Learning Solutions

Campus Technology reports on a free learning solution for university lecture classrooms:

LectureTools is an open source software tool that builds on the idea of classroom response devices but goes far beyond them, allowing students to use their laptop computers, rather than clickers, to answer a wide range and type of poll questions. The software also allows students to ask questions and share responses with the class, take interactive quizzes, and mark up PowerPoint slides.

I was watching “Jim Rome is Burning” the other day, and he was talking about the NFL player who was fined for using Twitter during practice, complaining about the cafeteria food. While feeling little empathy for the multi-millionaire athlete, since I was eating a ham sandwich at the time, I could not figure out why people still use Twitter as it first was intended. Who really wants to get updates about a particular person’s minute-by-minute account of their lives? The “Truman Show” goes digital.

Anyway, Rome mentioned that Twitter may have “Jumped the Shark”, a TV term signifying something has lost its luster, and is hanging on by any means possible. The term was coined based on a “Happy Days” episode in which the whole gang goes to the beach, and Fonzie jumps a shark on water skis. People saw this as the beginning of the end for the series, though it went on for a few more years. As an aside, Rome has a twitter account…

I don’t think Twitter is going away, just the way it is being used now. I have been using Twitter to post from my school headlines blog, on average is two per day. That should be the minimum expectation, with five tweets being the maximum. Instructors can use Twitter as a learning solution to send out class updates, interesting articles to read, etc. Twitter is entering that “trough of disillusionment” on the Gartner hype cycle, and will need an additional push to get the momentum. Count me in to provide that push.

A challenge from SMU professor Jose Bowen: “Teach Naked”, meaning to utilize the face-to-face time with students for more discussion and debate, instead of rote lecturing from bullet-laden digital presentations. He encourages the use of podcasts for the lecture material, and e-mail to point students to content covered in the curriculum.

Bowen warns residential colleges that they are under siege from cheaper online learning options to provide more engaging, personal interaction with students, in order to justify the cost of a college education.

Technology has a place for teachers, and is not a replacement for teachers.

I propose a “Teach Naked” week for all teachers to turn off their computers while students are in their rooms.

We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected. Social networking tools have taken the place of US Postal mail and telephones as communication devices. The problem is not what tool to use, it is how to get your information to the people who need it. Should you create and send your message through e-mail, post to Facebook, Twitter, then post to your blog? If you have 28 hours in the day, maybe. The solution is to use your blogging tool as a single point of entry, and leverage the RSS capabilities to give your readers flexibility in how they wish to view your content. RSS is the feature that provides a standard way many social networking tools use to display your information. Take a look at this from Common Craft for an RSS primer:

So, where does it go? Take a look at this presentation to get a feel about how one message on campus can be delivered to multiple outlets immediately:

This post is the first one since I installed the Twitter Tools. This should enable me to post this article, and then it will be placed on my Twitter account. We will see.

Aviary is a great, free suite of graphic tools for your classroom. The beauty of these tools is that they are all accessed through a web browser, with nothing to install on your desktops. The image editor, Phoenix, is comparable to Photoshop with a rich editing toolset and layering, with the ability to import to photo-sharing sites.

Why just read about it? The Aviary site has videos detailing each tool.

Phoenix Image Editor Preview:

The real reason to use this is the developer’s philoshphy.  As stated in their FAQ:

Through our interactions with the artists on Worth1000.com, we realized that while many people wanted to use digital editing software, it was very inaccessible:

• The costs were prohibitive (and many people didn’t want to risk installing a virus by pirating).
• The interface was too bloated with rarely-used features to make learning it easy.
• You actually needed to install the programs on a machine with specifications that complied with the program and suffer through any unwanted DRM malware that might also come with the software.

We have our roots in the grassroots hobbyists community. We are artists ourselves and know that there are so many other potential creators out there like us… all they need are accessible tools.

Testing the Qik service to have a live stream from the JB iPhone:

Google has revealed a new way of combining common communication tools, Google Wave.

The team behind google maps,  Jens and Lars Rasmussen,  focused on the following questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

E-mail has not changed much since it was invented and accepted into the mainstream culture.

From the google blog:

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The real question is how this learning solution may be incorporated into schools.  eSchool News reports about the educational impact:

For instance, an online teacher could add his or her students to a class Wave, update class information and assignments, hold discussions with students, and view the Wave’s history to see which students contribute to class discussions the most and which students might need extra help.

Instead of receiving 25 separate eMail messages from students, a teacher could use a class Wave to answer common questions or to hold weekly question-and-answer sessions.

A blogging feature will publish all content from a Wave onto a blog; the blog embeds the Wave, so users can still respond to the Wave. But students who might not use Google or who might be unable to participate in a Wave can still see and participate in class discussions through the blog

Google Wave is still in development, without a specific timeline for release, so you may want to go to the Wave site and sign up for alerts.

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!!