The Ed Techie

The Podstars lessons

I mentioned a while back that I was running an internal project called 'Podstars'. This ties into the whole digital scholarship/new digital outputs agenda. The title is somewhat misleading since the aim of the project was not to create online broadcast celebrities, but rather to raise the profile of producing new kinds of stuff for academics.

In the project we asked for volunteers, and then gave Flip cams to 16 academics. We got them together for an initial meeting, showed them the basic video editing software, talked through what they wanted to do and showed some good examples of videos and tools they might use. We then had a mid-project meeting where we reviewed contributions and discussed any issues, and then a final meeting. In the mean time we had a wiki to share contributions and ad-hoc support as needed. 

The project has now ended and we've done some evaluation, so I thought I'd share some thoughts. You can see some of the outputs here.

Feedback

The feedback was almost entirely positive. Of course, the group was made up of volunteers, but they all found the project useful and plan to take on aspects of it further. Below are a couple of representative quotes:

"It has been immensely useful to my teaching. I had created a great deal of AV and online content before, but this was all OU (or BBC) branded and I was simply not aware of all the free resources available now. The course really opened my eyes to the possibilities outside formal OU systems."

"Amazingly helpful. It gave me confidence to get on and try it"

"I'm now thinking about ways to extend use of video in my research and teaching"

"I learnt a lot about the options available for packaging and disseminating my research results. This was certainly a very useful project for me."

In general people favoured the open nature of the project (rather than giving them a set direction to film), found the wiki a mixed experience, didn't think a buddy project would work, the time required was more than expected, it was enjoyable and they felt that the number of meetings, and length of project, was about right.

Takeaway messages

Obviously with such a limited and self-selecting cohort this is not a representative sample, but I'd draw some tentative messages from this pilot study, or at least things to discuss.

• The legitimisation of 'playing' - most participants had thought about creating video before, and kept blogs or had specific projects, but had never quite found the time to make that commitment. By signing up to the project this both legitimised it in their own minds (and that of colleagues/managers) and also provided a motivation to engage.
• The switch to producer from consumer - this is small, but significant. We asked people to upload to YouTube, and although most had viewed lots of videos, none (I think) had produced their own. Once this switch has been made it will be interesting to see if it sticks.
• Different formats - although we started the project around Flip cams, I also introduced people to Xtranormal, Slideshare and Animoto, with the challenge 'you can produce something in 15 minutes'. Some participants preferred these other tools, and all could see value in having a mix. Exposure to the variety of tools (and see below, their ease of use), was a significant gain for many of the volunteers.
• An appreciation of how easy it has become - as you can see from a couple of the quotes above it was a mild revelation to many participants to realise how easy the tools are to use. This included the Flip cam and editing software (nearly all participants soon wanted to move beyond the limitations of the default Flip software for editing), and also the additional tools and services such as YouTube, Slideshare and Xtranormal. In fact the most cumbersome tool was probably the wetpaint wiki we used to share content. This is something I often stress in workshops - we've passed a threshold in the ease of use of multimedia but a lot of people don't know that yet. Seeing how easy it was to create content for themselves which can be used for dissemination, research or teaching was quite liberating.
• Context and framing is important - when you have your own blog, it is easy to construct the academic context around an artefact, eg I can embed a slidecast and then write a commentary around what I was hoping to achieve with it. Although we could have done this with the wiki, it didn't work well for the participants and thus some reported that they felt their artifacts were rather left floating. This ties in with another point which is about having a recognised output route. In the next iteration I think I'll create a podstars blog where people can then construct text around each entry.
• A non-project project - in my last post I proposed that the type of web 2.0/social media innovation organisations might want to explore doesn't fit easily into a conventional project structure, and yet projects are the means by which organisations conduct their business. The podstars project seems to be at about the right level for meeting both of these needs - it was identified as an internal project with people attached to it, there were some loose objectives associated with it, but it remained fairly lightweight and exploratory. A university may well have a higher level goal of finding efficient means of disseminating knowledge, which this would feed into, but it has to emerge out of work the academics feel is of value, rather than top-down directives. I can't guarantee these academics will continue using new tools, and scaling the project up will be an issue, but it does seem that if you repeated this often enough you would start to create an environment wherein the sort of frictionless outputs I have talked about elsewhere become a reality.
• Being creative is fun - who knew?

If anyone is running, or runs a similar project in their place, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Some thoughts on open conference contributions

Over the next few posts I'll be commenting on aspects of the Open University conference which I've just finished running. You can view the playback of all sessions from here.

 I'll cover reflections on the conference and what we did in separate posts. In this one I wanted to look at some of the contributions we got from people in Cloudworks. We had a fixed agenda of speakers (I thought multiple strands would be too confusing in Elluminate), but asked for multi-media contributions from anyone, highlighting their project. You can see all the contributions here. 

To be honest I don't think we used these as well as we could have in the main sessions, and I'd need to think about how we get better engagement around them for any future conferences, because many of them are excellent. But what I wanted to do in this post was pull in a few of them and what thoughts they had given rise to. What is key in this is that the format really helps. It's almost like, erm, the medium is the message.

First up is something very simple, but it made me reflect on how important personal contact is. Heather Richardson, a tutor on the creative writing course, created a short hello video for her students and showed them around some of the course materials.

During the conference a number of people said how good it was when the speaker put up a photo of themselves, just so they could make that human connection. I think Heather's video is a good example of this. It is also important that it isn't a course team video, but that it comes from the tutor as this is the student's point of contact. I think it's also significant in that it isn't high quality video production - the implicit message in this video is that I'm one of you, and also, you could do this too. I'd like to see more tutors doing this sort of thing.

The second video is from Janet Haresnape which sets out an activity for demonstrating genetic drift in evolution. The audio quality isn't great, but I think it's a really good experiment. With a day's recording effort and input from one AV professional I reckon we'd have a useful learning resource that many others could use. And there must be many more examples like this around. What we need is for people like Janet to have a go at creating something and then the OU can pick some to add a bit more gloss to and you'd have more 'learning objects' than we ever got from learning object approaches.

In the next clip Jennefer Hart asks 'What is  design atelier?'. This is part of a research project, and what I like about this short movie is that it isn't telling you about the project but rather prompting you to think about it. One could imagine taking this to the next step and asking people to respond with a YouTube clip and then you'd have a nice playlist, which becomes a meaningful resource.

Creating adverts or promotional videos for courses is something we'll see more of (both Tony Hirst and Alec Couros have started doing really good ones). This one from Giselle Ferreira is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind.

And lastly, mainly to wind up AJ Cann, here is an excellent video about the Second Life activity for postgrad students:

Now I could have got all this from traditional papers, but I think asking for multimedia content had two key benefits for me: firstly it encouraged some people to produce content when they hadn't before; secondly seeing the content made me think about how the OU can use and generate digital artefacts in different ways.

I've only picked out a few contributions here to make some more general points, they're all worth looking at.

For local people - new models for newspapers

In case you hadn't seen it, the Guardian is running an interesting model with some local versions. Cardiff Guardian is one of the first ones (Edinburgh and Leeds being the others). It is ostensibly run by one person (Hannah Waldram), who covers local news, and then pulls in Cardiff related stories from the existing Guardian stock material. Added to this there are guest posts from local people, some crowdsourced content (eg Flickr photos) plus third party tools, such as MySociety.Org and FixMyStreet. The outcome is a very useful site and, if you live in Cardiff, very engaging too.

What is interesting about it is that it offers a potential model for how many sectors can combine new and existing approaches (I'll come to education in a minute). It takes existing content, which you have a system producing anyway, and gets an additional use from it. This is combined with quality contributions from a dedicated (and employed) person to generate enough content, but also draws on the wealth of content created by those with an interest. Here is my summary of how I think it works:

You could see how this might be a model transferable for education also. In my Academic Output as Collateral Damage post I suggested we could view higher education as a long tail content production system. This is equivalent to the big Guardian content the local version draws upon - there is a pool of academic related content being produced. If you want to create a specialised course then you have one dedicated academic to draw this together and add in additional material. They then combine this with third party content and services. A course, almost by definition, has an interested group of participants, so the course content becomes populated by student contributions, but also by small invited pieces from other academics.

If you have such a model in place, then you could see how you could quickly create course for niche interests, timely events, specific employers, etc. And at little extra cost. The trick I suspect is putting in place a system that allows it to happen easily. The Guardian example is permitted because of all the prior work that the Guardian has put in to becoming a web-savvy newspaper.

Academic output as collateral damage

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was also an example of the type of output I had in mind.

The (poor audio quality) slidecast is below:

Academic output as collateral damage

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

My main points were that you can view higher education as a long tail content production system. And if you are producing this stuff as a by-product of what you do anyway then a host of new possibilities open up. You can embrace unpredictability - which if you are spending £1000s on a TV series you don't want, but online unpredictability is a good thing, it's where all the innovation comes from. But most importantly I think it means we can do things we couldn't do before - George and Dave's open course is an example of this and we've only just begun to explore the possibilities that this new relationship with content affords.

Content may not be king anymore, but it has some influential friends

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a two day staff development workshop here at the OU. It had been very well organised by the Social Sciences Faculty and the aim was to get staff thinking about using new technologies to solve some of their problems in teaching. There had been some good initial work, so the groups came with problems they wanted to address, eg student retention from 1st to 2nd level, encouraging reflection, etc.

I was asked to present on the use of blogs and wikis. I gave a brief whizz through and tried to convey my enthusiasm for them as educational tools (I ended with a half-jesting 'eat my hat challenge' that whatever their issue was, I could solve it with blogs and wikis).

Why use blogs and wikis?

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

There were also presentations on:

• Interactive quizzes
• Screen/slide casting
• Podcasting

The groups then had some hands on sessions and had to choose two technologies and on the second day, set about solving their problem with these technologies.

Can you guess which of the four technologies was most popular? The answer is Screen/slide casting, with every group wanting to create one of these, and the other three all about equal after that. I think this may have been because it was more immediate (blogs take some time to get going and you need students really) and thus suited the workshop format more readily. But I think it is also something to do with educators relation to content.

In the age of the social network, it has become a cliche to say that content is no longer king, but it is something that people can readily engage with, rather than some of the more nebulous and longer-term benefits of blogging. I saw a lot of academics very excited by the liberating effect of being able to produce their own content (this was something I had pushed as a benefit of blogs also, the easy multi-media aspect). One downloaded Camtasia and was off making videos, another used Xtranormal and soon they were producing complex ideas and scripts.

The take-away message for me then was that many people are unaware of how easy it has become to create multi-media content, and that demonstrating this is a good 'way in' to appreciating the potential of a whole range of new(ish) technologies.

The value of content

It has often occurred to me that TV companies don't make enough of their content, particularly in relation to films. You will often come across a truly great film either sandwiched inbetween soap operas or tucked away at midnight on one of their smaller channels. This was brought home to me again recently when I watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (Redux) on Film 4. It is a sumptuous film (and I haven't seen the original, which film buffs, naturally, say is vastly superior to the Redux version). Watching it I wanted to know more (partly to figure out what was going on, but also because you know it's a film that excites comment), so I browsed the IMDB reference, and also came across these interviews with the director on YouTube.

Now on TV you might get a 10 second introduction from the announcer and that's it. Why couldn't they put together some discussion or analysis programme before a film? They'd be dead cheap to make - you get some film buffs in a room and let them talk. This isn't going to be a massive draw, I accept, but if you trailer it enough it pulls in an extra audience for the film, it makes the showing of the film more of an event. And then you have maybe one of the experts interacting on twitter while the film is showing. Making TV an event is the new name of the game. My feeling though is that broadcasters are generally scared of anything vaguely 'intellectual' and underestimate their audience.

Sports TV has been good at wringing value from its content - as a football fan I used to watch a programme in which Jimmy Hill sat around with four newspaper journalists and they talked about the sports reporting in newspapers for an hour. It has to be the cheapest form of television around, and yet for a certain audience, it's worthwhile.

In a world where content is free and abundant I think there is a bigger message in this, beyond me wanting a film-bore bonanza. So here is my content-value advice: When there is lots of content it makes all content seem devalued, but the way to add value to content is to add more content to it, to provide context and interpretation. And if there isn't something in this for educators, then we're all wasting our time.