Riosalado's blog

Georgia Nugent is a former Classic (Latin and Greek) professor. She was a dean at Princeton--and is the current president of Kenyan College.

The Tower of Babel could inform the current efforts by Google. Nugent compared the hubris of Google founders to create the ultimate library (like that described by Jorge Luis Borges or of the historical Library of Alexandria) to the search for glory and prestige of Alexander the Great and Octavius (Augustus) Caesar. She noted that these libraries were spoils of war or the expansion of power and control. She noted the Vatican library as an extension of Papal power that controlled or hid information even from the clerics in its secret collections, and connected the joint efforts of Google to digitize the Vatican library to this same historical thread.

Presidents, Faculty, Students, Parents, and IT Professional do not share the same meaning of cost, security, and benefit. They speak different languages with different semantic systems. The remedy needs to leave technology as a means aside and concentrate on the end of mission of the institution. Different missions would then prescribe different technology needs and policies. Only by looking at the ends can the true translation take place—there is a translation by the letter—a literal translation—and a translation by the spirit—a translation of the intended meaning. It is the latter—the spirit that can transcend the Babel of IT—in order to build the infrastructure needed to make things work. Perhaps it could move us back to the days when we spoke the Adamic (original) language-and have a more Eden like—happier existence.

We visited the Horizon-Wimba booth and were able to verify that

• students would not have to login to Wimba to be able to listen to single sound files.
• at this point, adjunct faculty would have to login to Wimba to record a sound file for students--and can easily cut-and-paste a URL that can be placed into the QuestionMark Perception Scoring tool--to be sent to students.

There is a possibility that a java console for the instructor to record responses could be integrated (programmed) into the Scoring Tool.  There seems to be a protype out there--we may need to get QM to put it into the next version.

There will be a Horizon-Wimba users group breakfast at ASU in November.  I asked Estelia Young to make sure that Rio representative were invited.  Estelita Young is the Regional Sales Manager for Horizon-Wimba.  She has taught Spanish online for community colleges in Texas and in Tennessee.  She has also worked for WebCT.

There are also other applications of Wimba that faculty chairs and Instructional Design Services should explore for the future--AFTER we get these functions working in our RioLearn classes.

Presenters:

Victoria Getis and Deborah Lauriano, The Ohio State University

They ran out of handouts...

Test Your Emerging Technology IQ—Do you know what these mean?

Podcasts
Tablet PCs
VOIP
PELEs—personal learning environments
Clickers
RSS
Gaming
Blogs
Collaborative Spaces
Cell Phones and LMS
Tagging
Wikis
Mash-ups
IM-ing
Social Networking
Web-based Exams
ePortfolios
Geotagging
Vortals
Second Life (Game)
Digital Storytelling
Google Jocky 

This pesentation looked at a formal process for the evaluation and adoption of new technologies.

Technology Exploration Intake
ETA Process

One of four recommendations
1. reject
2. Tweak and iterate
3. Build consultation model
4. Adopt

Blackboard Backpack (Beta)

An Off-line eLearning Solution—a client side application is downloaded to a laptop—so that a student or faculty can work offline with all the content of a Blackboard course.

The coursework can be completed offline and then synched back up to Blackboard when the student or instructor has access to the internet. Discussion boards can be responded to offline—and they synced up again.

A homepage gives all courses, information, announcements, etc. as a starting point. Slides can be annotated—and converted from PowerPoint to a PDF document and then annotated—notes can be taken.

It has a search engine to search all the content of the course—or anything that has been annotated.

When synched, new information is uploaded and a notice is posted that something is new. The student can also sync with more than one institution—for example—if a student were taking a class at ASU and PVCC (both Blackboard shops), the student could download both courses to the Backpack environment. Backpack will recognize the credentials from both schools and download the appropriate courses.

Features

Presenters:
Dr. Catherine Finnegan - Univ. of Georgia
Dr. Libby Morris - Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia
Available at http://alt.usg.edu

eCore http://www.georgiacenter.uga.edu/ecore/

Fully online—developed with ID for undergraduate GE courses and jointly offered by the University System of Georgia. It is a “vanilla core” of GE courses that include Spanish, Humanities, English.
They are fully online--capped at 36 students.  16 weeks--75 days.

• Courses are developed by people other than the instructors
• Highly structured
• Pre-prepared instructional activities
• Faculty are self-identified with a mix of experience, tenure status, etc.
• Faculty get training

The underlying problem is Online Student Retention --Fall 2004 around 67% retention--what they have learned about students and faculty online

Predicting Retention
Research question:  How well can a student's group membership be predicted?
Used a two group variable--student completers and student withdrawers--nine predictor variables--gender, age, verbal ability, math ability, HS GPA, current credit hourse, overall GPA, locus of control  (Locus of Control Instrument administered online) and finanacial aid.

Session presented by Edward L. Ayers, Dean of Grad School of Arts and Sciences, Univ. of Virginia and
William G. Thomas, II, Professor of Humanities, Dept. of History, Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Earnestine Harrison attended this session with me.

Rating: Excellent.
This session was superior to the opening Keynote—and could have been a Keynote that would have been very informative.

How can we show history? Here is one of the best representations according to many:

http://www.napoleonic-literature.com/1812/1812.htm

It may be like a weather map. Climate is what we expect--weather is what we get--Mark Twain
How do we show the weather?

History lets us use time to “retrodict” why things happened. Just like the scientific data after a hurricane, history can help explain other things. History helps us to map time. We can map space--but we have not been so good at mapping time. These are ideas, prototypes, wire-frames of how to map time and space.

History may be a shattered mirror of time. Can we put the mirror back together and understand individual, family, and community experiences?
The Emancipation Project and the Southern History Database (Southern Mosaic) Team Assignments are examples of these displays of data:

http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/EP2/matrix.html
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/SHD/assignments.html

The goal is to add visuals and graphics to throw things off-balance--to create more creative tension--to mix things up.

How do we create a four dimensional historical atlas?
Railroads "annihilated space and time" in the 1800s--people moved faster than they could view or perceive--things moved faster.
We have a networked information system that has the potential of integrating representations—railroads can be related to migration of slaves, migration of the blues, movement of labor, purchase of slave labor by railroads, etc.
http://railroads.unl.edu/

Monday 1-4:30 pm

I started the preconference session on Monday, and noticed an interesting article that a participant was reading in the seat next to me in EDUCAUSE REVIEW. Upon further investigation, itt was nice to open up the recent issue of EDUCAUSE REVIEW to see an article entitled "Bringing the Best of Business Strategies to Higher Education" by our college president, Dr. Linda Thor http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm06511.asp.

Presenters were Kathi Baldwin and Susan Mircovich from the Univ. of Alaska, Anchorage.

Key points were:

• They are a BlackBoard shop, and emphasized technical training over pedagogical training and frameworks for creating and managing course development.
• They work in a single, academic unit--nursing and allied health--working with individual faculty members to create what I term "Craft" production courses--single faculty--single course--highly individualized design.
• They have a five stage model for bringing faculty on-board in the course development process.
• There was an assumption that faculty needed to move thorugh the stages with increasing technical skill in order to be successful. In the lower levels, the instructional designers did a lot of the work--an assisted model.  In the higher stages--the faculty did more of the technical work--and incorporated more rich media--with less assistance.  Faculty would produce their own sound, graphics and video.
• They supported faculty at their level of comfort--not pushing them to levels beyond their capabilities or interests.
• Very few faculty made it to the highest level.  Most were at stages 1-3.
• They did a good job at identifying barriers to course development within their environment including intellectual property, time constraints on faculty, skill levels, personnel support, lack of a reward system that is aligned with faculty tenure reward systems, and academic freedom.

Application to what we do at Rio:--some brainstorming ideas:

We are in Dallas listening to Google evangelist Vinton G. Cerf who is dressed in very elaborate graduation robes and a funky ephod (hat).  A gentleman who just joined us asked, "Hey, what's the deal with the hat?"

Cerf brought up scattered points about:

• The low cost of memory has changed things--Moore's law applies to computing as well.
• There is a challenge of backwards compatibility with digital information for archiving data--for example old PowerPoint files not being compatible with current versions--the information is lost if it cannot be retreived.  This is a really tough problem--the interpretation of the bits--even if we know the program.  Perphaps old software should be put in "escrow" in order to store not only the software and the files--so that they can be used in future generations.  We may need to rethink what copyright means in the digital environment.
• Self-Service is an new User-Oriented paradigm--users can get information that was not usually available before.  Amazon users know who is reading what book.  FedEx tells where your package is.  You can look for real estate online with a 3-D view.  This is inverting the paradigm--on-demand access and use of information--students don't have to go to class at 8 am--they go to class when they want.  This is driving advertisers crazy...the user can circumvent the ads--TiVO or internet ads.
• There is a lack of interest in science and technology areas by students.  Sputnik had a wonderful impact with a ripple effect. Global warming may be the new Sputnik.  Suppose we treated it as a national challenge and used it to addresss science and technology issues.  It would reduce the use of fossil fuels and the emissions and foreign oil dependencies.
• The Interplanetary Internet is part of an effort to map the Earth and Mars.  There are rovers on Mars that have been there for 3 years.  Things work still because the dust hasn't collected as much as they thought.  Cert believes someone is dusting off the solar pannels, but others think it is the cleansing winds on Mars.  There are 4 satellites orbiting around Mars--but the flexibility of the internet has been very helpful in retrofitting software.  They have created interplanetary protocols to accomplish the data transfer...which might be a way to build up a space-based network.
• Internet Freedom--the net has been very open for the last 15 years--which is important for academic institutions.  There is a threat that this openness would be decreased and thus access to full broad-band access.  This reduced access cost structure was labled "net neutrality" in legislative realms last year.
• There is not much Privacy left. Americans give up privacy for convenience.  Your credit card has more information than you think.  The MySpace and iPod Generations put up a lot of things--that will be discovered later on when they want to get a job.  Personal information is required to do business--that corporate information. The business community needs to use common sense and ethics to not release it.  If everyone knows your digitized house plans, your security is compromised easier.
• ID theft calls us to reexamine privacy issues.

It was interesting, but scattered.  We were PowerPointed.  Thumbs up for the outrageous garb.