Monthly Archive for January, 2007

http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2007/01/28/
toronto-bloggers-swarm-to-redesign-ttc-website/

OK, a little off topic, but this post from the Wikinomics blog kind of caught my eye because it resonates with a situation I’ve recently come across. The post talks about a group of bloggers getting together in Toronto to redesign the unbearably unusable Toronto Transit Comission’s website. Maybe the TTC will listen and adopt some of the design, maybe not, but creating an alternate (usable) interface to a terrible public service site like the current TTC one strikes me as an example worth emulating.

In my case, the dismally designed site is my local Victoria’s school board website. Now in the pantheons of bad information architecture, this might not rank right at the top, but it’s got to be pretty close. Designed by a bureaucrat, for other bureaucrats, not for parents, students or teachers, the people who actually need to use the site. I work online all day, and consider myself a reasonably savvy web user, yet every time I need information from the School District I am left scratching my head. For instance, this week I’m trying to find out more information about what’s going on, as they just announced 2 days ago that they are closing my son’s school! (oh wait, there’s a PDF of some sort of meeting announcement in the “Media Releases” section of the site titled “School Consultative Process” - oh yeah, that makes sense -?!- and then no times or locations given for the meetings!) I wrote the school board a few weeks back, before the whole business of the school closures, and got a pretty standard response about how they had consulted stakeholders in designing the site, never had any complaints, yada yada. Pretty well “blow it out your ear.”

So, what to do. Well, maybe the above is an example to follow. Any parents from Victoria out there interested in joining forces on this? To start with, how about a real self-interested exercise - identify all of the things as parents we’re looking for, and then design an alternative interface to the site that speaks to those needs, not the school board administration’s.

Indeed, why not take this a step further (and bring it back to ed tech, a bit). Redesigning your college’s website? Your departments? Why not solicit mockups directly from your users, take user-centric design a whole step further to user-designed design (yeah, I know, how passe of me - why not deliver everything as RSS and portlets and let people organize it how they want! Or make everything a wiki! Uh huh?). With tools like Sitekreator, Google Page Creator and Synthasite, to name but a few, this isn’t even really a technical exercise anymore.

End of rant. Back to work. But would love to hear your personal targets for redesign! - SWL

So, Brian wants to know 5 things about me he wouldn’t know…

• I used to be an avid hitchhiker. My longest ride ever was from Medicine Hat to Sudbury (over 2,500 kilometers, driven straight through at my behest!) which ironically came the day after my shortest ride, trying to get out of Cowtown (and getting as far as the ‘Hat in 12 rides!)
• My first official job title was “Knowledge Carpenter.” It started out as a joke (I worked for a ‘knowledge architect’ and since I was the one who ended up building everything…) but I eventually grew to be quite proud of it, though throught it I learned a valuable lesson – U.S. Immigrations Agents have no sense of humor and are definitely not fond of quirky job titles.
• If you look really hard through the photos in this book (which luckily seems out of print, though copies exist in many academic libraries) you might find evidence of my extremely short nude modeling career. ‘Nuff said. If you want to find out any more, it will cost you at least three drinks.
• I don’t drink. (Well not much. Except at Brian and Keira’s parties )
• I sent my first email message in 1977, at the age of 8. Whenever I’ve taught internet courses in the past I usually start with this as an icebreaker. So while not classic internet email as we now know it, the message was sent via a dumb terminal in my basement in Montreal that was connected via the phone lines to a VAX server downtown, then over dedicated lines to another VAX server in Kuala Lumpur where my father received it while he was working there for Menenco as a consulting engineer. My dad continued to play a big role in my interest and access to computers, getting us an Apple II for personal use and also having early DEC and IBM machines in our basement.

And now I will continue my tradition of meme muffling. - SWL

http://www.cyberlearninglabs.com/News/documents/2007-01-23.html

Not sure if it is right to link these too closely, but coming close on the heels of a story last week is an announcement that SUNY’s Learning Network has granted a ‘master agreement’ to Angel Learning. You’d hope business was actually pretty good over at Angel these days, what with their major commercial competitor getting deservedly pilloried for suing their other major commercial competitor. I mean, if you must choose a commercial vendor for your CMS, who are you going to select. The bully? The bullied? Or these guys, who’ve quietly built a very decent CMS (if you go in for that sort of thing) that plays well with others. - SWL

technorati tags:Blackboard, CMS

Sorry for this totally superfluous post - I am moving Edtechpost off of MoveableType on to Wordpress (finally) and a new URL, http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/. If I did this the way I hoped, you should still this post in your current subscriptions, through the wonders of mod_rewrite. Feel free to update subscriptions and blogrolls, but I’m hoping this won’t be totally necessary. The whole reason for the move - mainly to get Comments turned back on. I was getting killed by the spammers using MT, so much so that almost 2 years ago now I disabled them and never got a solution working that satisfied my ISP. I know, lame. Well here’s hoping the magic of Akismet and other WP solutions keep comments up and running. This ain’t no soliloquy, you know, at least not intentionally.

http://connect.educause.edu/blog/catherine/
the_perils_of_stargazing/16706

Catherine Howell writes (and Stephen Downes seconds - still no RSS feed in GReader today, Stephen, and how about some permalinks the rest of the world can understand) of the time lag and conservative nature of this year’s NMC Horizon Report choices for technologies that will have a significant impact on teaching and learning. [Disclosure: I was one of the 30 wannabe prognosticators on this year's Advisory Board members.]

First off, the assertion that “this years� list have already achieved significant impact” I think belies a bit of a rarefied view of actual technology practices in higher ed. My own expeience is that for every edublogger, for ever teacher using a wiki in their class or sharing podcasts on iTunes or publishing Creative Commons, I meet 30 others who still squint funny at the word wiki or have NEVER heard of the Creative Commons. I wish it were different. I often act like it is. But I know its not.

But don’t get me wrong - I actually agree that the list is small ‘c’ conservative, but that’s because I’m mostly off in left field anticipating the coming revolutions in AI, robotics and 80 Core chips! That’s why I actually found the process we went through quite fascinating, and the fact that NMC documented it, all out in the open on the Horizon Report wiki, to be an exemplary practice.

If you actually want to see where the advisory board started from, check out the answers to the 5 research questions, especially Question 3, where I think you’ll find all of the alternatives suggested by Downes and Howell, and more.

What was fascinating (and maybe a bit frustrating, but in a good way) about the process was how we went from these sprawling lists down to a list of 6 that actually seem to bear some resemblance to conceivable futures, not ‘wished for’ futures, not ‘if only everyone would listen to me’ futures, but ones that bear some resemblance to where these slow moving beasts called post-secondary institutions will get to. Now the frustrating part is how this doesn’t really deal well with discontinuous or disruptive innovations, but hey, that’s kind of their nature, to disrupt and not be so easily assimilated.

So, is this my list? No; mine included amongst other things Intelligent Tutoring, Internet-wide User-centric Identity Systems and Real-Time Language Translation. But is it a list I can get behind. Yeah, definitely; if 5 years from now all of these are significantly adopted in higher ed, that will represent a positive shift from where we are today, and in many cases, however lamentable, a large one. - SWL

http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v1n1/
lohman/IJ_%20Lohman.pdf

This is one of those papers where I find myself thinking “freakin’ amazing, I can’t believe it” (yes, I really think like that) but by the end I’ve been reduced to, “ok, but a sample of 50 students? And all of them graduate students of education from 3 courses?” I’m not saying that invalidates the results, and the paper itself actually seems well written. But if you do buy into its arguments, then this SHOULD be sending shockwaves (at least shivers) through ed tech departments (and the people who fund them) across the world. Why? Because it throws into serious doubt the value of course management systems when used (predominantly, as other studies, like Morgan’s, have shown) as really expensive web filing or content management systems in support of face to face courses. This doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for CMS; as the study concludes, instead one could draw the conclusion that if you want to see positive effects on pedagogy by using a CMS then use them, well, pedagogically, not as a glorified filing cabinet. But still, it does start to put to the test the conventional wisdom that simply giving people access to reading materials ahead of time will inevitably increase their learning. (First seen in Distance Educator.) - SWL

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/masson

This remarkably frank and insightful interview with Patrick Masson, the former Director of Technology for the SUNY Learning Network, is well worth the read, though by the end you would be forgiven for despairing about the future of SOA on any campus. I know I do and did. Monoliths ahoy! - SWL

Unlike most of the of the other cool kids, I’ve had a hard time kicking my bloglines habit for newer tools. A case of “if it ain’t broke…”

Well, sad to say, it is broke. It’s probably a familiar refrain to others who’ve made the leap, but after the umpteenth time of Bloglines acting funny, I sent yet another email to their support folks. Only to get a self-referential email from them telling me to refer to the below ‘discussion thread’ for their response, only to see my original email with another message to ‘refer to the discussion thread’ and so on…

So Google Reader, here I come baby! The basics seem pretty straightforward but there are some things I still just don’t grok. Hopefully I will get a chance at Northern Voices to query better minds than mine about this - I lament cogdog’s absence, but my friend Jason Toal (that’s dj draggin to the rest of you punks) seems to have a hnadle on it too. - SWL

http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/
ISU_IDUS/I061227I.pdf

Via Jim Farmer comes a link to this Pilot Report from the Instructional Technology Resource Center at Idaho State University, a current WebCT 4 customer. On the basis of this small (20 instructor) pilot, they are going expand it to 50 users. What I thought was interesting (and maybe the Moodle folks will notice this too) is that the only functionality that both students and faculty seemed not totally thrilled about were the assessment and grading capabilities in Moodle. That seems about right. Especially if you’ve used WebCT 6/Vista, which I have to admit seems pretty decent in this capacity. And you can tut-tut all you like about how those are such ‘administrative’ tools, but time and again the surveys come back that grading/gradebook management is actually one of the most used aspects of the CMS, ignored at CMS developers’ own peril. - SWL

BioDieselNow - Biodiesel from Algae

It truly is not that remarkable to find examples of informal learning communities online, indeed these are the very genes on which the net has grown so explosively. What’s maybe more remarkable is that people even feel the need to remark on them. So why highlight this one? Well…

- I like the fact that in this one spot you can see the convergence not only of informal learning communities, but also the “mass amatuerization of everything” and “open source science” in one fell swoop. Take a look at the post titled “Biodiesel from Algae Reading List” where a propsective Master’s students solicits feedback from the forum’s members on a proposed reading list as he has no access to local experts on as specific a topic as “generating biodiesel from Algae. What’s even better - he not only gets feedback on specific Thesis topics that could greatly advance the field, someone in the forum actually knows about a researcher at the student’s institution that might be worth hooking up with. Awesome!

- I think it illustrates quite well how discussion forums aren’t going away and can be quite powerful for facilitating community discussion. Sometimes we need to take a step back and realize not everyone has the same problems or goals as us, and that blogs aren’t the only way.

- in writing about this specific forum, I’m outing myself as a closet biodiesel fan. If I’m still writing EdTechPosts 10 years from now, please givem me a kick in the #@@. ‘Cos secretly (well, I guess not so secretly anymore) all I want to do is homebrew! - SWL