Richard’s Educational Technology Blog

About a year and a half ago, I became frustrated by the number of teachers that I had observed that had made no effort to connect their students with experts outside of their own classrooms. I began looking for ways to “break down the walls” of traditional classrooms through new technology. One of the ways that I found was through the use of webcams, which allowed experts to be connected with students inexpensively, and without having to travel. My first test was connecting a class that I was teaching at BYU at the time (IP&T 286) to an educational technology professor on the other side of campus. Next, I set up a virtual violin lesson. After two very successful “trial runs” I contacted my good friend Baldomero Lago, a Spanish education professor at BYU, with the project. He and I began testing the idea with some high schools in Utah. Technical snafus set us back a bit (mostly due to the strict proxy settings in the public schools). Baldmonero stuck with it though, and was finally able to get it to work. Using his connections in Spain, he was able to set up a project where students from Murray High School worked in teams with students from a High School in Galicia, Spain. There is an article on the project in the Salt Lake Tribune. What Baldomero has done is one of the best examples of technology integration I have ever seen. He and I are currently working on a paper discussing the benefits of using social connectivity technology in foreign language classrooms – stay posted!

Last week Infobase Ventures founder, Paul B. Allen, spoke at BYU. His presentation focused online tools to help educators and students.

Overview of Paul’s Lecture:

“In just 10 years, the World Wide Web has given more than a billion users access to billions of pages of information on virtually every subject. However, real learning requires much more than just having access to data or information. In his presentation. Paul Allen discusses ways in which educators and students can use Web-based data and tools to gain and share knowledge. Topics include open source and open content projects, social networking and community tools, blogging, multimedia, mobile computing, and location-based learning.”

View a QuickTime video stream of Paul’s presentation
Download a copy of Paul’s presentation in PDF format

In his paper Skill sets for the human performance technologist , Stolovitch lays out the sixteen essential skills necessary for an effective HP technologist. These skills can be broken down into two areas, basic technical skills (analysis, observation, evaluation, etc.), and basic people skills (management, organization communication, interpersonal, etc.). While I agree with the skills layed out by Stolovitch, I’m not sure that they apply more to HPT than any area of instructional design. If I were to hire an educational technologist, or a learning scientist, I would still want them to be able to “plan, manage, and monitor” projects, and “communicate effectively in visual, oral, and written form”. In fact, I would urge that we all accept these skills as a working foundation in whatever area of specialization we choose.
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This week AMD is expected to announce its Personal Internet Computer (PIC) for $249 (with monitor). The computer is part of AMD’s “50×15″ plan where they propose to have 50% of the world connected to the internet by 2015. This has a lot of implications for instructional designers nad educators alike.
For more information, check out their article on InfoWorld. www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/21/HNamdlocost_1.html

When it comes to delivering instruction, there are many methods that come to mind (web sites, DVDs, interactive CD-ROMs, printed materials, live presentations, etc.) Each of these methods have their strengths and weaknesses, both for the learner and the creator. However, I think the strength in delivering instruction is in combining delivery formats. This idea is commonly known as Blended Learning.
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An article from the Journal of Interactive Media in Education provides some useful information about the history of Educational Technology. That article quotes Allan Collins in saying,

“Technology provides us with powerful tools to try out different designs, so that instead of theories of education, we may begin to develop a science of education.”

Now before anyone gets bent out of shape about education being turned into science, Collins goes on to say,

“But it cannot be an analytic science like physics or psychology; rather it must be a design science more like aeronautics or artificial intelligence. For example, in aeronautics the goal is to elucidate how different designs contribute to lift, drag manoeuvrability, etc. Similarly, a design science of education must determine how different designs of learning environments contribute to learning, cooperation, motivation, etc.” (Collins 1993, p. 24)
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According to the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (an excellent resource), Human Performance Technology (HPT) is all about “improving productivity and learning in human resource systems. In other words: It’s about people and improving how they do things.” HPT comes into play whenever questions like “Can we do this better? Faster? or more efficiently?” arise.

The basic method behind HPT (I realize this is oversimplified), is to look at current performance, look at ideal performance, and then figure out what has to happen to get current performance to change to ideal performance. As many articles point out, this method can be used very effectively at an organizational level. My experience with HPT, however, has been at an individual level.
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My friend Rick West brought up an important topic in his blog: Should laptops be required for all university students? This is a topic that has come up a lot lately, including here at BYU. Quite honestly, I think talking about every student needing a “laptop” is a bit short-sighted. The discussion, in my mind, should be whether or not students should be required to have a “moble device”. There are many effective mobile devices other than laptops (such as the Blackberry 7230, a Tablet PC, a cell phone, or a PDA). This may seem like a nit-picky little arguement, but I think it’s very important to realize that there are many other ways to be mobily connected other than just through a laptop.

That said, should mobile devices be required on college campuses? Yes and no. Requiring students to use specific learning tools is goofy. Let me give you an example from my junior year in college. I decided that I was not going to buy any textbooks that semester. I would find all the materials that I needed in the library or on the internet. I saved hundreds of dollars and performed very well in all of my classes. Why then should anyone have requred me to buy my textbooks? [by the way, I have rarely purchased textbooks from that point on]. Now, if the universities see some new forms of learning that are available through the use of mobile devices, then they should start teaching that way and the mobile device situation will take care of itself. There will be a point where students just feel that it is impossible to survive without their mobile devise (like many today feel they cannot survive without buyng expensive textbooks). In that paradigm if a student can get by without the devise, then why not?

This is another issue that may seem like a minor wording change, but I think it’s an important paradigm shift. It’s also a perfect example of the backwards thinking that we do so often in educational settings. Find the best way to teach [period]. If that way requires mobile devices then students will get them. If it requres a mechanical pencil, they will get them. If it requires a paintbrush, they will get the. To be cliché, cure the problem, don’t just try to treat the solution. If the cure means that students will be walking around with Blackberry devices (which I think it may) then so be it.

See my post on mobile education

This week I had a great opportunity to listen to Chris Thomas, Chief Strategist for Intel (thanks to an invite from my friend Curt Allen of Agilix Labs). He gave a very interesting top 10 list of reasons to mobilize.

Before jumping into his list, I want to summarize (to the best of my ability) what he meant by mobilizing. His solution is that we look for ways to get the content directly to the users. For example, instead of having to go to a portal. like Blackboard, students could get the documents directly on their mobile devices. One way to think of it would be like e-mailing the documents to the students. The difference though, is that it would keep track of updates and changes to documents and automatically update your local files as needed. There are products that make this type of system work today. Bloglines and other blog aggregators work in this way, they give you a list of all of the changes and additions to the blogs that you are subscribed to. Agilix’s goBinder software provides this same type of functionality for Balckboard. Content from a student’s course is automatically downloaded to their computer and synchronized every time a student gets online.
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One significant “wake up” moment for me happened about 4 years ago when I took my first trip to Guatemala. I was working as a technology consultant for the Rose Education Foundation at the time. While I was there I had the chance to see issues in the news, both about the world and about the United States, from a Guatemalan perspective. It was surprising how different the stories were from what I had heard on CNN and other US news services. US reports of our global good-doing did not correlate with the reports in Guatemala. This was how I began to understand that “free press” does not necessarily equate to “true press”.
To take an example a little closer to home, I don’t think I’ve ever been quoted correctly in BYU’s newspaper, the Daily Universe (this bothered me until a friend pointed out that the Daily Universe is like the supermarket tabloids – everyone knows that it’s just a jumble of poorly written, inaccurate articles - but once you realize that, it’s kind of fun to read). In addition to making me slightly leery about what I hear on the news, these experiences have made me look for other sources of information, such as Blogs and Wikis.
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