EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
Archive for Higher Education
March 28, 2008 at 5:39 pm · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, PSU E-Learning Blog
A busy day in RSS-Land. These just flew across my Google Reader account. Apparently the US Patent & Trademark Office (USP&TO) has issued a preliminary finding that rejects all 44 of Blackboard’s patent claims. According to both Desire2Learn and Blackboard, this is just the first step in a lengthy review process but it is interesting for those of us who have been following this saga. Desire2Learn has made a PDF copy of this finding available on their website here.
From Desire2Learn:
On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will have an opportunity to comment before a final action will issue, and after that, the decision will be subject to appeals.However, we’re still pleased.
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From Blackboard:
Dear Blackboard Community,
Today, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a first Office Action in the reexamination proceeding regarding Blackboard’s U.S. Patent 6,988,138 (”the ‘138 Patent”). This Office Action was expected and is the first step in a reexamination process that often takes years to complete. It has no effect on the validity of the patent, the lawsuit between Blackboard and Desire2Learn or the pending injunction against Desire2Learn.
We remain very confident in the strength of our patent and have provided more information about today’s announcement should you have questions. Please see www.blackboard.com/patent for more information.
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All of this follows on the heels of Blackboard’s victory in their lawsuit against Desire2Learn a few weeks ago.
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Tags: blackboard, patent, lawsuit, desire2learn
February 3, 2008 at 3:28 pm · Filed under Higher Education
“The most shocking part of going back to school at this point in my life (in her 30s) is looking around and realizing that nobody is in the room. The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10.”
Profs compete for students’ attention | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
Part of my role as Coordinator for Learning Technologies at Plymouth State University is to work with our faculty in adapting to the new technologies that permeate our campus. While this quote from a recent CNet News article is nothing new, it is a reminder that just as technology is changing the way we communicate, it is also affecting the way that we teach. As evidenced by the quote above from Sharyl Grant, a non-trad student at UNC, technology is changing the way we interact even in the physical realm. When the “professor is just another open browser window,” is that a function of technology or rather a dysfunction of our teaching practice? K-12 teachers have grown up In an age of multiple intelligences and learning styles, differentiated instruction and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Yet in higher ed where we often still practice the lecture to learn, drill and kill, one-sided conversation/passive consumption methodology of information dissemination, can we really blame technology for a lack of student engagement or is it just another outlet (like doodling and note passing) for those stifled minds who reject passive learning and are seeking an opportunity for engagement?
Image courtesy of DavidDMuir
There are typically three schools of thought that seem to be prevalent. The first is the desire for an outright ban on laptop and mobile use in the classroom. Those faculty in this camp feel that their students should be focused entirely on what is being lectured and that technology serves only as a distraction to their learning. The second perspective is to simply ignore the technology use and pretend that it isn’t there, to teach around it. The last perspective is to embrace technology use and leverage it to make the class more engaging - integrating technology into their learning experience.
Now, integrating technology into the classroom experience at the higher ed level can be challenging and often means more preparatory work, and yet it has the potential to be far more engaging than the relatively static experience of lectures, overheads and PowerPoint presentations. Consider the opportunities for learning we could create if we tap our students’ affinity for technology by challenging them in class to find and share appropriate and timely references, news briefs, videos or lectures on our subject matter. Imagine if we showed our students how technology can serve them, rather than the other way around.
The 21-st century treats knowledge and information as currency and those who can effectively acquire, process and synthesize that knowledge into actionable projects and tangible results will be far better prepared for the world they will enter.
The image above is a screenshot of the resources I was utilizing to create this blog post. I tossed out a call for image resources to my Twitter network. I was searching for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr. I was composing my post in my Flock (web browser) editor with my Google Reader RSS feeds in the background. My feeds are what turned me on to this article and got me thinking about writing this post. Imagine the power of harnessing these resources to improve our classroom experience. What would a higher ed classroom look like if our students were actually engaged in the learning process, rather than sitting in their lecture seats as passive vessels? As web browsing becomes resource hunting, as personal Instant Messaging gave way to consulting one’s personal learning network, as students become partners instead of problems.
If the professor is simply browser window 1 of 10, the question then becomes this:
“Is the professor allowing this to occur because they have not created and drawn their students into an actively engaged learning community?”
Neither ignoring nor banning technology use will engage your students as effectively as embracing it and harnessing it for productive means. And embracing technology does not require that professors be tech experts, the students have that down. Professors just need to do what they’ve always done: share, guide, challenge and refine. They’re just doing it with more support and far greater resources than they’ve had in the past.
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Tags: attention, college, university, teaching, learning
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December 6, 2007 at 8:00 am · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, PSU, PSU E-Learning Blog, Social Software, TechTalk
Updated to include August through December 2007 releases
Educause has a series that highlights specific current technologies and boils them down into a mini-sheet that tech coordinators and advocates can use on their own campus. Unlike some of the Educause resources which require membership, this series is open to the general public which means that K-12 folks can access them as well. New brief sheets have followed a monthly publishing schedule with the latest being the Twitter brief posted just this month.
The series can be found here, but the individual links of papers (in PDF format) posted as of 19 July 2007 are listed below. I find looking at the timeline of releases interesting from an anthropological perspective as it illustrates where the edtech interest was focused over the past two years that these briefs have been published.
7 Things You Should Know About:
[tags]educause, 7things, technology, edtech, briefsheet, whitepaper[/tags]
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July 11, 2007 at 4:03 pm · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, PSU E-Learning Blog
Announced at the corporate keynote at BbWorld07, SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service integrated with the LMS that attempt to uncover and/or deter plagiarism while educating the campus community about what plagiarism is. Leveraging a dedicated assignment tool, assignments are uploaded to a central service which compares the submission against their databases and other submitted works held in the Global Reference Database. Any institution running any of the newer Blackboard Learning Systems is eligible to download and install the PowerLink/Building Block for their campus free of charge. Future platform deliveries will have this service embedded and will not require separate installation.
SafeAssign checks submitted papers (Word, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML and ZIP packages of these) against the Internet using Windows Live Search technology. Blackboard has partnered with ProQuest ABI/Inform and searches against their 2.5 million articles database. SafeAssign also checks against a local institutional database of locally submitted work, as well as a Global Reference Database which is comprised of submissions volunteered by students from SafeAssign campuses. Obviously this database is expected to grow over time as the SafeAssign system is adopted by Blackboard institutions. It is important to note that the Global Reference Database is an opt-in service that students may elect to take advantage of in order to protect their own work.
Beyond the course integration aspect, SafeAssign also boasts a Direct Submit feature that allows faculty (not students as of the current release) to check documents on a “one-off” basis if they receive work that triggers their “spidey-sense.”
Gradebook integration is not yet available for CE/Vista campuses meaning that after the creation of the assignment, the faculty member will also need to create a new grading column in order to provide a grade value. It is expected that a patch will be issued that will provide this service in the coming months.
General Counsel Matthew Small noted that this new service will in no way affect the PowerLink or Building Block servicing TurnItIn, and the general flavor is that TurnItIn is still considered a strong corporate partner. Greg Ritter pointed out that those institutions currently employing TurnItIn may be loath to move away and abandon the student submissions collected through their use of the TurnItIn service.
[tags]blackboard, bbworld07, safeassign, turnitin, plagiarism[/tags]
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July 10, 2007 at 10:55 pm · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, PSU E-Learning Blog, TechTalk
Today’s keynote had a couple of huge announcements, one of which may have an incredible impact on one of their partner vendors, TurnItIn.
CIO Michael Chasen announced that starting today all of the Blackboard Learning Systems: Blackboard, CE and Vista are able to download and install via either Building Blocks or PowerLinks, a new anti-plagiarism tool, SafeAssign. The tool can act either stand-alone locally or, like TurnItIn, it can upload student work to a centralized database that will then “protect” a student’s intellectual property from inappropriate use by other user’s of SafeAssign. There were a couple of interesting features such as a direction citation tool that identifies the specific resource that appears to have been used and the ability to allow students to “opt in” to the service (which I believe can be turned off administratively thereby effectively mandating use of the service). I wonder what kind of financial impact this will have on TurnItIn when Blackboard institutions learn that they can save the tens of thousands of dollars they spend on their annual subscription costs?
In other news, Chasen also announced the availability of a new tool intended to bridge the three learning environments. Available with the licensing of one of their three systems: Community, Content or Outcomes, is their Learning Environment Connector. Although a QA tech I was speaking with thought it was already available, I haven’t been able to find it on their site to link to as of yet. The idea is that schools will be able to bridge users to other Bb LMSes, as well as to the three Systems. This is big news as it is the first sign that the company is working to bring the formerly disparate environments together. In our own university system in New Hampshire, it means that Plymouth State which employs the Campus Edition version of the LMS may well be able to leverage the community and content systems that both UNH and Granite State College were only able to access as they were Blackboard sites. Rather than worry about the differences in our LMS, we can now focus on developing points of collaboration and tangency for our respective and some times cross-pollinating student bodies.
[tags]blackboard, bbworld07, chasen, turnitin, safeassign[/tags]
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July 10, 2007 at 10:19 pm · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, PSU E-Learning Blog, TechTalk
I’m down in Boston, Mass. and today was day one of Blackboard’s user conference. Steven Leavitt of Freakonomics fame gave the opening keynote and did an admirable job. My takeaway points:
- Incentives matter - For both good and bad. Leavitt opines that anything worth winning is worth cheating for. My take, if you make the prize too valuable, people will often cheat to obtain it (he sites the example of tax returns prior to the requirement to include your dependents SSNs and the overnight “disappearance” of over 7 million children that tax year). But also, folks like to feel like they are valued and therefore it is important to ensure that the incentive is relative to the task.
- One small idea can tip the balance - In the example above, a single IRS employee made the suggestion twice over a period of years. His suggestion, once acted upon, has meant an over 30 billion dollar increase in revenue. You never know when your one simple suggestion could have such an enormous impact, so act!
- Education is ripe for a revolution - We’re still trying to teach the same way we did 40 years ago. The corporate world has evolved, why hasn’t education? By the way, Leavitt also mentioned that the idea of tenure in the world of higher education has to go because it no longer serves it’s original purpose and now simply ensures that mediocrity is rewarded. I’m sure that will stir the pot with educators but perhaps he has a point.
I just finished listening to Tapscott’s Wikinomics, perhaps I should now add Leavitt’s Freakonomics to my list.
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March 6, 2007 at 2:07 pm · Filed under Higher Education, Teaching & Learning
I’ll be facilitating a campus workshop on new communications technologies on Friday, between 12:20 and 1:15 EST (1730 GMT/UTC) on Friday, March 9th. If you are available and willing to talk via Skype for a couple of minutes with us on how these new technologies have changed, influenced or improved your practice, please drop me a line. You can find me by my Skype handle, Edventures, via G-mail/G-Talk as rkclmr@gmail.com or by e-mail using the email icon to the left.
I look forward to hearing from you!
[tags]communication, highered, skype[/tags]
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February 22, 2007 at 12:20 pm · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, TechTalk, Web 2.0
Hot off the blog presses it appears that Google has finally gone official with their commercial release of Google Apps. I’m quite happy that they have included Docs & Spreadsheets and Shared Calendaring which I thought was an obvious omission when they first rolled the suite out. They’ve also embedded API and tech support for their paid service.
At first glance, it seems reasonably priced at $50/year, but upon further review the pricing structure is $50 per user per year. So rather than attract an audience in the small business, non-profit organization and small school higher ed markets, the pricing structure may only be appealing to larger organizations such as Disney’s Pixar. You can compare the feature sets between their Standard and Premier editions although the difference seems to primarily revolve around email storage capacity, service continuity and support, and the ability to integrate APIs and third-party apps. Incredibly, Docs and Spreadsheets is included in the Standard feature set so if you don’t require advanced integration points and don’t mind ads, don’t bother with the Premier at least until they roll out more features.
I’m still waiting/hoping/expecting integration with their Google Groups feature in order to support a small team approach to project management.
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February 9, 2007 at 1:29 pm · Filed under Higher Education, Teaching & Learning
The following post was sent to me by a colleague who had found it by way of a Google alert for electronic portfolio. The post is apparently from a faculty member, although the author is anonymous. While I didn’t agree with everything the author wrote and find the tone rather antagonistic, many of the arguments (stripped of their vitriol) spoke to me as I struggle with where higher education is today and where it needs to go to better serve the needs of our learners as opposed to simply continuing the aged paradigms of a time long gone.
The author recognizes that there is blame to share, beginning with the trustees and continuing through the administrative ranks. But who does the author feels is at the root of the problem?
I blame most of all the professoriate. This is who has let me and the world’s entire educational enterprise down. They are supposed to be intelligent and wise and to know better. In the classroom, they act like they know it all, so why aren’t they actualizing that comprehensive vision outside the classroom?
The post is lengthy and can be found in its entirety here. But I’ve culled out some of the nuggets that held meaning for me:
The information revolution will not eliminate the teacher, merely liberate him to become a better teacher. The only cost to the teacher will be preparation. She must become fit to teach, able to use the wonderful new tools that are transforming our discipline.
People need high touch as much as they do high tech. They always will. While computers will continue to get better and better at freeing the classroom teacher from the routine elements of instruction, they will never be able to inspire.
Teachers must abandon their role as the definitive source of information and become facilitators instead. Their new role is not to instruct but to guide discovery.
The whole purpose of the teacher is not to posture as an authority but
to share knowledge and understanding, to empower students.
All organizations, all humans , are resistant to change. Our teachers teach the way they are taught, because that is what they know. We cling to what is safe and familiar.
As much as I found the piece engaging, in as much as it echoes some of my own personal beliefs about the state of the educational machine. However, given my current advocacy for digital literacy and critical analysis in the age of Google, I wanted to apply a bit of triangulation to assess bias and authority. As I did, a couple of things stood out and concern me about how this piece would be received by others.
- The author is anonymous. Although the author espouses a desire for educational reform, civil discourse, etc. the choice of anonymity seems to me contradictory. While I would like to believe that this was written by a peer to the professoriate that he rails against, the lack of background diminishes the argument. The About page presents an almost farce-like face to the blog.
- In reading the authors earlier posts, while they are certainly thought provoking, the tone and language suggests a biased perspective as opposed to a global one.
But even without the external validation, and although as I stated earlier I didn’t necessarily agree with everything the author wrote, much of the perspective centering around the evolving nature of information, knowledge and learning has a ring of currency and truth.
[tags]education, highered, college, university, professor [/tags]
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February 5, 2007 at 2:31 pm · Filed under Connectivism, Higher Education, Learning Theory, Social Software, Web 2.0
The opening session to the 2007 Online Connectivism Conference
just concluded and my head is spinning (In a really good way). There was so
much investment in this room, over 190 participants in the Elluminate session.
The message board was rolling, the discussion thought-provoking (even if,
especially with the differing opinions), and my hands couldn’t keep up with my
thoughts!
I came away with a number of things that I need to think more about:
- The importance of the relationship of context to
information, knowledge and learning.
- The continuing geometric explosion of information in
both pace (sum of knowledge doubling every 18 months) and breadth means
that we need to puruse less linear perspectives on how learning and
what knowledge mean to those of us involved in education, but more
importantly what it means to our learners both present and future.
- Monolithic institutions such as government and higher
education require large forces to affect changes in their culture. Are the
changes that are presently occurring in these areas a result of our
connected culture?
- How we facilitate bidirectional communication across
distances has changed dramatically in the last century in both modality
and in speed.
letters -> telegraph -> telephone -> radio -> cell
phone -> Internet
- Impact on authority – This is changing our concept of
trust (verification, digital savvy) and requires an approach using a
critical eye as opposed to open acceptance.
- A sea change from knowledge as product to knowledge/knowing
as process
- Our current web environment is cultivating an architecture
of participation powered by network effects (the strength of the
community).
- And yet the sheer abundance of information creates its
own problems – we’re drinking from a fire hose!
- George identified three means to accommodate the flood
of information:
- Increase human capacity (evolve bigger brains)
- Increase technological capacity (via bio-augmentation)
- Increase procedural capacity (employ network
intelligence)
The driving question for many of us
attending the Online Connectivism Conference is:
What is
connectivism and how does it apply to education?
Please check it out. Better yet, join the Moodle
and dive into this community of practice! We look forward to learning with you!
This is food for thought… And I’m starving!
[tags]occ2007, connectivism, siemens [/tags]
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