vetpad

Interesting idea about recording an informal discussion such as might take place in the social spaces around a conference – Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering fame has put up the first example of their “Spoolcast“. If you can cope with the intro music (and exit music) between each section there are some interesting points made. How much impact a university’s website has on drawing in prospective students for example and what useable really means – “black and white” and “shades of grey” definitions.

Lots more podcasting ideas to support research and learning.

Tama is excited by the arrival of …

The first of three microphones for the iPod Video

I’m excited to see how well it works. If it’s good, all I will need is an iPod video

(UPDATE I’m not convinced – the mono, wav and distance ‘features’ make it a “not quite” device for me)

John Naughton is excited by iPod eBooks Creator

It seems to work well – I’ve transferred “The importance of being Earnest” to my Nano and even with such a tiny screen it is quite readable. I guess it would be easier on an iPod video though…

Although I’m not a great fan of traditional lectures as the mainstay of teaching and therefore announcements about university x podcasting its lectures don’t excite me much, I think there is a value in being able to go back and listen again to an event that you were at (and of course listen to an event that you were not able to attend).

I would guess that students who attend lectures that are recorded and made available shortly afterwards may well feel more confident about not having to write everything down and that may encourage less recording and reproduction of information and more thought and perhaps reflection…

The concern lecturers may have about students not turning up to lectures that are recorded may well be unfounded if the experience of Nathan Moss is anything to go by:

It was really good because the [lecture] numbers weren’t going down at all, so they were using them to revise

We will hopefully be finding out more about this as part of the HEA funded IMPALA project that we are a small part of.

I was supposed to be at a workshop in Leicester yesterday – the first meeting of a project that we are involved with (IMPALA) set up to explore educational uses of podcasting. However I spent 6 hours in the casualty department of our local hospital instead - my wife was rushed there by me with a suspected appendicitis. Anyway, she is now fine and that’s the main thing.

Reflecting on the event, reminds me of the patient experiences website that we recommended to medical students where I was working previously – and how story telling can be a powerful learning experience for students. The medical student who saw us first in casualty was clearly not aware that extreme pain requires acknowledgement and a rapid response and that lengthy interviews about your past medical history did not work well in this situation. The fact that history taking skills would have been just as effectively practiced after the morphine injection was missed somehow. This student could actually have helped to keep us informed of what was going on and built up a better relationship with us and probably learnt a lot more….

For me the most important skill demonstrated by any member of staff (one of the nurses) during that stressful time was COMMUNICATION with a little EMPATHY - the simple phrase “you are obviously in a lot of pain – we are going to give you something to ease the pain now” made a big difference to how we felt.