CogBlogged Tagged ‘ed tech’

Actually, we are not sure if the ePortfolio had anything to do with it, but one of the members of the student panel discussions at our February Dialogue Day with Helen Barrett, Nestor Martinez got some good news. According to a post from his teacher, Dale Doubleday: On a different note, those of you that attended the Dialog Day with Dr. Helen Barrett may remember one of the student panelists, Nestor Martinez. He is the art student that has been publishing his graphic design and painting work on his ePortfolio. His reflection on his work made him recently decide to continue to study, but in the area of painting, after he completed his AA degree in Computer Graphic Desing next month. The Phoenix College Art Department is proud to announce that Nestor received the Eric Fischl Merit Scholarship this past week. Eric Fischl came to Phoenix on Friday to personally [...]

This week we are fortunate to have as a Scott Leslie as a “virtual guest: for our Ocotillo Learning Objects Groups discussions: http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/bb/viewforum.php?f=20 Our internal participation is so far…. well…. light… so we are hoping some other voices in the mix might make things move along. Our discussion boards ar eopen for anyone to read, and to post you simply need to request an account. Jump in! Scott’s feeling lonely inside the boards.

Last Friday we had an eager audience for Brian Lamb’s visit for our Dialogue Day on Learning Objects, Wikis, And Other Curious Things. I’d say this blog summary is delayed as some people really despise things posted on April 1, but I have some other excuses. First of all, you can find Brian’s presentation materials on our Ocotillo Learning Objects wiki, which is a Wiki-RO (Ready Only)– meaning that the wiki requires an pass key for editing (thanks to spammers). On the day of Brian’s visit, we temporarily opened it up wide. What worked well was starting off right away with a discussion and hands on wiki activity, where Brian posed a few questions related to “You may already be a learning objects user…”. He asked participants to compose their responses in their own on the spot created wiki page using the barest of simple instructions. It actually took very [...]

Some might squint at my ethics, but by an interesting sequence of events, this Friday Brian Lamb is coming to Maricopa for a Dialogue Day on Learning objects, Wikis, and Other Curious Things. Brian and I have done a number of great collaborations since we both started chatting at one of those stale lecture format conferences, and have done some (I think) great work since then. So I was rather agreeable when Lisa Young, co-chair of our Ocotillo Learning Objects Action Group, e-mailed me a few months back and said: I’ve been reading a lot of great articles and blog posts by this guy at University of British Columbia and I think we would make an excellent speaker. Do you think we can bring him to Maricopa? Sure, no problem! So while Brian writes Far more disjointed than usual. It’s yet another cry for help…, we’re lining up an audience [...]

I just noted that podcasts are screaming up the meme charts, and a day later some exciting news. Audree, who programs our eportfolio system available at Maricopa and her Chandler-Gilbert Community College has announced the upcoming availability of streaming media being built into the system (see latest ePortfolio enhancements, nicely published in an eport): The (opensource) Darwin Streaming Server will be installed on all machines along with a set of opensource utilities called mpeg4ip. The Quicktime client will be used exclusively (unfortunately, proprietary features preclude interoperability between streaming media servers and clients at this time). Quicktime is a standard player which is very easy to install. When an ePortfolio user adds a Collection item or Document with an extension of mov,mp3,aac,mp4v,mp4,avi,mpg,mpeg, they will immediately be taken to a “Streaming ePort Page”. This is similar to what happens when ePort users upload .html files  - they are immediately taken to an ‘Upload Image/Reference’ eport page. [...]

Just wrapping up from today’s event “ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty” with our excellent guest Helen Barrett, and it was a rousing success. Wish I could have been blogging it all, but other duties called. Helen gave an outstanding overview of the eportfolio landscape, and hammering the not so subltu or semantic differences between assessment for learning versus assessment of learning, and where eportfolios sit. One of the two major highlights, beyond Helen’s expertise and storytelling weaving, was our panel discussion with 5 Maricopa students eportfolio experiences to share. Rather than summarizing, I am noting that by early next week, I will have the 50+ minute audio available as an mp3 cast (it is processing now in Audcacity). Okay, that was too easy– here is a 12Mb audio mp3 stream of the panel: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/eport05/student_panel.mp3 I also have lots of pictures, and the progress [...]

Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) intends to do for the community college level what MIT’s Open Courseware offers for upper division courses- free, open content courses you can use in whole or part. Free with Creative Commons licensing. The first 8 courses are available from their gallery: The pilot grant open content initiative, Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets), was initiated in March of 2004 under the leadership of Vivian ‘Vivie’ Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning at Foothill College. “Open” content refers to material that is freely available for use by faculty, students, and self-learners. The Sofia finalists include the following content contributed by faculty from five California Community Colleges: Creative Typography, by Carolyn Brown, Foothill College; Introduction to Java Programming, Steven Gilbert, Orange Coast College; Elementary Statistics, by Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, De Anza College; Physical Geography, by Allison Lenkeit, Foothill College; Musicianship, by Don [...]

This Friday, the self-proclaimed “Grandmother of Electronic Portfolios”, Helen Barrett is coming to town as our guest for our event “ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty”, where we are expecting an audience of 90+ faculty and staff. The day’s agenda is split-starting with a morning focus on student ePortfolios, with Helen presenting on her recent work connecting digital storytelling and eports, but the highlight (sorry Helen) hopefully will be a student panel we are assembling with 5 Maricopa students who are now or recently have been building ePortfolios. We are planning on capturing the audio of this discussion to be able to post online. Over lunch we are planning on setting up computer stations with a collection of Maricopa ePortfolios available for viewing, as well as having the student panel members and other faculty present be on hand to share their experiences. The afternoon [...]

I’ve done a number of workshops demo-ing how to search various learning object “repositories” and invariably deal with the question, “Why don’t we just do a Google search?”. Strangely, having built one sort of similar system myself, I am asking the same question. Stephen Downes today shared the announcement of the Commonwealth of Learning’s Learning Object Repository being released, “An online database of learning content that provides software to Commonweath countries free of charge” and the software was being made available as well.. sounds interesting enough to click around. Hitting the technical documentation, you get alphabet soup explanations: The COL Learning Object Repository (or in short COL LOR) integrates eRIB and pakXchange such that the local repository of eRIB is disabled and replaced with pakXchange, and pakXchange is modified to act as an EduSource node for the purpose of searching. Easy for you to say… what the heck is all [...]

CDB readers may know of the struggles written here to solicit Maricopa people to share their instructional materials and teaching ideas in our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) which is at almost 1100 items. Our efforts have included bribery and competition, but have yet to embrace physical threats. If I had a buck for every time someone told me “I am going to take some time next month to get you some MLX items” I’d be retired on my own private island. Out of those 1100, probably 200 are there as direct result of online reports to other electronic systems, maybe 60 are things we have entered in other people’s names so we could populate web sites with content (see how the winners of the Innovation of the Year program are pumped from the MLX to its own site). The same goes for an ePortfolio platform, developed at one of our [...]