March 2008 Archives

I gave a presentation to the e-Education Council today where the main focus was to update the council on the status of our planned upgrade to ANGEL 7.2 at the end of the spring semester. I also provided them with an update of what we're doing as far as bolstering the hardware and improving system performance. Since this is information a lot of you would also be interested in hearing, I made a brief movie out of my slides.

I interviewed Albert Simon, the Director of Instructional Technology for the College of Education at Marshall University, about his impressions of the conference and what he hopes to take back to his group. Albert and I attended many of the same sessions over the two days so I was really interested in his perspective.

Interview with Albert Simon.

I interviewed Ed Evans, the interim Director of Teaching and Learning with Technology at Purdue, about their annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. In this brief interview we discuss the evolution of the conference over the past decade as well as the theme of this year's theme, "Enhancing the Student Experience."

Interview with Ed Evans

I had the opportunity to attend Purdue's Teaching and Learning with Technology conference this past week. The theme of this years conference was, "Enhancing the Student Experience." The conference and the theme intrigued me because I am the program committee chair for our symposium this year and next year I'll be the symposium chair. So I was on a mission to learn as much as I could about how Purdue goes about putting the conference on as well as to see some interesting sessions on how social computing technologies can improve the learning experience of students.

This is the 11th conference hosted by Purdue, The conference is held annually and is funded in part by corporate sponsors.  Like ours, the conference is free. Purdue's conference is a two day affair and is open to anyone. There were presenters and attendees from across the country and from various disciplines. There was college faculty and staff, K-12 teachers, even physical therapists.

Many of the sessions focused on web 2.0 technologies and social computing. The most interesting track at the conference was Purdue's own FIT track. FIT stands for Faculty Ideas About Technology and is the TLT groups way engage their faculty. The FIT program is based on our use of white papers and community hubs along with the EDUCAUSE '7 Things You Need to Know' concept. To date they have published a white paper on Wikis and have explored, amongst other things, immersive environments and audience response systems.

We were a frequent topic of discussion at the conference. Lots of other ed. tech departments have or are seriously considering adopting our community model of support. Folks are amazed at how we're using this model to reach our audience. Also, whenever I talked about our educational gaming initiative people got very interested.

Another hot topic of discussion was the viability of a monolithic course management system, whether it be ANGEL, Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn, etc. This issue carried over from the CIC-LT meeting earlier in the week (go to post). Folks were interested in our adoption of Movable Type 4 as both a blog and portfolio platform as well as our interest in exploring the possibility of creating an education specific version of MT4. Illinois is exploring the same possibility with Drupal.

Purdue has a FIT program designed to engage faculty with new technologies. FIT is based on PSU Hot Teams and community hubs as well as EDUCAUSE "7 Things You Need to Know" concepts. FIT looks at things from the perspective of pedagogy, technology, scalability, adaptability, and usability.

One of the first social software tools the FIT team looked at was microblogging defined by Word Spy as "Posting short thoughts and ideas to a personal blog, particularly by using instant messaging software or a cell phone." Below is a link to an interview I did with the presenters, Ed, Kimberly, and Kevin.

Get Fit with Microblogging

I attended my first CIC Learning Technology team meeting yesterday and I came away with two major impressions. First, I was proud to see how much Penn State, and ETS, has to offer. The education technology units at other Big 10 schools are very interested in what we're doing and they are closely watching our progress as we navigate the  web 2.0 world, which is now in its adolescence and, therefore, experiencing the typical growing pains as it moves from infancy to adulthood. Second, I was excited to see how much we can learn from watching what the other CIC schools are doing. We're all reading the same tea leaves, making decisions based on our interpretations, and implementing a plan of action. All in the name of improving the teaching and learning experience. Fundamentally we all face the same challenges. Questions like: What is the future of a monolithic course management system? Is there a future? How do we tap into the potential offered by social computing applications? How do we harness the power of mobile computing devices to create a more authentic learning experience? How can we be agile enough to adopt to the ever-shifting landscape? How can we be there, ahead of the curve, to meet the demands of instructors and students?

One of the the immediate challenges the team discussed was the future of course management systems. Putting the Blackboard-Design 2 Learn case aside, the idea of a single application, particularly one that is inherently a closed-system, being able to meet the demands of our user community is dubious at best. These applications, whether they be commercial products such as ANGEL, Blackboard, D2L or open source products such as Moodle or Sakai, struggle to maintain content. What I mean is, the performance of each application is severely limited as the size of the content increases. At Penn State we had to put a 1GB cap on course size because of performance issues. Schools that use Blackboard are capped at 500MB. Well, this cap is just not practical in a world where it is increasingly easier and common to use multimedia files to both teach and demonstrate learning. Then there is the question of getting content out on the other side. How can content be re-purposed both by faculty and students? How can either easily place a single media file in a course, a personal website, a portfolio or a vita?

At Penn State we've chosen Moveable Type 4 as our blogging platform and now our portfolio platform. Illinois chose Drupal. Both offer a more agile platform that allows content to be used in multiple places and in multiple ways and they both play well with other applications. It is easy to drop in an image, a movie, or podcast in either of the tools and publish it. While we're using different applications to solve the same problem the challenges are identical and there is an opportunity for partnering on the process.

The other CIC team members were very interested in our community model of support. The idea of an open community that is agile enough to adopt to immediate needs and also allows in-depth conversation is powerful. Especially when combined with search and tagging capabilities. Several institutions have or are about to adopt this model. We should watch and learn from their interpretation and use of these communities especially where it concerns partnering with other separate but related areas. Other CIC schools are very interested in working with their respective libraries to find a common ground when it comes to faculty and student education when it comes to tools such as using library services and free tools such as Zotero and Refworks. This is a great idea because the librarians want to leverage many of the social applications and mobile tools for learning that we do. We've done some similar work with our instructional librarians and should continue to do so.

A common theme that evolved throughout the day was the idea of partnering our internal peers, such as the libraries, with our external resources in the CIC. Toward that end the CIC team is hoping to hold a conference in the fall at Wisconsin whose focus will be on building these partnerships. Details to follow later.