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"Digital Imagery and Informational Graphics in E-Learning: Maximizing Visual Technologies" will be released in November 2009.
http://www.igi-global.com/marketingdept/newsletter/novnewsletter/hai-jew.html
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A couple weeks ago, I was part of a free webinar that was supposed to be a clinic. People were given simple tasks…sent off to do their work…and were to rejoin the group some 20 minutes later to share their work. The work that emerged was very divergent, and it became clear that these faculty and instructional designers all had different mental models going in. The presenter very graciously made positive comments on their works and quickly moved ...
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Recently, I caught the tail end of a webinar that left a strong, positive impression. The presenter Dr. Patricia Ritschel-Trifilo (of Hardin-Simmons University) was demonstrating how she versioned a course lesson for the various types of learning styles based on a conceptualization by Albert Canfield summarized here http://people.usd.edu/~ssanto/canfield.html .
She applied the Canfield’s Learning Styles Inventory
http://arispa.com/styles/canfield1.html
or
www.tecweb.org/styles/canfield1.html
to her students and compared ...
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Participatory Sensing
For a kind of “situational awareness,” various fields (law enforcement, environmental science, landscape architecture, biological sciences, architecture, agriculture, and others) are now tapping into “participatory sensing.” This is a kind of information capture based on the widespread distribution of mobile devices that capture imagery and sounds in a location-sensitive way. Many mobile technologies enable live and easy emailing of the information and uploading of the contents to the WWW. Dedicated remote sensors also enable rich information captures.
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For a long time, my mental conceptualization of digital documents was that of finalized ones. I thought of finalized videos…finalized slideshows…finalized imagery…finalized articles.
However, after some consideration, I realize that many of my digital documents are transitory and temporal ones. They are raw images, audio, or video clips that get processed into a finalized work. Or they are annotated research documents that feed the research. Or they are sticky notes for feedback on a finalized project. By ...
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“The Network is your computer,” goes one of the slogans.
The techno buzz around the office and online has been about “cloud computing.” So when the email appeared in my box about Sun Microsystems offering a webinar called “Introduction to Cloud Computing…for Enterprise Users,” I signed up—only to see that opportunity get overshadowed by other commitments. Then, they sent a follow-up email offering the archived webinar online. Perfect.
Dr. Lew Tucker ...
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The draft article came in a neat little package. Here was a college that had found some open-source freeware that could help its institution deal with student service issues as well as resource management. They are arguing that their going the open-source route was saving them a lot of money and time and resources. However, the argument did not include baseline definitions of the pre- and post- intervention situations. There were no real metrics to speak of, only assertions without ...
Continue reading Making the "Business Case" for a Particular Technology
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There are a number of strategies to organize course contents in the field of instructional design. One de facto one is to rely on the tables of contents of the selected textbook(s) for a course.
For many faculty, this is almost assumed. They are relying on the subject matter experts of a field who also have the ability to write and express themselves. Or they’re using collections that include many contributions from different authors organized ...
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MERLOT's JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching) just published a position paper titled "Exploring the Immersive Parasocial: Is it You or the Thought of You?" related to 3D immersive learning.
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no3/hai-jew_0909.htm
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
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The implications of the future internet are that it will have a kind of machine knowledge of the individual user, so searches for information may be customized, and services (and advertising) may be tailored to the particular users. In a ubiquitous setting (with wifi and mobile devices and ambient intelligence), people could have their needs (digital and beyond) met in a variety of ways.
If that sounds claustrophobic to some (as it does to M. Andrejevic in his insightful book ...
Continue reading The Future Internet and its Implications for E-Learning
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Check out the trailer for an educational webisode series ("Suzy's Strategies") on doing well in college.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UobRqWGZNK8
for a college student well-being site located at
www.universitylifecafe.org
This webisode series will launch this Fall 2009.
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A recent wrap-up to a project ended with my comment to my direct lead that we were very fortunate that everything went well with this half-year collaborative course build. I quipped, “You have no idea how many things could have gone wrong.”
That same lesson came back to haunt me on a different project, which involved a fair amount of videography. Let me preface this with the reality that I’ve had very good videography support on all my projects ...
Continue reading All the Stuff that can Scotch a Video Project
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 July 2009
The simulation creator and author Clark Aldrich held a webinar recently titled “The Unifying View of Highly Interactive Virtual Environment (HIVE) Learning.” While I’d long looked forward to this presentation, I ended up with one of those mash-up days that allowed me to log on for the last 10 minutes of the presentation, and so I ended up experiencing this presentation as a re-run. Still, I found much that was thoughtful about his ideas.
(Truth to tell, I have ...
Continue reading Employing Highly Interactive Virtual Environments for "Learning to Do"
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When faculty clients or groups contract with web designers for a product, they often use a memorandum of agreement (or understanding) to define the work that will be done. The MOA or MOU should often specify a site tune-up within a particular time frame after a site launches.
The rationale is that no matter how prescient a development team is, it takes testing a site in the real world with real users to know how well the design ideas play ...
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Every so often, the proverbial curtain is pulled back, and one gets a sense of the inner workings of a company. This happened recently with an anomaly with a grading system in a learning / course management system. The downloaded grades did not fully download, and a number of columns of student work did not show any points.
I replicated this on my multiple computers and then called the 24/7 helpdesk. The person there asked me to delete my current ...
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There are plenty of educators who can speak coherently and amusingly off-the-cuff. They jot a few notes down about the main points they want to it, and you turn on the camera or the digital audio recorder, and they’re off. One or two takes, and you’re done.
This approach seems quite popular—with greater speeds of creation, more of a sense of speaker personality, more impulsivity, and more casual informality. There are also more chances for instructor gaffes ...
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This seems like an interesting resource for some specific purposes.
http://www.voki.com/
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Making the world's knowledge computable...and visualizable...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
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http://angeliclearning.blogspot.com/2009/05/flight-from-blackboard-to-angel-and.html (or http://tinyurl.com/BB-Angel
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Instructional designers work with a range of folks to have a secure technological working environment. Part of safety means being aware of where information goes and the devices it resides on…especially when data goes portable on small devices like thumb drives.
We recently had a computer security conference, and one of the sessions addressed how to avoid malware infections. The lead presenter highlighted campus statistics of those who had their information compromised or who responded to phishing schemes and ...
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http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html
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The work of an instructor is to make information understandable and easy-to-acquire. This means identifying critical main principles (How much learning is needed before certain concepts are attainable?). This means identifying threshold concepts—those ideas that if grasped will open up whole new vistas in a particular topic. This means identifying the critical decision points in a process that are crucial to the new learner. This is about identifying the learning moment when the “Aha!” occurs.
In mainstream films, these ...
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by IDOS Newswire
06 April 2009
Call for Chapter Proposals
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 2009
Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends
A book edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=626
Introduction and Objectives: Immersive learning has come to the fore with the popularization of Second Life and the development of open-source immersive 3D learning spaces. Those in e-learning have been working to find ways ...
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces (A Call for Chapter Proposals)
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Hello, all: I am soliciting responses to a brief survey on the experiences instructors and facilitators have had regarding security in 3D immersive, interactive and persistent spaces (like Second Life) in higher education. This information will be used for a forthcoming article or chapter.
Survey Title: Security in 3D Immersive and Interactive Spaces in Higher Education
This survey will be offered Mar 9, 2009 through Mar 31, 2009.
To participate in the survey, please go to the following link:
https ...
Continue reading Survey on Security in 3D Immersive Spaces in Higher Education
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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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Here's an interesting column about Facebook, which has been integrated with some e-learning endeavors.
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/02/didnt-you-know.html
And the latest
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-fi-facebook19-2009feb19,0,4088613.story
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Design of socio-technical systems is an interesting thing. For all the anticipation and thought that has gone into each one, there are still sometimes surprises when a system goes live. This phenomena has been addressed in many different ways. The “lab” of theoretical use can only anticipate so much. Here, developers work with others to make systems as self-explanatory as possible. They build for the widest common use. They use features that are both explicit and implicit. They build in ...
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Discussions have been rampant that e-learning may happen more and more outside the structures of a learning / course management system. The concept is that a cobbling of tools may offer learners a loosely coupled online learning experience at a lower cost than the proprietary or open-source L/CMSes may offer. The idea is that people may tap various user sources that are Web 2.0 and improve functionalities from there by adding contents and using the technologies in ways that ...
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Adapting to a new learning management system involves a fair amount of learning. Going live with it also means dealing with some surprises—in this case, the disappearance of student work. Usually, the default settings I have in Message Boards is to disallow student deletion of their own posts.
There are a number of reasons for that. Foremost is the need to have data integrity, so if students posted a particular message or assignment, and I responded to that work ...
Continue reading Plugging the "Student Editing" Gaps in a New LMS
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Check this out.
Dasher Project, Cambridge University http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/uai2005/
Google Tech Talks http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078334075080674416
Continue reading Writing as Navigating in "The Library of All Possible Books"
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 January 2009
Why do computer games need to evolve to keep people’s interests? How may AI enhance game playability?
For Darryl Charles, Colin Fyfe, Daniel Livingstone, and Stephen McGlinchey, who have teamed up for a new text that highlights biologically inspired AI for computer games, the answer is to create worthy game opponents. Games that adapt and learn are more challenging and therefore offer more learning and play value.
In Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games, these authors offer case ...
Continue reading Biologically Inspired AI for Computer Games (brief resource review)
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Handing over a project is a necessity, or else one could be a stringer for a project into eternity, which would mean lost project opportunities into the future. The handover moment is a fragile one because it involves conveying the rich understandings of a project over the many months of the design and build work. It’s also about letting go in a way so that the work is successful into the future.
One critical piece is to ...
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One ongoing project has involved the launching of a brand new site with plenty of interactivity, some curious AI security functionalities, and plenty of user-generated contents, along with professionally created contents. The ambition of the site meant that the coding would likely take longer than initially planned. And the many voices at the table would also mean more delays.
To push the site’s development, while the site was still in development, a version was pushed out into ...
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A month or so ago, I went ahead and zipped up course materials on Blackboard and downloaded that onto my desktop. Then I uploaded the zipped contents into a course shell in ANGEL Learning. And that was as far as I got in terms of transferring curricular contents en masse. I will admit to a great deal of skepticism that this particular organization should just ask faculty to move their own work even though I have instance manager privileges on ...
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It came as a bit of a shock to faculty at my university that there would be a foray into Second Life for educational purposes, social networking, and university service provision. There had been apparently long debates over concerns of what could happen in immersive 3D spaces in terms of griefers or other buses. And after some deep analysis, the advisory committee apparently was putting forward some solid recommendations along with hopes to maximize the use of this social virtual ...
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IDT Roundtable Nov. 12: Podcasting and Vodcasting
The next roundtable is 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. (CDT) Wednesday, Nov. 12, Union 212. Brent Anders, Bryan Vandiviere, and Ben Ward will present “Podcasting and Vodcasting”. Join us as we see what’s hot and what’s not, the effectiveness of these tools in teaching, how to get started, how to look like a pro, and where to show off your efforts when finished.
http://ome.ksu.edu/webcast/live ...
Continue reading Live Streaming Presentation on Podcasting and Vodcasting
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In some fields, the lineage of digital information affects its validity, and therefore its usability in a learning context. This is true for the empirical sciences, for geographic information systems, for legal chain-of-custody, and other fields. And yet, much of this lineage information is never captured, or even if known, is not captured in metadata. Many educators create their own contents, and they just keep the information about the information lineage in their heads…and assume that it’ll always ...
Continue reading The Lineage of Digital Information for Data Quality
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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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K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group will meet Nov. 20, 2008, from noon to 1 p.m. at the Union Stateroom 1...
Current or potential SL users are welcome to attend.
Contact Larry Jackson at ljackson@ksu.edu for more information.
Continue reading K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group Meeting
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 October 2008
I must be some sort of optimist. The “master” courses that I work on building are set up as perennial files, started one day and projected to go out to the year 2030 or beyond.
There’s no possibility that these courses will be offered in the same form as today some 20+ years from now, but that date is shorthand for “sometime into the future” until this course is sunsetted.
While we instructional designers may not ...
Continue reading For the Next Little While: Digital Preservation and Long-term Storage
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Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” shows how the affordances of Web 2.0 changes human potential. As a socio-technical system, Web 2.0 benefits through the power of networks—which grows in complexity “faster than its size.”
Connective technologies enable people to cover much more ground. Photo-sharing sites enable photographers to be virtually anywhere at any time…and to capture digital information that may not have apparent value enough for a company or ...
Continue reading "Here Comes Everybody" (Brief Resource Review)
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Human-computer interactions research offers quite a few occasions for laughter. On the one side, you have the machine, with the various affordances and limitations. On the other side, you have the persons, with their affordances and limitations and idiosynracies. The building of socio-technical systems then happens somewhere inbetween and with a complex mix of understandings and inputs / outputs.
It was in this spirit that I ran into a discrete strategy to relax speakers dealing with a speaker-dependent system…in a ...
Continue reading Coded Para-Verbals to Support Live Learner Engagement
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A current federally-funded project involves the building of a site that hopes to improve student mental health, and in so doing, prevent suicides.
The stats say that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Young adults 18 – 24 have the highest incidence of reported suicide ideation. A recent study apparently found that half of students had suicidal thoughts at some point in their history. Mood, interpersonal and academic concerns apparently have driven some students to be ...
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“Encapsulation” makes a lot of sense not only as a design strategy for software design but also for some instructional design. This basic concept is that of hiding elements that may be distracting or irrelevant or extraneous for learners. Apparently, the term comes from object-oriented programming in software design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
I’ve seen this theory in action in the designing of graphical user interfaces on a learning / course management system (L/CMS) and also in ...
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So I came to this split in the road, and neither turn would lead me directly to the doorway of my destination building. I was loaded with a digital camera, a tripod, a notepad, a bag of required knick-knacks for life, and a water bottle. I could trek across the nicely manicured lawn, or I could turn one way or the other. Then, I saw one of the professors in the department I was heading to, so I turned towards ...
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It’s in virtually all the business textbooks about entrepreneurship. When a new killer app comes on the horizon, a lot of competitors get into development. They all have a sense of what the public needs. They may have no sponsors per se, or they may have a local sponsor, but they get on the bandwagon and innovate with the rest of them.
The choices they make then in terms of how they’re going to execute their infrastructures and ...
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Clients know what they want, but they have a hard time explaining what they want in a way that is specific and usable enough for developers and site designers.
I’ve come to this conclusion after seeing projects languish, without any traction or support (and then the predictable finger-pointing). I’ve seen this with websites where faculty clients may not know what is available or possible technologically, and they have one image or groove in their minds. There’s no ...
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Usually when an all-day training takes the morning to launch, few will return in the afternoon for the rest of it. So there were about a dozen of us huddled in an upscale hotel conference room with very minimal wireless connectivity and trying to get in on Second Life and to embody our avatars.
Here was yet another foray into Second Life, this time, under the able guidance of Dr. Jonathon Richter (U of Oregon) as part of a day-long ...
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Surely, most people have received invitations to join professional social sites. Almost invariably, these come from people that one has met fleetingly at a professional conference. Or a person whom one hasn’t spoken to for years because of differing interests and divergent lives.
The idea is to maximize professional relationships as busy professionals by highlighting the relationship and taking advantage of each other’s connections. It’s like how people scaffold relationships through mutual acquaintances… It’s a kind ...
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Effective sound in instructional design refers to the initial sound capture and then the editing that follows. Initial poor sound capture (full of ambient sounds, poor voice quality) cannot really be enhanced much with desktop software. Live events that are not properly mic-ed ends up as a lost event.
With many departments videotaping their own events, there are plenty of digital videos with all-right video but fuzzy audio. Unintended ambient sounds—people walking down a hallway, the closing of a ...
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So bingo cards can draw numbers from between 1 – 75. There’s often a free spot on the card. And the cards may be 5 x 5 (25 spots – the one freebie)…or 5 x 6 (30 spots – the one freebie). The randomizer could put out as many sets of the numbers as I wanted. I needed 29 numbers chosen from the 1-75 inclusive pool, and I needed them in random order. I needed three bingo cards per sheet, so ...
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For the past half-year, I’ve been privileged to take part in several projects that have used the Open Journal Systems software (distributed by the Public Knowledge Project http://pkp.sfu.ca/).
This publishing system uses a logical workflow from when an author submits a work to the site and ends up in a submission cue. Then, the editors select reviewers and submit the writing to the various reviewers. The submission is then revised and edited, copy-edited, laid out, proof-read ...
Continue reading Two Projects and the Open Journal Systems Software
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Various research writings have originated creative ways to capture information as a byproduct of work. For some, creating help texts and directions can be unwieldy and time-consuming. An article by Paris, Colineau, Lu and Linden summarized an endeavor that captured a procedural help based on how people used a computerized system. This automation was to help replace the “labor-intensive and tedious” writing and maintenance of procedural help texts. Their system apparently captures use information from various data streams: textual, graphical ...
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Back in the day, there were some of my freshman classes that had some 700 – 800 or more students per auditorium. Our learning was facilitated by TAs, and there were notes that we could buy in case we missed a lecture date or two. That’s how I recall it. I never actually bought lecture notes as study aids although I probably could have earned some extra points with that. I remember seeing some, and they were full of typos ...
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It was a friendly invitation between two Kansas universities to chat about ITV via Polycom. We were meeting from two universities and one branch campus. The dry run had gone well. The automated dialing system didn’t quite work, but we all did finally get online live to discuss the issues at hand.
One of the universities in the state was seeing ITV (interactive television) as the way to do distance learning. While they ...
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Check this out. This Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (of MERLOT) special issue focuses on next generation learning management systems.
http://jolt.merlot.org/guest_editors0608.htm (Guest Editor Colleen Carmean Intro)
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html (The Current Summer 2008 Issue)
https://wiki.asu.edu/jolt/index.php/Main_Page (The Response Wiki)
Continue reading New Special JOLT Issue with a Wiki Accompaniment
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In a recent professional conference, one of the speakers presented on his use of virtual fairs and expositions. As a computer science professor, he would combine these virtual fairs (which people may attend from their desktop computers) with short research assignments for students.
He demonstrated a few of these for the audience. Essentially, these were websites that put a mental frame around the delivery of pre-packaged or live digital contents. There was a screen for live or canned speeches. There ...
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In my line of work, I occasionally meet people who are quite intriguing. A recent individual was a university professor for many years who now works for a peace organization in the West. She has traveled to numerous global hotspots around the world.
She has a nimble mind that analyzes the world as a power-based place, full of human emotions and angers that needed directing and diplomatic interventions and leadership interventions, or else these situations would hit “trigger point” and ...
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I have always had a kind of reverence for books—not the fabric covers and bound paper—but for the craft of writing that goes into quality works of literature.
It’s as the wise Mortimer J. Adler wrote: “Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that ...
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Every new functionality that I learn regarding my university LMS gives me that much more ability. A recent one increased my skills in a pretty major order of magnitude. I say this in part because I spent years working unintelligently in terms of question creation and upload…for a few faculty clients. One involved plenty of chemistry symbols, which meant very slow creation of the formulas and questions. (And yes, this is not typical ID work, but I make it ...
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Colin Barras’ “'Matrix'-Style Virtual Worlds 'a Few Years Away'” (Apr. 4, 2008, by ABC Internet News Ventures) suggests that people can immerse in 3D spaces in protracted and possibly even inextricable ways with the new realistic virtual worlds that are being created.
This author paraphrases Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. “He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away,” asserts Barras. He describes ...
Continue reading Photorealistic Virtuality: Light and Animation
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
01 May 2008
On Feb. 11, 2008, Dr. Cable Green (Director of eLearning for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges) hosted a virtual session for 42 faculty and administrators from around the US (with a cluster in Washington State) around “Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources.” This used the Elluminate technology for the virtual participants and actually had a physical location, too, at the Bellingham Technical College.
This was billed as a ...
Continue reading Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources
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One central premise of most support offices for online learning is the faculty DIY aspect, that is, the “do-it-yourself” potential of faculty. This idea has been persistent for a very long time even though there have been examples that might lead one to abandon this concept.
The stories abound. One faculty member had wrapped a scarf around her CPU, so it wouldn’t get too cold. Others have somehow lost their courses that they created on the learning ...
Continue reading Expanding the Faculty DIY Sphere in Academia
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While ubiquitous and mobile learning have not made that much headway in higher ed, I am reading more and more about various technologies that would enable some truly rich and engaging learning using such technologies.
I was quite amused to read about the idea of the “web of things,” or various electronic devices that are semi-sentient and wired in wifi space and that can embody virtuality. They would be connected by “hyperpipes”. (The authors explain: “The two endpoints of a ...
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Every so often, a faculty member will start a query that leads in intriguing directions. And delightfully, this often comes from faculty who are new to online learning.
So this came about when a faculty member asked about letting her distance students learn how to use a digital microscope…and also wanting them to see various slides virtually. She wanted pretty much all live F2F microscope functionalities as well as access to a number of slides that ...
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A chance comment by a faculty member started me on a brief run of research on “herding” behaviors in automated agents. The idea was initially to have a herd of cows online behavior as their real-life counterparts do when approached from a particular angle. Having only seen one cow up close (at a gas station, no less), I wasn’t sure about the actual behaviors, but I had read a little something about “flocking” behaviors and figured I’d look ...
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There it was in a mainstream article—the concept of being “web dead.” The concept is that some people want to be off-the-grid. They don’t want an online persona. They don’t want to be easily trackable. They don’t want automated digital messages selling them all sorts of unwanted junk and false promises. They don’t want to be known for what they’re doing or where they’re going.
In a sense, what can be made can ...
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There’s something charming about being able to watch a small college come online in creating an online program. What’s even more intriguing is watching from a distance and through the framework of an online course to train the faculty, staff and administrators—using the LMS they’ve selected for their program.
Having never set foot on the campus of this college and only driven by the small town where it’s based once on my way elsewhere, I ...
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Starting out a new venture in an academic setting involves plenty of collaboration-building and consideration. Universities are complex environments, and decisions can have ripple effects and unintended consequences—even when different constituencies have been fully
So we had our first meeting to consider launching a distance learning faculty wiki out of this university…potentially through the division through which the university’s e-learnings offerings are supported, coordinated and created.
Not surprisingly, the first meeting involved some general ...
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Student retention has always been a bit of a challenge in many academic programs. Doctoral programs seem to feature about a 50% dropout rate. High schools have a 30% dropout rate. For e-learning ones, there are additional challenges, many of which have been mitigated with more student screening, student support, learner outreach, and faculty and staff training. That said, the challenge of retention does crop up in different ways.
Recently, a program that has high student entry traffic but low ...
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Visualize a doctor who needs to trim a bone in order to fit a new hip. Or imagine some other surgical procedure which requires a steady hand and practical finesse.
A manufacturer of a haptic device showed what such a learning experience might be like by combining 3D computerized visuals with sound along with a haptic device (linked to the haptic virtual objects on-screen). Haptics, of course, relates to “touch” or “contact.”
The tabletop device was a white pen device ...
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The Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI) group is now the center for the public SCORM development, outside the auspices of the US Department of Defense.
http://www.letsi.org/letsi/display/welcome/Home
It looks like they're still looking for more founding sponsors at a cost of $10K..to have a seat at the table in defining this organization. The deadline to join will be March 13.
Meanwhile, it's wait and "let's see" for the time being.
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 January 2008
Games and Simulations in Online Learning Edited by David Gibson, Clark Aldrich and Marc Prensky Hershey: Information Science Publishing 2007 402 pp. hardcover
The three powerhouse editors of Games and Simulations in Online Learning -- David Gibson, Clark Aldrich and Marc Prensky - each have contributed to the field in their own ways.
Their editorial hands are clear in this text that addresses what's done effectively now, given pedagogical, cost and technology constraints.
The learning created through digital gaming and sims ...
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Every so often, there's a moment for a breather to look around at how the digital landscape has changed for e-learning. I marvel at the quality of various authoring tools for building digital learning objects. These tools now have features for accessibility. They have cooler design elements. They have high usability for even novice users. The designers have taken an anticipatory approach in building well designed tools.
The types of outputs are rich and varied. It used to be ...
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The new year starts off with plenty of resolutions. And this also seems so for community organizations. Years ago, when I was in my teens, I started volunteering for a local community newspaper, and amazingly now, many years later, I'm still friends with many who are related to that paper. And somewhat less surprisingly, I've been called on to work on building a blog site for one aspect of that newspaper.
2008 is opening with the financial pressures ...
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There are various ways to test the efficacy of a computerized system. I've read about how theoretical systems are tested with known inputs and known outputs, and the real-world results are often used to test the theoretical programming that happens in the "black box" in between the inputs and the outputs.
A couple weekends ago, I came across the notion of self-playing games. This, too, is another method to test software games through trial and error. The game developers ...
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It's all becoming do-it-yourself nowadays. One project / conference / publication after another, people are setting up wikis and expecting work and information to be submitted through these.
A conference in the planning stages is using a wiki to store prior digital artifacts and to draw potential attendees. http://arclite.byu.edu/id+scorm/index.php?title=Main_Page
For one publication set to go live early in 2008, the editors set up a wiki page on which contributors may evolve the ...
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Perusing the academic literature often results in delightful endeavors of others. Even if the work never directly overlaps with mine in instructional design and instruction, I can at least ponder it. It offers a brain tickle. A recent article addressed the issue of how one hardy band of academics would map between printed and digtal document instances.
In various design plans, paper has a role. While much paper has been ...
Continue reading Endeavors to Cross the Paper-Digital Divide
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Some technologies just have an "attraction." They're well designed enough to empower users to look smart and produce well. While many people seem to like to Microsoft-bash, they keep turning out technologies that are highly usable, fun, and that really help people to think. They make capturing digital contents easy. As a person who works in a tech office, I am beginning to learn how much design and thought and expertise goes into the back-end in terms of the ...
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"Facebook is a huge identity risk." -- A security guru at K-State
Universities are reaching out into the "metaverse" to retain and attract the "gamer generation" of students.
One part of this endeavor relates to going out into the social software spaces in order to create identities and digital spaces around which they may interact, bond, and get familiar with the university brand.
In service of this idea, I recently went onto Facebook for some initial research. I ...
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Christopher Chambers, with the Juxtopia Group, presented on a virtual sim that occurs in real 3D space. Live fire combat involves some muscle memory, similar to marksmanship.
Based on research into sports psychology and with an eye towards fully exploiting cutting-edge technologies, a traning was created to sustain and improve live fire combat skills: the speed of engagement, identification and acquisition of the target, and the accuracy.
Because of the need to engage actual physical muscle memory, this sim occurs ...
Continue reading Improving Live Fire Combat Training with Virtual Targetry
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In some research on gaming, I ran across interactive fiction (IF) games and the related idea of tangibles. Here, game developers would create boxes that would emulate books that had text and manipulables. They would have other objects created to intensify the mainly text-based gameplay. Indeed, tangibles are created for online learners, so I thought I'd add a small entry about that.
Tangibles most commonly involve textbooks, magazines, CDs and DVDs and even videotapes. Some ...
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There it was again, another department's story of the search for what my supervisor SF calls the "one-button solution." Various academic departments have educational needs. They want to set up particular functionalities.
They then send a graduate student or a staff member to search out a solution. Or an administrator will go to a conference, hear a rave about a software and then throw cash at that. A one-button solution is one that just requires pushing the play button ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 October 2007
Virtual Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures
Dr. Dale Olsen (formerly of Johns Hopkins University and now with SiMmersion LLC) presented on "Virtualized Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures" (at the Washington Interactive Technologies conference hosted by SALT).
He opened with a short PBS movie clip about the importance of cultural sensitivities in law enforcement approaching people to get information. So ...
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Demographics figures into projections for the economy, the future workforce, and the price of housing, among other things. The retiring out of the baby boomers is anticipated to have wide-ranging effects on job availability, future pay and also the quality of workplace training. With the complicated machinery in the energy industry, and the average industry worker at 48 years old, "human obsolescence" may prove a challenge to this industry, suggests Matthew Sadinsky, president of System Operations Success, International. Sadinsky presented ...
Continue reading Virtual Sims Standing in for a Dwindling Workforce
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So I've been working on an in-house whitepaper on educational games and sims for quite a few months now along with my other projects (with all faculty projects taking priority).
I've immersed in a number of books on gaming.
One practice in academic research is to come clean on one's background and initial thoughts, in order to approach the materials without any of that important information un-surfaced. The idea is also to get this on the table ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 September 2007
As part of a blog tour, Dr. Karl M. Kapp agreed to a Q&A. A future "brief resource review" will follow later this year.
Q: What are some strategies that you find are effective in reaching the so-called gamer generation?
A: Well, first I want to say that what we already know about good instructional design works with the software, gadgets and games of the gamer generation. You still teach facts with chunking, association and organization. You still teach ...
Continue reading Q & A with Dr. Karl M Kapp, "Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning"
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Here is the scenario. A successful chain of hotels opens up a new chain of exclusive hotels (approximately 200), with its own unique brand and niche market. They would like to employ some computerized method of training for the service staff, particularly those who would maintain the hotel rooms. Their average stay is 2- 3 years only, which is fairly high turnover. Many are English-as-a-second-language speakers. An organization is brought in to distribute the training. There ...
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It's always good to know that umm the IRS is reaching out to its constituency with trainings. Chris Ammon and Amy Gareis presented on "Adapting IRS Classroom Training Content for Web-based Training" at the recent Interactive Technologies Conference in Virginia. Originally, this training was delivered in a F2F way by the customer education wing of the IRS at various locations around the country and reached several thousand participants. The objective of this was to train those who worked in ...
Continue reading Adapting Classroom Training for the Web...at the IRS
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During the August 22 - 24, 2007, Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Crystal City, Virginia, an international consulting organization offered a powerful presentation on their use of mobile technologies to train their international workforce, with a particular focus on their executives.
I think it may be wiser not to mention their names because I'm going to bring in something that they may not want to be connected with - which is the effective use of low technologies cobbled with high technologies ...
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For many of us who work in the online realm, a lot of what we create is digital representing the real. I attended a session recently at the Washington Interactive Technologies conference that dealt firmly with real-space. Dr. Maria Lizano-DiMare discussed "Rugged Mobile Computer Technology."
The concept here is that ubiquitous research and learning require bringing potentially sensitive computer equipment into the field - whether that be a live volcano or crop field or an ocean habitat. While I've seen ...
Continue reading Stepping out of Virtuality into Real-Space Ruggedness
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Those who head online learning programs have the unenviable task of deciding when it's time to change to a different LMS. As an online instructor, I get to watch this from a comfortable distance.
The scenario looks quite daunting. First, there's the political management piece. Instructors need to understand why changes are necessary, in order to move beyond the built-up inertia of system familiarity and pre-built course materials posted online. Often, people face new learning with an inordinate ...
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A couple years ago when I was teaching full-time at a community college in Washington State, my supervisor let me know that there was a student who wanted to work on an independent study project. This was a software engineer who had created a product that could create automatic writing. He and I met, and it turned out that he wanted help writing a book about his product and also some publicity materials. I went online and read some of ...
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This year when the Axio LMS rolls out on August 6, I will not be in the office sweating any help documentation. That job is in the very capable hands of our content specialist, and I am more than full-time on curricular builds, research, grant proposals, and other work. Still, while I'll actually not even be in with the roll-out, that's a very special time.
The instructional design function is part of an IT office. While this office ...
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SoftChalk Lesson Builder's most recent Webinar involved a presentation by Lisa Young, a hydrology professor at Gateway Community College (part of the 10 Maricopa Community Colleges of Phoenix, AZ). Young also is a part-time elearning coordinator and co-chair of the RLO Action Group. Some 100 individuals had gathered online to listen in on "Re-usable Learning Objects - The Maricopa College System" (June 13).
Young used a purchased template from SoftChalk that was made for the particular college ...
Continue reading An Aligned RLO Effort in a Community College System
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Of late, I've been thinking a lot about a software program that I've been using for the past year and a half. It is flexible. It has a kind of elegance after one gets used to it. It facilitates learning for tens of thousands of students. I know from firsthand observation that a lot of work has gone into the architecture of this product. Tens of thousands of people hours have gone into the writing of the code ...
Continue reading Not Giving up on "Four Million Lines of Code"
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H. Wayne Hodgins, in the context of digital learning objects, offers the concept of a periodic table of information. This idea has been around for many years, and it has resided there in the back of my mind for quite a while. This is the concept that if digital learning objects are well-designed at the right level of atomistic granularity that all known information may be categrorized into different types ...
Continue reading Mulling over the Periodic Table of ... Information
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The management literature talks a lot about facing change and assuming change. Effective leaders anticipate changes. They don't get blind-sided by the changes in the environment. Change is repeated like a mantra.
Recent articles in various national publications talked about a "clean slate" effort for the redesign of the Internet. The way it was conceptualized years ago did not take into account the widespread commercialization of this tool or of the need for massive security and identity authentication. There ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
10 May 2007
Software makers that reach out to instructional designers with trainings and engaging events improve my ability to do my job. One of the coordinators in our building sent me an email about a series of Webinars ("Innovators in Online Learning") hosted by SoftChalk Lesson Builder, LLC. Their software is used extensively in our office and puts out some very usable and engaging interactive elements in Flash and Javascript and HTML. The other day, I participated in a seminar presented by ...
Continue reading Webinar: Language Instruction and eLearning (Brief Resource Review)
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One of the more engaging aspects of ID work here involves being able to sit in on development meetings where individuals brainstorm various features to add to a new tool, the developers argue over specs, and final decisions get made about the functions. At a recent meeting, one of the developers said something about "this spaghetti of a mess," which I thought was very apt. The various constituencies represented by the members at the table all need their parts heard ...
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A meditation is supposed to be something reflective and calming. These are often accompanied by soothing intonations, bells and backstories stemming out of the Himalayas and clouds. Maybe I can just say that an ID may not always have time to meditate. Or maybe the rush is part of the techno age.
I was digitally scrolling through a series of video captures of a course that involved stress management. Part of the curricular build involved the live course sequencing to ...
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In an academic office with plenty of technology-minded people around, it's not often that one sees a lot of obvious primping. As I consider this further, I am awestruck by the rarity of this event that occurred.
So there we were at the end of a virtual simulated tour conducted by a representative of an East Coast company. A group of us were beings in Second Life. One kept walking around with a virtual torch for quite a while ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 April 2007
Jeff Merriman of the OKI / MIT highlighted some interoperability trends. [A quick Wikipedia search defining the Open Knowledge Initiative suggests that this organization works on the specification of software interfaces comprising a "service oriented architecture" (SOA). This endeavor was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIT, and IMS Global Learning Consortium.] "The goal of an SOA is to provide a separation between the interface of a service and its underlying implementation such that consumers (applications) can interoperate across the ...
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Caveat: Whenever I write on technology issues that are beyond my purview, I should use a double or triple cover, so I may disavow that I wrote this. I think that what's going on on the back end is important enough to discuss, but I also know that I'm going to embarrass myself by writing about something in a way that a software engineer never would. I've faced the disdainful glare (once was enough) of a software ...
Continue reading CORDRA and ADL-R (Registry) for Shared Data Environments
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Dr. Bill Blackmon (Chief Technical Officer at ADL), in his presentation "ADL and SCORM," took a lowkey approach but dropped a surprising bit of news. Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) is looking for some other organization to steward "SCORM" and to develop the public global version of SCORM. The Department of Defense's needs for SCORM have long diverged from that of global users' needs, and it's time for new direction, development, and a diverging of paths. The new public ...
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The technology learning curve for instructional designers seems as steep as the cutting edge roller coasters that plaster your cheeks against your ears as you pull out of the starting platform and do the first loop-de-loop. There's no real keeping up. If it's any comfort, technologists will tell you that they know their areas very well, but it's near impossible to extend their expertise beyond a region of specialty. Their learning curve gets too high, too, and ...
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"Use cases could be a cultural tool (Lave & Wnger, 1991; Candlin et al., 1999) that (is) used for mediation between the various 'cultures' that take part in learning technology specification." (Hoel, n.d., pp. 2 - 22)
As an outsider to software development, I would never have assumed the importance of a so-called "use case." Now, as a person with a small toe in the door, I at least have a better sense of why "use cases" are ...
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Digital simulations may be used in situations where live simulations may be expensive, time-consuming, impractical and / or fast-changing.
At a recent conference, a representative of Chi Systems introduced the use of synthetic teammates for undergraduate pilot training. Here, pilots-in-training may practice the various voice communications with the tower (controller) and others in a runway take-off situation. Their voice inputs would be captured by voice recognition software (and VOIP for Net-mediated learning), and their responses and the timing of ...
Continue reading Fielding Synthetic Teammates for a Flying Simulation
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The Alice-in-Wonderland moment happened a couple days ago. There I was in the middle of an online course. I was making a change to an announcement when I accidentally hit some weird combination of keys and ended up in another person's account. I had access to that person's courses and all her "powers." I had attained "super powers" even without using my actual "instance manager" powers.
That got me musing about Alice-in-Wonderland moments. In these past 10 ...
Continue reading The Insidiousness (and Necessity) of Plug-and-Play
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It doesn't take long working as an instructional designer to realize that some curricular builds will be "data hungry" ones. Data hungry curricular builds require massive amounts of digital learning objects and information. They require huge amounts of research. They require complex data tracking. They require lots of legal copyright releases and permission seeking. They demand fact cross-checking and accuracy. They demand attention to details because every change has a price in terms of investment of ...
Continue reading The "Black Hole": Data Hungry Curricular Models
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Imagine a tool that could help manage the world...
That was the proposition made by Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI, the forefront company that designs and develops GIS technology. Dangermond visited K-state to present "GIS Vision and Enabling Technology" on Mar. 8. He visited as a speaker for the Provost's Lecture Series.
(A blurb introducing him reads: "Dangermond fostered the growth of the company from a small research group to an organization with more than 3,100 ...
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Getting smart machines to collaborate with humans may require some cajoling. One of my colleagues has a way with both people and with machines. He very masterfully originates workarounds that solve a variety of live issues for faculty as they use the campus-originated LMS. Being able to deliver such support requires a mental agility and a deep knowledge of the various technological systems. The very human demands on the technologies originate in the intersection of the teaching, communications, learners and ...
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I had ensconced myself in a 24-hour student cafe in the basement under the main library. The only "cafe" food was from vending machines, but at least I was out of the office enough to read a stack of articles on SCORM and digital learning objects. It had been a year since my last whitepaper on this subject, and I'd been snowed with numerous projects and clients. I was behind ...
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For many years, I earned my keep by giving lectures and speaking in public. I know what I sound like in various spaces - from a room with hundreds to more intimate 20-30 student spaces. I know what I sound like in various moods and circumstances. I know what I sound like in several languages. I know what I sound like in full strength as well as with laryngitis coming on. Indeed, this voice has been on radio. It's been ...
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A training by our resident security expert touched on various ways digital information may be grabbed and exploited. He addressed issues of open wifi networks. He talked about the risks of portable memory devices. He discussed regular patching. He talked about encryption. He gave vivid examples of data compromises along with some humorous Rumsfeldian quotes.
He didn't go into the weakest link, which would be the human factor. He maybe was being too polite.
A while ago, I'd ...
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Back in the day, when I was a full-time faculty member, I could do my job without wondering what my colleagues thought about my email life. Sure, there were emails from students and colleagues daily. And the assumption was that one would answer in a day or so. However, in this shift to an ID environment (and in an IT position of sorts - yes, my friends are laughing about this), I'm seeing that my email life really makes a ...
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So Dr. Michael Wesch (assistant anthro prof at K-state) has caused a YouTube splash with his witty video. Worth a look. Even more electrifying live.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/feb/13/professors_video_creates_sensation_youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
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The elements that would allow the integration of mobile learning with an LMS have been seriously evolving. Dr. Heather Katz and Bob Sanregret presented on "How to link mobile content results into your LMS system" at the recent SALT conference in Orlando, FL. Using the Hot Lava Mobile Learning Author (open source?), mobile devices may be set up do up to 5 API calls for SCORM-compliant data: the start and end times, the test results, and other data. Using SOAP ...
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Christopher Stapleton, one of the staff members of Simiosys at the University of Central Florida, calls himself a "faculty entrepreneur." With decades of experience working in the entertainment industry "creating memories of a lifetime," he left managing a megabudget (over a hundred million) and a fat salary...in order to apply himself to meaningful work. That said, he still describes some of his works that he's helped create with an earned sense of pride. He describes the ...
Continue reading Virtual Puppetry and a Simulated Urban Classroom
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Scott Edwards (of Outstart) presented on "Why your LCMS should be PENS Enabled" at the Jan. - Feb. 2007 SALT conference in Orlando. -His presentation addressed why the standard "package exchange notification services" (PENS) standard should be integrated into an LCMS or LMS. PENS is an AICC and SCORM-supported specification. PENS allows for the automating of the process of content publication, transportation, and messaging between servers hosting LCMSes, LMSes, and data repositories. PENS allows not only for the transfer but the ...
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Thomas Held (of MetaMedia Training International) came right out with his view in his keynote: Instructional designers coming out of the various higher education institutions need more scripting and video capture experiences. I'd have to agree with this assessment.
From the outside, multimedia looks quite simple to create. Neophyte consumers of multimedia consume the end product in very short time and often do not have any idea of how much work goes into the back end to create the ...
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So Tom Held of MetaMedia Training International, in his address at a prior SALT conference, talked about the concept of the "installed base" while considering which of the various DVD types (blue ray, high def, holographic) may be around for the (relatively) long haul. (This is only one small aspect of his content rich talk, but this is the only aspect I want to talk about here.) The concept here is that a critical mass of people will own a ...
Continue reading Building Digital Content to the "Installed Base"
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There's something disconcerting about the term "denaturing." To denature something is to remove the natural character or properties of something. It's to undercut something natural. These would be fighting words for an environmentalist. So when I ran across this word in the context of the design of learning objects (DLOs), I had to take a second look. The concept goes like this: all building of digital learning objects is necessarily unreal, fake, simulated, and not ...
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"Humanists look at these games as a new expressive genre like drama, opera, or movies; social scientists view them as anew form of collective behavior; computer scientists, engineers, and industrial designers find them a new focus of invention." -- Murray, Bogost, Mateas and Nitsche
So digital gaming has been around for 35 years now. So the talk in the academic literature on educational gaming is that games can be much more than that. They serve a learning purpose. They ...
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Former Microsoft "chief architect" Charles Simonyi's has said that he wants to be the first geek in outer space. He has bought a round-trip ticket for just such a trip and will make history as the fifth tourist cosmonaut ever. In a recent interview (in this case, with The Seattle Times), he has described his engineering approach to studying for this out-of-this-world fieldtrip. The interviewer asks him: "Is it circa 1990 technology on the spacecraft you'll ride?" He ...
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'Tis the season for wish lists, at least in our commercialized culture. In that spirit, I thought I'd put out a wish list of affordances for an imaginary LMS.
I want to be able to post grades right at the point of responding to the learner's posting of the assignment. I don't want to have to skip over several screens in order to punch in a grade. I want a running update of each learner's grade ...
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Academics and theorists have discussed the self-organization theory of (informal) learning communities, with these creations identified as critical to lifelong learning. These grow not by any designed infrastructure per se but evolve on their own as people pursue their individual and shared interests. This concept relates to the one of the Internet evolving like a "tree," with its main trunk and branching off until the tips, where there are no nodes but tiny petioles. It's a form of ...
Continue reading Stigmergy: Digital Crumbs a la Hansel and Gretel
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Sometimes, the Internet acts like a live amorphous being ready to lash out at users who poke it. Okay, that's a little melodramatic. Maybe a lot melodramatic, but I've noticed some interesting issues.
Last month, I launched an online survey, and to publicize it, sent emails out through listservs and postings to various eLearning sites. I got maybe a couple dozen responses on the survey, which was a complex one, but also, I had ...
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Virtual reality consists of simulations. Users suspend reality in order to participate in this universe. Augmented reality consists of add-ons to the real-world.
The sci-fi version goes like this. A person puts on fashionable light-weight glasses empowered with cameras and displays. He or she goes into a live environment. The glasses collect information in the live environment and report that back to a computer. The computer generates informational overlays and details not available in the natural environment in ...
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For the past several years, a series of articles in academic journals have engaged the technological strategies deployed for customizing or adapting learning for different learners. This, of course, is done by the faculty (some) in an instructor-led course. However, in automated courses, the instructional design and the technologies then come into play to try to achieve this. The research discusses various strategies from creating learning models to profile users (based on psychology, cognition, preferences, personality ...
Continue reading Educational Technology Standing in for the Live Instructor
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Representing information in different ways changes people's senses of reality. IDs have a suite of various authorware tools to present data - whether it be in tables, graphical representations, drawings, 3D models, audio-video, and a range of other data.
The Wikipedia offers a formal and informal definition of fractals. For my purposes, I'll quote their informal definition: "In colloquial usage, a fractal is a shape that is recursively constructed or self-similar, that is, a shape that appears similar at ...
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One of the major skills / talents of seasoned instructors (and some new ones) relates to their live "run-time adaptation." This computer term refers to the operation of a computer program. As applied to instructors, this relates to how an instructor leads and supports a group of learners. This involves a fair amount of complex multi-tasking and the nuances of reading human behavior and meaning (verbal and non-verbal). This run-time adaptation also involves a deep body of knowledge about a particular ...
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One of my more engaging projects has been a multi-state endeavor that involves teaching and course redesigns based on the cultural backgrounds and worldviews of a particular diverse group of learners. One of the tools that this community uses is a shared virtual site where individuals may share resources, hold conversations, post questions and observations, and feel a sense of connection to others involved in this shared labor.
One of the challenges of making this virtual group ...
Continue reading Virtual Spaces for Instructional Collaborators
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I returned from the E-Learn 2006 conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, which was from October 13-17. This was my first time to attend the E-Learn conference. I had registered to attend the tutorial sessions on Friday, (a day before the conference started for everyone). Each was scheduled for three hours. The first session I went to was "Blended Learning Situations, Solutions, and Several Stunning Surprises", by Curt Bonk, professor at Indiana University. He talked about blended learning and gave several examples ...
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Definitely, this commentary will offend some. (If you're my direct supervisor, you can stop reading here.) It's a good thing I'm using a pseudonym. After I attended an international conferences on elearning, it's impossible not to feel like I work in a backwater. The irony is that I would feel the same wherever I was, probably, and whatever I was doing.
What was once cutting edge becomes passe very quickly in terms of digital functionalities. Building ...
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So celebrity usually doesn't affect me. I've met famous people and even talked to quite a few of them for the purposes of writing articles. I have a high threshold for the ga-ga factor. But sometimes, some modern celebs sort of push the mold, and so it was today.
One thing about Vinton Cerf that I liked right away was that he looked like his press photos. Usually, the mismatch is quite great, and if it weren't ...
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When we buy a piece of software, we pretty much assume that it'll be plug-and-play. Few of us read the manual first, and most just follow the directions for the upload and then noodle around until the pieces start coalescing into sense. The immense amounts of support that go into a software product's launch and the continuing help provided for its users often seem invisible to most users. Lately, I've been noticing this "digital bubble wrap" that ...
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Pervasive or ubiquitous learning has been evolving with the explosion of new technologies from portable multimedia players to PDAs to cell phones, in a wifi environment. The concept seems to be not only lifelong learning but anytime-anywhere learning. In-class instructors have long struggled with trying to keep student attention in lecture halls where learners are multi-tasking on their laptops by checking email and TMing on their phones and scheduling on their PDAs. Now, instructors who create podcasts for deployment are ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 October 2006
How much of yourself do you bring to a classroom?
As a writing / mass communications / literature instructor, I find my students and I will get into various types of unpredictable discussions. One of them led to the issue of identity and how much of a "self" is brought into a classroom. Their responses ranged from about 5% to 100%. The 100% responder said that he brought all of himself to the classroom and communicated all of himself wholeheartedly and without ...
Continue reading "Partial Identities" in Learning: Technologically Disaggregating Information
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Part of the seductiveness of technology relates to the "Wizard of Oz" effect. This is that ability to multiply the effect of one's work as through a megaphone. It's the digital multiplier effect. It's about creating a big impression from modest means (you know Frank Baum's story with the wizard's identity eventually revealed). An example of a multiplier effect occurred at a presentation that I saw about a year ago. It was one on educational ...
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In an office that originates its own LMS, survey system, grade submission system, and other technologies, there is a major geek factor going on. And that rubs off on the instructional designers. I submit to you that my colleagues both have this geek characteristic although you'd never tell it by looking at them.
You can see that LCD glow on their faces when they get new hardware like tablet PCs. One of the IDs just got one with ...
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"It's my brother's paper, and I didn't know he cheated."
Professor Mary Pat McQueeney of Johnson County Community College spoke about plagiarism detection software. (This was at the SIDLIT / Summer Institute on Distance Learning conference on Aug. 3 - 4 at the Kansas University Edwards campus.) She identified some side benefits to such software. One is that publicity about the uses of such universal adoption of programs at an institution of higher learning may deter academic dishonesty and ...
Continue reading Age of the "Literate" Machines II: Plagiarism Detection
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English professors Maureen Fitzpatrick and Mary Pat McQueeney presented on software programs that ostensibly "grade" writing. (This was at the SIDLIT conference at the Kansas University Edwards campus on Aug. 3 - 4, 2006.) Apparently, various standardized testing outfits use such software. The development of such programs begin with measuring and quantifying elements such as English mechanics, writing organization, development, stylistics, and content. How would one begin to measure this? How would one be able to quantify this? Fitzpatrick explained that ...
Continue reading Age of the "Literate" Machines: Electronic Grading
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So here it was on a Saturday. It was go-for-launch day. Much like NASA with their launches, the weather and everything had come ...
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So the SIDLIT (Summer Institute on Distance Learning" conference (Aug. 3 - 4) had an insightful presentation on different software programs that may convert PowerPoints to Flash. Davy Jones of Johnson County Community College offered some reasons for why this might be done. Converted files tend to be smaller and may download faster and be more email friendly. There's a broader availability of Flash which allows for deployment and play on Macs, PCs, and PDAs...and on various browsers. The ...
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People in customer service have to get tough. When they're faced with irate and frustrated customers, they can handle the issue by troubleshooting it and getting out of the way. Others will "get back" at the complainer with further delaying tactics, ignoring strategies, baleful looks or filing the complaint in the circular bin.
For the past several hours, I've been reading digitally archived complaints. These are textual ones submitted by email and web forms. I'm not ...
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One of my most engaging projects of late has been a national one involving the use of reusable learning object or RLOs. In this case, I used Cisco System's RLO model, with its rigorous standards. This work reminded me a lot of my days as a distance runner a long time ago and the pacing needed to make sure I could hit my marks. While I did not absolutely fill in every single blank in the tables needed to ...
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Bugginess has been on my mind lately. It's bugginess in terms of Kansas insects, with spiders that run incredibly fast, grasshoppers and an unusual bug on my window screen that was white and looked like it was wearing a fur (it had poor recovery skills when I flicked it off the screen, and I think it fell into my egress window well). Bugginess has been on my mind relating to a project I'm engaged in which has plenty ...
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Software development often happens in a siloized way. Except for instances when international or national organizations take a lead on standards-setting or a mega-corporation ends up in a semi-monopolistic situation with a software program, there often are many versions of a thing...and the versions often don't talk to each other. They're interoperable. They're stand-alone.
A recent article by Nicholas L. Carroll and Rafael A.Calvo of the U of Sydney ("Certified assessment artifacts for ePortfolios") addresses ...
Continue reading Necessary Functions of an ePortfolio System
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So I just got spammed another round. It's sort of strange to get these emails with apparently word-generator-created subject lines that make no human sense. And while I haven't opened one of these in ages, the contents never seemed to make any sort of rational sense either. I have wondered why people would generate these, or if this is just some sort of scripting run wild (sort of like virus strands). The only thrill seems to be the ...
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Inexplicable things happen in a complex universe. In digital space, this human-made mass of data and interaction and messiness, mysterious occurrence happen as a matter of course. In a word processing program, my text suddenly starts to puddle. I receive mysterious programmer messages from the great beyond, which then takes some online research to find out what that means. Files disappear into cyberspace. I wonder if they'll morph and come back in a different form Internet years later. (in ...
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So a fair amount of research dollars have gone into natural language systems, AIs, and computerized intelligent agents. When I call some phone systems for information, I get the automated voice that directs me to where I want to go. At the grocery store, I check out my items by interacting with a canned digital voice. My banking is done online, but if I need to go to the phone, there's that same digital voice. I can go to ...
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Dr. Roberto H. Bamberger, a Government, Education, and Public Health Briefing Consultant with Executive Engagement and currently working with Microsoft Corp., suggests that eLearning may lead to a global exchange of ideas and the combined wisdom of people from various cultures, in a sense echoing Tim Berners-Lee's idealistic ideas for the WWW.
In his AAC&U plenary presentation "Creating Spaces for Learning: Exploring Technology's Role," he envisioned a world where technology is applied to solve shared challenges.
He ...
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One of the more engaging poster presentations at the recent AAC&U conference engaged the use of human patient simulators in nursing. Dr. Paula Dunn Tropello's "Interactive Learning with Human Patient Simulators" shed light on the practical use of human patient simulators, which have grown in complexity.
I'd recently had a brief run-on with a simulated baby when I was at an open house at KSU. I was at a table introducing eLearning when a young woman came ...
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For the longest time, I'd wanted to read The Art of War. I'd already read quite a few Chinese classics, which often dealt with feudal warfare and then familial warfare. And now, without hundreds of student papers to read every other day, I found myself at the library with a copy of this ancient tome in hand. I came across the following passage on foreknowledge.
"What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and ...
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When an LMS gets extremely popular, it becomes used 24/7 daily, which means there's no down time except for the mere slices when changes may be made. Programmers know when they have the most traffic to their servers, and they assiduously avoid using those times to upload and update. However, every so often, updates need to be made without much prior warning. And those are done in short stints.
Such an update was made to an LMS (which ...
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I was speaking to Nick deKanter, VP of Muzzy Lane Software (http://www.muzzylane.com/). His company creates educational software games of varying complexity for the liberal arts.
One complaint of online games is that many are necessarily closed-systems. Players choose limited options. There are only so many factors that may be played or input, and every game is bounded. Real-time interactive live-player games add open-systems complexity by the addition of the other ...
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Anyone who has dealt with technologies has had moments of stupefaction. I'm sure of it. I just had one on Saturday. I was uploading images into a database (hosted off another out-of-state university) when I kept getting graphics boxes that wouldn't accept an image...and wouldn't disappear. I could move them around, and they just sat there shadowed and unresponsive.
I could live with some computer garbage, I thought. Then, the whole thing froze. And I was ...
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It seems like in every discussion for selecting technologies that decision-makers have to vote between one platform or another, or go platform agnostic. They have to play off against others in commercialism... They have to figure what combinations to configure for service to learners. They have to decide what would best serve their users' needs.
The temptation is to remain non-committal. After all, any decision made means an investment in staff time, mental space, hard work, server space, potential licensing ...
Continue reading Platform Agnosticism and ID Development on Technologies
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Gatekeeping as a concept makes sense. There are times when some people should have access to particular information and other times when they don't really need to know. I thought of this recently when I got turned away by some army folks at the nearby military base. It turns out I didn't have the full documentation needed to gain entry, and they were right. When I returned in the afternoon with the proper documentation, they very graciously gave ...
Continue reading Gatekeeping, Keys and Trying to get on Base
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The buzzwords at the Educause Annual Conference in Orlando, last year was blogging, RSS feeds and readers. Even though everyone was talking about RSS at last year's conference, it has been around since 2002, when the New York Times began offering news by RSS feeds for the first time. Learn more on the history of RSS.
Some of you may already know what a RSS feed is and how to use it. But for those of you who do ...
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I found myself in an unintended discussion about the nature of blogs last night. I mentioned to my wife what I was going online under the guise of work (spreading the word about online learning, instructional design and community building), and next thing I know we are having a head-to-head about whether anyone is going to bother to read this stuff given the style of writing I am using (kinda a stream of consciousness, quasi-literary style, or in other words ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 February 2006
There has always been a mystique regarding software developers, at least where I'm from. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I met various people from the tech industry---some on the periphery and others at the heart. Those at the heart were the developers and the project leads. They were the ones who could speak to the machine and command it to execute on certain commands, with a deep precision and elegance. That was the ideal, of course, and one certainly ...
Continue reading The Human- Machine Interface and Learning Management System Versioning
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So a conference participant asked about what factors would make for a useful learning management system (LMS). This participant never left a business card or a note, so I was never able to deliver the details.
In doing some quick research, I found a great rubric tool from Edutools. However, before I got to this great tool, I went ahead and did a quick brainstorm.
Brand Reputation: The brand does matter in terms of how well they back up their ...