Technology "Office Hours"

While meeting with Tim yesterday and thinking about the huge amount of technology we are going to require of his students, I came up with an idea that I think is truly a good one.

Technology Office Hours

The idea is that one of the Instructional Designers or ITES will choose a time during the week where they will be available via Elluminate to answer any tech questions students might have. So students who are assigned to create a Powerpoint presentation but don't know how to use Powerpoint would come and get a lesson. Or if a student doesn't know how to download a podcast she/he could come and get a lesson.

We could also record each individual piece of a session based on topic so they could be archived for students who don't want to or can't attend a live session. If it started getting unmanageable with numbers we could also have themed times, where we focus on a specific topic.

I think I will start this with the Tim's class and my own this fall and see how it works.

I would hope that many students wouldn't need the help but I know there are a few that could really use it AND it would also help the faculty since they would not feel that they have to answer tech questions.

I believe it to be a win-win for everyone and, hopefully, not a massive addition to the ID's. If it works out we could even put it into the catalog! Maybe...

I look forward to getting the ball rolling.

Now we just need a snappy name....

Jeff Borden is the man!

We have been able to secure Jeff Borden as our Plenary speaker and we will have him do an additional classroom session. He's a wonderful presenter and teacher and I really look forward to having him here.

The website and graphics have been updated and we just agreed on a postcard. We'll be sending them to the faculty AND we'll put them in the packets for all incoming GA's and Faculty.

We have a date, rooms, speaker and we are rapidly moving forward.

http://www.uwyo.edu/techforum

Tim will be amazing!

We met to create a plan of attack for Tim and his iPod Touch project. We spent 2 hours over the lunch break to work out some ideas and address some problems.

Here are some of the notes from the meeting:

• Tim is teaching Literacy Methods online for the first time in the fall. He has some grave concerns. Hopefully we can help with ideas and technology
• His biggest concern/problem is the typical faculty one of time, or lack thereof. He'd rather have time than the development money. I told him we would provide either some money for a GA or a GA ourselves (in the form of Athena). This is the exact reason we chose to allow faculty to use TIE grant money for whatever they choose, they could hire a TA!
• We need to order him a Flip Video camera for Vodcasts on the fly
• He may want to do screen-capture so we'll need to either order Snapz or teach him to use Jing
• He will pod/vodcast short lectures every week which students can download to their ipods
• He will have 3 iPod assisted assignments: The "Running Record", students will record an "Running Record" using their microphone; a "teaching practicum" in which students will record themselves teaching a lesson and the Final Assignment, which is a mock interview, they'll discuss the components via the discussion threads and then record their responses to the interview questions.
• To support the students in the iPod portions, as well as some of the other technology ideas, we will provide "Tech Help Office Hours" where Cody and I will be available via Elluminate to assist students learn the technology necessary to be successful in the class. I think this is a brilliant idea and will write another blog post about the potential.
• We will look at sending out the iPods ASAP, once enrollments settle a little. It's a cohort group so it seems that attrition shouldn't be too bad.
• Additional apps that might be of value are Dictionary.com and Flashcards.

I know there will be many technical issues but I'm hoping that the flawless workings of Apple will help to cushion the blow a bit!

On the whole it was an amazing meeting and is one of the reasons I love my job. I LOVE working with faculty to try to better reach students.

TIE Grants

I finally spent some time writing a draft for the TIE Distance Education Grants. I've been putting this off but finally just sat down and did it and it wasn't too bad at all. 

I want to thank April for some great examples for me to draw upon. I was also able to use a great deal of the language and text from various documents.

I think it is a good start. It has now gone to the Mates and Cody for editorial review and then I'll send it on to April to preview for potential problems.

I will create an online form in Google Docs and then embed it into the TIE webpage once the time is right. I didn't create it yet because I don't want to have to edit it substantially so I'm waiting for revisions.

Once it is done we'll send it out to the OCP faculty and organize a committee to review and choose the recipients. I hope we get a lot of interest! I'll post the link to the Grant App once I get it finalized.

More droid vs. Apple

I've spent some time this morning playing with my iPad and while I love so much about it I'm still frustrated by many things. I think that I would have liked it better had I not gotten a droid first, then I wouldn't have know better!

I'm still highly frustrated by the lack of java and flash support. I thought it would be amazing to use iPad with Elluminate. Being able to draw on the whiteboard with my finger instead of the mouse would be truly amazing. However it is a java download and it won't work. Of course maybe that doesn't matter now because Blackboard has bought Elluminate and that may cause a change of webconferencing anyway. The other thing is that despite Apple's claim that Flash is problematic at this point it is truly one of the few video formats that always works with online classes. Losing the ability to view so much of existing content is problematic in the extreme!

Another issue I have is the multitasking. What a pain! I know this is being changed in the new OS but seriously...

Finally, i don't like the lack of a "mouse". What I mean is even just arrow keys to move around in text with. While the pressing your finger until the little zoom box is sexy it is not near as functional as actually having arrow keys to move around. Very timeconsuming and more difficult.

On the plus side, the keyboard on the ipad is actually really great. I can type reslly quite quickly and easily with few problems. Much faster than the keyboard on the droid. It is much smaller though and I don't like the iPod keyboard.

Generally I also like the autocorrect on the iPad but it seems to be fairly random. Sometimes it capitalizes my "I" and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it add apostrophes and sometimes it doesn't. I can't quite figure it out!

Don't get me wrong, I love Apple products and I really love my iPad, I guess I'm just extremely impressed with the Android software, it's amazingly great!

Writing!

This morning I put on my calendar 2 hours for research and writing. I did this because I can't seem to make time in my life to actually sit down and write up my projects.

It started slowly, I couldn't remember the name of the program I used to keep track of my sources and take notes, I couldn't find the articles on virtual labs, I couldn't find my dissertation... Eventually I managed to get going.

It turns out I like to do research and write! I forgot in my running towards new projects but it's actually quite fun!

I read through several articles, took numerous notes and started paring down my dissertation. Great fun!

I now need to check the submission guidelines for ASM-CUE, integrate the new sources I've found, majorly shorten the introduction/lit review and combine everyone else's parts into a rough draft that we can work from.

It actually sounds like fun!

Internship anyone?

I just finished meeting with Kent, department head for Professional Studies, and he's all behind the idea of an internship for ITEC students.

We have 3 areas identified for sure: Research, teaching and instructional Design.

I now just need to contact Doris, John, Craig and Steve and see if anyone will take the lead on their end.

This may slow the process down a bit since I know for a fact that at least 3 of the four are not here this summer. I'll probably have to shoot for an internship for spring 2011, the timing just won't work out this summer.

More Grant Program Notes

After a quick meeting with April I have a few more thoughts:

1. Personally approach people who would be good for the project
2. Be sure to tell them about their responsibilities up front - meetings and presenting
3. Set time-frame - beginning and end dates
4. Require mentorship of next group? probably just encourage them to continue coming to meetings
5. Outside evaluator? Necessary?

That's all for now, I'll keep updating this as we go!

Plenary Speaker...

So we really wanted to get Mimi Ito to speak for our e-volution forum but she is out of our price range, we're a small group and simply don't have the money.

We talked about some other options and it looks like we'll ask Jeff Borden to come. I've seen him present several times and he really is fantastic! I don't believe we could do better and his cost is extremely reasonable.

I have emailed Jeff and hope to hear back soon. I would love to get him up here!

Virtual Orientation

In March I was named to the Virtual Orientation Task Force and we've been meeting 1/week for about a month. It's an interesting group from all across campus as well as in OCP and UW/CC I never knew how much went into orientation on the campus!

Much of the discussion does not seem overly useful to distance, non-traditional students but it never hurts to listen and examine your own practices.

I believe that much of the material we need already exists online but how to better package it and whether to make it mandatory are two of the questions with which we are struggling.

We have now broken into several sub-groups, three of which I volunteered to join: Transfer - OCP, Transfer - UW and Transfer - UW/CC. Yes, I need to learn to keep my mouth shut...

Anyway, it should continue to be an interesting process.

YouTube.edu

Many faculty, as well as the rest of the world, have been using Youtube for a variety of purposes, including even a few instructional! One of the major advantages of Youtube is it's ease of use and the ability to embed videos in other webpages or, in the case of distance education, course shells. The process of uploading and embedding a video is so easy that it is extremely popular with instructors who are using existing content or creating short video content. The only problem with regular Youtube accounts is that videos are limited to 10 minutes.  For some instructional uses 10 minutes is a sufficient amount of time but for some faculty members it is not enough to accomplish her/his instructional goal. Some would argue, my among them, that most content should be less than 10 minutes but I have also seem some amazingly innovative video that is over that length and truly great!

Youtube has a .edu section of it's service which is devoted to educational resources. A University applies for a .edu account and this brings two big advantages: videos are not limited to 10 minutes and the University has an entire 'site' that can be used to organize the content.

Many Universities that currently have a Youtube.edu account have separate accounts for different entities on campus, with distance education and extension as options. Harvard has a University site as well as 3 other sites, including the 'Harvard Extension School'. UW already has one .edu setup but we hope to be able to add Outreach as well. We are the distance "delivery van" and as such we have unique needs.

I'm planning to apply for an UW Outreach Youtube.edu account. The main purpose of this would be for instructional purposes but once it is up we may find other great possibilities. If we named it Outreach instead of OCP then it could also be used by the other units of the Outreach school and UW/CC, OCP, Marketing, and OTS could all have a channel within the overall Outreach site.

We've got buy in and we're ready to apply and see what happens.