Congratulations to TWU's own Dr. Bob Martin - Recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal

President and Mrs. Bush Attend Presentation of the 2008 National Medals of Arts and National Humanities Medals

The Presidential Citizens Medal was created nearly four decades ago to recognize Americans who have performed exemplary service to our nation. It is among one of the highest honors that can be conferred on a citizen. As President, I rarely have the opportunity to surprise anybody. (Laughter.) It is tough to be stealthy -- (laughter) -- with a security detail that comprises a 20-car motorcade. (Laughter.) That makes me especially pleased to present the President's Citizens Medal to four outstanding -- and unsuspecting -- leaders in the arts: Bruce Cole, Dana Gioia, Adair Margo, and Bob Martin. (Applause.) Please do not rush the stage. (Laughter.) Remember the big security detail? (Laughter.)

As former Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Bob
Martin has helped preserve our treasured collections and bring libraries
and museums into the 21st century with new technology. He's helped recruit
and train a new generation of librarians to replace the many skilled
library professionals who are preparing to retire. I know of such person
preparing to retire. (Laughter.)

Process Engineering in Higher Ed?

M'hammed Abdous and Wu He provide an engineering oriented summary of what's commonly known as business process review.  It's from the Hammer and Champy school of thought, which is not such a bad thing.  I found this article thanks to George Siemen's weekly newsletter.  As George says, the article is a bit too focused, but with a little brainpower applied one can easily see the big picture implications of this article.  And that's why I include it here.

In this paper, we propose a conceptual and operational framework for process reengineering (PR) in higher education (HE) institutions. Using a case study aimed at streamlining exam scheduling and distribution in a distance learning (DL) unit, we outline a sequential and non-linear four-step framework designed to reengineer processes. The first two steps of this framework – initiating and analyzing – are used to initiate, document, and flowchart the process targeted for reengineering, and the last two steps – reengineering/ implementing and evaluating – are intended to prototype, implement, and evaluate the reengineered process. Our early involvement of all stakeholders, and our in-depth analysis and documentation of the existing process, allowed us to avoid the traditional pitfalls associated with business process reengineering (BPR). Consequently, the outcome of our case study indicates a streamlined and efficient process with a higher faculty satisfaction at substantial cost reduction.

Getting the DATA

BbWorld'08 DevCon - Greenhouse Grant Panel

From: ekunnen, 3 months ago

BbWorld'08 DevCon - Greenhouse Grant Panel

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: panel bbworld08)

SlideShare Link

I’ll Take My Lecture to Go, Please | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

My view = Lecture capture as SUPPLEMENTAL...NOT PRIMARY learning resources - a valid technology.  From other sources, here's a little snippet from Andrew Guess in Inside Higher Ed and referenced by Educause:

"It looks like students can be open-minded after all: When provided with the option to view lectures online, rather than just in person, a full 82 percent of undergraduates kindly offered that they’d be willing to entertain an alternative to showing up to class and paying attention in real time.

A new study released today suggests not only a willingness but a “clear preference” among undergraduates for “lecture capture,” the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for concurrent or later viewing."

Another interesting point was the survey finding about costs and willingness of students to pay:

"Over 60 percent of respondents said they would pay for lecture capture capabilities, and of those, 69 percent said they would be willing to pay on a “course-by-course” basis rather than bundled fees."

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/23/capture

Jon Mott's Blog - Very Insightful Reading

The End in Mind » Blackboard & the Innovator’s Dilemma

Jon's blog gives voice to the concepts and thoughts that a lot of us have, but aren't smart enough to organize it well like he does! For example, this nugget stood out for me

"...the real disruption in educational technology will come (and is already coming) via learner-centered technologies and networking tools. A rapidly growing number of people are creating their own personal learning environments with tools freely available to them, without the benefit of a CMS. As Christensen would say, they have hired different technologies to do the job of a CMS for them. But the technologies they’re hiring are more flexible, accessible and learner-centered than today’s CMSs. This is not to say that CMSs are about to disappear. Students enrolled in institutions of higher learning will certainly continue to participate in CMS-delivered course sites, but since these do not generally persist over time, the really valuable learning technologies will increasily be in the cloud."

I encourage you to check out the full post and the other things on Jon's End in Mind blog. (Thanks to colleague Jean Mankoff for pointing out this article)

TWU ID wiki - Online Teaching and Learning

TWU ID wiki - Online Teaching and Learning
TWU's instructional design team continues to add and improve this resource base to support faculty. While not a true open wiki yet, readers are encouraged to review the wiki and make suggestions or changes.

Distance Learning and Education Resource collection

Resources - DECADE Consulting, LLC
Dr. Mac Adkins and his group have a great collection of resources for the distance learning professional. Bookmark this page as a good first look for topics and organizations of interest.

Fueling Online Learning - Does Gas Pricing Really Drive Students to Online?

Ray Schroeder's Fueling Online Learning blog.

"This blog is to chronicle a linkage between the rising cost of transportation - notably cars and public mass transit - and the rising interest in online and blended learning."

I wonder aloud whether the price of gas is that much of a factor. Instead, does the price of gas give voice to the overall trend toward the juggling student - working, family and struggling to do a bunch of things? When it all shakes out, the older truism that bad economic times drives students to higher education is probably the real causal factor. Gas prices - yes - clearly a factor - but more as a great excuse for the types of individuals who are ripe for change and less as the cause for growth in online learning. Let's wait a year and see if the growth in online learning changes and if it ties to increased gas prices (i.e. shaky economic situation).

Oldie, but Goodie

Sometimes we run across information that is old for everyone else, but new for us. That's the case with this excellent article from the Online Journal of Distance Learning at West Georgia. This is a 2003 document but it fascinates me how relevant, accurate, and eerily predictive the 32 trends are/were.

Thirty-two Trends Affecting Distance Education: An Informed Foundation for Strategic Plannning

"Recent issues in this journal and other prominent distance-learning journals have established the need for administrators to be informed and prepared with strategic plans equal to foreseeable challenges. This article provides decision makers with 32 trends that affect distance learning and thus enable them to plan accordingly. The trends are organized into categories as they pertain to students and enrollment, faculty members, academics, technology, the economy, and distance learning. All the trends were identified during an extensive review of current literature in the field."

DLA Conference - UWG

Blogging from the DLA conference in Georgia:

DLA Conference - UWG: "DLA symposiums are specifically designed for those involved or interested in the administration, management, planning, and evaluation of distance learning programs."

Interesting Sessions....
Chris Cook's V-Brick session on how his company has evolved from point to point video appliances to a web-based service and product combination. www.vbrick.com

Ken Pisel's military background made for an interesting presentation on the required orderliness of strategic planning. His ingredients/recipe/chef analogy makes some sense. Anyone can collect ingredients...some people can follow recipes, but chefs master both by experience.

Melanie Clay's discussion of the new e-tuition policies at UWG. Really just distance learning fees, but the fee split and planning process discussion hit home.

Justin Johansen and colleagues led a small, but spirited and thorough discussion of the BYU indepedent studies, self-supporting fee structures and how it was achieved in the overall context of academic department needs and demands. Not applicable to most public universities but the overall formulas BYU came up with for splitting the development and delivery of courses is instructive.

Also of interest...Decade Consulting's updated course evaluation product for evaluating academic courses.

Testing Scribefire in Firefox 3 - A Blogging Tool

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging

ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

Early testing of the features on this tool bring good results....

Ning in Education

Ning continues to explode onto the scene with more networks, specific focuses, and relevant content.

View my page on Ning in Education

Student Email and the Customer Service Demand

A very accurate (at least from my own online teaching experience) and timely article from Denise Knight and Noralyn Masselink about student demands. I think anyone who teaches online could probably write a similar essay, but congratulations to the authors for stating it well. Here is a small selection, but please take the time to read the entire article...especially the netiquette tips that can be used by faculty and shared with students.

eLearn: Feature Article: "Ever since email exploded onto the scene in the early 1990s, it has become a fast, popular, and convenient medium for communication between college students and their professors. Some would argue that it has become too convenient. Students today seem to rely less on face-to-face meetings or phone calls with their instructors and more on electronic mail, which they use to challenge grades, explain absences, deliver unsolicited paper drafts, and announce their intention to 'drop by' outside of office hours, assuming that we will either be available or shift our schedules to accommodate their needs. Today's students view themselves as customers in a consumer culture who are entitled to answers and information 24 hours a day. Do things really have to be this way?"

Examples of the suggestions:
Don't email your professor to ask whether they will excuse a particular absence.
Don't email your professor to ask whether they will excuse a particular absence.
Don't expect an immediate response to your email.
You are what you email.
Use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

These are simply a few of the excellent suggestions. For more information, check out

"i dont mean too bother u but": Student Email and a Call for Netiquette, By Denise D. Knight and Noralyn Masselink, State University of New York College at Cortland

Questions for Covey: Communicating Potential

Stephen Covey, in May's Training magazine:
Questions for Covey: Communicating Potential

What are the challenges of leading a globally networked team?

"Obviously, the first challenge is a lack of face-to-face communication, where the transference of emotion takes place and a genuine liking and respect develops. That's why it's important to have such face-to-face meetings, at least annually, so people get to know each other in both informal and formal ways. Then put technology to work. Remember, however, that technology is a great servant but a bad master. Until the trust is high, it's difficult to communicate in shorthand and to really produce third-alternative solutions that harmonize the real cultural and political differences that exist around the world."

JMS: I think this concept applies to collaborative work at a distance (even if it is across campus), and to a certain extent applies to online education experiences. Must all online courses have an F2F component? No. But should any online course make a real effort to foster the "transference of emotion" that develops "respect" and "liking".

TWU ID wiki / Promising Practices

Try the TWU Distance education wiki for an updated and ongoing discussion of promising practices and instructional design.

TWU ID wiki / Promising Practices: "Promising Practices"

Working in Distance Education is sometimes like...

Building a plane in the air...

Institutional Factors - Recruiting Elearners

Higher Education Prospecting Resources - Recruit, Enroll and Retain - EducationDynamics.com
Presentation by Andrew Gansler at United States Distance Learning Association [4.22.08]

Gansler encourages elearning providers to "Understand Your Customer and Their Needs" by listing the most common reported "school factors" influencing enrollment decisions. Schools can influence but not always strictly control these items.

4 Traditional Factors:
Cost
Financial aid
Reputation of school and quality of instructors
Admissions requirement

Newer Factors:
Number of calendar starts
Curriculum delivery (students becoming more savvy...ask these questions now)
Credit transfer policy AND process (prospects now more concerned with the process hassle factor)
Requirements for completion
Required campus attendance
Geographic presence (evolving - eventually becomes unimportant to elearners after they actually take courses)
Uniqueness of program (newness of degreee - e.g. homeland security, criminal justice)
Enrollment process

The interesting conclusion is that these factors are the basis for identifying quality enrollment leads for distance learners. Whether your university does well or poorly in any of these is not the point. Instead, the point is understanding where the school is on these issues and where the student is (expressed needs) on these issues.

Teaching Naked - Dr. Jose Bowen

NTLF Vol. 16 No. 1 2006 - Teaching Naked: "The National Teaching & Learning Forum logo Volume 16 Number 1

Teaching Naked:
Why Removing Technology from your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning (Extended article)
Jose Antonio Bowen, Southern Methodist University"

TWU was pleased to host Dr. Bowen for our 3rd annual E-Learning lecture series on April 4th.

Here's a basic idea of what he discussed...“The most important benefits to using technology occur outside of the classroom. This talk focuses on the “why” and discusses how simple technologies can greatly increase your students’ engagement and prepare them for real discussions by providing content and assessment before class time. The argument is that technology can be used to free the teacher from the need to “cover” the content in the classroom, and instead use class time to demonstrate the continued value of direct student to faculty interaction and discussion. The goal and the future value of most higher education depends upon non-technological face-to-face interaction with students, but we have instead often embraced the least interactive forms of technology (e.g., PowerPoint lectures). “Teaching naked” offers an alternative strategy for improved pedagogy and learning through technology.” – Dr. José Bowen

I encourage you to visit his website.

A vision of students today - Michael Wesch - KSU

A Vision of Students Today
by Michael Wesch
October 12th 2007

This short video summarizes some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

Music by Try^d: http://tryad.org/listen.html

Dim Dim - ain't capitalism great!

Even though this is in beta, it's a great example of why we all need to be nimble and ready to move with any of the technologies that we hope to apply to online learning or communication. I'm not sure this is the answer for an enterprise or that it would adequately support online learning for an institution, but it certainly puts pressure on commercial providers to continue improving their product and to be sensitive to price.

"Dimdim is the world´s first free web meeting service based on the open source platform. Dimdim is a browser-based web 2.0 service that allows anybody to share their desktop, show slides, as well as talk, listen, chat, and broadcast via webcam. Dimdim´s hosted service is available for free and can be easily used for small gatherings, to seminars with hundreds of attendees. With absolutely no software to download for attendees, Dimdim gives everyone the opportunity to hold Web meetings and to customize and brand these meetings."

Learning 2.0 : The Antithesis of What We Know and Do

IWR Blog - information industry insight from www.iwr.co.uk - Individual Archives:

Interesting, but not new, observations from a recent Learning Technologies conference. The main speaker was Stephen Downes.

"Gurus are suggesting that the new use-driven web environment is spawning a new form of learning, learning 2.0. Learning 2.0 is the antithesis of learning which those of us who pre-date the Google generation would know as formal learning. Indeed learning 2.0 even seems to throw away the rule book that learning over the internet (e-learning) or the mixture of internet-based learning and traditional face-to-face learning (blended learning) were prepared to obey."

"(Stephen) Downes argues that learning is moving from a centrally controlled provision to a barely controlled group activity. In many spheres the internet is seen to be switching our behaviours from ‘push’ to ‘pull’ and this in one place where it is actually happening."

"We are usually defined as learners by the class we are in, or the educational institution or corporate learning activity to which we belong. Forget those sorts of boundaries with learning 2.0: the group is infinite, self-selecting, open and self-defining. The breaking down of these boundaries – a deconstruction which in learning terms some see as significant as the tearing down of the Berlin Wall – does raise some serious questions. For information professionals the question has to be what does this do to the use of the library resource and the scholarly approach in the process of learning?"

And of most interest to those of us who thought learning objects, modules and repositories offered some movement in this direction, Downes changes the equation...JMS

"...learning 2.0 is not based on objects and contents – the sort of elements we may expect to find stored in a library and which therefore may not be immediately accessible. Instead learning 2.0 is learning where you need it and when you need it. This is more than just in time it is just in time PLUS what you want. It is learned-centered because it is both owned by, and of interest to, the learner.

NMC Aggregator

Check out this link to the NMC - not because this blog is listed in it, but because it contains a wide variety of aggreggated information about a wide variety of stuff.

Sources | nmc

Voice Thread

http://voicethread.com/#home

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

Six “Key Emerging Technologies” for Higher Ed Profiled in the 2008 Horizon Report | nmc

Six “Key Emerging Technologies” for Higher Ed Profiled in the 2008 Horizon Report | nmc: "Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. “Campus leaders and practitioners alike use the report as a springboard for discussion around emerging technology,” noted Larry Johnson, chief executive officer of the NMC. “As this is the fifth edition of the report, it also offers an opportunity to look back at the overarching trends over time. What we see is that there are several long-term, conceptual themes that have affected, and continue to affect, the practice of teaching and learning in profound ways.” More than 40,000 copies of the 2007 Horizon Report were distributed in print and electronically last year."

six selected areas for 2008—grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence, and social operating systems