Make sure to check out my final project, the Fashion History Holodeck!

So now what? Not sure yet. I plan to relax, carry on what I learned at school and apply it in my 9-5 job, I really want to get OpenSim up and running there so I can really have some fun with it. But for now I want to spend time enjoying myself: maybe pick up the guitar again, learn ukelele, migrate this blog over to WordPress, and take care of everything I have been neglecting for the last two years, i.e. go to the gym more.

I learned first and foremost that being online student is just as hard as being the director of an online learning program. To succeed, you really need to work it in to your lifestyle and take it seriously! Here is my top five list for being an online student:

• 1. Start early in the week! If you have reading assignments, do them early so you aren’t jamming through them when assignments come due.
  2. If there are discussion forums, be one of the first to post up there so the rest of the students in your class can reply to them and you have more material to continue the conversation. This is especially true if you are mandated to reply to your classmates’ postings.
  3. Get to bed at a reasonable hour, or else the rest of your life will fall apart. Even if you schedule yourself wisely with assignments, make sure to sleep well and get to work refreshed, it helps everything else fall into place.
  4. Go the extra effort with group projects and fit in time to coordinate with your peers. If you live in another state, reach out first and let everyone know your are there. Pick a good system like a free PBWiki or Google Group to communicate and archive your conversations.
  5. Don’t let your personal life slip through the cracks. You will go crazy at times, but learn to take a day and cut loose a little bit, your friends and family will thank you.

Anyway, hope this helps. Check out my final project, the Fashion History Holodeck below!

I have been playing with a new tool to create interactive fiction games. I was a big D&D fan, and played the Zork games and even the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide Infocom game. This was about 25 years ago when my parents had to wrench me off the computer to keep me away from those dark rooms with lanterns and rusty birdcages in the corner. I have fond memories of those days (I was 10 or so-ish) but more visual media has pulled me into the career I have now.

That is, until my grad school program pulled me back. There is this really great tool out there called Inform that lets you generate interactive fiction games such as the ones I described above, all without too much drama coding it. The code is very legible, no crazy variables or other things to worry to create a simple game. Read on for a sample, and my first game!

Yeah, that’s it, easy huh? I highly recommend you try Inform. If you want to check out my cool little game, feel free. It is not very complex or anything, you mostly can go north, south, east, west, and talk to people and take items. But I had lots of fun writing it! I can’t wait to see where else this class takes me.

photo by caruba on Flickr

I had been meaning to throw up another update here but everything recently has been, as per my done-to-death saying, “all school-work and work-school.” I just finished my second to last graduate course in the CTER program at UIUC, Analysis of Advanced Instructional Technologies. If you are interested, the final report is a pbWiki page and we posted our final project preso on Slide.com. We discussed the future of education. Our group tried to tackle the question from a developmental/occupational point of view, from K through higher ed. Comments are welcome.

I used Slide.com since this was the only way I could get it to work on pbWiki, another great wiki tool by the way, if you can get around the coding restrictions. Slide.com seems to be more geared towards the photo slideshow/MySpace crowd but they did have a nice selection of transitions and controls.

Slideshare is a new favorite app 2.0 of mine since I also have been busy at work doing my presentations and such on teaching and learning with Sakai. Browse over and check them out if you like.

So, what did I get out of this class? I got a chance to step back and look around in order to evaluate the use of technology in teaching around me. It was a very cumulative experience for me since I am near the end of my M.Ed. program…just one more course to go!

Found this on Educause Review via Alan Levine’s blog (daily reading for me). It really is an excellent piece on how storytelling can evolve using web 2.0 technologies out there. I just posted the entry below, so I will link it up and let the experts speak for themselves.

Check it out: Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine.

I wasn’t originally going to post this, but after reading Rita’s blog entry about her experience in our student-led conversations tonight I had to chime in. Rita commented:

“I truly feel that I interact with my classmates and instructors more often and on a more complex level than I ever have in a face to face environment. I think that our conversations are more carefully planned and thought provoking than face to face conversations. Take a moment to think about all of the times that you have left a conversation and thought “oh I should have said this” or “I wish I would have worded this more clearly, I should have said…”. In an online environment, you have time to construct those complex thoughts and you can always, easily, go back and review the conversations and revisit the conversation, and add to it.”

Being on the other side of designing learning environments for students is a nice sheltered place where you can easily sit back and drop your standard collaboration applications in place and hope things come together for the teacher. Well, being a student in one of these environments changed my perspective completely on this. Not only do the tools have to fit the teaching style, but it needs to be engrossing enough so that intangible flow happens where the students and teachers get enough out of the environment so true learning can happen. This is where barriers to the online environment fall, and everyone becomes an eager participant, and the end product is something bigger than documented learning outcomes or a syllabus can describe.

Our last project was to lead a conversation in Elluminate, in essence, teach, for ten minutes about any topic. I chose Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). There wasn’t much else to say other than, “We’ve been doing this all along” but of course I ran out of time. I attached the slides below, and cut my teeth uploading them to Slideshare (thereby extending my PLE, natch).

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvORKwmk9Xo
TeacherTube link: http://tinyurl.com/66o9hv
PDF transcript
Quicktime download (57.7 MB)

Following my previously posted rant about content, I spent the evenings at my journey to Educause 2008 working on another content project for school: an instructional video. Since I didn’t have much to work with and I didn’t have my own machine…only iMovie and Jing, though TechSmith offered to help and tried to sell me a copy of Camtasia Studio on the Educause expo floor. But I got away with a free Camtasia manual for the team at work: SCHWAG! So, I decided to make a video geared toward teachers and the first time ed-tech conference goer.

I have been to many conferences in my career, and I wish someone told me these things a while ago. Educause is especially big, busy, and intimidating the frist time around; but careful prep, comfy shoes, extra business cards, and a willingness to meet people go a long way to making the conference experience a good one.

Wow what a week! First of all, I came face to face with my own digital mortality when the logic board on my trusty year-old MacBook Pro decided to have a campfire. So it’s out for a week, thank goodness for the extended AppleCare! I am using the loaned Mac from work at the Educause 2008 conference this week.

I am typing this out on the plane so I will try to recap a bit. I spent the week sitting in on a variety of sessions: one about Second Life and how it can be implemented in a teaching and learning context, another about GoogleApps solutions for student collaboration, tried to see the BlackBoard new product announcement (BOO! Sakai pwns!), and an analysis of student satisfaction in distance learning. There were lots of other conversations both formal and informal all centering around web 2.0 and in fact a lot of my time was spent reloading the conference Twitter feed and chatting with others. I also got a chance to be a presenter again to a big (250ish) audience about FIDM’s experience with Sakai one year after our big deployment.

All in all, another really cool conference experience!

I sort of threw out the storyboard for this one as my time spent driving around and recording this was sort of dictated by my wife’s patience for me doing homework and how much access I had to these landmarks. Enjoy!

Oh yeah, check out the Flickr photostream of the trip.

Since this was done on location, I had to use what was available on my computer while disconnected…which meant using iMovie and Quicktime Pro to massage some of the audio portions. I found a great song “Little Menehune” that I bought for a song (get it?!) at BitMunk which was rights cleared. I took most of the photos myself. But the construction picks and the Menehune graphics I got from Flickr and are cited in the credits at the end. I hope you guys find it entertaining and educational.

This has been an enlightening past couple of weeks. First, creating the WebQuest and now I am working on a digital story. Digital stories are essentially that: stories created digitally using all sorts of tools. I happen to be using iMovie which is still fairly new to me. The best part of this assignment is that it can be about anything. I happen to be on vacation this week in Kaua’i, so I am doing some investigative reporting into the story of the Menehune.

I am having a lot of fun with this. Somewhere along the line, I forgot about the actual content of what goes into online education, or education in general even. I think what I am grappling with is that I have spent so much time on managing the "container" that we put content into, that I forgot about the content itself. I think I have been in an instructional design rut.
Somewhere between migrating learning management systems, setting up new assessment server applications, and dealing with accreditation and student student outcomes; I forgot how important the actual content is. But when I started working in online education, all I did was create content, primarily because the tools weren’t readily available to let instructors work on their own content. Now that instructors come to me with Powerpoints at the ready, our team’s job has morphed in to "guarding the gate." We provision the online course, instructors load their material, and we make sure things run the way they are supposed to. We used to produce and script videos, make flash games, and really have fun.

I think I have been in an "instructional design rut." That’s not to say the management component of our team isn’t important. In fact it has gotten more complex. We try to work with the instructors to make sure the content is up to snuff, and we also have some talented design chops on our team. We can be doing these sorts of things with our own courses: WebQuests, digital stories, more fun content. Of course, not everything has to be Web 2.0, but weaving those skills in can make for a much more compelling experience for our instructors and students than just loading the textbook publisher’s slideshows into the LMS. Even more so, we can work with our instructors to do this sort of media creation on their own. Back when I started, making web pages was still in the realm of the "web geeks." I sat up late nights fueled on coffee and other chemicals cranking out Perl, HTML, some Java because that’s what it took and people paid me to do it. Now anyone can do this, without the shakes even. So it falls in our (the collective "our"…the ed-techs who are displaced 1990s web jockeys) laps to show people the way: that creating original unique content is not a scary thing. That crafting something like a digital story or setting up a blog can take as much time as writing out the same old lecture notes, but the pay-off ultimately is engaged students, and time saved in answering questions or working the kinks out of classroom management. Maybe I don’t exactly have an answer to this yet, and the whole struggle with competing for time factors in too greatly, but what I’ve begun to realize is that I need to get out of the rut.

If it takes a Kaua’i vacation to do this, then maybe I should travel more.

At first glance, at least with the people I meet casually, FIDM is all about sketching pretty clothes and dressing up models. That only scratches the surface of the business though. There is whole other layer of apparel manufacturing. This end of the business is ALL business. Garments must be costed, designed, sourced, and manufactured at a reasonable cost so that the teenagers can flock to Forever 21 and buy whatever crap is knocked off a Paris or Milan runway. Making a good quality garment (i.e.: your underwear or socks) at a cheap price is the name of the game.

Outsourcing this labor is the way to go right now at least if you are looking to save money, and most apparel manufacturing jobs are now farmed out overseas through an extensive network of wholesalers and middle-men. The flipside on this, obviously, is unemployment in our own country and the appalling working conditions at factories in regions like Malaysia and Indonesia. Just the research process alone in building this WebQuest was eye-opening. Please click on the WebQuest to learn more, as of now it is late and I am drained from putting this together.

Oh yeah, I was going to write about content versus delivery, but that’ll happen another night. Suffice it to say that this blog post is more of a vent. Apparel manufacturing is a fascinating business, the fashion runway is just the top level. The process by which a designer like Galliano can put together an outfit and send it down a runway…only to have it trickle down in six months to a worker in Malaysia assembling a knock-off version of the outfit for a nickel an hour only to have it be shipped back to the US to sell in a mall or wherever, I dunno, it just floors me.