education building

I was pleased to see the new online tv series ‘Your Education Matters‘ launched with much acclaim while I was away on vacation in Thailand. Produced with the exceptional talents of the ‘media folks‘ here in the LIDC, in collaboration with the Faculty of Education.

‘Your Education Matters‘ TV Program

Together with Faculty of Education, Media Design is producing a television program called “Your Education Matters“. It is the only TV program in BC dedicated to addressing education issues beyond the headlines. Hosted by Dr. Paul Shaker, Dean of Education at SFU, the program provides insight and opinions from practitioners and scholars on education issues that matter for parents, students, educators and policy makers alike. Your Education Matters will air a new episode with a new topic monthly and rebroadcasts three times a week on Shaw TV Cable 4: Mondays 6:30 pm – 7:00 pm, Sundays 9:00 am – 9:30 am and 7:00 pm – 7:30 pm

“We have created this program to provide insights and opinions from practitioners and scholars on education issues that matter for parents, students, educators and policy makers alike,” said Dr. Paul Shaker who will host the new program. “Our guests are people who know the key issues and who can help our viewers be prepared to actively participate in making the education experience a successful one for learners today and in the future.”

What I was even more pleased to see, is that along with the televised broadcasts, that they made the videos available online using the social video sharing site VIMEO. Of course, I had to immediately sign up for an account and add SFU education as my first contact. Vimeo seems fun! =) Among the very simple but useful features it boasts (besides your typical social networking stuff) is the ability…

to “Like” a video thereby recommending it to your other contacts,

to ‘Embed‘ a video onto your own blog or website much like you can do with YouTube (excpet i cant right now due to some unfortunate bugs in my Wordpress installation. )

or to add an ‘RSS feed‘ of a members vids, which will allow people to subscribe to SFU Education videos using Google Reader or Bloglines or whatever and keep up on the latest SFU education videos from the comfort of their aggregator.

Now, the LIDC has a bit of history with video, particularly webcasts and maintains an extensive archive of videos produced within the department. As well, it has been involved in the SFU TV project in collaboration with Media and PR, but each of these has lacked the extent of features and user experience that comes with a full fledged ‘Web 2.0‘ application such as VIMEO. I for instance like to post videos on my own blog (when i ca) and although this is possible with videos from the archive, there is no GUI support for it, and it in fact requires some funny scripting to make it work. Clearly, this new initiative shows how the third Party sites can be used to increase the reach of media produced at the university, as well as open up access to ‘amateur’ media producers who want to enrich their website content. The revolution continues!

Following up yesterday on a smaller talk I did a few weeks back on tagging for university web applications, I was fortunate to be able to give a full one hour seminar on tagging for educators in SCoPE. Quite a hot topic these days what with all the Web 2.0 apps flying around out there, this presentation was part of a larger 3 week seminar on Social media in education. How tags can be used in an educational context was the main focus of the session which you should be able to listen to the full recording of here, via the elluminate service we used to record it. There was some great discussion questions and a few new services emerged on the radar that deserve some linkage.

Scholar

Blackboard Scholar is built right into the Blackboard Learning System, for easy integration of relevant, reliable resources and dynamic streams from Scholar, directly into the course.

Peerworks

Peerworks is an open source project that is building content classification tools to help online browsing, collaboration, and social discovery.

Both of these look to be useful applications for educators and both of them incorporate tagging into the user experience. It was also fun to share with educators from around the world, and meet some new people from my own back yard. One of the participants in fact resides a stones throw from my own office, the blog Data Designs from from Therese Weel’s was a welcome addition to my RSS reader. Always good to know there are fellow bloggers right here at SFU. (and yes, one post per month still allows me to call myself a blogger)

saw a poster for this up here today, PUNK - Words, music, politics, influence

http://www.sfu.ca/punkconference/

North America’s first international scholarly conference on punk will be held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, on April 24-26, 2008. The conference will be held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre, located in downtown Vancouver, close to historic Gastown and the original site of Vancouver’s first punk club, the Smiling Buddha. The conference will help promote the establishment of a punk archive at SFU’s Bennett Library

Its amazing that I didn’t come across this sooner, but I was pleased to see the conference organizers (Paul Budra and Stephen Ogden) are using a blog as the main point of contact for web communication.

http://blogs.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/punk

The SFU library has been running a number of blogs for awhile using b2evolution.net , which seem to be working well. This one will definitely be worth keeping an eye on over the coming months as preparation heats up. I may even consider a contribution on the topic of my masters thesis or something, particularly if I can get a few of my old cohorts together for another kick at the speakers. fuckinhellya!

The bright folks up in the SFU library, have been busy working away behind the scenes on an interesting new web application for searching academic journals. They call it “e-Journals“.  The thing that caught my attention (Thanks Sandra W.) was their implementation of tagging as a means to organize the content.  Oh sure, they use a traditional classification scheme as well, but have added the ability to use tags for those ‘hard to classify journals’ .  I still dont know much about this yet but I am very eager to learn more!

I led a brown bag discussion on the topic of tagging today with some of my illustrious colleagues from the university, which is how I even came to discover this site. Hopefully we will see more sites around here that will be able to leverage this powerful Web 2.0 feature.  If you know of any, let me know or leave a note on the wiki.

It is so rare that we get to do a podcast in the LIDC that I am pleased to post a link to this exceptional series on Voice and Presentation Skills from our in-house Teaching Enhancement Specialist, Sarah Louise Turner. Produced as a companion to the Voice and Presentation Skills Workshop (which will be running again in the fall,) Sarah covers the essentials of breath work and presentation technique in this easy to listen to, six-part series which you can subscribe to in itunes. What was so nice about setting this up was the ease with which it was done. Of course working with some finely recorded, original audio didnt hurt either, but once those were in place it was simple matter of uploading them to a local server, and then linking to them from the Voicewerx Blog that Sarah has also set up and maintains. Pointing this blogs RSS feed to Feedburner, (now owned by google excuse me?!) a site that processes the feed into its final podcasty form and provides the necessary links, formatting etc. yay!  As far as the production goes, I think it still needs a bumper, with some familiar music that could be used to open every episode, and perhaps a bit more of an informal introduction from the hosts, but listening to these audio clips will inspire you to use your voice in ways you have never thought of before.

Be sure to check it out and come back for more as I expect this site to have some very interesting updates in the months ahead.

sustainability at SFU that is. I have long paid lip service to the idea and general concepts behind of sustainability, but besides trying to be a good recycler, and use my own coffee mug when I get take-out americanos (which I suck at doing most of the time), I have done very little to attempt to decrease my own ecological footprint on the planet, or help others decrease theirs. What with all the extra time and energy i seem to have on my hands these days, I was receptive to the call from Sustainable SFU to complete a survey they are conducting to analyze the viability of a Farmers market at SFU.

The SFU Local Food Project in collaboration with students from the Semester in Dialogue program would like to hear what you think about the possibility of a farmers market at SFU! We know your time is valuable so if you are able to participate we would like to enter you in a draw for a free cookbook. Please follow this link to participate in the survey http://websurvey.sfu.ca/survey/4817388 and then follow the directions for the draw entry.

Thought I would at least post the link to survey, (having already filled it out myself) but am thinking about volunteering with this group as they seem to be looking for a broad assortment of skills and talent. Their site is interesting , although as an info nerd I notice the lack of an RSS feed for their news and events right away. They do provide a couple of handy resources. a nice looking 2007 Local Food Calendar, which you can print out, (new recipes every month) and a green practices guide which I plan to look over.

I know some of my other web 2.0 brothers and sisters have been big in this area for awhile now, so i’m off to troll through my links for the best of the best eco websites and organizations out there. What factors make a kickass and eco-friendly website/community?

This morning on the CBC’s early edition, Rick interviewed Qixing Zheng, “Microsoft Canada’s first User Experience Advisor“. I was surprised they were doing such an interview in the first place, but more so that she is M. Canada’s FIRST user experience professional. I guess this responsibility has, until now been directed from the mothership or something. Regardless, it gave me some hope that my own role (as ‘experience designer‘ for several years now) here in the LIDC may become a little more recognized and understood. Of course it also begs the question, is such a position even needed at a university? A question I will attempt to tackle in future posts here.

The announcement was made back in March on the “User Experience Connection“, and I was interested to learn that Qixing is a masters graduate from UBC in Human Computer Interaction. I thought the interview went fairly well and I appreciated her explanation of what the role of the user experience professional is all about (even Ricki seemed to get it).  Her website states that her passion in this area is

…deeply rooted in helping people to improve their user experiences with the technology they rely on everyday. To me, a good user experience is simple, consistent, pleasing, and reliable.

I have been trying to update my profile page on the wiki we use in the LIDC (here, but soon maybe here), with a small blurb about my approach to creating better user experiences on SFU websites, and the projects I have worked on.  So far I’d say its still in an early draft form, but I look forward to articulating what I try to do here, especially in light of the recent news.

A great video on joho blog today, will kick off a new category for education.building on, organization. While discussing his new book Everything Is Miscellaneous, the guru of the topic goes off a bit on his public school system. Fortunately, I had the time to watch the whole thing and pulled out a great quote. He describes the way he sees his own kids using the web to do homework, and the incongruence with the testing methods they are evaluated on.

“..and they are doing their homework together of course they are, but they’re getting graded individually, and they’re getting tested more and more and more. They separate the tables, they all face forward and they get their little books they write down what they know as individuals.

This is a radically different view of knowledge. What they are being told is, to ‘know is to be equal’. I mean this is an old rant right but it’s getting worse. They are being told that ‘to know’ is have content shoved into your head and be able to write down answers, whereas they’re doing the right thing online outside of the view of teachers, who think they are doing their homework by themselves, they’re not. They’re learning socially.” timecode 22:28 - 23:05

If you keep listening from that point, he responds a bit to the issue of testing and suggests ways that social software may be able to create new ways of teaching and learning.
This software will be a new focus here, particularly in the area of organization. For digital resources to be useful for academics, some new proficiencies in managing these assets are needed such as tagging, and the capability to navigate between the many formats information can be displayed in and converted to.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to be part of a small usability study which was trying to gather some information from a very small sample of SFU students (only 17 actually). I was surprised MySpace didn’t rank higher in the participants responses to general social software activities with only 2 students reporting general use of the site. Facebook on the other hand, seemed to have wide recognition and use with 8 people saying they used it regularly or a lot. Some students admitted that they used it a little TOO much in fact.

Although rather paltry, my results do tend to reflect those found at eMarketer in their recently published survey for the top websites used amongst the college going demographic.

I thought it was interesting that of all the sites they deemed their ‘favorite’, only one, (wikipedia) could be considered educational, or at least seen to be usable in an educational context. So I thought I’d post the Top Web Tools for College students list from NextPath.

Maybe next year some more of these sites will be among students favs. (yea of course wikipedia is in there.)

1) Book Finder: Over a year you can end up spending thousands of dollars on books. I am one of those poor students who struggles for money, so the less I pay for books, the better. Book Finder is a neat site/tool that allows you to compare prices on more than 125 million books for sale from 4,000 sellers. So there’s no need to go to Amazon, Half.com and all the other book sites when Book Finder can search them for you.

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2) MynoteIT: If you’re a real organization freak—and by that I mean someone who irons underwear—you’ll love this app. Like the Google suite, you’ll have everything at your fingertips. But, and this is a big plus, it’s just for college students. Form online class groups, share, edit and search your class notes, plan your assignments with your calendar, and get things done with your task list.

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3) Ottobib: Don’t you just hate making those bibliography pages? Although they look really simple, they can drain a lot of time out of you when you have more than 20 sources. Ottobib is a simple bibliography tool that allows you to enter multiple ISBN numbers at a time and retrieve the bibliographies in APA, MLA, or Chicago format.

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4) Google Docs: Every semester it always seems that I have group projects. I use Google Docs heavily for collaboration work. I’ve had multiple papers with a partner, and with Google Docs I just give him/her editing ability on a particular document and we can write the paper at the same time while talking on AIM.

5) Tada List: Scatterbrained? Disorganized? If you never can remember what homework assignments you have, Tada List will do it for you. It will help you keep track of whatever it is that you need to do and easily is accessible from any computer, wherever you are.You can create as many “to do” lists as you like, such as “homework,” “projects,” or whatnot, and then track your items via RSS. Also, for a step up try Backpack. It manages your tasks, but also allows you to set up pages to store important files, photos and the like.

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6) Meebo: I am one of those tech geeks who is a computer science major, which means I have computers in a lot of my classes. I usually get bored because my teachers are slow, so I like to go online and chat with friends to keep up-to-date on all the latest things going around school, such as parties. Instead of installing chat software every time I go to class, I use Meebo. Meebo is an online instant messaging software where you can chat with others through AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and Gtalk.

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7) Wikipedia: Although Wikipedia technically is not a tool, it’s worth mentioning. If you have to do a term paper, Wikipedia is a great resource to get your information. I would not rely on Wikipedia by itself, but it is a great place to get basic information as well as find links to other sites that discuss the topic of your term paper.

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Zoho Show: Everyone I know who goes through college has to do a PowerPoint presentation sometime in their life. Some people like to use Microsoft PowerPoint, but I am not one of those guys. With Zoho Show I can edit, import, create and publish PowerPoint presentations online.

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9) Google Reader: Talk about information. One of the main reasons I am in college is to learn, but there is so much knowledge out there that it is just hard to keep track. With Google Reader I can easily keep up-to-date on the latest news.

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10) Del.icio.us: This social bookmarking site allows you to have all your bookmarks in one place and to share them with other people. The advantage to this site is that I can access my bookmarks on ANY computer. I Del.icio.us all of my college courses’ Web sites and tag them with the course name and semester date (i.e. gatech and spring07).