EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
May 31, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
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East Coast - Attractions & Landmarks
One of my Flickr pictures being used on the Schmap site.
tags: john-martin, picture, flickr, schmap
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SlideRocket - Create, Manage, and Share Presentations on the Web
Yet another web based presentation tool. This one has a very attractive user interface and transitions.
tags: sliderocket, presentation, tool, slideshow
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T&L in a Networked Environment
Jeff Utecht’s wiki for CE5160, Teaching & Learning in a Networked Classroom
tags: class, utecht, wiki, teaching, learning, network, classroom, course, plymouth, psu, plymouth-state
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Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
From Peachpit, $23.99
tags: book, presentation, zen, design
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Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web
From Peachpit, $31.99
tags: book, tagging, metadata, social, web
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January 11, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
bFree - Blackboard Course Extraction Tool Annotated
tags: bb, bfree, blackboard, unc
Use bFree to open a Blackboard™ course archive file and display an outline of the course. Preview and extract individual content items, or extract any or all content as an independent web site that mimics the original Blackboard™ course.
July 20, 2007 at 1:25 pm · Filed under ce5560
As we discussed, we are modifying the focus of this course based on your needs. Rather than approach it from a pedagogical approach, we will be looking more deeply at the technical aspects of the development and management of web-based services. There are no required readings for this course however there are two books that I would highly recommend for your bookshelf. The first is Will Richardson’s “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.” This is a great read on the pedagogical implementation of web technologies in the classroom. The other is Elisabeth and Eric Freeman’s “Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML” which I’ve found to be a wonderfully practical introduction to programming in HTML and is a great reference for those who need to know more about the inner workings of the code.
So for us, the first step is to find a home. As our explorations will require us to have deeper access to the dark and dirty recesses of the web, we will need to have two things to start:
First of all you will need an identity, a web address where folks can find you. This may be perhaps the most challenging of tasks as you will likely find that many of the names that you would hope to use are already taken, whether they are in active use or are simply being “squatted” on my domain name speculators. In the past I have used a number of different domain name registrar services but have recently used GoDaddy.com with great success. You can shop around and find domains available at a number of pricing levels but it seems that if you are paying more than $10 annually, you’re paying too much.
The first thing that you will likely notice is the wide range of choices in TLDs or Top Level Domains. If you follow the last link to the Wikipedia entry and click show next to the box entitled Generic top-level domains, you will see a list of common TLDs such as .com, .net, .org, etc. When you search on GoDaddy, you can select from a wide range of TLDs in the drop down but the results page is much more useful as it displays not only the TLD you selected, but the availability of other TLDs as well. For example, searching on my domain, whitemountaintech, shows that both the .com and .net are not available but that the .us, .info, .org are.
Take care in selecting your domain name, particularly if this site is going to have a life beyond this course. You want to ensure that it is memorable to your prospective audience.
Don’t buy the domain name yet though. Check out your hosting options next as you will need to know the IP addresses in order to point your new domain name to your hosting service. There are a number of hosting services out there. Some domain name registrars such as GoDaddy provide the option to have your site hosted by them. But as with any big purchase, make sure that you shop around. While many hosts offer the same basic array of services such as email, web space, etc. There are add-on features such as CPanel, Fantastico, email lists, streaming media services, etc. that you will want to investigate. The bottom line is that although it is possible to move your domain from one host to another, it is not without a level of complexity that makes it a rather unpleasant process for even the most hard-core of system administrators!
When I first launched my sites, I used a service called Hasweb.com primarily because it had the features I was looking for at a price that was just right for me - US$48 per year. Now this only let me host one domain name but that was ok because I wanted to use this as a springboard to learn the nuances of site management. I now use Dreamhost and a number of my fellow edutechies use Bluehost. Both of these run a bit more, closer to US$100-120 annually, although they also provide the ability to host multiple domains and have commensurately higher storage and bandwidth allowances.
So here is your homework.
- Select and purchase a domain name.
- Select and subscribe to a hosting service.
- Connect your domain name to your hosting service.
- Using the information provided by your host, explore the features available to you and learn more about what each does.
- Once you’ve done this, please respond via comment to this post.
[tags]ce5560, ce5560-summer2007, course, grad-course[/tags]
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April 6, 2007 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Twitter Log
- @jutecht: Mornin’ Jeff #
- @jutecht: I’m still recovering from shoveling nasty wet snow - wishing I was somewhere warmer right now
#
- Hitting the rack and looking for inspiration somewhere… #
- Working with a faculty member on a Student Response System pilot. Anyone else using these and have an opinion? #
- Back in my office #
- Working on a review of PacktPub’s Moodle - A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle. #
- @jefflebow: Wish I could head down there with you, PodcampNYC sounds like a blast. #
- @elsua: The problem with snow days is that work in addition to snow accumulate!!! Now I’m shoveling virtual snow
#
- @elsua: I’m ready for spring! Waiting for the rock to dry so I can go climbing! #
- Ok, so the new My Google Maps tool - ROCKS! Here’s to the death of boring history classes! #
- Check out the C-Net vid - http://urltea.com/3xu #
- @elsua: So where are you at geographically these days? #
- Filling out course proposal for #
- Grad course: Teaching & Learning in the 21st-century classroom #
- Heading to lunch #
- Wes Fryer’s podcasts 142 and 143 have thoughts spinning about evolving the model of education we use - it’s broken - how do we fix it? #
- Education leapfrog - abandon an evolution in education in favor of a radical leap forward. #
- Think cell phones in developing nations, they bypassed landlines almost entirely. #
- Education leapfrog - abandon an evolution in education in favor of a radical leap forward. #
- Testing VoIP on campus #
- Turned in winterim course proposal, yea! #
- Dreamhost mySQL FTL? #
- Dreamhost mySQL back #
- Upgrading my WP blogs to 2.1.3 #
- @brlamb, @dnorman: Yah, brag about shorts, we got nuthin’ but snow here.
http://flickr.com/photos/63586135@N00/448631253 #
- Correct snowfall pic link: http://flickr.com/photos/edventures/448631253/ #
- Heading home to celebrate Hunter’s 7th & Ethan’s 3rd birthdays tomorrow. Yup, you got it same day three years apart. #
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January 19, 2007 at 3:04 pm · Filed under Higher Education, TechTalk
Warning: This is a lengthy post as it contains the notes I was keeping over the course of today.
I am down in Southbridge, MA, a 3-hour drive from the mountains of NH, for a NERCOMP event which is bringing together current and hopeful Moodle users from the northeast region of the U.S. Today’s event is hosting five sessions:
- Moodle: Introduction & Highlights
- Faculty Perspectives on Using Moodle
- Student Response to Moodle
- From One CMS to Another in a Summer: Blackboard Basic to Moodle
- Customizing Moodle
The weather made me a bit late so the first session, Moodle Intro & Highlights was already underway by the time I got here. The speaker was Ellen Murphy, Director of Technology Integration for The Sage Colleges. She used her own Moodle site as part of the demo which in essence was a fly-by of the typical features of Moodle. Unfortunately her talk was interrupted by technical issues and as a result the flow of the discussion was not as smooth as I think she might have liked. She emphasized taking advantage of the Moodle.org site for development and support.
Sidebar: It was interesting to hear the 60 or participants echoing their frustrations with Blackboard. I ran into my CIO down here who was facilitating a NERCOMP Project Management seminar in the same building. Turns out he was using our local efforts to examine our LMS strategy as the basis for the projects that his seminar participants were focusing on. The reactions to Blackboard in his room were almost as polarized!
The second session, Faculty Perspectives on Using Moodle was for me an invaluable insight into what is important to faculty when it comes to the adoption of Moodle as the LMS platform in higher ed. Joanne CannonCarlson, Assistant Director of Educational Technology Services at Smith College was accompanied by three of her faculty members. From the English department, Jefferson Hunter. Representing the Languages, Judith Keyler-Mayer and from the Psychology department, Beth Powell.
- When working with faculty - do so one on one
- IT folks don’t always make the best teachers - different areas of understanding and expertise makes for translation errors! Workshops don’t always take into account the wide range of skills being brought to the table. Often workshops cater to an assumed skill level which may not reflect the actual skills of the attendees.
- The glossary feature, when moderated or edited by the professor, helped to correct errors in classroom notations and improve student learning and retention.
- As a professor, gave up nothing moving from Blackboard to Moodle, but gained a better user interface.
Session three, Student Response to Moodle, was a presentation by Paul Chapin, Academic Technology Specialist from Amherst College, on student usage of the former Blackboard solution and their perceptions of Moodle. The beginning of the presentation was an overview of current studies and surveys. He cited the following data sources (I’ve linked to the ones I could find):
The most used aspects of the LMS itemized below in order of highest to lowest usage (which I think he pulled from another recent study I will try to find and cite):
- Course content
- Announcements
- Discussions
- Grades
- E-mail
- Drop Box
- Group Functions
At Amherst, they tested Moodle with just a few pilot courses. No formal training in favor of just in time support. This went largely unused as their faculty weren’t interested in trying anything new. They also surveyed their students about their usage of Blackboard, their usage of Moodle and which they preferred (Moodle won by a large margin but few responses fell into the Highly Agree column. Students just wanted a decision to be made and did not want more than one environment to work in. They also mentioned that the value of either LMS was dependent solely upon the faculty member’s effective use of the technologies to further class objectives.
Session four, From One CMS to Another in a Summer: Blackboard Basic to Moodle was presented by Joanne CannonCarlson of Smith College. Their move to Moodle resulted from an inability to upgrade their system due to lack of financial support from their administration. College would pay for basic Bb license only, but faculty wanted the feature set in the Enterprise license. Deciding factor was the reality that there were now tools available that could do at least as much as their Bb product and in many areas could provide even more functionality at a potentially lower cost. The conversion process was not without pain - porting courses from Bb to Moodle involved a significant effort on the part of her staff of three student workers who did the work to port more than 200 courses over the summer. The worst part, Joanne noted, was the porting of quizzes as these all had to be manually recreated.
TCO focused on three areas: 1) Licensing fee (Bb Basic - $12k annually based on campus size and feature set), 2) Hardware and infrastructure requirements and 3) Support cost. Their experience was that supporting Moodle takes approximately 10% of her time compared to the 50% that Bb had required. Their first semester of use showed an increase in the total number of active courses taught, from 300 under Bb to 400 with Moodle. Moodle is also being used by departments and campus organizations for communication and management.
Most important lessons learned: only two faculty complaints about the new system and throughout summer they would port course and send out an invite to that faculty member which individualized the approach to retraining. The training focused just on those tools that they had already been using through Blackboard.
Smith factoid: 100 hours of training yielded 400+ courses in Moodle
this past fall. 2 complaints - 0.5% of total faculty population
Smith Documentation - some really high end items here, including Flash-based tutorials
Session five, Customizing Moodle, presented by Damon Blanchette of Smith College touched on hacking Moodle. Touted the resources already available through Moodle.org in the form of modules and plug-ins. He mentioned that Smith had incorporated Quickmail to facilitate communication. In my own state of New Hampshire, the Portfolio block is also a popular add-on. Gradebook+ from Humboldt State is another add-on they are using.
As Smith is a Banner school, they are looking to integrate their SIS with their LMS. This is something that bears watching for us as we are a Banner shop as well. Smith is using Moodle 1.7 which has a number of improvements, one of which is the institution of new roles in the environment which can specify with granularity what each role is capable of doing.
[tags] nercomp, moodle, lms, cms, course, management, system, learning [/tags]
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January 17, 2007 at 11:56 am · Filed under Higher Education, TechTalk
I’ve been kicking the tires on Moodle for a while now and it turns out that my institution, Plymouth State University, is interested in exploring this open-source learning management system as well. As the lead facilitator for this project, I’ve been asked to provide training and support for a number of our faculty who have been kind enough to volunteer to pilot a few courses to test its efficacy. As a result, I’ve been looking for documentation in the area of course development and pedagogy.
There are a number of online resources if you have the patience to search and sift through the flotsam and jetsam to find your answer. Of course, this approach assumes that you know your question. So I did a quick search for Moodle titles and came across two publications. One is a 2005 title published by O’Reilly and entitled “Using Moodle.” The other title is by a publisher I had never heard of, Packt Publishing. Written by William H. Rice, the book is entitled “Moodle - E-Learning Course Development.”
I asked for a complimentary copy to review and they were nice enough to accomodate me with the caveat that I write a review of the title. I’m in the process of tying the book to my faculty development and will publish the review here in about a week.
In the meantime, I’ll be attending the NERCOMP Moodle Interest Group this Friday at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. If you’re a reader and attending let me know and we’ll catch up F2F!
Turns out that a number of larger higher ed institutions in the United States are using or turning to Moodle as well. The list below is compiled from Moodle’s registered sites list. I was surprised to see so many University of California schools on the list considering their system-wide adoption of SAKAI. There was also a recent article on the Campus Technology website that mentioned UCLA was adopting Moodle as their campus LMS.
Here’s the list:
- Alaska Pacific University, AK - http://distance.alaskapacific.edu/
- Albertson College of Idaho, ID - http://moodle.albertson.edu/
- Alma College - http://courses.alma.edu/
- Anaheim University, CA - http://online.anaheim.edu/
- Antioch College, OH - http://gamma.antioch-college.edu/moodle/
- Athabaska University, CA - http://www.athabascau.ca/media/index.php?id=132
- Augustana College, IL - http://moodle.augustana.edu/
- Humboldt State University, CA - http://learn.humboldt.edu
- San Diego State University, CA – College of Education – http://coedata.sdsu.edu:16080/moodle/
- University of Florida - College of Education – http://online.coe.ufl.edu/
- Earlham College, IN - https://moodle.earlham.edu/
- Eastern Kentucky University, KY - http://www.modellabschool.com/online/
- Guilford College, NC - http://moodle.guilford.edu/
- Huntington University, IN - https://myclasses.huntington.edu/login/index.php
- Illinois College, IL - http://www.ic.edu/moodle/
- MIT, MA – Teacher Education Program – http://education.mit.edu/moodle/
- East Carolina University, NC - http://eagle.aos.ecu.edu/moodle/
- Kalamazoo College, MI - http://moodle.kzoo.edu/moodle/
- Colorado College, CO - https://prowl.coloradocollege.edu/
- Salem College, NC - http://moodle.salem.edu/college/
- SUNY, Oneonta, NY - https://aristotle.oneonta.edu/moodle/
- UCal Davis, CA - http://moodle.ucdavis.edu/
- UCal Irvine, CA – Distance Learning - http://learn.uci.edu/cms/
- UCal Santa Barbara, CA - http://www.moodle.cs.ucsb.edu/
- University of Hawaii, HI – Department of Educational Technology - http://etec.hawaii.edu/courses/
- University of Minnesota, MN - https://moodle.umn.edu/
- University of New Mexico, NM – College of Education - http://ssc-sf1.unm.edu/
- University of South Dakota, SD – Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) - http://moodle.usd.edu/
- UCLA, CA - http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/
- University of Washington, Tacoma, WA – Pilot - http://moodle.tacoma.washington.edu/
- Bradley University, IL – Pilot - http://blackboard.bradley.edu/faculty/LMSreview.shtml
[tags]lms, cms, learning, course, management, system, moodle [/tags]
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March 7, 2006 at 9:07 pm · Filed under Higher Education, Learning Theory, TechTalk
No sooner had I received the feed for Will Richardson’s post on his excitement over the first delivery of his newly published book then I ordered my own copy.
I have just cracked it open but I am excited about its prospects, particularly since I am working on a culminative project for my M.Ed. which is the development of a graduate level course in current EdTech tools. Between Will’s book, and the syllabi posted by Ulises Mejias in his Social Software Affordances course and Terry Anderson in his Emerging Issues in Educational Technology course, I am excited to start diving into the course’s creation.
Congratulations Will, and thanks!
technorati tags: will, richardson, book, blogs, wikis, podcasts, edtech, web, tools, classroom
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February 10, 2006 at 3:04 am · Filed under Web Expressions
For those of you who are fans of the SciFi genre, you may recognize the origin of these questions. For the uninitiated, the questions are asked of the protaginist in the series Babylon 5. I chose this theme after the discussion in our class today which highlighted the impact of media on the way we encounter, perceive and process information.Who are you?
In class today I asked you about your philosophy as a learner. I also asked you to think about your roles as a member of the classroom community. Now that you have had an opportunity to consider what was discussed, I would like for you to post a blog entry which addresses the following:
- Describe how you believe you learn best,
- Describe your perception of your role in this class and,
- Discuss one area of weakness that you would like to improve as a result of this course.
What do you want?
My philosophy is that this class is learner-centric. It is my belief that while we are addressing certain topics that are central to the course, it is important for each of you as learners to take control of your education and focus on areas that you wish to improve. As a new blog entry, or as a continuation of the entry started above, please speak to the question of “What do you want,” and what you desire to get out of this course. Be insightful and true to your hopes and aspirations.
A Friendly Reminder
This is a good time to begin brainstorming topics that you might wish to employ as the basis of your class project.
February 9, 2006 at 8:48 pm · Filed under Web Expressions
I am teaching a course for the Computer Science and Technology department at Plymouth State University called Web Expressions. This class is part of the effort to redesign our general education requirements for undergraduate students. This semester I am conducting the course entirely via blog (whereas last semester I used WebCT as the primary delivery tool). The blog engine that my students use is called Serendipity and while it is a rather robust system, it is no integration into many of the other e-tools I find myself using. As such, I am going to try cross-posting my course work to this blog in an effort to archive my work for the future.
The only caveat is that I have a couple of missing posts that I need to recreate for the sake of continuity so the flow may seem a bit awkward at first.
This initiative is also in keeping with my attempts to use my blog as a Personal Knowledge Management system. My blogroll includes four links to sites that have a KM focus. They are:
November 3, 2005 at 3:42 am · Filed under Web 2.0
Well, I activated this account thanks to Flock. 
I caught wind of this from a couple of blogs I follow in the EdTech arena and wanted to beta test it to gauge its efficacy for higher ed. We’ll see how this test goes. Unfortunately, this means I will be maintaining two separate blogs as the current version of Flock does not appear to support Serendipity installations. My other blog is temporarily hosted at one of my Plymouth State University accounts as it is used in the course of facilitating one of the courses I teach.
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