EDUCATION BLOG

Released today, the Horizon Report is an annual round-up of key trends in teaching, learning and creative expression within learning organizations. The 2008 edition spotlights 6 emerging technologies and three metatrends.

More detailed commentary to follow, but for now I'll pull out their observations on 3D spaces as one of their three metatrends (the others being collective generation and sharing of knowledge, and connecting people to the network):

Moving the computer into three dimensions has been an equally interesting and recurring theme that is now clearly a metatrend, with a mapping currently spanning the years between 2004 and 2010. In this case, development has been extensive, with the emergence of vector-based animation tools allowing simple 3D representations in 2004, and the growth of physical 3D outputs in the form of rapid prototyping over 2005 and 2006. Virtual and augmented reality began to find traction around that time as well, and today nearly every learning organization is exploring some form of virtual reality, either in direct learning applications taking place in platforms like Open Croquet or Second Life, or in research settings, where enhanced visualization tools are probing the depths of rich data sets for new learning and knowledge.

There's been a lot of talk that 2008 will be the year of virtual worlds primarily because of the explosive growth in its use by higher education. How 3D worlds are USED will be one of the defining questions of the year to come - anticipate seeing a lot of 'classroom replication' - teacher at podium, kids at desks, only this time you won't know they're asleep. It's the work that's done to break out of this mold that will be the source of innovation, and much like other great ideas from academia will be picked up by the commercial sector once its been tested and documented.

The Horizon Report is much broader than just coverage of virtual worlds, and the overall message is that leadership and innovation is required in education in the face of the challenges and opportunities of technology. Giving one example, they note that:

"The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking— combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization—is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship."

Anna University, Chennai - Distance Education MBA, MCA, M.Sc 2008 Admission Notice
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Social Media University, Global (SMUG) is a natural extension of my family’s interest in education and the development of the Internet, as well as my experiences in speaking to conferences of professional communicators who are interested in exploring how social media relate to their jobs.

My Dad was an elementary school teacher before becoming a principal, and upon his retirement served a term on the local school board. I graduated from college the traditional way in 1986.

But since then, we’ve taken a decidedly non-traditional approach to education.

In fact, SMUG’s headquarters facility, Old Main (pictured above), doubles as the headquarters for Aase Academy, a primary and secondary school that has seen its first two graduates go on to complete their four-year degrees at University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. I am the Superintendent of Aase Academy, and my wife Lisa is the Principal and Master Teacher.

Unlike SMUG, Aase Academy is an exclusive institution: you need to be born into it.

Accredited, certified, standardized degrees obviously have a place. My brother, Mark, graduated from college last year through a cohort degree-completion program that involved substantial on-line interaction and distance learning. He got a management job largely because of it, and was chosen to give the commencement address, which you can see here.

But while a degree (maybe even an MBA) may be a requirement for a particular job, it's generally just a minimum price of admission to be considered. What matters even more is demonstrating what you can do and the results you can deliver, and how you continue to learn and grow and develop new marketable skills.

This leads to discussion of another type of learning that I view as necessary and beneficial, but not quite sufficient. Many professionals attend conferences and seminars for a quick immersion in social media. I enjoy attending and speaking at these because they give opportunities for face-to-face interaction, and I highly recommend them. But if you spend a couple of days and hundreds or even thousands of dollars at a social media seminar, but then don’t apply what you’ve learned personally and professionally, you have developed familiarity with social media but haven’t really experienced it.

That’s where Social Media University, Global comes in; it provides an ongoing framework for structured learning about a field that will become increasingly important for professionals, particularly in communications, sales, marketing and management.

SMUG uses social media to help you learn social media. So you aren’t learning alone; you’ll be part of a group that is learning together. And it's not a theoretical, ivory-tower curriculum. It's real-world stuff.

SMUG is not accredited by any higher educational body, so therefore the credits you earn don’t transfer. The learning does transfer, however. You can apply it immediately in a hands-on environment to your personal or organizational projects.

So how do you get started?

• All posts to this blog that are part of the SMUG curriculum will be tagged as SMUG, and are available by clicking here. By reading those you'll be getting the most recent posts first.
• Likewise, you can subscribe to the SMUG feed directly here (assuming you’ve completed Social Media 102: RSS Feeds) so you’ll be made aware of new posts.
• As we flesh out the curriculum, you'll be able to go to that page in the SMUG section of this blog, and sequentially work through the posts related to a topic.
• Finally, a weekly (or so) message with links to new posts or other developments will be distributed to course participants who have enrolled in SMUG by joining the SMUG Facebook group. That group will serve as the virtual Student Union for SMUG. You can upload photos or videos, or post links to your projects, and otherwise network with people who share this common interest of learning about social media.

While SMUG's headquarters facility, Old Main, was completed over a century ago, our curriculum is definitely under construction. Please join us in building it out.

What are your suggestions for course topics?

   I've been teaching at Carteret Community College for 22 years. In fact, I have taught Photography in some capacity for over 25 years. Education has changed dramatically since the first day I walked into a classroom/lab. To think that I'm sitting in a coffee shop on the coast of North Carolina (this very cold Sunday morning) checking in to my Art and Photography classes with my laptop computer. I'm picking up a wireless signal and just finished having a discussion about art with a group of student 8 hours away at a college (SWCC) in the mountains of western North Carolina. If you would have told me I'd be able to engage my students, teach my students, connect with my students and help them learn a variety of college level subjects without actually seeing them 10 years ago I would have thought you were absolutely crazy. Now it's an integral part of what I do as an educator. Online education (distance learning) has been accepted and embraced by high schools and colleges around the world. Now don't get me wrong, there's good online teachers and bad just like in the classroom. It takes a completely different approach to be an effective teacher in the online environment. It's almost as if you become a moderator / facilitator instead of a didactic talking head standing in front of a group of students (sage on the stage) imparting your knowledge to them. Good teaching is still good teaching whether its in the traditional classroom or in the online environment. Good teaching is proactive, dynamic, engaging and takes a certain amount of empathy and compassion. Good teaching online also takes innovation, creativity and a willingness to think (and communicate) in completely new ways.

Distance learning empowers teachers and students in a variety of ways and offers so many more options and alternatives to the traditional instructional model. Teaching online has reinvigorated me to literally reinvent myself as a teacher in addition to making me think about (and teach) my subject matter in a whole new way. In other words it forces me to be a better instructor because I MUST rethink and retool every aspect of my teaching strategy and methodology to be effective in the online environment. The other part of this equation is our students. Especially the ones coming out of high school. Most of them are very comfortable working, communicating and socializing online and they expect their educational experience to be every bit as dynamic, interactive and sophisticated as their other online worlds such as My Space and Face Book.

Its like anything else in this world. People evolve, cultures evolve, society evolves and nothing truly stays the same. That certainly goes for the learning process. I think its great that I can get up in the morning, drive to my local coffee shop and start my day off teaching while sipping a cup coffee. Now I have to get back to a discussion about Prehistoric art with my students in Fayetteville. You gotta love technology. Like I mentioned in an earlier post - it can be a curse or a blessing depending on your point of view, attitude and mindset.

I decided that I should play with SecondLife since I'll probably have to use it sometime in my college career.  I downloaded the program, made my avatar, and decided to make her look like me.  My hunny looked at the avatar and said "Huh... you lost weight in SecondLife."  Should I have made myself into a furry animal instead?

The controls are a little strange, but I'm not sure how much of that is because I'm doing all this on my laptop, and how much of it is because of the way the program's designed.  For instance, sometimes I want to see something other than my avatar's backside... but I can't figure out how to toggle the camera view yet.  I did figure out how to add myself to the SJSU SLIS group though.  Now it says "Spartan" above my name.

Either way, I'll explore a bit more and play with it a bit more before I make any major decisions about it.  I did learn that I can't have any other windows open or my lap top will crash.  I think it has something to do with the graphics memory or something. 

In other news... I have a partner for my Information Retrieval class.  We paired up based on a mutual love of zombie movies, books by Laurell K. Hamilton, and quilting.  My partner lives in Sacramento, though, so it might be a little difficult for us to get together in person if we ever needed to.

I know I should be counting my blessings about this, but school isn't going as fast as I need it to go.  It's the first week, and I know things will pick up considerably.  My only problem with this week's pace is a matter of scheduling.  I'd like to get a better feel for how fast I need to go in these classes, and how much work I'll need to do so that I can figure out how to budget my time.  Also, each teacher has modified BlackBoard to suit their needs, so the buttons are all in different places, and sometimes have different names.  It's not a big deal, but it can be confusing.  I also wonder if any of the teachers will be posting lectures for us to listen to, if so how often and how long will they be?  Or will they just post their thoughts about the topics covered in the chapters?  Will they get involved in the Bulletin Board discussions, or just monitor them?  It's definitely difficult to get a feel for the class and the teacher if it's all online.  I thought I'd be very well prepared because the PACE program had some online classes, but to have ALL of them be in the distance ed format is very different.  *sigh*  I know I'll get the hang of it, and I know this is just me worrying for nothing... but still, I worry.

Alright it's way past my bedtime, so I should head to bed.  I have to be up sometime tomorrow to take care of the laundry and head to Chabot for a ballroom dancing class my hunny wants to take with me. 

Today, many of us have a day off at work because it is the Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I watch CNN pretty regularly and they have been talking about MLK Jr. for the last two days. Every politician, from Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to Republicans Mike Huckabee and George Bush, are talking about the contributions of Dr. King today. No doubt Martin Luther King played a pivotal role in ending discrimination and prejudice in American society. The media and politicians tell us that because of Dr. King's efforts and the efforts of other like him Blacks and Whites acheived constitutional equality in the US. But as I sit and watch everything on TV and hear all these speeches, I am thinking about a closely related issue: If blacks and whites have become constitutionally equal and racial discrimination is illegal, why do I not see that equality in business schools of the country?

Don't get me wrong. Everybody agrees that blacks have more access to higher education today than they had fifty years ago (Just read a good blog by a former admissions officer). More blacks have access to mainstream, white-collared jobs than they did half-a-century ago. Black men also lead many of the nation's top companies, such as American Express and AOL Time Warner. So, there is no doubt that as as a nation we have made significant progress because of leaders like MLK who worked tirelessly for racial equality in the country. What I am talking about is that when I get a chance to be at any business school in the country, I am surprised by how few black students (and faculty) I see there. Empirical evidence supports my observation. A research survey counted less than 1,000 Black students at the top-25 business schools in the country, and it seems that black enrollment at these top schools is decreasing. I believe less elite b-schools fare even worse. The number of black students at business schools in most state universities is even lower, especially when seen as a percentage of the total student enrollment. If business schools are where the future leaders of the business world get their training, what does this mean for how leaders of American corporarations will look like 40/50 years from now? Maybe, ABB- Anything but black! (To be completely honest, the racial gap is not limited to just b-schools. According to a Business Week article, "black men lag behind in every major occupational category -- from police officers to accountants" and these gaps are widening at the top.)

I don't think I am the only one to have noticed this. I recently learned of John Rice, a Harvard business graduate, who noticed this glaring race gap and started a non-profit Management Leadership for Tommorrow (MLT) to introduce young blacks to business schools. But certainly, any one person or one organization can not do it all. I think what we need is a top-administration commitment to increase racial diversity (African-American students) in business schools around the country. It would be a shame if American business schools, which are so good at attracting students from other countries including black students from African countries (Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw has a blog on this topic), continue to lag behind in providing young blacks who grew up in the US with the same educational opportunities that are available to their White brothers and sisters.    

My last class officially starts tomorrow. However, I have logged into the class and posted my introduction. I also started writing my first journal entry in which the professor requests that we discuss our opinions of online classes. It is due tomorrow. As I was working on the entry, I realized how much my overall thoughts about distance education have changed during my time at Southern and how mixed my emotions are on this subject. The bottom line? I seriously do not think that I would ever do an online program again. I might take an online class, but I would not enter a program unless a school had online tools to allow for student and professor interaction outside the classroom. There would need to be a good infrastructure dedicated to distance students - one that made them feel welcome and important. I found it very difficult to write the journal entry, to give form to my jumbled thoughts on this topic. I ended up saving it in draft form so that I can think more about it.

One of my biggest problems with my online program is the lack of community feeling. I know that I have been going to school. My stress levels can attest to that fact. Intellectually, I know that I am going to Southern Connecticut State University. I mean that is the school that is on my Visa bill - and the one that should be on my diploma. However, I feel no sense of belonging to any type of college community, feel no sense of connection the school and feel only limited connections to any peers or professors. While two years ago I probably would have said that this wouldn't matter, I now believe that it is very important. I have missed this type of connection and do feel as if my degree program could have been so much more than it has been.

Students who would like some math tutoring can make use of the after school class that is taught via the distance learning lab --- with a tutor from Newcomb.

This article from the peer-reviewed First Monday journal came just in time for an issue we have in one of our distance modules, where the use of the wiki in the VLE did not work as smoothly as we had hoped. In this instance, the problem was the wording of the assignment, but actually, it was something I have been thinking about and experimenting with anyway.

In the abstract the authors state that:

The purpose of this study was to improve the quality of students’ online discussion of assigned readings in an online course. To improve the focus, depth, and connectedness of online discussion, the first author designed a text–focused Wiki that simultaneously displayed the assigned reading and students’ comments side by side in adjacent columns. In the text–focused Wiki, students were able to read the assigned text in the left column and type their comments or questions in the right column adjacent to the sentence or passage that sparked their interest. In post–participation surveys, data were gathered about students’ experiences in the text–focused Wiki and prior experiences in threaded discussion forums. Students reported more focus, depth, flow, idea generation, and enjoyment in the text–focused Wiki.

It is a very interesting paper indeed, which I recommend anyone to read who is using wikis and/or discussion forums and/or blogs.

Gao, F. & Wong, D. "Student engagement in distance learning environments: A comparison of threaded discussion forums and text-focused Wikis. First Monday, Volume 13 Number 1 - 7 January 2008.

Hello all! I hope you are enjoying your first week of Learning 2.0 @ SEMLS.

Many of you already know me from classes you've taken at SEMLS, but for those of you who haven't had a chance to make it to our office yet, I wanted to include a brief introduction here. As the Assistant Administrator for Technology at SEMLS, I assist libraries in integrating technology in their services. I also provide assistance and consultation for their online services. I love thinking of new ways libraries can use the Internet to reach out to their users and provide a sense of community in a virtual environment. As libraries try to find their place in the 21st century, I firmly believe we need to offer online services that are as interesting and easy to use as the Web sites our patrons and students are accustomed to using. Read the rest of this entry »