Now I am starting to participate in an on-line  class on open-education, and I’ll be using this blog as a tool for that class. Maybe some of my old posts or drafts will be useful. In any case, this gives me a excuse to fix this old thing up.

Today in CMC, we has another day devoted to Second Life. This tool hasn’t been very popular with my students. This presentation centered on art in second life, we watched the ART 21 documentary about Cao Fei and then went into SL and collectively explored her installation RMB city (website, Second Life). We also took a look at the virtual Sistine Chapel and a few other of the more interesting Second Life projects (virtual hallucinations anyone?) As with my other visits to Second Life, I never spoke to another person. We didn’t see any avatars which struck me as being operated by humans in real time. Second Life is a very empty place … eerie. My students disliked the learning curve and they have difficulty imagining how they would use this technology.

PS, the ability to delete Tweets, is also a good thing.

This is somewhat surprising since novels and movies like Snowcrash, Neuromancer and The Matrix have given us an imaginary future in which immersive 3D environment are the norm and Second Life, while it isn’t the Matrix, is the first large scale step in that direction.

Twitter is conceptually, just the opposite, 140 characters only, no 3D graphics, no sound, no color. Yet, it seems filled with people and constantly buzzing with conversation and ideas where Second Life seems so empty.

My students have had a much more appreciative attitude towards Twitter as well, they can see ways that they might find this tool useful. At the very least its like Facebook, but with only status updates … and status updates are the best part of FB. The only tool that they’ve taken to with greater enthusiasm this semester has been Wikis. Students know about the frustrations of working collaboratively in groups of three or four, I think they were impressed that after 5 minutes of orientation, 20 of them were able to start working on a collaborative project with very little or no friction. They could immediately see how they might use wikis in the future.

Wikis and Twitter have at least two important characteristics in common:

1. shallow learning curve: a successful/popular application needs to be promising enough to pull learners through the curve. A shallow curve means a small promise is enough.

2. TEXT. It’s interesting that wikis were greeted even more enthusiatically than Twitter. The largest complaint about Twitter is that its hard to say anything useful in 140 characters. (I know, I know that’s also one of its strengths) Wikis over the same ease of use, but with no limit to the complexity and size of prose, there’s someplace you can really open up and write or, if so inclined, READ.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that there are several other documents, assignments and what not, that are referenced in the text. Students enrolled in this class have access to those through Cicada (the Moodle theme supported by our school, a good one at that.) If you’re at all interested in those assignments, then feel free to ask. How I write assignments would be a natural blog topic.

One thing that will be made clear is that the situation in higher education implementation of on-line learning solutions is very fluid. The exact competitive environment has changed somewhat since I wrote this. Also, I’ve decided that I really Cicada’s implementation of Moodle and I need to check out other themes from New School Learning.

Another thing that this paper demonstrates: the intersection of software development, business management and academia makes for a perfect storm of jargon.

(http://tomprofblog.mit.edu/2009/11/17/984-learning-in-140-character-bites/)

A assignment must meet three criteria 1. it must encourage learning and support course goals, 2. it must be transparent and 3. it must be fair and objective. The page I linked to above deals primarily with point 2 and 3. By transparent, I mean that students should have a clear idea of what needs to be done to succeed and to excel on a particular assignment before they begin, and they should be able to understand where their grade came from after they receive it. By objective, I mean fair. Taken together, these features imply that a motivated student can get an A … hard work gets rewarded.

A good professor motivates and inspires students to work hard.

Thus, good grading procedures plus a good instructor will tend to inflate grades. There will still be a selection procedure, though students will largely be sorted according to the effort they put into their own success. This strikes me as a lot more fair than the sort of sorting and ranking that was dependent on other, less well specified, versions of merit, and I don’t think that society is harmed by this move.

A current draft can be found here:

BlogPaper09.

I’ve started to revise this paper, so its not as polished as something that I might send to a journal.

One of the reviewers comments was that I did not include enough comments from students. Hence, I am very open to hear from students in my comments section of this blog, especially about how they feel about blogs in class.

Comments are welcome whether or not you’ve read the paper.

This blog is going to serve two purposes.

First, I am going to be using it to communicate supplementary material to students in my class on Computer Mediated Communications. Nothing will be necessary to do well in that class, but it will all be of interest to students who find that class material interesting. If you’re not enrolled in that class, you might have some difficulty in evaluating this blog as worth reading. Hence, I have included a copy of the syllabus here: CMCfall09.

Second, I am going to use to distribute and archive my scholarly work in digital communication, especially on-line education. My next post will probably be a plea for help to improve a paper that I have written on using blogs in writing intensive class.