It's the simple things that get you

Now that I can finally come up for air from my course (which took far more prep time than I had anticipated) I remember why I like to be a luddite in the classroom much of the time.  

1. Getting web video to work is always a hit and miss thing.  I found some great, obscure stuff and always managed to get it to work, but it took constant checking, codec downloads and the fanatical will not to use anything but IE for video.  Add to that the fun of watching screensavers start up in the middle of a movie...
2. Cross compatibility between Macs and PCs is still horrible.  There's nothing like watching a student try to figure out why their nice PPT suddenly has no images when they put it up on the screen in class.  
3. I put the vast majority of my readings up on electronic reserve in Angel, in part to save paper, in part to save money and in part to save my butt since I rare knew what the reading would be a week ahead of time.  Those students who read them just printed them out anyway- paper would have probably been better.

Of course, lower tech stuff fails too- I never had much luck converting malachite to copper as a class demo, and that process has been around for 4000 years...

An expert Wikipedia?

Wired posted an article today on Google's latest new thing: Knol, a Wikipedia-alike with the twist that the articles are written by a single, named individual (presumably an expert) and subject only to expert moderation after that point. As an added wrinkle, if the author wants they can get ad revenue from their site if it gets hit often enough.

I have to admit I have no idea if this will go anywhere at all. If removes by far the best part of Wikipedia: that anyone can author or edit an article. This is the reason that Wikipedia has articles on virtually every topic you could ever want to read, often with copious references and a fairly decent stab at a neutral point of view. Get someone with some specialized knowledge on an obscure topic: bingo, another article!

If also removes by far the worst part of Wikipedia: that anyone can author or edit an article. The competence and neutrality of Wikipedia's editors have been challenged time and time again, as anyone who watches the Colbert Report will note. There has been a lot of discussion about the regression to mediocrity in Wikipedia articles written by true experts followed by tons of "helpful" edits by people who don't understand the topic anywhere near as well as they think.

Right now there don't seem to be a huge number of Knols (understandable since it just launched) and those that are there seem to be mostly health related. This is actually an area where other-than-Wikipedia web sites do fairly well- the featured Knol is on Type 1 Diabetes, which is great except that there are at least a dozen other sites out there with similar information. The others seem to be random bits like how to make pancakes- the areas where true experts could chime in (hard sciences especially) don't seem to be very populated.

Given that many modern student's first resort for research is Wikipedia, any additional site with quality information will be welcomed. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like Wikiepedia, which is often also the *last* place students look for research.

Are online journals damaging science?

There's a fascinating and disturbing article in Science this week. A sociologist at the University of Chicago has looked at citation patterns before and after the growth of full-text online databases and search engines. You'd think that with the enormous growth in the number of accessible journals and powerful search tools that you'd see an enormous growth in the breadth and depth of the citation lists of articles. In fact, it appears that the reverse is occuring: journals from the electronic era cite references that are overall newer than before, and the total number of articles in a specific journal that get any references at all from other articles just plummets. People can get the articles they want, but it appears that the tools are making them narrow their finds.

I'm not at all surprised at the first- i remember back in grad school when I first started using INSPEC and noting how often I would get articles from 1984-> but not before. Gee, that's when INSPEC's database started- it was so much easier to use it than to dig through paper I ended up only using the articles it gave me, and once in a while digging through a reference chain.

The latter effect is both less obvious and more disturbing. Evans estimates that 5 more years of online availability will cut the overall number of cited articles in that journal from 600 to 200. People may be citing more, but they are all citing the same articles and leaving the rest to gather dust. Why this is is unclear- perhaps losing the browsing inherent in searching a paper journal loses the "Hmm, What's this other article about" bit, or perhaps those 200 articles are just better keyworded or indexed than the others. In any case it implies that scientific consensus will happen quicker- sadly because everyone's reading the same articles, not because they are looking at lots of different ones.

Given that nobody in their right mind is going back to the good old days without search engines and full text databases, how do we deal with this problem?

What's wrong with good old fashioned drudgery?

Looking over the recent EDUCAUSE report on the future of the learning management system (LMS) and the trend towards the personalized learning environment (PLE) as shown in one of the references, I had to note some comments about current generations of LMSes (or virtual learning environments to get in another acronym). They are derided as confining, creativity-stifling, professor controlled and too tightly bound to the basic "X students will take Y course in Z semester" model. They're mostly used for basic course logistics like posting syllabi and class notes, doing basic practice testing, collecting and redistributing student work and other routine, boring operations. Not so the new, sexy PLE, made up of a conglomerate of free Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and photo/video sharing sites that will allow students to collaborate, share and innovate, free from the artificial structures embedded in current LMSs like Blackboard or Moodle.

Umm, yeah. LMSes *are* primarily used as course coordination tools, usually in large lecture classes. They aren't used very much in small seminars since they are confining and not great tools for open discussion and collaboration unless you have special needs like geographically scattered students. Now, why is this bad?

Perhaps it's my background in physical science. Basic low level physical science courses like Chem101 generally are pretty similar everywhere- larger lecture based classes with grades based on tests, quizzes and homework. Collaboration? Innovation? Not so much- at this level students are busy with learning Things They Need to Know. There's a huge number of students per faculty member, so the kind of personal contact needed for serious project work simply isn't available. (Well, it is: it's called lab. This is something that will *never* be replaced by any form of virtual environment. Students need to learn that experiments fail and that things can hurt if you don't pay attention.) Perhaps your class is small enough you can do a few simple things -Teaching summer community college Chem 101 courses actually allowed this since the class size was small- but for the most part there's not a lot of discussion around PV=nRT. And yes, there is an asymmetry in the power structure of an LMS: that's because there's a knowledge asymmetry in the course in the first place. The students aren't there to discuss the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics-they are there because the professor understands it and they don't. By the end of the course hopefully that knowledge asymmetry is gone, but until then the best input students can give in this process is by asking intelligent questions. (And believe me, any decent professor *loves* getting a question that shows the student is actually interested in the material rather than "Is it going to be on the test?") The LMS can make this whole process easier- skip copying hundreds of random homework sets, give better tools to contact your class, provide a place for common discussion questions and virtual help.

And yes, the classical LMS is tied to the structure of the college: people, courses, semesters, enrollment, etc. But then again, most schools in the US (and world) use this model-if you're in the minority such as the authors of the white paper you should expect that standard tools won't fit. Can students take work from course to course over semesters? In most modern LMSes they can through various portfolio tools, so if students want they still can keep their electronic trail.

For smaller seminar courses? Perhaps a PLE is the way to go, but most people I know teaching these sorts of things don't bother since they'd rather be discussing things in class. And of course now you have the issue of "Do you have an account on X?" "What's my password- I forgot" and of course training people how to use six separate tools that all have different interfaces. Good luck with that- changing to Office 2007 has been enough campus trauma for right now. Oh, and you did clear permissions to post all that info up on Flickr and YouTube and have restricted access to your class, right? Really? Without some sort of way to deal with identity management and security you're well into pipe dream territory, and hands up everyone who's seen a good solution for those issues that is supported by Flickr, Youtube, LiveJournal, Wikidot and the dozens of other 2.0 sites out there.

The overarching concept of a PLE is a great idea. Everybody can agree that enhancing collaboration, reflection and innovation is a great idea, and existing LMSes aren't great in the 2.0 feature area like wikis and blogs. But PLE's are just a dream right now, and the VLE/LMS as it stands today is a useful tool. I don't have a fancy nailgun in my garage- perhaps I'll just use a hammer instead to stick these boards together.

P2P textbooks

With $100 textbooks now the norm, using Bittorrent to distribute pirated copies shouldn't surprise me in the least.

Somehow, I can't manage to feel too much outrage on the part of the authors. I've worked with folks writing textbooks before, and unless you're a huge name that's on one of the standard works for Bio101, you aren't going to make much given the enormous effort it takes to write one of these beasts. The publishers are the ones pushing to rev the book every year so that they can kill the used textbook market, but this has reached the point where everybody in higher ed is basically sick of it.

This is where a decent e-book reader and a few academics could really clean up. Get one or two of the "big" names in chem or biology like Zumdahl or Carey to decide to publish a direct-to-students version of the text for $20-25, half to the author and I suspect people would ditch paper in a heartbeat. The authors would probably end up clearing more as well in the end. However, this is going to need an ebook reader that can do a decent index and high-quality images, unlike the current generation such as the Kindle. Amazon seems to be at least somewhat aware of the demand here, so we can always hope...

Course planning?

I'm teaching a first year seminar next semester on the intersection of materials science and society- how the development of the materials we use has affected the course of history. This is a new thing for me- I'm used to teaching chemistry, where you have your textbook, you cover chapters 1-10 and you have to do all of them since the next semester (taught by someone else) covers 11-20, and you have to do them in rough order since the text assumes you already know chp3 when you do the problems in chp5.

Now suddenly I have total freedom- I barely have a text, I have no schedule, no specific goal I have to meet beyond what I design myself. I have stacks of articles to read from various online and print resources. I have group projects and demos. I have discussion questions. And I have 20+ topics I can organize in any format or order I want.

Uh, yeah. Freedom isn't always free- how do I manage this to build some coherent piece with assignments, lecture notes, discussion questions and responses, daily readings, etc? I usually just work up a notebook of stuff to discuss in lecture- topic outlines, sample problems, etc. Easy since I already know what I need to say, but now that's clearly not going to do it.

I can't seem to find anything obvious online. Google calendar + a wiki maybe? Any actual readers have any ideas?

Google apps

I'm up at the CLAC conference right now and sat through a very interesting discussion led by Hope college, who ditched their old email system and went totally to Google apps.  A couple of the interesting takeaway points

• Google has detailed terms of use policies which go through privacy, data mining and email ownership issues.  They do *not* own the data or emails- that's up to the given organizations if the person or the college owns it.  They can potentially data mine, but won't report anything identifiable.  A couple of colleges have had counsel look over the contracts and they have no issues with the setup and don't think that it exposes them to any FERPA/HIPPA related issues.
  
• 6 month lead time for changes in policy, so you'll have a bit of warning if they decide to start charging.  Folks using it said they'd be willing to pay anyway- you go back to senior staff and talk about how much money you've already saved
• Search not sort: you have to train your faculty to not throw things away and not to bother sorting into folders.  Google can search them faster
• Delete in gmail really means delete- you *cannot* get it back under any circumstances.  This is by design due to privacy issues
• They can include campus-wide directories for emails
• Calendaring has grown organically at schools using it, to the point it's now the default calendaring system even if there are others available.
• They now have a blackberry connector.
• Gmail will *not* do mass email.  You need to keep some solution for alum and admissions to mass-email folks
• They want folks to move over to Google mail for alums as well- oh, that has ads...

With google docs available as well and all the issues around large scale saving of email (See our SAN issues) I won't be surprised to see more and more people moving to this.

When software dies

So we're kind of stuck here. Our biology department uses a nice little program called the Genetics Construction Kit what allows students to try and determine the inheritance pattern for various traits in a virtual lab full of flies. You pick two flies with specific traits out of vials, mate them and see the pattern of what comes out. Repeat with some other flies and you can build up a case for understanding the underlying genetics of the system. It's a slick little program and the bio department has built a bunch of labs around it.

It was also written for the Mac Plus. You know, the little all-in-one machine with a 9" screen and a floppy drive that was all the rage in about 1987? It's never been significantly updated, and runs on a bunch of old Mac laptops that run OSX 10.3. That's the last version of OSX that will run GCK- newer versions of MacOSX don't have the OS9 compatibility mode anymore.

So what now? We can keep trying to use the old Mac laptops, but as with any computer their lifespan is finite- they're five years old now. We could try and replace it with something else, but the closest thing I've been able to find is the Virtual Genetics Lab. This is a Java based version with some changes in the types of experiments that can be done. VGL adds the ability to do both XX/XY and ZZ/ZW sex linking as well as 3 allele problems involving circulal or heirarchical dominance. Too bad the bio department doesn't care about that but instead uses the bits they removed- multiple trait problems and codominance-based systems.

We could try to keep the old GCK running using Windows emulators but they have significant limitations- you can't print, can't cut&paste, etc. It still ties us to an aging program that frankly, really shows how far we've come in UI design since 1988, and we're left with additional support questions- does the emulator run on Vista? We could try to roll one ourselves, but this is a significant amount of work and then we have to support it. We can simply give up and redo the labs to use VGL, but then the students lose out. We can lobby the publishers, but according to folks in the department biology profs have been doing this for years with no success. There really aren't any good options- I suspect we might try for rolling one ourselves. (Hey, I like to tinker...)

Ugh.

Coolest picture you'll see this year

Absolutely nothing to do with instructional tech, but just amazingly cool. How you manage to get a satellite hundreds of millions of miles away to get a photo of a tiny, very fast moving object with a highly uncertain position from a couple of hundred miles away, all without any real time guidance since Mars->Earth->Mars round trip radio time is well over 20 minutes is just beyond me...

More free courses online

It looks like some Indian universities are following along in the style of MIT's Open Courseware by placing lecture videos up on Youtube. Another project like this is great news however you look at it- the world can always use more education, especially for people who otherwise might have a hard time finding it. Couple this with something like the OLPC project (assuming they can ever get Flash video to run on one) and you have a way for people who might never have access to any form of higher ed to at least begin to learn a bit.

I'll be very interested to see how this works with copyright- having been to a bunch of the MIT talks at various conferences, the folks running OCW will admit that copyright is one of their biggest hassles- they have to clear every image, bit of video, etc. For some image heavy courses such as architecture, this means 900+ clearances for a single course. Since the universities are broadcasting their own lectures rather than putting up all of the course materials, much of this is avoided, but I suspect that a) copyrighted stuff will sneak in and b) that nobody anywhere will care.

Portals and the LMS continued

So, since I'm actually hosting a roundtable on this, where do they intersect anyway?

To be honest, I really haven't seen it done well even in the all-in-one products. Sure, you get single sign on and it all looks the same, but I managed to hack that into Dokeos and Academus in about an hour. So where could (or should) they leverage each other?

1) Content management. Right now things get stuffed onto the LMS from a network drive somewhere, but there's no real thought put into content reuse, sharing and the like. Why not have the ability to upload a syllabus to the LMS and have it automatically included in a list of syllabi for current courses on the portal that the provost can browse. (Or students- I've never understood the reluctance of various faculty to publicize their syllabi.) Why can't announcements posted on the portal appear on LMS calendars if the professor wants?

2) In a similar vein, is the campus portal being used for social networking: everything from the campus events calendar to surveys to blogs to full-on networking stuff exists in most portals. Much of this can be leveraged within the LMS as well, and most of them have similar tools built into them. Why can't you just have a single interface for a survey or a blog. Of course, this assumes your students actually use the social functions in your portal and just don't go to Facebook instead.

3) Library integration. This is one area I haven't seen done well anywhere. Book searches, reserves, online journals and all the rest could be built directly into the portal+LMS combo. A single link from a course to the electronic reserves (with no login) is a huge plus.

4) Data aggregation. One area where a portal home page can really help is a "Here's everything you need today" list. Let users customize the data that appears- you can get all the course assignments and tests/quizzes, the lacrosse schedule, the dining hall menu and a pull of any clubs you might be interested in into a single space. This can also be useful for campus-wide non-critical announcements such as our upcoming campus power outage.

5) Curriculum and advising integration. If you're at a school with a somewhat odd general education program, having a degree audit system in the portal coupled to course information in the LMS could work very well. We get petitions here from students asking to exempt from a requirement or count a course for some thing that it's not explicitily listed for, but with the backing of LMS assets like syllabi for the relevant courses advising a student would become a lot easier.

So, where else can we go that's beyond my limited imagination?

So, how far do you outsource?

Back at my old job I had a server that was devoted to instructional tech- the LMS (Dokeos) ran on it and I also added a bunch of custom apps, mostly written in PHP/MySQL with an occasional bit of Flash thrown in. It was a handy place to host stuff like a Wiki that didn't really need a dedicated home as well as a place to experiment in.

I haven't had that at GBurg and I've sort of missed it. Where can I put little one-off apps, host a wiki, etc? (The Wiki in our LMS, Angel, is not exactly a biug win) But as time's gone on, I've begun to wonder if it's really necessary. Other people are happy to host stuff, and perhaps we really don't need to do much of anything much anymore.

After all, this Blog is hosted: I'm not using the blog tools in our LMS or installing a blog on a server. I ran a survey tool on a machine at my old job: when the company decided to stop free educational licensing I dumped it for an open source product, still hosted. Yet SurveyMonkey is just as good, works for a quick, small survey and if you really need a lot of stuff, it's cheaper than hosting a product yourself. We don't have a good Wiki on campus, but I just pointed a professor at Wikidot for a project they want to use. I could even outsource the entire development environment since I just got an invite to Google App Engine.

I'm not sure I'd want to host anything needing serious security- I've had people do surveys that fell squarely under HIPPA- but for a generic one off it's not so bad. I could worry about losing the company that runs the outsourced server, but in reality that's no worse than when we lost the survey tool at my old job: we still had to migrate all of the data anyway.

So how far do you go?

Plug for the Portal 2008 conference

In case I do actually have a reader or two, I'll throw in an ad for the 2008 Gettysburg Portal Conference which is coming up this June. It's a small conference focused around using portals in higher ed with a minimum of corporate involvement. (They can host talks, but only with a school) The main theme is measurement and assessment, but there's also going to be a fair amount of learning management system (LMS) and portal integration. I'll be doing a roundtable on "The Portal and the LMS: Ships Passing in the Night?"

You'll also get to see the hilarity of us trying to run the conference during a campus power cut that is needed for construction of the new athletic center. It should be over by the start of the conference on Tuesday, but we'll have no technology at all available on Monday or Tuesday, including email. Add good beer onto the list and what more do you need?

It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue

Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in using games as tools in higher education in a variety of topics. Much of the hype has gone either to virtual worlds built in Second life or massive simulations such as Mike Wesch's world simulation project for his introductory sociology courses. But these both have the same problem- the student is playing a game that someone else designed- it's either structured into the course itself with rules created by the professor or has a barrier to entry so high that only specialists can create content within the system.

So why not go back to the future? For any of us old farts who grew up typing "Go north" or "Oil door" into a text adventure, a couple of lines of text followed by a > prompt doesn't seem unusual, and for the digital natives of today it has a retro feel, much like seeing an old Caddie with shark-like tail fins. It turns out that you can create a text adventure without a huge investment in programming time using the latest version of the Inform programming environment.

Inform uses a very natural language-like syntax, so a typical set of instructions might look like

The Office is a room. The description is "An office, complete with peppy motivational posters on the walls, a couple of family photos and an aging PC."
The hallway is east of the Office. The description is "A Hallway. What more do you need to know?"
The computer is in the Office. It is fixed in place. Instead of using the computer, say "You need to know the password first"

You've now created two rooms that you move between and an object that you can (sort of) interact with. While you can get a lot more complicated if you want (making a fully functional computer takes some work) the base syntax for creating a world, adding descriptions and simple triggers shouldn't be beyond anyone, even non-programmers. This means that ordinary students can build a world of their own and let people play in it without the overhead (and expense- Inform is free) that you would need for more "sophisticated" tools.

Here at GBurg, Chris Fee in the English department is using Inform in his courses on medieval literature to have students build areas that other students can explore. In many ways, it's similar to an essay- they have to build a fictional narrative, characters and then flesh them out, but they have the additional capability to lead people to try various actions within the story to see what happens, all the while the author has to better their own understanding of the area they are developing to cover strange or unusual actions by their players. The project is ongoing - the first class to develop these is just now finishing up and the adventures will be passed down to a 200-level course next year for them to explore, so we'll see how this goes, but as an educational tool I think it shows a great deal of possibility- cheap to use, easy to learn and able to leverage the "play" aspect that is so effective in using games to teach people.

Hidden in plain sight

Living in Gettysburg, you can't get away from the history of the town. I live less than a mile from the battlefield, which sounds interesting until you realize that the only places not less than a mile away are sitting on the battlefield itself. The battlefield itself is covered in monuments, markers, statues and of course tons and tons of cannon pointing everywhere. One of the most interesting things about all the displays isn't obvious to folks who don't know much about artillery. For example, check the two pictures to the left



If you ask people what the differences between the weapons are, most would probably just comment that the one on the bottom is green, yet the two cannon are vastly different.

The green cannon is a 12 pound Napoleon, a very popular weapon on the battlefield- about 40% of the total cannon on both sides were variants of this design. The gun tubes were made of bronze (thus the green patina) smooth inside and they were loaded by ramming powder, wadding and shot into the muzzle (front) of the cannon. With some luck you could hit a target a mile away with one of these, but they were more effective at close range firing canister rounds - effectively big shotgun shells- into massed infantry.

The weapon on the top is a 2.75 in Whitworth Breechloading Rifle. Only two of these were at the battle, both owned by the South who used them to shell Union positions south of the town from a hill to the north of Gettysburg. The gun barrel was rifled, allowing for much greater range, easily twice that of the Napoleon. It was loaded from the rear (breech) rather than the front, and the barrel was made from iron and steel. Virtually all modern artillery pieces follow this design- the Napoleon was a technological dead end, and continuing increases in range, accuracy and fire rate made modern artillery the most effective killer in warfare until the modern bomber came along.

So what all does this have to do with educational technology? Reading through the 2008 Horizon report from EDUCAUSE I'm struck by how the "transformative" future technologies have been hidden in plain sight much like the differences in the Civil War cannon. Their first key emerging technology is grassroots video. Nothing here appears new at all- students have been using cameras to make short films and videos for decades. Yet the incredible price drops in digital cameras and camcorders coupled with the explosive growth in hard disk capacity and improvements in online streaming technology have suddenly changed the entire landscape from one where a few film studies students could spend semesters learning the technology and then slowly putting together a five minute film to one where virtually any student can grab a camera, shoot hours of footage, slap it together in an easy to use editor and share it with anyone on the internet in a few hours. Nothing really looks all that different at first, but the underlying technology is so different and so much more efficient that it's not really the same after all.

The same is true with things like collaboration webs and mobile broadband. Nothing here is new at all- internet based editable documents have been around forever and viewing web sites on a mobile phone is nothing really new. Yet again the base technology is changing enough that suddenly what was tricky to set up or annoying to use isn't anymore. I left my laptop at home at a recent conference and brought only my phone, and I didn't really miss it- I was able to send mail, view web sites and even read EDUCAUSE reports on it. So long as I didn't mind the web being 320x240, it was fine.

The longer range stuff such as data mashups isn't quite there yet for non-specialists (I've developed custom Google Maps apps, but it's still only for the truly geeky), but it's obviously coming and once the technological barrier to entry drops things will change just as fast- technologies that don't really appear any different from what was there before will suddenly take over.

Or will they? I have to think back to the cannon and remember that modern tanks have ditched the rifled cannon in favor of smoothbores. Everything old is new again...

Opening up Flash

Adobe is finally realizing that Flash as a universal platform will be of more value to them than Flash as a revenue source. This isn't a full release of everything, but making the file specs and porting layers open and removing the licensing from the players it's a huge step to getting Flash onto every system out there. Programming purists may scoff at Flash and Actionscript, but for rapidly developing rich animated content it's the best tool out there.

There's still a major issue though: Flash video (such as Youtube) uses On2 codecs which are nowhere near as open, so some of these platforms may end up with all the Flash goodness without the site that pushed Flash into near-total ubiquity. Given the popularity of student created videos in classes (and for skateboarding crash videos outside of class) I'm not sure if this is going to be as big a deal as it might be for both Adobe and the creative community

Tim Berners-Lee: "The Web is still in its infancy"

Read the article here. Looking over the state of current uses for the web in education and some of the stuff out there that might change this in the future such as social networking, mashups and the like I have to agree with the guy who basically invented the web.

One point I think deserves highlighting more: the web was invented back in the day of proprietary online services such as AOL and Compuserve. The Internet itself was the plaything of geeks at universities, with text-based services like email, USENET, Gopher and Archie. CERN gave away the early webserver code, and today the web is the internet as far as non-geeks are concerned. This wasn't an coincidence.

NYT piece on textbook costs

As a followup from the Kindle post I came across this NYT article on the ever rising costs of textbooks and a pending bill in Congress to force publishers to unbundle the CD-ROM and other add-ons that help drive up the cost. This is a wonderful idea at the core- I've barely even looked at most of the CDs that come with the General Chemistry books I have used in the past and when I have sat down and evaluated them I've been highly unimpressed. Most suffer from "Powerpoint syndrome"; just because you know how to do fades and wipes in Director doesn't mean you should. The thing that always surprised me the most was how limited they were- you'd think in a high-tech resource you'd have clear, large videos, useful 3-d models and the like, but videos always seemed to be 320x240, 10 fps at best with horrible compression artifacts and the 3-d models were more limited than what the free plug-in Chime can do.

Perhaps a free textbook option (FWS or Textbook revolution) might actually work? I still haven't chosen a base text (or even know if I will) for my seminar next year- too bad FWS won't be ready yet.

Other blogs

A quick list of other ed tech blogs that are still being updated. Google finds lots of dead ones out there...

David Davies
David Wiley
Stephen Downes
ElearnSpace
Trey Martindale, Teachable Moment

Kindling

I spent an enjoyable lunch at Mamie's Cafe this week meeting with Rod (my boss), a number of faculty and a representative from Amazon who is looking into uses of the Kindle in higher education. We're one of the few schools that actually has tried this out: Rod has loaned one to everyone in his Comp Sci senior capstone course to read their various assignments on, and so Susie Kroll decided to come see how it's been working out.

We have a number of test Kindles laying around the college and I tested one myself for a few weeks a while back. My overall review of the machine (posted on Amazon) was not very favorable- in my opinion the machine has a number of technical flaws such as a small screen, poor control layout and poor battery life as well as being tied to DRM'd content that will simply vanish if the Kindle does. As a bibliophile, I have an extensive library at home, with books ranging from last week's paperback to 150-year-old textbooks, all of which are still quite usable. The technical limitations don't bother me too much- it's a first gen device that will be improved: that's just engineering. The DRM and content control issues, on the other hand, are far more serious.

To Susie's credit, she didn't try to shy away from this. It's a difficult position for Amazon to be in- they do make more money if you have to rebuy content in new formats, so she has to argue against her company's own interests if she pushes it. But it's also a demand from the copyright holders, and without them the Kindle goes nowhere quickly. Her comments that the Kindle is a major project at Amazon and isn't going away anytime soon ring a bit hollow on the same week Microsoft announced it's turning off the MSN Music license key servers. Somewhere along the line there's going to have to be a format you can get the content off the Kindle and put it somewhere safe or people are going to get burnt. This may not matter to many people, but for those of us who buy lots of books and keep them forever it's a killer.

So where could it help in academia? Beyond some pie-in-the-sky discussions of add ons like external video out and tablet-like support, there are some realistic options. Textbooks are big, heavy, expensive and honestly don't get used all that much. Why not put them on a Kindle- I know a lot of students would be happy to ditch 30 pounds of Zhumdahls and Campbell&Reeces for a single small device. But here the technical limitations of the Kindle come back to really kill this idea- the screen is too small, you can't do color illustrations, textbooks use lots of non-standard formatting (making them hard and expensive to convert) and the footnoting and indexing features of the Kindle are nonexistent. (It's a consumer device, after all) Perhaps the next gen?

The really interesting part of the discussion came when we began to discuss small-run content. College courses are notorious for requiring course packs, a few chapters of a dozen different books bundled together into one Frankenbook. These are annoying to create, since you have to clear each chapter with the publisher, pay fees, etc. Why not just have a "Create a reader" option on the Kindle website? Get the publishers to work out something flexible- if the book is $20, each chapter can be bought individually for $2 with all rights cleared. A professor could assemble a course reader in a few hours and get exactly what they want, all the tedious photocopying goes away, etc. Work out a deal with each college so that the student just goes to the Amazon website, clicks "My school", selects "Gettysburg College" and there are the list of all the course packs.

How about professor-generated content? Academics love to publish scholarly books, often with very small print runs: a few thousand perhaps. These aren't done for the money- one professor here comments he buys a case of beer every six months with the proceeds from his book. Instead, these are a critical piece of the academic reputation process, showing that you have the skills to do serious research in a field, and as such are essential for a professor in the humanities or social sciences to get tenure. The Kindle would be ideal for these in many ways- no need for a minimum print run since you can just make a copy when someone clicks "Buy", better exposure since anyone can get a copy of something there are interested in rather than having to go to a specialized academic library, etc. But will an ebook count towards tenure in the same way as a physical one? Until the answer is "yes", this idea is dead in the water, or perhaps we'll always have to have at least one small print run just so Joe Prof can hit his tenure committee over the head with his 600 page masterwork into the grooming habits of pre-Incan women.

There is a lot of promise here, but there's still a long way to go.

The infomation can find us...

but is it what we want?

Michael Wesch gave an amazing keynote at the NITLE conference in early April. He's an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, but has become somewhat well known outside of academia for a series of YouTube videos describing both information in the Web 2.0 world as well as the students who live there. See:

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Information R/evolution
A Vision of Students Today

He is simply an amazing speaker, one of the few who can truly make you sit up and watch an entire PowerPoint and enjoy it. These skills clearly translate into classroom popularity as well: his courses have long waiting lists and he makes students apply for his upper division courses. He's thought deeply about the way that Web2.0 applications change some of the information dynamics in modern education: information is not hard to find anymore. Information does not need to be indexed by experts. Information and its physical form have no relation. Information can even find us in the form of RSS feeds and bots.

Fascinating stuff. But step back and look a bit more: I think the experts might have the trump card after all.

Yes, information is trivial to find. Google has seen to that. Information can find us: RSS, Atom and the rest can feed us a constant stream of info on everything from current politics to fly fishing. The public as a whole will index the material, not experts. But is that really new?

Even in the Web2.0 world, information still has a place. It's not sitting on a bookshelf- it's sitting on a spinning hard disk on a server farm somewhere. It still has an address-not a call number, but a URL. The public can create links to it and index it for searching, but that's not really new: back in the good old days of Paper 1.0 we called those references. There's a reason scholarly papers and books have hundreds of footnotes- it's the Paper 1.0 version of linking. Reference works like the Science Citation Index are a public tagging facility for scholars.

Was information hard to find? Not really- any college grad should have the skills to search a journal for articles and to follow a reference/citation chain. Has Google made it faster and easier? Of course- I managed to find a paper on response rates in online course evaluations in an obscure British journal in about 20 minutes using Google the other day(Brit. J. Educ. Tech, V38, N6, 2007, 1085-1101), but it's not like it wasn't possible before. It just would have taken a few more hours of search time and then a wait for my library to request a copy of the article from another, but not impossible. (I'm still not going back to Paper 1.0)

What's changing is the democratization of this process. To get a journal article or book published is a significant undertaking, involving things like credential checks, peer review and the like. This is gradually getting replaced by thousands of people tagging, digging and otherwise marking any given article with their own set of keywords. Democratization is good, right?

I'm teaching a new course in the fall: the history of the world through materials science. Like Wesch, I can set up a home page that will feed interesting stories about materials in our world to a single location for my students. This will bring in lots of interesting topics to discuss: lead paint in toys, concrete fatigue in bridges, how mercury in vaccines causes autism and so forth. This will certainly help my students tremendously.

Except that study after study shows that mercury doesn't cause autism. There is an active, very loud group that despite all scientific evidence (and there's mountains of it) believes this link to be true and has written thousands of web pages detailing their beliefs. Doing a Google search for mercury will find these pages high up- lots of people link to them driving up pagerank, they are often dugg, etc. Yet to the best that serious research can show, it's simply not true. But people searching for this information won't find the careful, peer-reviewed studies about this, because they are long, hard to read and contain a lot of jargon. Even the newspaper articles that cite the journal articles are fairly dull- it's much more interesting to read about poor Stevie who suddenly changed personality after getting a vaccination and the trials his parents have to endure to care for him.

So the blogosphere gets this wrong, as it does a lot of science questions where a handful of loud mouths can distort the issue to make it appear that there is controversy where none really exists. How do we handle this properly? One way is to rely on experts to make the call about how an argument should be tagged, but then we're back to the Paper 1.0 days where the indexing is controlled by a small elite.

The information is out there. But which information is actually good?

Introduction

Welcome to paidogogos, my occasionally updated musings on instructional&educational technology. I've begun this exercise mostly to help crystallize my own thoughts on how technology and education interrelate. I've been working in this field for more than a decade, yet I spend half my time at conferences surprised at some idea out of left field that makes me feel like a dinosaur, and the other half surprised at the other folks who seem stuck in the stone age compared to us. Yet most of these new technologies have a pretty thin track record in terms of verifiable impact on learning- the number of talks, papers and ideas with detailed statistics on learning outcomes is low at best and often close to zero. (And this includes a lot of my own.)

So where do we go from here? Are our current projector + Smartboard equipped classrooms really effective? Do Web 2.0 technologies really translate into a different (and better) way of working and learning? Is Powerpoint truly a tool of the devil, or perhaps just a mild annoyance?

I've taken the name of the blog from the Greek παιδαγωγέω, a slave who would accompany a young boy in ancient Greece to supervise his education, make sure that he went to school and that he behaved while he was there. It's the origin of the modern word pedagogy, the science of teaching. Interestingly, the word origin assumes that you only teach children!