Blog Entry
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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The folks I know in academia have mixed feelings about peer review. “Peer review” simply means that colleagues have a lot of power over one’s teaching, one’s social standing, one’s publications, and one’s contributions to a field.
Peers are the “gatekeepers” in academia. They have a say on tenure. They have a say about whether one presents at conferences. They critique articles and chapters and suggest whether works should appear in public venues or not. They ...
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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
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Wired Magazine is hosting a contest to see how easily findable one of their reporters may be if he is active as a virtual citizen but is moving around incognito.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=8412415&page=1
How tight is the "digital enclosure"?
P.S. This is assuming that law enforcement's prodigious resources aren't being employed--so no official systems are involved...but just for regular citizens, how effective can they be in finding someone who ...
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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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One of my recent projects has involved the use of peer education, or the use of students to serve as supporters and peer advisors for fellow students on issues of acclimating to campus and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. These programs involve some vetting and training of students to support these services. This endeavor is a way to save on funds, but it’s also about packaging important information in a way that may be more effectively delivered to people—through ...
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A recent project highlighted the phenomena of designing websites to deliver information for synchronous wide-scale interactions. This refers to the delivery of information (via text and multimedia) to a broad-spectrum audience in real-time, often in a crisis or emergency situation. One aspect of this is that the information is not only for situational awareness but for decision supports—making choices in real time and with real implications.
Some basic tenets of crisis communications involve the need for having ...
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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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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
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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)
Blog Entry
In most academic fields, editors and publishers play a gatekeeper function by vetting the articles that make it into their vaunted pages (whether paper or digital). These roles involve a lot of power and a lot of responsibility and discretion. New faculty’s careers may be made or broken based on their publishing records. Even those who have published widely and are long-term tenured faculty have a stake in their reputations with the public and their peers when they publish ...
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Dr. Marilla D. Svinicki, a professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, spoke Mar. 30 at K-State in a presentation titled “Changing student (and faculty) attitudes about who’s responsible for learning”. This was presented as part of the provost’s lecture series.
She described a mis-match between learner and instructor expectations of each other, particularly over issues of who is responsible for what in a course. She led the audience through activities in which the ...
Blog Entry
Most major universities have branch campuses, many in-state and some abroad. Instructional design skills may not be a priority in some of the branch campuses, but the needs for that skill set exist in those branches as well.
There have been endeavors to reach out to our local branch campus by live webcasting of presentations. There are invitations to main campus events. And we will sometimes travel out to the branch to do face-to-face and interactive presentations. We work to ...
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ELATEwiki is the Electronic Learning And Teaching Exchange created and edited by those interested in advancing the use of technology in teaching. This site is intended to host a wealth of freely available information categorized and organized into E-Learning and Teaching topics useful to teachers, scholars, students, and administrators seeking to understand the dynamic and changing higher education landscape during this critical time of transformation.
The concept for ELATEwiki emerged during a series of conversations among members of K-State’s ...
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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
Blog Entry
One current project involves launching a wiki focused around e-learning that will be going global once we have legal cover and a few more understandings and skills in the MediaWiki technology. This endeavor will involve something that involves a pretty massive leap of trust: the building of shared knowledge with quality maintained by community standards.
What makes this harder to anticipate is that the definition of “community” is not clear. As with most wikis, the wikimaster is ...
Blog Entry
I was revisiting one of the projects that I served as instructional designer on and noticed in a very tiny font that the site now identifies the sponsoring university. This project had been brainstormed and evolved with the help of several dozen students, and the consensus then (and now) has been to soft-pedal the university tie. The rationale was to let the interactive site stand on its own merits and contents, and the greater access and support for our university ...
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
by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 February 2009
A recent book I’ve been reading talks about a nation’s power in part as ideational. Besides its economy and its military clout, a nation has “soft power,” the ability to influence other nations and peoples through the power of its ideas. This is about using charisma and the strength of ideas. Some of the more engaging ideas of late have involved Web 2.0 or the collaboration around shared ideas.
In that light, I’ve been thinking about ...
Continue reading The Ideational Power of Open Source and Creative Commons Releases
Blog Entry
For years now, I’ve been watching freshman and sophomore students interact with each other in a variety of online courses. Even though most of the learning in my courses are asynchronous, the general co-learning in time among college students really enhances the learning experience.
For one, online learners seem very supportive of each other. They pass along kudos and encouragements. They share personal life stories. They share photos—of desserts, of artwork, of ducks from a duck hunt, of ...
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. Allen G. Johnson presented as part of the Provost’s Lecture Series and participated in MLK Day events at K-State. He gave a presentation based on “Power, Privilege and Difference,” which is based on his most recent book. As a full-time author and speaker with a long history in academia, Johnson came highly recommended to the campus.
He suggested that the debates around the recent presidential campaigning avoiding hot-button issues of ...
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A small team has been researching and mulling the idea of launching an e-learning faculty wiki for “the good of the order” and as a university contribution to the Web-enabled information spaces. The idea would be to use the wiki to surface implicit knowledge and also to create a professional community mediated through technologies.
The team diligently scoped out the competition through direct research and queries posted to professional listservs. They found quality wikis like Edutech ...
Continue reading Early Proposal of a New E-Learning Faculty Wiki
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Dr. Michael Wesch has offered a view of disruptive informational technos and their impacts on learning...
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able
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K-State’s Counseling Services has launched a new interactive website for K-State’s students to promote mental wellness, particularly in relation to preventing suicide. The site offers information for various protective factors to promote student mental health and resiliency.
The site is based on a metaphor of a café, with the idea that students, faculty and staff, will create a sense of warm virtual community that will help make K-State a better place for all. At the site’s center ...
Continue reading The University Life Cafe Promoting Mental Wellness
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.
Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little ...
Continue reading A Phone Interview about Culturally Sensitive E-Learning
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Dr. 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
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
Blog Entry
Every quarter or two or three, I get into an online scape. Most scrapes can be seen forming like a storm cloud from a long way away. Usually, a student takes offense at a perceived slight because they’ve received a particular comment about their writing. They’ve conflated their idea of self with their work. Or their grades aren’t what they feel they deserve: they assume that they have earned full points before they’ve done any work ...
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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)
Blog Entry
From the outside (as a non-lawyer), disclaimers read like legalized clauses that say, “Here are very limited uses of this site, and don’t hold me legally responsible for what others do or say.” A recent project involved plenty of research and pursuit of the legal concepts and practices behind defining a “Terms of Service” for a site that involves both public and private contents for college students, in a site designed to build a protective wall and support around ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 August 2008
Dr.Michael Wesch’s "digital anthropology" presentation to the Library of Congress resulted in a thought-provoking video that has garnered a lot of airplay.
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179
Some of his observations about virtual “community” showed people with the art of mimicry and highly suggestible in terms of following others’ actions (something like lemmings).
Seeing Dr. Wesch’s presentation and then reading Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007 ...
Blog Entry
In student journalism, faculty and advisors work hard to shepherd student work forward towards publication—often locally and then in larger and larger venues. Students had a chance to evolve their work. They made mistakes in small venues before risking mistakes in the larger ones. Some of you already know where I’m going with this.
Students today often publish to the world early on. Various classes may require blogging or wiki postings. While these may ...
Blog Entry
It doesn’t take long for the doctoral students to find their way to those involved in instructional design. There’s research on quality matrices, hybrid learning strategies, interactive television, strategic deployment of e-learning, and any number of other issues and combinations of issues.
The outreaches come through on listservs, broadcast or micro-cast emails, telephone calls, online surveys, shoutouts at conferences, face-to-face queries, and conferences.
Students want advice. They want readers for their draft chapters. They want access and connections ...
Blog Entry
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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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
In the quest for high learner retention and high participation, one strategy in the building of CSCL spaces (computer supported collaborative learning) has been to encourage the building of so-called “back channels.”
In all sorts of communication environments, having such informal back channels is useful. It allows for richer interchanges without people having to necessarily go on the formal record. And if vetted, such information can be highly useful and pro-social and pro-learning.
One example of such ...
Continue reading Developing Back Channels for Online Learners
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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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Antoinette Bruciati's "Online Social Networking Communities: Issues for Educators" presentation at the SALT conference in Virginia sparked a cultural divide between some instructors and some technologists.
The gist of her presentation was of the number of risks that young people face online in various social venues. She pointed out various types of predatorial behavior of adults (apparently) in online spaces while she went undercover as a young person. She showed various software ...
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One of the coolest things about reading other people's research is how immersed people may be in their respective fields and how maybe even a part of their learning may have impact on what I do (or even think).
Most of us have likely engaged with informal learning. Learning...to rollerblade...about the real estate market...how to cook a particular type of food...and how to use a new software program...often is ...
Continue reading Informal or Untaught Learning ... and eSpaces
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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
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
One of my favorite books in my recent spate of studies had to do with Annalee Saxenian's Regional Advantage, which discussed the "culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (ripped from the book's subtitle). This author examined how Silicon Valley came out ahead because of its proximity to major institutions of higher learning like Stanford University and the synergies that come from informal and formal alliances and the sharing of knowledge. By contrast, Route 128 is ...
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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 ...
Blog Entry
An online community shares some common traits: a shared purpose, a semi-defined membership, planned and unplanned interactivity and inter-communications, shared resources, shared virtual spaces, a sense of mutual respect and civility and a simulation of the outside non-virtual world.
I was thinking about the Instructional Design Open Studio (IDOS) community here that will hopefully evolve from this blog. Then I looked at some of the research I ran across in terms of virtual communities.
The rules are to not have ...
Blog Entry
One of the cooler branches of business research and online applications has been that in virtual teaming. In 2004, Jill E. Nemiro's Creativity in Virtual Teams was published. Other works (J. Richard Hackman, others) have certainly engaged very practical issues of virtual teaming. It struck me that even if this issue hasn't been purposefully addressed that most of us in our work have "virtual teamed". Mediated by technologies, we have worked with others for certain end means maybe ...