Sailing by the Sound

As I think about bubbles

2011-04-07T15:11:00.001-04:00

As I think about economic bubbles (housing, higher education, etc.) it started me thinking about how businesses go about buying and delivering training. As the economy tumbles it would seem that it would make sense for industries to pull their resources and develop training and communities or practice (think trade guilds) to assist their employees to develop their skills.

But as I consider the topic and the commercial world's increasing focus on protecting "intellectual property" it puts me in mind of mideavel feifdoms where every little duke, lord, or baron kept each other at arms length and did not cooperate unless there was a serious threat to all of them.

Second screens in Life and Learning

2011-03-26T11:37:00.001-04:00

I have not thought of it before, but Elliot Masie's description of "second screens" defines what I find myself and my family doeing already, albiet I don't have access to an Ipad or a tablet PC, but his description does meet the bill.

I have a Second Screen in my life. Well, actually I have several of them:
* My iPad is often on my lap as I watch TV at home. I’ll look up a reference in the news, locate an actor in a movie or read something different during the boring bits.
* My SmartPhone comes out during a webinar, serving as a back channel - either by text or IM - to someone across the world. And, once or twice, I have used it when leading a webinar to get some background on the person asking a question in a session.
* My Tablet computer, with a 3G connection, gets me to places where a firewalled connection would not let me go, connecting on my own personal network rather than within the gated community of the host network.

And I have seen this in my workplace especially with our production folks. And I have to concur that it definitely has a place in the learning environment especially within corporate entities that lock down their computers to ensure that their networks are not compromised due to the use of third-party unapproved software.

To a certain extent this concept of second screens began before the advent of tablets, especially in the academic world where students bring laptop computers to the classroom to aid in taking notes.

He notes that there are great possibility for leveraging the use of these elements in the learning environment, but they are countered by the issues of bandwidth and firewall issues. I think another issue that still needs addressing is functionality and usability across all major brands of portable devices.

The one advantage paper-based books have over ebooks is that except for the language used to publish the book, they are pretty much universally functional for the bulk of society. The same cannot be said just yet for electronic formats.

No one uses the phone anymore

2011-03-23T08:17:00.001-04:00

I have to wonder if this is a result of enforced socialization in our school systems…

They text, they email, they IM, but increasingly the phone call is too intrusive of a communication option for many.

"I literally never use the phone," Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) "Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she'll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can't think of anyone else who'd want to talk to me." Then again, he doesn't want to be called, either. "I've learned not to press 'ignore' on my cellphone because then people know that you're there."

"I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, 'Don't call anyone after 10 p.m.,'" Mr. Adler said. "Now the rule is, 'Don't call anyone. Ever.'"

As a long-time hater of the phone call, this is good news.

Kids who want to be left alone are considered outsiders and suspected of being potential Columbine kids. What worries me is the increased risk of miscommunication due to the lack of personal contact. As a society we don’t seem to understand the desire for alone time.

Face-to-face communication transmits both verbal and non-verbal clues as to an individual’s message. A facial expression and body language can convey more information about the speaker’s mood and intent.

Voice communication over a telephone fails to transmit the non-verbal clues, but the tone of voice may still provide additional information.

Impersonal text messages and emails carry none of the non-verbal clues unless the writer is one of those people who use all upper case letters to SHOUT THEIR MESSAGE!!!!

One final thought is the move to ignore phone calls a growing response to the expectation that we be available 24-7. In a period of about 135 years we have developed a unspoken social response to a ringing telephone that it must be answered. This social response is now more than ever exploited by for-profit and non-profit organizations seeking to sell or collect money by the former and raise funds by the latter.

We are placed in a position of fighting an ingrained social response to answer the ringing telephone and are now rebelling and saying “No more, this is my time and you will not invade it.”

No one uses the phone anymore

Beware Social Media's Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO's - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-03-22T16:07:00.001-04:00

This article is intriguing for two reasons.

The presenters seemed to be trying to bait arguments by presenting blatantly broad-brush assumptions based on scant details.
Commentators to the article saw through this misdirection to recognize the presenters positions for what they were.

Beware Social Media's Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO's - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Reading in the Dark Ages -- Campus Technology

2011-03-22T12:44:00.001-04:00

Fascinating essay, but as commenters note it may not be the professor’s fault. There is something about paper-based reading that ebooks still cannot touch.

Plus there is still the issue of standardizing ebook file types. My local library offers ebook loans, but they don’t support my Amazon Kindle. It will support my Windows phone with Mobipocket reader.

Of course it is also disconcerting to see concerns over copyright and intellectual property spring up. It seems profits still trump pursuit of knowledge.

Reading in the Dark Ages -- Campus Technology

In the “info” age, everything gets a little shorter | Mercatus

2011-03-18T08:00:00.001-04:00

No truer words are spoken.

That doesn’t mean that we’re all growing stupid, or losing our ability to think, or losing our appreciation of books, albums or other types of “long-form” content. It just means we just don’t spend as much time with them as we used to.

What does this say about our current overall educational approach. Should we reconsider the one size fits all approach for learning. In academia, do all subjects warrant semester-long treatments? Should we break up content in shorter, one-week or two-week elements?

In the government and commercial world where training sessions equate to one- to five-day classroom sessions or one- to three-hour elearning page turners, should we look at more discreet methods of training sessions?

I could foresee one hour virtual presentations or brown-bag lunch roundtables if person-to-person training is required. And for elearning I would not venture beyond a half-hour and shoot for more like a maximum of 15 minutes. If elearning is running longer than that it has to be broken up. And maybe that is too long.

The big fear is the loss of continuity, if the broader picture is drawn out over a long period and presented in discreet elements. This is where educators would be forced out of their comfort zones and learn a new way of presenting their materials.

In the “info” age, everything gets a little shorter | Mercatus

Five Trends in Learning Delivery in 2011 - Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity

2011-02-17T08:51:00.000-05:00

Chief Learing Officer publishes Five Trends in Learning Delivery in 2011 - Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity by Caroline Avey of ACS Learning Services. Of her five trends the ones I find most compelling are:

The concept of developing systems for data mining.
Her vision of beefing up learning management systems to include access to informal learning opportunities.

You’ll Stick With Your Crappy School, and You’ll Like It | The Agitator

2011-01-26T08:05:00.000-05:00

Shakespeare could not have written a better tragedy. A mother trying to get a better education for her child uses the child's grandfathers address to send him to another school.

You’ll Stick With Your Crappy School, and You’ll Like It | The Agitator: "Williams-Bolar was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison earlier this month, although Judge Patricia Cosgrove suspended all but ten days of the sentence."

Is it fraud? Definitely, but like most crime its a gray area because the grandfather is paying school taxes and is otherwise not getting any direct benefit from his taxes. Because of an over-zealous prosecutor the mother not only has a criminal record, but is also facing the loss of a career because of that record. All because she wanted something better for her child.

The Student Loans Scheme: a Gateway Drug to Debt Slavery

2011-01-22T12:13:00.000-05:00

The Student Loans Scheme: a Gateway Drug to Debt Slavery: "

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

So that's what it is...

2010-09-12T10:30:00.000-04:00

I've never really wondered about why my stomach growls, at least not to the point where I went out to research it, but this entry from Indiana Public Media's Moment of Science explains a lot about what is going on when my stomach generates what Winnie the Pooh called a rumbly in my tumbly.

Rumbles From The Deep | A Moment of Science - Indiana Public Media

When the GI tract has finished digesting a meal, it continues to process the liquids and gasses remaining in the intestines. This process often causes your stomach to rumble when you’re hungry. Stomach growling is caused by intestinal contractions squeezing and popping intestinal gasses. Actually, stomach rumbles are simply flatulence that stays inside the body.
The same contractions that cause your stomach to growl also clean out the GI tract. To see how this cleaning movement works, picture a long hose made of a pliable material. If there were an object, say an egg, at one end of the hose, you could push it from that end to the other by squeezing all along the length of the hose.

hattip to Boing Boing

Final Reflections on the Campus Technology 2010 Conference

2010-07-22T17:57:00.001-04:00

Today was only a half of a day, so, first of all no free lunch was served. Drats! As a result, as I start to write this I’m sitting in Boston’s South Station mezzanine eating Cajun fast food (go figure, I travel to Boston, the heart of Yankee sensibility – although I challenge you to tell a diehard Sox fan that) and I’m eating a quintessential southern meal of chicken, jambalaya rice, and corn.

On the other hand, the half day was packed with wonderful information, anecdotes, and demonstrations of how technology is changing the face of education that it was a perfect capstone for the whole four day event.

Most of this new technology resides in the cloud, which is what I think both awes and scares the corporate world. It requires a great deal of courage to expose yourself in this way and to play in the clouds requires forfeiture of a great deal of privacy. Of course there is also a great deal of courage needed to bet on any cloud application. I spoke with Jeff Riman, an instructional designer from FIT-SUNY after he and his teammates finished presenting how their school implements the use of social and collaborative media. I was curious about what the time it took for their faculty and students to get use to Videothread, their collaborative cloud app that allows audio and video multimedia to be seamlessly meshed with forum discussions.

Anyone familiar with forums knows that they are text heavy and requires a bit of scrolling to read long threads and intuitively figure out where branches occur. Adding audio and video makes it a great deal more interactive. He acknowledged that there is a level of risk in buying into cloud apps.

You don’t know if it is being run by one lone guy from his basement with his lone server sitting next to his furnace.

And that vision is what will inhibit the corporate world from proceeding down this avenue…at least for a short while longer. I suspect the corporate world will want to continue to figuratively whistle while walking by the graveyard until the voices force them to stop and listen. The voices will not only be that of learners passed who they failed in their adherence to the LMS universe, but also those of the learners present and future who have been exposed to the new collaborative learning world and will not be happy with stale classroom events measured in hours of seat time and page-turning elearning with its mandatory final assessment filled with multiple choice and true/false questions.

As I write this I see a young man sitting in front of me eating his lunch while checking his Facebook account using his Smartphone while down below me, standing next to a row of pay telephones is a young lady who is chatting away on her cell phone. Sitting at a table is a 30something professional lady studying her Smartphone, I can’t tell if she is reading email or texting. In fact as I scan the floor of South Station I see a host of mp3 players, Smartphones, laptop computers, and netbooks in use. These devices have become ubiquitous and to deny their applicability as learning devices is a mistake. And the people who are using them will most likely need to be exposed to our training, or more likely not.

But does this mean that every teacher, training facilitator and instructional designer needs to acquire a Facebook or Twitter presence and then send out friend requests or follow invitations to every learner they may interact with? No, in fact this is one message that rang throughout the conference; students do not want that form of engagement. Just as we want a wall between our work lives and our family lives, so students want a wall between their social lives and their academic lives. So to move forward educators of all stripes will want to become the learners once again and learn to use these new collaborative tools in a way that they can reach and engage their students.

It can be as simple as learning the details of how to manage these tools themselves. We actually got into a somewhat heated discussion about this in the middle session of the day when we discussed how educational professionals can use social media to develop themselves. In that session, the debate was about the ratio of noise to sound on Twitter feeds. One participant argued that a lot of what is posted on Twitter is narcissistic. “Why should I care where Clay Shirky is eating dinner?” the participant said. And he has a point a person can quickly get overrun trying to follow all of the twitter feeds they have, but as others pointed out there are means to filter out the noise either by limiting who you are following or using specific codes within messages so that the feeds are more direct.

The other method is to employ technology to bridge the divide just as Dr Grant Warner of Howard University demonstrated with the use of ConnectYard. This tool, and I’m sure others like it soon to come will serve as a courier to carry simple email or text messages from the faculty member and deliver it to the students’ Facebook or Twitter accounts or straight to their text messenger service.

Note that earlier I used the words “want to” and “can” instead of “have to” or “need” or “must.” I almost used both of these words, but I fortunately caught myself. I nor anyone else that argues for the use of social and collaborative media should insist that others adopt their views and this is for two main reasons.

To insist on adaptation of your concept of learning crosses the line from educating and sponsoring new tools and applications for teaching to preaching and the creation of new dogma. Once a topic moves from education to holy writ it too become rigid and unwilling to change. As technology grows and improves the Facebooks and Twitters of today will become as archaic as the list servs and forums of the 1990s.
To continue to insist that the educators and the administration that pays their salaries while they continue to resist means you have adapted their approach of lecturing, which, ironically, is the system you wish to displace and your resistors are trying to preserve.

Of course privacy is also an issue. I am now writing onboard an Amtrak train hurtling south toward my home. The seat behind me is inhabited by a businessman, apparently a hedge fund salesperson. I got this information from overhearing him conducting business over his cell phone while we travel. I now know from listening to him (I couldn’t help it, he has a loud voice) that he is staying in a hotel on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston and I know his cell phone number which I will not give out here. All of this I gathered while listening to him call and leave messages with clients and prospects over his cell phone. Could I use this information to my advantage, I don’t know, but I bet a more unscrupulous, but tech savvy person could.

As we move into this brave new world we need to be mindful that we are giving out a lot of information we think should be private when we use these devices. If we are to integrate cloud apps with training we must be equally careful. The closing keynote speaker, Josh Baron of Marist College spoke of this and he thinks that in the near future there will be the capability to mash up collaborative apps with LMSs’ so that student personal and private information will be safe behind a firewall while the collaborative elements will reside in the clouds.

In the end I keep going back to day 1 and John Kuglin’s demonstration of how interactivity can be built into even a two-hour presentation. It’s not rocket science, but it does involve a certain familiarity with the technology. And that’s my goal to learn more about these social tools so that I can speak with greater authority regarding them.

Campus Technology – Day 4 – Part 3

2010-07-22T11:55:00.001-04:00

The final act of the conference in which the closing keynote address in which Josh Baron, the director of academic technology and elearning at Marist College talks about The Ed Tech Journey and a Future Driven by Disruptive Change.

He began by defining what disruptive change is. He also encouraged people to tweet any comments and questions that he will respond to the next date.

He asked what was important about the dates of 4/28/03 and 4/3/08? – on 4/28/08 – Apple launched itTunes and on 4/3/08 it has become the largest music retailer in the US with 50 million customers.

So how will education look like in the future due to this change. He quickly looked at the past impact of digital revolution, which has been minimal. Data transfer speeds have expanded exponentially from the telegraph operator transmitted at 28 bits per second while the internet transfers at 48 billion bits per second.

Processing speeds and storage capacity for computers have grown rapidly from the 1970s to the present.

In the classroom, he shows a picture of what he calls the high-tech hall of the 1960s had two televisions.

In the 1996 high-tech lecture hall has an overhead projection system with a computer, a camcorder, VCR and television, but the teacher is still lecturing like in the 1960s.

So he asks why there is no disruption? He answers that we ae trying to just automate instruction, i.e. switch from transparencies to PowerPoint. There was some disruption from distance education and entry of for-profits. Currently 1 in 4 students take at least one online course per semester.

Present

Emerging technologies are in two buckets. The first is Open eduction trends:

Open course content – high quality university-level course materials are free to access, share, and remix without cost. Example MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project – 2000 courses online.
Open Access Journals – to make scholarly journals free to the public. Jorunals can be found at Directory of Open Access Journals. The material goes through the typical vetting process.
Open Textbooks – similar to open access journals – a leader is Connexions based at Rice University. Another example is a commercial ecosystem in Flat World Knowledge. Flat World Knowledge allows her to customize books for her needs (Ed Note: does this create a problem in which two students with two different teachers use the same Flat World Knowledge textbook, but have modified them. Can they have a fair debate over a topic if they have two different sources of information.
Open Instructional Software. Carnegie Mellon is spearheading. It focuses on cognitive learning and the software has embedded cognitive tutor to assist.

Future

His predictions for the future disruptions in education are:

The cost of educational content dramatically reduced that will lead in the collapse of the traditional publishing industry.
Also see trends toward “best of breed” content, materials will be constantly improved. This will allow faculty to focus on teaching, not content creation.
It will empower “self-directed learners” and they will ask questions about the cost of their education.

Many people think we are heading into a post-LMS era with a focus instead on personal learning environment which is highly personal. But LMS will not go away because of privacy issues around grades and other personal data found on LMS. He thinks their will be a mashup of LMS and PLE.

Next he focused on electronic portfolios. They have been around almost as long as LMS, but it was not until 2003 that their use has started to take over. Growth drivers is the value of “reflection” in student-centered learning. Other drivers are Accountability (Spellings Commission), and a means to capture all facets of learning such as curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular. Unfortunately there is no credentialing module to give credit or extracurricular work.

Final disruption is the Semantic Web in which the machine can interpret the data in your system. Wolfram Alpha is an early attempt to address this issue. This will allow learners to ask computers deeper questions and learn from their answers.

The disruptions are:

Empowering of self-directed and informal learning
Enable documenting and credentialing of outcomes from self-directed and informal learning
Self-directed competes with higher education
The internet becomes a powerful learning tool for knowledge generation

He finished by envisioning what the future holds for education.

Learning will not be held hostage by large, professional educational organizations in which you pay for the right to education.

Campus Technology – Day 4 – Part 2

2010-07-22T10:43:00.001-04:00

The final breakout session for the conference that I am attending is Educational Social Networking for Professional Development presented by Steve Hargadon, a Social Learning Consultant for Elluminate.

Mr. Hargadon is saying we are telling new stories in new ways. He works largely in the k-12 grade level. He was told to start a blog, but he didn’t see a goal for it, but he did start and created a community called Classroom 2.0 and has a wiki called Educational Networking.

We have become much more visually literate as he shows an image of a girl with fairies dancing in front of her. But we don’t feel digitally literate. He asked about use of Twitter, he said he goes back and forth between it being a useful tool and a complete waste of time. He said that as he refined his use of Twitter he is coming to feel it is useful, but it required learning to use it.

He then noted that Facebook membership makes its population larger than the population of all countries except India and China.

The impact of the internet is going to be greater than the impact of the invention of the printing press. All institutions are losing power not that the individuals gain this kind of voice. For instance, United Airlines broke a passenger’s guitar and he made a You Tube video of it that garnered a greater audience then some major movies.

The internet is a conversation. We’re used to a world of printed material that was vetted, but the internet allows a more free flow of ideas.

Educational networking will become the framework structure of the educational experience, he says.

Educators are currently in a non-conversational culture. He asks them questions and asks them to rate from Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree and Strongly Disagree.

We have a hard time balancing assessment testing and true learning
Schools will change radically in the next 5 to 10 years.
Health care is a civil right and should be guaranteed by the government.

He then moves them to the appropriate areas of the room based on their response and discuss the point. They are always nervous to discuss the last question.

We put ourselves in a box when it comes to discuss social media. He showed pictures of a casino and a school. He said the problem with social media is it always seen as a casino, but now we are rethinking what social networking is.

He defines social networking as the aggregation of a set of participative web tools that facilitate creation, conversation, and sharing. Wikis and blogs are difficult to see any conversation occurs, but on Facebook there is instant success as people see you and want to be “friends.”

What are the building blocks of social networks:

The profile page in an educational perspective can find likeminded educational perspective. You can find resourses
Friending can form colleague relationships
Forums, you can find discussions on topics such as using the ipod touch in schools.
Photo/Video/Audio uploading – they are content repositories
Groups: allow individual members to become creator of a topic of interest. They represent Learning teams or self-created communities

So social networking + LMS + Live Collaboration will be the new learning platform. To implement student-related social networking systems you must approach in this order:

Start with educators and administrators first. An audience member notes that many people think that students will drive this effort, but the educators and administrators must be the guiding light providing assistance to students in learning how to blog and they must learn how to do this first. Steve agrees and says you can’t make people blog, we have to culturally negotiate this.
Fill the user’s needs not yours. Flickr did not start out as a photo sharing site it morphed to that – so its no longer a top down direction. In this new world you are not dictating you are generating and experimenting with all participants.
Facilitate the process, not the outcome (build a park, not a cafeteria)
Support and promote the early adopters (more important than you)
Seek Change – you need to look for ways to change to help a learner
Build a culture (tenor)
Recognize the importance of interpersonal skills to facilitate and mediate

Sustained participation depends on the tenor of the network and listening, trust, helping, authenticity, transparency, change, genuineness, being “”human,” having fun, being involved apologies, explanations, patience, communication.

Campus Technology 2010 – Day 4 – Part 1

2010-07-22T09:22:00.001-04:00

The final day of the conference and I’m kicking it off with Student Voices + Technilogical Innovation: Rethinking Online Pedagogies. Certainly a mouthful, and worthy of four individual presenters:

Elaine Maldonado, Director, Faculty Development and Center for Excel, Fashion Institute of Technolgy- SUNY
Jeff Riman, Instructional Designer and Coordinator, Fashion Institute of Technolgy- SUNY
Dympna Bowles, Dean of Curriculum and Instruction, Fashion Institute of Technolgy- SUNY
Tamara Cupples, Executive Director of Online Learning and Academic Technology, Fashion Institute of Technolgy- SUNY

Their presentation is about how FIT used web-based tools and other technologies to created blended learning opportunities.

Dympna Bowles led off with a general overview of FIT. FIT is located in Manhatten, NY with about 10,500 students and 1,000 faculty along with some other international locations. It is a public college within the SUNY system. They offer a total of 47 degree programs in 28 different areas of study.

They offer 100 fully online courses and 1 online degree program using the Angel LMS. They use a lot of specialized proprietary programs as well as off-the-shelf. One specialized program is Web PDM – data management program that allows students to track the life of a product including costs, marketing issues.

We asked employers what they were looking for in new hires in the softer skills area was collaboration skills.

Elaine Maldonado spoke about student response about the use of collaborative technology. They held roundtables between students and faculty to discuss this area. About 70 students participated in these sessions with an additional 30 students brought in later. The campus was abuzz afterward because the answers were not what the faculty expected.

In preparation for this session they handed out clickers to random participants. They showed us questions and asked people to use the clickers to respond and then compared the results to what students responded.

Audience asked

how often students expected faculty to respond to email by the end of the day, while students were more lenient saying 24 hours.
how often students should check their school email, the audience responded daily, which is what the students said.
How students feel about PowerPoint presentation, the audience responded, they are boring when faculty read the material to the class, which is what the students said.
How students felt about online learning, the audience responded that it all depends upon the teacher. The students responded that they don’t like online classes that have mostly written materials. This indicates that the faculty drives the online experience
Do students like their professor using social networking sites like Facebook in their class, and the audience responded that they answered “It’s Ok..sometimes.” But the audience responded “No…it’s an invasion of our privacy.”

It is a two-sided coin here, they don’t want faculty friending them in the Facebook arena, but they were OK if the faculty set up a Facebook page dedicated to the class. So maybe this means that faculty need to be educated about how Facebook works. Another concern is the fact that Facebook does not delete any information you post when you delete the page.

Student feedback on blended learning was more positive, feeling that it was more meaningful and helped learning the subject and improving on their time-management skills.

Jeff Riman took over to discuss the multi-discipline technologies that were applied to the blended learning. Faculty have reported that teaching a blended, technology enhanced course improves on their teaching skills.

First sample, History of Art class lends itself well to vodcasts in which the narrators speak while examples of the artwork is displayed. Learners have to take notes so there is still student interaction.

Second sample of a vodcast is taken from the Introduction to Sewing class – the vodcast demonstrates how to thread a bobbin on a sewing machine.

Business of Photography example shows how to use business-specific software. The instructor is using Voicethread which is not typically used for this process, but it helped students become familiar.

Screencast is used to introduce Autocad, done in Camtasia.

The last example shown is VoiceThread. We like it because people don’t like the text based forum. VoiceThread is more multimedia and it allows students to post using their voice and show images.

Voicethread seems fascinating but it seems on first blush a bit complicated to follow. I will need to follow up and explore it some more. If it is not as complicated as it seems then it is a fascinating alternative to reading extensive pieces of text. Accessibility was raised by another participant, but in regard to vodcasts, but I wonder how accessible Voicethread is. Again, I will have to research.

Campus Technology 2010 – Day 3 – Wrap up

2010-07-22T08:26:00.001-04:00

Day 3 started with Stephen Lester, the CIO from Harvard’s Business School stating that New Normal is a world where IT departments are going to have to be nimbler and consultative with their customers to succeed in a world where they have to do more with less. This is quickly becoming true across the board for all learning organizations, and this attitude was exemplified by JoAnn Gonzalez-Major from the University of Alaska-Anchorage as she explained she and her cohort Amanda Albright, senior instructional designers for that school.

Ms Gonzalez-Major and Ms Albright had to support 6 campuses, 6 extension, 1,278 faculty, 1,211 staff and other 20,000 students. Their presentation focused on the instructional design resource center they created to serve the faculty in not only becoming proficient in the tactical use of technology to serve their far flung student base, but also assisting them in determining the best strategic use of the technology to present their courses. They built the entire service on the open-source Moodle learning management system (LMS). They devised a Wiki with short how-to guides and multimedia links to demonstrate the operations.

They also ran virtual book discussions on instructional design books. The faculty would each be assigned a chapter in a book about instructional design to read. They would then present a report at a virtual meeting that would be recorded. These sessions would then be posted to the resource center for later review. Thus learning was not the traditional sage speaking to the crowds, but the crowds speaking to one another. Of course this requires participant buy-in on the topic.

There was also an infrequent need by the faculty – as they developed digital media for their courses – for the specific software (such as Camtasia, Captivate, and Snagit) they required. The school could not afford to provide licenses for this software to all of the professors, but they did buy blocks of licenses and they provided for faculty to check out a license as they needed it.

The other memorable session, was the final session of the day by Mike Rustici helped reinforce in my mind the current status and use of SCORM. The original concept of SCORM was to create online learning content as blocks that could be used and reused as needed by the learner. It has not, on a broad scale, met that goal just yet because of what Mr. Rustici called the Ransom Note Effect. This effect is the result of different content developers imbuing their content with their own personal vision. If you cobble together customized learning material for a learner the result would look like a ransom note.

So basically SCORM is used today solely at the course level to track learners’ completion rates. He advised that SCORM should only be applied if you want to:

Track learner success
Buying content and an LMS from different vendors
Create a library of reusable objects

Then there was the open period from noon until the 3:00 pm final session when their was lunch, vendor visits and presentations and poster presentations. The vendors of TechSmith did a fascinating short presentation about their tools: Camtasia Studio, Camtasia Relay, and Jing. Jing is a free online application that allows you to capture computer screen content, add narration, and then post it to personal servers or sites such as You Tube or Flickr. It limits presentations to 5 minutes and original content gets posted to TechSmith’s servers.

Also fascinating was their Camtasia Relay which records on screen content and the presenters’ audio, uploads it to TechSmith’s servers where it is converted into streamable video. But the real killer element of this tool is that TechSmith’s servers also scans the audio and turns it into searchable text. Viewers can then search for a specific word or phrase and the video will bounce ahead to that particular term. The idea came from watching college students in a classroom where the professor records and posts his lectures. These students did not bother taking copious notes, rather than recorded “time stamps” of elements of the presentation they wanted to review after the presentation was posted.

The other interesting vendor presentation was more a testimonial from Dr. Grant Warner of Howard University for ConnectYard. ConnectYard provides a centralized social media platform that simplifies and unifies communications across a variety of social technologies including Facebook and YouTube. Dr. Warner, a professor of mechanical engineering at Howard University explained how his school used ConnectYard to ensure that at-risk students could be supported to continue their study within the science fields.

These students were identified and encouraged to sign up for a program that Howard University created called Calculus, Physics, Chemistry Program (CP2). This teamed at-risk students with senior undergraduates to have weekly cohort meetings to tutor them in the various subjects. But the school recognized that this was not enough that to ensure these students stayed in the program they needed to be able to reach them beyond the time they saw them on campus.

The key he explained was to reach into these young peoples’ community without the faculty actually becoming a member of that community. By community he was referring to their presence on Facebook and staying connected to their friends through text messaging. Students do not necessarily want to “friend” their professor on Facebook and the faculty did not need to engage in media they did not want to become involved with.

Their solution is ConnectYard. Students were requested to log into ConnectYard and set up a profile with information about their social networking connection points. ConnectYard channels emails and text messages from the university’s faculty out to their students’ preferred social networking site. Their responses were channeled back to ConnectYard which created a threaded conversation that all students could follow.

This seems to me like a valuable tool to bridge the gap between instructor and students without having to have the faculty learn multiple different networking tools to stay in touch with their students.

Campus Technology 2010 – Day 3 – Part 4

2010-07-21T16:21:00.001-04:00

In which, I your humble author being extremely punchy from lack of sleep and the wear and tear of traveling by rail (always an iffy occupation) attempts to record his impressions of the presentation I Always Wondered What that Was: SCORM in Non-technical, Simple and Plain English, presented by Mike Rustici, the owner of Rustici Software.

1. What is SCORM?
It is a collection of standards: stands for Standard Collection Object Reference Model. It started with the military who wanted to be able to reuse content across different military systems. SCORM sets standards for how to create online content and LMS so that they can function together.

Standards are everywhere, how dvds play and electricity is delivered to your appliance. Problem is SCORM, like all standards, have room for interpretation. In the perfect world SCORM blends into the background.

2. What does SCORM do?
SCORM does not say anything about content whether it is good or not.

What SCORM does provide is interoperability on LMS. As a user it keeps you from being “locked in” by a vendor; you can move your content to another hosting site.

There are several versions of SCORM. First version 1.1, the main version is SCORM 1.2, a newer version is SCORM 2004

Another thing SCORM does is provide great data tracking. You can track what users are doing and how well they are doing it. This is big in the corporate world and SCORM helps to track compliance training.

3. Reusable Pieces
The idea is that all content is tagged with metadata so that you could develop customized SCOs for individuals based upon what each learner needs. As an industry we are not there yet. Within a SCORM course it can be broken into individual parts or clusters. These parts or clusters are the smallest part, a SCO (Single Content Object) and each part can be reused.

It has not been overwhelmingly taken off because it is not for the faint of heart. Reasons:

Ransom Note Effect – all these objects pulled from different sources and developed by different units will look like a ransom note not looking the same.
Maintaining the licenses on all elements can be problematic.

4. Why do we care about SCORM
Well, not everyone may care about SCORM. Not all data needs SCORM compliancy and it has become a standard and so people not knowing better demand that it be in an RFP.

You don’t need SCORM if you are

creating something for use in your LMS
Presenting material and you don’t want to track it, then its not needed just post it on a webpage or a blog.
only to be used once

You DO want to use SCORM if you want to:

Track learner success
Buying content and an LMS from different vendors
Create a library of reusable objects

Campus Technology – Day 3 – Part 3

2010-07-21T12:18:00.001-04:00

For the third session of the day, it is Building a Foundation for Integrating Rich Media on a Web 2.0 Campus presented by a panel of Adam Smeets, John Drevs, and Bruce Monte.

This is a great plus, they have added a work site that we can view as the presentation proceeds. The three gentlemen represent Loyola University in Chicago, a private Catholic university. This is the 2nd Catholic private school I have seen presenting. What is it with Catholic schools being innovative?

The goal of the session is to present an overview of how they integrated digital content onto the site. The problems they were seeking to resolve was the need to

communicate effectively and efficiently
support a community that already embraces Web 2.0 technologies

Web 2.o helps Loyala through marketing by providing a means to tell an authentic story. Showed a picture of a student attending an alternate break immersion to help the poor – she kept a blog to highlight what she did. This blog was distributed so we can show the public what Loyala means by championing Social Justice.

In a teaching environment professors incorporated rich media into the classroom. This allows the teacher to engage students in a medium where they are comfortable.

From an administrative perspective it provides a means of opening dialog

Tools they used meet their needs include:

Video
Blogs
Podcasts
Wikis
and integrated currently available resources
- iTunesU
- Blackboard
- PeopleSoft
- Serena collage
- Facebook
- Proprietary Resources

Loyala already had Twitter and Facebook sites, blogs and wanted to bring them all together. The result is igNation an aggregator of all these data sources.

This is an interesting approach in that they are attempting to meet three distinct goals. They pulled together various administrative functions to ensure that they have obtained buy in and that they have all issues, such as copyright and privacy, covered.

From a technical perspective they performed a needs assessments they asked:

What hardware and software constraints need to be considered
What restrictions need to be made against file content?
What is the current architecture/landscape?
What financial resources are needed to extend over lifetime?

Campus Technology – Day 3 – Part 2

2010-07-21T10:56:00.001-04:00

In which I attend a session titled Use of Video Objects as Exemplars for Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy presented by Jerald Cole, the chair of the Education Department at the University of Bridgeport…Oops…

Strike that, that session was cancelled. So instead I am sitting in a rather nippy amphitheater about to attend Virtual Support Center for Geographically Dispersed Faculty & Students. It is being presented by JoAnn Gonzalez-Major and Amanda Albright of the University of Alaska Anchorage. At the risk of sounding a bit prejudicial I have to wonder if the climate was not acclimated for the presenters. My bad!

Second oops, Only Ms. Gonzalez-Major is presenting. The University of Alaska has three campuses: Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Southeast. She starts by providing an idea of their size. Alaska is twice as large as Texas, but they also have the slowest bandwidth. Their campuses are so spread out and remote that they require staff to fly in.

The campus IT department support 6 campuses, 6 extension, 1,278 faculty, 1,211 staff and other 20,000 students. Issues that had to be considered when designing campuses:

4 native cultures and multitude of other cultures
Transient population due to military and oil industry
Students not always available either due to subsistence culture (fishing season, hunting season, etc) and tourist season

Needs for IT support

One-on-one distance support
Multiple campus offerings
Learning diversity and needs of populations
How to provide a consistent message across campuses – because of diverse campus each had diverse culture so movement between campus had to be seamless
Adjunct faculty support
Student resources and support
24/7 access to support

Solutions

For faculty support we select 12 faculty members and bring them in for one-week intensive training program to learn how to develop a course and they must share back with their other faculty. It must occur when they are off contract.

eLearning book group – choose one book published ahead of time – group pulled from all campuses – If they can reach Anchorage campus they appear in person. Those who can’t attend virtually – Each professor reviews an element of the book and share it with the others.

Subject Matter Experts brought in to help faculty with areas of expertise

Site visits in which IT visits the campus and they meet with faculty to assist them in using technology in their classes.

Meet with departments to focus on their particular needs

Multi-week workshops – asynchronous workshops: two areas of interest to faculty

Second Life – 8 week course to assist in setting up a 2nd life classroom
Developing online course – they work with colleagues using a peer review system for comment and input. – must develop 1st 3 lessons.

Shorter half-hour workshops – offered in various modalities – many are hands-on in lab, but also use eLive for remote campus faculty who meet in their labs and they work through topic. Typically focuses on one topic only that is worked through. We talk about a tool and how to implement in their classrooms.

EDITORS NOTE: Interrupted by a call, so I need to scramble to pick up where I left off. Minor snafu with my son and his car.

They developed a Resource Center within the school’s Moodle site to assist the faculty in use of technology which brought together various elements:

Faculty tutorials – series of tutorials to help faculty. She exhibits How to use a wiki in the course. They involve mashups of video and other media. Tutorials are no more than 3 pages long.

Blocks of software licenses are purchased for items such as Camtasia, Captivate, and Snagit and then the software is loaned out on an as-needed basis through a secure server.

The ebook sessions are recorded and posted to the school’s Moodle site so that they can be reviewed at any time.

Searchable FAQ built on call center queries, and if the center cannot handle the call it is referred to her and her associate, but they keep call center individuals on the call as well so that they can learn and answer the query the next time.

Results

They were able to:

Increase access to development materials
Enhanced call center skill sets
Support Call Center interactions
Reduced tier II calls

Increased faculty technical independence – they took to it and used it to learn during off hours. While the site was designed for faculty, students found it and began using the Moodle site and started setting up blogs and forums, which look and function like Facebook, and were using it to socialize.

Faculty also started sending students to the site to work through the tutorials. In response the IT department set up a Start Here site to download the plug-ins (Adobe Reader, Flash Viewer, etc.) that will be needed for the courses and provide an opportunity to test out using these plug-ins before the course begins.

Next Steps

Increase multimedia units – to change courses from mostly text-based to multimedia
Additional synchronous and asynchronous programs
Increased marketing
Continues to build new resources
Incorporate Sloodle tools.

UPDATE: All in all this was an enlightening piece on how great things can be done with limited resources. The University of Alaska folks demonstrated that support for the end user can be conducted over a great expanse at low cost. The key I thought was that they did not try to fix everything themselves, but instead worked to provide the tools and the training to use them for the faculty and staff they supported. This freed them to innovate. It was a great capstone to the keynote address about how an IT department should be run.

Campus Technology – Day 3 – Part 1

2010-07-21T09:40:00.001-04:00

Amtrak got me into Boston on time today and I am sitting in the Seaport Hotel’s Plaza Ballroom waiting for the day’s keynote speech to begin. The address today is by Stephen Laster, chief information officer of Harvard Business School. He will be speaking on The Road Ahead: Driving Innovation in the “New Normal”. Once again I am running on battery power; I will need to remember to use time between sessions to find an outlet and charge up. It makes me realize that one benefit the conference organizers could offer, but don’t currently, is a secure recharge area. It would be a place where you could leave your laptop or smart device to recharge while you do something like eat lunch.

The new normal is the same as the old normal; tight budgets and large demands. Plus, we have new demands. Higher education is ripe for criticism and due for consolidation. How can colleges demand higher tuition while there are high drop out rates.

Innovation is not about creating new technologies, but it is for using technologies smartly that produce results. How do we form an environment to address all of these issues?

He is dyslexic, so his mind worked differently, he could take things apart in his mind and remember lectures. Wasn’t until high school that he was introduced to an Apple computer which he could identify with its screen layout. The physics teacher who introduced him to the computer convinced his father to buy one. His grades grew greatly.

There are 8 factors of success.

#1 Hire and mentor a great team: technology is a people business –

Hire nice, smart, adaptable and skilled skilled is last because if you are nice, smart and adaptable you will learn to become skilled.
Manage the whole person – know their hopes and what they want to do
Make the work rewarding

#2 Run the Shop as a business

What is my competitive advantage?
Where do we add value? What businesses are you good at.
What business can I get out of?
What can I offer to remain stickey?

#3 Leverage Planning and Governance – the key is transparency in operations and governance – don’t take on tasks that can’t be handled efficiently – communicate issues such as querying how they want IT to expend the hours budgeted for IT support.

What is my capacity – operational, maintenance, project, support -
Prioritize backlogs with customer
Plan for the semester and the year
Involve campus leaders in governance

#4 Take Smart Risks – during difficult times IT can become risk averse and then you are doomed.

Look beyond core services
Preserve time for innovation
Deliver on the art of the possible

#5 Actively Measure – compare similar products and defects – provides a way to steer operation

Track deliverables
Live by your scorecard
Include “soft” data
- Customer perceptions
- IT employee engagement and satisfaction

#6 Capture the Customer – we try to adopt 10 administrators to hear what frustrates them about us, does our message get out, if you have a friend in IT you will not shoot the organization and IT will help you.

Walk in their shoes
Leverage relationships
Speak their language
Understand business needs

#7 Communicate, Communicate, Communicate – need to talk to your customer in their language.

CIO as CTE (Chief Technology Evangelist)
Demonstrate IT’s value
Share vision with IT team
Invite feedback
Make 10 friends

#8 Leverage Trusted Advisors – network can be former bosses, mentors, and advisors – ask them to review what we’re doing wrong and how we can improve and then I share that information with my boss – takes courage because you are opening a window.

Build an external advisory board
Be proactive
Periodically review business to address potential weaknesses.

Campus Technology 2010 – Day 2 – Wrap up

2010-07-21T09:37:00.001-04:00

EDITOR’S NOTE: I meant to post this last night, but I was so tired by the time I got home, ate, and finished my chores I was too tired to remember to do this.

Today was the first main day of the Campus Technology 2010 Conference; yesterday was a preconference workshop day. Today you had all of the session attendees, the trade show opened its doors and the breakout sessions were the full monty of the conference experience. Of course the day did not get off to a great start, but I thought I showed an amazing amount of patience waiting for Amtrak to arrive almost an hour late. And arrive they did and arrive I did in Boston…only an hour late, but again it didn’t bother me…then.

All I missed was the opening keynote address, titled Technology as the Architect of Self: Implications for Higher Learning presented by Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mause Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I’m writing this on the train home without Internet access (I know, what a noobie traveling without internet access) so I can’t just throw a link in to describe the focus of her talk and I can’t guarantee I will remember to do so when I get home, although I will try. But in recognition of my situation I will type in the relevant portion of it from the conference program.

Tuckle will consider how contemporary digital connectivity is changing the nature of the “self",” including our “selves” in academia. What are the deeper implications of changes in our students, especially those whose generation has grown up “tethered” to connectivity devices and in a new regime of privacy.

The folks I ate lunch with were all digital immigrants and the thought of loss of privacy seemed to scare them. I know in a pique of anger (or fear) I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts, only to find that when I calmed down and learned to accept the risks inherent in what I call the wild, wild internet I returned to re-engage with these programs. Facebook greeted me back like a long, lost friend who held on to all my digital possessions until I returned. Once back it graciously turned them back over to me without expecting any payment on return.

Twitter on the other hand was willing to take me back, but not under my old user name it said it was still in use despite no one apparently using it. I’m not sure which I am more chagrined about.

The privacy issue came up again (probably spurred on by the keynote address) in the second session I sat in on. This involved the presentation by Amy Stewart of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who was speaking about her institution’s efforts in developing an ePortfolio service for their students. She indicated that they used the privacy issue, specifically around Facebook to encourage students to focus chronicling their college experience within the school’s ePortfolio system. She said they remind their students that employers now regularly research potential new employees on Facebook so they should not be posting materials that could be considered as unacceptable by those employers.

As much as a cold shower the thoughts of privacy are, the final session, which I posted about earlier (Campus Technology 2010 – Day 2 – Part 3) left me with a genuine feeling of elation of how learning centers can be created and run in order to make learning comfortable. Libraries have always had a warm place in my heart. I don’t feel a visit to a place is complete without experiencing the local library. Largely this is because I am an unbelievable bibliophile (I think I am using the term correctly), but the integration of technology into Santa Clara University’s library and the willingness to allow the students to arrange their study spaces (wheeled tables and chairs, fully equipped study centers, etc.) left me feeling exhilarated. I would love to be able to visit that facility and see it in use. It would put to lie the claim that with the internet the library is dead.

In between those sessions was lunch and what I call the dog-and-pony shows. Between the hours of 12:15 and 3:45 participants were basically set free to roam as they might with the hope they will visit the various vendors who have set up shop in the main convention hall. To perform this trick lunch was served at the rear of the hall, so you had to walk pass the vendors to get to lunch and then, after you finished eating you feel so fat and sassy you can’t help but wander about the hall and chat up the vendors. I did my share, while scoffing up free pens, brochures and, from Pearson Learning Solutions (whose parent company I was employed by for a whole two months before they sold my section off to another firm) a computer cleaning brush.

One recurring theme I heard over and over again was “we have apps for the iPhone and Droid.” Those last two words were music to my ear. I’ve always been appalled by Apple’s insistence on being the only source for software for their mobile devices and insisting on putting all proposed apps through their morality filter. So, the fact that Google’s Android system is now competing evenly with the iPhone gives me hope for a continued open system.

The other trend I noted revolves around the Learning Management System wars. As Blackboard continues to buy up competitors, it seems that open-source Moodle is beginning to take a meaningful bite out of BlackBoard’s market. As the competing firms (because Blackboard and Moodle are not the only players, just the two that are still in my sleep-deprived memory) duke it out there are a number of niche players offering their wares as applications that can seemlessly blend into the various LMSs.

Well, that’s about it. It has been a long day, but a hopeful day, a day in which I heard educators of all stripes talk of how they are struggling to make learning meaningful. I hope I contributed to the discussions with my questions and observations during these sessions.

Campus Technology 2010 – Day 2 – Part 3

2010-07-20T16:34:00.001-04:00

Back to sessions after about 3 hours of eating, meeting with vendors and presenters, and sitting through mini presentations. More about that later.

The final session of the day involves a pinch hitter who is fitting in a presentation that was for some reason cancelled. The presentation is titled Creating Flexible, Technology-Enhanced Collaboration and Learning Spaces presented by Ronald Danielson, the vice provost for information services and Chief Information Officer for Santa Clara University.

This presentation is on a two-year process in developing an effective learning space. Santa Clara University is a private university located in Silicon Valley.

Three buildings involved in his story: the library, aka learning commons; business school building; and a renovated building.

Students want flexibility and comfort in their library this includes modifying the space to meet their needs. They also want technology and tools as well as staff to assist in using the resources that are available to them in the facility.

Design goals

Light, airy, welcoming, flexible spaces
A variety of spaces to satisfy different learning styles and needs
Many choices in seating
Technologies students don’t have themselves
Adaptable for future changes in learning/teaching approaches and technologies
Support collaboration and student-created content
Unique features, not just more of what we already have
Help generate new ideas

These goals were established based on ALA studies on what people want in their library systems.

The information center area (computer centered) has more chairs than computers so people can pull together and collaborate. The library also provides video cameras that students can check out and make videos, they also offer rooms with video cameras where students can practice their presentation.

Damn, I wish I was in college now. Stuff like this is so cool I would love to have a video room where I can record and review presentations that I have to deliver.

This is the real future for libraries to serve as a learning center where learners can come together and have all of the technology necessary to facilitate learning.

The biggest problem has been providing power. In viewing other libraries the problem was that power supplies are broken. The problem has occurred at Santa Clara University’s library as well.

A lesser success was the training and instruction rooms where they could train the use of software that the university supports. The room was built with the flexible collaborative spaces, but the collaborative alignment was only used twice because the power and data connections make reconfiguring slow and difficult. So requests had to be made in advance for the reconfiguration.

Overall it has been a success; in only 27 months that have had over 2 million visits on a campus that hosts 8,500 students on average. Overall lessons learned:

Technology is a facilitator, not an end in itself
Collaboration in many forms is here to stay – design for it, but not to the exclusion of solitary, quiet space. Students are developing their own culture around noise in the center.
Design for variety and flexibility of spaces and furnishings in all buildings. Remember “forgotten spaces” like hallway – it is hard on people who like order.
If allowed, students will create spaces to meet particular needs.
This can be hard on furnishings
This can be hard on staff.

Campus Technology – Day 2 – Part 2

2010-07-20T11:51:00.001-04:00

The second session I am attending today is ePortfolios For Studen Life and Academics, presented by Amy Stevens, Web Communications Manager of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

The focus of her presentation is the development of authentic assessments with a focus on ePortfolios. It is not a cheap thing to role out and she expected that the school she works at would pull the plug, but they didn’t.

Could ePortfolios be fitted into the corporate world as part of the employees individual personnel file in Human Resources.

First Year	Middle Years	Senior Year
Encounter 1: College and Academic Life	Encounter II: The World Outside the Classroom	Encounter III: Application of a discipline to the real world
Experiences Freshman expereience	Experiences Travel Service Learning (internship)	Experiences Undergraduate research Service learning in major capstone

The table above defined her schools intent to capture the high impact learning experiences they want their students to record.

They measured based on topics including:

Student proficiency
Could they relate it to a learning element
Awareness of intended outcome

Within the ePortfolio system students were asked to present evidence of their working to meet the school’s diversity experience and explain what they learned from the experience. This was rolled out in 2007 and it failed because no student uploaded anything to their eportfolio. She blamed it on a failure to communication expectations.

Instead, they decided to seek out clubs to have them perform the ePortfolios. The school rolled out the ePortfolio software and required each club, as it came up to have its constitution renewed, to take on the role. They still also require individual students to establish ePortfolios. They are required to:

Post a resume
Set goals
First days
Submit a document from their first year experience course

There is a template for them to use to set up these goals. Students are advised to maintain the portfolio by alerting them that the portfolio can be accessed by employers who are using the Internet to research their potential hires. If nothing like this is available they will look for individuals on Facebook.

They are assessed based on:

Community Reading
First Days, Goals, and Bio
FYE Writing

These are reviewed by academic counselors and professors and graded.

First year rubric is:

	In Progress	Satisfactory	Exemplary
Careful Reading
Critical Thinking
Reflective Writing
Citations
Content Area

Instructors will be allowed to customize. In conclusion she shared her own portfolio.

Someone asked about using Google portfolios. Found this site about how to use Google Sites for this purpose.

Campus Technology 2010 – Day 2 – Part 1

2010-07-20T10:56:00.001-04:00

Due to further delays with Amtrak (I’m seriously having my doubts that an electrified rail service in the Northeast is ever going to work) I have made it to the 2nd day of the conference. Unfortunately due to the delay I missed the keynote session: Technology As The Architect of Self: Implications for Higher Education. So instead I am picking up with the first breakout session I am attending: Teaching with Web 2.0: Case Study and Analysis.

The speaker, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, says “Love Technology, but don’t trust it.” those are definitely words I can live by.

Problem area: professors are not procrastinators, creative writers are. [EDITOR’S NOTE: I HAVE BEENADVISED THAT THIS WAS A JOKE, I THINK I MAY HAVE BEEN SELF REFLECTING SINCE I FANCY MYSELF A CREATIVE WRITER AND I AM A BIT OF A PROCRASTINATOR. I APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INSULT.]

Why do we have computers in the classroom?

Because they are shiny new technology.
Because the school purchased them and they were used for chat even though there are only 19 people in the classroom.

Her presentation is to show a

Case study: for using social media in the classroom
Analysis of the impact of social media use
Argument: Purposeful integration in the classroom.

Case Study

Group 1: PR	Group 2: CT
Public relations course Purposeful quilt of web 2.0 tools	Communications Theory course Twitter used for the novelty of it.

Twitter use in Group 1 felt they were more integrated. They reported higher in motivation, teacher relationship, career impact, and learning. The caveat is that across the board males reported lower responses and the communications theory group had more males than the PR group. As a result not sure of the reason for this.

She then focused on how social media made an impact on the focus group. Tools used:

Tool	Purpose
Twitter	Connect with PR professionals, socialize into the profession; maintain relationship with teacher
Writing individual blog	Create professional online identity
Reading blogs	Independent learning; Relationship building
Skype	Virtual guests; provide real-world relevance; increase motivation.

To determine if it worked we used the self-determination theory (learning, motivation (autonomy, competence, relatedness are relevant to success), and teacher relationship) We also added career success.

They used an online survey to gather the data asking learners measure various points about scale.

The students were aged 20-23 with 90% white Black 2%. Group 1 was 26 students in Group 1 and Group 2 had 13 students.

Both groups learned how to use the social media used through activities in the course. Generally, the students’ success was predicated on learning to use Twitter and Skype. Key relationships in success were:

Learning	Motivation	Teacher Relationship	Career Success
Read Blogs	Skype (hearing professionals speak)	Twitter	Twitter
Twitter	Twitter Reading blogs Writing blogs		Skype

UPDATE: She was asked about how she addressed privacy with Skype and Twitter, she said it was not considered but it must be considered because at one point we had to lock down the accounts after a troll came after her and her students.

She also expressed a concern about getting her students addicted to the internet and dumbing them down by having them read from the Internet constantly.

Campus Technology 2010 – Day 1 Summary

2010-07-19T21:24:00.001-04:00

So I’m sitting now on the only Amtrak train currently north of Providence, RI. I’m typing this entry up while waiting to pull out. An extremely vicious storm passed through Connecticut and Rhode Island knocking down the electric wires that power Amtrak’s trains in the North east corridor, but at least I have access to an electrical outlet even if I don’t have wireless access. Also, it is a lot more comfortable sitting in this train car rather than in warm and humid South Station.

I’m also thanking my lucky stars I upgraded to business class. Lots of room. The conductor has repeatedly stated that we are fortunate that this train had made it to Providence at 11 am because its the only Amtrak train north of there. Without it we would be still waiting in the station for about 3 hours for the next train.

The reason I am thankful for an electrical outlet is because I had maxed out my battery life at the conference today where I did not have access to an electrical outlet. So much for relying on a single battery and hope for an electrical outlet. So, while I was waiting for this train at the station I had time to record my thoughts of the day, the old fashioned way: pen and paper. The following is what I wrote.

The first day of the Campus Technology session went well, but for one flaw; not enough battery power for my aptop and for the last session I had no access to a battery outlet. As a result I am now composing my thoughts using late 20th century technology: a ball point pen and a composition notebook. I may not have been a Boy Scout but I do know to come prepared. This experience is a useful reminder of how fragile our electronic technology is.

Of course Amtrak is starting to worry me. Their 4:30 Acela to Washington DC has been cancelled and trains arriving from Washington DC are anywhere from 75 minutes to 4 hours late

[ED NOTE: As I typed this the train that was 4 hours late passed my train as we were pulling out of Back Bay Station].

In addition, there is an announcement that Amtrak police with bomb sniffing dogs are in the station; it could be a coincidence, but without any other announcement from Amtrak to explain the delays your mind can’t help thinking the worst.

[ED NOTE: As I explained earlier the delay was not due to any nefarious action by nar-do-wells, but the lack of any announcement by Amtrak about the actual cause of the delay is a severe customer relations snafu. An announcement for the reason for the delay did not come until about 5:10 pm, two hours after I originally entered the station and saw the delays.]

But back to my thoughts about the conference. The morning and afternoon sessions were, to steal from the theme song of the old Patty Duke show, was as different as night and day. The morning presenter was a true practitioner of the use of technology in the classroom while the afternoon presenter reminded me of the 1990s approach to technology in educational settings.

The morning presenter had a fully formed website for his presentation with links to a wiki where learners could connect to a form that they could use to post their thoughts about each segment of his presentation; a form he created using Google Docs and which recorded the results in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Their was also a link to a class chatroom where all people in his presentation could post questions and comments as the session progressed.

So I now see the value of real-time chat in the classroom. We humans are naturally sociable and always want to throw our two-cents into a conversation. Using chat, we can talk between ourselves without worrying about disrupting other people.

As organized and interactive was the first presenter the 2nd presenter, while apparently knowledgeable about his subject matter (integrating open content into course curriculum) his presentation was almost strictly death by PowerPoint with side trips to web sites that he did not provide links to. Only when asked by a participant whether his materials would be made available to conference goers did he say that he could email it to everyone who attended.

Campus Technology 2010 – Monday – Part 2

2010-07-19T13:23:00.001-04:00

Mashups of Educational Tools and Open Content

Afternoon session – back from a delicious lunch and an OK presentation further dampened by tablemates who chose to talk to one another instead of listening to the presentation. Oh well, it is what it is.

We’re doing the traditional go around the room and introduce ourselves. I’m pretty much the only non college person in the room. As I listened to my cohorts introduce themselves and explain how they are trying to reposition themselves to compete for the new millennial students, I recalled once again my thought I had this morning that as the cost of college education spirals upward, when will we see businesses, who have long depended on the colleges to provide them with new employees actually start sponsoring promising students for their education in return for a commitment to work for a certain term.

This would be a lot like how baseball manages its minor leaguers and younger major leaguers in which they are committed to the parent team for a certain time or until the parent severs the relationship.

Update…

Stuart Sim is the presenter and he will be talking about open content. what is being used are two drivers:

What students are using in their personal life – students are using cutting edge tools and when they reach school the school is still using old systems.
Faculties need to be able to use the tools in their classrooms – some faculty don’t want to use it

Integration of these different elements can be awkward.

Personal Learning Environment – that shows everything that the campus wants the learner to access.

Other challenges

Single managed systems do not work anymore

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are growing
IT staff expect to be able to mashup services

Demanding and sophisticated user base

Personalized learning environments
Social collaboration is everywhere
Expectations have never been higher
The web is a platform, not a destination

Just a side point, I feel spoiled from this morning with the presenter who made the materials available to all both during and after the presentation. This presentation feels so 1990s with everyone staring at a screen and being asked every once and a while if we have any questions.

Now talking about Open ID which is one ID that allows you into all participating web 2.0 tools. Or should I call it web 2.0 or is Open content the proper term. Talking about Ning as a social aggregator site, in which you can add your type of contents provided by them such as a photo page and other sites. Each of these tools are separate open content sites and Ning will use your open ID to pass you transparently to each.

Update…

At issue is that this open content does not interface with your LMS (sounds very familiar). Ways to resolve:

Develop elements of your LMS as open content that can be plugged into your open source social site.

Someone asked about the risk of betting the house on an open content site that could disappear. The presenter sez that you need to look around and see if their is open technology that will continue to support.

Of course another issue is that if any of these services crash you have little you can do…you especially don’t want them to take everything down with it.

Update…

He points us first to the OpenLearn learning space and is showing how schools in Great Britain have not only placed content on the site, but allows elements to be downloaded in various formats including Common Cartridge that allows you to download the whole curriculum and use it on your own site.

There seems to be a great deal of difficulty around licensing. Which raises an interesting conundrum…as open content tools are becoming more relevant so licensing is becoming even more difficult. Users need to be very well-versed in licensing requirements even in the so-called creative commons license, because there seems to be more flavors than ice cream at Basken-Robbins.

I’m about to post this and then I will need to shut down until I can get to an electric outlet. Unfortunately this room did not have any electric outlets to plug into…rather strange for a technology symposium. As a result I have run my battery down to about 12% power.

Campus Technology 2010 – Monday, part 2

2010-07-19T10:07:00.001-04:00

Trends:

in 1863, Abraham Lincoln recognized that for the U.S. to grow the 2 coasts needed to be connected by railroad reducing travel from 6 months to 6 days
in 1954, Dwight Eisenhower recognized that a interstate highway system was needed to reduce travel from 62 days to 4 days.

Trends for cloud computing:

Widespread wireless access
Affordable mobile devices such as Ipads, smart phones, netbooks, they do have limitations – strapped to all students hips – need to find apps that talk to all of these appliances. ITunes has ITunes University – also building a K-12 initiative
ASP or Cloud Computing

What is cloud computing?

convergence of 3 trends

virtualization
utility computing across a grid
software is a service

Bottom line it is a powerful, affordable, and scaleable like the electricity grid. Showing us the Spoon site:

He demonstrated how this site that runs applications through a server. First he demonstrated how Spoon runs apps such as Google Earth without loading a site.

Spoon’s business model offers to take campus apps and host them rather than requiring individuals to install software on individual devices.

Side note: Presenter asked if it bothers him that people are not looking at him. He said, no, in fact modern day presenters need to get over that…you have to assume they are paying attention.

Update…

Talking about 21st century learning tools

Google Docs – Use forms to gather information that is reported in an Excel spreadsheets.
Google Earth
Schoolfusion – Content management system – handling
Collaborative Mind Mapping
Sliderocket
ZamZar for converting to .flv.
Mindmeister – two or three maps for free then subscribe.
Jing – free version of Camtasia.

As he talks about using the cloud apps and how to integrate them for learning. He mentions that IT departments can’t provide this, but I’m wondering how long all of these apps will remain free. But I can’t help but be excited about these free tools.

Update:

Final hour – we’re starting to talk about DropBox, which is online storage that syncs itself across multiple devices. This is better for the educational community than the corporate world where security and intellectual property protection is paramount.

Next we talk about Jing, the online video creation tool. Like mentioned earlier it is Camtasia Lite from TechSmith. The demonstration for Jing – points out that it can be used to help people with computing issues. Microsoft’s Communicator takes it one better by providing desktop sharing during a chat.

Campus Technology 2010 - Monday

2010-07-19T08:58:00.001-04:00

Monday is always a tough day and I found out they moved the conference away from the main convention center and it is instead at the seafront. That said…

First, up is a workshop titled Next Generation Computing: Using the Cloud to Build Learning Communities. Presented by John Kuglin.

For this session, we are starting by going to John Kuglin’s website. For this interactive session he has set up a number of tools that are launched from that website for interaction including:

A wiki where you can post thoughts either thru

a reflections page or
a twitter like application.

SlideRocket presentations

Update:

Starting to discuss “What’s Important & What’s Not?” – because there is so much information how will you know you are focusing on the right stuff.

He’s showing a video clip from TED Kirk Citron about what’s important and what’s not in the news world.

His point thatFor educators’ the ultimate goal is to move a young kindergartener to a successful college graduate.

Update:

When considering cloud computing need to consider

hardware
software
network infrastructure
policies and procedures
professinal development
culture
staff proficiencies
student proficiencies

Update:

What are student expectations: because they are expected to drive their own learning they expect to be provided the opportunities to learn.

The target for technology professionals is to address this target:

The red area is the firewall that can be found in all schools. As technology specialists you need to be aware of what the Horizon Report is stating.

Update:

Question was asked about SlideRocket and its usability within Apple Ipad and Iphone. It was noted that Cloud Browser will allow you to view Flash movies on the Iphone and Ipad.

Interesting point that Bloom’s Taxonomy was updated in 2001 to reflect technology. the New version uses verbs versus nouns.

Intel provides a site to assist teachers to build HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) into the curriculum

I want to: ScreenToaster closing: alternatives

2010-07-06T08:38:00.001-04:00

So is this just a growing pain for the Internet or something users need to accept as a fact of life?

The online screen recorder, which I really liked, is closing down. This is a great shame, and what's worse is that your videos will no longer be available on the web after July 31st. This is a real pain, since I'll have to re-do a few of mine that I've put up. What are the alternatives?

I want to: ScreenToaster closing: alternatives

Social Media in the Workplace webinar

2010-03-15T08:48:00.001-04:00

This looks like an interesting session on implementing social media in the workplace. Obviously there won’t be much detail, but for newbies its probably a good starting point. The link is to a Facebook page so I’m not sure whether you need to be a member of Facebook to register for the webinar.

Leveraging Social Media Tools to Improve Workplace Learning

Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada)

People are communicating, collaborating, and learning in new ways. Building communities powered by social media provides a way to blend formal and informal learning into an integrated method for overall performance improvement. However, social media is often misunderstood. Professional networking features and user-generated content/Web 2.0 features are easy to develop but bring additional challenges around how to make social media work. This session will explore how organizations can use social media tools to improve learning in the workplace. Attendees will learn:

How social media has changed the way we communicate and collaborate

How social media can support overall performance improvement

Tips for building productive communities of practice

NOTE: Audio for this session will be provided using VoIP. You will require headphones or speakers connected to your computer to hear this presentation.

Freezing a laptop

2010-03-10T08:45:00.001-05:00

This video suggests the fault lines that are rapidly developing in the real-time learning world over the use of technology in the classroom. The person who posted this video states that it was not a functioning laptop and the incident was staged, presumably to make a point.

I can appreciate the instructor’s point-of-view. I teach a religious education class to sixth graders one night a week and I am constantly having to tell them to put away their smart phones as they text their friends that are not in class. On the other hand, I would have killed to have a laptop or a netbook to take notes with when I was in college.

The big question is whether outright banning of technology from the classroom to try and force students to pay attention to the lecture the route to go? I don’t think it is, but somehow students do need to learn the proper time, place, and decorum for using technology in the classroom. Who should be teaching this and when?

Huh?

2010-02-09T17:20:00.001-05:00

I understand that you want to take precautions in the face of a winter storm, but I was left dumbfounded by this early closing announcement in my local newspaper. I thought the whole purpose of holding a webinar is for people to participate without leaving their home or office.

Source: The Day of New London

I’m not dead yet!

2010-01-28T11:31:00.001-05:00

I’ve always liked this part of the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I use the line “I’m not dead yet!” whenever someone asks how I’m doing. But it also seems appropriate for the recurring discussion of the state of instructional design.

The latest discussion is cropping up on the University of Georgia’s Instructional Technology list service. It began with a post by Bev Ferrell who points to a blog by Cathy Moore who uses Google Trends to start a discussion about whether instructional design is still valued. Since you need to subscribe to the list service to read it (which is free) I will copy and paste his post and some of the relevant responses here.

http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2009/06/no-time-for-design/#more-597<http://elearndev.blogspot.com/2006/07/learning-trends-isd-down-web20-upway.html>

No time for design? Quality? Does rapid design make ID irrelevant? ADDIE
dead?

Bev Ferrell
Moderator ITF

The posting she pointed to is more fascinating for the comments section, which Bev noted in an early response, than the original post. The comments turned into a B***h session for IDs. I highly recommend reading it. Bev’s initial post lay dormant for a day, but then resulted in a response from Rod Sims.

Interesting that this question should emerge again!

I can recall many years ago (1992 @ AECT) when we put "ISD on Trial" - I recall Dave Merrill as one of the participants ... and ISD was sentenced to 10 years Drill & Practice. All in good fun yes, but the questions were being asked nearly 20 years ago!

While 'instruction' is more commonly used in the US than many other parts of the world, the real questions for me relate to how we view learning, how we view performance and what are the best strategies to achieve learning or performance.

What can be argued is that the creation of formal courses, delivered by instructors and based on assumptions that students 'do not know' just miss the point. That is contrary to current philosophical and theoretical perspectives.

Similarly, the growth of networks (not just social) now provides the opportunity for learning from those networks - with 'experts' emerging as the knowledge-need arises. In this case we don't need ID, we just need an interest in 'learning'.

What I would argue is that we need different approaches and understanding of the world in which we live and thus different approaches to enabling learning - but the notion of rapid ID or other fads seems more about making a dead horse interesting rather than a serious attempt to make learning better.

Surely ID, traditionally, is about an empowered teacher and disempowered learner. If that's what you want, then ID is the answer. If not (which seems to align with current rhetoric) then we need something different - and why not? ID has been around for decades and surely approaches more aligned with today's world will achieve the environments we are looking for.

This then produced a posting by Timothy Spannaus who wrote:

Ah, yes, I remember it well. I was the defense attorney for ID, though I think it might have been at one of the last conventions of ADCIS - the late Association for Development of Computer-based Instructional Systems.

Another take on the long-running argument, Rod, is that,in spite of twenty years of efforts to kill ID, it's still here, still useful, still evolving. It was never about "an empowered teacher and disempowered learner."

For a really good discussion of the topic, see the edited book by Tobias and Duffy, Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? It gets beyond the typical constructivist/ID discussion and gets to the research and philosophy that drive the discussion.

Instructional design as a formal activity has only been around since World War II and in my mind is evolving. The ADDIE model is sound in its approach if applied wisely. The concept of rapid training design still applies ADDIE, but tries to only condense it to a smaller window. Informal learning is heralded as just-in-time learning, but I fear that corporations are latching on to it as another way to save money by eliminating formal instructional elements.

Bottom line: to paraphrase Mark Twain: The report of instructional design death is an exaggeration.

Curious Pages: Grammar Can Be Fun

2010-01-11T16:11:00.001-05:00

The picture says it all:

Curious Pages: Grammar Can Be Fun

January Thiagi Gameletter

2009-12-30T07:58:00.001-05:00

The first 2010 Thiagi Gameletter has been released by Sivasailam (Thiagi) Thiagaraja. For anyone unfamiliar with Thiagi, he is a long-time advocate of developing training that is both fun and to the point. The January edition contains a thought-provoking piece for any instructional designer labeled Ten Exciting Ways to Waste Your Training Dollars. In this piece Thiagi skewers conventional wisdom around analysis and planning, content, and delivery. For example, here is his take on multimedia.

5. Multimedia Spectacular

Conventional wisdom: Invest time and money in producing slick media materials. Participants are used to watching TV shows and animated computer graphics and reading five-color printed materials. They have high expectations for production quality. So use the latest technology and the most attractive layout for your training package.

Reality: As my friend Richard Clark points out, it is not the production quality but the instructional design quality that contributes to effective instruction. For example, a fancy television documentary may not result in more effective learning than an inexpensive handout. Also, most non-print media take a longer time to produce and much longer time to revise than paper and pencil approaches. And as my friend Ruth Clark points out, sophisticated graphics and animation may actually distract people from learning.

Recommendation: Use the least expensive and most portable medium for training. In most cases this turns out to be paper and pencil.

All 10 of his items serve as a sobering wake-up call to instructional designers everywhere. Other topics covered in his January newsletter are:

An article about synthetic culture activities, which are a special type of simulation game.
A positive psychology activity about five approaches to increasing your feelings of subjective well-being.
An Guest Gamer interview with Scott Nicholson.
A Textra game with the immodest objective of bringing about world peace.
99 words of advice from Brian Remer on how to ride out life's turmoils.
Articles and activities by Brian about different aspects of breathing.
Information about game design workshops in Zurich and Chicago.
Tracy's single topic survey about new-year's resolutions.
A report on last month's single topic survey.
An invitation to our podcasts, hosted by Matthew Richter.

TGL: January 2010

Podcasters Beware.

2009-11-20T16:39:00.001-05:00

I place this in the category, the closing of the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is constantly battling to keep the internet open for all to use, has posted this statement about how they are now taking up arms to defend the rights for anyone who has a microphone, computer, and access to Internet to create and distribute podcasts. It seems a company named Volomedia has received a patent for exclusive rights to the process of podcasting.

The Volomedia patent covers "a method for providing episodic media." It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years. Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners. Right now, just about anyone can create their own on-demand talk radio program, earning an audience on the strength of their ideas. But more costs and hassle means that podcasting could go the way of mainstream radio -- with only the big guys able to afford an audience. And we'd have a bogus patent to blame.

EFF Tackles Bogus Podcasting Patent - And We Need Your Help | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Research Online

2009-10-19T07:57:00.001-04:00

The University of Wollongong in Australia has made a book on mobile learning available for download as a series of .pdfs: New technologies, new pedagogies: Mobile learning in higher education. The following is the table of contents and the preface.

Table of Contents

1 - Introduction: Using mobile technologies to develop new ways of teaching and learning³, Jan Herrington, Anthony Herrington, Jessica Mantei, Ian Olney and Brian Ferry

2 - Professional development: Faculty development for new technologies: Putting mobile learning in the hands of the teachers⁴, Geraldine Lefoe, Ian Olney, Rob Wright and Anthony Herrington

3 - Adult education: Using a smartphone to create digital teaching episodes as resources in adult education⁵, Anthony Herrington

4 - Early childhood education: Digital story telling using iPods⁶, Ian Olney, Jan Herrington and Irina Verenikina

5 - Environmental education: Using mobile phones to enhance teacher learning in environmental education⁷, Brian Ferry

6 - Information technology education: Incorporating mobile technologies within constructivist-based curriculum resources⁸, Anthony Herrington

7 - Language and literacy education: Using iPods to capture professional dialogue between early career teachers to enrich reflective practice⁹, Jessica Mantei and Lisa Kervin

8 - Mathematics education: Role of mobile digital technology in fostering the construction of pedagogical and content knowledge of mathematics¹⁰, Mohan Chinnappan

9 - Physical education: Using iPods to enhance the teaching of games in physical education¹¹, Greg Forrest

10 - Reflective practice: Collaborative gathering, evaluating and communicating ‘wisdom’ using iPods¹², Lisa Kervin and Jessica Mantei

11 - Science education: Using mobile phone cameras to capture images for slowmations: Student-generated science animations¹³, Garry Hoban

12 - Visual arts education: Art on the move: Mobility – a way of life¹⁴, Ian Brown

13 - Design principles: Design principles for mobile learning¹⁵, Anthony Herrington, Jan Herrington and Jessica Mantei

Preface: While mobile technologies such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and digital music players (mp3 players) have permeated popular culture, they have not found widespread acceptance as pedagogical tools in higher education.

The purpose of this e-book is to explore the use of mobile devices in learning in higher education, and to provide examples of good pedagogy. We are sure that the rich variety of examples of mobile learning found in this book will provide the reader with the inspiration to teach their own subjects and courses in ways that employ mobile devices in authentic and creative ways. This book is made up of a collection of double blind peer-reviewed chapters written by participants in the project New technologies, new pedagogies: Using mobile technologies to develop new ways of teaching and learning.

The book begins with an introductory chapter that describes the overall project, its aims and methods. The second chapter describes the professional development process that was used for the teacher participants involved in the project. This is followed by 10 chapters, each describing a mobile learning pedagogy that was employed in the context of a subject area within a Faculty of Education. The final chapter presents guidelines or design principles for the use of mobile learning in higher education learning environments.

We wish to acknowledge the support provided for the project on which this book is based by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. This research was also funded by generous support from the Office of Teaching and Learning at the University of Wollongong. Jan Herrington, Anthony Herrington, Jessica Mantei, Ian Olney & Brian Ferry, April 2009

The chapters and full text are arranged alphabetically by author below:

Research Online

The Curse of my.barackobama.com

2009-09-13T11:38:00.001-04:00

Whether you approve or disapprove of President Barak Obama or the Tea Bag rallies, this piece in Newgeography is certainly a clarion call to leaderships concerning the double-edged sword that is social media.

The days of politics as usual are over. The Obama team will have to play the game under a set of rules that have not all been written yet. This new era in politics will be much more open and subject to more public scrutiny than at any time in history.

The same communications tactics that won President Obama an election in 2008 may prove to be his greatest challenge in building public consensus for action going forward. In the age of “buzz” our young President will face challenges like none other. His greatest challenge may be in learning how to tame and control the inherently unruly politics of the information age.

There are unintended consequences to all leadership – be it politicians, business executives, or educators – to giving the masses an unfettered voice. It can be invigorating or frustrating since everyone is talking at once and those who would lead us are incapable of deciding whom to address first.

Even if they do make a decision, many will stop listening and starting talking themselves which will further infuriate and insult the leader. The leader unprepared for this eventuality will likely dismiss those individuals as we witnessed this summer with the Democratic leadership in Congress and in the old “media” where leadership is still struggling to come to grips with the loss of power that social media has stripped from them.

From an educational perspective, leadership must come to grips with the fact that social media is stripping the last vestiges of the “sage on the stage” from their hands. Sure they talked a good talk about being the “guide on the side” letting learners explore topics on their own, but make no mistake that as long as the “guide” was controlling the curriculum and the timing then the “sage” was still present as a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.

In fact the guide on the side is even more insulting than the sage on the stage because the guide only provides a veneer of autonomy to the student, but it was the “sage” that continued to hold the ropes and was the ultimate arbiter of whether the student had mastered a specific skill.

With social media students are free to draw their own conclusions and post them without the pressure of meeting an instructor’s predetermined outcomes. Conflicting ideas that gain grass roots support cannot be ignored or silenced by the leader without serious repercussions. I’m not sure there are many leaders out there that are willing to take that chance.

Learning Links for the week of Aug. 23, 2009

2009-08-30T11:16:00.001-04:00

Michael Erard offers a short manifesto on the future of attention. An interesting read as we race to incorporate Twitter, Facebook, etc. into the learning environment.

I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.

Harold Jache writes that as companies switch from silos to networks our means of communicating will change resulting, in part, in training becoming marginalized.

History shows that significant changes in how we communicate result in significant changes in how we work. Many silos of support functions will not work in a network-centric organization as there’s too much redundancy, duplication of effort and slowness to react. It’s becoming obvious that only highly networked organizations are going to be successful.

Harold’s piece was based off of a piece written by Jay Cross and Clark Quinn regarding the future of Learning and Development in the corporate workplace. Their conclusion, is that:

[B]e aware that this is a permanent climate change, not a passing storm. Most of the time, the global economy is cyclical. It has its ups and downs, but the underlying pattern remains the same. A swing in one direction is balanced by a swing in the other. But what we are experiencing today is fundamental. Things are not going to return to where they were, for we are witnessing the birth of a new world order. We’re moving toward continuous change.

Over at 2¢ Worth, David Warlick posts an interesting list of what 21st century learning involves:

Questioning your learning experience,
Engaging your information environment,
Proving (and disproving) what you find,
Constructing (inventing) new learning and knowledge
Teaching others what you have learned
Being respected for the power of your learning, and
Being responsible for your learning and its outcomes

I’m not sure I totally agree with this list, but that may be the subject of another post.

FatDux Blog offers up 20 tips for writing for the web. The eLearningPost focused on #2:

2. Apply George Orwell’s rules
George Orwell, the English author of 1984, Animal Farm and other classics, has six rules of writing. Here they are – they’re all gems:

1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

2) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4) Never use the passive voice when you can use the active

5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent.

6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous!

At the Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Facebook Group there is a listing of a series of free webinars:

Online Learning Technologies: Past, Present, and Future
Wednesday, September 2 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Gary Woodill
http://brandon-hall.com/webinars/webinars.shtml

Leveraging Social Media Tools to Improve Workplace Learning
Thursday, September 3 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Janet Clarey
http://ems3.intellor.com/index.cgi?p=304441&t=14&do=register&s=sumtotal&rID=105&edID=89

Selecting a Learning Management System
Wednesday, September 16 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Tom Werner and Richard Nantel
http://brandon-hall.com/webinars/webinars.shtml

Improving Knowledge Flow in Organizations
Thursday, September 24 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Gary Woodill
http://sabaex.centra.com/main/saba/m/Registrar/NewRegistration.jsp?event_id=0000004e579475012263639ad100763e&locale=en_US&source

The Armed Forces Journal has an essay by retired Marine Corp Colonel Thomas X. Hammes outlining why PowerPoint is a poor decision-making tool. Top take-away:

Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides. Time is wasted on which pictures to put on the slides, how to build complex illustrations and what bullets should be included. I have even heard conversations about what font to use and what colors. Most damaging is the reduction of complex issues to bullet points. Obviously, bullets are not the same as complete sentences, which require developing coherent thoughts. Instead of forcing officers to learn the art of summarizing complex issues into coherent arguments, staff work now places a premium on slide building. Slide-ology has become an art in itself, while thinking is often relegated to producing bullets.

The BBC reports that another study shows that the ability to multitask is highly questionable especially amongst those people who proclaim to be expert multitaskers.

At eLearn Magazine’s online blog Roger Schank asks Must e-Learning Be ‘Cool?’ His rant is focused on the use of Second Life, and I have even heard proponents of Second Life say that it is valueless if you are just going to gather people in a single virtual location in Second Life to speak with them. Money quote comes at the end of his post:

People who do e-learning need to learn to fight the demand for cool and cheap. Insist on effective.

There is interesting give-and-take in the comments between opponents and proponents of Second Life.

Jane Hart points to an article by Mind Map Inspiration outlining 100 reasons to mind map. Top ten reasons are:

1. Explore a subject
2. Study & learn a new topic, culture or country
3. Plan your schedules
4. Innovate & invent
5. Create new ideas
6. Expand existing ideas
7. Tap your unique talents
8. Increase your brain power
9. Consolidate your existing knowledge
10. Summarise your skills

Patrick Batty provides a brief discussion of Blended Learning and how social media can have a role in that environment. The post culminates in an invitation to a free, live webinar discussing social networking in the classroom.

Brandon Hall offers free webinars

2009-08-25T07:56:00.001-04:00

At the Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Facebook Group there is a listing of a series of free webinars:

Online Learning Technologies: Past, Present, and Future
Wednesday, September 2 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Gary Woodill
http://brandon-hall.com/webinars/webinars.shtml

Leveraging Social Media Tools to Improve Workplace Learning
Thursday, September 3 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Janet Clarey
http://ems3.intellor.com/index.cgi?p=304441&t=14&do=register&s=sumtotal&rID=105&edID=89

Selecting a Learning Management System
Wednesday, September 16 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Tom Werner and Richard Nantel
http://brandon-hall.com/webinars/webinars.shtml

Improving Knowledge Flow in Organizations
Thursday, September 24 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada) (GMT-4:00)
Presented by Gary Woodill
http://sabaex.centra.com/main/saba/m/Registrar/NewRegistration.jsp?event_id=0000004e579475012263639ad100763e&locale=en_US&source

A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention: Observatory: Design Observer

2009-08-24T12:33:00.001-04:00

Michael Erard offers a short manifesto on the future of attention. An interesting read as we race to incorporate Twitter, Facebook, etc. into the learning environment.

I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.

Learning Links for the week of Aug. 16, 2009

2009-08-24T07:32:00.001-04:00

The Training Zone provides a high-level review of what it takes to be a successful coach. Of course being the iconoclast that I am, I was put off by the statement that in the marketplace for coaches, credentials are becoming more important. “A post-graduate qualification or equivalent should be the benchmark for all professional coaches.” Verity Gough, the author, admits that proof that you passed a test does not prove you are a good coach, but it does signal that you are interested enough to pursue formal training.

Via Facebook: Greg Walker notes that the faculty of Education at the University of Regina is offering an open access course on Social Media & Open Education. He notes that it open to both registered and non-registered students and features live and recorded presentations. The course is built upon the wikispaces environment.

An interesting online forum on Monday, Aug. 24th at 1 pm. The Ontario Educator Meetup is holding a free online session on the strengths and challenges of mobile learning. The forum will be held in an Adobe Connect conference room and headset and microphone is required to participate.

An unnerving article in Slate about our instinctual desire to search is addictive and can be as dangerous as any other drug addiction. Money quote:

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

Cole Camplese provides a fascinating review of the recent OpenEd conference in Vancouver B.C. Not only does he recap, but he provides links to actual videos of the talks given. These were posted to UpStream (a YouTube video hosting site. Here is Gardner Campbell presenting “No Digital Facelifts.” He argues that the changes in communication brought on by social media is as civilization changing as the invention of the alphabet.

Elliot Masie is soliciting thoughts on how learning will have changed by the year 2019.

Jane Hart is seeking input on how organizations are using social media for learning purposes.

I've decided the best way to do this is to use a Google Docs form and collect them in a spreadsheet where users can easily view and sort responses. So below you will find the form embedded in this posting if you'd like to contribute and start the ball rolling. Once I have gathered a number of responses, I will, of course, share the URL.

Over at the eLearning Post, the author’s point to a sample chapter of Kristina Halvorson’s new book Content Strategy for the Web, in which she argues that content audits are necessary before creating additional content.

Before you ever begin to brainstorm about which content you need, you must understand exactly what you have. Before you can decide where to focus your web improvement efforts (and allocate your budget), you need to know exactly what needs improving and why.

The TrainingZone celebrates PowerPoint’s 25th anniversary with some useful do’s and don’ts for learning professionals.

Gina Minks at Adventures in Corporate Education writes about how social media in the enterprise may never take off due to malware that is accidentally installed by following links found in social media. Read the whole thing at Will zombies be social media’s downfall in the Enterprise?

Using Social Media Tools To Improve Workplace Learning

View more documents from Janet Clarey.

Learning Links for the week of Aug. 9, 2009

2009-08-16T21:15:00.001-04:00

The Technical Editors’ Eyrie provides a discussion on Developing a departmental style guide. I thought this item was extremely interesting.

Too many style guides get turned into tutorials on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. When the style guide is intended to be used by people who are not professional writers, this emphasis is understandable, but still misplaced.

Web Strategy blog provides an ongoing list on how to kick start an online community. I think the key proposal was made in the comments where it was recommended:

Make it easy for people to participate. Also, push content out to community members in the format they choose to keep the community at the forefront of their minds. If they like e-mail, give them e-mail. If they like RSS, give them RSS.

At the Training Zone, they offer a video on how to deal with “interrupters” in the classroom. It is presented by Monty Python alumni John Cleese. Free registration is required. They also provided a video defining how to work with the “waffler.”

The Rapid eLearning Blog demonstrates several techniques to build creative elearning courses, of course they all require the use of Articulate.

Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day lists some free online courses about e-learning hosted by the Brainshark Content Network.

Some people are suggesting that Adobe’s Acrobat and Flash “…vulnerabilities and exploits are on the rise while Microsoft’s is falling.”

JISC provides a guide to use Second Life in the learning environment. Among the advantages of Second Life is “that lecturers are not Potential advantages of teaching in Second Life are that lecturers are not limited by physical space in a classroom. Sessions can be recorded and the online interaction can give confidence to quieter students, which can stimulate more open and reflective discussion than would be possible in a traditional seminar.”

Learning Links for the week of Aug. 2, 2009

2009-08-08T10:40:00.001-04:00

The key to creating a coaching culture within an organization is the understanding that the coach recognize that that each situation is different and must be flexible enough to adapt. This makes developing managers as coaches a critical task, so says David Minchin, director of the School of Coaching and Leadership Development in a Training Zone article.

Lindsay Campbell offers two suggestions for how instructors can prepare themselves to project their voices once they are in the classroom.

Will Richardson reflects on whether he has becom a slave to technology after a confrontation with a New England contrarian.

The Rapid E-Learning Blog offers three practical ideas for using Twitter in e-learning: 1) follow an SME after a formal course is presented; 2) follow a specific topic on twitter using the application’s # command; and 3) use Twitter to build a community by again using the hashtags or signing up for a site like Twibes.

Training development should begin with a focus on what learners should do in the real world, not what they should know about the task in their head. Hat tip to Clive Shepherd, via FaceBook.

A fascinating piece on the shift from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows. In my mind the money quote from this piece is the following:

If institutions viewed their primary rationale as fostering scalable peer learning, they could create learningscapes that would help individuals develop their talent much more rapidly than these individuals ever could on their own. Of course, there is a huge transition required to get from here to there, but growing competitive and economic pressures will ensure that institutions either make this journey or fall by the wayside as a new generation of institutions emerges to take their place.

Be sure to check out the Shift Index Report as well.

Educause posts a long piece on Web 2.0 storytelling.

There is an interesting post about teaching to learn over at the blog of proximal development. The key statement in mind was this:

But let’s not forget that merely bringing Web 2.0 tools into the classroom misses the point. Yes, they do promote peer-based interactions and self-expression. But adding blogging or wikis or even global collaborative projects to our curricula is not going to magically transform our static classrooms into interest-driven communities, and it certainly is not going to prepare the students to safely and effectively navigate “networked publics” (Ito, Horst, Bittani, et al., 2008, p.8). These tools are not going to magically create interest-driven communities.

The whole post is wrapped around the author’s, Konrad Glogowski, reflections on the Living and Learning with New Media report published in 2008.

Jay Cross posts the text of an article he wrote for Chief Learning Officer about informal learning. Its class Cross in that he dismisses the old-school formal learning model that still holds sway in most organizations in favor of informal learning processes based upon “…drip-feeding, interaction, ease of access, timely reinforcement, peer coaching, respect for reflection, setting standards, cognitive apprenticeship and so on.”

In the Mailbag

Jacob Nielsen’s Alertbox explores the growing use of social networking on corporate intranets. His research is based on case studies from 14 companies in 6 countries. His advice to obtaining wholesale adoption is to gently guide users by integrating new web 2.0 tools into the existing intranet so that users encounter them naturally.

This week’s eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions e-Magazine is out with articles on the use of instructional graphics.

Gestalt Your Graphics: Improving Instructional Graphics explores four “laws” to help get your point across by treating pictures as information
Being an e-Learning Developer Doesn’t Excuse You from Being Careful cautions developers against trying to use licensed media illegally by doctoring them to make the media look different.

The e-Magazine can be downloaded here from Team Connection.

My Twine email contained a link to an 11-page .pdf involving workplace collaboration. That discusses the three levels of workplace collaboration from local team to network – how collaboration can be fostered at each level, and the role of the workplace leader in encouraging it.

I leave you with this You Tube video, the first of seven parts, of Neil Postman's speech on Technology and Society.

Learning for the week of 7/27

2009-08-01T13:39:00.001-04:00

Pete Rainger at Skills for Access reports on new metadata standards that address accessibility of learning objects. The new metadata would describe what type of media or interactions learning objects contain.

Training Zone points to a company that claims its Creatix system can measure a company’s innovativeness.

Don’t what to make of this, Jane Hart points to a Learning Footprint Calculator that will offer the eLearning community a means of calculating enrionmental savings from swtiching to eLearning over classroom training.

Coming soon to an electronic device near you…CALO: Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. It is described as software that learns in the wild and “uses transfer learning to apply lessons from one domain to another. Pipe dream? Maybe, but its being supported by DARPA, and for those of you who don’t know about DARPA, well, if you’re reading this online you can thank DARPA they created the Internet. Source: eLearn Magazine.

Kindle or just Kindling – educators are split over the value of replacing text books with Kindle-like ereaders. Source: Stephen’s Web.

Jane Hart updates and re-launches her resource list for Social Media in Learning.

Clive Shepherd reviews a SkillSoft survey that indicates that European workers believe that their employers are not providing enough training opportunities including opportunities to learn at their own pace, to revisit materials later (informal learning) and to practice skills learned.

Charles Jennings asks Who needs learning objectives? in a post at trainingzone. His argument focuses on learning objectives and teaching to the test rather than teaching to performance. Free registration is required to read the whole article. I would also recommend reading through the comments as well.

Ghostwriter Dad offers 10 useful tips on how for powerful proofreading. My favorite is #7 Read Backwards. Hat tip to LifeHacker.

For the Virtual Bookshelf

The J Paul Getty Foundation releases a free on-line book devoted to an Introduction to Metadata, described as “an online publication devoted to metadata, its types and uses, and how it can improve access to digital resources. Stephen Downes gives a tentative thumbs up.

Stephen Downes also points to a post by Susan Nash that she is making her e-Learner Survival Guide as a free .pdf download. Also available in dead-tree format from Amazon, the book is described as:

[A] broad reaching collection of essays on e learning examines accomplishments, new directions, and challenges from many perspectives. The essays are arranged in categories, which include e learning and e learners, teaching and instruction, student engagement, learning communities, outcomes assessment and institutional leadership, all of which relate to learners and programs from college, K 12, career, to corporate training. Of special interest is a focus on successful outcomes for students and programs, and essays on often overlooked niches of learners, including generational differences (Gamers, Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y), stay at home mothers, working mother e learners, homeschoolers, bilingual online education and training.

In the Mailbag

The eLearning Guild has scheduled its next online forum for Aug. 13 and 14 called Designing and Managing Learning in 3-D Virtual Worlds and Immersive Environments. Anyone who would like to attend should contact one of Vangent’s Member Plus: Dennis Coxe, Tracey Lyon, or Sally Brett.

Sally Brett sent us all this link to an article titled Measuring Learning Results by Will Thalheimer that she posted to the document library on our Team Connection website. The article explores why we assess learning, the methods of performing these assessments and ends with a list of recommendations on how best to perform assessments.

OK, this is just not right, while reading my Gmail there was a link to an open source software solution that incorporated Moodle and Drupal. Curious, I went to the sight and read this:

Now, that’s just wrong.

Wife blows MI6 chief’s cover on Facebook - Times Online

2009-07-06T12:28:00.001-04:00

This story is a cautionary tale about the use of Facebook.

But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.

How do businesses balance employees’ use of social networking tools and their concern for protecting proprietary information and other secrets.

Wife blows MI6 chief’s cover on Facebook - Times Online

Don’t Fence Me In

2009-06-22T08:43:00.001-04:00

Stephen Downes questions when lawmakers will recognize that the laws that result in multi-million dollar judgments for sharing songs over the Internet are wrong. I’m afraid Stephen that things are going to become a whole lot more restrictive. Stephen writes:

When a court awards a $1.92-million penalty for sharing 24 songs, we have to ask, when will it become clear to people that the law is wrong? Because, any law that allows this, is wrong. Some other things that are wrong (via Charlene croft): a city in Montana requiring job applicants to submit all of their Web 2.0 logins and passwords. And a bill introduced here allowing government to intercept internet transmissions and gather user information from ISPs. Wrong. And I say: there is a fundamental disconnect between government, and the people they purport to be governing.

I tend to see the freedom provided by the Internet much like the freedom the old West afforded people. Both were initially populated by early adapters who were resourceful and independent. They did not like the restrictions mainstream society offered and the control that the rich could impose on that society.

Of course, this chafing of restrictions also tended to create a situation where lawlessness also grew. As long as it was early adapters there was no problem. In the old West feuds were settled with gun battles; on the Internet it was flame wars in forums.

Then the railroads, major businesses, started to move westward as enterprising individuals found resources that the East could use. This led to more people moving west; people who were not early adapters and who wanted the civilization of the East imposed upon the West. It took time, but as more individuals became wealthy from the railroads opening the West it became apparent that the wildness of the West had to be brought under control and probably by the 1910s, when Arizona became the 48th state accepted into the Union the west was tamed.

The same thing is now occurring in the Internet. By 2004, Nielsen reported that three-quarters of the United States had Internet access. With this influx of people corporations followed, not just with personal websites but also entrance into social media. It’s not unusual now to see corporations advertising to follow them on Facebook. The music industry is just the first industry to discover the wildness of the Internet and are actively fighting to tame the West. They were quickly followed by the motion picture industry. DRM laws are the equivalent of the fences erected to shut down the freedom to roam as property rights took precedence. Frankly, I don’t hold out much hope that the freedom that existed with the Internet will continue much longer.

Small voices will be shouted down by the bigger corporations who have the resources to take control. It’s apparent that Google who offers the largest platforms for individual voices to be heard (Blogger, YouTube, etc.) already caves and censors the Internet for the People’s Republic of China. From my perspective, the freedom and independence offered to the individual by the Internet is not long for this world.

I want to learn this…you want me to learn that…

2009-06-11T15:50:00.001-04:00

A fascinating post on BoingBoing blog by Cory Doctorow, an author that I have a great deal of respect for, concerning learning. It tells the tale of a student at San Jose State University who had a run-in with his professor over the posting of his homework (computer code) on the Internet.

While the details of the incident are probably a repeat of incidents dating back to the first time a teacher and a student did not see eye to eye over sharing of information with other students, it was Cory’s assessment of the important learning moment from this tale.

There's a lot of meat on the bones of this story. The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs -- including me, at times -- fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.

I would agree with Cory’s assessment up to a point. I think it is true when the course is focusing on something the student wants to learn about, in other words, they are already self-motivated to learn. Other courses that may not necessarily interest the student, but are a required program by the university or corporate management, may not generate that level of interest.

This raises the interesting issue of how do we balance what we want to learn versus what others want us to learn? Of course every teacher thinks that his subject is the most important, but his students may not agree. It all depends upon their motivation. The question is how do you convince the student that even though he is not personally interested in a particular topic it is in his best interest to strive to perform to their highest level…to produce meaningful output, not just regurgitating what he thinks the teacher wants to hear.

The easy answer is to provide a motivating statement at the beginning of the course; this has been a staple in the corporate learning world for as long as I can remember. Provide the learner with a reason why they should want to learn the material. But is that always feasible. You ask any student and they can provide you with a class that they are required to take, but which they see no need to know the material.

My point is that not every class needs to involve producing meaningful work…sometimes proof that you are aware of the subject matter may be all that is necessary. Maybe the solution is to take the approach the state of Virginia is advancing, give students the option to take end-of-year tests or having their final grades based upon a portfolio of their work. The drawback with this effort is twofold.

You have the issue that Cory talks about, the “lazy trap” that teachers fall into. It is easier to grade multiple-choice tests than it is to evaluate a portfolio.
Is an “A” based on a final multiple-choice exam the equivalent of an “A” based upon a body of work.

The big question is how far as a society should we go in requiring students to learn information that they may not ever use. Is the concept of a well-rounded education a thing of the past?

Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course - Boing Boing

Reprimanded For Facebook Post

2009-06-10T09:25:00.001-04:00

This seems to be an up and coming issue as social media moves off of high school and college campuses and into the work world. An Associated Press reporter is reprimanded for a post to his Facebook page.

The minidrama is an increasingly familiar one as companies and workers navigate the landscape defined by sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Firings and reprimands over postings to social networking sites have become commonplace over the last year.

As learning professionals we need to ask ourselves and our clients if the workplace environment is conducive to such open communications before we recommend the use of social media.

AP Reporter Reprimanded For Facebook Post; Union Protests | Threat Level | Wired.com

The Social Media Gender Gap

2009-06-04T09:47:00.001-04:00

Business Week has a fascinating report that instructional designers should keep in mind before floating Web 2.0 ideas to a customer. In the article The Social Media Gender Gap suggests women are more apt to adopt web 2.0 applications then men.

It's no shock that men and women act differently online, just as they do in everyday life. The Web is an extremely social medium, and Web 2.0 is all about being social. Traditionally, men are the early adopters of new technologies. But when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront. At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they're using social media. While the trends indicate both sexes are using social media in huge numbers, our findings show that women far outpace the men.

Hat tip to MetaFilter community blog which also points to articles that Twitter appears to be the one social media that is dominated by men.

Creative Commons Flickr Photo from Kanaka’s Paradise Life.

Evolutionary Dead-end?

2009-06-03T15:27:00.001-04:00

Interesting observation about technology at the webblog Boing Boing.

Every gadget expands until it becomes a PC. Any gadget that does not so expand is replaced by one that will.

It sure seems that way. Comment was in reference to a post at its sister blog Boing Boing Gadgets about the digital picture frame shown here.

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets - Boing Boing

List of Cultural and Educational Video Sites

2009-06-03T09:34:00.001-04:00

Open Culture blog provides a list of 35 cultural and educational video sites.

Looking for great cultural and educational video? Then you’ve come to the right place. Below, we have compiled a list of 35 sites that feature intelligent videos. This list was produced with the help of our faithful readers, and it will grow over time. If you find it useful, please share it as widely as you can. And if we’re missing good sites, please list them in the comments below.

Movie camera photo courtesy of: domi-san’s photostream on flickr.

The Social Web as a New Walled Garden

2009-06-02T14:55:00.001-04:00

Interesting perspective from Wired magazine on the future of Social Web.

The social web trend is more or less complete. Oprah's gone Twitter, your co-worker has a MySpace problem, and if your parents aren't bugging you with Facebook movie quiz invites, they probably will be by the time you're done reading this. People are flocking to these sites in record numbers, as Facebook now boasts over 200 million users worldwide, and Twitter has grown 3,000 percent since last year. But for the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services, their users and everything they create will have to come down.

The article then suggests that once again we are building silos that restrict communications.

Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the popular TWiT network of technology podcasts, calls the phenomenon "the social silo," and he doesn't think it can last much longer. "People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites," says Laporte, "but they aren't going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next." Laporte and Owyang agree that in order for the social web to move forward, the separate ecosystems which make it up need to unite.

Of course the assumption that we all want to share with one another is just that an assumption, one predicated that we desire to be of one herd that is in constant communication.

Creative Commons photo from Eggman’s Flickr photo stream.

Dual Perspectives Article

Fair Use Video

2009-05-18T09:14:00.001-04:00

The American University's Center for Social Media posted this video describing guidelines for Fair Use of copyright material when creating new videos.

The video is part of a larger site focusing on Fair Use issues including a section for teachers.

Hat Tip: BoingBoing

On Writing Solid Emails

2009-04-17T08:49:00.001-04:00

For better or worse email has become the gold standard of communications in our world. We use it to communicate not only with our superiors and coworkers, but also with family and friends. We use it for both professional and personal reasons and like any form of communication that has broadened out to the masses it has become misused.

Harvard Business Publishing has a well thought-out piece on writing email, that could also apply to blog writing. Most of it is common sense that has been repeated extensively in other articles, but repeating it is like the weeding that gardeners have to constantly engage in.

Most email (and blog) writing has moved beyond its original context as a form of formal communication to a more on-the-fly, asynchronous communication tool for those who do not want to engage in a conversation with the email recipient. In that venue, the recommendations proposed by the author David Silverman, may not totally apply, although, even some of his 10 points are worthwhile to consider.

But for formal communications that are going to two or more people, his points are invaluable.

1. Delete redundancies. Say it once. That's enough. If you're repetitive, the reader will stop reading and start skimming. (Like you probably just did.)

2. Use numbers and specifics instead of adverbs and adjectives. "The project is currently way behind schedule on major tasks," is not as clear as "The project is 3 weeks late delivering hamburger buns to Des Moines." (If you don't have numbers, still get rid of the adverbs and adjectives.)

3. Add missing context. Does your reader know that hamburger buns in Iowa are required for the company to collect $37 million? If you're not sure, remind them.

4. Focus on the strongest argument. Should those hamburger buns get shipped because the delay is embarrassing for the company, because it's costing children their lunch, or because it's costing the company tens of millions of dollars? Maybe all three, but one of those reasons (and it depends on your reader) will be enough to get buns on the road.

5. Delete off-topic material. The best emails say one thing and say it clearly. One-subject emails also make it easier for the recipient to file the message once they've taken action, something anyone who uses Outlook to manage tasks appreciates.

6. Seek out equivocation and remove it. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" works for Dickens, not status reports.

7. Kill your favorites. Is something in your text particularly pithy, amusing, or clever? Chance are, it's not. If it sticks out, it's probably a tap-dancing gorilla in boxer shorts — hilarious when you thought of it, embarrassing when it gets in your manager's inbox.

8. Delete anything written in the heat of emotion. Will this sentence show them who's been right about the hamburger buns since the beginning? Yes? Cut it.

9. Shorten. Remember the reader struggling to digest your message on the run — a BlackBerry or an iPhone gets about 40 words per screen. What looks short on your desktop monitor is an epic epistle on their mobile device.

10. Give it a day. With time, what seemed so urgent may no longer need to be said. And one less email is something everyone will thank you for.

I recommend reading through the comments for additional observations about email etiquette.

Hat tip to Basil White for the Summarization flow chart shown in this post.

How to Revise an Email So That People Will Read It - David Silverman - HarvardBusiness.org

Educational or Over the Top: You Decide

2009-04-11T13:19:00.001-04:00

According to the poster of this video on You Tube, this is an actual safety video shown at a training session.

A quick Google search did turn up this site selling the video for $229. Don't know if its the same or not. Their description is:

This hard-hitting meeting opener will capture your employees' attention and show them just how easily accidents can happen. This video is an ideal way to start any safety meeting and features 10 accidents accompanied by victim testimony to set the tone for your next training session.

Because it is for sale I don't know how long it will remain posted on You Tube. So see it while you can.

The Dangers of Informal Learning

2009-03-10T07:53:00.001-04:00

I place this in the category of the dangers of putting too much emphasis on informal learning. There was obviously no emphasis on documentation which is a key ingredient in top-down learning which is the key to formal learning. The Sunday Herald of Scotland reports that the U.S. and Great Britain cannot refurbish Trident missiles because they "forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead."

Plans to refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) "lost knowledge" of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.

Somewhere along the line a decision was made by upper management not to document the process; relying instead on existing personnel to remember and to record.

But vital information on how Fogbank was actually made had somehow been mislaid. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," the report said.

This is occurring increasingly throughout all sectors of our economy, especially now when managers are struggling to make ends meet without having to layoff more personnel then absolutely necessary. But at what cost? How much knowledge will be lost as senior employees accept buy-out packages to retire early or high-end achievers leave during or ahead of cutbacks?

I blame management for not seeing the value of documenting their processes and providing employees with the time and the means to document their best practices during the "good" times before this economic downturn. Too much tribal knowledge was left ungathered because we thought the good times would never end and we would always have our tribal elders to pass on their knowledge through informal learning practices.

Well, what these economic times remind us is that even though we have moved way beyond the hunter/gatherer ancestors we are still held thrall by seasonal changes. I fear that as economic winter sets in a great deal of knowledge will be lost.

Hat tip: Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds

The Sunday Herald - Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper

Wasn't the Internet Cute Back in 1981

2009-01-30T17:50:00.001-05:00

This vintage news report demonstrates how the news media had no real clue about the possibilities of the Internet.

Hat Tip: IO9

Helpful Reminder for All Designers

2009-01-28T08:32:00.001-05:00

As we go about our daily design efforts under the pressure of increasingly tight schedules we sometimes forget about the people who will be sitting in front of their computer screens trying to digest the elearning we develop. This presentation - Dumping the Drone - by Cathy Moore is a helpful reminder of how we should be developing content.

Dump the Drone: Livelier Elearning

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: design instructional)

del.icio.us Tags: instructional design,instruction,writing

What Can Training Departments Learn from Our President's Experiences

2009-01-20T08:27:00.001-05:00

A report in the New York Times last Friday provides an interesting parable for the corporate training world that is looking towards Web 2.0 as a new avenue to deliver training. The article, titled Obama 2.0: Who's Leading Who?, notes that the leadership team around our new Chief Executive is discovering that once they let the genie out of the bottle they cannot get him back in. At the heart of the story is the fact that the grassroots elements that Team Obama connected with, in part using web 2.0 technology, are now continuing to demand the face time they had during the campaign.

Not everyone is sure, however, that once in office, President Obama will be able to marshall his online forces and engage them against his targets. Now organized, they may decide to move against him.

That’s already happened, wrote Ari Melber yesterday at the Nation, noting that the previous week a question about whether Obama would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate possible Bush Administration war crimes had been voted to the top of citizens’ questions submitted to the new administration via Change.gov. An Obama spokesman tried to dodge the question, but it didn’t go away:

It is striking that Obama’s aides, who helped win the election by harnessing new media, believed they could just spin away from their online interlocutors. Instead, the move backfired immediately. Bob Fertik, the activist who submitted the question, campaigned for it; and progressive websites, including thenation.com, blasted the dodge. Within a day, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann picked up the story. A day later, Obama was compelled to answer the question in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who quoted it and pressed Obama with two follow-ups. Obama’s answer, which prioritized moving “forward” but did not rule out a special prosecutor, made the front page of the January 12 New York Times.

So what does this mean for corporate training departments. I would suggest it means the end of the learning management system as a gatekeeper for training. It could signal the end of the existing static training experience (whether in the classroom or over the corporate intranet) in which information is dumped on the learner with a few exercises or multiple choice questions thrown in to break up the monotony. More importantly, learners are not going to stand by and just absorb information and then walk away and do what the training intended them to do. Web 2.0 will no longer allow that.

At least in the classroom they can ask questions and talk among themselves. I think in the elearning environment the days of the standard elearning course has to come to an end. Business likes elearning because the learner can take it at any time, any where. More importantly, the learner can be easily interrupted and pulled out of the learning experience to handle more profitable issues. If the training is programmed with bookmarking, the learner will not even lose their place.

In the future, elearning cannot be delivered in this fashion. The new generation of workers are not going to allow it. They are going to require that they have the ability to communicate with an expert and with one another. It is going to require creation of a cadre who will take the course at the same time and will have access to some form of online chat so that they can talk to one another as well as to a subject matter expert. The SME does not need to actively present the material, but he or she will be actively monitoring the chat session to answer questions as they appear.

Most important, it is going to require that the top-down model of communication in the company is going to have to relinquish some control over the learning environment.

Hat Tip to Will Thalheimer

del.icio.us Tags: elearning,learning,Web 2.0

Better Read then Dead

2009-01-19T18:20:00.001-05:00

Okay, I know that is mighty strange headline for a blog post, but what the heck, I’m in that kind of mood. The point I’m trying to make is that I used to think I could never read an ebook. I always thought that I had to have the dead tree version of a book to be able to enjoy the read.

I want to say right now: I WAS WRONG!!!!

To the right you see my most recent gadget. It’s a Samsung Blackjack; not as sexy as an Apple iPhone, but for my money its just as good. I’ve coupled it with my home version of Microsoft Office 2007 so I can create and edit documents to my heart’s content.

But my most recent addition to my Blackjack is the addition of Mobipocket ebook Reader. This free software has turned my Blackjack into a mobile library of books and documents. My most recent read, which I highly recommend, is Cory Doctrow’s Little Brother, a dystopian tale of the Department of Homeland Security run amok and the efforts of a band of teenagers to resist.

Other books I have read using my Blackjack include:

Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn
West of Honor by Jerry Pournelle
The Scarlet Plague By Jack London
The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons by F Scott Fitzgerald
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (in progress)

All of these book, except for Atlas Shrugged are available for free. Mobipocket ebook Reader also provides the ability to import web documents, .pdf files, and office documents and converts them to their reader. Whenever I connect my Blackjack to my computer Mobipocket will ask if I want to synchronize my library. I have met the future and it is wonderful.

del.icio.us Tags: ebooks,technology

Learning in Hard Economic Times: A Delicate Balancing Act

2009-01-08T08:29:00.001-05:00

Harold Jarche has an interesting post concerning innovation and learning that I post here in its entirety.

In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in difficult economic times - placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning;

" Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning."

Rapid learning is not PowerPoint slides turned into online courses but rather increasing the ways to connect ideas and people. This is the future of training and e-learning, or what I call ABC (anything but courses). Anthonys third point, love the low end, also speaks to the use of inexpensive tools such as web services or open source software. If learning professionals can be seen as catalysts for innovation, then even in difficult times will their future look bright.

While I will agree that the corporate world is mistaken in believing that a one-day or two-day training program is sufficient to develop employees in a specific process, I fear that Harold is going overboard with his "ABC" idea. Without a base, formal presentation of some sort to provide a framework for ongoing learning between people you could end up with a case of the blind men describing the elephant.

Harold is correct in stating that "[r]apid learning is not turning PowerPoint slides into online courses," but it is also not a matter of setting up a bunch of social web services to facilitate discussion. In fact what is telling about the quote he provides is what preceded it.

While more and more companies recognize the name of the game is transformation, the tolerance for blind experimentation has never been lower.

And that is too true. In times like these, the corporate world looks to cost centers such as training as the first place to make cuts. So any proposed innovation will require a balance between something old and something new, which is what I suggested way back in 2007.

Harold Jarche » Innovation and Learning

del.icio.us Tags: learning,informal learning,formal learning

Lunch and Learning Objectives

2009-01-07T08:03:00.001-05:00

Will Thalheimer has been providing a series of brown bag webinars called Webinoshs and the latest is about learning objectives. Here's the 411:

FREE Webinosh on Instructional Objectives This Friday January 9th, I will talk about Instructional Objectives, and some research, thereof. Instructional Objectives:

Do they produce learning results?

Are they all the same?

Do we have to use them?

Do prequestions work just as well?

How specifically do they have to be worded?

Can I use the word "Understand"? Answer: In some of them, but not others.

Hey Will, do you have a new taxonomy for us?

To sign-up just go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/247154110.

del.icio.us Tags: learning objectives,learning,objectives

Life’s (and death’s) little jokes

2008-12-29T11:42:00.001-05:00

I always get a kick out of seeing headlines like this. No disrespect intended, but if the gentleman is dead, then he is no longer the oldest man in the United States.

It reminds us once again that the English language is a very harsh taskmaster. I know they used this caption because until he died he represented the oldest man, but that’s no longer the case.

Teaching With Online Games - Dec. 11th

2008-12-01T07:33:00.001-05:00

This seems like an ambitious topic to cover in only one hour, but I guess for free you can't go wrong. Elluminate is hosting this presentation By Dr. David Gibson of the University of Vermont.

Can a game or simulation teach a teacher? Can it improve one's knowledge and skill as an instructor? As part of an international dialog between researchers in educational technology, this key question and many more related to it have led to this new collection of ideas, research and reflections by researchers looking for answers.This session is intended for a broad audience of anyone who is looking into games and simulations with an eye to their potential for improving teaching and learning. If this is you, then welcome to an emerging community!

Elluminate - Where Bright Ideas Meet

Going Too Far with Online Interactivity?

2008-11-19T08:17:00.001-05:00

Okay, I'm for making learning more interactive as much as the next person, but I think this proposal in an otherwise interesting post by Dr. Trent Batson in Campus Technology - Tipping Point for "Content"--Dynamic Interaction, Not Static Stuff - is taking immersion a little too far.

Or a class discussion carried on in a chat room (while in a real classroom) so students can interact with each other as much as with the teacher.

Why would anyone want to have learners who are gathered together in a real classroom carry on their discussion through an online chat room? I have a difficult time getting around the vision of a room full of learners all studiously clicking away at their i-Phones, laptops, etc. without a word being said.

About the only value that I can see from this exercise is that it creates a record of the conversations through the chat room log. If that's what a teacher wants then just buy a digital tape recorder.

Learning "Webinoshes"

2008-11-01T13:17:00.001-04:00

Will Thalheimer's newsletter announced the following two Webinoshes

Upcoming Schedule:

Friday November 7th, Noon U.S. East Coast Time Can We Improve Our Smile Sheets? Link to Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/345686876

Friday November 21st, Noon U.S. East Coast Time Does Context Matter? Link to Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/796752726

Available through both the phone and VOIP so folks from around the world can attend.

Will describes his webinoshes as "short, intimate webinars covering one essential topic in human learning and performance. I add questions, learning myths, and question-and-answer sessions (where you can ask me anything) to the mix to keep things interesting. These Brown Bag Learning experiences are provided using a "Subscription Learning" methodology, so that themes will be repeated over time for deeper, more impactful learning.

Chrome's impact on Web-based Learning

2008-09-07T11:16:00.001-04:00

With Google's release of Chrome, it's new browser, one has to wonder what impact it will have on the web-based learning development community. For those of us who create courseware for the corporate world we have long used Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the standard by which we measure the functionality of our output.

Part of this is because the corporate world has viewed Microsoft and its products, the software equivalent of General Motors. And to paraphrase the old saying, "What's good for Microsoft is good for the country." (In fairness, it appears that saying was a mis-characterization of what Charles Wilson, then CEO of GM actually said. ) Internet Explorer is so intertwined with the Window's operating system that it has become defacto corporate browser of choice.

But can this corporate mindset stand much longer. Mozilla Firefox is slowly cutting into IE's overall hold as the world's preferred browser. In the past eight months IE's percentage of the browser market has decreased over 6 percent, although it still controls a large 73% market share. It will definitely take a more secure release before Chrome can even be considered by the corporate world. But the overall concept is intriguing because it is taking Microsoft's approach to grabbing the lion's share of the browser market but in reverse. By bundling it with Google Gears, it has made it easy to use Google's online office application tools including setting up desktop icons to access Google Docs, Google Gmail, etc.

Time will tell whether Chrome becomes a hit or miss, but my gut feeling is that it will find its niche market in the small and medium corporate world. Google already bundles secure solutions with its other main services and Chrome could become the icing on the cake. Even if Chrome does not catch on, the publicity will make people start to reconsider IE and we, as an industry, will no longer be able to rely on IE as the sole yardstick for usability.

del.icio.us Tags: browsers,Microsoft,Google

Sunday Morning Respite

2008-08-24T10:52:00.001-04:00

I’d never heard of Webb Wilder until today. Wikipedia describes him as "a musician who famously mixes the sounds of country, surf guitar and rock & roll known as "swampedelic". He also produced an award-winning collection of short films under the title of Corn Flicks." Below are two videos that Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds displayed on his blog this weekend.

The first is a 1989 music video that cpatures Webb's musical stylings.

The second video is a short that provides a taste of his "Corn Flicks" films.

Does it have anything to do with learning, training, or education? Nahh, but it is certainly fun to watch and listen to.

Controlling the Information Fire Hose

2008-08-21T08:29:00.001-04:00

I confess, I’m an information junkie. Left to my own devices I would spend my life researching and reading about the things that interest me. The wonder of the Internet is that I can do this from the comfort of my own home thanks to my computer and the Internet. For instance, I have always had a fascination with the history of baseball and like to dabble in researching some arcane aspect of it. In the past, if I wanted to read newspaper and magazine accounts from the period I was researching I would have to visit a library and crank up the microfilm machine. Now many of these sources – both still publishing and deceased – can be found on the web.

So where am I going with this? I was inspired to write this by Jay Cross who posted a blog entry on his Informal Learning Blog entitled Flow of Information. He wrote:

Google Reader is excellent for managing your subscriptions with RSS. Google Reader makes it easy to subscribe to a site, to see what’s new, and to read previously unread items. Sometimes that works for me; other times I might prefer picking through a list of titles for what I want or having articles flow by one-by-one.

I commented on that post that “I am constantly battling information overdose and RSS feeds are the hypodermic needle that delivers my fix.” It’s true. I am constantly battling to maintain some control over my feeds. Constantly having to reluctantly pick and choose who I might read. At the present I have more than 90 different subscriptions just for educational feeds. I have a separate RSS reader for general feeds that number more than 40 feeds. What can I say, I’m a collector. Can I read them all every day? No, at best I can only glance at their titles.

Which got me thinking about my previous career path as a newspaper journalist. One of the hardest tasks for an editor is to write an attention grabbing headline. With the amount of news slotted into a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine articles are constantly jostling for your attention, and their means of doing so was with headlines, those big bold titles made up of three or four words. They are like carnival sideshow barkers competing to grab your attention.

Now, with the Internet and social media giving everyone the capability to be journalists the competition for attention is getting even tougher. We all need to learn how to write headlines. Think of the occasions we write headlines:

Every time we complete an email subject line
Posting a blog entry
Creation of a wiki entry

Each time we are fighting to grab our readers’ attention. Yet, I think little thought is given to what we name them especially email subject lines. As a result nuggets of important information gets missed because its just one drop in the spray of water from a fire hose.

Campus Technology 2008 - Day 2: Planning and Budgeting panel discussion

2008-07-30T11:58:00.001-04:00

This session is a panel discussion of planning and budgeting for the next-gen classroom. The panel includes

Moderator Scott Walker of Waveguide Consulting, Inc.
Panelists:

Randy Jackson, University of Washington, Seattle - 20 year veteran of providing educational technology leadership at the university. His campus is large and diverse.
Michael Kubit, Case Western Reserve University - director of MediaVision, part of IT - a 25 year veteran - Case Western is a private research university. The university has 200+ technology enhanced classrooms that are refreshed every 5 years.
Matthew Silverman, George Mason University - about 30,000 students - 138 technology-enhanced classrooms - four standard installations - classrooms are monitored and managed via the network.

First question: What are the key drivers to funding technology on your campus?

Randy: Upgrading older campus buildings that are between 80 to 100 years old. We contact the state legislature and ask for electrical upgrade for safety and once funding is approved we ask to upgrade technology.

Michael: The primary driver is does the classroom scale and can we support with the staff we currently have. You can design a facility hoping you will get the staff. We design rooms for middle of the adoption curve, we design to needs of the faculty. What goes into the room is designed to 80% of our faculty.

Matthew: We try to ensure that the faculty can move from classroom to classroom and they will find most of the same equipment. We are playing a lot of catchup.

Second question: Do you have any good metrics for use in technology planning and budgeting?

Randy: As far as FTE staffing, its a different argument from technology planning. We know we need staff to support it, but on our campus its a separate argument. Facilities Design Instruction Manual expresses what we want our classrooms to look like. We update it constantly and its available to the campus and consultants. By documenting this it provides details on what you need.

Michael: We develop a "total cost of ownership" of classroom - develop a five-year plan that is readily available and then we have to calculate operating costs which cannot be neglected. It's easy to get capital money to build, but more difficult to get operating costs. Key is to find problems before a professor does, because don't want the professor lectures to be delayed while we fix equipment.

Matthew: We use specific budget numbers based on our standards to begin budget process.

Third question: What kind of strategies of breaking a cycle of putting technology improvements on back burner?

Randy: We used to look at technology in classroom as items you put in there, but now with next-gen you have to also consider lighting and ambient sound. Part of this is being aware of issues and making the argument that we need to consider these issues.

Matthew: We all have instances of classrooms that are horrible, and we have got the major stakeholders in the classroom to have them experience sitting in these classrooms so that they can appreciate the student's experience.

Fourth question: what about integrating technology into historic buildings

Randy: Dealt with it in several ways, we save the shell and completely gutted the inside of these buildings because they are incompatible for technology. Fortunately these buildings are not "historic" that prohibit touching the interiors. We use ADA architecture.

Michael: You need to strike a balance between form and fashion. We try to keep it simple so we use simple switch zoning so not complicated and costs. Need to work with physical plant people so that when renovations are proposed you have a seat at the table.

Fifth question: What is a next-gen classroom for you?

Randy: For me it means interactivity and flexibility. If you are not letting student to be connected and interact with each other. It involves room space and technology. Current popular items is coursecasting and audience response. We can measure use by surveys and downloads.

Michael: In 2002 we innovated our own lecture capture and distribution. Lecture capture provided students with opportunity to review lectures. Provide mp3s of lectures, but not downloading them, surveyed them and they said that online courses were visually rich and audio-only lectures were not useful. Students are not enamored by technology, they are not impressed by it or surprised by it. Developing "classroom-flip" - faculty pre-recorded lecture and in classroom they are working on homework in classroom.

Campus Technology 2008, Day 2: Podcasting as Educational Inspiration at UConn

2008-07-30T10:57:00.001-04:00

The first breakout session was presented by David Miller, a professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Two main podcast series produced at UConn:

Icube: Issues in Intro: General Psychology
Animal Behavior

Many students coming into college not knowing what a podcast is, and the specific requirements to listen to a podcast. He said he has to tell his students they don’t have to buy a podcast. He said a whole ecosystem has grown around the iPod. There has been a real cultural shift in portable media from transistor radio to the iPod and iPhone. He shows off the accessories available for the iPod ranging from iBoxers to a toilet dispenser with an iPod docking station.

Why should we think about podcasting? he posed. It is a course enhancement with added depth and content beyond classroom discussions. It can also promote interaction between students and professors including student produced content. “It shrinks a large class,” he said. Some professors use podcasts to deliver content in order to free up classroom for other purposes. Lectures can be recorded to help out students who cannot attend class because of inclement weather or specific religious holidays.

Types of podcasts

Basic – audio only
Enhanced podcast includes
- Audio
- Images
- Chapter stops

He said there are some students who refuse to use iTunes so to resolve that problem he also generates the podcast as a .mov. He then looked at the use of podcasts to present lectures. He said many fear that using podcasting to present lectures will cut into notetaking. He said that if you do course cast you could use class time for examples/applications, demonstrations, videos, clicker interactivity, and student presentation.

He said his podcasts for reflection and expansion on in-classroom lectures, to clarify comments, to generate interaction by recording student/professor lectures. For ICube there are three components

Weekly discussions with students
Precasts – previews of what is going to occur in the next class – main points to look for in the next lecture. They stay up the entire semester. Since I don’t coursecast, people who miss a class know what the main points were and can look for them in a classmates’ notes.
Postcasts – If he does not feel that he was clear about a topic in the class he can reiterate the important points from the lecture. These are not planned.

Based on evaluations, 41% of his students would listen to the weekly discussions and over 50% for the precasts. The precasts were extremely popular. He also found, and he said he couldn’t figure out why, his podcasts are listened to internationally.

His second podcast is for his animal behaviors class. He has a number of Honors students. The Honors students get Honors credit for participating in the discussion podcasts.

He also podcasts Review sessions before tests. Open only to Introductory Psychology class. He gives two midterms and a final and he holds review sessions that he records. The sessions are used to clarify and amplify lectures, and he thought it would be great to podcast the sessions. He also uses special podcasts to acknowledge highly successful students and asks them to explain what special skills or tools they use to succeed in the class.

Other uses outside the classroom

Student interviews about freshmen impressions of his/her experience at UConn as well as seniors about to graduate. They are asked about their experiences.
Freshman orientation: The orientation describes the differences between high school and university academic requirements.

How to podcast

Record using a USB microphone and a mixer hooked to a computer, he is his own audio engineer.
Editing software for post production
Upload to site such as libsync (liberated syndication)
Generate RSS feed

Audio Capture advice

Decide whether to capture in stereo or mono – he recommends recording in Stereo
Adjust the gain to proper level
Have a theme song or identifier, he is in a rock band "Off Yer Rockers" as lead singer and rhythm guitar so he recorded his own music.
Introduce each episode
"Animate" your voice; exaggerate
Use students' first names only
Avoid distracting noises
No background music
For enhanced podcasts be mindful of copyright

Audio Editing Advice

Edit out silence and speech fillters
Mono can be a smaller file, but stereo provides quality
Adjust levels either in your audio editing software or with The Levelator freeware that does it for you .
Podcasting for Dummies

Campus Technology 2008 Session 3: Technology-enhanced Strategies for Engaging Your Learner

2008-07-30T09:21:00.001-04:00

The final session of Day 1 was presented by Bethany Bovard, Instructional Designer, New Mexico State University. She posed the question What is Engagement? She said there is a disconnect on instructional design if the teacher thinks engagement is student excitement over showing what they have read the night before while the learner thinks it means completing homework assignments. Participants brainstormed over what it means to be engaged.

Active listening and participation
Taking questions home to discuss around the dinner table
Model engagement by talking to them

The key she said is to communicate what your anticipation in engagement. Research has shown that the barriers to engagement are:

Social – isolation, lack of interaction, and missing social context cues (am I being understood, Do I understand?)
Administrative – lack of instructor feedback and inability to find materials on the web
Learner Motivation – hardest to address, procrastination due to other two barriers, boredom

Technology that can be used to reduce social barriers by creating a sense of community

Make first contact getting students to introduce to one another, encourage group projects, and provide audio/video message
Use email to share syllabus, context info, and resources – though not a web 2.0 tool it encouraged students to communicate before class began.
Create an audio/video greeting http://www.azoocacapture.com
Create an avatar at http://www.voki.com to create and send a greeting to learners. Can make the avatar speak in three ways, record your own voice with a microphone, call in using your phone, or type in a synthetic message and it will create a synthetic voice.
Use blogging to encourage interaction and create continuity between classes.

Administrative barriers include:

Missing directions/clear expectations – no way to clarify misinformation.
Lacking timely feedback (In published research, student-instructor interactions – including timely feedback – are one of the most significant factors in student satisfaction and learning.

Technological means of overcoming administrative barriers

Share contact information – be available to answer questions
Repeat yourself often – state directions and expectation in various ways
Provide feedback – vary your timing, amount, and manner of feedback -

She used Skype (http://www.skype.com) to address all of these issues.

Motivation Barriers include:

Overload of content
Deadlines are not communicated frequently

Ways to overcome motivation barriers

Chunk large assignments
Use Calendar & reminders
Use Multimedia resources (aggregating resources at one location – www.protopage.com www.netvibes.com www.pageflakes.com (start pages) www.protopage.com/tektrekker is her resource page for content.

Campus Technology 2008 – 2nd session: Explicit Bargain Setting

2008-07-29T14:39:00.001-04:00

The second morning session focused on the use of Second Life in the college workplace. It was presented by Sarah “Intelligirl” Robbins of Ball State University and co-author of Second Life for Dummies. She title her program Explicit Bargain Setting: Realistic Expectations for Teaching in Virtual Worlds.

Ms Robbins started her presentation with the following two disclaimers:

Pedagogy comes first and technology second

Students come first and the university second

She argued that technology should not be used without regard to the learners and she said she offered that her guiding principle in applying technology is to adhere to Chickering & Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Higher Education. She said that the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant argument is bogus; it’s an excuse by some not to learn new technology. She the real difference is in the Lifestyle, Engagement, and Motivation Divide. She said most people have cell phones, but older people tend to view them as a practical device to keep track of projects and people whereas teenagers and twentysomethings see them as a means of staying connected.

She said when considering the use of Second Life or any other technology we should follow Clay Shirky’s recommendations in his book Here Comes Everybody. In that book Shirky argues that when proposing the use of technology you should detail “The Promise;” explain how “The Tool” will help achieve that promise; and outline the Bargain which defines the rules of engagement between the teacher and the learner.

The promise made by Second Life is that involvement there will:

Increase a sense of presence
Allow bonding within the community of learners
Learning will be more engaging, immersive, and fun

The tools for delivering on this promise are:

Stigmergy – the ability to manipulate your environment for those who will follow
The ability to customize your avatar
Access to a global community
Multi-modal communication (text, voice, sight, hearing)

The bargain to make the promise work is that students must suspend their self-limitations and agree to learn to function in Second Life. They will drop this self-limitation, she said, if they are given a good reason. They also must be willing to cooperate and behave in an orderly fashion. That does not mean they cannot don the avatar of a huge dragon. She had one student whose avatar was that of a mermaid and since he had no legs he flew everywhere within Second Life. She said she did have to caution her students against nudity although it is present in Second Life.

And that is the key to applying any technology to learning. You, the teacher, instructor, ISD, must justify using the tool. She dismissed the idea of holding a meeting in Second Life where all you do is sit around and talk. Such a function is overkill in Second Life and could better be performed via conference call or in a private online chat room.

She ended on a cautionary note, stating that committing to teaching in Second Life required the teacher to be extremely familiar with how Second Life operates. “The teacher has to have expertise to serve as a guide, an advisor, and as an instructor so that when her students get into trouble because they are not familiar with Second Life she, the teacher can help them out. She told how she had one student who accidentally started his avatar break dancing and couldn’t figure out how to make the avatar stop. He resisted assistance for a week and as a result everytime he stopped talking his avatar would start to break dance.

The commitment involved in becoming a Second Life expert is intense and involves a steep learning curve.

Campus Technology 2008 – 1st session: Riding Web 2.0

2008-07-29T14:12:00.001-04:00

The first breakout session I attended was titled Riding Web 2.0 Toward Service Beyond the Classroom. This was presented by a trio of individuals:

Jim Wolfgang, Director, Georgia Digital Innovation Group, Georgia College & State University
Keith Politte, Corporate Relations Officer, University of Missouri, Columbia
Frank Lowney, Manager, Web Enabled Resources & Professor of Educational Foundations School of Education, Georgia College & State University

The premise of their presentation was to talk about how Web 2.0 can serve as a collaborative tool to reach beyond the classroom and involve the learner in the community. Mr. Wolfgang offered the question of the value of posting thousands of video lectures on a school website if there was no way for the students to talk with the professor and with each other. He said the key to getting buy-in to using Web 2.0 tools is to speak in the vernacular of the individuals in position to make the decision to implement Web 2.0 tools. Too often we get caught up in the technospeak of the tools.

Mr Lowney explained that especially in the corporate world new technologies are measured in ROI or Return on Investment, but he argued that ROI can mean more than just “money.” It can also mean good PR as word spreads on how you are applying the tools. He pointed to how his own university received positive publicity when CNN reported on their works in being the first university to employ Ipods as learning tools.

Mr. Wolfgang then encouraged the participants to experiment with Web 2.0 tools. “If you wait for 100% perfection, it ain’t gonna happen,” he said. He said the key is to start slow and to explain to the people you are trying to get to use the tools how each of the particular tools work. He argued if they see each tool as a hammer you will see people hammering nails with what is in reality a wrench.

As they talked I couldn’t help but wonder if the early web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis may ultimately give way to the verbal tools such as online audio and video as the preferred means to communicate. The computer and more importantly the smartphones and digital PDAs are really more of a visual and audio medium than a textual medium. Early adaptors grew up with the printed word as the primary means of storing and communicating knowledge. So it seems only logical that wikis and blogs would be the lead agents in the web 2.0 world. But as the Next-Gen generation pick up the pace, the wikis and blogs would seem to be logical to dropped.

Campus Technology 2008 – Keynote Address

2008-07-29T09:43:00.001-04:00

8:30 am

I’m sitting in the keynote address hall for A ‘New’ American University for Next-Gen Learners presented by Adrian Sannier. He is with Arizona State University and will talk about six transitions to the new university. Rightfully calls us a “roomful of geeks.”

He defends the name of his presentation, A New American University. In the previous century universities tried to emulate the likes of Harvard and Berkeley. What makes them great is they are selective, which means you can’t go. We need to change what “access” to college means. It means reaching out to the community. The 21st century won’t be like the 20th century. What are the people going to do if they don’t get a higher education. They won’t be able to participate in the economy.

We have faith in only one thing in this country: technology. There will be all kinds of presentations around wikis and blogs and its exciting he said.

Looks back at “promises” made in the 20th century. When 2001 came around there was no HAL like in 2001, no moon base, no flying cars. But some predictions did come true. We now have a form of telepathy in the form of instant communication. It has crept up on us, but it is taken for granted by our children. It’s incredible the way they communicate. It’s like a giant hive mind.

The singularity is coming and the kids are closer to it then we are.

Says that the Encyclopedia Britannica is the greatest invention, but notes that no one has read it. Millions of copies have been sold, but no one read it. It used to be what every high school report was built upon. Then along came Wikipedia and now its free.

He notes that Amazon.con can pick out better gifts for his mother than he can.

Took 85 years to get 80% of households to adopt the landline telephone.

Think about bundled services where you get television, internet, and telephone in one service.

Universities need a revolution in technology because they are falling behind in the technology game.

Teaching kids multi-column addition like they will be a bookkeeper in 1935 will not last long. Calculators don’t matter any longer. Only ones that use it are kids in school because they can’t use computers. He railed against his son’s schools because they banned all technology. “They can teach them like its 1950 and they can work in a factory. Except there are no factories.”

He said schools are still “sage on the stage” and tell him on tests what he told us. He rails against the dullness of the classroom. “That’s the dirty little secret, schools are dull.” Next-gen students are saying we will tune you out until you tune us in.

Frank Rhodes, President Emeritus of Cornell, “most instruction is still a cottage industry…they have not diverged much from Socrates, except that they moved indoors.”

John Chambers in Forbes magazine “Many agree technology should play a role in education, but they don’t know what role it will play in our future.”

Six keys for the future

From Context to Core: The enabling transformation – most difficult, but most critical – it liberates resources. We have been spending money on technology for the last 30 years. – In the early 1990s we had better technology than industry. Universities are the cottage industry for IT. It’s all about climbing the value stream.

Core Processes: The processes that differentiate you from competition everything else is context. Have to spend 80% of your budget on core processes, rather than 20%. No strategic advantage in investing in IT, industry has already done it. IT and bandwidth is like electricity (statement by Nicholas Carr in The Big Switch).

Concept of “1”: Reduce redundency in context, the things that people do not buy your offerings.

Concept of “0”: Don’t do it, get someone else to do it, someone bigger, richer, and more powerful. At ASU they hired Google to provide 65,000 students with email, storage, etc. Google delivered it in two weeks and saved them $400,000. From a corporate perspective, could Google provide similar services in a secure manner?
From info to Intelligence: ASU partnered with Oracle to manage information and transform it it into knowledge.
From Cattle-car to 1:1 No more forcing them into one form of technology. IT need to support virus-laden student laptops, not building the next email system. Also provide value in software, web-delivered services, etc.
From Cop to Concierge: IT too busy prohibiting things then helping students. Web sites are constructed that way. Finding info on university websites is like playing Twister. Calls for “Amizon.com-ification” website presence, there is no proprietary web page. To get there you need “Prune Concentrate” that requires pruning your website. ASU has thousands of webpages, but only 50 are getting the majority of hits. These should be concentrated in a single location. Help desks must be available 24/7.
Physical to digital: Burn down the library; all books are digitized. Single search brings up everything we have. Publishing should be digital as well, don’t need professional publishers. Remove the cost to look at the published documents.
From Traditional to Hybrid: Don’t know how to do this. We’re tool rich, but the problem is culture. The faculty don’t believe this. Faculty believe only technology they need is death ray from their eyes.

Feelin' like Don Quixote

2008-07-11T16:05:00.001-04:00

Its late Friday afternoon and I'm trying to express in words the theory and acts I carry forward as I create instructional materials and for some reason Gordon Lightfoot's song Don Quixote is striking a chord with me.

Google Takes on Second Life with Lively

2008-07-09T17:12:00.001-04:00

Well this is interesting. Google is apparently getting ready to take on Second Life with its own Lively. According to Cybernet:

People will get involved with Lively by creating an avatar, creating various spaces that they can decorate, and visiting other rooms. They’ll even be able to have televisions in their rooms playing user-selected videos from YouTube. According to Google, “The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web.”

Cry “Havoc,” And let slip the virtual dogs of war.

Google Takes on Second Life with Lively

Learning Opportunity – Connectivism as a Theory of Learning

2008-06-26T08:28:00.001-04:00

Stephen Downes and George Siemens are offering a 12-week, college-level course looking at the latest theory of learning: Connectivism. The course is free to audit or you can pay and receive college credit. Here’s how they describe the course.

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is a twelve week course that will explore the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. It will outline a connectivist understanding of educational systems of the future. George Siemens and Stephen Downes – the two leading figures on connectivism and connective knowledge - will co-facilitate this innovative and timely course.

This course will help participants make sense of the transformative impact of technology in teaching and learning over the last decade. The voices calling for reform do so from many perspectives, with some suggesting 'new learners' require different learning models, others suggesting reform is needed due to globalization and increased competition, and still others suggesting technology is the salvation for the shortfalls evident in the system today. While each of these views tell us about the need for change, they overlook the primary reasons why change is required.

The course will begin in September 2008.

Learning Digital Native Style

2008-06-24T08:09:00.001-04:00

Received a notice from the Digital Natives Facebook group of a two-hour online forum on Wednesday, June 25th entitled: Creativity and Media Literacy Forum. The forum is hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

The focus of the forum is “about current creative obstacles and opportunities media producers, teachers and others face in their fields. The presentation will be webcast in Quicktime, the conversation can be joined in the Berkman IRC room (irc://irc.freenode.net/berkman) using an IRC client such as Trillian, and can be viewed and interacted with in Second Life.

To quote from the Digital Natives’ Facebook page and the Berkman Center website:

We're excited about the group of presenters and attendees we've assembled, and wanted to let you know what the general game plan is. The conversation will be fluid, interspersed with very short presentations from team members of

Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/)

River City (http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/index.html)

Tom Snyder Productions (http://www.tomsnyder.com/)

LocaModa (http://www.locamoda.com/)

NML (http://newmedialiteracies.org/)

I’m fascinated by this effort not only because of the subject matter, but also the virtual means of presenting it.

del.icio.us Tags: Second Life,web 2.0,learning

Developing Productive Online Discussions

2008-06-23T08:39:00.001-04:00

Fascinating opinion piece posted at Campus Technology last week about grading conversations in the Web 2.0 world. The piece written by Trent Batson focuses on the academic world but has a lot to say to corporate training initiatives that seek to employ Web 2.0 tools.

Two items jumped out at me as I read the piece. Batson explains how a professor based all of his/her grades on student conversations in Blackboard.

The students' first impulse was to just write essays. However, these were not conversational turns, but performances, so they were graded very low. When the students instead started picking up on elements in the previous comment and including references to these elements in their own comments, their grades went up. If the students extended their discourse skills to synthesize several comments in their own comments, they got even higher grades.

He then cites four criterion for grading a written conversation:

Cohesion in which students need to show they are conversing with one another rather than just posting items to the message board/blog comments field/other conversation tool. This means repeating or restating elements of a previous post on which they are commenting, or at least referring to the post.
Awareness that because this is a conversation between all class members and not just between the commenter and the teacher. They need to be attempting to convince all to their point of view, not just the teacher.
The conversation must be directed to the purpose of the class, not just “social chit chat.” While the conversation does not have to be purely straight-laced, the social element must be related to the discussion points.
Finally, the diction employed must be academic in nature. Batson says “[a] discussion of an idea is not the same as the discussion of a party.”

As the corporate world starts to apply web 2.0 tools to their training environment it is essential that the individuals who will stand in place for the university professor be aware of these elements and maintain a watchful eye on online discussion boards. While grading may not be a factor, these elements offer clear guidance on how to maintain a productive online environment.

Gen Y and the future of IT

2008-06-22T15:03:00.001-04:00

Web Strategy by Jeremiah asks some interesting questions about how corporate IT is going to deal with the waves of Gen Y'ers that are entering the workforce.

These questions remain:

Do the once finite lines of the corporate firewall between work and personal start to fade?

Who is really an official spokesperson? Is there an unofficial spokesperson?

As Generation Y moves into the workforce, how will their communication habits change? How about ours? (I work with several talented ones)

Will Generation Y, who is accustomed to Facebook Applications, Google Docs, Rich internet application interfaces, and advanced web technology (all public) be shocked to find out how bad your enterprise software is?

How will companies adapt and changes their corporate policies to meet this change?

These are questions that need to be considered as well by learning professionals who still think that Level 1 elearning is an appropriate means to "train" their staff. This was touched upon in the comments section of the post:

Elliott Ng June 22nd, 2008 6:48 am

The questions this raise for me are:

1. What can we Gen X and older learn from Gen Y and Millennials? In terms of social media?

2. What assumptions do we have about Gen Y and Millennials that are wrong but we don’t know it?

3. What do we have to teach in order to get the most out of our Gen Y and Millennial people?

Cool post.

jeremiah_owyang June 22nd, 2008 6:55 am

Elliot

What I’ve learned about Generation Y is that because they are digital natives, they know how to learn. They can figure it out on their own, you just need to provide them direction and let them bump into a few walls to get experience.

Jeremiah's comment that company's need to "let them bump into a few walls to get experience" leads me to wonder whether they will be permitted that leeway during these tough economic times.

del.icio.us Tags: learning,technology,web 2.0

Free Experiential Learning Webinar

2008-06-19T08:01:00.001-04:00

Learned about this through the Instructional Technology Forum post by Christine Nickel of Regent University:

Want to know more about how you can use experiential learning in you traditional, technology-enhanced or online courses? Then plan to attend a free webinar brought to you by Wimba’s Distinguished Lecture Series.

Instructional designers Robert Fitkin and Christine Nickel of Regent University will explore Kolb's model of experiential learning and its application in higher education today. Scenario Based Learning, Digital Game Based Learning, and Storytelling will be examined as practical ways to use experiential learning in the traditional, technology-enhanced or online course.

Please mark your calendars and attend!

When: Wednesday July 2, 2008 at 2pm EDT

How to register:
http://www.wimba.com/eventreg/participant/registration.php?eventid=1172

Remember, the webinar is free and accessible to people throughout the world.

E-mail over Essays?

2008-06-17T10:15:00.002-04:00

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a month now. I saved the Campus Technology Web 2.0 newsletter in my inbox for more than a month, and now that I have the time I want to comment it. Dr. Trent Batson, PhD, is a professor of English and an ePortfolio consultant in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT.

Dr Batson made an interesting proposal in the May issue of Web 2.0; in his viewpoint piece, Writing: It Ain’t the Same Anymore, he proposes that for the new digital age the basic form of writing that should be studied is the email instead of the essay.

A native form (“the boots”) in the digital world is e-mail. Yes, the first reaction to suggesting e-mail is a form worth studying and teaching is, “Oh, e-mail is simple, nothing there to teach or examine.” Until you look under the hood, that is. We thought spoken interaction was pretty simple, too, back when many people predicted we’d have natural language processing software by 1967. Forty years later, we’re doing ok, but no one counted on it taking us 40 years.

In fact, e-mail is one of the most complex written forms any of us has ever written. Essays only seemed hard in school because educators made it artificially difficult: Though many writing teachers are changing the paradigm, the essay has traditionally been taught as an autonomous (not collaborative -- that’s “cheating”) structured communication written by a novice to an expert, telling him or her (the teacher) what that expert already knows.

Being the recipient (and the sender) of hundreds of emails each week, I’m not convinced that email is a complex writing form. In fact, I’m not sure it qualifies as a traditional writing form, it has evolved into an asynchronous dialog. Anyone who has been cc’d on an email chain that consists of one or two sentence responses will attest to that. In fact I would wager to say that most email constitute a Web 1.0 solution to the instant messaging clients of the Web 2.0 world.

Dr. Batson then asks the question “Is ‘real writing’ the context-less essay or is real writing what we all do during a large part of each day as we work at our computers?” He contends that an essay constitutes a “design challenge” while an email is a “communications challenge.” I’m not really sure what the difference is explains that with an essay you must "state your thesis in the first paragraph, limit yourself to five paragraphs, and conclude by summing up." He doesn't explain how an email differs from this. In my experience a well-written email follows the same formula, except you can't count on your recipient reading beyond the text initially shown in their email client viewing pane.

So, I guess I respectfully disagree with Dr. Batson's proposal.

Red Cross Using Web 2.0 Tools in Emergency

2008-06-17T08:10:00.001-04:00

The American Red Cross is using a variety of Web 2.0 tools to coordinate its response to the flooding occurring in Iowa and the rest of the Midwest.

ReadWriteWeb reports:

Getting information out to victims and their families during a disaster is a major issue for any relief organization. So while the Central United States recovers from a spate of storms that has ravaged towns with tornadoes and flooding, the American Red Cross is relying on a number of web 2.0 technologies to spread information to the press and people affected by the severe weather. The online newsroom that the organization has set up relies on a number of web 2.0 widgets.

The newsroom site runs off of Wordpress, and it's being used to push out press releases, media, and information about shelters. The Red Cross is using Utterz to post audio reports from the field, Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos, as well as a Slide-powered slideshow widget that allows anyone to upload photos of disaster areas. The site also features a Google Maps mashup that depicts the surprisingly large number of relief operations currently being run by the American Red Cross (hint: click the "view larger map" link, because viewing the informative popups inside the widget on site is next to impossible).

Read the whole story.

Twitter alerts me to free online presentation on Emotion, Learning and the Online Learning Environment.

2008-06-13T07:38:00.001-04:00

Picked up info about this free program via blog posting by Inge de Waard (Twitter name: Ignatia). The program is being offered by the Canadian Institute of Distance Education Research at Athabasca University.

Title: Emotion, Learning and the Online Learning Environment.

In spite of evidence that more and more students are engaging in online learning experiences (Alan & Seaman, 2006), clarity about the transition to a new learning environment is still at arm's length (Cleveland-Innes, Garrison & Kinsel, 2006). In addition, the impact of the emotion created by dealing with this new environment on learning is virtually (pun intended) undiscovered. In this session, Dr. Marti Cleveland-Innes and Zehra Akyol will review theory and data regarding emotion in online environments, with opportunity for discussion of the effect of emotion on teaching, learning and instructional design. In addition, this presentation corresponds with the launch of a web-site to support continued discussion and research on emotion and online learning. The web-site will be introduced at the end of the session.

I cite Inge’s Twitter name because I was alerted to the posting via Twitter complete with a TinyURL link to the post. Inge, nee Ignatia, has linked her blog to her Twitter account so that everytime she posts a blog entry on her Blogger account Twitter sends out a notice to her followers. I maintain a similar set-up.

Ignatia Webs: CIDER free online presentation on 'Emotion, Learning and the Online Learning Environment.

del.icio.us Tags: learning theories,learning,education

The Dangers of Social Networking

2008-06-09T11:24:00.001-04:00

One can only wonder how management will react when a post like the one displayed below finds its way onto a corporate Social/Professional network. This is a snapshot of the comments, the original can be found at http://digg.com/business_finance/Qwest_To_Workers_Pee_In_A_Urinal_Bag_Classy

Hat tip: Makeuseof.com The most Disgusting Digg Comment Ever (Pic) | MakeUseOf.com

Free Online Learning Book

2008-06-06T08:33:00.001-04:00

Athabasca University Press has released the book The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, edited by Terry Anderson, for free download as a PDF.

The book is published under the Creative Commons License copyright. Meaning it can be reproduced for non-commercial purposes provided the author is credited.

You can download the entire book or any of it chapters. Here's a snippet from the chapter In-Your-Pocket" and "On-the-Fly:" Meeting the Needs of Today's New Generation of Online Learners with Mobile Learning Technology by Maureen Hutchison, Tony Tin, and Yang Cao of Athabasca University.

If one assumes that the learner is in full control, what influence does this have on preferences for mobile learning? Given our knowledge of the Net Generation, Wagner and Wilson (2005) argue that mobile learning – while enabling equal opportunity access, ubiquitous connectivity, multi-generational uses and users, services for the mobile worker, and services for the mobile learner – will benefit most those who can leverage their digital communication skills in a world that has been levelled by mobile technologies. (Page 204)

Edupunk: the new generational battlefield

2008-06-03T13:20:00.002-04:00

I don't know if this is just a tempest in a teapot or we are seeing the next stage in the evolution of learning from the old industrial model to a new individualized approach. Over the past six days a figurative firefight has broken out over the concept of Edupunks. It seems to be an outgrowth of the uproar around an advertising pitch by BlackBoard surrounding its new academic suite. The promotion on its website reads:

Engage. Interact. Collaborate.

Release 8.0 is the complete engagement solution with smart grading capabilities that will delight faculty; tools that promote critical thinking skills and increase student engagement; and a single content management solution that enables users with diverse needs to collaborate across the institution. Learn more about the benefits and find out what it can do for you.

This announcement seemed to be a call to arms for education bloggers on the overall topic of whom should be controlling the means of learning and discussion. It appears that Brian Lamb Jim Groom of BavaTuesdays started the ball rolling back on May 25th when he argued that BlackBoard was turning learning from a community effort to a technology effort. My take is that the Edupunks endorse the concept that Web 2.0 tools are just that tools used to facilitate individuals' ability to learn from one another. Stephen Downes offers this definition of Edupunk (prefaced with the proviso that "true edupunks deride definitions as tools of oppression used by defenders of order and conformity.").

[E]dupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance.

Stephen has done great work on collecting the disparate threads of conversation around this concept. You can read his posts starting here, and then here, and the latest here. All are chock full of links to follow. Chronicle of Higher Education provided a brief cover of the piece as well.

Whether the Edupunk attitude carries on or not it does focus a spotlight on the future of Web 2.0 tools especially as formal organizations such as educational institutions and corporations look into using these tools. As David Warlick puts it in his blog post What's this about Edupunk?:

I do not have any real objection to corporate embrace of these tools. We’re all trying to make a living.
What worries me, though, is school officials hearing the buzz, and thinking that they can buy their way into the crowd, rather than learning their way in.

Replace "school officials" with "corporate officials" and Dave's line still rings true. I have to say that I think I have at least one foot in the camp of the Edupunks. The key to learning is not to use new tools to deliver the same top-down approach. As our society is opened up to alternative sources of information they are naturally becoming critical thinkers. The main stream news media are financially hurting because the public no longer has to rely on the single newspaper in their community or the three local television affiliates to provide them with news. The Internet has removed them from the isolation and dependence on these outlets to provide them with information.

Likewise, learners, especially those who have graduated out of organized schooling and have entered the workforce, no longer have to rely on organized training sessions to learn about their job responsibilities and how to perform those responsibilities. Professional organizations looking to use Web 2.0 tools to enhance learning need to step back and be willing to relieve control to the learners. Provide them with the resources (videos, podcasts, computer-based learning, monthly seminars, and the tools to create their own content) and let them construct their own learning at their own pace and let them talk about it.

UPDATE: I guess once again I'm late getting to the barricades, Intrepid Teacher brands Edupunk as "so yesterday."

I am not here to out punk anyone or defend terms I had no hand in creating. I am also not here to cheerlead a group of people who could articulate their ideas much better than myself. This post is already one of many, probably too many, posts trying to attach meaning to a label. The creators of the term are probably sitting back and laughing at the direction their idea has taken. Some students are already angry that adults without their input are once again hijacking their movement.

A commenter notes "I agree that the edupunk is just other stuff rebranded. what is more interesting is the notion of open source and cooperative approaches." They're both probably right, yet as William Shakespeare said, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." If you don't like the term "edupunk" than don't use it and look at the arguments within.

FURTHER UPDATE: Hat tip to Serena for correcting me on who blogs at babatuesdays. Jim Groom runs bavatuesdays, while Brian Lamb blogs at Abject Learning.

Brain Rules and presentations

2008-06-02T08:45:00.001-04:00

I've read Dr. John Medina's brain rules book and I have subscribed to both his Facebook page and his blog. The book is a very readable review of what we know about the brain, how it functions, and its impact on learning. The following slideshow was created by Garr Reynolds who publishes the Presentation Zen blog and it expertly captures three critical rules outlined by Dr. Medina in his book.

| View | Upload your own

Automobiles and Learning Technology

2008-05-12T11:51:00.001-04:00

In the past year I have become a big fan of the BBC television series Top Gear. For those of you who have not seen the show, it is a odd mix of British slapstick humor and reviews of the creme de le creme of automotive engineering. I'd like to share a 10-minute clip from the show in which two of the hosts look at the evolution of the driver's controls.

Now, what you may ask does this have with learning technology? I think that what we see happening today with the learning industry trying to work these tools into their offerings is the same as how the automobile industry worked out the details on how the driver controls the vehicle.

The means of working wikis, blogs, and podcasts into a structured learning environment is wide open and will remain so for another 20 or 30 years until the individuals we refer to as digital natives become the majority of decision makers in the corporate world. And then they will find what is the proper means of implementing these technologies in the corporate training world.

In the interim, we digital immigrants need to just keep experimenting with these tools and be prepared to get laughed at by the digital natives as we misuse tools that are ostensibly theirs. It will be through our trial and error

del.icio.us Tags: Web2.0,elearning,learning theories,education

The ultimate act of sportsmanship

2008-04-30T09:41:00.001-04:00

This is not totally on subject given that the focus of my blog is about learning and instructional design...well maybe it is.

I came across this story at Neatorama, a general interest blog, but I think it can serve as a learning moment. The lesson to be learned: teamwork can stretch beyond just individuals in your own group. Here are two college sports teams "competing" when an unusual situation drives them together to cooperate for a higher goal. The lead for the ESPN story really tells it all.

Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky had never hit a home run in her career. Central Washington senior Mallory Holtman was already her school's career leader in them. But when a twist of fate and a torn knee ligament brought them face to face with each other and face to face with the end of their playing days, they combined on a home run trot that celebrated the collective human spirit far more than individual athletic achievement.

To paraphrase the rest of the story, Tucholsky stumbles rounding 1st base as she is celebrating hitting the first home run of her college career and injures her knee to the point that she cannot stand let alone walk around the bases. Under the rules of the game she would be called "out" by the umpires if her teammates or coaches assist her. The only seeming alternative is to stop the play with her on first base, provide a pinch runner, and continue on with the game. Unfortunately, she would not be credited with a home run. That's when competition took a back seat.

"And right then," [Western Oregon coach Pam] Knox said, "I heard, 'Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?'"
The voice belonged to Holtman, a four-year starter who owns just about every major offensive record there is to claim in Central Washington's record book. She also is staring down a pair of knee surgeries as soon as the season ends. Her knees ache after every game, but having already used a redshirt season earlier in her career, and ready to move on to graduate school and coaching at Central, she put the operations on hold so as to avoid missing any of her final season. Now, with her own opportunity for a first postseason appearance very much hinging on the outcome of the game -- her final game at home -- she stepped up to help a player she knew only as an opponent for four years.
"Honestly, it's one of those things that I hope anyone would do it for me," Holtman said. "She hit the ball over her fence. She's a senior; it's her last year. … I don't know, it's just one of those things I guess that maybe because compared to everyone on the field at the time, I had been playing longer and knew we could touch her, it was my idea first. But I think anyone who knew that we could touch her would have offered to do it, just because it's the right thing to do. She was obviously in agony."
Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace lifted Tucholsky off the ground and supported her weight between them as they began a slow trip around the bases, stopping at each one so Tucholsky's left foot could secure her passage onward. Even with Tucholsky feeling the pain of what trainers subsequently came to believe was a torn ACL (she was scheduled for tests to confirm the injury on Monday), the surreal quality of perhaps the longest and most crowded home run trot in the game's history hit all three players.

I truly recommend you read the whole article, its amazing. Education, like almost any other area of human endeavor, has become so competitive that we miss out on the simple truth that we need to help and support one another. I know it sounds hackneyed, but as we develop instruction, especially asynchronous, we need to make sure that there is some sort of helping hand out there that a learner can turn to when they are unclear on something or are frustrated by a problem. This perhaps is the true bonus that Web 2.0 elements have to offer.

ESPN - Central Washington offers the ultimate act of sportsmanship - College Sports

Laptop U: Where No One Looks at the Professor

2008-04-21T13:24:00.001-04:00

For some reason I'm in a negative mood about Web 2.0 tools and education. Reading this article posted at Pajamas Media, got me wondering if what is necessary at the primary school level is some form of instruction on showing respect and prioritizing your life. Written by a professor who chooses to be anonymous so that her students don't discover "she is onto them."

I'm in the midst of a brilliant lecture. I'm very well prepared for this class. I have thirty or forty Powerpoint slides that boil down the textbook chapter into handy outlines. I have included outside material that I spent hours finding and scanning. I have even inserted a two minute clip from a news show that someone had uploaded to YouTube. I also genuinely find this topic fascinating, so I'm able to talk passionately about it. I'm pacing and making wild arm movements. I'm wearing a short skirt.

But about half the class isn't staring at the wonder that is me. Their eyes are glued to their computer monitors. There is a background sound of clacked-clack as they transcribe my lecture. At least, that's what they tell me what they're doing. I cant see their monitor screens. Its more likely that they're IM-ing their girlfriends and flirting with boys on MySpace and downloading songs.

Part of me wonders when adults ceded responsibility for how learning should occur to the students. How far does an instructor have to go to keep learners interested in the topic? If learners are allowed to surf the Internet without repercussions in the classroom, how will they respond in the workplace?

I am not arguing that we should tell them to check their laptop at the door, or schools should turn off Internet access in the classroom. But there needs to be some guidance. At the very least we need to re-instill a belief that we should show all people the kind of respect and attentiveness that we would expect from others when we speak.

Or maybe, the lecture hall should become a thing of the past, a quaint anachronism akin to the chalk board and the fountain pen. If lectures can be recorded and streamed, if lecture notes can be posted, and assignments delivered via the class web site why do we need to bring the students together in one room

There are winners and losers with each new technology and maybe, for better or worse, the time of the formal educator, the sage-on-the-stage and the classroom is passing.

del.icio.us Tags: education

Pajamas Media » Blog Archive » Laptop U: Where No One Looks at the Professor

Symantec: Online Security Concerns Growing in the Workplace

2008-04-21T09:20:00.001-04:00

I started reading Neil Postman's Technopoly over the weekend in which he presented a piece from Plato's Phaedrus in which a god named Theuth presented to King Thamus the discovery of letters. Theuth praised his discovery because he said it "will make Egyptians wiser and give them better memories." But Thamus replied

O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Postman presented the piece to note that adoption of any technology, regardless of its potential, is a Faustian bargain in which a sacrifice must be made in return for the power offered by the technology. I offer this up because of the post I read this post on Campus Technology about security concerns surrounding Web 2.0 tools in the workplace.

Symantec has posted a pair of reports that reveal that workers "put themselves at risk whenever they check their MySpace and Facebook pages...all while at the workplace."

Among the key findings in Symantec's "Global Internet Security Threat Report" are some staggering numbers, including the 711,912 new threats discovered in 2007, compared to just 125,243 in 2006. That's an increase of 468 percent.
The report also highlighted several enterprise system weakness trends which are germane to IT pros looking to balance the new work/life spillover in their IT administration space. According to the report, 58 percent of respondent-documented vulnerabilities in the third and fourth quarters of last year affected Web-based software or applications. Of those vulnerabilities, 72 percent were deemed "easily exploitable."

In their second study, Millennial Workforce: IT Risk or Benefit?, Symantec unveils that:

66% of millnnials access Facebook/MySpace during work hours
75% access their personal webmail accounts
46% use IM on the corporate network
Less than 45% stick to company-issued devices or software

The report then goes on to call for CIOs to study what devices are being used in their organization, what applications are being downloaded, and to track movement of data and information. Based on this data they need to quantify and remediate the problem.

The bottom line is that in this age corporations need to be extremely sensitive to protecting its proprietary information as well as the information of its clients. At the same time, the Millennial generation is not going to blindly give up the technology it has grown up with. Corporations want to tap into the innovative spirit of the Millennials, but to do so they need to treat them as equals and not as children that should be seen, but not heard.

Symantec suggests that IT needs to educate its audience. "Use logic to communicate the risk, solution and benefit to your employees. Recognize that coaching the millennial workforce is more effective than educating."

I think that last line is the key. Corporations cannot just promulgate policies and post them as .pdfs on the corporate intranet and accept that as job done. Nor can it produce mind-numbing training sessions that basically rehash the policy. If there is going to be a zero-tolerance attitude toward IT security failures there needs to be greater communication and cooperation in developing and enforcing the policies.

del.icio.us Tags: technology

Do you want fries with that philosopher?

2008-04-03T15:35:00.001-04:00

This seems to represent the ultimate triumph of capitalism over all other ideologies.

One student took a far more critical view: We the students are the customers, the consumers, the ones who make the choice every day to pay attention or not. I pay approximately $30,000 to go here, whether I text in class or not. Laurence Thomas gets paid whether his students text in class or not. Does he think that this is the first time this has happened on any college campus? Had he acted like nearly 100 percent of the other college professors in this country, he would have shrugged it off and continued with his lecture, which he is getting paid to do. His deterring of the class and exit from the lecture only serves to highlight is own selfishness, as he will get paid while his paying students are having their time and money wasted. He needs to get over himself here.

Call me old-fashioned, but I side with the professor. An education should not be treated as just another throw-away commodity in our society. And a teacher should receive the respect he or she has earned from their scholarly endeavors. Hopefully the student quoted here is not typical. His or her attitude speaks volumes about their attitude towards the class. Of course I think the professor was being a bit childish in walking out on all of his students because of the actions of one or two.

Unfortunately this class is probably a prerequisite for most of these students and they don't really care about the topic. It does speak volumes about the lack of true learning opportunities in a venue in which one person is speaking to hundreds of learners.

If You Text in Class, This Prof Will Leave :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs

Help yourself to the elearning buffet

2008-03-19T16:10:00.001-04:00

Interesting couple of articles published in the last few days about the future of elearning. On March 11th, the Rapid eLearning Blog wrote a piece called How to Create E-Learning Courses That Don't Waste Your Learner's Time.

In that piece Tom Kuhlmann writes that many learners are taking elearning courses "because they have to, not necessarily because they want to."

For them, it’s a matter of getting in and out quickly and then back to work. This is not a commentary on the quality of the course or its content. It’s just that many elearning courses are compulsory and the person taking it isn’t motivated by learning the content.

Those people only want to see the essential information, take the required quiz, and get on with their lives. They don’t want to be held hostage by a course that has them clicking all over the place. Tell them what they need to know and let them go.

He then proceeds to offer up a series of recommendations that include creating courses that are not courses and identifying course requests that would really serve a greater purpose as a reference work.

Then today I received an email newsletter from the training zone, a training association based in Great Britain. They published a an article titled: Help yourself to the elearning buffet (free registration is required to view).

This article contends that today's generation is accustomed to networked technology and "lives its life on the web and has come to expect instant gratification...[they] are less accustomed to traditional methods of training, and prefer to be in control of when and where they consume information. The writer, Julian Dable, a regional manager for Travantis, thinks that, with an appropriate tweaking of how we perceive it, elearning is the solution to meeting the new web generation's needs for information solutions.

Elearning is a perfect balance between traditional learning and self-determined 'quick-fix' internet learning. Readily accessible, expert information from sanctioned subject matter experts is the safest and most practical way of getting information into your employees' hands. These days, widely available authoring software tools put power into the hands of subject matter experts who don't need to be technologically savvy to create training courses. They can integrate the power of multimedia audio and video to create engaging learning. Even better, such tools are easy to learn and the process can be contracted to a matter of hours or days rather than weeks.

His thoughts tend to gravitate toward moving elearning away from the traditional page turner and more towards a two-way communication structure where social frameworks can be built.

Help yourself to the elearning buffet - 19 Mar 2008

del.icio.us Tags: elearning,instructional design

Learning Visions: Accidental Learning

2008-03-17T17:06:00.001-04:00

Cammy Bean has a great post about accidental learning. Cammy quotes from Yo-Yo Ma's presentation for NPR:

Every day I make an effort to go toward what I don't understand. This wandering leads to the accidental learning that continually shapes my life.

- Yo-Yo Ma

I've found that I often follow links (not just on the Internet) to discover new things. Just the other day I was listening to Jimmy Buffett's CD Don't Stop the Carnival. It was not a regular music CD, but it seemed to tell a story. So I searched Wikipedia to find out more about it and discovered it is based upon a Herman Wouk book by the same name. Buffett and Wouk colloborated on turning it into a musical

Normally I would not think about reading a Herman Wouk book because I am conditioned to think that he writes war stories (Thank you ABC which produced Winds of War and War and Rememberance mini-series.) The only war-related theme in Don't Stop the Carnival occurs at the beginning when it is described how the United States came into possession of the island during World War II.

After that it is the story of the adventures of Norman Paperman, a New York PR man who decides to slow down after he suffers a mild heart attack by running a resort in the Caribbean. I am now deeply engrossed in a book I would not have known even existed if I had not decided to find out the reasoning behind the unusual CD.

Learning Visions: Accidental Learning

The Blogosphere Mapped

2008-03-13T12:55:00.001-04:00

Ever wonder about the size of the blogosphere? Are bloggers just talking to themselves? Matthew Hurst of Data Mining put together various maps of the blogosphere. This one shows the blogosphere as a social network. It appeared on Discover magazine's website in April 2007.

As expected the most populous site is the bold white spot marked with the number "1" and represents the political world.

The outlyers represent LiveJournal social networking sites (3), sports blogs (5), and pornography sites (6).

Other maps can be seen at Matt's blog, Data Mining: Mapping the Blogosphere.

del.icio.us Tags: web2.0,social networking,blogs

Recommended Books for Instructional Design

2008-03-12T13:08:00.001-04:00

BOOKSTOREAD.COM has compiled a collected list of recommended books on instructional design and technology.

The purpose of the Top Ten Lists is to showcase the bookshelves of leaders in the field. Currently, we are accepting nominations for eminent scholars, theorists, and practitioners in instructional design and technology whom we would like to request that they submit a top ten list of their most influential or important books in the field.

The list is kind of dated (nothing new since 2002), but still a good starting point for individuals interested in pursuing an informal education in instructional design. Hat Tip to John Curry, Ph.D., at EffectiveDesign.Org, for including it amongst his links this week.

del.icio.us Tags: instructional design,informal learning,learning

Social Media: Reducing friction and establishing a NEW discipline

2008-03-10T13:05:00.001-04:00

A fascinating piece on the role of social media (blogs, wikis, twitter, etc.) in the corporate world. Key nugget:

Social media is not so much about direct influence of revenue, but more of a market optimizer - which DOES impact revenue. Current revenue streams AND future opportunities. Essentially social media aids in making markets more efficient with pervasive communication, connectivity and real-time transaction capabilities. Its a fundamental change in market mechanics.

Read it all.

spatially relevant » Blog Archive » Social Media: Reducing friction and establishing a NEW discipline

del.icio.us Tags: socialmedia,social networking

Of Typecasting and Individuality

2008-03-08T07:41:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. What we did was wrong, but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay writing about who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us—in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.

From The Breakfast Club
a film by John Hughes

Back in January the weblog Cybernet displayed the image to the right as a Friday fun piece titled: Optical Illusion: Are You Right or Left Brained. The image originally appeared in the Sydney (Australia) Herald Sun in a short article about which side of the brain we rely on. The short article that accompanies the image states:

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

According to this I am extremely right brain dominant as I could only rarely see her move in any other direction than clockwise. About the only time I could see her move in a counterclockwise motion is when I glanced at the image of the corner of my eye without thinking. But can this picture tell the whole story?

Can one picture determine whether you are left-brained or right-brained oriented, I'm not convinced and the more I thought of it the more it seemed to me to be a cute parlor trick and nothing more. As I write this, I'm watching the image out of the corner of my eye and I can see it moving counterclockwise, but as soon as I turn my full attention on it it switches back to going clockwise. I think this may suggest that when I am concentrating on writing my right brain kicks in to organize my thoughts. When my brain is at rest my right side takes over control. But it made me think about the impact on learning. And I did some cursory research.

While we like to see clean black/white solution for these issues, we live in a messy world and while there is extensive research into this phenomena, science is not ready to say that there is a hard and fast drawing of the line regarding brain lateralization.

But this got me thinking about how we use categories and classifications to simplify our lives even in the realm of learning. There are still raging battles over how people learn.

Is it sensory-related experience with no thought to internal motivation as the behaviorists believe?
Should we be treated as biological computers that await to receive data input by an expert on which we then act as the cognitivists support?
Do we use data input to reach solutions on how to make sense of the world around us as the constructivists would have us believe?
Or do we learn best by recognizing that learning operates much like a computer network in that data is received from a variety of sources in a variety of forms and we teach as much as we learn as the connectivists would have us believe?

The passion that arises over these discussions sometimes rise above mere academic debate and harken back to a more clannish response as we take sides in the discussion. Personally, I see some relevance in each. Only the individual who is learning knows what is going on inside his or her head (behaviorism), and if we have no knowledge of a subject then we are certainly filling a void with new data that is provided by an "expert" or someone who proclaims to be an expert (cognitivism).

As this new information is received and processed we usually work to fit it into our existing knowledge base, weighing it against previous information to determine if it augments what we already know or it replaces previous knowledge (constructivism).

Finally, there is no strict separation between learners and teachers - and there never has been. We learn from one another in an ongoing dialog that occurs on a daily basis in our schools, workplace, and our social life as long as we remain open to the idea that we can be taught by anyone (connectivism). And this is probably the biggest impediment we face today.

I am fond of saying to my children that the civilization we claim to see around us is but a thin veneer covering our continued preference for our prehistoric ancestor's clannishness. We find comfort in listening to people who hold similar views as ours; there is safety in numbers.

And every clan had an alpha male or female that the clan looked to for guidance. He or she was the leader and the survival of the clan depended on everyone following the alpha's directions. That is why education has adhered so closely to the sage-on-the-stage approach to teaching. For the clan to survive we must all learn to think as the clan thinks.

So, until we as individuals recognize that there is no one right way of thinking learning will remain stunted by our "simplest terms" and "most convenient definitions."

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