EduGeek Journal

Is social project collaboration the next big thing online? Will we finally see all of the separate tools that we currently use for communication and collaboration (email, IM, documents, micro-blogs, etc) integrate into seamless tools? Google is heading that way with Google Wave. Or, at least we think they are. Still waiting for that invite to come through…

Which leads me to the big problem with hyping a tool before you release it – your competitors will beat you to the punch. Maybe Google is banking that Wave will be cooler than anything else anyone else can rush to the market. But if your competitor comes out with a tool that works for everyone that wants to use it – people will stick with theirs no matter how cool your idea is.

That brings me to Zoho Projects 2.0. Many of the features sound similar to Google Wave – like integrating chat with online documents and project flow and all that. Zoho’s take on social project collaboration is a bit more business minded – you can create milestones and post progress updates and such. Zoho doesn’t hype the synchronous/asynchronous integration like Wave does, but it is there. Which I think is okay – I really don’t think people are going to care that much about switching between synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous communication is a huge drain on productivity, so I predict that many people will be turning off some of Google Wave’s synchronous innovations. Really – who needs synchronous online document editing? Too many editors in the room will cause some big arguments. There is a reason that face-to-face meetings only have one person at the white board taking notes, even thought many whiteboards are monstrous in size these days and there are usually enough pens for everyone to go around.

But the biggest missing feature of Zoho Project 2.0 is the open-source attitude that Google Wave embraces. The ability to install Google Wave on your server and then customize it the way you want will be killer. Zoho Projects will only be good for educational projects that can fit into it’s design and flow. Which will be several, no doubt – but Google Wave will potentially have the ability to adapt to whatever anyone wants. If you want to dig into the codes and/or APIs, that is.

Still, I can see Zoho Projects appealing to a certain mindset. For more information and a demo video, see this post:

Announcing The Social Way To Get Things Done: Zoho Projects 2.0

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“Why should we have to pay for chapters we don’t use in textbooks?”  We have all had this problem with textbooks.  There only seems to be two options for instructors when it comes to choosing textbooks for class: get a large book with 20-something chapters and only use 14 or 15, or get several smaller books and mix and match the chapters together and hope your students don’t get lost.  Two costly and ultimately wasteful options.  Oh, and of course, the dream third option – writing your own book… because we all have enough free time for that, right?

But what if there was another way to get the content you want in the order you want it?

What if you could choose chapters from several textbooks, put them in the order you want them to be in… and maybe even re-write several chapters or paragraphs, or even include pages from Wikipedia in there?

And what if you could offer the book to your students at the cost of printing fees, or even as a free PDF?

Sound crazy?  Think textbook companies will never go for that?  Maybe they won’t, but one new company has been re-thinking textbooks and will do just all this and more.  CK-12 has taken online free textbooks to the next level.  Sure, they offer free textbooks as PDF downloads, like other sites.  These books were written by experts to meet national edcuational standards… just like other open-textbook organizations.

The difference here is in what you as an end-user can do with these textbooks. They call them ‘flexbooks.’  All of their flexbooks are released under a Creative Commons license that allows you to modify and add to them as you want.  These changes do not affect the book itself, but it does allow you to create your own custom version.  You can mix and match chapters from different books as you see fit, even adding or deleting content that matches what you want to teach.  You can even add any content from any website (including Wikipedia) that shares content with the same open license.

Then, you create a PDF and do what you like – take it to Kinko’s, submit it to an online “print-on-demand” service, or save it online as a free download.

For now, most of the flexbooks on Ck-12’s site are for high school, but they desire to expand into higher ed and elementary education also.

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One conference down, one more to go.  I’ll be heading out to NUTN 2009 next week.  But this past week I was at the Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning.  Quite a mouthful.  I saw some interesting sessions on some new products that I plan on blogging about in the future.  I want to give each one of those their own post.  But for now, some issues that I pondered while at the conferences:

• One general session had a panel with an author and representatives from Google and Microsoft.  While the Microsoft and Google people were speaking, I couldn’t quit thinking “Hello, I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC.”  I’m beginning to think that certain companies really do attract and hire certain personality types….
• During one session, the presenter asked what people do to increase student engagement.  One gentleman raised his hand and declared “animated gifs!  Kids love them, and you can finds thousands of little ‘banging hammers’ and ‘flying birds’ out there for free!”  I had to strain to resist the temptation to smack my forehead so hard that they wouldn’t have heard it in the next session over.  Other people in the room actually began nodding and agreeing – “oh, yeah – students love media that moves!”.  A colleague even told me that the same man shared the same idea in another session. (We’ve had to ban animated gifs where I work for the most part, because students complain that they are distracting, boring, and make us look really, really ancient.)
• I sat in a session about creating realistic avatars of instructors that speak to students.  Basically, you spend hours (or days) creating a realistic virtual image of a teacher, then have the teacher record some speech, and then spend some more hours or days syncing the words to the avatar, adding blinks and stuff like that.  Or, you can just spend an hour or two actually filming the teacher and be done with it.  Seriously – it seems like no matter how far technology advances, some people just can’t get away from the talking head we’ve had in education for millenia now.  Do we really need high tech cutting edge talking heads now?
• Augmented reality made an appearance in a session (even though the session was about something else).  You don’t hear many people talking about educational uses for that, but they need to.  More on this on later.
• Adobe always has impressive products, but they always seem to be off people’s radar for some reason.  But they really do some interesting stuff.  They are trying hard to get Flash working on all media devices from smart phones to HD television.  That could prove interesting.
• One presetner asked “why should we pay so much for sales and marketing of textbooks, when we already need them in the first place?”  Or something to that effect.  70% of the costs of some textbooks goes in to those two categories.  But there are solutions for that – and many of the other problems that textbooks have – I’ll be blogging more about that later.
• Bing was brought up a few times.  It was actually spoken very highly of.  “It has a gorgeous interface” someone said.  Actually, it just has a gorgeous picture prominently in the middle, surrounded by a hideous interface that hides in the glow of the cool picture in the middle.  Ed-Techers get criticized that we are so distracted by coolness and flashiness that we tend to forget functionality.  And here we go proving that criticism to be true….

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Okay… scratch my last post.  What if the browser was your LMS?  Think about it – what is the biggest problems with most social networking sites?  Privacy and ownership of content.  Huge battles are being fought over who owns what when you upload it and issues like “how private is your stuff anyways?”  Opera released a new product today called Opera Unite.  The basic idea is that you take control of what you share online because your browser is a web server.

Interesting concept.  You retain all rights and controls over everything you want to share, because it is served up from your computer.  What a crazy thought.

So, what if the browser itself becomes the LMS?  What if the instructor created a bunch of activities that students worked on and then shared back with the class through something like Opera Unite?  The technical details would be crazy to make it work right, but think if it could get to work right?  You would have to authenticate all students and instructors through an official school database, of course.

But this could take our New Vision for Online Learning in a whole new direction.  Just some crazy thoughts.

Also think of combining this idea with Google Wave?

My head hurts from the possibilities….

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I was pondering Learning Management Systems this morning. I do that way too much.  Maybe Google Wave will get released soon and it really will be able to deliver on the hype and all my problems will be solved!  But until then… got to ponder….

FireFox plug-ins are pretty nifty little deals.  And many of them have educational uses.  A few more are even totally educational in nature.  But I wonder if LMS programmers will ever get into the business of making plug-ins that will enhance their products?  Have some done that already and I just missed it?

Yeah, I know that would force people to use a specific browser.  But just imagine if the concept of plug-in goes universal and all browsers end up being able to use the same plug-ins interchangeably for a moment….

Because I am thinking we are really going to need this – like yesterday.  I checked around for a plagiarism checker – one like “Map This“, where you just highlight some text and click “check for plagiarism” – and couldn’t find one.  I found a couple of dead links to some here and there, so maybe it is out there and just hard to find.

Because, let’s face it – going EduPunk or GoogleWave or what not with your class would mean that you might not be able to check that cool blog post against your plagiarism software.  Or maybe you can.  But wouldn’t it be nice to to integrate it with your browser instead?

Or what about designing your LMS to work with existing plug-ins like Zotero?

There are probably a hundred different ways to create plug-ins specifically for online courses.  Is there someone out there doing this, and I just haven’t searched enough?

Random thought that hit me today…

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I was a little shocked to see how little I could find about “slugging” in online learning when I searched recently.  Maybe I was doing a bad search.  Slugging is basically a way students can cheat by extending their deadline.  All you do is take a non-text file… an image, flash file, whatever… and change the extension from .jpg or whatever to .doc (or whatever format your assignment is due in).  You name the file (the “slug”) whatever the instructor requires, and upload it.  The instructor will usually be busy and they will wait a few days beyond deadline to download every one’s files.  They will try to open your Word doc and get a notice that the file is corrupted.  They will then email the you and ask for a better copy.  It is the modern equivalent to “the dog ate my homework.”  Even if a teacher is really on top of things and starts grading immediately after deadline, students can still claim they didn’t check their email, aren’t near the computer the file is on, etc – and buy themselves a few days.

Some people are even apparently making money off of this now.

One way to clamp down on this is to revise your late policy to include any technical glitches:

“all assignments must be submitted by the due date and time listed in the syllabus. Assignments must be in the format required in the syllabus, and must open with out any glitches or corruption on the my computer, or they will be considered late.  If you aren’t sure, please submit early and have me check to make sure it opens on my computer.  Any slugging (changing a document’s extension) is also considered cheating.”

Of course, an even better way to fight this is to go EduPunk and have your students do group work on blogs, Twitter, etc – that way, there is no way they are tempted to slug :)

(HT to Chris Duke who Tweeted the link above and reminded me that I have been meaning to blog on this for a while).

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If you haven’t already read the interesting article on how some colleges are weighing using blogs instead of Blackboard at The Chronicle, check it out here:

Colleges Consider Using Blogs Instead of Blackboard

It has a fairly balanced look at both sides of the issue. The last paragraph proves my point that I have made over and over again about Blackboard: the people in charge just don’t know what they are talking about.  Here is the direct quote:

Blackboard is trying to keep up.

Michael L. Chasen, the company’s chief executive, has told The Chronicle that the latest version of the software integrates some Web 2.0 tools and still offers plenty of features that blogging packages can’t match, like online gradebooks.

Good point.  Except, of course, for the fact that WordPress has a grade book plug-in (well, two actually). And some really cool social networking plug-ins, too.

My question has always been – why do you need an LMS or program of any kind?  Why limit your students to just a blog or a LMS?  Why not create a simple platform that aggregates whatever tool they use into one spot for easy of collaboration accross tools?  That has been the question we have been asking with our New Vision for Learning Management Systems idea, that will hopefully morph into an open source project soon.

UPDATE:

I forgot to also respond to this legitimate concern raised in the article:

Some professors asked whether it was possible to run a blog that only students could see, noting that they had concerns about making course activities public.

The short answer is, in WordPress and a few others, yes.  The University I work for installed WordPress MU for anyone (student or teacher) to use.  They were easily able to connect it to our university system – you log in with the same ID/password you use for email, and your blog is automatically set-up. Custom blogs for, say, groups or departments can also be created.  There are also a few instructors that keep it private for only their classes.  Our IT department was able to connect specific blogs to specific class rolls.  But even if you can’t do that, there are plug-ins that let you authenticate with users you want and then only authenticated users can see the blog.

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Everything Google does gets hype.  So you probably already read all there is known (so far) about Google Wave.  For the two anti-Google people out there in the world that just refuse to read anything about Google, it is said to be a new way to communicate online, based on new concepts of how we interact online.  Of course, I probably lost those two people at “Google”, so I just wasted time writing that.  Guess that makes me a true blogger.  Anyways, there is a really looooonnnggg video about it out there, too.  Which I haven’t watched, because I really just don’t have time.  Is it just me, or does it seem to be blasphemy to put a long video on YouTube,  THE website that proved people are more into short, concise summaries rather than long dissertations covering every detail?

Really?  How much can you talk about a service that is still in planning stages?

Well, the universe didn’t explode when it was posted, so I guess it is okay.  For now.

Everything that Google does usually turns out pretty good.  Even when it is something that doesn’t prove to be popular… like say Lively or Jaiku… they still do a good job with it.  But will Wave prove to be their first major misstep?  I’m thinking there is a slight possibility.

I’m sure it will work great.  I’m sure I will like it.  I’m just not sure it’s going to catch on.  This is what caught my eye, from the blog post quoted ’round the world:

He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold.

What if the reason that email and IM caught on was because they did mimic what we were used to?  What if is had nothing to do with network limitations of the time, or lack of other ideas? Let’s face it – Twitter caught on because it mimicked texting.  Skype caught on because it mimicked phone calls. FaceBook caught on because it mimicked interaction and games from real life.

What if online stuff has to mimic something we are already into before it will catch on?  Most people are attributing the death of virtual worlds to the fact that they just seem too surreal sometimes.

Sorry – as much as I wish virtual worlds would catch on and take over the world, the cold hard truth is they seem to be dying.  Blogs are still kind of popular and kind of not… wikis never truly caught on as a tool (Wikipedia is seem more as an information source than a tool by most people)… and collaborative documents haven’t really caught on yet.

I’m pretty sure I will love Google Wave (as I also love virtual worlds, blogs, wikis, Skype, you name it).  But are we going to lamenting what could have been in a few years, just like we did with Lively earlier this year?  I guess only time will tell.  Twitter was pretty much dying until Oprah and a few other key events breathed some life in to it.  Now it is every where.  Maybe we can get Obama using Google Wave?

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Are you tired of the way LMS programs are going?We’ve formed a group at FaceBook to air gripes and discuss ideas for something new -  a continuation of our series on a new vision for Learning Management Systems.  Join the group and add to our discussion – you can find it here:

FaceBook Group for a New Vision for the Learning Management System.

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I guess it was inevitable. As much negative press as Blackboard garnered over recent legal actions (in addition to the negative experiences some of their customers are always complaining about), they had to do something abut it.  I can see the board meeting now:

“We’re taking a beating over this lawsuit. What can we do to improve our image?”

“We need to do something that people like. And, Bob – no more stealing Start Trek jargon to name our new software versions, okay?”

“sighhh….. but NG sounded so futuristic and cool!”

“Maybe in the 90s! But focus – we need to do something good for our image.”

“I heard the other day that people like angels. Maybe that should be the new name for our next software version.”

“I like it! People want to make us out to be devils, let’s force them into calling us angels!”

“Oh, wait… I think we have a competitor named that already.”

“Even better! We can just buy them and get their image without doing any work! Just like we did with WebCT!”

I was really shocked when Katrina told me the news. Yes, she is still active in the Ed Tech world – even though we rarely hear from her here. She did recruit Shaun after all… so she is helping in some ways :)

But I just can’t see the logic behind this purchase, even from a twisted business CEO pointy-haired boss perspective.  From what I have read, a huge chunk of the people using Angel chose Angel because they were fed up with Blackboard.  Why do you want to acquire such a huge population of users that have proven that they will change software when disgruntled… and they were with the company you bought because they hated yours in the first place? Not to mention the fact that Blackboard is saying that eventually the two products will merge.  How? They are so vastly different.  That just doesn’t seem possible.

And let’s not forget how bad they botched the WebCT purchase.  Oh, wait… they are saying they learned a lot from that and will do better.  But… wait… WebCT wasn’t their first purchase. Prometheus anyone? If they didn’t learn enough from that one to help with WebCT, don’t count on them having learned enough from WebCT to make the Angel acquisition any less painful.

I just can’t help but thinking of Dilbert whenever I read anything from Michael Chasen of Blackboard.  I love how he pointed out that there is more competition now in the LMS market than there ever was… because new ones are starting every year.  Yep, there is a greater number of competitors, so that means greater competition, right? Nope – that means nothing for competition when those new options are just competing for the same small slice of customers that won’t go with the bigger options.  Percentage-wise, this purchase essential creates a monopoly.  One can only hope this will not be approved by the FTC.  But, then again, they should have never approved of the WebCT purchase.  So I’m not holding my breath on that.

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