| A
Serious New Commercial Advance for Online Training and Education
"Opening Up Online Learning," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed,
October 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/cartridge
This has not exactly been a season of
peace, love and harmony on the higher education technology
landscape. A
patent fight has broken out among
major developers of course management systems. Academic
publishers and university officials are warring over
open access to federally sponsored research.
And textbook makers are taking a pounding
for — among other things — the ways in which digital
enhancements are running up the prices of their products.
In that context, many may be heartened
by the announcement later today at the Educause meeting in
Dallas that three dozen academic publishers, providers of
learning management software, and others have agreed on a
common, open standard that will make it possible to move digital
content into and out of widely divergent online education
systems without expensive and time consuming reengineering. The
agreement by the diverse group of publishers and software
companies, who compete intensely with one another, is being
heralded as an important breakthrough that could expand the
array of digital content available to professors and students
and make it easier for colleges to switch among makers of
learning systems.
Of course, that’s only if the new
standard, known as the
“Common Cartridge,” becomes widely
adopted, which is always the question with developments deemed
to be potential technological advances.
Many observers believe this one has
promise, especially because so many of the key players have been
involved in it. Working through the IMS Global Learning
Consortium, leading publishers like Pearson Education and
McGraw-Hill Education and course-management system makers such
as
Blackboard,
ANGEL
Learning and open-source
Sakai
have worked to develop the technical specifications for the
common cartridge, and all of them have vowed to begin
incorporating the new standard into their products by next
spring — except Blackboard, which says it will do so eventually,
but has not set a timeline for when.
What exactly is the Common Cartridge?
In lay terms, it is a set of specifications and standards,
commonly agreed to by an IMS working group, that would allow
digitally produced content — supplements to textbooks such as
assessments or secondary readings, say, or faculty-produced
course add-ons like discussion groups — to “play,” or appear,
the same in any course management system, from proprietary ones
like Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn to open source systems
like Moodle and Sakai.
“It is essentially a common
‘container,’ so you can import it and load it and have it look
similar when you get it inside” your local course system, says
Ray Henderson, chief products officer at ANGEL, who helped
conceive of the idea when he was president of the digital
publishing unit at Pearson.
The Common Cartridge approach is
designed to deal with two major issues: (1) the significant cost
and time that publishers now must spend (or others, if the costs
are passed along) to produce the material they produce for
multiple, differing learning management systems, and (2) the
inability to move courses produced in one course platform to
another, which makes it difficult for professors to move their
courses from one college to another and for campuses to consider
switching course management providers.
The clearest and surest upside of the
new standard, most observers agree, is that it could help lower
publishers’ production costs and, in turn, allow them to focus
their energies on producing more and better content. David
O’Connor, senior vice president for product development at
Pearson Education’s core technology group, says his company and
other major publishers spend “many hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year effectively moving content around” so that
ancillary material for textbooks can work in multiple course
management systems.
Because Blackboard and Web CT together
own in the neighborhood of 75 percent of the course management
market, Pearson and other publishers produce virtually all of
their materials to work in those proprietary systems. Materials
are typically produced on demand for smaller players like ANGEL,
Desire2Learn and Sakai, and it is even harder to find usable
materials for colleges’ homemade systems. While big publishers
such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have sizable media groups that
can, when they choose to, spend what’s necessary to modify
digital content for selected textbooks, “small publishers often
have to say no,” O’Connor says. As a result, “there are just
fewer options for people who aren’t using Blackboard and WebCT,
and more hurdles to getting it.”
Supporters hope that adoption of the
common cartridge will allow publishers to spend less time and
money adapting one textbook’s digital content for multiple
course platforms and more time producing more and better
content. “This should have the result of broadening choice in
content to institutions,” says Catherine Burdt, an analyst at
Eduventures, an education research firm. “Colleges would no
longer be limited to the content that’s supported by their LMS
platform, but could now go out and choose the best content that
aligns with what’s happening in their curriculum.”
Less clear is how successful the effort
will be at improving the portability of course materials from
one learning management system to another. If all the major
providers introduce “export capability,” there is significant
promise, says Michael Feldstein, who writes the blog
e-Literate
and is assistant director of the State University of New York
Learning Network. “This has the potential to be one of the most
important standards to come out in a while, particularly for
faculty,” says Feldstein, who notes that his comments here
represent his own views, not SUNY’s. “It would become much
easier for them to take rich course content and course designs
and migrate them from one system to another with far less pain.”
But while easier transferability would
obviously benefit the smaller players in the course management
market — and ANGEL and Sakai plan to announce today that their
systems will soon allow professors to create Common Cartridges
for export out of their systems — such a system would only take
off if the dominant player in the market, the combined
Blackboard/WebCT, eventually does the same. “I’m not sure how
excited Blackboard would be about making it easier for faculty
to migrate out of their product and into one of their
competitors,” says Feldstein.
Chris Vento, senior vice president of
technology and product development at Blackboard, was a leading
proponent of the IMS Common Cartridge concept when he was a
leading official at WebCT before last year’s merger. In an
interview, he acknowledged the question lots of others are
asking: “What’s in it for Blackboard? Why wouldn’t you just lock
up the format and force everybody to use it?” His answer, he
says, is that by helping the entire industry, he says, the
project cannot help but benefit its biggest player, too.
“This will enable publishers to really
do the best job of producing their content, making it richer and
better for students and faculty, and more lucrative for
publishers from the business perspective,” says Vento. “Anything
we can do to enable that content to be built, and more of it and
better quality, the more lucrative it is eventually for us.”
Blackboard is fully behind the project,
Vento says. Having endorsed the Common Cartridge charter,
Blackboard has also committed to incorporating the new standard
into its products, and that Blackboard intends to make export of
course materials possible out of its platform. “Exactly how that
maps to our product roadmap has not been finalized,” he said,
“but in the end, we’re all going to have to do this. It’s just a
question of when.” There will, he says, “be a lot of pressures
to do this.”
That pressure is likely to be
intensified because of the public relations pounding Blackboard
has taken among many in the academic technology world because of
its attempt to patent technology that many people believe is
fundamental to e-learning systems. O’Connor of Pearson says he
believes Blackboard could benefit from its involvement in the
Common Cartridge movement by being seen “as the dominant player,
to be someone supporting openness in the community.” He adds:
“There is an opportunity for them to mend some of the damage
from the patent issue.”
Like virtually all technological
advances — or would-be ones — Common Cartridge’s success will
ultimately rise and fall, says Burdt of Eduventures, on whether
Blackboard and others embrace it. “Everything comes down to
adoption,” she says. “The challenge with every standard is the
adoption model. Some are out the door too early. Some evolve too
early and are eclipsed by substitutes. For others, suppliers
decide not to support it for various reasons.”
Those behind the Common Cartridge
believe it’s off to a good start with the large number of
disparate parties not only involved in creating it, but already
committing to incorporate it into their offerings.
Yet even as they launch this standard,
some of them are already looking ahead to the next challenge.
While the Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, will allow for
easier movement of digital course materials into and out of
course management systems, it does not ensure that users will be
able to do the same thing with third-party e-learning tools
(like subject-specific tutoring modules) that are not part of
course management systems, or with the next generation of tools
that may emerge down the road. For that, the same parties would
have to reach a similar agreement on a standard for “tool
interoperability,” which is next on the IMS agenda.
“This is only one step,” Pearson’s
O’Connor says of the Common Cartridge. But it is, he says, an
important one.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology and distance
education are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
The Global Technology Revolution 2020 ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2006/RAND_TR303.pdf
Questions
What are the most significant changes expected in higher education
by the Year 2025?
What major universities are now experimenting on the leading edge of
such changes?
Answers
Answer 1 ---
Cluster and Grid Computing! The first test linked Caltech,
Fermilab,
UC San Diego, the University of Florida, and the University of
Wisconsin
What's Microsoft been up to in
grid/distributed computing? The company's not talking, but we've
ferreted out some interesting details about the hush-hush "Bigtop"
project. Our sources say it involves loosely coupled machines, and
perhaps even a new version of Windows. Read our story for more
details on what
"Bigtop" could be, and when to expect it.
Jim Lauderback, What's New from Ziff Davis, December 30, 2004
From Syllabus News on September 24, 2002
Stanford Online Press Gets 'Clustering'
Software
Stanford's HighWire Press, an online
publisher of scientific and medical publications for researchers
and institutions, has licensed "clustering" software that will
allow it to organize its content into easy-to-navigate clusters
for end-users. HighWire licensed the Clustering Engine and
Enterprise Publisher from Vivisimo, Inc. to organize search
results and publish larger document subsets on its master site.
HighWire will offer the products to its own publishing customers
for use on their journal websites. "HighWire Press now has 13
million online articles, so researchers need tools to reduce,
refine, and tunnel into search results," said John Sack,
director of HighWire. The new software, he added, "will help
liberate readers from the need to make overly specific queries.
Instead, they can recognize interesting topic clusters and drill
down from there, in the `I know it when I see it' style."
For more information, visit:
http://highwire.stanford.edu .
"What Is Grid Computing,
Anyway?" by Tim McDonald, NewsFactor Network July 24, 2002
---
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18722.html
One
good way to gauge a new technology's degree of acceptance is to
observe whether it has moved out of the laboratory and onto
store shelves -- from science to commerce. According to that
measure, grid computing is just coming of age.
Often
called the next big thing in global Internet technology, grid
computing employs clusters of locally or remotely networked
machines to work on specific computational projects.
One
well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called
distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing
SETI (Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands
of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help
search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.
From
Science to Commerce
Grid
computing traditionally has been useful to researchers working
on scientific or technical problems -- much like the SETI
project -- that require a great number of computer processing
cycles or access to large amounts of data.
But
while this technology was once exclusively the province of
academics in fields like biomedicine and weather forecasting, it
has recently been making a strong foray into potentially
lucrative e-commerce sectors. Although clustering has been used
for several years as a load-balancing technique by server
hardware manufacturers, grid computing now seems to be coming of
age for other applications as well.
"Grid
computing has advanced to the point now that there are products
out there like Sun's Grid Engine Enterprise Edition,"
Aberdeen Group analyst
Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.
Much
like a load-balancing server cluster, Sun's Grid Engine software
lets organizations create networked grids to share resources on
a wider scale and to allocate processing resources according to
department priorities.
Grid
Computing Components
Essentially, grids are built from clusters of computer servers
joined together over a local area network (LAN) or over the
Internet.
While
several grids that run over the Internet -- like the SETI
project -- have been built with proprietary software, there are
several development tools that can facilitate the growth and
adoption of grid computing.
One of
those tools is Globus, a
research and development project focused on helping software
developers apply the grid concept.
The
Globus toolkit, the group's primary offering, is a set of
components that can be used to develop grid applications. For
each component in the toolkit, Globus provides an API
(application programmer interface) for use by software
developers.
Power
to the People
Research scientists historically have been attracted to grid
computing because it uses the power of idle computers to work on
difficult computational problems.
Proponents of grid computing say the technology will enable
universities and research institutions to share their
supercomputers, servers and storage capacity, allowing them to
perform massive calculations quickly and relatively cheaply.
In line
with those expectations, HP recently announced that a
9.2-teraflop supercomputer
soon will be connected to the Department of Energy's Science
Grid. When installed, it will be the largest supercomputer
attached to a grid anywhere in the world, according to the
company.
Sharing
Data
Until
now, the problem with grid computing has been a lack of common
software for developers to work with, largely because grids rely
on Internet-based software.
In an
effort to spur broader adoption of grids, the
National Science Foundation
established the US$12.1 million Middleware
Initiative last year, and the agency has recently released
software and other tools designed to make working on grids
easier for scientists and engineers.
"Scientists are now sharing data and instrumentation on an
unprecedented scale, and other geographically distributed groups
are beginning to work together in ways that were previously
impossible," according to the Grid Research Integration
Deployment and Support Center.
First
Gaming Grid
In a
real-world example of grid computing,
IBM (NYSE: IBM)
and Butterfly.net announced in May that they would soon release
a computing grid for the video game industry. Butterfly.net
spent two years building the grid, which distributes games
across a network of server
farms using IBM e-business infrastructure technology.
Massively multiplayer games (MMGs) historically have been run on
mirrored servers that essentially duplicate copies of the MMG
universe to balance user loads.
While
this technique is designed to reduce latency for all users -- so
that each set of servers behaves responsively to user actions --
the mirroring technique limits the number of players who can
participate at one time in the same game universe.
When
load balances increase, the typical MMG response has been to add
more servers, copy the game universe and spill the extra load
into that new copy.
Now,
however, Butterfly.net's grid technology provides "cross-server
sentinels" that supports the interaction of millions of players
in one world, with server boundaries invisible to players.
According to the company, the extension of grid computing to the
gaming world lets game developers support a limitless number of
users in their MMGs.
'Taking
Hold of an Industry'
Companies are lining up to jump on the Butterfly bandwagon. This
week, for example, software development site CollabNet announced
it will work with Butterfly.net to develop an online environment
that lets game developers test their games.
"IBM's
been extremely busy on a number of fronts in grid, in terms of
investing resources and winning new partners and customers," IBM
spokesperson Jim Larkin told NewsFactor.
"Butterfly is one of the key examples thus far of how IBM has
worked with another company to help develop a computing grid
that is in the commercial arena," Larkin said. "It's a clear
example of how grid is taking hold of an industry."
"Digipede to Showcase .NET Grid Computing Solutions at
Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference,"
PR Web, June 19, 2006 ---
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400497.htm
"Grids Unleash the Power of Many," by John Gartner, MIT's
Technology Review, January 14, 2005 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_gartner011405.asp?trk=nl
Computer scientists in three states --
West Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado -- are each
combining their technology resources into separate computer
grids that will give researchers, universities, private
companies and citizens access to powerful supercomputers.
The project designers say these
information aqueducts will encourage business development,
accelerate scientific research, and improve the efficiency of
government.
"Grid computing will provide 1,000
times more business opportunities than what we see over the
Internet today," says Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of
grid computing and networking services at MCNC in Research
Triangle Park, NC.
MCNC is spearheading North Carolina's
statewide grid development that currently includes seven
universities including North Carolina State, Duke, and the
University of North Carolina.
The North Carolina project -- which has
a goal to link 180 institutions -- is encouraging business
development through its Start Up Grid Initiative, which allows
fledgling companies to plug into the grid for up to nine months
free of charge and afterwards at discounted rates, Gentzsch
says.
Because raising capital and acquiring
technology takes up most of a new company's time, "Startups
usually only get to spend 10 percent of their time executing
their idea," says Gentzch, who has launched seven companies.
According to a 2003 report by Robert
Cohen, a Fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, North
Carolina's grid could create 24,000 jobs and boost the state's
output by $10.1 billion by 2010 if effectively implemented.
Before statewide grids can become a
realit, the software used to share and manage resources needs to
be improved to include more standard communication protocols.
Gentzsch says the expected release of version 4.0 of the open
source Globus Toolkit, which he estimates is used by 90 percent
of grid projects, will greatly simplify connecting computers to
the grid.
Securing a location's computing
resources so that only specified resources are made available
for sharing is a significant challenge, Gentzsch says. To
protect data files, institutions must "encrypt everything," and
configure the grid network so that "the CPU cycles are separated
from the disk resources."
Gentzsch estimates that advanced
computing resource utilization is just 25 percent, and grid
computing could increase the efficiency to 75 percent.
"Back to Basics and the Next Big Thing," by Phillip D. Long,
Syllabus, August 2002, pp/ 10-11 ---
http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590
Grid Computing: The Next Big Thing
The next big thing to transform the
Internet is likely to come from work going on with the grid. The
grid is an infrastructure that enables flexible, secure,
coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of
people, institutions, and resources.
It may be useful to recall that the
birth of the Web came from a desire to share research papers
among large numbers of particle physicists doing “big science”
at CERN, the Swiss research center. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision has
changed all our lives. In the world of international science,
its impact has been staggering. Recognizing this, the Joint
Information Systems Council (JISC), the UK analog of the
National Science Foundation, has embarked on a £98 million
project called the Core e-Science Programme, managed by the
Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) on
behalf of the UK Research Councils. The e-Science project
proposes to connect scientists with expensive remote facilities,
teraflop computers, and information resources stored in
dedicated databases. Add to these resources higher level
services such as workflow, transactions, data mining, and
knowledge discovery, and you begin to glimpse what’s envisioned.
The grid is the architecture proposed to make this a reality.
What kinds of research are we talking
about? Everything from particle physics (what goes around comes
around) to basic medical investigation. For example, our
understanding of even basic human physiology remains terribly
limited. We don’t know how multiple parameters interact over
time in fundamental processes like heart rate, blood pressure,
and other cardiovascular indicators. Imagine if 100,000 people
volunteered to wear real-time monitoring devices so that their
daily metabolic functions were recorded and analyzed in real
time. The volume of data is enormous but that’s just the
beginning. We would want to compare how the data relate to the
activities of the people as they went about their daily lives.
In the end, predicting the likelihood of an impending physical
problem becomes a potential reality. Just like the work underway
to provide predictive intervention for the replacement of
computing hardware, you can imagine high risk heart patients
wearing proactive monitors that page them to head for a cardiac
care unit because the data indicate a potential problem in the
next 24 hours. Today it may seem like science fiction, but with
research using the grid, it’s emerging into possible science
fact.
This may seem far a field from the
classroom. How far it is remains to be seen of course, but there
are people working today on applying the potential of the grid
to learning management or virtual learning environments. Better
descriptions about teaching processes and the learning objects
needed, along with work on metadata for educational objects, are
underway. So stay tuned for more about the “next big thing” in
future columns.
References
Laurillard, D. The Changing
University. 1996.
http://itech1.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper13/paper13.html
Metadata for Education Group
www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj
The full article is at
http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590
CLUSTER AND GRID COMPUTING REFERENCES ---
http://www.ic.uff.br/~vefr/research/clcomp/clustrefs.html
"Time to Hop on the Gridwagon," by Daithí Ó hAnluain, Wired
News, July 26, 2002 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,54098,00.html
"Grid computing was the reserve of 'big
science' five years ago," says Catlett, "But in five years, it
will be completely pedestrian. I was working on a Cray
Supercomputer in 1985, and my laptop would blow it away now!"
That's for the future. In the meantime,
Grids are currently deploying among Fortune 2000 companies to
deal with everything from batch analysis of financial data,
trend analysis of point-of-sale data, and design, engineering
and manufacture automation. Oh, and collaboration as well.
This last may seem a surprising tangent
to the pure processing power that grids typically deliver, but
collaboration and data analysis are two sides of the same
logistical coin. Engineers or scientists are increasingly
collaborating on projects and testing their theories across the
same grid. They are also dealing with terabytes of data.
It's one of the moves that makes
integration with Web services so obvious to grid gurus, like
IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of technology strategy.
"Grid computing is really the natural
evolution of the Internet. This is really looking at the
Internet, with all its promise of universal connectivity and
reach, and making it work far better by bringing the qualities
of service that people are used to in enterprise computing, and
... (what) we all have gotten used to in utilities like
electricity (and the) telephone."
Ultimately, then, the grid could
provide computing power on a utility model for consumers or
one-off projects or simply as a means to outsource processing.
Nonetheless, big science will still be
a major part of the grid's future. A case in point is the
TeraGrid, which goes live next spring and is set to steal the
No. 2 spot from IBM's ASCI White in the world supercomputer
rankings.
"The Earth Simulator is essentially a
big computer grid," Catlett says. "A bunch of computers put in a
grid to get the power. It's a short step from putting
supercomputers in a grid across the room to doing it across the
country, or across the world."
When completed, the TeraGrid will
include 13.6 teraflops of Linux Cluster computing power
distributed at the four TeraGrid sites, capable of managing and
storing more than 450 terabytes of data. It will be connected
through a network 40 Gbps, which will become a 50 to 80 Gbps
network or 16 times faster than today's fastest research
network.
It will be used for National Science
Foundation-sponsored projects and commercial applications.
So where will it all end? Nowhere in
sight, that's for sure.
"We have the genome sequence and now
we're working on the protein folding, and it won't be long
before the life sciences are looking at whole life systems,"
Baird says. "The nature of grid computing is going to allow for
bigger and bigger science applications. As long as we keep on
putting out more power, people will design better applications
for it."
There will be one paradigm shift that
may be noticed only for what's missing: the end of technology.
"We're entering the post-technology age
where users will be able to get on with what they want to do
without worrying about making the technology work," IBM's Hawk
says.
"It used to be cool to change your own
oil. Now it's not. Soon people won't have to worry about the
technology. Grid computing is what will make that happen."
The other parts of this article are at
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,54098,00.html
"The future of computing: The next big thing?" The
Economist, January 15, 2004 ---
http://www.economist.co.uk/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2352183
IT is increasingly painful to watch
Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to
explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand
vision of “adaptive” information technology is about. It has
something to do with “Darwinian reference architectures”, she
suggests, and also with “modularising” and “integrating”, as
well as with lots of “enabling” and “processes”. IBM, HP's arch
rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what
it calls “on-demand computing”. Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of
“seamless computing”. Other vendors prefer “ubiquitous”,
“autonomous” or “utility” computing. Forrester Research, a
consultancy, likes “organic”. Gartner, a rival, opts for
“real-time”.
Clearly, something monumental must be
going on in the world of computing for these technology titans
simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet
so hard to name. What is certainly monumental, reckons Pip
Coburn, an analyst at UBS, is the hype, which concerns, he says,
“stuff that doesn't work yet”. Frank Gens at IDC, another tech
consultancy, quips that, in 2004 at least, “utility” computing
is actually “futility” computing.
Yet as a long-term vision for
computing, what the likes of IBM, Microsoft and HP (and Oracle,
Sun, etc) are peddling is plausible. The question is, how long
will it take? Some day, firms will indeed stop maintaining huge,
complex and expensive computer systems that often sit idle and
cannot communicate with the computers of suppliers and
customers. Instead, they will outsource their computing to
specialists (IBM, HP, etc) and pay for it as they use it, just
as they now pay for their electricity, gas and water. As with
such traditional utilities, the complexity of the supply-systems
will be entirely hidden from users.
ER meets the Matrix The potential for a
computing infrastructure such as this to boost efficiency—and
even to save lives—is impressive. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an
in-house guru at IBM, pictures an ambulance delivering an
unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors go online
and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies,
etc), which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on
the other side of the world. They upload their scans of the
patient on to the network and crunch the data with the
processing power of thousands of remote computers—not just the
little machine which is all that the hospital itself can
nowadays afford.
For its nuts and bolts, this vision
relies on two unglamorous technologies. The first is “web
services”—software that resides in a big shared “server”
computer and can be found and used by applications on other
servers, even ones far away and belonging to different
organisations. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital would be getting
the patient's info from his home clinic through such a web
service.
The second technology is “grid
computing”. This involves the sharing of processing power. The
best-known example is a “search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence” project called SETI@home, overseen by the
University of California at Berkeley. Nearly 5m people in 226
countries have downloaded a screensaver that makes their
computer available, whenever it is sitting idle, to process
radio signals gathered from outer space. The aim is to find a
pattern that may be from aliens. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital
would similarly crunch patient-data using the internet, or grid,
as if it were a single, giant virtual microprocessor, but for a
more earth-bound purpose.
Both technologies have made great
strides recently. Web services, for instance, need common
standards and protocols. Some basic standards already
exist—awkward acronyms such as XML, SOAP and WSDL provide a
rudimentary grammar to let computers talk to each other. But the
sticking point, says Phillip Merrick, boss of webMethods, one of
the pioneers in the field, has been the many other fiddly but
necessary protocols for security, transaction certification, and
so on. A breakthrough occurred in October, when the two
superpowers, IBM and Microsoft, simply got up on a stage
together and declared what protocols they will use. Dubbed “WS
splat” by the geeks, this ought to speed up the adoption of web
services.
Web services are currently most visible
in the business model of so-called application service
providers. These are firms that offer to host software
applications and databases for customers for a monthly fee—an
analogy would be for firms to do their e-mailing via Yahoo! or
their buying via eBay. The most successful is Salesforce.com, a
San Francisco firm that, as the name says, specialises in
software for managing customer information and marketing leads.
It says that it was poaching so much business from a more
traditional seller of customer-relations software, Siebel
Systems, that Siebel had to adopt the model itself. In October,
Siebel teamed up with IBM and now also offers its software as a
service over the internet.
Nonetheless, this particular form of
web services is overhyped, says Rahul Sood of Tech Strategy
Partners, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. Such services appeal
mostly to small businesses and firms that do not need to
customise their applications very much. For the grander
vision—the on-demand, adaptive, seamless, ubiquitous, organic
sort—a lot more needs to happen.
At the core of the vision is
flexibility—a firm must be able to make its operating costs, and
therefore its computing and information costs, totally variable
so that they go up and down with business volumes. Firms can
improve cost flexibility today, says Mr Sood, but only if they
stick with one vendor, such as IBM, or if they make only one of
their many computing functions (data storage, say) flexible. But
for computing to be bought and sold as a utility, firms must be
able to switch vendors, to do it for all their computing
functions, and with meter-based pricing. All of this will take a
few more years to get right.
Continued in the article.
The Video Game
Revolution (also available from PBS on videotape) ---
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/
This is the story of how a whimsical
invention of the 1960s helped spawn the computer industry as we
know it. Video games have influenced the way children live and
play, forever altered the entertainment industry, and even
affected the way wars are fought. See how it all began and find
out what it means for the future.
When recruiting teens for college
and/or particular careers such as accounting, here's one of the
competitive tools that we have not successfully exploited.
This type of thing is also being successfully employed in recruiting
and training, but does not seem to have widespread success in
educational institutions.
Question
What has become the most successful and most controversial
recruiting tool of the U.S. Army?
Answer
I
viewed the answer to the first question of television.
I watched this while eating breakfast on March 31.
CBS News on March 30, 2004 proclaimed that an Internet game has
become a major recruitment tool. The game that is especially
successful is called America's Army. The official
version of this game is at
http://www.americasarmy.com/
"Army Recruits Video
Gamers," CBS News, March 30, 2004 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/30/eveningnews/main609489.shtml
The
soldiers are real. But they're also actors, staging scenes for
the Army's latest war game.
It's a
video game created by the U.S. Army to win over the hearts and
minds of American teenagers.
And, as
CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta reports, judging by these
faces, mission accomplished.
Game
player Rob Calcagni believes the game is going to work on a lot
of guys his age.
"Definitely, because it's a fun game," says Calcagni.
The
game, "America's Army" has become such an overnight hit, the
Army staged a tournament in New York. Recruiters were waiting at
the door.
"This
is a fantastic recruiting opportunity," says Lt. Col. John
Gillette. "We would like to sign up as many as possible. We are
looking for five to ten."
One of
these teens enlisted after playing the game, the other two are
thinking about it, which is exactly what the creator of
"America's Army" had in mind.
"We
look at all the things that the Army is doing that is under the
control of the Army that captures people's attention and the
game is number one," says the game's creator Col. Casey
Wardynksi.
America's Army has surpassed even the Pentagon's expectations.
It's now the number one online action game in the country. The
Army hasn't seen a recruiting tool this effective since "Be all
that you can be."
But
psychology professor Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan,
a critic of violent video games, complains "America's Army"
isn't real enough.
"War is
not a game," he says.
"The
video game does provide a sanitized view of violence," says
Bushman. "For example, when you shoot someone or when you are
shot you see a puff of blood; you don't see anyone suffering or
writhing in pain."
"Kids
aren't stupid," says Wardynski. "They know if they come into the
army there is a reason that we have rifles and tanks and all
that stuff."
The
players insist they understand the meaning of "game over."
"If you
are going to join the Army, you know the risk," says one gamer,
Bart Koscinski. "In this game you might die like eight times in
like 15 minutes. In real life people know what they are getting
themselves into."
New
editions of "America's Army" are now being developed for home
video game systems -- a move that will deploy even more young
cyber-soldiers to the military's virtual battlefield.
CombatSim.com ---
http://www.combatsim.com/
Welcome
to the web's largest resource of professionally-written articles
and news about military combat simulations and strategy games.
Our archives of news and articles span the golden age of this
category of games from January of 1996 to February of 2003.
DEFENSE COMBAT SIM OLYMPICS
–METHODOLOGIES INCORPORATING THE “CYBER GAMING CULTURE” bu Flack
Maguire, Michael van Lent, Marc Prensky, and Ron W. Tarr ---
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/IITSEC%20Paper%202002%20(536%20V2-Final).pdf
There have been many changes in the past
twenty years in the implementation of simulation and computer
games, including game development, usage
in fixed locations, and event-based experiences both in the
civilian and commercial spaces.
This paper examines each of these three areas individually in
order to predict their likely future
developments. It then evaluates the
dynamic potential for the military that lies at the crossroads
where these trends are merging, and
relates their interaction to the growing popularity of the
online computer gaming experience.
Although
far from a complete study, this paper aims to add to the
discussion of these industry trends.
The paper proposes that there is a strong
benefit to the military for recruiting, pre-training, and
training of active duty members
through the combination of :
·
Choosing, building, or modifying effective combat simulation
games for military use.
·
Operating computer game competitions with significant
military presence – similar to the air shows of
today
– for event-based and location-based computer gaming
competitions
·
Using the combined venues of (a) online gaming competitions,
(b) location-based game centers, and (c)
large
scale gaming competitions
·
Operating under the sports model of Leagues (by appropriate
military warfare specialty for each League)
and
further dividing the Leagues into competing Divisions.
By reaching out in this way to a wider
spectrum of possibilities for including the cyber entertainment
culture, the military will, we
predict, experience benefits in recruiting, pre-training, and
training, making further use of the
compelling attraction of computer games that has been
demonstrated by games’ recent rise to a predominant role
for military age people in our society.
"Computer Games Liven Up
Military Recruiting, Training," by Harold Kennedy, National
Defense Magazine, November 2002 ---
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/article.cfm?Id=967
Computer games—which entertain millions of U.S. teenagers—are
beginning to breathe fresh life into military recruiting and
training.
Earlier
this year, for example, the U.S. Army launched a new computer
game—called “America’s Army”—over the Internet.
Aimed
at encouraging teens to join up, it enables players to
experience both basic and advanced training, join a combat unit
and fight in a variety of environments, including arctic Alaska,
upstate New York and a third-world city.
Players
can fire on a rifle range, run an obstacle course, attend sniper
school, train in urban combat and parachute from a C-17
transport.
The
game accurately depicts military equipment, training and the
real-life movements of soldiers, said Lt. Col. George Juntiff,
Army liaison officer to the Modeling, Virtual Environment and
Simulation (MOVES) Institute, at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, Calif., which developed the game.
“America’s Army” features sound effects by moviemaker George
Lucas’ company, SkyWalker, and Dolby Digital Sound. In addition,
sound effects from the movie “Terminator II” were provided at no
charge.
The
game is getting considerable attention. During its first two
weeks, more than a million Americans downloaded the game for
free, Juntiff said.
“That’s
an enormous number,” he said. “It’s the largest release in
computer game history.”
Even
more people are likely to acquire the game starting in October,
Juntiff said, when the Army was scheduled to begin distributing
it as a free CD set to a target audience over the age of 13. The
developers plan to upgrade the game every month to attract new
players, he said.
Actually, “America’s Army” consists of two separate
games—”Soldiers,” a role-player based on Army values, and
“Operations,” a shooter game that takes players on combat
missions. It was developed and distributed at a cost of $7.5
million by MOVES and the U.S. Military Academy’s Office of
Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, N.Y.
The
computer game is a “very cost-effective” way to reach potential
recruits, especially compared to television advertising, said
Maj. Chris Chambers, OEMA deputy director. “It is also a more
detailed means of showing the American people what we do.”
The
game also puts the Army in a positive light, said Juntiff. “It
lets people know the Army is high-tech. It’s not what they see
in the movies.”
The
game, in addition, raises ethical issues, Juntiff said. “The
game sets rules of engagement, and if you violate those rules,
you pay the price.”
Once
they enlist, recruits, these days, can expect to encounter
computer games throughout their military training, said Michael
R. Macedonia, senior scientist for the U.S. Army Simulation,
Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), headquartered in
Orlando, Fla. Even well-known commercial games have been adapted
for military use, he told National Defense.
That
process began, he said, in the 1980s, when the Army modified the
Atari tank battle game, “Battlezone,” to let it have gunner
controls similar to those of a Bradley Infantry Fighting
Vehicle. The idea, he explained, was to enhance the eye-hand
coordination of armor crews.
Then,
in the mid-1990s, the Marines edited the commercial version of
the three-dimensional game “Doom” to create “Marine Doom,” to
help train four-man fire teams in urban combat.
More
recently, the Army’s Soldier Systems Center, in Natick, Mass.,
has commissioned the games developer, Novalogic, of Calabasas,
Calif., to modify the popular Delta Force 2 game to help
familiarize soldiers with the service’s experimental Land
Warrior system.
The
Land Warrior system includes a self-
contained computer and radio unit, a global-positioning
receiver, a helmet-mounted liquid-
character display and a modular weapons array that adds thermal
and video sights and laser ranging to the standard M-4 carbine
and M-16A2 rifle.
A
customized version of another computer game, Microsoft Flight
Simulator, is issued to all Navy student pilots and
undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training
Courses at 65 colleges around the nation. The office of the
Chief of Naval Education and Training has installed the software
at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to
install it at two other bases in Florida.
LB&B
Associates, of Columbia, Md., has modified the game engine from
author Tom Clancy’s best-selling computer game, “Rainbow Six
Rogue Spear,” to train U.S. combat troops in urban warfare. The
game—marketed by Ubi Soft Entertainment, of San Francisco—is
based one of Clancy’s military novels.
The new
version—which is still being developed—will not be used to
improve marksmanship, but to sharpen decision-making skills at
the small-unit level, said Michael S. Bradshaw, LB&B’s Systems
Division manager. LB&B has completed a proof-of-concept version,
which “worked brilliantly,” Bradshaw said. The project, he
explained, has been turned over to the Institute for Creative
Technology for final development.
Continued in the
article
October 4, 2005 Message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
PAPERS ON THE UNIVERSITY AND THE
INTERNET
EDUCAUSE is making available online, at
no cost, THE INTERNET AND THE UNIVERSITY: FORUM 2004. The book
is a collection of papers from the Forum's 2004 Aspen Symposium.
The papers cover three areas: technology and globalization,
technology and scholarship, and technology and the brain. The
book is available in PDF format at
http://www.educause.edu/apps/forum/iuf04.asp .
The Forum on the Internet and the
University "seeks to understand how the Internet and new
learning media can improve the quality and condition of
learning, as well as the opportunities and risks created by
rapid technological innovation and economic change."
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association
whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the
intelligent use of information technology. The current
membership comprises more than 1,900 colleges, universities, and
educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with
15,000 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder, CO, and
Washington, DC. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at
http://www.educause.edu/.
......................................................................
ACADEMIC COMMONS
In August the Center of Inquiry in the
Liberal Arts at Wabash College launched the Academic Commons --
a website offering "a forum for investigating and defining the
role that technology can play in liberal arts education." In
addition to publishing essays and reviews and showcasing
innovative projects, the site also offers the Developer's Kit,
an area for sharing project descriptions and pieces of code, and
LoLa Exchange, which shares high-quality learning objects. The
Academic Commons is available at
http://www.academiccommons.org/ .
The mission of the Center of Inquiry in
the Liberal Arts at Wabash College is "to explore, test, and
promote liberal arts education . . . [and] to ensure that the
nature and value of liberal arts education is widely understood
and to reestablish the central place of the liberal arts in
higher education."
For more information about the Center: email:
liberalarts@wabash.edu
; Web:
http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/ .
......................................................................
MORE ON GAMES AS LEARNING TOOLS
The July 2005 issue of CIT Infobits
presented a roundup of articles on computer games as learning
tools ("Games Children Play,"
http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul05.html#4 ).
For more on this topic, see the special
issue of INNOVATE (vol. 1, issue 6, August/September 2005) which
is devoted to the "role of video game technology in current and
future educational settings." Papers include:
"What Would a State of the Art
Instructional Video Game Look Like?" by J. P. Gee, Department of
Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Changing the Game: What Happens When
Video Games Enter the Classroom?" by Kurt Squire, Assistant
Professor of Educational Technology, University of
Wisconsin-Madison
"Game-Informed Learning: Applying
Computer Game Processes to Higher Education" by Michael Begg,
David Dewhurst, and Hamish Macleod, University of Edinburgh
The entire issue is available online at
http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=issue&id=9 .
You may need to register on the Innovate
website to access papers; there is no charge for registration
and access.
Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a
bimonthly, peer-reviewed online periodical published by the
Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova
Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use
of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes
in academic, commercial, and government settings. Readers can
comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends,
and participate in open forums. For more information, contact
James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate;
email: innovate@nova.edu
; Web:
http://www.innovateonline.info/ .
Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games
(including video games) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Important Distance Education Site
The Sloan Consortium ---
http://www.aln.org/
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning
organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth
according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will
become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for
anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.
January 25, 2005 message from News Update
[campustechnology@newsletters.101com.com]
Internet Study Predicts Aptitude
Will Drive Class Composition
A sweeping survey of nearly 1,300
technology experts and scholars on the future of the Internet
has concluded - not surprisingly - that the Internet would reach
into and influence every corner of American life over the next
10 years. The study, released under the auspices of Elon
University and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, paints
a picture of a digital future that enhances the lives of many
but which also contains some worrisome notes.
For instance, over half of the
respondents predicted the Internet would spawn "a new age of
creativity" and that formal education would incorporate more
online classes, with students grouped by interests and skills,
rather than by age. At the same time, two-thirds predicted a
devastating attack on the country's network infrastructure would
occur or in the next 10 years, and that government and business
surveillance would rise dramatically.
Full results of the survey can be found on the Web at
http://www.elon.edu/predictions
TechKnowLogia ---
http://www.techknowlogia.org/
TechKnowLogia
is an international online journal that provides policy makers,
strategists, practitioners and technologists at the local, national
and global levels with a strategic forum to:
Explore the
vital role of different information technologies (print,
audio, visual and digital) in the development of human and
knowledge capital;
Share policies,
strategies, experiences and tools in harnessing technologies
for knowledge dissemination, effective learning, and
efficient education services;
Review the
latest systems and products of technologies of today, and
peek into the world of tomorrow; and
Exchange
information about resources, knowledge networks and centers
of expertise.
- Do
Technologies Enhance Learning?
-
Brain Research, Learning and Technology
-
Technologies at Work for:
Critical Thinking, Science Instruction, Teaching Practices,
etc...
-
Interactive TV as an Educational Tool
-
Complexity of Integrating ICTs into Curriculum & Exams
- Use
of Digital Cameras to Enhance Learning
-
Creating Affordable Universal Internet Access
Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Corporations are starting to salivate over grid computing's
potential for massive storage and processing power. Its creators --
tech and science geeks -- look forward to a new era ---
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57231,00.html
For years, connecting university and research-center
supercomputers so they could share resources simply wasn't feasible.
New standards are changing that and opening the door to new research
possibilities ---
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57265,00.html
Answer 2 ---
The Intellectual Supermarket as Conceived Today by
Fathom (Columbia University and its Fathom Partners)
"The Intellectual Supermarket," by Ada Demb, Educause Review,
July/August 2002, pp. 12-22 ---
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0240.pdf
Higher
education requires a new model, one that can operate alongside
the old model but that will expand the capacity and explode the
boundaries of the industry with its new assumptions:
-
Higher education can be accessed directly by any individual,
without the intermediary of an institution. Supported
by technology, higher education can achieve society's
long-term goal of population-wide, universal access.
-
The demand for educational programming will far exceed the
capacity of current institutions. Designers of
educational programs are unlikely to know the
characteristics of the learners who will be accessing their
material.
-
Educational programming will be of a more general
nature--modularized and accessible to a general audience,
much as is television.
- In
the context of lifelong learning, individuals will seek
education intermittently, as somewhat unrelated "events,"
over a much longer timeframe than is commonly
associated even with part-time degree work. The
learner's objectives are likely to be situationally defined
by personal or professional knowledge needs.
-
Attracted by this potential market, and enabled by the lower
barriers to entry, new providers will enter the
market--providers from outside the current educational
system.
-
The value of a brand name will be determined by the value to
the learner as much as it will be by a third party that
seeks certification.
- As
a result, radically new ways of assessing and "certifying"
learning outcomes will be needed.
The
Supermarket Analogy
By
contrast with the assumptions of the current system--a very
orderly context in which quality has been tightly
controlled--the proposed assumptions for the new model may
appear to lead to a chaotic mix of undisciplined entrepreneurial
efforts. To examine whether this new model might be a
future worth pursuing, we need a radical analogy for the higher
education industry. The analogy should be consistent with
the new assumptions and should also raise provocative questions
about possible future scenarios. An unlikely possibility
can offer insights and images for exploring this new territory:
the food-retailing industry--in particular, the supermarket.
Nine characteristics of the supermarket yield a provocative
comparison with higher education:
-
Most products in the supermarket can be characterized as
commodities: there is a minimum standard of quality the
product must meet in order to be fit for sale; beyond that
minimum, competition occurs on the basis of price and of
perceived differences in quality. Profit margins on
individual products are very small; profits are generated by
volume of sales.
-
The supermarket manager and the customer are always looking
for better-tasting, cheaper, more-nutritious goods yielding
larger profit margins.
-
The supermarket represents the quintessential example of the
movement from full-service to self-service. The
customer chooses the fruit, weighs the fruit, packages the
fruit, and then takes the fruit to the check-out line to
pay.
-
The supermarket does not take responsibility for the quality
of the customer's diet or overall physical or financial
health. The supermarket offers a fantastic array of
goods, but it is up to the customer to make order from that
array and to select items that form some sort of coherent
diet or meal plan.
-
The supermarket tailors its product line to the geographic
area it serves, but generally it offers both low- and
high-end products.
-
The customer's safety and capacity for judgment are
supported by related regulation and markets: (a) the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration and state departments of
health, which oversee the food supply from point of origin
through processing and packaging to store delivery and
purchase; (b) labeling, which details the nutritional value
of foods on packaged goods as required by law; and (c)
nutrition, food, and diet consumer education, which is
supplied through a variety of media, including schools,
public programming, and private publishing groups such as
hospitals and for-profit publications on diet and health.
-
Consumers can turn to a range of services for more
personalized attention, from health spas to personal
nutritional advisors, books and magazines, or simply
restaurants.
-
Brand names, including supermarket brands, are related to
quality and are supported by both research and advertising.
They are evaluated by independent consumer groups, although
not systematically.
-
Food producers and processors are, for the most part,
independent of the distribution system in the United States.
The "system" that has brought Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup
into supermarkets for almost one hundred years is held
together by buyer-supplier market relationships.
The
power of the supermarket analogy is revealed more fully when
undergraduate education and lifelong learning skills are
considered separately from graduate education or professional
certification. Undergraduate education as presently
offered in the United States is a commodity. The larger
higher education institutions opened up access and kept costs
(and therefore tuition) down by creating lecture courses that
could accommodate many students at one time. Even when
these lecture courses are broken down into recitation sessions
or when these institutions hire more faculty to offer smaller
classes, the basic curriculum remains the same. This is
"mass education"--higher education in the manner of Henry Ford.
There are certain minimum standards that must be met; however,
beyond those, students are choosing on the basis of price and
perceived differences in brand names. Separating
undergraduate education into its two primary components--general
education and the major--and then applying the perspective of
the supermarket analogy leads to some startling conclusions
about possible transformations of the production and
distribution system for higher education at the undergraduate
level.
Continued at
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0240.pdf
To this I might add the increasing movement for colleges and
universities to offer certificate programs in addition to
traditional degree programs. In Fall 2002, the graduate school
of business at the University of Rochester commenced a six-course
certificate program to complement its two-year MBA program.
Major universities such as Stanford University, Columbia University,
and Carnegie-Mellon are now trading on their prestige names to rake
in hundreds of millions of dollars in training programs, especially
in computer science, engineering, and information technology
training courses. Virtually all of the top business schools
have executive development certificate programs both onsite and
online.
By the Year 2025, traditional degree programs may account for
less than ten percent of the revenues of major universities who
become part of the trend for education as well as training
certificates. The "traditional one-size fits all" bachelor,
masters, and PhD degrees will fade in importance as resumes of the
future will be built upon education achievement certificates in
humanities, science, and the professions.
Top Ten Emerging
Technologies According to CFO Magazine
THE
NEED-TO-KNOW LIST
1.
XBRL
2. Business Intelligence
3. Wireless Connectivity
4. Grid Computing
5. Multivariable Testing (MVT)
6. Digital Cryptography
7. Rich Media
8. Internet2
9. Biometrics
10. Small Technology
I used the following quotation in 1994 at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/215ach06.pdf
No one has been more wrong about
computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly
everything about the actual possibility-space that computers
have created indicates they are not the beginning of authority
but its end. In the process of connecting everything to
everything, computers elevate the power of the small player.
They make room for the different, and they reward small
innovations. Instead of enforcing uniformity, they promote
heterogeneity and autonomy. Instead of sucking the soul from
human bodies, turning computer users into an army of dull
colons, networked computers --- by reflecting the networked
nature of our brains --- encourage the humanism of their users.
Because they have taken on the flexibility, adaptability, and
self-connecting governance of organic systems, we become more
human, not less so, when we use them.
Birkerts, S. (1994). “The electric hive: two views,” Readings,
May, 17-25.
|
August 23, 2002 reply from Miklos Vasarhelyi
[miklosv@ANDROMEDA.RUTGERS.EDU]
Education and its future Prospects (Trends)
Institutional
-
Consolidation of educational institutions
(universities will merge)
-
States will tend to bring its several university
entities together · Super state consortia will
emerge · There will be a “career university
sector” with
-
For profit universities
-
Virtual Universities (associated or not with
existing ones) ·
-
New copyright policies, royalties for distance
learning a la the sale of a book
-
Faculty that develop a course will have
royalties rights to it
-
Universities will have the right, without
paying royalties, to use these courses
either locally or in any extended
activities
-
Organizations will have to emerge to take
education to the outer limits of current
civilization
-
The economics are such that the incremental
cost of providing usage over broadband of
highly sophisticated learning materials is
very small
-
Consequently once packages are assembled,
and their production is very expensive,
their marginal cost of utilization is close
to zero
-
Consequently model will emerge from free to
free for ‘used materials’, to name your
price, to pay over your professional career
-
Content pricing models as currently evolving
over the net and e commerce will also rule
education
-
Some states may decided to develop or
acquire educational content and make it
available for free
-
Alternate professor’s career will emerge
-
Tenure will become less common
-
A large number of faculty will emerge
as supporting faculty for modules prepared
and delivered from elsewhere
Pedagogic
-
Extensive usage of distance methods to ‘extend
the classroom’ even in traditional courses
-
Usage of mixed extended medium with many tools
-
Change in the nature of faculty control
-
Less prep time
-
Modularized content re-used in different
modules
-
Different delivery approaches
-
Separation of content and delivery
-
The best deliverers are not the best content
preparers
-
Substantive investment in packaging the
modules (that will go into several courses)
·
-
Link between courses and content for courses
will be broken
-
Package and offer content resources in
varying sizes and depths in unlimited
combinations
-
Publishers are moving now to build large
databases of content on the Web
-
These databases of content are attractive
portals for discipline knowledge ·
-
The nature of assessment will substantially
change from block tests to micro testing and
learning diagnostic tools that dynamically
change the students tasks based on the
measurement of their progress thru the distance
learning materials
-
There will be tremendous demand for the
development of both intelligent learning
assessment tools (e.g. devices that can read
an open ended exam answer, comment on it and
assess it) and information / knowledge
structure along which atoms of knowledge can
be measured and learning modules re-required
for students.
Tools
-
Teaching and learning management software
systems will be linked to their back office
administrative systems
-
Web course management tool
-
Student tracking and collaboration tools
-
An entire suite of learning aids, personal bots
will emerge
-
Personal digital assistants
-
Summarizers, finders, connectors, learners
-
The wide gulf between students and practitioners
will be narrowed by education coming to the
desktop and practicing experts made available
for testimonials, examples, actual observation
of behavior through broadband methods
-
For example a lesson about geology and oil
exploration may bring students to visually
observe man at work on oil platforms, or
drilling, or analyzing data, etc.
-
For example, while discussing strategy for
dot.com companies the CEO’s of these
companies can be brought in through
broadband to state their views or video
prepared showing facilities, products,
customers buying, etc..
-
Translation automation will allow for
substantial expansion of content markets.
-
Language will continue to be a barrier for
ubiquitous education · Physical libraries
will be transformed into study areas for
students in residential colleges (much
reduced in number) while enormous digital
libraries with most books also encompassing
video and audio and collaboration settings
will be made available for students
everywhere
Faculty
-
Highly more specialized researchers and content
developers will complement each other
-
Subsidy for research thru blind funding of
faculty salaries will become more difficult once
legislators realize that much of the delivery
will come form elsewhere
Environment
-
Tools for teaching and learning will become as
portable and ubiquitous as papers and books are
today
-
Teaching and learning anywhere any time
-
A larger percentage of content will age
rapidly
-
Alternate models for paying for education will
evolve with less of government subsidies and
more on the desk training paid by employers
-
Students will be savvy consumers with
substantive amount of choice
-
Increased level of student activism
-
Degrees may be obtained with a much
increased level of institutional mix
(courses from multiple universities)
-
Learning is moving off campus: to the home,
the workplace, the field, or wherever the
learner is
-
Students will pick up and piece together
certifications, skill sets, and knowledge
sets
|
Answer 3
--- Podcasting and
Blogs
Weblog (Blog)
Weblog = Blog =
What?
Also see
Podcasting at
http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework
Answer from
Whatis.com ---
A Weblog (which is sometimes
written as "web log" or "weblog") is a Web site of personal or
non-commercial origin that uses a dated log format that is
updated on a daily or very frequent basis with new information
about a particular subject or range of subjects. The information
can be written by the site owner, gleaned from other Web sites
or other sources, or contributed by users. A
Web log often has the quality of
being a kind of "log of our times" from a particular
point-of-view. Generally, Weblogs are devoted to one or several
subjects or themes, usually of topical interest, and, in
general, can be thought of as developing commentaries,
individual or collective on their particular themes. A Weblog
may consist of the recorded ideas of an individual (a sort of
diary) or be a complex collaboration open to anyone. Most of the
latter are moderated discussions.
Listing of Accounting Blogs
Among the millions of Web logs
permeating the Internet, there are some by and for accountants worth
checking out. This article includes an Accounting Blog List that you
can download, bookmark or print.
Eva M. Lang, "Accountants Who Blog," SmartPros, July 2005
---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x49035.xml
Bloggers will love TagCloud
Now, many bloggers are turning to a new service called
TagCloud
that lets them cherry-pick articles in RSS feeds by key words -- or
tags -- that appear in those feeds. The blogger selects the RSS
feeds he or she wants to use, and also selects tags. When a reader
clicks on a tag, a list of links to articles from the feeds
containing the chosen keyword appears. The larger the tag appears
onscreen, the more articles are listed.
Daniel Terdiman, "RSS Service Eases Bloggers' Pain," Wired News,
June 27, 2005 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67989,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_8
Weblog software use
grows daily -- but bloggers abandon sites and launch new ones as
frequently as J.Lo goes through boyfriends. Which makes taking an
accurate blog count tricky ---
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54740,00.html
Some eight million Americans now
publish blogs and 32 million people read them, according to the Pew
Internet & American Life Project. What began as a form of public
diary-keeping has become an important supplement to a business's
online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers on a personal
level -- and keep them visiting a company's Web site regularly.
Riva Richmond, "Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back," The
Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2005; Page B8 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110963746474866537,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
Want to start your own blog? BlogBridge ---
http://www.blogbridge.com/
What Blogs Cost
American Business, Ad Age
What Blogs Cost American Business
In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Work Years Reading ThemBy
Bradley Johnson LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Blog this: U.S. workers
in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.
About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force --
visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week
engaged with them, according to Advertising Age's analysis. Time
spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the
equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- bloggers
essentially take a daily...
Bradley Johnson, "What Blogs Cost American Business, Ad Age,
October 25, 2005 ---
http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46494#
Time Magazine's
choice of the 50 Coolest Websites for 2005 ---
http://www.time.com/time/2005/websites/
|
How do we come up with
our 50 best? Short answer: we take your suggestions,
probe friends and colleagues about their favorite
online haunts and then surf like mad. This year's
finalists are a mix of newcomers, new discoveries
and veterans that have learned some new tricks
|
|
Question
Does blogging hurt my chances for advancement?
See "Serious Bloggers," by Jeff Rice, Inside Higher Ed,
February 20, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/20/rice
Blog Navigation
Software
Blog Navigator is a new program
that makes it easy to read blogs on the Internet. It integrates into
various blog search engines and can automatically determine RSS
feeds from within properly coded websites.
Blog Navigator 1.2
http://www.stardock.com/products/blognavigator/
It's easy to start
your own blog. Jim Mahar's great blog was set up at
http://www.blogger.com/start
You too can set one up for free like Jim had done.
There are many other alternatives other than blogger.com for
setting up a free blog. See below.
BlogBridge ---
http://www.blogbridge.com/
Microsoft will open a
free consumer blogging service, its latest attempt to attract more
users to its MSN online service and away from rivals such as Google.
Question
A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old
and new media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S.
dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the
year.
What is that word?
Answer
BLOG
The other nine top words are discussed at CNN, November 30, 2004 ---
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/11/30/words.of.the.year.reut/
April 22,
2005 letter from Amy Dunbar
[Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
I would like some advice on what news aggregator to
use for RSS feeds. I read the BusinessWeek Online article on blogs
this morning, and it piqued my interest
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_18/b3931001_mz001.htm?c=bwinsiderapr22&n=link1&t=email
The
BusinessWeek Online blog,
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/
gave a link to
various blog RSS feed in a side menu:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Services/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/News_Readers/
Is anyone using blogs in classes? Any advice
on how to set up links to RSS feeds?
Thanks,
Amy Dunbar
UConn
Reply from Bob
Jensen
Hi Amy,
I don’t use blogs in class and only find time to
visit a few each week
For RSS feeds, look at the left hand column at
http://www.rss-specifications.com/blog.htm
Bob Jensen
"MBA Blogs,"
Business Week, September 12, 2005 ---
http://snipurl.com/MBAblog
You're invited you to join BW Online's new MBA Blog feature as a
guest blogger
STORY TOOLS Printer-Friendly Version E-Mail This Story
Our upcoming MBA Blog feature is an online community where you can
interact and share your pursuits of an MBA, job search, life as a
grad student, and much more. Whether you want to create your own web
log online, exchange advice, or launch a professional network - come
join our MBA Blog ---
http://mbablogs.businessweek.com/
The innovation that sends blogs zinging
into the mainstream is
RSS, or Really Simple
Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working
with software originally developed by Netscape, created an
easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into
Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain
blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at
a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together
the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news.
They're called "aggregators." For now, only about 5% of Internet
users have set them up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and
Microsoft plug them.
Business Week, April 22, 2005 --- ,
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/
"Controversy at Warp
Speed," by Jeffrey Selingo, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 29, 2005, Page A27
The deluge of messages left Mr. Corrigan wondering how so many
people had found out about such a small skirmish on his campus.
So his assistant poked around on the Web and discovered that six
days after the protest, a liberal blog (http://sf.indymedia.org) run
by the
San Francisco Independent
Media Center
had posted an article headlined "Defend Free Speech Rights at
San Francisco State
University" that included Mr. Corrigan's
e-mail address.
It was not the first time that Mr. Corrigan has been electronically
inundated after a campus incident. Three years ago he received
3,000 e-mail messages after a pro-Israel rally was held at the
university.
EVERYONE HAS A BEEF
Conflicts on campus are nothing new, of course. But colleges
today are no longer viewed as ivory towers. Institutions of
all sizes and types are under greater scrutiny than ever before from
lawmakers, parents, taxpayers, students, alumni, and especially
political partisans. Empowered by their position or by the
fact that they sign the tuition checks, they do not hesitate to use
any available forum to complain about what is happening at a
particular institution.
In this Internet age, information travels quickly and easily, and
colleges have become more transparent, says Collin G. Brooke, an
assistant professor of writing at Syracuse University, who studies
the intersection between rhetoric and technology. Many
universities' Web sites list the e-mail addresses of every employee,
from the president on down, enabling unencumbered access to all of
them.
"That was not possible 10 years ago," Mr. Brooke says. "Maybe
I'd go to a library, find a college catalog, and get an address.
Then I'd have to write a letter. Now it's easy to whip off a
couple of sentences in an e-mail when it takes only a few seconds to
find that person's address."
Continued in article
Student Blogs
"What Your College
Kid Is Really Up To," by Steven Levy, Time Magazine, December
13, 2004, Page 12
Aaron Swartz was nervous when I
went to interview him. I know this is not because he told
me, but because he said so on his student blog a few days
afterward. Swartz is one of millions of people who
mainstream an Internet-based Weblog that allows one to punch in
daily experiences as easily as banging out diary entries with a
word processor. Swartz says the blog is meant to help him
remember his experiences during an important time for him ---
freshman year at Stanford. But this opens up a window to
the rest of us.
Continued in the
article.
See
http://www.aaronsw.com/
"Microsoft Begins
Free 'Blogging'," by Robert A. Guth, The Wall Street Journal,
December 2, 2004, Page D7 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110194455538888633,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news
Microsoft Corp. today will open a
free consumer "blogging" service, its latest attempt to attract
more users to its MSN online service and away from rivals such
as Google Inc.
Called MSN Spaces, the service will
allow consumers to create Web logs, or blogs, that include
pictures, music and text. Blogs are personal Web sites and
opinion journals that have gained popularity in recent years.
Early blogs focused largely on technology and politics, but
millions of computer users have now at least experimented with
the form.
It's been said that
newspapers write the first draft of history, but now there are
blogs. These days, online scribes often get the news before it's fit
to print ---
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56978,00.html
Blogs Help You Cope
With Data Overload -- If You Manage Them," by Thomas E. Weber,
The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2004, Page B1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html
If you're an information junkie,
you've probably discovered the appeal of reading weblogs, those
online journals that mix commentary with links to related sites.
Obsessive blog creators scour the Internet for interesting
tidbits in news stories, announcements and even other blogs,
culling the best and posting links. A good blog is like the
friend who always points out the best stories in the newspaper.
More and more, though, the growth
of blogs is increasing rather than reducing information
overload. By some estimates, the number of blogs out there is
nearing three million. It isn't just amateurs either: Start-up
media companies are creating blogs, too. Gawker, for example,
publishes the gadgets journal Gizmodo (
www.gizmodo.com
) and Wonkette (
www.wonkette.com ), devoted to inside-the-Beltway gossip.
To help juggle all those blogs,
I've started playing around with a relatively new phenomenon
called a newsreader. Rather than forcing you to jump from one
blog to another to keep up with new entries, newsreaders bring
together the latest postings from your favorite blogs in a
single place.
That's possible because many blogs
now publish their entries as news "feeds." These are Web formats
that make it easy for a newsreader program (or another Web site)
to grab and manipulate individual postings. For a blog
publisher, it's like sending out entries on a news wire service.
To tell whether a site offers a news feed, look for a small icon
labeled "RSS" or "Atom."
I've tested a number of popular
newsreaders. At their best, they give you a customized online
newspaper that tracks the blogs you're interested in. But using
them is only worthwhile if you're willing to invest some time
upfront getting organized.
Newsreaders come in several
varieties. One is a stand-alone software program you install on
your PC. In that category, FeedDemon ($29.95 from Bradbury
Software) is especially powerful, with extensive options for
customizing the way news feeds appear on your screen.
Other newsreaders integrate news
feeds into your e-mail on the theory that mail has become the
catchall information center for many users. NewsGator ($29 from
NewsGator Technologies) pulls feeds into Microsoft Outlook,
while Oddpost (www.oddpost.com)
combines blog feeds with an excellent Web-based e-mail service
for $30 a year. For Mac users, Apple just announced it will
include newsreader functions in the next version of its Safari
Web browser -- a sign of how important the news-feed approach is
becoming.
Overall, I had the best experience
with a service called Bloglines, and I recommend it, especially
for beginners. Bloglines (www.bloglines.com)
works as a Web service, which means there's no software to
install and you can catch up with your blogs from any Web
browser. You're no longer tied to the bookmarks on a particular
PC, so you can check postings from home, work or on the road.
The service is also free. Mark Fletcher, CEO of Trustic Inc.,
which operates Bloglines, tells me the site will use unobtrusive
Google-style ads to bring in revenue.
After starting an account, you
enter the blogs you want to track. When you visit Bloglines,
your blog list will appear on the left side of the screen, along
with a notation telling the number of new postings since your
last visit; clicking on a blog pulls the new postings into a
right-side window. The beauty of this is that you don't waste
time visiting blogs that haven't posted new entries.
Of course, it's all pointless
without interesting blogs to read. The best way to find great
blogs is to follow your curiosity, tracking back links on blogs
you visit. Here are a few to get you started:
GENERAL INTEREST:
Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net)
is one of the Web's most established blogs, and one of its most
popular, too. By "general interest," I mean of general interest
to your average Internet-obsessed technophile. The focus isn't
explicitly on technology, but expect it to skew in that
direction -- over a recent week, posting topics included robots,
comic books and a cool-looking electric plug.
ECONOMICS:
EconLog (econlog.econlib.org)
offers a thoughtful and eclectic diary of economics, tackling
both newsy developments (the real-estate market, taxes) and
theory. It also includes a list of other good economics blogs --
there are more than you might think.
GADGETS:
Engadget (www.engadget.com)
can be counted on for a good half-dozen or more news morsels
each day on digital cameras, MP3 players, cellphones and more.
When it isn't the first to stumble across something good, it
isn't shy about linking to another blog with an interesting
post, so it's usually pretty up to date.
POLITICS:
WatchBlog (www.watchblog.com)
has stuck with an interesting concept for more than a year now.
It's actually three blogs in one: separate side-by-side journals
tracking news on the 2004 elections from the perspective of
Democrats, Republicans and independents.
TECHNOLOGY:
Lessig Blog (www.lessig.org/blog).
OK, this one's about politics too. More specifically, it covers
the intersection between regulation and technology. Its author,
Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig, weighs in on
copyright, privacy and other challenging topics in high-tech
society.
Blogging we will, blogging we will go! In Iran?
So what would a really
interesting and exciting piece of qualitative research on blogging
look like? And how would it get around the problems of
overfamiliarity with the phenomenon (on the one hand) and
blogospheric navel-gazing (on the other)? To get an answer, it isn’t
necessary to speculate. Just read “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: On
Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan,” by Alireza
Doostdar, which appears in the current issue of American
Anthropologist. A scanned copy is available here. The author is
now working at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard
University, where he will start work on his Ph.D. in social
anthropology and Middle Eastern studies. “Weblogestan” is an
Iranian online slang term for the realm of Persian-language blogs.
(The time has definitely come for it to be adapted, and adopted,
into Anglophone usage.) Over the last two years, Western journalists
have looked at blogging as part of the political and cultural
ferment in Iran — treating it, predictably enough, as a simple
manifestation of the yearning for a more open society. Doostdar
complicates this picture by looking at what we might call the
borders of Veblogestan (to employ a closer transliteration of the
term, as used specifically to name Iranian blogging). In an
unpublished manuscript he sent me last week, Doostdar provides a
quick overview of the region’s population: “There are roughly 65,000
active blogs in Veblogestan,” he writes, “making Persian the fourth
language for blogs after English, Portugese, and French. The topics
for blog entries include everything from personal diaries,
expressions of spirituality, and works of experimental poetry and
fiction to film criticism, sports commentary, social critique, and
of course political analysis. Some bloggers focus on only one of
these topics throughout the life of their blogs, while others write
about a different topic in every new entry, or even deal with
multiple topics within a single entry.”
Scott McLemee , "Travels in Weblogestan," Inside Higher Ed,
March 29, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/29/mclemee
Top Executives Are Finding Great Advantages to Using and Running
Blogs
"It's Hard to Manage if You
Don't Blog Business embraces the new medium as executives read—and
write—blogs," by David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine,
October 4, 2004 ---
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,699971,00.html
Jonathan Schwartz, president and
COO of
Sun Microsystems, has recently criticized statements by
Intel executives, mused that IBM might buy Novell, and
complained about a CNET.com article—all by writing a blog on a
Sun website.
Yep, blogs—which are a way to post
text to a website—have found their way into business. Schwartz
is the highest-ranking executive yet to embrace the new medium,
which is burgeoning globally. About 35,000 people read his blog
(http://blogs.sun.com)
in a typical month, including customers, employees, and
competitors. Schwartz encourages
all Sun's 32,000 employees to blog, though only about 100 are
doing it so far. But they include at least three senior managers
other than Schwartz as well as development engineers and
marketers.
The company's most popular blogger
is a marketer known as MaryMaryQuiteContrary. Her blog ranges
from rhapsodies about "proxy-based aspect-oriented programming"
to musings about her desire to become a first-grade class
mother. Says Schwartz: "I don't have the advertising budget to
get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on
handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our
developers, just by taking time to write a blog, can do a great
job getting our message out to a fanatic readership." He adds,
"Blogs are no more mandated at Sun than e-mail. But I have a
hard time seeing how a manager can be effective without both."
Over at
Microsoft, some 1,000 employees blog, says a spokesman,
though no top executives do. Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most
prominent blogger, says via e-mail that "I often link to
bloggers who are not friendly to Microsoft. They know I'm
listening, and that alone improves relationships." Other tech
companies with company blogs include Yahoo, Google, Intuit, and
Monster.com. Even Maytag has a blog.
But businesses are
learning—sometimes the hard way—that this new medium has
pitfalls. David Farrell, Sun's chief compliance officer, notes
that the company will soon require employees to agree to
specific guidelines before starting blogs. Companies are also
worried about unflattering portrayals and leaks. Last year a
Microsoft contract employee posted a photo of the company
receiving a dockful of Apple computers; he was promptly fired. A
Harvard administrator and a software developer at Friendster
were also recently fired after personal blog postings.
(Microsoft, Harvard, and Friendster declined to comment.)
But some managers find that even
more important than writing blogs is reading them. During a
recent conference for Microsoft software developers, top company
executives huddled backstage reading up-to-the-minute blogs
written by the audience to get a sense of how their messages
were being received.
While most people agree on Web logs' value
for promoting student expression and critical thinking in schools,
there's no consensus on the amount of control over access and
content that educators should exercise. Blogs may become more
of an issue in college courses when and if students begin to keep
Weblogs of day to day classes, teacher evaluations, and course
content.
"Classroom Blogs
Raise Issues of Access and Privacy," by Kevin J. Delaney, The
Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2004 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109882944704656461,00.html?mod=technology%5Ffeatured%5Fstories%5Fhs
First graders at Magnolia
Elementary School used a Web log earlier this year to describe
their dream playgrounds. Monkey bars were heartily endorsed, and
live animals and bumper cars also made the cut.
Students in a handful of other
classes at the Joppa, Md., school also used blogs, some trading
riddles about book characters with peers at a school in
Michigan.
Now, county administrators have
frozen the use of blogs in the classroom amid concerns about
oversight of what students might post online. Michael Lackner, a
teacher who jump-started blog use at Magnolia last year, is
optimistic that a technological fix will be found.
But the school's experience
highlights some of the issues that educators and parents face as
blogs -- simple Web sites that follow a diary-like format --
gain entry into the nation's classrooms. While most agree on
blogs' value for promoting student expression, critical thinking
and exchange, there's no consensus on the amount of control over
access and content that educators should exercise. As blogging
spreads, it could revive debates over student expression similar
to those that have cropped up around school newspapers.
The issues surrounding blogging and
related technology in the classroom are "pretty much uncharted,"
says Will Richardson, an educational-blogging advocate and
supervisor of instructional technology and communications at
Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J.
The use of blogs in schools remains
limited but is growing, as scattered programs piloted by
tech-savvy educators generate buzz and followers. Teachers are
attracted to blogging for some of the same reasons blog use has
exploded among techies, political commentators and would-be
pundits. Blogs are cheap, thanks to free or inexpensive software
packages and services -- Hunterdon, for example, pays just $499
a year for software to run hundreds of student blogs. And their
simple format makes them easy to set up. Using tools from Six
Apart Ltd.,
Google Inc. and others, consumers can create a blog in less
than 10 minutes and post messages to it over the Web or by
e-mail. By some estimates, five million or more Americans
already have created their own blogs, with some prominent
bloggers even influencing the news and political agendas.
Students in Mr. Richardson's
high-school journalism classes, for example, never turn in hard
copies of their homework. They post all assignments to
individual blogs. Their blogs also notify them when other
students complete writing assignments, so they can read and
comment on them.
Meredith Fear, 17 years old, has
created two blogs for classes taught by Mr. Richardson. The 12th
grader says posting her work online for others to see motivated
her to do better and increased her parents' involvement in her
education. "I don't often get a chance to talk with her about
school, so having the opportunity to check her blog and see what
she was up to was a great way for me to keep up on things," says
Jonathan Fear, Meredith's father. He adds that was one factor in
overcoming his wife's original concerns that ill-intentioned
outsiders could see Meredith's writings through the blog.
Recognizing such worries, some
teachers at Hunterdon protect blogs with passwords so only they
and their students can see them, particularly for
creative-writing classes for which the subject matter is more
likely to be personal. There are other blogging precautions:
Parents have to sign releases giving permission, and only
students' first names are used online. Mr. Richardson says the
school has hosted more than 500 student blogs in the past three
years without incident.
Mr. Richardson is planning a
session with parents later this fall to teach them about the
technology and set up blogs and Web-text feeds so they can gain
access to a broader range of information from teachers and see
what their children are up to. "Kids like it. And I can see more
enhanced learning on their part," Mr. Richardson says.
At Magnolia, teachers were happy
with their classroom blogging and had plans to expand it this
school year. But Harford County public school officials notified
them this summer that such projects appeared to fall afoul of
policies regulating student communication. In particular, they
were concerned that students and others could post comments to
the blogs before they were reviewed by a teacher.
"What we want to see is a Web log
where a teacher has final control, acts as a filter for any
postings or comments," says Janey Mayo, technology coordinator
for Harford County Public Schools. "We're trying to be very
cautious with this because we're working with kids." School
administrators also want to see further research on whether
blogging has educational value at the elementary-school level,
but so far haven't found any.
Mr. Lackner believes there is
potentially a quick technical fix to the problem: A blogging
service could add a function that would forward any online
comments to a teacher for review before posting them.
Continued in the
article
July 1, 2004 message
from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
THE EDUCATED
BLOGGER
According to
David Huffaker (in "The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to
Promote Literacy in the Classroom," FIRST MONDAY, vol. 9, no. 6,
June 2004), "blogs can be an important addition to educational
technology initiatives because they promote literacy through
storytelling, allow collaborative learning, provide
anytime–anywhere access, and remain fungible across academic
disciplines." In support of his position, Huffaker provides
several examples of blogs being used in classroom settings. The
paper is available online at
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/huffaker/index.html.
First Monday
[ISSN 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim
is to publish original articles about the Internet and the
global information infrastructure. It is published in
cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois
at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o
Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor,
PO Box 87636, Chicago
IL 60680-0636
USA; email:
ejv@uic.edu; Web:
http://firstmonday.dk/.
-----
Suzanne Cadwell
and Chuck Gray of the University of North Carolina - Chapel
Hill's Center for Instructional Technology have compiled two
feature comparison tables that describe three blogging services
and four blogging applications.
Blogging Services
Feature Comparison
Using a blogging
service generally doesn't require any software other than a web
browser. Users have no administrative control over the software
itself, but have some control over a blog's organization and
appearance. Depending on the particular service, blogs can be
hosted either on the service’s servers or on the server of one’s
choice (e.g.,
www.unc.edu). Users purchasing a paid account with a service
typically will have no banner ads on their blogs, more features
at their disposal, and better customer support from the service.
The Blogging Services Feature Comparison chart is available
http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/services/.
Blogging
Applications Comparison
Downloadable
blogging applications require the user to have access to server
space (e.g.,
www.unc.edu). Most of these applications are comprised of
CGI scripts that must be installed and configured in a user’s
cgi-bin folder. Although they are packaged with detailed
instructions, applications can be difficult to install,
prohibitively so for the novice. Blogging applications afford
users fine-grained control over their blogs, and most
applications are open-source or freeware. The Blogging
Applications Comparison chart is available at
http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/applications/.
Question
What services are available to help you create a blog?
Answer from Kevin
Delaney
"Blogs Can Tie
Families, And These Services Will Get You Started," by Kevin J.
Delaney, The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2004, Page B1
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html
Online Web logs, or blogs, have
long been a bastion of techy types, those prone to political
rants, and assorted gossips. But now they're making inroads
among families who want to keep up on each other's doings.
Blogs are personal Web sites where
you can post things, including photos, stories and links to
other cool stuff online. They resemble a journal, with
information arranged chronologically based on when you post it.
The simple form is a major virtue -- you don't have to think too
hard about how to organize your blog.
I've used a variety of Web sites in
recent years to share photos of my children with their
grandparents and other family far way. Lately, I've wondered if
it wouldn't be better to put photos, digital videos and other
links I want to share with my family on one Web site, making it
easier to manage and access them from afar.
With this in mind, I've been
testing three of the most popular blogging services, which are
available free or for a small monthly fee.
Blogger, a free service from Google
at www.blogger.com, promises you can create a blog in "three
easy steps." After selecting a user name and password, I chose a
name and a custom Web address. Then I selected a graphic look --
"Dots," a simple design with a touch of fun that seemed right
for a family site -- from 12 attractive templates. After that,
Blogger created my blog. Within a few minutes, I was able to put
a short text message on the site and have Blogger send e-mails
to alert my wife and father of the blog's existence.
Blogger, like the other services,
lets you further customize the organization and look of your
site and put several types of information on it. Sending text to
the blog is as easy as sending an e-mail. (In fact, Blogger and
the other services I tested even let me post text to my blog
using standard e-mail.) A Blogger button on Google's toolbar
software, which must be downloaded and activated separately,
offers the useful option of posting links to other Web sites on
your blog as you surf the Web. Another nice feature lets you
designate friends or family members who can post to the main
blog.
To put photos on any blog hosted by
Blogger, you have to download another free software package from
Picasa called Hello. Hello blocks connections to computers
operating behind what's known as a proxy server, which is a
pretty typical corporate configuration. As a result, I couldn't
upload photos from my work PC, though I was able to do so from
home.
Blogger lacks some advanced
features other services offer. But its main shortcoming is that
it doesn't let you protect your site by requiring visitors to
use a password to enter. I don't want strangers to look at
photos of my kids or search notes I'm writing for family
members. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on any plans
for such a feature, citing restrictions related to the company's
planned initial public offering.
TypePad from Six Apart, at
www.typepad.com, provides a higher-powered service for creating
blogs that does let you password protect your site. You can also
upload a broader range of files, including video clips. But the
tradeoff is a level of complexity that is unnecessarily
frustrating.
The company offers three monthly
subscription rates starting at $4.95. It costs $8.95 a month for
the version that allows you to create photo albums, a feature
that I consider essential for a family blog. Albums allow you to
avoid filling up the main blog site with strings of photos. If
you choose to password protect your blog, though, TypePad won't
let you link your blog directly to photo albums. It's a
surprising shortcoming, and Six Apart doesn't disclose it on its
site. Its support staff gave me complicated instructions for
another way to make such a link, but they never worked for me.
Six Apart Chief Executive Mena
Trott says the photo-album-linking problem is a bug the company
is working to fix. She acknowledges that parts of the service
could be easier to use, and says improvements will be made. She
also says that in practice Six Apart lets most users exceed the
company's miserly limits on blog storage space, which are 100
megabytes for the $8.95-a-month plan.
AOL's Journals service, which
requires an AOL subscription, is about as simple to use as
Blogger. It allows you to restrict public access to your blog
and provides nice albums for grouping photos. If you do decide
to restrict access, your visitors will have to register with
AOL. That registration is free, though, and many people already
have an AOL "screen name" because they use the company's instant
messaging service.
But other advanced features, such
as the button in Blogger for easy linking to Web sites, are
missing. In addition, the layout templates aren't nearly as
attractive graphically as Blogger's and TypePad's. AOL says it's
working on all of these issues, and expects to add a Web linking
button and phase out the registration requirement later this
year.
I'm not completely satisfied with
Journals, and I would be happy to use Blogger or TypePad if they
manage to work out their issues with photo albums and passwords.
In the meantime, though, I've chosen AOL's Journals to create my
family blog.
"WEBLOGS COME TO THE
CLASSROOM," by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
November 28, 2003, Page 33
They get used to supplement courses
in writing, marketing, economics, and other subjects
Increasingly, private life is a
public matter. That seems especially true in the
phenomenon known as blogging. Weblogs, or blogs, are used
by scores of online memoirists, editorialists, exhibitionists,
and navel gazers, who post their daily thoughts on Web sites for
all to read.
Now professors are starting to
incorporate blogs into courses. The potential for reaching
an audience, they say, reshapes the way students approach
writing assignments, journal entries, and online discussions.
Valerie M. Smith, an assistant
professor of English at Quinnipiac University, is among the
first faculty members there to use blogs. She sets one up
for each of her creative-writing students at the beginning of
the semester. The students are to add a new entry every
Sunday at noon. Then they read their peers' blogs and
comment on them. Parents or friends also occasionally read
the blogs.
Blogging "raises issues with
audience," Ms. Smith says, adding that the innovation has raised
the quality of students' writing;
"They aren't just writing for me,
which makes them think in terms of crafting their work for a
bigger audience. It gives them a bigger stake in what they
are writing."
A Weblog can be public or available
only to people selected by the blogger. Many blogs serve
as virtual loudspeakers or soapboxes. Howard Dean, a
Democratic presidential contender, has used a blog to debate and
discuss issues with voters. Some blogs have even earned
their authors minor fame. An Iraqi man--known only by a
pseudonym, Salaam Pax--captured attention around the world when
he used his blog to document daily life in Baghdad as American
troops advanced on the city.
Continued in the
article.
"Weblogs: a history
and perspective," Rebecca Blood, Rebecca's Pocket, September
7, 2000 ---
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
In 1998 there were just a handful
of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so
named by Jorn Barger
in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of
Infosift, began
compiling a list of "other sites like his" as he found them in
his travels around the web. In November of that year, he sent
that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published the list on
Camworld, and others
maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for
inclusion on the list. Jesse's 'page
of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in existence at
the beginning of 1999.
Suddenly a community sprang up. It
was easy to read all of the weblogs on Cameron's list, and most
interested people did. Peter
Merholz announced in early 1999 that he was going to
pronounce it 'wee-blog' and inevitably this was shortened to
'blog' with the weblog editor referred to as a 'blogger.'
At this point, the bandwagon
jumping began. More and more people began publishing their own
weblogs. I began mine in April of 1999. Suddenly it became
difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track
of all the new ones that were appearing. Cameron's list grew so
large that he began including only weblogs he actually followed
himself. Other webloggers did the same. In early 1999
Brigitte Eaton compiled a
list of every weblog she knew about and created the
Eatonweb Portal. Brig
evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site
consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what
was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most
complete listing of weblogs available, Brig's inclusive
definition prevailed.
This rapid growth continued
steadily until July 1999 when
Pitas, the first free build-your-own-weblog tool launched,
and suddenly there were hundreds. In August,
Pyra released
Blogger, and
Groksoup launched, and
with the ease that these web-based tools provided, the
bandwagon-jumping turned into an explosion. Late in 1999
software developer Dave Winer introduced
Edit This Page, and
Jeff A. Campbell launched Velocinews. All of these services are
free, and all of them are designed to enable individuals to
publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.
The original weblogs were
link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of
links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs
could only be created by people who already knew how to make a
website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML
for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites,
spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and
posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts.
Many current weblogs follow this
original style. Their editors present links both to little-known
corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are
worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the
editor's commentary. An editor with some expertise in a field
might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted
article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he
feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an
opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has
linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an
irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors
manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with
which they introduce the link (making them, as
Halcyon pointed out
to me, pioneers in the art and craft of
microcontent).
Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very
short space in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on
the part of the writer; longer commentary is often given its own
space as a separate essay.
These weblogs provide a valuable
filtering function for their readers. The web has been, in
effect, pre-surfed for them. Out of the myriad web pages slung
through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most
mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling.
But this type of weblog is
important for another reason, I think. In Douglas Rushkoff's
Media Virus, Greg Ruggerio of the
Immediast Underground
is quoted as saying, "Media is a corporate possession...You
cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the
foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the
difference between public and audience. An audience is passive;
a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is
public in its orientation."
By highlighting articles that may
easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do
more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles
from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts,
alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors
participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news
that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm and fearless
commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our
sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters
as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully
understand.
Weblog editors sometimes
contextualize an article by juxtaposing it with an article on a
related subject; each article, considered in the light of the
other, may take on additional meaning, or even draw the reader
to conclusions contrary to the implicit aim of each. It would be
too much to call this type of weblog "independent media," but
clearly their editors, engaged in seeking out and evaluating the
"facts" that are presented to us each day, resemble the public
that Ruggerio speaks of. By writing a few lines each day, weblog
editors begin to redefine media as a public, participatory
endeavor
Continued at
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
The Weblog Tool
Roundup, by Joshual Allen, Webmonkey, May 2, 2002 ---
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html
But then personal sites went from
being static collections of bad poetry and award banners to
constantly updated snippets of commentary, photography, sounds,
bad poetry, and links. The popularity of this format grew (for a
good primer on where weblogs came from and how they evolved, try
Rebecca Blood's
Weblogs: A History and Perspective), and people started
building applications to simplify the process of maintaining a
content-heavy personal site.
These applications have grown in
number and sophistication over the years, and with some major
upgrades appearing over the past few months (Blogger Pro,
Movable Type 2.0, Radio UserLand 8.0), I thought the time was
nigh to talk about what they do, why you might care, which one
would best suit your needs, and how they can keep you company on
those long, lonely nights, so empty since you were abandoned for
someone who could write Perl scripts.
Continued at
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html
"Will the Blogs Kill
Old Media?" by Steven Levy, Newsweek, May 20, 2002, Page 52
From Yahoo Picks of
the Week on December 3, 2002
blo.gs
http://www.blo.gs/
Weblogs continue to grow in
popularity, no doubt in part to their immediacy. Denizens of the
Internet enjoy the opportunity to drop by and catch an
up-to-the-minute account on their favorite blog. However,
nothing is more frustrating than encountering a cobwebbed blog
that hasn't been updated in weeks. To remedy such situations,
this site offers a minute-by-minute account of over 50,000
weblogs. It doesn't get fresher than this! For utility's sake,
the site offers a tiny java applet that sits on your desktop and
continually refreshes, keeping the weblogs whirring. You can
also stop by the most popular blogs to see what kind of content
is piquing the interest of others. Whether you're a neophyte or
veteran blogger, you're sure to find an intriguing site or two
to scour.
Some time ago, Glenn
Reynolds hardly qualified as plankton on the punditry food chain.
The 41-year-old law professor at the University of Tennessee would
pen the occasional op-ed for the L.A. Times, but his name was
unfamiliar to even the most fanatical news junkie. All that
began to change on Aug. 5 of last year, when Reynolds acquired the
software to create a "Weblog," or "blog." A blog is an easily
updated Web site that works as an online daybook, consisting of
links to interesting items on the Web, spur-of-the-moment
observations and real-time reports on whatever captures the
blogger's attention. Reynold's original goal was to post witty
observations on news events, but after September 11, he began
providing links to fascinating articles and accounts of the crisis,
and soon his site, called InstaPundit, drew thousands of
readers--and kept growing. He now gets more than 70,000 page
views a day (he figures this means 23,000 real people).
Working at his two-year-old $400 computer, he posts dozens of items
and links a day, and answers hundreds of e-mails. PR flacks
call him to cadge coverage. And he's living a pundit's dream
by being frequently cited--not just by fellow bloggers, but by media
bigfeet. He's blogged his way into the game.
Some say the game
itself has changed. InstaPundit is a pivotal site in what is
known as the Blogosphere, a burgeoning samizdat of
self-starters who attempt to provide in the aggregate an alternate
media universe. The putative advantage is that this one is run
not by editors paid by corporate giants, but unbespoken
outsiders--impassioned lefties and righties, fine-print-reading
wonks, indignant cranks and salt-'o-the-earth eyewitnesses to the
"real" life that the self-absorbed media often miss. Hard-core
bloggers, with a giddy fever not heard of since the Internet bubble
popped, are even predicting that the Blogosphere is on a trajectory
to eclipse the death-star-like dome of Big Media. One blog
avatar, Dave Winer (who probably would be saying this even if he
didn't run a company that sold blogging software), has formally
wagered that by 2007, more readers will get news from blogs than
from The New York Times. Taking him up on the bet is Martin
Nisenholtz, head of the Time's digital operations.
My guess is that
Nisenholtz wins. Blogs are a terrific addition to the media
universe. But they pose no threat to the established order.
Mobile weblogging, or
moblogging, is the latest trend in the world of blogs. New software
allows users to update their weblogs remotely with cell phones and
other handheld devices ---
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57431,00.html
The meteoric rise of weblogging is
one of the most unexpected technology stories of the past year,
and much like the commentary that populates these ever-changing
digital diaries, the story of blogging keeps evolving.
One recent trend is "moblogging,"
or mobile weblogging. New tools like
Manywhere
Moblogger,
Wapblog
and
FoneBlog allow bloggers to post information about the
minutiae of their lives from anywhere, not just from a PC.
The newest of these tools,
Kablog,
lets users update their weblogs remotely with cell phones and
other handheld devices like wireless PDAs.
Kablog works on any device running
Java 2 Platform Micro Edition, or
J2ME, a version of Java
for mobile devices. Those devices include cell phones running
the Symbian operating system, many Sprint PCS phones, the
Blackberry from RIM, and many Palm handhelds running OS 3.5,
such as Handspring's
Treo.
Todd Courtois, creator of Kablog,
offers the program for free as shareware and says that
word-of-mouth has already generated several thousand downloads
in the short time it has been available.
What distinguishes Kablog from
other moblogging software is that it does not use e-mail or text
messaging for updating weblogs. Other programs such as FoneBlog
enable users to e-mail posts from a cell phone or PDA to a
server, which uploads the entry onto a site. Kablog lets those
who use Movable Type
as their weblogging software log directly onto their sites for
updating.
Continued in the
article.
September 2, 2004
message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
RHETORIC, COMMUNITY, AND CULTURE OF
WEBLOGS
The Department of Rhetoric at the
University of Minnesota has created "Into the Blogsphere," a
website to explore the "discursive, visual, social, and other
communicative features of weblogs." Educators and faculty can
post, comment upon, and critique essays covering such areas as
mass communication, pedagogy, and virtual community. The website
is located at
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
For more
information on weblogs in academe, see also:
"Educational
Blogging" By Stephen Downes EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 9, no. 5,
September/October 2004, pp. 14-16, 18, 20-22, 24, 26
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp
"The Educated
Blogger" CIT INFOBITS, June 2004
http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjun04.html#1
January 2005
Update on Blogs
Eric Rasmusen
(Economics,
Indiana
University) has a homepage
at http://www.rasmusen.org/
His business and economics blog is at
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/
In particular he focuses on conservative versus liberal
economics and politics
Gerald (Jerry)
Trites (Accounting, AIS) has a homepage at
http://www.zorba.ca/
He runs an e-Business blog at
http://www.zorba.ca/blog.html
His site is a great source for updates on research studies in
e-Business
Some Blog
Directories
categorized directory of blogs
and journals.
www.blogarama.com - 17k
-
Cached -
More from this site
a
blog directory where users can
submit and find blogs.
www.blogcatalog.com - 23k
-
Cached -
More from this site
... Weird is our choice blog this
week, straight out of ... Blogwise often
find a blog that stands out for
its ... be featuring a new blog
every week in this slot ...
www.blogwise.com -
More from this site
... Download the Blog Search
Engine Toolbar. The blog Search
Engine is a web search resource for
finding ... Free Video Game and Online
Game Directory Web Conferencing
Small Business Forum ...
www.blogsearchengine.com -
15k -
Cached -
More from this site
blog search engine and
directory.
www.getblogs.com - 7k -
Cached -
More from this site
Bloghub.com - Your local blog
directory! ... Bloghub.com is an
international online blog
directory and community where
members from around the world gather
here ... site to our directory,
search our blog directory
or join us for ...
www.bloghub.com - 64k -
Cached -
More from this site
features a directory of political
blogs covering all viewpoints.
directory.etalkinghead.com -
9k -
Cached -
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... My Subscriptions Search The Web
Subscribe To URL. Directory.
Share. Home > Feed Directory. See
Also: Most Popular Feeds | Most Popular
Links ... View: Feed Directory |
User Directory ...
www.bloglines.com/dir - 19k
-
Cached -
More from this site
... and trackback services, and a
Blog O the Week feature. Blog
Universe. Blog directory
categorized by genre ... like you.
British Blog Directory -
BritBlog. A directory of blogs
written ...
www.lights.com/weblogs/
directories.html - 16k -
Cached -
More from this site
The BLOG page at Marketing
Terms.com - Internet Marketing
Reference. ... Blog. weblog.
---------------------------- (Requires
JavaScript ... eatonweb.com - blog
directory and portal. ...
www.marketingterms
"The Bottom Line
on Business Blogs: Entrepeneur.com, August 9, 2004
---
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,316638,00.html
They've moved beyond the realm of diarists and techies to
benefit mainstream businesses.
Anybody can go
slogging, but it is most common among teenagers
Thomas Claburn discusses
the new concept of
"slogging,"
or slanderous blogging, about someone you know or wish you
didn't. In my youth, we used to call this "gossip," and the
cardinal rule was never to put anything in writing for fear our
ill-tempered musings would be forever etched in stone and,
worse, overheard or seen by the person being dissed. But getting
"caught" by the subject is apparently the entire point of
slogging, as I understand it. I would have thought in our
overlitigated society that the voice of reason (if not
politeness and/or basic human decency) would trump that of
nastiness, but I would have been wrong.
InformationWeek Newsletter, August 31, 2005
June 1, 2006 message form
Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN THE
DISTANCE EDUCATION EXPERIENCE
"Presence, a sense of 'being there,' is critical to the success
of designing, teaching, and learning at a distance using both
synchronous and asynchronous (blended) technologies. Emotions,
behavior, and cognition are components of the way presence is
perceived and experienced and are essential for explaining the
ways we consciously and unconsciously perceive and experience
distance education." Rosemary Lehman, Distance Education
Specialist Manager at the University of Wisconsin-Extension,
explores the idea that understanding the part emotion plays in
teaching and learning "can help instruct us in effective
teaching, instructional design, and learning via technology."
Her paper, "The Role of Emotion in Creating Instructor and
Learner Presence in the Distance Education Experience" (JOURNAL
OF COGNITIVE AFFECTIVE LEARNING, vol. 2, no. 2, 2006), is
available online at
http://www.jcal.emory.edu/viewarticle.php?id=45
Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning (JCAL) [ISSN: 1549-6953]
is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published twice a year
by Oxford College of Emory University. To access current and
back issues go to
http://www.jcal.emory.edu/ . For more
information, contact: Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning,
c/o Prof. Ken Carter, Oxford College of Emory University, 100
Hamill Street, Oxford, GA 30054 USA; tel: 770-784-8439; fax:
770-784-8408;
email:
kenneth.carter@emory.edu
USING BLOGGER TO GET STARTED WITH E-LEARNING
In "Using Blogger to Get Teachers Started with E-Learning"
(FORTNIGHTLY MAILING, May 25, 2006), Keith Burnett discusses how
"[s]imple class blogs can be used to post summaries of key
points, exercises, links to Web pages of value, and to provide a
sense of continuity and encourage engagement with the material."
He includes a link to an online blogging tutorial and to
examples of how some instructors are using blogs in their
classes. The article is online at
http://fm.schmoller.net/2006/05/using_blogger_t.html
Fortnightly Mailing, focused on online learning, is published
every two weeks by Seb Schmoller, an e-learning consultant.
Current and back issues are available at
http://www.schmoller.net/mailings/index.pl. For more
information, contact: Seb Schmoller 312 Albert Road, Sheffield,
S8 9RD, UK; tel: 0114 2586899; fax: 0709 2208443;
email:
seb@schmoller.net
Web:
http://www.schmoller.net/
BOOKS VS. BLOGS
"Why would I write a book and wait a year or more to see my
writing in print, when I can blog and get my words out there
immediately?" In "Books, Blogs & Style" (CITES & INSIGHTS, vol.
6, no. 7, May 2006), Walt Crawford, both a book author and a
blogger, considers the different niches and purposes of the two
communication media. The essay is online at
http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ6i7.pdf
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large [ISSN 1534-0937], a free
online journal of libraries, policy, technology, and media, is
self-published monthly by Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at the
Research Libraries Group, Inc. Current and back issues are at
available on the Web at
http://cites.boisestate.edu/ . For more information contact:
Walt Crawford, The Research Libraries Group, Inc., 2029 Stierlin
Ct., Suite 100, Mountain View, CA 94043-4684 USA; tel:
650-691-2227;
Web:
http://waltcrawford.name/
Podcasting at
http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework
Video Games
Answer 4 --- Serious Learning
Applications of Video Games
Question
Have video game technologies changed learning styles? I might add
that this may also be true of women past their teens since there is
now a larger target market for these women vis-à-vis young males who
are often thought of in relation to game addiction.
Answer
In the next edition of New Bookmarks, I address how serious
educators are predicting that video-style games will become a
leading pedagogy for learning in the near future.
A new industry poll reveals that more
women than teen boys are behind video game consoles. The poll also
finds that lacking a better alternative, adult women prefer war
themes over the light 'n' fluffy doll games now offered.
Wired News, August 27, 2003 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,60204,00.html
August 28, 2003 message
from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
VIDEOGAMES -- THE
NEXT EDUCATIONAL "KILLER APP"?
In
"Next-Generation: Educational Technology versus the Lecture"
(EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 38, no. 4, July/August 2003, pp.
12-16, 18, 20-2), Joel Foreman, professor in George Mason
University English Department, proposes a "fringe idea" with
the potential to revolutionize the educational system. He
believes that "large lecture courses may someday be replaced
by the kind of immersive digital environments that have been
popularized by the videogame industry. Viewed in this light
the advanced videogame appears to be a next-generation
educational technology waiting to take its place in
academe."
Foreman illustrates his idea with a hypothetical Psychology
101 course that uses an immersive environment to engage
students in "learning through performance." Using the
videogame model, students would progress through several
"levels" of the course as they build upon their knowledge of
the material and meet the course's learning goals. The
article is online at
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0340.pdf.
EDUCAUSE Review [ISSN 1527-6619], a bimonthly print magazine
that explores developments in information technology and
education, is published by EDUCAUSE, 1150 18th Street, NW,
Suite 1010, Washington, DC 20036 USA; tel: 202-872-4200;
fax: 202-872-4318; email: info@educause.edu; Web:
http://www.educause.edu/. Articles from current and
back issues of EDUCAUSE Review are available on the Web at
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/.
Bob Jensen's threads on
higher education technologies are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
NEXT-Generation: Educational Technology versus the Lecture,
by Joel Foreman, EDUCAUSE Review, July/August 2003, pp. 14-22
---
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0340.pdf.
Chris Dede,
Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard
University, predicts that "shared graphical environments like
those in the multi-user Internet games Everques or Asheron's
Call" will be the learning environments of the future.
Henry Jenkins, Director of MIT's Games to Teach Project, leads
an effort to "demonstrate gaming's still largely unrealized
pedagogical potentials" and to explore "how games might enrich
the instruction...at the advanced placement high school and
early college levels." And Randy Hinrichs, Group Program
Manager for Learning Science and Technology at Microsoft
Research, claims that game technology (among other innovations)
"will move us away from classrooms, lectures, test taking, and
note taking into fun, immersive interactive learning
environments."
These
pronouncements are based on some incontestable facts.
First, the world is now populated by hundreds of millions of
game-playing devices. Second, the videogame market,
approximately $10 billion in 2002, continues to grow rapidly and
to motivate the push for increasingly sophisticated and powerful
interactive technologies. As in other areas of IT
development, these technologies are maturing and converging in
novel and unexpected ways. Text-based MUDs (Multi-User
Dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs Object-Oriented) have evolved into
massive multiplayer online communities such as Ultima and The
Sims On-line, in which hundreds of thousands of players can
simultaneously interact in graphically rendered immersive
worlds. And previously standalone game devices, such as
Sony PlayStation2 and Microsoft X box, are now Web-enabled for
geo-distributed multiplayer engagements. Imagine that all
of these networked "play stations" are "learning stations," and
you can begin to sense an instructional revolution waiting to
happen.
Still, some might
argue that higher education students already have networked
learning stations in the form of the Web-enabled PC. What
value is added by a game-based "learning station"? The
major difference is that game technologies routinely provide
visualizations whose pictorial dynamism and sophistication
previously required a supercomputer to produce. These
visualizations, best referred to as immersive worlds, can
bring a student into and through any environment that can be
imagined. Instead of learning about a subject by listening
to a lecture or by processing page-based alphanumerics (i.e.,
reading), students can enter and explore a screen-based
simulated world that is the next-best thing to reality.
Continued in the article.
"Can Grand Theft Auto
Inspire Professors?" by Scott Carson, The Chronicle of Higher
Education, August 15, 2003, Page A31
Educators say the virtual worlds of video games help students think
more broadly.
"People
ought to use Grand Theft Auto in the classroom to think about
values and ideology," James Gee a distinguished professor of
education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison says.
"There are lots of things people could learn from games."
This
isn't the talk of a hobbyist or an eccentric, but of a serious
scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field. Mr. Gee
thinks that video games--even those like Return to Castle
Wolfenstein, in which players run around and blast Nazis--hold
the key to salvaging American education. His argument was
recently delivered in a compact book: What Video Games Have
to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave
Macmillan).
Although Mr. Gee's colleagues suggested that he was wasting his
time when he started looking into video games, in the past two
years he has found that he is part of a new and growing academic
field. "In the time that I was writing my book, the
interest in games in academe went way up," Mr. Gee says.
"It's clear that by accident, I had entered an area where a wave
of interest was coming up--and is still coming up."
New
conferences and essays dedicated to games appear all the time.
Respected scholars, like Henry Jenkins, a professor of media
studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discuss
the cultural value of video games in the popular press.
And graduate students and professors are designing games for use
in the classroom.
Despite
the swell of interest, Mr. Gee and others say the academic study
of video games is still controversial. While some scholars
embrace research on the games, others are recoiling.
Celia
Pearce is the associate director of the Game Culture and
Technology Lab at the University of California at Irvine, where
two years ago the faculty rejected a proposal for a minor in
game design. A professor on the committee that made the
decision called the idea of a video-games minor "prurient," she
says.
She
finds it "baffling" that schools these days use a
"pre-information-society model" in teaching. "Kids are
playing games when they are not in school. They are going
from this digital environment into the classroom, and they're
suddenly in Dickens." Teachers and professors don't know
what games are, or how to use them to their own advantage, she
says. "At the worst they fear games, and at the best they
are completely ignorant of them."
Until a
few years ago, Mr. Gee was himself clueless about video games.
He became interested in the subject as he watched his son, then
6 years old, play a game called Pajama Sam. Mr. Gee
wondered what a game for adults would be like. So he
bought a game called The New Adventures of the Time Machine,
which was loosely based on the work of H. G. Wells.
"I was
floored by how long and how difficult it was," he says, sitting
in his office, one wall of which is now covered with posters of
video-game characters. He realized that the gaming
industry makes more money than Hollywood, which means that
millions of people are plunking down substantial amounts for
games that take on average 50 to 100 hours to complete--roughly
the amount of time spent in semester of college courses.
"Some young person is going to spend $50 on this, yet they won't
take 50 minutes to learn algebra," he says. "I wanted to
know why."
He says
that game manufacturers deal with compelling paradox from which
educators can learn.
Games
have to be challenging enough to entertain, yet easy enough to
solve--or at least easy enough for the player to feel like he or
she is making progress. "To me, that was the challenge
schools face," he says. "I wanted to see why these game
designers are better at that."
September 8, 2003 message
from Jon Entine
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Entine
[mailto:runjonrun@earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 11:11 AM
Subject: Research audit on "Body Shop" available
For
anyone studying or teaching The Body Shop, I've posted on my
website my internal 48-page audit of the company, which I've
previously only provided by email.
http://www.jonentine.com/reviews/Body_Shop_Roddick_audit.doc
It's an
extremely detailed account of the practices of this company. It
analyzes Body Shop over a range of areas including its
environmental practices, its marketing and ethics, its franchise
relations, corporate governance, product quality, etc. It's
based on more than 100 interviews, most of them recorded (and
available for fact checking).
It was
first written in 1996 and has been updated slightly. A lot of it
deals with the historical practices of the company, such as
Anita Roddick's brazen stealing of the concept, name, logo, and
products from the original Body Shop, the one founded in
Berkeley and San Francisco in 1970 that Roddick visited, then
ripped off without attribution, then lied about. The report is
very revealing about the character of Roddick and the sad,
dysfunctional, ethically-challenged multi-national corporation
she has created and continues to oversee.
The
backgrounder was prepared when Body Shop's lawyers (Lovell White
Durrant...Robert Maxwell's ex corporate swat team) and its PR
team (Hill & Knowlton ... The tobacco lobbyist PR firm) were
hired to counter articles by me, New Consumer in England, In
These Times, Stephen Corry of Survival International, and other
progressives who published fact-based accounts of the ethical
dysfunctionality of this company.
Please
feel free to use it in your research.
Regards,
-- Jon Entine
Miami University
6255 So. Clippinger Dr.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45243 (
513) 527-4385 [FAX] 527-4386
http://www.jonentine.com
Bob Jensen's threads on
higher education technologies are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Answer 4 ---
Distance Education Becomes Mainstream
Both Off Campus and In Courses On Campus
Distance Education Soared in the Latter
Part of the 1990s
Distance Education at Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions:
2000-2001, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), July
2003 ---
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003017
This report presents data on distance
education at postsecondary institutions. NCES used the
Postsecondary Education Quick Information System (PEQIS) to
provide current national estimates on distance education at
2-year and 4-year Title IV-eligible, degree-granting
institutions. Distance education was defined for this study as
education or training courses delivered to remote (off-campus)
sites via audio, video (live or prerecorded), or computer
technologies, including both synchronous (i.e., simultaneous)
and asynchronous (i.e., not simultaneous) instruction. Data were
collected on a variety of topics related to distance education,
including the number and proportion of institutions offering
distance education courses during the 2000–2001 12-month
academic year, distance education enrollments and course
offerings, distance education degree and certificate programs,
distance education technologies, participation in distance
education consortia, accommodations in distance education
courses for students with disabilities, distance education
program goals, and factors that keep institutions from starting
or expanding distance education offerings.
Introduction
This study, conducted through the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Postsecondary
Education Quick Information System (PEQIS), was designed to
provide current national estimates on distance education at
2-year and 4-year Title IV-eligible, degree-granting
institutions. Distance education was defined for this study as
education or training courses delivered to remote (off-campus)
sites via audio, video (live or prerecorded), or computer
technologies, including both synchronous (i.e., simultaneous)
and asynchronous (i.e., not simultaneous) instruction.
Key Findings
The PEQIS survey provides national
estimates for the 2000–2001 academic year on the number and
proportion of institutions offering distance education courses,
distance education enrollments and course offerings, degree and
certificate programs, distance education technologies,
participation in distance education consortia, accommodations
for students wit h disabilities, distance education program
goals, and factors institutions identify as keeping them from
starting or expanding distance education offerings.
The report's summary is continued at
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/peqis/publications/2003017/
October 31, 2003 message
from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
TRENDS
IN DISTANCE EDUCATION
The
American Federation of Teachers publication, AFT ON CAMPUS, is
running a series of articles on distance education trends.
In
"Trends in Distance Education" (September 2003,
http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/sept03/technology.html
) Thomas J. Kriger, State University of New York, writes about
how "critics of asynchronous courses and programs within higher
education have recently found unexpected support in the
corporate sector." Learners in corporations are increasingly
expressing dissatisfaction with online-only classes. This is
leading to the creation of "blended learning" -- courses that
combine "face-to-face teaching with software and Web-based
teaching." Such courses also allow faculty to retain greater
control in their distance classes.
The
October 2003 issue continues the theme with "Making the
Pedagogical Case for Blended Learning" by Cynthia Villanti,
assistant professor of humanities at Mohawk Valley Community
College, New York (
http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/oct03/technology.html
). She presents five primary pedagogical arguments for blended,
or hybrid, courses. These arguments include: -- enabling a
balance between faculty-centered and student-centered models; --
enabling faculty and students to develop a strong sense of
classroom community both online and in person; -- allowing for
both the "reflectiveness of asynchronous communication and the
immediacy of spoken communication;" -- helping to alleviate
faculty concerns about academic dishonesty and plagiarism.
AFT On
Campus is published eight times a year by the American
Federation of Teachers, 555 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington, DC
20001 USA; tel: 202-879-4400; email:
online@aft.org ; Web:
http://www.aft.org/ Current and back issues are
available at no cost at
http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/index.html.
......................................................................
NEW
RESOURCE ON ELEARNING AND COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
This
month, SYLLABUS magazine began a new, free email publication,
CMS REVIEW: A RESOURCE ON ELEARNING AND COURSE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS. This bi-monthly newsletter will provide information,
analysis, case studies, and technical tips on course management
systems (CMS) in higher education. To subscribe, go to
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=2978
Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by
101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101,
Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785;
email: info@syllabus.com; Web:
http://www.syllabus.com/ . Annual subscriptions are free to
individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools
in the U.S.; go to
http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/ for more
information.
Bob Jensen's links on online training and education programs
can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Other documents related to this topic are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Answer 5 --- The Future of
Textbooks
The future of text books?
From Jim Mahar's blog on June 16, 2005 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
The future of text books?
Megginson and Smart
Introdcution to Corporate Finance--Companion
Site
Wow.
I think we may have a glimpse into the future of text books with
this one. It is the new Introduction to Corporate Finance
by William Megginson and Scott Smart.
From videos for most topics, to
interviews, to powerpoint, to a student study guide, to excel
help...just a total integration of a text and a web site! Well
done!
At St. Bonaventure we have adopted the
text for the fall semester and the book actually has made me
excited to be teaching an introductory course! It is that good!!
BTW Before I get accused of selling
out, let me say I get zero for this plug. I have met each author
at conferences but do not really know either of them. And like
any first edition book there may be some errors, but that said,
this is the future of college text books!
Check out some of the online material here.
More material is available with book purchase.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
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