The STEEPLE Community hosted a workshop at Oxford on the 1 July 2011. This was an opportunity to bring together some existing members of the community as well as people attending for the first time who had interest and expertise to share.
My highlights of the day, the 8 question communication plan and the simplicity of HTML5, the future opportunities of eBooks and mobile, but please read on.
Peter Robinson (Oxford University) provide an overview of all that is good about STEEPLE, a community support in the scaling-up of production of video material, with support and advice to tackle technical, policy and legal issues. The theme for day was looking at what might be happening in the future, with lots of changes, new delivery channels and challenges for media services. However this is offering new opportunities for learners and allow us to do different things, away from the 50 minute lecture, towards smaller chunking of presentation.
The web site still has lots of really useful resources, guidance material and videos, to support that business case when meeting with senior managers. See http://www.steeple.org.uk. One action from the day was to ask members to update the wiki and add new resources and reviews.
Katharine Lindsay (University of Oxford) presented the 8 question communications plan.
- Who are you stakeholders? Know what makes them tick.
- Who are you audiences? People who need to receive messages.
- Who are most important? Interest and influence
- How will you engage them?
- What is your media for? Current, future audiences – these can become stakeholders
- What are the messages? May be different messages for different people. Need an elevator pitch.
- How will you deliver them? Different ways to communicate the messages, what works for each audience.
- How will you evaluate? How do you know if the communication works? Plan early on in the project and measure the impact, there are tools you can use to track websites, etc.
That was useful for projects, and so simple presented in 8 minutes.
Carl Marshall (Oxford University) provided an overview of the Listening for impact – measuring impact analysis project http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/listeningforimpact/category/project/ that looked at the use of iTunes U at Oxford. See the blog for some really useful lessons and ideas of how to promote you media site.
Emily Goodhand (University of Reading) looked at Policy & Copyright. We all know that technology has changed things and the law has not kept up. This year Govt plan changes to copyright to address this. She recommend people see Web2Rights http://www.web2rights.org.uk/
Zak Mensah (JISC Digital Media Service) http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk provided an overview of the guides , advice and training they provide on using digital media. They are actively looking for people using digital media to promote as examples to the community. There is also an obvious opportunity for the STEEPLE community and resources to complement the service.
Tom Hayes (Trinity College Dublin) has been implement podcasting for over 5 years. The challenges are the same: audio quality in a lecture theatre; getting a steady stream of podcast material that can be used internally or externally and having resources (people) assigned to support. They have established a Digital Broadcasting group to support the 20 lectures theatres now equipped. He emphasised that people as important as the hardware, raise internal awareness, it is not for everyone and a need for an editing service, and finally convincing institutions that this is a cost benefit activity.
Tobias Wunden (OpenCast Matterhorn project ) provided an overview of the Open Cast project that is a trying to address all issues around lecture capture. Part of the motivation was how to avoid getting locked into a redundant technology. So they promote open source, open technology, open formats (standards), open content (sharing knowledge), open community. See http://opencastproject.org
Frans Ward –(SurfNet – Netherlands) SurfNet Mediamosa is a software community supporting open source software to build media management and distribution platform.
- Screening- choosing who can access a video
- Coding – which format
- Metadata – to make it easier to find video.
See http:/mediamosa.org
Ben Hawkridge (Open University) presented the latest develops around eBooks and mobile devices at the OU. They are using ePub3 and HTML5 to produce eBooks with embedded media. This is a move towards producing open rather than proprietary eBooks for education.
The eBook market is growing as they offer the printed page along with the richness of the internet. The OU has developed its own authoring tool (using OS Software) and a process for generating eBooks from “source” materials.
The trend towards use of mobiles for accessing information is growing fast by 2014 (prediction 2010) as many people will be accessing internet from mobiles as computers. The use of mobile Apps are now exceeding internet on mobiles, so we need to be looking at Apps as learning opportunity. 18 months ago you couldn’t access iTunes from the OU, now 70% of access is via a mobile.
Ben then proposed the question “Are you ready for students who don’t have a PC?”. I would ask are institutions listening?
Pat Lockley gave an overview of browser technologies and HTML5. Is it really so simple? HTML5 offers support for audio and video embedding. Video and audio tags now exist, you can embed audio and video into a web page. You have various controls and can add java scripts for example jump to a time in the video. Life just get easier.
John Ireland gave a short introduction to the institutional use of cloud services. Cloud Computing is a recent extension of outsourcing, moving technical service outside and making it someone else’s responsibility. There is always a computer at the other end. You can buy a bit of space on someone else’s computer. Is Cloud cheap? For an individual maybe, it depends of how much you use what you buy, however it can get expensive at present if you want lots of users as would ne the case for an organisation. Cloud is emerging but still an immature technology.
The afternoon involved discussion sessions and an opportunity to speak to some of the presenters and ask questions.
Bjoern Hassler led small discussion identify some next steps
- Sharing reviews and information, idiots guide to microphones
- Linking with JISC DigitalMedia
- Facebook group for STEEPLE.
With so many media people present I just had to ask how many podcast on the Oxford iTuneU site were produced by media services, I leaned from Carl Harrison that at least 90% of podcasts were not produced by media services. Having the advice, support and services in an institution may be essential but this shows that a well organised podcasting service can lever large amounts of quality material from staff and students within the institution. The opportunities are endless.