Academic

Went over our basic plan for the presentation. I'll need to flesh out my part in more detail, and prepare some emergency screenshots just in case.

Meeting with a number of people from faculty and from the library about putting the Colonial Correspondence online. This project needs some discussion, and I think it should be a priority for us. I'll need to talk to EG-W and the R & D team about it.

As part of Paul Scifleet's survey of markup practices, in which we are participating, he's now conducting follow-up interviews; he interviewed me over Skype. He'll bepresenting preliminary findings at the TEI meeting in November.

Chris came over to plan out the presentation. We made a basic outline; we'll flesh it out later when it's clear whether David B is going to be involved or not.

1) Big-picture implications of Social Learning

Education seen as part of adult life, not rite of passage into adulthood; education for elites not sufficient for planetary survival.
Three types of entities beyond the individual:
- group (conscious membership, structured, e.g. virtual class)
- network (shared interests, informal, e.g. community of practice)
- collective (aggregated other, derived from participation, wisdom of crowds)
The educated person of the 21 century needs competence in all three, but formal education currently addresses only the first and is to some degree hostile to the second and third.

2) Academic Authorship Standards in World of Collaborative Authoring Tools:
- large implications on both "chain of knowledge" at heart of academic work (attribution conventions) and on "Critical Review" (evaluation and feedback to peers and to students)
- the academy is at a loss to deal with these issues, and it's natural conservative bias results in hostility
- ISO 690-2 (standard for citing electronic sources) does not accommodate many recent forms of document
- example, if accepted standard in wiki is to modify the document rather than annotate it, what are implications on notions of authorship and separation of authorship and reviewer

3) Interactive Whiteboards: Compliant or Disruptive Technologies:

- teachers doing exactly what they'd done with previous technology, at least for first year, though they claimed intention was to improve "student ownership"
- when asked if the technology was a teaching technology or a learning technology, teachers did not see a distinction (i.e. if it helps me teach, it helps them learn).
- next issue is how to determine for this (or any given) technology) whether it is a "jet-powered stagecoach" or a portal to new and more sophisticated applications of the technology

4) Significance of Second Life
- not much; hype not justified; nothing that we haven't seen for ten years
- judging the technology should be based on what people are doing not what the technology is doing
- advocates claim it transforms channels of communication and allows imaginative restructuring of environments, but second life spaces are more conventional than most of the real life spaces they are derived from
- gamers find the second life interface impoverished

5) Online textbooks
- network-specific features are a very hard sell to publishers, even with substantial economic evidence
- textbook that asks questions, then guides student efforts to find answer to those questions (resulting in covering much of the required reading for those that don't answer questions fully). XamPrep
- overall results 5-10% improvement in test scores vs control group with standard text book
- approach disproportionately benefits weak students who have problems with focus and study habits and so try to memorize all the content

6) incorporating student tracking and student ratings of course material in Moodle (MooDog):
- by tracking student use of resources and student ratings/reviews of resources, create a collaborative resource with student-oriented hooks into the material; also allows instructor to modify materials etc. based on what students say and what they do.
- findings are that students take more and more varied views of resource material in response to this data

1) Blended Learning - Challenging or Conforming to Institutions:
Three areas of blending: Space (virtual and real), Tools, Activities
In each trend is towared public|self-regulated and away from private|teacher/institution regulated, but institutions are biased other way and have a lot of inertia
Blending assumes fairly intellectually motivated, autonomous and technologically competent students, but evidence is not in that those assumptions are sound and in fact indicate students are less motivated and autonomous than before.

2) Engaging Slideware - Reflections on PowerPoint everywhere
- research shows that students in PP-enriched courses do not perform better than those without, but do rate their instructors higher
- unthinking application of PowerPoint default settings is so widespread as to present basic knowledge as a linear sequence of bulleted lists
- tendency to not turn Projector off once it's turned on - focusses attention away from presenter and audience

3) Exercises on Mobile Devices - lead to learning?
Technology can't overcome cultural/institutional bias. If the institution and students care only about test results, then encouraging reflection or collaboration is unlikely to succeed and cool technology won't overcome that.
Example: Hot Pot Multiple choice exercises deployed to hand-helds with objective of helping students reflect on material and work towards preferred answers conflicted with preference for "is it the right answer on the exam".

4) How to Teach and Assess Conative Domain achievement
Conative: Will, Desire to Learn, Level of Effort, Mental Energy, Determination
Net generation worse than predecessors in achievement in this sort of task
Obvious applications of technology work against Conative development - but that may just purifying tendencies already there in educational practice
Conative skills developed by educational tasks which are:
- ill-structured
- authentic or reality-based
- require varied and iterative engagement
- have multiple good answers
- tend to blur distinction between teaching and learning

1) Custom system for presentation of art history digital slides
Researchers thought main concern would be resolution of image and colour integrity, but instructors cared far more about the size of the image and that it look just like what they were accustomed to with two analog projectors.

2) Factors affecting student perception of course quality in technology enhanced courses:
peer interaction - moderate positive correlation,
feedback from instructor - strong positive correlation,
course structure and design as presented in course material - strong positive correlation
technical support - weak positive correlation

3) Perceptions of early adapters of communications tools in course management systems:
- ability for students or instructors to flag important or otherwise noteworthy posts in asynchronous discussion
- make each contributor and each thread more visually distinct
- instructors wanted to brand look and feel

4) Getting Beyond Centralized Technologies:
- centralized, all-things-to-all-users approach is not viable because it is either overwhelming the primary mandate of educational institution, or is resisted by growing portion of student users
- trend towards mash-up of materials rather than conscious aggregation of learning objects; "sense-making" still requires human intervention
- skills and knowledge around access to information is at least as important as the knowledge itself in situation of rapid change
- ability to jointly interact with features of filtered or represented data becoming more important than mastery of raw data itself.

5) Two non-English cultures learning about each other's culture in English using 3-D environments:
project created 3d models of landmark or typical buildings from L2 culture. L1 students traversed these environments and posted comments to wiki for peer review. Result was collaboratively produced annotated 3-D object. Goal was to focus on cultural nuances and distinctions between two non-English cultures communicating in English

6) Tradeoffs in Multi-point video conferencing:
Higher-def, wide aspect ratio images mean less camera work (and thus less technology instrusion), however implication is huge bandwidth. Attempts to reduce bandwidth by going to processing hub and spoke required lossy compression and latency of 1 second which is OK for presentation, but not acceptable for interactive conferencing. Conclusion is that IP networks currently available not up to video conferencing.

7) Comparison of Email and Chat in Second Language learning:
- Email had fewer, longer posts which tended to stay on topic more than was observed for chat postings.
- With both technologies, threads generally came back on topic
- Each technology has its place in a program depending on whether emphasis is social interaction or interaction with content.

Prevalent themes: attempts to implement Web 2.0 (network based social software) software meet with resistance from sys-admins and from management admins because the new technologies challenge the existing ways of administering computing resources and academic research and teaching.

Skepticism about SecondLife, but a lot of interest in integrating other forms of social software into technology base that students will have anyway (rather than forcing them into an institutionally-mandated user experience).

Skepticism about digital natives' depth of understanding of technology, specifically how to use it in the service of critical thinking and communication or the production of formally reviewable academic work.

Higher-profile papers provided empirical research results on implementation and results. Theory had to be tested.

Considerable emphasis on ubiquitous technologies (specifically hand-held devices with access to internet and other devices at all times) and whether or not and how to make use of them.

Presented FrancoToile project as a poster session at the EdMedia conference. Particular interest shown by:
London School of Economics for use in sensitizing their students to French (and other) cultural norms
Researchers from North West Territories for use in aboriginal language and culture
Instructors from Japan for use in non-verbal communication
Researchers from USA in XML encoding for this kind of document, particularly multiple threads