Does crisis stifle innovation?

This is more a question than an opinion. I have been thinking about this a great deal over the last few months. As California slowly edges toward what commentators seem to believe is certain financial ruin, I am struck by the lack of conversation about alternative means of running the state. We have the capacity to run a great deal of the day to day in government virtually, cutting down on the infrastructure needed to do common tasks such as register vehicles, pay bills, fill out forms, etc.. At some level wouldn't it make sense to reduce the amount of time that face to face transactions were made in government and move more of it to a virtual setting? I have puzzled over why this is such a leap. I'm sure that familiarity is a portion of the problem. In times of crisis might it be that we pull back to the familiar and take less risks with technologies and paradigms that have not been proven?

Maybe it is time for some real risk taking.

Transitioning to Blackboard 9 and training

Last Fall CSUB did a pilot of Moodlerooms as part of an investigation into alternative LMS systems once it was deemed that WebCT 4.1 (yes, 4.1) was no longer an option due to accessibilty issues. I was able to offer a course in Moodle for the first (and perhaps only) time. I have been familiar with Moodle for some time, since 2002 at least when I had it set up on a server at home and played with it extensively. The Fall semester was a great boon in that I was able to teach a course for K-12 teachers in using Moodle. I have been blessed in that a few have gone on to actually implement web enhanced and hybrid Moodle in their classrooms.

CSUB made the decision to go with Blackboard after the pilot. So now I must update my dated experiences with WebCT 4.1 to this new system. I am already familiar with the Blackboard from using it at different campuses, actually developing courses on it at one point, and last semester taking a real estate course in it.

I have decided it is time to take the Blackboard certification courses. Starting July 1st I'll be taking three courses in the Learning and Teaching certification track as well as in the advanced certification track. It will be the first professional development in this area I've done since 2007. I am very much looking forward to the opportunity. While I am not a Blackboard advocate particularly, in the same way I am not a Microsoft advocate though I hold four certificates there, it is the platform my university has standardized on and so is an area I must know as much as possible about. It will be an interesting experience. I will report back on anything remarkable as I go through.

Free to Air and academic programming

Last week I decided to investigate satellite TV in the form of an FTA receiver and a 36” dish. I have a number of reasons for doing this, not the least of which is my disenchantment with the programming on cable, and for that matter the state of modern programming in general. Most of what is available on the cable networks seems a bit pedestrian most of the time. I admit this is just my personal preference, I prefer more detailed information and greater depth than most of these entities seem to provide. Rule of thumb for me is that any station that has to provide multiple serialized reality show format programs is probably not somewhere I would go for entertainment or enlightenment.

So I started looking at what might be available directly from the satellites.

I found some interesting programming on the Galaxy 18 satellite. This satellite does have some free to air programming. You can find a list of what is on this satellite by going to Lyngsat and looking at Galaxy 18. Most of what is here is encrypted, but the entries that show as either NTSC or DVB are open and available to anyone with a dish pointed at the satellite. Some of the best here are The Research Channel, University of Washington (UWTV), and the 3C (California Community College) channels. There are others certainly, including Retro Jams, the oldies music video station, and This TV, the oldies movie station (hey, I qualify as an oldy myself :-) ), but the top three are very good 'brain food'.

Since I just set this system up, I have not spent much time looking at the programming, but so far the lectures and programs on UWTV and The Research Channel are top notch.

A bit about my setup. This is not a particularly difficult project if you are fairly handy, have a view of the south sky, and some patience. The system I put together cost less than $250 and consists of a receiver (Viewsat VS2000), a 36” dish with tripod, and accessories such as coax, a signal meter, etc..

It DID take me approximately 8 hours to figure out the basics, assemble the equipment, and aim the dish.

A few things I would like to emphasize:

1. The programming I am getting from this satellite is free.

2. The programming available can change at any time

3. You MUST have a signal meter to aim your dish. Otherwise you may become frustrated enough to decide to try to determine the glide path of your equipment through practical application.

4. This is not a motorized dish. If I wish to “change” satellites I will have to go through aiming again. A motorized system costs about $100 more.

5. HD PVR type systems are also available. These allow you pick up and record programming to an external hard drive. This can be very handy if you find programming to use in your classroom, but it is another $200-300 in addition to the original cost.

6. When aiming the dish take into account your elevation. In a nutshell, aiming a dish in Tehachapi is much different than in Bakersfield. Your satellite dish elevation settings will be much closer to the horizon.
   

For now I'm content with the setup I have. Since I teach in education and in technology, I have the quadruple benefit of being able to find intelligent programming, potentially more content for my courses, intellectual stimulation, and access to types of programming that absent from my cable provider.

I will report back at some point as I upgrade my installation.

Class registration Info Spring 09 in C&I at CSUB

Hi Folks!

If you are in the C&I program at CSUB you may be having trouble locating courses and CRN numbers because of the PeopleSoft changeover. I've created three PDF files that give you the availablew courses for Bakersfield, AV, and Extended University. You can use these PDFs to locate the section numbers you need to register for courses. Hope this helps! If you have problems email me.

Closing the gap, more educators get it (and so do I).

OK. I follow Ray Kurzweil and Marc Prensky, and think Alvin Toffler may have been talking more about education than other disciplines without knowing. As educators we have aresponsibility to meet our students where they live. Some of this can be started in K12, but that is dependent upon the technology that the district has available, the willingness of those teaching, and the technosavvy of the administration.

I'm sorry, but the 'if we build it they will come' mentality won't work if we are using the wrong materials and blueprints.

Who is our target audience and what is their comfort level not only with technology, but with change in general?

Another article acknowledges the importance of dealing with modern material. Closing the Gap Between Education and Technology by Chris Riedel in THE Journal discusses some of the revelations (or is it proselytizing) of Mark Benno. You can find the article here.

An interesting point related was the lack of watches in classrooms. This got me thinking about my digital immigrant self and how I have come to use technology.

I have not worn a watch since I bought my first PDA in 2002. No reason. Two months ago I bought an old tech Nokia 9300 to replace another Nokia that was terribly difficult to text using. Hey, I've been involved with computers since the TRS-80 days, so QWERTY is very natural to me.

Now it starts to blend. I have a PDA that is also in many ways a mini-laptop, I have Internet access (though the original browser on this Symbian Series 80 phone is truly dismal), and the only piece of regularly used technologies missing are a decent camera, a PC emulator like Virtual Box, and a higher resolution screen, or a miniaturized pullout adjunct screen like that on the new Thinkpad W700ds, and a decent MP3 player. My understanding is that the E90 addresses much of the shortcoming.

Add some voice recognition software tied to a decent browser and you have a combo for online discussion groups that would be useful indeed. Or even better something that would allow you to video blog to your course management system, the N95 with its dual cameras comes to mind. So the use of video clips or video blogging on the fly and easily creating posts in threaded discussions from the car (with phone or perhaps even enhanced GPS *????* ) becomes not only possible but almost easy.

Of course the article takes a little different tack. I'm married to a QUERTY keyboard for comfort, which in and of itself dates me. The article talks about multitasking that takes on a different flavor, actually taking in information from different sources literally at the same time. In my life the only equivalent I can come up with is when I am on the elliptical. I'll frequently listen to music (I recently discovered Dave Matthews and am exhausting that catalog now) while watching the news with the SAP program on to read the dialog. That is in some sense the spirit, if not the actual application, that is mentioned in the article. Now if I am listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour while watching the news on the elliptical, and actively participating in both then I might be closer.

I know, I know. Some will say that multitasking is not a good thing, that it decreases efficiency. All you need to do is plug the terms multitasking and efficient into Google to see the debate. But the fact remains people do it. Serial or Parallel? True multitasking or merely task switching (think GEM vs. Windows NT ). You be the judge.

But I digress. :-)

"Kids use technology in ways many of us would never think of, he said. " That's a good start.

This article is worth reading and the ACOT2 programis worth following.

I found a picture: Mary Nowlin in Jackson Wyoming

I'm slowly going through my mother's scrapbooks. Every once in a while I run into a real gem. This is my grandmother, Mary (McKean) Nowlin circa late 30s to early 40s at the house next to the Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole Wyoming. I believe one of the children is my Mother and another my Uncle Dan Nowlin. You can see the fence for the Elk Refuge in the background. This is the site of the Nowlin Creek Inn that my cousin Mark and his wife built many years back. My understanding is that the house in the picture has been moved to the back of the lot. I very much miss this area of Wyoming as it was before becoming 'discovered'.

Prensky: Engage me or Enrage me

Marc Prensky of course. What if we took learning back to the students in a way that would allow them to work within a complex system that held their attention? Prensky has an excellent point that young people master complex systems that go far beyond what we expose them to in school. My son Shawn at 11 is working his way through the Dungeons and Dragons books. A great deal of math, planning, and comparison at high levels going on there. But he is below average in many subjects at school. Maybe it is not about what we choose to engage them with as much s how?

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0553.pdf

So how do we do this? Is this something that can be achieved via educational gaming? Somehow I don't think it will be that easy.