March 3, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Publishing my thesis with WordPress and Digress.it – Part 1

This is part 1 of a many part process & is just the beginning of this little project. There will be more posts in the coming days as I get my thesis site launched. If you go there, you will see a work in progress at the moment.

A sick day at home with a kid gave me the opportunity to start tackling a project I’ve had on my plate for a few months now: publishing my completed thesis using WordPress and Digress.it.

One of the things I promised myself when I decided to do a thesis was that I would post a copy of it in this space in a format that would allow people to comment on it.

I think posting it in an open public space is important for a couple of reasons. For one, I think that, even though it is only a Masters thesis, it still represents academic research, and I strongly believe that any academic research should be as open and accessible as possible. And not just to other academics.

The second reason is that I want it critiqued by a wider audience of my peers. I want it to be a starting point for conversation. What worked in the thesis, what didn’t, what rings true to others using Twitter in a PLN, which parts are valuable & what parts are fuzzy or just wonky?

Finally, I haven’t had a good hands on WordPress project for awhile now so it feels good to dig into WP again after being in the Drupal/Moodle world for the past year.

The tools I’ll be using

I’m taking my inspiration here from the NMC and the Horizon Report and how they have published that report for the past few years. I’m also inspired by Joss Winn, who published his dissertation this way a few years ago.

You’re no doubt familiar with WordPress, the blog-cum-CMS platform that this site runs on. But you may not be as familiar with Digress.it. a WordPress plugin created by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

What draws me to Digress.it are two features; the ability to link directly to specific portions of a large document, and the ability to allow paragraph by paragraph commenting. Both of these are important when posting something as large as a 40,000 word thesis.

I don’t expect many will read the entire paper, but sections may be of more interest to some than others so I want to section the thesis as much as possible. And, if someone does read it, I want them to be able to comment on something when the comment pops into their head and not have to slog thru an entire section of 2, 3 or 4 thousand words before getting a comment box.

So, technically, here is what I am doing.

Create a multi-site WordPress instance

I want my thesis to live on my domain, clintlalonde.net. Since I already have a WordPress blog running here, I needed to figure out a way to add a second instance of WordPress that I could use Digress.it with.

If this was a few years ago, I probably would have installed a whole separate instance of WordPress. However, since WordPress 3, you now have the ability to run multiple WordPress sites on a single WordPress install. Each site is independent of the other, with it’s own set of plug-ins and themes. So, after doing a bit of reading on how to set up multisites on an established blog, I fired up a multi-site instance of WordPress on my domain clintlalonde.net.

Two Small Issues

The multi-site setup was fairly straightforward. I only had two small issues.

Permalink structure changed

The first was that the permalink structure on my original clintlalonde.net blog got changed when I flipped the switch to make my WordPress site a multi-site instance. The switch added the word /blog/ to the URI’s on my site. This means that links on my site that used to look like this:

Frog in a pot

were changed to this

http://clintlalonde.net/blog/2012/02/10/frog-in-a-pot/

Which broke all the internal links on my blog. So, when you clicked on the title of a blog post from my home page, you ended up with a 404 page not found error. Not good.

After a bit of digging on the WP forums, I found an easy fix to the problem, and was able to safely change the permalink structure to remove the word /blog/ from the link structure and set up the permalink structure to match what it was before. Once I did that, the /blog/ was gone from the URI and my internal links were repaired and working again.

Configuring cPanel

The second issue was that I couldn’t actually create a new sites. Whenever I tried to create a site in the WordPress admin panel, it looked like the site was created. But when I clicked the link to go to the admin panel or to the new site I got a “server not found” error. Technically, this told me that the sub-domain wasn’t being set up properly.

Off to trusty Google to try to find a solution, and it didn’t fail me. Once I had cPanel configured correctly and my directory structure set up (although I am not really sure why I need to have a folder called blogs.dir in my wp-content folder but, whatever, it worked) I was on my way.

I created a new site and sub-domain at thesis.clintlalonde.net.

Install Digress.it

After getting the site and sub-domain set up, I then downloaded and installed Digress.it. Before I could add Digress.it to the new thesis.clintlalonde.net site, I had to add the plug-in at the admin level of my newly created WordPress network. Once that was done, I went into the admin panel of the thesis site and activated the plug-in.

When I took a look at Digress.it out of the box, I saw that it needed some tweaking. There were unnecessary WordPress widgets in the lower part of the home page, and I wanted to get rid of the default text, posts and comments and get some more useful data posted to begin to see what the site would look like when I began posting my thesis content to it.

First, to replace the text on the homepage. Digress.it uses the contents from a WordPress page titled “About” to populate the homepage of the site. So, I created an “About” page and added some info about what the site was about along with the abstract of my thesis.

After that, I got rid of the default widgets that appeared in the area below the textbox.

I’ve noticed that the admin toolbar that runs across the top of the page is badly formatted and might need some tweaking. But since I am the only person who will see that, it’s not critical right now since I am the only person who will see it. So, this will do for now.

Before I wrap up my first days work, I install the Akismet comment filter to begin filtering out comment spam. I’ve found with WordPress sites, it pays to fire up Akismet sooner rather than later as the spam starts rolling in pretty quickly.

With WordPress multi-site up and running and Digress.it installed, the challenge now becomes one of getting the content from Word into WordPress in a more elegant way than cutting and pasting. That’s the next challenge, and the next blog post.

January 23, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Trends that will impact education in the next 5 years

My colleague at BCIT in Vancouver, Kyle Hunter, recently asked the following question:

Here is my video response.

After I did the video I felt like singing that old Sesame Street song “one of these things is not like the other” as I have lumped Apple in with this fine batch of openness when, in fact, I have some issues with the open of Apple and iTunesU. But I still think that iTunesU and the announcement last week that they are going to offer full courses through iTunesU fits with the point I was trying to make, despite the open/closed distinction.

And I said Stanford Thrun when it is really Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University.

January 4, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

The value of Android

As I read about the low cost tablets popping up in India like the $140 Classmate and the $45 Akash, I can’t help but wonder, would these low cost tablets exist if it were not for Google and their open source Android operating system?

It once again points to the importance that open source software plays in driving innovation. If Google had decided to create a proprietary operating system available only to an elite group of manufacturers with hefty licensing fees, would we see these kinds of inexpensive products appearing? Would we be seeing the kind of uptake of mobile devices that we are seeing right now?

Sure, you can argue that these tablets are nothing but cheap riffs on a truly innovative product (the much more expensive iPad), and you wouldn’t find me necessarily disagreeing: the iPad was a truly innovative product that created a whole new segment of products. But it is one thing to create an innovative product, and quite another to create an innovative environment that enables more innovation, especially innovation that lowers the cost barrier and allows technology to move from the elite to the common.

More is different. And by providing us with an open source platform to build on, Google has helped ensure that we will see what this different will look like.

Image: Powered by Android by JD Hancock used under Creative Commons Attribution license.

December 14, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Moodle

Universal Instructional Design Principles for Moodle

Universal Instructional Design is the design principle that instruction should be designed not for the average student, but rather for a broad range of students “with respect to ability, disability, age, reading level, learning style, native language, race, ethnicity, and other characteristics“.

For those of us working within the confines of an LMS, this type of design can be a challenge. And while using an Open Source option like Moodle means we do have some flexibility in customizing the LMS for UID (and Moodle has certainly put some thought into making the platform accessible), customizing is often easier said than done.

Which is why I am happy I stumbled across this IRRODL paper “Universal Instructional Design (UID) Principles for Moodle from Tanya Elias which makes a number of recommendations – both technical and pedagogical – on how to improve accessibility within Moodle.

Elias begins the paper by outlining eight universal design principles, based on the work of the Center for Universal Design (which, as an aside, have this wonderful printable infographic (pdf) outlining the principles). She then goes on to make recommendations on how to design Moodle courses & content to meet these guidelines.

Below is a summary of the principles, the recommendations from Elias, and a few of my own thoughts in italics.

1) Equitable use

The design is useful and accessible for people with diverse abilities and in diverse locations. The same means of use should be provided for all students, identically whenever possible or in an equivalent form when not.

Recommendations

Put content online and make them accessible by screen reader, text-to-speech, and screen preferences programs.
Provide translation to overcome language barriers for learners for whom English is a foreign language.

The takeaway here for me is make content accessible, and the most flexible, accessible content on the web is HTML. Eliminate those PDF, Word and PowerPoint files and convert them to the native language of the web – HTML.

2) Flexible use

The learning design accommodates a wide range of individual abilities, preferences, schedules, and levels of connectivity. Provide the learners with choice in methods of use.

Recommendations

Make synchronous sessions optional, or make them small group sessions to make it easier to for participants to schedule.
Provide recordings of synchronous sessions.
Present content in multiple formats.
Offer choice and additional information.

If you have the option to record what you are doing (which is baked into most synchronous applications), always record it & make it available to students. Not only good for accessibility, but good for review for students who can attend as well.

3) Simple and intuitive

The course interface design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, technical skills, or current concentration level. Eliminate unnecessary complexity.

Recommendations

Simplify the interface.
Offer text-only, mobile and offline options.

Most Moodle courses are built from a standard course template, meaning there may be blocks and tools you don’t use. If you are not using them, remove them. They are clutter.

4) Perceptible information

The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the student’s sensory abilities.

Recommendations

Incorporate assistive technologies
Add captions, descriptors and transcriptions

On adding caption & transcriptions, a good low cost way to do this for video is to use YouTube for hosting your video and take advantage of their transcription and captioning features.

5) Tolerance for error

The design minimises hazards and adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.

Recommendations

Allow students to edit their posts.
Issue warnings using text and sound.

Moodle gives learners 30 minutes to edit their posts, by default. if your administrator has disabled this option, here is a good argument to have it re-enabled. I would also say that audible warnings are good, but there should be a mechanism to disable them if the user decides they don’t want them.

6) Low physical and technical effort

The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with minimal physical and mental fatigue.

Recommendations

Consider issues of physical effort.
Incorporate assistive technologies and multimedia, and embed links.
Include a way to check browser capabilities

The paper notes that “extensive use of external links and external programs (my emphasis) in this way increases the technical effort required by all users.” So, not to harp on this point (but I will), but every time a learner has to open a PDF, Word or PowerPoint file, they have to load a new, external program.

7) Community of learners and support

The learning environment promotes interaction and communication among students and between students, faculty, and administrative services.

Recommendations

Provide study groups and tools.
Provide easy-to-find links to support services.

An easy win to add a block with links to institutional student services.

8) Instructional climate

Instructor comments and feedback are welcoming and inclusive. High expectations are espoused for all students.

Recommendation

Encourage instructors to make contact and stay involved.

As the paper states, “Instructor accessibility is an essential component of course accessibility.” An involved instructor will recognize when a student is struggling and can take steps to intervene and help.

Many of these principles are not Moodle specific and could be easily adapted to any online learning scenario. Where the paper does get Moodle specific is where Elias notes how many Moodle modules and plugins are available to help achieve these principles. This is also where the paper falls a bit short in that Elias gives the number of modules available and doesn’t actually review, or even name the available Moodle modules. So while it’s nice to know there are 4 translator modules available for Moodle, it would be useful to have the actual names of those modules and, even better, a review on whether they met the recommendations. Still, a useful piece of research on accessibility and the LMS.

December 6, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Moodle

Moodle 2.2 – now with more mobile goodness

Moodle 2.2 has been released, and along with some new features (like rubrics and some tools to make getting content and tools into Moodle from other systems easier) comes an improvement to the Moodle mobile app.

When I last looked at the Moodle mobile app a few months back, it was still pretty slim in terms of functionality, which was fine. It was a first generation mobile app so I didn’t expect killer functionality out of the box. And I deeply respected the fact that, out of all the functionality they could have delivered in that first crack, they decided that it was important to give students the ability to upload media captured on their mobile devices to their courses – a signal (to me at least) that they were looking at mobile devices through a disruptive lens.

Moodle 2.2 mobile app

The 2.2 release adds another piece to that mobile app, now giving learners the ability to download course content from the course to their mobile device. I have to say, not quite as pumped about this feature as I was about the upload feature in the first go round, but I get that for many students content is the key – it’s what they come for.

One thing is for certain with this new feature – we are going to have to be ever more vigilant on issues like optimized file size and correct web formats for content as we develop our courses. We do have a fairly stringent technical quality checks for our courses, but stuff does get through.

For example, today I had to deal with a course that wasn’t backing up and restoring properly. The culprit? 2 PowerPoint presentations; 1 was 54 meg the other a whooping 102 meg. Pity the poor student in that class who decided to download that content on their mobile device. That’s 20% of my monthly data right there in those 2 files.

Anyway, not Moodle’s problem. In fact, in this feature they have given me a tool and another reason to enforce standard file formats and optimized file sizes, so I am grateful for it, and for the continued development of the mobile application. And realistically, we won’t have to worry about this for at least a year or so as we are still in the process of migrating to 2.1 from 1.9 and have decided to continue on the 2.1 path and not go straight to 2.2 when we release next year.

You can read the official release notification in the Moodle forums.

December 4, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on Camosun, EdTech

Skype as disruptive educational technology

I realized something tonight as I read the story of how Virginia Tech professor John Boyer landed a Skype interview for his World Regions class with Aung Sun Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic movement in Burma – I don’t give near enough credit to Skype as a disruptive educational technology.

I’ve helped faculty use it for just this kind of activity – bring in a guest from a distance as a guest speaker, and not thought twice about it. I’ve read stories of teachers who have used it to bring sick kids into class so they don’t fall behind. People are using it to connect with native language speakers to learn another language.

All this for free in a package that most grandparents use to speak with their grand-kids.

Maybe it’s because Skype has reached that point where it has become boring which, according to Shirky, is now the point where the conversation becomes interesting. Which is to say, once we stop our fascination with the technology itself and it becomes first mundane and then invisible, then and only then do we begin to see the change it has on society. Maybe Skype is at that point.

Tomorrow John Boyer is introducing his students to Aung Sun Suu Kyi. Want to see a group of motivated students? Check out the last 30 seconds of Boyer’s video request to Aung Sun Suu Kyi, posted on YouTube.

But it doesn’t have to be someone world famous to make it relevant for students. For Camosun College video instructor Andy Bryce, it was a former grad of the Applied Communication Program who now works for CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada.

Which begs the question, who do your students want to see in your class?

Photo: sign of the times by Doug Symington used under Creative Commons license.

September 21, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

If This Then That Automates Simple Web Tasks

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/thecleversheep/status/115408222088728576″]

I don’t blog much these days about new web services or tools that I discover (if you are interested in what I find in terms of cool tools then you can connect with me on Diigo where most of the good web tool discoveries I make end up), but this service Rodd Lucier popped onto my radar screen is one that deserves a mention.

The service called If This Then That, a useful little utility that allows you to automate simple tasks from a number of different web services using the simple conditional statement if this happens, then do that. What IFTTT does is allows you to create simple web tasks mixing different web services that follow that flow.

For example, I was able to quickly set up a simple task that posts links I tweet to my Delicious account. IFTTT checks my Twitter account every 15 minutes. If it finds a tweet with a link in it, then it posts that link to my Delicious account (and, by the way there is already a great service that handles this type of task already, but this was a proof of concept task for me with IFTTT).

IFTTT supports a number of web services, including, Twitter, Gmail, Delicious, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr – basically all the major services are here – and allows you to set up time and date specific actions; a simple cron for web services, without having to know cron commands.

I like this service a lot. IFTTT takes a powerful computer programming concept (the “if-then” conditional statement) and gives us something that is incredibly useful and easy for non-programmers to use to automate web tasks, as opposed to say Yahoo Pipes which held a lot of promise in simplifying programming concepts enough to let the lay person build some powerful tools. I love and use Yahoo Pipes quite a bit, but in my experience Pipes requires a fairly sophisticated grasp of programming to be useful for most people. IFTTT simplifies the process of creating useful tasks considerably over Pipes, and I expect I will be using it quite often in the future.

Nice find, Rodd!

August 18, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Powerpoint is the apple in the Garden of Eden

An interest interview with four university students on the best and worst moments in classroom technology they have experienced in their academic career. Misuse of Powerpoint is high on the list, and prompts one of the best lines in the interviews in “Powerpoint is the apple in the Garden of Eden”. The interviews are just under 10 minutes long and was done using Google+ Hangout feature.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education.

April 20, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

QR Codes

I’ve been messing around with creating QR codes (PDF). We’ve been talking mobile lately at work and brainstorming different strategies we can start using quickly to get people thinking mobile, while providing some useful services to the students & faculty we serve. So, I wanted to see just how difficult it was to create a useful QR code. Turns out, not difficult at all.

A little searching found a number of sites to create QR codes. After trying a few, I stumbled upon the QR Code and 2D Code Generator by Keram Erkan that generates a huge variety of QR codes, including codes that will create links to a variety of websites, send emails, and even automatically hook your mobile device to a wifi network (how useful/popular would that be for students on campus?)

So, here is my first QR code, created in about 30 seconds. I’d appreciate it if you have a mobile device to give it a try and let me know if it works (I’ve tested on my Android powered HTC Magic running Barcode Scanner). This QR should take you to my About page.

About Me QR Code

April 18, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Playing with an iPad

I’m generally not a big gadget guy. I don’t have the desire to have the latest and shiniest, mostly because I am cheap and being on the gadget cutting edge costs more than I am willing to part with. I was late to the game with a smartphone, just got an ebook reader this Christmas, and bought a netbook around the same time the original iPad was released. So, this post might sound very 2010 for many of you.

I got an iPad. No, not an iPad 2, an iPad. Old skool. 5 of them landed in our department last week so we can test out the educational potential of the device. So, of course, I immediately downloaded Angry Birds, a cultural phenomenon I had not had the pleasure of experiencing until last Friday.

That out of the way, I spent some time on the weekend poking around the device. Much has been written and reviewed about the iPad so I won’t go into details here save for a couple of specific things I noticed about the device:

The screen orientation is crisp and fast. My Android phone takes a few seconds for the display to orient when I flip the phone. The iPad was instant.
The keyboard is more comfortable than I was expecting. I am a hunt and peck typist so it works for me. Others in our unit who are more classically oriented typists said they found the keyboard a bit more difficult.
The brushed aluminum finish felt slippery in my hands. I have an out of the box model, and can see where a cover or skin of some kind would make me feel more comfortable handling it and stop the “this thing is going to slip out of my fingers” feeling.
Setting up Gmail was painless. However, I couldn’t get it working with our corporate Exchange server, but that could have to do with our exchange server setup and not with the app or device.
The web experience is okay. I am not a big fan of Safari as a browser. It does the job, but the lack of ability for me to add-on extensions means that the browser is just that – a browser. I’m used to my browser being a tool and that possibility doesn’t seem to exist in Safari in the iPad. Other than that, the internal sites our unit is responsible actually worked pretty well, although my testing of Moodle consisted primarily of logging in and checking out content & navigation.
WiFi seemed iffy. I tried reading in bed one night. My bedroom is at the other end of the house from my wireless router, so the signal is fairly weak. But my laptop, Kindle and Android phone can all get a usable wireless signal while I am in bed. The iPad couldn’t. The signal was too weak for the device.

Okay, onto some more educational applications. I wanted to do was to see if there were any Moodle apps available, and there was – mTouch+ for $2.99, so I made the purchase and installed the app. It didn’t work – at all. I tap the app icon, it flashes briefly on the screen, then closes down. That’s it. I’ve posted in the developers forum, but so far haven’t heard back. I’ve also heard getting a refund on an app is difficult.

I had better luck with the next apps I installed – a 3d interactive Brain and an interactive periodic table. Both of these worked like a charm, and in a couple of minutes my daughter was rotating around a 3d model of the human brain.

Up next was the Kindle app. I have a Kindle and Kindle account, so wanted to give reading on the iPad a shot. The Kindle app installed & synced up nicely with my Kindle account, giving me access to the books I had already purchased on my Kindle. Excellent. The reading experience on the iPad was quite nice, but I did have some glare from my bedside lamp that was a tad annoying. But other than that, the short period of time I spent reading felt comfortable. And once I got t eh hang of the highlighting tool, I was able to highlight and annotate passages in my e-book, which I hope will synch back to my Kindle (haven’t tested that yet).

The WordPress app was installed next, which (at first blush anyway) seems identical to the Android app I have on my HTC. There is no WYSIWYG editor, so you are very limited in terms of formatting a posts, but it does the job. You can also moderate and respond to comments.

But the real highlight app in my first few days of using the iPad is Flipboard. First and foremost, Flipboard is a beautiful RSS reader that pulls content from my Google Reader account and gives me a nicely formatted reading experience. But in addition to being an RSS reader that can pull and compile feeds, Flipboard also connects to both my Facebook and Twitter feeds and aggregates the links being shared by my networks and presents those articles to me in a nice package. It’s like an iPad version of Twitter Times or Paper.li, and I found that the way that Flipboard works, it was very easy for me to scan accross numerous links and articles and pick out the ones that were relevant to me. The visual presentation of Flipboard made it easier to discover relevant information from my network.

So far, my experimenting with an iPad has been pretty high level try a few things for a couple minutes and move on, but I can already see some places where this thing could fit into my life. For example, at work taking notes in a meeting the iPad is much less intrusive than having a laptop sitting open on the table, although trying to access our internal Sharepoint collaborative site was (not surprising) an exercise in frustration.

Any recommendations for education type apps that I should try out?

Photo: iFuture by YiyingLu. Used under Creative Commons license.

March 20, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

A couple of upcoming events for BC EdTechies

I want to give a heads up to BC IT/EdTechie types about a couple of upcoming events some of my colleagues are busy organizing and that you may be interested in attending.

The first is the Vancouver Island Higher Education Information Technology Day (VIHET) being held next Wednesday, March 30th at Royal Roads University. I’m looking forward to the day and the opportunity to connect with my island colleagues from Camosun, UVic, VIU and North Island. The theme is Global Connections: International Trends in Educational Technologies. David Porter from BCcampus is the keynote speaker. I always enjoy seeing David present. He is one of the most progressive voices in our field in this province, and his recent excursion to Mongolia will no doubt provide him with some rich material for the theme at hand.

The second is the upcoming Educational Technology User Group (ETUG) spring workshop, being hosted by Selkirk College in Nelson, BC. My colleagues Tracy Roberts and Amanda Coolidge are part of the organizing comittee this year and are planning a great conference built around the theme of Open4Learning. Think open professional development, OER’s, open courses (MOOC’s perhaps?), open source software & some of the non-teaching & learning issues (privacy) related to being open. Personally, I’m hoping Grant Potter does a bit on open radio & show us all how he set up & manages ds106radio, but I know he’s on the organizing committee & will have his hands full as it is. Call for proposals is on now until April 8th for the event on June 2 & 3.

Photo: ETUG Mosaic by Sylvia Currie used under Creative Commons license.

February 5, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Google Body and Art

Two resources created by Google have popped onto my radar screen this week that will certainly be valuable for educators; Google Body and Google Art Project.

Google Art Project is a series of interactive virtual tours of some of the worlds top art galleries built using the same technology that powers Google Maps. You can take virtual tours of the Museum of Modern Art and view works of art like van Gogh’s The Starry Night in incredible detail. Here are some screen captures I took of a close up of this work.

Now, I am no Art student, but even I can see the inherent value for a student to have access to this level of detail as they understand the techniques of the masters. How much pressure did they use? How did they mix the paint to achieve those colours? What brush did they use to achieve this or that effect? You just can’t get this type of perspective by viewing the work from behind a rope 15 feet away from it.

The second resource is Google Body, an interactive 3d model of the human body (this one requires Google Chrome, Firefox 4, or another browser that currently support WebGL to get the full effect). This is an immersive 3d body simulation that looks to me like it was built using similar technologies to Google Earth. You can fly around and into the body at different angles, strip away layers and examine the body from it’s various system perspectives. If you don’t have a browser capable of viewing, here is a short video of the technology in action (there is no audio with the video):

January 30, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

On social software & student ownership of their own tools

Two points from this article. First, social software enables learning conversations to occur outside of the classroom, not only between students, but also between students and the larger community. Second, when students taking ownership of their own tools, they are set up to become lifelong learners. My take is that this requires flexibility on the part of educators in that they have to be willing to go where the learners are and let the learner decide where they want these conversations to occur.

Amplify’d from campustechnology.com

But, most importantly, their learning experiences often involve a conversation, a process, and this conversation can include teachers and others with knowledge in their field. The skills students gain in the process are those they need to join a wider community and succeed in today’s economy.

Colleges and universities need to do more to incorporate social software into their courses and methodologies. I hear from faculty and administrators regularly about transformations of entire programs to the social/conversational/active learning paradigm of today.

This extension of the learning conversation online (with blogs, wikis, e-mail, texting, chat, conferencing systems, portfolios, and so on), helps students develop online literacy skills. Though it is dependent on technology, it represents a return to the roots of human learning. Learning has always involved conversation. In fact, knowledge results from, or increasingly is, consensus-building through conversation.

To the extent that students are engaged in that conversation using their own–literally their own–Web and Internet applications, some of them have a chance to become independent, life-long learners and enjoy a better chance to develop their own expertise

Read more at campustechnology.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ao21x

January 29, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Using a wiki to collaboratively create course curriculum

I like this case study. It’s not from post-sec, but K-12, and the interview with the educators was done by Wikispaces so they have an interest in promoting wiki technology in a positive light. However, that said, it is still a great example of how educators living at a distance used a wiki to collaborate and develop an OER based on the Grade 6 social studies curriculum in Ontario. It also illustrates the benefits of being open, as the teachers involved sent out a tweet about their final result, which was picked up by the Wikispaces staff, who then interviewed the teachers and hilighted their wiki on their site – which was read by me, and is now being sent out to my network. Their work gets pushed around various networks and amplified, based on a single tweet that they sent.

Amplify’d from www.wikispaces.com

However, as we began to work on the project, we needed a way to share ideas, and work on pulling the assignment together without meeting in person as we all lived a distance away from each other.

We wanted to reach more educators than only those in our faculty and within the first week of our unit being posted, we had other universities’ and your own recognition!

Rachel: As part of our IT course, we were all required to open Twitter accounts and we were encouraged to use it as a way to connect and collaborate with other educators. We were all very excited about our completed wiki so we decided to “tweet” about it. The fact that you found us through Twitter demonstrates first-hand the power of Web 2.0 tools and how effective they are for connecting and sharing with others around the globe.

Marsha: We learned so much for this experience beyond just how to create a unit of study. By jumping right in and being willing to try new things, we really discovered the value of technology in education and one’s own professional development. Now that we have each had experience with creating Wikispaces, we have been able to implement them in a practical way in the classroom and have experimented with its many uses.

Not having integrated vast amounts of technology before, we have realized its potential as educators through the power of collaboration and its use for professional development and its power for our students and their continued learning.

It becomes really difficult when the school isn’t equipped with technology and when— if you’re in a community that is accepting of the idea of integrating technology, I think that that just allows so much growth for your students.

And I think, too, with traditional education, when you think of online games and Web tools and, you know, doing things like this with technology, that it’s not “educational,” and that it’s more just fun, and you’re playing online. But we learned that there are tons of games and tools and resources online, and even just different technological tools that you can use in you classroom that are educational, depending on how you use them and what you want the kids to get out of it.

So if you’re learning from it and enjoying it, then imagine what the students will get from it.

you don’t know if it’s going to work until you’ve tried.

And don’t expect it to be the same experience that someone else had, because you go in, and it’s all trial and error. Does this work, and does that work, and we found that the best way to learn was to play with things ourselves instead of having the instructor sit beside us and set everything up for us, it was so much more, “See what works for you.”

Read more at www.wikispaces.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/any7o

January 27, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Sematic web and information processing

Qwiki looks like a very interesting platform. It’s like Wikipedia in that it is like an encyclopedia of general knowledge, only instead of the knowledge being constructed primarily by contributors, it is created by machines, pulling all these little bits and pieces of content from other spots on the web. It does this on the fly using semantic web technologies. There is a way that users can participate, by suggesting sources of information that might improve a Qwiki, but the heavy lifting is primarily done by machines. And it looks very pretty. The UI is slick.

In taking a look at Qwiki, I came across this blog post from Gregory Roekens in which he connects semantic web technologies with a theory of knowledge creation and information processing called mental space theory, which, in turn, is based on something called a DIKW (data, information, knowledge and wisdom) hierarchy. DIKW illustrates a hierarchical relationship in that data and information lead to knowledge, which leads to wisdom. I haven’t come across this term or theory before, but it is intriguing.

Amplify’d from tell.posterous.com

Qwiki is one of those emerging platform leveraging the semantic web. I often used the Ackoff’s allocation of mental space theory to explain the importance of Semantic Web and its huge potential. This theory is based on the DIKW hierarchy.

In a nutshell and using the diagrams below, our brain is using 40% of mental space to process data into information, a further 30% to process information into knowledge, 20% to process knowledge into Wisdom and only the remaining 10% is used to process Wisdom into Vision (see diagram 1).

In his work Scott Carpenter explains that thanks to data-handling technology (think excel spreadsheet, charts and dashboard) it allows the human cognitive energy to shift upward and produce information out of data (see diagram 2). Without these technologies the cognitive is locked down by mundane and time consuming effort to process the data into information.

What’s really exciting in Scott’s theory is that with the Semantic Web and its semantic processing power cognitive allocation can shift to Wisdom and Vision with the machine effectively delivering the Knowledge (see diagram 3).

Read more at tell.posterous.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/anrsf

Qwiki via Stephen Downes

January 24, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Why SCORM is bad for elearning

This post is in regards to the recent $2 billion dollars that the US gov’t has set aside for the creation of Open Educational Resources. A significant shot in the arm for OER’s, except for on small glitch – the content has to be developed to be SCORM compliant. This post rips apart how that little gotcha puts the whole idea of resuability at risk. A good trashing of the SCORM standard. It should be noted that the trashing is being done by a person who is involved in creating a competing standard, but these remain valid concerns with SCORM. But really, what about just developing to web standards and be done with it?

Amplify’d from www.imsglobal.org

1. SCORM is severely outdated and narrow in scope. The model upon which it is based is 15 years old and very focused on one specific need: self-paced computer-based training (CBT). It is also old in terms of the technology used to implement it. It is not web friendly. It was even kind of outdated when it first came into the market. Now it is ancient.

. SCORM does not provide reliable interoperability or reuse. SCORM is very complex and notorious for providing inconsistent interoperability even among products achieving the SCORM certification.

3. SCORM was not designed for and has NOT typically been used for cohort-based educational courses with teacher and professors involved.

4. SCORM is especially bad for customizing and remixing by regular teachers and professors. SCORM objects are generally a “black box.” They require complex authoring tools to create and edit SCORM content. Therefore, remixing and republishing by the users is extremely complex

5. SCORM has no concept of or support for assessment. At best SCORM can be set up to provide short quizzes or individual questions that are a black box.

6. SCORM has no concept of protecting access to content with license codes or any other protection mechanism.

7. SCORM has no concept of or support for existing in a wider Information Technology (IT) infrastructure in which there are administrative student systems. This means that SCORM does not think through how access to various content and resources is restricted to certain individuals, including cohorts of students for collaborative activities and courses, or how data gathered from the learning is reported to administrative systems

it is very difficult to find even a single higher education course that has been reused as a result of SCORM

So, why is SCORM a poor fit for education? SCORM may be part of the solution, but at best it only addresses 10% of the requirements, and unfortunately based on very outdated technology.

Social learning, collaborative learning? These were never even contemplated with SCORM.

Read more at www.imsglobal.org

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ank97

January 17, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Wikipedia to build an OER platform

Good move by Wikipedia to help develop tools educators can use. By engaging the academic & teaching community, Wikipedia could actually become a much more substantive and “credible” resource. Plus by engaging educators in the act of editing Wikipedia and using them to introduce Wikipedia to their students as contributors and not just users, I can see these resources expanding the Wikipedia contributor user base as more students and educators become engaged in not only using, but contributing, to Wikipedia.

Amplify’d from chronicle.com

As Wikipedia hits its 10th year of operation, it is making efforts to involve academics more closely in its process. The latest is a new plan to build an “open educational resource platform” that will gather tools about teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom.

Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent company, is part of the team working to build the platform, which he said will highlight the ways in which Wikipedia can be used to improve student learning.

“We don’t want them to cite Wikipedia,” he said of students. “What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better.”

Read more at chronicle.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bmg5r

January 7, 2011 by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn, EdTech

Add comments to a D2L content page using Disqus

I am working with an Instructor on a project in Desire2Learn in which she wants to give students the ability to comment and respond to any piece of content in the course, similar to a blog commenting system.

D2L does have the ability to allow students to leave feedback on content pages, but this content is only visible to the Instructor. This particular Instructor felt it was important for all students to see each others comments as it may be the spark that gets other students to engage and discuss the content. She also wanted to have the conversation start and continue at the place where the content lived, rather than forcing the students to click on over and navigate to the discussion boards.

I really like the way this Instructor thinks. I think there is a lot of value in not only encouraging and make possible spontaneous dialouge in a course, but also reduce the cognitive load on the students by having the comment system on the same page as the content, as is becoming commonplace around the web.

So, in order to do this, we needed to figure out a system that was a bit more robust and transparent than the default D2L star rating system.

In the past few years, a number of third party blog commenting systems have appeared. Haloscan was one of the first (now called Echo). I use one called Intense Debate on this blog, and I am aware of another popular system called Disqus. Most of these third party commenting systems operate as a blog plugin, but I decided to poke around and see if one of these three had the option to work on stand alone HTML pages.

As it turns out, Disqus has some universal Javascript code that allows you to add the Disqus comment box to any static HTML page. Perfect. So I signed up for a free Disqus account, grabbed the universal code and hopped into my play course in D2L.

I didn’t hold out a lot of hope as D2L doesn’t tend to play well with Javascript, but, lo and behold, when I opened up the content page, switched into HTML view, popped in the JS code and hit save, the Disqus comment box popped up on the page.

I added a comment and hit submit. A Disqus popup appeared asking me to enter in a name and email address (it also gave me the option to sign in with a Twitter, Disqus, Yahoo or Open ID account)

I added in my email and name, hit post comment and up popped the comment in all it’s AJAX-y goodness right underneath the comment box. Seamless. And the student stays right on the page they comment on the entire time.

So far so good.

I started replying to my comments using a new email address and name for each comment. I was pleasently surprised to see that, not only were comments nested, but if I included a link to a YouTube video, it would attach to the comment and, when I clicked on the attachment, the video would pop up right there, in context, within D2L. So, not only could students include video in their comments, they could view that video right there without leaving the learning environment.

Very slick.

In addition to leaving a comment, a student can simply like or dislike the content as Disqus includes a thumbs up/down option. And students can subscribe to the comments using either RSS or email, so they can be notified outside of D2L if someone comments on their comments, and there is a Community button that will show stats about the comments begin left not only on this content, but on comments being left across the courses.

All this information about the learning community right there on the same page and in a very unobtrusive way. I think Disqus has done a bang up job of making a usable interface that looks generic enough that, out of the box, it does not look like an out of place element within D2L.

All this is making me feel all social learning gooey good.

There are compromises, of course, with using a third party tool in this way. The obvious one is that students are prompted to enter in an email address and name when they post a comment. Not a huge deal, but some of them will be faced with a moment of “why, if I am logged into a system, am I being asked to enter in my name and email address?” moment. But that is a problem that some well worded instructions could fix. And I still need to check out the privacy of the comments. So far it looks like all the comments are stored away on the Disqus site in a password protected admin area, which is good.

I should stress that I have only been playing with this for a few hours, and have not subjected it to heavy lifting. I am still not sure how well it will work out when I roll it out over a number of pages within the course. There are some configuration variables that I will need to muck around with, but so far this looks like a promising way to add comments to any static content page in D2L.

December 16, 2010 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Social Networks

Delicious – the place I got it

Delicious is dead.

Er, sorry. Delicious is in the sunset column.

I don’t know if I could write a better eulogy to Delicious than Marshall has at ReadWriteWeb. He hit on so many points and ways in which the service was so valuable to so many people. Me included.

I started experimenting with Delicious in 2005 after hearing a hallway conversation between Scott Leslie and another of my BCcampus coworkers at the time. They were talking about these things called folksonomy and tagging. I was intrigued.

Delicious was the place where so much of the Web 2.0 world first made sense to me. With Delicious, I got it. I got the power of networks. I got social learning. I got tagging. I got the cloud. I got transparency. I got open. I got web as tool. I got what a “social” network was, even though I was still years away from joining Facebook or Twitter. Delicious armed me with enough conceptual knowledge of what a social network was that I was able to scaffold that knowledge and easily “get” the value of Facebook and Twitter when they arrived a few years later.

Today I kinda feel like when AOL announced they were killing Netscape; a kind of melancholy sadness at the passing of something that was once so great.

But what makes this different from Netscape is that Delicious is still great and remains one of the most valuable tools in my network. It did what it did extremely well. Sure there was the convenience of storing your bookmarks on the web and having them accessible from anywhere, but that wasn’t the real value of Delicious for me. The real value is its transparency in that I am able to see what my network is bookmarking. Delicious gives me a glimpse into what they found important on the web. What they bookmarked helped me focus my attention on what was important. It helped me learn. Delicious was a small piece of social learning in action. I was observing skilled practitioners in my field through their bookmarks, and was able to follow their links and find out why they felt this article or this link was important to them.

Oh sure, there is that Twitter thing where links are shared all the time. But Delicious is different. Beyond the realtime stream of what my network is bookmarking at the moment, I also had access to everything they had ever bookmarked in the past. Through the Delicious search engine, I was able to search through hundreds of thousands of links curated by the members of my network. The people who I connect with in Delicious are dealing with the same problems, questions and challenges that I do. When I needed to recommend a new tool for a job, I would go to my Delicious network first and search what my network had squirreled away there. Being able to have access to this collected archive of links vetted by people I trusted? Invaluable.

Rarely did a conversation happen “on Delicious”. It wasn’t that kind of social network. It was a lurkers paradise. Not that I didn’t contribute. I bookmarked and annotated, passively adding to the collective knowledge (so I hoped) of my network.

Yeah, I know Diigo is there. That is probably where I will end up. But I always found Diigo too heavy, too feature rich. In Delicious, there was simplicity. It was the journeyman of Web 2.0 tools. Dependable, gets the job done, no nonesense. But yet flexible enough that you could mash it and collaborate in numerous ways.

In some respects, Delicious is just a tool. I mean, I still have those connections, and I can and will recreate them in other venues and services. My network will survive. I’ll find ways to continue doing what I do. That’s what distributed networks do. Survive thermonuclear bombs to rebuild and thrive again. But it was this tool (and, more specifically, the architects of this tool) who taught me so much about how the web works that calling it “just a tool” seems cheap and demeaning. It deserves more respect from me than that. A shovel is a tool. Delicious was disruptive and changed my view of how things worked.

Sometimes it IS about the technology. And I can’t give it much higher praise than that.