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.

I am usually not one to ruminate on and on about information I get at work. Many schools are run like a business, and being on the IT side of things, you get exposed to a lot of the business-y cross-talk and things that don’t necessarily relate to the world of education on the surface. In higher-ed, the two worlds are closer together as we need to prepare our students for the business world and to compete in an economy that ain’t what it used to be. But when you look at K-12, the dissociation between the business world and the world of schools seems much further apart. Or is this changing?

I was handed a white paper recently from IBM recently that echoed a lot of the ideas put forth in our recent readings on 21st century education:

Global CEO Study: IBM White paper exec. summary (register for full version)

Learning for the 21st Century by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills

These two documents are fairly aligned, given the differing focus, but the IBM paper struck me as being very relevant to education. With the emphasis being placed on technology in schools, isn’t our main goal to train students, regardless of age, to be productive, successful, and even innovative in the swelling knowledge economy? Of course the 21st Century Skills is something we’ve seen before…a call to place teaching and learning in the arena of technology to prepare students for jobs that don’t even exist yet, but what does big business actually have to say about it?

Quite a lot really…from the Executive Summary of IBM’s 2008 Global CEO Study:

Hungry for Change: The Enterprise of the Future is capable of changing quickly and successfully. Instead of merely responding to trends, it shapes and leads them. Market and industry shifts are a chance to move ahead of the competition.

Innovative Beyond Customer Imagination: The Enterprise of the Future surpasses the expectations of increasingly demanding customers. Deep collaborative relationships allow it to surprise customers with innovations that make both its customers and its own business more successful.

Globally Integrated: The Enterprise of the Future is integrating to take advantage of today’s global economy. Its business is strategically designed to access the best capabilities, knowledge and assets from wherever they reside in the world and apply them wherever required in the world.

Disruptive By Nature: The Enterprise of the Future radically challenges its business model, disrupting the basis of competition. It shifts the value proposition, overturns traditional delivery approaches and, as soon as opportunities arise, reinvents itself and its entire industry.

Genuine, Not Just Generous: The Enterprise of the Future goes beyond philanthropy and compliance and reflects genuine concern for society in all actions and decisions.

Let’s substitute the word “Student” for “Enterprise of the Future.” Interesting read there, huh? Students today are Hungry for Change. Of course! The are infinitely adaptable to their environment and seek to manipulate it any way they can. Change stimulates and challenges them toward achieving a new mastery and then they eagerly move on to the next thing. Boredom kills a curriculum! They are innovative beyond imagination when given the chance. Students today are resourceful and are the masters of all the new skills: mashing up, remixing, recontextualizing, and finally synthesizing! We need to meet them halfway! The are Globally Integrated and aware. The internet connects everything together and to borrow a page from Friedman’s The World is Flat mantra, they have grown up with this assumption that it was never a disconnected place. We need to utilize this openness as fertile ground for encouraging learning and growth, to teach them how to make new connections and captialize on the “known” ones. And of course we are trying to be Disruptive by Nature! Other than sounding fun, disruption in the positive sense is challenging the known variables, and looking for new solutions…even when the problems haven’t been acknowledged yet. There isn’t anything we can’t at least try to do better, whether it is finding a new route to work or re-telling a story digitally. Finally, they are Genuine, Not Just Generous. I truly believe today’s students are not completely “in it to win it” (unlike the 90′s when everyone in my classes wanted to have an internet start-up). Global concern about human rights and the environment are even closer to home now that we are seeing the effects of global events and politics up close and personal.

We need to work with our students to learn how to critically observe these events and participate to bring about real change. Just because our generation has messed up doesn’t mean they have to also! They are growing up more aware of global issues than any other generation previously, and as educators we need to be ready to swallow our pride as adults who are “new to this” and meet students on their turf, in a rapidly-changing world that will most likely keep changing faster than they would like it to, but are up for any challenge being the social-technical-global citizens that they are.

Hi everyone…this is for the course’s iWeb fans. Apple has released new iWeb themes for it’s popular blogging, web-site building, kitchen sink 2.0 tool. Read more at TUAW.