Customize Your Home Page

In the past if you wanted to customize the home page in your browser you had only one choice - build your own own website and set your default home page in that browser to that website.

The advent of RSS feeds though has led to services providing customized home pages. One is iGoogle (so far no lawsuit from Apple on that name), another is Netvibes. To set up your own customized home page in Netvibes go first to www.netvibes.com. You should see this:

The first thing you will need to do is register -- do that by clicking on "sign in" in the upper right hand corner of the page.

Next you want to customize the content by adding feeds to websites you are interested in. to do that click in "add content" in the upper left hand corner of the page. A new navigation pane will open on the left hand side of the page:

























Click on "add a feed". That will open this window:













I happened to know what blog I would like to read regularly, so I typed www.cafehayek.com into the link box.

Netvibes looks to see if that blog has an rss feed. If it does you get something like th following box.



















It doesn't really matter which feed type you choose. Some blogs only offer one, some like this one offer lots of formats. All of them work in Netvibes. As soon as you click on one feed Netvibes adds a content module to your home page:



















The module lists the most recent posts in this blog. If you click on one you have a choice of views. The default view loads quickly:


Or this one -- prettier, but slower to load:





There are all sorts of widgets (little programs that do something for you). To access the most common click on the add content button again and then look under the widget tab (see left).

For example you can add a widget that shows you the weather forecast for your zip code:


























If you have a lot of blogs you enjoy reading you can organize them in pages or tabs. I have a page for general things and a page for education blogs:


The only thing left to do is go to your browsers option menu and set www.netvibes.com as your new home page. Now the news and commentary you are interested will be fed directly to you every day.

Lisa

Late Work Policies

Tis the season to talk to students who are unhappy with their grades and faculty who are unhappy with their students. Late work of course causes the vast majority of the student/faculty conflicts I mediate each semester. Today while surfing I saw this policy on a course David Wiley teaches:

Late Work Policy

If your work is ever late, I may or may not accept the work and may or may not penalize the work, depending completely on my possibly grumpy, biased, or elated mood. If this does not seem fair to you, then do not be late with your work.

I like it because it reflects my own -- I let students turn in work as late as they want (although before the end of the semester), but I noted that I truly hate to get a mass of grading the last week of class and will probably be extremely grumpy at the sight of it. They should reflect that grumpiness to be reflected on their grade.

My high school daughter has a math class this semester which allows late work up to a point -- 5 days. She hasn't managed to turn in all of her assignments because she does tend to let them pile up for the entire 5 days, however she is learning a valuable lesson her other teachers are skipping - she is trying to figure out how to manage her own schedule -- school, work, social, etc. I appreciate the math teacher for giving her this flexibility and of course the rope with which to hang herself. :^)

Lisa

OER

Today I listened to a conference presentation given by David Wiley:

http://opencontent.org/presentations/bcnet07/

A long time ago when I first started thinking about learning object repositories I used David Wiley's definition of learning objects. I was very enthusiastic about the whole concept of repositories. CCCOnline folks spent a lot of time researching software and looking at how to build repositories. Unfortunately that whole process has stalled over the years.

Why?

Because it's too complex. Today we have a repository of sorts, but we only have one or two people who can actually put objects into the repository and no one appears to be able to get them out again.

H'mmmm

In the Wiley presentation he talks about meta-tags versus folksonomies -- the tagging of the last few posts in this blog.

Certainly the idea of tagging does help solve the complexity issue of repositories. For example, for this post I wanted a picture of David Wiley. I went to Flickr and searched for one. And for what it's worth there are many to choose from. Tagging and an LOR in action. :^) The one above was taken by D'Arcy Norman and can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/1451331578/ .

Reuse versus Adaptation

I think I am building up to an anti-copyright rant again. Learning Objects aren't overly usable unless they are obviously open. This is also something noted in the presentation above. Whenever I get some cool object that requires a contract to use I drop it like a hot potato. Getting a contract signed in my educational system is a lot like praying for rain. It might take months and I really have no control over the process.

Step two is that I have to be able to adapt the object. To use the presentation analogy -- I typically don't want to just string a bunch of objects together and call them a class, I want to change them first. This is of course much more complex than that - there are some technical skills involved, but at the least I want to know that I can change the object. :^)

Lisa

No More Syllabus

Warning -- soap box!

I'm the Academic Dean for Colorado Community Colleges Online and in that role I often play referee between faculty and students. Far too often the dispute is around the acceptance of late work and the inability of all learners to meet all deadlines. I'm in the community college world, so most of our learners are adults with jobs, families, crises, and many activities with many levels of importance in their lives. As faculty (because I wear that hat also) our goal is to help the learner meet a set of learning outcomes with respect to our field. In our interaction with the learner that is actually our only official goal.

Learners are taking our classes with the goal of meeting those same learning outcomes.

The problem comes when meeting the class schedule becomes the primary learning outcome and when the learner's grade reflects, not her understanding of the course material, but rather her ability to complete all required course activities on time.

Faculty have some rights in this debate of course -- they are also adults who need to have some control over their own schedule and they also need a way to evaluate the learner's understanding of the material. In most educational settings however, the faculty appears to have all of the rights, all control over the course schedule, assessment schedule and type. How much better and exciting would education be if some of this control was ceded to the learner?

For a much better post on this topic read Tomorrow's Professor on Death to the Syllabus - http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2007/11/834_death_to_th.html#more.

A solution discussed in that post and in many other books (Learner Centered Teaching by MaryEllen Weimer for example) and articles is a jointly developed syllabus where learners help develop the activities by which they will be assessed. Another solution is a more traditional syllabus but with flexibility in assignments built in, from something as straight-forward as allowing learners to take 5 out of 7 exams (they choose which ones to drop) to a more complex set of assignments of which learners choose a certain number from several categories.

Ideas such as these will help keep learners engaged in the course while alleviating the conflict between measuring learning outcomes and measuring learners' ability to meet fixed schedules.

Lisa

More Encouragement for Open Source - Google Highly Open Participation Contest

From the Website (http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/)

Google is holding a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We will work with ten open source organizations for this pilot effort, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research.

The list of projects open for participation includes Moodle and Drupal - both exciting projects in the area of content management.

Lisa

Educational Rap

My teenagers even thought this was pretty good rap.

http://www.educationalrap.com/music/index.html

Lisa

Textbook Costs - Denver Post

The Denver Post recently ran a series of articles on the high costs of text books and student reactions to those costs. This quote is from the article by Howard Pankratz published on October 17th, 2007, Students Rally for Cheaper Books:

Throngs of students on the Auraria campus signed a petition today calling for cheaper textbooks and accountability by book publishers and university faculty that they hope will lessen their financial burden.

The petitions, to be sent to the Colorado legislature, asks legislators to take action this coming session.

"In many ways it — buying books — is like getting a root canal," said Chris Dezember, 39, a theater major at Metropolitan State College. "I spend $500 to $600 a semester on books. It gets costly."

College textbooks are a $6.2 billion industry, according to the National Association of Stores. The College Board estimates that students spent about $940 on books and supplies in the 2006-07 school year, a 30 percent jump in the past five years.

The most recent article (Collegians' book, tuition concerns on same page) quotes students as working towards a legislative solution:

Students from Colorado State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Metro State College and the University of Northern Colorado are already working together to push for legislation that would make textbooks cheaper.

I think most business people would see a legislative solution to high textbook costs as cumbersome and inappropriate. There are many other possible solutions among which is NROC and open source content for at least some courses.

Lisa

Tagging Part 3 - Philosphy

As tag clouds come to replace expert taxonomies in common practice, carefully constructed hierarchies vanish. In their place is a flattened world where every idea, at any level, is a topic as worthy as any other. Eight Mile is a topic at the same level as Detroit, which is a topic at the same level as Cities, which is a topic at the same level as United States, and so on.

http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0505a.shtml
Jeffrey Zeldman
May 5th, 2005

The relative importance of various tags was initially defined purely through frequency of use and denoted in tag clouds by size -- more use equated to a larger font size within the cloud. Less frequency of use was denoted by ever decreasing font sizes, thus the fear that important topics could disappear from the blogosphere or at least that their tags would get so small that only folks with magnifying glasses would see them.

One influential blogger may mention another blog in their post. That mention might cause several thousand other bloggers to go to the post and tag it. That in turn might cause several million more bloggers to tag the post for future reading and..... a new star is born. Interest in topics could explode, or appear to explode, but then wane equally quickly.

The second issue mentioned regularly with respect to tagging is navigation.

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1] Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 with social software applications such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. Websites that support tagging and the principle of folksonomy are referred to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and tagging data is used in new ways to find information. For example, tag clouds are frequently used to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. The term folksonomy is also used to denote only the set of tags that are created in social tagging.

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Nov. 26, 2007

Flickr is already beginning to solve this problem by applying more traditional hierarchies to their newest search tools, primarily the world map now available on their website. This isn't a perfect solution as it still depends on user generated tags, but it does make searching for pictures of a specific geographic area much more quickly.

The graphic above is from Flickr this morning -- 2.2 million photos geotagged this month. Below is a video about a use for all of those geographically tagged photos, a software called Seadragon.



Photosynth takes navigation to a new level.

Lisa

List of Open Content Resources

This list came from one Rhonda Epper of CCCOnline is compiling:


Open Content Resources:
MERLOT: http://www.merlot.org
Hewlett Foundation OER initiatives: http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/openEdResources.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu
Carnegie Mellon: http://www.cmu.edu/oli/
Harvard University Library Open Collections Program: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/
Rice University Connexions: http://cnx.rice.edu/
Morgue File - public images: http://www.morguefile.com/
Wikipedia.org: http://www.wikipedia.org
Wikibooks.org http://www.wikibooks.org
National Repository for Online Courses: http://www.nrocnetwork.org
CCCOnline's Custom Hippocampus: http://www.hippocampus.org/myHippo/?user=myccco
Internet Archive's "Moving Images" collection: http://www.archive.org/details/movies
Prelinger Archives: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger
Free videos produced by various PBS stations around the country: http://www.learner.org/resources/

From Jesse Stommel and Sean Law's Open Content ENG 121 course:
Etext library: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/mary/s53f/
Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/
Full etext with MP3 files: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=6542
Brevity - An online magazine of creative non-fiction: www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/index.htm
Plagiarism Article Database: http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism
Hpyerdictionary: http://www.hyperdictionary.com
Wikibook on Rhetoric and Composition: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition
The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing: http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu

Lisa

Tagging

Tagging deserves its own post beyond the incredibly handy programs like Del.icio.us.

If you use Web 2.0 sites like Flickr or gmail you are probably tagging. Tagging at its simplest gives individual users a way to organize web-sites and content for their own purposes. If you are a gmail user for example, you can now tag the mail you receive instead of file it. Because you can give a single email multiple tags you can "file" that email under password, conference, and education instead of having to choose just one location. When you need the email again you can find it if you search under any of those terms.

Social web-sites expand this concept. Try visiting http://technorati.com/. Technorati searches and compiles web-content by tag and organizes it so you can search for relevant (maybe) content. I visited this morning and searched on yarn.
The first thing you might notice is that Technorati found almost 58,000 mentions of the word yarn, which might strike you as a little scary. It then gives you links to many of the blogs and videos which mention yarn today. Technorati searchs blogs, but also searches social media - photos, videos, and music. There is a tag cloud on the home page that shows you which tags are most frequently used at that moment.

I was there this morning - Britney Spears is #2 on the list, much scarier than 58,000 hits on yarn (left). Wii is apparently really the hot Christmas present this year - number 7 on the list.

Flickr (the photo sharing site) users also tag their photos. Flickr has a new feature - they take those photos with a geographic tag and organize them on a searcheable map. This essentially organizes tags in a traditional, hierarchical manner for the benefit of users:
It's still not a perfect search tool -- users tag photos with words they will remember, not with words users traditional search on. In my case I wanted a picture of the Black Canyon outside on Montrose, CO. A search on Black Canyon found the one in Idaho (hadn't heard of that one before). I had to search on Montrose to find a picture of the Black Canyon I was interested in.

This is a picture someone named Ken Lund took and posted.






The trouble I had searching for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison brings up a critical issue with tags - they aren't hierarchical or organized in any traditional sense, other than frequency of use. Flickr's use of the map has begun to address this - you can look for North America, then US, then Colorado, a more traditional search path. The taggers though (that's all of us) generally don't have formal training in research methodology, so the accuracy of the tags is .... not necessarily very good.

Tag Clouds shown by sites that utilize tagging and rate media, and thus ideas, by the frequency of the use of a specific tagging term do change the world that we see. Is Brittney Spears really that much more important than Iraq? If your frame of reference is the tag cloud on Technorati she is. Certainly more people are tagging more items with her name than they are with Iraq. Will other critical ideas not get enough tags and so will their tag just shrink in size until they just disappear?

More later.

Lisa

Web-based Bookmarking aka Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Put your cans of spray paint away, we are all mature academics here, so "tagging" in this context means labeling websites with your keyboard. Tagging is a much larger issue than web-based bookmarking, so for the purposes of this blog I am going to take web-based bookmarking first and then expand to tagging and social bookmarking in general.

Long, long ago in the early days of the web if you wanted to save the URL of a website you had to type it into a list you stuck up somewhere safe and secure. A major improvement to that filing method was the bookmark option soon built into most browsers. That has drawbacks also though -- first you have to build appropriately named folders to file those links in and then you have to be able to remember which folder you put the links into. Almost worse, the bookmarks were only saved in one browser on one computer. As we begin to collect more and more computers and more and more browser options the bookmark we want is almost always on the "other" computer, the one you don't have under your fingertips at the moment you need the link.

Social bookmark software services solve both of those problems - they use a semantic tagging process to let you put more than one label on each website, increasing the likelihood you will be able to find it again in a couple of months and they exist online in an account that you can access from every computer everywhere

An example of of a web service that allows you to do this is del.icio.us. To use delicious you sign up for an account, which gives you a place to save URLs of web-sites that interest you. Many browsers will let you download and install a plugin for del.icio.us that allows you to access your account automatically from the browser. In Firefox the plugin looks like this:


The first button opens a tag search feature in your browser (next graphic), the second button opens the tagging window so you can tag the website you are currently accessing (third graphic).







If you do this enough you eventually develop your own tag cloud - set of tags you commonly use. You also contribute to the both general tag cloud and the tag clouds of your friends, thus the name "Social Bookmarking".

On Del.icio.us my list of recent links looks like this:

It's interesting to note that Del.icio.us notes for you how many other users have tagged the same web-site you just tagged.

On Del.icio.us's home page they link you to commonly used tags (this is a tag-cloud):
Tags that I have used that others are also commonly using are highlighted in red. This may be a not-so-subtle attempt to guide tagging semantics or just an interesting piece of social commentary. Tags that are used more often are typically larger than less frequently used tags. Tag clouds like this can be organized in a variety of ways, from size (frequency) to alphabetical to geographical.

Here's a link to a new video from Lee LeFever on Social Bookmarking: http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english



In the next post we'll look at various web-sites that extensively utilize tagging such as gmail and Flickr.

Lisa

Blogging Tips

Many of us are struggling with how to blog as well as why to blog. From a teaching perspective I think the why is pretty obvious -- that elusive connection between writing (okay typing) and learning. Reviewing your thoughts and getting them down on paper helps place them in long term memory.

How is a little more difficult. For me, the most important aspect of blogging is to keep in mind that blogs are about conversation; they aren't a formal writing opportunity. You all have peer review journals for that.

The first step to blogging is to read blogs; today I read a blog post on how to blog - http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/2007/11/11/my-advice-on-being-a-more-effective-blogger/

That blog also has a link to a "how to" on Google Reader, a reader for blogs. http://aquaculturepda.wikispaces.com/Subscribe. Personally I use Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) as my reader, but Google is easy to use also.

Lisa

50 Ways to tell a Story

Alan Levine of new Media Corp/CogDogBlog has a wiki linking to demonstrations of 50 different tools you can use to tell a story (give a lecture, highlight some course material, excite your students, add interest to your class). To check it out go to http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools.

The directions for how to tell a story are great also - http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways.

CogDogBlog is online at www.cogdogblog.com.

Lisa

Web 2.0: Comments

While I am planning on continuing to review more types of Web 2.0 tools I wanted to pause and comment on why. All of the Web 2.0 tools have strengths and weaknesses. And it is undoubtedly true that they add yet another layer of technical complexity to our courses. However they also give faculty new ways to move learners out of the course box. We all believe that the material covered in our courses is needed for more reasons than simply to check off on a transcript that a learner fulfilled that particular requirement. Web 2.0 tools give learners more ways to interact with the content and to apply it to their own lives in their own ways. By moving outside of the course box we tell send a powerful message that this content is important stuff and it belongs in their lives outside of the classroom. So give it a try--- move a piece of your course out into the world of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0: Wikis

In two words: group work. Faculty have been told for years that group work improves learner knowledge retention. We've also been told that knowing how to work in a group will be a critical skill for the employability of our learners. Most of us don't assign group work though because learners hate it, we hate it, and it's impossible to grade. Wikis are the tool that we've been looking for. First, the research:

Students learn best when they are actively involved in the process. Researchers report that, regardless of the subject matter, students working in small groups tend to learn more of what is taught and retain it longer than when the same content is presented in other instructional formats. Students who work in collaborative groups also appear more satisfied with their classes. (Sources: Beckman, 1990; Chickering and Gamson, 1991; Collier, 1980; Cooper and Associates, 1990; Goodsell, Maher, Tinto, and Associates, 1992; Johnson and Johnson, 1989; Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991; Kohn, 1986; McKeachie, Pintrich, Lin, and Smith, 1986; Slavin, 1980, 1983; Whitman, 1988) Barbara Gross Davis “Tools for Teaching” Jossey-Bass, 1993

Wikis allow you and your learners to avoid some of the common problems with group work. First, wikis can be asynchronous. Learners do not all have to be in one location at one time to edit a paper. The paper can live on the wiki, learners can access the wiki to edit the paper at a time that is convenient for them. They no longer have to pass the paper back and forth in email, losing control of who changed what when and ending up with a confused mess of edits in twenty-three different files. Instead, the wiki keeps track of who edited the paper and what they changed.


The graphic to the left shows a wiki in the open source software mediawiki. The tabs at the top of the page give your options. The article is in front now, but to edit it one only has to click on the edit tab. This particular wiki software also automatically builds in a discussion area for each article. So if learners want to discuss edits before making them that discussion is conveniently placed and archived for the faculty to see also.

The history page though is what makes group work possible from a grading perspective. That page archives every draft of the article along with who edited the article and what changes they made. Not only that Mediawiki has a nifty little compare button, so the instructor (grader) can truly see who added what information to the article. (See the graphic below.)
There are several examples of classroom use of wikis. The 1001 Flat World Tales wiki was started several years ago and now has a significant amount of student writing posted there.

Some faculty have chosen to use a wiki for their entire course, such as the screen shot from a Drexel University chemistry course below:

Wikis have the flexibility and tools needed for a variety of course projects, from traditional papers to learner-generated textbooks. Many wikis can also be password protected should your situation require that.

The simplest way to begin to use a wiki is to choose one that is hosted. www.wikispaces.com hosts wiki space at no cost to users. (To get rid of the ads you do need to pay a monthly or annual fee.) www.Siteground.com hosts mediawiki for less than $7.00/month and www.pbwiki.com hosts Peanut butter wikis.

CCCOnline has a tutorial for Mediawiki available at http://www.facultywiki.ccconline.org/index.php?title=Wiki_Tutorials.

Lisa

Authentic Learning Experiences

Had an interesting juxtaposition of two emails today.

The first was from Stephen Downes of OLDaily. Stephen was considering the research and arguments around authentic learning or constructivist learning. Essentially the research seems to support direct or guided learning more strongly than it does minimally guided or constructivist learning as sometimes implemented. Here's the link to that blog post: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/11/kirschner-sweller-clark-2006-summary.html.

The flip side was a link to a YouTube video produced by a Cultural Anthropology course, which is perhaps an example of a minimally-guided, group project more or less panning the current educational system. This one was actually posted on this blog a couple of weeks ago, but I am slow and didn't watch it until now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o



Lisa

Web 2.0: What about blogs?

Blogs can be divided into the same three varieties as podcasts: faculty written, student written, and outside source. Both faculty written blogs and outside sources fed into a class via RSS feed can add a great deal to a class.

A faculty generated blog written specifically for learners can let your learners know that their instructor is still interested in and maybe even passionate about their field. And if the instructor is passionate about the field maybe the learner should be also.

A faculty blog also allows the faculty to take note of current events as they happen and comment on them relative the the course content. Then, when the class reaches the section of the course material that is relevant to the comment posted a month ago it's there to direct learners to.

Blogs written by other practitioners in the field bring their own strengths. In the past many disciplines didn't have much informal writing available to learners. Thanks to blogs there are many thousands of prominent individuals commenting more or less daily on various aspects of discipline knowledge. Many of these individuals are writing in an accessible style very different from formal, peer-reviewed journals and learners who would never consider reading a journal may find blogs fascinating and interesting.

Some blogs not only add currency to a course, they also may add what is essentially a lecture on a specific topic that is not covered well in the course textbook or perhaps adds a different (and important) perspective. Learner generated blogs bring another perspective also and can add to the writers' understanding of the course content.

Many of the learning management systems used today include a blogging tool. Those that do not have a specific blogging tool probably include a threaded discussion tool that could be adapted to a blog. So why not just use those tools? Why bother to set up a blog outside of the course? The primary reason I see is audience. When learners complete written assignments in the classroom they are writing for an audience of 1. Instructors can ask them to pretend there are others who will read the work, but everyone knows that's not reality. Knowing your audience and understanding your audience is critical to good, effective writing. Using a blogging service outside of the password protected course environment gives the learner many other potential audiences. It's sometimes possible to make the audience from the non-classroom world formal – for example, by inviting a local historical society to read learner history blog posts.

An equally important second reason to consider requiring learner blogs is that they are a tool to encourage learners to reflect in writing on the course content. Reflection is an important step in knowledge retention. Too many learners simply cram for exams rather than thoughtfully considering material and reflecting on how the course content might be important in their lives.

If you are going to use blogs in a course then it's important to learn about RSS feeds. Learners are more likely to read the blogs you are reading if you feed the posts directly into the course shell. Doing this requires you to do a little coding in java script on a page in your course shell. Fortunately (for me anyway) you don't have to write the code by yourself, there are script generators available online. I used http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/138.html to generate the code required to add an RSS feed to a course in Blackboard Vista.


The above example isn't particularly attractive. It would be good to at least put it into a single cell table to address margin issues or maybe just pull in headlines from several posts (next image). The point though, is that this entry will change every time the author of the Cafe Hayek blog adds a new post, which in this case is typically several times a day. The instructor of the course can then use the blog posts to generate discussion in the discussion area of the course without having to search for new and timely topics on a regular basis.


So how do you get started with blogs? There are several free services available for hosting blogs such as www.blogger.com and www.WordPress.com. Before you dive into this it's also probably a good idea to read a few blogs. The top 100 education blogs can be linked to from this page – http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-education-blogs.

So begin enjoying the world of blogs!

Lisa

Web 2.0 Why? Podcasts

(Part of a series on the rationale for the use of Web 2.0 tools in online and hybrid courses).

Why would you consider using podcasts in on online course? Podcasts come in three essential varieties from a faculty perspective: faculty created, learner created, and outside source.

Faculty created podcasts can be used to add interest for learners and to convey faculty enthusiasm for a subject. It is difficult to convey an instructor's enthusiasm for the course material through text alone. An audio file (podcast) can warmly welcome learners to a class and let them know how excited you are about the subject and about the coming term where plain text can fall a little bit flat.

Audio files can also be used by learners to change the time and location of the course – correctly formatted they can be downloaded by learners and listened to at a later time and in a different place. Many of today's learners have MP3 players such as ipods that they can use to facilitate shifts in time and location.

Audio files may also catch a learner's attention when they aren't looking (literally) – think about the learner who starts the login process, then wanders off to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee. While waiting, an audio file starts automatically as soon as the login process is complete. The resultant noise may pull the student back to the class or at least remind them that they were doing something in the other room before they headed for the kitchen. And hearing a reminder that there is an assignment due on Wednesday at 3:00 may be more memorable than more traditional ways of imparting that information (text).

Unfortunately creating audio files is a technically challenging process that requires equipment and skills that not everyone has. The alternative is to use podcasts that others have created. An economics course I taught several years ago used a podcast from the University of Washington's Last Lecture series. The topic of the lecture was the “Morality and Ethics of Capitalism”. That was a wonderful discussion topic with which to begin a class on basic economics. Podcasts which are updated on a regular schedule are a great way to keep your class current and to encourage learners to listen to the same material you listen to on a regular basis. If you encourage your iTune addicted students to subscribe to the podcasts you like from within iTunes they will get the updates automatically.

Speaking of which, a source for academically oriented podcasts is iTunes University. To see what is available go to the iTunes music store and look for the iTunes University. Most lectures are free. You can also google iTunes University to see a list of the many schools that are offering lectures in this format. MIT's Open Courseware project is there for example, as is Stanford U.

What about learner generated podcasts? I still think there are problems with this, primarily on the “ease of grading” side. I do think it's great for students to work with the course content in any way you can get them to. To create a podcast someone has to develop a script, which of course implies someone did the research required to write that script. From that perspective, allowing learners to create podcasts is a very good thing. You just encouraged them to spend a significant amount of time working with the course material. On the other hand, the faculty then has to listen to the podcast. That has to happen in real time, possibly more than once. Faculty need to be watchful of their time in this case.

Lisa

Web 2.0 Why?

Wiki's and Blogs and Podcasts, Oh Why!?

Last month CCCOnline surveyed our faculty on their training and professional development needs. Like most surveyors we included a comment section. One frequent response from faculty in that section was the question “Are we expected to use all of these new technologies in our classes?” If we answered “Yes!” to that question the follow-up would almost certainly be “Why?” Web 2.0 has brought with it a myriad of tools for adding content, editing content, and shaping what students see and do on the web. A critical question to ask though is “Why?” Why would we choose to use one of the new tools rather than those that are already built in to the learning management systems we are already using. What do these tools add the the learner experience?

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 has been called the teaching and learning web (Rob Stephenson, NROC presentation spring 2006). The web is transitioning from its original incarnation as a set of websites developed by a group of people and looked at by the rest of us. Web 1.0 was all about providing information more or less instantaneously. Web 2.0 expands the original group of web developers to include the rest of us. Now anyone with a computer and an internet connection can not only surf the web looking for information they can provide information through use of a free blog, a picture or video sharing site, or a more complex website such as a wiki.

In Web 2.0 users control the information flow through the use of personalized home pages (google, or netvibes perhaps) with RSS feeds from their favorite blog or news sites. Users create social networks through communities such as MySpace and FaceBook. In all of these spaces users decide what information goes up and how it is formatted. Web 2.0 is all about user control.

Web 2.0 Tool Examples:

• Customized Homepage - Netvibes, Google
• Tagging - Del.icio.us
• Pictures - Flickr, Picassa, Buzznet, Deviantart, Photobucket
• Video - YouTube
• Blogging - Blogger, WordPress
• Podcasts - podcast.net, podcastpickle.com
• Sharing - MySpace, Eduspaces, Facebook
• Virtual Worlds - Second Life, Croquet
• Wikis - Wikipedia
• Slideshows – Slideshare

Over the next couple of months I am planning a series of posts that will try to answer the “Why?” question for several popular Web 2.0 applications in the context of thier use in either an online or hybrid (partially online) course. First up -- podcasts, followed by blogs and wikis.

Lisa Cheney-Steen

Why use Web 2.0 Tools

For those of you who attended the webinar I gave last week on why to consider using web 2.0 tools in your class, here is an example of a class assignment using Wikipedia: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/29/wikipedia.

This article is a report on a presentation at the Educause conference last week given by Martha Groom, faculty at University of Washington. She asks students to write an article for Wikipedia, which requires them to write for a much larger audience than herself and also to learn to write an encyclopedia article.

Lisa Cheney-Steen

Students view on outmoded education methods

Clicking on the title will take you to a great student video (Utube)commentary on the gap between students' concepts of learning today and the state of traditional educational institutions. It capture the zeitgeist of youth culture in college!

It's getting better

Now that I'm in my second year of college I'm almost finished with my general education courses. Thus, more of my schedule is devoted to my major and I have more fun at school. I've noticed that now I'm not at the bottom rung of my program that professors are putting more work into the 'experience' of their class. To explain, in my GrC 101 class (Grc = Graphic Communication, my major) the professor gave us a complementary copy of his book and put some very rudimentary PowerPoint slides online. Most of my freshman classes followed suit with a fairly simple textbook and the occasional reminder to check Blackboard for the Powerpoint.

While some of my courses still adopt that method, things are starting to make a noticeable change. GrC 331, for the sake of contrast, has no textbook. When my professor explained that no book existed that made him happy I got a little nervous. That all changed when we were given 5 amazing handouts that he designed himself before listening to a lecture that instead of having a deck of PowerPoint (or Keynote) slides was based entirely on class discussion, drawings on the board, watching his desktop via projector and various hardware examples that he had brought in. After 3 weeks of class every lecture has created a similar experience: active learning via the use of technology in the classroom.

Not to dismiss my experience in 101, it was a wonderful course taught by our hilarious and engaging department head, but this class is just more fun. More importantly, I will remember all of this. By our professor's work of creating his own support material I have exactly what I need to support the coursework. Because he is so adept with his Powerbook I go into lab already understanding how software works. By watching him use and explain different pieces of equipment in lecture I can recall why that gadget is so important (and so expensive).

I have carried a theme of "get online!" in other posts but after only 3 weeks in the course I can already see the benefits of technology in the classroom as a supplement to material. While I may have had to wait for a class like this because there is more material in a 300 level course than a 101 course, the evidence it pretty clear. It works. Maybe I can fish for comments here...does this hold true in other disciplines? Is the extra work of integrating more 'active' material worth the result in student participation?

New school year

Summer is winding down and school is approaching. Being the person that I am, I spent a fair amount of my summer within arm's reach of my HP laptop. While at my apartment in San Luis Obispo I had readily available wireless access to keep up on work with MITE, stay in touch with my family via email and talk to college friends with Facebook. When I was able to go home and it was too hot for frisbee we'd play games and get on YouTube with the Wii. On vacation I had my laptop and my acoustic guitar and spent nights tracking my summer writing.

With school less than 2 weeks away, however, it's almost time to say good bye to most of these habits. I won't be home nearly as often and with spotty wireless coverage anywhere but the library my email will sit unread until late each evening. With studying, reading assignments and homework the Wii will sit idle and my guitar won't be recorded again until winter break hits in December.

It seems a little odd to me, especially as a student at a Polytechnic school, that my 'many technologies' will go nearly unused during the school year. I am in a fairly computer-based major so I will have occasional assignments that require me to use Creative Suite and upload files to Blackboard, but note the word 'occasional'. In most cases that really means 'if you don't finish in class'.

This leads me to a question suggested to me by Ruth, do faculty want us or support us in using the technology we know so well? You would be hard pressed to find a college student that doesn't know how to shoot or do simple editing on digital photos, to organize a music library containing thousands of songs, to check email from a cell phone...we use technology nearly constantly. Socially and in terms of entertainment we're more productive and efficient than ever before, we can carry every song we've ever heard, make phone calls and surf the internet from our pocket.

With the first generation of true technology natives coming into place, do administrators and faculty understand what we're capable of'? I would love to hear from faculty, teachers, educators or anyone involved in learning, would you want to implement these technologies into learning?

National Conference Season

The MITE Team is on the road, traveling the country to participate in a growing number of conferences about education, technology and online learning. National conferences tend to bunch up in the fall, but we also present, conduct workshops and organize round tables throughout the year at smaller, focused, regional conferences. We especially enjoy hooking up with NROC members to share tales and ideas.

Each year there are a few consistently popular topics that pop up across most, if not all, of the conferences. As one would expect, these themes show up when they are somewhere between the second stage of innovation and becoming mainstream. Conferences are one of best venues for spreading innovation beyond pioneers. When a conference room is packed with faculty and staff learning about educational applications of games, virtual reality environments, podcasts and web. 2.0 tools, you can expect to see the tools turning up in classrooms and online programs in non-tech subjects at a campus near you.

This year we continue to see standing-room-only sessions around tools that allow instructors and students to co-create immersive and interactive learning. Techie-pioneers were presenting earlier versions of such tools in previous years; now practitioner-pioneers share their reflections on the realities of using the tools to teach. Educators who advocate for more constructivist learning methods should be delighted at the abundance of these types of tools coming into mainstream use.

It's very encouraging to see an increase in sessions on two important non-tech subjects, which we at MITE have been pushing for a few years: sustainable models for open education resource (OER) projects, and inter-institutional collaboratives for developing and sharing digital content. We'll share some new ideas and highlights as we hear them out there.

What other topics are hot this year? We'll report back from the conference circuit, and welcome your comments.

Meeting MITE

I was extremely lucky to spend part of my Tuesday in Morro Bay, CA with members of the MITE team. Loredana, another intern from Poly, and I carpooled up to meet with the team during a meeting, have some lunch and talk about technology and education (shocking!) and get to know each other.

As a high school student I had a few lame part time jobs, bottom of the food chain type positions where my superiors liked me but I was replaceable and we all knew it. MITE, however, welcomed their two students like we had been with them for years. It was an incredible feeling having several experienced professionals not only ask serious questions about what I've been working on but to then complement my work and discuss future potential. Top it off with a great lunch and delivery of a paycheck, it was a full afternoon.

One of our discussion topics after lunch turned to the question of how often am I using technology for things completely outside my education. And I realized...almost always! My major is fairly lab and computer intensive and so when I am at school I can be found working on a press, sitting behind a big Apple monitor, proofing sheets, etc. But once I leave it pretty much stops. I may have lab assignment to finish at home, work on a document in Photoshop or Illustrator, but that's it. I program things into my GPS unit, send my lovely girlfriend text messages on my phone, carry my laptop on campus to check email, design webpages at home for my ska band, post comments on Digg...notice anything? Though all of those things are pretty enjoyable, the entire reason I live in San Luis Obispo is to go to school but it seems like once I'm off campus that experience stops.

MyROC? ROCbook? Something like that.

I think I have laid down the foundation of what I would like to see in the online student-professor environment, I figure I can lay down my "dream system" for stimulating online communication at the academic level.

Right now I only have to remember my Cal Poly email address and my password. That aspect can stay the same, adding additional user names and more passwords and authentication systems would only make things challenging. Students, professors and administrators would all be able to log on. Just like we invite our friends to events and form social networks, professors would establish online groups for individual classes, allowing students to get in touch with the entire class and an instructor from a single webpage. Message boards and folders to upload content would allow discussion and collaboration for labs and projects, leading to peer evaluation and a stronger group dynamic. Professors can upload resources such as lecture notes, podcasts of lectures, relevant external links (to NROC?) and provide feedback on student discussions. Online assignments/assesments would be a possibility, allowing busy students more flexibility in their study schedule. Professors could even create a hybrid environment that allows students to take the class while on a campus while other students are taking the class remotely, all contributing and sharing with each other via this online hub.

A system like this could really be quite simple, it doesn't need to be complex. It shares some similarities with school networks already in use and could make use of the great features developed by NROC, specifically the robust social network and online database.

This may be a ways off and surely would be a large undertaking, but it sure would be nice.

Just a little more.

I think that as I write for this blog I'll devote each post to a very specific idea, hopefully keeping my thoughts a little more cohesive. Now that I've finished my first year of college the thing that is most clear to me is that the time I spend online for school is very one-sided, that is, there is almost no interactivity. If I have to login to my Portal (Poly's online network) than it is typically just to check for email from a professor, see if test grades or posted or start planning a schedule for the upcoming quarter.

I wouldn't consider Poly's system bad, everything I have ever needed to do online has worked quite well, however, I would definitely consider it under used. Friends of mine in the College of Engineering are participating in online discussion groups about projects, taking online quizzes that provide instant feedback and submitting assignments digitally. Many of these professors have a highly technical background and can manage the content and information necessary to make this happen. Over in the College of Liberal Arts the situation is quite different, I rarely find more than grades.

To sum things up, instances such as this call for software intended for educators not to necessarily substitute classroom content but to facilitate online communication with students. Some professors, though highly skilled in a particular field, may not have extensive computer skills or may have too heavy a workload to manage physical and virtual classrooms. Mass market online communities like Facebook and MySpace posses some of the necessary qualities: they are very easy to use, allow a wealth of media to be easily shared among a group of people and allow easy communication between large groups. If a product could be produced that takes some of these qualities but tailors them to education, distributing Word documents and Keynote/Powerpoint slides, Flash tutorials, etc., then studying for an exam of collaborating with other students could change radically and lead to increased productivity for both students and professors.

A student's view

Hello, all -

As a new contributor to MITE and NROC I'm excited to start posting with views on education and the Internet from the view of a college student. To start, I am attending California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo, a school known mostly for it's programs in engineering and architecture although the list of majors is quite extensive.

To provide an underlying theme to my future posts, my main hope is to see my personal use of the Internet expand beyond just social networking and emailing my family back at home. As a graphic design student I am fascinated by the prospects of Web 2.0. As I look at sites like Digg and Facebook and seeing how much interesting and exciting content can be created and how such a strong sense of community can be fostered by intuitive, functional software, I'm eager for the same technology to spread to more "practical" aspects of everyday life, particularly as a student, education. With the software that is available and the strides that have been made by current designers and programmers, there is no reason that a majority of my web usage shouldn't be dedicated to expanding my education.

Hence, I find myself working on projects and writing in this blog for MITE, hoping to contribute in someway to this goal of taking the web off the sidelines and putting it at the forefront as a functional tool.

Teaching with Web 2.0 technologies

Hello from the TTIX conference in beautiful Orem, Utah. The snow-capped mountains ringing the valley a sparkling with new snow, in June!

I'm attending a conference sponsored by Utah Valley State College called the "Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Conference." It's a great regional conference model, hosted by the distance learning team at UVSC and free to participants. UVSC invited proposals about using technology in teaching and gathered peers from around the region and afar.

Not surprising, the most common themes at the conference were collaboration and using Web 2.0 tools. Blogging, Wikis, Google Tools, Podcasting, Second Life and more. The sessions included presentations and hands-on workshops. I did a presentation and a workshop on social authoring. All the sessions where recorded for others to view in the future.

If you live anywhere in the Utah area, or just want an excuse to visit, watch for the conference next summer. One gentleman traveled from Ankara Turkey to present and share ideas, but most participants came from Utah and neighboring states.

Watch for our NROC webinars on Web 2.0 tools and on social authoring, or catch one of my upcoming presentations at the League's College Summit, Distel2, ALN or CIT.

- Ruth

More SL Sites

A couple of participants from today's SL webinar sent in great SL sites:

From Sharon Taylor:

June 5, 2007, 1:00 PM EST

Designing Effective Asynchronous Learning in the Virtual 3D Environment

Seminar Leader: Christopher Keesey, Ohio University Without Boundaries

Ohio University has recently opened one of the first and most comprehensive virtual campuses of any research institution in the country. The campus was built in the Internet-based virtual world called Second Life. This seminar will use Second Life as a frame for discussing how virtual environments like Second Life can enhance learning through asynchronous or simulation-style exercises. Developments like Ohio University's effort demand that educators think creatively about how to exploit the potential of these kinds of resources. That is to say, how do we seize the opportunities that virtual worlds provide to drive learning forward, as opposed to simply extending the traditional classroom model of learning?

Register: http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/ > http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/register.cfm

Produced and hosted by ULiveandLearn, the Innovate-Live Portal, featuring Innovate-Live webcasts and Innovate-Live discussion forums, is the interactive centerpiece of Innovate. http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/

And From LisaMarie Johnson a link to the list of accepted proposals for another SL conference - http://collegeenglish.wikispaces.com/SLBPE2007AcceptedProposals

best,
Lisa