resources – Kent Matsueda

iPad Only?!

Updates: see the comments below this post…

Two days ago, I took my work laptop into the shop for warrantee work on the keyboard. Since then, I’ve been doing almost all of my work on my iPad. I have a personal iMac that I could use, but mostly as an experiment I wanted to see if I could use my iPad for work. It’s generally been a success.

Not surprisingly, there are a few things I cannot do.

I logged in with my personal iMac to view a course assignment that featured the WC Peer Eval tool. It is an antiquated tool and would not run in Chrome or Safari on my iPad.
I’m limited by what I can do in the Smartsheet app, so I have to make sure I’m using it in Safari.
A number of the hot-keys do not work the way I expect, so I’m not as fast performing a number of functions I’m used to.
I use my iPhone for Zoom, mounted on a stand above my iPad because the built-in camera on my iPad has me “looking down” at everyone. My camera also cuts out whenever I switch to a different app during a meeting to do things like update or view the meeting notes.
I’ve lost the ability to keep a large array of items in my clipboard. Having an app to do that on my laptop saves me a lot of time on certain tasks. Thankfully, the MacOS ecosystem allows me to copy something on my iPhone and paste it immediately onto my iPad without having to do anything.

I am surprised that the smaller screen really isn’t a big problem, but I’m used to working around that. Unlike many of my peers, I haven’t used an external monitor once since we switched to remote work back in the spring.

Using the College’s virtual machine also helps because it allows me to access a “full desktop” right from my iPad.

What’s the purpose or benefit? Well, I have a lot more confidence and knowledge of being able to work remotely with very little while not having to sacrifice any productivity.

TestOut LabSim 4.0

Brenda and I attended the LabSim 4.0 webinar “Navigating LabSim 4.0” yesterday and I captured a few notes from the session. Testout will be posting a link to the recording in a few days at: http://www.testout.com/home/educator-resources/instructor-tools/webinars.What are we looking to…

What are we looking to get from this product/service?

the ability to cherry pick activities within a course
reporting on performance within those activities
a means to manage multiple classes and account holders
ability to create new accounts
single-sign on access for our students
IT support for the product?
a licensing agreement?

Potential next steps

~~contact one of their sales reps~~
provide access to courses for faculty to return a list of possibilities for use with a PSU course (work with Brenda on this?)
share our needs assessment with TestOut (Craig Russon?)
discuss potential services

Bound by Law Comic Book

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:

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.html

It is a visual and entertaining presentation of copyright law. I tried reading certain sections and realized there is a lot of content here. This isn’t a comic book for an 11-year old. Well, I dunno, maybe it is. I prefer a lot of visuals when I’m learning about something and this delivery format is great for me in this regard. My biggest question at this point is, “how relevant is this information?”

An “OpenU” approach to course design

Before I start, I wanted to say that I’m going to take a different approach. I just posted an incomplete post to prove or remind myself that I can’t possibly cover all of the things that are going on. I’m having a hard enough time documenting what I do on an ongoing basis let alone add reflection to the work. At least I have what I am doing fairly well documented on my Google Site. So, my new approach isn’t to reflect on everything that has happened since my last post. I’m going to focus on one thing and try and build my skills there before considering something more expansive.

I don’t know much about The Open University in the UK, but we’re going to try an approach to developing courses that represents a significant shift for us here in World Campus Learning Design. Thankfully, I work with people who do understand what the Open University does and can help with understanding what and perhaps how we can use from their model.

The general approach that WCLD uses is based on a two-semester development time-frame. The basic idea is that if we want a course to launch in the Spring of ’12, we’ll start development in the Summer ’11 semester. One instructional designer will meet with one course author to develop and online course together. The author serves as the subject matter expert and is generally a faculty member selected by the academic-partner department head. The ID works with the author to provide pedagogical and design support. The ID is also a point-of-contact for numerous other resources like permissions, accessibility, multimedia, technical support, etc.

The big difference with this OpenU approach would be extending the development time to three months. The first month would be a brainstorming and planning session open to multiple ID’s and authors working on defining program-level design considerations. The second and third semesters would be used in a more traditional development tasks, however there would be differences how the ID’s and authors might collaborate during this time.

This is a fairly rough description of what we’re planning to do with WC Italian (IT) courses. I would be one of two ID’s, the other would be Juan Xia. Initially there would be three faculty members working together in the brainstorming session and then one would be selected as an author for each course. None of the faculty assignments are set yet, so we don’t know what that might look like.

I’m really looking forward to this approach. There are a number of reasons why this is potentially a great way to develop new courses in the future. First, I really like the idea of collaborating with another designer on a course. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, biases, perspectives, and styles. I don’t know Juan that well, but I’m sure we’ll get to know each other very well by the time this is over. Not only is she on a different design team, but she’s three time zones away! I would think this would be a great opportunity for her to feel more connected to the ebb and flow of daily life here in WCLD. She’ll bring to the table a very different set of competencies. Of course there will be challenges, but I think we’re the a great team to discover and work out potential bumps that the rest of the unit could benefit from.

Second, the brainstorming phase will potentially provide a unique chance to address faculty buy-in, faculty development, and explore a wide variety of solutions. I hope that we can get to the point where we can share inspirations from a variety of sources and define a strategy of offering innovative, world-class courses.

Lastly, I think we would be able develop higher quality courses for our learners because we’d be able to integrate support resources at the brainstorming stage and not during implementation. We’d be able to consider their ideas early enough when it would make a difference on the core design.

I’ll definitely be posting more about our progress and hang-ups.

MTSS Media Tech Expo

Just came back with Brian from the Tech Expo at the HUB. There were about 20-25 vendors showing their high tech array of resources and services.I spent time talking with four vendors, two of them with Brian. The ones Brian…

Just came back with Brian from the Tech Expo at the HUB. There were about 20-25 vendors showing their high tech array of resources and services.

I spent time talking with four vendors, two of them with Brian. The ones Brian and I saw were about video production and AMX-brand media controllers. I don’t remember the company that was showing off their integrated, network-oriented, production-class video capturing, transcoding, editing, streaming and publishing system. As you can imagine from the description, it was pretty freaking cool. The salient point I took away was that they were working on a system that was sensitive to:

multiple editing platforms under one roof
rapid digital video downloading from direct-capture video hard drives
flexible, end-user-selectable, exporting and publishing
simultaneous, network-based project workflow

The second vendor was AMX and Brian could really talk more about that visit. The one cool thing I took from there was that they have recognized the potential impact of the iPad and are developing an app that would allow you to control their switcher as an alternative to their pricey, proprietary controllers!

The place I spent most of my time was with AVRover.com, a vendor that has exclusive distributing rights over the OnFinity interactive whiteboard system. It takes the concept of a SMART Board to a new level. Being wand-based, one can now interact with projected content that is up to 12.5 feet! The hardware-software solution works with any app and was very responsive. It wasn’t cheap though: $863 and $2900 if you buy it integrated with a very well thought out portable projector, speaker system, full input and output panels and a secure shell that brought the system weight to 17 lb that fits in an included roller suitcase.

Given the price, the next vendor had a very interesting alternative: a wireless tablet. Simple and easy to use. I think they come in at under $300. The problem is, not every one is comfortable working with a tablet.

All-in-all a very interesting expo and worth the hour and a half we had to spend walking around. Now, we’ll have to cross our fingers about winning the door prizes 🙂

Google Analytics

I attended a Brown Bag Lunch seminar on Web Analytics this afternoon. The discussion covered the forming an next steps of this new community. Lots of their initial information can be found at the Google Analytics/Web Analytics User Community wiki. There is a website on Webstandards, Accessibility, and Usability at Penn State that the community wants to use for expanding on the topic of analytics. I have been wanting to try out analytics and took this opportunity to install analytics on my Tiddlywiki and this blog. I tried to do the same at Our.Outreach and the Fac Dev NING, but those sites kept stripping out the script necessary to track page visits. I still don’t have much of an idea of what I’m doing so I’ll have to train on the subject more from Google’s website.

This is the code for this blog:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-15285145-1”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”)); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-15285145-1”); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

How will Equella fit into my workflow?

We were asked to publish at least 10 objects into the Equella repository and it brought up a few questions for me:What level(s) of granularity are we supposed to publish? Let’s say that I have a custom graphic for a…

We were asked to publish at least 10 objects into the Equella repository and it brought up a few questions for me:

What level(s) of granularity are we supposed to publish? Let’s say that I have a custom graphic for a lesson. Do I publish the graphic, the graphic plus relevant content paragraphs, graphic, text and outcomes, the full lesson, the full unit, all of those discreet pieces? Let’s say that I publish the full unit… how does someone find just that custom graphic?
How are copyright issues handled? I would think: don’t even go there.
How should the content authors be involved with the metadata? I would say that they would be responsible for specific fields, but I’m sure that would be problematic. Many faculty don’t want to share their materials. There would be additional demands on the time line and task list as well.

I’m just not convinced that anyone would ever use the repository. It’s one of those things that sounds like a great idea, but doesn’t really work.

CE Faculty Profile

DRAFTLarry Ragan and I met with Kate Miffitt, an ID from Liberal Arts, the other day and he led a conversation that described the complexities surrounding the typical CE instructors. I wanted to try and capture as many of these…

DRAFT

Larry Ragan and I met with Kate Miffitt, an ID from Liberal Arts, the other day and he led a conversation that described the complexities surrounding the typical CE instructors. I wanted to try and capture as many of these attributes as possible. I’m still waiting on a key research document from Larry that is an important source of these factors.

Training – it is not clear when or how is the best way to provide CE faculty with training. Evenings seem to be a good time. Week days, working hours doesn’t work well for most. It’s important to have drinks and snacks budgeted and planned for these events.

All-faculty Summer Event – I’ve spoken to others and we have agreed that the past to events were probably not that effective in the sense that they were primarily talking-heads rather than interactive events. I can say this because I have been apart of the last two years as a presenter or co-presenter. It has been said that if the faculty will take the time out of their busy schedules to meet up at the BJC, then the event should be focused on their needs. They want opportunities to meet with other faculty to work out issues related to their courses.
New Faculty Orientation – I have not personally attended this event
Technology: ANGEL Orientation provided by WC Helpdesk
Weekend College Orientation – This session was run once with the help of Stephanie Edel-Malizia and featured Ike Shibley as a special guest to talk about blended learning.

Material Resources – limited

RI instructors may not receive the same level of resources for courses delivered outside of their own facilities or purview of their academic home
Adjunct instructors are limited from using PSU resources since they may not have PSU ID’s or the time to access them

Support

Technical
Instructional Design – currently only certain blended learning courses are being

Delivery methods

F2F
Blended Learning
Weekend College: Accelerated & Blended Learning
Polycom: Videoconferencing

Academic Partner and CE relationship – greatly varies depending upon the AP

CM2 MAX Portable Interactive Whiteboard System

El just id’d the product I was looking for! Thank you El!I had seen an article about this interesting USB portable projector. It sees an IR wand and uses that signal to allow users to interact with a projected computer…

El just id’d the product I was looking for! Thank you El!

I had seen an article about this interesting USB portable projector. It sees an IR wand and uses that signal to allow users to interact with a projected computer image similar to a SMART board. The big advantage is, you don’t need a special board and you aren’t limited to using a pen to write/interact with your computer content. This technology could be very useful in classrooms in ways the SMART board just couldn’t be.

I’m going to request one from next year’s budget so we can try it out for CE courses. It could be very useful for Dual Enrollment, math, science, and other f2f or blended learning courses.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what the pricing is and there’s only one distributor in the US. I’m waiting to hear back from Jim Cassin about pricing and availability.

What to consider when selecting a Photo-sharing service for your class?

An instructor recently contacted me about the option of using a photo-sharing service for her photography class with CE@UP. I don’t have a lot of details about the course and her expectations, but there are a few things to think…

uploading options
organization of the content
storage limits
bandwidth limits
view options: full-screen slideshows
sharing options
log-in requirements
visitor requirements
privacy and permissions
metadata options
service reliability
read the fine-print
Web 2.0 framework
service popularity
licensing options
statistics
printing options