Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Tom Green, in Digital Web Magazine , goes into great detail on how to encode Flash video in the final installment of his series on the rise of Flash Video. Definitely a good resource if you are going to make use of Flash video.

There are plenty of examples of universities putting curricula online -- MIT was the first, but the Open University is doing it along with others. It's still not clear to me who benefits the most from these efforts, but my guess is that potential instructors who might use some of the course materials would be at the top of the list, rather than independent students who might undertake some sort of self-study project. Andy Carvin writes about the Bellevue School District in Washington's efforts to put their entire K-12 curriculum online, thanks to funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation . The Seattle Times quotes Eric McDowell, math-curriculum developer for Bellevue School District on what the district should be able to do using the Gates Foundation funds: The site allows teachers to post lesson plans and ideas for each school day, and allows other teachers to rate how well they thought the lesson plans worked, similar to rating a book on Amazon.com , McDowell said...

I have been having some problems with this blog related to moving it over to the new version of Blogger. Google has someone working on it...

Moodle is the open source learning management system I'm familiar with. It has worked well for me and it was easy to get help when I ran into some installation problems. However, there are a number of other open source LMS projects. EduTools has a tool for evaluating various LMSes based on their essential features, including open source and commerical products. They also have a recent review of Sakai .

Robin Good has a nice article with great illustrations about Howard Rheingold's presentation at the NMC Campus in Second Life, Participatory Media And The Pedagogy Of Civic Participation - The Transformation Of Education And Democracy . The article includes the audio from the presentation as well as screen shots and photos. Nicely done. Here's an abstract: '' Education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – is diverging from schooling. Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn't looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves. This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today's student cohort, there's nothing innate about knowi...

Open Culture notes today that Stanford is moving beyond posting lectures to iTunes U and have now made some full course available to the public. One such course is The Literature of Crisis . The course has a weekly lecture which is available for download. In the spirit of equal time for my other Bay Area alma mater, UC Berkeley has a very extensive list of courses which you can get via iTunes. The question for me is whether or not people actually go out and buy the books, do the reading and listen to these podcasts in an effort to learn the stuff or if the podcasts really just end up being used by students who choose not to show up for class. It might work for some highly motivated people, but I bet they would be the exception. What might be nice would be for someone to set up a discussion board or online area where non-students could engage with others interested in learning from these materials. The social interaction, whether it's in person or online, is the missing piece. Of ...

CNN says Second Life is being used in classes at more than 60 schools and educational institutions. The three-dimensional virtual world makes it possible for students taking a distance course to develop a real sense of community, said Rebecca Nesson, who leads a class jointly offered by Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School in the world of "Second Life." "Students interact with each other and there's a regular sense of classroom interaction. It feels like a college campus," she said. She holds class discussions in "Second Life" as well as office hours for extension students. Some class-related events are also open to the public -- or basically anyone with a broadband connection. - - - - - Besides improving the quality of distance learning, educators are finding "Second Life" is a good way to introduce international perspectives. In Nesson's course, students as far away as Korea engage in the classroom discuss...

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

Released yesterday -- The Sloan Consortium Report: Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006 . ‘Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006 represents the fourth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education. This year’s study, like those for the previous three years, is aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group in partnership with the College Board, the report, based on responses from over 2,200 colleges and universities, examines a number of key questions: Has the Growth of Online Enrollments Begun to Plateau? Who is Learning Online? What Types of Institutions Have Online Offerings? Have Perceptions of Quality Changed for Online Offerings? What are the Barriers to Widespread Adoption of Online Education? The link to the report on the info page doesn't work -- this ...

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

OpenLearn is a website from the Open University in the UK which features free online courses. The materials are available for self-paced learning, but they also seem to be excellent resources for instructors looking to find resources for their courses. For example, there is a course on earthquakes which has a lot of images, diagrams and text. This might be a useful resource for someone teaching a similar course or for part of another course.

Also on the Academic Commons site : "Using World of Warcraft and Other MMORPGs to Foster a Targeted, Social, and Cooperative Approach Toward Language Learning" by Todd Bryant Much of the current research in second language acquisition (SLA) stresses the social aspect of language acquisition. Creating a learner-centered environment that a) fosters collaboration and communication, b) keeps learners motivated and on-task, and c) gives them a say in choosing their goals and how to achieve them, can be extremely challenging. Students will benefit from a framework that offers a wide variety of solutions to a given “real life” situation--solutions that require different amounts of time as well as vocabulary and grammar in the target language."

Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning is a report by David Green of Knowledge Culture . It's available on the Academic Commons site. The full report is 119 pages [PDF] and there is also an executive summary 15 pages [PDF] . The study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of the digital format. However, while changes in the teaching-learning dynamic and the teacher-student relationship were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric. These topics include the quality of image resources, image functionality, management, deployment and the skills required for optimum use (digital and image “literacies”). This report is rooted in faculty experience in “going digital,” as shown in four hundred survey responses and three hundred individual interviews with faculty and some staff at 33 colleges and universities: 31 liberal arts colleges together with Harvard and Yale Universities...

Solution Watch has part 3 of the series on Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0 . Part 1 had a huge list and review of Web 2.0 sites which could be used by students and teachers. One question which people have asked already is how will course management systems like Blackboard keep up with the tools available for free on these Web 2.0 sites and why will students want to use course management systems at all? I think the answer to part of that is that very few of the CMS are likely to be on top of the latest things possible. They change very slowly. Considering all the tools out there, if you could incorporate the functionality of the ones you want to use into one website to keep things organized, you could build your own CMS.