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Educause 2009 was streamed live to over a thousand participants at 44 colleges and universities in over 8 countries. The online presentations captured via MediaSite are available here.
http://educause.mediasite.com/mediasite/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=ef86ba82-810b-4e15-b223-097b2ea90230
Continue reading Educause 2009 National Conference (Recorded)
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A colleague recently emailed me with an interesting concept—the idea that it takes some 18 months for students to decide to take on a particular course of new learning…and the need for at least about a year before a new degree program or course catches on. The concept is something like having to live with an idea for a while before getting used to it sufficiently to accept it.
At this time when so many departments are working ...
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At the recent SIDLIT conference in Overland Park, KS, Tim Murphy presented on “Meeting the Challenges of International Online Teaching.” His task was to take part in online course redesigns for better acceptance by international audiences. He began with a Venn diagram of overlapping circles representing place, language and culture, for a global classroom.
At one point in the presentation, he asked rhetorically whether synchronous communications were ever advisable for international online classrooms. One ...
Continue reading Adjustments for International Online Teaching
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 July 2009
A recent article referred to how some companies design technological tools for amateurs vs. novices. In a sense, instructional design may also differentiate between learners based on amateurs vs. novices—as a construct.
Okay, so definitions, first. A “novice” is a person who eventually aims to be an expert. This person is at the beginning stages of learning about a particular area of expertise. This person will be initiated into a field from elementary understandings to ...
Continue reading Designing Technological Tools (and Instruction) for Amateurs vs. Novices
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One of the journals that I work with on occasion has a stated policy goal of going global linguistically. They already are on four continents and a half-dozen countries, in terms of their editorial pool. Their readers are from all over. Now, some six and a half years into publishing, they want to move their abstracts into a range of different languages.
The question then is how and what sort of human talent is there to do the translating and ...
Continue reading An E-Journal: Multiple Languages and Going Global
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A recent course build by a faculty member built the course foundation on resources found on the Web. Here, the instructor used links to downloadable files, simulations, and videos. She eschewed any textbooks. To create an overlay, she did add a syllabus and supplementary videos to explain the contents. She also invited professional colleagues to take part in videotaped interviews that illuminated the issues further.
It struck me that she was truly relying on the Web for her curriculum—by ...
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One of my recent projects has involved the use of peer education, or the use of students to serve as supporters and peer advisors for fellow students on issues of acclimating to campus and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. These programs involve some vetting and training of students to support these services. This endeavor is a way to save on funds, but it’s also about packaging important information in a way that may be more effectively delivered to people—through ...
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A recent project highlighted the phenomena of designing websites to deliver information for synchronous wide-scale interactions. This refers to the delivery of information (via text and multimedia) to a broad-spectrum audience in real-time, often in a crisis or emergency situation. One aspect of this is that the information is not only for situational awareness but for decision supports—making choices in real time and with real implications.
Some basic tenets of crisis communications involve the need for having ...
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For the faculty and staff who will be hitting the road this summer, many will be taking their various digital devices and laptop computers. In that spirit, our campus IT security folks offered a training to support us in keeping both equipment and data safe.
The actual physical protections of equipment are pretty straightforward, with many locking devices that may be used to secure laptops to more fixed surfaces. The presenter suggested bags that do not look like laptop ones ...
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Elluminate™ hosted “Informal Learning or Non-Formal Learning: What Makes More Sense In Your Organization” presented by Lance Dublin of Dublin Group (dublinconsulting.net)and a worldwide consultant on learning (on June 10). Between formal and informal learning, is there another way—with “non-formal learning” as a semi-structured, semi-purposeful / semi-random way of learning in Web 2.0 spaces. (This suggests that formal learning tends to be structured and purposive, and informal learning tends to be unstructured and random.)
Dublin seemed to ...
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Getting information out to people can be a messy business. It gets worse when the information is coming from individuals working in a variety of disciplines in a time-constricted crisis mode. It just so happened that when the H1N1 (Round 1) broke earlier this spring, that I was working on a multi-institutional public health project. I had met a range of experts and was learning of the hard work of capturing raw research and reaching out to the public in ...
Continue reading Rumors, Street Cred, Science, and Misinformation
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A recent project has involved the use of the Quality Matters Rubric to ensure the quality of the e-learning through the curricular design. A trained QM-certified faculty member is spear-heading the critique. That said, the others of us without that training are still finding this rubric very helpful for aligning the elements of the course and ensuring that the basic elements are in place.
This rubric was funded through a FIPSE grant (from the US Department ...
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The idea of digital “seeding” is to put in some basic ideas to a site in order to get participants started. One puts up “stubs” to a wiki, and the idea is that people will run with the maintenance of the site. At some point. one is supposed to let go, and others are supposed to take over and power the communications vehicle on their own. The problem is when to actually do the hand-off.
In theory, information is attractive ...
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Faculty members work with a number of audiences. They connect with their colleagues. They work with grant funders. They rub elbows with people from the business world, political environment, and military circles, and others. They work with students. They work with staff. And they also communicate with the general public.
Sometimes, their many constituencies are forgotten by those outside the professoriate or academia.
Faculty often do a great job of presenting concepts and contents to a class; they facilitate learning ...
Continue reading Sophisticates in Communicating by Digital Video
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The chatter about Google Analytics had been positive for a while. Talk was that Google could collect all sorts of information about visitors to a site in order to help site designers better tailor the contents to meet user needs. The data would be aggregate and anonymous, but all one needed was a gmail account and a little tech savvy and one could get a treasure trove of visitor information.
A tour of the Google Analytics site brings out the ...
Continue reading Google Analytics for Site Evolution Strategies
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The concept of cultural sensitivity in designing curricula is an important aspect of instructional design. Some domain-field assumptions are elusive and not well articulated. Or particular fields have a range of opinions that affect the dissonant voices in a field. Because of the need to understand what is going on in different domains, it helps immensely to attend different face-to-face conferences on campus.
These conferences not only result in helpful contacts, but they also enhance one’s sense of paradigms ...
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One of the PIs on a recent grant project made the point that she preferred to spend grant moneys locally to support other on-campus offices. Given that our office here was the recipient of her largesse, I’ve been thinking more deeply about the purchase of skills and talent to actualize different projects.
A few large grants in motion have brought up this issue of hiring talent. The challenges there seem to involve the discrete skill sets that are involved ...
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I see students in various stages of distress as they wrangle with their academic papers. They’re lying across their desks staring into the computer screens as they search for the words or ideas that they need to build the contents. They send emails about their concerns as their papers are in various stages of development, particularly when they’re stuck on a thesis or on the possible use of a particular source.
Recently, I had a déjà vu moment ...
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I was revisiting one of the projects that I served as instructional designer on and noticed in a very tiny font that the site now identifies the sponsoring university. This project had been brainstormed and evolved with the help of several dozen students, and the consensus then (and now) has been to soft-pedal the university tie. The rationale was to let the interactive site stand on its own merits and contents, and the greater access and support for our university ...
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The research literature on global virtual teams is intriguing. Most come from multinational companies that work with global laboratories or global work groups. They talk about multiple languages, time zones, different bridging endeavors, and management techniques. They talk about shared camaraderie mixed with never meeting face-to-face.
It all sounds somewhat exotic, something like an artifact of the business world…when I realize that some recent projects of late have been executed as global virtual teams (GVTs), namely, book endeavors. (I ...
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Dr. Allen G. Johnson presented as part of the Provost’s Lecture Series and participated in MLK Day events at K-State. He gave a presentation based on “Power, Privilege and Difference,” which is based on his most recent book. As a full-time author and speaker with a long history in academia, Johnson came highly recommended to the campus.
He suggested that the debates around the recent presidential campaigning avoiding hot-button issues of ...
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A small team has been researching and mulling the idea of launching an e-learning faculty wiki for “the good of the order” and as a university contribution to the Web-enabled information spaces. The idea would be to use the wiki to surface implicit knowledge and also to create a professional community mediated through technologies.
The team diligently scoped out the competition through direct research and queries posted to professional listservs. They found quality wikis like Edutech ...
Continue reading Early Proposal of a New E-Learning Faculty Wiki
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Dr. Michael Wesch has offered a view of disruptive informational technos and their impacts on learning...
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able
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A colleague of mine suggests that there’s a “new normal” for the economy. And current signs and projections seem to suggest that to a degree. Watching the aggregate behaviors and thinking of a population has been very informative about massive pendulum swings. No matter where this all goes, the new frugality in my field may be here to stay, an indelible part of doing business.
One part of a job is to create and demonstrate ...
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A new site that has been in the works for at least half a year will make its soft launch shortly, which means that it’ll go live without much fanfare. It’ll be built up and used over time, and optimally, it’ll start growing and evolving. It’s an interactive site. Now, we’re at the point in the project that it’s important to get some attention on the WWW for this resource.
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Back in the day, my students and I studied journalists and how they handled their notes in a way that would protect them. We got two distinct responses.
One school of thought was that it would be good to have all notes and audio and video to show who said what. The idea was that if they had questions in the writing of the article, they could refer to their records. They would have something stronger than pure memory to ...
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There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.
Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little ...
Continue reading A Phone Interview about Culturally Sensitive E-Learning
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Dr. Bernard Amadei, founding president of Engineers without Borders-USA (http://www.ewb-usa.org/) exhorted his audience (a full-hourse of students and professors at the Fiedler Hall Auditorium) to consider “service to humanity” as part of their professional work lives.
He joked that his openness to “random processes” led to his founding Engineers without Borders in Fall 2000. By chance, he picked a landscaping company for a project at his home that involved workers from Belize. These people told him about ...
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Dr. Michael Wesch always offers an engaging presentation, mixed with aptly used high tech, and there are always surprises—of the technological kind and absolutely of the human kind. In a recent standing-room only presentation at K-State, he spoke of the need to use technologies to help college students engage with learning. (“A Portal to New Media Literacy: Engaging New Technologies to Engage Students”)
He showed his digital ethnography dashboard http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography To show his uses ...
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A fast one-day immersion in the concerns of securing electronic votes occurred back in mid-September, with the visit of a leading figure in evaluating the security of electronic voting machines.
Dr. Douglas W. Jones of the U of Iowa Dept. of Computer Science presented “The Trials and Tribulations of Electronic Voting” in mid-Sept. at K-State. He gave a brief history of ballot voting in the US and showed how the various systems in the US have been hacked and abused ...
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During the MERLOT International Conference 2008 http://conference.merlot.org/2008/Program2008.html in the Minneapolis Hilton earlier this month, one of the organizers commented on the intimacy of a first language as an integral part of an engaging learning experience. He mentioned this in the context of looking for translators to help evaluate and analyze the value of learning objects on the MERLOT database. This idea carries over to non-English submittals to the organization’s journal as well.
Continue reading The Intimacy of a First Language for Learning
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
14 July 2008
The idea of reaching out to Millennials or the Gamer generation to enroll as students at a particular university is a common one. Universities work hard to attract and retain students, using a variety of outreaches, activities, supports and academic and non-academic endeavors. Various third-party companies promise delivery of a large percentage of those on the WWW or on networking sites to a university’s portals for a fee. Students may be surprised at the amount of effort used to ...
Continue reading Marketing a Department / Degree Program / University on Second Life
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IGI Global has a book coming out titled "Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning" this July 2008. This is edited by Drs. Ugur Demiray of Anadolu University and Ramesh C. Sharma of Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Main Book Site http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985
Table of Contents http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985&v=tableOfContents
This book takes more of an international and global perspective.
Continue reading Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning
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Dr. Alma Clayton-Pederson, Vice President of the American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) presented at the March 26 Provost Lecture Mar. 26, at K-State. I hadn’t realized that I’d actually already seen her speak in a 2006 AAC&U conference as one of the keynotes…until she was introduced. (Back in 2006, I was presenting at the AAC&U conference in Seattle and may have had the mind engaged in meeting up with former colleagues and ...
Continue reading Diversity and the Appreciation of the Other
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At several institutions of higher education that I've worked in, I've seen some tentative moves towards engaging the world for global eLearning. The steps seem to be wobbly and tentative, more hopeful than effective. These endeavors often involve third-party vendors who may represent different entities or populations in other countries. These efforts involve small groups that are budgeted to go overseas to try to attract learners. And often, these endeavors are not supported by overseas offices or anything ...
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One of the basic tenets of instructional design for online learning is to build for the learner. Without direct insights or access to the learner base, an ID ends up having to speculate based on the demographics of a particular audience. The build then becomes based on speculation, hearsay and guesswork. After all, how does one build for an audience that one has never met? The point of entry then seems to focus on the curriculum. The "what" of what ...
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If one walks through the neighborhood at pretty much any time of day, one can hear a wide range of dogs barking. There's the Gus Welcome, which comes along with a frantic run up and down a fence and some 80 pounds of German shepherd hurling itself against a new fence and bending part of it into the neighbor's yard. There are the yappies. There are mysterious growls coming through doors. It was on one such walk - dog-sitting ...
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So, a couple years ago when I lived in M. Corp.'s backyard (Seattle), I got to attend a presentation by one of their geopolitical strategists. His name was Tom Edwards, and he was their senior geopolitical strategist back in Apr. 9, 2004. While his ideas relate to a company's global strategies, his concepts have great utility for designing Web pages for academic purposes.
Publishing online to a non-password protected space makes the digital contents open to global perusal ...