I am working on my masters in Human-Computer Interaction in CDM at DePaul University.

At the moment I’m taking HCI 445: Inquiry Methods and Use Analysis, with Dr. Cynthia Putnam. The class focuses on observing user experience, and though it’s just getting started, so far it has taught me quite a bit about observing how people go about their daily work. One of the really informative exercises we did in class recently involved a visit to the reference desk at a bookstore chain located downtown.

From Flickr

In grade school, I remember learning the following: a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square. This logic lesson learned in elementary school can be applied to today’s debates about online education and MOOCs (massive open online courses). While MOOCs are online courses they are not what most universities consider online education. Unfortunately, most of the press these days about MOOCs, unfairly villianizes online education. Take for example the recent NPR Marketplace segment on Duke University’s announced decision to decline the invitation to offer online classes through the company 2U. What bothers me about the piece is not that Duke has decided to think about what the 2U partnership would mean to them, but rather the tying of this decision to Amherst’s decision not to team up with Harvard and MIT to offer free MOOCs.

A few days ago, I took a stroll between the DePaul Library and the Student Center, and this is what I saw in students’ hands in a single walk through campus:

• Lots of Android phones
• Lots of iPhones
• Several Macbooks
• A number of Windows laptops
• A couple iPads
• A Chromebook
• An Android tablet (something in the Asus Transformer family)
• A Microsoft Surface tablet (I couldn’t tell if it was the Pro version or not)
• A Kindle Fire

If there were any Linux devices, I must have missed them.

Earlier this month, the Digital Public Library of America launched its website to much nerdy fanfare online. This online platform aims to provide a singular portal for searching and accessing digitized content from a wide array of American libraries, museums, and research institutions. Forty-two cultural organizations have collaborated so far, in an effort spearheaded by the Berkman Institute for Internet and Society at Harvard. Though the idea has been around for a while, active planning and implementation over the past two years have finally yielded some results. According to Scott McLemee’s column in Inside Higher Ed, the DPLA currently catalogs “about 2.4 million digital objects, including books, manuscripts, photographs, recorded sound, and film/video.” (Impressive for a brand new endeavor; for comparison, the Smithsonian has more than 130 million items¹, and DePaul’s library has just over 1.1 million.²)

We sure love our acronyms at FITS HQ. If we’re not talking about D2L (our LMS), or DOTS, or MoLI, or our CRM, we come up with emoji to get our messages across.

My FITS colleague Jan Costenbader and I recently discovered another acronym with a much wider reach, a global reach, if you will. Globally Networked Learning Environments (GNLE). GNLEs are online learning settings in which students from far-flung countries convene as classmates to learn about the topic at hand in addition to exploring one another’s cultures.

The following techniques can be employed to address the issue of plagiarism in an online setting. Some of the techniques are specific to Desire2Learn while some are general guidelines to consider when creating assessments.

From Flickr

Turn-It-In Plagiarism Detection (D2L)

The Desire2Learn Dropbox allows students to submit written assignments in the form of documents. Enabling Plagiarism Detection sends the paper to Turn-It-In. Turn-It-In then compares the paper against its existing database of student work and internet resources and returns an originality report that appears in the D2L Dropbox.

Dropbox Quickguide [PDF]

Desire2Learn Quiz Randomization (D2L)

You know those awesome, addictive TED talks that can easily absorb hours of your time if you’re not paying attention? As it turns out, Chicago puts on an annual, local TEDx conference, and a couple of weeks ago, I spent a Saturday among the brilliant people.

As expected, the day was inspiring and brain-tiring, and I left feeling sure that none of those people waste time watching The Bachelor or reading the Craiglist Missed Connections or playing a pointless “find the hidden object” game on their iPad (guilty, guilty, and guilty). But I basked in their magnificent glow for several hours, and these are the two talks that stuck with me most:

I love technology! I am always one of the early adopters. I must have the newest and shiniest gadget or software that is still in beta. Right now, I have a preorder in for the Leap Motion Controller, an input controller that senses your individual hand and finger movements so you can interact directly with your computer. How do I plan to use it? I have no idea, but it looks “cool.” Such is my relationship with technology. Cool is good.

Let’s start this off by defining exactly what a hybrid course is. A hybrid course is the blend of face-to-face interaction such as in-class discussions, group work, and live lectures with Web-based technologies such as discussion boards and virtual chat rooms (wimba/collabortate). Since hybrid courses are still a very new concept, there is still much to learn on how to find the right balance between face-to-face and online learning activities.

On the January 21st edition of the New York Times President Obama’s Inaugural Address was published online—in a unique format. This format was described by a faculty member of DePaul’s WRD program as the way that writing was supposed to be in this day and age.

As shown in the screen capture above, this report is different from the traditional form of commentary, where comments are inserted between quotations. Instead, it took full advantage of Web technologies to include text, video, and annotation that can be delivered selectively through a click. If you mouseover the text, the play button appears, giving you the option to view the associated video, and by clicking on the highlighted text, you activate the annotation field that provides you with historical information, background, and context related to the text. A video index serves as a break-down of the topics addressed in the speech.