Blog Entry
Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
Blog Entry
by IDOS Newswire
28 May 2009
Dr. Carla R. Payne of Union Institute and the University of Vermont College has recently edited an edition of a reference text titled "Information Technolgy and Constructivism in Higher Education: Progressive Learning Frameworks."
http://www.igi-global.com/downloads/pdf/33447.pdf
Continue reading IT and Constructivism in Higher Education: Progressive Learning Frameworks
Blog Entry
Faculty members work with a number of audiences. They connect with their colleagues. They work with grant funders. They rub elbows with people from the business world, political environment, and military circles, and others. They work with students. They work with staff. And they also communicate with the general public.
Sometimes, their many constituencies are forgotten by those outside the professoriate or academia.
Faculty often do a great job of presenting concepts and contents to a class; they facilitate learning ...
Continue reading Sophisticates in Communicating by Digital Video
Blog Entry
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)
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
The research literature on global virtual teams is intriguing. Most come from multinational companies that work with global laboratories or global work groups. They talk about multiple languages, time zones, different bridging endeavors, and management techniques. They talk about shared camaraderie mixed with never meeting face-to-face.
It all sounds somewhat exotic, something like an artifact of the business world…when I realize that some recent projects of late have been executed as global virtual teams (GVTs), namely, book endeavors. (I ...
Blog Entry
A recent project is bringing together a cross-functional development team that is distributed, multi-institutional and virtual. The work that people are creating needs to coalesce and work in an interoperable way on multiple learning management systems. The work, of course, also has to be accessible and fully legal in terms of intellectual property. What this meant on the front end is that we would start with a stylebook.
The rationale for a stylebook is to surface ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
This concept sparked with an article of a guitar-playing astrophysicist who writes semi-risque music to make certain elusive astronomy concepts clear.
Part of instructional design work involves getting a sense of an instructor’s workstyle and personality and trying to capture some of that in an online learning experience—so as to engage and motivate learners. For some professors, their public personality is part of their schtick. For others, the personality may be more subtle and nuanced.
A ...
Continue reading Flavor: The Personality Piece in Instructional Design
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
So here was a pretty in-depth online training on two fairly large technological systems. One was an LMS, and one was an instance manager for that LMS. The learning involved the use of various slideshows, animated tutorials, and practice assessments.
In addition, these technical systems are deployed socially, for use in sometimes high-pressured academic environments.
Once all the mechanical parts of this training were built to spec, and the policy aspects for the role of the trainees upon graduation had ...
Continue reading Adding the Human Piece to an Automated Training
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Online learners have become much more diverse now over time, as e-learning has become more mainstreamed and accessible. And in writing classes, people bring much more about the inner texture of their lives. They joyfully share about being rednecks, vegans, Buddhists, and vintners.
In my F2F classes, students would bring in photos of the aftermath of an accident after a jump on the snowboarding slopes with plenty of stained snow. They would bring in slides of their ...
Blog Entry
For many quarters and semesters now, I’ve included a learner lounge space where learners can collaborate, share information, and socialize without any instructor presence. The only caveat is that an instructor will enter the space if something goes awry, and that presence is requested.
This space allows learners to have their own privacy, and it stands in the place of four-walls hallway conversations and chitter-chatter that doesn’t include the instructor.
I’ve ...
Blog Entry
Professor John Scigliano’s initiation into online space was not very salutary the way he tells it. He had logged on to Second Life when he was approached by a “furry” in lizard form, who promptly assaulted his avatar. This professor at the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences of Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, was somewhat traumatized, the way he tells it.
In “Payoffs, Spin-offs, and Ripoffs in Virtual Worlds: What Gain? What Pain?” at the ...
Continue reading IRBs, Video Releases and 3D Virtual Avatars
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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 ...
Blog Entry
At the beginning of summer term, learners tentatively begin preweek with some tentative emails. There are the queries about books, where digital resources may be, and some other probes about the class. There are the few brave souls who'll crack a joke or two. There are some who'll come rambling in with a raft of personal questions. There's the perennial sharing of nicknames and preferred choices of how the students want to be addressed ...
Blog Entry
Dr. Xiangen Hu (University of Tennessee) presented at a recent conference on intelligent tutoring systems. He suggests that computer tutors may solve learner problems by tracking the history of learners' academic performances and their interactions with the computer and curriculum. However, to build such systems, a numerical value must be given to a stimulus-response pair (with behaviorist underpinnings) in the interactions. The computer tutors use natural language interactions, and he later said that for any ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
Like the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz, I have been thinking of heart and the lack of it. What sparked this was a face-to-face meeting with some of my online students. Usually, it takes a while to build relationships to the point where candor is assumed. In this case, the candor came right out early on. Students "check heart" before they can take risks with an instructor. The question was, did I have a "heart" for them?
Blog Entry
I wouldn't have believed the following if it hadn't actually happened. My students and I were chatting about one thing or another when one of them mentioned that she weighed 350 pounds and had problems with her walking. The shock came not from any weight revelation but from my realizing that I'd forgotten that my students had bodies. We were engaging totally cognitively, and the other aspects of their lives had dropped away.
Blog Entry
So I was at a fair in Puyallup, Washington. In doing a basic walk-around to see what to sample, I noticed two people wearing full head-gear. They had some attachments to their arms and were jabbing at unseen fighters or adversaries in the hot afternoon, a few years ago. They seemed and were oblivious to the crowd around them. They reminded me of how people sometimes sing to themselves while wearing earbuds...and maybe rendering something out-of-tune ...
Blog Entry
Pre-Online Lurking Pre-online times, lurking had a very negative connotation. It suggested someone with ulterior motives scoping out a target or multiple targets. Now, the online version of "lurking" often is mentioned with a laugh. There's something charming about observing others in online space as a quiet non-participant.
Lurking Experience I've only lurked in online space once. I logged onto a parallel universe sort of site to check out its learning possibilities but probably didn't get past ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
As I sit at my desk and struggle to select a blog name for myself I wonder is it really that difficult to come up with a name that will represent me truly?
My colleagues have really been very encouraging in helping me to figure out my blog name. They have helped me brainstorm on names such as "ID Diva", "Pitch up" and "Metadata". They keep checking with me everyday if I have concluded on anything. To their disappointment I ...
Blog Entry
One of my colleagues has been struggling mightily to name herself as a blogger. She has an open promise that I'll update and change any references to her based on her new name. She has gone through dozens of different incarnations and tried them all on and discarded them like a heap of hats. Representing "self" in online space is no easy feat. There are about a million ways to be misread and misunderstood. Ideas may ...