Category Archives: education

Schools Dropping a Day Due to Gas Prices

Friday, 30 May, 2008 – 2:36 pm

Many community colleges, especially in rural America, are dropping Friday classes to save their students gas money.

Meridian Community College President Scott Elliott says his students, who on average drive 30 miles round-trip to campus, could save $200 or more a semester based on recent pump prices. “When you’re … working a minimum-wage job and (taking) care of a child or two, that could be a lot of money,” he says.

This seems to be a big opening for distance technology. Perhaps one class a week over a forum or an audio or video chat technology.

Thanks to Chris Penn for the link.

Related, also from CSP: Cisco’s really pushing telepresence. It’s hard to tell the quality from this video, it’s lighting, etc. but it’s clear they have something going.

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in classroom, instruction, technology, video | Comments (0)

A Status Update

Thursday, 24 April, 2008 – 9:19 am

Again, I have taken dramatic pause on this blog. This semester I hoped to start blogging about my Multimedia Projects class, but here we are at the near end of the semester, and not a peep! This is thanks to two issues: one lack of time, and two, lack of bloggable content.

I have been doing fascinating work that I am receiving credit for in my Multimedia Project course, but it’s not been something easy to explain. Like I’ve explained very briefly before, I’ve been lucky enough to become involved in a nascent project with Howard Rheingold, something we’re calling the Social Media Classroom. Along with Sam Rose and Max Senges, we’ve been trying to form the basis of the software product that will be delivered as a part the the project that has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation. You’ll notice that I have not linked to an official site about the project, because one does not yet exist. It’s so early in the project that I have nothing to “show” in a blog post. Yet.

Howard has been teaching a course at UC Berkeley about Social Media. This software is being built, at first, to power that endeavor.

The good news is that an alpha is coming soon. Late this spring we expect to have something to demonstrate the basis of our project. The software is being developed on the open-source Drupal CMS platform. This means that our project will be fully-open source, freely downloadable and modifiable. We’ll announce the applicable license when we have something to actually distribute. The short-term goal is to have a product that is reasonably easy for a teacher with a little bit of savvy to download, install, and administer without help from an IT department.

The product will incorporate the major range of social media tools, including blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarks, chat and video sharing into something to use in the classroom. To use all these pieces today requires a tremendous amount of effort to aggregate these discrete tools from around the world. And even when you do that, there is no continuity. We’re hoping to address that in one, customizable package in which the tools have a synergy, but also, the overall product will import information from the web, and also, share it back with the global community.

In the coming weeks I’ll have more to report, as our plans are fully solidified, we launch a home webpage for the project, and have something to show for our efforts. Things have not been finalized yet, but I may be a speaker at a an upcoming conference at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. If that pans out, I’ll detail my talk here. Stay tuned.

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in classroom, design, technology | Comments (0)

iPhone As An Official University Device

Wednesday, 27 February, 2008 – 11:19 pm

ACU, Abilene Christian University, has announced that they intend to give iPhones to their incoming freshman students. The university began thinking about the mobile/education convergence on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform in early 2007 and appears to have begun testing the device on campus midway through the year.

Today, along with the announcement of the forthcoming initiative, the university released two video which dramatize several mobile computing issues they can foresee using the device for. They have higher resolution versions available, but here are the YouTube versions: (Fair warning: some cool ideas, great production, somewhat hokie screenplay)

Connected, part 1:

Connected, part 2:

How does a small religious school in central Texas get to this program before bigger, more prestigious schools? Could be several reasons, but I’m sure a relatively small campus population certainly aided in their agility.

See the very smart mobile web portal they already have up: http://acu.mobi/ (Best viewed on a mobile device, especially Safari. Will render on desktop Safari, too). These guys are good.

One of their web developers offers this on his blog:

There are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone. I won’t go into all of them but the biggest is usability. Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface. Thanks to all the classes on usability and design standards with Dr. Susan Lewis in the JMC department that I thought I’d never need, I’m able to (hopefully) design with usability in mind.

Apple rumor site MacRumors believes this is only the first of several universities about to deploy such a program, with Apple’s active involvement. They offer up “Harvard, MIT and Stanford” as the other schools, but as typical of Apple rumor sites, I think they just made this one up. No offense to ACU, are clearly very tech savvy, but considering how much earlier Stanford (whose picturesque Palo Alto campus resides near Apple’s corporate campus in Cupertino, CA) was on iTunes U, I just don’t see them leap frogging these academic powerhouses if Apple was spearheading the program. I think the credit here all goes to ACU.

If nothing else, the program is a PR coup. Of course, they run the risk of becoming “the iPhone school,” but I imagine that’s a risk they’re willing to take to be out in front of this. Duke ran a One iPod Per Child (er, ahem, student) program for several years, before curtailing it. But I feel that this may just have more staying power. The looming question for me is “what about the AT&T contracts?” I haven’t seen this referenced anywhere yet.

Prediction: this program is the sound of the train horn in the distance. The freight train of mobile connectivity in education is coming this way… and it’s nearly here.

(updated with the web developer’s comments minutes after original post)

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in mobile, technology, video | Comments (0)

Help Me Wrangle the Future in Educational Technology

Sunday, 17 February, 2008 – 3:04 pm

The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.
—William Gibson

Imagine you could have any current technology, in it’s current or slightly reworked form, to help you in a in-person classroom setting. The technology would be used by both the facilitator and the learners. It could be used outside of the class’s meetings, or both in- and outside of class.

What would you choose? How would you use it?

In my short time as an Instructional Design graduate student, I see increasing evidence that learning is most effective in a social, community setting. As a “netizen” I see networked tools increasingly contributing to community formation, enabling connections and discussions. As a student, I continue to see (and often have to use) technology that delivers poorly. Uninspired design, non-current technology, there could be many factors. I believe the future Gibson was talking about has not arrived in the education community. Yet.

I want to reverse this.

With your help, I can find the tools that we should start with. We can see what’s been done with them thus far (”best practices”) and I’ll report on the current state of affairs, offer suggestions and design prototypes of future directions. Tools should be as inexpensive as possible (open-source preferable) and interoperable with a wide range of tools, services and non-school technologies.

I know that there must be some incredible work already being done. But I’m having trouble finding it. I don’t want to reinvent any wheels, and I want to lend a hand where I can. Where should I look?

This semester I have what amounts to an independent study where I can build a piece of this project. I would like this piece to be a foundation, a beginning to the rest of my studies going forward. I also want to spread the best ideas as far, as wide and as freely as possible for others to benefit from.

The result of this semester’s work will be reported here on this blog and possibly as presentations, which would also be announced here. I intend my research-in-progress to also be shared here.

My current, but not necessarily final, idea is the use of a blog as a lightweight replacement for the monolithic institutionally deployed learning management system (LMS, eg, WebCT, Blackboard, et al.). I am already involved with one at another institution that is being used in this manner.

I need more examples of current web technology being harnessed in ways that supplement the classroom experience, aiding in- and outside class discussions. This is only one place to employ simple, open technology in education. I have grand ideas (and diagrams) of larger, web2.0-ish systems that could be deployed institution-wide. But current institutional systems are almost universally disliked.

Change needs to start small.

Can you help? Help me to help you? Are there existing tools you use or have seen used well? Are there technologies that just need some adaptations, or a fresh coat of “user friendly”? Please leave me a comment or an email. Please pass my plea on to your opinionated, passionate, creative friends. With your help we can start distributing the future, today.

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in projects, technology | Comments (0)