Glogster

Make and remix posters, with animations, music, or video (or not) and share and embed them online. Check out a recent example from University of Mary Washington student who created a science poster for his psycholinguistics class. (Say good-bye to Death by Powerpoint!)

Animoto

Take images, video, and royalty-free music and create your own video shorts with lots of pizazz! Files can be shared and downloaded. Check out Animoto’s education section with education case studies and student work.

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doctrine of fair use. The document was created during 10 meetings with more than 150 members of leading educational associations across the United States, and follows in the footsteps of the Documentary Filmmakers Association who created guiding practices for their industry 3 years ago.

In the murky waters of what legally constitutes a fair use and what doesn’t, courts of law generally look to common industry practices. In the absence of such guiding documents, the courts must look to other other industries’ interpretations of fair use, or prior case law, which often themselves aren’t relevant or comparable. Interestingly, The Center for Social Media reports that they “don’t know of any lawsuit brought by an American media company against an educator over the use of media in the educational process”.

The Center defines Media Literacy in Education:

Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms. This expanded conceptualization of literacy responds to the demands of cultural participation in the twenty-first century. Like literacy in general, media literacy includes both receptive and productive dimensions, encompassing critical analysis and communication skills, particularly in relationship to mass media, popular culture, and digital media. Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts—when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content. And like literacy in general, media literacy can be taught and learned.

Head on over to their website and to read more and download the code.

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For those who may not have realized the relevance and power of blogs as self-service publishing platforms in higher ed, some good places to start are to explore the Wordcamp conferences (included the just-passed Northeast one) and (UMW) Jim Groom’s blog bavatuesdays, or (Penn State) Cole Camplese’s Learning and Innovation.

Below are some great examples of course blogs from UMW and UMass Amherst. Poke around for admiration and inspiration!

University of Mary Washington Course Blogs:
.

Art & Art History

• Professor JeanAnn Dabb’s Mosaics Exhibit
• Professor Marjorie Och’s Venice Seminar
• Professor Carole Garmon’s Sculpture I
• Prof. Rosemary Jesionowski’s Digital Approaches to Fine Art

Biology

• Professor Steve Gallik’s Online Laboratory and Digital Notebooks homepage for Cellular Biology
• Professor Michael Killian’s Biology 121 course blog

Chemistry

• Professor Kelli Slunt’s Freshman Seminar 100Bb: Kitchen Chemistry
• Professor Kelli Slunt’s Chemistry & Society

Classics, Philosophy, & Religion

• Professor Angela Gosetti’s FSEM 100B: The Journey to the Underworld in Greek Myth and Modern Film
• Professor Nina Mikhalevsky’s Ancient Greek Philosophy

Economics

• Professor Steve Greenlaw’s Economics 201
• Professor Steve Greenlaw’s Freshman Seminar: Globalization
• Professor Steve Greenlaw’s Economics 300

English, Linguistics, & Communication

• Professor Mara Scanlon’s Modern Poetry
• Professor Mara Scanlon’s Freshman Seminar: Ethics and Lit
• Professor John Morello’s Communication and the 2008 Presidential Campaign
• Professor Anand Rao’s Communication 205: Public Speaking
• Professor Anand Rao’s Communication 353: Visual Rhetoric
• Professor Tim O’Donnell’s Freshman Seminar: James Farmer and The Great Debaters
• Professor Tim O’Donnell’s Speech 209: Argumentation
• Professor Zachary Whalen The Virtual and the False
• Professor Zachary Whalen Forms of Narrative
• Professor Zachary Whalen Forms of Narrative

History & American Studies

• Prof. Sue Fernsebner’s Introduction to Historical Methods
• Professor Steve Harris’s Socialism: Theory and Practice
• Professor Steve Harris’s Stalin and Stalinism
• Prof. Jeff McClurken’s Freshman Seminar: Marching Home
• Professor Jeff McClurken’s U.S. History in Film
• Professor Krystyn Moon’s Consumerism Seminar

Modern Foreign Languages

• Professor Betsy Lewis’s Spanish Realism
• Professor Jeremy LaRochelle’s Ideas of Nature in Latin American Literature
• Professor Jeremy LaRochelle’s Spanish Composition and Spanish
• Professor Scott Power’s Contemporary France Seminar
• Professor Marcel Rotter’s German 399

Sociology

• Professor Kristin Marsh’s History of Social Theory

University of Massachusetts Amherst Course Blogs:

• Anthropology 104
  http://blogs.umass.edu/anthro104-dk/

• Astronomy 101
  http://blogs.umass.edu/astron101-schneide/

• Communication 397SS
  http://blogs.umass.edu/comm397ss-jsaxe/

• Journalism 392W
  http://blogs.umass.edu/journal392w-bjroche/

• Judaic Studies 390i
  http://blogs.umass.edu/jud390i/

• Kinesiology 530
  http://blogs.umass.edu/kin530/

• Physics 190E
  http://blogs.umass.edu/physics190e-kastor/

• Resources Economics 112
  http://blogs.umass.edu/resec112/

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Carnegie Mellon University

http://www.youtube.com/user/carnegiemellonu

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT

Stanford University

http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity

University of Southern California

http://www.youtube.com/user/USCCollege

University of California at Berkeley

http://www.youtube.com/user/ucberkeley

Dartmouth

http://www.youtube.com/user/Dartmouth

Northwestern University

http://www.youtube.com/user/NorthwesternU

Oxford University Said Business School

http://www.youtube.com/user/OxfordSBS

Harvard Kennedy School of Government

http://www.youtube.com/user/HarvardKennedySchool

Northeastern University

http://www.youtube.com/user/Northeastern

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• Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective

(The following was cross-posed in the podcasting blog, Podcasting Your Class)

What are some student perspectives on podcasting? Carie Windham, former undergraduate student, North Carolina State University, and current graduate student, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland presents her own views and experiences with podcasting as well as views from several students she interviewed in the paper: Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective.

In “Confessions…”, Windham recounts her own introduction to and involvement with podcasting (and how she became a “podcast junkie”) and cites student data and interviews from University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of British Columbia, Bentley College, Duke University, and DePaul University. Some of the conclusions are as follows:

All the students identified the same benefits to podcasting technology:
• The ability to access course content on a 24-hour basis
• The chance to take their learning mobile so that listening can be done on the bus, at the gym, or on a walk between classes
• The creativity factor when making podcasts: they can present the content in a way that they choose
• The ease of access: podcasts can be easily downloaded from the Internet for free

For teaching and learning, the students saw concrete benefits to podcasting projects, especially when compared with standard modes of testing, such as writing a paper or doing a class demonstration:
• They were able to get “intimate” with course material, either by re-listening to course lectures and supplements or by teaching the rest of the class.
• They could showcase their projects to the rest of the community, expanding the reach of
the classroom to their friends or members of the community.
• They had the opportunity to review course material during pertinent moments in the semester, such as before exams or during course projects.
• They learned new technical skills, whether they were downloading files or creating new ones.

Finally, all the students reported that they enjoyed their classes more because of the inclusion of podcasting, and all hoped that more faculty members would use podcasting in the future. Michael Martinez-Mann said it best when he said of podcasting: “The possibilities are absolutely limitless. If there’s an idea, there’s a way to do it.”

Some of the sections of the paper also include:

• Podcasting in the Real World: Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology
  
• Notes on the Go: Offering Lectures and Class Notes via Podcasting
  
• In Their Hands: Students as Podcast Creators
• A Microphone and an Idea: Nonacademic Podcasting on Campus
• If I Were in Charge: Tips for Faculty

Windham’s paper is informative, well-written, and entertaining, and was published in EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 42 (May/June 2007). It also appears on the web in the resource-rich ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Podcasting in the section “What Do Students Think?”

While whitepapers, research, and case studies are certainly useful, it’s definitely refreshing to get student perspectives directly from students in their own voices.

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• iTunes University

Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change? (Join us to face this fear together in a multimedia, interactive miniplay).

The four discussion-provoking videos in the session were created and presented by faculty and staff at the University of California, the University of Texas, the University of Mary Washington, Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and Middlebury College.

For a look at pedagogy and practice, interested faculty might also want to read “Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member to Do?” from last fall’s Connect.

In the meantime, enjoy “Institutional Fear”… Do You Fear It?

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• Excellent Examples of Course Blogs in Higher Ed