The Internet Has a Long Memory

This is a very interesting account from Scientific American of how a person broke into someone's bank account using only (for the most part) what he found freely available online.  Some of the resources he used were:

• an online resume the victim had posted
• blog postings the victim had made about celebrating her birthday
  
• public DMV records

He lists 7 steps it took him to do it.  I think this is a good reminder that while new web technologies let us connect in all kinds of new ways there is a significant risk to putting so much of our private/personal life into the public arena.  Even that LifeLock guy who had his Social Securoty number pastered on the side of a truck got his identity stolen.

What if someone doesn't know how to properly set up their security settings in Facebook?  What if those old Twitters get looked at by a potential employer?  What if someone finds your resume and old birthday blog postings?

The Internet has created a new social landscape that none of us completely understand.  Some of us go leaping through it like a gazelle.  Some of us go trepidatiously sliding one foot in front of the other wondering where the ice will crack (admittedly me).  However you tread, or however you lead your students through the landscape, remember to look both ways before crossing the street. </soapbox>

Posted by gdkraus ( Aug 27 2008, 01:44:42 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Blackboard NG Intro Video

I'm not sure how long ago this "sneak peek" was posted to Blackboard's website, but take a look at this intro video:
http://www.blackboard.com/projectNG/

Does it remind you of any other intros you've seen?  Okay so they ripped off Apple, but I can't blame them for copying the greatest marketers in the IT world.  I doubt we'll see any Blackboard logos on the backs of Honda Elements and Smart Cars any time soon, but trying to be friendlier looking is a good direction for them in general considering the lack of any real support videos, tutorials or any other materials for the last 2 years.

Some interesting points in the video to highlight. 

1. its got some AJAX magic sprinkled in, which is nice.  Dragging and dropping is always easier than a series of clicks and choices (there's my UX adage for the day). 
   
2. chapter 3 talks about the dashboard - and they mention the Moodle/Sakai tie-ins.  This is compelling for a few reasons I suppose, but to me the most important idea here for NCSU is the idea of a centralized point-of-entry for finding all of your online classes in one place.  Right now a student takes online classes in Blackboard Vista, Moodle, WolfWare, WebAssign, Unity space, etc.
   
3. instructor dashboard is kind of intriguing, what with the student performance monitoring page
4. looking at  it as a whole, and particularly chapter 5, "NG" looks more like "traditional" Blackboard than "Vista" (formerly WebCT Vista).  I see the WebCT View option, and that helps, but it's still clearly more on the traditional side.

Anyway, the video is worth taking a look at for all of you following the LMS saga.



-Charlie

Posted by cdmorris ( Aug 20 2008, 08:11:29 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Course Management Systems: Bad Pedagogical Practice?

There is an interesting article in Educause called "Toolbox or Trap: Course Management Systems and Pedagogy" by Lisa Lane from MiraCosta College.

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/ToolboxorTrapCourseManage/46576

In summary, the argument is that most commercial Course Management Systems (CMS)* hamper the development of sound pedagogical practices in online teaching.  She makes a lot of valid points like:

• They can force an unnatural structure to your course
• Creativity in pedagogical design is sacrificed for efficiency
• Faculty don't know what all the possibilities are with a particular CMS

However, CMSes should not always serve as our scapegoats.  There are a couple of things to keep in mind about CMSes.

• CMSes have significantly lowered the barrier to entry for creating web based resources.  When you deal with having to move an entire university's courses online, as opposed to a single faculty member's course, you have to think of scalability.  The online teaching  adoption rate could not be matched if we were limited to teaching only HTML publishing for creating web content.
• FERPA and accessibility issues are not always adequately addressed in third-party web applications.  Granted some CMSes have a ways to go with accessibility issues as well.
• The problem is not the technology, it is the way it is used.  I work extensively with Blackboard Vista (one of her examples of a bad CMS) and Moodle (one of her examples of a good CMS), and I can make either one of them behave pretty much like the other one.  There is some functionality and usability that is lost on BOTH sides of the equation between the two systems, but at the end of the day I can do most of the same things in both.  (Just for the record I do prefer Moodle, but there is some functionality I miss from Vista.)

I think some of her critique is really that CMSes cannot be everything to everybody.  Part of basic software design is that you cannot include every feature that everyone wants.  If you do the system becomes unusable.  For those who want to be more creative in their pedagogy I would recommend a different solution.

CMSes have tremendously helped progress the development and use of online resources in teaching.  They have also given us an opportunity to discuss new teaching strategies with faculty.  Isn't this called the "teachable moment" and isn't it what we educators yearn for?  By the way, have you ever tried to change anything in academia before?  Patience is a virtue, and baby steps are a necessity.

Greg


*CMSes are also referred to as Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Posted by gdkraus ( Jul 31 2008, 10:39:43 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Blackboard Contract for UNC System and thoughts on Moodle

Recently, Blackboard announced that "The University of North Carolina & North Carolina Community College System Select Blackboard for Statewide e-Learning Platform."

While Blackboard is heralding it as a "system selection", I think it's just spin.  In reality this is really more of a short-term (3 year) economic solution for the UNC system's current users of Blackboard, which includes us and Charlotte and UNC and maybe others.  While the release would imply that all UNC schools would have Blackboard forced upon them, that is not the case.  Really this agreement should be applauded as a collective bargaining agreement that probably saved North Carolina some money.

Some might read this news release from Blackboard though and fret about implications with Moodle or other open source LMS solutions, as NCSU and other UNC schools are in the middle of evaluating these tools as replacements for Blackboard.  The thing is that, at least at NCSU, a potential migration away from Vista would take a minimum of 3 years, which would actually be perfect timing with this recently struck agreement.  But, while I'm on the subject of LMSs, I'll take a moment to talk about Moodle versus Vista. 

While Moodle and open source solutions represent a shift to a better ideological place, moving to Moodle isn't a no-brainer decision.  Moodle represents a great deal of pain if it would be selected.  Migrating faculty to a new system would take a lot of resources, both financial and in man-hours of both training staff and faculty. Also, who really knows what problems Moodle could potentially throw at us down the line if in fact we went with it as a enterprise-level LMS?  The problems could potentially be even worse than what we've seen with WebCT/Bb Vista.  This is probably something that could be researched, but to the community at large, this is a total unknown. If in fact Moodle did have a serious problem, the only difference would be that instead of being able to point at Blackboard as having deficient support, we'd only have ourselves to blame.  And as a last point, the money involved is a moot point, they both (Moodle and Blackboard Vista) would cost about the same amount according to our best estimations.

Now don't misunderstand me, I do like Moodle and I'm very much in favor of piloting it and I am an advocate for open source.  I'm also not saying sticking with Blackboard is a no-brainer either.  I'm just trying to represent an opinion/argument that doesn't get a lot of air time.  I think we often over-inflate Moodle or paint too rosy a picture, what we need is an as-objective-as-possible comparison of the two systems and an equally objective decision to move forward.

Posted by cdmorris ( Jul 23 2008, 03:52:04 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Moodle Moot: Developments in the Quiz Module

Developments in the Quiz Module

Tuesday afternoon

Tim Hunt
Open University

New in 1.9

• New Question Types
• Identify part of an image
• Drag and drop matching
• Drag and drop ordering
• File upload
• Question bank
• have students create questions that teachers can then grade or use later in a test
• better sharing of questions between courses (like the Vista repository)
• Email when a quiz is submitted
• confirmation to students and/or teacher when a quiz is submitted
• Better question import and export
• improved error handling
• plug-in question types included in import/export

Current Developments in 2.0+ (none of these features are guaranteed to appear in 2.0)

• Improved Navigation
• Summary of quiz answers before you submit
• Improved  quiz reports
• New and improved question types
• calculated
• multi-answer
• regular expression
• JUnit (for doing unit testing for software assignments)
• algebra question type
• others
• More intuitive quiz editing interface
• Improve adaptive mode
• better feedback in adaptive mode
• Certainty based marking
• Students say how certain they are they got a particular answer correct, and there score is modified by their level of confidence.
• For example, a student picks a multiple choice answer, then they say how certain they think they are.  If they answer correctly and say they are very certain they got it correct they get 3 points, however, if they get it wrong they loose 6 points.  If they answer it correctly but say they are not certain they got it right, they get 1 point, however, if they are wrong, they get 0 points.
• The basic premise is that it's not important how well you can guess an answer but how confident you are that you know the answer.  (Just think about your surgeon having to take a test like this - a good guesser is not always desirable)

Greg

Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 10 2008, 06:15:32 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Moodle Moot: Keynote from Martin Dougiamas

Keynote from Martin Dougiamas

Tuesday morning

Martin Dougiamas is the creator of Moodle and delivered the keynote address to the conference this morning.  Two of the more interesting things I would like to share are his assessment of how well Moodle is being used pedagogically, and also what is new in version 2.0.

Pedagogy in Moodle

So how are pedagogical practices progressing in Moodle?  Martin doesn't think that it has progressed far enough.  Here is how he lays out the typical progression of how people teach in Moodle:

1. Put up the handouts (Resource, SCORM)
2. Have a passive forum - "OK, go talk now"
3. Using Quizzes and Assignments
4. Use wiki, glossary, database - here you are constructing things with your fellow students
5. Use the Forum seriously and actively - having more directed discussions
6. Combine the activities into sequences - you have to think about the student's learning journey
7. Think deeper about learning activities - i.e. have students create new discussions and respond to others
8. Use the Survey module to study/reflect
9. Use peer-review modules like Workshop - get students to be teachers with everyone grading each others, and the teacher can grade the grading
10. Sharing ideas, active research, self-study

According to Martin most courses stay in the first couple of steps.

Directions for Moodle

1.9

• Consolidation
• attention to detail throughout
• consistency throughout
• simplify the interface
• tidy up the code
• better help documentation
• fix known bugs
• Complete gradebook rewrite
• Outcomes (competencies) as part of grading
• Groupings
• Performance improvements (twice as fast as 1.8)
• Tags
• Notes
• Fancier themes
• Bug fixes

2.0

• Improved internal file handling
• import: support for external repositories (Merlot, Google Docs, Facebook, Flickr, and lots of others, plus you can roll your own)
• export: support for e-portfolios (Mahara, MyStuff)
• Moodle will not be a portfolio system - they will only push out to other systems
• also export to HTML, PDF, XML
• Community hubs - connect to other Moodle servers/repositories
• Conditional activities (think selective release from Vista)
• Progress tracking
• Web services API
• New Modules: Feedback, wiki (new wiki?) and probably others
• Secure feeds (RSS) and flows
• Blog comments, external blog support (grab blog postings with specific tags)
• Messaging improvements (redirect where messages are sent - third party services, popups)
• Improved security/performance
• Improved usability/interface

In Closing

Martin closed with a singe question:

Q. What is the single most powerful technique for online education?

A. getting students to ask questions

Ain't it the truth!

Greg


Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 10 2008, 01:41:37 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

Moodle Moot: Building Courses in Moodle

Building Courses in Moodle

Monday morning

This turned into more of a "here's what's new in 1.9" and lots of very specific questions about more advanced settings.  Here are the highlights...

Groupings

Moodle Docs on Groupings

In Moodle 1.9 onwards, groups may be organised into groupings. Activities and resources may then be assigned to particular groupings.

This is useful if you want to make different activities for different groups.  The traditional groups tool will create spaces for different groups that all contain the same activity.  For example, the groups tool will create separate groups all with the same assignment.  Groupings will let you create different assignments for each grouping.

Grading Discussions

There are new ways to calculate the grade from the ratings for each discussion - addative, average, maximum, minimum, counting.

Gradebook

* You can create custom columns (make your own column)
* Add feedback to the gradebook
* Outcomes reports (need to do some more research on this)
* Create custom calcuated columns
* There's a lot more to look at here, so there will be more to come...

Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 09 2008, 02:08:14 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Blogging from the Moodle Moot

I am attending the Moodle Moot this week in San Francisco, a gathering of people interested in using Moodle.  We are located in downtown SanFrancisco, with a view of the Transamerica building, and mere 3 blocks from where the great Steve will come down from the mountain and reveal the holy handset 2.0. 

I am going to blog about what I learn about Moodle, so stay tuned...


Greg
Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 09 2008, 11:31:14 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Digital Ethnography

I've been looking for a good way to help faculty understand where their students are coming from as they take courses. I think Michael Wesch at Kansas State has found a way. Check out these YouTube videos.

A Vision of Students Today

And...he's found a way to describe how the culture, creation, and transfer of information is changing because of the digital technologies.

The Machine is Us/ing Us
Information R/evolution

Brilliant stuff. Please share.

Kim R.
Posted by kmwilli3 ( Feb 21 2008, 10:15:25 AM EST ) Permalink Comments [1]

New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology

I found the following article from the NYT:
New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology

I can understand the author's sentiments 100%. But, as the last paragraph would suggest, it's up to teachers to hold students accountable, right?  Here's some notable quotes:

"Perhaps there's a nicer way to put it. The baby boomers seem to see technology as information and communication, said Prof. Michael Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State University and the author of "Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age." Their offspring and the emerging generation seem to see the same devices as entertainment and socializing."

"I'm so tired of that excuse, said Professor Bugeja, may he live a long and fruitful life. The idea that subject matter is boring is truly relative. Boring as opposed to what? Buying shoes on eBay? The fact is, we?re not here to entertain. We're here to stimulate the life of the mind."

Posted by cdmorris ( Nov 09 2007, 12:06:13 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Report Documenting Growth in Online Learning

The SLOAN Foundation recently released its fifth report on the growth in online learning - Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning

There's a nice summary page at the link above as well as a full report you can download.

A few highlights:

The 9.7 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.5 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.

Nearly twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2006.

A large majority (69 percent) of academic leaders believe that student demand for online learning is still growing.

Faculty acceptance of online instruction remains a key issue.  Those institutions most engaged in online do not believe it is a concern for their own campus, but do see it as a barrier to more wide-spread adoption of online education.

Higher costs for online development and delivery are seen as barriers among those who are planning online offerings, but not among those who have online offerings.

Posted by klducket ( Nov 05 2007, 06:29:32 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Facebook in instruction?

Should we use Facebook in instruction at NC State? Below are two articles about Facebook and learning environments.

Facing the Facebook. By: Bugeja, Michael J..
Chronicle of Higher Education, v52 n21 pC1-C4 Jan 2006. (EJ756266)

I'll See You on "Facebook": The Effects of Computer-Mediated Teacher Self-Disclosure on Student Motivation, Affective Learning, and Classroom Climate . By: Mazer, Joseph P.; Murphy, Richard E.; Simonds, Cheri J..
Communication Education, v56 n1 p1-17 Jan 2007. (EJ753327)

Shall we discuss?

Kim R.
Posted by kmwilli3 ( Nov 01 2007, 01:45:49 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

Class Website Templates

This will be a short posting, I just wanted to let the NC State community know that there are some new CSS templates that DELTA (Tim Wright) has made.  You can find them here, DELTA Templates.  The new ones are at the bottom of the page and they mirror that of the new NCSU main page.

Here's a thumbnail of the red one:





Posted by cdmorris ( Sep 27 2007, 10:15:28 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Speak your mind about Vista

DELTA has recently announced the dates of two forums that will be held this fall, for members of the NCSU communiy to discuss Blackboard Vista and other Learning Management Systems (LMS). The announcement states: Blackboard recently acknowledged a software... Posted by swatkins ( Sep 06 2007, 09:51:09 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Interactive white board

One of the new tools available in the Libraries' Learning Commons is an interactive white board -- the Polyvision Walk-and-Talk. Use your laptop (or borrow a Libraries laptop) to project files or webpages onto the large, wall-mounted white board screen. Then use your finger or a stylus to annotate and navigate the displayed content on screen. All of your annotated work can be quickly saved as image files (jpeg, png, etc.) to your laptop or flash drive for later reference, too.

The Walk-and-Talk is mounted in the Presentation Practice Room, which seats 14 and can be reserved online and used for group presentation rehearsals and delivery by any NCSU faculty, staff, or student. Stop by the Learning Commons service desk and ask try out this new tool.

Posted by jmwill16 ( Aug 15 2007, 02:21:10 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]