I don’t play golf, but if I did I am sure a tool like Golfscape would be in my mobile app collection if only to help me explain exactly what augmented reality, and demonstrate why the NMC/ELI Horizon Report picked augmented reality as one of the key technologies educators should pay attention to in their 2010 Horizon Report. Via ReadWriteWeb.

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I had the great privilege of being invited to talk to the faculty of the Justice Institute in Victoria last week and speak with them about a few of the projects I have been working on with our faculty at Camosun this year. The talk focused on some practical ways faculty at Camosun have integrated technology in their class to solve specific problems or achieve specific pedagogically based outcomes, hence the “peer to peer” part of the title with me acting as the proxy for our faculty (although they did have a direct voice as I interviewed a couple of them about their projects).

The faculty and projects I picked used Skype, Twitter, YouTube and Posterous as the tools. Scope of the projects ranged from fairly small and discrete (using Skype to bring in a virtual guest speaker) to fairly ambitious (using YouTube as a platform for student created video projects, which involved 5 sections of Nursing students).

This was the first time I used Prezi as a presentation tool and enjoyed having a reason to use it. Before doing the presentation, I tweeted out asking for potential gotcha’s on using Prezi and got some good tips back, including to go easy on the zoom and pan as it can be nausea inducing on the big screen to have things continually spinning and flying from corner to corner, and to download a hard copy of the Prezi to my local machine along with any external resources I might have embedded in the Prezi, like YouTube videos. The one tip I can add to that from my own experience is to test the presentation on a projector beforehand as the projector will tend to lower the screen resolution and could change your layout when displayed on the big screen as a result. I noticed that spacing of my text was altered from the widescreen view I had on my laptop to the narrow projector view when plugged into the overhead projector.

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Last week I attended a presentation on some research done by one of our instructors, Dr. Janet Reagan, on informal student course evaluations, specifically focusing on the website  RateMyProfessors . Those working within the BC college system may find the research particularly interesting as the data she used from RMP was pulled from 3 anonymous BC college’s, so it is very relevant for those of us working in this sector.

One of our College’s research analysts was in attendance – someone charged with doing our in house course survey, and remarked that there was a great deal of similarity and consistency with the informal information student’s posted on RMP and the results of Dr. Reagan’s study. I am not sure what the perception of sites like RMP is with our faculty, but I think it is easy to disregard the validity of the comments made on public spaces like this as places where students vent. Dr. Reagan’s research shows that these comments are valid and, surprising to some, equally weighted between positive and negative. Very useful and relevant phenomenological information can be found on sites like RMP and there is a great deal of congruency between what students perceive is effective teaching practice and what the research literature in this area suggests.

As part of the research, Dr. Regan has developed the ACCEPT Model of Student Discernment of Effective Teaching Characteristics which can be used as criteria to evaluate student perceptions of good teaching practice.

• Articulate: Teachers provide consistent, clear and distinctly accurate instruction to facilitate and direct the teaching and learning process.
• Competent: Teachers are qualified to instruct in adult education settings and exhibit skills expected of the teaching profession. They are organized and prepared for content delivery in an interactive style, and understand strategies to fairly and effectively assess learning.
• Content-Experts: Teachers are current, informative, reality-based content experts with substantive experience in their topic areas that may include their academic research background, or their career background, or their trades or industry background.
• Empowering: Teachers empower students in their learning to build self-confidence and assertiveness. Teachers challenge, motivate and encourage adult learners to think independently and critically.
• Perceptive: Teachers display a high level of authenticity and credibility including insight, intuition, and humour. Perceptive teachers care about the success of their students and are approachable.
• Trustworthy: Teachers are aware of their professional, ethical and moral obligations in relation to the trust relationship of teaching. Teachers are respectful in thought and reliable in action and have earned the students? confidence.

Dr. Reagan goes on to make 6 recommendations based on the results of the study.

1. Explore the use of informal online student evaluation of effective teaching characteristics, to promote credible and authentic teaching practice, aligned with self-regulated learning strategies that are both beneficial and desirable to adult learners.
2. Promote voluntary faculty development opportunities that demonstrates how humour and novelty may be used to enhance learning, as many anecdotal student comments relate to the positive effect on humour and novelty in the learning environment or, conversely, the negative effect when humour and novelty are absent.
3. Address power relations in the classroom that interfere with learning, as voiced through informal student evaluation of teaching effectiveness, and intervene when the quality of teaching is unacceptable to students and the teaching professions.
4. Build on the framework of the ACCPET model of Student Discernment of Effective Teaching Characteristics to develop informal adjunct to the institutional rating system. The interpretive analysis of this study revealed that students informal anecdotal comments align with empirical research on effective teaching characteristics and principles of adult learning.
5. Build on the framework of the ACCPET model of Student Discernment of Effective Teaching Characteristics to promote and integrate effective teaching characteristics. Also, with faculty agreement, conduct regular classroom research and improve teaching practice with ongoing in-service training, student and peer feedback
6. Improve the method of retrieving student evaluation of effective teaching characteristics by accessing informal and less traditional student communication, including data accessed from anonymous online faculty rating systems, while also acknowledging that students’ informal comments reflect credible commentary; even though possible abuses could limit validity in specific instances.

Dr. Reagan’s research was on RMP, but I suspect that similar results could be found monitoring any open social network and I believe this is a great opportunity for educators. Over the past year or so I have been monitoring keywords related to our institution on Twitter and it is always interesting when I see a student comment that I know is directly related to a class they are taking, or some kind of experience they are having with our institution. To me, the realtime web offers great potential for educators to provide immediate and timely feedback and intervention based on what our students are saying about the experiences they are having with our institution as they are having them. Many large companies are doing this kind of social media space monitoring with very positive results. Maybe it is time educators took a serious look at monitoring social networking sites as a regular part of their formative assessment strategy.

The full dissertation is available at DSpace at the University of Victoria.

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This is a short post as I am posting this from my Android phone using the new WordPress Android app that was just released by WordPress. Link.

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I love it when The Horizon Report comes out. It takes me back to being a kid in Northern Alberta, anxiously awaiting the November arrival of the Sears Christmas Wish Book at our house. It offered me a glimpse of what could be in the near future. And it excited me.

If you are not familiar, each year the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative publish The Horizon Report, a look into the future at some of the technologies that may have an impact on higher education in the next 5 years. This year the report has picked the following technologies and estimated a time for adoption for each.

1. Mobile Computing (1 year or less)
2. Open Content (1 year or less)
3. Electronic Books (2-3 years)
4. Simple Augmented Reality (2-3 years)
5. Gesture Based Computing (4-5 years)
6. Visual Data Analysis (4-5 years)

Scott Leslie from BCcampus is one of the advisors for the report. This year he travelled to Austin, Texas for the release of the report and created this video, which features interviews with members of ELI and NMC about the technologies in the report. It’s a nice piece of work from Scott that adds useful context around the reasons why these technologies were chosen.

Some things strike me about this list.

First, mobile computing has arrived at Camosun, at least if the connectivity stats coming from our IT Services department are any indication. Last week I was speaking with some members of the department who said that they have had to increase the number of available IP addresses for our wireless network twice this fall to meet the demand of wireless apps on campus. If you are not familiar with how networking works, each device that connects to the wireless network requires a unique address. These are pulled from a limited pool of addresses. Once that pool runs out, no more devices can connect to the network until a device returns an address to the pool. I don’t think that it’s a far stretch to imagine they will be significantly upping the pool again this fall. So, we know the students are connecting. How much of that connectivity is being used for learning & teaching is the unknown.

Second, of all the technologies on this list, simple augmented reality is the one that has me the most excited. I have been playing with augmented reality apps on my Android phone for the past 6 months and can see huge potential for education should they take off. Here is an example of augmented reality in which data pulled from the web is overlayed on top of what you see through your camera phone, kind of like a heads up display you might see in a car.

Imagine scanning the horizon with your smartphone and having geographical information pop up on the screen – the names of those mountains in the distance, the number of salmon that spawned in that creek last year, what developers hold development permits for that parcel of land over there. Very possible, and useful, information.

The barrier I see with this right now is that there is no standard for delivering the information. While many augmented reality browser are being created, the layers are not compatible with each other. Kind of like the early days of web browsers where websites would only work in either Internet Explorer or Netscape. Here’s hoping we learned from that mess & some open standards begin to emerge as the augmented reality market matures.

As for the other technologies, ebooks have to catch on at some point and you have to think sooner rather than later. 2010 has been dubbed by some as the year of the e-reader, with numerous options now on the market. The advantages of ebooks are numerous – cheaper, easier to update, they don’t use trees, you can increase the font size (a big one for me after spending a term frustrated trying to read 9 point type in a textbook), annotate, snip, republish yada yada yada. They have to catch on, don’t they?

After having lived with a Wii for the past year, I can also see the appeal of gesture based computing, especially in the areas of simulations. I can imagine a carpentry simulation someday swinging something akin to a Wii remote to simulate hammering a nail into wood, complete with tactile feedback where the remote vibrates as you strike the nail.

Of course, there are many qualifiers, maybes and outright unknowns whenever you try to predict technology and trends. But one thing seems certain – the innovation train is not stopping, and that makes for very interesting times to be working in educational technology.

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