You can find my Abilene Reflections Part 1 here.
I had the pleasure of getting to spend a lot of time talking to Kyle Bowen from Purdue University. Kyle is the Director of Informatics at Purdue, and manages the group responsible for some very innovative educational technologies that you may be familiar with, including Hotseat , a tool used to facilitate in-class discussion, and Mixable, which ties together a number of social media sites like Facebook and Dropbox to create a learning environment that leverages a student's existing social network and the capabilities of sites they are already familiar with, to engage in learning activities.
Kyle's presentation at the Abilene Connected Summit was focused on another tool his group created, called DoubleTake. DoubleTake is a mobile video solution that essentially streamlines the video capture, submission, and peer feedback process for students. It includes an iOS app, which allows students to authenticate using their Purdue credentials, capture video, and then submit that video to a course they are enrolled in. There is then a web-based component which allows students to see their peers' submitted videos and provide feedback. One of the use cases Kyle discusses for DoubleTake is in facilitating classroom assessment. An example of this would be in teacher education, where students would capture one another teaching and provide targeted feedback. I think there's a variety of other uses, basically any learning that requires video and peer collaboration.
On a technical note, the back-end architecture of Doubletake is pretty interesting. Purdue takes advantage of system called Condor to distribute video encoding jobs to idle computer lab machines. This enables them to make student videos available within 5-7 minutes of them being submitted. This is critical for making Doubletake useful within the context of the class session. And it's financially responsible as it makes great use of existing computing resources on campus.
As an aside, I have to say that Purdue does an excellent job marketing products like Doubletake. Good marketing obviously leads to awareness and adoption amongst faculty. And Kyle does some good assessment as well, so while he's making sure people know about these opportunities, he's also ensuring that they're resulting a positive impact on learning.
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In my next post I'll share some of what USC is doing around mobile journalism.
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