Author Archives: Matt Crosslin

About Matt Crosslin

I have been involved in education since 1994. I created my first web page in 2000 - which I used to deliver supplemental materials to an 8th grade Science class I was teaching at that time. I have been involved in distance education in some way ever since then. In March 2007 I started EduGeekJournal.com, an online community promoting educational technology. Currently, I work as an Instructional Designer for the UTA Center for Distance Education. I also adjunct a few online instructional design classes for UT Brownsville. I even earned my Master's degree online - so I have looked at Online Learning from all perspectives (student, instructor, designer, admin).

For the One Millionth Time, This is NOT Online Learning…

Leave a reply

The Chronicle boldly proclaimed today that “Online Learning May Slightly Hurt Student Performance.” How do they know this? A “study found that students who watched lectures online instead of attending in-person classes performed slightly worse in the course over all.”

That sound you hear is the collective world of EduGeeks around the world firmly planting their palm to their fore head. Online lectures are ten times as boring as the face-to-face version, so no wonder they performed so bad.

(that last statement is based on the results of my scientific study of the volume of snores originating from a few online lecture video based courses I know of)

One of the authors even had this to say: “It’s limited evidence, but I think it’s the highest-quality evidence that’s available.”

Sorry, but it is not anywhere near as good as the other evidence out there.  The previous analysis of online learning by the U.S. Department of Education (that this article mentions) actually looked at many different actual forms of online learning. Not the wanna-be online learning beast called video lectures.

The Best Place To Learn IS On The Web

Leave a reply

Much has been said recently about how the Web is making us more stupid. I blame Bing really – they said that humans are basically so dumb that we go on search overload if we can’t figure out a simple page of links.  I don’t feel “stupider” than I did before the Internet 🙂  Maybe I am just so ignorant that I don’t realize how dumb I am.

Finally, however, the New York Times brings some reality… and some actual science… into the debate with “The Defense of Computers, the Internet and Our Brains.”  My two favorite quotes:

“Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how ‘experience can change the brain.’ But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk.”

…and…

“It could be argued that the Web, which is the ultimate library of words, video, images, interactivity, sharing and conversation, is the quintessential place to learn.”

And thousands of EduGeek around the world then said… “amen”…

Edit: made some changes, just in case people didn’t get my use of humor with the word “stupider.”

HP Lets You Add Any Site to Augmented Reality

Leave a reply

Thanks in no small part to the iPhone 3GS, Augmented Reality is starting to grow in leaps and bounds.  Google and others are also helping this growth in many ways.  As I have blogged about in past posts (and many others around the web have also mentioned), the lines between the online world and the offline world are blurring.  Enter into this mix Gloe from HP.

Gloe is a new service that, among other things, allows you to connect any website to a particular location in real life.  When you are at a physical site, your mobile device can then pull up websites that were voted most relevant for that location.  Of course, all of the regular “social” buzz-functions are there – tagging, FaceBook connections, etc. Gloe is still pretty new in some areas, but as this article on ReadWriteWeb points out, even if some function doesn’t work that great – at least the idea behind the function is really interesting.

We may have to wait a good ten years before any educational site or LMS catches on to this, but I like the possibilities of using this for education. I am sure there are more than a few EduPunks that are already using this (if you know of some, please post in the comments).  I love thinking about how one could transfer learning from a desk at home to a mobile device in the real world.  Maybe you could send your students on a scavenger hunt for a place in your city that best relates to your topic, and then they use a mobile blog app to complete an assignment? Or maybe they have to search the tags in the city and find something that relates to the week’s topic? Art students could go paint somewhere, snap a photo of the picture, upload it to a blog, and then tag that blog post to the location.  Humanities students could interview people or take surveys, then post the results online, and then connect the results page to the location where they collected it.  Students could begin connecting research results to locations and maybe even map differences between neighborhoods.

Many possibilities… depending on where the technology takes us.

More Fun Bashing the LMS

Leave a reply

Clark Quinn has some great thoughts on “Why Bash the LMS“.  While the article is a bit more balanced than it might sound from the title, I still like that he calls out what needs to change:

“On principle, I want the best tool for each task.  The analogy is to the tradeoffs between a Swiss Army knife and a tool kit.  There will be orgs for which an all-singing all-dancing system make sense, as they can manage it, they can budget for it.  In general, however, I’d want the best tool for each job and a way to knit them together.  So I’d be inclined to couple an LMS with other tools, not assume I can get one that’s best in all it’s capabilities.”

Will The Internet Start Looking More Like the World, or the World Like the Internet?

Leave a reply

I was pondering future trends last week while watching the evening weather forecast.  Forecasting while watching a forecast?  Anyways… We were in for a possible round of severe weather that week. The news anchor put up a map of “storm spotters” – a network of people that would call in from their homes and tell what is happening in their area.

In other words, forecasting the weather is starting to incorporate crowd sourcing.

We have seen a giant push to get websites to work intuitively… and to even start thinking for us.  So on one hand – the Internet is starting to look more like the real world.  But I think even more often we are starting to see the world around us looking more and more like the Internet.  The powers that be are starting to see that there is power in crowd sourcing and social networking.  I wonder what real-life social networks we will see spring up next?

The real question for us is – can we use these ideas in education?  What if we took this weather stations ideas and applied them to a class? What if, instead of one large class, we broke that class down into smaller units based on geographic location.  Each smaller group forms a study group of sorts that watches issues related to the class subject in their area.  The small groups are loosely tied to one another in a way to share what they are learning about the subject.  The small groups would study local events or places. In this situation, the LMS would become more like the newscast – aggregating all of the input in one spot for everyone to benefit.

What if time and location became irrelevant for synchronous classes? What if you were grouped with a small group of people that lived near you when you sign up for a class, and then that group decided what day and time to meet for class?  The instructor would then send out assignments each week or maybe record a video for the group to work through. Maybe the instructor even met with each group.  then the groups send in their work to the class and the instructor aggregates all of the information coming in from each group and summarizes them for the entire class (which would essentially include all small groups no matter where they meet in the world).

Potentially, you could ave hundreds of students all meeting in a synchronous fashion, but all still in a way that fits their schedule.  This is, of course, another area where there is technology to do this… but we need one that is more specifically geared for educators.

Predicting the Future is a Risky Business

1 Reply

Part of my day job involves following trends and predicting what might happen in the future of online education.  Pretty risky business – I remember ten years ago when one article predicted that all colleges would one day have at least one class delivered online through AOL.  A-O-Who? Do they still exist?

But despite the potential for immense embarrassment, I still find looking to possible futures fascinating (can you guess what my favorite genre of entertainment is?).  I enjoy it so much that I wrote an article on what education could look like in 10 years, based on predictions of where technology is heading. The article is called “When the Future Finally Arrives: Web 2.0 Becomes Web 3.0” and it will be a chapter in a book called Web 2.0-based E-learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching

The great news is that chapter will be published next month. The bad news is that it took two years to get published, so a lot of what I say about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 sounds pretty dated.  This situation in itself exposes the weakness of publishing in traditional media. All of your cool, hip terms will become over-used cliches before your article gets printed.

I wish that I could just post the whole article here – I just proof-read it and I got pretty excited thinking about what the future could be like.  Some of the topics covered are:

  • Affordable media centers that have wide-screen, high definition, holographic, three-dimensional, multi-touch screen monitors, with cameras that can follow your movement to manipulate the display (like Minority Report) or respond to voice commands
  • Classes that easily transfer back and forth from synchronous to asynchronous.
  • Integrated systems – virtual worlds integrated with the web and each other, smart-phones integrated with desktops, etc.
  • Greater use of tags to organize information with more accuracy.
  • Better interaction between students and between the student and instructors.
  • And finally, of course, really cool technology like three dimensional printers and scanners.

Much of what I wrote on is technology-focused.  I realize that good pedagogy needs to come first in all educational situations… but if you think enough when you read it, you will see how I snuck a bunch of good pedagogy in there. If you do get to read it, I would recommend just skipping down to the section called “An Example of Online Learning 10 Years in the Future.” The rest of the stuff before that was just my attempt to sound scholarly and all that 🙂

That is to say – if you get to read it.  This is the other problem with traditional media: this booked is pretty darn expensive.  And I had to sign all my rights away to get it published, so I can put it on my blogs.  I can always let people that live near me read the “draft” version that I printed up for proof-reading.  Maybe the library will get a copy? Or maybe we should talk Pete into hosting a symposium on the future of online learning?

(Pete is probably getting tired of all my suggestions for symposiums and conferences and gatherings that I think he needs to host 🙂

A Brave New World Free of PowerPoints

Leave a reply

TxDLA was a great event this year. Harriet and I did our usual rebel-rousing there. Creating a session PowerPoint is usually difficult for us, since we usually don’t prepare any preset material.  We like to discuss, interact, and have some interesting conversations. But since most educators have to have something to look at, we usually put up a PowerPoint with pretty pictures (here is our old set of purty pics).

This year, Harriet created a Prezi presentation.  Prezi is pretty cool in that it can be very non-linear.  You can click and scroll around on the presentation as you like. This gives me hope for a future of conference presentations that are free of PowerPoint overkill.  Here is what I am thinking:

Someday, someone will come up with an iPad competitor that doesn’t have all of Steve Job’s weird hang-ups about Flash.  Prezi is built in Flash, so this is key. Oh, and it will run a real operating system instead of iPhoneOS.  Then they will create a cheap adapter that hooks this superior iPad product to projectors. Then the fun will begin.

Image if you could just create a map of all the concepts you want to discuss in a presentations in Prezi.  Then use this better iPad model to run the presentation.  Using the touch screen, you can scroll around and zoom in on concepts as they come up in the discussion. Non-linear, interactive presentations, controlled by a light, portable touchscreen pad.  That would make any session much more active and connected.

Also consider how this could change your classes. Or maybe this already exists and I am just not buying the right products?

Anyways, here is the Prezi from our TxDLA session (which is still linear – we didn’t want to blow too many gaskets in one session):

Outside the Box: Changing the Mindsets of Educational Zombies on Prezi

Next time I hope to go in to some thoughts about some of the discussions and feedback we had at the conference – it was some great stuff.

(this post was cross-posted at EduGeek Journal)

Creating a Virtual Presence For Your Students

4 Replies

At some point, I do plan on getting to blogging about the future of education and the new vision that is emerging in the Ed Tech filed for changes to the Learning Management System. But for now I am going to continue on with the practical ideas – things that current online instructors can use to add new life to existing classes, or things that new instructors can use to make their classes stand out from the pack. Most of the ideas I have shared so far are things that have been used in classes successfully at some point (even the EFGs are currently being used in one school). These ideas may not be for everyone, but they are some interesting ideas to dig in to. After I get all of these practical ideas out, then I will probably move on to the three C’s of social media usage in online learning (also known as “how you are using Web2.0 wrong and may not know it”) as well as hitting on some crazy ideas for the future.

For this post I want to get to something that I have used myself and that I know other bloggers here have used: creating a virtual office or classroom for your class.

If you back up several decades, before the dawn of the Internet, several researchers were investigating why some teachers were perceived by students as having better teaching styles than others. They found that there were at least two concepts that made the difference: immediacy and social presence.  (there are other words that get used somewhat interchangeably for these two, but I will stick with these because… well… I guess just because I like them the best).

Yes, I know that these are ancient terms by now. Immediacy and social presence are not as slick and cool to blog about today as they were a few years ago.  Maybe if I called it “Social Presence 2.0” it might sound cooler. But a good idea never gets old, so I still find these concepts are crucial to online success.

The surprising thing a few decades ago was that these things didn’t happen naturally in a face-to-face class. Just because instructors were in the room, that didn’t mean that a student felt they were accessible or approachable.  Instructors in face-to-face courses had to work to achieve these concepts, because it  was found that students preformed better when they felt a greater sense of immediacy and social presence.

Obviously, it was also found that this is true for online learning as well. But achieving these concepts in a disconnected asynchronous online course might prove more challenging. Thankfully, many people have stepped up through the years to prove that it is possible.

So how do you give students a sense that you are there and that you are aware that they are there also? Here are a few ideas:

  • One often overlooked way is by participating in class discussions yourself. Don’t just throw a question out there and let students hash it out. That seems basic, but so many professors miss that while just count responses for a participation score. Ask your students to expand on stuff they posted, or let them know that they never even really answered the question. But get in there and let them see your name every week.
  • If possible, turn on avatars. No, not the tall blue people with funky USB-ports for hair… I mean those small pictures that you can put next to forum and blog posts. Those don’t exist everywhere, but I encourage you to enable them wherever they do exist (and then ask students repeatedly to use them). Avatars help students inject their personality in to their work and the class as a whole. I also suggest that you encourage students to use an avatar that is actually a picture of themselves rather than a cute dog or their favorite movie star. That just makes it a bit more more realistic.
  • Create a virtual office online and use an embeddable chat tool for office hours. I know that many LMS programs have a chat tool now, but many of those are open rooms for anyone to come in. Not good for one-on-one conversation. Tools like Meebo can help you have a chat without giving away your AIM ID to students (or making you create a new one to maintain separation of personal and professional lives).  Meebo is basically an Instant Message chat tool. It gives you a web-based widget that lets you chat without installing a chat program. Chats happen through a web browser.  You can place the widget in an online “virtual office” and students can see when you are available for a chat session. (see my virtual office with Meebo here) You sign in on your end and keep that tab open on your browser when you are available.  Google Talk also has a similar widget if you prefer their service.
  • Speaking of Google, I am sure there are many ways to use Google Wave to connect with your students. Assuming, of course, they can all get invites.
  • One of the more radical ideas out there is to use a virtual world like Second Life to create a virtual office or classroom.  While many professors are doing just that, most of us don’t want to shell out money for a small space of virtual land in Second Life to set up virtual lounge chairs. The good news is that Second Life is not the only option – there are free, browser-based virtual worlds out there. One such option is Vivaty. Vivaty is a bit on the “dude, let’s party” side of the web, so take that in to consideration before jumping in feet first. While you get the benefits of a rich, free interactive environment online, the trade-off is that the FAQs tell you how Vivaty makes you look more cool (dude). That may not be a big deal to some, but I thought it needed to be pointed out. Nothing looks worse to students that a professor trying to look hip and cool. But if you avoid those trappings, it might be an interesting site to try out. Vivaty also lets you embed videos and picture slide shows in your room that you create, and that room can them be embedded in a web page.

I am sure there are many other ideas out there. What do other people use to create greater interaction and immediacy, especially in asynchronous formats?

The Web Is Changing: It’s Time to Dethrone the LMS!

Leave a reply

Do you know what bugs me about the Learning Management System (LMS)?

Well, a lot – but I will start with just two things. Whether you have noticed it or not, the web is constantly changing. Does anyone remember when they predicted that all colleges would have at least one class offered online through AOL?  What happened to that? LMS software updates have long production cycles – leading to out-dated “new” features appearing whenever a “new” version is released. The model is too slow to keep up with the web. Aren’t we on Web5.0 by now anyways?

Another thing that bugs me about the LMS is the name itself – one that is straight out of the business world from whence it sprung. Learning is to be managed? How about setting it free to explore and investigate?

Harriet Watkins and I (along with some covert input from Pete Smith) have been theorizing what a new LMS could look like if we turned the whole concept inside out.  What if we had Social Learning Environments instead of business-like management tools?  We have a few ideas that we are going to be presenting at the Texas Distance Learning Association’s 2010 conference in Houston – march 21-14th.

  • The Web Is Changing: It’s Time to Dethrone the LMS!

    Rapid changes in online learning concepts such as learning communities, personal learning environments, and complexity are driving a need to dismantle the learning management system as we know it. LMS systems and instructional design are in need of major overhauls and are in danger of becoming obsolete if they don”t evolve. Students need a place to connect and collaborate at complex levels rather than hide behind a “walled garden.” Two colleagues at UT Arlington will present a new paradigm as an innovative alternative to the existing LMS concept as we know it.

Come hear us talk about the challenges that LMS companies face, as well as where they could go in the future to address those problems. Be sure to stop by and say “Hi” if you do come.

If you haven’t been to TxDLA before, I would highly recommend checking it out. We’re going to be covering a wide range of topics from practical ideas to emerging technologies. There is going to be between 800-900 other distance learning practitioners gathered together to learn, network, and have a good time. Oh – and there will be Laser Tag this year 🙂

When Staleness Creeps In To Your Content

4 Replies

No matter how student-centered you are, no matter how often you tell others you are not a “teacher” but a “coach”, at some point you are going to be putting some content in to your course.  Even coaches will sit down their players and show them how to do things on a regular basis. Your students need to hear from you – and I don’t just mean a weekly due date reminder or an occasional “atta boy” comment.  Students need to hear your take on issues, facts, controversies, current events, trends, etc.

For most of us, a blog has been the extent of how we keep the content flowing while avoiding the creation of online textbook monuments.  Blogs are great for that, but they do have a few short-comings.  For one, they tend to be text heavy – which can grow stale after a while. You can insert images, videos, and audio clips in posts – but that takes a lot more time and effort to accomplish even after you have produced the media.  And even if you own a iPhone, blogging is much easier if you are sitting at a desk. Blogging on the go sounds great, but it is still pretty time-consuming.  If only there were a way to make this all easier…

Enter in to this equation Posterous.  Their tag line says it all: “The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.”  That is the basic idea – but here is low-down. You create an account, based on your email. Then you create an email and send it in. Posterous takes your email and turns it in to a blog post. The subject becomes your title and the body becomes your post. But that is not all. You can add tags with ease.  But you can also attach images, audio files, and videos – and Posterous will crunch it all for you and add it to your post. You can even designate where you want the pictures to go in the post.

But that is not where it stops. Posterous will then push that content out to any site you want it to:  Twitter, Picassa, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, and even a WordPress blog (there are even a few sites they publish to that I had never heard of).  They only give you about a Gigabyte or so of storage (you can buy more) – but you can always use other sites to hold your larger media – like videos (on YouTube).  Posterous does all of the heavy lifting for all of that.

So how can this help the educator/coach/what-we-are-supposed-to-call-ourselves-now? Well, for one – it makes mobile blogging much easier.  There is even an app that lets you take advantage of the built-in camera on your smart phone to shake things up a bit each week. After a couple of weeks of text blogs – why not record yourself and post a video blog? Or why not go somewhere in the city and film something that connects with your content? A civic event, an art exhibit, building architecture, etc?  Maybe even go talk to a colleague or content expert and record the conversation (with permission, of course), and then upload that audio one week as a blog post. I know these will not be the best produced videos in the world, but the spontaneous nature of them will give the students a sense that they are “following you around” as you practically apply what is being taught in class.

Why not even make it seem more like a tour of your subject? You serve as the lead journalist of the group. Take them on a tour of the city from the perspective of your subject. Mix up the media (text, audio, video, images, etc) each week. Don’t get so formal with everything you say. Start off some of your posts with statements like “You know, I was pondering the engineering concepts in this week’s reading while at Starbucks – and I had this revelation about the relationship between this coffee cup and this week’s subject.”  But really film yourself at Starbucks having the revelation.

The less you script it out for yourself, the more fun you will have and the more students will enjoy it.

Remember what I posted a few weeks ago about Delicious as content? Posterous can push your content to Delicious. So add your class tags every week and your content will be inserted in to your class stream on Delicious seamlessly.

Oh – and don’t forget those web cams on your desktop computer. You don’t necessarily have to have a smart phone to do any of this. I know this might be hard to believe, but good revelations can also hit us while we are sitting at our desks.  So do some media productions there if you like.

(this post was cross-posted at EduGeek Journal)