Digital Festival 2018 #KeeleDigiFest - Parody, Caricature and Pastiche: (Mis)using Digital Tools to Create an Artwork

Theme:

Author: Tim Anderson

School/Directorate/Research Institute: Humanities

Abstract: In the creation of Tim Anderson’s performance piece Mother, Baby, Life,(1) sounds, images and video were carefully harvested from the media and digitally subverted to parody themselves and to provide caricatures. This is permitted by the government’s handy Exceptions to Copyright regulations (2). The sources of the clips were diverse: popular music samples, exploitative websites, Freeview television, action movies, and on-line catalogues.

Additional material was created from serendipitous street video and children’s toys. Live elements were introduced for performance: two brief narrations plus several outbursts of my collaborator, Guillaume Dujat’s digitally-based percussion and electronica. Tracing our journeys from birth to death, the piece looks at childhood, media exposure, deference, rage and violence, individual and state sponsored. Each topic lasts a minute. 

By examining two of these segments, the digital processes involved can be seen and demonstrated. 

The first one, Baby, draws from René Magritte’s 1958 the Golden Legend where a sky full of golden baguettes is viewed through a window. My sky is made of doting mothers, providing a background for their babies to drift past. A sound sample, Freddie Mercury starting Bohemian Rhapsody, is stretched out of recognition before other melodic drones, built on samples from the Spice Girls, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, take over. Real sound, edited from a live recording in a Rochester haberdashery completes the segment. 

The eighth segment, War, colours a still photograph of a mountainous landscape with cut-outs of tanks and fighter planes selected from online catalogues of children’s playthings. The images are digitally animated and trundle or zoom across the scene accompanied by heavy gunfire and artillery sampled by Dujat from computer games and played live on electronic pads using the video as a diegetic score. 

The majority of the digital tools (mis)used are easily available and require little specialist knowledge.
1. https://youtu.be/eG2K47j5mgc 

2. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dealing

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Digital Festival 2018 #KeeleDigiFest - Analytics in the School of Medicine

Theme: Sharing experiences of using technology to enhance your practice

Author: Adrian Molyneux

School/Directorate/Research Institute: Medicine

Abstract: Traditionally, despite the high cost of summative medical examinations, opportunities for capturing useful in-depth performance data for all students have been limited, often resulting in a simple pass/fail result. Investigations in the School of Medicine demonstrated the wealth of data available that could be utilised for individual students to target and improve their weaker areas.

Summary of work: A bespoke analytics system was designed and developed from the ground up. This comprises (1) a feedback website giving students the means to view and listen in multiple different ways to all the feedback captured and compare themselves to the cohort average; (2) the server and database infrastructure to provide the necessary storage and statistical analysis; and (3) auditing tools to quantify the usage of the site by students.

Summary of results: Audit reports demonstrated that students made very heavy usage of the feedback website immediately following the release of results. Most made between 50 and 100 separate page “hits” within the first 24 hours. Separately, tutors report their satisfaction with the new streamlined electronic marking processes and their preference over the previous paper implementation.

Conclusions: A huge amount of data is available for capture during the various examinations that is of benefit to students in targeting areas for improvement. A technological approach facilitates this data capture and presentation.

Take-home message: With some initial investment in time and resources, summative exams may be extended to provide extremely valuable individualised and timely formative feedback for students.

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Digital Festival 2018 #KeeleDigiFest - Using PowerApps for collaborative student app development

Theme: Creating an active learning environment

Author: Luke Bracegirdle

School/Directorate/Research Institute: Pharmacy

Abstract: Applications for smartphone or tablet devices ("apps") are ubiquitous and used across many disciplines. Apps are often sought as solutions, but their development requires thought beyond the technical process of producing an app. This session will discuss how students on a foundation year programme used PowerApps (part of the Office365 suite currently available to all Keele staff/students) to develop a working health app within a single semester. It will explain the process used and share supporting files that fast-tracked students beyond the technical process, to think how the app would benefit potential patients. The activity formed part of a summative assessment and produced innovative ideas from the student group which can be presented.


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Digital Festival 2018 #KeeleDigiFest - Online learning environment to support open academic skills workshops, Google it?

Theme: Sharing experiences of using technology to enhance your practice

Author: Kizzy Beaumont

School/Directorate/Research Institute: Keele Institute for Innovation and Teaching Excellence

Abstract: Within the Student Learning department at Keele University, we have launched a series of university-wide freestanding workshops focusing on developing academic practice. Alongside this, Google Classroom was used to create a blended approach to these workshops, providing an online community for students to share and open dialogue around topics discussed during workshops. The aim was to bring students from different faculties together and create a sense of community surrounding enhancement of academic practice.

We selected Google Classroom for its intuitive and accessible interface for both staff and students, and its ability to create an online community. From both a student and staff perspective feedback was very positive. Students engaged in discussions, answered and posed questions to incite discussion, and gave feedback on resources. There is still much to do and learn in establishing whether Google Classroom can be used effectively in creating a sense of community through the shared want to improve academic practice. This conference paper will demonstrate how we have used Google Classroom whilst sharing frameworks for colleagues to explore in their own practice.

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Digital Festival 2018 #KeeleDigiFest - Enhancing the quality of remote feedback to students using screencasting technology

Theme: Sharing experiences of using technology to enhance your practice

Author: Ben Simkins, Keren Coney

School/Directorate/Research Institute: Keele Institute for Innovation and Teaching Excellence

Abstract: Feedback nationally has been consistently identified as an area for improvement through the National Student Survey. Screencasting has been identified as a form of technology that can help improve student perception of the feedback that they receive. It is also an approach associated with benefits for those who provide feedback. This session will explore, in detail, the benefits of adopting screencasting to both student and staff and will share the findings of a HECSU-funded research project conducted at Keele University. The research project explored the impact of adopting screencasting on the quality of feedback, in terms of depth, level of understanding, the extent to which the feedback is perceived as more personal and the impact of introducing this approach on learning gain.

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Digital Festival 2018 #KeeleDigiFest - Emerging technologies in the legal classroom: subject of the study, object of research and tool for active learning

Theme: Encouraging students to use digital platforms and tools for collaboration, debate and the production of online research and learning outputs.

Author: Maria Tzanou

School/Directorate/Research Institute: Law

Abstract: This proposal aims to explore the various ways Law students can approach and learn about new technologies and the relationship between these and the law. The contribution draws upon the innovative methods employed to teach a recently designed and developed module on ‘Law and New Technologies’ to third year undergraduate Law students at Keele University. The module which was awarded the 2018 Routledge/ALT Teaching Law with New Technologies Prize, adopts an active learning method and approaches technology in four ways: first, it encourages students to critically think about new technologies and evaluate how the law can approach these; second, it examines how new technologies respond to and incorporate the law (code is law); third, it uses new technologies at the object of socio-legal research; and, fourth, it employs technologies as a tool to enhance the actual learning in the module. In this way, new technologies play three distinct, crucial roles within the context of this module: they constitute the subject of the students’ learning, the object of their research and they are instrumental tools enhancing the learning process. An active learning approach is adopted in order to foster deeper understanding of the subject alongside transferrable skills based on teamwork, public speaking, advocacy and mooting.


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Lecture Highlights: repurposing of lecture capture to focus on essential concepts

Daniela Plana, Teaching Fellow in Chemistry, Keele University

The term “lecture capture technology” has been used in the literature to encompass a range of different technologies, ranging from pre-recording lectures in a separate environment to the recording of live lectures and their later distribution to students.[1-4] At Keele Playback is currently used, which allows for the audio (mainly the lecturer) and the screen to be recorded (both through projection from a computer or using a visualiser).

Lecture capture is a particularly inclusive tool, as it not only especially supports students who have genuine reasons for missing sessions (illness, caring responsibilities, work), but also students learning in a language that is not their own.[1, 5] The ability to re-live a lecture, to pause it and go at their own speed, as well as possibly having captions added, is incredibly helpful for learners that are not studying in their native tongue. For many of the same factors, it is also helpful for students with particular learning disabilities. Given Keele's strategic focus on both International Attainment Gap and Social Inclusion, it seems quite relevant to embrace a tool that quite easily can serve both aims effectively.

Lecture capture generates an extensive collection of learning materials. Although it has become commonplace, both at Keele and within the HE sector, there are fewer examples of lecture recordings being edited to create shorter clips.[6] Here we describe the editing of lecture recordings to provide short resources which can be used in a ‘flipped classroom’ approach or as revision resources. Through a Teaching Innovation Project, we (Laura Hancock, Graeme Jones and I) were able to partner with students who edited lecture capture recordings and produced “Lecture Highlights”. Details on the project can be found here and a report will be available in due course. Working with students to produce the resources provided additional value, as they said themselves “… lecturers can make what you think… I want a little bit more… you can get that if you have a student doing it, I think”. It allowed the students to focus on the key elements of the relevant lectures, which they considered important or particularly difficult.

“Lecture Highlights” are resources made from edited recordings from lecture capture, focusing on a key concept from a lecture. Each resource has a clear title, concise one sentence summary and at the end a handful of bullet points answering the statement “you should now be able to…” Additionally, they are fully captioned and have accompanying edited lecture notes for students to use whilst they watch. They are not necessarily of the polished quality of a standalone screencast, but as such require significantly less time and effort to produce.

Camtasia was used during the project, but any video editing software could be equally useful. Technically, the most difficult issue was the captioning of the Lecture Highlights; although various speech-to-text programmes were trialled, there were issues with the quality of the audio and the subject-specific terminology, which required significant input and on occasion full transcriptions. We initially included captioning, based on feedback from international students who had engaged with existing resources, such as screencasts. The effort was definitely worth it, as a large majority of the students who have used the resources have said they found the captions useful, many explaining that it made understanding easier, but also citing a range of other uses such as enabling note-taking, that they “can pause and read them”, for “clear understanding of terminology” or when “I couldn’t have the volume on”. 

Student feedback has been generally positive, describing Lecture Highlights as “the vital information of the lecture but extracted and shortened for a quick review when you need to be reminded of key concepts”, mentioning that they are “concise and easy to understand” and saying that they are “Good because it is easier to find the info you need than Playback and easier to understand than just lecture notes.”

1. Newton, G., et al., Use of Lecture Capture in Higher Education - Lessons from the Trenches. TechTrends, 2014. 58(2): p. 32-45. 
2. Witton, G., The value of capture: Taking an alternative approach to using lecture capture technologies for increased impact on student learning and engagement. British Journal of Educational Technology, 2017. 48(4): p. 1010-1019. 
3. Leadbeater, W., et al., Evaluating the use and impact of lecture recording in undergraduates: Evidence for distinct approaches by different groups of students. Computers & Education, 2013. 61: p. 185-192. 
4. Groen, J.F., B. Quigley, and Y. Herry, Examining the Use of Lecture Capture Technology: Implications for Teaching and Learning. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2016. 7(1). 
5. Shaw, G.P. and D. Molnar, Non-native english language speakers benefit most from the use of lecture capture in medical school. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 2011. 39(6): p. 416-420. 
6. Ferriday, R., Innovative lecture capture. Proceedings of INTED2015 Conference 2nd-4th March 2015, 2015. Madrid: p. 0657–0661. 
7. We thank Sam Goodwin and Asma Kabiri for their amazing work on producing Lecture Highlights. 

Lecture Highlights: repurposing of lecture capture to focus on essential concepts by Daniela Plana, Teaching Fellow in Chemistry, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.