Teaching in Second Life

As a postscript to my past posting, I also wanted to direct your attention to Second Life 'island' created for virtual teaching, an MSNBC article on the educational future of SecondLife.

YouTube: An eLearning Environment?

Back in September, I blogged about a course entitled "Learning From YouTube.” Taught by Andrea Jurhasz, a media studies professor, this class is still drawing a fair amount of attention from her colleagues in both media studies and ILT. Initially some thought that she was crazy to open herself up to possible mocking from her students, other YouTube patrons and educational community.

However, she’s attracted quite a bit of attention, including a notice in the New York Times:

September 15, 2007 – Here's a dream come true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube. Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

While there still has not been much posted about the effectiveness of YouTube as a learning environment, I would be quite interested in hearing what you have to say (after you check out this course, of course). What do you think: Is this just a way to generate hype? Does the YouTube environment have any validity as a learning space?

Constructivism & Blogs

I've been studying constructivism recently and ran across several articles that discuss how blogs, wikis and podcasts can be used as tools to turn theory into practical application. One of the most detailed is the eLearning Guild's Be Constructive: Blogs, Podcasts, and Wikis as Constructivist Learning Tools

This was an interesting read not only because of its practical pointers, but also because it adds credence to my previous rants about not using Web 2.0 tools just because they're cool. Instead, this article highlights ways to use these tools to assist learners in deliberately constructing their own learning environment.

Read it and let me know what you think!

When Is It OK to Copy?

Since multimedia is such a big part of eLearning, we often run head-on into the constraints of fair use. What's allowed? What's considered plagarism? How do you know the difference?

While I want to be respectful of the intellectual properties of others, I often find fair use guidelines somewhat murky. That's why I enjoyed reading this article from Inside Higher Ed: When It’s OK to Copy

Hope you find it useful as well!

Needing a New Phone

My wonderful teammates and I are currently crafting a mediated presentation on mobile learning and, as part of my research, I started to look at the various models of mobile phones on the market.

Now, I'm not a complete phone neophyte. In fact, I've had a mobile phone since I was 19 years old. (Remember the ol' bag phones? 30 minutes a month? Magnet antenna on the topic of the car? Anyone?) However, as I started looking at the various models and functions, it became why mobile learning professionals are predicting that phones are becoming one of the top mobile learning tools.

The iPhone, with its multimedia capabilities, is the perfect example of this. You can make calls simply by touching screen, download, store and play music, check email, access maps, surf the web, text, etc. And, following in the steps of it's iPod cousin, it also lets you synch information with your PC or Mac. With today's emphasis on "just in time" learning, the iPhone and the inevitable copy cats that are sure to follow, are revolutionining mobile learning.

As one who has both an interest in instructional design and eLearning, I find these new gadgets both fascinating and frightening. Fascinating because of the opporutnities they represent. Frightening in that I'm going to have to researching in warp speed to keep up with it all.

I guess my next step is to go get a new phone. One that does more than simply make calls, send and accept text messages and take the occasional photos. The options may be overwhelming, but just think how much fun it will be to play with.

Are You Ready for Mobile Learning?

As people become more comfortable with mobile technology, they should inherently become more comfortable with mobile learning, right? That’s not necessarily the case. As the EDUCAUSE article “Are You Ready for Mobile Learning” points out, “Frequent use of mobile devices does not mean that students or instructors are ready for mobile learning and teaching.”

Instead, we, as eLearning professionals, need to take a quick step back and consider the desired learning outcomes and our audience. Consider the following questions:

Who are our learners?
What are their needs?
How familiar are they with mobile technologies—very familiar or just somewhat?
What do want them to learn, demonstrate, etc?
How will they demonstrate both retention and transfer?

In the past, we’ve talked about the dazzling effect of Web 2.0 tools. I think that effect also carries over to mLearning. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinated by the topic, but am on a quest to learn how to do it right.

If you have a moment, please read “Are You Ready for Mobile Learning” and tell me what you think.

What Makes a Good Blog?

Another week has almost passed by and I just realized that I hadn't posted to this blog yet . . .

As I was thinking about what the topic of my post should be, I ran across this article, 10 Steps to Better Blogs, in this month's issue of University Business.

Karine Jolie, the prolific blogger behind collegewebeditor.com and a regular UB contributor, provides the following pointers:

1. GET STRATEGIC WITH TOPIC, AUDIENCE, AND GOALS.

2. GET TACTICAL WITH TONE, FREQUENCY, AND LENGTH.

3. SELECT YOUR BLOGGING PLATFORM WISELY.

4. HELP READERS FIND POSTS EASILY.

5. HELP YOUR READERS ENGAGE WITH YOUR CONTENT.

6. HELP YOUR READERS COME BACK OFTEN.

7. START CONVERSATIONS, NOT MONOLOGUES.

8. PROMOTION? THINK OUTSIDE THE BLOG!

9. CHECK THE BLOG'S VITALS OFTEN.

10. KEEP (IT) UP!

Wanna know the details behind each of these pointers? (You know you do!) You'll just have to read the article 10 Steps to Better Blogs yourself.

Handbook of e-Learning Strategy

One thing I really like about the eLearning community is its willingness to share resources and I'd like to contribute to that exchange of ideas. Today, I stumbled across a useful publication developed by the The e-Learning Guild. Titled The e-Learning Guild's Handbook of e-Learning Strategy, this e-book contains a collection of articles, tools and approaches for incorporating eLearning into a variety of enviroments and situations. While I'm still wading through it, it has been thought provoking and I wanted to share it with my classmates and peers.

Disclaimer: This book was sponsored by Adobe Systems--think Connect & Captivate--so it's not impartial. However, there's still good information to be had here.

Types of Learning Outcomes

I’ve been conducting research on cognitivism and connectivism for my other online course and ran across an article by Stephen Bostic from Keele University that discussed the various types of learning outcomes. While I’ve understood the guiding influence of learning outcomes for quite a while now, I had never thought of categorizing them by how learning could be demonstrated.

Entitled Instructional Design - Robert Gagné, The Conditions of Learning, this article draws heavily on the work of Gagné and further breaks the types of learning outcomes down by desired skills:

“intellectual skills - concepts
are demonstrated by labeling or classifying things,

intellectual skills - rules are applied and principles are demonstrated,

intellectual skills - problem solving
allows generating solutions or procedures,

cognitive strategies
are used for learning,

verbal information
is stated,

motor skills
enable physical performance,

attitudes
are demonstrated by preferring options.”

While I can’t speak for my fellow students, I found this approach to be both enlightening and absurdly practical. It’s certainly something I’ll keep in mind as I begin to think through future assignments and projects.

Slackers R' Us

I admit it -- I'm a posting slacker! However, I promise to post something substantial during the next two days. Thanks for your patience!

Web 2.0 -- Keeping Your Options Open

Fair Warning: This may seem like a strange posting to follow my "Lose the Tools . . ." posting (or more accurately, my online rant). However, I'd like to focus briefly on ways to stay current on technologies that have potential for use in eLearning.

In a previous course, we discussed the merits and possible disadvantages of Web 2.0 tools. While we had a number of debates on the best use of blogs, wikis, del.icio.us tags and other Web 2.0 options, my classmates and I came to the consensus that we need to stay up-to-date with emerging ideas. After all, one or more of these ideas / tools might resonate with a specific set of learners and help us, as instructional designers, support the corresponding learning outcomes.

Yet, as anyone who spends anytime on the web can tell you, things change very quickly. It's hard to stay current and, often, to even know where to begin. While the Go2Web20 directory is not geared towards elearning, it can provide you with a solid place to start your Web 2.0 research.

Just don't become dazzled by your options. Always remember your learners' needs, habits, preferences, technical capabilities . . . and the list goes on . . .

Lose the Tools . . . Or Just the Misguided Attitude?

During the last few weeks, I’ve had several conversations with various individuals about the role of technology-based tools in instructional design. Each of these conversations reached a similar consensus: Tools are just that—tools!

They’re not the main attraction. Instead of getting hung up on the possibilities and limitations of an ever-expanding tool set, we need to focus back in on our learners. What are their needs? What are their challenges? What do they want to learn? What are their motivational characteristics? Is there a specific learning outcome that they need / want to achieve?

Once we’ve answered these questions, then we can go back to our tool set and take a critical look. Is there an existing tool that will help us achieve the established learning outcomes? Are there tools that might be intuitive to our learners? If not, can we “break” the tool and use it in a way it may not have initially been intended?

These questions are mainly rhetorical in nature, but they do raise a point for each of us. In our quest to increase our tool set, let’s not forget our learners. After all, a tool is just a tool until it’s put into the right hands!

More on Accessibility & Usability

What good is a website if you can’t see it or use it properly? Food for thought . . .

I spent the past week in Houston facilitating a three-day conference / training workshop entitled “Managing a Website Redesign Project.” This was a program that I had designed about eight months ago for higher education marketing, communication and web professionals. While its main focus was on project management, we—the 50+ of us in the room— discussed a number of related topics, including usability and accessibility.

During this particular discussion, the participants were asked to identify each of their site’s target audiences and their corresponding needs / requirements. Keep in mind that these were the people who manage their institutions’ main websites and were experienced, dedicated higher education administrators. Yet, it was interesting that one group of individuals was consistently overlooked during this exercise: individuals with disabilities—be they prospective students, donors, current students, or just members of the general public.

According to Usability First, “1 in 5 people in the United States has some kind of disability and an estimated 30 million people are impacted by inaccessible computer and software design. The number of people with disabilities is only increasing, as it has increased 25% in the last decade, especially among those 50 years old and above. And among the 31 million seniors aged 65 and above, 16 million reported some level of disability (Census Brief 97-5). But accessibility actually affects a much larger percentage of the population, as many people who do not have permanent disabilities have temporary conditions that can affect the way they operate for a period of time.”

Those of you who have read my other posts may recall that I had eye surgery a few weeks ago. While I’ve been steadily improving, there was a week where I had significant difficulty reading anything on a computer screen, especially on our eCollege course shell. That, in turn, made completing my assignments on time a significant challenge. It certainly opened my eyes—pardon the pun—to the difficulties faced by students who have permanent eye conditions.

As we continue to design online learning environments, I want to challenge both myself and my classmates to consider our prospective learners in greater depth. This includes their strengths, weaknesses and challenges.

In the meantime, I’d like to provide a few more helpful resources on accessibility and usability:

Usability First

Usability & Accessibility Center, Michigan State University

HTML Center’s Usability & Accessiblity Forum. This forum includes links to helpful tutorials.

Thanks for reading my accessibility and usability rant. I promise to now get off my soapbox, at least for a little while . . .

A Surprising Treasure Trove of ID Whitepapers

What a week! Craziness just seemed to abound . . . and now we're on to the next one . . .

One of the highlights from the previous week was an hour-long conversation with Ken Thomas, the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Alchemy, an instructional design firm based here in Denver. Having spent 20+ years in the field of instructional design, Ken has an informative and very real perspective on the challenges and opportunities involved with eLearning. You can read more about our interview on my practitioner profile page.

Prior to this conversation, I spent some time on the Rocky Mountain Alchemy website and ran across a treasure trove of whitepapers in Ken's Laboratory. In my search for instructional design ideas, I've spent numerous hours reviewing academic papers, blogs and online communities, but have avoided the consultants' websites. Why? Most of their whitepapers are designed to showcase their services and to sell you on their approach to instructional design.

Ken's collection is a welcome change. He's not trying to sell the reader on anything in particular. Instead, he sees himself not only as an instructional designer, but also as a coach whose role is to mentor fledgling designers. Consequently, his papers are concise, deliberate and readable.

I highly recommend that you check these whitepapers out. They're worth the time!

In the Eye of the Beholder

It's been an interesting week . . . I had eye surgery and have been recovering somewhat slowly ever since.

However, as I've been trying to do my coursework in 15-minute increments--trying not to strain the ol' eyeballs--I started thinking about eLearning for the visually impaired. Too often, I make the assumption that my learners will have full use of their eyes and ears. However, that's not always the case; learners come in all shapes and sizes and levels of abilities.

This little bout of pondering lead to a Google search on "eLearning for the visually impaired." Here are a few of the resources that I ran across:

e-Learn VIP (eLearning for Visually Impaired Persons) - This consortium has a newsletter that provides some interesting insights into designing elearning for those who are blind or visually impaired.

Customisation of an eLearning Environment for Visually Impaired Students -- This article from the Waterford Institute focuses on "how both Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) technologies can provide individual customisation of an eLearning environment for Visually Impaired Students."

There are a number of other available resources, but I'm at the end of my 15 minutes. I'll likely add a few more later!

Betsy

A Sustainable Approach to eLearning

While I have yet to become a BIG fan of ebooks, I'm learning that they can be valuable resources. As I was doing some research this week, I ran across an ebook entitled Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to eLearning . Since I'm always looking to improve my efficiency and to not reinvent the wheel, I decided to take a closer look.

Turns out that this is a great compilation of chapters and ideas from eLearning scholars and practitioners. It is a long read, so I'm still working my way through it chapter by chapter. However, thus far, it's a resouce that I would recommend you check out.

YouTube Studies

I ran across an interesting article entitled YouTube Studies on the Inside Higher Ed website the other day. While the use of YouTube is becoming increasingly pervasive, especially amoung young adults, there hasn't been much written about its potential (or lack thereof) for educational use.

Alexandra Juhasz, a professor of media studies at Pitzer College, is changing that. This fall, she's offering a class called “Learning From YouTube,” which is drawing a fair amount of attention from her colleagues in both media studies and ILT. Some thinks she's crazy to open herself up to possible mocking from her students and other YouTube patrons, while other educators are waiting to see if YouTube can be successfully used to promote teaching and learning.

You can view the class syllabus, read aloud by Juhasz. She expounds on the topics she expects to cover, one of which is pedagogy — how learning takes place online vs. in person; from peers vs. from a professor.

It's worth a look. I plan to revisit this experiment throughout the semester and will post any applicable and interesting updates.

The Role of Attention in a Knowledge Society & eLearning

Although formal learning is often segmented into courses and “opportunities,” knowledge seems to know no boundaries. This semester, I am taking two courses, Policies and Planning for eLearning Programs and Instructional Message Design. Knowingly or unknowingly, the instructors for both courses provided their students with readings on the role of attention and perception in learning. While both the authors of these papers and my instructors varied in their approaches to the topic, there were some distinct commonalities that factor into my dual role as both student and instructional designer.

One of the first points that caught my eye was the role attention plays in a “knowledge society,” a term that is bandied about by scholars and the media alike. In their 2004 paper “Paying Attention to Attention: New Economies for Learning,” Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson wrote:

"The primary currency of an information society—that is, a society, in which information is designated as the main commodity produced, marketed and consumed—is necessarily attention. And education, which has always sought, however imperfectly, to cultivate a “knowledge society,” has therefore always had attention as it’s primary currency."

If that is true, why has much of our formal education taken place in the classroom setting where the transmission of knowledge primarily flows one way—from teacher to student? Why is a lecture format the preferred method for both secondary and post-secondary schools?

Apparently, I’m not the only one with these questions. In his paper, “Attention – an Information Design Perspective,” Rune Peterson delved into the origins of the lecture. Here is a brief excerpt from that paper:

"Many teachers spend most of their time in the classrooms talking to their classes. It appears that teachers generally teach the way they were taught, following the traditional approach to education, providing prepackaged information to students. No doubt, the lecture method has been the most common method of instruction in western education for centuries. In its early forms, the lecture method was a practised art form, a form of theatrical performance designed to grab and to hold the attention of the students. Until the advent of low-cost books, the lecture method was actually the most economical method of transmitting information. However, modern teachers are usually not selected for their lecturing and theatrical skills."

Having sat through more than one horrendously boring lecture during my undergrad days and when I was working on an MBA, I would agree that a number of professors are not skilled in the fine art of oratory. However, the dullness of a lecture is not just limited to the physical classroom environment. Unfortunately, it can also be transmitted to the online environment where the equivalent of a lecture is pages and pages of dense copy.

There are certainly online cures for this malady, including discussions, group projects, simulations, games and learner-centered projects. However, as I’ve learned in previous courses, implementing these strategies is more difficult than it seems. My quest as both an elearner and one who currently designs live and online professional development opportunities is to learn how to create effective and engaging learning environments. After all, knowledge is boundless, and, I should also say, boundary less.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

Betsy

Welcome!

Hello!

Welcome to my blog and my first posting . . .

You know, I read blogs all of the time, post comments on other people's blogs and am a big fan of RSS feeds. However, I had never created my own online "thoughts" space. Now, with a little encouragement from one of my instructors, I'm now the proud owner of a blog.

Most of my postings will likely focus on e-learning and what I'm learning as I progress through the University of Colorado at Denver's graduate program in eLearning Design and Implementation. However, I may digress a bit on occasion and post about any great epiphanies that I've had about life, love, cooking and other mysteries!

Betsy