dkeats.com

Beyond the traditional learning management system again Tweet
680 days ago

Beyond the traditional learning management system again is another talk that I gave at the Department of Public Service and Administration in Pretoria two weeks ago.

I will try to sync with the podcast on SlideShare when I get a round tuit.

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Moving to Johannesburg Tweet
681 days ago

It has been an open secret for some time now that I had been offered the position of Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC), Knowledge and Information Management at the University of the Witwatersrand. I have not been able to make it official due to the lengthy procedures involved when a higher education instution recruits for senior management positions such as DVC. However, this process is now complete, and I can make it official. My new role as DVC at Wits will begin in the third week of January, and my last day at UWC will be January 21, 2009.

It has been a remarkable time at UWC, where I have been in a very similar role for the past 6 years. We have taken UWC from a place where it was pretty much ignoring technology, to the point where IT pervades absolutely every corner of the campus. For the last few months, I have been touring the IT facilities on campus, and I am confident when I say that UWC has achieved IT penetration, not just in technology but in use, equal to any higher institution in SA, better than most, and probably in the top 15% in the world. It has not all been rosy, and there have been some failures, but in general, a lot has been accomplished.

Moving to Wits will give me a chance to face some new challenges, different from the ones faced at UWC 6 years ago, but certainly considerable opportunity to help make an very good university into a really great university. The macro vision of the Vice Chancellor is to make Wits into one of the top 100 universities in the world. What more a challenge could one hope for than this one?

I will make a post to thank UWC for the opportunity it has afforded me to grow, and develop as the time of departure draws nearer.

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DPSA workshop: eLearning technology considerations mindmap Tweet
692 days ago

This is the mindmap from the DPSA workshop session on eLearning Technology. It is included here for the benefit of people who participated in the workshop.

Download

• [Freemind mindmap]
• [Word document format]
• [Open Document format]

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Educational Techniques for Young People by an Old Dude: videos Tweet
698 days ago

Educational Techniques for Young People by an Old Dude: rap and remix as socially networked learning opportunities

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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Educational techniques for young people by an old dude: rap and remix as socially networked learning opportunities Tweet
707 days ago

Livecasting was done at 14:00-14:45 South African Time on Wednesday Oct 1.  Unfortunately, it did not quite work out how I meant it to. There was no setup time, so in the rush I forgot to put on the audio, and left the phone pointed at the audience. The video is jittery, but if you download it it plays fine. The talk is podcast though, and the podcast is below the video. Please note that as I do various demonstrations, the video here will change.

I HAVE TURNED THIS OFF TEMPORARILY

Abstract

Rap music began in the 1980s, but is still a popular part of youth culture today. It embraces the notion of taking parts of different music sources, and mixing them together (remix), and using the results to create musical poetry that can contain new lyrics and embrace deep meaning. The results are shared among friends, and with the advent of social networking technologies, rappers may have a substantial online following without ever talking to a record label. This remix and sharing culture is a metaphor for education, yet we seldom make the connection, and almost never exploit its potential. This talk focuses around the technologies that we have deployed in support of a Social Content project for Western Cape schools to explore how the technology can help to create an educational remix culture. It also demonstrates some uses of commonly used youth technologies such as cellphones, MP3 players, and Mixit to facilitate educational remix that can happen using the Social Content site.

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Response to Steven Downes on email and old people Tweet
712 days ago

I tried adding a comment to Stephen Downes comments on my blog post "I only use email to talk to old people". His blog has an open comment box, but when I submitted I got:

Error
Permission Denied (Check Status Error)
 
Fortunately, I had kept the text in a text editor just in case something went wrong, as it often does with this kind of thing. Stephen's comments are at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=46480

Stephen wrote

At no stage did I say that students should abandon formal communication, and fact ended the short post with "As academics embarking on an eLearning Journey, we need to spend a little time learning about the culture of our students, and get to understand the mediums and language they use to communicate. Embracing their world will go a long way towards helping them bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning and knowledge construction."

I think that makes my point clear. It falls in the real of the "oh duh" that they need to enter the world of formal learning and knowledge construction and the communication that goes with it. What I was attempting to say was part of an attempt to get professors who have only recently graduated from chalk to ink markers to think about other technologies, and to find ways to embrace the culture of their students to help them to "bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning". I will be following this post with some examples of what we are doing, technology wise, to provide means for bridging the gap, and hope that there will be some engagement around the 'pedagogies' thereof.

Perhaps you, Stephen, work in a world where saying that young people communicate differently is cliche. I don't. I work in a world where a tiny bit of change is an uphill battle. I work in a world where, in many cases, national policies have so messed up access to technologies that even in one of the top three Universities in the country 80% of the professors have never heard of the most popular social networking technologies, fewer than 1 in a hundred have used them, and almost none have ever thought about using Mixit or SMS (the two most popular technologies among young people here) for educational purposes.

Cliche's have context. What is cliche in New Brunswick may well be innovative and new in South Africa. Many of our professors think that these observations apply to North America, that our students - over 50% of whom grew up in conditions that do not exist in Canada - are somehow different. There is a belief that poorer students have escaped the technology revolution because of poverty.

The fact is that they are not different at all. And even if they have not had access to a world replete with technolgy, they join it very soon when they enter university, because the other 50% helps them to do so even when we as their university do not. If I can get 2% of professors in my university to think about how they can embrace hw stdnts cmcte n our cntxt, thn smthg wl hv bn achvd. Especially if they can think beyond 'Wy wrnt U N cls 2day?"

I guess I should have made the context clear, but the original post was made on the University of the Western Cape eLearning site, and copied to dkeats.com as I sometimes do. I have to think about how I do that in future, so that I take the context with the post.

Regarding how they communicate in 20 years, when I am 83, being humans, I expect via some method and formula that we have not even thought about yet.The current youth will be us, and no doubt they will be lamenting the death of the SMS, the loss of Facebook, and the final bankruptcy of Mixit. I expect that there will be a lot more voice and video, and a lot less in shorthand. SMS/Mixit shorthand is an evolutionary response to a very short term phenomenon, where communications are limited by cost. I would expect that in 20 years, with more widespread access to big computing via ubiquitous networks, the elusive speech to text might even have arrived. F nt, I grnT tht ths wl nt be th way.

I have logged a job to get RSS autodiscovery added automatically to pages that have RSS feed.  The blog already uses RSS autodiscovery in the posts, but it works with the older way of doing autodiscovery, which is still very widely in use. Give us a week or so. Its not quite a simple as adding it to the template because the template is also used to render pages that do not have RSS.

Regards, derek

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Broadcast video live from your cellphone Tweet
715 days ago

I just came across a new application calle QIK ( http://qik.com/), with the tagline "see what happens" that has some potential in eLearning. Its a little application that installs on your cellphone, and broadcasts your video live to the web via your phone's camera. There is a widget that you can embed into a page, as I have done below. Any time I use my phone for this, you will see the video below.

Of course, here in Africa this stuff is expensive right now, and bandwidth is worse than disgusting, but that will change. Cool to see what some of these new Web 2.0 companies come up with though.

Find me at http://qik.com/dkeats . Who knows what masterpiece I will creat!

Please note that this is an experimental service, and it is not always available. You may just see a grey box if it is down.

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Latest issue of International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET) is out Tweet
716 days ago

According  to an email I just received from Micael Auer, the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET) has just published its latest issue at http://www.i-jet.org. The Table of Contents is included here in case any of our colleagues involved in eLearning are interested in them. The great thing about this journal is the fact that it uses a Creative Commons Attribution license. That means you can use articles in your course content, create derivitive works, etc, as long as you attribute the source.

[COLORBOX: boxtype=greybox] International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET)
Vol 3, No 3 (2008)[/COLORBOX]

Table of Contents

Papers

A Pilot Project ­ From Illiteracy to Computer Literacy: Teaching and Learning Using Information Technology
(Mohamad Adnan Al-Alaoui, Mesrob I. Ohannessian, Ghinwa F. Choueiter, Christine Akl, T. Taline Avakian, Ismail Al-Kamal, Rony Ferzli)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/221/570

Web Coherence Learning
(Peter Karlsudd)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/253/571

Assembling content into dynamic learning objects versus authoring of e-learning courses.
(Jeanne Schreurs, Bart Vanhove, Abdullah Al-Zoubi)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/270/572

Item Modeling Concept Based on Multimedia Authoring
(Janez Stergar)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/243/573

Interactive Numerical and Symbolic Analysis: A New Paradigm for Teaching Electronics
(Jean-Claude Thomassian)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/243/573
 

Ad-hoc Composition of Distributed Learning Objects using Active XML
(Werner Wetzlinger, Andreas Auinger, Christian Stary)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/279/576

Short Papers

Games and Multimedia in Foreign Language Learning - Using Back-story in Multimedia and Avatar-based Games to Engage Foreign Language Learners: A Pilot Study
(Lili Teng Foti, Robert D Hannafin)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/259/577

Reports

The Trade Fair: Introducing ESP Multimedia at a Technical University in Taiwan
(Shu-Chiao Tsai, B. Davis)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/278/578

Calls

6th International Conference on e-Learning Applications
(Call for Papers)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/637/555

Second International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Accessibility - ICTA 09
(Call for Papers)
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/638/556
 

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SnagFilms not ready for use here Tweet
716 days ago

Found SnagFilms because Allison Kipta was exploring it and had it on her Facebook Status update. Started writing a filter for it, but realised that there is a bit of a problem with it. They use clearspring widgets, and there is no widget for Metaweblog API, only for blogging services. This means that people who host their own blog cannot easily post it, which for the 1 extra minute it would take to provide access to Metaweblog API, they loose some potential users, like me!

I could write a filter for it, but because the way clearspring widgets work, there is no easy way to do this because the URL to the video is obscured by the clearspring widget, which is a Javascript snippet. It can of course be embedded, as I WOULD HAVE done below if I was allowed to, but for the average user telling them to do

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4837b4759c19ccae/48d6959ec431acf0/4837b4755c571347/350c3288/widget.js"></script>;

is a bit like telling them to change the valve lifters on a modern car, assuming cars still have them.

The other thing about SnagFilms is that the films seem to say Availability: US Only. So while I could post the snippet, I would not be allowed to watch the film so it seems rather pointless. This feels a bit of the old region code nonsense (I know less kind words to use to refer to region codes, but will  remain polite here). Interestingly, the video that I tried to watch was called Alicia in Africa, which was a story about Alicia Keys journey through Africa. It seems a bit weird to prevent Africans from watching that! Oddly though (sic) the commercials at the start of USA Only films play fine in Africa!

Furthermore, the videos are full feature, so with our best bandwidth being less than what the average American would consider utterly useless, it is probably not sensible to try to watch one of their videos anywhere in Africa. Certainly not where I live, in South Africa anyway. Pity because it would have been a good distraction from the insanity of our current politics.

Last but not least, trying to view the film using Flash 10 on Linux crashed the browser. I suppose the is an Adobe problem, not a SnagFilms problem, but it does kind of get in the way!

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I only use email to talk to old people Tweet
723 days ago

I should start by saying that I am an old person. I still use email. My son, who is 19, hardly ever uses email, though he communicates electronically much more than I do, and I do an exceptional amount of digital communication for someone as old as me.

Prof Stan Ridge sent me a photocopied article from Times Higher Education called "Learning from the Future". It talks about the cultural differences between most professors in higher education and the students they teach primarily to shed light on the issue of plagiarism. The title of this blog post is a quote from a student responding to the question of why he did not respond to emails from a tutor.

The article describes the nature of the "culture of sharing" in which young people live. It is one in which music and video have a higher utility than text, and one in which the dominant textual communication is informal and largely unstructured, rather than formal and structured. Examples of such text include SMS messages, Mixit messages, Facebook, Twitter (and other status updates systems) and blogs. The article says "We as academics need to understand this culture if we are to influence it, or we risk becoming increasingly irelevant."

We often think that in South Africa our students are crossing the digital divide when they enter University, and so we have escaped the challenges created by so-called 'digital natives' by virtue of our economic situation and the disgustingly high cost of bandwidth. We have not.

The culture of communicating and sharing is widespread in South Africa, although it is not always PC based. Indeed, to some extent, PCs are for old people. Young people are much more comfortable with mobile devices, and often engage with Web technologies that we associate with PCs using phones and interfaces that are not web browsers. I have two teenage sons. They spend a lot of time in solitary social situations...i.e. they are physically alone, or in a room watching TV, listening to music or doing homework, but are socially connected to their friends via Mixit and Facebook on their cell phones. This is the reality, it is as sensless to decry it as it was to suggest that the invention of writing would destroy oral culture a long time ago.

As academics embarking on an eLearning Journey, we need to spend a little time learning about the culture of our students, and get to understand the mediums and language they use to communicate. Embracing their world will go a long way towards helping them bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning and knowledge construction.

I hpe ths s prty clr to U. F tis nt thn phps we nd a crs abt yng ppl, jst 4 old ppl.

So as not to be guilty of plagiarism, the article is
Culwin, F. 2008. Learning from the future. Times Higher Education, 21 Aug 2008, p. 24.
 

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International Journal on E-Learning Vol. 7 now available Tweet
726 days ago

The International Journal on E-Learning Vol. 7, No. 4 (October 2008) is now available online. There are perhaps some lessons in it for our own e-Teaching-and-Learning practices, though there are not many new concepts in this issue.

Understanding the Factors Limiting the Acceptability of Online Courses and Degrees
Jonathan Adams, FLorida State University, USA
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24314

Audio Use in E-Learning: What, Why, When, and How?
Brendan Calandra, Georgia State University, USA; Ann E. Barron, University of South Florida, USA; Ingrid Thompson-Sellers, Georgia State University, USA
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24297

Using a Virtual Learning Environment to Manage Group Projects: A Case Study
Yvonne Cleary & Ann Marcus-Quinn, University of Limerick, Ireland
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24342

E-Learning Incorporation: An Exploratory Study of Three South African Higher Education Institutions
Wanjira Kinuthia, Georgia State University, USA; Rabelani Dagada, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24339

Belonging Online: Students' Perceptions of the Value and Efficacy of an Online Learning Community
Loralee LaPointe & Marcy Reisetter, University of South Dakota, USA
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24419

The Design of Online Tertiary Courseware for a Blended Learning, Project-Based, E-Business Management Program in the Middle East
Arthur Rush, Higher Colleges of Technology, United Arab Emirates
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24305

Vienna E-Lecturing (VEL): Learning How to Learn Self-Regulated in an Internet-Based Blended Learning Setting
Barbara Schober, Petra Wagner, Ralph Reimann & Christiane Spiel, University of Vienna, Austria
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24292

Teaching Aspects of E-Learning
Soonhwa Seok, University of Kansas, USA
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24323

University Student Online Plagiarism
Yu-mei Wang, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24455

The Practitioner’s Model: Designing a Professional Development Program for Online Teaching
Debbi Weaver & Diane Robbie, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia; Rosemary Borland, Deakin University, Australia
Abstract: http://go.editlib.org/a/24411

 

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Rapping as an assignment type Tweet
727 days ago

In universities we get so entrenched in old ways of doing things, that new ways sometimes come and go without even making a ripple in the space-time continuum of the higher education universe. But if we are going to remain relevant in the lives of young people, we need to take a long hard look at our own assumptions.

I wonder what a typical physics professor would give for an assignment done as a rap song that remixed music, text, video and images?

The video below is not exactly that, since it was written by Katherine McAlpine, aka "alpinekat", a science writer working at CERN.  Her song  "The Large Hadron Rap"  was added to YouTube on 28 July 2008, and, as of today, it had been viewed about two million times.

I am not saying that students should not learn to write or do serious academic work. That falls in the realm of the 'oh duh' - something that is so obvious that it doesn't even need saying. However, if this kind of assignment can help revitalize learning, whyever not?

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What are twitters saying about the Large Hadron Collider? Tweet
727 days ago

I was just wondering what  Twitter users have been tweeting about the Large Hadron Collider. Fortunately, thats an easy task for Chisimba!

[RSS:limit=6]http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=+Large+Hadron+Collider[/RSS]

Cool thing to do, even if the comments are mostly inane.

Now that the time is past, I have reduced this to three  comments by setting limit =3 in the filter. The main purpose of this exercise was testing and demonstrating the use of the RSS / FEED filter.

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Flickr photos from Kirstenbosch last weekend Tweet
727 days ago

This displays a live feed from Flickr, so for a few days the title will be accurate. But since it is a live feed, this will change.

[RSS:limit=5]http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=93242958@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200[/RSS]

I am doing this to test my new RSS filter. I see a couple of small bugs.

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My YouTube videos Tweet
728 days ago

Here are some of the videos I have posted to YouTube.

[RSS: limit=10]http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/derekkeats/videos.rss[/RSS]

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Our chisimba twittering Tweet
729 days ago

This is a chisimba RSS feed of all mentions of Chisimba on Twitter. It was created using the RSS filter:
[RSS:limit=5]http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=chisimba[/RSS]
which demonstrates the power of Chisimba filters.

[RSS:limit=5]http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=chisimba[/RSS]

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New version of Chisimba released Tweet
733 days ago

The next release of the Chisimba PHP5 framework is now available.

Major enhancements included in this release are:

 - PDO and MDB2 support
 - Improved database performance
 - Bug fixes
 - Better code documentation
 - API integration for many more modules
 - Remote downloads of modules (apt like module installations)

and, of course, new modules to add onto your installation!

Please take a look, download it and give it a test drive!
 
Chisimba, for those that don't know it already, is a PHP5 framework made in Africa, for Africa and the world. It is a collaboration between around 13 African Universities, as well as around 35 active developers from around the continent.
 
It can be downloaded from AVOIR at:
 
http://trac.uwc.ac.za/trac/chisimba/downloader/download/release/5

and the docs can be found at:
 
http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/

There are server setup instructions, as well as installation walkthroughs available linking from the main AVOIR site:
 
For those interested in developing a module, or just getting some additional info please join our mailing list and ask some questions:
 
http://mailman.uwc.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/nextgen-online
 

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What mark would you give? Demonstrating the value of remix Tweet
735 days ago

Assume that I am a student, and I hand in the following text to you in a Third Year Education course, where I had to do an assignment on Education 3.0.

What kind of grade would I get for the above information, all of which is copied from somewhere, though the words are changed? I am guessing that you would not give me a very good grade. These are not even sentences, and I must be some kind of idiot to hand in something like this. You would probably glance at it and toss it in the ZERO pile.

 

What if instead of doing text like that, I went to Flickr and grabbed a whole bunch of images, and just handed them in to you? What kind of grade would you give me? (Note: Click the image to advance)

OK, what if I took the worthless text, and combined it with the worthless images. What would you give me for a grade? Does it demonstrate that I know why Education 3.0 is important in the African context, and does it use power or pursuasion? (Note: Click the image to advance)

Now you understand the value or remix!

 

Note that the images used in this presentation may have a license that varies from that of the page contents.

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