LTDC Online News

Presenters: Dr. LaVonne Cornell-Swanson (UWSA), Dr. Dan Riordan (UW-Stout)

OPID
Cornell-Swanson talks about how the UW-System Office of Professional and Instructional Development (OPID) supports faculty in their efforts to support student learning in the forms of curriculum development/pedagogy and reaching students.  OPID sponsors OPID council, Faculty College, WI Teaching Fellows and Scholars, a grants program, awards programs, and more.  For more information about OPID please visit: http://www.uwsa.edu/opid/

What is Naked Oyster? What is the Naked Eye? What is the Naked Truth? What is Naked Teaching?
Riordan talks about how his approach is based on Barbara Walvoord’s presentation at that she did at UW-Stout and influenced by her book “Effective Grading.”  Riordan also credits adapted ideas from Jose A Bowen, dean of the Meadow School of Arts at Southern Methodist University who used the term ‘naked teaching’ in The Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2009 when Bowen was interviewed stating he doesn’t want any technology in the classroom (article: http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/).

*Side note: there is even a book about naked authors but don’t be scared…www.nakedauthors.com

Naked teaching is an interesting term.  It basically means (1) to have few or no lectures or PowerPoints, (2) that the student’s first exposure to the content happens outside of class, and (3) to use class time for direct student-to-faculty interaction and discussion.

Riordan outlined the aggregate workflow in which instructors (1) plan, (2) deliver, (3) test, (4) grade, and (5) hand back and the student workflow corresponds to this by (1) paying attention, (2) studying, (3) taking the test, and (4) getting back the test.  This workflow is comfortable.  He then goes on to define the disaggregate workflow which corresponds with naked teaching and it is a bit more uncomfortable.  With the disaggregate workflow, the instructor (1) plans, (2) sets-up and enacts, (3) advise/redirect/theorize, and (4) review.  The students (1) prepare, (2) interact, (3) find/share/evaluate/create/disciplinary moves), and (4) create artifact.  This is a switch in workflow and does come with hesitation.  The main hesitations Riordan notes is that switching a workflow does take time and instructors do not always know the barriers.  Instructors should know that the disaggregate flow does still involve planning but now the planning is in how to facilitate the activity and how that activity is going to happen in class.

In order for the new workflow to work, instructors need to figure out the moment of first exposure within the workflow and the naked teaching has to meaningfully deal with what students prepare.  Naked teaching can be separated from technology, but technology can facilitate in-class dynamics and project creation.

To assess naked teaching, the assessment must be determined up-front, either at the first class session or before assignments.  Instructors should explain their methods to students, clarify goals for each class period, and create actions whose results achieve the goals.  Riordan also recommends using time-efficient grading when implementing naked teaching practices—grade work with a number, use well-chosen comments, and reach students in a ‘teachable moment.’

If implementing a naked teaching approach, Riordan suggests trying to create a group of colleagues to work collaboratively in the implementation, be ready for resistance from students (and possibly administration), and hold tight to the stance that instructors are paid to create learning experiences and not necessarily to lecture.

Good luck!

Presenter: Tanya Joosten
tjoosten@uwm.edu
SL: Juice Gyoza
(active in SL since 2006)
Uses SL in 3 Communication Courses and consults with faculty, including workshops

Note: Juice is willing to help just in case you get stuck in the water, lose your hair (or clothes), get lost, or need help on how to use SL for education

Blogger: Karen Skibba, UW-Whitewater
SL: Karen Sharpesworth

Juice Gyoza, wearing a customized UWM T-Shirt, in the UWM Second Life Island

What is the UWM Second Life Initiative?

•    Pilot started Summer 07, Delivered Spring 08
•    Received a UW System Emerging Technology Grant
•    Faculty Development Workshops for Second Life – over 40 new faculty
•    Second Life Wiki for Faculty (many resources 0n how to use SL in courses, including orientation materials, syllabi activities, freebies & advice): http://uwmsecondlife.wikispaces.com

What is Second Life?
•    Not a Game, but can provide a platform to create one
•    Online, Virtual World, 3-D
•    Network through software to a virtual space
•    Instead of going to a URL you visit a SLURL
•    Islands and Sims – similar to Web site and webpages
•    User constructed (free and “for sale” artifacts available to build)

Second Life is a platform that students and faculty access through a software download. The software provides access to a virtual space through a network where people can connect with other people. The virtual platform consists of virtual places, islands and sims (portions of an island), where students congregate, share, communicate, and perform. These islands and sims can have virtual locations, such as classrooms, meeting rooms, lecture halls, auditoriums, amphitheaters, galleries, exhibit halls, theaters, labs, medical facilities, and outdoor spots. Students enter the world as avatars, or digital representations of themselves, which are customizable to represent the students own identity.

What is the potential of Second Life?

There is great potential to transform learning from a didactic process utilizing a lean medium into a stimulating, thought-provoking, and media rich setting.

This can engage and motivate students by:

• providing an alternative platform for learning where they can construct knowledge through observation, discourse, construction, and interaction.
• providing a stage for students to share their work through an immersive, synchronous medium.
• building a community that is more personal and social — students identify with their and others’ digital representations (avatar) and actually “feel” the reactions, interactions, and emotions — feel like interact with “real” people or sometimes other forms of life
• meet and  interact with and get feedback from people from around the world that you would not normally have access to.

Note:  Must have a sound pedagogical reason to use Second Life. Take advantage of the media richness of SL.  Why would you lecture or show PowerPoints in Sl when other methods would work better and be simpler for students to use?

When to use D2L and when to use Second Life?

Use D2L to:

• Deliver content — students like to receive content asynchronously
• Assess and organize: dropbox, quizzes, gradebook
• Provide asynchronous discussions so students have time to reflect and consult resources and share ideas

A few suggested uses for SL:

• Showcase: art exhibition, presentations, architectural build
• Field work: interviewing, native speakers, virtual field trips
• Experiential: Simulation and role playing

A few more good resources on educational uses of Second Life:

Educational Uses of Second Life
http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/educationaluses

Lots of Second Life ideas and resources from UW campuses (let’s network and share resources!)
http://uwsecondlife.wikispaces.com/

Top 20 Educational Locations in Second Life
http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Top_20_Educational_Locations_in_Second_Life

Also, find the U-Wisconsin System members on Second Life.

Note: Tanya will share statistics on the effectiveness of Second Life at Educause.  So more to come.

So get a Second Life and help faculty create immersive and engaging educational events to explore and construct knowledge!

Presented by Dr. Debbie Paprocki

Assistant Professor of Spanish, UW Waukesha

She uses wikis for teaching Spanish. To view a sample of her activities:

http://spanishwauk.wikispaces.com

Wikis are useful especially when student numbers are large, to provide additional practice in communicating in Spanish.

Using Wikispaces:

The wiki administrator can set the look and feel etc. through Manage Wiki. Members are invited via e-mail. Anyone who is a member of the wiki can edit and change any of the pages in the wiki. Others can see pages nut not edit.

Use the History tab  to see who has entered changes. May provide information for participation element of grade.

Sample Assignments:

• Students create a script for small group skits that they then present for the class.
• Students insert questions about culture to “quiz” other students. Other students post answers.
• Students write poems, a 5-line Cinquian. Students in class go outside and write. Then students write final draft as homework  on wiki, resulting in an anthology.
• Insert image of an artwork. Students discuss the artwork on wiki. Students later add their own selections of artwork onto the wiki.
• Collaborative story: Instructor inserts a starting line of a story, e.g. It was a beautiful day when Ramon and Regina left the house for the park. Each students adds another line to the story.
• Instructor inserts the opening paragraph of a story–usually a suspenseful one. Each student writes a middle and ending to the story.

Tips:

• Remind students to click Save when done typing.

Discussion from participants: Sample assignments: etc.

• Have students collaborate to create a group glossary for review before an exam. Have students in  a language course put up sentences and then they edit each other’s for grammatical correctness and word choice.
• Assign small groups a different topic and wiki page. Each student adds information.
• Model editing behavior in the wiki.
• Have students write autobiographies. Then other students change the autobiographies ==change the facts in order to experience the editing of your own work — e.g. a student changes someone’s pet from a cat to a dog. Then debrief–what’s that like as an author?
• Idea is that as others edit a work, it becomes better and better.
• Community really builds.
• Assign students to contribute something to Wikipedia and experience the editing of others.
• Give students information about a sample case such as Adam Curry who wrote on a Wikipedia that he was instrumental in inventing podcasting, and got edited out by the community of editors. Other cases are out there also.
• Instructor sees a draft of a paper–can comment in place on student draft papers to help students write papers. Can
• Use in calculus class to solve problems as groups.
• Give students in small groups 100 points to allocate among their group members for their participation.
• Create a Sandbox page for everyone to submit to. This is a practice page to start posting anything.
• Page where they recommend topics before students divide into groups for projects.
• Have a page for technical questions and answers that students post and answer for each other.

Tools to try:  GoogleDocs, wikispaces, pbworks

About past project on wikis at UW System, see:

http://wiscwikis.wikispaces.com

Submitted by Lisa Larson

Presenter: Dr. Alan Aycock, UW Milwaukee, Acting Director of Learning Technology Center

Blogger: Karen Franker, Instructional Designer, UW Colleges

Blended learning is a bit transgressive in terms of active rather than passive learning

Does blended learning work? Faculty wanting evidence that it works, esp. those in the sciences
U.S. Dept. of Ed 2009 meta-analysis of measurable outcomes of blended learning; findings were across all discplines
Findings:
Blended courses are far more likely to be student-centered
Students who took all or part of a course online did better than F2F
Students who took blended courses performed slightly better than those only online
Conclusions of study:
Active learning, student self-reflection and self-assessment important
Rich media not found significant
Variables too complex to be definitive

What is the status of blended learning on your campus?
Is blended seen as its own genre or as mainly transitional to online?
Audience member reports that blended seems to work better for shorter-length courses; can cover more material
Another audience member reports that he enjoys knowing about student thinking in advance before lectures
UW Colleges supports blended learning training for faculty at 9 of 11 campuses so far; faculty must go through training before teaching first blended course
When is a course blended? Seat time is reduced; partly f2f & partly online; not just Web-enhanced; course was explicity designed to be blended; needs to be interaction between f2f & onine parts of class

History of Blended Learning at UW-Milwaukee
University of Central Florida influence; driven by lack of classroom space; showed greater student satisfaction
Curricular Redesign Grant with 5 campuses in UW System; developed a hybrid teaching resource site; created first faculty hybrid course redesign program
As result of hybrid Web site, UWM now seen as expert in blended learning and highly recognized internationally; offer their faculty development program at other higher ed institutions both overseas and in U.S.
Alfred P. Sloan Grant: application of blended learning to the program level – in 9 degree programs; increase accessibility to baccalaureate degree for 7-county area surrounding Milwaukee
Now Sloan-C offers fully online version of blended certificate program; mostly small institutions are enrolling, esp. two-year colleges taking lead in blended learning development

How Does Blended Learning Work?
What are some key themes in course redesign for blended learning?
Students have more time to think and reflect on learning in blended courses
Clarity between what is expected to be done online vs. f2f on part of the students; helping students manage their time so they are committing time to doing their out-of-class assignments; no surprises
Challenge and opportunity for faculty to decide which activities work best f2f vs. online

Four Solutions in Search of a Paradigm:
Breaking up is hard to do; change old ways of thinking in support of new pedagogy; still in transition about what it all means; encourages faculty to really ponder their teaching methods
1. Break content into “slices” or “chunks”
Use rich media content for engagement, not only delivery of information
Ex: short voiceover introductions; use YouTube clips; provides a context for week’s work; not often done in f2f work; 4 to 5 slides for students to view online before they come to class; follow up with discussion in f2f session; also require students to find video clips to contribute to class

2. Hearing voices
Silence and passive learning
Finding your voice is a responsibility and an opportunity of each student
Ex: Application — have students talk about their own experience and apply it to class; Critical Viewing — not just sit and “veg out” — focus students’ thinking (What makes these scenes seem “real” to us?); Reflection — have students reflect on their learning; can be done through D2L’s ePortfolio tool; ask them reflective questions)

3. Closing the loop between online & f2f
Activities need to reinforce each other between f2f and online; students may question reason for online work; problem of “course and a half” syndrome where too much material is incorporated; usually this is caused by the “two parallel, unconnected courses” syndrome; 20% rule — list all learning activities of f2f class and cut out 20% of those activities for the blended course
Create peer community of learners in both environments
Ex: entrance and exit assignments; students hand in hard copy of a question that pertains to the day’s reading when they walk in the door of the f2f class; Exit assignments — students quicky scribble down what theyve learned that day in class (Ex: “What was your crappiest job?”) Questions like these evoke good responses from students; summarize students’ comments online.
Rehearsals — way to help students think about what they’re going to do before they do it; onine reading that students have to find themselves, then they take a quiz in D2L; another type of rehearsal has students viewing a video in class and take notes; then go home and post their answers to the discussion board.

4. You only live twice
Investigating online sites — have students find and evaluate sites
“Scaffolding” for group work and research– teach students how to work in groups; give them a structure; assign roles; percentage of grade to be determined by peer evaluation
Ex: Providing analytical rubrics  — analyzing ads in YouTube

How Should We Invest in Blended Learning…and Should We?
59.5% increase in blended courses reports at UWM; online increased by 49.1%
Clearly a growing trend

Conclusions
Treat blended as a process rather than only a product
Excellent testing ground for lessons learned; begin with 15% of course Web-enhanced and see how it works
Blending is experimental and incremental
Blending fosters active learning — more responsibility on students
Blended can be transformational– faculty report it changed the way they thought about their teaching; would find it hard to go back to f2f teaching in same old way

Advice to faculty developers:
Be conservative — text-based only at first; learning to facilitate online discussions
Development of peer community using small groups and disc. forums
Investigation of online resources promotes active learning
Online and f2f must interact
Debriefings and self-reflections are critical

UWM’s blended (hybrid) site: http://hybrid.uwn.edu

Audience members reports that students flourish in online environment; then begin to speak up more in f2f sessions; students find their voice more easily in a blended course
Richer application of Universal Design is possible with blended courses
Blended teaching provides much better opportunity to know your students and their capabilities

Starting the session off Cheryl Deirmeyer from UW-Madison, noted that roughly a year ago in the Pyle Center marked the start of a digital storytelling event that kicked off her (and others) participation in learning about the storytelling method. The event triggered additional opportunities for interested faculty to participate in a digital storytelling workshop offered by the Center for Digital Storytelling. The session itself was more of an open discussion format. Feeding the discussion were 4 instructor or instructional technology types who were able to share their experiences with the digital story telling process:

Jane Henderson (UW Stout)
Caton Roberts (UW Madison)
Jim Winship (UW Whitewater)
Mary Wright (UW River Falls)

The discussion itself was primarily audience driven and free flowing. Initial remarks focused on terminology since some of the audience was familiar with the concept of digital storytelling whereas others were not. To aid in the discussion, UW Whitewater has a site up where faculty stories are presented as examples.

Another term presented during the course of the conversation was that of ’story circles’ where students discuss and vet story ideas with classmates. A video campfire was an alternate description–the key point of students gathered in a small group discussion sharing ideas and providing feedback. Ideas for visual or audible elements would also often result from the sharing.

In some cases students initially have the impression that they have nothing to say in a story format. But after getting engaged by the process students tend to discover that they have much more to say, and the story telling process forces students to distill stories down to single points. To aid in this, digital storytelling projects often utilize a single question students are expected to answer through the sharing of their stories.

Grading within the storytelling context could be done with rubrics, but it was also noted that ill-conceived efforts are usually easy to identify. Student completed rubrics or critiques, while not used by any of the panelists, seemed like a possible way to engage students further in the process–however trust is an important aspect to be sensitive to in a storytelling activity as some stories may leave participants more vulnerable than what’s comfortable.

In closing, large class sizes face additional challenges in the digital storytelling context. Panelists roughly agreed that 20-24 participants is the ideal group size. However some form of online component could aid in the sharing of stories with larger classes.

Blogger: Scott Reeser (UW Extension)

Dr W. Gardner Campbell – Baylor University

Wants to out some ideas – some are brand new

Book : The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur

Think about technology we think of iphone, netbook,

Need to think about technology in the broad sense -

Tree definitions:

• A means to fulfill a human purpose
• A collection of technologies
• “technium” the ecology of technologies in our world

We can be mislead by stories about technology.  Think more broadly about what a ‘technology’ is – spinning wheel, yarn, clothes, eyeglasses.

Argument:

• Technology uses a natural phenomena “for some purpose” – Arthur
• School is a technology that uses out brain’s natural phenomenon of wanting to learn
• The purpose of school is faster and better learning – Faster:more in one lifetime & Better:that one can learn more effectively

The building is a technology; the classroom is a technology; a curriculum is a technology;

What other schooling technologies?

• Credit hour (If we award degrees based on credit hours, we might be accessing at the wrong end of the student!)
• GPA
• Course
• Semester
• Examination
• “Year” (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior)
• Transcript
• Faculty (A means to serve a human purpose – a set of scholars who choose to live together to share their work)

Are our schools a ‘pill box’ or a cattle trough?

Look at what the printing press did for us. How disruptive it was.

Two kinds of technology – quote from Arthur “To have no technology is to be not-human. …”

Which technologies extend our nature?

Three recursive practices of education:

• Narrating – story telling
• Curating – assembly them, ‘curate’ them – which things go where and how to preserve
• Sharing – how to share
• Network effects are most powerful on the open web using Web 2.0 affordances

WEB 2.0

• Read/write web: user-generated content
• Perpetual beta
• the long tail
• Networks effects

WEB 2.0: Emotional layer

• Intimacy
• Authenticity – ‘escape the spin’ – find something ‘real’
• Creativity
• Emergence – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

courseblogs.gardnercampbell.net to see examples of blogs of collaboration of the students

Using the technology to have the students understand that learning is fluid and life long.

Nick Dvoracek, UW-Oshkosh

How do we record video for purposes of review and data gathering (lecture capture)?

We’ve moved from VHS, to DVD, DV fully digital devices.

The traditional ways for capturing video in a classroom are not workable solutions for today’s needs.

After much exploration into capture applications and devices UW-Oshkosh has chosen to use Xythos application which they’ve branded with the name “Titan” for the purposes of storing recorded lecture. Each student has 10 gb of space on the Titan drive which they use their campus ID and password to log into.Windows Media Encoder is used to record the lectures.
The recommended camera is the Aiptek  GVS 1080P camera. This camera stores in video in the h.264 format and costs around $149. This camera is also recommended as a check out camera for students to produce digital stories.

The Aiptek is placed about 6 -8 feet infront of the instructor and the mic is set to boost  mode and connected to the storage device via USB. It appears to be about a 5 step process to begin recording of the lectures.

If your department has a lot of the older DV camera’s Nick suggests using the Pinnical Video Transfer box stores the video in h.264 format onto a thumb drive. A good solution to use existing tools on your campus and works as a storage option for quick file transfer. The Pinnacle Video Transfer costs about $90.

After testing several audio only recording devises Nick recommends the Sony digital audio recorder ICDUX71 for audio only recording. This units records in MP3 format.

Window Media Encoder
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

Xythos (file sharing)
http://www.xythos.com/

Aiptek  GVS 1080P camera
http://aiptek.com/products/

Pinnical Video Transfer box
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/publicsite/us/products/consumer+products/home+video/studio+family/instant+video+recorder.htm

Sony digital audio recorder ICDUX71
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=1&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665829056&SR=sony_search_seo&SQS=ICD-UX71

Presenter: Lisa Larson, UW-Superior
Blogger: Karen Franker, UW Colleges/UW-Extension

Ethics as a starting point for 21st century information literacy. Example of music sharing habits.

92% of high school students are satisfied with their own ethics

Almost 40% of college students admitted to engaging in “cut and paste” plagiarism

Student tutorial developed by Lisa last fall to help students search for, select, and cite multimedia for papers and presentations.

Have students critically analyzing sample cases to determine harm (ex: Firestone case)

Used in ENG 102 and other first-year courses (46 students)

Students access the “surface web” fairly well; however, “frequency of contact with the Internet does not translate to good ICT literacy skills.” (Macklin)

Interactive activities to build search engine skills for effective searching

ACRL Standards for Higher Education

Give students 45 seconds to judge video search results for relevance, credibility, and objectivity
Then they rate themselves on how they did in the quick review versus a longer one; sometimes knee-jerk reactions aren’t the best answer

Do students view PBS as more credible than YouTube?

Students at UW-Superior report more difficulty finding good online videos for research purposes.

Faculty report problems teaching students to properly cite videos and wiki entries found on the Internet.
Difficulty for students to know who to credit when original source is not always listed.

Content is king, but don’t forget to laugh and/or cry.

Jim’s argument is that content should always be the king.  Still he
reminds us that this content should be engaging.  What does engaging mean?
In a few simple questions, will it make your audience laugh? Will it make your
audience cry?  Will it be powerful?  These are important questions to
consider as we now have access to numerous examples of learning objects, digital
video, digital audio, etc that allows us to distribute content to students more
easily in a variety of formats, anytime, anywhere.  Although making this
content is very possible within our digital landscape, the content itself is not
appealing to students.

For most of us who have admiration for our content, it may be hard to imagine
how some one else would not eat every bit of our content up?  Swallowing
this difficult pill is a challenge for many of use.  But as educators, we
often are called to make our complex content palatable, to make it
understandable, to make is something students will transfer to new experiences.

It made me begin thinking about Micheal Wesch’s popular video, A Vision of
Students Today – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o Which after just days became an incredible popular video that sparked conversation among faculty, student, administrators, etc.  Although the work anthropologists do is incredibly
wonderful, we generally don’t imagine that their work would engage the main
stream as well as his did.   Largely, it was the way in which he
delivered the content, not the content itself.

It is often argued that these types of examples are just adding bells and
whistles to content as a novelty.  We must remember that the content within
this rich media must also be solid or else it may be simply seen as edutainment.

On Myths of Rich Media

Jim provided context to the discussion by providing statistics on media from
the 2009 Educase ECAR study - http://www.educause.edu/Resources/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/187215/.
Reminding us that there are a lot of students using this media but rarely not in
an educational context.

As Jim showed statistics from the Educase ECAR survey, he was sure to follow
up with some of the myths of rich media.  To me, it is important to first
examine the limitations of rich media so that one does not make impossible
promises to an audience.

Making Connections

Jim made sure to point out that their is great work being done across the
system.  He encouraged the audience to utilize the resources as much as
possible.

Scott Wojtanowski

—————-

A summary of the presentation with bullet points ;-)  Jim encouraged
attendees to develop rich media that will resonate with with your audience.

Statistics on Media from ECAR 2009

• 80% of students have a laptop less then one year old
• 45% of student contribute to video content
• 95% of students ages 18 – 24 that use social networking and
  texting
• 6% of students review “academicly” created podcasts
• 45% of students feel that faculty use of technology adequently

How is rich media used

• Rich media is successful when…used appropriately
• Rich media is not capturing everything,  for example it is made
  available 1hour  lecture.  It is 5-10 minutes
• Portable
• Flexible
• Promotes individualized learning

Myths of Rich media –

• If you create it they will come – Not engaging they will turn you off.
• More is better than less
• Rich media makes presentation better
• Millennial students yearn for rich media
• More media, “that’s the ticket”

Consideration for Rich Media

• Audience Identification
  • 24 hours per day – 2:00am in the morning
  • International audience
• Using web streaming for other purposes.
• Warning Signs – Don’t be dooped by the Swine Flue.  Streaming media
  is not the answer to making content available to student.  We must
  remember to keep this memorable.

Who’s Going to Watch?:  The Project: Gen Ed

Questions to the Answer

• What is gen ed?
• Who do you ask?
• Who is the intended audience?
• How do you make it engaging

Links from the Presentation

• Internet Archive – http://www.archive.org/index.php
• MediaSite – http://www.sonicfoundry.com/
• UW-L Media Archive – http://www.uwlax.edu/edtech/mediasite/index.htm
• International Resources – Website in LaCrosse – http://www.uwlax.edu/international/
• HP Touch Smart Rich Media example – http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/touchsmart/
• Passport to technology – http://www.uwlax.edu/edtech/passport5/

Understanding the Context

Oblinger argues that the learning context is changing from the what learners
do and who they are, how knowledge is being created rather than processed, and
how students are accessing learning experiences are changing with mobile
devices.  I was reminded of two popular videos that puts for this same call.

In the Machine is Us/ing Us describes a new landscape of media in which learners are working with to collaborate, contribute, and create.
The Machine is Us/ing Us

This advertisement by Kaplan University, which I believe tries to reach adult
learners or those looking for flexible schedules approaching learning from a
different perspective.  Rather than simply using computer based instruction
that is often referenced as being “online learning” this provides an engaging
collaborative learning environment.
Kaplan University

Although there is much discussion about the learning environment and the
learners in that environment changing.  I like that Oblinger’s comment
detailing that students might know how to create a mash-up, but might not know
how to use an electronic spreadsheet.  It is an interesting thing to
consider that we often think that students are demanding these environments but
they might not have the technical knowledge to effectively use these in formal
learning environments.

Flexible Learning Environments

Knowing that we have so many tools and information easily available on the
Internet (learning objects, audio, video, screencapture, etc),we need to begin
to thinking that it is not having access to information that is powerful.
Instead, it is about using this information to build new knowledge.  To me
this means that we need to focus more on how we are developing learning
activities for students.  How do we create real-world activities that
students can investigate with each other, while using the the key concepts that
are available on the Internet.  Surely, developing these types of
real-world activities is hard to develop in practice.  Students are
unskilled at making the connections to the “big picture.”  Is there a way
to develop a structured learning guides while situating this in a problem based
learning environment.

Scott Wojtanowski