Learning Digital

Final thoughts

melancholia by Albrecht Durer

My synthesis post is complete and available here.

It is with some melancholy that I reflect on the end of this course. I have not always been completely successful in creating the various assignments over the last few months, but I feel I have learned the most out of any course I have taken in this program. I come away with a new confidence in my ability to create learning experiences and a toolkit for searching out and utilizing new technologies.

The discussions I have had with my fellow students have been instructional and entertaining. Even those exchanges which were a little less smooth were an opportunity to understand the limitations and possibilities for asynchronous communication….

I agree with some of the comments made that this should be a required course in the MET program. This is the perfect testing ground for your skills as a digital age professional. All of the theory we have learned in other courses can be applied in fairly close to real world situations.

Congratulations to the development and teaching team! This has been a great experience which will have lasting effects on my teaching practice.

Wiki collaboration

I came late to the wiki assignment so I don’t think I participated as much as I should have, but that being said I think it was a great way to have us develop a set of ideas for using social software. The system of voting for the benefits and challenges, with the option to add new points, made sense and appears to have worked well.

In comparison to other collaborative tools I have used I think that for the creation of a document, Google docs works just as well, but the system that my group used (having different colours for different contributers) would not work on a larger scale. Adding comments in the wiki and having the time stamp and signature was a good way of keeping track of who made each contribution.

I have used a wiki to work collaboratively on a presentation style project and I think that was a great use of the capabilities of the application. Using the wiki to collaborate on a document is certainly less onerus than sending an annotated Word document back and forth. There is never a question about who has the latest version of the document, and there is no confusion about which is the definitive version.

The wiki discussion was different from the threaded discussions we usually have in that all of the information was available when you viewed the page, as opposed to having to go back and read the whole thread again in the forums.  For a larger group like our section, this means there is a lot of information at once, which could be overwhelming, but was fairly well organized. The ability to edit the material posted by others can also be positive or negative. You can amend or correct something that another student has posted, but there is no quarentee  that the amendment will be better than the original contribution, and something great might be lost.

Would I use a wiki in my work? Good question. The courses I am involved with last only 4 weeks and there is little contact with the students after they finish. It would be an interesting project to try and get the students to participate in the creation of a wiki related to the workshops, but I think it might ultimately fail due to lack of interest. There would have to be a very compelling reason to create the wiki and I don’t think I have one yet. Also, most of my students are social workers who are very constrained in their ability  to discuss their work due to issues of confidentiallity.

Maybe a forum would be better, but I might be able to get remote workers in small, rural communities to work on a wiki related to finding resources and research relvant to their situations. In my LMS project I have a wiki that students would contribute links to web resources. I would hope that this would tap into the collective wisdom (and search capabilities) of the class, and could be continued by participants in later iterations of the course.

Toolkit reflection: Social software

I often use Second Life and Flickr for personal recreation, so I was very interested to go back and look at the TOSs for those services. I found mostly what I expected: legal language that seems to be made to confound, and statements in every section designed to protect the company from any and all legal action. In terms of using these services for students, I would be very wary since it is unlikely that even high-school students would understand the language of the agreements and it would be difficult to gauge whether parents had read and adequately translated the TOS for their child. It would be an interesting project to work with a lawyer and translate the TOSs for the services you want to use for children and adolescents (or even just for the legalese imparied among us..lol). Obviously students would only  have access to the Teen Grid of Second Life, but the same issues are also present for post-secondary students. In universities and colleges instructors have even less control over whether students have read and understood the TOS of the service they want to use.

In terms of ownership of the intellectual property and materials uploaded to the services, it seems that the creator (the user) retains the IPR to the content but the company has unlimited rights to use it in any way they see fit. In Second Life they even retain the right to delete your created content without notice or explanation, even if it is just an accicent. Realistically, by using Flickr, Twitter or World of Warcraft you send your ideas out into the community, and just have to hope that you will be credited in the inevitable event that your work/photo/music is used by someone else. In the case of the companies offering the service, they can use your material for finacial gain, in any way they want and without having to pay any royalties.

I feel that to use any of these services in teaching is risky. The benfit would have to be great to outweigh the costs. Requiring a student to produce and post a video on YouTube for an assignment (say a report on a field trip) means that you are forcing them to accept the YouTube TOS, regardless of whether they have read or understood it in order to pass the assignment. It implies that you as the authority approve of the TOS, which may sway a student toward accepting without reading or accepting despite their own doubts.

For example, if you want to hold a class in Second Life and the students are going to create content you are validating the TOS, and providing an opportunity for Linden Labs to have control over your students’ work. Your course opens your students up to interference from and reliance upon a commercial entity in the course of their creative process. At the very least, you have the moral and ethical responsibility to ensure that your students fully understand what they are getting into.

Of course, universities and colleges also have privacy policies and IPR policies that students may not have read or understood which gives the institution rights over their work, so using social software may not be the first place that students are exposed to legal isssues like these. Still, I would be reluctant to require the use of commercially controled social software with elementary students. Older secondary students might be able to comprehend IPR and TOSs if properly scafolded, but the service would have to be very pedagogically relevant for me to consider it.

Synchronous communication

Much of my exploration of synchronous communication was plagued by bugs…

My experiments with synchronous communication in the toolkit were somewhat hampered by the fact that I didn’t have anyone to connect with. I was able to call the automatic test facility in Skype, which was very simple and worked very well, but not very personal. I have found a few friends on Skype, but they are all in Europe and were presumably asleep when I was trying to test my video chat out… The same went for my Wimba live classroom.

Apart from my lack of friends, all of my experiments with the communication tools went well (other than that I was only communicating with my husband who was in the same apartment on the other computer…lol). None of them were labour intensive. Even uploading a test PowerPoint into Wimba went very smoothly. What I would like to do would be to test Skype and Wimba with an older computer or a lower-bandwith connection. Everything went well with my newish laptop and high-speed wireless, but my LMS will be designed for an audience that may not have access to dual-core PCs and high-speed internet.

I found an interesting problem with my headset though. I had bought an expensive (for me) USB headset from Logitech to replace my old one which just connects through the headphone and microphone jacks. I was hoping for clearer audio since I want to record voice-overs for my LMS project. Turns out that the fancy new headset is not properly shielded and there is a loud hum from interference by the power source. I can only get clear audio if I unplug the laptop. The logitech website says the problem was my laptop not being well grounded. Someone on the forum suggested attaching a copper wire to a metal part of the computer and grounding it with that, but that seemed impractical for a laptop.

I went back to my old headset which is not that bad, but I wonder if my prospective students will encounter other bugs with their systems and if they will be able  to resolve them. I think I will include a forum for technical issues and maybe I should address problems like these in the first live classroom I am planning.

webpage toolkit reflection

I am working through the toolkit activity on web page authoring (I am deliberatly staying away from HTML authoring because I get the theory, but the practice is going to take a while…..) and I have made some really brainless mistakes (forgetting to upload the image files I linked to…). In spite of this I have come to a point where I believe I can create some reasonably acceptable pages for my LMS project. I have even moved beyond text and into some graphics (created in GIMP) to give the pages a bit more impact and direct the students to the important navigation items.

My test ground for this sort of thing is usually my luddite mother. If what I have designed makes sense to her, then it is a safe bet that my students (not very tech savy) will be able to work with it. So far the pages have been clear for my mother, so I must be going in the right direction!

I am not sure that I would pass the “web pages that suck” test just yet, but I am steadily gaining faith in my skills. Even the IT guy at work was impressed that I have been able to get this far. The toolkit provided a good framework for learning and links to essential resources. I am still negotiating my way through bravehost.net (my domain name of choice is taken  ).

It is becoming clear to me why some colleges offer 2-year web design courses. With the toolkit I almost feel like I am becoming a Jack of all trades, Master of none.  I am able to produce beginer-level products in the various sections of the toolkit, but more importantly, I am learning how much I still need to learn. The excersises are giving me enough knowledge to evaluate what works for a given course, and give me guidelines for working with experts in the various areas. It is also pointing me into areas where I would like to continue and develop expertise – web design would be one area (although I will have to conquer HTML….).

Next up: synchronous communication tools

Tool Reflection

Choosing communication tools for my LMS course was an interesting process. I wanted to use Wimba, as I found the live demo I attended very good at conveying complex information and an excellent way to connect with my instructor. The problem was that I was concerend that I was just finding Wimba to be Kewl and it might not actually add to the educational experience in my course.

I went back to the storyboarding I was doing for the project and the SECTIONS model in hopes of being able to make Wimba curricularly relvant. I decided that since my hypothetical students were probably not the most technically savy and might find the online course sterile and inhospitable they might benefit from the chance to hear each others’ voices and my voice.

I read Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education by Garrison et al. (2000) which has a model with three overlapping circles which intersect to create the learning environment: teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence. For me  the Wimba demo increased all three areas for ETEC565, and I conclude from my experience with it that if I could overcome the technical elements it would also enhance the learning experience for my students.

The other tool I wanted to include was a wiki. I recently heard about a website called Innocentive.com that presents problems that need to be solved to anyone. They link problems in industry to solutions that might be generated by the millions of people that connect to the internet (there are cash prizes for the best solutions). The idea is to tap into the expertise of the many. I wanted a way to have that incorporated into my course. A wiki allows for the students to contribute to the actual content of the course, adding their expertise to that of the instructor.

This assignment touched on two points that I have come across several times in this course. First the Kewl factor. I can’t seem to get away from being drawn in by really neat stuff. I find I have to really settle down and evaluate the pedagogical merits of almost everything I come across because I could very easily get carried away. Second, I find that I enjoy weaving in ideas from non-educational arenas – like the Innocentive model of tapping into the problem-solving of millions of people (also very much like the SETI@home project where many home computers are used to analyse collected data for signs of intelligent life). What seemed like a small assignment has linked up with many threads…

References

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. pdf Full Text

The Kewlness of Virtual Video

I have spent the last few days trying to film a model of a neuron I built in Second Life. I have been using Fraps, a video capture application for games. This is more time consuming than I thought it would be, but I am so intrigued by the prospect of being able to shoot video for my course that I seem to be sticking with it.

If this works out it would be a sort of proof of concept for me that I can use virtual worlds for teaching. I can imagine my little bit of land in SL having a park full of models of cells that you can walk around and examine. I think my building and scripting skills will have to improve considerably before that happens though.

I am working through the toolkit exercise for video, and I am sure it will take me much more than an hour..lol

My first attempt is hosted here on Viddler.com.  It is still very rudimentary. There is no audio yet, that is the next project. I have used Audacity before for audio, so I will attempt to record a voice-over and add that to my next draft. I have been using MovieMaker for the editing, but I think that if I were doing this for a real course I would invest in a more sophisticated editing software package like Adobe Premier. In my ultimate fantasy I would get a mac, but I am still tied to my PC for work.

I am trying not to get carried away by the Kewl factor with this project. I hope that the final product will be useful for teaching my obectives for this course and not just a neat new trick. I have to admit it is pretty Kewl to be able to make a model and incorporate it into this project…..

LMS proposal thoughts

I have a real bee in my bonnet about open-source software. I am trying to convert my boss, which is a bit of an uphill battle, but he is so willing to listen to my arguments that it is a great exchange of ideas. Writing the proposal for using Moodle was an interesting exercise because I did not want to just fall back on my idealistic arguments about OSS as freedom from corporate interference in the educational process.

Using the SECTIONS model (Bates & Poole, 2003) gave me a more robust and diverse way of supporting my arguments for using an OSS package. I don’t know if I can convince him to move the whole office to OpenOffice.org any time soon, but at least my discussion with him can move on from my idealistic rantings about corporate influence and the common good…..

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.

Working with Moodle and Second Life

I have started working on my course in Moodle. It will be an introduction to neuroscience for non-medical practitioners. I will be working on a similar course with an instructor in the Fall, so the results of this project may actually have some relevance to my professional practice.

I have never used Moodle before, but I am finding it very uncomplicated to use at my low level of LMS functioning. I have used the Moodle docs for most of my information, and am finding them very easy to use and search through. I will admit to asking a number of questions of our IT specialist at work. I guess you have to take advantage of all the resources available to you.

I am struggling with the assignment requirement to use video. I don’t have the tools available to me to shoot video for this project, so I am working on shooting video of a model of a neuron I built in Second Life. I am currently testing several applications for capturing video on my laptop. Building the model was challenging, but my 3D modeling skills are improving rapidly – this project is great motivation.

The other thing I am investigating is the project joining Moodle and Second Life – Sloodle. I am not sure if this will be possible with this course, but it furthers my objective of turning my play – Second Life – into something more useful in my professional life.

Moodle-ing

I was able to complete the Toolkit activities for Moodle today, in about 15 minutes. I found it very easy to work with and found the interface to be straightforward. I think that choosing Moodle for my course project was probably the right decision for me. We have it at our company, although we don’t use it much, and I hope that with increased proficiencey I will be able to go back to work and use it professionally as well.

I have always been a big supporter of Open-Source software from a philosophical point of view. I feel that it is better for educational institutions to move away from more corporate involvement in their teaching and administration, and a pricey LMCS with contracts and service agreements does not allow for academic growth and freedom (IMHO). There are so many amazing OSS products available – LINUX, OpenOffice.org, Moodle, Sakai – that expensive, restrictive software can be easily replaced. IT departments can learn how to maintain OSS packages, and if not there are many companies that provide support for some of the bigger OSS products. But now I am rambling…….

I’m sure I will encounter hicups along the process, but so far Moodle has been fast and easy. I am going to try some more things with it and will probably have more to say when I have created more than a welcome page!