Monday March 09, 2009 DELTA Summer Institute Program Now Accepting Applications
The Teaching and Learning with Technology Summer Institute is a way for faculty to learn about instructional technology tools and techniques that can be used to support teaching and learning at NC State. The 11th Annual Summer Institute will be held May 11-15, 2009 in the D. H. Hill Library. The morning cohort will run from 8:45 a.m. - 1:30 p.m., and the afternoon cohort will run from noon until 5 p.m. (Lunch for both cohorts, which includes invited guest speakers, is from 12 - 1:30 p.m.). Applications for this program are being accepted now through April 3, 2009. Information about this program, as well as an online application, can be found at here. Posted by gdkraus ( Mar 09 2009, 04:43:52 PM EDT ) Permalink
Tuesday December 02, 2008 Blackboard suing US patent office
[Read More] Posted by cdmorris ( Dec 02 2008, 06:00:41 PM EST ) Permalink
Friday October 31, 2008 The Moodle Plugin Project
Check it out:http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3421/blackboard-announces-free-tool-to-interconnect-its-software-with-moodle-an-open-source-competitor
As expected, Blackboard is working on getting Moodle integration tied in to the "NG" project. What's strange to me is that they outsourced this, they have Iowa State doing all of the coding. Does that mean that Bb had to open up their source code for Iowa State? This is something that would have been completely unheard of in the past, Bb and WebCT too, were/are very protective of their code.
To me this information underscores how much Bb is afraid of open source. It's smart of Bb to be on the offensive like this, chances are there are plenty of universities in the same boat as NCSU. When NG is released it'll be sink or swim time for Bb. For a bit of humor, take a look at this site, a bit of comedic commentary through video mashup on the whole situation.
-Charlie
Posted by cdmorris ( Oct 31 2008, 09:10:40 AM EDT ) Permalink
Thursday October 30, 2008 The Chocolate Chip Cookie Rubric
If you want to learn how to make a rubric, just think about how you would judge the quality of a chocolate chip cookie. Let's say that you are the judge at the county fair and you and a group of other judges must find the best chocolate chip cookie in your county. Where would you begin? Likely, one of the first conversations would be centered around the criteria by which you would judge the quality of the cookie. Such criteria might include texture, the number of chocolate chips in each bite (but what constitutes a bite?), the size of the cookie, flavor and so on. Before you can move on to the rating system however, you must be able to define what the texture of the cookie would be like.This common knowingness defines what each judge will use when judging using the criteria. So agreement must be reached on each of the items viewed as the criteria.
Once you have established criteria, you must have a rating system so that each cookie tasted can be rated or graded for each element of the criterion. These ratings must also mean something specific. For example, are you going to have a rating scale that rates the cookies from 1-5 or poor, fair, good, very good and so on. What does a 1 mean? Only after coming to agreement on each of these elements can the judging actually begin to determine whose recipe wins the blue ribbon for the county?s best chocolate chip cookie. See The Advantages of Rubrics and there you can view the chocolate chip cookie rubric http://www.teachervision.fen.com/teaching-methods-and-management/rubrics/4522.html
Similarly, when creating a rubric for an assignment, the instructor must ferret out the most significant elements. What are the criterion by which the assignment will be judged? For example, if the student is writing a paper, it must be determined whether the paper is to be a persuasive argument or a research paper. Research papers address content differently than the way in which it is addressed in a persuasive argument. Is it important to cite references to support opinions? If so, what style is to be used (APA, Chicago, MLA)?
The instructor thinks about the critical elements and documents these for the student. The student then by using the rubric has a clearer idea of what the instructor?s expectations are. The instructor also indicates what the rating scale is. Many times it is most helpful to the student if the instructor identifies when using a scale what a 2 on a scale of 1-5 actually means. For example, here is a rubric that can be used to grade student discussion posts.
Magnuson, C. (2005). "Experiential Learning and the Discussion Board: A Strategy, a Rubric and Management Techniques", Distance Learning (an official publication of the USDLA), V2, No 2, p. 15-20.
Cleo Magnuson
Instructional Designer
NCSU-DELTA
Posted by cgmagnus ( Oct 30 2008, 12:57:20 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Friday October 10, 2008 Creeping into our Vocabulary
Have you noticed lately the way that the Internet has actively added to our vocabulary? We send a mail (email) or we ping each other to obtain something (round trip time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping]. We tag pictures in Facebook [http://www.facebook.com]when we identify ourselves in pictures. Of course, we google [http://www.google.com] when we are searching for information. We can create mash-ups [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)]. We twitter [http://www.twitter.com] to let others know where we are or what we are doing and feeling so they can keep up with us on a timeline. RSS (real simple syndication) has also allowed us to keep in touch with recently created or updated publications. These publications can be the blog of a friend or as formal as a well known news agency. Now with our ?cells? (cell phones) allowing us to access the Internet we really don?t have to be out of touch. Texting on mobile devices allows us to send a quick to the point message to answer a question or just communicate a thought. We can listen to lectures for a course we are taking by downloading a podcast to our .mp3 player.
With this in mind you may want to take a look at the following article: Fryer, Wesley (2005). "Teaching & Learning with the Read/Write Web" Integrating Technology in the Classroom, Accessed on 10/10/08
http://www.wtvi.com/teks/04_05_articles/read-write-web.html
Cleo Magnuson
Instructional Designer
NCSU-DELTA
BLINK
Malcolm Gladwell. Have you read his work? Blink and his publication called The Tipping Point. So what are the moments when you make those critical decisions..those first couple of seconds? How is one making those judgements? I don't think it is intuition either but I do think that the decision is intuitive. It's "knowingness". Have you had those experiences and then found out that that first response you had actually proved itself to be correct. I have too! I have also experienced the flip side of that too where my first impression was wrong.
I heard Malcolm Gladwell speak at a conference in San Diego in 2006. Did not use even one note and it was spell binding. My first impression was "I want to read those books". My second impression was "I want to practice my delivery so I can use these storytelling techniques". I'm fascinated by storytelling.
Cleo Magnuson
Instructional Designer
NCSU-DELTA
A great LOCATION
Recently I was searching for an application that students could use to store video. I found more than I was looking for-- http://www.kickapps.com/
KickApps is a social and media application site. After signing up for a free URL, the user can upload audio, video and photos, invite friends, post to blogs, and belong to groups.This is a WYSIWYG editor (What-You-See-is-What-You-Get) so after choosing from a short list of templates for a site, the site is available within minutes. There is an RSS feed from the site to further update the user's network of friends. You can also update your site with your favorite RSS feeds so it can be very personalized for the user. If the user has more advanced web design skills, there is also an option to customize the site using .css (cascading style sheets).
The educational uses for this type of tool in the distance education environment are many. For example, the user can create a web page and upload their movies and audio as a way to present their work both for the traditional (face-to-face environment), blended learning or fully online environment. Other students can preview the materials that the student is going to present and they can critique by using the message board or uploading an audio file.
Since we have examined many of the positive attributes of this site, let's see if there are any potential downsides. First of all, after you create your URL, you are immediately available to the public at large and announced in the "Recent Members" community. This does of course suggest that the user may get visitors and comments from those they are not looking to have visit their site but that is part of the web at this point in time.
Cleo Magnuson
Instructional Designer
NCSU-DELTA
Discussion Board: How do you want to be known by others?
The following are some tips faculty can share with students.
- Always post in a scholarly manner when you are responding to a discussion board post for your course. What you write is how you represent yourself to others. How do you want to be known?
- Avoid spelling, mechanical and grammatical errors. First, write your response to the discussion board question in a word processing program such as MS Word and then spell check the document. Finally, copy and paste your answer to the discussion board.
If you are asked to cite references to substantiate your response to the discussion board question, do cite your resources correctly using the preferred citation style identified by your instructor (Chicago, MLA or APA). The NCSU Library has a number of reference sources available: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/searchcollection/reference-tools/style-guides.html as well as a citation builder http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/lobo2/citationbuilder/citationbuilder.php . - Avoid using texting acronyms in your scholarly response to the discussion board. Such acronyms are best used in an informal environment but do not reflect academic writing. Also as a reminder, several of the students in your distance courses may be from other countries and may be unfamiliar with the acronyms you use and this informal approach to writing.
- Be sure to represent your own ideas when you post. The following is a tutorial that will outline copyright infringement, what plagiarism is, and how plagiarism is viewed at NCSU. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dspc/tutorial/plagiarism/index.html
- Follow rules of netiquette when posting to the discussion board. Virginia Shea outlines some of the Core Rules of Netiquette in an excerpt from her book Netiquette: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/corerules.html
Cleo Magnuson
Instructional Designer
NCSU-DELTA
Reducing Email in an Online Course
Instructors receive a lot of email when conducting an online course, however, there are ways to reduce the amount of email you receive. One of the most efficient strategies is to set up a discussion boards that focus on general questions about the course, questions about Blackboard Vista or Moodle (or another course management system being used), or questions related to a particular assignment. The discussion board becomes a place where students can post questions with a particular focus. The instructor may want to include a statement for students that they should not post questions about grades or anything that is private and confidential as the discussion board is open and can be read by everyone in the class.
The instructor will need to monitor the discussion board but in some cases students will respond to each other and answer questions such as where do I find??.
It is also helpful in a fully online course to have a social space where students can introduce themselves to their classmates and develop a learning community. You can creatively name the social discussion board in a way that corresponds to your course. For example, a business course might have a social discussion board called the ?Board Room? or an art history course might name the social discussion board the ?Studio?.
Cleo Magnuson
Instructional Designer
NCSU-DELTA
How do I get students to work together in a fully online course?
When you are interested in having students work collaboratively on a research paper or project there are a number of ways to designate the group in which they will work. The instructor can choose arbitrarily who will work in a certain group as well as set up a group discussion board (and other features) just for that group to access. The instructor will need to be enrolled in all the groups. Some instructors will want to designate who works with whom, however, others may wish to set up a discussion board designated for each group topic and then have students post their name under that particular topic.Each group may benefit from designating specific roles within the group, for example, team leader, scribe, and so on according to the student?s particular strength. One key advantage that students have when working in a group and posting their work to the discussion board as it develops, is that the group can receive feedback from the instructor as they are working on their project rather than receiving feedback in the form of a final grade after the project is finished.
Cleo Magnuson
Instructional Designer
NCSU-DELTA Posted by cgmagnus ( Oct 10 2008, 11:42:13 AM EDT ) Permalink
Wednesday August 27, 2008 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
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 [3]
Wednesday August 20, 2008 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- instructor dashboard is kind of intriguing, what with the student performance monitoring page
- 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 [1]
Thursday July 31, 2008 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
- 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.)
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]
Wednesday July 23, 2008 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]
Tuesday June 10, 2008 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)
Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 10 2008, 06:15:32 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]