Desire2Blog

This is part 3 of 4. In this 12-minute segment I get the audience reaction to six potential myths about online faculty. I briefly share my views/opinions about each of these items after the voting is concluded. Follow this link to view the part 3 natively (and full-screen) in Zentation . The six statements that might be myths include: 7) Faculty are embracing the concept of shared electronic learning objects 8) Online faculty work harder 9) As faculty become facilitators rather than teachers, they are less and less important in the e-Learning classroom 10) Web accessibility is NOT my job! 11) Entertaining students is NOT my job! 12) Highly interactive online courses are better than courses with little interaction.

This is part 2 of 4. In this 17-minute segment I get the audience reaction to six potential myths about online students. I share my take about each of these items after the voting is concluded on the six questions. Follow this link to view the presentation natively (and full-screen) in Zentation . The six statements that might be myths include: 1) e-Learning students believe that a sense of community is important 2) Online students plagiarize more than traditional students. 3) e-Learning enables anytime, anywhere learning. 4) Digital natives are well prepared for e-Learning. 5) Cheating is rampant among online students. 6) We are winning the bandwidth war in relation to delivering media-intensive courses.

This is the first of four shorter videos made from my keynote presentation at e-Learning 2008, the ITC annual conference held in St. Pete Beach. This first 11 minute segment is just the introduction and the warm-up act to the audience response portion. In the next three video segments (coming soon) you will see the 6 Reality/Myth statements for the a) student category, b) faculty category, and c) general category. You can click on the embedded player below, or go to this link to view the presentation natively at the Zentation site . The remaining three video pieces will be coming shortly.

LSC Online was well represented at the 2008 American Birkebeiner Nordic ski race . We had several students who were skiing and we also sponsored the Team Cup competition for high school teams and college teams. There were great ski conditions and almost 7,000 skiers entered in the Birkie and the Korteloppet. We're already looking forward to next year.

I picked up one of these t-shirts last week at the ITC e-Learning 2008 Conference in St. Pete Beach. The rSmart Group was one of the many great vendors in attendance and they had these two t-shirts as give-aways. I got the first one, but they were already out of the second one before I got there. I love this kind of stuff - except for the whole "Then you win" thing. Although I still think that Blackbeard will lose in the end and that we will win. By "we," I mean the educational community at large. I really do believe that BlackCT's tactics have served as a mighty wakeup call to the entire ed community that we cannot become beholden to a callous corporate vendor. I'm not recommending Sakai per se, but they do have good t-shirts and they also fall into my ABB category: ANYBODY BUT BLACKBOARD!!

Twelve people in Texas did their civic duty by deciding a case that they probably knew nothing about. My guess is that they just wanted it over - go ahead and punish the wayward Canadians and let the idiot American corporation carry out its heavy-handed patent bullying even though the weight of the evidence had to scream "NOT GUILTY!" I wonder how hard it is for patriotic American jurors to find in favor of a foreign company over a domestic one. Pretty hard, I bet. Doesn't seem fair - a little too much of a home court advantage (pun intended). 3 million dollar judgment against Desire2Learn in Lufkin, Texas. The scorn from the higher education community directed against Blackboard should now get another kick in the pants. Each year Blackboard will probably need to sue another competitor (Angel, you're next!) in order to make up for the lost revenue as they continue to lose clients who are not willing to play along with their slimy, sleazy tactics. Letter from John Bake...

While at the ITC conference I led a session that I've done many times called Podcasting without Fruit - for all the PC users out there who don't want to buy a Mac just so they can make podcasts. The session was not one of my better performances as I tried to do too much, too fast, blah, blah, blah. One thing I did illustrate is how to make an audio file with Audacity, how to add a music intro and exit to the file, how to upload the file to Odeo, how to embed the Odeo player into a blog post or VLE page, and how Odeo takes care of getting the file into iTunes. The problem came yesterday when I remembered that I just uploaded sort of a dummy file as an example. It was sitting in my Desire2Pod series and it needed to go away. So I get into my Odeo account and in an effort to delete the audio file - I DELETED THE ENTIRE PODCAST SERIES!! What a complete idiot. Luckily there are only 15 recordings in that series so far, not 50 or 100. Still, I had to start uploading those files once...

One of the best take-aways from the ITC e-Learning 2008 conference (for me alone, probably) was this video that I was absolutely shocked to see. What was shocking was that I had never seen it before or even knew that it existed. That's shocking to me because I love anything that takes a swipe at Blackbeard. This video was created at the 2006 WebCT user conference as their response to the (then) proposed merger between WebCT and Blackbeard. I can't find a way to embed this video - but you can view it here . Thanks to John Krutsch from Utah Valley State College for this little nugget that was just part of his good presentation about mashups in higher education.

Previous posts from the conference used CoverItLive. As a comparison, this post was written in Zoho Writer and displayed with Bitty Browser. Bitty Browser (iframes required)

From ITC E-Learning 2008

Britt comes from Virginia Commonwealth University

From the program: "Many institutions see the use of technology as a way to increase revenues and decrease the need for campus-based classrooms and other resources. However, emerging technologies have hastened the shift from teaching- to learning-centered education." At ITC e-Learning 2008 in St. Pete.

I came in late and had computer issues for the first fifteen minutes, therefore no live blogging. Rhonda is doing a great job of explaining the difference between the traditional VLE (virtual learning environment) and the concept of a PLE (personal learning environment). The specific tools she decided to illustrate include Google Notebook , Google Docs , Zotero (Firefox extension for bibliographies). She also recommended ThinkTank, OneNote, and several others such as news aggregators and alternatives to Wimba.

Corrine Hoisington Tirrell from Central Virginia Community College will take her best shot at convincing me NOT to uninstall Microsoft Vista on my newest computer. I love my new Fujitsu notebook/tablet, but I hate the operating system. Good luck to her. From ITC e-Learning 2008 in St. Pete.

Manoucher is from Tyler Junior College. He had about 60 people in attendance.

Sunday Morning Sermon/Keynote by Myk Garn from Kentucky.

If all goes well (that should be a small if), I plan to use UStream.tv to provide live video of my keynote address tomorrow evening at the e-Learning 2008 conference here at the Tradewind s in St. Pete Beach. If there is a usable recording of the broadcast I will come back here and post it after the fact. There are two ways that you could view the keynote live: 1) At my wiki page for LSC Online events , or 2) at my Ustream.tv page . In both cases, there is a live chat indow provided along with the video. If you load the page before the broadcast begins you will not see any activity. You may need to refresh the page occasionally if the video doesn't start playing on your screen. Date: Saturday, February 16, 2008 Time 5:30 PM Eastern (4:30 Central) Duration: 1 hour Topic: E-Learning Mythbusters : is conventional wisdom wrong? I'm going to use a student response system (clickers) to ask the audience about 18 (if time allows) different e-learning topics, asking their opinion about...

I'm getting settled into my room at the TradeWinds Grand Beach Resort. Looks like this is going to suck pretty bad. There will no doubt be people out there who criticize us for coming to a beach resort for this conference. They'll think something along the lines of: "It's too expensive, you're wasting state dollars," or "Is this just a paid vacation?" or "This just has a bad smell to it, so there must be something wrong with it," or "It's not fair that I don't get to go." For those people I'll add this for your consideration, which may help with the financial part of attending this conference. I'll be attending the Higher Learning Commission annual meetings in Chicago in April. The airfare and hotel room for four nights in Chicago for the HLC meetings will cost me $125 more than the hotel and four nights here at St. Pete Beach. Also, I will pay for Internet access in Chicago which is free here. My ground transporta...

I received an email this morning from Matt Walcoff, business reporter for The Record in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. Matt clarified what we was referring to in the article about the Desire2Learn V. Blackboard suit in Lufkin, Texas. Below is the quote in question, to which I expressed surprise about the idea of banning sales of D2L. "East Texas is, however, known for juries friendly to patent owners like Blackboard, which wants sales of Desire2Learn's education software banned in the U.S." Matt replied as follows: "Regarding the possible results of the court case: As I understand it, courts can't order a company to take out a license. What they can do is assess damages or issue an injunction preventing the defendant from continuing to infringe on the patent. The injunction in essence prohibits the sale of the defendant's product unless the defendant can create a "workaround" that avoids using the technology at issue. Blackboard's complaint again...

I was interviewed (briefly) on Friday about the D2L-Blackboard case by a reporter from The Record in Kitchener , Ontario which is where D2L is headquartered. It wasn't a great conversation since I wasn't really prepared to answer the questions intelligently. ( here's a PDF of the first page of the business section ) That becomes obvious when you see my one "quoted" passage in the article. Apparently this is what I said when asked about why we care whether Blackboard wins or not: "If Desire2Learn or anybody else is to lose a lawsuit like this, having an unfavourable judgment against them, we're not thinking it necessarily puts them out of business." "But it will substantially raise their cost, because they'll have licence fees and so on, and we'll have more to pay to Desire2Learn. It will have an adverse effect to the industry just to Blackboard's benefit." I did have a few other statements that were a bit more lucid than that, a...

Jury selection is expected to begin Monday morning in Texas with the possibility that the trial will start that day as well. I have no idea whether this will be long or short - but I betcha it will be action packed - at least for the VLE geeks out there, like me. Here is my biggest fear. This case will be decided by people who have no idea what they are doing. There will be a jury of people who decide this case who are totally clueless about the entire world of virtual learning environments. How does that make sense? When people are on a jury for a murder trial, the people understand the concept of one person murdering another. They are not dealing with a concept that is completely foreign to them. The jury members in this trial are going to hear arguments from Blackboard attorneys and from D2L attorneys. Does the fate of this case depend on which side provides a description of facts that are most easily understood by a layperson, even though a layperson cannot be expected to understan...

I've been critical of some of the shortcomings of Minnesota Online , and occasionally I have offered praise about some things that they have gotten right. Today's edition deals with a serious shortcoming. About a year ago I read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, which is an excellent book that I highly recommend. I also subscribe to the Long Tail Blog which is a bit different than most of the feeds to which I subscribe. While reading the book I continually pondered how the concepts of the long tail could and should apply to e-learning. I was also continually struck by how little it applies to the reality that is Minnesota Online. For those readers who may be unfamiliar with the concept of the long tail, here's a very brief primer. "The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge numb...