RSC Wales Teaching and Learning Blog » elearning

Esther Barrett’s Blog – digital storytelling

Esther Barrett — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 23:21:42 +0000

What I found out about the difference between Digital Storytelling and telling stories using technology…

Are You Taking Notes?

Paul Richardson — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:48:37 +0000

“Adios, theory!” wrote Charles Darwin, in the margins of a book he owned, referring to the impact which that section of text could have on his own theory of evolution. Fortunately for us, the theory survives, and so does the insight this note gives us. This is just one example from a rich pattern of annotations scribbled into the margins of practically every book which he owned. The collection is currently being digitised, and much of it is now available online, both in the form of transcriptions and images of the original (rather challenging) handwriting. This enables scholars to follow the development of Darwin’s thinking throughout his life. See

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary for more information and a link to this collection. This was also covered in ‘The Material World’ on BBC Radio 4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011zzhq

While this resource is fascinating in its own right, it also set me thinking about the value of note taking in general. If Darwin did it in such a comprehensive manner, it’s probably quite a good idea, isn’t it? Donald Clark raised this question in his ‘Plan B’ blog recently. “Note taking increases learning, results in deeper learning and leads to further learning”, Donald tells us, and I agree with him. How better to make sure that you have an understanding of what is said than by taking a note – to quote, comment on, evaluate, or to disagree with the speaker. All of these show evidence of processing what is being said, which is a prerequisite to learning.

I sometimes fail to take notes, and I nearly always regret that. However, there is one thing I have learned never to say when I am giving a presentation: “Don’t worry about taking notes, it is all in The Powerpoint”. What the speaker says may perhaps be in there, but what the listener is thinking can never be…

Improve your Videos in 4 Easy Steps

Justin Spooner — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:14:27 +0000

This advice from JISC Digital Media about ways to improve your videos is so useful that we decided to post it on our blog. For more information about the advice, guidance and services that they provide please visit http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

Improve your Videos in 4 Easy Steps

Often the difference between’ acceptable’ and ‘rather good’ is quite small. This, in my experience is certainly the case with amateur videos. I’ve seen a lot of self-made videos, particularly in the world of education, and again and again the same problems keep cropping up, problems which are actually very easy to rectify.

Here are my top 4. Pay attention to these and you will immediately see an improvement in the materials you produce on video.

1) Bad Lighting

The advent of autoexposure systems on camera and camcorders may have simplified the process of getting a properly exposed image but it hasn’t eliminated the need for user involvement. If you still believe that you can simply point your camcorder at a subject and it will produce lovely videos, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise.

The problem is simply this: the camera doesn’t know what the subject of your video is: is it the tree on the right? The picture hanging on the wall in the top of frame? Or perhaps the person standing slightly left of centre. The camcorder will use some sort of algorithm to come up with an exposure that will work in many circumstances, but it will rarely be perfect and will often be awful.

So how can you help your camcorder to calculate better exposures? Here are a few tips.

· Make sure there’s some light falling on your subject, preferably from the front (i.e. from your side of the subject) and a bit to one side. If the illumination comes from a ceiling light, it should be behind you and to one side. This applies to sunlight as well – but beware of squinting subjects.

· If you can’t get good lighting of your subject in the current location, move to a new one! Even if you can get good lighting in your location, be prepared to move both yourself and your subject around to find the best light.

· People tend to have their desks next to the window whenever possible. Unfortunately, this means that when you shoot someone at your desk it’s very likely that there’ll be a window behind them. If this is the case, do not shoot them at their desk – or at least try to find an angle where the window isn’t behind them, because otherwise you are guaranteed to have a bad image.

2) Shaky camera

This is perhaps the most common problem with amateur videos. Oddly, it is also the most easily corrected. How? Simple: get a tripod and use it religiously. It is not possible to hand-hold a camcorder of any size for a significant length of time without introducing some sort of shake or wobble into the image. This applies to pocket camcorders as well, because it is not the weight of the camcorder that’s the problem but rather the length of time you have to hold it still.

When you get a tripod, make sure it is a video tripod, not one for a stills camera. The difference is in the tripod head: a proper video head will permit smooth camera motion (panning left and right and tilting up and down), something which is not possible on a stills tripod.

There’s really no excuse for not using a tripod, not even expense. It is possible to get little desktop tripods (not the best solution but still better than hand-holding) for as little as £3.

3) Bad sound

In order to get a good picture we want to have the camera far enough away from the subject to see them. In order to get good sound we want to have the microphone very close to the subject’s mouth. So what do we do if the microphone is built into the camcorder? Simple: we get either bad sound or a bad picture – and picture unfortunately tends to trump sound.

This is unfortunate because the sound quality of the video is usually more important than picture quality, particularly when making educational resources. Is there a solution to this seemingly intractable problem?

The best solution is to use an external microphone such as a lapel mic. Even the cheapest such mic will give results significantly better than a built-in mic. We can then get excellent sound without compromising on picture quality. There are camcorders available at all price ranges which take external mics: make this a requirement when purchasing one.

Failing this, it is necessary to find a location which can at least partially make up for the shortcomings of the built-in mic. Try to shoot your video in a room which is not only quiet but also not too bright acoustically. The less noise there is on the audio part of your recording, the better the sounds you want will come out.

4) No editing

Even a tiny amount of editing can improve the look of your video immensely. There are numerous free editing systems available nowadays which can provide you the tools to perform basic editing, and even more sophisticated free systems are beginning to appear.

The most basic type of editing is called topping and tailing. Not surprisingly, this consists of removing the bits and the beginning and the end which you don’t need.

If you want to get a bit more sophisticated than that you might edit further to ’clean up’ the video: to remove mistakes, pauses and sections irrelevant to the intended purpose of the video. In addition it is possible to import slides into much simple editing software. These can then be inserted where appropriate in the video. Not only will the quality of the slides be better than if the projected slides were shot with the camcorder, they can also be used to hide edits made during the clean up.

JISC Digital Media is a JISC Advance service which provides advice about anything having to do with digital media. All of our advice including the helpdesk, our extensive library of documents and more is completely free to any FE or HE institution in the UK.

Living in the cloud

Esther Barrett — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:53:13 +0000

JISC RSC Wales’ Esther Barrett describes her experiences using iGoogle and how she has at last given up her paper diary! About time too…

Web tools, the ever changing landscape

Justin Spooner — Mon, 16 May 2011 10:18:41 +0000

At the RSC we are regularly pointing out web based tools that can be used to enhance teaching and learning. A lot of sites and tools on the internet are available for free, some of them charge for an enhanced version with more features and facilities but for obvious reasons we try to focus on the free ones.

With the recent news that the social bookmarking site Delicious and the video communications tool Skype have just been sold to other organisations it’s important to look at what can happen to services on the web that we are relying on for day to day activities.
In the above cases we aren’t likely to see too much in the way of change in the near future, Yahoo are in the process of transferring Delicious to AVOS (set up by the founders of YouTube) and are currently asking Delicious users for permission to transfer their details to the new owners. AVOS haven’t revealed their plans for Delicious yet but they say it’ll be business as usual for a while as they work on enhancements for the service. For enhancements I read “finding a way to make money from the service”, something that Yahoo didn’t really manage to do. I don’t expect Delicious to become a subscription based service but I do think that some sort of link to advertising or statistics gathering system is in the pipeline.

In my opinion the purchase of Skype by Microsoft is a very interesting development, Microsoft and Skype both have a huge user base and there are many exciting possibilities ahead for the service, as it gets integrated into more devices like MS Windows based smartphones and tablets. Imagine Skype running on an Xbox 360 with their Kinect system, Skype would be able to recognise the user that walked into the room, log them into their account and enable them to video conference from their home, office or classroom. The current version of Skype is also available on many more platforms and devices than just Windows based ones (Linux, Apple, i-Phone, Android) and must be one of the most widespread cross platform communication applications available.

Of course it isn’t all good news, some web based services just disappear or become so useful that they are bought by another company and become a subscription only service. The model that a lot of these new technologies works on relies on their success and popularity, they need to have a large user base to have value so they are funded by venture capitalist organisations, developed, and often plan to run at a financial loss for a number of years to allow this to happen.

We have to bear these issues in mind when we are planning to deploy services that rely on web based tools, what will happen if they disappear, start charging or increase their prices? In many cases the changes will benefit the users but if a tool is discontinued or becomes too expensive how will that affect your service and your learners?

Blogging about blogging (3 tips before I go …)

Helen Hodges — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:02:54 +0000

I was talking about starting a blog with a soon-to-be-colleague earlier this week and it made me think back to two and a half years ago when I first started blogging … or as I described it to them, was dragged kicking and screaming (perhaps a touch dramatic) into the world of blogging. This is my last blog post for RSC Wales so it seems appropriate for it to be about something that I have learnt and (sort of) grown to love and will take away from this job … hopefully into my next one.

Recently I came across James Michie’s ‘10 things I’ve learnt about blogging‘ blog post, where after a year he lists the things he thinks are important about blogging. Although I agree with many it then made me realise that there are different ways of blogging and that the purpose (reflective for yourself as a learner … or outward facing to share and discuss your personal thoughts or your organisation’s thoughts) affects how you blog. I’ve been blogging in different ways, for different audiences (here since 2008 for RSC Wales, as a learner for the Open University, as a guest for the FOTE10 event and more recently for myself) and if I tried to write a ’10 things I’ve learnt about blogging’ I think it would be slightly different in each case. So, if I was to give advice to someone thinking about starting a blog, the main things I have learnt and would want to pass on are:

It is not as easy as some people make it look … even after 2 and a half years practice of different types of blogging I feel I have a lot to learn from those who do it well and I will be taking note of the great tips in the BBC’s College of Production ‘Better Blogging’ podcast.
Be clear who your audience is and adapt your style of writing to suit … which is the same as you would for any type of writing … a formal letter (or email) of resignation to your employer as compared to a chatty letter to your friend … an account of an event in your personal diary as compared to a formal written report of the same event.
Read lots of blogs … and learn from the ones you like but also the ones you don’t

Signing off now as HelenHRSC from this great learning experience …

Engaging an invisible audience

Helen Hodges — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 12:39:20 +0000

I hadn’t appreciated what a difficult job radio presenters, with their invisible audiences, have until I tried delivering an interactive, live, online session for the first time last year. Unlike delivering face to face sessions you can’t see your ‘audience’ … so there is no body language or instant feedback or indication that someone doesn’t understand, is bored or is even listening. Perhaps this is to do with the fact that traditional radio broadcasters are doing just that … ‘broadcasting’ or sending out a message rather than trying to engage with and encourage participation of the ‘audience’ … something that those who are offering, or thinking of offering, live online session, tutorials, meetings (instead of or as well as face to face ones) to their learners or colleagues would surely want.

So how do you engage an invisible audience of online learners or colleagues? Peter Chatterton offers some excellent (imo) advice in the JISC ‘Elluminate Good Practice Guide’ (note: you don’t need to be using Elluminate for it to be relevant). Along with attending lots of online sessions to get firsthand experience of this type of online environment, which does feel different to a face to face equivalent, I used the pointers in this guide when getting ready to start delivering our Lunchtime Bytes (live, online interactive information sessions) with my JISC RSC Wales colleagues.

I am only going to pick out a few of the key points here, so let’s start with the reason why you might choose to use a web conferencing type tool like Elluminate, Adobe Connect, DimDim, BigBlueButton (all discussed in previous posts) … to promote engagement amongst learners, who are not in the same room or even country / time zone as each other. JISC’s ‘Elluminate Good Practice Guide’ says,

… and I would agree with this wholeheartedly. If all you want to do is send out a message to a live audience (broadcast) then perhaps a tool like Slideshare’s new ‘Zipcast’ is the one for you as it really only allows one person to speak to many about a topic (supported in this case by a Slideshare presentation); although Zipcast also enables the audience to communicate via text chat. Web conferencing tools like Elluminate and those mentioned above allow for much wider user engagement.

In order for tools like Elluminate not to be used solely as ‘broadcast’ tools JISC ‘Elluminate Good Practice Guide’ has the following advice:

Take time to learn and familiarise yourself with the tool you are using. I agree with the driving a car analogy used in the JISC guide “once people have mastered the use of the controls, they become second nature, but in the early days of learning, one has to consciously think about using the controls such as the clutch pedal.” If your passengers can tell that you are not a confident driver they are more likely to get out as quickly as they can rather than staying and enjoying the ride!
Prepare and plan and structure online sessions as much as you would face to face sessions (at least for the first few). Again I would agree with the comment in the JISC guide that tools like Elluminate have “a tendency to “amplify” either existing good or bad practice and poor preparation is likely to be “exposed” in the virtual environment“. It is also much more difficult to think on your feet and adapt a session when you are sat at a desk talking to your computer, rather than faced with a reactive live audience.
Draw on existing good practice. If you are good at engaging students and staff during workshops, tutorials or meetings then draw on these face to face practices and techniques and apply them appropriately within the online environment … although knowing the features of the tool and having planned how you are going to use them to achieve your desired outcome is really important here.
Sort out or minimise technical problems so that these things don’t get in the way of engagement.

The JISC ‘Elluminate Good Practice Guide’ is a great starting point for anyone engaging live, online with learners (or colleagues), particularly chapter 3 ‘Designing for participant engagement’ . In addition, the main piece of advice that I think all of the JISC RSC Wales team would give to anyone leading a live online session would be wherever possible have a co-presenter working with you – to welcome late arrivals, to deal with technical problems, to keep an eye on and respond to text chat, to past URLs, to change polling options, to open and close microphones … generally to enable the session leader to focus on the learners or attendees and keeping them engaged!

Pushing the BigBlueButton

Helen Hodges — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:07:04 +0000

I have blogged several times recently about using technology to meet and communicate, present and collaborate synchronously, with ‘Whatever the weather – an illuminating few months’ and ‘Is face to face the only answer?‘ being the most recent. As interest in using web based technologies for synchronous/live/real time communication increases, knowing more about the range of tools that are out there, especially the lower cost/free ones is becoming more important.

Today I had the opportunity to attend a demonstration of one of the open source technologies I have tried before (with mixed success) but that I seem to be hearing mentioned more and more often … Big Blue Button. JISC Mail (another of the JISC Advance services) recently set up a Big Blue Button (BBB) installation in their JISC Mail Lab and today offered a demonstration for anyone who was interested. I went along (well sat at my desk with my headset on and joined in) with about 35 other people to see what it was all about and here is what I found out:

What BBB had:

1 presenter (who we could see and hear) and 1 moderator who we knew was there via text chat
multiple webcams displaying a number of the participants
a presentation / whiteboard area (but only for the presenter to annotate)
text chat where messages could be posted to all or privately to any number of individuals
a demonstration of the presenter sharing their screen.

What BBB didn’t have:

tools for encouraging audience participation or gauging how the sessions are going … emoticons / hands up / polls …
a file sharing option or the ability to save the presentation
a recording feature … which would have been very handy in this case as those from the JISC RSC Wales team who couldn’t attend the session could have viewed it at their leisure and I could perhaps have even put a link to it here (like we do with our Lunchtime Bytes).

What impressed me about BBB:

the number of webcams that we had running at one time
that (as a participant) I could control the size and position of each of the elements (presentation board, web cams, text chat) and that I could also close most of them if I wanted to
there was the option to translate the text chat into various other languages, using Google translate
you could colour your text chat to more easily distinguish it from other’s text (little things …I know)!

What disappointed me about BBB:

audio wasn’t automatically activated when you entered the session and you had to know to click on a particular icon to activate it
I couldn’t save the whiteboard/presentation and so had to take screenshots all the way through
apparently a built in system for setting up and sending out instructions for joining a session is not part of BBB.

Overall impression of Big Blue Button …

At the moment Big Blue Button wouldn’t be suitable for something like our online Lunchtime Byte interactive, information sessions, currently delivered via Elluminate, because these sessions use the features (missing from BBB) that allow greater feedback and participation from the audience (emoticons, polls) as well as the recording feature. However, I like the simplicity of Big Blue Button’s interface and the flexibility for the participants to decide how they have their view laid out, as well as the fact that multiple webcams seem to run very easily … not something I have seen done well by many/any tools before. I think that Big Blue Button would be a very handy tool for geographically distributed groups of people who wanted to meet live online and have the ability to see and hear each other talk, as well as the option to share a presentation or document in a central space and also to have text chat as an alternative way of communicating.

One last thing … I haven’t mentioned anything here about the technical side of Big Blue Button but the Big Blue Button website or JISC Mail’s Lab will hopefully be able to continue to offer advice and support about all aspects of this synchronous communication tool that, after today’s demonstration (thank you JISC Mail!) does appear to have potential.

Today I had the opportunity to attend a demonstration of one of the technologies I have tried before, with mixed success, but that I seem to be hearing mentioned more and more often … Big Blue Button.

Is face to face the only answer?

Helen Hodges — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:42:00 +0000

Last month I blogged about an illuminating few months, where I had been using the web conferencing tool Elluminate in a number of ways. In that blog post I mentioned a range of web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools and said that I would blog about them in more detail at a later date … well here I am!

Yesterday saw the first of our JISC RSC Wales roadshows for 2011. ‘Advance and Enhance‘ is about looking beyond the classroom at how technology can help learning providers and partnerships share, blend and deliver in the classroom and also at a distance. My part in the roadshow is a session on synchronous communcations, which is entitled ‘Is face to face the only answer?‘ and which is about teaching and learning in real time using technology to break down barriers of location, time, money, weather …

As I am sure you will have guessed, ‘Is face to face the only answer?’ is really a rhetorical question, which I’m sure that most would agree the answer to is ‘no, it can’t be’ when refering to teaching and learning, especially when considering that most learning providers are aiming to reach more students regardless of location, to save money and time, to be as inclusive as possible for learners with disabilities or difficulties accessing physical learning environments and, as mentioned in my previous post, to not allow the weather to disrupt the teaching and learning. So, if face to face can’t be the only answer, how can technology help?

In preparation for my session at the roadshow and because it is increasingly an area of interest to the learning providers we support and as a way for us to deliver our service more flexibly, the JISC RSC Wales team have been looking at a range of the web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools that are currently available and being used already in education by a number of organisations. As a geographically distributed team we use a range of synchronous communication tools because we can’t be face to face a lot of the time. With regard to the service we offer we have had to look at different ways of delivering face to face sessions (like the roadshows) because of the reasons mentioned above (geography of our audience and the team, cost, time …). As a consequence we have come up with a way of using technology to deliver bite sized chunks of information in real time to you at your desk in the form of our ‘Lunchtime Bytes’ series of online events, delivered via Elluminate. It is our experiences with Elluminate that have informed our informal evaluations of a range of other web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools, which I can now share with you via an information and resources area in our Moodle at: http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk/webconferencing

This online area contains a database of the web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools that we have looked at so far. We hope to expand this as we are able to evaluate more of these tools but for now it contains our thoughts and experiences of Elluminate, vRoom, Adobe Connect Pro, Nefsis, DimDim, Big Blue Button, vYew, EVO and Skype. As you will see, there are a mix of paid for, free and open source alternatives. Some of the tools are aimed at business and some at education. Some of the tools are more suitable for formal delivery or meetings and others are more suited for informal communication and collaboration. The online area also looks at why you might want to use this technology as well as what you might use it for and also how others are using it already.

As I said when I shared this with the delegates at our roadshow, our part in all of this is to let you (the teaching and learning experts) know what tools (technology) is out there and to suggest how it could potentially help your organisation, its staff, learners and partners to communicate and collaborate in real time, even if you can’t be face to face. Whilst always considering the teaching and learning, the focus has been on the technology but then, as suggested today in this post by James Clay ‘you have to start from somewhere and by explaining the potential that learning technologies offer, you are starting from a good place that will open minds to future potential and possibilities‘

On the road again!

Helen Hodges — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:11:55 +0000

This time last year we at JISC RSC Wales were preparing for our first ever ‘roadshow’, Barrier Busters - Accessibility and Inclusion. The idea of the roadshows was that instead of asking you to travel to us (usually in mid-Wales) in order to take part in and hopefully benefit from any training or discussion forums we organised, we would bring the event to you in different parts of Wales. In 2010 we ran 3 separate roadshows on 3 different themes in all 4 corners of Wales. As with all of our events the contents and outcomes from those events can be found in our online event support areas:

Our latest roadshow, the first for 2011, is entitled ‘Advance and Enhance‘, the purpose of which is to bring people together to focus in a practical way on how technology can help learning providers and partnerships share, blend and deliver in the classroom and at a distance.

More details about the event can be found in the programme here: tinyurl.com/advanceandenhance

Details of the dates and venues are below … just click on the relevant link to be taken to the booking:

1st February 2011 – Cardiff
9th February 2011 – Swansea
22nd March 2011 – Llandudno

We look forward to seeing you there!