I just finished flipping through a comic book that Jen Berghage sent to everyone in the office. She sent us a link:
![boundbylaw_cover.png](http://sites.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4518/2011/05/boundbylaw_cover.png)
Advancing learning one byte at a time
I just finished flipping through a comic book that Jen Berghage sent to everyone in the office. She sent us a link:http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.htmlIt is a visual and entertaining presentation of copyright law. I tried reading certain sections and realized there is…
I just finished flipping through a comic book that Jen Berghage sent to everyone in the office. She sent us a link:
It has been a while since I’ve made any posts here in my ePortfolio. I’ve been struggling about how this tool/process fits into my workflow. I’m not the only one struggling to find time and a focus for my ePortfolio….
It has been a while since I’ve made any posts here in my ePortfolio. I’ve been struggling about how this tool/process fits into my workflow. I’m not the only one struggling to find time and a focus for my ePortfolio. The biggest issue I’ve had, like many others, is that I have a wide range of things to track for my courses and projects. Some are very detailed tasks and others are high-level operational updates.
what are my artifactspresentationsscreencastslessons learnedANGEL trickscool ideas – deafblind inventionsa blog-report from an eventarticle [sketch] and technology reviews / synopsis (see Jamie’s work)What’s the relationships between artifacts and a narrative?who’s my audienceElRickBlueWCLDWCOutreachPSUExternalnew found motivation: jin & jaroflife.swfreflect back on how…
I was in a “VP Awards” meeting this morning with Craig Weidemann, the VP for PSU Outreach. I was a little surprised at first that he began the meeting with a question about morale around Outreach in the context of…
I was in a “VP Awards” meeting this morning with Craig Weidemann, the VP for PSU Outreach. I was a little surprised at first that he began the meeting with a question about morale around Outreach in the context of these awards. One of the things I like about working with Craig is that he wanted to hear what everyone in the room had to say about the topic.
We had a pretty frank discussion about the recent organizational-change impacts here at Outreach. We agreed that recognition and awards are important in this time of transition for Outreach. Craig followed-up with an accurate analogy that stressed the importance of tradition and recognition of the things that mean a lot to us in spite of what is a stressful time for many.
Someone was brave enough to share some personal and professional reflections on the effect of a few lay-offs around the organization and a message they had received that it would be a good idea to “seek other employment.” They asked the question to consider the impact of getting an award while you’re standing in the unemployment line.
After some discussion, my response was that “good work is good work” and that recognizing someone is not dependent on whether they were laid-off. Craig added something to the effect that lay-offs are different than firings.
Here in the World Campus, many things haven’t changed since before the RESET. However, I work a lot with others from different units. Some of these units don’t exist anymore. Some don’t have job descriptions yet. It was interesting to note that it appeared that 4 of the 11 of us in the meeting have either been laid-off or have dealt with the impacts of loved ones that were laid off. Since my wife doesn’t work right now, I can’t even gauge the impact of me losing my job.
So when I hear “I’m so busy,” I can’t help but think “be happy to be so ‘busy’ and more importantly what can I be doing to do my best, push my own boundaries, and make life/work better for others?”
Not having taken the Authentic Conversations training yet, I don’t yet understand the connection between us being “authentic” with one another and new changes to our culture (can true cultural change be mandated?), since I never saw that as an operational problem in the committees, cross-functional teams, and in my day-to-day work. If someone had just come by and asked me, I would say that we have other problems, but talking is one of them. People here love to talk. All one has to do, simplistically speaking, is listen, ask questions and take action-planned, collaborative, and timely. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself before the training.
<!–Saying good bye to colleagues
OHR has helped to place 7 of the 8 PSPB workers that were laid-off
4 of 11 have either been laid-off before or have been effected by it
i am the only one working in my family
craig: difficult balance between living in the numbers and focusing on our great work
awards look good on a resume
people falling through the cracks
are we at square one?
wake-up call this morning–>
–OVERVIEW–This was my first time in Madison. Unfortunately, I fell ill with the flu during the second day of the conference. I missed the afternoon sessions of the second and third days of the conference. Having said that, I enjoyed…
–OVERVIEW–
This was my first time in Madison. Unfortunately, I fell ill with the flu during the second day of the conference. I missed the afternoon sessions of the second and third days of the conference. Having said that, I enjoyed the parts of the conference I was able to see. The location was wonderful and the audience was overall energetic and engaged.
–PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS–
• Using VoiceThread (VT) to improve educational outcomes
– discussion: What is VT? It is a web-based, multimedia-enabled, social-media sharing platform. What does it look like? VT features a main panel that displays images or movies; a control panel below for playback, commenting and navigation; and finally, two panels along the sides that graphically display avatars for the presenter and visitors. How does it work? VT’s roughly playback like movies except that anyone, generally speaking can interject comments along the way. Why is it significant? VT provides a platform for deep interaction between individuals-at-a-distance.
– examples: The examples ranged from internally and externally generated VT’s, and VT’s from the K-12 to the higher ed domains. They provided a valuable look at what can be done and the pedagogical implication of various strategies. VT is a powerful tool to motivate students to design and deliver their own content to the public. VT even integrates with ANGEL and other LMS’s. It would have been nice if the presenters asked us to find VT’s and share them with the group.
– hands-on workshop: We practiced using VT by importing already-existing content into VT. From there we narrated our VT’s using audio and video annotations. It would have been nice if we had time to visit other people’s VT’s and commented on them during the workshop. I think a good way to use VT would have been to publish out a screencast/VT of the didactic portion of the presentation before the workshop. This might have freed time up during the workshop to get our hands dirty using the tool. On the other hand, people rarely come prepared to workshops like this.
URL: https://sites.psu.edu/kent/2010/08/04/madison-10-voicethread-vt-pre-conference-workshop/
• Getting started with casual games: Justification, design, and development
– What is a casual game? They are developed for the average person, they spread like a virus, they are smaller in scope, they are developed around a unique business model (the game is developed, then it is marketed to certain portal sites, advertising pays for the portals that in turn fund the developers after the game has been released)
– development calculator: a simplistic graphing tool to help visualize how much work a particular project may incur.
URL: https://sites.psu.edu/kent/2010/08/04/madison-10-casual-games/
–SESSIONS OF INTEREST–
• Blended courses and higher ed: On mission or off course? An institutional-specific look at how blended learning benefits one particular school. The presenters closed with a 10 min open discussion on the definition of blended learning and it was not surprising how varied some of the responses were. It just goes to show how important it is to be as explicit about how we use the term blended learning or hybrid learning when addressing adult learners.
• Integration of virtual environment, Web 2.0, and cloud computing technologies: A great session that walked through the use of SecondLife in a particular online course. The instructor focused on finding educational and entertaining locations to bring her students to. This was a great look at why it’s important to search for locations like these for potential use in our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team pilot.
• Using 3D virtual world models in e-economics instruction: Another interesting look at how SecondLife is being used to create immerse learning environments, in this case for an economics course. It seems possible to import graphics and convert them into 3D models for use in SL.
–MAIN TAKE-AWAY’S–
• VT is a powerful multimedia platform that fits nicely with distance education pedagogy: faculty presence, engagement and motivation, and stimulates higher orders of learning.
• games are best used with learning when the learning outcomes are captured by the game mechanics (see: http://www.its.umn.edu/GridlockBuster/)
• many objects in SecondLife can be copied and are good to keep in your inventory for future building projects
• no one is willing to talk about the entire costs (development time, money, research, resources, hardware, training, etc.) associated with games and virtual worlds, is that because people know the ROI fails to justify these kinds of projects?
–CONTACTS–
• John & LeeAnn Orlando (presenters) – made a personal connection with them as they live in Vermont. We knew people in common. We’ve committed to future networking through a Yahoo! Group social networking site dedicated to developing materials in Voicethread.
• Jon Aleckson (presenter) – Penny and I spoke with Jon and his colleagues about our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team and hope to share our findings in the future.
–CLOSING COMMENTS–
It was difficult to take notes on my laptop for many of the sessions because a number of the rooms only offered seats. Thankfully the WiFi worked well for all of the sessions. There were plenty of opportunities to network. In preparing for the conference, I found the digital library associated with this conference and found dozens of articles that will be useful for our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team.
ePortfolio isn’t necessarily for anyone elsecreate a narrativeconsider who our potential audience is – SRDP process, our reports2/month at a minimum = 24 for a year2 distinct phases of developing an ePortfolioCollect & ReflectSelect & Presentthis project is about the…
ePortfolio isn’t necessarily for anyone else
create a narrative
consider who our potential audience is – SRDP process, our reports
2/month at a minimum = 24 for a year
2 distinct phases of developing an ePortfolio
Collect & Reflect
Select & Present
this project is about the artifacts and the blogging is the narrative that wraps those artifacts
artifact = your published articles and presentations
Louise is using an “Artifact” cateogry to indicate the presence of an artifact
Kent – try a VT post
Patty – are people checking other people’s blogs? RSS readers
Mike – when you finish a post end with a well-written prompt to your audience
Use TrackBack’s by grabbing the tbURL from another blog into your “Outbound TrackBack URLs” field on the edit page.
I went to the session on Digital Story telling and that topic overarched various tools (that included VT) and described a particular approach to teaching. Aaron Smith, from the Media Commons, made a great argument for packaging learning around a…
I went to the session on Digital Story telling and that topic overarched various tools (that included VT) and described a particular approach to teaching. Aaron Smith, from the Media Commons, made a great argument for packaging learning around a or a series of narratives: we remember things better when told as a [interesting] story. Honestly I don’t have excellent notes from his presentation because it was fast-paced and hands-on. The impression did stick though and I was intrigued by his approach.
His second point was that he urged the use of open, online media tools because when the [R.I.] student leaves PSU, they may not have the ability to leverage the same resources they had as a student here. It’s important to show them that freely available tools may fit one’s needs perfectly fine. He shared a few tools, some of which we used during the hands-on portion (in no particular order):
There were some familiar as well as new tools for me. We used aviary, jaycut, and flicker during our hands-on workshop to create interesting, short-video narratives about randomly-generated information bits from wikipedia.
As interesting as this session was, it’ll be a while before I could suggest this approach to faculty since I’m new to the development of this concept: digital storytelling. I do like the idea and will be something I will look to improve as a competency.
Prepared for QuickbaseBackground: This was the first mLearnCon conference and expo organized by the eLearning Guild also known for Dev Con and Learning Solutions conferences. Main URL: http://www.elearningguild.com/mLearnCon/content/1603/mlearncon—home Location: San Diego, CA Goals: (1) get a feel for the scope…
Prepared for Quickbase
Background: This was the first mLearnCon conference and expo organized by the eLearning Guild also known for Dev Con and Learning Solutions conferences.
Main URL: http://www.elearningguild.com/mLearnCon/content/1603/mlearncon—home
Location: San Diego, CA
Goals:
(1) get a feel for the scope of mLeaning in Higher Education
(2) develop a strategy to implement mLearning at the WC
(3) attempt to answer some questions related to identifying, budgeting, and implementing mLearning projects
Audience (based on anecdotal data): Primarily corporate, followed by military (civilian and military trainers), very small higher education representation (U of W and ACU).
Conference Overview:
Pre-Conference Session: “How to Create mLearning Content for the iPhone” http://bit.ly/b8CLfA
Keynote: “” http://bit.ly/9XuvOU
Session 104: “Using Mobile Technology as Part of an Integrated Learning Strategy” http://bit.ly/dl2Ue3
Session 201: “Context, Content, and Collaboration: Keys to Successful mLearning” http://bit.ly/c7AReE
Session 404: “Easily Creating Cross-device Online and Offline Content without Programming” http://bit.ly/a7pcoj
Session 502: “MLearning on Multiple Devices: A Practical Guide” http://bit.ly/aipyqo
Session 607: “Development Techniques for User Interface Text and Web-based Content in Smartphone Applications” http://bit.ly/cFdM0L
Session 703: “Pretotyping: Design, Iterate, and Test Apps Before You Write a Line of Code” http://bit.ly/c75FhI
Session 802: “Mobile Moodle” http://bit.ly/cY0hrk
My specific notes for each of the sessions: http://www.personal.psu.edu/kkm11/blogs/kent_matsueda/2010/06/
Major Take-aways:
– Context is king, content is queen/core, and learning is everywhere – this really seems to hold up in the research and activity found in the mLearning field; I keep thinking about the humorous analogy to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”: “the man maybe the head of the household, but the woman is the neck…” or something like that; if content is still seen as “the head” then surely context is “the neck.”
– know and respect your learners – there are 3.9 billion unique cellular subscribers and some believe that the cellphone is the first real personal computer; we have private relationships with our mobile devices and if mLearning doesn’t respect those relationships, it jeopardizes it’s effectiveness; it’s best to optimize apps for the specific platforms they will be used on
– SMS vs. native apps development – there was surprisingly little that was said explicitly about this topic; the debate was visible everywhere, however it seems that the focus on the learner more-or-less addresses which form of mLearning a program would invest in; SMS is ideal for performance support where as native apps are worth the expense to deliver incredible functionality while taking advantage that releasing apps are a form of marketing in of themselves; the five main development approaches are SMS, “local access” (ePubs and PDF’s), native apps, web apps, and hybrid apps
– is the iPad a mobile device – yes, because it is highly mobile and functional, especially with 3G service; no, because you cannot put it in your front pocket and have it with you at all times
– Pretotyping – to get good ideas you need a lot of ideas, reduce the failure cycle to increase innovation and accelerate conversations
– the devil is in the details – little changes to app UI’s can have a huge impact
– the mLearning environment challenged by a highly distracting environment
– mLearning is not eLearning light! skills development isn’t linear
– games and social networks [in mLearning] are the future
– if mobile doesn’t fit, we shouldn’t force it on our students
– EventPilot multi-platform, mobile apps for the conference – an excellent implementation of hybrid mobile apps to a conference http://www.ativsoftware.com/clients/eLearningGuild/mLearnCon2010/ provided schedules and the ability to create custom schedules, session descriptions, speaker bio’s, download handouts, provided note taking for attended sessions, twitter integration, maps, expo information, and the ability to generate an archive of all your work once the conference was completed
– GoodReader – a paid iOS app that allows you to manage, download, share, access, and view files on your mobile device
– QuickOffice – a paid iOS app that allows you to download, access, open, create, upload, share MS Office files on your mobile device
– iWebKit – an opensource framework for developing web apps for iOS devices, difficult documentation and development
– MockApp – a Keynote or PowerPoint template that allows you to create functional mock-ups of iOS apps
Other notable sessions that I was not able to attend:
Session 401: “The First 10 Questions Your Company Needs to Ask Before You Adopt mLearning” http://bit.ly/9s0Pw4 Nicole Fougere’s summary: http://twurl.nl/csv662
Would I recommend future attendance: Yes, if there appears to be more involvement by higher education institutions; there is a huge opportunity for Penn State to make a significant impact at this conference
Summary of the conference from Learning Solutions Magazine: “mLearnCon 2010: Mobile Gets Real,” By Bill Brandon http://bit.ly/bKm1KE
Other notable news:
– we “survived” a minor 5.7 magnitude earthquake Monday night
– wireless networking problems were being called “Steve Job’s Moments” in reference to the problems Steve experienced during the announcement of the iPhone 4
– San Diego’s “June Gloom” is laughable – those people need to see what the 7 month winter is like in Burlington, VT
– the Gaslight District is very cool to walk around as it has some interesting eateries
Wednesday June 16, 2010 04:00 PMRaw Dump:iClone & movie stormMobile moodleLooking for php and learning theoristsidewaard@itg.be & ckiyan@itg.benot very relevant to my context…
Wednesday June 16, 2010 04:00 PM
Raw Dump:
iClone & movie storm
Mobile moodleLooking for php and learning theorists
idewaard@itg.be & ckiyan@itg.benot very relevant to my context
Wednesday June 16, 2010 02:30 PMMain Pointsto get good ideas, you need a lot of ideasshorten the failure cycleincreases innovationGoogle – no processes, diverse work (start-up) culture90 second pitchescomes before wire frames and prototypingaccelerates conversations and concept developmentRaw Dump:Expends…
Wednesday June 16, 2010 02:30 PM
Main Points
Raw Dump:
Expends includes money, time, mind shift, etc.
Paper
Paper and video
Not a wireframe, something that has some thought behind it, a next stepFull or partial mockup
Investment of min/hours/days
Implies rather than achieves a design
Democratized innovation ?
Lo-fi aesthetics reflect transitory nature, intentionallyGoals
Increase innovation
Increasae ideas in the pipeline
Accellerate fail velocity
Good ideas from lots of ideasThink napkins, keeps it in his pocket
Is there a use case
Are there extrinsic rerwards?
Google bike app is the example
You want to taet your ideaWhat do you want to accomplish simply really well
As little program management as possible, high iterations
He mentioned agile in reference to project managment?
Think creative commons, two hours to create the video
The value is in the conversations between the evaluators, 30-60 min of time from the evaluatorsWhy use video? Rapid growth of conversation
How has the culture adopted this approach?