Musings on technology, learning & design
Former LFS Web Coordinator Trevor van Hemert gave an excellent talk on SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) and Google just before he left the faculty. Great work, Trevor!
This video was made using iMovie ’11, which has made adding titles and slides very easy. I think it really enhances the quality of a recorded lecture (as does Trevor’s very clear speaking voice).
This past year, I helped teach AGRO 490, Special Topics in Agriculture and Digital Communications. Today, my teaching colleagues (Andrew Riseman, Kathryn Gretsinger & Cyprien Lomas) and I will be presenting about our course at the Open Ed 2009 Conference. Thanks to Brian Lamb, our colleague in OLT and the Open Ed conference organizer, for encouraging us to submit a proposal.
Having attended the first two days of the conference, I feel like our presentation will be a bit of a strange fit with the other presentations. Most of the discussion I’ve seen has focused on systems or policy. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone discussing openness in an individual course; let’s hope we meet the audience’s expectations.
Our course worked with openness in a number of ways. Broadly, the idea behind the course—and the audio documentaries that are at the heart of the course—is to share the knowledge of our students with those outside of the university, making it accessible both in tone (using storytelling & journalistic techniques) and in medium (downloadable podcasts in mp3). We used standard formats for all media and open source software, most importantly Audacity audio editor, which allows students to continue to use the software outside the university without having to purchase it. Finally, our students licensed their materials with Creative Commons licenses, allowing others to use, share and remix their work.
So—in the spirit of openness—here are a number of materials related to the course.
Course syllabus & grading rubric
Guidelines for creating final podcast
Final Assignment: Group Podcast
Alicia Hall, “Soil: The Life Beneath Your Feet”
Jason Patchell, “Dandelion”
Jenna Pfoh, “The Farmhouse”
Venessa Alain, “Where We Are Growing”
Afton Halloran”Agricultural Inspirations”
Ben Amundson, “The Chicken Man”
All of these materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License
I recently collaborated with Yona Sipos (LFS grad studentextraordinaire) to create this map of the 2008 BC Food Security Project. It’s a work in progess, but Google has made it extremely straightforward to create maps like these (Setting this one up took about 20 minutes) and it’s a visually engaging way to present the scope of a project.
43 Folders, a blog on productivity and organizing, has an interesting entry on the distraction caused by email notification. In the course of writing this email I’ve been dinged three times and it’s interesting to consider what this does to work flow. I receive a fair amount of email (around 100 messages a day) most of which is CCed and does not require a response. Still, often I will stop what I’m doing to check on it, derailing my train of thought. I’ll have to try out the ding-less experiment!
Alan Taylor at the Boston Globe has started a fantastic new blog called The Big Picture. The premise is fairly simple: telling stories with large, engaging photos. Often, I find the web marginalises photojournalism and here the photos are given centre stage, much like Life magazine did a generation ago.
Wordle is a cool new site that’s spreading like wildfire around the web. It allows you to create word clouds based on the tagging in your del.icio.us account or text. Word clouds (a broader form of tag clouds) make the size of text porportional to the frequency of its use. It also offers lots of editing options for text, colours and configuration.
Here’s my del.icio.us account as represented by Wordle…
I guess I “work” too much.
A bit short notice (I just found out myself), but there’s a pretty cool looking WordPress camp tonight in downtown Vancouver. It looks pretty casual, a great way for a beginning blogger to learn more. If you make it, let me know how it went (I’m stuck with other plans).
Via Beyond Robson.
COMPFIGHT is a powerful new Flickr search tool. It offers all sorts of different searches.
The best thing is that it displays roughly 250 thumbnails at a time, allowing super quick photo picking. Hot stuff. Via Boing Boing!
I’ve found that one of the biggest challenges for those hoping to bring their content online is grappling with copyright. People who aren’t accustomed to working online can find it arduous to work around the laws pertaining to the photo, song or clip they want to use.
While Flickr has made finding Creative Commons photos pretty convenient, finding songs that are licensed for free use in educational/non-commercial use is a bit tougher.
Alan Levine, who was recently in town, has a great page of resources for CC-licensed songs that can be used for podcasting and digital storytelling. My favourite of these are CCHits and CCMixter. The offerings might leave you a little unsatisfied (the songs skew towards bad techno), but songs are being added all the time.
In terms of artists, Jona Bechtolt a.k.a. YACHT (who recently made waves [har har] with his MacBook Air case) released instrumental versions of albums by him and The Blow (his former band) free for you to remix, use for karaoke or use online. They can be found here. Very cool stuff.
Lastly, my friend Brian has told me a couple of times of a plan afoot at the great WFMU radio station in New Jersey to develop a repository of CC-licensed music. This would be a podcaster’s dream. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything concrete.
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