The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition this week announced the Second Annual Sparky Awards, a competition for students to create videos about “to promote the open exchange of information.”
This year’s theme is “MindMashup: the Value of Information Sharing.” Students are asked to create videos no longer than two minutes that “imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information,” according to a news release. The winning entry will receive $1,000. Last year’s winners can be found here.
Sparc is an international alliance of academic and research libraries that promotes open access to scholarship. It is co-sponsoring the Sparky Awards with the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries (at the University of Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture, and the Student PIRGs. —Catherine Rampell
27 Responses to Sparky Awards Theme Announced
Andy Rundquist - December 1, 2011 at 10:13 am
I do the jing/screencast.com method you describe quite often. I especially like it for student essays, though I also use it to assess my students’ screencasts. I went to the $100/yr account at screencast.com to be able to file my assessments better and to get around the bandwidth issues.
My students tell me they like that form of feedback a lot, and there’s at least one journal article that supports that with a survey of students comparing written feedback to both video and digital comments added to a word doc.
One interesting thing I’ve found, however, is that I still use a lot of paper. I currently use a drafting process for grading papers. On the bus (which I ride everyday), I go through the paper copies making marks for my eyes only. This lets me go through a whole batch before doing the first video. Then, either at home or at my office, I record my thoughts about their papers while marking them up digitally, led by the terse notes to myself. I have tried doing it all digitally, but this bus/draft method has really improved the quality of my feedback.
Another nice thing about Jing and screencast.com is that students seem to be able to easily use them as well. In my physics classes all assessments are turned in that way. They typically do their work with pencil and paper, and then scan it/take a picture of it and make a screencast of it, explaining the steps they’ve taken. I’ve found this to be amazingly useful in helping me determine what they know.
leadbelly - December 1, 2011 at 2:27 pm
I have been doing video feedback files for my ENG classes for the past year or so. My students respond well to the method, and I can grade as fast (or faster sometimes) with the videos than I can with paper.
For those who might be worried about putting the students’ graded work on an external site, you can always attach the video to the gradebook in Moodle or Blackboard (or create private folders for students).
Raphael - December 1, 2011 at 4:01 pm
As experienced TA, I can not imagine doing video assessments. This year, I have to grade 14 hand-ins every week. That means that just recording the videos would take me 70 minutes extra, and then uploading and everything. I just don’t have the time for this.
Digital hand-ins have their charm. I have received some hand-ins created used LaTeX or word processors. They are usually better to read and therefore grade. Doing this at the computer strikes me as impractical, though, for the same reason I dislike reading on computer screens: it does not feel natural. Given a tablet or better yet an ebook reader with annotation functionality I think it might work out.
One drawback is this: we typically discuss the exercise problems in groups. Nowadays, I give students their assessed hand-ins, they can check my comments, listen to what I say and relate. How would this work with digital hand-ins? I can not (and do not want to) assume everybody has a computer with internet access along for the session.
As a student, I stopped latexing hand-ins years ago. No matter how well I can code, I am faster by hand. Also, it is easier to collaborate; not every team member might be comfortable with LaTeX, you have to aggregate results and so on. Plus, as soon as you have an image in there it becomes messy.
If I want to digitise a hand-written hand-in I am in trouble. Are there scanners that automatically draw in sheets that students can access? I found that everything else causes too much overhead.
By the way, consider using xournal ( http://xournal.sourceforge.net/ ). It is free and allows you to export annotated PDF as flat PDF, including the annotations. Demanding PDF as hand-in format is ok as all common tools export to PDF (at least via PDF printers).
fullprof99 - December 1, 2011 at 5:06 pm
I’ve been using the Blackboard platform to handle almost all grading from face to face and on line courses for a number of years. In my lit. courses students generally submit papers in MS Word as attachments to the Blackboard discussion board. This means that others can see/compare their work and tends to make the papers communications to all, not just to me. I respond to most elements in the discussion board. Again, this means that others can see/compare–and respond themselves. Private comments regarding evaluation are attached to the grade in the BB Gradebook.
Frank Lowney - December 1, 2011 at 5:54 pm
I really like your ideas on video assessment but I am distressed to read that you are doing everything out of pocket. Given the economies that you cite, your institution should be at least helping with the costs if not covering them completely. You should be able to use professional screen casting software such as ScreenFlow or Camtasia which are far more expressive than Jing (by the maker of Camtasia). Of course, this approach could be an enormous time sink without a strong dose of self-restraint.
The other issue with video assessment is accessibility by deaf and hearing impaired students. They could and should be included in this rich form of feedback but we need something that creates soft subtitles (aka captions) quickly and easily. Camtasia has a subtitling feature but it is very time consuming to implement. What I think that we need is a toggle-able option that takes our audio annotation, applies speech recognition and then generates a soft subtitle track to our video.
_perplexed_ - December 1, 2011 at 6:36 pm
I’ve used Blackboard for student papers for several years, and require students to read and comment on the papers of other students. This requires me to teach a bit about how to do peer review, leads to higher quality papers and students seem to like it after the fact– but they do groan loudly in anticipation.
I too haven’t figured out a satisfactory way to do examinations electronically.
Robert Talbert - December 1, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Frank- I’ve been using Camtasia for years now and have made over 100 screencasts with it; see this earlier post: http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/06/07/how-i-make-screencasts-the-whiteboard-screencast/. I still don’t feel like I’ve mastered it, but I can do what I need to do at this point fairly automatically. It is my go-to tool for any video that requires a professional look to it. I use Jing for short stuff that is more informal.
And don’t worry, GVSU provides us faculty with a generous yearly technology allowance that more than covers what I need. In fact I don’t think I have spent a dime of my personal money to get any of this stuff, including hardware such as my headset mic, that wasn’t eventually reimbursed. And most of the stuff that I mentioned in the article is free (or comes built in to the software, like Word’s commenting functions).
You are right about students with disabilities. This is a major elephant in the room for screencasters.
mes27 - December 2, 2011 at 7:24 am
After using Turnitin for a few years to check the originality of student work I moved on to utilizing the other two built-in features available in this application. The GradeMark, electronic mark-up feature, lets me provide rich and consistent feedback to students on their writing. Since this is not a writing course, per se, this added help is welcome indeed. I can build, categorize, store, and, of course, re-purpose my own feedback elements and/or I can take advantage of the library of commonly-needed feedback elements that GradeMark already has provided and categorized for the instructor. This term for the first time I am also using the PeerMark feature wherein students can review course colleagues’ work and, using a rubric I designed and detailed specifically for the assignments, in order to make the exercise and learning experience a valuable one. It was more than satisfying and validating that, in the case of several mid-term papers last month that student feedback and comments to colleagues matched what I had already said on their work. All of this makes the grading paperless and dare I say easier, but more importantly, I believe that it is a fundamentally better way to grade written work and provides much richer feedback – enabling me to be both more efficient and more effective.
logica4d - December 2, 2011 at 11:33 am
I have been grading student papers digitally for a few years using Google Docs. Because we have Google Apps for Education this is simple for the student as well as the professor. I use the commenting feature to point out various aspects of the paper which provides clear legible feedback. One of the newer features is that you can export to Doc format and retain the comments. Emailed student papers can easily be added to Google Docs and then shared as view only once the grading has been completed.
I have also done some grading on the iPad using GoodReader to annotate the document and then email it back to the student.
art_of_nurture - December 2, 2011 at 11:54 am
Feedback should be specific enough to let students know what they needed to have changed—or, better, what they need to change before they resubmit. They do not need “A, you are a Woebegone above-average student,” nor do they need “D, you are not a worthwhile student.” They need to know how to improve their competency.
For subjects that do not need equations, all you really need is for students to have access to a word processor that can produce an RTF file. Mistakes can be highlighted by underlining, and requests for corrections can be put in-line within something like curly brackets. E-mails in and e-mail out.
When I was an undergraduate I would work hard on a paper, submit it just ahead of the deadline, get it back a week or so later, look at the grade, maybe try to make out illegible marginal notes, and then forget about it. I was not a good student, and my bad points were not corrected until I got into graduate school. There I got comments on my dissertation drafts that said, at least implicitly, “You will fix this non sequiter or go no further!” Or I got comments that indicated that the reader totally misunderstood my unclear argument.
Would it not be better for students to get feedback that will produce improvements in their abilities as early as possible in the educational process? I believe that, regardless of what other people may think about it, students are not pearls to be graded and put out for market. They are my clients and all of them pay for my best efforts to improve their competency.
When students get a paper to be resubmitted that is filled with “red ink” critiques, at the very least they must go through the paper and pay enough attention to the critiques to erase them. My experience has been that students will try to avoid making the same mistakes in their future papers. Moreover, sometimes students will have overlooked a logical connection that can open a new vista to them once pointed out. “Did it occur to you that a gate that keeps outsiders out can also keep insiders in? What was the functional importance of this gate in the total situation?”
kbellnier - December 2, 2011 at 12:03 pm
As an FYI – the most recent Acrobat Reader (X, for PC in any case) has basic commenting tools added. A big win in my book!
jandersen - December 2, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Robert: I have been doing this for 6 years and it is wonderful…without paper’s to lug around. I block out a time to grade using insert comment in document and adding an audio for general grading information. I find that I am able to give the student increase assessment with the use of Jing/screencast and adding links.
Robert Talbert - December 2, 2011 at 12:19 pm
The cost is a bit of a factor — almost $300 for the complete package. But it does seem like the ultimate PDF solution and might be worth the investment if you have the money.
cmcclain - December 2, 2011 at 1:47 pm
I’m curious… what is your typical courseload, class size, etc?
cmcclain - December 2, 2011 at 1:53 pm
Are you familiar with WeBWorK?
http://webwork.maa.org/
courtneyf - December 2, 2011 at 5:27 pm
I am an avid Jinger, but I recently used it for the first time to do what you had done, provide students with recorded voice comments of their Spanish writing assignment. I had the student’s assignment on my computer screen and did a voice over of suggestions and encouraging comments.
These Jings were for a continuing education Spanish class that meets only once a week, thus many of my students commute to campus for the class and are not likely to come to campus at any other time other than for class. I wanted to provide a more personalized assessment to these students and knew that having them come to my office hours would be cumbersome for them. The Jing method worked very well, and in the following class I asked the students what they thought of the comments. One of my students brought up an interesting point that is pro digital grading. His favorite aspect of the Jing recording was that he was able to listen to my comments as many times as he wanted, thus enabling him to take full advantage of them. If I had made these comments to him orally during my office hours, he would have surely forgotten the majority of them by the time he sat down to work on the paper revisions.
Dana C. Ernst - December 2, 2011 at 9:34 pm
I’m surprised that you are willing to deal with multiple formats. I’ve been doing some digital grading this semester and I require the students to submit PDFs and all of the files have to be named according to a particular format (otherwise, I won’t grade it). This saves me so much time and is easy for them to do! Nearly all of the students are using LaTeX, so producing a PDF is the default. I’ve been using GoodReader (or other similar apps) on my iPad to annotate and flatten the PDFs. It is so much faster for me to be able to write freehand than to type comments. I then email the files back to the student directly from GoodReader as soon as I’m done annotating. By the way, the filename is automatically modified in an appropriate way when this all goes down. One thing I need to do is find a good way to do freehand annotations on my desktop. Any suggestions out there for doing this? (I’m a Mac user.)
shelling - December 3, 2011 at 1:37 am
I use the redlining (i.e., track changes) function in MS Word — or even better, for Mac users, Pages — to add comments to my students’ electronic assignments. I add my comments in brackets within the student’s text itself. I then export these documents from Word or Pages as pdfs and upload them to my server. Students use the unique name of the file they sent me to download their graded papers, changing the file extension to pdf from whatever format they originally used. I have also used Skim to annotate pdfs and I have had no problem exporting the pdf with embedded notes so that it can be read on any platform. But I find commenting on a pdf more cumbersome than marking up a Word document, just as I find marking up papers in Google Docs and then returning these to students more onerous than keeping the files in a folder on my computer and syncing with Dropbox until I am ready to upload them to my server for distribution.
Raphael - December 3, 2011 at 8:20 am
With some training you can achieve decent results by using a graphics tablet, e.g. Wacom. They come for decent prices (though small) or with built-in displays. The latter is important if you have trouble dealing with hand-eye-disconnection.
Guest - December 3, 2011 at 9:37 pm
If I don’t do digital grading, am I a bad person?
johnsoad - December 4, 2011 at 11:54 am
All:
Thanks for sharing several good strategies and ideas. A TA who had dexterity limitations showed me a really simple method that works right in MS Office and other documents called drag tagging. Create a master page of 20-30 comment boxes (I use Word’s call-out shapes) and pre-fill them with the most common comments you make. Save the template, then open a student’s paper. For each correction, grab the closest applicable comment and drag it to the student’s paper. Edit if needed.
This can replace a lot of written comments while maintaining personalized touch. Anyone who wants a starter template is welcome to contact me at johnsoad@wfu:disqus.edu.
Annotate for Word (www.11trees.com) offers a similar service by adding an annotation template to Word.
Robert Talbert - December 5, 2011 at 12:36 pm
For me, I am typically teaching three courses a semester (two preps) with an average of 25 students per course, and no TA’s.
Robert Talbert - December 5, 2011 at 12:37 pm
Use it all the time in calculus classes. It’s not perfect and for the most part assesses only rote-mechanical skills, but it really fills a niche admirably for me in my assessment scheme.
Robert Talbert - December 5, 2011 at 12:39 pm
I guess I haven’t found that having multiple formats has slowed me down any. But I didn’t know GoodReader did stuff like what you are mentioning. I’ll have to check that out.
Robert Talbert - December 5, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Yes. Sorry.
cmcclain - December 5, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Ah, I have 100-150 students each semester across four to five courses. Making a 5 minute video for each student is out of the question.
ychumanities - December 5, 2011 at 4:20 pm
I love using Jing for video feedback, and the response from students has been very positive. My only complaint is that the 5 minutes you spend making your comments is only about half the time you need for each paper, when you factor in the time necessary to upload each video. Even with Jing Pro, which allows for a smaller file and therefore a quicker upload, the time spent waiting for each file to upload and generate an embed code or URL is frustrating.