eyespot

Eyespot is another potentially useful edu tool. Still in beta, and will likely mature with time. The concept of sharing and remixing short video clips and audio tracks for quick stories is intriguing, but perhaps I am easily intrigued. This example is fairly abstract. This was pieced together from other user clips uploaded to eyespot.

BubbleShare

This seems like a useful tool for sharing photos and creating quick tutorials. Check out their website: BubbleShare. Play the slideshow or click on the image below to view the slides at actual size.

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WZ, My new Hero

Walter Zorn is my new hero. I was looking for a tool tip tool and stumbled across his work. Not only are these useful applications, but careful attention is paid to making them stable across multiple browsers. This means more of your students will easily benefit. Tool tips might be especially useful for labeling complex drawings or glossing difficult texts or even providing a small thumbnail image for vocabulary.

It might not be the easiest tool to use just now. There isn't a GUI, so if you are not comfortable working with code, it might not be for you. Or maybe it just means finding someone who is comfortable and working together.

Walter attains hero status because of the cycle he built. That is incredible!

MI requires DL

Mich. first to mandate online learning

This is timely. Just this weekend I was talking with family about the upcoming expectations for students in regards to distance/online learning. I suggested hybrids and blends are almost expected these days in higher ed. Students want access to materials and more online. The students in the room (highschool) agreed. But I also suggested that as tools become more sophisticated less seat time will likely occur. The students in the room were less sure they would benefit from this as communication would be sacrificed. Of course, I assured them that online learning is (or ought to be) very communicative... potentially more so than F2F. My wife then shared her horror story of taking on online course where she was required ("forced") to post once and reply twice to a poorly designed discussion board. This didn't help my argument much. So, it will be interesting to see how MI students react to the requirement. I sure hope MI educators are ready in terms of the pedagogy of online learning, or my wife will be joined by hordes who will never stop sharing their less than positive online learning experiences.

odeo

powered by ODEO

And one more possibility here from Odeo.com. They must be using the same service as audioblogger as I called the same number. Only the pin numbers were different. This doesn't post directly to my blog, I had to copy and paste the code (they give this to you so it is quite simple) into this entry. But it does have the advantage of playing directly on the page with the help of the flash player.

audioblogger

This is the audioblogger.com method for posting audio online. The image is attached to an MP3 file so the audio will be opened (or saved) with another program. It might not be fair to judge the quality with this post as I was walking into a strong wind and speaking on a cell phone with poor signal strength. The posting procedure is simple: place a call, key your primary phone number, enter your pin number and press 1 to post to your blog.

evoca

This is evoca.com's audio posting. The quality seems better, but in fairness, I was out of the wind. The procedure for posting is simple: call, record and hang up when you're done, return to your computer and click a button to post to blog. There might be a way to have this automatically post to a blog, but I haven't seen it yet. There is code provided so you can post the audio directly into your WebCT or HTML page.

google video

Google has partnered with the US National Archives to begin offering video online. Nice. Another powerful resource for educators and those who seek to learn. And personally, I find other video offerings within google interesting as well... particularly the old commercial and education videos.

Learner Satisfaction

I returned from Savannah, GA this week. I was attending the ITC e-Learning Conference. Both the conference and Savannah were fantastic. This topic seemed to recur in many sessions. And in many sessions presenters were quick to point to statistics that learners are not very appreciative of peer-to-peer collaborative assignments. Other stats seem to show that a majority of online students claim community is not very important to their learning.

I think these stats are mis-guided. I am not doubting that learners dislike being forced onto discussion boards and pushed into groups to produce reports. I am not doubting learners find these activities more wasteful than educational. I am quickly annoyed in courses I have taken with the post once, respond twice routine. This is forced conversation! Do you ever take the time in your F2F class to ask everyone for their answer and respond to two student answers? No, there isn't time for one, and more importantly the idea that everyone's voice is necessary on any given topic is a bit mis-guided.

So, pay no attention to claims that students do not like community. Instead focus your attention on how to better create thought provoking prompts for learners. And allow community to form more naturally. Remove the classroom picture from your head! The online structure is different.

*steps down from soapbox*

Learn Sth New

An instructor asked me today how to allow students to see results of only certain quizzes in WebCT while not giving them access to the entire list of Quizzes they have yet to take. I replied I didn't really think it was possible as any quiz tool will lead to the same page housing ALL quizzes.

But then I was curious so I poked around on Ask Dr. C and found a javascript hack that loads specific quiz results... pretty slick, but not very user friendly (see script below).

I figured my search was over, but when I thought about it I realized I never had any reason in my courses to even try to add more than one quiz tool. So I wanted to see what it would do. It did just what I thought it would do. Created two quiz tool icons pointing to the same quiz listing page. But here is where it got interesting. I noticed a little field I had not seen before. It's in the picture above. That little Quiz listing section. The Select button let's the designer choose which quizzes or surveys to display on the linked quiz page. How cool is that!? Why didn't I know about this sooner?

Here is the javascript hack if you need it (replace the "course_id" and "quiz_#" and note that a return was added to make it fit on screen):

<html>
<script type="text/javascript">
self.location="/SCRIPT/course_id/scripts/
   student/serve_quiz_marked.pl?DO_GRADE+
   quiz_#+1+VIEW";
</script>
</html>