By KYLE HARDGRAVE, Daily Pennsylvanian

While some peer schools are hedging their bets that online education is part of the future, Penn is taking a more decentralized approach. On Jan. 19, Apple announced the launch of 100 free college courses through iTunes U — the latest in a recent trend in which schools are opening their classes and educational materials to global audiences online. Peer institutions like Stanford and Yale universities were among those that partnered with Apple. For its part, Penn’s smattering of online learning opportunities is growing from the ground up, through a number of different venues. One of Penn’s oldest offerings in free online education is Knowledge@Wharton, the Wharton School’s online business journal. The publication, which began in May 1999, publishes interviews, lectures and articles that tackle issues in the business world. “The goal is to take the school’s intellectual capital and make it available for free online,” said Mukul Pandya, executive director and editor-in-chief of Knowledge@Wharton.

http://thedp.com/index.php/article/2012/02/online_education_growing_from_bottom_up

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by KIM SUNG-MI, IT Times

The combination of education and cloud computing has created the wind of change to the education system. Today, we live in a world of digital information, which makes us enjoy smart education unhindered by spatial or time restrictions. Smart education or smart learning is construed as the new education system emerging from the development of information and technology. We have come to the age of smart Learning after e-Learning (electronic Learning), m-Learning (mobile Learning), and u-Learning (ubiquitous Learning) developed in the onset of the21st century. Dr. Kwak Duk-hoon, CEO of Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) in Korea and Chairman of Korean Smart Learning Forum, is the pioneer of smart learning and lifelong education. He is the fearless leader who led EBS to become the world’s best education media group and helped the country to learn more about the significance and vision of smart learning.

http://www.koreaittimes.com/story/19513/along-e-learning-and-cloud-computing-comes-advancement-smart-learning

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By Chris Riedel, THE Journal

According to Project Tomorrow CEO Julie Evans, “Today’s students have their own ’student vision’ for how they want to use technology for learning. That vision,” she said, “is really a statement of how students want to learn in general.” Speaking at FETC National Conference in Orlando, FL last week, Evans covered data from the 2010 and 2011 editions of the Speak Up Survey, with a specific focus on the use of digital media for learning. The Speak Up surveys include input from hundreds of thousands of teachers, students, parents, and administrators each year. What the data pointed to, she said, is a growing “frustration among students, not just with the lack of technology in their schools, but by the lack of sophisticated use of that technology.”

According to Evans, the data from those surveys indicated that students:

Have a growing interest in social-based learning;

Want to connect with and develop a personal network of expert resources;

Are looking for tools that increase untethered learning; and

Want a digitally rich learning environment, unencumbered by traditional rules.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/02/01/digital-learning-what-kids-really-want.aspx

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By Michael Feldstein

I just wanted to drop a quick note to point out that the always interesting Rob Reynolds will be running a webinar on the future of the textbook on Friday. Here are the deets:

The Future of Digital Textbooks in U.S. Education (And What That Means for
You)

Date: Friday, February 10
Time: 1:00 CST
Open registration – http://bit.ly/x8EGIw

Textbooks will be predominantly digital by the end of the current decade
and that means big changes in both the publishing and education markets in
the U.S. In this webinar, Dr. Rob Reynolds will explore the current trends
in the textbook publishing industry, the continued evolution of digital
textbooks, and the rise of open textbook and OER content. His presentation
will feature research from his forthcoming book (The Future of Learning
Content: E-textbooks, Open Content, Apple and Beyond!), and is also based
on his professional experience as an educator, author, administrator,
educational technologist, and publishing executive. Specific topics
addressed in the webinar include:

Current and future trends in educational publishing
Top 10 obstacles faced by traditional textbook publishers
Market projections for print and digital textbooks through 2020
The impact of tablet devices on digital learning content and the
curriculum
The evolution of the open textbook and self-publishing markets in
education  (and their challenges)
The rise of low-cost, digital-first publishing in education
Trends in e-reader software platforms for e-textbooks
The real impact of Apple, Amazon, and Google on textbooks

Possibly related posts:

1. EduPatents Webinar Coming Up Stephen Downes and I will be guests on Cable Green’s...
2. Apple and Textbooks, Part 1: The War on Paper Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of good coverage of...
3. The Coming Digital Textbook Wave Xplana has published some interesting growth projections on digital textbooks...

Webinar on Textbooks by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Today would have been my Mom’s 83rd Birthday, and in honor of her memory and love of butterflies, I asked Tim Owens to do a Makerbot print of a butterfly ornament.

If you want to a description of her belief about butterflies, listen to this recording I made last year when I visited her, just a week after her 82nd:

Mom on Butterflies

It’s been a year of thinking back on events that she was here for last year, and probably the sweetest memory was the outpouring of sympathy for cookielove last September

And it was was a year ago last November she was at my home in Strawberry making cookies, and I just felt like there would be many more of these.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This one last photo was a gift that came into the StoryBox this summer. I think I know who it is from, but am not 100% sure, nor does it matter.

Happy Butterflyday, Mom.

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Reaching a bit into the past for today’s Daily Create "a photo that represents that happiest or most memorable moment in your life."

As an absolute for "happiest" I find that impossible, so let’s reach into the hat.

Having driven across Texas twice in the last 3 months, I went back to first first Trans-Texas tour, in August 1987, when Dominoe and I drove to Arizona from Baltimore in my 1973 Ford Maverick.

This trip alone was epic for me, a grand aventure, and I had a perfect, non-complaining travel buddy, though she did not do her share of the driving. This is somewhere on US 387 between Dallas and Amarillo.

Dominoe was my first dog I owned on my own, and her story has gone very far with me. Picking happiest is tricky, but this was definitely memorable and rolled around in my mind this year as I went farther on my road odyssey

This was an old print photo (35mm FILM baby) I had scanned into my computer sometime last year, and as far as I recall, has not appeared in my other photos. To give it a memory look, a fiddled with the Paint Daubs filter in Photoshop to make it look more painterly.

By Phil Hill

One of the trends that I’ve been tracking in the LMS market is a move away from the monolithic, all-things-to-everyone enterprise LMS solution. There are several different approaches challenging this model, but the general theme is that the ed tech market needs more flexible, targeted approaches to directly support teaching and learning needs.

The news today is that LoudCloud Systems is officially announcing their LMS solution’s entry into the general higher education and K-12 markets as described in a Campus Technology article. In this announcement, LoudCloud promises what they describe as the “first fully adaptive and configurable Learning Management Systems for Higher Education and K12″. While I cannot judge yet how successful this vendor will be with their strategy, I think the announcement is significant for the LMS market for two reasons.

• LoudCloud appears to be providing the first disaggregated LMS on the commercial market; and
• The system has an integrated analytics engine that supports personalized content delivery.

Disclaimer:  I do not endorse any one company over another and am not doing so here. My point here is to describe the general product release and to describe how this announcement further changes the LMS market.

LoudCloud is a two-year-old company based on a team formerly at Tata Interactive Systems, a provider of corporate LMS solutions. This team, led by CEO Manoj Kutty, started LoudCloud in 2010, and in 2011 had some significant wins in the for-profit sector of the higher ed market (Grand Canyon University with an enrollment of 40,000 students, and Career Education Corporation with an enrollment of 116,000 students) as well as the K-12 market (Jefferson County, the largest K-12 school district in Colorado with 84,000 students).

Last September I wrote about some early news for LoudCloud here and here.

… During my phone call and online demonstration, they mentioned that Career Education Corporation is migrating to the LoudCloud LMS from their homegrown LMS, tool by tool. This is significant – LoudCloud has designed their system as a suite of web services, where each tool is designed to use role-based authentication and to be available on its own merits – architectural disaggregation. Furthermore, LoudCloud Systems has been designed for personalized learning environment driven by analytics. As the system tracks the students usage and a demographic profile from the Student Information System, the LMS will serve up specific content that appears to fit that students learning preferences and learning style.

At the time of the previous posts, LoudCloud was working on projects with these early customers, but it was not clear if they would develop a business strategy to support this approach for other customers. It now appears that they are fully releasing the products and marketing to the broader higher education and K-12 markets.

Disaggregated LMS

LoudCloud is betting on a vision of each customer configuring the system they need, based on choosing learning tools in a best-of-breed approach – using IMS standards and having each tool with its own API. The idea is if you already have a working LMS ecosystem but mostly need to change a discussion board or adaptive reader, for example, why should you have to change the whole system? In addition to this vision, I’m sure that they would be happy to sell the entire LMS as well.

This concept of a disaggregated LMS is not new, and in fact goes back at least to the SUNY Learning Network (SLN) effort from 2005 that would have leveraged open source components and built a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). As described in a SLN2 whitepaper:

After considerable research, SLN has identified the best solution to be a component strategy, as no single-platform LMS solution exists today to meet our needs. This powerful component strategy would integrate several carefully chosen Open Source projects, each with strong technical compatibility, resulting in a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

Collectively, the component technologies provide the requisite compatibility through standards compliance, complementary function, and strong alignment between their supporting communities.

Unfortunately this vision was not realized at the time, partially due to organizational resistance, but there has been progress in terms of the standards such as IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability). From the open source world, Sakai 3 is also offering portions of a component approach.

Adaptive Content Through Analytics

The second part of LoudCloud’s bet is that analytics are the key to allowing a personalized learning experience that is adaptable to each student. The analytics engine in the LoudCloud LMS appears to take data from three primary sources – assessment results, demographics, and student engagement. According to Kutty,

We also believe that to deliver a better educational experience, a high quality educational platform must capture, profile, statistically analyze, and help improve content, student learning, and instructional engagement.

Most other LMS providers are also investing heavily in analytics, particularly in the ability to visualize and report assessment data. What appears to be new with LoudCloud is that their analytics engine can adapt the end-user experience for both instructors and students. According to the Campus Technology article:

Adaptive Reader Technology is a retention tool that captures and statistically analyzes more than 300 variables from student demographics, course engagement, and assessment data to deliver preferred learning resources, remedial instruction, tutoring support, and personalized feedback based on each learner’s individual profile.

What to Watch

For this strategy to work and LoudCloud to succeed, I see two big issues that need to be addressed.

• Market Acceptance – This announcement is significant, but the real judgement will come from the LMS market and whether LoudCloud can pick up new clients. There are a lot of changes to the market with new approaches, not to mention that the incumbent LMS solutions are not standing still. Will LoudCloud be able to expand beyond the for-profit sector and sell to public online programs and even to traditional higher ed? I would have expected to see more progress in terms of signing up new clients by now – the higher education market relies strongly on word-of-mouth, so sales success and momentum is important for this business strategy to succeed.
• Interoperability with Other Systems – While the IMS LTI standards are making tool interoperability easier and richer in end-user experience, early system integrations will most likely arise where the institutions control the product. Note that CEC was one of the first customers to implement components of the system, and they have a home-grown system. I suspect that clients with either a homegrown solution, or using Moodle and Sakai will be in the best position to take advantage of LoudCloud’s best-of-breed solutions.

Possibly related posts:

1. Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS This is a guest post by Phil Hill from Delta Initiative,...
2. LMOS Project First Release Goals I’ve created a new wiki page for release goals on...
3. Teaching Faculty About Wikipedia (and Social Software in General) I just discovered Jon Udell’s wonderfully archeological screencast about the...
4. Blackboard Announces New 'Institutional Effectiveness Platform'; Patents Pending From today’s press release: BbWorld Europe, Nice, France – February...
5. Course Management Systems and Pedagogical Models By way of edTechPost, we find this article at Dublin...

LoudCloud Systems Announces Adaptive LMS General Release by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

A quick one for a new #ds106 assignment created by one of my students:

Comic Book Effect
Take a picture and experiment with the “Halftone Effect” in some photo editing software to create a comic book effect. There are lots of tutorials on Youtube and Google.

This was the original photo, one that Rowan Peter took of me when I visited him in Melbourne and we worked on some lawn art in his back yard:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I did all my edits directly in flickr using Piknic (Using “Edit Photo in Piknic” from the Actions menu). There was no half tone effect there, but I found the textured one worked pretty well. I added the bubble on some next to round it out.

Just a quick try!

(click for the full diagram in all its martian glory)

Inspired by Ben Rimes post today I wanted to take a spin at the ds106 Warning Design assignment:

Lots of things today have warning labels. Create warning labels for things that exist only in movies or your imagination

I felt that as a weapon of planetary destruction, the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator wielded by Marvin Martian would definitely need some warning labels.

That thing is dangerous. The users manual is about 800 pages long. Marvin is lucky he does not blow his Martian head off.

The real device was rather simple, almost just a stick of dynamite. I did a google search on the device and landed on the complex device from a tumblr blog. Building this was just some PhotoShop layering. I placed the device at the center. For each callout, I just copied a selection, pasted to new layer, and resized. Then I overlaid the items with text or graphics.

Danger, Marvin, he lives dangerously.

by Ryan Craig, Inside Higher Ed

First, MIT announced that it would extend its successful OpenCourseWare initiative and offer certificates to students who complete courses. MITx will allow students to access content for free. But students who wish to receive a certificate will be charged a modest fee for the requisite assessments. The kicker is that the certificate will not be issued under the name MIT. According to the University: “MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within the institute that will offer certificate for online learners of MIT coursework. Then, Sebastian Thrun, who invited the world to attend his fall semester artificial intelligence course and who ended up with 160,000 online students, announced he had decided to stop teaching at Stanford and direct all his teaching activities through Udacity, a start-up he co-founded that will offer online courses from leading professors to millions of students.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/02/03/essay-massive-online-courses-not-game-changing-innovation

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By: Pamela Knudson, Grand Forks Herald

Online education accounts for an increasing portion of UND’s enrollment, officials there say, and will be an important component as the school develops a new model for ensuring enrollment stays stable. “Online education is very important for our growth opportunities, because if you look at high school demographics, they’re decreasing,” said Lori Reesor, UND vice president for student affairs. “President (Robert) Kelley has said he believes we’re at the right size. Now it’s more about maintaining enrollment and shaping the class by increasing the quality and diversity of our students,” she said. “It’s not just the right number of students but insuring that the students who come here are prepared to be here.”

http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/228255/

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By Robert M. Shireman, Chronicle of Higher Ed

It is clear that Andrew Rosen, the chief executive of Kaplan, wants to leave readers of Change.edu with the idea that for-profit colleges are innovative, efficient, and effective in serving people left out by traditional higher education, and that their bad reputation is the result of unfair attacks. The eye-opening, gasp-inducing elements involve Rosen’s descriptions of the intense pressures on company executives to produce quick, huge profits for investors by shortchanging students. “An investor who wants to make a quick hit can, at least theoretically, buy an institution, rev up the recruitment engine, reduce investment in educational outcomes,” and deliver “a dramatic return on investment.”

http://chronicle.com/article/Changeeduthe-Problem/130596/

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Actually we don’t. We need more fake reality shows.

San Francisco: Flip This Mayor
There must be something in the water at Oakland’s City Hall which makes people stupid.

San Francisco’s unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom.

——————————————————-

Tune in for the drama in city hall, as city officials labor hard to prove their are “creating jobs”. Mayor Stan Usual was elected on a split opposition vote, and has no mandate. He is dealing with a water issue, but it is not stupidity, but lead. As the tech industry dries up, before the tumbleweeds are spotted blowing through SoMa, city council people have developed a new job sceme involving portable structures made from aluminum cans. Who will win this epic community battle for the hearts and minds of the city? Stay tuned….
——————————————————-

photo credits

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by echoman: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80154053@N00/151680058/

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by slworking2: http://flickr.com/photos/slworking/3875709508/

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by Thomas Hawk: http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2934728223/

Hence a new ds106 assignment, partly inspired by the formula of the Album cover assignment, Really Reality TV The tags for this assignment are DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments342

1. Use the Reality TV Show name generator to get a title for the show.
2. Do a Google search on the show title name.
3. Use the first paragraph found on the 5th result of the search as the first part of the show description.
4. Use the last paragraph found on the 10th result of the search as the second part of the show description.
5. Find three creative commons licensed images to represent a protagonist on the show, the setting, and one example of action. Combine them into a three panel show banner. Be sure to credit the sources in your blog post
6. On your blogpost, write in the elevator pitch for the show, and a tag line for it appearing on ds106 TV.
7. Sit back and wait for Spielberg to contact you. He is into TV these days.

So for my show, I generated this name, “San Francisco: Flip This Mayor”:

My google search results (which who knows if ever are unique?)

Result five was a link to 1st sentence from 5th result “the tattler: Occupy Oakland…Mayor Quan flip-flops! Cops cry foul!” where the first paragraph was There must be something in the water at Oakland’s City Hall which makes people stupid. (that is definitely show material).

The 10th search result was Tech company move boosts SF mayor’s branding push, where the last paragraph was:

San Francisco’s unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom.

That leads me to search terms in compfight for “Oakland City Hall”, “Mayor”, and “Tech jobs”, giving me these three photos:

I set up a blank photoshop document with a black background, and dragged and dropped the downloaded photos (500px size) right in there- you can move and resize them as smart objects, then added some text, and boom! Done.

The last bit was to write the pitch for the show.

Shiznit! Reality TV is done.

It's a Bag of Coal
by: cogdog

I cannot say this has a whole lot of meaning– it more or less came out of just thinking about the rallying call from Gardner Campbell’s No Digital Facelift presentation we use to start ds106.

So maybe if people do not see the value of the Bag of Gold, perhaps another precious natural resource. I visited Gardner a little over a week ago, and we did some lamenting how much people tend to gravitate, or not want to move away from the status quo.

Maybe gold is not enough of an inducement. Maybe it is a bag of? Doritos? a bah of crude oil? a bag of lobbyists? I don’t know.

All kidding aside, how do we stir up more excitement about the potential of the internet versus the fear and loathing that keeps people from embracing?

Like my other colleagues close to this, the answer seems to always end up at… ds106, the answer to everything. It’s not just us boasting, it is that sea of creativity that, to me, shows the potential for things we do not expect, the adjacent possibilities.

IT”S A BAG OF COAL! WHAT PART OF IT DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND!

I did this as a small sample of the web storytelling assignment for ds106 to use one of the 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story tools to say something about web storytelling. I always thought xtranormal was one of the most original tools— “If you can type into a box you can make a movie”. I was disappointed that they made the free options so slim, but I had some credits when I last used it for another video project.

It’s easy to slip into the silly mode for this tool, but really, it can be used quite easily to block out scenes, or play the part of a film director. It remains one of my favorite tools.

I moved this blog on to the wordpress platform in 2007 (I think.) I built a open learning search portal on wordpress in 2009. I have participated and helped organize a bunch of different “wordpress in education” events here in BC, and maintain wordpress installations for both BCcampus and etug. So I probably don’t need to tell you, I <3 wordpress.

A few years back, the folks at the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University spearheaded a very cool project to build a new digital humanities tool in one week. The result was the Anthologize plugin for WordPress which allows you to collect together a set of blog posts and publish them in a variety of web, print and eReader friendly formats.

Not long after (maybe even before) I became aware of both Comment Press and its successor digress.it. While neither of these are in and of themselves publishing or packaging tools, in greatly expanding the ways in which readers and editors could comment on a text at the paragraph level, they added to an emerging vision of WordPress as a web platform for authoring multi-format books in a dynamic, networked way.

So when I began last year thinking about platforms that met all my goals for an open textbook platform, I pretty much knew I had these in my back pocket and that with not too much finesse or effort they could serve quite well.

And I still think that. But before we really got underway with our Open Textbook pilot, I kept scanning the horizon to see what other options might have come up since I found these. And boy am I glad I did, because I stumbled on Pressbooks.

Pressbooks

Pressbooks is the work of Hugh McGuire, who also previously founded LibriVox, the biggest site in the world for audio versions of public domain works. Pressbooks is built on top of WordPress, and offers the same simplicity for authoring books that those of us who blog have come to know and love. Actually, it offers a BETTER system – the Pressbooks folks have customized the backend dashboard and interface of wordpress to suit it even better to authoring books specifically (see figure 1.) At first I had thought they had simply taken Anthologize and further customized it, but I recently learned that this was not the case. In addition, they have created a couple of custom post types to accomodate all of the additional book metadata fields that have accrued over the fears (see figure 2.)

Output is where Pressbooks really shines. To test it out I created my own book using the same “Intro to PowerPoint” content I tried porting to mediawiki. Again, there was no simple IMS CP to Blog import functionality, but given the fairly small amount of content, it didn’t take much more than an hour to setup the basic pages and copy the content over.

Actually, this point deserves some attention, because even more so than Mediawiki, Pressbooks didn’t like crufty HTML. And when your legacy content is coming via Word-to-HTML via Desire2Learn output, crufty is the order of the day!

But after a few go rounds to clean it up (and no small effort on Hugh’s part – thanks!!) I had a web-based version of the text, as well as both an ePub and printable PDF. Now as in the case of the mediawiki experiment, these results were produced automagically but similarly could be manually massaged after the fact. But more than this, Pressbooks also supports ICML exports, a native format of the industry standard Adobe InDesign application, meaning that you can deliver the content of your book, properly marked up, to a professional designer and save them a ton of hassle. Similarly pressbooks supports uploading custom CSS to style ePubs, which means you can style these until your heart’s content (see figure 3 for all export formats)

Tale of the Tape

So how does this approach fare? Let’s run it through the criteria I outlined in last post and see:

• collaborative authoring – whether via multiple authors on a single chapter, or by divvying up the book, this is no problem
• can be done “out in the open” – absolutely, though one can make it private if one chooses to
• results in all of a web, print and eBook version – definitely
• is easy for authors and readers alike to use – I’m maybe biased, but I thought it was dead simple
• is free/cheap and open/extensible (and produces open standards-based content) – yep, yep and yep (but let’s revisit below)
• limits the choices upstream of what authors and reusers want to do with the book as little as possible – I’d say the answer was absolutely yes – this does not seem to be a “lock in” game at all.

When I have shown this to a few trusted colleagues, one of the first questions they’ve asked has been “have the components that customize wordpress to make it pressbooks themselves been open sourced?” It’s a fair question and an obvious one in the circles I run in. The answer currently is no. This is being offered as a service, albeit currently a free one. This is slightly troubling, but something that I hope to discuss further with Hugh and team to see what the way forward looks like. That said, given the wide variety of export formats, and my affinity for letting others man the widgets if I can, I absolutely hope and expect there is a way to use this as a service and to be diligent about exit strategies, flexibility and autonomy.

There is ultimately no one solution that will work for everyone and every scenario when it comes to open textbooks. As I try to describe in my talk February 7th (slides here or else feel free to join us online at 1:30pm PDT), it is a question of balancing affordances with what your users need, what you can do, and what you’d love to enable. But for now, Pressbooks has risen VERY quickly to the top of my list of approaches that I think do a good job of balancing all of these and providing a self-service, inexpensive platform to move forward with open textbooks. – SWL

Catherine Westbrook and Anglia Ruskin, EURODL

At our University, the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education has delivered a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses via flexible distance learning for many years. Distance learning can be a lonely experience for students who may feel isolated and unsupported. However e-learning provides an opportunity to use technology to motivate students to interact with each other and their tutors and work together towards common goals. If done properly, this provides distance learners specifically with a sense of learning within a community and therefore enables them to learn more effectively. Five years ago, the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education started using a virtual learning environment (VLE) to expand and develop our materials and provide a variety of resources to support our students. In the postgraduate Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) course this was further developed by implementing several collaborative learning initiatives where students work together online. The purpose of this was to attempt to improve the student experience of distance learning. The aim of this review is to analyze the effectiveness of three online collaborative tools used in the postgraduate distance learning MRI course and make recommendations for the implementation of similar initiatives throughout health care education.

http://www.eurodl.org/?article=475

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by Mark A. Hommes and Henk T. Van der Molen, EURODL

This article describes a study on the effects of a self-instruction training programme in communication skills for psychology students at the Open University of the Netherlands in comparison to a fully supervised training. We expected both training programmes to increase students’ knowledge and skills, as well as their self-efficacy and motivation concerning the use of skills. Furthermore we expected that both training programmes would lead to the transfer of these skills to daily life situations one year after training. The results show that almost all expectations were met, and that the effects of the self instructional programme in this study were comparable to those of the fully supervised training. The main conclusion is that it is possible to construct an effective self-instruction programme in communication skills for psychology students in distance education and this method could be promising for communication skills training for others groups.

http://www.eurodl.org/?article=470

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by Sylvia van de Bunt-Kokhuis, Nabil Sultan, EURODL

The digitalisation of educational communities has increased rapidly in the last decade. Modern technologies transform the way educational leaders such as teachers, tutors, deans and supervisors view and manage their educational communities. More often, educational leaders offer a variety of gateways, guiding the e-learners in their search for finding and understanding information. A new type of leader is required for understanding the needs and requirements of geographically dispersed online learners. This calls for a compassioned kind of leader, able to reconcile the dilemma of high-tech versus hi-touch in the online classroom. This article examines servant-leadership and its implications for e-learning in the 24/7 classroom where community building is key.

http://www.eurodl.org/?article=472

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I made this as an example for a new ds106 Visual Assignment, Splash The Color- this is the effect of accentuating parts of an image by reducing it to black and white, and then re-coloring or restoring the color of parts of the photo. See examples from Photobucket or many groups on flickr.

Color splash is a technique to emphasize details- you remove all color from a photo, and then restore original color to a single object, e.g. a green apple on a table. Think of the Girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List.

You can do this in a number of ways with photo editing software or using mobile apps. The answer lies in the Google

The tags for this assignment are: VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments340

I’ve come across a few variations on how to do this, the easiest (how I did it) via Photoshop and the history brush, a slient demo is here:

In my words–

• Open the color image in Photoshop
• As a precaution duplicate the layer so you are working on a copy
• Select Image -> Adjustments -> Black and White to remove all color. You might tweak the sliders to give the image a boost, or more contrast.
• Zoom in on the area you will work with, you want to be able to get close to the edges.
• Selcet the History Brush tool.
• Select a brush size from the top menu, preferably with a feathered edge.
• Start brushing the object you want to colorize; as you paint, the original color is painted back in. Its better to work from the middle out. As you get to the edge, make your brush smaller to fine tune the margins (you know, all that old coloring book stay inside the lines stuff)

• Do just enough to bring out the detail of one object, or a group of similar object.
• Save, post, and blog about it!

A more complicated approach would be to paint an object a different color than the original…. That might be for another day.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Today (or technically yesterday since it is some early AM hour) would have been my parent’s 62nd wedding anniversary. Alyce and Morris (aka “Mickey”) look so serious in their pose here, though Dad, in his pseudi Desi Arnez style, seems to have a twinkle in his eye.

Yes it is sad to think they are both gone, but I am holding on to their memories living on if I retell the stories. I have some images I had scanned from the scrapbook my Mom had worked on- here they do look a bit more relaxed (after the ceremony?)

And this is the family photo on my Dad’s side- this is left to right my grnffather, Abraham (for whom I am named after, but never met), my grandmother who outlived everyone in this picture except for my Mom, Dad, Mom, and that is Dad’s younger sister Eve in front.

There is so much about these old photos that make them seem distant in time and place. The look, the clothes, the grain of the photo– this all says “Memories”. Will my digital photos now have that same dated look to some future person? Will on its own speak to this time? Hmmmm.

We had a bigger celebration in 2000 for their 50th anniversary; I remember laboring in Director to create a multimedia CD-ROM of photos and videos. I still have the discs though I need an old computer to play them anymore. That media does not hold up as well to time, but content on the web, in terms of being in standard media formats and HTML, are still accessible (c.f. tribute to Dad)

I so miss that time of assurance they would be there forever; that is how it felt, naive, not realistic, but can anything be more part of what you count on in the world than your parents– if you are fortunate as I was to have them in my lives, and supporting me always, unconditionally.

My conversations with Mom took on such a more fun and laugh filled mode in the last few years. I called Mom a year ago, and had a conversation like this.

“I’m just calling to share the memories of your anniversary, Mom…”

“Do you know what I was doing 61 years ago today, Alan?” she asks. “Your Dad and I were on te train to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon.”

“That’s nice Mom, was it a long trip?”

(We talked a bit more about some other things)

Mom comes back to her memories. “And do you know what happened 61 years ago tonight?”

I pause. Uh oh, where is she going with this?

“This was 61 years since the first time I had sex!”

“MOM I DON’T NEED TO KNOW THAT! ALL I NEED TO KNOW IS YOU DID IT 4 TIMES, NO MORE!!!”

We laughed so much. I miss that more than anything.

Happy 62nd Anniversary Mom and Dad, all I got you was a blog post.