Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein

• People who interrupt total strangers intensely absorbed in work to chat have probably never been intensely absorbed in work. #
• Who is this guy Oscar so many people are buzzing about? #
• Finishing up the 2nd half of 2nd set of postcards for #motleyread. I'm going to run out of both postcards & stories, though. #
• Print & Paper Über Alles (@zeldman; now with zombies!) AustinChronicle.com http://bit.ly/bM7VV2 #
• Listening to #BYU students complain about BYU. I'm still just grateful to be allowed to go to school… #
• @barrydahl Good luck on the interview! in reply to barrydahl #
• @cogdog Oh yeah! I've heard everyone is in love with him! in reply to cogdog #
• @jonmott Wha!? in reply to jonmott #
• Oh they hypocrisy! #
• @craniac Too true! But they can't all have the competing homeless shelter ambiance of the SLC library. in reply to craniac #
• UVU DE Sr Director candidate referenced @jimgroom and #edupunk in his faculty presentation. #
• OK, now it's getting a little old. 4th or 5th mention of @jimgroom by this candidate in half an hour. That's once every 6 minutes! #
• @jimgroom If only you knew… in reply to jimgroom #
• @jimgroom @mikhailg I need to convince my wife to watch it with me… or just convince her to visit her mother for a weekend. in reply to jimgroom #
• After listening to a great discussion of the nature of jazz tonight, began thinking through some crazy allegories to teaching and learning. #
• @fncll Ouch! in reply to fncll #
• Gradink. #
• Once again @jonmott has me second-guessing the role that I will play in UVU's LMS decision-making group. #
• Blackboard I hate you. #
• Oh, this takes me back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x-Jnun7s2c "All the punks are gonna scream, "Yippie!" #
• Instructure added "save this comment for reuse" to their rubrics–just like Moodle, very helpful for large-scale grading. #
• @kenwoodward You're bringing me a bag of kettle potato chips, for starters. in reply to kenwoodward #
• @kenwoodward After that, I'm pretty sure you're bringing in a Thomas Kemper root beer, with a frosty mug. in reply to kenwoodward #
• That was a long, tough mtg. #
• Selling $JST. #
• @jimgroom You just need to market it with a fancy-dirty image propaganda machine, just like The Sex Pistols did. in reply to jimgroom #
• Yes, my punk friends, that /was/ a jab at the Pistols. #
• @diamond_mind ++— in reply to diamond_mind #
• What good are great assignment dropbox features if half of them break? #

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Twitter posts for the week read more

Twitter posts for the week read more

Twitter posts for the week read more

I’ve written very briefly and meekly shared with a few close colleagues my interest in the role of solitude in learning–especially in context of modern networked communication media–i.e. the web. Recently I’ve begun to consider how metacognitive strategies figure into a view of the learner as a necessarily solitary figure and as a (even occasional) member of a learning community). I read an article this week past weekend that sparked some ideas:

Aleven, V, Koedinger, K. (2002). An effective metacognitive strategy: learning by doing and explaining with a computer-based Cognitive Tutor. Cognitive Science 26, 147-179.

In this report the researchers explain how explanation was shown to increase learner performance and increased time on task. In this particular case the learners input their explanations into a computer interface, but I wonder about self-explanation–that is, explanations crafted only as a part of one’s reflection, only for one’s own consumption. I make this distinction because though learners were “communicating” with a non-human (software) I suspect it was clear to the learners that their explanations would be archived and relayed to the instructor. So to me there may be an issue of learner privacy–a privacy that may shield them and allow them to more fully express themselves, or, conversely, a privacy that masks them and allows them to neglect a fuller explanation as might be made under instructor scrutiny.

There are more questions to raise (some fascinating ones regarding instructional design for solitary learning) and I hope to consider and investigate them in the coming weeks.

I conducted a 1hr demonstration of the open source learning management system Moodle 1.9.5 for higher ed folks in Utah and the Utah Education Network. The demo went well enough, and I hope some of my colleagues from around the State got a little taste of Moodle, especially as it compares to Blackboard/WebCT Vista. UEN facilitated this presentation to State participants via Wimba; I simultaneously streamed the session via Ustream using WebCamMax and recorded it for anyone who is interested: Moodle 1.9.5 Overview on Ustream.

As I reviewed the video I noticed I had made a handful of mis-statements that I should correct here:

• Martin Dougiamas is from Australia, not New Zealand.
• The book I reference at the beginning as inspiring me to rethink Moodle was Jason Cole’s “Using Moodle”
• Our Banner system talks to Moodle via a Luminus Message Broker plug-in, not LDAP (we use LDAP for WordPress MU)
• When I talk about adaptive quizzing, I meant to refer to educational research on web-based/hypermedia learning from the last decade or so.
• Though the Workshop tool has been dropped from Moodle 2.0, its functionality will not be replaced in the Assignment tool–instead a new Workshop tool is in development for 2.0

Jon Mott blogged about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the course management system (CMS, aka LMS or VLE) and a personal learning network (PLN, sometimes associated/equated with PLE). The LMS/PLE “dilemma” has been itching my brain for some time now, so Jon’s post was a timely motivator to begin to think the issue through in print read more

This semester I elected to test Instructure’s (pilot? beta?) learning management system with my own online course, DGM 2740: Web Design, the third course in the Digital Media web development track at UVU. Instructure is showing us how it’s done with strong AJAX enhancements for more streamlined user processes read more

Wikipedia had no article on Benjamin Bloom’s 2 sigma problem (1984), and virtually no references to the observed phenomena or related studies, so I drafted one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem.

It’s little more than a stub right now, but I plan to come back to it, and I trust others–especially those in Jon Mott’s IP&T 692R course, “The 2 Sigma Problem”–will contribute to and expand the article.

We’ve used dotProject in my Instructional Design Services unit for almost two years. dP is an open source project management and task tracking tool that has benefited our unit organizationally, and has helped us follow-through on projects in a more efficient manner. It has also helped me as a manager manage staff resources and understand time-to-delivery of common project types.

However, dP is not without its flaws read more