Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Faculty Development and Learning Object Technology by Patricia Ploetz I saw this paper referenced in DistanceEducator.com's March 3, 2004 Daily News release. The author's experiences match my own; the subtitle of her paper is "Bridging the Gap." There is a very wide gap between instructional technologists' understanding and acceptance of learning objects and the understanding and acceptance that regular faculty have about these endeavors. The gap is even wider in smaller institutions that have little in the way of instructional support services. One reason that I've kept the EduResources Portal and the EduResources Weblog expanded to sites and contents beyond learning objects is that most faculty are much more receptive to courses and lesson as shareable units than to learning objects as units. JH _______ "The following paper begins with a story, the story of a lived experience that illustrates the mismatch between faculty and technology experts' understandings of learning object technology. It then takes a look at faculty perspectives, to show that moving from the traditional approach in content creation to developing learning objects requires a paradigm shift for faculty content developers. Recognizing the changes that faculty face, and understanding their insights regarding new learning technologies, gives faculty support staff an opportunity to "put on" the faculty perspective. This "putting on" activity provides technical support staff with the mental models necessary to support faculty in "bridging the gap" between traditional content development activities and the creation and development of learning object technologies." "In my experience, when faculty speak about developing educational content, they traditionally use the following terms to describe the teaching/learning environment: courses, units, lessons, lectures, readings, projects, and/or activities. Terms such as learning objects, metadata, reusability, interoperability, accessibility, granularity, durability, and economy, while meaningful in a technological arena, often have little if any meaning for faculty. When I have asked, "What do these terms mean to you?" faculty responses have included: "They make me feel like I'm in Dilbert land" or "Are we talking about education? These don't sound like education terms, or at least not ones that I'm familiar with" and "They sound like buzz words that will soon give way to new buzz words." While I admit to talking with a limited number of faculty, I sense that these responses are more representative than not, of many faculty in higher education." 12:17:40 PM    COMMENT []

Mooter--a Mapping Search Engine Mooter is a graphing search engine that yields a cluster display of inter-related web sites. Mooter resembles Kartoo (http://www.kartoo.com) --both yield a mapping of the semantic search space. Mooter is still in beta, but does look promising. I did a quick comparison of the two search engines by searching for "EduResources." Kartoo was more elaborate and detailed and offered more options for customizing. Of course, graphical search engines relate to the overall topic of conceptual mapping since they yield a mapped display of web resources. ____ JH 11:37:16 AM    COMMENT []

Demonstration/Workshop about Academic Weblogging Last week I did a presentation about Academic Weblogging for faculty and staff at Eastern Oregon University. The link accompanying this posting provides the ppt slides from the demonstration/workshop. The demonstration showed the abc's of blogging and the first steps for using news readers. I pointed the participants to easy-to-use resources (such as Blogger and Bloglines) that they could try for themselves to explore the usefulness of weblogging and news aggregation for scholarly work. The workshop then took participants who wanted a more elaborate tool into the use of Movable Type which we have installed on a server here at EOU. My approach is to do two demonstrations/workshops when working with instructors: one to cover applications of blogging tools to academic scholarship, the other to show how weblogging can be applied as an instructional tool. It's important to recognize that blogging seems pervasive to those of us who have been using these tools for several years, but that it is still new and unfamiliar to most instructors. ______ JH 9:24:18 AM    COMMENT []