I really enjoyed this "expert" discussion and I'm bubbling with ideas about what my final itec project will be. I'm definitely going to start becoming my own expert on Drupal, Ed 2.0, moodle etc so that I can design a learning management system for my classes. I didn't have this project until last thursday nite so I'm indebted to our experts for their very informative presentation.
Which brings up a problem. As we move forward into new territory, can the itec program keep up? This year I've been taking seminar classes but next year it's about skill development. I tentatively plan to take dreamweaver and flash classes but I'm increasingly seeing that I need these skills less and less as web 2.0 develops. I started the program with a goal to create an awesome educational website so dreamweaver and flash made sense, but now I'm leaning more toward modifying something like drupal or moodle to create a learning management system. Where will I develop these skills. Sure..I can do my own research, join a user group, troll the forums and blogs for useful tidbits, but I only have so much free time and I can't both spend my monday/thursday evenings in a classroom (and my weekends doing homework for those classes) AND develop these outside skill sets. I'm burning candles at both ends already.
Perhaps the itec program can take a page out of it's own book and allow us to take elearning courses offered elsewhere and apply them as classes toward our degree? Of course, this brings up a money issue. Clearly sf state will want there $1500 a semester AND the elearning course will want tuition too!! I can't afford both on a teachers salary.
clearly a connundrum I must address..............but not today.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
podcasting...part deux
Good gravy!!! It apparently worked. Well whattaya know. I apologize for the length of the podcast. but I was trying to include as many of my classmates as possible while keeping it coherent.
podcasting
last week we were assigned this podcast to make on Doc Wagners visit. The goal was to cut up and splice together our recorded reflections and then post the finished product to this blog. I worked with garageband and found it relatively easy to use since I've used apple's imovie before. It was fun to add images to. However, I got stuck on the sharing function. My first effort to share to itunes seemed to be a closed loop since nowhere on this blog does it allow for uploading from itunes. Next try was to upload to iweb. Somehow, I've now created a web page with my podcast as the only content..rather embarrasing. Now I will try to link that web page to this blog. Wish me luck!!
My podcast should appear here
My podcast should appear here
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
podcast block
So I'm having such a difficult time with this assignment and it's not for lack of enthusiasm. I tried to start yesterday and found myself merely repeating what I wrote in my previous post but in a very contrived Q/A format. I just tried again but it doesn't feel right. I wouldn't mind doing an actual podcast sometime but this is not the way to do if....at least for me. Since the goal of the exercise is to apply some of Doc Wagners ideas to learning, I think I will attempt to focus on that and avoid the formatting efforts that are hampering my flow of ideas. (I sound like I'm conceptually constipated)
The topic that I would like to expand upon is the concept of the metaverse. Dr Wagner talked about how Web 3.0 was the 3-D web combined with the web of things. I find this so freaking fascinating. The metaverse is a phrase coined by Neil Stephenson in his book SnowCrash. (btw. that's the second time in this course my favorite cyberpunk writer has been mentioned. His follow up book, The Diamond Age, was referenced in one of our readings.....find his books and read them..they're great) The metaverse refers to an online universe; a sort of parallel world that exists alongside our meat universe. At the time it was far fetched but it's clear she thinks this is a future reality.
At this time, the best examples of this metaverse are massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest (know as EverCrack b/c of it's addictive nature) and the increasingly popular virtual reality world known as Second Life. While WOW lets you fight trollls and collect gold, Second Life is about networking and simple social interaction (carrying a sword and beheading people you meet in SL is frowned upon) WOW creates a virtual imaginary world, SL creates a virtual real world. People do mundane things in SL. They attend concerts, go on virtual hikes, watch sunsets (there's a beautiful sunset every 4 hours in SL) bu they do them...together. SL is a social virtual world, poeple log on to socialize with other people. Learning is a social function. I think it was the constructivists who first said that, but if you teach, you know it's a truism. SL is a starting point for virtual learning.....it's happening already.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has a 12 x 20 meter virtual island in Second Life that is a giant weather map of the U.S.A. Satelite weather data is fed into SL and constantly updates this virtual 3-D represantation of our nations weather. Students studying weather at University of Colorado can actually walk and fly around "IN" this virtual weather. It's a fully emmersive way to learn a topic. Nearby in the SL universe is another fun learning environment. At the International Spaceflight Museum, visitors can fly alongside life-size rockets, from the huge Apollo-era Saturn V to a prototype of the Ares V, one of the launch vehicles NASA hopes to use to send Americans back to the moon. They can fly alongside satelites or travel around our solar system examining planets. You like tennis? If so, just stroll a virtual tennis court inside Second Life and examine the paths of every serve and volley of a Wimbledon match in progress, reproduced by IBM in close to real time (youtube) Recently, the author of the comic strip Dilbert did a virtual book tour all within the SL world.
This is all cool..........but it's not the metaverse. Yes you can fly around mars, but these are still clunky, pixilated worlds in which you converse in chat form. But that will change...it already is. These social virtual worlds (and there are others besides SL) are incorporating more and more real-world data into their online universe. They become richer by the day.
Now lets think about google earth. Is there ever a week in this class when the ubiquitous G isn't referenced in some way. Google Earth is a "virtual globe" Virtual globes and their 2-D counterparts, Web maps, are getting more personal and immersive. This personalization has been referred to as "neogeography" and it's an explosion of user created content from travel photos, to sketchup representations of landmarks, to simple anecdotal reports, annotated to locations on this virtual globe. A trip to virtual Paris on google earth includes a bunch of information added by folks actually been to Paris. This layering of information is tranforming google earth from a virtual glove to 3-D wikipedia. In my opinion this is the first map of the metaverse. Base maps are just a reference point but these metaverse maps will include reviews, opinions, photos and anything else that we want to add. I can easily imagine a geography class visiting the pyramids via google earth and then exploring all the content at the location. Why not? In a real example, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum worked with google to create a layer that highlights the locations of villiages in Sudan that had been destroyed by the janjaweed. Close up views show destroyed homes and pop-up boxes contain testimony from survivors and some truly horrific photos. Now that's a learning tool. Berlin recently created a full 3-D representation of the cities infrastructure..all within a layer of google earth. You can actually walk right into the Reichstag and into the parliamentary chambers.
While the source code for both these environments is still tightly controlled by their respective owners, programmers can build any auxillary applications they choose....that's what makes both of these worlds so rich...people can build in them, and build out from them. Many folks are talking about a "mash-up" of google earth and second life; ostensibly called, Second Earth. Imagine combining Googles immersive 3-D data with Second life's immersive world...it's within this type of mashup that the metaverse will be born. Pundits predict that within the next 20 years...about the same time it took for the Web to get off the ground floor...this type of metaverse experience will be the standard way in which we think of going online. Today we visit a web site to shop for xmas presents, tomorrow we walk our avatars into an virtual store and inspect the merchandise. Wild huh!!
What set's this metaverse apart from the virtual world of something like WOW or SL is that it will actually be a mirror-world of our world. You can imagine it almost as a data filled, form-fitting net flowing over and around our own real world. And this is where Dr Wagners "Internet of things" concept comes in. As more and more objects input data into this web of information we construct a richer and richer mirror of our world. GPS is virtually ubiquitous, and I can download an iphone app that lets my friends know exactly where I am at all times (why I would ever want to do that is beyond me) so you can see that this tapestry is already being woven. As "things" are developed that send more and more information out into this mirror world, the image will start to gain resolution.........it will become a 3-D internet.
Fantasy worlds like WOW and Second Life won't dissapear (they'll get better) but a new type of "non-fiction" virtual reality will emerge that will become as all pervasive as the 2-D internet has become. Don't believe me! The tech research firm Gartner (authors of the now famous Gartner Hype cycle) predict that by the end of 2011 80% of internet user and Fortune 500 companies will participate in some form of virtual world environment like Second Life. The NOAA created it's Island as a kind of educational amusement park; Weather World, but dozens of hard core businesses are setting up shop in Second Life....including Big Blue (IBM) Caldwell Banker opened a real-estate brokerage where new second life residents can purchase virtual homes. Starwood Hotels constructed virtual prototypes of real hotels they plan to build and used suggestions from SL visitors into the final construction designs. You can download layers for most major U.S. airports that track all commercial flights in and out.
So the concept of combining SL and google earth into a Second Earth hybrid mashup is hella cool on it's own, combine that with a whole bunch of sensors around the real world feeding in real-time visuals, real-time atmospherics, the latest traffic situation, how much of your favorite beer is avialable in your local corner store, and you've got a transformative mirror world metaverse experience. Now make the metaverse accessible to all and you have a place where a teacher can teach anything, to anyone, at any time.
That's my podcast for this week.
The topic that I would like to expand upon is the concept of the metaverse. Dr Wagner talked about how Web 3.0 was the 3-D web combined with the web of things. I find this so freaking fascinating. The metaverse is a phrase coined by Neil Stephenson in his book SnowCrash. (btw. that's the second time in this course my favorite cyberpunk writer has been mentioned. His follow up book, The Diamond Age, was referenced in one of our readings.....find his books and read them..they're great) The metaverse refers to an online universe; a sort of parallel world that exists alongside our meat universe. At the time it was far fetched but it's clear she thinks this is a future reality.
At this time, the best examples of this metaverse are massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest (know as EverCrack b/c of it's addictive nature) and the increasingly popular virtual reality world known as Second Life. While WOW lets you fight trollls and collect gold, Second Life is about networking and simple social interaction (carrying a sword and beheading people you meet in SL is frowned upon) WOW creates a virtual imaginary world, SL creates a virtual real world. People do mundane things in SL. They attend concerts, go on virtual hikes, watch sunsets (there's a beautiful sunset every 4 hours in SL) bu they do them...together. SL is a social virtual world, poeple log on to socialize with other people. Learning is a social function. I think it was the constructivists who first said that, but if you teach, you know it's a truism. SL is a starting point for virtual learning.....it's happening already.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has a 12 x 20 meter virtual island in Second Life that is a giant weather map of the U.S.A. Satelite weather data is fed into SL and constantly updates this virtual 3-D represantation of our nations weather. Students studying weather at University of Colorado can actually walk and fly around "IN" this virtual weather. It's a fully emmersive way to learn a topic. Nearby in the SL universe is another fun learning environment. At the International Spaceflight Museum, visitors can fly alongside life-size rockets, from the huge Apollo-era Saturn V to a prototype of the Ares V, one of the launch vehicles NASA hopes to use to send Americans back to the moon. They can fly alongside satelites or travel around our solar system examining planets. You like tennis? If so, just stroll a virtual tennis court inside Second Life and examine the paths of every serve and volley of a Wimbledon match in progress, reproduced by IBM in close to real time (youtube) Recently, the author of the comic strip Dilbert did a virtual book tour all within the SL world.
This is all cool..........but it's not the metaverse. Yes you can fly around mars, but these are still clunky, pixilated worlds in which you converse in chat form. But that will change...it already is. These social virtual worlds (and there are others besides SL) are incorporating more and more real-world data into their online universe. They become richer by the day.
Now lets think about google earth. Is there ever a week in this class when the ubiquitous G isn't referenced in some way. Google Earth is a "virtual globe" Virtual globes and their 2-D counterparts, Web maps, are getting more personal and immersive. This personalization has been referred to as "neogeography" and it's an explosion of user created content from travel photos, to sketchup representations of landmarks, to simple anecdotal reports, annotated to locations on this virtual globe. A trip to virtual Paris on google earth includes a bunch of information added by folks actually been to Paris. This layering of information is tranforming google earth from a virtual glove to 3-D wikipedia. In my opinion this is the first map of the metaverse. Base maps are just a reference point but these metaverse maps will include reviews, opinions, photos and anything else that we want to add. I can easily imagine a geography class visiting the pyramids via google earth and then exploring all the content at the location. Why not? In a real example, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum worked with google to create a layer that highlights the locations of villiages in Sudan that had been destroyed by the janjaweed. Close up views show destroyed homes and pop-up boxes contain testimony from survivors and some truly horrific photos. Now that's a learning tool. Berlin recently created a full 3-D representation of the cities infrastructure..all within a layer of google earth. You can actually walk right into the Reichstag and into the parliamentary chambers.
While the source code for both these environments is still tightly controlled by their respective owners, programmers can build any auxillary applications they choose....that's what makes both of these worlds so rich...people can build in them, and build out from them. Many folks are talking about a "mash-up" of google earth and second life; ostensibly called, Second Earth. Imagine combining Googles immersive 3-D data with Second life's immersive world...it's within this type of mashup that the metaverse will be born. Pundits predict that within the next 20 years...about the same time it took for the Web to get off the ground floor...this type of metaverse experience will be the standard way in which we think of going online. Today we visit a web site to shop for xmas presents, tomorrow we walk our avatars into an virtual store and inspect the merchandise. Wild huh!!
What set's this metaverse apart from the virtual world of something like WOW or SL is that it will actually be a mirror-world of our world. You can imagine it almost as a data filled, form-fitting net flowing over and around our own real world. And this is where Dr Wagners "Internet of things" concept comes in. As more and more objects input data into this web of information we construct a richer and richer mirror of our world. GPS is virtually ubiquitous, and I can download an iphone app that lets my friends know exactly where I am at all times (why I would ever want to do that is beyond me) so you can see that this tapestry is already being woven. As "things" are developed that send more and more information out into this mirror world, the image will start to gain resolution.........it will become a 3-D internet.
Fantasy worlds like WOW and Second Life won't dissapear (they'll get better) but a new type of "non-fiction" virtual reality will emerge that will become as all pervasive as the 2-D internet has become. Don't believe me! The tech research firm Gartner (authors of the now famous Gartner Hype cycle) predict that by the end of 2011 80% of internet user and Fortune 500 companies will participate in some form of virtual world environment like Second Life. The NOAA created it's Island as a kind of educational amusement park; Weather World, but dozens of hard core businesses are setting up shop in Second Life....including Big Blue (IBM) Caldwell Banker opened a real-estate brokerage where new second life residents can purchase virtual homes. Starwood Hotels constructed virtual prototypes of real hotels they plan to build and used suggestions from SL visitors into the final construction designs. You can download layers for most major U.S. airports that track all commercial flights in and out.
So the concept of combining SL and google earth into a Second Earth hybrid mashup is hella cool on it's own, combine that with a whole bunch of sensors around the real world feeding in real-time visuals, real-time atmospherics, the latest traffic situation, how much of your favorite beer is avialable in your local corner store, and you've got a transformative mirror world metaverse experience. Now make the metaverse accessible to all and you have a place where a teacher can teach anything, to anyone, at any time.
That's my podcast for this week.
Dr Wagner podcast
Tonight our guest is Dr Ellen Wagner. Dr Wagner is a Partner and Principal Analyst for Sage Road Solutions / Sonoma Partners. She is responsible for learning industry market trend research aggregation, trend analysis, forecasting and decision support. Welcome Dr Wagner.
Thank you...and I must admit you're far more handsome in person than your blog picture would indicate.
Oh my...So tell our listeners a little about yourself.
Well...originally my background was in academics. I got my PhD at University of Colorado in Boulder. My focus was on learning psychology. I taught at Northern Colorado University and was chair of the educational technology program. I left academia for the corporate world and eventually found myself the senior director of worldwide eLearning at Adobe Systems.
Why did you leave Adobe?
None of your business.
I can't do this......
Thank you...and I must admit you're far more handsome in person than your blog picture would indicate.
Oh my...So tell our listeners a little about yourself.
Well...originally my background was in academics. I got my PhD at University of Colorado in Boulder. My focus was on learning psychology. I taught at Northern Colorado University and was chair of the educational technology program. I left academia for the corporate world and eventually found myself the senior director of worldwide eLearning at Adobe Systems.
Why did you leave Adobe?
None of your business.
I can't do this......
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Great conversation with Doc Wagner...and I'm enjoying following her blog. Good topics included the concept of "free beer" vs "free puppy" Both are "free" but one comes with "strings" attached. Free content management systems (or any kind of software) has hidden costs that must be considered; including limited functionality, security, and lack of support. On the other hand, these free puppies have open sourceware that allows them to be customized and often communities grow up around them. I'm not much of a techie but it's an interesting debate.
Another good topic was hype cycle as applied to tech. I love it. I recall the joy I got when I bought my iphone at the reduced price and outrage it engendered in the early adopters. In education I've seen lots of hype around technology...from probeware to smartboards. There is that initial trigger followed by that peak of inflated expectations. Laptops were going to transform writting in the classroom, but only writing can transform writing. In my chemistry class I've found probeware often removes students from the experiment and focuses entirely on recording data. You could say I'm in a trough of disillusionment regarding probeware. However, as I modify the poorly written probeware labs to better reflect the kind of teaching and learning I try to do I will enter that slope of enlightenment that will become the legacy of my probeware curriculum.
Then there's her take on Web 3.0....the 3D web. Right now she doesn't have much to base this on. Second life is really the only good example of learning taking place in a 3D (actually it's more 2D but lets say virtual) world. Limitations exist; The avatars are clumsy, the world is graphically poor compared to our world, but it's a start......and you can fly. Personally, I think Web 3.0 is the mash-up web. Things will start to cross polinate or cross platformate. This is where the free puppy pays off. People are already talking about a mashup of google earth and second life...second earth. These existing 3-D platforms let outside programmers build their own auxiliary applications (can you say mashup) within the virtual world. I read about a colorado professor using second life as a way to get his students "inside" the weather. At the international spaceflight museum, visitors can virtually fly alongside life sized rockets. It's only a matter of time before I meet my students in the metaverse classroom......'oh the places we will go"
Ok...now I've excited myself into a daydream. I think I'll work on my podcast for awhile
Another good topic was hype cycle as applied to tech. I love it. I recall the joy I got when I bought my iphone at the reduced price and outrage it engendered in the early adopters. In education I've seen lots of hype around technology...from probeware to smartboards. There is that initial trigger followed by that peak of inflated expectations. Laptops were going to transform writting in the classroom, but only writing can transform writing. In my chemistry class I've found probeware often removes students from the experiment and focuses entirely on recording data. You could say I'm in a trough of disillusionment regarding probeware. However, as I modify the poorly written probeware labs to better reflect the kind of teaching and learning I try to do I will enter that slope of enlightenment that will become the legacy of my probeware curriculum.
Then there's her take on Web 3.0....the 3D web. Right now she doesn't have much to base this on. Second life is really the only good example of learning taking place in a 3D (actually it's more 2D but lets say virtual) world. Limitations exist; The avatars are clumsy, the world is graphically poor compared to our world, but it's a start......and you can fly. Personally, I think Web 3.0 is the mash-up web. Things will start to cross polinate or cross platformate. This is where the free puppy pays off. People are already talking about a mashup of google earth and second life...second earth. These existing 3-D platforms let outside programmers build their own auxiliary applications (can you say mashup) within the virtual world. I read about a colorado professor using second life as a way to get his students "inside" the weather. At the international spaceflight museum, visitors can virtually fly alongside life sized rockets. It's only a matter of time before I meet my students in the metaverse classroom......'oh the places we will go"
Ok...now I've excited myself into a daydream. I think I'll work on my podcast for awhile
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Is that a terabyte of information in your pocket or are you just happy to see me.?
Bonks lecture was rapid fire but invigorating. One of the most enlightening things I learned was that the U.K. was an exceptionally "dodgy" place b/c of the rather bitey dogs. All kidding aside, the concept that anyone, can learn anything, from anyone, at anytime.....is what this class is really all about. I used voicethread to create a presentation on his WE ALL LEARN pneumonic (are caps really necessary) and it was an interesting exercise. I like the voice over aspect and I think it could be used by my students for classroom presentations. I decided to present his 10 big points in a "what can you do as a teacher" theme. It's posted right before this post...sadly, I couldnt' figure out how to embed them together.....next time.
On the whole the class was (as usual) pretty inspiring stuff....but an exceptionally bad powerpoint. Clearly Dr Bonk has ppt ADD. Each slide was filled with multiple graphical images and random odd noises. Combined with the constant chanting it tended to take away from the outrageous concept of the content. While his presentation left a lot to be desired (he should ask Al Gore for some ppt pointers) his ideas are powerful and well worth thinking about.
On the whole the class was (as usual) pretty inspiring stuff....but an exceptionally bad powerpoint. Clearly Dr Bonk has ppt ADD. Each slide was filled with multiple graphical images and random odd noises. Combined with the constant chanting it tended to take away from the outrageous concept of the content. While his presentation left a lot to be desired (he should ask Al Gore for some ppt pointers) his ideas are powerful and well worth thinking about.
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