This has been going around for a long time. But it's a good video, and I'm going to show it in a training next week, so I dug it up again.
I like that the video points out the flaws in trying to collaborate in email; most of us have been doing our work this way for so long that the inefficiency is not always obvious.
Campus Technology online reports on a Gartner study indicating that Open Source e-learning/course management systems such as Moodle and Sakai are gaining ground on commercial systems. Part of this is attributed to the uncertainty created by the Blackboard lawsuit against Desire2Learn.
John P. Campbell's data mining project at Purdue is featured in the Chronicle this week. I first heard about this project at Educause Midwest in 2007; the project is much further now. Campbell and his colleagues are able to notify students when the data indicates the student is struggling, and students are responding.
Outbreak at WatersEdge - A Public Health Discovery Game
Outbreak at WatersEdge is an online educational game from the School of Public Health. The game explores aspects of Public Health by having the player find the source of a bacteria outbreak in a community. Players are exposed to tools of Public Health professionals and career options in Public Health.
Outbreak at WatersEdge also includes a teachers guide and health career exploration options.
Digital Natives may understand much less than we think
Eszter Hargittai, a professor and researcher at Northwestern University, discusses the assumptions many of us in higher education make about how much students understand about Web technology. She notes, for example, that few students understand what BCC (blind carbon copy) means or what RSS does.
In March 2008, the Dean Saul Levmore at the University of Chicago Law School announced internet access would be blocked in campus classrooms. According to Inside Higher Ed, Levmore wrote the following in an email to students:
“You know better than I that for many students class has come to consist of some listening but also plenty of e-mailing, shopping, news browsing, and gossip-site visiting. Many students say that the visual images on classmates’ screens are diverting, and they too eventually go off track and check e-mail, sometimes to return to the class discussion and sometimes barely so. Our faculty (and I, as well as many of your classmates with whom I have spoken) believe strongly that we need to do everything we can to make Chicago’s classroom experiences all they can be.”
I certainly understand the impulse to ban internet access in the classroom; I have observed classes with students surfing all manner of sites. It is distracting to the students nearby. It limits the depth of discussions you can have in class if students are distracted. Even in a large lecture class, I assume it is also frustrating to the professor. Most of us can tell when our audience is not listening.
Using Google Earth to organize and understand Flickr photos
USC’s Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies have created Viewfinder, a program they describe as allowing users to “Flickrize” Google Earth. As described on the website, the project aims to “craft an experience that is as visceral as Google Earth and as accessible as Flickr by integrating photos into corresponding 3D models (such as Google Earth) so that they appear as perfectly aligned overlays.”
Viewfinder is reminiscent of Microsoft Live Labs’ Photosynth. But Photosynth relies on personal collections of photos, from what I can tell.
Using Flickr for source photos in Viewfinder adds a lot of power to the Viewfinder application. Flickr, as a collection, represents a huge amount of data and understanding of our (collective) surroundings. Flickr is fascinating now, and will be much more so in another 10 years, another 30 years. Adding Google Earth as a layer behind the Flickr collection extends our capacity to interact with and understand photos in Flickr.
Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Minnesota is housed in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. Billie Wahlstrom is the Vice Provost for Distributed Education and Instructional Technology. Dr. Wahlstrom and the TEL Team are advised by the TEL Council, and the TEL Team is assisted by TEL partners throughout the University of Minnesota system.
The Technology Enhanced Learning group provides strategic leadership in the area of academic technology at the University of Minnesota. Our goal is to enhance teaching, learning, and outreach activities on campus, around the state, and online.
Technology-enhanced learning (TEL) encompasses the broad range of experiences and environments in which technology is used to enhance teaching and learning. Technologies are relentlessly and seamlessly merging, and the lines separating the traditional classroom, the technology-enhanced classroom, and distance learning are disappearing rapidly. TEL initiatives use technology-based resources--video, audio, images, simulations, and library tools--to enrich the learning environment and to extend it from the classroom to the residence hall, the home, the workplace, and the mall.
Collaborating with colleagues across great distances is becoming easier and easier with technology. Faculty at the University of Minnesota are using UMConnect to deliver lectures while traveling to conferences. Teams of staff and faculty write reports together and discuss dissemination techniques for grant projects. Graduate students stay connected with advisers while conducting research abroad. As broadband speeds become ubiquitous in the US, high-speed connections allow close to real time collaboration across great distance.
There are many technologies at the University that can help students, faculty, and staff work together from afar.
The New Media Consortium released the 2008 Horizon report at the Educause Leadership Initiatives conference in San Antonio this week. The Horizon Project discusses emerging technologies that will strongly influence teaching and learning at colleges and universities. The emerging technologies the Horizon Report discusses for 2008 include:
A university as large as the University of Minnesota can be difficult to navigate. Recently, people from across the university have taken steps to ameliorate that problem. Called “tuning,” the goal is to make the search results of the University’s website more relevant and make University offices, departments and people easier to find.
Hundreds of common search phrases have been coded into the search engine with the most likely relevant results at the top. For example, if someone now searches for “bus pass,” the top result leads to the Parking and Transportation website, where University faculty, staff and students can buy a transit pass. Before this process, the link to Parking and Transportation was tenth on the search results page.
Tuning cannot replace a good search application, but it can hopefully help visitors to the University’s website find what they are looking for. If you have any suggestions about how to improve the search results, please submit them to tel@umn.edu.
Give us your feedback
Is there a search query you think needs tuning? Have you noticed the search function is more relevant? Let us know what you think by sending an email to the Technology Enhanced Learning team at tel@umn.edu.
How to spot tuned results
Links that have been manually added for specific search queries are listed at the top of the page, with “Keymatch” to the right of the results.
Moodle, the open-source course management software, is now being supported by the University of Minnesota through the Office of Information Technology (OIT). Moodle is an alternative to WebCT, and is being used at colleges and universities in the US and internationally. Currently at the University, there are about 362 courses using Moodle.
Moodle is an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. It was first released three years ago by a development team in Perth, Australia. As open-source software, Moodle is continually being expanded and improved upon by a network of developers worldwide. Because it is modular, it is relatively easy to add new functionality or specific tools, and can be more customized than typical “out-of-the-box “ software.
Any faculty member can use Moodle in their courses. Moodle provides many tools for collaboration and interaction between students and between the professor and students. See below for a list of features available in Moodle.
The University Technology Training Center offers short courses on Moodle. UTTC also has a resource page with useful links, downloadable help materials, and links to helpful print materials.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.
