Natalie's Blog

I've recently upgraded to a paid personal account on Safari since Penn State's access only includes a subset of the full Safari library, and not a lot of recent works. I'm learning jQuery fast and finding that I really love it. Just like css, jQuery allows you to keep your HTML pages clean and uncluttered. Unlike css, which controls the styles on and appearance of your pages, jQuery adds dynamic and interactive effects. It's pretty slick and easy to learn. It helps to know some javaScript, but luckily I'm not too rusty from my days coding javaScript in the 90's. Back then, a lot of javascript actions were inserted directly into the HTML, as was any element styling or document layout coding (read: HTML tables for layout). I'm most familiar and comfortable with client-side scripting, which is how jQuery primarily works, so this is all a piece of cake!

Here are the books I have on my Safari shelf for learning jQuery (with links to their Amazon pages):

Post Script: In an effort to organize all my formal course work better for later reference, I "tagged" all my writings by topic and by class. Unfortunately it seems the Movable Type tag cloud widget used at Penn State does not include page tags along with blog entry tags. I don't want to post my formal class writings as blog posts (which I tend to think of as being more informal). Does anyone have a solution to this? I have submitted this to official Blogs support, but perhaps crowdsourcing will yield a creative solution as well. :)

Like many early adopters that have been kicking the tires with this tool, I've been playing around while developing a small community of contacts to collaborate with. While I have yet to use this tool on any "real" projects, I think I've finally seen the light in terms of potential in my personal sphere of work and life. Let me elaborate.

Recently I returned from a somewhat extended vacation, during which I was largely out of touch with my workmates. As I was coming home on the train (a great way to travel if you have the opportunity, by the way), I started to feel the dread of returning to the office and sorting through the inevitable pile of e-mail. Don't get me wrong, I love most aspects of my job, but e-mail is one of those things I tend to feel neutral-to-hostile towards. One of the things that is especially challenging is doing the detective work of piecing together an ongoing e-mail conversation. We've all seen it and dealt with it: the chain of "Reply All"s within a workgroup. Not only does this become inefficient over time, since most actors in the chain simply copy the same text over from earlier in the chain, but it's terribly difficult, at least for me, to do the detective work of reconstructing the conversation as it happened over time. Essentially I end up reading "backwards" since my instinct is to read from top-to-bottom but this happens to be the reverse of the conversation timeline. (Incidentally, this is why Twitter is not a top tool within my personal learning environment - I face the same conundrum of trying to reconstruct conversations in reverse and generally find this frustrating.) 

How I see Google Wave really working for me to overcome this scenario is that I can easily jump in or back in to a conversation and not feel like I really missed anything. Conversations are threaded so I can easily see the context of replies. I can even use the "playback" feature to get a sense for exactly how the conversation played out, when edits were made, etc. Essentially the conversation and the collaboration are all there in one place for my review. No need to don my "detective" hat and try to recreate based on the bits and pieces I've gathered. Sort of like putting my work on "Tivo" while I'm away.

I welcome your thoughts and comments, as I am still learning about this new tool.

NCLB has generated students who are good passive, rote learners but have the inability to generate content and be active participants in their learning - important we address this. Very important to spell out the processes and expectations in the classroom to make this transition easier. World Campus does well in current economic environment because it pushes out this easily replicated rote content that does not involve much input from the instructor. This needs to change! Students are paying big bucks and tuition is going up!

Assessment  is an issue!

Cole: administrators are not the problem. A lot of the best new tech adopters are the administrators so they are not the usually the ones standing in the way. Is it status quo?

I'm reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink, and it's got me thinking about a lot of things. A lot of today's hot business/work life books encourage us to step outside of our comfort zones (Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week comes to mind). A Whole New Mind takes a unique approach in making the case that right-brained aptitudes and abilities are going to be among the attributes that will help workers achieve success in the workplace of the future. I have always thought of myself as foremost a left-brained thinker but I have also become aware that I am a much happier person when I pay attention to right-brained thinking. I also believe it makes me a better contributer to work and personal relationships. Right-brained thinking, as Pink defines it, is all about patterns, style, empathy, synthesis and holistic thinking, as opposed to logic, detail and language which are attributed to the left brain.

Yesterday I mowed my lawn. Not a terribly exciting chore normally, but I had a bit of a revelation this time round. Perhaps I had Pink's book for inspiration, but for some reason I decided to mow a different pattern than the one I had always used. I simply mowed diagonally rather than the usual straight up and down:

What's so exciting about this? Well not much on the surface. I don't think it saved me much time or effort. But it did make the activity a little more joyful than usual and it didn't feel like it took as much effort. And I enjoyed the artistic effect; enough that I was inspired to snap this picture with my iPhone.

What I've taken from this is that it's really important to change things up from time to time and approach things from a different angle. The next time I find myself in the doldrums at work without much inspiration, I will challenge myself to do things differently; to break out of my comfort zone. The worst that could happen is I fail, learn from my mistakes, and move on. But there's also a pretty decent chance I'll end up inspired and motivated to see things and act on things in a different way. And that'll take me closer to where I want to be - a more content person with more to contribute to the world and the people around me.

Some excellent possible uses for the pen include writing out and demonstrating math equations, formulas, and graphs, and also possible pen and ink drawing. Any of these uses would be useful for providing the "chalkboard" type experience to distant learners.

There are some drawbacks, however, of course. The output is a proprietary format that is hosted on the Livescribe site - not good if you're thinking of doing in-house enhancements to the pencasts (like adding captioning for accessibility purposes). Also, though students can use the pen to demonstrate and submit their work, it does not produce a file that can then be marked up and returned by the professor.

All in all, a nice way of demonstrating problem-solving techniques, but not a great way of providing a true two-way or social experience.

Our Quickbase use has fizzled a bit (or a lot).

One reason for this is likely due to the interface: It's very database-y:

Our workplace consists of instructional designers and assistants who may not be accustomed to a database interface, and honestly are not expected to be power database users as part of their skill set.

My charge, along with the team joining me in this journey, is to find what might actually work to achieve our ends. We know that the software is very good at managing data, tables and relationships. We also know that our users are drawing a blank when attempting to use it. So the question is: how do we build an interface that our users instinctively know how to use and serves the purpose of keeping team members honest and on track? There is yet another layer of complication here. The team interacts on a nearly daily basis with various data housing systems outside of Quickbase - systems that store more detailed course information, manage time tracking, store course multimedia, etc. Here in fact is a snapshot of the whiteboard from our last meeting where we were discussing all these systems:

You can see how tangled this problem is. Many of the systems are out of our control and will probably still have to be interfaced with manually, but for the in-house solutions, there is great potential for integration, saving time and duplication of effort for everyone who uses them.

Luckily, we have Jeanette Condo on our team, a programmer with database and API experience. (yay for us!) With her help, we may come up with a win-win solution that puts Quickbase in the background while fully taking advantage of its powerful database capabilities.

Our next team meeting is next Monday. We are still in the discussion and exploration stage and have not begun any nitty-gritty development or testing yet, so the question I think I want to ask is, if we were to design a system for managing our work from the ground up, without consideration for existing systems, what would it look like?

• web 1.0 - series of linked documents
• web 2.0 - communications
• web 3.0 - semantic web

purpose of semantic web - add meaning to Web documents

burners-lee - semantic web makes it possible for people and machines to understand web content

We all come into contact w/the semantic Web every day - Google is a good example when it comes up w/intelligent search results.

words can have different meanings in different contexts and depending on the bias of the observer - machines don't have bias and can't read context well

Question: can we pull non-sensitive enterprise data from a central source?

Semantics: meaning of words or symbols, become really useful when shared betw. individuals and w/in community

Keys - in the absence of meaningful identifiers, we invent a (usually numeric) key to unique data

Demonstration - Firefox add-on Operator. find and save events. Will have to work with it to see how it really works or is useful.

Code demonstration - possible implementations:

Brian Panulla - get rid of the words semantic web! Moving from metadata to linked data

tagging is NOT the semantic web - too loose and open. can lead to good results w/enough tagging, but not good enough.

higher ed = walled gardens. leads to redundant data. relational databases are about structure and not data. convention may allow us to integrate data across systems, e.g. usps state code, campus 2-letter code. problem - ad hoc identifiers and multiple copies of same data in existence, e.g. college/campus name changes

New W3C language - OWL: Web Ontology Language

Semantic Web means essentially:

• further the separation of content, presentation, behavior, logic
• breaking down data silos

______________

Current AR technology - GE smart grid

Mini automotive ad

topps 3d baseball cards

bmw augmented reality - example on youtube shows AR assisted car repair!!

AR island on Second Life - may be fun to explore

______________

• enabling reflections - blogging is a great way to allow in-depth reflection on a topic, increasing student retention and engagement.
• enabling conversations - blogs can be easily aggregated into a single source, essentially allowing conversations to occur around a single topic or course.
• student ownership of content - ANGEL supports discussion forums, chat and other forms of communication that can work in certain situations but ultimately do not give students ownership of their content. That carefully composed discussion forum posting or drop box submission that took a lot of thought and effort to create is essentially lost when the semester/term is over unless the student takes special effort to retain it.
• portfolio - related to ownership of content, the concept of blog as portfolio has powerful implications. The Penn State Blog platform can be used to support so much more than just blogging; essentially a student can easily set up a whole Web site with a collection of artifacts (pictures, stories, etc.) related to him or herself. The portfolio can represent not only the students' learning in the program but can include any learning or experiences that take place outside of the formal learning environment. Such an e-portfolio is a strong indicator to a potential employer of the depth of a person's strengths and experiences.

The two sessions I went to related to blogging were entitled: Engaging Students with Program Learning Outcomes and ENGL 202C on the Blogs at Penn State Platform. I learned of real-life examples that support my thinking above. The Engaging Students session had students that were using their blogs in the context of a program experience and not just for isolated classwork. They were doing all the things I mentioned above for portfolio, but were also using them for reflections and conversations. The ENGL 202C students were able to share their writing with the class in a much more meaningful and engaging way.

I also attended a session on the future of textbooks in the digital age and a hands-on session on Adobe Connect. The textbook session gave a lot of food for thought about what's in store for textbooks and what copyright means in the digital world. The Adobe Connect session gave me more hands-on practice with Connect and informed me of the detailed help page PSU has in place for the product - I intend to use this as a reference and source of ideas as I revise our own (World Campus) instructions for Elluminate Live.

Finally, the two keynotes with David Wiley and danah boyd were fantastic. All in all a tiring day but very well worth my time and as usual, gave me plenty of takeaways and food for thought.