One of the cool things about ETS is that we are responsible for the annual Symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology. Last year you may recall we had a great time and tried all sorts of new things — blogging from the sessions, podcasting, Flickr photo posting, and more to try and enhance and grow our community. This year we are pushing even harder.
One of the things I was very interested in doing was seeing if we could create a series of talks leading up to the Symposium that would pull leaders from our campus out and have them give talks. I wanted it to be a first rate series … with a great room and great speakers so as to help inspire others. I think the Fall 2006 series fits that bill. We have Kyle Peck, Brian Smith, David Passmore, and Rose Baker all doing some very interesting things. The thing I like the best is that these talks all have a very student centric tone to them. It will be good. The room is a wonderful space in the union building and will add to the overall feel of each talk. Below is the announcement. If you happen to be in the area on the dates, please let me know and we’ll make sure you can attend … and yes, we’ll be delivering enhance podcasts of each talk.
Teaching and Learning with Technology is proud to announce the TLT Innovators Speaker Series. Beginning October 2006, this new series will feature Penn State faculty presenting perspectives and approaches for teaching with technology. These presentations, are designed to inspire faculty to develop their own ideas for enhancing their courses with technological components and will continue until the 2007 Symposium, to be held on April 14, 2007.
Hi Cole:
I’m a World Campus IST student and I recently came across your 110 lecture podcasts from the past spring and I wanted to let you know I enjoyed them.
Your announcement here about the Speaker Series sounds interesting but I was put off by the ‘enhanced podcasts’ line. Is that just an add on slide presentation like you had with 110? I found the images in the 110 podcast to be unreadable on a desktop PC, at any screen size. I would your podcasts in an audio only format that I could listen to on the run, or even a higher-res video-cast for something to actually watch at my desk. The point was the little slides in your 110 podcasts just were not readable.
I did enjoy the content of your lecture podcasts though and think that would be great if World Campus instructors distributed some lectures that way.
My point is: make enhancements worthwhile, not just because you can.
Mike … I’m glad you found the podcasts interesting and worthwhile. When I produced those podcasts the technology was a little on the early side. The enhanced podcasts we are producing now are very viewable via the iTunes interface (at even small sizes). It is an interesting question we face when we go down this path — honestly about half of my students who report using/viewing/listening to my podcasts prefer the enhanced with the slides while the other half prefers audio only. It is actually really easy to move them to audio only for use on non-iPod portable devices. Once you have the file in iTunes, use the Advanced menu item “Convert selection to MP3” … this will strip the enhanced part away and you will be left with an mp3.
As for making enhancements worthwhile I’d like to stress that when I created those first podcasts I was doing it as much to understand the limits of the technology as I was for students. I know that sounds crazy, but this has all been part of a larger investigation … I learned quite a bit about what does and doesn’t work and I will work hard not to make the same mistakes the next time out.
I imagine now you’ve brought this up that we should provide both standard and enhanced versions of the speaker series podcasts. We are staying away from video because research and experience tells us that unless there is a need for the full motion (demonstrations, etc) it is a waste of resources to produce and a waste of bandwidth to distribute.
Mike, I really appreciate the comment and agree with all that you have to say. I would love to see more WC courses take advantage of this technology. I have talked with some designers there and several are interested … the great thing about the podcasting process is that it is a fairly straightforward and easy way to capture and distribute content. You keep pushing and so will I. Thanks for the comment.