WCLD Portfolio Pilot – Kent Matsueda

Talking about ePortfolios

Notes from Clay Shirky’s TED talkWhat is an/my online identity?before: “pick [content] then publish” -> now: “publish then [others] pick [what they want from your content”example: gnarlykitty is a blogger in Thailand who covered the coup; she made the case…

Notes from Clay Shirky’s TED talk

What is an/my online identity?
before: “pick [content] then publish” -> now: “publish then [others] pick [what they want from your content”
example: gnarlykitty is a blogger in Thailand who covered the coup; she made the case that bloggers are independent, influential, and cannot be coerced
is reverse chronological ordering/tagging limiting?
portfolios are about crafting the presentation
what does it mean to have a personal archive?
ideas -> solutions, we need lots of ideas, even if they are half baked and even wrong

Notes from ePorfolio Pilot wrap-up

collect, reflect, select, and present
what takes the whole picture? context!
about your audience: be selfish, it’s ok, but is it really for me, my team?
audience will be asking, what’s the info i need?
we’re talking about thought put into action
check out chris long’s blog post on curating activities
save your stuff in a place that cares about you and won’t go away
artifacts: publications, presentations, categories, content

Reflections on Immersive Environments Webinar

Alicia Swaggerty let me know about this webinar last week and I captured the event and posted it in YouTube. It’s an hour long, so I’ll share my take-aways:VenueGen is going after the corporate marketIE’s are more engaging than…

Alicia Swaggerty let me know about this webinar last week and I captured the event and posted it in YouTube. It’s an hour long, so I’ll share my take-aways:

VenueGen is going after the corporate market
IE’s are more engaging than ELive or Connect Pro webinars
this particular engine allows for avatar customization to more closely represent your real-world self because they value that over fantasy projections
this interface makes affective interaction easier than Second Life, though there are specific skills and competencies that moderators and students alike would need to master
the cost structure is most likely significant based on the tone of the presenters
I would be interested in doing research based on using this tool as a replacement for live events that have a far reaching impact (for example, non-credit professional development events for PA educators)

2011 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium: Clay Shirky

This past weekend, I attended my second TLT Symposium. The keynote was Clay Shirky. He was very well received.One of the reasons he impressed me was how well constructed his presentation was. He’s obviously been thinking about these topics for…

This past weekend, I attended my second TLT Symposium. The keynote was Clay Shirky. He was very well received.

One of the reasons he impressed me was how well constructed his presentation was. He’s obviously been thinking about these topics for a long time in a lot of detail.

I did a tweet search from the event and you can find the start of the keynote at: http://bit.ly/gkbW2X

I really wish I took notes at the beginning of his presentation. He mentioned three dynamics that are having an effect in social media today.

He began talking about the individual vs. group I believe. He used the example of Ryerson College vs. a student, Chris Avenir who used Facebook to create a study group (http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/309855). It was an example of how antiquated, traditional, institutional oxymorons collide. In the past institutions could broadcast one message, but institute a different code of conduct within their walls. From Ryerson’s perspective, Avenir was using Facebook to cheat. From Avenir’s perspective, they were use Facebook as a virtual study hall. Clay lamented that the settlement was undisclosed. However he was interested in something that wasn’t argued or addressed by the university: given that there were 146 members of this virtual study group, how could anyone regulate the participation? Clay used this as a segue into his next point:

Participation drops off in a power scale and is more dramatic in large groups. He used the Pluto page in Wikipedia as an example (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pluto&action=history). There are over 2,500 contributors to that page, but a disproportionate amount of those edits were made by a relative few and one in particular. Clay said this pattern appears with any example of group participation. The only pedagogical solution was to use small groups for those types of activities.

Clay then warned that our institutions do not reflect the reality of the greater world that we are a part of. He used the Library of Congress to make his point. We are segmenting our knowledge based on the size of a book shelf. Looking at the “D’s” for example (http://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/classification/lcco/lcco_d.pdf), we see some familar countries at the top of the list, but then it lumps Asia and Africa into the same heirarchtical level as the “Romanies” and “Great Britain.”

He concluded with a final example of all three dynamics at play. I have to admit that I kind of lost Clay here. He talked about a mathematical proof N=NP or N≠NP or something like that. The point of his example was that modern publishers ~~didn’t want to~~ couldn’t accept research that had an undefined pool of authors. There were other points he made, but it was an interesting look at how social media is changing and how if our institutions don’t change as well, we’ll be left behind and literally become extinct.

I’ve been reading his latest book: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010) and he talks about how the sitcom has supplanted our free time with enormous amounts of consumption. He claims that the US watches 200 billion hours of TV a year. By comparison, all of wikipedia has taken 100 million hours to develop-that’s equal to how many commercials we watch on TV in a single weekend!

Clay observes that people are social and want to share. TV has displaced the balance between consuming, creating and sharing. The internet and social media has changed the options people have and they are exercising that potential in very new ways.

Going back to the keynote, Clay mentioned a few other interesting points that I don’t really know how to weave into a recollection of his presentation, but even on their own, they are very interesting to think about.

Serious people do silly things and silly people do serious things. His examples were that for every wikipedia, there are a thousand lolcats. People have been using technology to do all sorts of benign and silly things. So much so, that we all ask “who has time to do that?” about almost anything we don’t understand or relate to. Clay used the example of gnarlykitty, a freelance lifestyle writer. She is known for her act of journalism around the relatively recent coup in Thailand. She has an interesting blog post reflecting back on some of her own work (http://gnarlykitty.org/?s=coup). This was an example that we are interacting in ways that traditional media outlets won’t and can’t function. This was an example of what is happening and will continue to grow.

People have to make things happen with the technology we have to support our social values. This kind of goes back to the people will do silly things comment earlier. Clay pointed out that once we had the printing press, people began to publish erotica. It took something like 150 years before the first scientific journal was published. We have to work in a concerted effort to use these tools to support our values.

In the question and answer period, Clay closed with a statement that we should try lots of smaller ideas and avoid the dogma of developing that one big perfect plan or vision. His point was that projects like wikipedia and linux began with very modest calls of action. We never know where the next big idea will come from, but people like Clay are helping us to understand how to best cultivate that potential.

As you can imagine, I’m still just processing the raw data. I’m not sure what all of this means for me, my team, my unit, my organization, my school. But, I kinda don’t have to worry about all of that. The best thing to do is to tear off a small piece, try it out, chuck it if it doesn’t stick and run with anything that looks good.

One of the initial things I’m thinking about is the relationship between cognitive surplus and work. Most of Clay’s examples were extra-curricular. They weren’t related to the workplace. Our bosses can’t make us use our free time to think about work. That statement doesn’t even make sense from Clay’s perspective (not that I can speak for him). Some questions I had about this are:

How do these ideas impact developing our workforce?
What do I do in my free time that has a greater impact? How am I spending my free time? I have an idea, but how skewed is it based on my subjectiveness and sheer ability to recall. Keep in mind that my daughter just turned one-year old and I still don’t feel like I’m getting enough sleep. David Norloff was the first to warn me that won’t change much as she grows older 🙂
How can we foster a culture that ~~acknowledges~~ encourages our innate urges to share and socialize? What kinds of other tensions do these ideas draw out between workplace paradigms?
Who would be eligible for contributing to the cognitive surplus? Better stated, how can we, as a country, better use and develop our cognitive surplus? Frankly, I look around the world and see a lot of things that would lead me to believe there’s a cognitive deficit, but I know that Clay isn’t making a value statement as much as drawing our attention to a latent potential that is shaking up the norm and will likely be a growing trend and that it’s really up to us.

I’m sure there are many more questions I want to explore. I’ll have to add them as I go along.

I have an interesting opportunity coming up with a new online Italian series of courses. I think we might be able to use many of these ideas in how we approach things.

How can you best use your cognitive surplus?

Ravi has also blogged about the topic.

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.

A look back at February

It’s been a long month. I really wanted to do weekly reflections, but that just didn’t work out. This post roughly covers topics since my last post, but kind of covers the last 30 days.SPAN 001-003 RevisionsAssessment FeedbackDifferences between SPAN…

It’s been a long month. I really wanted to do weekly reflections, but that just didn’t work out. This post roughly covers topics since my last post, but kind of covers the last 30 days.

SPAN 001-003 Revisions

Assessment Feedback

Differences between SPAN 001 and 003

Roll-over Templates

Audio Files in Assessments

New Instructors don’t touch courses

fixed gradebook

Release Dates and Grades, Early Progress Reports

Editing PDF’s

Fixing Flashcards

M&LD

Deafblind canceled

OL2000 finishes

TLT Videos

ALA Logistics and Planning for March Session

Budget

Gathering Content and Storyboarding

Draft

Future action plan based on these reflections?

Take a big breath when working on Spanish. We’ve done an incredible amount of work. Patty has assisted me with the majority of our 110 individual tasks since we began tracking them and that list isn’t fully comprehensive.

A “long” look back

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.

I’m not saying I haven’t done anything. On the contrary, this pilot helped me to develop a GoogleSite that is able to capture almost everything I need for work.

This ePortfolio still has a place for reflection. Frankly, it still seems a little forced since my GoogleSite is more than capable of handling reflective pieces. In fact I could argue that writing my reflections directly in my GoogleSite makes more sense because I have all of the project information there as well. I am going to try to keep my reflections and mention artifacts here, at least until the end of the pilot.

This week has been, yet another. busy one. I started the week off on Sunday, trying to work on my idea for a game engine that I’ve affectionately been calling Otaku. I had a meeting on Monday with Cece Merkel and Tom Wilson to explore this as a potential idea for an M&LD proposal. I wanted to get their feedback whether it would be worth the time. They were both interested in the project and Tom had some great feedback about defining the gameplay of the events more clearly. I had a separate discussion with Dean Blackstock about my project idea and realized that I have a lot of work to do on communicating my ideas more clearly. I have them in my head, but still need to get them down on paper. Dean had a great suggestion to follow through with scenarios that clearly share a narrative about how the game engine might be used in various contexts. El sent me an email later in the week that Rick was aware of my potential proposal and is interested in calling a larger meeting to talk about the game engine and another proposal I had for a voice recognition engine.

My Spanish portfolio continues to demand a lot of my attention. I’m still getting requests to fix elements in the course. One of which was particularly confusing since our student was clearly having problems with a quiz, but we weren’t able to recreate the problem. I’m also working to improve my relationships and communication channels with the instructors. I sat down and met Susana for the first time yesterday and had a wonderful lunch with her. The newest thing I’m trying out is a VoiceThread for our faculty that I hope to keep up with every month. It still in draft, but I’ll post a finalized version when it’s ready.

OL2000 started this week and I got a good start in the class, but still have to get in there to finish this week’s assignments and meet more of my class. Two instructors I am supporting are in the class with me, so that’s very cool. I love to see instructors taking the initiative to expand their horizons. I hope to teach OL2000 again soon. It’s a great experience.

I’ve got a lot do to this upcoming week. Most of it has to do with preparing the SPAN faculty for SU ’11.

Reflecting on reflecting

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…

what are my artifacts

presentations
screencasts
lessons learned
ANGEL tricks
cool ideas – deafblind inventions
a blog-report from an event
article [sketch] and technology reviews / synopsis (see Jamie’s work)

What’s the relationships between artifacts and a narrative?
who’s my audience

El
Rick
Blue
WCLD
WC
Outreach
PSU
External

new found motivation: jin & jaroflife.swf
reflect back on how this ties into srdp
how can i keep a reusable / repurposing attitude to creating posts?
relationship between this and my GoogleSite

Using Multiple Identities in VoiceThread

This screencast covers how we can use one Pro account with VoiceThread and multiple identities to create our own threads to share….

This screencast covers how we can use one Pro account with VoiceThread and multiple identities to create our own threads to share.

A tough time for Outreach

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–>

Conference Report: Madison DE ’10

–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.