Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Lexa from Belgium has an interesting blog about eLearning . One item which looks good is the Open Content for education entry from September 12 .

Last month, the Mellon Foundation published a white paper based on a year-long study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society , which examined the relationship between copyright law and education. In particular, we wanted to explore whether innovative educational uses of digital technology were hampered by the restrictions of copyright. We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are among the most important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in education. This looks like a good addition to some of the other materials on copyright which cover the law but not necessarily actual practices and how they are impacted by the law.

Someone's already started on this, trying to combine/link Moodle with Second Life. It's called SLoodle . They have also written a white paper [PDF] outlining what they hope to do. I'm sure there will be and probably are other efforts like this, but this should be a good project to keep an eye on.

The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction has a podcasting project -- CALI Radio -- with podcasts about legal issues and law school related topics. They've also got a list of law-related weblogs .

MERLOT 's Journal of Online Teaching and Learning had an article last month about using simulations in college physics courses. Interesting contrast with the College Board's concerns about virtual labs in the previous post here. High-Tech Tools for Teaching Physics: the Physics Education Technology Project by Noah Finkelstein et. al., discusses their project and how they've used simulations in various settings. The simulations they discuss are available for anyone to use online. As more educational simulations are put online, they can be plugged into online and face to face courses by instructors to enhance teaching. Another example like this is the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives which is a collection of Java applets developed at Utah State University which cover a wide range of mathematical concepts aimed at preK-12 learners but which could also be used by adult learners. The great thing about both of these examples is that...

The New York Times reports that the College Board has some doubts about the merits of online science labs as part of high school Advanced Placement courses. “Members of the College Board insist that college-level laboratory science courses not be labeled ‘A.P.’ without a physical lab,” the board said in a letter sent to online schools in April. “Online science courses can only be labeled ‘A.P.’ if the online provider” can ensure “that students have a guided, hands-on (not virtual) laboratory experience.” But after an outcry by online schools, the board issued an apology in June, acknowledging that “there may be new developments” in online learning that could merit its endorsement. Although many of the students who participate in the virtual labs score well on the exam, that may not be enough for the schools to continue to designate science courses which use virtual labs as Advanced Placement courses. If that's what they do, students will lose out on the college credit awarded when...

Steve Hargadon has an interview with Martin Dougiamas (audio), creator of Moodle. Steve also has notes from the interview on his blog. Here's an interesting one: There are some very large deployments of Moodle, including the upcoming use of Moodle by the Open University of the UK , where they anticipate it being used by 200,000 students. Large organizations that use Moodle also help the project by devoting staff to maintain or improve Moodle, and Martin said that the Open University will be working on helping to maintain the "quiz" module, as well as funding directly some upcoming developments.

The Cool Cat Teacher Blog had an item recently on searching Google Video for educational videos. Here it is in a nutshell: 1 - Go to Google Video - http://video.google.com 2- In the search box, type: genre:educational 3 - Follow it with anything you want to find video for.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed must be celebrating Wikipedia Week. They've got three articles and a live discussion on Thursday about Wikipedia available. Start with the history of the site . I like the Lawrence Lessig stuff: At this year's Wikimania, an annual meeting of Wikipedia contributors, Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who has become something of a guru on matters of digital copyright, praised the encyclopedia for "democratizing knowledge" that had been taken out of the hands of the amateur. Over the course of the past century, he said, "read-write culture," in which consumers felt empowered to make their own creative product, had been replaced by "read-only culture," in which companies and lawmakers had conspired to discourage people from creative endeavors. Mr. Lessig's criticism of "read-only culture" often focused on the entertainment industry's attempts to restrict file sharing, but his remarks sugges...

SFGate has an article about the rise of online tutoring for K-12 subjects. Tutoring is done one to one over the Internet and costs less than face to face tutoring, which appeals to many parents. Many of the tutors are in India. Between $20 million and $25 million of the roughly $132 million spent on online tutoring -- or one-sixth -- now goes to tutors in India, Wiley said. But Indian tutors may make up an even larger share of online tutors because they are paid much less than their U.S. counterparts. * * * Officials at tutoring companies that hire abroad say they check tutors' references and academic backgrounds -- Growing Stars and TutorVista require tutors to have a master's degree in the primary subject matter they teach. The one-on-one attention they offer is more effective, they say. The companies train the tutors for a couple weeks, review their performance, and solicit feedback from parents. At Growing Stars and TutorVista, tutors receive training in ac...

eSchool News has a story about the Blackboard elearning patent and subsequent lawsuit against Desire2Learn . Blackboard has about 60% of the higher ed market in online learning, with eCollege and Desire2Learn at about 20% each. What happened to Moodle ? Not everybody's happy about the Blackboard patent or their effort to enforce it: Blackboard's patent reportedly doesn't refer to any device or even specific software code. Rather, it describes the basic framework of an LMS. In short, Blackboard says what it invented isn't learning tools such as drop boxes, but the idea of putting such tools together in one big, scalable system across a university. "Our developers sat down and said, 'College IT departments are having a lot of trouble managing all these disparate web sites from each class. How can we turn this into one computer program that manages all of the classes?'" Small said. "That was a leap." Critics say it was a tiny hop at most. B...

I've started working on my own BlackBoard screen videos today, but I noticed that Atomic Learning has 7 free videos available plus a full set of 93 more if you subscribe to their service, which costs $79.99 a year for an individual. I had a subscription for a year, but I didn't use it enough to renew. They currently have more than 20,000 training videos for a wide range of software applications and they are always adding new stuff. In general, their videos are good and cover the important stuff you need to know. I have found the quality of their audio to be a little lacking, however. It sounds like they overcompress everything to keep their files small. The screen tutorials on Lynda.com are very high quality, but they primarily cater to users of professional applications like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Director, although they do cover MS Office and the Mac iLife applications. A one year subscription to lynda.com is $250, so you pay a little more for the higher quality. Lynd...

Hot Potatoes is a free quiz making software from the University of Victoria. It has some nice features, runs in Java and it can be integrated with BlackBoard, WebCT and Moodle. If it is used by a for-profit educational institituion, a license is required ($120 single user, $420 five user). For non profit educational institutions, as long as the material produced with Hot Potatoes is publicly available, the software can be use for free. In the case of Blackboard courses, a license would be required since courses inside of Blackboard are not accessible by anyone who isn't enrolled in the course.

Techsmith released version 4 of Camtasia Studio this week. Camtasia Studio allows you to create high quality screen videos to use with training videos, screencasts, and presentations. It is an excellent program which has only gotten better with the latest version. I saw it at the Podcast Expo a couple of weeks ago and it has some great new features which make it easy to publish for portable devices like the iPod.

The TEACH Toolkit is an online tutorial about copyright and distance education provided by North Carolina State University. TEACH refers to a distance education update of copyright law called the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH), which addresses copyright issues in online and other forms of distance education. The TEACH Act Guidelines are a good starting point, and there is also a PowerPoint presentation about TEACH authored by Peggy Hoon.

The PowerPoint presentation has become a standard for sleep-inducing high tech shows where one person reads text off a screen out loud to another group who sits and reads the same text silently. It doesn't have to be that way... Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds is a great website for ideas about presentations. One of the best entries is What is Good PowerPoint Design ? I also like the coverage of different presentation methods, particularly the Lessig method, but also the Kawasaki method. Another site devoted to presentations is Sociable Media by Cliff Atkinson, the author of B eyond Bullet Points . Check out the articles section for some good ideas about learning and presentations. In particular, the article with Richard Mayer -- Five Ways to Reduce PowerPoint overload (PDF) should be required reading for anyone thinking about creating a PowerPoint presentation. If you've got a PowerPoint presentation lacking images, check out Stock Xchng , a free stock photo site.

EdTechPost has an item today about two different online collaborative note-taking sites which could be used in online courses (or face to face courses) where students work together on projects. Notemesh is a collaborative note-taking system while stud.icio.us uses tags to combine the individual notes taken by students. How about using the online word processor Writely to accomplish this?

Interesting article from FastCompany about mobile learning -- Go and Learn, by Marcia Conner. While formal mobile learning programs are released from education vendors each day (the last statistic I saw said more than 2,000 companies are developing content to distribute on cell phones), I question how quickly they’ll be adopted and used. According to IDC Research, most American’s don’t know how to download ringtones to their cell phones so it could be argued the same would be true if we expected people to download formal learning programs, too. I believe education that becomes part of our everyday routines has the more potential for real impact. Consider the breadth and depth of what you want to learn, and think about how you might just learn that today. Away you go.

We don't have any publicly available tutorials for Blackboard that I'm aware of, but there are quite a few out on the web which might be helpful until we have our own. Blackboard has lots of documentation for Instructors . Palomar College has video tutorials about teaching with Blackboard. The University of Pittsburgh has recently updated their instructional videos for the new features in Blackboard 7.

This site by Alan Levine will create the Javascript you need to add an RSS feed to your Blackboard course. You need to know the RSS feed you want to add -- after that, it's easy to do. You can usually locate the RSS feed on a site by the orange icon. For example, if you want the latest Science and Space news from CNN, you can use this feed: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_space.rss from this page .

Check out Robin Good's review of SoundSlides , an OSX/XP application for creating online slideshows with sound. $39.95 -- Short version -- he likes it but says that the process of uploading the file to the web is a little too difficult for most people. He also points to Speechi , a service which seems to provide some of the same features, and does have a free version which will convert PowerPoint to Flash for web use although I don't think it has the audio feature. Update : Thierry from Speechi (who must have been the first reader of this weblog) emailed to say that they do have audio and video features in the paid version. I should have been more specific about that. It looks like a good option, particularly for e-learning, which is one of the things they emphasize on their site.

Newsweek had an interesting article recently about using podcasting to teach languages, in particular Japanese. Georgia College and State University has an interesting page devoted to their use of the iPod in instruction. iPods with Spanish accents at Duke University. Podcasting at UW Madison . iPods at Edith Cowan University .

I needed a place to post links and ideas for others, so here we are.