ITSAcast

ITSA Awarded $1,000

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:51:00 -0600

Utah State University's Council of Student Clubs and Organizations has awarded ITSA $1,000 to help with a service project in Nepal. For more information on the grant go to www.utahstatesman.com. Click on "Archives," go to the February 14 issue, and click "ASUSU: Are you the one who will get this $1,000?" in the opinion section.

The money will go to Tiffany Ivins and Mitchell Spence to help with their ongoing service work in Nepal. Tiffany and Mitch have been traveling to Nepal for the past eight years and recently have been setting up Youth Managed Resource Centers(YMRC). These YMRCs are computer labs run by youth that teach the local community computer literacy. You can find out more about the YMRCs at http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/ymrc/ or contact Tiffany at tiffany no space ivins at gmail dot com. Stay tuned for more about how you can help.

INST 6820 Design Contest

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Wed, 7 Mar 2007 14:24:00 -0700

As part of David Wiley's Instructional Design Studio class three groups were assigned to create some sort of instructional material using the following rigid criteria:

1. It has to teach something.
2. It has to be 'cool'
3. It has to show what is possible using legally reusable resources.

Tomorrow, in Rm 282 from 10:45-11:45, each group will present their project. Afterwards, you (yes, you!) get to vote and determine the best project. The winners will each receive an iPod shuffle! So come tomorrow and help decide the winner!

Professor Presentations for Spring of 2007

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:05:00 -0700

We are still working on the Professor Presentation schedule for this semester, but I can confirm that Dr. Marcy Driscoll will be presenting at 12:15pm on Feb. 21st. She has asked that we send her our own questions related to the "Politics of Education", as well as any questions that we might have about her text, "Psychology of Learning for Instruction". Please post your questions as a comment to this post.

And please stay tuned as we will be posting updates on the Professor Presentation schedule.

Informal Evenings for Spring of 2007

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:48:00 -0700

I'm very excited to annouce that everything is scheduled for our Informal Evenings this semester. Drs. Byron Burnham and Nick Eastmond are welcoming us into their families' abodes to have informal discussions about many aspects of graduate life and beyond. The schedule is below and listed on the ITSA Calendar.

Each Informal Evening will begin at 7:00pm. We ask that two or three people sign up, via a comment to this blog post, to bring hor deurves or snacks for each Informal Evening.

Informal Evenings Schedule

Date	Host	Starting Topic
Jan 18th	Byron	Preparing for comps
Feb 1st	Byron	Preparing for careers
Feb 15th	Nick	Dynamic life balance, juggling, and stress relieving exercises
Mar 1st	Nick	Publications
Mar 29th	Byron	Setting up committees/getting assistantships, fellowships, internships and other sources of funding.
Apr 5th	Nick	Professional organizations and conferences

Get your Zombie Gear!

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 03:57:00 -0700

Get your Zombie Gear! Fresh *chuckles* Zombie Gear! Get your Fresh Zombie Gear!

http://glarkware.com/securestore/c181845p16832531.2.html

p.s. updates on next semester's festivities coming soon!

Sudoku Competition

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 01:23:00 -0600

Want to know what sudoku is?
Want to play sudoku?
Want to compete in sudoku?

ITSA is organizing a sudoku competition!

Date: November 14, 2006
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: EDU282

Hurry up and start playing Sudoku!
If you want to compete, please send an email to: abbass.sharif@gmail.com

IT Research Centers at USU

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 16:13:00 -0600

The Instructional Technology Student Association (ITSA) cordially invites you to a lecture on research centers in the Instructional Technology Department at USU.

Research Centers:

1- COSL (Center for Open and Sustainable Learning)
2- IA (Instructional Architect)
3- CREATE (Center for Research on Engaging Advanced Technology for Education)
4- FACT (Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching)
5- CLE (Creative Learning Environment)

Cookies and drinks are served!

Date: Thursday Oct. 5, 2006
Time: 12:15 pm
Place: EDU 282

Election Results

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 18:13:00 -0600

Elections and appointments are done and I am proud to announce that the following positions will be filled as follows:

Committee Chairs
Academic – Preston Parker
Professional Relations – Brooke Robershaw
Social – Joel Gardner
Service – Seth Gurell
Technology – Heather Leary

Representatives
International – Murat Ozoglu
M.S. – Joel Drake
Ph.D. – Beijie Xu
Alumnae/I – Pete Maiden

I am disappointed that we were unable to find someone to serve as the M.Ed. representative. If, in the near future, there are nominees for this position then we will consider reopening the vote.

Look for the ITSA flag!

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:33:00 -0600

BBL: Academic and Professional Associations in Instructional Technology

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:20:00 -0600

Brown Bag Lunch
When & Where: Sep 21 from 12:30-1:30 in 282

Title: Academic and Professional Associations in Instructional Technology
Presenter: our very own Preston Parker

Ever wonder how to get involved in Instructional Technology on a national and international level? Ever wonder why you would want to? Preston Parker, a third year PhD student at Utah State University’s Instructional Technology program and Research Assistant for the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, will address these questions. He will offer a “student’s point of view” of what academic and professional associations can offer. As this year’s recipient of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology Strohbehn Internship, he offers a unique perspective of the benefits of becoming involved in associations. Topics will include: who the associations are, their contact information, their strengths and weaknesses, their annual conference dates and locations, what they offer, and why to get involved.

Inst. Tech. Tailgate party for Football Game

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:02:00 -0600

Who: For all Instructional Technology Students, Faculty, Staff, Friends and Family
Where: In the Football Stadium Parking Lot. We will have trucks and tables with the ITSA flag on them.
When: This Saturday from 3:00-4:30. You don’t have to attend the football game at 6:00 if you don’t want to.
How: Pot Luck!! Bring casseroles, desserts, chips, dips, salads, veggies, whatever you want. ITSA will take care of plates, cups and utensils. Also feel free to bring frisbees, footballs, or anything else you want.

Come have fun and support USU Aggies football team. They need help to beat U of U!!!
Students get in free with ID card. Other's will have to pay for general admission.
Please post comment of what you are bringing for food.

New School Year - Proposed Projects

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 13:02:00 -0600

As we start a new school year, we would like to solicit project suggestions, practical, doable, and otherwise, that students, alumae/i, faculty, and staff would like to see ITSA tackle in this and subsequent years. For each suggestion we need a few pieces of information, to include: a brief description, which standing committee would be responsible for it's implementation, its potential priority among other ITSA projects, whether it would be a one time or ongoing project, and any volunteers for completing the suggestion (as well as hours each volunteer would be willing to commit to this project). If you would like to volunteer for a standing committee or for a specific project, please let us know which committee/project and how much time you would be willing to commit to this committee or project. (Yes, you may volunteer for multiple committees or projects, but please do not volunteer for more than a total average of 2 hours per week for all committees and projects.) If you have specific suggestions or requests for projects, please feel free to make them known.

Some projects that have already proposed include (all would be ongoing):

* Planning and conducting student orientation (High - Steering) - handle the planning and conducting the annual fall orientation, in conjunction with faculty and staff
* Setting up and managing a mentoring program (High - Steering) - handle the initial setting up and subsequent management of a mentoring program
* Promoting publishing opportunities for students (High - Academics) - identify and make known to current students, various publishing opportunities
* Facilitating scholarship in the field (Medium - Academics) - identify and make known to current students, various non-publishing and non-conference related scholarship opportunities
* Promoting professional conferences (High - Academics) - identify and make known to current students conference related scholarship opportunities
* Leading fundraising efforts (Medium - Professional Relations) - identify and implement various fundraising methods
* Reaching out to alumae/i (High - Professional Relations) - identify and implement various methods of strengthening relationship between current students, the department and alumae/i
* Managing employment and graduate assistantship announcements (Medium - Professional Relations) - initiate a method of disseminating employment activities, to include graduate assistanships, to students and alumae/i
* Managing networking activities (Medium - Professional Relations) - identify, organize, and desiminate opportunities for networking for students and alumae/i within the instructional technology field
* Planning and managing weekly, monthly, and special occasion ITSA social events (High - Social) - solicit, plan, organize, and manage a variety of reoccurring and special occasion events ( e.g. NOD 'n NOFs, USU vs. BYU games, tennis matches, hiking trips)
* Assisting in departmental social events (High - Social) - assist in the planning and management of departmental social events (e.g. the fall and spring socials)
* Reaching out to international students (High - Social) - ensure that international students have additional support in acclimating to American culture
* Planning and managing student service and outreach activities (High - Service) - identify and organize opportunities for students to perform community service and outreach ( e.g. literacy mentoring, habit for humanity)
* Creating and managing an online, peer-reviewed journal (Medium - Technology) - identify the needs of our students, as related to a new, online peer-reviewed journal; implement and manage a journal based on the needs analysis results
* Creating and managing an ITSA wiki (Medium - Technology) - identify the needs of our students, as related to a new wiki; implement and manage a wiki based on the needs analysis results
* Managing the ITSAcast blog (High - Technology) - manage membership and postings on the ITSAcast blog
* Planning and managing podcasts of department and ITSA related podcasts (High - Technology) - organize, conduct, and publish podcasts of department and ITSA events ( e.g. guest lectures, lunchbox lectures, OpenEd presentations)
* Planning and managing the conversion of opensource texts to podcasts (Medium - Technology) - organize, conduct, and publish podcasts of opensource texts, book chapters and journal articles, of interest to the instructional technology field ( e.g. Wealth of Networks)
* Planning and managing an ITSA website (Low - Technology) - identify the needs of our students, as related to a new ITSA website; implement and manage a website based on the needs analysis results
* Planning and managing an ITSA newsletter (Low - Technology) - identify the needs of our students, as related to a new ITSA newsletter; implement and manage a newsletter based on the needs analysis results
* Organizing weekly lunchtime events (High - JOINT: Academics, Professional Relations, and Social) - organize weekly lunchtime events; can be purly social in nature, or have a variety of academic and professional activities ( e.g. just a lunchtime gathering, guest lectures, alumae/i visits, recruitment meetings)

Amendments to Student Constitution

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 12:52:00 -0600

There are currently six proposed amendments to be voted on by the steering committee. While the vote will be made by the steering committee, we are soliciting feedback, comments, and suggestions from all ITSA constituents.

The proposed amendments are:

1. Amending Article III, Section 2: The Vice President office is jointly considered a President-Elect office. Therefore, the elected Vice President becomes the President in his/her second year of officer service (after the year of service as Vice President is completed). Thus, the candidate for the office of Vice President must be prepared to serve two successive one year terms.

2. Amending Article IV, Section 1: The Program and Social Events standing Committee will be split into two standing committees called the Professional Relations Committee and Social Committee. The duties of the Professional Relations Committee are leading fundraising efforts, reaching out to alumni, handling employment and Graduate Assistantship announcements, and managing networking activities. The duties of the Social Committee are assisting in department social events, and managing weekly and monthly ITSA social events.

3. Amending Article IV, Section 1: Two new standing committees are to be created called the Academics Committee and the Technology Committee. The duties of the Academics Committee are promoting publishing, facilitating scholarship in the field, and promoting professional conferences. The duties of the Technology Committee are to create and manage technologies requested by the steering committee.

4. Amending Article III, Section 1, A: Along with the four elected officers (President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer) and appointed Committee Chairs, there will be five elected Representatives: (1) International Representative, (2) M.Ed. Representative, (3) M.A. Representative, (4) Ph.D. Representative, and (5) Alumnae/i Representative. The elected Representatives act as a voice to ITSA for a particular student group, therefore, he/she must be a current member of the respective group being represented. Only current members of a group can vote for their Representative. The Representative is also the point of contact for the represented group. The four executive officers, appointed Committee Chairs, and the five Representatives make up the Steering Committee.

5. Amending Article III, Section 3: Elections are to be moved from the Fall to the Spring at a time chosen by the Steering Committee.

6. Amending Article III, Section 2: An added duty is that the President is required to attend faculty meetings and the Vice President is required to be a member of the Graduate Senate. Both positions can be reassigned, as needed, to other executive committee members.

ITSA New Year :-)

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 10:26:00 -0600

We are beginning a new semester and a new school year. ITSA will have its first meeting on Thursday, August 31st in room 282. Be ready to elect a new president, or not. Get involved in your student community.

Also be aware that NOD N'OFF (students Night off dinner and Night ofF with Faculty) will begin September 21st, 6:30 pm at Angies. Hope to see all of you there.

Yoda would say: Do or Do Not get involved, there is no try.

Last Lunch Box Series for Spring 2006

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:10:00 -0700

It was sad to say good-bye to the last lecture for Spring 2006. But at least it was a good one, and very well attended. Brian Astorga, an alumni of our department, spoke about DocuMedia Learning Group. Daren made the following introduction:

In my opinion, Brian Astorga is to the Utah State Instructional Technology Department what Paul Revere was to the American revolution. For many years he was there for our faculty and students "In the hour of darkness and peril and need...", and we are happy to have him return to share with us the knowledge and experience he has gained working with DocuMedia Learning Group. Brian and Dr. David Gordon will do the following during their presentation:

1) Present a training approach that provides a competitive advantage to several companies they work with.
2) Present the tools that they have created to produce solutions and ROI results for these companies.
3) Discuss the various definitions of the term ‘simulation’ being used in corporate culture –the good the bad and the ugly.

Click here for podcast.

Ken McAllister

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:25:00 -0600

Learning Games Initiative (LGI) had its first Utah Kickoff at Utah State University. The featured speaker was Ken McAllister, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Arizona. Ken is the Co-Director/ Co-Founder of LGI. The title of his talk was Why Humanities Scholars Need to Pay Attention to Computer Games. It is included here in the podcast.

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

Jean-Claude Bradley and the EduFrag Project

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:38:00 -0600

This podcast represents an informal discussion of the EduFrag project between Jean-Claude Bradley from Drexel University (Philadelphia) and Faculty and students of Utah State University, including Robert McConkie, Brett Shelton, and Ryan Moeller.

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

Thank you for your patience

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:59:00 -0600

The following podcasts are from the COSL conference at Utah State University at the end of September. I thought you might want to get them as soon as possible, so I offer them here and now, in a somewhat raw form. This week we will be taking the mp3's to the sound lab to see if we can enhance them in any way. When they are finished we will replace any that we were able to enhance.

If you were podcasted and do not see your presentation here, it is because it didn't work. Some of the podcasts were accidentally turned off some time during the presentation. By next year we should have this thing mastered.

Thank you for your patience in this matter. And please enjoy!!

Brett Shelton, Ryan Moeller and Cheryl Ball

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:24:00 -0600

Games, Signs and Texts: Exploring Sustainable, Creative Learning
Environments Through Cultural Analysis and Localization

Brett Shelton, Ryan Moeller and Cheryl Ball, Utah State University
Thursday, September 29, 2005, 10:00-10:45 am

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

This presentation explicates a common research strand being pursued by the three presenters within the Creative Learning Environments Laboratory at USU. The research strand centers on the cultural impact of technological texts and investigates how technological texts change cultural formations. The three speakers will focus on the production and analysis of a variety of open texts within and across their particular fi elds of study: rhetorics, emerging media and graphic representations.

The Creative Learning Environments Laboratory is a collaborative multimedia research space that spans inquiry across the Instructional Technology and English departments. A mission of the lab is in itself an exercise of “openness:” to use textual theories from a variety of methodological fi elds including rhetoric, computer science, art and design, literary studies, and education to broaden approaches of learning and teaching from single-departmental efforts into ones that include a variety of adaptable learning perspectives.

“ All your base are belong to us ” and other computer game faux pas
Ryan M. Moeller
The Learning Games Initiative (LGI), one project supported by the Creative Lab, seeks to demonstrate that computer games are complex, cultural artifacts that, not unlike movies, need to be considered across multiple cultural mapping points beyond language translation. Subsequently, computer games can be used as sustainable resources to teach and analyze culture. The example of Magnifi cent Seven’s success is one of localization: a product that has been designed to be adaptable to various linguistic, economic, visual, environmental, and cultural conditions based upon its context and use. This notion of making products usable and sustainable across cultural boundaries is applied to many different disciplines and industries where it is most often used to discuss strategies of globalization—areas such as software development, economics, web design, movie and television production, and education. Popular, Americanized television shows for children such as the Power Rangers or Pokémon from Japan and Hi-5 out of Australia demonstrate the sustainability and reusability of resources 139 from talent to stock video to sets and props to music and sound effects. And, in an example of localization gone wrong, the widely popular Pokémon video game was banned in Saudi Arabia for its use of Zionist imagery. The video game Zero Wing, produced for the Sega Genesis platform, demonstrated a poorly localized product in which a bad translation (“All your base are belong to us “ ”) resulted in hilarious media frenzy for English-speaking gamers. Thayer and Kolko (2004) have recently articulated a protocol for localizing computer games, bringing educational games and simulations into discussions of international media. The LGI builds on this idea, allowing students and researchers to use, analyze, and produce computer games and educational simulations to discover how to effectively communicate in localized and globalized situations. We argue that many times, cultural faux pas like the Pokémon and Zero Wing examples teach us more about culture than even good adaptations might. Investigating the cultural infl uence for interpreting graphical information Brett E. Shelton Noted educational technology researcher William Winn (1994) posed the following questions over a decade ago: to what extent are the conventions of graphics culture specifi c, and are the processes that enable detection, discrimination and confi guration universal? Based on these questions, we are researching how culture infl uences the interpretation of familiar signs (e.g., graphic representations used for “restroom” and “stop”), looking primarily at differences in how Koreans and North Americans interpret the meaning of graphical symbols outside of their familiar context. A second phase of research involves investigating the infl uence of context on the interpretation of meaning by offering certain signs in a variety of familiar and unfamiliar settings. The third phase targets the identifi cation of the graphical components of the signs used in Phase 1 and 2 by studying the features of the signs that held signifi cant meaning for viewers based on their cultural and contextual meanings. We are currently in the fi rst phase of research in this project, but we expect the fi ndings will help inform our understanding of how we interpret meanings from graphical representations and may impact the design of graphics in order to increase understanding in a variety of cultural and contextual instances.

Trans-cultural multimedia production in an English classroom
Cheryl E. Ball
In English studies, the past decade has seen a dramatic shift toward analysis and production of multimedia texts (c.f. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Wysocki, Selfe, Johnson-Eilola, & Sirc, 2004). This shift is informed by the study of rhetoric, which we defi ne as reading and composing texts with an understanding of a specifi c audience, purpose, and context. In Dr. Ball’s Perspectives on Writing and Rhetoric class, students analyze creative multimodal texts using multiple reading strategies, and then compose their own texts. Although this generation of students is typically well-informed about technology, most of them have never encountered a digital, multimodal text whose purpose is primarily aesthetic. Studying the rhetorical situation in what literary theorists such as Eco and Rosenblatt would call an “open,” readerdriven, adaptable text provides a rich learning experience for students.In this class, students read several examples of open texts including “Murmuring Insects” (Ankerson, 2001), which successfully uses Eastern and Western multimodal elements—including written, aural, visual, animated, and other modes of communication—to juxtapose calm with fear while honoring the events of September 11, 2001. In this presentation, we show this piece in contrast to student-produced multimodal texts that attempt to adopt cultural contexts of other writers, often unsuccessfully. We conclude by suggesting why some students’ attempts at adaptation in these creative and social media are hindered by localized contexts. In addition, we demonstrate how students who don’t attempt to adapt their creative work to other’s contexts often make stronger rhetorical choices in their multimodal texts while still meeting the needs of various audiences.

References
Ankerson, I. (2001). Murmuring insects [Flash Player text]. Poems That Go. Retrieved September 19, 2003, from .
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York: Routledge.
Thayer, A. & Kolko, B. (2004). Localization of digital games: The process of blending for the global games market. Technical Communication 51, 477-88.
Wiley, D. (2005). A discussion of cultural texts, adaptation, and 141 openness. Personal communication July 17, 2005 with Brett E. Shelton.
Winn, W. (1994). Contributions of perceptual and cognitive processes to the comprehension of graphics. In W. Schnotz & R. W. Kulhavy (Eds.), Comprehension of graphics: Elsevier Science.
Wysocki, A., Johnson-Eilola, J., Selfe, C., & Sirc, G. (2004). Writing new media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Fred Beshears

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 8 Oct 2005 13:14:00 -0600

The Economic Case for Creative Commons Textbooks

Fred Beshears, University of California at Berkeley
Friday, September 30, 2005, 10:00-10:45 am

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

According to a recent survey, University of California students now spend 40 percent more on textbooks than they did six years ago. This presentation examines how colleges and universities may be able to significantly reduce these costs by creating a coalition for the acquisition and distribution of electronic textbooks. We begin by noting that although the textbook market seems rather tranquil at present, the same cannot be said for vendors of Learning Management Systems. One significant proposal that could disrupt the learning software market has been put forward by Ira Fuchs, Vice President for Research at the Mellon Foundation. In a recent article, he proposes the creation of Educore—an organization dedicated to the development of open source educational software. According to Fuchs, Educore would be made up of more than 1,000 colleges and universities around the world. And, to pay for the cost of software development, each member institution would be asked to contribute between $5,000 and $25,000 per year, based on size.

Inspired by Fuchs’s vision, this presentation explores the idea of establishing a global coalition of similar size that would acquire and distribute high-quality creative commons content that could be used in any of the following combinations: (a) as the basis of an online course, (b) as an electronic textbook, or (c) as a customized printed textbook for use in a traditional college course.

Unlike MIT’s Open Courseware initiative, this presentation focuses on content for the big introductory courses that account for a large percentage of student eyeballs and a substantial portion of the textbook market. The business model for the coalition would be simple: traditional colleges and universities would agree to pay membership dues to purchase content from one or more open universities such as the British Open University. The coalition would not develop the content; it would purchase content in bulk. In addition to saving money, this presentation also looks at how open textbook content could give faculty the freedom to customize course materials.

We examine the economically feasibility of an open textbook initiative by reviewing how such open universities now spend on content development. We then look at how much it would cost to buy this content on an ongoing basis. Finally, we divide the cost of purchasing the content by the number of students in the coalition to see how this cost compares with the current cost of textbooks.

According to our discussions with faculty, we find that a fair number of those who teach Berkeley’s large introductory courses would be willing and able to substitute open content for the commercial textbooks currently in use. But even if most instructors continued to use commercial textbooks, we believe that the figures show that it may still be that enough students will be able to use the initiative’s content to justify the small per-student cost. We also look at how schools may encourage instructors to use open textbook content by providing faculty stipends as well as paid student and staff support to help customize course content. We outline how some schools could support these costs by establishing a course material customization fee that could be far less than the current cost of commercial textbooks. Also, in our discussions with faculty we identify textbook selectors and authors to assess their stake in the textbook industry. Our initial findings are that only a very small percentage of faculty actually write textbooks. We also find that of this number only a small percentage report that they make a significant amount of money from their textbooks. On the other hand, we find that faculty who select textbooks for large survey courses are interested in the money that would be generated from a course material fee.

In summary, it should be noted that this presentation is not a specific business proposal. Instead, the main purpose of this presentation is to stimulate discussion of a number of different but interrelated cost savings issues, each representing a different lever that policy makers could move separately or together. Some schools, for example, may want to treat the open textbook content simply as a library resource. Other schools, however, may want to provide faculty with financial incentives and resources to customize the coalition’s open content. If these costs were substantial, then policy makers might need to consider a course material fee, which students might accept if it’s less than what they currently pay for comparable commercial textbooks. Also, any specific policy proposal would need to address licensing issues governing how said customized content would be owned. And, finally, different means of distribution (electronic vs. print) would entail different costs that would have to be addressed. The main point, however, is that a creative commons textbook initiative may not only save students money, it could also give faculty more freedom to customize the content of their courses.

See related papers at:
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20050407015813
and at
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Fall2005/opentextbook.
html

Richard Siddoway

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 8 Oct 2005 13:10:00 -0600

Utah’s Electronic High School

Richard Siddoway, Utah Electronic High School
Friday, September 30, 2005, 11:00-11:45 am

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

The Electronic High School was created in 1994 as a response to a challenge from Utah’s Governor Leavitt. We serve five major groups of students: (1) students who wish to make up credit, (2) students who wish to take a course not offered at their school, (3) students who wish to take extra credit and graduate early, (4) students who are homeschooled, and (5) students who have dropped out of school and now wish to earn a diploma. The Electronic High School courses are free to Utah students (which covers the $18 course cost). Out-of-state students pay $50 per quarter credit per course. Currently the Electronic High School is serving more than 40,000 students and has recently opened its doors to students and teachers displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The Electronic High School is funded through an on-going line-item appropriation from the legislature.

Jody Underwood

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 8 Oct 2005 13:07:00 -0600

What Am I Learning? Performance Feedback in an Open Learning
Environment

Jody Underwood, ETS
Friday, September 30, 2005, 10:00-10:45 am

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

Getting feedback on your progress is certainly a barrier to open education, except in the most informal environments. Home-schoolers, for example, don’t have access to the same kind of feedback that students get in traditional classroom settings. And it’s common to hear people complain that they can’t learn from self-study materials because they need to be ‘in a class’ to learn. What is it that they’re getting from the class, exactly? Partly, it’s structure and external pressure. But partly it’s feedback.

In order for people in isolated locations and other non-traditional settings to be able to further their educations, they need effective feedback about their performance. This involves helping them figure out what they need to work on, and what they’re in a position to learn given what they know already.

One way to approach this is captured by the concept of cumulative achievement (‘summit-ive’) testing. The idea here is to continually take variations of the same test until you score 100% on it. Helpful feedback describes the areas students still need to work on and what they are ready to learn, guiding them down paths toward mastering all the material.

One of the big changes that open education could bring—if we’re lucky!—is a viable alternative to the (completely insane) idea that everyone should be learning the same material, presented in the same way, at the same pace. One of the things that keeps this idea from being discarded is the current model of assessment, i.e., give everyone the same test at the same time, and then move on, whether the students are ready or not.

Once you break away from that assessment model, to one where any individual can get individualized feedback about his progress, open education would be poised to become the normal model for learning, rather than an alternative to the mainstream.

Andrea Edmundson

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 8 Oct 2005 13:03:00 -0600

“Using the Cultural Adaptation Process (CAP) Model”
Adapting e-Learning for Use by Non-Western Cultures

Andrea Edmundson, eWorldLearning.com
Friday, September 30, 2005, 11:00-11:45 am

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

The term globalization gained currency in the 1970s as Western corporations rapidly expanded into other parts of the world (Jarvis, 2002), accelerating cross-cultural exchanges (Walker & Dimmock, 2002). Industrial anthropologists, such as Hall (2003; 1981) Hofstede (1984;1997; 2001) and Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner (1998), have identified cross-cultural dimensions—categories of characteristics across which cultures can be compared and contrasted—to begin to explain how members different cultures communicate, perceive time, or view themselves in relation to others and to the environment. Thus, as e-learning options proliferate and globalization continues members of this expanding audience of learners are more likely to encounter courses created by another culture. Most e-learning courses are designed in Western cultures; however, the largest and fastest growing consumer groups live in Eastern cultures such as China, Japan, and India (Van Dam & Rogers, 2002). Educators will thus be challenged to provide e-learning opportunities that result in equitable learning outcomes for targeted cultures by addressing differences in educational systems and cultural values. In particular, corporations that have outsourced sections of their workforce will be challenged with providing training for employees in non-Western or non-American cultures. Today, much of this training is provided via e-learning. However, to be successful, e-learning courses, typically designed in western cultures, will more likely be successful if they meet the needs of learners in non-western cultures.

This presentation is based on current literature and an exploratory, quasi-experimental study (posttest-only control group design), The Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Globalized e-Learning: Pre-testing was neither desirable nor useful in this study, as the researcher was interested in the differences between learning outcomes caused by the culture, rather than the knowledge or skills generated by the e-learning course. The study examined the effects of cross-cultural dimensions on learning outcomes for employees in functionally equivalent jobs in Western and Eastern cultures. Participants from the United States and India completed a Level 1 e-learning course (one with minimized cultural influences) that was designed in the United States. Results (scores, time to complete the course and number of attempts needed to complete the course) were compared for 757 participants, using students’ t tests. Subsequently, 204 randomly selected completers of the e-learning course then reported their perceptions of the e-learning experience in an online survey.

The problem addressed in this study was: “Are e-learning courses designed in a Western culture equally effective when used in an Eastern culture?” The research questions used to address this problem were as follows:

When taking an e-learning course designed in a Western culture, do participants from Eastern and Western cultures experience equitable learning outcomes?

Do they have different preferences for or perceptions of elearning?

If there are strong similarities or significant differences in learning outcomes between the two cultures, in participants’ use of features, or in their preferences or perceptions, are these similarities or differences related to the cross-cultural dimensions described in the literature?

Learners from both cultures achieved equitable learning outcomes, suggesting that characteristics of a Level 1 e-learning course can mediate the effects of culture that may inhibit the achievement of equitable learning outcomes. In addition, while cross-cultural dimensions did seem to affect learners’ preferences for and perceptions of e-learning, both Eastern and Western participants were willing to try new approaches to learning that did not align with their cultural profiles, as identified in the literature.

Based on the results of this study, the cultural adaptation process (CAP) model was presented as a preliminary guideline for adapting e-learning courses for other cultures. The use of this model could assist corporations who are training their outsourced employees in another culture to ensure that all employees understand the training and acquire the desired skills.

Domestically, providers of e-learning will be challenged to accommodate increasingly culturally heterogeneous audiences of learners. In 1997, 36% of students in the United States were fromnondominant ethnic groups, yet 86% of new teachers were white, and only 3% of teachers spoke a second language (from the National Center for Educational Statistics in Carter, 2000). From an instructional point of view, incompatibilities between the cross-cultural characteristics of e-learning courses and learners could cause inequitable learning outcomes (Henderson, 1996). For example, members of cultures may prefer to learn in a particular manner (Gardner, 1989; Horton, 1999), or they may have specific approaches to problem solving (Lave, 1988; Soh, 1999) and creativity (Gardner, 1989). Or, a pedagogical paradigm espoused by one culture could alienate or confuse targeted learners (Hall, 1981), as could unintentional cultural biases in instructional design (McLoughlin, 1999). Thus, both producers and consumers of e-learning in cultures other than the designing culture may benefit from understanding and applying principles addressed by this study.

References
Carter, R. T. (2000). Reimagining race in education: A new paradigm for psychology. Teachers College Record, 102(5), 864-898.
Gardner, H. (1989). To open minds: Chinese clues to the dilemma of contemporary American education. New York: Basic Books.
Hall, A. (2003, June 2003). A Paperless Society, [Electronic newsletter]. Society The Public Library of Steubenville and Jefferson County [2003, Sept. 30].
Hall, E. T. (1981). Beyond culture: Into the cultural unconscious (1st ed.). Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.
Henderson, L. (1996). Instructional design of interactive multimedia: A cultural critique. Educational Technology Research and Development, 44(4), 85-104.
Hofstede, G. H. (1984). Culture’s consequences: International differences in Work-Related Values (Abridged ed. Vol. 5). Newbury Park: SAGE Publications.
Hofstede, G. H. (1997). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (Second ed.). London; New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hofstede, G. H. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Raymond Yee

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 8 Oct 2005 12:57:00 -0600

Towards Remixing Any Content from Any Source with Any Service:
Lowering the Barrier to Use of Content in Open Education

Raymond Yee, University of California at Berkeley
Friday, September 30, 2005, 10:00-10:45 am

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

As the amount of open educational resources grows, the need for tools that allow users to interact with this content will also grow. What do users want from such tools? In Digital Resource Study: Conclusions and Next Steps14, Diane Harley and her colleagues, drawing from work to date on the “use of digital resources in undergraduate teaching contexts in the H/SS [humanities/social sciences],” write: Many [faculty] want a one-stop shop in which they can find and re-aggregate snippets from available resources into a customized resource for their own use. In other words, they would like to build their own reaggregated resources, using their own materials, mixing them with resources they have collected along the way. How to manage the array of available resources and integrate them into teaching practice is a concern for those involved in tools development. For faculty, there may be an array of tools available to them for collecting, developing, and managing resources, but the efficacy and interoperability of these tools for the immediate tasks faculty need supported are questionable. And yet another challenge, for those directly providing support to faculty, is the integration of learning management systems with library resources and other course content. Current Learning Management Systems (LMS) appear to have limited overall functionality, especially since existing LMS may not allow easy integration with many types of digital resources.

This description of how faculty members like to use educational digital resources echoes what members of the so-called “remix culture” are already doing. The remixers gather digital content from a variety of sources, create works derived from this material, and share the new products with others. Catchier coinages abound to encapsulate essentially the same idea: Apple’s “rip, mix, burn” or Yahoo’s new FUSE “find, use, share, expand.”

At the Interactive University Project at UC Berkeley, my colleagues and I have been building the Scholar’s Box, a tool that gives users “gather/ create/share” functionality, enabling them to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal and themed collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. The Scholar’s Box can currently perform the following functions:

• Gather: From California Digital Library (CDL), amazon.com, google.com, NSDL, CalPhotos, RSS/Atom feeds, METS (digital library), WWW, CDL’s metasearch system, and the local file system.
• Create: Data and metadata gathered, annotated, and organized into personal collections via drag and drop
• Share: IMS-CP, OpenOffice.org Presentation or Text document, PDF, HTML, a METS document, a set of Endnote references, Chandler Parcel, or sent to a weblog via the Blogger API

At this point, the Scholar’s Box is primarily a prototype of an extensible general-purpose remix application geared to the educational community. Although there are more practical (but narrower) gather/create/share tools than the Scholar’s Box, there are unique aspects of the Scholar’s Box that should be of interest to the open education community:

• It is the one of few tools that connects domains that are of particular importance to educational users: digital libraries, educational technology, social software tools, and desktop content authoring.
• It is a tool that would have a particular affinity for open content, since it allows the manipulation of digital content on a fine grain level and the creation of derivative works in which the sources are explicitly tracked.
• It instantiates (if weakly) an architecture for a complete span of gather/create/share functionality

The current generation of gather/create/share tools represents only the first steps to enabling the robust re-aggregation of digital resources desired by educators. We predict that users will ultimately be satisfied by nothing less than a scholarly and educational information environment that gives them seamless access to any digital content source, handles any content type, and applies any software service to this content. Consider, for example, what a collection of bloggers expressed as their desires for next generation blogging tools:15

Bloggers want tools that are utterly simple, and allow them to blog everything that they can think, in any format, from any tool, from anywhere. Text is just the beginning: Bloggers want to branch out to multiple media types including rich and intelligent use of audio, photos, and video. With input, having a dialog box is also seen as just a starting place for some bloggers: everything from a visual tool to easy capture of things a blogger sees, hears or reads point to desirable future user interfaces for new generations of blogging tools.

Using the Scholar’s Box as a primary example, the talk will outline the many possibilities and challenges that face designers of tools for remixing content with services. We will analyze the progress that has been made towards the ubiquitous remixing of any content from any source with any service. In particular, this talk will consider what can be done specifically with open content to enable better reuse of open content by remixing applications.

Jacqus du Plessis and Alex Koohang

bobbemcghie@gmail.com (Bobbe McGhie Allen) — Sat, 8 Oct 2005 12:50:00 -0600

Underlying Open Learning Development—Reflections on Elements of
Success in Open Sourcing

Jacques Du Plessis and Alex Koohang, University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee
Thursday, September 29, 2005, 3:15-4:00 pm

mp3 podcast Right click and 'Save Target As' for manual download

Higher education institutions have begun the formation of open source
applications in recent years. They reduce vendor control and lock-ins.
They are flexible and possess definitive access, control, ownership, and
freedom (Young, 2004).

Freedom to choose, increasing user access, increasing user control,
encouraging the formation of a global community/communities of
practice, promoting quality, and enhancing innovation in teaching and
learning are among many benefits open learning model offers (Coppola
& Neelley 2004). Claroline (http://www.claroline.net), .LRN Course
Management (http://www.collaboraid.biz/products/dotlrn), Moodle
(http://moodle.org) and EduZope (http://www.eduzope.org) are some
examples of open source CMS options.

Open source is software’s source code made freely available to
anyone who wishes to expand, modify, and improve the code. The
success stories of open source model are Linux (http://www.linux.
org) and NetBeans (http://www.netbeans.org/about/index.html). The
source codes to both Linux and NetBeans are available to anyone
who wishes to reuse as they see fit, under the terms of use. Other
examples of the open source model are learning object repositories
such as CAREO (http://careo.netera.ca), Distributed Learning Object
Repository Network (DLORN) (http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/dlorn/
dlorn.cgi), MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/Home.po), Open Course
(http://opencourse.org), and OpenCourseWare (MIT) (http://ocw.mit.
edu/index.html).

The research emphasis of this paper is to explore the reasons
why open source works. The specific areas addressed include the
structuring of the community, the evangelism efforts, the license
agreement, and quality control.

The paper uses the essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (Raymond,
1999) as a basis to explore the underlying differences between
traditional commercial software development and the open source
models.

Several open source developments are investigated and a review
of literature is used to analyze the communities of practice, the
development cycles, the mainstream acceptance of these applications,
and the longevity of these development projects.
As Raymond (1999) indicated, we find that the Bazaar’s infrastructure
is crucial. Without an infrastructure the mission of the Bazaar is
frustrated. However, a good infrastructure allows the vision of the
Bazaar to be realized and the affordances of group-think and group-production
can be realized.

When looking at software development, the fi rst analogy describes the
traditional corporate environment and the open source development
environment. The cathedral-type system requires order and it is
managed top-down. This model claims private ownership and exists
primarily in a spirit of competition. The source code is proprietary
and every effort is made to make users dependent on the cathedral’s
products.

The bazaar-type of development is less predictable. It is an
environment where strangers all over the globe participate in the
development and enhancement of software. The tire-kicking, willing
contributions, bartering, and collaborations happen freely to express
and meet the needs of the participants. Unlike the cathedral, the
bazaar exists because people are willing to publicly collaborate in
development. The bazaar is based on public ownership. Should an
entity depend on a product, their source code can protect them should
the development infrastructure disintegrate.

The concept of reusability can be seen from the context of either a
service or a product. The transformation of libraries helps explain this
reality. Traditional libraries provide reusable products (books). The
same book can be checked out many times. On the other hand, digital
libraries provide a reusable service. The library would be subscribed
to databases. This access to the database is a reusable service. The
moment this access fee is not paid up, the library loses the service
and with the service gone, there is no product either. A library that
purchased a product instead, would still have the product should the
money to enhance the acquisitions dry up. It is then a question of
ownership once the money has been paid. Within the context LOs,
the future will continue to offer both types of reusability. What should
be avoided is to predominantly have access to LOs as a service which
implies being at the mercy of an institution or individual for access.
Textbooks (a tangible LO) illustrates what will be in the future, but
it also illustrates what is lacking in alternatives. Textbook companies
strive to produce the best possible product. The catch is the cost. The
product is good, but the costs are high, and the textbook company
has to ensure that the textbook has to be purchased frequently to
maximize the return on their investment. This is done with copyright
protection and frequent updates and new editions. In theory, an
open-source textbook could bring great minds together to continually
develop a superb product and to ensure free distribution. This might
offer a much-needed alternative that is presently not adequately
nurtured.

Although there is evidence of open source code as far back as the
50’s, the infrastructure that the Internet provides in tying together
the global community has laid the groundwork for the development
of networking and P2P interactions and a social understanding of new
ways of working and collaborating. Many of these efforts are now
maturing. The maturity is rated against the success of the products
and how well such products hold op to their commercial counterparts.
The time is right for several developments to migrate into each others
purviews, viz. open source development, open learning, sharable open
content, especially reusable learning objects, unfettered by copyright
restrictions.

References
Coppola, C. & Neelley, E. (2004). Open source open learning: Why
open source makes sense for education. Retrieved October 27,
2004, from http://www.rsmart.com/assets/OpenSourceOpensLear
ningJuly2004.pdf
Young J. (September, 2004). Five challenges for open source. Chronicle
of Higher Education.