EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
March 22, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
USTREAM.TV Shows: Free LIVE VIDEO, Webcam & Video Chat Rooms, Streaming Broadcast, Stream Video Clips, Internet Radio Cams, Web News Events, Watch .TV
tags: streaming-video, ustream, webvideo
A vision of the mobile, connected college experience - Today in Abilene, Texas » Moving at the Speed of Creativity Annotated
tags: college, edtech, higher-ed, iphone, university
The video is a carefully formatted and scripted production, but still quite impressive as a vision for utilizing mobile technologies in transformative ways for learning. I was particularly interested in the comments made by ACU instructors in the video. Students were provided with choices right in class, which they responded to as polls on their iPhone right away. Students self-selected a hybrid version of a class which included both online discussions and face-to-face meetings, or a more traditional seminar-style class that met entirely face-to-face. Students were encouraged to use their iPhone as a digital voice recorder to conduct interviews, as well as take photographs for a class project. I especially picked up on the comment, by one of the students, that most of the course lectures were provided in advance of class so the face-to-face time could be utilized for discussions and interaction. This is a vision of
>
>
21st century blended learning
>
>
, powered by ubiquitous student access to iPhones as well as professors adapting their pedagogic approaches to instruction in ways which appropriately leverage the transformative learning potential of mobile devices.
>
>
Top News - Schools respond to iPhone’s popularity Annotated
tags: college, edtech, higher-ed, iphone, university
Campus officials roll out programs to take advantage of the iPhone’s potential as a converged, mobile learning device
April 27, 2007 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
This edition of Diigo Links is brought to you courtesy of the MIT OpenCourseware Initiative. The following links are courses that I’ve culled that speak to a number of interests I have, particularly in the areas of anthropology/ethnography, digital media and social software.
Enjoy!
MIT OpenCourseWare | Writing and Humanistic Studies | 21W.785 Communicating in Cyberspace, Fall 2003 Annotated
This class covers the analysis, design, implementation and testing of various forms of digital communication based on group collaboration. Students are encouraged to think about the Web and other new digital interactive media not just in terms of technology but also broader issues such as language (verbal and visual), design, information architecture, communication and community. Students work in small groups on a semester-long project of their choice.
MIT OpenCourseWare | Writing and Humanistic Studies | 21W.784 Becoming Digital: Writing About Media Change, Fall 2005 Annotated
The computer and related technologies have invaded our daily lives, have changed the way we communicate, do business, gather information, entertain ourselves. Even technology once considered distinctly “modern” - photography, the telephone, movies, television - has been altered or replaced by faster and more dynamic media that allow more manipulation and control by the individual. Anyone can now create stunning photographic images without a processing lab; and film no longer earns its name, as the cinema often presents images that were never filmed to begin with, but created or doctored in the digital domain. What are the consequences of these changes for the media and arts they alter? How does digitizing affect the values, ethical and aesthetic, of images, texts, and sounds? How do these technologies change the way we spend our time and relate to other people? In the age of the digital, what becomes of property, of history, of identity? Through a series of careful comparisons of images, texts, movies, games, and music - pre-digital versus post-digital - this course will analyze the ways in which these media and our responses to them have changed in the digital era; and we will ask about the value of these changes.
MIT OpenCourseWare | Science, Technology, and Society | STS.360 Ethnography, Spring 2003
- This course is a practicum-style seminar in anthropological methods of ethnographic fieldwork and writing. Depending on student experience in ethnographic reading and practice, the course is a mix of reading anthropological and science studies ethnographies; and formulating and pursuing ethnographic work in local labs, companies, or other sites.
- post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Engineering Systems Division | ESD.85J Integrating Doctoral Seminar on Emerging Technologies, Fall 2005
- This team-taught subject is for doctoral students working on emerging
technologies at the interface of technology, policy and societal
issues. It integrates concepts of research strategy and design from a
variety of disciplines. The class addresses problem identification and
formulation of research topics, the role of qualitative and
quantitative research methods, and the use of various data collection
techniques. Coursework focuses on students’ thesis proposals,
faculty-student study panels, critical evaluation of research design,
and ethical issues in conducting research and gathering data. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Anthropology | 21A.750J Social Theory and Analysis, Fall 2004
- This course presents a survey of social theory from the 19th century to the present. The focus is on (a) the social grounds from which the theory arises; (b) the utility and limitations of older theories for current conditions; (c) the creation of new theory out of contemporary conditions; (d) sciences and technologies as the infrastructures upon which social institutions depend, are shaped, and shape.
- post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 6.805 Ethics and the Law on the Electronic Frontier, Fall 2005
- This course considers the interaction between law, policy, and technology as they relate to the evolving controversies over control of the Internet. In addition, there will be an in-depth treatment of privacy and the notion of “transparency” — regulations and technologies that govern the use of information, as well as access to information. Topics explored will include:
*
Legal Background for Regulation of the Internet
*
Fourth Amendment Law and Electronic Surveillance
*
Profiling, Data Mining, and the U.S. PATRIOT Act
*
Technologies for Anonymity and Transparency
*
The Policy-Aware Web
- post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Science, Technology, and Society | STS.069 Technology in a Dangerous World, Fall 2002
- Aim is to analyze important current events for what they reveal about
the nature and working of our technological world. Starting point is
connection between technology and terrorism. Subject also explores how
a human-built world can foster insecurity and danger, and how human
beings respond. Many invited guests help develop a strong
interdisciplinary approach (science, engineering, social science,
humanities). Topics include technological risk and remediation,
sociotechnical systems, imagination of disaster, technology and
identity, technology and religion, technology and education, and
technology and trust. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Comparative Media Studies | CMS.610 Media Industries and Systems, Spring 2006
- This course examines the interplay of art, science, and commerce shaping the production, marketing, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media. It combines perspectives on media industries and systems with an awareness of the creative process, the audience, and trends shaping content. There will be invited discussions with industry experts in various subject areas. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.966 Digital Anthropology, Spring 2003
- Digital Anthropology is a Spring 2003 applied social science and media arts seminar, surveying the blossoming arena of digital-artifact enabled experimental sociology/anthropology. We will emphasize on both (a) Technology Testbeds – systematically deploying research lab prototypes and corporate pre-production products in a sample human organizational population and carefully observing the social consequences, and (b) Sociometrics – using digital artifacts to better observe and measure the complex social reality of interesting human systems. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.965 Social Visualization, Fall 2004
- Millions of people are on-line today and the number is rapidly growing - yet this virtual crowd is often invisible. In this course we will examine ways of visualizing people, their activities and their interactions. Students will study the cognitive and cultural basis for social visualization through readings drawn from sociology, psychology and interface design and they will explore new ways of depicting virtual crowds and mapping electronic spaces through a series of design exercises. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.963 Technological Tools for School Reform, Fall 2005
- This course explores the potential impact of modern technologies on the school reforms debate. The first part of the course provides an overview of the current state of the school reform debate and reviews the ideas in the progressive school reform movement, as well as examining the new public charter school in Cambridge as a case study. The second part of the course requires critical study of research projects that hold promise as inspirations and guidelines for concrete multidisciplinary activities and curriculum for progressive charter schools. The course concludes with a discussion of the challenges in scaling the successful innovations in school reform to new contexts. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.963 Techno-identity: Who we are and how we perceive ourselves and others, Spring 2002
- The nature of human identity - how we think of ourselves, how we perceive others - is a mutable concept, changing with the rise and fall of religious beliefs, social mores, philosophical theories. Today, we live in a world in which science and technology are among the most powerful forces reshaping our culture - and thus our definitions and perceptions of identity. In this seminar, we will examine the impact of science and technology on identity. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.962 The Nature of Constructionist Learning, Spring 2003
- This course examines the philosophical and theoretical foundations of constructionism as a paradigm for formulating and evaluating new theories for learning and approaches to education. One of the goals of this course is to help new learning researchers situate their work within the constructionist framework through readings and projects that will focus on the rich interplay between the process of knowledge construction and the development and co-evolution of ideas, learners, tools, and contexts. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.961 Designing Sociable Media, Spring 2001
- This course is about social life in the on-line world. Its focus is on how the design of the interface influences people’s interactions with each other and shapes the cultural mores and structures they develop. We will examine the ways social cues are communicated in the real and the virtual world, discuss the limits imposed upon on-line communities by their mediated nature, and explore directions that virtual societies can take that are impossible for physical ones. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.961 Ambient Intelligence, Spring 2005
- This course will provide an overview of a new vision for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in which people are surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in the everyday objects around them. It will focus on understanding enabling technologies and studying applications and experiments, and, to a lesser extent, it will address the socio-cultural impact. Students will read and discuss the most relevant articles in related areas: smart environments, smart networked objects, augmented and mixed realities, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, tangible computing, intelligent interfaces and wearable computing. Finally, they will be asked to come up with new ideas and start innovative projects in this area. - post by edventures
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.714J Technologies for Creative Learning, Fall 2004
- This course explores how new technologies can help people learn new things in new ways. It analyzes principles and strategies underlying the design of innovative educational technologies and creative learning environments, drawing on specific case studies such as the LEGO Programmable Brick and Computer Clubhouse after-school learning centers. The course will include hands-on activities, analyses of learning experiences, and design of new tools and activities. - post by edventures
March 20, 2007 at 11:40 am · Filed under Teaching & Learning
I can’t believe I had forgotten this “kids conference” when I posted on Vicki Davis’ article the other day. When I worked at Moultonborough Academy, one of our science teachers, Shaw Smith, was the faculty coordinator for the NH Youth Environmental Summit, an environmental leadership conference for middle-school students.
As it turns out, Plymouth State University hosts the one day NHYES conference in our science center, Boyd Hall! This year’s conference was an exceptional success as it sold out and they were in the unique position of having to turn away those who had hoped to register.
One of the unique things about this conference is that the presenters are all high-school students, with a couple of outstanding middle schoolers thrown in for good measure. The students are responsible for developing the conference from soup to nuts including registration, publicity and presentation.
I would love to compile a list of similar endeavors if folks would be willing to throw the URLs my way. If you already have them in your del.icio.us list, just add the tags for:edventures and kids-conference and I’ll create a page for those resources.
Perhaps such a list could serve to inspire others to reach out and engage students at a very visceral level!
[tags][/tags]
powered by performancing firefox
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite 
February 10, 2007 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts
February 10, 2007 at 11:48 am · Filed under Diigo Links
-
- Another voice for a sea change in the praxis of higher education, this article has some pertinent insights into how those of us in higher education must begin to address and challenge some of the older paradigms which are inhibiting our ability to transform our praxis into one more suitable to the 21st century. - post by edventures
- A great article on internet-based teaching and learning resources by Bryan Alexander, Research Director for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. It touches upon practical uses of blogs, wikis, podcasts and virtual worlds in addition to social imaging. One topic that I think would be of particular interest to librarians is that of social bookmarking – using online tools to create and share dynamic lists of readings or resources that might be specific to their area of specialization. - post by edventures
EDUCAUSE Quarterly | Volume 30 Number 1 2007 Annotated
suppose for a moment that it’s the 1930s…”
…You’re the captain of the luxury liner, the Queen Mary, steaming across the Atlantic to New York. Suddenly, you hear a low drone. You look up and see a Pan Am Clipper, winging its way from London to New York. Would you realize that the age of steamships is about to end? Would the steamship company understand that its business actually is transportation, not ships?
Students offer Net advice to colleges | CNET News.com
ALA | Using technology in teaching and learning
The Creative Educator
December 31, 2006 at 6:06 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts
I’d been thinking back on the year and was wondering what my blogging meant to me. Then through my feeds came the Top Ten meme and I thought that not only would I consider what my blogging meant to me, but what it meant to those who visited my blog this past year.
So here are the top ten most read posts for 2006, surprising to me was finding that half of them were only just recently published*:
- New 2005 ECAR Report on Students and Information Technology - ECAR published the findings based on their 2005 surveys. Re-reading the post reminds me that I never did take the time to parse their findings.
- Our new home - 2006 saw me make the move from my original wordpress.com blog to hosting my own Wordpress blog on my site. Ah, the joys of home ownership!
- News from WebCT Impact - My first, and last, Impact conference. Lots of info about what would come of the Blackboard-WebCT merger but would later pale in comparison to the press over Blackboard’s patent and subsequent lawsuit against their next leading competitor, Desire2Learn.
- Revealing the title of Harry Potter Book 7 - Only a few weeks old and already #4. It just goes to show that popular culture has its own trends and they don’t always follow yours!
- The truly world-wide web, or my blog’s travellog - This was a fun post for me as I realized the global impact that today’s netizens enjoy. What I’ve found even more meaningful is cultivating relationships with those from around the globe, opportunities that I would not have had without the reach of the web.
- Online Connectivism Conference - Another recent post which speaks to the rise in popularity of “un-conferences” such as the incredibly successful K12 Online Conference.
- Encyclopodia - Wikipedia for your iPod - Wikipedia at your fingertips, or at least as close as your iPod’s dial! But I repeat my plea for a 5g compatible version!
- Links - 4 December 2006 - This was just a list of links I wanted to remember to come back to, although looking back, I don’t believe I ever did.
- Casey Bisson receives Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration - Another open-source initiative, this time targeting the library OPAC for greater accessibility. More will come of this in the new year, with a new name. Stay tuned!
- TikiWiki as a university knowledge base - Plymouth State launched an internal knowledge base intended to serve as a point of reference for frequently utilized HelpDesk and IT information as we did not have a content management system. However as of 1 January, it will be retired as we now have a content management system, Hannon Hill’s Cascade, which we hope will launch our knowledge base into the next decade with improved authorship capabilities.
*Ok, I found out why so many of my recent posts showed so high. BSuite was showing activity in the past 15 days rather than the entire year. So I changed my selector and here is what popped up. Many are the listed above and some are downright boring but in the interest of full disclosure here are the top twelve for the full year, although two of them: Resume and About the Author are pages rather than posts.
- New 2005 ECAR Report on Students and Information Technology
Tot: 1,052, Avg: 4, Max: 20
- News from WebCT Impact
Tot: 1,040, Avg: 6, Max: 66
- Resume
Tot: 630, Avg: 2, Max: 14
- Google Calendar available
Tot: 475, Avg: 2, Max: 20
- The Ten Faces of Innovation
Tot: 438, Avg: 2, Max: 8
- About the Author
Tot: 432, Avg: 2, Max: 10
- Interesting theme problem
Tot: 426, Avg: 2, Max: 15
- Our new home
Tot: 419, Avg: 2, Max: 15
- The Highlight of My Day
Tot: 408, Avg: 1, Max: 6
- WebCT Portfolio
Tot: 357, Avg: 2, Max: 14
- We’re moving!
Tot: 350, Avg: 1, Max: 13
- Dead Air
Tot: 312, Avg: 2, Max: 7
[tags][/tags]
powered by performancing firefox
October 19, 2006 at 11:31 am · Filed under Higher Education, TechTalk, Web 2.0
Note that this post will be a work in progress, so come back again or queue it up in your aggregator!
I was asked to present to the members of a Teaching Literature in Secondary School course. Typically this usually results in a “how to use your Plymouth State resources” monologue. Which isn’t to say it isn’t useful, but it’s not exactly inspiring.
As I was working with this group, a couple of things immediately stood out: 1) this was a mixed class of undergraduate and graduate students and 2) many of these students if they weren’t already in a position to work with students would be graduating in the spring. As student accounts are removed within 6 months of their graduation, they would need to move their work in order to retain access it to it. Well that got the little cogs in my head spinning and with all the recent buzz over Google Apps for Education and my previous post on the “Digital Nomad,” I decided to take a chance and dive into resources that would enable these current and future professionals to develop, access and share their resources without being required to be place bound. I started with the growing suite of Google apps.
Google Apps
Google’s legacy is the search engine we all know, but not as many folks in my area are aware of the companies efforts to develop a suite of products that can be accessed anywhere one has a network connection. Some of these applications include: G-Mail, Docs & Spreadsheets (Docs was formerly known as Writely), Calendar, G-Talk, and in beta (think not quite ready for primetime - Saturday Night Live) - Page Creator, Personalized Homepage, Groups and Reader. So how is this different from Microsoft Office, you might ask? Well, for one thing, your documents are available online so you can access them from any computer with Internet access. Additionally, you can control access to your documents for online collaboration.
The key to the kingdom is a simple and free Google account.
Technorati Tags: teacher, educator, digital, nomad, web2.0, blog, google, app, podcast,
powered by performancing firefox
April 4, 2006 at 7:54 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts, TechTalk
I was checking out my blog stats from Performancing when I noticed that one of the referral URLs to my site was from blogsearch.google.com. I hadn’t heard of that one before so I pulled it up. It’s an interesting way to search just blog content. In a search for “ECAR,” my blog post New 2005 ECAR Report on Students and Information Technology was the second return. It is my sincere hope that speaks highly of the search process. I’ll have to remember to share this with my Web Expressions class.
UPDATE: Ok, so it turns out that blogsearch has been around since September of last year. That’s a lifetime in computer years but I wonder why it didn’t generate much buzz. I did notice as I was poking around that it’s process for returning results seems to favor those blogs with the key words in the title versus the content. I don’t know if I like that. For example, I did a search for edublogs and the first page was fine, but page three and many of the following pages of results had the same blog listed, albeit with differing posts.
I guess I would prefer a feature that would return a blog hit but would then subcategorize or compress links to the same blog.
BTW, Will Richardson’s blog, weblogg-ed.com didn’t make the first page for edublog. What gives? At least James Farmer and Josie Fraser were well represented!
February 14, 2006 at 6:56 pm · Filed under Web Expressions
Class: Lab and field experience
Exercise: Student survey (visit online survey to assess current skill set)
Field Experience: Security Fair visitation
Learning Objectives: Students should be able to:
- Explain the technology that allows us to view web pages
- Explain how email is created, delivered and read
- Explain how the Internet impacts one’s privacy
- Identify and explain the impact of:
- spyware
- adware
- viruses
- worms
- phishing
- Define and explain “cookies”
Internet Basics
Please visit the Learn The Net website and explore the links that discuss the following:
- Connecting to the Internet (this animation deals with dial-up accounts, please be able to explain how your on-campus or apartment account differs)
- How the web works(please be able to discuss what hardware and software is required to be able to access the Internet)
- How e-mail works (Please be able to explain how you access your email here on campus and what is required in order to be able to send and/or receive email)
This online quiz will help you assess your knowledge of the Internet.
Privacy and security on the Internet
Phishing IQ test: This is an excellent test as it shows how difficult it is to distinguish legitimate emails from phishing attempts. Particularly informative are the explanations located on the solution page.
There is also a PDF advising how to evaluate possible phishing attempts called: Top Ten Tips for Finding a Phish
Here is a recent article from Slashdot that discusses the more sophisticated vectors of attack that hackers are employing in their efforts to elicit your personal and account information.
UPDATE: After our discussion of phishing what should arrive in our University HelpDesk email but the following (note the link address):
Cookies
Wikipedia has an excellent article on cookies.
As does the following Cookie Central website.
This article provides quick and easy tips on how to view the cookies that reside on your computer and provide information about your Internet habits. Make a note to explore the links on the side that explain about the darker side of cookies. They also have an FAQ page that will tell you everything you never wanted to know about cookies.
These are questions you should be able to answer once you have explored these cookie resources.
- How could cookies divulge private information about you?
- What other dangers exist using cookies?
- What advantages exist to using cookies?
Now let’s examine the cookies that exist on your M: drive.
You can find them here: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Cookies
- What do you think?
- Will you delete your cookies?
- Do you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?
Now that you know where they are, here is how you can delete your cookies:
IE: Tools -> Internet Options -> Delete Cookies and then click “OK”
FireFox: Tools -> Clear Private Data -> Check the Cookies box and click “Clear Private Data Now”
Spyware
Again, wikipedia has a terrific definition on what spyware is.
Compare this to how they define viruses, or more properly virii.
See if you can answer the following questions:
- What characteristics distinguish spyware from other forms of malicious software?
- How is spyware similar to viruses?
- How does spyware get installed on your computer?
- What can you do to avoid/remove spyware?
Look at a few instances of spyware and describe their effects.
Provide an example of spyware masquerading as a spyware removal tool.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
November 25, 2005 at 9:32 am · Filed under TechTalk, Web 2.0
I am in the process of developing a presentation for the Technology for Teaching & Learning track of the annual NERCOMP (the North East Regional Computing Program) conference to be held in Boston, MA from 20-22 March. The working title is:
Dancing on the Bleeding Edge
- The Implications of Web 2.0 in Higher Education.
The gist of it, as laid out in my presentation abstract, is this:
The recent emergence of a trend identified as Web 2.0 is heralding a new influx of challenges for educational institutions from faculty buy-in to the selection, deployment and maintenance of new campus-wide applications. This presentation is an overview of the technology, pedagogy and politics of the next generation of web apps.
The guiding question asks, “What is so important about the phenomenon known as Web 2.0 and how do institutions balance the demand for emerging technologies against their already strained resources?” The answer to follow will, hopefully, be a birds-eye view of the concept of Web 2.0 as recently coined by Tim O’Reilly, including the apps, but more importantly the attitudes that shape his definition over the past few years.
The proponents of Web 2.0 believe that the net experience is no longer satisfied by personal home pages and uni-directional communications. The new net experience is defined by its social impact, its facilitation of what George Siemens calls “connectivism.” Generic apps such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and other forms of social software such as del.icio.us and flickr, even mySpace and Facebook pose new challenges to be faced by not just IT departments but also the faculty and students we support.
As nearly all institutions struggle to keep up with the growing demands of their user base when it comes to new technologies, it is becoming increasingly essential that we stay abreast of current trends in order to best support those who will be using them.
Some of the resources I am using to compile supporting data for the presentation include:
There will be more to come, but this is a start in the right direction. Please feel free to send other resources my way!
Next entries »
- post by edventures