Anyone thinking of submitting a proposal to present at HigherEd BlogCon? The call for presenters is due to close on January 31.
HigherEd BlogCon 2006
April 3-28, 2006
http://www.higheredblogcon.com
The more I read mainstream articles like this one from the New York Times on podcasting in K-12, the more urgent it seems for college and university instructors to understand and begin using this technology. The phenomenon is no longer new. Students are going to expect a way to get their college classes via podcast.
Apple has launched iTunes U, a platform for universities to publish podcasts. University webmaster listservs are all a-buzz over it.
Some are seeing this move as a renewed commitment on Apple’s part to serve the education sector. Note that they also recently launched a podcasting server for schools.
University of Missouri Columbia is one school announcing this week that they’ve joined.
Read more on TUAW.
The Johns Hopkins University website is full of RSS feeds, both from the university and from schools and programs. The school of public health has an audio podcast and a video podcast.
Here is a list of their feeds.
The University of California San Diego Science & Engineering Library has a feed, adding to the existing set of engineering-related feeds on Edufeeds.com.
Google has recently added a feature enabling websites to embed videos from the Google Video site. The feature is available for certain free videos.
The embedded video appears as a player with controls, displaying an early frame in the video. I found a handful of college promotional videos on the site, but so far only one that has the “Put on site” feature enabled–a promotional video for Multnomah Bible College, which I embed below as an example.
I was surprised not to find more college promotional videos in the Google Video search. I was also surprised that many of the ones I did find didn’t have the “Put on site” feature enabled. This seems like a great way to encourage the distribution not only of promotional videos, but also classroom videos and screencasts. TILT (Teachers Improving Learning with Technology) has already picked up on the idea, and is embedding videos it uploads to Google back on its own blog (cool idea!).
It would be great to see someone begin to include the code for embedding these videos in an RSS feed (perhaps someone with a classroom video or screencast), as a way to begin syndicating embedded video. Perhaps, in the future, Google will offer an easy way to make this happen, possibly by offering publishers a way to syndicate what they publish on Google Video.
If the feature is enabled for a given video (see, for example, this video), you will see a “Put on site” link on the page for the video itself. Clicking the link reveals a window containing HTML code for embedding the video on your site, which you copy into the page where you want to embed a video.
(Disclosure: Multnomah Bible College admission office is a client of Thomson Peterson’s.)
Technorati tags: Google Video, Multnomah
~Ivy Tech Community College launched a marketing podcast which is being promoted on the school’s home page. Here’s the podcast feed.
~Chicago Tribune piece on college blogs in marketing, mentioning many blogs with which we are familiar: Ball State, University of Dayton, Colgate. (The article contains some quotes, but nothing terribly new for readers following this blog.)
~WRAL.com (Raleigh-Durham, NC): Some students prefer classes online: “…students are increasingly demanding both high-tech delivery of education, and more control over their schedules.” Administrators at Arizona State University say that “the distinction between online and traditional is now so meaningless it may not even be reflected in next fall’s course catalogue.”
I’m thrilled to see that the idea of HigherEd BlogCon is catching on in the K-12 area. They’ve already generated some program ideas and started a wiki.
Update: 2006 K12 Online Edublogger Conference is scheduled for May 2006, with the call for presenters closing on Febraury 17, 2006. Here’s the event RSS feed.
From the Daily Trojan:
“The Information Technology Program at the Viterbi School of Engineering will podcast 13 classes this semester, including ITP 215, ITP 280 and ITP 457. The podcasts will include entire lectures available for download in MP3 format, said Ashish Soni, director of the Information Technology Program.”
TheDartmouth.com: “In an attempt to make the faculty more accessible to the public, the Dartmouth Office of Public Affairs recently created a series of audio programs made available online through a new format called “podcasting.”" They’re using Feeder to generate the RSS feed. (Page | RSS feed)
Southern Utah University’s Admission Office is indeed podcasting. The first show (mp3), dated 1-9-2006, introduces the series and highlights the latest sports headlines. They’re using Smultron 1.1, an open-source text editor for Mac OS X, to generate the RSS feed. (Page | RSS Feed)
