Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein

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…)

I attended the 3-day eLearning DevCon 2009 in Salt Lake City this past week, and have compiled some brief notes based on the experience. I summarize the conference as having an enticing depth and knowledge of topics, good “presence” and information from most of the presenters, primarily for corporate e-learning developers (which was a refreshing change), not at all a bargain, and awkwardly spread out across Fort Douglas, though I must admit it was a joy to walk outside in late spring weather (more…)

Anyone who knows me knows about the Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, aka TTIX, a small, free conference dedicated to the open exchange of ideas and best practices in distance learning and technology-enhanced education. If I’m not soliciting proposals, I’m soliciting keynotes, or I’m soliciting sponsors, or I’m soliciting participants–and really, the participants are the most important ingredient for a successful idea exchange! (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…)

Mike Caufield asked that I put up a screencast on the OpenShare mod for Moodle. Here’s one that comes in just under 8 minutes–shorter even than my hatcheted and curtailed preso at MoodleMoot ‘08 SFO (more…)

Now that Open Ed 2008 is over (I think I’ve written more PHP in two weeks than in the past two years to kick out the re-release of our open educational resources mod for Moodle … more on that next week), I am finally able to direct my energies toward the Next Project: an all-day pre-conference workshop for the 2008 WCET conference held this November in Phoenix, AZ. This workshop is titled Creating Personal Learning Environments with Web 2.0, and I’ll be collaborating with the inestimableChris Lott and Scott Leslie (more…)

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus column published a short commentary on the creepy tree house effect, quoting Alec Couros and myself. I then stumbled upon a couple really great blog posts on the subject that simply popped in response–definitely worth the read, as each offers an in-depth reaction to the concept and term:

• LilaTov Cocktail: “Creepy Treehouse” effect: Twitter & Facebook suck when they’re required by your professor
• Marie-Jose Klaver Met je professor in een boomhut (In a Treehouse with Your Professor) (Dutch — does “kippenvel” mean “goosebumps”?)
• AnneC Trouver l’équilibre (French — relates personal experiences with student resistance to instructor-implemented social media)
• History-ing: Creepy Treehouse

The persistence of this discussion should be encouraging for John Krutsch and Marc Hugentobler, who will be presenting at this year’s WCET Annual Conference specifically on the creepy tree house effect in a session titled “Taking the ‘Creepy’ Out of ‘Creepy Tree House’”. I look forward to seeing educators and administrators engage in discussion and debate on the meaningful/meaningless-ness of the term, any deleterious effects it might have on teaching and learning, and how we can leverage technology without wasting our time.

George Siemens gave a great end-of-first-day keynote session at 2008’s Distance Teaching and Learning conference, in which he addressed connectivism. It was forward-thinking, heady, and deep, which I love in a keynote; unfortunately, I think a number of attendees were expecting it to be “keynote lite”.

George put his slides for this keynote online on SlideShare. Here are my fast-and-furious, almost-at-George’s-pace notes (which I hope to come back in and edit);

Task of education is to “combat” for lucidity

Knowledge is in the connections
more college students in china than in any other country
we are not in control of where education is going
we are not in control of these tbs of information

Complexity
putting together a puzzle
metaphor of a weather pattern – that’s why we can’t predict (Photo)
education is meant to be more like a puzzle
too much information
we end up with extra nuts and bolts
fragmentation
(I remember reading EVERYTHING in a book, in a newspaper, in a magazine, in a comic—hungry for knowledge. Now there’s too much)
“Fragmentation requires re-creation”
Fragmentation challegene coherance”
freedom of creation = abundance
(how do we filter)
There’s something else I need to read.
Need to filter out the noice, but that’s beyond the capability of our tools
fast-paced deep stuff. I feel like I’m a smooth stone George has skipped across a deep water
Brings up Kerr’s challenge
“Something is happening.
“But is it sufficient to warrant a reconsideration of learning theory?”

Web 2.0 is hype. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that blogs are hype.”

oh shiny object slide (George should use more of these—great response, great illustration)
Long timeline ofslwo change: Information (great slide showing transition upwards)
what do the tools allow us to do that they didn’t before
reminds me of the idea that technology returns us from individual thought (intraspersonal/intraspective) to collective though, or thought heavily influenced by the sometimes rash opinion of others (interpersonal/extraspective). Can we have a balance of these when everything is published open, for everyone.

Gutenberg press was one of those technologies that spilled blood

Let’s look at this; don’t look at the tools. It’s about those bigger factors of openness, access, creation, control.

Connectivism.
Tagged his critics on his del.icio.us account—great modeling of the true scholarly approach toward getting at truth.
How is this unique?
(pause. Man, he’s a bullet train barreling down the track)
a unity of learning and knowledge
not a significant difference between learning and knowledge
learning != process; knowledge != product
Abundance
I say overabundance. Scarcity of quality may remain proportional? Of course not exactly, but there will be a quantity of crap that may equal the proportional quantity of silence we had before the Internet. Now instead of not having enough I have too much information. Instead of being hungry and savoring the crumbs of information, I am overfed and nauseous at the sight of more platters of information.

Levelsof networked learning
Neural-biological
Conceptual
External-social

neural
connectionism and ai
what fires together wires together
biologically learning is creating a network

conceptual

when we make a concept map it makes explicit what we know

the occurrence of words reveals connectedness of concepts to create meaning

do network properties exist at a conceptual level?
We do have network attributes to knowledge seems intuitively right
PERSONAL BRAIN
novak on concept maps (see his delicious)
our concepts are understood by filtering through networks
simulations dont teach us steps, they teach us sequences of patterns
enable individuals to form patterns

external and social
we are connected to each other

On Friday, August 8 2008 I presented at Distance Teaching and Learning 2008 with Marc Hugentobler and John Krutsch. I’ve posted the the slides and the rubric from that session as the page, “The Cheatability Factor”.

Presentation Slides

cheatability_factor.ppt

For this session I added several slides that illustrate my gut reaction to a number of the new technologically-based approaches to inhibit cheating in assessments which I hope you will find amusing.

We had a lively and interactive discussion of the problem of cheating in online courses, and possible approaches to inhibit it. We took one participant through our cheatbility rubric explaining criteria and concepts along the way.

For the first time John administered Buzzword Bingo live in-session with bingo cards printed with key terms from our presentation. We did this not (only) as a self-deprecating joke, but as a means of focusing participant attention on the presenters and the dialog. I believe at least 6 participants scored a prize during this session while playing Buzzword Bingo, though John and Marc had to coax more than one participant to simply shout out BINGO instead of raising their hands!

Notes taken at Distance Teaching and Learning Conference 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Presenter: Dam Lim

Learning games are built for mobile devices using SWF and XML. Mr. Lim talks about how he would like a single interface, and comments on possibilities for inter-institutional collaborations. I’m sure John Krutsch will be talking to him afterwards.

How does this work cross-(mobile-)platform? I know you can play YouTube videos, but you can’t generally run Flash content on iPhone or on Treo’s Blazer. Mr. Lim is using Windows Mobile on a PocketPC to demo this.

Plays a YouTube.com videos that show how making of the game works.

YouTube.com video is too small to see. Should make it full-screen.

Quickly demonstrates how the game is made and loaded in PocketPC.

I’d like to see the game itself in greater depth, and discuss how these are implemented into a course structure, and at least the predicted impact on learning.

Sums up with plenty of design challenges–so many broad and disruptive challenges leave me pessimistic.

Shows what Krutsch labels “simulated screenshots” of what a game might look like on iPhone (if it supported Flash).

Exit Mr. Stein.