My editor was pressuring me. I had stalled on my next technology article for the Fall 2004 issue of our publication, the mcli Forum. I had waited too long to do interviews with some faculty (there are some coo, things some folks are doing with teaching GPS… maybe in the Spring…) What would I do? […]
We’ve got some regular visitors to some of our Ocotillo wikis, too bad they are not contributing to our collaborative space, unless you think that inserting about 150 URLs for Asian web sites has something to do with Learning Objects. They hit the same pages, and in fact are wiki URLs mentioned here, so I […]
Some readers may have followed our mention new efforts this year with our ‘Ocotillo’ faculty-driven technology initiatives, now in its 18th year of existence. This year, we ripped the page right out of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined concept and built a system to support our four action groups that will lead activities and projects […]
Attention everyone in IP 221.*.*.* and 60.*.*.* – you have been banned from our Ocotillo wikis. Sorry if you are accidently in that group, but place the blame on 221.198.73.159, 60.25.119.199, 221.196.57.131 and who has been repeatedly inserting into our wikis a mangle of URLs to strange Asian URLs, and a handful of other IPs […]
Last night, my friend and colleague Tom Foster invited be as a “guest expert” (hah!) for a class he is teaching at Arizona State University, “Social and Ethical Issues in Educational Media”. The students were all K-12 teachers, librarians, and media specialists, and they had amazing, heroic energy for a group who had worked all day with kids, then put up with technology stuff from 5-9 PM.
The class had already reviewed issues in Copyright and Fair Use, and Tom asked be to take the turn from the messages of what they cannot do in terms of using media found on the web, to one of, what they can do.
So I took a cue from Brian Lamb, and set up the who workshop in a wiki, Finding (and Using!) Good Free Stuff.
I have been a fan of Brian’s approach at UBC of making the wki his presentation outline and activity focus as well. First of all, it is very quick to build. You can easily re-dploy the same content for a different workshop be either editing the titles or copying to a new wiki page. But best of all, you can expose people gently and subtly to the wiki way.
Anyhow, the focus of last night’s session was to introduce the class to the value of using media resource sites marked by Creative Commons licenses, where the re-usage is more clearly defined. We provided a longer laundry list of media resource sites where they might find relevant media items.
Then for an activity, we had them spend time at these sites, locate a media item they can cite as useful in their teaching area, and we had the post a summary to a FoundFreeStuff wiki. I was pleasantly surprises that all 16 of them managed to get one or two wiki items added, despite the freakish things IE was doing to the web pages and the weird things that happen when wiki editing collides (on the spot problem-solving- create a second open wiki page).
Some observations:
Update: Sept 1
Tom sent some copies of the class comments gathered in the course discussion area…
Wow. That’s about all, I can summarize. Wow. The newest EDCAUSE Review (September/October 2004) has not one, but two top notch articles on things near and dear to the CogDog, blogs and wikis. These are so good I am ready to print them, something I almost never do. In Educational Blogging Stephen Downes not only […]
Friday was our first meeting for this upcoming academic with the faculty co-chairs of our Ocotillo Action Groups. Part of this was planning, part of it catch up in the research they did over the summer, but the first bit was me trying to get them up to speed on the blog/wiki/discussion board tools we are using (blogged previously here as the “small pieces”).
We have pairs of faculty leading activities, projects, research, in Learning Objects, Hybrid Course Structures, ePortfolios, end Emerging Learning Technologies.
I’ve had to remind myself numerous times that I am a full time technology person who has been immersed in blogs and such for 2 years, and these are new fish in the pond, and as busy faculty are going to not jump in head first like I do. I’d been sharing information, instructions, etc over the summer, but the traffic had been, ahem, light.
In fact, it was just last week that I was able to sit down with John, the faculty member who is the over all leader for the group, to give him a quick start. John was quickly sold, and he has his own area for blogging his “chair’s eye view”— but he saw the power rather quickly and several time in last week’s meeting he let it be known he had high expectations for much activity on the group blogs.
We are working toward a late September event for our system- a virtual “kickoff”. Rather than setting up a physical meeting where people could learn about the new groups, each group will be posting on their blog their goals and plans for the year. We will be doing some brief video interviews/greetings, which will be made available the week before the “kickoff”- the activities during the kickoff will be mostly in the discussion boards, where people can ask questions and more or less “shop” for the groups they might be interested in participating in this year.
We are trying to not just “talk” hybrid courses, but be more hybrid like in our activities.
The group were all positive abut the potential, especially for the “dashboard” view we have for being able to scan the activity from 4 blogs, 4 wikis, and 4 discussion boards on one screen. From the questions over the summer, they were all struggling with figuring out what should go in a blog versus a wiki versus a discussion board. I tried to explain that there are no rigid rules, and they are going to have to figure out what works by trial and some error.
What follows is from a document I whipped up the morning of the meeting…
Taking some blindfolded tosses into the wiki pond, I am going to see if this stuff really works. It comes up in many circles, discussions of online course development, learning objects, and just today in the digital storytelling workshop: Where can I find sources of free media (images, audio, video)? This is usually in the […]
I believe in wikis…. but they are very strange internet things to wrap your head around. I met today with David, one of the co-chairs of our ePortfolio Ocotillo Action Group and we had an interesting discussion on how to make wikis approachable and appreciated (and used) by people who have never ventured into them. […]
Our NMC 2004 Small Pieces session intended to make a case for creating effective net-based collaboration using a discrete set of free tools, not so tightly controlled. This was fine, fun, and (frilly), but I wanted to describe here how we are trying to implement this for some real work.
We are headed into the 18th year of a faculty-led initiative for instructional technology at Maricopa called “Ocotillo” (see some history and the details on the metaphor). Dealing with technology, this almost organic organization evolves and re-invents itself, and just this past year, we “flipped” over a structure from representing college interests to topical ones (more details than anyone wants).
Anyhow, bottom line, this coming academic year, we will have four “action groups” each led by a pair of faculty, who will research, promote, prod, disseminate, dissect, and hopefully engage people in the areas of:
Being a large, decentralized college system in an ever sprawling metropolis, I am vigorously promoting using more technology to share, communicate, and conduct this work, and get us out of the “F2F meeting/workshop” mode. So while ramping up for our Small Pieces presentation, I was also cobbling together a system of weblogs, wikis, and discussion boards, tied together with RSS, tape, and bailing wire, and hoping we can spring this effectively on our system this year.
In what will become a long rambling post, I will describe how this all works together. Brian has already pointed out that this is actually not loosely joined but rather “tight” (a compliment, I hope). And as an off kilter kind of success, before even sharing the URL, this morning already got a drug product spam (MTBlacklist now engaged)…
