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)

(this is a follow-up to Ellysa's post about our workshop)

(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.)

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.

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:

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 are some that might argue that the media pieces I'm talking about, while they might belong in an ePortfolio, do not have a place in a formal academic document like a dissertation.  But consider something like this: http://softmatter.cscm.ir/FilmMotor/.  These videos are just as significant as any other illustration that was included in papers on this research.  I can think of dozens of other examples, from Engineering to Liberal Arts, where audio and video would be key elements of a research paper.  And these elements would have to be stored with the paper.  

Archiving isn't an especially exciting topic, but it's one that bears some thinking.  It is a potentially serious limiting factor in getting instructors (especially in graduate and honors programs) to adopt this technology in their teaching.  One person at this meeting mentioned an experience she had with an Engineering class where students were given the option to write a short paper or produce a video.  The instructor assumed that the students would be excited about the latter, but they overwhelmingly chose to write a paper.  When asked about it, most were concerned that come job interview time, the video would be too cumbersome.

There's no easy technical solution to this problem.  But it would be a shame if these limitations were stifling innovative teaching practices.  It's certainly something that I and the Digital Commons team are going to spend some time researching.

I was talking to Allan Gyorke a few days ago about some different options for a pre-TLT Symposium workshop.  This also happened to be the same day that myself and the DC team had had an opportunity to hold a conference call with Bryan Alexander to discuss the work each of our groups are doing around digital storytelling.  So we got into talking about running a DS workshop similar to the one we did at the Digital Commons Tailgate last Fall.  

The first session I attended was on "Academic Digital Storytelling" by a group from Ohio State University's Digital Union (http://digitalunion.osu.edu/. They are using DS as means for faculty to produce professional portfolios. Some obvious examples include slideshows of a Fine Arts faculty's work, and a narrated video of an Education faculty's research into innovative teaching practices. These pieces are creative, visually appealing, and most importantly tell a story which engages the audience and engenders a personal connection with the author. OSU conducts a 3 day intensive workshop for faculty, during which they learn how to use the necessary authoring software in addition to becoming familiarized with the elements of effective storytelling. The software they learn is the type of consumer-level authoring apps that we often train on at Digital Commons, namely Apple's iLife suite (iMovie, Garageband, etc.). It's very easy to get even a novice user (faculty or student) up to speed on these apps, and the various templates and other automation they provide make it very easy to create very professional looking media. Most of the time limitations and lack of flexibility of these packages are precisely what makes them attractive - a lot of creativity can come from being forced to work within constraints. Advanced features just cause unnecessary cognitive load, which is clearly bad when your primary objective is self expression and learning concepts other than how to operate software. OSU seems to have successfully developed a program that places emphasis on the appropriate skills. 3 days does seem to be a rather excessive duration for these workshops, and I wonder how easily we could convince Penn State faculty to take that much time. Although their attendance levels are decent, which makes me at least consider the potential of this here. 

The second session I attended was Bryan Alexander's Web 2.0 Storytelling presentation/workshop titled "Chaotic Fiction, Alternate Reality Games, and the World's Cheapest MMOG". First off, Bryan is the essence of what you want to see in every teacher - energetic, passionate, very smart but able to communicate difficult concepts very clearly. There's a lot about his approach to this session that I'd like to incorporate into our own future DS workshops. He explained the theoretical foundation of DS, much of its history, and showed many examples of how the affordances of social media platforms such as blogs, wikis, and Twitter can enable some fascinating exercises in collaborative storytelling. One example was of a short story authored entirely in a wiki by a community of people, which I believe was guided by a single master author. The end results might not have been top-notch, but I think the journey is what's of real interest here. Every plot twist and new direction was vetted by the group, and successfully adopted ideas were the jumping off point for new ideas. Some other examples included rich media (audio and video) and more or less extensive uses of group collaboration. What really brought it all together was the hands-on group storytelling exercises which Bryan wove into the presentation, which consisted of everyone getting into small groups and being presented with a wiki within which we were asked to tell a brief story about a random image assigned to our group. It's at this point that everyone really starts to understand the choice of the term "Chaotic Fiction". Bottom line, if your students are laughing while they're learning, you're doing something right, and we were definitely laughing (and learning). Just some final thoughts on Digital Storytelling: There's a time and place for it, although you might be surprised how many educational uses there are. Pick a subject and brainstorm some ideas. And think across Bloom's taxonomy - there's definitely some compelling uses along the continuum from lower-order thinking (telling a story which simply conveys basic facts) to higher-order thinking (synthesizing many ideas to tell an original story). You'll be much more successful if you use simple tools. Provide access to straightforward access to Creative Commons licensed media so authors can jazz up their productions - (http://digitalcommons.psu.edu/freemedia). Use free tools like PBWiki, Blogger, and Twitter (if you don't have in-house options) to add an element of collaboration to the process. We'll offer more storytelling workshops this semester. I will try to post follow-ups to that in this space. Thoughts?