academhack » Course Management Software

Teaching Carnival

dave — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:23:53 +0000

This week I am hosting the Teaching Carnival.

This weeks Teaching Carnival theme: The Future of Education.

Alex Halavis suggests that the future of education lies outside the walls of the university. After all, what are students paying for? an administrative function that they can perform themselves? Personally I am not that keen on ad supported textbooks or holding class in Panera, but I do think professors can start delivering their services sans the wall of the institution. Alex Reid also chimes in on the future of education, suggesting that we adopt the freemium model.

Mills Kelly opines about innovation in distance learning and more importantly about ways to foster that innovation. And, if you still need more convincing that Learning Management Systems (Blackboard etc.) are a bad idea check out Matt Gold’s, Against Learning Management Systems.

On the practical side of going edupunk Teaching for the Future covers how to turn compujunk to educational use (hint start with Ubuntu).

Over at The Future of Higher Ed Jim Moulton gives evidence from his recent trip to India that technology penetration is not yet what we assume it to be and reminds us that “there is no digital solution to a fundamentally human challenge.”

But perhaps we yearn to much for online distance learning, Howard Rheingold defends the importance of physical presence.

Generally I agree with @chutry, that there should be a ban on using the phrase “a spectre is haunting . . .” (completely overdone). So when you read or watch Mark Pesce’s keynote on education and digital citizenship you will just have to pretend the first sentence is not there, cause otherwise this is a good piece.

The best practical pedagogy post I saw this past week comes from Mark Sample and his American Postmodernism class using the network to create an annotated bibliography (results here).

This week saw the 50th Anniversary of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which was not only an excuse to issue a 50th anniversary edition, but also a good reason to debunk the usefulness of this text, Open Education also piles on. (I am always a fan of going after sacred cows).

If you are thinking about mobile uses in the classroom, check out The Salt-Box‘s thought experiment on possible uses (again the pay off is in the comments).

And now that Oprah is on Twitter, even if she types in all caps, what teaching carnival would be complete without referencing a few twitter articles. Wired Campus covers a Professor at Penn State who uses twitter during class. (In fairness though I think I saw this a year ago, when @briancroxall was doing this (although it wasn’t in The Chronicle. (As always you should make sure that you read the comments on the aforementioned twitter article, even if for just the pure amusement factor.)

@mkgold recently used twitter to demonstrate to his class the power of the network. The result is not only a good demonstration of knowledge building, but a rather robust list of online education tools and how various professors use them.

OMG-Blackboard Does Something Right

dave — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:47:23 +0000

Pardon my snark, but I have become accustomed to Blackboard and WebCT innovating after the curve, and providing vastly inferior products with pathetic user interfaces. Perhaps though someone at Blackboard is paying attention as they are developing a Blackboard interface for the iPhone. I do however reserve the right to make fun of them when it doesn’t work. Ohh wait, I won’t be using it because I refuse to store knowledge which should be public behind a firewall . . .

Tools for Teaching Writing

dave — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:48:55 +0000

For those who have teaching writing and composition, or for that matter anyone who requires analytic writing in their classes, you might want to check out The Topoi brought to you by USC Writing Program and Mark Marino (of Writer Response Theory).

One of the things I have wondered is how long it will take professors (mostly talking about higher ed. here, as K-12 has been far better at this in my estimation) to start leveraging the web for pedagogical purposes, and not just in terms of sharing narrative, ideas, thoughts, philosophies about teaching, but actually sharing teaching tools. It seems to me that we repeat a lot of content across colleges and universities, especially in the core courses. So, why not share some of these resources rather than having instructors re-invent the wheel everywhere. To be sure a lot of sharing does go on, especially intra-institutionally, or at the level of swapping syllabi, but still much more can be done.

In that regard, enter the Topoi. What Mark has collected here in one page are a series of writing tools to help with basic composition instruction. But the innovation here is to collect the tools as a series of “widgets.” This means as an instructor you can easily borrow from what Mark has collected to suit your particular needs. Think of this as Textbook 2.0 with a serious “rip-mix-burn” aesthetic/ethic. Because everything is in a self-contained widget it is easy to take the pieces you need and put them into your own writing/composition assignments or class resource page.

It’s a bit hard to explain, so just click on over to the USC page and have a look for yourself.

Digital Literacy Presentation

dave — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 15:24:27 +0000

For those who requested it, here is the information and links to the talk I recently gave to the Texas Community College Teacher’s Association.

Approaching Digital Literacy: Creating a Networked Culture on Campus (Texas Community College Teachers Association 2008). (You can download the high quality Quicktime Movie or the lower quality mp4.) Below are the references for this presentation:

Mark Pesce on Hyperconnectivity: A lot of my thinking on what happens when we increase the speed at which people are connected comes from Pesce, particularly this presentation.
Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody: This is one of the best books on how organizing changes in the age of the network. Shirky’s book is both informed and accessible. He also did an interview for weblogg-ed which focuses on education.
Micheal Wesch is well known in academia for his work on Web 2.0. In this presentation at the University of Manitoba he talks specifically about using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.
Axel Bruns’s book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond is worth reading. His thoughts on how the industrial model of production is shifting to a “produsage” one carries implications for academia.
In the presentation I talk about Sakai and Moodle which are free alternatives to Blackboard, WebCT etc. However, I prefer something like edublogs, as blogs offer one of the best alternatives to Course Management Software.
If you are looking for more analysis, news, and tips on digital literacy and academia, Digital Campus (a bi-weekly podcast) is one of the best places to start.
Finally this talk references MIT Open Courseware, Open Yale Courses, and Physics for Presidents.

Mobile Academhack-iPhone Apps

dave — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:54:50 +0000

If anyone doubts that the age of mobile computing is here compare the lines at your local Apple store (or just search Flickr) and compare those to lines at Sprint, or TMobile. When someone asks me about the iPhone, I explain it is not a phone but rather a portable computer that happens to make phone calls. While the cell-phone companies were slow to innovate, Apple moved on the market, and we are now seeing the beginning of a transformation. Granted the iPhone is still expensive, and has a limited market share. Other companies are copying the iPhone though, and hopefully projects like Android will drive the price down making mobile computing devices fairly ubiquitous.

The significant change this last week in the iPhone though was not GPS or 3G network access, but rather the ability to put applications on the phone, allowing users to customize the phone and drastically increase its usefulness. I have had the iPhone since last year and noticed it allowed me to leave my computer at home a lot more, and now with applications I can see this being even more the case. There are a lot of educational possibilities for something like this once more students and instructors have access to mobile computing devices, but for now I thought I would mention the iPhone applications which have a place on my mobile computer already. Most are free, or really cheap. (Note: I have more apps than those listed here, but these are the ones that I already use for academic purposes, or know I will once the semester starts.)

BookZ ($1.99): Reading books on a mobile device (Kindle, Sony eReader) doesn’t quite measure up to the analog device yet, the user interface for the paper copy is still significantly better. That having been said, it is still useful for me to carry around a book or two on the phone to read, or consult when needed. While there are several book readers already available for the iPhone, of the ones I tried this was my favorite. The ability to customize the font size and type is perhaps the most important feature. Now anywhere I go I can get a text from Project Gutenberg and read away. I even read Doctorow’s Little Brother this way.
Twitterific (free): No surprise here given my appreciation for microblogging. Hopefully an application like Twhirl which handles multiple microblogging services will soon be available for the iPhone.
WordPress (free): Since I use blogs as my basic course management software having access to them via my mobile device is important if I want to rely only on my phone. Now I can post class updates, amend prior posts etc, all without a computer. WordPress supports multiple blogs, making it easy to post to all of my classes. I was hoping for MarsEdit mobile but this will do for now.
NetNewsWire (free):Still a little buggy, and it doesn’t have all the feature I want, but I can now keep up with The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, and all of the blogs I follow from anywhere.
OmniFocus ($19.99): Okay I know what you are thinking $20 for a phone application. But Omni makes great software, and the ability to carry my GTD sorted todo list with me anywhere and have it sync to my computer at home is worth the price. Couple that with location aware contexts (“I see you are on campus, here are the things you need to do”) and you have the killer todo application.
Wikipedia (free): This is the only web app (i.e. you don’t download this from the store it is just a webpage to access) on my list. Wikipedia anywhere is useful but this bookmark goes to a web optimized version.
FileMagnet ($4.99): FileMagnet lets you transfer files from your computer to your iPhone. In other words carry your syllabi with you everywhere, or any .pdf file for that matter.

(Brief mention for my favorite non-work related iPhone app: Urbanspoon.)

Any other academically useful iPhone apps? or requests for apps?

Update: Liberal Education today links to some of the more science oriented apps.

Online Course Management-Nfomedia

dave — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:39:16 +0000

It’s no secret that I think Blackboard and WebCT are a scam. They charge excessive rates for a second rate, clunky product, and Blackboard is trying to patent and corner the market (all around bad for education). At any rate I think most of what Blackboard offers can be done for free, in a more user friendly way. For my purposes a blog covers almost everything I need (consider me to be edupunk). I do however realize that there are some feature others want that are not as easy with a blog (online grades, test quizzes, etc.). Some faculty are simply looking for a more robust Course Management Platform. Enter Nfomedia.

A couple of weeks ago someone emailed me about Nfomedia, suggesting I take a look at it. Nfomedia is trying to be a free online courseware choice, with a full list of features. (It appears that they are going to make money by charging for a “premium” service,” but the free set of features will more than meet most needs.) Once you create an account (this was actually the only annoying step-see below) it is relatively easy to set up a series of course pages. The site works like a wiki (I suspect that they are using wiki-software to run the back end) allowing the professor or teacher to simply add content. One can add a syllabus page, assignment pages, note, or content pages. All of these are treated as nodes so you can link between them, pretty much getting your students all the class info you would need. What’s more they also offer a gradebook and exams (although I wouldn’t necessarily store students grades on a third party site). Furthermore Nfomedia allows you to register students, or have students register themselves, allowing for email distribution etc. to all of the students. Finally the way Nfomedia is set up at the end of the semester you can roll over all the general class information and delete out the student specific information. So, if you are teaching the same class over and over again you only have to write the content pages once.

The only part of Nfomedia that was less than user friendly was the registration process. When you register if your University or School is not already listed, you have to wait for approval before creating a course page. (At first I thought this was to make sure you are associated with an institution, but I think it also might be so that they can collect all of the schools who are using Nfomedia-sort of a bragging process.) Whatever the reason for this step, seems to me that they could just let your start immediately and not wait for approval, perhaps waiting for approval before your site can go public. In fairness though it took less than 24 hours for approval, I just hate to wait for this sort of think.

Finally one last word of caution: It might not be as easy to get the data in an out of Nfomedia as a blog, if for example Nfomedia wanted to eliminate the free account, or if the site ceased to exist. Clearly this is also a problem for the big dogs like Blackboard and WebCT, if you institution switches it might not be so easy to get the professors’ data out.

Blogs for Course Management

dave — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:31:51 +0000

Last week I had a request to detail how I use blogs as a course management tool, as a way to subvert and improve on the horrible ones most Universities encourage (sometimes force) faculty to use (yes I am talking about WebCT and Blackboard).

So, I am preparing said post, but in the meantime for those who use blogs in the classroom you might want to check out The Edublogs Magazine. Edublogs is usually my recommendation for those who want to use blogs in their class, not only because what they offer is good, but also because they have a large collection of tutorials etc., to help newcomers. You should though skip this post which recommends using a horrible piece of software. If I had my way the inventors of this program would be sentenced to a lifetime of watching “Saved By The Bell” reruns, the only thing I can imagine more mind numbing than the use of their program—laugh it’s a joke, I am only partly serious).

Some Useful, Some Not, Things for You

dave — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:26:26 +0000

Here is a list of things I have been collecting as of late, which may or may not be of interest to those in academia . . .

I frequently make the argument that blogs are one of the most useful “tech tools” in education. In fact I now run a class blog for each of my classes, which becomes the primary means thru which students can access course information (cutting out WebCT and Blackboard all together). Even more importantly though in several of my classes I require students to blog as part of the coursework. So, I am always looking for ways to make the blog composing/maintaining process easier and smoother. Lifehacker’s recent post on the Top 10 Blogging Tools is worth a read, even for the most experienced bloggers. As usual, reading the comments to a Lifehacker post can be just as productive as reading the actual post (this is where I learned about Windows Life Writer which looks impressive for PC folks). Most of the tips here are for those who use Firefox and/or blog from their web browser, so not the most useful for those who use MarsEdit or Ecto, but well worth the read for those who don’t want to spend money on software for blogging.
Powerset which has been in private Beta, recently went public. (Read the CNET article here). Powerset is one of the first stabs at creating a semantic web search (i.e. using natural English). You can watch the video demo to see how this works. Right now it only works as an interface for Wikipedia, but for me this is what makes it really interesting. One of the shortcomings of Wikipedia has been the interface, layout, and search function, Powerset improves all of this.
Following up on last weeks post about online presentation software, Omnisio has also launched. Omnisio solves one of the problems with making your presentation available online. Before you had to either sink your audio to the slides, and not show yourself talking, or show the video of your presentation at the expense of not always being able to see the slides. No longer. Omnisio allows you to synchronize the video with the slides and show both.
A reader sent me a link to jygy a mobile social networking site. Despite my interest in twitter mobile computing is not really my thing, so I have not really checked it out, but it does let you create texting “micro apps” which might be useful for teachers mobilizing the mobile space.
The above not withstanding I do own an iPhone, which I might add is totally worth it, changed my life. As of now I have not yet jailbroken it (in other words I can’t install applications on it). For me though, the “killer app” so far has been anywhere access to Wikipedia (instant knowledge). I was using Wapedia for this, but have recently switched to Comoki which rather than splitting the information into several pages (like Wapedia) presents it in a collapsable outline (see below).

Proof that Blackboard is not your Friend.

dave — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:26:30 +0000

Apparently Blackboard wants to be Big Brother. (As if being a patent troll wasn’t bad enough.)

Some Useful Stuff

dave — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:05:55 +0000

Sorry, still working on an extensive twitter post (our spring break is next week so it should come soon), but in the meantime here are some other useful things that I found around the internet that might interest you as well.

How To Teach with Netvibes: Mainly I use a blog to organize online material for my classes, but I have been thinking of switching to something than can aggregate info from various locations (making the blog just one component). Enter Netvibes a website that lets you customize a page which updates content from various sources. Think of this as your ultimate Blackboard replacement, and it is free. This article has the link to Michael Wesch’s course which is using Netvibes.
Students are Smart: Students seem to be smarter than the average internet user, or at least smart enough to choose the right browser. Campus Technology reports that Firefox has a much larger user base on campuses than it does with the public at large. In fact, Firefox is tied with IE according to this survey. Good, there is hope. (My first rule of digital literacy is learn to use something besides IE.)
Teaching with Facebook: The University of Manitoba has this wiki resource which gives both a summary overview of Facebook, as well as suggesting educational uses. Me, I am not a Facebook person (or Myspace for that matter) but for those who are . . .
Have we talked about how evil Turnitin is? Incidentally there is also an article in last week’s Chronicle (sorry it is behind a firewall, you need a password) regarding Turnitin. My favorite part of the article, a professor at GVSU who suggests that professors wouldn’t be so happy if they had to turn in all their work to turnitin. This to me sounds like a good idea: Schools can only use Turnitin if everyone on campus has to use it for all work.
One of the questions I get most often is about how to effectively sort/handle RSS feeds. The Read Write Web ran this excellent post on tools for sorting and filtering RSS feeds. This is a good place to start.
In Defense of Wikipedia, Nicholas Baker sees the positive side in this online creation. Nice to have some agreement, as I honestly received hate email after I wrote this piece in favor of Wikipedia.