• @diamond_mind @mikhailg Second that. in reply to diamond_mind #
• I've been reading "The Hobbit" to my son for the past week; his interest grows each night. I'm hoping he'll illustrate his favorite scenes. #
• Call for proposals now open for 2010's Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) in SLC, UT June 9-11: http://ttix.org/ttix-propose.php #
• I can imagine @jimgroom doing a mean impersonation of Mojo Nixon. #
• @michaelcjohnson Your notes are better than those on the whiteboard (for folks like me who came in late)! #
• "Netbooks will be the next Trapper Keeper." — @fncll http://chrislott.org/story/responding-to-a-few-education-predictions-braddo/ #
• Anyone use a RSVP reading app on their browser or mobile device? #
• @fncll You forgot to add: "plz RT" in reply to fncll #
• @jonmott With empirical evidence! (Got any?) in reply to jonmott #
• RT @grantpotter The Apple Tablet emerges … http://bit.ly/90BoWi — I gotta say, that's a slick looking device. #
• @jonmott Really? I'd be happy even with just a survey of users… in reply to jonmott #
• @tom4cam My prediction: No SD slot ever. in reply to tom4cam #
• Wow. After what I thought was a lively half-hour phone interview with a Chronicle reporter, the one quote used is a self-deprecating one. #
• @fncll That quote was from an off-topic discussion, even. Not a word on the meat of the matter… Guess I'll keep responses to 140 char in reply to fncll #
• @fncll Makes one wonder why one invests time and energy in that crap. From hereon out I'll politely decline. in reply to fncll #
• @fncll I suppose if one keeps rolling the dice, even a 20d, one'll score a critical hit eventually… in reply to fncll #
• @fncll One does what one can. in reply to fncll #
• Loading up another disc of Peter Gunn, cause the brain is too fried for La passion de Jeanne d'Arc. #
• New Tindersticks album is out today: http://www.fallingdownamountain.com/ #
• (Zombie) Dwarfs in Space: Colonization, "Phantasm" and Transhumanism http://bit.ly/9T06WZ #
• More paper edits for #ITC10 pres. I hate this part, but love seeing decreasingly rough cuts… #
• OH @kenwoodward "Should we guess what she wants or should we ask her?" #
• I've cut 28 minutes of interview down to 12. Now to cut below ten. It's like amputating perfectly good limbs. #
• @courosa Any live feed of that session? Based on @craft184's tweets, this baits my curiosity… in reply to courosa #
• @courosa QUOI!!! OK, I'm switching to a Mac. in reply to courosa #
• Leaving another inaudible #educon Elluminate session. I think one person's registration fee would cover the price of decent mics… #
• 1 set of projects scored; 1 letter written to a friend; finances in order; time for a late Saturday brunch with my son. #

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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.

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

To be clear, we don’t really know what a model PLN looks like, or how it works, or if it’s efficient; we may not even know what the difference between a PLE and a PLN is. It may be that the one thing we can say definitively is we don’t know what a PLN looks like, for any two are unlikely to be the same. It may be that we want a PLN to resist being reified. When I think of a PLN/PLE I try to keep it open-ended; I conjecture that it is shaped by habits formed in the accomplishment of daily tasks, is connected to resources for discovery of new information, and is fostered by social relationships that may be authentic and trusting or merely incidental, built by one-to-one/one-to-many communications. Many of the facets of a PLN–but especially the social aspects–are increasingly open to the world.

I think we know what a LMS looks like: it is typically a monolithic, institutionally-controlled system that provides user accounts and digital space for the tasks of teaching and learning. A LMS is likely to allow file storage and redistribution, private and public communication, user tracking and logging, assignment management, timed/semi-secure assessment, and so on. Even more so than a traditional classroom, a LMS course environment is nearly always closed to the world.

Jon hit most of the primary strengths and weaknesses of each already, but I wanted to add or expand the list a little, but really just take this chance to brain dump and play both sides of a still relevant issue:

LMS Strengths

1. One-stop shopping. Not only do instructors build everything in one place, students can reach all aspects of the course in a single silo (except in the case of ePacks). Related: tools look and act similarly.
2. Bred by educators. Features are based on feedback and requests from a community of educators (theoretically).
3. Attention of ed tech market. Not only to CIOs attend to education-centric software products, third-party companies (textbook publishers to advanced communication tools such as Wimba) build content and products to work with the LMS.
4. Many models of academic use are available as examples or objects of criticism, especially in fully online courses.
5. Potentially greater latitude in using third-party materials under Fair Use or TEACH act. At any rate, many vague, fuzzy, or even illegal uses of third-party material by faculty are masked by closed system.
6. A closed environment–the metaphorical “walled garden”–may encourage students to freely express themselves.

LMS Weaknesses

1. LMS companies seem prone to buy-out, and thus may “pull the rug” out from adoptive institutions.
2. Adoption often requires licensing, which may inhibit switching, or may impel adoption of new versions.
3. Quality of third-party products and integration is often poor, inhibiting access and blemishing the experience.
4. Improvements, features, and fixes are historically are slow.
5. Design may encourage outdated, limiting, or less effective teaching practices.
6. With the exception of Moodle and Sakai, most LMS are closed source (in spite of Blackboard’s claims to be “open”).

PLE Strengths

1. Tools are based on “real world” needs, uses, and practices, and are more likely to be “authentic”.
2. Tools are likely to be coded or scripted according to broadly adopted standards.
3. Stability may be based on community adoption and support as well as financial viability.
4. Students may engage with communities of practice—real experts operating in their profession.
5. 50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Unable to rely upon corporate contracts or other adoption criteria, Web 2.0 tools rely on continued user support and expanded adoption.

PLE Weaknesses

1. Few models or case studies to use as examples or objects of criticism.
2. Tools often require terms of service agreements peculiar to the product company.
3. Likely not designed specifically for education.
4. For interoperability or data harvesting data must be both open and standardized.
5. Related to institutional control of data, data may be impermanent.
6. Some individuals may disdain open publishing or prefer to maintain privacy.

As our semester crawled into the second week and I began to enter scores and feedback for the students’ first assignment–a blog post–I noticed a couple unusual features:

1. When a student submits an URL for an assignment, Instructure grabs a screenshot of the rendered URL in addition to providing a hyperlink. This ensures that students actually have completed what they claim to have completed at the time of submission.
2. Students and instructors can each reply to an assignment’s score and feedback seamlessly within the system. For instance, after I submitted scores for this first assignment, one student explained in the assignment feedback why I failed to notice that she had in fact completed the assignment. I confirmed this, changed her score, and replied back, much like I would in private e-mail, but without any of the hassle of opening a message, choosing an addressee, etc.

Not only is this feedback discussion feature both seamless and the default, I can also use a built-in rubric, attach individual files (though Instructure has an even better way to upload assignment feedback en masse) and even record audio feedback inline (uses a Flash-based plug-in [still buggy for me on Win 7 in FF3]).

This is a great way to negotiate feedback and scoring with students. This also provides an opportunity for learners to engage in the assessment process. And since the features on this particular tool are easy and even intuitive to use, there is no excuse for accurate, timely corrective feedback that is understood by both instructor and learner.

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.

However, dP is not without its flaws; indeed, I became so frustrated that late last week I asked my lead developer Ken Woodward to send me some examples of competitive systems that did not include BaseCamp. While BaseCamp is a great system, and probably amongst the top few project management tools out there, it’s not cheap, and we have a lot of projects running simultaneously. Plus, I am a constant advocate of OSS solutions, and in this situation, where many of my staff are student developers, having a locally-owned OSS platform that can be modified by my staff as they learn their trade is very attractive.

Let me note that I always feel guilty critiquing an OSS project, especially when I myself haven’t made any significant contributions to the code. At the same time, with increasing competition in OSS solutions, one has more liberty to leave behind that which doesn’t suit one’s needs. Further, reasonable explication of the features and failures of any system is valuable to developers who are committed to building and maintaining a quality system. So here’s a quick review of dotProject with some particular attention to the broken bits. My next post will introduce the alternatives that we are considering.

Here’s a list of dP’s strengths or notable features:

• user-based and password protected
• email integrated
• distinction between projects and tasks (you’d be surprised how many “project management” tools omit this!)
• robust data at the project level, with good hierarchical layout of tasks
• project tasks may be imported into other projects, thus “templates”
• calendaring
• task dependency
• good, flexible task logging and time tracking
• decent gant charts
• written in PHP
• themes

Now, a list of complaints:

No RSS. For my unit, RSS or Atom feeds are taken for granted. If I can’t put my task list on my Google home page, I’m not happy. RSS is easy to script, however, so we could add this feature to our To Do list.

Inconsistent task/to do list. I haven’t quite figured this out, but one’s “tasks” list is different from the “to do” list that dP presents. This appears to just be a bug, as the To Do list–which is actually harder to get to–is more accurate.

Some weird PHP scripting. For instance, project categories: one can create categories for projects, like “in planning” or “in progress” or “pilot” or “complete”. The problem seems to be that dP attaches a simple numeric id to each of these category names. It attaches the same numeric id to the projects in the category. Makes sense, right? Wrong. The category ids correspond to the order in which they appear as tabs in the dP interface; if you change the order, the numeric ids of the categories change, and thus no longer match the project categories. I’ve actually found several examples of similarly breakable scripting in the system (including a stubborn “masking” of certain projects related to this) but this was the most frustrating one.

Calendar/date entry is inadequate. In order to set a task due date to, say, December 2010, you can’t type 12/01/2010, you have to open the calendar GUI, then click, click, click, click through the months until you get to December 2010.

Little data available outside of gant charts. And the gant charts fail to react intelligently to clearly “inactive” projects, instead extending them perpetually as if someone were still working on it (even though no hours were logged). But really the main complaint here is that there is no simple, easy way to access data on staff or projects. For example, I can’t click a user’s name and determine how many hours they logged in dP this week. I can’t look at all projects of a type and get an average of hours spent to completion. I can get clear, individual project data from individual projects

Not embeddable, widgetizeable. Several project management systems have scripts, or embeddable widgets, or even desktop apps that help you monitor your tasks. dP does not yet. If they only had RSS, we’d be able to get somewhere. XML RPC? That’d be cool.

Average GUI. The graphical user interface in dP is average at best. It’s not horrible; it’s not elegant. It could be adjusted with a new CSS, but my experimentation with theming in dP is that too much can go wrong, and I’ve tried several themes that actually break basic features of the system! OK, so maybe I just need to spend more time on this, but compared to theming in Drupal or WordPress, dP theming is no fun.

Small community support. Though the quality of people involved in dP is great, the number of people developing, contributing, and using the system is a lot smaller than I’d hoped for. The last date of a major upgrade or bug fix was July 2008. I really want to add some of my staff to that community, but right now may not be the best time in the history of our organization.

So, we’re looking at other options–and I’ll review some of those next time–but I recognize that in the end we may stick with dP. If we do, it will have to be with a greater commitment to participate in the dP community, because several of these complaints I’ve listed simply can’t be allowed to stand, and its true we haven’t given much back.

This Wave was embedded with the wavr plugin for WordPress. In beta testing I was able to get my wave ID from the URI, and made the wave public by adding public@a.gwave.com.

I must admit: now that I’ve shared, I have to worry if every image was properly credited, and the occasional borrowed slide attributed to the original lender. May the open web forgive us our sins of omission!

1. Prior to the session, run WebCamMax on the presenter’s laptop and under Source > Main Source choose “Screen” as the primary source.
2. If you want to have a picture-in-picture (for example, of the laptop’s integrated webcam), you can choose a secondary input under Source > PinP Source 1.
3. Minimize WebCamMax.
4. For a mic set up, I used a production-quality wireless lavalier mic from Sony (thanks to Adam and Scott), but really any mic will do. Instead of an XLR output from the receiver I used a simple male-male stereo mini cord, plugging the other end into the laptop’s mic port.
5. Then, I simply login to Ustream and initialize the broadcast.
6. I make sure that Ustream is using WebCamMax for the video source, and the external mic as the audio source. Don’t forget to test the audio levels!
7. Hit Begin Stream and Begin Recording, minimize the ustream window, and you’re off to the races.

The ustream broadcast will capture whatever activity happens on your computer, whether that’s a PowerPoint presentation, computer application, or web browsing–similar to Jing or Camtasia. Loaner mic aside, this was a very inexpensive, portable solution that turned out better results for computer-based presentations than most ustreams from a tripod-mounted camera, which only capture the projector screen.

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