Clicker alternatives and a New Year's wish.

Classroom response systems, aka clickers, are a great way to provide some interaction and student-centeredness to a large lecture hall class. Even in smaller classes, these systems can provide useful feedback to both instructor and student as well as providing stimulus for discussions. They are expensive though, and I always have my eye out for alternatives. Recently I've found two that can be had for free, but with major limitations.

The first is from Microsoft. They have developed the Interactive Classroom for Powerpoint plug-in, available as a free download It seems like a well designed system. Instructors can put questions up right on a Powerpoint slide, start and stop when the question is open for responses, and immediately display results. You can even spontaneously pop up questions on the spur of the moment. There are two limitations, on the instructor side it only works with the latest Windows version of Powerpoint, 2007. The second limitation is that all the respondents must be connected to the network, and have Microsoft OneNote installed. OneNote is bundled with the version of office available to our students, but except in our Windows teaching labs, and maybe some classes in the College of Business, it's far from likely that every student in a class would have a Windows computer available.

A more likely scenario which uses devices almost all students have in their possession, is Poll Everywhere. The instructor side is entirely web based, so you can use it on either a Windows or Macintosh. On the response side, you can use any device that can access the web, via a web page or Tweet, and also regular phone text messages, a modality dear to the heart of college students. Between laptops, notebooks, smart phones, iPod Touches, iPads, and regular cell phones, almost every student would likely have some device that could respond. Each individual question is set up as a poll, but you can group polls and move from one to another rather easily. You can choose to view a "static chart" that just displays the possible answers and the codes needed for submitting, and when you've received all the responses, switch to a "live chart" which displays the results. Polls can be embedded in a Powerpoint slide. The big limitation with Poll Everywhere is that it's only free with up to 32 respondents. There are paid plans that allow up to 1000 respondents per poll, but they're not exactly cheap. $399 per semester for each instructor. (This would actually be cheaper than we're paying now for eInstruction's CPS System). There are also plans where each student subscribes for $14 apiece for a semester for each class.

It should be noted that there are some features available in the classic clicker systems not available on these. The most noticeable one is that it is not recorded who responded to what. You get the interactive benefits in class, but lose the ability to track how students are doing, as well as using it as a way to record attendance. The other issue is the question of whether every student would have a compatible device, and if that were a basic free cell phone, a text messaging plan that wouldn't cost them extra to use it.

It would really be great if someone created an open source solution for this. It seems like it would be within the capabilities of the Plone content management system which we use on our campus, although it would probably require some special scripting or workflows to make it workable. (You know who I'm talking to here).

The system would probably have to be web based. Eliminating text message responses would reduce the universality as with Poll Everywhere, but I think it would still have a lot of application. For example, in our College of Nursing, all students are required to have a smart phone, and in several nursing classes I've been in recently, every student had a laptop open (following the instructors Powerpoint, I might add). I'd be willing to bet it's not unusual to see College of Business classes where everyone had a laptop, netbook, ipad or smart phone, and likely upper division science courses too. And keep in mind, the price of admission here would be as low as a refurbed iPod touch, which college kids could also find lots of other uses for, and who knows how cheap Android devices will get. If the system was free otherwise, and lots of instructors adopted, I'd bet it would encourage students to get some kind of device to make use of it.

The basic system would consist of a series of one question polls. A sophisticated Plone user could probably rig this up without special scripting, but to make it widely applicable, I think some special tools to simplify it would be necessary. The nature of the questions would primarily be multiple choice, but numerical entries and text entries would be useful too. The Instructor would have to be able to move to a particular question (from a menu maybe), make it active to receive input from users, and stop it from being active. When they had received all the input, they would then display the results, perhaps as a graph or a histogram in the case of numerical answers (This would be a great way to demonstrate a normal statistical distribution).

On the client side, you'd probably want to strip it down to all but the essentials needed to vote, since you might have as many as 200 users logged into the wireless network. If the users were on mobile devices a special CSS for them could do the trick, but I'm not sure how you'd do it for regular laptop users, maybe having one display for the page owner, and a different simpler display for the rest of the world. It would be great if they didn't have to move to a different page to go to a new question, that is, it would just update as the instructor moved to a new question.

I'm sure Plone stores survey results, so the instructor could later review how the class did, but it would probably be difficult to track who voted how without creating an account on Plone for each student. I'm not sure how much this would clog up the server, but we spend enough on conventional clickers that it would probably be worthwhile for a specific Plone server just for this purpose to be set up and connect it to the LDAP server.

If this could be set up as a Plone "product," I'm sure we could see some widespread use of it around the country, and it would probably be a sure conference presentation, and of course it would be the ultimate of cool.

Rhythm Guitar Therapy

I've played guitar since I was thirteen years old. In college, I was an active local folkie. Except for one spontaneous coffee house performance in the late '70's, and accompanying Christmas carols at a pack meeting, I hardly touched it for the rest of the century. Then, in 2001 Sarah and Andy gave me an American Standard Telecaster, and a year later a Marshall amp. I've been a regular basement rocker for the last decade. (They're also responsible for moving my listening habits from Classic Rock 'n Roll to the harder, metal edge–Loud Rock according to Andy's title at his college radio station.)

There are three impetuses for this post.

The first is my friend, George Possley, with whom I played and sang regularly in college. George recently retired from being a higher education techie and former math teacher, and has set about his life's dream of being a recording star. Accordingly, he posts a daily song to YouTube on his channel Geoman7447. George wondered in a Facebook comment on my wall what I sounded like now and encouraged me to record and post something, OK, here ya go, George.

The second was a blog post by Lisa Golden last fall about why she blogs. My take away from that post was that to really follow through with any creative process , you have to put it out there for an audience to chew on. Thanks for the nudge, Lisa.

The third was an article this weekend in the St. Paul Pioneer Press about an upcoming performance by Los Straightjackets. One member of the band stated that they had been moving to a more punk, metal sound. I have always described my guitar playing as surf punk metal and I wanted to establish my precedence as surf punk metal hero.

So I recorded the piece below sometime in November. It's through a Line 6 Pod into Audacity on a Mac Book. This is the fourth take. I tried different settings of amp type and effects, but they all ended up sounded much the same once I fiddled with them to sound like me. I'm not sure which guitar it was, either the black Ventura or the Warlock.

The basic riff is one of the first things I learned to play on the guitar.

Listening to the playback, I get the impression that this is a long rhythm part in search of a lead. From the title of the post, you can see I consider myself essentially a rhythm guitarist.

One of the things guitar magazine editorials always encourage the beginner to do is follow their own style. I've always been of the opinion that you really don't have much control over it, a style is going to emerge once you start doing something with enough facility to not have to concentrate totally on the mechanics. I should mention that I've been taking formal lessons for three years, and it's starting to stick, and by the time I retire, I may have the confidence and skill to approach other musicians to play with, but, I don't think it has had much influence on what you will hear here. That having been said, if this sounds like something you might think it's fun to play drums or bass to, give me a call.

It might fall into the category of what Sarah occasionally characterizes as more fun to play than to listen to, most commonly applied to Yingwe Malmsteen and Steve Vai.

So here it is, my riff on Rebel Rouser–Nick Dvoracek raw and unfiltered. I don't think I'm the kind of rebel Duane Eddy had in mind.

Rebel Rouser (MP3, 4MB, 4:18)

Better handouts, fewer dead trees

One practice that wastes a lot of paper yet doesn’t yield any benefit is printing Powerpoint presentations one slide to a sheet of paper.

One real downside is that it creates quite a stack of paper. Who needs to carry around 36 sheets of paper when you could get away with six. Another problem other than the simple mass of the extra paper is the hassle of leafing through all those pages to review the presentation.

When you go to print a Powerpoint file, there’s a “Print what” menu. The default is “Slides” meaning print one slide to a page. If you pull down the menu, you’ll see a choice for Handouts. When you select that just to the right is a choice for 2, 3, 4, 6 or 9 slides per page. 2, 4, 6 and 9 fill the page with reduced size versions of the slide. 3 only fills half the page with slides, and fills the other side with lines for writing notes.

A common response is: How am I going to read slides that are reduced that much in size?

There are two things that compensate for this reduction. One is that the type size for a Powerpoint presentation is typically in the 32 point and up range. The type you normally read on a page is 10 or 12 point so although six slides to a page is reduced from the size that you need for the whole audience to read, the type on the printed page is pretty much what you’re used to. Legibility studies show that readibility on a printed page is much better at 10 to 12 points than at larger sizes.

The second control is that the printer has much higher resolution than the projector you use to watch the presentation in class. The projector is probably 1024 x 768 pixels (There is some variation, but that’s been the standard for about 8 years). At the average laser printer’s resolution of 600 dots per inch, thats only about 2 x 1 1/4 inches, so the 3 x 2 1/4 reproduction you’re seeing on a six-to-the-page handout is actually more detail than you see in class.

Another thing you can do to make a better handout and be more sustainable is the Color/greyscale menu just below the Print what menu. (Output on a Mac) The default is Color which is pretty obviously reproducing exactly what you see on the screen, although you’re probably printing on a black and white laser printer, so what you get is a grey scale interpretation of the color image. Unless the presenter was pretty careful in keeping the contrast up, that could make a difficult to read print.

The second choice under Color/greyscale is Greyscale, kind of a confusing choice for the menu item, but what it does is drop out any background color of the slide to just white paper, changes the color of any text created in Powerpoint to black, and reproduces any graphic or photo to a grey scale rendering. So basically you get high contrast, easy to read text, and exactly the same information for any illustrative materials, and you save a lot of toner and wear and tear on the printer.

iPad mania

One of the weird things about learning technologies is the way new things pop in in fits and starts and dominate your life for a while. Some become so mainstream as to be almost invisible. Desktop Publishing came in the '80's, Presentation software (dominated by PP of course) and course management systems in the '90's, student response systems (clickers) in the oughts were exciting new developments. Now the stream is pretty continuous. The latest splashy new toy is the iPad. It's one of the most successful product introductions ever, and now we have to see what we can do with it in education.

There's no question it's the most comfy, intuitive way to surf the net. Yes, yes, I know, no flash. That is irritating, but it's surprising that after a tiny bite of disappointment when encountering a non-functioning flash object, well, you just surf somewhere else. The web is a big place with lots of shiny things to look at. I'm not a gamer, but I've read that the iPad and it's little sibling the iPod Touch are making big inroads as gaming applications. There's no question that the iPad has gotten more press than any other single product ever. It gets 786 million hits on Google versus 679 million hits for Windows 7.

So what can we do with this in education.

Well, personally, and I'm not an instructor, I'm using it mainly as a PDA (a '90's term, Personal Digital Assistant); staying in touch with email and calendar while on the go. (It's also nice to whip open and have something to read while waiting for Windows 7 to reboot while installing something in a classroom, which I inevitably have to do in the beginning to of the semester.) An objective of mine for the iPad is to not print anything that's been sent to me as an email attachment when going to meetings. (I do still carry a pad of paper to take notes.)

I have a personally purchased one of my own at home which my wife and I refer to as the source of all knowledge. We use to refer to our iPhone that way, but that's become mostly a road tool since we got the iPad, although it's not unusual to have one of us on the phone and one on the pad at the same time.

In order to find out what kind of teaching/learning affect it can have, we used some money available on the happy end of end-of-the-year accounting to purchase five iPads and some software and projector connectors to loan out to faculty for one month and have them report what they made of it. Since payment for apps is tied to an iTunes U account, it took a while to figure out how we could pay for apps, while not leaving a University purchasing card available for our borrowers, but that got worked out and it leaves it possible for borrowers to install free apps (and even pay for apps if they want–they would still be good for installation on another iPad if they acquire one themselves after our loan period, but they'll be wiped from ours before going to the next instructor.) We did include the pretty sweet iWorks suite–Numbers, a spread sheet, Keynote, presentation, and Pages, word processing and layout–and a connector to display it on a classroom projector.

If this sounds like an announcement to solicit participation in our little project, its too late. The announcement hit the Announcements email list, which I have to mention isn't closely monitored or even subscribed to by a significant portion of the population, at 4:00 on last Friday afternoon (Were you at your desk monitoring email at 4:00 on Friday afternoon?) The five available iPads were spoken for in under 5 minutes, and we now have them reserved well into the next semester.

I'm not sure if we can scarf up more money to add to the project and I'm going to wait for the reports of the first wave before I even try for that. I can't wait to see what they're going to come up with. I suppose they could just say they used it to watch YouTube in their office, but I'm hoping they'll come up with some interesting uses that affect teaching and learning.

But it has gotten my imagination going.

About ten years ago we bought a portable computer lab. Ten laptops on a cart with their own wireless access point. Instructors had been complaining that they couldn't get into one of the three teaching computer labs on campus when they needed to, and besides, what they wanted was for small groups to have a computer to work with, mainly to seek resources on the internet to inform discussions. That failed pretty miserably because we could get about an hour and a half use on a battery charge, and it took four hours to charge up, not to mention somebody had to carefully connect each computer to the power supply back at the classroom technology office. (Distribution was limited to two adjoining classroom buildings, but they account for about half of all classes.) This meant only one class could use it each day. Also, since for efficient battery charging, they had to be shut down, which meant they had to be started up in class, taking up a few extra minutes. It's not the first thing you think of, but they also had to be handed out and gathered back up, taking up a few more minutes. If the class didn't get them packed up, one of our staff had to do the cleanup, tricky to do in ten minutes between classes, especially if you have other deliveries scheduled. There was the obvious security issue. Did the instructor count to see if all the laptops were actually put back in the cart? This never actually happened, but there was no control to cover it other than the vigilance of the instructor.

OK, fast forward 10 years and change the laptops to iPads. An iPad can easily get 11 hours of use out of a charge that only takes about an hour, they weigh 30 percent what a laptop does, and they come on instantly, and don't require shut down, and wireless is available everywhere on campus. We could even set them up so they didn't require any log-in to the wireless network.

The security issue is kind of amplified though, thanks to the extreme portability and desirability of the iPad, and– it's not a computer. If you're trying to teach how to use Photoshop or Indesign, it's not going to work. A lot of internet applications don't work on them–for example, I can't edit this blog post on it and the text editor in D2L doesn't work.

However, many internet apps do work–I can post to Facebook and even older discussion boards–and as noted before, it's the greatest way ever to surf for information to inform discussions and fill out reports in small group situations. And there are lots of special purpose free apps that could have instructional value.

If we did this we'd have to find some creative way to solve the security issues, and someone would still have to take class time to hand them out and gather them at the end of class. I'm not going to pursue this idea unless I have a pretty good idea that instructors would like to use them in this manner.

If you substituted iPod touches for iPads, it would be even more portable. You could get 15 of those in a small briefcase. They also cost half as much. Again as noted above, before I bought the iPad, our iPhone was the source of all knowledge and the iPod Touch is pretty much the same device until you want to make a phone call. Would these meet the kind of objectives instructors have in class?

This leads me to the thought, that since small groups are the target users, is it possible that enough students in the average class have smartphones of some kind in their pocket to meet this kind of objective, eliminated our need to make the expenditure and manage their distribution?

I've never had much luck getting comments on this blog, but to quote one of my favorite bloggers: Wise and worldly readers, do you have any ideas how iPads could be applied to teaching and learning?

Bring 'em in

One of the changes I'm most excited about this fall is that all our classroom computers now have built in cameras and have the videoconferencing software Skype installed. Almost every faculty member has colleagues who are either experts on some topic you cover, or are teaching a similar class at another institution. Bringing in guest lecturers has always been a great way to engage students, but it was pretty inconvenient and expensive. Connecting classes at different institutions to compare or collaborate on projects is another rather engaging idea. Desktop videoconferencing lowers the bar to accomplish these objectives to almost negligible levels.

Skype is a commercial outfit that makes money by interfacing the internet with conventional phone lines which allows them to charge less for international calls, and allows travelers to make international calls from wherever they're connected to the internet. Luckily this doesn't have anything to do with the video-conferencing end of the business. All computer to computer calls, whether video or audio only, are completely free.

To make a video call, you need some sort of camera, but as mentioned, all the classroom computers at UW Oshkosh have one installed. For your guest's connection at the far end, many laptops come equipped with a camera, and an external camera that's pretty good quality can be had for $40 at Target.

We've had a few instructors work this into class in the past few years.

Barb Benish in Journalism has had several alumni from their program who have gotten jobs in the field skype into her class (do you have to capitalize it when you use a proper noun as a verb?) to discuss what they actually end up doing in the real world, and how the class content prepared them. How's that for validating learning objectives?

In the current presentation environment, it's pretty common to want to accompany the human presentation with a presentation or demonstration on a computer. Skype makes that pretty easy with a Share Screen function. You lose the video while the screen is shared, but it's easy to switch back and forth at will, and while the distant guest is sharing their computer screen, they can still see and hear the video of your class. Jodi Carlson in Career Services has brought in a vendor into class to demonstrate software that the students need to use and we have a similar event planned for Becky Cleveland in Nursing.

Dating from before Skype, when we had to have somewhat rare and expensive special videoconferencing systems at both ends, the Economics Department set up a partnership with a similar class at the University of the Pacific in Lima, Peru. The students worked on parallel projects, with small student groups communicating and eventually holding a mock trade negotiation at the end of the session. (It was handy that they're only an hour later than us so they could meet at normal class times.) While there are still some advantages to these high end video conferencing systems, Skype could now accomplish everything we did in those sessions for the cost of a web cam, and you don't have to arrange for us to bring in the video conferencing equipment.

In another example of pre-Skype days using the higher end video conferencing system, Paul Van Auken brought in the author of one of the books the class was reading. The author traveled to Eau Claire to utilize a video conference facility at UWEC. Now, the author could probably have stayed at his home in New Auburn (or anywhere else with a moderate to fast internet connection.) This year the Miriam Toews, author of the Common Intellectual Experience book, cannot make to campus as we have done with prior years, but we plan to have an event connecting over Skype later this fall. I wonder if we could have gotten Steve Martin in a Skype call when they did Picasso at the Lapin Agile last year?

Outside of class, Skype is a great way to be involved in meetings you can't physically attend. Last spring my colleague Kerry Huberty was afflicted with a broken foot. We were both going to attend a meeting in the College of Ed and Human Services on a cold rainy morning on which it would have been a definite problem for her to cross campus on her little medical scooter. I just walked into the meeting, whipped out my laptop at the end of the table and connected with Kerry on the other side of campus. The meeting proceeded pretty much normally with the benefit that we could continue to deal with the agenda that required Kerry's input.

I gave a presentation with desktop video conferencing to a conference in Toronto a few years ago. My co-author AnnMarie Johnson was physically attending the conference, but I was really the main presenter. She connected her laptop to the internet and the projector, and I delivered the presentation. Being able to see my audience really made a difference. If you've ever been a presenter with a "webinar" system where the audience can see and hear you, but the only communication back is a chat window, you know that can be a pretty strange experience. Even a low resolution video image coming back gives you the feedback to know if the audience got your jokes or simply if they are paying attention. I was surprised how easy it was for me to see raised hands and converse with attendees during the Q and A.

More than a few job interviews have been conducted by departments on campus via Skype.

Skype has an option for audio-only calls with up to 20 participants. Lenore Wineberg in Curriculum & Instruction has used this to allow her students to participate in elective out-of-class discussions on the course material. John Zarbano of Radio-TV-Film/Theatre used a similar method to meet with his on-line summer class. It's also a great way to have office hours available for distant students.

In order to use Skype, both parties need to have a Skype account which is as as easy to set up as any other internet service, and you have to have the program Skype installed (already on all our classroom computers). It's available for every kind of computer and actually as voice-only on many smart phones. To make contact, you exchange your Skype user names, which get added to a contacts list. Calling is a simple matter of clicking on the name on the contact list and clicking a green button with a telephone icon on it. Skype, of course, has to be running on both ends, so it's a good idea to establish times via email prior to the video call.

The cameras on our computers are fixed to the computer, but at UW Oshkosh our classroom computers are on carts with wheels so it's pretty easy to turn it around to face the class and tilt the computer to frame the image the way you want. There's no zoom, but if you need a little more intimate contact, a student questioner can come closer to the computer.

Back in my days as a photography teacher, I had thought it would be neat to have my class talk to a famous photographer or museum curator. I wonder if I could have gotten them to take the time if I had a Star Trek transporter. Skype's not quite transporting our atoms across space and time, but it does a pretty good job with a picture and voice. I wonder who will be the first to bring in a Field's medal or Pulitzer winner to a class in Oshkosh? Dare we go for a Nobel laureate?

As usual, for UW Oshkosh readers, give me call if you'd like some help.

Media Services —> Learning Technologies

I've worked for 25 years for Media Services at UW Oshkosh, but no more. I'm not going anywhere, but we're changing the name to Learning Technologies.

If you think of the last time you actually held some specific media in your hand other than a CD or DVD (which are just digital storage devices), you'll understand the logic.

The last time I saw a 16mm film was appropriately enough at my predecessor's retirement party ten years ago. The last time I used an overhead transparency was simply as a prop to take the photo at the top of this blog.

It's been a long time since the point of our unit was to manage and play back media. Content is delivered from a variety of interchangeable digital storage devices, and most of it from the "cloud" of the internet.

Also, much of what we do now involves various kinds of instructor-student and student-student interaction that simply isn't associated with specific content-digital drop boxes, on-line discussion, clickers, video conferencing, etc.

The choice of the the new name, Learning Technologies, is part semantics and partly a no-brainer.

The semantic part involved the choice between Learning Technologies and Instructional Technologies. We thought Learning implied the more the active and interactive nature of what we support, whereas Instructional seemed to continue the old sage-on-the-stage philosophy.

The no-brainer part is that virtually every campus in UW System with a group that shares our functions has some variant of Learning Technology in their name.

We also had to change some of the names of some of the segments of Learning Technologies (I wonder how long it will take me to get used to using that name).

The group that supports use of technology in the the classroom has been know as Instructional Technology Services–way to broad a term–so we're changing that to Classroom Technology Services. They are expanding their support to include software and methods in face-to-face instruction, not just delivering and maintaining the equipment.

Television seemed a little 20th century, so Instructional Television Services will become Instructional Video Services.

The Instructional Resources Center (IRC) is a name I'm a little more invested in since I was coordinator of that unit for 15 years. Again, it was a little too broad, and in the past few years a lot of technologies fell under the moniker of the Instructional DEvelopment and Authoring (IDEA) Lab. The services offered by the IRC became concentrated on presenting in class and presenting scholarly work, as well as developing graphic materials for on-campus communication, so they will become Graphics and Presentation Design.

For several years we've been using the IDEA Lab as a designator of both the room itself and the support for some of the new technologies, but we're going to add the categories On-Line Learning and Interactive Media and Web Development to lead people more directly to those services, retaining the IDEA Lab name for the facility.

And before anybody mentions that the Authoring in the IDEA Lab name is kind of a nineties term, we're retaining that name because it's the one that just about everyone on campus knows and associates with us.

Although I've been aware for some time of the historical anachronism of the name Media Services, I've had a hard-to-define reluctance to change it. I didn't think the name was that big a deal since we were keeping up with a contemporary suite of services, and that organizationally we were in the right place–Media Services reporting to Information Technology reporting to the Provost and Vice Chancellor. (n.b. Notice that Polk Library is not in that chain, although we both eventually report to the Provost. We haven't been organizationally associated since the break-up of Enrollment and Information Services when John Berens retired in 2005.)

But I guess I must have picked up some marketing savvy in recent years. This summer I came to the stunning realization that every time I or someone in my unit introduced themselves at a meeting as being from Media Services, they always qualified it with "We're the Learning Technologies support unit." Duh!

Now that we've made the leap, I'm beginning to embrace the new name. Director of Learning Technologies sounds a little grand to my proletarian little heart, but if it helps people find and get the support they need, I can live with it.

Postscript: In a beautiful little example of irony, someone just came in to my office with a pile of overhead transparencies to be revised and reprinted. I guess none of us can escape our past.

In praise of document cameras–OHP RIP

One of the mainstays of 20^th century audio-visual is the overhead projector (AKA view graphs to those with military backgrounds). As a matter of fact they're having remarkable staying power in the 21st. As with most technologies these days, it's being overtaken by a more flexible and convenient technology, the document camera.

Overhead projectors have been nearly ubiquitous in classrooms. It was fairly easy to create a transparency for them, first with a relatively inexpensive machine that used infrared energy to create an image on the film, and later with copying machines and laser printers. Of course, if you had just a plain piece of acetate and a suitably sticky writing instrument, you could just write on them. They were the paragon of reliability. The major failure was burning out a bulb, but many models had a lever that would just change to a second bulb. From the banner above this blog, you can see that I still have some affection for overhead projectors, but I really don't have much use for them anymore.

There were downsides. The main one, of course, is that in order to use a transparency in class you had to make the thing first. The material and appropriate machine isn't always right handy. They're a little bulky to carry and store. And, they cost fifty cents to a dollar each to make.

One thing that always bothered me is that the projector always seems to be askew from the screen, and projects a distorted image (Keystoning to you AV Club members).

Document cameras are taking over the role of overhead projectors, and as with a lot of the digital revolution, provide additional capabilities and flexibility.

A document camera is basically a digital video camera that's mounted to point straight down at (you guessed it) a document. Any document—a sheet of paper on which you can write with any instrument you've got handy, an editorial cartoon in this morning's New York Times, the post-it note with a lame excuse a student left on your office door. You don't have to make a transparency, you just use it the way you found it. You can even put your overhead transparencies on it, although the shiny plastic may reflect the lights above the camera.

The document camera is connected to a video/data projector that projects on the screen, and in a permanent installation, it's always fills the screen and is straight and undistorted.

Zoom lenses provide a range of magnification so you can zoom in on the fine print, or out to fill the whole page.

Early document cameras got a questionable reputation because they used plain old TV cameras which had a maximum resolution of about 400 lines and type could look pretty fuzzy on a full page view. Current document cameras use digital cameras that are probably sharper than the projector you view it with. (Although you'll probably still have trouble reading a full page of text, but, let me clue you in, your audience couldn't with an overhead either.)

Things start getting really cool when what you want to show the class isn't a flat piece of paper, but maybe a bug, a chemical reaction, or a medical device. Three dimensional objects work just fine. At UW Oshkosh, we've installed a few document cameras that have the electronics in a small box on the side so you can put a pan full of chemicals under it without worrying that a small leak will kill the electronics. (If you spill a cup of coffee on it, however, it will kill the electronics—ahem!) Many document cameras also have a tilting head so you can turn them and use it like a conventional television camera. Some can even be pointed into the eyepiece of a microscope.

The big downside is the cost. Not only do document cameras themselves cost more than an overhead projectors, but they need to be connected to a projector in order to be any use. The cost of the document cameras themselves have come down recently, and it's likely that the classroom already has a projector available to project a computer image. Another downside is that you can only present one device at a time on the projector so you have to somehow switch between the two devices as you use them. This is usually done at UW Oshkosh with a control panel in a fixed place in the front of the classroom, but some of the larger lecture halls have wireless control panels the instructor can carry around the room.

At UW Oshkosh we have document cameras installed in the larger lecture halls, and are deliverable as needed to smaller rooms.

In our planned new academic building, document cameras are going to be really integrated into the system. Every classroom will have two projectors, one for the computer, and one for the document camera (as well as the capability to view DVD's and whatever else they're going to invent). In addition the screens will be above the whiteboards, so they won't impede the instructor's ability to write on the board. And there won't be any overhead projectors.

The Growth And Development Of Podcasting At UW Oshkosh

I contributed a post to the UW System Learning Technology Council Blog about Podcasting last week, so I might as well cross-post it here.

You can go directly to it at this link.

No technology at all. or not.

This blog is supposed to be about instructional technology, but one of the first things you learn in instructional design class is that it isn't the solution for everything.

I really enjoyed this post from a Geologist on using a technique to stimulate discussion. Actually I think it could be applied in developing discussions in an on-line class where it's critical to involve all members of the class.

Progressive disclosure or the dreaded build?

Since the mid-'90's I've been doing workshops training people to use Powerpoint and do it effectively and have had a web page with my workshop handouts and presentations. In the presentation I use to introduce the workshops, one of the things I recommend is the use of custom animation to introduce concepts on a slide as you get to them in your spoken presentation. Recently on a Physics Blog of all places, I saw a link to report of a study which found that using custom animation has a detrimental effect on learning!

Coincidentally, I was looking at my web site's Google Analytics today and noticed my Powerpoint page has been getting a few more hits than usual lately, so out of curiosity, I googled "Powerpoint instruction" to see where I landed. The last time I did this a couple years ago, I quit looking after 50 pages. Today, it was number four on the first page! I'm going to have to be more careful about what I'm shooting my mouth off about–and the first thing I thought about was this study about custom animation.

In an article titled "The Dark Side of Custom Animation" published in The International Journal of Innovation and Learning, Stephen Mahar, Ulku Yaylacicegi, and Thomas Janicki of the University of North Carolina Wilmington compared two classes who used the same recorded lecture with a synchronized Powerpoint presentation. One was set to present each element on a slide as it was presented, and the other to present the the whole slide at once. They found that students could recall more details of the slide presented all at once, than with the one progressively disclosed. (I've only seen the abstract and blog summaries of the article, but I've got an interlibrary loan request in for the whole thing).

My fondness for what I've always called progressive disclosure, long before Powerpoint existed, is based on several ideas.

Back in the stone age, probably the biggest abuse of overhead transparencies was to put practically your entire presentation on one transparency. They were relatively expensive, kind of bulky to drag around, and a bit of a distraction to change during your presentation (Although they were kind of fun to throw like a frisbee into the audience if you had a good stiff mount). The bad things about this were that regular typewriter type (12 pitch for you oldsters) was a little small to be read from even the middle of the room, not to mention the back row and it also gave the audience something to read while you were speaking. I'm pretty skeptical of the idea of multi-tasking, especially when the tasks are reading and listening. If I'm reading something, I lose track of what's being said.

I said earlier that people put their whole presentation on one transparency. Well it was more like an outline of their whole presentation, so when reading the outline, the audience was probably missing the full detailed story the speaker was saying. The same thing is true of Powerpoint. (If the text on the slide is exactly what you're saying, you're already doing badly enough that no technique is going to save your presentation).

You (again those of you old enough) may remember presenters attempting to do "progressive disclosure" by sliding a paper down the transparency revealing only what had been covered by the presenter. With illustrations we used to have multiple overlays which could build up to the complete visual. (I had an instructor in AV grad school who referred to this as selective revelation, which has a spooky religious sound to it). This is exactly the idea behind custom animation in Powerpoint.

In addition to missing out on what's being said while reading, the audience may skip ahead to the end, and start wondering about how you reached the conclusions, instead of listening to you explain how you did. Revealing on your slide the parts of an argument or process as you talk about them seemed to me to allow you to concentrate the audience's attention on what you were saying rather than having them get ahead of you.

In the age of Powerpoint, in many presentations I've found myself listening to a presenter expounding on a list of points on a slide, and realized I'm not sure which point they're talking about. Looking at the slide doesn't help me clarify anything, and I lose more of the spoken presentation reading the list on the slide. It seemed to me that presenting the slide one point at a time would keep me focused on the subject being dealt with right now.

My basic point is that I thought progressive disclosure, on an overhead transparency or with Powerpoint, concentrated the power of the projected visual to focus the attention of the audience, allowing you to develop a concept point by point. The Mahar et al study seems to contradict this.

I'm curious to see the slides used in this study. Were they just lists of bullet points, labeled illustrations or diagrams of processes?

Did the students have access to the slides after the lecture? Could it be a matter of better note taking from the static slide? Would they do better if given access to the slides after the lecture so they could concentrate on the presentation and have the illustrations to review later?

There is an alternative in Powerpoint that would preserve my need to know which part of a slide was currently being talked about, and to also have the entire slide available. One of the classes of effect in Powerpoint is Emphasis, whereby the element being acted upon is made to look different–one assumes more noticable–when it's place in the order is reached. Using this instead of the Entrance effect would help the audience stay synced between the spoken presentation and the visual on the screen, and preserve the enhanced retention effect the Mahar et al study seems to have identified. It wouldn't keep the audience from reading ahead, but maybe that's not such a detriment to understanding I thought it was.

When I get the whole article maybe I'll send some of these questions to the authors. Maybe they'll google themselves and find this blog and submit a comment!

How Conveeeenient.

The Church Lady always made that sound like a bad thing, but with instructional technology, making something more convenient can lead to benefits for learning.

I recently participated in a planning meeting for a daylong faculty development session to inform faculty what instructional technology tools are available and to encourage adoption. We talked about what added value these technologies gave to teaching. Things like better interactivity and engaging the wired generation came up, but when I volunteered convenience, the rest of the group was reluctant to include that in the list, but I've seen several instances where the initial impetus to adopt a technology was because it made something involved in teaching easier, and as a side effect, had a positive impact on learning.

An example that is dear to my visually oriented little heart is the use of Powerpoint to bring illustrative materials into lectures (notice I didn't say anything about putting a lot of text on the screen). I was a history major as an undergraduate. In five years (yes, I took five years), I don't think I saw a single map, chart, diagram of succession or picture of any historical figure or location during a lecture. Before scanners, the internet and digital cameras, in order to show a picture to your class, you had to schlep down to the AV department with a stack of books and periodicals, wait a week or two until they were done, probably pay a buck or so per slide, and then drag a slide tray to class with you, if there was a slide projector available. And then you only had one copy of the slide. If there was another lecture or presentation in which you wanted to use that picture, you had to either get another copy or remove it from your original presentation and hope you remembered to put it back right side up before you gave that lecture the next semester. With digital images, you can make as many copies as you need with a keystroke, organized into as many different lectures as you need and if you use network storage, you don't even have to carry anything to class. Not only that, but with presentation software like Keynote or Powerpoint, you can label and annotate and draw Officer Obie circles and arrows all over them. Associating a concept with a visual image is a powerful tool for retention. The language learning software Rosetta Stone builds vocabulary by associating words with pictures rather than with text rendering of English equivalents. This benefit to learning was always there with slides and overheads. What has made it more common in classrooms today is that it's easy. (I guess I am assuming there's a computer and projector available in the classroom–at UW Oshkosh, this is a valid assumption)

Another fairly recent example is GradeMark, an add-on to the plagiarism detection software Turnitin. It has a lot of features that offer convenience for instructors. It provides for on-line submission of assignments which are then accessible to both student and instructor on the web, so no one has to keep track of stacks of paper or files. The big thing that makes life easier for the instructor though is the comment library. Every comment you make is saved and available to be repeated with a menu selection. Since most commenting on papers consists of repeating the same criticism thousands of times, this is a great time saver. In a workshop introducing Grademark to a group of faculty, when we got to the comment library feature you would have thought we had given them a raise. Making it easier leads to more and more timely feedback from the instructor, which certainly has a positive impact on learning.

Group projects for students have been problematical requiring students to sync class, work and social schedules to get together. This is one case where technology making it easy can be detrimental to learning, or beneficial, depending on the tool used. Students very quickly discovered the divide and submit strategy. Any project was broken up into pieces, each student wrote a bit of the report, exchanged them via email and then somebody cut and pasted a Word document together and submitted it to the instructor. The method does provide the convenience of not having to physically get together, but really circumvented the learning objective, since there really wasn't much group work being done. Students dislike this method because they feel they're being judged on what might be the shoddy work of others and instructors don't like it because they can't tell who contributed what. On-line collaborative writing tools like Google Docs and Wikis provide the scheduling and shoe-leather-saving convenience, but more importantly to the learning objective truly allow the students to interactively work on a document as a group, and provide some individual accountability by maintaining a log of who did what.

Whenever a group of Learning Technology folks get together, it always comes up that in order to get faculty to adopt instructional technologies, you have to make it easy. I think they usually are referring to easy to learn. In the examples I've cited, there is some learning the instructor has to invest in, but once implemented, can make it easier to do things you been doing all along, and give your students a learning booster in the bargain.

You can't always get what you want, but....

Sometimes you do get what you want. This is a little bit of a long story involving the history of classroom technology and the sometimes labyrinthian budgeting of the University of Wisconsin System. The large lecture halls on our campus were some of the first rooms to be "technology enhanced," which means to have some sort of projector installed which will serve up the screen from an installed computer, the screen from a user supplied laptop, video from tape or DVD, maybe a document camera, and some way to control all these devices. At this point in history, some of them have been through one upgrade since being first enhanced in the early to mid 90's and are now due for another upgrade, and a couple for odd reasons have only been half enhanced (I'll explain as the story goes on). It seems like every time I have attended an event in a classroom in the past several years, I was grossed out by how dim the projectors were. In a statewide conference that we hosted last year, the presenters had to keep changing the lighting from "presentation mode" to "off" so the audience could get a decent look at the photographs in the presentation. I felt like everyone was looking at me wondering why the projectors were so lousy.

So, for the last few years, I've been focusing on upgrading these big lecture halls where so much instruction takes place.

I have to mention a lot of the smaller classrooms also really need upgrading too. (see an earlier post) The primary source for funds to install technology in classrooms is the Classroom Modernization Fund, which was established in the early 90's to enhance classrooms with the then new technology of digital projectors for computers, which could also project video, which had almost 100% replaced 16mm film by then, but until then almost had to be viewed on a television set, which made things a little tricky in large lecture halls.

Sometime around 2002, we started utilizing this money to replace computers and projectors which had been purchased with this fund. The number of classrooms which have projectors and computers in them has grown quite a bit, and in recent years, most of the Classroom Modernization Fund has been dedicated to replacing computers and projectors, and especially due to a perfect storm of funding to install new classrooms in 2002-2003, we currently have more equipment that needs replacing than the Fund can handle.

But, there are other sources of funds that can be used for Classroom Technology.

The Clow Pits are three lecture halls that have had special problems for installing technology. One of them was technology enhanced in the mid '90's. The stage area and most of the seats are only accessible by stairs, which means they're not ADA accessible, and if you want to remodel them they have to be made ADA accessible, but because of the way they're sort of buried into the ground surrounded by city and university utilities, this was so expensive to be out of reach, so there they sat without much technology. In the two rooms that had no installed technology, we put a projector on a cart in the front of the lecture hall, which worked OK, but it's inevevitable that when you say loose cable, you often also have to say risk management, and if the instructor didn't trip when wandering around the stage, they had the projector shining on them, and casting a shadow on the screen. Another issue was that we could get the projectors only so far from the screen, and even with an expensive wide angle supplementary lens, the image was a little small for the room.

Now these rooms had projection booths in the back from the era of 16mm projectors where we could place projectors (without "remodeling"), but a data projector needs about a 1/2 inch diameter cable running from the computer to the projector, and there is a distance limitation. This distance limitation could be overcome, but we're talking about even more expense. Recently, however, someone invented a relatively inexpensive technology where the video and control signal would be sent to the projector with Category 5 cables (your computer is connected to the internet with a Category 5 cable), which are much easier to deploy these kinds of distances than a proper video cable. Also about this time, the the video projector in the one of these lecture halls that been installed failed early in the semester, and because it required building scaffolding to get to the projector hanging from the ceiling, we had to put a projector on a cart in that room too.

This came to pass after the deadline for submitting Classroom Modernization Proposals for that year, so even if I did have money in that Fund, it would be a year and a half before we could make these improvements. Well, we also have the Student Technology Fee in UW System. Each student pays a certain amount that is supposed to be dedicated to increasing student access to technology. I had always refrained from addressing the Student Technology Fee for classroom upgrades, because the guidelines for that Fund explicitly exclude that type of use unless a committee composed of students (which we do have at our institution) decides that's what they want to do with it. The previous year they had decided to put aside 10% of the fund to purchase classroom technology in a new academic building which will open in 2011, so that seemed like they were amenable to this kind of expenditure. I made the proposal for these three problematic rooms, and they went for it! The upgrades took place last winter. Not only are the projectors more conveniently (and safely) located, and their controls were more consistent with what we have in other classrooms. but we also specified higher brightness projectors which put a very nice image on the screen even with the room somewhat illuminated.

I should say something about the brightness of projectors. The image in these big lecture halls is over twice as wide as the image in a normal classroom, so the light is spread over an area more than four times as great, and if the projector brightness is equivalent, it's four or more times as dim. In the past, high brightness projectors were available, but were four times the cost of a normal room projector, so we always had installed the same projectors in the lecture halls and just accepted that we would have to turn the lights almost off to see a good image. Considering that people still had memories of turning the lights completely off to view 16mm films and slides, that wasn't so hard to accept. Several things have changed since then. In the first place, the projector is in use for almost the entire class today, so sitting in the dark is more of a bother. Secondly, projectors are much brighter in general, and higher brightness projectors intended for these large venues are now only a little more expensive than the ones for normal classrooms.

Now to another set of lecture halls, this time two rooms in Halsey Science Center. The technology in these rooms had been installed as part of a building remodeling project in 2001. The outside vendor who did the installation frankly did a lousy job. We almost immediately replaced the portable projectors they had hung with heavier duty models, but those are now getting old, and as mentioned earlier, are kind of dim compared to new projectors. We also had a problem with the control system. The programming of the control systems in this case was done by the vendor, who retained the rights to the programming, so if it needed changing, we had to go to them to get that done. This is not an unusual arrangement, but it is getting to be less common. What really capped this off was the vendor went out of business without giving us the programming, so any change would require starting from scratch, which is a bit of expensive programming. Somebody dropped one of the control devices several years ago and we had quite a scare that we would wouldn't be able to recover this programming. Also at issue is that newer control systems now have less complicated programming which was easy enough to learn that our technicians could pick it up in a three day training session.

I had proposed improvements to these two lecture halls to the Classroom Modernization Fund, but before the time came for the committee to review that proposal, another of the UW System's funds entered the stage. There is a Classroom Renovation Fund, which in the past was distributed to the campuses annually, but now is distributed on an irregular basis. It allows for installation of technology, much like Classroom Modernization, but also covers a wide range of remodeling and infrastructure improvements that Classroom Modernization does not. Since it is the prime source of funding for these extensive remodeling projects, our Facilities Management group is loath to use it only for technology improvements. Last year, we received a larger chunk of this fund than we had been getting, and Facilities decided to use some of it to make the improvements to these two lecture halls that I had recently proposed for Classroom Modernization! (It turned out this had to be delayed a year, but the improvements will be done this summer) Five lecture halls down and three to go!

Now to the lecture halls in the Nursing/Education Building I had been embarrassed in that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. They also had older, dimmer projectors, and also had older, although still working and reprogrammable, control systems. Complicating this one were limited inputs on the control system. These older control systems really couldn't add a new device. If you wanted to use a laptop, you had to take the video cable from the installed computer, and plug it into your laptop. In addition, we had added a document camera in there which had a feature where you could plug the computer into a port on the document camera and if the document camera was off, the projector displayed the computer, and when the document camera was on, it displayed the document camera. This allowed us to add the device, but to put it mildly, this was a sub-optimal user interface. More than a few guest speakers lost a chunk of their available time trying to get their laptop image on the screen.

Well, the Student Technology Committee had been so forthcoming with the Clow Pits, I made the proposal to them for these rooms. What a difference a year makes when working with a student committee. This year's committee not only didn't approve the proposal, they were a little offended that I even tried to take such advantage of them when I had other funds (however inadequate) for classroom technology.

But, the committee didn't make this decision for about six months after I had proposed it, and during that time I was pretty confident it would get funded. I began to worry about that last lecture hall, the largest one in Halsey Science Center. This was the first multimedia classroom and a big showpiece when it was first installed in 1992. The original design was pretty good. It's always been popular with faculty because it has two projectors. You can show a video on one and the computer on the other, or the installed computer on one, and your laptop on the other (this is the science building, ya know). We had replaced the projectors once and updated the control systems two years ago. but I worried if I got all those other lecture halls upgraded with new, brighter projectors, this room was going to look pretty dim. I had intended to make this my highest priority in the next Classroom Modernization cycle although that meant it wouldn't happen for a year and a half.

Enter the last budgetary player, End-of-the-Year Accounting! It's a little frightening when I think about it too much, but especially in Information Technology, there can be quite a bit of difference from what you plan on in a budget, and what you actually have to do with that budget. Happily some costs go down unexpectedly, less happily some staff leave and you have salary savings, and you always stick something in there in case something unexpectedly breaks, knowing that you'll probably have new needs you hadn't thought about if nothing does break unexpectedly.

This year, our IT division was on the happier end of that equation and at the end of the fiscal year we identified a good bit of money, and my boss decided to fund the Nursing/Ed project the Student Tech Fee had rejected and get to that big Halsey Lecture hall a year earlier!

There's some question about where the Nursing/Ed project can be competed this summer, but my wish to bring these lecture halls from their somewhat outdated condition to some pretty neat places to teach is going to be granted. In contradiction of Mick Jagger's famous lyrics, In addition to getting what the University needs, I'm going to get just what I wanted.

In case there's anyone still reading this incredibly long post, and in case any of you are UW Oshkosh faculty, start looking for pictures, videos and web resources to illustrate your lectures next year, because they're going to look really good.

Another way to capture digital video

Digital video is easy to capture with web cams  but they're usually have an unzoomable wide angle lens and have no viewfinder, so you have to watch the computer to point them.  Video is easy to capture with Mini-DV cams, but then you have to connect the thing to your computer and do a real time capture of the video.  There are VHS webcams out there that are pretty good camera's, but what use is a VHS tape these days.  Pinnacle systems has come up with a device that can help all these problems.  It has analog video connectors on one side and a USB port on the other into which you can plug a Flash drive or a USB hard drive.  Almost all camcorders, digital or otherwise have analog video outputs that are live whenever the camera is on. (Although I think the intention was to use that to play back recorded material on a TV set.)  With this new device, the Pinnacle Video Transfer, you can use them to capture digital video.

Here's a link to a five minute video demonstrating it I made for the Communications Faculty at UW Oshkosh.

It's also great for  capturing all those VHS tapes in digital format.

Here's a link to the product website