Mac Pages to GIF

Dear Folks,
Although I may be re-inventing the wheel here, a few of you may be interested in how to convert your well-designed table from the Mac word-processor (Pages) into a gif for publication. Publishers may use Windows based Word, rather than Mac. Constructing a table inside Pages or a figure inside Keynote slide-maker is extremely accurate and a joy to use, with pixel by pixel accuracy, in contrast to the neanderthal eye you need for positioning stuff in word or powerpoint.

However, you will find (table select) copy and paste is ineffective to transfer a table into Powerpoint (even Powerpoint for Mac), and export to Word or to Powerpoint distorts the artwork too much. Previously I have resorted to re-drawing from scratch. But help is at hand.

If you put the table into a single Page by itself, then select custom size on Page Setup, you can choose for example 15cm wide and 10cm high page size, and then centre your table within this. Choose print and Save-As pdf to obtain a custom sized pdf, and then simply Save-As gif (or png, jpg, tiff depending on your graphics). Also at this point I selected 1500 pixels per cm resolution - just for fun, and obtained an excellent high-resolution gif.

This can be stored for re-use back inside Pages, or inside a Powerpoint, Keynote, or Word file.
Mac is really intuitive ! You just need to sit back and think through how to proceed, and the results are great.

All Best Wishes
Paul

A Busy Year, for all

Dear Folks,

It has been a very busy year for everyone.
Thanks must go to colleagues studying at West Georgia together with me - my overall conclusion is that in distance education particularly - it is the students that make the learning happen. So much work has followed on from those studies. Especially my reports to the Asian Association of Open Universities, and presentation to Beijing Normal University. I thank all concerned.

All Best Wishes to you for the New Year !

For those of you interested, next year will be the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a special issue of six journals worldwide will commemorate this anniversary with papers published on Article 26 the Right to Education. For details go to the homepage of the Asian Journal of Distance Education here at http://www.AsianJDE.org and click on the Special Issue button on the left column menu.

If anyone wants more information please email to me.
Talk to you, next year -
Paul


.

rss feeds might timeout

Dear Folks,
While I have been sojourning in the garden, it seems that some of you who regularly follow this blog through receiving the rss feed may have had transmission interrupted. I guess your rss feed has timed out. This blog is still active, though I have been busy updating my website to incorporate it there (you might need this URL for later access ;- http://www.open-ed.net . The blog is on a top left button marked 'blog' beneath the title banner.

Well I hope rss feeds do time out ... since this will prevent my hard disk crashing from overload if I ever click accidently on my 'blogbridge' alligator. I am sure it works fine, but who has three or four hours each day to keep up. I do - of course, but not during the hibernation season.

By the way, while I wrote yonks ago about there are more blogs in Japan than in any one country, this was picked up by the newspaper media and in the daily paper yesterday -- I guess electronic media is faster !!

All Best Wishes
Paul

PS I hope this short utterance reactivates your rss feeds ...

Impatica Presentation on e-Learning

Hi Folks,

You might be interested in viewing my latest Impatica work. This presentation introduces e-learning starting from the basics and is interactive : users should pause to answer the questions and puzzles. I have made this for new online students and those new to online course designing. This a simple no-voice-over slide presentation with forward, pause, back controls for use in class or by students at home. The presentation is fairly standalone, although I do offer pdf handouts as additional notes to you and your students.
Please download the four-page easy-going pdf from here http://www.open-ed.net/e4/eLearning1.pdf and here http://www.open-ed.net/e4/eLearning2.pdf
and then view the presentation here http://www.open-ed.net/e4/eLearning.html
or if you wish you may access, adapt and use the original powerpoint from here
http://www.open-ed.net/e4/eLearning.ppt
Enjoy !
All Best Wishes
Paul

Skype revisited

Dear Folks,

Since the end of last year, several new tools have been developed for recording multiple persons in conference calls through Skype. One of these is HotRecorder that comes free forever, but records only two minutes, and comes with a file converter to mp3, or wav, or OGG for podcasting. I have HotRecorder installed. The full version costs about $15, providing a recording duration up to two hours (I think - I must check again) and removes the adverts that might distract you. Some difficulties have been noticed, but the free version worked perfectly for me - in Windows on my Mac - giving me the two-minute mp3. A quick scan of the hits on a Google search found one comment that HotRecorder was difficult to unload from your system - though I doubt this would be too difficult. HotRecorder works not only for Skype but for all VoIP including Google Chat and Yahoo. There is another tool for Mac users called Call Recorder which works for Skype and iChat and records any length of audio-video conferences. A great way to build up your family album, but also for synchronous tutorials ... recorded for student assessment and course evaluation ...

The best available of these tools is Pamela - especially the top-end version Pamela Professional. The basic version of Pamela is free with up to 15-minute call-duration recordings possible, and the top-end version is only $24.95 for ever, with unlimited hours and hours and hours of recording potential. Pamela seems to be for only Skype. Nonetheless its features make this a great add-on to Skype, since Pamela can answer any Skype calls you receive with your pre-recorded message as auto-reply. Pamela also always notifies the other persons connected that you have Pamela recording the session. And for you on the go, Pamela will forward your auto-answered and recorded voice mails to you wherever you are by email. Amazing !

Perhaps you may wish to add Pamela to your Skype. Why didn't we use this last month ? Well these recording tools only arrived this year. Perhaps WestGa may need to re-write and update some modules more regularly. The reason I took this course was to update my knowledge in advanced technologies. These new tools show us that we cannot take too long an interval rest nowadays. Google search on any of the above for all other details.

Skypecasting has arrived !
More later.
All Best Wishes
Paul

On Blogs and Facebook

Dear Folks,
I have spent a few good hours fruitfully reading other blogs - going back to older posts to catch those parts that didn't get enough attention first time round. I have commented on Del.icio.us and the reviews by Pam and Diane, and was also interested to read more about Wikis by Sue (thanks Sue). I was perplexed by the review comments by Ginger - on SnagIt or Sputtr to deploy all search engines simultaneously in your search. My own view (posted to Ginger) is that I believe search engines are becoming more specialised, and we discover specific ones most suited to our search topic and the effectiveness that derive from the returned results on improving our learning or teaching ;-) I am not sure I can handle Google-plus-Yahoo-plus-plus results. On another blog, I teach deaf students and blind students, so Mary Jane's discovery and review on www.TagDeaf.com is very useful for me, and for my colleagues. I will add more later after visiting that site.

Well, what did catch my attention was Facebook , reviewed by Bessie, as Social Apps. I do appreciate clear English. And Bessie is a model for us all especially for native-speakers too. The Camtasia powerpoint presentation was professional. I couldn't find words to write notes and describe my impression, so I went over to Facebook to sign up immediately ; entered my real name, real age, and said I was a first-year student at college (thanks WestGa) trying to avoid the FBI as far as posssible. And visited various pages there. It is a social chat area similar to MySpace though it would tend toward being for students in higher education. That said, their English is a foreign language to me. I can read most of the phonics and decode most of the lol junk, but in a free writing space, surely this died out with pocket-bell SMS twenty years ago. Do they think they are inventing something new ? I read through pages and pages - like a dating service it seemed to me - Are students really that lonely they need this ?? And do they really have so much free time to do this ?? That 19 million students are members must give us a wake up call. Most of the conversational chat was in English, with a few percent in regional languages depending on the region-specific area you choose. Nonetheless those in the Japan area were 99% in the States, talking mostly about Okinawa - which is part of the States already or was it returned ?? Must avoid politics. My main concern here is how Facebook can be used in distance education. I need to study more, and will post up my findings later.

It seems a lovely face picture is de rigueur on Facebook - hence I guess its name ...

Thanks everyone for great articles and reviews.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Video on Wikis in Distance Education

Hi Folks,
I thought I might express my views on why and how to use wikis in distance education more clearly through a video of comparative technological methods. The technological difficulties in adding screen grabs as jpg to iMovie for exporting at mpg are in my next book ;-) Powerpoint have extremely limited animation and limited pixel-by-pixel design capabilities. So I stayed here with my old Mac, avoided screen grabs and iMovie and other applications. The resulting movie is by Keynote exported directly to Quicktime (you can download the latest Quicktime version from the left side margin on this blog). Inserted media notably mpg can be shortened by limiting the time for the slide-play duration, since - as I described in an earlier post - Sony mpg cannot be edited by Mac or Realplayer, except optimistically if I study another week or two...
Well, folks, here is the http://www.open-ed-podcasting.net/rlo53-wikis.mov (.mov , 82.9MB -- it is worth the short download time, really ! (It comes through best on a high resolution Mac 24" screen - find a colleague who has gone out for a few seconds and left her/his Mac in the room.)It will open as a full-screen movie, and if you click on the screen it will reduce automatically to one-quarter screen for you, as you like), and for those on the move using a mobile telephone or iPod to watch this, here it is in compressed format at http://www.open-ed-podcasting.net/rlo53-wikisA.mov (.mov , 4.MB), both at seven minutes. It is a satirical look at wikis - with the laborious time-consuming old technology presented first, followed quickly by the efficient wiki method.

I still do not see the need for voice, though I am in the video. I would like to add background Jupiter music to this and voice, but this might detract from the visual humour involved ....
- enjoy !
All Best Wishes
Paul

or just click on the picture screen-grab below

Commentary on Del.icio.us

Dear Folks,

The Social Apps Del.icio.us has been reviewed by Pam and Diane.
A Google search on Del.icio.us finds millions of hits. I mention this since Del.icio.us is suitable to an edited list or selected list of a few hits only. Selected by who ? - well you, or him ( who ? ) or her ( who ? ) depending on which network of friends of friends of friends you link to and what they ( who ? ) like best.

I have watched the excellent video by Pam at http://www.compmat.wcape.school.za/PHS/examples/delicious/delicious.swf and the excellent powerpoint by Diane at http://www.westga.edu/~dfulkers/Del.icio.us/Del.icio.us.html , and am enthralled not only by the technological achievement but also by the clarity in presentation.

As a brief introduction here, Del.icio.us is a web-based Social Software Application for use on any browser online. It is essentially a subject-grouped list of URLs. Whereas before you telephoned to directory enquiries or used a local yellow-pages, now you can post your favourite website URLs to Del.icio.us and add tags to each one (don't forget this !!) to cross-link them among various subject-groups. They do not yet allow personalised annotations. For this functionality please use your offline wordprocessor or notebook and pencil like I do.

I would use and plan to use Del.icio.us for my own use with no importing of lists from others from others from others : very much just an online store of my subject-indexing as part of my online library ; for mainly myself as well as for others to use. I would not like my blog open to adverts or any other uninvited intruders, not my Del.icio.us, not my wiki, and not my kitchen. I agree with Pam and Diane that Del.icio.us can be useful, and we should use tools each for their own advantages. When I first set up my own online library (including definitions I like and quotations) it was to satisfy a need. It did, it does, and it will for the foreseeable future. But I think we do require the 'need' to be tangible - not to use Del.ico.us just in case we might ... or just for fun. Of course personal websites, personal blogs, MySpace and so on are widely popular, but I don't subscribe to such time-consuming pastimes. I am too busy learning and teaching.

Actually if I need help academically, I usually email to a colleague friend in my network and they help me out, as I do them. They personalise their search to my purposes. So there is no need for me to import their bookmarks. I think we need to maintain some human-human contact in teaching and learning. This position does not conflict with my stand on objectivity and no-posting of beautiful faces, blond hair and blue eyes. Indeed I maintain that the human-human contact should be objective - I ask my colleague friend for specific academic help - not to download his bookmarks of his local tailor and candlestick maker. Do I have time to download your bookmarks then go through them deleting the irreverent and irrelevant, and re-tagging them to my own purposes ? No, not yet. Del.icio.us is mass mailing your private contacts. I will however upload my own bookmarks for synchronised portability between home and office, but I would nevertheless still want them downloadable for use offline - together with my annotations and comments for my use and re-use - as DVD-backup or on A4-paper.

More later,
All Best Wishes
Paul

Critique of the Literature on Wikis

Dear Folks,
Here I would like to offer a critique of the literature on using wikis in education – noting that there is not much available yet. This is attributable to wikis being first-generation tools not yet fully suited to the purpose of education, since they were designed initially for personal non-academic use as social applications. I have delayed this critique for some days now with some anguish over whether or not I have become too decrepit and cynical during the past 120 days. Don’t answer that : this is a blog ! not a wiki ;-)

A wiki is a certain kind of blog. While a blog has serial entries according to date much like a diary, a wiki can be built up both horizontally in breadth and vertically in depth, while being fairly time independent. Since pages can be added for increasing breadth, and more hypertext links and details can be added to any pre-existing page for increasing the depth, wikis are therefore considered to be synchronous collaborative tools, and potentially effective as such in education. Wikis are considered to be synchronous collaborative tools since they are continually being updated by users. For more details on their educational potential, see Schwartz, Clark, Cossarin, & Rudolph, (2004) and Boulos, Maramba, & Wheeler (2006). .

It is noteworthy that wikis are not yet part and parcel of university learning management systems such as Blackboard and WebCT. Rather, they are standalone applications to build an open knowledge database accessed through any browser on the internet. Wikis are interlinked with each other so that the MIT wiki has pages by Cornell University as well as links to password-protected copyrighted library sites. A good up-to-date academic paper on the topic of Social Applications for e-learning is by Dalsgaard (2006). In this paper he presents a host of different social applications including wikis. None are gone into to any great depth, but this is a good overview paper, and provides the interested reader with a good list of relevant literature references. Dalsgaard argues that learning management systems (LMSs) are not designed for student-student(s) group learning tasks. When LMSs are for example used for student-student interactions through text-messaging chat-rooms, they are slow and cumbersome. As a result, I believe LMS do not achieve the potential of providing virtual spaces for learning (chat rooms are 99% unused), Such LMS virtual spaces can help with certain discussions for deciding a schedule or negotiating a syllabus. Indeed at WestGa, the virtual classroom on WebCT was used successfully by a group of students synchronously and collaboratively – and this was to arrange a shared schedule and proposing with counter-proposing preferred ways forward and methods for the [our] group learning task.

Dalsgaard does pose a very good question when he asks whether LMSs will incorporate social software tools such as wikis in the near future for such purposes as arranging a schedule and learning methods. However, I disagree with Dalsgaard when he writes that students should solve their problems individually or at least direct their own learning and problem solving activities. This is what tutors are for. Although he cites Vygosky and social constructivism here, there are limits to Vygotsky’s theory in that some tasks are so complex that group members cannot verbalize and communicate their individual context to others fully, so that distributed knowledge is always far greater than the knowledge communicated (see my Posting on Navigation Negotiation on 10 April 2007, for details here). Wikis can only represent those fractions of the context that have been contributed.

Moreover, since a key feature of wikis is the anonymity and the sharedness of the content presented, then the resulting text is so blended as to disallow any kind of individual social presence to be portrayed through the wiki. Their use is therefore limited in online education.

Another general paper on social applications is by Anderson (2005), and he focuses on educational social applications. He presents in particular his vision for using social apps to enable self-paced continuous-enrolment open-access online courses. This is moving way beyond MIT putting their course syllabuses online, and adopts the concept of re-usable learning objects applied to whole courses. Anderson gives a confusing picture of social presence citing some seminal work on tutor presence online, but then talks of his own model and vision in which a student can click an icon to indicate they are online or not available, much like WebCT Virtual Classroom and like Google Talk, Skype and other popular chat Social Apps. Personally, I don’t relate clicking an icon to show my hand is raised as constructing and projecting online social presence. My own concept of social presence was formulated from the frequency, personal rapport and deep enthusiasm of Fred Lockwood as an online tutor, a few years ago. From that experience, I do not rate a ‘hand-raising’ icon as social presence. Anderson mis-cites Paulsen 1993/2003. Paulsen proposed new definitions for ‘cooperative’ learning activities as non-compulsory and of short duration, while ‘collaborative’ learning activities were compulsory and of long duration. I am surprised Anderson bothers to use ink on that. Paulsen could easily buy a dictionary to find out the meanings of ‘cooperative’ and ‘collaborative’, and Paulsen’s proposals have long ago been superseded by correct definitions, and he should stick with words like ‘compulsory’ and ‘duration’ to give his views. Here a wiki would be ideally suitable !!

Anderson in his next paragraph writes, ‘Humans and other social animals tend to flock to activities in which others are engaged’. This would imply he is referring to a voluntary activity. Education at the primary and secondary level is compulsory. So I think he is suggesting that if we can make students’ learning more visible to others then we can draw in more students to the course. Most universities now do this on their home websites with student voices or student opinions about their learning experiences. Wikis do not ideally show student learning narratives.

The issue of whether wikis can be used for collaborative learning balances on the point of what level of learning is being done. During construction, contributors offer their own ideas cooperatively, although the finished product is unknown by anyone and so the overall process can be considered collaborative construction through cooperative sharing. Children in school can learn from wikis as a resource of reasonably-reliable current knowledge, in a one-way cooperative delivery mechanism ; wikis rarely offer conflicting or contrasting opinions within a same page – any incoming knowledge usually displaces the ‘weaker’ earlier contributions, sadly, and to our loss. University students might also access wikis for up-to-date knowledge – especially since hard-back textbooks are so expensive nowadays. As for students in higher education and at the postgraduate level, wikis offer no space for collaborative progress unless users understand they must tolerate differing opinions on the page and structure their page to accommodate these. This level of maturity is essential if wikis are to be effective collaborative learning spaces. This would move us on to the concept of learner autonomy.

Anderson (p3) writes “Recent interest in so called blended learning ( Bersin, 2004 ; Garrison & Kanuka, 2004 ) shows that it is very possible to combine different formats and media of delivery. However, the challenge is to select … those forms of education that offer the greatest degrees of freedom …” [= autonomy]. These sentences are interesting for several reasons. One that Bersin writes magazine articles without any literature references, two that Garrison does not anyway understand the Theory of Transactional Distance, and three student learning autonomy should not be maximized. I have previously discussed Bersin. Garrison (2000) has described that in “Moore’s theory, the most distant program has low dialogue and low structure while the least distant has high dialogue and high structure”. He is wrong. The least distant has high dialogue and low structure (Kawachi, 2004 ; Moore, 1991 & 1993 ). According to Moore (1993, p. 27) the institution here should “take measures to reduce transactional distance by increasing the dialogue through use of teleconferencing”. According to Kawachi (2005), students will lose some Autonomy (A-) in going to synchronous mode since they must become more empathic with others, but they will gain in Dialogue (D+) and also gain in responsiveness to their own wants and needs, and own context (with S- decrease in institutional Structure) leading to more learning and deeper quality learning. Moreover, even though adults in open distance education may want increased autonomy, they /we must compromise on autonomy in order to achieve pre-set learning tasks.

This point is surely illustrated in our current experience with WestGa. We may want more autonomy and self-pacing, but we must compromise on our desire for more autonomy if we are to complete the pre-set coursework duly and on time.

All Best Wishes
Paul


Anderson, T. (2005). Distance learning – Social software’s killer ap? Proceedings of the ODLAA Annual Conference. Retrieved June 11, 2007, from http://www.unisa.edu.au/odlaaconference/PPDF2s/13%20odlaa%20-%20Anderson.pdf

Boulos, M.N.K., Maramba, I., & Wheeler, S. (2006). Wikis, blogs and podcasts : A new generation of web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. BMC Medical Journal, 6 (41). Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6920-6-41.pdf

Dalsgaard, C. (2006). Social software : e-Learning beyond learning management systems. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/Christian_Dalsgaard.htm

Garrison, R. (2000) Theoretical challenges for distance education in the 21 st Century : A shift from structural to transactional issues’, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 1 (1), 1-17. Retrieved 10 July, 2007, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2/22

Kawachi, P. (2004). Course design & choice of media by applying the Theory of Transactional Distance. Open Education Research, 2, 16-19.

Kawachi, P. (2005). Empirical validation of a multimedia construct for learning. In S. Mishra, & R. Sharma (Eds.), Interactive Multimedia in Education and Training (pp. 158-183). Hershey, PA : IDEA Group

Moore, M.G. (1991). Editorial: Distance education theory. American Journal of Distance Education, 5 (3), 1-6.

Moore, M.G. (1993). Theory of transactional distance. In D. Keegan (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Distance Education (pp. 22-38). London : Routledge.

Schwartz, L., Clark, S., Cossarin, M., & Rudolph, J. (2004). Educational wikis : Features and selection criteria. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 5 (1). Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/163/692

Compressed Presentation

Hi Folks,
There may be a need for compressed powerpoint slides to use while speaking at a conference. I have summarised my review of using wikis in distance education, and compressed these using Impatica here - being careful to upload the WikisODE.imp and ImPlayer300.jar files into the same folder as the WikisODE.html file. This time round, I avoided using full screen jpg picture as background since this delays streaming, and used a standard Arial font - previously Arial-rounded and Lucida Calligraphy (my preferred fonts) did not go through Impatica. Naturally my voice will be live as standard in conferences. I am not sure if they would accept a voice-over-powerpoint to count as a conference presentation - not at those I have been to - although I have heard some conferences have video sections where the author and speaker are absent. Voice-over anyway has been done earlier. Here I set out to see the what minimum size could be achieved for a practical conference presentation and the result is 7 minutes speaking and 30.8KB file size. Click here for http://www.open-ed.net/WikisODE/WikisODE.html , or click on the slide below for immediate instantaneous streaming playback.
All Best Wishes
Paul

On Chopsticks and Wikis

Hi Folks,
Not sure if this is wholly on topic, but it may be of related interest.
The term 'wiki' as you may know derives from the Hawaiian word for 'quick' and the Hawaiian Honolulu Airport bus called the 'wiki wiki' bus. However this is hardly a novel use of 'quick' as those of you in the States of Chinese descent will know. After the railroads were constructed and the gold dug, the early Chinese worked as cooks. You could imagine them not knowing English and the cowboys not knowing Chinese - so when the food was ready, the Chinese would call out "chop chop" and the folks would hear that the food was ready ; "food food" they thought. And those two sticks used by the Chinese to cook with - rather than call them 'food-sticks' - became the misnomer 'chopsticks'. I still remember my working days when the factory foreman would yell at us "chop chop" meaning "hurry up" or "quick quick !"

This is unrelated to the 'chopshop' where I bought my car ...
It is early morning here, so bear with me ;-)
All Best Wishes
Paul

Podcast Update : additional access

Dear Folks,

I have received notice that low-bandwidth connection might prevent your access to my Series 5 Podcasts on Using Wikis in Distance Education through the Studio.Odeo website (thanks Pam). I too have found some recent difficulties with Odeo. The series however are also available on iTunes, as indicated in the screen grab a few days ago of the iTunes Application available on Mac/Linux/PC - and also through the rss feed to my podcasts in my left column margin here. Additionally you may like to access them directly from my podcasting website at

http://www.open-ed-podcasting.net/5.1wiki.mp3
http://www.open-ed-podcasting.net/5.2wiki.mp3
http://www.open-ed-podcasting.net/5.3wiki.mp3

I can of course email them directly - or snail-mail them on CD-ROM ;-)
All Best Wishes
Paul

Wikis for Course Evaluations

Hi Folks,
I have been looking at wikis, developing my opinion that they are likely very effective synchronous collaborative tools in distance education for students to add comments and build either (1) a negotiated syllabus, or (2) a course evaluation. Such course evaluation as I have alluded to earlier may be mid-course formative evaluation to inform the tutor and institution of matters arising, or end-of-course summative evaluation. It would seem prudent to keep these wiki projects separated for different courses. Accordingly I have set up three wikis as follows
http://www.Open-Ed-A.wikispaces.com
http://www.Open-Ed-B.wikispaces.com
http://www.Open-Ed-C.wikispaces.com
The reasons underlying my decision to have three are that the host site 'wikispaces' is in the plural (if it were 'wikispace' then I would tend towards having only one), this host offers free hosting so any number are available and they are disposable, and students should generally not have access to evaluations by others about my courses if they are to remain on-topic and up-to-date ->-> my courses do change year on year ;-)
I might prefer to have only one wiki, for professional collaboration and free of distracting advertisements, and which would therefore be not free and with more editorial control. Therefore I set up another wiki at

http://www.Open.EditMe.com

This wiki has a valuable full-feature toolbar only when using the Mozilla Firefox browser. With Safari, most of the font styles and so on were not functioning. It also has an excellent html editor so my email address is now there given in hypertext. Here are two screen grabs - first of the editor and toolbar in Firefox, and second the resulting homepage






Both wikispaces and EditMe have WYSIWYG 'What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get' text input function, that may help visitors, while it is easy for me to look at the site mark-up language and learn the idiosyncratic codes. There is no standard mark-up language for wikis ; some use punctuation like ":;hello;:" and =others= or '"StrangerStyles"'. I will use the wikispaces A, B and C sites for my course evaluations by students next week. Thhe other is closed by invitation only, like an intranet website ; if you would like access - that is why my email address is there :-)
All Best Wishes
Paul

Podcasting Update

Dear Folks,

I would like to share with you my update of my podcasting,



I have produced three podcasts on wikis according to my criteria and conventional style with fade-in / fade-out Jupiter music at the beginning and end, involving an introduction, then methods, and then assessment, of new ideas and techniques for use in education. Series 5 is on the Social Apps wikis in distance education. You should receive these if you are subscribed taking into consideration my new podcasting website and its rss, as follows ;-

5.1 Introducing Wikis in Education (mp3, 8.3MB, 9m06s) and here at http://studio.odeo.com/audio/14882643
5.2 Using Wikis in Education (mp3, 11.8MB, 12m19s) and here at http://studio.odeo.com/audio/14882673
5.3 Assessing Wikis in Education (mp3, 6.9MB, 7m29s) and here at http://studio.odeo.com/audio/14882683

In the interests of ISO 9004 /2000 and Section 508, the pdf are available here - except that the interviewee's commentary is abbreviated in 5.2 ;-
5.1 Introducing Wikis in Education pdf
5.2 Using Wikis in Education pdf
5.3 Assessing Wikis in Education pdf

The second of these includes my interview discussed in my previous post.
They are all available through i-Tunes freely worldwide.





The first series was 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 Audio Files in Education,
the second series 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Video Files in Education,
the third series 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 Powerpoint Files in Education,
the fourth series 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 Blogs in Education,
and the fifth series here 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 Wikis in Education

Lots to do still yet.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Producing a Podcast Interview

Dear Folks,

I can well appreciate (more so today than yesterday) that having two persons in one room sharing one microphone into an mp3 recorder has 'technological' advantages.

As for me, I live in the mountains, and I decided to test out interviewing at a distance using the Google Chat feature of Google Talk, on my Mac(s). The interviewee was 1000 km away. I sent an email with my invitation, schedule proposal and a couple of documents about wikis, as pre-interview reading material. The analogue voice output from my interviewee through Mac speakers was however much quieter than my voice into the microphone here. How to edit an mp3 file to adjust alternate voice loudness volumes ?

GarageBand music application can not open up mp3 to adjust the loudness of only one segment, but iMovie can using the recording head to make a break in the timeline.

Therefore I transferred the GarageBand mp3 to iMovie, adjusted the loudnesses, reverted back to Garageband deleting the unused video-track and then shared the mp3 to iTunes, from where I could click and drag the soundtrack as .aif file to Switch (a sound file converter application) and get an mp3 with correctly adjusted volume levels now.

For some reason StudioOdeo does not accept recording new audio into an old Podcast channel, so I uploaded the mp3 to my website Open-Ed-Podcasting.net and then linked StudioOdeo to the file there, for publishing as a podcast, and accessing via iTunes. The technological schema is given here



I will detail the actual podcasts in the following Post.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Review of Wikis in Distance Education

Hi Folks,

Of the various Social Apps, I would like to review the use of wikis in distance education.

Since 1992, several software programmes have been written to enable individual to and from other individuals to communicate through the internet. These add a social aspect to distance education which has been been dominated by heavy learning management systems that control the enrolment, dictate the syllabus and archive the student’s work for assessment. Learning management systems (typically Blackboard and WebCT) have allowed open and distance mega-universities to keep track of their millions of students – with some courses having several thousand students simultaneously on the one course. An army of tutors and their comments, grading and feedback are also managed by such university-wide systems. These systems however do not facilitate the social aspects of learning. They tend to offer FAQs and moderating of student text contributions to threaded discussion sites, but almost nothing in the form of live voice chat. Indeed the telephone continues to be used by some mega-universities with tutor ‘office hours’ for student-tutor one-on-one consultation – usually remedial in nature. Social software applications – Social Apps for short – have recently been developed to allow mid-course student-student interaction in real time synchronously. These were initially text-based instant messaging - like Yahoo Messenger, but later adopted voice over the internet VoIP - like Skype. Both of these are basically free. While initially also text-based, Google Talk now offers live voice VoIP Google Chat. It should be noted that VoIP is not recorded and not archived, and so encourages free conversation among students – though usually only between two students at a time. Skype now offers multiple users to chat in conferencing mode. Audio-visual conferencing has been available on learning managements systems for the past ten years, but used only at pre-set times for specific tasks academically.

Search engine capabilities have developed separately alongside web-based management systems and the use of email lists for group text-based asynchronous discussions. These search capabilities were initially developed by commercial for-profit companies providing an individual subscriber with matches to his or her personal data enquiry for dating purposes. Later on, these search capabilities have enabled individuals to find like-minded other individuals then to form special interest groups – usually hobbyists and not academic. Now students at universities can use these tools to form their own social groups. These social applications are especially effective for students studying at a distance.

Recent research still finds that middle-aged adult students in open and distance education do not avail themselves of the Social Apps or of the tutor ‘Office Hours’ conferencing. Younger students between 20 and 30 years old do so for both social reasons and academic (to get their money’s worth in terms of tutor attention and help), and older students above 55 years old do so for social reasons (to make new friends with other old students and with the tutor often of similar mature age, through their enrolling in study). There are now more than four hundred Social Apps for student-to-student use in distance education. Most however are not free and so not so widely adopted by students. They are also generally only for the Windows operating system, and not for Mac or Linux ; so even if most students use these Social Apps, a few will be left out in the cold because of their computer being incompatible.

Social Apps include Friendster, MySpace, YouTube as well as blogs and wikis. For educational purposes the leading Social Apps are blogs. From a literature search and from my interview in my recent podcast 5.2, it is clear that wikis are not used much in education. Both blogs and wikis may be termed first-generation social software applications.

Wikis are a special type of blog. Whereas blogs generally have short entries about work by others and mainly giving reference to work by others, wikis have entries produced by individuals together. The individuals may be separated by distance but they are considered to be synchronous tools since the individuals work on the entry collaboratively : one person may be writing one new sub-page while another is adding details to a previous page. Wikis are works-in-progress and are never finished. Despite being considered synchronous, a group may take up work produced years earlier and update it adding new pages and recent knowledge through more hypertext links. Such links are constructed automatically by the software (rather than requiring the author having to write using html) and links are made to other wikis. If the new pages are inside someone else’s wiki and are fairly self-contained not connected to other wikis, it is considered squatting – perhaps since the owner of the wiki in most cases pays for the wiki site hosting. Only a very few hosted sites are free, and open-source code is unusually difficult to put onto your own website.

Wikis are not used much by education administration, or by teachers and students. Several reasons might underlie this reluctance by those in education to use wikis. A wiki is a kind of blog in which multiple anonymous users can access and change the text on the wiki site. While the opportunity to destructive attack exists, surprisingly wikis have been very successful in building up a shared knowledge base open to everyone with any internet access.

Blogs are very visual and of all countries, Japan has more personal blogs that any other country. This is attributable to the manga comic genre and the visual range of writing available in Japan. Wikis on the other hand are hardly used. University administrators have paper-based regulation-format methods in use and firstly see no reason to change, and secondly see the novelty of wikis as untested and potentially unreliable.

Wikis are indeed open to misuse and hacking by ill-intentioned anonymous persons. However companies are adopting wikis instead of in-house intranet and close their wikis to prevent non-company access. Universities administrators, teachers and students too could set up closed net wikis for collaborative work-in-progress. Changes to a wiki can be tracked and the change author can be identified. This may in turn lead to competition between student users – which goes against the spirit of wikis as a shared work with contributions of various qualities and quantities from users.

As first-generation tools, wikis are best used for specific tasks such as deciding on a schedule for the students – those with something worthwhile adding can do so, and those with little to add are free to observe and acquiesce. This would appeal to the Japanese group-oriented culture. Additionally, wikis could be used in the same vein for summative anonymous course evaluation. They could also be used in mid-course to collate feedback on issues such as pacing, workload, and problems encountered – anonymously and formatively.

It is unlikely that they will be used as collaborative group learning tools, since a strong participant may be discouraged by no credit and by others freeloading.

Therefore wikis should be used for their strengths – to formulate group opinions, rather than for course work itself. Perhaps second-generation wikis will have sufficient recording functionaliity to allow for assessing each individual student, but not yet. Blogs remain more suitable for such applications.

Wikis and blogs are leaders in first-generation educational social software. Of these, we can expect refinements and further developments in wikis in the next few months and years.

Coming up soon, I plan to review a few small Social Apps including the full-screen whiteboard described a few days ago here, and also VoIP recording as mp3 for podcasting.

Also I plan to post here soon a critique of the available literature on wikis.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Educational Social Software

Hi Folks,
I would like to give here a brief overview of educational social software - what it is and how useful - and then in a future Posting review one of them in more detail.
While ten years ago the internet was basically a read-only resource, it has evolved now into a write-and-read media in which user-generated content is a massive driving force that has revolutionalized the internet, to such an extent that people talk of Internet 2.0 . Social Software, sometimes referred to as Social Apps or applications, is now dominating the internet. There are more than 400 applications available with at least one new significant application being added each week. Common applications include Friendster, MySpace, del.icio.us, Flikr, Facebook. YouTube, SecondLife, and thousands of blogs and wikis.
Friendster was started in March 2002, has more than 45 million users, and is the largest of these. It also holds the global copyright patent on social networking applications granted to them on 27th June 2006, but not yet applied to my knowledge in the courts against the others. They hold now the patent on the "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks". They refused a buyout offer from Google in 2003, and since 2004 have been in decline. MySpace now has the most hits and interactions per day. Here is a screen grab of the Friendster site



Social Apps are increasingly being used in education, though these are mainly limited to blogs. Podcasting and wikis are rarely used in education. I have for instance designed and deployed a blog for educational use worldwide linking students on four continents inside the same shared blog at the same time (with same log-in name and password) in America, India, S Africa, Malaysia, Germany and Japan. And I will use educational blogs in all my courses starting in October. Here is a photograph from the teacher's desk showing this student blog live in action, where the teacher or any peer can synchronously moderate and help others -



Most Social Apps are not free. However I have noticed in WebCT that users have remarked about the small whiteboard size available, so you might be interested in this huge whiteboard full-screen across 24 inches here ; smaller if you are using a laptop or iPod ;-) free from General Electric at http://www.imaginationcubed.com shown here



and this may be of immediate utility to you if you want a larger whiteboard for sharing with two friends. There doesn't appear to be an eraser, but it is free and you can start over easily, email the result to others and print out the result too - more than was possible in the WebCT Virtual Classroom Whiteboard Area.
As I wrote, there are hundreds of Social Apps, although very little academic literature on them as yet. Nevertheless, I will review what there is of the literature very soon.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Raptivity - second look

Hi Folks,

On a second look (well, so so many actually) at my Raptivity files I noticed the Publish folder in Raptivity, in which there is another folder SFO_Publish within which is the paul3.swf file of my interactivity. I have therefore uploaded at length a top-level /raptivity folder with four components ;- the /paul3.dat, Activities folder (with components /paul3.dat, /paul3.xml, and /Role based.swf), Pics folder (with components /background.jpg, Next.jpg, Role based-0.jpg, and Role based-1.jpg), and Publish folder (with SFO_Publish folder and inside this the /paul3.swf). Giving the full set at 638KB. Surely this should now work. I tested it out with the Raptivity first example about five astonomers on flash-cards to make sure it worked. You may notice here I saved my new experiment as paul3 and used fewer pictures to save on memory !
The resulting html link would then become http://www.open-ed.net/raptivity/paul3/Publish/SFO_Publish/paul3.swf and this link does indeed work , try it here ; (in red just to highlight the length and number of levels involved http://www.open-ed.net/raptivity/paul3/Publish/SFO_Publish/paul3.swf

Anyway after doing all this and returning to this my old Mac to post to my blog, I thought I'd give one last try to the plain and simple http://www.open-ed.net/paul2.swf that I posted earlier below -- and that simple link works ! Well, I was surprised - a bit annoyed at having spent several more hours mastering Raptivity. Though I won't waste this learning and will make some more interactivities tomorrow for you all to enjoy !
All Best Wishes
Paul

Infacta PollDaddy easy tool

Hi Folks,

It really does take only two minutes to create this simple instant poll using the tool by Infacta at http://www.PollDaddy.com . The content here was not my primary concern in investigating this tool, which rather was to see how easy it would be to create an instant poll. I chose the White Plastic Standard style to match my Mac. They offer a wide range of templates or you can design your own.
The only difficulty ( took me a few seconds ) was that after choosing 'Custom Style' then it moves to 'Preview Style' and stops. There is no way on the main page to move on. However the tool bar gives 'Custom Styles' followed to the right by 'Widgets' and though I don't want widgets just my html code, I clicked the banner tool bar and it moved on to my widget html, copied and pasted that here within two minutes.
Enjoy.
Now back to Raptivity for further study . . .
All Best Wishes
Paul

Raptivity : Trial and Tribulation

Dear Folks,
I have managed to get Raptivity to run on my Mac, though some difficulties remain.
My project is to build one or more self-standing modules to help students reflect on how best to use the virtual classroom for synchronous collaborative group learning.
I selected my template 'Role-based Individualized Simulations' from the Raptivity Booster Pack 1, since it most closely matches my needs for setting the text-based scenarios for the student to reflect on. I chose six scenarios, and asked the student-user if he or she thought this use would be appropriate for the vrtual classroom. Then the feedback box (which on loading sometimes was invisible - not sure why, but it eventually does appear - please be patient) gives aspects to reflect on.
Here are screen grabs showing the module-in-action. Notice the Mac Icons along the bottom !!






Several problems occurred, as you might imagine. The most serious is the ability to play back on my Mac the resulting flash file (255KB) which is uploaded and given here as http://www.open-ed.net/paul2.swf . Very minor design issues pervade Raptivity. For example, the scenarios must all contain the same design settings which include the title and unfortunately the instructions - I wanted the last sixth scenario to say 'Thank you', but there was no choice but to keep the unhelpful and useless Click 'Next'. Another serious problem or inadequacy in Raptivity is that it does not offer a print out record - only the flash file. If you cannot open this flash file using Adobe Flash Reader 9.0 then it certainly opens beautifully in Raptivity. So I think the cross-platform use of Raptivity does cause some portability problem. I am still working on this. My next step will therefore be to choose the most simple jigsaw puzzle and publish as a single flash file - hopefully smoothly opening in Adobe, Realplayer or Quicktime.
More later.
All Best Wishes
Paul

On using ‘Raptivity’ for packaging e-learning

Hi Folks,

Previously below I have reported that Archibald (2005) wrote that conventional e-learning design involves the subject content expert, then instructional designer, followed next by a developer who makes the interaction solution, and the e-learning programme is then tested out. However in practice, e-learning design often entails far more steps and more people.

Especially, I should like to add that any educative transaction involves a minimum of four interactions – the first of these is the stimulus of need conveyed to the teacher or content expert. This important initiating step was overlooked by Archibald. If there is no want or need then the programme is ab initio redundant - although like popular edutainment, a market could be created through addiction, and this is likely what consortia have in mind : they want to provide the stimulus to employees to learn through offering fun-type gaming modules. Companies however do have real learning needs and wants to be satisfied, so this first step to listen to them is perhaps wise. Timely response to a need is key to the success of such rapid packaging of e-learning. Another point of note here is that once done, the training module can be re-used ad libitum as and when required. This is one of the well-known principles underlying re-usable learning objects in education (well known in academia for the past ten years if not thousands of years).

Several tools for rapidly packaging e-learning are on the market including Raptivity and these will be reviewed here soon. Notwithstanding that Raptivity is not intended for use on Mac computers, I think I have got it to work now (after several days and nights) on my Mac.

A virtual classroom or chat conferencing can be an ideal medium for synchronous cooperative sharing of knowledge ; however, for collaborative learning, the participants need clear structure to bridge differences and co-construct together new shared knowledge. Therefore I have set about using the Raptivity tool to fulfil this need, drawing from my July 05 posting below 'On Synchronous Collaboration', and taking my definition of 'rapid e-learning' to be 'just-in-time training delivered electronically'. The aim is for the resulting training module to be used to teach the desirable skills just-in-time prior to entering the synchronous collaborative forum.

All Best Wishes
Paul

Archibald, D. (2005). Rapid e-learning : A growing trend. Learning Circuits, 1, 1-3. http://www.learning circuits.org/2005/jan2005/archibald.htm

Nigerian Shrink-Wrapping :

Nigerian Shrink-Wrapping : was going to be entitled, On Defining Rapid e-Learning : Part 2
Hi Folks,

The term ‘rapid e-learning’ was coined about three years ago by consortia consisting of corporate business and education providers, as was e-learning about twelve years ago. A simple definition of ‘rapid e-learning’ is just-in-time training delivered electronically. However, REL is not e-learning and is nothing to do with learning. It is best thought of as packaging. I use the acronym REL here not to lend approval or permanence to the term but to distance it from implying any actual learning. I define it as timely chunked-content packaging that is fast and cheap to produce. The term ‘Nigerian shrink-wrapping’ would suggest more about the commercial vested interests involved.

How does REL relate to conventional e-learning design ? According to Archibald (2005) conventional e-learning design involves the subject content expert, then instructional designer, followed next by a developer who makes the interaction solution, and the e-learning programme is then tested out. However in practice, e-learning design often entails far more steps and more people. In some cases (as in the British Open University), actual students are used to test out the not-yet-piloted programme, to save time, energy and costs. The main point to bear in mind here is that there are people involved, and often many people. Rapid e-learning involves in contrast far fewer people – sometimes only one. In such case, a single person who is a content expert can deploy re-usable software templates onto which content can easily be pasted to produce a finished programme within minutes or hours – rather than months or years. Moreover if the content expert uses pre-made master-board powerpoint or other templates, then end-user or stakeholder preferences and feedback can be put into the programme by the writer in the very early stages of development. Archibald (2005) has accordingly defined REL as “e-learning that can be developed quickly and inexpensively”. Bersin (2005) adds to this by saying that the cost-savings are due in large part by reducing the number of people involved in the production of REL “defined as web-based training that can be created in weeks and is typically authored by subject-matter experts” - a particularly weak and useless definition ; given that all e-learning is created in weeks and authored by subject matter experts – as Bersin clearly states on his next page in Table 1 where he with some originality divides e-learning into three ‘categories’ of REL packaging, conventional e-learning, and infrastructure. Terming the infrastructure as ‘strategic e-learning’ is a red-herring distractor, as is his right-most column % of Projects. An REL ‘Project’ might be a ten-minute typing exercise, while traditional e-learning generally takes months, and infrastructure to switch a traditional university to adopt e-learning may take years. To assert that 36% of all ‘projects’ are REL is excessive freedom-of-expression to try to claim some authority by comparing REL shrink-wrapping to building an open university. His left-centre column is missing a + sign in front of the second 3. I am curious about his choice of phrasing “Most [REL] create tests to measure knowledge absorption” (page 2, paragraph 5). Did I miss something in Education 101 ? or is there something called ‘absorption’ ? Is this osmotic immersion or mechanical by rote memorisation ? Anyway, Bersin does correctly identify REL as multiple-choice quiz in Table 2. (He calls his tables ‘Figures’ but his typing is misinformed.) When he writes of putting “learning professionals into coaching and facilitating roles”, you should read this word ‘professionals’ to mean business persons not teachers. I would hope all teachers are professional and already in coaching and facilitating roles. They are in my world, at least.

This Posting was hoping to review the definitions of an exciting new form of e-learning, but has been side-tracked and sunk by pre-set Readings about shrink-wrapping.

I will review the other literature later.
All Best Wishes
Paul


Archibald, D. (2005). Rapid e-learning : A growing trend. Learning Circuits, 1, 1-3. http://www.learning circuits.org/2005/jan2005/archibald.htm

Bersin, J. (2005). Making rapid e-learning work. Chief Learning Officer – online magazine. http://www.clomedia.com/content/templates/clo_article.asp?articleid=1008&zoneid=62

.

On Defining e-Learning and ‘Rapid’ e-Learning : Part 1

Hi Folks,

In order to understand a definition of so-called ‘rapid’ e-learning, we need to be clear on what we understand by conventional e-learning.

E-learning is a relatively new term, and derives from the development of alliances and consortia consisting of corporate businesses and education providers emerging at around 1995 (Jegede, 2001, p.75). Hirumi (2002, p.19) has defined e-learning as learning that is stimulated primarily through the use of telecommunication technologies, such as electronic mail, bulletin board systems, electronic whiteboards, internet-relay chat, desktop video conferencing and the world-wide-web. And a simple working definition has been given by Jung as the internet-based delivery of information, communication, education, and training (Jung, 2002, p. 63). A full treatment of terminologies and definition of e-learning are given in Kawachi (2005), where conventional e-learning is defined as learning that utilizes electronic means of information and knowledge management in a wide sense, and social constructivist learning through computer-mediated communications in a virtual space in a narrow sense.

All Best Wishes
Paul

Kawachi, P. (2005). Computers, multimedia and e-learning.
In U.V. Reddi & S. Mishra (Eds.), Educational media in Asia, (pp. 97-122). Vancouver : Commonwealth of Learning.

Hirumi, A. (2002). The design and sequencing of e-learning interactions : A grounded approach. International Journal on E-Learning 1(1): 19-27. http://www.aace.org/dl/index.cfm/fuseaction/ViewPaper/id/6526/

Jegede, O. (2001). Hong Kong. In O. Jegede, & G. Shive (Eds.), Open and distance education in the Asia Pacific region (pp. 44-79). Hong Kong : Open University of Hong Kong Press.

Jung, I. (2002). Promises and challenges of e-learning in a globalized society. Plenary Session II, Proceedings of the 16 th Annual Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities, 5-7 November, Seoul, Korea. http://www.aaou.or.kr

On Synchronous Collaboration

Dear Folks,

I think there is some need here to discuss if and how collaborative group learning can be achieved using synchronous media.

As I have mentioned before, the distinction between cooperative learning and collaborative learning must always be kept in mind, and moreover cooperative synchronous media are useful in the initial stage of brainstorming or framing a problem, while collaborative asynchronous media are better for the vertical thinking next followed by the horizontal dialectic thinking. And synchronous cooperative learning suits the final stage of personal meaning making, experiential learning and accreditation including publishing. The middle stages involve hypotheses testing and problem solving. I have previously held that the important central stages must be collaborative and asynchronous. Here however it is worthwhile to consider if and how these processes could be achieved synchronously – with specific reference to using a virtual classroom.
I have briefly reviewed the relevant literature, and found two possible scaffolding structures, and these are worthwhile elucidating here. If anyone has any other structure, then please let me know.

The first is by Zimmer (1995) and I interpret his structure as three functional turn-taking steps ABA between two persons A and B which when repeated as BAB give both participants the opportunities each to give opinions and receive counter-opinions empathetically, as follows :-

A) (Hello) Affirm + Elicitation
B) Opinion + Request understanding
A) Confirm + Counter-opinion
B) Affirm + Elicitation
A) Opinion + Request understanding
B) Confirm + Counter-opinion

The second I have drawn from analysis of ideas given by Probst (1987) for collaborative learning in literature and art, in which transactions are not aimed at hypotheses-testing characterised by counter-opinion, but rather a new insight built on critical reflection that while shared may be personalised in each individual. In literature, learning is not cooperative : there is no ‘knower’, the tutor does not guide the student to some pre-set conclusion of the meaning of the text. In literature, the tutor or any student (A) elicits opinion to initiate the three functional turn-taking steps BAB (followed by ABA) , as follows ; -

A) (Hello) Affirm + Elicitation

B) Opinion / Analysis + Request understanding
A) Affirm + Elicitation of Evidence
B) Reflect + Elicit other opinions / Analyses

A) Opinion / Analysis + Request understanding
B) Affirm + Elicitation of Evidence
A) Reflect + Elicit other opinions / Analyses

This framework - basically of reflective analysis followed by articulation, bring in ideas from other own reading or elicited from other students, then repeat reflective analysis with accommodation to construct a new insight – involves the same cognitive processes that occur in individual learning. In the group, content comes from texts and other students, while in the individual learning, content comes only from texts, and in both cases it is the transactions between the student and the content that creates the new knowledge in the student.

There are two additional aspects to consider. One is to implore the participants to be explicit in articulating their feelings since the illocutionary force is lost without video and cultural empathy. In other words use phrases such as “I am confused”, “I am sorry” or “I don’t understand” rather than silence or ambiguous phrases like “Why not this” or “I think I see what you are getting at”. And the other is to keep the virtual classroom uncluttered by moving massive discourse away to a virtual coffee shop or to a blog.

In both the above frameworks, I suggest that any participant(s) may be behind either voice, so the framework could be effective for more than two persons at the same time. Bork (2001) has suggested the optimal number may be four in collaborative transactions, in an optimal online class-size of twenty students, while six has been reported by Laurillard (2002) and about ten by others. Wang (2002) has asserted that engaging as many participants as possible would maximise diversity and optimise collaborative learning. Zimmer (1995) has found that provided at least one participant is aware of the framework, then in practice collaborative learning succeeds.

Concerning synchronous cooperative (in contrast to collaborative) group learning, the optimum number of active participants is different from that for asynchronous collaborative learning. An online survey of those on the DEOS-L listserv, who have had relevant experience in conducting synchronous ‘chat’ (Neubauer, 2003), found the optimum number was from 10 to 20 students : if students were new to the synchronous media then 5-7 was optimum, in groups of 10-15 mixed-experience students then 10 was optimum, while if students were experienced and the moderator (tutor) also was experienced then 15 was optimum. And 20 was suggested as the upper limit to keep the discussion at a sufficiently fast rate to maintain high interest levels. There seemed to be a marked difference between respondents who found 5-7 was optimum and those who found 20 was optimum, and this difference might be related to the task at hand : 5-7 new students would imply that they were at the early initial stage of forming a learning community with personal introductions and so on, while 20 students were likely at the final stage sharing course experiences.

These two frameworks each indicate what content should optimally be included in an utterance, and specifies in what serial order to progress towards achieving discovery and co-construction of new understanding and new knowledge collaboratively using synchronous media such as the virtual classroom.
I could expound further but I am a bit busy actually.
All Best Wishes
Paul


Bork, A. (2001). What is needed for effective learning on the Internet. Educational Technology and Society. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~bork/effectivelearning.htm

Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking university teaching : A conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies. London : RoutledgeFalmer.

Neubauer, M. (2003). Number of online participants. Online posting January 22 to the Distance Education Online Symposium. http://lists.psu.edu/archives/deos-1.html

Probst, R.E. (1987). Transactional theory in the teaching of literature. ERIC Digest ED 284 274. http://www.ed.gov/databases/ERIC_Digests/ed284274.html

Wang, H. (2002). The use of WebBoard in asynchronous learning. Learning Technology newsletter, 4 (2): 2-3. http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/

Zimmer, B. (1995). The empathy templates : A way to support collaborative learning. In F. Lockwood (Ed.), Open and Distance Learning Today (pp. 139-150). London : Routledge.

Synchronous Media in Education : Summary

Hi Folks,
Synchrony Revisited -

Not to waste such a valuable resource, I want to summarise my learning and my experience from the various group discussions that have occurred synchronously using WebCT Chat, Google Talk (including Google Chat and File Sharing), i-Chat, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail and other email so fast that they crossover in the post and must be considered synchronous, mobile-phone and landline telephone. Also live Webinar will be included – especially since it is my favourite tool for future adoption.

Google Apps includes a range of applications generally free of cost to universities in the States built around a gmail hub, with G Calendar and G Talk. Some universities have added social software applications such as photo sharing and calendar sharing, and educational resource building software such as file uploading, storage, search and retrieval. If G Library and i-Library are not already out there somewhere, I predict they will be very soon. Can Blackboard and WebCt keep up with these fast innovative newcomers ? I predict WebCT will downsize to modular units to compete perhaps through offering a free basic version, and G Moodle will likely be launched before or after that.

The irony of synchrony is that its key advantage of simultaneous voice-to-voice is also its key disadvantage. Participants must be online at the same time, with compatible hardware and software. Moreover, participants must be well-prepared ; for human-technological interaction, human-human interaction, and human-content interaction. The technological aspect is not easy and requires preparation and pre-testing. The human-human aspect needs social skills especially of a moderator or conversation leader (though I believe we have had successful interactions where this role was distributed and shared). The human-content aspect needs the participants to have exchanged and shared the agenda and text/visual content beforehand, have read these, assimilated these to their prior knowledge, experience and new studies, reflected upon and re-read these, and have their coherent contribution written out ready. In the next ten years I expect most synchronous tools will move over from one-dimensional (talk) and two-dimensional video and file-sharing to three-dimensional virtual learning spaces. I predict that every university will be offering virtual world education within a year. Evidence to support this prediction includes the fact that the leading universities are already out there virtually, and these all becoming four-dimensional (with lesson transcript retrieval and so on). Moreover leading game software edutainment is based on virtual reality – no doubt we may realize this tomorrow …

Finally I would like to look at the potential for synchrony to help in achieving group assignments. I think this is looking in the wrong direction for adult education. Peer-to-peer and studying together are helpful in schools (and pre-school), but is not highly accredited in universities simply because participation and contribution rates vary. Synchronous group activities online may thrive in the distance education network such as that in New Zealand where children stay at home everyday and study online with regular visits by a school tutor. Cram schools or university preparatory schools such as those in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore will also benefit from adopting synchronous group study. In adult education which I believe now includes most tertiary education, synchronous media can only be used to complement asynchronous actual learning. Here, the synchronous media most likely to succeed will be the webinar with a skilled tutor participating, and the free student-to-student applications. Examples of group assignments that might benefit from using synchronous media (with the proviso that asynchronous learning is done) might include initial self-introductions to speak what you expect to get out of the course, and what dreams and apprehensions you have about the course. Brainstorming will be a leading learning exercise using synchronous, and the webinar will suit this, although other conferencing media such as Skype may work satisfactorily. Then the next stages of learning must be asynchronous. Only the final experiential stage may then benefit from synchronous media. The final stage could be interview teacher-to-student about the course, points covered, things learnt, reasons, and so on – in other words a viva voce. Accordingly synchronous media may become more widely adopted as a standard accreditation technique.

I rest. I want to read some more and add to the above if need be later.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Google Apps - Part 2

Hi Folks,
This is a continuation from my previous Post below on Google Calendar to look in more detail at how Google Apps is being used by various educational institutions. The basic links are hypertext linked in the previous Post for you.
I have reviewed Arizona State University earlier. Here I would like to look at Northwestern University (Evanston, Chicago) and the only other N.Am. university listed - Lakehead University (Ontario, Canada). Then for a change in cultural spice, I will look at the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University (New Delhi, India) and the Victoria Junior College (Marine Vista, Singapore).
First however here is a screen grab of Google Apps-type personal calendar in use at a central Japan university (I mentioned this last time), that has been up and running for about two years based presumably on Microsoft Calendar or on an early Google Calendar beta.



Now to Northwestern University ; there are more than ten million hits for this university, so I selected only the first page links from - of course - Google Search ;-)
They have their own branded version of Google Apps, and they call their online Calendar 'Plan-It Purple', with each student having his or her own 'My Plan-It' (in a Chicago accent, I guess, this sounds like 'My planet' ?). This seems to be only for students since the official webpages such as that of the registrar still use html, and pdf (click here to view it)
Their music school at www.music.northwestern.edu may be using another version since it is out-of-date showing June, though it is July in Chicago. Here is a screen grab superimposed in time and place over the WestGa July 1 dated WebCT calendar ;-



Their law school at www.law.northwestern.edu uses Blackboard, and has what appears to be a non-Google Apps installed as their Course Management System at https://courses/northwestern.edu/webapps/login. This could have Google behind the scenes, and if so this suggests the possibility for universities with Blackboard or WebCT to use Google Apps. One of the clear advantages of accepting Google Apps is that they replace (somewhat slowly) piece-by-piece student-by-student the pre-existing links and put in gmail as the hub of the new communications systems. So the indications from my brief look at Northwestern are that the full Google Apps installation may be not yet completed. Along the same lines, having started in mid-April 2007, Arizona State University plans to complete the switch before the end of the 2007 academic year - fairly soon.
The only other North American university listed by google is Lakehead University. Their CIO (Chief Intelligent Officer ?) writes "Google's track record [i.e. their past] is consonant with Lakehead's philosophy of innovative thinking" - this sentence surely should make one wonder about the cart and the horse. Lakehead set their own criteria for a replacement system as a solution to their communications problems ;
o . . High availability
o . . Scale to grow with Lakehead's enrollment growth
o . . Be fully secure
o . . Have storage space similar to, if not better than, what is beng offered by free email service providers, and
o . . be able to offer email for life for Lakehead alumni
One may wonder why the last criterion was included : their website and that of Northwestern, as well as others I guess, all have links on their pages for giving $$$ to support the alma mater ; - having one's alumni locked in seems a good criterion in this light. They chose Google Apps from a range of similar systems, and deployed gmail, G Calendar, and G Talk (for G Chat and VoIP). These three seem to be the minimum set of Google Apps. They say they will save C$6~7 million by avoiding upcoming Microsoft Exchange upgrading or re-design costs, and maintenance recurrent costs of C$2~3 million/year. Arizona State University saved US$353,000/year on email costs for its 65,000 students.

The Faculty of Management Studies of Delhi University at www.fms.edu have installed Picasa photo uploading and sharing as well. And they still keep their old message boards, and forums. They have made the files uploading function through Google Talk into a searchable storage and retrieval resource. I didn't know this was included into Google Apps, so it might be FMS software or may be G Docs and Spreadsheets beta. Moreover they advocate students share calendars for their friends' birthdays and anniverseries [sic] - adding a degree of socialization into their business-oriented courses. At least their Google Calendar does work, and shows the correct date today as 02 July.

Lastly, please let me briefly look at Victoria Junior College (Marine Vista, Singapore) at www.vjc.moe.edu.sg, one of the best university preparatory colleges in Singapore. Their Calendar of Events has been temporarily suspended. They use Blackboard as does the Ministry of Education, Singapore (click here to view) . And notice Moodle also in the right column of sponsored adverts beneath Blackboard. Surprisingly (since blogger is NOT included into Google Apps) VJC has an acclaimed award-winning students' blog (http://cosiety.vjc.sg) that doesn't appear to be a google-blog. VJC also has an award-winning blog about Second Life VJC . I put this in red, because I think this is a worthwhile direction for educational institutions to move towards. Both blogs appear to be hosted by wordpress.com, not G Blogger. The Second Life VJC started in April 2007, and is a blog-based learning resource for the 'General Paper' for university entrance in Singapore to expose students to new ideas and concepts to learn to write something worthwhile in the General Paper examination. The blog is brilliant - far better than this one you are reading. Second Life VJC reports on their hopes to get into second-life, with their application still-pending for the new island for Singaporeans only, to be named 'Lion City'. While this is drifting away from Google Apps review, it does highlight the absence of Google Blogger integration with the gmail-hub.

Google Apps 2007 say "hundreds of schools" have converted to Google Apps (click here to read) and you can read about "many schools around the world", through a link there. In summary, these mainly extol the benefits of gmail and its spam filter - such has online life become that the quality of the trash basket is the quality of life !! (Please don't overlook the point in my previous posting that gmail does have sponsored adverts included into each email, and / but excludes those spam not paying $ to google.)

At Northwestern, it was the students who told the university to implement Google Apps so the university can focus on education while outsourcing the communication services to google. It does say a lot about education when the students complain about the quality of communication by the university. That said, I have first heard this new word "calendaring' from Arizona State University. Is this a gerund from the verb 'to calendar' ?

Should I review the rival Windows Calendar here ???
It comes free inside the new 2007 Microsoft Office suite, and fully integrates with Windows Vista. There are 123,000,000 hits on a google search !!! on 'microsoft calendar'. Google are not to be undone though and introduce emigration switchover from Microsoft's calendar to its own (but not vice-versa away from Google) similar to its functioning export into gmail. Please see this screen grab, it is worthwhile inserting here
or click here to go to the live page , and notice we can put Google Calendar into our own website independently of Google Apps, and moreover add weather forecasting into Google Calendar.

More on Second Life later, and on Windows Calendar, and ...
All Best Wishes
sleepy Paul

Review of Google Calendar

Dear Folks,
I hope this Post is not too long. Please bear with me. There are several issues to be covered in a review, step by step.
There are four stages of critical thinking for learning. The first stage involves one's own brainstorming or mind-mapping, before considering the theory and ideas of others. So I would first like to reflect on what a Calendar should do for me, or for others in my experience and knowledge.

I have a tiny calendar on my blog, which is pretty and fairly useless since it is not at all interactive apart from showing the date in the USA. What I want and will build into my new website and blog within the website is an interactive calendar which has each day hypertext linked to notes or webpages. That I would have to update it at midnight each day if I wanted the day’s date to be highlighted is hardly necessary since my computer has the date on the desktop screen anyway (so does my office wall). With the hypertext linked days, and my own html, the calendar is easily uploadable to any website, is safely on a flash-memory stick in my pocket, and highly flexible and adaptable – I can add the local holidays and changes in schedule. And .Mac can synchronize my different Macs to the latest schedule. If an outsider could update events on it automatically, I would still need to okay any new schedule, but if my college administration could move beyond a whiteboard nailed on their office wall to using a keyboard then it would be nice to get updates and warnings of forthcoming or re-scheduled meetings - or even meeting agendas in advance.

Next I would like to mention how online calendars are currently being used by other college faculty and students in my experience. My own college does not have any calendar online whatsoever. I do, of course, plus the Mac iCal, and a Mac Dashboard widget calendar. A new hospital down the road with a new computer system and its own systems software has a hospital-wide calendar on its homepage, giving only the most general information such as holidays, but not departmental information such as out-patient clinic schedule or any doctor’s own meetings. My local university is aware of Google Calendar and is trying to get each department – at least each faculty – to use it, without noticeable success yet. It is still early days : Google Calendar was announced in early April 2007 (I believe). A major university in mid-Japan have their own calendar, and all students can enter their own password to access their own lesson schedule, homework assignments and due dates, and submit files by email - all seamlessly - provided the student is awake and studies. The students use it 24/7 and even access it from home as a personal organizer.

I must include Arizona State University in my experience too since it was required pre-set reading. I don’t want to waste ink on that Reading 5 , which is a magazine article with the print-out text compressed to within a 43mm column crowded out by advertisements. It is an old article from October 2006 talking about Arizona State University partnering with Google (it doesn’t say who paid whom here, but Arizona State gets promotion by being the only featured university on Google's Apps page 3 and the writer was enthusing about getting gmail for its students. Wow. He writes that the university will become defined by who it includes rather than by who it excludes. Very noble words considering the Google Apps it installed has Google Talk that generally excludes all their 2006 current students who had Mac (before Intel) or Linux computers. G Apps is however touted as cross-platform - for Windows, Mac and Linux, but the G Pack (including Google Talk) is only for Windows, Firefox and Explorer, so I am confused. The G Pack for Mac includes only G Notifier (gmail), G Picasa (upload photos instead of using iPhoto), G Desktop (search your screen, instead of using Spotlight), G Earth, G Sketch Up (for drawing pictures in 3D) and the G Toolbar.

Google Apps is free for educational institutions .

Several universities have adopted G Apps - including Northwestern U Chicago, U Tempe Arizona, Lakehead U Ontario, Hofstra U Long Island, a few business colleges, Victoria Junior College Singapore, a school in Thailand, a U in Colombia, another U in Macedonia (not sure where Macedonia is ? somewhere near Greece ??) and a faculty at Delhi U India. Delhi University reported that the point they were most pleased with was the reduced spam in their email inbox - so kudos here for the gmail spam blocker. Gmail does of course come with paid advertisements on the right-hand side, so this could be called blocking free spam and only paying spam allowed in ? I guess we can include WestGa in users of Google Apps in as much as it invites us to review Google Apps. I am still very cautious about becoming overly dependent on any one system.

And so now on to Google Calendar. Nothing but praise here. I have read ten or twenty pages with no bad criticism at all. It seems to be the keystone of the Google Apps applications package and works beautifully, detecting dates and events in gmail for instant request to be pasted into Calendar and even gmailing you reminders for upcoming events (let's just hope they don't start charging for gmail or for including in even more advertisements into each gmail message - they say these are still "optional for students" ... ). They also say they will call me on my mobile phone to remind me of upcoming Calendar events - but I cannot imagine this is a free service (ringing me each morning to wake me up, and before each lesson, and before each meeting surely will cost someone - perhaps other mobile phone users will have their fixed contract rates increased to cover tthe free services to others - or perhaps the advertising will increase. I have heard some free telephone forwarding service adds in some advertisement at the beginning of each call. I am sceptical, but I am seriously considering installing this on my new Mac, to test it out. I can live with the increasing number of sponsored ads in Google Search since their search engine is quite successful for my purposes and life. Will they give me the free Education Edition with the option to exclude advertisements ? - I don't think so. Maybe they will say I must get the individual Standard Edition with fixed advertisements included inside each gmail. Well, one way to find out is to try ! My current email and internet service provision costs me $20/month with no advertisements whatsoever. I feel like maybe I am in utopia missing out on the real world ?

All Best Wishes
Paul

On Synchronous Media for 'Office Hours'

Dear Folks,
I have discussed this topic before but it may be worthwhile to recapitulate here.
With global e-learning, online tutoring requires a team approach for 24/7 availability and service. In other words five or six tutors taking turn being online and available. Google Talk would be very clear and useful in one-to-one tutorial under the auspices of 'open office hours'.

Several problems are arising however.
(1) the tutor(s) may be repeating the same thing to each and every student. Some mega-universities have millions of students, and several thousand on a single course simultaneously. So therefore FAQs (frequently asked questions) need to be put up online (for asynchronous learning - like the standard Help function).
(2) the tutor and student should be engaged in objective teaching-learning discussion, but chat can easily turn to family problems, work or stress conditions and subjectivity. We do not need this synchronous interaction to become sexual or personal in any way. Students must limit their topic to the mind and education, not the heart. Teachers are generally well-trained in this, but students are not.
(3) At the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Open University, several thousand students turned up at the door of the tutor for the open-office tutorial just before the examination ... One-to-one Google Talk cannot cope with several thousand in need at the same time.

Several advantages pertain.
(1) A student can get instant direct help at the right time and right place 24/7. Pre-sent emails should communicate the essence of the difficulty and the time of the online meeting. If several students are requesting a Google Chat, the tutor can allocate five-minute chunks to each in sequence, so students are not on-hold queuing online. And the tutor can get feedback from the student instantly - emoticons are not so many but adding a photo could help fill in for the limited choice of available emoticons in Google.
(2) Google Talk is available on Windows. While windows-users don't necessarily appreciate this gift, Mac-users would opt for iChat and use live-camera and voice. Now of course Mac-users can also use Google Talk. I am not sure yet about Linux which is used significantly in developing countries.
(3) Personally I find only a few students would want to use open office hours, so the few who do should have no difficullty getting through and having a sufficient long and satisfactory tutorial. I find students who write out their problem clearly beforehand end up solving their own problem by themselves through the writing process, reflecting, and aesthetic reading which co-occurs during writing.

Well, three disadvantages aand three advantages seem to constitute an adequate balance, but not by any means a comprehensive review. A more comprehensive review and inquiry would need to ask does WestGa have open-office hours on WebCT ??
More later.
All Best Wishes
Paul

More on Google Talk (Part 3)

Hi Folks,
Google Talk is an excellent tool for online commmunication.
Here I would just like to sing more about it.
For me having Google Talk on my Mac live online alongside my Skype, WebCT Chat, Yahoo Messenger, email, mobile-phone-with-texting/photo-sharing/internet-access, and landline telephone is a very welcome addition to my synchronous communications. I have not yet changed my mind about the ineffectiveness of synchronous media alone for learning : I still feel we really need the asynchronous aspect in which the learning does take place, as Plato said - "Learning occurs in the mind, independent of time and place". Google Talk does archive the chats and voicemails and seamlessly connects to gmail (naturally) as well as file-sharing, for asynchronous learning. Here is a screen grab of Google Talk / Chat / Voicemail on my Mac.



While Google Talk does not yet have a three or more participants conferencing mode, the quality is outstanding for one-to-one voice chat. And if anyone has the wherewithal to get Google Talk, then they probably can get Skype conferencing and Yahoo conferencing - both free as well. So where does that leave the white-elephant WebCT ? It takes 200 seconds to open up its Chat Room using the fastest posssible cable connection in Japan with the newest Intel high-speed Mac. In other countries one with narrow bandwidth can only wonder and wait. And a further 30 seconds inside the WebCT Chat Room to activate the typing text-messaging function - incredibly slow. I do not however endorse a total Google environment. I think that this may lead to become overly dependent on a commercial venture business - in which even now the advertisements are overcrowding what was until last year superb search technology. That said, I also do not endorse the dependence of being locked into WebCT - since some students may use Mac or Linux systems and increasingly the digitally-unreached in developing regions globally are now entering the forum - with the high-end WebCT increasingly too overpowering for the low-end student users. I am surprised that even locally in the States, there are connectivity hassles. India (which is probably considered a developed nation by now) of course has its difficulties but they compensate by their great sense of humour, and willingness and strategies to cope with the power cuts.
Up next will be a review of Google Calendar ...
All Best Wishes
Paul

Discussion on Synchronous Media for Learning : Part 2

Hi Folks,
We have had five Readings assigned ;- Reading 1 – a list of media (no hypertext link as this is proprietary to WestGa), Reading 2 – Distance Learning and Synchronous Interaction , Reading 3 – VoIP Has Come of Age , Reading 4 – UNC’s Evaluation of Live Synchronous Tools , and Reading 5 – Google Apps and the New American University . I have looked through the first two and added some comment in a Post here yesterday. Discussion of the last Reading 5 is more appropriate to a separate Post later this week as it involves much more asynchronous study by me. Here I would like to go through briefly Reading 3 and Reading 4. Let’s hope the pigeons don’t kill the cat !
Both Reading 3 and Reading 4 are within the grey literature – meaning they are not published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, though they add to research resources and serve the academic community. ‘VoIP Has Come of Age' by Sandy Berger appears in a magazine LearnTech undated but carrying a copyright 2007 so we can expect this to be up-to-date. However it mentions Windows XP and 2000, but not Vista. And it mentions MacOSX but indicates Google Talk is not for Mac. So this article is dated at least by one more year backwards. Sandy writes that "you need an invitation to open a Gmail account" (page 1). This is no longer true. The overall impression from this article is that "although you can use these [VoIP synchronous tools] over a dial-up connection, a broadband connection like cable or DSL is really necessary for adequate speed for the voice transmissions". The implication is that VoIP may be not useful in the developing world : since it really does benefit from good broadband infrastructure, VoIP does not reduce the digital divide. However in my own experience across Asia, VoIP is being very keenly adopted (in 2007) – as well as gmail accounts – because they are free of recurrent costs. If we were to compare VoIP with WebCT-chat , then cost may likely be a leading concern – particularly if we were to aim for open access and inclusivity. Sandy concludes with two caveats ; - one, that you need to be near your computer to see or hear a call coming in, and two, that there is some echo. We have tested out VoIP Google Talk and Skype, and external speakers compensate for the low-volume of most computer built-in speakers, and echo can be eliminated by using headphones. Both these problems were initially experienced and were both resolved perfectly satisfactorily.
One of the great things about the grey literature is being free of editorial oversight : the author(s) can invent new punctuation and new words without fear of being hammered. In Reading 4 (a 'Final Report') for instance, the authors choose not to use a period full-stop at the end of their Abstract, and not the three dots signifying to be continued; rather, they choose two dots which is cute – somewhere between one dot and three dots. Reading 4 is an in-house report on the four synchronous tools that they use and also reviewed by their staff who use them. No comparison is made to tools they don't use, and there is no outsider review comment. The most detrimental aspect however is that this is written by teachers for teachers with no concern and no mention at all whether or not these tools improve learning. No student comments were included, and no recognized evaluation design on the achieved quality of learning using these tools. So when they say it was easy to use by the teacher familiar with it, there is just total absence as to what the students thought or whatever. (They write "and other information from faculty and other active users" – if they mean students here, surely they should expressly say so.) It is a subjective not objective report – actually a collection of subjective reports. It is true that two subjective perspectives can produce an objective result, but their second subjective perspective was from the vendors. However, I do recommend your reading this article. They clearly state that it is intended for "potential instructional and collaborative use within" their campuses ( I suspect they mean 'cooperative' here), and it fulfills their mandate. How useful is this report to others ? ummm it reviews Centra Symposium 7.5, Elluminate Academic version 6.5, Horizon Wimba Live Classroom 4.2, and Macromedia Breeze Meeting version 5, and concludes of the four that Centra was best, and Elluminate was second. Centra was cited for its conferencing capabilities and advance organizer 'agenda builder' (which I personally think is a necessary tool for any meeting online or offline), and Elluminate was cited for its cross-platform compatibility with Windows and Mac simultaneously. They say Horizon Wimba is cross-platform, but don't mention Mac, only citing its compatibility with Blackboard and WebCT. WestGa use Horizon Wimba, and perhaps others - Is there a review available among the University System of Georgia, and do Georgia find Horizon Wimba to be the best? From these four reviews, I would choose Macromedia because is highly customizable and accessible by most students using basic Macromedia Flash (free reader, and widely available through Macromedia Flash creation tools such as Dreamweaver). Reading 4 does not include any review of any open source free tools. I am curious, but then the authors probably have no idea or experience or care about such free tools. Maybe the TLTC Board that instigated the review wanted to know whether it was or not getting value for the hundreds of thousands of dollars it has spent. Moodle and many other open source teaching / learning tools are taking a greater share of the market day-by-day, and reviewing only those expensive tools that they have already installed leaves room for further review studies. Of their four moreover, which did the students prefer? Which brought about the most stimulating educational experience for the students and achieved the best improvement in quality of learning?
All Best Wishes
Paul

Discussion on Synchronous Media for Learning : Part 1

Dear Folks,
In order to discuss the merits and demerits of synchronous media and of asynchronous media for learning, it is essential to know and keep in mind the precise distinction between cooperative learning and collaborative learning. Many lax writers tend to use the term collaborative for fashionable unwarranted claim to authority, since collaborative is more complex and desirable being the mode for non-foundational co-creation of new knowledge. I have previously clarified in detail ad laborium the distinction between group cooperative learning and group collaborative learning (see for instance my Papers, and my Impatica presentation). The Impatica presentation elucidated thus ; “If in a group, there may be someone who knows the content already for example there is a teacher or expert among your group, in which case learning can proceed by repetition, demonstration, translation and sharing cooperatively. If there is no–one among your group who knows the answer, then participants offer up hypotheses in turn to bridge the unknown gap and co-construct new knowledge co-owned by the participants collaboratively. … Learning in a group has two distinct ways depending on whether or not there is a knower in the group.” Please refer to the sources for elaboration.
Here, I want to offer up a critique of the relevant literature, especially of the pre-set readings.
First, Reading 1 says that online synchronous tools include video conferencing, real-time chat or instant messaging, whiteboards, application sharing, survey and polling tools, and moderating tools. Video conferencing can be a most effective synchronous tool, but requires a pre-arranged schedule, agenda, pre-distributed textual materiel, and pre-reading – all of which are asynchronous. Whiteboards are synchronous, and would benefit from adding an E-Beam device for recording, archiving and re-use. See http://www.e-beam.com and in practice Al-Shalabi, H., & Al-Jufout, S. (2005). The electronic classroom through embedded e-learning in Jordan. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 3 (2), 42-47. available online at http://www.AsianJDE.org/2005v3.2.Al-Shalabi.pdf . Application sharing is synchronous and maybe facilitates technology skills training (though not practice by the student and feedback) and trouble-shooting, but hardly constitutes learning in the synchronous mode because the student needs to read, reflect, recall prior knowledge and then get back to the screen – all of which are asynchronous. Students also read for comprehension with assimilation at different rates depending on native language, age and gender – see for instance Kawachi, P. (2002). On-line and off-line reading English rates : Differences according to L1, gender, and age. Proceedings of the XVI Annual Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities. Seoul, Korea, 5-7 November, available online from http://www.Open-Ed.net/Kawachi-reading.pdf in particular here is a plot from SPSS analysis that gives not-the-50%-average reading rate, but the rate at 98% inclusivity : ie the low curves above which 98% of readers are included, and this circumvents the inherent uselessness of 50%-average rates in which half the students by definition cannot cope.



Application-sharing can be synchronous and has been covered earlier today in my post on Google Talk, with the proviso that word.doc files sent will need reading time asynchronously, but slides.ppt and video.imp can be synchronous. A URL shared file is either synchronous or asynchronous depending on the complexity of the task and density of the content on the web-screen. Survey and polling tools need reflection and are not suited to synchronous use. And finally in that list, moderating controls are asynchronous not synchronous. You can moderate something only after it has been presented, though you could put in place synchronous blocking of foul language – Is this what synchronous moderating is about ?
Now let me move on to a review of Reading 2 ‘Distance Learning and Synchronous Interaction’ by Joel Foreman, available online from clicking here . This article is old, first published in 2003. My critique here is mainly negative. Joel does not comprehend the essence of asynchrony for collaborative learning and writes that asynchronous tools are “primitive and significantly limit interactivity and collaborative learning” (page 1). He is wrong. Moreover findings published in May 2007 by Doshisha University in a well-designed carefully controlled study found better quality learning achieved by students using asynchronous e-learning media compared with synchronous lectures, seminars, and slides.ppt. Doshisha University followed students over one year from April 2006 to March 2007, and attributed the better quality asynchronous learning to the potential for students to re-play any part as much as they wished or needed for comprehension. To my knowledge of the no-significant-difference debate, this is the first clear study to report a valid significant difference between asynchronous and synchronous learning. Joel goes on to say that synchronous chat needs good writing and typing skills “which are not widely available” (page 2) – he may likely be talking about himself here. Continuing on page 2, he goes on to write that synchronous conferencing can enable a group to “collaborative write and edit a document”. I would really like to see two or more persons correcting grammar simultaneously on the same open shared document ! On page 3, he writes that “VoIP is intrusive and clumsy” – his writing is out-dated. On page 4, he reveals his colours by saying he is involved with xxxx (I won’t support his unprofessional example of self-promotion and advertising) calling it a brainchild he ebulliently writes that his synchronous tool can get all members in a group to orient themselves to the mission, analyze and sequence the task and perform metacognitive reflections to arrive at a solution. Apart from most of his mentioned activities being asynchronous, I would like to see his great synchronous tool get Jupiter Team together online and complete a group report :-) He concludes (page 5) by saying all too truly that “Under the best circumstances, the students will divide the work, perform it separately, and then gather online …” In other words asynchronous is better.
Synchronous media introduce severe pacing which reduces learner autonomy. I am not against reducing learner autonomy or pacing, but adult education theory at least is against it.
More tomorrow, after some further reflection asynchronously.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Google Talk - further explorations

Hi Folks,
A few more words on Google Talk to bring Folks up to date on my explorations.
First, it really does help if each speaker wears good quality headphones – so that the incoming voice does not enter into the other person’s microphone that causes a two-second delayed echo.
Google Talk allows for file sharing. I have exchanged pictures.jpg, word.doc, slides.ppt, and clickable URL that can open up a shared view of a website. I am keen to try out video.imp on Google file-sharing in the next few days. Then with patient slow clear discussions not only cooperative but also collaborative group learning was achieved. Santa Claus might like to know that such VoIP guidance can enable the listener to take an online test with surreptitious fraudulent help from others. We tested it out and the results were perfect. Cooperative learning was achieved by one sender of ppt talking through the content using text-messaging and voice. Collaborative learning was achieved by one person suggesting a potential hypothetical way forward and the other – as well as the speaker – testing this out to see if movement towards a common goal was viable. Then from that stage co-exploring how to move on to a next stage closer to the common goal. All transfers of materiel and all text-messages are archived ; only individual own voice recordings would be necessary in order to produce complete archives of the learning transactions. All this was free of cost, and to a far extent, I believe, a virtual classroom. At least it would be effective for a tutorial, technology skills instruction, and collaboration on ways to proceed with asynchronous media. Accordingly Google Talk is effective in and for distance education, and for open education. In particular with respect to open education, Google Talk would be effective for online tutorials and tutor-student discussions - what may be called 'open-office-hours' when anyone can log in to chat, text-message and file-share to and from each other. Ideal for example for the tutor to comment on a student's essay and get a response from the student in turn (though I hope Santa knows this might not be authenticatable). The advantages would certainly include the any-where aspect, and while the time must be pre-set for both student and teacher to be online at the same time, either could be in pyjamas at the time in a different global time-zone, so this I think would mean the any-time aspect is reasonably fulfilled too. The free-of-cost and superb audio and file-sharing qualities of Google Talk makes this a great distance learning tool. Would this be more convenient than the chat feature in WebCT ? - this would depend largely on whether or not you have the several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for the WebCT licence. If you do, then WebCT would have the integrated capabilities for such chat to be logged against each student and into their e-learning portfolios, as well as into the tutor's e-teaching portfolio - both of which would clearly be advantageous in mega-universities with thousands of tutors and millions of students.
As far as Google University is concerned and the offer by Google to allow a university to put their own branding on the media, I am not at all convinced this would be acceptable to the institutional authorities just yet. WebCT has been an expensive option with costs being raised year by year, and anything ‘free’ might be viewed with some incredulity. However, I have not reviewed Google University yet, although I find the sponsored hits on Google Search more than annoying nowadays – appearing not only at the top, but intermingled with research results with very tiny words alongside saying sponsored. A flexible and highly adaptive approach to adopting technology seems to be the most recommendable way forward. At the moment Google Talk is really great.
All Best Wishes
Paul

On Reflecting

Hi Folks,
I have been reflecting on my Post earlier today, especially on the sentences about students in a virtual classroom raising their hands to signal cueing. How can students within a group given only as logged-in names signal to the teacher ? It really does seem that a little 'raise a hand' tab button works ideally. Notwithstanding this, it does bring to my mind the methods used in my infant school days. I just wonder whether this is too harsh a criticism of the technique, or merely simplicity itself. In a large class, we cannot be efficient if all students are talking simultaneously and some technique must be employed.
I don't know what alternative could be viable in practice. This would lead me further along in my belief that synchrony is not as good as asynchronous messaging, email, discussion board and so on - that have the time between utterances for deeper reflection and informed response.
Still reflecting . . . and in this asynchronous blog, I have the time between utterances to think and study, read and weigh possible alternatives . . .
All Best Wishes
Paul

On Synchrony

Dear Folks,
I thought a few words here might be appropriate about the use of synchronous (live chat) media compared with asynchronous (email, discussion board) media.
Synchronous media entail the familiarity of facial cues, voice, and even socialization such as chat about one's likes/ dislikes, family and so on. In the virtual classroom or Webinar, the teacher can deliver a lecture with traditional methods such as visuals (powerpoint or e-scans of drawings) and talking, can check the student's attendance, and even ask the students a question ("Raise your hands if you know the answer" which takes me back nostalgically to my infant school days). We certainly don't find today's teenagers using this style with their MySpace chats, which makes me think the designers of WebCT must be fifty years old or more. Is the ultimate goal of high technology just to re-create the Victorian classroom ? There is a case for such re-created familiarity in enabling learning - to extend the student's context into the room, so that the teaching occurs within the student's world. However, that socialization can be described as reducing anxiety and reducing other psychological barriers to learning. Do I myself want to see the faces of other students / teachers / visitors? I recommend your reading the article by Nigel Blake

Blake, N. (2000) 'Tutors and Students without Faces or Places', Special Issue: Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of Online Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 34, no. 1. pp. 183-197.

Moreover, I would guess that the teacher in the virtual classroom has (or had) technical support to make it all work, but as far as I can determine none of the students did. Though I will go back and go through the 'Help' button on my computer to see what technical support there is for me - ASYNCHRONOUSLY of course.
So now let's examine the asynchronous aspect. How many of the students in that virtual classroom had done the required / suggested reading (Module 8, Readings 1, 2 3, 4, and 5) ?? I wonder. As for me, I read only slowly, dissecting, reflecting, and re-reading many times over. And I still plan to re-read yet more times. So I wouldn't say that I have finished the reading. I think asynchronous media such as reading and writing are much more powerful teaching and learning media than being in the same room at the same time as peers and teachers. I heard somewhere that learning never occurs inside the classroom, but afterwards where the student has some cognitive intellectual space to reflect and put things in order in their mind, putting things together and joining up points with their prior experience and knowledge. The face-to-face episode in the classroom only serves as a stimulus or guideline. I believe learning occurs at one's own time, pace and place - and this not necessarily at 3:00 a.m. in the morning in a live virtual classroom.

Oh I learnt many things today this early morning, through synchronous media. I learnt how practice with the media would be a prerequisite for more effective participation, how useful an 'advance organiser' would be in synchronous virtual lessons (an advance organiser is like an agenda or proposed schedule and topics, distributed or disseminated beforehand). And I learnt how wonderful Google Talk was !! I would really recommend Google Talk to everyone. I have heard that Skype has more functionality (I have reviewed Skype at length earlier), and that Google Talk was plain and simple - but here I would like to say that the quality of the plain-and-simple Google Talk was overwhelming, and to be recommended : so refreshing, even at 3:00 a.m. in the morning.

I would also like to add that Google Talk is free.
Whereas a WebCT licence (for the bells and whistles and virtual classroom) is several thousand dollars per year, plus technical support. The Chronicle of Higher Education puts the cost of WebCT at several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year (see the article here) . More than my week's wages anyway !
I will continue this discussion here asynchronously of course.
My thanks really to Stacey - I really enjoyed our live chat, and to Pam always.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Windows inside Mac

Hi Folks,
Here is the latest news ; the screen-grab photo below of my Google Talk up and working inside Windows inside my Mac.
I have not yet found out what a WestGa 'Google Talk email' is.
But my google account is simply paulkawachi@gmail.com.
If you type this into the 'add contacts' section it should work, to get through to me on Google Talk ...
Looking forward to talking with you !
All Best Wishes
Paul

Skype and yahoo messenger are covered a few weeks ago below, and MSN doesnt work yet (the Windows crashes inside the Mac, but I am still trying . . .

Older and Wiser - Part II

Hi Folks,
Well, I am analysing the findings from SurveyMonkey, not purely for WestGa but for my own practical use. I notice yet more demerits along the way, sadly and annoyingly.
(1) Firstly their pop-up continues to plague and contaminate my peaceful blog, no matter how much I delete my membership with them.



(2) Secondly I am just confused. I adopted their template question (my mistake) for MultiText Boxes ;- my question five = Please list your top three favourite activities for learning English (choose from ; talking, listening, watching video, reading, writing) followed my label 1st then a text box, my label 2nd then text box, and then my label 3rd and textbox.



To me, this was a simple question along the lines of their sample 'Please list your top three favourite brands of peanut butter.' One [text box], Two [ text box] Three [ text box], given above.
Mine was a loaded question since were expected to respond video, and the following question then asked which activity they would prefer to combine with video - quite useful data for me. However, it then proceeded to demand from my respondents a digital number, not text. Luckily for me I had included a closed list from which they might choose their response, and luckily for me too my students realized the confusion and input digital numbers.





Moving along a bit, I notice that the output list of respondents if you click any [view] box the respondent number-1 is Asuka according to the individual answer sheets for each respondent with the 'time started' recorded in minutes-and-seconds. Asuka was the earliest to 'start'.

But the responses elsewhere are collated in reversed order according to the minute - so the earliest three respondents are not in correct order by seconds but junked together as within the same minute - Asuka appearing as third-from-bottom instead of most-bottom, for example in any other question the [view] box gives a number to the the entry (here the bottom three 20, 19 and 18 were completed earliest - number-18 Asuka was earliest to the minute-and-second but appears as number 18.





Such a mess, and they call that analysis ! Well, I have printed out each completed response form, and will do the analysis myself. And I won't subscribe to MonkeyMonkey.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Cyberlearning Definition

Hi Folks,
Several people have asked me what did I mean when I talked about 'cyber universities'.
The earliest literature reference I can find (so far) is by Chen (2002). She coined the term one year earlier in a Paper, but here below she gives a definition.
You may recall that I mentioned the new Cyber University in Fukuoka, Japan, opened in April 2007, and more than one have been open for a couple of years in Korea administered by a consortium of universities, I believe.

As for a definition, I quote ; "Open and distance education … has evolved into the third phase – cyberlearning – conceptualized as teaching and learning interactions mediated entirely through the application of state-of-the-art information and communications technologies, such as the Internet and world wide web ... They offer real-time multicast instructional systems using videoconferencing and cable TV technology, virtual classroom systems via network-based instructional management systems, and curriculum-on-demand systems utilizing video-on-demand technology ... these cyber universities ...”
Chen, Y-J. (2002 ; p1). The development of cyberlearning in dual-mode higher education institutions in Taiwan. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 2 (2).

See also Chen, Y-J. (2001). Cyber university and adult learning. Adult Education Bimonthly, 59, 30-39. And the term 'cyberlearning' was (perhaps) first given by Han, H-W., & Wang, Y-C. (1999). Lifelong cyberlearning system : A pilot project for the learning society in the ROC. Educational Media International, 36 (2), 115-120.

I have several thousand definitions of concepts and terminology in education up on my website, in searchable alphabetic order with full literature citations - with many definitions from different authorities of the same term, to help you in your learning.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Simplified insertion of photo

Hi Folks,
Really for the Mac-users out there, but maybe the PC-users will want to switch over after this ...
After you download the free widget 'Image Upload' from Apple.com/downloads/dashboard, all you need to do is drag your image with the mouse - at the same time press F12 to callup the Dashboard - and then drop the image onto this widget. It produces an URL in your pasteboard for you to just 'paste' into your text in email, html (here), website or wherever. Voila -> http://tinyurl.com/ynsdgy
You can see how useful this will be - avoiding the needed to get into your server to upload a photograph and then type out the URL. Many thanks to the widget 'Image Upload' designer !


(photo of my garden recycle energy generator)
All Best Wishes
Paul

Wave Analysis

Dear Folks,
There was an interesting paper by Larry Leslie at Penn State that has important currency for all of us administering surveys and worried about not getting everyone to return the survey duly completed on time. Provided you record the time when you give out the questionnaire (if the same time for all the respondents, then you can effectively ignore this), and then record the exact time each is returned to you, then a simple wave analysis will give you valid and reliable findings from relatively-low response rates. I use this all the time (even though I collect 100% response rates by never using anonymity) because it can show me if there are likely to be any new response or finding were I to administer the survey to more persons or to an additional cohort.

Basically, you analyse the responses returned within the first week - and note all the different responses or categories and the distribution pattern of the frequencies of each response. Then you analyse similarly those returned in the second week. If you don't find any new category, and you find a similar distribution as in the first-week categories, then you can be fairly confident that you have captured the full range of categories and their relative incidence given in the distribution pattern. Then after you analyse those few late-respondents in the third week, if you find the same range of categories and distribution pattern, you can validly and reliably claim you have got the whole range of potential responses and their distribution pattern, even though a few responses are still not returned in the fourth or fifth week.

Actually, there may be a drift in the distribution pattern from early-respondents to late-respondents, allowing you to extrapolate the pattern drift to cover the few very-late/non-respondents. If you find new responses or a new category being given by the second-week respondents, this means that either your sample size was not sufficiently large or that the time allowed for collecting the early-respondents should be longer than one week. It is easy to change the time allowed for being in the early-respondents group, since you have the time-stamp on each return. However it is usually difficult to change the sample size. You need to do a pilot study, and have at least 2 or 3 times as many respondents as you have question items according to the SPSS version 6.1 software guidebook. However Sanjaya Mishra and Santosh Panda (page 29) in an excellent article on questionnaire design cite Tinsley & Tinsley (1987) as suggesting a ratio of 5 to 10 respondents per item - see http://www.AsianJDE.org/2007v5.1.Mishra.pdf , and Tinsley, H.E.A., & Tinsley, D. J. (1987). Uses of factor analysis in counseling psychology research. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 34, 414-424.

A pilot study should never be omitted in any case, period.

I have used wave analysis in all my studies. It can show me three cohorts from different places give a same pattern and therefore gives high confidence in the findings. In other studies, I use it to see the drift from one year to the next, over four or five years, in say the use of computers at home, or in the earlier adoption of collaborative group learning skills.
Here is the full citation ; enjoy -
Leslie, L.L. (1972) ‘Are High Response Rates Essential to Valid Surveys?’, Social Science Research, vol. 1, pp. 323-334.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Further analyses

Hi Folks,
Well, I succeeded in getting lots of data from my students. They were pretty simple data just to test out the technology and learn the idiosyncrasies of the technology. Nonetheless, the survey was a formative course assessment design, and the data are useful to consider fine-tuning the second half of their course.

I am learning to live now with the snag-it screen-grab images provided by WestGa that don't match what I see on screen - presumably because their screen shots were collected for use last year and not yet updated. This note is more a reminder to me to always go through the online courseware myself just prior to letting it loose on the world, and time permitting to go through the course again in real-time alongside the students checking for any broken links or old screen shots that could then be immediately repaired. While this could and should be done by the course writer prior to the start of the course, there is nothing as sharp and eagle-eyed as a bunch of hyperactive students.

Concerning administration of the survey, the screen-grabs did not match the current options given online by SurveyMonkey- for example; WestGa instruct 'the third option -Send link to your email list', thus



This is now perhaps the first default choice at SurveyMonkey, although it looks like the current third choice. Confusing.
The first given default choice gives me the URL for my survey - the same as that printed on the bottom of the paper when printing out tthe online survey from SurveyMonkey and used in my posting yesterday. Typing in that URL needs hyperfocal attention, so I copied and pasted it as a hypertext link into email to each student along with a personal invitation from me and a deadline by when they should complete the survey.



I tried all three options. The second requested I send my email list tio them, and they can administer the survey and automatically 'track who responds' in my list. I was a bit cautious here, in case they deluge my students with massive instructions and incomprehensible warnings to complete the survey while they watch. Anyway I didn't have the student email list at hand - not that I would have given it to them anyway - it's still illegal in Japan unless the email owner expressly agrees.

I tried the third item too for the html code, which was cool.

All Best Wishes
Paul

Older and Wiser

Hi Folks
A few comments on yesterday's offerings.

When I designed my survey (being an obsessive skeptic), I added the consecutive question number to the initial position of each question - since it was not given in the template. Fool that I was, the software then added the question numbers automatically, so I went back and deleted my numbering to avoid the questions looking like "1.1. Please ... " "2.2. Please ... " , and so on until 10.10. And the resulting survey looked okay.
However after collecting the data, the SurveyMonkey analysis deletes all their numbering leaving my results without any numbers. This is not too much strain on my memory - over only ten questions - I can recall what was Q7 without too much effort. But if this was my target survey on learning styles that has 76 items and which need to be re-sorted from random ordering into the ten Areas of Concern and then entered into SPSS, I would need the number to be given beside the response boxes in the analysis ! Not really angry, just disappointed that I had already thought of that, but their software is deceptive - hoping I guess when we have collected all our data to see the numbers are missing that we would sign up for the $$ upgrade $$.
May as well add this other point of curiosity that has resolved itself after looking at the analysis. They don't tell you why they want you to input your time zone. But then in the analysis they give you the time that each respondent 'started' the survey. The time is given correct to the second. Alas, they don't say what time this actually means, was it the time the respondent first set eyes on the questions, or the time (after reading and studying the questions for hours ?) when the respondent entered the first response. They don't give a finishing time, when the respondent presses 'done' - though that should be easiest technologically. And no data on the duration taken by the respondent - potentially very useful for a timed-limited-duration online examination. (I'll take a peek at their software html code, and talk more on this later.) I guess they really really want us to sign up for the upgrade version.
Time for a cup of tea.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Online Survey Instrument

Hi Folks,
You may be interested in the online survey instrument produced by http://www.SurveyMonkey.com . They offer a free trial of unspecified duration, for an unspecified number of surveys. On most of their webpages they present various features - for which you need to 'upgrade now' (this translates basically as you must pay money). However, the trial membership is an excellent way to get people to try it out, and find - as I did - how easy it is to use, and quite effective educationally.

I plan to 'upgrade' to full service tomorrow. Today, I would like to cover just a few points about online surveys generally, and SurveyMonkey in particular. Generally, such surveys could be divided into whether or not they are being used formatively or summatively. A formative survey could be used to gather data from current actors in order to inform a future potential revision in a course (as performed by WestGa), or as summative to judge the learning achieved (usually respondents not anonymous) or the teaching (usually anonymous) or any other completed activity. I am against anonymous surveys as a rule since anonymity can provide cover for incomplete or disruptive responses, that are difficult to repair or recover, and moreover I believe it is better to value and honour the time and effort of the respondent by acknowledging their participation.
My present survey is formative, administered in the middle of a course, and inviting feedback on future potential revisions.

I have designed and applied a SurveyMonkey to 20 students at college, and they should complete this by 6pm. No doubt, then I will be in a better position to report any glitches. The actual survey html code is very complex and looks as if it was developed by google.analytics.com based on their /urchin program. It is not adaptable by the user (i.e. me), which is a drawback. Since it is standard design protocol for surveys to use the native-language of the respondents and my students are Japanese, so then I would want to write the survey in Japanese. Even in English, I would like to adjust the amount of 'white space' in the presentation - SurveyMonkey has everything quite densely packed on the screen-page. The margin widths for my label to go beside their textbox is limited to only nine character-spaces (although in their sample they have 12, maybe because the upgrade version has more flexibility). I wrote the survey questions on paper first and reflected on these for a day or so, before entering their website and creating my survey. Everything went smoothly in retrospect, but in the creation process I did have several worries - for example we do not need to number our questions - they will do this for us. We do not have to 'save' the final creation anywhere or by any special button, they do this for us automatically. It would have been more comfortable for me if they had said we can just shut down our computer and the survey so far will be safely preserved until we next visit and log-in, (who said learners shouldn't take risks?) The 'Edit Question' button was a useful button to allow later changes. Everything was left-aligned in this trial version. I hope the full upgrade version allows for us to align text as we choose.

This morning, I decided it would be interesting in the analyses to look at the responses with respect to the time of day they were written. I can perform a wave analysis to see how results would look if I had gathered data from an unlimited large number of respondents (more on this tomorrow). My final version had ten questions ; - the first asking for the date and time (and forcing a completed response), the second their name, email address and so on (not forced) to deny anonymity, third, fourth, and sixth asked them to select one of a comprehensive range of given answers, fifth write their top three favourite learning activities using three singleline textboxes, and then seventh, eighth, and ninth used comment/essay boxes. The final tenth question asked them to select one of a given range presented on a single horizontal line. Overall, I used four types of question. SurveyMonkey offers these templates for about fifteen different types of question.
You can view my survey here , but please do NOT complete it,
because you would be corrupting my data \\\ thank you ;-)

I am keen to try to use their software to design my own template, but first I want to look at the quality and depth of their analyses, and to check if I can retrieve the raw data easily or not. More later ...
All Best Wishes
Paul

How to Annoy Visitors with a Perpetual Pop-Up

Hi Folks,
Well it's a sunny cool Monday morning out here in Japan.
And about ten weeks now since I started this blog
If it disappears from blogspot, then you can find the archive and new version on my website at www.open-ed.net . Please continue visiting there.

Ten weeks, ten weeks ... now ten weeks I have been visiting a certain study website that is run using WebCT and every time I am faced with this pop-up quiz incessantly blocking the screen. It is a great example of how NOT to design an online quiz.



Apologies to the team of quiz so-called-experts who thought this one up, but in my case and in each case of all the other newly enrolled visitors who similarly want to answer 'no experience' in all areas - this pop-up just WON'T EVER go away. Of course, I could answer the quiz, saying I have experience in one or more of the areas (not true) and it ?might? go away - but it probably would pop-up back to me with a loooongerr pop-up quiz :-(
Frustrating is not the word here. Perhaps 'annoyed' is better - annoyed at the designer's presumptious narrow-minded view. No doubt the designer was and still is (and will ever be) hoping to collect data online for his/her doctoral dissertation, and disserves every sympathy. My advice is 'Please re-design your pop-up quiz'.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Skype-with-Yahoo

Hi Folks, Greetings !
Well I tested out VoIP Skype with CapeTown and had a most enjoyable chat for one hour free - thanks Skype !
A little practice is needed to pause after a sentence, to wait to hear if the other speaker has started speaking - to take account of the few seconds delay for the voice to travel (undersea ? or satellite in tthe sky?) -
and no sooner had we set a day and time for a next chat, then Yahoo was ringing with my good friend from Delhi online.

He remarked he has Skype, which -with a large screen - I could access simultaneously, and called him on Skype too. He said on Yahoo his mic was not working, but that his speakers were - so he listened to me over Skype while I read his writing on Yahoo Messenger. This overcame the delays in typing on Yahoo in which messages often arrived a little delayed causing the transcript to appear a bit juggled.

Here is a Yahoo screen grab of this quite amazing experience -
All Best Wishes
Paul

Skype and Yahoo Messenger

Hi Folks,
I hope everyone is coming along fine.
June is here, and the rainy season (like monsoon) has started here in Japan.

Well, I downloaded the latest version of Skype version 2.6.0.140 and am pleased to say it looks and sounds like it is working. My Skype-name is paul-5 and user name is - you guessed it - Paul Kawachi.
I also joined Yahoo Messenger and there my email address is paulkawachi@yahoo.com . Other email for google is paulkawachi@gmail.com , though I hardly use this as a mailbox. All this paul-stuff is because I can never remember all those super catchy nicknames that seem epidemic, and I still believe 'simple-is-best'. Good times to catch me online is any time I am here at home ; most of Saturday and Sunday, and most evenings except Wednesday. Please try to remember Japan time is GMT +9 hours ... if you hope to catch me awake :-)
Don't waste your free five minutes of Skype trying to get through to me on my landline - my computer usually answers - better try someone you know is there then to pick up your call.
Many thanks in advance (for your patience and kind conversation)
All Best Wishes
Paul

Online Safety becomes an Issue

Hi Folks,
I thought very much before deciding that this was worth posting here.
There is a very good vlog available through Technorati and it is crosslinked to the movie up on YouTube in the open public domain without parental controls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtvKLtMnH4U about 'How to Vlog' aimed at new shy beginners - like me.

I was impressed by that episode, and would rank it pretty highly in quality. It was my own fault I guess, but I went to watch any other vlog by tthe same author. This was my mistake. Next to the 'How to vlog' one is another made just before the above one and is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CJmHboejhMXX . I don't give the hot link to it out of deep reservations and alarm. I would like to echo yet again Pam's message of online safety - and as Pam says it my duty and the duty of everyone to be responsible for protecting others. I just awaoke from nightmares still - an extremely shocking vlog - I added two xx onto the http as further precaution against your accidentally watching it. I give the URL to illustrate the point for academic reference. But you should not watch the last half of the violence. Just my humble opinion, folks. How do you think ? Is concern about online safety something for everyone else but not for you and me ?

I gave the author the benefit of doubt after watching his quite excellent 'How to vlog', but I was mistaken. I had hoped to find an equally good or better instructional vlog. My price paid so far is learning something I hope I never need, and the loss of one night's sleep. Oh I am all for strolling around the city centre in the twilight zone, and similarly I watch action movies like Narc to learn the darker side of humanity, to become a better wiser teacher and protector for my friends and students. Wow, I would caution against any use and any access to YouTube in schools or the home - since this stuff can get tthrough filtering. I was shocked, you would be too. Don't watch any other vlogs by this author. Being a teacher does have responsibilities, and teachers should also discuss these and determine where to draw the line. Maybe you don't draw the line where I do. Fair enough, but I draw the line there, and your comments are invited below (they get moderated - since I draw a line somewhere there too).
All Best Wishes
Paul

Mac Keynote compressed

Hi Folks,
A short update.
I put 20 Keynote slides into iMovie, recorded voice-over narration into Garageband and shared into iTunes as .aif, from where iMovie imported a voice track. With another track for Keynote slides and another of course for the Jupiter music ;-) this ten-minute iMovie was then compressed from 440MB in Quicktime to 6.6MB as .mov
The compression 1.5% is similar to that achievable by Impatica.
However my thoughts on all this are that the topic must be suitable for the very small screen 320x240 at the outset. Text itself is hardly legible, after compression, though voice-over is fine. This might suggest that students listen to the compressed movie with their textbook open ...
Reusable Learning Objects must be better designed than this.
Comments do get here through Blogger who email them to me for accepting (all so far).
All Best Wishes
Paul
Here is the clickable screen-grab for the Mac Keynote compressed

Reflecting ...

Hi Folks,
Please let me include two points somewhat related.
(1) While earlier I believed that yellow letters on a dark blue background are best - this was in the context I was accustomed to for conferences where slides are projected from a far distance. This is quite unlike the situation viewing a computer screen, where I would now endorse the WestGa tutorial view that dark letters on a white background may be best. Indeed I have my RLO and my websites in such colours - see below. This implies that we should produce the message to suit the media.

(2) RollsRoyce as you know build the coachwork and import the car engine from Ford (and take the Ford engine apart, polish it up until it runs smoothly), stick the price tag on all this and sell cars that run beautifully. Not unlike Impatica coachwork using a Powerpoint engine. Now Apple Mac have created (not any better word perhaps) the slide-maker system 'Keynote' that works fully digitally with pixel by pixel positioning and digital colour matching (unlike Impatica and Powerpoint). And I use keynote to make my slides. A screen grab is given below. They may take time to download, but that has yet to be discovered (Powerpoint files are largely analogue pictures with concomitant massive file sizes - while fully digital positioning etc in Mac are smaller file sizes). So here goes ... I took a set of keynote slides, saved-as html, and uploaded here with navigation controls. Let's see how they look.
All Best Wishes
Paul
Just click on the picture and watch the online slideshow -
or click here http://www.open-ed.net/library/RLO/rlo27.html
For techies out there the html is 24kB, and all the 16 slides come through at 1.5MB, they load instantly and playback ->-> beautifully. Now I don't have to convert all my Mac slides to Powerpoint - but nonetheless am deeply reading Impatica, and will try out some new stuff in the next few days. I suspect Impatica can compress Mac files with a little tweaking.

(Mac also does keynote save-as quicktime movie etc - tomorrow, ok?)

Successful Impatica

Hello Folks,
I have played around a couple of days with Impatica. At the outset here I would suggest to you to avoid using a file name that includes a hyphen, dash, underscore, or space. These are potentially problematic for Impatica. Most importantly, I found that we need to upload three files to the same folder for the html to playback in a browser. The three files are the Impatica-generated ones after clicking 'done', that appear in the folder where the original ppt was dragged from into Impatica for translation. The three files are the name.html, name.imp, and ImPlayer300.jar . I also uploaded to the same folder the associated screen grabs showing the achieved compression, and the final player Title slide in my browser, similar to my earlier post - but working !! You can click on the Title picture to go directly to the html file here in this post.
My earlier effort below came through a little too quietly for my liking. Therefore this time round, I set Impatica to not compress the sound file - giving a larger 7.6MB result (compared with the quieter 1.6MB).

So here are my 20 ppt slides compressed from 166.9MB (a slight increase over the previous 164.3MB since the narration on slide 3 was cut short previously and that has now been re-recorded) down to 7.6MB.
Notice the Impatica translation time was 1 hr 10 m.



And the resulting http://www.open-ed-podcasting.net/library/RLO/GlobaleLearning.html plays perfectly 16m15s by clicking on the picture below



The full printable version is downloadable here as GlobaleLearningText.pdf
All Best Wishes
Paul

Impatica

Hi Folks,
Well Impatica works fine for me compressing my 20 ppt slides from 164.3MB down to 1.6MB.
As you can see here



And the resulting rlo-01.html plays perfectly on my desktop, as this shows



The full printable version is downloadable here as Impatica-01.pdf
That said, I have uploaded everything I can find of Impatica which should include the Impatica applet to play the movie, but alas java says it cannot find the upper level folder ... so a bit puzzled at the moment. Folks may try the following link which works well on my desktop http://www.open-ed.net/rlo-01.html
Puzzled - does it come through on PC ? with Impatica installed ?
All Best Wishes
Paul

Compressed iMovie

Hi Folks, Greetings !

Singing in the rain, today - it is a grey day outside, but feeling much better inside.
Here is the 5.7MB compressed version Jupiter.mov

which plays on Quicktime on my Mac, and on Real-Player for Mac.
It is small but full length 4m26s, and it opens and plays immediately with no download delay.
Enjoy !

Next I must write out the Instructions for Mac Users (before I forget)
in case someone else needs any help.
I feature in the above iMovie in heart, voice and e-presence, but with no face - in order to assert my stand on objectivity over subjectivity - I don't want viewers to swoon over my blond hair and blue eyes. Regarding online safety, beware the piano player is underage. The uncompressed movie in the earlier post had my hand lines and fingerprint whorls for identification.
All Best Wishes
Paul

iMovie

Hi Folks,
This is an Mac iMovie compressed as file.mov at 4 minutes 26 seconds.
Click here for Jupiter
or click the picture below. Please be patient for it takes about one minute to download, as it involves still photos, title-boards, and synchronized music to video - well, almost synchronized ;)
Tomorrow I'll try to compress it further by reducing the quality - when you will lose some sound and video quality.
It is important, so I will mention it here, that such published stuff be cleared for copyright, and the pictures used of Holst and of his music are in the public domain free-of-copyright. The final product is copyrighted by me, however.
Now after viewing the video, did you see how many white keys there are ??
52 of course - twice the number of letters in the roman alphabet ... and if you have playing cards you will know that the number of letters needed ( a c e t w o t h r e e f o u r f i v e s i x s e v e n e i g h t n i n e t e n j a c k q u e e n k i n g ) is exactly 52.
Well that's all for tonight ! It is 4.00 a.m. Wednesday morning here - time for an hour's sleep before work !

All Best Wishes
Paul

For the uncompressed 21MB version, click on the picture NewJupiter.mov

My Current Plans

Hi Folks,
My current plan is to work on recording new video, make a few still jpg for insertion including title / subtitles and so on, and then use iMovie to add new audio, synchronize all these, compress and post up here. The eventual vlog posting will probably not be interesting to non-Jupiter members, and is really a practice run for me, featuring new Jupiter music. Synchronizing the piano keyboard movements with the audio track will be one foreseeable difficulty - and avoidable too if I had chosen another topic. I want to test out and learn the technological aspects first, prior to embarking on a useful reusable iMovie ...
My main plan is then to take short video clips and still photos, to build up the various graphics-board, text-board, and then sound-board (being careful to keep notes on everything, as I described earlier in my post 'Moving along' on 7 May) ) on an educationally useful topic - about how to teach large classes. The resulting vlog could then become a so-called reusable learning object (RLO).
I hope this will all be achieved this week.
All Best Wishes
Paul

mp3 's and their compatibilities

Hi Folks.
Well, I learnt a lot over the weekend.
The short version for those of you who are busy is "it doesn't work".

The slightly longer and worthwhile-reading version is that there are more than ten different mp3 formats - basically proprietary-formats. So my Sony digital camera output saved as mp3 and (playable, with audio and video) can be fully read by Mac, or for that matter Windows. Mac can read it, store it in iTunes (and iTunes can transfer it to iMovie but minus the audio ...), but not use it in iMovie. To be usable in Mac-proprietary applications, it must be Mac-mp3. In other words, don't import your mp3 from another maker.

The way forward is to input audio directly (without third-party technology) into the Mac or PC, and then edit, compress or podcast whatever. Even Quicktime-Pro cannot access the audio bundle of files hidden inside the Sony-mp3. However, input audio into Mac-Garageband can easily be used by all other Mac applications. If any of you are having trouble with compatibility, one possible answer (I suggest) is to stick with one brand.

mp3 is not cross-platform.
I must start over on my iMovie presentation - a little tired but a little wiser.

This is also the reason why the Mac-version of powerpoint called Keynote producing file.key (and the Mac-version of Word called iPages producing file.pages) cannot be uploaded to the web. The file.key is not a single file but half a dozen bundled together -- and for others affected by this, the only way to proceed is to compress the Mac file.key into something like file.key.zip and then upload the single file.zip (don't auto-unzip on uploading) - for later retrieval and download as the file.zip.

All Best Wishes
Paul

Discussion of Other Vlogs found Online

Hi Folks,
Should we try to make instructional video entertaining/creative or plain/simple ? – with some suggestion here that entertaining/creative will likely take more time to create than plain / simple.
First I don’t think it necessarily follows that entertaining/ creative will or needs to take more time. With genius or practice one can usually speed things up. Alternatively, a team-approach to building re-usable learning objects or designing instructional video should be considered if at all possible – since sooner or later someone else is going to view or judge the product – as I have argued earlier - education is essentially making public what might otherwise remain private. Therefore bouncing ideas or drafts off colleagues, piloting and building in pre-set shelf-life and revision dates should be done (the shelf-life of the podcasting news-flash reading given to us in this course earlier was about several months at most, and much more carefully chosen readings could have been selected for a shelf-life of two years or so with a built in review at one year and revsion at two years).
And so now to the main point of the qualities of instructional video,
I think anything is fine providing it improves learning (instruction is only one-side of the equation – inherent in the term ‘Instructional Designer’, whereas 'Educational Technologist' includes aspects of learning being the target or achieved aim).
Video can help viewers develop social, technological or other skills, as well as knowledge. Entertaining or plain/simple doesn’t matter – but like sports – education should be healthy. I have earlier fairly-comprehensively covered the design aspects of using multimedia in various permutations and combinations, with literature references.
Enriching video beyond two or three media does not lead to improved learning. No data have yet been reported to suggest otherwise (as far as I am aware – please email to me any lit refs to the contrary, or any on the topic you think are worthwhile reading).

Concerning instruction video found online- I very much like ‘The Angry Professor’ at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hut3VRL5XRE It is entertaining as well as educational – it teaches mobile-phone manners about a student using a phone in a large class, as well as brings about learning – viewers are likely to think twice afterwards about disrupting a professor busy helping others. It gives both sides of education- from the teacher’s viewpoint and from the students’ viewpoints (of the user who may have been getting an urgent call about a family emergency, and of other students who may have supported that student or supported the professor). You might laugh or be shocked at first viewing but on repeat viewing you may see justification in all the various perspectives being raised by the 36 second clip, very balanced and educational, I think, and plain/simple (taken on a mobile-phone video-camera or handycam ?).
Another is the following about student careers that seems to be trying to be educational called ‘TV at Worknet”.. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6994259869433097486 very flashy and professionally made at very high bandwidth – so streaming does not come through well now. It is 26m 11s long – too long for my attention span. Apart from the very very flashy introduction, at 1m25s and again suddenly at 2min they give added textual media subtitles superimposed on flashy video and voice-over. This is highly distractive and such three media have not yet shown improved learning. The text is redundant except for deaf viewers or those listening to Pink Floyd on their iPods ;)
Well folks, there are two worthwhile discussing – any comments or different perspectives on these ?

All Best Wishes
Paul

A second try

Hi Folks,
Well I think I have managed to hyperlink the video-grab to the video. Though apologies in advance this video is still not edited or compressed. The blogger-site-ware doesn't like my html :( and refuses to give me mouse-over change too. Please wait for another try ...
All Best Wishes
Paul
Wed 16 April -> I have deleted the mp3 from here to free-up memory

A first try

Hi folks,
I am still working on how to edit in iMovie, and compress.
Meanwhile I have uploaded this as an uncompressed mpg file at 3min 5sec, and without title board or inserted jpg yet at
http://www.open-ed-podcasting.net/Jupiter.mpg
Please be patient over the next few days for a revised version.
I hope that I can manage to post the URL here on Monday or Tuesday early next week
All Best Wishes
Paul
Alternatively please"Click here to view video"
Wed 16 May -> I have deleted the mp3 from here to free-up some memory, now available on request by email from me

Moving along

Hi Folks,
Movie-ing along a bit to using video technology in education, the hardest part I see at the moment is what I would put into an educational video. Various popular video search engines have a large stock of humorous clips – some might be considered educational. Since this a learning exercise, I would follow the published Model for Learning using Multimedia – which has four stages in an iterative learning cycle ; -
Stage 1 of brain-storming, recalling prior experience and prior knowledge,
Stage 2 of theorizing, developing, creative and lateral thinking,
Stage 3 of disjunctive thinking, guided exploration of possible solutions, problem-based learning, hypotheses testing, vertical thinking, and
Stage 4 of testing out this chosen solution, publicizing, experiential learning.
I illustrate these here in the figure below.



I am at Stage 1.
Of brainstorming to initiate and quantify the scope of video, formulating possible titles, educational purposes, and how a video could be eventually evaluated in terms of its educational effectiveness- what qualities educational video should have. Included in this stage is framing the task - noting the time frame, cost frame, equipment limitation frame, audience frame and so on. Other points to be determined now are the narrative style and genre, and if possible a paper-and-pencil sketch of the storyboards to be designed and sequenced, writing a potential script or scripts, deciding on possible background sounds, music, sub-titles and visuals.

In Stage 2, I will have to make and collect materials such as photos, video, music, voice clips, diagrams, and animations to form an adequate reservoir from which to select and edit to a final choice in Stage 3. I can foresee distinct collections of boards may be needed ; text-boards of titles, subtitles, captions, logos, copyright notices, acknowledgements and thanks ; photo-boards of photos, scans, maps, diagrams, digitally made pictures such as powerpoint slides ; video-boards of shots, scenes (groups of related shots), sequences (groups of related scenes) ; and sound-boards of background music, theme fade-in / fade-out music, sound-effects, voice clips.

In Stage 3, I will have to join bits of edited material together in some way to produce a final draft of sorts. Hopefully iMovie here on a Mac can be used – though as I wrote this is the first time to think about this. I got Impatica yesterday in one of my happier moments, and am keen to see what this will do to powerpoint.

In Stage 4, the ‘final cut’ needs to be saved to CD or DVD, or compressed and uploaded, or exported to podcast. I think Impatica does compression … More on this later.

Well, the first Stage of trying to recall prior knowledge and frame the task of making an educational video has begun here. Now to the readings ! and starting a new note-book to record the process.
All Best Wishes
Paul

The Model for Learning with Multimedia is published here ;
Kawachi, P. (2005). Empirical validation of a multimedia construct for learning. In S. Mishra, & R. Sharma (Eds.), Interactive Multimedia in Education and Training (pp. 158-183). Hershey, PA : IDEA Group ISBN 1-59140-393-6

And I quote from my earlier 2003 scratchings
"Advanced learning technologies are not yet used optimally due in large part to there being no theory underpinning the practice. The Model provides such a theory and serves to understand when, why and how to use these technologies effectively. Despite various difficulties arising concerning students’ engaging Stage 3 collaboration using advanced learning technologies, the present Model is the only practical model proposed to date for acquiring critical thinking skills using computer-mediated multimedia, and constitutes an intelligent syllabus to be tested out further."
Kawachi, P. (2003). Hyperlearning : Empirical validation of the ‘Design for Multimedia in Learning’ model - Problems arising and suggested solutions. In V. Devedzic, J.M. Spector, D.G. Sampson, & Kinshuk (Eds.),
Advanced Learning Technologies. Los Alamitos, CA : IEEE Computer Society.
ISBN 0-7695-1967-9

On 'the Language we are Speaking'

Hi Folks,
Knowing where people are coming from is useful in actually decoding the meaning of the words conveyed. 'The language we are speaking' is a kind of metaphor for how our minds work. The great potential of parallel cognitive processing in one mind , and then collectively in a networked group of individuals can rarely be transmitted through the narrow bandwidth of speech or other media like writing or even video (more on video soon). That some distributed knowledge cognitive processes in others are outside of being received and acquired by an individual mind, would raise the question whether some internal cognitive processes are outside those received - which puts limits to Vygotsky's theory that all internal knowledge processes are acquired from others.

This puts the psychological distance into distance education in Moore's 1993 Theory of Transactional Distance.

Especially across cultures where minds are formed by local cultures, even cognitive conceptions of being a teacher vary remarkably and are worth noting. In Japan, the conception of a teacher is as a ‘knower’ and leader, and the idea of the teacher still learning is not institutionally accepted, as Zeichner et al. (1987, p.38) cautions –
"[Only] a few professionals think of teaching as a continual process of development, ... The conventional view, probably the view of the majority of teachers and administrators, is that any fully-licensed teacher should be expected to be a 'completed' teacher, fully capable of meeting all the obligations and demands of a classroom." Teachers in Japan are socially and culturally bound by rules that likely differ ffrom culture to culture. Even mentioning being on a course as a 'student' learning is not recommended in Japan even in this blog.
Late nights and long hours at the weekend probably mean that teachers who do study outside of teaching-time are more than exhausted. Teaching is one of the occupations in which the individual can expect to experience 'burn out' three or four times during their teaching career, so coping strategies especially in Japan are essential. A recent study by the way published in March 2007 found in Japan that (while an individual teacher can expect to suffer 'burn out' the most frequently) of various occupations, the occupation with the highest population frequency of 'burn-out' was ( you guessed it ?! ) being a fire-fighter.

Getting back to the Theory of Transactional Distance, I believe certain aspects of how the theory deals with autonomy need revisiting since it describes increasing autonomy as desirable, while Adult Education Theory sees adults as bringing with them so much prior knowledge and culture which is a type of baggage that at times reduced autonomy is needed to accomplish the learning task in a team manner.

Though this may be complex . . . I hope readers can see where I am coming from and can see the differences in 'the language we are speaking' .
All Best Wishes
Paul


Zeichner, K.M., Tabachnick, B.R., & Densmore, K. (1987). Individual, institutional, and cultural influences on the development of teachers' craft knowledge, (pp. 21-59). In J. Calderhead (Ed.), Exploring teachers' thinking. Lewes : Falmer Press.

Review of a few podcasts

Hi Folks,
Thanks to Pam's blog, I could locate another two podcasts by WestGa members - Sandra and Diane.
Diane has three quite short episodes up in her podcast here. Diane usefully suggests that we should incorporate video into our podcasts, and also for our own students we should search out podcasts made by others to recommend to our students or use in our lessons - both excellent points.
Sandra has one episode up so far in her podcast here. Sandra uses Bloglines rather than Blogbridge as aggregator, which she recommends as easy to use, but then so again is Blogbridge, I think. Sandra also mentions that Bloglines can show you how many persons are subscribed to your podcast - useful if like me you wonder all the time if anyone is ever listening or reading this stuff. However Odeo in http-view mode also does this - see for instance mine at http://odeo.com/channel/411283/view. Since Sandra mentions Audacity again, I would guess she recommends recording the mp3 on Audacity and copying this over to Podomatic for podcasting.
We must note that Odeo no longer allows users to upload mp3 from a computer desktop to Odeo, but only record directly to Odeo or transfer audio from an URL. This echoes somewhat Pam's podcast here on online safety, where she includes Internet Service Providers as also responsible for content (in addition to you !, teachers, students, parents and the world governments). What offends one person however may not offend others, and it is a difficult call to make. I for instance find shabby grammar offensive.
Sue in particular in her podcast here has very good grammar and clear enunciation. Concerning which type of students - Sue ponders - might better suit podcasting and e-learning rather than regular face-to-face education, I think Sue would be interested to hear Doshisha University, Japan, announced the test results this week of last year's (April 2006- March 2007) students where the e-learning internet students showed better results than those in the classroom - and they attributed this to the capability of e-learning students to 're-play' as often as they needed those points they wanted to revisit in their lessons. Other studies generally report no significant difference - when such variables are factored in.

Well, all those four podcast feeds provide stimulating food for thought ;)

All Best Wishes
Paul

'Podcast Maker'

Hi Folks,
A short report on 'Podcast Maker' by LemonzDream -
This works like a dream with instant upload to a .Mac account.

You can see here the resulting uploaded podcasts.

Not only this, they have a Jin Kim on their customer support staff who emailed back to me within minutes - incredibly prompt service, and so polite manner. One benefit in online education is that I don't know whether this is a beautiful young blond or a doddering old baldy - Don't know and Don't care, but "Thank you, Jin Kim, for your kind help".

Coming up next is my report on Podomatic ...
All Best Wishes
Paul

Open-Ed-Podcasting.net

Hi Folks,
Reflecting on my experience of using podcasting,
I suggest that we not rely on outside server providers for hosting our podcasts.

Instead, I think a regular website could be used,
an RSS feed can be added,
and Guys&Gals can put the feed into their alligators.

Hence my new website for 'Open Education Podcasting Network'
http://www.Open-Ed-Podcasting.net
I'll write up the html, opml and xml
when I get a few minutes spare ;)

All Best Wishes
Paul

Another reason for a separate website is that I can foresee that
a lot of memory may be needed for hosting video-podcasting,
and moreover a back-up website may be a wise move in any case ...

.

More on My Podcasting

Hi Folks,
It seems Odeo as a host for podcasting does have its idiosyncrasies.
I re-started with a new email address and new account there for
Open Education Network Podcasting
and this seems to be working much better. In case the Odeo logo below dies, then you can see here it was working once.

Previously on Odeo, my old audio files were set as 'not in a podcast' (see here) , but nevertheless still came through in the podcast view, and my first podcasting episode was up in saved audio in the podcast, but did not come through into iTunes.
I recommend all you folks to set up a new Odeo account purely for your podcast files, to avoid these hassles.
I have subscribed to the old Open Education Network, and now to the new
Open Education Network Podcasting
successfully in iTunes (see here) . and successfully pasted the feed URL (see here) http://odeo.com/channel/411283/rss.xml
into Blogbridge (see here) .
Aaah the trials and tribulations of life as a student !
All Best Wishes
Paul

Commentary on Podcasting

Well Folks,
This has been a very busy week.
Here I would like to review my experience of podcasting and share my thoughts on using this media in education.
Yes, podcasting was / is challenging. I have gone a little further than following Odeo guidelines, by drawing my original graphics for publishing my podcast on iTunes - where you can now see my podcast in the iTunes Store. I have explored and uploaded my podcast to iMac, through iWeb, also through Podcast Maker by LemonzDream, and Podomatic.

I have listened to several podcasts. What strikes me is that these should be educational (thanks to Pam and Sue for getting their podcast feeds and three Episodes up online - I am subscribed ), but most are too conversational and not so rigorous in educational integrity. That these podcasts should be educational has been suggested three times by the Guys&Gals at WestGa ; - (1) in Module 4 Optional Readings guidelines, (2) in Module 4 Assignment 1 guidelines, and (3) in Module 4, Assignment 3 (point 4) guidelines. I would suggest podcasts could be improved by following these suggestions and the author's own proffered four criteria in Module 4, 5.1 Assignment 2, Discussion of what makes a good podcast. See my criteria which I have indeed followed ( blog 'Podcast Subscriptions' 29 April ) as follows ; -

(1) be educationally useful, and effectively improve the quality of learning,
(2) use clear, concise, coherent English, and with vivid enthusiastic tone,
(3) short duration, within ten minutes (those at 30 minutes long became a drag on my time and attention), and
(4) have short theme music at the beginning and at the end, to help me recall the podcast topic context and related prior knowledge and schema in my mind.

I would also suggest that podcasters use a speaker of clear English if at all possible, and if they cannot ummm avoid aa the I mean aa other aaa speech mumbles, then try using a pre-written script. This podcast script will also help with Section-508 compliance and ISO Standards. Note I give my scripts as pdf for each podcast episode.

Moreover, my short fade-in / fade-out theme music was created by me, as were my graphics - both copyrighted by me.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Introducing Podcasting continued ...

Hi Folks,
Greetings. Here are the three episodes in my first podcast series.
The topic of this series is using audio in education.
Episode 1.1 : Introduction to using Audio Files ( mp3 6.2MB 6m29s ) pdf
Episode 1.2 : Creating your own Audio ( mp3 5.8MB 6m24s ) pdf
Episode 1.3 : Assessing the Benefits ( mp3 7.0MB 7m08s ) pdf

These were created using Mac Garageband and a USB microphone, copied to iTunes, then dragged from iTunes onto the desktop, as m4a or mpeg4, then Switched to mp3 and uploaded to here, and to my podcast rss feed on iMac Podcasting at feed://homepage.mac.com/paulkawachi/Series1/rss.xml, as you can see here . Yesterday, I uploaded also a wav version of Episode 1.1 at 68.6MB --- a ten-fold memory size in contrast to mp3 at 6.2MB. So, for those of you without Quicktime, download the free Quicktime player here.
I have also uploaded these three mp3 audio files to Odeo and the podcast feed to those is here .

or if the above links don't work (so much trouble with Odeo), then simply paste the feed view URL http://odeo.com/channel/381313/view into your blogbridge or other podcast aggregator.
Now I must check if the iTunes-store can access these feeds for public subscription, and if I can download ? the series to my brand-new iPod . . .
All Best Wishes
Paul

Introducing Podcasting

Hi Folks,
Well it has been a long day, and I am looking forward to another busy day tomorrow.
Here, I am pleased to introduce my podcast to you.

The first series has three episodes about using audio files in education.
Episode 1.1 : Introduction to using Audio Files ( m4a 9.1MB 6m29s )
Episode 1.2 : Creating your own Audio (not yet published)
Episode 1.3 : Assessing the Benefits (not yet published)

My podcast graphics for putting into iTunes is above - that was yesterday's work.
Below you can listen to Episode 1 which I created using Mac Garageband and a USB microphone (my first effort, so please don’t knock it), copied to iTunes, then dragged the file onto the desktop, as m4a or mpeg4. All this was done off-line, on a laptop with battery power (just to illustrate the power of Mac over online-Odeo-with connectivity-problems). I then uploaded the m4a Garageband file to iMac Podcasting and the feed is at feed://homepage.mac.com/paulkawachi/Series1/rss.xml
I then converted from iTunes m4a audio file to mp3 and wav, and uploaded these to my website. The direct links to the mp3 audio-file (6.2MB) is here, and to the plain-simple-PC wav audio-file (68.6MB) is here. For deaf readers and 508-compliance, here is the script-text as pdf.
Enjoy listening to my podcast !

I will podcast Episode 2 and Episode 3 tomorrow, and test out Odeo for a comparison and talk to you later.
All Best Wishes
Paul

ISO for Quality Assurance in Online Education

Hi Folks,
Took a day off yesterday, shoved all the print-outs and papers off my desk into a box (tidying-up was the ‘work’ for the day), and spent the day relaxing in the garden.

On a more serious note, sooner or later, online courses are going to have to compete on the basis of quality assurance. And by quality assurance, I mean ISO certification with Section 508 compliance, (for openness and inclusivity). Especially, the Joint Technical Committee of the ISO and the IEC has several Sub-Committees, one of which SC36 deals with using information technology for learning, education, and training. See http://jtc1sc36.org for details. I have been an observer participant on the discussions of the IEEE to establish these standards based on my interest in the definitions of terms. Hence my collection of definitions I collate and continually update on my website library with free access to all at http://www.open-ed.net/library/definitions.html.

I give a brief overview of ISO 9004 : 2000 Standards (an extension of 9001) for quality assurance in education for teachers and course providers in my ppt A2-slides in the free-access RLO-elearning Courseware on my website at http://www.open-ed.net/e-learning/slides.html.

Folks may be interested to know these ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 Standards should be ready in a few weeks’ time. Watch this space for an update.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Podcast Subscriptions

Hi Folks,
Here I would like to introduce to you those podcasts - among the many to which I have subscribed - which I think are instructionally useful for online education.

I have decided upon my four criteria for evaluating a podcast with respect to its use in online education. Although earlier I had only three (see my blog 'Delphi' 25 April), I have realized I need a supra-arching first criterion, thus ;-
(1) be educationally useful, and effectively improve the quality of learning,
(2) use clear, concise, coherent English, and with vivid enthusiastic tone,
(3) short duration, within ten minutes (those at 30 minutes long became a drag on my time and attention), and
(4) have short theme music at the beginning and at the end, to help me recall the podcast topic context and related prior knowledge and schema in my mind.

Applying these criteria, I recommend the following podcasts. I have subscribed to many others, and also downloaded example episodes for evaluation purposes, and kept these individual episodes since they fulfill the above criteria, but I did not subscribe to the whole podcast and other episodes because they were irrelevant to me.

* * * * * Foreign Language Resource Center
Felix Kronenberg introducing educational technology for language learning, though he is German, his English is clear, and pleasant to listen to, and the six-minute podcasts are bi-weekly which suits my busy schedule just fine.
feed://flrc-old.pomona.edu/podcast/podcast.xml
from where you can download each episode, for example see the video podcast on how to use PulpMotion (for Mac only) at
flrc_podcast_episode1.mp4 (mp4, 14.5MB, 6min-16sec)
(His second episode is Photo Story for PC only.)

* * * * * Make Magazine
This podcast gives short instructional guides to new technologies which could be used in education.
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/make_podcast/
feed://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/make_podcast/index.xml

* * * * * November Learning Communities
Alan November or a guest giving short instructional podcasts on using educational technology, with the podcast feed at his blog at
http://nlcommunities.com/communities/alannovember/
and websites at http://blog109.org
and at http://www.novemberlearning.com
for example listen to this episode in which Brian Mull talks with Seth Bowers
http://novemberlearning.com/podcasts/seth.mp3

* * * * Tech Tips 101
Charonda Cosey and Dawn Corley giving short instructional podcasts for teachers to introduce technology into the classroom (only four stars here by me, because their English is not so clear, and there is too much redundant speech – almost sounding like a radio talkshow).
http://media.switchpod.com/users/techchick101/feed.xml
for example listen how to use blogs globally
which by the way I had already thought of and had earlier set up for linking my students here in Japan with those in Germany (thanks Jane), with those in India (thanks Ramesh), with those in the Philippines and USA (thanks Charito), with Viet Nam (thanks Trang), and with those in South Africa (thanks Pam)
http://media.switchpod.com/users/techchick101/Febr23.mp3

* * * The French Pod Class ‘Sebastien – Let’s learn French the fun way’
http://www.frenchpodcast.com
feed://www.francewithsebastien.com/rss
feed://www.frenchpodclass.com/rss
for example listen to his mp3 at
http://cache.libsyn.com/frenchpodclass/FrenchPodClass78-04212007.mp3
Although this is in French, using an immersion approach, Sebastien speaks the instructions in simple easy-to-understand English. I chose this subscription since I teach French.

I should also like to mention here the following blog. Although it is not a podcast, nonetheless it is updated regularly with short educationally useful tips for improving learning ;
* * * * * How to Blog
http://dummies-guide-to-google-blogger.blogspot.com

All Best Wishes
Paul

Team Music

Hi Folks, and especially Jupiter Team,
Just a short interlude ...
I have my own original version of Holst's Jupiter now up
in the left links for Jupiter Team,
at 75 seconds, and here as 1.1MB mp3, or as 12.6MB wav
copyrighted © 2007 Paul Kawachi ,
and offered free to Jupiter Team Members for onward use
perhaps as fade-in/fade-out theme-music to voice or video podcasting.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Delphi

Hi Folks,
This post is on the utilization of the Delphi technique.
(Please google-search on "Delphi technique", if you want more details than given in this link.) How should we judge the efficacy and usefulness of a podcast? Well, WestGa indicate fairly clearly that "We're looking at podcasting for instructions", so we can surmise this means for educational purposes - instructor-to-students, the one-way delivery of technical guidance. The Dephi technique can help to narrow down the criteria either of a group or of oneself. I have a lot of criteria in my mind, and then after listening to a range of podcasts, I can score each criterion on importance to obtain my own short-list of criteria for a good podcast. Listeners are so diverse in their needs and wants, I don't think we can form a small set of shared group criteria.

After subscribing to several and also downloading and listening to many more, my own individual criteria in order of decreasing importance are

(1) use clear, concise, coherent English, and with vivid enthusiastic tone,
(2) short duration, within ten minutes, (those at 30 minutes long became a drag on my time and attention),
(3) have short theme music at the beginning and at the end, to help me recall the podcast topic context and related prior knowledge and schema in my mind,
(4) ?

I am still thinking if these three are an adequate set, maybe a fourth will materialize with more experience. Of much less importance, is to have two persons involved, and to include text or graphics, and have no overbearing advertising or self-promotion.

Next, I will apply these three criteria to my favourite podcasts, with discussion, tomorrow.
All Best Wishes
Paul

e-Quality

Hi Folks,
The term 'e-Quality' was, by the way, first coined by me, several years back on the topic of open education, access and inclusivity, and published then and in several following works. Kawachi, P. (2002). Poverty and access : The impact of language on online collaborative learning for Japanese learners. In H.P. Dikshit, S. Garg, S. Panda, & Vijayshri (Eds.), Access and Equity : Challenges for open and distance education, (pp. 159-170). New Delhi : KoganPage. ISBN 81 7554 180 6

If you need help to find a copy for your private non-commercial use, please ask me.

All Best Wishes
Paul

Technical Video

Hi Folks,
Technical video can have good educational value.
For example if one tries to explain a simple water leak using a photograph (shown here on the right), then the explanation may be not so clear. In such cases, a short technical video can help to bridge the communication gap, the receiver can email the video on to the technician, and the problem is resolved efficiently. Mobile phones can have a camera and video function too, to make and send a short video. The video is here (8.9MB) (25 secs) (mpg)
Alone at my friend's house deep in the high mountains, I took this photo and video last weekend for an educational technical purpose to show him the problem. The video was educational and served its purpose well, as he and you can see, perhaps. (Some folk may need to download the free Quicktime software for Windows to watch this mpg - click on Get Quicktime or in the top-left column.) And... since this also about changing file formats, here it is in Windows wmp format.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Sunday is a Holiday

Well Folks,
Tomorrow is the deadline for these various tests.
I'll be taking a cold drink to refresh myself -
and talk to you afterwards.
All Best Wishes
and still feeling very grateful to WestGa.
Paul

mp3, to wav, to vox, to ...

Hi Folks,
It's hard not to sing the praises of Mac.
Use ask.com to write your question in easy plain English, for example here "How to make an mp3 file on a Mac?", thus ;
And go to the top first hit to free Switch software at http://www.nch.com.au/switch
And then download install the free software to convert any sound-file to any other.

After you have downloaded this, click on Switch to open it and browse to your file, for example my AudioIntro.mp3 used earlier in my posting 'Audio Blogging' on 13 April 2007. Then using the Mac Timed-Screen-Grab, I can show you the drop-down menu of the full range of audio formats available as output format …

and convert my AudioIntro.mp3 into AudioIntro.wav, and/or viceversa.

Actually with a Mac, you don’t need this conversion software. To change a file format, you can just go to whatever.gif and click its name and retype it as whatever.jpg, or taking a few seconds longer click open what.gif and save-as what.jpg (when Mac says ‘Do you really want to use jpg or keep gif, just click ‘use jpg’. Same with mpg to wmv, and same with mp3 / wav / vox /whatever you like.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Gabcast - Welcome

Hi Folks,
At the top of the left-side margin, you can click on the word 'Welcome !'
and listen to my Gabcast welcome-message.

For those of you with no speakers, the welcome-message is ;
"Welcome to the Open Education Network blog.
You may visit the website at
http://www.open-ed.net
( ... above is hot linked ... )
All Best Wishes
Paul"

Thanks to gabcast.com for this media. You may again notice
I have somewhat edited the Gabcast html to keep my blog tidy.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Gabcast for Online Education

Hi Folks,
Can I embed html here ...
I wonder

Listen to my Gabcast above by clicking on the > play button,
or click on this hypertext for mp3 'Gabcast for Online Education', (0.5 MB) (62 seconds)

Aaha ! It works. (You may note I have edited the html downloaded from Gabcast.com to be simpler here.) For those of you with an internet connection and no output speakers, my Gabcast recording is ;

"Hello. Good morning.
Hi, Folks
Gabcast could be useful in an emergency when other media are unexpectedly not available or connectivity is disabled - for example, the receiver doesn't have a telephone to answer your call, but does have internet. However, its quality limits its use in normal circumstances of education where clear communication is the 'sine non qua' (that's Latin, not Japanese).
All Best Wishes
Paul"

Well, I should like to add my thanks to WestGa for introducing this media to me. Their instructions were (in my case at least) clear enough for me to succeed in posting up my telephoned-in message. Noting some people have found Gabcast instructions to be difficult to follow, I went to the Gabcast London mirror site, which was just fine.
Thank you
All Best Wishes
Paul

The Value of $$ilence

Hi Folks,
On the new Law governing Your Public Internet Audio Casts

As you may have heard,
earlier this week (on Monday, 16th April 2007) the law changed for radio DJ's paying royalties for playing a pop-song.
Though an appeal is being positioned, it would seem that henceforth the royalty may be increased -
however the Copyright Royalty Board -- which is Las Vegas-based by the way :)
-- has said the royalty fee is now calculated on the average number of listener x hours.
Luckily for me no-one reads my blog, much less listens to my Odeo or voice, and I should be safe since only one person at WestGa probably listened only to the first few seconds - busy that they are - and the pop / classical music I like to listen to perchance in the background was likely not noticed by anyone except Pam (Thanks Pam) (aaahhh that makes two listeners...)

Well e-copyright and e-law governs us all, and what we borrow for our lessons (students pay for these and these are thus a commercial event ... ignorance is no excuse for not following the law) and the websites belonging to others to which we guide our students become an issue of increasing concern and currency.

So far this applies only to the States,
and South Africa and Japan are still in the clear,
and a US Congress law five years ago exempted small broadcasters from royalty rates.

Well, stay tuned in, folks.

All Best Wishes
Paul

Online Audio record / playback Quality

Hi Folks,
Just a short posting today.
I have listened to Pam's Gabcast, and I have listened to Pam's Odeo-cast.
It is clear that the qualities of the record / playback differ significantly.
This is probably dating me to pre-internet days, but I remember when Dolby first came out, and there was a lot of discussion on their technology - of putting the large range of human-voice tones onto narrow audio-tape bandwidth by reflecting or bouncing back those tones heading off the top or bottom end of the available bandwidth.
If this was not reflected back, then the cut-off frequency at the top end (and at that at the bottom end) would sound overly dense or 'coloured'. The Dolby word and technology is highly protected by copyright (I hope they don't hammer me for discussing them here) and as far as I know does not come free.

Maybe we should not be using these free software audio services like Gabcast and Odeo...
Perhaps - and I am going to search through this issue - there is Dolby Audio for online education, and at low cost but superb quality. You pay for what you get. And the free stuff is ...

You may HEAR more from me (yawn) on the topic of audio.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Does added audio improve learning ?

On the Additive Benefit of Audio and Visual Media :
Optimal Use of Multiple Media in Online Education

If audio is added to text and graphics would this lead to improved learning ? I don’t think so.
Since audio media is a current topic, it is a valid subject here and worthwhile exploring for its effectiveness. This topic also impacts on posting up personal photos, and the educative benefit of personal introductions face-to-face or through media to establish a community of learners (also I think this is not valid). For those of you who are busy, please just scroll to the final sentence.

I add references to the published literature on the topic, of course. If you have any additional references, then I am interested – please send to me. Moreover if you need help to get a copy of any of my references, please ask me.

Paechter & Schweizer (2006) have recently put forward the need for more studies on the educative value in terms of improving learning in students of visual and audio information from the tutor in addition to pictorial/graphic and textual information media. Their study found that the face-to-face visual cueing and real-voice oral/aural media routes were not only redundant and added nothing, but detracted from the achieved quality of learning in the students. I have previously expounded in an earlier blog posting ‘Judging by your face’ (www.paulkawachi.blogspot.com 30 March 2007) that academic integrity depends on objectivity and negotiation of meaning through discussion of ideas, and not on subjectivity and smiles. I quote from my earlier work on selecting the optimum mix of media (Kawachi (2003) that some educators have reported that a face-to-face real meeting of all participants could be used (especially at the start of a course), but the inherent subjectivity that entails detracts from other values : Blake (2000) has argued that the precise lack in face-to-face interactions has a clear advantage in online teaching since it removes the personal and subjective, and unclutters the academic objectivity and disinterestedness that should characterise the essence of higher education.
It has been widely reported (Hara & Kling, 2000 ; Phillips, 1990 ; Wegerif, 1998) that there was an educational need for building a sense of community into asynchronous online learning, (though this was only in the early foundational stages of learning). Not based on shared learning : a sense of community has also been identified as developed through shared frustrations and anxieties (Hara & Kling, 2000) as in a virtual ‘coffee-shop chat room’ (Phillips, 1990) which appears to be satisfying a virtual extrinsic (outside of the course content) social motivation of the students – that reduces feelings of isolation, and that more aptly could be described as a community of non-learning (see Richardson & Turner, 2000) : in a carefully controlled objective study, Boling & Robinson (1999) found that there was some considerable trade-off between distance students’ satisfaction with social aspects of the course and the actual quality of learning achieved. Accordingly, intrinsic social (integrative) motivation may be not the best for deep quality learning, and once a student has some learning achieved and performative anxiety is reduced, then the tutor should convert the student to instrumental motivation. The intrinsic vocational, intrinsic academic and intrinsic personal motivations to learn constitute the instrumental motivations. These are more effective (Gardner & Lambert 1972 ; Kruidenier & Clément, 1986 ; Lukmani, 1972) than the integrative social intrinsic motivation in adult education, and in distance education, and for the acquisition (through cognitivist co-construction) of non-foundational knowledge. Laurillard (2002) also concluded there was a role for promoting a community of learning online in foundational courses, but added that there was no clear evidence that increased dialogue in the community produced deeper quality of learning.
The definition of ‘multimedia’ used here (see Kawachi, 2005) is that according to Jonassen (2000, p. 207) as “the integration of media such as text, sound, graphics, animation, video, imaging, and spatial modeling into a computer system”. The term multimedia could be applied to a document consisting of text and graphics (Greenlaw & Hepp, 1999, p. 44) or any form of presentation using multiple media (Schwartz & Beichner, 1999, p. 8), but here only multimedia through computer presentation is reviewed.
There is little research on the educational effectiveness of applying multimedia. Most reports just advocate the desirability of a future deployment of multimedia in a silver-bullet or bandwagon approach. A few describe simply an introduction of multimedia and assert its effectiveness without analyses and usually on the basis only from student post-test satisfaction. Student satisfaction with a programme is important, but does not necessarily correlate directly with improved learning outcomes - the addition of interactive multimedia to a distance program was less effective for learning than the face-to-face equivalent, in a well-designed three-way controlled comparative analysis by Boling and Robinson (1999, p. 170). They found that students enjoyed their distance learning experience most when the online lecture was supplemented by CMC video conferencing with other students - more than when supplemented by face-to-face cooperative group discussion, and more than when supplemented by only individual study (the control). However, their students through testing showed most learning after the face-to-face group discussion. This indicated that the level of student enjoyment or satisfaction cannot be equated automatically with better quality learning (that there is some trade-off between these). Teacher-student and student-student interactions have been reported to be a key basis for deep quality learning outcomes (see for example Wegerif, 1998 ; Kawachi, 2003a). However, even this research is not yet fully clarified. While an online community of students is believed to foster learning, at least in the early stages of a course (Kawachi, 2003b), some students especially adults engage distance education not for intrinsic social reasons. For instance, student perceived learning and course satisfaction have been related (Walker and Hackman, 1992) more to the amount of information received than to online rapport with tutors and other students.
An overview of how to deploy multimedia is given by Reddi & Mishra (2003) in a learning resources module for teachers. They provide a succinct interpretation of Jonassen’s list of media, with their categorisation of the media as text, audio, visual, and animation, plus the navigation interactivity. The various sub-types were also given as audio (narration or voice-over, music, and sound effects), visual (static graphics, and moving video), and animation (of the text, and of the graphics – using movements, fade in/out, and zoom in/out). And they clearly described the step-wise construction of a multimedia presentation that could be up-loaded to the internet for on-line learning or provided on a CD-hybrid for off-line learning. Each page, according to them, could be enhanced through the addition of multimedia to reach simultaneously the senses of the student. Indeed, the current power of instructional designer software can provide the platform with templates for this; however, there is little research yet on the educational effectiveness of deploying multimedia particularly when it is aimed at simultaneously engaging the senses. Most design is simply intuited from pre-computer studies that more media resulted in more learning - such as the findings reported by Geisman (1988) – that students remember 20% of what they see, 40% of what they both see and hear, and 70% of what they see, hear and do. Screen design is an important factor found to affect both the completion rate (poor design caused a 39% decrease in completion rate) and study time required (good design required 1/5 of the time to complete the lesson) (Szabo & Kanuka, 1999). Concerning the additive and potentially synergic advantages of multimedia for learning, the educational value of plain text can be enhanced through adding multimedia to simplify comprehension (Hashim, 2000). However, some additions for example of text to a presentation of animation and narration have been found to show poorer learning outcomes (Doolittle, 2001) (for a comprehensive review see Najjar, 1995). And Beccue & Vila (2001) have found no learning benefit from adding audio to multimedia of text plus graphics.





REFERENCES :

Beccue, B., & Vila, J. (2001). The effects of adding audio instructions to a multimedia computer based training environment. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 10 (1), 47-67. Retrieved May 6, 2003, from http://dl.aace.org/6387

Blake, N. (2000). Tutors and students without faces or places. Special Issue: Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of Online Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34 (1), 183-197.

Boling, N.C., & Robinson, D.H. (1999). Individual study, interactive multimedia, or cooperative learning : Which activity best supplements lecture-based distance education ? Journal of Educational Psychology, 91 (1), 169-174.

Doolittle, P.E. (2001). Multimedia learning : Empirical results and practical applications. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Retrieved April 26, 2003, from http://edpsychserver.ed.vt.edu/workshops/edtech/pdf/multimedia.pdf

Gardner, R., & Lambert, W. (1972). Attitudes and motivation in second language learning. Rowley, MA : Newbury House.

Geisman, J.L. (1988). ‘Beyond CBT : Interactive Video’, Computers and Personnel 2: 35-38.

Greenlaw, R., & Hepp, E. (1999). In-line / On-line: Fundamentals of the Internet and the World Wide Web. McGraw-Hill, Boston, MA.

Hara, N., & Kling, R. (2000). Students’ distress with a web-based distance education course. Information, Communication & Society. Retrieved Aug 20, 2000, from http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html earlier version at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_12/index.html

Hashim, K. (2000). ‘Virtual University Implementation : A Paradigm Shift for Instructors and Learners’, Proceedings of a Conference at University of South Australia (retrieved 26 April 2003). [http://www.com.unisa.edu.au/cccc/papers/non-refereed/hashim.htm]

Jonassen, D.H. (2000). Computers as Mindtools for Schools. Merrill, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Kawachi, P. (2005). Computers, multimedia and e-learning. In U.V. Reddi & S. Mishra (Eds.), Educational media in Asia, (pp. 97-122). Vancouver : Commonwealth of Learning.

Kawachi, P. (2003a). ‘Vicarious Interaction and the Achieved Quality of Learning’, International Journal on E-Learning, (in press).

Kawachi, P. (2003b). Choosing the appropriate media to support the learning process. Journal of Educational Technology, 14, ( 1 & 2), 1-18.

Kruidenier, B.G., & Clément, R. (1986). The effect of context on the composition and role of orientations in second language acquisition. Quebec : International Centre for Research on Bilingualism.

Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking university teaching (2nd Edition) : A conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies. London : RoutledgeFalmer.

Lukmani, Y. (1972). Motivation to learn and learning proficiency. Language Learning, 22, 261-273.

Najjar, L.J. (1995). A Review of the Fundamental Effects of Multimedia Information Presentation on Learning. Technical Report GIT-GVU-95-20, Georgia Institute of Technology, GA. [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/reports/TechReports95.html] (retrieved 18 April 2003)

Paechter, M., & Schweizer, K. (2006). Learning motivation with virtual tutors : Does it matter if the tutor is visible on the net ? In M. Pivec (Ed.), Affective and emotional aspects of human-computer interaction, (pp. 155-164). Amsterdam : IOS Press.

Phillips, C. (1990). Making friends in the ‘electronic student lounge’. Distance Education – An International Journal, 11 (2).

Reddi, U.V., & Mishra, S. (2003). Educational Multimedia : A Handbook for Teacher-Developers. Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia, New Delhi, India (retrieved 10 April 2003) [http://www.cemca.org/EMHandbook/EdMul_Full.pdf]

Richardson, J.A., & Turner, A. (2000). Collaborative learning in a virtual classroom. National Teaching and Learning Forum newsletter. October, 9 (6). Oryx Press. Retrieved March 20, 2001, from http://www.ntlf.com

Schwartz, J.E., & Beichner, R.J. (1999). Essentials of Educational Technology. Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA.

Szabo, M., & Kanuka, H. (1999). ‘Effects of violating Screen Design Principles of Balance, Unity, and Focus on Recall Learning, Study Time, and Completion Rates’, Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 8(1) : 23-42. [http://dl.aace.org/9176] (retrieved 6 May 2003)

Walker, K., & Hackman, M. (1992). ‘Multiple predictors of perceived learning and satisfaction : the importance of information transfer and non-verbal immediacy in the televised course’, Distance Education – An International Journal 13(1).

Wegerif, R. (1998). The social dimension of asynchronous learning networks. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 2 (1). Retrieved August 20, 2000, from http://www.aln.org/alnweb/journal/vol2_issue1/wegerif.htm

Discussion on Using Audio Media

Hi Folks,
It seems to me that several new bloggers - especially teachers - have proffered reasons why they do not think audio is used much in online education, reasons why they do not yet use audio files, and then say they may try to introduce and utilize audio files soon in their courses.

Is this just a novelty effect, an interviewer effect, or is it a Hawthorne Effect ?
(if you don't know what these are, then we certainly need more discussion)

The adoption and utilization of audio files in online education is worthwhile discussing.
And I am putting together a posting on the topic.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Those who do read this blog might like to share in my happiness that I finally succeeded in Control-Click downloading my audio files from Odeo to my desktop and uploading them to my website (see below 'Audio-blogging' posted 13 April 2007). This is important since Odeo may or may not work in the future, or various technological changes might make Odeo-stored files inaccessible. (They have, I believe no advertising -like google -pasted on yet, but there seems to be a limit on the number of free accesses to your stored recording - check out their Odeo help FAQs.)

Wimba Voice Board

Hi Folks,
Talking about Wimba Voice Board (Assignment 2, Module 3) which I read soooo easily integrates with WebCT ... Is it possible to copy and paste the Wimba recording to our blog ? (in a way similar to Odeo)
See http://www.wimba.com/products/voicetools/ for pdf guidance and their online Voice Board, potentially useful for podcasting.

I made a recording, as follows, on their website and on WestGa WebCT,
but cannot discover how to copy that from there and post here the Wimba sound file or link.

"Hello. Good morning.
I cannot find the recorded question anywhere
so I am guessing from listening to two of the above responses.
Here are three points about me ;-
(1) I am a teacher but still a student - lifelong education is my lifestyle.
(2) Students tell me what I need to learn or know about helping them learn - listen to your students.
and
(3) I think audio is a useful addition to the media we can use in education - the more the better.
So, what is your answer - which is false ?
All Best Wishes
Paul"

(Total recording time 59 seconds)

The English language ...

Hi Folks,
I read today that Generation Z - the uncaring youth - are the source of so much junk English being used nowadays. (Thanks -Pam) One wonders why those who apparently are native-speakers are so uncaring in their use of English - a wonderful language constituting each day more and more of the language passing as Japanese.

Several words are new to English such as the verb to 'scrap' - which I naively thought meant to discard something useless or disused, but the OED gods now inform me that the new meaning is to'pick up some small piece of discarded paper and keep it as treasure within a book for the purpose' from the Japanese 'scrap-suru' = to do or make a scrap-book. So we are all learners, beginners and should be tolerant of diversity.

However, that is no excuse for those of you using such poor grammar (I am struggling with understanding) in this online course !
English should be clear, concise, and coherent.
Can you understand the instructions given for Assignment 1 Module 3 ; "...tell in writing you think .." ??
I blame the typewriter.

So much stress to understand such bad English.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Testing something

Hi Folks,

Well, this week marks the end of Module 3, and I have yet to take the step-one Online Test which will be assessed.
How do I feel ? How do you feel ? I think they are called a 'pop-quiz' in the States, but still I would feel much better if I knew what topics were to be covered by the test. I am really busy studying along this route and that route, but have no idea what should I study, before pressing the 'start' button for this 12-minute-limit timed test on ...

I hope it is in Japanese, so I can understand it !!

All Best Wishes
Paul

Audio-blogging ...

Hi Folks,
Welcome to audio-blogging ...
I am in Jupiter Team, so what music to choose . . . Have you seen Gustav Holst ?
You can use audio files uploaded to your blog, website, hyperlinked from inside a powerpoint or keynote presentation slide, or in your email, podcast, or simply keep them on your computer desktop or on CD , or DVD, to use at any time or any place. The code is a bit long - meaning that file size or time is limited. So it is best to make short small generic recordings that you can re-use whenever you need them.
http://media.odeo.com//files/2/7/3/3946273.mp3 (1.0KB) (67 seconds)
http://odeo.com/show/11154053/1882303/download/AudioIntro.mp3
http://www.open-ed.net/AudioIntro.mp3

Why would you want to use audio files ?
Well, listening to an invited expert in your field may enhance your college lecture and captivate your audience. You can explain the mating call of the lesser woodpecker, illustrate the difference between cockney and Brisbane accents.
You can present the difference between Mozart and Sibelius – not only showing their faces, their music writing, but now also examples of their sounds. Textual instructions will still be needed – for example “click below to listen to Mozart, and then Sibelius, and notice their different use of the long pitches at the end of the first crescendo. Replay if needed. Listen to the next recording and decide if it is Mozart or Sibelius”. Audio files can be uniquely useful and effective in online as well as in conventional education.
http://media.odeo.com//files/4/5/3/3946453.mp3 (1.4KB) (100 seconds)
http://odeo.com/show/11154143/1882303/download/AudioWhy.mp3
http://www.open-ed.net/AudioWhy.mp3

Why would you NOT want to use audio files ?
Audio files are not used much in online education because they are new and unfamiliar to the teacher. Teachers tend to merely upload their lecture notes to the course website - and audio is not effective for delivering pages 23 to 46 of the textbook. The file size of even one minute tends to be quite large. Students may find they need time to adjust to catch listening to your English – though they can easily re-play as often as they need. And remember the students faraway may not have the bandwidth infrastructure and playback software available and installed yet.
Teacher time is expensive, and the script if any needs to be carefully prepared with redundant phrases removed. Repetition and re-phrasing commonly used in speech for adding clarity can be deleted - since the student listener can just click on ‘re-play’. When used judiciously, audio can be extremely interactive and motivating to the student.
http://media.odeo.com//files/4/7/3/3946473.mp3 (1.9KB) (120 seconds)
http://odeo.com/show/11154163/1882303/download/AudioWhyNot.mp3
http://www.open-ed.net/AudioWhyNot.mp3

All Best Wishes
Paul

Other blogs

Hi Folks,
I know everyone is busy.
I should be too - I mean 'busy in this world' ...
I would just like to draw your attention to various 'other blogs'
which I have added recently to here in my left-side column
- easily missed.
But once there, take a look at the map of the universities in Second Life !
(This map is public)
Now where was I ?

All Best Wishes
Paul

Navigation negotiation

Hi Folks,
I wrote earlier that I was reading and learning about navigation at sea.
Probably you skimmed over this and dismissed it as Paul havering about some thing or another.
Yo ! There is much more to this, and comments are cordially invited.

At sea you need three expert bearing takers to take simultaneous compass bearings to fix a position ( briefly ). No one person can perform this activity alone. It is not a simplistic 'the sum is greater than the parts'.
I have always been a staunch steadfast advocate of cognitive constructivism, and of constructionism (that learning occurs in the mind, from outside stimuli and experiential practice - see my books and papers on this). And I sidelined Vygotsky as merely arguing that homo-sapiens working in a group could succeed over individualist neanderthal. However, I am deeply reconsidering my position in view of this course.

Let me give you an example. In a rock band the guitarist and drummer perform separately, and cannot replace each other. What goes on in one mind is intelligent (at least as far as Pink Floyd was concerned) but the communication channels among the different functioning minds is severely limited - a bottleneck ; the same as in this WestGeorgia course or any distance education course.

Now we can visualize the navigation team networking by looking at the pencil lines drawn on the chart, and we can hear the amazing sounds of Shine on You Crazy Diamond, but we cannot learn and perform the functions of the other team members (well we could if we gave up our own job, but the complexity of each job is such that the human mind cannot do two complex tasks simultaneously). The visualization shows us that the context of the task dictates the need and presence of distributed knowledge, which can never be internalized by any one person. (This impacts somewhat on Vygotsky : it puts limits on his theory, and draws it into the networked computer age of distance education.)

Unless we accept that the role of the context dictates the nature of the distributed knowledge construction, we can never fully appreciate correctly the role of learning as individual cognitive constructionism (here I mean constructionism not constructivism).

More later.
All Best Wishes -
Paul

Extending learning

Hi,
Yesterday was a long busy day.
A senior colleague was talking about his new research group of six postgraduate students all to be working on the same or similar projects but they are distributed over a wide area working in different parts of the country.

I'll set up a networked blog for him, as I explained yesterday.
It should circumvent email overload, yet keep email open for individual tutoring and guidance. The six students all specialist medical-doctors can read, edit, comment and collaborate while signing each posting individually to maintain moderate integrity.

I know if they each have their own blog, and my friend has an rss aggregator, then this would technologically replace my networked-blog concept. However, the problem in his context was to develop unity and cohesion among dispersed researchers. A common blog acts as a prompt too, and rss feeds can be left-margined for academic readings, upcoming conferences, individual websites, and so on.

Yesterday I wrote of my idea for my own students within the same room working seated beside each other, and here I extend this concept to dispersed students who need close supervision (to get their doctorate) while allowing any place any time studying.

Thanks again to WestGeorgia -
Paul

Networked blog- it works !!

Hi Folks,
Great news !
( though I am bit shy I may be re-inventing the wheel )
I had much trouble with email reports from cohorts of students last year,
and wondered if a blog would work for us - and it does !!
I tested it out today with my multimedia students.
I set up before class a gmail address and password, and signed into blogger.
Then in today's lesson all students signed in on multiple computers
at the same time to the same google account, password and blog.

I was a bit concerned that only one machine - perhaps the first to log-in - would
be able to post or comment etc, but no, all the machines could simultaneously
post and edit, comment on the same one blog.
This means I can use peer-correction and writing,
and my simultaneous guidance, and my comment assessments,
and each small group of three or four students can post up
a message - under a group name/pseudonym - and can comment on the
messages from other groups : all in real-time synchronously.
Well, I was amazed.
We don't need to worry so much about our college email server
from now on, and they can access the blog from the school cafeteria
( no email is allowed from there, only internet access ->-> blog !! )
or from home at any time and at any place, and collaborate together
by co-editing each other.
All is a dream come true.

Now about adding the telephony...

Best Wishes to All,
I am really happy this course provides such tangible benefits
resolving real prior troubles, and directly helping my students !
My thanks to WestGeorgia.
Paul

Sounds like ...

Hi Folks !
Talking of audio-files...
It is becoming increasingly dangerous to listen to audiofiles : it is against the law in some few places to drive a car or even walk across the street with a green 'walk-across-ok' sign wearing earphones or listening to ipod-casts - called 'shiro-fone' in Japanese - a corruption /adaptation of 'white(=shiro)-headphones' referring to the white earplugs that come with the ipod.
In my lessons, I need sign-language to tell students to take off headphones and pay better attention to a whole-class discussion.

What I think may be of interest to you is the website at
http://www.findsounds.com/types.html

There is a whole range of police car siren sounds
http://supernextel.com/supernextel/ringtones/Police%20Siren.wav
- depending on which you want to download for your mobile phone ring-tone...
Personally I like to go through the kitten sounds
http://www.pawsonline.info/wav/kitten%2003.wav
- the 'findsounds' guys&gals provide the weblinks and the visual tone patterns - all in colour too!!

Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger ( http://members.iinet.net.au/~fitzac/tigger2.wav ) are there too, Simpsons etc etc etc
These can be added as very-small clickable hyperlinks on your powerpoint, for use during your next conference presentation
I mean the great sound clips you then set to repeat and increase in volume of a crowd clapping, and then cheering
http://sxm.funda.free.fr/Sonore/Applaus.wav - just what you need during your quick exit off stage after your boring bullet-point presentation :)

Enjoy !
Paul

It's Monday !

Back-to-work day !

I hope other folks don't mind - especially those at WestGeorgia -
but I have modified the links in my left-side column to other blogs
to show not the atom feeds
which display as text-only - - a bit impersonal, and unappetizing ?

changing to the blogspot.com (only) address
by deleting the .atom.xml from the end of the URL-link.

In this way, I can better connect personally, and
the artwork in the blogs of my colleagues is
refreshing impressive and easier to relate to
and learn from !

All Best Wishes
Paul

Adaptive

Hi Folks,
This blog is developing slowly but surely step-by-step.
One thing that I have learnt recently has been that rss could be used to monitor academic journals for key words - this should save professors a lot of time which they now spend locating articles for their junior department staff to read. However the number of journals with rss or atom feeds is still limited, and some help may be needed to manage this technologically.

It is one of my personal goals now being set.

All Best Wishes
Paul

On navigation

Hi folks,
Well, though I am really busy busy reading about Adv Tech,
other tasks still engage some of my time.
I still read other stuff - such as ancient Chinese history, and
today on how to navigate at sea.

So what has all this to do with learning.
Well, continuous teaching and learning is necessary because of the
high turnover of technical staff as occurs in the navy, to pass the old expertise to the newcomers.
The most important point in learning to navigate is that the learning be done in context.
i.e. during actual navigation practice.

This undelines with yet another example that the context of learning is important.
For some students at a distance in a non-English-speaking country in a rural area
the box (computer) is their whole context. For some, the context is also their workplace.
For others the context is a hope or dream to be achieved -
and teachers need to be aware of these differences in context,
in order to better guide the student learning.

All Best Wishes
Paul

New School Year

Well Folks,
Yesterday no blog... the 31st of March is an important deadline here in Japan,
with lots to get done dated before the 1st of April.
Well we have crossed that hurdle, but that's not to say everything got done !
I'll spend the next few days tidying up my desk.
And then really must get around to that book promised and overdue (by two weeks now).
It's really great to be busy -
and it's always great to see my new students (from next week).
Talk to you tomorrow -
Paul

WebCT down time

Hi Folks,
“This Friday/Saturday, the WebCT Service will be unavailable, due to time needed for regular maintenance …”
Well, this may be of no consequence or care to folks asleep in Georgia.
However for some of us, this timing coincides with peak study time on Saturday morning – Welcome to the world, folks, and all the time zones around the world.

How long will this down time take? Well, you know, the technician is doing his best - working at night-time, and some Smalltown College in northern Georgia need their server re-wired because because because. This happened last Saturday in the middle of my posting up an assignment !! This weekend is the deadline for assignments to the University of West Georgia …

Now, we could use facsimile … except the antiquated one in India hasn’t been replaced for years due to no capital reinvestment, the one in Viet Nam is switched off at 5pm to save electricity costs, the digital ones in Japan keep digital copies on a hard disk and have privacy concerns …

Or we could use google – gmail, and blogspot.com !
Surely this is as good a reason as any for diversification in technology,
and for NOT relying on WebCT threaded discussions for blogging.

I had taken a natural backup precaution of printing out a page or two from the WebCT pages and had the email address of an Assistant (you did too, right ?), but sadly while I was having trouble and asking for help, no email reply has arrived back, though now at seven days later response action has been done.

Diversity Diversity Diversity.
I think through diversity, we can try to increase access, and inclusivity to education, to try to provide a level playing field to those on Georgia time as much as to those on Mongolia time. Surely access is a key issue.
How’s the technician doing there tonight/ this morning ?? Any idea how long the WebCT system will be down? Anyone care ?

All Best Wishes
Paul

Judging by your face . . .

Well folks,
Greetings !
I have noticed recently that students in online distance education are still invited (if not required) to introduce themselves, and follow others customarily in posting up a face photo or so. I want to ask why !!!
The purpose of education is to develop one's knowledge and share meanings and ideas.
Well of course I have a playboy figure, blond hair, blue eyes or whatever - but do these get me the grade A ??!!
And what judgements do others make of one's shapely figure, cheekbones, and hair colour, not to mention superb fashion sense, sportscar and bright 'marakesh' red BMW bike ? What on earth have these to do with education ?

Nigel Blake of the UK Open University advocates clearly the academic objectivity quality of distance education, to discuss ideas and attack these not the person, and avoid the subjectivity of face-to-face introductions. Ohhh these are touted by instructors as easing us into an online community of learners - let's all choose our partners and group members by their eye colour ...

We need to be alert ever more strongly in our aims to bring openness and inclusivity in education to the retarded, homeless, poor, unwashed, homeless, foreign, and so on. Let's focus on your mind not your body !

I was at college, with my office next to that of Stephen Hawking (http://www.hawking.org.uk/) at ABC university. How so much poorer would the world be if we had let first appearances colour our judgement !

I heard a rumour... that half the people posting up the beautiful blonde faces were old guys in prison trying to ensnare rich foolish guys, and that the other half were the FBI trying to catch those old guys trying to catch the teenage blondes.
What has all this got to do with education ?

Online distance education courses start off with a face-to-face session to meet and get to know each other ...
How fair is that to us old coloured folk in a wheelchair ?

All Best Wishes
Paul

Reasons against autonomy . . .

Fellow Students / Teachers,
Musing out loud, if language resides in a different area of the brain from other memory, and if language learning is different from other learning, then language learning autonomy cannot be equated with learning autonomy. My current studies are in the area of autonomy, and it seems that while generally learner autonomy may be a good thing, language learner autonomy is not. And not only this, but it would also follow from adult education theory, that adult language learning autonomy must at many times be diminished in order to complete the language learning task at hand.
I don't see that we can with a broad brush say that learning autonomy is a goal of education.

Comments please . . in moderation !
All Best Wishes
Paul

For Your Information ...

Hi folks,
For your information, if any of you are interested, I have a small library online at
http://www.Open-Ed.net/library/home.html
For example, the left-side menu button can guide you to 'Definitions'
which I have collected over the years
( somewhat superseded now by google-searching on define:thisterm )
but my collection does give the various definitions by authorities in distance education
one-by-one with full lit ref - ideal for your writing that academic paper
where you may select which definition best expresses your point :)
And 3700 or so other Papers and Books.
If you need any help in getting a copy for private non-commercial use
- these are on my shelf here (maybe !) - please ask.
The 3700 are given by first-author alphabetically and year.

The RLOs are under-construction, and dozens are ready now, but how to upload large files ?

You will need to have the free Flash reader installed.
Well, talk to you all tomorrow.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Bucket not in so regular a shape ...

Hi folks,
I sometimes wonder - well mostly everyday - what is worthwhile posting up in a blog. Most bloggers give a family history. Yet for educational purposes I wonder if I should just stay with what I read, studied, learnt, and reflected upon today. (For those who really want to know, I am deliberating the disadvantages of student autonomy... ... )

Well, with a bucket and spade today I moved half of the delivered mountain of 24000kg of gravel ( crushed stones ) for re-surfacing my parking area at my home. I moved to re-cycle another 2000kg of sand - all by hand of course - and rescued three little plants that had taken root ( likely seeded by fruit pips dropped by migrating or local birds ) and re-planted these carefully in my Japanese-style garden.

Now I am not sure if all this counts as educational, but even teachers should take time out and exercise a bit.
( I don't mention the hours before dawn, and just after, spent editing and answering email ... )

These points probably say a lot about my attitude to work and helping students in need.

Anyway, this may be a self-introduction of sorts : - who I am, what I do, and how I tick.
If any of you are in the area of southern Japan, you are very welcome to freely stay over, and enjoy the mountain life in this hermit-quiet corner of Japan.

Maybe in a few days I'll post up a photo or two.
All Best Wishes
Paul

Still Learning...

Hi, Now I have found we should post up our banner hereabouts.
And follow the instructions fairly accurately, so here is my new Banner.
(Technologically, I hand-drew the JCSat on powerpoint Mac, transferred to Windows to make transparent, and copied back to this Mac)
Please note, in MS powerpoint the minimum banner size is height 1" or 2.54 cm, and it cannot produce a banner, say, of dimension 2cm x 20cm. You will need a Mac for that ;)
All Best Wishes
Paul

Not feeling so 'genki'...

Hi, everyone,
Well one good thing about distance education is that I can continue even with a body-temperature at 38.9 C !
Influenza is widely contagious here in Japan, but one day or so in bed should sort this out... we must thank the WestGa folks for not putting you all in the the same brick-and-mortar room as me !
Talk to you tomorrow ...
All Best Wishes
Paul

My earlier blog discontinued

Hi, Some of you may have found my earlier blog, but I am trying to delete that. Maybe I will find time tomorrow to go through all the various settings - but not tonight !
Paul

And this is me more recently - now I 've set my mind on action !

And this is another more recent photo ... it takes time to get ready to study. Not sure if I am ready yet, but at least I am dressed!


All Best Wishes
Paul

Takes time...

Procrastination is my weak point. Here is a photo of when I started to think about beginning to study ... ... ...

All Best Wishes
Paul

Welcome !

Welcome to this new blog for the Open Education Network, to offer learning opportunities to all, especially to students and teachers in Asia. If you have any comments, please feel free to email to me directly at kawachi@open-ed.net.
All Best Wishes
Paul