Education Technology Services » ETS R&D

Hot Team: Grassroots Video

Allan Gyorke — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:25:43 +0000

Most of the content in YouTube is grassroots video: short videos posted by ordinary people who are recording what is going on around them. Most of these videos don’t have special lighting, sound, scripts, costumes, or props. In a 2008 survey of Penn State students, we found that 85 percent of them were watching videos on YouTube or a similar service and 17 percent were uploading videos of their own. That means that 14,000 students at the university are creating and uploading video. These videos are easy to search, rate, share, comment upon, and embed in other locations, such as blog posts.

How does grassroots video work and what are the implications for teaching and learning? To answer these types of questions, we formed a Hot Team, which wrote a Grassroots Video White Paper.

Hot Team: Social Ratings

Cole Camplese — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:39:02 +0000

Allan Gyorke recently lead a Hot Team to explore the concept of Social Ratings for content. He and his team looked at a couple of approaches and worked to expose some interesting use cases. Social rating systems are open systems that allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of nearly anything (e.g. books, blog posts, broadway shows, movies, news stories, hotels, etc…). In its simplest form, this may involve applying thumbs up/down or star ratings to a resource, and this can be extended to include reviews and discussions of the resources by multiple contributors. As more items are ranked, it is possible to utilize the rankings to generate sets of popular or important items, by sorting by applied relevancy ranking. In order to help maintain relevance, subsets of resources, and of people, may be required in order to rank items within the context of a course, semester, or group. This approach has huge implications in a distributed environment where courses are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State and faculty are looking to bring content into one location with ratings to help pull top posts to the surface.

An example can be found here.

Read the Social Rating Hot Team white paper as a PDF.

Hot Team: Zotero

Cole Camplese — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 19:34:13 +0000

Recently ETS’ Elizabeth Pyatt was the lead for a Hot Team that looked at Zotero. Zotero is a Firefox plug-in which allows users to capture and record bibliographic information about Web pages, images, and online journal articles, and export them as both a formatted bibliography or a text file suitable for EndNote import.

The white paper is now available for download as a PDF.

Social Ratings

Cole Camplese — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:19:11 +0000

Social rating systems are open systems that allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of nearly anything (e.g. books, blog posts, broadway shows, movies, news stories, hotels, etc…). In its simplest form, this may involve applying thumbs up/down or star ratings to a resource, and this can be extended to include reviews and discussions of the resources by multiple contributors. As more items are ranked, it is possible to utilize the rankings to generate sets of popular or important items, by sorting by applied relevancy ranking. In order to help maintain relevance, subsets of resources, and of people, may be required in order to rank items within the context of a course, semester, or group. This approach has huge implications in a distributed environment where courses are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State and faculty are looking to bring content into one location with ratings to help pull top posts to the surface. An example can be found here.

Location Aware Technologies

Cole Camplese — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:11:06 +0000

Location-aware technology is a general term for technology that can determine its own geographical location. A familiar example is the Global Positioning System (GPS) â€” the navigation system that is installed in many cars today. A GPS uses satellites to triangulate its position on the surface of the Earth. It then displays this psition on a map. Value is added when physical information is combined with the descriptions about that location (e.g. street layouts, local landmarks, directions to a destination, etc.). Related terms include â€œgeoreferencingâ€ and â€œgeotagging,â€ which refer to specifying the geographic location associated with some piece of information. An example of this would be relating key events in history to points on a map, thus enabling a new way to navigate the content and discover relationships within it. One of the things we are looking at how location aware mobile devices can be used to update learning opportunities on the fly.

Hot Team: Location Aware Technologies

Cole Camplese — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 03:22:31 +0000

I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks, but we never posted the white paper results from a Hot Team we did in cooperation with Purdue University looking at Location Aware technologies. Chris Millet guided this team through exploring how things like GPS and Google Maps can be used to create teaching and learning opportunities.

Get the white paper and please post any comments you may have.

Hot Team: The Facebook Platform

Cole Camplese — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:00:39 +0000

A few months ago, Some of us here at ETS and faculty from the University Libraries were discussing Web 2.0 tools in the contexts of the Libraries. The meeting was really just to get an idea of the types of things they are thinking about and we started discussing the Facebook and the new FB Platform opportunities. The librarians showed us what some other higher education libraries were doing in that space, and we decided to form a Hot Team to look at it so we could understand the potential. Part of the team’s exploration included building a simple library search application. In looking at the it, the team sees some opportunities to mash up learning with the most popular web application among students at the University.

Download the white paper to learn more about the Facebook Platform.

Hot Team: Pachyderm

Cole Camplese — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:47:43 +0000

This was our first hot team. I am at a CIC Learning Technologies meeting and just heard that University of Minnesota is using Pachyderm. I thought about the fact that we never provided a link to that paper. If we were doing this now it would look much different, but it is what it is.

Take a look by downloading the PDF.

Hot Team: Collaborative Writing Tools

Cole Camplese — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:49:14 +0000

Tom Davis recently lead a Hot Team to investigate collaborative writing tools. Tom is uniquely qualified to think about the need for tools that facilitate collaborative content creation and sharing because he actually spends most of his days working from his home in Pittsburgh. For those of you unfamiliar with PA geography, that is a good three hours or so away from most of his teammates here in State College. Tom and the group looked at a couple of tools that can enable online content creation and sharing. The resulting white paper is a quick survey of these tools and provides a nice overview of this new and emerging space. The white paper is modeled after Educause’s “7 Things” series. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Hot Team: Studiocode

Cole Camplese — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 01:33:27 +0000

A few months ago, some faculty from the College of Education approached TLT to talk about their use of a software product called Studiocode. We decided to create a Hot Team to do a thorough analysis of the tool so we could understand what it is all about. The resulting white paper is now available for download.

Essentially, Studiocode is a video editing and analysis package. As Studiocode plays live or pre-recorded video clips, you code them with terms that you define based on your area of interest. You can use these codes to retrieve video segments and build compiled movies. For instance, if you are interested in disruptions in high school classrooms, you could build a set of codes around types of disruptions, demographic information about the students, and their position in the classroom. Once the video clips are encoded in this manner, you can search through them and pull up combinations such as “male students in the back of the classroom who throw objects”. Seconds later Studiocode would produce a customized movie composed of cases where all of those conditions were met. This movie could be saved as a separate file for later analysis or inclusion in a presentation.

In addition to the ability to code and search through files, Studiocode includes video editing, compression, and transcription features. If you transcribe a movie, the transcript becomes searchable, enabling you to compile video segments where certain words or phrases were used. This kind of integrated package has a great potential to streamline video-based research. It can also be used to provide rich feedback to students or for students to compose video essays of their own performance.