Friday forums at DistEd in Madison 2008

A forum titled The World of Web 2.0 in Distance Education featured Paul Kim (Stanford), Marilyn Lombardi (Duke) and Mike Simonson (Nova Southeastern). Simonson discussed the myriad technologies that make up Web 2.0, particularly those dealing with social networking. He suggesting that it is the responsibility of those involved with institutional distance learning to investigate these new technologies to determine their applicability to the classroom and to teaching. This tied in with an article handout titled Will You Be My Friend (Simonson, 2008).

Kim demonstrated one of the earliest 3D gaming environments that brought back fond memories of Duke Nukem. He had developed a medical office environment for students to navigate, interact with patients, and respond to symptoms. It looked quite advanced for the mid-90s.

Sites that were mentioned during the presentation included:

• wiziq.com: a site to develop and teach online
• croquelandia: a 3d world similar to Second Life
• Two other sites have been lost forever to crappy handwriting.

The 11:45 forum featured Curt Bonk and George Siemens, two speakers I always enjoy listening to. The session dealt with academic writing and research using Web 2.0 technologies. Mention was made of faculty making videos of lectures and posting to Youtube for student viewing. Once again a number of resources were mentioned throughout the presentation including:

• Confessions of a Acu-Fan: blog of Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and advocate for gaming in education.
• slideshare.net: site for uploading and distributing slide show presentations
• elearnspace: Personal blog of George Siemens. EXCELLENT!
• plos one: Open source scientific journal for peer-reviewed scientific and medical research
• diigo: a social bookmarking site. Users can annotate Web pages and add sticky notes which can be shared with others
• publicationshare.com: freely available articles dealing with online learning. Primarily from Curt Bonk. Great resource.
• e-Learning World: home page of Curtis Bonk
• Theory and Practice of Online Learning (Anderson & Elloumi, 2008, 2nd ed.): freely downloadable version available free of charge. Print version available for purchase. First edition (2004) also available for download.
• Lulu.com: self-publishing. Create your book. Upload to Lulu. Select your cover art. Publish. Sell.
  

More session comments...

Sloan-C sponsored a forum titled Strategic directions for institutional support of blended and distance education. The session emphasized whether institutions are aligning DE and hybrid courses and programs with the institutional mission. Quality was also mentioned as a staple and something that programs should build and capitalize on. The positive branding of an institution can also assist in bringing in students. One panel member emphasized that you should not be ignorable. Make a splash and get others involved to support the causes of the program.

A questions that should be asked is administration is how we are recognizing the DE efforts by faculty. Course development, course implementation, and adoption of innovation all takes time and effort. Administration needs to recognize this.

Institutional DE strategy needs to focus of:

• Increasing student access
• Growing continuing education
• attracting students from outside the area
• improving DE teaching and pedagogy
• increasing the rate of degree completion
• get students through the program at faster rates
• enhancing the value of the institutional brand (this is especially helpful during times of natural disasters)
• increasing the diversity of the student body
• augmenting DE faculty recruitment and retention
  

A notable quote is to "Put the sidewalk where students walk anyway." In other words, communicate the way that students communicate, and provide resources and materials in ways that students use, not how administration uses.

Students were categorized as scholars, careerists, conflicted, and drifters.

When marketing DE, emphasize the savings in gas costs.

Lastly, adopt a service philosophy, with student as customer and consumer. There is too much competition that will take away our dissatisfied customers.


A number of free resources were mentioned throughout the conference. Most I have embedded in my other comments thus far. However, here are other resources not mentioned as yet:

• Free books
  
• The Wealth of Networks (Benkler, 2006). This book is freely available online or download, or available for purchase from Amazon. It was mentioned that the book is getting purchased even by those who have read all or parts of it online.
• The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Zittrain, 2008): Another book made freely available by the publisher, Yale Press, or for purchase through Amazon
  

• Peer rating systems for published works were mentioned. Instead of the current method of peer review that can take weeks or months, some alternative resources were suggested:
• knol.com : peer reviewed encyclopedia from Google
• technorati: a blog search tool
• google alerts: alerts subscribers of new blog postings, news and similar
• digg: user-submitted content that is rated for popularity
• twitter: a mini-blog. Used as a text-chat tool to inform others what is happening instantly. Each message you send is called a "tweet"

• Copyright source materials mentioned included:
• creative commons: allows authors to share materials legally.

• Other good stuff
• public knowledge project: open source scholarly research project
• scribd: site for self-publishing papers, books, research, whatever
• flatworld knowledge: open source (free) textbooks
• plos one: peer reviewed, open access scientific research
  

Session Comments from Madison DistEd

A number of excellent sessions at the Madison Distance Teaching and Learning conference held last week. Summaries follow:

Palloff and Pratt covered course, faculty and program evaluation strategies. They suggested embedding faculty evaluation into institutional faculty development efforts to ensure everyone knows what is being evaluated. They also suggested basing faculty evaluation on course design, facilitation skills, and how well teaching efforts are mapped to course outcomes. They also warn about student privacy issues when entering active courses to evaluate an instructor. Good point! A rubric was provided for asessment course and faculty performance effectiveness. The handout also included an example course evaluation form rating the course, the interaction, and open-ended questions about the course in general.

Michael Anderson and Brad Shaevel presented on a template for designing case-based courses. The template can be easily modified for creating a number of different types of courses that use case-based materials. Best of all, the model will soon be available free of charge at sourceforge.org. UT Telecampus does it again!

Ardelle Pate and Sharon Smaldino presented results of a study on social presence in online discussion forums. The research question was whether different types of forums added to the perception of social presence. Results indicated that a forum specifically designed to provide an informal place to socialize was poorly received and did little to increase social presence. However, the discussion forums in general contributed to success in the course.

The remainder of my notes are on my XO laptop which I don't currently have access to. The remaining session summaries will be posted later.

Keynote Comments from Madison DistEd

The Distance Teaching and Learning annual conference at Madison Wisconsin provided yet another great experience, although getting there proved to be difficult. Tropical Storm Edouardo ripped through Houston the same day I was to fly to Madison. Continental cancelled all flights into and out of Houston for that day. However a quick call to Continental reservations and adjustments in hotel and car rental reservations took care of everything.

The first post is on the keynotes. I'll attempt to place my disorganized pile of notes into a a partially coherent semblance of order for the highlights:

Opening keynote speaker Curtis Bonk provided a great start to the day. He spoke of the ways for spreading the word by way of technology. He mentioned a number of resources including:

• scribd.com for publishing your own papers and materials
• ustream.tv for live streaming your own video and audio
• epals.com for collaborating with other classrooms across the world
• cnx.org and curriki.com for the sharing of educational materials
• teachertube.com is the youtube.com of the education set
• gng.org is the Global Nomads Groups that creates global educational programs
• englishpod.com, spanishpod.com, italianpod.com (and probably others) for language learning through podcasts
• librarything.com for sharing your personal library collection with others. You become a thingamabrarian! Amazing site.
• dotSUB.com allows subtitling of videos on the Web
• montereyinstitute.org/nroc/ is the National Repository of Online Courses available at no charge to both students and educators
  

He also referred to several print resources including Learning at the Back Door (Wedemyer, 1981), Minds on Fire (Brown and Adler, 2008), and The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005).

Friday morning keynote speaker Marilyn Moats Kennedy took a surprisingly funny take on generational learners and the methods used to supervise and influence them in the workplace. She spoke of management trends as they apply to the generational workers and supervisors. For example, one difference between Baby Boomers and Netsters is in perception: the boss says to a Baby Boomer "Would you mind.....?" The Baby Boomer takes this as an order and does the task. When the boss says the same thing to a Netster, they begin ticking off reasons why they would mind. She also brought back a quote from Star War's Yoda who told Luke Skywalker to "either do or do not. Never try." What a great line. I'd forgotten that one.

I was disappointed to miss the Thursday noon keynote by George Siemens but thoroughly enjoyed his Friday morning forum co-presented with Bonk which I'll summarize in a later post.