October 2009 Archives

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutGoogl/188963

Google Wave is a web-based application that represents a rethinking of electronic communication. Users create online spaces called "waves," which include multiple discrete messages and components that constitute a running, conversational document. Users access waves through the web, resulting in a model of communication in which rather than sending separate copies of multiple messages to different people, the content resides in a single space. Wave offers a compelling platform for personal learning environments because it provides a single location for collecting information from diverse sources while accommodating a variety of formats, and it makes interactive coursework a possibility for nontechnical students. Wave challenges us to reevaluate how communication is done, stored, and shared between two or more people.

I wanted to make sure everyone saw this.  I spoke with some folks at the Educause Learning Initiative a few days ago and asked about Google Wave.  They said that they were within days of releasing their 7 Things... paper on Google Wave.  Sure enough, it came out yesterday.  Our own investigation of Google Wave will continue though - both because it will provide us with some hands-on experience using the tool and because we will need to personalize what we learn to a Penn State audience.  It's good to see what they came up with though.

I will be meeting with members of the ELI leadership group next week when I go to the Educause 2010 conference.  The scheduling and production of their 7 Things... series is one of the topics that I'd like to discuss with them.

Last week, I did quick Jing recordings about Moodle and Sakai.  Today, I made a recording of Blackboard to show what it looks like to log in and create some items, and then I go into a fleshed out course to show what the finished product could look like.  I got this account by going to Blackboard.com and requesting a Preview Account.




I was prepared to dislike Blackboard, mainly because of what I've heard about their corporate culture, but I have to admit that I like the look of Blackboard. The interface made sense to me, seemed very flexible, and looks polished compared to Moodle and Sakai. I don't think that Blackboard has the advanced controls that ANGEL has (for example, releasing content on a particular date or based on their completion of other items), but the majority of our faculty don't use those features. Then again, the ones who do rely on them pretty heavily.

Now that Blackboard owns ANGEL, there is nothing to stop them from taking the best of both products, so those missing features may exist by the time we would move to Blackboard.

A quick demonstration of Moodle for those who haven't seen it before.  I got access by going to demo.moodle.org and the login information is listed right on the home page.

Five minutes goes by very quickly, but I was able to record a basic video that shows what Sakai looks like.  I got this account by going to testdrivesakai.com.




Overall thoughts - most of the basic features are present, but there are several things that were confusing such as the "Modules" tab.  I didn't like that all of the tools were separated without a good way to link them into what I would consider to be a natural academic workflow for a student or instructor.  I didn't see a good way to rename or reorder the list of tools.  Also, the course blog feed seemed to be broken, but it lets you import an RSS feed from another source into the course.  What I didn't get to show is that there is a lot of good in-line help on each of the tools. 

Jeff and I made this presentation at the CIC CIO TechForum yesterday.  In it, we talk about the Hot Team process, the TLT Symposium, the Learning Design Summer Camp, and other projects and events that we (meaning all of us in the learning design space) have collectively designed in the open.

By the way, this was done by recording directly in Keynote as I described in my previous post.


This is strongly connected to this morning's theme of "Shared Leadership" in the IT realm.

It's after lunch.  I'm at a session about Moodle by Chris Ament and Elena Ivanova.  Based on my pre-session discussion with them, they feel strongly about the tools in Moodle and its ability to scale.  They are running Moodle centrally in parallel with WebCT Vista.  Since bringing up Moodle and with no advertising, Moodle has grown to 2000 course shells and 30,000 users per semester while WebCT Vista hasn't grown.  About 250 concurrent users (typical, not peak use).  Some of their users in WebCT would switch if there were tools that helped them migrate their content out of WebCT.  Most of the users are in the College of Liberal Arts.

Moodle has a lot of options for user roles within a course, which cal also be set at specific item levels (e.g. one particular assignment).  Version 2.0 of Moodle will be released in mid-2010.  It will include a file repository for sharing across courses, a portfolio tool for pushing content to an external repository, conditional activities, and improvements to many existing tools.  Faculty who favor active learning and social constructivist ideas prefer Moodle to WebCT.

Minnesota has done several integrations including: iTunesU, Wimba, Respondus, MyU (portal), and enrollment integration (Peoplesoft).  Instructors link their Moodle sites with their rosters.  The sync happens every 5 minutes.  You can have one Moodle site with enrollments from multiple sections or enroll the same sections into multiple Moodle sites.  Moodle Metacourses help with merges and splits.  They currently don't create Moodle sites for every course on the books.

Server environment:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
• Apache 2
• MySQL 5 (with InnoDB to make it act like Oracle)
• PHP 5
• GIT (for version control)

To control growth, they dump everything off the server after each semester and put it on their archive server, where it can be accessed live for another two years.  This also helps because they aren't applying upgrades to old content.

A lot of their information about Moodle can be found at: http://www.oit.umn.edu/cms-search/supporting-documents/index.htm

Some of this was already posted in the Stuff blog, I thought I'd replicate the complete set here.  I'll keep editing this page as the conference goes on.

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Chuck Severance is giving the kickoff talk at the CIC CIO Techforum.  I don't spend most of my day thinking about high performance computing, but Chuck has.  He has some interesting insight into how Google manages to scale (massive global replication on cheap hardware) and choosing between local supercomputing resources and remote data centers.

He is also talking about using tools like Google Apps to integrate with course management tools, which should enable course management systems to include the best-of-breed applications.  Cloudsocial adds a learning management bar on enabled pages that ties back into your course management system.  He thinks that this is the future of open educational resources.  Idea for baby cloud computing - give each student their own cPanel-based Web space to take control of their learning.  A lot of this is reminding me of Cole's post after his trip to the OpenEd conference with more of an emphasis on the intersection of IT Infrastructure than purely teaching and learning.

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I'm in a session about Northwestern University is using social computing.  They are using it mostly for external push communication to students.  Not too much different than what ETS doing to get messages out to faculty and the learning design community, but I don't think we have an ITS-wide strategy to get information to students.  Maybe Marcus is working on something?  The speaker, Sherry Minton, said that they implemented a weekly blog, but turned off the commenting so they could control the message.  Part of our presentation today is going to cover what happens when you let go of the control when working with groups like IDs, technologists, and faculty. [Maybe students as well, but I don't work directly with groups of students.]

Indiana University has mainly been focusing on using Facebook to communicate with students about things like alerts, reminders, events, etc...  Charles Rondot said that they have their wall open so anyone can post.  There was some initial fear about this, but after a year, there hasn't been a problem.  They have 1600 fans on Facebook. Using social networking to communicate with an audience is much like being the host of a party; until things get going, you have to go around to engage people and keep things fresh.  He's also very realistic about this being only part of a communication strategy and that technologies like Facebook are transient.

Paul Baepler is talking about their digital idea stream, which is a lot like the Lightning Talk presentations (5 minute presentation with 2 minute Q&A). He agrees that this adds a game-show-like atmosphere to the presentation.  He recommends Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. 

Paul is switching to Pecha Kucha (sounds like pechachka) - PowerPoint on adrenaline, Presentation Haiku.  20 slides, 20 seconds each = 6:40 presentation.  Spend an evening seeing a bunch of these.  Lawrence Lessig's presentation was mentioned as a variation of this (even less time per slide).  Ignite format = 20 slides x 15 seconds each = five minutes.  WAM Chatter: presented the question "What is News Now?" and had three people present their Pecha Kuchas on that question.  Speed Geeking - timed rotations around tables with different topics.  Good times.

I put together TLT's Teaching During a Pandemic page at the end of the summer. We gathered feedback on that page and one suggestion was to show how to do voice annotated slides on a Mac. So I powered up Keynote and use Jing to make the recording.

By the way, I had some scaling issues when I first posted this, so if anyone notices a problem with the recording, let me know and I'll work on it. It seems to be working now, but I need to find an Internet Explorer user to look at it.