I am really starting to enjoy seeing things like this. Stanford has joined the party and started using iTunes for content distribution. It is a very cool project … there are several of these out there. I spent an hour or so talking with some of the folks from U Mich during Educause — specifically in one of the Apple Digital Campus Podcasts (Subscribe via iTunes) — about how they are using it as well. What blows my mind is how this product (iTunes) wasn’t really built for this, but over time Apple has really listened to its education customers and realized just how powerful the iTunes environment really is. I mean, if you get right down to it, eEducation is a whole hell of a lot like eBusiness — transactional, relies on scalable infrastructure, and the notions of community. At any rate, these are good stories.
Learning
The New iPod … Are We There Yet?
I haven’t really been spending much time writing about stuff Apple releases … tons of other people do that — and do it much better than I. At any rate, I listened like everyone else to Steve telling us over and over again that we didn’t want a video capable iPod … then, he told us we did need one and gave us one — all in the same day.
I have to say that now that I see it, I am impressed with it. You can go read all the tech specs yourself, but what is really important here is that opens another set of opportunities for teaching and learning. I have said it before that you cannot walk across campus and not see every other student with white ear buds. Granted these aren’t yet video iPods, but it won’t be long. When that starts to happen, I can go from podcaster to videocaster and actually show my students a thing or two. On the flip side, they can do the same. By using the class blog, RSS enclosures, a video assignment, and a subscription I can now auto receive their work, watch it while I walk (or eat lunch, or whatever), and use the rating system to grade it. I do like it.
I can see this having a potential impact on hybrid/blended class and pure distance education classes … shipping assignments via a cross platform application like iTUnes (or a web site) and allowing students to download portable lessons on the fly. I don’t know about you, but I have seen very slcik Keynote presentation that have been turned into killer voice-overed QuickTime files that do a great job of teaching. I know there are things like Breeze out there, but the ability to quickly produce a learning experience that is filled with video, audio, and stills is interesting. It is actually getting close to the enclosure bundle concept. At any rate, here is hoping there is some killer context for the next great thing. BTW, I need one.
The EDU Bar Talk Podcast
I’ve been doing podcasts for quite some time … I had a podcast called From the Basement for close to 8 months last year … it was myself and several guys from the Solutions Institute sitting around having a few drinks talking about various items. It just got out of hand, so we sort of disbanded.
This week I got some very smart people from PSU together to sit down and try again. This time we went to the Nittany Lion Inn, setup our gear, and did a way too long podcast. It is about education, technology, beer, life, you name it … it is long, but you might find some of it interesting. Check it out! It features Cole Camplese, Chris Millet, Kyle Peck, and Brian Smith.
This first one was really a dry run and more to show the participants how easy it is to get lost in beer and talk. Great fun and we are working on a format that will really be great. For now, we are calling it the EDU Bar Talk podcast … sort of a rip off of the great Car Talk radio show. At any rate, go ahead and have a listen. We will probably be moving it to its own server soon, but for now jump over to the old FTB site and check it out.
The Sloan Semester
In the face of devastation, I am thrilled to see what is going on here … the Sloan Foundation is encouraging Universities to participate in the Sloan Semester. An eight week, accelerated semester offered free online to students from impacted Universities in the south from Katrina. This is the kind of stuff that makes me so proud to be a part of higher education … I could keep rambling about the program, but here is the intro paragraph from the press release:
The Sloan Consortium, an international association of colleges and universities committed to quality online education, is offering students displaced by Hurricane Katrina an opportunity to continue their education at no cost. In collaboration with the Southern Regional Education Board and with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the special accelerated program will provide a wide range of courses to serve the learning needs of students at the community college, university and graduate level, regardless of academic discipline. These courses will be given by major universities and other Sloan Consortium members. Students interested in finding out more about the program and the free courses can do so beginning Sunday September 4, 2005 at www.SloanSemester.org.
All I can say is that I hope Penn State is somehow involved in this. Our World Campus has some of the best eLearning opportunities out there and could really make a difference. I read that 40 schools have expressed interest in being part of the program to supply courses. Sounds like a good thing to me. If anyone needs an instructor to teach anything I know anything about, come get me … I’ll do it! This is why we build this stuff … to reach those who can’t get to campus otherwise. Makes me proud.
First Day of Class
Last night was the first day of class … we actually did a ton of stuff for the first day thing. I am sorry my posts have been few and far between — and completely focused on the course, but I have been working at trying some very different things this semester, so its been like designing a course from the ground up.
At any rate, the students all did hands on stuff — we got bloglines accounts, setup del.icio.us accounts for everyone (decided on a class tag), and they got into the blogs@110 and posted their first post. We went over how to subscribe to feeds and how to create custom ones in the blogs … I think a good majority got it and may even use some of this stuff all semester. I’ll be posting thoughts about the course and the progress here from time to time … I will also try to get back to writing about other stuff on a regular basis, but for now I will be posting over at the blogs@110.
Social Bookmarking … In Courseware?
I was spending some time with one of my colleagues here today, Bill Rose, discussing social bookmarking. He hadn’t heard of the concept and we were just discussing the basics … I showed him how de.licio.us works and he got excited … we kept talking and we started to wonder if we could really put it into place for our Online IST courses. If we could add an open source social bookmarking tool (know any good ones?) as service within our Edison Services toolset and let students click a simple “remember this” link on any page of a course and bookmark it. From there, they could do the simple tagging that goes along with this stuff — that makes sense to them. That could lead to all sorts of good things — shared resources, note-taking capabilities, and so much more.
After doing some quick google work I did find one open source tool, de.lirio.us based on the Rubric framework. I can’t figure out how to get it running, but when Millet gets back from the Gathering of the Vibes festival his non-profit, helpingmusic.org is assisting with this will be sitting on his plate. Does anyone out there have any ideas on how we could make this work? And any good ideas for lessons built around a semester long tagging exercise? One thing I was thinking at the minimum was having all my students this fall get an account and tag resources with the course number (110) and do weekly peer reviews of each other’s links. Just some thoughts I didn’t want to misplace. Any other ideas or pointers for me?
Update: I got an open source tool, scuttle running. Take a look, create, an account, and drop a few bookmarks (with tags) in so I can see how this will play out. Jump over. Thanks!
The Enclosure Bundle
I may have written about this in the past, but I thought it was timely after just reading a nice piece called the Podcast Theory Gap by Susan Smith Nash … it got me thinking again about podcasting and what I will be doing this fall. I also just listened to Lessig’s Free Culture talk from OSCON 2002 again and re-realized how powerful well designed mixed-media (dare I say multimedia?) pieces can be if done well.
What I am planning to do is create a series of Enclosure Bundles throughout the semester. The concept of the bundle is to place an audio file, a PDF of a case, some slides, an assignment, and other items into a package, zip it up and deliver it via RSS. The pieces will add up to some sort of educational experience that I am hoping will provide some level of educational value. My students last fall weren’t really into the podcast thing (here is a link to when I introduced it to them), but I have a feeling if I can bring some more depth to my enclosures, they will enjoy them. Hey, they might even learn something. Has anyone been doing this?
Can you Brand Learning?
When we started the Online IST project it was just a course, a set of resources, and a vision (and a collection of courses to come). It wasn’t called Online IST, I was doing what everyone else does, “This is IST 110, but for the web.†As it started to grow and we were thinking about how to get the entire faculty in our system to use the courses I wanted a way to market the whole initiative. I had come from the commercial eTraining world; so the concept was to build each course as if it were a product within a specific line … I wanted a brand name. A brand name gave us something we could all easily use to discuss all the pieces of the puzzle that makes up our version of an eLearning course — the course pages, a communication space, a roadmap, support tools, resources, etc … without a central brand I didn’t think we could mount a marketing effort. I know that sounds strange, but that’s what was going on – marketing to build utilization and adoption.
Now if you look at learning resources/materials/objects as products, you have to think that we’ve finally arrived at this point where we have access to an almost overwhelming amount of content. Some content is free, while other stuff is locked down behind authenticated walls, and others still are available from a ton of commercial vendors. It is interesting to me that we have gotten to the point where there is actually as much choice for learning materials as there is for products that sit on the shelves at Target, Wal-Mart, and in a virtual sense Amazon.com. It seems though what we are lacking is a mechanism for powerful brand recognition … is a brand in a name or the quality … or both? And whose name matters? In my case, I chose to brand around the school in which we were building the materials for (Online IST) … or is a particular faculty member who is extremely well respected in a field a good source for a brand? Is it the University — Phoenix, PSU World Campus?
I was reading a great post over at one of my favorite blogs this morning, The Long Tail, called Brands: Think people, not products. One line that really struck me is, “the changing role of brands in an era of empowered consumers.” What got me is how savvy our students have become — savvy consumers of education if you will. What that is telling me is that we — the so called innovators in this space — really need to take the next step with our design, our environments, our ability to integrate the social components of learning, and build some seriously strong learning brands that our consumers demand
I’ve always thought that eLearning/eEducation should be powered by strong eCommerce models … it is more true now than ever. If you think of the transactional nature of learning and compare it to business it is so similar it is amazing … it really has me thinking again about how learning objects could be treated as products and take advantage of the tricks marketers use to get us to buy (in the learning world, I’ve called it adopt) — think in the e-sense what that is … ratings, people who bought this also bought this, user feedback, etc. All of this works by the way. Is it fair to say adoption of eLearning materials, methodologies, pedagogy, etc really is a matter of solid branding and marketing? Maybe, I’d like to know what you think … oh, by the way, it doesn’t hurt to have world class people behind it all.
Just some morning thoughts while listening to my favorite jazz … by the way its the people, not the products that I buy to listen to.