I am lucky to have the opportunity to attend several conferences each year and I often comment on these experiences in this blog. The comments are not intended to make those unable to attend jealous, but to share items I find interesting or useful. I admit such contributions may not satisfy those unable to attend.One of the ideas of an online conference is to allow people to participate from where ever they live. K12Online took this approach last year and it was an interesting experience so I am going to follow the events again this year. There is no registration fee. If this sounds valuable, the small graphic that follows provides a link. The conference begins tomorrow.
This is a comment on the movement to offer university instructional content to the public. The experiences generating this comment were pretty much random events, but perhaps the co-occurence of such events during a given day imply something other than randomness.I learned today that UC Berkeley has decided to offer the content of some courses on YouTube. The course that caught my attention was SIMS 141 which included a lecture (actually more of a Q&A) by Sergey Brin. Several major institutions have been offering course content for a few years now, but the YouTube approach is new.At one level the high tech approach is amusing – in several of the Berkeley courses, the visual presentation consists of college profs lecturing and writing on the chalk board. It was the combination of YouTube and chalk board that struck me as unusual. I can’t say I have watched a chalk board based lecture in many years. Brilliant scholars aside, perhaps the local tech folks ought to focus on improving the lecture supplements offered to the students sitting in the seats before streaming the content to the world.I don’t know what I think of the move made by several major institutions to offer the content of lectures courses for general consumption. Because I am teaching Intro Psych this semester, I have been listening to Intro Psych lectures available from several major institutions. My guess is that most students listening to these lectures and the lectures of my colleagues would be unable to associate the lecture with the institution. Perhaps this is more about Intro Psych than the scholarly expertise of the instructors. Perhaps leading national scholars in visual perception are no better at explaining topics in abnormal pscyhology than my colleagues.I have a different opinion of the UC Berkeley SIMS (internet search, information seeking) course. The individuals presenting and the focus of the course are unique and not available on most campuses.The University of Minnesota College of Public Health presented at the Beyond Boundaries conference and outlined their approach to podcasting/vodcasting. What they describe is probably a better model for offering resources to the public. They offer short pieces on specific topics, profile graduate students in the program, and provide access the invited lectures. They have invested production resources in creating these products. To me, this is a better approach to generating resources with broad appeal.So – offering information to the public is great, but who is the intended public and what is it that this public is expected to do with this information? What if introductory content is of general interest, but the institutions offering content do no better job in presenting this information than most other institutions? What if advanced content is done particularly well at some institutions, but the audience for this content is mostly at these same institutions.If this trend continues (more institutions making more courses available), I predict that some system for locating courses, perhaps even lectures on specific topics, that are especially informative, creative, or motivating will emerge. It will probably look like some type of iTunesU Digg mashup.
Here is a description of another Google tool – Google Notebook. I took notes on the tool using the tool so I will offer these notes as a link.
One of my research interests for several years has focused on collaborative class note taking and note using. Google Notebook would be perfectly suited to such applications.
The University of North Dakota has an annual technology conference (for 6 years now). I think local conferences are great and I continue to be impressed by those who participate.
Our graduate program in instructional design takes the opportunity to do a little self promotion. In helping to set up the booth, I missed the opening session, but I found a vacant room streaming the session and watched what was going on at a distance.
Late last night, as things tend to go for me, I encountered a great reference on how to blog a conference. Perhaps if things go a little slow during one of today’s sessions, I may open the pdf the authors provide and see what I should be doing.
Cindy is also attending the conference. I guess this is a perk of us both working in the same field. When I remarked to her about the participation from distant places, she speculated that some folks must be coming up on their tenure decision. And she says that I am a cynic. Whatever the explanation, many of the topics look interesting and perhaps I will find something specific to write about in a later post (after I learn about blogging a conference).
Twice a week I walk across campus to teach Intro Psych in the Ed College’s large lecture classroom. Each trip I walk down the hallway toward the classroom and I walk past a distribution site for the NY Times. I always notice how many copies are available. Now, understand that I make this trip in the afternoon and the copies of the paper are free for the taking. I don’t know how many copies are available at the beginning of the day, but it always seems to me that a very large number of copies are left.
For some reason I have becone preoccupied with why it takes so long to get rid of free copies of the paper. Perhaps I am interested because I recently wrote a post announcing the availability of free online access to the paper. I guess I do not understand what the NY Times hoped to accomplish by giving away copies of the paper. Perhaps there was an assumption that there was an untapped market in North Dakota and students who got hooked on the paper would purchase it when they leave school. My daily unofficial observation would seem to indicate that a different approach may be required. Perhaps the Times should include a page of local news – something like the USA Today does when it offers a paragraph of news for each state. Of course, I don’t know if students who bother to pick up a free copy of a local paper either. Maybe the digital natives don’t read content in hard copy. I guess that might explain the performance of students on my last exam.
I did learn from my reading of the paper that there is a growing dispute over the unsanctioned use of images posted to Flickr. You don’t have to buy or even pick up a free copy of the paper to read this article – it is available online.
Here is a new take on the the role of social networking and the politicial process. Myspace/MTV are sponsoring a series of presidential candidate dialogues. On different scheduled dates, individual candidates respond to questions in real time – there is no debate (see YouTube debate).
An interesting feature is the opportunity to participate by agreeing/disagreeing with stated positions. In the Read/WriteWeb blog analysis, it sounds like a good idea, but those who respond tend to agree with nearly all statements. Perhaps we are only willing to watch our favorite candidates. A debate at least exposes viewers to multiple candidates.
I have long been a Ken Burns fan. I own his “jazz” series and is the type of material that I will watch every six months or so.
His new documentary, The War, examines the WWII from the perspective of 4 communities (one in Minnesota) and has been playing on PBS this week. Burns and PBS offer some great resources related to the program – one component of this site offers resources for educators.
My father was stationed in the south pacific during the war as a radar operator. When I was a kid, I found an old radio in the attic that could search the ham radio frequencies. Dad knew Morse code from his military days and he would sit in the bedroom with me and write down the morse code conversations I would find. I remember he always printed in capital letters when he did this and this was not the way he normally wrote.
The images in the Burns videos made me remember my dad. A big personal regret I have had in the last few years was that I had basically ruined a large collection of negatives my dad had brought back from the war. I became aware of the lost potential of these negatives when Cindy was working on her history project and the Burns material reminded me again. My dad was an amateur photographer and also a bit of an entrepeneur. He had a 620 camera and took black and white pictures. A 620 negative is large enough to contact print (it is about the size of a snapshot and you don’t need an enlarger). He took pictures and sold small collections to his buddies so they could send pictures home. There was a shoe box full of these pictures in the attic (I did spend a good deal of time exploring the stuff in the attic.). My dad helped me take and develop pictures and I also printed some of his pictures from the war. I was not particularly careful and he did not put a lot of personal value on the negatives. Over time the collection was kind of depleted and somehow disappeared. What a resource the collection would be now!
We worry about leaving our kids money. That was the way my dad was. You can always make more money. Once the pictures are gone, they are gone forever.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
