Boost: A private look into the lives of high school students at risk

I came across this interesting site at http://www.boostup.org that showcases the stories of several high school students at risk of dropping out. The mission of the Boost project is “to create an identity, support and encouragement for those whom might be at risk of dropping out.” The most interesting part of the website to me is the 10 video projects made by high school seniors. They are pretty raw in production and they do a great job of communicating to the viewer the personal challenges that each student faces in grade 12. Most of the students are in large urban centers such as Los Angeles, Miami and Brooklyn and some of their videos demonstrate that their environment is a significant detractor to their goals to be successful in school. If you’re an educator at any level, take the time to watch these short videos. They can really bring a dose of reality to your work. Note that you must have Flash Player installed to view the videos.

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The Canadian Public Domain Registry is conceived!

Access Copyright, formerly known as CanCopy, is the Canadian copyright licensing agency. In a collaboration with Creative Commons Canada and with the assistance of the makers of Wikipedia, they announced on March 3rd the development of a Canadian public domain registry. This project will create an online, searchable catalogue of published works that are in the Canadian public domain. In their press release, Access Copyright does not provide a target release date... so keeep your eyes peeled for the registry's arrival in the future! This registry will an invaluable resource to instructional designers and educators in Canada.

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eLearning 2.0: what does the future hold?

Answer: I don't know.

But lots of people are talking about it. Tony Karrer recently asked me to take a peak at his blog located at http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/ and he's been talking about e-Learning 2.0 quite a bit!

For example, he states that e-Learning 2.0 is trending towards: “small pieces of content, delivered closer to time / place of work, and likely delivered in pieces over time as part of a larger program.” I think he is "bang on" in my view. This statement makes me remember back to what the manufacturing sector experienced in the 1980s where much of the sector transformed to a Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory model in order to maximize efficiency. In the future, I see training establishments now moving to more a more effective, e-Learning 2.0, model where staff are delivered training only at the moment they need it for their job performance (i.e. JIT!), that the training be in small pieces that are not intermingled with other less-relevant content, that they receive the training while on the job, via their own workstation, that there be permanent access to the training resources to act as a job aid and that this job aid be centrally updated for all employees in the future should any processes/policies change/improve. To me the job aid aspect of training is very crucial and I think the ease with which electronic materials can be updated centrally lends itself very well to this.

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Two new EduBlogs to the blogroll

These two come from Saskatchewan:

Rob Wall's Stigmergicweb

Donna DesRoches's Illuminated Dragon

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Do instructional designers in the trenches really need to know about things like Web 2.0 right now?

Jay Cross suggested some web competencies that generalist instructional designers should have. A couple of them surprise me because they are very specific technology issues. For example, he lists "Web 2.0" as one issue. Personaly, I am not convinced a generalist instructioanl designer has to worry about Web 2.0 at this time. I think that generalist instructional designers should try to focus on general issues around instructional design and project management, and that they should strive to work within multidisciplinary teams where the computer technologists on the team are well versed on the more specific technology-ladden concepts. I've written about this before. If you'd like to check out Jay's list of competencies, here's the link. Many of them are quite good!

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iTunes U

Are you an educator that sees value in recording or taping your lectures or demonstrations and making them available to your students? Be it video or audio, you can now do it easily with Apple’s new service: iTunes U. It’s a no cost hosted service that allows educators to post their recorded media files and make them available over the Internet to their students. Students can listen or view the material directly on their computers, or if they have iPods, they can seamlessly download your media to their iPod using the Apple iTunes software. Note that only those lucky students with video iPod can view your video content on their portable device. From their iPod they can listen and/or view your material 24/7 anywhere they go! Now that scores big points for accessibility.

Some people reading this may note that any good LMS such as WebCT, D2L, or Sakai, can also host audio and video files, so what’s the advantage of using iTunes U if your educational institution has an LMS? The advantage is that the bandwidth requirement is displaced from your school’s LMS server to Apple’s server. That can make a big difference in server performance with large audio and video files. You can alleviate some of the bandwidth pressures on your local institution’s LMS server by displacing the bandwidth requirement to Apple’s server. Obviously, if your school doesn’t have an LMS, iTunes U looks very attractive indeed!

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Why Skype is getting lots of Hype

It was my Dad's birthday this week; he's 62 years old. He and I don't live in the same city and we see each other only a hand full of times each year. I spoke to him to wish him happy birthday and he's doing well. I called him from my home, I have no land telephone line and my cell phone was dead. So instead, I used Skype. It's a piece of software that allows free voice transmission over the Internet and it’s from the makers of the infamous KaZaa! But don’t let that dissuade you from trying it. It's incredibly easy to use... anyone with a high-speed Internet connection and a headset can use it. The clarity is phenomenal and far outweighs the audio transmission possible over other popular instant messaging services such as MSN or ICQ.

So what does this topic have to do with e-education? Well, I think Skype can be used as a no-cost method of increasing student-to-student interaction at a distance so that they can work collaboratively as a team. For those students who enjoy a bit of synchronous interaction with their team members that extends above and beyond conventional text-based chat, this could work very well. In fact, a teleconference with multiple participants can be undertaken with the newest versions of Skype. Because it's so easy to use, has no cost associated with it, and has excellent audio quality, Skype is getting lots of hype! Try it. You might just like the impact it has on your long distance bill as well.

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5000+ Hits!

It's a new record! The last 1,000 hits only took 10 weeks to achieve! It took 15 weeks to move from 2,000 to 3,000 hits and 14 weeks to move from 3,000 to 4,000 hits. Nice!

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Instructional Design Practitioners - what should they do to stay successful?

I am a practitioner in the field of Instructional Design. Currently the field is fast changing and Instructional Designers are focussing on melding their systematic methods of course design with project management theory in an increasingly online format. As budgets become progressively tighter and expectations for course design in the online modality become increasingly higher, new and innovative approaches that combine multidisciplinary educational teams strongly rooted in a practical project management framework will emerge in the future. With this being said, what should Instructional Designers do today to stay successful in the Course Development business in the future? They should seek out opportunities to work in multidisciplinary teams, continuously challenge themselves to think outside the box and always engage in life-long learning to be prepared to adapt to the future needs in the field. In addition, possibly obtaining formal project management experience would be something to consider strongly. Armed with these skills and attitudes, Instructional Designers will be able to contribute positively to the development of online courses well in the future.

What do you think? Leave a comment by clicking below.

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Corporate Training and e-Learning Blog - New Blog to the Blogroll

Corporate Training and e-Learning Blog by Jenna Sweeny President of CramerSweeney Instructional Design has been added to the Blogroll on the right hand side of this page..

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Today's Generation Y is tomorrow's Adult Learner

After reading this quick description of Generation Y, the first thing I think about is that Generation Y is the Adult Learner of the near future. This Adult Learner will be (and has been) marketed to by companies in very slick high-budget multi-media fashion (via the Internet, TV, Movies, print advertising, etc.). Their expectation for a good product is consequently very high and they have many choices to make!

Here's an example, I went to go see the movie The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe last Tuesday and I took a Generation Y member with me. When we discussed the movie afterwards, she said the story was good but the special effects could be better. Her exact quote was "it was no Lord of the Rings for special effects." This got me thinking that her expectations about special effects in fantasy-type movies are very high (I mean very!) due to her experience with the Lord of the Rings Trilogy that was released between 2001 and 2003. Had The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe come out before the Lord of the Rings Trilogy it would have been hailed, but now it is slightly inferior in special effects despite spending approximately $150M on the movie according to this website (which is a higher budget than each of the Lord of the Rings Movies... chalk it up to inflation perhaps?)

My point is that as educators we must consider the expectations of our target market (the forthcoming Generation Y people) when designing and developing courses and curriculum. They have experience and expectations that if we can strategically address then we can successfully compete for their satisfaction and their tuition dollars. They have traditionally had so many choices to make as a consumer that they can be discerning. Lets make sure they choose our institutitions because we're attractive, innovative, exciting and enjoyable. Gone are the days of the professor that reads our of the textbook. That's not going to fly anymore.

What do you think? Post a comment below.

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Pause a second and think about blogging for educators

I think bogging can be a very useful practice for a practitioner because it gives an opportunity to chronicle and reflect upon your work. It's the reflection aspect that really helps us learn in my view. I think in the field of education we need to do more of this. My partner is a clinical social worker. She sees clients every day and after seeing them she write case notes into her files. These case notes are personal notes of hers as to issues surrounding the client's therapy. Invariably she is also chronicalling the strategies and approaches she is undertaking in the treatment of her clients. During this documentation process it gives her the opportunity to reflect upon her chosen approach, to look back at previous entries in the file, and to (re)consider if the chosen strategy is demonstrably effective or needs to be modified in some way. The aspect of reflection upon previous notes is the key here. So I use this blog to chronicle my activities as an Instructional Designer and Professor, and I often look back upon it for ideas, and also to get a sense of where I have been. I've been keeping this blog for almost a year and half and hopefully its value to my practice of reflection will increase as time passes.

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Educational Technology Talk Show

Want to hear some interesting banter on Educational Technology? EdTechTalk is a blog that hosts a series of archived MP3 files of interesting EdTech discussions. You can even participate live in future events! Very cool! I enjoyed listening to a couple of these discussions in the background while I'm doing something else on the computer.

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Incorrect information in the field!

Some of you might already know about the existence of some incorrect information in the field of education, educational technology and instructional design.

Have you ever seen a statement similar to "Students remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, 50% of what they hear and see, 70% of what the say and write and 90% of what they do"? It is most commonly associated with Dale's Cone of Experience (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4, Example 5, Example 6, Example 7, Example 8, Example 9 and Example 10) but did you know it's a completely unfounded statement? Dale's Cone of Experience is legitimate but the associated statement with percentages is not the result of any study published in any refereed journal in the field. So it's essentially bogus!

This article from the Work Learning Research group does a great job at summarizing this particular tidbit of incorrect information. It's a real lesson learned for educators like us; go to the primary sources and make sure what you're quoting is in fact true!

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Technological Changes in E-Education in the Last Two Years

From an E-Education perspective, the last two years have yielded significant technological change on three major fronts: hardware, software and network connectivity. Distance educators and administrators should take note of these changes and trends when planning new programme and course development activities in order to continue to compete successfully in this fast-changing field.

First, on the hardware front the most important technological changes relating to e-education have been the proliferations of both Flash memory drives and Apple iPods. Large capacity Flash memory drives have now become very inexpensive and most college students find themselves using this hardware to transport files easily from on location to another; thereby increasing the portability of their work (Lightbody, 2005). A high degree of portability and the ability to access their distance education anywhere at anytime have now become the expectations of the distance learner. Like Flash memory drives, Apple iPods are now becoming more and more popular. An educational spin-off of the iPod is the concept of podcasting. Where anyone can record themselves using audio files and publish their sound files to the Internet for people to download and play either on their iPod or on there computer. From a distance education perspective, podcasting allows for instructors and students to share audio, including lectures, much easier than in the past (Read, 2005). Also, some visionaries are now regularly publishing podcasts as a way to share, explore and build knowledge in the field of e-learning (For an example, see Susan Smith-Nash’s e-Learning Queen blog).

Second, on the software front the most important technological changes relating to e-education have been the proliferation of web-logs (a.k.a. blogs) as well as the rise of free beta versions of new Google services. Weblogs have exploded in popularity in the last two years. The Internet now contains thousands of blogs and a significant amount of them belong to the education category or have educational applications. They have been used in an educational setting to provide a way of sharing student work, of chronicling experiences, of journaling thoughts and feelings, and of disseminating knowledge (Dyrli, 2005; Krause, 2005; Richardson, 2005). Educators are also using blogs to communicate and share with their colleagues. So called Edubloggers form an active collection of writers on the Internet and share their practical knowledge of technology in education. In the last two years, Google has begun to transform itself into a formidable service provider that will benefit e-education initiatives. With the creation of free beta versions of its Google Scholar portal (a service which allows users to search some peer-reviewed material; I've writen about it before here), Google Booksearch portal (a service which allows users to search full text of public domain books) and most recently its Google Base service (a service which allows users to add any kind of content to the Google database), it has become increasingly useful to e-educators and students alike (Young, 2005). From a distance students can now use these Google resources to supplement their institutions library services and they can also publish new content to Google for their classmates to use.

Third, as wireless technology becomes faster and cheaper most laptop manufacturers are now including wireless cards in the standard configuration of their products and students are taking advantage of this technology to learn (Carlson, 2005; Gossey, 2005). The result is that more distance education students have laptops which they can connect to wireless networks to increase portability of their work space. Students can now connect their laptop to the Internet at various points throughout their homes as well as other semi-public places such as some workplaces, libraries and even laundromats! The increased portability will facilitate Internet access for students and will continue to help them learn anywhere at any time.

The ramification of these advances in the last two years is important to consider. As hardware, software and network technologies continue to bring new levels of portability, functionality and resource access to students at a distance, the popularity of web-enabled distance education programmes will continue to grow. Designers who design their courses to leverage new tools, services and Internet functionalities in order to better connect students with resources and with each other at a distance will be the e-education leaders. This interconnectedness is the value in distance education today; student-to-student interaction, information accessibility and content sharing are now the expectation of students at a distance. Forward thinking educators will continue to provide students with new e-education models that take advantage of the positive aspects in the fast-changing technological landscape in order to maintain and grow their market share. A century old quotation from Will Rogers still remains pertinent today: “Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.”

Do you think there have been other major changes in E-Education technology in the last two years that I've missed? If so, please leave a comment with your ideas.

References

Carlson, S. (2005). Colleges Increase Use of Technology in Teaching, Survey Finds. Chronicle of Higher Education, 52(9), 42-42.

Dyrli, O.E. (2005). School blogs. District Administration, 41(10), 69-69.

Gossey, D. (2005). Wireless for All of Us. Edutech Report, 21(10), 4-5.

Krause, S.D. (2005). Blogs as a tool for teaching. Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(42), 33-35.

Lightbody, K. (2005). USB flash drives: Easy data transfer in education. Retrieved 02 December 2, 2005, from http://members.ozemail.com.au/~leemshs/flash.htm

Read, B. (2005). Lectures on the go. Chronicle of Higher Education, 52(10), 39-42.

Richardson, W. (2005). Blog revolution. Technology & Learning, 26(3), 48-48.

Young, J.R. (2005). 100 Colleges Sign Up With Google to Speed Access to Library Resources. Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(37), 30-30.

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Open Courseware is Growing!

Together with colleagues of mine, we recently built a list of Open Courseware sites. I have mentioned some of them on this blog before (i.e. MIT and Sofia). Here's a much longer list. Definitely worth a look.

• MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Open Courseware Project


• China's Open Courseware (most of it in Chinese)


• Japan's Open Courseware


• Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI)


• Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHBSPH)


• Tuft's University


• Utah State University


• Foothill College Sofia Project

If you have any other Open Courseware websites to add to this list, please let me know.

Thank you!

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Effective e-Learning Presentation: NewsU

Probably the most common application of Macromedia Flash is to create banners on websites. These Flash banners have been delighting and annoying us for several years now. We all know there are other effective ways to use Flash animations. I recently came across a lovely little Flash presentation from a training company called NewsU. They create and offer e-learning courses for journalists.

This presentation is really nice because it shows people like us that work in the e-learning community how a little bit of creativity can result in a very effective presentation with a little bit of Flash technology. My guess is that the creation of this presentation was relatively cheap too. The presentation is humorous at time, very creative, fun and compelling in the way that it sells its product. It also outlines several important features of effective e-learning courses (i.e. addressing your target market specifically, having engaging products, using puzzles, games, quizzes, problem-solving activities and giving students feedback, etc.) and it also identifies several common pitfalls of e-learning course (i.e. like avoiding the text-heavy online "page turner" or creating synchronous lectures that simply mimic the classroom environment.)

Turn on your speakers, sequester yourself for five minutes and have listen to this great pitch about e-Learning courses at NewsU.

What do you think are the most effective parts of this Flash presentation?

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4,000+ hits!

The hits on this blog keep-a-rolling at a pretty consistent rate. It took 15 weeks to move from 2,000 to 3,000 hits and 14 weeks to move from 3,000 to 4,000 hits. Will anyone predict if it will take 13 weeks to get to 5,000 hits? (*grin*)

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Simulations and Problem-based Learning in Online Courses

I attended a really great two-day workshop last week in St-Jean, Quebec. It had the theme of defining the roles of the Training and Development Officer and the Educational Services workers within the framework of the Canadian Defence Academy. The topics on the second day were particularly interesting to me, specifically, the topics and workshop on e-Learning Innovation. Three proactive themes were distilled that were thought of as being alternatives to weaknesses in the current instructional design models: rapid prototyping, simulations and the creation of performance supports.

Consider simulations for a moment. When most people think of simulation they think of something rivaling a video game and that’s ok because those are indeed simulations. If you’re an instructional designer and someone comes up to you and says… “why aren’t you using simulations in your online courses?” You might cringe in fear of the work involved as well as the cost involved of designing and developing a detailed and immersive simulation. (That’s my reaction anyway HAHA!) But there are other ways to develop simulations. Problem-based Learning (PBL) comes to mind. It’s a way to emphasize the constructivist approach to learning and to promote higher-order learning in a scenario-based framework (i.e. address learning objectives into the levels 4 through 6 of Bloom’s Taxonomy for cognitive skills.)

A great article was published recently in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education (IRRODL) that presents a case study for using PBL in an online biotechnology course. If you’re interested in using PBL as a type of simulation in your online courses make sure you read this article. It does a great job at outlining the detailed rational needed when designing this activity. It’s not an easy job to create; it’s tougher to create a PBL learning activity than it is to create a multiple choice exam, but you don’t need high-powered graphics, animations, or predictive and interactive software to provide a simulation to your students in this case. All you need is the student’s imagination and a real world problem for them to work on.

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Google Print is off the the races

Google Print has been launched at http://print.google.com. It's a search engine that allows you to view the entirety of public domain books as well as the Table of Contents of copyright protected works. For example, I was able to view the entire text of:

Before and After Socrates
by Francis M Cornford - Philosophy - 1932 - 144 pages

Note that a free Google Account is required in order to view the full-text of public domain books on the Google Print website. The utility of Google Print may be limited at this point due to the fact that only public domain books are available full-text but I wonder if in the future we will see Google negotiating rights to reproduce some of the copyrighted material. Hmmm. Maybe Google will charge a fee for this service to the end user? Hmm. Time will tell. Check it out and let me know what you think.

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