The following resources are available under a Creative Commons license which means that they may be used by any person or institution provided that the Division of Nursing and Midwifery at La Trobe University is attributed as being the author.

Examination of a Placenta - By Michelle Newton

This short video (7 minutes) shows an examination of a placenta. It is currently available in Windows Media Format. Other formats will be made available soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Filed under: Resources on September 11th, 2008 | No Comments »

The latest version of Techsmith’s very powerful Camtasia Studio has been released. We have been using the free trial of Version 5 for the last two weeks and have found that the new version offers some useful new features, some bug fixes and performance improvements.
We have talked about Camtasia quite a lot in previous posts and we have used it extensively in the Division over the last year. It will definitely be part of our delivery strategies in the new year.

Filed under: Camtasia, Technologies on November 21st, 2007 | No Comments »

There was an interesting article on ABC National’s Law Report program this week that takes a look at the Creative Commons licensing system. The article is well worth reading or listening to as academic staff are increasingly likely to both use and provide Creative Commons licensed material. In a previous post I talked about ways of getting Creative Commons licensed images from web sites such as www.flickr.com that can be used in teaching an learning material.

You can read the transcript or download the audio from the ABC web site.

Filed under: Issues on November 21st, 2007 | No Comments »

As a Division we are moving towards a more flexible method of course delivery at undergraduate and, especially, postgraduate level. We see a key component of the move to flexible delivery being the delivery of learning material through web based video.

This short video explains some of the technology choices that we have made and looks at strategies for using web based video in our courses including ways of encouraging student interaction and feedback.

You can view the video in Windows Media Format here.

Filed under: Camtasia, Technologies on October 4th, 2007 | No Comments »

A useful source of images for use in teaching material comes from online services such as Flickr. For those that are unaware, Flickr is the largest online photo sharing web site with thousands of users from around the world.

Many of the images that are posted are free to be used under a Creative Commons license. This short video shows how to find and download such images. One of the advantages in using images under the Creative Commons license is that we don’t need to register the images in the University’s copyright database.

All that is normally requires is that the source of the image is attributed.

Filed under: How To, Resources, Technologies on July 4th, 2007 | No Comments »

I am often asked by staff members about the copyright issues associated with using images in PowerPoint presentations. This is particularly the case when staff are considering placing PowerPoint presentations online as PDF files, PPT files or as recorded presentations.  Listed below are some simple guidelines for using images in PowerPoint presentations. I would like to thank Paul Gialanze who is the Copyright Officer for La Trobe University for his help in preparing these guidelines.
Read more »

Filed under: How To, Issues on July 3rd, 2007 | No Comments »

There is an interesting paper in edition 23(2) of the Australian Journal of Educational Technology that looks at the use and ownership of emerging technologies by Australian students. The paper is by Beverley Oliver and Veronica Goerke from Curtin University of Technology. It uses data from a survey of students in 2005 and a similar survey carried out in 2007. It then compares the data with other studies carried out in Australia and the US.

Some of the interesting things to emerge include:

• 91.4% of students had access to the internet outside of the University at the time of the study.
• 48.6% of students owned a laptop.
• 5.6% owned a handheld computer.
• 96.2% owned a mobile phone.
• 70.1% owned an MP3 player.

It will be interesting to see how these findings compare to our own survey of first year nursing and midwifery students that we will be carrying out later this year.

Oliver, B. and Goerke, V. (2007). Australian undergraduates’ use and ownership of emerging technologies: Implications and opportunities for creating engaging learning experiences for the Net Generation. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 23(2), 171-186. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet23/oliver.html