CLIPP Board

Camtasia Relay

This week I attended a “Boot Camp” for Camtasia Relay. Camtasia Relay is a product produced by an American company called Tech Smith. They produce a number of products that sit in or around the screen capture market. Their most well known product is probably Camtasia Studio that started off as simple video capture of a computer screen but has now grown into a fairly comprehensive multimedia authoring package. With this comes the issue though that every time you add a new feature it makes the learning curve that little bit steeper. With this in mind Tech Smith decided to develop a new more simplistic version of Camtasia Studio that was based more around the idea of simple capture and processing rather than authoring or production in the normal sense.

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Articulate and Flash Player 10 problems

Many of our lecturers use Articulate to create on-line lectures/presentations for students. Unfortunately there are some issues with Flash Player 10 and play back of these presentations.

To solve this issue you must download the Articulate updater and follow the instructions that can be found in the article “Why are my presentations not loading with Flash Player 10?“. As a heads up the updater does 2 things.

1. Updates Articulate Presenter 5 so that any thing you export in future will be correct.
2. Updates already exported presentations so that you do not have to export them again. Please bear in mind though this will mean that you will need to re-upload any material that you have put into the resource centre.
   

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Lecture Capture: Beyond Cost & Complexity

I just signed up to this, its free so head over to the on24 web site and register so that you can attend. Bear in mind that its in the evening so unless you want to hang around at work, you’ll need to have a computer and internet at home. Details of what is going are below.

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Equella and the Blackboard building block

Over the last few months we have noticed what one might term to be some “short comings” in the functionality of the Blackboard building block for Equella. For those who have no idea what they are reading about right now Equella is our media repository and the building block is what allows us to place links into Blackboard to material stored within the repository. See the list below for some things that you should be aware of when adding content to Blackboard:

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Microsoft Live and Education.

Microsoft have arranged a webinare to show what they are offering in the Education market. It will include a demo of their collaboration tools as well as communication and storage services for students, staff, faculty and alumni.

They are attempting to bring together all of the online aspects of a users life by integrating tools that can cross the boundaries between “work style” and “lifestyle”. These services are free and are all fully hosted within the European Union.

We have registered for the event on Wednesday 18th February between 14:00 and 15:00. In room SW413 we have a big screen PC that will be showing the presentation. There are very limited places so please if you wish to attend drop me an email. If there is a lot of interest we will attempt to get a bigger room.

You may want to check out some of what they do over at there showcase site Live Campus. Beware that this site uses the Silver Light and requires you to have version 2 of the plugin.

MacLaren Memorial Lecture on Management – David Smith CEO Jaguar Land Rover

MacLaren Memorial Lecture on Management

Date: Wednesday 11 March 2008
Start time: 7pm prompt with teas/coffees and cakes/pastries available in Aston Business School Conference Centre from 6.00pm
Venue: The Great Hall, Main Building, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET

David Smith of Jaguar Land Rover – Investing in Our Future

David Smith became Chief Executive of Jaguar Land Rover in June 2008 on the sale to Tata, after twenty five years in the automotive industry with Ford. He has also been a Board member of Advantage West Midlands for the last five years.

David has had a roller coaster ride during 2008, dealing with complex transition issues for the newly independent company, putting the long term strategy for the business in place and trying to manage through the fallout from the worst global financial crisis for generations.

In this lecture, David will outline how he sees the future and the opportunity to develop Jaguar Land Rover into one of tomorrow’s industrial companies during a period of such uncertainty.

This Lecture is free and open to all.

To book a place please contact Claire Hopkins on 0121 204 4542 or at events@aston.ac.uk

Media and Learning Technologies will be recording this event. The video will be available on the past events section of the Aston University web site within a day or two of the event.

Carl Senior Explains MRI through the medium of dance.

What I find really interesting about this video is the reaction of the students. There is a lot of laughing as you would expect, if a lecturer was stood in front of a class doing the ‘dance of the proton’ but the important thing here is that all of the class are pretty much taking notice of what is happening.

Many of us in the education industry are guilty of looking to technology to assist in engaging students. Recently while I was at BETT I noticed just how much of the technology that was on show was about how to engage students. It wasn’t about ‘distribution techniques’ or ‘tools’ it was about how can we present the same thing but make it more interesting and enhance the experience for the learner.

What Carl has done is too take the best resource he has, himself, and use that to truly deliver something that reaches past the normal boundaries of the talk and chalk lecture. What he potentially surrendered in dignity he has gained 2 fold in respect from students that now, if not understand what he was getting across, will at least remember what to look up because they were engaged at the time.

More ways to manage your content for Blackboard

Lecturers, have you ever published an item on the resource centre, and then later on found that there was a typo or it needed updating? Well, you weren’t alone. We’ve listened and now you can log into the resource centre directly and manage all of your items from the interface there.

Internet & Higher Education Journal – Free Sample

I have been doing some hunting around for some journals that cover Internet related technologies and there effect and use in teaching and learning. I stumbled across Internet and Higher Education which is a peer-reviewed journal that comes out quarterly. It attempts to address issues and developments in the the field of on line learning, teaching, and administration on the Internet in post-secondary settings. There is a free sample issue available over at Science Direct. If you are on the Aston network then you shouldn’t need to log in.