I missed this story back in March. A student at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada was almost expelled from the
university for creating a study group. Huh? I was in study groups when I was an undergrad along time ago. So what did he
do that was so different or so wrong?
He created that study group online using Facebook. Running a Facebook study
group was seen by Ryerson as cheating.
The student is Cris Avenir, a freshman computer engineering student, and he
was charged as the administrator of the online group (he wasn't the creator, but took over the admin role) and with an
additional 146 counts for each classmate who was a member of it. Geeeeez.
Though I missed this story when
it broke, there was a lot of online debate about whether the study group amounted to online cheating or it was students
exchanged academic ideas in the same way that face-to-face groups, tutoring and mentoring work.
Initially, when
his "Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions" was made known to his chemistry professor, the teacher
gave him an F in the course and charged him with academic misconduct. The main thrust of the professor's charge was
that he had told students to work independently.
The Ryerson University's Faculty Appeals Committee ultimately
announced that they would not expel the 18-year-old, but he would be required to take a course on academic misconduct,
have a note on his transcript saying he was disciplined, and get a zero on one of his assignments, worth 10 per cent of
his course grade.
His defense was that the group allowed students to share notes on assignments that were worth
10% of the overall course grade and was no different than any study group that met in he library or student center. The
Facebook group was originally created by Ryerson students who had study group sessions in a room on campus known as
"the dungeon" and wanted to continue online.
Chris has an entry on Wikipedia now
and I don't see any news posts after the decision about an appeal or follow up.
I doubt that Ryerson University
expected the world headlines and online posts about their actions, but the incident became a kind of test case. There
are other online study groups in higher education and in secondary schools. I did a search on "study groups"
in Facebook and there were over more than 500 which is the number a Facebook search stops at, so maybe there are 5000.
If we could search other sites like MySpace, Ning sites etc. we would find plenty more.
I'm not sure the real issue
for us is whether or not students were supposed to work together on those Ryerson chemistry problems in person or
online. The local issue is whether or not the university reacted appropriately. The global issue is how we react to
students using the Internet on their own to learn.
Students are going to do creative, legal, illegal, helpful and
harmful things online - and I'm not convinced that students will always be clear on where their actions fall.
Is
being in an online study group wrong? I doubt it. But I would have to see the information on the course's syllabus and
the school’s acceptable use policy, their academic rules and their student’s rights and
responsibilities.
What? You say that online study groups isn't even addressed in any of those documents?
Oh...
Students are very comfortable working and having online discussions - more comfortable than most of their
teachers - and we keep asking them to work online in learning management systems, ePortfolios, blogs, and social
networks. Schools (and teachers) need to look formally at their policies for technology use.
You don't want me
and the rest of the bloggers writing about your course or school, do you?
The "7 Things You
Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on
emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going,
and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them
with time-pressed colleagues.
The 3 latest guides:
7 Things You Should Know About Second Life Second
Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters of virtual lands, more than 13 million “residents,”
and a thriving economy. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases, individual departments or
faculty—are active in Second Life, not only for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities
for prospective students, and fundraising. Second Life lets educators easily build and modify learning spaces to test
how different strategies for a physical space affect learning, and a similar approach can be taken toward educational
activities in those spaces.
7 Things You Should Know About Multi-Touch Interfaces Multi-touch
interfaces are input devices that recognize two or more simultaneous touches, allowing one or more users to interact
with computer applications through various gestures created by fingers on a surface. Some devices also recognize
differences in pressure and temperature. Multi-touch technology introduces users to swipes, pinches, rotations, and
other actions that allow for richer, more immediate interaction
with digital content. Multi-touch devices and supporting applications offer diverse ways of visualizing information to
improve understanding, and they facilitate new ways to foster collaborative creation, permitting several users to work
simultaneously on a single screen.
7 Things You Should Know About Ning Ning is an online service that
allows users to create their own social networks and join and participate in other networks. No technical skill is
required to set up a social network, and there are no limits to the number of networks a user can join. Users of Ning
social networks have
access to functionality similar to that of more well-known social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Various
features allow users to read news or learn about related events, join groups, read and comment on blog entries, view
photos and videos, and other activities as set up by the network creator. RSS feeds let users subscribe to updates from
specific parts of the social network.
I was talking to some people from another college here in New Jersey last week about posting their videos to
YouTube. In the course of the conversation, it became evident that there was a some basic confusion about what having
your own "channel" on YouTube really means.
Back in 2006, while I was working at NJIT, I wanted to
create a YouTube account for the university where we could post some of our videos. I knew that students were already
posting videos with the tag "njit" and that most of those were not exactly what you would call good
"promotional" video for the school. Unfortunately, someone had already taken the user name we would want
http://www.youtube.com/user/NJIT/ although they were not doing anything with the account. (The university has tried to
contact the owner and get the account, but has been unsuccessful - not because they want money, but because they don't
respond.)
So, I took the user name highlandertech and starting uploading, and the university continues to use that account. The
next year, I created an account called MSPTC in the name of the Master
of Science in Professional and Technical Communication program that I continue to teach in at NJIT. Though it has
the program's "brand" on it, so far I am the only user and the videos there are primarily selected so that I
can send my own students to a playlist of videos I have selected for assignments. My course in in visual design, so, as
an example, I might have them look at the videos in the "typography" playlist. NJIT has done the
same sort of thing - an example is a playlist of Dr. Bruce Bukiet's calculus videos.
Here's the
confusion. None of those examples are actual university channels.
You need to go beyond what I did for that. The
college would need to actually apply to YouTube for a non-profit status channel.
I don't plan to create an
unofficial list of all the college YouTube sites (as I had done for iTunes U sites earlier), but here are 15 that I have
visited that will give you an idea of the presence some schools have in YouTube. Which ones are "official"
channels? One way to tell is by the amount of customization the school has been able to do.For example, you can see that
UB Berkeley has created a banner image with a clickable image map. You can't do that with a regular user account.
Why would a school apply to YouTube’s non-profit program? I would start by telling you to search on
your school at YouTube by your full name, abbreviation and variations and see what is out there already. There's a
good chance that someone has already taken your name. That is true for several local New Jersey schools. You should
claim your online turf. Joining YouTube also gives you some additional branding options - using a banner image, page
customization for layout, and the removal of advertising.
The Terms and Conditions for non-profits are what you
would expect:
Must be a U.S.-based nonprofit with IRS 501(c)(3) tax status
May not be religious or
political in nature
May not be focused primarily on lobbying for political or policy change
Commercial
organizations, credit-counseling services, donation middleman services, fee-based organizations, and nonprofit portals
are not eligible for the program
YouTube is way beyond the fad phase, and any institution that continues to
ignore its impact on the public image of your school to potential students, current students and the global public is
being foolish.
According to the Chronicle Wired
Campus blog, the web site that I wrote about earlier called Textbook Torrents has been taken offline. The site
had hundreds of links to bootleg textbooks and had been online since January 2007. Actually, it was a piece in The Chronicle that probably did
them in since it brought the attention of publishers to the site which had been "underground" for
months.
Visitors to the site now see an error message saying “Site Temporarily Unavailable.”
One of our PCCC
librarians, Paul Martinez, found a very useful tool for creating bibliographies and passed it along.
It is
BibMe at BibMe.org It is free to use,
and, unlike NoodleBib, you can create an entire bibliography/works cited page. You can also create citations from only
the ISBN.And, like many products these days, they also have a blog, so you can subscribe and keep up with what they are doing.
There is a YouTube video that
is an animated version of Zinn’s essay, "Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the
American Empire".
A People's History of the United States was considered a rather radical approach to
the textbook with its inclusion of the voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and others. Zinn
explains his perspectives this way:
"My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse,
judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But
the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to
save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is
still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other
facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
It would be an interesting
exercise for student and teacher to read the original essay and then look at the video (below or on the YouTube site) and see how the two mediums differ in their
presentation. A good lesson in historical perspective...
A virtual school (AKA cyberschool) is an institution that essentially teaches courses through online methods. Plenty of
schools offer online courses and degrees, but far fewer are totally virtual.
I see the term used more for schools at
the secondary level. Many states have their own virtual school. I didn't really have any contact with a virtual school
until I was contacted by an instructional technologist at one who wanted help doing training as they moved from
Blackboard to Moodle. I asked Chris
Shamburg for some background because I knew he did some teaching for NJeSchool. Chris told me, "It's an
initiative for New Jersey kids who want more than their schools offer or who have special circumstances that keep them
home bound. It offers a mix of traditional courses (e.g. Algebra, American History) and more niche offerings (e.g. HS
English courses based on student podcasting, fanfiction, and writing college admission essays)."
NJeSchool is a virtual school in New
Jersey as part of the Hudson County Schools of Technology, a county-wide school district serving the high school and
adult populations. There is also the NJ Virtual School.
Its classes are web-based and students can satisfy their high school requirements at anytime and from anywhere. They
began offering courses in 2005. Course offerings at both schools are consistent with New Jersey State graduation
requirements and aligned with the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards. All courses are taught by New Jersey
State Certified instructors fully trained in online instruction. The NJVHS is modeled after the nationally recognized Florida Virtual School.
Virtual
schools around the country and world offer different instructional and enrollment models. Instructional design ranges
from fully independent self-paced courses, to more traditional semester teacher-facilitated courses. Class sizes range
widely with small seminars of 15 and large lecture-hall styled courses of 200 students both being available.
As
with online courses in higher ed, students interact with teachers and other students using course management systems
like Blackboard or Moodle and sometimes with older tools (email, phone) that have largely fallen away in
colleges.
Another example is the new Connecticut Virtual Learning Center which had its first term in January 2008
with 300+ of the state's public high school students taking online courses as supplemental options to their traditional
classroom curricula. You can see their course listings at ctvirtuallearning.org.
42 states reported in
2007 some sort of virtual learning for their students, and there are at least 147 virtual charter schools operating in
the U.S. They serve students who fallen behind, need more time to work, have dropped out of traditional classes for
emotional, physical, or academic reasons, students who want enrichment and can't fit it into their schedules. Students
are using IM, Skype, Twitter, Moodle and all the tools we use at the college level. These schools also encounter the
same problems like training online instructors and dealing with the feeling of isolation that new online students often
feel.
Yesterday, I was reading an announcement that Blackboard is partnering with Syracuse University to try to integrate
its commercial product with the open source alternative Sakai.
They made the announcement at the Blackboard Developers Conference this week which precedes the BbWorld conference (both
in Las Vegas) that many higher ed technology professionals will attend. (It started last night.) It's not a total shock.
There was a Blackboard
blog post about the general idea at the end of June, but I'm curious to see the general community
reaction.
I'm not sure what my own reaction to this news is now, or will be as I learn more about the partnership.
Guys in white hats join the black hat gang? Blackboard tries to embrace open everything? The end of Sakai? Blackboard
finally realizes it must deal directly with open source? Unfortunately, for Blackboard, they have picked up an evil
empire reputation in the same way that Microsoft did - too big a player, monopolies, patent suits, buy out & squash
other products etc.
I attended a spring semester Blackboard presentation here in NJ and you could hear hints of
all this integration then. They were calling the new product Project NG (for"Net Generation" though the
"No Good" comment ran through the room too) and this new plug-in is called the "Blackboard-Sakai
Connector" which is part of the Learning Environment Connector that is supposed to allow you to integrate data from
an external CMS/LMS to Blackboard in version 8. The word on the Net is that Blackboard is also working with another
university to work for integration with the other big open LMS, Moodle.
Some Syracuse users apparently use the Sakai ePortfolio with Blackboard and
the plan is to allow you to import Sakai data into Blackboard or vice versa. Not so radically different from the
“Building Block” idea that Blackboard has had running for years.
Blackboard says this project was
“community-driven” in that it was customers who wanted this ability to use a commercial & open source mashup.
PCCC didn't send me to the Sakai
conference in Paris earlier this month, but Blackboard says the reaction there was "actually mostly
positive.” Stay tuned.
That was 2007. Now, they have made a video for their “House of Cards” song (from In Rainbows)
but they wanted to make the video without any cameras. They used lasers and data.
They employed two 3D scanning
technologies. One, from Geometric Informaticso was
used to capture close objects. The second, a Velodyne
LIDARsystem uses several lasers to grab the wide shots.
According to info on Google, they used 64 lasers
rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute to produce all the exterior scenes.
The Google
folks were interested enough to post the video, and a behind the scenes video.Go play with the data visualization
using a 3D viewer and you can use your mouse to manipulate the data. That's how I made the image in this post.
If you're more ambitious and a better coder than me, download the data and create your own visualizations.
Is there anything truly disruptive in education? To a teacher, "disruptive" has the negative sound of that
kid in the back row who is ruining your class. Disruptive technologies are innovations that upset the existing
order of things, often in a good way.
It's an idea that comes from the business section of the bookshelves.
Typical scenario: a lower-end innovation catches the fancy of the public, for example, Internet video like YouTube. It
might suit the needs of people who are not being served by current products - like young people with commercial
television. It it succeeds over a long enough period, the capacity/performance of the innovation begins to displace the
established product. People stop watching traditional TV.
The real problem for the incumbent technology (often a
big company - a Microsoft, a Blackboard) is that they often don’t react to these disruptive innovations until it’s
too late. Why would they do that? Part of it is that they view this new market as rather uninteresting because it is low
end, low cost and perhaps low profit.
Sometimes the disruptor isn't a small company. Look at the idea that Google
is disrupting the office-productivity application software business of something like the Microsoft Office package by
making its applications free and available on the Net cloud.
Is there a disruptive technology in education?
Educators might nominate cloud computing or collaborative tools.
What got me thinking about this line of
questioning was a book I was reading while having a coffee at my local Barnes & Noble. (SIDENOTE: Has anyone else
noticed how B&N stores with a cafe are turning into libraries? There are people there with a stack of the store's
books, their notebook, a laptop and they are working. Is this a good business model for a bookstore?)
When I look
at a technology like cloud computing and a service like Google Apps, I conclude that people are not using Apps because
it is better than Microsoft Office. They aren't better. They use them because - Is it because they are free? Maybe. I
use Apps, but I already have Office for free from my employer.
Christensen coined the term "disruptive
technology" in a 1995 article which he coauthored with Joseph Bower and his book is aimed at managers rather than
educators. When he wrote a sequel, The Innovator's Solution, he replaced "disruptive
technology" with the term "disruptive innovation" because he says few technologies are
intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character.
Christensen might say that some people use Google
Apps because of "low-end disruption." The service works for users who do not need the full performance valued
by customers at the high-end of the market.
YouTube might be considered a "new-market disruption"
because its target audience (though I'm not sure some of these technologies actually knew who their target audience was
when they started) are people who felt their needs weren't being served by the existing technology. The Linux operating
system (OS) when it was first introduced wasn't "better" than existing systems (like UNIX and Windows NT) but
it was cheap and pretty good. Today, after many improvements, Linux might actually end up displacing the commercial UNIX
distributions. Is Microsoft afraid? Even if they are not, they better be paying attention.
In education, I can't
say that I see one "killer app" that is so widely used that it has dethroned a king or queen. Yes, 16mm
projectors were pushed into AVA closets by the VHS players and then by the DVD players. Has streaming video pushed out
the DVD? Is that a disruptive innovation or is it just video in new delivery systems?
I'm not alone in thinking
about disruption in educational terms. There's actually a paper by Christensen, Aaron, and Clark from the EDUCAUSE 2001
Forum for the Future of Higher Education called "Disruption in
Education."
Christensen’s theory, developed in the corporate realm, is based on the
constant pursuit of excellence by both businesses and higher education institutions. As the quality of products
increases, they often surpass the needs of their consumers, leaving a gap to be filled by a disruptive innovation (a
product or service of lower quality or performance that more closely matches consumers’ needs). Other features make
the innovation appealing as well, such as being cheaper, simpler, and more convenient to use. Early adopters of the
disruptive technology or service most often are the least demanding customers in a market.
That
last sentence catches me. Early adopters are the least demanding. They say: "The video quality isn't anywhere near
as good as a DVD - but it works and it's free. Google Docs doesn't have all the features of Word - but I don't use most
of the Word features anyway and with Docs I can collaborate on a document online easily and never even have to email a
file or carry a flashdrive copy of the file."
Look at the early adopters in your school: the ones who are
trying out Second Life or signed up to pilot Moodle while everyone else was in Blackboard or were the first ones to try
a podcast, create a wiki, or have a blog for class. If they really were early in their adoption, they were probably
willing to accept some shortcomings in the technology innovation because they also saw the potential.
First, from the blog of Second Life comes words that Linden
Labs and IBM Teleport Across Virtual Worlds. Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM
announced that they have achieved the first recorded teleport of their avatars from one virtual world into
another.Sounds like something out of Star Trek. Researchers from the two companies teleported avatars from the
Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world without logging out of one world and logging in to the
other.
Apparently, they have been working on this type of thing since last fall and author Nick Carr had
half-seriously wondered if World of Warcraft avatars could attack and conquer parts of Second Life if they were allowed
to pass from world to world.
One possible point of interest in all this for educators is that as virtual worlds
slowly make their way into classrooms, interoperability across virtual worlds will become critical. For Second Life, it
will help them maintain the viability of SL as an increasing number of virtual worlds become available. I'm not
convinced that SL will be the platform for educators, but it may be one of them. The portability of users and
digital assets will be important to creators.
In some ways, it reminds me of the CMS wars. Second Life is
WebCT/Blackboard - the big commercial player with a strong foothold. But coming along are "open source" worlds
that will compete and may look more attractive to educational institutions - the Moodles of virtual worlds.
Speaking of which, reading Niniane Wang's
(Engineering Manager at Google) post on their house blog, I see that they have launched their own virtual world
project.
...I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual
experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.
The Lively team wants to help people experience another
dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the
places you already visit on the web.
If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can
immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose.
You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having
to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user
research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text
“[[hug]]”.
Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU
students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and
showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can
also run on your desktop.
Hanging out with some Orkut users in a Brazilian "room" in the treetops.
To learn more about Lively,
please visit www.lively.com. Lively is available
through a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer and is Windows only for now.
Lively is not a
"world" like Second Life but instead splits the space into different rooms. It runs completely in the browser
and you use your Google account to log in and create your own avatars, interact with other users, watch YouTube clips on
virtual TVs, share your own photos etc. It's pretty cool that the rooms can be easily embedded into any web page.
Creating rooms is fairly simple using a number of templates to get started. For now, all virtual items for Lively
are for free. Moving avatars around the rooms is clunky (you have to drag them through the room) and SL users may find
the rooms and limitations restrictive at this early stage. I only played for a hour or so in it, but I couldn't fly or
interact much except for chat. The rooms and avatars generally look more like videogame graphics than the rich SL
locations at this point.
There have been rumors for awhile that Google was planning something like this in Google
Earth, and it would be exciting to think that these rooms might be able to move into the Google Earth world in some way.
Not that we need a new search engine, but I tried out a new way of searching called Viewzi. It offers a
variety of ways of viewing your search results.
You start in the usual way - type in a keyword or term. I tried a
vanity search on "Ronkowitz." I'm not the only one out there, but I have a good share of the web traffic, if
only because of my blogs and sites. Then, you select how you want to view the results. I chose first a Thumbnails View which shows me the results in small
screenshots of the sites found. Even if I choose the Simple Text View, you see a small visual of the page,
the Alexa rank of the page and what search engines found the pages. The 3D Cloud View actually floated pictures of me
around, but the Celebrity Photo View came up empty - so much for fame from blogging. (I also don't show up in the
recipe, Amazon.com or weather views.)
I also ended up finding some items
that I guess I haven't noticed in other searches or that I had forgotten were out there. I suspect that changing the way
you view search results actually has an effect on what we see on that screen beyond the literal sense of viewing. (Note:
topic for paper) I rediscovered that I
have a Dipity site that I never bookmarked. I found out that the blog for the portfolio tool called Digication
(which we are actually looking at for PCCC) once posted about my
review of Digication and other similar tools on Serendipity35.
Viewzi does pull in results from search engines
like Google and Yahoo, so you are really adding another level to your search. The creators have coined the term
"smashup" (as in "search+mashup") to describe what they are doing.
This idea of visual search is not brand
new. Last year, I had looked at oskope.com
which also gives you visual results, but only one view. Viewzi has more views today than it had in its beta version that
I looked at earlier and I suspect it will continue to add new viewing options.
I believe that
technically Viewzi is not a "visual search engine" which is really a search engine designed to search for
information on the Web by the input of an image. For example, you input a photo of a building and it searches for the
location or name of the building. This type of search engine is sometimes used to search on the mobile Internet.
I did a bit of searching and turned up a site called kooaba which is being developed to allow you to
access and search for digital content from your mobile phone. The kooaba engine currently allows you to search for
information about movies advertised on posters. For instant access to movie information, you take a picture of any movie
poster on a billboard, in a newspaper or magazine, and send it to kooaba (by MMS, e-mail or using the kooaba client).
You will be immediately pointed to the correct page on their mobile movie portal, which offers you trailer downloads,
reviews, blog-posts, merchandise etc. Currently this service is available in Switzerland but will be expanded to other
countries in the coming weeks and they plan to add new types of objects soon. (Check out the demo on how to use kooaba.)
It's a bit spooky to think that some day soon
you might be able to take a photo of me (or a statue or car or whatever) with your phone, submit it to a service, and
get back search results without really knowing what you were searching for in the first place.
I also ended up finding some items
that I guess I haven't noticed in other searches or that I had forgotten were out there. I suspect that changing the way
you view search results actually has an effect on what we see on that screen beyond the literal sense of viewing. (Note:
topic for paper) I rediscovered that I
have a Dipity site that I never bookmarked. I found out that the blog for the portfolio tool called Digication
(which we are actually looking at for PCCC) once posted about my
review of Digication and other similar tools on Serendipity35.
