cccc’s posterous

Startup PBWorks, which was formally known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has steadily added innovative, real-time features to its platform, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging.

Today, PBworks is entering the stream by adding real-time functionality and voice collaboration within the application. PBWorks is adding four new features to its suite.

Online programs are generally profitable. But despite the buzz about Web 2.0, the education they provide is still dominated by rudimentary, text-based technology.

Those are two key findings in a recent report, “Benchmarking Online Operations: Snapshots of an Emerging Industry,” produced by the consulting firm Eduventures.

Online education has grown in popularity, yet it remains dependent on learning-management systems, with content-delivery built around text, says Richard Garrett, an Eduventures managing director.

“The underlying delivery model or pedagogical model hasn’t really changed much in the last five, 10 years,” Mr. Garrett says.

The survey of 96 institutions, which is not publicly available online, was released to Eduventures members and subsequently to The Chronicle. Mr. Garrett describes it as the first attempt to benchmark online-specific operational activities across a large number of schools --- activities like technology, outsourcing, and marketing. Data were collected in the fall and winter of 2008-09. The Campus Computing Project is expected to soon release an expanded, updated version of the survey.

The study found that nearly all programs were either profitable or breaking even. Overall, 65 percent reported that their online programs were profitable. For for-profits, 100 percent were profitable; for nonprofits, 62 percent were. (With nonprofit colleges, “profit” is used in the sense of a surplus, with revenues being larger than expenses. Universities have various systems for handling the surplus).

The profitability findings underscore how the recent -- and widely publicized -- demise of University of Illinois’ online Global Campus program does not reflect the typical experience, Mr. Garrett says.

The finding “gets away from any notion that online is somehow a flash in the pan, or it’s all up-front investment and no return, like the Illinois Global Campus,” Mr. Garrett says.

But when it came to technology, the Eduventures survey found that the widely used tools are email, text discussions that don't happen in real time, physical textbooks, and word and pdf documents.

That contrasts with what you find on the programs of distance-learning conferences, where the talk is often about Web 2.0 technology that allows students to interact with the content or the provider in tangible ways. Those tools might be social-networking platforms or wikis or virtual worlds.

“Any innovation is really on the periphery in terms of the odd synchronous session, or the odd video clip, or the odd simulation,” Mr. Garrett says of online programs. “But those are really to supplement what is still a pretty rudimentary core.”

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Video Blogging is Still in its Infancy

Robb Montgomery, CEO of a public charity that promotes journalism education called Visual Editors, said in an email interview that web video consumption overall is a booming phenomenon but maintains that we are still at the beginning of an emerging art form and story form with video blogging and it may be too early to generalize about long-term effects.

It may seem surprising that video blogging hasn’t take off considering how cheap the equipment has become and how easy it is to shoot, edit and post video online. According to Adam Singer’s Future Buzz blog, some reasons it hasn’t include: it’s time consuming to produce compelling video, video is not searchable, and pros still have an advantage.
But the demand is there. In August, more than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer, according to data from the comScore Video Metrix service. A whopping 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average online video viewer saw 9.7 hours of video in August.

Web Video Puts People on Equal Footing

Video on the Internet does two things — it puts people on equal footing versus the top-down communication of broadcast media and it allows for direct talkback from the audience.

Michael Rosenblum, CEO of Rosenblumtv, said in an email interview, that the only reason people used to differentiate between average person and journalist is that access to the equipment and the ability to publish was just too complicated and too expensive. He said that went away with the web, which gave anyone the ability to write or publish whatever they wanted.

“Now that freedom comes to video — as the cost of cameras goes to next to nothing and the web carries video with the same fluidity that it carries text,” he said. “What we are looking at here is the true democratization of video — a real ‘free press.’ This, I think, is a very positive thing.

“The move to video blogging, just getting started, is to my mind the same as the move to writing books post-Gutenberg. It took the printing press to liberate writing from the few literate monks; now the web will liberate video from the few ‘video literate’ TV types,” said Rosenblum, who just launched an online video training site called the New York Video School.

Lights, camera, learn?

Did you know that many of today’s online classes come equipped with video lectures from your instructor? When I was enrolled in an online topics of mathematics course it was especially helpful to see the instructor solve the problems. The video lecture library was a godsend for me. The best part was I could cue up the lectures whenever I wanted during the week. It was a completely different learning experience from my traditional classroom days.

When I was in a traditional classroom I would take shorthand notes at a fever pace and even bring in a recording device to capture what I missed. But the most critical element was what he or she was putting on the board, and that was the one piece I didn’t have. I had the notes and the sound but not the video to guide me.

Now I’m not here to tell you that sitting in a traditional classroom is bad, or that taking online classes is the only way to go. But what I will say is that they both serve a purpose. They both educate you. You should try both and see which one suits you better. If you don’t you’re just doing yourself a disservice.

By Eric Hoover

Baltimore

Colleges pay admissions officials to predict the future, and that future is likely to include a revolution in the way many high-school students learn. As attendees of the National Association for College Admission Counseling heard here last week, online education is spreading rapidly among secondary schools, a trend that raises many questions for admissions officials.

On Friday, Brian Lekander, program manager for Star Schools, a distance-education initiative in the U.S. Education Department's Office of Innovation and Improvement, described the rise of virtual learning in elementary and secondary schools. Thirty-two states have virtual-school programs, and 70 percent of all school districts offer online and distance-learning programs, according to the Education Department. In 2008, two million secondary students were enrolled in online-learning programs or in "blended" programs, which include face-to-face and online instruction. In 2000, that enrollment was only 50,000 students.

"It's going to drastically change over time what classroom education looks like," Mr. Lekander said.

It will also pose a challenge to admissions officials, who will need to develop ways of evaluating online course work. After all, over time admissions officials have become familiar with the high schools that many of their applicants attend. Knowing what programs a high school offers and what kinds of students it serves provides crucial context for weighevaluating applicants' preparation. But the fast-increasing array of virtual programs poses a challenge. As a leader of one such program, Jan Keating, said at the conference: "How would you know when you see an online course on a transcript that it's a high-quality program?"

Ms. Keating is headmaster of the Education for Gifted Youth Online High School at Stanford University, which offers computer-based distance-learning courses to high-achieving students. More than 50,000 students from 35 countries have taken courses through the program. To help admissions officials understand how to assess the quality of online programs, Ms. Keating described what questions they should ask.

Does the program have a clear mission? What are the educational backgrounds of its instructors? Do the instructors ever have face time with students? Can the program's organizers provide information about student outcomes? And is it fully accredited?

Beyond evaluating curricula, admissions officials would also want to understand how students interact in online-learning programs. As David Mabe, assistant dean of admission and financial aid at Davidson College, asked, "How do virtual high schools foster a sense of community?"

Ms. Keating described the social interactions of the students in her program. A lack of face-to-face contact, she said, does not prevent students from connecting intellectually—and it may have some key benefits: "You lose the physicality and awkwardness that occurs in high school."

Zach Chaffin, a former student in Stanford's online high school, described how the program had allowed him to interact with students from different places, who had different viewpoints, which prepared him for campus life. While studying in California, he became best friends with a fellow student in Hong Kong. "There actually was a totally legitimate social environment," he said.

Mr. Chaffin, now a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University, said that online schooling requires a lot of "self-motivation," especially because it gives students more free time than they would have in a traditional high school. "In that sense, now that I'm in college," he said, "it was a really good experience."

A prep school in Massachusetts is in the process of giving away its library books and replacing them with digital versions. Dr. James Tracy is headmaster of Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts and explains the difficult decision.

via here & now

via teachingcollegemath.com

This is a follow-up to my recent research about Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age.  I’ve spent considerable time thinking about how to alter the classes I teach to re-center them on a core of flexible learning.  In all of my classes this semester, students will be completing a variety of learning projects that involve alternative ways to learn (e.g. blogging, making mindmaps, teaching a lesson, making a video presentation, or designing a non-digital game).

The difficult part about including these alternative learning methods is teaching the students all the necessary technology skills first.  Most of my students are the traditional freshman-level age-range  (18-25).  For the most part, they “get” technology (cell phones, facebook, video games, and gadgets), but they haven’t been taught how to do anything productive with technology - at least, not with regards to learning or career skills.

If America wants to continue to be a world-leader, we can do it with a technology advantage - but only if we actually know how to leverage that technology to continue to be more productive.

So, I began to write out a list of the tech skills that I think students should learn before they leave college.  Ideally, these are skills that would be integrated throughout K-12 and college curricula.

Basic Web Stuff
1. Basics of HTML (bold, underline, italics, special characters)
2. How to use EMBED code or make a live link
3. How to make and share a screenshot
4. How to make and share a short video explaining something or asking for help
5. Learn basic abbreviations and emoticons (e.g. ROFL, IMHO)
6. How to build a landing page for your web-based stuff (e.g. iGoogle, NetVibes)
7. How to add gadgets or plug-ins for various sites
8. How to make a simple website (e.g. Google Sites)
9. Build a clickable resume / digital portfolio
10. How (and when) to use collaborative documents or spreadsheets
11. How (and why) to create tags and labels
12. How (and why) to use URL-shortening sites (e.g. TinyURL)

Organization
13. How to set up a web-based calendar and use it to manage your time
14. How to set up and manage an RSS reader
15. How to find a common meeting time (e.g. Doodle)
16. How to set up a communication aggregator (e.g. Digsby, Trillian, TweetDeck)

Communication
17. How to manage email
18. How to write a good “first-contact” email
19. How to write a good subject line
20. How to write a good email response
21. Texting etiquette (when it’s appropriate, when it’s not)
22. How to summarize your thoughts in 140 characters or less
23. How to use Twitter (reply, retweet, direct message)
24. How to determine whether you should share it in a public forum (will it affect your future job prospects, your current employment, etc.)
25. How to manage an online meeting
26. How to give an effective webinar
27. What are the differences between various social networks and how they are used? (e.g. Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn)

Finding and Managing Information
28. How to use web-based bookmarks
29. How (and when) to use library search databases
30. How (and when) to use an image-based search engine
31. How (and when) to use alternate search engines (e.g. Clusty)
32. Who writes Wikipedia articles and when can they be trusted?
33. How to build a custom search engine
34. When can you trust the information you find?
35. How to use article citations to find better references
36. How to manage a bibliography online (e.g. Zotero)
37. How to set up web alerts to track new information (e.g. Google Alerts)

Privacy, Security, and the Law
38. Creative Commons – what is it and how to choose appropriate license?
39. How to read the legalese that tells you who owns it after it is shared online
40. What should you share and how does that change for different audiences?
41. How to manage usernames & passwords
42. How to find and tweak the privacy settings in common social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter)
43. How do data-mining sites get your information? (e.g. participating in FB quizzes)
44. What are the security concerns with GPS-based tracking systems?

Presentation
45. How to determine the audience and appropriate length for your presentation
46. Good presentation design principles
47. Principles of storytelling
48. How to share a set of slides on the Internet
49. How to build a non-linear presentation
50. How to build a flashy presentation (and when to use it)
51. How to find high-quality images that can be used in presentations (with appropriate copyrights)
52. How to find audio that can be shared in a presentation (with appropriate copyrights)
53. How to create a captioning script for a video
54. Ways to caption an internet-based video
55. How (and when) to use a virtual magnifier with your presentation

Ways to Learn
56. How to build an interactive mindmap to organize ideas
57. How to use a blog to track your learning process
58. How to find good sites, blogs, and other online publications for the topic you are learning about
59. How to cultivate a personal learning network (PLN)
60. How to participate in a live learning chat (e.g. TweetChats)

Okay, that’s sixty items and I’ve just scratched the surface (I haven’t even touched on virtual worlds, for instance).

The big problem?  How many educators do you know that have these skills?