MaineED 08 – Live Blog on Magnificent Moodle

EDIT: Looks like liveblogging isn’t working right now. Network issues. Oh well. You can just follow the tag #maineed08 to see what people are twittering.

Click Here for the live blog of this session.

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

A great look at the way the web works and where we are going. If you haven’t subscribed to TED Talks yet, you should. Probably the most inspirational look at the future you will find.

Video Link

COEHD Laptop Program on Apple.com

Our one to one laptop program made it to the front page on apple.com. Check it out:

http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/uofmaine/

Fall 2008

Back to school again. I am just getting things under control and should start posting more for you all in the coming semester. I wanted to take a few moments and run over some bullet points.

• COEHD Moodle – Available at moodle.umeedu.maine.edu, is an online learning environment that is in use in K-12 schools around Maine. Free as in money and free as in liberty. Also, don’t think this is used just for online classes. Moodle is a great supplement to face to face instruction. If you want to get started, let me know.
• Grad Assistants – Jon Allen is my new GA. I am training him up on the things he needs to know and you will see him around as the year moves on. Qiuli Wang is also helping out at certain times.
• Office hours – Jon and Qiuli have office hours in the lab (35 Shibles) from 8:30-10:30 Monday through Friday. You will still need to schedule a time with me if you want to be certain to grab me.
• LCD Projectors – You should contact Roxanne Lee to sign out LCD projectors. She is in her office more often than me and this should give you greater access. Also, please try to keep the dongles (the white pluggy thingies) with the projector.
• Lab Sign Up – If you would like to sign up to use the lab please also see Roxanne.
• Interactive Whiteboard – 35 Shibles as a Polyvision interactive whiteboard. Let me know if you want a quick demo.
• Backups – Please make sure you are backing up your stuff. The college has a backup system that not everyone is on yet. I will be contacting everyone in the college to triple check people work related files are being backed up. To make things more interesting (read, frustrating) wireless users are no longer able to access the COEHD backup system. IT Networking has changed the way IP addresses are given out to wireless devices. I am working on a fix for the issue and hope to have a solution soon. In the mean time, make sure you are backing up to CD, DVD, or external hard drive AT LEAST once a week.
• Digital Cameras – The COEHD has three digital still cameras and eight digital video cameras for use by facutly.
• Microsoft Office 2008 – I have Microsoft Office 2007 (for Windows) and 2008 (for Macs). If you need an upgrade, please let me know and we can schedule a time for me or a GA to install it for you.
• Professional Development – Be on the lookout for a schedule of PD opportunities for Faculty, Staff, and Students. I will post the schedule here and push it out on email.
• If you have any tech-related PD need, please send me an email.

I also want to let you all know that if I don’t get back to right away or take immediate action on a request, I am not ignoring you. The start of the semester has brought a higher than normal load on the IT-fixit part of my job.  Be sure, I am working through my prioritized to-do list as fast as I can. Thank you for being patient with me.

Have a great semester everyone.

~Tim

Forward @maine.edu to @umit.maine.edu

If you want to forward your @maine.edu address (the email Mainstreet uses) to your @umit.maine.edu address (your firstclass email) just watch this little video. If you need more help, email Tim Hart.

Final and Other NECC 2008 Thoughts

I was planning on blogging quite a but more when I was in San Antonia, but it wasn’t in the cards. I was blown away by the people, sessions, and buzz that made up NECC 2008. I got very involved with meeting people and making connections here and there, which left me with little time to blog. Now that I am finally caught up at the College (yes it took a week, and I am not really caught up), I wanted to put some thought down on the blog. In no particular order, here we go.

On day two of the conference I sat in on a panel led by Steve Hargadon on the use of social networks in education. The discussion was, of course, very social with a backend chat online and heavy involvement from the crowd. It seemed that the most vocal people at NECC were in this conference. The tipping point happened at some point and most people in the seesion believe that social networks have great potential as platforms for communicaiton. While there were those that raised the typical alarms, the majority was ready to implement. I walked out of the session wanting to do more PD around social networks. I think the concept has a bad wrap thanks to alarmist media. Things like Ning and even Facebook are powerful communication tools. They aren’t for everyone, but those who try them rarely stop because they see the wide array of ways they can collaborate with others.

My strand at Summer Tech 2008has started a Ning called Tech4Me. Our group started the community to support Maine educators and help them find resources about technology, education, best practices, tools, PD, how tos, and more. There are already 47 members and hopefully this group will turn into a viable platform to further technology integration in Maine schools.

I am also thinking of how great a course on social networking would be. If you are interested, drop me a line. I am going to start the process in developing such a course. It would most certainly be an online course. I will be blogging about this process in the coming months.

I also sat in on a make shift discussion on twitter and how people are using it. Just a bunch of teachers talking about how they are using it and if there was any way to use it in K-12 education. One thing that I noticed was how diverse the use of twitter was in this group. Some people just twitted what they were doing haphazzardly. Other were using it a little more like a micro-blog, posting resources and links for their followers. If you aren’t on twitter yet you should be. You may be in the camp that doesn’t get it yet, maybe thinking that it is just another thing to keep up with in a world of blogs, wikis, and emails. It is another thing to keep up with, but one that is so worth while once you find the power of the network Twitter creates. I constantly find new resources and relationships through my twitter network that I would otherwise not have. If you are unsure of the power of Twitter you should check out summize.com. If you missed NECC, this link had a running tab of what people were twitting about real time who mention NECC in their tiwtter posts. Awesome. Just awesome.

Most of my other sessions had one thing or another to do with Second Life. We are using SL at the college as you know if you read this blog. It was great to catch up in real life with education folks that I know only in SL. I met many of the ISTE people and I ended up volunteering some time docenting at ISTE Island. You may see me there in the coming weeks.

My apologies for the all over tha place post but I had to get these thoughts out. My hope is ramp up this blog to keep you readers up with my latest thoughts and projects here at UMaine. Have fun everyone.

Getting a MUVE On

Just finished Kathy Schrock’s talk on her thoughts about using multi-user virtual environments. I have run into Kathy in-world around ISTE quite a few times and she is doing some great things on Lighthouse Learning Island. The session was introductory but it was great to see how many people are interested in this new medium. Less and less people are asking “why” and instead wondering how they can actually start using tools such as Second Life.

She made a great analogy to the Second Life interface. It is a little hard to use and its adoption is hampered by the new paridigms its use bring to the table. She equated this change to the jump from text based computer interfaces to graphical user interfaces. GUIs were a change for existing computer users, but the change was worthwhile in the longrun. Learning to operate in MUVEs may take a bit, but the investment is worth it.

Kathy has put up all her resources for the presentation at kathyschrock.net/muve. Great links and resources there. I am having some thoughts on how we could get SL into more Maine schools. Can’t wait to try and flesh them out over the summer.

NECC Day One

Okay. Officially, this blog post comes to you on the second day of the NECC conference. The session, events, and meetings have left me with no time for reflection. I had planned on doing more, alas this will have to do.

I am sitting in the Bloggers’ Cafe this fine Tuesday morning watching thousands of people file to the Keynote. This morning Jim Carleton and Mali Bickley are speaking and I am sure it will be both inspirational and informational. I am going to watch the event from the lounge as I can plug my computer in and can get a few quick thoughts up.

On to my thoughts so far.

First. Wow. This truly is an awesome conference. So many great sessions. So many great people. So many opportunities for new connections to content, tools, methods, and people. I have to recommend that all educators attend this conference at some point. Especially those who still hold the view that technology is a separate subject instead of something to be integrated into the classroom.

On Sunday night Crystal Priest got me seats up front to the kick off keynote with James Surowiecki. He authored The Wisdom of Crowds and gave a poignant speech to the phenomenon of how a group of people can be “smarter” than any one of its members. He argued we should harness the wisdom of crowds in the information age with the new communication mediums that are popping up everyday. I enjoyed the talk very much and grabbed a copy of his book for the flight back to Maine.

Monday morning I attended two sessions given by Chris Dede from Harvard University. The first, Immersive Collaborative Simulations in Augmented Reality, discussed how Chris and Rebecca Mitchell have used augmented reality in the classroom as part of the Alien Attack curriculum they developed. Students were given handheld GPS devices and walked around town trying to piece together what the aliens are doing here. In the process they are learning math, logic, reading, and collaboration skills. I was great hearing Rebecca talk about how the process went and what she would do differently. I had read about Alien Attack before and it was great to connect with the author and see what she was working on now. It looks like she is taking what she learned and creating a new aug reality curriculum called Gray Matter. My beliefs on situated learning were reinforced listening to her talk about how the students were successful. Students seemed to have a more authentic learning experience just by simply (ok..not so simply) being put in a role where they are expected to produce an outcome.

The second session Chris Dede gave was on his other work with collaborative simulations. He talked to Harvard’s Rivercity multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) and how it is used for meaningful formative assessment. Another great session. It was probably the best talk on assessment I have ever heard. Yes, I know. Assessment. Something we hear about way too much, but this wasn’t your old summative multiple choice tests. He talked about how Rivercity MUVE used formative real time data to leverage student improvement. While we are still in the early stages of this type assessment, it is certainly going to gain traction with tools like Second Life being more accepted into the traditional classroom.

I attended the NETS-S implementation discussion. It was a group talk on how best to use the new ISTE NETS. It was very insiprational and gave me a few new idea on how to use them at the college for both the IT program and in the teacher prep program. I have to admit to leaving a bit early. The session were going so great that I forgot to eat lunch. I am finding that very easy to do here.

After refilling my gas tank I ran to the Grand Hyatt to catch up with Westley Field from the MLC School in Australia. We had talked a few time already due to our travels in Second Life. He is a lead in the Skoolaborate project, a collaborative of schools using Teen Second life to deliver course content in new ways. The group allows schools from all over the globe to work together in the learning experience as well as lowering the costs to get involved. My thought is that this may be the right opportunity to getting a group of students from Maine involved with Teen SL. I will be following up on this one, so those of you who are interested, contact me.

Nope, not done yet. Still going. Like I said, LOTS of great sessions.

Will Richardson lead a session on using new Web 2.0 tools for Live Web TV. He talked on using uStream as a delivery mechanism and the low costs (free) in using them. They also showed Mogulus, a tool I hadn’t know about. Yes, I learned about a new tool. I love it. It is a free streaming tool, but is more like a TV studio. you can switch between camera and prerecorded footage. Amazing. Just 10 years ago…or even 5 years ago…it would have cost thousands to do what we now have access to for free. What a great tool. I will be blogging about this tool a bit more when I use it a bit more.

The final session I attended was the birds of a feather Moodle discussion. I finally had a chance to meet Michelle Moore from remote-learner.net. It was basically a group of 100 or so people who use Moodle and wanted to discuss issues and concerns. It really is amazing to see how much Moodle has grown in a few years. Michelle was mentioning that they have done the same session for three years now. The first year was done in the hallway with only a handfull of folks. Really cool to see so many embrace such a cool open source tool. I made some new contacts from aroun the globe during the session. They are doing things with their configurations that could help me with the COEHD implementation as well as helping support others who are using moodle around the state.

Whew. Day one down. Here goes day two.

Getting ready for the conference

For those of you who are virtually attending NECC you may want to check out the live summize feed. Hit is here. You will see twitter posts real time with those tagging their posts with necc. Have fun.

I am off to lunch before the welcome sessions start.

Tim is in San Antonio

I am finally here. 6am flights are very early. I will be live blogging, twittering, and posting photos at Flickr for my stay. Got any questions, email me at timothy.hart@gmail.com