When I took 670 in 2003, he was the only professor using Moodle.  I thumbed my nose at Blackboard and haven’t used it in any of my classes since. 

Until now.  

We’ve moved to 100% Blackboard and Wimba. Last year we brought Online and Campus students together for a synchronous session using Adobe Connect. I attended each classroom session and while Bernie lectured, I monitored the webcam and got participation from online students. 

I had done the same thing with a Project Management class 2 years earlier and it had worked brilliantly. But it didn’t work in this class because the content is so different.  PM was a class full of stories and concepts. Edgames is more experiential.  

Rather than a live lecture, he’s using flowgram, a free online presentation program that allows you to create a presentation using powerpoints, images, and the real kicker.. live web pages.  That means you can talk for 30 seconds to set up the course syllabus, then have students pause the lecture and read through the page without leaving the presentation.

We can give students an overview of a game, then let them play it until they’re ready to resume the lecture. How fun!

I’ll use it for a lecture soon, but for now I’m thinking of other ways to use it outside the classroom. Including helping clients review the sites I’m building for them. 

I say run don’t walk to flowgram.com and set up an account.  Or just go and view some of the examples on the front page, like Web 2.0 Writing Tools.

picture in the paper

This summer I’ve been working with a group of English professors from Nangarhar University.  I’ve been working as an instructional designer that puts together the course materials for the courses on teaching with technology, second language acquisition, and program and curriculum design.  I taught them how (and why) to use the course management system, Moodle.  

This project was picked up by the local paper, The Union-Tribune, who wrote up more about the project and the grant from the World Bank.  There are so many people that have worked hard to make this program a success, I’m honored that my face is the one that ended up in the paper.  You can read the full story here. 

hell

I think four 8-hour sessions online sounds like a new version of hell, so I’m using a different format.

I set up a blog for the class where I’m posting daily.  They have to respond to my posts as part of a participation.  I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with different activities for them to do each day, including test driving new web browsers, setting up newsreaders, and commenting on each other’s posts.

I’ve had at least 1 blog going since 2003, but have received more comments this past week than in all that time. I’m really enjoying teaching a class on Web 2.0 using the tools I’m teaching them about.

The first time I saw Jing was at the recent ASTD convention in San Diego. I tried it out at the vendor booth and walked away thinking it would be just another app that a pro like me wouldn’t use. Besides, I have a license for their pro level app, Camtasia, on my machine already.

However, this weekend, I’ve been setting up a blog for the class I’m teaching on collaborative learning with blogs, wikis, and podcasts. My students will be creating their own accounts on Edublogs.org, who has used Jing to create training movies. I thought I’d check Jing out so that I could handle any of my student’s questions about it. I didn’t realize that I’d be so impressed.

Unlike Captivate, it’s success is the less-is-more design. It is a little sun that lives in the top right corner of my screen.

When I move my mouse to it, I see 3 simple options.

From there, I can make a quick diagram or a screen recording that converts to a .swf file. It’s fast, easy, cross-platform, and free. I find I’ve been using it today to make mock-ups even though I’ve got  Camtasia open on the computer beside me.

The form you see below is tied to one of their online spreadsheets, so that anyone who’s a collaborator will have access to up-to-the-minute completion records. It’s no LMS, but it’s a great way to go paperless for free.

My session, 2 Great Tastes that Taste Great Together/Rapid eLearning with Articulate and Adobe Captivate, went well. It was the first presentation I gave where I had an audience in person, and through Ustream. I had about 12 people watching online, I’m told. The text chat isn’t archived, but you can watch the presentation here.

These embedded slides are what my .ppt file looked like, (though the formatting’s moved a little bit).

[Since Articulate is essentially a Powerpoint Plugin, it shows Adobe preloaders and Engage placeholders instead of the media I published for the slides I used presentation. If you want to see the original version of the slides, it's here. ]

My favorite link from the past few weeks has been YouConvertIt.com , which I just used to convert a quicktime movie to .flv, then windows media.  The site allows you to convert any kind of image, audio, or video file to any other type of file that I can think of.  All for free online. 

In 2004, I took my first instructional design course.  It was my second semester in my masters program, and I was eager to show off my skills.  The class had each student paired with a client.  On the first night of class, 20 potential clients came in to pitch their projects to the 15 or so students in the room.  We each wrote down our top 3 choices and the professor set us up. 

I got my top choice, to work with the San Diego Maritime Museum.  It was a project that centered around the travel journals kept by a Mr. Stead Ellis as he spent 9 months aboard what’s now known as the Star of India.  Euterpe was traveling from England to New Zealand, and Mr. Ellis and his family were on board.  In his journals, he described the feeling of pulling away from the shore, the dangers of a storm at sea, and the risk of getting sick on board.  

Not only did he keep this travel journal, but he worked with other passengers on board to create a small handwritten publication called the Euterpe Times.  All of which is part of the permanent collection of the museum. 

As I said, this was my first experience with a client, and I learned an important lesson.  Sometimes you need to take orders and follow directions, and other times you need to help the client define what they’re asking for before you get to work.  The need and the ask aren’t necessarily the same thing.

The project ended up being an interactive DVD.  We hired an Englishman to read through some of the passages and put the audio behind the pictures we had of Euterpe in her heyday. We didn’t have enough pictures, so as the narrator was talking about the games they played at sea, we’d be showing portraits, or a shot of the boat on the water.  We had a crawl running along the bottom of the text, but rather than doing subtitles like you would for a movie, the ask was for a scrolling CNN-style caption that didn’t always sync with what was being said at the time.  

Cognitive Overload overboard!

The project was for 80 hours, and I easily spent double that.  In our final meeting, I learned that the biggest reason we wanted an interactive exhibit was so that people could look up lists of passengers from the different voyages.  I felt the pain of putting so much work into something they couldn’t use for the first time.  I’d given them what they asked for without asking the questions up front I needed to find out what they really wanted.  

This has been a project that pops up every year or so since then.  Eventually I got into podcasting and blogging and showed them a mockup of the same content, but in a audio blog format, which they liked.  That prototype came up in google as Mr. Ellis’s great great great grandson was researching family history, and I got to exchange emails with him.  Then this past week, I met with new exhibit designers who are interested in reviving this project.  

I’ve agreed to work with them on the Stead Ellis Cabin.  They’re going to convert one of the cabins on board into a study/library along with a showcase of his writings from his journal.  I’m helping them integrate our readings somehow.  Not on an interactive DVD with not enough pictures and too much text.  

I’m doing it because it’s a neat project, but also because I was impressed with the legacy the man left behind. The way he chose to spend his time on board inspired me and I want to help pay tribute to what he did.