The New York Times looks at a movement among art museums that allows users to tag their image collections; the aim is to come up with a natural "common language" that can be used to describe and search works of art.
article via news.com
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Revealing a hidden Picasso
The San Francisco Museum of Art has used some modern wizardry to reveal a previously unknown Picasso underneath one of the paintings in their collection. A reconstruction of the painting is currently on exhibit.
article at the SFgate.com
article at the SFgate.com
Sunday, March 25, 2007
UNC TLT Conference, Day Three
And here are my notes from the third and last day of the conference.
Staying Ahead of the Curve: The Open Croquet Consortium
Presenters: Marilyn Lombardi
The presentation started an overview of the involvement by young people in "Web 3.0", which could basically be summed up as interactive virtual spaces. Croquet, which includes involvement by computer scientist Alan Kay, is a virtual spaces application, similar to Second Life, that is open source and built from the "ground up" as a tool for use in teaching. The presenter outlined the issues with using Second Life in a academic context. Since it's a commercial application, there are FERPA issues as student work is stored on servers outside the university; users are anonymous and SL includes inappropriate content, so you don't know who might drop in to a class or who students might interact with; questions about stability and viability as the application becomes more popular. Croquet uses peer to peer model - user's computers connect with each other to update the environment, rather than talking to "the mothership" like Second Life. It's designed to be platform neutral and there are plans to offer it through PDAs and mobile phones.
Croquet users can create virtual "worlds within worlds" and bring multimedia and other objects there; the software includes authentication issues to limit where users can go and the kinds of roles they have.
The presenter showed some movies of the environment. It's very much a beta and looks rather crude compared to Second Life and other applications. There was a demonstration of tagging objects in the world and creating an object "on the fly" by drawing a fish, then having the fish render in 3d and having behaviors attached to it. Users can create a "frame" to show/hide objects (ie, showing students some objects if they perform certain tasks or instructor can have objects they can only see.) Integrated with Jabber and VOIP in a basic way (ie, doesn't seem to allow for real time "talk" between characters, but you can have static pictures with VOIP.
Croquet is current a development environment, not a software package that can actually be used right now. It seems to be a framework for creating applications that operate in a virtual environment, rather than a virtual environment that users can drop in and use. They're releasing a SDK version 1.0 next week.
The speaker noted that Duke is creating an orientation environment in Croquet so that new students can get an idea of what attending Duke is like.
Development of the Course Training Design Development Package
Presenters: Forrest McFeeters, Antionette Moore, Irene Chief
Staff from Winston-Salem State University described a program they've put in place to help faculty put together online courses. The process takes about six months to one year and starts with the faculty member using course design principles to come up with goals and activities for their courses, similar to what the Duke CIT has used for our recent course design grants. There are specific deadlines that faculty meet for content for the course and they have put in place a system where a faculty peer does a quality control check on the course content and others do checks on the course design. They're looking at how to involve students in the quality control process.
They noted that they've tried the same process during an intensive summer workshop, with faculty putting the course together over a 20 day period. Faculty seem to like this better than the longer process, since they can concentrate on the process without being distracted by other duties, but assembling the components for the courses in such a compressed time period is difficult for the small staff. Overall, the process is quite similar to what is used in a corporate environment or by commercial design firms when putting together an online training course for an internal or external client. At any one time, they're working with 20-30 faculty on courses.
It was noted during the Q&A for the session that the new head of WSSU has set a policy that all faculty must create at least one online course in order to be eligible for promotion or tenure.
Facilitating Faculty Connections: The Technology Practices Directory
Track: Other
Presenters: Kevin Oliver, Geetanjali Soni
Staff of NCSU's LITRE office ("Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment") created a web-based mechanism for faculty to enter ways they use instructional technology in their courses. The effort emerged from NCSU's quality enhancement plan to gather information on a broad base of faculty on the campus.
http://litre.ncsu.edu/
A demonstration of the web database was part of the presentation; faculty enter information about themselves and, for each class they teach, entered technologies they used and then how those were used for instructional purposes. The form was designed in this way because faculty generally had difficulty reporting how they used technology in a pedagogical way, but could more easily describe technologies they used. The group formed a specific taxonomy that covered most types of tools and instructional uses on campus. The form is about five pages long and was quite lengthy - the group's board of advisors was made up of individuals from several campus units and each was wanting to gather specific information through this effort.
The software includes a search function so that faculty can connect with others who have similar interests. It also included the ability to export material about a department to an Excel spreadsheet so that Deans and department heads could get an overview of faculty in their area. The group also hoped to use the information to target calls for proposals for grants, training and other program offerings.
The database was advertised in a letter from the Provost and Deans, through a postcard and a newsletter over a period four months. Only 89 faculty out of 2,000 entered some form of information in the database. The main problem they found was in the length of the form and the fact that many tended to report only innovative or high-end technologies they were using.
The group thinks that the effort might make more sense taking a form that's similar to MySpace that faculty can use as a social networking tool over the entire UNC system. They're also looking at ways to give access to the database to administrative assistants or others that could contribute information about faculty activities, but they're concerned that these individuals might not know enough about the specifics of what the faculty are using to teach and how the faculty use the tools in classes.
Staying Ahead of the Curve: The Open Croquet Consortium
Presenters: Marilyn Lombardi
The presentation started an overview of the involvement by young people in "Web 3.0", which could basically be summed up as interactive virtual spaces. Croquet, which includes involvement by computer scientist Alan Kay, is a virtual spaces application, similar to Second Life, that is open source and built from the "ground up" as a tool for use in teaching. The presenter outlined the issues with using Second Life in a academic context. Since it's a commercial application, there are FERPA issues as student work is stored on servers outside the university; users are anonymous and SL includes inappropriate content, so you don't know who might drop in to a class or who students might interact with; questions about stability and viability as the application becomes more popular. Croquet uses peer to peer model - user's computers connect with each other to update the environment, rather than talking to "the mothership" like Second Life. It's designed to be platform neutral and there are plans to offer it through PDAs and mobile phones.
Croquet users can create virtual "worlds within worlds" and bring multimedia and other objects there; the software includes authentication issues to limit where users can go and the kinds of roles they have.
The presenter showed some movies of the environment. It's very much a beta and looks rather crude compared to Second Life and other applications. There was a demonstration of tagging objects in the world and creating an object "on the fly" by drawing a fish, then having the fish render in 3d and having behaviors attached to it. Users can create a "frame" to show/hide objects (ie, showing students some objects if they perform certain tasks or instructor can have objects they can only see.) Integrated with Jabber and VOIP in a basic way (ie, doesn't seem to allow for real time "talk" between characters, but you can have static pictures with VOIP.
Croquet is current a development environment, not a software package that can actually be used right now. It seems to be a framework for creating applications that operate in a virtual environment, rather than a virtual environment that users can drop in and use. They're releasing a SDK version 1.0 next week.
The speaker noted that Duke is creating an orientation environment in Croquet so that new students can get an idea of what attending Duke is like.
Development of the Course Training Design Development Package
Presenters: Forrest McFeeters, Antionette Moore, Irene Chief
Staff from Winston-Salem State University described a program they've put in place to help faculty put together online courses. The process takes about six months to one year and starts with the faculty member using course design principles to come up with goals and activities for their courses, similar to what the Duke CIT has used for our recent course design grants. There are specific deadlines that faculty meet for content for the course and they have put in place a system where a faculty peer does a quality control check on the course content and others do checks on the course design. They're looking at how to involve students in the quality control process.
They noted that they've tried the same process during an intensive summer workshop, with faculty putting the course together over a 20 day period. Faculty seem to like this better than the longer process, since they can concentrate on the process without being distracted by other duties, but assembling the components for the courses in such a compressed time period is difficult for the small staff. Overall, the process is quite similar to what is used in a corporate environment or by commercial design firms when putting together an online training course for an internal or external client. At any one time, they're working with 20-30 faculty on courses.
It was noted during the Q&A for the session that the new head of WSSU has set a policy that all faculty must create at least one online course in order to be eligible for promotion or tenure.
Facilitating Faculty Connections: The Technology Practices Directory
Track: Other
Presenters: Kevin Oliver, Geetanjali Soni
Staff of NCSU's LITRE office ("Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment") created a web-based mechanism for faculty to enter ways they use instructional technology in their courses. The effort emerged from NCSU's quality enhancement plan to gather information on a broad base of faculty on the campus.
http://litre.ncsu.edu/
A demonstration of the web database was part of the presentation; faculty enter information about themselves and, for each class they teach, entered technologies they used and then how those were used for instructional purposes. The form was designed in this way because faculty generally had difficulty reporting how they used technology in a pedagogical way, but could more easily describe technologies they used. The group formed a specific taxonomy that covered most types of tools and instructional uses on campus. The form is about five pages long and was quite lengthy - the group's board of advisors was made up of individuals from several campus units and each was wanting to gather specific information through this effort.
The software includes a search function so that faculty can connect with others who have similar interests. It also included the ability to export material about a department to an Excel spreadsheet so that Deans and department heads could get an overview of faculty in their area. The group also hoped to use the information to target calls for proposals for grants, training and other program offerings.
The database was advertised in a letter from the Provost and Deans, through a postcard and a newsletter over a period four months. Only 89 faculty out of 2,000 entered some form of information in the database. The main problem they found was in the length of the form and the fact that many tended to report only innovative or high-end technologies they were using.
The group thinks that the effort might make more sense taking a form that's similar to MySpace that faculty can use as a social networking tool over the entire UNC system. They're also looking at ways to give access to the database to administrative assistants or others that could contribute information about faculty activities, but they're concerned that these individuals might not know enough about the specifics of what the faculty are using to teach and how the faculty use the tools in classes.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
UNC TLT Conference, Day Two
And here are my notes from Day Two of the UNC-TLT conference.
One note about the hotel, the Raleigh Hilton, and a surreal moment today. I was in the washroom during lunch and heard the Rolling Stones's "Paint It Black" on the Muzak system - a version played by a Mariachi band.
Developing Online Primary Source Specialists
Presenters: Elizabeth Coulter, Pamela Johnson
This session presented an overview of Adventures of the American Mind, a pilot project, just completing its seventh year, that was funded by the Library of Congress and was designed to introduce the use of primary resources in K-12 classrooms. The program went through different iterations. Initially, they gave laptops to K-12 teachers in exchange for taking a graduate level course and they had about 120 teachers that went through the program. More recently, to broaden the impact, they produced a series of professional development workshops, dubbed PROPEL, for media specialists at schools and worked with them to come up with activities the media specialists could do in cooperation with teachers in their local schools. They're also producing a Flash-based SCORM compliant module on using primary resources. More information is at http://www.aamonline.org/.
e-Texts
Presenters: Darwin Dennison, Michael Worthington, Catherine Fountain, Elizabeth Deifell
This panel concerned the experiences of some faculty in producing electronic textbooks. Darwin Dennison at UNC-Wilmington developed a "Dine Healthy" textbook with nine chapters and a 72 page curriculum guide that could be used for a short Continuing Education class or as a supplement to a health or PE course; the etext also included an application to analyze student diet and physical activity and presentation slides from the etext can be used with the Video iPod. Worthington's ebook was tied to the ECU's freshman seminar and the freshman reading at the university; it's in HTML format so it could be used in Blackboard. (They also saw it as a way to acclimate students to using Blackboard.) Fountain at Appalachian State is using a web-based e-textbook that's under development for a fourth-semester Spanish course; it uses authentic language material from and information about the local Spanish-speaking community as a basis. The textbooks is free and includes multimedia.
http://www.appstate.edu/~fountainca/1050/
The panel discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of the ebooks. They liked the fact they could include links and multimedia information in the texts, that the etexts can be ADA compliant, and that they are inexpensive to distribute. Some of the issues highlighted included the dependence on an electronic device to work with the material, difficulty for students to annotate or highlight materials; lack of standards for ebook formats; and difficulty in reading lengthy material on a computer or device. There were still several students in all the classes that wanted to print out the pages primarily for highlighting or taking notes, but they were surprised at how many read all of the material online (over 50% in the case of ECU). They noted that they thought the larger trend was to move towards PDF format since it allowed for highlighting and taking notes, in addition to links and multimedia, and could be formatted for viewing on-screen or printed, if needed.
I also had a brief conversation with one of the presenters after the session about the difficulties in formatting etexts for different output devices - the ways that students use computers, the Web, iPods and cellphones and the different displays used on the devices require that the material not only has to be reformatted for the devices, but that the writing style has to change as well.
Effective, Efficient, Easy: Managing the Teaching with Technology Workload
Presenters: Linda Lisowski, Joseph Lisowski
In this session, two faculty members from different discipline areas - English Literature and Special Education - presented about methods they use to minimize the time required to manage their course. Many of the methods they're using - planning the course schedule ahead of time in detail, preloading content into the course before it starts, using the automated grading features of Bb, and getting students to do peer review of their work on papers or in discussion boards - are one's we commonly advocate at Duke when working with faculty.
Social and Emotional Presence in Online Learning
Presenters: Ginny Sconiers, Robert Hambrick, Martha Cleveland-Innes
This presentation looked at a study on social presence in distance courses conducted at East Carolina University. Using a defintion of social presence as a "sense of being and belonging in the course", they recruited faculty teaching distance courses to carry out the study. The faculty members received training about some of the research in online social presence and ideas for implementing activities for their course. The faculty and students were surveyed as the course progressed to see the impact of these activities.
Basically, the researchers concentrated on practices in four areas. In self presentation, faculty members sent out initial contact letters and created an instructor bio on their course site; they were also encouraged to use "ice breakers" when starting the course and to have the students create profiles about themselves and their interests. For creating a safe environment, the instructors were encouraged to set expectations for the course, publish rules about interactions and behaviors in the course, and a "pre-lesson" to get the students familiar with how the course worked. The instructors also made the students aware of contingency plans if some part of the technology didn't work for an activity or assignment. The instructors were also encouraged to do activities that would get the students interacting with each other - having an informal "coffee shop" for discussions, using group activities and having students act as moderators and do peer review.
Part of the presentation dealt with efforts by North Carolina State University's Delta program as they put some of the ideas into practice with distance courses they designed with faculty. One of the items they developed with a kind of "course preview" that included information about the course, the expectations for the work and a five minute video introduction from the faculty member.
One of the presenters (who is in Canada) was supposed to be brought in through Elluminate video conferencing software, but there were problems with the network connection.
Generally, the principles being used in the study would probably work well in a face to face or blended course to increase student participation and engagement in the class.
Plagiarism Police or Teaching Tool?: Building Research-Based Writing Connections with Turnitin.com
Presenters: Amy Martin
This session looked at how Western Carolina University instructors use Turnitin.com as a teaching tool with student writing. The presenter acts in an instructional technology support role, teaching workshops on how to use the software. She found that many instructors don't know many of the capabilities of the software and were just using it to turn in final drafts of papers. She encourages them to get the students to set up turnitin.com accounts and use the originality reports on drafts of a paper with students to discuss how they're using sources. She also noted some of the legal issues in using the software since turnitin keeps all of the papers in their database. (They offer a template letter at the site that can be used by instructors to get permission to upload student papers.) She encountered some faculty who use it without telling students, which would be a FERPA issue. During the main part of the presentation, she demonstrated what different drafts of a sample paper might look like at the site.
Around the World of Learning Objects in 30 Minutes: A Tour of Discipline-Based Collections
Presenters: Hilarie Nickerson
Handout from session (Word format)
The presenter in this session put together a list of discipline based repositories of learning objects; she demonstrated Merlot and other sites and discussed some ways to more effectively search for materials at the sites. She noted that she didn't find any specifically for the Humanities; many of those in the Sciences have had major grant funding to get started and there haven't been similar efforts in the Humanities.
Poster Session
Interactive Models of Tonal Pitch Space
Presenters: J. Williams
A faculty member at UNC-G has developed a set of web-based learning tools that let students explore tonal music; it uses theories presented in the text "Tonal Pitch Space" to represent sounds visually.
website for the project
Essential Collaborations for Large Enrollment Course Redesign
Presenters: Dorothy Muller, Dorothy Clayton, David White, Joyce Newman, Jennifer Raby, Larry Bolen, Kathryn Weegar
PowerPoint presentation from session
This panel discussion looked at a redesign of two large enrollment courses at East Carolina University in Psychology (230 students) and Health Sciences (1200 students). The Psychology course was taught by one instructor and student assistants; the Health course used four instructors and included online assessments and multimedia. The Health course used a blended approach using lectures delivered via Blackboard and class meetings once per week for each section. The redesign was a team effort and included faculty who had previously taught online; they surveyed the students and observed increased satisfaction with the course after the redesign. The Psychology course included more "break out" sessions with smaller groups of students.
One note about the hotel, the Raleigh Hilton, and a surreal moment today. I was in the washroom during lunch and heard the Rolling Stones's "Paint It Black" on the Muzak system - a version played by a Mariachi band.
Developing Online Primary Source Specialists
Presenters: Elizabeth Coulter, Pamela Johnson
This session presented an overview of Adventures of the American Mind, a pilot project, just completing its seventh year, that was funded by the Library of Congress and was designed to introduce the use of primary resources in K-12 classrooms. The program went through different iterations. Initially, they gave laptops to K-12 teachers in exchange for taking a graduate level course and they had about 120 teachers that went through the program. More recently, to broaden the impact, they produced a series of professional development workshops, dubbed PROPEL, for media specialists at schools and worked with them to come up with activities the media specialists could do in cooperation with teachers in their local schools. They're also producing a Flash-based SCORM compliant module on using primary resources. More information is at http://www.aamonline.org/.
e-Texts
Presenters: Darwin Dennison, Michael Worthington, Catherine Fountain, Elizabeth Deifell
This panel concerned the experiences of some faculty in producing electronic textbooks. Darwin Dennison at UNC-Wilmington developed a "Dine Healthy" textbook with nine chapters and a 72 page curriculum guide that could be used for a short Continuing Education class or as a supplement to a health or PE course; the etext also included an application to analyze student diet and physical activity and presentation slides from the etext can be used with the Video iPod. Worthington's ebook was tied to the ECU's freshman seminar and the freshman reading at the university; it's in HTML format so it could be used in Blackboard. (They also saw it as a way to acclimate students to using Blackboard.) Fountain at Appalachian State is using a web-based e-textbook that's under development for a fourth-semester Spanish course; it uses authentic language material from and information about the local Spanish-speaking community as a basis. The textbooks is free and includes multimedia.
http://www.appstate.edu/~fountainca/1050/
The panel discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of the ebooks. They liked the fact they could include links and multimedia information in the texts, that the etexts can be ADA compliant, and that they are inexpensive to distribute. Some of the issues highlighted included the dependence on an electronic device to work with the material, difficulty for students to annotate or highlight materials; lack of standards for ebook formats; and difficulty in reading lengthy material on a computer or device. There were still several students in all the classes that wanted to print out the pages primarily for highlighting or taking notes, but they were surprised at how many read all of the material online (over 50% in the case of ECU). They noted that they thought the larger trend was to move towards PDF format since it allowed for highlighting and taking notes, in addition to links and multimedia, and could be formatted for viewing on-screen or printed, if needed.
I also had a brief conversation with one of the presenters after the session about the difficulties in formatting etexts for different output devices - the ways that students use computers, the Web, iPods and cellphones and the different displays used on the devices require that the material not only has to be reformatted for the devices, but that the writing style has to change as well.
Effective, Efficient, Easy: Managing the Teaching with Technology Workload
Presenters: Linda Lisowski, Joseph Lisowski
In this session, two faculty members from different discipline areas - English Literature and Special Education - presented about methods they use to minimize the time required to manage their course. Many of the methods they're using - planning the course schedule ahead of time in detail, preloading content into the course before it starts, using the automated grading features of Bb, and getting students to do peer review of their work on papers or in discussion boards - are one's we commonly advocate at Duke when working with faculty.
Social and Emotional Presence in Online Learning
Presenters: Ginny Sconiers, Robert Hambrick, Martha Cleveland-Innes
This presentation looked at a study on social presence in distance courses conducted at East Carolina University. Using a defintion of social presence as a "sense of being and belonging in the course", they recruited faculty teaching distance courses to carry out the study. The faculty members received training about some of the research in online social presence and ideas for implementing activities for their course. The faculty and students were surveyed as the course progressed to see the impact of these activities.
Basically, the researchers concentrated on practices in four areas. In self presentation, faculty members sent out initial contact letters and created an instructor bio on their course site; they were also encouraged to use "ice breakers" when starting the course and to have the students create profiles about themselves and their interests. For creating a safe environment, the instructors were encouraged to set expectations for the course, publish rules about interactions and behaviors in the course, and a "pre-lesson" to get the students familiar with how the course worked. The instructors also made the students aware of contingency plans if some part of the technology didn't work for an activity or assignment. The instructors were also encouraged to do activities that would get the students interacting with each other - having an informal "coffee shop" for discussions, using group activities and having students act as moderators and do peer review.
Part of the presentation dealt with efforts by North Carolina State University's Delta program as they put some of the ideas into practice with distance courses they designed with faculty. One of the items they developed with a kind of "course preview" that included information about the course, the expectations for the work and a five minute video introduction from the faculty member.
One of the presenters (who is in Canada) was supposed to be brought in through Elluminate video conferencing software, but there were problems with the network connection.
Generally, the principles being used in the study would probably work well in a face to face or blended course to increase student participation and engagement in the class.
Plagiarism Police or Teaching Tool?: Building Research-Based Writing Connections with Turnitin.com
Presenters: Amy Martin
This session looked at how Western Carolina University instructors use Turnitin.com as a teaching tool with student writing. The presenter acts in an instructional technology support role, teaching workshops on how to use the software. She found that many instructors don't know many of the capabilities of the software and were just using it to turn in final drafts of papers. She encourages them to get the students to set up turnitin.com accounts and use the originality reports on drafts of a paper with students to discuss how they're using sources. She also noted some of the legal issues in using the software since turnitin keeps all of the papers in their database. (They offer a template letter at the site that can be used by instructors to get permission to upload student papers.) She encountered some faculty who use it without telling students, which would be a FERPA issue. During the main part of the presentation, she demonstrated what different drafts of a sample paper might look like at the site.
Around the World of Learning Objects in 30 Minutes: A Tour of Discipline-Based Collections
Presenters: Hilarie Nickerson
Handout from session (Word format)
The presenter in this session put together a list of discipline based repositories of learning objects; she demonstrated Merlot and other sites and discussed some ways to more effectively search for materials at the sites. She noted that she didn't find any specifically for the Humanities; many of those in the Sciences have had major grant funding to get started and there haven't been similar efforts in the Humanities.
Poster Session
Interactive Models of Tonal Pitch Space
Presenters: J. Williams
A faculty member at UNC-G has developed a set of web-based learning tools that let students explore tonal music; it uses theories presented in the text "Tonal Pitch Space" to represent sounds visually.
website for the project
Essential Collaborations for Large Enrollment Course Redesign
Presenters: Dorothy Muller, Dorothy Clayton, David White, Joyce Newman, Jennifer Raby, Larry Bolen, Kathryn Weegar
PowerPoint presentation from session
This panel discussion looked at a redesign of two large enrollment courses at East Carolina University in Psychology (230 students) and Health Sciences (1200 students). The Psychology course was taught by one instructor and student assistants; the Health course used four instructors and included online assessments and multimedia. The Health course used a blended approach using lectures delivered via Blackboard and class meetings once per week for each section. The redesign was a team effort and included faculty who had previously taught online; they surveyed the students and observed increased satisfaction with the course after the redesign. The Psychology course included more "break out" sessions with smaller groups of students.
Finding video art on the Web
Slate has an article that explores why video art is so hard to find on sites like YouTube, explaining a bit about video as an art form and comparing it to sculpture and installations. The second page of the piece has links to several sites that do have some video art pieces online for viewing.
article at Slate.com
article at Slate.com
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
UNC TLT Conference, Day One
Over the next three days, I'm attending the UNC-TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) Conference in Raleigh, NC, as part of my work at Duke. Here are some of my notes from the sessions.
Accelerating Educational Innovation and Transformation Through Learning Communities and Knowledge Networks
Presenters: Toru Iiyoshi
The opening plenary was a kind of overview of where we are in IT, with trends towards use of new tools like Second Life and movements towards open access to educational materials. The speaker, who works with the Carnegie Foundation, encouraged the audience to take a close look at what's working and not working about what we're doing, finding out why, for example, faculty aren't really using open courseware materials and what could be done to make them really useful for a broad audience. The overall message seemed to be to look beyond whether something is sustainable in a financial sense or seems like a good idea to use evaluation to really investigate what the best approaches would be in the future. At least, that's what I got out of it ....
Designing and Evaluating Online Critical Thinking Discussion
Presenters: Scott Chattin, Marvin Croy
Chattin is at Southeastern Community College and teaches two courses on Philosophy; the mehods he developed were also used in different courses at UNC-Charlotte by Croy. The courses are taught online through Blackboard and consist primarily of discussion board postings and papers. The students in his classes come from rural North Carolina and often have difficulty with critical thinking skills; they can be rather dogmatic in their views and have problems having empathy with other points of view. (Some students are initially offended by the material - one, after being assigned an early reading in the course on the existence of God, wrote him that the reading made her throw up and possessed by "demons", so she was dropping the course.)
He uses an evaluation rubric for the class activities based on two authors (McPeck and Richard Paul) that have written extensively about building critical thinking skills. He shares the rubric with the students and they use it for self evaluation of their work; he's found it is usually pretty close to how he would evaluate their work (if he doesn't agree, he sends them a rebuttal and his own evaluation). As part of the process, students have to include short extracts of their writing to demonstrate particular aspects of critical thinking skills in the rubric.
The rubric itself is quite detailed and includes items drawn from Richard Paul's textbook on critical thinking; the items, on intellectual standards and elements of reasoning, look at areas such as clarity, accuracy, precision, depth, relevance, logic, significance, breadth and fairness or point of view, assumptions, inferences, and implications. Students are given an understanding that he's not grading on their ideas, but on their adherence to critical thinking standards he sets ouf the for the course. He's found that many of the students, which are given controversial subjects like abortion or gay marriage to debate and write about, are initially unable to engage in critical writing about the topic and fall back on emotion or personal beliefs; after a few weeks, they're able to show more empathy to other points of view and draw upon readings and research to support their views in a more organized and detailed way. He showed some sample writing from the semester mid-point that was pretty impressive.
Connecting a Community of Educators: Building a New Online Journal with Open Source Software
Presenters: Katherine O’Connor, Terry Atkinson, Sue Steinweg, Sharon Collins, Dionna Manning, Courtney Maness
This presentation was a demonstration of the Open Journal System, an automated software tool that manages workflow for journal publication. I attended this session thinking that it might be useful in the context of a writing class for certain types of assignments or for managing special writing projects like a senior thesis. OJS is being used by the Journal of Curriculum and Instruction published at East Carolina University. The software is very full-featured and allows for a great deal of customization; it can manage users in different roles and manages the workflow in an automated manner. The software is free and is part of an effort funded by the Canadian government; the software authors also have published an automated system for managing virtual conferences. About 120 journals use the software and there will be a conference on OJS in Vancouver in July. Since the software is open source, the users at ECU had difficulty getting training and information to get started; they used an online manual and "self taught" themselves on the system; they also arranged a three hour teleconference training session with the publishers of a journal at Emory that were using the system, which might be a useful model for other institutions using open source systems on their campus.
Open Journal System
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
Poster Session
One of the more interesting posters was from UNC-Greensboro's Library. They've developed an online board game on information literacy, based on the UNCG Objectives for Library Instruction for First-Year Undergraduates.
http://library.uncg.edu/game
The game, developed with AJAX, is ADA compliant and incorporates Web evaluation exercises. You can download your own copy of the game and modify it:
http://library.uncg.edu/game/game.zip
They also have a blog on library games at:
http://librarygames.blogspot.com/
Image Quiz: Using Principles of Cognitive Psychology to Teach Visual Expertise
Presenters: Bruce Kirchoff
Unfortunately, I missed this session - I got into a really good conversation with a colleague from Winston-Salem State University about their development of online courses. However, I did some research on the Web on the software.
Kirchoff has developed a prototype software package, Image Quiz, which uses principles of cognitive psychology to help students learn to identify plants. He feels the principles used in the software could be applied in other subject areas where students learn to identify works of art or other types of materials. Basically, the software uses a set of quizzes that take the student through stages of learning visual material. One stage concentrates on distinct features of the object in question and identifying it with a "family" of similar objects; in another stage, the students examine the overall configuration or "gestalt" of the objects.
The prototype is available from his website, http://www.uncg.edu/~kirchoff/. (Note that it says his site hasn't been updated since 2004; the .zip file containing the software and an article about the principles behind it is dated 2006.)
Accelerating Educational Innovation and Transformation Through Learning Communities and Knowledge Networks
Presenters: Toru Iiyoshi
The opening plenary was a kind of overview of where we are in IT, with trends towards use of new tools like Second Life and movements towards open access to educational materials. The speaker, who works with the Carnegie Foundation, encouraged the audience to take a close look at what's working and not working about what we're doing, finding out why, for example, faculty aren't really using open courseware materials and what could be done to make them really useful for a broad audience. The overall message seemed to be to look beyond whether something is sustainable in a financial sense or seems like a good idea to use evaluation to really investigate what the best approaches would be in the future. At least, that's what I got out of it ....
Designing and Evaluating Online Critical Thinking Discussion
Presenters: Scott Chattin, Marvin Croy
Chattin is at Southeastern Community College and teaches two courses on Philosophy; the mehods he developed were also used in different courses at UNC-Charlotte by Croy. The courses are taught online through Blackboard and consist primarily of discussion board postings and papers. The students in his classes come from rural North Carolina and often have difficulty with critical thinking skills; they can be rather dogmatic in their views and have problems having empathy with other points of view. (Some students are initially offended by the material - one, after being assigned an early reading in the course on the existence of God, wrote him that the reading made her throw up and possessed by "demons", so she was dropping the course.)
He uses an evaluation rubric for the class activities based on two authors (McPeck and Richard Paul) that have written extensively about building critical thinking skills. He shares the rubric with the students and they use it for self evaluation of their work; he's found it is usually pretty close to how he would evaluate their work (if he doesn't agree, he sends them a rebuttal and his own evaluation). As part of the process, students have to include short extracts of their writing to demonstrate particular aspects of critical thinking skills in the rubric.
The rubric itself is quite detailed and includes items drawn from Richard Paul's textbook on critical thinking; the items, on intellectual standards and elements of reasoning, look at areas such as clarity, accuracy, precision, depth, relevance, logic, significance, breadth and fairness or point of view, assumptions, inferences, and implications. Students are given an understanding that he's not grading on their ideas, but on their adherence to critical thinking standards he sets ouf the for the course. He's found that many of the students, which are given controversial subjects like abortion or gay marriage to debate and write about, are initially unable to engage in critical writing about the topic and fall back on emotion or personal beliefs; after a few weeks, they're able to show more empathy to other points of view and draw upon readings and research to support their views in a more organized and detailed way. He showed some sample writing from the semester mid-point that was pretty impressive.
Connecting a Community of Educators: Building a New Online Journal with Open Source Software
Presenters: Katherine O’Connor, Terry Atkinson, Sue Steinweg, Sharon Collins, Dionna Manning, Courtney Maness
This presentation was a demonstration of the Open Journal System, an automated software tool that manages workflow for journal publication. I attended this session thinking that it might be useful in the context of a writing class for certain types of assignments or for managing special writing projects like a senior thesis. OJS is being used by the Journal of Curriculum and Instruction published at East Carolina University. The software is very full-featured and allows for a great deal of customization; it can manage users in different roles and manages the workflow in an automated manner. The software is free and is part of an effort funded by the Canadian government; the software authors also have published an automated system for managing virtual conferences. About 120 journals use the software and there will be a conference on OJS in Vancouver in July. Since the software is open source, the users at ECU had difficulty getting training and information to get started; they used an online manual and "self taught" themselves on the system; they also arranged a three hour teleconference training session with the publishers of a journal at Emory that were using the system, which might be a useful model for other institutions using open source systems on their campus.
Open Journal System
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
Poster Session
One of the more interesting posters was from UNC-Greensboro's Library. They've developed an online board game on information literacy, based on the UNCG Objectives for Library Instruction for First-Year Undergraduates.
http://library.uncg.edu/game
The game, developed with AJAX, is ADA compliant and incorporates Web evaluation exercises. You can download your own copy of the game and modify it:
http://library.uncg.edu/game/game.zip
They also have a blog on library games at:
http://librarygames.blogspot.com/
Image Quiz: Using Principles of Cognitive Psychology to Teach Visual Expertise
Presenters: Bruce Kirchoff
Unfortunately, I missed this session - I got into a really good conversation with a colleague from Winston-Salem State University about their development of online courses. However, I did some research on the Web on the software.
Kirchoff has developed a prototype software package, Image Quiz, which uses principles of cognitive psychology to help students learn to identify plants. He feels the principles used in the software could be applied in other subject areas where students learn to identify works of art or other types of materials. Basically, the software uses a set of quizzes that take the student through stages of learning visual material. One stage concentrates on distinct features of the object in question and identifying it with a "family" of similar objects; in another stage, the students examine the overall configuration or "gestalt" of the objects.
The prototype is available from his website, http://www.uncg.edu/~kirchoff/. (Note that it says his site hasn't been updated since 2004; the .zip file containing the software and an article about the principles behind it is dated 2006.)
Monday, March 12, 2007
Zoho office suite
Slate has an article on a web-based office suite, Zoho, that is more fully developed that a similar offering from Google. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications in addition to a calendar and a wiki creation tool. The company is also introducing a "notebook" application to the suite that's similar to Microsoft's OneNote and the suite includes collaboration features.
article at Slate
article at Slate
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Online and screenwriting software
Recently, I've been looking at some new alternatives to commercial screenwriting software (Final Draft being the one I use right now).
Celtx (http://www.celtx.com/ is still not at version 1, but offers a host of features. It can be used to write screenplays and stage plays and as a management tool for the writing or production process. It also allows users to create an online account and work collaboratively; the software can be downloaded for Mac, Windows and Linux.
ScriptBuddy (http://www.scriptbuddy.com/ is web-based screenwriting software - just go to the website, log on and start writing. The "pro" version, available for about $5 per month, adds other features such as PDF output and access to an online forum to upload your script and trade reviews with other writers.
Celtx (http://www.celtx.com/ is still not at version 1, but offers a host of features. It can be used to write screenplays and stage plays and as a management tool for the writing or production process. It also allows users to create an online account and work collaboratively; the software can be downloaded for Mac, Windows and Linux.
ScriptBuddy (http://www.scriptbuddy.com/ is web-based screenwriting software - just go to the website, log on and start writing. The "pro" version, available for about $5 per month, adds other features such as PDF output and access to an online forum to upload your script and trade reviews with other writers.
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