Posts from — September 2008

Following on from the recent ALT-C Conference, the EXTEND project team would like to invite you to participate in an online asynchronous discussion in which we will explore the Educational Digital Divide. Funded by JISC-Emerge Benefits Realisation, the discussion begins on Monday 29 September 2008, with topics and questions including:

· What does the digital Divide mean to you?

· Who has the hardware, software and bandwidth?

· Digital Divide as a duality - link to Perpetual Divide

· Gender as a lens on the Digital Divide

· Silver surfers and Digital Natives

However, you’re not restricted to the above topics - with multimedia resources to inspire you and plenty of opportunity to explore your ideas, we are expecting this to be a lively and interesting discussion.

The event will be hosted on the HELP (Higher Education Learning Professionals) network, which you can join by visiting http://www.cabweb.net/portal/course/view.php?id=7 - this will take you to a login page where you can create an account in 2 easy steps and enter the discussion.Please do join us for what we expect to be a lively and thought-provoking event!

Helen Keegan, Frances Bell and Cristina Costa

Chris Procter attended a workshop run by Netskills (set up by HEA and JISC) at Oxford University 24/9/08.

Here is his report:

This was quite an interesting small workshop with a few people talking about good practice, mainly from new and very new Universities. Probably the most interesting element was discussion on ePortfolios. The Centre for Recording Achievement independently evaluate and advise on this, which is important since there are a lot of software alternatives, many of which were discussed/ demonstrated in the workshop. Quite a bit of discussion also on blogs and wikis.  Work in the NHS on eportfolios is interesting. http://www.eportfolios.ac.uk/ is also worth looking at.

Chris Procter

http://www.business.salford.ac.uk/staff/chrisprocter

Delicious tag for eportfolio

Frances Bell’s delicious tag for eportfolio

Have you ever considered searching the video site youtube.com for resources to support your teaching?

What you find:

A search of youtube for ‘credit crunch’ turns up a range of video clips, some of them are original content provided by the youtube user and channel, but many are user-recorded clips from tv shows.

Is it legal?

Youtube’s policy on copyright clearly states that TV shows are among the content that is copyrighted but it seems that the BBC takes a fairly relaxed attitude to the publishing of clips on youtube.com, both on the BBC youtube.com channel and elsewhere on youtube.com. So how do we find our way through this minefield? An ongoing JISC project is producing useful resources to help us grapple with copyright and legal issues, Web2Rights.

An example !

I used the example of the recent launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - what resources could I find to:

• inform my audience (and myself) about the LHC
• trigger discussion about it?

My search threw up 287 videos - too many to look through!  Two caught my eye, and my investigation led to a third.

1. Unlicensed but persistent

The first was a clip from Newsnight where Jeremy Paxman interviewed Professor Brian Cox.  I would find this a useful resource for provoking discussion but will it be taken down from youtube as an infringement of copyright? A search of youtube for Newsnight tends to suggest that 5-10 minute clips can survive over months, without the BBC insisting that they are removed.

2. Apparently owned and original

Not surprisingly, the Large Hadron Rap caught my eye.  This is a funny, informative and engaging 5 minute video, created with the cooperation of CERN staff.  Obviously, I would like to use this, but is it original and legal?  The long list of credits suggests that this is original and attributed, but who is Alpine Kat?  A google search reveals that she is “e-News Coordinator for the Atlas Project at CERN and is maybe better known these days as the author of the LHC Rap” http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/rapping-the-higgs-boson-kather.html

3. Officially published on Youtube

If I were unhappy about option 1 for reasons of copyright, then I could go to the BBC Channel on youtube and search,  finding short clips of BBC content.  The BBC seems to say little about the terms of use of these clips, in its web site entry. Youtube has a detailed Terms of Use statement, this section being relevant “you agree not to access User Videos (as defined below) for any reason other than your personal, non-commercial use solely as intended through and permitted by the normal functionality of the Services, and solely for Streaming.” Youtube offer embed code (this option can be turned off by the uploader) so presumably they are happy for the content to be embedded for personal, non-commercial use.

To summarise:

• there is valuable content on youtube - if you can find it
• some clearly violates the owners’ copyright and is in contravention of youtube’s terms of use; some can clearly be used legally as long as we comply with the terms of use; and yet more are in a grey area, where it’s probably OK to use the videos.

So what do you think?  Would you use youtube videos in your teaching? presented in a face to face setting, embedded in a Blackboard course, provided as a link to students.

P.S. This version of Wordpress does not permit the embedding of youtube videos (whereas this older version does).

Next week Hans Rosling is a keynote speaker at ALT-C 2008 next week.  I recently viewed his TED talk (check out others, most are excellent) where he makes excellent use of publicly-funded data in a very, very visual way.

Here is a Link to youtube video of Hans Rosling’s TED talk . You can also create similar visualisations using the tools available through Gapminder and Google.  Check out all the resources at Gapminder.org.

If you want a  quick look at Rosling’s work try this 4 minute video on CO2 emissions and coal for electricity.