Wired Campus Blog: Virtual Island Fosters Educational Innovation

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Virtual Island Fosters Educational Innovation:

"On May 16, the new island will make its debut in Second Life, the interactive virtual world. Built to foster collaboration in the higher-education community, the site -- a joint effort of the software developer Angel Learning and the Second Life Educators community (SLED) -- is a place for educators new to virtuality to figure out how things are done. Teaming up to tear down a campus and redesign it is one possible use."

How Many Students Are Just Right in a Web Course?

How Many Students Are Just Right in a Web Course?

"In one university engineering program, an additional $150 per student was added to a faculty salary for every distance learning student — plus an additional $50 per student goes to the department’s budget. At a state university, faculty teaching distance learning courses received a $100 bonus for each student once the enrollment exceeded 25. In another example, in a library information program on the east coast, faculty received an additional $50 per out—of—state student enrolled in the course." ( Copyright Judith V. Boettcher, 1997-2007)

This article is actually a decade old, though it has apparently been updated over time... -- Alan

Japan's First Internet University Goes Online

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Japan's First Internet University Goes Online

Japan’s first entirely Internet-based university opened last weekend with a real-time entrance ceremony Webcast to the PC’s of its 1,200 freshmen students and a promise to shake up the country’s moribund higher-education sector.

SlideShare.net - The Joys of Powerpoint!

I always use Powerpoint for my presentations (there are no alternatives), and after almost every conference presentation that I have made in recent years, I have had students asking me for a copy of the Powerpoint file. This is especially true in Asia, where students must have gigabytes of .ppt files on their computers. When this first started happening, I was wary of giving my work away, but now I pretty much let anyone who wants to make a copy -- life is too short to worry about it!

SlideShare.net is website where people can upload their Powerpoint presentations (also works with Open Office and PDF files) to share with the world. This is sort of Youtube for slide presentations. While it is not as entertaining as Youtube (I can waste a lot of time there!), there are gems of information that can be useful for teaching purposes. For those interested in emerging elearning, for example, there are a bunch of presentations about Second Life, several of which focus exclusively on it use in education.

A wide variety of topics are covered by the presentations, and some are approaching 1000 views (probably more by the time many people read this). I uploaded one of my presentations (on "Travel 2.0", below), which I think is a pretty good one. However, many (if not most) of the others are of questionable value. Also, there are a lot of Spanish language presentations that are not easily filtered out (since I do not know any Spanish at all). As a result, it takes a lot of digging to find the gems in this collection -- at least if you are looking for something specific. If not, then just browsing can be fun, just like Youtube!



Click Here to view my presentation in the image above.

"Making Wikipedia Better" - Class Assignment

This comes from The Wired Campus blog and email newsletter (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 March 07), where you can also follow the discussion.

"Nicola Pratt, a lecturer in international relations at the University of East Anglia, in England, tells The Guardian that she was once one of those "disgruntled" academics who berate students for using Wikipedia in their essays. But then Ms. Pratt had an epiphany: Instead of complaining to her students, why not recruit them to make Wikipedia better? The lecturer is now asking her graduate students to edit eight Wikipedia articles -- on contentious topics related to the politics of the Middle East -- and to make them more balanced. Ms. Pratt has also told students they must create a new article of their own. One hopes students' grades won 't be dependent on articles making it intact through Wikipedia's rough-and-tumble editing process. "

Personally, I think think this is a great idea, especially for a small seminar-like class of seniors or graduate students where not only can content be expanded, but sticky issues of knowledge and epistomology and the role of science and social science in society can be explored.

Second Life University

Universities register for virtual future | CNET News.com

According to this article on CNET News, "more than 70 universities have built island campuses in Second Life."

I think there is one known faculty member here at Northern Arizona University who is just barely starting to play with Second Life -- but not teaching. And if any of my students want to use Second Life for their final project this semester, they are welcome to do that. For me, it is hard enough to find time to sleep in my first life, let along to spend a lot of time on a second one.

That being said, I did sign up for the Second Life Educator's email list, and I was amazed and pleased to see the educational resources that Linden Labs is providing to encourage teaching in their virtual world. Maybe I need to find something in my first life to give up so I can explore Second Life more....

(The image above comes from this SLurl - "Second Live URL.")

Open Culture: University Podcast Collection

Stanford U. and UC Berkeley have gotten quite a lot of media coverage through their affiliation with Apple's iTunes U and Google Video to put audio and video podcasts of lectures up on the Internet. However, there are a lot more universities that are podcasting themselves in different ways to their students and the world.

The Open Culture Blog has put together a comprehensive list of university-sponsored podcasts. These are podcasts that are often accessible through some university (or other institutions of higher education) website portal. Business school podcasts are listed on a separate page.

Open Culture does not list independent university podcasts, such as my Geography for Travelers podcast, which supports my classes, but is not run through my university. Although the Open Culture blog has a more general list of podcasts, they are more culture than education-related.

More comprehensive directories of educational podcasts, covering K-12 and higher education, can be found at:

• Educational Podcast Directories
  
  

Formatpixel - Serious Online Graphic Publishing

Formatpixel is allows you to create gorgeous high resolution, page-folding, online magazines, similar to the Latitudes travel magazine our of Italy. This would be a wonderful tool for a graphic arts class to get their feet wet with quality online publishing. The list of online editing tools includes the following:

Editor (WYSIWYG)
- Insert pages
- Use the Spread Planner to arrange the order of, add and delete pages
- Layer objects on your pages in front of and behind one another
- Apply colour to your pages
- Apply background colours to your project
- Utilise the snap-to-grid functions and alignment helpers
- Upload your own images with the built in image library [ see Image object ]

Text objects
- Change font face
- Change font colour
- Change font style [ normal, bold, italic ]
- Change font alignment [ left, centered or right justified ]
- Change the background colour
- Add drop shadow
- Change the kerning [ spacing between letters ]
- Change the leading [ spacing between lines ]

Media objects
- Import your own JPG, GIF or PNG [ including support for transparency ] files
- Import FLV Video files
- Create your own formatpixel image library
- Edit the names of your images or delete them
- Crop your images
- Add blending modes to images
- Apply colour filters [ normal, greyscale or sepia ]
- Apply a customisable blur effect
- Scale object

Shape objects
- Change shape [ square or circle ]
- Change shapes colour
- Add blending modes to your shapes

There is a free account option, though it is limited to only one project at a maximum of 512k -- which will not get you many pages, but should be enough to introduce students to the concept of virtual magazines. Paid accounts go up to 20 UKPounds for 20 projects and 20MB of storage.

Tourism and Social Software Class at NAU

I have added Social Media to my Spring 2007 class, "Planning for Sustainable Tourism". The class is taught 100% online. Hopefully I will not overwhelm the more technologically challenged students in the class! Click on the title above to go to the current version of the class overview. Registration information can be NAU Distance Learning.

OVERVIEW of PL 376 for Spring 2007
- January 16 - May 11, 2007

Click here for Syllabus

Topic Groups: Each student will be assigned to one of the following three groups at the start of the semester. Students will be given the opportunity to switch groups later in the semester. The Final Project will be related to the topic of the group. A couple of sample topics for each group is shown below.

1. Sustainable Tourism and Money
   • Promoting Destinations and Sustainability Online
   • Monetizing Sustainable Travel and Tourism Websites, Blogs and Podcasts
2. Sustainable Tourism and the Environment
   • Social Networking for the Environment
   • Online Environmental Education
3. Sustainable Tourism and Community (Physical and Digital)
   • Online Citizen Participation / Political Activism
   • Virtual Communities and Real Communities

CLASS SCHEDULE - Please See the LEARNING MODULES and CALENDAR for Actual Assignments and Due Dates

This Schedule is Under Construction, though it will probably not change much.

Week		Points
Module 1 - Intro to Class, Sustainability, and Social Media
1-2	Class Intro Assignment: Tourism Development Issues	75
3	Sustainable Development and Tourism	75
4	Social Media and Tourism	75
5	Planners and Planning for Tourism	75
6	Sustainable Tourism, Planning and Social Media	75
7	Midterm Exam #1	100
Module 2 - Tourism Impacts (using collaborative blogs)
8	Economic Impacts of Tourism	75
9	Social Impacts of Tourism	75
10	Environmental Impacts of (and on) Tourism	75
11	Topic Group Wiki Projects: Resources for Manging Tourism Impacts, Greening the Tourism Economy, or Tourism Planning for People	75
12		75
13	Midterm Exam #2	100
Module 3 - Social Media and Destination Marketing
14	Final Project: Place Promotion with Social Media (website creation, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 Travel Tools; there is no final exam)	75
15		75
16		100
	Total Points (subject to change)	1200

Definitions: Social Media - Social Software - New Media

Social Software Tools that will be used in this class, include:

• Message/Discussion Boards (we will use this in Blackboard-Vista)
• Websites (this will be part of the final project, most student will use the simple online web creator at Weebly.com, or the free domain service from Microsoft Live)
• Wikis (at a minimum, there will be one wiki for each of the Topic Groups above)
• Social Bookmarking (e.g., Del.icio.us - optional)
• Blogs (potentially including video and photo blogging; at a minimum there will be one collaborative group blog for each of the three Topic Groups above)
• Podcasts ( this will be part of Final Project, and if it is good enough I will put it out on my Geography for Travelers podcast - with your permission, of course; this will also be shared with student at the University of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia)
• Virtual Reality (optional; can you promote a destination through Second Life? want to try?)
• Social Networks (all students will be required to join and report on a travel-related social network)

---

NEW: FYI - I presented a summary of this class, along with a small survey of the students, at my university's eLearning Institute in May. Here is the prsentation (audio and slides):

| View | Upload your own

WikiMatrix - Wiki Comparison Tool

WikiMatrix.org is a website that allows you to compare different wiki tools available on the web. It is amazing how many wikis are out there -- currently 77 on the WikiMatrix site. Click on "Choice Wizard" to get started. Comparisons cover an incredible amount of items, including cost/fee options, storage and bandwidth quotas, intended audience, security and spam controls, editing and history features, formatting, media, and statistics. The wikis with the floppy disk icon next to them require server installation, while those with a hand icon are web-based. There is also a Discussion Forum on the topic of wikis.

I have used Wikis to some degree in my classes, and plan to do more. And I have had a few previous entries on this blog related to wikis that I have encountered:

• Collaborative Writing with Writeboard & JotSpot
• Designing Learning Spaces (a Wiki-based class)
• Schtuff.com
• Writely.com

Other interesting links that can be found at the very top of the WikiMatrix page are:

PodcatcherMatrix.org - Did you know that there are 20 different Podcatchers out there! (A podcatcher is a program for subscribing to and downloading podcasts -- iTunes added a podcatcher capability in summer 2005.) The WikiMatrix people also have PodcastMatrix.org -- which looks just like WikiMatrix, but compares podcatchers.

ForumMatrix.org - Compares 20 different Bulletin Board Systems to run your own discussion forums.

Fleck - Annotate Any Webpage

If you click on the title link above, it will take you to the Fleck.com homepage that I just annotated (same as in the photo above). While not intended to be an educational tool, like many other Web 2.0 sites these days, it has a lot of potential.

Fleck allows you to go to any web page, start the Fleck tool (I dragged the link to my favorites toolbar), and then start adding post-it notes on the web page. You can then click on "Share" and get a URL for the annotated page, which you can then send to other people. When the other person goes to the URL, they can move and edit your notes, as well as add their own.

I was just in the process of preparing a class for next semester in which one of the options I will have is for students to create their own web pages about the topics we will be covering. Initially, I will have links to Google Page Creator and to Weebly.com. With Fleck I now have an easy way to comment on and grade their work. And, according to TechCrunch, Fleck is the easiest tool of this kind currently available. Plus, they say:

• There’s a long list of features that Fleck aims to roll out in time, including photo integration, arrows, multi-language support and Pro accounts with premium features. If they can make this a more fleshed out service while retaining the incredible simplicity it offers now, Fleck could grow into a particularly solid contender in the web page annotation space. TechCruncha>, 16 Nov 2006
  

Very Cool!

Others that offer this type of annotation tool are: Stickis.com, Diigo.com, and Trailfire.com. Reviews of the different feature these offer can be found on TechCrunch.

NEW: The Newest site offering a tool like this is Zpeech.com - to create a comment or discussion page about a site, all you need to do is add http://zpeech.com/ before the URL.

Educause Videos + Podcasts Now Available

Educause is a higher education information technology association that sponsors the largest IT event in higher education in the US, and probably the world. This year's annual conference was in Dallas, Texas, earlier this month and drew close to 8000 participants. As of today, you can view videos of 10 of the hundred or more sessions that were held that week - Go Here, then click on the Videos tab. One that I attended and thought was quite good is titled "Pioneering New Territory and Technology".

They also have some interview podcasts (yes, you can subscribe to the feed) on the same site, and will eventually put recordings up of all of the sessions for free (you currently need to pay). Much of the conference is really for university IT and eLearning people, but there is also a lot that is of potential interest to faculty.

NEW: Alternatively, you can subscribe to the Educause Podcast, which includes the interviews from Dallas, on the Educause Connect website on the Podcast tab.

Social Networking for Students and (recent) Alumni

Every now and then I scan Emily Chang's eHub as one of my sources for Web 2.0 teaching and travel tools for my two blogs on those topics (this is the education one; the travel one is here). Recently she posted several social networking website for university students and alumni. Unlike Facebook, which is more of a college-based MySpace, these are focused on collaborative learning, networking for future employment, and campus life.

CLASSROOM NETWORKS

NoteMesh - "Collaborate to Graduate: NoteMesh is a free service that allows college students in the same classes to share notes with each other. It works by creating a wiki for individual classes that users can edit." I think this is a good idea and may even create my own wikis for my classes to discuss and share notes. However, when I mentioned this to my daughter, she suggested that the best students might not want to share their notes with the slackers in a class. In addition, just because there are a lot of students contributing to a set of notes does not mean the notes will be error-free.

Notecentric - "Notecentric is a web based note taking application. Notecentric keeps your notes organized and readily available online." Notecentric allows you to keep your notes online for a class that you are in. You can also elect to be connected with other students in the class (if they are registered with Notecentric), who you can then communicate with and, at your option, share your notes. This is an online version of the more traditional face-2-face ways of sharing notes in a class.

CAREER NETWORKING

Alumwire - "Alumwire is a professional college network that provides personal and career opportunities for alumni, students, and faculty." You either need to have a .edu email address or a Facebook account to register with Alumwire. The site appears to be very new. There is almost no information on the public website. Once you register and log in, there are sections on Job Search, Career Interviews, Career Advice Forums, My Connections (other members), and a Calendar tool. The Advice Forum only has a few postings. If you like basic and simple, you may find this of use, though I am not sure just how many job offers will come from it if the use base is small.

IdeaWhip - "An Entrepreneurial Community For Undergrads, Graduate Students, and Young Alumni...by Them." This is a social networking site for future business people to share ideas and experiences in starting their own business. It also included links to related news stories and online presentations.

CAMPUS LIFE

Campus Central - "For Life Outside the Classroom" at Canadian universities. Sections on this website include Books (for selling textbooks), Classified (for selling anything), Events, Articles (on sports, sex + dating, entertainment, studying, etc.), Profiles (of members), and Message Board (for general discussions). It appears to be very new with not many members or postings, as yet.

CampusReader - "America's College Newspaper" - I think I once saw a print version of this -- a collection of news articles from college and university papers around this US. This one is online and has a lot of articles. You can even customize a section of the homepage to show news items from universities in states near your zip code, which I think could be very valuable. Two other sections on the homepage are "Top Stories" and "Reader Roulette" (random stories from a random state).

Putting Lectures Online - Podcasts, Streaming, and more

I just returned from the 2007 Educause conference in Dallas, which had some 8,000 university IT and eLearning attendees, and almost as many vendors. There I learned of several companies in addition to BoxPopuli (see my previous blog entry) that offer classroom recording/podcasting products similar to BoxPopuli. My impression is that these tools are more robust (more features) than is currently offered by BoxPopuli, but then they may also cost a lot more.

To start, I suggest that you check out this online lecture at Mediasite.com. Yes, it is a sales pitch, but it gives you a good idea of what is possible with these lecture capture and recording tools.

• Emerging Trends in Classroom Webcasting - Presenter:A. Sean Brown VP, Market Development; Date:7/11/2006; Length:1 Hour 4 Minutes 51 Seconds

Mediasite.com (by Sonicfoundry) is both a tool for putting recorded "navigable" lectures online, as well as a directory of lectures that can be viewed from the Mediasite webpage. Like all of the other tools listed here, as well as Box Populi, they offer both a hardware box and software to manage the lecture capture and upload.

Others who offer similar tool are (descriptions of each are copied from their websites):

Tegrity.com -Tegrity Campus is the first student achievement system that impacts learning across the entire institution, improving retention and student satisfaction. Tegrity makes class time available all the time by automatically capturing, storing and indexing every class on campus for replay by every student. With Tegrity, students quickly recall key moments or replay entire classes online, with digital notes, on their iPods and cell phones.

Horizon Wimba Voice Tools - Perfect for language learning and creating vocal exercises in any subject, our web-based voice tools facilitate and promote vocal instruction, collaboration, coaching, and assessment. Increase the interaction and student engagement level of any online class by allowing faculty and students to easily embed vocal interactions into the page level of their CMS (Course Management Systems. Wimba Voice Tools are now perfect for Podcasting and iPods.

Anystream's Apreso - Apreso Podcast software can be affordably, and unobtrusively, installed on existing podium computers in any classroom where lectures are to be captured. This "capture station" automatically interacts with classroom audio sources to record the professor's remarks. It encodes the lecture audio into a podcasting-ready MP3 version of the classroom experience, called an "Apreso," which can then be accessed on-demand from iTunes or other portals, and synchronized to iPods for later replay.

Techsmith.com's Camtasia Studio with Screencast.com's web hosting - Camtasia Studio 4.0 helps you keep pace in a mobile world by making it easy to publish videos and MP3 files for iPod and other portable media players. Now your marketing message, screencast, lecture, or just-in-time training video can reach your audience practically anywhere – on the bus, in a coffee shop, or while they’re jogging. Camtasia Studio videos are simply designed to share....You can publish your videos directly to Screencast.com from Camtasia Studio 4.0. Then, send your viewers to Screencast.com to see your content, or use the site’s built-in RSS and iTunes functionality to automatically deliver the content to them.

Accordent.com's Capture Station - Offered as a fully integrated system, the Accordent Capture Station seamlessly records and synchronizes audio, video and data output from any presentation device (notebook PC, document camera, smart board, etc.) and instantly turns it into an online rich media presentation. Version 2.0 gives administrators the ability to remotely provision resources such as classrooms and encoders as well as automatically stop and start the presentation capture process from a centralized location with Accordent's Event Scheduling & Notification module.

There may have been a few others, but I can't remember them all after three days of higher ed IT overload. I would be happy to add others to this post if anyone lets me know about them.

Box Populi + Meedu = Podcasting for Academia

I came across Box Populi (formerly Webcast in a Box) at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo last week in Ontario, California. The event was a podcast feed-fest! I found almost all of the booths in the exhibition hall of interest, though there was not much that was focuses on education. Among items of potential interest to educators, the guy at Libsyn told me that they are planning to roll out university version of Libsyn Pro (their corporate podcast tool), and Box Populi was showing their almost turnkey podcasting solution.

Box Populi is basically a computer running software that is designed to automate the podcast creation and posting process. It is targeted specifically toward universities that want to podcast lectures. Lecturers would connect a wireless mic for recording themselves and insert a USB thumb drive to identify themselves and their class, and start the recording. When they are done, they remove the UBS drive to stop the recording, which is automatically formatted and uploaded to a server for distribution. The box costs about $1000 and you would need one in each classroom where lectures are being recorded. The Box Populi software (which is open source) can also be configured to run on other computers. The wireless microphone is extra, I believe.

Meedu.org (pronounced Mee-djoo) is a podcast hosting service at UC San Diego that is currently offering to host academic podcasts for free on the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Podcasts can be public or have restricted access.

In talking to the two guys from Box Populi at the Podcast Expo, it sounded like they have a very simple to use, almost turnkey lecture recording and podcast posting device that should enable any school to emulate Stanford on iTunes. I have not yet seen a list of schools who have adopted the Box Populi tool, though there is a quote on the Meedu.org website from Fullerton Community College.

NEW: Marcus at BoxPopuli sent me a partial list of schools (and a few media sources) that have purchased their device. This contains 30 entries, among them: UC's Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego, San Jose State University, Oregon State University and the University of Oregon, Princeton, and the Naval Postgraduate School. Non-university buyers include CNN, Powells Bookstore, Intuit, and Atlanta Water and Sewage.