I'm just testing out embedding Kaltura videos created on the Digital Commons site in MoveableType. These videos were created during one of our Digital Literacy workshops.
(this is a follow-up to Ellysa's post about our workshop)
As part of the faculty fellowship with Ellysa Cahoy, we're going to be holding a workshop on digital literacy. As we've been meeting and planning this, we've started to come up with some really great ideas that I think will make for an engaging learning experience for instructors, instructional designers, librarians.. basically anyone involved in developing student instructional activities. It started out as essentially the DC Digital Storytelling workshops rounded out with information about literacy, research, and utilizing library collections. The idea we came up with last week was to wrap the whole workshop in an overarching project to develop a historical narrative. Essentially what we'll be asking participants to do is choose an important moment in history, and use library media collections and media authoring tools (potentially Kaltura) to tell a story from the point of view of someone who was there. Each step of the way participants would develop their digital literacy. For example, effective research skills by searching AP videos of the event, and then identifying appropriate use given licensing restrictions and Fair Use freedoms.
The workshop will help us round out our understanding of digital literacy, especially as it pertains to literacies required by students to successfully complete digital media projects in their classes, which will factor into research studies we'll be running over the next year.
If you're interested, you can sign up for the workshop here: https://register4its.psu.edu/Public/ShowDetail.asp?scheduleid=106796
(this is a follow-up to Ellysa's post about our workshop)
As part of the faculty fellowship with Ellysa Cahoy, we're going to be holding a workshop on digital literacy. As we've been meeting and planning this, we've started to come up with some really great ideas that I think will make for an engaging learning experience for instructors, instructional designers, librarians.. basically anyone involved in developing student instructional activities. It started out as essentially the DC Digital Storytelling workshops rounded out with information about literacy, research, and utilizing library collections. The idea we came up with last week was to wrap the whole workshop in an overarching project to develop a historical narrative. Essentially what we'll be asking participants to do is choose an important moment in history, and use library media collections and media authoring tools (potentially Kaltura) to tell a story from the point of view of someone who was there. Each step of the way participants would develop their digital literacy. For example, effective research skills by searching AP videos of the event, and then identifying appropriate use given licensing restrictions and Fair Use freedoms.
The workshop will help us round out our understanding of digital literacy, especially as it pertains to literacies required by students to successfully complete digital media projects in their classes, which will factor into research studies we'll be running over the next year.
If you're interested, you can sign up for the workshop here: https://register4its.psu.edu/Public/ShowDetail.asp?scheduleid=106796
Browse presentations from the Open Video Conference main stage. Just click Menu > Browse On-Demand Library. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be titles on each stream, so you may have to cross-reference this with the conference schedule.
This weekend I attended the Open Video Conference, which was held at the New York University School of Law and organized by the Open Video Alliance. Allan, Matt, and I recorded a quick vodcast in the afternoon of Day 1. I'll post some additional thoughts on this excellent event, but for now here's the video:
(NOTE: since we used a separate device for video and audio capture, and synced in post-production, the audio and video is not quite lined up towards the end.)
I recently got some feedback from a campus where we have a Digital Commons setup. As you may know, we support campuses by occasionally visiting them and conducting in-class workshops, faculty consultations, etc. The rest of the time, faculty and students at the campus can call us (toll-free), engage in screen sharing (which enables us to see their screen and virtually work alongside them), or use our numerous web-based resources if they want to work at their own pace. This support is provided 9am-9pm every weekday. We also train local staff (whoever wants the training) so that they develop the ability to support students in their digital media endeavors (if they want to). This is our support model, in a nutshell. From my perspective, we're doing everything short of driving across the state every time a student has a question. It's not a perfect situation (perfect would be physically being there all the time), but it's pretty darn good.
The feedback we got is that at this campus, students expect to get face-to-face support whenever they need it, and anything short of that is not sufficient or acceptable. And it got me wondering if this was really true, or does our own definition of quality support maybe not line up with student expectations. I suppose that we are in an age of "helicopter parents" that are constantly at the beck and call of their children, and thus when these kids grow up and come to college, they expect the same level of support. Certainly there's some merit in this. They pay good money to come to this institution, and we should (and sincerely try to) do everything in our power, within each of our roles, to help them learn. However, a) they are increasingly digitally literate and b) we're training them to be functional professionals. They know, or should be learning about how to use the web (and especially the social web) to develop their skills. In my opinion, we have just as much of an obligation to make ourselves physically available to every student when they need us as we have an obligation to teach them how to use modern tools and alternative forms of (digital) communication to get the help they need.
Of course there's the practical reality that we can't be physically available for every student, 24/7. But I'm not trying to make excuses for not always being able to be there, or argue the merits of face-to-face vs. online, or synchronous vs. asynchronous help. I'm simply saying that there are viable options available, and that we'd be doing students a disservice by not making them aware of those options and not equipping them with the ability to make informed decisions about which options are appropriate for any given situation.
With that being said, I commend this campus for holding such high standards. And I hope that we can help them provide the quality, breadth, and depth of support their students need when they need it.
Without further ado, here's instructions on 1) how add human-readable geotagging and GeoRSS to your blog and 2) consume that RSS feed to display on a map interface in your blog. This will require you to edit your blog templates, so if you're afraid you might hose your blog (I make no guarantees about my code) try it out on a test blog first. Some basic understanding of HTML will help, although you basically just have to paste the right code in the right places.
I'm using Yahoo! Maps and nonstandard RSS elements because Yahoo! allows me to enter human-readable locations. The objective here was to come up with a very simple-to-implement and easy-to-use solution. I could've gone with Google Maps and technically valid "GeoRSS" (as defined here: http://georss.org/) but the solution would be a bit more involved. The purist in me says I should've gone in that direction, but my final solution worked and it's easy, so screw it.
To create a Yahoo! Maps-compatible GeoRSS feed:
(anything in code that's bolded indicates something you might want to customize)
1. Create a new Custom Field
- Navigate to: Preferences > Custom Fields > New Field
- Choose options:
- System Object: Entry
- Type: Single-Line Text
- Template Tag: location
- Click 'Save Changes'
2. Enable the new Custom Field
- Navigate to: Preferences > Entry > Default Editor Fields
- Click the checkbox to enable your new field ('location').
- Click 'Save Changes'
3. Modify your RSS template to include location information from your new field
- Navigate to: Design > Templates > RSS
- Paste this right before the </item> tag:
<ymaps:Address><mt:entrydatalocation></ymaps:Address>
NOTE: <mt:entrydatalocation> is based on whatever you named your custom field. It could be <mt:entrydatasomethingelse>..
4. Add location information to your posts
- Create a new blog entries or edit an old one.
- There should be a new location field under your body field. Anything that Yahoo! Maps accepts as an address will work here. Even incomplete or poorly formed address usually work. For instance: "penn state university park"
- Submit your entry.
To add a Yahoo! Map to your blog to consume GeoRSS feed:
1. Edit your Header template to initialize your Yahoo! Map
- Navigate to: Design > Templates > Header
- Paste this before the </head> tag:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://api.maps.yahoo.com/ajaxymap?v=3.8&appid=cjgfW3LV34EVWbeNK.zXpLqYBL7Lkt.BwDBLkZmYoCqdFnWAVLb0L3GvJJGL.yefCyi4">
</script>- Click 'Save Changes'
NOTE: The "appid" is something I requested from Yahoo!. I believe you can just use mine, since we're all at PSU and the usage is the same, but if you're having problems, you may want to request your own appid at: http://developer.yahoo.com/
2. Post map embed code in a blog/page
- Create a new blog entry or page
- If you're using the Rich Text editor, click on the '<A>' button to go to HTML view, and paste in this code where you want the map to show up (edit width and height as you need to):
<div style="width: 573px; height: 400px;" id="geomap"></div>
- ..and paste in this (edit the "YGeoRSS" to be the URL of your own blog, and drawZoomandCenter to center and zoom by default on whatever location and zoom-level you want):
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
var map = new YMap(document.getElementById('geomap'));
map.addPanControl();
map.addZoomShort();
map.drawZoomAndCenter("University Park, PA",4);
function doStart(eventObj) {
var defaultEventObject = eventObj;
}
function doEnd(eventObj) {
var defaultEventObject = eventObj;
map.smoothMoveByXY(new YCoordPoint(10,50));
}
YEvent.Capture(map,EventsList.onStartGeoRSS, function(eventObj) { doStart(eventObj); });
YEvent.Capture(map,EventsList.onEndGeoRSS, function(eventObj) { doEnd(eventObj); });
map.addOverlay(new YGeoRSS('http://www.personal.psu.edu/cxm470/blogs/educational_technology/georss.xml'));
</script></div>
- Save and Publish your entry.
- You should see a map and marks for your geotagged blog posts.
Some other tidbits:
- You may want to go to Preferences > Publishing and change "Excerpt Length" to something around 100. This will prevent very long blog posts from trying to display in their entirety in your map bubbles.
- If you're afraid that this will render your RSS feed incompatible with some feed readers (it shouldn't) you can duplicate your RSS template and make your edits there, so your site has a separate geo-enabled feed. As you can see, my feed is called 'georss.xml'.
Please let me know if any part of my directions don't work...
Enjoy!
I've refined what I was doing with GeoRSS a bit. I am now able to use human-readable locations (addresses), so it's much easier to post location information, which I think is critical to this being useful to any non-geek. I had to switch to Yahoo! Maps because their API accepts addresses and does the geocoding (turning the address into latitude/longitude coordinates). I think the Google Maps solution will be better in the long run, but I wanted something that anyone using Blogs at Penn State could implement without us having to do any changes to the MoveableType system.
And the end result, consumed by a Yahoo! Map looks like this:
So, posting with this system now looks like this (note the "location" field):
And the end result, consumed by a Yahoo! Map looks like this:
I spent a little time on Friday experimenting with GeoRSS and the Blogs at Penn State system. You can see the results of that work in the map embedded in this post. Basically I've added location information (latitude and longitude) to each of my blog posts, and modified my blog's RSS feed to include this information, according to the GeoRSS specification. The embeded map reads my blog feed and plots the geotagged posts.
Everything I did was through the MoveableType interface (I'll post instructions soon). The only thing that's missing right now is the ability to enter human-readable addresses. Right now you have to use a geocoding service to get the lat/long of a location.
There's some pretty cool applications of this. Study-abroad students could blog about their experiences, and students interested in the program could use the map to learn about places around the world where they might want to study. Philosophy students could role-play figures from greek-mythology, and geotag their posts of significant moments in literature. There's other examples in the Location Aware Technologies hot team white paper [PDF] I wrote with some folks at ETS.
Just a little test. Please ignore.
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