iTunes U?
I got an e-mail the other day from NOVA's VP for Instructional & Information Technology. He informed the faculty that later this month we'll have the option of putting our lectures & course materials up on iTunes, as part of something called iTunes U. Thomas Nelson Community College, another community college in Virginia, is already participating, as are a great many 4-year universities, including Ivy Leaguers.
I like this idea, but wonder how much time it's going to take. In general, I am super-duper excited over the advent of increased sharing online, and the decline of barriers to sharing. One of my pet peeves has been academic journals. Many are published by huge publishing companies like Elsevier, who make money off of them. For many years, scientists (and other scholars) who wanted to publish their research were forced to give up the copyright to their work and turn it over to one of these companies. Other scientists (or other scholars) who wanted to read about the research then had to pay OUTRAGEOUS subscription fees for these journals. I'm talking thousands of dollars a year -- far beyond the means of anyone who doesn't have a massive academic bureaucracy backing them up. To me, this seems massively unjust. It's the scientists who produce and consume the research; and publishing companies appear to make crazy profits off of all that stressful labor by others. ...Reminds me of slavery!
However, the Internet has the potential to change all that. With the net, anyone can publish their research online, and someone else on the other side of the world can access it 2 seconds later. With this, of course, comes the potential for lousy scholarship and fakery in research. At least that's the line touted by Elsevier and their ilk. Peer review is still essential, and it's going to be cool to see which journals get on board with the new reality. One I checked out recently is PLoS One. (They had a research article on really cool jellyfish fossils from the Cambrian, which is how I found out about them.) Somewhat more basic is the Journal of the Virtual Explorer, where my thesis advisor and some colleagues published an article (about kink banding) in 2004.
And while you're talking about the distribution of online information, it would be remiss not to mention Wikipedia. Wikipedia is HUGE among my students. I frequently use it myself as a handy reference. But handy doesn't mean accurate. Because anyone can edit the entries on Wikipedia, it's not guaranteed to be peer reviewed. A competitor, Citizendium, hopes to out-wiki Wikipedia with fully-refereed articles written by identifiable authors. WIRED explored their competing styles in their recent "Geekipedia."
More information about the iTunes U / online lecture phenomenon is available in a Washington Post article from the end of December.
I like this idea, but wonder how much time it's going to take. In general, I am super-duper excited over the advent of increased sharing online, and the decline of barriers to sharing. One of my pet peeves has been academic journals. Many are published by huge publishing companies like Elsevier, who make money off of them. For many years, scientists (and other scholars) who wanted to publish their research were forced to give up the copyright to their work and turn it over to one of these companies. Other scientists (or other scholars) who wanted to read about the research then had to pay OUTRAGEOUS subscription fees for these journals. I'm talking thousands of dollars a year -- far beyond the means of anyone who doesn't have a massive academic bureaucracy backing them up. To me, this seems massively unjust. It's the scientists who produce and consume the research; and publishing companies appear to make crazy profits off of all that stressful labor by others. ...Reminds me of slavery!
However, the Internet has the potential to change all that. With the net, anyone can publish their research online, and someone else on the other side of the world can access it 2 seconds later. With this, of course, comes the potential for lousy scholarship and fakery in research. At least that's the line touted by Elsevier and their ilk. Peer review is still essential, and it's going to be cool to see which journals get on board with the new reality. One I checked out recently is PLoS One. (They had a research article on really cool jellyfish fossils from the Cambrian, which is how I found out about them.) Somewhat more basic is the Journal of the Virtual Explorer, where my thesis advisor and some colleagues published an article (about kink banding) in 2004.
And while you're talking about the distribution of online information, it would be remiss not to mention Wikipedia. Wikipedia is HUGE among my students. I frequently use it myself as a handy reference. But handy doesn't mean accurate. Because anyone can edit the entries on Wikipedia, it's not guaranteed to be peer reviewed. A competitor, Citizendium, hopes to out-wiki Wikipedia with fully-refereed articles written by identifiable authors. WIRED explored their competing styles in their recent "Geekipedia."
More information about the iTunes U / online lecture phenomenon is available in a Washington Post article from the end of December.
2 Comments:
I started podcasting in the Fall of 2005 and it's been an unqualified success in my experience. I'd point you to the blog posts that I made about my experiences, but they were on my university's blog, which got shut down without giving users a chance to recover their posts (grrr).
For me the process is relatively painless. I own an Olympus DM-10 digital voice recorder. At the beginning of class I lay it on the front desk and start it and at the end of lecture I shut it off. Back at my office I download the audio, convert it from WMV to MP3 format, and upload it to my web server. I post links to the MP3 files in my lecture notes and I include the MP3 files in blog posts in order to generate an RSS feed. I don't much like Apple's embrace of DRM so when FHSU got iTunes I didn't bother to jump through the hoops necessary to get stuff up there. The fact is I already had a functioning podcasting system that works well for my students. Others have discovered my podcasts, too, though probably not as many as if I had chosen to use iTunes. The whole process takes me less than 10 minutes a day and has become part of my regular routine.
The benefits to you and your students are potentially many. With web lecture notes and podcasts available on the web, students who are sick or have to miss a class can relive the experience on their own time. Students can also review materials better in preparation for tests - for that matter, you (or your administrators) can review your lectures, as well. I was initially concerned that attendance would be adversely affected, but I found that the attendance actually improved slightly after I started podcasting (your results may vary).
I'm about to make revisions to the class for the spring semester, but here's the link to my Fall 2007 Intro Geology class: http://www.outcrop.org/GSCI100/
Feel free to contact me if you've got any questions!
Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine!
Here are the original podcasting posts I made in the Fall of 2005:
Podcasting from the Classroom
and
Podcasting Update
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