Month: May 2009

Kesmit-ing: The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas

Kesmit-ing: The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas.

Take a look at this very creative way to get students in a fairly large class (90 students) actively involved in the course. The instructor makes use of Twitter as a primary instructional strategy in the course.

In her own words, “I set up a course schedule that followed a standard formula most weeks. On Mondays and Wednesdays I delivered traditional lectures covering important terms and concepts. Fridays were reserved for the “twitter experiment.” The idea was to set up all of the students on twitter while they were in class and have them post discussion ideas/questions and respond to each other using twitter. Students were required to complete a reading assignment prior to class every Friday. The readings included historical essays and primary documents that related to the lectures I had given on Monday and Wednesday. I provided a list of reading suggestions and questions on my website to help students read effectively and take helpful notes on the readings. At the beginning of class on Fridays, I gave an open-note quiz based on the assigned readings and the web questions. After the quiz, our twitter discussions began.”

This is definitely worth checking out.


Blended Learning Web Resource from Simmons College

With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Simmons College has launched the website Blended Learning at Simmons College:

In addition to serving as a resource for Simmons faculty and students, the site is designed to help schools around the country make a successful transition to blended learning. The site includes information and resources for use in planning, implementing, and assessing the effectiveness of blended programs. In particular, we encourage you to check out five case studies that include video interviews with Simmons faculty, course simulations, and blended course planning exercises. In coming months, additional online case studies and resources will be added to the site.

In addition to the resources they’ve created and provided, which are very good (explore the site to see), I’ve included their external resources list below, as there is some great content on these sites definitely also worth exploring:

Teaching and Learning Centers
Course Quality Checklists
  • Quality Matters
    An inter-institutional quality assurance process for online and blended courses.

Uploading a Flip video to Blackboard – Duke Digital Initiative

At our SBS Undergraduate Online Teaching Best Practices workshop this past Friday, May 1, we experimented with new Flip video cameras, but had difficulty getting them the videos to show in Blackboard.

Well, Woo Hoo!

Not only did I find an existing online resource to guide us through uploading a Flip video into BlackBoard, IT WORKS! If you open this YouTube video from the Duke University Digital Initiative on one half of your screen, and then have your Flip video software open on the other half of your screen, I’ll think you’ll find it easy enough to work through the process of uploading a file, step at a time.

Uploading a Flip video to Blackboard – Duke Digital Initiative.

Give me a holler if you need some help.
~Elaine

Using Copyrighted Materials in Education: Fair Use Guidelines for Educators

I’ve written about Fair Use before, but thought I’d bring up the topic again since the summer online courses are about to get under way.  Often, faculty wonder whether their use of copyrighted materials in the classroom constitutes Fair Use or not. Making a Fair Use argument is not always easy, especially when so many draconian interpretations of copyright law exist.  But Fair Use is part of copyright law, even though it is little understood (and poorly spelled out).  I hate to see faculty forgo valuable lesson plans for fear of using copyrighted material that’s essential to the curriculum.  But often they do, or they are “quiet” about the uses they make (particularly audio and video) for fear that they may be doing something wrong, when quite often they are not.

Three and a half years ago, the Association for Independent Film Makers got together and defined their own industry guidelines for Fair Use.  In the absence of case law regarding Fair Use, judges often look to common industry practices to determine whether a use of copyrighted work falls under the Fair Use doctrine or not (and such information is not always available or easy to find).  Having a written set of documented principles and guidelines is useful for both practitioners and courts in determining whether a use is fair or not.  

Finally, this past November, after a year of study and collaboration, educators released their own “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education“. (Download the Code of Best Practices here.)

Below is a clip they’ve put together on the topic:

 
Here’s a short video on The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy from a talk given at American University’s Center for Social Media:

 

Following are the Five Principles in the code above, with Descriptions and Limitations:

ONE: EMPLOYING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN MEDIA LITERACY LESSONS

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