Apr
2019
Bryan Alexander EdTech class
Follow Along With a Grad Seminar About Edtech: Part 1, Picking the Best Tech
By Bryan Alexander Mar 12, 2019
a tech catalog for students to explore and choose from, partially based on Georgetown’s enterprise suite, including a learning management system (Canvas), blogging (WordPress or other), student-run web domains, web annotation (Hypothesis) https://web.hypothes.is/, collaborative writing (Google Suite), discussion boards (Discourse), and videoconferencing (Zoom).
Neil Selwyn’s excellent Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates.
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How Can Digital Audio Enhance Teaching and Learning?
By Bryan Alexander Mar 28, 2019
Before there were podcasts, there was pirate radio, rogue broadcasters flinging unusual sounds over borders and adding new music to cultures. And before that there was the “theater of the mind,” harnessing radio’s deep power to inspire listeners’ imaginations.
Then we advanced to podcasting’s second wave—the one we’re enjoying now—the one sparked by Serial’s massive success in 2014. When you consider audiobooks in the mix, it’s clear how varied and mainstream portable digital audio is today.
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Digital video has taken the world by storm. Netflix is busy changing television and movies. YouTube may be humanity’s largest collaborative cultural project, aggregating an astonishing amount of user-generated content. The Google-owned service is widely used that it may already soak up more than a third of all mobile traffic.
Unsurprisingly, we increasingly learn from digital video. The realm of informal learning is well represented on YouTube—from DIY instruction to guerrilla recordings of public speakers. Traditional colleges now rely on digital video, too, as campuses have established official channels and faculty regularly turn to YouTube for content. And new kinds of educational institutions have emerged, like the nonprofit Khan Academy,
We also explored the rise of teaching via live video. More colleges are using it for online learning, since it can make students and instructors more present to each other than most other media. We also saw videoconferencing’s usefulness in connecting students and faculty when separated by travel, illness or scheduling challenges.
Our readings—Zac Woolfitt’s “The effective use of video in higher education,” and Michelle Kosalka’s “Using Synchronous Tools to Build Community in the Asynchronous Online Classroom”—and discussion identified a range of limitations to video’s utility. Videoconferencing requires robust internet connection that not all students have access to, and even downloading video clips can be challenging on some connections. People are not always comfortable appearing on camera. And some content is not well suited to video, such as mostly audio conversations or still images.