Technology & Instruction for UNEX

I've been a little inactive here recently, but there are two entries from the Presentation Zen blog by Garr Reynolds which are worth a look. First, his gift buying guide has a great list of books for anyone who has to present information to others. I've got a few of the books and have actually read some of them, but should spend some time with a few more of them. Garr also has a list of gadgets you might like. His entry on Slideshare and the value of uploading PowerPoint slides -- "Sounds promising, but the only problem with this service today is that you can not actually share a presentation. What they mean — and what they should say — is that you can share slides generated in PowerPoint/OpenOffice." This has always been a pet peeve of mine. Uploading your PowerPoint presentation to the web doesn't do much for me if I can't hear your voice and see the actual presentation as it is done. Garr points out that the lack of audio on Slideshare is a problem that m

The blogging and wiki tools from Learning Objects are now available in the UCR Blackboard installation. These add some new options for instructors and students. The blog is a group blog which can be set up either for the entire class or for a group. I'm still looking for some more documentation or help which explains the features and limitations. Actually, the blog tool offers individual blogs. I just haven't figured out how to set that up yet. So, you can have a course blog, a group blog, and an individual blog for each student. Documentation on the blog feature is here [ PDF - instructor version]. The Wiki tool is called Teams .

There is an interesting contrast in the ideas expressed in an article about an Australian University's medical school's decision to replace lectures with online learning . While delivering information through lectures is still the most common method of instruction at universities, there are other ways to accomplish the same goals. The comments sound to me like a conflict between a student centered and a teacher centered instructional methods. Some people still prefer the "sage on the stage," but when you are talking about preparing people to perform a particular job, like teaching or being a doctor, there needs to be a balance between practice and theory. The traditional university lecture will be scrapped by the nation's biggest medical school and replaced by online learning programs. Partly prompted by a swell in student numbers expected in 2008, the University of Queensland's School of Medicine is developing an interactive web program to deliver the inform

Google Docs has a recently added new feature which allows you to publish to your Blogger blog . I like this idea. In fact, it was something I suggested as a beta tester for Blogger Beta. I am sure there are some ways that you could take advantage of the collaborative writing features with Google docs and use the blog as the end product. But you could probably do that with Blogger already, so maybe if you are using features on Google Docs that you don't get with Blogger, that might be the reason to do it that way. I'd like to see some integration with Google Reader for either Google Docs or Blogger though, as reading other blogs tends to be a popular way to get ideas and content for bloggers. One thing I noticed is that there's no way to include a title when you post from Google Docs to Blogger.

The Online Education Database has an interesting article from yesterday, " Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better." Funny how many of them deal with things which seem more peripheral to learning but definitely make a difference. Here are some samples: Food for thought, part 2: Eat a light lunch . Heavy lunches have a tendency to make people drowsy. While you could turn this to your advantage by taking a "thinking nap" (see #23), most people haven't learned how. For the multitaskers: Focus and immerse yourself . Focus on whatever you're studying. Don't try to watch TV at the same time or worry yourself about other things. Anxiety does not make for absorption of information and ideas. And in the category of "This is just not going to work": Learn by osmosis . Got an iPod? Record a few of your own podcasts, upload them to your iPod and sleep on it. Literally. Put it under your pillow and playback language lessons or whateve

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.

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.