Audio and even video capture of lectures is becoming more common on college campuses, which post the material to their Web sites so that students can revisit a lecture after the fact.

But Drexel University in Philadelphia, long known as a technology powerhouse, is using the university’s academic capture product in another way. There, instructors are far more likely to produce recordings from their desktops, including individual commentaries to a student from a professor. Staff members also are using rich media recording software, a product from TechSmith called Camtasia Studio, in new ways, such as creating online training videos for new hires.

However, where Camtasia really shines at the university is in what Drexel’s director of academic technology innovation, John Morris, calls “individual capture.” Most Drexel instructors who are taking advantage of Camtasia, he said, are using it at their desktops… ( Here’s an example* of a professor providing written and audio feedback while marking up a student’s paper and recording the process in a Camtasia video.  *Need a RealPlayer to view the video)

The source is from: Linda L Briggs, “Drexel Puts Course Capture To Work on Desktops,” Campus Technology, 10/24/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=52378

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Technology plays a major role in Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s new course titled Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century. The course “makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university can deliver” including a course Web site with texts, images, artwork, music, geographic, cultural, and historical resources, even a virtual ship tour. According to Greenblatt, his use of new technologies - including GoogleEarth, digital images, and digital video - reflects his latest scholarly thinking, allows for true interdisciplinary approaches and stimulates deep engagement with the material and creativity in his students. Greenblatt is a world-renowned scholar of Renaissance literature and University Professor of the Humanities working on ways to “cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.” For details of how the course is organized and how technology is used, see the Chronicle of Higher Education’s description.

The library guide for the course reflects the rich array of materials used.

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“Authentic learning”—or learning-by-doing— engages students in the multidisciplinary problem solving and critical thinking researchers and experts use every day. Advances in technology enable access to a greater range of real and virtual environments. Why Today’s Students Value Authentic Learning, a white paper from the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI), explores student attitudes toward authentic learning, highlighting its benefits as well as potential concerns.

Haptic technologies are one way to make learning more realistic for students. Haptics simulate physical properties such as weight, momentum, friction, texture, or resistance through interfaces that let users “feel” what is happening on the screen. For example, medical students may use haptics for a simulation of giving an injection or performing a surgical technique. ELI’s paper on The 7 Things You Should Know About Haptics provides a simple overview of how haptic technology can enable authentic learning.

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Google Earth has recently published new imagery, allowing higher resolution viewing in some areas in over 130 countries. You can read more about it and follow clues to the new images at the Google Lat-Long Blog.

The Google Earth Blog (not affiliated with Google) highlights interesting uses of Google Earth, including a visualization of Burma, and a description of new, free tools to explore census data in Google Earth. From Frank Taylor’s Google Earth Blog:

“A nice new US census visualization tool for Google Earth has been released by Zonums Software. The new tool is called GE Census Explorer and allows you produce colorful 3D bar charts, pie charts, histograms, and scatter-plots. FreeGeographyTools has a good review and lots of screenshots. This new tool requires you to download an application, but a web interface is promised “soon”. Meanwhile, you could also try gCensus which does something similar for Google Earth using a web interface.”

The Center for Instructional Technology is offering workshops for anyone interested in Google Earth, including a brief lunchtime introduction, a hands-on workshop to create your own materials within Google Earth, demonstrations by the Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness and a Google Earth users group. Come and find out what you can do! Register on the CIT website for these events.

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Courses, events and campus life activities at the University of California at Berkeley are now featured on YouTube. Much of the content is similar to U.C. Berkeley’s channel on iTunes U.

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Arden: The World of William Shakespeare ended a year of development, but the multiplayer online world modeled on the settings and characters in Shakespeare’s plays is incomplete. The MacArthur Foundation provided $240,000 for the project, but as Edward Castronova, the professor at Indiana University who led the virtual environment project notes in his blog, “…this is very hard to do, and especially hard to do in an academic context. ” As for future development, Castronova writes, “The Bard has left the building for now, and his return date is unknown.”

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The Third Annual World Usability Day New England conference will be held on November 8, 2007 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.

Keynote
- The New Science of Universal Usability
by Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland at College Park

Track 1: Teaching and Learning
- Universal Design in Instruction: Moving Beyond Accessibility into Classroom Application
by Manju Banerjee, University of Connecticut and Loring C. Brinckerhoff, Educational Testing Service
- Making E-learning Usable at The Hadley School for the Blind
by Michael C. Rydel and Andre Lukatsky, Hadley School for the Blind

Track 2: Web Usability
- Universal Usability of Dynamic Content
by Marguerite Bergel and Ann Chadwick-Dias, Fidelity Investments
- Adaptive Design for Web Environments
by Sarah Horton, Dartmouth College and Patrick J. Lynch, Yale University

In addition, there will be a poster and demo session featuring technologies and methodologies that support universal usability, followed by a student panel, where learners share their experiences as beneficiaries of universal usability. The day will conclude with a roundtable discussion on Design, Creativity, Learning, and Usability, led by Steve Fadden from Landmark College.

The conference registration fee is $60, which includes meals and refreshments. You may pay by check or online using Google Checkout.

Register online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~wud/. Don’t delay as space is limited!

Please contact Sarah Horton at sarah.horton@dartmouth.edu or 603-646-1087 with any questions or concerns.

WUDNE 2007
Third Annual World Usability Day New England
Universal Usability in Teaching and Learning
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
November 8, 2007
9:00am – 4:00pm
www.dartmouth.edu/~wud

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The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning an open access, peer-reviewed, international academic journal focusing on improving college teaching & learning. It includes articles, essays and discussion about the scholarship of teaching and learning and its applications in higher education. The current issue of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (IJ-SoTL) is now available online.

To receive an email notification when new issues of IJ-SoTL are published, go to http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/email_notification.htm. Currently, 1,934 people from 63 countries have requested to be notified of new issues.

The submission deadline for the January 2008 issue of IJ-SoTL is November 15, 2007.

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This article at MIT’s Technology Review suggests that there may be gender differences in the way technology is used. This has potential implications about the way we look at academic technology tools or the way we talk about them, train users, and write supplemental documentation.

In general, we don’t have control over how software is designed by others. We do have control over how we deliver training and the documentation that we offer on our CIT and Blackboard web sites.

Click http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/19424/ for Technology Review article.

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The The New York Times Knowledge Network has expanded into an online initiative that provides distance education, course content and social networking. Mount Holyoke College, Stanford University and the Society for College and University Planning are some of the institutions working with this initiative. Educators can select Times articles, archival content, graphics and multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts and make them available to students online, along with other course materials. The Times will be providing technology and marketing for non-credit courses taught by college and university professors. Funds from tuition revenue will be split between the colleges and the Times.

Read more in The New York Times press release or in a news article from Inside Higher Ed.

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