The End is Near

This is my last semester at SF State--after 5 semesters I will graduate. However, currently standing between me and graduation victory is my ITEC 830 final project and my ITEC 894 culminating experience. Right now both seem rather daunting. As I look at the projects and think about what I would like to still add, it seems like a never ending list of tasks. Luckily for me the company I work for is closed for the entire week of Thanksgiving (cost cutting measures) so I have nine straight days to dedicate to the two projects. This certainly will be a Thanksgiving I won't soon forget.

Interface Design Critique of the Kindle by Amazon

Since my original Web 2.0 presentation was not strictly on a Web 2.0 tool but on the Kindle eBook reader by Amazon, I did my critique on the Kindle. Although I expected that the critique would be much different for a device than for a web page or web tool, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did the critique outline fit quite well for the Kindle; but also it provided me with fresh insights into the design of the Kindle. After completing the assignment, I had a much better appreciation for the design and designers of the Kindle.

You can read my complete review of the Kindle on my Wiki.

The online community

The presentations last Thursday were quite impressive and what made them even more impressive is the fact that participants were scattered literally all over the World. One benefit of having almost everyone online was that it was much easier to hear everyone since everyone had his or her individual Mic to use. Also, since so many people were online, there was only a small group of people in the classroom and that kept the noise caused by side conversations to a minimum

By far the most impressive of all from that class was having a participant who was 15 or 16 time zones away! Dr. Foreman sounded as immediately present as those at home in San Fransisco. Truly the internet has shrunk the world.

The timeliness of daylight savings time

Daylight savings time was last night / this morning and it was a very timely event as we are reading Norman's article on Design of Everyday Things. A problem I have twice every year is resetting all of the clocks, watches, timing devices in our home. It should be a relatively easy thing to do as they all, for the most part, afford us the same things: the ability to read time and set timing events. And of course, the ability to adjust either the time of day or the timing events you set. The reason I find it so difficult--and sometimes frustrating--is that they mostly use different design mappings to achieve the same goal. And since I only do it twice a year, I tend to forget what I have discovered in between times.

As Norman points out, the design should tell (or at least hint) at what you need to do. And then you need to get feedback when you do something as to what you did. The timing devices I am resetting do a good job of giving me feedback. I can usually see immediately what the impact of pushing buttons is. However, it is often not intuitive. Sometimes a single button has multiple functions depending upon how many times you push it or how long you hold it in when you push it. Maybe it was because I read Norman's article about design and function--and malfunction--but this time I had the easiest time of all changing things. Usually I end up turning on the alarm on my watch when I only want to change the time. And I couldn't figure out how to adjust the time--only the alarm--for the bathroom clock. But not it is all right. I guess you need to go into thinking that things are going to non-intuitive and Viola! It all starts to make sense. Thank you Mr. Norman for the instights!!

Hubs and experts

Eugene's discussion on SocialText and its use in 'the real word' was very interesting--especially the concept of hubs. Like in search engines, if you map who references whom, you will find certain websites standout as being referenced more than others: the experts. In the SocialText paradigm, you look at how many followers people have. The assumption is that people with lots of followers can act as hubs of communications and information. Certainly the greater the followers, the more communications to that person will be 'heard' by others. Another useful measure would be who receives the most communications from others. If one could assume that a large percentage of these communications were queries of some sort; you might be able to conclude that this person is an information broker. Being able to identify such information brokers is a useful because these are the people who, as Eugene said, know who knows.

Everyone loves ice cream

I've always loved making ice cream (and of course eating it also). I think I like making it so much because it gives people such joy to eat it. I've tried to capture that joy with my photo essay.

Andragogy and emerging technologies

This article expressed an idea that has become a common theme this semester: the emerging class of social learning tools implies a shift in the role of the instructor. No longer is the instructor the 'dispenser of wisdom' who leads students along the learning journey based on his or her superior knowledge of the subject matter. Instead, the instructor is leading students along this journey based on his or her ability to facilitate learning among students. The students are now discovering the knowledge or even constructing the knowledge with a little help from the instructor. No where is this paradigm more true than in the case of adult learning. Adults tend to be much more self-directed than younger students. Adults have an opinion on what is important for them to learn and they act upon that opinion. They want 'just in time' learning rather than 'just in case' learning. And the emerging social learning tools support that paradigm nicely allowing adults to collaborate with each other in a learning environment under the facilitation of an instructor. Of course, for this paradigm to succeed, both the instructor and the student need to accept their new roles. With the power to direct their own learning comes the responsibility to do so!

A Whole New Mind (Chpts 1-3)

In the first part of Pink's book, the author describes the two parts of our brain and how they differ from each other: both at a low level--control of body parts--and a higher level--reasoning, pattern recognition. After that, the author takes us through an historical perspective describing the dominance of left brain thinking and the more recent rise of right brain thinking. He even offers several drivers for this rise of the right brain. The story is fascinating; but it makes me want to go back to learning for the 21st century. In learning for the 21st century, the authors describe a group of skills that are a 'must' for successful education. However, it is interesting to note that most of the skills/tasks described in that article were pretty much left brain thinking. There was not really an emphasis on the right brain skills that Pink talks about. Is this because we have don't yet know how to interject right brain learning exercises into our schools? To me, this seems like a critical point. I tend to agree with what Pink is saying about right brain skills and since these are so 'foreign' to our currrent culture, we have to make an even greater effort to exercise and develop these skills in our schools. I think this could be a major challenge for 21st century learning.

For a mind map of the first three chapters, see my wiki.

A student on vacation

I just returned from a week's vacation--both physically and metaphysically. I was on the East coast and almost completely disconnected from my normal life (no wireless in my cabin, cell phone reception was spotty, I had to go to the library or K-Mart for computer access, but I had my Kindle with me). It was both a good feeling and a bad feeling. I did access my email several times during the vacation and kept up with the text book readings via my Kindle; but I had no communications with my fellow students. No blogging, no ninging. So now I am back and I can spend some time reacquainting myself with the joys of asynchronous communications. It is good to be away; but it is also good to be back.

Learning for the 21st Century

In their report, the partnership of 21st Century skills discusses the need for relevance in education. The idea of education needing to be relevant is not new. What is new; however, is what relevance means for the current generation of kids. Not only are they very technologically and digitally savvy; but they are use to a life style much different than the traditional classroom. They are use to being very social and interactive with their peers. They are use to multi-media and multi-tasking. This background has huge ramifications for education. For a detailed outline of this article, see my 830 Wiki. Also, look at the image below for a mind map of the article.

Growing Up With Google

In her article, Growing Up With Google, Dr. Oblinger describes a generation that grew up with the internet and how that has shaped their psyches. These net genners as they are called have, among other things, a high need to communicate and collaborate--and not just one on one. She goes on to describe what impact this has for education. Being I am in a Corporate environment, I see it also having a huge impact to the Corporate world as these net genners enter the work force. In our Company, we rely very heavily on email and the telephone for communications (and a smattering of IM). The net genners; however, rely much more heavily on IM and social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. I can foresee generational issues with communications--especially in team project situations. We have been trying for several years to increase the use of collaborative tools--primarily Sharepoint--with very little luck. I would imagine the net genners would find it both incomprehensible and frustrating to encounter such resistance toward technological collaboration. I foresee a lot of learning happening in the next several years.

The World is Flat Project

I was very impressed with what these students did with the World is Flat project. Using a wiki for structure, they created an extensive library of videos that, taken togehter, examine not only what the World Wide Web is but also what it means for society. The particular episode I reviewed (see my specific comments on my class wiki 830 wiki) was an interview / debate between two classic points of view: the individual who believes the Internet is the be all and end all for his or her world and the individual who believes that books still hold a special place in this World.

The producer of the video was the off camera narrator / moderator, asking each individual questions, follow up questions, offers to rebuttal. It was quite effectively done. Most of the shots were tightly framed and really allowed you to see who the interviewees felt about what they were saying. It did a good job of capturing their emotions and not just their words. Also, it did a good job of illustrating that there are always more than one side to any issue.

Emerging Technologies

As pointed out in this week's reading, emerging technologies can have a significant impact on instructors, students, and the entire learning process. One aspect brought out by the author that I find very interesting is the way emerging technologies can promote facilitation and the impact that has on the process. A key premise of the author is that in order to maximize the value that emerging technology can produce in terms of promoting facilitation, the instructor must transition their pedagogical strategy from one of being a lecturer to one of being a facilitator. Although this may seem relatively self evident, the process itself is not necessarily trivial. Based on my own research for my 894 project, the problem can be two pronged. Not only are many instructors quite familiar and comfortable with the 'brick and mortar' classroom and lecturer style of teaching; but also, they are quite unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the many technologies that are typically deployed in the online environment to foster to foster collaboration among students. So I thoroughly agree with the author's suggestion that a support mechanism must be in place to help the instructor with the transition from lecturer to facilitator. I would just add that such support must take into account not only the mechanics of using the new technology; but also the pedagogical strategy for using the new technology. Both can be new for the instructor and both need to be learned before the instructor can realize the full potential of the online learning environment.

Week 3: class reflection

Tonight's class was interesting. Having another remote student online--Eric--added a nice dimension to the experience. We did not have as much collaboration as the tool would allow; but I think that could be built up with experience. Also, the listening experience was great and I did get a lot out of the class from that. If we can only find a way to allow me to interact more with the class as a whole...

Week 3: Connected Specialization

This week's readings reinforced something I have known for awhile about me--I am an auditory learner. For some reason, I reflect best on material that I listen to--like the Siemens podcast.

A topic that really hit home for me was the idea of connected specialization--the networks we form with the people we feel have the knowledge that we are interested in. At first, it sounds a little like a community of learning; however it is different. A community of learning usually decides on a common topic or purpose and then works on that. In connected specialization, I chose a 'topic' for me; but no one else in my network needs to actively work on that topic for me. All members have their own agendas and each member gleans from the group that which is of interest to him or her and ignores that which is not.

Week 2: Connectivism and the information explosion

People have always said "necessity is the mother of invention" and that seems to hold true for education also. In George Seimens post about connectivism, he discusses the explosive increase in the rate of knowledge creation and the "inventions" within education that have appeared to help accommodate this explosion. A primary mechanism is the ability to share both knowledge retrieval and knowledge creation. Today, with all the Web 2.0 technologies available to us, we share known knowledge across the web. In addition, we can now collaborate on the knowledge creation process across both time and space with such tools as this blog.

Week 2: An online student in an unonline world

Last night I was the sole online student for the itec830 class. I have taken itec online classes before and usually there are one or two others online. It can get lonely when you are the only one online. It helped immensely that Joshua--even though he was physically in the classroom--was performing as an online student. For the most part, I was able to follow classroom conversations, however I was not able to participate too effectively in them. One thing that would have been nice is to form a small team during the breakout session that included me and two or three of the inclass students, but interacting over Elluminate. Maybe we can try that next week. I do find online interactions in small groups quite effective for learning.

ITEC 830 -- Week One: The Kindle

I was really excited last week to see that one of our text books for this class was available in Kindle format. I got my Kindle in January and have really enjoyed reading on it. I originally got it because I felt it had a lot of potential in education. Now I will get a chance to gain some insight into its use in an educational setting. It has the capability to allow notes and highlighting. I'll keep you all informed on how well this works.