It’s a busy time for edtech conferences online. First, HigherEdBlogCon is running, now Cole Camplese and friends are putting on a shindig at Penn State, and sharing it with all of us!
Cole sent me a link to their Teaching & Learning with Technology Symposium website – a Wordpress site running a nice K2 theme. How cool is that, for a campus-wide symposium at a huge university to be driving the online resource for the event in an open source blogging app?
The agenda for the event looks pretty interesting. Everything from the usual suspects to “The Strategies of a Dog Who Finally Caught the Car” – sounds like Alan might have had an influence 
Anyway, thanks to Cole for sending the link, and thanks to Penn State for sharing this symposium with the rest of us!
Brian just linked to a great description of how blogging can affect reading and writing in the classroom. The blog he linked to is one I hadn’t come across in my travels, so I’m dutifully subscribing. Some good thinking about this stuff in Konrad’s blog.
What hit me in this post was the simple and clear demonstration of the power of an online community of practice to support the “real” physical face-to-face community. In Konrad’s case, it changed his perception of “reading” his student’s work – it became a participatory experience – more of a conversation or dialog than a fire-and-forget writing exercise. That, through blogging (or more appropriately, through participation in a dynamic community of practice), his evaluation of students shifted to become somewhat more holistic. Less brute-force “marking” of writing, to more of a comprehensive assessment of competence.
That’s when it occurred to me that I have stopped “marking” or “correcting” and started reading. I do not mean that my students are no longer evaluated, that they no longer receive grades. They do. But my approach has changed dramatically. It’s taken over a year but I have become a teacher-blogger and I am recording this change because it is crucial to my thesis and my professional development.
I have become a teacher who reads, who looks forward to reading, who comments on student entries and can’t wait to see the responses, who can’t wait to see where the conversation takes us. I have become a teacher who sees my students as writers, as people with voices who can contribute to and initiate insightful conversations.
That is such a powerful shift, and shows some of the real benefits that this blogging stuff can provide if applied appropriately.
I’m looking forward to reading through Konrad’s blog, and his stuff on connectivism, etc…
Gizmodo linked to a new machinima talk show: This Spartan Life
If you’ve seen Red vs. Blue, or some of the similar movies made using “in game” videography from some games like Halo or Quake3, you’ll know what machinima is.
But This Spartan Life takes it one step further – instead of being a scripted “in-game play” being acted out, it’s a full-blown talk show. Complete with guests, interviews, cameramen and crew, perimeter security snipers, stray rocket fire from nearby newbies, and the Solid Gold Elite Dancers.
The first episode includes an entertaining interview with Bob Stein, one of the pioneers of interactive media. It somehow adds to the conversation, watching him experiment with movement in Halo, and dodging newbie enemy fire. His entrance in a flying warthog was pretty funny, too…
What I’m really curious in, though, is how could this be used to bring guests into a class in a more interactive way than just piping them in via videoconference. Imagine your students being able to walk around with, interact with, and have personal discussions with invited guests. And, recording the session for later use/review…
This is along the lines of Mike and Rob’s class project from a couple years ago, where they took a game engine, and modeled an ancient Yemeni temple for use as a setting for inquiry-based learning by groups of students. Professors and TAs could participate as well, and students were able to explore the temple and surrounding area, interacting with in-game characters and other students.
I’m not sure what ever came of their simulation, but the technology has come a LOOOONG way since then, so I’d love to see what they could do now…
I’ve been asked to participate in a new effort by Apple, called the “Apple Digital Campus Exchange” – it’s basically a community of folks much smarter and more interesting than myself (ranging from Cole Camplese to Alan Levine to Larry Johnson to Carl Berger) who just get to talk about stuff like The Future, iPods in the classroom, etc…
I thought this was going public next week, but I see it was actually scheduled for launch on May 12. Since it is now somewhat after May 12, I think I’m safe linking to it…
I’m a contributing blogger on the Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning in a Digital World weblog. It needs a longer title, or at least an acronym.
I am pretty darned excited by this ADCE effort – it could be a chance to get the stuff we’ve all been dabbling with over the last little while finally pushed out to the Rest of the Class™ (because the folks that still haven’t heard of or use blogs etc… just might sit up and pay attention when the Big Glowing Apple Icon starts talking about it. All we really need is for it to me shown in a Stevenote…)
I took the opportunity to write my First Post to the Tools blog, where I babble for a bit about the internet not being read-only, yadda yadda…
On the technology side, they’re basically mixing existing tools, including Wordpress and vBulletin (and some others, I’m sure) to provide a pretty compelling software suite for managing the community. (the admin side is secured behind an Apple Connect login, or I’d share the URL to that – it’s pretty cool, though…)
Oh, and someone in Apple Corporate decided that we all needed bios on the website. I absolutely hate writing a bio. Booooring. So I decided instead to have fun with mine. They want a bio? I’ll give ‘em a bio! 
Update: The Campus Exchange community site is now live, with registration open to anyone. Come play!
I took some time last night to process the backlog of new educational podcast notifications. I added 16 new podcasts to the iPodder.org Educational category – including a new General Education category for stuff that just doesn’t fit into K-12 or Higher Education.
There are now 31 education-related podcasts listed. And it’s growing every week, it seems…
I do have to say that the iPodder.org category browsing interface is pretty sucktacular (although consistent with Radio/Manilla interfaces). Click targets are too small (why not make the title clickable, instead of just the meaningless icon?), and you can’t drill down easily – no expand/contract categories, you have to actually move up/down the hierarchy. Also, why is it a central collection of podcast links? Why not collect links from the wild, using tags? That would remove the current bottleneck for posting new links. *cough*sorry*ahem*
At the user’s conference, they appear to have announced a new Building Block for Bb that lets you search Merlot from within the Bb interface, to easily add resources to courses.
That’s exactly what I’ve been hoping to build for CAREO/APOLLO, but haven’t had any time to address. They’ll be releasing the source for this building block, so that might get me at least partially there…
I just got word that my proposed session for Faculty Technology Days has been accepted/approved/whatever.
Academic Publishing with Weblogs and Wikis – D’Arcy Norman
This session will provide an introduction to personal publishing and collaboration tools, including weblogs and wikis, and will demonstrate potential application of these technologies to support teaching and learning in an academic setting. These tools allow anyone to easily publish, find and use information on the internet without needing to know HTML, FTP or other geeky acronyms.
I still don’t know the exact day, time, or room for the session, but FTD runs from May 4-6 2005 at the U of C. They still haven’t updated the website from last year’s event, but I’m assuming more info will be available on the FTD website (which is a scary FrontPage monstrosity) as soon as it’s available.
I got to give a presentation to a group of about 15 anthropology grad students today, about new technologies for teaching and learning (the official topic was "new technologies for the classroom," but that's rather limited, no?). I had initially planned on talking for only 15-20 minutes of the hour we would have, and we booked a lab so every person could hammer away at weblogs, wikis, etc… I wound up giving the whirlwind tour of new technologies – intro to blogging (3 people read blogs, 1 has one already), wikis (huh?), Flickr (one user), social bookmarking (huh?) I showed them the new weblogs.ucalgary.ca service (which worked fine in the demo, but the LDAP connection died when they tried to login – think that's been fixed now). The students were quite interested in the tools, and we had a discussion about how they could be using wikis to collaborate with other students and colleagues. I told the story of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, TheFuss, and Pachyderm (showing the paper we wrote for Museums and the Web 2005 in a wiki). Next time I do this, I'll have to remember to break it into smaller bite-sized pieces. Perhaps a session on weblogs. One on wikis. One on RSS. One on social bookmarking… Links and resources for this session are online here and here.
January 20, 2005 · 1 comment
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An interesting idea… Web technologies: a first step towards biomimetism? The idea that enterprise-class, “hardened” applications are flawed by nature, and that web technologies that mimic biology in the ability to adapt and respond are more successful and appropriate.
It’s another telling of the small pieces loosely joined story. One that’s been going through my head very loudly lately (as it has before).
Things like the new Technorati Tags system really showcase what can be done with the loosely bound small pieces, rather than trying to build the entire widget (or series of widgets, or framework of widgets) yourself.
Over the next year, I plan on investigating this much more closely as it pertains to blended learning. What are the small pieces? How can they be tied together? What is the larger ecology that forms as the pieces learn about each other? Where are the gaps and opportunities?
I’m definitely not alone in my interest in this model. James Farmer is thinking about it too… (as are Alan, Brian, and many others…)
We were talking today about how to be more strategic with our various inter-related projects (and specifically with the communication of status and plans), and the idea of some form of blended learning strategic advisory council was raised. The theory would be to have representatives from various organizations (University of Calgary, University of Alberta, Alberta Learning, BCCampus, and any other relevant organizations) working together to share strategic planning for projects related to blended learning.
The goal for us is to move our efforts into a more transparent setup, so communication with partners and interested organizations would become easier and more effective.
This would provide a clearinghouse for information related to the various projects (APOLLO, Pachyderm, BCCampus, SciQ, Mavericks, etc…) so balls don’t get dropped, and everyone is on the same page.
We’ll be putting together a proposal over the next few weeks, and I’ll post updates as they happen.
Anyone have any thoughts on this idea?
