with a higher ed focus. The first event and by far the most interesting was Using Twitter to Improve College Student Engagement by Rey Junco.You can listen to his presentation

or view the slides

The gist of Dr. Junco’s presentation was that students were more engaged, as long as it was clear that Twitter was an important aspect of the class. Dr. Junco presented the findings of a study conducted with colleagues to substantiate this statement. The study had faculty use Twitter for announcements, to have students organize study groups, to have students ask the professor questions, and discuss a class reading. The class had a twitter account and each student had an account. Ning was used as a control. The stats gathered from pre- and post-engagement surveys indicate that the students felt more engaged and actually were more engaged. Also of interest was the fact that the Twitter group had a .5 higher mean GPA.

Interestingly, in a larger class of 300 with no control and where students self-selected to use Twitter, were not encouraged, and where the instructor never really used Twitter or the class hashtag, the students claimed to feel more engaged but showed no statistical evidence of being more engaged.

The take aways for me were:

• Faculty should be interacting with students on Twitter.
• Course content must be integrated with Twitter for engagement to be increased.
• Faculty should encourage students to use Twitter to collaborate.

As with any technology, if the faculty member isn’t invested in using it then there is a very good chance that the technology will not benefit the students or help meet the learning goals.

I also had a chance to meet Jim Groom, Andrea and Ron Rennick, Andy Peatling, Matt Mullenweg, and many others. Jim and I had a chance to talk over some yummy pizza and some drinks. Our views on WPMU, the direction of personal publishing, and education in general seem to be very close. We talked a little about the idea of setting up a multi-school WPMU, possibly with the help of a grant. Our thinking is that this might cut down maintenance and would give us an opportunity to connect students and faculty at the participating institutions in a way that cannot be done currently. This is kind of sketchy, but I really want to explore this some more with Jim.

I also had a thought while attending all of these presentations. I saw so many people with their laptops open and typing away. I’d say about 90% of some of the audiences had their laptops open. Of those 90% it seemed that about 10% were taking notes/tweeting notes. The rest seemed to be checking e-mail, surfing, etc. This struck me as a little odd. I took my laptop but all my notes were written on paper. I also thought it was interesting that Jason Alley of Lafayette was taking paper notes as well. I just wondered what people were getting out of surfing while sitting in a session. I think this is the fear that some of our faculty have when we mention laptop programs.

This week’s webinar series was all about SEO and inbound marketing. The event was organized by Hubspot and featured a series of well-respected authorities on SEO and marketing. A lot of attention was payed to increasing your rank in Google, extending the reach of your content, and making the proper use of social media in marketing yourself. It was very interesting stuff to listen to as I completed my various daily quests. Many of the things they mentioned I knew, but there were several things I took away that I think will prove useful in the coming months as I work on the Voices site. Who knows I may have even passed their exam so I will be certified in inbound marketing.

Also in the so far, so good category is NMC 2009. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I have been really happy with the sessions I have attended. Kathy Sierra’s talk this morning was excellent and I’ll probably have a separate post about it in the near future. The Google Earth session gave me some great ideas for Katie and Peter’s World History Museum project, the Screencasting session had a few cool tricks, and the session by the CSUMB faculty was great. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

In addition to this I’ll be going to the Moodle users meeting at Smith College next week and to the NMC conference in Monterey a week or two later. I’m looking forward to these opportunities to network and learn. The sad part is that the two events cut out about 8 days from the already limited time I have (really starting to hate silly ten month contract) to get all of this stuff done. I’ll just have to muddle through as best as I can.

Minimizing Legal Risks in Digitization Projects

• Copyright
• Some things to keep in mind: ADA, NAGPRA, HIPAA, Rights of Publicity, Deeds of Gift
• Privacy, Censorship, and Pornography

PCLED

• Physical
• Copyright (applies to all)
• License (applies to signing parties)
• Encryption (DRM, passwords)
• DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act-illegal to tamper with technological protection measures)
• Exceptions
  • The big one is the exception allowing film and media studies professors to break protection on DVDs

It appears that before we digitize the IS projects we must make sure that the Catalogue has always said that the College can do whatever it wants with the ISs. If it has not, then we must contact the authors or the heirs to get permission. We should have students sign a non-exclusive perpetual license with the College. This might be put in the Catalogue and made very explicit to the students. Or we could have the students sign something just for IS.

We should check to see if we are insured possibly “advertising injury” against copyright infringement. Use of disclaimers and there are examples at http://memory.loc.gov and a take-down policy. Things which are not subject to copyright: Facts, Recipes, Ideas, Dedicated Work, Government Work, Expired. Copyright metro will guide you through the use of media in the classroom. TEACH allows the use of something like Moodle for video and audio delivery.

Anyway, I am in Pamona (a very nice area with mountains all around) at a NITLE sponsored workshop on copyright. I ran into Peter and Eric from the ITLAC conference in 2005 and have had dinner. The discussions start tomorrow but I’ve already got a lot out of it in the form of handouts which lead to the Copyright Information Center. This is a treasure trove of all things copyright. The two most useful documents so far appear to be the

• Public Domain Chart
• Fair Use Checklist

but there are a lot of other interesting looking things. There is also the flow chart for determining if permission is required (adapted with permission of Mary Minow).

I look forward to the discussions tomorrow.

Two references were given for information on Podcasting:

• http://web.mac.com/ipodcentral/iWeb/
• http://www.apple.com/education/solutions/podcasting/

The first gives some tools and examples of educational Podcasts.

The majority of the session focused on using Garageband 3 to produce an enhanced Podcast. An enhanced Podcast is one which contains video or stills. Garageband 3 makes it very easy to create enhanced Podcasts, but you can only have a single video or stills. You cannot have both stills and video in an enhanced Podcast created with Garageband 3 (or at least I haven’t figured out how to do it).

I had one idea for using enhanced Podcasts with our education department. Now they have a reading buddy. Each college student is paired with a third grader and they trade a paper book back and forth. The elementary students color, draw, and write in the journal and the college students respond in kind. I thought that at the end of the year it might be interesting to have the buddies meet face-to-face and turn the book into an enhanced Podcast by scanning the pages and putting them in as stills. Each person could record what they had written and the students would have something they could share with relatives far away. It would also help students identify errors in their writing as it is often easier to spot an error when listening to what you wrote.

The other idea that came out of the session was the OSU horticulture department‘s introduction of blogging to students. They use a six step approach for WordPress:

1. Find a story and develop an abstract and post it
2. Same as 1 but also put in an in-line image
3. Same as 2 but put in an audio file
4. Same as 3 but use audio blogger (might use Skype?) to have them include their own audio
5. Do everything in 4 but pick your own story idea
6. Use Joomla to create a Web site and incorporate the content in the blogs

I am going to try to modify this and encourage Faculty to take a similar approach when incorporating blogs into their courses. Peter’s class was just sort of thrown in with a sink-or-swim approach, but the course is really all about technology and this approach is kind of appropriate.

The last part was about hosting, but we have that kind of worked out so I didn’t pay too much attention.

Update: Got another link from our Apple rep

• http://www.apple.com/education/resources/podcastingvideos/