Social Software and more…

Even though I usually don’t like to advertise for Elliot Masie , I just found a podcast on how to do podcast for educational purposes through Masie’s newsletter. You can get the podcast from this site.

Some ideas they used:

• Using interview podcasts with experts from the subject area that you need for your own seminar
• "treasure hunt" podcast: using a podcast to lead people through certain locations. This could be used for the introduction of new employees in a company
• course cast: record a regular course and distribute it for reinforcement and repetition of the course
• integrating podcasts into other devices, e.g. coffee machine, kitchen, etc. to support the work flow or to train employees
• "executive books program" –> author interviews about their books, about 20 minutes to reduce the immense amount of material otherwise to be found.

After Prof. Andreas Pospischil and his colleagues presented the e-asessment at his faculty of the University of Zurich (I reported on this here), Mandy Schiefner now did a Podcast on the same subject which can be downloaded here: File Download (10:12 min / 4.8 MB)

There are more podcasts on e-assessment on the respective website of the E-Learning-Center of the University of Zurich.

Shortly, SCIL will bring out a working paper on E-Assessment and E-Portfolio documenting the workshop that we held in November.

Yesterday, SCIL’s first online workshop on social software started. It was planned to be taught only through social software but indeed, we now also use a virtual classroom (Breeze) and of course, we still depend on e-mail. The idea behind it is to engage people in little projects where they plan how to use social software in their own teaching. The focus is on wikis, blogs, and podcasts and most participants want to get to know wikis and podcasts but one participant is about to produce his own podcast for his university, and I’m very much looking forward to this.

The course is supported by a blog (where I also do most of my blogging right now). And we also use a wiki which is protected by passwords to make participants feel more comfortable with putting their work online.

Here’s a graphic of how the workshop will proceed (in German):

More information on the course can be found at the SCIL website and at our course blog. Enjoy! 

I was asked to give a short presentation on social software in one of our IWP - team meetings. I will focus on the basic concepts of blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and on the possibilities to use them in educational settings - especially in universities. I made a number of graphics to illustrate the presentation, here’s one of them:

 (based on a graphic by Roell, 2005)

The presentation is just the basics and will be well-known to most of you but I thought I’d make it available nevertheless - you can find it here (in German only). Feedback, of course, would be very welcome.

First of all, thanks to Andreas Auwärter from “Podcasting for Learning” to introduce my blog and me in one of his recent blog posts. It took me quite a while to come back to this but I guess that’s what life is about.

Anyway, this gives me a chance to link to one of his new initiatives. Andreas and his colleagues at the University of Koblenz started a new podcast series on “Are universities ready for Web 2.0?” - quite interesting and the podcasts are well done. Here’s the link to the podcast-page. Thanks for investing the time and effort!

Today something on podcasting… There seems to be a fairly new German magazine called "Podcaster"which presents a monthly overview about what happened and what willhappen in the German "Podosphere". I’m posting this here because eventhough this blog is in English I suppose there might be some Germanreaders out there interested in German news about Podcasting.

There are some hints on eduational podcasting inthe newspaper-like pdf-file as well. It’s interesting to find apdf-newspaper about podcasting. How come they are not doing it as apodcast or as a simple blog? Does this mean we’re going back to theroots?

By the way the next meeting of the Swiss Podcasting community will be at the end of November in Aargau.

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