teaching - cyberpop!

Online Learning and an iPad Giveaway

February 13, 2012 By sidneyeve 1 Comment

It’s that time of the year again, launching on Valentine’s Day, the annual Summer eLearning video contest at Queen’s University — and first prize is a shiny new iPad.

Students are challenged to submit a 3 minute (max) web video short about why online learning in the summer is great! The video with the most YouTube likes takes home the lovely new gadget (or a Best Buy gift card for the equivalent amount of a 16G model). Contest closes on 16 March. All the contest details and regulations are here.

I’m teaching a course this summer on digital culture trends so I am VERY excited about this cool little contest. Here’s a 45 second video promo I made for Queen’s Continuing and Distance Studies to promote the contest!

And here are some of my favorite entries from last year’s contest, including the grand prize winner “Online at Queen’s — A Love Story” by Hayley V. Fuller. Enjoy!

Filed Under: teaching

New Digital Trends e-Course

January 16, 2012 By sidneyeve Leave a Comment

Are you looking for an online course this summer in social, mobile, and digital media culture trends? Queen’s University has one!

More info at FILM260.com

Thank you Hayley V Fuller for making this video!

Filed Under: teaching

Visualizing Social Media Culture

January 7, 2012 By sidneyeve 17 Comments

For my online summer course on social media cultural trends, my students are tasked with creating an infographic. These (2nd to 4th year) undergraduate students came up with some fantastic and insightful creative work as is evident from the samples below (please click images for larger view).

To evaluate these infographics I used a rubric that assessed the quality of research and the impact of design choices. Students were also asked to submit a designer’s statement which documented that fewer than 10% of the 200 students in the class had any experience in using photoshop or similar image editing software. That made the results all the more impressive, because in this condensed 6 week course I do not offer any software instruction. Exit surveys confirmed that students found this infographic assignment to be the most challenging aspect of the course, stretching their digital creativity to the max. Here are my assessment guidelines for infographics.

Twitter Trends by Chris Palmer:

Digital Love by Melanie Fida

Information Freeway by Sam Rosenbaum

Fashion 2.0 by Nadia Yau

Social Music by Leanne Hein

Death of the Music Industry by Sarah Jacobs

Online News by Adam Seaborn

Filed Under: design, edtech, teaching

Evaluating Digital Creativity

December 27, 2011 By sidneyeve 11 Comments

Over the December holidays I am busy planning and designing my next courses for 2012, setting up assignments and calculating assessments with the help of some excellent resources and rubrics for evaluating digital creative work, including these:

Blogging
This rubric for evaluating student blogging by University of Wisconsin is exceptionally detailed and a great starting point. As well, there are a couple of helpful articles in The Chronicle of Higher Ed discussing assessing student blogs, including this one about grading, and this one about setting and communicating expectations regarding student blogs. Closely related, here’s a useful list of how to come up with great blog topics.

Infographics
In designing my next infographic rubric I will remix elements of this infographic rubric used in Kathy Schrock’s workshop, with some ideas and insights from a course at U Mary Washington. As part of my infographics assignment I have students complete a written statement about their process, and this rubric—(link opens Word Doc) from Deaken University provides some great ideas for self-reflection regarding research and design choices and challenges.

P2P Commenting
Peer to peer feedback and collaboration are key elements of my hybrid and online courses, and as such they are evaluated as part of students’ grades. I am always seeking resources I can use to design rubrics that will describe with precision my objectives for online P2P engagement and how these activities are assessed. U Wisconsin has a great rubric here. Beyond that, two unconventional starting points for me include this piece by Judy Dunn on the qualities of unremarkable comments, and on the flipside — some best practices and tips for great comments by Bill Ferriter.

Filed Under: design, teaching

Connected and Mobile Students

December 7, 2011 By sidneyeve 12 Comments

A detail from the exit surveys of just over 1,100 students in my mass comm course, asking about what kind of smartphones they are using, if any. BlackBerry wins by a landslide at this Canadian university.

Smartphones in FILM240X Fall 2011

Strange but true then, considering this data, that my iOS/Android ClassCaddy smartphone app for this course was downloaded 725 times (see chart below). I used MobileRoadie as an app development platform and they do not offer a Blackberry solution, so I expected to see fewer than 300 installs this term. To bridge this BB-gap I designed a mobile-optimized course website containing all the same content as was in the app.