Academic 2005

At Academic 2005, faculty could sign up for one of four topics: 1) Using the smartboards; 2) Fundamentals of Turnitin.com; 3) Library Databases + Wireless Laptops; or 4) Lectora and CamStudio. Dr. Golding and I used the same materials from the Teaching & Learning Conference workshop for our own faculty. Not a full house, but everyone had a good time!

21st Annual Distance & Learning Conference

On August 3, 2005, Dr. Golding and this author presented a workshop entitled, "Visual objects in a visual society - Creating a hook"at the 21st Annual Distance Teaching and Learning Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Joanne covered the approach to writing a learning objective for a learning object and Camstudio. I covered the Lectora section of it and had them use the avi file that they created in the Camstudio section. I truly wish some of these conferences were earlier in the summer. This late in August makes it hard to go back and try new things.

I also enjoyed attending several of the sessions. I picked up some great ideas form "Dying to learn: Instructional design and MMORPGs." I also enjoyed the "Creating and using learning objexts with open source tools." Even writing about it makes me want to pull out the bag and try some things!

More about this later.

InSITE 2005 Conference

I've been working on the chapter, "Syntax and Semantics of Learning Object Meta-data" to present Sunday, June 19 from 9:00-10:30 in Room D. The InSITE Conference is in Flagstaff, AZ starting June 16 and ending Sunday evening. Alex Koohang is the session chair and also serves as editor of the book, Learning Objects (my chapter to be included). This book has contributors from around the world. In fact, just during the 9-10:30 timeslot, there will be presenters from USA, Norway, Sweden, UK, and Italy. I'm looking forward to meeting some of the other authors and sharing notes and resources as well.

Working on Chapter

I've been doing quite a bit of research into the semantic and syntactic interoperability of learning object metadata and asked Judy Tribble, the SMWC Library Director, if she could get the actual standard 1484.12.1-2002. I am actually able to access the draft standard which came out July 15, 2002 (the final standard was published in September 2002). Judy was able to get the standard for me. When I received it, the notice on the standard makes me concerned that I should even quote it!! I'm going to check other articles on the same subject and see if anyone is actually quoting the FINAL standard or if they are using the draft standard. The FINAL standard costs money, but it may be more of an issue of making sure a rule isn't violated than the cost of purchasing the standard. I have until June 15 to get this done, but my goal is to get this chapter done by June 7 so that Nicholas and I can check each others work. I love teaching summer school, but it has certainly dipped into my writing time.

And this is not an easy write. I want to write in non-technical language in a way that conveys the information in enough depth that the students "get it" without overwhelming them. Oh well, the same old question we all face.

More to come soon.

To present at InSITE - Informing Science & IT Education Conference

Alex Koohang, Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects has worked with the InSITE Conference organizers to submit our abstracts. This conference will be in beautiful Flagstaff, AZ June 16 through the 19th. The conference information is located at http:/2005.informingscience.org. Since our book chapter deadline is June 15th for the Learning Object Book, this is a perfect opportunity to share information as well as meet and work with the other chapter authors of the Learning Object Book. In addition, Alex arranged for a conference fee reduction.

I am working again with Nicholas Farha at Indiana State University. He is co-authoring my book chapter, Learning Object Standards, Metadata, Repositories, and LCMS and I am co-authoring his book chapter, The Future of Learning Objects. I originally submitted a chapter under a slightly different area, but this was the area of acceptance.

The next few months will be busy ones...

FlashLite 1.1

As I work on editing and completing the seven chapters, I still find myself reviewing new innovative products which I hope to still sneak into the book. FlashLite 1.1 is such a product. You have proably head about Flash. Well, FlashLite 1.1 is a version that allows you to author a version that will play on phones and other mobile devices. If you already know Flash, this is a product that you want to review. The presentation is an archived version of a Breeze presentation made March 29, 2005 by Bill Perry from Macromedia. This is a 50 minute presentation, so set aside a block of time!

I can find uses for this even in Terre Haute, Indiana! Illianatech made a great map of the hotspots along Wabash Avenue. I can see a tour guide product of hotspots that works on a mobile phone that has internet access. Or how about a handset that works to interact with a museum? Yikes, the examples are endless.

The presentation shows some gaming applications and then best practices using FlashLite 1.1. The action script commands are a piece of cake. For example:

.on (keyPress"") = select keypress
etc - easy
The CDK is great since SWF files are provided that you can try on your handset. An excellent way to see what navigation matches with a specific handset.

The presentation provides very specific directions. Example - use bitmaps instead of vectors, avoid screen wipes.

Next, Bill showed a sample application creation. Steps abbrieviated here - I will add more later after I take his example and try it myself.

Flash MX Professional 2004 - select Mobile, Nokia 3650 Template, Delete the layers that show the phone image, then select Version 1.1 on settings, and save file. Now you are ready to add some layers - background, buttons, text, backing, AS (for action script layer). Application to create - a screen where user has to press a button, that will load a webserver application.

Chapter Proposal Accepted!

I just received word from Alex Koohang that my abstract has been accepted for a chapter in the book, Learning Object, in the category Learning Object Standards, Metadata, Repositories & LCMS. The book is planned for release in December of 2005 by Informing Science Press. The 20 to 30 page chapter is due by June 15th. I was pleased with this comment, "Your chapter proposal was among the highest rated proposals." That certainly made me feel pretty good!

Getting ready for Educause

The slides are ready and checked for the Midwest Educause Event. The presentation is Tuesday March 22 at 8:30 in the Empire Ballroom (Seventh Floor). Learning Objects, Wikis, & Blogs - Oh My! should appeal to any faculty member interested in seeing some examples of learning objects, our WIKI (Digitizing Inspiration) that we used to work on this project, or looking at how blogs are being used in our courses.

Although we removed some slides and don't plan to visit all the links, our practice presentation was right at 43 minutes (and we have 45 minutes tops!). Oh well, so much for questions. Nicholas and I plan to announce that we will be located in the hallway for awhile if anyone has other questions (at least we hope we can do this). Not sure where Lana is - since her daughter delivered a child this week. Hoping we hear from her soon!

Workshop Proposal Accepted!

A colleague at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, Sister Joanne Golding, asked if I was interested in co-presenting with her at the 21st Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wisconsin. After we started looking through the objectives of the conference, we decided to submit a workshop idea. If you submit a workshop, the conference registration fee is paid for two presenters and with the budget constraints at our institution – this just seemed like the way to go!

This year’s conference will reflect on lessons learned and how to apply them to improve the design, delivery, and support of distance teaching and learning. The conference is held August 3-5 and I believe we present on the 3rd. Both of us have taught online courses at our campus since 1996, but our latest passion is creating learning objects. We plan to demonstrate a variety of software packages that support the creationof learning objects. I’ll add another post soon that outlines our workshop, but I just wanted to share this with all my blog readers!

RSS Feed into Web Page

This was a very productive early morning (4:30 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.). Blogger.com uses atom instead of RSS and regardless of the reasons, it just wasn't working with my pluck or feeding into my web page. So, I used the feedburner (feedburner.com) to make my blog friendly regardless of the reader that someone uses. This assumes that you used the setting at blogger to use site feed and that you are on a free blog account). Anyway, I used the step-by-step process to take my XML (http://jlmitchell.blogspot.com/atom.xml) in Atom format and convert it. That generates a new address from the feedburner site that you can successfully use in pluck or any other RSS Agregator. Next, I used that addess in my JavaScript (see http://accounting.smwc.edu and go to Blogs) to pull in five or so of my postings. I also pulled in some late breaking business news just to see how it would work. I will warn you - on a slow SMWC account, it took awhile to pull it the first time, but future visits seemed quicker.

I noticed that feedburner also has a mobile feed reader for select handheld devices. I want to try that next. That would mean that I could read my favorite blogs on my handheld! I could go for that.

I will post a complete tutorial of this soon AFTER it gets included in THE book.

Auditing Blogs at Woodsonline!

Today, I'm working the Auditing AF website to incorporate the blogs of everyone. We may want to use this site in our presentation at the EDUCAUSE conference so I'm trying to spruce it up a little. I'm going to test the theory of incorporating an "RSS" reader into WebCT, to see how well it will pull in the blogs as they change.

Site Feed Added & Learning Object Using FARS

Today, I added a site feed to The Ramblings mostly so that I can show my students how to do this. Now that I have more than a dozen students blogging, I want to get it organized. The students in BU327AF are using blogging to reflect on ethical cases, readings, and their journey through the audit case. Only one student in the AF class had a blog and she said it wasn't current. Well, I hope this changes things for them - I want them to take the time to reflect on some of the hard ethical issues using this technique.

I also created a Learning Object today on FARS for both the Auditing students and the Intermediate Accounting II students. I used Camtasia Studio 2 to record the screen while I looked up the most current information on Earnings Per Share. This required capturing me entering the FARS site, clicking on "Current Text," changing to the JAVA option, and drilling down to Earnings Per Share. I added a screen image made from a PowerPoint slide for the introduction and then added some callouts to point out the alphabetical order and that you open the folder by clicking on the "+" key. I saved the production as raw .avi, wmf, and swf. I wanted to see how each of them worked. I found out that .wmf files don't do well when I used a zoom feature in Camtasia Studio - so I'm learning as I go.

Camtasia also lets you use options for SCORM - basically adding metatags, but also making it possible to zip up all you need to export it to an e-Learning environment (like WebCT, Blackboard, etc). I haven't tried that yet, but I will soon.

I received an email from SmartMeeting. They've extended my trial version and are requesting that I update my version to try it. I think I'll give it one more chance!

SmartMeeting & WIKI

SmartMeeting did not work for us on the 9th of February! Instead, we talked some on the phone and worked on the Wiki. The WIKI is set up for our paper that we plan to present at Educause. The WIKI is called Digitizing Inspiration3 (for the three of us) and is housed at SeedWiki.

We plan to get together again to discuss some of the learning objects, support for learning objects, etc. BUT, we have not set a meeting date yet - shall we try SmartMeeting? I guess we will give it another chance...

Midwest EDUCAUSE

Getting ready for the Midwest EDUCAUSE...

Lana Lytle, Nicholas Farha and I are presenting a paper on Learning Objects, Wikis, and Blogs..Oh my.. Lana is introducing blogs for reflection in her database class as well as using learning objects. Nicholas is doing a broad search on learning objects that relate to the I.T. field and has spent hours looking for learning objects that fit our working definition. In my classes (Auditing mostly), I'm using learning objects to explain some basic accounting concepts (not ones that I created yet, but ones that I found). In addition, I'm using blogs for reflection but leaving it somewhat open-ended by giving students a list of URLs that they can explore and use as part of their reflection. Basically, I incorporated lots of ethical case materials, news articles that reflect Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, etc, - even ethic cartoons...! Should be interesting. The students helped design a matrix for determining the blog postings. Now if I could just get them to add it to their signatures!

What is really exciting is the way we are working on this paper. We will meet February 9th in a Smart Meeting Room. If you've not tried this - you need to. SmartMeeting (http://www.smartmeeting.com) is a way to meet in a virtual office. You need a microphone, but not a camera. Instead, you choose a vivitar right down to hair color and clothing that represents you at the meeting. The vivitars are controlled by you and even include facial expressions like smiling, waving, yawning, voting, etc. Your vivitar can walk around, take a break in the lounge - play some chess OR get back to the board room and work. You can upload documents and powerpoints, watch live broadcast video, share a white erase board - well things that you would expect in a meeting.

Another piece of our experience is a WIKI. We are using a wiki at seedwiki (the name is Digitizing Inspiration 3. The 3 is for the 3 of us working on this paper. You may recognize the title Digitizing Inspiration - the short name for the book that Nicholas and I are working on. The wiki is located at http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/digitizing_inspiration3/. I think this new way of collaborating will add an edge to our presentation that maybe only the three of us will appreciate - but we will see.

More to come - but just had to share!

Some exciting times - the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education has approved the recommendations (with minor changes) of the Learning Objects Task Force and will award 50K for training and 50K for Learning Objects. I have worked the past semester on the Learning Objects Task Force as led the IHETS's Lynn Ward. According to IPSE, $100,000 of the $250,000 grant will be set asside for learning ojbect support and the remaining $150,000 will be used for course and program development.

The following information is taken from the Learning Objects Program Recommendations:


II. Background

For the last seven years, the IPSE grant program has supported the development of complete online courses and, more recently, instructional modules. Although past recipients have been strongly encouraged to provide public access to materials develop with grant funds, in reality most of the content resides behind password-protected institutional course management systems. Moreover, very few of the courses and modules have been constructed in a manner that facilitates reuse of the smaller components comprising the whole. Thus, even when the materials developed with grant funding has been made publicly available, they cannot be easily incorporated into different learning contexts.

In winter of 2003/2004, the IPSE Program Development team was asked to consider expanding or shifting the focus of the IPSE grant program to include explicit support for developing learning objects with the goal of increasing the impact of the content developed with grant monies. A task force of eight campus instructional technology leaders representing seven IHETS member institutions was convened to study the issues and issue a set of recommendations. During the fall 2004 semester, the Learning Objects Task Force (LOTF) reviewed existing literature about learning objects, interviewed directors of two large-scale learning objects initiatives, and conducted two statewide surveys, one targeted at college and university distance education faculty and the other at instructional technology professionals.

III. Learning Objects Task Force Recommendations

Although there are still many questions to be answered and issues to be resolved regarding learning objects, both within Indiana and nationally, surveys conducted by the LOTF suggest there is sufficient faculty and staff interest to justify at least small steps toward supporting development of learning objects. The task force therefore recommends expanding the scope of the IPSE grant program to include support for the development of learning objects. To maximize the potential for success, the task force suggested the following guidelines for program implementation:

• A new Request for Proposals for learning-object development with different requirements and evaluation criteria should be developed, with perhaps a rolling deadline or proposals considered as submitted rather than on an annual basis.
• Since levels of interest and adoption vary among and within institutions, initially the program will likely attract only early adopters. Education and training are critical to cultivating broad statewide interest. During the first few years, funds should be set aside from the grant budget to develop a comprehensive training program for faculty and instructional support staff.
• In the first year, the recommended budget for the learning objects program is $100,000 with as much as half of that amount dedicated to support and training efforts. The balance of the annual grants budget ($150,000) will be used to support course and module development. The funding formula should be evaluated on an annual basis and is expected to change as awareness and interest in learning objects increases.
• The maximum award for a single object should be $5,000 with a maximum of $20,000 for a collection of four or more objects.
• To encourage widespread interest among faculty, the program should cultivate the development of learning objects that:
  solve a particular instructional challenge or problem
  are highly visual and interactive
  focus on a single concept or learning objective (highly granular)
  provide a engaging learning experience that cannot be easily duplicated through more conventional means
  offer opportunities for active learning, problem solving and analysis, data manipulation and interpretation, exploration and discovery, and/or self-assessment
  
• Project evaluations should similarly emphasize the impact on student learning
• To maximize the likelihood of use and re-use, the learning objects program should strongly encourage:
  collaborative projects that span multiple departments, colleges, campuses, or institutions
  community, cohort, or discipline-based projects
  projects that will serve large numbers of students (e.g., large enrollment courses)
  
• To encourage a culture of sharing, the program should require that all funded learning objects:
  be made publicly accessible
  be submitted to MERLOT
  be submitted to Indiana repository/referatory, if created
  include Dublin Core metadata
  
• If resources permit, learning object clearinghouse should be created for Indiana in the form of an online repository or referatory. Such a system could provide opportunities to centralize metadata creation and storage, accommodate user ratings and comments, and increase awareness and recognition for developers.
• The task force recommends the following short-term goals for the program:
  Positive impact on student learning (must be part of the program evaluation)
  Solve specific, well-defined instructional problems
  Increased interest in developing learning objects
  Increased interest in using learning objects developed by others
  Improved understanding of learning objects and the issues surrounding them
  
• For the long term, the program should seek to:
  Increase sharing of instructional content
  Increase availability of high-quality instructional materials
  Increase institutional collaboration
  Create an Indiana-based repository or referatory
  Secure national recognition of the program and associated results
  Secure additional funding for development
  
• Progress toward goals should be evaluated on an annual or bi-annual basis, with specific metrics defined for each goal.
  

IV. Financial Implications

No additional funding is required for implementation. However, moving forward with the learning objects program will reduce the available support for development of complete courses and instructional modules. The shift from funding complete courses to instructional modules to self-contained learning objects represents a change in emphasis that has been occurring not only in Indiana, but also nationally. By supporting the development of content that can be used by multiple faculty and students in multiple learning contexts, we have the opportunity to magnify the impact of our scarce grant dollars and to foster a culture of sharing between and among our member institutions.

The book is on hold - it will not be done on January 15th as expected. Over Christmas break, Chapter 6 was revised and Beth worked on getting it into the 1" margins as well as working on the bookmarks. It is my intent to have the bookmark file work with the book. What we discovered was that I had many more bookmarks that did not appear in the book. So more work is needed to make sure that I've covered all that we planned to cover. Nicholas, Lana and I are working on a presentation at EDUCAUSE so I know we want to include some of this work in the book as well. More to come