Today Stewart is unveiling his new book/web site project Using Wiki in Education, headlined there as “A Wiki-Based Book”. I got a sneak peek a few days ago, and am rather excited to see this work go out. It includes 10 in depth case studies of educators who are using wikis in the classroom:

It contains 10 case studies written by teachers that describe how they’re using the wiki to transform courses and engage today’s students in a range of environments including high school, small college, major research university, online/distance learning and research lab. This is the first book to focus specifically on the wiki in education and be developed and published using a wiki, so it actively demonstrates the tool in action.

On the site, two chapters are free for anyone, and US$19 gets you access to read, download PDF, and help co-edit a last chapter. Each month, another chapter will be released as free.

It’s great content for those interested in learning more about educator beast practices, but to me even more interesting as an experiment in a new publishing mode.

Learn more in Chaoter 1: Four Letter Words: how wiki and edit are making the Internet a better learning tool (available now for free).

This book is intended to help you better understand how a wiki can transform what you do for the better. Through a compilation of case studies you’ll see how different wiki tools have been applied to a variety of situations – from a major research university to a small liberal arts college, from open source to web-hosted and enterprise tools, from a high school technology course to a college freshman writing program. The first of these case studies illustrates how a wiki has been applied to a world-wide educational website to enable a growing community direct access to contribute and edit content. It also tells the story of how I became interested in the wiki.

Go now! http://www.wikiineducation.com/

flickr foto

I know The Little Rose is There
available on flickr

Playing the Second Life memory game at the NMC 2006 Summer Conference

Duriung the late afternoon Corporate Partner’s Showcase at the 2006 Summer Conference, for the NMC booth, we set up a station connected to Second Life (with thanks to Case for the big wide plasma screen).

Participants had a chance to play the in-world Memory game with cash prizes for the best time. Here, Joann is highly focused on finding that orange circle object.

Gardner Campbell, a.k.a. Campnell D. Gardner a.k.a Dr Glu is recognized in a major way by one of our shred über gurus, Jon Udell. In Easing app deployment with an open source sandbox, Udell reflects on his visit for Gardner and Gang’s Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington. Dr. Glu had snagged Udell for a keynote.

In his column, Udell praised Gardner’s strategy of settting up R&D space on an external hosted ISP, so his team could explore and develop new ideas with social software:

It was just as enjoyable to hear about the approach that UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies is taking to the evaluation and acquisition of enterprise software.

If you’re working in a higher-ed IT shop, you’re likely supporting one of several course management systems, Blackboard and WebCT being the two names that come up most often. But you’re also acutely aware of the educational relevance of blogs, wikis, and related applications and services sprouting everywhere. This stuff is mostly open source software. There are vendors who will package it for you or deliver commercial alternatives, but the UMW team wanted to work in a more exploratory and iterative way.

So they hooked up with a hosting service that’s providing them with what they provocatively describe as a sandbox…

Of course you can create your own sandbox, but that means you’ll spend way too much time configuring and deploying. You’d rather invest that time on higher-order tasks: connecting people to the software, learning what works for them, building composites tailored to their unique requirements.

Way to go, Dr. Glu! Can’t explain, aside, you rock.

Anyway, I’ve said on a number of occasions that ePortfolios are a lot like artificial intelligence in that they will be only a year away for the next ten years… The real problem is that, for all the many different definitions of ePortfolios out there, we have a bizillion different sets of application requirements which are not being looked at holistically. We’re trying to solve the wrong problems.

… the box of papers in the basement. You know, the one with all your notebooks, your tests, your essays…maybe your thesis…? … does anybody ever really think of that box as a portfolio? Personally, I think of it as my “stuff.” If I want to put together a portfolio, I’ll go through my stuff and pull out the best stuff. A portfolio is, roughly, a portable folio. Emphasis on portable. My box of stuff isn’t terribly portable, nor would I have any reason to port it around with me except on those rare and exceptionally distasteful times when I’m moving all of my stuff. I need my box of stuff to put together my portfolio, but the box of stuff is not a portfolio in itself.

and further down:

So to support ePortfolio applications of all types, we need two things: A big box for stuff and some smaller…um…folios that are easy to fill with carefully selected subsets of the stuff. In other words, we need to give students a personal file storage system that’s linked to a personal publishing system.

So what might be the big box? Is it the web itself? Is it a (dreaded word) “repository”? Is it a formal content management system? Is it .. “mySpace” (not suggesting, just asking). Michael seems to be asking if we really need to build these large scale eportfolio systems or look more at some simpler services (like a weblog API) that can take content form somewhere, wisk it through a template, and roll on top some comment and access controls. Smells like a weblog app to me.

Let’s keep it simple. An ePortfolio is a lightweight personal publishing system that should sit on top of an LMS’s personal file management system.

Amen, brother Michael.

If anyone has time, like less than 3 minutes, can you say “hello” and perhaps share some ideas for interesting uses of podcast technology beyond “recorded lectures”? Or tell me the methods you are using to do “podcasting on the cheap”

Just send me an Odeo:

I wish I could offer more than thanks (and Cole and Gardner, you are off the hook since you’ve previously responded). Audio will be shared/casted from http://www.odeo.com/channel/69807/view

Thanks.

Thanks.

Phoenix College Biology faculty and Ocotillo Chair John Arle did just that this week as he participated in the Instructional Technology Council e-learning 2006 Conference.

You can find his notes at:
http://eport.maricopa.edu/published/j/ar/jarle/weblog/1/.

Session coverage included among others, “Tailoring Discussions to the Asynchronous Environment”, “Proprietary v. Open Source Course Management Systems”, “Logon or Retire? Getting Senior Faculty On-line“, “Blackboard vs. Moodle: A Comparison of Online Teaching & Learning Tools”, and more.

And it is RSS-ified. And if John had been set up for it, he could have also podcasted coverage, since that feature is built in as well.

Doing this has that double impact of Social Software- it gives Johns a record of his thoughts and notes and makes it part of his teaching portfolio, but open to the public, he shares with others information from this conference.

Then yesterday, I stumbled across the Artichoke blog, where a posts on Mr Ed the talking horse on those Digital Learning Objects and Dear Horse God, about those Digital Learning Objects, the Artichoke takes some nice big bites:

You cannot earjack a conversation between card-carrying members of the MoE digerati “A-list” at the moment without picking up terms like Learning Management Systems and Digital Learning Object.

These terms are tossed like Brassica sprouts into the (e) conversations of the digerati with a facility and confidence that belies the fact that these resources and design environments are contentious, as yet not well defined, and often do not support contemporary understandings of meaningful learning environments…

When I question the digerati it seems that learning management systems are all about managing content for consumption, and digital learning objects all about creating the content for consumption.

…

Perhaps it is in the various representations, and misrepresentations of learning, within these conversations about LMS and DLO’s that underlie the bewilderment, amongst the educators I work with, over what a digital learning object looks like.

Ouch, sharp bark at the establishment, we like it!

I have been holding back, waiting, just waiting, for the Horse God to stamp her hoof for once about Digital Learning Objects. Because it didn’t seem to matter how many times I searched the Kia ora and welcome to Te Pātaka Matihiko Our Digital Storehouse site, I just didn’t get it.

I couldn’t understand why a seemingly retro notion of “knowledge as an object thinking” was being celebrated with such (e) froth and (e) frenzy by our pro constructivism Ministry of Education.

Sweet web serendipity, indeed.

The funny thing is the tangle trail to finding this blog from New Zealand. I was surfing my RSS feeds, and a post by Albert Ip had a quoted comment to his blog containing the artichoke link… so I just took a peek. It’s this kind f serendipity that maybe fluff like Web 2.0 might enable, but does not create. Casual links, curiosity, discovery… those are the gems on the web.

Of course, I am a fan of most things Kiwi ;-)

Here’s a nice little tool, community, and design pattern for creating and sharing how-to learning objects. Basically, it provides a wizard for inputting text step descriptions and illustrative images. Mix in some Flickr-style usability principles and some folksonomic tagging goodness, and you have a nice little instructional confection.

Following a long line of resources for the Do It Your Self Type leading up and through MakeZine, Istructables provides both a collection of information for those interested and a platfom for building illustrated guides on how to build stuff.

What can you learn to make? A bike rack made of PVC pipe, Computer-controlled music-synchronized Flashing Christmas Tree Lights, 3D chocolate printer made from LEGO, Patternmakiing tips for Bras, and my favorite, How to turn an old Mac into a toilet paper holder, or an Apple iWipe (pictured).

Okay, it would be easy to dismiss this stuff as niche activities for nerds, glue gun and soldering island junkies, and people who comb through garbage to find useful parts.

But I agree with Michael, when you look more closely at the environment set up on the site, the flickr like use of photos with notes areas to highlight key features, the use of tags, there is something worth considering past the silly content.

The instructables site, a free web app hanging out there, is a versatile content creation platform. Written in the “about” section, beyond the history, is a glint at a place to record things that are essentially linear in form (steps in building a project) but may be constructed of steps that may be common to other projects:

A key insight behind instructables is that humans are constrained to working in linear time – ie you do things sequentially and are generally not in two places at once. This gives us the overall framework for instructables, a way of documenting the sequence of steps that are undertaken to make any particular thing or do any task. Many of the sub-sequences will be re-useable. Why have everyone document how to drill a hole repetitively? These sorts of things should be seen as share-able sub-routines in the library of how to do things. Add to that the power of a large community filtering sub-routines for best practice and you get an expanding library of human knowledge, craftsmanship, and best practice for making just about anything.

Does that ring of the decades old not very much realized goal of resuable learning objects, but here they are, in the flesh? Maybe it is reusable “doing” objects. I don’t care what you call it- it’s a tool that mere mortal, non technical people can use to create multimedia content.

As Michael suggests:

We’re starting to see more and more of these specialized tools that instantiate particular design patterns to address specific learning needs. What we need to do now is to start codifying them into a pattern language.

So no, not all learning could be encapsulated in this structure, but think of how many things taught would benefit from a clear sequence of illustrated steps, in a shared environment that allows content to be mixed and matched. What could be cast into this form? How to write an argumentative essay? How to differentiate an equation? How to conduct a titration? How to measure strike and dip of a stratigraphic layer? How to…

But the bigger question is- with all these free content constructions tools blossoming like mad weeds, the free hosted wikis, the flickr and wanna-bes, the various feedmixers, the social bookmark collections, the free hosting of rich media at places like Ourmedia, are there hordes of teachers yet beating down a path to use them? I am extremely interested in hearing of educators who are exploiting these Web 2.0 (or whatever decimal place they fall into) tools that maybe were not built explicitly for learning, but have been used to do exactly that.

As many people who have gotten excited when I demo-ed all the things you can do in an app like Flickr (annotating images, building slide shows, holding discussions, group pools, syndicating images, the cool stuff Michael’s colleague Beth harris has done with Art history, things like flicktion or the Memory Maps), there really does not seem to be as much of a rich treasure of educational uses as I thought might bubble up. Or maybe I am just not seeing them (which is entirely possible).

I’ve done more than my share of trying to push these tools for consideration, and I do get some pushback from our teachers who say, “I don’t want my students to have to have remember another log in” or “They cannot handle another interface beyond their Blackboard”, or “my colleagues fear storing our work on an outsider’s site that may disappear.” It really does not hold up against the way not just the Net generation, but the Grandmma Generation, the Boomer Generation, are using technology outside of school.

So I just cannot buy into the notion that learning is “managed” by a single über tool. I think it is much more relevant, much more timely, much more valuable, to exploit a number of environments and tools, because the technology land under our feet is not fixed and stable, but a rapidly shifting tectonic force.

So tell me, where are the cool, compelling pieces of content that educators are spinning out of Web 2.0 sites? Is there life outside of the CMS?

Whew! I need a wipe now.

This is the same MyEport developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College by the brilliant Audree Thurman. It has uncommons features of blogs inside an eport, RSS all over the place, embedding of RSS feed content in pages, automatic streaming media, podcast generation, wiki page types, quizzes and polls, and more.

At Chandler-Gilbert Community College the have actually extended the functionality there to be the editing platform for their college web site, what they call a “webport” so that individuals have the editing control over department and program web pages vis some friendly easy tools.

But I digress.

This semester there has been a steady increase of eport account creation by students, especially a lot of Art students from Phoenix College and Paradise Valley Community College. With some free time, i’d really like to comb through here, as students are posting some fantastic eport artifacts of their work, and posting reflections in the blog pages.

We ran some faculty workshops last year, with some, but not significant uptake. But this morning we announced by email a hands on workshop for late February 2006 – and it filled in three hours, plus I have processed faculty account requests for 4 other people who just must have heard about it.

This is good news that the interest is finally perking up in eportfolios.

Another angle we are working to get people in related to the upcoming NMC Conference on Educational Gaming. We are sponsoring the registration of maybe 10 faculty. Over the last year, we’ve been working in getting participants in these events we sponsor to do more than take the free ticket; we are asking for them to bring back and electronically share information. Last April we asked participants in the NMC Online Conference on Visual Literacy to post session reports on a wiki site– this was marginally successful, but a lot of people had some wiki-loathing.

So for the NMC conference, we are asking each person we are registering to create a Maricopa ePortfolioa ccount, and within there, create a blog page type that they can use to journal their experiences in the online conference. It is kind of a backdoor way of getting people into doing eport activity. See the tidbits and instructions posted just today. We could easily rip and mix the RSS feeds from their eports, and that is likely coming soon.

Maybe next week, I’ll have some time to pull out some interesting eport examples going on in there, but the whole site is wide open to browsing.

SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and maybe even your friends to-be. Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu:

* gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place.
* presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can customize.
* is FREE to use!

So in less than 10 minutes, I had glued together 4 or five pieces of my extended, syndicated self. The beauty of the glue is that it uses info that is publicly syndicated elsewhere. This is very much in line with Scott Wilson’s notion of the Future VLE… and prtty much is a working case that an Electronic Portfolio system may need not be some monstrous, code pile enterprise application, but as simple as an aggregator of artifacts stored elsewhere.

Whether that is far fetched or not, SuperGlu is the living example of what a few of us Canadians and pseudo Canadians have tossed about as Rip. Mix. Learn.

It works. It uses open (simple) content (RSS). It’s free.

I’m into the Glu.