Summer Workshop Reflections Day 3

Another busy day with a number of new concepts and tools to ponder. Our initial discussion compared the motivation for the implementation of technology. Could versus should; just because the technology is cool and neat and we could use it to do ______, should we? We need to ask ourself if the implementation is bringing significant value to the learning experience. Steve mentioned having spent hours creating a cool new module that really brought very little benefit to the course. He caught himself wanting to use the tool exclusively or excessively. I know I have been guilty of the same. Remember, "Could vs. Should" when considering using a technology tool.

We discussed a couple of digital libraries and contrasted them with digital repositories. Sandie suggested that for our purposes, they are pretty much the same. Some examples mentioned were: Galileo, the Gutenberg Project, NSDL, Instructional Architect, Pioneer Library, Family Search and Ancestry.com.

We talked about RSS; how an aggregater will act as you web news article browser. Sandie explained that she no longer uses RSS. I have to agree with that. It takes me at least 20-40 minutes to go through and parse out desired information when I do it. I found myself un-subscribing to many feeds. Perhaps a leaner more focused approach would be better.

We the talked about copyright issues. We determined early in the discussion that it was not only illegal in a lot of cases, but also immoral in many cases to use material from the web. We talked about "Fair Use" and we found that most educators have their own definition of what percent is allowable in Fair Use. The range was from 10% to 50%. I shared how I include on my Wiki opening page a statement about Fair Use and the link to the section of code at the U.S. Copyright Office. This led into a discussion of Creative Commons.

I had heard of Creative Commons somewhere previously. The concept is to allow differing levels of use or reproduction and assigning an appropriate symbol. From their web site:

• Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."
  
  We're a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free.

Sandie pointed out that as an employee, your created material may be the the copyright property of the employer and that the non-disclosure agreement of the employer would clarify the issue.

An interesting sidebar was the idea of personal pride or ego as opposed to the common good. My take is, "Life is too short and you can't take it with you." But of course I have never created anything of much value so that's easy for me to say.

Sandie instructed us to use original work on our project for the most part and to site sources and use links to web resources rather than copy the material.

Sandie asked us to reference the proposal template for the 6460 course and to gear our final paper as a transition to that end. The literature review should function as background information and justification for our design. I had a thought relative to optimal time spent on an activity.

In our recent class, I can't remember which, a discussion thread emerged about the optimum time that should be spent on any one learning activity. The feed back that surprised me was that this particular teacher felt like 15 minutes was about right for high school seniors. I have always gone by the old adage the mind can only absorb that which the butt can endure, or about 45 minutes. This got me thinking and doing some informal research including some verbal surveys of my students; I must say that I am leaning more toward an optimal time of 30 minutes. This will be one of the areas of research, literature review I plan to conduct. I've already done some comparison of LMS systems. I need to do more there. Perhaps identify the common components of various LMS products and determine which would fit my situation.

What ever final project I decide upon, I want to use it in my class which is not a DE situation. Much of what we do is web based and I have used a wiki extensively with success. There are several components that I know I want to implement and some that are out of my control, mandated by the school or district such as grade reporting and attendance recording.

Sandie shared something that I found intellectually intriguing. Her doctoral work deals with a topic new to me: Notational Systems. She recognized early in her involvement with Instructional technology that there were terms that ambiguous within the discipline or across associated fields. Don't I know how that is. Information technology is awash with duonyms, (my own word). She pointed out that historically, any study or discipline has accelerated rapidly once a method of notation was defined and implemented. The case she used to illustrate the point was the study of music and how it took off once a system of notation was invoked. Music contrasted with dance also made the point that once the notational system was in place, the "science" (or art) took off.

We had some fun with Skype. This could prove very useful in an on-line course. We could even do video with the phone; not very useful for a F2F class.

After Skype, we set up a MySpace account and reviewed Sandie's space. I think parents would not approve of this in the classroom in addition to the fact that some districts block the site.

Sandie asked all to research Open Course Ware, ARCS, and CSBs. She also assigned us to research Captivate by Adobe.