Category Archives: education

Emerging Media and Communication at UT Dallas

Sunday, 23 August, 2009 – 4:32 pm

A new program in Emerging Media and Communication at UT Dallas looks very interesting.

The Emerging Media and Communication degree prepares the “communicators of the twenty-first century.” These new communicators will combine technological expertise with effective communication skills across a wide range of media, developing “new media literacy” in response to the digital revolution that has radically changed all aspects of human communication.

There are both undergrad and graduate majors within the program.

This syllabus from the an Introduction for Emerging Media course in the program seems much like one I’d like to create for teachers and instructional designers at the graduate level. Teachers and instructional designers are being increasingly being expected to understand the Internet and become content managers and publishers of new media. They are very rarely given any instruction about the Internet and how it functions. They occasionally get training or classes on LMSs like Moodle and Blackboard, but what they really need is a clear understanding of the entire medium, that Moodle and Blackboard are but a tiny bastardization of. The Internet is to today as the Gutenberg Press was to the middle ages… a marked shift in communications where society must change to accommodate this new method of communication.

David Parry, one of the professors in program wrote this piece on his blog talking about getting the class off the ground this year, which is worth a read. He notes,

[…]we are educating our students for a world that no longer exists instead of educating them for the world they will inherit. This strikes me as irresponsible.

A similar problem exists, as I see it, at the graduate level for teachers and instructional designers. They can take courses where they make a course in Moodle or an activity in Flash, but those are tools used today (mostly poorly)… by the time they get jobs in the field, the tech will have changed. Plus, so many of these courses use proprietary software, which, once it falls out of favor, those creation skills are almost useless, unless you have the underlying theory and literacies for the digital landscape of the Internet. They need to know what types tools are good for what tasks, and learn to make those types of critical analyses for themselves, so in a year or two when they have to decide how or why to deploy something, they’ll know how to make those choices.

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in instruction, instructional design, teaching, technology, theory | Comments

Tech Etiquette or Using the Right Tool for the Job

Thursday, 20 August, 2009 – 10:41 pm

Imagine you have a house party and you invite 25 people you’re friendly with. They don’t all know each other, but there’s a good cross over. Interesting connections are being made and lively chat is spontaneously popping up all over the house.

Then something strange happens. Someone you met fairly recently, who seemed pretty cool, throws open the window. He sees your neighbors having a conversation in their backyard. He listens for a few minutes, then starts chiming in… loudly… while still in your house. It sounds like he’s having a conversation, effectively with himself, from the side of your living room.

This wouldn’t fly at a house party, right? Social etiquette would preclude this from happening. So why is it acceptable on Twitter? This is exactly what it is like when you join a conversation using a #hashtag instead of engaging in conversations with an @reply at the beginning. (See #lrnchat, #journochat, et al.)

Prefixing your tweet with an @username makes your conversation completely opt-in. The only people who will see your conversation will be someone who also follows the person you’re replying to. This greatly increases the chance it will be relevant or at least interesting to them. When you use a hashtag, it strips this functionality from the system, punishing all your uninterested followers… who will likely be the majority of your followers.

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What this is is the misapplication of a tool. It’s an endemic problem with new technology. Many people want to hop aboard the latest, most popular tool and do so with the best of intentions. But tools are about solving problems. You must ask yourself what problem you’re looking to address and what the most effective way to do so is. You might want to create a new wiki to store all your information for a project, but in some situations a simple paper handout might be the best tool for the job!

You have to look critically and objectively at the characteristics of the tool and ask yourself if they really assist you in solving your problem. Wikis are a fabulous tool for collaboration, group documentation, and group curation of digital assets, just to name a few. But if your project requires you to provide a quick-access job aid displaying data unlikely to change frequently… a piece of paper might be the best technology to have. Perhaps upgrade it with a piece of Scotch™ tape to adhere it to the side of a computer display. There you have it, fast, easy, recyclable.

Tools are rarely free. People often have to use a tool because it’s available, not because it’s the best for the job. That’s reality. However, if you can master proper application of technological tools, then you can also maximize the available budget for them. If you become known as someone who makes the most form the dollars they’re given, you’re more likely to get them in the future. Don’t waste your company or organization’s resources on something just because “That’s what the kids are using these days.” Make sure it passes the sniff test.

People don’t care if you’re using the most popular, buzzword-worthy tool. They care that they’re able to get things done. Help them with that, and you’ll be a hero.

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[If this is your first visit to this blog, you may notice it's a bit dormant. Please visit briandigital.com to see links to more active content by Brian. I hope to get this place hopping again soon.]

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in technology | Comments

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

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

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

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