My notes are identified by an asterisk (*).

Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment (DIAA)

• Address teaching, technology and assessment needs
• Work with ALL UT colleges, schools and units
• Power to convene, advise and advocate (responsible for informing Provost and make recommendations)

Supports faculty through:

• instructional and technical consulting
• professional development
• resource development
• project development
• incentives & grants

Next-gen learners

• mobile
• digital
• connected
• experiential
• immediate
• social

* Experiment and learn through identification of cause and effect

They want to be engaged, to be part of a vibrant learning community, and have the opportunity to explore, collaborate, innovate and be challenged.

UT defines Web 2.0 in their environment as:

• social computing
• mobile learning
• educ gaming
• geospatial technologies
• immersive media

As UT scans their horizon, they are looking for tools that will:

• facilitate collaborative and group work
• connect students with ideals and information
• create experience that we could not provide students before
• merge the power of spatial analysis with geo-tagged multimedia

Identification Process

• Technology – what are the characteristics of the tech?
• Benefits – Does the tech address an important problem
• Faculty Readiness – Are faculty ready, willing and able to use it?
• Implementation – Can we implement and support it?

Funding & Dev

• Student development grants
• Provost’s incentive awards
• Digital media support
• Collaborative proposals with colleges

Incubation circles

• Inner ring: tools
• 2nd ring: new media research & support (NMRS)
• 3rd ring: Student employees retention & Training (SERT)
• 4th: faculty incentive grant (FAST TEX), Digital Media Services (DMS)

UTA – Teaching with Technology Resource Page

What is UT keeping up with?

• Changes in technology
• Shifts in student characteristics and expectations
• New approaches to teaching and learning
• The emergence of global communities
• New knowledge

What if we don’t keep up?

• We will have “Digital students at analog schools”
• We will lose out on opportunities to engage students
• We will fail to raise the bar in teaching & learning
• We will fail to be a leader in higher education
• We will fall short in support of the 21st century workplace and society
• We will fail to contirbiture toa culture of innovation

* I changed the bullets above to statements as they seemed to be more powerful in conveying the message about a need for change and attention to our students.

Robert Bruce made a good link back to the tech problems early on in the presentation. The speaker’s IM failed to connect, as she used the tool to stay in touch with her children (said it’s the only way she can reach them). The corollary is that we will fail to connect with our students if we cannot adopt technologies that reach them.

Tags: camptech08campus-technology campus technology education web2.0 next-gem academic

Students first, universities second
*Again, amen!

Chickering and Gamson 7 Principles for Good Practice in Higher Eduation (look up after)
*wOOt!

PPT is on blog, address on last slide

She is against idea of immigrants v. natives, no supporting data, causes divisiveness and problems. It’s a crutch.

Real difference is in the digital divide in terms of lifestyle, engagement and motivation. UK study – 15-18 yr olds least likely to give up cell phone, older folks more likely to give up cell phone and sex rather than liquor, caffeine and chocolate. *Scary!*

Don’t build a creepy treehouse! (http://technagogy.learningfield.org)

Approach
Identify problems and/or opportunities first, then match technologies with opportunities. What problem will tool X solve? Primary point of hesitancy and push-back. How will this HELP me?

From Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, The Promise -> The Tool -> The Bargain
Establishes offering, expectations, operating norms, and rules of conduct. Focus on The Promise and The Bargain, not The Tool.

What is the Second Life Promise? Increased sense of presence, community bonding, more engaging and immersive learning (when SL used correctly), fun

What is the Second Life Tool? Stigmergy (ability to manipulate environment to send a message to someone who comes after you-we have the ability to build and create, change/modify, leave something for those who follow), Customized Avatars (allowing students to make changes, reading the student by who they choose or allow students to role play in a realistic setting),  Global Community , Multi-modal Communication (text chat, voice 1 to 1, group and area and ability to emote)

She cites a great example of using it to teach rejection and social interactions such as discrimination in a safe environment.

Sarah also shared a great example of modifying environment to experience LD life, what happens when your environment is upside down? How do you cope?

What is the Second Life Bargain? What we need to accept: There is a Learning Curve (install and learn to get around, build avatar, learn to build, learn to script), Students need to suspend self-limitations (Loyalist College Border Crossing),  That we are using the tool as the best, justified use of the tools, Necessary expertise to serve as guide, advisor, AND instructor.

Resources
http://ubernoggin.com
http://SL-educationblog.org
SLED Mailing List
SLRL Mailing List

SL Avatar: Intellagirl Tully
http://intellagirl.com

Tags: camptech08campus-technology campus technology education seond-life SL

*Indicates my thoughts

Service-learning: The campus and beyond
Developing a community, a sense of belonging and common purpose/intent

*The bourgeoning growth of offline apps: Google Gears, Adobe AIR, MS Silverlight leading to innovation.

Real world application – Reynolds Journalism Institute “programming” competition
http://rji.missouri.edu

*Integrate technology using real world projects that lead to a real product/service as opposed to a theoretical one. Develop local history resources, develop materials to benefit your peers, profession, community.

*Beginning to see my “need” for an iPod Touch

Budget – how do you develop these innovations without money? Approach Provost for innovation funding – cross-disciplinary. Tell story to possible supporters. Match funds from other sources. Interdisciplinary Innovations Fund, Univ of Missouri 2008-09 Projects – iPhone Student Developer Competition, Building Dashboard, Sustainable Agriculture, FilmTech, Solar Decathlon

*Market and reach out!

Business of Innovation – how do you develop your innovative practice?
Consider: ownership, marketing, branding, promotion
ROI, it’s not all about money!

How others are using web 2.0 beyond the classroom?
*PELI, touted at #camptech08 for outreach and resource research and connection facilitation. I forgot to mention how we’d like to work with the State Dept and aid orgs for mapping and developing complementary efforts

Tags: camptech08campus-technology campus technology education web2.0

Faith in technology – tech will solve our problems
Extend education will increase excellence
We can’t see how amazing the age we live in is.

Progression of phones – Switchboard in Mayberry to cell phones for 8-year olds
Adoption 85 yrs for phone, decade for cells

Ray Kurzweil –

Static v. dynamic
portfolios are a representation but are not learning
How do we leverage technology for learning, for synthesis rather than re-presentation?

Frank Rhodes, Creation of the Future

How do we measure a university, what would we do if we were to start a university today?

Context to Core
ASU wants to go from 60K to 100K students, how long can we compete when we try to do it all ourselves? At what point are we wasting our resources trying to replicate what others can provide for less?

How do we move from context to core? Eliminate inefficiencies, redundancies…
Research – The concept of one, do it once, do it well, do it everywhere
The concept of zero – don’t do it, let someone else who is better at what they do, do it for you. It’s a simple matter of scale, and Service Level Agreements.

Cop to Concierge
Amazon.com-ification – cut out the middleman

Info to Intelligence
Fractured business intelligence – Dashboards to die for
Create a data singularity where you train people to manage data from dashboards rather than fracturing their attention and time

Cattle-car to 1:1
Promote don’t prevent technology adoption on campus. Provide apps online, provide anytime, anywhere learning.

Physical to digital
Burn the libraries, stop air conditioning the books
We need change now

Traditional to hybrid
Abilene Christian University – 0 to warp speed

Is it time for a radical infusion of tech into higher ed?
Does the role of IT declien?
Does the CIO cease to be a strategic officer?

Tags: camptech08campus-technology campus technology conference education adrian-sannier asu

While a terrific step in the right direction, my desire is that wiki developers will seriously consider embedding this functionality into the web experience such that an extension is unnecessary.

Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the alert.

Photo and quote provided by UniversalEditButton.org

Tags: wiki, universal-edit-button, ueb, edit, participate, culture

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First, create your account
Twitter is free, but you do need that digital identity so folks can find you. So visit Twitter.com and sign up.

Second, start posting
You really don’t need to do a whole lot if you just want to sample the world of Twitter. Once you are logged into your account, start dropping your Tweets into the What Are You Doing? box.

Third, find folks to follow
Now you will want to build out your network. This is done by finding folks to follow. You may want to find those in your local area or in your industry. You may want to find those who share your interests. Or you may just start picking folks at random. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to use Twitter’s Search feature to find folks by name or by location. Once you find someone that you wish to follow, take a moment to see who they are following. You can quickly and often times effectively expand your network in this fashion, growing geometrically rather than linearly. Another recent resource is TwitterPacks. Twitter-ites are adding themselves to this wiki and self-sorting by field, location, and interest.

Fourth, find a good Twitter app
Once your network starts growing, you will likely find that constantly refreshing your Twitter page gets old quick. Once you hit this point, you will want an application that displays your Twitter activity in near real-time. Finding a good Twitter app, or client, is sort of like finding a good pair of shoes. You have to try a few on before you’re happy with the fit. I’ve tried Tweetr, Twhirl and Snitter. I finally settled on Snitter as it had most of the features that I needed/wanted in a Twitter client.

Fifth, manage your network
Your network is organic and I would compare it to the art behind the bonsai tree. Like the bonsai, you need to nurture your network. It requires care, fertilization and sometimes, pruning. There are a number of tools you can use, but that is a topic for a future post. Managing your network is an art form and it deserves greater attention than a few lines can deliver.

Sixth, have fun!
When it comes to Twitter, if you’re not having fun then you are doing something wrong. Twitter is kind of like Cheers, where everybody knows your name. Spend some time Tweeting and responding to other Tweeters and pretty soon, when you come online, your Twitterverse will treat you just like Norm (minus the beer)!

There is a wealth of information out there but I’ve found the Twitter Wiki (http://twitter.pbwiki.com/) to be an incredible resource for all things Twitter.

Tags: twitter, how-to, community, collaboration, network

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My LinkedIn Answer

It’s been over a year since I first heard about and chose to dabble with Twitter. I’d long been frustrated with the one to one limitations of the majority of Instant Messaging services and had longed for a means to collaborate with a number of folks simultaneously. Twitter was the answer to my needs but it took nearly four more months after I used it for it to become the tool I desired.

You see I wanted a network that was a stripped down version of the Facebook/MySpace wall. I wanted a community of contacts with whom I could converse on a variety of topics without all the extraneous chrome that surrounded Social Networking sites. The problem was not with the tool as Twitter was designed for this very thing. The problem was adoption. It wasn’t enough for me to be online, I needed colleagues and contacts to adopt this tool as well. As it turned out, it was simply a matter of time. By last fall, Twitter had, for me, finally reached a critical mass. This was identified not only by the number of Twitter users, but by the number and variety of tools that sprung out of the needs and desires of the community to communicate and collaborate in different ways.

Now, a year later, my very own personal and professional network has grown. I have 421 followers and am following 352 Twitterers from all over the world. Nearly every day I add someone new to my network and as a result I have a steady stream of information flowing through my Twitter client, Snitter. Which begs the question…

How do you keep up with the flood of information?
There is a literal ocean of information that floods through our processors every day: e-mail, RSS feeds, Tweets, IM, SMS, the list is endless. It is impossible to keep up with the torrent and foolish to even try. So rather than spend one’s time trying to consume it all, try a different approach. One of my colleagues (can’t remember who, so drop a comment and I’ll make sure to give you proper attribution) had an analogy about a river and fishing. Mine is quite similar.

When I was stationed in Pensacola, I used to head to Johnson Beach as often as I could to escape back to nature. One of my favorite pastimes was to throw a cast net and see what I caught. I could spend hours casting just to see what I could find, or I could spend just a little time fishing for a specific critter. And as with every endeavor, the more your refine your technique, the better you become and the more efficiently you use your time.

CC Flickr Image by jaredb

Throw a cast net and see what you catch. Sample bits and pieces and if you find something of interest, follow up. Or you can refine your technique by automating the process of searching on a specific keyword that you can identify.

Tags: twittercommunication collaboration community practice

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Chris Johnston has announced the availability of a public WordPress 2.5 demo site. This site will house the most up to date version of WordPress 2.5 prior to its release in March. This is particularly useful to those who do not wish to setup an SVN install of WordPress on their local machine or web server.

I had problems with a redirect to SiteSpinner using the URL http://wp.chrisjohnston.org but adding /wp-admin to the end got me right to the login screen.

The username/password combo for the demo site is admin/demo

Below are current screenshots of the major working spaces. Click on the image to see a larger version in my Flickr account.

Dashboard
Write
  Manage
  Design
  Comment
  Plugins
Users
  Settings

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Tags: wordpresswp2.5 wordpress2.5 blog

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That led to a decision point: do we continue to pay for a landline when both my wife and I have cell phones with excellent service here at home? Is it worth it just to suffer through on a questionable dial-up connection? Turns out that neither one of us believed it was. So begins our experiment with disconnecting from the physical and going ethereal (ok, wireless). For the cost of our landline at about $50-60/month and the cost of our dial-up connection via PeoplePC at about $10/month, we could get set up with Verizon’s Broadband Access wireless Internet service at $60/month.

I had reservations about how the service would fare at our home but I figured I’d give it a shot. I tried to swing by our local computer guy but his office is closed on the weekend. So I traveled down to another Verizon store and purchased a USB720 wireless adapter and service.

Interestingly, each connector is assigned its own phone number. I wondered how they managed to keep track of service and it turns out they do key it to a phone number. It strikes me as a bit limiting in that it would almost make more sense to attach an IPv6 number instead but I know little about the infrastructure that comprises their network.I was concerned about signing on to a contract but Verizon does have a 15-day return policy and I figured that would be plenty of time to test the typical use cases I would be employing. So now it came down to testing the device. Installation was a snap. Drop in the CD, run the configuration app wizard, attach the device and connect to the Verizon network. In less than 5 minutes I was online and connecting at 684 Kbps download/480 Kbps upload. Now this isn’t great compared to the possible connect speed of the Broadband Access service (600 Kbps – 1.4 Mbps download/500 Kbps – 800 Kbps upload), but considering that we are on the fringes of the deployment of this service and compared to my old connection speed of 22 kbps, I ain’t complaining!

SpeedTest Results – Round 1
Speed Test Results – Round 2

I was even able to install the VZAccess software on my wife’s laptop and our home desktop so that they could use it as well. So far, so good, as all three connected successfully. The only caveat to the plan is that they have a cap of 5 GB per month:

“If usage exceeds 5 GB per line during any billing period, we reserve the right to reduce throughput speeds of any application that would otherwise exceed such speed to a maximum of approximately 200 Kbps. These speeds are subject to change, in our reasonable discretion, in order to address network issues.”

It will be interesting to see how much bandwidth I consume on a monthly basis and the VZAccess software should allow me to track this.

[tags]verizon, wireless, internet, isp, online, usb720[/tags]

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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:

• Skype (December 2007)
• Citizen Journalism (November 2007)
• Data Visualization (October 2007)
• Haptics (September 2007)
• Cyber-Infrastructure (August 2007)
• Twitter (July 2007)
  
• Wikipedia (June 2007)
• Facebook II (May 2007)
• RSS (April 2007)
• Creative Commons (March 2007)
• Open Journaling (February 2007)
• Digital Storytelling (January 2007)
• E-Books (November 2006)
• Google Earth (October 2006)
• YouTube (September 2006)
• Facebook I (August 2006)
• Mapping Mashups (July 2006)
• Virtual Worlds (June 2006)
• Google Jockeying (May 2006)
• Remote Instrumentation (April 2006)
• Screencasting (March 2006)
• Virtual Meetings (February 2006)
• Grid Computing (January 2006)
• Collaborative Editing (December 2005)
• Instant Messaging (November 2005)
• Augmented Reality (September 2005)
• Blogs (August 2005)
• Video Blogging (August 2005)
• Wikis (July 2005)
• Podcasting (June 2005)
• Clickers (May 2005)
• Social Bookmarking (May 2005)

[tags]educause, 7things, technology, edtech, briefsheet, whitepaper[/tags]

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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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• 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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Turns out that somehow my comments.php was pooched. Went back to an older version of the function, copied the good code, dropped it in et voila! Comments are now working once more.

It really shouldn’t have taken me this long to fix this considering how easy it was but my head has been in other places of late.

So please if you have wanted to comment but were unable to, come on back and drop a line. I would really love to hear from you!

And thanks to Cliff Pearson for motivating me to fix this problem!

Cheers!

[tags]wordpress, comments, pooched[/tags]

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[tags]flock, browser[/tags]

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My thanks to the edublogosphere for the wealth of ideas to chew on and to Diigo for the annotated link posts. Diigo has been a wonderful tool. I really like the way it helps me organize my ideas, it has changed my approach. It still has it’s rough edges but I have to say that Maggie Tsai and crew have been really responsive to community feedback.

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UPDATE: Upon reflection, this is only kinda cool. It is great that your G-Talk contacts are available from your own personal home page and embedded YouTube videos are a neat trick but it seems to me sort of an obvious next step. Obvious as in should’ve been done months ago. When I first saw this, I somehow read it to mean that the Call function was included which would have made this widget ROCK but in testing, it launched Google Talk as an external app so it is clear that the real time VoIP functions are not yet embedded in this widget. Oh yeah and while you can modify the height and width parameters, this really wants to run in its native 320×447 size to see all the neat new embedded functionality. It needs the same “pop-out” feature that the G-mail version boasts to be worthwhile. So hey Google, call me when you build in both of these features and I will upgrade your status to WAY COOL.

You check it out in action under my Google Shared Items widget in the sidebar. Note that this is not yet a true widget, just a script embedded in a text widget.

To find out more, visit the Google Talkabout page. To download it yourself, go to the gmodules page.

[tags][/tags]

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[tags]video, epic2015, whatif[/tags]

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[tags]video, 2020, whatif [/tags]

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So I took the Fjords01 theme and tweaked the footer to include a get footer call as it wouldn’t work with Casey Bisson’s bsuite stats plugin out of the box. Since the Fjords01 theme supports widgets, I took the opportunity to see how they worked. I have to say that if I end up changing themes again, the use of widgets would save a ton of time in recoding the theme to accomodate my particular needs. For more info on WordPress widgets, check their Codex.

So here is the rundown of the plugins I’m using:

• Akismet – Stock plugin for prevention of comment spam, works pretty well for the most part.
• bsuite – to collect stats over time such as total hits, recent comments, most read, incoming referrals
• Category Converter – To merge my blogroll and topic categories.
• del.icio.us widget – Serves up my del.icio.us feeds quite nicely
• Dofollow – Gets past that annoying nofollow property
• Feedburner Feed Replacement – Redirects native WordPress feed URLs to your Feedburner URL
• Google Analyticator – Simplifies the process of embedding the Google tracking code
• Google Search widget – Allows your viewers to search your site using Google search rather than the default WordPress search
• Optimal Title –
• podPress –
• Sidebar Widgets – Allows for the use of widgets in your sidebars, I particularly like the ability to add RSS feed and Text/Code blocks! Adding the Sidebar Widgets drops in the del.icio.us and Google Search widgets listed above.
• Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to get updates when new comments are posted to a specific entry.

Beyond the plug-ins, you’ll notice a number of features in my sidebars which I dropped in using a Text widget rather than hard coding into my theme. In my sidebars I have links to the following:

• Google Search widget
• Google Reader Shared Items feed – I use this to act as a tickler for me and for my readers to see what I think is important in the current state of the edublogosphere.
• Recent Comments widget – So that readers can see what others have written
• del.icio.us links widget – This points to my general account but you could point to a specific tag as well.
• EdVentures pbWiki link – This points to the pbWiki resource I’m using.
• myBlogLog Recent Readers script – A blog meets mySpace kind of visual community indicator.
• Google Search widget
• LinkedIn contact link
• Technorati script
• Feedburner script
• Talkr feed links – A neat service that turns your text to speech. A little mechanical but a far cry from the old days of text to speech converters.
• And then your standard Pages, Archives and Blogroll links

[tags]wordpress, blog, plugin, theme[/tags]

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So bear with me and hopefully this will be a relatively painless process. Dang it there is no wood on my keyboard! Oh well, you get the idea.

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