Recent Course & Workshop Resources: HTML5, Drupal, Distance Education

Here are some web sites for courses I’m currently teaching or recently taught:

• Distance Education Tools - http://detools.wikispaces.com/
  • This site now has dozens of links of various tools and technologies you can use with online and blended learning
• Multimedia Development with HTML5 - http://html5.wikispaces.com/
  • As I posted earlier, HTML5 is emerging as an alternative to flash and java
• Instructional Design Projects – http://holton.usu.edu/moodle
  • We learn how to use a learning management system (moodle) and about “post-modern” instructional design techniques, such as constructivism, problem-based learning, simulations, games, cases…
• Internet Development: http://internetdev.usu.edu/outline
  • I’ll be teaching web development with the Drupal content management system again next summer.  I hope to improve the videos.

At the AECT conference last week I gave a workshop on using Drupal to create web applications – here’s a Drupal Cheat Sheet I made for it.  And here are slides for a talk on embodied cognition and instructional design.

Embodied Cognition & Education Talks at AERA

I’ll be giving just one talk at AERA this year, and hosting a symposium session. Both are related to the applications of embodied cognition research and enactivism to education.

1. Embodied and Enactive Approaches to Instruction: Implications and Innovations. SIG-Learning Sciences. Scheduled Time: Mon, May 3 – 2:15pm – 3:45pm Building/Room: Sheraton Denver / Governor’s Square 14.
   • Discussant: James Paul Gee (Arizona State University)
     Chair: Douglas L Holton (Utah State University)
     Participant: Dor Abrahamson (University of California – Berkeley)
     Participant: Mark Howison (University of California – Berkeley)
     Participant: Robert Goldstone (Indiana University)
     Participant: David Landy (University of Richmond)
     Participant: Qing Li (University of Calgary)
     Participant: David Birchfield (Arizona State University)
     Participant: Mina Catherine Johnson-Glenberg (ASU)
   • The purpose of this session is to explore the implications of enactivism and embodied cognition research for educational design and research, as well as share innovative instructional techniques and learning environments inspired by research on embodiment.
2. Constructivism + Embodied Cognition = Enactivism: Theoretical and Practical Implications for Conceptual Change. SIG-Constructivist Theory, Research, and Practice. Scheduled Time: Sat, May 1 – 2:15pm – 3:45pm, Building/Room: Sheraton Denver / Plaza Court 3.
   • Part of the symposium: Theoretical and Practical Frameworks for Understanding Learning
   • The objective of this paper is to explore specific theoretical and practical implications of recent research on embodied cognition and enactivism for the design of effective learning environments, especially those targeting conceptual change. The ultimate goal is to illustrate how enactivism and embodiment meet the criteria that often defines scientific progress, and thus can help progress educational research and development and constructivist theory.

Yo Dawg, I heard you like conferences…

So we made a conference about conferences so we can talk about talking. A free online AACE conference about how to improve traditional conferences starts tomorrow: Spaces of Interaction: An Online Conversation on Improving Traditional Conferences. (yo dawg meme)

2007 Open Education Conference Underway

The 2007 Open Education Conference started today here at Utah State University in Logan, UT. There are already pictures and blog posts being posted online. Eventually the audio/video and presentation files for each presentation should be freely available on the conference website, as was done for the earlier open education conferences. So I’m not really ‘live blogging’ the event myself, but I will say Chris Hoadley gave a nice presentation this morning on taking the context and community in account when incorporating technology into instructional reform efforts. He ended with a critical analysis of the OLPC laptop project, which thus far is not taking context, community, and pedagogy into much account. If you are blogging anything related to the conference, use the tag or mention the word “opened2007″ in order for the site to pick it up.

AERA Blogging

Students and researchers at Northern Illinois University and elsewhere will be blogging the AERA conference next week.

In other news, there will actually be 2 sessions there on embodied cognition as it applies to education. The first is entitled “Mathematics Learning and Embodied Cognition” and will be on Tuesday. The second one which I will be attending on Thursday is entitled “Embodied Cognition: A More Meaningful Ontological Unit.” My own presentation discusses embodied cognition in relation to designing an educational science simulation, but I am not presenting in either of those sessions, rather, one entitled “Cultural and Pedagogical Issues in Technology Design.”

John Bransford, Sasha Barab, and James Paul Gee are presenting in the latter session on embodied cognition. Since none of the presenters have written about embodied cognition before (although Bransford was on my dissertation committee), I thought I’d whip up a flyer and/or wiki page by next week that is a primer on work in embodiment, embodied cognition, enactive learning, and the like.

There actually is not even a wiki out there on the learning sciences or educational technology in general, for that matter. I had some wikis on those topics at coedit.net up until about a year ago when I shut it down. I’ll probably use the free Wikispaces site instead, and link to (rather than duplicate) some of the existing resources out there like on the EduTech wiki and the recently started ENCORE wiki.

Open Education 2007 Conference Call for Proposals

David Wiley has announced the call for proposals for the Open Education 2007 conference at Utah State University. The conference will run from September 26-28, 2007 and the deadline for proposals in May 18th. See the proceedings from last year’s conference to get an idea for what it is about. This year’s theme is learning:

If our open education efforts aren’t supporting learning, we’re failing as a field. Period. And as we are beginning to understand how to produce and license content, we have to turn some of our attention to how this content is used by learners and teachers. How do they change, adapt, and localize it for their specific needs or the needs of their specific students? Do open educational resources support learning in ways different from non-open resources? In what concrete ways do open educational resources support learning?

If you are not that familiar with opencourseware (OCW) and open education, one place to start exploring is this OER content providers page which lists all the OCW and open digital library sites out there and provides a searchable and browseable list of all their open educational resources and courses.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be working at Utah State this fall, so I’m glad I’ll be able to attend the conference and perhaps meet some of the edubloggers that I’ve stumbled upon many times over the past years, such as Brian Lamb, who will be keynoting at the conference, and possibly Stephen Downes.

As to contributing to the conference myself, I don’t have a good topic for a session, just some initial thoughts on possible future directions related to OCW and open education.

• Including assessment/test/quiz tools on OCW sites, not just courses and notes. Open source interactive tools to support quiz authoring and delivery. Most such quiz authoring and delivery tools are expensive and proprietary. Even QuizStar, a web-based tool created by researchers at Kansas University, is no longer going to be free.
• Including and integrating more interactive resources such as simulations and games, and making it easier to actually develop such resources. This also involves linking to existing databases of free interactive resources, such as the National Library of Digital Manipulatives, Illuminations from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the PhET physics simulations at Colorado, Physlets, ESCOT, Math Forum, Virtual Courseware for Earth and Environmental Sciences, ExploreLearning (which is not free though), and the like.
• Extending the open education “movement” to educational research. Making research data available to other researchers when feasible, and publishing research in open access journals. There is already an open source PHP-based tool for supporting open access peer-reviewed journals called Open Journal Systems.
• Connecting open education to curriculum reform and evaluations. For example letting students and the public rate courses, and publicly sharing evaluation data on the learning effectiveness of the course.
• Marketing open education resources better. Writing about them in journals, magazines, blogs, and social software sites such as digg and reddit. Highlight good quality resources, as well as content on controversial issues or that are of interest to the general public.
• Extending content beyond what’s already in standard texts and courses. Take advantage of the fact that you can include more up-to-date, more in-depth, and more interesting content. This makes online, open education resources more valuable to professors, researchers, teachers, students, and the public.
• Letting teachers and students mix and match modules to create their own courses.
• Adding social cues to make OCW resources and sites feel more “alive,” such as showing where users are clicking, and linking to synchronous chat and asynchronous discussion resources. This includes working with LMS tools like Sakai or Moodle.
• Connecting courses and modules to some sort of learning standards and prerequisites system, and providing just-in-time remedial resources when students don’t have sufficient background knowledge to grok the content.

Meet Up at AERA Conference Next Week

This coincides with the time I’ll be at AERA next week (Thursday, April 12th), so I thought I’d share it here. If you are attending the AERA Conference next week in Chicago, be sure to drop by a special symposium and reception in honor of the late Dr. William Winn, who passed away last year.

This is sponsored by the Technology, Instruction, Cognition & Learning SIG, the Learning Sciences SIG (formerly ATL/EST SIG), and others. Also Texas Instruments will be there to announce funded research opportunities with their next generation graphing calculator due out this year, TI-NSpire.

The paper presentation symposium will be from 4-6pm, followed by a reception from 6-8pm, both in the Truffles Room on West Tower-Blue Level of the Hyatt Regency Chicago, on Thursday April 12th.

There will also be a reception from 7-9 that same night by the MacArthur Foundation, as noted on their blog.

AERA, SIGCSE, ICER Conference Proceedings Online

Haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been criss-crossing the country interviewing for ed tech jobs. I’ll write more on that soon.

Some conference proceedings and papers have been made available online recently, such as the AERA 2007 conference program. Their website is quite horrible I’m afraid. Don’t use the back button or multiple browser windows or tabs.

At AERA I’ll be discussing my initial research on students learning with an animated AC circuit simulation, as measured by a test of their conceptual knowledge (a “concept inventory”). Here is the proposal, which for anonymizing purposes has no references, so here is a big reference list. I’ll post a link to the full paper when the conference is closer, and hopefully a link to the simulation as well. Until then I’m mainly busy continuing to re-program it as well as writing a journal article about earlier research on AC circuit (mis)conceptions with my former colleagues.

The SIGCSE conference (computer science education) is occurring next week near Cincinnati. Here are the papers and topics being presented there. As always Mark Guzdial is very involved in that conference, along with the ICER 2007 conference (International Computing Education Research) in Atlanta later this year. The papers from last year’s ICER 2006 conference are online. I am not a CS person or really interested in CS education, but rather making it easier for hobbyists and beginners to develop interactive educational software. So I think there is a close connection to what they are doing, but actually both the SIGCSE and ICER seem to be almost solely about formal CS education in classrooms.

I posted earlier about all the ed tech related conferences coming up in 2007. Here are a few interesting ones:

• International Conference on Imagination and Education
• NECC 2007
• ED-MEDIA 2007
• Improving University Teaching
• National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
• and the International Conference on Enactive Interfaces, the one I would love to present at one day (read my proposal you’ll see why).

I have a whole rant about the inefficacy and costliness of conferences, but I’ll spare you.

Ed Tech Year in Review, and Conferences in 2007

Clayton Wright has created a list of many of the ed tech related conferences coming up in 2007. See the word document at the bottom of the page. Some others not mentioned are listed here (sorry, requires a free subscription), including ICLS (2008), Frontiers in Education, SIGCSE, Visualization in Science and Education, Engineering Interactive Systems, Enactive, Physics Education Research Conference, Multimedia in Physics Teaching and Learning, the K12 Online Conference, and others.

Educational technology news:

• eSchoolNews has listed what they believe are the top ten educational technology issues from 2006, see part 1 and part 2.
• Another eSchoolNews article, Computer-simulated training on the rise.
• Games of learning take action to lure kids, an article in the Detroit Free Press.

Australian Games in Education Workshop & Sessions

Tony Forster summarizes and links to some games in education papers presented at the Australian Computers in Education Conference. There was also a couple of pre-conference workshops on using the commercial GameMaker tool to create games.