SITE05: Platform decisions, PC or Mac?

Anyone who knows me knows I love my Mac. So I was interested in a presentation about a college struggling with the decision about whether to buy/support macs or PCs. They had PC people and Mac people work together to evaluate the advantages of both platforms. Here's some of their findings:

Servers
Mac servers were more reliable. One person claimed to run with Mac servers for three or four years without ever rebooting because of problems.

Security
59,940 Windows-based identified viruses
60 Macintosh viruses, based on OS 9 not OS 10
'Nuff said.

iEverything
iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iPages, and a bunch of other free, easy-to-use programs that are ideal for schools and students on a budget.

Software
PCs have more freeware and software available. (very true-but that is changing with more opensource Apple stuff coming out)

Other issues
PCs computer of choice in some careers and some high schools
Support infrastructure was greater with PCs

The dean's decision was to use both Macintoshes and PCs. He wanted to terminate the Macs, but there was enough convincing evidence to still include them.

Good for him! :-) I'll agree that there is definitely advantages to both platforms, and personally feel students should be taught to be able to use both, in case they ever need to.

Random SITE notes

Yesterday was the poster session here at SITE, and they have an excellent model for poster sessions that I WISH AECT WOULD DO (did I get anyone's attention?). At SITE, all of the poster presentations are the same day, same time, in the same room. The benefit of this is more people come to your poster presentation. At AECT, I rarely go to poster presentations because they are often not the most-developed ideas and research studies. That's okay, and that's not necessarily a criticism, that's just the way it is. The same is true at SITE, but because I can quickly look at 116 poster sessions at one time, it makes it worthwhile for me.

At AECT, it seems people rarely go to poster sessions, and consequently, people rarely stay by their posters because why should they if nobody comes? But at SITE, EVERYBODY goes to the poster session because it's a quick way to take in many ideas all at once.

I wish AECT would do this.

_____________________

Last night I went with some friends to the Mesa LDS temple. That was a wonderful experience. What a beautiful building and temple grounds! Talk about aromatherapy--we walked around for a little while and just drank in the blossoming flowers and lemon trees. I actually quite like Phoenix and Mesa--more so than other large towns. If only it wasn't so awfully hot for half of the year.

_____________________

Charles Graham from BYU posted on his blog about a presentation he went to yesterday on Internet safety. It's at http://ipt286.blogspot.com/2005/03/internet-safety.html#comments

_____________________

One thing that AECT does do well that I wish was here at SITE (sorry to directly compare conferences, but these are the only two conferences I've attended for two years in a row), is how AECT members are open, friendly, and wanting to meet and talk to new people. At AECT I've never had trouble finding groups of people to go socialize with or with whom to go out to dinner. SITE participants don't seem to be quite that way, and if you don't come with a group, you might be spending some time alone. How (not) fun is that?

SITE05: Our presentation on Tech in Higher Education

I'll reflect briefly on our presentation yesterday (Dr. Charles Graham and I). I'd post up the conference paper here, but I can't get my server to work while I'm here in Phoenix for some reason.

Anyway, it was a roundtable reporting a project Charles and I worked on together last year that will be published in Educational Technology in a few months. Basically, we asked instructional designers on campus and department chairs for recommendations of the most "innovative" technology-using instructors on campus at BYU (admittedly, "inovative" is very subjective and means different things to different people, but what can you do ...). We interviewed about 40 of the most creative/succesfull of these teachers (based on their perceptions of success and our perceptions of creativity--again very subjective), and tried to identify some global patterns indicating how technology was impacting learning in this classrooms. This was exploratory research, and we wanted to just get an idea of what the "master" teachers were doing across campus.

We found many exciting and interesting applications of technology, and five overall patterns that seemed to span multiple colleges and departments:

1. Technology helped learners to visualize content
2. Technology facilitated learner/instructor and learner/learner interactions
3. Technology supported meaningful learner reflection
4. Technology involved learners in authentic, real-life learning activities
5. Technology improved the quality and quantity of learner practice

Anyway the upcoming article gives case study snippets and support for how teachers were using technology in these five ways. But I won't go into that now.

I felt the presentation went well--I counted about 25 people attending. A couple people were questioning at first about what our terminology meant, what our criteria for selecting cases were, and ideas for applying this research. Admittedly, those are issues with this project because of the focus of the project. Charles explained it well: This was exploratory research--so our methods were not clearly defined but more flexible and developed as we moved through the project. Basically we wanted to see what was happening, and get ideas for future projects. In fact we've delved a little deeper into a couple of the issues we identified and will address those in future articles that we're working on right now.

Now we've got to try and nail down what exactly we will be presenting on Saturday, but does anyone even stick around until Saturday?

SITE05: Using video models to train teachers to use Technology

SITE05: "From Text to Video: The Evolution of Video Case Study for Teacher Professional Development"
Pamela Redmond, Univ. of San Francisco

I was interested in this session because as we have tried to help preservice teachers get the vision of how to integrate technology into their teaching, we have found that the use of models is very important. We have used both video case studies, and “live” modeling where the instructor roleplays an effective lesson with the preservice students. In fact, I’m presenting on this on Saturday.
This group is creating a website database of video case studies at http://www.teachinginterchange.org.

They asked: Should video cases show authentic classroom footage, exemplary footage, or what?

Comment: I think some of both is good, but they should be clearly marked. I think we’re all interested in best cases most of the time, but my interviews with preservice teachers concludes that many do not pay attention to video case studies or give them much credibility because they know they are best cases, and in their minds, not realistic. So it’d be useful to have some authentic classroom footage, to give credibility to the students that something positive—even if it’s not the best practice and has a few minor problems—CAN happen in a classroom. This would also help them see “what is really happening” so they can reflect on what they want to do differently.

“You can send students out to observe classes, but they don’t know what they are looking at—they don’t know how to deconstruct.”

I’ve found this is true. No matter how good the model, students often don’t know how to learn from the model. How do you teach these tacit skills? They are crucial to truly learning and becoming good teachers, but it’s hard to teach students to reflectively learn from video case studies and other models.

SITE: Maybe unfinished studies CAN be valuable

SITE05: Christopher Sessums, Univ. of Florida
"Examining the teaching styles of online instructors: A proposed research study of online instructors at the university of Florida."

Quoted Marcel Proust
"The only real voyage of discovery ... consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes."

How do we help teachers to think differently about education online, so they realize that teaching online is not just using old methods with a new tool, but means actually changing your methods to match the new tool?

He is proposing using an instrument to track how teachers interact online, and how students perceive their teachers interacting online, and overlay Grasha's metaphors on these results:

Grasha's metaphors, or orientations: (think in terms of a continuum)
Expert
Formal authority
Personal model
Facilitator
Delegator

Research questions:
1. will the two sets of perceptions be aligned?
2. determine reliability/validity of results

Comment: Unusual that a research proposal was accepted, when not only is the study not completed, but it hasn't even begun! He hasn't even begun to collect data! But, I'm glad he was accepted and that I attended. He has some good ideas for how to research online teaching, and his presentation was engaging and well-prepared, and I'd like to work with him on a project like this.

This brings to mind the discussion going round about whether AECT should accept projects that aren't yet completed. I think we should--IF THEY ARE GOOD. We can learn as much from good ideas and research methods as we can from results because we all need to research and publish anyway.

Survey Instruments
http://insight.southcentralrtec.org/ilib/delesi/delesi.htm
http://insight.southcentralrtec.org/ilib/delesa/delesa.htm

The lady next to me in this session said this is a valuable website, that stores other instruments available for use.

Balance between learning and applying

Paul Allen of Infobase Ventures wrote an interesting column in connect-utah.com this week. He made the point that we all knew, but it's good to be reminded:

"The paradox for knowledge workers is this: the more time you spend in gaining knowledge, the less time you have to apply it. The reverse is also true. We must strike a proper balance between learning and doing. Most people have their nose to the grindstone. Very few spend enough time, energy and money in a quest to gain and process knowledge. But maybe the Web can change this. With the Web, each of us can make a list of all the experts in our field and track their every move and their every word."

With over 100 feeds to my Bloglines account; gigabytes of books, podcasts, and talks on my iPod; and papers all over my house that I should be reading striking the balance between gaining knowledge and taking the time to reflectively apply it is tough. That's a needed skill in the information age that I still need to hone.

I wish I had been taught information literacy skills in school--remind me why embracing the digital age and emphasizing the skills needed for this new era isn't taught more in schools? :-)

Another clip from the article, basically saying we need to spend some time and money teaching employees (and I'd say students) how to use the information available for professional development:

"Why pay someone $50,000 a year and not spend 3 or 4 percent more to help them stay sharp?

Good point, Paul!

Comics through your aggregator

Just for fun, if you can't live without your daily comics (and I can't :-) then try comicalert.com, a service that allows you to pick your favorite comics and generate a RSS feed for you. I also like that it doesn't break copyright laws, because instead of sending the comic directly to your news reader, it sends a link each day to comic's website, where you can view or ignore their advertising. It means an extra click to get the comic each day, but I'm willing to do that if it helps support the artist.

If you're lazy and don't want to subscribe and create your own list of favorites, you can borrow mine:
http://xml.comicalert.com/runninrick/rss.xml

A ranking of the top podcasts

Just found out about Podcast Alley from Paul Allen. Looks like it provides links to the most popular podcasts on the 'Net. Now that's useful, because I don't have time to listen to everything. Now we need someone within AECT to put together a site like this for stuff related to instructional technology and design. I was asked by somebody the other day what podcasts I'd recommend that were related to our field. The only one I knew of were those located on ITConversations, but a lot of those are for developers and technogeeks, not necessarily instructional designers.

If you are aware of other podcasts or downloadable audio that is related to the field of instructional design, please let me know! One idea that I think would fly would be to create a site where departments could upload seminars conducted at their conference. We have weekly professional seminars in our department that are recorded and stored on our server. I'd love to have a repository for all of these recordings from other universities as well, if they have.

What a great resource that would be--to be able to listen to the presentations made by others in the field whom we can't afford to fly out to Provo to listen to them live. For that matter, why doesn't AECT record some of its conference presentations and post them on a members-only (if they want to go that route, if copyright is an issue) portion of the AECT site. That way we don't disenfranchise paying members who can't attend the conference but are interested in some of the presentations.

I would be the most loyal listener to that kind of material!

SITE: Wednesday's Keynote

I'm at the SITE conference (Society for information technology and teacher education) in Phoenix AZ. Being from Utah, this was a convenient and easy conference to attend. I went last year, and had a good experience, so I submitted some of the projects I've been working on. I'll be presenting later today, Friday and Saturday with Dr. Charles Graham and Geoff Wright. More on that later.

As is my custom, I'll be blogging my notes from the sessions I attend, or at least some of them. My formatting style will be to put my comments/reflections in italics. Whether anyone reads it or not, it's helpful for me to organize my thoughts.

The keynote today was:

Yong Zhao “The Social life of technology: an ecological analysis of technology diffusion in schools and its implications for teacher professional development”

Mr. Zhao asks:

1. How much is spent on computer technology in schools?
2. How many good uses for computer tech have been developed?
3. How much are computers used in schools?
4. How well are computers used?

OECD, 2004 report: investments have brought computer tech into nearly all schools in the world. But they are not used well.

Mr. Zhao talked about the difference between an innovation and an appliance, and the issue is largely one of transparency:

Innovations
Expensive
Rare
Evolving functions
Unreliable
Little expertise
Little social capital
Innovations: Introducing something new

Appliance
Affordable
Widespread
fixed functions
more reliable
more expertise
rich social capital
Appliance: A tool designed for a specific function

Mr. Zhao explained three stages of IT integration
1. Psychological
2. Sociological “I want to replicate it in other situations”
3. Ecological “It’s part of the environment … We can’t study schools without noticing
computers. They are there.

He explained that Ecology comes from Greek “oikos”, meaning “household” combined with “logy” meaning “the study of”. I like the idea of studying the integration of technology as the study of a household, or what occurs naturally.

Classrooms as Ecosystems

• Computers are constantly evolving
• Consume resources
• The survival of a technology is how “fit” it is for a certain environment

Here’s an interesting quote from Mr. Zhao:

“Ask your students, and they will not be able to tell you very many different ways to use computers, to draw, to paint, (to type).”

That is sad. Computing technologies are so powerful, and all we usually use them for is typing and drawing. That was so five years ago! J It reminds me of friends who want the biggest, baddest processors and souped-up machines so they can just surf the web. Can we find more powerful applications of these technologies?

Zhao's lessons learned from his study of the ecological practice of using technologies

• Give the idea some time to grow. Do not implement too many ideas at once
• Encourage play instead of teach – ideas evolve because teachers played and understood the technology
• Connect to existing practices/beliefs

Some of these seem not to be too "ah-hah", but perhaps it's good to remind ourselves of these things. I did like his point that too many innovations can make change too difficult. I also buy into systemic change ideas, but I see the logic in both arguments.

I've now enabled trackback

As David prompted me, it really was time to enable trackback on this blog. Unfortunately, Blogger does not offer this service, so I had to install HaloScan, a free commenting and trackback service. It's easy to do, but when you comment on this blog, it will pop up their window, instead of blogger's with some annoying advertising underneath the commenting window. At least one of these ads, I felt, was offensive. So ignore that, please.

I really do need to get my blog hosted somewhere where I can use Wordpress ... I just need to get around to doing it.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Schools: What we're doing isn't working

And it's not me saying it:

Virginia Governor Mark Warner:
""We can't keep explaining to our nation's parents or business leaders or college faculties why these kids can't do the work,"

Bill Gates
""America's high schools are obsolete," Gates said. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools _ even when they're working as designed _ cannot teach all our students what they need to know today."

Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee:
""This is an issue that transcends all those typical things that cause people to split in different directions"

These quotes are from an AP story published by Yahoo! News. Schools aren't ready to prepare today's students for tomorrow's workplace. But the biggest problem is so few people realize this, so most are content with just trying to patch the current system. What I think is particularly funny is that everyone's answer for improving schools is to give them more money--where is the data that money equates better instruction? It's helpful to have money, of course, but this is a false assumption of causality. The reason this happens is because it's easier to simply tax and spend than actually think about what good instruction means, what the world is becoming and what our children need to learn, and then having the guts to suggest the kind of radical overhaul needed.

Google's secret: Save time for innovation

This is something I've been wanting to blog about but have been pretty busy lately. You know, that thesis thing that everyone says is important ...

Recently there's been some buzz about Google's allocation of employee time, the "70/20/10" split as reported by EWeek. Basically, employees spend 70% of their time working on main projects, 20% of their time working on adjacent projects (like Froogle, Google News, and other beta projects), and 10% of their time working on personal pet projects that may or may not pan out, may or may not be useful, but that are sure fun to play around with.

How brilliant! At other businesses, spending time off-project working on things you like would be called "wasting your time" or "being distracted at work." But Google calls it "innovation." THAT'S why Google is the hottest company out there right now, and will stay that way for a while. As Paul Allen put it:

"Most companies operate from the top-down. Managers tell employees what to do. Executives make all the resource allocation decisions. But Google has embraced a philosophy which I think can revolutionize the business world--if other companies are smart enough to adopt it. While the most talented, creative, and entrepreneurial people leave companies like Microsoft in frustration in order to start their own enterprises, Google has created an environment where the most talented, creative, and entrepreneurial employees can play in their own sandbox, attract attention and support from top management, and have their pet projected funded within the company. I understand that Larry and Sergei keep a list of the top 100 pet projects in the company. Many of the existing services which Google offers (including Orkut and Google News) were developed by employees. I expect to see hundreds more innovating and exciting free services coming from Google in the coming years. I see more innovation here than from almost all the other top internet companies combined."

Top 100 gadgets of all time

Mobile PC magazine just released their list of the top 100 gadgets of all time. Of course, like all top 100 lists (don't we have too many of those now a days?) the decisions are completely arbitrary and subjective. But like other lists, it's also fun to see where your favorite gadget stacks up. Included on the list is the abacus, iPod, walkman, pez dispenser, scissors, stapler, TiVo, and others. The prestigious number 1 position goes to the Apple Powerbook 100 of 1991. Here's why:

"Never mind the Apple versus PC debate: Until Apple unveiled this 5.1-pound machine, most "portable" computers were curiosities for technophiles with superior upper-body strength. But the PowerBook 100's greatest and most lasting innovation was to move the keyboard toward the screen, leaving natural wrist rests up front, as well as providing an obvious place for a trackball. It seems like the natural layout now, but that's because the entire industry aped Apple within months. The first PowerBooks captured an astounding 40 percent of the market, but more important, they turned notebook computers into mainstream products and ushered in the era of mobile computing that we're still living in today."

Seeing Apple on top made me smile.

Of course, like all lists, some gadgets turned up missing. Everyone has their favorites. Among mine on the DNA ("did not appear") list are: flashlights, cell phones, digital voice recorders, eyeglasses, and DVD players. I know I'm forgetting others--the hardest thing is to think explicitly about gadgets so transparent that we forget about them, but couldn't live without them if they were taken away.

Any favorites not on the list? I'd love to hear them!

Sold on Google

Well, Google's done it again! I'm already a huge fan of their search engine, scholarly search, news alerts, email service, and other innovations.

Add Google maps to that now.

I've always been loyal to Mapquest, but I tried out Google maps for the first time today and I'm never going back. Here's why:
- If you type in the city a little wrong, Google searches for what you might have meant. I've gotten really annoyed lately that Mapquest will reject any search if you don't have it exactly right (S. for "South" and so on)
- zooming in on Mapquest maps takes way too long, so I usually don't do it. With Google's service, it's as easy as a scroll bar and immediately resizes the map without the wait!
- I thought this was slick: When I printed out my directions, the map printed on one page, and the directions printed on a second page. There was no extra stuff usually associated with printing from internet sites. Cool!

Can Google ever go wrong? Is it too late to put my retirement in Google stock :-)

View your Flickr Networks

Ever wondered how your tangle of contacts/thoughts/ideas related to each other? Now there's a tool called Flickr Graph that dynamically shows you how your Flickr images relate to each other. To quote:

" Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs."

This is really quite wild. You click on any node, and it becomes the center of the graph with all relationships dynamically linked. I'm not sure exactly how I'd use this ... or when I'd find time to use it ... but this is cool.

Here's an image of the tool from cogdogblog, and try it out yourself at http://www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/flickrgraph.cfm?q=willrich








Now this is what we need ... (Edugadget Blog)

There is a lot of blogging out there about new technologies, written for information technologists. There is also a lot of blogging for teachers about how to integrate technologies that are already known. Finally it seems that somebody has put together a blog geared towards reviewing the latest, most cutting-edge tools available for teachers, with some discussion about application. The site is Edugadget, and you can access it here, or get the rss feed here. The site looks fairly new now, so it's hard to say how good it will be. But I like the idea and will add it to my Bloglines account for a little while to see what they put out. Hopefully it will not be overkill on blogging/podcasting technologies (which it has quite a few posts on right now) but on many different tools coming out for teachers.

IPods popular among Microsoft employees

I thought this was funny. Wired magazine reports that iPods are wildly popular among Microsoft employees -- and that as much as 80 percent of the employees who use mp3 players (which is most of them) use iPods.

And Mr. Gates and the administration hate it.

"So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use."

iPods have also taken over our campus here at BYU - I swear everyone got one for Christmas. Last semester, they were rare ... now they are almost as prevalent, it seems, as cell phones, as people walk to class with distinguishable white earbuds poking out of their ears. Our campus newspaper reported yesterday about this phenomenon.

It's really not any surprise. What a cool gadget. Being the audiobook addict that I am, I'm loving my iPod. I don't have time to read, even though I enjoy a good book ... but I do have time to listen to something on my way to school or while exercising. MP3 players are only going to grow in popularity as the competition gets more intense, and prices drop.

The future in technology is to allow people instant access to any media or information on demand, as evidenced by iPods, TIVO, and rss. The iPod is one step in that direction, and eventually I hope to see devices, continuously connected to the Internet that allow instant access to anything audio, video, or text-based. Then you can personalize your own learning, listening, viewing, or reading WHAT you want, WHEN you want, and maximizing your free time for something useful instead of just listening to whatever's on the radio, or viewing whatever's on the TV.

What if a home PC cost $100?

Well it does ... or it can. Red Herring announced the other day that MIT Media Lab says they can build a home PC for $100. To quote:

The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution.

Someday, we'll be able to go to Wal-mart and buy a decent computer for the price of yesterday's VCRs. What kind of implications will that have for education? I have taught preservice teachers for the past year and a half how to use educational technologies, and I was constantly amazed and frustrated with their constant pessimism. If I had a dollar for every time I heard or could see in their eyes, "Well, we won't have technology in the school where I will teach" -- then I'd be going to Vancouver in April to the ISPI conference. They struggled to understand that while they may not have sufficient technology tools when they first start teaching (although I don't agree with that necessarily either), but give it five years, and they will.

When computers cost $100, and we can give one to every student, how will education change? When you can pick up wireless internet in any building in the developed world, and can have instant access to anything you want to know, will we still pretend that as teachers we are the only way students will gain any piece of information? When will we realize that we need to get ready for a new age, a new time when we'll need to teach very differently than we have in the past. Information Age? I get the feeling that we have no idea just how easy, available, and ubiquitous information will be in a few short years.

Starving Student Software

Want some cool software on a student (i.e. nonexistent) budget? I just heard that some good folks at my university (BYU) have put together a starving student software collection of free, but useful, software programs. You can download it at

http://uug.byu.edu/ftp/sss/

Brittanica's credibility questioned

Remind me again why Encyclopedia Brittanica is so much more credible than wikipedia? Especially after a 12-year-old finds several errors in their 15th edition?

Read more:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1456119,00.html

Teaching students something more ...

I really enjoyed this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, reprinted today by ucomics:

http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1994/01/27/

I often have felt like Calvin. I have a pretty good verbal memory, and it was easy for me to memorize words, especially, and numbers to regurgitate on tests. But did that mean I learned anything? No, not necessarily. Learning has to be more than known facts, dates, and principles. Right now I am working on some research with Drs. Allen and Graham here at BYU considering just what learning entails. We feel that students' learning needs to create a change in the students: a change in what they know, what they can do, but then something else as well. That something else is difficult to nail down. Is it a change in motivation? Feeling? Attitude? Character? Emotional Intelligence? What does it mean to truly become a __________ (fill in with words like "journalist" or "nurse" or whatever), and how can teachers/trainers help students to do this?

List of blogging references

I must have missed this before (How did that happen), but I was glad to find today a list of references of blog-related publications. Here it is:

http://blogresearch.com/ref.htm

But I have not yet begun to debate!

Do you ever feel that things in the blogosphere move too quickly to really digest? Maybe even if I had all day to mull over what I read in my morning jog around the Internet ...

For example, I used to be a journalist for the Idaho Falls Post Register and Logan Herald Journal. I also love to blog. So I have some interest in the debate over blogs vs. traditional journalism. I read what Will Richardson, and others say, and know their debates that traditional journalism will slowly disappear or diminish as more people get news from first-hand accounts. I think they're right ... to some extent. But I still read my morning paper. There are things I want from a newspaper, and things I want from blogs. I'm still not sure what those "things" are--I'm still thinking about that. That's why I haven't posted my thoughts here on my blog yet on this topic. I have thoughts, but they are not developed enough to speak aloud yet.

But I guess I'm too late! Because now Jay Rosen declares the debate is over, before I could even join the debate. Here's a few snippets, by way of Will:

Bloggers vs. journalists is over. I don't think anyone will mourn its passing. ... In the final weeks of its run, we were getting bulletins from journalists like this one from John Schwartz of the New York Times, Dec. 28: "For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs."...

The question now isn't whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn't whether bloggers "are" journalists. They apparently are, sometimes. We have to ask different questions now because events have moved the story forward. By "events" I mean things on the surface we can see, like the tsunami story, and things underneath that we have yet to discern.

I think for me, the biggest issue is credibility. I know by saying this that any hard-core bloggers reading this will be upset. I agree that journalists are not always credible, and they are biased. But so are bloggers. But bloggers don't lose their job or get forced to retire if they get caught lying. So there does seem to be a credibility check with journalism. I agree that ultimately, we must become discerning readers, able to sift out the bogus from the true for ourselves. But it's a lot easier to do that if a good share of the bogus is already sifted out before we ingest it.

Can blogs and journalists co-exist? I think so, and I hope so. They provide credibility checks for each other. But I don't think I'll ever read a blog first for my news -- I'll read a news website for the first story, and then read the blogs to get the detail, description, and first-hand account, if I want it.

I think that's what I'll do. But the debate isn't over for me. I'm still thinking about how blogs and journalism can both be valuable for me personally ...

Spam's good for something ...

A while back, CogDogBlog reported that you can take your favorite (?) piece of spam and make a shirt out of it!

At least that junk is good for something ...

On the topic of spam, I have had much less trouble with spam in my gmail accounts than I do with my Yahoo accounts, although it's gotten a little worse lately. What is the experience of others? What email accounts handle spam the best? What tips do you have for limiting your intake of spam? For example, I've heard that making an incomprensible email address of letters and numbers makes it harder for spammers. Is that true? Emails like that are so hard to remember, however, that I've always tried simple email addresses.

I'd be interested in your comments. ...

Usability guidelines never grow old

This post is especially directed towards my fellow classmates in Dr. Graham's HCI class. I recently saw an article by Jakob Nielsen where he sampled 60 usability guidelines from the 944 created for military designs in the 1970s and 1980s. He felt that 90 % of these guidelines were still valid. He concludes that:

The more permanent guidelines tend to be those that are the most abstracted from technology. ... Usability guidelines have proven highly durable, and most hold true over time. Present-day designers should not dismiss old findings because of their age.

I'm reading Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things right now and would tend to agree with Nielsen. While Norman's book is about doorknobs and phones, there are good principles that can be abstracted for computer interface design. I've summarized these principles from his book, for anyone who's interested, at http://ipt.byu.edu/~wiki/515/Main/RWNotes011105.

Adding metadata to photos

D'Arcy tips us off to Keyword Assistant, a small plugin for iPhoto that makes it quick and easy to add keywords to photos. D'Arcy makes an observation that really hit me:

I found it odd when I spent more time tagging web pages that I might look at possibly once or twice in the future, than on the photos I take of my family that I hope will remain valuable forever.

Guilty as charged, D'Arcy. I also need to do better about adding metadata to the photos I want to be able to find for years to come. Maybe this tool will help.

Podlicious-ness

Now here's a good idea from Dave Gilbert through Will Richardson! Any bets on how long it will take this to happen? Based on how quickly podcasting is taking off, I'm betting not long:

Podilicious is an imagined social search engine and clips manager for the Podosphere. The design of Podilicious is based on successful social software such as del.icio.us (its namesake), Flickr, and Furl.

Cool, very cool. This would be helpful to me, at least, because I like listening to audiocasts, but I hate listening to worthless ones. But if someone I know or trust has a podlicious link, I can listen to those snippets, which are probably good ones. Sign me up!

Why go to school?

From Will Richardson comes this thought:

What’s even more ironic (scary? sad?) is that we have an educational system that still asks students to basically try to learn independently (they work collaboratively but seldom learn) and use that learning to impress a very limited audience of teachers. Meanwhile, what the real world expects are students that are able to truly learn through collaboration and share that learning with large, extended audiences for meaningful purposes.

He's right--we don't give kids a very good model in our school systems for how they will be expected to perform in "real life." So, why go to school in the first place?

I'm kidding. I really am. I know going to school is crucial for young students and that they learn many wonderful things in school that will prepare them for their futures. But I think a big challenge in education is that we get too comfortable with the way we do things, and we don't seriously consider whether we are even doing it the best way. And then when students "fail" on some test or another, instead of reconsidering our basic assumptions, we charge ahead with "more of the same" of whatever it is we are already doing.

"What, our kids are not scoring well on tests? Well then that must mean we need more testing!"

I feel it would be a good idea for educators and administrators to take a more serious look at what they want the school experience to provide for students, and then maybe consider if there would be better approaches to doing it. I think we don't discuss these types of issues enough.

Can't we blog about something different?

Finally! Someone has said what needed to be said long ago. There is too much blogging ... about blogging! I love to blog, but the blog is not the answer to every educational dilemma, and I'd like to read more discussion about other educational technologies. But it seems all the really interesting educational bloggers talk about blogging, podcasting, rss, open learning, and the like. Blogging is still such a new (okay, it's not THAT new, but it feels that way) thing that the community still seems fairly small and self-centered. On Think Thunk today:

I've also been in this field for over a decade, and social software is still a tiny fraction of what educational technology is. It represents an overwhelmingly disproportionate share of the word count on the blogs that define themselves as being of the field. Some of that's to be expected. ... I have to imagine that there are some other pros out there who'd like to use the medium to discuss the vast sweep of technologies, applications, resources, and models in the field of academic computing.

Amen! And yes, I know that I blog a lot about blogging ... and this post is an example. But it's the new year, and I resolve to be more perceptive of other technologies that, like blogging, can also be useful for improving education.

I hope more bloggers will share this resolution!

Blog use statistics

From Pew Internet and American Life Project and by way of Will Richardson comes these statistics:

38% of people know what a blog is 27% of people read blogs 12% have posted to blogs 7% of people own blogs 5% of people use RSS

Even Microsoft uses Google

For all the hoopla that Microsoft has put out lately in their battle to dethrone Google's search engine, Vistorville Intelligence (whoever they are) reported that in a study of how employees at different companies use the internet, 66% of Microsoft employees used Google as their search engine while only 20% use MSN Search.

Who knows if this study is legitimate, but it's funny. I'd believe it -- go Google!

Does the Internet make us less social?

News.com reported last week that internet use has cut into our social time, more or less making us less social because we spend about three hours a day (is that all?) online. The researchers quoted in the article that

According to the study, an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes, lowers the amount of time spent watching television by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes.

Well, if these statistics were true, then I'd be spending about four hours less time with my family than before the internet. I hope that's not true!
The report also found some good news

The survey found that use of the Internet has displaced television watching and a range of other activities. Internet users watch television for one hour and 42 minutes a day, compared with the national average of two hours,

I can hear the anti-internet activists striking up their argument right now! Warning: internet use takes Daddies away from families and makes us all more disconnected from each other. I had this debate with some of my students this past semester as well. One student, who was always thoughtful in his blog posts said on his blog that

We are in an age where communication is easier than it has ever been. We can follow the news in myriad mediums. We can send and recieve emails rather than wait for days or months to receive snail mail. But it seems to me that technology leads to a downgrade in communication rather than an upgrade. We spend time every week sitting at a computer communicating in writing precisely so we don't have to sit down in person with people who walk around all day on our same campus.

These are legitimate concerns. Too much of any media can make a zombie of you to some degree and disconnected from reality. However, I don't buy into the argument that using the internet discourages social contact. Rather, I believe it ENCOURAGES social contact! I know much more about my friends and family because of email and instant messenger than I would otherwise because I am a horrible letter writer and phone caller. I still prefer visiting face to face, but when that's not possible, then communicating online is phenomenal!

I responded to this student by saying:

Some people argue that technology increases collaboration and interaction, some argue it doesn't. I think a key is, does the computer-supported collaboration replace face-to-face interaction? If so, then it might not be a good choice. However, does it add interaction that wouldn't be there otherwise? For example, if the choice was no interaction because we don't have time (or whatever our excuse is), or interaction through the Internet, which is better?

Another example, I'm interacting with teachers from Australia and England right now on a project. They met me through my blog, and we are collaborating by working together on a wiki, discussion board, and through email to accomplish a project. I'd never talk to these people for real, so being able to communicate through the Internet is helpful. But I agree that emailing my wife or close friends here at BYU is less effective than actually talking to them."

Another example: I spent two years serving as a religious missionary in Ecuador. I developed many fierce friendships with many Ecuatorians. However, it's been difficult to stay in contact with them because they usually do not have phones, or even mailing addresses. Recently, though, a few of them (mostly the younger ones, attending a trade school of some kind) have started using email. In this way, the Internet is increasing my social contact with dear friends I would not have been able to stay in contact with otherwise.

I seem to be often fielding questions from people who seem so anti-technology ... as if the increase in technology was going to destroy the world. I believe we should understand the danger in any technology and medium, but seek to find ways to use this technology to improve our lives in a positive way. I read today that internet gaming can help immerse students in foreign language learning and this is another example of what I mean. Too much gaming can hurt you, but the technology, used in the right contexts, can be very postive.

That's enough of my soapbox for today! Sorry for the long post!

"Everybody's doing it!"

Here's a little positive peer pressure to encourage you to blog (although if you're reading this, you probably already blog anyway). The BBC reports that blog readership is up 58% this last year and six million Americans now use aggregators. I believe that most of the rest of America should be!

The article also reports that most bloggers are,

likely to be young, well-educated, net-savvy males with good incomes and college educations, the survey found.

Which describes me very well, I must say ... all except the good income part! :-)

Shocking development! Students can't find reliable online sources

I hope you sense the sarcasm in my title because this is one of those "We already knew that" kind of things. Take this for what it is, a simple online poll, but eSchoolNews just sent me their newsletter and reported the results to last week's online poll question, which was "Grade your students' ability to choose reliable sources for their online research." The results are not unexpected, but still depressing:

6 percent said "A."
13 percent said "B."
47 percent said "C."
29 percent said "D."
5 percent said "F."

Okay, now for my informal poll. Everybody who feels that the deluge of possible information sources is only going to grow drastically in the next few years, say "Ay!" I have been teaching my preservice students that the one of the most important things they could teach their future students is how to find good, reliable and HELPFUL information quickly, and how to discern between the good sources of info and the bad. We're not doing this in our schools, and we're still clinging too much to the "sage on the stage" mentality that students come to school to learn information from their teachers. I don't think they should; rather, I think students should go to school to be mentored in how to discern and find good sources of information, not necessarily to learn more facts and numbers. The internet is full of facts and numbers, dates and sources. What students need is a helping hand to navigate this mess!

Until teachers start to get this message, more and more children will be "left behind" in this digital age.

Ahh, the benefits of commercialism

I love when competing companies drive the prices down and the performance up, benefiting all of us consumers. Wasn't it just a few months ago that Yahoo was only giving me something like 6 megabytes of email space? I can't even remember anymore what my old account was because it seems that email space A.G. (After Gmail) is just skyrocketing. When Google released Gmail, Yahoo jumped my account up to 100 megabytes overnight. Now I just noticed for the first time that my account has quietly been extended to 250 megabytes.

Cool.

Killing a sacred cow

Whoa! Long time, no post. End of semester finals will do that to you. I couldn't keep quiet, however, when I read Nate Lowell's post about getting rid of paper journals as we know them. He's really taken an ax to that sacred cow.

And it's about time.

Others have talked about this kind of thing before, but there needs to be a continued discussion to update the awful printed journal tradition. Maybe the routine of writing, submitting, waiting 6 months, rewriting, resubmitting, waiting 6 months to 1 year for the journal to come out is good in some fields--but not in the field of Instructional Technology. By the time the "current" research is published, computers are twice as fast, there are dozens of new software applications, and the "new" research is old news. Since when was that ever a good thing? As Nate points out, "Paper journals do not foster nor support research. They support history." Amen.

I responded to Nate's post by saying, "I, for one, turn to journals when I have to but my daily reading to stay up to date on the field is checking my rss news reader and email listservs." In our field it is crucially important to stay current, and research journals don't do that. Nate refers to podcasting, which didn't even exist until a few months ago, and by the time the research on podcasting is published, it'll be way old news. This is the case with "older" technologies such as wikis and blogs. How much research has been published in journals about these technologies? Not much, even though they've been growing in popularity in educational circles in the last two years. I was thinking the other day it'd be useful to have a special issue or book about best practices of teachers who are succeeding at using weblogs in the classroom. Why hasn't this been published (to my knowledge) yet? It'd be pointless. By the time it was published, the trends and research would have already changed.

Let's do a needs analysis here: What is the essential component of the traditional form of publishing that is still needed for promotion, tenure review, etc? PEER REVIEW. Okay, we can keep that -- I'll be the first to say that is very important. But why marry ourselves to the printed journal? That's not a need at all. As Nate suggests, there should be a way of keeping peer review but by making the journal an all-digital journal the research would get out there that much faster. Nate suggess two-week turnarounds from when an article is submitted until it is reviewed and published online. That'd be great, but let's take it one step at a time. If we could just cut out the time it takes to publish printed journals by publishing something online the minute it passes peer review, that would be a great step forward. If money is an issue, have a password-protected login before someone can view the articles. We'd be saving so much money anyway on publication costs that the cost of "subscribing" to these journals would be greatly reduced. Then more people would subscribe--how cool would that be? Higher readership, greater dissemination of information, and more recent research. It'd be even better if rss could be incorporated so the minute the article is published, it shows up in my news reader.

I know I'm oversimplifying this and am probably too ignorant to understand some of the barriers. But it could be done. It's about time this WAS done. It should've been done years ago.

Microsoft claims it owns the internet

Well, ok, so Microsoft is only claiming to own part of the internet. But it's still pretty funny! Read more here about how "Microsoft is claiming intellectual property rights on over 130 Internet protocols that make up the very core of the Internet infrastructure."

What an awful thought! Can you imagine the wall we'd hit if Microsoft could control any part of the internet? Honestly, Microsoft has created some wonderful tools, but what could be any more damaging to the progress of educational technologies than Microsoft-style monopolistic practices? The beauty of the internet is how open, accessible, and consumer-friendly it is.

Fuzzy instructional objectives

The debate sometimes rages about the value of stated objectives in instructional design, but I think we can all agree that fuzzy and poorly defined objectives are worthless! To back this up, get a chuckle from Dilbert:

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20041106.html

Scary, real scary

I was shocked to read on James Farmer's blog that his university adminstration has banned him from using weblogs and wikis and required him to use a standard CMS. This is awful for two reasons:

1) How is a university supposed to be able to progress in knowledge if they do not allow faculty to research and experiment with new innovations?
2) Anytime you standardize something, quality is lost.

I think blockbuster CMS systems like Blackboard and WebCT provide a great service, but anytime you standardize a system, you lose the quality that comes from being able to adapt to unique instructional and learning needs. That's why for my classes, I'm using more weblogs and wikis, and hope to use a portal system like Xoops, Drupal, or Plone in the future. You may not like the technologies I have chosen, but then you don't have to use them. They work for me, for what I am trying to do in my classes. Blackboard doesn't. Standardization can impede adaptability and quality, and it's a real tragedy when institutions don't realize that.

The safest operating system ... is it any surprise?

Well, a recent study vindicated what Macaphobics have known ever since OS X came out: The Apple operating system is simply the best out there. The mi2G Intelligence unit concluded that the safest and most secure operating system are the open source BSD (who?) and Apple's OS. And what about Windows? Need you ask ... near the bottom with Linux.

ISD debates: Calling water H20

Ed reflects on a recent class discussion on the famous Clark/Kozma media and methods debate. This discussion followed similar discussions on the debates in our field about Addie vs. other models, Constructivism vs. Behaviorism vs. Cognitivism, etc. Exasperated, Ed says:
"I am still not understanding why it is that many people are still trying to divide the sea and call one side water and the other H2O and insist they cannot mix (that is the way I see this and other debates on the ID field). It is true that there are interesting points on each side, which I particularly think that together will make a powerful weapon on the learning process."

Great analogy, Ed! I often feel the same way: that we spend too much time in the Instructional Design field arguing about which is the RIGHT way of doing instruction instead of just finding as many VARIETIES of effective instructional methods or theories that simply work. The more good instructional tools that we can put in the toolbox, the better instruction will be for all learners.

The history of Social Software

This post is mostly for Charles and to anyone else interested in computer-supported collaboration (by the way, if you are going to BYU, make sure you consider taking Charles's Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning course next semester). Anyway, Christopher Allen has a nice summary of the history of the terms associated with technology-supported interaction or collaboration. He begins with Memex in the 40s and continues through to more recent terms like Groupware, CSCW, and now Social Software. Along the way, he describes key people, technologies and trends that supported this movement. It's interesting and definitely worth reading!

A good laugh

Oh, this is rich! Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said in a press conference in London that most IPod music is "stolen," and he basically tried to bill Microsoft as the good guys in corporate America and Apple as the villains trying to destroy corporate America. At least that is the way Andy McCue reported it.

Well, if for nothing else, Microsoft's always good for a laugh! :-)

Rip, Mix, and Learn - a new way of learning

For those who are reading my blog who attended the IT Institute with me, this is old news. For others, there is a lot of chatter on the Internet now about RML: Rip, Mix, and Learn. The basic idea is that with the Internet, a good model for learning is to rip stuff that's out there (or in other words, grab it, collect, convert it so you have it, whatever it is), mix it (which means personalize it, remix it, change it so it has your spin), and then learn from the process. It's a way of synthesizing material from many sources by mixing them into one product. We've done this for a long time. Traditional English papers often meant collecting quotes from others and remixing them so it made sense to you. Now with modern technologies we can do this in many new ways and do it much easier.

The implications, as I see them, for education are that students don't need to be receivers of knowledge, or dumpsters where teachers do some information dumping. Instead, they can be creators of new knowledge, remixed from old information they glean from the Internet. They can Rip, Mix, and Learn words, audio, video, and many other things and learn through the creation of the new products.

Will Richardson refers to a presentation on this topic by Alan Levine about this topic, and then Will goes on to say how blogging and other new technologies can enable RML by our students:

" Today, Alan writes about RML with RSS as he's building combined feeds with Blogdigger. The "rip" is to take feeds from a number of different sources, "mix" them into one feed, and "learn" from the results. The easy example for students is to create a number of search feeds for the same terms from various sources (Bloglines, Feedster, Google News etc.) and then stick them all together at Blogdigger.

What I think has even more potential at some point is the mixing on all the content feeds that a particular student might have to create a virtual portfolio feed. For instance, as a teacher using all of these tools in the classroom, I would love one feed that watches what my student posts in her Weblog (either just in my class or in all of her classes,) what she saves to Furl, the pictures that she takes to supplement her work at Flickr, the e-mails she receives to her rss-able Bloglines e-mail account, and her contributions to the class wiki. I wouldn't mind that as a parent either. Anyway, it's cool to think about the possibilities. Still just a wacky vision in a few wacky brains, but you never know..."

I don't know if I would take it as far as Will (can you imagine trying to manage all of those different feeds from all of you students?), but I agree with him in previous posts that blogging is a form of RML. Maybe that's why I love to do it!

Blogs + IPods = Podcasting!

Well, if you like blogging, and if you like IPods, you'll love Podcasting. You can post audio files, which are sent by rss feeds to all your buddies' computers. They can then download your daily, or weekly, or whatever, audio file into their IPods and listen to it. If you want to read more, here's a news article, and here's Adam Curry's blog, where he posts a daily audio essay.

How cool would that be? Can you imagine getting a daily audio file from, say, lds.org? How about if your professor posted things to you every day? What if your best friend, or boyfriend/spouse, did that? Could this be better than email? What if you could record your voice into your computer, and then send it by rss to your friend's IPod, and they would hear it the next time they plugged their IPod into their computer. Fun!

Will Richardson started talking about some educational possibilities for this technology on his blog:

"..now let's take this into the classroom, huh? Foreign language students can now read their homework responses which automatically get sent via RSS feeds to their teachers who download them to their iPods or other player to listen to them. Or, the teacher creates a daily broadcast that his students download and listen to. Or, each day, one student does an oral reflection on the class that then gets sent around to kids who miss the class."

This is something I could get very excited about, maybe partly because I love audio talks and audio books. On my other blog I am carrying on a discussion with my students about possible educational applications of Podcasting. If you have ideas, please go there and post them! (or post them here, if you wish)

In closing, the article says this about Podcasting and why it might take off and get popular:

"But Podcasting -- like blogging -- seems to combine the best of the Internet with the best of traditional media. It's a way for someone to create and distribute a show to 40 people. And it also would allow a media company to distribute audio content to millions."

The need for standards

Back to a favorite soapbox of mine, an article by wired.com quotes Tim Berners-Lee as saying a major hurdle to the collaborative internet he always envisioned is standards. To quote the article,

"The inventor of the World Wide Web told a technology conference on Wednesday that making the web more useful hinges on a familiar challenge: Getting the players behind the technology to agree on standards governing how computers communicate with one another."

Standards are not always what everyone wants, but if we all kept them, what an easier time we would have collaborating if our technologies all spoke the same language!

If you aren't using Firefox yet ...

Then you should be. Not only is Firefox the safest way to surf the Internet, not only is EVERYBODY doing it (one million downloads in 4 days), and not only is it NOT Internet Explorer (a good enough reason there), but the Firefox designers have added two really cool features to the browser: 1) rss feeds and 2) wikalong. The rss feeds feature is the ability at the push of a button to subscribe to the rss feed of a website as a Firefox bookmark. I'm still loyal to Bloglines and think that's a better choice for heavy internet readers, but if you only want to subscribe to a few sites, than this Firefox feature can be really useful. Plus, it pushes us closer to some kind of new interactivity and new experience with the Internet.

I just heard about the wikalong feature today and am still trying to wrap my brain around what it could mean. To quote the Firefox people:

" Wikalong is a FirefoxExtension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet."

Too cool, way too cool. I'm really interested in your ideas: how could this technology be used in education or IDT?

Here's a screenshot of what wikalong would look like:

OK, let's collaborate!

In my last post, I refer to a new collaboration tool called Web Collaborator. In my post I ask if anyone wants to try it out with me. Theresa from the United Kingdom suggest I get something started, and she might participate.

So I did.

I created a project at Web Collaborator, creating a list of differences between blogs and other forms of CSCL tools. This is something I am interested in because blogs do a lot of the same thigns as discussion boards and other tools, and one of my students point-blank told me he didn't think they were different. I do ... but I can't always explain why very well. So maybe you can help me. If this project interests you, sign up at Web Collaborator, and then send me your email (the same one you use to sign up). I will add you to the project, and we can share our ideas on this topic!

You can send your emails to rw@byu.edu if you want to join this collaboration.

A blog? A wiki? A discussion board? What is it?

There's a new collaboration tool that I heard about from Will Richardson that looks pretty interesting— Web Collaborator. Best part is it appears to be free. Here's what it claims to do:

"Web Collaborator coordinates collaborations automatically, keeping backups of every revision ever made to the project, letting you see who made the changes, and allowing you to focus on the work instead of managing the work."

There are three different aspects of this tool
1) A discussion aspect of some sort where collaborators talk to each other
2) the project itself. This part has wiki-like capabilities where the members of the group can each add, edit, or delete things from the project and the changes show up instantly. You can print out a pdf form of the project at any time.
3) Also a la Wiki, Web Collaborator allows you to go back to previous versions of the document.

Anyway, looks interesting, and I'm itching to try it out. Anyone have a collaborative project they need to work on? :-)

More on compatibility, Jabber and Tiger

First, my apologies to Charles and everyone in his 692r class for being quite off-topic in this blog, but this is the place where I think and store things I want to think more on later.

This falls in the "compatibility" department. Recently Rich posted a neat tip about Jabber as a way of chatting with ALL your contacts, regardless of whether their instant messenging souls belong to AOL, Yahoo Messenger, IM, or [insert client here]. I have also posted recently that I feel one of the biggest barriers to computer-supported collaboration is the lack of compatibility across computer platforms and applications. Jabber is definitely a step in the right direction, and what a convenient tool! Thanks Rich for the tip!

This post is to inform any Mac users that the new version of IChat in Tiger will be utilizing Jabber. To read more about this, check out the post on Slashdot. In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, "Sweeeeeet!"

Please say it's so!

There's a new transitive technology out there that claims "our software allows any software application binary to run on any processor/operating system." This means Windows programs would run on Macs, Mac programs would run on PCs, and we'd finally be all one, happy computing family. For more on this, check out the article in Wired magazine.

On Slashdot, someone asked the all-important question, is this legitimate computer alchemy or vapormare?

I have my doubts until I see it work myself. Call me faithless. But I blogged once that someday the biggest breakthrough in computer-supported collaboration will be greater compatibility. I believe the biggest barrier to greater online collaboration is we aren't compatible across platforms, or across programs.

Social learning software report

If social and collaborative learning is your thang, then you might want to check out this article on ISociety by William Davies. Here's the plug on the website:

"Social capital analysts have debated the implications of the Internet for some years now. But this debate has recently been joined from the opposite side, as software experts and developers are showing an increased desire to understand and improve social networks, both offline and online.This report introduces some of the core ideas of this new unified debate, and outlines possible directions for the future."

Looks good! I'll be scanning over this when I get some time ...

ITI: A list of reports on the Institute

Dave Wiley on his AutoUnfocus blog lists a bunch of people who attended the Instructional Technology institute this week and blogged the sessions they attended. If you wanted to hear more about the conference, there you go.

Breaking the Internet speed record

Slashdot reports (it was from an article in internetnews.com, however) that there is a new internet speed record:

"The old record was nearly cut in half: the two parties, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 'transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes.' InternetNews goes on to say, 'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'"

What options does this hold for education? What if we could transfer simulations, video, multimedia, and ANYTHING as fast as we transfer text? Would this change the way we design instruction? In what ways?

The difficulty in our field is making our ideas keep up with the technology. Old models of instruction won't suffice. How would we teach if the technology barriers came tumblin' down? Because eventually they will.

I made OLDaily!

Well today I was excited to learn that Stephen Downes in his OLDaily newsletter/blog referenced my analysis of his keynote at the IT Institute, which I published on my edu-blogger blog yesterday. How exciting! I read OLDaily, well, daily, and many other bloggers in our field do. Just like that, my article on his keynote address was spread throughout the blogosphere, getting my ideas out to many people in our field.

How scary! My first feeling was excitement. My second feeling was fear: did I spell everything right? Did I do Stephen's keynote justice? What if I completely misunderstood what he was trying to communicate? What if I wrote something dumb that now everybody might read?

I'm mentioning this because 1) I think it's the first time anyone outside of BYU has read my blog, so I'm excited; and 2) this is a good example about the beauty of blogging. This is a quick way for your voice to be heard. What you write today could be read by who knows who tomorrow. It's also, like I said, scary and will force me to be a little more thoughtful about everything I say. The potential to have an audience, even if I don't, will force me to be a much more careful blogger from now on.

Behaviorism

OK, I'm finally going to respond to a few posts I've read from my peers at BYU about behaviorist learning theories. There's been some great posts and ideas on this topic!

Rich said:

"The point I want to make, however, is that if Behaviorism is to be evaluated or discussed, it should be done using appropriate examples. Citing bad examples of Behaviorism as the reason not to use it ignores those contexts where it may have some useful contributions to the field of education."

I wanted to comment and say (but I can't find out how to comment on your blog, Rich!) that I agree that we often criticize behaviorism by pointing at awful examples that everyone would agree is poor instruction. I think behaviorism can be an effective instructional strategy in some contexts. So the question should not be "behaviorism or constructivism?" but "WHEN do I use behaviorism, HOW do I use behaviorism, and WHAT EXPECTATIONS should I have when I do use this strategy?" We need to stop bickering in our field about whose theory is the best and instead start looking for more applications of each theory. But I do think it is necessary to remember what expectations we can have from each theory. Expecting high level synthesis and analysis (which many teachers do expect) after using only behavioristic methods (which is how many teachers teach) is unrealistic.

So to reframe the debate, does anyone have any ideas about when behaviorism is most appropriate?

I also thought Geoff posted an interesting analysis:

"It seems even our very existence is contingent upon a rewards system, where we have cognitively made the decision to pursue certain careers, choices, life, et cetera."

"Do I believe this is the most effective system? No. But do I think we can escape it? No."

Hmmm, CAN we escape behaviorism? Maybe not completely because it does seem to be human nature to do whatever gets us a reward. But I think we can be optimistic and find ways to use alternative methods and theories to guide our instruction--when an alternative method is more appropriate. I think people can learn to be less behavioristic--isn't that what progression in character is all about? Learning to do, think, and be motivated for more important reasons than to get a reward?

ITI: Let e-learning go out of control

I really enjoyed Brian Lamb's talk on digital learning: "Go fast, go cheap, and let it go out of control". For those who might want to know the pedigree, this is the guy who sold David Wiley on blogs and wikis, so he's a pretty trend-setting and innovative guy. Instead of a PowerPoint (so 20th century!), he gave his presentation using a bunch of tabbed wikis in his Safari browser. Each wiki was a different section of his presentation. He gave us the URL at the beginning, and encouraged us to start adding to his presentation wikis. How wild! Talk about audience participation. People could add material at the same time as he was presenting it!

Anyway, log these urls well, I think they'll be useful:
Gogogo.notlong.com - His presentation wiki
Itibloggers.notlong.com - a list of edubloggers from the IT institute. A great source of IT bloggers!

Brian started his presentation by saying "The digital and academic worlds are butting heads together. Can these work together?"

His argument is that digital media requires that we teach differently than before. We need to move quicker, think looser, and, most especially, let learners go crazy with the technology and not over-moderate how they learn. In this way, he had many similar ideas as Stephen Downes. One example of digital technology butting heads with academia is what Brian called "Mass Amateurism." This is the ability that fast, cheap, and simple technologies can give to the masses to approach a level of professionalism. Brian claimed that this often scares the "intellectuals" and tenured professors because "What is academia about? About being the professional. The notion of allowing the common man to do it makes them uneasy." He gave the example of digital cameras. He's not a professional photographer, but with the incredible cameras anyone can buy, he is "80% there."
Another example is Apple's GarageBand, where anyone can be a professional music mixer. Brian later observed, "The more esteemed a scholar is, the less likely they seem to be to embrace new technologies. The ones who accept new technologies are struggling new faculty looking to get an edge. Those with tenure aren’t interested." He might be over-generalizing, but it is true that technology could change the traditional model of education to some degree.

Brian's actual job is to run the learning objects movement in a British Columbian university. He made the claim that technologies like Furl and Flickr (both of which are AWESOME tools BTW) are really creating types of learning objects because you tag a piece of content (a website) or a graphic with some kinds of metadata (like what categories they belong to, what rating you give these objects, and what keywords you attach to them).

He then attacked the lack of openness and freedom to adapt and "remix" objects (a.k.a. Larry Lessig's keynote). He said that if we could have the freedom to take material and change and adapt it without worrying about copyright infringement, then we don't have to make the difficult decisions about how much context to add to a learning object, or what the granularity of the object should be--because teachers will make these decisions themselves. They will remix the objects and take the amount of the object that they need and adapt it to their own context.

Anyway, he had many other very good points, but ala modern society, he was very all over the place and scattered in his thoughts so they are hard to recreate here. But that's exactly what his point was: we need to let go and let modern e-learners go "out of control" with technology, even if the way they interact and learn is different than what we're used to.

ITI: Stephen Downes keynote

Stephen Downes gave the closing keynote and did a really good job, I thought. He's a heavy blogger, in fact his OLDaily blog is a daily wealth of knowledge about hot topics in our field that he finds on the internet. If you want to get more updates on the Instructional Technology Institute than I am providing, check out his blog for the last couple of days. He does a much better reporting and analysis job on this kind of stuff than I do.

Anyway, he tied in the three major themes of this conference: reusability, social software, and open learning. I thought he was a perfect closing keynote because he had taken pictures and notes from all the presentations he had seen and used them in his own presentation.

He's a visionary man. he said that “In general new technology is introduced in two stages … First, it duplicates existing products and services. Second, it obliterates them.”

Examples of this phenomenon are:

• Blog vs. newspapers
• Internet vs. Television
• Skype vs. Telephone
• Wikipedia vs. encyclopedia

Honestly, who reads an encyclopedia anymore when we have the internet? Will anyone read newspapers anymore once you've been thoroughly immersed in blogs? I used to be news reporter--nobody's more of a loyal newspaper reader than I am. But I can now get all the news I want through my aggregator (including the Daily Herald), so I'm canceling my DesNews subscription. I can even get Dilbert comics and Dave Barry's column through my aggregator, what more do I need?

Back to Stephen. He presented some dichotomies between models. The old model is broadcast, commercial, bundled, proprietary. The new model is open, network, free. He then asks:

"What has worked in the past?
FTP, email, usenet, the web, blogs, RSS …
What did these have in common?
They were …

• - simple
• - decentralized
• - open – We could all play
• - free, etc.

He then said that we are at the point now were in e-learning we have duplicated the existing model of education. The next step is to leave the model and go on to something new. He believes one thing we need to change is to stop trying to organize and structure e-learning. He quotes David Wiley that "Instead of trying to organize learning communities, we should focus on how learning communities can organize themselves."

My opinion? I'm not sure, but I think I'm halfway. We need general boundaries, but without dictating exactly how e-learners have to talk, walk, and listen. If we get too ordered, then we're like the pharisees and stifle their ability to grow. We should provide some general structure, and then let the communities dictate how they will relate and grow and we should be there as instructional designers to support them.

To finish, I'll paraphrase Stephen again:

"We have to gain our voice, to speak for ourselves, to reclaim our language, our media, our culture. Could we learn to read and write if only a small number of people had access to language? No, we need openness for everyone. Go fast, go cheap, let it go out of control."

He quotes a writer who describes it as 'Educhaos'. He feels we should "let go" and let learners take the digital medium to its deteministic end.

To paraphrase him again:

• "Social software- we need a way to support conversations with content, and not just content.
• Learning – we need to leverage the principles of self-organizing networks.
• We need to transform learning … from something we do for people to something they do for themselves."

Which ties into our behavioristic/constructivist discussion this week, eh?

Blogging the IT Institute!

Hello! I am currently at the Instructional Technology Institute in Logan, Utah. This is a much better conference than I anticipated with some really great presenters. The food's been great too--they feed you 5 great meals with your $75 student registration. What a deal!

Anyway, I'm going to blog the presentations I like the most. I'll do this for two reasons:

1. To help me learn the material better by writing about it
2. To maybe allow anyone not here at the conference to catch some of the highlights

So if any of these posts interest you, read them and ask me questions when I get back. If you don't care, don't bother! Either way, I'll still be learning more from this conference because I'll be articulating and reflecting my thoughts.

ITI: Martindale and Categories of educational websites

I heard a great presentation yesterday by Trey Martindale (who is a blogger himself, by the way--check out his blog if you want a good one on instructional design). Especially I think Charles and Rich may be interested in this, so talk to me about it when I get back if you have questions. Anyway, he and two compadres checked out three major compilations of the best educational websites on the web, and then they started analyzing a sample of these sites to find out what kinds of educational websites are being recognized as good ones. They created a list of 11 categories of educational websites. Here they are:

1. Instructional
2. Learning Activities
3. Content Collection
4. List of Links
5. Reference/Archive/News/Database (RAND)
6. Teacher and Parent Resources
7. Shared Experiences
8. Personal Expression and Interpersonal Interaction (PEII)
9. Informal Education
10. Research and Service Organizations and Projects (RSOP)
11. Commercial

Descriptions and examples of these categories, as well as their soon-to-be-published paper in Computers in our Schools is available at Trey's weblog or Trey's website.

I thought this was a phenomenal research idea and project. I suggested to Trey that the next step might be to offer keys to evaluating each category of websites, because just describing to a teacher that "hey, this is a RAND website" is kind or worthless. It will be very important to tell them, "if you need to use a RAND for your classroom projects, here is how you could evaluate RANDs and know when you've found a credible and useful one." So could we create some evaluation steps for each category?

After I suggested this, one lady said this had already been done, because there are many places that tell you how to evaluate educational websites. Yeah, we do this too in IPT 286. But the evaluation standards would be different for each type of website. A content website should not be commercial--that's a red flag. A commercial site SHOULD be commercial. A learning activity website should not have fluff but should have meaningful content. A weblog should have fluff because the blogger and the reader are learning through interaction and co-construction of ideas until the fluff becomes more thoughtful and refined.

Does this make sense?

The next step for Trey is that he wants to create a search engine that would then find only RANDs or PEIIs or whatever, and the website in its metadata would define what category that website falls into. However, he's also wanting to switch gears on the project entirely and instead define attributes of educational websites instead of categorizing the entire website. This is a much better idea because pbs.org, for example, has many different attributes and could fit into many different categories.

Anyway, I'm definitely using some of Trey's ideas in teaching digital resources in IPT 286, but I'm not sure how yet. I'd like to ask each student to find a good website for each category, but that might be too heavy of a workload. So maybe instead have them find their 5-10 websites and then require them to analyze the sites and put them in their appropriate category. This could just be a helpful tool to aid their reflection.

ITI: Simulated learning companions

Here's a long post about a session I saw yesterday. Sorry everyone! Skip it if you are not interested in simulations and/or computer-assisted interactions.

Session: Impact of the affect and gender of a learning companion on learning outcomes
Yanghee Kim, USU

Yanghee had some interesting ideas about simulated learning companions, which are basically computer-generated “peers” that e-learning students can relate to during a computer-mediated learning activity. She was reporting on her dissertation research about how the affect (how happy/grumpy) and gender of a learning companion could impact the learning. Her prerequisite assumption was that the more a learning companion showed emotion, the more believable the simulated peer would be and the more effective it would be in helping to mentor the students.

Her logic went something like this:
People learn better through interaction – they prefer interaction with peers – peer interaction is absent in strict Computer-Assisted Learning (we won’t talk about blended environments here) – would a simulated peer be able to fulfill this role?

She also did a second experiment investigating responsiveness of the learning companions. After completing each part of the CAI activity, there were emoticons, and they were supposed to pick one. If they said they were happy or doing well, the LC said “great! Glad you’re understanding it.” If the student was struggling, the LC expressed understanding and sympathy and gave reinforcement.

Her specific hypotheses were something along these lines:
A happy, positive learning companion creates more positive student attitudes
A responsive learning companion will positively impact self-efficacy and student affect.

The results? Of course her hypotheses were supported. She also found that male LCs were more effective at mentoring than female ones. I think this must be because the class was mostly female, and not because a male LC is better.

(As aside about positivistic research. Yanghee had to report her finding that, in her study, a male LC is a better mentor, even though she isn’t convinced. So we’re not convinced, but we report it as a “finding” anyway!)

Here are my thoughts that stemmed from her presentation:

• Could we create simulated learning companions that can take a variety of roles (mentor, coach, teacher, student, etc., whatever is needed for the learning situation)?
• Could students pick an LC that would most uniquely match their own attributes? I think Bandura said something about how we learn best from those with similar attributes to our own.
• Could we allow students to pick a new LC any day or for any part of the activity? For example, in Mario Bros. games, you can pick Mario, Luigie, Donkey Kong, etc to be your opponent. Could we have those options in an LC? Let the students pick a hunk to be their learning companion if they want.

• An exciting implication, I think, is to allow students to learn by teaching (she alluded to this but didn’t elaborate it). Maybe we could allow the live student to learn by teaching the simulated LC?

ITI: Wiley, Lambert, and OLS

I'm listening to Dave Wiley and Lambert discuss their Open Learning System project. If you were in the program last year (but I guess most of you in 692r weren't), you heard Dave speak in a seminar about MIT's open courseware project. USU is now doing the same thing. The basic ideas is that learning and knowledge should be available freely to everyone. So MIT and USU are actually putting EVERY single course, and EVERY recorded lecture and EVERY instructor material online so someone could basically teach themself Linear Algebra using MIT's linear algebra class and accessing the linear algebra professor's materials.

The problem is, as Dave says it, "No matter how smart you are, someday you will have a question. And having the material online is not enough. You need to talk to somebody."

They are working on a possible solution for this with OLS. This is basically a collaborative component tied into every open course. For example, if you are reading the Linear Algebra material, you see a link on the menu bar for OLS. You go there, and there are discussion boards and features to support a growing community where students help each other learn the material.

It has some interesting features, including the ability to click a button and give "kudos" to someone's post. If someone gets more and more kudos from lots of people, they gain credibility in the community, and people will start listening to that person more (kind of like ebay's feedback feature). This way, if you have a question, you can choose to read the posts written by the smartest people in the community.

They also learned the hard way that too many advanced features can kill a growing community. So the default features of the software are simple. As the community grows and wants more features, the software is extensible and can grow and add more features.

Great idea!