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 – andPosterous 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 Soundings)

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In other words: BORING!

The classes that most students end up liking are taught by instructors that are talking to them about current events and new information related to their subject. The course that you get this semester is slightly different than the one last semester. In other words – there is a a greater value in showing up to this course, because it will be interesting and relevant (and slightly different from what your roommate learned last semester). The instructor is reading and researching the subject and keeping you up to date on the course subject.

But… can this be done online… where classes are usually canned and solidified months before the first day of course?

Through the modern miracle of technology, the answer is yes – if you plan ahead.

You are probably teaching a course in a subject that you like. That means you are also probably reading blogs, articles, journals, and other websites related to that subject.  What if your students could follow you as you do all of this reading? What if they could research with you – and this research became the course content? What if they discussed what you read that week, instead of some canned, stale question you stuck in a “discussion board” months ago?

Technically, this is possible with a blog. But do you really want to log in and create an entire blog post for every article, blog post, etc, etc. that you find… several times a week? Sound too tiring to you? Well then I have two words for you:

Social Bookmarking

You have probably heard of sites like Delicious and Digg.  Did you know that you can use these sites as the content for your course? Ditch the pre-processed cheese html zip file, pdf, or (shudder) audio lecture recording and go flexible, relevant, and easy.

Here is one idea: create an account in Delicious. Then come up with a tag just for each class – edtc3320, for example.  Then install a Delicious bookmark plug-in for FireFox or Chrome (if you are using Internet Explorer, well… I am sorry).  You can then send your students to the page for your specific class tag, and they can use whatever RSS reader they want to follow you. You can even create multiple tags for different classes.

As you come across different articles and links that would apply to your class – bookmark them in delicious and tag them for the class you want to read them. Maybe even add a second link of ‘edtc3320week1′ or whatever to help students organize them better. Delicious lets you write short comments on each link – so let students know why you bookmarked the link. Then add a discussion question for each link. For your class discussion, tell students that they have to answer at least one question raised during each week’s readings.

But don’t ditch the blog just yet – you are the content expert, so you have great insights to add to everything you read, and delicious has a short limit on comments.  So blog about what you want, and then bookmark your blog post in Delicious. It gets added to the flow that students have to read each week.

Dynamic content, active learning, reflection, and rapid course design all in one neat package! Want to be really fancy? Get a RSS feed widget, and then insert that in to your LMS course for the students that don’t get RSS. They can just click on the content page and it will be there for them in the walled garden…errr… Learning Management System.

Want to see what this could look like? Well, as I find resources I like online, I have created a Delicious tag just for EduGeek Journal readers to follow:

http://delicious.com/grandeped/edugeekjournal

Follow me in your favorite RSS reader to see what this could be like.

{this post is being cross-posted at Soundings: Best Practices in Teaching and Technology]

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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.

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Barker pointed out that with more tech-savvy learning, the curriculum will have to change, too. He and his wife funded a five-year experiment in Chattanooga, Tenn., to create a 21st-century curriculum founded not just on learning the ABCs, but also the “EFGs”: Eco ed (“How do we interact with the planet?”), Futures ed (“How do I shape my future?”), and Global ed (“What is my relationship with other human beings?”).

Each student had to learn a 500-word vocabulary in six languages and, in sixth grade, choose one in which to be fluent, including cultural knowledge. Physical fitness focused on lifelong sports such as tennis and golf, not team activities. Grade levels were kindergarten “through competence” — that is, when students accomplished all of the program’s lofty goals, they graduated.

Personally, I get more excited about these approaches to changing education than others.  The “death to the university” concept is too much “baby and bathwater” to me, and the open education movement is too caught up in hopeless romanticism (or unhealthy bitterness) for my taste. I don’t think people in either one of these movements have really thought about what would happen if they got their way.

Think about it – you don’t want to drive across a bridge designed by someone that learned engineering through following an engineering blog do you? Or, for that matter, get operated on by a surgeon that learned surgery by watching a bunch of YouTube videos.  After Universities die and education goes free and open, people will begin to realize that we need to be able to prove that people learned what they needed to in order to do certain things. Then we will need to hire people to track who learned what, and those people will need a place to work and store records. We’ll go out and buy the empty college buildings, which will cost money, so we will start charging for education again. We’ll just end up right back where we started.

Or, we could listen to the people that want to reform what we have and end up in a better place overall in the end.

Anyways, the article I mentioned above covers a lot of ground in 4 pages, so give the whole thing a read with an open mind. Assessment, socialization, and realistic school reform (i.e. ideas for change that involve educators keeping their jobs) are all covered.

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• The biggest reason not to buy one: no Flash support. I’m no Flash lover, but how on Earth can you expect to surf the web without it? Even if Flash dies, it will be years before you can get around without it. Can someone please tell Steve Jobs to get over himself?  His anti-Flash rants are just sounding silly.
• Multi-tasking is pointless on an iPhone (or any smart phone).  I mean really – why would you want to do multiple things on a tiny screen? So what that you can’t listen to Pandora and write an email. Just turn on iTunes (you’ll get a better song selection, anyways). But on the iPad – kind of impossible to think of really using something that large without it. Another big gaping feature hole. Right next to where the camera should be.
• For that matter, why not just go with a regular OS instead of iPhone OS?  Well, one reason really – $$$$$. Can’t make money in an app store if people are free to install whatever program they want.
• Everyone keeps asking why get an iPad instead of a full featured laptop. My question with full featured laptops has always been “why do I have to buy all of these features I don’t use?”  Full featured laptops are usually overkill. And bulky at that. Get me the features I need in an easy to use interface like the iPad has, and you have a winner there. I can see the iPad becoming a laptop replacement for people that don’t want everything and the kitchen sink.

Will I get one? Probably not. I will probably wait for the Google Chrome OS to come out in a multi-touch pad device. The combination of an iPad experience with the openness of a fuller OS sounds killer to me. Not to mention cheaper.

So, a note to all educators pondering Kindles, Nooks, or even iPads for their schools/classes/etc: wait for the followers to come out with better ideas. Just because they haven’t been able to do that with iPhone doesn’t mean they won’t succeed here.

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the trade group is arguing that a password-protected space on the Web is not a classroom

Give me a second to remove my palm from my forehead. Welcome to the 1800’s folks. We can’t grow or change our definitions of anything. Online classes: learning takes place there, students are there, instructors are there, content is there, but by golly…. it is not a classroom because there isn’t a door or even a single brick!

I can probably go online and find a free, illegal copy of any movie in the theaters now in about 5 minutes or so and the sites that would help me do that will still be here next week. But an instructor tries to use a clip of an old movie to teach (and inspires a few students to go out and buy that movie from my experience)… and they are clamped down on brutally.

I dream of a day when we get the idiots out of education and legal policy and make it actually desirable to be a teacher.

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Oh, I sent out invites to my wife and some friends and several colleges, but most of them never got an invite.  The few that did are the ones that are too busy to really kick the tires around. So it pretty much sits in my Google account, lonely and unused.

What worries me is the relative silence coming from Google about Wave.  Anybody remember Lively? Google released it with as much fanfare as Wave a few years ago. People were pretty excited about Lively. Many articles were written on how it was the future of educational virtual worlds.  Then came an uncomfortable, prolonged silence from Google.  And finally, out of no where… Google pulled the plug.

Let’s face it, Google Google has no problems hyping their priorities.  Why the silence about Wave? Every other educational article seems to be about Wave, but Google seems to be mum.  The momentum is starting to die for Wave. Google needs to build some fresh momentum soon….

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Harriet and I were meeting with our uber-boss Pete Smith the other day (who will probably read this and “comment” on it by walking past my office and telling me his comment :) to discuss our “New Vision for the LMS” concept. When you get Pete talking about cutting edge stuff, he will truly make your head spin. He was envisioning the role of an educator taking on more of mentoring slant… but wondering how that can work with online asynchronous courses.  His idea was to use something like Google Reader to guide students through weekly readings by sharing what you think students in a particular class should be reading (out of all of the vast amounts of data out there).

An interesting idea. Maybe there are people out there doing this already? The basic idea is that students would follow a instructors on a service  – something that operates like Digg or Google Reader, where you share certain things you read and then tag them with a class tag (#engl101).  That would then be the students “content” for the week. Their projects and blog posts would have to reflect that they read this week’s shared content.

The interesting thing about this idea is that it allows the instructor to take advantage of many sites, many experts, and many voices… while still contributing overall to class learning.  In fact, instructors could still keep their own blog and add content to the stream of shared content. Or add notes to what they are sharing (at least in Google Reader).

I don’t think there is a tool out there that would be as robust as it would need to be for educational purposes – without creating multiple accounts. Students will just need to see the content for their class – so if a teacher has multiple classes, most sharing tools would require some kind of separate account to handle all classes without confusion.  It would be nice to have a function that works like Digg or Delicious with browser plug-ins. But once you “digg” something, you have the ability to tag it with a class tag and that sends it to every student in that class. If you see something else for another class, then you tag it with that class and then only those students see it.

Other features that would be nice would be the ability to add notes to your “diggs” as well as the ability to turn a specific digg in to a class discussion.  One of those discussions I blogged about last week that is not contained in the LMS box.

Just one of many new ideas we are working in to the NEW “New Vision for the LMS” concept….

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Or maybe a bunch of our so-called “educational leaders” will get finally get some counseling for their childhood conflicts they had with teachers and grow up. Then we can get rid of all of this weird stuff we are debating now and get to some real educational reform. You know – stop throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

Look, I get that there are problems out there and we need to change things. But students as co-teachers and teachers and co-students? Are we getting so egotistical as a species that we can’t even stand to admit that we might need to learn from someone else? That it is okay to have a hierarchy in class, as long as we teach those on the top to be open and non-abusive?

If students teach themselves, with teachers as co-students, where will they get their knowledge from? They will go out and read blogs or books or Tweets by experts.  So, if a person has the title of “teacher” or “professor,” students couldn’t just learn from them. But this person happens to, say, go out and start a Google Wave… then it is okay for other students in other schools to then learn from them?

I am all for active learning and students getting to participate in their learning…. but let’s not forget that the instructor is also a valuable resource.

A few people say we don’t need teachers and BAAAA!!! “we don’t need teachers any more” they all say.

Someone says “schools will be obsolete by 2010 and BAAAAA!!! “schools will be obsolete by…”

Oh, wait… what year is it now?

And no one has still explained how people who work in education are going to put food on the table in an open learning new world order future. Every class everywhere in the world is going to learn from a billion experts putting a bunch of free resources out there in their spare time? Yeah, right….

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• Why do we have to turn in assignments any more? Why can’t technology be used to detect our work on class projects on other sites and automatically submit these for us?
• Why are class discussion so hard to grade? Why can’t we make them easier to grade?
• In fact – why do class discussions have to be so contained? Why can’t they happen anywhere we want them to online? Why can’t the SLE just pull it in for us?

I’ve been pondering many of the ideas of Jim Groom that they use at UMW Blogs… and I might have come up with a pretty wicked way to combine those ideas with the New Vision SLE.

But I need to bounce these off of my partner in crime Harriet first – she always comes up with good ideas to sort out the problems with my ideas.

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