wrap-up

What started with a request to come and talk with instructors about educational technology and learning management systems has turned out to be a great information gathering, networking and community-building 48 hours. So many good people working on so many good things. Building the relationships and continuing the communication can only help everyone. Community is the platform. Thanks to everyone who helped this happen, the real people, as well as Mr. Twitter, and Wendy, my GPS. Good to see that technology can play a real role in making connections and sharing knowledge.

choicebot

Last stop was a quick meeting with Nick from Choicebot. Well researched, well developed software to help people make the best possible decision, least amount of effort. Based on the idea that having the information is one thing, now we need to deal with it. Starting to look at using the software in an educational setting, getting students to create the framework to use Choicebot, and think about how decisions are made, how people define criteria and place value to make informed, good decisions.

carletonu

Met with Patrick from Carleton University’s Educational Development Centre. He’s responsible for all the edtech at Carleton, including CUTV, distance/flexible learning initiatives, clickers, and their LMS (Blackboard CE 8). Very similar issues, challenges, opportunities with hybrid/blended course delivery, frustration with the LMS. Point: LMSes need to be simple, reliable and fast. They need to integrate with existing systems and be expandable. Patrick leads a LMS task force at Carleton, we’ll continue the conversation.

“Education is a slow moving supertanker, and there’s lots of icebergs around”

We swapped stories about ePortfolio initiatives. He noted (rightfully) that in architecture and engineering that paper-based ePs were still important. Carleton has small first-year seminars, similar to UofG where ePs could play a role, and a Arts One cohort program where there might be some application for an eP.

Question: how can we get instructors turned on to web 2.0/new web/user-generated/participatory media? HOW?

Carleton has a 500 clickers that they loan out to instructors who might be interested in starting to use with their class to get their feet wet. Good model.

Patrick pointed me to eduroam, enabling staff and faculty from member institutions to connect while at other institutions. Good idea. Will have to talk with folks at Guelph about this.

travelpod

Clayton, partner of a friend (it’s a small world), is a developer for travelpod. Travelpod is a free travel blog that lets you chart your trips on a map, share unlimited photos and videos, and stay in touch while you travel.

Good looking tool. Talked briefly re: the way travelpod aggregates posts to display a multi-author view of a destination or trip. Links to experiential learning and exchange semester/travel abroad programs? I dunno…

chide.it

I met up with Aydin from chide.it and talked about their tools. Fluid Survey, built with Jango, is a fully fuctional and pretty darn slick online survey tool.

ReviewRoom allows a group of reviewers to collaborate and decide on the status of applications submitted into the system, organizing application management and decision making.

The concepts behind Fluid Review have great potential in an educational setting, allowing for review of documents (within a group, between students and instructors, within a reflective ePortfolio, etc. There’s some good integration between the survey and the review tools as well. Plans to tell D2L about these folks, and to bring it to the attention of the PEAR dev team as well. Very impressed.

Kemptville Campus, University of Guelph

beautiful day…look at the photostream on the right for some images.

I did 2 information sessions at Kemptville this morning. Instructors and staff from 3 regional campuses of UofGuelph were there. Some familiar faces from my work with DE and CE courses at Guelph.

A couple notes:
- Degree and Diploma courses will all be in Colleague for Fall 2009
- Aldred is interested in sites. They haven’t done too much (any?) in the past. We’ll have to get D2L’s french language pack installed, and think about documentation and support as well as training.
- Lots of interest. Many of them want to get started right away. Will have to send out information about the training sessions and other links.
- Concerns over copyright, plagiarism, sharing logins, protecting content within the site.
- Interest in non-course (project/resource) sites.
- Should plan for webinars and other training opportunities over next year.
- Arrange for training opportunities to piggyback on TLI, target Ridgetown and Kemptville and Aldred participants!

I’m in Kemptville

the "gentleman's" room

The Anthony House, circa 1844

http://www.bbcanada.com/9085.html

Meeting with uottawa

Met with Richard Pinet, Alain Erdmer, and Michel Marcheterre from Teaching and Learning Support Service. Centre for eLearning & Centre for Mediated Teaching and Learning.

They’re running Blackboard Vista for all their online courseware, and are about to start a LMS review. Financial considerations, support considerations. We traded Blackboard (lack of) response time stories.

Also talked about ePortfolios. uottawa is using eP for experiential learning courses, as well as occupational therapy coop courses. They have been using iwebfolio (links with Banner) and Vista eP. We chatted about the potential use in project management certification courses, clinical studies, nutrition, education, etc. Great links with accreditation and competency-based programs.

Interesting issue raised about feedback on presentations and artifacts being made public (hadn’t thought of that before). We talked about issues of support, ownership, (ex)portability, longevity. All million-dollar questions.

Agreed to continue the conversation around LMSes and ePortfolios. Maybe we can collaborate on a project in the future. Richard is completing a survey of first year student use of technology at uottawa. I’d like to see the results, and do something similar at UofG.

Will have to look up these companies

And maybe meet up on another trip:

http://www.coursepark.com/, and
http://www.dualcode.com/

Ottawa?

I’m headed to Ottawa from April 28 to April 30, 2009. I have some training workshops to lead (note to self, start planning presentation), some meetings at University of Ottawa and Carleton University.

I’ve also managed to set up meetings with Aydin from http://Chide.it, and Nick from http://www.choicebot.com/.

Not all work though, let’s hope.

Plans to visit:

• Museum of Civilization (NOT the kid’s area, for a change)
• The Manx
• mec
• National Arts Centre
• Kehla Design

…and visit some folks too.

Will be posting stuff here regularly.