• A lecturer from the University of Westminster lecturer winning an award for his online teacher training videos
• An announcement of the re-branding of TASI to JISC Digital Media
• A new online archive of British Cartoons
• A report on student experiences of technology

JISC/Times Higher Innovation in ICT Award Winner

Russell Stannard from the University of Westminster won the JISC/Times Higher aware for ‘Innovation in ICT’ for his online teacher training videos (Teacher Training Videos). The teacher training videos are aimed at helping teachers to learn about how to use various technologies in their teaching. These include training on desktop applications such as Powerpoint, Photoshop and Word and web 2.0 tools such as Delicious and Flickr. Despite my obvious interest in these training materials for what they are there’s a number of other interesting points that come out of the article. Russell has produced these videos using Camtasia, a piece of software that we in the DELU are very fond of ourselves so it’s a useful case study of what is possible using Camtasia. Also, Russell has published some information about using this type of technology to provide audio-visual feedback to students. This is something that we’re seeing increasing interest in around the College and indeed some staff are already using alternative mechanisms for providing feedback to students such as screencasting (though not necessarily using Camtasia) and just audio feedback alone. There are also more official projects in progress around this area such as the ‘Sounds Good’ project (again JISC funded), looking at the use of audio feedback. It would be useful to know more about this, in particular how using these types of feedback mecahnism has been received by students.

Links:
JISC/Higher Education Award article in JISC Inform online
Teacher Training Videos Website
Sounds Good Project

TASI rebrands as JISC Digital Media

This is basically just a small announcement in JISC Inform but it made me remember what a fantastic resource this is. The service used to be known as the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) and originally provided resources and advice on the use of still images in education. It began to widen its view and take in moving images and audio and I assume this is what has lead to its re-branding. The website is a total wealth of information and resources on still and moving images and sound. We’re seeing a real increase in the number of people wanting to use multimedia resources in their teaching and many of the queries that we get from staff could be dealt with using some of the resources on the JISC Digital Media website. A good example is the Choosing a Digital Video Filetype article. We get asked questions about filetypes a lot. As well as the website, they also have a helpline which is free to those working in higher education and they run a variety of training courses (these are not free).

Link: JISC Digital Media website

A searchable century of satire

This article describes the new JISC sponsored British Cartoon Archive. This currently features ’120,000 cartoons from 250 leading artists’ including a couple close to my heart, Andy Capp and Giles. The images can be searched in a variety of ways, cartoonist, publication, date, name or subject. Although the images are freely viewable in the archive they are not copyright free, so they can only be printed for private research (not for study packs) and they cannot be re-used online (e.g. put in a CE6 course area) without obtaining specific permission. An interesting resource.

Link: The British Cartoon Archive

Improving the student experience

‘Improving the student experience’ describes the opening of the JISC Student Experiences of Technology campaign. This seemed particularly pertinent to me as I attended our own annual Queen Mary Student Experience Seminar earlier this week which was focussed especially on online resources. The article here largely provides extracts from the ‘Digital Student’ supplement that was published in the Guardian a while back which I had actually already read but it should be worth keeping an eye on what else comes out of the JISC campaign as it has great relevance to what is going on in the College at the moment.

Links:
JISC Student Experiences of Technology Campaign
The Digital Student supplement published by The Guardian.

^[1] JISC Inform is a publication produced by the Joint Information Systems Committee to raise awareness of the use of information and communications technology to support further and higher education in the UK. JISC Inform can also be found online.