e-Learning Mythbusters Video 03 - Online Faculty

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.

e-Learning Mythbusters Video 02 - Online Students

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.

e-Learning Mythbusters Video 01 - Intro

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 at the Birkie

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.

Supporting Innovation, Not Suing It

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!!

Injustice is Served

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 Baker on the D2L Patent Blog.

Flickr photo (CC) by nyghtowl

What an Idiot

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 again.

On the plus side it did give me an opportunity to clean up the blog posts a little bit for those with the embedded players from Odeo. It also showed me a use of iTunes that I didn't expect to need. By subscribing to my own podcast series in iTunes, those 15 files were tucked very neatly in a folder on my computer.

The last problem is that Odeo started borking out after the first fourteen recordings were uploaded. Now I'm waiting for them to get back up to speed so that I can finish episode #15 and I do have #16 ready to be released for the first time.

Here is a filter link to see the fifteen posts. Hopefully podcast #15 will be working by the time you go there. Session #16 will be posted soon.

Peapod photo (CC) by Barron on Flickr

Old Video about WebCT and Blackboard

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.

Closing Keynote - Elliott Masie

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

E-Learning in Estonia

From ITC E-Learning 2008

Britt Watwood - Using Delicious Instructionally

Britt comes from Virginia Commonwealth University

Keynote: Patricia McGee - Seeking the Gold Standard

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.

Rhonda Ficek - Personal Learning Environments

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 Tirrell - Vista with Vitality

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 Khosrowshahi - Reaching Digital Natives

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

Myk Garn Keynote - CoverItLive

Sunday Morning Sermon/Keynote by Myk Garn from Kentucky.

Ustreaming my Keynote at E-Learning 2008

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 Tradewinds 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 whether it is a myth or a reality. I have about 35 total topics identified, but will only be able to ask about half of them during the presentation. Even then, I won't get through all of those if I stop and ramble too much about why I agree or disagree with the audience vote.

Here are a couple of questions that won't be used during the keynote. Please vote using the polls embedded below.

Arrived for E-Learning 2008

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 transportation to-and-from the airport will cost more in Chicago than here. The cost of meals in Chicago anywhere near the HLC meetings is unbelievably expensive, much more expensive than it is here. However, as far as the meals go, the State of Minnesota will pay the same per diem amount in both places. That per diem falls far short of the cost of eating in Chicago (less than what you'll usually pay for dinner alone), which means that I will have the privilege of paying the extra costs out of my own pocket while in Chicago. On top of that, during the ITC conference they provide almost every meal as part of the registration fee. At HLC, they don't provide any meals during the regular conference.

All told, it will cost the State of Minnesota approximately $300 more for me to go to the Chicago conference than to come to this conference in St. Pete. It will personally cost me about $100 more to go to Chicago than here. So, you can complain about this all you want - with the exception of being able to complain about it being too expensive.

Just in case anyone asks.

Follow-up With Kitchener Reporter

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 against D2L (that is, the first court filing) requests "That D2L, its officers, agents, and employees, and those persons acting in active concert or in participation with D2L, and its successors and assigns, be enjoined from further infringement of the '138 patent pursuant to 35 U.S.C. [section] 283."

Blackboard's ultimate goal may be to force D2L to take out a license rather than to put D2L out of business. But it hopes to use the threat of an injunction - a ban on D2L sales in the US - to force D2L to do so." (eom)

I have reprinted that with Matt's permission, but the added emphases are mine. I think he probably has that about right - although how can any of us know what lurks in the minds of those Blackbeard pillagers and plunderers.

Now what I really want is to find a mole in the courtroom who can feed us some of the juicy stuff. Please!?!?

Kitchener Newspaper Interview

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, and I believe a bit more important as well, but they didn't get into the article. He asked about how Blackboard's actions are being viewed by those of us in higher ed. My answer basically dealt with how higher ed in general doesn't like being held hostage by corporate shenanigans, and in general doesn't like being locked into the constant efforts of companies like Blackboard to please their stockholders with constantly increasing profits.

This is how the article begins: "Everything Desire2Learn Inc. has built over the past nine years will soon be in the hands of 12 randomly selected people from an area where pro rodeo circuit stops outnumber sizable software companies two to zero."

"Unlike barbecues, taco places and Southern Baptist churches, the high-tech industry doesn't have much of a presence in Lufkin, Texas, where Blackboard Inc. has chosen to sue its Kitchener-based competitor for patent infringement."

"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."

I think it is safe to say that the reporter has similar thoughts to mine that the jurors can be expected to be completely clueless about the development of VLE platforms over the years. However, the statement about banning sales in the U.S. is news to me. I thought that BlackCT was only after royalties (licensing fees) from D2L. Banning sales is a whole different ballgame. I'll try to get the word as to whether the article is correct or not in that regard.

CC Flickr photo by ReneS

Desire2Learn v Blackboard - who wins?

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 understand all the intricacies of software development, whether prior art applies, and whether the patent should have been granted in the first place?

In other words, will it just be a matter of who is more convincing to an audience (jury) that doesn't have any idea what they are talking about? That sounds a whole lot more like chance than justice. "But it's the best system we have ...." Bull.

Minnesota Online - No Long Tail

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 number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare." Yep, I was going to write something myself, but it was much easier to copy and paste from here.

So basically, if MnOnline was an efficient distribution system for online courses, the niche courses would have a shot at gaining decent enrollment levels. If the long tail applied, students would have many more choices in the variety of online courses being offered by the 32 schools that make up MnOnline. However, that is just absolutely not the case.

One of the better examples of the ineptitude of course distribution is with undergraduate online anthropology courses. If you want to take Cultural Anthropology, you can choose from at least a dozen offerings from different schools. About half the schools appear to have developed their own version of Cultural Anth, which would pretty much be akin to being able to find the latest DVD movie release at stores all over town. However, if you want something other than Cultural Anth, then you'll find only a few offerings. In other words, MnOnline should be the Netflix/Amazon of online learning that allows you to find just about anything you want (those niche offerings in the long tail), but it fails miserably in this regard.

Even though MnOnline has a website where a student could search for a course from any school, it is not a first stop for most students and even if they do get there, the search tool doesn't allow them to easily find courses that fill certain niches across the system. Case in point, LSC offers an online World Ethnography course that appears to be the only one in the state. Having canceled it at least two previous times due to low enrollment, we were lucky enough to get 15 students to enroll this time which allowed us to not give it the ax. However, there were still 30 unfilled seats in this course. Students at the other 31 schools would never find that course unless they specifically searched the list of courses at LSC (not the so-called "systemwide list") or unless they magically entered the term "World Ethnography" into the search engine. Neither of those is very likely, so courses like this are pretty much doomed to low enrollment.

Due to the lack of collaboration among schools, due to the high amount of duplication throughout the system, and due to the lack of a good information dissemination system, the promise of the long tail of e-learning is simply not being realized. Students can get all the Cultural Anth that they can eat. And that's about it