I had a productive Christmas making geo-mashups for teaching. Mashups are a method of developing web applications that link different web platforms through their programming interfaces (APIs).

My first project has been to link Google Maps to my own database of articles and news stories about China so that students can locate them geographically. The articles can be categorised by broad subject (e.g., political, cultural, economic), source (academic or newspaper article, blog, photograph) and elevation (national, regional, city or local issue). I still have a little work to do on this project (mostly on the user interface), but hopefully can deploy it for teaching this coming semester.

I am hoping to link this system with one developed by my friend Ben Bedwell for a virtual tour of Bagdad. You can see a video of his work with Theresa Caruana here. The idea is that Ben could pull the data from my database and present it on his system.

I am still tweaking things (and adding content), so no demonstrations yet).

The second project allows comments about locations to be placed on the map to provide a site for later reflection (the comments are time coded so can be reviewed in the sequence they were created). My hope is that when I take students to China in April, this site can be deployed (and also be used to keep those at home in the UK informed about progress). I will have two opportunities to pilot test this system before April.

Having spent the last 10 days in Taiwan for work, I was able to do a test of the system. It is a bit ugly (and the contents a bit banal), but you can get an idea of how it might work with student posts. The link is here. Oh, and sorry, for some reason it doesn’t work in Safari (but Firefox and IE seem to be fine).

I have concluded a couple of weeks of experimenting with multimedia to support my teaching and have come to some conclusions.

The most important is that, at least for my subject material, there are very limited learning benefits from developing teaching support resources beyond well structured web resources and podcasts — at least in terms of the time for production and the alternative uses of that time.

A key reason for this, is that for lecture material that is mostly argument or summary, synchronised video / text adds almost nothing to the learning experience (just as it almost nothing to a live lecture). The reason for this is that during a, well structured audio presentation the headings and structure should be obvious — if they are not, then the problem is in the spoken material not in the absence of supporting synchronised text (e.g., PowerPoint or similar slides).

Of course, this is not the case for colleagues who need to talk through complex diagrams or equations. For them, an electronic equivalent of interacting with the chalkboard might be very helpful.

One of my worries with typical powerpoint presentations is that there is a tendency to treat the text as the only method of engagement. I suspect that for a lone student listening and watching with headphones in a computer lab, library or study, this might be even more so the case — but impossible with audio only.

This cost-benefit analysis (rough as it is) must be essential to all such choices. I estimate to make a 30 min lecture, with synchronised audio and slides and decent production values would take at least a full working day (assuming the content is prepared). However, as I note, the incremental learning over an audio only production be are probably negligible. As such, that teaching time would be better spent answering email, extra tutorials, etc.