Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

We were talking Discussion forums on the Canvas list earlier this week, reconsidering our assumptions about forum designs based on the long-lived “threaded bulletin board”. Victoria Rasmussen suggested:

“…it feels like it might be better if community is formed around solving a problem together and the communication is an intrinsic result…”

Victoria, I think you’re on to something here.

It may be that our tendency to manage and count discussion activity is based on a desire to measure what’s quantifiable, but not necessarily what’s central to learning.

It does seem like the “flat” discussion format discourages deep investigation of disparate ideas or lines of thought, but then maybe the discussion forum is not the best place for those deeper, often tangential conversations; maybe we need to encourage those to occur elsewhere, let’s say on a student’s blog, or in peer review conversations, etc.

At the same time, building a temporary, quasi-authentic learning community in a tool that was created and refined for on-going, intermittent, voluntary, self-organizing learning communities may not be the best use of the technology. I certainly get the sense in my small-ish (15-25 students) courses that the “flat” forums encourage participation in breadth if not depth.

Or, maybe a discussion forum is the best place, properly structured. It’s certainly worth experimenting with.

I attended a peer’s presentation this morning on a project he’s working on to facilitate the creation of “extended narratives” for learning content. An extended narrative maintains most of the authorial control over a narrative, but grants readers the option of digging deeper into “extended” scenes, but at no requirement to achieving core objectives. Presumably, the idea behind using narratives as learning material is that they can be more engaging, or perhaps they simply don’t feel like learning as much as purely expository texts do. Let’s set aside my concern that there’s nothing like a good narrative, and most educational narratives I’ve read are, indeed, nothing like a good narrative (more…)

The UVU Blackboard server now allows designers to require Respondus Lockdown Browser (LDB) on assessments. This means that if an assessment is set to use LDB, the end-user (test-taker) computer must have the free LDB software installed (Bb should prompt the user to install it before the assessment can be accessed). UVU’s Testing Center has installed LDB on all its computers and is testing it before next semester. We presume this is pointless unless the Bb assessment has LDB selected, but are looking into it. In any case where LDB is used to take an assessment, “lock down” happens according to Respondus’s descriptions–even if the exam itself is not triggered to require Lockdown. I asked Respondus to clarify the “switch” in Bb, and they responded this afternoon (more…)

I began the following Google Wave yesterday as a means of orienting myself to its functionality and features, but more importantly as a way to move past the more mundane and obvious applications for education. As you will see, I invited a number of colleagues and contacts to join, then made the Wave open to the public (more…)

Earlier this week my boss asked “what I had” on capping class size in online courses. I had nothing, but it’s an interesting question. In Distance Education at UVU we have seen online class sizes vary from just one student to hundreds of students–the decision is made by the academic department chair in consultation with the instructor. This question is therefore pertinent for our academic department chairs, especially as UVU moves to reduce enrollment-based instructional compensation. Administrative pressure to free up class space and meet students’ demand enlarges this issue. However, a review of recent and available articles reinforced what I already suspected: there is no single optimum size for an online class; instead, class size should be informed by learning objectives, curriculum, instructor load, and teaching philosophy (more…)

In my Web Essentials online course I facilitate a discussion on the future of internet technologies. One student focused on how education is, and, as you’ll see here, should be affected:

The internet is a rebel and a bully, threatening to destroy the established system of education that dictates how we learn. Shocked? Well, this is a good thing any way you look at it (more…)

A member of the ITForum mailing list asked about the legality of using Audacity to create MP3 files for an educational project, because patents on the MP3 technology are claimed by various different companies and organizations (more…)

In David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course students were asked to randomly choose and then examine 5 MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) courses, and 5 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI) courses. I’ve done random examinations of OCW/OER in the past, so I changed this up a bit to fit my own inclinations: first, I made my choices semi-randomly (more…)

I’ve suggested that “open education” should not be seen as synonymous with various related efforts. Just as there are only approximations at a manifesto for the open education movement, there is no single definition of what efforts constitute or contribute to open education, and open education can not be fairly defined by more granular efforts for the production of open educational resources, opencourseware, etc. That is as much due to conflicting definitions of “open” as it is to organizational motivations (more…)

When I think of open education I tend to think of it at a granular level, in terms of open educational resources (OER), opencourseware (OCW), or even the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). At these more limited levels engaging in open education makes a lot of sense to me, and offers very attainable, short-term goals which serve bot the “target audience” (whoever that is) and my institution. But OER, OCW and open education are not synonymous. Open education, though often referred to as a “movement” is a broader philosophy, one which prescribes aspects of the creation, release, and access to education (more…)