Week 5- Blendkit conclusion

The one bit that hit me this week was the comments on how the biggest impact on quality of courses is good faculty training programs, much of it based on peer-mentoring and evaluation.  For those of us at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, we don't have that (yet).   We're in the process of building up a group of faculty fellows who will be required to mentor the next batch, but in terms of peer-mentoring we're currently lacking.  We have a couple of faculty who have done a lot in terms of flipping so we have some experience as well as a small bit of knowledge within IT on best practices, but we're having to bootstrap most of it.  The materials within Blendkit are mostly designed for partly-online course that we won't be running, and we've had limited success in terms of detailed evaluation plans with faculty beyond the always mostly useless student evals.

The faculty fellows will help to some degree, but they are few and the various departments are many.  The classes proposed by faculty in Spanish, Education, Middle-East/Islamic Studies and Chemistry, for example, span a huge range of techniques, course types and learning styles.    I just hope we'll be able to figure out a way to measure how well their various ideas worked out...

Blendkit week 4

Time to be a curmudgeon and summarize this week's reading

• Your online and in-class components should be well integrated.

• There are a number of different ways/technologies that will work.

Ok, class dismissed.

Seriously, that's about the entirety of the chapter.  I'm honestly unsure what I'm supposed to gain from it, other than the fun of actually seeing Second Life mentioned multiple times in a table from 2007 and getting to read sentences like "However, it is important to remember that it is the manner of implementation, rather than any affordance of the modality itself, that will bring about this perceived consistency."

This is one of my major annoyances about much of the educational literature: without really good ways to assess the results, it tends to degenerate into statements of the blindingly obvious, tables of activity types matched to somewhat nebulous learning types (often changing between various articles) and all of it covered up with florid writing.  Assessment is incredibly hard since you can't pry open someone's brain to see what they actually have learned, so very often you end up with feedback based on student evaluations, such as the comments from the Aycock et al. reference where the students complained that the online and F2F portions weren't integrated enough.  How so?  Reading the original article sheds little extra light, other than commenting that the instructors' inexperience was more of a problem than the blending.  Even given the students' complaints, do we know if they did any better in the poorly integrated blended class than previously?  Or did they do worse than in better integrated, later courses?  The article claims that the faculty saw that "Student interactivity increased", "Student performance improved" and "[students] could accomplish course goals that they couldn't in their traditional course".  Data for any of this?  If so, the article provides none of it- if I write a paper for a chemistry journal claiming my new synthesis improves yield and enantiomeric purity, I better have some numbers backing me up.

Ok, grumping over.  Given that I have nothing to add to actually *solving* the problem I can't hammer at those who are trying for very long.

Assessment in Blendkit

Week 3 this time, and I have to say I was completely underwhelmed by the reading on assessment strategies.

The biggest issue was the lack of discussion at all for us physical scientists in the room.  How can you do any form of online assessment when you're dealing with highly technical material, often involving long derivations or problems where a single math error gets you a wrong multiple choice answer even if you knew the entire process?  Many years ago I wrote a quiz question engine that would randomize the numbers in an equation, which at least solves the "The answer for #4 is B" problem, but it still does a lousy job of helping those folks who just stumble instead of fall.  Back at Va. Tech when I had classes of 180 intro chem students I was forced to use MC in-class exams, but I always offered students the choice to take a "Write it all out" test with no prechosen answers, in which I'd offer partial credit.  5-6 would take me up on this, and they always did very well.  (Partly because they were always the best students...) For PChem I got some great advice from an older professor and just banned calculators during exams.  I don't care about the final number, I only care if you can get there.

The reading does point out that it's important that students feel comfortable with the tools needed to respond to the question and that they have access to the technical resources needed.  This is a huge issue for chemistry, organic and physical alike.  Short of scanning pages of handwriting the tools to write structures or equations online are going to be new to students and are often very complex and difficult to master.

Things like one sentence summaries and online discussions are helpful to an extent, but when the students themselves don't know the material it's almost impossible for them to judge the accuracy of the responses.  I saw this quite a bit in the original Stanford AI MOOC: there were a ton of folks who knew the material very well and could explain it, but there were also folks who tried and failed, misleading other students.  Generally they got downvoted, but not always.

The Coursera Game Programming in Python is the closest to an actual, functioning method I've seen yet.  Each assignment has a *very* detailed rubric with specific points for specific tasks.  Peers grade using this rubric and can add additional comments.  It's clear the instructors spent a ton of time developing these rubrics, and they are *far* more detailed than anything discussed in the readings.  As an alternative, the optional project way back in the AI MOOC also worked well- you had to decrypt a chunk of text and enter in the sentence.  Self checking- a minor error is obvious, and a major problem doesn't let you get anything at all.

Then again, perhaps I expect too much.  Assessment is really, really hard.  I always get an ulcer trying to deal with it.

Dusting off the blog for BlendKIT

A couple of years between blog posts never hurt anyone, right?

It's now week two for the Blendkit MOOC and as usual we're being asked for a posting on our reflections of the reading this week.  Rather than thinking about it in the context of my job, while reading I was wondering how my learning guitar fits into the structure that was discussed.

In many ways, I'm sort of creating my own "Blended" course- most of the content in learning is already online in the form of detailed websites and videos that cover learning guitar from step one to playing Classical Gas fluently.  Periodically, I sign up for in-person lessons with a nearby instructor.  This method lacks a central "professor", instead relying on a variety of experts such as Justin Sandercoe who all cover slightly different areas and the local instructor to tell me if I'm doing something stupid.

This probably is closest to the Concierge model- the online teachers will point out the things I don't know and then guide me through some exercises to learn the technique, then give some songs to practice with.  Once you understand the idea, it's possible to go out and find good exemplar songs to learn- "This solo is basically a set of c-minor arpeggios", and so forth.  Periodically the in-person instructor can point out specific flaws in my technique and suggest additional areas to work on.  Typically I'll go through a set of designed lessons and then spend a while simply learning music that I feel like, then return to a set of lessons to work on another specific area.  The combination of online and in-person stuff fits the Concierge model reasonably closely.

The biggest problem in my current learning is that I lack a good structure for conversation with other students at my rough level.  Forum postings are possible as an asynchronous method, but for music instant feedback from others would be valuable.  But it's difficult to find folks who are where I am- one of my coworkers invited me to play with him, but he's a semi-professional with decades of experience playing out.  I'd merely hold him back.  It's a powerful reminder of how important the face-to-face, peer-to-peer interactions in learning are; something I need to remember when I'm the guy in front of the class.

Rant time 2; SMART

So we have a new professor who's interested in doing neat things in Music Ed. He'd like to use a SMART board or some similar interface to be able to mark up music and take notes. Great.

The physical layout of the room makes a touch screen or standalone unit not really viable, but SMART markets a wireless slate that he's really excited about using. We order one and install it and get ready for interactive goodness.

Pen works, highliter works, camera does the neat little snapshot animation. Hmm, the Notebook icon doesn't seem to be working. That's a problem- without that you can't save your files, edit them, put up backgrounds (like musical staves) and so forth- the device is close to useless without it. So I go to the SMART site and try and download the software.

"This product is not eligible"

I spent a while going around in circles with tech support yesterday- the Notebook software is *not* included because, quote "People are using the Notebook software with non-SMART hardware"

Hunh? I just bought a $400 piece of SMART hardware and I want to actually, you know, use it. Instead, I'm being told that I can only use it if I purchase yet another piece of SMART hardware that does come with a license. If you read carefully the web page you'll find hints of that, but given that every other piece of SMART hardware comes with the Notebook software it's not exactly what you might expect.

Anyone know another good vendor, because I'm not so sure these folks are very SMART.

Rant time1; Microsoft

What is it with companies and interesting interfaces?

A couple of professors here are interested in using Microsoft Surface. Looks like a neat idea. Check price: Commercial version $12500. Ouch. But they're developers- we should get a discount, right? MS will sell developers a table for $2500 *more* than the commercial version. I'm not sure I can publish the academic pricing discount, but let's just say it's pretty skimpy. As in, I spend more on a trip to the grocery store than the academic discount is for a $15000 item. Do they care about this product at all? I remember back when NT 4 came out and seeing a student package of Visual Studio for every language plus a full version of NT 4.0 for $90- it’s the day I knew OS/2 was dead, since the equivalent boxes of OS/2 software sat next to it and cost over $1000.

I thought the chant was "Developers! Developers! Developers"

On failure

One thing I'm realizing from the NITLE summit so far is that the talks focused on failure are generally much more effective than those of successes. First, they tend to be funny- it's easier to poke fun at yourself when you look foolish. Second, it's easier to draw parallels in failures- the major successes, with all sorts of structure, collaboration, planning and assessment attached to it can seem awfully daunting when you haven't started down the path, especially when you know the stars won't align as well in your situation. But everyone has some terrible story to tell, and learning how to work around the issues ends up being the real interesting information. Finally, it reinforces the idea that failure is sometimes an option- when you try new things it doesn't always work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Experiments often fail- it's part of life even if we don't want to admit that we're the ones failing, and it shows ways to bets cut your losses and move on to something new.

I love failure...

Two visions of Powerpoint

I feel a bit like Jim Anchower since it's been so long since I updated, but Hola again.

I spent a day last week at a Edward Tufte workshop, focused entirely around presenting huge amounts of data in limited spaces, and how Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. Tufte has some good points here- the average bulleted list Powerpoint slide, read in a monotone by a speaker unsure of the material is one of the worst possible ways to get information across to a group. It's boring, slow and information poor. But I have to disagree that this is Powerpoint's fault: it's just a crappy speaker using a tool badly. Just because you're trying to drive a screw with a hammer doesn't mean that a screw is bad way to join things- it's just a crappy way to use the screw.

The NITLE workshop I'm at right now has a variety of people (including me) using a pecha-kucha format for our talks- 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. No more bullet lists, no more reading a slide of text - you don't have the time. 3-4 words and a funny picture or a single graph, that's it. It actually works even better IMHO if you both mess with the timings a bit as well as throw in blank slides to break up the flow- go fast, use the slides either for a bit of data or something to make the audience laugh and talk for the rest

The true irony was watching Mike Winiski from Furman doing a pecha-kucha Powerpoint talk on data visualization, using a lot of Tufte-like examples. He did his much more slowly and carefully than I did mine, and it worked very nicely- just enough to get you thinking about how you might want to do new stuff without bogging down into a boring discussion of how you make or use them. You can do all that off line at lunch, after 6 more talks in the P-K format.

Full circle

I had to chuckle upon seeing the video for the Struminator. In a previous blog post I commented about the fusion of a real instrument and a game as a teaching tool- playing music is fun, but learning a real instrument to play real music is hard so people created Guitar Hero to play a much easier fake instrument. With LittleBigStar we now (mostly) have the ability to use a real instrument to play a Guitar Hero-like game, which could be an amazing teaching tool. But of course there's one combination that didn't exist- fake instrument, real music.

Someone just had to do it...

Don't forget to cite your search engine

Groklaw brings us an interesting twist on the new search engine from the folks who brought you Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha. From their TOS:

Attribution and Licensing

As Wolfram|Alpha is an authoritative source of information, maintaining the integrity of its data and the computations we do with that data is vital to the success of our project. We generate information ourselves, and we also gather, compare, contrast, and confirm data from multiple external sources. Where we have used external sources of data we list the source or sources we relied on, but in most cases the assemblages of data you get from Wolfram|Alpha do not come directly from any one external source. In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.

If you make results from Wolfram|Alpha available to anyone else, or incorporate those results into your own documents or presentations, you must include attribution indicating that the results and/or the presentation of the results came from Wolfram|Alpha. Some Wolfram|Alpha results include copyright statements or attributions linking the results to us or to third-party data providers, and you may not remove or obscure those attributions or copyright statements. Whenever possible, such attribution should take the form of a link to Wolfram|Alpha, either to the front page of the website or, better yet, to the specific query that generated the results you used. (This is also the most useful form of attribution for your readers, and they will appreciate your using links whenever possible.)

In short, they argue that since Alpha is not a plain search engine, but a tool that synthesizes information, they own the information that they synthesize. You have to cite it like any other source. This is not the case with Google- they require no attribution at all.

My first though was "This is stupid", but in retrospect I'm not so sure. We routinely allow copyright on synthesized, non-original information such as textbooks or journal review articles, with or without internal attribution. (Alpha cites its sources)

Where this is really going to get interesting is if Alpha starts citing news articles, music or video. Some news corporations are already annoyed about Google News, since they feel it takes their content and then profits from the aggregation. Will they feel the same way about Alpha? (I won't even get into what the RIAA or MPAA would think...)

Crap, crap crap!

http://www.blackboard.com/Company/Angel.aspx

I have *no* idea why Blackboard thinks this is a good idea. The Angel user community (and we're one) is made up of people who hate Blackboard with a passion. The company is a cancer in the world of higher ed with legendarily bad customer service. It's willing to sue other companies over trivial patents and has bought out and killed superior products multiple times. My guess is that of the ~400 institutions on Angel, less than 10% will make the switch back to BB when they kill Angel. Our faculty love Angel- they *vastly* prefer it to Blackboard, and we have the increased usage statistics to prove it.

By the fall I'll have test instances of Sakai and Moodle up and running and a faculty group looking at them. (My guess is that we'll go Moodle) We are *not* moving back to Blackboard under any circumstance, and we have only a year left on our Angel contract, so I suspect that by summer 2010 we'll be running a new LMS.

A better Powerpoint?

PPT annoys me- it's a useful program in a lot of ways, but it's just so bloody ugly and annoying. If you have a bunch of photos/graphs and some text to show it's a pretty decent tool, but it's very linear at the core, making people go through hoops if they want to jump around in a presentation rather than follow along.

So when my boss showed me Prezi I was instantly interested. At the core it's basically a presentation graphics program, but set up somewhat differently. There's only one slide- you can include text, graphics, video and the like on the slide in any arrangement. You can define a path to follow where the program will follow along, PPT like, or you can jump back and forth by zooming in and out and clicking on what you want. Prezi autoscales as you click- you can "hide" pictures and text by making them too small to see on the overview and then have them appear/vanish through zoom. There's some nice zooming/rotation animations, although I'm still not a believer in funky slide changes- it distracts from the content.

I really like the freeform setup of the content. Imagine you have a talk with three distinct threads. You can set them up at 0, 120 and 240 degrees and make it instantly clear how your talk is organized. it works equally well in "bush/tree" form where you start with a concept and expand out from that through multiple layers, each with an option. You basically build your talk's overview within the program automatically.

It's still clearly an early beta- it's missing a lot of stuff like user-defined text styles, the help is barely there and bugs abound, but that's not exactly unusual for Web 2.0 apps. There's an offline viewer so you can package up your content and use it in the boonies, and you can either get the free version or pay for more storage. I'm going to be very interested to see how this goes.

Learning by game.

Most everyone even remotely interested in video games will recognize the picture on the right. It's Guitar Hero, the game where you get a controller that looks like a little plastic guitar and you can rock out to all sorts of tunes, getting higher and higher scores the more accuratly you press the buttons on the "guitar". It's wildly popular, spawning endless sequels and imitators, including those that include multiple guitars, a drum set and a microphone so you can create your own virtual band.

Except that anyone who's actually played Guitar Hero knows that it's not GH or any clone. (No preening virtual rock stars in the background.) Instead, it's a freeware program called LittleBigStar. The main difference? No plastic guitar. Use your real one. Play the real songs.

LBS and an unreleased commercial competitor called Guitar Rising are the first wave of games that have come full circle. Lots of people want to play music with friends, but learning an instrument is hard. So the game makers created Guitar Hero and its clones and proceeded to make money hand over fist. Millions of copies have been sold- in fact, they've sold so well they now bring in more money than the sales of actual digital music. Players have spent hundreds of hours learning Through the Fire and the Flames on expert.

But you're still playing with a cheap plastic imitation of the real thing. So why not skip it and just use a real instrument? You can still use the same idea- hit the right notes at the right time and you get a higher score. Even better, the computer can adjust the difficulty: if you can't play a passage, just slow it down until you can, then pick up the pace later. Think of it as a metronome, but a lot more fun. Unlike guitar Hero, LBS also includes a top bar that mimics guitar TAB, so you can learn the notation at the same time that you are trying to max out your score

I'm not sure what to call this: it's not a simulation, but it's still a game. The closest thing I can think of is comparing a shooter game like Quake to a game of paintball. It's not virtual anymore- you're playing (within the limits of not dying) as close as possible to real combat. As a rank beginner, it's also close to impossible for me since I still need to watch my fingers rather than a screen, but LBS will force me to break that (bad) habit that I need to dump anyway.

These real life games aren't there yet- they still have difficulty handling quick chord changes and LBS shows that it's a labor of love by a single person, but expect to see a lot more of these pseudo-simulations coming soon.

IT; Teaching Luddites

Gettysburg is fairly unique in that a lot of the folks in IT teach a course or two per year. Most of the upper leadership have PhDs or at least a masters in EE with a lot of real world experience, and so we do everything from Shakespeare to Astronomy labs to first year seminars. We recently gave a quick set of talks at a lunch run by our campus center for creative teaching, and it was rather amusing to note how *little* most of actually do.

I've long been a believer in only using tech where it's appropriate, but almost all of the rest of the IT leadership is in the same boat. Our associate VP, our 17th century lit guy, has his students rework a scene in an old play, then act and film it using low end equipment. Rather than build the course around this, he actually goes very slowly, uses it for only one assignment and gets feedback from the students if it's useful. Our senior instructional technologist (population studies) wanted to use full bore GIS in her last class, but ended up backpedaling and trying something much less ambitious when it became obvious that it was not going to be possible. Our VP did go through with using Kindles as textbook readers, but his senior capstone CS course is built around real life experiences in the IT world far more than the technology. The head of computing services is the sort of guy who builds remotely operated radio telescopes, but then claims he doesn't really use tech all that much in his classes...

As for me, in my FYS I use only the most up-to-date technology. When making flint arrowheads, I use pressure flaking to rework hard hammer starters. We use only the most up to date gunpowder recipies, and I even let the students use paper to paint on rather than a rock wall after they finished making earth-pigment-based paints...

The only course where surfing Facebook is not only allowed but required

...is the NITLE seminar we're hosting right now at Gettysburg on Web2.0 technologies and social software.  I'm fascinated by the folks that showed up- they skew far older than you might expect, but many have been using technology in serious ways in their classes for years.  Blogging during class?  I'm just doing my homework!

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...