EDTECH Island Two Years Later: Training Teachers in Virtual Worlds

Had a great experience today presenting at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2009 conference.  Thanks to everyone who participated.  As always, I appreciate your feedback and input.

Slideshow

Chimera's screenshots from event

Audio (coming soon!)

VW BPE starts tomorrow!

The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education starts tomorrow and runs through Sunday in Second Life.  Hope to see you there!  Many of our friends from EDTECH will be on the program. 

Schedule of presentations 

ARVEL SIG coming to San Diego April 13!

I blame Sarah Robbins.  Two years ago at AERA in Chicago, she posted a call on the SLED listserv to show up for pizza to meet-n-greet other Second Lifers.  I not only got to meet Sarah, but several other folks with whom I've developed lasting relationships.  One of those individuals was Mary Herring, current President of AECT, who went on to start the AECT in Second Life group.  Two other folks included Jeremy Kemp and Jonathon Richter.  As the three of us lingered over a late-night chat, we brainstormed ways to create a venue for virtual world researchers to share their work, and voila! the Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning Special Interest Group (ARVEL SIG) was born.

With many thanks to our original 30 founding members, and our current membership of over 70 virtual world educational researchers, we are pleased to announce our first year offering eight sessions, roundtables, and interactive symposiums representing the work of over 65 researchers at this year's annual meeting of AERA in San Diego.  Our sessions run April 13-16, and we look forward to your participation as we continue to grow and evolve as a SIG!

Be sure to join us on Tuesday night for our business meeting, socializing, and most importantly, to hear our keynote speaker, Yasmin Kafai, discuss her work studying tweens in virtual worlds.

ARVEL SIG Schedule of Presentations

What Would Jeff Jarvis Do?

Yesterday I finished reading "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis.  Amazing text.  I was pleased to get a Twitter from him asking him about my new ideas as a result of reading it.  As I write this post, I'm wondering how much of an "Apple" I should pull--how discreet I should be at this point as we have new work in-progress that is in non-disclosure, versus being totally open with my ideas--a central tenet of Jarvis's book.  

One of the later chapters in the text (Google U) discusses potential implications of the Google Way for universities.  It was a good overview chapter, but surprisingly, didn't give me the depth I was looking for as we seek to continue to evolve the way we "do" education in our EDTECH program at Boise State. However, in earlier chapters, I was able to glean many great ideas that can be parlayed into educational realms:

1.  Make curriculum open.  While many in educational technology are starting to work openly (George Siemens does a good job at this), most of us keep our curriculum guarded.  After all, if you're an online program, what distinguishes your program from every other online degree around the country?  People will choose your university for several reasons:  1) cost, 2) prestige of degree, 3) innovativeness and/or reputation of program, 4) reputation of faculty, 5) friend referral, 6) potential for employment with a specific degree from a specific university.  

On our website, http://edtech.boisestate.edu we are very open with tons of information.  All class syllabi are listed, schedules, faculty information, projects in-progress.  We are also re-working our site and putting it in Drupal to make it more dynamic. However, what you don't see are our curriculum modules.  These have value.  What happens if we make all that curriculum freely available on the web?  Do we lose our advantage?  Jarvis gave me lots of reasons that confirmed it could be distinct advantage to offer-up our online curriculum to the public.

2.  Create platforms that organize bodies of information for others, and provide the gadgets that get that information easily to the user.  Don't make the user come to you.  Fascinating!  This process mirrors tenets of social constructivism and connectivism in learning theory.  Now we have the actual tools to make it happen.  As we train teachers, older existing pedagogical models such as cooperative learning now have new mechanisms to facilitate that process.  So what could that organization look like?  A Moodle learning site incorporating streamed feeds?  Google map mash-ups that overlay audio and video to create place-based curriculum?  Twitter communities of educational technologists that can be subscribed to with one click of a button?  What if we overlay college credit on top of these technologies and curriculum to rethink what a college education could look like in 2009?  

Jeff, I look forward to sharing more concrete examples of these ideas and how they play out in educational technology and teacher/faculty training.  For now, I return to our Apple-ized approach to keeping things closed until we are ready to release a quality product that can be modified and improved by the community.  Thanks!

Do we still need college degrees?

Jonathan Mead's recent blog on "Land Your Dream Job: Ditch School and Get a Library Card" proposes that we may no longer need college degrees to be successful.  He gives great examples such as Bill Gates and Walt Disney.  In an era of social networking and instant access to information, just what purpose DOES college serve? 

In its current format, it's becoming hard to justify four years of sitting in lecture labs.  However, trends in online education show that enrollments continue to grow across all grade levels:

• Over 20% of freshman will take at least one online class this year.
• Over 1,000,000 K12 kids will take at least one online class this year.

In online education, if you're lucky, your instructor will have incorporated access to social networking tools outside the LMS--blogs, wikis, twitter, facebook, virtual worlds, etc., to help empower the learner in constructing their own knowledge and link them to unique individual and ideas around the world.  We use all these technologies and more in our EDTECH program at Boise State.  So what's the value-add of using these tools "in college," as opposed to using them on your own?

First, with a savvy professor or instructor, you have a "guide" in your studies--someone who can facilitate you organizing your own studies, introducing you to important resources that you may not find on your own, assist you by posing questions that allow you to reconsider, think more deeply, and reframe.  A good professor is trained to be a facilitator in your learning process--THIS is their expertise.  This is what you should be paying for in a college education.  

Second, as much as we may or may not like it, degrees open doors.  They provide employers a quick means of determining a baseline or advanced education.  While the self-studier can create a portfolio to leave with an employer to review (and ALL learners should have some place where they collect their work), as an employer, to me a degree indicates that a person has some level of self-discipline, ability to write at a basic level, a foundational knowledge base to think critically, and some subject-specific knowledge.  In today's competitive economy, I'm going to encourage my kids to move on to college, and at the same time, follow their passions and creative process, wherever that leads them.  My 12 year old asked me if he could be a guild leader and gold-farmer, and start a business.  He's showing leadership and enterpreneurial skills, even if I'm not quite ready to let him go down that path.

Now, is there a way to reframe higher education so that it doesn't have to be boring lectures?  Can we support self-directed learning, integrate the voice of individual through social networking, pursue our own passions?  Absolutely.  We work on this everyday in our own program.  Jeff Jarvis also gives us some hints in "What Would Google Do?"  See his chapter on GoogleU.  

As a university professor, I suppose I'm biased about college degrees.  It can even be a love-hate relationship, at times.  But I'm an eternal optimist.  I wouldn't give up my degree in a million years, and thank the powers-that-be on a daily basis that I put in the time to get the degree done.  I was lucky and had amazing professors in graduate school who taught me to think about the world in a different way.  My goal is to assist others down the same path, to evolve institutions of higher education.  And maybe, just maybe, we don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Google Earth 360 & Ancient Rome Curriculum Competition

Google Earth just keeps getting better and better! Approximately a year or so ago, they introduced streetside maps that allow you to see the view from street level. If you haven't been in recently, check out the 360 feature (a red dot with the number 360 in the middle of it). You can turn it on by opening "Layers>Gallery>360 cities." Typically, you'll see these panoramics in major cities at tourist attractions.

When you click on the 360 button, you'll see a 360 panoramic image, clear as a bell. What amazed me about the 360 pictures is how they capture a full scene from the perspective of an individual. So imagine you are standing on a street in Tulum, Mexico. You'll see the taco stand, individuals riding by on bikes, cars, tourists on the streets, people eating in restaurants. It feels like you are there. These great images are hosted by 360 Cities and imported into Google Earth, see the shot above at http://360cities.net/image/carnitas-merchant

For teaching anything related to history, geography, study of cultures, etc. this tool is wonderful! When the 360 view is open, you can do a "File>save" and create a .jpg of that image. These images can be imported into slideshows or other rich media that students create for reports or projects.

Oh, and have you seen Ancient Rome in 3D in Google Earth?! Check out this first ancient city available in Google Earth, inside the Layers>Gallery menu! Note the ancient Rome curriculum competition, due February 2009.

Idaho Forum on Virtual Education

We had a strong turn-out last night for the first public Idaho Forum on Virtual Education. Many thanks to Diane Demerest, Executive Director for the Idaho Charter School Network, for her commitment to organizing such a powerful venue!

State Superintendent of Instruction, Tom Luna, opened the event with his support for school choice, especially via virtual education. Recently, Idaho was ranked third in the country for policies and practice in K-20 Online Education by the Center for Digital Education. Much of that ranking was due to this man's efforts and vision.

John Watson of Evergreen Associates was the keynote speaker, giving interesting highlights from his annual Keeping Pace report, which tracks growth in K-12 online programs (both state sponsored supplemental programs, and full-time K-12 online programs typically funded through private corporations). Over 42 states in the country currently offer one or both of these types of online learning for their kids.

Next up came a panel of state leaders (I was honored to be included on the panel) discussing where we are going with K12 virtual education. Tom Luna and John Watson rejoined us, along with Senator Russ Fulcher, Charter School Commissioner Alan Reed, and myself.

Here's a recording of the forum. Perhaps the most powerful portion of the evening came when a student panel, consisting of kids and a teacher from several virtual schools, shared their views about why online learning options were important to them. After listening to them present, I would dare anyone to disagree that online learning shouldn't be an option made available for ALL kids.

Cool new graduate elective!

OK this falls in the category of "cool news!" The Dept. of EDTECH at BSU does it again for spring 2009.

NEW ONLINE ELECTIVE! EDTECH 597: Augmented Reality Curricular Design (special hardware required; course hosted in Blackboard)
Dr. Patrick O'Shea, Harvard University, is designing and teaching this cutting-edge special topics course. AR is an effort to merge physical and virtual environments to the benefit of students. This course will include discussion of the theory behind AR and will include the development of individual AR curricula. Students will storyboard a central storyline for their AR curriculum, design characters and objects to include in their curriculum, produce media elements to represent these characters and objects, and produce the interactive AR instructional module. Learn more about Dr. O'Shea's HARP Project at http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=harp
Required Hardware/Software: Handheld Computer running Windows Mobile Operating System, PC running Microsoft OS
Required Prerequisite Skills: No required skills, but familiarity with web design and video editing would be beneficial.

Contact Jerry Foster at jfoster@boisestate.edu for registration information.

Moving forward on the EdD in EDTECH

Great news--we've received permission to move forward with planning of our online EdD program in EDTECH! Our goal is to launch the program by fall 2010. I'm hesitant to announce it here, as we begin to get a lot of interested students wanting to know if they can take courses NOW that will apply THEN. Although I'd love to say yes, in reality, we can't count our chickens before they are hatched.

There are many levels of approval before a doctoral program launches. The program has to be reviewed within a university, and once that's done, it goes out for external review before being submitted to the State Board of Education for approval! The process can get bogged down or suspended at any point along the line, so from a student's perspective, it's not wise to take coursework now anticipating something that may not be there when they need it.

Now, having all the disclaimers out of the way, let me say I'm VERY excited to begin re-visioning our program. I say re-vision, because we actually outlined a doctoral program two years ago. A lot has changed in two years--we are a larger department, with more faculty, more courses, and a little more experience and understanding about where we want to head as a program. We've been encouraged to align our work to the Carnegie Foundation's Initiative on the Doctorate. Excellent! I'm looking forward to working with our team of faculty and staff to reflect on notions of excellence in doctoral education, especially as they apply to a program that likes to focus on emergent technologies for teaching and learning.

I'm baaaack....with EDTECH Island!

Well, it's been 2 years, and I rediscovered my blog! Wow, a lot can happen in two years. No doubt, the most interesting thing I've been doing is building EDTECH Island in Second Life. What started as an experiment to run an online graduate course in Educational Games & Simulations has turned into a virtual world community with over 1,000 members, guest speaker events, and hosting numerous courses on the island. Ooops, I didn't even mention the great residents who've taken up living in our condos! Seriously, if you have yet to venture into virtual worlds, check out http://secondlife.com. And for those of you who have participated in our work there, thanks for everything you've done to contribute to who we are!