Mark Williams

Learning Technologist, living in Penryn UK

[mark-a-williams]

On demand video streaming tools

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen the emergence and rise of two technology tools that are competing to win us over with real-time, on-demand, video streaming/broadcast with a social media twist. Meerkat and Periscope offer the ability for mobile users to broadcast and view live video from all over the globe with the added function of connecting with other viewers using Twitter.

Both apps do similar things, but at the time of writing only Meerkat is available on Android as well as iOS, so we’ll be looking at the experience of Meerkat to begin with.

Creating a new live stream on Meerkat will present you with a screen like this:

At the top you see user and location details, across the video you see message details and at the bottom you have a few controls; post a message, switch on the flash, flip the camera and stop the stream.

When you start a new stream, it will post a link to your Twitter feed and then when you make any comments you have the choice for them to appear just in the app, but also on your Twitter feed:

Whereas previously, live video streaming apps have been designed around the Desktop use (Skype, Hangouts), Meerkat and Periscope are specifically focusing on the mobile experience, by having full screen video and a commenting overlay with just a few buttons for interaction.

Potential Learning and Teaching Applications

I’ve written before about DIY Lecture Capture and these new apps offer similar possibilities for mobile users. With the addition of a Swivl for example, you could stream a live session and have an automated camera operator following you around the room. You could use this for CPD in the form of a lesson observation, have colleagues comment live with their thoughts/feedback.

Live streaming might also be great for field trips. You could connect with other staff/students and potential students in real time and learners could choose to document the video through Twitter/Storify and discuss this when back on campus.

These examples are off the top of my head and there will be educational practitioners already putting this technology to use, so if you have an idea or learning activity that might benefit from  on-demand streaming, get in touch with the team.

[mark-a-williams]

Hardware to support community groups

In a previous post for University Of The Village, I looked at some emerging web technologies that support community engagement, with a focus on user experience (UX). Many people will have their own devices (laptops/phones/tablets) that they want to use to connect, but larger groups may need to consider additional audio/video solutions to facilitate community learning.

These technologies need to be easy to setup, use and support with a gentle learning curve, that facilitates the community without needing expansive technical knowledge. Cost is also a significant factor for community initiatives, so where possible, it’s preferable to use open source technology and avoid ‘vendor lock in’, meaning that you have to keep purchasing technology from the same supplier to be compatible with other systems/devices you have.

For those that want an out-of-the box solution, Google’s offerings of the Chromebox and Chromebook offer relatively affordable ways to connect. The operating system updates automatically and using modern web tools as described previously, there is no need to install any software or worry about security updates. Most current laptops include an HD camera, but you will need to purchase one for the Chromebox, most Logitech cameras will work, with the C310 being fairly inexpensive. I’ve written about my experience with the Dell Chromebook 11 before, it’s a really useful and modern apporach to the traditional laptop.

For the more adventurous, you could look at pairing up a small format computer like the Utilite, with a  Pico Air projector . It’s the size of a smart phone and would mean you could take your technology with you in your pocket. You can still use a modern web browser and video technologies to communicate and could set up practically anywhere with a good wifi connection and a surface to project on to. Again you would need a camera like the C310, but this method might open up new opportunities for learning.

[mark-a-williams]

Web technologies that support communities

With the recent University Of The Village project in mind, I thought I would post up some information about the range of modern video chat technologies and community forums that are available to use for free and with a minimum of fuss to setup.

Video chat

Skype has been around since 2003 and as such is the tool that people are most familiar with, but it’s age also means that inherent problems like connectivity, usability and working across multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, iOS) haven’t been addressed at the same rate as the technology moving forwards.

Many current solutions make use of in browser technology which mitigates these issues and mean that the user experience (UX) is consistent for all. So rather than having to download an app, you can go to a web adress and perform all the same functions of Skype, without having to install anything or have to remember passwords, as you don’t even need an account to use them.

Two examples of this are appear.in and room.co, which both offer the ability to quickly set up a chat room without needing to setup an account. They both have similar funtionality, so I would reccomend trying them out and going with the one that feels best.

Google Hangouts should also be mentioned here, as it also allows you to use modern web video technology. One person will need a Google+ Account to initiate the Hangout, but you can invite other people in without them needing to sign up for anything. This has the added benefits of being tied in to the wider Google ecosystem, so you can make use of things like Youtube for easily capturing and instantly uploading your video conversations, and Google+ Communities that lets you form discussions and schedule video chat events (more on that here), which leads nicely on to...

Community Tools

We’ve recently been making use of Tumblr for the University Of The Village Project; it offers a simple sign up process, has a relatively gentle learning curve, is easy to configure and update, for those interested in the design aspect as it has a built in HTML/CSS editor. Blogging behemoths like Wordpress are still popular, as again it’s been around for a long time and offers huge customisation and acts as a Content Management System (CMS), meaning it can be used for applications weider than just blogging. This also has it’s downside, it makes Wordpress overbloated and hard to manage, which in turn can lead to security holes and open it up to attack.

Other blogging tools also exist and I have written about these elsewehere, but it’s also worth returning to Google+ Communities which offers a more integrated solution. You’ll need a google account to start, but the information you post can be open access if you wish. 

Google+ Communities allow you to host discussions and in a similar way to tumblr, post links, images and also polls. It has the advantage of integrating with Hangouts, so you can set a date for a community event and link to a live video feed that people can add to their online calendar and connect with.

If you want a simple discussion forum, you might also look at Disqus, which is used widely across the web on blogs like Tumblr, but also with online national newspapers. You can log in with popular tools like Twitter and it means that your comments across websites that use Disqus are all stored in one central place. Another modern take on the web forum, Discourse has become very popular recently and particularly in online education. It has a more social feel and has useful tools like being able to ‘vote up’ a discussion.

These tools are just a few places to start, but they easily faciliate ongoing discussion within the community with the minimum of effort, the maximum user experience and little or no financial commitment other than a device to use them on. 

In another post, I’ll be looking at a range of low cost devices that support video/audio connection.

[teamdigitallearning]

A new breed of online collaborative tools

Though I would advocate face to face meeting in physical space to help form supportive Communities Of Practice (Lave & Wenger), I’ve been thinking about how these communities can easily move in and out of online/virtual space and that through development of technology there seems to be less and less distinction between the two. I communicate with colleagues across the globe in the same virtual space as I do with the person on the opposite desk and I use similar tools in personal and professional space. On the back of these thoughts, I thought I would post up a few emerging platforms that facilitate continuing the discussion and would be appropriate tools to apply to the SAMR model of technology adoption in learning and teaching.

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[teamdigitallearning]

FOTE 2014

The 6th Annual Future of Technology in Education Conference, hosted at University of London provided  the ET team with an opportunity to connect with other learning and IT professionals working in Higher Education. Themes centred around Women In Technology, Co-Creation in Learning, Collaboration between ET and IT and Digital Learners.

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[teamdigitallearning]

Educational Technology Trends for 2015

Season’s greetings one and all. As the Ed. tech team finish the washing up and recycle the wrapping paper (providing we’ve all been good this year), we take a little time out to reflect upon last year and predict what’s on the way for Educational Technology in 2015.

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[teamdigitallearning]

Opportunities for Ed. Tech CPD in 2015

One of the fundamental affordances of web technology is the ability to connect with content at a time and in a place convenient to us and there are a wealth of online opportunities to learn more about how technology can support learning and teaching. Here’s an introduction to some of our favourites and some ideas for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in incorporating Educational Technology into teaching practice.

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[teamdigitallearning]

A Lens On...

Feedback

In this series, the Educational Technology team will be providing an insight into existing practice using technology for learning and teaching at Falmouth University and also at projects being undertaken within the wider HE sector.Our first installment looks at the process of Feedback.

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[teamdigitallearning]

Open Source Tools that support a Digital Taxonomy for Learning and Teaching

image by opensource.com

How Open Source supports Education

The Open Source movement grew out of the frustrations users have in proprietary hardware and software; technologies that enable barriers to use and models of development that alienate the user. Eric Raymond uses the metaphor of the Cathedral and the Bazaar to talk about these opposing models of software development. In the Cathedral model there is top down control on the design and the implementation of the project (an analogy to the building of cathedrals in the middle ages). The project is unveiled once built, whereas the bazaar model is much more informal, messy, open and relies on community participation. Open Education and Open Educational Resources share a similar ethos with Open Source with a focus on sharing and accessibility to learning.

A brief history of Bloom’s taxonomy for learning

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist developed a taxonomy of Educational Objectives, proposing that  that learning fits into one of three psychological domains; Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor and that learning objectives can be designed around these. Fast-forward to 2001 and student of Bloom Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, revised the taxonomy to include the use of verbs rather than nouns for the categories within the cognitive domain and rearranging it as a progression from ‘lower order thinking skills’’ to ‘higher order thinking skills’:

So this…                                              Becomes:

Creating a Digital taxonomy

On the Edorigami Wiki, Andrew Churches documents an update to Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy that accounts for the “new behaviours, actions and learning opportunities emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous”. This revision provides further granularity and suggests a taxonomy based upon the opportunities that technology provides:

The Tools

Within the educational institution, we are often prescribed proprietary solutions to work with, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, but there are a range of free and open source alternatives that help develop transferable skills and promote sharing and collaborating. So with this and Bloom’s in mind, here’s a freely available collaborative list of tools that support a taxonomy of learning and teaching verbs. Feel free to use, add to, comment upon and vote for your favourites.

[mark-a-williams]

Password Managers

For those of you who are tired of having to remember the passwords of all the websites you use, there are online and downloadable password managers that make life a bit easier. I use MITRO, which encrypts password data and stores it for you. When you visit a website you are then prompted to click a button to log in with your stored password and you can also give groups access to your websites, without handing over the password.

If you aren't happy entrusting the storage of your passwords to a third party, you can also download KeePass which works on most devices/operating systems, or if you are on a Mac and use the Mac's built in web browser, Safari you can store paswords in the Mac/iCloud Keychain. Here's a list of password managers that gives a bit more detail about the services they provide.

[mark-a-williams]

[mark-a-williams]

Analysis of University Of The Village - Week 4

Over the past week, whilst we haven't had an online session, people are still visting and interacting with the UOTV Tumblr site. As the image below shows, the site’s home page is where most of our visitors have began their journey into UOTV (shown in green), some continuing to our 'Portscatho' and 'Resources' areas and some dissapearing off to other websites or not leaving the home page (shown in red).

Other interesting stats this week is that our new visitors to the site are using the Firefox web browser on Windows and Linux operating systems, though Apple Macintosh continues to be the most popular among users. If you have your own website or blog, it's often worth thinking about the types of computer and internet browsers that your visitors are using to access your content and designing it with them in mind. For example, Microsoft's familiar Internet Explorer browser accounted for almost 30% browser usage in 2010, but this has been far outstripped by more modern and up to date browsers, such as Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox and now IE accounts for only 7.8% of usage, mainly because other browser's make use of Open Source technologies and are available for mobile devices like phones and tablets.

[caseybloomquist]

Day 108 #create365 - Physics Animated

For this next set I am going to focus on making animations of physics concepts — today: wavelength dependent index of refraction… a.k.a dispersion!

My background is rooted in math and physics and I also work as a math/physics tutor, so I’ve often though about animated examples in textbooks etc. Beyond animations of concepts, having interactive examples would be really helpful for students trying to learn and understand the concept.

While this is only a GIF, another piece of this project will be to get up and running in p5.js to create and post interactive sketches. I tried to port this one into processing.js quickly but, surprise, it didn’t like it. Rather than spending a ridiculous amount of time troubleshooting that, I am going to push forward with p5.js. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post them on Tumblr, but if I can’t, I’ll host them somewhere else and provide links.

[mark-a-williams]

Chromebooks - Foiled by Paper

I could have used webprint this morning, but I don't know the address and by the time the IT helpdesk get back to me the deadline will have long passed. So I'm back to Mac as I have the driver installed on here.

I also need to remotely connect to some windows servers and stuff today and I'd have to install Chrome Remote Desktop on them anyway to access them from the CB.

Aside from that, the Chromebook is excellent to use and can totally replaced my Apple catalogue of stuff at work and at home. Google have done what MS and Apple are trying to do and as is there way made it cheap and accessible, providing you provide them with your data. This article gives a better overview of the Chromebook market than I can here, but I can comment from an educational perspective.

Sales for the Dell Chromebook 11 have gone through the roof and at £180 it's not hard to see why. In the laptop world it's competing against a lower price bracket of £400 and in the tablet world, the iPad at £500 and MS Surface at £850. A course at Falmouth recently bought a load of the cheapest tablets they could find to use for written work. These tablets were brick heavy and had such a poor resolution that you couldn't read from the screen and you'd end up with RSI if you used them to type in a lecture. Chromebooks would be a valid alternative, particularly for our writing courses and Google Apps For Education would provide a safe environment in which to work in. There are detractors to use of laptops in the learning environment, with teachers citing disengagement as a result of online detractions like email or social media, but designing learning activities that encourage critical engagement and learning through technology will help develop digital literacies for students and teaching practitioners alike.

As an addendum, I've just discovered you get 100Gb Drive storage free for 2 years when you buy a Chromebook, so that could be useful for students who need to store non-google (google docs and photos above 2048x2048 take up room) items like video and audio.

[mark-a-williams]

Learning Technologists Forum

Organised by JISC Regional Support Centre for the South West, yesterday was a fantastic opportunity to meet fellow Technologists and colleagues working and supporting learning and teaching.

Representing Falmouth University, Cornwall and Higher Education at the event, Amy Sampson and I gained a great insight into and provided feedback on the creative implementation of some inspirational learning technology projects.

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[mark-a-williams]

Chromebooks - Creating resources in the cloud

I connected up my MacBookPro via Chrome Remote Desktop yesterday and it reminded me of a couple of work things that I haven't tried yet on the Chromebook, but I already use Google Drive for. It's worth mentioning as this post from Codestarter talks about the process of dual booting into Ubuntu/edubuntu or some such flavour of Linux  to give kids the tools they need for coding projects. I think this is an excellent and affordable way to get people working with code, but there are also ways in which the cloud already facilitates this and I thought I'd share a coupleof tools  that allow you to do that:

Editey allows you to edit webpages hosted in google drive, it has a couple of cousins that focus specifically on HTMl and Javascript

Google Drive hosted sites allow you to stick web content in a public folder and access on the web. I use a folder called htdocs in the same way I would on a webserver and make this public, it's where I host reveal.js presentations like this:

Finally, screen capture is quite important for my work, both for off-the-cuff 'help' videos and for learning resources. I normally use Quicktime for this on the mac, but there are a range of alternatives in Chrome. I've talked about WeVideo before, but Snagit also facilitates this and once you've created your file, you can always take it to CloudConvert to make it web accessible in open formats like WebM or OGG.

So  whilst i'm not doing this stuff this week, I thought it worth adding to this series.

[mark-a-williams]

Chromebooks - Laptops are the new tablets

The Google+ Photo integration is excellent and the ability to just plug an SD card into the slot and it upload and categorise your photos is great. This sort of thing would send the MacBook into screaming, aircraft taking off noise mode as it tried to cope with megabytes of external files.

A couple of things take getting used to when switching from Mac; the position of the @ or ", using ctrl rather than command and not using "shift+cmd+4" for screengrabs, which it seems I do loads of. But the community is on hand with various keyboard shortcuts to help you through this. In fact, the experience is much nicer. Grab a screen shot, it saves to your internal storage and you get a notification asking if you want to view, which takes you to your files area or copy to clipboard.

The other thing I wanted to get my head around was how to remote into my Mac Mini at home as I use it as a Media Centre. I normally use Remote Mouse on the iPad, but the Chromebook has replaced the iPad in all ways this week (watching TV in bed, recipe finder, dual screen, social media), I haven't even picked it up. Interestingly, some schools are also ditching the Apple tablet in favour of the inexpensive notebook and in terms of note taking and quick access to familiar resources through the browser, I can see why that would be a preferred option.

On the Mac I use whatever implementation of Apple Remote Desktop is current. Lo and behold, there's an app for that. Chrome Remoe Desktop is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and also has an Android client that lets you view and control your machines remotely from the browser. And... it does what it says on the tin.

Once you have the application/extension installed on your remote machine, you generate a 6 digit key that allows a Google account access. It's no where near as nice as ARD was for management and deployment, but it's not aimed directly at Administrators. It would be a useful tool for remote management on the fly though and I could see this being useful within the University for helpdesk teams.

So that's my main use this week. In summary:

+ Google Apps integration - Photos, Hangouts + Remote Desktop + Ease of use with multiple accounts + Speed and size + Replaced iPad

- Two finger second button mouse click (infuriating when editing documents) - Chrome updates break functionality , for me this was in mouse clicks in Hangouts. Had to reinstall the Chrome Extension to get it to work. - Bluetooth and Wifi dropouts. Not sure if this is hardware related and which hardware (Dell Chromebook or Apple Mouse and Keyboard)

Nothing too concerning though, at least I don't have to delve into system files to rollback official updates as long suffering Windows users will.