See you on July 7th.

Educause just released a guide to using Ning in teaching - Seven Things You Should Know About Ning.  Ning has all the functional features of Facebook and MySpace and is a great way of building collaborative activities in the classroom.

I was recently hired to develop a set of training sessions to teach instructors how to use the new blog and wiki tools in Blackboard. I am quite excited about this because I believe that blogs and wikis are great teaching tools and I am glad that I can now use these tools within the Blackboard environment rather than relying on third-party tools.  I will keep you all posted on my progress.

I had recently blogged about using Pocket Video in the classroom and was planning an activity for my summer class students to record short video resumes which they could drop into a PowerPoint.  So I was talking to a colleague and just casually mentioned this when she became very excited about the possibilities.  Currently, our department has over 700 students a semester in a beginning public speaking course where we record the speeches using VHS camcorders.

This has been a major problem because the parts are becoming harder to find and some of the incoming freshman have never seen a VHS tape before (this does make me feel so old).  We have discussed getting hard-drive camcorders but the “Powers-That-Be” are concerned with theft and breakage and the cost.  So many brick walls we feel like we are playing some 80’s Atari game.

But, with the pocket video only costing $85 bucks on Amazon, self-contained, extremely portable, and easy to operate, we may have found a solution.  We could easily buy several and send them out with the instructors when they go to class.  And not only can we capture the formal speeches, we can even capture the impromptu speeches with little effort.

Then the instructor comes back to the office, uploads the video to a central storage place for the student’s e-portfolios, and emails a copy to the student for his or her review.  This is a valuable learning experience because the number one method for improving your public speaking is to record your speeches and review them.  Before pocket video, this was a logistical nightmare but now the technology has caught up with our needs.

Playing around with Topicscape which creates mindmaps in three dimensions.  Looks a bit confusing during the demonstration but I am willing to download the 30-day trial and give it a closer look.  I wish there was a better design than the cones.  What would be really cool is if they could give it more of a Second Life feel where I could have my avatar walk around information structures.

Joe Firestone discusses how Boyd’s OODA Loop is not actually double-loop learning as some scholars would argue. I am not sure that I agree with this but Firestone does give an intriguing argument which he promises to develop in future postings.

Recently finished Christensen, Horn, and Johnson’s Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. I read the book because of Christensen’s groundbreaking work on innovation (The Innovator’s Dilemma) and I wanted to see how he applied his theories to education. Christensen captured the problem with current education which is that it still operates in a factory mental model in which education is composed of bits of content which are delivered in a limited range of learning styles and with very little customization for individual learners.

Christensen’s solution is to provide computer-based learning which molds itself to the individual student’s preferred learning styles and ability to absorb information. “Well, that’s nothing new,” I thought and was tempted to stop reading at this point. But I pressed on and I am glad I did. What Christensen describes as the new wave of innovation in education is the creation of a “student-centric learning framework” which uses “facilitated user networks” to create and deliver educational content. In other words, the community of practice concept brought to the primary and secondary school level. Again, nothing new here but Christensen has put together a series of arguments that crystallizes the current movement toward learning communities and Long Tail Learning.  Essentially, this is the clearest case for social-network based learning that I have read yet.

I also liked Chapter 7, “Improving Educational Research,” because I also believe that the biggest hindrance to educational reform is the current state of educational research (”methodologically weak”, “jargon-laden”, and “given to fads”  pretty much sums it up).   As Christensen points out, much of educational research is contradictory and hard to follow when trying to reform a school or program.  No wonder that students and parents are developing their own networks of learning to compensate for the inadequacies of the current educational system.  Christensen rightly points out that educational researchers need to shift from their prescriptive theories (how things should be) and focus on empirical research that leads to descriptive theories (how things are).

I recently purchased the Vado pocket video camera from Creative and I love it!  Right out of the box, it was easy to setup and work with and I was shooting video within a few minutes.  Good resolution although I wish the microphone worked better.  I have a better video camera which I use for video projects but I like the ability to quickly whip the Vado out and just start shooting.

This has some great applications for the classroom.  First, it’s a great way to record student impromptu speeches and then play them back for peer critique.  Second, I can quickly record on the spot demonstration and then upload that learning management system for later review by the students.  For that matter, I can record entire lectures (the Vado has a two-hour onboard storage although that drops to one hour when you record in high quality).

Another great activity is to give some cameras to the students (at $100 a camera, that’s a reasonable budget request) and have them do some active learning with the Vado.  They could do video surveys, record skits, or take field trips and post their trips online for the rest of the class.  Pair this up with Windows Movie Maker or IMovie (both free) and the students can make a nice professional video product.

Anyone else using pocket video cameras in class or have some good ideas for their use?

Tony Karrer asks three intriguing questions in this month’s Big Question:

* In what situations, do you believe it makes sense to develop a learning experience that will be delivered within Second Life?
* If you were to develop a training island in Second Life, what kind of environment and artifacts would you consider essential for teaching?
* Just as there are considerable differences in blended learning and virtual classroom training, what are some of the major differences (surprises) in training within virtual worlds?

I’m actually encountering these issues as I transform a traditional classroom course on web development into an online course delivered through Moodle. I plan to use Second Life in a support function for the students. Using connectivist learning theory and learning design theory from Mason’s The e-Learning Handbook: Designing Distributed Learning , I plan to create a “learning path” of artifacts on my parcel of land where the students can pick up blocks that represent HTML tags and assemble them into physical representations of web pages.

The reason for this is that in virtually building a web page like you would build something out of LEGOs, the students can better grasp the concept of using tags to assemble bits of content and functionality for a web page and web sites. In the classroom, this concept is rather abstract but I think that if the students can (in a virtual way) involve both intellectual and physical activity in building a web page, they can understand the concepts better.

Two major issues so far:

1)  Adapting to the new environment: I’ve been to several teaching events where my avatar just sat in a lecture hall and endured a PowerPoint presentation.  Boring!  The better method is to break up the PowerPoint into free-standing posters in conjunction with some training artifacts.

2)  Technical Difficulties:  The technical demands of Second Life are a large strain on my ancient classroom computers and even my new Toshiba laptop still lags in rendering the SL environment.  That is why Second Life is still in a secondary, supporting role and I plan to have the students work with it out of class.