Category Archives: conferences

Web 2009 Conference

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Wayfinding the Semantic Web


AD-54 Penn State policy will not be updated any time soon to require semantic metadata

instant history of the Web
  • web 1.0 – series of linked documents
  • web 2.0 – communications
  • web 3.0 – semantic web

purpose of semantic web – add meaning to Web documents

burners-lee – semantic web makes it possible for people and machines to understand web content
We all come into contact w/the semantic Web every day – Google is a good example when it comes up w/intelligent search results.
An Argument For Semantics
words can have different meanings in different contexts and depending on the bias of the observer – machines don’t have bias and can’t read context well
Question: can we pull non-sensitive enterprise data from a central source?
Semantics: meaning of words or symbols, become really useful when shared betw. individuals and w/in community
Keys – in the absence of meaningful identifiers, we invent a (usually numeric) key to unique data
Demonstration – Firefox add-on Operator. find and save events. Will have to work with it to see how it really works or is useful.
Code demonstration – possible implementations:
  • microformats – class attributes in CSS that are standard, can be parsed out, eg. class=”time”
  • metadata
  • xhtml attributes – 
  • RDF – THE language for presenting semantic info on the Web – it is essentially embedded in the html. WILL NOT VALIDATE. Creative Commons licensing is an example.
  • RDFa – embedded as attributes
  • Content management systems do a good job of handling semantic web aspects. They make it easy for developers but don’t “make” you do it. Recommend a person w/the role “final release editor”, someone w/a librarian mind.
Brian Panulla – get rid of the words semantic web! Moving from metadata to linked data
tagging is NOT the semantic web – too loose and open. can lead to good results w/enough tagging, but not good enough.
higher ed = walled gardens. leads to redundant data. relational databases are about structure and not data. convention may allow us to integrate data across systems, e.g. usps state code, campus 2-letter code. problem – ad hoc identifiers and multiple copies of same data in existence, e.g. college/campus name changes
New W3C language – OWL: Web Ontology Language
Semantic Web means essentially:
  • further the separation of content, presentation, behavior, logic
  • breaking down data silos

______________

Augmented reality
Current AR technology – GE smart grid
Mini automotive ad
topps 3d baseball cards
bmw augmented reality – example on youtube shows AR assisted car repair!!
AR island on Second Life – may be fun to explore
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TLT Symposium 2009

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Blogging – I largely focused on the Penn State Blogs in this year’s Symposium. I am looking at them in the context of their potential application in the iMBA program, and I see enormous potential for the platform, with many potential strengths and applications, including:

    • enabling reflections – blogging is a great way to allow in-depth reflection on a topic, increasing student retention and engagement.
    • enabling conversations – blogs can be easily aggregated into a single source, essentially allowing conversations to occur around a single topic or course.
    • student ownership of content – ANGEL supports discussion forums, chat and other forms of communication that can work in certain situations but ultimately do not give students ownership of their content. That carefully composed discussion forum posting or drop box submission that took a lot of thought and effort to create is essentially lost when the semester/term is over unless the student takes special effort to retain it.
    • portfolio – related to ownership of content, the concept of blog as portfolio has powerful implications. The Penn State Blog platform can be used to support so much more than just blogging; essentially a student can easily set up a whole Web site with a collection of artifacts (pictures, stories, etc.) related to him or herself. The portfolio can represent not only the students’ learning in the program but can include any learning or experiences that take place outside of the formal learning environment. Such an e-portfolio is a strong indicator to a potential employer of the depth of a person’s strengths and experiences.

The two sessions I went to related to blogging were entitled: Engaging Students with Program Learning Outcomes and ENGL 202C on the Blogs at Penn State Platform. I learned of real-life examples that support my thinking above. The Engaging Students session had students that were using their blogs in the context of a program experience and not just for isolated classwork. They were doing all the things I mentioned above for portfolio, but were also using them for reflections and conversations. The ENGL 202C students were able to share their writing with the class in a much more meaningful and engaging way.

I also attended a session on the future of textbooks in the digital age and a hands-on session on Adobe Connect. The textbook session gave a lot of food for thought about what’s in store for textbooks and what copyright means in the digital world. The Adobe Connect session gave me more hands-on practice with Connect and informed me of the detailed help page PSU has in place for the product – I intend to use this as a reference and source of ideas as I revise our own (World Campus) instructions for Elluminate Live.

Finally, the two keynotes with David Wiley and danah boyd were fantastic. All in all a tiring day but very well worth my time and as usual, gave me plenty of takeaways and food for thought.

Sharing my class work

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study.jpg

I’ve been rather quiet in the blogosphere of late. This is in no small part thanks to the class I’ve been taking, ADTED 532: Research in Distance Education. Yesterday was my last day of class, and I handed in my final paper entitled Becoming a Network Organization: An Extended Research Proposal. This paper is available on this blog, listed under Writings on the left-hand side of this page. I’ve also put up all the other writing I did for the class. I invite your perusal and comments. My intention is to eventually go back through ANGEL and retrieve all my class assignments for posting here. I want to share my work; I work really hard at it. And while the feedback and discussion I get from my classmates within the confines of ANGEL is absolutely invaluable, I’m interested in seeing what others might think. (I also feel more like I’m taking ownership of my work by collecting it here.)

By the way, ADTED 532 is the last graduate class I needed to earn the 18 credit Distance Education certificate. Hooray! Next I will be applying for formal admission into the Adult Education master’s degree program. Wish me luck.

2009 NMC Symposium on New Media and Learning

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Tomorrow and Thursday I will be attending the 2009 NMC Symposium on New Media and Learning. It is a virtual conference, with all sessions taking place in Second Life. I like to go into a conference by reviewing the sessions offered and defining my objectives for participation. What do I hope to learn, discover or take away from the conference?

The conference actually begins tonight with a reception and poster session at the NMC conference center in Second Life. I like poster sessions – it provides a nice informal opportunity to interact with the poster creators. The theme of the conference is New Media and Learning so I will be paying particular attention to education professionals like myself that are using Web 2.0, learning management systems, Second Life, etc. in innovative ways to support learning. The poster creators will be there to chat with.

The full conference begins tomorrow and there are several sessions I will be paying attention to. I’ll name a few, describe them briefly and give my reasons for being “all ears”, defining my objectives in italics.

  • Imagination Engine: Rapid Media Visualization and Storyboard Creation Process. Joe Tojek (or his avatar) from Capella University will be demonstrating the process and tools his intructional design team uses to brainstorm and plan new media projects and tools in support of learning. I’ll be looking for cues and ideas for how our IT and media shop can work better with the instructional designers to provide input and support as we move to using new technologies in our courses.
  • Digital Media Tools for Replacing Traditional Methods of Instruction. This session will look at Web 2.0 tools used in the support of collaborative learning, and will show how these tools enable us to go beyond traditional instruction. I’m assuming by “traditional instruction” the presenter intends to compare Web 2.0 – enhanced learning with both f2f and older distance learning models. I’ll be focusing particularly on how we can better support and provide scaffolding for learning in new environments such as wikis and blogs, and what new learning outcomes we can expect.
  • Going GaGa for Google: Using Google in Virtual Worlds. This session will show how Google tools such as Google Docs, Google Maps and YouTube can be “mashed up” with the virtual world experience to provide a highly textured learning experience (my words). My objective here is primarily for fun – there is an interactive component to this session and we’ll actually be building something! I will be paying attention to the possibilities for learning, too, of course. :-)
  • Dramatically Different: Strategies for Socially-Engaged Learning in Virtual
    Worlds.     This session will describe the use of virtual worlds for role-playing and active learning in support of learning in the drama/theatre arts area. This session will support a meta-objective for attending this conference; since the conference is taking place entirely in Second Life, I will be experiencing first hand its power in supporting learning.

There are many other sessions too numerous to mention that have caught my interest. I’m sure I’ll be refining my objectives and coming up with new ones as I meet new people and make new discoveries at the conference. I’ll be blogging my discoveries so stay tuned.

Declaring e-mail bankruptcy

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I’ve taken the plunge and have officially declared pre-emptive e-mail bankruptcy for the holidays. What this means is that I’ve set up a vacation auto-reply informing recipients that I “will not be checking or accumulating any e-mail” until January 1st. I simply do not want to get back to a mountain of e-mail that I then have to spend a good deal of time manually filtering (I don’t use any auto-filters, as I prefer to take time to reply to or file e-mails one by one). I enjoy the work I do quite a bit, and take pride in the fact that I do a quality job. Thus, the prospect of jumping right back into my projects right after break, as opposed to spending a lot of time filtering e-mail, is quite appealing to me.

The idea of declaring pre-emptive e-mail bankruptcy is not an original one of mine. It’s been discussed around the blogosphere as one way of managing stress and information overload. Two of the blogs I follow – Tim Ferriss’ and Danah Boyd’s, advocate for different forms of e-mail bankruptcy. Declaring e-mail bankruptcy pre-emptively seems to me a way of handling things honestly and responsibly. Better to declare ahead of time that communications might be lost than to find oneself in the situation of coming back from a long absence, being overwhelmed with a bloated inbox, and accidentally deleting communications that might be important.

We’ll see how this experiment goes. I hope no one gets upset with me. The real test will come, I suppose, when I try this experiment during vacation time. Folks might understand my doing this over the holidays, or will likely not even be aware of it, but on a personal vacation where others are actually working, there might be a possibility of stepping on some toes. In that case, it might be wise to inform stakeholders well ahead of time and make very clear what my intentions are. I’ll still want to consider it, though, for the sake of my own sanity and productivity.

Best wishes for the holidays, everyone. Stay safe and I’ll see you in the new year!

Nose to the grindstone

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It’s been nearly two months since I’ve last published here, dear reader (continuing in the “confession” theme of this blog). Needless to say I’ve been quite busy. On October 1st I officially started my new position of IT Consultant with the World Campus and almost immediately saw my workload intensify. Lots of exciting things, though. In addition to working on technology projects related to our courses, something I had been involved with to some degree for some time, my work now includes the training and teaching of new and current staff on our systems and processes, as well as improving some of those systems, like Quickbase, our project management system (another confession: I’m a project management geek).

I’ve also been continuing with my classwork. Working on a team paper right now which is no easy task. Luckily, I was able to introduce Google Docs to my teammates and they’ve taken to it quite well. Working on a shared document online has significantly reduced the time and stress of passing a document around for edits. I’ve shared this information with the course instructional designer, and she plans to introduce it (Google Docs) program-wide next semester as part of the “tool kit” for students to consider. I also have an individual final paper due in less than two weeks!

Blogging in the classroom

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I am currently in the thick of my participation in ADTED 498A, Teaching Adults Responsibly, another required course in the Adult Education program at Penn State. Recently I had a conversation with the course instructional designer in which I shared some of my reflections on how the class was going.

A bit of background – the class, as designed, is presented as a series of readings accompanied by a course syllabus. Grading is based on class participation as well as a series of essays which provide an opportunity to reflect on our own real-life teaching experience. What the class lacks is content – a guided, well designed path that describes our learning goals and weekly activities in depth. Essentially the hand of the instructional designer has been tied. The instructor’s hand has been tied as well, in the sense that she is teaching a class that has been “designed” by another faculty member.

The class instructional designer mentioned in our conversation that she had been trying to convince the new instructor to start a blog as a way of supplementing the course materials. I thought it was a fantastic idea when I heard it, and the more I think about it, the more I think it is a great idea, not just in this class, but for any teacher who wishes to provide a more motivating and enriching class experience. It gives a venue for class communications that provides a twofold purpose:

  1.  It keeps the class “alive” as it were, providing a tempo and a personality as well as learning enrichment, important considerations especially when teaching learners at a distance.
  2. Blogging’s inherent informality takes some of the pressure off both the faculty and the students. Our blogging platform at Penn State is separate from the LMS, and this is a good thing. Faculty can be expressive and engaging without, say, having to post a formal announcement in the course LMS, where meanings and intentions might be examined more closely and are more likely to cause anxiety in the learners.

These are my initial thoughts. Any others?

Class reflections: Past, present and future

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I would like to use this post as a platform to reflect on the learning opportunities I’ve engaged in the past few months, as well as learning opportunities on the horizon.

Last spring I took EDTEC 449: Video and Hypermedia in the Classroom through the World Campus. I learned a lot about video I never knew before, both technically and (dare I use the word) pedagogically. By that I mean I learned that video adds another dimension to the learning experience, appeals to different learning styles, and is often a very appropriate means of conveying complex concepts. I’m not a big fan of the “talking head” videos, and I don’t know many that are. It’s a bit of a snooze to have to engage the eyes in a medium that is flat, often poorly filmed and poorly planned, when the same information can be conveyed just as easily through text and/or an audio podcast. Great course and I am much the wiser for having taken it. :-)

Over the summer I’ve attended a few conferences and presented at two of them – the Hendrick Adult Learner conference and Web 2008. They were both worthwhile experiences, as was this year’s Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) conference. I’ve also engaged in decidedly less formal learning opportunities, such as my ever-increasing breadth of rss feeds, twitter friends, and conversations with colleagues and teammates. Summer is always nice. I will miss it though I look forward to my favorite season, fall. And fall, gentle readers, means back to school.

Two learning opportunities with different degrees of formality will be in the picture for me this fall. One is another class I am taking for credit, ADTED 498A, Teaching Adults Responsibly. Sounds onerous but doable. Though I’m sure my thinking on that premise will be shaken up, down, and all around by the time the semester’s through. The teacher of the course has already promised that we’ve “signed on for an adventure.” I’m sure it will be challenging. The other course I’m taking informally (though it follows a decidedly formal structure and can be taken for credit) is called “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” and is moderated (taught) by George Siemens and Stephen Downes: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism. We’ll see how well I do keeping up with that one. I hope to participate as much as possible, whether as the proverbial “fly on the wall” just observing the conversations or indeed as an active participant.

Wish me luck.

New Title

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A couple of days ago, I decided to give this blog a new title. “Natalie’s Blog,” while certainly appropriate given that, well, it’s my blog, never seemed really creative enough. I wanted a title that was creative and reflected the overall theme of my postings, or that reflected my overall approach to this thing called blogging. Well, as it so happens, a few days ago I started making a list of all the social networking-orientated Web services that I either actively participate in or have signed up for at one time but have since given up the ghost. I realized just how overwhelming this list really is. I highly recommend this exercise if you are at all curious about the extent of your own online presence.

My thinking has evolved lately around just why I am intimidated by the prospect of having too ubiquitous of an online presence. For one thing, I am a bit of an introvert in the online environment (see my Twitter as Public Brainstorming post). I am not an advocate for “keeping all your eggs in one basket,” so to speak, when it comes to online networking vs. private life. I do recognize that there’s probably no looking back in today’s global environment in terms of the necessity of maintaining an online presence and of nurturing healthy connections with others through this medium. But I am also an advocate for simplicity – ultimately, I believe that technology should not feel like technology, it should just be a natural part of our lives (and of course, in my field, a natural part of teaching and learning). Services like Twitter and Flickr truly fit this model – they have a singular purpose and a low barrier to entry. LinkedIn and Facebook, while more complex and revealing of personal information, are so ubiquitious that to not join them is to miss out on positive networking opportunities (not to mention both have privacy controls that are somewhat reassuring). So I guess the two questions I ask myself when I consider a new service and adding to my social networking list are:

  1. Is it simple to use or will it require an investment of time and effort to get up and running in the new environment?
  2. Does it fill some need of mine that is not being met very well by some other service or method I use to stay connected?

If something fails the simplicity test, then it better meet the needs test or I’ll likely pass on the service for now. Not to say that I wouldn’t reconsider in the future – I am flexible like that. But for now, the executive decision is a no-go.

That brings me to what I hope will be the last point I make in this post. A change that I have had to make in my own modus operandi in this uber-connected world is that I’ve had to learn to not be afraid to hurt other people’s feelings. If you invite me to join you on some new social networking service, and I don’t take you up right away, it’s not you, it’s me. I have a lot of respect for my colleagues and friends who are willing to be pioneers and try these new things. And I am honored to be thought of along the way.

Thoughts are welcomed and encouraged.

University culture and innovation

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The latest entry on David Wiley’s blog “iterating toward openness” points to the accrediting bodies as a possible culprit behind the stifling of innovation within the university culture. I like the analogy he uses, likening a school that might buck the accrediting behemoths to Martin Luther breaking from the Catholic Church (sacrilege as that might be to my own Catholic upbringing). Though I’ve never considered the accrediting agencies as stiflers of innovation before, other culprits have come to mind – lawmakers, corporations providing research funding, helicopter parents, etc. Food for thought, read what David has to say if you get the chance:

http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/505