Educause 2009

While I’m a firm believer in doing things at a distance, some experiences are very rich when they are in-person.  Educause 2009 is just one of those experiences.  First, no where in Alaska will you have an opportunity to see and touch technology like the Educause vendor floor.  That alone is incredibly valuable.  To be able to walk from one vendor to the next comparing products, asking for demos on the spot.

Then, come the keynote speakers.  While watching a keynote on your computer screen doesn’t really feel any different from watching the keynote speaker on several large screens surrounded by 5000+ people, listening to people talking about the speaker in the hallways and at lunch does make quite a difference.

The sessions are always hit-and-miss.  Some of them are great and others, you wonder why they were accepted to present.  Some speakers use their hour to show slide after Powerpoint slide.  Others are so interesting that you wished they would continue into the next hour, with examples and ideas.

Of course, ultimately it comes down to the people.  Mingling and talking and questioning people from many different universities.  Hearing what experiences they have had and how they have solved the same problems that you face.   Walking around, living and breathing conference can be exhausting, but ultimately, if you return home with one or two nuggets that you can use, it is well worth it!

I’ll be posting those nuggets very soon.

Maximizing Productivity

Sitka Harbor at night

While I’m a 100% advocate of working at a distance, I have to say that occasional face-to-face meetings really have a way of crystalizing the discussion and maximizing productivity.  This past week we met with content experts from around the globe and after months of working via audio/web conferencing our prior work really came together.  I wonder how much longer it would have taken had we not had this opportunity to meet together?  Something about eating lunch together, working and taking walk breaks, it’s all about the side conversations and personalities mixing together in ways that are difficult to reproduce online.  So, now I’m a 70% advocate for distance, and a 30% advocate for hybrid occasional real time, face-to-face meet-ups.  Very nice change of pace.  Glad we were able to pull it off.

Meanwhile, to catch up, we had a busy week at ASTE too.  You can find the presentation materials that Maureen and I gave at a presession entitled Breaking Through the Web (2.0) of Confusion at http://aste2009.pbwiki.com/ There are notes, resources, and our PPT on this website and it links to last year’s ASTE 08 presentation that Tina (UAA) and I gave.  So enjoy both resource pages.

Just a reminder too, for those asking, my Personal Learning Environment Map is updated and found at:  http://www.mindmeister.com/9002694 Had a few people ask about that again lately, so I thought I’d link it again.

The picture to the right (sadly only taken on a cell phone) has a caption created by bubblesnaps.com Kind of fun!  Check it out.

More from WCET 08

Well, I didn’t do a great job keeping up on the conference, so here’s a recap of some of the sessions that particularly resonated with me.

First of all, some links that were of interest:

• Digital Scholarship Lab: This website will direct you to at least 2 great projects Voting America (which is now integrated with Google Maps) and History Engine which allows students to use primary documents to discover history. Great stuff here! They also have a terrific website: Valley of the Shadow which almost excites me about history. Definitely a great site to take a look at.
• TinyUrl This will take a long, long url and create a smaller url for you that is easier to give to people or send via email. Says it will not expire or break.
• WorldCat I haven’t explored, but this is a global library. I think you have to pay to be a part of this library, but then you’d be sharing online library resources with thousands of others.
• Tumblr Kind of like a blog on steroids. This looks like a very resource-rich blog site. They say it is more like a scrapbook than “just” a blog.
• Informal Learning This is a very nice module on Informal Learning with great links if you have the time to work through it. There are more modules to browse at: MET Course Weblog
• The 2008 Horizon Report Haven’t had a chance to read the entire report, but it looks like a terrific resource which explains a lot of the newest technologies and talks about adoption times etc. Excellent reference for all educators.
• Pageflakes A very easy portal or homepage where you can add news, RSS feeds, images, weather, very similar to iGoogle pages, very friendly interface. Another similar website is Netvibes, but I think I like Pageflakes better.
• Sharepoint Server At least 2 universities mentioned using Microsoft’s Sharepoint to monitor projects and set deadlines and tasks online. Not sure how different it is from BaseCamp (another project management tool) but it is definitely worth looking into. If you are using this product, please let us know what you think! Overkill if you are sharing projects between only 4-5 people?

In general, WCET again did not disappoint. The networking was great, the sessions mostly good and there’s a lot to follow up and learn about.

Personal Learning Environments

Pre-conference on PLEs WCET 2008

I’m at WCET and just completed the first session on PLEs. What are PLEs? Why do we care about this? In truth, Personal Learning Environments are really not ‘personal’ at all,in the sense that they involve all the co-workers, friends and resources that we gather to enhance our learning experience. However, they are “personal” since each of us gathers the technologies that help us do our jobs, gather our research and share information with others.

Collecting, sharing, analyzing, building by action– PLE is a verb, not a noun. PLE is really about who we are. The facilitators challenged the group by asking how teachers can presume to ‘teach’ if they themselves don’t have experience with the technologies that are now being used to share and connect people with similar interests, jobs, etc. They felt that our web presences also people know who we are–what does it mean not to have any web presence? What happens when I look for you on the web and there’s nothing there? Identity is now linked to the web.

This was a very rich session. The facilitators have provided their resources and links and activities at edtechpost

Some of the tools that were showcased and definitely worth further investigation included:

• Diigo- like delicious but with other features that might make drafting and publishing to a blog easier. Social bookmarking allows you to save your bookmarks on someone else’s server. Save your identiy and access your bookmarks. No longer trapped on a single computer. Share with other people. Tagging, keywords. Descriptive information is provided by *you* or by others. Can be corrupt. Scribe and annotate. Create groups and lists for your bookmarks. Add link to your blog. Share bookmarks.
• File Url and Dropbox — tools for sharing large files with others; free tools
• Pipes and Feed2js– Okay, this is pretty cool. Take a number of blogs and create an RSS feed that consolidates them together. This could have particular use for a team or group that maintain separate blogs, but you can read them all together.
• Scraping– was really interesting. Gathering data on the web and scraping it off a website into googlespreadsheet so that it can be repurposed and relinked. Great way to gather information from multiple locations which is dynamic and not have to keep updating it. Can’t say that I’d ever even thought about this before.
• Google Coop, Lijit– Creating your own social networks, bookmarks, websites and make them searchable. You can gather pertinent links and search the content, rather like creating your own mini-google collections.
• Wow, and plugins too were mentioned. No point in re-creating their great resource page here.

Kind of silly for me to not take advantage of their resources and be relinking here on my page– so I won’t do that, again check their resource website listed above. Suffice it to say that this was a stimulating session, their resources are excellent and I think Scott Leslie, Chris Lott and Jared Stein for a very worthwhile day.

Phew- Was it just the pre-session today??

More about Teaching and Learning Conference

Okay, back at home and time to process all the things we were exposed to at Madison. Usually it takes a bit of time for things to sift out, the speakers and ideas that ‘stick’ to the top layer of your mind versus the less useful, less dynamic things that have sunk to the bottom reaches.

I’m going to try to organize my thoughts using one of the new mind/concept mapping tools that we saw-I’ll invite Maureen and Marissa (who also attended this conference from UA) to join this site and add their thoughts and links collected from Madison.

More soon (and that address) when it’s complete. Meanwhile, feel free to check out the polling feature of Zoho Polls.

Pre-Sessions Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning

I am in Madision, Wisconsin and have finished a very interesting morning session on using Flash for creating interactive content and video. The speaker did an exceptional job keeping all participants ‘on click’ and his handouts were very well done. I have copies to share with the team.

He emphasized some of the new features in Flash CS3 including drag and drop templates, though we didn’t have time to actually try that. He also gave us some good tutorials (also on the disk we were given). Let me know if you want a copy.

Google Analytics– talk about Big Brother– you can put Google script on buttons, pages, slides etc. to gather data on whether people are actually clicking or downloading throughout your pages. The java script must be placed at the root level (important if you are moving captivate into flash). You must have an account with Google.

In Captivate-

1. pageTracker._trackPageview(“anyname”) This goes on your button in captivate where it is says “On success” execute javascript. Click … Type in pageTracker above.
2. Also notice that the down arrow says “current” must be changed to “top”
3. It will progress project to next page; this is a limitation because you can’t give it another command (like jump to slide 10)
4. Can put on slide- properties, navigation: execute javascript is another way of doing this so you don’t have to use button capabilities
5. Then must add the code to HTML file

On the html page:

Before </body> you’ll paste the google code.

Gets a little complicated if you don’t own the domain you are tracking though.