This 2-part session introduces participants to the popular Web 2.0 collaborative tool, the wiki. After we’ve discussed how wikis may be useful to educators, we’ll have a full hour of hands-on activity setting up your own free wiki, and learning to edit, cultivate, and maintain it.

Update: Download the presentation file

This presentation will (1) introduce the open education movement and, specifically, open educational resources; (2) explain work done to identify and match OER to Open High School of Utah curriculum needs; (3) describe implications and recommend directions for instructional designers and teachers interested in working with and creating OER.

Purpose of the Presentation

A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. The open education movement is introduced, and we discuss how to find and organize open educational resources, specifically within the context of the  Open High School of Utah.

In addition, some frameworks for those interested in creating OER will be provided. The “open” in “open educational resources” is not a simple dichotomy; rather, there is a continuum of openness. We discuss four separate aspects of reuse and demonstrate how these describe different levels of openness. Licensing and technical aspects of open educational resources are also discussed

Presenter

John Hilton III is a doctoroal student in Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University.

Do the implications of digital media turn our educational institutions inside out? Can educators learn to stop worrying and love the remix?  Is originality overrated?  What’s the difference between reuse and plagiarism? Is openness our only hope? Where’s the RSS feed? What does “data literacy” look like? Are Web 2.0 companies a teacher’s best friend, or a bunch of creeps converting our work, our relationships and our private data into marketshare? Has the Web 2.0 bubble popped, and if so now what? How do we teach our students, our colleagues and ourselves to be technology strategists? How many copyright violations can be jammed into one presentation?

Brian Lamb’s presentation and discussion will review the opportunities and initiatives resulting from the convergence of open source, free culture, open access and open educational resources.

Collaboration between different disciplines, age groups, genders, ethnicities is a must when creating a program that appeals to the demographics emerging in our education system. Building educational tools which do not recognize our differences and similarities are incomplete tools when providing a full education to a young audience. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Sandy’s Keynote Presentation from TTIX 08.

Sandy Mills-Alford is the CEO of AliveTek, Inc., an organization known for designing highly interactive e-learning environments for a multitude of organizations at all educational levels.

Ms. Mills-Alford belongs to the first generation of web-based course designers in higher education. Her career as an educator has included many roles including K-12 educator, college instructional technologist, educational program manager (WebCT), technology coach for faculty, and college instructor in the fields of educational technology and web design.

In addition to being involved in research initiatives for web-based learning, Sandy delivers motivational seminars on effective uses of technology for learning.

R. J. Clougherty, Jr. is the Director of the Institute for Technological Scholarship at Tennessee Tech University. He is a Fulbright Scholar who is also the founder and director of TTU’s Web Design program and a Professor of English. He is on the founding board of the WebCT Digital Games Community. He has done workshops on gaming in education on many campuses, at many conferences, and created summer camps for kids on game creation.

Teaching the Facebook generation:
A wish list for course management software

Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley

Today’s generation of students know how to use the web for a lot more than just checking their email. They’re perfectly comfortable with dynamic web pages and highly interactive content. They spend hours a day on social networking sites communicating and collaborating with friends. So why is it that the only interaction they have with Learning Management Software is when they check to see if their grades have been updated?

LMS systems offer a hub of interaction for today’s online students — at least, they should. Instead of collaborating within an LMS, students are organizing themselves into independent Facebook and Google groups, and teachers are making outside blogs for their students to follow. Some teachers avoid LMS software altogether because it’s too clunky and confusing. There’s a growing disconnect between what LMS solutions provide and what students and teachers actually use or want.

At Instructure we’re working to create a new type of course software that embraces the open technologies of the web. Our real goal, though, is to create a system that will actually get used. We have our own ideas about how to make a modern LMS really shine, and we’ll start the presentation off by going over some of these thoughts. Then we’ll open it up for discussion to hear what you want/need in an LMS. We’re building this product for you, and we want to make sure it’s something that will actually fit into your educational plans.

This presentation will be the chance to start participating in the creation of a meaningful, useful educational product. It’ll be an open-discussion opportunity for us to get to know you better, and for you to get excited about a fresh new take on educational software.

The management of knowledge has always been at the heart of education and research in terms of development and improvement. This reality together with the complex interplay of social, economic, and technological forces are strengthening the importance of knowledge and its management.

Significant changes have been witnessed with the arrival of the knowledge age. During the industrial age, learning was assumed to be largely an individual activity and a consequence of formal instruction. However, today’s reality supports that learning is a collaborative problem solving activity that involves far more than instruction alone. It occurs through progressive construction of individual knowledge, not simply through information transfer.

Changing societal and workplace demands of our current century call for learning processes that support inquiry, self-reflection, problem solving, communication, and collaboration. This kind of learning process, at variance to those of industrial age, requires continual updating, so a top quality on-going education system is essential for living and working in the knowledge age.
Future implies increased collaboration with community, institutions, and students. Then the focus in education will be on the learning and collaborative knowledge construction. Thus, the purpose of education will move from being curriculum driven to being learning centered. It is stated by many researchers that key aspects of the emerging pedagogy for the information society are emphasized as active, integrative, creative, collaborative, and evaluative.
Today’s knowledge society emphasizes innovation and intellectual capital and makes knowledge management a strategic issue that holds one of the highest potentials for gaining efficiencies, and creating value in organizations. Consequently, the asset base is shifting from traditional tangible assets to an intangible asset base such as innovation, effective utilization of knowledge and human capital resources.

To increase the capacity of identifying, distilling, harnessing and using information to construct knowledge for the organizational learning process became an indispensable objective for any organization. As being very powerful tool to reach this objective; knowledge management represents the core work of organizations in education and research. It deals with the creation, interpretation, critique, and distribution of knowledge within communities of scholars, researchers, experts, learners and teachers. However, only some education organizations are pioneering knowledge management by creating necessary infrastructure, and support systems. It is necessary to understand how to strengthen the management of knowledge for supporting activities, and planning quality standards. Furthermore, knowledge management initiatives are required to adapt to meet new challenges and retain the leading organizations in education and research.

This presentation will discuss knowledge management concept in the context of education. Presentation will thus recall fundamental concepts of knowledge management and relate with the field of education through different perspectives to explore the ways to solve educational problems. The presentation will also include knowledge management experiences obtained in different lectures.

Biography
Tarkan Gürbüz is an Instructor at Middle East Technical University, Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology in Ankara, Turkey. He holds a PhD and MS in Computer Education and Instructional Technology, MBA in International Business, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics. His areas of interest include distance education, e-learning, human computer interaction, knowledge management, and teacher education.

Text Messaging: An Innovative Educational Method
Home visitation has proven effective in some cases, but continues to have limitations. Child-bearing women and single, young mothers, who are often recipients of this visitation continue to need education to increase compliance and follow-up; which ultimately relates to the well-being of both the mother and child. Due to the increase in limitations with home visiting, the use of texting with cell phone technology may be utilized in addition to continued medical care to enhance the education of a mother for herself and her child. The use of this technology is perceived as a more familiar concept with today’s population. This form of communication through texting may be used as a mechanism for monitoring compliance and providing education to high-risk pregnant teens. With more frequent periods of contact that enable communication in variable settings; the outcomes of women and their children may be improved.
The presentation will review the current trends in home visitation and how current needs are not being met specifically to the high-risk parenting teen group. Because of researched teen preferences and receptivity to this form of communication, text messaging serves as an effective method of communication for education. Current trends and uses of text messaging for medical education will be discussed, as well as the benefits of text messaging for convenience, multi-tasking and confidentiality.
This method is a practical applicaiton for implemenation in education. A current Mediamark Research study (2006) showed cell-phone only households now outnumber land-line only households. This same study also reported 86.2% of people now have at least one cell phone. Young consumers, paticularly those who live on their own now dominate the cell-phone only population. It appears a great percentage of the population now has access and utilizes this form of communication, thus this form of communication for education is presumptively feasible.
This content directly relates to the conference theme of technology enhanced education. By providing education through this method we may be able to reach more individuals and more individuals may be receptive to this form of education.
Information for this research paper and eventual study was taken from several cellular phone and text messaging studies, including those of Mediamark Research, Rand Research
and Cingular. The theories of adolescent behavior and communication was derived from the theory of Erik Erikson. Current studies utilizing text messaging for healthcare communication are being utilized by the Centers for Disease Control and Kenya’s Ministry of Health.

Biography
A nurse for 7 years in the areas of pediatrics, NICU and nursery. Currently teaches at Kaplan University in Lincoln, NE in the Maternal/Child rotation and continues to practice at Saint Elizabeth Regional Medical Center in Lincoln, NE. Also, currently a doctoral student at the College of Saint Mary in Omaha, NE in the doctorate of education program for healthcare professionals.