Pandæmonium

Dispatches from Blogistan: A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger, by Suzanne Stefanac is a good introduction for anyone who is considering a blog.  I found the first chapters of the book to be a well-told history of free speech.  Blogging is the next expansion of the power of the printing press, whether you are getting a free blog account at WordPress.com or Blogger, or if you are setting up your own domain as we have done in Center this semester.

Stefanac then gives a tour of the different types of blogs you’ll find on the web: linkfests, diaries, clubhouses, newsrooms and soapboxes.  Each type has examples and some good ideas for you depending on the type of blog you are thinking of creating.  She then provides an overview of the technologies that support today’s blogs, including permalinks, trackback, wysiwyg editors and spam control.  There is a review of different blog services, both free and for a fee, as well as blogs that you can set up if you have your own server.  There’s a chapter on “Writing That’s Engaging”, and information on legal issues.

I also like the fact that Stefanac is encouraging despite things like spam, comment wars and even legal issues like copyright and libel.  If you take a reasonable approach to your writing and management of your blog, you’ll find the rewards easily outweigh the liabilities.

I’m going to get some additional copies of this book so we in the Center have something we can pass to faculty who are thinking about blogging.  It’s a quick and entertaining read that answers many questions.  It should also provoke some additional conversations among interested faculty as they think about using blogs as their own printing presses to capture research while extending the conversation globally.

Thanks to Brian Alexander and Barbara Ganley for mentioning the book in their EDUCAUSE pre-conference workshop!

Technorati Tags: blogging, learning, blog, social software, teaching, Web 2.0

Here are some links I’ve come across this week.  They interest me, they may interest you.

Second Life’s Must Have Stuff: From Wired.  I haven’t bought The Swimmer yet, but I’m thinking about it.  The real find is Freebies.  Several buildings are available for L$1. 

Digital Media and Learning: From the MacArthur Foundation web site.  Big grants are coming to digital learning spaces near you.  Watch the site and subscribe to the blog.

Two mods for php-bb: Easy BotStopper and User Shield.  Together, these two mods might stop the two or three spam accounts that are hitting php-bb every day of the week. 

The Levelator Download Page: This may become the most popular podcast finishing tool someday soon.  A java based tool that runs on PCs and Macs.  Note for the Mac install – when the installer asks you if you want the desktop and start menu icons, say yes. 

typo3.org: A content management system worth understanding.

Technorati Tags: audio, podcast, Second Life

c|net has an article, “A Midsummer Night’s Virtual World“.  In it they interview Edward Castronova, who has just been announced as a $240,000 grant recipient from the MacArthur Foundation for a game he is developing, called Arden: The World of Shakespeare.

Castronova is a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, but he’s also an expert on the economies of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online game.

The game appears to be a social science experiment using the world of Shakespeare and his plays as the context, but Castronova seems to understand that the world has to be compelling if he wants to keep people playing so he can perform his studies.

c|net asks him what he thinks Arden will offer that isn’t possible in other virtual worlds.  Castronova responds:

At universities, we don’t have a track record of game design, but we sure as hell have a track record in economic design and political design, social design and the practice of designing human institutions. So players of our world should look for a great deal more sophistication in terms of what the economy is, what the government is and what the military situation is like.

Compared to the economics of Second Life, I wonder if what Castronova says is true.  Political design will be interesting to see, though. 

MacArthur is funding the project for a year.  Hopefully that means something will be out there for us to see before too long.  I can think of one person who would be very interested in visiting an online world modeled on Shakespeare and his works.

Technorati Tags: gaming, learning, virtualworlds, Second Life

Malcolm Brown, Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth, Salid Ganjalizadeh, Assistant Director for Instructional Technology at Catholic University, Leslie Hitch, Director, Academic Technology Services at Northeastern University, Christine McMahon, Manager, Advanced Technology at Saint Louis University, Pablo Molina, CIO Information Systems at Georgetown University, John Moses, Director, Technology Planning, Biological Sciences at the University of Chicago, and Art St. George, Manager, Advanced Communications Technologies presented.  The session was dedicated to the memory of Howard Strauss – his friends and family were in the first row.

Pablo began the session.  He was the chair of the Evolving Technologies Committee.  The five other presenters all wrote white papers to participate in today’s session. The point was to identify and investigate emerging technologies, and to make us thirsty not only for happy hour but to learn more about technologies presented today.

Pablo mentioned an article in the EDUCAUSE Review that we all received for the conference, “Pioneering New Territory and New Technologies“.

Art St. George from the University of New Mexico spoke next.  He began with a quote from Stuart Brand, “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”  Wireless is a steamroller – it is being adopted quickly everywhere.  Drexel, Wake Forest and Notre Dame are leading the way.  Wireless is not a fad, and while it’s not a complete substitute for researchers on the wired network, it is embraced quickly as the network.

Saiid presented next on course management tools.  They have become enterprise applications over the last few years.  edu-tools has a comparison of the different CMS applications – they are largely the same.

Open source systems lack documentation and formal support.  Saiid recommends having multiple CMS systems on campus until the open source applications are more mature, integrated and accepted by the faculty.

Leslie presented next about cell phones and mobile phones.  MyFoodService.com will take your photograph of your food for $10/month and send you a caloric evaluation (I couldn’t find the site – perhaps that was a joke?).

Challenges to cell phone use include aging eyesight, adoption, and authentication.  But can the cell phone replace some applications?  Should we partner with vendors over cell services and form function, and can we use students to make our case?

Malcolm Brown talked about the rapid pace that has come with Web 2.0 applications.  They are a broad range of applications that are expanding so rapidly it is being likened to the .com boom.  Example categories of Web 2.0 functionality include Office alternatives, web desktop (UOS, IOS), social hangout, shared content depositories, VoIP, E-mail and Mapping.

Office players include: Jotsopt, iRows, DabbleDB, Thinkfree, NumSum and Thumbstacks.  Google also has many competitors.  Tagging and collaboration are finding their way into these applications.

These applications are gaining in relevance, and the OpenDocument Foundation is working towards an XML-based document standard that may bring an end to Microsoft’s dominance.

Christine presented on Vortals – vertical portals that can be used for research services and more. How do you build tools that reach the researchers desktop that helps them comply with compliance rules? The model is an onion, with the research community on the outside, with investigators next, followed by research administrators and collaborative information.  Information from Banner is downloaded to the portal so they can build routing tables that allow researchers to push proposals through the appropriate areas on campus.

Question: how are some of these devices adding to or helping close the digital divide?  Cell phone ownership worldwide has increased exponentially.  Cell phones are perhaps the most ubiquitous device today.

Technorati Tags: EDUCAUSE2006, Web 2.0, technology

Andrea Eastman-Mullins from Alexander Street Press and Robert Hambrick  from North Carolina State University presented.  At the time of the study, Andrea was employed by NCSU.

The speakers were part of a task force to evaluate four web conferencing systems:

• Breeze 5
• Centra Symposium 7.5
• Elluminate 6.5
• Horizon Wimba Live Classroom 4.2

What is a Synchronous Learning Management System (SLMS)?  It’s a virtual classroom system that brings together voice, video, data and graphics in a structured group-learning environment.  Robert stressed that the products are all good, and that what they will present is the process of evaluation, which is more important than determining the one solution for everyone to use.

Bringing asynchronous and synchronous learning systems together allows you to reap the best elements of both.  Robert reviewed the features that you’ll find in the different systems, including live audio and video conferencing, whiteboards, integrated text chat, polling and quizzing, application and file sharing, and more.  Not all systems have all features, and part of the review process is identifying which features your institution needs.

The instructional benefits of these systems are:

• Student-Centered Learning
• Interactive Discussions
• Lifelong Learning Styles
• Media-rich Course Materials
• Immediate Student Feedback
• Flexibility
• Intimate Community of Learners

Video-conferencing works for the first five minutes to establish the presence of the instructor, but after that people are self-conscious and lots of bandwidth is consumed.

The UNC SLMS Task Force was asked by the TLTC Board to evaluate a system for system-wide use.  The task force included 36 members representing 14 of 16 UNC campuses.  The evaluation process developed an evaluation rubric, hosted group demos and small workgroups, and used a listserv and a Wiki to communicate and document the evaluation process.

Robert spent a good bit of time going over a web conferencing rubric (in an Excel spreadsheet) that was used in the evaluation of the tools.

Centra Symposium 7.5 strengths included threaded text chat, high quality VoIP, video, whiteboard and application sharing.  It was a good content management system and had a very intuitive interface.  Text chat is un-docked, so it must be launched to be accessed.  Version 7.5 allowed the instructor to launch text chat on the student’s computers.  There is a toolbar that allows you to print, save or reply to a student’s message.  By selecting a topic first, you can keep the conversation threaded, something NCSU found to be powerful.  Symposium also has auto-swtiching for video so that the application replicates a face-to-face environment as participants talk via video.  You can display up to 6 concurrent videos at the same time.  Audio features were also strong: you have a full range of control over the quality of the sound.  From 2K per second to 13K per second.

Weaknesses of Symposium incliude that it was PC only at the time, and worked best only with Microsoft products, there was no integration with Blackboard.  Symposium 7.6 has a recording studio that allows faculty to capture and edit audio and post it to Blackboard.  There is also Surgient Virtual Lab Integration for lab control.  The application will be integrated October 1 with Blackboard and Vista.  There is also Mac Intel support, and closed captioning has been added to the application.  If the instructor has Dragon, it will caption his discussion.

Elluminate 6.5 has high quality VoIP, video, whiteboard.  It came out on top in terms of accessibility.  Good integration with Blackboard and WebCT and it has nice participant management (you can see what the students are doing).

Drawbacks included single microphone use at one time, which was too structured (this has changed).  Converting a PowerPoint slide into Elluminate is fuzzy, and there is no text wrapping in the whiteboard.  There was no strong content management library, but there is now.

Horizon Wimba 4.2 strengths included LMS integration, and cross-platform support.  Assessment tools were the most robust of the four they evaluated. Wimba voice tools were good and external user devices

Weaknesses feedback tools archive feature and the whiteboard. Stopping a session briefly generated an archive separate from the other parts of the event.  The whiteboard is not object oriented, but they are working on that.

Macromedia Breeze 5’s strengths include a customizable interface, a hands-free microphone, a good content library and that it is a Flash-plug in.  Since Breeze is based on Flash, there isn’t much download or setup involved.

Weaknesses that they observed include inconsistency in audio quality; participants do not have the ability to interact unless “promoted” to presenter; Fewer options for feedback; customization increases the learning curve.

Breeze is now called Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional.  New features include improved VoIP capabilities, always on personal meeting rooms and other server-side enhancements.

The needs of the different campuses pushed UNC into purchasing several of the systems.  NCSU has chosen Elluminate after first choosing a different product.  There is a web site where you can learn more.

Technorati Tags: EDUCAUSE2006, web conferencing

Joanne Dehoney, Director of E-LLearning and Victoria Gertis, Special Projects Manager at the Ohio State University presented.

We began with everyone in the room listing three technologies (I picked geotagging, clickers, and wikis).  As people around the room called out technologies, we all crossed these items off our lists.

• Podcasts
• Tablets
• Voip
• Web conferencing
• Clickers
• RSS
• Gaming
• Blogs
• Personal learning environments
• Collaborative spaces
• Cellphones and lms
• Maships IM
• Social Networking
• Eportfolios
• Wiki
• Web based exams
• Tagging
• Google Jockeying
• and so on

“Emerging is as emerging does.”  Lots of people are dealing with the specifics of any of these technologies.  The presenters aren’t worrying about whether something is emerging, they are simply looking for the specific projects that come to them over time.

Four recommendations:

1. Reject
2. Tweak and iterate
3. Build consultation model (correlates with reject)
4. Adopt

Adopting means acquiring the funding through a service improvement request (at Richmond these are called program improvement requests) to fund the technology in an ongoing way.

The evaluating technologies model (I need a chart!)

Project overview includes:

• Problem/Opportunity
• Goals
• Objectives
• Success Criteria
• Assumptions Risks Obstakles
• Stakeholders

Ohio State used this overview document to evaluate the request from three faculty in different departments who wanted to see how they could use Second Life in teaching.  English Composition, Design, and Women’s Studies were the three departments.

Crucial Factors:

• Reject the project if these are not in place (Supports undergraduate or graduate instruction,
• Conceivable technical / personnely/ physical infrastructure,
• Exploration feasbel within available budget, and definite limit to committment (in.e not an unfunded service)

Faculty are required to provide input (writing) in the final report.

Next you want to explore: how does the technology work? what are other schools doing with it?

You then begin to plan, creating a project charter, which contains some elements from your overview document.  You need to add scope  – what won’t you do?  Are you fitting the mission of your unit? 

(I have to say at this point that the presenters were going through their material so quickly that if you, like me, didn’t get a copy of the handouts beforehand, there’s very little opportunity to keep up.)

They give faculty a document that lists benchmarks they would like faculty to consider as they are evaluating the technology on teaching and learning.  Impact assessment, Support estimates, and expenses.policy implications, technical assessment are all covered, though only the first three are for faculty to consider.

Have faculty write a faculty pilot report, including what research question they were pursuing, the project description and project methodology.  New questions may also come in the report.

Once the faculty have filed their pilot report, it’s up to the instructional technology team to review the information and decide what recommendations to make to the rest of IT.

At OSU, the pieces are working for them, but lots of intervening factors come into play during the length of the project.  Their Second Life project is their first full walk-through of the approach.  They like the fact that they’re trying to hold onto the outcomes without worrying about the formats that people are choosing to submit.

Most projects are going to be in one of four categories (reject, tweak, consult, adopt).

Someone from UT Austin said that they get institutional buy-in before getting to the pilot stage (they have an island in Second Life).

Perhaps explorations of policy implications are higher than OSU made them – these should be in the exploration phase.  Third parties especially trigger FERPA review and similar policies.

OSU has just this morning rejected Pachyderm – the software failed a faculty member three times.

Technorati Tags: EDUCAUSE2006, project management, technology