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The Importance of Defining Computer Literacy

Compared to digital illiteracy, traditional illiteracy is relatively easy to spot. For the most part, people who can’t read and write don’t sneak into universities undetected and they don’t often hold down white-collar jobs. I know it’s tempting to argue with me here. This is the part where you want to derail my entire opening argument by telling me all about a student who graduated from University X and couldn’t even sign his own name. Or you might want to rain on my parade with the tale of the Fortune 500 CEO who had his son write all his memos. While I’m sure such things have happened on rare occasion, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s fairly easy to design an assessment that can determine if someone can read and write at a particular level of proficiency.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as easy to determine if someone is computer literate. The problem isn’t that we lack the means to test a person’s level of technology-savvy. The problem is that no one can agree on specific minimum, universal standards that define basic computer literacy. And even if we established such standards, no one seems eager to require faculty or students to take a computer literacy test before being approved to dive into the world on online learning. As a result, universities across the country encounter very similar problems as they try to develop online learning programs. Instructors are asked to develop online courses, but they don’t know how to create zipped files or edit a photo. Students are encouraged to take online courses, but they might not know where to find files on their hard drives that they’ve downloaded. Help desk staff wind up answering educational technology questions, but insufficient training and bureaucratic problem-logging systems prevent them from answering these questions quickly and effectively.

So, what is the instructional designer’s role in this whole debacle? Are they just co-dependant enablers who can’t say no? Are they guilty of encouraging computer-illiterate faculty to explore new, painful ways to torture computer-illiterate students without ever addressing the underlying literacy problem? Of course, many professors’ level of computer literacy improves as they work with instructional designers to develop online courses because an instructional designer’s job often includes technology training. Yet, this doesn’t resolve the concern I hear faculty express most often when I’m encouraging them to use a new tool in their courses:

“I don’t have time to learn how to use this new technology, let alone teach my students how to use it.”

Of course, all instructional designers have their own ways of mitigating this. They promise it won’t take long to learn how to use a new tool. They vow to be there for faculty throughout the quarter whenever questions arise. One of my old bosses had no authority to motivate faculty to complete their courses on time, so she spent a lot of time trying to catch flies with honey—and coffee and donuts paid for out of her own pocket. (I suspect this approach is quite common for instructional designers whose job security depends on producing a certain number of online courses a year.) Whatever technique is employed to get faculty on board, the instructor’s concern about time constraints and professional priorities remains valid.

I think most academic administrators would agree that it isn’t fair to expect teachers to be both experts in their fields of study and expert users of the latest educational technologies. However, they’d probably throw in a caveat that a certain level of basic computer literacy is essential in any job field today, including education. Yet, until everyone (at least at the institutional level) can agree on what that essential level of computer literacy is and what should be done to ensure it is met, it seems futile to try to define the role that students, faculty, technical support, and instructional designers must play in a successful online learning program. Before we introduce instructors to the wonders of podcasts or encourage them to set up instructional blogs or wikis or virtual classrooms, shouldn’t we make sure faculty and their students possess certain fundamental digital media knowledge? Shouldn’t we be sure they possess certain basic digital media skills, like how to perform a basic image edit in a tool like Photoshop and export the file in the ideal format for its intended use?

I think every institution could benefit from a required computer literacy course with a curriculum developed and approved by a well-rounded teams of experts. It’s tempting to believe that such a course isn’t necessary for most students today. 85% keyboard for coders were made to add ease to their work. So many students already know how to add photos to their Flickr accounts or embed a YouTube video in a MySpace page. However, as someone who has recently taught undergrads how to build basic webpages using HTML, I can tell you that learning to use a social networking tool does not a computer literate person make. These accomplishments belie a very superficial knowledge of how the Web—and digital media in general—truly works, and that lack of knowledge almost always shows up later when it’s too late to do anything about it.

I’m not sure how realistic it is to think that computer literacy training and/or standardized testing could ever be forced upon the faculty at most American colleges and universities. Addressing the student side of the problem is probably an easier place to begin, and its benefits would extend far beyond the development of online learning programs. If nothing else, we’d at least ensure that our students are truly prepared for that “digital, global, information-driven economy” I keep reading so much about. Plus, we’d avoid the embarrassment of graduating a generation of students who will one day shock their closest friends by revealing they never learned how to zip a file or edit a photo or compress an audio clip.

DePaul Teaching Commons—It’s a Launch!

IDD is pleased to announce the launch of the DePaul Teaching Commons, DePaul’s virtual teaching and learning center. Designed to address teaching issues at multiple levels, this website provides a single location for information about teaching at DePaul.

It is hoped this website will grow to become a collaborative space where DePaul faculty members can share their teaching practices and explore new tools and ideas. Do you notice anything missing? Do you want to contribute a sample syllabus or assignment? The site contains many links requesting faculty suggestions, resources, and comments, making it easy for instructors to contribute and fill in any gaps.

The DePaul Teaching Commons expresses the unique nature of DePaul. Collaboration among fourteen departments and committees contributed to the website’s extensive content. For examples of how similar sites have been developed at other institutions, view the sites listed below.

I think the DePaul Teaching Commons beats ‘em all, hands down!

Applying the Business Model to Education: Part II

Back in September, I wrote a post addressing some drawbacks of applying the business model to education. In the meantime, and thanks to Don Casey, Dean at DePaul’s School of Music, I came across Jim Collins’s Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer. This is a monograph accompanying Collins’s book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. I found this monograph extremely useful in the way it articulates and organizes both the problems involved in applying the business model to education.

Below, I have constructed what is hopefully a meaningful collage of quotes from Jim Collins’s work (organized based on the monograph’s sections), making my arguments through his words and concluding by posing some questions.

(Introduction)

“We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business.’ Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. Business Insolvency Advice and Liquidation Services can help you maintain a healthy financial outlook and ensure your business stays on track.

“The critical distinction is not between business and social [e.g. education], but between great and good. We need to reject the naive imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors, and instead jointly embrace the language of greatness.” 

(Calibrating success without business metrics)

The confusion between inputs and outputs stems from one of the primary differences between business and the social sectors. In business, money serves as both an input (a resource for achieving greatness) and an output (a measure of greatness). In the social sectors, money is only an input and not a measure of greatness. This distinction is also relevant to reliable customer relationship management services, where implementing effective CRM strategies is key to measuring and achieving outstanding success. By leveraging CRM systems, organizations can gain valuable insights into customer needs, enhance service delivery, and drive substantial growth and profitability. Consider consulting with professionals from ipa london to gain insights into financial strategies tailored to your specific sector.

“It doesn’t really matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence—quantitative or qualitative—to track your progress. If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence.”

“In the social sectors, performance is defined by results and efficiency in delivering on the social mission… [A great organization] makes such a unique contribution to the communities it touches and does its work with such excellence that if it were to disappear, it would leave a hole that could not be easily filled by any other institution… [It] can deliver exceptional results over a long period of time, beyond any single leader, idea, … or well-funded program in education and also the numerous of resources which can be used for this such as services of Jason Linett professional hypnotist which can help boost a business and more.

(Getting things done within a diffuse power structure)

“Social sector leaders are not less decisive than business leaders as a general rule; they only appear that way to those who fail to grasp the complex governance and diffuse power structures common to social sectors.”

“In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power to simply make the right decision… Legislative leadership [on the other hand] relies more upon persuasion, political currency, and shared interests to create the conditions for the right decisions to happen. And it is precisely this legislative dynamic that makes Level 5 leadership particularly important to the social sector.”

“True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.”

“There is an irony in all this. Social sector organizations increasingly look to business for leadership models and talent, yet I suspect we will find more true leadership in the social sectors than the business sector.”

For a seamless business registration application hong kong, get help from Acclime to navigate the process efficiently and ensure compliance with all necessary requirements.

(Rethinking the economic engine without a profit motive)

“[The Hedgehog Concepts of great companies reflect] deep understanding of three intersecting circles: a) what you are deeply passionate about, b) what you can be the best in the world at, and c) what drives your economic engine… A fundamental difference between the business and social sectors [is that] … the third circle shifts from being an economic engine to a resource engine. The critical question is not ‘How much money do we make?’ but ‘How can we develop a sustainable resource engine to deliver superior performance relative to our mission?’”

“The resource engine has three basic components: time, money, and brand. ‘Time’ refers to how well you attract people willing to contribute their efforts for free, or at rates below what their talents would yield in business. ‘Money’ refers to sustained cash flow. ‘Brand’ refers to how well your organization can cultivate a deep well of emotional goodwill and mind-share of potential supporters [as well as the respect and admiration of those demanding the services offered].”

I will conclude this post by posing the following questions:

a) Could the recent trend to assess educational institutions’ performance based on business models and metrics reflect more our degree of familiarity with such models/metrics and less their fitness to the task?

b) Assuming that an educational institution’s/department’s mission is systematic, rigorous, and representative of its members’ passions, shouldn’t assessment of the institution’s/department’s success be tightly linked to achieving excellence relative to this mission rather than to some easily measurable bottom line that is irrelevant to the mission?

c) Regardless of whether or not we approach education altruistically, isn’t it about time we became honest enough to modify either our altruistic missions to match our bottom-line assessments or our assessments to match our socially conscious, rather than business-based missions?

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Denny’s Christmas Gift: What I Learned from My Best Student

It was Christmas time again. I knew a big box filled with gifts for everyone in my family would soon arrive at my door. Among them, a square-shaped object wrapped in colorful holiday paper would be a special one for me. It’s a Christmas gift from Denny Sapp, a close friend of mine who passed away seven years ago.

This year’s gift is no different. I unwrap it slowly, savoring the anticipation, and inside I find a custom photo wallet. It’s adorned with a picture of us from one of our many adventures together, a beautiful reminder of the bond we shared. As I hold the wallet in my hands, memories of Denny flood back, making me both laugh and tear up.

Also, this year as always, I put Denny’s gift—the latest version of Merriam Webster’s 365 New Words a Year calendar—next to my computer screen and once again, felt the urge to write down Denny’s story. His story touches on many aspects of teaching, learning and, most of all, living a life enriched by teaching and learning. He taught me many valuable lessons that I would like to share with you.

Denny was my student—the one who had achieved the most during his life. He had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in architecture and a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Illinois. By the age of 40, he had already achieved tenure and full-professor status and was chair of the civil-engineering department at Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, which was ranked the number one engineering school in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.

Photo of Sharon Guan and Friend DannyDenny was also the oldest student in my Chinese language and culture class. Seeing him, a seventy-some retired professor sitting in the first row of the class with a bunch of twenty-some youngsters, made my Chinese class very “American.” For someone of his age to tackle Chinese—which is often referred to as the most difficult language in the world for students of any age—was certainly a challenging task. But Denny was determined. He did everything possible to make himself a top student. He was always the first one to show up in class and the last to leave. He collected books, dictionaries, and tutorials beyond the required reading materials for the class. He carried his Chinese learning materials in a brief case—which he called his “Chinese brain”—everywhere he went. He even asked to meet with me after class for more instruction.

So, we started to meet for lunch every Saturday in a Chinese restaurant, where he would practice Chinese and I would bring him English-related questions that I encountered during the week. Thus, we became each other’s student and teacher. The meetings continued even after the Chinese class was over, and, as we meet more often, I realized that what I could learn from this man was beyond language. It was even more than knowledge. Many years after Denny died, I still remember vividly the life lessons I learned from him in dealing with the task of learning, in handling students and friends, and in reacting to fame and challenges. Here are just a few of my favorites:

“I think you should finish your dissertation.”

When my doctoral venture got into the ABD stage, Denny was the head of my “butt-kickers” committee. This committee was comprised of family members and friends, and it was their job to pressure me to get the dissertation done. Everyone who has been through the dreadful journey of a Ph.D. knows how easily this last swing could be dropped because of the freedom a doctor-to-be has in deciding whether or not to do it. At this point, there are no more deadlines given by anybody but yourself—unless you are as fortunate as I was to find someone who would police the process and kick butt to keep it going.

Denny was the one who did the kicking when my mind started to wander from writing my dissertation to dating and finding someone to settle down with. At the time I was well past the typical marriage age in my culture and the fear of missing the boat started to haunt me. I started to bring my concerns to our lunch table and asked Denny who I should date. He looked me in the eyes and said in a calm but firm tone, “I think you should finish your dissertation.” It was a short sentence but a big wake-up call to alert me to stay focused until the job is done.

“Let’s learn some real English when you finish your dissertation.”

Denny was the editor-in-chief for my dissertation, the one who read the first draft of every single page of my writing. In fact, I even brought to him articles or documents I wrote for work and research. He would read them, make changes with a pencil, read them again, erase his changes, and then re-edit. When I saw him re-editing my work for the third time around, it taught me what makes a truly good writer.

One time he noticed a straightforward sentence that he had edited had been revised by my doctoral committee chair into the “dissertation-style.” He frowned and said to me, “Okay, Sharon, let’s learn some real English when you finish your dissertation.”

Real English, in Denny’s eyes, was the type of English that’s simple and direct. To help build my vocabulary, each Christmas Denny would give me a one-word-a-day Webster calendar. He also taught me that if an idea can be expressed in a simple word, I shouldn’t use complicated ones. “No gobbledeegook,” as he would say. To this day, I still have a problem writing or speaking the word “pedagogy” because Danny had once asked me, “Why don’t you just call it ‘teaching’?” And I know that he wouldn’t accept, “Because it is a popular ‘P’ word in higher education,” as an answer.

In today’s world where so many of us strive to fancy our writing with jargon and buzz words, Denny pointed out a simple fact: good writing should always be simple and direct!

“Take that doctor thing off your voice mail greeting.”

After all the pains and sufferings I had been through for my degree, I was finally crowned with the title. One thing I did to highlight the change was to revise my voice mail greeting. Like many of my professors, I put the “doctor” prefix in front of my name, upgrading what was once just “Sharon Guan’s office” to “Dr. Sharon Guan’s office.”

A couple of days later, I met Denny for lunch. He said to me in a father-to-daughter tone, “Take that off, Sharon. You don’t have to include that.” I could think of many excuses to defend myself. As an instructional designer, I thought I needed that title to gain the respect of faculty, and I wanted to point out that others had ‘Dr. so and so’ in their greetings. Yet I didn’t offer Danny any excuses. Instead, I went back to the office and re-recorded the greeting, dropping that doctor. I did this because Denny had just shown me that respect is to be earned through your actions, not your title.

“Flip nine fingers…to confuse him!”

As a licensed airplane pilot, Denny drove like a pilot. He wouldn’t speed but the starts and stops were quite sharp. It had been fun to ride in his red Miata to our lunch place until one day we bumped into a guy who was annoyed by Denny’s way of driving. This guy “saluted” us with his middle finger while driving by. I was aggravated (This was in Terre Haute, Indiana, not Chicago). I told Denny that we ought to drive up and flip a finger at him. Denny said, “Well, next time, let’s throw nine fingers…” “What’s that for?” I asked, thinking it was another American gesture that I hadn’t been acquainted with. “To confuse him!” He cheered like a little kid who had just pulled off the perfect prank. His joyful attitude toward this awful experience told me that revenge is not a solution for someone with a big heart and a great sense of humor.

“You can’t burn down that building…because my office is there!”

Denny once told me a story about a paranoid student of his who got so extremely angry with the institution that he decided he wanted to bomb one of the buildings. When he accidentally mentioned his plan to Denny, Professor Sappy gave him a simple reason to quit.

“You can’t burn down that building,” Denny said. “Why not? Because my office is there!” And then Denny started to meet the “bomber” the same way he met me, sharing books and ideas about life and discussing ways to deal with problems. The student became a lifelong friend of Denny’s and later graduated from Rose Hulman with honors. Denny shared this story with me mainly to amuse me with his funny answer, but I saw what a powerful influence a teacher can have on a student. I also realized that a teacher’s influence often goes beyond the classroom.

It had been several years since I started to meet regularly with Denny when I heard that Denny had multiple myeloma, a type of cancer somewhat like leukemia. I shook my head in disbelief. For all these years, there hadn’t been a single sign of illness in this happy and active person. But then, the signs started to show as it got into the fifth year of his battle with this fatal disease. Thankfully, he was able to get spasticity cannabis treatments to ease his pain a bit. Behind his gentle smiles, I saw tiredness and exhaustion. Yet he maintained his sense of humor, telling me proudly the best compliment he received from a Chinese friend. “When I told XiaoMao maybe I was born on the wrong planet, you know what he said to me? He said, ‘No, you were born on the wrong side of the planet!” I know that to Danny, the right side would be China, where his view of life would be highly valued by many. And that explained why so many Chinese showed up at Danny’s funeral. They were the reason for him to study Chinese at the age of seventy because he wanted to communicate with these friends in their language!

In the spring of 2001, Denny died at the Regional Hospital of Terre Haute. The last word he said was “Ni Hao ma?” or “How are you?” in Chinese. He left behind his wife Helen, elder sister Margaret, and many friends, both Chinese and American. He didn’t have children because, in his words, “There are too many people in the world already.” He hadn’t published any books because he claimed, “There are too many publications already.”

Four people were selected to speak at his memorial services. Among them, I was the only one standing at the podium without a script in hand. I started my speech with the following sentences:

“It was such a privilege to me to be among these respected university professors and administrators to deliver a speech at this very special event. Being a non-native speaker and being the most inexperienced person in the group, it must have been very brave of me to stand here without a script. Well, that is not true. I did go to my office last night trying to type something up. Yeah, Denny knows what a last-minute person I am. But last night, when I fired up my word processor, all of a sudden I realized this is going to be the first article that I wrote that wouldn’t be edited by Denny… The screen then got blurred… and I could not finish my homework any more…”

On the seventh day after Denny passed away, Panda Garden, the Chinese restaurant where Denny regularly visited was crowded with diners. People waiting at the door couldn’t figure out why there was a table in the corner set up with plates and chopsticks but not being used by anyone… This table at which Denny usually sat was reserved for him by Allen Yan, the owner of the restaurant. It was reserved for Denny because of an ancient belief among Chinese that on the seventh day, the spirit of those who died would come to visit their favorite places. And Allen knew that his friend Denny wouldn’t forget to stop by his restaurant…

It took a few hours to drive from Terre Haute, Indiana to the cemetery in Illinois where Denny was to be buried. The drive was extremely dreadful for Allen’s three-year-old son Jimmy who kept throwing up during the trip. I asked Allen why he insisted on bringing his son along knowing he would get car sick. Allen answered with his voice trembling with sadness and anger, “I want him to remember Grandpa Denny! I want him to remember who named him!” In Chinese culture, it is a privilege to name a newborn, and that privilege was given to Denny by Allen Yan’s family, new immigrants from Taiwan who survived in a small town in the Midwest because of the support of people like Denny. Denny named Allen’s son after his favorite president, Jimmy Carter.

With little Jimmy standing straight beside him, Allen took out a bag of dirt that he had brought from Taiwan and poured them onto Denny’s casket before the burying. The dirt was from the other side of the planet, and Allen said it would accompany Denny on his next journey.

When Christmas came in 2001, my family received a big box of gifts from Denny’s wife Helen and sister Margaret. Among them, I spotted a squared-shaped object wrapped in holiday paper. I knew what it was because I had been getting this gift for many years. Through glares of tears, I read the little note attached to it:

Sharon,

This is really a gift from Denny. Margaret and I had the pleasure of mailing it to you!

Love, Helen.

And the gift has continued to arrive every Christmas—so precious, like the memory of Denny.

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Will Pre-Teens Still Love Virtual Worlds When They’re Old Enough to Drive?

A recent article in the New York Times (see Web Playgrounds of the Very Young) led me to think about whether educators are simply ahead of the curve in the use of virtual environments for educational purposes. While Second Life and other virtual environments for adults have fallen short of anticipated use expectations, those for children have enjoyed unprecedented growth. The success of sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz begs the question that perhaps the generation of students now in elementary and middle school will be open to and expect their educational experiences to exist in virtual worlds. Then again, these students are currently not using virtual worlds for collaborative learning experiences. Instead, these sites exist as a social outlet for children who are often unable to freely travel to visit their friends in person. Will the fascination with virtual environments wane as these same students grow into their late teen years and are able to more freely socialize with their peers? I think this question has yet to be answered.

If our experiments with virtual worlds are teaching us anything, it is perhaps that our course management systems will need to change from the largely asynchronous environments that currently exist to “virtual classrooms” that more closely mirror the face-to-face environment. Such environments would allow for more natural social engagement, easier collaborative learning opportunities, and a better sense of community. In order to make these “virtual classrooms” a reality, educators should begin planning now in order to meet the needs of the generation of students who will be attending college in five to seven years.

The 12 Web Tools of Christmas

If you are like me, you come across dozens, if not hundreds of new websites a year, each offering some new tool or web 2.0 service that is sure to revolutionize the way your surf the web or do your work. Most are just neat little gimmicks or don’t fit into your workflow. However, there are some I’ve run across this year that I found to be quite useful either for personal or professional use. And without further ado, I give you the 12 Web Tools of Christmas.

DropSend1) dropsend.com — Do ever need to email a large file like a high-resolution photo or video clip? Don’t want your email to hang-up for 30 minutes, only to reject the file and force you to start all over? With DropSend, you can send files up to 1 GB with ease. A free account also gives you 250MB of online storage.

Buzzword2) buzzword.com — Buzzword is hands down the best online word processor I’ve ever used. The interface is clean and elegant. Adding images and tables is easy, its collaborative tools are very slick, and it handles pagination and typography better than Google Docs and Zoho. Adobe recently acquired the company that developed Buzzword, so look for them to put their muscle into Buzzword’s future development. (I like Buzzword so much, I even used it to create the first draft of this blog post.)

EditGrid3) editgrid.com — What buzzword is for word processing, EditGrid is for spreadsheets. It’s the most “Excel-like” of the available online spreadsheets and if you are a power Excel user, then EditGrid is the only web app that could possibly meet your needs. Many Excel features, including sorting, charts, auto-fill, cell border, number formatting, cell formatting, import, export, freeze pane, text overflow, auto-fit row/column size, word warp, and cell comments, all work the same in EditGrid as they do in Excel with the exact same keyboard shortcuts. And since EditGrid is a web app, it’s easy to setup cells that retrieve data directly from the Internet. Also promising is EditGrid’s integration with the iPhone.

splashup4) splashup.com — Splashup is the closest thing to a web-based version of Photoshop—at least until Abobe releases the real thing. This little tool covers about 20% of the real Photoshop’s features, but they happen to be the ones I use 80% of the time. It connects directly to flickr and picasa for easy access to your images stored online. I just wished it saved working files as .psd instead of in its own proprietary .fxo format.

Scribd5) scribd.com — I hate websites that contain links to .pdfs and Word .docs. It’s annoying to have to download the file and open it another application in order to get one or two pieces of information. The more I have to repeat this process the more annoyed I get and the more likely I am to abandon the site and go on to something else. Scrbid prevents you from annoying me and other users like me. It allows you to upload your .pdfs and .docs and then provides you a flash document reader that you can embed in your webpage. Think of it as youtube for documents.

VectorMagic6) vectormagic.stanford.edu — This is THE TOOL if you need to convert bitmap images into vector formats. It actually works better than Adobe’s LiveTrace feature that is included in Illustrator. This little utility has allowed me to scale up logos for HD Video with a minimum of fuss.

ZamZar7) zamzar.com — Zamzar is another utility that has proven to be a real lifesaver. If you ever find yourself out of the office and away from your $1000 encoding software, zamzar will be your best friend. Zamzar is a Swiss-army knife of file conversion. It can convert from formats like DOC to PDF, PNG to JPG, and OGG to MP3. Name almost any two file types and Zamzar can convert one into the other. The quality of video file conversion is not the greatest, but when you are in a pinch, it’s good enough.

Miro8) getmiro.com — I love iTunes. It’s great. It’s the primary way I listen to music and find and download podcasts. However, iTunes was initially designed as an audio player and video has just come along for the ride. Imagine an iTunes that was designed from the ground up with video in mind. What would it include? Well, it would play multiple file types including MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, and Flash Video. It would handle HD files with ease and efficiency. It would support and download bit-torrent files. It would connect to any publisher with a video RSS feed. Take all this, add in social-site integration with Digg and del.icio.us, and you have Miro.

Box9) box.net — Box.net provides simple and easy to use online file storage and sharing, but’s that not all. You also get password protection for all shared files and integration with web apps like Zoho, and Twitter. Plus, box.net provides one-click posting to WordPress and LiveJournal with more apps and services being added all the time The first GB of storage is free with a wide range of pricing plans for additional storage and bandwidth. A box account is a real asset when you are on the road without a laptop of your own.

TokBox10) tokbox.com — TokBox is an online video chat client that you can embed in any webpage or blog. This has exciting educational potential, since a TokBox video chat session could theoretically be conducted from within a course in Blackboard.

wufoo-copy.gif11) wufoo.com — Wufoo let’s you quickly build pretty web forms and surveys and then embed them into your personal webpage. The data analysis tools look nice too. The free account gives you 3 forms with up to 100 entries a month.

Flock12) flock.com — Flock is the web browser for users devoted to their social networks. If I were a big Facebook user, Flock would be the only browser I would use. Flock’s ability to keep track of your contacts, online accounts, social bookmarks, and stored media and keep them all in easy reach is the best thing to happen to web surfing since tabbed browsing.

And here’s one more tool for a Happy New Year…

Twinetwine.com — What is twine? I have no idea. Apparently it is social bookmarking meets wikis meets YouTube with a layer of artificial intelligence keeping everything just a search tag away. It’s the first true semantic web application! (Whatever that really means.) I recommend you apply for a beta invitation because everyone will be blogging about it next year and you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. It’s 2008, the year of Web 3.0.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go: The Evolving Role of Instructional Designers

Recently, I finished reading Top-Ten Teaching and Learning Issues, 2007 from the November 3rd, 2007 edition of Educause Quarterly. This article discusses the top-ten issues facing academic technologists/instructional designers and how “this is a particularly important time for the academic technology/instructional design profession, which is moving beyond the formative stages.”

For those of you who are now dying to know what the top-ten issues are, you can read them below:

  1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence
  2. Demonstrating improvement of learning
  3. Translating learning research into practice
  4. Selecting appropriate models and strategies for e-learning
  5. Providing tools to meet growing student expectations
  6. Providing professional development and support to new audiences
  7. Sharing content, applications and application development
  8. Protecting institutional data
  9. Addressing emerging ethical challenges
  10. Understanding the evolving role of academic technologists.

It is interesting to note that these top-ten issues group themselves into the following themes: assessment, best practices, expectations, collaboration and ethics/privacy. Personally, I believe that numbers 1 through 9 are all parts of number 10. Part of the role of academic technologists/instructional designers is to assist in the issues presented in 1-9. All of this is in addition to being the “expert resource on best practices in educational technology” and maintaining “knowledge of online methodologies, instructional design, Web and multimedia design, accessibility and adaptive learning technologies, and learning styles.”

The article goes on to emphasize that academic technologists/instructional designers need to be more integrated into the institutional culture and campus initiatives as a whole in order to effectively help set directives. In addition to this, I see that individuals in these roles also need to be actively involved with other organizations at the same institution. The pieces of design, technology, assessment and accessibility are often handled by various individuals in various departments across the institution. In order for technology to be effectively integrated into the curriculum with the ability to assess exactly how effective it is, many different units need to come together and work collaboratively to make it happen. It is difficult to design effective courses if parts of the technology are not dependable or don’t work in a manner that achieves pedagogical goals. It is nice to create a lot of interesting curricular pieces, but if there is no broad assessment of its effectiveness, is the development of the content worthwhile? Are proper accessibility guidelines being followed which match the efforts of the institution at large?

In a field which is still finding its firm footing in education, it is good to occasionally step back for a broader perspective. It’s important to not only observe how far we’ve come, but to also look at where we are currently and where we need to go in order to provide the best education for our students that we can.

Too Cool for School Revisited: Second Life in Higher Ed

“Everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as it is available without distinction of good or evil. This is the principal law of our age.” —Jacques Ellul, 1954

I just returned from Orlando, where I attended the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, and can’t stop thinking about Ellul’s views on technology. While I can’t claim to be an expert on his seminal work The Technological Society, my take on him is that he believed the advancement and implementation of technology as inevitable, but that we can choose how we respond and adapt. In essence, tech is here, tech is staying, more tech is coming. What shall we do about it?

Ellul came to mind as I thought about the heated arguments against Second Life I heard at Sloan. Some people are angry—really angry—about the idea of Second Life in education. I found myself wondering what it is about Second Life that’s so threatening. Is it the learning curve? The time and money it takes to develop a viable presence in-world? Or maybe it’s the fear of losing an old and trusted way of teaching in the headlong rush to embrace the new and unproven. No matter. That Second Life and the technology it represents and exploits will be widely implemented in education despite our fears is given. How thoughtfully we’ll use this technology and to what ends are the things we should be researching and debating, not casting stones about in an attempt to forestall the inevitable.

I think I understand the objections some educators have to Second Life. It’s often difficult to point to a sound pedagogical reason for having a Second Life campus. It’s expensive to purchase, develop and maintain an island. It’s still relatively clumsy to navigate and interact in-world. It’s still more a novelty and a pleasant diversion than a proven learning tool. And just how do you justify the expenditure of resources for a virtual campus when your physical campus has its very real needs? Are we going to build virtual campuses just because students think Second Life is cool?

Well, yes. That’s exactly why we will. We will build institutions in Second Life because online learning students in the near future will demand it. They’ll insist on access to it for social connections and interaction and a palpable sense of user presence that smashes the psychological walls of distance; a presence, connection and interaction unmatched by cost per user or ease of use by any other technology currently available. We’ll build them to market our institutions, to strengthen our brands, to compete for students and prestige. We’ll build them for many of the same reasons we fund and field sports teams and build student unions and fitness centers for our on-campus students; because it adds to the social experience of higher education and because that experience has value in and of itself.

And we’ll build them because we must be prepared for the inevitable. The technology that Second Life exploits will become cheaper, more stable, easier to use and impossible to ignore. I’d bet that we’ll see some kind of 3D virtual environment incorporated into Blackboard et al within 5 years. Will we make creative use of its potential? Will we maximize its benefits and mitigate its drawbacks? If we use Second Life and its descendants merely to deliver the same old course content and methodologies, we’ll fail our students and ourselves. We need to think now about how we’ll use this technology, how we’ll exploit its strengths, and how we’ll create new learning methodologies and possibilities for experiences and connections. Second Life is here. The rise of the virtual campus is inevitable. Will we be ready?

Lessig’s Last Copyright Rant: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law

A friend sent me a link to a great twenty-minute speech by Stanford University Professor of Law Larry Lessig. The speech, “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”, was filmed in March at the TED Conference but was posted just last month at the TED site. I’m posting it a bit late by blogging standards, but it’s a “better late than never” type of thing. It’s a must-see. A twenty-minute cultural moment, like Scorsese’s homage to Hitchcock.And even though many of you have seen this much-forwarded video already, I believe that Larry Lessig deserves as much bandwidth as possible. You won’t be disappointed with this presentation. Lessig is an incredibly engaging speaker who has gained a reputation of being quite a PowerPoint virtuouso. He’s passionate, incredibly brainy, and skilled at making an issue sound extremely pressing. Lessig gives a forceful speech about on how in our Internet-driven age, overly-restrictive control of copyright will truly stifle and stagnate creative expression in the youth today. Youth not only speak in a different way, but create and distribute knowledge in a completely different format. The older generation (music and movie execs included) need to stop and listen.

This presentation has some additional significance. This speech is probably the last public one Larry Lessig will probably ever give on this topic. In June, Lessig stated that he was shifting his academic focusfrom copyright and intellectual property issues to fighting the corruption that’s in the political process. As a founder of Creative Commons, an organization that helps artists, authors and scholars give others the freedom to adapt and build upon their works and improve their creativity without having to bring in any sort of legal counsel, Lessig has given creators a serious, concrete way to share information and build upon ideas without having the pressure and worry of the law breathing down their neck.I’m excited to see what Larry Lessig will be able to bring to the fight against political corruption. I hope he’ll speak with Jeff Tweedy regarding this cause. But I do know that there is still a lot of work to be done regarding Creative Commons, particularly at the higher educational level, where academic publishers seem to have their own stranglehold on creativity with their copyright regulations and such. But that’s a blog post for another day. Until then, enjoy the video. Share it. Remix it. Just don’t remix it with a Prince song.

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Kindle Doesn’t Light My Fire

If you haven’t heard, Kindle is Amazon.com’s new digital device that allows you to read books on the go. The device features a glare-free screen based on electronic paper technology. According to Amazon, the screen can be read even in bright sunlight and is as easy on the eyes as reading text on paper. In addition, Kindle can download books by connecting to Sprint’s high-speed wireless network, but it doesn’t require a monthly service plan because the data download fees are built in to the price of each book. Amazon also claims users can read thousands of pages before needing to recharge the device, and that the battery will last for about two days with its wireless network access left on.

Although Kindle offers some innovative features, I wouldn’t call it revolutionary. Sony has been attempting to bring ebooks into the mainstream for years with devices like the Reader and the Connect ebook delivery service. Smaller companies like HanLin have also tried to make a name for themselves in this market, but for the most part, their sales have been limited to early adopters in tech-hungry Asian markets. Of course, being the first isn’t nearly as important as being the best, as any iPod/iTunes fan will tell you. Although I think Amazon is on the right track, I don’t think Kindle is going to revolutionize how we read or how digital educational content is delivered—at least not right now. Here are a just a few reasons why it’s not making my Christmas list this year and why I don’t believe Kindle will be a hit with students and teachers, either:

Kindle costs $499. That’s comparable to the cost of an iPhone, a bargain-priced laptop, a long weekend in Vegas, or 4,000 packages of Ramen noodles.

Book downloads are around $9.99 a piece. Sure, a new hardcover is a lot more than 10 bucks, but a library card is free. Furthermore, on the rare occasion that I buy a pricey book, I expect it to be more than a stimulating read. I expect it to add a touch of class to my living room. (I find people don’t laugh as much at my Kelly Clarkson album collection when it’s sandwiched between Tolstoy and Nietzsche.)

Kindle is a one-trick pony. Say what you will about “convergent” devices being hard to use. I’ll compromise on usability if it helps me avoid uncomfortable backpack bloating. At the very least, I expected that Kindle would be able to store and display personal documents from programs like Microsoft Word. However, to do this, the Kindle promo video claims you must email files to your Kindle device (I’m still not sure how that works) and pay Amazon to convert them to a Kindle-compatible format.