Getting with the Program

Learning to Podcast

Being a visual person (and a deaf educator), I don't always tune in to technologies and teaching tools that focus primarily on audio format. Up to now I've paid little attention to the whole podcasting phenom, but now that iPods and other handhelds have progressed to the point that video is not only feasible, but relatively easy to produce, I'm exploring the process of creating video podcasts as an educational tool. I'm also considering vlogs and video podcasts as a means of sharing those vlogs in a more portable format than simply posting them to YouTube.

One of the projects I'm working on is a plan to help students enhance their formal writing skills in preparation for the FCAT Florida Writes assessment by developing their own video podcasts. Planning, creating, and filming a script for one requires the same skills as the kind of writing called for the test. The students I'll be working with attend a boarding school so this format seems ideal in terms of being able to more easily share students' work with their friends and family members outside of school. The idea of creating a podcast is also more motivating for students than just sitting and writing practice essays in a copy book, and given the fact that students spoken expressive language tends to be richer than their level of writing ability, it is my expectation that the resulting scripts will be of a higher quality than the work found in their old composition books.

So...I've been learning to use the tools for creating a video podcast myself and now see even wider applications for them (and some other projects I'm working on) that I might've previously doubted just from reading books and research articles. I've had my ups and downs, and the first one I created is seriously amateurish and a bit embarrassing to look at now, but I think I've got it down.

On a trip to Costa Rica, I visited the Country Day School in San Jose, an international school serving local Costa Ricans and expats from around the globe. Steve Katz, the tech teacher there, has been doing some really cool things with his students that have helped to inspire me to get with the program and open up this form of communication and expression to the teachers and students I'll be working with. The students at CDS have their own show covering school news topics and life in SJ.

That's the beautiful thing about podcasting, as Lee Lefever points out: everyone can have their own show - not as a broadcast, but as a podcast. I don't think I'm up for my own show just yet, but I do have a lot to say about things and this just might be one more way for the little font in my head to bubble forth...courtesy of RSS.

Putting the Educational in Educational Technology

For the last year, I've been teaching EME 2040, Introduction to Educational Technology at the University of Florida. The sections I teach are blended, that is my students have a lab period each week with me and then complete the rest of the course online using the Moodle LMS. I've finally been given the "go ahead" to revamp the course and turn it on its head whereas for the last year I've been working with a curriculum designed by others that, to me, didn't really make a lot of sense.

So now the big question is how to define the course (other than just by the standards set forth by the DOE as it is a teacher prep course) and what exactly is educational technology and what tools should we be giving these students. Although 2040 is in the College of Education, the majority of students come from other colleges within the university as it is cross-listed and known as an "easy" alternative to a "real" computer course in the computer science department. With this in mind, I think it is essential to help students understand that the tools we're considering and talking about are applicable across the disciplines. While, in the past, we have focused on using Dreamweaver and Photoshop and helping students understand how they could use them in their future careers. Philosophically, I am pleased to have the opportunity to move the curriculum towards understanding the purpose of tools and programs rather than specific programs themselves.

With today's economy and record cuts to school budgets, teachers are increasingly being demanded to be resourceful. I'm excited about the possibility of bringing open source and web apps to the masses. I'm hoping that this shift in content and philosophy will cement for students that technology is ever changing and how to teach with technology rather than educating about a specific technology. Possibilities....possibilities...

R.I.P. Walter Cronkite

I don't know if anyone saw the news this week, but I'd like to take a moment to note the passing of a great American, Walter Cronkite. Cronkite, while not the first TV news anchor, defined the role and what we expect in a network news anchor. Beginning his career in radio in WWII and later moving into television, Cronkite narrated the timeline of the lives of the Baby Boomer generation, from the early days of the space program to the civil rights movement to the Kennedy assasinations to Vietnam to Watergate to the Iran Hostage Crisis. Cronkite brought us man's first steps on the moon and the Beatles' first steps in America. He helped Middle Americans understand complex issues with footage from foreign lands that previously had been reduced to inches below the fold. Although he officially retired in 1980, Cronkite continued to appear periodically on CBS News, notably appearing in the aftermath of 9/11.

We don't often think about the power of the news as an educational tool but, until the advent of 24-hour cable news and the Internet, the news was the primary means of informing the masses about the world beyond their driveways.

So profound was Cronkite's hold on the American people that he was called "the most trusted man in America" and LBJ said, after a critical opinion piece by Cronkite, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America" and decided not to seek reelection. He was Uncle Walter, seen as one of the few people who would give it to us straight in an era where the government was most definitely not to be trusted and fewer sunshine laws existed. In his folksy yet authoritative way, he shaped the way America views television news and what we expect of our reporters and anchors. He was more than just a newsman, he was an icon, and, for many of us, an accent to childhood memories of family dinners and discussions always with his voice in the background. From Uncle Walter I learned that the world was bigger than my hometown.

Walter Cronkite will be missed but his legacy is with us in every newscast every day. "And that's the way it is...."

The End of an Era - The Death of Geocities

I was saddened to get an email last night announcing the end of Geocities. For those not in the know (or too young to remember), Geocities was the first free hosting service that made it possible for absolutely anyone to create their own website. Not only could you upload your own HTML files, but it had a WYSIWYG editor that you let users create web pages with no knowledge of HTML whatsoever. Geocities grouped users' pages into communities (cities) that were grouped by themes or interests and visitors could easily jump around between other sites/pages within all of Geocities. It was also one of the first large sites to have ads running down the right hand side of the screen although you could turn them off.

Geocities was eventually bought out by Yahoo! and now, finally, they are moving over to Yahoo's own hosting service at a charge of $4.99/month. Pages that aren't switched over to the new service or another hosting site will see their digital doom in October, 2009.

With the advent of MySpace and Facebook and other professional networking sites like LinkedIn, many people use them as their primary web presence and don't feel the need to develop their own standalone site. The benefit of networking sites is the more people can find your information more quickly.

Still, it is with a sense of nostalgia and a bit of sadness that I bid farewell to my old friend, Geocities. Now if I could just remember the password to go get my old pages off their server...

Blogs, Vlogs, & Tech Shaping a Culture

My background is in the Deaf community and using American Sign Language. When I was younger, Deaf people congregated at weekly Deaf Club meetings to socialize and experience a sense of community. At these events, people would play Dingo (deaf bingo) and watching a captioned movie was a treat. The Deaf Club was the hub of the Deaf community. In those days few people even had a TDD for using the telephone and there were no relay services or means for Deaf people to use the telephone.

Since then...WOW!...things have changed! Most shows are on TV are closed captioned and DVDs are subtitled (though the special features aren't), relay services are abundant including videophone relay, and cellphones and especially the Sidekick and Blackberry make communication easy and instant. These leaps in technology have meant the demise of the Deaf club and a Deaf Diaspora as people are no longer dependent on their immediate community for support. And just like in English, technology has led to the development of new signs/words in the ASL lexicon.

Ok, background info aside, a new development that I'm interested in is the evolution of the BLOG to the VLOG, or video blog. The Deaf community is rapidly picking up on them and using them to share their views and ideas just like bloggers do. I've been looking at VLOGs by Deaf people to teach other Deaf people how to do it as an interesting instructional design example. English is not native and difficult for a large majority of the Deaf community so being able to VLOG in ASL allows them to be more expressive than if they had to negotiate written English. Just a couple of weeks ago there was actually a symposium in California about Deaf blogs and vlogs.

I wanted to share a video for you and had picked an example of a deaf person explaining how to create a vlog, but I couldn't find one that was captioned so I chose one of the commentaries/reactions about the symposium itself. Like most things in the Deaf community, things tend render themselves into political issues on different sides of a linguistic fence.

I Could've Stayed Home, or, Will the virtual replace the face-to-face?

A little over a year ago, I was faced with the really tough decision of whether to enroll in an online Ed.D. program or uproot my whole life to pursue a face-to-face Ph.D. program. While it takes me forever to order a sandwich, I, somewhat rashly, made the decision to move across the state to a university and a town that I literally knew nothing about other than its approximate location. While my experience academically has been a positive one for the most part, I wonder at the fact that so many resources have been poured into the online Ed.D. program that the majority of my major-field courses have been online with those very online program students. In talking with the *extremely* few students in my program who are actually in the on-campus program, I've been prompted to wonder what will happen to the F2F program as the online counterpart continues to grow and what impact that will have on the remaining F2F students. I mean, why do what I did and uproot one's life when one could simply stay home and continue their career while earning their degree online at the same time? True, there are benefits to a F2F program such as opportunities to teach and get in on research projects and there is much to be learned in incidental discussions with fellow students and the faculty; that informal learning that takes place standing around in hallways or passing by open office doors. That said, the F2F community is shrinking as fewer candidates are applying for the F2F program and more are enrolling in the online program. What community will we have left? Will people continue to apply for F2F programs given the convenience and availability of online ones? There could be any number of additional factors to consider such as the struggling economy, rising tuition, and reduced number of available faculty jobs for Ph.D. grads for the decrease in applicants overall as well as a perceived difference in purpose between the Ed.D. and the Ph.D. degrees. However, of the remaining F2F candidates (all 3 of us), we would be equally served by either degree program given our stated individual goals for the future which are not generally focused on careers in academia. I don't want it to sound like I'm dissatisfied with the quality of my current program of study, because I'm not, but I do wonder (with a possible research topic in the back of my mind) what the impact is on those of us in the F2F program and on the F2F program itself long term.

Now, universities have always led the way in distance and online education ahead of K-12 schools. The number of K-12 courses offered online is increasing, and it is my presumption that based on sheer numbers that F2F K-12 students will never suffer at the expense of online K-12 programs, but is it possible that one day DE enrollments will outnumber F2F students?

With all of this in mind, it is insufferably hot in this inland university town and the people next door are rather loud given the paper-thin walls of my apartment and I start to miss the cool breezes of my seaside hometown, the solitude of living in my very own house with a yard big enough to buffer even the rowdiest of neighbors, the steady income of my well-established former career, and the ready wi-fi access from beachfront hotels so that one can surf and surf the web from the same sun lounge and I think to myself, "I could've stayed home."

Real Life, Second Life - Potentials for Real Learning in Virtual Worlds

I've finally been given a golden ticket and granted the privilege to a facility as wondrous as anything Willy Wonka could come up with: the University of Florida's Digital Worlds Institute labs. In the lab, I've seen demonstrations of the virtual worlds that are being built at UF and been granted access to the Digital Worlds Island in Second Life. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Second Life is a virtual world where users can build their own islands, trade in virtual commodities for Linden dollars which can be exchanged for U.S. dollars, and interact with others through the use of virtual personae, or avatars. While my past experience in SL has been primarily aimless wandering around *you can FLY* and the odd webinar or panel discussion on ISTE Island. While SL is a bit too virtual for me, personally, and feels video game-ish, I can see the potential for it as a means for people to connect with those that they never would have the opportunity to in RL, or real life. This is especially true in terms of learning foreign languages, visiting virtual museums and virtual replicas of landmarks and historical sites, and holding virtual meetings to collaborate in learning and work product. While not Second Life itself, this concept was an impetus for my current research track; I saw the trend of corporate meetings moving increasingly to online webinars and netmeetings and the increase in K-12 courses offered online. It seemed to me that online learning and virtual schooling (whether in a virtual world or not) is the wave of the present and holds the potential to bring educational opportunities to millions who would not otherwise have access to them as well as the potential for distance and online education to serve as a powerful tool for international development. So...while SL does feel like an overgrown video game, it does, in actuality, have the potential to be a powerful learning tool to impact people in their real lives.

As an aside, I searched and could find no SL islands related to deafness or sign language even though Vcom3D was working on signing avatars that could translate text to ASL as far back as 1997. Since then, the signing avatars have been refined and their linguistic accuracy improved but they still haven't really caught on other than in a few schools around the country that use them in a limited capacity in literacy classrooms. It seems that while they were working on these elaborate avatars as a potential communication aid, cellphone technology surpassed it and simple text messaging capabilities have made the Sidekick and Blackberry the choice of hundreds of thousands of otherwise visual communicators.