Serendipity35

U of Minnesota Open Textbook Project

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:18:00 -0400

I have been an advocate for open textbooks. I think they are a good way to cut costs and put more textbooks in the hands of our students. But I'll admit that they are not widely used.

There are a number of possible reasons for that. They aren't easy to find, even though there are a number of sites that collect open and free titles. Instructors don't always trust that titles are "as good" as commercial textbooks. It also takes time to review titles for adoption.

The University of Minnesota has started its own online catalog of open books. In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development created the catalog to be reviewed by faculty members. The books are all released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license, and instructors can customize the books to fit their course needs.

Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks. The university will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books, and professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500. (The money comes from donor funds.)

They hope to address faculty concerns about locating texts and having quality control over titles that have been peer-reviewed. They have almost a hundred books in the catalog.

Although it is encouraging that UM is working to get open textbooks used on campus, I find it discouraging that they need to duplicate the efforts of other repositories that are collecting textbooks and reviews on a larger scale.

What do you consider the most important criteria in choosing an open textbook for use in your teaching? Check my list and vote here.

And Now edx

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:16:00 -0400

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made an announcement recently that gave more energy to my feeling about the University 2.0 that is coming. They announced edX, a joint platform for massive online versions of their courses. See http://www.edxonline.org

These massive open online course (MOOCs) projects that I have written about before (Coursera, Udacity etc.) seem very "open" and allow online access to professors and courses that would be unimaginable to many people.

But the two universities are also describing edX as a research project on how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online.

Coursera had said earlier that they want to use their usage data to “understand human learning" too.

Stanford and MIT moved into these online projects in 2011. Other higher ed big players like Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, and the University of California at Berkeley are also planning to have MOOCs with help from Coursera. (Coursera was started by two Stanford engineering professors and has venture capital behind it now.)

Reading About Designing Social Media

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:14:00 -0400

For my graduate students in "Designing Social Media" this summer, I created this list of outside reading in various aspects of using social media. Social media is a topic that is changing so rapidly that using a traditional textbook or even a popular title is almost impossible. Some of these titles are not new and are included because they not only give some historical context to the discussion, but they contain the "theory" of using social networks and media. Having students look at that theory and compare it to the current practices is valuable.

I wish all the readings could be from open textbooks and readings available online for free. I do use many articles available online and I assign some readings from open textbooks such as The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler. Benkler's entire book is available for free download at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/

Students are required to select a book for outside reading.The titles below have been used in previous semesters or were recommended by students and faculty. They cover a wide range of social media and related areas. Hopefully, students choose a book close to their own interest in the field - marketing, visual design, theory etc,

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Lon Safko

Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site - Gavin Bell - covers moving from building a web site/application to building a social application that encourages visitor interaction
The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out - Christopher Barger - views social media success within a large company - Barger was the SM director who built successful programs at both GM and IBM - deals with corporate culture, legal barriers, and the kind of bureaucratic resistance that that are unique to large organizations.

Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business - Amber MacArthur - with many business examples, looks at targeting the right networks, seeding & building a community, enngaging with customers/fans and managing online "friendships"on a budget

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - has more of a software and design focus
Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected, Connect Your Business to Everyone.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li

Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen

The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services

Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown

The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins. This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture.

YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis is his first book that looked at Google's abilities to harness the power of the Internet Age and how businesses—especially media and entertainment industries—can continue to evolve and profit by using Google's strategies.

Jarvis' newest book is perhaps more relevant - Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live looks at privacy and publicness and how our new sense of publicness changes business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all. (He also has a short Kindle Single Gutenberg the Geek about the "original technology entrepreneur and disruptor."

The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More Bodnar & Cohen - SM's specific application to B2B companies and how it can be leveraged to drive leads and revenue.

Do you have a suggestion for titles to be added? Post titles, comments or links in the comments area.

Grading With Flubaroo

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:23:00 -0400

Flubaroo is a Google Apps for Education integrated tool that lets you easily grade assignments and do in-class assessments. Flubaroo is a free tool that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice or fill-in-blank assignments.

It works with Google Docs. It is more than just a grading tool. It also computes average assignment score, average score per question, and flags low-scoring questions. It shows you a grade distribution graph and gives you the option to email each student their grade, and an answer key.

Join us to learn about how this tool works, and what's in store for Flubaroo in the future. Also join to share your experiences using this tool, and your ideas to improve it. For those interested in writing their own similar tools, we'll also spend a little time discussing how to get started writing Google Apps Scripts.

Flubaroo is an edCode.org project.

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This Google+ Hangout video archive was part of the Education On Air conference on May 2, 2012. Watch to learn about how this tool works, and what's in store for Flubaroo in the future.

https://sites.google.com/site/eduonair/conference-sessions/using-google-apps-to-enhance-instruction

STEM Grants For Predominantly Minority Institutions

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:16:00 -0400

The United States Department of Education has awarded grants to "predominantly minority" colleges and universities looking to effect "long-range improvement in science and engineering education."

The grants were awarded through ED's Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program, whose aim is to promote STEM careers among underrepresented populations, including women and ethnic minorities.

Funds are used to improve college and pre-college STEM programs, fund faculty development, provide stipends for participants, support student research, and renovate facilities.

"These grants will help support the expansion of America's scientific and technological capacity to build global competitiveness by increasing minority graduates in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics," said Arne Duncan, U.S. secretary of education.

Additional information about the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program can be found on ED's MSEIP portal.

Tablets Slump, iPhone Drops To Number Two

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:12:00 -0400

Worldwide shipments of tablets increased significantly in the first quarter of 2012, driven by strong sales of Apple's iPad. But owing to a slump in Android tablet sales, overall growth was weaker than expected. Meanwhile, on the smart phone front, Apple dropped to second place as Samsung more than tripled its unit shipments in the quarter to land in the top slot.

iPad Drives Tablet Growth While Android Tablets Slump

Mozilla's Open Badges Project

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:19:00 -0400

I sat in on a webinar today about how Mozilla and others are using badges as a way of recognizing and legitimizing learning and skill development that happens outside of the classroom. (I assume the webinar will be archived at connectedlearning.tv/webinar-archive.)

The concept of issuing badges is usually compared to the scouting merit and skill badges that have been around for a long time, and the badges that come for game achievements.

The main presenter was Erin Knight - Senior Learning Director at Mozilla - who currently spearheads the learning and badge work, overseeing the building of learning pathways for webmaker skills, as well as the development of the Open Badge Infrastructure.

The Mozilla Open Badge infrastructure enables any organization or community to issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners/users can then collect badges from different sources and share them across the web, unlocking new career and learning opportunities.

Here is some of what I culled from the session and the Mozilla site:

There are countless examples of learning occurring through informal channels. The web and other new learning spaces provide exciting new ways to gain skills and experiences—from online courses, learning networks and mentorship to peer learning, volunteering and after-school programs.

While degrees do convey information about people’s skills, they often tend to be abstracted from the actual learning that has occurred. Two people with the same degree may have taken very different learning pathways or developed different skills. Many people without a formal degree possess a vast set of job-relevant skills. Badges help by providing a more complete picture, recognizing a more granular set of skills.

I good real world example of that is resumes. Resumes are documents that people write themselves and granular information on a resume is often difficult to validate. With digital badges, users can click on a given badge to access information about the badge’s issuer, how the badge was earned, and more. In other words, badges can go beyond traditional resumes by providing built-in evidence for validation.

The Mozilla Open Badge site OpenBadges.org (still beta) can get you started on using, creating and issuing badges.

Mozilla started with this project in 2010 and is now at the point of a public beta. On the Mozilla blog they discussed the Open Badges Infrastructure entering public beta which allows badge issuers and developers to have access to the software that will allow them to build badges.

Though I am viewing all this through my academic lenses (and with the idea that school credit will be changing radically in the near future), most of these badge efforts are from online or out-of-school learning situations. For example, the past year they have been used by NASA, Disney-Pixar and 4H.
The public-beta adds new features like an improved badge issuer API and new ways for users to manage their badges.

Mozilla has a "Badge Backpack” so that users can store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites in a single location. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms. There are also documentation and privacy features, including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers. The hope is that they can get from beta to version 1.0 by the end of the year.

If you want to start working with Open Badges right now, check out the developer documentation and source code.

The Mozilla project it totally new to me, but I did learn the basics about Open Badges (and earn my first 2 badges) today.

The webinar was via Connected Learning's Livestream channel. They offer a lot of education webinars using Livestream, Google+ Hangouts etc. Their Twitter hashtag is #connectedlearning.

The Unclear Future of Liberal Arts Colleges

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:09:00 -0400

A frightening idea was on the minds of those at a conference recently at Lafayette College. The conference was called “The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education Around the World.”

Attending were 200+ college administrators, including about 50 college presidents, from many top national liberal arts colleges. The idea that was worrying them was that elite liberal arts colleges might have to make significant changes in the next few years if they are to remain relevant (or present) in the current educational market.

Not a new idea to me or this blog and it's getting late for colleges to be just thinking about it now and not attempting to do something about it. Unfortunately, they seemed to believe the problems and solutions are economic.

But even among the fairly homogeneous group represented here, there was significant disagreement about how pressing the economic challenges are and the best ways to tackle them. And liberal arts college administrators still seem reluctant to adopt some major ways of cutting costs that other sectors of higher education have adopted.

And the solutions administrators did offer, many of which have high up-front capital costs, such as increased collaboration through technology, might not be options for the many less-wealthy liberal arts colleges (generally not represented here) that are facing some of the most immediate threats.

I would say that the cost of an education and its ratio to the quality of that education is what should be their main concern. Yes, technology is part of a solution. Colleges realize that's the case because they see that "less-elite" institutions are beginning to draw off their students whether or not they have a prestigious name or can even offer a degree.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/11/lafayette-conference-shows-concern-about-liberal-arts-colleges-economic-future

Grad Students Need More Career Guidance

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:36:00 -0400

A colleague who read my post yesterday on the changing perceptions of dissertations sent me a link to this article which she thought was "an interesting extension of your ideas about a University 2.0."

from "Prepping Grad Students for Jobs" April 19, 2012 by Mitch Smith
insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/19/study-grad-students-need-more-career-guidance

American graduate schools -- strong in developing specific skills in talented students -- must do more to inform students about career options and prepare graduates for non-academic workplaces, a new Council of Graduate Schools study suggests.

Among the study’s other findings:
- Some employers are wary of online graduate programs, suggesting the individual nature of those degrees makes students less prepared for collaborative work.
- Just about one-third of graduate students said they had adequate information about careers before enrolling.
- A majority of students cited personal enrichment, supplementing undergraduate work and fulfilling job requirements for a future career as reasons for pursuing graduate studies. (Students were allowed to choose more than one reason.)
- Seventy-three percent of students seek out career advice from graduate faculty.
- Though figures vary by field, around half of new doctoral degree recipients found initial employment outside the academy.

Diss That Dissertation

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:01:00 -0400

The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D. At least that's what I read was said at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers pointed out that those students finishing dissertations now probably started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads and many other technologies existed.

That's what I was reading in the article "Dissing the Dissertation" by Scott Jaschik. I have had my own discussions with colleagues and students (I teach in a graduate program) about the value of dissertations (especially those in the humanities) which almost always sound like a book written a long time ago in an educational galaxy far away. Do these dissertations prepare students to work in this century in any place other than academia?

The discussion at MLA seems to have centered around not only the time required to complete a dissertation but also the topics and format. Is it possible that digital projects and publishing, and "public scholarship" may actually become alternatives? That stone wheel turns very slowly...

The MLA actually issued a report back in 2006 about promotion and tenure practices that had also questioned this monograph (or "proto-book") production process.

It's one thing to diss dissertations but it would be a whole other thing to actually see schools ditch dissertations. Still, the discussions in places like the MLA adds further fuel to the movement towards another kind of University 2.0 that I think institutions will be pushed towards harder by the workplace and students.

Now, Groups for Schools from Facebook - and down the road?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:07:00 -0400

Facebook has unveiled Groups for Schools https://www.facebook.com/about/groups/schools which hopes to further connect students and faculty at colleges and universities.

Groups for Schools allows online communities in Facebook where users can send messages to other members in groups and sub-groups. It also allows you to share files such as lectures, schedules and assignments (up to 25 MB), and create and post events.

They envision Groups being used for classes, dorms, campus clubs etc. The members of groups do not need to be Facebook friends although it will probably drive some holdouts on campus to make the move.

Schools are already using Facebook in this way via fan and "follow" pages but this gives a more controlled platform with additional features. There are customizable privacy settings, including open, which makes the group available to anyone, closed, which allows anyone to see the group and its members, but requires membership to view or post material, and secret, which only allows members to see the group and who's in it.

As you can see in my screenshot from the NJIT group, it is aimed more at students than at faculty (which makes sense) although faculty could use it. (Beware the creepy treehouse...)

You can see from a menu your friends' groups, all groups, your groups, and suggested groups. To access Groups you must have an active .edu e-mail address. To find out if a group has already been created for a school, you can enter your school name on the Groups for Schools page and search. If your college isn't thee yet, you can be alerted when a group is set up.

Groups for Schools was tested at Brown and Vanderbilt universities in December 2011. The Vanderbilt and Brown groups that are the largest are all graduating class groups (Class of 2014 etc.).

Although this is not new ground for Facebook or for colleges, it does show that Facebook is thinking more about getting into education - particularly higher education, which was their original user base.

As Brandon Croke says on the Inigral blog: "While this may be Facebook’s attempt to tame the wild west of runaway university Pages and Groups, it doesn’t look like schools will have any control or authority of their branded communities." Inigral is a company that works with schools on using social networks to increase student engagement and use community building as a path to improved student success.

I think that at some point post-IPO, we will see Facebook move into creating a platform that is much like our current LMSs which will allow courses to be taught using Facebook software. The courses won't be in the Facebook that we know, but will have strong technology ties to that community. If something like that was offered as "free" (probably not as open source) to schools (with advertising, publishers and other ties as the business model) it would be very tempting for schools. I actually expected Google to move into this area a year ago, but it hasn't happened. Then again, Google has been running behind Facebook when it comes to social for awhile now, so...

The Mac Virus

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:11:00 -0400

Some people - probably Windows users - seem to be happy that there is finally an actual Mac virus out there.

It has been 28 years of essentially virus-free surfing for Apple Mac users. Windows users have surfed in fear for those years. Things have been better in Windows land lately. For years, the claim was that the reason the Mac was safer was because there were so few out there that virus builders didn't bother making them to attack Macs. Maybe this is yet another sign that Apple sales are healthy.

The recent Mac attack was from the Flashback Trojan horse. It looks like an Adobe Flash installer, but it changes your Web search results and sends you to the sites that it wants you to go to. I have read that about 600,000 Macs were infected. A Java update and a free removal program makes all well in Mac land. No one is safe.

Apple Sued Over Book Deals

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:07:00 -0400

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued Apple and five big book publishers for price fixing. The story is that back in 2010, Steve Jobs encouraged the six to meet in order to discuss ways they might be able to defeat Amazon’s effective discounting for e-books. Their plan supposedly included agreements to set their prices for e-books higher. The Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have already settled with the government and ended their deals with Apple, but the Penguin Group USA and Macmillan have not settled and claim no wrongdoing.

http://www.chicagotribune.com

Google 101 (and maybe 102)

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:26:00 -0400

I had planned to do a post about using Google search more efficiently and call it Google 101. I collected a bunch of links, but then I thought that it might be better to put it on one of our LibGuides at PCCC.

So, check out http://pccc.libguides.com/google101 which is a collection of tips and links to help you use the features of Google search and its related tools and services better.

I find all my students are using the Google Basic Search all the time and just typing in a few words to begin a search. They don't get much from the services offered, but they are satisfied with the results.

In fact, Google has gotten smart enough to figure out what you're probably trying to find even if you don't do it very well (like guessing at your typos and pre-guessing at what you are probably going to type next).

I am disappointed that Google removed the "advanced search" link on the home page. I'm guessing that it may be because the basic search is a lot more intelligent. When I start typing "incredibly loud" Google suggested incredibly loud and extremely close (for the book & film) which is actually wrong - but clicking that actually took me to the correct results on extremely loud and incredibly close. The search is smart enough to learn the mistakes most people are making when they search.

One quick tip is useful if you want to search a specific website (especially if the site doesn't have its own search feature) you can use Google to search the site. Put site: in a search as a modifier. For example, you could search "social media" site:www.starbucks.com and get information on social media from the Starbucks corporate website.

Most students - and most teachers - don't know how search engines like Google do what they do. A basic description from howstuffworks.com says "A search engine uses software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites. When a spider is building its lists, the process is called Web crawling.The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web."

Google searches are NOT case sensitive - "passaic county" and "Passaic County" will return the same results. A search will return results that include ALL of your search terms - putting "and" between terms is unnecessary, and Google also ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters.

Google uses stemming technology which means that it will sometimes search not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms.

Google searches across all types of content including images, news, books, maps and videos (but not currently Google Scholar results except for JSTOR)

The term "cached" means you can see the contents of the web page when it was last indexed, so that if for some reason the site link doesn't connect you to the current page, you might still find the information you need in the cached version.

One of Google's big innovations was that it uses PageRank™ which ranks the popularity of the page based on how many other pages link to that page and the popularity/authority of those linking pages.

"Sponsored Links" are really ads paid for by businesses in order to be at the top of the results pages when you search. Companies pay Google each time someone clicks on one of these link/ads.

Like Wikipedia (although that's a whole other topic), students are using these tools, so I think we need to educate them on how to use them well.

Holistic College Admissions

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:19:36 -0400

Interesting look at admissions at "elite" colleges

"How They Really Get In" By Scott Jaschik via www.insidehighered.com

Most elite colleges and universities describe their admissions policies as "holistic," suggesting that they look at the totality of an applicant - grades, test scores, essays, recommendations, activities and so forth.
But a new survey of admissions officials at the 75 most competitive colleges and universities (defined as those with the lowest admit rates) finds that there are distinct patterns, typically not known by applicants, that differentiate some holistic colleges from others.

Most colleges focus entirely on academic qualifications first, and then consider other factors. But a minority of institutions focuses first on issues of "fit" between a college's needs and an applicant's needs.
This approach - most common among liberal arts colleges and some of the most competitive private universities - results in a focus on non-academic qualities of applicants, and tends to favor those who are members of minority groups underrepresented on campus and those who can afford to pay all costs of attending.

Reading the Blackboard Tea Leaves

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:42:59 -0400

If you are trying to do some tasseography about the announcement yesterday that Blackboard has acquired acquired Moodlerooms and NetSpot, here are a variety of links that have come to me via email, listservs and tweets.

Everyone should keep in mind that owning those companies is not anything close to owning Moodle. The two companies acquired are leading providers of Moodle (which is free and open sourced) service solutions to the education market. Moodlerooms is in the USA and NetSpot is in Australia and they are both official Moodle Partners. Part of the announcement said that each will continue their current programs to support clients with no changes to their leadership or their support and service models.

Why is Bb moving in this direction? Two reasons culled from posts by the company's CEO & CTO (see below) are "...this shift is the result of the broader perspective that has come over the past few years as we have updated our vision and mission. Rather than focusing just on the LMS market, we're looking at the entire student lifecycle within the education institutions we serve... online learning continues to grow all around the world, applied to increasingly diverse learning challenges every year. As usage deepens, needs not only expand, they also become more specialized. The result for education institutions is the need for increased choice among systems with different strengths and deployment models to best suit their particular situation.”

Blackboard Announces Continued Support for Angel http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases.aspx?releaseid=1676733 – this is a change from the previous “expiration” date of October 2014 for Angel and from Blackboard’s tendency to eventually discontinue other products has acquired.

Senior leaders from Blackboard, Moodlerooms and NetSpot signed a Statement of Principles http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases/Strategy-Update/statement-of-principles.aspx affirming that their work would continue a number of key initiatives currently supported by Moodlerooms and NetSpot, including contributions of software code to the open source community, financial support for the Moodle Trust, and continued support for community gatherings like Moodlemoots.

Blackboard Launches Open Source Services Group blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases.aspx?releaseid=1676740 – “a new effort to support clients using open source education technologies. With the announcement, the company will continue to focus on its flagship Blackboard Learn™ blackboard.com/Platforms/Learn/Overview.aspx platform as well as ANGEL and Edline, while also helping institutions successfully manage open source learning management systems (LMS) including Moodle and Sakai."

Blackboard Appoints Sakai Foundation Board Member Charles Severance to Lead Company’s Sakai Initiatives blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases.aspx?releaseid=1676736 – “a longtime leader and one of the founders of the Sakai community, to a senior role to lead the company’s initiative on the Sakai open source learning management system.” And here is Chuck Severance’s own blog posting dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2012/03/connecting-blackboard-sakai-and-open-source giving a fairly extensive explanation of why he accepted this position and his excitement for the future.

Ray Henderson (CTO and President, Academic Platforms for Blackboard) describes their plans in his blog post: Evolution Unbound: Blackboard Embraces Open Source rayhblog.com/blog/2012/03/evolution-unbound-blackboard-embraces-open-source.html – “…should we expand our offerings to include multiple LMS products, particularly the open source products that are now more widely adopted? Our answer is yes.The long game for Blackboard is to bring the full complement of our solutions across the student lifecycle to more institutions”

Michael Chasen (CEO) and Ray Henderson write An Open Letter to the Education Community blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases/Strategy-Update/Open-Letter.aspx – “The high level change is this: Blackboard is becoming a multiple learning platform company that supports both commercially developed software as well as open source solutions.”

Reactions

Blackboard Acquires Moodlerooms, NetSpot sacbee.com/2012/03/26/4367794/blackboard-acquires-moodlerooms.html (Sacramento Bee article)

Blackboard, MoodleRooms, NetSpot: First Reactions insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/blackboard-moodlerooms-and-netspot-first-reactions (Inside Higher Ed)
Tony Bates’ blog tonybates.ca/2012/03/26/blackboard-adds-on-open-source-service

Blackboard Buys Mooderooms & Embraces Open gettingsmart.com/blog/2012/03/blackboard-buys-moodlerooms-embraces-open “This announcement will make my OER friends nervous, but I think it has the potential to bring new investment and energy to open platforms.

You Can Acquire Open Source Companies, But You Can’t Buy Open Source Community hackeducation.com/2012/03/26/blackboard-moodlerooms-open-washing

Blackboard Inc. Buys Moodlerooms and NetSpot, with Eye Toward Open Source blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2012/03/

Blackboard Acquires Moodlerooms and NetSpot

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:17:00 -0400

Today, March 26, 2012, Blackboard Inc. announced "a major investment in open source" with a news release that it has acquired Moodlerooms and NetSpot, two leading providers of open source online learning solutions to the education industry. Both organizations will "continue to operate independently to support their clients."

Moodlerooms and NetSpot are official Moodle Partners, and each will continue their current programs to support clients with no changes to their leadership or their support and service models.

In addition, each team will also become part of Blackboard’s new Education Open Source Services group, dedicated to supporting the use and development of open source learning technologies globally.

Global Mobile and other Megatrends

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:43:12 -0400

It is hard to predict a trend in educational technology for the next year. But I recently came across a piece attempting to identify the "Most Significant Metatrends for the Next 10 Years."

From this list, I definitely agree that taking 5, 7, 8, 9 & 10 collectively, we have much of my own argument for a new kind of school (School or University 2.0 are often the tags for these ideas).

This top ten of metatrends are from A Communiqué from the Horizon Project Retreat, January 2012, which is a NMC Horizon Project publication under a Creative Commons attribution license.

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.

2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and e-reader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices.

3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network--and already is at its edges. mobiThinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85 percent of new devices can access the mobile Web.

4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.

5. Openness - concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information--is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media.

6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry.

7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments--but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa.

8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount.

9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia--and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.

10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.

The Personal Cloud

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:47:00 -0400

A new report from Gartner,"The New PC Era: The Personal Cloud,"predicts that in the next two years users will store more of their data in the cloud than on their personal computers.

While this means that those users will have greater device flexibility and probably be more productive, schools and businesses will have to rethink their delivery of applications and services.

Gartner identifies five "megatrends" to the personal cloud (as opposed to the services we already use in the cloud for work and school): consumerization, virtualization, app-ification, the self-service cloud, and the mobility shift.

I agree with Gartner's idea that the tendency that past decade has been for new technology to emerge first in the consumer market rather than the enterprise market. Why? Increasing user tech literacy, better mobile devices, the ubiquity of Internet access, social media, and, to a degree, the "democratization" of technology. (Though the shift to smarter and more expensive mobile devices and service plans also means the possibility of more limited access to this technology.)

My own community college campus is just moving to virtualization this academic year. Not everyone on campus is happy with having a "dumber" terminal on their desk that stores things in the cloud. They don't like giving up control, but the advantages are clear if done correctly.
I have spent a lot of time this past year thinking, writing and presenting on the "app-ification" trend in the way applications are being designed, delivered, and consumed by users. Apps have users continually accessing server/cloud-resident applications on their phones, tablets and pads - and increasingly on their more traditional laptops. Unlike the computer in my office that is getting dumber, my smartphone is getting smarter. Add to that better user interfaces, touch and gesture-based controls, speech recognition, location and contextual awareness and my phone IS my computer.

When I travel this week to a conference, my only device will be my iPhone. I will miss the bigger features of my laptopn, but I don't miss bringing it along. I have never been a fan of having to pay for the Net in a hotel that just got hundreds of dollars from me, when I can get it free in a place where I make a $3 coffee purchase. My phone will jump on the free wi-fi or get me what I need through my data plan.

Like many users, my first taste of any personal cloud was using Google Documents. I used it to store my own documents, share them with co-workers and access them at different locations and on different computers. It almost eliminated my use of flashdrives.

More recently, I started using Dropbox which offers free cloud storage and also paid services for greater storage. You can get a free account on Dropbox easily. You can install their small app on a computer and then your Dropbox folder's files are automatically synced and backed up online. If I work on a document or PowerPoint at work, it's there when I get home and open the folder on my home office computer. If I am working on a computer that isn't my own, I can still access all my Dropbox files online at their site. I use that for all my presentations and for "carrying" documents to other locations. You could also use it to backup your photos or videos (though that might require purchasing additional storage). You get at least 2GB free.

The story is that Dropbox was initially written co-founder Drew Houston forgot his USB key on a bus ride. Students with a valid school email address get 500MB for each person they invite to Dropbox, so I recommend using it to my students.

This mobility shift because of the increased use of smartphones and tablets needed the cloud to allow these devices to do tasks that we associate with "computers." Of course, what we think of as a computer or even as technology is also changing.

Are we in the post-PC era? Not yet. But personal computing is certainly changing and it will continue to impact how we work and learn.

Kids, Literacies and Lifelong Computer Skills

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:24:00 -0400

Jakob Nielsen wrote on his site that he believes that schools need to "teach deep, strategic computer insights that can't be learned from reading a manual." He gives this example:

I recently saw a textbook used to teach computers in the third grade. One of the chapters ("The Big Calculator") featured detailed instructions on how to format tables of numbers in Excel. All very good, except that the new Excel version features a complete user interface overhaul, in which the traditional command menus are replaced by a ribbon with a results-oriented UI.

Sadly, I had to tell the proud parents that their daughter's education would be obsolete before she graduated from the third grade.

The problem, of course, is in tying education too tightly to specific software applications. Even if Microsoft hadn't turned Excel inside out this year, they would surely have done so eventually. Updating instructional materials to teach Office 2007 isn't the answer, because there will surely be another UI change before today's third graders enter the workforce in 10 or 15 years -- and even more before they retire in 2065.

It is a tall order for educators. How do you make student truly literate in a skill and not just tech-savvy (a term I hate) in using a product? Teaching literacy is teaching deeper concepts that survive longer than specific applications. I hear parents say that their 6 year old can use their smartphone. Tech savvy kid. But with what real understanding?

What I am concerned with are life-long technology skills. That is more than just "computer skills" because our definition of what a computer is and will be is being changed as you read this post. Is my iPhone the only computer I will need one day? If you say that you will cling to your desktop or laptop computer, you have to consider that companies (including Apple) are already considering dropping those products from their product lines.

Nielsen offers these as general skills that he believes should be taught in elementary schools:

Search Strategies
Information Credibility
Information Overload
Writing for Online Readers
Computerized Presentation Skills
Workspace Ergonomics
Debugging
User Testing and other Basic Usability Guidelines

If those sound outrageous for elementary school students, read Nielsen's post for more details. For example, when he says "Workspace Ergonomics" he means that kids need to be aware of the RSIs (repetitive
strain injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome and "text-message thumb") that are hurting adults now, and teach young people about proper usage (frequent breaks, monitor placement, lighting etc.) and head off the headaches, backaches and RSI that will come from an entire life of tech use. Those kids will be the user interface designers of the future anyway, so start early!

But seriously, he is also suggesting that living in an interactive environment means that usability heuristics like "recognition vs. recall" or "consistency" will be concepts that an educated person will need.

Finally, Nielsen referenced a book that I checked out. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane. The book looks at how people at work use tech and also at how researchers in cognitive science, computer science, and economics study how computers are enhancing productivity (as they also eliminate jobs).

The authors see a growing division between those who can and cannot earn a good living in the computerized economy, and see the challenge for educators to teach the new skills that will survive a changing technologized workplace. Three of those skills are ones that no educator should have a problem with including in a curriculum. The three are problem solving, understanding the relation between concepts, and interpersonal communication.

Are You Making Audio Visual?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:10:00 -0400

Help!

This is query to all of you reading this blog. Are any of you dealing with anything like this at your school?

We have a professor using video files in his online Biology class (mp4 files). He has a student who has received an accommodation from our disabilities services to have text provided for any audio content in his online classes. Apparently, just having a printed audio transcript is not enough. He needs to provide synchronized text as with closed captioning.

The prof is locked into using these videos as an essential part of the class. We are looking for software which takes pre-recorded audio (in a video file) recognizes speech and transcribes it to text automatically and embeds it into a audio/video file in the same or another format. It’s not just transcription, but it would need to combine voice recognition together with captioning/subtitling features.

We have looked at the usual speech to text software (such as Dragon Dictate) and although that can be tricked into transcribing pre-recorded audio rather than live speech, it doesn't embed the transcriptions into the video at the correct frame locations.

Third party transcription/captioning services (such as tech-synergy.com ) are cost-prohibitive.

Suggestions from other technologists have included using Articulate which provides a transcript but it works through PowerPoint. A colleague at another college suggested Cogi which they said they use for both video and audio, although the website only says audio.

Any suggestions? We can't be the only ones dealing with providing accessible files in this way.

Faculty Buy-in to Using Technology

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:53:00 -0400

I am doing a presentation today on measuring faculty buy-in to instructional iechnology at the NJEDge Best Practices Faculty Showcase. It covers the assessments that we have done for the 5-year grant that I have been directing at Passaic County Community College. In October 2007, PCCC was awarded a $2.5 million grant through the Department of Education’s Strengthening Hispanic Serving Institutions Program (Title V) aimed at increasing achievement and program completion rates of Hispanic and other students by integrating critical thinking, information literacy and technology into college-level writing.

In our annual review, the Dept. of Education asks us: “What were any unintended consequences (positive & negative) of the program?” It is an interesting question to ask about any initiative or course we teach, and it became the idea for my presentation.

Some people question the idea of phrases like “faculty resistance,” or a “lack of faculty buy-in.” One article I read claims that they are "empty and lead nowhere; they are phatic, having a social purpose (bonding among technology advocates) but they contain no useful information." That's not my own feeling, because I do find there are reasons for and against faculty buying into using any piece of or approach to technology.

I have found a number of articles that list ways to get faculty to accept technology. Typical advice includes: 1) Start with champions - a few faculty who are willing to use the tech and who will then serve as models. 2) Don’t “require” the technology - a good approach, unless you're working on a project that requires the technology (like introducing a new LMS) 3) Make the tech the reward - typical of a "carrot and stick" approach. Use iPads in your class, get an iPad. If you want the new LMS, go through the training. 4) Use multi-faceted training - 1:1, group, peer-to-peer, self-paced, online, face to face etc.).

Though in our grant initiative we have touched on all of those, using multi-faceted training is the one that we have focused on.

Here are some of our lessons learned that I'll address in today's session.

If at all possible, have faculty involved in the planning stages of your project. You shouldn't expect buy-in to something that was decided for you rather than by you.

On the plus side, we found buy-in for some technologies. Faculty liked using LibGuides to create websites to supplement their courses. The tool allowed them to do something that is not easy otherwise at the college - create "official" webpages and have collaborators (other faculty, librarians, staff) contribute. The technology filled an already perceived need. We intended those LibGuides to be created for the 25 courses we were focused on, but over 200 guides have been created for a varirty of purposes well beyond the scope of the grant.

Faculty did not see a need for e-portfolios that were a part of the initiative. We saw a need for them as a tool to assess student writing. We saw them as a tool that could help students reflect on their writing and monitor their own improvement. But, unfortunately, OUR needs or the possible positive aspects for students was not enough to get faculty to use the tool. Not that the effort was a total failure. 70% of the students in our initiative cohort did use the portfolios. But that average comes from classes where there was 100% use and classes where there was 0% use - and that zero percent was in classes where the instructor simply did not even try to use the portfolio or made it a total option to do so.

Oddly enough, we did have buy-in from faculty on the overall writing goals. 80% of faculty responded that they were using elements of the initiative in course sections that did not require using them. That is buy-in.

We were disappointed that faculty resisted using technology in general. Some faculty commented that they saw the tech as getting in the way of the writing. Some of that perception was also seen on the student side. We use an online software package to allow students to make appointments in the writing center at any time, but students often preferred to come in person to make appointments.

One aspect that is decidedly low-tech that was widely accepted was creating reusable learning objects (RLO) like templates and rubrics and making them available in an online repository. Need + Ease (of use).

We also made a push for faculty to create their own streaming video (using ECHO360). Creating media had limited buy-in, probably because of the steeper learning curve and time commitment. And we also encouraged using commercial streaming services like Intelecom and FMG which we purchased rights to use. Those services had almost no use at all, but free services like YouTube and TED had wider acceptance.

As far as training, going 1:1 with a faculty member was definitely the best method. Unfortunately, in many cases that is just not feasible.

What is "buy-in" anyway? In management and decision making, buy-in (as a verb or noun) signifies the commitment of interested or affected parties to a decision (often called stakeholders) to buy in to the decision, that is, to agree to give it support, often by having been involved in its formulation. As an investment, would you be willing to put your own money into a venture?

My concluding Big Ideas that I take away from our experiences are:
- Just because you build it, doesn't mean they will come and play on your "field of dreams."
- You have to be willing to let things go when they don't work.
- Faculty will use a new technology (or pedagogy) when they see how it will help THEM - not just because it will help students.
- Be careful about offering solutions to problems that are not seen as problems by faculty. ("I'm fine with the old version of the software. Why do I have to upgrade?")
- Cultivate relationships with faculty - especially 1:1.
- And, whether or not you are on a grant, plan early on how you will sustain and institutionalize your initiative after the funding and the initial energy starts to fade.

iTunes U for K12

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:31:00 -0400

One of Apple's announcements earlier this year that did not get a lot of attention was that K12 Institutions can now sign up to deliver content in iTunes U. Most of the attention in January went to the news that textbooks were coming to iBooks and that author software to create your own books would be supported, along with a dedicated iTunes U app, which "bundles" courses in a manageable, multimedia package.

The K12 news could be more of a motivator for change than the textbooks in the K12 space. I can see some teachers creating textbooks, but creating podcasts and support materials for iTunes U will be much easier. In fact, many educators may already have some of those materials created and ready to upload.

Of course, K12 is very different than higher ed - especially when it comes to issues like permissions for using students and student work and the probable "review process" that will be required by a school district.

To get started with iTunes U, K12 school districts, universities, and colleges in 26 countries can start at eduapp.apple.com

Slideshare 100K

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:20:00 -0400

A nice automatically-generated email today from SlideShare:

Hi ronko4,
Congrats! Your documents on SlideShare have had 100,000 views.
Wow! You must be doing something right. Only an exceptionally few reach this milestone.

100,000 views is a pretty nice milestone. If you have never used SlideShare as a viewer or as a contributor, you should check it out. It allows you to upload your own presentations so that: others can view them, favorite them, follow your work, download the presentation (as .pdf, .ppt or .key IF you want to allow that sharing). You can also follow, view and save presentations by others - and there are many. SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.

Some things that you can do on SlideShare:
Upload presentations publicly or privately
Download presentations on any topic and reuse or remix
Embed on blogs, websites, company intranets
Share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
Zipcast: free, no download, 1 click web meetings
Leadshare: generate business leads with your presentations, documents, pdfs, videos
Slidecast: sync mp3 audio with slides to create a webinar
Embed YouTube videos inside SlideShare presentations
Use SlideShare PRO for premium features like branded channels, analytics, ad free pages etc.

SlideShare 101

View more presentations from Amit Ranjan

This presentation on "LibGuides and Evolving Learning Spaces" that I posted in November 2008 has had 3,130 views, which is nice.

LibGuides and Evolving Learning Spaces

"Learning spaces continue to evolve as web tools further erase the physical walls of classrooms, libraries and other educational settings.This presentation examines the use of LibGuides, a web 2.0 content management and information sharing system from Springshare designed specifically for libraries but being used at Passaic County Community College as a collaborative tool for courses. This hosted service offers opportunities to create and share reusable content, tagging, widgets, embedded video, RSS, and easy integration with other tools like Delicious and Facebook.

But this presentation on "Moodle: a free learning management system" from the year before has had 39,782 views! It was a presentation I did on NJIT’s pilot program using Moodle as a learning management system, and examining the open source/free aspect of Moodle and the support needed to implement it on a campus.

Now, that is sharing.

Are You Ready for MOOCs?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:56:00 -0500

Are you ready for MOOCs? A MOOC is a massive open online course. That's a course where the participants and materials are distributed across the web. To make this work, the course also has to be "open" and have large numbers of participants.

How large? Thousands. Yes, you thought that 101 course you took as a freshman that had 300 kids in a lecture hall was large and impersonal - or perhaps you liked the anonymity that came from large numbers. A MOOC connects "distributed" instructors and learners across a common topic or field

This is a recent form of online course development and many of the standard formats and resources of online courses - for example, the Learning Management System (LMS) - don't really work.

Google artificial-intelligence guru Sebastian Thrun was in the news earlier this year because he left Stanford University to start a company based on the A.I. course he made freely available last fall. With that course, tens of thousands of students were taking it on the web. Now, two of his old Stanford colleagues who were also trying out MOOCs have decided to bring their own free online courses into a for-profit venture.

A lot the attention comes from the fact that these are "elite" schools experimenting with this format. The company they have started is Coursera www.coursera.org which says it wants to make "the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it."

MOOCs are founded on the theory of connectivism and an open pedagogy based on networked learning. At the start, these courses were typically free of fees to participate. This new venture takes it in a commercial direction. Those fees may be a kind of tuition if the participant wants some certification or accreditation after successful completion. Of course, the design of these courses is often without specific requirements (as in papers or tests or materials that would need to be graded) although they usually have the familiar weekly topics to focus discussion.

In some ways, they remind me of early (and not so great) online courses with minimal structure, weekly presentations/lectures, discussion questions, and suggested activities and other resources. The materials in these new MOOCs may in fact be very high quality. But pedagogically, much of the course motion is expected to come from the participants and so the course allows curriculum and structure to emerge from the exchange between participants. Discussions and participants reflecting on the concepts amongst themselves and also sharing resources using any number of social media tools are seen as part of the learning process in MOOCs.

By leaving their elite university, are these professors and the students who take these courses further pushing the idea of a University 2.0.? Is the degree from the elite university becoming less valued?

Right now, Coursera has eight courses, centering on computer science with some math, economics and linguistics. (5 taught by Stanford profs, 2 by profs at the UC-Berkeley and 1 by a University of Michigan professor) These are all listed as free now and none give you any type of credit from any source. Learn for the sake of learning. What a concept.

coursera.org/modelthinking's description starts out by saying: "We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it? Models. Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don't. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one."

The UC-Berkley course is Software as a Service coursera.org/saas/ and one from Stanford is on Game Theory coursera.org/gametheory/.

I'm not much interested in Coursera's business model, and more interested in the impact this may have later on online learning, pedagogy and the changing university. In fact, I was torn about what category on this blog this post should be tagged as - since it falls into my Open Everything, Pedagogy, eLearning, Trends, Social Web - almost any category might come into play.

Game changer? Maybe. With more than 335,000 people already registered for the five Stanford-provided courses in the Coursera catalog, who knows what may come of this.