• Rewrite my research paper, taking into account her revision comments
• Write a one-page abstract that I can give as part of my oral presentation
• Meet with her next monday to go over the paper in its final form and make any last revisions

We're now finishing up the companion website that goes with the Podcasting for Education workshop that we gave a couple of weeks back.
I don't have much to add, except to say that developing a website with Google Sites is both the best and worst experience I've ever had.
Worst because uploading images and tweaking the layout of the site is a nightmare.

Best because this is the only way for our group to collaborate on a single website in and out of class. Otherwise we’d all be using Dreamweaver and keeping track of multiple site revisions and overwriting each other’s work and it would just turn into a steaming mess.

A lowly washing machine.

After digesting Donald Norman’s points regarding design aesthetic, I’d like to use the washing machine as an example of good/bad design and make a distinction between consumer and institutional product design.

Consumer products are sold on feature sets—a washer is sold on the basis of what separates it from other washers: an insane set of features, modes, cycles, and cleaver names for each of these options. After it is taken home, how many of these advanced features are used? Who really becomes a laundry expert and reads the manual? Institutional products, on the other hand, are sold on the basis of durability and simplicity. At our oiled wildlife washroom in Santa Cruz, our giant, stainless steel washers have three settings for water temp (cold, medium, hot), and four settings for washing (heavy/moderate/light/delicate). I can tell you that these washers have been used on all four settings and all four water temperatures, i.e. 100% of the design features have been used to their full advantage.

So, in terms of Norman’s design principles, aesthetics matter greatly in the design of consumer washers, but not institutional ones and good aesthetics don’t indicate simplicity or intuition. Creeping featurism is present in consumer washers, but not in institutional washers. Lastly, standardization: in institutional products, less options make it much easier to standardize the interface on the washing machine—a washer from the previous generation looks essentially similar to the current product model. On the consumer side, designers are forced to reinvent the wheel with every new product model.

Here, I’ll tell you a secret: when I was young, I never worked well with others. It was either that I wanted to have control over everything, or that the other people in my group were so stoned that it was useless to have a meeting because they had forgotten what the project was about. That was Santa Cruz, this is San Francisco. Not only have all of the people in my group here been rockstars and endured the soft rock in our favorite café, but every member has contributed something unique from their skillset to make the Podcasting for Education workshop greater then the sum of its parts.

We taught two 1-hour classes back-to-back. We initially had a lot more instruction planned for the workshop, including how to upload and syndicate, and extend a podcast. After running through the presentation at least three times, we paired the instruction down to creating a podcast using a pre-recorded script in Garageband. It was essential to run through the workshop beforehand! Because we did, we encountered no surprises during the workshop.

We have a website that will be finished in the next couple of weeks:

http://sites.google.com/site/itec815podcast/

Google likes it a lot: if you ever find yourself pining for podcast instructions and can’t find this link, just google “itec 815 podcast” and we’re the first hit on the search results. Nifty, eh?

Some nice features of this website include:

• Viewing the powerpoint presentation we gave in class (visual learning)
• Viewing the brochure we handed out (visual learning for low attention spans)
• Downloading the entire workshop as a Flash movie (auditory and visual learning)
• Viewing the steps to create your podcast on the website itself, with extended lessons on how to upload, syndicate, and extend its reach to greater audiences (visual learning)
• Getting help from the Masters of Podcasting (MoPs) – that’s us!

We had a great class last Thursday when Eugene Lee, CEO of SocialText, dropped by to speak. He was a charismatic speaker and I remember a lot of his talking points.

Mr. Lee was demonstrating many tools he used in his daily life to keep up with industry buzz, including using twitter alerts to stay abreast of comments and problems relating to his product and also to those of his competitors. I didn’t ask if he also had a twitter alert set up to poll for new content with “Eugene Lee” tagged in the post, but after lecturing to our class, I have a feeling that he may have set up a “Eugene Lee ITEC SFSU” alert, in which case it would be pretty neat if he read this message.

Here are some other comments: Mr. Lee talked about “weak connections” in relation to how he got his job as CEO of socialtext. An acquaintance of his knew the former CEO of socialtext, and helped him made the final connection through LinkedIn, demonstrating the importance of “it’s not WHAT you know, it’s WHO you know” or more succinctly: “you know they know”. He framed this as the importance of having people act as “hubs” in social networking: individuals who know a large group of people and are thusly mined for their knowledge of others.

Also interesting was Socialtext’s notion of “followers” instead of “friends” which is a similar concept to Twitter. A friend relationship requires a two-way handshake that implies there is a relationship, a sense of bi-directionality. A follower, on the other hand, is more like a person aware of the other person’s skills and interests, but not necessarily in a formalized, friendly way. Again, back to “weak connections” proving valuable.

And lastly, to Mr. Lee, you are one of the few people that use the word “rockstar” without me wanting to gnash my teeth. I can see how MBA types have a standard set of adjectives they use to describe high performers, but I’ve heard people on cellphones in suits using the word “rockstar” on crowded busses as they attempt to manipulate the person on the other end of the phone “you’re a rockstar!! Now sell them that support package!!” and it has always irked me. At least you’re using it to show genuine respect for the people you work with. I’m curious, however, where you first picked that term up…and thanks for the lecture.

Today’s reading was a through exploration of how mobile technology could perhaps have a positive impact on education. There are a few important points that the author made about what it would take to make this happen, and barriers between technology and education

First, not every child can afford to have a computer at home, but more often then not they will at least have a cell phone. At the very least, there could be some way to extend learning from the classroom to a location-aware device such as this. Hopefully, learning situated in a contextually relevant place would stimulate the curiosity of the learner and provide a more authentic learning environment.

Second, programmers and engineers, including those writing programs FOR educational purposes, are generally not educators by trade. This results in programs that are innovative but have little educational value.

Third, and something we’ve covered before—education doesn’t drive technology, it simply adopts technology that was developed for other purposes. Social networking was not developed with academia in mind, but it can be used towards that purpose.

Fourth, gaming, whether ALICE or an augmented reality treasure hunt or instructional manual, has been an excellent way to involve students in learning in a way that is fun and engaging.

My response to all of these points that the author makes is that we’ve had 15 years to develop effective educational tools based on the technology of the Web, and we’re still behind the rest of the developed world, academically. The cynical side of me says that computers aren’t worth anything to education if students are already overloaded by non-educational technology around them, and alienated by education as an institution. The practical side of me thinks that this issue could be attacked on a single front: Education, and just as importantly, teachers, need to be elevated in society in terms of respect and pay (they already go through enough schooling). This is the responsibility of parents, administrators, and policymakers. Because, even with the slickest, most intuitive educational game to learn algebra I, what percentage of children would even bother trying if they didn’t care about school in general?

 --notes from reading below--

Mobile, wireless, connected information clouds, and learning

• Expectation of communication at our fingertips
• Mobile AND connected
  • 3.2 billion cell phone users
  • diversity of mobile devices and offline browsing
  • cloud computing – keeping all of your data in a web-accessible location, ability to share with others
    • device and platform independent
      • java, ajax, flash
      • remember mac vs pc compatibility?
    • Personal, local, global, and external infoclouds.
    • The importance of context, including device awareness of physical location
      • Tagged objects
    • geotagging
• Personalization
  • re-used,
  • changed, mixed, re-organized and shared by others using Web 2.0 technologies on mobile devices
    • Uh, twitter, anyone?
• Media-rich experiences
  • Web 2.0: mixing and re-mixing
  • Access information in a local context
    • Again, geotagging
    • QR tagging
  • Aggregate information from local sources
• Learning while mobile and connected
• How do the above three characteristics affect learning?
  • Learning at times and locations previously not considered practical or useful.
    • Concept: Personal Learning Environment (PLE)
      • But, does personal time=personal learning?
    • MyArtSpace: online-offline collaborative learning
    • National Museum of Art and Science
      • Learner-defined experience, context aware
    • Projects online that are physically removed from the classroom
    • E-portfolios (SFSU), updateable on the fly, interactive with other ITEC students?
    • The writing of the article itself (ohh! Post-modern, self-referencing!)
• Barriers and Issues
  • Privacy and Safety
  • Authenticity: Will you be truthful? Who is the SME?
  • Data security
  • Ownership of data
  • Connectivity: we don’t all live in the first world
  • Ownership of devices: can schools afford to buy equipment in the long run? Probably not. Are equipment grants a good idea? Only if there is a guaranteed lifecycle replacement. An even better solution: use the mobile devices that children are already carrying.
  • Are we in search of true learning or just the latest fads?
    • Again, does tech influence learning, or does learning influence tech?
    • Why hasn’t the IT revolution sparked a learning revolution? We’ve had, uh, 15 years to make this work.
  • Technology and media literacy: just because these tools are available doesn’t mean the user knows how to use them for learning
    • Cognitive, literacy demands to get the most out of these tools, exercise good judgment.
  • Safe, ethical, responsible use of the internet
  • Whatever trail you leave behind can be followed by others, including future employers
• Conclusion
  • Use technology to provide opportunities for learning that don’t exist without then

• Location-based and context-aware education: prospects and perils
• The roots of ubiquity
  • Now a part of everyday life
  • Weiser: industrial computing. Reality: personal computing
    • Insight: he was applying the concepts of industrial computing to micro-computing
• Towards locational and contextual computing
  • GPS
  • Inference engines
    • “information pushed to you varies with where you are, who you happen to be with, and what tasks you’re currently engaged in.”
  • Social dependency on these devices?
• What does this have to do with education?
  • “place plus narrative equals a more resonant and memorable experience than either place or narrative alone.”
    • AI is sorely lacking to bind these together effectively.
      • The conference room example, gestalt theory, computers lacking the “right brain” and having only the “left brain”
      • Electronic autism
    • Engineers are not social scientists
    • Cultural nuances: “the values and orderings encoded into a system at the time and place of its development will rarely prove to be the appropriate ones for other venues and audiences”
  • So what works then?
    • Games: ALICE, and that one we played in 815.
    • Crossroads: combining the real and virtual
    • Reliving the Revolution
    • Shift from “student” to “player”
    • Informational overlays extended to the terrain “augmented reality”
    • Heat maps to show housing values
  • New approaches to assessment
    • Real-time testing based on previous answers
    • Environmental sensor grids: think Blade Runner: sense robots (and measure text anxiety)
  • New horizons: anywhere can be a classroom
  • “education will, of course, be competing against a great many other prerogatives for use of the local information infrastructure, and that for a variety of social, economic, emotional and psychological reasons, these other claims will often be seen as more pressing”
  • “The success or failure of such initiatives will hinge to a great degree on decisions made at the level of their architecture, and to the humility and realism with which they are devised. The clear lesson of the last decade of research into the question is that the promise inherent in location-based and context-aware techniques is very real, but that delivering the promise – especially in the educational domain – will depend vitally on the degree of insight and sensitivity the designer is able to call upon.”

I finished reading Using Technology with Classroom Instruction…that Works! I found it to be a good resource for further ideas on how to deliver our workshop’s website. Not only has our group been using the collaborative features of Google Docs to allot the time of each presenter and the PowerPoint visuals, but we are also collaboratively editing the website that will be paired with the instruction we deliver.
The Mindmap that I created has the actual tools and programs highlighted in green, on the periphery of the map. The higher-level concepts are towards the center of the Mindmap.

This week yields another impressive result in mind-mapping (see below). In reading Learning for the 21^st Century, mindmapping is a great way to keep track of concepts, suggestions, and ultimately, best practices for modern education.

If you look at the mindmap, you’ll see the broader headings closer to the center of the mindmap, for example, critical elements for creating learning, which are then refined to sub-parts, one of which being teaching and learning in a 21^st century context, which can then be distilled into a specific best practice, such as comparing the information between different media sources and judging reliability. I highlighted the best practices in green, because after reading through this report, it was really the suggestions, not the observations that were helpful.

Also, see the mindmap below this one. I had some extra time traveling this weekend and read A Whole New Mind. I guess we’re reading it later on in the semester, but many of the ideas in the book regarding using your right-brain functions to engage your creativity and ability to recognize patters and empathize with others in order to become a successful person connected well with the Learning for the 21^st Century piece.

A Whole New Mind was quite a fun read (though I guess I read it somewhat in advance of the due date), extolling the virtues of right-brain (i.e. creative thinking, empathy, pattern recognition) as the single saving grace in the American rat race to remain successful. Mr. Pink laid out the history of the US as: agriculture age->industry age->information age->conceptual age. The factors that have influenced this shift to the conceptual age are: automation, Asia, and abundance.

Learning management systems are centralized electronic programs that educators can use to develop and administer courses. More here, please.

Quantitative Approach:

Research question:

Does using a learning management system affect the amount of time teachers spend developing and administering courses in higher education?

Hypothesis:

Teachers will spend more time developing and administering a course using a learning management system during the first academic year they utilize this resource in comparison to teachers who do not. During subsequent years, the amount of time teachers spend developing and administering courses using a learning management system will decline in comparison to teachers who do not.

Operational Definitions:

Learning Management System: An electronic program overseen by the university to centrally manage students, teachers, course material, and evaluative material.

Course Development: Any time associated with researching, acquiring, and organizing material to present to a class. Course material can be electronic, paper-based, auditory, or lecture preparation.

Course Administration: Any time associated with teaching a class within higher education. This includes time in class lecturing and demonstrating ideas and concepts, and all of the time spend out of class facilitating online discussions between the teacher and students, along with assessment activities.

Qualitative Approach:

How is course development and administration affected by a learning management system?

Categories of Inquiry:

Teachers – Course Development:

Learning management systems can accomplish two tasks in relation to course development:

First, putting course material online that would traditionally be in the form of handouts and lectures. For example, a handout could be converted to a PDF and made available online so that it could be searchable and available to all students enrolled in the course so that a student would not have to be physically present to receive the material. Similarly, course lectures could be pre-recorded and played during the semester, or recorded at each class and made available after the conclusion of the class for further study.

Second, learning management systems enable teachers to use so-called web 2.0 tools to facilitate discussion between students and themselves. As part of course development, teachers could choose to set up discussion boards that would hold responses to weekly questions posed by the teacher, or the discussion boards could be used as a place for students to ask questions about the class that could be answered by the students or the teacher. Any of these discussion boards would have to be set up ahead of the semester.

Teachers – Course Administration:

A learning management system can accomplish three tasks in relation to course administration:

First, it can act as a repository for course material, whether it is loaded into the system during the development of the course, or loaded into the system as the course progresses.

Second, facilitates Web 2.0 interaction

Third, manages student grades

Students:

Instructional Technologists and Trainers: Instructional technologists and trainers

Network Administrators: The network administrators are generally the farthest away from the daily operation of the learning management system, and rely on feedback from teachers and instructional technologists as to how the software has impacted their teaching experiences. The following questions might be asked of this group of people: How reliable is the technology that underlies a learning management system? Has student and teacher material ever been lost? Has the learning management system gone down unexpectedly during critical times in the semester or quarter? Has the learning management system ever become slow or intermittently unresponsive? Have requests for features by teachers and instructional technologists been evaluated and fulfilled? If not, have teachers and instructional technologists been given adequate explanations as to why these features have not been made available?

Social bookmarking – though I’ve never used it--seems like a good way to organize collections of related links for a K12 class. I think the real power lies in how the information can be aggregated in a single web page, updated frequently, and in some cases, be displayed alongside similar content chosen by similar users rather then the teacher, giving him or her “fuzzy” control over the entirety of information displayed.
Julie brings up a good point, though…most associated information that is generated alongside your bookmarks/videos/blogs is relevant but also popular. And, what happens to be popular may not be appropriate for the grade level. Teachers have been suspended for introducing controversial literature during various educational dark ages our country has been through, and this was a voluntary risk. Who will help the poor teaching soul that finds inappropriate links and content generated by his or her own collection of links and content?

Though this book doesn’t target K12 specifically, we’ve been reading the free, collaborative e-book “Education for a Digital World: Advice, Guidelines, and Effective Practice from Around the Globe” in Dr. Foreman’s ITEC 830 class. If we think of social bookmarking as a Web 2.0 technology and as something that has the warm and fuzzy potential to make the teacher a collaborator and facilitator instead of a lecturer, we also need to think about how this loss of authority affects the classroom. Do K-12 students prefer to think of students as their peers or their superiors? And, alternately, if a teacher sees him or herself in an authoritative role, does using a Web 2.0 technology threaten this authority and erode their credibility? Is that just a pessimistic view?

Reflection:

Looking at the relationship between education and e-learning while reading this chapter, I was struck by the question: do trends in education effect the development of e-learning technologies, or is e-learning simply an outgrowth of web 2.0 technology that is focused on education and is developed at the whim of web 2.0 companies and individuals.

If I state that trends in education have affected web 2.0 technologies, and essentially have provided a teacher-learner framework that web 2.0 technologies have been built around, I need to prove that student-centric teaching came before web 2.0. Sure enough, it did. Constructivism, placing greater emphasis on the student’s individual role in learning, rethinking the role of the teacher as a facilitator and peer, encouraging learning from peers via small group discussion—this came about long before web 2.0, arguably even when the web itself was in its infancy.

But the converse argument has valid points as well. Social learning, wikis, myspace, Google documents, in fact, any of the emerging technologies listed below all can be used in support of education, but they were not developed specifically for education. And, as Kathleen Ferenz told us regarding Google: there is only one employee acting as an official liaison between Google and the instructional community, and even she is doing this on her “20%” free time at the internet behemoth. As a comparison, WebCT/Blackboard, a longtime commercial LMS, did not have many features considered “web 2.0” until the past couple of years.

So, my basic answer is that approaches to education changed (mid 1990s constructivism), then Web 2.0 came along (2002), then the two became intertwined (2005 connectivisim).

What is your opinion?

My notes from the reading are posted below. I highlighted the red parts as I was reading as important points to discuss.

homework reading summary:

Summary: Create – Communicate – Collaborate.

web 1.0 is commerce, web 2.0 is people.

“makes sense to take students’ ideas and upgrade them using 21^st century technology”

identify emerging technologies:

• digital storytelling
• online meetings/interactive distance learning
• communities of practice
• personal broadcasting (blogs, syndication)
• wikis
• educational gaming (ALICE?)
• MMOGS (second life)
• Extended learning (blended online-offline learning)
• Intelligent searching
• Webcam/cell phone digital video
• Mashups
• Social networking
• Peer-to-peer file sharing (centralized copy, version control)
• Mobile learning
• Content aware environments and devices
• Augmented reality
• Smart mobs

incorporate these technologies to engage learners

• sharing resources
• user-created content—which voice has the most validity?
• Lecture-based approaches fail to engage students online
• Online course development takes time not given to faculty.
• Shift from lecture to facilitator, place alongside instead of in front of classroom.
• e-portfolios exist but there is no technology to systematically grade them.
• “Learning should never be old methodologies delivered through new technologies.” Rosen (2006)

explain how emerging technologies will effect education and vice versa (which direction is more dominant?)

identify challenges in adoption of these technologies

• administrative policies, government (age appropriate registration requirements < 13), culture.
• Quality of instruction, lack of hands-on training—can e-learning replace direct experience?
• Intellectual property rights, digital rights management, large for-profit corporations (WebCT?). Answer: Creative Commons (some rights reserved)

Parallel shift between student lead learning and web 2.0? No, that was constructivisim, and that came BEFORE web 2.0. I would argue that constructivism made learning between student and teacher bi-directional, and working in small groups introduced student to student learning. Web 2.0 is the technological equivalent of constructivism-based learning.

RSS:

Really simple stalking, aka really simple syndication.

The key being an easy way to syndicate information that is rapidly updated.

First, what is a non-internet way to describe it? Let's start with the concept of syndication:

A small hometown newspaper wants to have a blend of local and national news. Local news is written by a small number of staff reporters. National and international news in written by a large pool of reporters in a standardized format:

UPI, AP, Reuters are three wire services, or syndicates, of information, that sell these articles to local papers for placement alongside local reports. Oh, sold to the tune of $36,000/week.

Standard newspaper format:

Headline, byline, lead, nut graph, supporting information.

The difference between syndication then and now: controlled, edited, subscription-based service vs. free, voluntary, and democratic.

In RSS, if you have content on your website that other people find useful and you ALLOW it, they can syndicate, or in this case, partially replicate, your content on their website/in their feed reader..

Similarly, if you see content on someone else's website, and see an orange radio wave signal, you can add their content to your website/feed reader.

This is all about efficiency in web browsing. Rather than having to visit your favorite 50 websites each day to check for updated news and commentary, you only have to visit one. (Aggregation)

If you wish to syndicate your own content, you need an RSS-generating program that takes the content from your website and puts it into a standard format

If you wish to read syndicated content, you need an RSS-reading/aggregating computer program (Firefox) or a web-based reading/aggregating program (iGoogle, Google Reader, Netvibes)

In RSS,

http://www.xul.fr/
Xml graphical interface etc...

The BORG may share a lot, but it sure makes them vulnerable to catastrophic failure.

I realize that the connections the learner has to others in society has a huge impact on learning. But I it is a mistake to think that connectivism is inseparable from technology.
Siemens mentions informal learning and communities of practice—theories that recognize that learning takes place outside of the classroom. I agree, and I ascribe to these beliefs that knowledge can be acquired without the intentionality of a classroom setting.
But Siemens is sneaky. He intersperses our supposed dependency on technology within these theories, and this is incorrect. Technology does not have to facilitate connections between people. Informal learning and communities of practice have been around hundreds of years before the internet—they’ve just not be formally recognized. And, it is dangerous to think of the internet, let alone any artificial commodity, as a pillar of this emerging theory of education.In many years of working in IT, there is one scenario that is never planned for but will inevitably happen: catastrophic failure.
So I’m asking Mr. Siemens to put people before technology, in spite of its widespread use.