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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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Dr. Mark David Milliron presented on "A New Generation of Learning: Diverse Students, Emerging Technologies, and a Sustainability Challenge" at the recent Axio Learning Conference in Sept. 2009.
The video capture of this event will be available at the following URLs:
http://www.axioconference.org/followup
http://www.k-state.edu/provost/academic/lecture/2009-2010/milliron.htm
http://www.axioconference.org/schedule/keynote-presentation/
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Dr. Sam Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight, presented on “Open Learning: The Convergence of Collaboration-Based Learning and Social Network Learning” (June 24, 2009) via a free webinar.
He explained his role in surveilling various customer segments—consumer; PreK-12; higher education; corporations and businesses; the federal government; state and local government; associations, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and nonprofits; and healthcare—in terms of their use of online learning products.
Their model tracks ...
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At the recent SIDLIT conference, I attended Tracy Newman’s “Digital Storytelling: How to Bring your Stories to Life,” and the presenter offered a helpful concept in the assigning of video storytelling and creation to students.
Newman cited research that showed that student creations of digital stories may address a range of skills: research, writing, organization, technology, presentation, interview, interpersonal, problem-solving, and assessment skills. The secret, though, is to incrementalize the work ...
Continue reading A "Seemingly Simple" Assignment (in Digital Storytelling)
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http://scholarspace.jccc.edu/sidlit/15
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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
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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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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On a recent and rare afternoon when I had a chance to attend a presentation on tips for writing up NSF grants, I came away with an intriguing angle. (And do instructional designers support the conceptualizing, writing and fulfillment of federal grants—you bet!)
Dr. Parag R. Chitnis described the general guidelines for NSFs…which focus on science and engineering (but not the study of diseases). He suggested that this organization has the defined strategies of funding “discovery, infrastructure, learning ...
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by IDOS Newswire
27 April 2009
Consider creating an account and submitting some ideas for a presentation to Colleague-to-Colleague's SIDLIT!
http://www.sidlit.org/
This is a very collegial and professional conference.
Continue reading Submittal for Colleague-to-Colleague's SIDLIT Annual Conference July 30 - 31, 2009
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
06 March 2009
Professional development keeps work life fresh, and it helps keep the skill sets (semi)viable. In a time of scarcity, it takes a bit more initiative to find professional development opportunities. Oftentimes, such opportunities are piecemeal and catch-as-catch-can.
Many workplaces have a serious shut-down of travel out-of-state. We are getting emails about on-campus conferences that have been cancelled. Many conferences are listing the option of tele-porting in to a conference from desktops to save on travel costs. Interestingly, I am ...
Continue reading Maintaining Professional Development in a Scarcity-Based Environment
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“Teaching with Online Games” Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
I’d never taken part in a truly global webinar. Most of the ones I attend are local…or only have the occasional person tapping in from a few other locales. Then, I attended Dr. Gibson’s “Teaching with Online Games,” and as a warm-up to the actual presentation, the facilitator asked participants to indicate their locations on a virtual map. She turned on that annotation tool in Elluminate, and the ...
Continue reading "Teaching with Online Games" Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
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At a recent conference, the presenters discussed their on-campus policy for using Second Life. A few strategies emerged from the presentation.
First, this campus simulated buildings from the physical campus to the virtual island—as grounds for familiarity. I know of another campus that has used its mascot and logo as a design element for an island on SL as well. The term used to describe this was “mimic proximity.” The spaces mimicked were ...
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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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A recent presentation at C2C's SIDLIT (Aug. 1, 2008) addressed the physical prototyping of a high-tech classroom in order to make it the most flexible and functional possible. The idea was that once this prototype had been experienced by many different types of users that that feedback would be assiduously collected and then applied to a brand new government building, with standardized classrooms.
Here, the prototype classroom was built to specs in a warehouse…after an initial planning process ...
Continue reading Prototyping a Physical Classroom for Hybrid Learning
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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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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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On Sept. 18 - 19, at K-State, the third annual Axio Learning Community and Conference will be held. This is open to Axio LMS users.
http://www.axioconference.org/
Continue reading The Third Annual Axio Learning Community Meeting and Conference
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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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Now that finals are over, you probably don't even want to think of August, but brace yourself!
For the ninth year in a row, the Colleague to Colleague (C2C) organization and Johnson County Community College are hosting the Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology (SIDLIT). The Institute is open to all faculty members, and support staff (librarians, students services, tech support and administrators) who are interested in instructional technology and online learning. The 9th Annual SIDLIT will ...
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One of the first tenets of political storytelling is to embody one’s story. Have a clear alignment between one’s lived life and one’s presentations…the theories-in-action vs. the professed theories-in-use.
At a recent national conference, a large corporation fielded a team of presenters who demonstrated a system that they used for automated training of their staff. However, instead of showing any of their actual trainings, they used fictional training contents—in this case, how to tell why ...
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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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A self-professed “peripatetic” professor, Dr. Chris Sorensen presented on “A University without Walls” at the final Provost Lecture of the year at K-State on Apr. 24.
He pointed out that those in academia tend to specialize in their respective fields. Yet, the creativity happens in the interfaces between domains of knowledge. He used Arthur Koestler’s idea of “bisociation” from “The Act of Creation” to show the interstices where new things may coalesce—in the intersections between disciplines and human ...
Continue reading Expanding the Traditional Lecture in F2F Space
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It seems to be a basic truism that people need to practice shared endeavors. Coordination requires tight communications and cooperation.
At a recent conference, a presenter from the Department of Homeland Security described some desktop “spiral” exercises that brought together various offices to deal with shared potential large-scale disasters.
For example, one involved a pandemic sequence broken down in vignettes for a chronology of interactions and decision-making. Another involved flooding. These virtual simulated experiences involved various ...
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MERLOT International Conference August 7-10, 2008, Minneapolis Hilton http://conference.merlot.org/2008/
See you there.
Continue reading MERLOT's International Conference in August
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As part of a parallel to a recent high tech conference, one of the participants set up a discussion on data portability. While quite a few were invited, there were just three of us in addition to the organizer and his assistant. I’m told that most people headed off to enjoy the sunshine and local shopping, and many certainly did even during the main conference.
Well, I went running in late, which meant I couldn’t make too much ...
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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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The KU Libraries hosted a "Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities" conference back on March 7. They have published the resources of the presenters, and those may be found at the following site.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/CopyrightSymposium/CopyrightSymposiumhandouts.shtml
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At a recent e-learning conference, a presenter on informal learning demonstrated his instrument that involved basic trivia questions and also involved an assessment of how much confidence each respondent had to the certainty of correctness for each answer.
He showed that people had quite a few incidences of high confidence linked with incorrect answers.
At another event, the speaker asked the audience how many of them made decisions in their lives knowing they were wrong. No ...
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Dale A. Morris, an instructional development meteorologist of NOAA, in the presentation titled "National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario," presented a powerful live tabletop exercise designed to raise the situational awareness of the various entities that may be involved in a severe weather incident - the meteorologists, TV newscasters, and an emergency operations center.
A National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office piped in simulated weather information (based on past weather events). To create this, they built a weather event simulator ...
Continue reading The National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario
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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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Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities
The University of Kansas (KU) is hosting a day-long symposium on copyright issues in academia, with two powerhouse speakers: Tracy Mitrano and Wesley D. Blakeslee. This is a free conference for locals.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/copyrightsymposium/
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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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After a professional conference, I often end up with a goodie bag full of CDs, DVDs, business cards, and marketing decks of cards. For weeks after, I run across the candies I've squirreled away in my backpack from the varous displays. My email box captures the occasional follow-up emails, and I am popular for a period with sales reps who call, full of cheer and hope. The presenters have had their bit of glory after slogging through the day-to-day ...
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For those interested in ID + SCORM, BYU is hosting another conference this year. The venue is lovely, and the participants last year were high achievers in computer science and ID. (If you go, drop me a line and let me know how it goes. I'll be at a different conference at that time.)
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On Feb. 19, 2008, there will be a preconference at the Sheraton Orlando Downtown Hotel in Orlando, FL, as part of SALT's 2008 New Learning Technologies conference.
More on this tutorial follows:
Maximizing Affordances: Using an LMS for Education and Training
This tutorial will introduce learning management systems (LMSes) and the affordances they provide for distributed eLearning. This will offer mental models for conceptualizing the functionalities of learning management systems and highlight the commonalities among the main LMSes available ...
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"I wonder if there's a way to make a PowerPoint that can be shown, but the slideshow images cannot be captured by a digital camera."
The scenario went something like this. A researcher had put plenty of time into a research project. She went overseas to an international conference to present on her research findings. While she'd written a short overview of her presentation, the actual presentation itself included tables of sensitive never-before-published data that ...
Continue reading Private Information and Very Public Presentations
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The Society for Applied Learning Technology's schedule has just been published. This is scheduled Feb. 20 - 22, 2008.
http://www.salt.org/index.htm?fl/orlandoP.asp?pn=orlando
http://www.salt.org/grid.asp
The conference tracks include gaming and simulation, mobile computing, knowledge management systems, training applications, assessment, design and e-learning. See you there.
Continue reading 2008 SALT "New Learning Technologies" Conference in Orlando, FL
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A couple weeks ago, I had just offered two presentations at a conference and was headed out to another for another two. As I was wrapping up work in anticipation of this next one, I got to thinking about an instructor I'd wanted to meet at the prior conference who was a no-show. Those who knew her already predicted she would not show, but I'd been hopeful that she could somehow make the time and the will to ...
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"The Trust Factor in Online Instructor-Led College Courses" will appear in the upcoming Journal of Interactive Instruction Development (JIID), Volume 19, No. 3 on July 24 at the Society for Applied Learning Technology site at the following URL: (www.salt.org). This article covers research of over 630 learners at WashingtonOnline (WAOL) out of Washington state and interviews of online learners, faculty and administrators.
Continue reading The Trust Factor in Online Instructor-Led Courses
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 July 2007
As sometimes can happen with a project, I was bulding one thing under false assumptions and my supervisors were thinking I was making something else. The divergence wasn't serious, but it meant an extra layer of work later on. My small piece in a project was to teach college composition and research writing courses to Native American students, in a cohort model. One aspect of this project was to create Native case studies as part of a curriculum. My ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 July 2007
When Dr. Michele Lansdowne of the Salish Kootenai College (SKC of Pablo, Montana) went looking for a curriculum for Native American students of business, she found very little that resonated. She found even less in terms of business endeavors on an American Indian reservation. That dearth of academic materials in this field led her to start a project of interviewing American Indian entrepreneurs on reservations, in a grant-funded project that resulted in a widely used text and multimedia CD set ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 July 2007
To get ready for the Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop, I read through various cases from the site. There was an interesting "choose your own adventure" type of quality to these cases.
Various author voices came through clearly, and a range of sourcing strategies were used to capture the information.
"Sovereign Still from the Forest to the Plains" (Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff), "Indian Identity in the Arts" (Tina Kuckkahn, J.D.), "Evil Water" (Dr. Subodh K ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- Current Cases (Part IV)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2007
Getting hands-on is a fine way of learning how case studies may be experienced.
It was a couple of years in the making - this case. Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff started out with the relationship building that is so critical to doing research in Indian Country. Without trust, without a clear showing of personality / motive / "heart," there would not be sufficient synergies or motivations to "do business" there. In her ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- A Forestry Management Case (Part II)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 July 2007
The invitation to present came just about half a week before the conference itself was to be held. I was not brought in to be a space filler but rather to contribute a small bit of knowledge - about half an hour's worth. The knowledge base for my presentation had been in the works for at least two years, but even prior to that, I'd been learning a lot about interactivity, learning communities, DLOs and such. I was looking ...
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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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Truth is that it's hard getting scooped. A couple months ago, while at a conference, I met up with a fellow attendee, and we shared some fun hallway chatter. He attended my sessions. We all took away a lot of learning, and then a day or two later, I got a notice that my name had been noticed on a new posting on the WWW. One always assumes that anything presented at a conference will take on ...
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"Learning outlasts all other pleasures." Isaac Asimov (1980)
Dr. Michael Bush in his "SCORM-enabled Knowledge Economy: Willit be Hollywood or YouTube?" suggested that the ID + SCORM conference offered an opportunity for scholarly endeavors...and made suggestions to reach an academic audience. He said that human conservatism and slowness to change may not be negative per se. This reluctance may protect some valuable instructional approaches, for example. He seconded M. David Merrill's ideas that learning communities are tantamount to "pooled ...
Continue reading Gauging Speeds for the Status Quo and Innovations
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by IDOS Newswire
14 May 2007
The Colleague-to-Colleague (C2C) conference SIDLIT (pronounced "sidelight") addressing various issues in distance learning and instructional technology will be held Aug. 2 - 3, 2007, at the Edwards Campus of the University of Kansas.
http://web.jccc.net/c2c/sidlit/
This collegial and low-key conference adds value to the work and refreshes the participants for a full year of instructional design and IT work.
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The Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) will be hosting the next Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Virginia from Aug. 22 - 24. Preconference tutorials are available Aug. 21.
This conference offers a range of tracks such as Assessment, Design, eLearning, Gaming and Simulations, Knowledge Management, Mobile Computing and Training.
http://www.salt.org/dc/washingtonP.asp
Continue reading SALT's Washington Interactive Technologies Conference
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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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Our small team had driven two hours to take part in an educational Web conference, which drew people from neighboring states. The publicity for this event had been pretty unrelenting and positive. The conference was featuring two nationally known authors in the elearning field. They were the authors of numerous accessible and reader-friendly texts. They somehow managed to capture meta-analysis data about various aspects of elearning and then to simplify the concepts into texts that people from various backgrounds could ...
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One higher education takeaway from the flooding of New Orleans relates to disaster recovery / business continuance (DR/BC). Many of the universities in New Orleans survived because of the good will and contributions of other universities - that took the stranded students and offered them a comparable education but which deflected the tuition back to the universities in that city.
This realization that the brick-and-mortar of a campus could be hit by an unforeseen disaster led various ...
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Before I starting learning about IT, I'd always seen the word "legacy" as a generally positive one. It's something that politicians try to shape; it's something that a person leaves behind, in terms of something useful to future generations. It's a clean name that future generations may laud.
However, in IT, which is constantly updating and changing, "legacy" implies something like leftovers in the fridge, ruts worn into the road, or ...
Continue reading Legacies, Cosmologies and Unfunded Mandate Technologies
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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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It's often refreshing to hear more traditionalist voices in education - those that will laud lectures, text (as a "reusable technology"), and that will decry some of the strategies used in eLearning. M. David Merrill, a visiting professor from the U of Florida, was one of the presenters who joined us by a live Net-mediated videostream. He described learning as continual and goal-based. Good learning is purposeful, not incidental.
He does ...
Continue reading A Skeptical Voice re: Online Exploratory Environments
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My skeptical supervisor looked askance at the invitation. Indeed, I was not looking to head off to another conference. I had my hopes on a few that I'd submitted proposals to and was waiting to hear back from.
The email invitation was like any number of other electronic come-ons. Upon opening the email, I saw that it was a mass emailing invite to a conference. The email had names and led to a ...
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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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Several presenters at the SALT Orlando Jan. - Feb. 2007 conference echoed a similar point. One was a simulation virtuoso who'd adored this method of learning for 20 years but had yet to see this approach adopted. She said wearily, such technologies - no matter how fantastical and effective - will not sell themselves. Innovations need commercial level promotion. Another presenter, who'd been around from the time of the Plato System, described the slowness with which some technologies "take." He gave ...
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The snippet of information was included deep in the presentation. A fascinating curricular build has been achieved for miners to improve safety. The learning was delivered off of a website as well as through mobile devices. The learning met SCORM 2004 compliance and Section 508 standards. It useful integrated prior existing digital contents. It met the standards of the oversight agency, and it did so under budget and within deadline. They had built in an "accident reporting coach" to help ...
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I'm doing a mental inventory of the various software programs I've decided to purchase from the professional conferences I've attended. Truth is that there have been very few such products. Yet, a staple of various conferences has been that of vendors and salespeople-as-presenters who have a new product or functionality that they'd like to sell. One "inoculation" for me has been that of working in an office full of technoids, who would generally not let me ...
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Elearning's rich functionalities may play a large role in the support and promotion of accelerated learning. A recent conference I attended defined this term as the following type of learning situation. Accelerated learning
This is not to be confused ...
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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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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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One of the more creative forms of teaching online at the university level involves the use of custom-originated case studies. In the Native American learner context, these teaching cases are used to surface new research and to provide learners with more open-ended and analytical learning online.
www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases
The following public site (out of The Evergreen State College) recently debuted and may be helpful.
Continue reading Native American Teaching Case Studies Online
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K-state is hosting the "Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Teachers as Learners" conference on Jan. 8. This day-long conference is the 4th annual teaching renewal retreat. To find out more about this event, visit the site at the following URL.
http://www.k-state.edu/catl/TeachersAsLearners.htm
The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning is hosting this event.
Continue reading Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Teachers as Learners
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by IDOS Newswire
19 November 2006
Eruditio Loginquitas will be presenting on "Online 'Live Personalization' of Learning and Implications for Learning Object Repositories and Automated eLearning" at the C2C Fall Forum Nov. 20 at Hutchinson Community College.
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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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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
22 October 2006
The Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) will be hosting a conference on New Techno in Orlando, FL in early 2007.
The Office of Mediated Education will be participating in this conference by sending a presenter.
http://www.salt.org/fl/orlando.asp
And if that's not enough, Disneyworld is nearby.
Continue reading SALT New Technologies Conference in Orlando, FL Jan. 31 - Feb. 2, 2007
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Building Educational Games and Simulations 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, Union 212. Sign up by 5 p.m. Monday, Oct. 23.
Ever want to jazz up your class with a learning game but just didn't know how to get started? Have you thought about building a simulation but thought it would cost too much money, time, and effort? Join Ben Ward, Instructional Designer for Office of Mediated Education, as we explore the basics of ...
Continue reading The Second Fall IDT Roundtable is on Oct. 25, 2006
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Having back-up speakers for a conference makes a lot of sense. Life happens, and people occasionally cannot show up to present on their expertise. People change their minds. They get sick. Their transportation fails. I'd submitted a paper for a national conference and received my first-ever alternate speaker offer. The offer came with free "tuition" for the conference and the promise that the work (a paper and a slideshow) would appear in the formal CD that came with the ...
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At a recent conference I attended on interactive learning technologies, I noticed intriguing culture clashes among the participants. Four main identifiable groups were engaged in this conference. Most noticeable were those who worked within and for the military. These people brought some of the strongest minds in the field. They were able to design using cutting-edge technologies. They clearly had their own in-house software developers because of what they were able to deliver. They had cozy relationships with some private ...
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The first IDTR for Fall 2006 will be this week. See below for details.
Have you heard of podcasting? Come and learn what podcasting is and how it works. How instructors around the country have utilized this powerful tool. Examples of podcasting used by other universities will be shared. We will discuss and share ideas on the future uses of podcasting.
Continue reading Instructional Design & Technology Roundtables (IDTR)
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"Are you a medical doctor?" asked the man next to me on my airplane row. I was in 18F for all four flights I took to get from Kansas to DC and DC back to Kansas, so I was in my seat by the window sort of above the wing of the plane. It couldn't have been a white jacket and stethoscope. I was in jeans and some cotton top. I had been reading academic articles and dozing now ...
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At the SALT Washington Interactive Technologies conference held in late August, the gaming and simulation track consistently attracted a crowd. Given its popularity, I thought I'd share some highlights from some of the presentations. Gaming offers creative ways to promote education - in cognitive, affective and psychomotor ways.
The games ranged from multiple-choice frames with simple graphics to those with 3D backgrounds to video dramatizations with narrative voiceovers to dashboard simulators. The technologies now can offer some fairly ...
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In a recent conference I attended, I noticed an engaging subtext. Given the tough competition for the LMS / CMS market in both K-12 and higher education, the various companies representing various LMSes were all scoping out the competition. In one presentation, I saw various reps from the various LMS-maker tables attending conferences showcasing each other's products and taking notes furiously onto laptops. There were strategic questions about functionalities. So why are the eportfolios linked to the various courses? What ...
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Writing about t - r in the context of instructional design seems to be inflammatory, potentially evocative of histrionics, and a little over-the-top.
I have a mental note that when I fly out to the SALT Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Virginia in a few days that I'll pack my toothpaste, sunscreen, lipstick and lotion in my check-in baggage. I'll drink my fill of juice before I board. I'll actually buy trial sizes for once...and do a ...
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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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Earlier that Saturday morning, people had been bringing their luggage down to the concierge's desk. This was the third day of a three-day conference that had been intense. It had been full of presentations, roundtables, a reception, a poster session, and various keynote addresses.
Now, it was later afternoon, and others were catching flights across the country. A ragtag band of participants convened in the West Room of the Third Floor of the Renaissance Hotel in Seattle.
They were ...
Continue reading Social and Cultural Implications of Education with Technology
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I got an email from one of my supervisors on a national curriculum design project, and she let slip that she thought I was going on vacation for six days. I was actually hitting the road to present at a national teaching and learning conference in Seattle on my dissertation research (on the role of trust in instructor-led online college courses).
Anyway, I started thinking about all the work that one usually does while on the road. That doesn't ...
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Sometimes, going to a national conference on technology and learning seems to be an exercise in joyful daydreaming. The endeavors tend to be high-minded. Administrators and instructors will talk about standardizing instructors' electronic presentations. They'll talk about setting up standards for online learning across the campus. They'll talk about having instructors do their own multimedia builds. Setting up that alignment between people in an organization may be quite a challenge. Making change is terrifically hard work.
One exercise ...
Continue reading Force-Field Analysis re: Online Learning on Campuses
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 April 2006
Debriefings are often used in learning---to reinforce the main ideas. It's often helpful after a conference to unpack the overloaded suitcases and backpacks to find what the takeaways are from the meeting.
From the Association of American Colleges and University (AAC&U) conference "Learning and Technology: Implications for Liberal Education and the Disciplines" in Seattle (Apr. 20 -- 22, 2006), I ended up with folders of materials, a dozen business cards, lots of URLs, and ideas---plenty of them. The challenge ...
Continue reading White Asparagus, PowerPoints, and Per Diem: Conference Debriefing
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Susan Patrick, the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology of the US Department of Education, spoke at the Beach Museum of Art on Apr. 26 to a receptive crowd. Her talk related to K-state's strengths as an institution of higher education.
Drawing on her national and international level work, she observed that Mexico took three years to digitize its K-12 curriculum in order to maximize their ability to educate its populace.
She shared other inspirational examples and ...
Continue reading Online Teaching and Learning for Global Workforce Training
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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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A number of faculty and staff have contributed to the IDT (Instructional Design Technology) Roundtables, and they deserve our thanks and kudos.
Others who've contributed to make this blog real include: Rob Caffey, Scott Finkeldei, Joshua Works, Andrea Mendoza, and others.
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April 20 (Thur.), 2006 11:00AM - 12:30 PM K-State Union 212
Have you ever thought about using groups in your online class, but weren't sure how to do it? Ever curious about what kinds of activities work well with online groups? Come join us as we walk through the basic "how to" steps for creating and facilitating online groups and then discuss strategies and best practices.
For more information go to the Instructional ...
Continue reading IDT Roundtable - Maximizing Online Student Groups
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March 30 (Thur.), 2006 11:00AM - 12:30 PM K-State Union 212
Blogging is an excellent way to encourage students to process and apply what they've learned - but there are possible hazards and pitfalls instructors must look out for! We'll show you how to start a blog and use it in your classes, and spend a little time exploring the ins and outs of the Blogosphere. Presented by Mike Ribble, Shalin-Hai Jew, Ben ...
Continue reading IDT Roundtable - What the Heck is a Blog and Do I Need One?
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by ID Alochona
13 March 2006
I am on the listserve for C2C, and this is what I received recently:
The 7th Annual Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology (SIDLIT) is scheduled for Thursday and Friday, August 3-4, 2006 at the University of Kansas - Edwards Campus in Overland Park, Kansas. SIDLIT is coordinated jointly by the Colleague to Colleague and Johnson County Community College. Each year SIDLIT focuses on instructional technology and distance education with presentations, hands-on training workshops, and special-interest break-out sessions. More ...
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Feb. 22, 2006 (Wed.) 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. K-State Student Union 212
Join the discussion as we review the research comparing online to face-to-face instruction. Bring examples from your own teaching and questions for your colleagues as we cover the trends and transitions from traditional to digital education.
Presented by Ben Ward, Swasati Mukherjee, and Shalin Hai-Jew, Office of Mediated Education
For more on IDT Roundtables, please go to the following site: http://ome.ksu.edu/id ...
Continue reading IDT Roundtable Feb. 22 Online vs. Face-to-Face Instruction