This is the end result interview of the guy who tried to go off the grid while challenging people to find him – for $5,000.Obviously, $5k is a nice fat motive, but the point is that he was found and that a whole lot of info was made available about him despite all his best efforts to lay low. Imagine if the motivation were emotional – like catching a terrorist or an Amber alert?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/09/14/dcl.wired.found.cnn/index.html

This set of papers is a good example of a way to save time grading online discussions. It includes a handy form students can use to assess themselves, a rubric, and even a Jing movie on how to create your own custom Word form.

This bit works on discussions, but the concept should be easy enough for smart faculty to extrapolate to other activities.

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/HowtoRedesignaCourseforHybridD/163280

If you use Twitter, you can search for tweets from the 2009 Higher Education Web conference using #edweb09. The Chronicle just ran a piece on “tweckling” which is getting some interesting comments. Some of the comments are so stuffy and pompous I have to laugh – one complained about the use of the word “tweckling” in plain gross ignorance of the culture and traditions of tweeple who tweet. I say, people who use language are the ones who own and control language, not some gatekeeper in an ivory tower!

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Tweckling-Twitterfolk-/8895/

Evidently someone gave a really bad, out-of-date keynote, and the audience wasn’t having it. About 15 minutes in, they began posting critical, sometimes rude, tweets. Many have rushed to the defense of the speaker, and a few have defended the audience.

I’m inclined to support the audience, regardless of how hard the message might be to hear, so long as the responses are constructive and true. The speaker was paid to give a good talk and he didn’t bother preparing properly, so I have little sympathy for him. However, he doesn’t deserve to be totally humiliated for that. We in higher education need to make an effort to uphold civil discourse as well.

Andy sent me this post today: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/20/google.os/index.html

Pretty exciting stuff! Conor and I both agree it would be fantastic to have such a device but that there would still be the need for more powerful computers that are not cloud-based to do things like crunch multimedia.

I’m already halfway there – I don’t much use MS Office any more and instead, use Google Docs. All my stuff is stored in the cloud as well – email, twitter, ning, Google Wave, Google Docs, web sites, etc. I’ve really been trying to make the effort to get away from paper use, and now I think I finally am starting to succeed.

Boy, do faculty hate grading crappy student papers! The moaning and the gnashing of teeth starts mid-semester and carries on through finals every year. I sincerely wish these folks would take a little time out to figure out a better way. Calibrated Peer Review is one way that comes to mind, or some variant of it. This piece has some helpful suggestions as well:

http://www.facultyfocus.com?p=8899

Higher education is different than business education. Further, small liberal arts colleges do things a bit different than larger research/public institutions. That doesn’t mean there aren’t wonderful things to be learned from each genre. Cathy Moore (http://blog.cathy-moore.com/) advocates for far more simple, clear, action-oriented learning approaches. Given how prone many faculty are to endless bloviation (from the student’s perspective), I wonder if any of her ideas might be accepted? I have no doubt that the majority of students would learn and remember more via her approach, but that would require such a culture shift for some faculty that I don’t think it could happen. For those faculty who are interested in moving to a more blended approach, there might be hope. Successful blended courses have been proven to improve learning outcomes overall, but I suspect this success depends on how well the blended course has been designed. Nearly all well-designed blended courses put more of the learning actions into the hands of students and less into the hands of faculty, which engages the students far more.  Faculty who are willing to try a new approach and are willing to share the power and control in the classroom with their students could really benefit in so many ways, including saving time.

Cathy Moore outlines how she uses a wiki to create a hybrid course:

I’m also developing a course/reference hybrid using TWiki. The project walks people through a complex procedure and provides the worksheets they need along the way. It will also collect learners’ ideas and comments. Users can return as needed to refresh their memories, re-use a worksheet, or get new ideas from the comments.

I’m finding all sorts of advantages to developing in the wiki engine. Here are a few:

Most of the development takes place in the wiki. I started with a simple Word outline, turned that into the course menu and started drafting content in the wiki itself. If this were a team effort, we’d all look at the evolving content in the wiki and wouldn’t have to email Word docs around.

It’s easy to embed Flash interactions, video, and other media. Plug-ins also help you create basic interactivity, such as twisty code, without knowing javascript.

It’s easy to include job aids right along with the how-to content, including collaborative worksheets, checklists, etc. that teams will complete together.

You have fine control over who can change what. For the alpha test I’ll have comments turned on but everything else locked, so the testers can comment directly on each page without actually changing the content. The comments appear at the bottom of the page in a separate box.

The final product will be distributed to several companies. Most of the content will be easy for them to modify and customize–they’ll just need to click the Edit button and type.

Finally, with comments turned on, learners can contribute their ideas to the material. Administrators could periodically incorporate the strongest ideas into the “official” content.

This reference/course/brainstorming hybrid wouldn’t be nearly as useful locked away in an LMS.

http://community.astd.org/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/6401041/m/55610414/p/2

Have been asked repeatedly for either same budgets or very similar budgets, with detailed justification that is tied to foundational principles for every single thing, right down to basic necessities like worn out desktops. We all know these justifications will likely not be read; in fact, our requests will in many cases likely not be even considered. Meantime, we are urged to go all-out on planning for certain campus changes that we are simultaneously being told we can’t fund. All this disfunction is sapping my energy and distracting us from doing important things we can more reasonably accomplish. So, I am beginning to find myself reacting from a place of burnout. Good thing I have a chunk of time off coming to me soon.

Here’s a quote from someone who’s contact info I can’t find. Anyway, it’s free citation software.

Zotero is an excellent tool for managing data for bibliographies, footnotes, and reference lists.  It is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser that allows users to either type in author,  title,  and other publication data manually or enter it automatically from library catalogs.

To install it, simply select “add-ons” from the Firefox tool menu.  Click on “Get Add-ons” and type “Zotero” in the search box. When Zotero appears, click the “Add to Firefox” button. After restarting firefox “Zotero” will appear in the lower right of the browser window.  Clicking on “Zotero” here will open the database for editing.

My college uses WorldCat to search library catalogs worldwide.  Here is what I do to automatically enter information from WorldCat to Zotero:

Use WorldCat as usual to find a book or other media you would like to save in Zotero.

From the library catalog record window, click “Cite/Export.”  Then choose “Export to Endnote” in the resulting pop-up window.  That’s all it takes to automatically enter all the publication data into Zotero.

When it is time to enter the information into a paper, Zotero lets you choose from several different citation styles and paste formatted entries right into your bibliography.

Please visit www.zotero.org for complete instructions.

Several people sent me this. I couldn’t agree more with it.
——————

Forty internationally known leaders in open education and technology met in Barcelona on October 19-20, 2009, at the NMC’s first official European event, the Open EdTech Summit, cosponsored by the Open University of Catalunya (UOC) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). Together, this extraordinary group considered the question of how to design educational institutions that fully embrace open education as means of being truly responsive to the needs of contemporary society and of today’s students.

Summit attendees generated fifty action items necessary to realize the goal of creating an institution truly responsive to the needs of students today and into the foreseeable future, and then ranked them. Those which ranked highest are captured here, and framed as a Call to Action – five major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving open education:

1. We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media. In order to achieve this, it must be easier to find, use, and cite pieces of media, especially for educational purposes. Contextual tools that perform these tasks, co-developed by students as the end-users, must be created and made available to all. We must also develop ways to translate rich media, not only between languages, but also between modalities, such that content produced in a certain geographical area and medium may be accessed and reused in other places and in other forms. Portability of rich media is key; content must not be tied to a certain platform for delivery, nor to a specific medium or environment.
2. We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms. Mobiles – not simply phones, but all kinds of handheld and portable devices – are a powerful tool for learning because they are controlled by the holder. With mobile devices, users can direct their own learning experiences, accessing information where and when they need it. It is critical that we effect a paradigm shift toward recognizing mobiles as a primary platform for delivery of educational content – not content that is translated for use on mobiles, but content that is designed for such use from the outset. We must actively encourage development practices that remove platform dependence. Likewise, we must advocate for a global mobile network that is as easy to use, as inexpensive, and even more ubiquitous than the web.
3. We must award credentials based on learning outcomes. It is time to recognize the learning that occurs outside of courses and beyond classroom walls. The model of awarding credentials solely on the basis of participation in established programs must give way to a more flexible design that separates credentials from coursework and recognizes mastery regardless of where or how it is attained. As more learners choose alternate means of education, including non-university programs, mentoring, apprenticeship, and other informal or innovative options, we must accept and recognize their achievements as equivalent to those gained in more traditional ways.
4. We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a key component of the university of the future, we advocate building a culture of sharing in which concerns about intellectual property, copyright, and student-to-student collaboration are alleviated and the model of proprietary work dissolves in favor of a more open one. To this end, we must establish reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and scholarly publications of all kinds, including reputation systems, peer review processes, and new models for citation of such content. We must empower students to share knowledge with one another in ways that are viewed as collaboration rather than cheating. Assessment models must change to support these practices. Ultimately, we see a culture of sharing as a crucial piece of the infrastructure of a scalable educational system that can support the millions of learners who will participate in it.
5. We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable its use and understanding. Content out of context is at best easy to misconstrue, and at worst, too difficult to use. Content producers and users alike must embrace strategies (reflective blogging, metadata, documentation of process, visualization of learning, etc.) for linking content generation to “pedagogical wraparounds” that embed content within effective learning practices. Such strategies would ensure that the focus remains on learning objectives and process, rather than on the technology used to deliver the learning materials.

The attendees noted that the task of reinventing higher education is complex, and the road to change long. Institutions change by degree, and the group underscored that it must become part of our culture to embrace our collective knowledge and wisdom when it comes to designing learning experiences. Higher education must begin to recognize the utility and value of informal avenues of learning, self-directed learning, and the new forms of mentorship made possible via the network and social media. Thoughtful experimentation must be encouraged at all levels, including the formation of whole new forms of institutions.

The work of the attendees was captured in real time in the summit wiki. For more, please read the full Communiqué.

Larry Johnson
Chief Executive Officer