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December 2008

12/30/08

A MUST READ: The End -- from Portofolio.com, by Michael Lewis; my thanks to Mr. Joe Byerwalter for this link
NOTE: The language is not appropriate for kids.

End of Wall Street

From DSC:
Greed is at the heart of this matter...and speaking of hearts, we Americans need to tend to our often cold and non-caring hearts, which also contributed greatly to the problems that we are now facing. It's a very disturbing article; and it points out the critical need for all of us to be standing on solid moral ground. Don't get me wrong, I know that I'm a sinner (and so is everyone else) and my sin is ever before me. But when you mess with other peoples' lives, money, and futures...you need to have your feet on some solid ground and at least strive to do the right thing!

It also points out that we Americans don't often want to hear the truth until we have to hear the truth or until we need someone to point the finger at and blame for the issues we face. For example, how many politicians have been discarded in the past because they delivered some harsh, unpopular truth and plans of action? This same thing happened to some of the prophets of old who had to deliver some unpopular truth. Perhaps these struggles will be the 2x4 onside our collectives heads to get our attention and move towards caring about others.


The Smart Way to Study -- from UC San Diego, by Inga Kiderra
UC San Diego Researchers Report on How to Improve Long-Term Learning

7 Things You Should Know About Lecture Capture -- from Educause

5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML 5 -- from the Read/Write Web


12/29/08

Using the “Bible” as the Ultimate Electronic Textbook Template -- from A Piece of My Mind, by Scott Floyd -- which links to youversion.com:

YouVersion

From DSC: I can hear some of you saying, "This Dan guy is crazy...he's off his rocker... he's carrying this online stuff waaaaaay too far." But why can't believers use the Internet & its potent communication technologies to discuss matters, share information, build community, and develop relationships all over the world? Why should the church be left out of this? Wasn't there something about a Great Commission in the Word? You may think this is crazy, but instead, I have it that it's crazy to leave this incredibly-powerful source of information, influence and relationship to the typical worldly ways of doing things.

Stop The Presses … [Digital Daily]  -- from All Things Digital by John Paczkowski

"The Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of national and international news. That’s the axiomatic conclusion of a new survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that proves irrevocably what anyone with even a passing interest in the news business has known for some time now."

Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall (emphasis DSC). That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet. Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry — the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors. A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it.

- News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch

From DSC:
This quote applies to education as well. The disruptive affects of the waves from Internet-related technologies have started to crash in on the beaches of higher ed already...and will continue to do so for years to come. And...like the waves of the ocean, we don't know when they will be stirred up, just that they will be stirred up at some points...and we can't stop it. Instead, we need to prepare to embrace such waves of change. Better to be on the front/top side of the wave than trying to swim up the back of one...

Also see:
Internet Overtakes Newspapers As News Source
Biggest Stories of 2008: Economy Tops Campaign

The state of e-learning, 2008 -- from Tony Bates

State of the blogosphere 2008 -- from Derek Wenmoth

Futurist Top Ten for 2009 and Beyond -- from the World Future Society

The reality of virtual schools: A review of the literature

Technology changing how kids learn - Wyoming Tribune-Eagle  -- from Educational  Technology
When Chris Black wanted students to see the school their Christmas pen pals attend, she chose a mouse instead of a map to help her. Using a Web site and downloaded program called Google Earth, she quickly found Jacksonville, Fla., and zoomed in on an aerial view of the students' school there. She projected the image from her computer onto a SMART Board so her third-graders at Anderson Elementary could see the school whose students sent a Christmas letter. She also found an image of Anderson Elementary and displayed it on the SMART Board as well.

Tips for Photographers for Working with Web Designers -- from Digital Photography School

A World Enslaved – link from Miguel Guhlin, by E. Benjamin Skinner
There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. True abolition will elude us until we admit the massive scope of the problem, attack it in all its forms, and empower slaves to help free themselves.

From DSC: Though we hear things about slave trades from time to time, this is a horrific situation! We here in the United States often think that this is behind us...having experienced abolition a ways back. But slave trades are definitely occurring -- and in various forms -- what can/should we do about it?

Ultimate Portable PC Troubleshooting Guide -- from Miguel Guhlin
Miguel states, "...what a great article that outlines a list of programs to use for a variety of problems you'll be sure to encounter when working on someone else's (e.g. your brother-in-law) Windows computer (uh, the best solution is reformat and load UbuntuLinux)."

Studio4Learning -- from Miguel Guhlin
"...www.studio4learning.tv is a library of free middle & high school plus freshman year college tutorial videos. Over 1600 video clips on all core curriculum topics."

Studio4Learning

Q: And what do you do? A: I’m a cloudworker -- by Janet Clarey
"The way I see it, you’ve got two types of information workers at your organization. You’ve got ‘cloudworkers’ who will define what they need. They won’t feel the need to rely on you. They won’t limit their professional development to what you provide. They will use the tools and technologies that fit them. They will develop (and have developed) their own social networks. Their identity and content is ‘out there’ in the cloud. ‘Here I am and here’s what I’ve got to offer.’ This means learning anywhere at anytime. In a house. With a mouse. In a box. With a fox. Here or there. Anywhere."

Separating Real From Fake on the Internet -- from the New York Times, by Jenna Wortham

International Society for Technology in Education

"Study blog" at Cramster.com

Digital Storytelling with Web-based Tools -- from Around the Corner, by Miguel Guhlin

Microsoft weighs pay-as-you-go computing -- from CNN.com's Technology section
Microsoft has applied for a patent on metered, pay-as-you-go computing. The application details Microsoft's vision of a situation where a standard PC is given away or heavily subsidized. The consumer then pays to use the computer, with charges based on length of usage time and performance levels.

College students flocking to online classes -- from the Boston Globe
The current financial crisis is expected to further the trend.
"In these tough economic times, with unemployment up and higher costs for heating and transportation, we will inevitably see the appeal of online education grow," said Frank Mayadas, program director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "The survey results demonstrate that online education is increasingly playing an important role in higher education."

From DSC: This trend supports my thoughts on the "Forthcoming Walmart of Education".

The Higher Education Academy (UK)
Our vision is for students in UK higher education to enjoy the highest quality learning experience in the world. Our mission is to support the sector in providing the best possible learning experience for all students. Our strategic aims are to...

Also see their resources page and The Future of Higher Education Teaching and the Student Experience

Trends Shaping Education 2008 -- from the OECD
The OECD recently published a report into Trends Shaping Education 2008:

  • Ageing OECD Societies
    - Fewer children - birth rates well down since the 1960’s.
    - we start parenthood later
    - Living longer
    - Changing age structures
  • Global Challenges
    - Our crowded planet
    - International divides of affluence and poverty
    - Populations on the move
    - Global environmental challenges
  • Towards a New Economic Landscape
    - The global economy
    - Knowledge-intensive service economies
  • The Changing World of Work and Jobs
    - Lives less dominated by work?
    - Less securely attached to the labour market?
    - Women at work
  • The Learning Society
    - Educational attainment
    - Rising investments in education
    - Global educational patterns – inequalities and student flows
  • ICT: The Next Generation
    - The digital revolution
    - The expanding World Wide Web
    - Towards Web 2.0?
  • Citizenship and the State
    - Changing forms of political participation
    - The role of the welfare state – smaller government?

And the 2008 winners are….
The winners of the 2008 Edublog Awards are….

Edublog Awards

Studywiz (Europe)
Studywiz is a dynamic Becta approved learning platform for schools. It is a key tool in transforming education to address 21st century needs. Studywiz allows schools to meet government initiatives with the capability to link seamlessly to other systems, environments and content. Its inherent flexibility makes customisation easy and it has the potential to extend future use with specialised modules.

It provides an online space where educational content of all types is collected, organised and managed to create an enriched learning environment and curriculum for students. Studywiz gives teachers a unique tool for elevating instruction through personalised, collaborative and interactive learning and real-time assessment and results, and it supports parental participation in learning.

Studywiz is the learning platform of choice for major local authorities and schools in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Our UK office is comprised of a dedicated team of project development, curriculum support and technical specialists. Worldwide, Studywiz is deployed in more than 22 countries including the USA, Australia and China.

The Mobile Professor -- from the University of Manitoba & George Siemens
The internet continues to make geography irrelevant for many daily activities. Certain activities, such as banking, shopping, and information access, no longer require a visit to a physical location. Within corporate environments, companies like IBM anticipate a future where over 50% of employees are mobile without a physical office. What about higher education? While it’s unlikely that traditional universities will do away with physical learning environments, many faculty members find attending conferences, conducting research, and related activities are now possible without a disruption to teaching schedules. To address the various blurring responsibilities (such as teaching an online course while simultaneously attending a conference, or having data stored on a laptop for travel as well as a desktop at the office), new mindsets, tools, and skills are required. This session will explore ways for mobile faculty to manage information, use tools for interacting with learners, and employ technologies for coping with information abundance.

A Thousand Words - Storytelling and Editing -- from lights, camera, learn! by Frank Guttler

21st Century Pedagogy -- from 21st Century Classrooms
Definition: Pedagogy - noun the profession, science, or theory of teaching.
How we teach must reflect how our students learn. It must also reflect the world our students will move into. This is a world which is rapidly changing, connected, adapting and evolving. Our style and approach to teaching must emphasise the learning in the 21st century.

21st Century Pedagogy

The key features of 21st Century Pedagogy are:

  • Building technological, information and media fluencies [Ian Jukes]
  • Developing thinking skills
  • Making use of project based learning
  • Using problem solving as a teaching tool
  • Using 21st C assessments with timely, appropriate and detailed feedback and reflection
  • It is collaborative in nature and uses enabling and empowering technologies
  • It fosters Contextual learning bridging the disciplines and curriculum areas

Last Major VHS Supplier Throws In the Towel -- from All things Digital and Ars Technica

SMARTBoards and my 2008 Top Five List - Science -- from Teachers Love Smart Boards

12 Days of iPod touch and iPhone -- from Learning in Hand by Tony Vincent
Here's a listing of my 12 Days of iPod touch posts:

  1. Palm vs. iPod touch
  2. iPod touch and Comics
  3. iPod touch and Math Practice
  4. Installing iPod touch Apps
  5. iPod touch and Animations
  6. iPod touch and Podcasts
  7. iPod touch and Microphones
  8. iPod touch and Games
  9. Linking to iTunes and App Store
  10. iPod touch and Quizzes
  11. iPod touch and Homepages
  12. iPod touch Tips

HOW TO: Use Google Reader (RSS) Like A Rockstar -- from Mashable

The 10 Key Components Of An Ideal Learning Environment And The Timba Music School Model -- from Robin Good

  1. Open access
  2. Learning objects
  3. Passionate peers
  4. Elders
  5. Models
  6. Professionals
  7. Opportunity To Try, Experiment and To Be Wrong
  8. Showcase - Perform - Put Into Practice Publicly
  9. Learning From Each Other, Just-in-Time, With No End (or Exam) in Sight
  10. Learners' in the Driver Seat

Group Project from Cambridge University
This youtube video shows a winning group project from computer science undergraduates from Cambridge University.

Seeing the Future in NPR’s Custom News Podcast -- from the NY Times, by Saul Hansell National Public Radio has introduced a nifty little feature that lets you create your own custom podcast of NPR content on topics that interest you. Type in Obama or Madonna or whatever, and you can sign up for a stream of NPR clips that match your keywords that can be downloaded to your computer, smartphone, iPod or Zune.


12/19/08

IN DEPTH: iPhone/iPod Touch apps for education PART 1 -- from the New Media Consortium by Keen Haywood

iPhone/iPod Touch apps for education

T=Machine -- blog from Adam Martin, recent keynote speaker at ARGs in Charity & Education Conference
Internet Gaming, Computer Games, Technology, MMO, and Web 2.0

iPod touch and Podcasts -- from Learning in Hand by Tony Vincent

Below links are from the NDLR Modern Languages’ Community of Practice

Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom -- from Joe Dale; may be more for K-12
Joe offers practical tips and advice on using ICT to enhance the teaching of modern foreign languages.

There’s something going down on Facebook. Pay attention. -- from Brad Ward and Mark Greenfield

But for 500+ schools? Owning the admin rights to groups equaling easily 1,000,000+ freshman college students? That’s huge. Think of it: Sitting back for 8-10 months, (even a few years), maybe friending everyone and posing as an incoming student.  Think of the data collection. The opportunities down the road to push affiliate links.  The opportunity to appear to be an ‘Admin’ of Your School Class of 2013. Alumni down the road.  The list of possibilities goes on and on and on.

Best of CSS Design 2008 -- from Nick La

Capzels -- from Interactive Multimedia Technology blog, by Bryan Alexander
Capzles is an interactive multimedia story timeline that I found when looking for timelines about the financial crisis. Meltdown 101 was created by TruthDig, a member of the Capzles community. Capzles can contain audio, video, blog post, photos, and other forms of content. More information can be found on the Capzles website.

Tutorials re: Adobe After Affects and motion graphics -- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio. Also see PSDTUTS, VECTORTUTS, and AUDIOTUTS. AETUTS is a brand new site from the TUTS+ family by Envato for Adobe AfterEffects.

Tutorials

Web Designer Wall-- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
Web Designer Wall serves as Nick La's public blog where he posts his design ideas, tutorials, and talks about modern web design trends.

N.Design Studio-- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
Here, Designer Nick La focuses mainly on designing stock icons, illustrations, and beautiful CSS websites.

The Art Book

Un-Guaranteeing Tuition Prices -- from InsideHigherEd.com
"As college tuitions have continued to escalate, and to rise significantly faster than the rate of inflation, political and public pressure has grown on campus leaders to rein them in. Success has been sparse; a few have frozen their prices or slowed their rates of increase, and a handful have experimented with cutting tuition outright, challenging the conventional wisdom that doing so sends a message to students and families that their quality is declining."

Back from November 24, 2008:
Minnesota wants 25% of education online:

Pawlenty wants more online ed at state schools -- from Saint Paul Legal Ledger's Capital Report, by Charley Shaw, Staff Writer
Expert says call for in-state tuition for out-of-state students for online classes is right on

U. of Michigan Buys Huge Pfizer Complex in Ann Arbor as Research Ambitions Grow -- from The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Goldie Blemenstyk
Talk about seizing the moment: Two years after Pfizer Inc. announced that it was closing its giant research complex in the University of Michigan's hometown of Ann Arbor, the university approved a deal on Thursday to buy the site for $108-million. The university plans to use the...


12/18/08

100 top sites for the year ahead -- from The Guardian (UK); link from Derek Wenmoth
Two years after we last picked the web's cream of the crop, our latest selection finds that location-based services, work-anywhere collaboration and video are prominent

The 2008 Edublog Awards

2008 edublog Awards

35 Excellent Church Websites - Part Two -- from Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design
Several months ago I published 50 of the Best Church Websites, which has been one of the more popular posts on the blog. Since I published that collection I’ve come across many other noteworthy church sites, so I thought I would add a second post on the topic. For those who never work on church websites, these are great sources of design inspiration in general. If you do work on church sites, I’m sure you’ll appreciate these as well.


12/17/08

Be sure to watch this film! -- My thanks to Mr. Glen Cahill and Dr. D. Christian for this link.
Beautifully done; don't forget to turn up your speakers.

 

Merry Christmas! Watch this film -- and turn up your speakers!


Cool pavement-based artwork by Julian Beever
Visual trickery I say!

Sidewalk-based globe by Julian Beever

 

Performance Funding 2.0 -- from InsideHigherEd.com
One of the underlying premises of the Making Opportunity Affordable project — that colleges and universities will need to become more productive if the country is to meet the widely recognized goal of significantly increasing the number of Americans with a postsecondary credential — just got underscored by the economic downturn rippling across the states. As stock markets have tumbled and state revenues evaporated, the possibility that the higher education system would have to accomplish whatever gains it can without a significant infusion of new funds just became a likelihood if not a certainty. “The fiscal reality is that there’s just not going to be enough money to fund the 800,000 more degrees this country needs a year without major improvements in the academy’s efficiency,” said Kristin Conklin, a partner at HCM Strategists, which provides technical assistance to states for Making Opportunity Affordable.

From DSC:
The above article highlights another trend that brings me right back to here.


Kiva.org -- from Alan November
Kiva is a non-profit corporation whose mission is "to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty." Kiva was designed as a way for individuals to partner together and provide the working poor with micro-loans for expanding their businesses and building homes. To date, over $50 million in loans have been facilitated by Kiva, $17.3 million have been fully repaid and only 3.1% of these loans have gone into default.
Kiva.org


12 Great Digital Photography Books for Your Christmas Stocking -- from Digital Photography School

Economic Indicators -- from Educational Technology blog
Both scholars and those with a penchant for statistics will want to bookmark this fine website created and maintained by the federal government. The site provides monthly compilations of economic indicators covering prices, wages, production, business activity, purchasing power, credit, money, and Federal finance. Visitors can use the search engine to type in their desired terms, or they can browse every month from January 1998 forward via a series of drop down tabs. For those who might be looking for more specific data, the "Search Tips" feature is quite useful. The site also contains links to the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER), which contains economic indicators back to 1948. Overall, the site will be a real boon to those looking for high quality, accurate information regarding current and past economic trends and patterns in the United States. From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2008. http://scout.wisc.edu/

Mind Mapping: Best Tools To Draw Your Own MindMaps - Sharewood Guide -- from Robin Good

The MOST beautiful PowerPoint animation ideas-- from slideology; links to slide effects with instructions

The Empty-Stomach Problem -- from Edutopia.org
As families struggle to buy food, schools get creative about feeding students.

21st Century Technology Tools, 2nd Edition -- from The Power of Educational Technology, by Liz Davis


12/16/08

Isaiah 40:4

Images purchased from Stockxpert.com

From DSC:
Taking a slightly different perspective and application on the above verse -- and going down a more technological and educational route -- one might say that the Internet is becoming the great leveler...as it has the potential to open up a world of educational possibilities to everyone on the planet. It has the potential to offer the best educations from the best teams in the world -- to everyone -- opening up the doors to further opportunities in life. Though I realize we are a long ways off from this situation, eventually -- and hopefully -- this will be the case.

iPhones as clickers: mobile devices in the classroom -- from Liberal Education Today by Bryan Alexander
One Texas school is using iPhones as personal response systems, or "clickers." The application was developed by programmers at Abilene Christian University, which handed out free iPhones and iPod Touch devices to all first-year students this year.

Poll Students for Free from Landline or Cell Phone! -- from From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning by Liz Kolb

HeyCosmo


Fed Cuts to 0-0.25%; Target Range, Not Funds Rate -- from The Big Picture, by Barry Ritholtz
The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to establish a target range for the federal funds rate of 0 to 1/4 percent. Since the Committee’s last meeting, labor market conditions have deteriorated, and the available data indicate that consumer spending, business investment, and industrial production have declined.  Financial markets remain quite strained and credit conditions tight.  Overall, the outlook for economic activity has weakened further. Meanwhile, inflationary pressures have diminished appreciably.  In light of the declines in the prices of energy and other commodities and the weaker prospects for economic activity, the Committee expects inflation to moderate further in coming quarters.

Scholarly podcasting: Journal of American History -- from Liberal Education Today by Bryan Alexander
Another scholarly entity started podcasting this week, as the Journal of American History launched its JAHcast.

Chicago Reform Advocate Duncan Picked by Obama for Education -- from Bloomberg.com, by Kim Chipman and Julianna Goldman

Also see: Obama: Duncan 'Doesn't Blink' on Tough Decisions

40 Tutorials for Working with Shapes in Illustrator -- from VandelayDesign.com

Free Desktop Language Translator -- from Techie Buzz by Keith Dsouza
At times you may come across a text or a file, which is written in a language you do not understand and would require to convert it to a language you understand. In such cases online services come in pretty handy, however a desktop tool to translate languages would definitely come in handy.

10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs -- from Smashing Magazine by Dmitry Fadeyev

iPod touch and Math Practice -- from Learning in Hand by Tony Vincent

Students building mobile device applications: MIT class, open source platforms -- from Liberal Education Today by Bryan Alexander
An MIT class built a series of applications for mobile phones this semester. On top of a full college course-load at one of the most challenging schools in the country, these groups of students built fully working mobile applications for Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian devices while mentors from the likes of Google, Nokia, Bank of America, and Microsoft oversaw their progress.


12/15/08

Items from Net Gen Nonsense -- blog by Mark Bullen

  • Study questions the digital native discourse
    Anoush Margaryan and Allison Littlejohn have released the full draft of the paper that reports on their study of student use of technology in two British universities. As reported earlier, their findings tend to contradict the prevailing view of the "digital native" as a sophisticated user of technology who has a fundamentally different approach to learning. For me, one of the most interesting findings is on student attitudes towards learning: "students’ attitudes to learning appear to be influenced by the teaching approaches adopted by their lecturers. Far from demanding lecturers change their practice, students appear to conform to fairly traditional pedagogies, albeit with minor uses of technology tools that deliver content."

  • We Still Need to Change
    One point I don't make frequently enough is that I am not anti-technology. My critique of the net gen, digital native discourse is not meant to support the status quo but rather it is motivated by a desire to ensure that our decisions are based on evidence, not hype. We do need to change and adapt to the new technologies but we need to be sure we are making appropriate changes and not changes that are driven by a naïve view of who our learners are and what their needs are. Anoush and Littlejohn make the case for change:

    "As students look to their lecturers for clues as to how to use technology tools for learning, many lecturers are unaware of the potential of these tools, since they themselves are not using emergent technologies for their own learning and work. While some lecturers recognise the educational value of some emergent technologies, others view these as ‘fads’. This situation could become exceedingly problematic as many social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds are progressively adopted by organisations, where employees are required to use them regularly for knowledge sharing and communication. This raises the question as to how well universities are preparing students for employment if they continue to dismiss these tools and more importantly the processes and philosophies of learning and collective knowledge creation underpinning these tools. " (pp. 22-23)

Governor Crist Praises Florida’s Virtual Education for Leading the Nation as Study Ranks Sunshine State as No. 1 for Online Learning -- from B2E

Nice, new digital camera out there -- the Canon PowerShot SD880 IS

sdafg

Also see
this 360 degree movie about the Canon PowerShot 880 IS digital camera.


Cognitive overload – why we’re in the forgetting not learning game -- by Donald Clark

The Hoot -- from CIT's Teaching & Learning Team, a new blog called "The Hoot."

The Hoot

The Hoot is a casual, on-going publication focusing on topics and issues of the teaching and learning process, especially the use of technology. It will feature pedagogical best practices, Calvin faculty highlights, and time-saving tips, as well as emerging technologies and other new ideas we pick up along the way. We invite all (Calvin College) instructors to visit our blog at: www.calvin.edu/go/hoot, then either bookmark it or subscribe to our RSS feed. Stay in the loop with "The Hoot."

Open Source Shakespeare -- from Educational Origami by andrewch
This is a useful resource for shakespearean plays. The website is open source shakespeare - http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/

TLT CoffeeRead: Need help with class? YouTube videos await -- from PSU's Education Technology Services by Jamie Oberdick
Need help with class? YouTube videos await

YouTube: Need help with class?

The Type Directors Club -- from I Love Typography
For over 60 years the Type Directors Club has been the leading international organization whose sole purpose is to support and promote excellence in typography wherever it’s found.

The Next Future of the Internet -- from Pew Internet & American Life Project
We have just released a new report on the future of the internet. It is the third in a series of reports we have built around surveys of experts about the world to come. In this newest report 578 experts and analysts have this to say in reaction to scenarios we asked them to evaluate:

  • The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
  • The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
  • Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
  • Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing "arms race," with the "crackers" who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
  • The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
  • "Next-generation" engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

You can find the report here.

We Papers -- from The Stingy Scholar by Wynn Williamson

WePapers.com

12/12/08

JUST RELEASED:
The 2008 New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference Proceedings (92 pp, 2.5 Mb) -- from the NMC
Attendees at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference, held in June at Princeton University, were asked to identify sessions of special merit that should be included in the 2008 NMC Summer Conference Proceedings, an invitation-only publication juried by the membership of the NMC. The 2008 Proceedings features ten papers including case studies; a tutorial; introductions to current topics such as storytelling, digital media, and fair use; descriptions of special services, tools, and information technology support programs developed at member schools; and discussions of new media and pedagogy. These media-rich papers are presented in PDF format to take advantage of the images, video, and links that they include.

Or you can download individual chapters:

Digital Storytelling: An Alternative Instructional Approach
   Ruben R. Puentedura, Hippasus

Digital Storytelling: Old Ways, New Tools
   Laurie Burruss, Pasadena City College

The Adding Machine: Remote Digital Storytelling and Performance
   George Brown and James Ferolo, Bradley University

Building and Supporting a Large-Institution Digital Media Service
   Chris Millet, The Pennsylvania State University

DAM if You Do! BlueStream Digital Asset Management Infrastructure
   Louis E. King, The University of Michigan

A Call for the Corporeal ‘cause Pixels Are Ephemeral and Archeologists Won’t Find Them
   Jared Bendis, Case Western Reserve University

Infrastructures in Virtual Learning
   Holly Willis, University of Southern California

Learning 2.0: Who’s in Control Now?
   Wendy Shapiro and Lev Gonick, Case Western Reserve University

Why Walk When You Can Fly? Reflections from an Advanced Second Life Preconference Session
   Christopher Holden and Beth Sachtjen, NMC Virtual Worlds

Fair Use Ain’t What You Think It Is: Copyright and Fair Use in the Digital Classroom
   Mark J. Davis, Tulane University, CERT, and Loyola University

Teachers count on multimedia program to grab kids' attention -- from eSchoolNews.com
Lessons from an iPod? A video quiz on the Bill of Rights, with questions posed by rapping teachers? Online discussions of class lessons spontaneously popping up at night? Creative uses of technology are becoming the norm in Michigan's Southgate Community Schools, reports the Detroit Free Press, where a new computer-assisted teaching system hasn't replaced regular instruction -- but its ease of use has increased teachers' reliance on the technology. For teachers, the program, called Study Wiz Spark, offers preloaded activities that include discussion threads, video and audio clips, games, tests, homework, and more. Students can log in and access everything their teachers provide, whether they are at school or not. And parents can check their child's lessons and grades. "The No. 1 thing we hear from teachers who use it, is that when they run the usage reports, it's amazing," said Wendy Nowak, technology integrator. While teachers could do many of the online lessons without a special program, the technology puts the many uses of classroom computers in one place, making it easier and faster for teachers to access...

From DSC to faculty members:
Eventually the above item/topic will affect you -- make no mistake about it. It would benefit you to keep your eyes and ears open to potentially-changing students' expectations as well as potential changes in their learning styles/habits/ preferences.

Web-based videoconferencing items

U Wisconsin Campus To Roll Out 14,000 Notebooks to Students -- from CampusTechnology.com, by David Nagel
The University of Wisconsin-Stout is gearing up to deploy 14,000 notebook computers to students over the next four years. UW-Stout has contracted with HP to supply the machines, which will be delivered to students at a rate of about 3,500 per year based on enrollment forecasts. The move is part of UW-Stout's e-Scholar program, which is designed to give students technologies and support that will help them succeed at the university. Aside from the laptop computer, the e-Scholar package provides student with "backpack, cords and accessories, software, course management systems, service and support, training, network storage, e-mail, Web page space, wireless and wired connectivity on campus, and multimedia classrooms," as the university described it.

"The digital culture at UW-Stout is emerging as a dynamic agent for changing
ways we learn. The e-Scholar Program is included in the undergraduate student
tuition so that UW-Stout students are provided with the tools that they
will need to be technology literate in this environment."

Items from Clark Aldrich

12/11/08

Isaiah 7:14 -- from Bible Gateway's Verse of the Day

“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”


Global Classroom

Through a new partnership with Global Classroom, CUE is excited to offer online courses its members! Global Classroom has delivered online professional development to teachers since 2004 and has a wide array of technology-focused courses. Link from Mark Wagner, Ph.D.

Program for the Future conference - Stanford
An Invitation to Innovation. An interactive conference inspired by Doug Engelbart's vision of harnessing technology for human betterment. The quest continues...
Engelbart dreamed of technology and tools that increased our Collective Intelligence and gave us a stunning example of how it works.  Now it's up to us to take up the challenge.  To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Engelbart's astounding demo, the Program for the Future is bringing together some of the best minds in science, media, business and education -- and we hope you will be among them -- to explore the question: what's next? 

An Example of Convergence: Interactive TV : uxTV 2008 -- from Interactive Multimedia Technology Technology and Jeremy Vaught
Re: the First International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video, held October 22-24, 2008 in Silicon Valley, California.

Creating Dynamic Online Learning Environments: Wimba Connects With Brain Research -- from Wimba
Presented by: Janice Butler, University of Texas at Brownsville
What does the latest research on the physiology of the brain and the biology of learning have to say about effective online learning? This session will take a look at the works of James Zull and John Medina, relating the science of learning and effective teaching online. Within the context of brain research, strategies for using Wimba to encourage learning synchronously and asynchronously in an interactive, engaging, participatory and experiential environment will be discussed using a variety of Wimba examples. View the Archive here

WiloStar3D -- link from Learning Matters blog

Immersive 3D education for K-12

Blobby Doodle Town is an engaging, creative immersive education world for students in grades 3-5. WiloStar3D is a revolutionary new way to homeschool for grades 6-12.

What exactly is 3D immersive education? WiloStar3D has been pioneering the use of 3D immersive education with homeschooling and classroom students for distance learning now for over a decade. WiloStar3D's use of immersive education involves the use of enabling media such as Web 2.0 technologies, streaming video and audio and then submerses these technologies inside richly immersive 3D virtual worlds for students. WiloStar3D's educational worlds "immerse" and engage students in the same way that today's best video games grab and keep the attention of players. The main difference is that our accredited educational curricula and worlds have been carefully crafted and developed around constructivist and active learning strategies designed to maximize student interactivity. WiloStar3D's immersive educational 3D worlds support both self-directed learning as well as collaborative group-based learning and have been developed with one key goal in mind: to allow and encourage students to manipulate ,change, and create their worlds their way!

Top 12 Reasons Our Approach Works:

  1. Goes from passive learning to active learning.
  2. 3D technology used as a means to enhance learning process
  3. Incorporates stimulating 3D collaborative projects and virtual world development
  4. Utilizes role play and character immersion:students become historical characters, scientists wolves..whatever they are learning about...they become
  5. Adapts to different learning styles
  6. Promotes higher order thinking skills
  7. Helps retain materials learned
  8. Enhances problem-solving abilities
  9. Keeps students engaged
  10. Results in higher achievement levels
  11. Motivates students to excel and keeps them engaged
  12. Certified teachers and fully accredited program

The digital student: the Guardian explores (UK) -- from Liberal Education Today by Bryan Alexander
A special issue on digital teaching and learning comes from The Guardian. A series of articles touch on new learning spaces, support expectations, faculty development, assessment, podcasts, accessibility, virtual worlds, and copyright.

Online Student Teaching? -- from The Fischbowl by Karl Fisch
One of the sessions I attended at the NCTE Convention was centered around online instruction. It was presented by and made up mostly of college professors, although there was at least one other high school teacher in the room. It was a very interesting session and spurred a couple of thoughts.

All the attendees discussed how their respective institutions were really pushing online instruction, both at the college level and – in the case of the high school teacher – at the high school level in Ohio (apparently they are considering a plan like Michigan’s requiring at least one online course to graduate from high school). The reasons were many, including teacher shortages, budget constraints, competing with other institutions, and responding to demand from students. They quoted the prediction that if current trends continue, by 2019 over half of all high school classes will be taught online.

Related item:
How Do We Transform Our Schools? -- by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn
Use technologies that compete against nothing

From DSC:
What if future schools go the route of having over 50% of all high school courses offered online? How will institutions of higher education react to that? Will school systems in the future want graduates who have not taken a significant portion of their undergraduate courses online themselves?

While Detroit Slept -- from the New York Times, by Thomas Friedman
As I think about our bailing out Detroit, I can’t help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today’s integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed. It’s this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don’t think it won’t be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you’ll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.

From DSC:
The same is true for figuring out how to deliver the best-quality education at a significantly lower price. Someone will do it. Then, the players who weren't involved in this disruptive move will be in a position of having to react and defend against it, vs. being proactive and being on the offensive side of things. Bottom line: I hope an article isn't written again in 5-10 years saying "While America's Universities and Colleges Slept."

Foreclosures - Nov 2008

Inflection Points -- from the human network by Mark Pesce
I have to admit that I am in awe of iTunes University. It’s just amazing that so many well-respected universities – Stanford, MIT, Yale, and Uni Melbourne – are willing to put their crown jewels – their lectures – online for everyone to download. It’s outstanding when even one school provides a wealth of material, but as other schools provide their own material, then we get to see some of the virtues of crowdsourcing. First, you have a virtuous cycle: as more material is shared, more material will be made available to share. After the virtuous cycle gets going, it’s all about a flight to quality.

When you have half a dozen or have a hundred lectures on calculus, which one do you choose? The one featuring the best lecturer with the best presentation skills, the best examples, and the best math jokes – of course. This is my only complaint with iTunes University – you can’t rate the various lectures on offer. You can know which ones have been downloaded most often, but that’s not precisely the same thing as which calculus seminar or which sociology lecture is the best. So as much as I love iTunes University, I see it as halfway there. Perhaps Apple didn’t want to turn iTunes U into a popularity contest, but, without that vital bit of feedback, it’s nearly impossible for us to winnow out the wheat from the educational chaff.

"The network is acting like a universal solvent, dissolving all of the boundaries that have kept things separate. It’s not just dissolving the boundaries of distance – though it is doing that – it’s also dissolving the boundaries of preference. Although there will always be differences in taste and delivery, some instructors are simply better lecturers – in better command of their material – than others. Those instructors will rise to the top. Just as RateMyProfessors.com has created a global market for the lecturers with the highest ratings, RateMyLectures.com will create a global market for the best performances, the best material, the best lessons." (From DSC: Pesce is right on the mark with these last few sentences -- that's where I see things heading. Perhaps top faculty members will reach what we now know as "celebritry status" in the future.)

K-12 items

12/10/08

The "Holy Grail" of teaching & learning

From there, I hope our students pursue their passions,
and use such knowledge to make positive and significant
changes to the world we live in.


Floridal Virtual School - Global Services -- a unique learning environment; link from Will Richardson
The Global School is truly a global community that includes middle and high school students from around the world. Imagine the opportunities for working across geographical, cultural, and socio-economic boundaries. Students participate in online discussions, clubs, competitions, newspaper teams, and national forums. Our highly qualified instructional instructors, located across the U.S., are certified in the subject they are teaching.

Florida Virtual School

...of which Will Richardson comments:

Finally, I think the conversation that most blew me away was the one with Andy Ross, the VP of Florida Virtual High School. They’ve got almost 1,000 full time staff now and over 20,000 kids on their waiting list to take classes. They can’t hire teachers fast enough. Kids can take their entire high school curriculum online without ever meeting a teacher face to face, though there are plenty of phone calls and e-mails. Andy said that their research shows that those kids do better on the standardized assessments than kids in physical schools, primarily because of the deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery. Now I’m not saying that those are necessarily reasons to move everything online, but it was the one solid vision of a “School of the Future” that I got at the conference. Andy agreed to come on and do a UStream at some point in the near future, and I’ll be sure to be posting times and dates in case you’d be interested.

David Yaskin at Bb World 08 -- my thanks to Dr. Kate Byerwalter at GRCC for this link
David Yaskin, CEO & Founder of Starfish Retention Solutions, presents at the "New Web 2.0 Technology Showcase" at BbWorld '08 on July 16, 2008. (Yaskin was one of the key heads for product development at Blackboard for many years, and is now at Starfish.)

David Yaskin at Bb World '08


Web site Lets Kids Experience Life as a Peace Corp Volunteer -- from School Library Journal
What’s life like as a Peace Corps volunteer? A new Web site gives kids the opportunity to visit the fictional village of Wanzuzu, where they can work with local villagers and other Peace Corps members to solve eight different challenges. 

Minding the Campus
The Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University (CAU) has established a web magazine, Minding the Campus, which includes daily commentaries, original essays, and a blog.

While Public Colleges Feel Pain, For-Profits See Gains -- from InsideHigherEd.com, by Jack Stripling
State support of public colleges is shrinking. Endowment values are plummeting. Tuition is increasing, and threatening college affordability. Sounds pretty bleak, right? Not if you run a for-profit college. “In my opinion, all of that is good news for career colleges,” Rene Champagne, chairman of the Career College Association, told fellow leaders of for-profit colleges at a conference here Tuesday.

From DSC:
Also see these related stories about California State University:

    • CSU may cut future enrollment by 10,000
    • CSU May Cut Future Enrollment by 10,000
      At the same time that the nation’s largest college system, California State University, is experiencing soaring admissions — up 10 percent over last year — the college system has announced it may begin turning away qualified students due to a state budget shortfall that could reach $24 billion by 2010, The Los Angeles Times reports

    What's occurring to CSU could represent a major influential trend -- especially with the recession we are in...so....this is where I think this is going.


Virginia Tech's Math Emporium -- link from Transformation 101 article mentioned by George Siemens below
Students studying calculus, linear algebra, and other mathematics subjects at Virginia Tech are engaged in an exciting new way to learn. From the outset, they know a course's learning goals, plus important learning milestones they must meet. They set their own schedules. They learn at their own pace. They receive immediate feedback on quizzes and problems. They explore alternative approaches to learning challenging material. They interact one-on-one with faculty and other students. They master coursework as well as, and often better than, in conventional classrooms. Virginia Tech students are able to do these things and more thanks to a bold experiment called the Math Emporium, a place where technology and teaching are changing the way students learn and succeed. It's an experience that's right in step with the kind of learning they will encounter in the workplace when they graduate.

What shall we do with higher education? -- from elearnspace by George Siemens
In addition to a delightful array of vehicles, General Motors has given us a great metaphor: a company that once ruled supreme, lost touch with the changing world around it, and, in spite of warnings over a period of three decades, still failed to align itself to the new reality. From royalty to peasantry in less than 30 years. Can higher education learn lessons from GM? Do colleges and universities share a similar fate? According to a few articles I’ve recently encountered, yes:

  • Transformation 101: "This is a classic unsustainable trend. Higher education prices cannot grow faster than inflation and family income forever. If colleges use productivity gains from technology to restrain prices, they’ll continue to thrive in a world that values their product more than ever. If they don’t, they’ll be hammered simultaneously by a frustrated public and new competitors eager to steal their customers.”

  • The Next Bubble?: "Obviously higher education will (and should) survive. But there is no reason to think that higher ed will be immune to the shakeouts and reorganizations that have affected so many other institutions in this age of globalization, which has wrought a heightened level of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”"

A Brave New World-Wide Web

The Networked Teacher graphic -- from A Brave New WWW presentation

A graphic on "The Networked Teacher" from
"A Brave New World Wide Web" Presentation

Virtual world for Muslims debuts -- from BBC News

FutureSight (UK) -- my thanks to Anita Crawley for this link
Will children of the future learn alone at home or in small groups, linking with teachers and other pupils via virtual communities? This is one of six scenarios that you can explore with the FutureSight toolkit. FutureSight is part of an international project undertaken with the OECD, the DfES Innovation Unit and Demos, developing the OECD Schooling for Tomorrow initiative. This initiative explores the nature of schools and their response to the challenges of the 21st century.

Library For Hire: Johns Hopkins U. Sells Services to an Online College -- from The Chronicle of Higher Education
"For its part, the Johns Hopkins library system gets $1-million this year, says Excelsior President John F. Ebersole. The arrangement is rare among college libraries, which typically spend money rather than making it."

Growth of Market for Videoconferencing, Streaming, and Lecture Capture Driven by On-campus Students and Worried Workers -- from CampusTechnology.com, by Dian Schaffhauser
A new study concludes that real-time videoconferencing, streaming, and lecture capture solutions for distance education and e-learning markets is growing not to address the needs of remote students but to accommodate demand from campus-based users who want the ability to attend class whenever and however they wish.

Quote addressing adult learners/training:
"All learners will welcome the flexibility to control when, where, and how they
access training and course material, and these tools are receiving
overwhelmingly high marks for their effectiveness--and ability to enable
interactions between educators and learners in new ways."

From DSC:
I can easily see how this is true with lecture hall-based classes with 100-300 students in them. I'm not sure if this is relevant at places like Calvin College or not (with much smaller class sizes and individual attention) -- but it's worth keeping an eye on.

50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools -- from Smashing Magazine by Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz

VoiceThread compared to GarageBand -- from Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer
The following is a reply I shared tonight in a closed online learning community to the question, “Is VoiceThread something you can use [for digital storytelling] instead of GarageBand?”— start of response — VoiceThread can be used for digital storytelling instead of Garageband, but I see it as a different tool with different benefits as well as limitations.


12/9/08

The Role of the College Professor -- from Paulo Ribeiro at Calvin College

  1. Don't tell everything to your students. Let them find out. Provoke their curiosity. Let them (not you) exclaim: Wow!!! This is Great!!!

  2. Don't feel responsible for their learning. Encourage dependability.

  3. Let them see that for you learning is a joyful and exhaustive game, not a boring activity to get facts straight and be graded

  4. Challenge their statements. Insist on first principles.

  5. Let them know that when you refute their statements you are not thinking that their assertions were irrelevant or insignificant, but had risen to the dignity of error.

  6. Nourish their responsive and artistic faculty. Baptize their imagination.

  7. Instead of presenting them with predigested material for their easy assimilation direct them to the raw ingredients - - Give them information and background for the development of personal taste

  8. "Don't tell them which books are good but teach them to become good readers"

  9. Encourage them to challenge other authorities and think for themselves and convince them never to take you or themselves too seriously :-)

  10. Bless them, and aim to become superfluous. That the hour when we can say "They need me no longer" should be our reward. If we are any good, we must always be working towards the moment at which they are fit to become our critics and even rivals."

  11. Teach them to ask questions, especially questions that don't have easy answers.


Top 10 iPhone Apps -- from Time Magazine's The Top 10 Everything of 2008 lists -- link from Steve Rubel

The Best All-In-One Search Engines on the Web -- from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Create Professional Presentations Without PowerPoint: The Web-Based Alternative Has Arrived - SlideRocket Reviewed -- from Robin Good's blog, by Andre Deutmeyer
Create professional looking presentations without using PowerPoint or Keynote and do it all from the web. Or at least that is what SlideRocket promises to offer.

WorldFuture 2009: Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World
The Annual Conference of the World Future Society
July 17-19, 2009, Hilton Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Education Next Journal

Lets Say Thanks -- my thanks to Mr. Steve Gibson for the links

Let's Say Thanks

The mission of Let's Say Thanks is to provide a way for individuals across the country to recognize U.S. troops stationed overseas. By submitting a message through this site you have the opportunity to send a free personalized postcard greeting to deployed servicemen and women. The postcards, depicting patriotic scenes and hometown images, were selected from a pool of entries from children across the country. All you have to do is click on your favorite design and either select the message that best expresses your sentiment or draft a personal note. The postcards are then printed on the Xerox iGen3 Digital Production Press and mailed in care packages by military support organization Give2TheTroops. Xerox is committed to helping people across the nation express their gratitude to our troops overseas. The launch of this program is aimed at reminding them how much Americans appreciate their service.

Give2TheTroops


Cosmotions.com -- link from Joe Girolamo in the T&L Digital Studio
Time lapse photography; the cosmos in motion.

HubbleSite.org/gallery/ -- link from Joe Girolamo in the T&L Digital Studio

HubbleSite

Science-related blogs

IT Engagement in the Future of Medical Education -- from Educause, by Edward W. Tawyea and Bruce A. Metz, Volume 2008, Issue 24, 14 pages
Abstract: This ECAR research bulletin focuses on how the latest wave of information technology advances is shaping the future of medical education to achieve the reform objectives outlined by the Association of American Medical Colleges and others. It details how Thomas Jefferson University, a leading academic medical center, along with other institutions, is embarking on a new course to educate medical students. The new course is driven in large part by emerging developments in technology. Based on the pace and intensity of IT adoption in medical education, this bulletin also discusses key implications for reshaping other fields of undergraduate and graduate education.

The Future is E-Learning -- from Liberal Education Today
According to an ASTD webcast titled “Future Trends in Training & Development”, it was pointed out that the future of training will involve independent learning. Learners will become more independent and self-taught as it becomes increasingly easy and convenient for them to find information and knowledge at their fingertips - and right in their workplace. The main meat of this talk is that Online Learning will be the future of training and education, especially for professionals with very busy schedules but want to upgrade their skills for better employability. Because E-Learning offers the flexibility of learning at your own time and pace, no need to take time out from work, or sacrifice precious moments away from your friends and loved ones.

Q from DSC:
Does this future trend for profesisonal development in the corporate world affect what colleges and universities should be doing/offering?

MathML for IE7 Update -- from Elizabeth Pyatt's TLT Blog
My last write-up on MathML indicated that I was having problems implementing MathML on Internet Explorer 7.

Environmentalgraffiti.com -- link from Joe Girolamo, T&L Digital Studio
Born in May 2007, Environmental Graffiti is an eclectic mix of the most bizarre, funny and interesting environmental news on the planet. We search the vast realms of the Internet on behalf of all environmentalists who don’t take themselves too seriously and compile it into a daily blog. Surf and enjoy!

EnvironmentalGraffiti.com


12/8/08

Wow! A must read.Fluid Learning -- by Mark Pesce; Word doc here; also speaks to disruption

"Our greatest fear, in bringing computers into the classroom, is that we teachers and instructors and lecturers will lose control of the classroom, lose touch with the students, lose the ability to make a difference. The computer is ultimately disruptive. (emphasis DSC) It offers greater authority than any instructor, greater resources than any lecturer, and greater reach than any teacher. The computer is not perfect, but it is indefatigable. The computer is not omniscient, but it is comprehensive. The computer is not instantaneous, but it is faster than any other tool we’ve ever used."

"The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you..."

Recommendations

  • #1: Capture Everything
  • #2: Share Everything
  • #3: Open Everything
  • #4: Only Connect -- connection is king.

"I’m seriously thinking of hanging out my shingle and becoming an independent educational contractor with a virtual class instead of working in a traditional school.
Still thinking of what the challenges might be."

-- Bill Farren's response to Mark's posting


World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others -- from Will Richardson, Edutopia
How to teach when learning is everywhere.

Some resources for English Professors & Teachers

Some resources for Economics Professors

Boston Globe: A field guide to economics and finance blogs -- from The Big Picture
Very cool article in the Sunday Boston Globe: A field guide to economics and finance blogs:

Designing for Disability Seminar --from UK Web Focus by Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)
Designing for Disability: A recent blog post by Neil Witt on The VC’s New VLE inspired me to provide a new introduction to a talk I gave at the “Designing for Disability” seminar held on  Friday 5th December 2008 at the British Museum.

Layers Magazine -- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
Layers keeps you on top of the latest design trends taking place within the world of the Adobe® Creative Suite® programs. Each issue unlocks new possibilities, new ideas, and new methods that help you accomplish more.

iTunes-Like Web Application For Watching YouTube Videos -- from Techie Buzz by Keith Dsouza

The Technology Integration Matrix ( for Florida's K-12 Schools) -- link from Teaching and learning design, by Dean Groom
The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed (i.e., reflective), authentic, and collaborative (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003).

After reviewing the following, can you tell me what a learning object repository looks like these days?

Note from DSC:
These types of links make me question what a "learning object repository" even looks like anymore. I don't think it's what I used to think it was...and in fact, I'm not sure of the best way to build/access one anymore.

Open University Podcasts Site Goes Live

OU Podcasts

Open University on iTunes U

OU on iTunes U

Wisc-Online Electronics

Wisc-Online Electrical


A Widget Onto the Future -- from InsideHigherEd.com
They float around on desktops, populate home pages and bulge out of Facebook profiles. They aren’t exactly tangible, which is why they’re called widgets, but they’re real enough within the digital ether than some educators want to turn them into teaching tools. The portable, Web-based gadgets are an ideal medium, they say, for creating interactive, individualized instructional materials that can live on a course Web site, a personal blog or even a mobile phone.

Also see "Widget-Based Education" from Mark Marino, USC.

Pedagogical planner summit cloudscape -- from Cloudworks, from the University of Sydney, Co-organised by James Daziel, Leanne Cameron, Sue Bennett and Peter Goodyear
Issues and challenges around learning design research. The aim of the summit was to provide an opportunity for researchers active in the area of pedagogical/activity planners, educational/learning design, etc. to report on their recent work, share perspectives and discuss promising lines for future work.

My Podcast Set-up -- from The Thinking Stick by Jeff Utecht
I like it when other podcasters share their set up. A thanks to Leo Leporte, one of my favorite tech podcasters….or is that netcaster. I’ve learned a lot about podcasting just listening to the different shows he produces. I wrote this page for the Shifting Our Schools site to share with others the set up I use to stream, record, and converse all at the same time. I thought I’d share it here as well. You can find links to the different equipment I use at my Amazon Store as well.

50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials -- from Smashing Magazine by Jacob Gube

Changing Expectations - Gen Y -- from Change and uncertainty: The making or the breaking of corporate learning and development -- by Clive Shepherd

Gen Y


Gen Y

Links from technical writer/cartoonist Mr. John Auchter -- see John's work at http://auchtoon.com

MarketPlace's Whiteboard: Explaining some of the mess we're in...
Are these good or not...perhaps your class could discuss one of these.

Call for proposals for the 2009 MERLOT Conference:
Teaching and Learning in a Networked World


12/5/08

As teachers we are always learning. When we integrate the most recent literature from our disciplines into our classes, we must also be open to allowing life experiences to shape and reshape our understanding of our subjects. Examining the construction, arrangement, and presentation of our courses' components provides myriad opportunities for increasing our own understanding and drawing new connections. And, as our courses become more efficient, we can, perhaps, even sneak in a bit more material.

-- from Building Cognitive Assemblies: An Exercise in Course Design

Voice Thread Update -- from iLearn Teachnology
Voice Thread is an amazing site that just keeps getting better! Voice Thread is the site that makes outstanding web 2.0 slide shows interactive and collaborative. Voice Thread came out with an outstanding new update yesterday, the ability to...  

More Mythbusting Evidence -- from Net Gen Nonsense by Mark Bullen
 Two British researchers have just completed a study of undergraduate students that found "many young students are far from being the epitomic global, connected, socially-networked technologically-fluent digital native who has little patience for passive and linear forms of learning." Instead, the study found that students use a limited range of technologies for both formal and informal learning and that there is a "very low level of use and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools such as wikis, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies."

Comments on this from DSC:
This may be the case in 2008...but if we were to track these things over the next 10 years, could Mark post this in 2018? I highly doubt it. The point is that this is where students are heading...and we need to ask ourselves what are the impolications of this for our teaching methods? For student engagement?

Bottom line that I'm convined of:
We better get ready for some serious, mind-blowing change.

Comment from Tom Hanson and his Open Education blog:
"It is time to drop the digital natives’ hype and recognize that the debate should not be about digital natives versus digital immigrants. The debate should be about how to use technology to effectively enhance the learning experience for students."


The Future - The Era of Engagement -- from Chapter 8, "The Future - The Era of Engagement" in the book, Blended Learning in Higher Education, Framework, Principles, and Guidelines, by D. Randy Garrison and Norman D. Vaughan.

Most important, incentives are being put in place, and there is an increased adoption of blended designs by those in the mainstream of higher education. A critical mass of blended learning course designs serve as exemplars, having received the serious attention of leaders in higher education.

Everything you wanted to know about Google but were afraid to ask -- from TechCrunch.com, link from G. Siemens. See also: this page

Everything you wanted to know about Google...

which includes this slide -- noting one of the reasons why faculty
NEED to be in touch with a worldwide network of bloggers:

The Network Effect


Managing the Chair's Paradoxical Role -- from Tomorrow's Professor
Knowledge workers are the primary force that determines the success of an organization. As noted earlier knowledge workers, like faculty members, don't like to be told what to do. They also enjoy more autonomy than other workers, and much of their work is invisible and hard to measure because it goes on inside their heads.The similarity between the profile of knowledge workers and faculty is striking.

Managing human intellect is as vital to the success of any academic unit or institution as it is to an organization that employs knowledge workers. Organizations designed to maximize the performance of the knowledge worker integrate the best elements of self-organization and networking and are effective in leading, relationship building, allowing clever people to thrive, authenticity, using integrative thinking, and, most of all, managing constant change effectively. They offer an organizational frame for academic leaders to consider and model.

Resources re: animation (I can't vouch for all of these, but were recommended by some of the blogging animators out there)

Matrix helps students weigh internet research -- from eCampusNews.com
Two professors develop tool to aid students in assessing research and resources -- both online and off

The professors' published guideline is formatted as a matrix of questions aimed at helping students decipher what should be used in a research project and what should be ignored.

VoiceThread supports template-based digital storytelling! --from Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

iPod Flash Cards -- from Learning in Hand by Tony Vincent

The convergence of neuroscience and education -- from Michael Horn's Amazon Blog
As scientists continue to study and learn how the brain actually works—something we are a long way off from understanding fully at the moment—what they learn should have an impact on how we educate different children and allow us to continue to improve people’s learning opportunities. That’s precisely what an initiative, called the Neuro-Education Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, is doing, according to an article in Education Week titled “Project Aims to Bridge Neuroscience and Schools.”

The magazine of the Institute of Education (London)

IOE Life


12/4/08

College Tuition Not Affordable in Future? -- from Will Thalheimer
The New York Times published an article today saying that college tuition may be out of reach for most Americans. This, of course, is stunning news. If true, it will rip a gaping hole in the very fabric of our society. It will also, make the job of work-learning professionals that much harder.
...
On the other hand, perhaps there will be a need for learning professionals who can be really creative in dealing with these issues. Perhaps China is educating them now...

From DSC: Another reason for my posting/thoughts here>>
How much longer can this situation go on? What can we do to address it?


Soaring College Tuitions -- how much longer can the public take this?


Stratified Learning: Responding to the Class System of Higher Education -- by Sherry Lee Linkon, professor of English and American Studies and co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University

Measuring Up -- Report released 12/3/08

Measuring Up -- 2008


George Siemens, elearnspace, comments:
Measuring Up 2008 (.pdf) is a report on state of the American higher education system. Lessons can be gleaned for other countries, particularly with regards to costs as barriers. Tuition has increased by 439% between 1982 and 2006, far out pacing the increases other costs in society (medical care only increased an anemic (in contrast) 251% during the same time period - see p. 8 of the report). While online learning has many more advantages beyond a reduction of costs (in theory at least - costs are often as high, or even more so, in online learning versus face-to-face), figures as high as those cited in this report are grounds for exploring cost reductions through online education.

Comment from DSC:
Online learning has higher initial costs than face-to-face education -- to begin with -- but online learning offers the advantage of making it easier to spread out the associated costs over time and space, greatly lowering the total cost per course offered.

Several publishers already have a great deal of the work done on the courses that are offered to the majority of the students (Intro to Psych, Composition/English, Intro to Econ, etc.) They can repackage this content in a heartbeat. Take an Intro to Psych course that could be repackaged from a publisher, then offered to students from a consortium of Christian colleges for example -- for the next 5 years. That course could be extremely-well done, with costs easily recouped.

The increase of 439% between 1982 and 2006 is the one of the reasons why I believe we are looking at "The Forthcoming Walmart of Education."

The threat in all of this is how not to become a commodity!


Purdue students rate their professors online -- from eCampusNews.com
University is the latest to move course evaluations to the internet, speeding feedback and saving nearly a million sheets of paper.

School of the Future Summit -- from Derek Wenmoth


The Future for Higher Education: Sunrise or Perfect Storm? -- from Educause, 2006


Simulations -- link from Donna Murray; links and descriptions of simulations


3 Factors that Affect Social Loafing -- from Teaching Professor, by Maryellen Weimer


Learning in 2020 -- from ASTD
Today’s Leaders Take a Look at What’s Ahead -- A whole new world of work

  • Tools 2020
    Prediction: Although the next 10 to 12 years might not constitute any drastic upheavals there are shifts and changes at work on every level.
  • Technology 2020
    Prediction: Technology’s impact on how we learn is returned the favor as machines and applications become smarter, and form increasingly symbiotic relationships with other applications as well as learners themselves.
  • Workforce 2020
    Prediction: The role of workplace learning and performance professionals will change because of the need for new skills, competencies, and communication.
  • Talent Management 2020
    Prediction: Today’s narrow talent management scope broadens to incorporate organization-wide strategy and executive-level support.
  • Future Leaders 2020
    Prediction: The learning leaders of 2020 may not have their names carved in stone,
    but several are off to a great beginning.


Items from Michelle Martin -- from The Bamboo Project Blog


Ed-Tech’s Role in a Competitive World -- from Digital Directions, by Michelle R. Davis


Project Probes Digital Media's Effect on Ethics -- from EducationWeek.com, by Debra Viadero
Howard Gardner Leads Team Studying Youths’ Web Norms

Researchers here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education say stories like that one illustrate one of the ways new digital media are raising distinct ethical challenges and temptations for young people today.
...
Mr. Gardner, an eminent psychologist best known for his multiple-intelligences theory, is working with a team of researchers at Project Zero, the research center he helped create at the graduate school, to study how students’ use of digital media affects the development of their “ethical minds.”


FETC 2009 Presenter Profile: Chris Dede Talks Emerging Interactive Media

Dede: "Part of it is acknowledging that you're in a community that creates and shares knowledge, as opposed to being in a hierarchy where an expert pours knowledge into the minds of novices. Teachers and administrators who are willing to risk moving away from that hierarchical control to having authority that's based on experience and expertise usually wind up with engaged students who learn both in and out of school. As a result, much can be accomplished in the classroom, without the teacher having to worry about how to teach his or her students how to use technology."

12/3/08

Internationalisation of higher education: a 10 year view -- from Xiphos by Sarah Bartlett (UK)
This (very substantial) report, written by Professor Drummond Bone, commissioned as part of the DIUS Review of Higher Education is an impressive addition to both the DIUS Review and to the growing body of literature on the internationalisation of higher education.

The changing education experience -- from Lorcan Dempsey
...interview with David Melville chair of the Committee of Enquiry into the Changing Learning Experience...

But perhaps the largest surprise so far is the continuing value students place on face-to-face contact, despite the time they spend on the web. This does not mean they regard teaching staff in the same way as their predecessors did. "Because web 2.0, Google, Wikipedia are all about being able to change things yourself, the expectations of learners change as a result of that," says Melville. "Universities are beginning to notice this. There is a greater expectation from students that they are involved in the design of their education." [Students fashion their own education | Digital student | The Guardian]

... and a general background piece ....

Technology has dramatically changed the way students experience university life, and not just in terms of the number of gadgets they own. It has affected where and how they study, helped them collaborate with each other and broken down barriers between students and teachers, social life and study. It has also given students a greater voice in the way they learn.[Academia tackles the future | Digital student | The Guardian]

The evidence it has collected points to institutions becoming more permeable places. As universities offer more and more content online, people, including many who are never formally registered as students, will dip into these online resources as and when they need to.

The e-Learning Rules of Engagement -- by Mark Notess, Indiana University; original link from Ray Schroeder, editor, OTEL

Virtual Peace: academic computer game for conflict resolution -- from Liberal Education Today, by Bryan Alexander

Better Learning With Sites and Sound -- from InsideHigherEd.com
Even as many instructors embrace digital tools in the classroom, some are pushing the technology envelope with more complex tools for teaching or interacting with students. New research suggests the promise of such approaches. One qualitative study, which surely won’t be welcomed by manufacturers of basic word processing software, found that students who create and edit documents using Web-based collaboration tools include more complex visual media in their assignments — and come away with a better understanding in the process. Another ongoing experiment finds, with statistical significance, that instructors can be more effective in grading students’ work if they record their comments directly into documents as audio.

Jr. colleges outpace 4-year schools in tech use -- from eCampusNews.com

Items re: online music

  • Classical music meets Web 2.0 -- from the Contra Costa Times (CA, USA), by Richard Scheinin
    How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Through YouTube. Not that "practice, practice, practice" isn't still the key to making it to the world's most famous stage. But a new YouTube Symphony Orchestra project, announced Monday in San Francisco, London and New York, promises to set culture and technology on a far larger stage: YouTube's global video platform. The immediate goal is to create a new orchestra with 100 members from around the world, coming together to perform April 15 at Carnegie Hall.

  • YouTube Symphony Orchestra

YouTube Symphony Orchestra

  • Jamendo -- my thanks to Caleb Kuntz, in the T&L Digital Stuudio for this link
    "On Jamendo artists allow anyone to download and share their music. It's free, legal and unlimited."

  • MusicBrainz.com

  • Pandora.com

Teaching with computer gaming: Harvard interview -- from Liberal Education Today, by Bryan Alexander
These discussion notes cover a presentation, then Q+A, with Harvard faculty member Chris Dede. Dede addresses the RiverCity game he helped design, and expounds on principles of teaching, immersion, and gaming.

Learn How To Pronounce Foreign Names Correctly -- from Digital Inspiration, by Amit Agarwal

Google generation has no need for rote learning -- from The Times Online (UK); link from Angela Maiers

Capturing audio from the Internet
Such as Internet-based radio, and saving files in the MP3 file format or to other file formats

Capturing audio from a CD:
(Also allows for the conversion of the audio file to various file formats if you want to, including the MP3 file format)

Capturing video from YouTube:


Changing Minds.org -- from the T&L Digital Studio's Niko Solihin
"The largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do. There are already over 3000 pages here, with much more to come."

Wrangling your RSS feeds -- from Amy Sample

Mourning the losses...

  • Dr. William Spoelhof -- following announcement from the Office of the President
    • Dr. William Spoelhof, president of Calvin College from 1951-1976, died peacefully in his sleep at 1:45 a.m. on December 3.We praise God for his long and fruitful life, his love for his family, and his long and loving service to Calvin College, service which continued well after his official retirement three decades ago. Dr. Spoelhof would have celebrated his 99th birthday on Monday, December 8, but now rests instead in the arms of his Lord and Savior.

  • William Placher -- following announcement from John Witvliet
    • Theologian Bill Placher passed away unexpectedly this week at the age of 60. See the revealing tribute on Wabash College's homepage. The posted comments at this page are a remarkable testimony to the value of a liberal arts education, and especially to great books, tough grading, loving hospitality, and a tenacious belief in the triune God. They are a source of encouragement for the home stretch of a busy semester.

"The way we best show our love to the whole world is...
to love with a particular passion some little part of it."

-- William Placher

The Hoot -- following announcement from Krista Spahr, Teaching & Learning Group, Calvin College

Recently, CIT's Teaching & Learning Team launched a new blog called "The Hoot."

The Hoot

The Hoot is a casual, on-going publication focusing on topics and issues of the teaching and learning process, especially the use of technology. It will feature pedagogical best practices, Calvin faculty highlights, and time-saving tips, as well as emerging technologies and other new ideas we pick up along the way. We invite all (Calvin College) instructors to visit our blog at: www.calvin.edu/go/hoot, then either bookmark it or subscribe to our RSS feed. Stay in the loop with "The Hoot."

Us Now -- from 4iP by Adam Gee; includes this quote:

"My new film, Us Now, explores examples of transparent, self-organising groups who are achieving large-scale, complex results. It follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers."

The International Journal Of Learning

Innovate

12/2/08

From DSC:
As a follow up to yesterday's posting -- The Forthcoming Walmart of Education -- here's a visual representation of one of the pieces that I was talking about:


Players at the Table -- 2008


Some of the players at the table in 2015


Top 50 P-12 Edublogs? - Technorati shakeup -- from Dangerously Irrelevant by Scott McLeod

Networks of Everything -- from George Siemens
Apparently, by 2017, personal networks will consist of over 1000 devices. I’m not sure how they came up with that number, but it seems realistic. Most of us already deal with hundreds of devices on a daily basis. They’re not all networked yet…but they will be. The key to effective functioning with these multiple devices will be in how they are connected and in how we can use that connectedness in making decisions. Obviously, we need something more than just tying these devices together. We need new approach to managing the overwhelming information they will produce. That’s partly as software problem and partly a conceptual shift. As I’ve stated before, as information becomes more complex and abundant, we will begin to rely to a greater degree on technology to perform a grunt cognition role by deciphering and presenting patterns for us to consider.

From DSC:
The above posting by George backs up what I was trying to get at with this image I created and posted on 5/31/08:

Learning Agents -- Prediction from DSC

eLearning Tool Chest -- link from B.J. Schone
Your one-stop shop for eLearning books, software, tips, and tricks We’ve gathered tons of information on eLearning books, software, and other useful resources in order to make it easy to find and buy what you need.

Items from Bryan Alexander

Evolution of the online ecosystem


10 e-learning trends -- from LunchBox blog

(For K-12) Effective pedagogy -- from The New Zealand Currriculum
While there is no formula that will guarantee learning for every student in every context, there is extensive, well-documented evidence about the kinds of teaching approaches that consistently have a positive impact on student learning. This evidence tells us that students learn best when teachers:

    • create a supportive learning environment
    • encourage reflective thought and action
    • enhance the relevance of new learning
    • facilitate shared learning
    • make connections to prior learning and experience
    • provide sufficient opportunities to learn
    • inquire into the teaching–learning relationship

MIT Mobile Web -- from MIT; link from Steve Rubel
Get essential MIT information and services anytime, anywhere on your mobile device: m.mit.edu. The MIT Mobile Web offers up-to-date information, optimized for different types of mobile devices. Find people, places, events, course news, shuttle schedules, and more. All you need is a mobile device with a web browser and either WiFi or a data plan...

Items from Wes Fryer re: Digital Storytelling

NMC ReportNMC releases Horizon Report focused on Emerging Technologies in Australia & New Zealand -- from the NMC
The Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand Edition (304K, 32 pp) is available now. The report is free, and has been released with a Creative Commons license to facilitate its use, easy duplication, and broad distribution.

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
Virtual Worlds & Other Immersive Digital Environments
Cloud-Based Applications

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Geolocation
Alternative Input Devices

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Deep Tagging
Next-Generation Mobile

 

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? -- from the New York Times, by John Markoff

Interactive Video Object Manipulation -- from Open Thinkinig & Digital Pedagogy

Clay Shirky in London: Group action just got easier -- from Ewan Mcintosh (also from Jenny Levine)

Clay Shirkey

That, my dears, is a big part of what 4iP is about. 4iP has the potential to be the convener of great ideas, and convene groups that ought to be talking to one another.

With 38minutes we're starting to do just that, having convened a space but given it over entirely to those who want to meet to talk about where they take their design, gaming, coding or new media business in this new(ish) age of t'interweb. Where previously these groups didn't talk, in less than two months we've convened nearly 500 of Scotland and Northern Ireland's top talent from four large sectors who until now rarely spoke about collaborating on projects. But it's happening thanks to the love, sweat, tears and effort of those 500 people, not really 4iP. Just having that shared situational awareness of who's doing what and how you might be able to help make it better is worth its weight in gold.


Add Multimedia Links And Embeds To Your Website With One Click: Apture Reviewed -- from Robin Good

100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates -- from SmashingMagazine.com

Realising The Potential of Web 2.0 -- by Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Letter from Lynda (Weinman) Lynda Weinman

Season’s Greetings!
December means the end of one year and the beginning of another. As I reflect on the past year from a software training perspective, I am amazed at how the industry has grown like it has at no other time in history. Financially speaking, the knowledge economy has created a bigger and bigger divide between those who have computer skills and those who do not. At lynda.com, we view it as our mission and our honor to help people navigate the digital age and elevate their knowledge. We are growing our library at an unprecedented pace, and we remain committed to helping others develop skills, confidence, and economic viability. More of Lynda's letter here.
(From DSC: lynda.com now has gift subscriptions; this is a great way to help out family members!)

12/1/08

The Forthcoming "Walmart of Education" -- from DSC (NOTE: These represent my perspectives, but not necessarily the viewpoints of Calvin College.)

The forthcoming Walmart of Education

From DSC:
I realize this may be a bit strange to find here...on a personal website of a multimedia specialist / educational technologist from a Christian-based college. But I do believe that this is where one significant piece of the puzzle is heading. I would hope that such an organization would integrate/build a strong moral fabric throughout its courses...but that probably won't be the focus for this type of forthcoming institution. Read more of my thoughts and implications of this impending competitive situation here...


An Interview with Dr. Roy Pea: E-Learn 2008 Keynote Speaker -- from Curt Bonk, U. of Indiana

If you unfortunately missed the conference, one of the fantastic keynote speakers at the E-Learn 2008 Conference last week in Las Vegas was Dr. Roy Pea from Stanford University. I have been a fan of Roy's work for more than two decades now. Roy is currently Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences at Stanford. He is also Director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. The title is his keynote address was, "Learning in a Networked World: Trends and Opportunities in the Future of Technology for Learning Environments and Education." Roy has a couple of relevant websites:

1. Info from Stanford on Roy Pea.
2. Roy's Personal Homepage.
3. Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning.
4. Learning Sciences and Technology Design Program at Stanford.


The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center -- link from Dr. Roy Pea, Stanford University

LIFE

The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center was one of the first four Science of Learning Centers to be funded in the Fall of 2004. LIFE is a an interdisciplinary collaboration between learning scientists at the University of Washington, Stanford University, SRI International, and other institutions across the country.

Networks and Connected Learning -- from thinking 2.0 by msbarnsley
This video describes how students can use the web to create a powerful learning network. Created by Wendy Drexler, The Networked Student, was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Drexler’s high school students as part of a Contemporary Issues class. It explains how students can use RSS, podcasting, blogs and wikis to learn in new and powerful ways and to access a range of expert information.

Networks and Connected Learning

NOTE from DSC on this:
This networked learning is true for faculty members and teachers as well as for students. My take on this is that professors and teachers will want to build their international networks of contacts/blogs/websites/etc. -- that is, if they plan on keeping up with what's happening within their disciplines. Will everything that's important show up in the journals that one reads? I'm not sure...but taking advantage of a worldwide network has become increasingly important in building and maintaining a top-notch knowledgebase and providing a quality product.

Top 10 Blogs for the WordPress Community -- from Vandelay Website Design

The Best Cheat Sheets for Web Developers -- posted on WebAppers by Ray Cheung

Top

 
November 2008


11/26/08

connectED SummitACU’s ConnectEd Summit 2009 -- from iThinkEd
As you likely know, mobile technology is dramatically shaping the nature of teaching, learning and social interaction at Abilene Christian University. This past fall, ACU became the first university to distribute Apple iPhones and iPod Touches to the incoming freshman class. This strategy has enabled all freshmen and their teachers to integrate technology and learning both in and out of the classroom. Along with this mass distribution of Apple devices, ACU introduced a portal, ACU Mobile, to help connect students to the campus through news and calendars, course documents and media, in-class surveys and polls.

This spring ACU will host the ConnectEd mobile learning summit (Feb. 26th and 27th) for campuses deploying iPhone and iPod Touch focused applications, portals, and initiatives in higher education. Whether you’ve just started thinking about mLearning or are a leader in the field, ACU is inviting you to join colleagues from across the academy for a summit focusing on integrating iPhones and iPod touches into your institution.

Governor Pawlenty and Minnesota State Colleges and Universities chair announce online learning initiative -- link from George Siemens' "Online Learning Req'ts" posting

To expand access, increase technology skills, provide exciting and inspiring course content, and maximize efficiency and use of taxpayer resources, Governor Tim Pawlenty and Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) Board of Trustees Chair David Olson today announced a goal to have 25 percent of all MnSCU credits earned through online courses by 2015.

Anything That Can Be a Video Will Be a Video -- from Education Innovation blog

Anything that can be a video will be a video, or so says this post from the site ReadWriteWeb. Here is an excerpt from their post Is YouTube the Next Google?

Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future -- podcast from Educause

Today's technology enables users to form and join communities of common interest to learn and share information. In opposition to the privileged learning spaces of higher education, social media encourage learners to seek out their own answers and construct knowledge as a community rather than as individuals. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Second Life offer new learning spaces, but how do they fit into the learning expectations of institutions?

Is Education Technology Anything New? -- from ideaworks blog

"But even these popular technology solutions won’t improve student performance unless they are oriented around proper learning goals. Like all learning tools, educational technologies must engage students’ curiosity, develop critical thinking skills, encourage good questions and cultivate effective communication proficiency."

Will Richardson highlights an interesting site: Rip-Mix Learners

Rip-Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio recordings of the lectures, compile class notes, and other materials and share them with their peers online. Many say that to really understand something, you need to teach it...perhaps this is a step in that direction...

Another related idea here (from DSC):
Have students create the multimedia-based, interactive learning materials in our futures. Have the materials posted to the Bb Content System (or a similar system), with search capabilities and tagging, and allow for editing these materials by other classes as time goes by.

11/25/08

Four trends that could change everything -- from eCampusNews.com
From NCTI conference remarks: These tech-driven trends are giving us an unprecedented opportunity to alter the world and ourselves

  • Trend No. 1: Parallel Computing
    Traditionally, we think of one computer working on one problem at a time. That's serial computing. When you take one large, complex task, break it into byte-size pieces, have multiple computers process the problem simultaneously, and then reassemble that output into a single, unified outcome--that's parallel computing. Universities are doing this sort of thing routinely now.
  • Trend No. 2: Cloud Computing.
     Cloud computing is just a poetic way of alluding to software that runs on remote servers accessible via the internet or a similar network. It might also be called the World Wide Computer.
  • Trend No. 3: Brain Mapping.
    Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (or FMRI), we can go under our own hoods and see what makes us tick.
  • Trend No. 4: The Global Dis-Assembly Line.
     Be it round or be it flat, globalization has arrived.

Words to think on -- from Jill Christian
"I went to a friend's memorial get-together last Saturday. The home was filled with an assortment of people all wanting to honor her memory. Her two sons gave tender, warm memories, one of which was the following admonition that she gave to the two of them:

THINK WELL. SHOW NO MALICE."

My mom mentioned that she thought they were extraordinary -- not do well, but think well. Not, "Be a good boy", but "show no malice."

AUDIOTUTS.com -- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
"AUDIOTUTS is a blog for musicians, producers and audio junkies. We feature tutorials on the tools and techniques to record, produce, mix and master tracks. We also feature weekly articles for the music obsessive. Our commissioned tutorials are written by industry experts and professionals, but anyone with an awesome skill to showcase can contribute a post and we’ll pay $150 if we publish it. You can learn about the submission process on our Write a Tutorial page."

AudioTuts.com

NETTUTS.com -- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
NETTUTS is a site aimed at web developers and designers offering tutorials and articles on technologies, skills and techniques to improve how you design and build websites. We cover HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails.

NETTUTS.com

AllMovie -- link from Caleb Kuntz in the T&L Digital Studio
One of the more impressive databases of movie information on the internet, including the staples of any movie database (cast information, synopsizes, etc.), but also some more interesting features such as Amazon integration for purchasing movies, as well as division of movies by themes and styles such as "Wishes Come True" or "Magic Realism"

AllMusic -- link from Caleb Kuntz in the T&L Digital Studio
Same as AllMovie, except for music! It's interesting to point out that AllMediaGuide, the company behind AllMovie, AllMusic, and a few other similar projects, is a relatively local company (from Big Rapids).


11/24/08

For this Thanksgiving week, this speech from David Letterman is highly appropriate! -- originally forwarded to me from my dad, Dr. Daniel K. Christian; also found this at a PR Writing Class Blog (in a Word document here.)

From DSC:
I have to say that Letterman captures the anger I sometimes feel towards the media for their often reckless, unhelpful decisions and behavior; behavior that often results in creating constant division rather than unity. When I hear the newscaster nonchalantly announce yet another murder or death, I wonder to myself...

- Have you announced so many body counts that you are that calloused towards life?
- Do you only care about your ratings?
- What if that were your son, your daughter, your husband, your wife?
- Who are you working for -- really?
- What is your agenda -- really?
- How is this information helpful to anyone?

...and show some genuine feeling for crying out loud! Or shut up with your "death and dying" reports and give us some news that builds people up and creates some unity in this nation! I realize this could be strongly debated, but I don't care today. I'm tired of listening to these cold-hearted, ratings-hungry newscasters -- and ultimately, this includes their producers, directors, editors, etc. -- who don't take their responsibilities and abilities to influence seriously. They will be held accountable.

Perhaps I am reacting strongly to reading this speech because it was just announced that Mr. Rick Mosher, Audio Visual Technician here at Calvin College, passed away this last weekend. Though Rick constantly ran or was on the cross-country ski trails, we lost him to a sudden heart-attack.

Rick was a dear friend to many in this community, having worked here for the last 19 years of his life. I worked closely with Rick and I know that I will miss him sorely. Not only will I miss seeing Rick and his smile around campus, I will miss his most-excellent craftsmanship, his expertise, his attention to detail, and his very-classy, professional, kind demeanor.

Life is precious. We'll look forward to seeing you again Rick. For now, good-bye.

Heaven's gain...our loss...Mr. Rick Mosher passed away this last weekend.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.
Psalm 116:15


Praise the Source of Faith and Learning
Text by Thomas H. Troeger; poem sung to the tune of "Come thou long expected Jesus" in the Methodist hymnal. Again, I'd like to thank my dad, Dr. Daniel K. Christian, for sending me this poem. He has a wonderful baritone voice that -- along with a perfect harmony from my mom (who is a piano teacher & a gifted musician who often signs the alto part) -- is a blessing to listen to.

Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind
With a passion for discerning how the world has been designed.
Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey
Keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray:
 
God of wisdom, we acknowledge that our science and our art
And the breadth of human knowledge only partial truth impart.
Far beyond our calculation lies a depth we cannot sound
Where your purpose for creation and the pulse of life are found. 
 
May our faith redeem the blunder of believing that our thought
Has displaced the grounds for wonder which the ancient prophets taught.
May our learning curb the error which unthinking faith can breed  
Lest we justify some terror with an antiquated creed.

As two currents in a river fight each other's undertow
Till converging they deliver one coherent steady flow,
Blend, O God, our faith and learning till they carve a single course,
Till they join as one, returning praise and thanks to you, their Source.

The Australian Learning and Teaching Council Exchange
The Exchange is an online professional networking site which enables members to contribute, collaborate, and share knowledge about innovative teaching and learning practices in higher education with like-minded professionals.

ALTC


Crafting Digital Tales and More with Web-based Tools -- from Share More! Wiki, by Miguel Guhlin

“Digital storytelling begins,” says Joe Lambert, Co-Founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling, “with the notion that in the not [too] distant future, sharing one’s story through the multiple mediums of digital imagery, text, voice, sound, music, video and animation will be THE PRINCIPAL HOBBY OF THE WORLD’S PEOPLE.” As that world becomes more connected through the Internet, the importance of learning to use digital tools to share your ideas, your vision, your stories becomes all the more critical. Given the choice of drill-n-practice or digital storytelling that is authentic, involves multiple media forms, which would your students select? I invite you to join the digital storytelling revolution, adding your voice to the mix.

MIT's Media Lab Creates Center for Future Storytelling

Traditional and digital approaches to teaching -- from Educational Origami blog

Engagement of our students -- from ICT U Can!

Embedding Student Expectations -- the 25th installment of the "Impact of Open Source Software" Series, by Cole Camplese. Cole, Director of Education Technology Services at the Pennsylvania State University

Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project -- link originally from Will Richardson, report from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning | November 2008

Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

This white paper summarizes the results of a three-year ethnographic study, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, examining young people’s participation in the new media ecology. It represents a condensed version of a longer treatment of the project findings. The study was motivated by two primary research questions: How are new media being integrated into youth practices and agendas? How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge?

From DSC:
When reading this report, notice quotes like "Online spaces enable youth to connect with peers in new ways" or, "Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities."

The bottom line:
Technology does not equal anti-relationship.

Becoming Screen Literate -- by Kevin Kelly

Bridging the Gap Between the Campus Enterprise and the Cloud -- by Jon Mott

New Research Commissioned by Thinkronize Shows More Than 85% of Principals and Teachers Want Web Resources To Help with Differentiated Instruction -- from B2E
In a new national survey of principals and teachers released today, more than 80% of educators expressed a need for resources that enable differentiated instruction to reach all students based on the different reading levels, prior knowledge, interests, and learning styles students bring to the classroom. More than 85% of those surveyed wanted access to Web resources that can help accomplish this. Read more.

7 things you should know about... -- from Educause

Browser Compatibility Testing: Cross-Platform Cross-Browser Multiple Resolutions Compatibility Testing Tools - Sharewood Guide -- from Robin Good

Mobile Learning Conference: Winter 2009
"The mobile phone is emerging as something more than what students use to text friends. And with the expansion of mobile phone services, this portable device is a logical solution to equipping students with generation-appropriate learning tools."

Homeschooling goes mainstream -- link/below quote from George Siemens

Education is being enlarged. More choices, more options. F2F, augmented, blended, online learning, etc are enlarging options for learners and educators to deal with individual, personal needs and contexts. Much like content is fragmented from large holding structures (newspapers, books, courses), the entire education system itself is breaking into multiple specialized choices. For example - homeschooling goes mainstream: “Home education is now being done by so many different kinds of people for so many different reasons that it no longer makes much sense to speak of it as a political movement.

 

 

11/18/08

Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge (podcast) -- from Educause
Today’s students already enter the university with high expectations for the use of technology in their learning and for maintaining relationships with their high school classmates, wherever they may have scattered for college or career. The educational system must respond dynamically to prepare our population for the complex, evolving, global challenges of the 21st century. Advances in technology are poised to meet these educational demands. Cyberlearning offers new learning and educational approaches and the possibility of redistributing learning experiences over time and space, beyond the classroom and throughout a lifetime. This talk presents the report of the National Science Foundation Task Force on Cyberlearning and its implications for higher education.

New Approaches for Libraries – Jenny Levine in Conversation -- from Panlibus blog, by Richard Wallis

I’m new to eLearning - Where do I start? -- from eLearning Weekly, by B.J. Schone; also mentions other resources below:

Items from the Masie Center & their Learning 2008 Event

  • 15 Hours of Video from Learning 2008 Online
    We have just posted over 15 hours of high quality video from the General Sessions and other activities from our Learning 2008 event. Segments with Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired Magazine), Sue Gardner (Wikipedia), Second City Communications and many more hours of learning content are now available free at http://www.learningwiki.com We also have a wealth of text and audio resources at that site as well.

  • Follow up podcasts from faculty sessions at Learning 2008

Minding the Engagement Gap -- from Angela Maiers
You can rarely have a conversation in education without hearing about some "gap", and we've got a lot of them: Achievement Gaps, Economic Gaps, Technology Gaps, Knowledge Gaps, Gender Gaps, and the list goes on... But, who minds the Engagement Gap?

Related links:

CIOs Play 'Increasingly Strategic Role' in Organizations -- from CampusTechnology.com

Yale Announces Multimillion-Dollar Effort in India -- from The Chronicle of Higher Education

EDUCAUSE Quarterly - No. 4 2008 now available

With Students Flocking Online, Will Faculty Follow? -- from InsideHigherEd.com
"The current model of higher education was several centuries in the making. That leaves colleges adapting to online learning, a viable option for only about a decade, with a monumental game of catch-up. ... No two models are exactly alike, but as colleges experiment with ways to keep their faculty happy and their courses high in quality, evidence of some common practices is emerging".

Internet Guides for Nursing -- from AcademicInfo; original link from Karen Romeis

  • Cybernurse.com
    Links compiled by the health sciences libraries of the Greater Midwest Region (GMR) of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) and those of the Committee for Institutional Cooperation.
  • Allnurses.com
    Includes links to associations, nursing schools, boards of nursing, nursing employment, nursing literature and more.
  • Nursing World
  • Midwifery Today
  • Nursing Time

Top 3 Free Online Media and Document Converters -- from TechieBuzz.com -- useful in capturing YouTube videos as well


10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming -- from SmashingMagazine.com

Showcase Of Clean And Minimalist Designs -- from SmashingMagazine.com

The Debate on the Future of Higher Education -- from Dept for Innovation, Universities & Skills (UK)
In his speech to the Wellcome Collection at the end of February, John Denham announced his intention to develop a framework for Higher Education over the next ten to fifteen years. He said:

The world is evolving very quickly and we must be able to unlock British talent and support economic growth through innovation as never before. We need to decide what a world-class HE system of the future should look like, what it should seek to achieve, and establish the current barriers to its development. As I have said previously, I want to do this before we initiate the review of undergraduate fees next year. As part of this process I am inviting a number of individuals and organisations to make contributions. Not to write government policy but to help inform it and - equally important - to stimulate debate and discussion in the sector.

The commissioned contributions have been delivered to the Secretary of State and are now available online.

11/17/08

From DSC:
What I've been calling "A New Language" is highly-related to what many others have been referring to as "digital literacy" or "new media literacy". Here's one item along these lines -- The New Media Literacies, by Henry Jenkins.


The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On -- from Stephen Downes; some key quotes listed below

Microsoft Word version of this essay here.

As learning evolves slowly from a classroom-based and deliver-based type of instruction, and toward wide-ranging learning activities that are largely selected and managed by the students themselves, the dedication of space in schools to classroom instruction will be reduced. Instead, schools will be converted into meeting facilities, workrooms and laboratories, multimedia studios, and more. Specialized equipment, such as sound-proof recording studios and high-speed video editing equipment, will be made available. Libraries will evolve (in a transition that is happening today) into multimedia studios, where students engage with interactive media, games, and other types of content. VR rooms, such as the CAVE, will be constructed, emulating the simulation environments that police and military use today.

The Bottom Line
As I stated ten years ago, and as we see today, even though savings will not be as great as anticipated, it will be necessary for institutions to offer their courses online - and sooner, rather than later - because the costs of not doing so are too great.

Distance learning institutions, such as Athabasca University and the University of Phoenix, are beginning to cut into traditional student bodies. It is becoming necessary for traditional institutions to accommodate more students with existing resources, which means that the pressures to take advantage of the potential savings offered by technology, which were not so great before, are now mounting.

Even more to the point, all educational institutions are facing their greatest competition from their students themselves. This is especially the case in nations where college and university degrees can be obtained only by a moneyed elite. A determined population of ambitious, talented and self-sufficient students can educate themselves, creating their own community, their own professions, their own future. We are seeing this unfold before our eyes, if we would only look.

The Future
Today, and for the last century, education has been practiced in segregated buildings by carefully regimented and standardized classes of students led and instructed by teachers working essentially alone.

Over the last ten years, this model has been seen in many quarters to be obsolete. We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.

Though today we stand at the cusp of this new vision, the future will see institutions and traditional forms of education receding gradually, reluctantly, to a tide of self-directing and self-motivated learners. This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.

Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 -- from eLearning Weekly, by B.J. Schone

Design-related items

  • PSDTUTS.com: Spoonfed Photoshop Tutorials -- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
    "PSDTUTS is a blog/Photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner. Photoshop is a fantastically powerful program and there are a million ways to do anything, we hope that reading PSDTUTS will help our readers learn a few tricks, techniques and tips that they might not have seen before and help them maximize their creative potential!"

  • VECTORTUTS.com: Spoonfed Vectors -- link from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
    "VECTORTUTS is a blog of tutorials, articles, freebies and more on all things vector! We publish tutorials on techniques and effects to make awesome vector graphics in programs like Adobe Illustrator, by authors and writers from all over the industry. Most of the content is free, but you can also grab a premium plus membership and get access to special extras as well as source files for the tutorials."

  • 2008 Promotion Design Award Winners: Best of Show -- from HOW Magazine

  • Top 10 sites for Designers -- from HOW Magazine

11/16/08

Thank you LORD for the freedom of speech!

My thanks to Karen Romeis for the link to the article.

11/15/08

From DSC:
School districts, colleges and universities throughout the world need to be careful with the number of monkeys being placed on the backs of their teachers and faculty members. The other day I was reading a posting about the "solution" to having K-12 teachers be more effective at integrating technologies into their classrooms. The solution was to offer more training, especially sustained training. To me, this isn't the solution. Many teachers and professors did not grow up with these technologies...my concern with this approach is that I wonder how long before many of these same folks:

  • Feel overwhelmed or frustrated?
  • Feel like they just don't have all of the tools and talents to do everything that's being asked of them? (and by the way, no one does!)
  • Start to not want to go to work like they used to?
  • Loose interest in teaching in this new "Information Age"?

Perhaps not everyone is as enamored with technology as those of us in the worlds of Instructional Technology / Instructional Design / IT / Systems / etc. So we need to find other solutions to the issue, as it seems like we are trying to put square pegs in round holes. It just doesn't work...and if it is forced to work, you end up shredding parts of the pegs in the process. As Covey (1990) would say, "Don't kill the Golden Goose".

No...to create and deliver engaging content will require TEAMS of people. If this can't work into the current educational systems of today, then the current systems need to change, not the other way around. This is not farfetched, as many of the technologies to allow this to occur are already in place.

PREDICTION: Even in 10-20 years, as the current students are graduating and moving into teaching jobs, they will still need TEAMS of people. They'll be able to wear a lot more hats that are currently being worn (only because they grew up with these technologies and don't need to be sold on the benefits of using them), but they won't be able to wear all of the required hats. No one has all the time, gifts and talents that are necessary.

Do you need some evidence of this? Look at the credits of a quality film -- educational or otherwise -- and you will see a looooooonnnnnggggg list of people who created that film --producers, directors, writers, actors/actresses, animators, audio engineers, videographers, etc. Eventually, as the bar continues to rise, teams of people will be needed in order to create engaging, multimedia-based, interactive content.

Listed below are the 4 main tracks listed below for next summer's NMC 2009 Conference -- can ANYONE know/do/implement all of this? And this is just a small fraction of all the potential topics that we could talk about!

The 4 main tracks for the New Media Consortium's Summer 2009 Conference

Applications of Emerging Technologies
This track features sessions that explore the newest technologies applied to learning, communication, and creative expression, especially ones featured in the Horizon Report. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  • The potential of digital storytelling
  • Educational applications for mobile devices
  • New forms of scholarship and emerging forms of publication
  • Web 2.0 applications
  • Social networking and collaboration in higher education
  • Strategies for incorporating user-generated content in institutional media and Web sites
  • Context-aware environments and devices
  • Immersive learning experiences and spaces
  • New media applications for advancing global humanitarian efforts
  • New media applications delivered over high performance networks
  • Planning and delivery of new media applications for the health and life sciences
Best Practices
This track is an opportunity to highlight successful projects, practices, or responses to emerging challenges and issues. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  • Supporting the research mission
  • Podcasting and use of audio
  • Video production and delivery
  • Educational gaming
  • Examples of new scholarship
  • Supporting and working with faculty or curatorial staff
  • Addressing accessibility
  • Evaluating the impact of technology on teaching and learning
  • Integrating pedagogy and technology
  • Live performances and Internet2
  • Course management systems
Digital Stories and New Approaches to Content
This track will explore digital storytelling and encourages sessions that cover the art and mechanics of digital storytelling and provides a showcase for the ways in which digital storytelling is impacting teaching and learning. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  • Teaching with digital stories
  • Community-based digital story projects
  • Integration of digital storytelling into curriculum
  • Collaborative storytelling projects
  • Best practices for teaching story telling methods
  • Approaches for teaching digital story production
  • Hardware and software for digital story creation
  • Web-based storytelling
Tools and Techniques
This track focuses on how to best use the latest software and tools for teaching and learning, including sneak peeks at the newest tools, tips and tricks for using old favorites. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  • 3D and animation techniques
  • New media tools and applications
  • Video production and digital compositing
  • Open Source projects (e.g. Almagest, Sakai, Steve, Connexions, Pachyderm)
  • Web 2.0 applications
  • Mobile delivery of educational content
  • Demonstrations of new software from key NMC corporate partners
  • New techniques involving established software
  • 2D animation and motion graphics

**********

Or take another example...

Do you think Joshua Thurbee (in this clip from brightstorm) did everything on his own to produce his courses?

Brightstorm

 

Covey, S. (1990). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Free Press.


The New Media Literacies -- from the New Media Consortium (NMC)
"This short video featuring members of MIT's Project New Media Literacies (NML) "discuss the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully engage with today's participatory culture." Edited in a modern graphic format, it quickly highlights what is "new" about new media literacy."


Elliott Masie's Learning Wiki

Some of the Learning 2008 Videos from Elliott Masie and the Masie Center

... and many others such as:

  • Mike Cuffe & Second City: Comedy & Learning
  • Second City Improv Skit
  • Charles Fadel: Multi-Modal Learning
  • Stephen M.R. Covey: Trust in Difficult Times
  • Learning 2008 PIT Winning Team
  • Champlain College final video game
  • Wayne Hodgins: Lost @ C? - Session 401
  • Cushing Anderson: How Has Buying Learning Changed? - Session 504
  • Dick Sethi: Understanding India: How to Deal With Indians in Plain English - Session 705
  • Elliott Masie: Learning Press Conference: Q & A With Elliott Masie - Session 900
  • Beth Thomas: Happy Associates are Productive Associates - Session 204
  • Evaluation - Quantitative vs Qualitative
  • Doug Lynch: An Economist on Learning
  • Paul Arciero: Mind, Body & Wellness
  • Second City Communications: "Learning is the only way to go"

New Report Profiles Role of 'Visionary Administrators' in Bridging the Digital Disconnect in Schools -- from Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard Inc. and Project Tomorrow released a report highlighting the emergence of "visionary administrators," a new breed of school superintendents and principals who are leveraging new technologies to meet the learning goals and preferences of increasingly tech-savvy students. Like the students they serve, visionary administrators championed the use of technology, including Web 2.0 tools, blogs and wiki entries, to expand the reach of the classroom and more effectively engage students. Read more.

From Ideas to Action: Enhance Your Teaching with Technology -- from Educause

RIPE Model



The presentation addresses questions like:

  • How can faculty interact with large groups of students in a teaching session?
  • How can faculty gauge what students are learning?
  • How can I continue the learning outside of my classroom time?
  • How will I know students have understood the concepts?
  • How can faculty provide time/opportunities for in-class interaction and discussion that will build on foundational ideas?
  • How can students prepare, at their own pace, for inclass applied learning?
  • How can faculty provide opportunities for formative student self-assessment outside of the classroom?
  • How can students practice applying their knowledge in real world scenarios??
  • How can students extend what they have learned?

It addresses items like video and audio files, online repositories, e-cases, online learning objects, clickers, web design tools, Articulate Presenter software, and more. It aimed to give participants many ideas for planning for technology-enhanced teaching. An annotated reference list and planner was handed out during the workshop.

Inspiring Innovative Teaching Ideas Through the E-Teaching Collaborative -- from Educause
The E-Teaching Collaborative is an innovative, interdisciplinary team that provides faculty with one-stop access to support in electronic learning resources, technological tools, and educational methodology. This session will feature an interactive discussion of the ETC's collaborative processes and the unique technological solutions employed by the team.

eCampus New -- November 2008 Edition

Thank you LORD for those with the courage to make it thus.


11/14/08

Disruption in higher education

Let it rise -- From The Economist print edition

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology visionary at IBM, compares cloud computing to the Cambrian explosion some 500m years ago when the rate of evolution speeded up, in part because the cell had been perfected and standardised, allowing evolution to build more complex organisms. Similarly, argues Mr. Wladawsky-Berger, the IT industry spent much of its first few decades developing the basic components of computing. Now that these are essentially standardised, bigger and more diverse systems can emerge. “For computing to reach a higher level”, he says, “its cells had to be commoditised.”

(From DSC: Though I don't believe in evolution, I do believe that Irvin hits the nail on the head when he talks about the pace of change. Now that enough of the key foundational pieces are in place, knowledge can flow freely, quickly, and worldwide. Those who are tapped into such information highways will prosper...those who are not will fall quickly behind.)

The students themselves. Listen to this podcast from Project Xiphos:

Kevin Prentiss Talks with Talis about Swift Kick and student engagement in education
"We discuss Swift Kick’s work to increase student engagement, and consider the ways in which traditional models of education are being disrupted both by providers of new technology and by the students themselves."

Education, globalisation and the knowledge economy:
A Commentary by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (UK)
[This commentary] reports on ground-breaking research with multinational corporations around the world which suggests that policy-makers have yet to appreciate the fundamental shifts which are now taking place in the way companies use skilled people. Large firms are increasingly aware that emerging economies, especially but not exclusively India and China, are building up their education systems at a rapid rate. Leading corporations are abandoning the idea that high-end activities such as research and design have to go on in the high-cost economies of Europe, North America or Japan. Instead, they are developing ways in which high-value work can be standardised, as manual work already has been. Once this is achieved, high-skill people in low-cost countries suddenly become an attractive option for multinationals.

This part of our analysis suggests that if the twentieth century brought mechanical Taylorism, characterised by the Fordist production line, where the knowledge of craft workers was captured, codified and re-engineered in the shape of the moving assembly line by management, the twenty-first century is the age of digital Taylorism. This involves translating knowledge work into working knowledge through the extraction, codification and digitalisation of knowledge into software prescripts and packages that can be transmitted and manipulated by others regardless of location. (From DSC: Think 1:1 computing, personalized learning agents)

Another disruption in higher education: the teaching university -- from Innosight Institute

Let Disruption Fix Higher Education: The time has come for teaching-model universities -- from Strategy & Innovation, by Henry Eyring

In contrast is the teaching-model university. Here, the “products” are students who are well-prepared for the workplace. Students would be on top of this customer list for the teaching university. Government comes next, with its stake in making sure public universities are serving the public.

Disrupting Class and the presidential election -- from Innosight; includes a link to http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/10/1021_education_tech/index.htm

One of the core reasons schools struggle is because their structure compels standardization in the way they teach and test. This standardized, monolithic experience would be fine if all students learned in the same way. But as we know from our own experience, we all learn in different ways. Different things motivate different people, we each have different intelligence strengths and learning styles, and people learn at different paces. Standardization in schools therefore will not do the trick. We need customization. Technology allows for the possibility of an escape from this standardization.

Online Education in the United States, 2008 -- by The Sloan Consortium
The evidence: Online enrollments have continued to grow at rates far in excess of the total higher education student population, with the most recent data demonstrating no signs of slowing.

  • Over 3.9 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2007 term; a 12 percent increase over the number reported the previous year.
  • The 12.9 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.2 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.
  • Over twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007.

Future of Higher Education: How Technology Will Shape Learning -- from the NMC

Innovation in Online Higher Education -- from the Thinking Differently... blog, by Tony Hirst

The Debate on the Future of Higher Education -- from The Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills, UK; link from Tony Hirst

The Coming Wireless Revolution -- from MIT Technology Review
Gadgets that operate over television frequencies promise to transform the wireless landscape. (From DSC: Think mobile learning.)

Disruption in K-12

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns -- by Clayton Christensen

Disruptive Education Technology -- from BusinessWeek.com

Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008-14 -- from Becta, link from Tony Hirst

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century -- by Henry Jenkins, et. al.

Insight Schools, Inc. operates the nation’s largest national network of full-time, diploma-granting, public online high schools.

(As the K-12 division of eCollege)
eClassroom has been working with online education for the K-12 market since 1996.


Examples of eLearning 2.0 -- from Tony Karrer

eNapkin : eLearning Technology -- from Tony Karrer
I'm at the Dan Roam - The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
- keynote at DevLearn. You can find something similar here.

WordPress Blogs Showcase -- from TechieBuzz

6 Quick Steps to Create a Game Based E-learning Course -- from the "One-Stop Resource for Instructional Designing" blog

DevLearn 2008 Bloggers -- from elearningweekly blog


11/13/08

Conclusions of the Online Learning Policy and Practice Survey: A Survey of the States -- from the Center for Digital Education (Michigan ranked #2 by the way)

CDE has observed that states and school districts are increasingly aware that students are spending more time online than ever before. In response to this phenomenon, states are pursuing online education initiatives to better serve their student population and meet the academic demands of Millennial students inside and outside of rural areas.

Online learning: A survey of the states

Fifteen states have taken significant steps in online education and have implemented state-led programs. Overall, CDE has observed the states are mainly serving their students through district online schools. School districts continue to have the conundrum of maintaining high levels of academic achievement with budget cuts and decreased funding. Online education enables districts to draw from a larger teacher talent pool and serve students who are geographically dispersed. States without online learning programs appear conscious of the trend and are evaluating the feasibility of implementing such programs.

CDE concludes online education will become ubiquitous in the United States as states and school districts continue to face the challenges of meeting student achievement levels, finding qualified teachers and preparing students for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

ISTE unveils new tech standards for teachers -- from eSchoolNews.com (back from August, but very relevant to education programs)
“We’ve got to have teachers prepared to prepare today’s students for the challenges of a new digital world,” explained ISTE Chief Executive Officer Don Knezek at the launch of the new framework.

Some math-related sites for you -- my thanks to Joe Girolamo in the T&L Digital Studio

Bagatrix.com

Mathway.com

Wolfram Mathematica Online Integrator -- from Joe Girolamo in the T&L Digital Studio
People from all walks of life and with all levels of mathematical ability have found The Integrator useful. We get comments from calculus students, engineers, physicists, and professional mathematicians, among many others.

CyberSchoolBus from the United Nations -- my thanks to Daniel Laninga in the T&L Digital Studio for this link
This is a site that is run by the United Nations and it tells about some of its projects/goals at a simple level. Possibly a nice fit for an international development intro class.

Lessons in Google Earth -- my thanks to Daniel Laninga in the T&L Digital Studio for this link
This is a site that works with Google Earth and other applications, and is meant for teachers. There are pre-built example resources for teachers as well as how-to's for using Google Earth for those folks who want to know how to create their own materials using Google Earth.

Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL)

MACUL

Careers of the Future -- from Converge Online, by Jessica Renee Napier

Big Ideas 4 Education: An example of the Delphi Method in practice -- from DavidWarlick.com

Higher Education Training / Curriculum Resources from Adobe -- for developing digital careers and for creating online-based content; my thanks to Mr. Michael Haan, Calvin Information Technology, for these links/info

Welcome to Adora's World -- encourage your daughters and sons to write/contribute like this! :)
Inspiring Literacy with Adora Svitak | Nov 14 @ 1pm EST
"Join Tandberg’s Jan Zanetis as she chats with Adora Svitak, renowned author, teacher, literacy mentor, and prodigy.  Eleven year old Adora has been working with students in person and over video for years to share her writing while inspiring them to create their own stories and poems. Participants will learn tips on how to motivate their own students, whether they be young children or full grown teachers. Learn how she makes the most of technology tools to engage students and get her lessons to come across at a distance. Most of all, participants will be amazed at the confidence and perception of Adora, a young lady that is quite at home on CNN, Oprah, or in your classroom. Join us and be inspired!" Her site is at: http://www.adorasvitak.com; recent news at http://www.wnem.com/video/17719161/index.html

Welcome to Adora's World!


11/12/08

MusicoveryMusicovery -- link from Donna Murray
Choose the music mood and dance tempo as well as the genres and decade.  Get an interactive visualization of songs that match your choices.

12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean -- from SmashingMagazine.com

Gates Foundation to Spend Big on Community Colleges -- from InsideHigherEd.com

"The college completion rate in America has been flat since the 1970s. We were once first in the world in postsecondary completion rates, we now rank tenth. That’s a danger for the nation’s economy, and it’s a tragedy for our citizens.”

"Building partnerships. The fund wants to promote better communication between colleges and local employers so programs are designed to meet local needs and students know the preparation they need to get jobs."

Educational Designer: A new online journal -- link from from Doug Holton
Education Designer is an international e-journal for design and development in education. It comes from the International Society for Design and Development in Education. ISDDE has established this journal to promote excellence in the research-based design, development, and evaluation of educational products and processes in the fields of mathematics, science, engineering and technology.

Histografica.com -- link from NMC, Alan Levine
"HistoGrafica is a community-driven website with high aims - making a large amount of historical pictures easily accessible in one place on the web. Everyone can share and describe their old pictures on HistoGrafica and help expand this free archive. Together, we can create the biggest, freely available archive of geo- and timetagged historical pictures in the world."

YouTube Ventures Into Live Event Webcasting -- from the New York Times / Reuters

The Airwaves Have Been Freed -- from Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy by Alec
On November 4, 2008, by a vote of 5-0, the Federal Communications Commission agreed to free the unused TV airwaves for unlicensed public use. To understand what this could mean for public wifi access, listen to Minnie Ingersoll of Google...

Screenshot Applications For Multiple Mobile Platforms -- from Techie-Buzz.com

Quick play with xtranormal -- link from The Ed Techie, by Martin Weller; Martin links to this take on FightClub

xtranormalbeta

Google Earth: Ancient Rome

Google Earth & Ancient Rome

A New eBook from The eLearning Guild
144 Tips on Synchronous e-Learning: Strategy + Research 
The eLearning Guild conducted a survey of its members, asking for their favorite tips relating to strategies for effectively creating, managing, and using synchronous e-Learning. Members could submit tips relating to any or all of five different categories. As is usual in our past surveys, the tips range in length from one-sentence ideas all the way up to multi-page discourses. You will find tips in these categories...

  • Blending Synchronous Learning with Other Learning Modalities
  • Designers of Synchronous Presentations, Courses, and Webinars
  • Managers Who Lead Synchronous Learning Efforts
  • Synchronous Speakers and Instructors
  • Technical Production, Planning, and Preparation

From a whitepaper entitled
Academic Research Makes a Case for the Wimba Collaboration Suite

Though it may sound intuitive, research shows that students need to collaborate in different ways with their instructors in order to succeed. While some students excel in a text-based course, many others need audible and visual elements to thrive. For instance, in 2008 the Metiri Group, an education consulting firm, published Multimodal Learning through Media:

What the Research Says which found that adding visuals to verbal (textual and/or auditory) instruction can result in “significant gains in basic or higher-order learning.” It also found that students using a well-designed combination of visuals and text learn more than students who use only text. While this idea of students learning in different ways seems obvious, the majority of online classes worldwide still primarily rely on text. As both hybrid and distance learning programs at institutions mature and evolve, many are now looking toward adding collaborative elements to their online courses, but some still aren’t quite sure if adding new technologies will help their students succeed or if they’ll prove to be too costly and time-consuming to maintain.

...For example, in How Using Wimba Supports Cognitive Processes Resulting In Higher Retention Rates, a dissertation in progress by Lisa Frazier, MED, Curriculum Development Specialist/ Instructional Technologist at Great Basin College, Frazier finds that, “students who have access to graphics and narrations scored twice as high on [problem-solving tests] than students with only graphics and text.” And in four additional studies using problem-solving tests, students with animation and narrations scored 43-69% more on these tests than students with animation and text.” In other words, the more spoken words and visual elements made available online to students, the better they tend to perform. It’s examples such as these which clearly demonstrate that collaboration is key to any student’s success, particularly for students learning at a distance.


11/11/08

In Florida, virtual school could make classroom history -- from eSchoolNews.com

Thousands of Florida students may ditch public elementary and middle schools next year in favor of online classes at home -- an option that could change the face of public education, reports OrlandoSentinel.com.

A new law that takes effect next fall requires every district in the state to set up an online school for kindergarten through eighth-grade students.

They won't have to get on the bus -- or even get out of their PJs -- to head to school at the family computer. A handful of elementary- and middle-school students already are experimenting with virtual classes, withdrawing from regular schools and enrolling instead for online instruction. Students take a full range of courses, including reading, writing, math, science, history, art, music and even physical education.

"I am so excited about this that my goal is to go all the way through 12th grade," said Joni Fussell, whose 8-year-old daughter has been studying at the kitchen computer in their Altamonte Springs home since January...


Quote from the
2008 Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK:

"Learning and teaching activities are consolidated longitudinally as the
primary drivers for considering using Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL),
although meeting student expectations is increasingly close
as the next most important driver."

online learning, writing, and student engagement -- from AlexReid.net

The future look of IT in higher ed? -- from Edmusings’s Weblog
From DSC: Though this was posted on July 29, 2008, it is a very relevant, well-thought out posting.

Learning in a networked world -- from E-learning innovation: research, evaluation, practice and policy

The Best Video Podcasts about Tech, Software & Internet -- from digital inspiration, by Amit Agarwal

Best tech podcasts


Developing Rubrics -- from Maryellen Weimer

Cloudworks.open.ac.uk/
Cloudworks allows you to find other people's learning and teaching ideas, designs and experiences as well as sharing your own. You can also get access to many learning design tools and resources to help you create learning designs.

  • Clouds - notes and information about learning and teaching ideas and activity designs you have tried
  • Resource Bank - methods and approaches to doing design and repositories of learning and teaching case studies or learning objects
  • Tool Bank - interactive learning design tools

Ideas 4 Change: Thoughts from an Info Mgmt Class -- blog from Prof. Kevin C. Desouza of the Information School at the University of Washington ("This Blog will be used to foster discussions on change management issues and engage graduate students, executives, faculty, and any interested commentators".)

The six secrets of change according to Michael Fullan are*:
1. Love Your Employees
2. Connect Peers with Purpose
3. Capacity Building Prevails
4. Learning is Work
5. Transparency Rules
6. Systems Learn

* The author states that the secrets are not secret in the sense that they are hidden from public view. Rather, they are secret because they’re complex, hard to grasp in their deep meaning, and challenging to act in combination (p. viii).

Laying the Foundation for Innovative, Flexible, and Consistent Classroom Technology -- from Educause
Carnegie Mellon University has just completed an intense analysis and implementation of new, standardized technologies in all of the university's general classrooms. This presentation will discuss the careful analysis and planning used to ensure the consistency, supportability, and usability of technology in the classroom now and for the years to come.

technologies and education: mobile technologies -- from the "You are Never Alone" blog

Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat -- from Gmail blog; original link from techie buzz

Burn-out and Online Instruction: Ten Tips to Revive Your Online Course and Yourself -- from The Online Instructor blog (Texas Woman's University Distance Education blog for Faculty and Staff who use Blackboard to teach or enhance their courses.)

  • International Journal of E-Learning (IJEL)
  • Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT)
  • Online Classroom
  • Innovate
  • Academic Leader
  • American Journal of Distance Education (AJDE)
  • Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (JTATE)
  • The Internet and Higher Education
  • Journal of Interactive Learning Research
  • Journal of Research on Technology in Education (JRTE)
  • E-learning-It Blog (http://elearning-it.blogspot.com/)
  • The Online Instructor (TWU’s blog)
Tough times strain colleges rich and poor -- from eCampusNews.com
Tough economic times have come to public and private universities alike, and rich or poor, they are trying to figure out how to respond, reports the New York Times. Many are announcing hiring freezes, postponing construction projects, or putting off planned capital campaigns. Arizona State University, anticipating at least $25 million in budget cuts this fiscal year--on top of the $30 million already cut--is ending its contracts with as many as 200 adjunct instructors. Boston University, Cornell, and Brown have announced selective hiring freezes. And Tufts University, which for the last two years has, proudly, been one of the few colleges in the nation that could afford to be need-blind--that is, to admit the best-qualified applicants and meet their full financial need--might not be able to maintain that generosity for next year's incoming class.

Professors collect big bucks for online classes -- from the Des Moines Register, by Erin Jordan; original link from eCampusNews.com

Online learning

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education -- from American University
This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances—especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question—as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.

Subliminal pattern recognition and RSS readers -- from Tarina blog
Linear, intentional learning was how you learned in the past. Enter nonlinear, visually active way of learning of the future. The blogosphere is like a digital photograph: one pixel is one blog post. The details don’t make any sense but once the pixels appear to be connected, it forms a pattern, a picture perhaps that you can recognize. This is exactly what happens if you swim in information overload and try to perceive how things fit together. As a result, you might think that you have almost psychic capabilities to know what is happening at the market right now and how to respond. If you are an individual, start using RSS readers and expand your field of subliminal vision. Use sources that regularly provide insight into your life. If you are a corporation, create information overload inside your organization and give people tools to follow and perceive patterns. Otherwise your competitors will soon know better than you what to do next.

Get to Know Your Learners (And Avoid These Pitfalls) -- from The Rapid E-Learning Blog

Keynote from Zaidlearn's Zaid Ali Alsagoff: 69 Learning Adventures in 6 Galaxies

Website Redevelopment: A Big Job with a Big Payoff -- from Educause, by Antonia Malavazos & Toby Sitko

Schools Take Recruitment Virtual with Online Education Expo -- from CampusTechnology.com; see this article also

Lying about Personalized Learning -- from iterating toward openness blog

50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus - Part I -- from Vandelay Design

50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus - Part II -- from Vandelay Design

My Nominations For The 2008 Edublog Awards -- from Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo Here are some of my nominations for the 2008 Edublog Awards (though I might very well add more later):

11/10/08

2008 National Survey of Student Engagement Results -- link/idea from InsideHigherEd.com
The online edition of the NSSE 2008 Results is now available:

NSSE 2008 Results

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) documents dimensions of quality in undergraduate education and provides information and assistance to colleges, universities, and other organizations to improve student learning. Its primary activity is annually surveying college students to assess the extent to which they engage in educational practices associated with high levels of learning and development.

Royalty Free Music and Images -- from Creating Lifelong Learners blog

Education, You Are Long Over Due -- from Education Innovation blog

  • 40 years for radio to get 10 million users
  • 15 years for TV to get 10 million users
  • 3 years Netscape to get 10 million users
  • Hotmail and Napster less than a year to get 10 million users

Yes, You Can Use Copyrighted Material in the Classroom -- from American University; link originally from ETS at PSU
All manner of content and media is now available online, but fear and misinformation have kept teachers and students from using this valuable material, including portions of films, TV coverage, photos, songs, articles, and audio, in the classroom. Now, thanks to a coordinated effort by the media literacy community, supported by experts at American University and Temple University, teachers and students have a guide that simplifies the legalities of using copyrighted materials in an academic setting: The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education.

Campus IT Budgets Down, Open Source Looking Up -- from Liberal Education Today, by Bryan Alexander, who links to article by David Nagel at CampusTechnology.com
Nearly half of public universities and public four-year colleges in the United States reported central IT budget cuts in fall 2008, according to new research released Wednesday by The Campus Computing Project. That's up significantly over last year. At the same time, open source software is looking more appealing to campuses, with about a fourth reporting a "high likelihood" that they will migrate to an open source LMS within the next five years.

Quality Matters
Inter-Institutional Quality Assurance in Online Learning

From DSC:
Consider the source of the following report -- CDWG -- but still...I include it here because this topic is one of the very things that I addressed in the graphic I created last Saturday.

Is Higher Ed Technology Keeping Up with Student Demand? -- link from Liberal Education Today, which links to 10/14/08 article by David Nagel at CampusTechnology.com
Students see campus technology is a key factor in selecting a college or university and consider it critical for their professional development. Yet higher education institutions on the whole aren't keeping up with student needs in this area, according to a new report released Monday by CDW Government.

Emerging Learning Spaces -- from Educause
The library information commons. Technology-enhanced classrooms for projecting multimedia. Labs to support team-based projects and student-generated content. These examples continue to inform campus learning space design decisions. Best practices from these spaces can also point to strategies for assessing next-generation space needs and designing discipline-specific spaces and might help us understand effective design in virtual learning spaces.

Finding the Good Fit: Faculty Members, Instruction, Evidence, and Technology -- from EducauseThe proliferation of Web 2.0 applications and other emerging technologies has made it difficult for academic support staff, instructional designers, and faculty members to select the best tool for their purpose. The challenge lies in understanding instructional style, content needs, student abilities, and pedagogical "fit," as well as figuring out how to capture evidence of successful practices. In this hands-on, faculty-centered seminar, participants will learn how to determine faculty member expertise and comfort level in using various emerging and existing instructional tools and how to devise strategies to document instructional success.

ArtScope -- from Larry Ferlazzo
"I’m planning a field trip to San Francisco, and discovered that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a neat new tool on its website called ArtScope. It’s one of those web applications that’s hard to describe. Basically, it’s a very cool way to explore their collection. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it provides a particular benefit to English Language Learners other than the fact it’s certainly a much more enticing way to get students to check-out art. You can also use the search function, which will be useful since students can look for photographs of Yosemite in anticipation of another field trip we’re making there."

ArtScope

Assessing PLE/LMS systems -- from NMC, by Alan Levine
Contains summaries of what others have found out...

Internet Attacks Grow More Potent -- from the WashingtonPost.com, by John Markoff
Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet -- are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world’s largest networks, according to a new report on online security.

The Change Will Happen -- from weblogg-ed.com, by Will Richardson

What is the reason we gather face-to-face (f2f)? -- from The Thinking Stick blog

  • What is the reason we gather face to face when content can be found 24/7/365?
  • What is the reason when research can be done outside face to face time?
  • What is the reason when reading/listening/gathering/analyzing content can be done outside of school?
  • What are we doing with face to face time to maximize the learning potential for students?
  • What is technologies role?
  • What is the teacher’s [professor's] role?

Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is -- from Education and Technology, by Steve Dembo
From DSC: This posting has some good resources/thoughts re: RSS feeds.


11/8/08

Why is establishing a culture of adopting technology becoming more critically important for colleges & universities?

Down 36 Students, College Will Lose 40 Jobs -- from InsideHigherEd.com

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 -- from Jane Hart

Top Learning Tools 2008


The classroom is disappearing - or is it? -- from EffectiveDesign.org

-- The classroom isn’t disappearing, but it is no longer the star of the show.

Online Interactive Simulations -- link from Donna Murray

Example of digital storytelling -- link from Wes Fryer

Celebrate Oklahoma Voices
Welcome to our online learning community for Celebrate Oklahoma Voices presented by The Oklahoma Heritage Association. COV is a statewide digital storytelling project empowering learners to become digital witnesses, archiving local oral history and sharing that history safely on the global stage of the Internet.

Participatory Video and Digital Storytelling -- from Hear One, Do One, Teach One blog

Facebook for Educators: A Guide for Instructors -- from Edumorphology blog

Facebook: A Guide for Instructors

Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens -- from Robin Good's blog

The above link refers to Learning On The Move: MLearning Is Next -- also from Robin Good, which is highly relevant.

Efficient and effective podcasting: Survey results and practial recommendations -- from EffectiveDesign.org; tips included:

  • Don’t rely on podcasts alone
  • Poor medium for lengthy or detailed information and delayed recall
  • Best for introductions, summaries, reviews
  • Length
    • Remember their timeframe and attention span.
    • 10 to 20 minutes MAXIMUM. That’s what I have found as well.
    • Vodcasts even shorter
  • Integrate
    • Use to augment other activites such as discussions, analysis, seminars, groupwork
  • Formats
    • Most like podcasts over vodcasts
    • Video lectures are ineffective

To connect with bloggers (worldwide) that are focusing on education...

Edublogger World


11/7/08

President-elect Website launches -- http://change.gov/ -- from Liberal Education Today
A Website for president-elect Obama's transition to governance has been launched. Its prominent features suggest certain expectations from a general audience, with potential implications for academic digital design.

Change.gov

Blackboard's Project NG -- original link from ETS at PSU
"With Project NG, Blackboard aims to create a more open and flexible platform that combines the best of Blackboard and WebCT systems with new innovations, including new capabilities to engage students, leverage the power of social learning communities and drive success in institutional assessment. In addition, Blackboard is working to provide new levels of freedom and choice for institutions by partnering with leading universities to develop integrations with the open source Sakai and Moodle course management systems."

The Magic of Digital: Collaborative Interaction in Teacher Professional Development -- this is a podcast from Wes Fryer

Along the lines of learning agent software:
(For the Mac)

DEVONthink

DEVONthink
Information Manager with Built-in AI
 

DEVONagent

DEVONagent
Intelligent Internet Research Assistant

Psychology-related items -- my thanks to Niko Solihin, in the T&*L Digital Studio for these links

psychtoday.com pyschcentral.com
Your amazing brain
PsyBlog
socionics.com
Change Cycle Series
Try it yourself

The secret of change...From DSC:
If one doesn't adapt...doesn't anticipate the future,
then the resulting issues seem to have a greater negative force
and impact. The window of opportunity is gone, and now you're into playing catch-up ball. For an example of this in current action, see this article first, then this article or this news release.

From The Change Cycle Series

Choosing Authoring tools -- from eLearning Slam blog

Making Higher Ed Research Matter -- from InsideHigherEd.com

Cambridge students 'plagiarising' - BBC -- from Educational Technology


11/6/08

Leslie Reid on team projects in large classes -- from D'arcy Norman dot net

Bryant University Takes On-Demand Approach to Multimedia Delivery -- from CampusTechnology.com, by Linda Briggs
Extending classroom walls through educational videos and other multimedia offerings has become common in higher education but often brings its own set of challenges. Managing the increasing amount of multimedia content, along with cataloging new material, such as live recordings, can be costly.

CNN Hologram Technology May Change Web Conferencing forever -- from CNN.com and digital inspiration; also see this diagram

CNN hologram

 

Items from Educause

School board to discuss meeting by Internet -- from ArgusLeader.com, link from eSchoolNews.com

Designing Mobile Learning -- from elearnspace blog

New iPhones have made cheating easier for students - Matt Loving, TJC Newspaper -- from Educational Technology blog

Studying the net.generation on campus: one university's study -- from Liberal Education Today, by Bryan Alexander
How do traditional-age students use social software on campus? An Arizona State University team surveyed their incoming students, especially first-years, and analyzed the results. Their presentation to the 2008 Educause conference (download) breaks it down in detail. Some of their research questions:

How are today’s undergraduate students using social networking applications as part of their campus lives?...
How might student use impact recruitment and retention?...
Do students see any potential value of using social networking sites for academic and non-academic campus experiences?...
Does social networking use related to college activities result in increased social and academic integration and ultimately improve persistence?

POSbase -- from Caleb Kuntz in the T&L Digital Studio
A database of Powerpoint presentations on numerous psychology studies and experiments, designed to be used in psychology classes from a freshman to post-graduate level.

The new language continues...

Image purchased from StockExpert; thanks to Robin Good for putting a similar image in his blog today.


THEOPEDIA.com -- from Daniel Laninga in the T&L Digital Studio
This is a wiki-based site, focusing on Biblical Christianity.

Theopedia.com

Developing Rubrics -- from Maryellen Weimer
See also the International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning (ISETL) site at www.isetl.org as well as The Teaching Professor site at www.teachingprofessor.com.

Embedding Student Expectations -- from Cole Camplese at PSU's Terra Incognita blog

The best example of big media getting it I can point to is the emergence of hulu.com as a real player in the online TV distribution world. Not only can I do almost all of my TV watching online for free, but I am now able to do something that I never thought I’d see from the likes of NBC — embed real TV content on my own site legally. Not only do they give you the simplicity of the embed tags, but they even let one embed custom versions of the content. If I only want to point to 30 seconds of a Saturday Night Live piece, I can do that. With this simple affordance, the future of personalized media just took another step forward. Where are the tools for education that take advantage and promote these ideas?

Imagine what that does to student expectations? If a student can control NBC, why in their mind can’t a faculty member respond to email on her terms? The future is happening right in front of us. I think it creates some interesting questions for our course and learning management systems, our policies, and our responsibility to promote open access to content. With the rise of blogs, with easily embedable media, and the explosion of point and click user-generated content what should the new tools look like for teaching and learning?

I have, for the most part, abandoned the notion of the walled garden as the assignment dumping ground via CMS drop boxes and have instead fully embraced the concepts of student centered creation. As we attempt to drive more students towards portfolio thinking via open platforms, what will it look like to turn an assignment in? Should we be rethinking a model built around aggregation that allows content to be “owned” by the creator and more easily shared to the faculty and the learning community? What does it mean for life long learning and an ability to connect with a broad community? How is moving towards a distributed set of resources that are easily reused going to challenge our control over curriculum? These are just some of the questions I am asking my administration and staff. People wonder if the print media folks are listening … I am more concerned if we are paying attention as well.

Globalize Your Blog -- from Teach42 blog


11/5/08

Podcasts for Educators, Schools & Colleges -- from Recap, UK

Web Developer Resources -- my thanks for Niko Solihin, in the T&L Digital Studio for this link

Music Theory -- my thanks for Niko Solihin, in the T&L Digital Studio for this link

MusicTheory.net

11/4/08

Teaching Professor

Active Learning and Student Persistence -- by Maryellen Weimer, who, by the way, is coming to Calvin College tomorrow
One of my favorite higher education researchers is John Braxton, a professor in the Peabody College (of education) at Vanderbilt University. I’ve highlighted much of his research in the newsletter. It is some of the very best. I also admire John because of his commitment to connecting research and practice.

John and a group of colleagues are out with a new study titled, “The Role of Active Learning in College Student Persistence.” Here’s the finding: “Faculty use of active learning practices plays a significant role in the retention of first-year college students.” It’s a finding that is supported by previous research, some completed by John and some by others. Here’s the explanation of why. “The pattern of findings of this study tends to indicate that active learning practices that faculty use shape in students the perception that their college or university is committed to their welfare in general and their growth and development in particular, a perception that leads to their sense of social integration. The greater a student’s degree of social integration, the greater is his or her level of subsequent commitment to the college or university. The greater the student’s level of subsequent commitment to the college or university, the greater is his or her likelihood of persistence in the college of initial choice.” (p. 81)

Buying Web Domain Names - Some Tips and General Precautions -- from digital inspiration, by Amit Agarwal

LoudLit.org -- link from Liz Davis

LoudLit

LoudLit.org is committed to delivering public domain literature paired with high quality audio performances. We pair together great literature and accompanying audio. Putting the text and audio together, readers can learn spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure by listening and reading masterpieces of the written word. Read and listen via your web browser or on your mp3 player. Regardless of how you enjoy the audiobooks (audio books), they are free.

[Collection] [Contact & Donations] [Agreement] [About]
[Children's Stories] [Poetry] [Short Stories] [Novels] [Historical]


Digital Signage: A small sampling of vendors and articles
See also: http://campustechnology.com/articles/46403/

Digital Signage

Education Review: A journal of book reviews -- from ASU

The Very Expensive Myth of Long Distance -- from the New York Times, by Saul Hansell
Start with this dreadfully inconvenient fact: On today’s phone systems, there is virtually no difference between a local call and a long-distance call. The biggest expense of offering local phone service is maintaining the wires to each customer’s house (wires which in many cases also carry Internet traffic). In any case, virtually all of the costs of offering phone service are fixed and have nothing to do with how many calls customers make, how long they talk or what distance the calls travel.

DevLearn 08

DevLearn 08

One of the keynotes is entitled, "Brain Rules for Learning":
The brain is an amazing thing. Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every designer, developer, and manager should know. How do we learn? Why is it so easy to forget—and so important to repeat new knowledge? Dr. John Medina, author of the revolutionary new book, “Brain Rules,” will take us on a fascinating tour of our brains. You’ll discover what neuroscientists are learning about learning, and what we might do about it to ensure the e-Learning we create is truly engaging and effective.

IACE-T Presentation: eLearning promises and practices -- Peter Tittenberger, Learning Technologies Center, University of Manitoba
This presentation discusses some trends and change pressures occurring -- or about to occur -- out there. Here are a handful of slides from that presentation:

This presentation discusses some trends out there right now -- and into the future

A funny snapshot from the presentation

asdf


Docs to Go for the iPhone --from iThinkEd

In a Political-Blog Course, Students Sort the Spin -- from The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Katherine Mangan

Get Blogs Delivered to your Email Inbox as a PDF Newsletter -- from digital inspiration blog

Tabloid from HP


11/3/08

Emerging Tech Challenges -- from CampusTechnology.com
(From 50 IT Leaders at Campus Technology's 2008 Executive Summit) Response to the question "Who do you think is primarily pushing new technologies in higher education?" revealed students as the drivers (44%).

asdf

From DSC: This has been my theory/hunch but also my concern all along.
Won't students come to expect that all sorts of technologies will be available to them in their
institutions of higher education if they've grown up using them during K-12?
We're just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg here.
What's at stake? How engaged students are in their learning!

asdf


Challenges
What are the challenges surrounding the deployment of emerging technologies?

asdf

Bottom Line
What were participants' "top challenges" overall?


Prediction from DSC:
Given the current strategies, org charts, institutional setups, policies, and incentive systems, the digital divide
will continue to grow until the students become the professors. This is not to put the blame on faculty members
or on anyone else; it's merely to say that the way things are currently set up is not working to reduce this digital divide.


Clickers in academia: three campuses reflect -- from Bryan Alexander

Tips For Students On Doing PowerPoint Presentations -- from Delaney Kirk
Professor Barbara Nixon (Georgia Southern University) shares tips on how to put together a great PowerPoint presentation. There's some very useful advice to share with our students. Here's how NOT to use PowerPoint.

#@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet -- from CNN.com

Film School for Video Podcasters -- from Creating Lifelong Learners blog, by Matthew Needleman

Education in 2015: Cyberlearning for digital native: What will learning look like in 2015? -- from MacWorld.com, by John Cox

The Future of Instructional Computing Labs -- from Educause

The Anatomy of a Course Designed Like a Video Game -- from Educause

Some good sites/tutorials for learning how to use a computer -- from Larry Ferlazzo

Learning about the economy through computer games -- from Bryan Alexander
Some learners are studying the current economic crisis by playing computer games, according to the Wall Street Journal. These students are teenagers, and use several different games to understand market chaos. In contrast, an item about colleges creating digital learning objects concerning the crisis in the NITLE prediction markets suggests that...

New App Brings the Cloud to Your iPhone -- from Steve Rubel

New App Brings the Cloud to Your iPhone

“New technologies offer new opportunities for educators to increase learner engagement and
improve the overall value of the learning experience." -- George Siemens Presentation

11/1/08

Comments on water from DSC:
I grew up in Michigan which is surrounded by the Great Lakes, and contains hundreds -- if not thousands -- of smaller inland lakes throughout the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan (not to mention the series of rivers, streams, etc.). So when bottled water first came out, I asked myself, "Who in the world will buy this stuff? Why would they bottle water?" It just seemed so foreign to me. Boy, years later, it's good for me to reflect upon some learning that's been done in that area (at least)! :)

Piggybacking on Wes Fryer's announcement immediately below, I'm going to call this announcement:
Michigan is the Saudi Arabia of water for the United States

Check out this "New atlas of global water supplies" -- link from Bryan Alexander
plus see
Great Lakes states sign off on water compact -- from mlive.com from back in July 2008

Michigan is the Saudia Arabia of water for the United States

I sure hope we don't mess this one up. We better protect that
water supply...or we may be very sorry in the long run.


"The United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind power" -- from the Pickens Plan; link from Wes Fryer


The Pickens Plan

The Difference Between a Blog and a Wiki -- from ConverStations, link from Delaney Kirk

Face-to-Face blog - Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery -- from Educational Technology
Online for less than a year, Face-to-Face is written by a team of National Portrait Gallery staff members with diverse responsibilities, from webdesign to curatorial. The blog is "dedicated to art, history, and the telling of American lives." There are four categories on Face-to-Face:Biography, Events, Exhibitions and News. "Biography" currently features an article series on presidential trivia...


The future of education according to Steve Hargadon

Surface Finally Above Water -- from Technology Trends by Phillip D. Long
Orlando - Educause 08: The Microsoft Surface has finally become available to the general public. It has an acrylic top, a DLP projector shooting up to it and Windows Vista PC running the system. The Surface has a 30 in. touch sensitive display, currently with a very small number of apps that accompany it but a number of commercial apps available for purchase.

Microsoft Surface - Picture 1 Microsoft Surface - Picture 3

Microsoft Surface - Picture 2 Microsoft Surface - Picture 4


UN data -- from Educational Technology
The United Nations (UN) website contains a tremendous amount of data, and for some new users (and even those who are more experienced), it may be a bit overwhelming. Recently, the UN created this fine website designed to assist those who might need a bit of assistance with this whole process.

October 2008

 

10/31/08

Faculty Success Stories at Penn State University

PSU faculty success stories PSU faculty success stories




Commentary from DSC:
The image below explains why I like interactive multimedia so much! This is why I think it would be highly effective if we could offer the same information in 3, 4, or 5 different ways, then give the student control over which methods of delivery/practice work for them:

Cone of Learning

Cone of Learning -- idea from Nigel Paine's blog

The Future is Unwritten -- by Miguel Guhlin

Analysis: New Strains Put Pressure on Traditional College-Pricing Model -- from the Chronicle of Highere Education, by Beckie Supiano
Concern over the rising cost of college is nothing new, but it's taking an interesting turn. Most of the attention given to college costs focuses on the sticker price, but few students ever pony up that much. As that price rises, merit-based aid does, too, and most students get what amounts to...

"How long can the model of ever-increasing price and merit aid be sustained? What new system would rise in its place? The college pricing system's shaky foundation is based on a decline in government support for higher education."..."The economic reality and the demographic reality is there aren't enough residential full-time students for all the colleges that want them who can afford them," says Robert A. Sevier, senior vice president for strategy at Stamats Inc., a higher-education-marketing company.

FROM DSC:
This is why folks should be concerned about the upcoming "Walmart of education" that can produce an excellent education at 1/2 the price -- via online-based learning, offered worldwide.

Archeologist finds 3,000-year old Hebrew text -- from CNN.com; also see Dead Sea Scrolls

Tomorrow's Students, Today's K-12 Digital Learners: Are You Ready for Them? -- from Educause
Since 2003, the Speak Up National Research Project has collected authentic feedback about technology and education from over 1.1 million K–12 students. Learn about the expectations of today's digital learners for 21st-century learning environments, and how you can be prepared to address the technology needs of your future students.

iPhone Deployment: iStanford -- link from Hear One, Do One, Teach One blog at PSU

iStanford

The Learning MarketSpace, October 2008 -- from The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT)
A quarterly electronic newsletter of the National Center for Academic Transformation highlighting ongoing examples of redesigned learning environments using technology and examining issues related to their development and implementation.

Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum -- from Innovate, by Dave Cormier -- links from George Siemens
The pace of technological change has challenged historical notions of what counts as knowledge. Dave Cormier describes an alternative to the traditional notion of knowledge. In place of the expert-centered pedagogical planning and publishing cycle, Cormier suggests a rhizomatic model of learning. In the rhizomatic model, knowledge is negotiated, and the learning experience is a social as well as a personal knowledge creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.

Also see the Rhizome Project (which George properly questions whether this project drew upon the work of Dave Cormier)

The Learner-Centered Methodology (LCM) approach to ID -- from Learnability Matters blog

From DSC:
With all due respect, I'm coming to the conclusion that the following presentation pursues the wrong approach -- i.e. that the faculty should bear most of the weight in implementing technologies. We just need to train them on how to do it. Bottom line: "It's up to you guys." Well...this hasn't been working well enough; it also assumes that all faculty members even want to know how to use technology (let alone have the time and incentives to do so); and it assumes that 1 person can know their discipline as well as keep up with an ever-increasing rate of technological change -- I'm not sure that this is going to be possible any longer.

Sustainable Faculty Technology Development to Facilitate a New University Culture -- presentation at Educause 2008

Best Wiki Tools and Services -- from Robin Good

Toolboxes from SmashingMagazine.com

More campuses using WordPress for digital publication -- from Bryan Alexander at the "Liberal Education Today" blog

Lyceum -- my thanks to Mr. Jonathan Wyse at Davenport University for this link
Lyceum is a multi-user, multi-blog branch of WordPress.

Lyceum

UMWblogs: academic publishing in Web 2.0 -- from Liberal Education Today blog, by Bryan Alexander

PC makers move closer to a post-Windows world -- from CNNMoney.com
Hewlett-Packard announces a new Linux-based laptop while tech execs fret over the power of the iPhone - signs that Microsoft's days as the king of software are over.

Find Lost User Manuals For Any Products / Gadgets / Accessories --from Techie Buzz, by Keith Dsouza

Researching the Effectiveness of Virtual Worlds -- from Learning Matters! blog

Report assesses K-12 online learning -- from eSchoolNews.com
Further growth hinges on policy, funding changes in states from coast to coast, it says

The Science of Spectroscopy

Drop.io -- from William Overbeeke in the T&L Digital Studio
The simplest way to share files online. Simply set up a private space to drop any files by phone, email, web, widget or fax and then share them with whoever you want via a variety of outputs.

Learning Content Strategies Meeting -- from EdTechPost


10/30/08

From DSC:
Items relating to e-books

  • Various links and resources relating to e-books

  • OverDrive: Brochure -- Factsheet -- my thanks to Mr. David F. Burleigh for this information
    OverDrive is a global distributor of eBooks, audiobooks and other digital media to libraries, schools and retailers.

  • www.idpf.org -- link also from Mr. David F. Burleigh
    The International Digital Publishing Forum, which sets standards and facilitates communication about eBooks between suppliers, distributors, hardware and software manufacturers and the channel.

  • Questia.com -- link from edtechlife.com
    Questia is the world's largest online library of copyright-cleared books, with over 67,000 full-text books, 1.5 million articles, and a reference set complete with dictionary, encyclopedia, and thesaurus.


Worlds of David Darling -- link from Joe Girolamo in the T&L Digital Studio
A large on-line collection of information on all aspects of science, technology, mathematics, philosophy, and science fiction.


10/29/08

From DSC:
Microsoft is at it again -- not innovating, but rather copying and jumping on the prevailing bandwagons, then putting up smokescreens so that their customers and/or other organizations won't make any moves to its competitors. However, this announcement is important, as it signals even Microsoft's move to cloud computing.

Office goes to the Web -- from All Things Digital

Microsoft is joined by IBM in the clouds...so, along with Google, we now have some very heavy hitters in the clouds.

University, IBM join in cloud-computing project -- from eCampusNews.com
Program aims to revolutionize computing for North Carolina students; N.C. State promises to give underlying code to schools elsewhere

Also, the next three links are some further changes brought about by technology.
Do not underestimate the disruptive power of technology!

The Christian Science Monitor shifts from print to web-based strategy -- from CS Monitor.com, by David Cook
In 2009, the Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily print edition with its website; the 100 year-old news organization will also offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions . Also, there's a video clip including Monitor Editor John Yemma and Managing Publisher Jonathan Wells, as they discuss the thinking behind the changes coming to the Monitor. (Print product for weekends; web-based for daily items.)

Time Inc. Plans About 600 Layoffs -- from the New York Times

New From Google: The Library of Babel -- from All Things Digital

Educational LeadershipOn Tuesday, the search sovereign said it’s resolved a copyright dispute with the publishing world that will allow it to scan millions of in-copyright books and make them searchable online.

“This agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways,” Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, said in a post to the company blog. “First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.”

 

 

 


From Educause:


Thinkature.com -- my thanks to Daniel Laninga w/ the T&L Digital Studio for this link
Real-time collaboration for the web.

Thinkature

Can We Say FREE Online Conferences and Learning Events? -- from Professor Curt Bonk, Indiana University

Educational LeadershipFootprints in the Digital Age -- from Educational Leadership, by Will Richardson
In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks.

It's a consequence of the new Web 2.0 world that these digital footprints—the online portfolios of who we are, what we do, and by association, what we know—are becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives. In all likelihood, you, your school, your teachers, or your students are already being Googled on a regular basis, with information surfacing from news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Facebook groups. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, and most is beyond your control. Your personal footprint—and to some extent your school's—is most likely being written without you, thanks to the billions of us worldwide who now have our own printing presses and can publish what we want when we want to.

On the surface, that's an unsettling thought—but it doesn't have to be. In fact, if we are willing to embrace the moment rather than recoil from it, we may find opportunities to empower students to learn deeply and continually in ways that we could scarcely have imagined just a decade ago.

Texas A&M Video Campaign Shows New Face of Marketing -- from CampusTechnology.com, by Linda Briggs
In a move that will certainly be echoed by other institutions if it hasn't been already, Texas A&M University just launched a new microsite specifically to let students post YouTube-style videos showing what life as an Aggie is all about. The site, along with a new Facebook profile, is part of a university marketing campaign called "Do You Wonder?"

Annenberg Media -- from Daniel Laninga from the T&L Digital Studio
Teacher resources and teacher professional development programming across the curriculum

10/28/08

Items from Educause:

Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the YouTube Generation in the Classroom -- from Educause
Undergraduate video creation at American University, Dartmouth College, and University of Pennsylvania engages students from a campus-wide mashup contest to courses in several disciplines where videos replace research papers. New-media assignments have ramifications for copyright and fair use, for viral marketing, and for best practices in media education.

How to Redesign a Course for Hybrid Delivery


Toys to Tools book released -- from Liz Kolb
After what seems like years, my book Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education has been released today. Published by ISTE. I started writing this book two years ago (October 2006), there have been many revisions since. I look forward to hearing feedback.

Iowa State To Develop Moodle-Blackboard Integration Software -- from CampusTechnology.com

Advancing eBook technologies -- from Wes Fryer

Student/Classroom Computing Infrastructure -- from Alan Levine, NMC

Leading the Change Keynote -- by Chris Lehmann
The Voices of School 2.0: School Reform as described by the words and images of the people of the Science Leadership Academy

5 Common Quiz Question Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them) -- from the Rapid e-Learning Blog

Pilxr -- my thanks to Travis LaFleur for this information
Pixlr is a free online image editor, offers the abilities to make adjustments and use filters. Another example of moving towards "cloud computing".

Pixlr

From DSC:
This may or may not turn out to be the Wal-Mart of education that I've been referring to, but check this out:

New low-cost college option emerges
Program allows for self-paced online learning that transfers credits to colleges
Burck Smith wanted to give college students a way to earn course credits and kick-start their higher-education careers while slashing first-year college costs by more than half.

Smith, CEO of StraighterLine, introduced the online service this fall, giving adults resuming their education or recent high school graduates a chance to complete online classes that will transfer to colleges and universities across the United States.

Students can take a StraighterLine course for $399 and face no minimum or maximum time to complete the class. But in a unique business model that could revolutionize the online-learning industry, students also can sign up for any of the eight classes—including economics, accounting, developmental writing, and English composition—offered by StraighterLine for a flat fee of $99 a month. Enterprising students who work hard to complete the courses as quickly as possible can save money—or earn more college credit in a fixed amount of time.

Students also receive up to 10 hours of one-on-one tutoring per course. The student can use these hours at his or her choosing.

From DSC:
The organization that the rest of higher ed should (or will) be concerned about is the one who can:

  • Offer the same information in 4-5 different but engaging ways -- for example in a textual/graphical format, an audio-based format, a video-based format, and/or by using educational games and simulations
  • Offer their courses at 1/2 off the normal price (which, therefore will probably be online as it is far less expensive to add some more servers than it is to build a whole new facility)
  • Provide means to communicate to a "live person" in multiple ways on a 24x7x(close to)365 basis
  • Meet the needs of the traditional and non-traditional student

Such an organization will be a tough foe to beat, but such an organization is coming...and it may be sooner than we think. To create effective online learning is expensive...but once you create it, you can offer it again and again and again and again...plus, the tools to communicate via web-based audio- and video-conferencing are already in place. The technology is here. Such an organization just needs to be built.

What time is it?

Upcoming online presentations from Wimba

Creating Dynamic Online Learning Environments: Wimba Connects With Brain Research
Presented by: Janice Butler, University of Texas at Brownsville
Date: Dec 4 Time: 2pm ET Place: Online - Register Here
What does the latest research on the physiology of the brain and the biology of learning have to say about effective online learning? This session will take a look at the works of James Zull and John Medina, relating the science of learning and effective teaching online. Within the context of brain research, strategies for using Wimba to encourage learning synchronously and asynchronously in an interactive, engaging, participatory and experiential environment will be discussed using a variety of Wimba examples.

Implementing a One-to-One Program
Presented by: Kate Kennedy, One-to-One Institute
Date: Dec 11 Time: 2pm ET Place: Online - Register Here
One-to-One Institute will provide an overview and discussion around implementing a one-to-one program. OTO will highlight best practices within a one-to-one program as well as provide examples of one-to-one teaching and learning. Research results of the Michigan Freedom to Learn program will also be provided.


Mankind is no island -- link from Education Innovation blog
This is powerful.

As you did to the least of these...

It makes me reflect on a variety of quotes:

  • Several from Jesus in Matthew 25
  • One from Pastor David Handley at the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, who said, "Everyone has a story to tell."
  • The last quote I thought about, strangely enough, was a statement I overheard years ago on the TV -- "None of us are but 1-2 steps away from being homeless". How true that is when you stop to think about it.

We truly are in this boat together.

Insert Live Web Pages in your PowerPoint Presentations -- from Digital Inspiration, by Amit Argarwal

Google Earth on iPhone - Significant Learning Applications -- from Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development


10/27/08

The future of higher education: How technology will shape learning
A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by the New Media Consortium

Executive summary
Technological innovation, long a hallmark of academic research, may now be changing the very way that universities teach and students learn. For academic institutions, charged with equipping graduates to compete in today’s knowledge economy, the possibilities are great. Distance education, sophisticated learning-management systems and the opportunity to collaborate with research partners from around the world are just some of the transformational benefits that universities are embracing.

But significant challenges also loom. For all of its benefits, technology remains a disruptive innovation—and an expensive one. Faculty members used to teaching in one way may be loath to invest the time to learn new methods, and may lack the budget for needed support. This paper examines the role of technology in shaping the future of higher education. The major findings are as follows:

  • Technology has had—and will continue to have—a significant impact on higher education. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of survey respondents from both the public and private sectors say that technological innovation will have a major influence on teaching methodologies over the next five years. In fact, technology will become a core differentiator in attracting students and corporate partners.
  • Online learning is gaining a firm foothold in universities around the world. More than two-thirds of respondents from academia say that their institutions offer online courses. Many of them, especially those with a public-service mandate, consider online learning key to advancing their mission, placing advanced education within reach of people who might otherwise not be able to access it.
  • Corporate-academic partnerships will form an increasing part of the university experience, at a time when locating funding and controlling costs are key concerns, and when only one-quarter of university chief information officers (CIOs) have a place at the table when it comes to setting strategy. To attract corporate partnerships, institutions will need to demonstrate a commitment to advanced technologies.
  • University respondents view technology as having a largely positive impact on their campuses, but acknowledge that operational challenges may hinder the full benefits from being realised (for example, tenure, promotions and other organisational practices may need adjustment to encourage faculty members to adopt new technologies). In addition, technology may be disruptive in ways not intended: respondents note a rise in student plagiarism, cheating and distractability, which they attribute to easy and ready access to mobile technologies.
  • Higher education is responding to globalisation. Respondents say that having an overseas presence will be the norm for the majority of universities over the coming years, and 54% of academic respondents say their institutions either already have foreign locations or plan to open them in the next three years. Distance education is also becoming increasingly global, with universities in the US and overseas leveraging advanced technologies to put education within reach of many more individuals around the world.

From DSC:
Follow up on my recent trips from 10/23 and 10/24 to the SoapBox

Quote from the NMC/Economist Report above:

"For all of its benefits, technology remains a disruptive innovation—and an expensive one. Faculty members used to teaching in one way may be loath to invest the time to learn new methods, and may lack the budget for needed support."

This quote supports my theories of the potential move on the part of institutions of higher education to pool their resources* (in order to spread out the costs), that not all faculty members even want to learn about technology (let alone implement it; and that they may not have signed that part of the contract when they took their teaching job years ago), and that technology can be a very disruptive innovation (think iTunes and the entire music industry within the last 5 years).

But we can either pretend that the trends will go away, or we can be aware of them and take steps to respond/prepare for them.

* Alternative scenarios might be teams from publishers spreading their costs out -- and/or having the open source movement serve this type of purpose as well.


Video Tutorials for the Mac, iPod and iPhone -- from ScreenCastsOnline.com

Growing a More Diverse Learning Network -- by Liz Davis

The Fall 2008 issue of Digital Directions is now available online. Topics/articles include:

  • Dollars & Sense: Ed-tech Leaders Employ Creative Tactics to Cut IT Costs and Save Programs.
  • GoinGreen  -- "Green technology" is fast becoming part of a school tech leader's lexicon. It's being incorporated into everything from saving paper to building new high schools.
  • Open-Content Licensing  -- As the movement for "open" education resources continues to grow, encouraging educators to share online curricula and materials­ for free, it's become vital for ed-tech leaders and classroom teachers to understand the different types of licenses that make the process legal and safe.
  • Help Wanted: Finding the Right IT Worker -- School technology leaders across the country differ when it comes to the skills, education, experience, and personality they look for when hiring an IT specialist.
  • 'Credit Recovery' -- Under pressure to raise graduation rates, some high schools are turning to online courses to help faltering students revive their academic careers and retrieve the credits they need to earn their diplomas.
  • Plus e-curriculum and go-to sites for educators

Collaboration in the Cloud with Acrobat and Acrobat.com -- from Alan Levine and the NMC

Microsoft Unveils ‘Cloud’ Operating System -- from the New York Times

How To Build The Global Mind -- from Nova Spivack

iClass -- link from Karen Romeis' blog posting entitled, "Personalized Learning"
iClass is based on a strategic thought process on technology enhanced learning (TEL) and technology enhanced personal development (i.e., education), which leads to an enlarged vision on the desired technology enhanced learning and personal development for the digital/knowledge/ postmodern society. This process goes systematically all the way towards the realization of a detailed and operational pedagogical model, methodologies and technological platform.

Update on AHS Chemistry Podcasts - Physics, Too! -- from The Fischbowl blog
Includes a link to the AHS Chemistry Podcasts, where he says, "I first ran across the idea of podcasting Chemistry lectures about three years ago. Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University posted this:"

A new way to teach. Having an archive of lectures available gives me a lot of added flexibility. This term I have assigned the archived lectures (podcasts and screencasts) and instead of lectures I run workshops during class time. I have the chance to interact one on one with every student who needs help with the specific problems that they have. I can use other modalities such as watch them play games or build molecular models from kits. In other words, I can be a teacher again, instead of a parakeet.


10/25/08

The Best Websites To Learn About Various Religions (& English) -- from Larry Ferlazzo

Helpful Documents for Innovative Educators -- from the Innovative Educator blog
Includes The School 2.0 Transformation Toolkit | School 2.0 Learning Ecosystem Map | The Bandwidth Planner | School 2.0 Reflection Tool | Description of Technology Literate Students | National Educational Technology Standards | National Standards for Technology in Teacher Preparation | Information Communication Technology Literacy Maps | as well as other items

The Innovative Educator

Million Futures -- link from Jane Nicholls blog, New Zealand

Million Futures

10/24/08

The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

Hubble Images

wikisky

From DSC:
Follow up on the soapbox
See 10/23/08 posting below; I would also like to thank Sandy Boyd and Capella University for their class "The Future of Higher Ed Institutions" which I'm currently taking and which has influenced some of these ideas.

Due to the rate of technological change, some other things we need to do are to:

  • Develop methods/tools to constantly poll our faculty members and give them opportunities to quickly vote and comment on technologies under consideration (yes/no/needs further work/etc.) Such a mechanism would allow us to take quick pulse checks of our faculty to see which items/tools/pedagogies should make it to the project list and which departments are interested in any particular technology. This would also help:
    • Increase cross-departmental communication
    • Increase cross-departmental brainstorming, including (hopefully) creating cross-disciplinary assignments for our students (like projects are in the real world)
    • Increase ownership of technologies when they do get implemented
    • Identify potential issues (and opportunities) before they are a problem (or lost opportunity)
    • Provide a way to raise some test balloons/trials (at little to no cost) and move forward with those that have faculty's blessing

  • Develop such consistent polling/radar mechanisms for our students as well; as students learning habits, desires, and expectations may be changing quickly over the next few years and we need tools to find out what they want and don't want (and what we are doing well and not doing so well)

  • Constantly running scans/radars of the social, political, economic, education, and demographic spaces to create a living strategy (as Gary Marx would call it)

  • Utilize online, Web 2.0-based applications, concepts, and methods of identifying issues to see which issues are specific to one academic department, several academic departments, all academic departments, or more broadly, to all departments throughout a college or university.

    For example, drawing upon the work of Gary Marx (2006) and Howard Chase (1984), here is a diagram that I'll call "Setting Priorities College Wide"that illustrates how issues and opportunities could be voted upon and the important ones would float to the top (the diagram is based on Probability/Impact Matrices, however, not all of the departments are listed in the diagram)

The key items float to the top...

 

From DSC:
Addressing a misunderstanding about technology's place in higher ed
I think there is a major misunderstanding out there. Technology is not meant to take things away from faculty members. It is not meant to replace faculty members. It will certainly affect faculty members -- no doubt about it. But it is meant to be helpful to faculty members in achieving their goals for the students within their classrooms. For example, when looking at the large lecture halls that Michael Wesch speaks of and that I experienced in my undergraduate days at Northwestern University, I believe that students would benefit greatly from being able to control the absorption of a good lecture at their own pace -- no matter how talented the faculty member is. A person is still needed to give the lecture, highlight the main points, help draw out the key questions and conclusions, etc.

I do think it's important to provide a "live person" to those students who want or need a "live person" to answer questions...but even then...a "live person" can be available via the telephone, via web-based video conferencing, via chat, via application sharing, or via other methods (see Smarthinking.com for example).

Also, using technology, perhaps we could record our faculty members and let everyone in on a good thing. By doing so, it makes their gifts available to many more people than what our brick-n-mortar lecture halls can hold. Also, it allows struggling students to go at their own pace instead of madly trying to write down their notes before the faculty member erases the board.

And let's not kid ourselves and talk about how great the "live person" is within our large universities and that the face-to-face element is so important. Come on; in the large lecture halls of 100-300 students, how many students does the average faculty member really know? In fact, does the average faculty member even look at their students' work or are those tasks done by TA's? Let's not kid ourselves...in mass education, students are numbers -- at least that was my experience, and was charged a pretty price in the meantime for it.

Here at Calvin, the setting is very relational -- with 15-25 students in the average classroom. So my comments don't hold as much in such settings, because the faculty members do know their students and do grade their work. At Calvin College, often times our students could ask for -- and receive -- letters of recommendation from their professors; but that wasn't my experience. After attending Northwestern for 4 years, I bet I could only ask one professor for a letter of recommendation...and I worked for him for a summer...that was the only reason I felt like he would even know me or write a letter of rec for me.


50 Beautiful Blog Designs -- from Smashing Magazine by Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz

Free College Education, Scale, and Analogies -- from David Wiley

Moving Teaching and Learning with Technology from Adoption to Transformation -- from Educause, by Joel Hartman

Evolving Technologies Reports -- from Educause

North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) -- from Educational Technology blog; actual article by Kathee Austin from Phoenix News
NACOL is bringing leaders and experts in K-12 online learning from around the world to Arizona for their annual conference, the Virtual School Symposium, held this year at the Renaissance in Glendale. Michael Horn, co-author of Disrupting Class, will keynote on Tuesday and Fabrizio Cardinalli, co-chair of European Union E-Learning Industry Group, will keynote on Monday. There are more than 100 sessions all focused on e-learning in K-12 education.

Smarthinking.com -- online tutoring and writing services

Online tutoring and writing services.

From the 20th Century T.V. Dinner Families to 21st Century Networked Families! -- from Toy to Tool, by Liz Kolb
PEW Internet & American Life Project, has released a new report on 21st Century families and how digital media and tools are affecting the family unit. Below I've listed a few of the highlights.

One Story
One Story is a non-profit literary magazine that features one great short story mailed to subscribers every three weeks. Our mission is to save the short story by publishing in a friendly format that allows readers to experience each story as a stand-alone work of art and a simple form of entertainment. One Story is designed to fit into your purse or pocket, and into your life.

One Story

Find the Exact Address of any Place on a World Map -- from Digital Inspiration, by Amit Agarwal

Visual Understanding Environment at Tufts University -- link from Miguel Guhlin


DSC is up on his soapbox again.10/23/08

From DSC:
Up on the soapbox
My take on things? It’s not working. The whole educational system is quickly becoming outdated and unable to keep up with the quickening pace of change and the rising bar of students’ expectations. Speaking of expectations, we in the higher ed world have some expectations that are no longer feasible, given the changes that have been and still are occurring.

That is, colleges and universities expect their faculty members to:

  • Know their disciplines
  • Keep up with the latest news and developments within their disciplines
  • Teach classes
  • Meet with students to help them along with their learning as well as to advise them
  • Create engaging content and exercises
  • Adjust their courses for an ever-changing set of students (demographically-speaking)
  • Develop fair, challenging and appropriate assessments
  • Do their research
  • Publish their findings
  • Modify their courses along the way as necessary
  • Manage TA's
  • Chair departments
  • Take part in various committees and projects

    but also to

  • Keep up with an ever-increasing pace of technological change; often this means trying to find the patience to listen to those pesky folks from IT knocking on the door again and probably thinking to themselves, "What is it this time?!" or "How long will this one last?!"
  • Be interested in learning about, and then using, such technologies
  • Find ways to meet rising student expectations while keeping students engaged and motivated to learn. This is not a small task! Students have increasingly grown up around a media-rich environment and are used to extremely well-done --but costly to produce -- media.
  • Effectively implement teaching with technology into various teaching environments -- face-to-face, hybrid, or online classrooms and to do so with command of the various – and every changing – tools and technologies coming down the pike (here's just one illustration of that).

That is a lot to ask any one faculty member or teacher to do!

Not surprisingly, the majority of faculty members at colleges and universities are not able to do it all by themselves. Granted, there are some exceptions within higher ed as well as within the K-12 environment. For example, take the work being done by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams. These two chemistry teachers at Woodland Park High School in Colorado have turned the normal ways of teaching and learning on their heads by implementing technologies relating to podcasting. Now their students listen to their lectures at home and come prepared to do their hands-on work and ask questions in their face-to-face classrooms. Students are more in control of their learning this way, as they engage with the materials with a bit more flexibility in terms of control – doing so on their own schedules and terms. They can fast forward through the parts they already know, and replay parts of the lectures that they do not understand. If questions come up, they can ask their teachers in class; thus, maximizing the value of their face-to-face time.

But overall, most teachers and faculty members are not technologically savvy enough to pull this off. It's not that they couldn't -- they are extremely bright people (and brighter than me that's for sure)! Yet the way most colleges and universities are set up, the expectations are that they will be able to do all of these things. Resources have been set up to help assist the faculty members, but lack of incentives as well as full job plates (as alluded to above) often keep faculty members on the sidelines here.

Meanwhile, some of the other relevant players -- such as those of us folks in the IT/technical areas -- are focused on sorting through the vast array of tools and technologies, separating the wheat from the chaff; and then trying to select, implement, train, and support the faculty members on the use of these technologies. We can not know the content of all of the disciplines that we support. So we are forced to become generalists, and generalists not only in technology, but also in areas that we get called into, such as: pedagogy, instructional design, graphic design, web design, systems administration, programming, copyright, interface design, media creation, plagiarism and many more systems-related projects.

So this is why I say that we need teams, as no one can do all the required pieces anymore!

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with change.
It leaves us with developing partnerships. It leaves us with inviting all of the necessary parties to the table (and making room for more parties as need be in the future). There are now many more seats to fill at the teaching and learning table. So some remodeling might be necessary to make room for some bigger tables.

It leaves us with faculty needing to let go of the steering wheels -- or at least allowing others to:

  • Drive somewhere along the journey
  • Relay directions from the passengers' front seat on which way the road is about to turn
  • Bring up a Mapquest- or AAA-type of service to see where the road constructions are ahead

It leaves us with creating better standards for sharing information, so any content management system can access any other system or learning objects repository-- worldwide. That content needs to be accessible 24x7x365. It needs to be playable on PCs, Macs, mobile devices and hopefully on the next generation of mobile communication devices most likely to come our way within the next 1-2 years.

It leaves us with figuring out how to pay and protect the people who created the materials -- even if it's just pennies per access/download.

It means that more campuses will need to create collaborative spaces where teams of people can get together and create content that will be standards-based (and will hopefully be playable for more than the next 5 years). I recommend personnel with:

  • Subject matter expertise
  • Instructional design experience
  • Digital storytelling skills (as people commit items to long-term memory via storytelling)
  • Project management experience
  • Graphic design backgrounds
  • Web design skills
  • Expertise in digital audio and/or digital video
  • Programming skill
  • Business relationship managements skills for working with other teams from publishers

Given the significant investments to create these sorts of teams and engaging content, a couple of key questions come up:

  • How can we afford to do this?
    I believe via the growth of consortiums and pooling our resources.

  • How long will that content be "playable"?
    Hmmm...I'm not sure...perhaps there will be groups devoted to converting learning objects from one format to another; sort of like taking media from an 8 track player to a cassette to a CD to a DVD to a...

It also leaves us with constantly scanning the future for what's coming down the pike -- using the tools that Gary Marx (2006) discusses in his book, Future Focused Leadership:

  • A modified Delphi Process:
    • Use groups of advisors/councils -- community leaders, gov’t, business, educators, etc.
    • Tap into the genius of people; listen to people; incorporate their ideas (which increases ownership)
  • Scenario planning, which includes:
    • Looking at what we would like to have happen and then try to figure out how to create that future
    • Looking at the plausible pictures of our futures, which makes the "elephants in the room" visible; helps us deal w/ those things we "just don’t talk about"
  • Trend analysis
  • Environmental scans
  • PEST (political, economic, social, and technological factors) Analysis – or some prefer to say STEP Analysis
  • STEEPV (social, technological, economic, environmental, political and values) Analysis
  • STEEPED (social, technological, economic, environmental, political, educational, and demographic) Analysis
  • Gap Analysis: What’s ideal? What’s reality? Where are we now? What do we need to do to get there?
  • Root cause, defining moments, historical analysis
  • Flexibility/innovation analysis
  • SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) Analysis
  • Stakeholder Analysis
  • Competitive Analysis

When will things really change?

  • When a Wal-Mart of education (or open education?) comes along and clobbers everyone else.
  • When the boards convene only to see yet another year of shrinking enrollments, and the question moving more to the forefronts of their thinking, "Where are so many of the current students going to get their educations?!"
  • When the pocketbooks get hit and tough budgetary conversations and decisions need to be made.
  • When layoffs appear on the horizon...and then potentially the closing of one's doors. (Yeh, I know, we've heard it for the last 10 years that 1/2 of the universities and colleges won't be in existence anymore...well, that hasn't happened...but that doesn't mean it won't happen. In my career, which has been heavily involved with disruptive technologies, things just take time. Here at Calvin College, there are many things going for us, and numerous areas are going well here; so I'm not saying that the doors are going to close here. However, I can't say the same for all institutions of higher ed out there.)

Ok...I'll step down from my soapbox now...thanks for listening.

Addendum: A possibly-related posting from Robin Good
(I say possibly for two reasons: 1) Because some teams in the future will meet virtually while other teams will meet face-to-face, and 2) Because I didn't watch all of the videos so I can't speak to all of the content therein.)
PART I: Virtual Teams & The Bioteaming Approach - A Video Interview With Ken Thompson
PART II: Virtual Teams And The Bioteaming Approach - A Video Interview With Ken Thompson


U.S. Higher Education Lags in Technology Integration, New CDW-G Study Reveals -- from EducationalTechnology Blog, Ray Schroeder, Ed.
CDW Government, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of CDW Corporation and leading source of Information Technology (IT) solutions to educators and governments, today announced the results of its new study, "The 21st-Century Campus: Are We There Yet?", which examines the current and future role of technology in higher education. With responses from more than 1,000 college students, faculty and IT staff members, the study uncovers how technology is leveraged as an academic tool on campuses today; identifies leaders and barriers to adoption; and recommends next steps to improve campus technology integration. Regardless of their major, students say campus technology was a key factor in their school selection - and is critical to their chosen professions.

Alan November Keynote-ITEC 2008 -- from Angela Maiers
Alan made the compelling case that students need to be able to do three things well to succeed in their 21st century world:

  • Have the capacity to do quality research on the web
  • Have good global communication skills
  • Be self-directed (Corporations need people who don’t need a boss to tell them what to do!)

There is no questions that a large gap exists between what we teach children and what is highly valued in the workplace; and the problem is bigger than technology. November suggested the following:

  1. Turn every (yes, every) classroom into a global communication center where teachers connect children to authentic audiences around the world, and as teachers we should be evaluating our students on their ability to introduce themselves and communicate in these collaborations. We have the tools and the power to do this!
  2. Build Independence rather than Dependence. I have always said that students should leave more tired than their teachers. Alan suggests giving students important jobs-not busy work, but really important learning tasks. Make students contributors to the learning rather than recipients. We have underestimated what kids can do that contributes to rich content that can be shared with the whole class! He gave many examples of students creating tutorials, teaching one another, recording podcasts reviewing the weeks content...the possibilities are exciting!
  3. Stop Blocking and Teach Digital Literacy-In an effort to keep our students secure, we are actually putting them in harms way by not teaching them to interact and engage in a digital, global world. Our students are on Facebook, they download YouTube, they use Wikipedia,and search Google, but who is teaching them how to do it well? In Alan's words: "If blocking is your only strategy for protecting children, you’re setting them up for failure in the real world. This is immoral. It’s a manipulative world out there. We have to teach kids how to navigate it."

Digital-Media Venture Capitalist on Hollywood and Silicon Valley’s Awkward Dance -- from The New York Times, by Claire Cain Miller

UIUC's tech chief explains her school's success -- from eSchoolNews.com
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ranked No. 1 on PC Magazine's 'Top Wired Colleges' list

Adobe's Master Collection -- useful in digital storytelling, graphic design, movie making, etc.

Adobe Master Collection

Savannah College of Art and Design — named one of the "25 cutting-edge schools with an eye
toward the future" — uses Adobe software to prepare students for career success.
Watch a video case study to see how instructors incorporate Adobe Creative
Suite Master Collection software throughout the curriculum.

The Eyes Have It: Potent Visuals Promote Academic Richness -- from Edutopia.org
Visual Thinking Strategies blazes a path from artistic inquiry to scholastic achievement.

Visual thinking...

This image (on Edutopia's site) is from GettyImages.

Items regrading web-based collaboration and communication -- my thanks to Mr. Tarek Bahnasy, SLED Regional Manager, Cisco WebEx for this information


Yale MBA dean to found Apple University -- from CNET News
(From DSC: Perhaps that's how Apple will be spending some of its $25 billion in the bank...)

The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing -- from Educause Connect

Web site puts campus research online, in one place -- from eCampusNewsOnline.com

Comcast begins rolling out 50-Mbps broadband service -- from eCampusNewsOnline.com
(NOTE from DSC: I wouldn't trust Comcast to deliver solid customer service as far as I could throw them. As an example, my parents' were without Internet service for 22 days. After numerous calls, a technician from Comcast finally came out to find out that a repeater wasn't working. They have some of the best marketing in the business...but too bad they can't deliver.

Instead, I post it not to give them press, but because it signifies that our ability to transfer information will only get better and faster...which will lead to even more multimedia-based communications.)

10/22/08

From DSC:

What ROI did I give the LORD?

From Tombstone Generator
My thanks to Steve Rubel for the link.

The learning versus technology disconnect -- from Learning Technologies blog

She's a nurse in a large hospital...

Training-Related Videos (Desktop Screen Recordings) -- from Russell Stannard

Learn Trends 2008 Free -- from eLearning Technology by Tony Karrer
Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovation 2008
November 17 - 21, 2008 | Online | Free

Getting Started with Oral History Interviews -- from Wes Fryer

The Financial Crisis -- from NigelPain.com:

I have been banging on about the fact that this is not only a financial crisis but a moral and ethical one as well and today in the New York Times my words resonate. Margaret Atwood has written a short, brilliant think piece which I know you will enjoy. She says:

To heal our wounds, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.

Also see Margaret's article, entitled "A Matter of Life and Debt"

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008 -- from Educause

For designers out there:

The Future of Work -- from the Institute for the Future

  • Future of Work: Map
  • Future of Work: Technology Foundations
    1. Introduction ........................................................................... 1
    2. Proactive Computing ......................................................... 3
    3. Amplified Collaboration Tools and Processes ..................... 5
    4. Sensemaking and Visualization ......................................... 9
    5. Device Webs and Sensor Webs ........................................ 11
    6. Ubiquitous Displays ......................................................... 13
    7. Abundant Computation and Connectivity .......................... 15
    8. 3D Graphical Interfaces.................................................... 17
  • Future of Work: Perspectives


University of Virginia explores virtual computing -- from eSchoolNews.com

Microsoft aims to get more touchy-feely -- from CNET.com

iTunes U: Beyond Camps

iTunes U: Beyond Campus

Good tutorial on phishing scams -- from CommonCraft.com

10/21/08

Enhancing Document Camera Use -- from Miguel Guhlin

Enhancing Document Camera Use

Also see:
100 Ideas for Data Projectors and Document Cameras
From the Umatilla-Morrow Education Service District


Revisiting “A Vision of Students Today” -- from Professor Michael Wesch, Kansas State University

I started talking and an almost deafening silence greeted my first words. I have always been amazed and intimidated by this silence. It seems to so tenuously await my next words. The silence is immediately filled with the more subtle yet powerful messages sent by 500 sets of eyes which I continuously scan, “listening” to what they have to say as I talk. In an instant those eyes can turn from wonder and excitement to the disheartening glaze of universal and irreversible disengagement. Perpetually dreading this glaze I nervously pace as I talk and use grandiose gestures. At times I feel desperate for their attention. I rush to amuse them with jokes and stories as I swing, twist, and swirl that gyromouse, directing the 786,432 pixels dancing points of light behind me, hoping to dazzle them with a multi-media extravaganza.
...
Reports from my teaching assistants sitting in the back of the room tell a different story. Apparently, several students standing in the back cranked up their iPods as I started to lecture and never turned them off, sometimes even breaking out into dance. My lecture could barely be heard nearby as the sound-absorbing panels and state of the art speakers were apparently no match for those blaring iPods. Scanning the room my assistants also saw students cruising Facebook, instant messaging, and texting their friends. The students were undoubtedly engaged, just not with me.

Interjection from DSC:
This last sentence above states one of my fears of the future....and that is, how are we going to keep students engaged? How can we get them passionate about something? My answer to this involves creating cross-discplinary assignments; for example, have computer science majors create educational games/simulations by teaming up with students majoring in engineering or music or art. Have students find the role that they want to play -- graphic designer, writer, photographer, videographer, musician, editor, director, programmer, web designer, etc. -- and then encourage them to play that role to the best of their God-given ability. Then have students post the items -- to a worldwide learning objects repository -- that they think are publishable and noteworthy...then have other students vote on them...the good ones will float to the top.

...
[Wesch continues]
They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed. There is literally something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.


New Alliance To Research Gaming in Math and Science Education -- from Dave Nagel, The Journal
Video games have always had and probably will always have their detractors. But there's a growing movement in academia and industry recognizing the value of this medium as an educational tool both inside and outside the classroom.

Open Source Schools -- from EffectiveICT.co.uk
Open Source Schools is an initiative to inform schools about Open Source Software (OSS). A number of schools are already realising the benefits of OSS within their ICT strategy. This project will work to share their experiences with the wider community of educational practitioners.

The atracTable Multi-Touch System from Atracsys -- from Interactive Multimedia Technology
The atracTable is a multi-touch presentation system developed by the Swiss engineering and development group, Atracsys. It is similar to Microsoft's Surface. Interaction on the table can be triggered by laying objects on the table.

atracTable Multi-Touch System


The Big Picture blog

The Big Picture Blog


Study Confirms Our New "Connectedness" Is A Mixed Blessing -- from ReadWriteWeb.com, by Sarah Perez
To all those who feared that technology pulls people apart, a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project on the American family reveals the opposite is true: today's families are more connected than ever. However, this always-on interaction with technology has a darker side too...one which leads to higher stress and less satisfaction with both family and leisure time. In reviewing the data, we discover that technology is really both a blessing and a curse.

(K-12) Integrating Video Production into Curriculum and Classroom Activities -- from the Journal; November 6, 2008 | Time: 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern
Students of all ages benefit from the use of camcorders and video production in the classroom. Utilizing a variety of projects ideas teachers can easily integrate video in to any school subject curriculum. Children can learn to communicate verbally as well as visually, learn a technical skill, and be truly engaged in learning. Learn how to integrate video production into your k-12 curriculum. From art to science see and hear how teachers across the country are using video to increase visual literacy, critical thinking and problem solving, in this free, one-hour webcast moderated by T.H.E. Journal's Matt Villano. Register today!

Technology Integration Podcast -- from Edutopia

Pazera Free Video To Flash Converter Features -- from TechieBuzz.com

  • Supported video formats: AVI, DivX, XviD, MPEG, MPG, WMV, ASF, MOV, QT, FLV, SWF, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, MKV, VOB, VCD DAT, OGM, AMV.
  • Supported audio formats: MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, MPC, AC3, FLAC, APE, SHN, WV, AMR, MPA, M4A, MP2.
  • 2-pass encoding which will improve the video quality.
  • Possibility to convert audio files to FLV/SWF format using the image or text as a background instead of video stream.
  • Does not need any installation.
  • Portability. This program doesn’t use system registry and can be run from portable devices. All settings are written to INI file.
  • 100% freeware! - for private and commercial use. There are no limitations, watermarks, adware, spyware etc.
Interest networks -- from Minding the Planet blog
So, what is an interest network? In short, if a social network is about who you are interested in, an interest network is about what you are interested in. It’s the logical next step. We’re seeing more and more companies think about how to capitalize on this trend. There are lots of different companies that could be viewed as interest networks out there, and here are a few:


Monet's Gardens at Giverny with Music, Version II

Draw Perfect Shapes with your Mouse using Dabbleboard -- from Digital Inspiration

CouchSurfing.org: Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch At A Time

"CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance, and facilitate cultural understanding."


10/20/08

From DSC:
The "new language" continues to develop, as exemplified by Glogster.com.

(See below; the concept of a "new language" was gleamed from an older white paper from Adobe that was written by Macromedia staff in 2005.)