Technological landscape
From Elearning
| Guide for Evaluating Podcasts |
| This page is part of a series on the use of podcasting in education. |
| I: Concepts, Issues and Characteristics |
| II: Sample Evaluations |
| III: Getting Started |
Overview
The use of new technologies in Education is part of a wider technological landscape worth examining in order to understand the success of podcasting, blogs and wikis.
This landscape is constantly evolving and the current one (November 2006) is very different from the one we knew just five years ago.
Contents |
Broadband
Even though the availability of fast speed broadband in Australia is lagging behind some of its neighbours such as Japan and South Korea, there is already sufficiently fast Internet in this country to make it easier to consume audio-visual material over the Net.
Lower cost of Hard Disk Storage
The size of hard disk storage as well as of Flash memory cards, is growing exponentially as the prices are plummeting, making it possible to store an ever growing amount of sound and video files on computers as well as on portable devices, such as iPods or even on mobile phones.
Larger screens, smaller screens
Screen sizes for computers are growing as the prices are falling while at the same time, paradoxically, a proliferation of handheld devices has seen the need to target much smaller screen sizes than in the past.
Proliferation of handheld devices
This proliferation of handheld or mobile devices is especially apparent with the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones and the success of Apple’s iPod. This success has given rise to increasing competition from a lot of feature-rich mobile devices and multimedia mobile phones while Microsoft has just released its own handheld device in the US, the ‘Zune’.
Mobile Phones
Mobile phones are now much more than phones. The sound capabilities are getting better and, with better storage, those phones are now competing with mobile mp3 devices such as the iPod.
These mobile phones often incorporate digital still and video cameras, putting sophisticated technology in the hands of the average teenager. Filming and recording are no longer the domain of professional cameramen and sound engineers. The new generation of digital authors have those tools ready in their pocket everywhere they go
Instant Messaging vs. Email
The main tool for communicating over the Internet, email, is being replaced, at least for young people, by Instant Messaging, first in a purely text mode but now increasingly with audio and video.
Digital Recording of Lectures
Several Australian universities (although not the University of Sydney) have put in place a system to automatically record face-to-face lectures and publish them on the Web as streaming media. Called 'iLecture' before being renamed 'Lectopia', this system creates a vast amount of digital material that is currently being streamed but could be easily repurposed for podcasting.
This automated lecture recording system was pioneered by the University of Western Australia (Fardon & Ludewig, 2000) and is now being adopted in more than twenty universities across Australia.
Adoption of LMS
Most universities in Australia are now using some kind of Learning Management System (LMS), such as Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, or other.
LMS modules
These LMS usually have a number of modules that the teacher can easily add to their courses, such as a content module, a calendar, or a bulletin board.
Tracking function of LMS
Some of these LMS also offer a series of monitoring tools for the teacher to check how popular some parts of the online course are and to see how often students actually login and what kind of resource they access.
Web 2.0
In the last two years, the Web has gone through a rebirth, and become Web 2.0 (the Web, version 2). The first version of the Web was all about experts creating websites and the public visiting those sites, as passive consumers or recipients of information, or education, where the only interactivity was clicking on links.
Participation
The second coming of the Web is a much more social and participative affair. It’s all about social networks like ‘MySpace’ and sites where everybody is invited to create material and to tag each other’s creations to add meaning to it and to share with their friends.
Collective work
Encyclopaedias are no longer created by experts from Encyclopaedia Britannica or Encarta but have become a collective effort where the ‘wisdom of crowds’ makes a phenomenon like Wikipedia possible.
The adoption rate of web 2.0 services like del.i.cio.us, Blogger, Skype, Flickr, Writely and a myriad other second generation web applications has been exponential.
The technology has been a facilitating force for the social dimension of this experience. It is now the era of mass amateurism in a Read-Write Web where everyone can participate.
Useful in Education
Four types of web 2.0 technologies have particular relevance in education: weblogs (or blogs), podcasts, wikis, and social bookmarking
Personal Learning Environment
As people subscribe to blogs and wikis through RSS, they have a growing choice of personal spaces where they can gather (aggregate) all their RSS feeds. This situation has led for some calls in educational circles to replace the now traditional LMS with a student-centred Personal Learning Environment (PLE) or, as an interim measure, to combine LMS with PLE.
References
- Fardon, M. and Ludewig, A. (2000). “iLectures: A Catlyst for Teaching and Learning”. Published in R. Sims et al (eds). Learning to choose ~ Choosing to Learn: proceedings of ASCILITE 2000. Coffs Harbour, Southern Cross University, 2000, 45-56.
