Learning Solutions

Wiggio is a free learning solution that allows people, mainly students, to easily set up group areas for study, socializing, or community involvement.  A simple process sets up the site in a few minutes.  All you have to do is invite people to join, and you are ready to chat, share calendar and documents, conduct polls and even set up a phone conference.

From the website:

Wiggio was created in January 2008 by two Cornell graduates looking for a better way to manage the responsibilities of working in groups. The project secured funding in August of 2008 and was officially released to the public as of September 15, 2008. Our mission is to continuously develop an application that eliminates the frustration of working in groups by providing the powerful, straightforward functionality that you need to work effectively.

I have set up groups for my office area, family, and church group.

Wiggio uses Scribd for displaying documents, and Zoho Writer to edit.  Versioning can be enabled to keep track of any changes made to documents.

Many other tools are out there, so it will be interesting to see if Wiggio can stand the test of time.

From Campus Technology:

Bryant & Stratton College graduates will receive their degrees where they earned them–online. In what may be a first, the college will host a fully online, Second Life college graduation ceremony June 10, 2009. About 40 graduates from Bryant & Stratton’s online degree programs have committed to receive their hard-earned degrees in their avatar form on the college’s virtual campus.

Second Life is becoming ubiquitious in higher education, as more schools are understanding the potential.  Schools like Bryant and Stratton College are pushing the boundaries, trying to fully understand the promise of these types of learning solutions.

“How to Become an Executive in Information Technology in 400 Words or Less“.

Uses 63 commonly used IT buzzwords.

Ideally, change management begins at a 50000-foot level, so first and foremost you want make sure you are talking apples to apples with the right people in the right seat on the bus that is on the right street in the right city and state. When the time comes to bridge the gap, best practices dictate you put a stake in the ground and mind meld with the solution architect. Be tactical, taking baby steps, staying off the bunny trail, even if it is a moving target. In this initial phase of information gathering, understanding time to value will help you avoid vendor rage.

It’s like building a house, taking a cool concept and through many iterations, minimizing disconnect while managing cost of service. If you find yourself in the critical path, revisit the action items to get traction, even it you take a vanilla approach.

Don’t drop the ball when you encounter showstoppers, and feel like you are pushing a string, that is healthy friction. To get your ducks in a row, think out of the box, and try playing the customer, without reinventing the wheel. This is not just a stopgap measure, but rather an interface to peel the onion and get the low hanging fruit. Lessons learned say you will experience push back, like you are drinking from a fire hose. Next steps would be telling the story to connect the dots, using a phased approach that increases synergy, and well, warm fuzzies!!

When you are about to operationalize, it’s like building a car, so don’t be afraid to eat your own dog food, though it may feel like herding cats. This is when your passion for databases and capacity planning will allow you to leverage those resource buckets, and move past the proof of concept stage. This may sound like a chicken and the egg approach, and make you go from hero to zero. But, you should play devil’s advocate, and focus on a dashboard of KPI metrics, not onesy-twosy objectives, which would increase fuzziness. Avoid building buggy whips, and your triangle will take you from hide and seek to show and tell, thus creating GOODNESS!!

OR

Just outsource it!!

Seems Blackboard, Inc, is serious about dominating the Learning Management System market.  This email was from CEO Michael Chasen to Blackboard customers:

Dear Bb Customer,

I’m writing today to communicate the news that Blackboard has acquired ANGEL Learning and to share with you some of the thinking behind the combination.

Why put these two organizations together? This combination was about getting better. At Blackboard we’re always trying to improve, both by focusing internally within our company and by looking externally to
other organizations we admire, like ANGEL. We admire them not just for their story of entrepreneurial growth and impact on teaching and learning, but also for very specific strengths that we wanted to add to our story and deliver to our clients:

- The first is their customer support culture that has translated into consistently excellent experiences for ANGEL clients. We can learn from their skill in this area and add their know-how to the ever improving client support capability we’re building here at Blackboard.

- The second is their history of innovation - especially in the areas of user experience, teaching and learning tools and course-based
assessment. Independently our two offerings have led the way in a lot of areas. Now we have the opportunity to bring these strengths together for the benefit of learners in our Project NG vision for the future of the Blackboard platform.

Sincerely,

Michael Chasen
President & CEO
Blackboard

Interesting that this was sent to a Blackboard customer who is also heavily involved in the Sakai community. I wonder what functionality Angel LMS has that Blackboard needs, or is it just market domination?

I came across this article about a great learning solution for supervising teachers advising student teachers in the field.

From eSchool News:

Using a web camera connected to a laptop computer, and a Skype video conferencing account, the (University of Southern Mississippi) assistant professors can observe and evaluate 18 online elementary education students who are working in the field.

“We started the program because we saw a need,” said Assistant Professor Kelley Samblis. “There were a lot of teacher’s assistants [who] were not able to come to school, come to face-to-face classes. So we thought, let’s offer an online venue for them.”

This next part is probably the most revolutionary technique I have heard about in a while.  If you have seen the show “Howie Do It”, this takes it into the classroom:

The assistant professors can communicate with their students through a Bluetooth earpiece and give them instant feedback. “If there’s a problem, we can just whisper in their ear with the headpiece when we’re talking on the microphone,” said Assistant Professor Holly Hardin Hulbert. “But if not, we just let it alone and we talk to them as soon as it’s over.”

You literally have  an expert inside your head.

I applaud the University of Southern Mississippi for thinking outside the box.

Now that several schools are being closed, and even whole districts are shutting their doors, I am wondering if the schools have a contingency plan to continue and instruct the students while closed.  Are kids being given another spring break, or are they being sent home with worksheets to complete on their own?

This is the perfect storm to raise awareness about the use of learning management systems as out of school learning solutions.  A basic Moodle install would solve many problems that the closed schools are facing at this time, if the days are not to be made up.  Teachers could continue to communicate with students, and not lose any instructional time.

The most unfortunate result of this: it is happening after TAKS testing.  Everyone knows that teachers finally do authentic, constructivist teaching once the 8 months of TAKS readiness is over.