Digital Union

Research suggests that student learning is enhanced when students are engaged through active learning strategies. One of the most efficient ways to create active learning and assessment can be done with online polling software.

Most web polling software is intuitive, sometimes free and requires little to no technical knowledge; however, numerous sites exist that can make it difficult to choose the best tool to meet your needs. 

I have created a helpful guide that will allow you to make the right decision. These sites will not only help in the class or conference room, but outside of it as well.

1. Text The Mob - Presenting information to your class or audience and want their feedback with real-time polling software? Text The Mob allows for data to be collected by project polls or message boards on a large screen and allow students or audience members to text their responses via cellular phone and see results instantly.

The only downside to Text The Mob currently is that responses are limited to 100 participants per question, but you can contact them for larger events.

 

2. Poll Daddy - After applying for a free account you can create online surveys and polls for your website, blog and social network(s). It also allows you to insert YouTube and photos in polls, create your own skins, utilize full foreign language support as well as numerous other great survey features. 

Poll Daddy polls are extremely easy and extremely effective in engaging learning and social communities. This may be one of the easiest to use in the online polling world.  

 

3.  Senteo - The Senteo interactive response system is designed to enhance interactive teaching and learning with students or audience members. With it, you display or speak prepared or ad hoc questions, members anonymously key in answers with their remote, and responses are tallied, then displayed on a projection screen or interactive whiteboard. Tallying and displaying results occurs immediately.

Because Senteo comes with SMART's NotebookTM collaborative learning software, it enables you to create dynamic questions that can be incorporated directly into pre-existing lessons. A downfall of this version is that portable devices outside of the remote are difficult to install, but given the ease of use with SMART technology it is a wonderful teaching and learning tool.  

 

 4. Vote-Now - Vote-Now can be used to carry out on-line polling and surveys for members, clients, students, co-workers and other social groups. Professional organizations utilize Vote-Now to survey their membership on ballot issues, future meeting site preferences, executive committee opinions and by-law changes. Educators can survey students on in-class topics, exit satisfaction, teaching techniques and content knowledge.

Vote-Now is primarily email based, with users receiving a email to their personal inbox for participation. This could potentially decrease the number of participants but the process is very concrete and provides clear, simple data. 

 

5. Turning Technologies - Turning Technologies can help turn any event or lecture into a active and engaging learning environment. They have numerous polling solutions that can meet the needs of any presenter or faculty.

Turning Point works through Microsoft Powerpoint and allows both audiences and students to participate in presentations or lectures by submitting responses by using a Turning remote or hand held device. This makes Turning Technologies both very diverse and useful given they have multiple feedback options in place.  

Furthermore they have a large focus on accessibility, distance learning and open forum discussion. This is probably the most complete tool for higher education.   

How should I decide?

Basically it comes down to the type of research or assessment information you are attempting to gain. Free sites like Text The Mob and Poll Daddy are not only cost effective but produce very useful data with a few simple clicks. As for more concrete controlled data, both Turning and Senteo seem to provide the best on-site solution as well as engaging audience members or students in the presentation or lecture. Vote-Now remains as a tool that may work best for organizational opinions or departmental decisions. 

In any case, the online polling world will continue to grow and evolve by providing useful, informative ways of engaging participants while improving the teaching and learning process.

Here are a few more links to alternative online polling sites that may also be useful.

ENJOY!

 

Strawpoll

Google Docs 

Poll Everywhere 

 

 

GLS fifth annual conference

I just returned from one of the best conference experiences I’ve ever had. The Games+Learning+Society (or GLS) Conference focuses on video games, education and how they can be used to help student learning.

The conference organizers did a superb job of providing great topics in several venues: panels, workshops, seminars, presentations, keynote speakers, small discussion groups, and a poster session. Participants could learn from leading scholars in the field of video game research such as Lawrence Kutner, James Gee, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler, Eric Zimmerman, as well as local Wisconsin educational game company Filament. It was nearly impossible to pick which activity would be the most interesting. Fortunately, many of the sessions were videotaped and will be posted online in the near future on the GLS website. Click on the archive to see the 2009 conference proceedings.

During the conference, I was part of a small group that elected to conduct a real time research experiment. We called our project Viral Notebooks. We asked conference participants to answer a question in a notebook and pass it along to someone else. We then collected the notebooks after about 24 hours and evaluated the data and prepared our presentation. We plan to try again next year and look for a way to increase participation. One of my group members and I took another workshop together on rapid prototyping. We used that opportunity to make our research question into a conference game that would help people exchange information and give them a reason to talk to people they don’t already know.

The conference organizers provided delicious and abundant food and drink. Beer was locally brewed in Wisconsin and quite good. Not only did they provide food for every meal and an inviting way to eat it that encouraged conference attendees to talk and get to know one another, but they added an arcade room that was open until midnight each night. There, we could play new and old video games like Little Big Planet, Flowers, and World of Warcraft, (WoW), or relax with pillows on the carpet with an Artri  3600 and about 20 some games to choose from. One group of WoW players gathered in the game room. Usually they play as a guild, but this time they joined up as an anonymous group of elves and went streaking through the WoW world causing virtual heads to turn!

Yes, and that’s not all. Madison, WI is a great city to visit. There are great restaurants, cool shops and bookstores and a wonderful on campus art museum. To end the conference, everyone received a $10 gift certificate to the campus bar and restaurant. We all relaxed on the terrace, had a beer and brat and looked out over the lake on a beautifully sunny and mild day while a local band played live music. The band happened to include Sean Michael Dargan, our conference organizer, and Professor Squire stepped in for a few songs.

Great talks, conversations, games, food, new friends, connections, and fun. I think video game scholars, designers, programmers, engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, professors, and grad students + a few spouses and kids (and more) provide the best combination for a conference. I can’t wait for GLS 2010!

How do I use Microsoft Word to format a portrait style page number on a landscape page?

We get this question a LOT from grad students working on dissertations.  Unfortunately, there's no straight forward way to do this, but here's a tutorial on how to work around it using Word on Windows.  Happy formatting!  And thanks to student staff member Jim for finding this link!

Webspiration is found at:

http://www.mywebspiration.com/

Webspiration is an online visual organizational tool that allows the users to work collaboratively (as many as 25 people at one time) and create visual organizational diagrams that can, with a mouse click, be reformatted as an outline, allowing the user to go back and forth between them. During a brainstorm meeting one can easily create a web of circles linked to a main idea circle using the “rapid fire” feature. One can change the thickness, color, and set the direction of the arrows. There are several symbol options including various scalable arrow shapes and clip art. It also provides templates that help students write thesis papers, think through choosing a major or developing an argument as well as many other student writing support features. It can also help you create a family tree.  The best part about it is that it is fairly intuitive and easy to use.  

Webspiration is currently in a Beta format and free; however, there will be a day when it is no longer free. A timeframe has not been set for when the Beta will be concluded. They state on their website that they provide a secure firewall to protect your privacy. Documents are edited and stored online through the Webspiration website.

The interface is fairly intuitive (see example below) and allows the user more than one way to do the same thing using drop-down menus, right click for menu options and a tool bar. One can also save multiple versions of documents, which could prove useful when collaborating. Collaborators can be included on a list of editors and past versions can be saved as changes are made. It automatically saves the document you are working on every few seconds.



In addition to inviting collaborators to join you in the creation process, Webspiration hosts your document and provides a link so that you can invite people to view your work. You can also save your document as html and embed it within a website. These features make it very useful for both collaboration and communication. I made the following diagram for a class I'm taking about video game production. (Click on this link to see my example http://www.mywebspiration.com/view/138812a290fd)
This option of easily putting the diagram online, as well as updating it as needed, makes it easy to share and include in presentations.
 
One limitation that I found was that one cannot left or right justify text. Text is automatically centered. I would have also appreciated the option of creating a title that wasn't in a box.

If making visual representations of ideas is something you want to do and want a program that will remain free of charge, Cmap is a good alternative. However, posting the Cmap for group use is more cumbersome and difficult than with Webspiration. Other alternatives include:

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/ (not free)

http://www.myexperiment.org/ (free)

http://www.inspiration.com/inspiration (not free)

http://www.mindmeister.com/ (free)

http://www.mindomo.com (basic account, free)

It's hard not to notice all of the interesting new things people are doing with Google Maps these days. Twittervision shows you tweets from across the globe in real-time, Cartifact and Hypercities let you look at historical maps overlayed on their modern counterparts, Flutracker documents the recent swine flu outbreak, and if you search hard enough, you'll even find a Google Map which shows the locations of ornamental manhole covers in Japan.

All of these custom Google Maps are made possible by use of the Google Maps API available from Google Code which gives you a library of functions (for both JavaScript and Flash) which let you dynamically build Google Maps.

Through the API you can add custom markers, information windows, image overlays, and controls to a Google Map. The significant point here is, of course, the ability to create the markers at points on the map by supplying a latitude and longitude to the marker creation functions. If you have geocoded data to feed into the API functions, you can create your own, dynamic, custom map from whatever data sources you have available.

If you're interested in getting started in using the Google Maps API you'll first have to register for an API key.  Beyond that you can consult the documentation, take a look at some examples, and tinker in the Code Playground.

 

Early this year, as part of our "Future of the Amateur" series, the Digital Union hosted a competition called "Tell Us A Story" open to both campus and Columbus community members. We asked for video and audio submissions which met the three guidelines below.

Each story must:

1. Be less than 2 minutes long
2. Include the sound of water
3. Include the phrase, “In the last 4 years I never”

Of the many submissions, three award winning pieces, by Lauren Angelone, Julia Applegate and Doug Dangler, were aired at the Wexner Center for the Arts. You can view these three winners at this link along with several other wonderful pieces that deserved honorable mention.

 

Image by Liako

     Google has unveiled their latest project at the Google I/O 2009 Developer Conference this year called Google Wave. Nice name, but what does it do, and more importantly, is it worth keeping tabs on. The answers are "a whole lot" and "yes" respectively. Below is a video from the I/O conference on Google Wave (I must warn you that it is 1.5 hours, but well worth it if you're intereseted in technology). More commentary follows bellow.



    Google Wave is an open-source API (if you have Ubiquity installed in your browser, highlight the word "API," activate Ubiquity and type "wiki") that brings amazing realtime collaboration into your browser. The best way I can describe Wave is like a forum (with it's linked threads) combined with a wiki, instant messenger, and email that are then congregating all into one, universal interface. Wave recreates the way we think about email, and combines it with collaborative editing, and picture/file sharing. You have complete privacy controls over who can see your "wave," allowing you to keep information controlled.  I find that one of the beautiful things about Google Wave is that it updates in real time, allowing people to see almost immediately the content as it is being created (great for collaboration).

      While live updates are nice, I would have to say that my favorite feature by far is the "playback" feature, which allows you to watch as the "wave" evolved, allowing you to quickly and easily see when edits were made, who made them, and in what context (this is demostrated 13:00min into the presentation).

      Since Wave is open-sourced, it will be hosted on Google's servers or can be hosted on anyone else's server (alowing it's powerful capabilities to be controlled by an organization instead of being completely "out there" on the web... do I hear educational uses?). Any "wave" that is created within a privately hosted server will still be able to interact with other Wave servers, but will also have the option of keeping their content private, or off of Google's servers (this is demostrated 1hr09min into the presentation).  

Image by Liako

     I am excited about Google Wave and really think that it is the "wave" of the future. Our world is head toward more online, realtime collaboration, and Wave is bringing us one step closer.

Sound out in the comments below and tell us what you think.

 

 

    If you’re like me, and can’t wait to find out about new technology that either boosts your productivity or is just plain cool, then check this out. It’s called Ubiquity. Ubiquity is an experimental extension for Mozilla Firefox (an extension is a browser plug-in that extends its functionality) that tries to combine the everyday tasks such as: email web snippets, finding directions, weather, word definitions and translating text into one streamlined interface.

    While some may say that I can already do all that with bookmarks, I find that Ubiquity makes those tasks much more accessible. With the simple press of a key combination (ctrl + space for windows, and option + space for mac) ubiquity is up and ready to take your commands.

     Below are two videos that show Ubiquity in action. The best way to learn how Ubiquity works is to try it out for yourself. I have found it to be a valuable asset in my daily web meandering and I’m sure you’ll find it the same.

Sound out in the comments below and tell us how you use Ubiquity and what are your likes and dislikes.

You can get ubiquity here (direct link: here).
**Please note that Ubiquity requires Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or higher.
**Growl (free download) is required for Ubiquity on a mac. For more info, click here

 

 

The Ohio State University Office of Student Life launched an online film competition for OSU students last January. This is part of a collaboration with the Inspire USA Foundation, a non-profit that promotes the health and well-being of young people worldwide.

"Real to Reel" gave OSU students the opportunity to show off their creativity in promoting positive mental health messages. We were thrilled to receive 7 outstanding videos. The winners will receive multiple prizes, including a grand prize of $1,000!

The judges have cast their votes for the grand prize winners, but there is one major award left to be determined. The Reel to Reel Campus Choice Award.

View the seven videos here. Then cast your vote!

The video with the most votes will receive the 1st annual Real to Reel Campus Choice Award! Cast your vote by posting a comment on your choice's blog post. Feel free to write a review or explain why you chose it. You can comment on all of the videos, but only vote for one.  

The winners will be announced at our Preview Party and Awards ceremony in Room 150 of the Younkin Success Center on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 from 5:30pm - 7:00pm. Everyone is welcome to attend this celebration of our students' creativity and dedication to positive mental health support for young people around the world!

Information provided by John A. Vaughn, MD, Senior Manager, E-health Initiatives, Student Health Services, The Ohio State University

 

As you may already know, iMovie HD only accepts camcorder import via Firewire - not USB.  Although the more recent versions of iMovie address this issue, many still prefer the interface and functionality of iMovie HD.  Fortunately, it's pretty easy to import your footage using iMovie '08 or '09, then drop that footage into iMovie HD for editing.

 The footage that you import into iMovie '08 or '09 can be found in the iMovie Events folder.  Make sure you take the .mov file within your event folder - NOT the one in your iMovie Cache or iMovie Thumbnails folder.  Once you've found the clip you need, just drag the file into iMovie HD and start editing.

This article is a follow up to my last post, Computer Hoppin' with iMovie '08.  Fortunately, iMovie '09 offers many improvements - one of the most important being that you can now transfer your whole project from one computer to another without manually copying and pasting all the files associated with your movie.  iMovie '09 still doesn't have a File>Save feature, so you'll be doing the transfer through the Project Library.  You can access this by clicking on the Project Library button on the upper left hand side of the iMovie window.  From here, you can drag the project from one hard drive to another, at which point iMovie will ask whether you want to "Copy project" or "Copy project and event."  Choose "Copy project and event."

This will create two folders on the destination hard drive.  A folder called iMovie Projects holds your project file(s) and a folder called iMovie Events holds the associated footage.  If you've added audio and photos to your movie, it's stored within the project file.  (Oddly, the photos are stored strung together as a video in mov format rather than as separate image files.)  You can see this by right clicking on the project file and then selecting Show Package Contents.

Note: From my experience, this process does not work with a USB flash drive, or what some people call a thumb drive.  Those simply won't show up in your project window.  You have to connect an actual hard drive.

So you're online and come across a really great recipe for homemade pop tarts and definitely want to try it -- although, let's be realistic, it's doubtful you'll get to it in the next month or two. So what's the best way to hold onto this recipe?

You can go old super school and print it -- although that would mean remembering to look for it next month; you can go slightly less old school and email it to yourself, but that would require finding it again next month; or you can step up to the latest in searchable notetaking tools and use Evernote.

Evernote is a free online tool that allows you to clip and archive anything you find online or in real life -- recipes, articles, images, even handwritten notes and scribbles. Clip it from the web, take a picture with your iPhone, or record audio and send it to Evernote -- you've got it captured and tagged for life. Evernote's high-powered search feature allows you to search by keywords or tags, and will locate them in text, images and even handwriting that you've captured to Evernote.

Evernote advertises that it can be used to capture:

• Tasks and to-dos
• Notes and research
• Web pages
• Whiteboards
• Business cards
• Scribbles
• Snapshots
• Wine labels
• Even Twitter messages

What else can you come up with? To learn more about how this tool works or to get started, check out this video. Happy notetaking -- and better yet, enjoy actually finding it again!

 

Flip video cameras are a very low cost cameras which allow students to record video with the push of a button.  The battery and memory are built-in, and the camera battery is charged when plugged into a usb port on your computer.  With no tapes, cables, or batteries floating around, the units are extremely small and easy to manage.  The cameras have a fixed focus lens with a range of around one or one and a half meters to infinity. There is a digital zoom for 2x magnification and the microphone is built in.

The Flip Video ($129) camera has 1 Gigabyte of memory, the Flip Ultra ($149) and Flip Mino ($179) cameras have 2 Gigabytes of memory. These cameras record AVI format files and shoot at 640 x 480 resolution,  The Mino HD ($229) is an HD video camera with 4 GB of memory that shoots at 1280 x 720 resolution. Each camera records an hour of video; the quality of the capture is the benefit to paying for more memory.

The video quality is very good within the limits of the fixed lens and auto exposure, especially when considering the price.  These cameras would work well for students capturing video blogs, close up interviews, and subjects where they can get close to their subject and background noise isn't an issue. Since the Flip cameras lack optical zoom, an external microphone jack, and can only record for an hour before it is nescessary to download the captured video, they are not suited for longer projects or shots where the subject is away from the camera.

Camera shake can be an issue when capturing footage with the these cameras, the size and weight are so small there isn't much to hold on to while shooting.  Aftermarket devices are available to give users more to hold; alternatively a very light tripod would be sufficient to give these tiny cameras some stability.  Wind noise was an issue when testing the Mino Ultra outdoors, where the Mino HD didn't seem to have the same problem.

Althought the Flip camera lack some of the fuctionality of larger cameras, they literally fit in a shirt pocket and are extremely simple to use. These little video cameras have found a niche in the crowded video camera market; to try one contact the Digital Union.

If I want to transfer a sandwich from Liv's desk to Joe's, I simply take the sandwich from Liv's desk and put it on Joe's desk.  If you're used to using iMovie HD (or previous versions), you know it's equally as simple to transfer a project file from one computer to the next.  Starting with iMovie '08, it's not so straight forward.  The new iMovie software doesn't bundle up your footage with the project file in a nice little package like iMovie HD used to do - in fact the File > Save option doesn't exist.  Instead, there are two separate items you need to transfer: the project file which autosaves and remembers all of your edits, and the events folder which holds the elements of your movie (footage, audio, photos).  Both of these things have to be copied from computer 1, then placed into the same relative spot in computer 2 for the project to remain intact.

Things to note:

• If your project contains footage from multiple events folders, be sure to transfer all relevant event folders
• If your project contains photos, you'll have to transfer that photo folder to computer 2 as well
• If your project contains audio, be sure to transfer that file as well, although I haven't had any luck keeping it linked with the project.  I've had to re-import the audio.  Let me know if you find a solution before I post one!

By default, iMovie will save all project related files into the Movies folder, which you will find by double clicking on your hard drive and looking under Places in the list down the left side of your window.  You can also access the Movies folder by clicking: your hard drive > Users > "your user name" > Movies.  Within the Movies folder, there's a folder called iMovie Events and one called iMovie Projects.  Let's say you need to transfer a project from Liv's computer to Joe's.  Here's how.

From Liv's computer, navigate to the iMovie Projects folder and copy the project file you want to transfer.  Next, navigate to the iMovie Events folder and copy the event folder that holds the elements of that project.  On Joe's computer, paste the project file you copied into the iMovie Projects folder.  Next, paste the events folder you copied into the iMovie Events folder.  Done!  Now we can open the project on Joe's computer and continue editing.  Ooh, gotta go - Liv's looking for her sandwich...

PS:  The process is a little different for iMovie '09, which I've been experimenting with lately - stay tuned.

Looking for a new research tool to help you organize, comment on, highlight, and share your web research? Looking for a social network that is suitable for academic use and also would excel in a research-oriented course? A relatively new web application to try is diigo.com. Diigo is basically an enhanced social bookmarking tool (think del.icio.us, but more powerful). In addition to allowing its users to bookmark and save websites, it also grants to ability to highlight, comment on, and pull excerpts from webpages. If you head to diigo now, you can join some of the numerous educational or subject-specific groups that will allow you to learn from, share with, and network with other scholars in your field. Through a quick browse I found groups on sustainable energy, education in Second Life, architecture of the future, and cognitive neuroscience, just to name a few.

Another highly effective way to employ this tool is to use it as homepage for students to share research and ideas with each other, perhaps as part of a larger joint-research project. A good example of such a project can be seen here. Mike Wesch, professor at Kansas State and producer of this very popular video, created this page for his students in Digital Ethnography. This page has been set up in such a way that non-class members can view it (you can choose to make it only accessible to specific people), so go check it out and see what his students are sharing.

Setting up an account with Diigo is easy, as is creating a group for your students or joining a preexistent group. To highlight the web and save your notes you will need to download a new toolbar, but thus far I have found it to be a very useful tool. Overall, I think this could be a particularly useful teaching tool, especially for smaller, advanced classes in which the students are ready to do some research.