• There has at GU for many years been occasional recording of special lectures, originally by manned video camera crews.
• About 2005, we started "podcasting" lectures. Actually, this was recording, using handheld audio recorders from which files were uploaded and mostly distributed as MP3 files. I have a page about our early initiatives on this.
• For the last few years, a number of lecturers have sometimes used Camtasia or other systems, running on their laptops from which they gave lectures, to capture both video and audio from lectures.
• Lately, Echo360 has been installed in some of the large lecture theatres, and is used to record lectures more automatically (driven off central software: no need to set it going locally); and the resulting records are stored centrally for access by students and other users. Its use is growing, but is by no means (yet) standard practice.

"Podcast" lecture recording at GU

The default Moodle2 audio player doesn't allow downloads (for student's ipod players), and doesn't allow fast forward or any way to move forward and back.

What we probably want (what I want for level 3 lecture recordings) is to pass the file as a link (URL) so that the user gets whatever audio player they have installed in their browser on whatever device they are using at that moment.

Phil has been uploading and installing recordings as File resources. All that has to be done is to edit the settings in Moodle for each such File resource: Click tab/section "Appearance" -- select "In pop-up" not "automatic".

I might add that Moodle is doing the file protection we want: Even if I copy a link (URL) and put it outside Moodle, users can't play or download it unless: 1) They can login to Moodle (all staff and students, but very few outside GU, can do this. 2) They are enrolled on the course where the resource is stored. For level 3 CHIP: that is only enrolled students, 3 staff (and a surprising number of the Moodle team).

Proposals?

2) Students downloading.

a) Historically, but possibly not now, it was important to many students to get a copy of the audio on to players they carried round. Hence I regard this as a key requirement until someone shows no students do this now.

b) A tech-savy student can download them from the poor moodle player: you ask your browser to show the source of the page on which the Moodle player is operating, search the blizzard of HTML code for "Source" or ".mp3" and you get the underlying URL of the resource, and get it. Thus "protection" stops the naive, but not the informed but malicious.

3) An expert I consulted said the trend now was not to embed players, but pass the file direct to the user's browser; partly because it will know better (be configured better) to deal with it depending on whether it is a phone, tablet, ....; which we and Moodle cannot know.

4) I agree we should make clear to the students that lecture recordings should be treated essentially like copies of library PDFs of journal papers: never passed on or put on public websites by students. The current handbooks used not to do that clearly, but now do (in 2015-6).

Echo360 lecture recording at GU

For now, just some pointers.

• Rooms in GU with Echo360 lecture capture installed, and bookable:
  • Official page, and booking instructions
  • Description of service. GU page on the service
  • List of rooms
  • List of rooms (my old list)
• GU Lecture recording policy
• Echo360 guide for academic staff
• Echo360 guide for 'personal capture'

Notes on using it

Logging / "analytics": Info is sliced at every few mins; then combined with gaps of user attention < 10 mins ignored; and a "view" is one chunk of combined slices. So just 2 mins play should show up. The slicing may make "average completion" pretty inaccurate for short videos. But I didn't see anything update because of my viewing in either view:

1. Student view: list of videos on a course with thumbnails. The stats here take maybe an hour to update. They are somewhat adjusted to take account of one person looking many times vs. different people; and one person viewing with some gaps vs. apparently looking several times.
2. Staff/editor view of the list of presentations. This takes a day (overnight) to update the count of "views". This count does not correspond to the adjusted stats above: may be a crude count of all accesses to a recording.

Security / privacy is given by:

a) All recordings are on a server, which every user must login to with their GUID.

b) A course is offered to a class by making an obscure URL available to them e.g. http://moodle2.gla.ac.uk/mod/url/view.php?id=469500 Thus it is unlikely that other students will find it. Placing the link on Moodle, behind Moodle's login wall for a given course, gives moderate security.

c) Sets of recordings "owned" by a given person (typically the lecturer giving a course being recorded) are accessible (with editing and deletion rights) only to that owner(s): https://lectures.gla.ac.uk/

The second Echo window is the one for playing recordings: https://lectures.gla.ac.uk/ess/portal/section/bc9cff6c-c1b8-40c7-8652-0eeee2525182 Lecturer-owners can edit the title of any lecture from the window for playing them. (Select = highlight a lecture; click on the pencil icon by the title at the top of the right hand panel beside the list of titles.)

Slides may not be recorded usefully for some settings of screen resolution on the computer displaying the slides, even though they display correctly on the lecture theatre data projector itself. (1024 X 768 is one that works for Echo360 recordings.)

Other lecture recording approaches / systems

But another way is to use software built-in to a lecturer's laptop, asusming they take a laptop to the lecture theatre normally. "Camtasia" is one such system. But also: free Mac software "Keynote" does this, using the laptop's built in microphones and camera and screen display of slides. This works surprisingly adequately.

Learner uses of (reasons for) lecture recordings

• Foreign students, for whom English is not their first language. They often have trouble understanding the lecture as they go, but are helped by being able to listen to it again (with a pause button). They need the recording to be posted at once if they are to understand the next lecture, which is frequently the next day.
• Students who have to miss a particular lecture e.g. for a doctor's appointment. Again, they need to have access almost immediately to the recording.
  • This is particularly acute for courses with lectures only 24 hours apart, where they need to listen to it in order to understand the next day's lecture. In my dept. (pscyhology) this is true of lectures in level 1, level 2, and at least one course in level 3. This then puts a premium on systems like Echo360 which publish recordings within an hour or less from the end of the lecture. This means not having to wait for a human to find time for this.
• Revision: careful re-listening. This would be much more useful if each recording had a tagged index i.e. a way of jumping direct to various labelled points. This is true of both video and audio recordings.
  Solution: (1) each slide should be a live link that jumps into the audio at the appropriate point. (2) Someone / students create tags: target points in the recording described by tag-words.

• Students in my class today tell me that they listen in class without taking notes (get too confused doing 2 things at once); then 4/5 of them said they had already listened to some recordings (only week 3 of the course); that they promptly re-listen to about 50% of lectures; that the combination of the textbook chapter, my slides handout, and re-listening to the recording was good, and was normal practice for them now.

Problems

• Copyrighted images on lecture slides must not be publicly distributed
• Confidential material dealt with in class discussions.
• Participation vs. canned delivery.
  Solution: do not record classes which are essentially about participation.

"Editing" lecture recordings

• Mac Quicktime reads in .mov and .aiff files (and .mp3); but not .wav
• Quicktime is not my default app for opening these files; but can select the file, click Open-with lets me do it.
• Mac Quicktime has a fast Trim function for lopping off unwanted start and end portions of a recording: easier and quick to use than Audacity.
• Mac Quicktime exports only .m4a, .aifc

• Echo360 also has an editor; fairly easy to use, especially for trimming. Obviously it edits the videos as well as the audio. However, this is only possible while it retains all the original files: after a year or less only a playable (but not editable) form remains.

• Audacity reads in uncompressed fast, but .aifc also fast.
• Audacity (re)exports in multiple formats, esp. the compressed .mp3 format. (Export takes 4 min.s for 50 min. lecture).
• Audacity: has a much more general editor, but I still have trouble with the user interface.

• Currently we have been saving audio files at quite high resolution. File sizes depend on this. A rough trial on one of my lecture recordings (of about 50 mins in length) shows this:
  • .mov (uncompressed, from the recorder): 69.4MB
  • .mp3 (? kbps; what Phil uses): 70.5 MB
  • .mp3 (128 kbps): 45.4 MB
  • .mp3 (64 kbps): 22.7 MB (Sounds fine to me)
  • .mp3 (32 kbps): 11.4 MB (Audible, but sounds worse than the others)
  So for faster up/down-loading, smaller files are better for everyone, and compressing them to 64kbps and getting smaller than one third the original file size, may be best. However this is a single trial, with a recording from a tie-clip mike as is normal for dept. recordings: so this might not generalise.

• I have a neat recorder that looks like a USB pendrive.

  My recipe for converting its .WAV files is:

  • Drag and rename .WAV file from pendrive/recorder
  • Open it in Audacity; Re-save it as .aiff [Mac non-compressed]
  • Open the .aiff in Quicktime
  • Trim there, and save (as .aifc)
  • Re-read .aifc into Audacity
  • Export it as .mp3

• Audacity recipe for trim / edit out the middle.
  • When read in ...
  • Select "I" mini-icon tool for specifying range by dragging.
  • (MagGlass with '+' expands zoom)
  • X Cuts it
  • It won't do it while playing; have to get <----> in top margin AND greyed out to show selection; ....
• Audacity recipe for merging files
  • Read in first file; then
  • File -- Import -- Audio to get 2nd file (You get both, one below the other)
  • Use the time shift tool to displace 2nd one to right, having selected the whole of the 2nd one. The tool looks like <---> mini-icon
  • Then just export or save the result.
• Audacity recipe for splitting files
  • [Don't use Audacity but Quicktime, and a double trim]
  • Read original file into Audacity, then out into .aiff; close.
  • Duplicate that file (2 sep names for the 2 parts)
  • Trim 1: file 1, trim 2nd half of talk off
  • Trim 2: file 2, trim 1st half of talk off
  • Then as above, for each separately:
  • -- Read .aiff into Audacity, and export as .mp3.

Last changed 17 Feb 2013 ............... Length about 600 words (3,000 bytes).
(Document started on 6 Aug 2012.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ipod/atag.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Audio tagging

This will be a page about our internal LTDF grant about tagging audio recordings i.e. providing index pointers into an audio stream, and thus making it "random access" like other media.

some links / book marks

Last changed 4 Feb 2017 ............... Length about 1,500 words (17,000 bytes).
(Document started on 3 Nov 2013.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ipod/echo360.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Lecture recording at Glasgow University

This page is mainly to hold notes on the two systems of lecture recording currently in use in Psychology at GU (Glasgow University). But note you can consider using recordings of broadcast TV.

Systems of lecture recording:

• There has at GU for many years been occasional recording of special lectures, originally by manned video camera crews.
• About 2005, we started "podcasting" lectures. Actually, this was recording, using handheld audio recorders from which files were uploaded and mostly distributed as MP3 files. I have a page about our early initiatives on this.
• For the last few years, a number of lecturers have sometimes used Camtasia or other systems, running on their laptops from which they gave lectures, to capture both video and audio from lectures.
• Lately, Echo360 has been installed in some of the large lecture theatres, and is used to record lectures more automatically (driven off central software: no need to set it going locally); and the resulting records are stored centrally for access by students and other users. Its use is growing, but is by no means (yet) standard practice.

"Podcast" lecture recording at GU

The default Moodle2 audio player doesn't allow downloads (for student's ipod players), and doesn't allow fast forward or any way to move forward and back.

What we probably want (what I want for level 3 lecture recordings) is to pass the file as a link (URL) so that the user gets whatever audio player they have installed in their browser on whatever device they are using at that moment.

Phil has been uploading and installing recordings as File resources. All that has to be done is to edit the settings in Moodle for each such File resource: Click tab/section "Appearance" -- select "In pop-up" not "automatic".

I might add that Moodle is doing the file protection we want: Even if I copy a link (URL) and put it outside Moodle, users can't play or download it unless: 1) They can login to Moodle (all staff and students, but very few outside GU, can do this. 2) They are enrolled on the course where the resource is stored. For level 3 CHIP: that is only enrolled students, 3 staff (and a surprising number of the Moodle team).

Proposals?

2) Students downloading.

a) Historically, but possibly not now, it was important to many students to get a copy of the audio on to players they carried round. Hence I regard this as a key requirement until someone shows no students do this now.

b) A tech-savy student can download them from the poor moodle player: you ask your browser to show the source of the page on which the Moodle player is operating, search the blizzard of HTML code for "Source" or ".mp3" and you get the underlying URL of the resource, and get it. Thus "protection" stops the naive, but not the informed but malicious.

3) An expert I consulted said the trend now was not to embed players, but pass the file direct to the user's browser; partly because it will know better (be configured better) to deal with it depending on whether it is a phone, tablet, ....; which we and Moodle cannot know.

4) I agree we should make clear to the students that lecture recordings should be treated essentially like copies of library PDFs of journal papers: never passed on or put on public websites by students. The current handbooks used not to do that clearly, but now do (in 2015-6).

Echo360 lecture recording at GU

For now, just some pointers.

• Rooms in GU with Echo360 lecture capture installed, and bookable:
  • Official page, and booking instructions
  • Description of service. GU page on the service
  • List of rooms
  • List of rooms (my old list)
• GU Lecture recording policy
• Echo360 guide for academic staff
• Echo360 guide for 'personal capture'

Notes on using it

Logging / "analytics": Info is sliced at every few mins; then combined with gaps of user attention < 10 mins ignored; and a "view" is one chunk of combined slices. So just 2 mins play should show up. The slicing may make "average completion" pretty inaccurate for short videos. But I didn't see anything update because of my viewing in either view:

1. Student view: list of videos on a course with thumbnails. The stats here take maybe an hour to update. They are somewhat adjusted to take account of one person looking many times vs. different people; and one person viewing with some gaps vs. apparently looking several times.
2. Staff/editor view of the list of presentations. This takes a day (overnight) to update the count of "views". This count does not correspond to the adjusted stats above: may be a crude count of all accesses to a recording.

Security / privacy is given by:

a) All recordings are on a server, which every user must login to with their GUID.

b) A course is offered to a class by making an obscure URL available to them e.g. http://moodle2.gla.ac.uk/mod/url/view.php?id=469500 Thus it is unlikely that other students will find it. Placing the link on Moodle, behind Moodle's login wall for a given course, gives moderate security.

c) Sets of recordings "owned" by a given person (typically the lecturer giving a course being recorded) are accessible (with editing and deletion rights) only to that owner(s): https://lectures.gla.ac.uk/

The second Echo window is the one for playing recordings: https://lectures.gla.ac.uk/ess/portal/section/bc9cff6c-c1b8-40c7-8652-0eeee2525182 Lecturer-owners can edit the title of any lecture from the window for playing them. (Select = highlight a lecture; click on the pencil icon by the title at the top of the right hand panel beside the list of titles.)

Slides may not be recorded usefully for some settings of screen resolution on the computer displaying the slides, even though they display correctly on the lecture theatre data projector itself. (1024 X 768 is one that works for Echo360 recordings.)

Other lecture recording approaches / systems

But another way is to use software built-in to a lecturer's laptop, asusming they take a laptop to the lecture theatre normally. "Camtasia" is one such system. But also: free Mac software "Keynote" does this, using the laptop's built in microphones and camera and screen display of slides. This works surprisingly adequately.

Learner uses of (reasons for) lecture recordings

• Foreign students, for whom English is not their first language. They often have trouble understanding the lecture as they go, but are helped by being able to listen to it again (with a pause button). They need the recording to be posted at once if they are to understand the next lecture, which is frequently the next day.
• Students who have to miss a particular lecture e.g. for a doctor's appointment. Again, they need to have access almost immediately to the recording.
  • This is particularly acute for courses with lectures only 24 hours apart, where they need to listen to it in order to understand the next day's lecture. In my dept. (pscyhology) this is true of lectures in level 1, level 2, and at least one course in level 3. This then puts a premium on systems like Echo360 which publish recordings within an hour or less from the end of the lecture. This means not having to wait for a human to find time for this.
• Revision: careful re-listening. This would be much more useful if each recording had a tagged index i.e. a way of jumping direct to various labelled points. This is true of both video and audio recordings.
  Solution: (1) each slide should be a live link that jumps into the audio at the appropriate point. (2) Someone / students create tags: target points in the recording described by tag-words.

• Students in my class today tell me that they listen in class without taking notes (get too confused doing 2 things at once); then 4/5 of them said they had already listened to some recordings (only week 3 of the course); that they promptly re-listen to about 50% of lectures; that the combination of the textbook chapter, my slides handout, and re-listening to the recording was good, and was normal practice for them now.

Problems

• Copyrighted images on lecture slides must not be publicly distributed
• Confidential material dealt with in class discussions.
• Participation vs. canned delivery.
  Solution: do not record classes which are essentially about participation.

"Editing" lecture recordings

• Mac Quicktime reads in .mov and .aiff files (and .mp3); but not .wav
• Quicktime is not my default app for opening these files; but can select the file, click Open-with lets me do it.
• Mac Quicktime has a fast Trim function for lopping off unwanted start and end portions of a recording: easier and quick to use than Audacity.
• Mac Quicktime exports only .m4a, .aifc

• Echo360 also has an editor; fairly easy to use, especially for trimming. Obviously it edits the videos as well as the audio. However, this is only possible while it retains all the original files: after a year or less only a playable (but not editable) form remains.

• Audacity reads in uncompressed fast, but .aifc also fast.
• Audacity (re)exports in multiple formats, esp. the compressed .mp3 format. (Export takes 4 min.s for 50 min. lecture).
• Audacity: has a much more general editor, but I still have trouble with the user interface.

• Currently we have been saving audio files at quite high resolution. File sizes depend on this. A rough trial on one of my lecture recordings (of about 50 mins in length) shows this:
  • .mov (uncompressed, from the recorder): 69.4MB
  • .mp3 (? kbps; what Phil uses): 70.5 MB
  • .mp3 (128 kbps): 45.4 MB
  • .mp3 (64 kbps): 22.7 MB (Sounds fine to me)
  • .mp3 (32 kbps): 11.4 MB (Audible, but sounds worse than the others)
  So for faster up/down-loading, smaller files are better for everyone, and compressing them to 64kbps and getting smaller than one third the original file size, may be best. However this is a single trial, with a recording from a tie-clip mike as is normal for dept. recordings: so this might not generalise.

• I have a neat recorder that looks like a USB pendrive.

  My recipe for converting its .WAV files is:

  • Drag and rename .WAV file from pendrive/recorder
  • Open it in Audacity; Re-save it as .aiff [Mac non-compressed]
  • Open the .aiff in Quicktime
  • Trim there, and save (as .aifc)
  • Re-read .aifc into Audacity
  • Export it as .mp3

• Audacity recipe for trim / edit out the middle.
  • When read in ...
  • Select "I" mini-icon tool for specifying range by dragging.
  • (MagGlass with '+' expands zoom)
  • X Cuts it
  • It won't do it while playing; have to get <----> in top margin AND greyed out to show selection; ....
• Audacity recipe for merging files
  • Read in first file; then
  • File -- Import -- Audio to get 2nd file (You get both, one below the other)
  • Use the time shift tool to displace 2nd one to right, having selected the whole of the 2nd one. The tool looks like <---> mini-icon
  • Then just export or save the result.
• Audacity recipe for splitting files
  • [Don't use Audacity but Quicktime, and a double trim]
  • Read original file into Audacity, then out into .aiff; close.
  • Duplicate that file (2 sep names for the 2 parts)
  • Trim 1: file 1, trim 2nd half of talk off
  • Trim 2: file 2, trim 1st half of talk off
  • Then as above, for each separately:
  • -- Read .aiff into Audacity, and export as .mp3.

Last changed 27 Sept 2014 ............... Length about 2,000 words (21,000 bytes).
(Document started on 17 Oct 2005.) (Document editing on "podcasts" ended on 11 Nov 2008.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ipod/ipod.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Podcasting and podlearning site

This page is about using podcasting in connection with learning, particularly at the University of Glasgow (at least from one person's angle on it). The good news is that the Chancellor's Fund is now supporting Joe as a research assistant for a year (July 2007-8), and anyone who would like to draw on his advice and support should contact him or me or both. (A single combined page for convenient printing is here).

Contents (click to jump to a section)

• The distinct key aspects involved
• Technical terms explained

• General articles

Introduction for complete outsiders

To test whether there is any educational benefit to be had by exploiting this, Joe Maguire recruited two lecturers and five courses in the 2005-6 session. Lecturers and seminars were recorded and distributed; and evaluations done based on staff and student opinions. These proved strongly positive. Since this relies only on equipment the university and students already own, the only barrier to rapid expansion of this is communicating the advantages and promoting ways of using it.

The most obvious application is recording lectures, and circulation of the audio recordings could become as standard as providing lecture notes or slides on the web. The effect of this is probably going to be as various as lecturing styles: for instance in dense lectures, students (especially foreign students) may welcome being able to listen without taking notes, and then re-listen to the recording to update their notes; while in sparse cases e.g. where a topic as student already knows is being gone over again, they may choose not to attend, but listen to the recording at a convenient moment to check they haven't missed any points. However the most interesting issues in the longer term are probably going to be other kinds of recording. Already a hit on one course was recording seminars: the recordings allowed staff and students to discover what went on in the other group's discussions. And it allows staff to record and distribute short talks: perhaps with a different tone, of a different length (no need to think in 50 min. chunks). Even more interesting would be getting student comments and reactions to the current topic, and have these circulated as a collection of short spoken pieces. Current technology promotes class discussions by text e.g. in emails, VLE discussion forums; but most people feel more spontaneous when speaking rather than writing. Current technology would allow discussion to be promoted in this older medium and circulated outwith booked teaching rooms.

From the point of view of the field of educational technology there are several notable features of this. It takes technology (iPods, podcasting) that are already used by students, and asks how to get educational value from them, rather than introducing new devices. It matches the central activity of our teaching: lecturing, and seeks to get additional value from these occasions. Further, the podcasting mechanism allows bundling of the heterogenous media used in practice in lectures: audio, handouts, short videos. It also matches the way most courses evolve during delivery, in response both to the audience (which topics seem to need more time, different examples, etc.), and to the presenter (e.g. material dropped due to lack of time). This responsiveness is a feature, not a defect. The ready mechanism of progressive updates also matches and promotes a sense of community and interaction. If student discussions can be launched as part of the circulated material, then these would be further enhanced.

From the viewpoint of policy issues:

• Flexible delivery is promoted (flexible in time and place of listening to the material).
• Foreign students will especially benefit from being able to re-listen to material in a language they may not be fully fluent in.
• Promote interactivity between staff and students, and among students, and so increase engagement.

Papers and articles

General articles

• A first such article
• "Student led educational technology" University newsletter article April 2006 issue 275 p.16.
• "Aural Recording of Lectures" University newsletter article September 2006 issue 278 p.8.
• "Lecturer is iTunes chart topper" University newsletter article November 2006 issue 280 p.13.

• Olga Wojtas "Kant get no satisfaction, try iTunes new No 1" Time Higher Education Supplement 15 Dec 2006, front page
• "Kant take my iTunes off you" Donald MacLeod Thursday 14 December, 2006 Education Guardian

• Draper, S.W. & Maguire,J. (2007) "Exploring podcasting as part of campus-based teaching" Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education" vol.2 no.1 pp.42-63

• Maguire,J., Stuart,S. & Draper,S.W. (2008) "Student generated podcasts: Learning to cascade rather than create" Proceedings of LICK 2008. See this page

Courses using podcasting in 2005-6

• Consciousness course     Susan Stuart of HATII
• Kant's epistemology     Susan Stuart of HATII
• Heritage and Cultural Informatics     Ian Anderson of HATII.
• 2D digitisation     Ian Anderson of HATII.
• Document encoding     Ian Anderson of HATII.

Courses using podcasting in 2006-7

• Astronomy 3/4/5: General Relativity I     Norman Gray of Physics & Astronomy     The podcasts/ MP3 files
• Consciousness course     Susan Stuart of HATII     podcasts
• Kant's epistemology     Susan Stuart of HATII     podcasts
• Heritage and Cultural Informatics     Ian Anderson of HATII.     podcasts
• 2D digitisation     Ian Anderson of HATII.     podcasts
• Document encoding Ian Anderson of HATII.     podcasts
• Demonstration course Martin Sullivan and Drew McConnell Faculty of Veterinary Medicine     podcasts

Courses using podcasting in 2007-8

Now that Joe is employed for this, we expect course-related podcasting to expand substantially, no doubt spearheaded by HATII who led this at Glasgow.

I expect the HATII courses above to use podcasting again. Psychology and Computing Science are recording their level 1 lectures. Archaeology is recording is level 1 and level 2 lectures, and will attempt to provide "video podcasts" of the level 2 lectures that combine the slides with the audio. I believe also that Martin Hendry of Physics will be offering recordings of both his level 2 and honours lectures.

Other podcasting applications at Glasgow University

Other Links

• Podcasting in education: Apple   iPods   itunes
• iTunes at Stanford University
• iTunes at Brown, Duke, ... University
• iTunes at Berkeley
• itunes/iPod deal for Edinburgh's Gracemount High School
• Ashraf's claim that we should replace his lecturing by podcasts
• iPods at Georgia College and State University
• UWE (near Bristol)
• podcasts from CUNY recommended by a student taking our level 3 including 2 on neurophysiology

• Impala project (Leicester)   Gilly Salmon
• Try google "Frydenberg podcasting"
• Mark Frydenberg's course, with student-created podcasting
• * Podcast bibliography

• Videos: attempts to use for science / public education:
  • one project's video diaries
  • Kroto
  • videos of published sci. papers

Contact Joe Maguire

.. Joe Maguire Joseph.Maguire AT glasgow.ac.uk

RSS

Lib blog

Last changed 21 Jul 2007 ............... Length about 500 words (4,000 bytes).
(Document started on 21 Jul 2007.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ipod/keyaspects.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

The key component aspects of podcasting

"Podcasting" is the most used term to attract our attention, but really there are a cluster of technical advances each important and usable by themselves, although usually more powerful together. This page pulls them apart. (For explanations of the technical terms, see this companion page.)

• Cheap but high quality audio recording.
• Cheap (largely free) and easy publishing and distribution of audio recording.
• Mechanisms for "push" distribution of digital content, that work like subscriptions rather than going to the shops daily. This is particularly important for things like news, where the consumer cannot know what they want in detail before they see it (that's the whole point); but does know the kind of things they are and aren't interested in (e.g. which magazine). "RSS".
• Open world wide publishing (distribution). We are used to this for text: but the same can be applied to audio (and video). Of course, many authors do not want their particular pieces distributed like that. So there are two important ways to go here: open distribution for everyone, and protected sites, so that a specified group only have access. In education, there are good arguments for both: textbooks and academic journal articles have always been intended for everyone who wants them; while a contrasting aspect of learning, is a quite small community ("the class") of people whom you are learning with: and freedom from being overheard by others contributes to a better atomosphere for learning through interaction with your learning community.
• Mobile players: just as a huge advantage of printed text is that you can easily carry a book or magazine around, and read it almost anywhere, so now (pretty recently) there are audio players each smaller and lighter than books, that allow you to carry round a copy of an audio (or video) piece and listen to it almost anywhere. This allows "flexible" use: each audience member does not have to be at the same place at the same time as the others. Asynchronous use, not broadcast technology.

Last changed 22 Jun 2007 ............... Length about 900 words (6000 bytes).
(Document started on 22 Jun 2007.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ipod/rec.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Podcasts recommended by members of GU

This page collects recommendations of podcasts offered elsewhere as useful to GU members. I.e. besides podcasts offered here at GU for particular courses, what's been offered elsewhere that students here might find useful?

• podcasts from CUNY recommended by a psychology student taking level 3 including 2 on neurophysiology

Last changed 21 Jul 2007 ............... Length about 900 words (6000 bytes).
(Document started on 21 Jul 2007.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ipod/terms.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Terms

This appendix has brief introductory explanations on the underlying technologies. Readers requiring further information are recommended to consult the relevant wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/) entry. Beyond that, introductory textbooks might be the next step, although these change so fast that citations will become rapidly out of date.

MP3 is an international open standard for a format for compressed digital audio files (although there are patent claims for the encoding software algorithms). A wide range of current consumer products can play it back: many mobile phones, digital audio players, and desktop PCs.

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding: part of the MPEG-4 standard) is a newer international standard for a format for compressed digital audio files. Since it provides perceptibly higher audio quality, and significantly smaller file sizes, it is preferable, other things being equal. Many of the latest mobile phones, digital audio players (e.g. iPods), and desktop PCs can play it back. It is easy to convert a recording from one format to the other (although converting from one compressed format to another may theoretically degrade sound quality).

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is an open standard for structuring information. From a formal viewpoint, (re)defining HTML is one application of it (HTML appeared first in 1993, XML first in 1998), while another is the "chaptering" that can be added to podcasts by XML-encoded information associated with the basic sound file in MP4 and M4A container formats. From an applications viewpoint, what HTML does for text and still images to support web pages around the world, more general uses of XML aim to do for mixed media such as audio and video. An intentional feature of XML-defined sublanguages is that software will interpret the parts it expects and understands, and harmlessly ignore any other parts. This strongly contrasts with typical proprietary file formats, where software that doesn't match the exact format and version cannot use the file.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary) is a family of standards originally inspired by "tickertape" news services. In practice the term "RSS" is used to allude to file formats (built on and in XML), to a communications protocol, and to a general approach to organising information distribution. The approach addresses situations where there is a source (server) which intermittently but frequently adds new items to what it offers, and subscribers (clients) who want to keep up to date by fairly frequent, but efficient, checks. The server posts summaries (in RSS format) of what is new and/or currently available (which saves repeated big searches by every client); the client "aggregator" software (of which iTunes is one of many examples) periodically requests this summary, and compares it both to what types of item it has been set to select, and what items it has already got.

Thus the idea is that once the client "subscribes" to a feed, the software then ensures that periodically its collection of items is updated, rather than requiring the user to personally select each item, or requiring the client to be always connected so that it can be updated when a new item first appears on the server. iTunes does it for digital content.

Synchronisation means keeping file collections on two separate devices up to date with each other e.g. keeping computer files on separate home and work PCs up to date with each other. RSS formats can be used by software implementing synchronisation. iTunes will do this for iPods and PCs. Educationally, it could make it easy for a student to keep a mobile device up to date with the latest items released in connection with a course, without knowing when they had been posted.

Container files wrap digital media files in XML, so that information ("metadata") about the content is transmitted with it e.g. title, author, etc. Examples are .MP4, which is a container format defined as part of MPEG-4; and .M4A, which is Apple's development of this that wraps AAC with some XML to support enhanced podcasts. These container file formats are often not official standards but are nevertheless open (because XML is easy for humans as well as software to understand) so that they are not tied to one manufacturer.

Podcasting originated earlier, and is essentially blogging with audio rather than text content. It is currently (although not necessarily for long) best served by Apple's iTunes software (running on both Apple and non-Apple machines). The idea is something like a radio programme or audio magazine: repeated new items are put out under a single "name", identified by an RSS URL. Users can subscribe (or unsubscribe) and will get access to all current items in each podcast, and have newly published items automatically downloaded in future. At present, these are predominantly audio items, but may be any digital content.

Enhanced podcasts allow "chaptering" as additional information encoded in XML and bundled in a container file format, and are supported by iTunes and QuickTime, and so can be played on both PCs and Macs.

Miniature video screens are a feature of a number of new consumer devices, including the latest iPods. Those who haven't tried them often assume that providing video on a one inch or two inch screen is worthless. It certainly is diametrically opposite to the strong consumer trend for giant screens for domestic TVs. But reports from those who have actually used such technology is often surprisingly positive. In any case it may be that the use of screens on iPods and mobile phones will be different from showing 2 hour DVDs e.g. listening to an audio tour of a museum or the university library, and being able to glance at a miniscreen to help you recognise what you are supposed to be looking at. Apple were taken by surprise by the rapid sale of their new iPod models with video. When even those making the most money from it, and with the most understanding of the technology, are surprised by user attitudes, then trusting our intuitions about what is useful seems even more unwise than ever.