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Friday, October 6, 2006 |
August 2006 MIT OpenCourseWare Newsletter. The latest OCW Newsletter lists 11 new courses at MIT, bringing the OCW total there up to more than 1400. There is also news about the OCW Portal that permits searching for courses across all the OCW member institutions. _____JH
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"The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware." [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
11:34:04 PM  Google It!.
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Yale to Make Selected Course Lectures Open. Inside Higher Education reports on Yale's project to make selected course lectures openly available to non-registered students and calls the project "The Next Step in Open Source." Of course, lecture materials have been made available from other universities such as MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, so Yale's decision is not the first step in this direction, but it is important as part of the opencourseware movement to have a major university supported by a major foundation (Hewlett) commit to making full lecture materials systematically available for some of its courses. Instructors and students outside Yale who access the materials will undoubtedly benefit from having more content than they could find in just syllabi, quizzes, and course notes. _____JH
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"In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started placing materials for its courses online--and making them available for anyone to use, at no cost. OpenCourseWare, which currently contains materials for 1,400 courses, has been a huge success, and thousands of people use the MIT materials each day.
The MIT project and others like it--such as Connexions, at Rice University--are based on the model of putting curricular materials online, but not the actual courses (although a few professors at MIT, Rice and elsewhere have put videos of their lectures online).
On Tuesday, Yale University announced that it would be starting a version of an open access online tool for those seeking to gain from its courses. But the basis of the Yale effort will be video of actual courses--every lecture of the course, to be combined with selected class materials. The money behind the Yale effort is coming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was an early backer of MIT[base ']s project, and which sees the Yale project as a way to take the open course idea to the next level." [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
11:31:48 PM Google It!.
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Telling Stories. I was so pleased today to hear so many colleagues talk about using eportfolios to find out more about their students. I worry that in too many initiatives eportfolios are seen simply as tools that bring efficiences to the teaching and assessment production line. ePortfolios offer so much more than that - they offer personal spaces for story telling: stories about the learner; their aspirations; successes; values; capabilities and concerns.
The eportfolios I am thinking of are those that are owned by the learner not the instituion; that are concerned with learning not assessment (though I be
[Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research blogs]
11:28:16 PM Google It!.
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Writely. Once again, via Brian Lamb a synchronous text-editing tool that I hadn't tried. I like Writely because:
1. The registration was simple, allowing me to get up and running in minutes, the only obstacle being that it didn't work with my Safari browser. However, it works well in Internet Explorer, which is what the majority of our instructors and many of our students seem to be using anyways.
2. The interface is intuitive and uncluttered, which means I didn't waste valuable time trying to figure out where to go and what to do.
3. It builds on what most users will have as prior knowledge, namely how to use Word documents, which means the learning curve is minimal.
Increasingly, course approaches (constructivist approaches) are adopting group work and collaboration on projects as assessed course activities, and students are largely stuck fumbling with sharing word documents in a discussion forum, through IM, or through email. Obviously, distance students don't have the luxury of being able to meet face to face to work on projects together, and even if they can, sometimes it's not always the most efficient way of getting something done.
The nice thing about synchronous text editing tools such as this one is that they don't have to be used synchronously (but obviously can be used that way if needed). Personally, I think that the asynchronicity of online courses is what gives them the potential to be so great, especially for adult learners who don't want to be stuck with the task of trying to fit synchronous course activities into their already busy schedules. However, some of our course instructors have noted an increased amount of requests for a chat tool option for student-student communication (but not student-instructor communication, which is interesting). But that's a whole other discussion...
I'm thinking about introducing Writely in a couple of ways:
1. In a case study course, as a space where students would work on developing a group response to a case.
2. In courses where peer-evaluation of writing is required, allowing a peer, or group of peers to comment and assist each other's work.
I would also recommend it to faculty who are collaborating on research articles. I've been using Peanut Butter Wiki for the co-authoring of an article, and while I highly recommend it as a password protected wiki, I feel restricted in the level of formatting that wikis can provide. I like the option to change font colours, easily add images, and spell check (which Writely does) without having to find out how a wiki will let me do that. [Connections]
11:27:10 PM Google It!.
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Voice Feedback. Now that the end of semester has brought piles of final assignments to our desks, I thought it would be helpful to post something about using voice tools to provide feedback and comments on student assignments. I actually meant to do this way back in September following the Instructor orientation that we had, but I suppose it's better late than never. There's also been other posts in the blog world on this topic that you might like to check out, such as this one via Brian.
As an instructor, I enjoy reading student assignments, but find it challenging time-wise to provide a sufficient amount of feedback to a large group of students. Rubrics certainly help the process, but composing a page or two of constructive, critical yet encouraging feedback can take me hours. As a student who has received more than one paper back with only a few words as comments, I'm aware of the importance that feedback is to students, but I'm also aware how an extremely busy faculty member would have a difficult time providing this.
The solution? An ipod (or other mp3 recording device) with a mike (I use an italk). This is how it works if you're teaching in a WebCT system. I have a Mac, but I think the same instructions would apply.
1. use an ipod (with italk) or some other digital recording tool. Record your feedback, into your ipod.
2. Plug the ipod into your computer. Itunes should open up.
3. Find the file that has been uploaded to itunes. It is usually assigned a date as a titleâo[oe]you might find it helpful to change this date to something like âo[ogonek]Sonja Assign. 1 feedbackâo�
4. In WebCT, attach the audio file as you would attach a word document and send.
My colleague and I tested this with a group of students last February, and if you're interested you can check out our Elearn presentation here.
Basically, we found the advantages of this approach are:
1. voice allows you to communicate a tone of voice that can be a little more personal and less threatening than text. It also gets closer to the idea of feedback as a dialogue between the author and the reader/s, which is certainly in line with a constructivist approach.
2. distance students feel an enhanced teacher presence with voice as a medium of communication
3. you can pause and play with the ipod without recording any clicks, so the message is seamless (which using your computer and Audicity, for example, doesn't do).
4. it's easier to provide students with more feedback, and lets you provide feedback on some things that would be difficult to reference and compose through text.
You can also do this with the Wimba voice email tool that work inside of WebCT, but if your institution hasn't purchased the tool, you're a bit stuck. (Here at UBC it is available to us). And if your institution isn't using WebCT, you can just record and send by email, although the size of the file might become an issue, even though the ipod is recording very small wav files.
In testing this, we also found that converting the small wav files to mp3 resulted in a loss of quality that wasn't desirable, so going that extra step isn't necessary.
[Connections]
11:25:40 PM .
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New workshop wikis. The nice thing about participating in workshops is that it forces you to update your resources and general knowledge about what is out there. Jan, kele, and I prepared a 2 hour version of our original 6 hour workshop on Digital Tools for Feedback and Assessment at the ETUG gathering last week, and in the process did some well-needed updating to the wikis that link the resources we talk about in the presentation. We moved them off the old careo server, so all the URLs have changed, and we added a few extra pages as well.
Unlike the workshop we do for the UBC audience, this one pushed us to locate tools that were available to everybody, and not just the UBC community. Most of the tools we talked facilitate peer feedback and group work, but some participants were looking for tools that provide computer generated feedback. Therefore I've included 2 new wiki pages for Concept Tutor and Quiz Image, two of my favorites from the Engage group at the University of Wisconsin.
The starting page is this one: Digital Tools
Voice tools
Track Changes
Concept Tutor
Quiz Image
As always, this was a great opportunity to learn from the participants and hopefully we'll see some of their contributions to the wiki at some point, since it would be nice to know a bit more about how others are dabbling with tools and feedback in their own institutions. [Connections]
11:23:47 PM Google It!.
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eduTools ePortfolio product comparison goes public. WCET released the results of their first round of ePortfolio product comparisons today: http://eportfolio.edutools.info/. Early on, I worked with edoTools staff on the features glossary, which has been simplified and refined since then. The particular products reviewed were chosen by the seven campuses participating in the project. Currently, there are reviews of ANGEL ePortfolio, Blackboard ePortfolio, Avenet eFolio, the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium's ePortfolio.org, version 2.0 of the Open Source Portfolio, LiveText, and Taskstream. While I would have picked a somewhat different list, it's not a bad selection that reflects products currently popular in higher education in the United States.
[Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research blogs]
10:53:04 PM Google It!.
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ID card anthropology.
When Belgian children turn 12, they'll receive a smartcard and a
reader from the government. Americans would regard this program as an
Orwellian intrusion. For Belgians, it's a way to help protect kids
without necessarily compromising their privacy. One of the first uses
of the youth eIDs will be to prove age to age-restricted websites.
How that's done is a matter of choice, but there's no technical
requirement to fully disclose identity and a strong cultural
preference not to. Kids will only need only prove (by authenticating
to the card) that they are citizens, and prove (by selectively
disclosing their birthdate) that they meet the age requirement. [Full
story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio]
10:19:57 PM Google It!.
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Google Acquires Picasa, Improves Blogging Tools. clandestine writes "It appears that our lovable search engine has again expanded its horizons - the internet wasn't enough; now you can search and organize your own pictures. I don't know about you, but I use Google for nearly everything; heck, I found links about their acquisition of Picasa through Google News! Any slashdotters going to benefit from this tech, or already do? And yes, the addition of Picasa to their arsenal is a couple of days old, but they just started linking them on the homepage today." [Slashdot: Articles]
10:18:46 PM Google It!.
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stu.dicio.us - what a student-developed, student-focused learning/study tool looks like. http://stu.dicio.us/
Thought I've been away I did try to catch up in Bloglines the last 2 days and I didn't see this making the rounds so hopefully of interest - stu.dicio.us, while still in beta, is an incredibly simple student-focused tool that currently supports note taking and scheduling, with file storage and self grade-tracking coming soon. There are three things about it that are really beautiful:
- it is REALLY simple, and yet quite useful. Try the note creation facility; it's a very nice web-based outliner that uses keyboard commands (more below)
- all class notes are shared (you have to agree to this to use the system). So not only does this create an ecology of class notes for individual classes (with basic 'tagging' principles in play as to how to identify a class, no heavyweight SIS-integration here) but by searching on certain terms you may find class notes from other classes, even from other institutions, around specific keywords (which does raise quality issues, but one assumes the developers could bring practices from other social softwares to bear here).
- based on the amazingly simple interface, I assume (though I couldn't find such an announcement on their site) that a prime target for the app will be cell phones/PDAs and other mobile devices.
So... a web-based, mobile-accessible site for students to store THEIR notes/information about THEIR studies, which simultaneously gives them access to other students' notes as well. So cool. - SWL [EdTechPost]
10:12:41 PM Google It!.
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The Gong Project - Free Voice boards, voice chat and language tool. http://gong.ust.hk/index.html
During my holidays I received an email from Dr David Rossiter and Gibson Lam from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology inviting me to try out some software they had developed called Gong. I am often hesitant about blogging such invitations and didn't even manage to get around to trying it until today because of the backlog of email etc., from my holiday. But after trying it out I am glad I did.
Free voice recording might not seem like much in the age of Odeo and the like, but this is, to my eye, much more. The Java-based client-server program has been built very much with an eye to teaching languages but looks like it could be useful for anyone wanting to include voice in their online clases. It supports the creation of voice-based message boards and forums, and the client allows users to index their recordings to text, meaning subsequent viewers can see the text 'read' while they hear the message, and jump to specific parts of the message by clicking on that word (for instance on a particularly confusing spelling, as often happens with English). Recorders of messages can also edit the message directly in the client after the fact, easily removing awkward pauses and silences. Additionally, listeners can slow down aqnd speed up the playback of messages on demand.
And if all that isn't enough, it can support synchronous audio chat sessions as well. Did I mention that there is also an existing Moodle module that allows creation of Gong 'boards' directly in Moodle. And that it has an API. Oh, and it's free too (but not 'yet' open source.) Well worth a look for language teachers or for anyone wanting to incorporate voice recording into their online classes for free. - SWL [EdTechPost]
10:11:34 PM Google It!.
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Moodle OCW Module. http://metasolutions.us/resources/moodle/mods/
ocw_metamod.php
So I usually don't "blog on demand" but when Michael Penney emails me stuff it's almost always worth a post, and this time is no exception (and totally by chance it turns out I have the pleasure of sharing the stage with the developers in November). As it says on the site, "OCW MetaMod for Moodle provides instructors and designers with the ability to mark individual resources or activities in a Moodle course as 'shared' (allowing guest viewing) or 'private' (only visible for registered students). Additionally, the MetaMod tags resources and activities as 'C' (copyright) or 'CC' (Creative Commons/Copyright Cleared)." This is a great step forward in enabling easy sharing of resources, allowing instructors to do it right from where the resource has been used.
As Michael wrote "Despite Mr. Small, the beat goes on...:-)" speaking of whom, the next chapter is slowly unfolding. - SWL [EdTechPost]
10:09:33 PM Google It!.
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Report on "Organization for Open Source Software". http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/oss
This extensive paper funded by the Mellon and Hewlitt foundations (amongst others) is an important read. It looks at the adoption of open source in higher education (in the US) and the need for an organizing body that could address "uncertainty about future support for and improvements in the software" and supply coordination to prevent "wasteful duplication both of development efforts and of governance structures." Sounds sensible enough, right?
The case made here for adoption of open source in higher ed seems strong and unassailable, and the scope is not just 'educational' software like LMS but all aspects of higher ed infrastructure, things like SIS, Library OPACs and Financial Aid systems.
Here's where my wordy wrestling with the issues would usually go. Too busy. Suffice to say - the issue of 'freedom' is as tantamount here as it's been recently noted elsewhwere, and while my first reaction is to bristle against some of the seemingly artificial constructs these organizations would engender, those might be small concessions compared to the freedoms from commercial licensing fees, patents and the like that I think honestly motivate initiatives like this. - SWL
Note: The original reference was from Lorcan Dempsey's always insightful blog. Read his original post for a much better synopsis and questions about the report. [EdTechPost]
10:08:25 PM Google It!.
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This is the beginning of a renewed blogging effort focused on educational technologies and cognitive psychology. One particular focus is to bring together teaching materials related to ACT-R theory of the mind which seems to me to be the most promising comprehensive theories in psychology. The theory is expressed in terms of a computer model of the architecture of the mind and while this theory is generating impressive research literature most of this is not easily accessible to undergraduates in psychology.
The plan is for this focus on teaching-learning materials for ACT-R to be a collaborative effort that will speed the dissemination of this important theory to the next generation of researchers. An important step in this process has already been made by Terry Stewart at Carlton University in creating PythonACT-R which brings computer simulation modeling within the reach of undergraduate psychology students.
3:41:07 PM .
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© Copyright 2006 Bruce Landon.
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