Looking good!  NIce to see examples etc so prominently displayed, and some useful information that is pretty easy to find. Also excellent to be able to open this out to the broader community for commentary here. One or two thoughts...

It's not clear why some things open in new windows and some don't  - perhaps better (if it is done at all) to limit opening of new windows to external sites only? Otherwise it is a bit easy to lose a sense of continuity and it is easy, depending on browser configuration, to lose people altogether that way.

It would be nice to see more links to someting about the great people involved, maybe to their Landing profiles? That way they could reveal as much or as little as they like to whoever they wish to see it and open up the opportunity for more dialogue. Quite a few of the things there encourage me to want to start a conversation but at that point I just get led to an email or phone link or nowhere at all. Or perhaps there might be a link to a CLDD Landing group, maybe, in the contact page and maybe elsewhere?

One very small point: I suspect one FAQ might be 'why does the FAQ tell me about an introduction to calcululus?' 

Thanks for the great comments, Jon.

We'll look into the opening windows issue and try to ensure consistency.

Great suggestion about linking to peoples' Landing profiles. I'll take the request to CLDD staff and we'll do that for those who are interested.

The FAQ is a left-over from the old site, and will disappear tomorrow when registration for the pilot version of MATH 265 closes. We are working on a real FAQ for the site to be launched soon.

Cindy

- Cindy Ives

Excellent. It's great to see this developing - would be nice to see such good communication right the way across the university. I think we are getting there but there are pockets here and there that are unloved by their makers. 

Sometimes a voice (picture or video) is worth a thousand words - adds teacher presence  and immediacy.

An important proviso; like any technology, it can be done pointlessly, badly, counter-productively. 

As much as anything, inclusion of podcasts usually implies that the creator cares enough to put effort and personal energy into creating a good learning experience. The caring of the teacher is among the very top factors in motivating learning in an educational/training setting. It is very hard indeed to extricate the enormous benefits of that simple fact alone from anything that is innately valuable about podcasts themselves.

A further benefit is that it almost always increases time on task: time spent listening to a podcast provides more opportunity to think about, reflect on and generally connect knowledge gained in other ways. Again, this is not so much a necessary feature of the technology itself as a useful side-effect of using it.

Animated gifs come to mind. Just because we can do it doesn't mean we should. That said, I know that well-designed podcasts can improve engagement and help students grasp elusive concepts. (I learn a lot from YouTube )

However, I think it is more foolhardy than brave to venture beyond a talking head without some support from a visual designer and/or videographer. The medium is the message, and badly designed (or undesigned) media can convey the message "this is silly," or  "this person is an amateur" even though you may be an expert in an academic field.

Where podcasts have evolved I still think of them as audio content even though video podcasts seems to be growing.  Never thought of it as talkiing ebooks. Streaming content fits with the definition of what a podcast is which used to include access it via an RSS feed.  

To me, it's audio, but the 'cast' part implies a continuously (regularily or irrgularily) updated clip, about something that just happened around a topic (the reason for people to subscribe), plus an archive of old clips. 

Pod casting? Is that like throwing away the shells of the peas?