Jim has some great ideas for what you can do with blogs in education.  The basic ideas can be found here:

http://blog.uta.edu/~jgroom/presentation/

Also, you can see how they actually use these ideas at UMWBlogs.org.

Tweet This Post

If you are still wondering what Google Wave is, you can head over to the handy Complete Guide to Google Wave for more information.  Of course, I am in Wave now and I still can't really describe what it is that well.  You see, it really just isn't what email would be if email was invented today. Gmail is what email would be if it was invented today.  Email is just electronic mail – a system to send messages and documents electronically.  You can't really change that much, because it was never meant to be synchronous communication. Even though I have been in many situations where the emails are flying so fast and furious, you kind of have to wonder…

So far, Wave seems more like a slick mixture of a synchronous wiki and a synchronous discussion board.  The ability to slip in and out of the conversation – to go from asynchronous to synchronous as you wish – is really cool. What few plug-ins they have are pretty cool. Watching others type in real time is creepy, but still kind of cool.

But this is the problem I now have – I have to separate the geek side of me from the educational side of me.  The geek side of me loves Wave so far, even though I barely ever use it (because so few people I know are on it).  The educational side of me is a little more skeptical.  It is true that Wave is information overload. Even one active wave is hard to keep up with, because people can be adding information and responding to other people all over the place.  You can be reading the bottom of a wave and find out that a better exchange is taking place two scroll lengths up. Kind of frustrating.

I have seen many of the long lists of ideas people have for educational uses.  Which all look nice, but you have to realize that you can also come up with a long list of educational ideas for NotePad (I have seen them).  The problem is, most of those ideas sound good on paper, but they turn out pretty boring in implementation.  Will people be able to implement these Google Wave ideas in an effective manner?

That remains to be seen. The learning curve for Wave is steep. Second Life is floundering in many areas because of this same issue, while FaceBook keeps growing and growing.  FaceBook is way more complex than Wave, but it is fairly simple to ease yourself in and then explore new features as you feel comfortable.  I don't know if I see Google Wave as being as simple to ease in to. Maybe they are working on that.  All of this is just to say that Google is going to have to get Wave to appeal to more than geeks like me for it to go anywhere.

I also find it interesting that Mozilla has recently announced the Wave-like Raindrop product.  Raindrop is different in many aspects, but I already understand what they are going for… while I still struggle to get exactly what Wave is going for.  I bring up Raindrop because competition is good, and I think the best thing for Wave will be a good, solid competitor.  So keep your eye on Raindrop.

Of course, don't let my reality check fool you – I will still be using Google Wave as much as I can as long as I can.  And no, I don't have an invites to give!

Tweet This Post

We have all had really good face-to-face courses – taught by an energetic, enthusiastic instructor that really had some creative teaching methods. The truth of the matter is that most face-to-face courses are not like this.  Excellent face-to-face instruction requires a certain personality type… one that is semi-rare.  Rare enough that I can probably safely say that there is only a fraction of the number of really excellent teachers out there to cover all the classes that are being taught face-to-face.  Not to mention that even the best teachers will have off-days from time-to-time due to getting tired or even sick.

An excellent online class, by contrast, is more dependent on the skills of the instructor, rather than the personality.  These skills can be taught if the instructor is getting it wrong. You can't teacher people how to be an interesting, entertaining public speaker – but you can teach them how to build community, social presence, and immediacy, as well as how to design activities and assignments to take advantage of the online setting.  Not to mention that the more asynchronous a course is in design, the less it depends on an instructor's enthusiasm or energy level at a specific time of the day.

This is why I feel that online courses have a more realistic long-term sustainability than face-to-face courses. You need teachers with skills and not a certain personality to make them good.  We will always need face-to-face courses for certain subjects and just to keep human contact alive, but I think it would also be a good idea to transition the face-to-face courses that aren't working in to an online environment (training the instructors that don't have the personality to teach face-to-face on how to run a successful online course).

Rushkoff also quoted someone from Second Life as saying that SL will be photo realistic in 10 years time.  Rushkoff disagreed with this, stating that no matter how much we advance, something else will come up to keep it from being realistic.  I have to also slightly disagree here. If you go back in time and study art history, you will come to a time when people thought you would never have totally realistic paintings and portraits of real-life people.  They thought there would always be a limit to paintings.  Then, the camera was invented, and before long… you had totally realistic portraits.  I think with virtual worlds (and computer graphics in general), it is only a matter of some new discoveries to make them totally photo realistic.

I don't want to make it seem like I am picking apart everything Rushkoff says – those were just two points I wanted to comment on.

Tweet This Post

In many ways, the Learning Management System is the antithesis of the Personal Learning Environment.  So, as we talk about creating a new vision for the LMS, are we talking about something that competes with or super-cedes the PLE as well as the LMS?

I hope not, and here is why.  The New Vision for LMS is not meant to create a new way of managing learning, but rather it is meant to get rid of the current idea of an LMS totally and go in a different direction.  That different direction would take the focus off of a centralized learning management system and place the focus on the personal learning environment.  The difficulty of that is the personal part – what you personally choose to use might not easily interface with what I choose, or might require a lot of work for me to find. Then multiply that by 30 (or more) for the instructor.  We want to begin to think of the LMS as a PLE aggregator.  The main reason for this is to make it easier for instructors to track student learning and to assign grades or give feedback, but another good reason is to also help other students track each other more easily.  Sure, there are systems now (such as RSS feed readers and bookmarks) that can help us track everyone’s personal stuff, but these weren’t really designed for educational purposes. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of cobbling together stuff that was made for other purposes in to a franken-monster collection of good ideas that kind of works. I want something made by educators, for educators!

Of course, even though we are working on a sample idea of how this would work (built on top of Moodle), we also envision that this will not take on the form of one “New Vision LMS” program that everyone would have to use.  We would like to start seeing all LMS solutions drop the LMS label and go for the SLE (social learning environment) approach.  We would like to see an SLE built on top of Google Wave… and as plug-ins for WordPress… and as a whole host of options that aggregate PLE in different formats, so that you can choose which SLE design works best for your class.

Ultimately, we don’t just want to see the students get a personal learning environment – we want to see teachers get to choose a personal teaching enviornment.  Wouldn’t it be great if, someday, your institution doesn’t have to choose a program for delivering classes online?  As an instructor, you choose the one you want, plug-in a custom code from your school, and then your Personal Teaching Environment (where ever it resides) would be plugged in to your school? Students would be automatically enrolled, grades would be ported back and forth, etc.?  Student authentication / log in would be handled by a central program on your school servers maybe, but clicking on the link for your class takes them to your class where ever you choose to host it.  Maybe it is in a Google Wave, maybe on your own website where you self-installed your own program, or maybe even on a third party hosting solution.  The technology exists to do this now – we are just trying to get it all put together. Just wish that it didn’t take so long to get the first Alpha release out there!

Tweet This Post

What really worries me is that there are probably about a thousand or so technophobes out there sitting on their invites because they had no idea what they were signing up for. “Oh, Google Wave. That sounds so nice and refreshing, don’t you know. Sure I’ll sign up. Is it a new soft drink or something? Well, I’ll agree to all this mumbo-jumbo talky-talky on this page and find out.”

Anyone got a spare invite? So far, I have read some good feedback and some not-so-enthusiastic feedback. I am guessing that some of the negative feedback is coming from people that just like to be anti-hype. There have even been people that have made a list of Top 10 Google Wave problems. Already? Sounds kind of speculative at best, and others have already successfully argued that it is too early to dismiss the G-Wave so easily.

The real question is whether or not Google will draw out this private Beta stage so long that people will stop caring about Wave by the time it is open to everyone. If you want to change the way that people communicate online, you’ve got to get everyone on board pretty quickly. People can prove to be resistant to change if it takes too long.

Tweet This Post

Are we ever gonna see change here?  Two exhibits to consider:

1. Five Companies Google Might Buy Next

   Blackboard is listed as one of those companies (thanks Katrina for the link!).  That is probably not going to happen, but I find the Wall Street Journal’s description of the Borg particularly interesting: “Once a school begins using Blackboard software for their students there are high switching costs as class guides, exams, results, etc are all stored within the blackboard system.”  Wow – if a non-educational company only writes one paragraph about your company, and they choose to highlight one of your worst features… you gotta realize that maybe your business model has drifted too much over to the dark side.

2. Mark Smithers posted an interesting list of various LMS Evaluations he found.  I haven’t read through every report on the list exhaustively, but I did notice some trends.  In all but one case where Moodle was evaluated against Blackboard, Moodle won.  In any case where there wasn’t Moodle but there were other platforms, Blackboard won.

So, the natives are getting restless, and people are noticing…. but is it enough?  Should we be happy that our institutional money (and by extension, our tax money when an institution is a state college) is going to a lawsuit happy near-monopoly?  What would it take to get Blackboard’s attention?  The Wall Street Journal article shows that everyone is starting to notice the questionable practices of Blackboard.  Mark Smither’s list might possibly indicate that there is another LMS option that is winning evaluations, but most of the other options out there still don’t seem to be gaining ground.  Do we need to get more people to realize that Blackboard is hurting education in general, or do we need to get Blackboard to realize that they need to change course?  Or is this just the immovable object meeting the irresistible force?

Personally, I just want to call for Blackboard to  give it a rest and move on.

Tweet This Post

I’ve seen a few online options for the creative types that want to go the cloud-computing route, but most weren’t that special (yet).  Recently, I’ve been seeing a site called Aviary get some attention, so I decided to check it out.  The short version: not too hard to figure out, with a large number of features, all for free.

You can look here for a list of tools they have available so far.  Most of these tools are related to some kind of visual art (including what they claim is the world’s first online vector editor), but there is also an online audio editor in the list.

What interests me about Aviary is that there is a community feeling to it – profiles, favorites, messages, groups, etc.  Kind of like online productivity for creativity mixed with social networking.

There are some drawbacks for the free account.  For example, you can only download a flattened version of your layered artwork or images (with a watermark).  But layered export is coming in the Pro Version.

Ah HA! You say… A Pro version?  That’s where they are going to stick it to us, with a big charge for the really good stuff.  Well, so far… not really.  The tools work the same in both version it seems.  The Pro version gives you features surrounding the tools that pros will need – like private groups to keep your work from being stolen.  And, the Pro version is $24 a year.  Click here for a comparison of the two levels.

I haven’t messed with the Audio mixer – but it looks like you can record entire songs or podcasts online (directly through input, or by uploading pre-recorded audio parts).

Interesting tools for educators – something to keep an eye on.

Check out some of the work created on Aviary.

Tweet This Post

Colleges Will Be ‘Torn Apart’ by Internet, Law Professor Predicts

They appropriately shred this argument to bits.  Not that it is hard.  Let’s see… the first time I heard this “death of the university” junk, the prediction was that they would be gone by 2010.  Which is… three and a half months away? Better start kickin’ the bucket soon all you Universities… you all must have missed the memo.

George Siemens also gives some longer thoughts on why universities won’t go away any time soon. Not the least of which is how much research your average college professor adds to the world, making it a better place to live one study at a time.

The sad thing is, there is plenty of room for us to discuss how the Internet will tear apart colleges by re-arranging how we deliver and design education.  But that does not seem to be what the whole “death to universities by 2020″ movement is saying.  They are saying colleges will just be gone.

Gone?  Let’s see here – actual classroom education is a small percentage of why many student go to college.  They also go to socialize, to become involved in service projects, to take a smaller step towards independence from parents (unless they are unfortunate enough to have the helicopter variety), etc, etc.  So, not only will the Internet change how colleges educate, but it will fundamentally re-alter the entire system from top to bottom, completely removing a large list of non-educational reasons for going to college? I highly doubt that.

I need to make up some crazy theory and gain some attention.  Let’s see…. how about “Second Life will replace all office cubicles by 2020.  Sources report that Dilbert is speechless.”

Tweet This Post

What about computer graphics/modeling and virtual worlds in 3-D?  Chinnock discusses the need for content in 3-D.  Why not give students the ability to create content/images/etc?  Will the programs to do this be too expensive for schools to utilize in individual classes like they do with some programs such asMicroSoft Word?

These questions (and more) will all probably be asked and answered in the near future, I am sure.  Not to mention that the future of 3-D  is not just about projectors.  There are also advances being made in holographic displays and three-dimensional monitors.

But this is all leading to the fact that the walls between the real world and virtual reality are slowly crumbling away.  We now have the ability to create a virtual reality room.  Surround sound and cameras that can follow your movements already exist.  Combine that with the projectors that Chinnock discusses, pointing in all directions in a room, connected to a super-fast computer that can feed realistic CG to those projectors based on your movements, and you pretty much have the early version of a Star Trek holodeck.  Imagine what Second Life would be like then?

Tweet This Post

So, for a little reality break here… a little shocker for people out there.  Are you ready for this one?  People have been leaving FaceBook since the day after it started.  No… really.  Same is true for AOL, MySpace, Google, Twitter…. you name it.  People try a site, don’t like, don’t get it, or whatever… and so they leave.

Fast forward a few years to a time when FaceBook has seen amazing growth.  Record numbers of people are trying it out.  Guess what that also means.  Yep – that also means a greater number of people are leaving it.  Simple math, really: as the number of people trying a site out increases, so would the number of people quitting.  Amazing!

Of course, take an obvious fact and construct enough smokescreens around it… and people will think you have an actual story!  Sad, but true.

What FaceBook really does (and Twitter for that matter) is expose the misanthropic nature of many people.  Take some of the more prominent gripes about FaceBook:

• I don’t care what you had for dinner!
• Why would I want to play all these silly trivia games?
• I don’t care what Goonies character you would have been! (or insert whatever other current quiz is going around).
• Why would I want to join some cause I have never heard of?

Basically, it is just a bunch of people saying that they just don’t care about other people.   The last time I ran into a friend in a store, they told me many random trivia thing… including what they were having for dinner.  That is what people naturally do. I also get together with friends and show them pictures, and play board games that basically amount to nothing but trivia.  Pretty much everything I could ever do on FaceBook, I also do in real life in some form or fashion.

These anti-FaceBook statements show how sadly misanthropic we have become as a society. You had better share a funny, witty, life changing story every time you open your mouth, or it is a waste of my time. I remember as a kid how we would sit around on chairs outside and talk about dinner and movies and politics and a hundred other simple and complex topics… because we actually liked the people we called friends. Now people delete you from their friend list on whatever site just because you didn’t change the world with every post.

What ever happened to caring about the little things in the lives of people that we call friends or family?  You don’t have to like FaceBook, or Twitter, or Google or whatever if you don’t want to… but can we all stop trying to place guilt trips on the people that do like the things we don’t?

(unless, of course, you want to put guilt trips on people that like Blackboard.  That is totally understandable :)

EDIT: Yes, I know that just like any other site (AOL, MySpace, etc) – FaceBook will someday start to die off and be replaced by something else.  Let’s just wait until we have an actual study or data to back up that event, rather than just a bunch of “my buddy so-and-so left, and so did some others.. so it must be true!”

Tweet This Post