This is just a quick post to say how useful I’ve been finding screenr lately. There are lots of reasons why I like screenr, here a just a few:
it doesn’t require installation – so no need to bother IT Services;
it’s really easy to use – no specialist expertise is required (I showed it to a non-tech colleague the other day and he couldn’t believe how easy it was);
you can create basic screencasts quickly – like this one;
you can also create more polished screencast animations when combined with PowerPoint (or similar) – like this one;
you get options re how you want to publish it – including embedding (see image);
There are of course some downsides, so just to be balanced…:
you have to have a Twitter account (but there’s no reason why you can’t set one up under a pseudonym and protect your updates);
you can’t edit the screencast in screenr (but there is a pause button so you can take a breath – and if you downloaded the mp4 file I think you could edit it then);
there is a maximum time limit of 5 minutes (but this is a brilliant idea – any longer than 5 minutes is very dull!)
Our helpdesk is staffed by a group of postgraduate students who answer the phones, respond to emails, talk to visitors and are, as the term suggests, generally helpful. More recently they’ve also been tweeting and facebooking (I’m verbing nouns) – this started back in September. Our aim has been to engage with students without invading their social space – which I blogged about recently here. When they started it was quite experimental, I gave very little guidance other than ‘be friendly and remember it’s public‘ but they took to it like ducks to water.
Well, a much-loved member of our helpdesk staff is moving on so I asked her if she would write some guidance on how to tweet from our Student Development account to help new members of helpdesk staff. Here’s what she said.
There are just a few things to remember when sending out Twitter updates:
Students are not children – they do not like to be patronised.
Students don’t generally use Twitter for business, so don’t want lots of boring updates. You have to catch their attention.
Anyone can see your Twitter update- you need to make sure you don’t say anything you’ll later regret.
If you make the tweet interesting enough, maybe it will be re-tweeted (and you could start a revolution).
It’s important that students know what’s going on, but also important that you show how it could be useful. I try and make it a bit personal, usually by asking a question beforehand or relating it to a situation that many students will be in:
You can do the same thing for resources that are available. I think if it’s clear that you understand what students are going through, they’re more likely to make use of the things you are advertising.
You can find things on the events pages of the website that people might not know about otherwise, like tree planting or cake baking, or re-tweet things from other people that SDZ followers might find useful.
If all else fails and there is nothing going on, I usually resort to grammar guides – if your grammar is shoddy and you don’t make an effort to sort out your punctuation either in essays or job applications, it gives the impression that you might not pull out all the stops in other areas, too. Anyway, nobody likes a misplaced apostrophe!
After the success of the cake at our pedagogical research group in the School of Biological Sciences yesterday a couple of people asked me to blog the recipe, so at the risk of raising the bar of the standard of posts on this blog, here goes. Its officially called Sticky tea loaf but my kids lovingly call it Brown cake.
4 oz butter
5 oz sugar
4 oz dried fruit
5 floz water
1 teasp bicarb of soda
Heat all that lot up in a saucepan. Bring to the boil, then simmer gently for 10 minutes. Allow to cool.
6 oz plain flour
1 egg, beaten
1 teasp baking powder
Sift dry ingredients and add to fruit mixture. Finally, add beaten egg. Place in a lined loaf tin and bake in preheated oven (gas mk 4/180) for about an hour. Eat as is or spread with butter. Keeps for a couple of weeks.
PS. I’ll add pictures later when I make it again – wouldn’t want just any old brown cake pictures on here!
On Tuesday I’m presenting a paper at the Learning Futures Festival with Matt Mobbs and David Morgan entitled Engaging without invading. Our paper outlines our experiences of using Facebook and Twitter to engage students regarding issues related to Student Development and the Students Union at the University of Leicester. The conference is entirely online but you need to register to be part of it (I think the registration period has been extended – if you’re interested…). But if you’re not going to be there, don’t worry (!), as it’s all going to be recorded and I’ll post a link on here when I have one. Alternatively you can flick through our paper whilst looking at our slides. Any comments, as always, gratefully received.
What better time than 4 pm on 22 December to start a blog post.
I saw via Twitter a while ago that YouTube had made it possible to add closed captions (subtitles you can turn on or off) to YouTube videos. This had been something that I’d wanted to do a while ago to our What it means to be a critical student tutorial that I’d blogged about back in September.
You can find the instructions in YouTube’s help centre item called Getting Started: Adding / Editing captions, plus additional instructions on Getting Started: Preparing a Transcript File. I decided that I wanted to test out using a transcript file rather than a caption file as this would be much quicker if it worked – and this is what the help article says about it:
YouTube uses experimental speech recognition technology to provide automatic timing for your English transcript. Automatic timing creates a caption file that you can download. Short videos with good sound quality and clear spoken English synchronize best.
And I tried it and it worked a treat! We already had the script in a word document so I simply pasted it into Notepad, removed any special characters (bullets, in our case) and then uploaded it as per the instructions. The speech recognition software did it’s job brilliantly and timed the captions perfectly. The only errors occurred where Steve (the narrator) had deviated from the script. It was an easy job to edit the transcript on paper whilst watching the captions. I then amended the .txt file and uploaded it again. Fantastic and well done Google on making captioning quick and easy!
Here it is – and just click on the CC icon in the bottom right hand corner menu to turn the captions on.
I’m feeling rather stalled on this project after an initial flurry of activity and the good news that we got the funding, so I’m hoping that forcing myself to write a blog post about it might focus my thoughts (it will also mean that the slightly inane Twitter fixed my dishwasher post isn’t sitting at the top of my blog any more).
The project team is made up of Mark Rawlinson, Alex Moseley and me. So when I refer to ‘we’ that’s who I mean.
Title
The project is officially called Text Tagging: Searchable Reader-Commentary on e-Texts, and a Pedagogy of Implicit and Explicit Meaning – so you can see why we’re shortening it.
The problem we’re trying to address
Reading novels takes a long time and a good discussion about a long novel takes much longer than the time available in one tutorial. Additionally, when students are reading a novel they are expected to make the meaning of the narrative explicit (in order to be able to discuss it in a tutorial) but during their private reading they are experiencing the richness of the text’s language implicitly. There is therefore often a disconnect between the meaning of a text and their experience of it. Add to this the fact the experience of the text is ‘available as a rapidly diminishing memory’ and you begin to see some of the problems faced by both tutors and students in reading and talking about novels.
The solution we think might work
This is best explained by quoting directly from our bid document.
Text tagging (marking up textual elements, and adding searchable tags which make the implicit explicit) is a procedure for bridging the gap between narrative experience and narrative analysis, between private study and seminar discussion. Readers could share an online text, and through individual acts of tagging (either concurrent with the initial reading, or retrospectively, in a guided rereading) contribute to a social network of interpretive acts which can be retrieved by searching the text and/or the tags. The social network of tags is a meaning map of the narrative under study, and crucially, a map that always takes discussion back to the territory of the text being analysed (discussion invariably tends to abstraction where the evidence is as apparently inaccessible as the fine details of a very long book).
Project aims
The aims of the project are:
to test the pedagogical benefits of tagging and commenting on a shared online work of fiction (Anna Karenina) by a small group of third year undergraduates, and using this collaborative markup as a discussion point in face-to-face seminars: this is focussed on making meaning explicit;
to test the pedgogical and community-development benefits of sharing comments and tags across multiple cohorts, focusing on the new meanings and affordances offered by pervasive and incremental tags;
to determine the technical suitability of a number of freely available tagging/commenting tools to support the above activity;
to test the pedagogical benefits of tagging and commenting on a shared e-book within the BlackBoard VLE, by a small group of distance-learning postgraduates;
to develop one or more pedagogical models for the use of tagging and commenting on online texts within a higher education context;
to report on the technical suitability of a number of freely available tools and platforms to enable pedagogically-effective tagging and commenting within a higher education context;
to form the basis for discussions with publishers (initially Routledge) on the use of e-books within academic courses.
We need a researcher
The majority of the funding for the project will be spent on a research assistant. So if you’re interested or know anyone who might be – please get in touch.
Right, now I’ve reminded myself what the project is about I’m off to have another think about digress.it and Diigo.
On Wednesday last week I was working from home to get some marking done. I’d spent about an hour the previous evening trying to fix our dishwasher. I’m not very good at white goods maintenance but I knew enough to clean out the various filters and the pump and find the reset function. Unfortunately it still didn’t work – I could get the numbers to light up but no water would flow into the machine. I thought it was well and truly bust.
Then I had an idea, why not ask on Twitter how to fix it. So that’s what I did…
At 10.06 am on 28 October I tweeted the following – ‘Is anyone any good at fixing dishwashers? Cleaned filters and pump last night but still bust’
And at 10.16 am I got the following reply ‘@stujohnson Sometimes you need to tip them forward a LOT ie over 45 degrees to reset the “safety” microswitch’
Which in a spare 5 minutes later in the morning I did. And lo and behold – it worked! So, thank you to Twitter and thank you to @adijeff, who you should definitely follow if you have any white goods maintenance queries!
Next time I plan to blog about something more educationally focused – promise!
After last week’s Friday afternoon blogpost on how I’m using RSS, Twitterfeed, Twitter and Facebook to engage with our students, I thought I’d write a follow up.
Up until now I’ve only connected up our news item RSS feeds to Twitterfeed but I haven’t connected up our events RSS feeds. The reason for this is that some of our events (e.g. our workshop programme) we publish in bulk at the beginning of term and so RSS out from these wouldn’t work in a timely fashion. Then I had an idea (just as I was trying to get to sleep) – what about creating a collection portlet on our website (Plone) and set the criteria to only display events that are 24 hours in the future. Then if the RSS from this collection was connected to Twitterfeed the events would appear automatically on our Twitter account 24 hours before they happen, which in turn would appear on our Facebook fan page. All of which would neatly feed in to our followers’ news feeds without me having to do anything (or without having to pester other people to do anything).
So now we’ll be letting students know of events, via Twitter and Facebook, 24 hours before the events happen, without having to do anything. And whilst this clearly doesn’t stop the need for conversation – it does help facilitate it.
I thought I should write something about how I’m using Twitter and Facebook in Student Development at the University of Leicester. Two important things to say first:
I’m not saying we’re doing it perfectly – I just want to let people know what we’re doing and invite comment. Some things are going well and some things could definitely do with improving – I’d be interested to know your thoughts
I’ve had a lot of advice, some of it inferred from how I see people using Twitter and Facebook and some of it direct advice (thanks especially to @caffeinebomb, @ajcann, @fawcettbj and @thisisdavid)
What are we doing?
We’re trying to connect with students in order to make them aware of the services we offer to help them in their studies and their career planning. I’ve recently revamped the Student Development website to make it more dynamic by adding lots of RSS feeds to get news articles out. The other thing I’m trying to do is to connect up to people’s social spaces using Twitter and Facebook.
Broadcasting (the easy bit)
The easy bit (although it took a bit of thought to connect it all up) is broadcasting. I didn’t want to have to do this manually so I’ve automated it using a combination of RSS, Twitter, Twitterfeed, Facebook and a Facebook application called selective Twitter status (see ‘How are we doing it?’, below).
Conversation (the more difficult bit)
The more difficult bit is actually having conversations with people, and this is the bit we need to work on more. Having conversations takes time and resources but is the bit that makes the biggest difference. I’m using Hootsuite to allow multiple users to tweet to our uolsd account. Hootsuite took a bit of figuring out but is great now we’ve got the hang of it. The people who tweet to the account are me plus our Helpdesk staff – these are PhD students who work for us on a casual basis in our Student Development Zone. We need to work on this more because the PhD students haven’t used Twitter before, and we also need to get a consistent voice. Generally speaking we are being reactive, responding to requests, rather than proactive. As we follow more people though we should begin to see more people who we can help. I am trying to follow only University of Leicester students who first follow us – that way we are a) responding to the needs of our students and b) hopefully it doesn’t feel like we’re stalking them(!).
Twitterfeed is connected up to our Twitter account and so automatically tweets our RSS-ed news items
Facebook’s selective Twitter status application picks up the tweets and posts them in our Facebook fan page (this is achieved by adding the suffix ‘#fb’ at the end of the tweet in the advanced options for the feed within Twitterfeed (see below)
And that’s it! We’re slowly building up a bit of a following – currently 201 followers on Twitter and 147 fans of our Facebook page. We have a link to our Twitter and Facebook informationon every page of our website, along with a bit of an explanation, which you can see here.
That’s a bit rushed but I’d be interested in your comments and suggestions.
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