http://doteduguru.com/id423-social-media-uses-higher-education-marketing-communication.html
The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education by Rachel Reuben
Bruce M. Saulnier, my old colleague at Quinnipiac University, has a great article out in the June issue of Information Systems Educational Journal entitled "From “Sage on the Stage” to “Guide on the Side” Revisited: (Un)Covering the Content in the Learner-Centered Information Systems Course"
Bruce has long been ahead of the game, educating the rest of us on the value of learner-centric course design and teaching practices.
I read this article in the context of thinking about how we can use social media tools to complement our CMS platforms. The advantage of social media tools are that they accomplish many of the goals advocated by Bruce and other progressive educators, that is move the students from consumers to creators and get their work out into the larger conversation.
As Bruce writes: "In this community setting learners raise their own questions and generate their own hypotheses, seeking feedback from their fellow learners, both students and faculty, in testing their hypotheses." (page 5)
The social media I'm thinking about these days are publishing platforms for rich media course assignments. Video to YouTube is straightforward. Michael Wilder blogged about how YouTube's Quick Capture tool is a great way for students and faculty to make and share quick video casts.
Where I'm struggling is how to combine the advantages of a simple voice-over presentation system that students can use with a publishing platform. At the College we have given a few workshops on TechSmith's free Jing tool - a great way for students to rapidly created voice-over presentations and share them in Blackboard. In the course I'll be teaching this summer the students will be required to create (in teams) 6 short teaching voice-over presentations on the major sociological themes (using the course reading as the basis for these teaching presentations.
The problem I'm having is that Jing - the free version - does not publish to YouTube. YouTube does not accept *.swf files.
The students will be publishing their Jing voice-over presentations to the Blackboard Wiki - the method that we work with faculty to diffuse (and which has had some success). The problem I have is that the Jing's are then locked up in Blackboard. We loose the ability to engage in a wider dialogue. The great work that the students produce will not be available for other learners in other educational settings. The students will not be able to show-off their work to friends, parents, future employers.
We could publish to http://screencast.com/ (owned by Techsmith) but this site does not get the network effects (lots of users, lots of sharing and conversation) that YouTube allows.
So I'm feeling sort of stuck. Any suggestions or ideas?
How about trying screencast-o-matic? It's browser-based (Java applet) and allows upload to YouTube as well as exporting the resulting video. I have made a sample and it works, but have not uploaded anything to YouTube.
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com
Posted by: Brian Reid | May 28, 2009 at 01:33 PM
Brian....When I've used this tool in the past it has felt sort of flaky.
But I'll look at it again to see if this will work.....and report back.
Posted by: Joshua Kim | May 28, 2009 at 03:59 PM