Searching the Internet

A Question Posed…

Posted on by Jon K.

I was thinking on the walk home last night about how I could change my Searching The Internet Effectively course so that it might have more impact. Currently it’s a fairly straight forward deal – lecture for one hour, then give students class time to complete an exercise which I will help them with over the next two hours.  Most students choose to leave after the lecture and complete the work at home, or another place. The last question on the last exercise asks students to factor in everything they know at this point, and search for something that is related to searching and outline this in a word document with evaluations of the websites they’ve found – sort of an annotated bibliography. Then there’s an exam, which is mandatory.

This course is far too straight forward for my tastes. I think I’d like to keep the weekly worksheets as an exercise, but make the markable stuff in a wiki. I was thinking each student wiki account would also allow the student to journal their searching terms, perhaps on an account info page that the student would cut and paste search terms into so that I was sure of the technical aspect of searching was covered.

Anyone out there mark contributions to a wiki other than this one? How would such a beast exist? I’d break it down to deal with content (is it a good website?), form (how it was discovered),  editing (did they revisit and revise content?)… Frankly I’m a pessimist, and what happens if the students reject this sort of (in my institution anyway) radical idea?

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Thinkature

Posted on by Jon K.

Hmmm, dunno what I think about Thinkature, but it seems like a decent little tool. I was looking for a free web based collaborative tool for my Searching The Internet class – came across this. We don’t have elluminate available college-wide (although I would like to use elluminate sessions in my Distance Ed offering of the same course). The idea that I wanted to do is a whiteboard session where people add different ideas as to what web searching means to them – it bombed in class. Terribly. It resorted to me talking and drawing answers out of people. I think one of the reasons it failed was that it just wasn’t something people expected. They expect to come in use the computers and leave. Asking people to get up in front of the class and express how they feel about searching doesn’t work for them. So, maybe using a website will be more in line with what they expect, but get what I want out of them.

As an aside, the whole webmaster certificate course is very silo’d. I don’t know what other people are teaching, I just know my areas. So if I teach something, it’s quite possible it’s been taught before. In another class. It’s also very geared to the web individual. The part that’s missing is that web designers rarely act alone. They interact with clients, other designers to figure out problems, other programmers to deal with database code or scripting and have a brief idea of what consumers want out of websites.

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A Non-Reflective Post For Once…

Posted on by Jon K.

Interesting couple of days, had a Distance Ed class pop up from nowhere and all of a sudden I’m back in instructor mode. So I took the powerpoints that I present in the face to face version of this course, and do a couple takes of the voice over, in an incredibly noisy office and voila, a weekend later I have five little videos uploaded to the internet that talk about the internet.

The process was quite convoluted. I’m sure I could’ve tried to figure a more streamlined approach. This post is going to be purely nostalgic after I’ve done this a couple times, so if you are interested in how NOT to do this, this post is for you.

On Friday, I updated the powerpoint, having to use Power Point 2007, instead of the old 2003 that was available in my office. So having to figure out where all the things that I used to do automatically was a bit of a learning curve, but nothing too bad. Then do some sort of narration. First I tried using a Firefox plugin called CaptureFox but that didn’t do the job I needed. I wanted something else that was a little more slick. So searching for free/shareware I came across Cam Studio 2.5. Now I realize, I could’ve just walked over to the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Research and used Camtasia, but there’s not a great narration facility there. The Camtasia computer is in fact in a hallway, that’s secluded enough, but I know people over there and it probably would’ve been distracting for me to perform (teaching is a performance isn’t it?). Anyways, Cam Studio did the job. I set it to convert to SWF, and discovered that, to my knowledge which is about 2 hours of use, there’s no way to convert the screen size. And that converting to SWF would take me about 12 hours. I didn’t want to come back to work just to upload my video, so I bailed and came home to use some Adobe product. Surely CS3 will be able to handle this sort of easy task?

Maybe I’m a moron, but it turns out that Premiere Pro CS3 doesn’t convert AVIs to Flash (I did discover that After Effects can, but won’t resize the dimensions of the screen without fuss). Or do anything easily. So again, back to the world of shareware, I found Xilisoft FLV Converter. Took the AVI I had (1.5 gig), resized, converted to FLV and chopped it to the length I needed (10 min segments).

Total time? Started sometime after 2 PM Friday, posted sometime on Sunday (in between Thanksgiving turkey and apple strudel).

Oh yeah, there’s one student enrolled in the distance ed class. Hope they appreciate the effort. (You can too here under “members own videos”).

So the moral of this story is – sometimes technology isn’t the friend of the techie.

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