Vancouver & e-Learn

I'm in Vancouver this week attending the e-Learn conference. On Friday morning I make a presentation on the use of "research alouds." (Some of you may remember this technique from last year's Cognitive Psychology class.) Put differently, I won't be responding to emails this week.

I haven't been in Vancouver in over 20 years. It's always been a beautiful place, but I really like the makeup of the population here. This is probably the most international city I've been to (perhaps more so than London or Paris). There's a great vibe here. So between the conference and walking about the city, I'm enjoying an invigorating week. See you soon!

Belated Birthday Wishes

The whole month of October has been very busy for me. So much so that I missed one student birthday, and am very likely to miss another!

First, happy birthday to Monica (October 3rd). I hope you had a great celebration of your 29th birthday. Is this what has inspired your recent immersion into cultural activities?

Second, happy pre-birthday to Beth Ann (November 1). I hope your birthday isn't as scary as it would seem being so closely linked to that upcoming holiday. Any musical shenanigans in your near future?

Where's the Rubrics?

Some of you may be wondering where the rubrics are for our course projects. The simple answer: there aren't any! The longer answer is, well, looonger. In a course like Cognitive Psychology it makes lots of sense to have a rubric for the audiobook assignment since the students are beginning students and the audiobook products being created are for the same audience (first-year doctoral students).

In this class it's a wildly different situation. Each of you are making your audiobook, slideshow, and Flip video products for very different audiences. We're ranging from fourth graders to doctoral students right now. More importantly, the purpose of these assignments is to force you to experiment with three different forms of multimedia communication. A very common question from students that I hear outside of this class is: How do I decide what type of format to make my product? It's not always easy to decide. Towards that end I want each of you to have a hands-on experience with creating different products. In turn this should help increase your understanding of when or why you might want to use each of these three different formats.

The key is I want you to increase your multimedia-making experiental resevoir and to give you the opportunity to experiment with creating multimedia. Rubrics wouldn't capture the experiential-experimental focus of these assignments. At this point I only want to encourage you to give each project your best attention and care. We'll share the work and we'll discuss (at the last class) what are the trends and the implications of the various products created by students this semester.

The Cheryl Amendment

I'm amending (slightly) how people can submit their three main projects given some of the comments Cheryl has made over the past few days. (Note: all the comments from Cheryl were good.) Here's the amendment:

Your total audiobook materials need to be 10 to 15 minutes in length, and your total slideshow materials need to be 7 to 10 minutes in length. The implication of this amendment is that, for example, that you could create two slideshows with lengths of 4 and 5 minutes and meet the project guidelines.

Why create the Cheryl amendment? Simple really: for some of you creating shorter audiobooks or slideshows may be more beneficial for your learners. That's fine. What I want to hold constant is that everyone has created a certain amount of multimedia material—so as long as all your slideshow "stuff" is between 10 and 15 minutes then you've fulfilled the spirit (and now the letter) of the project's intent. Ditto with your audiobook materials.

I hope this slight amendment makes the course projects more useful for some of you.

Games and Assessment

I'm reposting the very useful web link that Monica provided in the Knowledge Dig 6 discussion. If you haven't already viewed this, then it's worth your time to check out. The presented is James Gee from the University of Arizona.

Session 7 Materials Ready

The learning materials for Session 7 on Slideshows are ready to download. Make sure you can download these items before this upcoming Friday class. If you experience any downloading problems, then let me know.

session 7 page link

Creations

There is a new Creation section to our course website! (Notice the tab to the far right, just to the right of "Links.") This is where all of your project work will be placed.

I want to draw your attention to a few key elements of this section. First, when you go to it you will find 15 subpages (just under the website banner). There's one page for each of you. The font used on these subpage tabs is somewhat small, but that's because I needed to fit in all fifteen names.

Next, when you go to a specific subpage, it will contain 4 "areas" by the end of the course. It will contain entries for each of your three products—this includes a general description of the product plus any relevant links to download the product. The fourth "area" will be at the top of each page and will contain an overall description of your three projects and why you created them. This general description text is likely the last bit of information that each student will submit, but it will comprise the top of each page.

Currently three students have one product posted on their pages. It's worthwhile checking out their pages so you get an idea of what the description text for a product looks like—relatively short but also specific. So it may help to check out the pages for Dionne (video), Kristina (audiobook), and Navdeep (audiobook).

You do not need to post all three products at once. Simply get me a product, with the descriptive text, when complete and I'll post that product to the website within 24 business hours.

Dissertation FAQs Form

I briefly told all of you about a Dissertation FAQs form that we had created for the L&I Department website. In the background we are working on making the Dissertations section of the website much stronger. One of the ways we want to do that is to include a Frequently Asked Questions page where we can give extended responses.

In theory all of this makes sense, but in practice we need to be able to respond to real questions that real students have. Put simply, we need you!

Thus I've added an extra assignment for you over the next two weeks: to submit at least one question via the Dissertation FAQS form we've provided. Of course, you can submit more than one question if you want. I've set up the form so that once you submit one question you'll then be recycled back to a blank Dissertation FAQ form—in this way it's easy to submit multiple questions, or just submit one and go back to surfing Amazon!

Whether you are a new student, or a wiley veteran, your questions will help us create a more useful webpage for future students. Many thanks in advance.

dissertation faq form link

Session 5 Updates

I have updated the Session 5 page on Editing to include the live audio plus the handouts from our class meeting on October 9th. The audio is mainly for Gina, but others can download if they want. Check it out at the Editingpage in the Learn section.

Editing page in Learn section

The University & the Future of Knowledge

Below is a presentation given a couple of weeks ago by David Parry from the University of Texas at Dallas. You may want to check it out.

Session 6 Materials Ready

Most of the learning materials for Session 6 on Audiobooks are ready to download. The one exception is a live lecture to be given this evening titled Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. I'll be audio recording and posting the presentation tomorrow (hopefully).

Make sure you can download these items before this upcoming Friday class. If you experience any downloading problems, then let me know.

session 6 page link

Delay in Posting Session 6 Materials

I won't be posting the learning materials for Session 6 on Audiobooks until Thursday or Friday of this week. Yesterday and today my office is going through renovations—specifically new windows are being installed. That's great news overall, but in the short term it means I have to work away from my office and thus don't have access to all of my "stuff." I should be able to use my office tomorrow (Thursday) or Friday at the latest. Once I have access, then I'll post the new learning materials. This shouldn't be a practical problem for anyone, but I did want to give you advance notice about why the new learning materials haven't been posted yet.

DropBox Video

The video below was recently released to explain Dropbox to new potential customers. It's a bit less that 2.5 minutes. Long enough, but not too long. I suggest looking at this video because it's created in a very simple, yet very clear way. No "fancy" graphics, but they use clear hand-drawn graphics rather than computer snapshots. This, and a series of other videos to explain things, have been created by the folks at Common Craft.

Links: A New Section

You may have already noticed that I've added a new section to this website titled Links. This is in a rough draft format only. The purpose is to provide you with short, concise access to a variety of software and hardware products you might want to use. For right now this area is pretty incomplete—save for the information about audio editing software. However, over the next few weeks a number of links will be added—and in turn hopefully this will be an easy resource for you to identify software and hardware you may want to use at some point.

If some of you have specific recommendations you'd like to make, then submit that info to me and I'll add. I'll certainly include cross-platform software, and Mac software, but I'll be weaker on Windows-only software. Recommendations from Windows folks will be much appreciated.

Since we are now pretty far underway with the semester, I have moved the Help section to be a subsection under News.