worst practices

Opening Keynote, Dr. Myk Garn, gave a nice little talk, with powerful images (he was a photography instructor), about learning from our worst practices. Learning best from my mistakes has certainly been true in my life and in teaching. He enhanced his presentation with mistake testimonials from the attendants. Good fun, and certainly good lessons learned.

When I started at Kirkwood, I often suggested that faculty incorporate discussion into their classes -- at least for those who did not use it already. Most told me about how terrible their experience had been in the past and so were not interested in discussing discussion. This always left me feeling strange, because while they learned a lesson from their failure, their solution was simply to avoid that behavior altogether. It seemed they had learned the wrong lesson.

Dr. Garn has a website: worstpractices.org. I haven't looked much, but it could grow into something interesting. He certainly has some insights... "Learning to fail in an organized manner" -- I like that.

He recommended The Innovator's Dilemma and talked some about sustaining vs disruptive innovations. He did not mention, to my recollection the next volume, The Innovator's Solution, and I probably shouldn't read into that too much, so draw your own conclusion. In any case, it's interesting to think about how we handle innovation. Careful planning? Or more of a "Fire - Ready - Aim" approach? Part of it, I think, is personality. But if we temper our personality to suit the type of innovation perhaps more successful failures will occur.

He didn't mention one of my favorite books, "The Logic of Failure", but I think it relates, so I did. Hey, it's my blog.

e-Learning Conference 2008

Made it a little on the wrinkled side. Flights were fine, some traffic in Orlando, but that's the price you pay for large cities.

The sun is rising now. The day beckons discussion about learning at a distance (and surfing). I can see a few surfers heading out to catch some waves already. I'm still drinking coffee and looking over the conference agenda. I have a pretty good idea which sessions I will attend today, but I will carefully choose my seat in case I need to change my mind and make a quick exit.

If there are particular questions about teaching and learning at a distance anyone wants me to watch for, let me know.

iPod Quiz

The folks at Respondus have added an interesting publishing feature to their test generation software. The software will now let you save the test for the iPod Quiz feature. If you already have your self-test questions loaded in Respondus, this will be a simple option to provide students. If you don't, it's 100% possible to download your questions from CE6 and then republish them for the iPod. Pretty nice. Can't say too many students will use it, but giving more options is certainly what counts.

50 Story Sites

From Alan Levin on CogDogRoo we can quickly explore and evaluate 50+ tools for presentation and story creation on the web. Plenty to look at here. Most interesting might be the Powerpoint conversion and sharing sites. I like the concept of timeline tools but I wasn't overly impressed with any of the embedded styles.

YouTube Lectures

UCBerkeley is using YouTube to host and deliver course lectures, visiting scholar events and marketing videos. Such a simple and useful vehicle.

KQED on SL

This comes from Quest on the KQED.org site. A great introduction to Second Life and how distance educators are using it.



*it might take a bit to load since it's HD*

Second Life T-Shirt

I've been looking at Second Life again. I was curious to see how other colleges were represented in SL and what kinds of activities they are promoting. I'm also curious if colleges are using SL as a marketing tool and if so, how. Clothing seems to work in the real world, so it seems an obvious choice for SL as well. So, I made myself a Kirkwood t-shirt. If anyone wants a copy, we can arrange a time to meet in SL and I'll give you one.

I'm pictured here in China. A small boat of an island really, but it was happenin'. Got to "speak" some Chinese too.

Social Learning

Heard about this study on NPR this morning. Claims humans are better at learning via social cues than other primates. And suggests this is perhaps why humans were able to develop complex social structures like language among other crazy human-only accomplishments. And then I was searching for the actual study (apparently in the new issue of Science) when I came across the College-cram.com website. It's an interesting site concept that combines elements of facebook with interactive online learning objects with old fashioned study groups.

GrandCentral

This might be of some use to Distance educators. GrandCentral is a telephone linking service. It works like this: You sign up with GrandCentral and they give you a phone number. Then you choose which phone or phones (home, work, cell) will ring whenever someone calls that GrandCentral number. Interesting, no?

So, for example, you give your students your GrandCentral number and set it so it rings both in your office and on your cell. If you happen to be in your office, you can pick it up there. If you are out and about, you can answer it on your cell. It doesn't matter which phone you pick up. And one number does it all.

But wait, there's more! The service also allows you to ListenIn on someone leaving a message if you need to screen calls a bit. And if you press 4 anytime during the call, the call is recorded (there is fine print in the agreement warning users that some states have laws that require you to inform a caller s/he is being recorded).

Currently the service is FREE! There will likely be levels of subscription in the near future.

Morguelife.com

In a recent edition of Mac World, I found reference to morguefile.com, a free high quality image site that might be of use to some. Here are some images I found there doctored up a bit by me.