In 2017 my Website was migrated to
the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me atrjensen@trinity.eduif
you really need to file that is missing
The 21st Century
Pedagogy Alternatives and Tricks/Tools of the Trade
Social Networking for Education: The Beautiful and the
Ugly
(including Google Plus and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses
of Twitter)
Updates will be at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
New and Old Tools(including
tools for large classes, screen capture, video capture, panoramic capture, etc.)
More than 100
colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu Many
universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583 (or
many more by now)
Search for words like “accounting”
More than 400 colleges and universities have
set up channels on YouTube as part of the YouTube EDU section of the
popular video site, but university officials admit they are still
experimenting with the service and learning what types of videos
resonate with off-campus audiences.
With data provided by YouTube, The Chronicle
has determined the 10 most popular videos on YouTube EDU of the 2010-11
academic year (from June 2010 to June 2011). Some college officials
stress that popularity is not always their main goal—because many
colleges upload lectures and study materials designed for those enrolled
in the courses. Still, the list gives a sense of the variety of videos
colleges post and their impact.
Star-studded commencement speeches seem to be
the best way for colleges to draw viewers. Four graduation videos made
it onto the top-10 list, and three of the four featured high-profile
celebrity speakers: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Conan O’Brien.
According to YouTube officials, searches on the site for the phrase
“commencement speech” have increased eightfold since 2008.
But the biggest hit of the year focused on a
graduating student rather than a star speaker. UC Berkeley’s video,
“Paralyzed student, Austin Whitney, walks at graduation,” topped the
list, with over 471,000 views. The clip shows Mr. Whitney, a graduating
senior who was paralyzed from the waist down before entering college,
walking to receive his diploma, aided by a mechanized exoskeleton that
UC Berkeley engineers designed for him.
Robotics videos were also crowd pleasers this
year. The University of Pennsylvania’s baseball-pitching machine earned
it a spot in the top 10, and the University of Chicago made it on the
list twice for gadget-themed clips. The first, the “Universal Gripper,”
displays a device researchers developed that can grip and move nearly
any object regardless of shape or size. The other video investigates how
the mechanized book-retrieval system in the university’s newly
constructed library works. Jeremy Manier, the university’s news
director, attributed the library video’s success to the fact that it
could engage several Web communities: those concerned with libraries and
the future of print; architecture enthusiasts; and techies. “It tells a
good story and it’s got robots,” he said, adding jocularly that “robots
rule the Internet.”
No traditional lectures made the list. The
closest thing to a lecture is an MIT physics “module”—a 20-minute
explanatory video by Walter H.G. Lewin, a professor of physics at the
institute. It explains the physics behind a familiar dilemma: Which will
make you more wet, walking or running in the rain?
Other academic lectures have proven quite
popular, though: A Harvard University lecture series on the philosophy
of justice has accumulated more than 1.6 million views since it was
uploaded in September 2009.
Although other individual lectures may not
receive a high number of hits, a growing number of colleges are posting
them. Some universities, such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, have
begun posting all of the recorded lectures from selected courses,
allowing viewers from around the world to tune in and see what goes on
in their classrooms. By broadcasting their lectures, they “broaden the
window of access” to their resources, said Ben Hubbard, the manager of
UC Berkeley’s YouTube EDU channel. Through feedback from students and
spikes in viewership during midterms and exams, Mr. Hubbard has inferred
that the channel is actually being used as a study tool. However, he
said, “We know that we haven’t had just students logging in 120 million
times. We know we’re serving the public.”
It can be difficult to determine the factors
that lead a college video to go viral, and many college-news offices and
technology departments are still experimenting with ways to take full
advantage of their presence on YouTube. Angela Y. Lin, EDU’s manager at
YouTube, says the service provides “resources for all of our partners
regarding how to optimize their channels,” including statistics on user
views, as well as suggestions such as adding metadata, creating
playlists, and tagging keywords.
But the success of a video is ultimately
determined by the whims of The Crowd. “There is a certain mystery or
alchemy about what captures the public’s minds,” said Dan Mogulof, a UC
Berkeley spokesman. “There are common themes and variables that can
increase the chance of something becoming popular, but it’s not a simple
formula.”
There are now
nearly 7,000 accounting education videos on YouTube, most of which are in very
basic accounting.
But there are nearly 150 videos in advanced accounting.
There are nearly
70 videos on XBRL
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos
that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for
your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips
for video projects as well as free online communication tools.
My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of
work that they are now sharing with us
While many students turn to YouTube when looking
for help with their homework, it can be hard to find good-quality
educational clips there, according to two professors who did a preliminary
analysis of several video search engines.
The two researchers, Jeffrey R. Bell, a professor
of biological sciences at California State University at Chico, and Jim
Bidlack, a biology prfessor at University of Central Oklahoma, entered
scientific terms into several video search engines and analyzed the top 20
results from each one to compare their relevance and educational usefulness.
Students were also shown some of the resulting videos and asked to rate
their effectiveness at explaining the concept involved.
The professors found that YouTube favored videos
made by students as class projects, perhaps because those videos attracted
more comments than professionally made ones, said Mr. Bell in an interview.
Google Video
returned the most high-quality videos in the top 20
search results, the professors said. (Google owns YouTube but also operates
Google Video, which includes videos across the Web rather than just those on
YouTube, which hosts videos from users.
"You go into YouTube and you put in "mitosis,"
you're going to get 3,000 videos back," said Mr. Bell. "But no one looks at
all of that. You're only going to look at the top 10, so the ranking
algorithm is really important."
The professors presented their findings during a
poster session at last week's
Emerging
Technologies for Online Learning symposium, run
jointly by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group to support teaching with
technology, and two providers of educational software and resources. The
professors say they plan to expand their study and hope to publish the
results.
Jensen Comment
I posted the following comment at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
What the authors are indirectly concluding is that
some of the top researchers in our most prestigious universities are lousy
teachers.
The videos that I've watched to date are only the
top researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. I thought they had a lot
to say although they were not always the most dynamic speakers. Some were
pretty good.
What's lacking is the music and the graphics arts
and the comedy found on Comedy Central. Take your pick.
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos
that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for
your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips
for video projects as well as free online communication tools.
My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of
work that they are now sharing with us.
The Journal of Accountancy has a great monthly technology section
(with particular focus on things you never, ever thought you could do with MS
Office, particularly Excel) ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/
The Q&A modules are particularly informative and should be centralized in one
place in addition to monthly editions.
Technology is changing the way students learn. Is
it changing the way colleges teach?
Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director
of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning
Technologies Centre.
While colleges and universities have been “fairly
aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens
told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few
decades is altering our pedagogy.”
To help get colleges thinking about how they might
adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process
information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center,
have created a Web-based guide, called the
Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.
Taking their own advice, they have outfitted the
handbook with a wiki function that will allow readers to contribute their
own additions.
In the its introduction, the handbook declares the
old pedagogical model—where the students draw their information primarily
from textbooks, newspapers, and their professors—dead. “Our learning and
information acquisition is a mash-up,” the authors write. “We take pieces,
add pieces, dialogue, reframe, rethink, connect, and ultimately, we end up
with some type of pattern that symbolizes what’s happening ‘out there’ and
what it means to us.” Students are forced to develop new ways of making
sense of this flood of information fragments.
But Mr. Siemens said that colleges had been slow to
appreciate this fact. “I don’t see a lot of research coming out on what
universities might look like in the future,” he said. “If how we interact
with information and with each other fundamentally changes, it would suggest
that the institution also needs to change.”
This Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning (HETL) has been
designed as a resource for educators planning to incorporate technologies in
their teaching and learning activities.
How is education to fulfill its societal role of clarifying confusion
when tools of control over information creation and dissemination rest in
the hands of learners[3], contributing to the growing complexity and
confusion of information abundance?
Global, political, social, technological, and educational change
pressures are disrupting the traditional role (and possibly design) of
universities. Higher education faces a "re-balancing" in response to growing
points of tension along the following fault lines...
Technology is concerned with "designing aids and tools to perfect the
mind". As a means of extending the sometimes limited reach of humanity,
technology has been prominent in communication and learning. Technology has
also played a role in classrooms through the use of movies, recorded video
lectures, and overhead projectors. Emerging technology use is growing in
communication and in creating, sharing, and interacting around content.
A transition from epistemology (knowledge) to ontology (being) suggests
media and technology need to be employed to serve in the development of
learners capable of participating in complex environments.
It is not uncommon for theorists and thinkers to declare some variation
of the theme "change is the only constant". Surprisingly, in an era where
change is prominent, change itself has not been developed as a field of
study. Why do systems change? Why do entire societies move from one
governing philosophy to another? How does change occur within universities?
New literacies (based on abundance of information and the significant
changes brought about technology) are needed. Rather than conceiving
literacy as a singular concept, a multi-literacy view is warranted.
Each tool possesses multiple affordances. Blogs, for example, can be used
for personal reflection and interaction. Wikis are well suited for
collaborative work and brainstorming. Social networks tools are effective
for the formation of learning and social networks. Matching affordances of a
particular tool with learning activities is an important design and teaching
activity
Evaluating the effectiveness of technology use in teaching and learning
brings to mind Albert Einstein’s statement: "Not everything that can be
counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". When we
begin to consider the impact and effectiveness of technology in the teaching
and learning process, obvious questions arise: "How do we measure
effectiveness? Is it time spent in a classroom? Is it a function of test
scores? Is it about learning? Or understanding?"
Through a process of active experimentation, the academy’s role in
society will emerge as a prominent sensemaking and knowledge expansion
institution, reflecting of the needs of learners and society while
maintaining its role as a transformative agent in pursuit of humanity’s
highest ideals.
Also I forgot to add some special considerations for detection and prevention
of online cheating ---
Also see helpers for detection and prevention of cheating in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Some universities, especially those with distance education
programs, have online examination software. This varies greatly in cost and
quality. You can read more about such software at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Examinations
The movie Dead Poets Society showed examples of why
students recalled so much of their learning. There were changes in location,
circumstances, use of emotions, movement, and novel classroom positions. We know that
learners remember much more when the learning is connected to a field trip, music, a
disaster, a guest speaker, or a novel learning location. Follow up with a discussion,
journal writing, a project, or peer teaching.
From U.K.'s Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University
of Bristol
Social Science Information Gateway
http://sosig.esrc.bris.ac.uk/
The Crucial Role of Passion in Teaching and Learning
April 7, 2012 message from XXXXX
I am currently attending Perkins School of Theology
pursuing a Masters of Divinity in preparation for entering the ministry.
Perkins is the seminary located at Southern Methodist University. While
SMU's main campus is in Dallas, the class I am taking is taught (live) at a
satellite campus in Houston. Last Monday, one of the faculty visited the
Houston extension to see if the satellite was delivering the same quality of
education received at the main Dallas campus.
One of the topics that came up was on-line
education. Another Methodist seminary (Asbury) offers on-line courses but
Perkins does not. The agency which accredits most main-line seminaries
requires for any degree at least 24 hours of credit be earned at the main
campus of the seminary (I have already completed 33 hours in Dallas).
The unanimous recommendation by myself and the
other students was that Perkins does not offer on-line courses. (The faculty
member was surprised by this.) But our reasoning is that ministry is a
face-to-face profession. Personal interaction is a critical skill that
cannot be simulated by a computer. Another factor is that the way most
main-line churches are organized, the clergy are a small group that rely on
each other for a great deal of support. The students attending Perkins now
will be working with each other professionally for the next 30 years. And,
with pastors, there is more emotional investment and a higher priority on
personal relationships that might be found in such professions as
accounting.
As I said, this recommendation was unanimous among
those of us who spoke to the faculty member (there were about a dozen of us
or about a third of those who attend the Houston satellite campus). All of
us are second-career students. I would guess the average age was about 35
with ages ranging from the upper 20's to about 60. Three of us actually have
experience in on-line education (myself as a technician, one as a corporate
instructor, one as a course manager for a public university). To be fair, I
do know of at least one Houston extension student that does advocate for
on-line courses but she was not present at the interview. However, the
purpose of the interview was not to discuss on-line education - it was just
one of the topics that came up and I know it is something you are interested
in.
I guess what I wanted to let you know is that
on-line education may not be the "wave of the future" that some pundits say
that it is. Since for-profit schools are generally on-line universities, I
am wondering if it is the next bubble that will eventually burst.
XXXXX
April 8, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi XXXXX,
Good to hear from you.
Online education learning, like onsite education learning, depends on
many, many variables. The most important variables as a rule, aside from
student motivation to learn, are the skills and passion of the teacher.
The best teacher I know is Amy Dunbar at the University of Connecticut.
She's won all-university teaching awards at UTSA, the University of Iowa,
and UCON. She wins these awards whether teaching onsite or online. She says
online education has some key advantages to students, and if done optimally,
online learning may be easier for students and harder for teachers ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm
Some things that are surprising is how shy or easily intimidated students
who rarely speak up in class or in face-to-face teams will assert themselves
in chat rooms or other online communications, including social networking.
There are of course dark sides of both online learning and education
technology in general, and these might lend support to the negativism of
your friends toward online courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
If a teacher is not passionate about teaching an online course, the
online course is probably doomed from the start. If the teacher is
passionate about an online course then some wonderful things might happen
for students that cannot happen in a college that only has onsite courses.
‘Super Courses’ Authors discuss their new book on how courses reflect the
future of teaching and learning ---
Authors discuss what makes a 'super course' (insidehighered.com)
Jensen Comment
For good students eager to learn it's not clear that super courses sacrificing
some content for motivation components is such a great thing. What those
students often want most from those teachers is to distill complicated and vast
subject matter into its most essential components. That does not necessarily
entail spoon feeding. Great teachers have a way of making students learn a lot
on their own (think case method teaching). But they filter out the content that
students must learn. In some instances they may be teaching super courses
without knowing they meet many of the parameters of super courses.
Jensen Comment
Viewing my own past over 22 years of college and 40 years of interacting with
faculty colleagues it seems impossible to put a fence arround the best
personality traits of great teachers. Nearly all of them in my estimation were
self confident but many were also humble about it. Many were extroverted, but
this is not a necessary condition. What is a mystery to me is how a few great
teachers were lousy faculty colleagues but were highly respected by their
students. I recall one who never took an interest in any of his colleagues and
remained aloof and distant even to members in his department. To us he almost
seemed autistic. But with students he was caring, confident, and highly
respected as an advisor and a teacher.
Most great teachers I knew were passionate about their discipline, but not
all were what I would describe as passionate teachers. I mean think of New
England Patriots coach Bill
Belichick. Based upon his record and his player's testimonials he's one
of the greatest and most powerful football coaches of all time. But if you
listen to him talk his presentations are better than prescription sleeping pills
if you need help falling asleep. He's the perfect example of an introverted
mumbling accountant low on testosterone rather than a NFL football coach.
But Belichick is arguably the most prepared coach in the history of the NFL.
In my viewpoint powerful teacher does not necessarily equate to great
teacher. The first ingredient of a great teacher is expertise at the level of
course being taught. I grant you that teaching at the introductory level
certainly requires less expertise and more power, although expertise helps when
introductory students ask tough questions. Certainly introductory teachers
should have sufficient expertise to admit they are not experts on some issues.
At advanced levels expertise trumps almost every other ingredient of a great
teacher. However masterful experts who are unprepared for class or learning
tutorials often blow it and lose the respect of ttheir students.
Can your students learn more from the various free accounting and finance
modules learning modules at the Khan Academy?
https://www.khanacademy.org/
Have you reviewed the teaching ideas and resources in Issues in Accounting
Education from the AAA over the past few years?
http://aaahq.org/pubs/electpubs.htm
Some Jensen History
On August 2, 2010 in San Francisco I was invited to make a short speech at the
Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum Section Breakfast. Afterwards a couple of you
questioned some of the dates I gave to events in my life. The events I mentioned
were true, but the dates were way off --- something I can only attribute to old
age and extemporaneous speaking.
For some unknown reason I decided to divert from my prepared remarks while
approaching the podium on August 2. I had not planned to talk about the "game
changer" in my professional life, but suddenly I was talking about the big game
changer in my life. Between 1966 and 1990 I was a lousy teacher focused only on
three performance scores for my work --- the number of accountics research
working papers (over 200 by 1990), the number of invited out-of-town research
presentations, and the number of refereed publications (about 50 by 1990) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Published
My research rather than my teaching paid off handsomely when I became the
Nicolas M. Salgo Professor of Accounting at the University of Maine in 1968,
received a Guggenheim Fellowship for two think tank years (1971/72 and 1973/74)
at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford University), became the the KPMG
Professor of Accounting at Florida State University in 1978, and ultimately
became the Jesse H. Jones Professor of Business at Trinity University in 1982.
My purpose here is not to brag. My purpose is to point out that research and
publication outweighed every other criterion to my "success" prior to 1990 and
made me what I think was overpaid between 1966 and 1990.
It was in the April 1990 (corrected date) when the game changer took
place in my life. I was invited, along with about 40 other accounting professors
in the State of Texas, by Prentice-Hall to attend an expense-paid seminar in
Dallas on "How to Improve Your Teaching." The presentations on how to improve my
teaching were uninspiring for nearly a day and a half until the very last
presentation of the seminar --- the game changer in my life that
instantly changed my entire focus from accountics research game playing to
teaching, learning, and technology.
The game changer in my life was a presentation by Darrell Ward.---
http://www.einstruction.com/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.display&menu=news&content=showArticle&id=202
Darrell resigned from the Computer Science Department at the University of North
Texas in the late 1980s to form HyperGraphics Corporation, HyperGraphics
first built upon the old HyperCard seminal slide presentation software for the
Apple II computers and added an entire non-linear navigation system and course
management system for learning and assessment of learning. I don't think the
Apple II version was all that successful, but when Darrill developed
Hypergraphics for the DOS-based PC, HyperGraphics had considerable success.
I think my mouth was open during Darrell's entire presentation. Afterwards I
went down and asked how I could buy the DOS-based HyperGraphics software.
Darrill said that I could buy the stack of floppy disks and an instruction
manual for $850 on the spot. I took out a check (my wife only allows me to carry
one check) from my bill fold and wrote out a check for $850.
During the flight home from Dallas it then dawned on me that I did not own a
PC. So instead of taking a taxi home from the San Antonio Airport, I took cab to
a store called CompuAdd. There I paid over $2,000 for my first PC and projection
panel. Until then I was always a snobby main frame guy (having taught FORTRAN,
COBAL, and SPSS for the main frame) who, like IBM, thought that the the PC was
simply a child's toy. After arriving home from the CompuAdd store I had to
explain to my wife how I spent $3,000 on my way home from Dallas. Since I used
my only check to buy the HyperGraphics software, I had to use a Visa card to buy
the PC and an overhead panel.
In the summer of 1990 (corrected date) I worked about 15 hours a day
programming my first course (a managerial accounting course) in HyperGraphics.
In September of 1990 I unveiled my course to some of my Trinity University
colleagues in a totally dark room using one of those terrible projection panels
sitting on top of an overhead projector. The early panels converted all the
color pictures to gray scale and were dim to read. But I could still demo what I
thought was really cool --- nonlinear navigation for asynchronous learning and
graphics/equation building in stages for student learning of complex details
asynchronously. My colleagues departed shaking their heads and whispering that
Jensen must be nuts.
It was October 4-5, 1990 (corrected date) when I made my first away-from-home
dog and pony show on featuring HyperGraphics technology --- at the University of
Wisconsin. HyperGraphics software pretty much died after Windows replaced the
DOS operating system in PCs. I then shifted my managerial accounting and
accounting theory courses to ToolBooks for the PC. My out-of-town dog and pony
shows really commenced to roll when my university hosts invested in those old
three-barrel color projectors that predated LCD projectors. I eventually made
hundreds of presentations of HyperGraphics and then ToolBooks on college
campuses in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Finland, Sweden, Germany,
Holland, and the United Kingdom (where I lugged my full PC and LCD projector
between five campuses as the European Accounting Association Visiting
Professor). Many of my campus visits and topics are listed at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Presentations
You can read about the history of HyperGraphics, ToolBook, Authorware, and
the many other course authoring and management software systems (most of which
died either early or prolonged deaths) at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
The important game changer for me in April 1990 is that I belatedly commenced
to think about how students learn and more importantly how I could become a
better teacher (or rather learning manager) by helping students study
complicated material on their own asynchronously with the ability to keep
replaying at their own learning paces. I even wrote an early 1994 book on
learning technology with the aid of Petrea Sandlin as my editor ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245cont.htm
My thoughts about how students learn are summarized in two evolving papers
at:
My life seems to have taken on more meaning since I focused more on my
students and how they learn.
October 19, 2010 message from Jagdish Gangolly
Over the years I have been frustrated with the lack
of software support for collaborative research, especially for writing
papers. Very often my coauthors are far from Albany (and out of the
country), and we need a way to maintain version control for papers,
annotation of document changes, facilities for rollback, and management of
bibliographies with minimum effort.
At long last, I (and my collaborators) seem to have
found the solution from a very unlikely source: the Eclipse IDE used widely
for programming. In fact I had used it in my teaching of Java language in
the past. In conjunction with texlipse (which works within Eclipse), it
provides a superior authoring environment in addition to being able to use
the same environment for programming of necessary. Best of all. it is FREE,
so no tithing the Church of Bill.
It works exactly like any commercial database
system with good access controls. It also is platform agnostic, and works on
windows, linux/unix/mac as well as most IBM mid-range and mainframes.
I wonder if any one on AECM has worked with it.
Jagdish Gangolly (
gangolly@albany.edu )
Department of Informatics College of Computing &
Information State University of New York at Albany
7A, Harriman Campus Road, Suite 220 Albany, NY 12206
Phone: (518) 956-8251, Fax: (518) 956-8247
October 20, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Thank you Jagdish,
I will add your Tidbit to my threads on much simpler ways to collaborate
such a Google Docs that Amy Dunbar and Rick Lillie passionately recommend
for student collaboration projects.
August 15, 2010 message from Bob Jensen
Hi Rick,
In my reply I should’ve
added some things about technology-experimenting accounting professors who
pull off their experiments with an exceptional degree of passion. In
addition to Amy Dunbar and Rick Lillie, I should’ve mentioned Steve Hornik
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
I can’t imagine how Steve pulls these innovations off with class sizes in
the hundreds.
I’m certain there are
others that are passionate in their own ways, and some of these passionate
and innovative accounting educators are identified in the TLC Section Page
at
http://aaahq.org/TeachCurr/index.html
I also should’ve elaborated a bit about the passions of Amy Dunbar and Rick
Lillie:
May 31, 2010 message from Amy Dunbar
[Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
I
just finished the first week of a 12-week MSA online tax course at UConn. I
put students in groups and I ask them to work fairly lengthy quizzes
(homework) independently, putting their answers in an Excel spreadsheet, and
then they meet in chats to discuss their differences. When they can’t
resolve a question, they invite me into chat. This week a student introduced
me to Google docs, and I was swept off my feet by the way this tool could be
used in my class. I love it! I created a video on the fly on Thursday to
illustrate how to create a spreadsheet and share it with other group
members. I may be the last to the party on this tool, but in case some of
you aren’t aware of it, I am posting the video.
If
anyone wants the “quiz” that the students worked, send me an email (not AECM),
and I will send you the file.
Amy
Amy
Dunbar
University of Connecticut School of Business
Department of Accounting
2100 Hillside Road Unit 1041 Storrs, CT 06269-1041
amy.dunbar@business.uconn.ed
I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets with all of my courses. It's
free, includes most of the Microsoft Office features, and makes it easy for
students to collaborate on team projects. It also makes it easy to submit
the final document in various formats (e.g., .pdf format).
My students use two communication tools in conjunction with
Google Docs and Spreadsheets (i.e., TokBox and Skype). To use these tools,
they need a headset/microphone and webcam.
TokBox (http://www.tokbox.com)
is a free, hosted video messaging service. You can record up to a 10 minute
video clip that can be shared by URL link. TokBox also includes a video
chat feature that enables multiple people to video conference. This feature
works great with study teams.
Skype (http://www.skype.com)
includes chat, audio and video-conferencing. The chat feature works
probably better than what you have been using. With a headset/microphone,
you can have up to 10+ people in a audio conference call.
Video-conferencing is 1:1 and includes a great screen sharing feature.
You can really change the nature of team collaboration when you
combine Google Docs and Spreadsheets with TokBox and/or Skype. Following is
an example of how to do this.
EXAMPLE
Students use Google Docs to create a shared workspace for writing
a paper. One student sets up the workspace and invites team members into
the space through an email link. Each team member is given editor rights.
Using a headset/microphone and webcam, students use TokBox to
host a group video conference call. This enables students to brainstorm and
get a project running.
During the work process, each team member adds/changes the paper
in the common workspace in Google Docs.
When it is time to pull the paper together and do final editing,
students use the audio conference call feature to talk with each other.
While all are online in Skype, each team member logs into the Google Docs
paper and views it on his/her computer screen. One or more students act as
the editor. All see changes as they are made.
When editing is finished, one student exports the final
assignment document in .pdf format to his/her hard drive. The student then
submits the document for grading (e.g., student uploads the paper through
the Digital Drop Box in Blackboard).
OUTCOME
By combining the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets with
communication tools like TokBox and Skype, students learn how to use
technology to get things done. Major companies pay a fortune to do what
your students can do for free. Purchasing a headset/microphone and webcam
is relatively inexpensive. The experience students get is priceless.
I use this approach and technology tools with face-2-face,
blended, and online classes. It works great. The approach changes the
nature of how students and instructor interact in the teaching-learning
experience.
Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email:
rlillie@csusb.edu
Telephone: (909) 537-5726Skype (Username): ricklillie
On the last day of class, I would love to hear my students say:
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so
much. I never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
(Joe Hoyle)
Jensen Comment
I’m certain that you will miss your beloved TokBox software now that it,
like Google Wave, has been discarded on the trash pile of abandoned
technology.
From:
AECM, Accounting Education using Computers and Multimedia [mailto:AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Rick Lillie Sent: Saturday, August 14, 2010 9:18 PM To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU Subject: Re: An Example of how I combine technologies to create a fully
online teaching-learning experience
Hi
Bob,
Thank you for great feedback about the interactive Class Assignments
Schedule (CAS) format that I developed for my third course in Intermediate
Accounting. I agree with your comments. I am revising the CAS for my FQ
2010 course, so your comments and suggestions arrive at the right moment.
Below are comments for several issues that you raised. Hopefully, I can
explain why I did, what I did.
For AECM readers, below is the link to the interactive Class Assignments
Schedule that you reviewed.
When
exploring linked features on the CAS, it works best to "right-click" on a
link and then click the "open in a new window" option. This makes it easier
to navigate CAS features.
ABOUT THE VOICETHREAD STUDENT COMMENTARIES
Both CalState San Bernardino and UCLA Extension use Blackboard. The LMS
includes a discussion board feature that works well for certain information
sharing activities. However, this past year, I became dissatisfied with
using the "finger tapping" discussion board for student discussions.
What I tend to find is that the first few students who post discussion
comments and responses post original thoughts. After the first postings,
things get repetitive. Unfortunately, Blackboard (and most LMS systems)
does not make it possible to keep postings private until after a deadline
has passed. The LMS structure almost by default encourages plagiarism.
VoiceThread includes an option that allows postings to be kept private
until I am ready to make them public for all class members to view. This
greatly reduces the chances of plagiarism occurring.
VoiceThread allows three ways to post comments (i.e., text, audio, or
video). For the first VoiceThread assignment, students can use any of the
three formats to post comments. For subsequent VoiceThead assignments,
students must post video comments. This helps students improve their oral
speaking/conversation presentation skills. A student can see how he/she
comes across to others. A student can hear his(her) own explanation.
I tell students to explain in terms a client will understand. Save the
"technical jargon" for colleagues who need to be impressed. VoiceThread
makes it possible for a student to see how well he(she) met this standard.
Once the posting deadline passes, I make all postings public to all class
members. I use Zoomerang (online survey system) to allow students to
anonymously rate each other's commentaries. I use the overall ratings and a
simple grading rubric as the basis for awarding individual grades. Often a
student wants to talk about his(her) presentation. We use Skype for a 1:1
video conference call.
EARLY COURSE FEATURES
I will add the "start-up" professionalization topics that you recommended.
I talk about these throughout the course, but have not specifically included
them on the Class Assignments Schedule. I set up other pages in Blackboard
for these items. I'll see I can add them to the Class Assignments Schedule.
During FQ 2009, AAA allowed me to include Sir David Tweedie's speech from
the 2009 AAA Annual Meeting. I replaced Sir Tweedie's speech with the Paul
Volker video. I viewed the Partnoy video. I agree this would be a far
better opening video. The "financial transparency" issue sets a good
opening tone for the overall course. The way the CAS is currently designed,
I use Warren Buffett materials to focus on "financial transparency." But,
this is done through the closing topic.
My syllabus (which is different from the CAS) includes discussion of
academic ethics, integrity, plagiarism, and cheating. However, my comments
are not as dynamic as yours. I will revise wording in my syllabus.
I agree with your comment about introducing XBRL. I already decided to
introduce XBRL throughout the course through short, web research exercises.
This should make the coverage relevant, practical, and less technical.
GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT COURSE DESIGN
I agree with your comments about demanding almost too much from students.
I am cutting back supplemental readings to no more than one or two per
topic. I refer to the readings as "Connect to Practice." Readings will
come from practitioner publications like the Journal of Accountancy or The
CPA Journal. I appreciate your references to Joe Hoyle's teaching advice.
IN CLOSING
Thank you for great advice and outstanding ideas. Once I revise the
interactive Class Assignments Schedule for FQ 2010, I will email you the
hyperlink to the revised web page. I think you will see significant
improvements.
Again, thank you for your comments at the TLC Breakfast meeting. I really
appreciated you doing this.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie Rick
Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
On
the last day of class, I would love to hear my students say:
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so
much. I never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
(Joe Hoyle)
Inspired by a Twitter conversation last week with
Caleb McDaniel (@wcaleb),
I decided to revisit it here.
I recently used Wordle in an assignment for my
January Intercession class (on F. Scott Fitzgerald) and found it very useful
for introducing students to close-reading and the basics of textual
analysis. As an English professor, textual analysis is one of the most
fundamental skills that I teach, and as a result, it can feel like the bane
of my existence. The source of my frustration (and that of my students) is
trying to get from summary and/or description to analysis. Students are
often very good at describing what is happening in a text, but it can be
very hard for them to break out of this habit and think about language in
other ways.
Enter Wordle.
To me, there are two things that make Wordle
invaluable:
It’s free and very easy to use. As an open
web-based program, all students with access to a computer can use it. It
doesn’t require specific hardware (read: iPad) or charge fees for
accessing the site.
It’s fun. Generating a Word Cloud is as simple
as clicking on the “Create” link, pasting in “a bunch of text,” and
clicking “Go.” Once the Word Cloud is created, students can then play
with fonts, color schemes, and other visual variables such as whether
they prefer the words to be laid out horizontally, vertically, or a bit
of both.
In my class, I first demonstrated how to use Wordle
with the novel we were reading (This Side of Paradise), which had
the added benefit of being published in 1921, so it is no-longer copyright
protected so I could use passages from
Project Gutenberg’s edition of the novel rather
than having to transcribe them manually. We created a few word clouds
together as a class to make sure everyone knew how to do it, and then I
asked the students how looking at these passages through the Wordle lens
might change their understanding. What did they notice seeing the words
rearranged, and in some cases resized (the size of words in the Wordle is
directly proportionate to the number of times that the word appears in the
initial text block)? By deconstructing and defamiliarizing the passage,
Wordle magically freed students from the summary trap and helped them to
think about the text analytically beyond the constraints of plot. Word
clouds do not have plots, at least not in the linear convention sense that
allows easy summary, so analysis was suddenly less confusing.
Finally, I asked students to create a Wordle on
their own and post a screenshot of it to the class blog. They could choose
any episode from This Side of Paradise that we had not already
examined together in class. Once they had their Wordle, they were asked to
answer a few questions: “Does this graphic visualization of the text
highlight certain themes or issues in the episode? Does it emphasize
particular themes or ideas? Do you notice things about the episode that you
had previously discounted in your earlier reading?”
Posting the Wordles to the website proved to be a
bit tricky for some, but that difficulty stemmed from the screenshot rather
than Wordle itself.
My class created some very interesting Wordles, and
more to the point, using this tool helped to make the task of literary
analysis less daunting, which is often no easy feat! I was left wondering
why I don’t use it more often in my classes and am currently trying to
figure out ways to incorporate it into other assignments.
Continued in article
Video Conferencing
Zoom.us -- An Amazing
Cloud-based, Video-Conferencing Posting the AAA Commons by Rick Lillie
Zoom.us -- An
Amazing Cloud-based, Video-Conferencing...
Zoom.us -- An
Amazing Cloud-based, Video-Conferencing Service (It's free!)
intro text:
Recently,
I read about
Zoom.us
a new free, cloud-based, video-conferencing service.
Yesterday, three of us used zoom.us to work on a research
project. We are located throughout the U.S. We logged into
the video conference call and worked for more than an hour.
The audio and video were crystal clear. We shared desktops
to work on documents together. Wow! The virtual work
session was very productive and enjoyable.
I use
Skypeto work with
colleagues and to offer virtual office hours for my
students. Skype offers a free 1:1 video-conference call
with desktop sharing. To include more than two people in a
Skype video call, you need to subscribe to
Skype's premium service. Skype's
fee is very reasonable; however, it's difficult to beat
"free."
Both
Zoom.us and Skype have features
that meet specific needs. Therefore, both services are
valuable to the teaching-learning experience. The quality
of the zoom.us video-conference call was exceptional. Zoom.us
versus Skype is not an either/or situation. Using one
service or the other is a judgment call regarding features
that best fit the need as hand.
Getting started with zoom.us is quick and easy to do. Their
support page explanations
are easy to follow. The service works with Google and
Facebook, iPad, iPhone, Windows and Mac. When I set up
zoom.us, I had to download a small file to my computer that
includes the zoom.us interface. The download was quick. No
problem.
Below is a
screenshot from the support page indicating key features of
the zoom.us interface screen. Individual members
participating in a video call are shown at the top of the
screen. When a member speaks, the border of the member's
screen turns "green." The speaker's screen displays in the
"big screen" section of the interface window. This process
works as the conversation switches among participants. Wow!
This is amazing and allows each speaker to be the center of
attention.
Check out
zoom.us. I think you'll like this new
video-conference service.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie
(
CSU San Bernardino)
UPDATED
INFORMATION: DOWNLOADING ZOOM.US TO YOUR DESKTOP -- IMPORTANT
I talked with the developers of zoom.us this afternoon. They explained the simple way to download the small zoom.us file to your computer's desktop.
Follow-up screen
should start the download process. (Allow this to happen.)
zoom.us file should
download and the "z icon" should display on your desktop.
Unless you change the
"settings" in zoom.us, you will need to double-click on the zoom.us
icon on your desktop to start the program. Once the icon displays
at the bottom of your monitor screen, click the icon to open the
zoom.us screen. Click the Start Video Meeting
button. When the screen displays, click the Invite
option. Enter the email addresses for participants
you wish to invite into the video conference call. Send
the email message. Stay logged into zoom.us. Watch
participants join the video conference call.
I think you will be
amazed by the clarity and crispness of the audio and video call.
January 4, 2010 reply from Robert Bowers (tax accountant)
This Skype thread interests me.
I have been cutting costs w/ a vengeance for sev
yrs
Sev yrs ago I went from Verizon tel (120) + full
Comcast cable (130) + net = about 250/mo
I talked Com into giving me a promo rate of 62,
went to Vonage @ 25, total 87 … not bad
Then Com went back to 130, so I talked Verizon into
70 for all 3. But this expires in June.
I have looked at Vonage, Magic Jack, not Skype –
all these alt phones don’t seem to support Faxes,
and to be honest it seems Verizon still beats all
these for clarity
This wouldn’t bother me, as I send email
attachments to all but one – guess who – the IRS
As far as cable, I just went w/ Netflix – unlimited
movies for $8/mo
Now if I could find a TV provider of all the news (incl
CNBC), I would be happy
When you go to alternative providers there is
always a tradeoff – you can’t get something for nothing.
January 4, 2010 reply from Rick Lillie
While there are some features in Skype v5.0.0.156
that I do not care about, overall I really like the new Skype version. I'm
not a Facebook person. I prefer that links to Facebook and other social
media be kept optional for users who want such features.
We all have our biases, which is clear from the
Howlett article, forum comments and my comments in this email message. I'm a
"PC" person. I'm not an "Apple" person. I'm probably in the minority, but I
don't care for the iPad. I'll stick with my ThinkPad Tablet computer. It's
capabilities go far beyond what the iPad can do.
I use Skype to offer virtual office hours for my
students. This makes it possible to extend the benefits of traditional
office hours to students who are unable to come to my office during set
times. Students really like using Skype to work together.
Skype features like desktop sharing make it easy to
work one-on-one with students when they need help with assignments. The
instant messaging and file sharing features are exceptional, especially with
improvements added in v5. With v5, you can send a message or file to someone
even though the other party is not online at the moment. Skype now
temporarily stores the message or file until the other party is available
and then downloads it. This improvement takes peer-to-peer to the next
performance level.
I have used Skype's new multi-party video
conferencing. It worked fine. Several study groups used multi-party video
conferencing during Fall Quarter 2010 and liked its performance. I see a
real future for multi-party video conferencing. My concern is that it will
become a fee-based service that students will not be able to afford.
I combine the free features of Skype with features
of other free Web 2.0 technologies to teach my students how to use
technology to create, share, and communicate. For example, when we combine
Skype with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, students learn to do what you can
do in WebEx or Adobe Connect. This combination is free. The alternatives are
extremely expensive.
Skype's interface changed with v5. Without a doubt,
it will change again. Skype listens to feedback. Technology evolves.
Skype includes a bundle of features that makes it a
powerful communicative, collaborative Web 2.0 technology tool. It includes
far more useful features in one tool than I find in other similar tools.
This is what makes Skype really useful and easy to use.
Skype changes itself about every 15 minutes. If you
don't like the current version, be patient or find a better alternative. If
you truly find a better alternative, please share it.
Happy New Year! May we all prosper in 2011.
Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email: rlillie@csusb.edu \
Telephone: (909) 537-5726
Skype (Username): ricklillie
From:
AECM, Accounting Education using Computers and Multimedia [mailto:AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Jensen, Robert Sent: Saturday, August 14, 2010 3:17 PM To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU Subject: FW: An Example of how I combine technologies to create a fully
online teaching-learning experience
Hi Rick,
I will expand well beyond your direct question
to me in the interest of all AECM readers.
Probably the most unique aspect of your course
is the use of student voice threads. I really don’t have much to say about
these since I’ve never seen them used and have not read testimonials about
how it well they work. Like most education technology, I suspect that this
technology mostly depends on context and how it is used for grading
purposes. Like Joe Hoyle, I think how you test is how students really learn.
The voice thread idea might counter this somewhat, but much depends upon the
role of voice threads in the grading formula.
I think all AECM readers should watch your
tutorial on how to use the voice threading system.
You are a bit like Amy Dunbar in that when you
try something new it will probably work for you because of your passion for
making it a success. Less passionate accounting educators should be warned
that what works fantastically for Rick Lillie and Amy Dunbar will not
necessarily work for them without the accompanying passion.
My first reaction to your syllabus is that you
demand almost too much from your students --- especially in terms of the
volume of reading and video watching. For the readings assigned as “peruse
readings” perhaps you need guidelines about what you expect from a “peruse”
cruse. Some students will spend a great deal of time and take copious notes
if they think any assigned material will be on an exam or quiz. Perhaps you
should let students see “possible quiz questions” in advance for each
“peruse” cruise. But then reserve the right to ask a general question not
given in advance to scare students who may decentralize (among themselves)
the answering of possible quiz questions.
2009 Best Places
to Start/Intern According to Bloomberg/Business Week
Also see the Internship and Table links .
The Top five rankings contain all Big Four accountancy firms.
Somehow Proctor and Gamble slipped into Rank 4 above PwC
The accountancy firms of Grant Thornton and RMS McGladrey make the top 40 at
ranks 32 and 33 respectively.
Best Places to
Intern
I'm waiting for Francine to throw cold water on the "ever
before" claim
Especially note the KPMG Experience Abroad module below
"Best Places to Intern: Bloomberg BusinessWeek's 2009 list shows employers
are hiring more interns to fill entry-level positions than
ever before," by Lindsey Gerdes, Business Week, December 10,
2009 ---
Early on invite some of your most gifted
graduate students in to talk about their intern experiences --- hopefully
there will be Big Four interns and non-Big Four interns for these
presentations.
In lieu of having live presentations, former
intern videos might be displayed for the class.
Perhaps XBRL can be delayed a bit. That’s a bit
technical and dull for openers.
You should explain why global work opportunities
are opening up somewhat because of IFRS (avoid the convergence debate at
this point).
I would also dwell on the growing opportunities
for accounting majors --- including working for the FBI and working on your
own or within a company as a forensic accountant. Explain the typical duties
of both types of professionals. Explain how advantages arise for graduates
fluent in more than one language. Also explain the difference between
education and training so that your students try to stop hating humanities
and science requirements.
Also explain why working for government (e.g.,
the IRS) can lead to great career opportunities later in life such that
you’ve given hope to graduates who do not make it into or do not want to
make it into the Big Four to start with at the time of graduation. Graduates
who do not get Big Four offers are not doomed for life.
I would also devote some class time to the
shortage of doctoral graduates in accounting and opportunities for
accounting doctoral graduates (e.g., mention Texas A&M, USC, and Stanford
starting salaries, research stipends, teaching loads, and research expense
report. But be fair and also mention tenure track hurdles. A good reference
is the following:
Then explain why it is probably best to obtain
1-5 years of experience as a practicing accountant before returning to a
doctoral program.
Drop the VARK Stuff
I’m not into learning styles since I think top students adapt to whatever
pedagogy is used by the instructor in every course taken at a university. I
would instead explain why self-learning may be superior for nearly all
students without going into details and conjectures at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
And remember what Joe Hoyle alleges --- students
learn what you test them on such that, good or bad, examinations and quizzes
are the focal point of student attention. You need to spell you your testing
and grading guidelines very clearly.
Early on, especially in the syllabus, I would
explain the nuances of academic ethics, integrity, plagiarism, and cheating
that you will not tolerate in the course. Explain the difference between
learning collaboration/cooperating versus cheating and free riding.
Probably the most unique aspect of your course
is the use of student voice threads. I really don’t have much to say about
this since I’ve never seen this used and have not read testimonials about
how it well it works. Like most education technology, I suspect that it
mostly depends on context and how it is used for grading purposes. Like Joe
Hoyle, I think how you test is how students really learn. The voice thread
idea might counter this somewhat, but much depends upon the role of voice
threads in the grading formula.
One thing the
AECM can provide are alternate ideas to replace the financial system
collapse as the first topic of voice threading. For example, it might be
better to focus on the Partnoy video than the Volcker video: Watch the video! (a bit slow loading)
"Bring Transparency to Off-Balance Sheet Accounting," by Frank Partnoy,
Roosevelt Institute, March 2010 ---
http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/policy-and-ideas/ideas-database/bring-transparency-balance-sheet-accounting
Watch the video!
Abusive off-balance sheet accounting was a major
cause of the financial crisis. These abuses triggered a daisy chain of
dysfunctional decision-making by removing transparency from investors,
markets, and regulators. Off-balance sheet accounting facilitating the
spread of the bad loans, securitizations, and derivative transactions that
brought the financial system to the brink of collapse.
As in the 1920s, the balance sheets of major
corporations recently failed to provide a clear picture of the financial
health of those entities. Banks in particular have become predisposed to
narrow the size of their balance sheets, because investors and regulators
use the balance sheet as an anchor in their assessment of risk. Banks use
financial engineering to make it appear that they are better capitalized and
less risky than they really are. Most people and businesses include all of
their assets and liabilities on their balance sheets. But large financial
institutions do not.
Lynn Turner has the unique perspective of having been the
Chief Accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a member of
boards of public companies, a trustee of a mutual fund and a public pension
fund, a professor of accounting, a partner in one of the major international
auditing firms, the managing director of a research firm and a chief
financial officers and an executive in industry. In 2007, Treasury
Secretary Paulson appointed him to the Treasury Committee on the Auditing
Profession. He currently serves as a senior advisor to LECG, an
international forensics and economic consulting firm.
The views
expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily
reflect the positions of the Roosevelt Institute, its officers, or its
directors.
My point is that I think there are a lot of
better accounting things to start this course with than the Volcker finance
video.
As I mentioned in my TLC breakfast speech, I
think Rick Lillie is one of the brightest resources in accounting
education’s stable of accounting educators. He brings a passion for
technology experimentation into learning and is willing to share his
experiences with the education world. All accounting educators should track
his main blog at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
The postings are not frequent (i.e.., not daily) but they are highly
informative about new advances in education technology.
Robert E. (Bob) Jensen
Trinity University Accounting Professor
(Emeritus)
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Tel. 603-823-8482
www.trinity.edu/rjensen
From:
Rick Lillie [mailto:rlillie@csusb.edu] Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 8:36 PM To: Jensen, Robert Subject: FW: An Example of how I combine technologies to create a fully
online teaching-learning experience
Hi
Bob,
I have deactivated several links on the example Class Assignments
Schedule. As I wrote to you earlier today, I deactivated some links in
order to protect student privacy. It is OK now to share my comments and
example Class Assignments Schedule on your website and AECM.
I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Have a great weekend,
Rick Lillie
From:
Rick Lillie [mailto:rlillie@csusb.edu] Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 1:55 PM To: Jensen, Robert Subject: An Example of how I combine technologies to create a fully
online teaching-learning experience
Dear Bob,
You blew me
away at the TLC breakfast, when during your presentation, you mentioned me
and my work. Thank you. I am most grateful for the kind comments.
I read your
comments today about the game-changing experience that moved you toward
teaching with technology. I really enjoyed your presentation at the TLC
breakfast. I wish there had been more time, but that's how speeches go.
Like your
experience, several events happening since "2000," have done much the same
thing for me. I would like to share an example of how I use technology to
create course materials and share them with my students. I do not think I
have shared this with you before. I would appreciate your feedback
comments.
The approaches
I am developing may be used in face-2-face, blended, and fully online
formats. Click the link below to access what I call an interactive class
assignments schedule. I have taken the traditional assignments schedule
included in a course syllabus and converted it into a Web 2.0 interactive
teaching-learning experience.
I use the
interactive class assignments schedule format with the third course in
Intermediate Accounting that I teach for both CSUSB and UCLA Extension. The
CSUSB section is taught in a blended format. The UCLA Extension class
includes students from around the world and is fully online.
The page
design is simple. It is a data table. Each row presents a study week
during the course. The study process moves left-to-right across the row. I
treat the study week as beginning on Monday and ending the following
Saturday evening at 11 PM (PST/PDT).
The second
column of the table includes study content. The third column includes
practice. The fourth column includes assessment.
Each week
begins with an embedded video where I talk with students about the study
week. I create an interactive mind map to guide students through the
chapter topic. I use VoiceThread to create short lecture/discussion
segments that are linked to subtopics of the mind map diagram. Click on the
"V" icon on the mind map to view a streaming video lecture segment.
Homework is
completed through WileyPlus, an online homework system that supports the
Kieso textbook. I talked with Jerry Weygandt about how I select exercises
for homework assignments.
Homework
assignments are at the concept-technique level. Weekly quiz questions are
open-book, research-based and go deeper into concepts and critical
thinking. Each Sunday morning, I post links to suggested solutions and
support explanations for quiz questions.
The
interactive class assignments schedule is asynchronous and combines features
of several Web 2.0 technology tools. When a student needs "live" contact,
we use Skype. This works great.
Student
feedback has been excellent. During Spring Quarter 2010, UCLA Extension
students rated the course 8.5 out of 9.0. It was a great class. Everyone
enjoyed the give-and-take during the term.
I would
really appreciate your feedback comments about the interactive class
assignments schedule. This is one example of what I am doing. I am working
on a paper that describes how to use technology to create "teaching
presence" in the teaching-learning experience.
If you would
be interested, perhaps we could use Skype to talk about the class
assignments schedule.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D.,
CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
On
the last day of class, I would love to hear my students say:
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so
much. I never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
(Joe Hoyle)
The iPad Decision Some CPAs swear by the iPad, calling it an
indispensable business tool. Other CPAs believe Apple's tablet is about as
useful as a legless table. This article examines the iPad's strengths and
weaknesses, introduces the top apps and accessories, and gives guidelines for
deciding if the iPad is right for you and your business.
http://email.aicpa.org/cgi-bin15/DM/t/eit20bAne80GTt0Bpwt0Ea
¶At one of Apple’s
trademark press events here, Tim Cook, the chief executive, took to the
stage to unveil this year’s iPad — and a few other surprises.
¶I’m calling
it “this year’s iPad” because it has no other distinguishing name. Apple
says the name is not “iPad 3,” even though the previous model was called the
iPad 2. And it’s not “iPad HD,” even though its new retina screen has higher
resolution than a high-definition TV screen.
¶I played with
it a little Wednesday and I will be doing an extensive review later. For
now, here are a few first impressions.
¶In addition
to the retina display, it has:
• a faster processor chip
• a better camera (a five-megapixel)
• 1080p hi-definition video recording (with stabilization)
• voice dictation (speak-to-type — not, however, the whole Siri
voice-command feature)
• Personal Hotspot (pay your carrier an extra monthly fee; the iPad
broadcasts its Internet signal to nearby laptops and other gadgets over
Wi-Fi, wherever you are, even in a car)
• 4G LTE, which means super-high Internet speeds in cities where Verizon
Wireless and AT&T have installed 4G networks.
¶The prices,
storage and battery life are identical to the previous iPads’. Which is
impressive — 4G is famous as a battery hog. That’s why this new iPad is a
tiny bit thicker and heavier than the last one; it needs a beefier battery.
¶That wasn’t
the only news during the unveiling. Apple also revealed that its $100 Apple
TV would get a minor upgrade on March 16. It will be able to play movies in
1080p high definition, and it will have a new icon-based software design.
¶Oh — and
movies you buy from Apple’s online store are now available in an online
iCloud locker, available for viewing on any Apple gadget, just as music and
TV shows are.
¶To me,
though, the most interesting developments were the new apps that Apple has
developed for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
GarageBand, for example, has been blessed with several new music-making
features. One of them lets up to four people play different instruments
simultaneously. Somehow, their four touchscreen devices stay synchronized
over Wi-Fi, and they make a master, perfectly synced four-track recording,
ready for mixing, editing (there’s a new note-by-note editing mode) and
posting online.
¶My favorite,
if Apple’s demo was any indication, will be iPhoto for iOS. (Like GarageBand,
it’s a $5 download. GarageBand is a free upgrade if you bought an earlier
iOS version..)
¶In
some ways, it goes beyond iPhoto for the Mac, in that its editing tools can
do more than affect an entire photo in one swoop.
It offers brushes that let you dab with your fingers to brighten, darken,
saturate, desaturate or otherwise enhance individual parts of a photo.That’s something you can do in Photoshop, but it’s never
been possible in iPhoto.
Multitouch is used cleverly; for example, with two
fingers you can rotate a photo, zoom in and out, adjust the shadowy
“vignette” framing, and so on.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I sure would've liked USB and VGA ports.
"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it." Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Last week's release of
Paper for iPad
was a huge boon to the cottage industry of third-party
iPad styluses. It was hardly the first app for drawing or writing directly
on the screen of an iOS device, but it struck a chord. It was just the right
blend of skeuomorphic real-world design and familiar iOS gestures. I had
never even considered a stylus before, but this seemed like my chance.
I travel the Internet in fairly Apple-obsessed
early-adopter circles, so I went with the stylus I'd seen recommended most
often: the
Cosmonaut by
Studio Neat. Studio
Neat made the
Glif
camera mount, one of the most celebrated iPhone
peripherals around, so it seemed like a safe bet.
The Cosmonaut arrived in short order in spartan,
Space Race packaging. It's fairly wide to hold like a pen. It's black,
grippy and dense, the exact same length as an iPhone. The business end
exhibits the capacitive properties the touch screen requires: a soft touch
that gives way gradually to pressure, just like a fingertip, but more
precise.
Although Apple's popular iPad tablet has been able
to replace laptops for many tasks, it isn't a big hit with folks who'd like
to use it to create or edit long Microsoft Office documents.
While Microsoft has released a number of apps for
the iPad, it hasn't yet released an iPad version of Office. There are a
number of valuable apps that can create or edit Office documents, such as
Quickoffice Pro, Documents To Go and the iPad version of Apple's own iWork
suite. But their fidelity with Office documents created on a Windows PC or a
Mac isn't perfect.
This week, Onlive Inc., in Palo Alto, Calif., is
releasing an app that brings the full, genuine Windows versions of the key
Office productivity apps—Word, Excel and PowerPoint—to the iPad. And it's
free. These are the real programs. They look and work just like they do on a
real Windows PC. They let you create or edit genuine Word documents, Excel
spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
I've been testing a pre-release version of this new
app, called OnLive Desktop, which the company says will be available in the
next few days in Apple's app store. More information is at
desktop.onlive.com.
My verdict is that it works, but with some caveats,
limitations and rough edges. Some of these downsides are inherent in the
product, while others have to do with the mismatch between the iPad's touch
interface and the fact that Office for Windows was primarily designed for a
physical keyboard and mouse.
Creating or editing long documents on a tablet with
a virtual on-screen keyboard is a chore, no matter what Office-type app you
choose. So, although it isn't a requirement, I strongly recommend that users
of OnLive Desktop employ one of the many add-on wireless keyboards for the
iPad.
OnLive Desktop is a cloud-based app. That means it
doesn't actually install Office on your iPad. It acts as a gateway to a
remote server where Windows 7, and the three Office apps, are actually
running. You create an account, sign in, and Windows pops up on your iPad,
with icons allowing you to launch Word, Excel or PowerPoint. (There are also
a few other, minor Windows programs included, like Notepad, Calculator and
Paint.)
In my tests, the Office apps launched and worked
smoothly and quickly, without any noticeable lag, despite the fact that they
were operating remotely. Although this worked better for me on my fast home
Internet connection, it also worked pretty well on a much slower hotel
connection.
Like Office itself, the documents you create or
modify don't live on the iPad. Instead, they go to a cloud-based repository,
a sort of virtual hard disk. When you sign into OnLive Desktop, you see your
documents in the standard Windows documents folder, which is actually on the
remote server. The company says that this document storage won't be
available until a few days after the app becomes available.
To get files into and out of OnLive Desktop, you
log into a Web site on your PC or Mac, where you see all the documents
you've saved to your cloud repository. You can use this Web site to upload
and download files to your OnLive Desktop account. Any changes made will be
automatically synced, the company says, though I wasn't able to test that
capability in my pre-release version.
Because it's a cloud-based service, OnLive Desktop
won't work offline, such as in planes without Wi-Fi. And it can be finicky
about network speeds. It requires a wireless network with at least 1 megabit
per second of download speed, and works best with at least 1.5 to 2.0
megabits. Many hotels have trouble delivering those speeds, and, in my
tests, the app refused to start in a hotel twice, claiming insufficient
network speed when the hotel Wi-Fi was overloaded.
The free version of the app has some other
limitations. You get just 2 gigabytes of file storage, there's no Web
browser or email program like Outlook included, and you can't install
additional software. If many users are trying to log onto the OnLive Desktop
servers at once, you may have to wait your turn to use Office.
In the coming weeks, the company plans to launch a
Pro version, which will cost $10 a month. It will offer 50 GB of cloud
document storage, "priority" access to the servers, a Web browser, and the
ability to install some added programs. It will also allow you to
collaborate on documents with other users, or even to chat with, and present
material to, groups of other OnLive Desktop users.
The company also plans to offer OnLive Desktop on
Android tablets, PCs and Macs, and iPhones.
In my tests, I was able to create documents on an
iPad in each of the three cloud-based Office programs. I was able to
download them to a computer, and alter them on both the iPad and computer. I
was also able to upload files from the computer for use in OnLive Desktop.
OnLive Desktop can't use the iPad's built-in
virtual keyboard, but it can use the virtual keyboard built into Windows 7
and Windows' limited touch features and handwriting recognition. As noted
above, I recommend using a wireless physical keyboard. But even these aren't
a perfect solution, because the ones that work with the iPad can't send
common Windows keyboard commands to OnLive Desktop, so you wind up moving
between the keyboard and the touch screen, which can be frustrating. And you
can't use a mouse.
Another drawback is that OnLive Desktop is entirely
isolated from the rest of the iPad. Unlike Office-compatible apps that
install directly on the tablet, this cloud-based service can't, for
instance, be used to open Office documents you receive via email on the iPad.
And, at least at first, the only way you can get files into and out of
OnLive Desktop is through its Web-accessible cloud-storage service. The free
version has no email capability, and the app doesn't support common
file-transfer services like Dropbox or SugarSync. The company says it hopes
to add those.
OnLive Desktop competes not only with the iPad's
Office clones, but with iPad apps that let you remotely access and control
your own PCs and Macs, and thus use Office and other computer software on
those.
New features have transformed Excel into a business intelligence tool with
some surprising and very powerful applications.
An apple grower in New Zealand has a warehouse stocked with different types
of apples stored in crates on shelves.
It would be useful for him to know the location not just of the type of
apples and where they are in the warehouse, but also how old they are.
With this information, he could better manage his inventory and improve the
speed at which the apples could leave the warehouse and more stock could be
added.
New features in Excel
One low-cost
solution to this, perhaps surprisingly, lies in Microsoft
Excel. It’s not
found in the tried and tested spreadsheet which most businesses have used
for a decade or more, but in one of the newer features which has transformed
Excel from a data entry tool to one offering self-serve business
intelligence.
The apple
warehouse example was one of the business cases which came across the desk
of Excel expert Mynda Treacy, who operates the training site My Online Training Hub.
Treacy, who has the status of a “Most Valuable Professional” (MVP)
accredited by Microsoft, is in the business of helping her clients solve
data and business intelligence issues with Excel.
When the New Zealand apple grower got in touch, she recognised the problem
could be addressed with a new feature called 3D Maps, which is now fully
integrated in Excel 2016 as part of the Office 365 suite.
3D Maps was previously called Power Maps and was available under particular
licences as part of Excel 2013, but is now simply a tab which can be
accessed on the Excel programs downloaded by hundreds of thousands of
Australian businesses as part of their Office subscription.
“It was super easy and very intuitive,” says Treacy. “You just drag and drop
from a data spreadsheet onto 3D Maps.”
3D in Excel
Data on the grower’s apples was taken from the spreadsheet and dragged onto
3D Maps, which created a three-dimensional representation of the warehouse
with apples marked by location, type and age.
An added benefit was that the representation was in 3D, giving the location
of the apples by height, tracking their position on stacked shelves.
Continued in article
Video Messaging and Self-Testing
September 27, 2011 message from Amy Dunbar
Has anyone used Google docs to
create self-tests? I have been creating self-tests in Flash, but I just
discovered that I can create a “form” in Google docs that results in a
self-test. I can edit the form after I have created it, but if I delete a
question it still stays in the Excel doc that records the student answers.
I’m not sure what I am doing wrong.
I am trying to get undergrads to
engage in class, and I thought the Google self-tests might be one way. One
thing I know for sure is that the way I am using Powerpoint doesn’t work.
For example, I developed slides to illustrate a problem step by step. Then
I ask a similar question, and it’s like I’m speaking a different language.
My students just tune out when the slides start going.
If the Google self-test works
like I think it could, I could post a link to a self-test in a web page or
slide, have the students work the question in class and submit the answer,
and then bring up the answers in the Excel sheet to see in real time if
students are understanding the concept. I think clickers would do the same
thing, but I should have adopted those at the beginning of the semester.
I’m open to any other suggestions
you might have.
Amy
September 27, 2011 reply from Rick Lillie
Hi Amy,
Have you considered using VoiceThread as an
alternative to the PowerPoint slides? You can still use PowerPoint slides or
your own slides and mark them up as you talk about each slide. Rather than
audio narration, you can use video narration that displays in a separate
side window to the presentation screen.
This approach works much the same way as if you
projected an image onto a whiteboard in the classroom and then talked to
students while marking up the image. I use this technique in fully online
classes. Students really like this approach. It might get you a better
result than what you describe in your AECM post.
I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets to create an
online scantron type answer sheet for quizzes. The underlying spreadsheet
format is set up in the spreadsheet. The form is tied to the spreadsheet.
You can select a theme to make the form look more appealing to students.
You should be able to modify the spreadsheet and
then resave or recreate the form. Changes should then be reflected in the
online form.
I hope this helps.
Rick Lillie
CalState San Bernardino
September 27, 2011 reply from Ruth Bender
Hi Amy
I don’t use it myself, but
you might like to read this page and the comments below it. @russeltarr has
tweeted about it a few times.
The iPad Decision Some CPAs swear by the iPad, calling it an
indispensable business tool. Other CPAs believe Apple's tablet is about as
useful as a legless table. This article examines the iPad's strengths and
weaknesses, introduces the top apps and accessories, and gives guidelines for
deciding if the iPad is right for you and your business.
http://email.aicpa.org/cgi-bin15/DM/t/eit20bAne80GTt0Bpwt0Ea
A small army of multitouch tablet computers has
been launched this year to take on Apple's iPad, which has managed to sell
25 million units and attract 90,000 tablet-specific apps in just about 15
months, and is already in its second generation, the iPad 2. So far, none of
these contenders has gained any significant traction with consumers or app
developers.
Now, the world's largest PC maker, Hewlett-Packard,
is entering the fray. On Friday, it will start selling the TouchPad, a
10-inch tablet with a slick, distinctive software interface. The TouchPad
starts at $500, the same entry price as the iPad 2.
Clever Interface
I like the interface a lot. Instead of a screen
full of app icons, the main screen of the TouchPad's operating system,
called webOS, presents running apps as "cards"—large, live rectangles that
you scroll through in a horizontal row.
When you tap a card, it fills the screen and is
ready to use. To minimize it, you just swipe up on the bezel surrounding the
screen. A second swipe takes you to a screen from which you can launch or
download a new app. To get rid of a card, you just flick it upward, and it
disappears. Multiple cards can run in the background.
And these cards are clever. For instance, the
contacts and photo cards combine both local and online content, from sources
like Google and Facebook; and cards with related functions, like an email
message and an attachment you've opened, are stacked atop one another.
You can make Skype video and audio calls directly
from the messaging apps. And if you buy a forthcoming H-P webOS smartphone,
you can link it to the tablet wirelessly, and send and receive voice calls
and text messages from the tablet, or transfer a Web page from the phone by
tapping the phone on the tablet.
Hardware and Battery
But the tablet's hardware is bulbous and heavy
compared with the iPad 2 or the svelte Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, an Android
tablet. Worse, it's missing some key features common on the other tablets,
like a rear camera or even a camera app for taking videos and still
pictures. It has a front camera that can be used only for video chats.
I found the TouchPad's battery life was only 60%
that of the iPad 2. In my standard tablet battery test, where I set the
screen brightness to 75%, keep the Wi-Fi connection active and play local
videos back to back, the TouchPad lasted just 6 hours and 5 minutes,
compared with 10 hours and 9 minutes for the iPad 2. H-P claims 9 hours of
continuous video playback, but that's with Wi-Fi turned off. In mixed use,
battery life was decent. Apps
When H-P bought webOS a year ago this week as part
of its purchase of the system's inventor, Palm, one hope was that the giant
company's clout would attract lots of apps to the platform. But the TouchPad
will launch with just 300 tablet-optimized apps and only 6,200 webOS apps
overall, most written for phones and only 70% of which can run on the
tablet, in a small, phone-size window that can't be expanded. That compares
with 425,000 total apps for the iPad and 200,000 for Android tablets, nearly
all of which can run on tablets even if they aren't optimized for the
tablet.
This first TouchPad has no app, such as Netflix,
for streaming TV shows or movies (though its Web browser, unlike the iPad's,
can run Adobe Flash and can stream videos via the Web). Its version of the
QuickOffice productivity suite, unlike the same product on the iPad, can't
edit documents, but merely displays them. My test unit lacked stores for
directly downloading TV shows, movies and music. H-P says a music store will
be available at launch and a video download store "shortly" after launch.
Glitches
I also ran into plenty of bugs in my tests, even
though H-P said I was testing a production unit. For instance, on various
occasions, the email app failed to display the contents of messages, the
photos app failed to display pictures, and the game "Angry Birds" crashed
repeatedly. All of these problems required a reboot of the device to
resolve.
. . .
Bottom line
H-P stresses that webOS is a platform and that the
TouchPad is just one iteration of it. The company plans to add the operating
system to numerous devices, including laptops, and hopes that this scale
will attract many more apps. And it pledges continuous updates to fix the
current shortcomings.
But, at least for now, I can't recommend the
TouchPad over the iPad 2.
Jensen Comment
All the competitors to iPad have the advantage of being able to play Adobe
Flash.
Question
How can you best publish books, including multimedia and user interactive books,
on the Web?
Note that interactive books may have quizzes and examinations where answers are
sent back for grading.
Answer
There is no optimal software for all authors, because different alternatives
have different features that will appeal to authors in varying degrees. Below
are a few of the leading alternatives.
The main advantage is that most authors are familiar with how to
write in MS Word.
This is the easiest Web alternative for authors who've already
written their books in MS Word. All an author has to do is simply click
on "File save as" and choose the HTM option in place of the usual DOC
option. Updates of older HTM files created in MS Word are done in Word
and the revised document can then be easily saved as an updated HTML
file.
Saving a DOC file to an HTML file enables the book to be viewed in
all Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Foxfox, Opera, and Safari.
Saving to an HTML file eliminates some MS Word features such as
macros, but authors rarely write books with macros for readers.
MS Word is probably the best alternative for importing other
MS Office content such as Excel and PowerPoint content.
HTML files work well in conjunction with extensive coding like XML
and XBRL ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XMLRDF.htm
For example company filings with the SEC can now be viewed in
interactive XBRL linked from HTML documents. It becomes rather simple
send HTML book readers off to SEC interactive filings on HTML book
pages.
Disadvantages
Saving as an HTML file loses some of the author's desired security
alternatives that are optional for DOC files
Some of the features of imported content from Excel and PowerPoint
may be lost when pasted into the DOC/HTML file in MS Word.
MS Word is not the best authoring alternative for multimedia and
interactive content.
MS Word does not have a lot of the authoring wizards that are
pre-programmed into other alternatives. For example, Toolbook has
various wizards that make writing of examinations and answers to
examinations much easier than writing them in MS Word.
MS Word does not have built-in features for writing learning
simulations and scenarios.
Author it in MS Word and save as a PDF (Adobe
Acrobat) file
Advantages
This has all the ease of authoring in MS Word.
PDF reader files are free and it's easy to update these readers from
Adobe.
Adobe Acrobat has the best security alternatives for protection of
copyrighted material of all the Web publishing alternatives which is the
main reason the major publishing firms choose PDF files when they want
to make books available on the Web. For example, it's possible to make
it impossible to easily select text for cut and paste from a clipboard.
Some of the features of imported content from Excel and PowerPoint
may be lost when pasted into the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat.
MS Word is not the best authoring alternative for multimedia and
interactive content. This content cannot be added in Acrobat since
Acrobat itself is not authoring software.
MS Word does not have a lot of the authoring wizards that are
pre-programmed into other alternatives. For example, Toolbook has
various wizards that make writing of examinations and answers to
examinations much easier than writing them in MS Word.
MS Word does not have built-in features for writing learning
simulations and scenarios.
If you're looking for a way to convert pdf files to
html, this helpful application can do just that. Visitors just need to click
the browse button here to locate the pdf that they wish to transfer. After
doing this, they will supply their own email, and seconds later, they will
have the converted file. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
Author it directly into HTML files using such authoring
software as
FrontPage or
Dreamweaver
Advantages
HTML authoring software has some features that are not be available
when saving DOC files as HTML files.
FrontPage is more than authoring software. It can be used as a
complete Website system.
Some authors, not me, find Dreamweaver easier to use as an authoring
tool without some of what I call FrontPage bugs and complexities.
Disadvantages
Authoring directly in HTML loses some of the author's desired
security alternatives that are optional for DOC and PDF files
Some of the features of imported content from Excel and PowerPoint
may be lost when pasted into the HTML file..
MS Word is not the best authoring alternative for multimedia and
interactive content.
HTML authoring software does not have a lot of the authoring wizards
that are pre-programmed into other alternatives. For example, Toolbook
has various wizards that make writing of examinations and answers to
examinations much easier than writing them in MS Word.
HTML authoring is not an efficient alternative for pasting in
multimedia.
MS Word does not have built-in features for writing learning
simulations and scenarios.
Author it in
Toolbook
that automatically saves files in HTML/DHTML files
Advantages
Although I've not yet tried the latest version of Toolbook
Instructor, authors who use this software contend it is much easier to
use than HTML software such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver. One of the
main advantages is that shells for writing book chapters are already
pre-programmed. Watch the video at
http://www.toolbook.com/demos/toolBook_demo/index.html
It is much much easier to author multimedia and interaction (such as
examinations) in Toolbook than in HTML software such as FrontPage and
Dreamweaver. Watch the video at
http://www.toolbook.com/demos/toolBook_demo/index.html
You can author interactive books in either Toolbook Instructor or
ToolBook Assistant.
Toolbook makes it quite easy to author animations using built-in
wizards.
Whereas early versions of Toolbook required Toolbook Reader
software, Toolbook now saves the files in HTML or DHTML files that can
be read in major Web browsers such as Internet Explorer.
Toolbook authoring software is not commonly provided free by
colleges as part of the installed software that computer centers
pre-install in all college-owned computers using campus wide license
agreements. The single-user license is currently $2,795 for Toolbook
Instructor Version 9.01 as of March 2008. There are group-license
discounts.
Although I've not yet gone back to ToolBook, I was an early Toolbook
enthusiast in the 1990s. One of my constant complaints in those days was
the tendency of the company to send out software before its time and let
customers find the many bugs in the system. The company's technical
support often had not yet discovered the problems or their solutions.
Toolbook today has only a miniscule part of the Web authoring market.
Being small means that it will take longer to discover and correct bugs
vis-a-vis big market share alternatives like MS Word and Adobe Acrobat.
In fairness, however, it is now easier for Toolbook to pre-test its
software than it was back in the days of its bug-saturated OpenScript
scripting code. I'm just about convinced to give
Toolbook another chance for my Web authoring. I've delayed this
long because of memories of the days and weeks I sometimes wasted using
bugged-up OpenScript software.
If the book contains animation and interactive features requiring
DHTML above and beyond simple HTML, this may restrict readers to read
books in a smaller subset of Web browsers that are DHTML compliant.
Fortunately Internet Explorer is DHTML compliant. But if DHTML declines
in popularity among authors worldwide, newer browsers may eliminate
these rather expensive code blocks from browsers. Fortunately there's no
immediate threat of this happening.
DHTML itself is a very inefficient coding/markup scripting
alternative. More than a hundred lines of code may have to be written
for a very simple task. This highly restricts authoring creativity of
animations and interactions. Authors in Toolbook are for all practical
purposes limited to the pre-scripted templates provided in Toolbook.
Most colleges and business firms have firewalls that prevent two-way
communication via DHTML such as when a student fills out the answers to
an examination and then clicks on a "Send" button to transmit the an
answer or set of answers to graders on campus. Some universities allow
their Blackboard servers to receive answer files.
A cheap alternative for
penetrating a firewall is to attach an answer file to an email message
that penetrates campus firewalls. This can even be done via instant
messaging with live graders responding to each answer in real time. But
there are huge security risks to opening email attachments. Students can
innocently or knowingly attach bad things to attached messages that will
destroy your computer. Graders can reduce the risk by telling students
that they will only open attached TXT files such as those generated in
Wordpad.
Another alternative is to run your own server that will allow student
returned answer files to penetrate the firewall (firewalls can be
adjusted for degrees of security). If done right this is enormously
expensive. First you must hire technicians to maintain the system.
Second you much install back up systems such as
RAID.
Another alternative is to hire a commercial online testing service
our course management service, including Blackboard, that allows student
returned answer files to penetrate its firewalls. Such services off
campus,
including Blackboard, will even serve up your entire book, although
it is possible to have them only serve up the examinations and receive
returned student answer files. Some testing services have course
management systems and will serve up and manage entire courses and
tutorials.
Examples such as
eCollege are reviewed at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
Bob:
In respect to sending exam scores and exam answers as email
attachments - it really isn't effective in just about any content
authoring tool that offers it - Camtasia, Toolbook or Captivate
because of security issues. Before the email goes out it goes to the
email client and the student can edit the exam score if they wished.
Because of security issues the "owner" of the system should be the
only one to control outgoing messages.
Author it as an interactive video (probably a
flash video) file.
Advantages
Youth of today prefer video and animated games to reading an many,
many instances. Even us venerable readers often prefer short video
tutorials of complicated tasks rather than having to read the manual.
For example, I much prefer to watch a video on how to install and
operate hardware/software than having to read the confusing manual.
Demonstrating is often a better pedagogy than reading.
The video alternative is better for certain types of handicapped
users such as attention deficit readers, partly blind readers, and users
who like an easy choice of subtitles for use in alternative languages
such as English subtitles to Japanese learning videos.
Adobe Flash interactive videos can be created from the relatively
inexpensive
Camtasia
Producer software suite that offers various video compression
choices including Adobe Flash. Another alternative is Adobe's
Captivate3. Interactive Flash videos
allow users to navigate nonlinearly through video modules. For example,
it is easy to repeat short segments on the fly or drill down into
details when a user chooses to drill down further or skip details when
desired. I find interactive video authoring to be somewhat complicated
for authors but neat for readers.
It is possible to author books that are viewed by users as streaming
video rather than files that have to be downloaded into a user's
computer. This has the advantage of not requiring large amounts of
storage capacity on a users computer. This also makes it much more
difficult for users to save and modify the video files. It is possible
to capture and save streaming video, but its somewhat technical and
there probably will be a downgrading of quality for inexpensive
capturing alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#StreamingMedia
Disadvantages
Even interactive video cannot be navigated as efficiently as text
and large tables. A reader of text may speed read and scan paragraphs
and tables at will rather than have to live with the navigation
alternatives that authors pre-programmed into the video.
Video files, even highly compressed video files, are enormously
costly in terms of massive file size. They can be put on DVD disks or
auxiliary storage such as thumb drives. But downloading on the Web may
be very slow for big files. It is best to author in multiple smaller
files than huge files, although this can limited interactive navigation
through a video book.
Streaming video overcomes the file storage problems, but there are
drawbacks since users of streaming video must generally be on high
bandwidth Internet connections. Also streaming videos must be served up
from streaming video broadcasters. Most colleges do not broadcast
streaming video, but there are commercial broadcasters available to
authors. For example see the broadcast service available from Camtasia
ScreenCast ---
http://www.techsmith.com/screencast.asp
Video files are not optimal for simulation and game authoring,
although they may be quite useful as modules within simulations and
games.
Richard J. Campbell
School of Business
218 N. College Ave.
University of Rio Grande
Rio Grande, OH 45674
Voice:740-245-7288
http://faculty.rio.edu/campbell
Dell Sells 64-bit Windows 7 Computers But the Sales Division is Still
Relying on 32-Bit Windows XP Computers
Maybe that tells us something about backwards compatibility problems of 64-bit
Windows 7 computers
I sure would like to know if and why some 64-bit Windows 7 computers can
run the videos such as the videos at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/
Most such computers, however, cannot run the above samples of part of my life's
work.
My experience also tells me that there's something to being able to store
your life's work in hard copy on library shelves.
When I recently bought a 64-bit Dell Studio 17 Laptop, Dell assigned me to a
good guy named Charlie Mullins in the Sales Division. Charlie not only held my
hand so to speak and tracked my order before my new computer was built, he
continues to hold my hand figuratively-speaking throughout my three-year onsite
service warranty that I paid extra for when I bought my computer.
When I have a hardware problem, I must pass through Charlie to get access to
a Dell hardware technician who then walks me through some tests to determine if
I really have a hardware problem. On this Charlie is very efficient and merely
forwards my phone call to the hardware specialist. I am having troubles with a
flaky on-off switch, and the hardware technician spent an hour with me yesterday
on the phone guiding me through a series of tests. He even remotely took charge
operating my new computer. It turns out that I really do need a new switch and
possibly a new motherboard such at a hardware technician will soon visit my
house. Since I live in the far-away New Hampshire mountains some Dell technician
may have to travel all the way from Boston, thereby giving me his entire day and
maybe more just to replace a switch (I think the motherboard is fine).
I also have a problem in that a huge part of my life's work producing
educational media files will run perfectly on my old Dell 32-bit XP laptop, but
my life's work will not run on my new Dell 64-bit laptop due to what a popup
claims are missing codecs. It turns out that this is a huge problem for
Microsoft to the extent that the 64-bit Windows Media Player in Windows 7 is not
the default WMP player you see on your screen. Microsoft embeds a 32-bit WMP
player in Windows 7 that is the default player in your new 64-bit Windows 7
machine. The reason is the shortage of 64-bit codecs for the world of media
playback. But if you choose to do so, a few techies in the world know how to
change to a 64-bit WMP:
WMP 64-bit switch ---
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/10/25/how-to-set-64-bit-windows-media-player-12-wmp12-as-default-player/
Things get more complicated when I have a software problem under warranty on
my new computer. Dell only offers a warranty on applications that are built into
the Windows 7 operating system and not other software that Dell installs such as
MS Office software. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit WMP applications are buried in
the operating system, so I argued with Charlie Mullins that my WMP problem is
under warranty. He's now writing up a proposal pleading with Level 2 technicians
at Dell to talk to me.
I turns out that I do not have to go through Charlie to reach Level 1
technicians at Dell. I first did so with my codec problems. Two Level 1
technicians concluded that my codec problem cannot be solved. I will have to
keep keep my old XP computer running for the rest of my life if I want to replay
my life's work. And so will any other accounting educator and researcher who
wants to view the videos of my professional career.
This just does not seem right, so I want access to Level 2 experts at Dell.
However, to do so I have to describe my problem to Charlie Mullins who then must
write up a formal proposal on my behalf to try to convince Level 2 experts to
consider my problem. Two Level 1 technicians at Dell who declared my problem
unsolvable privately admitted they did not understand problems of missing codecs
and how to resolve the problems of not having codecs present in the Windows 7
operating system that were and still are present in the old Windows XP operating
system.
When sending Charlie an email describing my problem I asked him to try to run
any one of these sample accounting theory wmv video files on an XP machine and a
Windows 7 machine ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/
In my case all the wmv videos run perfectly on my old Windows XP machine and not
on my new 64-bit machine. By the way, many people have by now contacted me
claiming they cannot run my accounting education and research videos on their
64-bit computers, although a few have mysteriously managed to get them to run on
their 64-bit computers. In most cases they don't fully understand why they work
on their 64-bit Windows operating machines.
By the way, the Quicktime player from Apple never would play my wmv files.
Nor will any other video player such as VLC that I installed play my life's work
on a 64-bit machine even though these players work fine on my 32-bit machine.
Charlie wrote back and informed me that he cannot try to run my sample videos
linked above on a 64-bit computer, because nobody in his Sales Division at Dell
has a 64-bit computer even though virtually all the computers sold by this
division are now 64-bit computers. I'm not sure Charlie was supposed to let this
out, but to me this tells me something about Dell still having worries about
leaving the 32-bit architecture.
One sign of getting too old is when years of a professor's work can no
longer be used under current versions of hardware and software. It's a little
like having a double tree for horses on a wagon in the era of tractors or an old
threshing machine in the era of harvesting combines.
The real definitive sign is when your wife wants you evaluated on the PBS
"Antiques Road Show."
My experience also tells me that there's something to being able to store your
life's work in hard copy on library shelves.
A Bit of History This reminds me of when Apple used to come out with new versions of the Mac
operating system that were not backwards compatible. I recall sharing a cab in
Manhattan with the University of Waterloo's Efrim Boritz years ago. Efrim
grumbled that Apple had destroyed years of his work by not making the new
version of the Mac operating system sufficiently compatible with an updated
version.
For years one huge advantage of Microsoft was insistance on making new
versions of DOS compatible with older versions which led to millions of lines of
code that would've been unnecessary if new versions of DOS were not backwards
compatible.
That does not seem to be the case today.
Boo on TechSmith! Boo on Microsoft! Boo on Apple!
They are sometimes uncaringly destroying years of our work with new upgrades.
Taking up the command line is easier if you have a
specific problem you’re trying to solve. For me, the problem was that I
wanted to do all of my writing in a
plain text format, like Markdown or
LaTeX. But I need to be able to share my writing
in a variety of formats: HTML for the web, PDF for printed documents or
academic writing, and occasionally RTF or Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.
The best way I’ve found to move between these
formats is
Pandoc.
Pandoc is a command line tool written by a philosophy
professor,
John
MacFarlane. Its general use is to take a document
in one format and convert it to another. You can get an idea of the wide
variety of formats Pandoc can translate by looking at an
enlargement of the header diagram.
Here’s an example of how this works. Suppose that
you have a Markdown document like the one we created for the post on
Markdown. (View
pandoc-example.markdown on GitHub.)
You can convert this to a number of text formats with a simple terminal
command:
That command calls pandoc, tells it
which file to convert (pandoc-example.markdown) and tells it
which file to export (e.g., pandoc-example.html). Pandoc
figures out what types of files these are from the extension, or you can
pass it additional arguments. For some of the formats, you can convert the
other way. For example, you could convert LaTex to Markdown or to a Word
DOCX, or HTML to Markdown or LaTeX. To convert to PDF, though, you’ll need
to have LaTeX installed on your system.
If you're looking for a way to convert pdf files to
html, this helpful application can do just that. Visitors just need to click
the browse button here to locate the pdf that they wish to transfer. After
doing this, they will supply their own email, and seconds later, they will
have the converted file. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
Author it in simulation/game authoring software, including
Second Choice virtual learning
Advantages
Simulation, interactive game, and virtual learning software can do
things that just are not possible in other authoring software. You can
read about some of the authoring alternatives at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_software
Video and computer games have huge attractions to 21st Century
learners who grew up enthralled with playing such games in arcades and
at home. These games are a way of reaching certain learners who are
turned off by more traditional pedagogy. You can read more about
learning games and edutainment at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
The above site also links to some relatively inexpensive software for
authoring learning games.
Disadvantages
Simulation, learning games, and virtual learning systems sometime
sound better on paper than they deliver in real life. These can be quite
time consuming for students relative to other alternatives for a defined
set of learning content. You can read about some of the problems at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
Artificial worlds are just that --- artificial. It is only possible
to program in a miniscule number of factors from the myriad of
contingency factors and combinations of factors in the real world.
Its one thing to author a book or a tutorial. It's quite
another to manage an entire course with software systems. Course
(learning) management software (CMS/LMS) software often includes
software for authoring books and lesson tutorials. CMS software, for
example, often integrates learning modules with e-Mail chat rooms and
other student networks.
CMS software can offers different levels of security. For example,
alternatives like Blackboard and Moodle allow authors to control access
to students enrolled in a course rather than making the materials
available to the world on a Web server.
Disadvantages
Authoring software embedded in CMS/LMS systems often is not a full
featured as software designed for book, simulation, game, and virtual
world learning.
Thanks for the update. At one time ToolBook was my main man, but those
days are long gone. ToolBook has morphed through many changes in ownership
and codes, but it does somehow manage a Darwinian evolution. It evolved from
early versions that required authors to be techies in coding in OpenScript
to later versions that feature over a dozen templates for relatively simple
course authoring --- almost plug and play.
It seems to have caught on with training programs in some deep pockets
corporations, including Big Four accounting firms. Some of the sample
courses look great ---
http://www.sumtotalsystems.com/resources/toolbook/learn_showcase.html?src=tbhome
However, there are no samples from universities as far as I can tell.
Is there a reason?
I do not see signs that the latest ToolBook upgrades have cracked into
the academic market.
Are there any universities that have ToolBooks to demo?
Are there any college online education or training programs built on
ToolBook?
Is there special academic pricing for Version 10?
Apparently not. The single-user price is $2,800 although pricing is
complicated for company licenses.
ToolBook 10:
Revolutionize the way you create e-Learning content ToolBook empowers
subject matter experts and learning professionals to rapidly create
interactive learning content, quizzes, assessments, and software
simulations. With the convenience of on-demand and mobile access, your
employees will learn more, faster—and deliver better business results.
Learning content that you create in ToolBook is
distributed as HTML and delivered through almost any Learning Management
System (LMS) available, including the SumTotal LMS, other SCORM/AICC-compliant
LMS, or standalone systems.
Thousands of corporations use ToolBook today to
deliver high-value learning. ToolBook users span multiple
industries—including healthcare, manufacturing, finance, retail, government,
education and more—and easily deploy across major operating systems, Web
browsers, and mobile devices.
Bob:
I'll be developing in Toolbook, and will share some of my output, but I am
very busy until the end of the year at least.
They have become more aggressive in pricing - A
single license is now in the $2,800 range, and I am not aware of any
academic pricing. I usually shy away from academic licenses, since I sell my
output in the commercial market, and most academic licenses prohibit that.
Most content authoring tools like Toolbook do not have royalty sharing
arrangements. You are paying big bucks for the product, why pay more?
Jeff Rhodes at
www.plattecanyon.com
is the smartest, most productive multimedia programmer
in the world (IMHO) created a very profitable private corporation around
Toolbook and multimedia development.
I am writing this in Microsoft Word, hardly an
unusual way to author a document. But I'm not using Word as you know it—part
of the large, complex Microsoft Office suite installed on your computer's
hard drive. Instead, I am using a new, streamlined version of Word that for
the first time resides on remote servers you reach through the Internet.
This new version of Word is used inside a Web
browser. It works on both Windows PCs and Macs, and via the newer versions
of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and
Chrome. It's free and it doesn't require you to have regular Office on your
computer.
Word isn't the only Office component that's now
available in a free online version. Microsoft has created similar simplified
versions of Excel, PowerPoint and its OneNote note-taking program as part of
the free online suite called Office Web Apps, which is available at
office.live.com. To use the new online Office, you'll need a free account
for the company's broader Windows Live online service.
WSJ's Personal Technology columnist Walt Mossberg
takes a look at the new free, online version of Microsoft Office, called
Office Web Apps. It's a stripped down version of the familiar desktop
edition of Office, and runs on both PCs and Macs. Walt says it may be all
you'll ever need in an Office suite. Microsoft is also releasing a new
version of its traditional desktop Office for Windows next week, called
Office 2010. But in my view, the online edition is the most interesting new
development for consumers in this round of updates. It's part of the broader
trend toward cloud computing—doing tasks online rather than with desktop
programs. And it's meant to help the software giant compete with rival
online office suites from competitors like Google and Zoho.
I've been testing Office Web Apps on both Windows
and Mac computers, and in all four major browsers, and I like it. It has
some downsides and is still a work in progress. It lacks many of the more
sophisticated features of the local, desktop version of Office. In fact,
Microsoft—apparently trying to protect its profitable desktop suite—refers
to Office Web Apps as a "companion" to desktop Office, for "light" work.
Mossberg Mailbox Mossberg on buying an iPad for
children But these are capable, if simpler, programs that look and feel like
their desktop counterparts and they will likely meet the needs of many
consumers who produce basic documents, even if they don't own desktop
Office. Also, the new Web Apps are connected to a generous 25 gigabytes of
free online storage for your documents, via a companion Microsoft online
storage system called SkyDrive.
Another big benefit: Microsoft boasts its Office
Web Apps produce documents that use the same file formats as the desktop
programs and thus, look fully accurate when opened in desktop Office. The
company calls this "fidelity." In my tests, this claim held true, at least
on my Windows PC. (A revised version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, tuned
to work with Web Apps, is in the works.)
The new version of the desktop Office suite also
has many new features, but a lot of these are for power users or corporate
users, and, overall, it isn't nearly as big a change as its predecessor,
Office 2007. Among the new desktop features consumers will notice and use
are the extension of the consolidated top tool bar called the "Ribbon,"
introduced in the 2007 version in most Office programs, to Outlook; a new
unified view for printing, sharing and previewing documents, called
"Backstage"; and richer graphics. You can also now customize the Ribbon.
In my tests of the streamlined Office Web Apps, I
was able to use a variety of fonts and styles, insert and resize photos, and
create tables. And I was able to view my documents, though not edit them, on
an iPhone and iPad. This also works with other mobile devices.
One glitch I ran into in the Word Web App was that,
if you use a tab to start a paragraph, it changes the left margin of each
subsequent line. Microsoft says this is a bug and it is working to fix it.
Another downside for some users may be that the Web
Apps only directly open documents from, and save them to, your online
SkyDrive storage, not your hard disk. So you have to upload files from your
hard disk to SkyDrive to edit them in the Web Apps. And, like most
cloud-based programs, they can only be used when you're online.
There are numerous things you may be used to doing
in desktop Office that can't be done in the online version. For instance,
you can't drag photos by the corners to resize them, embed videos, create
slide transitions or add new spreadsheet charts.
You can, with one click, open a Web version of your
document in the full desktop program, to take advantage of richer editing.
However, this only works with certain combinations of browsers and desktop
Office versions.
Two of the Web apps, Excel and OneNote, allow
multiple users to log on and work on the same document together. The others
don't yet. In fact, in my tests, I couldn't open a Word document locally
until I had closed it online, and vice versa. Microsoft says it is working
on expanding simultaneous use to all the apps.
Office Web Apps are a good start for Microsoft at
bringing its productivity expertise to the Web, and may be all many
consumers need for creating simple documents.
Greg Smith, chief information officer at George Fox,
said the iPad's technological limitations—its inability to multitask and print,
and its limited storage space—have kept students dependent on their notebooks.
"That's the problem with the iPad: It's not an independent device," he said.
"Classroom iPad Programs Get Mixed Response," by Travis Kaya,
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 20, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Classroom-iPad-Programs-Get/27046/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A few weeks after a handful of colleges gave away
iPads to determine the tablet's place in the classroom, students and faculty
seem confident that the device has some future in academe.
But they're still not exactly sure where that might
be.
At those early-adopter schools, iPads are competing
with MacBooks as the students' go-to gadget for note taking and Web surfing.
Zach Kramberg, a first-year student at George Fox University, which allowed
incoming students to choose between a complimentary iPad or MacBook this
fall, said the tablet has become an important tool for recording and
organizing lecture notes. He also takes the device with him to the
university's dimly lit chapel so he can follow along with an app called
iBible. "The iPad's very easy to use once you figure them out," he said.
Still, Mr. Kramberg said the majority of students
rely on bound Bibles in chapel and stick to pen and paper or MacBooks in the
classroom.
Greg Smith, chief information officer at George
Fox, said the iPad's technological limitations—its inability to multitask
and print, and its limited storage space—have kept students dependent on
their notebooks. "That's the problem with the iPad: It's not an independent
device," he said.
Mr. Smith said that the 67 students—10 percent of
the freshman class—that opted for iPads over MacBooks are really excited
about the technology but have not been "pushing the capabilities" of the
device.
Caitlin Corning, a history professor at George Fox,
said it's been hard to meld iPads into the curriculum because only a small
subset of her students has the device. Ms. Corning used the iPad as a
portable teaching tool during a student art trip to Europe this summer,
flashing Van Gogh works on the screen when they were in the places he
painted them. Translating that portable-classroom experience into her
classroom back in Oregon, however, has not been easy. "It's still a work in
progress," she said. "It's a little complex because only some of the
freshmen have iPads."
Faculty members at Seton Hill University, which
gave iPads to all full-time students, are working with the developers of an
e-book app called Inkling to come up with new ways to integrate the iPad
into classroom instruction. The textbook software—one of many in
development—allows students to access interactive graphics and add notes as
they read along. Faculty members can access the students' marginalia to see
whether they understand the text. They can also remotely receive and answer
questions from students in real time.
Catherine Giunta, an associate professor of
business at Seton Hill, said the technology has changed the way students
interact with their textbooks and how she interacts with her students. While
reviewing the margin notes of a student in her marketing class, Ms. Giunta
was able to pinpoint and correct a student's apparent misunderstanding of a
concept that was going to be covered in class the next day. "The
misunderstanding may not have been apparent until [the student] did a
written report," Ms. Giunta said. "I could really give her individualized
instruction and guidance."
As students and faculty members around the country
feel around for new ways to integrate the iPad into academic life, a handful
of programs are taking a more formal approach to finding its place in the
classroom. Students in the Digital Cultures and Creativity program at the
University of Maryland at College Park will turn a critical eye on the iPad
as a study tool while integrating it into their curriculum. "I think
[students are] taking a sort of wait-and-see approach," said Matthew
Kirschenbaum, the program director and an associate professor of English.
Similarly, the faculty at Indiana University has
formed a 24-member focus group to evaluate iPad-driven teaching strategies.
The groups have started meeting this month to assess how their iPad
experiments are going, with a preliminary report due in January. "It's meant
to be a supportive, collaborative, formalized conversation," said Stacy
Morrone, Indiana's associate dean of learning technologies. "We don't expect
that everything will go perfectly."
Although not entirely related to the substance of
the iPad educational debate, a pilot program at Long Island University was
thrust into the spotlight over the weekend in an animated e-mail exchange
between a college journalist and Apple's founder Steve Jobs. As Gawker
reports it, complaints about a few unreturned media inquiries from a
deadline-stressed reporter led to a curt "leave us alone" response from the
Apple chief executive.
In the e-mail chain, Mr. Jobs said, "Our goals do
not include helping you get a good grade."
Video:
Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 (and beyond)---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic
education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job
market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may
teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may
award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards
is a
"microcredential."
Credential (Certificate,
Badge, License, and Apprenticeship) Count Approaches 1 Million ---
Click Here
For example, credentials for computer programming skills are becoming more
popular. Some certificates supplement college diplomas, whereas others are
earned by students who did not enroll in college.
Although not MOOC complete courses, there
are over 2,000 free learning modules at Kahn Academy, including some
advanced-learning accounting modules: Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories but there are more courses than
fit undert these categories. It's best to search for a topic of
interest.
Growing up as an
aspiring javelin thrower in Kenya, the young
Julius Yego
was unable to find a coach: in a country where runners command the
most prestige, mentorship was practically nonexistent. Determined to
succeed, he instead watched YouTube recordings of Norwegian Olympic
javelin thrower Andreas Thorkildsen, taking detailed notes and
attempting to imitate the fine details of his movements. Yego went
on to win gold in the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, silver in
the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and holds the 3rd-longest javelin
throw on world record. He acquired a coach only six months before he
competed in the 2012 London Olympics — over a decade after he
started practicing.
Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube.
Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video
service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may
shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of
communication, such as written articles or books. But critically
overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit knowledge
transmission which is historically unprecedented, facilitating the
preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise have been
lost.
Tacit
knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal
or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or
assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of
intellectual dark matter,
pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of
them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking,
housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly
line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.
Before video became
available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person,
so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action
and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is
impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local
nature, it presents a uniquely strong
succession problem:
if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the
few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if
he’s written books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an
obstacle to centralization, as its local transmission provides an
advantage for decentralized players that can’t be replicated by a
central authority. The center cannot appropriate what it cannot
access: there will never be a state monopoly on plumbing or
dentistry, for example.
Some will object that tacit
knowledge acquisition must be possible without close observation of
a skilled practitioner; otherwise we would never see skilled
autodidacts. It’s true that some are able to acquire tacit knowledge
by directly interacting with the object of mastery and figuring out
things on their own, but this is very difficult. True autodidacts
who can invent their own techniques are rare, but many can learn by
watching and imitating.
The scarcity
of people who can truly learn from what they’re given is why the
massive open online courses of the early 2010s
didn’t work out,
with 95% of enrolled students failing to complete even a single
course, and year-on-year student retention rates below 10%. Learners
who wish to acquire tacit knowledge, but who are unable to figure
things out on their own, are therefore limited by their access to
personal observation of skilled people.
Massively
available video recordings of practitioners in action change this
entirely. Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate
the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and
economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal
access. These new points of access range from the specialized
trades, where electricians illustrate
how to use multimeters
and how to
assess breaker boxes,
to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn
basic knife-handling techniques
from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to”
category has grown
70% year-on-year.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Two days ago a replacement gasket for an Amana lower freezer door
arrived (from Amazon). When I commenced to take the old gasket off I
discovered that replacing the old gasket was going to be a bit trickier
than I realized for a very old refrigerator that came with our house
when we purchased the house 15 years ago. I had no original refrigerator
manual and most likely would have to spend hours locating the manual if
I had one in the first place. So I went to YouTube and in seconds found
dozens of helper videos for replacing Amana freezer door gaskets. I
watched one of these videos and discovered how to take out 32 panel
screws to remove the inner door panel and how to heat my new gasket in a
clothes dryer to get it to shape properly for replacement.
The training needed to do the job took me less than ten minutes on
YouTube. Millions of similar training videos are available for fixing
almost anything imaginable and addressing a myriad of health issues
should the need ever arise.
My point here is that YouTube makes it easy to find just-in-time
training modules in a matter of seconds.
Over the years I've occasionally written tidbits about the Monte Hall
problem. But it helps to renew my old memory on this and other technical
education issues that come up every day. First thing I went to Wikipedia
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
Then for added kicks I went to a sampling of the many YouTube modules
on the Monte Hall problem (search for Monte Hall) at
www.youtube.com
My point here is that YouTube is truly amazing for training and
education needs. It's better than Wikipedia in terms of coverage of
topics like freezer door gasket replacements or replacing the starter
cord on Toro lawn mower (which was also a problem for me this summer).
Of course YouTube now has amazing free education channels maintained
by top educators (think complete course modules for many disciplines)---
https://www.youtube.com/edu
My point here is that YouTube is evolving to a point where it's easy
to lose sight of the many wonderful ways you can learn from YouTube.
It's not the YouTube you forgot to follow closely over the last 10 years
even though you used it for specific needs quite often.
Some of the most wonderful things in life really are free. Activists
seeking to break up giant tech companies like Amazon and Google should
keep one thing in mind. Those tech companies can bring us a lot of
wonderful things for free or with ease because of the ability to cover
losses in one area with profits in another area. What would happen to
the many wonderful free videos we get on YouTube or the free or very
cheap books that can be downloaded from Amazon if we tear those
companies apart?
Sure we can take all the videos about repairing freezer gaskets (so I
would have to phone for a maintenance technician) and videos of the
Monte Hall problem away from the public. And sure we can restore some
shopping in malls (think bookstores) by banning online shopping from
Amazon. And we make it a lot more expensive to file tax returns by
removing all the tax helper videos from YouTube.
Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic
education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job
market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may
teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may
award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards
is a
"microcredential."
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on July
20, 2015
YouTube advertisers increase 40% in year--- Top brands eager to reach millennial
consumers have boosted the number of advertisers on Google
Inc.’s video site by 40% in the past year, the Financial
Times reports. YouTube also said advertisers from the top 100 brands
based on a ranking by Interbrand were spending 60% more than last
year.
Jensen Comment
This reveals the changing times in free communication, marketing,
entertainment, education, and training --- yes free education and
training. YouTube is playing a huge role in education and training as
major universities and training companies now have YouTube channels for
a vast amount of training and education videos.
But featured channels are almost a
miniscule part of what you can learn on YouTube. For example, you can
learn how to operate or trouble shoot almost any device in the market by
searching YouTube in a clever way. You can learn how to do virtually
anything in Excel via YouTube. You can learn how to analyze financial
statements and prepare tax returns on YouTube. In fact there is very
little that you cannot learn from YouTube.
My problem with YouTube learning is that
it is less efficient than first trying other sources, especially
Wikipedia. You can efficiently scan millions of Wikipedia modules with
word searches and in many instances their table of contents. For
example, compare searches of the "Capital Asset Pricing Model" in
Wikipedia versus YouTube. Learning about the CAPM from YouTube takes
much more time than learning about this model from Wikipedia.
Most MOOC, EdX, MITx, and Harvardx courses sign ups are only available on
designated schedules. The best approach is to go to an elite university
Website and look for links to free online courses.
I have two sons home for the summer asking if I
know of any great resources to help them get ahead of Intermediate
Accounting as they approach the fall semester. I figured I would go to the
best source I know of to help them out – these two listservs.
So can you direct me to any on-line and other
resources that may get them studying for Intermediate Accounting I and
Intermediate Accounting II?
Also, what advice would you give them on how to
approach these courses (one is in I and the older in II)?
I will also be sharing this on our student site…
On another note – we are working in an
International Pavilion on CPA Island in Second Life and our Accounting
Eductaion Pavilion (see details at
www.cpaisland.com
and
www.slacpa.org ).
We continue to offer free kiosks with links to your
colleges and universities and free areas to meet as classes. We have an
interne working this summer who can give you a demo and show you around –
just send an e-mail to my attention ad mention the CPA Island.
Thanks,
Warmest regards,
Tom
Tom Hood, CPA.CITP CEO & Executive Director
Maryland Association of CPAs Business Learning Institute www.macpa.org www.bizlearning.net
Then search for the term "accounting" at
http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400
Scroll down to find videos that might be relevant to intermediate accounting
topics. Some of these videos are more up to date than even the latest
textbooks.
Some of these videos are from the top teachers or top CPA firm leaders (like
Jim Turley's videos) in the world.
Also note that if you search out the instructor (usually found at her/his
university) you will often find more course materials available for
downloading. Also email messages to these instructors may result in more
shared learning materials.
But more importantly, Tom, consider the goals of your two sons in
studying for intermediate accounting. The overriding goal of an intermediate
accounting student is to eventually pass the CPA examination. For studying
intermediate accounting I would have your sons dig directly into a CPA
examination review course and focus on the answers to CPA examination
questions in the topical areas identified above in intermediate accounting
textbooks. They have to pick and chose topics found in an intermediate
accounting textbook, because many CPA examination questions come from other
courses such as advanced accounting and governmental accounting and tax
accounting and managerial accounting.
There are some topics that are probably not totally up to date in even
the latest available intermediate accounting textbooks. One is IFRS
although, unless your sons will be taking intermediate accounting from an
IFRS nut, I would probably not worry too much about technical IFRS problems
on the CPA examination in the near future. However, great free materials for
learning IFRS are available at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#IFRSlearning
In a typical intermediate accounting two semester sequence, much of the
first semester is spent reviewing basic accounting (especially in
universities that receive a large number of community college transfer
students). If your sons need video reviews of basic accounting, I highly
recommend Susan Crosson's video lectures. The links are at the bottom of the
page at
http://www.youtube.com/SusanCrosson
Look for "Financial Videos Organized by Topic."
Members of the American Accounting Association, including student
members, can find some instructional helper materials at the AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
Click on the menu choice "Teaching" and then "Browse resources."
Implied in all the above recommendations is a learning pedagogy that
pretty much entails memory aiding and abetting in a traditional manner
(study the problems and then study the textbook answers). At the other
extreme there is better and longer-lasting metacognitive learning such as
the award-winning BAM pedagogy (for an intermediate accounting two-course
sequence) invented by Catanach, Croll, and Grinacker ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
This pedagogy is more like the real world where your supervisor gives you a
problem to solve and you go out and solve it any way you can. You can study
BAM's problems, but there are no answers provided to study. Students have to
teach themselves by seeking out the answers from anywhere in the world.
Although the BAM pedagogy would be much more time consuming for your
sons, you can probably get the Hydromate Case and some of the instructional
support materials from Tony Catanach ---
anthony.catanach@villanova.edu
If Tony is not available, Noah Barsky can help ---
noah.barsky@villanova.edu
By the way, at the University of Virginia, where the BAM pedagogy was
born, the passage rate on the CPA examination rose dramatically after
switching to the BAM pedagogy in intermediate accounting, This is not
surprising since you remember best those things you had to learn on your
own. Of course many students looking for an easy way out hate the BAM
pedagogy.
Without diminishing learning outcomes, automated
teaching software can reduce the amount of time professors spend with
students and could substantially reduce the cost of instruction, according
to new research.
In experiments at six public universities, students
assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on
“machine-guided learning” software -- with reduced face time with
instructors -- did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in
traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses. This largely held
true regardless of the race, gender, age, enrollment status and family
background of the students.
The
study comes at a time when “smart” teaching
software is being
increasingly included in conversations about
redrawing the economics of higher education. Recent investments by
high-profile universities in “massively open online courses,” or MOOCs, has
elevated the notion that technology has reached a tipping point: with the
right design, an online education platform, under the direction of a single
professor, might be capable of delivering meaningful education to hundreds
of thousands of students at once.
The new research from the nonprofit organization
Ithaka was seeking to prove the viability of a less expansive application of
“machine-guided learning” than the new MOOCs are attempting -- though one
that nevertheless could have real implications for the costs of higher
education.
The study, called “Interactive Learning Online at
Public Universities,” involved students taking introductory statistics
courses at six (unnamed) public universities. A total of 605 students were
randomly assigned to take the course in a “hybrid” format: they met in
person with their instructors for one hour a week; otherwise, they worked
through lessons and exercises using an artificially intelligent learning
platform developed by learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s
Open Learning Initiative.
Researchers compared these students against their
peers in the traditional-format courses, for which students met with a live
instructor for three hours per week, using several measuring sticks: whether
they passed the course, their performance on a standardized test (the
Comprehensive Assessment of Statistics), and the final exam for the course,
which was the same for both sections of the course at each of the
universities.
The results will provoke science-fiction
doomsayers, and perhaps some higher-ed traditionalists. “Our results
indicate that hybrid-format students took about one-quarter less time to
achieve essentially the same learning outcomes as traditional-format
students,” report the Ithaka researchers.
The robotic software did have disadvantages, the
researchers found. For one, students found it duller than listening to a
live instructor. Some felt as though they had learned less, even if they
scored just as well on tests. Engaging students, such as professors might by
sprinkling their lectures with personal anecdotes and entertaining asides,
remains one area where humans have the upper hand.
But on straight teaching the machines were judged
to be as effective, and more efficient, than their personality-having
counterparts.
It is
not the first time the software used in the
experiment, developed over the last five years or so by Carnegie Mellon’s
Open Learning Initiative, has been proven capable of teaching students
statistics in less time than a traditional course while maintaining learning
outcomes. So far that research has failed to persuade many traditional
institutions to deploy the software -- ostensibly for fear of shortchanging
students and alienating faculty with what is liable to be seen as an attempt
to use technology as a smokescreen for draconian personnel cuts.
But the authors of the new report, led by William
G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, hope their study --
which is the largest and perhaps the most rigorous to date on the
effectiveness of machine-guided learning -- will change minds.
“As several leaders of higher education made clear
to us in preliminary conversations, absent real evidence about learning
outcomes there is no possibility of persuading most traditional colleges and
universities, and especially those regarded as thought leaders, to push hard
for the introduction of [machine-guided] instruction” on their campuses.
Milwaukee —
Digital natives? The idea that students are superengaged finders of
online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning
strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a load
of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the textbooks and
other content they’re assigned in class.
Not quite. The preliminary
results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online study habits,
presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended learning here this
week, show that most students shop around for digital texts and videos
beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class.
It’s nothing new
to hear that students
supplement their studies with other
universities’ online lecture videos. But Ms. Morgan’s research—backed by
the National Science Foundation, based on 14 focus-group interviews at a
range of colleges, and buttressed by a large online survey going on
now—paints a broader picture of how they’re finding content, where
they’re getting it, and why they’re using it.
Ms. Morgan borrows the
phrase “free-range learning” to describe students’ behavior, and she
finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators
would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from
other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely
publicized Khan Academy, she says. If they’re on a pre-med or
health-science track, they prefer recognized “brands” like the Mayo
Clinic. Students often seek this outside content due to dissatisfaction
with their own professors, Ms. Morgan says.
The study should be
welcome news for government agencies, universities, and others in the
business of publishing online libraries of educational content—although
students tend to access these sources from the “side door,” like via a
Google search for a very specific piece of information.
But the study also
highlights the challenge facing professors and librarians. Students
report relying on friends to get help and share resources, Ms. Morgan
says, whereas their responses suggest “much less of a role” for
“conventional authority figures.”
They “don’t want to ask
librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that,” she says.
“It’s more the informal networks that they’re using.”
Ms. Morgan confesses to
some concerns about her own data. She wonders how much students are
“telling me what I want to hear.” She also worries that she’s tapping
into a disproportionate slice of successful students.
We're getting close to the tail end of the
36-week-long experiment called #change11, or “the mother of all MOOCs.”
How can I tell?
First, I'm getting ready to facilitate my week, exploring Digital
Identities. I'm second-last in the lineup, so the fact that I'm on deck
means the whole undertaking is drawing to a close.
But it's also clear we're winding down because the #change11 conversation
hubs have begun to resemble, uh, ghost-towns. Once there were lively
debates and intense exchanges. As the winter wore into the spring of the
year, though, the tumbleweeds began to tickle.
Note to self: next time you facilitate a MOOC module, pick Week #2, not Week
#35.
Any course that runs from September through May requires stamina. When that
course is voluntary on the part of both learners and facilitators, and runs
as a series of totally separate modules, the drop-off can be fairly
significant. Erm, even my own participation as a student has crawled to a
stop over the last month or two.
I find myself wondering if the other learners will be keener than I've been?
Am I going to throw a MOOC and have nobody show up?
I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm a teacher at heart. I'll put the work into
developing my one-week course whether there are going to be 3 students or
300. But as I'm preparing, I'm thinking about what it means to facilitate in
a truly social, networked, voluntary environment like #change11.
Or the internet.
As the awareness of the MOOC experiment grows, the term is being
increasingly applied to grand-scale enterprises like the Stanford AI course
and MITx. While heady, this blurs some very important distinctions.
The MOOC model from which #change11 originates was built on the connectivist
learning theory of George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Highly social in
format, these courses tend to be experimental, non-linear, and deeply
dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently
direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between
learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the
facilitator.
On the other hand, the MOOC models offered by the big universities tend
towards formalized curricula, content delivery, and verification of
completed learning objectives.
Far more embedded in traditional paradigms of knowledge and teaching, these
courses only harness the connectivity of social media insofar as they enable
masses of people to link themselves to the prestige of a big-name
institution. They offer discussion boards, but their purpose is
content-focused, not connection-focused.
If I were teaching in an MITx-style course, I'd have a very different module
ahead of me, one far more familiar to me as a higher ed instructor.
I've been teaching for eighteen years. I profess to be in favour of
learner-centered classrooms. But until this MOOC module, every single course
I've taught has on some level obliged the students to be there. I am
accustomed to having the institutional powers of status, credentialism, and
grading backing me in the classroom.
In the connectivist MOOC model, I don't.
There is no bonus for learners who participate in my week of #change11. They
won't get a badge at the end, and there is no certification announcing they
completed anything. There's nothing specific for them to complete, unless I
design an exit goal as part of the week's activities. But that would be MY
exit goal: not theirs. They don't get to put the word MIT on their CV. And
while some weeks of the #change11 MOOC have allowed participants to connect
with leaders in the learning and technologies field – Howard Rheingold,
Pierre Levy – I'm among the less well-known of the 30-plus facilitators in
the year's lineup. They won't even get the relational perk of engaging with
somebody famous.
Continued in article
April 29, 2012 message from Mark Lewis
This is an interview with Sebastian Thrun, formerly of
Stanford and still associated with Google. In my ideal
world, every faculty member and a large fraction of the
administration and staff would watch the last half of this
video. The first half is worth watching if you have an
interest in Google Glass, autonomous cars, or Google X
projects in general. The second half talks about his views
and what he is doing in education. He is the person who
taught an AI course online that had 160,000 students enroll
and had 23,000 students complete it. In this interview he
describes how this impacted him so much that he left his
tenured position at Stanford. The lack of personal contact
he talks about in his classroom does not apply in most
Trinity classrooms, however, a cost of $0 for something that
many students find as more personal than a large lecture
hall does have the potential to change the economics of
higher education.
Jensen Comment
Having taught both Fortran and COBOL at one point in my career, I will pass on
this opportunity to upgrade my programming skills. However, these sound like
valuable free resources for the younger generation headed for college or that
generation of unemployable history majors seeking new skills.
This week, IBM announced its next group of IBM Fellows, seven
of its employees who share, according to the press release, "a
commitment to tackling the world's biggest problems with ingenuity,
invention and inspiration." The designation is a big deal for IBM, and
over the years only 238 staff members have been so honored.
One of the more
interesting choices this time is Jeff Jonas, a 47-year old chief
scientist with the company who
blogs here.
Jonas never graduated from college with any degree
but is clearly one of the smarter people you'll ever come across. He is
also quite a character.
Unlike many of his fellow
Fellows - who have resumes that you might have trouble parsing - Jonas
has lived a very interesting life and worked on numerous problems that
are easily understood by the rest of us.
Jonas came to IBM
through a 2005 acquisition of Systems Research and Development, a
company that he founded in 1985 to handle labor reporting, inventory
management and other back-office systems consulting. One of his jobs was
designing the casino security systems in Las Vegas, where he currently
lives. He worked for the surveillance intelligence group of several
casinos, and automated various manual processes, adding facial
recognition software that was key to slowing down the MIT card counting
group. "We built [another] system to immediately identify risk in real
time so they could get these people out of the casino quickly." This
software is still offered by IBM as its
InfoSphere Identity Insight event processing
and identity tracking technology.
Jonas is one of these
people that look at the world with very careful thinking, always
searching for actionable patterns. For example, he helped use his casino
risk-management system to track down lost family members after the
Katrina flooding of New Orleans. He and his team integrated data across
15 web sites - these web sites were being used by people who said they
were seeking family members with those seeking them. I was impressed by
how he structured his algorithm so it wasn't going to be used by bill
collectors, for example.
He calls this
perpetual analytics and sense-making to keep track of data changes and
to help advise decision-makers in real time. "As information changes,
you want to be able to reconsider earlier decisions. If you want to
prevent really bad things from happening, you want to be able to monitor
risks and trends while they are happening." You want to monitor the
motion of the data, as it were.
His
current internal IBM project is called G2. The
idea is to "make sense of new observations as they happen, fast enough
to do something about it, while the transaction is still happening." His
work is looking at how to commingle diverse data and weave them together
- especially when things are the same, such as people named Billy and
William, who could be the same person. "If you can count things that are
the same, you can analyze them better and understand how they are
related. It is a bit of a breakthrough technology," he told me in an
interview today. "I took what I developed for the casinos and made it
more generalized and easier to use." He and IBM plan to offer G2
sometime soon for the paying business public.
More than 400 colleges and universities have set up
channels on YouTube as part of the YouTube EDU section of the popular video
site, but university officials admit they are still experimenting with the
service and learning what types of videos resonate with off-campus
audiences.
With data provided by YouTube, The Chronicle has
determined the 10 most popular videos on YouTube EDU of the 2010-11 academic
year (from June 2010 to June 2011). Some college officials stress that
popularity is not always their main goal—because many colleges upload
lectures and study materials designed for those enrolled in the courses.
Still, the list gives a sense of the variety of videos colleges post and
their impact.
Star-studded commencement speeches seem to be the
best way for colleges to draw viewers. Four graduation videos made it onto
the top-10 list, and three of the four featured high-profile celebrity
speakers: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Conan O’Brien. According to
YouTube officials, searches on the site for the phrase “commencement speech”
have increased eightfold since 2008.
But the biggest hit of the year focused on a
graduating student rather than a star speaker. UC Berkeley’s video,
“Paralyzed student, Austin Whitney, walks at graduation,” topped the list,
with over 471,000 views. The clip shows Mr. Whitney, a graduating senior who
was paralyzed from the waist down before entering college, walking to
receive his diploma, aided by a mechanized exoskeleton that UC Berkeley
engineers designed for him.
Robotics videos were also crowd pleasers this year.
The University of Pennsylvania’s baseball-pitching machine earned it a spot
in the top 10, and the University of Chicago made it on the list twice for
gadget-themed clips. The first, the “Universal Gripper,” displays a device
researchers developed that can grip and move nearly any object regardless of
shape or size. The other video investigates how the mechanized
book-retrieval system in the university’s newly constructed library works.
Jeremy Manier, the university’s news director, attributed the library
video’s success to the fact that it could engage several Web communities:
those concerned with libraries and the future of print; architecture
enthusiasts; and techies. “It tells a good story and it’s got robots,” he
said, adding jocularly that “robots rule the Internet.”
No traditional lectures made the list. The closest
thing to a lecture is an MIT physics “module”—a 20-minute explanatory video
by Walter H.G. Lewin, a professor of physics at the institute. It explains
the physics behind a familiar dilemma: Which will make you more wet, walking
or running in the rain?
Other academic lectures have proven quite popular,
though: A Harvard University lecture series on the philosophy of justice has
accumulated more than 1.6 million views since it was uploaded in September
2009.
Although other individual lectures may not receive
a high number of hits, a growing number of colleges are posting them. Some
universities, such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, have begun posting all
of the recorded lectures from selected courses, allowing viewers from around
the world to tune in and see what goes on in their classrooms. By
broadcasting their lectures, they “broaden the window of access” to their
resources, said Ben Hubbard, the manager of UC Berkeley’s YouTube EDU
channel. Through feedback from students and spikes in viewership during
midterms and exams, Mr. Hubbard has inferred that the channel is actually
being used as a study tool. However, he said, “We know that we haven’t had
just students logging in 120 million times. We know we’re serving the
public.”
It can be difficult to determine the factors that
lead a college video to go viral, and many college-news offices and
technology departments are still experimenting with ways to take full
advantage of their presence on YouTube. Angela Y. Lin, EDU’s manager at
YouTube, says the service provides “resources for all of our partners
regarding how to optimize their channels,” including statistics on user
views, as well as suggestions such as adding metadata, creating playlists,
and tagging keywords.
But the success of a video is ultimately determined
by the whims of The Crowd. “There is a certain mystery or alchemy about what
captures the public’s minds,” said Dan Mogulof, a UC Berkeley spokesman.
“There are common themes and variables that can increase the chance of
something becoming popular, but it’s not a simple formula.”
In just a few short years, Salman Khan has built a
free online educational institution from scratch that has nudged major
universities to offer free self-guided courses and inspired many professors
to change their teaching methods.
His creation is called
Khan Academy, and its core is a library of thousands of 10-minute
educational videos, most of them created by Mr. Khan himself. The format is
simple but feels intimate: Mr. Khan's voice narrates as viewers watch him
sketch out his thoughts on a digital whiteboard. He made the first videos
for faraway cousins who asked for tutoring help. Encouraging feedback by
others who watched the videos on YouTube led him to start the academy as a
nonprofit.
More recently Mr. Khan has begun adding what
amounts to a robot tutor to the site that can quiz visitors on their
knowledge and point them to either remedial video lessons if they fail or
more-advanced video lessons if they pass. The site issues badges and online
"challenge patches" that students can put on their Web résumés.
He guesses that the demand for his service was one
inspiration for his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
to start MITx, its self-guided online courses that give students the option
of taking automatically graded tests to earn a certificate.
Mr. Khan also works the speaking circuit, calling
on professors to move away from a straight lecture model by assigning
prerecorded lectures as homework and using class time for more interactive
exercises, or by having students use self-paced computer systems like Khan
Academy during class while professors are available to answer questions. "It
has made universities—and I can cite examples of this—say, Why should we be
giving 300-person lectures anymore?" he said in a recent interview with
The Chronicle.
Mr. Khan, now 35, has no formal training in
education, though he does have two undergraduate degrees and a master's from
MIT, as well as an M.B.A. from Harvard. He spent most of his career as a
hedge-fund analyst. Mr. Khan also has the personal endorsement of Bill
Gates, as well as major financial support from Mr. Gates's foundation. That
outside-the-academy status makes some traditional academics cool on his
project.
"Sometimes I get a little frustrated when people
say, Oh, they're taking a Silicon Valley approach to education. I'm like,
Yes, that's exactly right. Silicon Valley is where the most creativity, the
most open-ended, the most pushing the envelope is happening," he says. "And
Silicon Valley recognizes more than any part of the world that we're having
trouble finding students capable of doing that."
Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)
In August 2004, Salman Khan agreed to help his
niece, Nadia, with her math homework. Nadia was headed into seventh grade in
New Orleans, where Khan had grown up, but she hadn't been placed in her
private school's advanced math track, which to a motivated parent these days
is a little bit like hearing your child has just been diagnosed with Lou
Gehrig's disease. In particular, Nadia was having trouble with unit
conversion, turning gallons into liters and ounces into grams.
Math was something Khan, then 28, understood. It
was one of his majors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along
with computer science and electrical engineering. He had gone on to get a
master's in computer science and electrical engineering, also at MIT, and
then an MBA from Harvard. He was working in Boston at the time for Daniel
Wohl, who ran a hedge fund called Wohl Capital Management. Khan, an analyst,
was the only employee.
Being a bit of a geek, Khan put Yahoo!'s (YHOO)
Messenger to work to help Nadia, using the Doodle function to let him
illustrate concepts for his niece as they spoke on the phone. Then he wrote
some code that generated problems she could do on a website. With Khan's
help, Nadia made it into the fast track, and her younger brothers Arman and
Ali signed on for Khan's tutoring as well. Then they brought in some of
their friends. Khan built his site out a little more, grouping the concepts
into "modules" and creating a database that would keep track of how many
problems the kids had tried and how they had fared, so he'd know how each of
his charges was progressing.
Messenger didn't make sense with multiple viewers,
so he started creating videos that he could upload to YouTube. This required
a Wacom tablet with an electronic pen, which cost about $80. The videos were
each about 10 minutes long and contained two elements: his blackboard-style
diagrams—Khan happens to be an excellent sketcher—and his voice-over
explaining things like greatest common divisors and equivalent fractions. He
posted the first video on Nov. 16, 2006; in it, he explained the basics of
least common multiples. Soon other students, not all children, were checking
out his videos, then watching them all, then sending him notes telling him
that he had saved their math careers, too.
Less than five years later, Khan's sideline has
turned into more than just his profession. He's now a quasi-religious figure
in a country desperate for a math Moses. His free website, dubbed the Khan
Academy, may well be the most popular educational site in the world. Last
month about 2 million students visited. MIT's OpenCourseWare site, by
comparison, has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million visits each
month. He has posted more than 2,300 videos, beginning with simple addition
and going all the way to subjects such as Green's theorem, normally found in
a college calculus syllabus. He's adding videos on accounting, the credit
crisis, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. He
masters the subjects himself and then teaches them. As of the end of April,
he claims to have served up more than 54 million individual lessons.
His program has also spread from the homes of
online learners to classrooms around the world, to the point that, in at
least a few classrooms, it has supplanted textbooks. (Students often write
Khan that they aced a course without opening their texts, though Khan
doesn't post these notes on his site.) Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher
and Stanford University PhD candidate in education, puts it this way: "If
you're teaching math in this country right now, then there's pretty much no
way you haven't heard of Salman Khan."
Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of Khan
Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ a not-for-profit educational
organization. With the stated mission “of providing a high quality education
to anyone, anywhere”, the Academy supplies a free online collection of over
2,000 videos on mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry,
astronomy, and economics.
In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin in
mathematics using Yahoo!’s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends
sought his tutorial, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the
tutorials on YouTube. Their popularity there and the testimonials of
appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance in 2009 and
focus on the Academy full-time.
Khan Academy’s channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
has 45+ million views so far and it’s one of YouTube’s most successful
academic partners.
In September 2010, Google announced they would be
providing the Khan Academy with $2 million to support the creation of more
courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into
the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of Project 10^100,
http://www.project10tothe100.com/.
Oh my God, she's trying to replace me with a
computer.
That's what some professors think when they hear
Candace Thille pitch the online education experiment she directs, the Open
Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.
They're wrong. But what her project does replace is
the traditional system of building and delivering introductory college
courses.
Professors should move away from designing
foundational courses in statistics, biology, or other core subjects on the
basis of "intuition," she argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with
her team to put out the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively
built online course materials, cheaply available to the masses.
"We're seeing failure rates in these large
introductory courses that are not acceptable to anybody," Ms. Thille says.
"There has to be a better way to get more students—irrespective of where
they start—to be able to successfully complete."
Her approach brings together faculty subject
experts, learning researchers, and software engineers to build open online
courses grounded in the science of how people learn. The resulting systems
provide immediate feedback to students and tailor content to their skills.
As students work through online modules outside class, the software builds
profiles on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that
data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.
When Ms. Thille began this work, in 2002, the idea
was to design free online courses that would give independent novices a shot
at mastering what students learn in traditional classes. But two things
changed. One, her studies found that the online system benefits on-campus
students, allowing them to learn better and faster than their peers when the
digital environment is combined with some face-to-face instruction.
And two, colleges sank into "fiscal famine," as one
chancellor put it. Technological solutions like Ms. Thille's promise one
treatment for higher education's "cost disease"—the notion, articulated by
William G. Bowen and William J. Baumol, that the expense of labor-heavy
endeavors like classroom teaching inevitably rises faster than inflation.
For years, educational-technology innovations led
to more costs per student, says Mr. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton
University. But today we may have reached a point at which interactive
online systems could "change that equation," he argues, by enabling students
to learn just as much with less "capital and labor."
"What you've got right now is a powerful
intersection between technological change and economics," Mr. Bowen tells
The Chronicle.
Ms. Thille is, he adds, "a real evangelist in the
best sense of the word."
Nowadays rival universities want to hire her.
Venture capitalists want to market her courses. The Obama administration
wants her advice. And so many foundations want to support her work that she
must turn away some would-be backers.
But the big question is this: Can Ms. Thille get a
critical mass of people to buy in to her idea? Can she expand the Online
Learning Initiative from a tiny darling of ed-tech evangelists to something
that truly changes education? A Background in Business
Ms. Thille brings an unusual biography to the task.
The 53-year-old Californian spent 18 years in the private sector,
culminating in a plum job as a partner in a management-consulting company in
San Francisco. She earned a master's degree but not a doctorate, a gap she's
now plugging by studying toward a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
She has never taught a college course.
Ms. Thille wasn't even sure she'd make it through
her own bachelor's program, so precarious were her finances at the time. Her
family had plunged from upper middle class to struggling after her father
quit his job at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company because of his
opposition to the Vietnam War. But with jobs and scholarships, she managed
to earn a degree in sociology from Berkeley.
After college, Ms. Thille followed her fiancé to
Pittsburgh. The engagement didn't last, but her connection to the city did.
She worked as education coordinator for a rape-crisis center, training
police and hospital employees.
She eventually wound up back in California at the
consultancy, training executives and helping businesses run meetings
effectively. There she took on her first online-learning project: building a
hybrid course to teach executives how to mentor subordinates.
Ms. Thille doesn't play up this corporate-heavy
résumé as she travels the country making the case for why professors should
change how they teach. On a recent Tuesday morning, The Chronicle tagged
along as that mission brought Ms. Thille to the University of Illinois at
Chicago, where she was meeting with folks from the university and two nearby
community colleges to prepare for the development of a new pre-calculus
course.
It's one piece of a quiet but sweeping push to
develop, deploy, and test Open Learning Initiative courses at public
institutions around the country, led by an alphabet soup of education
groups.
The failure rate in such precalculus courses can be
so bad that as many as 50 percent of students need to take the class a
second time. Ms. Thille and her colleagues hope to improve on that record
while developing materials of such quality that they're used by perhaps
100,000 students each year. Facing Skepticism
But first the collaborators must learn how to build
a course as a team. As Ms. Thille fires up her PowerPoint, she faces a dozen
or so administrators and professors in Chicago. The faculty members
segregate themselves into clusters—community-college people mostly in one
group, university folks mostly in another. Some professors are learning
about the initiative in detail for the first time. There is little visible
excitement as they plunge into the project, eating muffins at uncomfortable
desks in a classroom on the sixth floor of the Soviet-looking
science-and-engineering building.
By contrast, Ms. Thille whirls with enthusiasm. She
describes Online Learning Initiative features like software that mimics
human tutors: making comments when students go awry, keeping quiet when they
perform well, and answering questions about what to do next. She discusses
the "dashboard" that tells professors how well students grasp each learning
objective. Throughout, she gives an impression of hyper-competence, like a
pupil who sits in the front row and knows the answer to every question.
But her remarks can sometimes veer into a
disorienting brew of jargon, giving the impression that she is talking about
lab subjects rather than college kids. Once she mentions "dosing" students
with a learning activity. And early on in the workshop, she faces a feisty
challenge from Chad Taylor, an assistant professor at Harper College. He
worries about what happens when students must face free-form questions,
which the computer doesn't baby them through.
"I will self-disclose myself as a skeptic of these
programs," he says. Software is "very good at prompting the students to go
step by step, and 'do this' and 'do that,' and all these bells and whistles
with hints. But the problem is, in my classroom they're not prompted step by
step."
Around the country, there's more skepticism where
that came from, Ms. Thille confides over a dinner of tuna tacos later that
day. One chief obstacle is the "not-invented-here problem." Professors are
wary of adopting courses they did not create. The Online Learning
Initiative's team-based model represents a cultural shift for a
professoriate that derives status, and pride, from individual contributions.
Then there's privacy. The beauty of OLI is that
developers can improve classes by studying data from thousands of students.
But some academics worry that colleges could use that same data to evaluate
professors—and fire those whose students fail to measure up.
Ms. Thille tells a personal story that illustrates
who could benefit if she prevails. Years ago she adopted a teenager, Cece.
The daughter of a drug user who died of AIDS, Cece was 28 days' truant from
high school when she went to live with Ms. Thille. She was so undereducated,
even the simple fractions of measuring cups eluded her. Her math teacher
told Ms. Thille that with 40 kids in class, she needed to focus on the ones
who were going to "make it."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In a way we already have something like this operating in colleges and
universities that adopt the Brigham Young University variable speed video disks
designed for learning the two basic accounting courses without meeting in
classrooms or having the usual online instruction. Applications vary of course,
and some colleges may have recitation sections where students meet to get help
and take examinations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Although BYU uses this no-class video pedagogy, it must be recognized that
most of the BYU students learning accounting on their own in this manner are
both exceptionally motivated and exceptionally intelligent. For schools that
adopt the pedagogies of Me. Thile or BYU, the students must be like BYU
accounting students or the pedagogy must be modified for more hand holding and
kick-butt features that could be done in various ways online or onsite.
Perhaps Ms. Thille is being somewhat naive about turf wars in universities.
Certain disciplines are able to afford a core faculty for research and
advanced-course teaching with miniscule classes because teaching large base
courses in the general education core justifies not having to shrink those
departments with almost no majors.
Where Ms. Thille's pedagogy might be more
useful is in specialty courses where its expensive to hire faculty to teach one
or two courses. For example, it's almost always difficult for accounting
departments to hire top faculty for governmental accounting courses and the
super-technical ERP courses in AIS.
Over the last few years, my wife and I have become
big fans of the video classes produced by The Teaching Company. Two or three
times per week, we will watch a 30 or 45-minute video lecture on art or
literature or history or religion prepared by a college teacher. I am amazed
by how much I now know about topics that once were totally foreign to me.
In watching these videos, I am occasionally
reminded of a question that comes up in colleges now and then: Do we need
live instructors? Why don’t we find the very best college teachers and film
their classes? Then, put those videos up on the Internet and everyone (or,
at least, our students) can learn the material without the need of a
classroom or a teacher.
Well, the easy answer to that query is that a
college education has to be more than the conveyance of information to a
passive student taking notes. So, doesn’t that automatically raise the next
question that we need to address as teachers: What are we adding in our
classes that goes beyond the conveyance of information to a passive student?
If the answer is nothing, then maybe we should all be replaced by videos.
As you get ready for the fall semester, ponder how
you are going to add value to your students. --“I’m going to tell them some
interesting stories.” -- A video can tell them hundreds of interesting
stories. --“I’m going to tell them about the history of my discipline.” -- A
video can tell them about the history of your discipline. --“I’m going to
walk them step-by-step through the essential core of the disciple.” - A
video can walk students through the essential core of the discipline.
Those are all important to a class but they could
just as easily be done by a person on video. What are you going to do this
coming semester in your classes that a video could not do?
We live in a time when too many people believed
that they could not be replaced until they were replaced. My assumption is
that if you add real value to a process, you become essential. Otherwise,
someone will eventually catch on that you can be replaced.
There are many, many ways that teachers add value
to the students in their classes. How will you do that in the coming fall?
What will you do that couldn’t be replaced by a video?
Jensen Comment
Believe it or not, I think the most important thing we can add is to be live
role models day-to-day for our students. We can be role models regarding what it
means to be professionally competent (without necessarily awing them in every
class). We can be role models for such other things in life as empathy, caring,
ethics, human frailty, and yes even fashion.
Fashion?
Professors who show up in class wearing T-shirts, jeans, and open toe sandals
really turn me off. Perhaps that's because I'm an old farm boy who, at one time,
was awed by male professionals who wore white shirts and neckties to work. Our
most scruffy professors will spiff up when applying for a job or make a speech
at a local Rotary Club luncheon. What makes our students less important
day-to-day?
But the most important thing we add is to awe our students with both our
professional competence combined with professional honesty in admitting things
we cannot answer. Watching a talking head on television can be really
educational, but having a live teacher fumble about out loud while trying to
reason out a brilliant answer can be even more educational (even if it is more
time consuming). Teachers demonstrate how real-world thinking takes us down
blind alleys and stumbling blocks of dumb ideas. Students leave our courses with
a better understanding of what a non-perfect world of reasoning is really like
(as long as our stumbling really gets eventually us to the best answers).
The latest exchange of AECM messaging regarding the question raised by Tom
Selling about sales discounts provides a perfect example of great teachers
stumbling about trying to find the best answer. If Carla had been the first to
respond it would've been disappointing to the AECM learning process.
What is sad in teaching, as illustrated by many lurkers on the AECM, is
the hesitancy of some teachers to be fearful of subjecting their incomplete or
flawed reasoning to students and peers. The classic case is the teacher who
delivers only canned lectures and cases in which he or she only delivers perfect
reasoning that are much like prepared answers being read from a teleprompter.
This can make students fearful that they can never be as smart as their teachers
who always seem to know the best answers.
I love teachers who have the confidence to even provide answers they know are
wrong and then testing how students discover the errors and are willing to point
them out. This, by the way, is part of the BAM pedagogy ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Probably the best teaching lies in asking the best questions without telling or
even knowing the best answers.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on July 20, 2015
YouTube advertisers increase 40% in year--- Top brands eager to reach millennial
consumers have boosted the number of advertisers on Google Inc.’s
video site by 40% in the past year, the Financial Times reports. YouTube
also said advertisers from the top 100 brands based on a ranking by
Interbrand were spending 60% more than last year.
Jensen Comment
This reveals the changing times in free communication, marketing, entertainment,
education, and training --- yes free education and training. YouTube is playing
a huge role in education and training as major universities and training
companies now have YouTube channels for a vast amount of training and education
videos.
But featured channels are almost a miniscule part of what you can learn on
YouTube. For example, you can learn how to operate or trouble shoot almost any
device in the market by searching YouTube in a clever way. You can learn how to
do virtually anything in Excel via YouTube. You can learn how to analyze
financial statements and prepare tax returns on YouTube. In fact there is very
little that you cannot learn from YouTube.
My problem with YouTube learning is that it is less efficient than first
trying other sources, especially Wikipedia. You can efficiently scan millions of
Wikipedia modules with word searches and in many instances their table of
contents. For example, compare searches of the "Capital Asset Pricing Model" in
Wikipedia versus YouTube. Learning about the CAPM from YouTube takes much more
time than learning about this model from Wikipedia.
Jensen Comment
What I remember most about what I've read is what I've written down while
reading. In virtually every book or journal article I've read (as opposed to
skimmed) I take notes in the margins or at the end (inside the book covers) or
on paper that I insert into my copy of the item.
Of course in my three blogs and in my huge Websites I've commented a lot
about what've I've read. This is better, because I can use search engines
(memory aids) to find my comments. Yes I even use Google, Yahoo, and Duck Duck
to search for my own comments.
If you’ve taught in higher
education, you no doubt have discovered plagiarism on a written assignment
or cheating on an exam. It’s also likely that your college or university
requires you to report every one of those incidents — or maybe on your
campus, that’s a request rather than a mandate.
Regardless, faculty
membersare drastically underreporting
academic-integrity violations. Most of us just deal with these situations on
our own, or perhaps by mentioning it to colleagues. At some level, we all
realize that underreporting makes the problem seem less severe than it is
and reduces an institution’s incentive to adopt stronger measures that would
promote academic integrity.
I have heard many
instructors say they are reluctant to report students who are first-time
offenders. But of course, if nobody is reporting first-time
offenders, then the institution can never identify repeat offenders.
Acentralized reporting system is
a prerequisite for the development of a culture of honest academic work.
Decentralized policies on cheating tend to result in inconsistent standards,
applied unfairly and without any oversight or training. Colleges and
universities, then, have good reasons to adopt a centralized system for
reporting and tracking academic misconduct.
But what are the incentives
for faculty members to get on board with a centralized system? Clearly we
want to support students and ensure the integrity of their work.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply expect us to comply with a
centralized mandate, because there are a lot of good reasons why we
wouldn’t.
Among the disincentives
that make it more difficult for instructors to report misconduct at the
institutional level:
·We areanxious about the reporting process
because it’s oftendifficult and time-consuming
to prepare the appropriate evidence and document the cheating. Once you
consider all the time, paperwork, and bureaucracy involved, it’s a tempting
shortcut to handle a case on your own.
·Some faculty members
have little confidence that the process will treat students fairly.
·Others worry that a
centralized adjudication system would take authority out of faculty members’
hands. Those of us in favor of robust sanctions for a student’s cheating
fear that the administration would not support our decision, while those of
us who prefer light sanctions worry that the institution will impose greater
penalties than we think a particular undergraduate may deserve.
·And what about when
students claim they are falsely accused? Such cases can cause a lot of
complications for the faculty member who reported the misconduct —
especially if you happen to be untenured and/or contingent. Besides hours of
campus meetings and hearings, you might be on the receiving end of a
lawsuit, and very few academics carry professional liability insurance.
The procedures for
reporting a cheating incident are highly variable across academe. At one end
of the spectrum is a simple web form that requires minimal documentation,
and can be filled out in a few minutes. At the other end is a lengthy paper
form that may take an instructor an hour or more to complete. Then there’s
the documentation required to substantiate the misconduct — in a plagiarism
case, that might be a comparative analysis of source material versus the
student’s assignment.
In short, at some
institutions, reporting a single incident involves a lot of faculty
labor.
How institutions handle the
cases that do get reported varies as well. In some places, a first offense
merely gets recorded, and the only consequences come at the full discretion
of the faculty member. At other institutions, every report results in an
investigation, with a panel convened (typically including professors and
students) to decide how the matter should be handled. Again, if every
reported incident commits a faculty member to lots of paperwork and
meetings, then clearly that will make it harder to ensure every incident
gets reported.
Our academic culture
generally rewards students who cheat. So what are we to do?
If faculty members
are going to be expected to report every incident of misconduct, then we
need a simple and easy mechanism of reporting, and access to clear procedures
that are demonstrably fair to all parties involved. We also need the
academic freedom to determine how grades are assigned in our own courses,
and that includes how grades are assigned when academic misconduct takes
place.
As instructors, it’s our
job to create a classroom environment that supports student learning, and
that means acknowledging the high frequency of cheating as we design our
courses. Academic misconduct emerges out of an adversarial atmosphere, in
which students feel compelled to circumvent the rules to boost their grades.
While we cannot
unilaterally change the extrinsic pressures for high grades (such as
admissions criteria of professional schools), we should recognize that many
courses are designed to exacerbate the rewards for cheating as well as the
perceived need for it. Students are more likely to cheat when they feel
cornered and don’t have other options, and when an exam or a written
assignment constitutes a large fraction of the total grade, then the
perceived reward might trump the low risk of getting caught and reported.
Fortunately, it turns
out that some highly effective teaching methods are alsoless conducive to
cheating:
·Create scaffolded
writing assignments — that is, break down a big project into smaller,
sequential steps. That way, you not only reduce the probability and rewards
of plagiarism, you also teach more effectively.
·De-emphasize a big,
high-stakes exam in favor of more frequent, lower-stakes forms of
evaluation. That reduces students’ focus on memorization and cramming,
provides more frequent learning opportunities, and lessens the anxiety that
a single grade on a big test will "ruin" their course grade.
All students —
including the ones who never cheat — benefit from those kinds of
course-design changes. Instead of investing heavily in vigilance, you can
spend your time on teaching and provide more structure
so that students with all levels of investment in the course have an
opportunity to learn.
I suspect another reason a
lot of us don’t report academic misconduct is that we are focused on student
success: We want to spend our time on learning, not legerdemain. However, if
we help our campuses in their efforts to detect more of the students who are
engaged in skulduggery throughout their academic careers, that can
contribute to a healthier academic climate for all.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Teachers should take steps in advance to gather evidence of cheating. For
example, students should be filmed while taking examinations. It will help
prevent cheating if students know they are being filmed. Other steps should be
taken by reordering of questions on different colored exam booklets and having
adjacent students taking different colored exams.
In large examination rooms more than one proctor should sit in the back to
provide multiple witnesses.
As a college president, I ask students and
graduates what are we doing correctly and what can we improve upon. The
typical responses to how we can improve are not surprising — more parking
and more financial aid (often in that order). Lately the most common answer
from recent graduates as to how we can improve has been surprising — more
education about financial literacy and the practical aspects of living in
today’s world.
I hear the following comments with increasing
frequency, particularly since the Great Recession of 2008:
had no idea of the impact of my student debt
and credit card debt on my ability to live a comfortable life after
college.
Living in the residence halls and dining at
the college, I didn’t need to know about budgeting and renting an
apartment. I had no idea how to create a budget so I could live
responsibly and comfortably on my salary.
In college I learned how to cultivate a
pointed argument, but quickly learned that in the workplace an
aggressive argument can get you fired. No one told me about how to
disagree with your boss and not have your job threatened.
Faculty and administrators at liberal arts colleges
do not shy at complex thinking. We tend to scrutinize the details even as we
comprehend the big picture. We look for connections among areas of thought,
and revel in a multitude of perspectives. By the end of their four years on
campus, our students have benefited from a well-rounded, richly layered
education. I believe most even recognize what it means to be liberally
educated. Having learned to "turn the crystal" as they develop their views
and goals, they are confident and able to find success on many levels.
Why then do so many recent graduates seem unable to
demonstrate sound decision-making in an area as fundamental as finances and
entering the work world?
Is it possible that in our efforts to foster
creative and critical problem solving, we neglect the basics of responsible
day-to-day living and working? As we carefully engage students in discerning
shades of gray, is it at the expense of black and white?
Two events have led me to ask these questions.
First is the number of conversations like those described above, with
graduates who confided to me their frustrating lack of “real-world”
financial knowledge. The second is the fact of the high loan default rate
among recent college graduates, which is 7 percent nationwide (Augustana’s
rate is 4.2 percent). I know I am not alone in asking the question: What
should we do?
Personal Prosperity and the Common Good
Jon Meacham, the former editor of Newsweek,
addressed the 2011 Council of Independent College Presidents Institute.
Meacham praised the role of liberal education, noting that "people who know
about Shakespeare tend to create the Internet." But if appreciating
Shakespeare and other skills common to a liberal education is viewed by most
as "quaint and quirky," liberal education will not survive. Instead, he
argues that liberal education must be "vital and relevant" by "training
young minds to solve problems and to see what others have yet to see and to
think energetically about creating jobs and wealth," which Meacham calls the
"oxygen of democracy."
I'd go one step further than Meacham. Our graduates
can’t create wealth and jobs if they don’t have the ability to balance a
checkbook, or the skills to hold a job.
When asked to define "personal success," I think it
is fair to suggest that most college freshmen would put "financial success"
toward the top of their list. As they begin taking liberal arts courses,
they connect their learning to other aspects of their lives, and many begin
to think of a career as something more than just a paycheck. They develop
meaningful working relationships with faculty members and other students,
and may experience some peaks in their education — whether through an
internship, international study, research with faculty or other achievements
in their major studies. Their definition of success develops more facets.
At Augustana College, we have long promoted
high-impact learning experiences as well as the close relationships that
allow integrated and collaborative learning to flourish. Recently we have
begun to take new steps toward teaching certain life skills fundamental to
ensuring success of all kinds.
Leadership about financial literacy must come from
the top. I remind our students that if they live like college graduates with
good jobs while they are students, their debt levels will cause them to live
like students when they graduate. Going out to a mid-priced restaurant twice
a week for four years could easily cost $8,000. Putting those charges on a
credit card and carrying the balance over four years tips the cost to well
over $10,000.
Five years ago, before the severe economic
downturn, we introduced a class on personal finance. Offered each spring and
fall term, the class is packed with seniors and some juniors. Having read
Plato and Neruda, spent hours upon hours working in our human cadaver or
volcano lab, or climbed Machu Picchu, these students suspect they must
improve their financial literacy before they graduate.
Their instructor, an alumnus retired banker, begins
by teaching how to use financial templates. The students create a personal
profile and then produce a cash flow statement for the previous year. After
clarifying their own understanding of their financial history, which
generally is filled with gaps until this class, they work with their
instructor on the process of creating a budget for the next year. Taking
into account three to four personal financial goals (e.g., paying for
students loans, emergency funds, etc., and even retirement), the students
lay their financial path for the future. At all times throughout the class
they keep in mind their current net worth, and how that value should affect
their financial decisions. The course is such a success that, given the
financial illiteracy demonstrated by too many young alumni, we now are
offering a free three-hour seminar as a "crash course" in personal finance
for our graduating seniors.
Sharing Responsibility
Augustana is not the only liberal arts college to
offer such a class, and there is more we all can do. Many liberal arts
colleges are adding majors that address personal financial viability in a
changing world and also attract prospective students in an increasingly
competitive market.
Augustana’s newest majors — which extend from
traditional majors — include graphic design, neuroscience, environmental
studies, multimedia journalism and engineering physics, among others. While
some of our faculty state concerns that our college’s liberal arts
foundation might be shaken by the contemporary and perhaps more fiscal focus
of these programs,
most see the new majors as logical progressions of
traditional fields and therefore deeply related to our college’s mission.
Every night at
bedtime, former Celtic Ray Williams locks the doors of his home: a
broken-down 1992 Buick, rusting on a back street where he ran out of
everything.
The 10-year NBA
veteran formerly known as “Sugar Ray’’ leans back in the driver’s seat,
drapes his legs over the center console, and rests his head on a pillow of
tattered towels. He tunes his boom box to gospel music, closes his eyes, and
wonders.
Williams, a
generation removed from staying in first-class hotels with Larry Bird and
Co. in their drive to the 1985 NBA Finals, mostly wonders how much more he
can bear. He is not new to poverty, illness, homelessness. Or quiet
desperation.
In recent weeks, he
has lived on bread and water.
“They say God won’t
give you more than you can handle,’’ Williams said in his roadside sedan.
“But this is wearing me out.’’
A former top-10 NBA
draft pick who once scored 52 points in a game, Williams is a face of
big-time basketball’s underclass. As the NBA employs players whose average
annual salaries top $5 million, Williams is among scores of retired players
for whom the good life vanished not long after the final whistle.
Dozens of NBA
retirees, including Williams and his brother, Gus, a two-time All-Star, have
sought bankruptcy protection.
“Ray is like many
players who invested so much of their lives in basketball,’’ said Mike
Glenn, who played 10 years in the NBA, including three with Williams and the
New York Knicks. “When the dividends stopped coming, the problems started
escalating. It’s a cold reality.’’
Williams, 55 and
diabetic, wants the titans of today’s NBA to help take care of him and other
retirees who have plenty of time to watch games but no televisions to do so.
He needs food, shelter, cash for car repairs, and a job, and he believes the
multibillion-dollar league and its players should treat him as if he were a
teammate in distress.
One thing Williams
especially wants them to know: Unlike many troubled ex-players, he has never
fallen prey to drugs, alcohol, or gambling.
“When I played the
game, they always talked about loyalty to the team,’’ Williams said. “Well,
where’s the loyalty and compassion for ex-players who are hurting? We opened
the door for these guys whose salaries are through the roof.’’
Unfortunately for
Williams, the NBA-related organizations best suited to help him have closed
their checkbooks to him. The NBA Legends Foundation, which awarded him
grants totaling more than $10,000 in 1996 and 2004, denied his recent
request for help. So did the NBA Retired Players Association, which in the
past year gave him two grants totaling $2,000.
Amazon launched a new service that helps educators
and authors publish their own digital "textbooks" and other educational
content that students can then access on Fire tablets, iPad, iPhone, Android
smartphones and tablets, Mac, and PC.
"Educators and authors can use the public beta of
Amazon's new Kindle Textbook Creator tool to easily turn PDFs of their
textbooks and course materials into Kindle books," the company explained in
its announcement. "Once the book is ready, authors can upload it to KDP in
just a few simple steps to reach students worldwide."
Features include flashcards, highlighting, and
note-taking.
Those who publish through the KDP (Kindle Direct
Publishing) program can earn royalties of up to 70% and keep their rights
and maintain control of their content. "They can also choose to enroll their
books in KDP Select for additional royalty opportunities like Kindle
Unlimited and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, and access to marketing
tools like Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions," Amazon said.
More information about the KDP program is available
on the Amazon website.
Jensen Comment
It's relatively easy in my field to write chapter material relative to the
end-of-chapter material on questions, problems, and cases to be accompanied by a
separate answer book. Also in accounting and tax there's a constant stream of
rules changes such that updating textbooks becomes a pain in the butt for an
individual author. For popular accounting and tax textbooks such updating has
become a factory operation by the big publishing firms along with production of
all the supplementary videos, test banks, teaching notes, etc.
My point is that its harder to be a textbook author in some disciplines
vis-a-vis others where the content needs changing annually or more often.
Textbook authors often find their textbooks own them rather than vice versa.
Kindle Textbook Creater makes it relatively easy to change course handouts
into a textbook. But consideration needs to be given to all those copyrighted
notes now in your password-controlled Moodle or Blackboard servers that cannot
be made available by to the general public.
Also consideration needs to be given to ethics and your employer's policies
regarding sales of materials to your own students.
Interactive (online or offline) Homework and Other Student-Friendly
Features of Google Apps
Google Docs has added an equation editor so students
can actually complete math problems within a document, allowing students to not
only write papers that include numbers and equations but also take notes from
quantitative classes using Google Docs. Google has also added the ability to
insert superscripts and subscripts, which can be useful for writing out chemical
compounds or algebraic expressions.
"Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly," by Lena Rao, TechCrunch.com via The
Washington Post, September 28, 2009 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092802665.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Google has been aggressively marketing Google Apps
to schools, recently
launching a
centralized site designed to recruit universities and colleges. Now, Google
is
tweaking Google Docs, which is a part of Google
Apps' productivity suite, by adding a few student-friendly features.
Google Docs has added an equation editor so
students can actually complete math problems within a document, allowing
students to not only write papers that include numbers and equations but
also take notes from quantitative classes using Google Docs. Google has also
added the ability to insert superscripts and subscripts, which can be useful
for writing out chemical compounds or algebraic expressions.
Google is also trying to
make Docs appealing to those humanities majors out there by letting users to
select from various bulleting styles for creating outlines and giving
students ability to print footnotes as endnotes for term papers. And a few
weeks ago, Google
launched a translation feature in Google Docs.
As we've written in the
past, Google is wise to recruit educational institutions because that's
where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances
to productivity apps. Drawing from Apple's strategy, Google knows that brand
loyalty is definitely forged at these schools and is steadily developing its
products to become more appealing to students. Rival Microsoft is also
launching web-based versions of its Office
products aimed at the student audience. And startup
Zoho offers a free web-based productivity suite.
Google Docs can now be exported from the
Google Takeout
menu, thanks to Google's
Data Liberation
Front. Previously, users could
export and import documents in various formats,
but they are now available alongside data from all other Google services in
Takeout.
Google Takeout was
unveiled in summer 2011. It allows Google users to
export all their Google data to disk or just data from individual services.
It's all thanks to the
Data Liberation Front team, which builds tools to
give Google users control over their data.
I just finished the first week of a 12-week MSA
online tax course at UConn. I put students in groups and I ask them to work
fairly lengthy quizzes (homework) independently, putting their answers in an
Excel spreadsheet, and then they meet in chats to discuss their differences.
When they can’t resolve a question, they invite me into chat. This week a
student introduced me to Google docs, and I was swept off my feet by the way
this tool could be used in my class. I love it! I created a video on the fly
on Thursday to illustrate how to create a spreadsheet and share it with
other group members. I may be the last to the party on this tool, but in
case some of you aren’t aware of it, I am posting the video.
I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets with all of my courses. It's free,
includes most of the Microsoft Office features, and makes it easy for
students to collaborate on team projects. It also makes it easy to submit
the final document in various formats (e.g., .pdf format).
My students use two communication tools in conjunction with Google Docs and
Spreadsheets (i.e., TokBox and Skype). To use these tools, they need a
headset/microphone and webcam.
TokBox (http://www.tokbox.com)
is a free, hosted video messaging service. You can record up to a 10 minute
video clip that can be shared by URL link. TokBox also includes a video
chat feature that enables multiple people to video conference. This feature
works great with study teams.
Skype (http://www.skype.com)
includes chat, audio and video-conferencing. The chat feature works
probably better than what you have been using. With a headset/microphone,
you can have up to 10+ people in a audio conference call.
Video-conferencing is 1:1 and includes a great screen sharing feature.
You can really change the nature of team collaboration when you combine
Google Docs and Spreadsheets with TokBox and/or Skype. Following is an
example of how to do this.
EXAMPLE
Students use Google Docs to create a shared workspace for writing a paper.
One student sets up the workspace and invites team members into the space
through an email link. Each team member is given editor rights.
Using a headset/microphone and webcam, students use TokBox to host a group
video conference call. This enables students to brainstorm and get a
project running.
During the work process, each team member adds/changes the paper in the
common workspace in Google Docs.
When it is time to pull the paper together and do final editing, students
use the audio conference call feature to talk with each other. While all
are online in Skype, each team member logs into the Google Docs paper and
views it on his/her computer screen. One or more students act as the
editor. All see changes as they are made.
When editing is finished, one student exports the final assignment document
in .pdf format to his/her hard drive. The student then submits the document
for grading (e.g., student uploads the paper through the Digital Drop Box in
Blackboard).
OUTCOME
By combining the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets with communication
tools like TokBox and Skype, students learn how to use technology to get
things done. Major companies pay a fortune to do what your students can do
for free. Purchasing a headset/microphone and webcam is relatively
inexpensive. The experience students get is priceless.
I use this approach and technology tools with face-2-face, blended, and
online classes. It works great. The approach changes the nature of how
students and instructor interact in the teaching-learning experience.
Rick Lillie, MAS,
Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email:
rlillie@csusb.edu
Telephone: (909) 537-5726Skype (Username): ricklillie
On the last day of
class, I would love to hear my students say:
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so
much. I never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
(Joe Hoyle)
January 25, 2012 update from Amy Dunbar
Hi Bob,
I’m now using Google Docs with my undergrad students, too. (I’m back in the
classroom after 12 years online.) No one needs instructions on how to use
the tool anymore. I particularly like the chat function in the
spreadsheet. Students generally use the Google chat feature instead of AIM.
To make sure I have access to the spreadsheets, I set them up for each group
and send the groups the link. Google is truly making learning collaborative.
At the end of the semester, I delete them all and start over with the next
class.
And a follow-up to Rick Lillie’s suggestion to read
Clark, R.
C., and R. E. Mayer. 2011. E-Learning and the Science of Instruction:
Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning
Third ed. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
After reading that book, I revised all my content modules in an effort to
reduce cognitive overload. Now I use dropdown windows to provide examples,
problems, comments. My Dunbar comments are coded a different color, so they
can ignore them. ;-) When I mapped my quizzes back to the content modules,
I discovered that a lot of my material was not on point for the quizzes, and
thus wasn’t essential to what I thought they should know cold when the
course was over. That extra material is now in a drop-down window titled
“more,” which students can read if they want to know more. The content on
each page is now fairly straightforward (she says hopefully). Thank you,
Rick, for suggesting that book. It changed the way I create my content
modules.
Last semester I taught my favorite book, Mark Z.
Danielewski’s House
of Leaves. With
nightly reading assignments that take three to four hours, I expect students
to fall behind. So I wasn’t surprised when, a few days in, I asked if
everyone had done all the reading and the majority of the class avoided
looking at me. Such are the occupational hazards of teaching.
We’re only a few weeks into the semester, but
experience shows that it’s never too early for students to get behind in
their reading—even if you’re not teaching amazing post-print
fiction. While students clearly have the right to choose what they will and
will not read, when a significant portion of the class falls behind it can
make it very difficult to lead a class discussion.
Last semester, I heard a strategy from my friend
and colleague Alyssa Stalsberg-Canelli for dealing with exactly this
problem: have the students write down the page number they’ve reached in
their reading on a scrap of paper and pass it up to the front. Students can
then tell you, more or less anonymously, how far they’ve come in their
reading. Taking the class’s temperature in this manner allows you to adjust
your strategy for leading the class and saves you from asking questions that
no one will be able to answer, resulting in
the not-so-golden silence.
For just one more turn of the screw, I decided to
forego the pieces of paper and instead used Google Docs. (You want
posts about Google Docs? We got ‘em!) First, I created a
spreadsheet. As I’ve said before,
I use spreadsheets for everything! Then I clicked
the “Share” button in the upper right corner.
Jensen Comment
Various accounting student team projects come to mind using the above
technology. One could be an accounting history project in which students map
important events in early accounting history, some of which are mentioned at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Abacus Techniques by Totton Heffelfinger &
Gary Flom.
Early History of Mathematics and Calculating in China The best general source for ancient Chinese mathematics
is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 3. In this
volume you will learn, for example, that the Chinese proved the Pythagorean
Theorem at the very latest by the Later Han dynasty (25-221 CE). The proof comes
from an ancient text called The Arithmetical Classic of the Gnomon and the
Circular Paths of Heaven. The book has been translated by Christopher Cullen in
his Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient China: The Zhou Bi Suan Jing. Needham
also discusses the abacus, or suanpan ("calculating plate").
Steve Field, Professor of Chinese, Trinity University, September 24, 2008
Jensen Comment
Later Han Dynasty ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_Han_Dynasty_(Five_Dynasties)
Pythagorean Theorem Theorem ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_Theorem
Pythagorean Theorem (Gougu Theorem in China) History ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_Theorem#History
Suanpan ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suanpan
Accounting History (across
hundreds of years) A Change Fifty-Years in the Making, by Jennie Mitchell, Project
Accounting WED Interconnect ---
http://accounting.smwc.edu/historyacc.htm
Questions
What was an ancient Greek ploy to combat inflation?
How do you account for interest paid in cabbages during hyperinflation?
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings." Lewis Carroll, The Walrus
and the Carpenter ---
http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html
1300s A.D. crusades opened the
Middle East and Mediterranean trade routes
Venice and Genoa became venture
trading centers for commerce
1296 A.D. Fini Ledgers in Florence
1340 A.D. City of Massri
Treasurers Accounts are in Double Entry form.
1458 A.D.Benedikt Kotruljevic (Croatian) (Dubrovnik,1416-L’Aquila,1469)
(His Italian name was Benedetto Cotrugli Raguseo), wrote The Book on the
Art of Trading which is now acknowledged to be the first person to write
a book describing double-entry techniques (although the origins of double
entry bookkeeping in practice are unknown)
1494 Luca Pacioli's Summa de
Arithmetica Geometria Proportionalita (A Review of Arithmetic, Geometry and
Proportions) which is the best known early book on double entry
bookkeeping in algebraic form.
Recall that double entry bookkeeping supposedly evolved
in Italy long before it was put into algebraic form in the book Summa by
Luca
Pacioli and into an earlier book by Benedikt Kotruljevic.
Jolyon Jenkins investigates how accountants shaped
the modern world. They sit in boardrooms, audit schools, make government
policy and pull the plug on failing companies. And most of us have our
performance measured. The history of accounting and book-keeping is largely
the history of civilisation.
Jolyon asks how this came about and traces the
religious roots of some accounting practices.
Eventually, educators might be able to get copies of these audio files.
October 3, 2009 message from Rick Dull
Benedikt Kotruljevic
(Croatian) (Dubrovnik,1416-L’Aquila,1469) (His Italian name was Benedetto
Cotrugli Raguseo), who in 1458, wrote "The Book on the Art of Trading" which
is now acknowledged to be the first person to write a book describing
double-entry techniques? See the American Mathematical Society’s web-site:
http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/book1.html .
Rick Dull
And so on --- I think you get the idea.
One truly valuable research for an accounting history mapping
project is the free Accounting Historians Journal archive (although not all of
the publications are free online but should be free to students using the hard
copy stacks in campus libraries) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/general_library/dac/files/ahj.html
Using MAAW and Jstor for Accounting History Research --- http://maaw.info/
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos
that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for
your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips
for video projects as well as free online communication tools.
My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of
work that they are now sharing with us.
Zoom (stylized as zoom)
is a videotelephonyproprietary
software program developed by Zoom
Video Communications. The free plan provides a video
chatting service that allows up to 100 concurrent participants, with a
40-minute time restriction. Users have the option to upgrade by subscribing to
a paid plan. The highest plan supports up to 1,000 concurrent participants
for meetings lasting up to 30 hours.[2]
Oh my God, she's trying to replace me with a
computer.
That's what some professors think when they hear
Candace Thille pitch the online education experiment she directs, the Open
Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.
They're wrong. But what her project does replace is
the traditional system of building and delivering introductory college
courses.
Professors should move away from designing
foundational courses in statistics, biology, or other core subjects on the
basis of "intuition," she argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with
her team to put out the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively
built online course materials, cheaply available to the masses.
"We're seeing failure rates in these large
introductory courses that are not acceptable to anybody," Ms. Thille says.
"There has to be a better way to get more students—irrespective of where
they start—to be able to successfully complete."
Her approach brings together faculty subject
experts, learning researchers, and software engineers to build open online
courses grounded in the science of how people learn. The resulting systems
provide immediate feedback to students and tailor content to their skills.
As students work through online modules outside class, the software builds
profiles on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that
data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.
When Ms. Thille began this work, in 2002, the idea
was to design free online courses that would give independent novices a shot
at mastering what students learn in traditional classes. But two things
changed. One, her studies found that the online system benefits on-campus
students, allowing them to learn better and faster than their peers when the
digital environment is combined with some face-to-face instruction.
And two, colleges sank into "fiscal famine," as one
chancellor put it. Technological solutions like Ms. Thille's promise one
treatment for higher education's "cost disease"—the notion, articulated by
William G. Bowen and William J. Baumol, that the expense of labor-heavy
endeavors like classroom teaching inevitably rises faster than inflation.
For years, educational-technology innovations led
to more costs per student, says Mr. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton
University. But today we may have reached a point at which interactive
online systems could "change that equation," he argues, by enabling students
to learn just as much with less "capital and labor."
"What you've got right now is a powerful
intersection between technological change and economics," Mr. Bowen tells
The Chronicle.
Ms. Thille is, he adds, "a real evangelist in the
best sense of the word."
Nowadays rival universities want to hire her.
Venture capitalists want to market her courses. The Obama administration
wants her advice. And so many foundations want to support her work that she
must turn away some would-be backers.
But the big question is this: Can Ms. Thille get a
critical mass of people to buy in to her idea? Can she expand the Online
Learning Initiative from a tiny darling of ed-tech evangelists to something
that truly changes education? A Background in Business
Ms. Thille brings an unusual biography to the task.
The 53-year-old Californian spent 18 years in the private sector,
culminating in a plum job as a partner in a management-consulting company in
San Francisco. She earned a master's degree but not a doctorate, a gap she's
now plugging by studying toward a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
She has never taught a college course.
Ms. Thille wasn't even sure she'd make it through
her own bachelor's program, so precarious were her finances at the time. Her
family had plunged from upper middle class to struggling after her father
quit his job at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company because of his
opposition to the Vietnam War. But with jobs and scholarships, she managed
to earn a degree in sociology from Berkeley.
After college, Ms. Thille followed her fiancé to
Pittsburgh. The engagement didn't last, but her connection to the city did.
She worked as education coordinator for a rape-crisis center, training
police and hospital employees.
She eventually wound up back in California at the
consultancy, training executives and helping businesses run meetings
effectively. There she took on her first online-learning project: building a
hybrid course to teach executives how to mentor subordinates.
Ms. Thille doesn't play up this corporate-heavy
résumé as she travels the country making the case for why professors should
change how they teach. On a recent Tuesday morning, The Chronicle tagged
along as that mission brought Ms. Thille to the University of Illinois at
Chicago, where she was meeting with folks from the university and two nearby
community colleges to prepare for the development of a new pre-calculus
course.
It's one piece of a quiet but sweeping push to
develop, deploy, and test Open Learning Initiative courses at public
institutions around the country, led by an alphabet soup of education
groups.
The failure rate in such precalculus courses can be
so bad that as many as 50 percent of students need to take the class a
second time. Ms. Thille and her colleagues hope to improve on that record
while developing materials of such quality that they're used by perhaps
100,000 students each year. Facing Skepticism
But first the collaborators must learn how to build
a course as a team. As Ms. Thille fires up her PowerPoint, she faces a dozen
or so administrators and professors in Chicago. The faculty members
segregate themselves into clusters—community-college people mostly in one
group, university folks mostly in another. Some professors are learning
about the initiative in detail for the first time. There is little visible
excitement as they plunge into the project, eating muffins at uncomfortable
desks in a classroom on the sixth floor of the Soviet-looking
science-and-engineering building.
By contrast, Ms. Thille whirls with enthusiasm. She
describes Online Learning Initiative features like software that mimics
human tutors: making comments when students go awry, keeping quiet when they
perform well, and answering questions about what to do next. She discusses
the "dashboard" that tells professors how well students grasp each learning
objective. Throughout, she gives an impression of hyper-competence, like a
pupil who sits in the front row and knows the answer to every question.
But her remarks can sometimes veer into a
disorienting brew of jargon, giving the impression that she is talking about
lab subjects rather than college kids. Once she mentions "dosing" students
with a learning activity. And early on in the workshop, she faces a feisty
challenge from Chad Taylor, an assistant professor at Harper College. He
worries about what happens when students must face free-form questions,
which the computer doesn't baby them through.
"I will self-disclose myself as a skeptic of these
programs," he says. Software is "very good at prompting the students to go
step by step, and 'do this' and 'do that,' and all these bells and whistles
with hints. But the problem is, in my classroom they're not prompted step by
step."
Around the country, there's more skepticism where
that came from, Ms. Thille confides over a dinner of tuna tacos later that
day. One chief obstacle is the "not-invented-here problem." Professors are
wary of adopting courses they did not create. The Online Learning
Initiative's team-based model represents a cultural shift for a
professoriate that derives status, and pride, from individual contributions.
Then there's privacy. The beauty of OLI is that
developers can improve classes by studying data from thousands of students.
But some academics worry that colleges could use that same data to evaluate
professors—and fire those whose students fail to measure up.
Ms. Thille tells a personal story that illustrates
who could benefit if she prevails. Years ago she adopted a teenager, Cece.
The daughter of a drug user who died of AIDS, Cece was 28 days' truant from
high school when she went to live with Ms. Thille. She was so undereducated,
even the simple fractions of measuring cups eluded her. Her math teacher
told Ms. Thille that with 40 kids in class, she needed to focus on the ones
who were going to "make it."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In a way we already have something like this operating in colleges and
universities that adopt the Brigham Young University variable speed video disks
designed for learning the two basic accounting courses without meeting in
classrooms or having the usual online instruction. Applications vary of course,
and some colleges may have recitation sections where students meet to get help
and take examinations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Although BYU uses this no-class video pedagogy, it must be recognized that
most of the BYU students learning accounting on their own in this manner are
both exceptionally motivated and exceptionally intelligent. For schools that
adopt the pedagogies of Me. Thile or BYU, the students must be like BYU
accounting students or the pedagogy must be modified for more hand holding and
kick-butt features that could be done in various ways online or onsite.
Perhaps Ms. Thille is being somewhat naive about turf wars in universities.
Certain disciplines are able to afford a core faculty for research and
advanced-course teaching with miniscule classes because teaching large base
courses in the general education core justifies not having to shrink those
departments with almost no majors.
Where Ms. Thille's pedagogy might be more
useful is in specialty courses where its expensive to hire faculty to teach one
or two courses. For example, it's almost always difficult for accounting
departments to hire top faculty for governmental accounting courses and the
super-technical ERP courses in AIS.
Apple’s recent release of free software to build
e-textbooks has brought attention to custom publishing of academic
materials. But Apple’s software, called iBooks Author, lacks easy tools for
multiple authors to collaborate on a joint textbook project. Since most
books aren’t written in isolation, two new publishing platforms seek to make
that group collaboration easier.
The first,
Booktype,
is free and open-source. Once the platform is
installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their
browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time
about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by
dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on
e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also
comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups,
and track books through editing.
Inkling
Habitat, the other new offering, appears to have
even greater ambitions. Where iBooks Author is designed mostly for would-be
amateur publishers, Inkling Habitat creates a cloud-based platform for the
professional market. Matthew MacInnis, Inkling’s chief executive, said the
company’s tool is designed to give the global teams who work on
professionally published textbooks a single outlet to publish interactive
material for the iPad and the Web. Mr. MacInnis said hundreds of users can
access the same textbook content at once, and the software will keep track
of each step in the editing process.
Inkling Habitat also automates some of the editing
process that is unique to e-textbooks, like checking for broken links
between special terms and their definitions in a glossary. Those automatic
functions, Mr. MacInnis said, will allow e-textbook publishing to get easier
without requiring additional staff. “You can’t build the industry up around
digital content if you’re going to throw people at every problem,” he said.
Stanford's d.school space is the stage for creative
collaboration. A new book by two of its leaders provides direction for
design spaces elsewhere.
The spaces within Stanford's popular d.school are
as creative as the furniture and fixtures are inventive, and every aspect of
the space impacts behavior.
In his foreword for Make Space, David Kelley, the
founder of the design school as well as the design firm IDEO, writes,
"Regardless of whether it's a classroom or the offices of a billion-dollar
company, space is something to think of as an instrument for innovation and
collaboration. Space is a valuable tool that can help you create deep and
meaningful collaborations in your work and life."
As a spectator on the second floor of Stanford's
d.school building, on any given day you might observe a team of students
standing at a project table in an active stance – literally learning on
their feet. Or you might see a group engaged in a sharing exercise sitting
on foam cubes in a circle as if around a campfire. From the overlook you
might also be able to peer down at the atrium and see an assembly of
executives paired up at cocktail tables doing some cutting and pasting – as
in scissors and glue, not keystrokes.
Need an office? Slide a few suspended dry-erase
panels together and roll in a table and chair. Swap out the table and chair
for a couple of couches on coasters and you've got yourself an informal
lounge. Need a respite from an open, collaborative environment? Step into
the "Booth Noir," a simply furnished low-tech hiding place tucked in a
corner. In each case the environment supports a different kind of learning
or exchange of information.
Google Docs can now be exported from the
Google Takeout
menu, thanks to Google's
Data Liberation
Front. Previously, users could
export and import documents in various formats,
but they are now available alongside data from all other Google services in
Takeout.
Google Takeout was
unveiled in summer 2011. It allows Google users to
export all their Google data to disk or just data from individual services.
It's all thanks to the
Data Liberation Front team, which builds tools to
give Google users control over their data.
I just finished the first week of a 12-week MSA
online tax course at UConn. I put students in groups and I ask them to work
fairly lengthy quizzes (homework) independently, putting their answers in an
Excel spreadsheet, and then they meet in chats to discuss their differences.
When they can’t resolve a question, they invite me into chat. This week a
student introduced me to Google docs, and I was swept off my feet by the way
this tool could be used in my class. I love it! I created a video on the fly
on Thursday to illustrate how to create a spreadsheet and share it with
other group members. I may be the last to the party on this tool, but in
case some of you aren’t aware of it, I am posting the video.
I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets with all of my courses. It's free,
includes most of the Microsoft Office features, and makes it easy for
students to collaborate on team projects. It also makes it easy to submit
the final document in various formats (e.g., .pdf format).
My students use two communication tools in conjunction with Google Docs and
Spreadsheets (i.e., TokBox and Skype). To use these tools, they need a
headset/microphone and webcam.
TokBox (http://www.tokbox.com)
is a free, hosted video messaging service. You can record up to a 10 minute
video clip that can be shared by URL link. TokBox also includes a video
chat feature that enables multiple people to video conference. This feature
works great with study teams.
Skype (http://www.skype.com)
includes chat, audio and video-conferencing. The chat feature works
probably better than what you have been using. With a headset/microphone,
you can have up to 10+ people in a audio conference call.
Video-conferencing is 1:1 and includes a great screen sharing feature.
You can really change the nature of team collaboration when you combine
Google Docs and Spreadsheets with TokBox and/or Skype. Following is an
example of how to do this.
EXAMPLE
Students use Google Docs to create a shared workspace for writing a paper.
One student sets up the workspace and invites team members into the space
through an email link. Each team member is given editor rights.
Using a headset/microphone and webcam, students use TokBox to host a group
video conference call. This enables students to brainstorm and get a
project running.
During the work process, each team member adds/changes the paper in the
common workspace in Google Docs.
When it is time to pull the paper together and do final editing, students
use the audio conference call feature to talk with each other. While all
are online in Skype, each team member logs into the Google Docs paper and
views it on his/her computer screen. One or more students act as the
editor. All see changes as they are made.
When editing is finished, one student exports the final assignment document
in .pdf format to his/her hard drive. The student then submits the document
for grading (e.g., student uploads the paper through the Digital Drop Box in
Blackboard).
OUTCOME
By combining the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets with communication
tools like TokBox and Skype, students learn how to use technology to get
things done. Major companies pay a fortune to do what your students can do
for free. Purchasing a headset/microphone and webcam is relatively
inexpensive. The experience students get is priceless.
I use this approach and technology tools with face-2-face, blended, and
online classes. It works great. The approach changes the nature of how
students and instructor interact in the teaching-learning experience.
Rick Lillie, MAS,
Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email:
rlillie@csusb.edu
Telephone: (909) 537-5726Skype (Username): ricklillie
On the last day of
class, I would love to hear my students say:
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so
much. I never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
(Joe Hoyle)
January 25, 2012 update from Amy Dunbar
Hi Bob,
I’m now using Google Docs with my undergrad students, too. (I’m back in the
classroom after 12 years online.) No one needs instructions on how to use
the tool anymore. I particularly like the chat function in the
spreadsheet. Students generally use the Google chat feature instead of AIM.
To make sure I have access to the spreadsheets, I set them up for each group
and send the groups the link. Google is truly making learning collaborative.
At the end of the semester, I delete them all and start over with the next
class.
And a follow-up to Rick Lillie’s suggestion to read
Clark, R.
C., and R. E. Mayer. 2011. E-Learning and the Science of Instruction:
Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning
Third ed. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
After reading that book, I revised all my content modules in an effort to
reduce cognitive overload. Now I use dropdown windows to provide examples,
problems, comments. My Dunbar comments are coded a different color, so they
can ignore them. ;-) When I mapped my quizzes back to the content modules,
I discovered that a lot of my material was not on point for the quizzes, and
thus wasn’t essential to what I thought they should know cold when the
course was over. That extra material is now in a drop-down window titled
“more,” which students can read if they want to know more. The content on
each page is now fairly straightforward (she says hopefully). Thank you,
Rick, for suggesting that book. It changed the way I create my content
modules.
The OpenScout Tool Library is a social network of
individuals and collectives who are developing or using learning resources
and want to share their stories and resources from different countries.
The OpenScout Tool Library is currently hosting the activities of the
COLEARN community of research in collaborative learning and educational
technologies in the Portuguese language. This group is run by Alexandra
Okada (The Open University UK) and consists of learners, educators and
researchers from academic institutions in Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Their
interests focus on collaborative participation through social media,
colearning (collaborative open learning) using Open Educational Resources (OER),
Social Media and Web 2.0 research. There are 26 research groups from
Brazilian and Portugal universities - 115 people currently registered in the
Tool Library.
At the moment, this community is developing a book project called "Web 2.0:
Open Educational Resources in Learning and Professional Development". From
January to February 2012, three workshops will be run in the Tool Library
for improving OER skills: image, presentation and audio/visual material.
These collaborative activities and workshops aim at engaging people in
developing their skills and discussing concepts as well as preparing
themselves to be OER users who are able to produce, remix and share open
resources and open ideas.
Cutting-Edge Social Media
Approaches to Business Education: Teaching with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,
Second Life, and Blogs, by Charles Wankel ---
http://management-education.net/rmed9/
January 10, 2011 message from David Albrecht
HETL is a professional organization dedicated to
advancing teaching and learning in higher education. It got its start on
LinkedIn with discussion groups. To participate in the discussion group, a
collegiate teacher (and now doctoral students) would have to apply. If the
applicant had 2-5 years experience teaching in higher education (and met
certain disclosure requirements on their profile), they were admitted.
LinkedIn membership is now over 10,000 and rapidly climing. I believe it is
the largest LinkedIn discussion group. Knowing me, you'd probably expect
that I'd get involved in the discussions. I have. I answered a call for
volunteers, and am now a reviewer for its publications. There are two
refereed venues. One is for commentary pieces on higher education. So far,
contributors have been well-known academics such as Dee Fink. The other is
an on-line journal.
Currently, HETL has a call out for volunteers to expand its editorial and
review boards. Information can be found at the HETL portal (http://hetl.org).
While there, you can see that an option is to join with a paid membership
($60 per year).
I really like the give and take with profs from around the world. There
were over 450 comments on a thread about whether or not to be a Facebook
friend with a student.
You can find out more information about the group from the web site:
http://hetl.org
If you have to jointly
author a spreadsheet with a colleague, what is the first thing that you do?
Email it back and forth. This can be painful, particularly as you try to
keep track of your partner's changes and hope the emails transit back and
forth across the Internet. Add a third or fourth person, and things get
worse. Luckily, there is a better way, and a number of Web-based service
providers have stepped up with tools to make spreadsheet sharing a lot
easier than sending attachments.
We've written about a
few of them, including
Longjump and Hyperbase (one of our products of the
year for 2008), but I have tried a bunch others, and will show you what is
involved and how they stack up.
The process is very
straightforward: you either copy and paste data or take your spreadsheet and
upload it to the service, after creating accounts for you and your
collaborators. Then you can make changes via your Web browser, no other
software is required. Some of the services allow for more bells and
whistles. Setup time is minimal; your data is properly protected by the
service and safe from harm. And you don't need to learn any Web/database
programming skills either.
For many people, the
spreadsheet is still one of the most popular low-end database applications.
The rubric of a table of rows and columns is easily understood and can
easily be used as a way to view records and fields of a database. Plus, you
don't need to design special reports to view your data entries, and you can
easily sort your data without having to create data dictionaries or other
database structures, just use the appropriate Excel commands. Having a
specialized service that can share this data makes it easier to collaborate
too, whether your partners are across the office or on the other side of the
world. As long as they have an Internet connection, they are good to go.
There are eight different
services currently available, in order of increasing cost:
When you decide on the
particular service, it pays to read the pricing fine print. There are
discounts for annual subscriptions on most services, and some such as
Smartsheet offer additional discounts for non-profit and educational
institutions. All of these services have 14 day or 30 day free trials to
get started, so you can get a feel of what is involved in manipulating
your data and how easy it is to make changes, produce reports, and
receive notifications.
Continued in article
June 18, 2011 reply from Amy Dunbar
I find Google docs great for small spreadsheets,
but cumbersome for large files.
I set up Dropbox folders for each of my groups in
my online class (3-5 students in a group). They post their project
spreadsheets in the group folders, and if a student has a question, I can
quickly open the spreadsheet to see what is going on. Students contact me by
AIM and we discuss the spreadsheet via AIM. Works like a charm for me.
I just
finished the first week of a 12-week MSA online tax course at UConn. I put
students in groups and I ask them to work fairly lengthy quizzes (homework)
independently, putting their answers in an Excel spreadsheet, and then they
meet in chats to discuss their differences. When they can’t resolve a
question, they invite me into chat. This week a student introduced me to
Google docs, and I was swept off my feet by the way this tool could be used
in my class. I love it! I created a video on the fly on Thursday to
illustrate how to create a spreadsheet and share it with other group
members. I may be the last to the party on this tool, but in case some of
you aren’t aware of it, I am posting the video.
I use Google
Docs and Spreadsheets with all of my courses. It's free, includes most of the
Microsoft Office features, and makes it easy for students to collaborate on team
projects. It also makes it easy to submit the final document in various formats
(e.g., .pdf format).
My students
use two communication tools in conjunction with Google Docs and Spreadsheets
(i.e., TokBox and Skype). To use these tools, they need a headset/microphone
and webcam.
TokBox (http://www.tokbox.com)
is a free, hosted video messaging service. You can record up to a 10 minute
video clip that can be shared by URL link. TokBox also includes a video chat
feature that enables multiple people to video conference. This feature works
great with study teams.
Skype (http://www.skype.com)
includes chat, audio and video-conferencing. The chat feature works probably
better than what you have been using. With a headset/microphone, you can have
up to 10+ people in a audio conference call. Video-conferencing is 1:1 and
includes a great screen sharing feature.
You can
really change the nature of team collaboration when you combine Google Docs and
Spreadsheets with TokBox and/or Skype. Following is an example of how to do
this.
EXAMPLE
Students use
Google Docs to create a shared workspace for writing a paper. One student sets
up the workspace and invites team members into the space through an email link.
Each team member is given editor rights.
Using a
headset/microphone and webcam, students use TokBox to host a group video
conference call. This enables students to brainstorm and get a project running.
During the
work process, each team member adds/changes the paper in the common workspace in
Google Docs.
When it is
time to pull the paper together and do final editing, students use the audio
conference call feature to talk with each other. While all are online in
Skype, each team member logs into the Google Docs paper and views it on his/her
computer screen. One or more students act as the editor. All see changes as
they are made.
When editing
is finished, one student exports the final assignment document in .pdf format to
his/her hard drive. The student then submits the document for grading (e.g.,
student uploads the paper through the Digital Drop Box in Blackboard).
OUTCOME
By combining
the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets with communication tools like
TokBox and Skype, students learn how to use technology to get things done.
Major companies pay a fortune to do what your students can do for free.
Purchasing a headset/microphone and webcam is relatively inexpensive. The
experience students get is priceless.
I use this
approach and technology tools with face-2-face, blended, and online classes. It
works great. The approach changes the nature of how students and instructor
interact in the teaching-learning experience.
Rick Lillie,
MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email:
rlillie@csusb.edu
Telephone: (909) 537-5726Skype (Username): ricklillie
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so much. I
never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
(Joe Hoyle)
While I am familiar with most of what Bonk
writes about, just about every chapter introduces me to something
new. For example, Chapter 8, “Collaborate or Die!” introduced me to
Collanos Workspace, a free
collaboration workspace software tool developed by
Collanos Software, AG (Zurich,
Switzerland). Collanos Workspace is a workspace tool similar in
design to
Groove workspace, originally
developed by
Ray
Ozzie. Groove is now integrated into
Microsoft Office . Ray Ozzie is the guiding light for Microsoft’s
move toward cloud computing.
Last week, I posted comments about Collanos Workspace.
I asked several Master of Science in Accountancy (MSA) grad students that I
will direct in a self-study project during Spring Quarter 2010 to download
Collanos Workspace. They have gotten up and running very quickly. So far,
I am really impressed with the features of Collanos Workspace and how easy
it is to use.
While Collanos Workspace does not
have all the built-in bells and whistles of
MicrosoftGroove,
the bells and whistles are easily replaced by Web 2.0
tools (e.g., Skype, TokBox, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets). Web 2.0
sharing/collaboration tools can be used in conjunction with the Collanos
Workspace. This is very easy to do.
This morning, one of my students called me on
Skype.
He shared his desktop with me and then opened his
Collanos Workspace. I have two monitor screens, so I opened my Collanos
Workspace on my other monitor. We talked on Skype. He added files and
posted a note to his workspace. Since we were both online, the items he
added instantly added and displayed on my workspace. Outstanding
performance!
I am working on papers with a couple of
colleagues. I am going to do my best to persuade them to download and use
Collanos Workspace. We can work together both live and offline. I cannot
say enough about the convenience that Collanos Workspace offers.
This new tool is taking me back to my “Groove”
days. I really liked Groove and hated to see it get buried as an advanced
feature of Microsoft Office.
Continued in article
Rick Lillie has to be frustrated. First his beloved TokBox software became
vaporware. Now his highly acclaimed Collanos is possibly history.
"Collanos Workplace — Seems to have died!" by Rick Lillie, Thinking
Outside the Box Blog,October 22, 2010 —
http://iaed.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/collanos-workplace-seems-to-have-died/
In a previous posting, I introduced you to
Collanos Workplace and told you how great the
collaboration software is, especially for use with distance teaching and
learning projects. I have used it successfully with both undergraduate and
graduate students. For example, during Winter Quarter 2010, I used Collanos
Workplace to guide five grad students through independent study projects.
Collanos Workplace made it easy to communicate with students and keep the
whole process under control. In a nutshell, I felt that Collanos
Workplace was a great collaboration tool!
Faculty members and information-technology staff
members alike say technology is useful for teaching and learning, but
professors take a narrower view of what technology belongs in today's
classroom, according to a report released on Monday by the technology
company CDW Government Inc.
Eighty-eight percent of the 303 faculty members
surveyed said technology was essential or useful for student learning, and
over 60 percent said they used electronic materials in their teaching,
according to the report.
The most popular tools cited by professors were
e-textbooks and online documents, with faculty members reporting far less
enthusiasm for other electronic tools. Under a quarter of faculty members
surveyed use wikis or blogs in their teaching, and only 31 percent of
professors surveyed considered online collaboration tools "essential" to
today's classroom, compared with 72 percent of over 300 IT employees
surveyed.
That suggests an interesting gap between technology
staff members and professors when it comes to how smart classrooms need to
be. How wired should teaching spaces be?
E-mail Print Comment (22) Share Share Delicious
Digg Facebook Linked In Mixx Reddit Twitter Yahoo Buzz Comments 1.
morningsider - July 19, 2010 at 05:47 pm
Perhaps IT employees already know how to use such
tools. I am self taught but have been evangelizing wikis to my faculty
colleagues. I have even voluntarily led a faculty workshop on wikis--just to
help my colleagues learn how to use them.
I think there are at least three problems that
might explain this "gap" between IT and faculty attitudes. First, for many
faculty there is a learning curve: on top of structuring course material,
they have to learn the vagaries of specific software or platforms. Second,
there are so many options for tech tools many faculty don't know which are
most appropriate for their teaching style. Who can guide them to the tools
most useful for their teaching? Third, many faculty, at least at my
institution, don't have enough technical support in the classroom. Let's say
an instructor has prepared a class period on collaborative work on a wiki:
the network goes down (too frequent an occurrence on our campus) or the data
projector malfunctions. S/he calls computer services for help--no one is
available to troubleshoot until it is too late.
The existence of technology tools is not enough.
Faculty need help, training, and technical support before such tools can be
used effectively.
2. arrive2__net - July 20, 2010 at 05:06 am
The information-technology staff members provide
support across all faculty members, so their answers probably would reflect
the perceived needs across all faculty. Faculty are likely answering just
for themselves. Faculty have to pay a lot of attention to what is going on
in their own field, they have to keep up-to-date with what often turns out
to be a moving target. For professors, learning, developing, and practicing
applications of new learning technologies is a whole other work effort that
goes on top of their existing full time job of being a teacher and a scholar
(and often a researcher). Another factor is that a professor can get burned
by investing a lot of time developing and learning tech applications if
then, he or she turns out not to be teaching that course next year or term,
or if changes in the text or field renders the tech application out-of-date.
For IT, on the other hand, the technology is their bread-and-butter, so
naturally ... (you'd better bet) it matters.
Bernard Schuster Arrive2.net
3. beveridge - July 20, 2010 at 07:09 am
At Queens College, where I teach, seven different
sign-ons are required for students to have full access to the various types
of computer systems they need: Account to Claim College System Account,
College System Account, E-mail Account, Blackboard Account, Cuny Portal
Account, MyQc Web Account, Portal Account for Library Access, Account for
Remote Access.
Any of these tools: wikis, e-portfolios, blogs, add
still another level of access issues and make teaching even more difficult
with extremely limited resources.
In a recent survey, we found tht about 15% of
students do not have adequate access to do their work in a Statistics class.
About half drop out, and the other half jump through significant hoops to
get them.
In the words of Van Holland (former UMICH Tech
Guru) "No more miracles please."
4. paievoli - July 20, 2010 at 07:20 am
You can easily fix the sign-on problem. Just use a
student portal that supplies all needs in one place. A very simple
aggregator of all contant in one place that is accessible 24/7/365. This is
the problem. Just take a look at my site and see. http://www.thecampuscenter.com
everything in one place and for free no seat charges no cost.
5. mberman54 - July 20, 2010 at 08:05 am
I'll throw in an IT prefessional's point of view:
It's our job to be futurists in this area. Pin one of us down and we'll
admit that we don't know which of the tools we advocate for today will still
be around in 10 years, but we also know that if they're not around, the
functions will be subsumed into other things. We also know, from supporting
our student populations, that the students are trending strongly towards a
preference for online communications. Morningsider made the important point
that many faculty don't know how to use, or are uncomfortable, with these
tools. From experience I can promise you that they will get easier to use
over time, but in the meantime we're here to help you, and if you want to
reach your students, you'll find them online.
6. infogoon - July 20, 2010 at 08:05 am
@beveridge - There are many single sign-on
technologies that would help with that. Industry standards like LDAP and
Kerberos are supported by most systems (email, Blackboard, etc.) and can be
used to synchronize passwords across multiple login environments.
My school decided to bite the bullet and deploy a
solution to mitigate this same problem a few years back. It's a fair amount
of legwork, but not especially cutting edge or difficult for most
environments.
7. infogoon - July 20, 2010 at 08:06 am
(Oh, I forgot to mention - Blackboard does _not_
support LDAP authentication on their lowest tier product, forcing you to buy
a huge and expensive bundle of additional services instead. They're an
exception. We got around the problem by switching to another LMS, since our
contract with them ended during this deployment.)
8. vudutu - July 20, 2010 at 08:17 am
There are a number of problems, the usual budget
issues, management by committee, lack of training, dated and overly complex
systems and tools, poor direction, lack of faculty involvement in
understanding IT and not feeling inclusion in IT decisions.
That all said I believe the biggest issue is
digital immigrants teaching digital natives. The most digitaly enabled and
accepting are the adjuncts, the aging faculty are frozen in the digital
headlights. IT personel, like the younger students live with tech so they
accept it.
9. csgirl - July 20, 2010 at 08:22 am
I'm in computer science, and if anything, tend to
be ahead of our IT staff when it comes to nifty online tools. My teaching is
of course very dependent on technology. My problem is, I can't get IT to
adequately support the tools that I need - software repositories, bug
tracking systems, any IDE other than Visual Studio - so I have to spend a
lot of time doing my own setup and support. I also find that IT is its own
little closed world. They don't have much inkling of the teaching needs of
faculty, so the applications they choose to promote are often not that
useful.
10. jleone - July 20, 2010 at 08:23 am
At RIT, we have a strong ITS and excellent support
services for using technology in the classroom. And while older faculty tend
to be lass facile with technology, it isn't uniformly true. At age 72, I
have pushed myself to stay current with technology. Of course, I teach in
the computing disciplines. We have access to very high quality seminares and
workshops for faculty on our campus. We have access to hi-tech rooms for
recording lectures. Our major problem is the strong push for scholarly
endeavors, a recent (past 10 years) in the direction our institution has
taken.
11. interface - July 20, 2010 at 08:39 am
Every IT department has its favorite platforms;
every IT person has preferred programs and ways of accomplishing any given
task; every administration has different notions of the place of technology
in the classroom. And those favorites and preferences and notions keep
changing. If you're an adjunct working for different institutions, as more
and more of us are, it's tiring and time-consuming and ultimately
counterproductive to try to adjust to them all. One thing's true across the
board: those most enamored of technology are the first to lose sight of the
fact that it's a good servant and a bad master, and that there's no
substitute for the human connection necessary for good teaching.
12. clancymarshall - July 20, 2010 at 08:50 am
The DynamicBooks platform is an e-book that enables
instructors to upload online documents, audio and video and also to edit the
text to make it more relevant for students. What do you think? Will
instructors in 21st Century classrooms customize e-books for their students
or use them as is?
13. 3224243 - July 20, 2010 at 09:21 am
#9 (csgirl) - I'm at a comprehensive state
institution with 8500 students and 300 faculty. All of our general-use
classrooms (appx 100) have a base level of technology with upgrades
performed regularly and newgen technology implemented as budget allows. What
we provide and support is a result of what faculty members request. And, we
do it with 2.5 FTE.
Get off your high horse. You're not the only
instructor on campus and you're not the only one we support.
14. catlkelley - July 20, 2010 at 09:21 am
From the title I thought this article would be
about the classroom itself - i.e. what technologies need to be installed in
a classroom, such as data projectors and smart boards.
In any case, from an IT / teaching support point of
view, I agree with comment #2 above. If 25% (or even 10%) of our faculty
need or want a particular technology, then that is 100% a concern for me. So
I am not at all surprised that the numbers of IT people who find particular
technologies to be "essential" is much higher than the numbers of faculty
who say that about the same technology. I am actually surprised that the
numbers for IT staff aren't higher than they are.
Reading through the comments so far, it is very
clear to me that there is a great deal of variability in the kind of support
that is provided to faculty. And by this I do not mean only the breadth of
technologies available. I mean the support that faculty need to thoughtfully
integrate technology into the curriculum. My office is dedicated to the
concept mentioned by "interface" in comment #11 - namely, technology is a
good servant but bad master. We try to focus on teaching & learning first
and technology only when it will help. It's a difficult thing to do, as we
are also bound to keep up with current trends and new technologies. We'd
like to see adventurous faculty try out the new stuff so that we can gauge
its utility in real life.
15. broekhuysen - July 20, 2010 at 09:44 am
I wonder how many of the faculty members surveyed
are teachers of foreign languages -- I'd be willing to bet that a very
higher percentage of them use technology regularly (as long as they teach in
institutions with the specific professional support they need) -- and not
only in "labs", for doing homework, but as a constant presence in the
classrooom -- if they have the kind of access they need.
16. alex369 - July 20, 2010 at 10:32 am
Let me get this straight: The Chronicle publishes a
free ad for CDW Government Inc., a private company with undisclosed
interests, and there is a serious debate about the company's claims?
17. jeanniec - July 20, 2010 at 10:40 am
@alex369 Agreed. Why is this even posted here?
According to the report you can contact Kelly Caraher CDW-G Public Relations
for more information. Her title says it all.
18. drjeff - July 20, 2010 at 10:44 am
As an IT guy, I couldn't sit here a "listen" to
everyone saying how "easy" it is to do "single sign-on." (This is what IT
folks call integrating things to the point that students -- and faculty --
don't have a separate account on each little fiefdom's system.)
Yes, the technology to do it is reasonably
well-known (even if beyond the least expensive version of Blackboard and
some other products). All you do it install, set up and populate a directory
system (usualy LDAP), then make every system refer to it rather than its own
database. But, because the various systems are, on most campuses, highly
Balkanzed (at least in their ownership), many campuses, like many
corporations, find it exceptionally difficult to get essentially every
department to dedicate the effort (even if fairly small) to support the
project, which is what's necessary to actually make it happen.
In corporations, the CEO or COO usually ends up
"pushing" successful implementations, or else it takes literally years. On a
campus, it often takes the President. The next person in line (on our
campus, it's the Executive VP for Finance and Administration) may or may not
have the necessary "pull" with some of the departments.
Don't forget, we're probably talking about everyone
from the Rec center to the Religious Studies department to the Credit Union,
not to mention Food Services, Computer Science and the LGBTQ Center. Did I
leave out Middle Eastern studies and the repair shop behind the research
labs? You get the idea.
Sure, you (or I) can describe what has to be done
with one sentence. Getting it done? That's going to take a little more.
19. csgirl - July 20, 2010 at 11:29 am
#13, you guys sound seriously overwhelmed, and I
can appreciate that. I used to teach at a comprehensive state U that sounds
remarkably like what you are describing. But that isn't what this article is
talking about. The article seems to be discussing a gap between supremely
knowledgable IT people and Luddite professors who won't adopt the wonderful
technology the IT people recommend (at least, this is how the IT folks see
it). This is the mentality I deal with at my current school, where we have
armies of IT specialists. The problem is, our IT people are spending tons of
time playing with whiz-bang technology that no professor has requested,
congratulating themselves on how "advanced" they are, instead of educating
themselves on the technology that we actually need and use.
20. jboncek - July 20, 2010 at 11:45 am
Technology is sometimes useful, but hardly
essential.
21. lizlanin - July 20, 2010 at 11:58 am
"For professors, learning, developing, and
practicing applications of new learning technologies is a whole other work
effort that goes on top of their existing full time job of being a teacher
and a scholar (and often a researcher)."
Shocker, sounds like my job in the corporate world.
I too have to learn new technologies in order to do my full-time job... why
should professors be any different?
Social networking tools such as Twitter and the
emerging Google Wave web application are taking individuals and
organizations to the frontiers of real-time communication and collaboration.
The technology has the potential to make it easier to discover and share
information, interact with others, and decide what to buy or do. But the key
word is "potential": Social networking's evolution is still in its early
stages. What makes the current crop of services more promising than those
that came before? What are the obstacles to further progress?
An expert panel debated these questions at the
annual Supernova technology strategy conference, produced in partnership
with Wharton and held last winter in San Francisco. The 2010
Supernova forum
will be held this month in Philadelphia.
The panel at the San Francisco event was chaired by
David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Appearing on
the panel were: Anna-Christina Douglas, product marketing manager at Google;
Laura Fitton, principal of Pistachio Consulting and co-author of Twitter for
Dummies; Paul Lippe, founder and CEO of Legal OnRamp; Jason Shellen, founder
and CEO of Thing Labs, and Deborah Schultz, a partner with the Altimeter
Group. In addition, Google engineers were in the room demonstrating Google
Wave by allowing the audience to post to the social networking service
during the session; their comments appeared in real time on projection
screens near the panelists.
Weinberger began the session by asking panelists
what made the introduction of social networking tools different from
previous technological endeavors to improve communication and collaboration.
One significant issue discussed was how social networking compared with
knowledge management (KM). KM systems first appeared on the scene about 20
years ago and once represented the frontier, embodying companies' most
innovative ideas for integrating internal access to disparate information in
order to improve communication, collaboration and business processes.
KM systems were implemented through technologies
such as web portals, e-mail networks, content management systems and
business intelligence infrastructure. Web portals, which were probably the
most successful type of KM system, allow users to access a range of
information -- including reports, diagrams, catalogs and maintenance records
-- through one interface, rather than many. The portals also include
external information supplied by business partners, government agencies and
news sources. The technology automatically pulls information from the
sources on demand so that users do not have to search for it manually.
Organizations employ KM systems to increase the
value of their "intellectual capital." However, the technology that supports
KM systems has traditionally been difficult to develop and deploy. And the
systems have not been universally successful at fostering real time
collaboration between employees.
According to Shellen -- who was part of the
development teams for Google's blogging program and Reader aggregator
service -- before social networking tools enabled quick and casual
communication, many bloggers in corporate organizations had "some KM tool
where you captured the knowledge in the tool's silo and assigned all sorts
of tags, folders and so on to it. You would then pass the blog to your
manager for him or her to [learn from] what you were writing." Shellen now
heads Thing Labs, a San Francisco-based company that builds web-based
software for sharing content. Social networking is easing some of the
frustration users in many organizations have encountered with traditional KM
systems. Through use of Twitter and other tools, more of the intellectual
capital that KM systems once guarded is flowing freely, in real time, inside
and outside organizations. If an employee needs to find expertise or share
information, he or she doesn't have to work within the rigid confines of a
KM system, or even the confines of his or her organization. Instead, the
employee can use social media to collaborate with others and to find answers
more quickly and put relevant advice into practice.
While there are virtues to being able to
communicate faster and more easily with social networking tools, panelists
agreed that many organizations are struggling to adjust to the spontaneity
and loss of control over information that comes with these tools. Concerned
that organizations will eventually clamp down, Weinberger asked, "Will all
the fun be stripped out of it? Will people become afraid to Tweet about
things that are not strictly business-related?" Fitton, whose consulting
firm focuses on helping companies to use micro-blogging in a business
environment, suggested that companies may find the "messy and random
serendipity" of Twitter and other social networks to be more efficient than
lumbering KM systems and processes. "It brings an infusion of humanity to
business," she noted, who adding that, in her experiences at Pistachio
Consulting, she has observed social networking having an impact on
organizations by leveling management hierarchies, accelerating team-building
across geographical locations, and improving mentoring. She stated that, in
some cases, research to find human expertise that used to take many hours
can happen much faster when queries are "flung out into the commons" to
catch the attention of people who can provide answers more quickly.
Breadth vs. Depth
One of the advantages social networking tools have
over KM systems, experts say, is that they simplify the process of obtaining
information that would be useful to a business or employee. Tools such as
Twitter provide a sort of "KM in the cloud," allowing users to collaborate
with each other and send messages to locate expertise without a company
having to build and maintain a complex and expensive system to provide these
capabilities internally. Social networking tools provide access to a broad
population and employ simple, standardized, techniques to link users to
information. But while social networking offers "an enormous amount of
horizontal power," Lippe said, "most of the hard collaboration problems are
[solved] in vertical domains." His firm, Legal OnRamp, is a collaboration
platform for lawyers that allows information to be collected and shared
virtually. Membership is by invitation only.
Lippe noted that, in the legal field, "there's
already a structure of knowledge, and most knowledge repositories and
structures of the collaborative web have existed for multiple generations.
So, the question is, how do you tap into them?" One core structure is
attorney-client privilege, which Lippe said "has long preceded the
information confidentiality and security regime that we all have now. It
creates the structure of what you can and cannot share." In the legal
universe, he added, the messy serendipity of "horizontal" social networking
cannot solve the hardest problems. "Lawyers have some questions they will
answer for free, and others that they will figure out a way to get paid to
answer."
But the legal field's communication sensitivities
are "a very specific case," Shellen pointed out. He noted that companies
have built private social networks that feature protected blogs and search
engines, and that these tools have proven effective in achieving new forms
of collaboration while keeping information secure. Organizations are now
incorporating use of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media into
their daily routines, although they are in need of systems that can
integrate and update the information being posted across all of the
platforms. Shellen's Thing Labs produces a reader called "Brizzly" that can
be used to provide that service.
Lippe agreed that, despite the concerns he noted,
large legal firms have an opportunity to use social networking to
reestablish an intimacy with clients that they may have lost as the
businesses grew larger and adjusted to structural changes in the industry.
Lippe wrote recently on his Legal OnRamp blog that social networking tools
can be used to save attorneys from "e-mail and attachment overload" and to
"share existing knowledge or collaborate on new work [including] high volume
work like commercial contracts and high complexity work like major case
litigation."
Office culture plays a significant role in what
platform is used to share information, according to Schultz, a partner with
the San Mateo, Calif.-based Altimeter Group, a technology strategy
consulting firm. She noted that media companies, for example, may be a
better fit for the horizontal nature of social networking. Schultz has been
active in social media and networking for many years and has advised
organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies, including
Citibank and Procter & Gamble. At P&G, she built the P&G Social Media Lab, a
program that enables the company to study the new dynamics of customer
relationships in the age of social networking, and to use social media to
break the mold of standard marketing measures and approaches that were
geared toward older types of media. By encouraging brand managers to pay
close attention to what customers were saying on community sites and other
social networking places, Schultz said the Lab has helped P&G redefine how
it engages, communicates with and uses marketing to influence consumers. "I
see the tools making the roles we have more porous," she stated. "As the
consumer-driven nature of social networking moves into organizations, the
collaboration potential of their use becomes more interesting."
The use of tools like Twitter and Google Wave
"definitely make a cultural statement," said Douglas. The Google product
marketing manager described how Google Wave has the capabilities for
real-time, rolling conversation and collaboration among users that can
include messages, links and attachments. Douglas noted that each
conversation or "wave" can be modified with different editing and replying
privileges so that enterprises can "exercise controls for how people want to
lock down content." The Google engineers demonstrated the application on the
big screen behind the panelists; they showed how users can comment with
links embedded in their messages and also load attachments.
Google Wave could be used effectively for private
communication inside the firewall, as well as for working with a diverse
community outside an organization, panelists said. Previous KM systems did
not easily integrate communication with content management, making it
difficult to use existing tools to access and manage information during real
time conversations. Google Wave and other social networking tools offer the
potential of a much tighter integration between communication and content,
meaning conversations can include richer information sharing and easier
references to content available across the organization.
To Shellen, the most interesting aspect to how
social networking and collaboration tools are used is users' ability to join
ongoing conversations. He said his firm is currently building a "data set on
top of that engagement, where we ask people to explain trending topics on
Twitter." The combination of immediate updates plus access to more in-depth
information can enhance knowledge. "Tools like Twitter make me much smarter
about you," Schultz noted. "And the 'you' could be an entity or an
individual." She said that with the right kind of filtering, people can
collaborate and make more effective use of the information available on
social networks. "Companies can collaborate in real time with customers on
products and even pricing."
But does the 140-character limit for posts to
Twitter enable engagement, or is it "a sign of triviality?" asked
Weinberger. "Constraints breed invention," replied Shellen. Douglas added
that communities using Twitter, Google Wave and other tools are creating
their own etiquette. Panelists agreed that both the creation of etiquette
for particular conversations and the sheer ability to engage in several
discussions at once would be difficult using blogs and older forms of web
content sharing programs.
An Open and Vibrant World
Weinberger asked the panelists whether progress
toward the real-time collaboration frontier is being driven by new
technology or human needs. Speaking to the human needs, Fitton observed that
social networking tools such as Twitter "help us overcome human isolation in
a way that is not brand new but is happening on a different scale." She said
that the collaboration possible on the site is a question of "not just;
'What are you doing?' but, 'What do we have in common?'" Fulfilling that
need is what fascinates her about the phenomenon. Shellen added: "There's
accountability behind it; we now have modes of identity tied to short bursts
of communication that are very much 'you.'"
Organizing your papers and citations from the Web
Sharing and remotely accessing your bookmarks
February 16, 2006 message from Vidya Ananthanarayanan to the faculty at
Trinity University
Dear Faculty,
Ever wished your bookmarks
in Internet Explorer or other browsers were accessible anytime anyplace?
Ever wanted to share your Internet resources with your class, research
colleagues, or peers? How would you like to know what information sources
other people in your field are using? Perhaps, you simply want to organize
all your bookmarks in a manner that is more meaningful and personal to you?
How often have you been frustrated by an outdated or broken URL and wished
you could have saved the article or paper itself?
Want to find out more about
how you can do any or all of the above? Then mark your calendars for the
Social Bookmarking: Tag & Share! TEACHnology Seminar in Library Room 103
from 10:00 - 11:15 am tomorrow. We will explore online services like
del.icio.us and CiteULike, and discuss ways to leverage them in
the classroom and in your research. Refreshments will be served.
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to
share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you
see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have
it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the
citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works
from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special
software.
Because your library is stored on the server, you
can access it from any computer. You can share your library with others, and
find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you
discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have
known about.
You're currently looking at a list of the last few
papers submitted by all the CiteULike users. Why not register for a free
account today and start organising your collection and see just the articles
you're interested in? All we need is your email address, a username, and a
password. It should take less than fifteen seconds.
If my son
asked me today to see video of my late grandfather, whose name he bears, I’d
be in trouble.
First, I’d
have to locate the VHS tapes. Then I’d have to hunt down a gray-market VCR.
($500
and up for defunct technology!) Then I’d have to meet in some other dark
alley for a converter
box to hook it up to my fancy smart TV. Then I’d have to hope that, back
in 1996, someone was kind and did in fact rewind.
Luckily, my
3-year-old only asks for “Dora the Explorer.”
Technology
allows us to preserve the stories of people who die—assuming the technology
doesn’t die, too.
The idea of
old photos and videos being lost in obsolete media formats was something I
thought about a lot as I was producing “E-Ternal:
A Tech Quest to ‘Live’ Forever,” a documentary about death and
technology.
It’s
something viewers have written to me about, too. Some even suggested in
emails that paper is the best solution to ensuring stories are passed down.
Of course, I never met a piece of paper that improved in time—or in fire.
Printouts are great, but they’re not the same as digital copies living on a
rugged hard drive or up in the cloud for the entire family to access.
Converting old media into digital files might not sound like your idea of a
good time, but it doesn’t have to be a struggle. Here are some tips on how
to make these older formats enjoyable in 2021.
Old
Photos
There
are really two routes to digitizing any old media: 1) Source some
specialized hardware, roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, or 2)
outsource.
Photographs and prints are the easiest to do yourself. The most efficient
route? Invest in the $600
Epson FastFoto FF-680W scanner. Put a stack of photos—even Polaroids—in
the tray and it scans them in bulk, a photo as fast as every second, sending
them to your computer via USB or Wi-Fi. Epson’s software helps with
assigning years to each of the photo’s metadata and has simple
color-restoration and editing tools. It’ll even scan the backs with the
fronts, to preserve any writing or time stamps that are visible.
While
it’s pricey, the cost is worth it if you’re dealing with hundreds of photos.
Plus, the scanner is something you can share with family members or friends
who are daunted by their own photo troves.
Don’t
want to spend that much? iOS and Android apps like Google
Photoscan or Photomyne’s Photo
Scan App let you use your smartphone’s camera to capture the photos. Find a
table with good light, and point and shoot—without getting your hand-puppet
shadow in the way. The apps will automatically crop out the surface. Just
set aside plenty of time and prioritize the most important images, since you
have to go photo by photo with this option.
If any of
that sounds like a headache, just ship your photos to the pros at services
like ScanMyPhotos.com and Memories
Renewed. Gather your photos, organize them by year, get some bubble wrap
and pop them in the mail. ScanMyPhoto will even send you a prepaid label and
shipping box. The services will then digitize them, giving you options to
get them on a DVD, USB drive or cloud download. The companies send back the
originals. I used
ScanMyPhotos a few years back and was quite satisfied with the
turnaround time, the quality of the scanned images and the care taken with
my original prints.
Old Slides
Those
services will also take your old slides—35mm and other formats. But I
recently discovered the thrill of scanning those myself. Inspired by my
uncle, who scanned hundreds of 35mm slides during quarantine, I bought the $160
Kodak Scanza Digital Film Scanner.
Just power
up the coffee-tin-size device, pop your slide or negative into the
appropriate tray and slide it into the machine. You can see the image on the
built-in screen. Hit the camera button to save the photo to an SD card.
Sadly, there’s no easy way to assign dates to the photos—you’ll have to do
that afterward in your photo-editing program of choice.
If you’re looking to do some quick and dirty slide scans, try
the Photomyne’s SlideScan app for iOS and Android.
Hold your slide up to a backlit surface (your computer’s web browser pointed
to photomyne.com/backlight is
great) then snap a photo. The app automatically crops and brightens the
image. The quality wasn’t great, but it’s a nice way to figure out what’s
hiding on those old negatives.
ld Tapes
Converting
videotapes—be they VHS, Betamax, MiniDV, Video8 or some other ancient
format—requires a device that can play them. Then you need another device to
record the video, like this $170
ClearClick Video2Digital Converter 2.0. There are other ways to do this,
too, including hooking the VCR or old video camera up to your computer via
a converter like this.
It’s a lot.
There are plenty of online services that do tape conversion, too, including
ScanMyPhotos, Memories Renewed and Legacy Box. Also, Costco, CVS, Walmart and
other retailers use a third-party
service called YesVideo. Drop the tapes off at a local store and they’ll
take care of the rest for you.
All those
services will convert DVDs to digital files, too, although doing that on
your own is simple.
Continued in article
Free Public Affairs Case Teaching Materials and Sometimes Entire Course
Materials from the University of Washington The Electronic Hallway ---
https://hallway.org/
The Electronic Hallway is
pleased to announce a unique and progressive new product—Integrated
Management: A Complete Core Curriculum
— a previously untested venture
in presenting an entire course package using online technology. This package
represents a 30 week integrated core management curriculum.
IATH is a research unit of the University of
Virginia. Our goal is to explore and develop information technology as a
tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, we provide our Fellows
with consulting, technical support, applications development, and networked
publishing facilities. We also cultivate partnerships and participate in
humanities computing initiatives with libraries, publishers, information
technology companies, scholarly organizations, and other groups residing at
the intersection of computers and cultural heritage.
The research projects, essays, and documentation
presented here are the products of a unique collaboration between humanities
and computer science research faculty, computer professionals, student
assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff. In many
cases, this work is supported by private or federal funding agencies. In all
cases, it is supported by the Fellows’ home departments; the College or
School to which those departments belong; the University of Virginia
Library; the Vice President for Research and Public Service; the Vice
President and Chief Information Officer; the Provost; and the President of
the University of Virginia.
News Update from Campus Technology on January 11,
2005
Creating the Classroom of Tomorrow
What does it take to successfully integrate all
systems across a campus? Planning, communication, flexibility, and more. In a
new micro site sponsored by HP, you'll read how several campuses approached
their IIS projects and what made them successful. Join a peer forum to discuss
implementation and budget issues; read white papers, case studies and articles
on the challenges of integration.
Perhaps the most
significant new "feature" in the new release is the hook that Adobe is
providing to other revenue-enhancing products like Acrobat Connect, which
provides web-conferencing capabilities within Reader for a competitive price
to
www.gotomeeting.com (which I use). Incidentally, I
personally believe that such a web conferencing product is an indispensable
feature of any Internet-delivered accounting course.
One intriguing new
development in the new Acrobat PROFESSIONAL version ( the pdf creation
tool), is the ability to create forms that can be filled out and saved by
users who have the free Reader. This is a departure from prior practice for
Adobe, because they were trying to sell more expensive server software to
facilitate that task.
Richard
Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and YouTube as
Knowledge Bases
Jensen Comment
I'm reminded of Steve Hornik at Central Florida who stands in front of a
classroom of over 1,000 students. The above article presents Chris Dede's ideas
on how to customize large lecture and case courses to the varying needs of
individual students.
Synchronous Partnering Course Modules in
Universities in Different Nations
"Frontiers in Higher Education: A Procedural Model," Ruth Sesco,
The International HETL Review, Volume 2, June 9, 2012 --- http://hetl.org/
The paper describes a procedural model implemented
at Ohio State University that shares similar content and interaction among
international partner classes for a short time, usually 3-5 weeks. The model
is flexible and adaptive to any discipline at both the graduate and
undergraduate levels and includes expertise from both partnering
instructors. Technologies are embedded to integrate a variety of structured
opportunities for interaction and to utilize different teaching and learning
strategies. There is no exchange of credits or funding, and all instructors
are individually responsible for grading their own students, thus allowing
subject expertise and peer interaction from around the world at no extra
personal cost. The model can be implemented to internationalize an entire
curriculum to a broad spectrum of learners world-wide with a significantly
reduced carbon footprint, at minimal cost, and in direct response to the
needs of higher education.
Jensen Comment
I suspect that Ruth Sesco independently developed a model that was invented
for an international accounting course by a San Diego State University
accounting professor years ago when the most advanced online technology was
rudimentary.
Zoom (stylized as zoom)
is a videotelephonyproprietary
software program developed by Zoom
Video Communications. The free plan provides a video
chatting service that allows up to 100 concurrent participants, with a
40-minute time restriction. Users have the option to upgrade by subscribing to
a paid plan. The highest plan supports up to 1,000 concurrent participants
for meetings lasting up to 30 hours.[2]
DO emphasize interaction
with and between students.
Jensen Comment
Although professors should understand their tech tools, there are times when
professors should be willing to introduce course content they really understand.
For example, how many accounting and finance professors fully understand bitcoin
and other virtual currencies? They should learn enough about such content to
include it in their courses. But if we had to fully understand everything we
teach we may be leaving out important content just because we cannot yet answer
all possible questions raised by students. There are some topics that teachers
and students can and should interactively learn together. And even if we do have
answers to some questions, it's sometimes better to make students learn those
answers on their own rather than spoon feed ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Jensen Comment
There are a lot of tools and tricks of the trade. I think I'd pass on using
music to teach basic accounting. It's better to put students on laptops and use
narrated Camtasia illustrations of how accounting rules and traditions work.
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
Scroll down
Overcoming Mistakes of Early Efforts in Online Teaching During the 2020 Pandemic
1. Over-Assigning Work
2. Recording Long Video Lectures
3. Not Engaging Students in Multiple Formats of Learning
4. Being Disorganized
5. Not Engaging with Students
Trying to
"translate" a classroom course to the online environment. While
I'd argue that there's no such thing as "online pedagogy" (there's only
good pedagogy and poor pedagogy), classroom and online are different
experiences that require attention to the conditions of learning distinct
to each. Attempts to re-create the classroom learning experience,
methods, and modes to the online environment is a basic error. Teaching
online requires a "start over" in your course design, though not
necessarily a change in student learning outcomes.
Applying wrong
metrics to the online experience. For
example, many professors are wondering how to take attendance, or
figuring out what counts for attendance. Attendance is a rather archaic
and almost meaningless metric left over from the industrial age model of
schooling. A better metric is student engagement.
Becoming a talking
head. It's
bad enough students have to put up with a lot of poor classroom
lectures. Now they have to suffer through countless hours of talking
heads as professors videotape themselves "lecturing." I've been teaching
online for 22 years. I've never once used Zoom in an online course or
posted taped lectures. Forcing students to watch a taped disembodied
talking head almost guarantees student disengagement, especially
if we fail to appreciate the liability of transactional distance in
the online environment. If the content of your lecture is that
important, give your students a manuscript or your lecture notes to
study.
Posting video
lectures over seven minutes long. The
lecture method takes on a different function in the online environment.
When instructors ask me how they can video tape and post their lectures
online I ask, "Why would you want to duplicate the most maligned and
least effective teaching method and pretend the online environment is a
‘classroom’ when it offers so much greater opportunity for student
engagement?" The question to ask is, "What is the pedagogical function
of this video?" The most effective functions are: a short introduction,
an explication, or a demonstration.
Assessing the wrong
thing. I
see some schools wanting to assess whether students "like" the online
experience. What students "like" is beside the point of the educational.
A common student comment on course evaluation for online courses is, "I
would have preferred to have taken this course in the classroom." The
response is, "How do you know?" Ask those students if they learned what
the course was intended to provide, and they'll likely say, "Yes!"
Assess the right thing: evidence of student learning and achievement of
the course student learning outcomes. One can also evaluate the
effectiveness of the course design: structure, scope, flow, alignment
with program goals, etc.
Ignoring aesthetics
and design when creating an online course. Figuring
out your course should not be an assignment. Your course should be
designed so intuitively and aesthetically pleasing so the student
perceives, intuits, and understands immediately what they are seeing and
what is expected of them. Your students don't read a user manual or
instructions when playing complex video games—they can immediately
perceive what the game is about and what they are supposed to do. A
well-designed website does not provide an orientation to new visitors.
Your course should be clean, intuitive, and logical in design (and that
includes not adding anything that does not directly support the learning
outcomes).
Attempting to go
for coverage rather than depth. Many
classroom instructors fail to appreciate that because online learning
requires a higher level of student engagement, they need to reduce the
amount of coverage they usually attempt in a classroom course—-which
usually is way too much as it is. A good rule of thumb: cut the content
coverage by half and focus on student engagement that (1) helps students
achieve a learning outcomes and (2) provides evidence of learning.
Failing to ask for
help. Most
faculty members are used to the silo-oriented isolated nature of
academia. Traditionally, they develop their courses alone. At most they
may share their course syllabi with colleagues on their faculties or
departments, though more often than not they are seen mostly by the
dean, registrar, and library services. Teaching online, especially for
first time instructors, is a great opportunity to be more collaborative
in our approach to teaching. Ask for help. Experienced online
instructors, your school's instructional designers, and numerous online
teaching support groups are ready and happy to help you make your online
course the best it can be.
Mistake 1: Preferring quantity over quality
Mistake 2: Lack of planning and organization
Mistake 3: Using too many assumptions
Mistake 4: Being monotonous
Error 5: Little feedback
Jensen Comment
Nothing is more boring than watching talking heads or endless PowerPoint slides
on a computer screen or inside classrooms.
Students prefer live-action
asynchronous and even interactive videos.
Exhibit A is the hundreds of wonderful tutorials available free from Khan
Academy --- https://www.khanacademy.org/
For example sample the math videos --- https://www.khanacademy.org/math
Exhibit B is at Brigham
Young University where the first two semesters of basic accounting is taught via
asynchronous videos to students living on campus.
There are only a few times where students meet in a classroom ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Exhibit C is when I flipped
my own classrooms
In the last ten years of my 40 years of teaching full time I flipped my
classrooms. I prepared hundreds of short Camtasia videos on the most technical
parts of my accounting and AIS courses. Before class meetings students viewed
these videos over and over until they saw the light. In class I then had
students demonstrate in front of the class what they had learned. Student teams
can even make their own videos as term projects.
Camtasia videos or related
screen capture videos from other software vendors are really quite easy to make
and don't take much more time than preparing a lecture. They work best where
what you are trying to teach can be shown in successions of computer screens.
Students watch your cursor move about and listen to you explaining what is
happening --- you use a microphone to put your voice into the videos. In
Camtasia you can even make the videos interactive to keep students engaged.
Camtasia Free Trial ---
https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
Ask you campus educational technology experts about Camtasia and competing
software for preparing Camtasia-like videos.
You can use Zoom to bring your
videos into remote classrooms, although there are other ways to bring these
videos to students on and off campus.
Among some of the colleges
that moved classes quickly from onsite to online, I'm getting all sorts of raves
about "Keep Teaching" temporary remote teaching software ---
https://keepteaching.osu.edu/
The coronavirus has colleges and universities
swinging into action to move courses
online. In the coming weeks, we’ll find out just how prepared (or not) academe
is to do this on a large scale. Those of us in online teaching and educational
technology have moved quickly to help, too, and it’s astonishing how many
helpful resources have already been pulled together.
Even just a few weeks into the crisis, and really only a few days since class
cancellations started to become a reality, there are top-quality guides free for
the taking, created by people who really know their stuff. I will make no claim
to have read all or even a fraction of them, but there are several that are
clearly share-worthy:
A
detailed Google doc, written by
Jenae Cohn and
Beth Seltzer — both academic-tech
specialists at Stanford University — is geared for Stanford, but there’s a
lot there that anyone can use. Their guide is particularly noteworthy for
how it breaks down the synchronous-asynchronous distinction, explaining
advantages and disadvantages of each and offering guidance about how to use
Zoom
for virtual meetings.
Derek Bruff, director of the Center for Teaching
at Vanderbilt University, has
pulled together a lot of useful ed-tech advice
under the heading of "just-in-time online teaching." Read
this page, in particular, for
step-by-step instructions on key aspects of going online fast (the advice is
geared toward the Brightspace learning-management system, in particular, but
is general enough to apply to other platforms, too).
I (article author)
did teach two virtual guest lectures in May and thought nothing of the fact
that the instructors recorded them—something we’d discussed in advance and
which seemed important given the emergency outside of all of our apartments
and the very real technology barriers that students at CUNY face.
Then in the summer
when both courses ran again and the instructors emailed to ask if I could
reprise my guest lectures, they both indicated they could also just use the
recordings from spring if I was busy or away. I responded immediately that
either was fine as though we all implicitly understood that in virtual
education contexts, ourselves and our pre-recorded simulacra are basically
the same. Aren’t they?
But then, upon
further reflection, I felt a little odd and I began to wonder how many MP4s
of me had been recorded or shared since the pandemic had started. I thought
of a virtual conference panel I participated in, which I learned was being
live-streamed to YouTube only after the session had commenced: “thousands of
people are watching right now,” one of the organizers said, proudly. Then in
June, I was asked by a faculty member who I’d worked with before to do
virtual library instruction for a research-intensive course and was startled
to join a Zoom session and see the red recording button blinking before I
opened my mouth.
I wondered then,
gloomily, if part of the natural progression of higher education in this
moment is not only the loss of corporeality but the end of the ephemeral
educational encounter altogether. Or perhaps we are all experiencing some
kind of temporal implosion in which college exists both nowhere and
everywhere, and classes are attended by black boxes on a screen, which may
or may not represent the attention and presence of actual students, and the
teacher might be ported in from another time and place.
. .
.
I don’t know exactly what I’m worried will happen with
the videos, which are not exciting and
I can’t imagine many people
rewatching. I certainly would never rewatch them, in part because
they are, with some small deviations, almost identical. In the background
are small personal details-—a framed May Day poster a friend designed, a
dying succulent, my swimsuit drying on a door-knob, my husband walking by.
Parts of the videos are potentially dangerous out of context in that they
are mildly political; almost all students in first year composition courses
are researching social and political issues. It’s unlikely but not
impossible that pieces of the videos could be recontextualized and
weaponized by alt-right cyber-trolls who spend their days harassing and
doxxing liberal academics and students of color (the majority of students at
the CUNY campus where I work are Black and Hispanic).
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In my courses (not online) I made videos of the most technical aspects of my
courses (e.g., how to account for very technical derivative instrument contracts
as speculations versus as hedges under FAS 133 rules). The students watched and
rewatched these videos over and over before class as many times as needed,
because they knew they would have to demonstrate what they learned in front of
the class in subsequent class meetings).
My point is that there are many
types of videos that can be used for onsite or online teaching. My preference is
to make learning videos on very
technical topics that students learn at different rates.
Videos were a great way to level the
playing field on learning rates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
.
PwC and tech startup Talespin have teamed up to
train employees on implicit bias using virtual reality.
· VR-based implicit bias training
immerses its participants in scenarios where they learn to make inclusive
hiring decisions and point out instances of discrimination.
· Studies have shown VR learners
required less time to learn, had a stronger emotional connection to the
training content, were more focused when learning, and were more confident
about their takeaways from the training.
· It comes at a time of public
reckoning that current corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives aren't
doing enough, especially when it comes to implicit bias during the hiring
process.
Virtual reality
could permanently alter the way businesses approach diversity and inclusion
trainings.
Despite spending billions of dollars on D&I
initiatives, US companies are more
segregated now than they were 40 years ago,
and implicit bias in hiring remains one of the biggest culprits. Implicit
bias refers to the unknown assumptions
people make about others based on their gender, ethnicity, age, or minority
status, rather than their professional qualifications.
Some companies are exploring new options for
diversity trainings. PwC is one of them.
The professional-services firm is working with
software company Talespin to implement VR-based implicit-bias training
programs —and it could be a new frontier for how companies approach
diversity, equity, and inclusion training.
The Big 4 consulting and tax firm completed a
pilot with Talespin last year, and it has since used virtual reality
programming to train over 4,000 employees on implicit bias.
How the VR training
works
The training places employees in simulated
office settings designed after actual PwC offices, where they speak with
virtual characters through a head-mounted display. During the
five-to-seven-minute training modules, they are prompted to make decisions
about who to hire and promote, and must use inclusive leadership practices
introduced prior to the simulation.
Kyle Jackson, CEO of Talespin, told Business
Insider that PwC employees using the VR tool are trained on how to recognize
unconscious bias when hiring. They have to think about how even a
candidate's name on a résumé can stir up implicit biases, he said.
Studies have shown,
for example, that résumés with names that sound "white" get more call backs
than those that don't. Employees using the VR training are asked to
formulate responses if these biases are expressed in a hiring meeting by a
colleague, or a senior partner.
Continued in article
Sixty Minutes April 5, 2020:
How to Communicate Interactively With the Dead (without doubt the most
fascinating Sixty Minutes module I've ever viewed)
Jensen Comment
It's possible to communicate with dead people in many ways, especially if they
have Websites that are still hosted. For example, one of my colleagues and close
friends was a sociology professor named Mike Kearl at Trinity University. Mike
died of a sudden heart attack in March 2015. But his once-popular and widely
viewed Website is still hosted by Trinity University.
One of the ways of
communicating with a dead scholar's Website is via Web crawlers like Google,
Yahoo, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc.
For example I entered the search phrase "EXERCISING THE SOCIOLOGICAL
IMAGINATION" in the following Web crawler ---
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
One of the hits I got was Mike Kearl's hit at http://faculty.trinity.edu/mkearl/
This in a way is how Mike can still communicate with us via Web crawlers.
You have to watch this show
from beginning to end to appreciate how extensive interviews with a person
before death, innovative video capturing, and artificial intelligence have been
combined to create interactive communications with the dead.
As
this technology becomes more efficient and less costly, it will almost be like
the dead really aren't dead.
I've always liked Snagit from
TechSmith for capturing all or part of what's on my computer screen as a picture
file or capturing video. But there are times when you are capturing a picture of
text that I would prefer to capture the screen image as text rather than as a
picture such as when I want to quote from a book page or a PDF file that won't
let you select that text and copy it to your clipboard directly. The Snagit 2020
software is a relatively cheap OCR capturing text on your computer screen test
I find myself using it the Grab Text app over and over again when I want to
quote only part of a text page as text rather than as a jpg or other image file.
The OCR app in Snagit is relatively accurate, although you should carefully
proof read any OCR captures for errs.
Another feature in Snagit that
is useful is the scrolling capture feature that was available on versions even
before Snagit 2020 but never would work on my computer. Many screen capture apps
will only only capture what is currently on the screen. The Scrolling Capture
option in Snagit (maybe) allows you to also capture parts of the image that are
only visible if you scroll. There may be a way to get this to work on my
computer, but I never found the way.
For me the above tutorial
Scrolling Capture app never worked on my computer. The arrows never appear for
me. However, the following Panoramic Capture option in Snagit 2020 does work on
my computer.
Added Jensen Comment
I did not create hot keys to bring up the Snagit capture window. Instead I
pinned the capture program to the Windows task bar --- that way I'm only one
click away from capturing what I want on the screen.
Amazon launched a new service that helps educators and
authors publish their own digital "textbooks" and other educational content
that students can then access on Fire tablets, iPad, iPhone, Android
smartphones and tablets, Mac, and PC.
"Educators and authors can use the public beta of
Amazon's new Kindle Textbook Creator tool to easily turn PDFs of their
textbooks and course materials into Kindle books," the company explained in
its announcement. "Once the book is ready, authors can upload it to KDP in
just a few simple steps to reach students worldwide."
Features include
flashcards, highlighting, and note-taking.
Those who publish through the KDP (Kindle Direct
Publishing) program can earn royalties of up to 70% and keep their rights
and maintain control of their content. "They can also choose to enroll their
books in KDP Select for additional royalty opportunities like Kindle
Unlimited and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, and access to marketing
tools like Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions," Amazon said.
More information about the KDP program is available on
the Amazon
website.
The idea behind FlashTabs is as simple as it is
effective. Let's say you are studying for an anatomy exam, or a driver's
test, or a learning a new language. How do you integrate the information and
the studying process throughout the day? FlashTab has an answer. The Chrome
browser extension lets you create digital flashcards that will appear every
time you open a new tab. This way, learning is integrated into daily
activities at work and/or at home. Adding the extension takes only a few
clicks of your mouse. From there, create a deck of flashcards and activate.
Then learn your targeted information as you browse the Internet
Jensen Comment
Early on in education technology I adopted and made visits to nearly 200 college
college campuses demonstrating the use of course management systems (in those
days ToolBooks) and screen capture videos (in those days Camtasia) for flipped
classrooms. If I were not retired these days I would adopt chatbots for my
courses and my traveling dog and pony shows.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Presentations
Veronica Paz (2017)
Innovative New Apps and Uses for the Accounting Classroom. Journal of Emerging
Technologies in Accounting: Spring 2017, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 63-75.
Innovative New
Apps and Uses for the Accounting Classroom
Veronica Paz
Indiana University of
Pennsylvania
Editor's note:
Accepted by Hui Du.
ABSTRACT:
New instructional technologies provide educators
with opportunities for student engagement and collaboration. As technology
evolves, educators will spend more time identifying and testing new platforms.
This instructional resource paper reviews several recent innovative technologies
by providing brief descriptions, pricing, and current and potential uses. More
specifically, this paper examines Doceri
and DisplayNote in detail. My results from
analyzing exam scores and course grades identified that the use of Doceri
improves overall course performance in an introductory managerial accounting
class. Poll Everywhere is an audience response system using mobile phones,
Twitter, and the web in place of clickers. Student surveys suggest that the use
of the Poll Everywhere app encourages questions and class discussions. Students
perceived they participated more, and the class provided more illustrative
examples with the utilization of the Poll Everywhere app. Top Hat is a
cloud-based classroom and student response system used to increase student
engagement during lectures using cell phones, tablets, or other devices.
Finally, nClass and Asana are new tools to consider for classroom adoption and
future research.
Learning by and from mistakes is a good way to learn. This
was noted in the metacognitive self-learning pedagogy of the BAM Project ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Salman Khan is not afraid to make mistakes in his
popular teaching videos. In fact, he considers them a feature.
"I’ll giggle every now and then because I make a
mistake, which I think students say, "OK, it’s OK to make mistakes and it’s
OK to giggle while doing mathematics," he says. "And it seems like a small
thing. But when was the last time you giggled, you know, while doing a math
problem?"
He’s the founder of Khan Academy, which has grown
from something like a hobby, when he recorded videos in his walk-in closet,
to a thriving nonprofit organization with more than twenty million
registered students. Those videos are now one small part of a mission to
remake education.
The University of North Carolina system has built a
Yelp-like review site for teaching tools, where it is asking professors to
review and comment on how useful various digital services were in their
classrooms.
Though the process will not be quite as simple as
awarding five stars, Matthew Z. Rascoff, the system vice president for
technology-based learning and innovation who is leading the project, said
professors would use a research-based rubric to describe which tools had
helped increase student learning and which aren’t worth the time or money.
Technology vendors will also be able to use the site to view feedback on
products.
The online platform, known as the
UNC Learning Technology Commons,
opened to vendor applications last week and will end
its first round of applications in mid-March. After a rolling review of the
first cycle of applications within the next few weeks, faculty members on
the university’s 17 campuses will have access to the commons. There they
will be able to virtually discuss, review, and share ideas on which
instructional technologies work and how educators in diverse disciplines can
use tools to engage students in the classroom.
Librarianship is a funny profession–the day is
often a mixture of hokey jokes from people who haven’t been in a library in
years, and strategizing ways to implement robotics and computer coding into
programs for everybody from preschoolers to seniors. When people see what
libraries actually get up to these days, they’re almost always surprised. So
many people in America depend on their libraries to help them forward when
it comes to technology, and lots of libraries have answered that call with
aplomb, learning as they go.
At
six o’clock on a Wednesday evening last spring, dozens of students at
Columbia Business School jostled into William C. Warren Hall to learn how
the study of literature might prepare them for executive success. They were
there to attend “Leadership Through Fiction,” a three-hour weekly course led
by adjunct associate professor Bruce Craven, a novelist and Hollywood
screenwriter turned business school administrator.
Craven was all smiles as he stood in the middle of an ultramodern
amphitheater, radiating can-do energy and West Coast cool. This evening, the
class was discussing Little Big Man,
Thomas Berger’s 1964 parody of the western genre. Narrated by 111-year-old
Jack Crabb, who claims to be the sole white survivor of the Battle of Little
Bighorn, the novel moves briskly through a series of gruesome confrontations
between the Cheyenne tribes and white settlers in the nineteenth century.
But Craven did not begin the class discussion by pointing to the history of
colonial conquest or its attendant politics of racial genocide, as one might
expect in a literature class. What he focused on, rather, was the failure to
communicate.
“You can see how
ineffective the communication is between the Cheyenne and the settlers,”
Craven said. “In their world at the time, violence was the immediate
reaction. Yet we can still fall into these kinds of traps. What kinds of
insights can we take away from this?”
“These types of
situations really make you tough,” one student volunteered. “They thicken
your skin. It might be painful, but it can be really beneficial.”
“Good!” Craven
said. “Anyone else?”
“I think it’s
good when you’re
talking with people from different cultures to bring things back to the
human level,” said another student. “Talk about things that aren’t
inherently contentious—the weather, your family, children. That’s
a good way to bridge the gap.”
“But sometimes
conflicts just can’t
be resolved,” said Brian, a former Navy officer who quickly emerged as one
of the class’s
more outspoken students. “Through a leader’s—or
a hero’s—journey,
it’s
important to realize what’s
worth fighting for, and when you shouldn’t
compromise your values.”
Craven nodded.
“It often comes down to finding a balance between protecting your
identity—staying true to your identity and your values—and finding common
ground.” Then he launched into a story about running an executive coaching
program in China. “One of the things I had to practice was listening and not
always jumping in as a big loud American trying to talk my way through
differences,” he recalled. He reframed this insight with his signature
nonchalance. “For the Cheyenne, it’s
like, ‘Our laws are better . . . Our women are hotter . . . Our culture
rocks.’
It’s
like Coachella, Lollapalooza, Woodstock—but with knives.”
A four-minute
promotional video posted online alongside Craven’s syllabus outlines the
rationale for repurposing literature as management shibboleth—a teaching
philosophy that embraces everything from ordinary self-improvement to
solipsistic delusion. The camera leads the viewer to the King’s Highway
Diner, just inside Palm Springs, California. Craven sits at the counter,
flanked by a pile of books. As he rifles through the stack, he puts on his
reading glasses and peers over them intently when he wants to make a point.
These novels, he explains, are “narratives about characters in many
different professions” who must find a “balance between their professional
obligations, their personal expectations, and goals.” Like real people,
fictional characters stumble, and it is “through their stumbling,” Craven
promises, “that we will learn how to prepare ourselves for the future.”
The Stumbling
Muse
Through my own
travels in the literary frontiers of New York, I had heard of classes like
Craven’s. Some years earlier, I had received an email from a friend, a
former investment banker, tipping me off to a class he was taking at
Stanford’s Graduate School of Business called, improbably enough, “The Moral
Leader.” “It’s probably a lot like what you do now,” he assured me. “We read
novels and plays and poems to try to figure out how they can make us better
people.” When I tried to explain that that wasn’t at all what I did—I was a
literary critic, not a therapist or a spiritual guru—he seemed distressed.
“You should give it a try,” he replied encouragingly, and added, almost as
an afterthought: “Plus, you could make a lot more money teaching in a
business school than at a college.”
As the site notes, Wikispaces Classroom is "a
social writing platform" where teachers and students can use the latest
technology to seamlessly communicate and collaborate. This virtual workspace
allows teachers to create a safe, private network where students may work on
writing projects, either independently or in teams. Creating a classroom is
relatively easy, but does require a free account. Once an account is
created, users can build a space of their own by creating new pages,
uploading files, starting discussions, and adding projects and tags. For
educators looking for ways to make homework more interactive and dynamic,
Wikispaces Classroom is a big step forward.
Since it first appeared in 2007, LeechBlock has
provided Internet users with a simple tool intended to increase productivity
by blocking "those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your
working day." With many customizable options, this Firefox browser extension
allows users to select specific sites to block while leaving access to those
that may be needed for school or work. It also tracks the total amount of
time spent browsing websites within a specific block of time, a helpful
feature for staying on top of your good and bad browsing habits. Interested
users will want to explore this website before installing, which features
Examples of various uses of the different settings, as well as a
comprehensive FAQ section, and four-step Installation guide
Use Plickers for quick checks for understanding to know whether your students
are understanding big concepts and mastering key skills ---
https://www.plickers.com/
Thank you Sharon Garvin for the heads up.
Amazon launched a new service that helps educators and
authors publish their own digital "textbooks" and other educational content
that students can then access on Fire tablets, iPad, iPhone, Android
smartphones and tablets, Mac, and PC.
"Educators and authors can use the public beta of
Amazon's new Kindle Textbook Creator tool to easily turn PDFs of their
textbooks and course materials into Kindle books," the company explained in
its announcement. "Once the book is ready, authors can upload it to KDP in
just a few simple steps to reach students worldwide."
Features include
flashcards, highlighting, and note-taking.
Those who publish through the KDP (Kindle Direct
Publishing) program can earn royalties of up to 70% and keep their rights
and maintain control of their content. "They can also choose to enroll their
books in KDP Select for additional royalty opportunities like Kindle
Unlimited and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, and access to marketing
tools like Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions," Amazon said.
More information about the KDP program is available on
the Amazon
website.
The idea behind FlashTabs is as simple as it is
effective. Let's say you are studying for an anatomy exam, or a driver's
test, or a learning a new language. How do you integrate the information and
the studying process throughout the day? FlashTab has an answer. The Chrome
browser extension lets you create digital flashcards that will appear every
time you open a new tab. This way, learning is integrated into daily
activities at work and/or at home. Adding the extension takes only a few
clicks of your mouse. From there, create a deck of flashcards and activate.
Then learn your targeted information as you browse the Internet
October 12, 2015 message from accounting professor Jim McKinney (University
of Maryland)
I use the PDF Annotator with my tablet PC in class all the time. I create
pdf worksheets and walk through problems in class and can save the results
and post on-line.
At the end of every academic year, my department
gathers to celebrate our graduating English majors and everyone is invited
to share a favorite poem or passage. One of my colleagues always reads aloud
Galway Kinnell’s poem "Oatmeal," in which the poet describes how the great
authors of the world enrich his breakfast with their writing.
"Yesterday morning," she recites, "I ate my oatmeal
porridge, as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
"due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness,
hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal should not
be eaten alone.
"He said that in his opinion, however, it is
perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had
enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton."
I’ve been having a similar experience lately,
although, instead of the great poets, my companions have been leading
thinkers and visionaries on teaching in higher education. Nevertheless, they
have been very kind to accompany me as I run my daily errands, do chores
around the house, exercise, and even wait in security lines at the airport.
As I was making pancakes for my twins the other day
(I’m not an oatmeal fan),
Jose Antonio Bowen, president of Goucher College
and author of Teaching Naked,
spoke to me about why he loves "noisy and messy
classrooms." He also reminded me that "the thing that teachers do best in
the classroom is to be human beings, and to get to know their students as
human beings, and to make that connection between what matters to your
students and what matters to you." -
Alexa Voice Service (AVS) ... may be Amazon’s best
hardware product since its Kindle e-reader
"Amazon's Awesome Alexa Voice Tech Reaches Out To Other Devices: The
Alexa Voice Service goes into developer preview." by Adriana Lee,
ReadWriteWeb, July 31, 2015 ---
http://readwrite.com/2015/07/31/amazon-alexa-voice-service-developer-preview-echo
Alexa, the chatty personality that
makes the Amazon Echo smart speaker so fun and handy, wants to join more
devices. The company announced Friday the launch of its free Alexa
Voice Service (AVS) developer preview.
AVS was born out of the company’s
work on the Echo, which may be Amazon’s best hardware product since its
Kindle e-reader. The device is a voice-controlled cylindrical appliance that
can tell you the weather, give you traffic conditions on your commute, play
music, control connected lights and other appliances, and—of course—buy
things from Amazon.
Voice features may seem rather
dime-a-dozen these days, but Echo’s accuracy and grasp of natural language
could be among the best to date. Although it’s not perfect either, it does
largely succeed in living up to the promise of understanding organic speech.
Users can talk to it easily, without learning a rigid lexicon of verbal
commands.
Now hardware makers, both
professional and hobbyists, can see what those language powers can bring to
their projects.
Jensen Comment
Photocopy machines are often placed in libraries because it's assumed that
extensive photocopying of books is too expensive for copyright violations.
However, newer technologies in video make page copying quite cheap.
When I
first required my students in a large lecture course to use Twitter, many of
the roughly 120 enrolled did not approve. And they voiced that opinion quite
clearly on my evaluations. Their comments could be divided into two
categories: helpful and unhelpful.
Here
are a few of the helpful ones:
“Make Twitter an extra-credit option instead of a requirement.”
“Use another form of communication than Twitter. Twitter is hard to
follow when responding to other’s tweets.”
“The use of Twitter seemed to be a less-effective tool as a mandatory
use for the main classroom discussion. Some students seemed turned off
by the use of it for the course.”
“While some may not find Twitter a necessity, I believe it did prove
more beneficial than detrimental. There were some good discussions that
evolved due to Twitter. It provides for great communication with the
proffesor [sic] as well.”
These
comments are helpful because they express a concern (e.g., Twitter feeds are
tough to follow) and then offer a solution (e.g., perhaps make Twitter
optional). Unfortunately, most of my students’ comments regarding Twitter
fell into the unhelpful category. (Note: Except for inserting single quote
marks for clarity, none of the spelling, grammar, or wording below has been
modified.) Among the unhelpful remarks:
“I
hated Twitter.”
“Twitter should not be mandatory. Twitter shouldn’t be a part of your
grade.”
“[Dr. Marshall’s] ridiculous obsession with Twitter and bringing it into
the classroom is unacceptable — it does not enhance learning, it is just
her pushing her obsession on the rest of us.”
“When I ask questions, they never really get answered, for instance, if
I question on Twitter, [Dr. Marshall] will respond ‘you tell me…’ never
a real response.”
“Twitter forces students to “dumbdown” their language. It goes against
everything I have ever learned. In other words, it is detrimental to our
intelligence!”
“Using Twitter for participation was a terrible idea and should not be
done again. It would be much better if the exams were the only grades.”
Often my first stop when I'm looking for a new
idea for the classroom is
Faculty Focus. It
regularly publishes short articles with practical ideas for the college
instructor. It’s a great resource -- well-designed, organized by topic,
and searchable. It also boasts Maryellen Weimer and her
Teaching Professor blog,
an outgrowth of Weimer's much-loved newsletter of the same name.
Weimer's articles are little jewels of concision, distilling practical
advice from recent pedagogical research findings.
Another useful site is that of
the IDEA Center,
a nonprofit that you may know from its student feedback services. Over
the years, IDEA has amassed a trove of pedagogy research, from short
"Notes on Instruction" to longer, peer-reviewed "IDEA papers."
Take a look; there's plenty there.
Speaking of peer-reviewed papers, it's now
easier than ever to plug in to current pedagogy research. Alongside
traditional, research-heavy articles, many pedagogy journals also
feature shorter, more practical papers that offer easily usable ideas.
Here's a good list of top pedagogy journals.
I often find new classroom ideas by visiting
the web pages of campus teaching and learning centers. Many of those
websites have evolved into excellent collections of teaching tips, as
their sponsoring universities have become more attuned to faculty
development. Some of my favorites are the ones at
UT Austin,
Berkeley, and
BYU.
Closer to home, The Chronicle hosts a
wide variety of good resources for instructors looking for ideas. James
M. Lang has been writing a monthly column on teaching for years now, and
if you're reading this, I probably don't need to tell you how useful his
columns are. Although there doesn't seem to be a dedicated archive page
for Lang's columns, you can find links to his most recent columns by
clicking here and scrolling down to "On Course".
In addition, The Chronicle’s
ProfHacker blog,
while it features posts about far more than just teaching, has a roster
of experienced and personable academics
frequently write about classroom strategies.
The blog is a particularly good place to go to learn more about using
new technologies in the classroom.
Finally, a promising new resource has just been
launched right here at Vitae:
a straightforward and easy-to-use syllabi database.
It’s an obviously useful idea. Teachers have probably shared syllabi for
as long as there has been syllabi; this just facilitates that sharing
across great distances. I’m excited at the prospect of this database
growing and providing a library of well-made syllabi, ready to consult
the next time I’m putting together a new course. It will only be as good
as its contributions, however. The folks at Vitae have made it
very, very easy to upload a syllabus; I just put one up in about 60
seconds. Why not head over there now and share one of yours?
What web resources do you make use of for your
teaching? I’m always eager to learn of more—add your favorite sites to
the comments below.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/770-the-best-teaching-resources-on-the-web?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en#sthash.04UAyWZs.dpuf
Often my first stop when I'm looking for a new idea
for the classroom is
Faculty Focus. It
regularly publishes short articles with practical ideas for the college
instructor. It’s a great resource -- well-designed, organized by topic, and
searchable. It also boasts Maryellen Weimer and her
Teaching Professor blog,
an outgrowth of Weimer's much-loved newsletter of the
same name. Weimer's articles are little jewels of concision, distilling
practical advice from recent pedagogical research findings.
Another useful site is that of
the IDEA Center, a
nonprofit that you may know from its student feedback services. Over the
years, IDEA has amassed a trove of pedagogy research, from short "Notes on
Instruction" to longer, peer-reviewed "IDEA papers."
Take a look; there's plenty there.
Speaking of peer-reviewed papers, it's now easier than
ever to plug in to current pedagogy research. Alongside traditional,
research-heavy articles, many pedagogy journals also feature shorter, more
practical papers that offer easily usable ideas.
Here's a good list of top pedagogy journals.
I often find new classroom ideas by visiting the web
pages of campus teaching and learning centers. Many of those websites have
evolved into excellent collections of teaching tips, as their sponsoring
universities have become more attuned to faculty development. Some of my
favorites are the ones at
UT Austin,
Berkeley, and
BYU.
Closer to home, The Chronicle hosts a wide
variety of good resources for instructors looking for ideas. James M. Lang
has been writing a monthly column on teaching for years now, and if you're
reading this, I probably don't need to tell you how useful his columns are.
Although there doesn't seem to be a dedicated archive page for Lang's
columns, you can find links to his most recent columns by
clicking here and scrolling down to "On Course".
In addition, The Chronicle’s
ProfHacker blog,
while it features posts about far more than just teaching, has a roster of
experienced and personable academics
frequently write about classroom strategies.
The blog is a particularly good place to go to learn
more about using new technologies in the classroom.
Finally, a promising new resource has just been
launched right here at Vitae:
a straightforward and easy-to-use syllabi database.
It’s an obviously useful idea. Teachers have probably
shared syllabi for as long as there has been syllabi; this just facilitates
that sharing across great distances. I’m excited at the prospect of this
database growing and providing a library of well-made syllabi, ready to
consult the next time I’m putting together a new course. It will only be as
good as its contributions, however. The folks at Vitae have made it
very, very easy to upload a syllabus; I just put one up in about 60 seconds.
Why not head over there now and share one of yours?
What web resources do you make use of for your
teaching? I’m always eager to learn of more—add your favorite sites to the
comments below.
Welcome to the official web site of the jigsaw
classroom, a cooperative learning technique that reduces racial conflict
among school children, promotes better learning, improves student
motivation, and increases enjoyment of the learning experience. The jigsaw
technique was first developed in the early 1970s by Elliot Aronson and his
students at the University of Texas and the University of California. Since
then, hundreds of schools have used the jigsaw classroom with great success.
The jigsaw approach is considered to be a particularly valuable tool in
averting tragic events such as the Columbine massacre.
Sometimes, I come across ideas for posts quite by
accident.
Early this afternoon (November 6), for instance, I
was looking at the wiki that we use for scheduling our posts, trying to
figure out my posting schedule for the next few weeks. I was also wondering
whether I’d be able to post something for the week of November 10. We try to
have our posts in by midnight on Thursday of the week before the post runs,
and I was, quite frankly, drawing a blank on post ideas.
I’d pretty much concluded I’d have to put posting
anything off for a week, and I turned to other concerns. I’ve been
frustrated with my writing (or lack thereof) lately, and I’ve been thinking
I need to restart a daily writing practice — something along the lines of
using 750words.com,
but without relying on that service
Readers may recall that I recently wrote about
using Evernote in the classroom.
In that post, I noted that I use Evernote for storing
all kinds of information, not just for keeping track of my class notes.
Since everything in my Evernote account is searchable, it seemed a good
place to start keeping that daily writing.
The catch is that I’ve started doing most of my
writing in Markdown, for a number of reasons. (I won’t go into them here,
but if you’d like some good reasons and a quick introduction to
Markdown, check out
Lincoln’s post
from a few years back.)
So far as I’m aware, Evernote doesn’t handle Markdown natively. Still, I was
sure there had to be a way to get them working together, and that more than
likely some clever person had already figured something out. So off to
Google I went, and I found this:
Evernote for Sublime Text.
I’ve been using
Sublime Text
for most of my writing for some months now. A Sublime
Text package that integrates with my Evernote account is ideal. I can do my
writing in the application and markup language I’ve become most accustomed
to using, and can send daily work to my Evernote account with just a few
keystrokes, and without having to leave Sublime Text. The note shows up in
Evernote formatted in rich text, but I can easily open it (or any other note
in my account) again in Sublime Text to continue editing in Markdown. This
may turn out to be just the tool I was looking for.
One web page for every book ever
published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.
To build Open Library, we need
hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of
people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building
the site.
To date, we have gathered over 20
million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single
contributions, with more on the way.
Open Library is an open project: the
software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we
welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write
a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic
programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!
Open Library is a project of the non-profit
Internet
Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the
California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.
After over thirty
years of service, the U.S. Department of Education's ERIC Clearinghouses,
and the AskERIC service, permanently closed at the end of December 2003.
ERIC is a national information system funded by the U.S. Department of
Education's Institute of Education Sciences to provide access to education
literature and resources. The Clearinghouses, stationed at various
educational institutions, provided documents and reference services on
educational topics ranging from Elementary and Early Childhood Education
to Urban and Minority Education to Adult, Career, and Vocational
Education.
After over thirty
years of service, the U.S. Department of Education's ERIC Clearinghouses,
and the AskERIC service, permanently closed at the end of December 2003.
ERIC is a national information system funded by the U.S. Department of
Education's Institute of Education Sciences to provide access to education
literature and resources. The Clearinghouses, stationed at various
educational institutions, provided documents and reference services on
educational topics ranging from Elementary and Early Childhood Education
to Urban and Minority Education to Adult, Career, and Vocational
Education.
Many of the students and scholars I know who have
picked up technical skills in the world of the command line (see Lincoln’s
introduction and a
series of posts here at Profhacker) or who have
attempted their hand at programming come to what they know through
tinkering. Some new way they want to analyze their sources, improve the
discovery of interesting patterns, organize their stuff, or automate their
tasks supplies them the justification they need to carve out some time to
learn by playing. Tinkering leads to googling, googling leads into the world
of obscure documentation, endless forum posts, and tutorials usually
targeting a much different audience with differing needs. This adds
significantly to the time it takes to figure things out.
One of the earliest and most consistent exceptions
to this in the case of my own learning is found in the tutorials by
William Turkel,
especially through his blog entries and important work
on the
Programming Historian project. They not only
introduce some really powerful utilities and coding snippets, but apply them
immediately to the kinds of tasks we might find useful as historians and
indeed the broader humanities.
2013 offered a particularly rich harvest of
tutorial material by Turkel on his blog, especially contributing to what he
calls a "workflow for digital research." Most of these help you obtain,
clean, and analyze textual sources. As with most things technological, there
are many different ways to perform most of the tasks listed below, but I
found that these postings give great practical examples of some of the core
techniques of using the command line for manipulating texts. I’d like to
just highlight just some of them and suggest why you might want to give them
a try.
Almost all of Turkel’s
tutorials this year work from the command line. If you use a Mac with OS X,
you already have access to a lot of command line utilities and many others
you can find and install using
Homebrew
or the respective websites for the tool you want. This is not always the
case, however, and for the "permuted term index" utility mentioned in one of
the text analysis posting mentioned below I wasn’t able to find a way to get
it for OS X (tips welcome). A solution to this problem and also for Windows
users is to set up a virtual machine that runs a Linux distribution like
Debian. Turkel’s posting goes through the whole process step by step and
will get you up and running. Also see Lincoln’s
posting here at Profhacker.
A virtual machine is also
very handy to keep self-contained sandboxes when you want to tinker. The
free VirtualBox software used here is very easy to use and if you
participate in the
ArchiveTeam Warrior program, you probably already
know how it works. For those working with security sensitive materials, you
can also easily keep a virtual machine and its files encrypted.
This is a great intro to
some of the most useful command line utilities for very basic text analysis.
Using an example from Project Gutenberg, this tutorial uses the command "wget"
to download the file, shows you how to use "head" and "tail" to quickly see
the beginning and end of large files, the use of the "sed" command to "crop"
a header or footer, the "wc" command to get basic text statistics, "grep" to
search the text for things you are interested in, the "tr" command to clean
a text and prepare it for analysis by removing punctuation, capital letters,
etc. and then the sort and uniq commands (covered in earlier Profhacker
posts
here and
here) to get word frequencies.
This posting on pattern
matching taught me some great trips on how to use the "grep" command when
you have a handwritten document with difficult to read words that you can
only make out a few letters from. It also shows you how to color matched
patterns that you have searched for with "egrep" and how to use "fgrep" to
isolate words in a text that are not found in the dictionary. This is handy
when you are looking for unusual terms, proper nouns, or potential mistakes
in Opical Character Recognition. The posting also shows you how to use the "ptx"
(permuted term index) command, which I had never heard of, to quickly create
a concordance from a text.
This posting is more
advanced and requires some scripting. Turkel often uses the Python
programming language in his earlier postings but in all of these postings he
uses "BASH scripts" which are really just little sequences of regular
commands you can issue on the command line (in the
Bash shell) with some added flow control and logic
to handle repetition etc.
In this posting Turkel
uses "wget" to download a batch of files, the "split" command to split a
large file into smaller ones and a simple web indexing package called
"swish-e" to build an index from your source and make searching it easier.
Building on the last
posting, we now work with the java-based Stanford Language Processing
Software, and Turkel shows us how to find a list of potential people,
places, and organizations in our text source.
This posting shows how
you can use the free Tessecract OCR software on the command line using an
example of some typed correspondence from the early 20th century. Another
great section in this posting is how to do "fuzzy match" search of a text
using tre-agrep (I had trouble getting this to work on OS X, so try it in
the VirtualBox Linux install instead).
We have talked a bit
about working with PDFs on the command line here before. See, for example,
Lincoln’s post on
fixing PDFs using pdftk. This post by Turkel
offers an introduction to a broader range of command line utilities for PDF,
including "xpdf", "pdftk", "pdfimages" and "pdftotext" for the extraction of
text and images from PDFs and the creation of new PDFs with imagemagick’s
"convert" tool.
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
Social Networking for Education: The Beautiful and the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses
of Twitter)
Updates will be at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
More than 100
colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu Many
universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting”
There are now
nearly 7,000 accounting education videos on YouTube, most of which are in very
basic accounting.
But there are nearly 150 videos in advanced accounting. There are nearly
70 videos on XBRL
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos
that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for
your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips
for video projects as well as free online communication tools.
My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of
work that they are now sharing with us
The aim of the Innovation 20/20 Series is to
showcase teaching innovations in the College of Education, and share ideas
about how the “Big I” and “little i” innovations are taking place at the
largest College of Education in the nation. Recognizing how important a
commodity time is in our lives, each session consists of a focused
presentation of only 20 minutes sharing a specific innovation, followed by
20 minutes of discussion and interactive engagement with the topic. If your
schedule does not allow to be present during the talks, please visit the
links below to view the video archive of the presentations.
November 1, 2012 Respondus message from Richard Campbell
Is the student taking your class the same one who is taking your exams??
One of the first Business School Deans to work at a standing desk was Harvey
Wagner when he became Dean of the business school at the University of North
Carolina back in the 1960s. Prior to that Harvey was a Stanford University
professor and author of one of the first books in Operations Research in the
early days of OR. Harvey was one of my OR professors. He was a good teacher with
a great technical brain, but I cannot imagine that he was a very good dean. He
eventually wrote five books and over 60 technical articles in OR and management
science.
While Harvey stood at his own desk as a Dean at UNC his office visitors also
had to stand. It was rumored that Harvey liked this because meetings were
shorter when people were not comfortably seated.
During my last week of being
mostly disconnected at a conference in France, I
ran into one big challenge: my knowledge of French is limited, and usually
involves dictionary-heavy translation of text, not everyday conversation or
quickly reading for comprehension and navigation. I relied heavily on
phrases picked up from travel guides before my trip. Most street signs were
immediately comprehensible: other documents, like menus, descriptions on
products at the pharmacy, or signs on art, took much more work.
Throughout the trip, I found myself wishing for
better technical solutions to the problem of translation. I started relying
on a few apps to make the daily information processing easier.
Word Lens. The visual
translation app Word Lens, available on
Android and
iOS, is beautiful. It works by taking a
picture and attempting to translate the words directly at they appear,
which can lead to some very strange interpretations but often is enough
to get the gist. It works as well on signs as conference paper titles in
printed programs–of course, it may have trouble with discipline-specific
terms. It can even translate powerpoint signs if they’re close and clear
enough and the font isn’t too small.
Google Translate. There are
several rival apps for translation, but Google’s (web,
iOS,
Android) works well for already-digital texts
or quickly typed in work and ultimately is the most powerful solution
I’ve seen. It requires an active Internet connection, so it isn’t so
great on the go, and it can be tedious to type in long phrases on a
smartphone for translation. This works best when the specifics really
matter.
A Pocket Phrasebook. Those of
you traveling without tech might rely on some old-fashioned solutions: a
phrasebook and a dictionary, whether downloaded or paper, may not be as
fast as Google or a translation app, but it’s often organized with
attention to terms a traveler needs to reference quickly.
Languages has several options for download
(each for a fee) in-app.
Medical students can
earn academic credit at the University of
California at San Francisco for
editing content on Wikipedia. Fourth-year medical
students in a new class will be editing articles, adding images, reviewing
edits and adding citations to support unreferenced text. They will focus on
editing 80 frequently used articles that have low levels of quality.
Wikipedia is a widely used reference for health topics, but medical entries
can lack sources and have gaps in content.
“We’re recognizing the impact Wikipedia can have to educate patients and
health care providers across the globe, and want users to receive the most
accurate publicly available, sound medical information,” said Amin Azzam,
association clinical professor and instructor for the new class, in a news
release. The class will also teach students how to communicate with
consumers about health topics.
The class is a collaboration between the UCSF School
of Medicine and the Wiki Project Med Foundation.
Jensen Comment
I don't see why schools of accounting cannot do something like this for student
assignments. However, since accounting is so poorly posted, relative to
economics, finance, and medicine, to Wikipedia accounting students would
probably have to start new modules.
Most eBooks are still pretty boring as objects:
text, pictures, maybe a video or interactive visualization in a more
experimental work. But that landscape may be changing, thanks in part to the
number of cool free tools for
building interactive books. One of these
platforms,
inklewriter, has some great potential for use with
students in the classroom or for creating interactive stories or texts.
Last week, Inkle Studios released “Future Voices,”
a curated collection of stories produced with its interactive story
development tool. This slick iPad app features the tech behind
Frankenstein, an interactive adaptation of Mary
Shelley’s novel by Dave Morris. Play through any of these stories for a
while and you’ll see everything from straightforward choices of action to
complex moral dilemmas and experiments. You can also check out many
experiments on the web, including
Emily
Short’s Holography–she’s also written
some thoughts on inklewriter as a platform.
While
Inform 7 (as discussed last week) uses a parser
interface based on interpreting a broad range of user actions (get lamp,
open door, look at book, etc.), Inklewriter uses an interaction model
similar to ’80s
Choose Your Own Adventuregamebooks, which
recently came back into print and made the transition to eBooks. However, it
goes beyond any of the simple
page-shuffling models of those past books in part
because it can keep track of decisions and variables from the user’s
actions.
Inklewriter has a great
tutorial “story”
to introduce writers to the platform. The interface, shown below, is mostly
free of distractions and built around creating story nodes and choices:
March 11th saw the pre-release of my digital
project,
Songs of the
Victorians, an archive of parlor and art song
settings of Victorian poems, and also a scholarly tool to facilitate
interdisciplinary music and poetry scholarship. I had been building it for
the last two years with the help of fellowships from
NINES and the
Scholars’ Lab,
and it was a great experience to finally make the site
public.
It was also a surprisingly challenging experience,
as I had to figure out how to make the site display properly on a wide
variety of browsers, operating systems, and iOS devices (iPad, iPod, etc.).
Before I jump in with details about the trials and
tribulations of testing website compatibility, I’ll first explain a little
more about my site and the programming and design challenges it presents. It
is a part of the final chapter of my dissertation on Victorian poetry and
music, and it will contain four songs: Michael William Balfe’s and Sir
Arthur Somervell’s settings of “Come into the Garden, Maud” (both based on
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s monodrama, Maud), Sir Arthur Sullivan’s version of
Adelaide Procter’s “A Lost Chord,” and Caroline Norton’s “Juanita,” although
for the limited release, it only includes “Juanita.” The site contains two
components for each work: an archive of high-resolution images of the first
edition printing with an audio file, and an article-length analysis of the
song’s interpretation of the poem, with playable excerpts of relevant
musical phrases to support the argument. When the song is played on either
component, each measure of the score is highlighted in time with the music
so that everyone, regardless of their ability to read music, can follow the
score and the thread of the argument.
To incorporate audio, I needed to use a
comparatively new feature of html, namely, the <audio> tag, which lets you
embed an audio file and player in a website. I was disappointed to discover
that no two browsers handled it in precisely the same way: Internet Explorer
won’t recognize it at all in versions 8 and earlier (and inexplicably won’t
render it in version 10), ios devices will only play the audio file if it is
triggered by a user event, and Firefox will only play ogg vorbis, not mp3
files.
Such compatibility difficulties are often
colloquially (and aptly) referred to as “browser hell.” I learned about some
of these problems from researching the <audio> tag as I was developing Songs
of the Victorians, but I learned most from an incredibly useful site for
testing website compatability:
BrowserStack.
Jensen Comment
This might be a great application (using hypothetical taxpayers) for students
learning spreadsheets as well as basics of income tax reporting.
"MILLIONS OF LESSONS LEARNED ON ELECTRONIC NAPKINS," by Rick Lillie, AAA
Commons, January 2, 2013 ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/6040b395eb
Most AAA Commons postings are only available to AAA members. However, this may
be one of the freebies
In addition to short summaries of leading presenters, you may want to just
note what speakers were given the great honor of speaking at plenary sessions.
You can then do Google and other searches on these speakers.
Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written several posts
over the years about cloud computing and collaboration. Most of our focus
has been on GoogleDocs and collaborative authorship (see my “GoogleDocs
and Collaboration in the Classroom,” for example).
Not to be outdone by the cloud services offered by
Google and others, Microsoft has been working on offerings like Office Live
(which
I wrote about in 2010)
and Office 365 (which
the New York Times covered in 2011).
These services are designed to let users access and edit cloud-based
documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any device with a connection
to the Internet and to collaborate on these files simultaneously with other
users. And as Microsoft attempts to
stay competitive with its mobile devices, introduces
a new operating system (or two), and starts
selling a new
tablet device,
cloud-based tools are going to be more and more important.
Last week, Microsoft announced
Office 365 University, a cloud-based service to be
made available to students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities.
The company says that the service is scheduled to become “[a]vailable in the
first quarter of 2013,” and will be free for higher ed users who have
purchased
Office University 2010 or
Office University for Mac 2011. (However, later in
that same announcement a price of $1.67 per month is specified, which is
still pretty good, but not as good as free).
Q:
I have been tasked with reviewing and updating our firm’s website content,
and I want to go about it as efficiently as possible. Can you help me get
started?
A:
I find that I can review content better on a printed page with pencil in
hand. Adobe Acrobat Standard X ($139) provides the ability to produce a
single document containing your entire website. To use this feature, from
the Acrobat X menu, select Create, Create PDF from
Web Page, and enter the website’s URL (URL is an acronym for
uniform resource locator, which is the site’s home page web address) in the
URL box. Click the Capture Multiple Levels
button, select the Get entire site radio button, and then
click Create
Many Mac users have hidden files located on their
computers that they might not know about. ShowOrHide is a utility designed
to locate invisible files and folders so that users will have more knowledge
about such items. This program is compatible with computers running Mac OS X
10.5 or later.
For all those who have wrestled with creating
charts and diagrams in word processors, the Google Chrome application
Lucidchart may be a long-awaited answer. Users can start using the intuitive
drag-and-drop interface right away, although a free signup is required to
save diagrams. By sharing a link with coworkers, project collaborators can
work on the same diagram at the same time. This application is compatible
with all computers running Google Chrome.
“R is really important to the point that it’s hard
to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which
uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and
complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.”
Ashley Vance, "Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power," The New York Times,
January 6, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?_r=0
Well, it would seem we
have identified the week in which being a big data wonk became
cool. After all, there’s Nate Silver—the Electoral College
Oracle—being feted on The Daily Show and across the Web
for collecting polling data and then massaging it with a clever
algorithm. Now everyone wants to hang out with the skinny, kinda
nervous dude who knows his way around R. (R? Look it up. You’ll
need this for cocktail
parties from here on out.)
If you don’t have time to
attend the soon-to-be-planned Nate Silver’s Datapalooza, you can
still have a crack at becoming the big data star around the
office. That’s because the data fiends in Silicon Valley have
been hard at work creating software that lets mere mortals run
complex information analysis jobs. Some of the best examples of
this type of technology can be seen at the
Alteryx
Analytics Gallery,
where you can find ready-made apps for poring over data ranging
from census figures to how a merger between two companies may
play out.
Alteryx’s main business
revolves around selling software that helps people submit big
data sets and then choose from a menu of analytical operations
to perform on the information. The idea is to remove some of the
coding grunt work that has surrounded data analysis jobs for
decades. “This has been the world of statisticians and Ph.D.s
and not the people on the front lines trying to make good
business decisions,” says George Mathew, the president and chief
operating officer at Alteryx. “We wanted to change that.”
Customers using Alteryx’s
software will find some huge, preloaded data sets like
information from the 2010 Census and marketing services company
Experian’s consumer profiling data. Then you can literally drag
and drop analysis functions such as regression models from a
menu to apply them to the data and receive a pretty report at
the end. Companies can, of course, supply their own data, making
it possible for, say, an executive at a retailer to take data
from 900 million point of sale transactions, 2.5 million loyalty
cards, and 500,000 Likes on
Facebook
(FB)
and try to determine what
the value of Facebook Likes might be on a given store.
The Analytics Gallery is a
spot where people can find prepackaged data analytics apps and
have some fun poking around on the information. Ahead of the
presidential election, for example, there were models available
that let you see how particular zip codes might vote based on
polling numbers and things like census data. The
Presidential Election App
predicted Obama’s win with
Silver-like accuracy.
One of the newer apps has been
tuned for Facebook employees trying to cash in on the company’s
initial public offering. It helps you
find the ideal house
based on how many Facebook shares you’re willing to sell, how
close you want to live to the company headquarters, and the
usual bedrooms and bathrooms desired.
Alteryx’s Mathew hopes these
types of apps will prove that more people can become data
analysis whizzes if they’re given the right tools. He says there
are 200,000 so-called data scientists in the world, who
regularly command more than $200,000 per year in salary. These
are your Nate Silvers. Then, there are 2.5 million people in the
workforce that have enough statistics, business, and math
knowledge to do some serious data crunching with a bit of
technological help. “I think there’s a tremendous arbitrage
opportunity here,” Mathew says.
Hear that, Silver?
Jensen Comment
To my knowledge, Nate Silver is not a collector of raw data. He is a data
aggregator using databases collected by others. As such he's totally dependent
upon the depth and quality of data points in those databases. He's best known
for aggregating baseball and political poll databases ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver
Insider Trading Issues
Another issue is whether Nate's findings are self-serving in some way in the
sense that players fare better or worse as a result of Nate's predictions. This
seems to be less likely in baseball than in political polls. There are
various degrees of insider trading in life. To the extent that inside
players of a game can alter the databases upon with aggregators like Nate
depend, the more dysfunctional highly publicized predictions such as those of
Nate Silver become.
Herein lies Nate's problem.
Baseball databases are pretty independent, reliable, and very deep about
collecting almost everything about professional baseball games apart from
personal data of players such as most medical data and other very personal data
on players and managers. Players cannot fudge most baseball statistics in a
self-serving way.
But with political poll databases, it's a whole new ballgame.
Dear Bob, I did not know any
of this background, so
thank you for putting things
into clear perspective.
One technical point (that
does not answer your
criticisms totally) is that
the Bayes mechanism of using
likelihood p(signal|event)
to find p(event|signal) is
that built-in bias in the
signal is accounted for
logically in determining
just how strong it is.
I didn’t forward the message
to AECM because I did not
think the crowd is keen for
more Bayesian spruiking from
me, and because I did not
know too much about this
Silver man. Your points make
it clear that caution was
justified.
I did know that you would be
a good barometer though!
One thing I will say on
another point, accounting as
a discipline does not
properly understand Bayes
theorem, despite the amount
of Bayesian
argument/modelling. This is
remarkable given that
accounting is a signalling
discipline. Foster was right
when he started his Fin Stmt
Analysis text with Ch.1 on
Bayes and the value of info.
I am just finishing up a
couple of papers on this, so
will send soon.
Jensen Comment
f there is more cheating in online courses, the fault lies with the internal
controls of the online system rather than the difference between online versus
onsite systems per se. Cheating is largely the fault of the online and
onsite instructors and their universities. There are controls (not costless) to
reduce online cheating to levels below those of onsite courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
For example, observing a student taking an online test can be more one-on-one
observation with the proper Webcam procedures or with hiring the Village Vicar
to or a Sylvan Systems to proctor the examination.
Have you ever wanted to create a bundle of links to
share with friends, colleagues, and others with simpatico interests?
Bundlenut makes this possible with just a few easy steps. Visitors can use
the site to create a bundle of links and give the bundle a title. There's a
"bundle browser" as well, and it's easy to share them. Some of the sample
bundles on the site include "Food from Scratch," "West Coast Road Trip
Itinerary," and "Mrs. Comstock's 11th Grade Reading List." This version is
compatible with all operating systems.
Have you ever wanted to see a website in 3D? Well,
this is now possible with Tilt3D 1.0.1. Created by Victor Porof, the tool is
"layers each node based on the nesting in the tree, creating stacks of
elements, each having a corresponding depth and being textured according to
the webpage rendering." It's a pretty fun little tool and it is compatible
with all operating systems running Mozilla Firefox.
As I mentioned a
couple of weeks ago, there are too many new tech products and services for
one man to review in a single lifetime.
Here, then, for your
summertime skimming, is another batch of interesting-looking tech
developments. Again, I haven’t tried these and don’t endorse them — I just
think they’re cool ideas worth noting.
Onavo Extend
By compressing data, Onavo Extend can increase the power of your data plan
by up to 500 percent. Avoid overage charges, roaming fees, data throttling
and poor performance, without draining your battery. Also provides a
breakdown of your data usage. Free. (www.Onavo.com)
OptimumCS-Pro
This app finds the lens settings that minimize the blurring caused by
defocus and diffraction, so that you can get the sharpest images from your
D.S.L.R. that the laws of optics will allow. For iPhone, $7. (www.georgedouvos.com)
YouVisit
This app offers prospective students GPS-guided tours of college campuses
and academic programs. Offers news, weather, photos and contact info for
each college. Free for iPhone/Android. (www.youvisit.com)
SproutConverter You know all those distorted and blank sections on
your home video tapes that remain after you transfer them to your computer?
SproutConverter gets rid of them automatically. Import your videos to your
computer using whatever device you choose, then drag and drop. $30, for Mac.
(www.gearsprout.com.)
Addressgate
Ever wanted to contact a neighbor you don’t know? Sign up to this
specialized social network with your home address, then communicate with
neighbors privately, or view/post neighborhoodwide alerts, news and events.
Free. (www.addressgate.com)
Gogobot
This app lets friends and like-minded travelers, rather than anonymous
strangers, provide tips for coming trips. Online/iPhone/iPod Touch, free. (www.gogobot.com)
Novatel MiFi
4620L Mobile Hotspot No larger than a stack of cards, this
self-powered pocket 4G WiFi hot spot has an interactive OLED screen and
five-hour battery life. Connects up to 10 Wi-Fi devices. $50 with two-year
Verizon contract. (www.verizonwireless.com/verizon-jetpack-mifi-4620l.shtml)
FlightView
This app offers push alerts on flight status changes, visibility into
nationwide airport delays, directions to the airport and social integration
for sharing your flight’s status with the people picking you up from the
airport. (j.mp/SEUePI)
YouMail
Visual voice mail on steroids. Customized greetings, smart and social caller
ID, call blocking and the ability to save your messages. Free. For Android,
iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone. (Voice mail transcription services,
performed by people instead of software, is available for $5 to $40 a month.
(www.youmail.com)
Continued in article
Update on Portable Scanning
August 22, 2012 message from Scott Bonacker
I deleted the extraneous
material from this marketing email - it describes a scanner that could be
useful for onsite work like I do - and maybe someone else as well – scan
student papers at your desk at the front of the room?
Scott Bonacker CPA - McCullough and Associates LLC - Springfield, MO
1. A SCANNER THAT GIVES DUPLEX A WHOLE NEW MEANING
The secret to success in the technology world is to solve a problem. Here's
one. Mobile scanners can handle documents, but not bound materials. Wand
scanners can handle bound materials but not documents. You can "scan"
anything by snapping a photo with your smartphone, but positioning your
smartphone perfectly wastes time, the lower quality makes optical character
recognition more challenging, and you risk looking dorky. A new scanner
attempts to solve this problem.
The MobileScan Pro 100 consist of two components -- a dock and a wand
scanner with an LCD display. When the scanner is docked, it functions like a
typical sheet-fed simplex scanner with speeds of up to 10 pages per minute
in black and white (it can also scan in color).
However, you can detach the scanner from the dock, thus transforming it into
a wand scanner for bound materials not to mention fabric and other items
that you cannot feed.
Other Notable Features
The entire docked unit measures 12.4 x 2 x 1.7 inches and weighs 12.6
ounces. You can power it with the included USB cable or a battery (the
battery resides inside the scanner component). The LCD screen enables you to
adjust settings without the need for a computer.
The MobileScan Pro 100 scans at 300, 600, or 900 dpi, and saves your
documents in JPEG or PDF format via the bundled PageManager 9 software. You
can save scans to an attached computer or to the included 4 GB microUSB card
that resides inside the scanner. The scanner can encrypt your scans on the
microUSB card for security in the event of loss or theft.
What is "kwout"? Basically, it's a tiny application
that allows users to "quote" a part of a web page as an image with an image
map. It is easy to use, as all users have to do is add the kwout bookmarklet
to their favorite browser. Visitors can then grab a screenshot, cut out the
area of inte
The mail is still
coming in about my review of Barnes & Noble’s latest e-book reader, the
Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight.
Very little of the
mail is actually about the reader, though. Most of it challenges the
statements I made when I characterized the state of the e-book world right
now.
Here’s a summary —
and a few clarifications.
• What I wrote:
“When you buy an e-reader, you’re committing to that one company’s catalog
of books forever, because their book formats are mutually incompatible.”
Sample reader
pushback: “Why do you write about things you don’t know anything about?
Apparently, you haven’t heard of the free app called Calibre. It converts
any e-book format into any other format. If I want to switch from a Kindle
to a Nook, I just let Calibre convert my current Kindle library. It’s that
simple.”
My reply: It’s
actually not, for one towering reason: Calibre can’t convert copy-protected
books. It doesn’t even try. And that rules out most of the books people want
to read these days: best sellers. Current, commercial fiction and
nonfiction. Books by people who are still alive.
I mean, if all you
want to read is old, expired-copyright books like “Moby Dick” and “Little
Women,” then — great! You don’t need Calibre at all, because these books are
available free online in any format you like (or in formats that any reader
can display, like text files or PDF files).
But when it comes to
more recent books, my statement still stands. If you buy a bunch of modern
books for the Nook and then one day switch to the Kindle, you’ll have to
kiss your entire investment goodbye.
• What I wrote:
“You can’t read a Kindle book on a Nook, or a Nook book on a Sony Reader, or
a Sony book on an iPad.”
Sample reader
pushback: “Your remark about not being able to read various book types on
rival readers is disingenuous at best. I can read all of my Kindle books and
all of my Nook books on my laptop or my iPad, thanks to reader apps made by
those companies.”
My reply: Yes,
that’s true. There are Kindle and Nook reading apps for tablets, phones and
computers, so that you can read your purchased books without actually owning
an e-book reader at all!
To be technically
complete, therefore, I could have written this: “You can’t read a Kindle
book on a Nook or Sony Reader, or a Nook book on a Sony Reader or Kindle, or
a Sony book on an iPad, Kindle or Nook, or an iBooks book on a Nook, Kindle
or Sony Reader. With a special app, you can read a Kindle book or Nook book
on an iPad, laptop, iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone.”
But my point was
not to create a Wikipedia entry on e-book compatibility. I was just trying
to make the point that if you are thinking of buying a dedicated e-book
reader — and since this was a review of an e-book reader, I think that’s a
reasonable assumption — then you’ll be locked into books from its
manufacturer.
• What I wrote:
“Once you buy the gadget, you’ve just married its company forever. If you
ever want to change brands, you have to give up all the books you’ve ever
bought.”
Sample reader
pushback: “Your article contains an error. If you buy a Nook, you are not
tied to Barnes & Noble’s bookstore. They use the ePub format, and accept the
Adobe Digital Editions DRM [copy-protection] scheme, so you can buy books
from a number of vendors. I have purchased books from B&N as well as Kobo,
the Sony bookstore, and a couple other sites.”
My reply: I’ve
always known that the Sony, Nook and Kobo readers all read standard ePub
files. But it was my impression that, here again, the only books you can
exchange freely among readers are the old, public-domain ones — not the
copy-protected modern best sellers that most people are interested in.
It appears that I’m
wrong. With some effort, you can, in fact, move copy-protected books among
those three e-book readers. When I asked that reader how he does it, he sent
along the instructions:
Say I bought
“My Man Jeeves” from Kobo. I copy it to my Kobo e-reader. Now, to copy
it to my Sony reader, I must manually download the acsm file that
controls my license for this book. Kobo allows this, but not through
their desktop application — only on their Web site. I simply use my Kobo
account credentials to log on to the site. I go to “My library.” Beside
each of my purchases is a Download button (it may be called “Adobe DRM
ePub/PDF”). I click this button, and the acsm file is downloaded.
Now I “open”
the acsm file using the Sony Reader desktop application. (On Windows, I
do that by right-clicking the file, then selecting “Open with Sony
eReader.”) My book is now copied-downloaded into my Sony Reader desktop
app. I can then connect my Sony reader by its cable to my PC to copy
that book as usual.
Wow. I’m not entirely
convinced that average consumers would be willing, or even able, to wade
through all of that for every book in their libraries.
But technically, I
was wrong, and you’re right. If you’re technically adept, you can transfer
your purchased books among Nook, Sony and Kobo readers — and any others that
offer ePub compatibility.
The only big-name
reader that doesn’t is the Kindle. Once you buy a Kindle book, you really
are stuck with Kindles and Kindle reading apps forever.
Whispersync
is Amazon's new
feature that allows for Kindle e-books and Audible
audiobooks to sync up. This makes perfect sense, as
Amazon owns Audible, and can leverage common platforms
and accounts to provide a seamless reading experience
across e-book and audiobook reading methods.
The idea is that we can get more reading done if we can
easily move between platforms, listening to our books
while multitasking (driving, exercising, cleaning etc.),
and then reading the e-book during those times in which
it is rude to have earbuds stuck in our ears.
I love the option of switching back and forth between
audio and e-paper (or paper). Most of my reading is done
via my ears, but most of my pleasure reading comes
through my eyeballs.
The genius of syncing up the e-book and the audiobook is
that the technology gives to us the thing that is most
valuable - more time to read.
All of us would read more books if we had more time to
read.
By
syncing a book across platforms, including a Kindle
smart phone app, a dedicated Kindle reader, and the
audio version, we can read more by reading in smaller
chunks. We can get a bit of reading done whenever we
have a few minutes. And then we can transition to longer
stretches of pleasure reading with our dedicated Kindle
reader.
Whisperync is a
terrific concept, but in execution Amazon has fallen a
bit short. I'm hoping that we are in the early days of
cross-method / cross-platform book syncing - and that
Amazon will rapidly evolve this service.
3 ideas for Whispersync:
1. Allow Kindle Book Purchases via Audible:
The way it works now is that you purchase the
"Whispersync
Voice-Ready" Kindle book first
from Amazon, and then you are given the option to buy
the audiobook. For example, you can buy the Kindle
edition of
Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern
Economics for $9.55. You
are then given the option of buying the Audible audio
version for $7.95. On Audible, this book costs $19.59 or
1 credit for members. There is no way to go the other
way, to buy the audiobook from Audible and add on the
Kindle book. Most audiobook shoppers get our audiobooks
from Audible, not from Amazon. For audiobook fans, the
audiobook is the primary means of reading. The e-book is
an "add on." By requiring Whispersync purchases to go
through the Amazon.com website, Amazon is making it more
difficult to find and purchase books.
2. Bundle Kindle Books in with Audible Credits:
The bigger problem with the Amazon/Kindle centric
Whispersync system is that the program does not work
well for Audible subscribers. I'm a longtime
Audible Platinum subscriber,
a program that gives me 24 books (really credits) for
$229.50. This works out to $9.56 a book. The Whispersync
program is a bad deal for me (and all Platinum
subscribers), as the typical cost of a book would jump
from under $10 bucks (for the audio version) to around
$18 bucks. What Audible should do is come out with a
"super credit" - one that buys both the audio and the
Kindle version of the book. I would pay $12 a super
credit, as having the book in both formats is valuable,
but not so valuable that I want to double pay for the
book. This seems like a good deal for the authors, the
publishers, and Amazon - as delivering the digital audio
and e-book file does not cost Amazon or the publishers
anything extra. My guess is that making a dual format
book affordable would drive book sales.
3. Introduce A Dedicated AudioBook Device:
The idea of reading audiobook and e-books, with
everything seamless syncing, is wonderful in theory. In
reality, the hardware makes syncing across audio/e-book
formats somewhat challenging. I listen to my audiobooks
books on an iPod Nano. Since the Nano is not WiFi
enabled syncing is impossible. Syncing only works when
listening to the book on an iPhone, or a Kindle device.
Amazon should come out with a dedicated audiobook
reader. Call it the Kindle Spark, or the
Kindle Ember. A small device that works well for
exercising, and that is WiFi enabled so syncing works.
A small screen would even allow for Kindle reading, and
for purchases of digital books right from the device.
I am writing this paragraph on an iPhone. But I am
not typing it on the phone's virtual keyboard. I am dictating it using a
little-known feature that allows you to employ your voice, instead of your
fingers, wherever text entry is possible on the device.
So, on the suspicion that dictation on smartphones
might prove useful for others as well, I've been testing it heavily over the
past week. I used a top phone with Google's Android software, the Samsung
Galaxy Nexus, and an Apple iPhone 4S. In general, I found that, while
dictation could occasionally fail badly, it worked surprisingly well in a
wide variety of environments and applications.
On both leading smartphone platforms, I found that
relatively short dictation—such as emails, texts, tweets, Facebook posts and
notes—was at least as accurate, and often more, as typing on a glass screen.
It was better in quiet environments, but did OK even in most noisy places
like grocery stores, coffee shops and carwashes. It was also faster, since,
as long as you don't have to correct numerous errors, speaking is usually
faster than typing on glass.
For this review, I am not mainly referring to Siri,
the widely publicized, voice-controlled feature on the new iPhones, which
can do things like tell you the weather, or stock prices. Nor am I
discussing the "voice actions" on Android, which can perform Web searches
and other tasks. Both can also help with some text dictation. I concentrated
on a much simpler feature of both platforms: a small microphone key that's
included right in the phones' on-screen keyboards.
Android phones have had this microphone key for a
couple of years, and Apple added it to the latest iPhone, the 4S, last fall,
and to the new iPad, when it came out last month. But I'm guessing that many
users of these phones either haven't used this special key, or haven't even
noticed it.
While the microphone keys work a bit differently on
the two platforms, they are basically similar. When the keyboard appears,
ready for you to type, you can instead hit the microphone key and simply
dictate what you want to say. The phones then send your spoken words to a
remote server, which rapidly translates them into text and sends them back
to the phone's screen. If corrections are needed, you make them by typing,
though both platforms make this easier by indicating the likeliest errors,
and suggesting alternatives.
A couple of caveats are in order. I didn't compare
dictation to typing on a phone with physical keys, whose devotees are often
speedy and accurate. Instead, I thought the apt comparison was with a
virtual keyboard, which is becoming the norm on phones, but is still a
source of frustration for many users. [PTECHjump1]
But Android was more reliable.
I also didn't try dictating a long document, like
this column, because phones are rarely used for lengthy composing.
I found that both platforms' dictation systems
worked well enough for me to recommend them. In case after case, both phones
got it right, or close enough to require little correcting.
But there are differences. Android has an advantage
in that, in the newest version of its operating system, it displays the
dictated text almost in real time, lagging just slightly behind your spoken
words. On the iPhone, the system only reveals its rendering of your
dictation after you've tapped on a "Done" button.
Android's dictation system also supports many more
languages than Apple's—40 languages and dialects, including Spanish,
Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew. On the iPhone, only English, French and German
are currently supported, though Apple says Chinese, Korean, Italian, and
Spanish will be added later this year.
However, I found the iPhone 4S worked better than
the Galaxy Nexus in noisier environments. For instance, in a crowded
shopping-mall food court, while neither phone was perfect, the iPhone
understood me to say: "I am dictating this email from the very noisy Court
at Montgomery Mall on the iPhone"—missing only the word "food" and
capitalizing "Court." The Android phone mangled a very similar sentence as:
"I am dictating this email on droid phone from the bearing noise for it
montgomery mall."
In death, as in life, people don't always leave
their papers in order. Letters, manuscripts, and other pieces of evidence
wind up scattered among different archives, leading researchers on a paper
chase as they try to hunt down what they need for their work.
"It can be hugely frustrating—especially when you
make a journey cross-country to an archive, and then discover the piece you
really wanted must be somewhere else (or, God forbid, rotting away in a
landfill)," says Robert Townsend, deputy director of the American Historical
Association, in an e-mail interview. Chasing after distributed historical
records is so common that "any historian who has not suffered from that
problem can't be working very hard," he wrote.
The Internet has made the hunt easier, as more
archives post finding aids for their collections online. "Scholars have at
least gotten to the point where they can search over the Internet for these
materials," says Daniel V. Pitti, the associate director of the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, or IATH, at the University of
Virginia. But what he calls "hunting and gathering" persists for
document-seekers, who "a priori have to have some idea, some hunch, of where
to go, because the access systems are distinct and not integrated any way."
Now imagine a central clearinghouse for those
records, an online hub researchers could consult to find archival materials.
That vision drives a project of Mr. Pitti's called
the Social Networks and Archival Context Project, or SNAC. It's a
collaboration between researchers and developers at IATH, the University of
California at Berkeley's School of Information, and the California Digital
Library. The project recently finished its pilot stage with the help of a
grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Another grant, from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will support the project through another
two years as it adds millions more records and begins beta testing with
researchers.
Some people have already found the prototype, which
is up and running although not yet widely promoted. The site allows visitors
to search for the names of individuals, corporate entities, or families to
find "archival context records" for them.
"So if I'm interested in a particular person," Mr.
Pitti says, "I can find where all the records are that would be required to
understand them." For instance, a search for Robert Oppenheimer turns up a
link to a collection of the physicist's papers housed at the Library of
Congress, plus links to other collections in which he is referenced, a
biographical timeline, and a list of occupations and subjects related to his
life and work.
A researcher can explore a person's social and
cultural environment with SNAC's radial-graph feature. It creates a web,
which can be manipulated, of a subject's connections as revealed in archival
records. The radial graph of Oppenheimer's network, for instance, includes
George Kennan, Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Schweitzer, among
many other names represented as nodes on the graph.
Not yet fully developed, the radial-graph feature
supports one of the project's main goals: to visualize the social networks
within which archival records were created. "What you're trying to do is put
together the puzzle, the fabric of someone's life, the people that
influenced them and the people they influenced," Mr. Pitti says. "One could
certainly, in an analog context, piece this together, but it would take
years and years of work. What we're demonstrating is that we can go out
there and gather all that information and present it to you, which would
liberate scholars." Connecting archival data can reveal patterns of
association hidden in disparate collections.
Data Quality Important
To work well, SNAC requires good data. Its first
phase drew on thousands of finding aids—encoded with a standard known as
Encoded Archival Description, or EAD—from the Library of Congress, the
Northwest Digital Archives, the Online Archive of California, and Virginia
Heritage. A newer standard for encoding archival information, referred to as
EAC-CPF, for Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and
Families, was then applied to those records, making them easier to find and
connect.
Archives are idiosyncratic, and it's not always
easy to tell whether a name refers to a particular individual or to
different people with identical or similar names. One of Mr. Pitti's main
collaborators is Ray R. Larson, a professor in the School of Information at
the University of California at Berkeley. He concentrates on what Mr. Pitti
calls the "matching and merging" required to winnow out duplicate names,
find variants of the same name, and so on. To do that Mr. Larson has tested
several approaches, including machine learning, in which a computer is
programmed to recognize, for example, common variations in spelling.
The job is about to get much tougher, though,
because SNAC is about to get much bigger. As part of the second phase of the
project, supported by the Mellon grant, 13 state and regional archival
consortia and more than 35 university and national repositories in the
United States, Britain, and France will contribute records. The British
Library "is giving me 300,000 names associated with their manuscript
collections," going back to before the Christian era, says Mr. Pitti.
The project will also ingest as many as 2 million
standardized bibliographic records, in the widely used MARC format, from the
online OCLC collaboration in which libraries exchange research and
cataloging information. OCLC has its own centralized archival search
function, called ArchiveGrid; Mr. Pitti describes it as complementary to
SNAC. Unlike SNAC, though, "ArchiveGrid does not foreground the
biographical-historical data, nor does it reveal the social networks that
interrelate the archival resources," he says.
Of all the confusing technology terms used in
consumer marketing today, perhaps the most opaque is "4G," used to describe
a new, much faster generation of cellular data on smartphones, tablets and
other devices. It sounds simple, but there are many varieties of 4G and
conflicting claims.
AT&T T -0.30% claims "The nation's largest 4G
network," and T-Mobile says it has "America's largest 4G network." Verizon
Wireless boasts "America's fastest 4G network," and Sprint S -0.17% says it
had the first 4G network.
Yet the technology used by T-Mobile, and mostly
comprising AT&T's 4G network, isn't considered "real" 4G at all by some
critics, and the one used by Sprint has proven to be a dead end and is being
abandoned. The flavor being used by Verizon is now being adopted by its
rivals, but won't be interoperable among them.
It's a headache for consumers to grasp. So here's a
simplified explainer to some of the most common questions, based on
interviews with top technical officials at all four major U.S. wireless
carriers.
What is 4G?
It's the fourth and latest generation technology
for data access over cellular networks. It's faster and can give networks
more capacity than the 3G networks still on most phones. There's a technical
definition, set by a United Nations agency in Europe, and a marketing
definition, which is looser, but more relevant to most consumers.
Who needs 4G?
It's mostly for people with smartphones, tablets
and laptops who often need fast data speeds for Web browsing, app use and
email when they're out of the range of Wi-Fi networks. It can give you the
same or greater data speeds as home or office Wi-Fi when you're in a taxi.
In hotels and airports, it's often faster than public Wi-Fi networks.
How does 4G differ from another term
being advertised, 'LTE'?
LTE, which stands for "Long Term Evolution," is the
fastest, most consistent variety of 4G, and the one most technical experts
feel hews most closely to the technical standard set by the U.N. In the
U.S., it has primarily been deployed by Verizon, which offers it in over 200
markets. AT&T has begun deploying it, offering LTE in 28 markets so far.
Sprint and T-Mobile are pivoting to LTE, though they have no cities covered
by it yet.
What are these other versions of
4G?
Sprint uses a technology called WiMax. T-Mobile and
AT&T deployed a technology called HSPA+, a faster version of 3G that they
relabeled as 4G, and which many technical critics regard as a "faux 4G."
Sprint will begin switching to LTE later this year, and T-Mobile in 2013.
How fast is 4G?
Claims vary and performance depends upon the type
of device, location, and time. In my tests, 4G phones, tablets and data
modems for laptops typically deliver from three to 20 times the download
speeds of 3G devices. The speed king is LTE. The LTE devices I've used have
typically averaged download speeds of between 10 and 20 megabits per second,
with frequent instances of over 30 megabits per second. The other forms of
4G have generally produced download speeds well under 10 mbps in my tests.
But all of these are better than 3G, which in my tests on all networks and
many devices, averages download speeds of under 2 mbps. The Digital Solution
How does LTE compare with common wired
home Internet speeds?
Although it is wireless, LTE is often faster than
most Americans' wired home Internet service. According to Akamai, a large
Internet company, the average broadband speed in the U.S. in the third
quarter of 2011 was a mere 6.1 mbps.
How does LTE compare with Wi-Fi?
Wi-Fi is usually a wireless broadcast of a wired
Internet service, so, if the average U.S. broadband speed is 6.1 mbps,
that's around what the average Wi-Fi speed is. But, in public places, the
shared Wi-Fi is often much, much slower than LTE. In tests I did this week
at Dulles Airport near Washington, and at a hotel outside Boston, the public
Wi-Fi networks delivered well under 1 mbps on the new iPad. But the Verizon
LTE cellular network on the iPad averaged over 32 mbps in both places.
It's a golden age for educational-technology
start-ups. The past three years have seen a spike in venture-capital
investment in upstart companies, many founded by entrepreneurs just out of
college. Last month The Chronicle outlined the trend ("A
Boom Time for Education Start-Ups"), but we wanted
to dig deeper.
Below are short features on three such companies,
focusing on the problems they hope to solve and the challenges they face in
selling their unusual ideas. To get a sense of the emerging field, we've
included a
list of a dozen other start-ups competing for a
piece of the action.
Pooja Sankar may eliminate
the need for professors to hold office hours, or to endlessly respond to
student questions by e-mail.
Ms. Sankar, a recent
graduate of Stanford University's M.B.A. program, leads a start-up focused
on finding a better way for college students to ask questions about course
materials and assignments online. Her company, Piazza, has built an online
study hall where professors and teaching assistants can easily monitor
questions and encourage students who understand the material to help their
peers.
At first blush, the service seems unnecessary.
Students can already e-mail questions to professors or fellow students, and
most colleges already own course-management systems like Blackboard that
include discussion features. But Ms. Sankar feels that such options are
clunky. She says professors are finding that Piazza can save them hours each
week by allowing them to post answers to a single online forum rather than
handle a scattershot of student e-mails.
Piazza is a Web site that refreshes with updates as
new questions or answers come in. Professors simply set up a free discussion
area for their course on the service at the beginning of the term and invite
their students to set up free accounts to participate. Ms. Sankar says that
students typically keep Piazza open on their screens as they work on
homework, often staying on the site for hours at a time.
Ms. Sankar, who is 31, was inspired to create the
service based on her own experience as an undergraduate in India, where she
studied at the highly selective Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.
She says she was a shy student, and one of only three women majoring in
computer science, so she often found herself watching from the wings as more
social students collaborated on homework assignments. She felt there had to
be a way to recreate a study hall online, in a way that made it easy for shy
students to ask questions anonymously.
After graduating, she got a master's degree in
computer science at the University of Maryland at College Park, and then
worked as an engineer for Facebook and other companies for a few years. When
she decided to head to Stanford to study business, she was sure she would
not try to start a company of her own, since she found the prospect "too
scary." But a course on entrepreneurship made her realize that the path to a
company was simply a series of "baby steps," and that she wanted to bring
her vision of a better "question-and-answer platform" to life.
She wrote the original version of Piazza herself,
after teaching herself the programming language Ruby on Rails from a book.
By the time she first sought investors, she already had hundreds of students
using the service. She raised an initial round of $1.5-million last year
from the venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, and raised an additional
$6-million from investors in November.
As of yet, the site has no plans to generate
revenue—the service is free and does not carry advertisements. Ms. Sankar
said that she didn't write a business plan for the site, because she doesn't
believe in them, and that she believes that once a critical mass of students
and professors are signed up, revenue models can emerge. When pressed, she
says that in the future the company may charge for advanced analytics for
professors or other extra features.
She spends much of her time seeking feedback from
users and obsessively tinkering with the service in hopes of improving it.
"I am an engineer at heart," she explains.
To spread the word about the site, she has taken an
unusually personal approach. She sends e-mail messages to professors telling
her story and the goal of the site, and asking them to try it.
Greg Morrisett, a computer-science professor at
Harvard University, got one of those e-mails. He said he was curious, but he
was concerned that the site's policy noted that it claimed ownership over
comments posted on the site, which Mr. Morrisett felt violated Harvard's
policies. So he wrote back to Ms. Sankar and said he wasn't able to use it.
"Ten minutes later she wrote back and said, 'We fixed the policy,'" the
professor recalls. (Users now own their own posts.) So he gave it a shot.
PowerPoint is boring. Student attention spans are
short. Today many facts pop up with a simple Google search. And plenty of
free lectures by the world's greatest professors can be found on YouTube.
Is it time for more widespread reform of college
teaching?
This series explores the state of the college
lecture, and how technologies point to new models of undergraduate
education.
Last month, we began inviting students across the
countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video
commentaries about whether lectures work for them. Below are highlights from
the first batch of submissions, which are full of frustration with
“PowerPoint abuse” – professors’ poor use of slide software that dumps too
much information on students in a less-than-compelling fashion.
Creative Computers Replacing Writers and Composers And the frightening thing about this is that what might be "cheating"
becomes possible with zero chance of being caught for plagiarism of things
stories and songs written by Hal.
Forbes has joined
a group of 30 clients using Narrative Science
software to write computer-generated stories.
Here’s more about the program,
used in
one corner of Forbes‘ website: “Narrative
Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative
content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data
sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and
tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories,
headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”
The New York Times revealed last year that
trade publisher
Hanley Wood and sports journalism site
The Big Ten Network also use the tool. In all, 30
clients use the software–but Narrative Science did not disclose the complete
client list.
What do you think?
The
Narrative Science technology could potentially
impact many corners of the writing trade. The company has a long list of
stories they can computerize: sports stories, financial reports, real estate
analyses, local community content, polling & elections, advertising campaign
summaries sales & operations reports and market research.
While company shares have dropped 17.2% over
the last three months to close at $13.72 on February 15, 2012,
Barnes & Noble (BKS)
is hoping it can break the slide with solid third quarter results when
it releases its earnings on Tuesday, February 21, 2012.
What to Expect: The Wall Street consensus is
$1.01 per share, up 1% from a year ago when Barnes & Noble reported
earnings of $1 per share.
The consensus estimate is down from three
months ago when it was $1.42, but is unchanged over the past month.
Analysts are projecting a loss of $1.09 per share for the fiscal year.
The company originated with two electrical
engineering and computer science professors at Northwestern University.
Here’s more about the company:
“[It began with] a software program that automatically generates sports
stories using commonly available information such as box scores and
play-by-plays. The program was the result of a collaboration between
McCormick and Medill School of Journalism. To create the software, Hammond
and Birnbaum and students working in McCormick’s
Intelligent
Information Lab created algorithms that use
statistics from a game to write text that captures the overall dynamic of
the game and highlights the key plays and players. Along with the text is an
appropriate headline and a photo of what the program deems as the most
important player in the game.”
More of you have probably read about artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil
(an expert on computer music composition)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
Free online courses for the masses are all the
rage—and many are being run by start-ups hoping to profit by selling related
materials and services. Jim Groom thinks that’s too commercial, so he’s
raising money for the online course he co-teaches at the University of Mary
Washington using Kickstarter, the popular “crowd funding” service.
In a campaign
released today, the professor makes his plea in an
irreverent video that mixes in clips from a 90s true-crime show, and video
interviews with students and professors shot from unusual angles. He
explains that last year he ran the course, which is on digital storytelling
and is called DS106, using his own equipment. But the class has grown so
large that he needs a new server to keep it going, and he estimates that
will cost him $2,900.
He’s asking for contributions ranging from $1 to
$3,000, and those who give will get what he describes as “DS106 schwag”—a
T-shirt, a bumper sticker, or a desk calendar with a different creative
assignment for each day. Some of the rewards reflect the quirky nature of
the course itself: For $100 you can have one of the course assignments named
after you.
The campaign will run for a couple of weeks. If he
hasn’t met his goal of $4,200 (a price that figures in the server cost and
the price of the schwag), then the project gets nothing and all of those who
pledged keep their money. If the target is met, the deal is on. If the goal
is exceeded, he says he will use the extra money to add other enhancements
to the course.
In an interview this week, Mr. Groom stressed that
the course is “not about him,” and he criticized the way some massive online
courses rely on what amounts to a celebrity professor to attract students.
He used the word “community” frequently to describe the group of professors
and students involved in the course.
The idea for the campaign came from Tim Owens,
another instructional technologist at Mary Washington. “I’ve wanted to do a
Kickstarter for so long, but I’ve never been able to think of what could we
do,” he said. When he heard Mr. Groom wondering where they could come up
with $2,900, he suggested the crowd-funding site.
Mr. Groom argues that crowd funding could be a
model for other free online-education projects. Even some of the largest,
such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare effort, have mostly relied on grants for
support and
have struggled to find a long-term way to stay afloat.
“It’s like a PBS model” of pledge drives, Mr. Groom
said.
The Chronicle asked the folks at
Kickstarter whether other educational efforts have used the site to raise
money. A representative from the company pointed us to these five campaigns,
all of which succeeded:
—SmartHistory:
Raised $11,513 for a Web site created by two art historians.
—Punk
Mathematics: Raised 28,701 for a book of mathematical stories.
Taking up the command line is easier if you have a
specific problem you’re trying to solve. For me, the problem was that I
wanted to do all of my writing in a
plain text format, like Markdown or
LaTeX. But I need to be able to share my writing
in a variety of formats: HTML for the web, PDF for printed documents or
academic writing, and occasionally RTF or Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.
The best way I’ve found to move between these
formats is
Pandoc.
Pandoc is a command line tool written by a philosophy
professor,
John
MacFarlane. Its general use is to take a document
in one format and convert it to another. You can get an idea of the wide
variety of formats Pandoc can translate by looking at an
enlargement of the header diagram.
Here’s an example of how this works. Suppose that
you have a Markdown document like the one we created for the post on
Markdown. (View
pandoc-example.markdown on GitHub.)
You can convert this to a number of text formats with a simple terminal
command:
That command calls pandoc, tells it
which file to convert (pandoc-example.markdown) and tells it
which file to export (e.g., pandoc-example.html). Pandoc
figures out what types of files these are from the extension, or you can
pass it additional arguments. For some of the formats, you can convert the
other way. For example, you could convert LaTex to Markdown or to a Word
DOCX, or HTML to Markdown or LaTeX. To convert to PDF, though, you’ll need
to have LaTeX installed on your system.
Apple’s recent release of free software to build
e-textbooks has brought attention to custom publishing of academic
materials. But Apple’s software, called iBooks Author, lacks easy tools for
multiple authors to collaborate on a joint textbook project. Since most
books aren’t written in isolation, two new publishing platforms seek to make
that group collaboration easier.
The first,
Booktype,
is free and open-source. Once the platform is
installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their
browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time
about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by
dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on
e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also
comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups,
and track books through editing.
Inkling
Habitat, the other new offering, appears to have
even greater ambitions. Where iBooks Author is designed mostly for would-be
amateur publishers, Inkling Habitat creates a cloud-based platform for the
professional market. Matthew MacInnis, Inkling’s chief executive, said the
company’s tool is designed to give the global teams who work on
professionally published textbooks a single outlet to publish interactive
material for the iPad and the Web. Mr. MacInnis said hundreds of users can
access the same textbook content at once, and the software will keep track
of each step in the editing process.
Inkling Habitat also automates some of the editing
process that is unique to e-textbooks, like checking for broken links
between special terms and their definitions in a glossary. Those automatic
functions, Mr. MacInnis said, will allow e-textbook publishing to get easier
without requiring additional staff. “You can’t build the industry up around
digital content if you’re going to throw people at every problem,” he said.
I did not know that iBooks were superior to all eBooks (including ToolBooks)
on the market.
Is that what you're trying to tell us?
Does this justify having to pay Apple a huge royalty on every iBook an
author sells?
I'm sorry, but I despise eBook vendors that do not support open standards.
Apple shot itself in the 1980s with the Mac operating system. Now it's
shooting itself in the other foot by trying to be an iBook hardware
monopoly. The tech world resists vendors that do not support open standards.
Excellent authors trying to make money on iBooks will pay a price!
Windows still has about 92% of the PC Market. Add to this the other
alternatives that won't run iBooks like Linux. The last time I looked Kindle
still had the overwhelming share of the eBook reader market. Seems like an
aspiring author should consider market share.
Personally, at think at this stage of technology, a textbook author should
still focus on eBook and hardcopy open standard alternatives and provide
multimedia supplements. Eventually, hard copy books will have something like
a USB port to a multimedia chip embedded in the binding.
Inspired by a Twitter conversation last week with
Caleb McDaniel (@wcaleb),
I decided to revisit it here.
I recently used Wordle in an assignment for my
January Intercession class (on F. Scott Fitzgerald) and found it very useful
for introducing students to close-reading and the basics of textual
analysis. As an English professor, textual analysis is one of the most
fundamental skills that I teach, and as a result, it can feel like the bane
of my existence. The source of my frustration (and that of my students) is
trying to get from summary and/or description to analysis. Students are
often very good at describing what is happening in a text, but it can be
very hard for them to break out of this habit and think about language in
other ways.
Enter Wordle.
To me, there are two things that make Wordle
invaluable:
It’s free and very easy to use. As an open
web-based program, all students with access to a computer can use it. It
doesn’t require specific hardware (read: iPad) or charge fees for
accessing the site.
It’s fun. Generating a Word Cloud is as simple
as clicking on the “Create” link, pasting in “a bunch of text,” and
clicking “Go.” Once the Word Cloud is created, students can then play
with fonts, color schemes, and other visual variables such as whether
they prefer the words to be laid out horizontally, vertically, or a bit
of both.
In my class, I first demonstrated how to use Wordle
with the novel we were reading (This Side of Paradise), which had
the added benefit of being published in 1921, so it is no-longer copyright
protected so I could use passages from
Project Gutenberg’s edition of the novel rather
than having to transcribe them manually. We created a few word clouds
together as a class to make sure everyone knew how to do it, and then I
asked the students how looking at these passages through the Wordle lens
might change their understanding. What did they notice seeing the words
rearranged, and in some cases resized (the size of words in the Wordle is
directly proportionate to the number of times that the word appears in the
initial text block)? By deconstructing and defamiliarizing the passage,
Wordle magically freed students from the summary trap and helped them to
think about the text analytically beyond the constraints of plot. Word
clouds do not have plots, at least not in the linear convention sense that
allows easy summary, so analysis was suddenly less confusing.
Finally, I asked students to create a Wordle on
their own and post a screenshot of it to the class blog. They could choose
any episode from This Side of Paradise that we had not already
examined together in class. Once they had their Wordle, they were asked to
answer a few questions: “Does this graphic visualization of the text
highlight certain themes or issues in the episode? Does it emphasize
particular themes or ideas? Do you notice things about the episode that you
had previously discounted in your earlier reading?”
Posting the Wordles to the website proved to be a
bit tricky for some, but that difficulty stemmed from the screenshot rather
than Wordle itself.
My class created some very interesting Wordles, and
more to the point, using this tool helped to make the task of literary
analysis less daunting, which is often no easy feat! I was left wondering
why I don’t use it more often in my classes and am currently trying to
figure out ways to incorporate it into other assignments.
For those learning to code this year, either for
professional reasons or to expand personal horizons,
Codecademy
has been a popular tool. Jason has
written about Codecademy as a platform for code-literacy,
and I discussed the
Codeyear “new year’s resolution” initiative the
site launched in January. Now the platform has expanded even further with
the addition of tools that allow any user to create new courses and projects
in JavaScript, Python and Ruby.
Codecademy may not be a substitute for more
traditional forms of programming instruction, but this new platform does
offer possibilities for shaping hybrid learning or building coding
familiarity into a course dedicated to another topic, as customized
tutorials could supplement face to face instruction. Julie
Meloni makes some great points about the pedagogical problems of Codecademy
and the question of results: “…it is not teaching
you how to code. It is teaching you how to call-and-response, and is not
particularly helpful in explaining why you’re responding, why they’re
calling, or—most importantly—how to become a composer.” I share a number of
these concerns, particularly when Codecademy is the only source of
knowledge–and I hope that this new tool affords Codecademy the opportunity
to crowdsource new approaches to pedagogy.
There are some great examples of instructional
programming tools available for free on the web, such as Scratch,
MIT’s young-learner friendly code “building blocks.”
(Scratch is just one kid-targeted programming tool: there are other great suggestions
at Digital Humanities Q&A.) But these are often
starter languages that don’t directly apply to web development or other
applications, and thus require additional investment before literacy in more
widely-used languages is achieved.
The choice of languages in Codecademy’s toolset
focuses on utilitarian scripting languages with a range of potential
applications. As Ryan Cordell noted in Ruby
for Humanists, Ruby is a great starting language
and its inclusion is particularly promising. As Ryan mentioned, there’s
already a site for learning programming basics through Ruby tutorials:
Hackety Hack.
But Codecademy moves a step further with an easy
system for building and sharing interactive tutorials.
This is only at the nominating stage at this point.
It is, however, informative to read the nominations already listed as comments
to the above article.
I liked Paul Miller's nomination and try very hard year after year to serve
accounting like Tom Bruce serves law.
Guidance emerging from the International Federation
of Accountants might prove useful even in the United States in the coming
weeks as companies close the books on 2011 and plan for the year ahead.
IFAC's International Auditing and Assurance
Standards Board has issued a practice note on special considerations that
should be taken into account when auditing financial instruments. The alert,
titled
International Auditing Practice Note 1000, provide
some practical assistance to auditors when dealing with valuation and other
issues related to financial statement assertions, a touchy and complex area
in any entity's financial statements in light of economic pressures and an
increasing focus on fair value.
According to IAASB Chairman Arnold Schilder, the
practice note can help auditors understand the nature of and risks
associated with financial instruments as well as the different valuation
techniques and types of controls entities may use in relation to them. The
guidance also highlights audit considerations that should be taken into
account throughout the audit process. IAASB Technical Director James Gunn
said through a statement that the exercise of developing the guidance was
informative even to the board, which will further inform the board's work as
it develops future auditing standards.
In a separate release, IFAC's Professional
Accountants in Business Committee has
proposed some best practices guidance on evaluating and improving internal
controls to help organizations benchmark their
work in maintaining effective controls. The committee says the guidance is
intended to be useful to any organization, regardless of the internal
control framework it uses, to help deal with internal control issues that
are often problematic because of poor design or implementation.
Vincent Topoff, the committee's senior technical
manager, says the guidance would be meaningful even to U.S. companies where
internal controls are more closely scrutinized because it was developed in
part by U.S. experts who have spent many years working to improve internal
controls. “Together, they have identified in this guidance those areas where
the application of good practice guidance often goes wrong,” he says. “This
guidance considers the areas organizations need to continuously improve and
the issues they need to address.” The guidance is not meant to replace any
existing framework that is in use, he says.
Finally, the IAASB also refreshed its warnings to
auditors to keep economic conditions and pressures in mind as they consider
whether disclosures are adequate and whether there is reason to doubt an
entity can continue as a going concern. Companies continue to face
volatility in capital markets and exposure to debt in distressed countries,
leading to uncertainty that puts pressure on cash flow and access to credit,
the board advises. Those factors complicate the audit process, and therefore
must be considered closely, the board says.
A couple of weeks ago, my 12-year-old daughter
sought my advice about a video she wanted to make. Her concept was so
elaborate and involved so many scenes, I doubted it was even doable — unless
she used a green screen and filmed the whole thing in the basement.
A green screen, of
course, is the oldest trick in the movie-making book. You name the “how did
they film that?” movie — “Mission Impossible,” “Avatar,” “The Matrix,”
whatever — and I’ll show you scenes that they shot using the old-fashioned
green screen technique.To make it work, you film your actor in front of a
bright green background — either a green cloth or a painted wall. Then you
import the video into the computer, and its software elves cleverly replace
every pixel of green with a background you’ve selected, like a photograph or
a video you shot at another place or time. If it is done properly, the
audience never suspects that the actor was not, in fact, right there at the
Eiffel Tower, the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro or the moon.
¶The key word,
though, is “properly.” Getting green screen shots to look right is
fiendishly difficult. If the green dropcloth has wrinkles, if the actor
casts a shadow on it, if the actor’s lighting doesn’t match the substituted
video background, then the illusion is ruined. (Ever see the final scene of
“The Hunt for Red October”? The green screen setup is so crude, it almost
looks as if there are crayon lines around Sean Connery’s head.)
¶So as you can
imagine, my success at using home green screen kits has been pretty mixed.
Just hanging a green cloth usually doesn’t work very well. You have to light
the green cloth perfectly evenly, which requires at least two lights on
stands, to prevent shadows. Then you have to light the actor, which usually
requires a third light. And if you want your actor to walk, you need a
second green cloth on the ground (or you have to paint the floor).
¶After years
of fiddling around with amateur kits, I decided to see what a pro green
screen kit might cost. My daughter’s project needed one, and there have been
many times over the years when I’ve wished I had one for my own video
projects.
¶So I poked
around on photo-video Web sites like
bhphotovideo.com
and
adorama.com.
As I figured, the pro kits, containing both screen and
lights, cost $1,300 and up. (A 6-by-6 cloth with frame by itself costs
$675.) But there, nestled among all the high-priced kits, I saw something
that I thought must be a misprint: a complete green screen setup —
9-by-10-foot green screen, a second 5-by-7-foot cloth, two 500-watt lights
with 20-inch “softboxes” (diffusing screens for even light), two collapsible
seven-foot light stands, software to teach you green screen techniques and
perform the actual actor extraction — for $250.
¶But the
customer reviews were overwhelmingly glowing. All of them seemed shocked
that a rig this good could cost so little.
¶It’s called
the Westcott uLite Green Screen Lighting Kit.It comes in a surprisingly tiny box, but everything was
compactly folded inside.In our basement, I hung
the 9-by-10-foot screen by its grommets from a water pipe along the ceiling.The light stands were easy
to set up, sturdy and extremely easy to
position and adjust.
With one on each side of the green screen, I had a huge, perfectly evenly
lit, wrinkle-free background.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
A popular application of this green backdrop filming is in weather forecast
videos where the broadcaster is not really standing in front of a weather map.
While reading this I kept thinking of how an instructor might use this same
technology to be immersed in an Excel spreadsheet or a MS Access database.
Compared to how things used to be done with desktop
computers, accessing your smartphone seems as instantaneous as it gets. You
just pick up the device, tap a button, slide a finger to the right, enter
(or Swype) your passcode and you're in. The whole process takes about two
seconds and requires virtually no physical energy on your part. Piece of
cake.
As quick and painless as this seems, Apple wants to
simplify things even further for owners of its iPhones, iPads and other iOS
devices. Imagine walking up to your phone or tablet in its dock and seeing
the screen light up with a greeting. You pick it up and pull it a few inches
closer to your face, and voilŕ! the screen is unlocked and the digital
universe is instantly at your finger tips.
This reality is not too far off, according to a
patent filed recently by Apple. The company wants to build presence and
facial recognition into its device so that users can simply approach and
peer into a device in order to activate it. No more PIN numbers or
button-pressing.
This is a feature already available on jailbroken
iPhones, but one that works very slowly and can easily be hacked using a
photograph.
Update: As some of our diligent commenters have
pointed out, facial recognition unlock feature is also available in Ice
Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android. That implementation, however,
has been shown to be easily fooled and Google has acknowledged that its not
as secure as a traditional passcode.
The technology required to get this type of feature
to work effectively is pretty sophisticated and, as Patently Apple describes
it, "computationally expensive." The trade-off for using an alternative
method is weaker security, which defeats the purpose.
In a somewhat jargon-loaded post, the Apple
patent-watching blog describes how the company plans to overcome the
challenges associated with implementing such technology. Their method would
use a two-dimensional analysis of the placement of facial features as well
as skin tone and check those details against "target images" previously
captured by the device. This patent comes about a month after news of
Apple's acquisition of a patent for advanced 3D object recognition, which
could be used in a similar fashion.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This technology might have a tremendous future in online and onsite academic
integrity. Firstly, it might discourage students from hiring smart people to
take entire courses for them. Secondly, it might discourage students from hiring
smart people from taking examinations for them. Thirdly, it might discourage
fraudulent students from being admitted to universities or to pretend they were
admitted like the guy who keeps pretending he's a Harvard Student.
And it may have tremendous possibilities in crime prevention. For example, a
pedophile with a long rap sheet might find it harder to get a job teaching in
pre-school or K-12 schools.
Three University of
Pennsylvania students who recently dropped out to start an upstart
course-management system today unveiled their software, called
Coursekit, after
having raised more than $1-million in venture capital.
The trio, frustrated
with the systems offered by universities, such as Blackboard,
decided to team up and design their own online
course platform, which emphasizes social networking and an easy-to-use
interface. By May, the founders, Joesph Cohen, Dan Getelman, and Jim
Grandpre, had raised so much start-up cash, from sources including the
Founder Collective and IA Ventures, that they decided to quit school to
focus on developing Coursekit.
Thirty universities
tested Coursekit this fall, including Stanford and the University of
Pennsylvania.
Coursekit offers a
platform for hosting discussions, posting grades and syllabi, sharing
calendars and links, and creating student profiles. The company has
hired 80 student ambassadors to introduce the new course-management
system to students at colleges across the country.
The software is one
of several new challengers to Blackboard, which is used by a majority of
U.S. colleges. In October, Pearson announced
OpenClass, a free
course-management system, and last year a Utah company called
Instructure unveiled Canvas, which
is available under an open-source license.
For collaboration tools, we used Sharepoint in our
intro to MIS course, which is required for all business students. Since we
adopted Pearson products, Pearson provided with the full version of
Sharepoint and 200 access codes. Students can rent the ebook for 180 days on
Coursesmart for $24 (list price of hard copy is $56). My techphobic students
struggled with learning Sharepoint, and all of us, I included, did take some
time to get the hang of it. I think Sharepoint makes a great tool for an AIS
course because students have to make many security/control/access decisions
for their own group sites. For example, what kind of permissions do you
grant to various people/groups? How are you going to control access to
documents? Are you going to use check-out/check-in for documents or are you
going to let multiple people edit simultaneously?
I am going to use it in my graduate AIS course next
semester for the reasons stated above and because they will likely use
Sharepoint or some other set of collaboration tools in their professional
careers.
iTunes
as we know it is over. It is walking, talking, and
continuing to pretend it's alive, but
Spotify,
Europe's outrageously successful streaming music product, has just shown us
the future.
Though you might not even be aware of the
competitor that is attacking the music titan of the past decade, that iTunes
business model is about to be blown up completely and swiftly. And it could
even be thought of as fitting; iTunes accomplished the exact same thing
during its early-2000s attack on the bricks-and-mortar retail music
industry. Apple set the stage to decimate Tower Records and Sam Goody before
either had a clue their industry was about to revolt. But innovation theory
can provide a crystal ball; theory could have predicted iTunes' success and
it's currently predicting Spotify's success.
To appreciate the truth of this claim, it's vital
to understand one of Clayton Christensen's theories on marketing and product
development:
Jobs-to-be-done. Jobs-to-be-done suggests that in
order to predict how to develop, compare, and position our products, we
should be driven by a fundamental understanding of what that product is
hired to do. For example, every day I hire a Coke to be a wake-me-up
mid-afternoon break in my workday. To get the Coke, I walk from my building
to a store next door and pay $1.25. I could substitute a free cup of coffee
from my own office, which would provide my much-needed caffeine at no cost.
But because the job is to break up the afternoon, I value both the caffeine
in the product and the distance I walk to pick up the product. I am happy to
pay for the Coke because it completes the job I hire a mid-day beverage to
complete. To disrupt the purchase of my afternoon Coke, a product would has
to be fundamentally advantaged in one of the two areas I value for that
product; caffeine and time away from my desk.
When it comes to the music industry, I used to hire
Tower Records to deliver my music. For that job, I valued Tower's music
selection, the store's convenient locations, the fact that its music was
compatible with my Discman, and the low prices. When I compared Tower to
other options to fulfill that job, it was pretty well positioned.
Enter iTunes. After iTunes was introduced, its
online model beat Tower in selection, convenience, and price. As an online
storefront it had a fundamental advantage. It was in your home, had no shelf
space limiting its inventory, and could beat Tower on price because of its
lower fixed costs. The only thing that might have kept Tower treading water
at first was its ability to be compatible with Discmen, which we know now
disappeared quickly. With a basic grasp of technology innovation trends,
Tower should have known as much and immediately begun running around with
its hair on fire.
Now, a decade later, enter Spotify (at least, enter
the U.S. market). Based on the job of delivering music, Spotify completes
the job of delivering music in much the same way as iTunes does. Spotify is
conveniently located, has a wonderful selection, is compatible with my
computer, smartphone, and tablet (which are in turn compatible with my
stereo and car), and is backward-compatible to play music from my existing
iTunes library.
Audiences for oral presentations and poster
sessions at academic conferences often want more information about a
particular topic. One way to provide this, obviously, is to create printed
flyers or brochures and hope that you’ve brought enough copies for everyone
who’s interested. But what if your printed handout doesn’t make it all the
way back on your audience member’s trip home?
For example, Peter Organisciak gave a talk entitled
“When to Ask For Help: Evaluating Projects For Crowdsourcing,” and on one of
his presentation slides–as you can see in the photo at the start of this
post–he displayed this QR code:
If you have to jointly
author a spreadsheet with a colleague, what is the first thing that you do?
Email it back and forth. This can be painful, particularly as you try to
keep track of your partner's changes and hope the emails transit back and
forth across the Internet. Add a third or fourth person, and things get
worse. Luckily, there is a better way, and a number of Web-based service
providers have stepped up with tools to make spreadsheet sharing a lot
easier than sending attachments.
We've written about a
few of them, including
Longjump and Hyperbase (one of our products of the
year for 2008), but I have tried a bunch others, and will show you what is
involved and how they stack up.
The process is very
straightforward: you either copy and paste data or take your spreadsheet and
upload it to the service, after creating accounts for you and your
collaborators. Then you can make changes via your Web browser, no other
software is required. Some of the services allow for more bells and
whistles. Setup time is minimal; your data is properly protected by the
service and safe from harm. And you don't need to learn any Web/database
programming skills either.
For many people, the
spreadsheet is still one of the most popular low-end database applications.
The rubric of a table of rows and columns is easily understood and can
easily be used as a way to view records and fields of a database. Plus, you
don't need to design special reports to view your data entries, and you can
easily sort your data without having to create data dictionaries or other
database structures, just use the appropriate Excel commands. Having a
specialized service that can share this data makes it easier to collaborate
too, whether your partners are across the office or on the other side of the
world. As long as they have an Internet connection, they are good to go.
There are eight different
services currently available, in order of increasing cost:
When you decide on the
particular service, it pays to read the pricing fine print. There are
discounts for annual subscriptions on most services, and some such as
Smartsheet offer additional discounts for non-profit and educational
institutions. All of these services have 14 day or 30 day free trials to
get started, so you can get a feel of what is involved in manipulating
your data and how easy it is to make changes, produce reports, and
receive notifications.
Continued in article
June 18, 2011 reply from Amy Dunbar
I find Google docs great for small spreadsheets,
but cumbersome for large files.
I set up Dropbox folders for each of my groups in
my online class (3-5 students in a group). They post their project
spreadsheets in the group folders, and if a student has a question, I can
quickly open the spreadsheet to see what is going on. Students contact me by
AIM and we discuss the spreadsheet via AIM. Works like a charm for me.
With the launch of
Google Plus,
there may be some confusion as to how the photos uploaded to the social
network (Google+) integrate with Google's online photo-sharing service
(Picasa),
especially in terms of storage limits. The answer provides some great news
for Google Plus users - nearly everything you upload to Google Plus won't
count towards your storage limits on Picasa, with the only exception being
videos longer than 15 minutes.
And there's another nifty feature involving
photo-tagging, too - your Google+ friends can now tag your Picasa photos.
Thus far I past my photographs on two Web servers at Trinity University:
Here's one we missed.
Bing launched Bing+ last week, it just skipped all
the unnecessary stuff. (It's not really called Bing+.) There's a
new feature called
Linked Pages
that allows Bing users (U.S. only, for now) to connect
their various websites and profiles to their Bing identities, using Facebook
for authentication. You can also link your Facebook friends to their pages.
Thanks to its relationship with Facebook, Microsoft
has the advantage of not needing to build its own identity provider or
social network. Everyone's already on Facebook. To build good results for
people, Bing will use the same technique Facebook Groups use: get friends to
draw their own graph. Just like with Facebook Groups, if a friend connects
you to something you don't want, you can remove it permanently. We all
thought that feature would suck for Groups, but it worked just fine.
Facebook Groups build themselves, and Bing can build identities the same
way.
Social Network Overkill
The interesting thing is, this is exactly what
Google+ is for, but
the product isn't being pitched that way. Google's
social layer is all about establishing the Google-presence for people and
brands, so they can appear across Google-land, especially in
Search, plus Your World. But Google+ is spun as a
place for "sharing." It has all these pieces of a social network, but
people aren't using them.
It's a shame, because some of these features are
absolutely wonderful.
What could be more social than Hangouts? Google+
is full of great ideas, but it is struggling to bring them together. The
user experience isn't there. And that's all
because Google felt the need to build a full-blown social network itself in
order to act as an identity service.
Couldn't Hangouts have just been a Gmail feature?
Social Search Is All We Needed
There's no need for a new social network, but there
is a reason to put personal identities in search. Searching for
people has always been a terrible experience. It's nearly impossible to find
the person you're looking for, unless they're famous. Search engines need an
identity layer.
Bing is just being honest about that. If you want
to control the way you appear in search, you can connect the sites
and pages that matter to you via Facebook. Your friends can do it, too. When
you use Bing to search for people, now you'll be able to find the content
that's related to them. That's
what Search, plus Your World does for Google, but
Bing does it without requiring this new, extra place to waste time online.
Google could have done that. The Google+ profile
works exactly the way Bing's Linked Pages does, allowing users to
link their outside sites and pages to themselves.
It could have just made a Facebook app, and boom, there are your social
search results. But that's not how the business works. Google and Facebook
can't cooperate. They have to compete for eyeballs around social content,
and
Facebook is winning.
Jensen Comment
I've previously written about why I think Bing Maps is superior to Google Maps.
Sometimes (horrors) Microsoft really does do a better job when it comes late
onto the scene ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Travel
I think it would be great if some of the faculty who teach large classes (say
over 50 students) would share some of their teaching tips on the AECM.
Jensen Comment
At this point Mark really does not offer answers in the above article. And I
never taught a large class on campus or online so I don't have a lot to offer.
It is important to discuss what is meant by a large class. Over 30 years ago
I had an economist friend who taught economics via television piped into
basements of dormitories at Michigan State University. His classes always had
over 1,000 students. But these were not all "his" classes. Students were also
part of relatively small recitation sections where they could personally
identify with a teaching assistant in Al's television course.
I think a large class is a class of 90 like you find in the Harvard Business
School when there are no recitation sections that are also part of the course. I
never could figure out how case-method instructors could grade case discussion
participation when each student on average got less than one minute of air time
in a 90-minute class. I don't think we turn to the Harvard Business School to
seek out technology ideas for large classes.
Barry Rice had large basic accounting classes at Loyola College in Maryland.
Over 20 years ago his technology of choice was ToolBook and HyperGraphics
hand-held clickers (response pads) where he flashed student names on the screen
and asked them to recite in front of the class ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#ResponsePads
Probably the pedagogy of choice for large courses is video where students
outside the classroom can learn asynchronously at their own learning paces and
styles. At BYU the basic accounting courses rarely meet face-to-face. The
technical learning all takes place via variable-speed video (faculty at other
colleges can adopt the specially-recorded BYU DVD disks) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
I think it would be great if some of the faculty who teach large classes (say
over 50 students) would share some of their teaching tips on the AECM.
We thought we’d begin a new year of Wired Campus
with a quick look back at the biggest tech stories of 2010, as voted by you.
Items concerning Facebook, iPads, and cheating ranked high in page views.
Here are the top 10 headlines from our tech blog:
On
Tech Therapy, our monthly technology podcast, an
interview with Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales scored the most listeners.
Here are the three most popular tech podcasts from 2010:
As for our longer, feature articles about
technology, a story about a one-man university on YouTube drew the most
readers. Here are the top five technology articles from The Chronicle:
The OpenScout Tool Library is a social network of
individuals and collectives who are developing or using learning resources
and want to share their stories and resources from different countries.
The OpenScout Tool Library is currently hosting the activities of the
COLEARN community of research in collaborative learning and educational
technologies in the Portuguese language. This group is run by Alexandra
Okada (The Open University UK) and consists of learners, educators and
researchers from academic institutions in Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Their
interests focus on collaborative participation through social media,
colearning (collaborative open learning) using Open Educational Resources (OER),
Social Media and Web 2.0 research. There are 26 research groups from
Brazilian and Portugal universities - 115 people currently registered in the
Tool Library.
At the moment, this community is developing a book project called "Web 2.0:
Open Educational Resources in Learning and Professional Development". From
January to February 2012, three workshops will be run in the Tool Library
for improving OER skills: image, presentation and audio/visual material.
These collaborative activities and workshops aim at engaging people in
developing their skills and discussing concepts as well as preparing
themselves to be OER users who are able to produce, remix and share open
resources and open ideas.
Before George Washington University renewed its
iTunes U contract, the administration wanted to know how the podcasts
impacted student learning and engagement.
In fall 2009, the university's Center for
Innovative Teaching and Learning studied a world history class of 262
students to find the answer.
But the answer isn't yes or no — the answer depends
on the student's learning style, gender and motivation.
“If your goal is to find a magic bullet that makes
all students better, this isn’t it," said Hugh Agnew, a professor from the
Elliott School of International Affairs who taught the course. "But If your
goal is to reach some students better that maybe you aren’t reaching so
terribly well, then I think this is worth trying.”
6 interesting results He created 10-minute podcasts
with graphics and audio, as well as a text transcript of the podcasts with
visuals to supplement his lecture class. In the first research run, half of
the class used the podcasts, and the other half used the text. In the second
run, they switched.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on learning and memory are at the following two sites:
Greg Smith, chief information officer at George Fox,
said the iPad's technological limitations—its inability to multitask and print,
and its limited storage space—have kept students dependent on their notebooks.
"That's the problem with the iPad: It's not an independent device," he said.
"Classroom iPad Programs Get Mixed Response," by Travis Kaya,
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 20, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Classroom-iPad-Programs-Get/27046/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A few weeks after a handful of colleges gave away
iPads to determine the tablet's place in the classroom, students and faculty
seem confident that the device has some future in academe.
But they're still not exactly sure where that might
be.
At those early-adopter schools, iPads are competing
with MacBooks as the students' go-to gadget for note taking and Web surfing.
Zach Kramberg, a first-year student at George Fox University, which allowed
incoming students to choose between a complimentary iPad or MacBook this
fall, said the tablet has become an important tool for recording and
organizing lecture notes. He also takes the device with him to the
university's dimly lit chapel so he can follow along with an app called
iBible. "The iPad's very easy to use once you figure them out," he said.
Still, Mr. Kramberg said the majority of students
rely on bound Bibles in chapel and stick to pen and paper or MacBooks in the
classroom.
Greg Smith, chief information officer at George
Fox, said the iPad's technological limitations—its inability to multitask
and print, and its limited storage space—have kept students dependent on
their notebooks. "That's the problem with the iPad: It's not an independent
device," he said.
Mr. Smith said that the 67 students—10 percent of
the freshman class—that opted for iPads over MacBooks are really excited
about the technology but have not been "pushing the capabilities" of the
device.
Caitlin Corning, a history professor at George Fox,
said it's been hard to meld iPads into the curriculum because only a small
subset of her students has the device. Ms. Corning used the iPad as a
portable teaching tool during a student art trip to Europe this summer,
flashing Van Gogh works on the screen when they were in the places he
painted them. Translating that portable-classroom experience into her
classroom back in Oregon, however, has not been easy. "It's still a work in
progress," she said. "It's a little complex because only some of the
freshmen have iPads."
Faculty members at Seton Hill University, which
gave iPads to all full-time students, are working with the developers of an
e-book app called Inkling to come up with new ways to integrate the iPad
into classroom instruction. The textbook software—one of many in
development—allows students to access interactive graphics and add notes as
they read along. Faculty members can access the students' marginalia to see
whether they understand the text. They can also remotely receive and answer
questions from students in real time.
Catherine Giunta, an associate professor of
business at Seton Hill, said the technology has changed the way students
interact with their textbooks and how she interacts with her students. While
reviewing the margin notes of a student in her marketing class, Ms. Giunta
was able to pinpoint and correct a student's apparent misunderstanding of a
concept that was going to be covered in class the next day. "The
misunderstanding may not have been apparent until [the student] did a
written report," Ms. Giunta said. "I could really give her individualized
instruction and guidance."
As students and faculty members around the country
feel around for new ways to integrate the iPad into academic life, a handful
of programs are taking a more formal approach to finding its place in the
classroom. Students in the Digital Cultures and Creativity program at the
University of Maryland at College Park will turn a critical eye on the iPad
as a study tool while integrating it into their curriculum. "I think
[students are] taking a sort of wait-and-see approach," said Matthew
Kirschenbaum, the program director and an associate professor of English.
Similarly, the faculty at Indiana University has
formed a 24-member focus group to evaluate iPad-driven teaching strategies.
The groups have started meeting this month to assess how their iPad
experiments are going, with a preliminary report due in January. "It's meant
to be a supportive, collaborative, formalized conversation," said Stacy
Morrone, Indiana's associate dean of learning technologies. "We don't expect
that everything will go perfectly."
Although not entirely related to the substance of
the iPad educational debate, a pilot program at Long Island University was
thrust into the spotlight over the weekend in an animated e-mail exchange
between a college journalist and Apple's founder Steve Jobs. As Gawker
reports it, complaints about a few unreturned media inquiries from a
deadline-stressed reporter led to a curt "leave us alone" response from the
Apple chief executive.
In the e-mail chain, Mr. Jobs said, "Our goals do
not include helping you get a good grade."
Cutting-Edge Social Media Approaches to Business Education: Teaching with
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and Blogs, by Charles Wankel ---
http://management-education.net/rmed9/
February 12, 2011 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
Bob, Steve,
The forensic practices at the Big 4 are WAY ahead
of the accounting academia in using the technology to cover the dark side of
social networking in e-discovery. We in the accounting academia have been
too busy regressing to take note.
I know of at least two who used it extensively in
fraud examination as far back as 2008. They demonstrated its use to me while
I was designing our fraud examination course.
I'm not sure I've ever said this out loud, but
ReadWriteWeb
is my absolute favorite blog in all the blogosphere,
and has been since they began covering all things technology-related
in 2003 or so—it's
the emphasis on critical thinking and analysis rather than knee-jerk
"first!" responses to news and events that makes me respect them so.
However, I'm interested in your answers as
well. No, I don't aim to write a similar story as Audrey, but I do
wonder about the different answers based on the different audiences.
Audrey's readership comes from the already highly-technologically-inclined,
often found on Twitter. The ProfHacker audience in the CHE is not
necessarily so. In fact, I think it is safe to say that the majority of the
ProfHacker readership is not on Twitter and is more
technology-curious than technology-embedded (or invested).
So, I'd like to hear from you as well. In the
comments, please let us know what's the tech tool you're most
excited to take into the classroom with you this fall? (anything
hardware or software "counts," and I'll even accept analog technologies as
valid answers)
Hopefully, given your responses and Audrey's own
article from (predominantly) her own audience, there will be some
interesting food for thought on the state of technology in higher ed.
Jensen Comment
“Taking into the classroom” is a rather ambiguous
phrase that should probably read “taking into the course.” In the latter case,
something Camtasia is still on my list of important priorities for things to add
to virtually any course whether onsite or online ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Videos Illustrating How to Make Videos Using Camtasia Version 7.1
October 13, 2011 message from Rick Newmark
Here are three videos that I made
to show my colleagues
how to use Camtasia to make a class video for when you
go out of town, or to create a tutorial for your class.
I figured that some of you might be interested, so here they are. Please
note that these are not Richard Campbell-quality videos. I shot these
quickly and without any script. I made only a couple of minor edits.
Also, please note I used
Screencast-O-Matic to make the first part of Part 1 so that I could capture
setting up Camtasia Recorder. Pay attention to before and after I press the
Record button to see the differences between the two applications.
FYI, In Part 1, I used the
following to demonstrate different ways to use Camtasia
1.Running virtual machines on your PC using Virtual Box
·Apple Snow Leopard 10.6
·Linux Ubuntu 11.04
2.Creating a two-table query in Access 2010
3.Demonstrating how to use Windows Journal with a Tablet PC—also
applies to using the Sympodium on a classroom computer.
·I showed how to use the REA Enterprise Ontology, t-accounts,
and journal entries to explain the following
i.
The nature of accounts receivable and unearned revenue, including the
duality imbalance that creates them
ii.How to use t-accounts to design database queries to compute accounts
receivable and unearned revenue.
Rick
----------------------------------------
Richard Newmark
Professor, School of Accounting and Computer Information Systems
Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business 2004 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
Winner University of Northern Colorado
Campus Box 128, Kepner Hall 2095D
Greeley, CO 80639 (970)
351-1213 (office) (970)
351-1068 (fax) http://PhDuh.com/unc
Update on Lanny Arvan: From SCALE Experiments to Blogs
Years ago economics professor Lanny Arvan directed the famous in a controlled
SCALE experiments comparing resident full-time students at the University of
Illinois taking onsite versus online courses from the same instructors using
common grade assessment procedures. Thirty courses across multiple disciplines
were examined across five years of experimentation ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
In spite of some technology glitches in those olden days, many students tended
to prefer taking the courses online. Typically, many more students moved from B
grades to A grades in online courses. However, there tended to not be much
difference for D and F students, indicating that lack of motivation and aptitude
cuts across online and onsite pedagogies in mostly the same way.
“It is my impression
that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of it. It is not only as
Dostoevsky put it that 'taking a new step, uttering a new word is what
people fear most.' Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely
without some stirring of foreboding.” --Eric Hoffer, Between The Devil And The Dragon
I tried the new in fall
2009,
teaching with student blogs, (look in sidebar and
scroll down) out in the open where anyone who wanted to could see what the
students were producing. The blogging wasn’t new for me. I’d been
doing that for almost five years. Having students
blog was a different matter. I had no experience in getting them to overcome
their anxieties, relaxing in writing online, learning to trust one another
that way. Normally I believe what’s good for the goose is good for the
gander. If I could blog comfortably and get something from that, so could
they. On reflection, however, I was very gentle with myself when I started
to blog. As an experiment to prove to myself whether I could do it, for
three full weeks I made at least one post a day, 500 to 600 words, a couple
of times 1,100 to 1,200 words. I didn’t tell a soul I was doing this. There
was no pressure on me to keep it up. It was out in the open, yet nobody
seemed to be watching. After those three weeks I felt ready. In the
teaching, however, at best I could ask the students to blog once a week. I
gave the students weekly prompts on the readings or to follow up on class
discussion. (See the
class calendar for fall 2009. The prompts
are in the Friday afternoon entries.) If I let them blog quietly to get
comfortable as I had done, the entire semester would expire before they were
ready to go public. There seemed no alternative but to have them plunge in.
The uncertainty about how
best to assist the students once they had taken the plunge created an
important symmetry between the students and me; we both were to learn about
how to do this well, often by first doing it less well. Though it was an
inadvertent consequence, of all my teaching over the past 30 years I believe
this course came closest to emulating the
Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education by
Chickering and Gamson. I learned to comment on the student posts, not with
some pre-thought-through response based on what I anticipated they’d write,
but rather to react to where they appeared to be in their own thinking.
(This
post provides a typical example. The student
introduced time management as a theme. My comment aimed to make her think
more about time management.) As natural as that is to do in ordinary
conversation, I had never done it before when evaluating student work.
Indeed, I didn’t think of these comments as evaluation at all. I thought of
them as response. In the normal course of my non-teaching work I respond to
colleagues all the time and they respond to me. This form of online
interaction in the class made it more like the rest of my interactions at
work.
Most of the students were
quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a
seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the
Honors Program, but lacking experience in
this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception
of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated
mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for
them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was
quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more
responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on
which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so
long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of
the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the
writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers
if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they were not used
to hearing. So it took a while for them to believe it was true. In several
instances they tried it out only after being frustrating with the results
from their usual approach. This,
as Ken Bain teaches us,
is how students learn on a fundamental level.
I'm crustier now than I
was as a younger faculty member. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to deal
with the emotion that underlies giving feedback to students when that
feedback is less than entirely complimentary to them. Yet given their
awkward early attempts at writing posts that’s exactly what honest response
demanded. It’s here where having the postings and the comments out in the
open so all can see is so important, before the class has become a
community, before the students have made up their minds about what they
think about this blogging stuff. Though both the writing and the response
are highly subjective, of necessity, it is equally
important for the process to be fair. How can a
student who receives critical comments judge those comments to be fitting
and appropriate, rather than an example of the insensitive instructor
picking on the hapless student? Perhaps a very mature student can discern
this even-handedly from the comments themselves and a self-critique of the
original post. I believe most students benefit by reading the posts of their
classmates, making their own judgments about those writings and then seeing
the instructor’s comments, finally making a subsequent determination as to
whether those comments seem appropriate and helpful for the student in
reconsidering the writing.
A positive feedback loop
can be created by this process. The commenting, more than any other activity
the instructor engages in, demonstrates the instructor’s commitment to the
course and to the students. In turn the students, learning to appreciate the
value of the comments, start to push themselves in the writing. Their
learning is encouraged this way. Further, since the blogging is not a
competition between the students and their classmates, those who like
getting comments begin to comment on the posts of other students. The
elements of the community that the class can become are found in this
activity.
Since on a daily basis I
use blogs and blog readers in my regular work, one of the original reasons
for me taking this approach rather than use the campus learning management
system was simply that I thought it would be more convenient for me. Also,
given my job as a learning technology administrator, I went into the course
with some thought that I might showcase the work afterward. Openness is
clearly better for that. However in retrospect neither of these is primary.
The main reason to be open is to set a good tone for the class. We want
ideas to emerge and not remain concealed.
Yet there remains one
troubling element: student privacy. Is open blogging this way consistent
with
FERPA? As best as I’ve been able to determine, it
is as long as students “opt in.” (I did give students the alternatives of
writing in the class LMS site or writing in the class wiki site. No student
opted for those.) My experience suggests, however, that is not quite
sufficient. If most students opt in, peer pressure may drive others to opt
in as well. More importantly, however, students choose to opt in when they
are largely ignorant of the consequences. Might they feel regret after they
better understand what the blogging is all about?
If you want your web pages to only display what you
want to read, this is an incredible tool. It strips a web page of all but
what you want to read. Go to this web site, check the settings you desire,
and drag the Readabiity box to your browser toolbar. When you are viewing a
page click on the Readabiity box on your browser toolbar and the page you
are viewing is cleaned of all but what you want to read.
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Sunlight is a site promoting cutting-edge technology
and ideas to make government transparent and accountable.
You’ll enjoy their design contest. I particularly thought the IRS web page
redesign, US Passport application redesign and How Laws are made to be
excellent examples of clear communications.
The school year isn't so far away, and educators
may want to take a close look at this most helpful web application. Quizlet
allows students and teachers to create flashcard sets with little fuss, and
they can also share their flashcards with friends via email, Facebook, or
MySpace. The site has a great "How do I??" section that provides many
answers to how to best use the program. Quizlet is compatible with all
operating systems.
Want to make an online notice board? It's never
been easier than with Wallwisher, which is a new application that offers a
number of excellent features. Visitors can use the application to put up
just about any item on their wall, including video clips, audio files,
drawings, photographs, and so on. "Walls" can be set so only certain
individuals can have access to them, and visitors do not need to sign up an
account to get started. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
School districts and college campuses across the
country are trying to grab students' attention and teach them in ways they
learn best. That means they're adding social media features to learning
management systems, offering more online and blended courses, and taking
advantage of mobile devices.
Check out the top trends in learning management
systems, online learning and mobile computing identified in a 2010
Software & Information
Industry Association report released this month.
Learning management systems
In 2008, 35 percent of the K-12 schools surveyed
said they had no plans to buy a
learning management system, but lower prices and
higher federal accountability requirements will change their minds,
according to the report. And when they do change their minds, they'll be
looking for digital content and professional development to go along with
the systems.
They'll also be looking for tools including
curriculum planning and lesson management. These tools allow them to create
detailed lesson plans for individual students and assign digital curriculum
lessons to students.
In higher education, professors increasingly rely
on digital content and use social media to teach their students. They're
also adding more online classes and reducing administrative costs. As a
result, learning management systems should be incorporating rich Internet
applications, social media, user-generated content, mobile devices, Software
as a Service and business process management systems.
Faculty members expect to do a number of tasks in
learning management systems:
Post grades, access class rosters
Set up class chats to answer questions
Hold electronic office hours
Add course assignments to student calendars
Send announcements to the class
Access enhanced learning management and course
management systems
Online learning
The e-learning market has been expanding steadily,
and over the next four years, forecasters predict that K-12 online learning
will advance at a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent, while higher
education will grow at 8 percent.
In online learning, blended or hybrid classes that
combine face-to-face and online instruction are popping up, particularly in
higher education. And the expansion of
open source content on sites such as Flatworld
Knowledge, Curriki and CK12 give teachers and professors more options to
potentially save money.
Mobile devices, WiMAX technology, podcasts and
software tools allow students to learn any time, anywhere. And that
mobile computing experience is what they're
looking for.
Mobile computing
In the past two years,
netbooks have arrived on the scene, but their
sales are already growing more than 200 percent per year. K-12 schools
adopt them at a higher rate because many of them provide devices for their
students. Netbook trends include 10-inch screens, faster processors, longer
battery life and built-in wireless wide area networks.
Laptop use is still growing steadily, but not as
fast as it was previously. Laptop trends include LED backlights, backlit
keyboards, more rugged mechanical designs, larger hard drives, newer
processor designs and increased availability of 3G/4G wireless wide area
network support.
Meanwhile, tablet computers are becoming more
popular in postsecondary education, and companies are creating smartbooks
that have long battery lives of about two days.
More people view Web pages through smart phones and
cell phones than through computers. Cell phones have become widely accepted
in postsecondary education, while many K-12 districts still ban them in the
classroom.
As far as operating systems go, Microsoft Windows
leads the pack on desktop and laptop systems. But Mac OS X from Apple,
Windows Mobile, iPhone OS, Symbian, Linux and Android have entered the
mobile market.
On the connectivity side, most postsecondary
campuses have robust WiFi, but less than 30 percent of K-12 classrooms have
robust WiFi access. While WiFi has been around for more than 10 years, WiMAX is
coming on the scenes as a 4G wide area data service in the U.S. And don't
forget the cellular 3G and 4G data services for smart phones.
While these are some trends that are happening now
and in the next year or two, the report also forecasts what education
technology will look like in the future. In the next five years, the report
predicts that
cloud computing,
cell phone use and 3G and 4G data plans will
become mainstream in education.
I take notes. A lot of notes. I take notes when I
read, when I'm in meetings, when I'm listening to lectures, when I'm
figuring out what I need to do any given day. In fact, if I ever tell you
that I'm going to do something, but you don't see me make myself a note
about it, don't believe me.
Notes are the key to remembering, for me. Or, more
precisely: the act of taking notes is the key to remembering. Something
about the act of taking notes helps make an idea, or an issue, or a plan
more real to me.
I used to take these notes longhand, in various
notebooks, some devoted to particular projects, some to more general
notetaking. Several years back, though, I began shifting my notetaking to
the computer, so that those notes would be more easily searchable and
repurposeable.
Originally, I used Word for this purpose, but after
one MS Office upgrade too many, requiring that all of my documents be
converted (and thus become unreadable to the older version of the software),
I decided that I wanted something more lightweight. The purpose of these
notes, after all, was the text that went into them, and not their
formatting; plain vanilla ".txt" files were likely to remain highly flexible
into the future.
But those .txt files started proliferating on my
machine, and so did the folders I used to organize them. And while Mac OS
X's search capabilities via Spotlight aren't all that bad now, that wasn't
always the case. So when I stumbled across
Steven Johnson's post about how he used DEVONthink,
I was sold.
DEVONthink is an extraordinarily powerful
information management system -- a bit too powerful, quite honestly, for
what I needed it to do. So back in May, when
Shawn Miller guest-posted here on ProfHacker
about how he uses
Evernote, I was
persuaded to give it a try.
One might begin to think I'm too easily swayed, but
honestly, I test out a lot of software that doesn't stick with me long. I've
been using Evernote for just shy of two months now, though, and I'm fairly
sure I'll be using it for a while. A few reasons why:
1. Automatic. I have Evernote
installed on my office desktop, my home desktop, my laptop, my iPad, and my
iPhone. And each of those instances automatically connects to the Evernote
server to keep my notes synchronized across all my devices. I've had one
incident in which I accidentally overwrote a more recent version of a note
by editing an old version before my iPhone had finished downloading the most
recent updates to my notebooks, but now I'm more cautious to be sure
everything has synchronized before I start typing in an existing note.
2. Web accessible. My notes are
also of course directly accessible from the Evernote server, should I not
have one of those five devices with me.
3. Lightweight. The Evernote
application itself has a very small footprint, using the teeniest amount of
memory and disk space. It's also quite nice in terms of response time. And
as most of my notes are just plain text, the database doesn't take up much
in the way of space.
4. Flexible. Of course, I don't
have to confine my notes to text with Evernote: I can easily
capture entire web pages with the Chrome (or other browser) extension, I can
import images and PDFs, and any number of other things I haven't even tried
yet. And, as Shawn pointed out, images are OCRable, so that the text within
them becomes searchable just like the rest of my notes.
5. Free. As I was just
experimenting with Evernote over the last two months, I haven't committed to
the paid version as yet. But the free version is thus far everything I need.
I've never come anywhere near using all of the monthly data allowance of the
free version, and the little ad in the corner of the application is
inoffensive. At some point, I'll probably upgrade to the paid version,
partially for a bit more flexibility in the kinds of files I can attach to
notes, and partially to support the team developing a really great project.
I do perhaps wish that my text files were really
stored as text files (Evernote saves them in its own proprietary
XML-based format, as well as in HTML format), but for what I'm doing, just
being able to find and copy the notes is enough. And overall I've had a
great experience with Evernote so far, which is allowing my notetaking habit
to become more productive and more organized than before.
For anyone who spent time in public practice, the “timesheet”
was both a good thing and a bad thing! It helped you keep track of what you
accomplished (and what you didn’t). I have often wondered whether
maintaining a timesheet would be a useful exercise for a faculty member.
A couple of years ago, I discovered a personal
timesheet program called iZepto
developed by
Shine Technologies, an Australian
company. I started using iZepto to keep track of my time. iZepto is
particularly useful when preparing my annual faculty activitity report.
iZepto is a Web 2.0 hosted software service. There
is nothing to download except reports that you setup and print
periodically. It is easy to tailor to personal needs. Classify your
activities in ways that make sense to you.
iZepto is free for 1 to 3 users. Great price! For
iPhone users, there is a free
iPhone application that you can
download from the iPhone App Store. What could be more useful?
iZepto is a great personal productivity tool. Take
a look. Give it a try.
While attending a recent accounting education
conference, I played with
Pulse Smartpen by Livescribe.
The Pulse Smartpen records and links audio to what you
write. It provides an interesting way to take notes and capture information
that can be played back later for review, study, and/or sharing with others.
I was curious about ways the Pulse Smartpen might
be used to create course materials and share them with students.
Livescribe’s website includes a variety of illustrative recordings. Click
this link to view a demo lecture entitled “Crossing
the Chasm.” The demo shows how to use
the Pulse Smartpen to record and share a lecture that includes
drawing a picture or diagram and supporting the drawing with audio.
[NOTE: In order to make the viewing screen easier to see, you may wish to
click the icon in the upper right-corner of the playback screen to enlarge
the viewing screen.]
I see how the Pulse Smartpen can capture a drawing
and audio explaining the drawing. This could be particularly useful for
creating a walk-through explanation of a problem or process. Note that you
need to draw the picture from scratch as you put together a walk-through
explanation.
At Holmdel High School in New Jersey, students
speak Spanish in front of their class, but they also practice their language
skills on the phone.
This year, Spanish 2 teacher Katy Taylor wanted to
find a different way to assess their progress in addition to listening to
oral presentations in class. So, she asked them to call her Google Voice
number and leave a message.
On their own time, the students read something in
Spanish or create a dialogue, which could take up to 1 1/2 minute. Google
Voice captures the audio and sends her an e-mail with the recording
attached. Then she listens to their recordings and e-mails them feedback —
and it's all free.
Google Voice, a telecommunications service by
Google launched in March 2009, provides a U.S. phone number, chosen by the
user from available numbers in selected area codes, free of charge to each
user account.
“It was kind of just fun to experiment and see how
it works in the classroom," Taylor said, "and the kids respond really well
to it.”
Instead of taking up clas time, they dial in to her
phone number, and then she can go online that evening to hear what they've
done.
Many students are afraid to make mistakes in front
of their peers, so when they do receive a recording assignment, they're more
apt to take risks because they have some privacy.
“I’m hoping that the end result will be that
students are speaking more and getting feedback," Taylor said. "Every time I
think it gets a little better.”
March 11,
2010 message from XXXXX
Bob,
I am wondering if you know of any websites where I can gain access to watch
camtasia-style (or narrated powerpoints) videos/lectures of upper level
accounting instruction?
My Dean asked me to look into creating an asynchronous, distance/hybrid
accounting program. I want to get an idea of what is out there. I think the
classes I need are:
AIS Cost Intermediate 1 and 2 Tax Auditing Advanced GNP or NFP Any other
advanced accounting, like advanced cost.
Thank you,
XXXXX
March 11,
2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Firstly, I would begin with the asynchronous way basic accounting is taught at
BYU almost entirely with variable-speed videos even to resident students living
on campus ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
BYU sells these video CDs to the public at a reasonable price.
Next I would enter a number of search terms into YouTube ---
http://www.youtube.com/
Examples include:
Accounting Information Systems
Accounting Ethics
Intermediate accounting
Advanced accounting
Governmental accounting
Hedge accounting
Cost Accounting
Managerial Accounting
Fair Value Accounting
Auditing
SAP or ERP
XBRL
I'm not sure I've ever said this out loud, but
ReadWriteWeb
is my absolute favorite blog in all the blogosphere,
and has been since they began covering all things technology-related
in 2003 or so—it's
the emphasis on critical thinking and analysis rather than knee-jerk
"first!" responses to news and events that makes me respect them so.
However, I'm interested in your answers as
well. No, I don't aim to write a similar story as Audrey, but I do
wonder about the different answers based on the different audiences.
Audrey's readership comes from the already highly-technologically-inclined,
often found on Twitter. The ProfHacker audience in the CHE is not
necessarily so. In fact, I think it is safe to say that the majority of the
ProfHacker readership is not on Twitter and is more
technology-curious than technology-embedded (or invested).
So, I'd like to hear from you as well. In the
comments, please let us know what's the tech tool you're most
excited to take into the classroom with you this fall? (anything
hardware or software "counts," and I'll even accept analog technologies as
valid answers)
Hopefully, given your responses and Audrey's own
article from (predominantly) her own audience, there will be some
interesting food for thought on the state of technology in higher ed.
Jensen Comment
“Taking into the classroom” is a rather ambiguous
phrase that should probably read “taking into the course.” In the latter case,
something Camtasia is still on my list of important priorities for things to add
to virtually any course whether onsite or online ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed
captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire
listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the
video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you
can even search inside the video. Here's an
an example of video that includes a transcript.
I suggest you contact my good friend Amy Dunbar about how she uses Camtasia
videos in her online tax courses --- Amy.Dunbar@business.uconn.edu
In the future U.S. accounting programs will be building in more and more IFRS.
Here there’s a heck of a lot of free educational material available ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#IFRSlearning
There are some good cases available, especially from the Big Four.
There is also a lot of free XBRL material, including some good videos ---
http://www.xbrl.org/Home/
Click on “Education and Training”
The AICPA has a library of both fee and free videos ---
http://www.aicpa.org/
Enter the search term “video”
Other organizations have some deals on videos for courses, including the IIA,
Certified Fraud Examiners, etc.
There’s a ton of free material on ethics and fraud.
"MIT's Management School Shares Teaching Materials (Cases) Online," by
Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27, 2009 --- Click Here
Though some business schools charge for the “case studies” they develop as
teaching aids, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today that it
is making a set of teaching materials available free online.
The announcement comes eight years after MIT created its OpenCourseWare project,
which makes instructional materials for courses available online for free.
I forgot to mention the AAA Commons where there’s now a great deal of available,
including syllabi, tutorials, course materials, videos, and textbook
recommendations ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
Soon many of the AAA Commons pages will be available to the world in general and
not just AAA members. Among other things this makes the resources available to
all of your students
New features have transformed Excel into a business intelligence tool with
some surprising and very powerful applications.
An apple grower in New Zealand has a warehouse stocked with different types
of apples stored in crates on shelves.
It would be useful for him to know the location not just of the type of
apples and where they are in the warehouse, but also how old they are.
With this information, he could better manage his inventory and improve the
speed at which the apples could leave the warehouse and more stock could be
added.
New features in Excel
One low-cost
solution to this, perhaps surprisingly, lies in Microsoft
Excel. It’s not
found in the tried and tested spreadsheet which most businesses have used
for a decade or more, but in one of the newer features which has transformed
Excel from a data entry tool to one offering self-serve business
intelligence.
The apple
warehouse example was one of the business cases which came across the desk
of Excel expert Mynda Treacy, who operates the training site My Online Training Hub.
Treacy, who has the status of a “Most Valuable Professional” (MVP)
accredited by Microsoft, is in the business of helping her clients solve
data and business intelligence issues with Excel.
When the New Zealand apple grower got in touch, she recognised the problem
could be addressed with a new feature called 3D Maps, which is now fully
integrated in Excel 2016 as part of the Office 365 suite.
3D Maps was previously called Power Maps and was available under particular
licences as part of Excel 2013, but is now simply a tab which can be
accessed on the Excel programs downloaded by hundreds of thousands of
Australian businesses as part of their Office subscription.
“It was super easy and very intuitive,” says Treacy. “You just drag and drop
from a data spreadsheet onto 3D Maps.”
3D in Excel
Data on the grower’s apples was taken from the spreadsheet and dragged onto
3D Maps, which created a three-dimensional representation of the warehouse
with apples marked by location, type and age.
An added benefit was that the representation was in 3D, giving the location
of the apples by height, tracking their position on stacked shelves.
Continued in article
How to Create 3-D Popup Books May 21, 2010 message from Steven Hornik
[shornik@BUS.UCF.EDU]
Fun for the weekend? I just
came across an interesting site that enables creations of short (up to 10
pages currently) pop-up books. Whether or not this is useful for delivering
basic concepts to our students is debatable but is certainly another
technique to try. It also has the added fun of being an augmented reality
book, so you can use the website to read your 3-D pop book as if its resting
on your hand - neat in a very geeky way, but pedagogically I'm not so sure.
The website is at:
http://alpha.zooburst.com/index.php and is
currently in Alpha stage testing, I wrote up a blog article on it replete
with pictures, a video and of course an accounting pop-up book:
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
Twitter: shornik
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Watch the Video showing how easy it works
I useSkype with all of my classes
(i.e., face-2-face, blended, and online). At the beginning of each term, I
ask students to set up a Skype account and add me to their contacts list.
I then add them to my Skype contacts list. Using Skype changes the nature
of how I connect with students. We audio and video conference.
Skype messaging archives all messages
received and sent throughout a course. I subscribe to
Skype Voicemail which allows me to send
voicemail message to students. Likewise, students can send me a voicemail
message. Skype recently added a new
screen sharing featuring, which works
great for one-on-one tutoring sessions. All of these Skype features (and
more) changes the nature of instructor-student interaction.
Now,
Applian Technologies has created a
software tool that takes Skype to a whole new level. Replay
Telecorder for Skype makes it
possible to record Skype audio and video calls. This provides a unique way
to bring “guest speakers” to the teaching-learning experience, especially to
the blended and online learning environment. Click the picture below to
view a short You Tube recording that demonstrates how to record a Skype call
that displays in a side-by-side format. The presentation is a little silly,
but illustrates what you can do with the program.
Installing and uninstalling various programs can
leave behind annoying detritus on a computer, and WinUtilities can help out
with this predicament. The application brings together a number of tools
designed to free up disk space and improve overall system performance. The
application includes a "One-Click Maintenance" feature, and visitors can
also use the application to shred files, locate duplicate files, and
schedule various maintenance tasks. This version is compatible with
computers running Windows 2003 and newer.
The Center for History and New Media at George
Mason University is always working on new projects, and their Courseware
plug-in for Word Press is worth a look. Visitors can use this latest version
of Courseware to publish class schedules, assignments, and bibliographies.
Courseware is primarily intended for use by the higher education community,
but it could easily be used in high school classrooms or other collaborative
environments. This version is compatible with all operating systems,
including Linux.
By now, everyone who reads this blog probably
understands that I teach by means of the Socratic Method. I give a list of
3-8 questions one day which serve as “conversation starters” for the next
class. In addition, our brand new Financial Accounting textbook (published
by FlatWorldKnowledge) is written entirely in a Socratic Method fashion. A
question is posed followed by an answer followed by the next logical
question and so on.
When this process works perfectly, it is because of
the questions. You must ask the proper question in order to create an
environment for discovery. How do you develop those questions? Don’t the
questions have to be something more than “when did Columbus discover
America?” or “who won the Civil War?”
I had never thought much about the creation of
questions until a few years ago. Then, I had an epiphany. I was reading the
wonderful book “What the Best College Teachers Do” by Dr. Ken Bain. Dr. Bain
and his team selected a group of outstanding college teachers from around
the country and shadowed them for a period of time to discover their
secrets. I was reading along and came to page 40 where I found this
marvelous passage: “One professor explained it this way: ‘It’s sort of
Socratic . . . You begin with a puzzle—you get somebody puzzled, and tied in
knots, and mixed up.’ Those puzzles and knots generate questions for
students, he went on to say, and then you begin to help them untie the
knots.”
You get somebody puzzled, and tied in knots, and
those puzzles and knots generate questions for students and then you begin
to help them untie the knots.
I cannot think of a better description of what I
think a teacher should strive to do. Puzzle students, tie their thinking
into knots, and then help them untie the knots.
College teachers often view themselves as conveyors
of knowledge/information. If that is the case, then a pure lecture works
fine. You convey knowledge; students try to catch it as it flies by.
However, if you want understanding, curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm, you
have to go beyond that. And, I think the “secret” to working on a higher
level is in the idea of puzzling the students, tying their thinking into
knots, and then helping them to solve those puzzles.
Let me give you an example. Next week, in my
Financial Accounting class, I will start talking about accounts receivable.
As far as I can tell, most accounting teachers tell their students to read
the chapter and assign one or more problems to work. The students then
search (often desperately) through the chapter for a reasonable facsimile
and try to duplicate that process to solve the homework assignment. In
class, the problem is worked and the students make corrections. How do you
rate the learning that occurs? Is it much different than learning to change
the oil in your car? Ask yourself: does that process generate understanding,
curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm?
Here’s how I might go about starting a discussion
about reporting accounts receivable. (My quick answers are included in
parenthesis. I obviously don’t give the answers to the students.)
1 – Your company sells 1,000 toasters near the end
of December 2009, for $60 each. All $60,000 of these sales are made on
account and collection will be in three or four months. A balance sheet is
produced on December 31, 2009. What do outside decision makes really want to
know about those accounts receivable? (The amount of cash the company will
collect.) 2 – What is the problem with what the decision makers want to know
in the above question? (Uncertainty—the accountant can only guess at the
amount of cash that will be collected.) 3 – Accountants are known for being
obsessively accurate. Will the reported number be accurate? (It is only an
estimate; no one expects an estimate to be accurate. Things like exactness
fly out the window when you start making guesses.) 4 – If the number is not
accurate, what is it? (A fair representation according to US GAAP. In other
words, the reporting follows the rules.) 5 – If there are $60,000 in
accounts receivable, how can you report any other number on the balance
sheet? Doesn’t it have to be $60,000? (The company sets up an allowance
account to reduce the asset by the amount that is anticipated as being
uncollectible.) 6 – Assume you know that $2,000 of the $60,000 will prove to
be uncollectible in 2010. Two customers will die, leave town, go bankrupt,
or the like. That is an expense for the company. Should the $2,000 expense
be recognized in 2009 or 2010? (In 2009. Expenses are recognized according
to the matching principle. Revenues from the sale of toasters are recognized
in 2009 so any related expenses [such as the bad debts] must also be
recognized in 2009.
Okay, I could go on and on but you probably get the
idea. Here is my challenge to you on a very cold and snowy Wednesday: are
you puzzling your students enough and tying their thinking into knots? Are
you helping them solve those puzzles and untie those knots? If not, you
might want to consider that strategy as a way to increase their
understanding, curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm.
Student 1
I am confident that taking this class is the most valuable
academic experience I will ever have. By far the best professor
at Richmond. Go see him after class, become his friend. Try not
to get frustrated, you may study 15 hours for a test and get a
C. Attendance policy: If you don't go, you're screwed.
Student 2
As everyone has said, Great Professor and forces you to learn
the material. I worked by far the hardest for this guy but also
learned the most. He loves to send out emails about life lessons
but some are interesting. Be ready for LOTS of work but lots of
learning too.
Student 3
Professor Hoyle is indeed the best professor in the business
school. His tests are challenging but very fair. If you have any
interest in accounting or business in general, then you must
take this class. The curve is extremely helpful so making an A
is reasonable while getting below a C is almost impossible.
Student 4
Attendance is not mandatory, but this class is one that will
kill you if you don't come to it. It is an extremely difficult
course, but interesting and worth the time. Hoyle is one of
those profs you either love or hate, and is also one of those
profs that you will remember your entire life.
--Each chapter opens
with a video to explain the importance of the
material and get the student interested in reading
the chapter before they even start.
--The material (all
17 chapters) is written in a question and answer
(Socratic) format to engage and guide the students
through each area. The subjects are broken down
into a manageable and logical size. Faculty often
complain that students do not read the textbooks. I
think this format can change that trend.
--Embedded
multiple-choice questions are included on virtually
every page to provide immediate feedback for the
students. CJ and I wrote the multiple choice
questions ourselves as we wrote the manuscript to
ensure that they would tie together logically.
--Each chapter ends
with a review video where we challenge the students
to pick the five most important areas from the
chapter. I firmly believe that students need to
learn to evaluate what they are reading. We then
provide our own “Top Five” list so that they can see
where we agree and where we disagree.
Yes,
professors do get hard copy versions.
Joe is also
behind the free CPA Review course that was once
commercial but then became a freebie to the world.
Free CPA Review Course ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Gadgets For People Who Roam the Hard Copy Stacks Rather Than Google
These gadgets might also be useful for detail tests on audits
It's often said that less
is more. If only this were true for computer devices like printers and scanners,
which take up a lot of desktop real estate. The reality is that small, stylish,
portable versions of these gadgets are often pricey and not as functional.
This week, I reviewed two
products that unfortunately live up to that reality: a portable printer and mini
scanner that put a premium on good looks at $300 each. I've been using
Fujitsu's newest $295 mini scanner, the ScanSnap
S1300 (fujitsu.com),
and PlanOn System Solutions Inc.'s tiny $300
PrintStik PS905ME (http://3.ly/6QVS).
There are several good printers, scanners or all-in-ones that cost significantly
less or offer more functionality than these devices.
But boy, do these gadgets
look good. The Fujitsu ScanSnap collapses down to a small, rectangular box with
mirrored buttons. The PlanOn PrintStik resembles a box of aluminum foil in the
kitchen drawer—except more compact.
Both devices are small
and lightweight enough to fit in a bag or briefcase, if necessary. Either one of
these could be ported around without a problem: The PrintStik weighs 1.5 pounds
and the ScanSnap weighs twice as much at 3.08 pounds. Both fit well in a tiny
work space or on the desktops of people like me, who don't print or scan much
and don't want a device taking up a lot of space.
As is usually the case
with smaller devices that lack display screens and extra buttons, one hopes they
come with straightforward software or simply plug in and play. The Fujitsu
ScanSnap meets that requirement with software that installs on Macs or PCs and
can be used without reading complicated instructions.
The PlanOn PrintStik uses
thermal printing to produce images and characters on scrolls of paper. The
PlanOn PrintStik worked adequately as a basic black-and-white printer for
Windows PCs (it isn't Mac compatible), but fell short as a wireless printer for
smart phones. The PrintStik is meant to receive and print documents sent to it
via Bluetooth from BlackBerrys, but I found the BlackBerry program to be clumsy
and in the end, it didn't even work despite at least two dozen attempts.
PlanOn's tech support said they thought my PrintStik's Bluetooth could be
faulty, but couldn't send me a new device in time for this column.
These two devices offer
some interesting design elements. The PlanOn PrintStik PS905ME uses thermal
printing—an old technology that has been around for decades—rather than ink
cartridges, to produce images and characters by applying heat at tiny points.
The PrintStik's thermal
printing only works with special scrolls of thin, slippery paper. It comes in
packs of six rolls for $23; one roll is about 23 feet long and prints roughly 30
sheets of letter-size paper. You can opt to print only as much as a document
requires to save paper. But a long document prints out in one continuous scroll
rather than separate pages.
The PrintStik has a
rechargeable battery that lasts long enough to print about 30 pages; a wall
charger is also included. It can churn out up to three pages per minute. I can
imagine tossing this printer into my suitcase for business trips; it would also
come in handy for printing boarding passes for use at the airport, among other
things.
Documents that are
supposed to be printable from the BlackBerry with a remote-printing app include
Web pages, attachments including PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets,
JPEGs, and PowerPoint presentations. PlanOn representatives say an app will be
available for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones in about four or five
months; they also are working on an iPad application. Though the PrintStik's
remote-printing app for the BlackBerry is currently free, the company intends to
begin charging $30 annually for its remote-printing service this summer.
Fujitsu's ScanSnap S1300
can suck in 10 pages at once, and has two cameras that can scan the front and
back of printouts. This process can scan as many as eight dual-sided pages a
minute. Item sizes range from 2x2-inch cards to legal documents.
The ScanSnap comes with a
wall charger but also runs without being plugged into the wall: It uses a USB
cord for charging from a PC in addition to the USB cord that transfers data
between the scanner and computer.
Seconds after I scanned
documents into the ScanSnap, colorful icons appeared on my computer screen.
Choosing one of these icons let me send the documents to one of the following:
email, Word, a printer, Excel, iPhoto or Cardiris—a program that exports contact
information from scanned business cards into Address Book or Entourage;
CardMinder on Windows exports contact information to Outlook and other programs.
If you want to scan old
or precious documents, you may not like using the ScanSnap's sucking method for
scanning, in case a page gets stuck or damaged. For sensitive objects or page
scanning, the best bet is to use a flatbed scanner or all-in-one (that prints,
scans, and faxes) with a lift-up lid that scans items on a flat surface.
Though the Fujitsu
ScanSnap S1300 and PlanOn PrintStik PS905ME aren't the least expensive or the
most functional devices of their kind, they're easy to move around and take up
minimal amounts of space. For some people, that may be well worth the higher
cost.
The
Marrakesh Treaty entered into force in September 2016, faster than any other
international copyright text in the last 40 years. It promises to remove
some of the key barriers to access to information by people with print
disabilities.
Yet the Treaty will
only be effective, where it has been incorporated into national law, when
libraries and others are using it. Not all librarians feel confident in
dealing with copyright law, potentially leaving users without the access
they need.
This guide, edited by
Victoria Owen, and with the welcome support of the World Blind Union, the
Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Electronic Information for
Libraries, and the Unviersity of Toronto, offers answers to frequently asked
questions. It can also be adapted by national actors to their own laws -
IFLA encourages this, in order to get the largest possible number of
libraries involved.
Question
What hand-held device can photograph close up and read aloud from books, price
labels, receipts, and newspapers?
Hint:
This device has far more uses beyond being a helper for sight impaired people.
For one thing, auditors might make use of this when detail testing.
The Intel Reader, powered by an Atom processor, is a
handheld device with a five-megapixel camera that can read aloud any printed
text it is pointed at, including product labels, receipts, and pages from books
and newspapers. Previously, visually impaired or dyslexic people required a
desktop scanner connected to a computer to convert print into speech.
"Scan and Listen," MIT's Technology Review, December 17, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24198/?a=f
Also see
https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2009/20091110corp.htm
New Helpers for Sight Impaired and Even Totally Blind Readers
The new software is the latest product of Google’s
research into using large collections of simulated neurons to process data
(see “10
Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”).
No one at Google programmed the new software with rules for how to interpret
scenes. Instead, its networks “learned” by consuming data. Though it’s just
a research project for now, Vinyals says, he and others at Google have
already begun to think about how it could be used to enhance image search or
help the visually impaired navigate online or in the real world.
Google’s researchers created the software through a
kind of digital brain surgery, plugging together two neural networks
developed separately for different tasks. One network had been trained to
process images into a mathematical representation of their contents, in
preparation for identifying objects. The other had been trained to generate
full English sentences as part of automated translation software.
When the networks are combined, the first can
“look” at an image and then feed the mathematical description of what it
“sees” into the second, which uses that information to generate a
human-readable sentence. The combined network was trained to generate more
accurate descriptions by showing it tens of thousands of images with
descriptions written by humans. “We’re seeing through language what it
thought the image was,” says Vinyals.
After that training process, the software was set
loose on several large data sets of images from Flickr and other sources and
asked to describe them. The accuracy of its descriptions was then judged
with an automated test used to benchmark computer-vision software. Google’s
software posted scores in the 60s on a 100-point scale. Humans doing the
test typically score in 70s, says Vinyals.
That result suggests Google is far ahead of other
researchers working to create scene-describing software. Stanford
researchers recently
published details of their own system and reported
that it scored between 40 and 50 on the same standard test.
However, Vinyals notes that researchers at Google
and elsewhere are still in the early stages of understanding how to create
and test this kind of software. When Google asked humans to rate its
software’s descriptions of images on a scale of 1 to 4, it averaged only
2.5, suggesting that it still has a long way to go.
Vinyals predicts that research on understanding and
describing scenes will now intensify. One problem that could slow things
down: though large databases of hand-labeled images have been created to
train software to recognize individual objects, there are fewer labeled
photos of more natural scenes.
Microsoft this year launched a database called
COCO
to try to fix that. Google used COCO in its new
research, but it is still relatively small. “I hope other parties will chip
in and make it better,” says Vinyals.
Jensen Comment
It's a bit like captions for the hearing impaired in television shows only this
time the captions are for the blind regarding images in computer screens.
Of course authors could probably do a better job by merely describing aloud
the images they insert in there text. Some publishers now have audio versions of
their textbooks. But do they also describe each
image in the page?
Intel developed software for reading hard copy text aloud, but the software
cannot describe images.
This year, spruce up your teaching toolbox with some of the top education
blogs, tweets, wikis and more, as voted on by educators in the
Edublog Awards.
On these sites, you'll be able to connect with other educators, see
what's going on in classrooms around the world and find out what technology
tools you can use in your classroom.
Best individual blog
Winner:
Free
Technology for Teachers
Google certified teacher
Richard
Byrne reviews free technology resources and shows educators how they
can integrate those resources into their teaching. He also won the best
resource sharing blog award.
First Runner Up:
Kathy Schrock's
Kaffeeklatsch
Technology administrator Kathy Schrock covers ed tech tools, techniques
and tricks of the trade.
Second Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo's Websites Of The Day For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif.. He provides links to sites that help
educators teach English to non-native speakers. He also won best
resource sharing blog award.
Best individual tweeter
Winner:
web20classroom
From Winston-Salem, N.C., technology educator Steven W. Anderson
interacts with other educators by sharing links to online resources and
participating in conversations about real issues in education.
First Runner Up:
russeltarr
Russel Tarr teaches history in Toulouse, France.
Second Runner Up:
courosa
Alec Couros teaches educational technology and media in Regina,
Saskatchewan, Canada.
Best group blog
Winner:
MacMillian Dictionary Blog
As the English language constantly changes, five authors take the pulse
of the living language and share how it is used around the world.
First Runner Up:
I.N.K.:
Interesting Nonfiction for Kids
Authors and illustrators give readers a behind-the-scenes look at how
they research, write and integrate art into their books.
Second Runner Up:
SCC English
The English Department of St. Columba's College in Whitechurch, Dublin
16, Ireland posts news, poems, drama, essays, podcasts, book
recommendations and more.
Best new blog
Winner:
Kirsten Winkler
Kirsten Winkler started blogging about online education in January and
takes readers on a quest to find better education.
First Runner Up:
Look At My Happy
Rainbow
A male kindergarten teacher shares stories from his classroom in Maine.
As for the blog title, one of his students shouted, "Look at my happy
rainbow!" one day after he drew a rainbow with four or five crayons in
one hand.
Second Runner Up:
Teach
Paperless
Shelly Blake-Plock shows educators how to teach with interactive
technology and provide real-world learning opportunities for their
students.
Best class blog
Winner:
Billings Middle School Tech Class Blog From Seattle, Technology Integration Coordinator Jac de Haan shines
a spotlight on students' adventures with digital tools and discussions
about the social, political, environmental and moral impacts of
technology.
First Runner Up:
Mrs.
Yollis' Classroom Blog
Third graders from Linda Yollis' class learn and share what they're
learning on their blog.
Second Runner Up:
English With
Rosa
Rosa Fernández Sánchez helps her students from Coruńa, Galicia, Spain,
practice English.
Best student blog
Winner:
Civil War
Sallie
A Boyd's Bear named Sallie Ann travels to classrooms, museums and
battlefields to learn about the United States Civil War, and then shares
what she learns on her blog. The person who created Sallie Ann is a
student from St. Patrick School in Carlisle, Pa.
First Runner Up:
Universo
Eighteen-year-old Néstor Aluna Maceda Pacheco writes about botany from
Rio Blanco, Veracruz, México.
Second Runner Up:
Moo
A college student majoring in photography shares photos and commentary.
She also happens to be the daughter of
The
Scholastic Scribe, which earned first runner up in the best teacher
blog category.
Best resource sharing blog
Winner:
Free
Technology for Teachers
Voted the best resource sharing blog for the second straight year.
Google certified teacher
Richard
Byrne reviews free technology resources and shows educators how they
can integrate those resources into their teaching. He also won the best
individual blog award.
First Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif.. He provides links to sites that help
educators teach English to non-native speakers.
Winner: "Heads
in the Cloud" from Anseo.net
This post shows how one school uses cloud computing through Google Apps
as a communication tool for the staff and board of management.
Joint First Runners Up: "This,
This, That" from Dear
Kaia and Skyelar
Three-year-old Kaia explored the desert near her home in Qatar, took
photos of what she saw and created a photo essay that she posted on her
blog. She wrote the post with her dad, teacher Jabiz Raisdana, who then
sent it out to his Twitter network.
The link made its way into the Twitter stream of technology teacher
William
Chamberlain, who asked the eighth grade students in his class to
comment on the blog post.
The story doesn't end there. The eigth-graders had some questions about
Kaia and her dad's life in Doha, Qatar, so Raisdana skyped into their
class. The students also created video comments that they sent to Kaia (read
the complete story on Raisdana's blog).
On top of that, professor John Strange from the University of South
Alabama saw the post and passed it on to the students in his educational
media class. They commented on Kaia's photo essay as well and wrote more
than 50 blog posts in response to the photo essay (read
this part of the story in Raisdana's words).
She had to pay to find out what was in the report "Techno Addicts: Young
Person Addiction to Technology, and what she found was 'poor research.'She gives her analysis in this blog post.
Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet-based discussion
Winner:
#edchat
Through Twitter, educators discuss real education issues on Tuesdays at
noon EST and 7 p.m. EST using the hashtag "edchat."
First Runner Up:
Blogworthy Tweets
English teacher Claudia Ceraso from Buenos Aires, Argentina, publishes
some of her tweets on the blog
ELT notes.
Second Runner Up:
#teachertuesday
Every Tuesday on Twitter, educators and others recommend teachers to
follow through the hashtag #teachertuesday.
Best teacher blog
Winner:
Two
Writing Teachers
Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz share their tools, ideas and experiences
with educators who teach kids how to write.
First Runner Up:
The
Scholastic Scribe
A high school journalism teacher writes about life inside and outside of
her District of Columbia classroom. She is the mother of the college
student behind
Moo, who earned first runner up in the best student blog category.
Second Runner Up:
Cool Cat
Teacher
Vicki A. Davis from Camilla, Georgia, shares her experiences with
technology as well as how students are collaborating globally through
activities including the
Flat Classroom Project.
Best librarian / library blog
Winner:
Never Ending Search
Joyce Valenza writes about technology, research, search engines and more
from Springfield Township High School in Oreland, Pa. Check out the
school's cool
virtual library.
First Runner Up:
Bright Ideas
The School Library Association of Victoria run this blog, where school
library staff can share how they use the latest research tools in their
libraries.
Second Runner Up:
Library Media Tech Musings
Gwyneth A. Jones passes on education links and resources, among other
things, with a sprinkle of snark, as she puts it.
Best educational tech support blog
Winner:
iLearn Technology
Technology teacher Kelly Tenkely wants to help teachers "fall in love
with technology the way that their students have," and she does that by
giving them ideas for how to integrate new technology into their
classrooms.
First Runner Up:
Langwitches
This blog follows Silvia Tolisano as she discovers the magic of learning
on her journey as a technology integration facilitator.
Second Runner Up:
Life Feast
Ana Maria Menezes shares what she's learning about using Internet tools
to enhance her classes and change up the daily routine for her EFL
students in Brazil.
Best elearning / corporate education blog
Winner:
MPB
Reflections — 21st Century Teaching and Learning
From Teaching Without Walls, co-owner and educational consultant
Michelle Pacansky-Brock posts her thoughts about changes in higher
education, with an emphasis on online learning.
First Runner Up:
Angela Maiers
After a 20-year career in education, Angela Maiers became an independent
consultant who focuses on literacy education, and through her blog, she
encourages teachers to be great learners.
Winner:
Xyleme Voices
Podcasts
A podcast library on the evolution of training, featuring interviews
with top industry analysts, consultants and practitioners in the field
of learning.
First Runner Up:
Musical Blogies
Ignacio Valdés posts audio and video of his students, who play music
from a secondary education institution in the Spanish principality of
Asturia.
Second Runner Up:
My Audio School
Children can download more than 150 classic books and listen to more
than 200 radio and television broadcasts on My Audio School. While this
Web site was originally designed to help dyslexic students, it can be
used for any students.
Best educational use of video / visual
Winner:
Bitácora de
Aníbal de la Torre
Aníbal de la Torre compiles short educational videos on his blog from
Palma del Rio, Cordoba, Spain.
First Runner Up:
The Longfellow Ten
Middle school students create and share stop-motion films that depict
academic terms and concepts. They're definitely not boring.
Second Runner Up:
Inanimate Alice
Through text, sound, images and games, writer Kate Pullinger and digital
artist Chris Joseph tell the story of a girl named Alice and her
imaginary digital friend, Brad. Pullinger teaches creative writing and
new media for De Montfort University in Leicester, United Kingdom.
First Runner Up:
Soar 2
New Heights
A fourth-grade class shares books and themes that they enjoy.
Second Runner Up:
HUMS3001:
Censorship and Responsibility
From the University of South Wales, the students in Ben Miller's class
on censorship and responsibility work together to build the pages in
this wikispace.
Best educational use of a social networking service
Winner:
English
Companion Ning
English teachers help each other on this network, which high school
English teacher and author Jim Burke created.
First Runner Up:
EFL Classroom
2.0
This Ning provides a space for English language teachers and students to
ask questions, share answers and find resources to help them learn.
Second Runner Up:
RSC Access and
Inclusion Ning
The Regional Support Centre for North and East Scotland allows educators
to discuss, share and join with other colleagues as they work with
learners who need additional support in higher education.
Winner:
Virtual Graduation at the University of Edinburgh
While some education students graduated at McEwan Hall in November,
other students graduated online in
Second Life. Those
students completed their Master of Science in E-learning, which is a
distance learning program.
Winner:
Karl Fisch
Karl Fisch has been teaching for 21 years and is currently director of
technology at
Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. He was previously a middle
and high school math teacher.
First Runner Up:
Will Richardson
Will Richardson is the "learner in chief" at Connective Learning and
author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for
Classrooms.
Second Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif. On his blog, he provides links to sites
that help educators teach English to non-native speakers.
For more ways to learn online, check out these resources:
You're in a meeting. You and your team identify a
great new business opportunity. If you can launch in 60 days, a rich new
market segment will be open for your product or service. The action plan is
developed. Everything's a go.
And then you come down to earth. You need new
computer equipment, which takes weeks, or months, to install. You also need
new software, which adds more weeks or months. There's no way to meet the
timeframe required by the market opening. You are stymied by your
organization's lack of IT agility.
Or, you could have the experience
the New York Times had when it needed to convert
a large number of digital files to a format
suitable to serve up over the web. After the inevitable "it will take a lot
of time and money to do this project," one of their engineers went to the
Amazon Web Services cloud, created 20 compute instances (essentially,
virtual servers), uploaded the files, and converted them all over the course
of one weekend.
Total cost? $240.
This example provides a sense of why cloud computing is transforming the
face of IT, with the potential to deliver real business value. The rapid
availability of compute resources in a cloud computing environment enables
business agility — the dexterity for businesses to quickly respond to
changing business conditions with IT-enabled offerings.
Notwithstanding the fact that IT seems to always
have the latest, greatest thing on its mind, cloud computing has the entire
IT industry excited, with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google
and others investing billions of dollars in this new form of computing. And
in terms of IT users,
Gartner recently named cloud computing as the
second most important technology focus area for 2010.
But what is cloud computing exactly? Why is it
different than what went before? And why should you care? While there are
many definitions of cloud computing, I look to the definition of cloud
computing from the National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST), part
of the US Department of Commerce. In its cloud computing definition,
NIST identifies five characteristics of cloud computing,
which include:
on-demand self service, which allows business
units to get the computing resources they need without having to go
through IT for equipment .
broad network access, which enables
applications to be built in ways that align with how businesses operate
today - mobile, multi-device, etc.
resource pooling, which allows for pooling of
computing resources are to serve multiple consumers
rapid elasticity, which allow for quick
scalability or downsizing of resources depending on demand
and measured service, which means that
business units only pay for the compute resources they use. Translation:
IT costs match business success.
To offer a concrete example of how cloud computing
agility enables organizations to respond to business opportunity, let me
share the experience of one of our clients, the Silicon Valley Education
Foundation. Its Lessonopoly application allows 13,000 teachers throughout
Silicon Valley to collaborate on lesson plans. NBC approached SVEF just
before this year's Winter Olympics with science-focused lesson plans
centered around the science behind the experience of Olympic athletes (e.g.,
the loads placed on a skier's legs as she swerves around a slalom gate).
One concern SVEF had was whether or not Lessonopoly
could handle the likely application load increase. There were only a few
days before the start of the Olympics, which would initiate heavy use of
these lesson plans. The group had migrated the application to Amazon Web
Services a few months earlier, and they were able to quickly shut down the
small machine Lessonopoly was running on and bring it back up on a larger
instance with three times the computing capacity of the original.
It's a cliché to say that business is changing at
an ever-increasing pace, but one of the facts about clichés is they often
contain truth. The deliberate pace of traditional IT is just not suited for
today's hectic business environment. Cloud computing's agility is a much
better match for constantly mutating business conditions. To evaluate
whether your business opportunities could be well-served by leveraging the
agility of cloud computing, download the
HyperStratus Cloud Computing Agility Checklist, which
outlines ten conditions that indicate a business case for taking advantage
of the agility of cloud computing.
Bernard Golden is CEO of HyperStratus, a Silicon Valley-based cloud
computing consultancy that works with clients in the US and throughout the
world. Contact him at bernard.golden@hyperstratus.com
Winner: "Heads
in the Cloud" from Anseo.net
This post shows how one school uses cloud computing through Google Apps as a
communication tool for the staff and board of management.
You may have seen the video below (it is four
minutes long). It had a lot of impact on me when I was creating our new
Financial Accounting textbook. The video was apparently created by the
students you see and really made me think about the state of education
today. As far as I am concerned, education is expensive and, too often, both
boring and inefficient. I wanted to be part of the solution rather than part
of the problem. As a result, I helped design and create this new type of
Financial Accounting textbook.
As I have mentioned previously, a few years ago I
wrote a free on-line teaching tips book (https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~jhoyle/).
I was lucky, a few people read it and told other people and then I got a
very nice review in the Chronicle of Higher Education. As a result, I
started getting emails from around the world about teaching. That was
wonderful.
One day I received an email from a professor in London who said something
like: “you don’t know me but I have read your teaching tips book and have a
quote that I think you are going to love.” And, he was absolutely
correct—this is one of my two or three favorite quotes about teaching.
Whenever I give a teaching presentation, I always use this quote to explain
what I believe is the true secret for becoming a better teacher. It is the
best piece of advice that I can give any teacher who wants to improve.
"Teaching does not come from years of doing it. It actually comes from
thinking about it."
I get pretty decent teaching evaluations from my students and I have won a
few awards. Whenever anyone asks me how I managed to do that, I always say:
“I think about this stuff a lot. Whether it is 6:00 a.m. when I wake up or
10:30 p.m. when I go to bed, teaching and my students and how to help them
learn is always floating around in my head.”
So, today, I decided to tell you about what has been floating around in my
head recently.
It seems to me that college education in my lifetime has focused on the
conveyance of information. One content expert (the teacher) conveys
information to a group of individuals who want (or are required) to gain a
bit of that expertise. Despite what we might say, that process has not
changed too radically in the last four decades since I was a college
student.
However, with the Internet, Google, Bing and the like, information is
readily available to most individuals at any time. It is hard to find a
factual question that you cannot answer in less than one minute using a
search engine. What then is the future purpose of a college education (other
than the acquisition of a very expensive diploma)? If there is no longer a
huge need for the conveyance of information from one generation to the next
because it is so readily available, what are we doing? Don’t we need to know
that before we even start the first class?
Do we who teach in college think about that question enough or just try to
ignore it as best we can?
When I give teaching presentations, we work on developing “fly-on-the-wall”
philosophies. What the heck is that? I ask the members of the audience to
picture the course that is their favorite to teach. Then think of the final
day of the semester when the students file out of the room for the last
time. I ask each of the teachers to pretend they are a fly on the wall right
above the door. If you were that fly on the wall, what would you want to
hear from your students as they exited for the final time?
--The teacher sure conveyed a lot of information??
--I certainly took some great notes this semester??
--I memorized a lot of material so I could pass a test??
From my experience, a lot of teachers teach as if that is their goal. But,
surely that cannot be the reason we became teachers. In 2010, doesn’t it
have to be something more than that? And, if the answer is Yes, then what is
the purpose of a college course?
I can tell you my own personal fly-on-the-wall philosophy but I am not sure
that I am not ready for some change in it. So, if you have suggestions, let
me know.
Here is my mine. On the last day of class, I would love to hear by students
say:
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so
much. I never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
In Western Civilization class at The John Carroll
School, freshmen grab plastic chairs from a stack against the wall, gather
around the room in different areas and jump online with their tablet PCs.
Using a class hashtag, they respond to questions
that teacher Shelly Blake-Plock posts on Twitter. He projects their
discussions on the classroom wall so that everyone can easily track what's
going on.
Then, instead of pulling out textbooks to study
ancient Rome, the students check out primary sources online such as BBC's
interactive history section or the Metropolitan Museum of Art timelines that
integrate text and artwork. As jazz music plays in the background, they pull
up a document and use Diigo to annotate the text as well as share
annotations.
They'll keep scouring the web for sites on ancient
Rome and share the links they find on Twitter, then pick the best ones to
post on their class wiki. Afterward, students look for correlations between
the history they're studying and current events that media sources post on
Twitter.
At the end of the 45-minute class, Blake-Plock
throws out another question on Twitter that the students use as a guide to
write a post on their personal blogs that night. The next day, they read and
comment on their classmates' blogs and start the process all over again.
These students are learning through technology and
directing their own learning in the process. Here's how educators around the
country are empowering their students to do the same.
Focus on education At Charlotte Country Day School
in North Carolina, Technology Integration Specialist Tim Moxley works with
teachers to incorporate smartboards, document cameras and netbook computers
into their lessons. To successfully blend tech tools into their instruction,
teachers need to have a combination of technological, pedagogical and
content knowledge (TPACK), which is a model that Punya Mishra and Matthew J.
Koehler of Michigan State University researched.
Educators took on the job of providing a quality
education, and a piece of that quality education is teaching kids how to use
and become comfortable with tech tools.
"When you work in education, the end goal is what’s
best for the student," Moxley said. "If using a piece of technology is gonna
improve the student outcome in some way, then it’s worth it.”
Students are turned on 24 hours a day, whether
they're surfing the web, watching TV or playing the Nintendo Wii, said
Technology Integration Specialist Susan Jenkins, and they need to be engaged
in order to learn. Engaging students often means using technology to teach,
if it can help meet a learning goal.
“We don’t want to put it out there just because
it’s a cool thing to have," said Jenkins, who works in Bullitt County Public
Schools in Shepherdsville, Ky. " We want a purpose for it.”
Learn about the tools Jenkins helps teachers find
that purpose by providing in-service training once a month as well as
meeting with them on an appointment basis. While she does show them how new
tools work, she also gives them ideas about how they can use them to help
students learn.
“As we’re training them to use the tool, we try to
train them with the integration side mixed in," Jenkins said.
In addition to learning from other people in their
school district, teachers can learn from people they're connected to on
Twitter, said Kyle Pace, an instructional/consumer technology specialist
with Lee's Summit School District in Missouri. He finds plenty of resources
from educators, particularly those who use the hashtag edchat, and shares
them with co-workers and teachers in his area.
“If you start to think, ‘Well, I’ve seen all there
is to see with this kind of tool,’ something new comes out or the next day
you learn about something new,” Pace said. “We’re fortunate in our district
that instructional technology is a huge focus, and I think it just has to
remain a huge professional development focus at the district and at the
building level.”
Back in North Carolina, some teachers tell Moxley
that they are computer-illiterate and are horrible with technology. He
reminds them that they wouldn't accept that response from a child who tells
them he isn't good at math, so he won't accept that as a response for them.
When he puts it in those terms, they are more receptive to learning about
new tools.
He sits in on grade-level planning meetings, and
based on what he hears, he looks for resources that might work with the
lessons that teachers have coming up.
“I try to deemphasize the technology itself and
just try to get them to see it as a tool that hopefully will enhance the
lesson in some way,” Moxley said.
Mix tech into lessons When language arts teacher
Heather Mason plans a lesson, she starts by figuring out what she wants her
students to learn in her class at Jefferson Middle School in Merritt Island,
Fla. Then she thinks about what tools could help accomplish her goal.
And as she wrote on her blog, the technology
doesn't have to be new to work. She uses tools such as Post-it notes,
highlighters and personal whiteboards to engage her students.
Pencils are also effective tools, and they're the
focus of John Spencer's blog Adventures in Pencil Integration. Set in 1897,
the blog posts tell the story of a fictional character named Tom Johnson,
whose small school district starts paper and pencil integration initiatives
to prepare students for the 20th century.
Through satire, he paints a picture of the hype and
the paranoia that comes with new technology. Back in his classroom at Raúl
Castro Middle School in Phoenix, he teaches his students to identify with
both extremes.
“I want them to be both absolute critics of
technology and also people who absolutely embrace it," Spencer said. "And I
know that’s a really idealistic kind of view to have, but I want them to be
both.”
He helps them become both by starting conversations
in his multimedia authoring/publishing class that force students to think
critically about what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Two universities--Kean University in Union, NJ and
Emory University in Atlanta, GA--have gone public with their use of
Datawatch's Monarch data mining software to teach students how to perform
business intelligence work.
Kean professor Beth Brilliant introduced Monarch to
graduate students of her accounting information systems (AIS) and auditing
information system classes.
"I have been using Monarch for years as a
[certified public accountant] and swear by it," said Brilliant. "For
example, I use Monarch to quickly find any bank discrepancies. As I work for
a law firm with client trust accounts, this is extremely important, as all
accounts must balance to the penny. I am able to reconcile all the accounts
in minutes thanks to Monarch, picking up differences in checks from pennies
to hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Brilliant added, "My department has also become
more efficient with the use of Monarch, saving hours by importing data into
the accounting system electronically vs. manually. Reports that I receive
from vendors are saved as PDF files, which are mined using Monarch. The data
is then extracted and imported into our accounting system. This not only
saves time but it removes the risk of manual data input errors."
"I rely on Monarch to ensure data quality and to
ensure I know exactly where company data is coming from, with no need to
rely on the company's accounting and IT departments," she explained.
"Monarch is an excellent resource for auditors and accountants, and well
worth including Monarch within my AIS coursework."
Robert Gross teaches a graduate course on managing
healthcare databases at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory. The
course is part of the curriculum for the university's master of public
health degree.
"Most of my students are physicians and other
working healthcare providers, middle managers and public health agency
leaders," said Gross. "The students are non-technical, yet must understand
how to independently gather, sift, sort, and work effectively with public
and private healthcare information sources. We address issues including
effective data access strategies, how to ensure data quality, comply fully
with HIPAA, and actively work with healthcare data using Excel, Access, and
several statistical analysis products."
Continued in article
Bentley College Students Will Make Microloans to Small Businesses
Perhaps this is also an opportunity for accounting students to advise loan
recipients on accounting, software, and taxes. There is precedent here for
students in colleges that used to administer Small Business Administration
grants. Years ago at the University of Maine I supervised some students who in
turn were assisting grant recipients with accounting. In one humorous instance,
the students could not find the recipients. The SBA had given a grant to a
startup company to make patio furniture in much the same manner as birch-bark
canoes are made using ash wood and birch bark. Once the recipients got the money
for their chain saws and trucks, they were nowhere to be found. Turns out all
they wanted the money for was to help them steal wood to sell to the paper
companies. Such will also be the risk of microlending by college students.
"Bentley University Class Creates Local Microfinance Fund," Market Watch,
October 28, 2008 ---
Click Here
New Student-Run Initiative Brings Microlending to
the Greater Boston Area An honors finance class at Bentley University has
paved the way for an innovative financing initiative: a domestic microcredit
organization that will fuel economic and community development by providing
loans of $1,500 to $6,000 to local entrepreneurs at or below the poverty
level.
The Bentley Microcredit Initiative (BMI) is the
result of a course, Seminar in Micro Lending, which debuted in spring 2008.
The mission of the BMI is to integrate microfinance into the Bentley
community and to promote community development through education and
innovation in microlending activities. The class and the BMI are the
brainchild of Finance Professor and BMI Director Roy Wiggins. "The fund is
something I really thought could be viable here at Bentley," says Wiggins.
"Since it's student-run, it will provide hands-on banking experience while
also furthering the Bentley mission to send future business leaders into the
world who are socially responsible."
Microcredit or microlending refers to modest-sized
loans for poverty-level recipients who may not qualify for funds at
traditional financial institutions. The practice gained public attention in
2006, when Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, received the Nobel
Peace Prize for their work in microfinance.
Students enrolled in Seminar in Micro Lending
developed a working model for the BMI after researching microfinance
successes and failures both abroad and domestically to create a framework
that could operate in Greater Boston. The fund is being financed by
donations from alumni and parents and has an initial equity line of $100,000
on its way to a total loan portfolio of $300,000. The Bentley Microcredit
Initiative will identify potential loan applicants by tapping into existing
Bentley relationships with community organizations. "One of the attractive
things about this venture is that it will be utilizing Bentley's academic
resources," says Bentley President Gloria Larson. "We are essentially
marrying Bentley's foundation in service and business to help address a
societal issue. We hope the Microcredit Initiative will become a part of
Bentley's legacy." BENTLEY UNIVERSITY is a leader in business education.
Centered on teaching and research in business and related professions,
Bentley blends the breadth and technological strength of a university with
the core values and student focus of a close-knit campus.
SOURCE Bentley University
Epsilen Environment from Purdue University appears to have brought
together the latest technology in a course authoring, course management, and
e-learning package ---
http://www.epsilen.com/Epsilen/Public/Home.aspx
The Epsilen Environment is the result of six years
of research and development within the Purdue School of Engineering and
Technology at IUPUI. Epsilen Products and Services are commercially
available through BehNeem LLC, the holding company created in Indiana to
commercialize, market and further develop the Epsilen Environment. The New
York Times is an equity and strategic partner in the company.
A 2008 addition to the above history site came to my attention in a
loose-card advertisement for Epsilen Enviroment that came in the November 3,
2008 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Free ePortfolios
Basic ePortfolio accounts are free for all registered students and faculty
of U.S. colleges and universities. An Epsilen ePortfolio can be created in
minutes and be used throughout one’s academic career, during
professional life, and even into retirement. The free Epsilen ePortfolio
account offers tools and resources enabling members to:
Create and maintain a professional ePortfolio
Engage in professional and social networking
Showcase scholarly work and other documents in a wide range of
formats
Develop and share resumes
Store and share files/objects
Use Epsilen e-mail, blog, wiki, and other communication and
collaboration tools
Create and participate in professional collaboration groups
Access to online
courses and trainings using the Epsilen Global Learning System (GLS)
courseware.
Produce a personal ePortfolio Web site with profile, photos and
video
Receive an automated weekly Epsilen status report
that lets you know about those that have visited your “corner”,
share similar research, teaching, internship or consulting
interests.
If your
campus is, or becomes, a licensed Epsilen institution (see below), your free
ePortfolio will integrate dynamically with more sophisticated tools and
services listed below that accompany the paid license. Visit www.epsilen.com
to
create
your personal ePortfolio and begin exploring the Environment.
Exploratory
Institutional Memberships
The Exploratory Membership is an easy and cost-effective option for colleges
and universities, schools, districts and state systems to explore and
experience the features of Epsilen, the next generation of learning and
networking software. Upon payment of an annual
membership fee, the following features are available to Exploratory
Members:
Administrative
account to brand, monitor, and maintain internal ePortfolio accounts of
your students ,faculty and alumnae
Institutional
ePortfolio site for your college or university
Global announcement
and message broadcasting to ePortfolio accounts associated with your
institution
Delivery of 12
online courses or training using Epsilen’s Global Learning System (GLS),
with the option to incorporate New York Times content described below
Direct access to the
Epsilen helpdesk
A hosted Web-based
solution that requires no, or little, institutional IT support
Ability to upgrade
to other licensed services (see below)
Ability to integrate
Epsilen with campus SIS (see below)
Ability to cross
list courses across institutions, departments, and schools
Annual Exploratory Memberships begin at
$5,000 for campuses with up to 2,000 students. Click here for
more pricing information and order application.
New York Times Knowledge
Network New York Times
Knowledge (NYTKnowledge Network) offers New York Times content to
complement faculty-designed courses served dynamically in customizable
templates through Epsilen’s Global Learning System. New York Times
content is aggregated by subject and easily selected and incorporated into
lessons by faculty and the interactive learning environment. NYTKnowledge
Network provides access to a repository of Times archives back to
1851 Times articles, special issues sections, multimedia features,
and synchronous and asynchronous contact with correspondents, resulting in
an extraordinary integrated learning environment that supports hybrid or
online offerings.
The New York Times
Knowledge Network also offers the opportunity to participate in Webcasts
with the Times correspondents and other subject matter experts.
These can be included in traditional courses, or offered by your institution
as stand-alone life-long learning experiences with comprehensive continuing
education programs designed by the New York Times.
NYT Knowledge Network Provides:
A rich
repository of archived content back to 1851
Access to other
major content providers
Multimedia news
content
Interactive maps
and graphs
Webcasts, chats
with correspondents
A comprehensive
range of content aggregated by subject and easily integrated to
support your teaching objectives.
NYTimes
Knowledge Network marketing of your continuing education courses.
Student Learning Matrix
Programs, departments, and schools within a campus may create unlimited
student learning matrices to be used by students through an automated
learning outcome assessment tool for both summative and formative learning
assessment. Features include:
Creation of
unlimited student learning matrices for program- or campus-level
learning outcome assessment (Each axis includes attributes defined
by the program/campus.)
Ability for
students to upload their learning outcomes according to predefined
rubrics
Access by
faculty and academic advisors to each student learning matrix for
assessment, advisement, and certification
Program- and
campus-level assessment reports for internal and external
accreditation reviews
A hosted
Web-based solution that requires no institutional IT support
The annual
Student Learning Matrix membership fee is based on the number of students in
the program or institution. Click here
for more information and online membership application.
Global Learning System (GLS)
Epsilen offers the Global
Learning System (GLS), a new Web-based learning framework developed as the
next generation of eLearning and networking. In contrast to current legacy
learning management systems, the GLS offers true global learning
collaboration by connecting students and instructors on campuses in the U.S.
and around the world in an interactive and intuitive Web 2.0 learning
environment. The GLS complements existing licensed or open source CMS
products. The GLS features include:
Global learning
management system that enables students and instructors to easily
register or be invited to courses and learning collaboration
Cross listing of
class rosters of two or more courses within various campuses, or across
institutions
Innovative tools
using professional and social networking to enhance learning, encourage
collaboration, and utilize peer review technology
The ability to
easily archive courses and working groups for continued engagement
A hosted
Web-based solution that requires little, or no institutional IT support
The annual GLS membership fee is based on the
number of students and courses within the institution.
Click here for
more information and online membership
application.
Charter Membership Experience the
full suite of the Epsilen “Environment” and resources with unparalleled
access to NYTKnowledge Network content. Charter members receive special
pricing for unlimited use of ePortfolios, the Student Learning Matrix,
courses through the Global Learning System, and interactive Webcasts with
correspondents. With charter membership, two university administrators will
be invited to participate in the Epsilen - New York Times charter
council, with meetings and events scheduled at The New York Times.
Benefits include:
Single sign-on
environment featuring a toolbox of services for ePortfolio, social
networking, Learning Matrix, GLS, object repository, and
NYTKnowledge Network
Totally hosted
turnkey solution with no need for local servers or local technical
staff
Cost
effectiveness for both small and large campuses
Collaboration on
designing the next generation of eLearning through networking with
other members of the Epsilen - New York Times charter council
The Epsilen Charter membership fee is
based on the total number of students within the institution. Click here for
more information and online membership
application.
Technical Support and
System Integration Epsilen offers consulting and technical
support through both internal and third-party sources for the integration of
Epsilen with local campus databases and existing licensed technology. This
provides a seamless, single sign-on, portal approach to all resources and
services supporting the learning and teaching initiatives of a campus.
Click Here for
more information and online membership
application.
Look to our specialists to
help you use best practices in your teaching. Whether you
are new to our services, or an old friend, please don't
hesitate to contact us at
site@psu.edu with your questions.
Questions
How can you turn your email messages into free video messages?
How can you video conference calls?
For those of you in
the American Accounting Association, I call your attention to a new
Teaching Resource called TokBox submitted to the Commons by accounting
professor Rick Little. You do not need to go to the Commons for some of
Rick’s links passed on below. I thank Rick for sharing this teaching
resource.
AAA Members
Please go to the AAA
Commons at least once each day ---
http://commons.aaahq.org
For Teaching and Research Resources, Click on the menu bar item called
“Roles”
Rick’s posting is called “Thinking Outside the Box”
You might want to clidk on Rick’s picture to see his interesting profile
(e.g., with Grant Thornton and as a local CPA before getting his PhD in
accounting)
If you are trying to
gather a group of people for a conference or chat, TokBox may be just
the perfect thing. Visitors can use the video chat feature to include up
to 20 participants in a call, import contacts from Gtalk and Facebook,
and also text chat with other people during the call. Also, visitors can
share YouTube videos and files. This version is compatible with all
computers running Windows 2000 and newer.
Last year, TokBox
decided to drop the video messaging feature of its service and focus
on multi-party video conferencing and chat. I told them that I felt
they were making a big mistake with this service change.
I replaced TokBox
with two other services (i.e., Eyejot and YouTube). Eyejot is a
video email messaging service. YouTube added an option that makes it
possible to upload a video and keep it private but shareable.
I'm using Eyejot
with all my students. It's working very well and students really
like it. I've been able to integrate Eyejot into Blackboard.
Students can send me a video message of up to 5 minutes in length.
Soon, Eyejot is supposed to increase the message time from 5 minutes
to 10 minutes.
If you would like to submit a quiz, reply to this
message and I will send you the Excel template.
*****
Coming later this year: information on a
scholarship program for your accounting students. AccountingWEB will be
bestowing a load of money on three U.S. accounting students.
"15 Tools to Make Your PC a Multimedia Powerhouse: Enjoy your
video and audio collections to the fullest with the help of these free and
low-cost downloads," by Preston Gralla, PC World via The Washington Post,
October 30, 2008 ---
Click Here
Your
PC has become the greatest entertainment device
ever created, but you wouldn't know that judging by the software that ships
with the machine. Bundled media players, and related software for playing
and managing audio and video, tend to be underwhelming at best.
We've assembled 15 of our
favorite video and audio applications, all of which can handle just
about any job you can throw at them. The vast majority of these
downloads are completely free, and the others offer no-cost trials.
They'll help you download YouTube videos to your PC, or convert videos
to formats that you can view on handheld devices. They'll play any audio
and video formats you can find. They'll make you into a DJ and allow you
to create your own customized mixes, too. So if you want to get the most
out of the entertainment device on your desk, read on--and start
downloading. (And if you want to access all of these tools in one
convenient place, hop to our
audio and video downloads collection.)
Video
Want to download YouTube
videos to your computer, convert video files to formats that you can view on
portable players, find the best videos online, or watch TV from around the
world? We have software that does all that, and a lot more.
TubeMe
How many times have you
watched a YouTube video and wished that you could save it to your hard drive
for future viewing? With this free software, you can save YouTube videos as
.flv files; afterward, you can watch the videos in any multimedia software
that supports the .flv format (such as FLV Player or VLC Media Player, both
discussed below). Before downloading the videos, you get a full description
of them, as well.
Be aware that using this
program can be a bit confusing. Make sure to click the Download path
button, at the bottom of the screen, to tell the program where to download
your videos. And to download the video, you'll have to copy and paste the
YouTube URL into the program. After that, click the icon with a small plus
sign; it looks grayed-out, as if it were nonfunctional, but it does work.
Once you've added the link, you can download the video. You can also put
multiple videos in a list, and download them all at once.
FLV Player
If you've downloaded YouTube videos using TubeMe or another downloader, or
if you've collected other files in the .flv format, you may run into a
problem: Many media players, including Windows Media Player, can't handle
them. FLV Player is a straightforward media player designed to play .flv
files exclusively. To access a video, press , browse to the file, and open
it, or else double-click the .flv file from inside Windows Explorer. You can
also drag and drop files into the player. The software even handles multiple
.flv files: Simply drag several files to the program, and the app plays each
video in its own window.
You can control video
playback through the usual controls, or with a variety of keyboard
shortcuts. You can also toggle between full-screen mode and normal mode.
Note that you may run into problems installing the software on Windows
Vista. If that happens to you, right-click the installation file and choose
Run as Administrator. That should solve the problem.
Playing
video these days is no longer confined to your PC--countless other devices
can play video as well, including handheld devices and music players, mobile
phones, and the PlayStation Portable (PSP). The problem, though, is that if
you've downloaded videos to your PC, they might not be in the formats your
devices require.
Continued in article
Do It Yourself Interactive Whiteboard (about $60 instead of over $1,000)
Mr. Lee encourages innovators to ask themselves,
"Would providing 80 percent of the capability at 1 percent of the cost be
valuable to someone?" If the answer is yes, he says, pay attention. Trading
relatively little performance for substantial cost savings can generate what
Mr. Lee calls "surprising and often powerful results both scientifically and
socially."
As evidence, he might point to a do-it-yourself
interactive whiteboard, another of his Wiimote innovations. Interactive
whiteboards, which in commercial form generally sell for more than $1,000,
make it possible to control a computer by tapping, writing or drawing on an
image of the desktop that has been projected onto a screen. Mr. Lee's
version can be built with roughly $60 in parts and free open-source software
downloadable from his Web site.
Some 700,000 people, many of them teachers, have
downloaded the software, Mr. Lee says. Much more expensive whiteboards may
offer more features and better image resolution, but Mr. Lee's version is
adequate for most classroom applications.
This came as part of a
subscription to a technology newsletter, I haven't tried this product
myself. Scott Bonacker CPA, Springfield, MO]
As an
IT professional,
chances are good that you have lots of detailed
information that you have to keep track of in order to do your job
effectively and efficiently. You probably have a multitude of documents
stored in a multitude of folders on your hard disk. Using a series of
documents and folders to store all your information is a pretty logical way
of doing things, especially when used in combination with
Vista’s Search tool and Saved searches
feature, keeping track of all that information is pretty easy. However, it
could be better — especially if all that information could be made available
in one place.
Well, I recently discovered a very nice document
manager called Maple from
Crystal Office
Systems that runs perfectly on Windows
Vista and produces what is essentially a document database. In this edition
of the
Windows Vista Report, I’ll introduce you to
Maple and show you how to use it manage your document collection.
You can download Maple from the
Crystal Office
Systems Web site. Once you download it,
installation is a snap and you’ll be ready begin creating you custom
document database in no time. You can download and try Maple for 30 days at
no cost. A single-user license is $21.95.
When you access the Crystal Office Systems Web
site, you’ll also notice that there is another version of this document
manager called Maple Professional, which provides a set of advanced
features. You’ll also find free reader called Maple Reader that will allow
other users to view any document database created with either Maple or Maple
Professional.
We are sending you
this email because you are an author of material in the MERLOT collection (www.merlot.org).
As you know, MERLOT is an international consortium of higher education
institutions, professional societies, digital libraries, and corporations
who support educational improvement through technology. Last year, MERLOT
had more than 1,000,000 visits from people searching for reusable
learning materials to incorporate into their teaching and learning. As
MERLOT continues to grow (over 20,000 materials accessed by more than 62,000
members, growing at 1200+ new members monthly), participants are
increasingly concerned about legal issues related to the reuse of online
materials.
We recognize the
efforts of people like you who have created learning materials and have
agreed to share your work through MERLOT. To protect and guide members of
the MERLOT community, we have adopted the intellectual property policies of
the increasingly popular consortium, Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org).
We are doing this to:
·Encourage
creators of online materials to share their work with others who might wish
to reuse the materials.
·Ensure that
contributions of online materials by MERLOT members are protected from
misuse and abuse.
We would like to encourage you, as a developer of online materials, to
declare Creative Commons licenses for all your material so that
others don’t use your work in ways counter to your intentions. Creative
Commons provides an easy process for defining licenses; it also provides
HTML code you can copy directly to your website to let others know what
license applies to your work. To easily select the license of your choice,
go to
www.creativecommons.org/license.
If you wish to
have a Creative Commons license displayed with your MERLOT digital
content and you are the original contributor of your material to the MERLOT
collection, you may add the Creative Commons information yourself. You may
also send an email to the MERLOT Webmaster (webmaster@merlot.org),
indicating the title of your material in MERLOT and the Creative Commons
license you would like to display with the description of your material.
If you aren’t sure which license to use, we suggest the Creative Commons
license that allows others to reuse and alter your work, but only if they
provide attribution to you as the author and only if they reuse it for non
commercial purposes
(Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license).
Many professors who teach online complain that they
have no way of seeing whether their far-away students are following the
lectures — or whether the students have fallen asleep at their desks. But
researchers at the University of California at San Diego say they have a
solution. They recently tested a system that can detect facial expressions
of online students and determine when they find the material difficult, so
that cues could be sent to the professors telling them to slow down.
In the experiment, eight subjects were shown short
video clips of lectures while a Web cam tracked their facial expressions —
looking for smiles, blinks, raised eyebrows, and the like. The subjects were
then asked to report how difficult they found each section, and to take a
quiz on the material. Mr. Whitehill says that the system correctly detected
when students were having trouble (the most reliable indicator: students
blinked less when they were struggling to understand).
The system could be used to give valuable feedback
to professors teaching online, says Mr. Whitehill. “It’s not going to be
perfect by any means,” he says, but it’s better than no student feedback at
all. “Professors say that they can’t see the students. This could do it for
them automatically.”
Microsoft has decided to enlarge a service of keen
interest to colleges, even as the company last week
dumped another offering used by higher education,
its Live Search Books program. Now
Live@edu, the free Web-based e-mail and online
collaboration program for students and alumni, is getting much larger
inboxes, the ability to handle bigger attached files, true shared calendars,
and the chance for colleges to block student e-mail containing words they
deem offensive, the company announced today.
Tired of the 5 gigabyte inbox? Live@edu now offers
accounts with 10 gigabytes, and the capacity to handle attachments up to 20
megabytes in size, says Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for the
service. The boost is because the company has decided that, in addition to
handing campuses Microsoft Hotmail accounts (with university-based e-mail
addresses), it will offer accounts on the more powerful Microsoft Exchange
Web access system. That gives users access to Windows programs like Outlook,
with e-mail, full calendars, and a contact list.
It’s a solution used by many businesses, and
Microsoft has been quietly offering it, in a form called
Exchange Labs, to a few educational institutions
since last fall. Drexel University, Hinds Community College, and the
Colorado Community College system are some that have tried it.
With Exchange Labs, users at the same university
can see one another’s calendars to set up meetings. E-mail tracking is
enabled, so students can see whether a term paper was delivered to a
professor’s inbox. They can also push e-mail to cell phones. (And they can
use Exchange to wipe data from those phones if they happen to lose them.)
Exchange Labs also gives university officials the ability to set up filters,
like spam filters, for offensive terms in e-mail, though Mr. Gabrielle says
he wasn’t sure what words, if any, that universities have tried placing on a
“do not type” list.
At this point the service is not being offered to
faculty members or administrators. “I think it’s a business model decision,”
Mr. Gabrielle said, noting that the company may need to figure out whether
it wants to allow ads on Web pages seen by those users; the student and
alumni service is ad-free.
"SketchCast:
a New Blogging and Teaching Tool," Chronicle of
Higher Education, May 14, 2008 ---
Click Here
Want to preserve that lesson you did at the
blackboard today in class and share it with students online? Try
SketchCast, a free
blogging tool that allows users to record a digital drawing (and
contemporaneous audio), and then embed the animated video onto a Web site.
It’s essentially an easy form of animation.
What a nice tool to capture and share ideas
informally! I have been trying to capture tools and concepts for opening
up collaborative learning on my blog
www.collaborativenetworkedlearning.blogspot.com
Stay informed
Use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to keep up with technology news
and events. To use RSS you'll need an RSS reader like
Google Reader,
NetNewsWire (Mac), or
FeedDemon (Windows) to read RSS feeds. An
RSS feed is basically a dynamic link that updates your RSS reader
when new content is posted to a website (click the "RSS Feeds"
button under our search bar to see examples).
You can also subscribe to technology newsletters, and talk to
students about websites and web services they use on their own. A
majority of teachers do not know what
Stickam or
Meebo
are, yet these sites are used daily by many of
their students.
Focus on the learning process, not
the end product
When little Susie uses iMovie to create a video of her class field
trip to Cape Canaveral, she should be evaluated on what she's
learned through the creative process, not how many wipes and sound
effects she used in her final movie file. The quality and relativity
of the still pictures she took by learning how to use a digital
camera, or video footage from a well-designed storyboard are better
barometers of a successful project.
Work with IT professionals who
understand education
I work on the IT side of education daily, and I know it's important
to unfetter technology at a school to stimulate the learning
process. IT staff must be willing to bend on certain security
measures and trust students with equipment so that they can be
creative and not boxed in. We let students take laptops home to work
on approved projects, which ultimately motivates their peers to do
the same. We also have a dedicated instructional adviser who helps
teachers integrate technology into their lesson plans. This often
helps ease the teachers' modification of antiquated lessons.
Become a user
Make a
Facebook account so you can understand the
allure of social-networking sites. Add some information about
yourself. Locate former school pals. Join some groups. This will let
you see sites like Faceook from a student's perspective.
To collaborate and share course materials, you can create a
Moodle site for your class, or start a
class
blog.
Students benefit more from teachers who
collaborate and less from teachers who force-feed lectures. Also,
it's much easier to teach about something that you've actually used
in depth. It's time to break the stigma of "those that can, do;
those that can't, teach."
Don't be afraid of change
Some teachers think that upgrading from Office 2003 to 2007 is using
the latest technology. However, a Word document is still words and
formatting meant for someone to read. Instead of being satisfied
with word processing in a new version of software, why not let
students create a school "newspaper" on something like
Joomla. The news could be updated in
seconds, it could be interactive (comments, updates, etc.), and it
could be include user-submitted media.
Google Earth
could be used to give an elementary student
global perspective by flying in from a world view down to the roof
of his home.
Jensen Comment
There are other things that I would recommend. I think joining listserv
of other educators is important, especially educators in your discipline
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Late at night on a television station in Lansing,
Michigan, a new kind of program tries to make the audience the main
attraction. It's called
TextMeTV,
and it goes like this: One or two young hosts, some of them college
students, sit on a couch and read text messages being sent in live from
viewers, and those messages are also posted on a box in the corner of the
screen. Sometimes the hosts encourage those texters to debate topics of the
day, other times they offer free iPods or other prizes to viewers who can
answer trivia questions. The show looks more like a YouTube page than a
television show. Though moderators do edit the text messages that come in
before they post them to the screen, the show is live with no tape delay,
says Helena Kirby, a producer for the show and one of its 7 rotating hosts.
"There's no swearing and no sexual talk -- we keep it pretty clean," she
adds. Viewers pay a small fee per text message to participate. Ms. Kirby
says the show's best moments have been when viewers sparred about race
issues or politics. "People get fired up," she says. But this January the
show -- which has been on since last year -- began focusing more on games
and contests, like trivia challenges, than on debates.
One entertainment blogger
recently called the show "the dumbest thing I’ve ever
heard," noting that the show seems empty of substance. But Ms. Kirby argues
that it represents a revolutionary new format. "I think some people are just
afraid of it -- that this new concept is going to do something big, and they
don't want it to," she says. "I say, Out with the old, in the with the new."
Amariee Woods, another host of the show who is a senior at Michigan State
University, says that younger audiences want to participate, not just
passively consume media. "People want to put their comments on everything,
and the faster they can do that, the better." A similar show in Texas called
Subtext, which
features students from the University of Texas at Austin, uses a similar
format but focuses on dating. The shows are essentially trying to turn
television into something more like the Internet. In fact, the shows would
probably work better as interactive Web pages where people could put aside
their cell phones and interact with their computer keyboards. But then the
show's producers would not be able to make a cut of the text-messaging fees,
as they do now. Do younger viewers now see one-way broadcast television as
dull? Or are these interactive shows a sign that media companies are trying
to mix many kinds of media formats? Use your computer keyboard to let us
know what you think.
Pen Kenrick J. Mock says he loves recording lectures for his classes
using his tablet PC. And the associate professor of computer science at the
University of Alaska at Anchorage also loves projecting computational
problems using PowerPoint or the writing program OneNote.
What Mr. Mock does not love is the inability to point to a specific part
of the problem for his class. “It’s always bothered me that the pen cursor
is a tiny little dot,” he writes in his blog on technology and teaching.
“The problem is that I like to use the pen to “point” at things as I give
the lecture, but it doesn’t help if the class can’t see it.”
He looked, in vain, for a program that would enlarge the cursor. And
finally he gave in, remembered he was a computer scientist, and wrote a
program himself.
The result is PenAttention, and it turns that minuscule dot into a
minuscule dot with a big colored spotlight around it. It’s a little more
distracting to write with this kind of cursor, but his class can finally see
what he is doing.
The program is free, works on tablet PCs running XP and Vista, and can be
downloaded from a link in Mr. Mock’s blog post describing it.
Microsoft wants to help students get their lives
together (their learning lives, at least), and Tuesday it rolled out a
product to help. As part of
Live@edu,
the company’s free Web-based email and calendar suite,
Microsoft unveiled
Office Live
Workspace, which lets students access their work
online and share it with others. Live@edu is in use at more than 600
colleges.
“The most visible new feature is the activity
panel,” said Guy Gilbert, a Microsoft group product manager, in an interview
with The Chronicle Monday. “Suppose you are in a work group with
other students. You can look at the panel and see everything that anyone has
done since you last logged on. And links in the panel take you right to that
object,” whether it is a document, a spreadsheet, contact list, or database.
Users can also set up e-mail alerts that notify
them any time an item is changed.
The service has been running in beta for several
months, and of its estimated 100,000 users, 20 to 30 percent are in higher
education, Mr. Gilbert says. Microsoft has worked with 13 colleges to
fine-tune the service, including Florida Community College at Jacksonville,
Vanderbilt University, and the University of Wisconsin at Parkside.
And if the new service doesn’t seem familiar to
users of
Google Docs, don’t worry. Microsoft’s arch rival
also promises real-time collaboration, and the two companies seem to be
running neck and neck in the education marketplace.
AtGentive: New software platforms that incorporate artificial
intelligence and social networking into their approach toward e-learning.
Attention Please! Next-Generation E-Learning Is
Here ICT Results (02/14/08)
European researchers working for the AtGentive
project have developed two new software platforms that incorporate
artificial intelligence and social networking into their approach toward
e-learning. AtGentive coordinator Thierry Nabeth says the first generation
of e-learning platforms focused on replicating the classroom experience, but
student's often had difficulty staying motivated and the learning program
failed to keep their attention. To overcome this problem, one of the
AtGentive platforms uses techniques similar to those found on Web sites such
as Facebook that make them so popular as a means of staying in touch with
others. The platforms also use artificial intelligence to keep students
interested. "Artificial agents are autonomous entities that observe users'
activities and assess their state of attention in order to intervene so as
to make the user experience more effective," Nabeth says. "The interventions
can take many forms, from providing new information to the students, guiding
them in their work, or alerting them when other users connect to the
platform." The artificial intelligence agents provide a smart form of
proactive coaching for students by assessing, guiding, and stimulating them.
The agents can alert students when others have read their articles, or when
they receive feedback on their contributions to a collaborative project. The
agents are also able to detect when students are not interacting with the
system and try to get them to rejoin the lesson.
Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Accounting & Information Systems, COBAE
California State University, Northridge
Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948
818.677.2461 (messages)
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
Notes on the Smart Pen The
smart
penthat Wired Campus flagged back in May was
unveiled last week at a technology conference in Palm Springs, Calif. The
company behind it, LiveScribe, has been aggressively marketing the device to
college students with the slogan "Never miss a word." It's basically a
combination recording machine and camera. Users take notes while a minirecorder,
embedded in the pen, records whatever is being said. Later, to clarify the
written notes, the user can touch the pen to a specific passage and listen to a
recording of the instructor speaking those words. A tiny camera links what is
being written to what is being recorded. In a takeoff on television commercials
for pharmaceuticals, the smart-pen advertisement below features a student who
suffers from "restless mind syndrome." The pen is offered as a panacea.
Livescribe has set up a Facebook page to push the pen, and
offers to pay college studentsto promote the
device on their campuses. It's also advertised on the Web site
ThePalestra, where Andy Van Schaack, a senior
lecturer at Vanderbilt University, who is an adviser to LiveScribe, is seen
praising the pen. Will the pen, which sells for about $200, take off with
college students? Will it be used as a crutch for students who are too tired or
distracted to listen to their professors? Andrea L. Foster, "Notes on the Smart Pen," Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2719&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Questions
Will we soon be able to lecture without opening our mouths?
Can you send a "relational" database file to a friend by simply shaking hands?
Is this the beginning of a whole new definition of human "relationships?"
Can the message of a hug be digital and unambiguous?
New magic in a kiss or two?
Does your database have halitosis or dirty fingernails or a flu virus?
I'd better stop asking questions about this before I get in trouble!
Japanese firm harnesses the power of human touch They say you can tell a lot from a handshake. But while
it's usually guesswork, the power of human touch will soon be used in Japan to
transmit data. Telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) is
planning a commercial launch of a system to enter rooms that frees users from
the trouble of rummaging in their pockets or handbags for ID cards or keys. It
uses technology to turn the surface of the human body itself into a means of
data transmission. As data travels through the user's clothing, handbag or
shoes, anyone carrying a special card can unlock the door simply by touching the
knob or standing on a particular spot without taking the card out. "In everyday
life, you're always touching things. Even if you are standing, you are stepping
on something," research engineer Mitsuru Shinagawa told AFP. "These simple
touches can result in communication," said Shinagawa, senior research engineer
at the company's NTT Microsystem Integration Laboratories. He said future
applications could include a walk-through ticket gate, a cabinet that opens only
to authorised people and a television control that automatically chooses
favourite programmes. PhysOrg, February 21, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news122793751.html
Question
What are real time virtual office hours?
Hint:
They operate a bit like a course
chat room
with some added features like microphones, and an instructor or teaching fellow
is in the room at all times.
As
reported in
The Harvard Crimson on Monday,
teaching fellows (Harvard parlance for TAs) for the course this
semester will begin holding real-time, online help sessions for
students this week. Using free, Java-based software, students
can
log on, chat with each other (via text
or microphone) and even “raise their hands” with the click of a
button, which adds them to a queue on the teaching fellow’s
computer.
Andy Guess, "Office Hours:
Coming to a Computer Near You," Inside Higher Ed,
September 18, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/18/officehours
Like it or not, Wikipedia is one of the most
sought out sights in the world by e-Learners ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
There are risks, but the odds are high that users will get helpful learning
information and links.
Each year, I look
forward to the “Top 100 Tools
for Learning” list compiled by
Jane Hart(Centre
for Learning & Performance Technologies,
UK). This year’s
tools were recommended by 545 learning
professionals from around the world.
You may recognize many of the tools on
the list. Some have been around for a
while. Pay particular attention to
tools shaded in “blue.” These are new
to the 2010 list. Click the picture
below to access the Top 100 Tools for
Learning web page.
Jensen Comment
In the past I've been very critical of this supposed "Top 100 Tools for
Learning." I'm still not impressed in 2010, but there are a few improvements ---
http://c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100-2010.html
Like
it or not, Wikipedia is one of the most sought out sights in the world by
e-Learners ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
There are risks, but the odds are high that users will get helpful learning
information and links.
In 2010 this was finally added at Rank 16. It should've been Rank 1.
ToolBook should’ve been number 1 but it
fumbled the ball. What proportion of e-Learners are now learning, today,
from ToolBooks? My guess is that much less than one percent. A negligible
proportion of instructors are developing learning materials using ToolBook
dhtml files relative to FrontPage and Dreamweaver htm files.
The biggest innovation for e-Learners and
authors was Adobe Acrobat’s tremendous development of online pdf files that
could be read and electronically searched for free but not be tampered with
by readers. Now major commercial publishing houses are putting new books on
line as pdf files.
One of the biggest innovations I forgot to
mention was the unknown (at least to me) date in which MS Office files
(particularly ppt, doc, and xls files) could be downloaded and read from
Web servers that at one time only could handle htm markups. In terms of
e-learning htm, pdf, doc, xls, and ppt files are overwhelmingly the main
files for e-Learning, although they are now joined by such files as xml
files.
Another huge e-Learning innovation that I
forgot to mention is the unknown (at least to me) date in which the above
learning and research files could be attached to email messages. This made
it easier to have private distributions (say to students in a class) without
having to put files on Web, Blackboard, or WebCT servers. Anybody with email
can not send files back and forth.
There is still a great risk of macro viruses
when downloading MS Office files from the Web or email messages. However,
most e-Learners are doing so from trusted Web sites and/or email senders
such as files from their course instructors.
ToolBook could fade away and the world would
hardly know about it or miss it.
Zotero
is a
free,
open source extension for the
Firefox browser, that enables
users to collect, manage, and cite research from all types
of sources from the browser. It is partly a piece of
reference management software,
used to manage
bibliographies and
references
when writing essays and articles. On many major research
websites such as digital libraries,
Google Scholar, or even
Amazon.com, Zotero detects when a
book, article, or other resource is being viewed and with a
mouse click finds and saves the full reference information
to a local file. If the source is an online article or web
page, Zotero can optionally store a local copy of the
source. Users can then add notes, tags, and their own
metadata through the in-browser
interface. Selections of the local reference library data
can later be exported as formatted bibliographies.
The
program is produced by the
Center for History and New Media
of
George Mason University and is
currently available in public beta. It is open and
extensible, allowing other users to contribute citation
styles and site translators, and more generally for others
who are building digital tools for researchers to expand the
platform. The name is from
Albanian language "to master".
It is
aimed at replacing the more cumbersome traditional
reference management software,
originally designed to meet the demands of offline
research
Zotero is
a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating
digital documents. It has been available for not quite a
year. I started using it about six weeks ago, and am still
learning some of the fine points, but feel sufficient
enthusiasm about
Zotero
to recommend it to anyone doing research online. If very
much of your work involves material from JSTOR, for example
– or if you find it necessary to collect bibliographical
references, or to locate Web-based publications that you
expect to cite in your own work — then Zotero is worth
knowing how to use. (You can install it on your computer for
free; more on that in due course.)
Now, my highest qualification for testing a digital
tool is, perhaps, that I have no qualifications for testing a digital tool.
That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. The limits of my technological
competence are very quickly reached. My command of the laptop computer
consists primarily of the ability to (1) turn it on and (2) type stuff. This
condition entails certain disadvantages (the mockery of nieces and nephews,
for example) but it makes for a pretty good guinea pig.
And in that respect, I can report that the folks at
George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media have done an
exemplary job in designing Zotero. A relatively clueless person can learn to
use it without exhaustive effort.
Still, it seems as if institutions that do not
currently do so might want to offer tutorials on Zotero for faculty and
students who may lack whatever gene makes for an intuitive grasp of
software. Academic librarians are probably the best people to offer
instruction. Aside from being digitally savvy, they may be the people at a
university in the best position to appreciate the range of uses to which
Zotero can be put.
For the absolute newbie, however, let me explain
what Zotero is — or rather, what it allows you to do. I’ll also mention a
couple of problems or limitations. Zotero is still under development and
will doubtless become more powerful (that is, more useful) in later
releases. But the version now available has numerous valuable features that
far outweigh any glitches.
Suppose you go online to gather material on some
aspect of a book you are writing. In the course of a few hours, you might
find several promising titles in the library catalog, a few more with
Amazon, a dozen useful papers via JSTOR, and three blog entries by scholars
who are thinking aloud about some matter tangential to your project.
Continued in article
October 12, 2011 reply from Steve Hornick
I've used both Endnote and Zotero but now use a Mac
product called Papers - if anyone has a Mac I'd highly recommend
looking into it:
http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/
How to Avoid Expensive Adobe Software for
Converting MS Office Documents to PDF Files
"Creating Documents for All to Read Inexpensive
Ways To Convert a Variety Of Content to PDFs," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall
Street Journal, August 8, 2007; Page D9 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118652753636390978.html
For years, people have
accessed a variety of digital content in one of the most universally
accepted formats: Adobe's Portable Document Format, better known as the PDF.
A PDF holds images and text without altering a document's original fonts and
layout. It can be searched, protected with a password, disabled from
printing and enriched with bookmarks and hyperlinks that make it more
navigable.
But while Adobe provides a
free reader for viewing PDFs, creating PDFs yourself can be costly and
confusing, even though the format is great for saving and sharing documents
of almost any kind including images, Web pages, Word documents and emails.
For users who want higher-end PDF creation and collaboration software, Adobe
Systems Inc. offers its $450 Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional software program.
But that's pricey for most casual users. So this week I tested some
inexpensive or free methods for making PDFs.
There are plenty of Windows programs available
for download online that will help you create basic PDFs. On Windows
computers, I tried three programs, starting with the $20 standard
version of deskPDF from Plano, Texas-based Docudesk Corp. (www.Docudesk.com).
I tested a stripped-down and less-expensive version of Adobe's
program called Create Adobe PDF Online, which works by uploading
your document at
www.CreatePDF.com
and costs $10 monthly or $100 annually. And I also used a free
program called CutePDF from Acro Software Inc. (www.CutePDF.com).
If you own a
Mac, things are even simpler. Macs come out of the box with the
ability to turn documents into PDFs, and I tested that function as
well.
DeskPDF and
CutePDF worked roughly the same way, though deskPDF costs $20 and
CutePDF is free. Adobe's less-expensive program offered a few more
features than deskPDF and CutePDF, such as the ability to add
password encryption to a document or to make it unprintable by
others. Making PDFs on the Mac was a cinch, including options to
compress or encrypt a PDF. None of these methods allowed me to add
extra features to PDFs like bookmarks and hyperlinks; for that,
you'll need a more serious program.
When
Microsoft's Office 2007 program shipped early this year, many people
expected that it would have the built-in ability to save documents
in PDF format; it didn't. Users can find a patch that fixes this on
Microsoft's Web site.
Apple's
operating system has long been known for the ease with which it can
create PDFs using built-in tools. Put simply, any document that can
be printed from a Mac can also be turned into a PDF. Users follow
the normal steps necessary to print a document or Web site (usually
File, Print), but can choose a button on the Print screen labeled
"PDF" that converts the document.
In seconds, I
turned all types of documents on my iMac into PDFs, including images
in JPEG and TIF formats, emails, Word documents and Web sites. This
last conversion was helpful for saving not just a view of the
current screen, but the entire site from the top of the page to the
bottom.
Options
labeled "Compress PDF" and "Encrypt PDF" can be chosen in this Print
screen. I chose Encrypt PDF and protected a PDF using a password in
one quick step. The option to compress a PDF will decrease the size
of an image in a document, but won't decrease the size of a
text-only document.
Two of the
three Windows programs use a method similar to Apple's, letting me
send documents or Web sites into print mode and converting them into
PDFs. Downloading and installing deskPDF or CutePDF adds a virtual
printer driver to the computer. Rather than choosing a separate
button labeled "PDF," the conversion program is selected from a list
of printers, and hitting the Print button saves the document as a
PDF file. The first time I did this, I thought my document was
printed rather than saved because a printer icon appeared in the
bottom right-hand corner of the screen, as if the document was
printing. But a screen appeared asking where I wanted to save the
new PDF, and I specified a location.
Docudesk
offers free 24-hour technical support with all of its deskPDF
programs, even trial versions. The company also touts its $40
deskUNPDF program, which restores PDFs to Word documents for editing
purposes, one of the features also found in Adobe's $450 product.
CutePDF writer
and deskPDF must be used with separately installed converter
programs, but these are small and free, and their installation is
prompted after each of the core programs is downloaded. Both
programs are also offered in upgraded versions that cost $50 for
CutePDF Pro and $30 for deskPDF Pro, enabling advanced features like
hyperlinks, encryption, password protection and printing
restrictions.
Adobe's Create
Adobe PDF Online program offers a few more features than the others,
but feels a bit disconnected because it uploads documents to the Web
for PDF conversion rather than converting documents in an installed
program.
An option
called Create Adobe PDF Online Printer installs a printer driver on
your PC, like deskPDF and CutePDF. But this saves your PDF online
forcing you to retrieve it via Adobe's Web site, an emailed link or
an emailed attachment.
After
registering to use Adobe's online conversion product, users must
select the file or Web page intended for PDF conversion. Security
features are optional with each document, such as requiring a
password to view it or not allowing others to print it. I tried both
successfully. Once converted, a document can be delivered to you via
email in a link or attachment. It can also be retrieved from a
Conversion History section on the site or converted directly on the
site.
Most of these
conversion programs are available in some free capacity. DeskPDF can
be used five times free of charge in the standard and professional
versions before it starts adding a watermark to each PDF, which is
intrusive. Adobe's program can be used five times for each email
that you register before you must subscribe to its conversion
service.
If you need to
save a document in a format that has the greatest likelihood of
being viewable by all of your recipients, PDFs are the way to go,
and they aren't difficult to make.
Is Facebook the New MySpace? MySpace has an impressive lead today, but things can
change quickly in the fluid world of mass-market social networking sites. Just
ask Friendster. First Friendster was everybody's favorite social
networking site. Then Friendster fell out of vogue--precipitously--and people
stopped going there. In its place, MySpace became the darling of the Web.
MySpace provided not only a free place to host your own online identity, but a
full set of tools for meeting and interacting with others. Now everybody is
talking about Facebook, which fits the same description, but in a very different
way. Will Facebook become the next MySpace? I think so, and here's why.
Mark Sullivan, PC World via The Washington Post, July 20, 2007 ---
Click Here
From the University of Chicago
BiblioVault: An Alternative for Long-term Storage of Digital Book Files
BiblioVault helps scholarly publishers preserve and
extend the value of their books. We provide long-term storage of digital book
files for our member presses, as well as a wide range of scanning, printing,
transfer, and conversion services. Launched in late 2001 by the University of
Chicago Press, BiblioVault operates under the umbrella of Chicago Distribution
Services, which also oversees a digital printing center, the Chicago Digital
Distribution Center (CDDC). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the
development of BiblioVault and the CDDC with three grants totaling $3.2 million.
http://www.bibliovault.org/BV.index.epl
Integrating and Automating Production
and Fulfillment
Short-Run Digital Printing (SRDP)
An Oldie but Goodie
An Oversize Classic
Saved by SRDP
Impact of CDDC SRDP
Harvard University Press: Ultra-Short
Inventory-Replenishment Program (USIRP)
MIT Press Classics Series: Bringing Books Back into Print
Print-on-Demand (POD)
Electronic Distribution (E-books)
CHOOSING PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION
ALTERNATIVES
Effects of Digital printing
Outstanding Issues
From Carnegie-Mellon University: How to Turn
Your Photographs into 3-D Photographs
"A New Dimension for Your Photos Web service
Fotowoosh wants to be the Flickr of 3-D," by Wade Roush, MIT's Technology
Review, April 27, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18596/
Looking at the photo prints
from your Washington, D.C.,
vacation can prompt memories
of being at real,
three-dimensional places
like the Lincoln Memorial.
But what if you could
actually walk into your
photograph and stand at
Lincoln's feet all over
again--or at least zoom
inside a 3-D version of your
image on a computer screen?
A new Web service called
Fotowoosh
promises to deliver such an
experience, courtesy of
computer-vision researchers
at Carnegie Mellon
University, in Pittsburgh.
Derek Hoiem,
a doctoral candidate at
Carnegie Mellon's
Robotics Institute,
has
spent the past year and a
half figuring out how to get
software to convert flat
images into 3-D
virtual-reality models that
can be manipulated
on-screen. Working with
faculty members
Alexei Efros
and
Martial Hebert,
Hoiem
came up with a
machine-learning system that
identifies various surfaces
and their orientations based
on what it has learned from
examining previous photos.
In essence, Fotowoosh frees
the person viewing a
photograph from the
photographer's point of view
so that he or she can
explore perspectives other
than the one the camera
actually captured.
Microsoft has created a
free add-in that enables you to embed a Creative
Commons copyright license into a document that you create using the
Microsoft application Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. With a Creative Commons
license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may
be used by others.
Installation of the Creative Commons Microsoft
Office add-in will add an option to your File menu whereby you can easily
add the CC logo and usage statement to your document.
Video Capturing, Editing, Compression, and Playback
(With Links to UserView for Viewing and Capturing Remotely Located Computer
Screens and Audio)
More than 100
colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu Many
universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting”
Overcoming Mistakes of Early Efforts in Online Teaching During the 2020 Pandemic
1. Over-Assigning Work
2. Recording Long Video Lectures
3. Not Engaging Students in Multiple Formats of Learning
4. Being Disorganized
5. Not Engaging with Students
Trying to
"translate" a classroom course to the online environment. While
I'd argue that there's no such thing as "online pedagogy" (there's only
good pedagogy and poor pedagogy), classroom and online are different
experiences that require attention to the conditions of learning distinct
to each. Attempts to re-create the classroom learning experience,
methods, and modes to the online environment is a basic error. Teaching
online requires a "start over" in your course design, though not
necessarily a change in student learning outcomes.
Applying wrong
metrics to the online experience. For
example, many professors are wondering how to take attendance, or
figuring out what counts for attendance. Attendance is a rather archaic
and almost meaningless metric left over from the industrial age model of
schooling. A better metric is student engagement.
Becoming a talking
head. It's
bad enough students have to put up with a lot of poor classroom
lectures. Now they have to suffer through countless hours of talking
heads as professors videotape themselves "lecturing." I've been teaching
online for 22 years. I've never once used Zoom in an online course or
posted taped lectures. Forcing students to watch a taped disembodied
talking head almost guarantees student disengagement, especially
if we fail to appreciate the liability of transactional distance in
the online environment. If the content of your lecture is that
important, give your students a manuscript or your lecture notes to
study.
Posting video
lectures over seven minutes long. The
lecture method takes on a different function in the online environment.
When instructors ask me how they can video tape and post their lectures
online I ask, "Why would you want to duplicate the most maligned and
least effective teaching method and pretend the online environment is a
‘classroom’ when it offers so much greater opportunity for student
engagement?" The question to ask is, "What is the pedagogical function
of this video?" The most effective functions are: a short introduction,
an explication, or a demonstration.
Assessing the wrong
thing. I
see some schools wanting to assess whether students "like" the online
experience. What students "like" is beside the point of the educational.
A common student comment on course evaluation for online courses is, "I
would have preferred to have taken this course in the classroom." The
response is, "How do you know?" Ask those students if they learned what
the course was intended to provide, and they'll likely say, "Yes!"
Assess the right thing: evidence of student learning and achievement of
the course student learning outcomes. One can also evaluate the
effectiveness of the course design: structure, scope, flow, alignment
with program goals, etc.
Ignoring aesthetics
and design when creating an online course. Figuring
out your course should not be an assignment. Your course should be
designed so intuitively and aesthetically pleasing so the student
perceives, intuits, and understands immediately what they are seeing and
what is expected of them. Your students don't read a user manual or
instructions when playing complex video games—they can immediately
perceive what the game is about and what they are supposed to do. A
well-designed website does not provide an orientation to new visitors.
Your course should be clean, intuitive, and logical in design (and that
includes not adding anything that does not directly support the learning
outcomes).
Attempting to go
for coverage rather than depth. Many
classroom instructors fail to appreciate that because online learning
requires a higher level of student engagement, they need to reduce the
amount of coverage they usually attempt in a classroom course—-which
usually is way too much as it is. A good rule of thumb: cut the content
coverage by half and focus on student engagement that (1) helps students
achieve a learning outcomes and (2) provides evidence of learning.
Failing to ask for
help. Most
faculty members are used to the silo-oriented isolated nature of
academia. Traditionally, they develop their courses alone. At most they
may share their course syllabi with colleagues on their faculties or
departments, though more often than not they are seen mostly by the
dean, registrar, and library services. Teaching online, especially for
first time instructors, is a great opportunity to be more collaborative
in our approach to teaching. Ask for help. Experienced online
instructors, your school's instructional designers, and numerous online
teaching support groups are ready and happy to help you make your online
course the best it can be.
Mistake 1: Preferring quantity over quality
Mistake 2: Lack of planning and organization
Mistake 3: Using too many assumptions
Mistake 4: Being monotonous
Error 5: Little feedback
Jensen Comment
Nothing is more boring than watching talking heads or endless PowerPoint slides
on a computer screen or inside classrooms.
Students prefer live-action
asynchronous and even interactive videos.
Exhibit A is the hundreds of wonderful tutorials available free from Khan
Academy --- https://www.khanacademy.org/
For example sample the math videos --- https://www.khanacademy.org/math
Exhibit B is at Brigham
Young University where the first two semesters of basic accounting is taught via
asynchronous videos to students living on campus.
There are only a few times where students meet in a classroom ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Exhibit C is when I flipped
my own classrooms
In the last ten years of my 40 years of teaching full time I flipped my
classrooms. I prepared hundreds of short Camtasia videos on the most technical
parts of my accounting and AIS courses. Before class meetings students viewed
these videos over and over until they saw the light. In class I then had
students demonstrate in front of the class what they had learned. Student teams
can even make their own videos as term projects.
Camtasia videos or related
screen capture videos from other software vendors are really quite easy to make
and don't take much more time than preparing a lecture. They work best where
what you are trying to teach can be shown in successions of computer screens.
Students watch your cursor move about and listen to you explaining what is
happening --- you use a microphone to put your voice into the videos. In
Camtasia you can even make the videos interactive to keep students engaged.
Camtasia Free Trial ---
https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
Ask you campus educational technology experts about Camtasia and competing
software for preparing Camtasia-like videos.
You can use Zoom to bring your
videos into remote classrooms, although there are other ways to bring these
videos to students on and off campus.
There are now
nearly 7,000 accounting education videos on YouTube, most of which are in very
basic accounting.
But there are nearly 150 videos in advanced accounting. There are nearly
70 videos on XBRL
For those of us who give presentations, write
blogs, or post on social media, we often want to offer a snippet of a longer
video to make a point, get a laugh, or otherwise spice things up. Enter
TubeChop. The platform is beautiful for its simplicity. Just find the
YouTube, Vimeo, TedTalk, or other video that you would like to sample and
paste the link into TubeChop. Then use the end bars to choose the exact
second when your clip will begin and end, select "chop it," and copy or
embed the generated link.
With TechSmith Smart Player for Office, you can
seamlessly integrate interactive content made with TechSmith products like
Camtasia and Snagit into your PowerPoint and Excel documents right from
OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. To truly make your content
measurable and collaborative, you can also add quiz and survey questions at
any point in your video to make your content a two way communication tool.
Then use our preview version of TechSmith Results
to see your quiz and survey results and measure how well your message is
received. Instead of back and forth questions via email and meetings,
clarify document expectations or instructions with visual communication.
Advanced video production for your touch screen computer or
mobile--- Http://www.touchcast.com
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up on March 22, 2014.
So if you have an IPad, go to the above link to view their sample
content.
Also you can download the free app to create content on your IPad.
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos
that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for
your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips
for video projects as well as free online communication tools.
My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of
work that they are now sharing with us
Screencasting ScreenCast from TechSmith is a leading storage/server alternative for your
Jing and Camtasia videos ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechSmith
The
University of Leeds in the United Kingdom is
deploying
Sonic Foundry's Mediasite Enterprise Video
Platform for lecture capture and multimedia management. The Mediasite system
automates the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand
videos and rich media.
"This is a significant investment which will
transform teaching and learning here at Leeds," said Neil Morris, director
of digital learning at the university, in a prepared statement. "Not only
can we capture all our audio and video assets, but Mediasite will allow us
to store, manage and publish content across multiple channels."
While the university had previously captured
lectures on a limited scale, it wanted to scale up its efforts with a single
video platform that integrates with its Blackboard learning management
system. Expecting to capture about 50,000 hours of content annually, the
school plans to record lectures and other teaching activities to give
students a flexible and personalized approach to learning. All content will
be searchable, secure and managed in one place via Mediasite.
"We know our students learn in different ways, so
as well as attending lectures, this gives them the opportunity to engage
with the materials wherever they may be and at their own pace," continued
Morris. "Whether that's going over topics that are particularly complex or
using recordings to help with revision, this new system will provide over
30,000 students with outstanding resources to support their learning."
Question
What other ways can I use my new sunglasses with a built-in Camcorder?
Here are a few starting thoughts:
My neighbor Lon has just driven across part of my lawn and crashes into
a birch tree. He appears to be unconscious while slumped over the steering
wheel in his Cadillac Escalade. I race out wearing my cool sunglasses and
capture video of his wife breaking out the rear window with a golf club in a
frantic effort to unlock the car. (Actually I think Nancy would be smart
enough to find a window closer to a door lock). I later sell my video to the
paparazzi for a million dollars. I then give Lon and Nancy $8,000 for
repairs to their Escalade. But that's not enough! They sue me for my million
dollars and ask the judge to throw in my cool sunglasses as well.
I can wear my cool sunglasses on mountain hikes and capture video of a
hawk in flight, bear dung in the middle of the trail, an owl sleeping by day
on a pine bough, and a huge moose sending ripples across the pond as he
lifts his rack out from under the mirror-like surface of a reflecting pool.
On a moonlit night I can capture the audio of frogs singing in my pond
or capture distant hoot owls singing to each other most summer nights.
There's even the shivering scream of a
Fisher cat on some dark nights. The video will probably not show up in
the dark of night, but I can still capture audio with my cool sun glasses.
I can capture skiers who are mere moving dots ten miles off as they wind
down the steep slopes of Cannon Mountain.
Not wanting to appear too cool in public, I can pull the colored sun
shades out of my cool glasses and capture inspiring moments of a speaker or
a musical performance such as the local women's choir in concert at our Town
Meeting Hall next Sunday afternoon (really).
Before I retired from teaching, I used to set a video camera on a tripod
and capture student team presentations that were part of the project
assignments in my two graduate courses. My cool sunglasses have the capacity
for eight hours of video recording, and I could capture other memorable
classroom moments such as when I try to make a sleeping student more
comfortable or particularly like the plaid fabric in a mini skirt. I mean
teaching has its own rewards.
Unfortunately and truthfully, my wife's favorite cable TV channel is QVC ---
http://www.qvc.com/
QVC generally has high quality merchandise. Erika mostly buys clothes, gifts,
and gadgets for me that I can never find on those rare occasions where a gadget
might be useful.
Eagle-I Built-in Video/Audio Recording Camera
Sunglass is designed with polarized lenses that provide UV protection. The
Eagle-I Camera Sunglass comes with built-in video camera to record video and
audio content for up to three hours on the internal memory. The camera is
positioned over the bridge of the nose for minimal visibility, while still
providing a wide recording range. It is very easy to use, just push a button
to start recording. A slot on the arm of the glasses allows you to input
your own MicroSD memory card for more recording time up to eight hours with
a 2GB MicroSD card, not included. QVC offers Eagle-I Built-in Video/Audio
Recording Camera Sunglass for $79.20
Interestingly, the price above is stated as $79 whereas the QVC site has them
with a crossed out $96 price that makes you think you're getting a special deal
for $87. Erika falls for that every time. What's worse is that the QVC site also
claims the "retail value" is $192. That's stimated the same way banks are now
estimating the value of poisoned loan portfolios.
My cool sunglasses plug into a USB port for battery recharging and video
downloading. Video playback works on either
Quicktime
software or my favorite free video software called VLC Media Player ---
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
My favorite would be Camtasia Producer if this software was not so limited with
respect to what codecs it will play.
YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed
captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire
listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the
video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you
can even search inside the video. Here's an
an example of video that includes a transcript.
To be honest I would probably use my cool sunglasses more if they only
captured still photos since it's a bit more convenient for me to put still
photos on the Web, and readers of things like
Tidbits probably prefer viewing pictures rather than having to download
my home videos.
But now I'm watching each and every day for Lon to drive across my lawn and
crash into a tree. Actually its more likely to be a partying golfer in a golf
cart on Lon's golf course behind my back lawn.
The Sunset
Hill House golf course is owned and operated by Lon and Nancy Henderson.
Fortunately, the golf course was placed into a New Hampshire Conservatancy so
that it can never be developed into anything other than a golf course. The
golfers are really friendly folks.
We have a son Mike in Yuba City, California who owns a pro shop. He sent me a
sign that reads as follows:
"When I die bury my balls beside my old
bag."
(His mother doesn't care for that sign.)
I nailed the sign to the side of my barn so that golfers can
read it while moving toward the third tee.
Erika has not yet discovered that I tacked it on the barn.
This cool new product reminds me of a GAAP issue of
many years ago. I was in the national office of E&Y and we were discussing
the amortization of film costs for one of the major movie studios. Those
costs are amortized based on total expected revenue per film. At that time,
domestic revenues were still the major part of a film's total expected
gross, but foreign revenues were also quite large and sales to both
broadcast and cable television were becoming larger. More importantly, video
rentals were becoming a much larger source of revenue and the client in
question was predicting that this would increase substantially in estimating
future revenue. Our practice office auditors were naturally skeptical and
asked for advice from "national." As we discussed this issue, I observed
that if we had had the same conversation several years earlier we wouldn't
have even thought of sales to broadcast television, much less video rentals,
so perhaps it was reasonable to assume expanding sources of revenues. Then I
went on to speculate that sometime in the future there could even be a
product where individuals could watch movies on the backs of their glasses
while commuting on trains into New York City, for example! It turns out that
my prediction came true!
There’s quite a discussion going on over at AECM
now, centered around whether or not corporate disclosures via XBRL tagged
data will be audited, and therefore receive some sort of assurance blessing.
One professor whom I respect a great deal is
arguing that it is in the best interest of companies to make the best and
most honest disclosures as they seek to raise capital, and it is in the best
interest of auditors to associate themselves with only those companies that
make the best and most honest disclosures via XBRL (and presumably via
financial statements, also).
To which I say: hogwash!
I’ve seen enough corporate reporting shenanigans,
and auditor “nod-and-wink” assurance, that I have concluded that there are
indeed sufficient incentives in place for corporate agents to try to game
the system by mis-reporting financial results. I don’t see why, if there is
substantial non-compliance with GAAP, that XBRL tagging would be a refuge of
purity. Moreover, there are incentives in place for auditors to fail to
object to minor transgressions. Some of the times, the incentives are
sufficiently large so that auditors fail to object to major transgressions.
I guess I don’t see why assurance on XBRL reporting will be any different.
I certainly don’t trust corporate executives or
auditors, as classes, to properly exercise “professional” judgment. Oh,
proper judgment may be exercised more than half the time of the time, but
given the risk averse nature of many investors, it is enough for a few bad
apples to give the rest a bad name. It is the many examples of bad reporting
and bad auditing (while admittedly in the minority) that are enough to
destroy trust.
A spouse only need go wayward one time in order to
destroy any trust the other felt. From that point on, the wayward spouse may
be preceived to be untrustworthy even though a majority of days end without
an unsanctioned hookup.
I believe it is not always in a company’s best
interest to make an honest disclosure, and it is not always in an auditor’s
interest to demand proper accounting. That is because many costs to
misbehaving are long-term, but the rewards for transgressing are short term
in nature. When making certain decisions, sometimes the focus of either
corporate executive or auditor can shift to the short-term on a moment’s
notice.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
David has entered into the very controversial "little white lie" rationalization
of deception. The truth should stand on its own in financial reporting, because
once we start rationalizing little white lies we never no when to stop. Pretty
soon a thousand dollar white lies here and a hundred dollar white lies there
begin to accumulate until we have over a billion dollar accumulation of lies ---
which is exactly what happened in Worldcom.
If you really want to take up the debate of whether the ends justify the
means, then have your students first watch the video of how Worldcom's
Controller, David Meyers, at the time of the infractions justified his illegal
actions on the premise that the ends justified the means --- because investors
and employees in Worldcom would be better off by deceptive rather than honest
accounting in the "short term."
I apologize if this is
something that has already been mentioned but I just became aware of a very
interesting video of former WorldCom Controller David Meyers at Baylor
University last March -
http://www.baylortv.com/streaming/001496/300kbps_str.asx
The first 20 minutes is
his presentation, which is pretty good - but the last 45 minutes or so of Q&A is
the best part. It is something that would be very worthwhile to show to almost
any auditing or similar class as a warning to those about to enter the
accounting profession.
Denny Beresford
Jensen Comment on Some Things You Can Learn from the Video
David Meyers became a convicted felon largely because he did not say no when his
supervisor (Scott Sullivan, CFO) asked him to commit illegal and fraudulent
accounting entries that he, Meyers, knew were wrong. Interestingly, Andersen
actually lost the audit midstream to KPMG, but KPMG hired the same same audit
team that had been working on the audit while employed by Andersen. David Myers
still feels great guilt over how much he hurt investors. The implication is that
these auditors were careless in a very sloppy audit but were duped by Worldcom
executives rather than be an actual part of the fraud. In my opinion, however,
that the carelessness was beyond the pale --- this was really, really, really
bad auditing and accounting.
At the time he did wrong, he rationalized that he was doing good by shielding
Worldcom from bankruptcy and protecting employees, shareholders, and creditors.
However, what he and other criminals at Worldcom did was eventually make matters
worse. He did not anticipate this, however, when he was covering up the
accounting fraud. He could've spent 65 years in prison, but eventually only
served ten months in prison because he cooperated in convicting his bosses. In
fact, all he did after the fact is tell the truth to prosecutors. His CEO,
Bernard Ebbers, got 25 years and is still in prison.
The audit team while with Andersen and KPMG relied too much on analytical review
and too little on substantive testing and did not detect basic accounting errors
from Auditing 101 (largely regarding capitalization of over $1 billion expenses
that under any reasonable test should have been expensed).
Meyers feels that if
Sarbanes-Oxley had been in place it may
have deterred the fraud. It also would've greatly increased the audit revenues
so that Andersen/KPMG could've done a better job.
To Meyers' credit, he did not exercise his $17 million in stock options because
he felt that he should not personally benefit from the fraud that he was a part
of while it was taking place. However, he did participate in the fraud to keep
his job (and salary). He also felt compelled to follow orders the CFO that he
knew was wrong.
The hero is detecting the fraud was Worldcom's internal auditor Cynthia Cooper
who subsequently wrote the book: Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower
(Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. ISBN 978-0-470-12429)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0470124296/ref=sib_dp_pt#
Internet users can view video either as video file downloads (that may or may
not be stored on a hard drive) or as streaming video (that does not entail
downloading a media file but can be captured with streaming media software).
Update from the AAA Accounting Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home I thank Rick for sharing his expertise in the new VoiceThread multimedia
education and communication technology.
Accounting Professor Rick Lillie Uses VoiceThread to Create Streaming Video ---
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
If you have not yet discovered VoiceThread, I
strongly recommend that you click on the link below and explore the
VoiceThread website. You are in for a real technology treat!
I use VoiceThread to create streaming video
lectures, to create tutorials explaining how to solve problems, to explain
answers to quiz and examination questions, and more. VoiceThread is easy to
use, is similar to PowerPoint (but much more robust), and is web-hosted
which makes it easy for you to share VoiceThread presentations with your
students and colleagues.
During a presentation that I gave at the recent
2008 American Accounting Association (AAA) Annual Meeting in Anaheim,
California, I talked about VoiceThread. To help participants to see how easy
it is to create and share dynamic presentations with VoiceThread, I put
together a short presentation that explains how to use VoiceThread. Click on
the link below to view the short tutorial program.
I encourage you to sign up for a free account.
Learn to use VoiceThread. If you like what you create, then you can
upgrade to the “Pro” version, which is very inexpensive. To get the full
benefit of using VoiceThread, you need a headset/microphone and webcam.
To begin, use the tools included in VoiceThread. If you have questions about
VoiceThread, use the “Contact Me” option on the right side of the screen.
Send me a message. Include your email and/or telephone number. I
will be happy to work with you.
Enjoy!
Rick Lillie
Jensen Comment
VoiceThread has an advantage in allowing a community of users to comment (in
multimedia) comments on an instructional video.
It's drawback is that it uses a lot of storage and bandwidth for talking heads.
Some VoiceThread pricing information is given at
http://voicethread.com/pricing/pro/
It is possible to get small amounts of video file storage free, but it can get
really expensive when the community goes on and on with long commentaries.
In the pro version, file sizes are limited to 100 Mb. This is about one tenth
the size of a 10 minute YouTube video. YouTube generally limits file sizes to 1
Gb or 10 minutes of compressed video such as mpg compression ---
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=57924
Colleges can stream much larger videos on YouTube such as the courses that UC
Berkeley makes available on YouTube with over one hour of video for each lecture
in a course.
VoiceThread makes it possible to have somewhat longer videos in a 100 Mb file
by using small video screens. Note how Rick does this at
http://voicethread.com/#q.b173180.i923368
YouTube also allows any users to comment in text format such that
commentaries can accompany videos on YouTube. The huge advantage of YouTube is
that videos can be uploaded, viewed, and even downloaded for free. VoiceThread,
for an annual fee, has more features.
Although I've not tried VoiceThread, it would seem that cost and file size
limits make this less attractive than YouTube.
However, in most instances open sharing videos are streaming (using the
term loosely here) videos for which there is no file to download. In that
case the video must be captured in total or in part by software designed for
such purposes. The software I like for video capturing is called Camtasia
Recorder ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/record.asp
Also see
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
This is cheaper alternative than many more specialized products for
streaming video capture. You can download my PowerPoint file about Camtasia
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/PowerPoint/
Links to examples are given in this slide show.
Most faculty serve up video from their university's servers, YouTube, and
Tech Smith's Screencast, but there are other alternatives
Thank you for your comments about
VoiceThread. I would like to expand on several points that
you raised.
Regarding the way VoiceThread
works
VoiceThread is a hosted service that can
be used in a variety of ways. For example, VoiceThread may be used
to create
a digital discussion board where comments may
be made in text, audio, or video formats.
streaming audio commentaries (e.g., streaming
lectures, tutorials and personalized feedback to students).
streaming video commentaries (e.g., steaming
lectures, tutorials, and personalized feedback to students).
Currently, VoiceThread is offered
in both free and low-fee options. The pricing screen needs a
little more explanation.
When using the "free" version, you are limited
to three active VoiceThread programs (files) at any given
time. If you need to go beyond three active VoiceThread files,
simply delete one or replace it with the new program.
The file size and time limitations apply to
EACH VoiceThread program created. This is not an overall
limitations (e.g., for all three VoiceThread programs if you
use the "free" version).
The "Pro" version is extremely generous in
that you can create an unlimited number of VoiceThread programs
during a subscription year, with each file including up to 500 slides
and being up to 100 MB in size.
You create your slides on your own computer
and then upload them into VoiceThread. Once uploaded, this is
where the production process takes place. Commenting on individual
slides is done online through the VoiceThread interface
screen. You control
how your VoiceThread will be made
available to viewers (i.e., public or private).
whether viewers can post reply comments to
individual slides within the program.
whether individual slides may be
downloaded.
The VoiceThread file is condensed
which reduces overall file size for a VoiceThread program.
Pros vs Cons of VoiceThread
VoiceThread recognizes the need to
maintain privacy of materials created for use within a learning
environment (i.e., face-to-face, blended, or online classroom setting).
You control who may view a VoiceThread. While a
VoiceThread may be viewed through VoiceThread's social network
(i.e., visable to everyone), you may limit viewing. This is important
with respect to satisfying "fair use" of copyrighted materials.
VoiceThread is extremely easy to use as
compared to other software programs (e.g., Camtasia).
To create a streaming video VoiceThread,
all you need is your computer, an internet connection, a
headset/microphone, and a webcam. If you do not have a
headset/microphone, you can use a telephone to record the audio track.
VoiceThread does not currently meet
all ADA (Sect. 508) requirements. However, the developers have said
that VoiceThread is expected to be fully ADA compliant by early to
mid-2009.
VoiceThread does not currently
include a closed-captioning option. YouTube announced
yesterday (8/30/08) that it has added a closed-captioning feature for
use with videos uploaded to YouTube.
VoiceThread includes a feature that
the other software programs do not include.
VoiceThread makes it possible to annotate a slide while the program is
being recorded. All other programs record
static slides and attach an audio and/or video track to the slide. The
capturing of the live annotationadds a "warmth" to the delivery of the
content that brings the student's learning experience closer to what
would be experienced in a live, face-to-face classroom. I have found
that this "single feature" improves the learning experience for
students, especially when used in blended and online learning settings.
IN CLOSING
There are lots of ways to create rich-media
instructional materials. I use them extensively in my accounting courses.
Personally, I do not like Camtasia, Adobe
Presenter, Camtasia Recorder and similar software programs.
For me, these programs are too complex to use. I like processes to be as
simple as possible. This is why I prefer VoiceThread.
VoiceThread allows me to focus on creating the
slides, pictures (jpeg files), Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files, etc., that I want
to include in a streaming presentation. VoiceThread makes it easy
to go from slides to streaming video with embedded commentary.
VoiceThread saves the file and gives me a URL to the program or the
html code for embedding a player into course materials.
The overall process is simple and easy to use.
Many accounting faculty that I have talked with
seem hesitant to include technology in their courses and to use technology
tools when creating course materials. When I find something that will make
life easier, I share the information.
Thank you for your comments. I enjoy this type of
discussion.
I really appreciate your detailed elaboration on video creation
alternatives. Thank you so much! Please keep them coming at the AAA Commons.
You obviously have unique technology skills.
The one area where I disagree with you is on Camtasia. I personally
learned how to use Camtasia in less than an hour and then recorded many
technical videos for my students to use outside the classroom. It cut down
on the traffic through my office door by about 95% from students who just
did follow the technical details in class. More importantly these videos
(especially the ones about MS Access technicalities) helped me explain
things that I forgot how to do over time. Examples of my Camtasia videos can
be found at the following links:
I even prepared a tutorial on how to record (capture) computer image
videos and produce (compress) them into smaller files for storage and
delivery ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/
(I suggest clicking on the CamtasiaTutorial.wmv
file)
I hope accounting professors and students will not be scared away from
Camtasia before even trying it out. A limited and free version may be
attempted first. It is called Jing ---
http://www.jingproject.com/
But an even better suggestion is to download Camtasia Studio itself on a
free trial basis ---
http://www.jingproject.com/
Another interesting product from TechSmith is called UserView. Suppose a
student is located somewhere else in the world. UserView allows a professor
to both see and record what is happening on a student's computer screen such
that the professor can analyze the moves and suggest to the student how to
do something better. Similarly, the student can see what is happening on a
professor's computer while he/she narrates. Good stuff ---
http://www.techsmith.com/uservue.asp
But for me, the best thing since grapefruit is Camtasia Studio for
producing videos for my own servers, YouTube, and possibly even VoiceThread.
For YouTube I suggest choosing mpg compressions after recording a wmv video.
Xtranormal is a website which hosts text-to-speech
based computer animated videoclips which can be created by any user and
uploaded by a downloadable program or created directly online. It has had
little online advertising and has spread by word of mouth and by being
uploaded to Facebook and other social media sites.One website refers to
controversy about an employee from Best Buy being fired for uploading an
animated video complaining about customer service.
The website offers either a free trial program to
be downloaded to the computer with a fairly userfriendly interface, though
limited to simple animation or creating a video while logged into the
website. Popular user-created animations are available to watch.
A growing collection of amateur animators use a
do-it-yourself Web site called Xtranormal to vent comically about the academic
life. And to teach.
The online animation site they use has become a tool for teaching as well as
satire "So You Think an English Professor's Life Is a Cartoon," by Mark Parry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Think-an-English/125954/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
March 11,
2010 message from XXXXX
Bob,
I am wondering if you know of any websites where I can gain access to watch
camtasia-style (or narrated powerpoints) videos/lectures of upper level
accounting instruction?
My Dean asked me to look into creating an asynchronous, distance/hybrid
accounting program. I want to get an idea of what is out there. I think the
classes I need are:
AIS Cost Intermediate 1 and 2 Tax Auditing Advanced GNP or NFP Any other
advanced accounting, like advanced cost.
Thank you,
XXXXX
March 11,
2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Firstly, I would begin with the asynchronous way basic accounting is taught at
BYU almost entirely with variable-speed videos even to resident students living
on campus ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
BYU sells these video CDs to the public at a reasonable price.
Next I would enter a number of search terms into YouTube ---
http://www.youtube.com/
Examples include:
Accounting Information Systems
Accounting Ethics
Intermediate accounting
Advanced accounting
Governmental accounting
Hedge accounting
Cost Accounting
Managerial Accounting
Fair Value Accounting
Auditing
SAP or ERP
XBRL
I suggest you contact my good friend Amy Dunbar about how she uses Camtasia
videos in her online tax courses --- Amy.Dunbar@business.uconn.edu
In the future U.S. accounting programs will be building in more and more IFRS.
Here there’s a heck of a lot of free educational material available ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#IFRSlearning
There are some good cases available, especially from the Big Four.
There is also a lot of free XBRL material, including some good videos ---
http://www.xbrl.org/Home/
Click on “Education and Training”
The AICPA has a library of both fee and free videos ---
http://www.aicpa.org/
Enter the search term “video”
Other organizations have some deals on videos for courses, including the IIA,
Certified Fraud Examiners, etc.
There’s a ton of free material on ethics and fraud.
"MIT's Management School Shares Teaching Materials (Cases) Online," by
Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27, 2009 --- Click Here
Though some business schools charge for the “case studies” they develop as
teaching aids, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today that it
is making a set of teaching materials available free online.
The announcement comes eight years after MIT created its OpenCourseWare project,
which makes instructional materials for courses available online for free.
I forgot to mention the AAA Commons where there’s now a great deal of available,
including syllabi, tutorials, course materials, videos, and textbook
recommendations ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
Soon many of the AAA Commons pages will be available to the world in general and
not just AAA members. Among other things this makes the resources available to
all of your students
No clear winner emerges in the contest between
video and live instruction, according to the
findings of a recent study led by David N.
Figlio, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern
University. The study found that students who watched lectures online
instead of attending in-person classes performed slightly worse in the
course over all.
A previous
analysis by the U.S. Department of Education that
examined existing research comparing online and live instruction favored
online learning over purely in-person instruction, according to
the working paper
by Mr. Figlio and his colleagues, which was released
this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
But Mr. Figlio's study contradicted those results,
showing that live instruction benefits Hispanic students, male students, and
lower-achieving students in particular.
Colleges and universities that are turning to video
lectures because of their institutions' tight budgets may be doing those
students a disservice, said Mark Rush, a professor of economics at the
University of Florida and one of the working paper's authors.
More research will be necessary, however, before
any definite conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of video
lectures, said Lu Yin, a graduate student at the University of Florida who
worked on the project. Future research could study the effectiveness of
watching lectures online for topics other than microeconomics, which was the
subject of the course evaluated in the study, Ms. Yin said.
Jensen Comment
Studies like this just do not extrapolate well into the real world, because so
very, very much depends upon both how instructors use videos and how students
use videos. My students had to take my live classes, but my Camtasia video
allowed them to keep going over and over, at their own learning pace, technical
modules (PQQ Possible Quiz Questions) until they got technical things down pat
---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Students who did not use the videos as intended usually paid a price.
However, some outcomes in the above study conform to my priors. For example,
Brigham Young University (BYU) has very successfully replaced live lectures with
variable-speed video lectures in the first two basic accounting courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
However, BYU students most likely have mostly high achieving students to
begin with, especially in accounting. It would be interesting to formally study
the use such variable-speed video in colleges having a higher proportion of
lower-achieving students. My guess is that the variable-speed video lectures
would be less effective with lower-achieving students who are not motivated to
keep replaying videos until they get the technical material down pat. The may be
lower achieving in great measure because they are less motivated learners or
learners who have too many distractions (like supportingchildren) to have as
much quality study time.
In conclusion, I think much depends upon the quality of the video versus
lecture, class size, and student motivation. Videos offer the tremendous
advantage of instant replay and being able to adjust to the best learning pace
of the student. Live lectures can, and often do, lead to more human interactive
factors that can be good (if they motivate) and bad (if they distract or instill
dysfunctional fear).
The best video lectures are probably those that are accompanied with instant
messaging with an instructor or tutor that can provide answers or clues to
answers not on the video.
Jensen Comment
By now you are probably weary of articles about flipped classrooms. This one is
a bit more interesting, however, since it entails flipping the large lecture
courses in a famous Ivy League university (Columbia University) ---
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/10/22/flipping-the-lecture-hall.aspx
There's no question that the flipped classroom
model has become all the rage at colleges and universities across the
country. In fact, in the most recent
Horizon Report, the New Media Consortium (NMC)
called the flipped classroom one of the most important emerging trends in
educational technology for higher education, noting, "The model is becoming
increasingly popular in higher education institutions because of how it
rearranges face-to-face instruction for professors and students, creating a
more efficient and enriching use of class time."
Yet with all the flipped classroom's potential for
active, collaborative learning and increased interaction between professors
and students, there's still one bastion of higher education that has
resisted the trend: the large lecture course.
With the large lecture format, said NMC Senior
Communications Director Samantha Becker, "it's really hard to personalize
the material so that a student can feel like they have ownership over their
own learning process." And, she added, "It's hard to speak up. There's
always the fear of being ostracized by other students or feeling like asking
stupid questions."
Maurice Matiz, executive director of Columbia
University's (NY)
Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning,
agreed: "Sitting in one of these 180-student
classrooms is a very passive situation," he said. "We've found that students
aren't really learning very much."
Matiz and his colleagues are out to change that —
by finding ways to adopt the flipped classroom model to traditional large
lecture courses.
The Big Flip
They started last year with Associate Professsor
Brent Stockwell's biochemistry class of 180 students. Stockwell was
discouraged by the number of students who were not completing the required
reading assignments before coming to class and, thus, were unprepared to get
the most out of his lectures.
So, in the fall 2013 semester, he began creating
weekly slide presentations using PowerPoint and the screen-recording
application
ScreenFlow. He would upload the videos to YouTube,
then embed them into the syllabus section of the online learning management
system and invite students to watch. Stockwell also placed a link to a short
quiz underneath the video player on the syllabus page. Since the quiz
results counted toward students' grades, he was assured that most students
would watch the video and come to the following day's class prepared.
"[The quiz] is something we learned to do with our
MOOCs, and then applied to what we do on campus," said Matiz, who helped
Stockwell organize the flipped class.
The flipped format allowed Stockwell to delve
deeper and in new directions with the live content he presented in class. He
also incorporated a polling service called
Socrative that students could access on their
mobile devices. Students could respond to questions anonymously in real
time, giving him a sense of whether they understood the concepts presented
to them, allowing him to revisit a difficult topic or move on to other
material.
Then he divided the class of 180 into groups of
five and, for part of each class, he would give them problems to work on
together, such as how a specific fatty acid should be labeled or how to
predict the mechanism of an action of a drug based on the results of an
experiment.
The group work led to livelier discussions and
forced students to synthesize and apply information from the textbook,
videos and classroom discussion.
"What I particularly appreciated about Professor
Stockwell is the way he wove all the different components together," NMC's
Becker said. "He countered the size of the class by grouping people together
and allowing for anonymous polling through the response feature."
Deciding to try an even larger class, Matiz moved
on to Professor Rachel Gordon's Body, Health and Disease class of 250 in
Columbia's
College of Physicians and Surgeons. Gordon also
used short video lectures students could view before class, reserving class
time for discussions of case studies with an audience response system. She
would poll students after covering a concept and, if less than 50 percent of
students chose correct answers, she would ask them to break into small
groups to discuss their choices.
Typically, she said, the peer discussions would
lead to increases in accuracy when students were polled a second time.
"On many levels it was more satisfying than
lecturing, where you don't really know if the students are 'getting it,'"
Gordon said. "I hope that more teachers will take the plunge. It's worth
it."
Challenges
One challenge that Matiz and Stockwell encountered
with applying the flipped classroom model to large courses: the physical
limitations of spaces that are not inherently designed for small group work.
"This is an old university," Matiz said, "over 250
years old. A lot of the classrooms are traditional classrooms. Many of them
even still have desks that are bolted to the floor."
Nevertheless, Stockwell made it work. "If you're
willing to deal with those issues, you can still do it," Matiz said.
Fortunately for Gordon, the Columbia medical school
has a relatively new campus and entire sets of classrooms that were built
with collaboration in mind.
Stockwell also noted that the biggest challenge he
had in the first year was running out of difficult, thought-provoking
problems and case studies to give his students when they broke up into small
groups. To resolve that challenge in this, his second year of using the
flipped classroom model with the biochemistry course, he has called on other
biochemistry professors in the New York area to build a repository of
problem sets that can be shared.
Despite the difficulties, Matiz said, the command
of material by students during and at the end of the course was so obvious
to Stockwell and Gordon that he is convinced of the benefits of the flipped
classroom in college and university courses.
"There are so many advantages," Matiz said. "The
course really becomes just for the student."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I was flipping my classes in an electronic classroom at Trinity University
before somebody coined the phrase "flipping the classroom." I forced students
to study technical content in my Camtasia videos before coming to class. In
class I made them show what they had learned from those videos. This is a great
way to help students learn technical content and to not put off learning until
examinations. The chronic complaint was that my courses demanded more time than
their other courses.
Sara Infante listens intently and scribbles notes
as her chemistry professor describes how to identify the masses and atomic
numbers of two isotopes of carbon. When it's time to fill in a table showing
that she understands the lecture so far, she clicks her mouse, and the
lecture, which is being delivered online, freezes on the computer screen.
The questions that Ms. Infante and her classmates
at Southwestern University ask their professor, Maha Zewail-Foote, will help
shape the next day's session in the classroom. There, moving on to
more-complex topics, she'll help them tackle the kinds of problems that used
to be given as homework.
It's Ms. Infante's first experience with the
flipped classroom, where traditional classwork is done at home and homework
is done in class.
"I like this because when you're listening to the
lecture at home and you don't get something, you can rewind and replay it as
many times as you need to," says Ms. Infante, 19, a sophomore majoring in
animal behavior who hopes to become a marine-mammal trainer.
"And when you're working through problems," she
adds, "you aren't sitting in your room pulling your hair out because you
didn't retain the information from the lecture."
The video for the semester's first flipped class,
with its accompanying tables and diagrams, lasted just under 10 minutes.
They're usually five to seven minutes, which Ms. Zewail-Foote describes as
the attention span of most students. But in her opinion, a well-crafted,
concise, 10-minute video that students can pause and replay as many times as
they want packs more teaching in than a 20-minute lecture.
The course Web site include outlines that students
fill in while they're listening to her recorded lessons, each of which ends
with a short quiz.
"Between the lecture outline and video, they should
come to class ready," Ms. Zewail-Foote says. "They understand how to
calculate average atomic mass, so we can jump right in."
At colleges nationwide, more and more professors
are inverting homework and classwork this way, using technology to give
students a head start on classroom sessions where they can be active
participants and not just listeners.
The flipped classroom is not for everyone. Many
students feel lost without a traditional lecture to get them started, and
some instructors are reluctant to give up the podium for a role on the
sidelines, says Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for
Academic Transformation.
Since 1999 the center has helped redesign about 300
courses on 159 campuses, often in a flipped format, using technology to cut
costs and improve learning. (Southwestern did not work with the center on
the revamped chemistry course, but it did consult with other proponents of
the technique, as part of a project, supported by the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute, aimed at making Southwestern's science curriculum more hands-on.)
Many of the national center's course redesigns have
been in remedial math, financed by $2.2-million from the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation. The center has also helped flip courses in subjects as
diverse as Spanish, psychology, nutrition, and anatomy.
"The traditional classroom typically consists of a
lecture of some kind where students are listening or watching the
professor," Ms. Twigg says. "Then they do the hard work, solving problems,
on their own. The notion is, flip that experience so the professor can help
students when they need the help."
Switching from the role of "sage on the stage" to
"guide on the side" requires a professional and cultural shift that many
faculty members resist, she says. "It's easier to stand up and give the same
lecture you've been giving for 20 years than it is to rethink your course,
come up with new activities, and really engage your students."
The problem-solving and personalized interaction
that take place face-to-face sets these classes apart from massive open
online courses, or MOOCs, which too often consist mainly of recorded talks,
she says, explaining that flipping the classroom requires more than simply
moving lectures online.
Teaching to the masses is tempting, but it's not
the same as offering a flipped course, she says. "Let's say I am the most
brilliant lecturer of intelligent design, and now I'll have an audience of
200,000 instead of 200.
"The problem is, the success rates are awful," she
adds, in a not-so-subtle jab at Sebastian Thrun, the former Stanford
University professor who co-founded the MOOC platform Udacity last year,
after his online "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course attracted
more than 160,000 students worldwide. About 23,000 of those students
completed the course.
While MOOCs can be effective at delivering content,
flipped classrooms make students active participants in their education,
says Southwestern's new president, Edward B. Burger. The former mathematics
professor at Williams College has created more than 3,000 instructional
CD-ROMS and videos in math that are used in classrooms from kindergarten
through college. Instead of having students struggle to figure out problems
in their dorm rooms at 2 a.m., he says, "I want to be there when students
hit those roadblocks."
Although he didn't call it a flipped classroom at
the time, Mr. Burger cultivated the technique of "inverting the roles of
homework and classwork," an approach that contributed to his winning a
national teaching award in 2010.
Back in the common room of her dormitory suite at
Southwestern, Ms. Infante has finished listening to the online lecture and
asks her roommate, who's curled up in an armchair across the room, for a
scientific calculator so she can take the quiz.
Her roommate's own chemistry professor, Emily
Niemeyer, offers the format once a week, on what she calls "flipped
Fridays."
Ms. Infante aces the quiz and doesn't have any
questions for her professor. Other students were stumped by a few questions,
Ms. Zewail-Foote notes the following morning as she prepares for class. One
student asked: "Will there ever be a time when an atom is not neutral and
the number of protons and electrons don't balance each other out?"
The explanation would normally come up in Chapter
4, but Ms. Zewail-Foote decides to work the answer into today's classroom
problem-solving session. Reviewing the quiz results, she can tell that
students generally understand the material, so she is comfortable
accelerating the pace a bit.
There's little danger that students are going to
nod off in her class, because she peppers it with questions that they must
answer using their hand-held clickers. If 29 students have clicked their
answers, she pauses before moving on until all 30 have weighed in.
Shortly after the class begins, students cluster
their desks into groups of three or four to work on problems as she walks
around, occasionally crouching next to those who seem stuck.
When the semester's first flipped-classroom session
is over, at least one student isn't yet sold. "I'm going to fail this
class," says Alex Petrucci, a 20-year-old sophomore. The pre-class video
didn't adequately prepare her for the problems she was asked to solve in
class, she complains, and even with a cluster of classmates to confer with,
she felt lost.
That kind of reaction isn't uncommon when classes
are flipped.
An aeronautics-engineering professor at Mississippi
State University who taught a course in statics, in a flipped format,
encountered similar resistance from some students who couldn't get used to
online lectures.
Masoud Rais-Rohani, who worked with the National
Center for Academic Transformation to revamp the statics course, says having
students watch videos, take quizzes, and reflect on what they learned before
each class session made it possible to spend class time doing hands-on
projects that the course had never before had room for, like working with
physical models of bridges and calculating the loads they can carry.
The report, "A
Review of Flipped Learning," is designed to
guide teachers and administrators through the concepts of flipped
classrooms and provide definitions and examples of flipped learning in
action. Among those concepts are four "pillars" that are required to
support effective flipped learning.
Flexible
environments: Teachers must expect that class time will be "somewhat
chaotic and noisy" and that timelines and expectations for learning
assessments will have to be flexible as well.
Culture shift: The
classroom becomes student-centered. According to the guide:
"Students move from being the product of teaching to the center of
learning, where they are actively involved in knowledge formation
through opportunities to participate in and evaluate their learning
in a manner that is personally meaningful."
Intentional
content: Teachers are required to evaluate what they need to teach
directly so that classroom time can be used for other methods of
teaching, such as "active learning strategies, peer instruction,
problem-based learning, or mastery or Socratic methods, depending on
grade level and subject matter."
Professional
educators: The instructional videos used for flipped classrooms
cannot replace trained, professional teachers.
The report also
identified challenges and concerns about flipped classrooms, including:
The fear that
flipped classrooms will further standardize instruction and lead to
"further the privatization of education and the elimination of most
teachers";
Unequal access to
technology among students; and
An inability to
engage students immediately when instruction is being delivered.
The guide provides
references to research supporting the teaching methods used in flipped
classrooms and includes three case studies focusing on flipped
classrooms in action at the high school and college level. The complete
report can be downloaded in PDF form on the
Flipped Learning Network site.
YouTube holds a rich trove of videos that could be
used in the classroom, but it’s challenging to transform videos into a truly
interactive part of a lesson. So the nonprofit group TED has unveiled a new
Web site that it hopes will solve this problem—by organizing educational
videos and letting professors “flip” them to enhance their lectures.
The new Web site, unveiled today, lets professors
turn TED’s educational videos—as well as any video on YouTube—into
interactive lessons inspired by the
“flipped” classroom model. The site’s introduction
is the second phase of an education-focused effort called TED-Ed, which
began last month when
the group released a series of highly produced, animated videos on a new
YouTube channel.
The TED-Ed site is both a portal for finding
education videos and a tool for flipping them. On one page, videos are
organized by themes, such as the pursuit of happiness and inventions that
shaped history. Instructors who want to use videos that are directly related
to the subjects they teach can visit another page, where videos are
organized in more traditional categories such as the arts and health.
TED’s videos are displayed on lesson pages that
include multiple-choice quizzes, open-ended questions, and links to more
information about the material. Professors who don’t want to rely on the
premade content can press a button to flip the videos and customize some of
the questions. With each flipped video, professors receive a unique Web link
that they can use to distribute the lesson to students and track their
answers.
And instructors don’t have to rely only on TED’s
educational videos to make their lessons. A special tool can flip any video
on YouTube, adding sections to a lesson page where professors can write
free-form questions and create links to other resources.
Logan Smalley, TED-Ed’s director, noted that this
feature is truly open—instructors could flip viral videos of cats if they
wanted to, he said. He said his group wanted to leave the possibilities of
flipped videos up to the people building the lessons.
“We didn’t want to limit what people might want to
use to teach,” he said. He added that designers provide a way for users to
flag any published lesson that they feel is inappropriate.
Michael S. Garver, a professor of marketing at
Central Michigan University, has been testing the site and called it a tool
to improve teaching that will bring more voices into the classroom. For the
last seven years, Mr. Garver has been making his own videos, and he said the
site will allow professors to turn videos created by experts into fresh
lessons for class discussions.
“It’s kind of a way to showcase the talent around
the country,” he said.
I flipped my classrooms largely by preparing hundreds of short Camtasia
how-to video on technical aspects of my accounting theory and AIS courses ---
especially on technical aspects of FAS 133 and MS Access relational database
accounitng. My students just were not getting some of this technical I explained
in class, and I grew weary repeating the same material over and over and over
again in my office. The Camtasia videos were a huge relief to my students and
me. They could play each Camtasia video repeatedly until they mastered the
topic. I rarely had to explain those topics during office hours when Camtasia
explanations were available to students.
The Camtasia videos also meant I did not have to devote so much class time to
teaching technical procedures. This made more free time for class quizzes to
verify that students were really mastering those technical opics.
YouTube added a cool feature for
videos with closed captions: you can now click on the "transcript"
button to expand the entire listing. If you click on a line, YouTube
will show the excerpt from the video corresponding to the text. If
you use your browser's find feature, you can even search inside the
video. Here's an
an example of videothat includes a
transcript.
"Is It Possible To Invent An Investment Product (purely fake satire) Too
Stupid To Find Buyers?" by Jim Carney, Business Insider, November 19,
2009 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
And as academics we question how Wall Street could get away with gimmicks all
these years.
"There's a sucker born every minute second ."
Makes you sort of wonder if auditors with their SOX on are just wasting time
and money.
Other People's Money
is my favorite business movie. I've viewed it a dozen times or more. I think it
is the best movie for showing students what is involved with a proxy fight.
The Deal,
starring Christian Slater, is my recommendation for a movie focused on due
diligence investigations.
The Devil Wears Prada
is my recommendation for a movie dealing with an ethical dilemma. Although
The Contender (Joan Allen), Dave, Working Girl (Melanie Griffith)
aren't bad.
Only Devil
will be familiar to today's students. Doesn't mean they can't learn from an old
movie.
Stranger Than Fiction
might be the best movie about an accountant. The Harold Crick character evolves
through three of the stereotypes discussed in Dimnik and Feldon.
In Carnal Knowledge Jack Nicholson plays a deeply dysfunctional
CPA in this racy and depressing movie having zero accounting or business
education but some education about Ann Margaret's body.
And there's
Suze Orman's video The Laws of Money, The Lessons of Life (also a
2003 book)
Click on the category "Movies and TV" at Amazon.com and feed in the
search word "accounting."
It was at the above site that I stumbled on many non-Hollywood movies,
including
?Accountant with Jeff Gardner
?Enhanced April with Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson,
Alfred Molina, and Neville Phillips
?The Incredible Mr. Limpet with Don Knotts, Carole Cook,
Jack Weston, and Andrew Duggan
?The Producers with Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder,
Christopher Hewett, and William Hickey
?Midnight Run with Charles Grodin, Robert De Niro,
Danielle DuClos, and Dennis Farina
?Secretaries with Kelly Brown; Dale Rutter; Alana Evans
?Frontline: The Madoff Affair
?1945 Financial Accounting & Bookkeeping Vocational Film
DVD: Accountant Career History
?Lean Accounting ($255 to buy so it's better to rent)
?Fair Value Accounting: A Critical New Skill for All CPAs
($379.95)
?CBS News (multiple volumes somehow linked to
accounting)
?Many others at Amazon under "accounting" Movies and DVDs
And of course there are Bob Jensen's exciting free accounting tutorials on
Excel, MS Access, Swap Valuations, XBRL. Camtasia, etc. ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/
Like most faculty, students coming late to class
bothers me - it disrupts the class, interrupts my train of thought, and in
general causes a negative externality. In previous years, the problem seems
to have gotten worse - in some classes, 15% would wander in after class has
started. So this semester, I borrowed a page from a colleague's book. He
teaches law for our B-School, and is a former partner for a major Wall
Street Law firm. He's very formal in class, is known throughout the school
as a fantastic professor, and a bit of a hardass (formal, but a hardass).
So now, whenever a student walks into class late, I merely stop talking in
mid sentence. I then quietlty wait until the student is seated. At this
point, they're usually embarrassed. I continue waiting they have their book
AND pencil out. Of course, the spotlight on them makes them extremely
uncomfortable. I don't ream them, don't make any faces, comments, or do
anything else - merely ask "Are you ready now?" Then I take up right where I
left off. It's kind of fun, and I don't have to come off like my usual
sarcastic self. It seems to work pretty well - late arrivals have really
dropped off this semester.
But
this guy (Scott Galloway at NYU) just throws them
out if they come in late. A student got the treatment recently and sent him
a (to my ears) somewhat entitled email. Galloway give him an epic reaming.
Read the responses - they're classic (particularly the David Mamet
references). If you have any favorite techniques for dealing with late
students, feel free to share.
Of course, as they say in the ads, "your mileage may vary".
Jensen Comment
I heard about an instructor who stretched construction zone tape across both
doorways to the classroom before closing the doors. The tape was not to be
crossed for any reason. Some instructors lock the doors, but this is acceptable
only when the doors can be opened from the inside in case of fire.
But a professor needs a Plan B for the occasional student that is late for
reasons beyond that student's control. Perhaps the student really was mugged or
had an epileptic seizure on the way to class. Then there are the unacceptable
excuses such as the student that was held up by traffic congestion or a traffic
cop. I always considered those to be excuses and not valid reasons since
students could've allowed more time for such contingencies.
Plan B might be instigated outside of class rather than by allowing class to
be disrupted for any valid reason for lateness. But Plan B should be stated
clearly in the syllabus.
This tutorial includes how to edit video in Windows 7
"Manage All Your Media in Windows 7 From online streaming to all-new library
controls, here's how to get more out of Windows 7's new multimedia features,"
by Zack Stem, PC World via The Washington Post, October 22, 2009
---
Click Here
http://snipurl.com/windows7multimedia [www_washingtonpost_com]
Whether you're leaping directly from
Windows XP to Windows 7 or you stopped in Vista territory along the way,
you'll find that the latest version of Microsoft's operating system handles
media files in several new ways. The methods for photo and video importing,
editing, and exporting have been all updated. You have new options for
sharing and streaming files between computers. And media libraries become
more-versatile vessels for finding and managing media files. I'll explain
how to get started with these and other entertainment features of Windows 7
Check Out the Libraries
Windows 7 manages media files differently
than previous Windows OSs did. It retains the familiar Pictures, Videos,
Music, and Documents folders, but you can assign additional library
locations in order to collect your media files more dynamically.
The libraries in Windows 7 organize file
types to help applications find media more easily. By default, programs look
to the Pictures, Videos, Music, and Documents folders instead of having to
scrutinize your whole disk. Windows XP and Vista tied media libraries to
those specific folder locations. For example, Windows Media Player watched
vigilantly over C:\Users\[username]\Music. Then, anytime you added new audio
files to that folder, Media Player showed them in your music library. If you
wanted Media Player to look for media in other areas--say, in the iTunes
music folder or in another user's music library--you had to add the new
locations manually within the program.
In Windows 7, the Pictures, Videos, Music,
and Documents folders are not the only doors into those libraries; you can
add any other disk location you like, and library-savvy applications will
automatically pool media wherever it's stored.
Add Libraries
Instead of manually curating media in the
traditional user folders, you can turn any folder into a library.
Applications will know where to find media, and you can keep your computer
organized in whatever way you want.
For example, you can turn a networked
folder into an auxiliary library, or even pool music files from a different
user on the same PC. Or transform your Downloads folder into a library,
instantly putting MP3 and video downloads into media applications. Here's
how (the process is the same for any of these situations).
Open the Start Menu, and click your
username. Open the Downloads folder, and pick Include in library, Music.
Then select Include in library, Movies. Henceforth, without your having to
open them immediately after downloading them, your PC will automatically
slurp music and movie files into Windows Media Player.
To remove the library status of a folder,
open a window in the desktop and then navigate to that library folder in the
left pane. In our case, the menu path is Libraries, Music, Downloads.
Right-click the library-enabled folder--Downloads--and choose Remove
location from library.
Get Windows Live Essentials
Windows 7's standard installation omits
some previously bundled Windows software, including Photo Gallery and Movie
Maker, but you can still download these apps at the Windows Live Essentials
download page. Click Download on the right side, and save and run the file.
In the installer, mark the checkbox for
each piece of software you want to add. If you're on the prowl for useful
multimedia options, check Photo Gallery, Movie Maker Beta, and Silverlight.
(You're likely to encounter Silverlight video-streaming sites such as
Netflix, so you might as well add it to Windows 7 now.) Click Install, and
after several minutes, okay the final prompts to exit the installation. (I
skipped changing my default home page and other needy-relationship-style
requests.)
You can sign up
Use these groupings to your advantage.
Click Next and then click Add tags next to any of the groups. Enter a few
keywords from that particular photo session, separating them with
semicolons. Click Import.
If you shot RAW files, the program may
prompt you to download and install an additional codec. I had to go through
that process to accommodate photos from my digital SLR camera; but once
you've installed the extra piece of software, Windows 7 can display the
higher-end RAW files in the same manner as it does JPEGs.
Publish a Photo Gallery Online
Your friends and family can view your
photos through the Windows Live site. After importing and arranging an
album, you can upload the images within Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Within that application, right-click My
Pictures, and pick Create new folder. Name the new folder. Drag in pictures
that you want to publish online. Click the name of the folder within the
main window near the top to select all of the pictures. Choose Publish,
Online album. Sign into your Windows Live account if needed.
Give the album a title and in the pop-up
menu choose who can view the pictures. Change the value for 'Upload size' in
the pop-up menu if you wish; Medium gives enough detail for Web viewing;
Large and Original allow ample size for displaying on a big TV, printing,
and otherwise downloading. Then click Publish.
After the photos have finished uploading,
the program will prompt you with the option to view them. Click View Album
to open the page in your Web browser. If you miss that option, click your
account name in the upper right corner of Windows Live Photo Gallery, and
select View your photos. Copy the link from the Web page, and share it with
your friends.
If you decide to limit who can see one of
your albums, visit that album's Web page, and click Shared with: Everyone
(public) at the bottom of the page. Click Edit Permissions on the following
page, and uncheck the Everyone (public) box. If you've made friends through
the Network area of Windows Live, pick the My network box instead.
Otherwise, you can add individual e-mail contacts at the bottom. (Press the
spacebar to speed up entry of the next address.)
Back in Photo Gallery, you can add more
photos to a published group by selecting the new pictures and choosing
Publish, [gallery name]. Hold Shift and click the first and last images to
select pictures in sequence, or hold down Ctrl and click pictures to group
them in any order you like.
Import Photos and Videos Into Windows
Live Movie Maker
Windows Live Movie Maker eschews video
capture tools in favor of relying on the rest of Windows 7. If you connect a
DV camcorder to a Win 7 PC, the capture process should automatically launch
outside Movie Maker.
Click the Import the entire video radio
button, enter a name, and click Next. Click the Import videos as multiple
files checkbox, and the tool will splice the tape into your individual
shots. Approve the next windows to import the tape; the importing process
will take exactly as much time as your footage does to play.
Once your PC has captured your media, you
have some options for adding clips to a video in Windows Live Movie Maker.
From the desktop, drag your photos and videos into the right pane in that
program. If that area is blocked, drag the files over the Movie Maker icon
in the Taskbar, continue to hold the mouse down, and then drop them into the
right pane. Alternatively, select Add above Videos and photos in the
software, select the media, and click Open.
You'll want to rearrange and trim various
clips during the editing process, but at this point all of them are part of
your movie. If you added too many clips or images, delete them from the
storyboard by clicking the files and then clicking Remove.
Edit Your Movie
Windows Live Movie Maker cuts the timeline
view, focusing instead on arranging clips in a storyboard. Just drag and
drop each clip and each image to place them in the desired order within the
right pane. Since some video clips run too long, you'll need to trim them
into shape.
Click a video clip to select it; then
click the Edit tab at the top of the window, and click Trim. At this point,
you can adjust the in- and out-point sliders (which govern the length of the
clip, by trimming from one or both extremities) at the beginning and end of
the timeline. Press the spacebar or click the Play icon to view a sample
from the full clip, playing only between the edited points.
If you're satisfied, click Save and close
to finish. You'll make the edit here, but the original video file will stay
the same, in case you want to reimport it later.
The early 90's were awesome. Bill Waters was still
drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were
falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced that the
Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and that Apple was
more or less on its way out.
Into this time of innocence came a radical vision
of the future, epitomized by the movie Lawnmower Man. It was a future in
which Hollywood starlets had virtual intercourse with developmentally
challenged computer geeks in Tron-style bodysuits and everything looked like
it was rendered by a Commodore Amiga.
Anyway, at that time Virtual Reality was a Big
Deal. Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist most closely associated with the
idea, was bouncing from one important position to another, developing
virtual worlds with head mounted displays and, later, heading up the
National Tele-immersion initiative, "a coalition of research universities
studying advanced applications for Internet 2," whatever the heck that was.
Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches
for "Virtual Reality" Soon some sensed that the technology wasn't bringing
about the revolution that had been promised. In a 1993 column for Wired that
earns a 9 out of 10 for hilarity and a 2 out of 10 for accuracy, Nicholas
Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab (who I'm praying will have a sense
of humor about this) asked the question that was on everyone's mind: Virtual
Reality: Oxymoron or Pleonasm?
It didn't matter if anyone knew what he was talking
about, because time has proved most of it to be nonsense:
"The argument will be made that head-mounted
displays are not acceptable because people feel silly wearing them. The same
was once said about stereo headphones. If Sony's Akio Morita had not
insisted on marketing the damn things, we might not have the Walkman today.
I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will
wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and
planes."..."One company, whose name I am obliged to omit, will soon
introduce a VR display system with a parts cost of less than US$25."
Affordable VR headsets were just around the corner,
really? And the only real barrier to adoption, according to Negroponte? Lag.
Computers in 1993 just weren't fast enough to react in real time when a user
turned his or her head, breaking the illusion of the virtual.
According to Moore's Law, we've gone through
something like 10 doublings of computer power since 1993, so computers
should be about a thousand times as powerful as they were when this piece
was written - not to mention the advances in massively parallel graphics
processing brought about by the widespread adoption of GPUs, and we're still
not there.
So what was it, really, that kept us from getting
to Virtual Reality?
For one thing, we moved the goal posts - now it's
all about augmented reality, in which the virtual is laid over the real. Now
you have a whole new set of problems - how do you make the virtual line up
perfectly with the real when your head has six degrees of freedom and you're
outside where there aren't many spatial referents for your computer to latch
onto?
And most important of all, how do you develop
screens tiny enough to present the same resolution as a large computer
monitor, but in something like 1/400th the space? This is exactly the
problem that has plagued the industry leader in display headsets, Vuzix.
Their products are fine for watching movies, but don't try using them as a
monitor replacement.
Consumer-level Virtual Reality, it turns out, is
really, really hard - not quite Artificial Intelligence hard, but so much
harder than anyone expected that people just aren't excited anymore. The
Trough of Disillusionment on this technology is deep and long.
That doesn't mean Virtual Reality is gone forever -
remember how many false starts touch computing had before technologists
succeeded with, of all things, a phone?
And, just a coda, even though the public long ago
gave up on searching for Virtual Reality, the news media never got tired of
it. Which just shows you how totally out of touch we can be:
Comments
Artificial intelligence
To my opinion there is a big need to artificial intelligence, therefore the
virtual reality research has future. I wish the mankind had artificial
"people", who work instead him. Virtual reality must be created from the
simple reality, and storaged in big memories of artificial creatures.
Afterwards these robots can learn anything... Rate this comment: (Reply)
vkrmful 10/22/2010 Posts:1
VR, AR, etc.
The problem with all of these technologies is not just interface (getting
the tools to work well), it is also one of content and content creation. I
would argue that iPhone only made touch interfaces sexy again because they
created a platform that had just enough tools to make it easy for the 3rd
party comunity to generate lots of exciting content for it that leveraged
the interface. If someone could create an inexpensive VR/AR system and tool
kit that not just worked but also made it easy to for instance point the
system's cameras at a nearby object and get a workable shaded 3D model which
the user could easily manipulate and use to create new conent I think these
products will continue to stay out of the consumer space. Sure bits and
pieces of AR and VR will continue to creep into our lives but don't expect
any explosions anytime soon there is a lot of work on this stuff left to be
done.
Re: VR, AR, etc.
VR has to be vectored, In order to deal with the specter, Of people losing
their way, While navigating their stay, In a world where reality is
sectored. Rate this comment: (Reply) luddite 10/22/2010 Posts:151 Avg
Rating:
Jensen Comment
High end virtual reality learning was and is too expensive for main stream
higher education. Second Life is vastly inferior to virtual reality but was more
affordable until the 50% academic discount was taken away. Any type of virtual
world learning beyond video is probably to technical facilitate and deliver for
mainstream higher education Now in the military training for most any nation, it
is quite another matter where virtual reality is too valuable to ignore..
The Financial Accounting Standards Board recently approached Bloomfield
about studying how to create financial accounting standards that will assist
investors as much as possible, he quickly turned to the virtual world for
answers.
"Theory Meets Practice Online: Researchers and academics are looking to
online worlds such as Second Life to shed new light on old economic questions,"
by Francesca Di Meglio, Business Week, July 24, 2007 ---
Click Here
In fact, many economics researchers, including
Bloomfield, professor of accounting at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of
Management, are using the virtual environment to test ideas involving
staples of economics such as game theory, the effects of regulation, and
issues involving money. Since 1989, Bloomfield has been running experiments
in the lab in which he creates small game economies to study narrow issues.
But when the Financial Accounting Standards Board recently approached
Bloomfield about studying how to create financial accounting standards that
will assist investors as much as possible, he quickly turned to the virtual
world for answers.
"It would be very difficult to look at the complex
issues that FASB is trying to address with eight people in a laboratory
playing a very simple economic game," he says. "I started looking for how I
could create a more realistic economy with more players dealing with a high
degree of complexity. It didn't take me long to realize that people in
virtual worlds are already doing just that."
. . .
At
Indiana University, researcher Edward Castronova has posed
the idea of creating multiple virtual economies to study the
effects of different regulatory policies. At Indiana,
Castronova is director of the Synthethic Worlds Initiative,
a research center to study virtual worlds. "The opportunity
is to conduct controlled research experiments at the level
of all society, something social scientists have never been
able to do before," the center's Web site notes (see
BusinessWeek.com, 5/1/06,
"Virtual World, Virtual Economies").
A
virtual stock market is certainly not the only online entity
that opens itself up to research. Marketers are already
using the virtual world to test campaigns, packaging, and
consumer satisfaction. Pepsi (PEP)
famously tracks use of its products in
There.com. Architects seek reaction to design. Starwood
Hotels (HOT)
test-marketed its new loft designs in Second Life
(see BusinessWeek.com, 8/23/06,
"Starwood Hotels Explore Second Life First").
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been
recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly
interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published
by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu
for possible inclusion in this column.
Infobits subscriber Karen Ellis, founder of the
Educational CyberPlayGround (http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/),
recommends the
following:
STUDIO THINKING: THE REAL BENEFITS OF VISUAL
ARTS EDUCATION By Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veneema, and
Kimberly M. Sheridan New York: Teachers College Press, 2007
$24.95
ISBN 978-0-8077-4818-3
"The authors set out to tell us why arts education
is important and to give art teachers a research based language they can use
to describe what they teach, and what is learned. They reached their
conclusions after studying a number of well-taught studio classes in two
schools.
Over the course of a year, they observed what they
call a 'hidden curriculum' that defines what art education is and what it
does. Studio Thinking presents their findings in a cohesive model along with
lesson examples and commentary. The authors say they want to 'change the
conversation about the arts in this country' and that could happen if they
can resurrect, or reinvigorate, some of their earlier work. Studio Thinking
presents what the authors say is the right 'reason' for arts education as
opposed to some other rationales, which they say, are just plain wrong."
-- Review by John Broomall, Executive director of
the Pennsylvania
Fun for the weekend? I just
came across an interesting site that enables creations of short (up to 10
pages currently) pop-up books. Whether or not this is useful for delivering
basic concepts to our students is debatable but is certainly another
technique to try. It also has the added fun of being an augmented reality
book, so you can use the website to read your 3-D pop book as if its resting
on your hand - neat in a very geeky way, but pedagogically I'm not so sure.
The website is at:
http://alpha.zooburst.com/index.php and is
currently in Alpha stage testing, I wrote up a blog article on it replete
with pictures, a video and of course an accounting pop-up book:
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
Twitter: shornik
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
The Journal of Accountancy (AICPA) has begun
a new series of articles to review accounting research papers and explain
them to practitioners. The April issue has an article on "Mining Auditing
Research."
It summarizes about a dozen research articles,
mostly from The Accounting Review, but also including articles from JAR,
CAR, AOS, and the European Accounting Review.
In a class about United Nations regulations on the
laws of war, the discussion turned inevitably to Star Trek.
When the U.N. authorizes sanctions against a
particular nation, said Ilan Berman, the professor, the institution acts
much like the Borg — in the show’s universe, a mechanized force of cyborg
mercenaries bent on assimilating all of mankind. The analogy was lost on
most of the class, but Berman drove the point home for those who didn’t
regularly tune in to syndicated science fiction programs in the early 1990s:
Each member nation must act as part of the collective.
The lecture, peppered as it was with the occasional
pop culture reference, covered a lot of ground, from the U.S. national
security strategy to the justifications for nations’ use of force. The
students in the class — five were present on a Monday night in July for the
elective — come from a range of backgrounds, several of them working
full-time, but all in the program with an eye toward defense policy, whether
in the government, consulting or think tanks.
In Washington, those are hardly unorthodox goals.
Programs in defense or security studies churn out students every year in the
nation’s capital, from well-known and respected institutions such as Johns
Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and Georgetown
University’s School of Foreign Service, and also outside the Beltway at
places like Harvard (Kennedy) and Princeton (Wilson). The students in
Berman’s class, tucked in a conference room on the seventh floor of a
corporate office building in Fairfax, Va., are part of a relatively new
experiment: What if a state school in Springfield, Mo., operated a satellite
campus alongside the established players in defense studies?
So far, enrollments have been growing each year
since the unit opened shop in 2005 within commuting distance from the city,
sandwiched between a rapidly developing apartment complex and an office
park. The Department of Defense and Strategic Studies, a part of Missouri
State University, caters to students who want to break into Beltway defense
circles with a public university price tag and the advantages of a more
practical approach. In doing so, it offers a two-year M.S. degree that
requires both coursework and internships.
Having access to actual practitioners in the
classroom means, in this case, connections to defense and foreign policy
officials in the government. As with others like it, the program has had a
long revolving-doors tradition, starting from its original incarnation in
the early 1970s at the University of Southern California, where it was
founded by a former defense official who served on the SALT I delegation,
William R. Van Cleave, and partially funded by the free-market Earhart
Foundation. But unlike at similar departments elsewhere, Missouri State’s
full-time faculty of three and its nine affiliated lecturers tend to come
mainly from positions in Republican administrations and conservative-leaning
institutions.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Some years back Professor Sharon Lightner (UC at San Diego) put together a
really interesting online course for students, practitioners, and accounting
standard setters in six different countries where the classes met synchronously.
"An Innovative Online International Accounting Course on Six Campuses Around the
World" ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255light.htm
Ohio State University: Synchronous Partnering Course Modules in
Universities in Different Nations
"Frontiers in Higher Education: A Procedural Model," Ruth Sesco,
The International HETL Review, Volume 2, June 9, 2012 --- http://hetl.org/
The paper describes a procedural model implemented
at Ohio State University that shares similar content and interaction among
international partner classes for a short time, usually 3-5 weeks. The model
is flexible and adaptive to any discipline at both the graduate and
undergraduate levels and includes expertise from both partnering
instructors. Technologies are embedded to integrate a variety of structured
opportunities for interaction and to utilize different teaching and learning
strategies. There is no exchange of credits or funding, and all instructors
are individually responsible for grading their own students, thus allowing
subject expertise and peer interaction from around the world at no extra
personal cost. The model can be implemented to internationalize an entire
curriculum to a broad spectrum of learners world-wide with a significantly
reduced carbon footprint, at minimal cost, and in direct response to the
needs of higher education.
Jensen Comment
I suspect that Ruth Sesco independently developed a model that was invented
for an international accounting course by a San Diego State University
accounting professor years ago when the most advanced online technology was
rudimentary.
There are now nearly 7,000 accounting education videos on YouTube, most of
which are in very basic accounting.
But there are nearly 150 videos in advanced accounting.
Sometimes the videos are advertisements such as an advertisement for downloading
INTERMEDIATE ACCOUNTING 12th ED Solutions Manual by
KIESO, WEYGANT, WARFIELD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca08uh1cq1Y
There are nearly 70 videos on XBRL.
More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube ---
http://www.youtube.com/edu Many universities offer over 100
videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
More than 100 colleges have set up channels on
YouTube, and this week the popular video service unveiled a new section that
brings together all of that campus content in one area.
It had been difficult to find college lectures on
YouTube, since they are generally far less popular than the site’s humorous
and outrageous clips, and so they do not show up in lists of the most viewed
videos on the site. Although YouTube has long had an
education category,
it relies on users who post videos to decide whether to categorize their
videos as educational, and as a result the definition of education is very
broad. The new
YouTube
EDU page includes only
material submitted by colleges and universities.
Spencer Crooks, a spokesman for YouTube, said in a
statement that the site now features complete lectures for some 200 full
college courses. “Subjects range from computer science to literature,
biology to philosophy, history, political science, psychology, law, and much
more,” he said. “You can search within YouTube EDU
to find videos on topics of interest.”
The new section makes it possible to find out which
college-produced video is most popular. The winner so far is an interview
with a University of Minnesota professor discussing
the science behind the
new movie Watchmen. That video has been
viewed about 1.5 million times. The most popular lecture video on YouTube is
from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, on the subject of “Advanced
Finite Elements Analysis” (which has been viewed about 19,000 times).
I would be very grateful if you would look at my
new website
http://auditeducation.info . The site contains
articles, cases, classroom exercises, videos and academic research related
to financial statement auditing. I’d appreciate suggestions for improving
the site and publicizing it.
Paul M. Clikeman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Accounting
Robins School of Business
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173
October 12, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Paul,
I welcome this exciting new site containing resources for auditing and
the history of auditing. It selectively links to some of the best articles
on an array of auditing topics, including auditing history.
http://auditeducation.info
Jensen Comment
Having taught both Fortran and COBOL at one point in my career, I will pass on
this opportunity to upgrade my programming skills. However, these sound like
valuable free resources for the younger generation headed for college or that
generation of unemployable history majors seeking new skills.
1,400+ Open Sharing "Tutorials" On YouTube from a Harvard Business School
Graduate
Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)
The most popular educator on YouTube does not have
a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all
of his lectures from a bedroom closet.
This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit
his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture
videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way
to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online
phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed
educational system.
"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things
the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently.
The resulting videos don't look or feel like
typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional
colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these
lectures are short—about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see
only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his
digital sketchpad software as he narrates.
The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of
whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a
PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views,
making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other
traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube's
education section.
Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos "Khan
Academy," and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches
every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006.
Now he records one to five lectures per day.
He started with subject matter he knows best—math
and engineering, which he studied as an undergraduate at MIT. But lately he
has added history lectures about the French Revolution and biology lectures
on "Embryonic Stem Cells" and "Introduction to Cellular Respiration."
If Mr. Khan is unfamiliar with a subject he wants
to teach, he gives himself a crash course first. In a recent talk he
explained how he prepared for his lecture on entropy: "I took two weeks off
and I just pondered it, and I called every professor and everyone I could
talk to and I said, Let's go have a glass of wine about entropy. After about
two weeks it clicked in my brain, and I said, now I'm willing to make a
video about entropy."
Some critics have blogged that this learn-as-you-go
approach is no way to run an educational project—and they worry that the
videos may contain errors or lead students astray.
But to Mr. Khan, occasional mistakes are part of
his method. By watching him stumble through a problem, students see the
process better, he argues. Sometimes they correct him in comments on his
YouTube videos, and he says this makes students more engaged with the
material. "Sometimes when it's a little rough, it's going to be a better
product than when you overprepare," he says.
The Khan Academy explicitly challenges many of
higher-education's most sacred assumptions: that professional academics make
the best teachers; that hourlong lectures are the best way to relate
material; and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Mr. Khan argues
that his little lectures disprove all of that.
Watching his videos highlights how little the Web
has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges
simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as
effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years
ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their
informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of
multimedia.
The Khan Academy raises the question: What if
colleges could be retooled with new technologies in mind?
College From Scratch Mr. Khan is not the only one
asking that question these days.
Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York
University and a popular Internet guru, recently challenged his more than
50,000 Twitter followers with a similar thought exercise:
"If you were going to create a college from
scratch, what would you do?"
Bursts of creativity quickly Twittered in, and Mr.
Shirky collected and organized the responses on a Web site. The resulting
visions are either dreams of an education future or nightmares, depending on
your viewpoint:
All students should be required to teach as well,
said @djstrouse. Limit tenure to eight years, argued @jakewk. Have every
high-school senior take a year before college to work in some kind of
service project away from his or her hometown, said @alicebarr. Some
Twittering brainstormers even named their fictional campuses. One was called
FailureCollege, where every grade is an F to desensitize students to failure
and encourage creativity. Another was dubbed LifeCollege, where only life
lessons are taught.
When I caught up with Mr. Shirky recently, he
described the overall tone of the responses as "bloody-minded." Did that
surprise him?
"I was surprised—by the range of responses, but
also partly by the heat of the responses," he said. "People were mad when
they think about the gap between what is possible and what happened in their
own educations."
Mr. Shirky declined to endorse any of the Twitter
models or to offer his prediction of how soon or how much colleges will
change. But he did argue that higher education is ripe for revolution.
For him the biggest question is not whether a new
high-tech model of higher education will emerge, but whether the alternative
will come from inside traditional higher education or from some new upstart.
Voting With Their Checkbooks Lately, several
prominent technology entrepreneurs have taken an interest in Mr. Khan's
model and have made generous contributions to the academy, which is now a
nonprofit entity.
Mr. Khan said that several people he had never met
have made $10,000 contributions. And last month, Ann and John Doerr,
well-known venture capitalists, gave $100,000, making it possible for Mr.
Khan to give himself a small salary for the academy so he can spend less of
his time doing consulting projects to pay his mortgage. Over all, he said,
he's collected about $150,000 in donations and makes $2,000 a month from ads
on his Web site.
I called up one of the donors, Jason Fried, chief
executive of 37signals, a hip business-services company, who recently gave
an undisclosed amount to Khan Academy, to find out what the attraction was.
"The next bubble to burst is higher education," he
said. "It's too expensive for people—there's no reason why parents should
have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that
there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching."
No one I talked to saw Khan Academy as an
alternative to traditional colleges (for one thing, it doesn't grant
degrees). When I called a couple of students who posted enthusiastic posts
to Facebook, they said they saw it as a helpful supplement to the classroom
experience.
Mr. Khan has a vision of turning his Web site into
a kind of charter school for middle- and high-school students, by adding
self-paced quizzes and ways for the site to certify that students have
watched certain videos and passed related tests. "This could be the DNA for
a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching
videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building
robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever," he said.
The Khan Academy is a concrete answer to Mr.
Shirky's challenge to create a school from scratch, and it's an example of
something new in the education landscape that wasn't possible before. And it
serves as a reminder to be less reverent about those long-held assumptions.
Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)
Although Khan Academy has many general education tutorials and quite a few
things in economics and finance, I could not find much on accounting. One
strength of the site seems to be in mathematics. There is also a category on
Valuation and Investing which might be useful for personal finance.
MIT's Video Lecture Search
Engine: Watch the video at ---
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one
of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy
academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and
direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
Lecture Browser website gives the general public
detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the
university's
OpenCourseWareinitiative. The search engine
leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other
institutions to
convert
audio
into text and make it searchable.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f
Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with video) is at
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
University offerings at the
dedicated YouTube channel include peace and conflict studies, bioengineering
courses, and a science class titled "Physics for Future Presidents."
"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life:
academics, events and athletics," said vice provost for undergraduate
education Christina Maslach.
The University plans to continually add videos to the channel, which
officially launched Wednesday with about nine full courses consisting of
approximately 40 lectures each.
Berkeley lays claim to being the first university to offer full courses on
popular video-sharing website YouTube, which is based in Northern
California.
The university began online broadcasts, called "webcasts," of its own in
2001 and last year began making audio "podcasts" available for download at
Apple's iTunes online store.
"We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on
YouTube," said Ben Hubbard, who co-manages the university's webcast program.
"I think the whole open content movement is in keeping with what we are as a
public institution, we really believe at our core that making this available
to the public is truly important."
UC Berkeley is the first university to make videos of full courses
available through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can
view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. Topics range from
bioengineering, to peace and conflict studies, to "Physics for Future
Presidents," the title of a popular campus course. Building on its initial
offerings, UC Berkeley will continue to expand the catalog of videos available
on YouTube.
View the Playlist Here ---
http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
There is a link to the most viewed videos (with star ratings) at the above page.
On October 4, 2007 I could not find any accounting, finance, or economics
videos at the UC Berkeley site. There were six courses that popped up for
"Business."
Nearly all prestigious universities now offer some form of open sharing of
course materials, the most noteworthy of which is MIT. Yale, however, has some
of the finest lectures on video ---
http://www.yale.edu/opa/download/VLP_QuestionsAnswers.pdf
Copyright Restrictions on Open Sharing/Source Learning Materials
These are only my opinions, and they should not be taken as legal advice.
Just because something can be accessed online does not mean it is an open
sharing item. Generally online items are like library books that can be accessed
by the public but have copyright restrictions copying and uses other than
personal reading. If online learning materials are billed as "open sharing," or
"open source" (as
in the case of OCW materials at MIT) chances are that they can be used in
total or in part for educational purposes in other open sharing materials if
proper credits are given. In commercial materials such as books and course
videos, there is vulnerability for lawsuit by the copyright owners. In my
personal opinion, I think a lot depends upon how central the copyrighted
material is to the purchased material. If use is incidental and credits are
fully proper, then the risks of lawsuit are less than when the copyrighted
material becomes more featured in the material. In any case, it is good advice
to seek permission from copyright owners if the use is for some for-profit
purpose. This probably includes online or onsite courses for which fees are
charged to take the course. The dreaded DMCA is somewhat vague on open sharing
materials, but open sharing does not mean that copyright owners have abandoned
all rights. You can read more about the dreaded DMCA at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Since the term "open source" is rooted in computer software, the term is a
bit cloudy when it comes to text and multimedia learning materials. You can read
more about open sharing and copyrights at the following sites:
How to Excerpt Open Courseware Video, Compress It, and Serve it Up to
Students
Suppose that a very long video lecture is available as open courseware for
proper use in other learning materials. An instructor may only want to use parts
of this lecture in another course or supplemental tutorials for a course.
Searching a long video is tedious and time consuming. A better approach is to
make audio or video excerpts of portions of the long lecture.
Homemade video tutorial (very basic) on how to record
streaming audio on your PC ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPHSDOyj5f8
Note the passing reference to a free sound recorder called Audacity ---
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Note that if you are watching a lecture video that's pretty much a talking head,
it saves a lot, I mean a LOT, of file space to only capture the audio.
This might, for example, work very well when capturing parts of the many
UC Berkeley, YouTube, Yale, or Harvard video lectures ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Just in case source streams disappear from the Internet, I suggest capturing
what's important to you and saving to external media such as a CD or DVD disk.
Capturing also allows you to only capture what is relevant to you or your
students without having to spend a lot of time waiting for the good parts.
If the video open sharing video is a file, you might be able to download the
video file and then edit the file using something like the Producer Module in
Camtasia Studio ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/enhance.asp
However, in most instances open sharing videos are streaming (using the term
loosely here) videos for which there is no file to download. In that case the
video must be captured in total or in part by software designed for such
purposes. The software I like for video capturing is called Camtasia Recorder ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/record.asp
Also see
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
This is cheaper alternative than many more specialized products for streaming
video capture. You can download my PowerPoint file about Camtasia at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/PowerPoint/
Links to examples are given in this slide show.
When you capture streaming media as an avi file it has the advantage in that
you can edit the movie and delete parts you do not want using software like
Camtasia Producer ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/enhance.asp
You can also add interaction "skip to" buttons, quiz questions/answers, survey
questions, etc.
But captured avi files are generally enormous and cannot be stored
efficiently anywhere. After you've excerpted and edited the captured video as an
avi file it is almost always necessary to compress it into a wmv, mov, rm, scf,
flv, or some related option such as the compression options available in
Camtasia Producer. There is not generally a noticeable quality degradation in
the compressed versions. However, it is not possible, at least in Camtasia, to
alter the compressed version without recapturing it as an avi file.
After you have your compressed file such as a wmv you will need to get it to
your students. Chances are that your Blackboard, WebCT, or Web server does not
give you enough capacity to serve up a lot of video, including space-saving
compressed video. The next best thing is to either distribute your video to
students on CD or DVD disks or to send it to them over the Internet.
". . . the crisis in the scholarly communication
system not only threatens the well being of libraries, but also it threatens
our academic faculty's ability to do world-class research. With current
technologies, we now have, for the first time in history, the tools
necessary to effect change ourselves. We must do everything in our power to
change the current scholarly communication system and promote open access to
scholarly articles."
Paul G. Haschak's webliography provides resources
to help effect this change. "Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication
-- Open Access and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: Open Access
Statements, Proposals, Declarations, Principles, Strategies, Organizations,
Projects, Campaigns, Initiatives, and Related Items -- A Webliography" (E-JASL,
vol. 7, no. 1, spring 2006) is available online at
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v07n01/haschak_p01.htm
E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and
Special Librarianship [ISSN 1704-8532] is an independent, professional,
refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge and research in
the areas of academic and special librarianship. E-JASL is published by the
Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP), Athabasca,
Canada. For more information, contact: Paul Haschak, Executive Editor, Board
President, and Founder, Linus A. Sims Memorial Library, Southeastern
Louisiana University, Hammond, LA USA;
email: phaschak@selu.edu
Web:
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/
The October/November 2006 issue (vol. 3, issue 1)
of INNOVATE is devoted to open source and the "potential of open source
software and related trends to transform educational practice." Papers
include:
"Getting Open Source Software into Schools:
Strategies and Challenges" by Gary Hepburn and Jan Buley
"Looking Toward the Future: A Case Study of Open
Source Software in the Humanities" by Harvey Quamen
"Harnessing Open Technologies to Promote Open
Educational Knowledge Sharing" by Toru Iiyoshi, Cheryl Richardson, and Owen
McGrath
Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly,
peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of
Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal
focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance
educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings.
Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends,
and participate in open forums. For more information, contact: James L.
Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate; email:
innovate@nova.edu ; Web:
http://www.innovateonline.info/ .
The JOURNAL OF DIGITAL INFORMATION (JoDI) has
recently published a special issue focusing on adaptive hypermedia.
"Adaptive hypermedia systems are those that build a profile of the user and
then deliver content that is appropriate for these needs, rather than the
more traditional 'one-size-fits-all' approach of the web." These systems
have the potential for tailoring online learning experiences to the
individual student.
The Journal of Digital Information (JoDI) [ISSN:
1368-7506] is a peer-reviewed Web journal, supported by Texas A&M University
Libraries. Current and past issues are available at
http://journals.tdl.org/jodi .
See also:
"Adaptive Hypermedia: A New Paradigm for Educational Software" By H.
Spallek ADVANCES IN DENTAL RESEARCH, vol. 17, December 2003, pp. 38-42
http://adr.iadrjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/1/38 [Note: online
access available via a subscription by your institution.]
Although this paper discusses how adaptive hypermedia was used in dental
education courses, it's findings can be applied to other disciplines.
Spreadsheets made their first appearance for
personal computers in 1979 in the form of VisiCalc [45], an application
designed to help with accounting tasks. Since that time, the diversity of
applications of the spreadsheet program is evidenced by its continual
reappearance in scholarly journals. Nowhere is its application becoming more
marked than in the field of education. From primary to tertiary levels, the
spreadsheet is gradually increasing in its importance as a tool for teaching
and learning. By way of an introduction to the new electronic journal
Spreadsheets in Education, the editors have compiled this overview of the
use of spreadsheets in education. The aim is to provide a comprehensive
bibliography and springboard from which others may develop their own
applications and reports on educational applications of spreadsheets. For
despite its rising popularity, the spreadsheet has still a long way to go
before becoming a universal tool for teaching and learning, and many
opportunities for its application have yet to be explored. The basic
paradigm of an array of rows-and-columns with automatic update and display
of results has been extended with libraries of mathematical and statistical
functions, versatile graphing and charting facilities, powerful add-ins such
as Microsoft Excel’s Solver, attractive and highlyfunctional graphical user
interfaces, and the ability to write custom code in languages such as
Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications. It is difficult to believe that
Bricklin, the original creator of VisiCalc could have imagined the modern
form of the now ubiquitous spreadsheet program. But the basic idea of the
electronic spreadsheet has stood the test of time; indeed it is nowadays an
indispensable item of software, not only in business and in the home, but
also in academe. This paper briefly examines the history of the spreadsheet,
then goes on to give a survey of major books, papers and conference
presentations over the past 25 years, all in the area of educational
applications of spreadsheets.
The Blackboard: A tribute to a long-standing but fading
teaching and learning tool
From the Museum of History and Science at Oxford University:
Bye Bye Blackboard: From Einstein and others ---
http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/blackboard/
Question
What are real time virtual office hours?
Hint:
They operate a bit like a course
chat room
with some added features like microphones, and an instructor or teaching fellow
is in the room at all times.
As
reported in
The Harvard Crimson on Monday,
teaching fellows (Harvard parlance for TAs) for the course this
semester will begin holding real-time, online help sessions for
students this week. Using free, Java-based software, students
can
log on, chat with each other (via text
or microphone) and even “raise their hands” with the click of a
button, which adds them to a queue on the teaching fellow’s
computer.
Andy Guess, "Office Hours:
Coming to a Computer Near You," Inside Higher Ed,
September 18, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/18/officehours
Mobile learning is the theme
of the current issue of the INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND
DISTANCE LEARNING. Papers include:
"Mobile Distance Learning
with PDAs: Development and Testing of Pedagogical and System Solutions
Supporting Mobile Distance Learners" by Torstein Rekkedal and Aleksander
Dye, Norwegian School of Information Technology
"The Growth of m-Learning
and the Growth of Mobile Computing: Parallel Developments" by Jason G.
Caudill, Grand Canyon University
"Mobile Learning and Student
Retention" by Bharat Inder Fozdar and Lalita S. Kumar, India Gandhi National
Open University
"Instant Messaging for
Creating Interactive and Collaborative m-Learning Environments" by James
Kadirire, Anglia Ruskin University
"m-Learning: Positioning
Educators for a Mobile, Connected Future" by Kristine Peters, Flinders
University
International Review
of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a
free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open
University. For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing
Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672;
email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ;
Web:
http://www.irrodl.org/
.
See also:
"Are You Ready for
Mobile Learning?" By Joseph Rene Corbeil and Maria Elena Valdes-Corbeil,
University of Texas at Brownsville EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY, vol. 30, no. 2, 2007
http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm07/eqm0726.asp
"Frequent use of mobile
devices does not mean that students or instructors are ready for mobile
learning and teaching."
PROPOSED SOLUTION TO
"BROKEN" COLLEGE TEXTBOOK MARKET
"Most debates over high
textbook prices devolve into a blame game . . . Publishers go after
excessive profits, bookstores stock too few used books, professors ignore
prices and switch books on a whim, colleges fail to guide their faculty
members, and students are not smart shoppers. Such claims are unproductive,
the [Education Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance] says,
though it sides more with students than with publishers." [The Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 1, 2007]
After a yearlong study, the
Committee, an independent panel that advises the U.S. Congress on student
aid policy, has released "Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More
Affordable," a report that addresses the problem of rising prices of college
textbooks. Long-term solutions would entail an "infrastructure of technology
and support services with which institutions, students, faculty, bookstores,
publishers, and other content providers can interact efficiently. This
infrastructure would consist of a transaction and rights clearinghouse,
numerous marketplace Web applications, and hosted infrastructure resources.
. . . The hosted infrastructure would ensure that all systems interface,
support a registry of millions of learning items, provide marketplace
services to thousands of campuses and millions of users, and process
hundreds of millions of transactions for both fee-based and no-cost
content."
Mobile learning is the theme
of the current issue of the INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND
DISTANCE LEARNING. Papers include:
"Mobile Distance Learning
with PDAs: Development and Testing of Pedagogical and System Solutions
Supporting Mobile Distance Learners" by Torstein Rekkedal and Aleksander
Dye, Norwegian School of Information Technology
"The Growth of m-Learning
and the Growth of Mobile Computing: Parallel Developments" by Jason G.
Caudill, Grand Canyon University
"Mobile Learning and Student
Retention" by Bharat Inder Fozdar and Lalita S. Kumar, India Gandhi National
Open University
"Instant Messaging for
Creating Interactive and Collaborative m-Learning Environments" by James
Kadirire, Anglia Ruskin University
"m-Learning: Positioning
Educators for a Mobile, Connected Future" by Kristine Peters, Flinders
University
International Review
of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a
free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open
University. For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing
Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672;
email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ;
Web:
http://www.irrodl.org/
.
See also:
"Are You Ready for
Mobile Learning?" By Joseph Rene Corbeil and Maria Elena Valdes-Corbeil,
University of Texas at Brownsville EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY, vol. 30, no. 2, 2007
http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm07/eqm0726.asp
"Frequent use of mobile
devices does not mean that students or instructors are ready for mobile
learning and teaching."
Question
What are the supposed Top 10 and the Top 100 e-Learning tools, at least in
England?
Like it or not, Wikipedia is one of the most
sought out sights in the world by e-Learners ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
There are risks, but the odds are high that users will get helpful learning
information and links.
ToolBook should’ve been number 1 but it
fumbled the ball. What proportion of e-Learners are now learning, today,
from ToolBooks? My guess is that much less than one percent. A negligible
proportion of instructors are developing learning materials using ToolBook
dhtml files relative to FrontPage and Dreamweaver htm files.
The biggest innovation for e-Learners and
authors was Adobe Acrobat’s tremendous development of online pdf files that
could be read and electronically searched for free but not be tampered with
by readers. Now major commercial publishing houses are putting new books on
line as pdf files.
One of the biggest innovations I forgot to
mention was the unknown (at least to me) date in which MS Office files
(particularly ppt, doc, and xls files) could be downloaded and read from a
Web servers that at one time only could handle htm markups. In terms of
e-learning htm, pdf, doc, xls, and ppt files are overwhelmingly the main
files for e-Learning, although they are now joined by such files as xml
files.
Another huge e-Learning innovation that I
forgot to mention is the unknown (at least to me) date in which the above
learning and research files could be attached to email messages. This made
it easier to have private distributions (say to students in a class) without
having to put files on Web, Blackboard, or WebCT servers. Anybody with email
can not send files back and forth.
There is still a great risk of macro viruses
when downloading MS Office files from the Web or email messages. However,
most e-Learners are doing so from trusted Web sites and/or email senders
such as files from their course instructors.
ToolBook could fade away and the world would
hardly know about it or miss it.
Wow.
I think we may have a glimpse into the future of text books with this one.
It is the new Introduction to Corporate Finance by William Megginson
and Scott Smart.
From videos for most topics, to interviews, to
powerpoint, to a student study guide, to excel help...just a total
integration of a text and a web site! Well done!
At St. Bonaventure we have adopted the text for the
fall semester and the book actually has made me excited to be teaching an
introductory course! It is that good!!
BTW Before I get accused of selling out, let me say
I get zero for this plug. I have met each author at conferences but do not
really know either of them. And like any first edition book there may be
some errors, but that said, this is the future of college text books!
Colleges taking their battle for high school
seniors to the Web and beyond.
Frustrated by the failure of e-mail solicitations to
generate much response - largely because of the colleges' own unrestrained
e-mail policies - admission directors are looking for new ways to incorporate
the Internet into their marketing plans. For some, that means setting up more
online chats. For others, it means streaming more video from their Web sites.
For Saint Mary's College, a Catholic college for
women in Notre Dame, Ind., the answer is a high-tech version of campus view
books, glossy tomes featuring ethnically diverse samplings of students
wandering through verdant campuses, happy to be within sprinting distance of a
Chaucer text.
After two years of testing, this fall Saint Mary's
rolled out a video magazine, or Vmag, aimed at prospective applicants.
Students can download the publication from the Saint Mary's home page (www.saintmarys.edu),
along with software that automatically retrieves updates. When an updated
version is ready for viewing, a desktop icon prompts the user to reopen it.
Each Vmag contains four one- to two-minute video
clips featuring various aspects of campus life. While some of the clips show
monologues by the college president or financial aid director, most are
narrated by a pair of Saint Mary's students, who take viewers on a tour.
"We were searching for something a little more
innovative and exciting to catch the attention of prospective students, and we
found it," said Mary Pat Nolan, who was until recently the Saint Mary's
director of admission. "This really sets us apart."
Ms. Nolan, who left Saint Mary's this month, said the
college had tested the Vmag for two years, sending it to applicants who had
been accepted by the school but had not yet decided to enroll. She said it was
impossible to determine how it had affected enrollment, but added that she
suspected it had helped.
Delivering a video magazine, Ms. Nolan said, "is
a way to tell students we're not living in the dark ages, and that we're
technologically advanced."
"We're not a convent school that's isolated,
where you'll never see a man or have a social life," she said.
"You'll have it all."
That message resonated with Maggie Oldham, who was
among the first prospective students to view the video magazine two years ago.
Ms. Oldham, now a sophomore, had been accepted by four colleges; initially,
Saint Mary's was at the bottom of her list.
"When you see pictures, you think, 'That looks
nice,' " Ms. Oldham said. "But with video, I could see myself in
that class or at that basketball game. It was pretty persuasive, the whole
interactive part of it."
Frequent updates to the video were helpful.
"Once you go to all those schools, they all kind of run together,"
she said. "You can go back and look at all the brochures, but this is
better at reinforcing what you've seen."
Kathleen Hessert, co-founder of NewGame
Communications, a Charlotte, N.C., company that produces Vmags for schools and
other organizations, said the technology is starting to attract interest from
more colleges. "I think we were a little bit ahead of the market
initially," Ms. Hessert said.
Jensen Comments
Some slides have less text, which is probably a good thing during the
presentation. However, for those of us who cannot attend the presentation,
sometimes more text adds value for a much larger absentee audience. A dark
background is easier on the eye, and the dark background makes it easier to
track a red laser pointer. However, be sure to set the your printer so that it
does not drain your printer ink to print dark backgrounds.
Jensen Comment
Even though the Amazon Kindle displays books and runs streaming videos into its
own screen or television screens (a feature that I use for one movie per day),
it's not a tablet computer. Erin Templeton, however, shows how to load PDF
files for on-the-road and classroom presentations.
Jensen Comment
Of course many powerful speakers, like evangelical preachers, make presentations
without any visual aids, including PowerPoint, Videos, White Boards, or Chalk
Boards.
For those that want live Websites, there's a bit of a risk since Webservers
can fail when you need them the most or access to the Internet may be very
expensive as is sometimes the case in a hotel ballroom. Also the presentation
may be made in a room without an Internet connection (including wireless) such
as a presentation in a developing country.
The trick I used to use is to make a Camtasia video of live Website pages and
then make my own live presentation using the Camtasia video complete with the
Pause button and a laser pointer.
When anti-PowerPoint professors rant it's usually about those boring
PowerPoints that have too much text or are simply bullet points. But those same
professors fail to mention how wonderful PowerPoint can be to point, with a
laser pen, to a parts of a complicated graph or columns of numbers in a table.
It's not that PowerPoint is bad. Like any tool it can be used effectively or
be badly misused.
Educators have argued politely (and not so
politely) about the most effective pedagogical methods for decades, and at
times, they have even been able to agree on certain approaches. One recently
created resource designed specifically for community college educators is
the Getting Results website. Created as part of partnership between the
National Science Foundation and WGBH, this self-contained professional
development course is designed to "challenge previous thinking about
teaching and learning and give you the basic tools for effective classroom
practices." Users of this fine resource can work independently, or also
elect to team up with groups of colleagues. Enhanced with online videos and
worksheets, the course contains six modules, including "Moving Beyond the
Classroom" and "Teaching with Technology". With an easy-to-use interface and
non-intrusive graphics, this site is a most welcome addition to currently
available online resources for community college educators.
PowerPoint is boring. Student attention spans are
short. Today many facts pop up with a simple Google search. And plenty of
free lectures by the world's greatest professors can be found on YouTube.
Is it time for more widespread reform of college
teaching?
This series explores the state of the college
lecture, and how technologies point to new models of undergraduate
education.
Last month, we began inviting students across the
countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video
commentaries about whether lectures work for them. Below are highlights from
the first batch of submissions, which are full of frustration with
“PowerPoint abuse” – professors’ poor use of slide software that dumps too
much information on students in a less-than-compelling fashion.
I am writing this in Microsoft Word, hardly an
unusual way to author a document. But I'm not using Word as you know it—part
of the large, complex Microsoft Office suite installed on your computer's
hard drive. Instead, I am using a new, streamlined version of Word that for
the first time resides on remote servers you reach through the Internet.
This new version of Word is used inside a Web
browser. It works on both Windows PCs and Macs, and via the newer versions
of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and
Chrome. It's free and it doesn't require you to have regular Office on your
computer.
Word isn't the only Office component that's now
available in a free online version. Microsoft has created similar simplified
versions of Excel, PowerPoint and its OneNote note-taking program as part of
the free online suite called Office Web Apps, which is available at
office.live.com. To use the new online Office, you'll need a free account
for the company's broader Windows Live online service.
WSJ's Personal Technology columnist Walt Mossberg
takes a look at the new free, online version of Microsoft Office, called
Office Web Apps. It's a stripped down version of the familiar desktop
edition of Office, and runs on both PCs and Macs. Walt says it may be all
you'll ever need in an Office suite. Microsoft is also releasing a new
version of its traditional desktop Office for Windows next week, called
Office 2010. But in my view, the online edition is the most interesting new
development for consumers in this round of updates. It's part of the broader
trend toward cloud computing—doing tasks online rather than with desktop
programs. And it's meant to help the software giant compete with rival
online office suites from competitors like Google and Zoho.
I've been testing Office Web Apps on both Windows
and Mac computers, and in all four major browsers, and I like it. It has
some downsides and is still a work in progress. It lacks many of the more
sophisticated features of the local, desktop version of Office. In fact,
Microsoft—apparently trying to protect its profitable desktop suite—refers
to Office Web Apps as a "companion" to desktop Office, for "light" work.
Mossberg Mailbox Mossberg on buying an iPad for
children But these are capable, if simpler, programs that look and feel like
their desktop counterparts and they will likely meet the needs of many
consumers who produce basic documents, even if they don't own desktop
Office. Also, the new Web Apps are connected to a generous 25 gigabytes of
free online storage for your documents, via a companion Microsoft online
storage system called SkyDrive.
Another big benefit: Microsoft boasts its Office
Web Apps produce documents that use the same file formats as the desktop
programs and thus, look fully accurate when opened in desktop Office. The
company calls this "fidelity." In my tests, this claim held true, at least
on my Windows PC. (A revised version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, tuned
to work with Web Apps, is in the works.)
The new version of the desktop Office suite also
has many new features, but a lot of these are for power users or corporate
users, and, overall, it isn't nearly as big a change as its predecessor,
Office 2007. Among the new desktop features consumers will notice and use
are the extension of the consolidated top tool bar called the "Ribbon,"
introduced in the 2007 version in most Office programs, to Outlook; a new
unified view for printing, sharing and previewing documents, called
"Backstage"; and richer graphics. You can also now customize the Ribbon.
In my tests of the streamlined Office Web Apps, I
was able to use a variety of fonts and styles, insert and resize photos, and
create tables. And I was able to view my documents, though not edit them, on
an iPhone and iPad. This also works with other mobile devices.
One glitch I ran into in the Word Web App was that,
if you use a tab to start a paragraph, it changes the left margin of each
subsequent line. Microsoft says this is a bug and it is working to fix it.
Another downside for some users may be that the Web
Apps only directly open documents from, and save them to, your online
SkyDrive storage, not your hard disk. So you have to upload files from your
hard disk to SkyDrive to edit them in the Web Apps. And, like most
cloud-based programs, they can only be used when you're online.
There are numerous things you may be used to doing
in desktop Office that can't be done in the online version. For instance,
you can't drag photos by the corners to resize them, embed videos, create
slide transitions or add new spreadsheet charts.
You can, with one click, open a Web version of your
document in the full desktop program, to take advantage of richer editing.
However, this only works with certain combinations of browsers and desktop
Office versions.
Two of the Web apps, Excel and OneNote, allow
multiple users to log on and work on the same document together. The others
don't yet. In fact, in my tests, I couldn't open a Word document locally
until I had closed it online, and vice versa. Microsoft says it is working
on expanding simultaneous use to all the apps.
Office Web Apps are a good start for Microsoft at
bringing its productivity expertise to the Web, and may be all many
consumers need for creating simple documents.
Students from the University of Denver created this video "parody" on
technology in the classroom.
It appears, however, to be a bit more serious critique than what I would call a
humorous parody.
http://www.youtube.com/user/DUinnovations#p/a/u/0/6svk_R_rVhA
Are PowerPoint slides making us stupid? Are all
problems really just a few bullet points away from their solutions? Or is
the medium having a bad effect on the message? I'm no Marshall McLuhan or
Edward Tufte (I will pause here to let you all shout, "Damn straight!"), but
I do know something about business presentations and how they're put
together. And I know that PowerPoint too often gets in the way of the
message, replacing clear thought with unnecessary animations, serious ideas
with 10-word bullet points, substance with tacky, confusing style.
I DON'T KNOW what
McLuhan would think about PowerPoint, him being dead and all. But Tufte is
very much alive and, in
an essay appearing in the September issue of Wired, minces no words:
"PowerPoint is evil," says the Yale professor whose books have set the
standard for graphic presentation in the computer age.
Tufte says that slideware programs like PowerPoint
(there aren't many others left) "may help speakers outline their talks, but
convenience for speakers can be punishing to both content and audience." The
standard PowerPoint deck, he says, "elevates format over content, betraying
an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."
This is especially true given that many
presenters--who really shouldn't be presenting in the first place--use
PowerPoint as a crutch. PowerPoint becomes a tool to separate the presenter
from the audience and from the message.
But it doesn't have to be this way. It's possible
to use PowerPoint as a tool (just like
the projector you probably use to display your presentation), and as a
real complement to what you're saying, without dumbing down your ideas.
Today I'd like to offer some advice to help you do just that.
Do the presentation first, then the slides.
Many people draft and write their presentation in PowerPoint itself.
It's far better to prepare the presentation in Word (or whatever other
tool you use to write)--including all the detail you want to
present--and then transfer the highlights to PowerPoint. The one problem
with using Word for this: It doesn't have a very good outlining tool.
Artwork has killed more presentations than
it's saved. You're not a graphic artist, and neither am I.
PowerPoint makes it too easy to add confusing graphics to presentations.
Use restraint.
Animation is for cartoons. Animation
tends to take over the presentation, which then becomes more about the
presenter trying to make all the builds and transitions work properly
than actually presenting the content.
Present more than the slide. Don't you
hate it when presenters stand at the front of a room and read their
slides ? Slides are supposed to convey the major points of the
presentation, reinforcing the speaker's points. Use them as prompts to
talk about specific topics, as an outline, not as the substance of the
presentation itself.
Use the notes pages. Many people are
unaware that PowerPoint lets you attach notes to slides, which can then
be printed and used to guide you or to give to the audience. Search for
"notes" in the Help file to find out more about this feature.
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. No, you
don't have to stand in front of a mirror and do your entire
presentation. But a sit-down with some colleagues can answer the
questions, "Do these slides make sense?" and "Is this the information
people care about?"--before you find out the hard way.
My point here is that PowerPoint glitz alone does not
an effective presentation make. While your decks shouldn't be boring, they
aren't entertainment, either. A few staging and showbiz skills help, but
most presentations are won or lost in the actual content. Your job is to
control PowerPoint. If you don't, PowerPoint will control your presentation.
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been
recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly
interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published
by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu
for possible inclusion in this column.
"I was recently invited to a presentation by an
accomplished speaker. Needless to say, his speech was well structured, his
manner relaxed and confident, his eye contact and body language excellent,
etc. He normally spoke without slides, but this time he felt they would
reinforce and illuminate his message. They didn't. In fact, they were more
of a hindrance than a help."
Marketing communication consultant Jaffe provides
useful advice to anyone adding visual materials to their lectures,
conference presentations, and other public speaking activities.
Onsite rounds give way to PowerPoint for medical interns
Socratic Dialogue Gives Way to PowerPoint
"Socratic Dialogue Gives Way to PowerPoint," by Lawrence K. Altman, MD.,
The New York Times, December 12, 2006 ---
Click Here
Grand rounds are not so grand anymore.
For at least a century at many teaching and
community hospitals, properly dressed doctors in ties and white coats have
assembled each week, usually in an auditorium, for a master class in the art
and science of medicine from the best clinicians. Before us was often a
patient who sat in a chair or rested on a gurney and two doctors, one in
training and the other a professor or senior doctor at the hospital. In a
Socratic dialogue, they often led the audience in a step-by-step deciphering
of the ailment.
But in recent years, grand rounds have become
didactic lectures focusing on technical aspects of the newest biomedical
research. Patients have disappeared. If a case history is presented, it is
usually as a brief synopsis and the discussant rarely makes even a passing
reference to it.
Now grand rounds are often led by visiting
professors from distant hospitals and medical schools. Sometimes,
manufacturers of drugs and devices pay the visitor an honorarium and
expenses, a practice that has drawn criticism. And the Socratic dialogue has
given way to PowerPoint. These rounds are often useful, but certainly not
grand.
Precisely when and where grand rounds began is not
known. There are many types of rounds where doctors learn from patients. For
example, there are the daily working rounds as doctors walk through a
hospital to visit and examine patients. In teaching rounds, more senior
doctors supervise the work of residents, or house officers, at a patient’s
bedside or in a clinic.
Grand rounds were showcases featuring the best
clinicians, and the practice thrived in an era when doctors knew little more
than what they observed at the bedside. Professors often demonstrated
characteristics of physical findings like an enlarged thyroid, a belly
swollen with fluid or another grotesque disfigurement that the audience
could see. Those with a flair for showmanship were often the best teachers,
adapting the predictable structure to their needs and talents.
Grand rounds usually began with a younger doctor’s
reciting the medical history of a patient with an unusual disease, physical
finding or symptom. Sometimes the professor knew about the case, other times
he did not. The professor would then ask the patient what was wrong. The
more compassionate professors gave reassurance by placing their hands on the
patients.
The professor would conduct the interview much like
a journalist. When did the fever begin? How high was it? Did you notice a
rash? Did you have pain? Where did you feel it? What relieved it?
Each major specialty, like internal medicine and
surgery, held separate grand rounds. Pediatrics had a different style. A
child unable to relate the events involved in his or her medical history
often sat on a parent’s lap. The format promoted direct dialogue and
emotional reaction between the pediatrician and the family in a way that
would not come across if a doctor coldly presented the child’s case.
After arriving at a diagnosis, the professor
related the current state of medical knowledge to the patient’s case. The
emphasis was on diagnosis, treatment and the management of a patient, not on
research.
In those earlier days, the patient stayed for part
or all of the session, which usually lasted an hour. Sometimes doctors in
the audience asked questions of the patient and professor. Humor trickled
into some sessions. So did personal attacks among faculty members.
As a student at the Tufts Medical School in Boston
beginning in 1958, I joined the throngs of doctors on grand rounds when Dr.
Louis Weinstein spoke about infectious diseases.
Usually, the patient’s pertinent information was on
a blackboard. Dr. Weinstein would study the fever chart, seeking clues in
the pattern to help identify a particular infection. Then he would regale
the crowd with anecdotes from his vast experience in caring for patients
with typhoid fever, diphtheria, polio and many other infectious diseases.
Before the Medicare and Medicaid plans were enacted
in 1965, many patients treated in teaching hospitals received charity care.
In those days, when costs were less of an obstacle, professors sometimes
hospitalized patients a few extra days so they could be presented at grand
rounds. In other cases, many patients returned after discharge in gratitude
for their free care.
Even the smartest experts had to be on their toes,
because younger doctors often selected a case intended to tax their brains.
Another intention was to have the experts explain their thinking as they
matched wits against colleagues and the illness itself.
In San Francisco in 1987, I heard a visiting expert
discuss the possible reasons that a woman in her 80s, who complained of
weakness and muscle spasms in her back, had a severe loss of potassium.
After the resident gave a detailed account of her
illness, the discussant, Dr. Donald W. Seldin, then the chief physician at
the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center in Dallas, went to a
blackboard to highlight the crucial elements and list possible causes.
Epsilen Environment from Purdue University appears to have brought
together the latest technology in a course authoring, course management, and
e-learning package ---
http://www.epsilen.com/Epsilen/Public/Home.aspx
The Epsilen Environment is the result of six years
of research and development within the Purdue School of Engineering and
Technology at IUPUI. Epsilen Products and Services are commercially
available through BehNeem LLC, the holding company created in Indiana to
commercialize, market and further develop the Epsilen Environment. The New
York Times is an equity and strategic partner in the company.
A 2008 addition to the above history site came to my attention in a
loose-card advertisement for Epsilen Enviroment that came in the November 3,
2008 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Free ePortfolios
Basic ePortfolio accounts are free for all registered students and faculty
of U.S. colleges and universities. An Epsilen ePortfolio can be created in
minutes and be used throughout one’s academic career, during
professional life, and even into retirement. The free Epsilen ePortfolio
account offers tools and resources enabling members to:
Create and maintain a professional ePortfolio
Engage in professional and social networking
Showcase scholarly work and other documents in a wide range of
formats
Develop and share resumes
Store and share files/objects
Use Epsilen e-mail, blog, wiki, and other communication and
collaboration tools
Create and participate in professional collaboration groups
Access to online
courses and trainings using the Epsilen Global Learning System (GLS)
courseware.
Produce a personal ePortfolio Web site with profile, photos and
video
Receive an automated weekly Epsilen status report
that lets you know about those that have visited your “corner”,
share similar research, teaching, internship or consulting
interests.
If your
campus is, or becomes, a licensed Epsilen institution (see below), your free
ePortfolio will integrate dynamically with more sophisticated tools and
services listed below that accompany the paid license. Visit www.epsilen.com
to
create
your personal ePortfolio and begin exploring the Environment.
Exploratory
Institutional Memberships
The Exploratory Membership is an easy and cost-effective option for colleges
and universities, schools, districts and state systems to explore and
experience the features of Epsilen, the next generation of learning and
networking software. Upon payment of an annual
membership fee, the following features are available to Exploratory
Members:
Administrative
account to brand, monitor, and maintain internal ePortfolio accounts of
your students ,faculty and alumnae
Institutional
ePortfolio site for your college or university
Global announcement
and message broadcasting to ePortfolio accounts associated with your
institution
Delivery of 12
online courses or training using Epsilen’s Global Learning System (GLS),
with the option to incorporate New York Times content described below
Direct access to the
Epsilen helpdesk
A hosted Web-based
solution that requires no, or little, institutional IT support
Ability to upgrade
to other licensed services (see below)
Ability to integrate
Epsilen with campus SIS (see below)
Ability to cross
list courses across institutions, departments, and schools
Annual Exploratory Memberships begin at
$5,000 for campuses with up to 2,000 students. Click here for
more pricing information and order application.
New York Times Knowledge
Network New York Times
Knowledge (NYTKnowledge Network) offers New York Times content to
complement faculty-designed courses served dynamically in customizable
templates through Epsilen’s Global Learning System. New York Times
content is aggregated by subject and easily selected and incorporated into
lessons by faculty and the interactive learning environment. NYTKnowledge
Network provides access to a repository of Times archives back to
1851 Times articles, special issues sections, multimedia features,
and synchronous and asynchronous contact with correspondents, resulting in
an extraordinary integrated learning environment that supports hybrid or
online offerings.
The New York Times
Knowledge Network also offers the opportunity to participate in Webcasts
with the Times correspondents and other subject matter experts.
These can be included in traditional courses, or offered by your institution
as stand-alone life-long learning experiences with comprehensive continuing
education programs designed by the New York Times.
NYT Knowledge Network Provides:
A rich
repository of archived content back to 1851
Access to other
major content providers
Multimedia news
content
Interactive maps
and graphs
Webcasts, chats
with correspondents
A comprehensive
range of content aggregated by subject and easily integrated to
support your teaching objectives.
NYTimes
Knowledge Network marketing of your continuing education courses.
Student Learning Matrix
Programs, departments, and schools within a campus may create unlimited
student learning matrices to be used by students through an automated
learning outcome assessment tool for both summative and formative learning
assessment. Features include:
Creation of
unlimited student learning matrices for program- or campus-level
learning outcome assessment (Each axis includes attributes defined
by the program/campus.)
Ability for
students to upload their learning outcomes according to predefined
rubrics
Access by
faculty and academic advisors to each student learning matrix for
assessment, advisement, and certification
Program- and
campus-level assessment reports for internal and external
accreditation reviews
A hosted
Web-based solution that requires no institutional IT support
The annual
Student Learning Matrix membership fee is based on the number of students in
the program or institution. Click here
for more information and online membership application.
Global Learning System (GLS)
Epsilen offers the Global
Learning System (GLS), a new Web-based learning framework developed as the
next generation of eLearning and networking. In contrast to current legacy
learning management systems, the GLS offers true global learning
collaboration by connecting students and instructors on campuses in the U.S.
and around the world in an interactive and intuitive Web 2.0 learning
environment. The GLS complements existing licensed or open source CMS
products. The GLS features include:
Global learning
management system that enables students and instructors to easily
register or be invited to courses and learning collaboration
Cross listing of
class rosters of two or more courses within various campuses, or across
institutions
Innovative tools
using professional and social networking to enhance learning, encourage
collaboration, and utilize peer review technology
The ability to
easily archive courses and working groups for continued engagement
A hosted
Web-based solution that requires little, or no institutional IT support
The annual GLS membership fee is based on the
number of students and courses within the institution.
Click here for
more information and online membership
application.
Charter Membership Experience the
full suite of the Epsilen “Environment” and resources with unparalleled
access to NYTKnowledge Network content. Charter members receive special
pricing for unlimited use of ePortfolios, the Student Learning Matrix,
courses through the Global Learning System, and interactive Webcasts with
correspondents. With charter membership, two university administrators will
be invited to participate in the Epsilen - New York Times charter
council, with meetings and events scheduled at The New York Times.
Benefits include:
Single sign-on
environment featuring a toolbox of services for ePortfolio, social
networking, Learning Matrix, GLS, object repository, and
NYTKnowledge Network
Totally hosted
turnkey solution with no need for local servers or local technical
staff
Cost
effectiveness for both small and large campuses
Collaboration on
designing the next generation of eLearning through networking with
other members of the Epsilen - New York Times charter council
The Epsilen Charter membership fee is
based on the total number of students within the institution. Click here for
more information and online membership
application.
Technical Support and
System Integration Epsilen offers consulting and technical
support through both internal and third-party sources for the integration of
Epsilen with local campus databases and existing licensed technology. This
provides a seamless, single sign-on, portal approach to all resources and
services supporting the learning and teaching initiatives of a campus.
Click Here for
more information and online membership
application.
The Knowledge Media Laboratory works to create a
future in which communities of teachers, faculty, programs, and institutions
collectively advance teaching and learning by exchanging their educational
knowledge, experiences, ideas, and reflections by taking advantage of
various technologies and resources.
The KML is currently working with its partners,
including Carnegie Foundation programs, to achieve the following goals:
• To develop digital (or electronic) tools and
resources that help to make knowledge of effective teaching practices
and educational transformation efforts visible, shareable, and reusable.
• To explore synergy among various technologies
to better support the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
• To build the capacity for faculty and
teachers independently to take advantage of information and
communications technologies that enable them to re-examine, rethink, and
represent teaching and students learning, and to share the outcomes in
an effective and efficient way.
• To sustain communities of practice engaged in
collaboratively improving teaching and student learning by building
common areas to exchange knowledge and by building repositories for the
representation of effective practice.
I discovered Dan Madigan in the February 2006 issue
of Accounting Education News ---
http://aaahq.org/ic/browse.htm
In that issue of AEN, a summary of provided of his Idea Paper #43 on "New
Technologies that are Shaping Education and Learning." Excerpts from that
summary are provided below.
Idea Paper #43 by Dan Madigan
New Technologies that are Shaping Teaching
and Learning
Blogs
You can create your own blog for free by going to
http://www.blogger.com/home . Blog technology allows blogs
to be syndicated and aggregators allow users to automatically
search for favorite blogs on the web and have them delivered to
personal accounts (
http://www.bloglines.com/ ) [using tools like RSS feed
readers-Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary].
Many universities buy a proprietary LMS, but increasingly
universities are building their own LMS based on open source
software like Moodle (
http://www.moodle.org/ ). Moodle's no-cost (excluding costs
associated with hardware and support), flexibility to adapt to
small or large institutions, departments, programs and
individuals, and world-wide support are attractive features. http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
(This includes modules on Blackboard, Moodle, and various competitors)
Although PowerPoint®
may be the most common example of this program, there are many
other programs including Keynote, Adobe Acrobat, and the popular
and free Open Office Suite package that includes IMPRESS as its
presentation program (
http://www.openoffice.org/index.html ). Simple
presentations can also be created using the Simple
Standards-Based Slide Show System (S5). This open source system
(
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ ) requires only basic
knowledge of web skills and can be learned quickly.
Tutorials/Self-tutorials
A basic tutorial can be created with any text editor and
delivered to students through a variety of digital technologies
such as email, Portable Document Files (PDF) that can preserve
the format and colors of a document, web pages, and CDs.
Tutorials that appeal to visual learners can be created with
scanning software or basic screen capture software found on any
operating system. Video tutorials, like those for software
applications, can be created with screen capturing software that
captures the movement of a mouse as it is used to open windows
and select options in a program. A microphone, used
simultaneously with the screen-capturing tool to narrate the
actions and video-editing software, completes the process. More
advanced tutorials include functions that, for example, mimic
teacher/student interactions and exchanges, and include an
assessment of those interactions. These interactive tutorials
can be created through advanced programs such as Adobe FLASH and
java scripting.
Concept Mapping Software
Description: Concept mapping (a method of
brainstorming) is a technique for visualizing the relationships
between concepts and creating a visual image to represent the
relationship. Concept mapping software serves several purposes
in the educational environment. One is to capture the
conceptual thinking of one or more persons in a way that is
visually represented. Another is to represent the structure of
knowledge gleaned from written documents so that such knowledge
can be visually represented. In essence, a concept map is a
diagram showing relationships, often between complex ideas.
With new mapping software such as the open source Cmap (
http://www.cmap.ihmc.us/download/ ), concepts are easily
represented with images (bubbles or pictures) called concept
nodes, and are connected with lines that show the relationship
between and among the concepts. In addition, the software
allows users to attach documents, diagrams, images other concept
maps, hypertextual links and even media files to the concept
nodes. Concept maps can be saved as a PDF or image file and
distributed electronically in a variety of ways including the
Internet and storage devices.
Webcast
These live sessions are highly interactive and allow users to
share applications, such as whiteboards, concept maps and word
documents, and to communicate live through audio and chat.
Elluminate (
http://www.elluminate.com/educator_solutions.jsp ) is one of
many server-based software programs that is enjoying popularity
in educational settings. Webcasts provide educational
institutions with the ability to support conferencing and to
deliver training and presentations to personnel anytime and
anywhere. Recorded and archived webcasts, because they are
economical to develop and store, are increasingly becoming the
preferred way for universities to deliver lectures, events and
presentations to faculty and students through the web, CDs, DVDs
and even TV broadcasts.
Podcasts
Some popular free podcatcher websites are iTunes and iPodder.
The browser Firefox also has podcatching features. Users can
create their own podcast for free by going to websites such as (
http://www.twocanoes.com/vodcaster/ ). For a nominal fee, a
more powerful and cross-platform podcast creator tool can be
found at (
http://www.potionfactory.com/ ).
ePortfolios
Although many standard software programs can be used to
create basic ePortfolios, the most dynamic programs, such as
Open Source Portfolio (
http://www.osportfolio.org ) are designed specifically for
developing portfolios that serve a variety of reflective and
representational functions within a password protected system.
Personal Response Systems (Clickers)
Individuals are equipped with their own remote control
keypads that have letters or numbers that correspond to choices
given by a presenter. The results of the responses are captured
on a computer either through infrared or radio signals and
compiled in ways that show such breakdowns as class distribution
and individual responses. Typically, the results are instantly
made available to the participants via some type of graphic that
is displayed with a projector. Presenters can set automatic
controls within the system that limit the time a responder has
to answer a question. Each remote "clicker" has a serial number
so that all users and their responses can be individually
identified and recorded.
Supporting Digital Technology for Teaching
and Learning
As faculty are carefully assessing their use of technology
for purposes of teaching and learning, universities need to
assess whether their technology support is adequate and
responsive to the needs of those instructors. During the early
phases of the digital revolution on campuses, this meant
building an infrastructure, providing equipment and offering
basic skills-oriented workshops to faculty and students. Over
the years, however, we have learned that basic technology
support has not always been enough to ensure that digital
technologies are being used effectively as ways to enhance
student learning. Some universities have heeded the challenge
and are creatively building upon existing programs to develop a
technology of support that is responsive to the professional
lives of today's faculty. What follows are five examples that
serve to represent ways that universities are developing
creative solutions for supporting a learning environment that is
increasingly being influenced by a digital revolution that show
no signs of abating anytime soon.
Faculty Involvement
Faculty need to have a critical voice in university decisions
about technology improvement and deployment on
campus--especially when the technology relates to teaching and
learning issues...Forward thinking universities find new and
inclusive ways to tap into the collective voice so that student
learning and new technologies can be effectively aligned.
Blended Workshops
Forward thinking universities go beyond skills-based
technology workshops. They have found creative ways to blend
pedagogical instruction with technology instruction...Also,
universities have begun to offer blended workshops that have a
distinct pedagogical focus yet blend in thinking about
resources, including technology resources, which can support a
strong pedagogical focus...
Threaded Workshops
Universities are using the threaded workshop model as a
framework for teaching and learning workshops that include
learning about new technologies. Each workshop in the series is
"threaded" in such a way as to relate to one another and play
off of one another. Thus, a series on integrated course design
might have individual workshops on different topics like
assessment, learning activities, motivation, and learning
outcomes that are aligned in a way that gives participants a
more comprehensive view of how to build a dynamic course. All
discussions about technology in these threaded workshops are
contextualized within the larger pedagogical discussion, and are
focused on how the technology serves to support the pedagogy.
Because instructors attend the series over a period of several
weeks, they bring back to each workshop their applied knowledge
and share it with one another as real world and relevant
experiences...
Just-In-Time Resources
Universities are increasingly realizing that busy instructors
do not need to be experts in all areas of digital technology in
order to use technology effectively in the classroom.
Universities support this notion by making technology learning
easy, accessible, and just-in-time. Today's digital technology
allows just-in-time resources to flourish on campus. For
example, Internet available tutorials that are home grown or
licensed (
http://www.atomiclearning.com ) make it easy for instructors
to learn new software/hardware in bits and pieces and when
needed. Why learn everything there is to know about PowerPoint
or your computer operating system when you can learn only what
you need by going to a two-minute video that is available
anywhere and anytime. In addition, just-in-time resources
extend the learning environments of students. Why spend
valuable class time teaching students how to use a certain
technology application for a project or activity when
just-in-time resources can be made available to students at
their level and at a time outside of class time?
Universities are home to a rich diversity of student learners
whose cultures have been tremendously impacted by the digital
revolution of the last fifteen years. These students grew up
communicating, creating knowledge, and sharing resources through
the Internet and all its applications. As university students,
they are poised to take advantage of the digital world for
learning. But are we as teachers? We should not jump
headfirst into this potential digital cauldron without taking
stock of an important detail--as with all technologies and
instructional practices, we must not only understand their
potential to impact deeper learning in students, we must also
understand their limitations as a means to achieve a deeper
learning. It is not the lecture, cooperative learning or the
problem-based method itself that enhances student learning any
more than it is the Internet, podcast, or blog. It is far more
important to know how to use instructional methods and
technology to support learning outcomes that are integrally
linked to the student learner as a critical thinker. Students
may know how to navigate the Internet and use other forms of
digital technology for purposes of their own learning, but do
they know how to take full advantage of those technologies for
learning at the university level? This is where progressive
universities enter the equation and lead.
In today's educational climate of decreasing state support
and public scrutiny of educational spending, universities can
ill afford to squander important dollars on technology resources
that have not been critically assessed in terms of supporting
student learning. But, universities cannot stop there. Faculty
and administrators must combine efforts to celebrate openly the
important symbiosis between technology and learning. Nothing
less will suffice or we will suffer from our own negligence.
The above quotes are only isolated quotes from a much longer
document.
I think chatbot technology is perhaps the most important learning
technology ever.
Here's a good place (not free) to start learning about their use in education
---
http://results.chronicle.com/AIChatbotsHE18
When I was still teaching (now I'm retired) I made over 100 Camtasia short
videos to teach technical modules in my courses. If I were still teaching my
next move would be to develop chatbots.
Bob Jensen
Jensen Comment
Microsoft is betting that chatbots will be the wave of the future in ways that
thus far are unimaginable, including education chatbots yet to be invented.
Jensen Comment
If I were still teaching I would be developing chatbots for my courses and for
other technical accountancy modules. There's a great opportunity for chatbot
development consulting.
Times of crisis
like the ongoing coronavirus pandemic can be a major roadblock
for investments that companies make on digital transformations.
But at Providence St. Joseph
Health,
a nonprofit healthcare system that operates in seven states, the epidemic is proving
why those efforts are so critical. And it's even helping to accelerate the
ongoing tech overhaul.
"If we hadn't made the progress we made over the last 12 months on this
digital transformation, we would be in severe jeopardy right now," chief
information officer B.J. Moore told Business Insider. "We've had a couple
hundred other pet projects that people insist we continue work on. It's
given us the room to shut those down."
When Moore
came onboard from
Microsoft,
he embarked on a "back to basics" mission that focused on seven core areas,
including a pivot to the cloud from physical data centers and consolidating
its electronic health records to one provider.
Those initiatives remain ongoing during the coronavirus crisis and employees
working on them continue to travel to Providence's 51 hospitals. This is
despite other projects falling off and the spread of the disease forcing
other firms to prohibit non-essential travel.
Like other tech leaders,
Moore warned that halting projects could actually be more detrimental in the
long term. Instead, he advised others CIOs to use the situation as a way to
realign to the overall goals of the transformation.
"Use this as an opportunity to create focus on those vital few [projects],"
he said. "Use this as an opportunity to shut down the 500 other non-critical
activities we are asked to do."
The coronavirus outbreak has also given Moore the result he needed to
justify to leadership the investments made so far and the need for those to
continue.
Several of the milestones his team already hit are proving critical in
helping the company respond to the pandemic.
The adoption of
Microsoft Teams,
the software giant's workplace chat platform, and other Office 365
productivity tools (along with improvements to the network infrastructure)
made it possible for more employees to work remotely.
The hospital chain also created an online chatbot that is helping to field
many initial questions from potential patients, which is reducing traffic to
the hospitals and allowing those with the most urgent cases to get faster
access to care.
The situation is even quickening the pace of the transformation.
"Things that we were going to spread out over the next two to three months,
we're accelerating to the next four to six weeks," Moore said.
The chatbot, for example, had been in the works for six months. Once the
coronavirus started to emerge, it went into production within a week.
Jensen Comment
I think chatbot technology is perhaps the most important learning technology
ever.
Here's a good place (not free) to start learning about their use in education ---
http://results.chronicle.com/AIChatbotsHE18
When I was still teaching (now I'm retired) I made over 100 Camtasia short
videos to teach technical modules in my courses. If I were still teaching my
next move would be to develop chatbots.
Bob Jensen
I always thought the pressure to ban video making in class would come from
the faculty. I never thought about other students contending that filming them
speaking in class is an invasion of their privacy.
The Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin
at Whitewater has responded to a controversy over a surreptitiously obtained
classroom video of a guest lecturer lambasting
Republicans by moving to bar students from recording and disseminating such
footage.
Although the campus’s chancellor, Richard J. Telfer,
has not yet signed off on the videotaping policy, statements issued by him
and a spokeswoman on Thursday suggested he expected to approve it as soon as
it lands on his desk.
"Faculty on this campus have the right to establish
the policies for their individual classrooms," Mr. Telfer said in a written
statement.
"Also," Mr. Telfer added, "I believe it is
important that our faculty and students are able to have the free exchange
of ideas without concern that what is said will be communicated beyond the
limits of the classroom or campus."
Kyle R. Brooks, the freshman who recorded the video
that triggered the controversy, expressed frustration that the institution
had responded to his producing the video rather than what it depicts: a
guest lecturer denouncing many Republicans as racist, classist, sexist,
homophobic, and dishonest.
"People should have been upset that he came into
the classroom and said that," Mr. Brooks said, "but instead they were upset
that I recorded it and made it public."
The question of how to deal with students’
videotaping of classroom interactions has become more pressing for colleges
as technological advances have made both the production and dissemination of
such recordings easier. The University of Wisconsin at Whitewater is one of
several higher-education institutions that have come under fire in recent
years after covertly obtained recordings of controversial statements by
faculty members have been posted online.
Of 72 four-year colleges whose faculty leaders
recently responded to a Chronicle question on the subject, 20 said
they had policies intended to
prevent the unauthorized recording and
redistribution of classroom speech. In December officials at the University
of Colorado at Boulder cited fears of such videotaping to justify their
decision to
discipline a sociology professor over a classroom
skit on prostitution.
‘White Rage’
The incident that sparked the controversy at
Whitewater occurred in late February, in an introductory sociology course
called "Individuals and Society." The instructor, Monique Liston, a doctoral
student in urban education and women’s studies at the University of
Wisconsin at Milwaukee, had arranged for students to hear a guest lecture by
Eyon Biddle Sr., political director and director of organizing for the
Milwaukee-based Service Employees International Union Local 150.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
With technology these days, I'm not optimistic about policies banning videos
taken scrumptiously by students on the various devices available to them. For
example, it's fairly obvious when students wear Google Glass eyewear or keep
their mobile phones aimed at a speaker. But I have a pair of eyeglasses that
look like common eyeglasses and also take video of anything that I am looking
at. These eyeglasses also record audio, but the miniture microphone leaves
something to be desired. Often I only record the video without audio.
Journalism professors are exploring Google Glass
this year to see how it works in their field.
California State University, Chico, is one of the
latest journalism and public relations programs to buy the wearable
technology, which allows users to shoot video, share tweets and show the
latest news, among other things. The developer version of Google Glass costs
around $1,500 and is currently only available to explorers that Google
selected through a contest.
"As I told Google when we entered their contest, we're training students for
jobs that probably don't even exist yet," said Susan Wiesinger, associate
professor and department chair of the university's Journalism and Public
Relations program. "We need them to think creatively. We need to think what
might be ahead. And for them to even see a device that isn't yet on the
market, it makes them engage with it and not ignore it."
Some feel that the journalism field has a history
of ignoring technology until it's too late. For example, few journalists
took desktop Internet seriously, and as a result, classified ads went to
Craigslist instead of online newspapers.
"When has the journalism industry ever benefited
from dismissing or ignoring emerging technology?" asked Robert Hernandez,
assistant professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism. "In other words, I don't know how Glass can be
used for journalism on either creation, or distribution or consumption, but
the only way to find out is to play with it, so I've been experimenting with
it."
Hernandez already plans to bring Google Glass into
a new journalism class with another technology he's been experimenting
with: augmented reality. He also hopes to hire a developer who will create
Glass apps for existing media brands. And this year, he'll work on a pilot
with a few other people that could turn into a Glass app developing course
for news and information.
At Chico State, Google Glass will spark discussions
around privacy issues and technology development in a media literacy class
that Wiesinger teaches. A student from Tehama Group Communications, the
department's public relations firm on campus, will write a first-person
story on how it could be used in the industry and another story about how
the department is using it. On top of that, a digital media start-up class
will allow students to develop apps for the device.
But neither of these professors say that Google
Glass is groundbreaking for journalism at the moment. Right now, it's a
hands-free accessory to a smartphone and still needs to be tied to that
phone to tweet and post pictures.
The technology does allow students to record video
while keeping their hands free for other tasks, such as taking notes. And it
could provide contextual information for buildings that they're looking at,
for example.
Hernandez said that context is king with journalism
and technology. The storytelling has to come first, and the technology comes
second in these journalism programs.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I envision that Google Glass could also revolutionize some auditing procedures
and the teaching of auditing.
New gadgets — I mean whole new gadget categories —
don’t come along very often. The iPhone was one recent example. You could
argue that the iPad was another. But if there’s anything at all as different
and bold on the horizon, surely it’s Google Glass.
That, of course, is Google’s prototype of a device
you wear on your face. Google doesn’t like the term “glasses,” because there
aren’t any lenses. (The Glass team, part of Google’s experimental labs, also
doesn’t like terms like “augmented reality” or “wearable computer,” which
both have certain baggage.)
¶Instead, Glass looks like only the headband of a
pair of glasses — the part that hooks on your ears and lies along your
eyebrow line — with a small, transparent block positioned above and to the
right of your right eye. That, of course, is a screen, and the Google Glass
is actually a fairly full-blown computer. Or maybe like a smartphone that
you never have to take out of your pocket.
¶This idea got a lot of people excited when Nick
Bilton of The New York Times broke the story of the glasses in February.
Google first demonstrated it April in a video. In May, at Google’s I/O
conference, Glass got some more play as attendees watched a live video feed
from the Glass as a sky diver leapt from a plane and parachuted onto the
roof of the conference building. But so far, very few non-Googlers have been
allowed to try them on.
¶Last week, I got a chance to put one on. I’m
hosting a PBS series called “Nova ScienceNow” (it premieres Oct. 10), and
one of the episodes is about the future of tech. Of course, projecting
what’s yet to come in consumer tech is nearly impossible, but Google Glass
seemed like a perfect example of a breakthrough on the verge. So last week
the Nova crew and I met with Babak Parviz, head of the Glass project, to
discuss and try out the prototypes.
¶Now, Google emphasized — and so do I — that Google
Glass is still at a very, very early stage. Lots of factors still haven’t
been finalized, including what Glass will do, what the interface will look
like, how it will work, and so on. Google doesn’t want to get the public
excited about some feature that may not materialize in the final version.
(At the moment, Google is planning to offer the prototypes to developers
next year — for $1,500 — in anticipation of selling Glass to the public in,
perhaps, 2014.)
¶When you actually handle these things, you can’t
believe how little they weigh. Less than a pair of sunglasses, in my
estimation. Glass is an absolutely astonishing feat of miniaturization and
integration.
¶Inside the right earpiece — that is, the
horizontal support that goes over your ear — Google has packed memory, a
processor, a camera, speaker and microphone, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas,
accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and a battery. All inside the earpiece.
¶Google has said that eventually, Glass will have a
cellular radio, so it can get online; at this point, it hooks up wirelessly
with your phone for an online connection. And the mind-blowing thing is,
this slim thing is the prototype. It’s only going to get smaller in future
generations. “This is the bulkiest version of Glass we’ll ever make,” Babak
told me.
¶The biggest triumph — and to me, the biggest
surprise — is that the tiny screen is completely invisible when you’re
talking or driving or reading. You just forget about it completely. There’s
nothing at all between your eyes and whatever, or whomever, you’re looking
at.
¶And yet when you do focus on the screen, shifting
your gaze up and to the right, that tiny half-inch display is surprisingly
immersive. It’s as though you’re looking at a big laptop screen or
something.
¶(Even though I usually need reading glasses for
close-up material, this very close-up display seemed to float far enough
away that I didn’t need them. Because, yeah — wearing glasses under Glass
might look weird.)
¶The hardware breakthrough, in other words, is
there. Google is proceeding carefully to make sure it gets the rest of it as
right as possible on the first try.
¶But the potential is already amazing. Mr. Pariz
stressed that Glass is designed for two primary purposes — sharing and
instant access to information — hands-free, without having to pull anything
out of your pocket.
¶You can control the software by swiping a finger
on that right earpiece in different directions; it’s a touchpad. Your swipes
could guide you through simple menus. In various presentations, Google has
proposed icons for things like taking a picture, recording video, making a
phone call, navigating on Google Maps, checking your calendar and so on. A
tap selects the option you want.
¶In recent demonstrations, Google has also shown
that you can use speech recognition to control Glass. You say “O.K., Glass”
to call up the menu.
¶To illustrate how Glass might change the game for
sharing your life with others, I tried a demo in which a photo appeared — a
jungly scene with a wooden footbridge just in front of me. The theme from
“Jurassic Park” played crisply in my right ear. (Cute, real cute.)
Description:
Concept mapping (a method of brainstorming) is a technique for
visualizing the relationships between concepts and creating a visual
image to represent the relationship. Concept mapping software
serves several purposes in the educational environment. One is to
capture the conceptual thinking of one or more persons in a way that
is visually represented. Another is to represent the structure of
knowledge gleaned from written documents so that such knowledge can
be visually represented. In essence, a concept map is a diagram
showing relationships, often between complex ideas. With new
mapping software such as the open source Cmap (
http://www.cmap.ihmc.us/download/
), concepts are easily represented with images (bubbles or pictures)
called concept nodes, and are connected with lines that show the
relationship between and among the concepts. In addition, the
software allows users to attach documents, diagrams, images other
concept maps, hypertextual links and even media files to the concept
nodes. Concept maps can be saved as a PDF or image file and
distributed electronically in a variety of ways including the
Internet and storage devices.
Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and
representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles
or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a
connecting line linking two concepts. Words on the line, referred to as
linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two
concepts. We define concept as a perceived regularity in events or objects,
or records of events or objects, designated by a label. The label for most
concepts is a word, although sometimes we use symbols such as + or %, and
sometimes more than one word is used. Propositions are statements about some
object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed.
Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or
phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic
units, or units of meaning. Figure 1 shows an example of a concept map that
describes the structure of concept maps and illustrates the above
characteristics.
Another characteristic of concept maps is that the
concepts are represented in a hierarchical fashion with the most inclusive,
most general concepts at the top of the map and the more specific, less
general concepts arranged hierarchically below. The hierarchical structure
for a particular domain of knowledge also depends on the context in which
that knowledge is being applied or considered. Therefore, it is best to
construct concept maps with reference to some particular question we seek to
answer, which we have called a focus question. The concept map may pertain
to some situation or event that we are trying to understand through the
organization of knowledge in the form of a concept map, thus providing the
context for the concept map.
Another important characteristic of concept maps is
the inclusion of cross-links. These are relationships or links between
concepts in different segments or domains of the concept map. Cross-links
help us see how a concept in one domain of knowledge represented on the map
is related to a concept in another domain shown on the map. In the creation
of new knowledge, cross-links often represent creative leaps on the part of
the knowledge producer. There are two features of concept maps that are
important in the facilitation of creative thinking: the hierarchical
structure that is represented in a good map and the ability to search for
and characterize new cross-links.
A final feature that may be added to concept maps
is specific examples of events or objects that help to clarify the meaning
of a given concept. Normally these are not included in ovals or boxes, since
they are specific events or objects and do not represent concepts.
Concept maps were developed in 1972 in the course
of Novak’s research program at Cornell where he sought to follow and
understand changes in children’s knowledge of science (Novak & Musonda,
1991). During the course of this study the researchers interviewed many
children, and they found it difficult to identify specific changes in the
children’s understanding of science concepts by examination of interview
transcripts. This program was based on the learning psychology of David
Ausubel (1963; 1968; Ausubel et al., 1978). The fundamental idea in
Ausubel’s cognitive psychology is that learning takes place by the
assimilation of new concepts and propositions into existing concept and
propositional frameworks held by the learner. This knowledge structure as
held by a learner is also referred to as the individual’s cognitive
structure. Out of the necessity to find a better way to represent children’s
conceptual understanding emerged the idea of representing children’s
knowledge in the form of a concept map. Thus was born a new tool not only
for use in research, but also for many other uses.
Psychological Foundations of Concept Maps
The question sometimes arises as to the origin of
our first concepts. These are acquired by children during the ages of birth
to three years, when they recognize regularities in the world around them
and begin to identify language labels or symbols for these regularities (Macnamara,
1982). This early learning of concepts is primarily a discovery learning
process, where the individual discerns patterns or regularities in events or
objects and recognizes these as the same regularities labeled by older
persons with words or symbols. This is a phenomenal ability that is part of
the evolutionary heritage of all normal human beings. After age 3, new
concept and propositional learning is mediated heavily by language, and
takes place primarily by a reception learning process where new meanings are
obtained by asking questions and getting clarification of relationships
between old concepts and propositions and new concepts and propositions.
This acquisition is mediated in a very important way when concrete
experiences or props are available; hence the importance of “hands-on”
activity for science learning with young children, but this is also true
with learners of any age and in any subject matter domain.
Continued in article
"Using Cmap Tools to Create Concept Diagrams for Accounting," by Rick
Lillie, AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/6d0b8c8402
There are many comments following this entry on the AAA Commons
activity type:
Using Cmap Tools to Create Concept
Diagrams for Accounting Classes
delivery method:
technology
author name:
IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine
Cognition)
topic(s):
This teaching tip explains how to use
Cmap Tools, a concept mapping software
program, to create concept maps.
Concept maps provide a way to visually
present complex concepts and rules.
Research suggests that NetGen students
are visually oriented. If true, concept
maps should prove to be a useful way to
present accounting concepts and rules to
today's NetGen accounting students.
Attached to this posting is a Cmap
diagram that I created for my ACCT 574
Intermediate Accounting class.
-----Original Message-----
From: AECM, Accounting Education using Computers and Multimedia [mailto:AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Fisher, Paul
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 1:13 PM
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Subject: Re: The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use
Them
Here are some examples
from my classes. Three types of graphics are generally recognized.
Concept maps, mind maps, and graphic organizers, but they all require
the same type of mental discipline. I encourage my students to use EXCEL
because it is familiar and will probably always be accessible to them.
The other programs for mapping are pretty amazing, but there is the
extra layer of "learning" the program. I would also suggest that
graphics are becoming a larger part of successful practitioners and
institutionally we neglect to sufficiently expose our students to these
skills.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: AECM, Accounting Education using Computers and
Multimedia [mailto:AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Steven Hornik
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 10:06 AM
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Subject: Re: The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and
How to Construct and Use Them
If anyone would like to
see some of the concept maps my students create (these are the best of
the best) click this link:
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
April 10 reply
from Australia's Jim Richards
From:
AECM, Accounting Education using Computers and Multimedia [mailto:AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU]
On Behalf Of James Richards Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 10:22 PM To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU Subject: Re: The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and
Use Them
I am
not sure what Steve’s students use but 2 free ones I have used are VUE and
CMaps. My personal preference is VUE but I am sure that there are others
who prefer CMaps.
Jim
Richards
Phone (Home): (08) 9249 6874
Phone (Mobile): 0419-172-100
ArtNC (Concept Map, North Carolina History, Immigration) ---
http://artnc.org/
Question How can you add audio to PowerPoint presentations?
March 2, 2007 message from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Deborah Johnson writes:
"any recommendations for software that would
enable me to prepare a slide show presentation with audio. Each slide
would be on screen for different lengths of time depending on the
narrative that accompanies it. It would have to be a DVD format
compatible with computers and TV viewing. If it is also compatible with
automobile CD/DVD players would be great for audio only. Deborah Johnson
Miami, FL
My response:
I'm sure there are a lot of products out there, and
everyone on the list probably has his or her favorite.
Of course, webcasting isn't the same as TV DVD
formats. Are you interested in Webcasting, or DVD playback on a TV?
For the former, I personally like Tegrity
recordings. They are easy to make, use native PowerPoint slides directly,
allow live recording, and publish almost instantly. The recording can even
be viewed over a dial-up line! I don't know if they have a free version or
not, but the full-blown version wasn't very expensive. Others like Richard
Campbell on the list probably know of a host of other products, and they
will vary in terms of ease of use, and some of them may beat Tegrity and be
totally free to boot.
If you are looking for non-web, but TV DVD
playback, Microsoft MovieMaker is about the easiest thing to use I can
imagine. I notice that some manufacturers are now shipping their new
computers with a basic copy of Microsoft MovieMaker already installed. The
last five computers my wife ordered from Dell for clients came with it, even
though it was not ordered nor was it even mentioned in the order specs. A
friend who purchased a new computer from CompUSA also discovered MovieMaker
on his list of installed programs.
Microsoft MovieMaker is one of the lowest
learning-curve products I've seen in a long, long time. The steps you follow
to do what you want to do are:
Use PowerPoint to make your text and title frames,
and export the slides to JPG format.
Record the audio narration as MPEG or WMV, using
one of the audio recorders that comes with windows, or any of the sound
capture programs so popular these days.
Start movie maker, import the slides to
"collections", import the audio, then drag the slides to the storyboard in
the order you want them. Switch to timeline view and adjust the timing of
each slide to your liking by dragging the edge of the slide along the
timeline. Voila. Write your "movie" to a DVD. You can make a 30 minute movie
with about 100 slides (including transitions, etc.) in well under an hour.
The standard DVD format works in any TV DVD player,
as well as on any computer that has a DVD reader. I won't work in standard
CD-format players in the older cars, but you can certainly use Roxio or
something to write a CD of just the MPEG audio file to the orange-book CD
format.
I'm sure others on the listserv will give their
favorites too, so go with what's easiest and most cost-effective and most
easily obtainable for you. Good luck...
David Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University
Deborah: I agree with David - you need to choose
one or the other - tv or computer output. As far as computer - inexpensive
route - I like Swishpix available at
www.swhishzone.com
- You can see a Valentine I created in Swishpix at:
This is a FORMER girlfriend and I used Snagit to
crop the photo for re-use on eharmony.com.
If you are looking for tv output, your best bet is
to get a studio tool like Roxio creator Nero, or a program like Adobe's
Encore which is more expensive.
Question
How can you incorporate streaming media such as archived Webcast into a live
presentation?
Answer:
You should try
www.playstream.com
- They have very inexpensive streaming services using
a variety of file types - wmv, mp3, realmedia and quicktime. After you
upload your clips to your site, you will get an "easylink", and all you need
to do is paste that link into your Powerpoint presentation. Playstream has
been purchased by Vitalstream, but the new owner has only enhanced their
services.
I am making a presentation later this month to
professionals that are returning to the University for continuing education.
I want to focus participant's attention on particular line items on my
PowerPoint slides. I will be using an add-in for PowerPoint called PopOut
Presenter that does 60-minute type call-outs or tear-outs. Experts at
PowerPoint can do some of what it does within PowerPoint, but this is easy,
quick and only cost $15. It is available at:
Thank you for linking to a useful product that I
never heard about before.
There is a helpful PowerPoint FAQ page that
discusses add-ins of various types at
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/
It is interesting to search at the above site using the phrase "pop out"
Bob Jensen
Links to two Bob Jensen helpers for tools are as follows:
Researchers at MIT
have released a video and audio search tool that solves one of the most
challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy academic
lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and
direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
Lecture Browser website gives the general public
detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the
university's
OpenCourseWare initiative. The search engine
leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other
institutions to
convert
audio
into text and make it searchable.
The Lecture Browser arrives at a time when more and
more universities, including Carnegie Mellon University and the University
of California, Berkeley, are posting videos and podcasts of lectures online.
While this content is useful, locating specific information within lectures
can be difficult, frustrating students who are accustomed to finding what
they need in less than a second with Google.
"This is a growing issue for universities around
the country as it becomes easier to record classroom lectures," says Jim
Glass, research scientist at MIT. "It's a real challenge to know how to
disseminate them and make it easier for students to get access to parts of
the lecture they might be interested in. It's like finding a needle in a
haystack."
The fundamental elements of the Lecture Browser
have been kicking around research labs at MIT and places such as BBN
Technologies in Boston, Carnegie Mellon, SRI International in Palo Alto, CA,
and the University of Southern California for more than 30 years. Their
efforts have produced software that's finally good enough to find its way to
the average person, says Premkumar Natarajan, scientist at BBN. "There's
about three decades of work where many fundamental problems were addressed,"
he says. "The technology is mature enough now that there's a growing sense
in the community that it's time [to test applications in the real world].
We've done all we can in the lab."
A handful of companies, such as online audio and
video search engines Blinkx and EveryZing (which has licensed technology
from BBN) are making use of software that converts audio speech into
searchable text. (See "Surfing TV on the Internet" and "More-Accurate Video
Search".) But the MIT researchers faced particular challenges with academic
lectures. For one, many lecturers are not native English speakers, which
makes automatic transcription tricky for systems trained on American English
accents. Second, the words favored in science lectures can be rather
obscure. Finally, says Regina Barzilay, professor of computer Science at
MIT, lectures have very little discernable structure, making them difficult
to break up and organize for easy searching. "Topical transitions are very
subtle," she says. "Lectures aren't organized like normal text."
To tackle these problems, the researchers first
configured the software that converts the audio to text. They trained the
software to understand particular accents using accurate transcriptions of
short snippets of recorded speech. To help the software identify uncommon
words--anything from "drosophila" to "closed-loop integrals"--the
researchers provided it with additional data, such as text from books and
lecture notes, which assists the software in accurately transcribing as many
as four out of five words. If the system is used with a nonnative English
speaker whose accent and vocabulary it hasn't been trained to recognize, the
accuracy can drop to 50 percent. (Such a low accuracy would not be useful
for direct transcription but can still be useful for keyword searches.)
Jensen Comment
I have pretty good experience with the HDMI connection on my high-end Dell
Laptop (called Studio) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
My wireless connection to the HDMI plug is rather unreliable so I instead
take my laptop close to the television set and use a hard wire connection. It
works great.
The problem is that lower-end cheaper laptops do not have the HDMI port. I
think the Chromecast dongle only requires a USB port.
University offerings at the
dedicated YouTube channel include peace and conflict studies, bioengineering
courses, and a science class titled "Physics for Future Presidents."
"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life:
academics, events and athletics," said vice provost for undergraduate
education Christina Maslach.
The University plans to continually add videos to the channel, which
officially launched Wednesday with about nine full courses consisting of
approximately 40 lectures each.
Berkeley lays claim to being the first university to offer full courses on
popular video-sharing website YouTube, which is based in Northern
California.
The university began online broadcasts, called "webcasts," of its own in
2001 and last year began making audio "podcasts" available for download at
Apple's iTunes online store.
"We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on
YouTube," said Ben Hubbard, who co-manages the university's webcast program.
"I think the whole open content movement is in keeping with what we are as a
public institution, we really believe at our core that making this available
to the public is truly important."
UC Berkeley is the first university to make videos of full courses available
through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can
view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. Topics range from
bioengineering, to peace and conflict studies, to "Physics for Future
Presidents," the title of a popular campus course. Building on its initial
offerings, UC Berkeley will continue to expand the catalog of videos available
on YouTube.
View the Playlist Here ---
http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
There is a link to the most viewed videos (with star ratings) at the above page.
On October 4, 2007 I could not find any accounting, finance, or economics
videos at the UC Berkeley site. There were six courses that popped up for
"Business."
Nearly all prestigious universities now offer some form of open sharing of
course materials, the most noteworthy of which is MIT. Yale, however, has some
of the finest lectures on video ---
http://www.yale.edu/opa/download/VLP_QuestionsAnswers.pdf
Copyright Restrictions on Open Sharing/Source/Courseware Learning
Materials
These are only my opinions, and they should not be taken as legal advice.
Just because something can be accessed online does not mean it is an open
sharing item. Generally online items are like library books that can be accessed
by the public but have copyright restrictions about copying and uses other than
personal reading. If online learning materials are billed as "open sharing," or
"open source" (as
in the case of OCW materials at MIT) chances are that they can be used in
total or in part for educational purposes in other open sharing materials if
proper credits are given. In commercial materials such as books and course
videos, there is vulnerability for lawsuit by the copyright owners. In my
personal opinion, I think a lot depends upon how central the copyrighted
material is to the purchased material. If use is incidental and credits are
fully proper, then the risks of lawsuit are less than when the copyrighted
material becomes more featured in the material. In any case, it is good advice
to seek permission from copyright owners if the use is for some for-profit
purpose. This probably includes online or onsite courses for which fees are
charged to take the course. The dreaded DMCA is somewhat vague on open sharing
materials, but open sharing does not mean that copyright owners have abandoned
all rights. You can read more about the dreaded DMCA at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Since the term "open source" is rooted in computer software, the term is a
bit cloudy when it comes to text and multimedia learning materials. You can read
more about open sharing and copyrights at the following sites:
How to Excerpt Open Courseware Video, Compress It, and Serve it Up to
Students
Suppose that a very long video lecture is available as open courseware for
proper use in other learning materials. An instructor may only want to use parts
of this lecture in another course or supplemental tutorials for a course.
Searching a long video is tedious and time consuming. A better approach is to
make audio or video excerpts of portions of the long lecture.
Homemade video tutorial (very basic) on how to record streaming audio on
your PC ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPHSDOyj5f8
Note the passing reference to a free sound recorder called Audacity ---
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Note that if you are watching a lecture video that's pretty much a talking head,
it saves a lot, I mean a LOT, of file space to only capture the audio.
This might, for example, work very well when capturing parts of the many UC
Berkeley, YouTube, Yale, or Harvard video lectures ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Just in case source streams disappear from the Internet, I suggest capturing
what's important to you and saving to external media such as a CD or DVD disk.
Capturing also allows you to only capture what is relevant to you or your
students without having to spend a lot of time waiting for the good parts.
However, in most instances open sharing videos are streaming (using the term
loosely here) videos for which there is no file to download. In that case the
video must be captured in total or in part by software designed for such
purposes. The software I like for video capturing is called Camtasia Recorder
---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/record.asp
Also see
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
This is cheaper alternative than many more specialized products for streaming
video capture. You can download my PowerPoint file about Camtasia at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/PowerPoint/
Links to examples are given in this slide show.
When you capture streaming media as an avi file it has the advantage in that
you can edit the movie and delete parts you do not want using software like
Camtasia Producer ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/enhance.asp
You can also add interaction "skip to" buttons, quiz questions/answers, survey
questions, etc.
But captured avi files are generally enormous and cannot be stored
efficiently anywhere. After you've excerpted and edited the captured video as an
avi file it is almost always necessary to compress it into a wmv, mov, rm, scf,
flv, or some related option such as the compression options available in
Camtasia Producer. There is not generally a noticeable quality degradation in
the compressed versions. However, it is not possible, at least in Camtasia, to
alter the compressed version without recapturing it as an avi file.
After you have your compressed file such as a wmv you will need to get it to
your students. Chances are that your Blackboard, WebCT, or Web server does not
give you enough capacity to serve up a lot of video, including space-saving
compressed video. The next best thing is to either distribute your video to
students on CD or DVD disks or to send it to them over the Internet.
Jensen Comment
I have pretty good experience with the HDMI connection on my high-end Dell
Laptop (called Studio) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
My wireless connection to the HDMI plug is rather unreliable so I instead
take my laptop close to the television set and use a hard wire connection. It
works great.
The problem is that lower-end cheaper laptops do not have the HDMI port. I
think the Chromecast dongle only requires a USB port.
Question
How can you capture and send streaming media?
August 9, 2007 question from XXXXX
How do I get a copy of the power point show of this
great presentation? Am not computer literate but would like this on disc or
dvd for a friend who does not have a pc.
One alternative is to capture the streaming media in a Camtasia Studio
video. This will work fine for the images, but the music that is also
captured may be somewhat disappointing ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
For capturing and sending out streaming media you may also check out
Playstream at
http://www.playstream.com/
One approach to get a PowerPoint version is to click on Pause with each
image and capture the image in streaming video. You can then paste the image
into your own PowerPoint slide. It’s a bit tedious but you can then have a
PowerPoint slide for each captured image. There are various software options
for image capturing such as the Import command in Paints. Separately you can
capture the music and then add it to your PowerPoint file ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#PowerPointAudio
Various alternatives for capturing screen images are available for a fee.
For years I used the Import feature of Paint Shop Pro from JASC. Now,
however, I prefer SnagIt from Tech Smith ---
http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp
Tech Smith also has a free capture program called Jing. PC World (via The
Washington Post) gives a highly favorable review of Jing that is quoted at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070801.htm
Internet users can view video either as video file downloads (that may or may
not be stored on a hard drive) or as streaming video (that does not entail
downloading a media file but can be captured with streaming media software).
Update from the AAA Accounting Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home I thank Rick for sharing his expertise in the new VoiceThread multimedia
education and communication technology.
Accounting Professor Rick Lillie Uses VoiceThread to Create Streaming Video ---
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
If you have not yet discovered VoiceThread, I
strongly recommend that you click on the link below and explore the
VoiceThread website. You are in for a real technology treat!
I use VoiceThread to create streaming video
lectures, to create tutorials explaining how to solve problems, to explain
answers to quiz and examination questions, and more. VoiceThread is easy to
use, is similar to PowerPoint (but much more robust), and is web-hosted
which makes it easy for you to share VoiceThread presentations with your
students and colleagues.
During a presentation that I gave at the recent
2008 American Accounting Association (AAA) Annual Meeting in Anaheim,
California, I talked about VoiceThread. To help participants to see how easy
it is to create and share dynamic presentations with VoiceThread, I put
together a short presentation that explains how to use VoiceThread. Click on
the link below to view the short tutorial program.
I encourage you to sign up for a free account.
Learn to use VoiceThread. If you like what you create, then you can
upgrade to the “Pro” version, which is very inexpensive. To get the full
benefit of using VoiceThread, you need a headset/microphone and webcam.
To begin, use the tools included in VoiceThread. If you have questions about
VoiceThread, use the “Contact Me” option on the right side of the screen.
Send me a message. Include your email and/or telephone number. I
will be happy to work with you.
Enjoy!
Rick Lillie
Jensen Comment
VoiceThread has an advantage in allowing a community of users to comment (in
multimedia) comments on an instructional video.
It's drawback is that it uses a lot of storage and bandwidth for talking heads.
Some VoiceThread pricing information is given at
http://voicethread.com/pricing/pro/
It is possible to get small amounts of video file storage free, but it can get
really expensive when the community goes on and on with long commentaries.
In the pro version, file sizes are limited to 100 Mb. This is about one tenth
the size of a 10 minute YouTube video. YouTube generally limits file sizes to 1
Gb or 10 minutes of compressed video such as mpg compression ---
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=57924
Colleges can stream much larger videos on YouTube such as the courses that UC
Berkeley makes available on YouTube with over one hour of video for each lecture
in a course.
VoiceThread makes it possible to have somewhat longer videos in a 100 Mb file
by using small video screens. Note how Rick does this at
http://voicethread.com/#q.b173180.i923368
YouTube also allows any users to comment in text format such that
commentaries can accompany videos on YouTube. The huge advantage of YouTube is
that videos can be uploaded, viewed, and even downloaded for free. VoiceThread,
for an annual fee, has more features.
Although I've not tried VoiceThread, it would seem that cost and file size
limits make this less attractive than YouTube.
However, in most instances open sharing videos are streaming (using the
term loosely here) videos for which there is no file to download. In that
case the video must be captured in total or in part by software designed for
such purposes. The software I like for video capturing is called Camtasia
Recorder ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/record.asp
Also see
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
This is cheaper alternative than many more specialized products for
streaming video capture. You can download my PowerPoint file about Camtasia
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/PowerPoint/
Links to examples are given in this slide show.
Future Lab (in the U.K.):
Developing innovative learning resources and practices that support new
approaches to education for the 21st century. By bringing together the creative, technical and
educational communities, Futurelab is pioneering ways of using new technologies
to transform the learning experience.
FutureLab Innovation in Education ---
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/index.htm
Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT for short) is a
teaching and learning strategy based on the interaction between web-based
study assignments and an active learner classroom. Students respond
electronically to carefully constructed web-based assignments which are due
shortly before class, and the instructor reads the student submissions
"just-in-time" to adjust the classroom lesson to suit the students' needs.
Thus, the heart of JiTT is the "feedback loop" formed by the students'
outside-of-class preparation that fundamentally affects what happens during
the subsequent in-class time together.
What is Just-in-Time Teaching designed to
accomplish?
JiTT is aimed at many of the challenges facing
students and instructors in today's classrooms. Student populations are
diversifying. In addition to the traditional nineteen-year-old recent high
school graduates, we now have a kaleidoscope of "non-traditional" students:
older students, working part time students, commuting students, and, at the
service academies, military cadets. They come to our courses with a broad
spectrum of educational backgrounds, interests, perspectives, and
capabilities that compel individualized, tailored instruction. They need
motivation and encouragement to persevere. Consistent, friendly support can
make the difference between a successful experience and a fruitless effort.
It can even mean the difference between graduating and dropping out.
Education research has made us more aware of learning style differences and
of the importance of passing some control of the learning process over to
the students. Active learner environments yield better results but they are
harder to manage than lecture oriented approaches. Three of the
"Seven
Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" encourage
student-faculty contact, increased time for student study, and cooperative
learning between students.
To confront these challenges, the Just-in-Time Teaching strategy pursues
three major goals:
1. To maximize the efficacy of the
classroom session, where human instructors are present.
2. To structure the out-of-class time
for maximum learning benefit.
3. To create and sustain team spirit.
Students and instructors work as a team toward the same objective, to
help all students pass the course with the maximum amount of retainable
knowledge.
What JiTT is Not
Although Just-in-Time Teaching makes heavy use
of the web, it is not to be confused with either distance learning (DL) or
with computer-aided instruction (CAI). Virtually all JiTT instruction occurs
in a classroom with human instructors. The web materials, added as a
pedagogical resource, act primarily as a communication tool and secondarily
as content provider and organizer. JiTT is also not an attempt to 'process'
large numbers of students by employing computers to do massive grading jobs.
The JiTT Feedback Loop
The Web Component
JiTT web pages fall into three major
categories:
1. Student assignments in preparation
for the classroom activity: WarmUps and Puzzles.
2. Enrichment pages. Short essays on
practical, everyday applications of the course subject matter, peppered
with URLs to interesting material on the web. These essays have proven
themselves to be an important motivating factor in introductory service
courses, where students often doubt the current relevance the subject.
3. Stand alone instructional material,
such as simulation programs and spreadsheet exercises.
For detailed examples of the JiTT web
resources, please see the
JiTT
resources page.
WarmUps and Puzzles are the heart of the
JiTT web component. These are short, web-based assignments, prompting
the student to think about the upcoming lesson and answer a few
simple questions prior to class. These questions, when fully discussed,
often have complex answers. The students are expected to develop the
answer as far as they can on their own. We finish the job in the
classroom. These assignments are due just a few hours before class time.
The responses are delivered to the instructor electronically to form the
framework for the classroom activities that follow. Typically, the
instructors duplicates sample responses on transparencies and takes them
to class. The interactive classroom session, built around these
responses, replaces the traditional lecture/recitation format.
Students complete the WarmUp assignments before they receive any formal
instruction on a particular topic. They earn credit for answering a
question, substantiated by prior knowledge and whatever they managed to
glean from the textbook. The answers do not have to be complete, or even
correct. In fact, partially correct responses are particularly useful as
classroom discussion fodder. In contrast to WarmUps, Puzzle exercises
are assigned to students after they have received formal instruction on
a particular topic. The Puzzles serve as the framework for a wrap-up
session on a particular topic.
The WarmUps, and to some extent the Puzzles, are undergirded by
education research and target a variety of specific issues. The list of
targeted issues might contain: developing concepts and vocabulary,
modeling -- connecting concepts and equations, estimation- getting a
feel for magnitudes, relating technical scientific statements to "common
sense", understanding the scope of applicability of equations, etc. The
targeted issues are highly content specific. They may involve the
characteristics of a particular class (e.g. the background skills of a
particular student body).
In preparing WarmUp assignments for an upcoming class meeting, we first
create a conceptual outline of the lesson content. This task is similar
to the preparation of a traditional passive lecture. As we work on the
outline, we pay attention to the pedagogical issues that we need to
focus on when in the classroom. Are we introducing new concepts and/or
new notation? Are we building on a previous lesson, and if so, what
bears repeating? What are the important points we wish the students to
remember from the session? What are the common difficulties typical
students will face when exposed to this material? (Previous classroom
experience and teaching and learning literature can be immensely helpful
here). Once this outline has been created, we create broadly based
questions that will force students to grapple with as many of the issues
as possible. We are hoping to receive, in the student responses, the
framework on which we build the in-class experience.
The Active Learner Classroom
The JiTT classroom session is intimately linked to the electronic
preparatory assignments the students complete outside of class. Exactly
how the classroom time is spent depends on a variety of issues such as
class size, classroom facilities, and student and instructor
personalities. Mini-lectures (10 min max) are often interspersed with
demos, classroom discussion, worksheet exercises, and even hands-on
mini-labs. Regardless, the common key is that the classroom component,
whether interactive lecture or student activities, is informed by an
analysis of various student responses.
In a JiTT classroom students construct the same content as in a passive
lecture with two important added benefits. First, having completed the
web assignment very recently, they enter the classroom ready to actively
engage in the activities. Secondly, they have a feeling of ownership
since the interactive lesson is based on their own wording and
understanding of the relevant issues.
The give and take in the classroom suggests future WarmUp questions that
will reflect the mood and the level of expertise in the class at hand.
In this way the feedback loop is closed with the students having played
a major part in the endeavor.
From the instructor's point of view, the lesson content remains pretty
much the same from semester to semester with only minor shifts in
emphasis. From the students' perspective, however, the lessons are
always fresh and interesting, with a lot of input from the class.
We designed JiTT to improve student learning in our own classrooms and
have been encouraged by the results, both attitudinal and cognitive. We
attribute this success to three factors that enhance student learning,
identified by Alexander Astin* in his thirty year study of
college student success:
increased amounts and quality of student-student interaction
student-faculty interaction
student study outside of class.
By fostering these, JiTT promotes student learning and satisfaction.
Long before any of us started going online, Jean
Baudrillard wrote about the “ecstacy of communication.” This was not as
pleasant as it probably sounds. It referred to a state in which “the most
intimate processes of life become the virtual feeding ground of the media”
and “the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic
screen.” It is a new cultural scene that abolishes “the minimal separation
of public and private,” in which certain aspects of life were “played out in
a restricted space.” Baudrillard, writing in the 1980s, was thinking of TV,
which is hardly the “screen” that comes to mind now. Clearly things have
gotten ever more ecstatic since then.
In any case, not being disposed either to text
messaging or IM certainly did not mean living off the grid. I went through
the usual struggles to maintain some degree of control over how much of my
attention was consumed by “new media” (an expression that is starting to
seem a little silly after all this time). Spending more than about 30
minutes online at a stretch tends to produce a condition in which my head
feels like a Mexican jumping bean – my brain thrashing around inside its
shell without much possibility of deliberate, purposeful motion. It is
possible to minimize this distracted state through the practice of iron
self-discipline. So one tells oneself while Googling “how to develop iron
self-discipline.”
None of this is unusual, of course. Friends,
relations, and colleagues report similar experiences. Nor is it necessarily
a sign that the media are creating irreversibly stupifying effects. In my
experience, it is still possible to have long spells of tightly focused
concentration — times when the flow of my attention to the work at hand
precluded any distraction by email, or news updates, or what have you.
Or so it once seemed. Over the past few months,
I’ve started to wonder.
For a while, it seemed like a generational
thing.... The first text message came to my cell phone from a young
political activist (someone born around the time this 45 year-old was first
arrested at a protest) sending out a reminder about the location of a
meeting. “Please respond if you can attend,” the note said.
Someone with the necessary skills explained how to
type a response on my cellphone. I felt old. But it was a special nuance of
that feeling – one that comes with learning to do something you understand
to be commonplace, now.
Such reservations were moot. A few days later,
another meeting, another message – followed by another, and another – all of
it leading, in due course, to that moment of first seriously considering
whether it might make sense to abbreviate the word “for” with the numeral 4
in the interest of saving keystrokes, which is not a sacrifice of standards
I am quite prepared to make.
Around the time all this texting was beginning to
grow routine and familiar, something else happened. The editor of a literary
magazine sent me an instant message asking if I would be interested in
writing about a new book. Once, this sort of inquiry would have arrived by
e-mail, and I might have responded to it by picking up the telephone.
Instead, the IM popped up on my computer screen as a little box – making a
loud electronic “bing” sound as it did – and seemed to demand an instant
reply.
What would normally have taken the form of a phone
conversation instead took place at the keyboard. Over the next few days, the
“bing” resounded several more times as other friends and colleagues started
to IM me. (I had been contacted by one other person by IM about a year ago,
but only noticed the message well after it appeared, and never took up IM as
routine.) After nearly 15 years of coming to some kind of modus vivendi with
e-mail and the Web, I found Baudrillard’s “ecstacy of communication”
suddenly growing even more pervasive.
At one level, texting and IM are just slight
variations on the now-familiar medium of e-mail. They tend to be even more
casual — without so much formality as a subject line, even — yet they
finally seem more similar to e-mail than anything else.
But now that e-mail itself is both so commonplace
and so prone to abuse (“naked Angelina Jolie pics here!”), these
supplementary forms have a slightly different valence. They seem more
urgent. In the case of IM in particular, there is a suggestion of presence –
the sense of an individual on the other end, waiting for a reply. (Indeed,
the IM format indicates whether someone you know is online at a given time.
The window indicates when a person is typing something to send to you.)
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One of the first accounting/tax professors to use Instant Messaging with online
students was my online hero Amy Dunbar when she taught those early UCONN online
courses from her home. You can read her paper and listen to Amy describe
her early successes with IM in online teaching at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002
Her mp3 file is also at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/
Scroll down to the audio link to her mp3 file (this large file loads slowly)
I recorded this using my video camera's microphone, so don't expect much in the
way of audio quality.
In August 2008 after
eight years of intensive use of AIM, she wrote the following:
Bob,
By now AECM is probably tired of hearing about how
I teach online, but thank you for the plug. I never tire of talking about
online teaching because I am such a huge believer in its efficiency and
effectiveness, particularly for working graduate students. Of the 11 online
faculty, only 3 of us use AIM in our classes, so most prefer not to
synchronous interaction. After 8 years of teaching online, I am still a big
fan on instant messaging with my students. Unlike the earlier years,
however, I now have scheduled office hours online, although I occasionally
log on at other times, especially if an assignment is due. My TA logs on
every Tuesday night. I log on every Wednesday and Thursday nights, from 7 to
9, which usually goes on until 10 or later because I have a policy that as
long as I am getting questions I will stay online. Sometimes when I am
getting a lot of IMs, I just post brb (be right back), and the student types
the question while I am answering another question. The trend has been that
students IM me much less and IM their group members much more. They have to
evaluate each other each week, so they have an incentive to work together to
ensure high participation scores.
When I log on, I can see which groups are meeting
because I change their screen names (usually undecipherable names) to G(roup)#LastName,
using an AIM tool. Works like a charm. Students post their AIM chats on
their group boards so anyone who misses a meeting can see what happened. As
I have noted before on AECM, I take excerpts from their chats and post a
weekly highlights at the end of each week. This reminds the groups that they
are part of a larger class .
Some instructors fear that they will have no
personal impact in an online setting. That has not been the case for me. The
following is from a student email today: Your energy level is not only
exhausting, but inspiring ...
Thus, students still get a feel for who I am as a
person, although the energy is certainly going down as the years pile on!
Amy Dunbar
UConn
Questions
How can you turn your email messages into free video messages?
How can you video conference calls?
For those of you in
the American Accounting Association, I call your attention to a new
Teaching Resource called TokBox submitted to the Commons by accounting
professor Rick Little. You do not need to go to the Commons for some of
Rick’s links passed on below. I thank Rick for sharing this teaching
resource.
AAA Members
Please go to the AAA
Commons at least once each day ---
http://commons.aaahq.org
For Teaching and Research Resources, Click on the menu bar item called
“Roles”
Rick’s posting is called “Thinking Outside the Box”
You might want to clidk on Rick’s picture to see his interesting profile
(e.g., with Grant Thornton and as a local CPA before getting his PhD in
accounting)
Tokbox is a free
service that lets you talk with your friends over live video. Here's how
it works: you sign up and we give you a link. When you want to talk with
anyone, just give them the link - they click and you chat.
This is an innovative
idea for conferencing, letting your parents see their grandchildren, and
motivating students. From a societal standpoint it may be a waste of
bandwidth for sending videos of talking heads across the Internet.
Question
How can you get Instant Messaging (IM) for free without having to install any
software?
Just use an Internet-based service so that you can
chat from a Web page without having to install any software, which might be
blocked by a firewall. I tested two such services: Meebo at
www.meebo.com and
KoolIM at
www.koolim.com . Both are free.
These services let you simultaneously log in to
multiple IM accounts -- and communicate with people with various services.
If you have a friend who uses Yahoo Messenger, for example, and another who
likes MSN Messenger, you can chat with either.
Another plus: Meebo and KoolIM are far less
vulnerable to viruses than downloadable applications. They're also more
efficient, saving users the hassle of installing multiple programs on a
computer. This is especially handy for people with old computers that slow
down when running several applications.
Meebo has a well-designed, sleek interface that
makes it appealing to even the least tech savvy. From its home page, you
simply sign in for different IM services—MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger,
GTalk (or Jabber) and AIM (or ICQ). Your buddy list will be combined
automatically. You don't have to register, but if you do, you get perks such
as a single sign-on for all of your accounts, and the ability to share
files, save chat logs and store conversations.
I tried Meebo on my work Windows PC and my iBook at
home, and it worked well on both. To start chatting, you just log in to any
of the IM services by entering the screen name and password you already have
with a service, or by picking a new name, password and services. Your buddy
list will appear in a window on the right side of the page, with each name
marked by an icon denoting the service the person uses. Once in your buddy
list, you can add or delete a contact, message or join a group chat.
I just wanted to let the list know that I've been
using Meebo this semester for my undergrad financial accounting class and my
grad AIS course. You can see the meebo widget on both of my webpages (wikis)
that I use for the course at either:
http://financialaccounting.wikispaces.com or
http://acg5405.wikispaces.com and if I'm online
feel free to say hello to see how it works.
I have always included my Yahoo ID in my syllabus
so students could IM me with questions. In recent years I observed two
things: 1) I tended to forget to start my IM more and more - I just wasn't
using it that much, and 2) students weren't using it, as it required them to
get a Yahoo account, download the IM software, etc.
Since using Meebo, and in particular placing the
meebo widget on my web pages, student communication with me has increased at
least 10 fold (anectodal not empirical). I'm convinced of the reasons: 1)
Ease of Use - students just have to access the course web page, and the
widget lets them know if I'm online, and if so they can just type away. 2) I
don't forget to start it - since it's web-based I simply have the meebo
webpage as one of my tabs in firefox and whenever I start my browser (first
thing I do whenever I'm at my computer) meebo is there.
Meebo also has chat rooms (I haven't used these
yet), that allow you to import almost any kind of media (audio/video) and
you can invite your students to it to create a synchronous environment for
viewing course material and discussing it as a group.
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
College of Business Administration (407) 823-5739
Google Introduces Instant Messaging Google Inc. is joining yet another Internet turf
battle, the one over instant communication. Google introduced today an
instant-messaging service that lets users exchange text messages and make voice
calls over personal computers. Google's move pits it against Internet giants
such as Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
that dominate the market.
Mylene Mangalindan and Christopher Rhoads, "Google Introduces Instant
Messaging," The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2005; Page B3 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112482337312020777,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace See this IM
service at
http://www.google.com/talk/
The Louisiana Community and Technical College
System
yesterday announced the creation of
LCTCSOnline, a new program built in collaboration
with AT&T and Pearson Custom Solutions, a branch of the publishing and
education company.
Beginning in January, students can register on a
single
Web site
for online courses offered — at $63 per credit hour — by any community
college in Louisiana. And they’ll be able to complete their coursework on
desktops, laptops, or mobile phones.
“The top barriers for students in obtaining their
degrees are geographic access, cost of higher education, and scheduling
conflicts,” said Joe D. May, the college system’s president, in a written
statement. “We’re excited to be able to bring a greater level of access to
potential students.”
Louisiana ranks last among the 50 states in the
percentage of adults with associate’s degrees, according to the college
system, which hopes to solve workforce shortages by enrolling nearly three
times as many students as it does now.
“This initiative embodies the type of thinking we
need,” Sally Clausen, Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education, said in
a written statement.
A $500,000 grant from the Louisiana Board of
Regents financed the program, which the college system developed in nine
months with AT&T and Pearson,
The Town Talk, a local newspaper, reported
Stanford's d.school space is the stage for creative
collaboration. A new book by two of its leaders provides direction for
design spaces elsewhere.
The spaces within Stanford's popular d.school are
as creative as the furniture and fixtures are inventive, and every aspect of
the space impacts behavior.
In his foreword for Make Space, David Kelley, the
founder of the design school as well as the design firm IDEO, writes,
"Regardless of whether it's a classroom or the offices of a billion-dollar
company, space is something to think of as an instrument for innovation and
collaboration. Space is a valuable tool that can help you create deep and
meaningful collaborations in your work and life."
As a spectator on the second floor of Stanford's
d.school building, on any given day you might observe a team of students
standing at a project table in an active stance – literally learning on
their feet. Or you might see a group engaged in a sharing exercise sitting
on foam cubes in a circle as if around a campfire. From the overlook you
might also be able to peer down at the atrium and see an assembly of
executives paired up at cocktail tables doing some cutting and pasting – as
in scissors and glue, not keystrokes.
Need an office? Slide a few suspended dry-erase
panels together and roll in a table and chair. Swap out the table and chair
for a couple of couches on coasters and you've got yourself an informal
lounge. Need a respite from an open, collaborative environment? Step into
the "Booth Noir," a simply furnished low-tech hiding place tucked in a
corner. In each case the environment supports a different kind of learning
or exchange of information.
Continued in article
Absent Student Shadows in Class:
Virtual Students in the Classroom
I remember years ago
receiving my first FAXed term paper (35 pages). I can add a new
technological wonder to my first-time teaching experiences. One of my
students left home early for Easter. I have a lab/class that meets at 4pm
Tuesday and Thursday. She Skyped into the class by contacting another
student in the class with a laptop. She attended the class via Skype and
commented on the festivities as they happened. Amazing.
Bob Blystone
Robert V. Blystone,
Ph.D. Professor of Biology Trinity University One Trinity Place San Antonio,
Texas 78212 rblyston@trinity.edu
210-999-7243
We use Saba-Centra - Skype on steroids, essentially
- in 90-100 grad classes in our MSA and other grad programs every year. We have
a camera built into the back wall of 13 "hybrid online" classrooms so online
students can see both the professor and classroom students as well as anything
on the PC or written on the Smartboard. Faculty clip on a wireless mic, and
there are built-in mics at every student seat. Online students click on a
"raise hand" icon to ask a question, and when called on, are heard via the
ceiling speakers. If online students have webcams, the class sees them as
well.
As of last semester, 37% of students attended online
vs. in the classroom, and 22% said the online option was why they chose
Bentley. 90% of in-class and online students play back recorded classes, and
unlike most online formats that struggle with simple student retention, 80% of
online students rated their experience an 8 or higher on a 1-10 scale. One of
these days, we may start advertising our hybrid-online programs, as enrollments
have grown significantly almost entirely due to word-of-mouth.
We have a TA in all these classes to monitor online
student technical/audio issues, and we also use the TA PC that we install next
to the primary classroom PC in the podium as a "hot swap" backup PC. If
anything goes wrong with the main PC, we can switch the room over to the TA PC
in a matter of seconds to keep classes running seamlessly until the next break.
These things you learn after doing this for 10 years!
Phil
Phillip Knutel, Ph.D.
Executive Director of Academic Technology, the Library, and Online Learning
Bentley University 180 Adamian Academic Center
175 Forest St.
Waltham, MA 02452
781.891.3422/3125 (fax)
April 2, 2010
reply form Peters, James M [jpeters@NMHU.EDU]
In effect, this is how I teach all my classes now.
I use Elluminate instead of Skype, which works much better because I can
broadcast what I am displaying on my in class computer and I don't broadcast a
video of the classroom, just sound and what is displaying on the computer. This
makes what on the computer much clearer. I have some students in class and some
students attending via the internet, but they are treated the same in the class
and I seamlessly switch from working with students in class and working with
those on the internet (i.e., I use Socratic Method and so classes are dialogs
and group problem solving exercises, not lectures).
Nothing really new here, at least not in my little
corner of the world.
"In discussions about the future of the university,
little has been said about how these changes will affect its spatial layout,
even though a university's physical characteristics must complement and
strengthen its mission." In "Designing the University of the Future"
(PLANNING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005-2006, pp. 5-19) Rifca
Hashimshony and Jacov Haina discuss several factors, including teaching and
learning technology, that may define what the physical facilities of the
university of the future will look like.
The paper is online ---
Click Here
Planning for Higher Education is published by the
Society for College and University Planning, 339 E. Liberty, Suite 300, Ann
Arbor, MI 48104 USA; tell: 734-998-7832; fax: 734-998-6532;
email:
info@scup.org
Web:
http://www.scup.org/
According to a survey conducted by the Association
of Higher Education Facilities Officers: "Nearly three out of 10 students
spurned a college because it lacked a facility they thought was important."
"Facilities Can Play Key Role in Students'
Enrollment Decisions, Study Finds" by Audrey Williams June THE CHRONICLE OF
HIGHER EDUCATION, May 30, 2006
http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/05/2006053002n.htm
(Online access requires a subscription to the Chronicle.)
YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed
captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire
listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the
video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you
can even search inside the video. Here's an
an example of video that includes a transcript.
Mr. Lee encourages innovators to ask themselves,
"Would providing 80 percent of the capability at 1 percent of the cost be
valuable to someone?" If the answer is yes, he says, pay attention. Trading
relatively little performance for substantial cost savings can generate what
Mr. Lee calls "surprising and often powerful results both scientifically and
socially."
As evidence, he might point to a do-it-yourself
interactive whiteboard, another of his Wiimote innovations. Interactive
whiteboards, which in commercial form generally sell for more than $1,000,
make it possible to control a computer by tapping, writing or drawing on an
image of the desktop that has been projected onto a screen. Mr. Lee's
version can be built with roughly $60 in parts and free open-source software
downloadable from his Web site.
Some 700,000 people, many of them teachers, have
downloaded the software, Mr. Lee says. Much more expensive whiteboards may
offer more features and better image resolution, but Mr. Lee's version is
adequate for most classroom applications.
This seemed like it might be of interest, if not
useful
Scott Bonacker CPA
Springfield, MO
LCD
= Liquid CrystalDevice computer/video
panel and projector displays
DLP = Digital Light Processor projection device developed by
Texas Instruments.
DLP is based on a digital micromirror device (a chip with millions of
microscopic, hinged mirrors). Red, green and blue light is filtered through a
color wheel.
I've been reviewing projectors for quite some time,
and I've seen them evolve from extraordinarily expensive, bulky,
poor-quality devices into what they are now: reasonably priced,
high-performance display systems that now enjoy widespread adoption. I've
also seen the gap between the two major projector technologies--LCD and DLP--diminish
over the years. Nevertheless, some minor perceptual differences remain (as
well as one major one) that should be considered when making purchase
decisions for setting up classroom and auditorium systems.
LCD Pros and Cons
In the olden days, the divide between LCD projectors and DLPs was defined by
color fidelity and contrast ratio. That's still true to a lesser extent
today. But it comes down more to individual products than the technologies
as a whole. Given a halfway decent budget, you could easily find a projector
using either technology (or LCoS, for that matter) that would suit your
quality standards.
However, schools are faced with budgetary
restrictions that generally lead them into purchasing lower-end projectors.
And DLPs seem to offer better specs in the sub-$1,000 category than LCDs.
Seem to.
LCDs on the low end still have some advantages:
Color performance is better in low-end LCDs
than in low-end DLPs, at least in my experience. This helps produce an
image that seems brighter owing to color saturation.
The images produced by LCDs are sharper, which
is good for data display.
LCDs are still brighter than DLPs at any given
brightness rating (ANSI lumens).
There are only two real disadvantages to low-end
LCD projectors. First, they're more bulky than DLPs in general. This should
not impact installations or even applications that require moderate
portability. For those traveling constantly with a projector, size and
weight can become a factor. The other disadvantage is the screen door effect
produced by LCDs. This is less pronounced now than it used to be, but it's
still there, and it can be a distraction for those sitting close to a screen
or for those watching video programs.
DLP Pros and Cons
DLP projectors, on the other hand, offer more portability and can offer much
higher contrast ratios than LCD projectors. However, the reported contrast
ratios from some manufacturers are highly tainted with shady testing
practices.
Contrast ratio is a means of stating the range
between the brightest gray (white) the projector can produce and the darkest
gray (black). Theoretically, the greater the contrast ratio, the greater the
range between white and black, meaning that more details should be visible
in dark scenes and shadows.
In reality, tests of some DLP chips are conducted
in such a way as to create artificially large contrast ratios by testing
only white and only black and measuring those results separately. This is
called "On/Off," and it can produce a contrast ratio 125 percent the ratio
that would be measured using the ANSI method, in which blacks and whites are
displayed and measured simultaneously.
Continued in article
Physical Design of Schools in the Technology Age
A 2006 Report from the National Summit on School Design provides recommendations
to help designers and educators make better decisions about some of the $30
billion spent annually on new or renovated school facilities---
http://www.archfoundation.org/aaf/documents/nssd.report.pdf
Stanford
University Experiments With the Latest Classroom Technology and Building Design
Each Wallenberg Hall
classroom offers a platform for a new level of teaching, at the same time
serving as a laboratory for testing and analyzing the value and potential of
new technology. Some of the tools will prove invaluable, SCIL researchers
believe, while other tools may not be worth their expense. Such information
could prove useful to everyone, from an academic department deciding whether
to invest a small amount of money in several tablet PCs for the classroom, to
a university redesigning or creating a new multimedia auditorium, to a college
seeking funding to reinvent its learning spaces.
“The teaching and
research happening here in Wallenberg Hall could be of enormous value to our
colleagues at all levels of education regardless of their geography,” says
Steinhardt. “Wallenberg Hall represents the university’s commitment to
explore new ways of enhancing learning and education through targeted
investments in technology.”
Research
and Teaching at Wallenberg
Research
The broad range of
multidisciplinary projects includes:
High-Performance
Learning Spaces: A multidisciplinary team of researchers is
examining two years’ worth of audio and video records of Wallenberg
classes, related interviews, activity surveys, and focus group data to
assess the effects of technology on teaching and learning. Results will
assist educators at all levels in how to best employ technology in the
classroom.
DIVER:
Created by a team led by SCIL co-director Roy Pea, DIVER software
enables users to focus attention on relevant portions of any video
footage, then annotate and analyze the video to share it with colleagues
and peers. This year, student teachers utilized DIVER to reflect on
tapings of their own teaching to evaluate their performances through
“guided noticing.” DIVER also has promising applications in the
fields of law, medicine, film study, and architecture.
Folio
Thinking: Based on the hypothesis that documenting and tracking
learning through the use of an electronic portfolio deepens learning,
students in an engineering class in Wallenberg Hall are the focus of
SCIL’s current research on ePortfolios. Findings will help researchers
understand more about how students learn and what tools most complement
their experience.
Virtual
Video Collaboratory: Supported by a grant from the National
Science Foundation, a team of SCIL researchers is creating the world’s
first Digital Video Collaboratory—a multimedia library that will be
available on the Internet. The library will allow the viewing,
annotating, and editing of a vast array of useful footage collected and
catalogued from sources around the world.
Teachable
agents: The CAT2 Lab at SCIL, which has developed its own
“learn by teaching” software, is studying the idea that a powerful
way to learn is by teaching.
Interactive
toys and robots: This broad project involves the development
and testing of interactive toys and robots that teach and entertain,
utilizing concepts and ideas from psychology, sociology, linguistics,
computer science, robotics, communication, and education.
Social
responses to communication technology: This new research is
examining the extent to which human interactions with computers,
television, and new communication technologies are conditioned by real
social relationships and the navigation of real physical spaces.
Teaching
Since Wallenberg
Hall first opened its doors to classes in 2002, it has grown from a magnet
for early adopters to a widely sought-after learning center for faculty and
students from more than 20 departments and schools at Stanford University.
Courses offered in the high-performance learning spaces of the hall have
included anthropology, history, biochemistry, classic Greek, engineering,
and Hebrew, reflecting the fact that virtually any subject can benefit from
a well-designed, technology-enriched environment.
Every day from
early in the morning until late into the evening, teachers and students
utilize the frequently updated classroom equipment such as interactive
Webster boards, video conferencing tools, in-class laptops, tablet PCs, and
reconfigurable furnishings to create a seamless multimedia experience. As
faculty and students employ these technologies, researchers from the
Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL), who also reside in
Wallenberg Hall, evaluate and analyze the impact in an ongoing study of
technology in education.
Highlights from
some of the innovative courses taught in Wallenberg Hall include:
Using iRoom
software, Prof. Russ Altman had his students download Web pages on
particular diseases each was studying, then asked them to share the
material with the class. PointRight, experimental software, allowed them
to “beam” their material to the computerized Webster white board.
During discussion, the Webster screens were jointly controlled by the
students from their own computers so that anyone could point out
highlights and issues without passing around a keyboard or leaving their
seats.
In her course,
“Introduction to Hebrew,” instructor Vered Shemtov used the three
large screens in the Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater to present
diverse content, from written poems, to music, to video clips, maps, and
artwork. One screen could display the course outline for the day, while
another showed a piece of literature and a third ran a related video
clip. Moving from one medium to another occurred without hesitation, all
controlled by one remote computer mouse.
The Program in
Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), directed by Prof. Andrea Lunsford, is a
requirement of all freshmen and sophomores at Stanford. Freshmen
practice everything from working individually on their laptops, to
working collaboratively in small groups with one computer and a large
plasma display, to whole class discussions utilizing the Webster smart
boards. The PWR program is an excellent example of how Wallenberg Hall
allows teaching and learning to keep pace with technological advances.
A new program started this month by the Princeton
Review, a test preparation company, and wireless application developer VOCEL
allows students to do practice drills in math, reading and grammar by having
the questions sent to their phones. Students can download a bank of questions
and minidrills or have the phone call them at set intervals with practice test
questions.
The program can also be set up to call or e-mail
parents with the results.
"When you are sitting waiting for the football
game or whenever you have a few minutes, instead of carrying around a big
book, it is all right in the palm of your hand," said San Diego high
school senior Brian Plavnicky, 17, who tried the phone during a Princeton
Review SAT preparation class. "Since you are able to use it whenever and
wherever you are, it is convenient for you and you are able to study more
often."
Julia Kokina and Paul E. Juras (2017)
Using Socrative to Enhance Instruction in an Accounting Classroom. Journal of
Emerging Technologies in Accounting: Spring 2017, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 85-97.
Using Socrative to Enhance Instruction in an
Accounting Classroom
Julia
KokinaPaul E. Juras
Babson College
We thank the organizers and participants of
the Best Teaching Practices Panel of the 2015 AAA Northeast Regional Meeting in
Providence, RI.
Editor's note: Accepted by Hui Du.
ABSTRACT:
Are you interested in increasing the level of
student engagement in your accounting course? You are not alone. In today's
classroom, increased student engagement and active learning are desired by
faculty and students alike. In this paper, we outline how to use Socrative
Student Response by Mastery Connect (Socrative
2016), a variation of a real-time response tool called a “clicker.” We used
this tool in both undergraduate and graduate-level managerial accounting
courses. We provide a user's guide to Socrative, as well as helpful tips to
ensure its successful implementation in the classroom.
Julia Kokina and Paul E. Juras (2017)
Using Socrative to Enhance Instruction in an Accounting Classroom. Journal of
Emerging Technologies in Accounting: Spring 2017, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 85-97.
Using Socrative to Enhance Instruction in an
Accounting Classroom
Julia
KokinaPaul E. Juras
Babson College
We thank the organizers and participants of
the Best Teaching Practices Panel of the 2015 AAA Northeast Regional Meeting in
Providence, RI.
Editor's note: Accepted by Hui Du.
ABSTRACT:
Are you interested in increasing the level of
student engagement in your accounting course? You are not alone. In today's
classroom, increased student engagement and active learning are desired by
faculty and students alike. In this paper, we outline how to use Socrative
Student Response by Mastery Connect (Socrative
2016), a variation of a real-time response tool called a “clicker.” We used
this tool in both undergraduate and graduate-level managerial accounting
courses. We provide a user's guide to Socrative, as well as helpful tips to
ensure its successful implementation in the classroom.
Classroom response systems, or “clickers,” have
been around for years, but only a small percentage of classes use them.
Competing and incompatible brands, faculty reluctance to try new
technologies, and confusion about which campus group should provide support
for the devices all contribute to a slow adoption, says Derek Bruff,
director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching and author of
Teaching With Classroom Response Systems. The Tech Therapy team looks
at how those gadgets can be seen as an example of the difficulty in moving
technology beyond the early-adopter stage.
Each month, The Chronicle’s
Tech
Therapy podcast offers analysis of and advice on what the latest gadgets
and buzzwords mean for professors, administrators, and students. Join hosts
Jeff Young, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology
consultant who works with colleges, for a lively discussion—as well as
interviews with leading thinkers in technology.
Jensen Comment
Response pads have a long history dating back over 30+ years in the classroom. HyperGraphics was one of the first companies to shift from wired to wireless
clickers using the old DOS HyperGraphics course (learning) management software.
My first dog and pony technology shows featured my managerial accounting course
in HyperGraphics. My first gig was at the University of Wisconsin.
It was October 4-5, 1990 when I made my first away-from-home dog and pony
show on featuring HyperGraphics technology --- at the University of Wisconsin.
HyperGraphics software pretty much died after Windows replaced the DOS operating
system in PCs. I then shifted my managerial accounting and accounting theory
courses to ToolBooks for the PC. My out-of-town dog and pony shows really
commenced to roll when my university hosts invested in those old three-barrel
color projectors that predated LCD projectors. I eventually made hundreds of
presentations of HyperGraphics and then ToolBooks on college campuses in the
United States, Canada, Mexico, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Holland, and the United
Kingdom (where I lugged my full PC and LCD projector between five campuses as
the European Accounting Association Visiting Professor). Many of my campus
visits and topics are listed at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Presentations
Shortly thereafter Loyola's Barry Rice with his ToolBooks became a much
heavier user of clickers than me in his large accounting lectures.
I think Bill Ellis at Furman University is a current user of clickers in his
accounting courses.
Use Plickers for quick checks for understanding to know whether your students
are understanding big concepts and mastering key skills ---
https://www.plickers.com/
Thank you Sharon Garvin for the heads up.
From
clickers to programs like Learning
Catalytics—which data-mines to match students
with discussion partners—student-response systems are becoming more and
more sophisticated. But Liam Kaufman, a graduate of the University of
Toronto, thinks that the key to effective feedback is a tool with fewer
bells and whistles.
Mr. Kaufman is the developer of Understoodit,
a browser-based app that lets students indicate their level of
comprehension during class, and then see how much everyone else
understands.
The idea is that, during
a lecture, everyone runs the Understoodit Web site, which is also
accessible via mobile and tablet devices. Students press buttons to
indicate that they either understand the material or are confused by it.
The feedback is displayed in real time, in the form of a
“confus-o-meter” and an “understand-o-meter,” which show the percentage
of students who comprehend the material.
The app was inspired by
clickers, Mr. Kaufman says. But whereas clickers usually require
students to answer questions so the professor can gauge their
understanding, Understoodit lets them directly indicate confusion or
comprehension, which is then available for everyone to see. That
approach, he hopes, will encourage students to ask more questions when
they realize that others are confused as well.
Mr. Kaufman first tested
the app on an entry-level computer-science class at the University of
Toronto in February. The app is still in beta testing, and available by
invitation only. More than 2,000 people have signed up so far, Mr.
Kaufman says, including professors at institutions such as Harvard
University, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
"Does Using Clickers in the Classroom Matter to Student Performance and
Satisfaction When Taking the Introductory Financial Accounting Course?" by
Ronald F. Premuroso, Lei Tong, and Teresa K. Beed, Issues in Accounting
Education, November 2011, pp. 701-724
http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/iace-50066
There is a fee for the full text version
ABSTRACT:
Teaching and student success in the classroom
involve incorporating various sound pedagogy and technologies that improve
and enhance student learning and understanding. Before entering their major
field of study, business and accounting majors generally must take a
rigorous introductory course in financial accounting. Technological
innovations utilized in the classroom to teach this course include Audience
Response Systems (ARS), whereby the instructor poses questions related to
the course material to students who each respond by using a clicker and
receiving immediate feedback. In a highly controlled experimental situation,
we find significant improvements in the overall student examination
performance when teaching this course using clickers as compared to
traditional classroom teaching techniques. Finally, using a survey at the
end of the introductory financial accounting course taught with the use of
clickers, we add to the growing literature supporting student satisfaction
with use of this type of technology in the classroom. As universities look
for ways to restrain operating costs without compromising the pedagogy of
core requirement classes such as the introductory financial accounting
course, our results should be of interest to educators, administrators, and
student retention offices, as well as to the developers and manufacturers of
these classroom support technologies.
I have been using clickers in my classes for three
years now, and for me, there’s no going back. The “agile teaching” model
that clickers enable suits my teaching style very well and helps my students
learn. But I have to say that until reading this Educause article on the
flight out to Boston on Sunday, I hadn’t given much thought to how the
clicker implementation model chosen by the institution might affect how my
students learn.
Different institutions implement clickers
differently, of course. The article studies three different implementation
models: the students-pay-without-incentive (SPWOI) approach, where students
buy the clickers for class but the class has no graded component for clicker
use; the the students-pay-with-incentive (SPWI) approach, where students
purchase clickers and there’s some grade incentive in class for using them
(usually participation credit, but this can vary too); and the
institution-pays-clicker-kit (IPCK) approach, where the institution
purchases a box of clickers (a “clicker kit”) for an instructor, and the
instructor brings them to class.
For me, the most interesting finding in the study
was that there appears to be a threshhold for the perceived usefulness of
clickers among students. The study found that in the SPWOI approach, 72% of
student respondents said they would buy a clicker if it was used in at least
three courses they were taking per semester. But drop that number to “at
least two courses” and the percentage drops to 24%! So once the saturation
level of clicker use reaches something like 50–75% of a student’s course
load, they start seeing the devices as worth the money, even with no grade
attached to its use. (Only a depressing 13% of students said they would pay
$50 for a clicker based solely on its value as a learning tool. We have some
P.R. to do, it seems.)
In the SPWI approach, 65% of respondents said they
would buy a clicker if the contribution of clicker use toward their course
grades was between 3% and 5%. (This is sort of mystifying. What do the other
35% do? Steal one? Just forfeit that portion of their grade?) The study
doesn’t say explicitly, but it implies that if the grade contribution is
less than 3%, the percentage would drop — how precipitously, we don’t know.
The study goes on to give a decision tree to help
institutions figure out which implementation model to choose. Interestingly,
if it gets down to choosing between the SPWI and SPWOI models, the deciding
factor is whether the institution can manage cheating with the clickers. If
so, then go with SPWI. Otherwise, go SPWOI — that is, if you can’t control
cheating, don’t offer incentives.
Here at GVSU, I use the SPWI approach. Students
have to pay for the clickers, but they get 5% of their course grade for
participation. I take attendance at each class using the Attendance app for
the iPhone. Then, once or twice a week, I’ll cross-check the attendance
records with the clicker records for the day. If a student is present but
doesn’t respond to all the clicker questions, they lose participation credit
for the day. This method also mitigates cheating; if a student is absent for
the day but has records of clicker response, then I hold the student guilty
of cheating, because someone else is entering data for them. (Putting the
burden on the absent student makes it less likely they’ll give their clicker
to someone else to cheat for them.).
Continued in article
January 10, 2012 reply from Steve Hornik
Late reply to this thread, but my memory is pretty
bad and I was trying to remember a "clicker" alternative. I finally did, its
Pollanywhere and works the same way as clickers. I've used for presentations
at AAA meetings a few years ago, here's a link if anyone is interested in
finding out more:
Here’s new software from a reliable source. I’ve not
tried this yet, but it might have a use in classrooms.
FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools
Ever wanted to make presentations a more interactive, Web 2.0 experience? A
prototype version of the PowerPoint Twitter Tools is now available for
testing. Created using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius <http://www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/sme/reporting-dashboarding/index.epx>
(but requiring only PowerPoint for Windows and Adobe
Flash to run), the twitter tools allow presenters to see and react to tweets
in real-time, embedded directly within their presentations, either as a
ticker or refreshable comment page. There are currently six tools:
PowerPoint Twitter feedback slide
PowerPoint Twitter ticker bar
PowerPoint Twitter update bar
PowerPoint Twitter voting — bar charts and pie chart
PowerPoint Mood meter
PowerPoint Crowd meter
Jensen Comment
Thanks for this heads up Bill. For over a decade I taught in an electronic
classroom where each student work station had software that made clickers
unnecessary, although clickers would still be useful for students not having
computers at their seats. The above software does more than most electronic
classroom software to date.
I summarize the history of classroom clickers (response pads) below.
This includes a previous message from Bill Ellis and reference to an early
adopter back in the 1980s --- our own AECM founder Barry Rice (who by the way
was a very popular old-style ToolBook lecturer when using response pads).
The main advantage of response pads, in my viewpoint, is that they help hold
student attention in a lecture because of fear/anticipation of being called on.
I used an Excel program that not only called on a student at random, it flashed
his/her picture on the screen.
My electronic classroom software could also instantly flash whatever was on
any student’s workstation screen. This prevented students from doing email or
playing computer games in class --- or so I discovered after embarrassing a few
students early on in the course. If a student seemed to be furiously typing an
email message in class, I flipped that student’s screen in front of the class.
Some would begin “Dear Mom.”
I thought I’d pass along this email on clickers and
recommend a new book by Derck Bruff.
I’ve been using Clickers for almost two years now
in Principles, Advanced and Governmental accounting courses at GTC and
Furman. The comments by Derck Bruff, a Furman graduate, below are right on
target.
Accountability and engagement are the primary two
features clickers have brought into my classrooms. There is no place for shy
students to hide. A response is demanded and every student’s score is
recorded. Every student is engaged not only by having to answer questions
throughout the lecture, but in discussions using “think-pair-share”
techniques that reinforce learning in a very active way.
I don’t use clickers for grades but do let students
know their “scores” and class averages. I’ve seen a high positive
correlation between responses on the question “how many hours did you study
this week?” to a student’s clicker score for the lecture. If students miss a
question that gives me an early warning that I should go over that learning
objective again.
I’m convinced that clickers when used creatively
help confidence, teaching and learning to improve.
Bill Ellis, CPA, MPAcc
Furman University
Accounting UES
"Instead of creating chaos, faculty find that when
everyone gets a remote control (and you ask good questions), everyone ends
up on the same channel."
Folks:
The posting below looks at the impact of an
important new technology on faculty lecturing and student learning. It is by
James Rhem, executive director of the National Teaching & Learning Forum and
is #45 in a series of selected excerpts from the NT&LF newsletter reproduced
here as part of our "Shared Mission Partnership." NT&LF has a wealth of
information on all aspects of teaching and learning. If you are not already
a subscriber, you can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line
edition of the Forum--like the printed version - offers subscribers insight
from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping students reach the
highest levels of learning. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter,
Volume 18, Number 3, March 2009.? Copyright 1996-2009. Published by James
Rhem & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with
permission.
Clickers have been quietly marching over the
horizon of attention for several years. Only early adopters, however,
and schools with enough money and vision to try them have come to
understand that, far from being simply the latest new gadget, they offer
students a pedagogically powerful blend of intimacy and anonymity that
can move them from passive to active learning with the click of a button
(and a battery of well-crafted questions).
Rapid improvements in the technology and
especially the publication of Derek Bruff's Teaching with Classroom
Response Systems: Creative Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass,
2009) seem poised to place clickers in faculty consciousness across the
board. The attention the book has already received offers some index of
the growing interest in clickers. Bruff has already been profiled by the
on- line newsletter Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle of Higher
Education.
How They Work
For those who don't know, clickers are
hand-held devices similar to the remote controls for televisions and
other media devices. They can send a specific electronic signal to a
central receiving station connected to a computer equipped with software
that tabulates the responses and can then display the distribution of
answers on a bar graph.
In operation-especially in quantitative fields
with concrete correct and incorrect answers-a professor presents a
multiple choice or true/false question. Students respond by pushing
buttons for answers (a), (b), (c), and so on. Then, normally, the
professor shows the bar graph of how the class answered. Quickly,
students can see where they stand in terms of how well they understand
the material, and (just as importantly) where their classmates stand,
and where they stand in relation to these peers. And students get all of
this very specific feedback on their learning without risking a moment
of embarrassment. The anonymity of the system allows students to
confront little important truths about their progress (or lack of it)
without risking a thing.
Faculty schooled a few generations back when
shame and guilt were felt to have at least some pedagogical value-that
is to say, in a time when students felt ashamed to make a poor grade or
come to class unprepared-the ascendance of this new teaching environment
may seem strange. However, as the emphasis in education has shifted over
the centuries from building character to simply learning, it all makes
sense. (And, of course, whether shame and guilt actually built character
remains an open question.)
Anonymity's Advantages
The anonymity is "pretty important," says Derek
Bruff, who teaches mathematics and serves as assistant director of the
Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. "Students are often hesitant to speak up
in front of their peers," he says. "A key element in that is the desire
not to be wrong or foolish in front of their peers, especially in a
class where there are right/ wrong answers. In other classes, they don't
want to stand out or be the one with the strange opinion."
Peer pressure, says Bruff, "dampens
conversation." The anonymity that clickers provide is one way of dealing
with that. "It's not the only way," Bruff concedes. "There are
professors that are able to create a safe environment where that's not a
problem."
If escaping peer pressure and taking refuge in
anonymity prove such positive elements in teaching and learning, a
question that comes immediately to mind is, where do cooperative
learning and other small group activities fit in? The answer? On the
next click, so to speak.
Offering an answer via the clicker establishes
a "buy-in," says Bruff, a commitment not simply to an answer but to the
learning process. With this threshold crossed, passivity has begun to be
left behind. The anonymity allows cumbersome emotional baggage to be
left behind as well, lending both a purity and a more animated sense of
mission to the next step, the familiar "think-pair-share."
The "Think Moment"
"We use the think-pair-share method a lot
here," says Bruff, "think, talk with one, talk in the larger group.
There's more risk at each stage, but giving students a warm-up
experience is important because many need that moment. If a hand in the
first row goes up to answer a question, their thinking is stopped. The
class is then moving on. Maybe they needed 30 more seconds. Giving the
'think moment' is helpful. Then, in the pair, they get to practice
saying what they think, and they get to hear other thinking which then
sharpens theirs."
The silent, private "think moment" operates
like moving from warm water to hotter and hotter baths in a hot spring,
for example, and finally into strong currents where one may have to swim
against the tide intellectually.
Just as this technologically enhanced learning
environment intensifies the focus on learning and recognizing where
everyone stands in the process moment to moment, it also intensifies the
burden on faculty to become "agile teachers." For example, when clickers
first began to be used, showing the bar chart of student responses
immediately was expected. As their use has grown and influenced faculty
understanding of group behavior and learning patterns, whether to show
or not to show the graph has become an important "thinking-on-your-feet"
decision. Even if most students agree on a correct answer, how deeply do
they understand the reasoning behind it? Sometimes, to make sure their
learning goes more deeply, faculty withhold the results and ask students
to turn to their neighbor and talk out the reasons for their answer,
especially if their neighbor gave a different answer.
"When I have that happen," says Bruff, "I tell
my groups, 'Even if you agree, talk it out because you could both be
wrong.' I want them to test themselves a little bit."
It's the "thinking-on-your-feet" challenge that
burdens faculty. "That's a roadblock for some faculty," says Bruff.
"They want 'ballistic teaching,'" he says with a laugh. "Launch lecture,
and once it's off, it's off on its way." Clickers offer lots of chances
for mid-course corrections, but their use also demands something of a
chess player's mentality of knowing not only how the pieces move, but
which move to make next for maximum advantage. Sometimes, the best move
does turn out to be "creating times for telling," says Bruff (using a
phrase coined by Schwartz and Bransford), time for a little lecture
students need and which skillful use of clicker questions can lead them
to want. For example, anticipating a common misconception, faculty may
ask a question experience has shown them most students will answer
incorrectly.
"The instructor then reveals the correct
answer," says Bruff, "often through a demonstration. The students are
surprised most of them got the answer wrong and it makes them want to
hear why the right answer is right and the answer they gave is wrong."
Making Good Questions
Successful use of clickers turns on the
skillful use of good questions. "Writing good questions I would have to
say is the hardest part" of teaching with clickers, says Bruff. But it's
also the most exciting part because it causes faculty to become
intensely intentional about their teaching moment to moment, not just
lecture to lecture. "That's why I like to talk about clickers with
faculty," says Bruff, "because it generates this kind of conversation:
'What are my learning goals for my students?'"
There are content questions asking for recall
of information, conceptual questions seeking evidence of understanding,
application questions, critical thinking questions, and free-response
questions. When and how to ask the right kind of question in response to
where the students actually sitting before the faculty member are
becomes the proof of good teaching in that moment.
One of the most interesting aspects to emerge
from the use of clickers has to do with the flexibility of the multiple
choice question to stimulate thinking and learning. "Many people think
of the multiple choice question as being only about factual recall,"
says Bruff, but the one-best-answer variation probes much deeper. "A
really good teacher can write really good wrong answers to a question,"
says Bruff, ones that key into common student difficulties with
material. "When I really like 40-60% of my students to get it wrong. And
I'd like them to be split between a right choice and several wrong
choices, because then that means I have tapped into some misconceptions
that are fairly common and need to be addressed and the question is hard
enough to be worth talking about."
Metacognition and Confidence
Some of the problems that have emerged in using
clickers have also turned out to reveal opportunities for increasing
student learning or rather student learning about their own learning.
Bruff, a mathematician, began to ponder how much confidence he could
have in student learning reported via true/ false questions or even some
multiple choice questions. In a true/ false situation, for example,
students might guess and have a 50% chance of lodging a correct answer.
Multiple choice questions might be constructed to include an "I don't
know" option, but then the matter of discouraging student engagement
becomes an issue. Students might retreat to the safety of an "I don't
know" answer rather than commit to a response they felt uncertain about.
Pondering this problem has led a number of pioneers in clicker use, like
Dennis Jacobs at Notre Dame, to marry self-assessments of confidence
levels with decisions about right or wrong answers. So, for example, in
Jacobs' system (where clicker responses are graded) a correct answer in
which a student indicated high confidence would receive five points. An
incorrect answer that a student had expressed high confidence in would
receive no points. On the other hand, an incorrect answer in which a
student indicated low confidence would receive two points.
"If a student gives a right answer," says Bruff,
"but realizes they aren't confident in it, they have a little
metacognitive moment thrust upon them: they have to ask themselves 'Why
wasn't I more confident in my answer? What are the standards of evidence
in this field that would allow me to be confident in my answer?'" By the
same token, a student aware enough of his own learning to express low
confidence in an incorrect answer receives partial credit for sensing
that he didn't know, thus encouraging him as a learner rather than
thumping him for getting something wrong. With this system, he gets both
the positive and negative points to be made through the question.
Creative Options Everywhere
One of the strengths of Bruff's book on clicker
use lies in the wide range of faculty examples he includes. That range
evinces impressive imagination and commitment among faculty to improving
student learning, itself a pleasure in reading the book. And, while the
dominant use of clickers falls in scientific fields, the book includes
rich examples of skillful use of clickers in humanities courses as well.
Moreover, while clickers offer the most efficient means of collecting
student responses, the overall emphasis falls on collecting those
responses and on the dimensions of psychology, motivation, and cognition
involved in their use. Hence, Bruff includes discussion of some low-tech
means of collecting student responses as well.
With clickers, as with so many other new
technologies, the greatest benefit seems to lie in the way they uncover
new means of improving one of the most ancient of transactions-teaching
and learning. Socrates would be proud.
One of the enthusiastic early adopters of response pads (clickers) in the
hands of students during lectures was our AECM founder Barry Rice. Barry
used the early technology called HyperGraphics for screen presentations and
student responses on screen ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#ResponsePads
HyperGraphics was DOS-based before the Windows operating system came on
the scene. HyperGraphics had a unique niche in the DOS world but never
competed well in the Windows/Mac worlds when ToolBook and Authorware came on
the scene ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm This illustrates
how technology can make and destroy software. ToolBook and Authorware, in
turn, never competed well in academe after course technology became more
Web-based. Now we have HTML, XML, Wikis, chat rooms, instant messaging, etc.
But response pads (clickers) are still popular with many faculty in
various academic disciplines. In a lecture, clickers offer limited response
capabilities that online students get with full network capabilities from
their PC stations.
I’m certain Barry Rice will be pleased with your 2009 testimonial about
successful clicker use that he used successfully as far back as 1989. Barry
would probably still use clickers in lectures had he not switched to
full-time administration many years ago.
I had the luxury of teaching in an electronic classroom over the past two
decades. Each student sat in front of a PC capable of easily interacting on
screen and via ear phones with the instructor and each other. With a flick
of a button I could flash any student’s screen in front of the class just as
a clicker response can be flashed in front of the entire class.
What I did not develop software for was response aggregation. One
advantage of clicker software is the power to instantly aggregate joint
responses of all students in the class such as the number of responses for
each of the choices in a multiple choice question. I think the Trinity
University electronic classrooms now have such aggregation software that can
slice and dice multiple student responses.
While many faculty users of clickers minimize clicker cheating by not providing student performance grades based on
clicker usage, there are some that give credit in some form, including quiz
points based upon clicker responses. This can create problems. One study on
clicker cheating can be found at
http://www.lychock.com/portfolio/Documents/final report.pdf
Another problem in very large lectures might arise when clickers are used
for taking attendance. These are not very reliable for taking role unless
accompanied by some verification controls.
Resembling television remote control devices,
clickers transmit and record responses to questions. Unlike earlier keypad
student response systems, clickers can be registered to a student and used
in any classroom equipped with a receiving station (which can also be
portable). Using clickers, instructors can quickly poll students to
ascertain their understanding and mastery of course materials. Clicker
polls, unlike a show-of-hands poll, can be anonymous; the results can be
quickly tabulated, recorded, and saved in a variety of formats; and students
report enjoying the immediate feedback they get. For more information about
using clickers in classroom settings, see "7 Things You Should Know About .
. . Clickers" at
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7002.pdf .
EDUCAUSE publishes the "7 Things You Should Know
About . . ." series on emerging learning practices and technologies.
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher
education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. For
more information, contact: EDUCAUSE, 4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206, Boulder,
CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax: 303-440-0461; email: info@educause.edu;
Web:
http://www.educause.edu .
Jensen Comment
Back is the early 1990s, Barry Rice and I were both inspired heavily by a
company called HyperGraphics that authored a complete course management and
delivery system in DOS (before the days of Windows and Macs). My classes
were small at Trinity University, but Barry had some large basic accounting
lecture classes at Loyola College of Maryland. He made active use of
hardware from HyperGraphics that allowed each student in a large lecture to
respond to questions in class. At first all these response pads were hard
wired to student desks. Later they became wireless. HyperGraphics
changed names over the decades but is still in the business of selling wireless
response pads. Now the classroom "Clickers" are replacing the older style
wireless response pads. You can read more about the history of this type
of thing at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
Alan Webb and I have done a study of the effects of
clickers on student satisfaction, engagement and learning in an accounting
context. We looked at incremental effect of the clickers beyond what is
acheived through the use of an interactive pedagogy alone. Our results
suggest that while students enjoyed the use of the technology, there were
only modest positive effects on learning (as measured by exam scores)
relative to students not using the clickers. There were some interesting
effects on oral participation that suggest that using the response pads to
ask questions that are too easy actually reduces students asking questions.
(We suspect that when the results are displayed showing that most students
got a particular question right, those that didn't are even more reluctant
to ask questions to improve their understanding, since they are clearly in
the minority).
Similar to what Amy said, both Alan and I found it
a useful means of determining what the students did and did not understand
so we could tailor our material coverage accordingly.
So Carla, in your conclusion you suggest that
students are more uncomfortable after the GRS System has been removed. Given
my teaching experience in an atmosphere where verbal interaction is required
and participation is graded the reluctance of students to talk in front of
peers and instructors is quite obvious even though students get better over
the semester they are still prone to silence. It seems to me that while the
GRS is beneficial to the instructor (which I do not deny) is propagates the
incentives to remain silent, to not express an opinion, and never allow the
possibility of being seen given a wrong (or right answer for that matter)
answer in class. In a sense it heightens the continuing problem of a mute
society of students that must suddenly find their voice when the first pay
check arrives.
Interesting paper, good luck on your presentation.
May 5, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen
A clicker and a response pad are both devices that
can be used as technology aids for "cold calls" in the class. Many of us
use a cold call pedagogy to keep students more alert and tuned into the
class lecture/discussion. There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that
cold calls improve attentiveness in class.
Salespeople trade tales about cold-calling
customers, but at the Business School, students and alums reminisce about
the moments when their hearts stopped because of “cold calls” from Professor
James Van Horne.
The A. P. Giannini Professor of Banking and Finance
is legendary for his classroom-quizzing techniques, which somehow strike
both fear and respect into the students who volunteer for his elective
courses. Now in his 40th year at the Business School, Van Horne crafts tough
questions about interest rates and finance for corporations, nonprofits, and
governments. He also demands tough answers of himself. During a lecture to
alumni last fall, for example, he challenged the conventional wisdom that
says it’s good for the Federal Reserve Board to signal its intentions on
interest rates. Van Horne argues that the policy gives us a false sense of
certainty.
Recently, the School’s most fabled inquisitor
consented to have the tables turned. At the suggestion of an alumnus, this
magazine invited four alums to cold-call Van Horne on anything they desired.
Here is an edited transcript of that laughter-filled discussion last
October, which Van Horne, in his usual disciplined style, promptly ended at
the appointed time.
Many recent studies on tablet PCs in higher
education have focused on student users. The purpose of the Seton Hall
University project described in "The Tablet PC For Faculty: A Pilot Project"
(by Rob R. Weitz, Bert Wachsmuth, and Danielle Mirliss in JOURNAL OF
EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 9, issue. 2, 2006, pp. 68-83) "was to
test and evaluate faculty applications of tablet PCs apropos their
contribution to teaching and learning. Put another way, how would real
faculty teaching actual classes use tablets, and how would they evaluate the
utility of doing so?"
Some of the study's findings:
-- "only a fraction of faculty are motivated to use
tablet technology: roughly a third of faculty expressed an interest in
replacing their notebook computer with a tablet computer"
-- "generally, participating faculty did indeed use
tablet functionality in their classes and were convinced that this use
resulted in a meaningful impact on teaching and learning."
The Journal of Educational Technology & Society
[ISSN 1436-4522 (online), ISSN 1176-3647 (print)] is a peer-reviewed
quarterly online journal published by the International Forum of Educational
Technology & Society (IFETS). Current and past issues are available in HTML
and PDF formats at no cost at
http://www.ifets.info/
From Syllabus News on Octiber 26, 2004
UVa. Testing Tablet PC-Hosted Digital Courseware
Program
The University of Virginia is hosting the test of a
state-of-the-art educational delivery platform this fall in a collaboration
with three companies holding a big stake in the higher education community.
The project involves Thomson Learning, which is supplying Web-based courseware
developed with UVa. faculty based on the firm's iLrn platform. Course packages
will include Web sites with online tests, diagnostic tools for personalized
learning and planning, and links to reference materials via Thompson Gale's
InfoTrac service.
Students will be equipped with Tablet PCs from HP
running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC software and Microsoft OneNote digital
note-taking application. In one application, OneNote templates are being used
to record biochemistry lectures. The university expects a professor's ability
to gauge students' comprehension of the course material immediately via their
online performance will improve student retention.
"The academic environment has changed
dramatically in the last decade as a result of numerous social, cultural and
economic factors," said Edward L. Ayers, dean of Arts and Sciences at UVa.
"The rise of technology has affected how students learn, how instructors
teach and how course materials are developed and presented. Greater numbers of
students, as well as significant changes in the demographics of those
students, necessitate new approaches and instructional models." The
program will continue through the spring 2005 semester.
Tired of watching in frustration as its popular
Android mobile operating system failed to make much of a dent in the tablet
market, Google GOOG -1.81% is stepping in next week with an Android tablet
it helped design. It's the Nexus 7, a $199 model with a 7-inch screen. And
in my view, it's a winner.
After testing the Nexus 7 for a couple of weeks, I
consider it the best Android tablet I've used. It's a serious alternative to
both Apple's AAPL -0.62% larger $499 iPad and to a more direct rival:
Amazon's $199, Android-based, 7-inch Kindle Fire. I prefer the Nexus 7 to
7-inch models from Google partners like Samsung, 005930.SE -0.80% whose
comparable product costs $250. [image] Google
The Google Nexus 7's My Library home screen
displays a user's recent media content.
The new Google tablet doesn't have all the features
of the iPad. For instance, it lacks a cellular connectivity option, a rear
camera and the iPad's dazzling screen resolution. Its base model has half
the memory of the iPad's. It offers fewer content choices—music, movies, TV
shows—than either the Apple or Amazon devices do. It also has very few apps
designed for a tablet, as opposed to a phone, while the iPad boasts over
200,000 apps for tablet use. And its screen area is less than half the size
of the iPad's.
But Google's tablet is a better choice than the
iPad for people on a budget; for those who prefer a lighter, more compact
tablet that's easier to carry and operate with one hand; and for those who
prefer Google's ecosystem of apps, services and content to Apple's.
Despite some drawbacks, I found it a pleasure to
use.
. . .
Google's voice-controlled question-and-answer
feature, like Apple's Siri, didn't understand me or get it right a lot of
the time. And it didn't understand some questions Siri does, like "Will I
need an umbrella today?"
And Google Now requires you to compromise some
privacy, by allowing the service to track your location and search history.
It tries to figure out your home address by detecting where the device is
during most nights.
Overall, however, Google and Asus have produced a
very good tablet in the Nexus 7, one I can recommend.
On Monday at a Los Angeles media event that had
been veiled in secrecy, Microsoft announced that it was going to make a
gorgeous touchscreen tablet like the iPad. It’s called the Surface tablet.
Its main differentiators from the iPad: It has a kickstand, it has real PC
ports and it will run Windows 8.
In some ways, the announcement was a departure for
Microsoft, which, for decades, has carefully stayed out of the PC business.
There’s never been a Microsoft-branded computer.
On the other hand, the opening scenes of this movie
sure look familiar. Apple comes up with a hit product (iPod, iPhone).
Microsoft comes up with a rival that’s nicely designed (Zune, Windows
Phone). Unfortunately, it doesn’t add anything attractive enough to lure
people away from the safe choice, and nobody buys it.
There will actually be multiple Surface tablets;
this is Microsoft, after all. There are already two basic models: a lighter,
superthin one, with an ARM processor, that runs a modified version of
Windows 8 called Windows RT, and a Pro version with an Intel chip that runs
the full-blown Windows 8.
There are lots of questions. Microsoft didn’t tell
us the ship date, battery life or price. The Pro version, which Microsoft
hints will cost about the same as an ultrabook ($1,000), will run regular
Windows apps like Office and Photoshop; so what apps, exactly, will be
available for the Windows 8 RT version?
Won’t it anger Microsoft’s traditional “hardware
partners” that Microsoft is now making its own competitive tablet?
Will there be a cellular version? The company
demonstrated a magnetic screen cover that, ingeniously, doubles as a
keyboard with trackpad. Will that be included, or sold separately?
I think that Windows 8 represents some of
Microsoft’s best work. Fluid, fast, useful, easily grasped — and different
from the old iPhone/Android concept of icons-on-black. I’ve been
using a prerelease Windows 8 version on a Samsung
tablet, and it works beautifully.
But the iPad’s been around for two years; it’s
awfully late for Microsoft to begin its pursuit now. (See also: H.P.’s
tablet, BlackBerry tablet, Zune.) To me, the most compelling model is the
Intel version; imagine a gorgeous, sleek, thin tablet that can actually run
Windows software.
Continued in article
Creating Educational Cartoons
I've not tried
making cartoons, but this sounds like a relatively easy thing to do for those of
us without drawing talent.
Bob Jensen
"Create
Cartoons With Anime Studio Debut Create South Park-like cutout and simple 2D
animation easily using the bone structure of a drawing," by Steve Horton,
PC World, via The Washington Post, August 6, 2009 ---
Click Here
Anime Studio Debut is Smith Micro's homegrown
animated answer to their translated 2D art program, Manga Studio. It uses a
"bone" interface as its core. You use a tool to add bones to the structure
of a drawing. You can then animate these bones, and you can adjust their
strength to behave more like real bones. Anime Studio Debut ($50, 30-day
free trial) can also animate based on edges of drawings and in many other
ways. It includes a straightforward timeline system that allows you to
intuit when and how animation happens easily.
Build animated characters from the skeleton up with
Anime Studio Debut.
Underneath the animation is a full-featured paint
program that has a familiar look to it, as it appears inspired by Manga
Studio.
One of the best things about Anime Studio Debut is
its well-designed tutorial PDF. This tutorial, which is laid out like a
design book, goes from simple to complex in numerous tutorial topics. Anyone
wanting to master Anime Studio Debut would be best served by running through
this tutorial from beginning to end. The tutorials are detailed and
involved, so expect that to take several hours.
Myth 01
Online students must do all their learning from content stored on a computer.
This is true only in the relatively rare case of
online courses that have no online synchronous classes in virtual classrooms, no
electronic communications with a live instructor, no electronic communications with
classmates, and no mentors or experts to contact for help and information.
Experiments show that communications tend to increase when students take courses online.
A major advantage of technology today is the ease and efficiency of linking students to
experts and mentors.
Myth 02
Students on average will perform worse on examinations if they only have online courses as
opposed to onsite traditional courses. There are so many variables and
contextual factors that it is risky to make any claims on this one way or another.
With online courses, much depends upon the quality of the technology hardware, the
quality of the specially-designed online learning materials, and the maturity and
motivation of the students. If the suitable materials are available and motivated
students know what must be learned, there generally is no difference in examination
performance. There is some evidence that online learning is more efficient in the
sense that students learn faster and there is less time wasted in travel, setting up
meetings with instructors or other students, and in searching hard copy documents that are
not available on a computer.
Myth 03
Students have deeper and more important communication in face-to-face encounters.
There are advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face communications vis-ŕ-vis
electronic communications. Clearly there are advantages of face-to-face
communications in learning social skills and in reading body language. There are
obvious advantages when the learning is physical (e.g., learning to play team sports,
learning how to diagnosis patients, etc.). Being able to read body language improves
communications when students are weak in the language being spoken.
But there are many disadvantages in face-to-face encounters. Some people are more
shy, more easily intimidated, more bothered by physical defects. Electronic
communications make follow-up messaging easier. So many times, students do not think
of everything they would like to say at a given point in time. An hour later, they
may think of something to add or something to retract. Electronic messaging may be
strung out over days and are not limited to a particular meeting time. Electronic
messages are more easily translated into other languages. Even when not translated,
it is easier to deal with another language in text form than in audio form. For
example, students who can read French often have no idea what is being said on the streets
of Paris.
The major advantage of electronic communications is the ease of sending off a message at
any time to most anywhere in the world. Face-to-face encounters take more time to
set up even if teleconferencing is of thehighest quality.
Myth 04
Virtual classrooms are vastly inferior to live classrooms. Technologies
for live audio and video virtual classrooms have vastly improved. The advantages of
bringing students face-to-face from all over the world to conduct live (synchronous)
classes are obvious. The worry is that the technology is unpredictable or that the
learning is inferior to a traditional class meeting in a room. Schools such as Duke
University, the University of Virginia, Notre Dame, Northwestern University, Columbia
University, Stanford University, the London School of Economics, and hundreds of other
top-rated universities are praising the technologies of virtual classrooms. For
Example, the Global Executive MBA program at Duke University now has years of successful
operations of virtual classrooms.
The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley,
the University of Michigan Business School, and the Darden School at the University of
Virginia will offer each other's students classes specializing in e-business.
"So
much of business education is the network-building between the students," said Haas
Dean Laura Tyson. "What is nice here is that people in each location will now be able
to have a new selection of classes to choose from, and a new selection of people to work
with."
"In essence, this program is not only about sharing knowledge but about sharing
communities,.
Myth 06
Online Testing is Both Less Effective and More Prone to Cheating
Accounting Professors in Support of Online Testing That, Among
Other Things, Reduces Cheating
These same professors became widely known for their advocacy of
self-learning in place of lecturing
Critics of testing through the
computer often argue that it’s difficult to tell if
students are doing their own work. It’s also unclear to
some professors whether using the technology is worth
their while.
A new study makes the
argument that giving electronic tests can actually
reduce cheating and save faculty time.
Anthony Catanach Jr. and Noah Barsky, both associate
professors of accounting at the Villanova School of
Business, came to that conclusion after speaking with
faculty members and analyzing the responses of more than
100 students at Villanova and Philadelphia University.
Both Catanach and Barsky teach a course called
Principles of Managerial Accounting that utilizes the
WebCT Vista e-learning platform. The professors also
surveyed undergraduates at Philadelphia who took tests
electronically.
The Villanova course follows a pattern of Monday
lecture, Wednesday case assignment, Friday assessment.
The first two days require in-person attendance, while
students can check in Friday from wherever they are.
“It never used to make sense to me why at business
schools you have Friday classes,” Catanach said. “As an
instructor it’s frustrating because 30 percent of the
class won’t show up, so you have to redo material. We
said, how can we make that day not lose its
effectiveness?”
The answer, he and Barsky determined, was to make all
electronically submitted group work due on Fridays and
have that be electronic quiz day. That’s where academic
integrity came into play. Since the professors weren’t
requiring students to be present to take the exams, they
wanted to deter cheating. Catanach said programs like
the one he uses mitigate the effectiveness of looking up
answers or consulting friends.
In
electronic form, questions are given to students in
random order so that copying is difficult. Professors
can change variables within a problem to make sure that
each test is unique while also ensuring a uniform level
of difficulty. The programs also measure how much time a
student spends on each question, which could signal to
an instructor that a student might have slowed to use
outside resources. Backtracking on questions generally
is not permitted. Catanach said he doesn’t pay much
attention to time spent on individual questions. And
since he gives his students a narrow time limit to
finish their electronic quizzes, consulting outside
sources would only lead students to be rushed by the end
of the exam, he added.
Forty-five percent of students who took part in the
study reported that the electronic testing system
reduced the likelihood of their cheating during the
course.
Stephen Satris, director of the Center for Academic
Integrity at Clemson University, said he applauds the
use of technology to deter academic dishonesty. Students
who take these courses might think twice about copying
or plagiarizing on other exams, he said.
“It’s good to see this program working,” Satris said.
“It does an end run around cheating.”
The report also makes the case that both faculty and
students save time with e-testing. Catanach is up front
about the initial time investment: For instructors to
make best use of the testing programs, they need to
create a “bank” of exam questions and code them by
topic, learning objectives and level of difficulty. That
way, the program knows how to distribute questions. (He
said instructors should budget roughly 10 extra hours
per week during the course for this task.)
The payoff, he said, comes later in the term. In the
study, professors reported recouping an average of 80
hours by using the e-exams. Faculty don’t have to
hand-grade tests (that often being a deterrent for the
Friday test, Catanach notes), and graduate students or
administrative staff can help prepare the test banks,
the report points out.
Since tests are taken from afar, class time can be used
for other purposes. Students are less likely to ask
about test results during sessions, the study says,
because the computer program gives them immediate
results and points to pages where they can find out why
their answers were incorrect. Satris said this type of
system likely dissuades students from grade groveling,
because the explanations are all there on the computer.
He said it also make sense in other ways.
“I
like that professors can truly say, ‘I don’t know what’s
going to be on the test. There’s a question bank; it’s
out of my control,’ ” he said.
And then there’s the common argument about
administrative efficiency: An institution can keep a
permanent electronic record of its students.
Survey results showed that Villanova students, who
Catanach said were more likely to have their own laptop
computers and be familiar with e-technology, responded
better to the electronic testing system than did
students at Philadelphia, who weren’t as tech savvy.
Both Catanach and Satris said the e-testing programs are
not likely to excite English and philosophy professors,
whose disciplines call for essay questions rather than
computer-graded content.
From a testing perspective, Catanach said the programs
can be most helpful for faculty with large classes who
need to save time on grading. That’s why the programs
have proven popular at community colleges in some of the
larger states, he said.
“It works for almost anyone who wants to have periodic
assessment,” he said. “How much does the midterm and
final motivate students to keep up with material? It
doesn’t. It motivates cramming. This is a tool to help
students keep up with the material.”
Bob Jensen attempts to
make a case that self learning is more effective for metacognitive reasons
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm This document features the research of Tony
Catanach, David Croll, Bob Grinaker, and
Noah Barsky.
Myth 05
Only wealthy schools can set up virtual classrooms and conduct reliable distance education
programs. Technologies for virtual classrooms and high quality
asynchronous course delivery are exceedingly expensive, especially in terms of the cost of
backup systems for the primary systems. These are sometimes too costly and too
complicated even for the wealthy schools. Fortunately, there are relatively
inexpensive alternatives available from external providers such as eCollege,
Blackboard, and HorizonLive. For more details see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
Myth 06
The most important goals of technology in education should always be to make learning
unambiguous, easier, faster, cheaper, and more fun. These are important
goals and, in the 21st Century, technology advances (e.g., wireless communications,
improved bandwidth, audio access, knowledge portals, ubiquitous computing, etc.) will take
education and training to unbelievable heights. The problem is that we are also
discovering more about human metacognition and the fact that deep learning and deep
memory rely more upon discovering answers "on your own" with frustration,
pain, anger, ambiguity, mistaken paths, making and correcting of mistakes, and
serendipity. The fact of the matter is that students may be better off if instructors
program in deliberate mistakes and fail to provide easy access to some learning content.
Bob Jensen's Working Paper 265
Concerns Giving Students the Full Benefits of Newer Technologies May Be Hazardous to Their
Long Run Memory and Accomplishments.
Multimedia and Other Technologies Can Give
Students What They Want by Making Learning More of the Following:
Easy (e.g.,
interactive graphics, interactive databases, ease of search, ease of access, ease of
finding help, ease of navigation, etc.)
Fun (animations,
videos, audio, etc.)
Inspirational
(cream-of-the-crop instructors, access to experts and motivators)
Realistic (networked
simulations and virtual reality)
Collaborative (ease
of communication and collaborative software)
Efficient (learn
from any location at any time at less cost with personalized knowledge bases and portals)
What Students Want is Not Necessarily What They
Need
Humans retain more when something is hard to learn.
Humans retain more when something is painful to learn and that part of the retention of what is
learned is the struggle in finding the answers.
Students retain more when they reason and discover
something on their own.
Leaning from mistakes
may be the best teacher.
Humans are prone to information
overload.
The pace of life
and learning may indeed be a killer.
Myth 07
Knowledge portals of the future will be so fantastic that there will be little need for
courses, instructors, or student interactions. Knowledge portals such as
Fathom at Columbia University will become bigger and better to a point where they will be
described as panaceas to ignorance at all levels of knowledge. But they will not
likely be true panaceas to deep learning and deep memory. Ironically, educators of
the future may be needed to create ambiguity, difficulty, pain, and frustration to
overcome the simplicity of knowledge portals. Also there will be so much knowledge
in the world's knowledge bases that educators will be desperately needed to put together
curricula "cruises" that can be managed by students in a sea of knowledge.
See my threads on knowledge portals at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm.
Myth 08
A major advantage of education technologies is that they make life easier for
instructors. Nothing can be further from the truth than the myth that
instructional technologies make it easier to teach a course. In fact, the major
drawback is that use of technologies causes instructor burn out even among instructors who
are proficient in the use of these technologies. One of the burn out factors is the
increased burden of dealing with heavy electronic communications from students and the
monitoring of student communications in electronic chat rooms. Another drawback is
that learning materials should be designed specifically for an online pedagogy. Old
lecture materials cannot simply be pasted into a web server with the expectation that
students will get as much from reading them as they did from listening to the
lectures. Lecture materials must be redesigned into hypertext and hypermedia format
with gaps filled in where the lecturer tends to ad lib or interact live with students in
class. Messages from "daring professors" on their frustrations with
educational technologies can be found at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm.
Myth 09
For a variety of reasons (notably convenience of course access and/or
timing), there will be less student attrition in online courses than onsite
courses.
It is very common for a higher proportion on online students to not complete
distance education courses. Many reasons are confounded in this
phenomenon. One of the major reasons is that online students are often
part-time students who are not able to take an onsite course because of job
and/or family commitments (e.g., a parent who must be home caring for
children or a person with an unpredictable work schedule that may entail
frequent travel.). Such students sign up for the online course with
great optimism for how much time can be devoted to the online course
and later discover that they were overly optimistic. Another reason is
the "try out" phenomenon. Since online courses are sometimes
easier to "try out" with fewer logistical problems of getting to
an onsite class, there is a tendency for students to enroll for a trial
period and then drop if their grades are lower than expected before the
deadline for dropping a course.
Some Other
Myths
147 PRACTICAL TIPS FOR TEACHING ONLINE
GROUPS: ESSENTIALS OF WEB-BASED EDUCATION, by Donald E.
Hanna, Michelle Glowacki-Dudka, and Simone Conceicao-Runlee [Overland Park, KS: Atwood
Publishing, 2000, ISBN: 189185934X]
Myths of Online
Teaching and Learning
43.
Myth: Learners are unable to adapt to the online
environment
44.
Myth: The instructor has to know how to do everything
45.
Myth: Time requirements for teachers are lower in an online
environment
46.
Myth: Online classrooms aren't conducive to group
interaction and activities
Learner-Teacher
Learner-Learner
Learner-Guest Expert
Learner-Student (e.g., where the learner is practice
teaching)
Learner-Interviewee (e.g., where student plays the
role of an interviewer)
47.
Myth: Online classrooms aren't as social as face-to-face
classrooms
48.
Myth: The number of learners in online classrooms can be
unlimited
49
Myth: Technology will always work
50.
Myth: The course will market itself; post it on the web and
they will come
51.
Myth: Learners will always understand your intended
expectations for them from your clearly written syllabus
Dropout rates are down and
test scores are up. Students are engaged in learning and their self-esteem is
soaring. So what's really going on within the classroom walls of the country's
top wired schools? By Leslie Bennetts
Once upon a time, back in the
olden days, kids used to exult about getting out of school, celebrating their
release from drudgery by singing "No more pencils, no more books!"
or so the schoolyard ditty would have it. These days, with the explosion of
technology that's revolutionizing education around the country, many students
are now eager to stay after school, competing for access to all the high-tech
equipment that's opening up so many new opportunities to them.
For younger kids, technology
is transforming the schoolwork their older siblings sometimes regarded as
tedious into challenging games and activities. For high-school students,
technology may banish once and for all the tired questions about relevance.
Even the most rebellious adolescents are aware of the real-world value of the
skills and experience they're getting in wired schools.
Teachers who have
mastered the art of integrating technology into the curriculum also deserve
credit. For a closer look at some of the ways educators are transforming
American schools, here are six outstanding examples from this year's Top 100
Wired Schools—two elementary, two middle, and two high schools that have
applied creativity as well as resources to the educational challenges of the
21st century.
My sampling of innovations includes the
following:
CAMELOT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL Lewiston, Idaho
This year, 6th-graders and their Idaho pen pals are
discussing a state proposal to remove dams on the Snake River; the
environmentally friendly plan to encourage salmon breeding could have an
adverse impact on the livelihood of some state residents, including their
parents. "The kids are learning that people in other parts of the state
are impacted in different ways by the same issue," says Kuntz.
CAMELOT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL Lewiston, Idaho
(After drawing monsters, 3rd-graders must describe them in English (creative
writing) to e-mail pals at other schools.)
The culmination of the project is a picnic at a local
park. The kids from the different schools, who have not met before, line up
holding their monster pictures and try to find their monster twin. After the
picnic, students create Web pages about the project, including their monster
descriptions, their own drawing, and the drawing that their pal made. The
pals continue their e-mail relationships for the rest of the school year.
DELANO OPTIONAL SCHOOL Memphis, Tennessee
Students in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades produce a
daily news show, the "Noon News," which is broadcast to every
classroom via closed-circuit TV. Each week, a team of students fills 15
positions, from director and producer to sound technicians, visual
designers, and weather announcers, with each successive crew training the
next one. They use digital audio/video mixers to switch between the cameras
and the computers for different video shots. Broadcasts run from 10 to 25
minutes and include world news.
At the end of the year, the school celebrates students' achievements with a
Technology Fair, where students create traditional cardboard displays and
multimedia presentations that show their use of technology. Parents and
friends are invited to attend the fair.
FAYETTE MIDDLE SCHOOL Fayette, Alabama
Last spring local leaders asked the school to create a
CD-ROM highlighting all the good things the town of Fayette has to offer,
with the idea of using it to advertise the community and attract new
businesses.
(Students in the 8th-grade actually worked with civic leaders to produce the
CD.)
AUDUBON MIDDLE SCHOOL Milwaukee, Wisconsin
An urban school with a predominantly minority student
body, 98 percent of whom are bussed to school from the inner city, Audubon
has made enormous strides in getting wired over the last few years.
Last September, several 6th-grade social studies classes from Audubon, under
the instruction of Karen Jagmin, cooperated with a group of 10th-graders
from another Milwaukee public school in a project involving the Olympics in
Sydney. The students picked Olympic sports they were interested in,
researched the sport and its athletes, and kept track of the United States'
performance in the competitions using the Internet, newspapers, online
magazines, CD-ROMs, and TV. Every day they e-mailed a group of high-school
students in Sydney, who would respond to their questions.
Among the topics the students discussed via e-mail were whether other
countries make icons out of sports figures the way the United States does,
and how cultural differences affect the ways in which athletes are selected
and trained. The Audubon students made spreadsheets and graphs showing
everything from the medal counts to the shot-put distances, and they wrote
summaries explaining their data. They then worked in cooperative groups to
create PowerPoint presentations about their experiences to share with other
students in their grade and with their 10th-grade partners via Audubon's
distance-learning network.
GRANBY HIGH SCHOOL Norfolk, Virginia
Last fall, Fred Hartnett, an advanced placement
government teacher at Granby, taught an entire unit using Web-based
assignments. His students participated in the Youth Leadership Initiative
sponsored by the University of Virginia. The kids registered online for a
statewide mock election to vote for presidential, congressional, and
senatorial candidates. One class member attended a training session at the
university to serve as a student facilitator. Each student used the Internet
to research a state's past presidential voting history and current polling
projections. The unit culminated in an election-night sleepover at the
school in which students tracked the results of the election, including the
cliffhanger presidential race. "A number of kids were saying, 'I'll
never miss another election,' because of the drama of just being
involved," says Michael J. Caprio, the principal. "It was very
valuable; they saw what the system was all about. They saw democracy work.
They lived history."
GULF COAST HIGH SCHOOL Naples, Florida
In Gulf Coast's interdisciplinary approach to
learning, teachers from more than one academic area work together to design
a teaching unit. One recent project was called Legends, an unusual
collaboration between the English and physical education departments in
which students studied the tale of King Arthur. "Students in the
English classes took different themes: King Arthur in stained glass, King
Arthur in literature, King Arthur in Broadway plays, and so on," Gates
says. "They researched their topics using the Internet and created
presentations that included 3D animation, sound, and video. The physical
education classes researched medieval and Renaissance dance and sporting
events like jousting. They learned medieval dances, which they taught to the
students in the English class. The results were filmed and are being made
into a CD-ROM."
In fact, the phys ed department infuses technology
into all of its fitness activities. "Every single one of our PE courses
uses video and digital photography in many ways, including analyzing
movement in sports and presenting information on fitness and health,"
says Gates. "Students research a topic such as jet skiing, kayaking, or
surfing, and make a PowerPoint presentation about that fitness activity.
They also take digital pictures of the correct way to use each weight and
exercise machine in the school's fitness room and they post the images on
the school's Web site."
Ideas
for Modifying Traditional Classroom Materials
Into Online Learning Materials
(Including Updates on MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative called OKI)
One of the most frequently asked questions asked in my education
technology workshops is as follows:
"In what ways should course content materials be
modified for online learning?"
My quick and dirty response is that faculty who develop content should learn
how to use FrontPage or some other good HTML editor and then learn how to screen
capture and video capture themselves rather than relying upon technicians.
You can learn Microsoft FrontPage, screen capturing, and Camtasia video
capturing in just a few days with a little help from your friends. With a
little added effort, you can make your online course materials more interactive
by saving Excel worksheets as interactive Webpages and by learning how to use
JavaScript. You can learn all of these things in less than a week if you
have the correct software and hardware.
MP3 Audio
Audio capturing is especially
important since you can let students hear what you like to say in lectures
or case discussions. For example, in an Excel spreadsheet you can add
buttons that students can click on to hear your explanation of what is
going on in various cells of the spreadsheet. Look under "Resources" at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
Camtasia AVI Versus RM Recordings
--- See
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm
Flesh in PowerPoint, Excel, or other presentations with
video and audio. Camtasia works great for both capturing dynamic
computer screen presentations in video accompanied by your audio
explanations. Your video files may take up more
space than you are allowed on your Web server. However, you can save
them to CD-R or CD-RW disks that can be sold to students for around $1.00
per disk. You can learn more about Camtasia from
http://www.techsmith.com/
. You can make CDs by simply dragging files to a blank CD using
Windows Explorer if you first install Easy CD (http://www.roxio.com/en/products/ecdc/
).
Excel Saved as Webpages Can Add Interactivity In Imaginative Ways
Suppose that you want to have students make journal entries in a HTML
Webpage. Or suppose you want to see the impact of interest rate swap
valuations with changes in forward yield curve estimates.
Or suppose you want an interactive Excel chart imported into a HTML Webpage
where the chart will change when the reader changes the loan principal,
interest rate, or maturity date.
JavaScript Calculations and
Interactivity
Try to make your online materials more interactive by saving Excel
workbooks as interactive Webpages and use of JavaScipt. For my
JavaScript tutorials, see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
.
Amy Dunbar's Online Pedagogy
Make a lot more use of online questions and answers that replace the
question and answer type of style that you probably use in lectures.
Amy Dunbar uses this approach extensively. You
can read about how she developed her first online course. See
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q4.htm#Dunbar
Recent developments
in digital imaging, streaming audio and video, and interactive human-machine
interfaces provide a wealth of opportunities to enhance the learning
experience. More important than the technologies, however, is the context in
which the multimedia enhancements are presented to learners. The design and
development of combined media components—text, graphics, audio, video,
animation, and simulations—for enhancing the learning process will depend on
the learning model appropriate for the delivery of given course content. A
list of a few potential multimedia enhancements might include:
Audio annotations
to graphics
Graphical
visualization
Audio annotations
to video demonstrations
Video
demonstration of graphical elements
Animated graphical
frames (animated gifs)
Audio annotations
for animated graphics
Animation of
physical concepts
Text annotations
to video frames
Animated
simulations
Numerical
simulations for parametric studies
Graphical
simulation of mathematical equations
Video, animations,
and simulations offer exceptional potential for enhancing the interface of
education. Experimental demonstrations and real-life experiences and
situations can be captured on video and provided as digital video.
You can now get free e-books on iTunes U. Apple announced today that
Oxford, Rice, and the Open University have all added digital books to the
lectures and other materials traditionally available on the popular
educational-content platform.
"New at iTunes U: Free E-Books," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education,
October 29, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-at-itunes-u-free-e-books/27957?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
How to embed a YouTube video window into
PowerPoint (which can be viewed when online if the link is not broken)
October 24, 2009 message from Rohan Chambers
[rohanchambers@ROHANCHAMBERS.COM]
I just learnt
this! I know that some of
you already know how to do it, but for the others who are interested:
Study the Works of Pioneers Who Have Experimented Early On
Update on free sharing of courseware
from MIT, Stanford, EDUCAUSE and elsewhere.
"CourseWork: An Online Problem Set and Quizzing Tool," by Charles
Kerns, Scott Stocker, and Evonne Schaeffer, Syllabus, June 2001, 27-29.
I don't think the article is available online, although archived table of
contents for the June edition is at
http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/magazine.asp?month=6&year=2001
A Web-based learning
support tool that helps faculty assess student understanding will soon be a
component of the Open Knowledge infrastructure under the development at
Stanford, MIT, and other universities.
THE OPEN
KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE (OKI)
MIT, along with its
principal partner Stanford University, has launched The Open Knowledge
Initiative (OKI), an ambitious project to develop a modular,
easy-to-use, Web-based teaching environment for assembling,
delivering, and accessing educational resources and activities.
The initiative emerged from the realization that our institutions were
repeatedly building specialized Web applications that shared common
requirements for enterprise data and services. Existing
commercial products still require extensive customization to integrate
into student information, authentication, and authorization systems,
and related data stores. Faculty using these tools frequently
complain that while sometimes helpful, they require extra effort,
forcing them to impose their style of teaching upon the rigidly
structured course system format. And changing the color of the
screen or shape of the buttons isn't the level of customization that
really supports different pedagogical approaches.
What is OKI?
OKI is about tools, a
system, and a community. It is not a new browser, document
editor, or pre-packaged content. OKI tools are the
elements that enable basic teaching on the Web and that support
specialized discipline-specific needs, pedagogical methods, or group
logistics.
OKI is being developed
with careful attention to IMS, SCORM, AICC,
Dublin Core, and related standards efforts. In keeping with
another recently announced MIT project, the OpenCourseWare
Initiative (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw-facts.html)
which will make content from MIT courses available on the Web
for free, OKI is based on an open source licensing model (there
are no proprietary components). It allows the tools, no
matter who creates them, to:
Save information about
learners, subjects, and teaching methods in the same format
Share information
Access other systems like
the library, the registrar, and authentication and authorization
systems
Extend the system; anyone
can add new features and new tools.
OKI is being built by
institutions that have dealt with large open systems in academic
settings. Besides MIT and Stanford, core initial
collaborating institutions include the Dartmouth College, North
Carolina State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the
University of Wisconsin.
Recalling the vitality and
success of another open source effort, the development of the Linux
operating system, OKI hopes to build a community of developers,
teachers, educational technologists, librarians, and researchers who
will collaborate to continually improve and extend the OKI
learning management system. OKI is committed to working
with its partners and early adopters to establish a dynamic open
source framework for continued development, support, and training.
Getting Involved
Information about the
progress of OKI can be found on the OKI Web site:
http://web.mit.edu/oki . For updates subscribe to the list
oki-announce@mit.edu
using the form on the OKI Web site. If you'd like to
contribute more directly to this effort, e-mail
oki-suggest@mit.edu.
Update on Course Design and OKI
"Designer of Free Course-Management Software Asks, What Makes a Good Web
Site?" by Jefferey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education's
interview with Charles Kerns, one of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI)
management team, January 21, 2002 ---
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002012101u.htm
What makes a good course Web site? That's one of the
questions facing Charles F. Kerns, education-technology manager for academic
computing at Stanford University, as he helps design a new course-management
system that will be free for any college to use.
The effort to create the course-management system,
called the Open Knowledge Initiative, is led by Stanford and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and also involves several other colleges. The group
plans to release a series of software modules to help professors teach both
classroom and online courses, as well as a set of technical specifications
that will let programmers at other colleges develop compatible software.
Before working on the Open Knowledge project, Mr.
Kerns led the Stanford Learning Lab, a division of the university that does
research and development into using technology in education.
Q. What makes a good course Web site?
A. There's a lot of activities that you can engage in
on the computer, but if you just slap them together as an add-on to a course
without really thinking about how it fits in with all the other things in the
course, it doesn't make much sense. So I don't really like to think about a
course Web site; I like to think about all the learning activities and how
they work together.
I'd say a good Web site is one that doesn't just sort
of hang out there as an independent entity, but is an important part of
teaching for the course.
Let me give you an example of one. When I was in the
Learning Lab, we worked for several years with the human-biology program here
at Stanford, and one of the issues that we had was how to get an understanding
of the misconceptions and the knowledge of the students by using weekly
assignments -- and how to grade them with limited resources. So the research
team at the Learning Lab developed a system where we have multiple-choice
questions, and then the multiple-choice questions also have a free-text entry
area for putting in a rationale for the answer.
Pedagogically, this is sound ... and it also helps in
time management, because you can sort the questions for the most frequently
missed questions. So you can be very efficient in looking at where students
have problems, and then you can look at their answers in the rationales and
find out what the misconceptions are.
Q. What are some misconceptions about designing
course Web sites?
A. One of the big problems is if you think the
instructor has to do an upfront information-design task that might take six
months. Then it's such a high barrier to using technology and multimedia. But
if you let the students, as part of their research, post the material on the
site ... then you don't have to go through this long authoring process ahead
of time, and you can take the role you normally do as a professor -- critique
student work.
You probably don't write a textbook the first time
you start teaching the class. ... Making an engaging Web site with all of the
content is not the really important part of course Web sites -- it's the
communication aspect [that's important].
Q. What are the biggest challenges for designing the
Open Knowledge Initiative?
A. One is the wide range of skill levels of our
faculty. We have many faculty who could write this [software], and we have
many faculty who use e-mail and the Web, and that's about it. We have this
wide range of skill levels, so how do we support across this?
We also have different practices in different
disciplines. ... We have a lot of peer-reviewed writing assignments in our
writing courses, but we have nothing quite like that in our engineering and
science courses. There's lots of variants for different departments, so how do
we accommodate all this, and these different skill levels, and have something
for the student that looks coherent?
Q. So is one of the unique aspects of the Open
Knowledge Initiative the attempt to accommodate the teaching needs of
different disciplines?
A. The idea is that in this open-source system, you
can make modules, and they will work [together]. For instance, if I got a
grant to build something, then I could build a module that was focused on my
problem -- let's say in product design, or mechanical engineering, or English.
Then I could use the other tools that were already there for gradebooks and
announcements and that sort of thing, but I'd have my module that focused on
my specific needs.
That's Step 2 for us right now, though. Step 1 is to
have a basic system that covers things like posting documents, making
announcements, giving quizzes, having a home page. That's a star we can almost
reach. We're getting close.
If you
know any accounting educators with helpful materials on the web, please ask them
to link their materials in the American Accounting Association's
Accounting Coursepage Exchange (ACE) web site at
http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/ace/index.htm
Please send these professors email messages today and urge them to share as much
as they can with the academy by easily registering their course pages with ACE
"Designer of Free Course-Management Software Asks, What Makes a Good Web
Site?" by Jefferey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education's
interview with Charles Kerns, one of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI)
management team, January 21, 2002 ---
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002012101u.htm
What makes a good course Web site? That's one of the
questions facing Charles F. Kerns, education-technology manager for academic
computing at Stanford University, as he helps design a new course-management
system that will be free for any college to use.
The effort to create the course-management system,
called the Open Knowledge Initiative, is led by Stanford and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and also involves several other colleges. The group
plans to release a series of software modules to help professors teach both
classroom and online courses, as well as a set of technical specifications
that will let programmers at other colleges develop compatible software.
Before working on the Open Knowledge project, Mr.
Kerns led the Stanford Learning Lab, a division of the university that does
research and development into using technology in education.
Q. What makes a good course Web site?
A. There's a lot of activities that you can engage in
on the computer, but if you just slap them together as an add-on to a course
without really thinking about how it fits in with all the other things in the
course, it doesn't make much sense. So I don't really like to think about a
course Web site; I like to think about all the learning activities and how
they work together.
I'd say a good Web site is one that doesn't just sort
of hang out there as an independent entity, but is an important part of
teaching for the course.
Let me give you an example of one. When I was in the
Learning Lab, we worked for several years with the human-biology program here
at Stanford, and one of the issues that we had was how to get an understanding
of the misconceptions and the knowledge of the students by using weekly
assignments -- and how to grade them with limited resources. So the research
team at the Learning Lab developed a system where we have multiple-choice
questions, and then the multiple-choice questions also have a free-text entry
area for putting in a rationale for the answer.
Pedagogically, this is sound ... and it also helps in
time management, because you can sort the questions for the most frequently
missed questions. So you can be very efficient in looking at where students
have problems, and then you can look at their answers in the rationales and
find out what the misconceptions are.
Q. What are some misconceptions about designing
course Web sites?
A. One of the big problems is if you think the
instructor has to do an upfront information-design task that might take six
months. Then it's such a high barrier to using technology and multimedia. But
if you let the students, as part of their research, post the material on the
site ... then you don't have to go through this long authoring process ahead
of time, and you can take the role you normally do as a professor -- critique
student work.
You probably don't write a textbook the first time
you start teaching the class. ... Making an engaging Web site with all of the
content is not the really important part of course Web sites -- it's the
communication aspect [that's important].
Q. What are the biggest challenges for designing the
Open Knowledge Initiative?
A. One is the wide range of skill levels of our
faculty. We have many faculty who could write this [software], and we have
many faculty who use e-mail and the Web, and that's about it. We have this
wide range of skill levels, so how do we support across this?
We also have different practices in different
disciplines. ... We have a lot of peer-reviewed writing assignments in our
writing courses, but we have nothing quite like that in our engineering and
science courses. There's lots of variants for different departments, so how do
we accommodate all this, and these different skill levels, and have something
for the student that looks coherent?
Q. So is one of the unique aspects of the Open
Knowledge Initiative the attempt to accommodate the teaching needs of
different disciplines?
A. The idea is that in this open-source system, you
can make modules, and they will work [together]. For instance, if I got a
grant to build something, then I could build a module that was focused on my
problem -- let's say in product design, or mechanical engineering, or English.
Then I could use the other tools that were already there for gradebooks and
announcements and that sort of thing, but I'd have my module that focused on
my specific needs.
That's Step 2 for us right now, though. Step 1 is to
have a basic system that covers things like posting documents, making
announcements, giving quizzes, having a home page. That's a star we can almost
reach. We're getting close.
From CIT Infobits Newsletter on January 31, 2002
MORE ON GOOD COURSE WEBSITE DESIGN
In the summer of 2001, the University of Oregon
Library System's Web Publishing Curriculum was redesigned to incorporate many
of the newer standards, including HTML 4.01 and Cascading Style Sheets. The
site, aimed at developers in colleges and universities, includes web page
design tutorials, guidelines for good practice, and a collection of handouts
for use in web publishing workshops. The site is available at
http://libweb.uoregon.edu/it/webpub/
EDUCAUSE has developed this Effective Practices and
Solutions (EPS) service to
offer you a way to easily share the practices and
solutions you have implemented on your campus that you have found to be
effective in managing and using information technology;
provide an information service to help you learn
"who is doing what" among your colleagues to solve common
challenges; and
bring your practice or solution to the attention
of the planners of EDUCAUSE professional development activities, who are
always looking for interesting new content and contributors for
publications and conferences.
This service is entirely member-driven; its success
depends on your willingness to share your successes with your colleagues to
help them save time and resources. The more practices contributed to the
service, the more valuable it will become. Please note that practices in the
EPS database have been identified as effective and replicable by their
contributors; their value has not been judged by EDUCAUSE.
The term
“textbook” no longer necessarily means a sturdy bound volume of sewn
pages. Today’s textbook may be that, or it may be an entirely online
product with hyperlinks in place of pages, or perhaps a combination of
CD-ROM, Web site, and printed handouts. The five companies highlighted here
publish and/or distribute digital texts, each with a unique approach.
Rovia, based in
Brookline, Mass., distributes copyrighted intellectual property online.
Rovia works with publishers to deliver online content to students while
protecting the publishers’ rights. Using the RovReader, a proprietary
browser plug-in, users can access and interact with their electronic
textbooks from any Internet-capable device.
www.rovia.com
MetaText offers
completely online textbooks integrated with course management systems (CMS).
MetaText has partnered with several course management system providers,
including Blackboard, and also offers its own course management features
such as Course Editor and SyllabusEditor.
www.metatext.com
Atomic Dog
Publishers has merged the roles of traditional print publisher and online
content provider into what they call “hybred” (as opposed to hybrid)
media publishing. Their titles are a combination of online content,
interactive media, and print component. Atomic Dog’s holistic approach
starts with the content, building technology tools such as video and
animation around the subject matter.
www.atomicdog.com
Thinkwell
Publishers, based in Austin, Texas, offers textbook content in both CD-ROM
and online formats. Thinkwell’s titles (about 15 so far in the social
sciences and sciences) feature a complete set of video lectures (about 10
minutes each in length), illustrated notes to accompany the lectures, and
even transcripts of the lectures for those who need them.
www.thinkwell.com
OpenMind publishes
customized, personalized learning materials. They work with authors to
publish original content or supplements to existing OpenMind content. Using
an open source model, OpenMind encourages authors and adopters to engage in
a collaborative process of continuously revising, improving, and customizing
content.
www.ompg.com
More than 1,000 questions inspired by content in
accounting textbooks are featured in a new online game created for high
school students.
The AICPA helped develop
the game, called “Bank On It,” which is available
at
startheregoplaces.com. The game is intended to be
a fun, engaging way for educators to reinforce the accounting principles
being taught in class while giving their students a taste of real
working-world scenarios in the accounting profession.
The concept for the game was designed by a team of
high school students who won the AICPA’s
Project Innovation Competition. The game is won by
reaching a winning bank balance set prior to starting. Players earn money by
answering questions correctly and landing on other strategic spaces as they
move around the board.
Players can play the game at the “Staff Accountant”
or “CEO” level, focusing on business and industry, public accounting, or
not-for-profit accounting. Sample questions below are pulled from “Staff
Accountant” and “CEO” levels for business and industry.
I’ve written a lot about
using and making games for the classroom here at
ProfHacker, as while games and learning have been around for a long time our
ability (and interest) in realizing their potential is on the rise. One of
the continuing challenges for bringing games into education is assessing the
impact of games on learning. Often, it’s hard even to agree on what we want
games to accomplish: are we most interested in raising student engagement?
Reaching learners who are alienated by traditional lectures? Increasing
critical thinking and analysis skills? Or getting content memorized or
absorbed?
Games for Change
and the
Michael Cohen
Group just released a report,
Impact with Games: A Fragmented Field, that
addresses some of these questions. It’s a great read for those of us
thinking about the ramifications and challenges games present for higher
education. Today I’m going to take a look at a few of the highlights that
might be particularly of interest for ProfHackers working with digital
pedagogy.
The group found five sources of disconnect within
the field that contribute to the challenge of measuring impact: of those,
two that strike me as particularly important are that ”Impact is defined too
narrowly” and ”Evaluation methods are inflexible.” These are some of the
frustrations with assessment that accompany any digital pedagogy, as we may
default to using comparative measures (does this game “teach” better than a
lecture?) rather than defining new metrics for a different type of learning
Defining games by their impact is one way to find
great games that become the imitable standards for socially conscious or
serious gaming. However, these games don’t all “teach” content in an
expected way, and the impact of a game might even be entirely unrelated to
knowledge-based outcomes–for instance, a great game might bring a team
together for collaboration and problem-solving in new ways. The
team observes that: ”When evaluators and
researchers stick too rigidly to their preferred methods they lose the
flexibility required to tailor assessment to unusual and complex games. Such
rigidity can be dangerous, sometimes leading to games based on evaluation
methods (rather than methods based on the game).”
What if the classroom were more like a video game?
Barry J. Fishman, a professor of information and
education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, would like to help you
find out. Mr. Fishman has borrowed elements of gaming to develop
GradeCraft, a learning-management system that lets
instructors organize their courses in a “gameful” way.
The system lets students choose their own path
through a course, selecting the assignments that interest and challenge
them. At its heart is a tool, called the “grade predictor,” that helps to
“manage some of the chaos” of such a personalized system. The grade
predictor also helps students figure out what they need to do to reach the
classroom goals they set for themselves.
GradeCraft also aims to give students the ability
to fail without detrimental consequences. There are many assignments to
choose from, so any students who do poorly on one can find plenty of other
tasks to redeem themselves. Instructors, meanwhile, can allow students to
revise their work. Mr. Fishman’s assessment system treats unsuccessful
assignments not as failures but as learning experiences that pull students
closer to mastery.
Today’s students are often made to feel that they
can’t afford to make mistakes, Mr. Fishman says. In video games, by
contrast, risks don’t come with serious consequences: Maybe you just end up
repeating a level. “The idea that, if you played a game and when your
character died that was it, that game couldn’t be played anymore, that would
not be a very good-selling game,” he says.
I just got home from
THATCamp Games II
at Case Western Reserve University, where we
played and made a lot of games. In the past I’ve talked about
making games for the classroom using lots of
technologies (Inform
7,
inklewriter,
Twine,
Scratch), but games don’t require any computing
power to be great. Physical board and card games can be powerful systems of
representation and more immediately accessible for exploring something in a
classroom. This might bring back made memories for some of us of classroom
jeopardy–but when the mechanics of the game fit the content, it can be much
more powerful than that.
During THATCamp Games II I taught a crash course
workshop in making educational board games. Here’s
the full Prezi from
the workshop. The same basic process can be used for designing a game for a
lesson or in asking students to make a game, which itself can provoke a
different way of thinking about an idea. Here’s an overview of the process
we used:
Phase One: Imagine
Brainstorm an educational objective
Choose a central mechanic
Clarify your theme
and concept
Most of us learned through board games at some
point–even if it was the foundations of capitalism in Monopoly, a reductive
version of the American dream in the Game of Life, or just color recognition
from Candyland. But board games can address much more complex topics:
Pandemic models cooperative disaster response to
the spreading of infectious diseases;
Eco
Fluxx poses questions of environmentalism
through a changing rules system; and there’s even an
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose board game.
A straightforward goal–a purpose behind the
game–works best when it can clearly be connected with the game. One of the
teams during the workshop chose creative thinking and connected it with
competitive challenges, as seen in the prototype above for “Think. Build.
Tell.” These mechanics can then be interwoven with a theme, ideally in a way
that strengthens both. For instance, a rebranded version of Monopoly may
have a new “theme”, but it doesn’t really change gameplay–while moving a
strategy game to a different era often rewrites all the rules.
Phase Two: Make
Imagine your game space metaphor
Design your system and pieces
Prototype your
playable design
There are lots of ways to think of game boards, but
all of them have to represent something complex in a simple way. Most of
them do that through using a visual metaphor–Monopoly simplifies the city to
a single block, Sorry uses complete abstraction, The Game of Life conflates
movement through space with movement through stages of life. One way to
jumpstart game design thinking is to take all the pieces of a game box and
throw away the rules, then imagine a new ruleset that makes all those pieces
work together. This helps us explore how all the pieces of a physical game
combine to form a system–it’s a lot more transparent than most video games.
Continued in article
Jokes
are a vital part of teaching and learning. Jokes serve many purposes in academe,
and most of these purposes are not taken up in the book reviewed below. But the
book does delve into humor and cognition.
Some famous authors built
their serious messages within humor, notably Mark Twain, PG Wodehouse, Charles
Dickens (sometimes), Shakespeare (sometimes), Will Rogers, and many, many others
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorists
Their messages in many cases live on because of the humor.
Review of Inside Jokes:
Using humor to reverse-engineer the
mind
by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C.
Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.
359pp. MIT Press. Ł20.95 (US $29.95).
December 2012
978 0 262 01582 0
A Dissertation Recommendation The Effects of Humor on Cognitive Learning in a Computer-Based Environment
by Whisonant, Robert Dowling
Virginia Tech, 1998
Free Download
Previous studies on humor in education have focused
on the use of humor embedded in the presentation of content material. Some
research, however, suggests that humor is an effective tool for increasing
divergent thinking and information acquisition if the humor is given prior
to the presentation of content material. This study used an experimental
design to test if humor given prior to content presentation was more
effective in helping students understand and remember information and enjoy
the presentation than a control group treatment. Statistical tests did not
support either hypothesis.
Jensen Comment
One of the biggest mysteries in teaching and writing is how some
teachers/authors can pull humor off amazingly well while others in similar
circumstances perform terribly.
Also be aware that subjects of humor are much more restrained in recent
decades by evolving political correctness. Particularly puzzling is how people
who are from a particular racial, ethnic, gender, or religious cohort may tell
jokes about themselves and their cohort friends that become offensive retold by
humorists outside the cohorts in question. There are very few cohorts for which
there is open season for humor --- except for the elderly, politicians, and
Scandinavians Americans named Ole, Lena, and Sven ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_and_Lena
Welcome to the official web site of the jigsaw
classroom, a cooperative learning technique that reduces racial conflict
among school children, promotes better learning, improves student
motivation, and increases enjoyment of the learning experience. The jigsaw
technique was first developed in the early 1970s by Elliot Aronson and his
students at the University of Texas and the University of California. Since
then, hundreds of schools have used the jigsaw classroom with great success.
The jigsaw approach is considered to be a particularly valuable tool in
averting tragic events such as the Columbine massacre.
The challenge of finding
a game for the classroom can be difficult,
particularly when the games you’ve imagined doesn’t exist. And if you wait
for a particular challenge or topic to make its way into game form, it might
be a while. Educational games and “serious” games haven’t always kept up
with the rest of video gaming, in part because there’s no high return.
Modern game development tends towards large teams and impressive budgets,
and these resources are rarely used on explicitly educational productions.
While efforts like the
STEM Video Game Challenge provide incentives for
new learning games, and commercial titles can often be
adapted for the classroom, there’s still more
potential than games have yet reached.
But if you have a new concept for playful learning,
you can still bring it to life for your classroom. There are two ways to
start thinking about making games in the classroom: the first is to build a
game yourself, and the second is to engage students in making games as a way
to express their own understanding.
You’re probably not
a game designer, although there’s a game for that:
Gamestar Mechanic
can help you “level up” from player to designer. But
it’s also important to remember building games rarely happens alone: as with
digital humanities projects, games lend themselves to collaboration. If you
have a game design program (or even a single course) at your university or a
neighboring school, there might be an opportunity to partner your students
with them towards creating valuable content-based educational games.
Similarly, there may be other faculty who are interested in collaborating on
grant-funded projects to build new educational experiences, or collective
and expanding projects like Reacting
to the Past (which many readers cited as a
classroom game system of choice). You might also find collaborators,
inspiration and games in progress through communities such as
Gameful,
a “secret HQ for making world-changing games”–and community manager Nathan
Maton has a few things to say about
building serious games for education.
There’s also a difference between making a game or
asking your students to make a game as an expression of content for
pedagogical purposes and making a game in the industry. Even a flawed game
can provide an opportunity for learning and discussion. And your students
will often bring a wealth of their own experiences with games to the
process, offering them a chance to make new connections with your course
material.
Ready to try making games? Here are a few tools for
getting started.
Board and card games can be a
great first project, particularly for students. Digital games are
flashy, but board and card games offer the advantages of structured play
with a lower barrier to entry. They can also be good practice for
learning the mechanics and structure of games
without getting bogged down in programming and logic. We’ve all played
some version of classroom jeopardy before, and it remains an example of
taking game-like mechanics and applying them to any content–but when
content guides the way, board games can transcend these roots.
Inform 7
is a modern heir to text-based games, and it’s a
free development tool that’s perfect for interpreting and building
worlds without needing visual elements. Aaron Reed’s Creating
Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 is a
thorough guide to the system. The
Voices of
Spoon River IF offers one example of literary
instruction through the form, while Nick Montfort’s
Book
and Volume demonstrates the potential for
systematic logic. There’s even the
ECG Paper Chase
IF for a meta-experience on the origin of gaming
and educational technology. (Curveship,
a newer interactive narrative platform, is less friendly to
non-programmers than Inform 7 but offers some impressive possibilities.)
GameMaker(with a free
lite version)
allows for building games on two levels: at the surface is an easy to
manipulate, graphical interface for building games. Beneath that, an
advanced scripting language allows for the possibility of delving
further. The
GameMaker’s Apprentice textbook goes
step-by-step through making a variety of basic games drawn from arcade
genre standbys, many of which could serve as the basis for more creative
projects while also offering the tools to build procedural literacy and
digital skills.
GameSaladis a free tool for building simple
games. While GameSalad is only available for Macs, it offers a code-free
way to create graphical games for both mobile platforms and HTML5. It’s
relatively new, and most of the educational games created for it aim at
the younger crowd of kid-friendly mobile apps, but it definitely offers
the chance for experience with logic and rapid
prototyping.
For ideas on getting started, I recently spoke with
Lee Sheldon, author of the recently released The Multiplayer
Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Cengage
Learning 2011), whose book chronicles both his own
and others’ experiments with taking the structures, terminology, and
concepts of a massive multiplayer role-playing game and applying them to the
classroom. You can check out Lee Sheldon’s syllabus at his blog on Gaming
the Classroom, along with more of his reflections
on the experiment, which divided his students into guilds and encouraged
them to “level up” through the semester. After using the course model in its
latest iteration, he reported perfect attendance. He also notes the value in
his system of “grading by attrition”—students are not being punished for
failing, but instead rewarded for progressing and thus less likely to be
defeated early.
As a professional game designer teaching courses on
game design, Lee Sheldon has a natural environment for innovation–but his
concepts open the door for a conversation across disciplines. Lee Sheldon
describes his model as “designing the class as a game”—so not just focusing
on extrinsic rewards (the typical focus of gamification), but instead trying
to promote “opportunities for collaboration” and “intrinsic rewards from
helping others.” As game designers, like teachers, are focused on creating
an experience, many of the strategies for building a class as game are
similar to more traditional preparation. And he advises that these ideas can
work for anyone: “You don’t have to a be a game designer…you can prep like
putting together a lesson plan, but learn the terminology.” Lee Sheldon
explains that one of the benefits of using games as a model is that a game
is abstracted—it has to “feel real”, but you get to “take out the stuff
that isn’t fun.” He also notes that “You can do just about anything in a
game that you can do in real life,” and the wealth of games today is a
testament to that range of possibilities.
Lee Sheldon and his team at RPI are now working on
an experiment with their new
Emergent Reality Lab that offers a possible future
for courses as games. He explained their current project, teaching Mandarin
Chinese as an alternate reality game, as a “Maltese Falcon-esque mystery”
narrative—the class will start out as usual, in a normal classroom, but it
will be interrupted and move into the lab as the students take a virtual
journey across China aided by motion-aware Kinect interfaces in an immersive
environment. Lee Sheldon said that his ideal outcome would be for students
to learn more Chinese than they would in a traditional class.
Continued in article
Teaching Case
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on November 1, 2013
SUMMARY: The article describes expected growth for the first time
in several years during the upcoming Christmas season for video game
manufacturers because of new gaming systems just coming out, the Sony
PlayStation4 and Microsoft Xbox One systems. The article examines
profitability of Electronic Arts and Take-two Interactive relative to
expectations based on analysts' forecasts. Revenue is also examined; the
amount is adjusted to include deferred revenue stemming from accounting
practices based on software revenue recognition requirements. Questions ask
students to access the financial statements to understand the companies'
revenue recognition practices and resulting deferred revenue liability
balances.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is an excellent way to introduce
software revenue recognition with products likely to be of interest to a
good number of students in class. NOTE: INSTRUCTORS SHOULD REMOVE THE
FOLLOWING DISCUSSION BEFORE DISTRIBUTING TO STUDENTS AS IT ANSWERS SEVERAL
OF THE QUESTIONS. Take-Two Interactive Software's disclosure about
significant accounting policies related to revenue recognition states that
their multiple element arrangements provide "a combination of game software,
additional content, maintenance or support." They use vendor specific
objective evidence (VSOE) of fair value of each of these components to
allocate the price of product sold. "Absent VSOE, revenue is deferred until
the earlier of the point at which VSOE of fair value exists for any
undelivered element or until all elements of the arrangement have been
delivered. However, if the only undelivered element is maintenance and
support, the entire arrangement fee is recognized ratably over the
performance period." For Electronic Arts, disclosure about similar issues is
made under Note 10: Balance Sheet Details. Discussion of deferred net
revenue indicates that the balance is related to online-enabled games. This
balance "generally includes the unrecognized revenue from bundled sales of
certain online-enabled games for which we do not have VSOE for the
obligation to provide unspecified updates. We recognize revenue from the
sales of online-enabled games for which we do not have...[this] VSOE ...on a
straight-line basis, generally over an estimated six-month period beginning
in the month after shipment. " The most interesting is the difference
between the two companies' treatment of the related COGS. Take-Two
Interactive states, "For arrangements which require that revenue recognition
is deferred, the cost of goods sold is deferred and recognized as the
related net revenue is recognized. Deferred cost of goods sold includes
product costs, software development costs and royalties, internal royalties
and license amortization and royalties." Electronic Arts, on the other hand,
expenses "...the cost of revenue related to these transactions during the
period in which the product is delivered (rather than on a deferred basis)."
Questions ask the students to identify this issue and speculate as to the
companies' reasons for the differing treatment of related costs. The
questions also ask students to state the source of the requirements for
treatment of these items which can be found in ASC 985-605-25-5 through 7
and 25-10 as well as in the general revenue recognition sections of
605-25-30-6a through 30-7. Take-Two Interactive has made its filing on Form
10-Q for the quarter ended 9/30/13 on 10/30/13 and is available at
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=946581&accession_number=0001047469-13-010066&xbrl_type=v#
For Electronic Arts, only the Filing of the press release on Form 8-K has
been made as of this writing; its most recent 10-Q was for the quarter ended
June 30, 2013 and is available at
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=712515&accession_number=0000712515-13-000037&xbrl_type=v#
2. (Introductory) The article forecasts growth for these two
companies this Christmas season. What is the major reason for expecting that
growth?
3. (Introductory) How is the growth expected to affect the two
companies' earnings as described in the article?
4. (Introductory) The author also compares revenues by the two
companies. How is this comparison affected by deferred revenues? In your
answer, define the term deferred revenue.
5. (Advanced) Access the two companies' quarterly filings on Form
10-Q for the most recent period available (see above). Locate the amounts of
deferred revenue on each companies' balance sheet. State the amounts you
find and describe the size of these balances relative to the overall
business.
6. (Advanced) Again access the Electronic Arts quarterly filing on
Form 10-Q for the most recent period available and Click on "Balance Sheet
Details" under "Notes Tables." For what types of products does Electronic
Arts defer revenue?
7. (Advanced) Now access the Take-Two Interactive filing on Form
10-Q for the most recent period available and Click on Accounting Policies
in the left hand column, then scroll down to Revenue Recognition. Again
describe the type of products for which the company defers revenue
8. (Advanced) What do you notice that is different about the two
companies' policies? Why do you think the companies have this difference in
accounting practices? How do you think this difference will affect quarterly
profitability comparisons between the two companies, as is done in this
article?
9. (Introductory) What accounting standard requires EA and TTI to
defer these components of revenue? Provide specific references to a section
or sections of the FASB's Accounting Standards Codification.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
Videogame makers Electronic Arts Inc. EA +0.96% and
Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. TTWO +4.49% raised their full-year
outlooks following strong sales of their products and early indications of
robust holiday sales.
The forecasts indicate the industry is upbeat that
new hardware releases from Sony Corp. 6758.TO -11.13% and Microsoft Corp.
MSFT -0.38% in November will jump-start videogame sales after years of
struggling to find growth.
EA raised its adjusted profit view by a nickel to
$1.25 a share, while Take-Two raised its per-share outlook to between $3.50
to $3.75. Both were above average analyst expectations.
EA reported its loss narrowed by 28% to $273
million in its fiscal second quarter, thanks to cost-cutting efforts and
successful launches of new big-name new titles, such as its "Madden"
football game and "Plants vs. Zombies 2" strategy game for mobile devices.
EA said sales fell about 2% to $695 million.
Adjusted for items such as deferred revenue, sales tallied $1.04 billion,
down slightly from the $1.08 billion a year prior.
Take-Two Interactive, meanwhile, posted a wider
loss in its fiscal second quarter, due in part to increased marketing costs
for its games. Take-Two said sales fell more than 45% to $148.9
million—though when adjusted for items such as deferred revenue, the tally
jumped to $1.27 billion, up significantly from the $288 million it reported
a year ago.
Behind that jump was the company's latest "Grand
Theft Auto" crime-drama videogame, which was released in September, right
before the end of the quarter. Take-Two said sales of the game topped $1
billion in its first three days on the market, a record for the videogame
industry.
Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two's chief executive, said
sales of that game and its other top-tier titles "demonstrate consumers'
enduring appetite for groundbreaking interactive entertainment."
Both firms are increasingly expecting a bounty from
consumer enthusiasm for the new consoles. Blake Jorgensen, EA's chief
financial officer, said the company is still cautious about how the market
will receive Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, but he said
customers appeared enthusiastic. "There's a huge amount of excitement," he
said.
Continued in article
Jensen Comments
I think video games are for idiot addictions unless they are designed with
specific educational objectives in mind such as a Jeopardy-like video game.
Last week, Stanford GSB’s
Social Web Strategist Karen Lee attended aWeek
0 coursecalled
“How Neuroscience Influences Human Behavior,” co-taught by Marketing
Professor Baba Shiv and Lecturer Nir Eyal. Each post focuses on an
interesting insight from class.
In my
last post, I explained how desire is a fundament
driver of habits and how companies can leverage Nir Eyal’s “Desire
Engine” framework to build engaging,
habit-forming products.
After two days of learning the
fundamentals of how our brain functions and influences human behavior, our
co-instructors Nir Eyal and Baba Shiv invited
Managing Director of Mayfield Fund Tim Chang (Stanford
MBA ’01) and
Founder of Gamification Co. Gabe Zichermann to
provide our class a real-world perspective on the applications and
implications of habitual behavior for customers, businesses and future
generations. They both addressed gamification, which is defined as the
process of using game thinking and mechanics to engage users.
Gamification has become somewhat
a polarizing topic for people, as its grown from a niche technique used in
the gaming industry, popularized largely due to social games like Farmville,
to a popularized approach to engage customers across different industries.
Tim Chang explained that gamification is largely misunderstood because of
the implied meanings in the word “game” itself. People think of gamification
in two extremes, either a hardcore competition or something casual,
frivolous and shallow. The definition of game is actually much wider in
scope. A game is defined by these 3 core elements:
Goal or objective: system or
user defined
Score: usually in real-time,
explicit feedback after every action or decision
Rules: to influence score,
boundaries for play
Through this lens, there are many
goals in life that are like a game. Dating. Landing a job. Hitting a sales
goal. Driving a car. Gabe Zichermann shared how the automobile industry has
embraced gamification to encourage fuel efficiency and engage drivers in a
more meaningful way.
Ford rolled out with a new
dashboard for their their 2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrid models.
The “SmartGauge
with EcoGuide” dashboard displays 4 types
of data screens based on what you’re interested in, ranging from the basics
of fuel level and battery charge status to more complex information like
your driving performance and fuel efficiency.
The game objective Ford creates
for the driver is driving efficiency. The driver’s score is comprised of
several different data points (e.g., hills, air conditioning, braking style)
and is presented in the dashboard with multiple displays in real-time . . .
.
. . .
The system’s real-time feedback
acts as personal driving coach on how to maximize fuel efficiency, so the
driver learns overtime how to change the way they drive to improve their
score.
In a slightly different but
related game objective of achieving long-term fuel efficiency, Ford took
gamification a step further by displaying on the right hand side “Efficiency
Leaves,” which is a visual representation of the driver’s efficiency in the
form of growing or wilting leaves and vines. The more efficient a driver
is, the more lush and beautiful the leaves are. It works the other way as
well.
Edutainment Idea for Class
This might be a fun thing to try in class.
The instructor could identify three students in the class that have some cartoon
drawing skills.
Then the three-column Jeopardy-like listing of choices could be presented to the
class where the choices relate to accounting issues.
Students pick one issue from each column.
The cartoon-drawing students could then commence their cartoons.
While they're drawing, the instructor could show New Yorker's accounting
cartoons to the class. At The New Yorker Website it is possible to drill
down to accounting cartoons.
President Obama on Thursday announced the launch of
"Change the Equation," a new nonprofit
organization, led by corporate CEOs, to promote improvements in science
education. The new organization will seek to replicate various successful
efforts so that they can spread to many more schools and localities. Among
the areas of emphasis: expose more school-age students to robotics, improve
professional development for math and science teachers and increase the
number of students who take and achieve good test scores on Advanced
Placement courses in math and science. The new organization also plans to
create a state-by-state scorecard on efforts to improve science education
Jensen Comment
The bit about introducing edutainment (robotics) to motivate students to major
in science reminds me of several reasons for using edutainment in some courses.
Attract majors. What are some accounting professors doing to attract majors?
At a time in the roaring 1990s when accounting was losing out to many top
students electing to major in finance and computer science, the Big Eight
accounting firms donated $4 million to an AAA Accounting Education Change
Commission (AECC) to bring about change in college accounting with the
primary purpose being to attract more and better students to accounting. The
AECC issued various grants for experimentation in various universities. Some
professors like Karen Pincus at USC found other funding for experimentation.
Karen proposed taking a lot of the drudgery details out of basic accounting
by having students take field trips and propose creative ways to improve
accounting such as improve internal controls. Asking students to be creative
in problems that they have not yet studied in college was almost unheard of
for students who had not yet learned any accounting. In a sense she was
dumbing down the coverage of basic accounting in an effort to attract more
majors into accounting by stimulating their creative juices. Karen received
the AAA Innovation in Accounting Education Award in 1992. To this day her
ideas are controversial among debates of creativity versus coverage in the
first accounting course. Intermediate accounting instructors sometimes are
disappointed if basic accounting students have been dumbed down. But they
are not disappointed if they get better students who are now motivated to
knuckle down to hard learning.
After the 1990s bubble burst, computer science graduates had and are still
having some difficulty getting great jobs. In turn it became more difficult
to attract majors.
What are some computer
science courses doing to slow the decline in enrollments?
Could robots play Monopoly in basic accounting and economics courses? "U.S. Colleges Retool Programming
Classes," by Greg Bluestein, PhysOrg, May 26, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news99378145.html
"Community College Uses a Video-Game Lab to
Lure Students to Computer Courses," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of
Higher Education, December 14, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i16/16a02601.htm
A computer lab has become one of the most
popular hangouts at Northern Virginia Community College after officials
decided to load its PC's with popular video games, install a PlayStation
and an Xbox, and declare it "for gamers only."
On an afternoon this fall, nearly all of
the 15 computers were in use, and students stared in concentration —
some gunning down bad guys in Counter-Strike, others strumming along
with Guitar Hero. No one was doing any classwork.
But the goal of the lab is very much
college-related. It is to entice students to take game-design and other
IT courses, says John Min, dean of business technologies on the
college's campus here.
Mr. Min decided to create the Game Pit,
as the lab is called, because he noticed that IT enrollment had been
falling since 1999. "We need to find ways to get more students," he
says.
Posters and fliers in the gaming lab list
the many computer courses offered, and professors sometimes stop in to
tout their courses.
It is too soon to tell whether the effort
will raise enrollment, say professors in the department. At least one
student playing here, though, says he plans to take a course next
semester that he learned about at the Game Pit. "There's actually a
gaming class," says the student, Abdullah Alhogbani. "When I saw the
poster I was like 'Oh, that's awesome.'"
David Williamson Shaffer, an associate
professor of education psychology at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, says the community college could be on to a winning strategy.
He is the author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn.
Continued in article
Note that video games are not the same as
virtual learning such as with Second Life where there is interaction between
instructors and students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
However, video games may be used in virtual worlds.
Improve Learning of Technical Concepts
and Theories
Apart from attracting majors, some instructors feel that students learn some
subjects better with the aid of some type of edutainment. What we're finding
is that what works varies a great deal with the subject matter, the
underlying motivation and aptitude of a student to learn that subject matter
(great students may find edutainment too distracting and time consuming),
and the passion of the instructor when using the edutainment --- See Below
Some instructors report they had more fun teaching with edutainment and that
teaching evaluations soared.
An example of using edutainment is the use of Lego blocks to teach cost
accounting at New Mexico State University. Sherry
Mills and Cathleen Burns won the American Accounting Associations
Innovation in Accounting Education Award by using a Lego project to teach
cost accounting ---
http://aaahq.org/awards/awrd6win.htm
Sherry and I have been teaching using Legos now for 15 years. We have
done a number of presentations at teaching conferences over the years.
Please see this article: "Bringing the Factory to the Classroom" by
Cathleen S. Burns and Sherry K. Mills Journal of Accountancy,
January 1997, pp. 56-60 ---
There are countless other reported innovations in
teaching using edutainment --- See Below
The bottom line seems to be to carefully consider
alternatives and perhaps experiment with your classes and your students. You
should not, however, expect edutainment of any kind to be a silver bullet
for teaching and learning.
The biggest conflict is that the best kinds of learning are
often at odds with the most fun kinds of learning, especially for relatively
mature students who often get more out of pain than pleasure ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
For young children pain may be more of a turn off to learning in general.
Mature students are more likely to endure pain that is more efficient and
effective to their goals such as better preparation for graduate studies,
passing a certification examination such as the CPA examination, landing a job,
improving performance on after landing a job, and being better able to teach and
do research a complicated topic.
But in science for K-12, President Obama's launch of
"Change the Equation," is right on target.
John A. Schatzel at Stonehill College does research on simulation games for
teaching auditing, some of which entail ethics ---
You must have access to the AAA Commons for the above link.
John posts to the AECM on occasion. Maybe he will read this and help us out.
The challenge of finding
a game for the classroom can be difficult,
particularly when the games you’ve imagined doesn’t exist. And if you wait
for a particular challenge or topic to make its way into game form, it might
be a while. Educational games and “serious” games haven’t always kept up
with the rest of video gaming, in part because there’s no high return.
Modern game development tends towards large teams and impressive budgets,
and these resources are rarely used on explicitly educational productions.
While efforts like the
STEM Video Game Challenge provide incentives for
new learning games, and commercial titles can often be
adapted for the classroom, there’s still more
potential than games have yet reached.
But if you have a new concept for playful learning,
you can still bring it to life for your classroom. There are two ways to
start thinking about making games in the classroom: the first is to build a
game yourself, and the second is to engage students in making games as a way
to express their own understanding.
You’re probably not
a game designer, although there’s a game for that:
Gamestar Mechanic
can help you “level up” from player to designer. But
it’s also important to remember building games rarely happens alone: as with
digital humanities projects, games lend themselves to collaboration. If you
have a game design program (or even a single course) at your university or a
neighboring school, there might be an opportunity to partner your students
with them towards creating valuable content-based educational games.
Similarly, there may be other faculty who are interested in collaborating on
grant-funded projects to build new educational experiences, or collective
and expanding projects like Reacting
to the Past (which many readers cited as a
classroom game system of choice). You might also find collaborators,
inspiration and games in progress through communities such as
Gameful,
a “secret HQ for making world-changing games”–and community manager Nathan
Maton has a few things to say about
building serious games for education.
There’s also a difference between making a game or
asking your students to make a game as an expression of content for
pedagogical purposes and making a game in the industry. Even a flawed game
can provide an opportunity for learning and discussion. And your students
will often bring a wealth of their own experiences with games to the
process, offering them a chance to make new connections with your course
material.
Ready to try making games? Here are a few tools for
getting started.
Board and card games can be a
great first project, particularly for students. Digital games are
flashy, but board and card games offer the advantages of structured play
with a lower barrier to entry. They can also be good practice for
learning the mechanics and structure of games
without getting bogged down in programming and logic. We’ve all played
some version of classroom jeopardy before, and it remains an example of
taking game-like mechanics and applying them to any content–but when
content guides the way, board games can transcend these roots.
Inform 7
is a modern heir to text-based games, and it’s a
free development tool that’s perfect for interpreting and building
worlds without needing visual elements. Aaron Reed’s Creating
Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 is a
thorough guide to the system. The
Voices of
Spoon River IF offers one example of literary
instruction through the form, while Nick Montfort’s
Book
and Volume demonstrates the potential for
systematic logic. There’s even the
ECG Paper Chase
IF for a meta-experience on the origin of gaming
and educational technology. (Curveship,
a newer interactive narrative platform, is less friendly to
non-programmers than Inform 7 but offers some impressive possibilities.)
GameMaker(with a free
lite version)
allows for building games on two levels: at the surface is an easy to
manipulate, graphical interface for building games. Beneath that, an
advanced scripting language allows for the possibility of delving
further. The
GameMaker’s Apprentice textbook goes
step-by-step through making a variety of basic games drawn from arcade
genre standbys, many of which could serve as the basis for more creative
projects while also offering the tools to build procedural literacy and
digital skills.
GameSaladis a free tool for building simple
games. While GameSalad is only available for Macs, it offers a code-free
way to create graphical games for both mobile platforms and HTML5. It’s
relatively new, and most of the educational games created for it aim at
the younger crowd of kid-friendly mobile apps, but it definitely offers
the chance for experience with logic and rapid
prototyping.
For ideas on getting started, I recently spoke with
Lee Sheldon, author of the recently released The Multiplayer
Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Cengage
Learning 2011), whose book chronicles both his own
and others’ experiments with taking the structures, terminology, and
concepts of a massive multiplayer role-playing game and applying them to the
classroom. You can check out Lee Sheldon’s syllabus at his blog on Gaming
the Classroom, along with more of his reflections
on the experiment, which divided his students into guilds and encouraged
them to “level up” through the semester. After using the course model in its
latest iteration, he reported perfect attendance. He also notes the value in
his system of “grading by attrition”—students are not being punished for
failing, but instead rewarded for progressing and thus less likely to be
defeated early.
As a professional game designer teaching courses on
game design, Lee Sheldon has a natural environment for innovation–but his
concepts open the door for a conversation across disciplines. Lee Sheldon
describes his model as “designing the class as a game”—so not just focusing
on extrinsic rewards (the typical focus of gamification), but instead trying
to promote “opportunities for collaboration” and “intrinsic rewards from
helping others.” As game designers, like teachers, are focused on creating
an experience, many of the strategies for building a class as game are
similar to more traditional preparation. And he advises that these ideas can
work for anyone: “You don’t have to a be a game designer…you can prep like
putting together a lesson plan, but learn the terminology.” Lee Sheldon
explains that one of the benefits of using games as a model is that a game
is abstracted—it has to “feel real”, but you get to “take out the stuff
that isn’t fun.” He also notes that “You can do just about anything in a
game that you can do in real life,” and the wealth of games today is a
testament to that range of possibilities.
Lee Sheldon and his team at RPI are now working on
an experiment with their new
Emergent Reality Lab that offers a possible future
for courses as games. He explained their current project, teaching Mandarin
Chinese as an alternate reality game, as a “Maltese Falcon-esque mystery”
narrative—the class will start out as usual, in a normal classroom, but it
will be interrupted and move into the lab as the students take a virtual
journey across China aided by motion-aware Kinect interfaces in an immersive
environment. Lee Sheldon said that his ideal outcome would be for students
to learn more Chinese than they would in a traditional class.
Continued in article
September 30, 2012 reply from John A. Schatzel
Thanks Bob,
I do receive the posts from this group in archive
mode, saw your suggestion, and hope that I can add something helpful to
Mark, yourself, and others. My recent research has turned to introducing an
ethics audit simulation to accounting education. I recently created such a
game and am dedicating it to the advancement of international business
ethics research. It is my fifth auditing simulation and although the others
(as you noted in your post) address ethics to various degrees, the latest
one is focused primary on doing an ethics audit using either a Triple Bottom
Line or international ethics auditing standards approach.
The newest game involves doing an audit using
SA8000 by Social Accountability International, which includes ethics
management and several other ethics areas. The game was made using
interactive multimedia technologies and is played online. The initial
prototypes have been tested successfully in accounting systems and business
ethics courses and the student feedback has been, on balance, very positive.
From Mark's perspective, the game would allow
students to be assigned to groups and then play the game competitively using
the internal scoring system. The scoring system is based on the one I
originally created for the Real Audit(tm) financial auditing simulation and
then adapted to the Swanson Interactive Internal Control Simulation, which
involves a role-playing adventure doing a COSO internal control evaluation
(including ethical values). The scores from Swanson and the new Ethics Audit
Simulation are posted to a web-based performance reporting system that
faculty can access, but are not reported in the game to students. I kept the
scores private because I didn't feel the scoring system was refined enough
at present.
One possible research study would be to examine the
effect of introducing a game-based scoring system to students on the
learning process or on learning outcomes (if that were possible).
Regardless, I believe that there are many studies that could be performed
with the new ethics audit simulation while students are being encouraged to
think at the higher end of Bloom's intellectual scale. If Mark or anyone
else is interested in using the software for teaching/ research purposes,
they can contact me directly and I will get them a demo set up as well as
accounts for their students. I hope this helps!
John A. Schatzel, Ph.D., CPA
Professor of Accounting
Stonehill College jschatzel@stonehill.edu
Last week, Stanford GSB’s
Social Web Strategist Karen Lee attended aWeek
0 coursecalled
“How Neuroscience Influences Human Behavior,” co-taught by Marketing
Professor Baba Shiv and Lecturer Nir Eyal. Each post focuses on an
interesting insight from class.
In my
last post, I explained how desire is a fundament
driver of habits and how companies can leverage Nir Eyal’s “Desire
Engine” framework to build engaging,
habit-forming products.
After two days of learning the
fundamentals of how our brain functions and influences human behavior, our
co-instructors Nir Eyal and Baba Shiv invited
Managing Director of Mayfield Fund Tim Chang (Stanford
MBA ’01) and
Founder of Gamification Co. Gabe Zichermann to
provide our class a real-world perspective on the applications and
implications of habitual behavior for customers, businesses and future
generations. They both addressed gamification, which is defined as the
process of using game thinking and mechanics to engage users.
Gamification has become somewhat
a polarizing topic for people, as its grown from a niche technique used in
the gaming industry, popularized largely due to social games like Farmville,
to a popularized approach to engage customers across different industries.
Tim Chang explained that gamification is largely misunderstood because of
the implied meanings in the word “game” itself. People think of gamification
in two extremes, either a hardcore competition or something casual,
frivolous and shallow. The definition of game is actually much wider in
scope. A game is defined by these 3 core elements:
Goal or objective: system or
user defined
Score: usually in real-time,
explicit feedback after every action or decision
Rules: to influence score,
boundaries for play
Through this lens, there are many
goals in life that are like a game. Dating. Landing a job. Hitting a sales
goal. Driving a car. Gabe Zichermann shared how the automobile industry has
embraced gamification to encourage fuel efficiency and engage drivers in a
more meaningful way.
Ford rolled out with a new
dashboard for their their 2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrid models.
The “SmartGauge
with EcoGuide” dashboard displays 4 types
of data screens based on what you’re interested in, ranging from the basics
of fuel level and battery charge status to more complex information like
your driving performance and fuel efficiency.
The game objective Ford creates
for the driver is driving efficiency. The driver’s score is comprised of
several different data points (e.g., hills, air conditioning, braking style)
and is presented in the dashboard with multiple displays in real-time . . .
.
. . .
The system’s real-time feedback
acts as personal driving coach on how to maximize fuel efficiency, so the
driver learns overtime how to change the way they drive to improve their
score.
In a slightly different but
related game objective of achieving long-term fuel efficiency, Ford took
gamification a step further by displaying on the right hand side “Efficiency
Leaves,” which is a visual representation of the driver’s efficiency in the
form of growing or wilting leaves and vines. The more efficient a driver
is, the more lush and beautiful the leaves are. It works the other way as
well.
Continued in article
Edutainment Idea for Class
This might be a fun thing to try in class.
The instructor could identify three students in the class that have some cartoon
drawing skills.
Then the three-column Jeopardy-like listing of choices could be presented to the
class where the choices relate to accounting issues.
Students pick one issue from each column.
The cartoon-drawing students could then commence their cartoons.
While they're drawing, the instructor could show New Yorker's accounting
cartoons to the class. At The New Yorker Website it is possible to drill
down to accounting cartoons.
"Perceptions of accountants' ethics: evidence from their portrayal in cinema.:
byFelton, S., Dimnik, T. and Bay, D. (2008, December). Journal of
Business Ethics, 83(2), 217-232.
Abstract: "This article examines popular
representations of accountants' ethics by studying their depiction in
cinema. As a medium that both reflects and shapes public opinion, films
provide a useful resource for exploring the portrayal of the profession's
ethics. We employ a values theoretical framework to analyze 110 movie
accountants on their basic ethical character, ethical behavior, and values."
After the Oscars last weekend, I started to think
about which movies have really inspired me as an entrepreneur. Here are
three films I believe that you should not only see, but also share with your
teams. Each ties to an important entrepreneurial and leadership lesson.
Man on Wire
A story of the fanatical pursuit of a dream. Philippe
Petit, a French tightrope walker, was consumed by the idea of walking a wire
between New York's former World Trade twin towers. To do so, he would need
years of planning and would have to do it as a covert mission. When I first
watched this film, I did not know if it was based on a true story or not.
The narrative and grainy black-and-white shots made me constantly question
whether I was wishing for this to be true or if it was just brilliant
story-telling. The fact that Petit is real and actually accomplished the
feat in August of 1974 is beyond incredible. In an
earlier post, I wrote about the thin line that
great entrepreneurs balance between what Oscar Levant described as genius
and insanity. You want someone like Petit to succeed because it seems so
improbable and outlandish that it takes a creative visionary with some
degree of craziness to pull it off. Seeing this movie is an inspiration for
those who dare to think differently and push the boundaries.
More than a Game
This is the inspiring story of a high school
basketball team and their quest for the national title. It is also happens
to be the documentary of the high school basketball team on which superstar
Lebron James played. I loved this movie for so many reasons, but the
inspiration for entrepreneurs is in the unfolding of how Lebron and four of
his closest friends from childhood pursued a dream, Starting as a team of
fifth graders playing and growing up together in some of the poorest
neighborhoods and practicing in a Salvation Army basketball court with
linoleum floors. The movie highlights how the journey is always as important
as the ultimate goal and inspires us to believe that almost anything is
possible with the right people and right dedication.
Slumdog Millionaire
A hugely successful film about how you can create your
own luck. So many successful entrepreneurs I have met talk about the role of
luck in their careers, but it is equally true that they put themselves in
the pathway of opportunity. In some ways this movie was like a modern day
Bollywood version of
Forrest Gump (we all need a little Bubba Gump
shrimp luck in our lives). Both are believable tales because of the
attitudes of the protagonists who, like great entrepreneurs, have a
boundless optimism and openness that allow luck to come to them.
That's it for my Siskel and Ebert moment. I'll see
you all at Netflix.
I'm really not a big fan of video or computer games, but this one from the
popular Price is Right television show is both fun and has educational
attributes.
Jane McGonigal has a message: games are good
"Are Games Good for You? Jane McGonigal, in her latest book and during her
PAX East keynote, talks about the positive effects of playing," by Kristina
Grifantini, MIT's Technology Review, March 16, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26528/?nlid=4250
Jensen Comment
I have my doubts when games become addictive to a point of disproportionate time
allocation vis-a-vis other forms of learning and scholarship..
This Saturday, high-school students around the
country will sit for hours of silent testing that will determine some
portion of their future: That's right, it's SAT time. For both parents and
kids, the preparation for taking the standardized test is stressful and
expensive, often involving hours of studying and several hundreds of dollars
spent on classes, workbooks and tutors. And many kids will take these tests
more than once.
So this week I tried a Web-based form of test prep
called Grockit that aims to make studying for the SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE or
LSAT less expensive and more enjoyable. Grockit.com offers lessons, group
study and solo practice, and does a nice job of feeling fun and educational,
which isn't an easy combination to pull off.
A free portion of the site includes group study
with a variety of questions and a limited number of solo test questions,
which are customized to each student's study needs. The $100 Premium
subscription includes full access to the online platform with unlimited solo
practice questions and personalized performance analytics that track a
student's progress. A new offering called Grockit TV (grockit.com/tv) offers
free eight-week courses if students watch them streaming live twice a week.
Otherwise, a course can be downloaded for $100 during the course or $150
afterward. Instructors hailing from the Princeton Review and Kaplan, among
other places, teach test preparation for the GMAT business-school admissions
test and SAT.
For the sake of testing, I focused on the SAT and
plunged back into the depths of reading, writing and (gulp) math to get a
sense of what students see and do on Grockit.com. In a short period of time,
I found myself wanting to go back to the site to get better at certain
sections or to earn more Experience Points, which result in badges and
unlock new levels of study, both of which can be optionally posted to
outside networks like Facebook or Twitter. By default, everyone can see one
another's points, which invites healthy competition; these can also be
hidden if you'd rather keep them private.
I tested both the free version of Grockit.com,
which includes an SAT writing diagnostic test, and the extra offerings of a
$100 Premium account, including diagnostic tests for writing, reading and
math to evaluate my strengths and weaknesses in taking the SAT. The free
version had too many messages that constantly notified me of what I could do
with a paid account and prompted me to upgrade.
Along with completing practice questions with
strangers and instructors, I got a friend of mine to also use Grockit.com so
we could compete together in Grockit's Speed Challenge Games. These are
included in the free portion and they reward the fastest person who answers
a question correctly—but also display incorrect guesses, thus narrowing the
possible answers for those who don't answer first. It was more fun for me to
play against someone I knew, but I can imagine kids preferring the anonymity
of competing with strangers when they don't answer questions correctly.
In an introductory video, Grockit founder and chief
product officer Farb Nivi describes the site by saying, "It's like having a
complete multimedia textbook and workbook online, at your fingertips." But
for kids (and from my experience, adults), the computer isn't an easy place
to concentrate. On any given PC, especially one used by a teenager,
instant-message indicators are chiming, Facebook updates and Twitter tweets
are waiting to be checked, music is playing in the background and emails are
flowing into inboxes. Plus, the Grockit site is just a tab away from other
websites and distractions. And the site has no way of working in a
distraction-free mode, like how the new Microsoft Office for Mac offers Full
Screen View, which quiets any alerts or pop-up distractions.
It also isn't necessarily comfortable for students
to read extensive text (like in reading questions for the SAT) on a vertical
computer screen. The site will run on the iPad, which can be held on a lap
for more comfortable reading, but many students don't own one of these.
Part of the way Grockit is made more fun is by
purposely incorporating social networking into the experience. As people
work on questions, they can instant message with one another in a right-side
panel about tips for answering questions or simply for commiserating about
studying. These IMs don't make indicator sounds, so they aren't too
intrusive, but they can't be fully closed. I saw several chats among teens
about nothing in particular, as well as some test-taking tips from
instructors and other students.
Grockit encourages users to "be nice" in chats
because all conversations are logged; people can also flag one another for
offensive remarks. Chats are also archived on your page so you can reread
them for tips and study hints. If you find someone's tip helpful or if you
simply like a person, you can award him or her with Grockit Points, which
show up beside a name and profile photo. Users' ages or last names aren't
displayed.
Grockit offers one-on-one tutoring for a fee of $50
an hour, and I tried one session for math. My instructor and I used Skype to
audio chat throughout the session and he took advantage of a whiteboard in
Grockit, where he could write out the steps in an algebra problem to
demonstrate how to solve for X.
Around 40 instructors are employed for Grockit, but
anyone can run a practice session, even other students. I signed up for a
scheduled practice session at 8 p.m. that I assumed was run by an
instructor, and later found out it was run by a student. Grockit instructors
can also pop into sessions at any given time to help students, and one did
during my session. Grockit works on a system of transparency so users can
evaluate all teachers. My tutor had five-star rating and did a great job
reminding me of algebra rules.
If you're looking for an inexpensive and more
enjoyable way to study for big tests, Grockit is a viable and easily
accessible option. But its proximity to the rest of the Web could prove much
more distracting than the old SAT workbook.
—See a video with Katherine Boehret on Web-based
test-prep software at WSJ.com/PersonalTech.
Email her at
mossbergsolution@wsj.com
AICPA's Accountancy Video Games
I wonder if there are any accountancy video games in this Paris museum?
I wonder if any accounting educators have visited this museum?
"Museum Lets You Play Just About Every Video Game Ever: Paris's
Museum of Arts and Trades has put together a comprehensive playable video game
exhibit - Help us name some mystery consoles," by Christopher Mims,
MIT's Technology Review, October 27, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25927/?nlid=3695
MuseoGames
is as comprehensive a history of home video game
consoles as any museum has ever created. Visitors to Paris's
Museum of Arts and
Trades are treated to a collection of video games
so extensive that all but the most hardcore gamer would be hard-pressed to
identify them all. They stretch from the birth of Pong in the 1970s through
the heyday of console gaming and end with the PS2.
The exhibit also includes interviews with many of
the developers responsible for these early gems--all of them overdubbed in
French, unfortunately, so I hope you've been brushing up.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I could not find the English version of this Paris Website. An English version
would be nice for some of the categories such as Blogs.
Back in the U.S.A., the AICPA has a Website to attract students into
accountancy that includes accounting video games --- http://www.startheregoplaces.com/
Eventually click on the Games hot word at the the bottom of the screen.
Accounting teachers, however should first click on the Teachers hot word at the
top of the screen. They will be asked to get "sign in" login name and
password. There is a delay before they get login permission.
"Perceptions of accountants' ethics: evidence from their portrayal in cinema.:
byFelton, S., Dimnik, T. and Bay, D. (2008, December). Journal
of Business Ethics, 83(2), 217-232.
Abstract: "This article examines popular
representations of accountants' ethics by studying their depiction in
cinema. As a medium that both reflects and shapes public opinion, films
provide a useful resource for exploring the portrayal of the profession's
ethics. We employ a values theoretical framework to analyze 110 movie
accountants on their basic ethical character, ethical behavior, and values."
After the Oscars last weekend, I started to think
about which movies have really inspired me as an entrepreneur. Here are
three films I believe that you should not only see, but also share with your
teams. Each ties to an important entrepreneurial and leadership lesson.
Man on Wire
A story of the fanatical pursuit of a dream. Philippe
Petit, a French tightrope walker, was consumed by the idea of walking a wire
between New York's former World Trade twin towers. To do so, he would need
years of planning and would have to do it as a covert mission. When I first
watched this film, I did not know if it was based on a true story or not.
The narrative and grainy black-and-white shots made me constantly question
whether I was wishing for this to be true or if it was just brilliant
story-telling. The fact that Petit is real and actually accomplished the
feat in August of 1974 is beyond incredible. In an
earlier post, I wrote about the thin line that
great entrepreneurs balance between what Oscar Levant described as genius
and insanity. You want someone like Petit to succeed because it seems so
improbable and outlandish that it takes a creative visionary with some
degree of craziness to pull it off. Seeing this movie is an inspiration for
those who dare to think differently and push the boundaries.
More than a Game
This is the inspiring story of a high school
basketball team and their quest for the national title. It is also happens
to be the documentary of the high school basketball team on which superstar
Lebron James played. I loved this movie for so many reasons, but the
inspiration for entrepreneurs is in the unfolding of how Lebron and four of
his closest friends from childhood pursued a dream, Starting as a team of
fifth graders playing and growing up together in some of the poorest
neighborhoods and practicing in a Salvation Army basketball court with
linoleum floors. The movie highlights how the journey is always as important
as the ultimate goal and inspires us to believe that almost anything is
possible with the right people and right dedication.
Slumdog Millionaire
A hugely successful film about how you can create your
own luck. So many successful entrepreneurs I have met talk about the role of
luck in their careers, but it is equally true that they put themselves in
the pathway of opportunity. In some ways this movie was like a modern day
Bollywood version of
Forrest Gump (we all need a little Bubba Gump
shrimp luck in our lives). Both are believable tales because of the
attitudes of the protagonists who, like great entrepreneurs, have a
boundless optimism and openness that allow luck to come to them.
That's it for my Siskel and Ebert moment. I'll see
you all at Netflix.
Wanda and I served on the same AAA Executive Committee during what was perhaps
the first AAA Annual Meeting in Hawaii (at the Hilton Hawaiian Village). That
was the same year the AAA Executive Committee (with spouses) met in Amsterdam
(courtesy of funding raised by Jerry Searfoss).
A book editor once told me that Wanda Wallace was the best textbook author he'd
ever worked with in the sense that her books were virtually perfect before they
were sent out for editorial review.
Wanda was also a former Editor of Issues in Accounting Education (IAE).
Her message to the 2002/2003 AAA Executive Committee (under Pete Wilson) that
tried to terminate both Accounting Horizons and IAE played a key role in
saving these journals ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AAAJournals.htm
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dennis R Beresford<dberesfo@uga.edu>
Date: Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 4:22 PM
Subject: Fwd:
To: Bob Jensen <rjensen@trinity.edu>
Bob, Now here's a forthcoming
publication from an accounting academic that some people may
actually read! The title of Wanda's novel is "The Soothsayers."
Denny
Dennis R. Beresford
Ernst & Young Executive Professor of Accounting
J.M. Tull School of Accounting
Terry College of Business
Athens, GA 30602
dberesford@terry.uga.edu
Dear Denny,
It's been a long time since we've been in correspondence,
but thought I'd drop a line to say hello and share some
news.
Since retirement from academe I've been enjoying writing
poetry and fiction. My first novel is to be launched in
September 2012, and I am thrilled. The cover is already
posted as "Coming Soon" on the home page of
champagnebooks.com.
Hope things are going well,
Regards!
Wanda
P.S. One of my published fiction short stories is in the
literary journal The MacGuffin (Fall 2011) called
"Intrusions" and was great fun to craft. FYI
Wanda A. Wallace (The John N. Dalton Professor of Business
Emerita)
College of William and Mary, School of Business
Administration
Williamsburg, Virginia 23185
Email address:
wawall@wm.edu
Question
How is accountancy practice like mystery writing?
Edutainment via Fiction Writing
'May 7, 2011 message from Larry Crumbley,
Bob, you may wish to update your accounting novel
material. My tax Ultimate Ripoff novel is now in the fourth edition and I am
now revising it. My cost accounting novel Costly Reflections in A Midas
Mirror, is in the 3th edition at Carolina Academic Press. They also have
published later editions of my auditing and forensic accounting novels. LSU
press will have my Sports Marketing out shortly. Give me your mailing
address and I will send you a couple. Larry
May 8, 2011 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Larry,
My forays into fiction so bad that even I won't share them --- and I share
almost everything I write. My one exception is my "play" on eduarbitraging
at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/muppets.htm
Now you know why I won't share my other fiction attempts.
I'm glad you're still doing well with your mystery/detective novels.
I also need to update my page on Accounting Novels in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNovels.htm
If you have any suggestions for things I should add here beyond what are
noted above, please let me know.
The crux behind game mechanics is the feeling that
you’ve accomplished something; “Whether you’re clicking on a plot of
land or a musical note, that is an accomplishment” says
Social Gaming Network’sShervin Pishevar. Social gaming gives you
the opportunity to share these goals with your social graph so that many
people see them, as well as the chance to work on these accomplishments
collaboratively.
Pavlovian mechanics are crucial. It’s important as
a user to feel like the time that you spent came up with a result, social
elements like being able to see how you did with other people, and being
able to play with other people play into this. Integration with music also
creates an emotional linkage, one thing responsible for
Tapulous’
success was the functionality to apply multiple songs from artists like
Justin Bieber to Lady Gaga.
Decrem elaborates,
“There’s an actual science around how to engage and
monetize users, the
Farmville harvest mechanic, for example. On
mobile, its ‘the x factor’ does the game have magic?”
What we’re now seeing is what happens when the science of game mechanics in
social games is combined with the quirkiness of what you see on the iPhone
platform.
According to Seth Priebatsch, new employees at
SCVNGR memorize a deck of 50 game dynamics like the progression dynamic, or
earning points to make progress. They then can incorporate those elements
into a game, “Humans love progress bars, if you see a progress bar, you
want to complete it.”
How will games increasingly square with the real world?
Currently all the value creation happens mostly on
Facebook, but that will soon change. The panelists all agreed that this
recent integration of social and mobile is beginning of a new computing
platform, mainly due to the capabilities introduced by the iOS. Killer apps
on this new platform will need to incorporate both a social element and an
entertainment element in order to survive.
According to Pishevar, SGN is “Working on
things where you’re placing your phone in the real world and seeing 3D
characters walking down the street, games where you have a garden in your
actual physical yard that you’re actually tending to and it’s growing and
you can see it on the iPhone.“
Decrem elaborates “There’s no difference to me
between playing Tapulous on the iPhone and using my Starbucks card in the
morning, wanting to get 15 stars so I can get a free coffee … “
Real life rewards for online behavior are a force
to be reckoned with, and will increasingly become more prevalent as
developers continue to experience success with them. Yelp for example, saw
their usage skyrocket when they incorporated the Check-in element.
“You’re checking in with a physical card instead of a mobile. We haven’t
invented anything new.”
Says Priebatsch “We are bringing one very new
thing to the game framework, the open graph API. Social traffics in
connections, games traffic in influence. By applying that to the real world,
we are building a platform that traffics in motivations and rewards.”
In what new ways can these game mechanics can be applied in the
future?
“We’re really in the first or second inning on
the mobile side,” says Pishevar, “The level of creativity and fun
that’s coming is incredible.”
Should businesses rush to apply social mechanics?
“It’s just natural evolution,” says DeCrem. Businesses developing a
product should ask themselves, How about if you can connect with your
friends? How about if we make it fun?
Piveshar’s one criticism is that the gaming
industry could do so much more. “Because of the social graph many have
cut corners of quality in order to monetize; We’ve got hypergrowth. Lots of
millions have been created and its time to give something back.”
Acker brought up the idea of games that cure cancer
as one way social gaming can actually benefit society, referring to HopeLab’sRe-Mission
and
Zamzee,
“It doesn’t matter how many brochures you show a
kid, he’s not going to want to [go to chemo]. But when you build an avatar
called Roxy, have her shooting the cancer cells, and then when she feels
feel weak you go get her a chemo tap … It’s incredibly powerful.”
Elements of gaming engender powerful emotions; Chemotherapy can become a
positive thing and cancer becomes something you can beat. And that’s pretty
formidable.
"Perceptions of accountants' ethics: evidence from their portrayal in cinema.:
byFelton, S., Dimnik, T. and Bay, D. (2008, December). Journal
of Business Ethics, 83(2), 217-232.
Abstract: "This article examines popular
representations of accountants' ethics by studying their depiction in
cinema. As a medium that both reflects and shapes public opinion, films
provide a useful resource for exploring the portrayal of the profession's
ethics. We employ a values theoretical framework to analyze 110 movie
accountants on their basic ethical character, ethical behavior, and values."
After the Oscars last weekend, I started to think
about which movies have really inspired me as an entrepreneur. Here are
three films I believe that you should not only see, but also share with your
teams. Each ties to an important entrepreneurial and leadership lesson.
Man on Wire
A story of the fanatical pursuit of a dream. Philippe
Petit, a French tightrope walker, was consumed by the idea of walking a wire
between New York's former World Trade twin towers. To do so, he would need
years of planning and would have to do it as a covert mission. When I first
watched this film, I did not know if it was based on a true story or not.
The narrative and grainy black-and-white shots made me constantly question
whether I was wishing for this to be true or if it was just brilliant
story-telling. The fact that Petit is real and actually accomplished the
feat in August of 1974 is beyond incredible. In an
earlier post, I wrote about the thin line that
great entrepreneurs balance between what Oscar Levant described as genius
and insanity. You want someone like Petit to succeed because it seems so
improbable and outlandish that it takes a creative visionary with some
degree of craziness to pull it off. Seeing this movie is an inspiration for
those who dare to think differently and push the boundaries.
More than a Game
This is the inspiring story of a high school
basketball team and their quest for the national title. It is also happens
to be the documentary of the high school basketball team on which superstar
Lebron James played. I loved this movie for so many reasons, but the
inspiration for entrepreneurs is in the unfolding of how Lebron and four of
his closest friends from childhood pursued a dream, Starting as a team of
fifth graders playing and growing up together in some of the poorest
neighborhoods and practicing in a Salvation Army basketball court with
linoleum floors. The movie highlights how the journey is always as important
as the ultimate goal and inspires us to believe that almost anything is
possible with the right people and right dedication.
Slumdog Millionaire
A hugely successful film about how you can create your
own luck. So many successful entrepreneurs I have met talk about the role of
luck in their careers, but it is equally true that they put themselves in
the pathway of opportunity. In some ways this movie was like a modern day
Bollywood version of
Forrest Gump (we all need a little Bubba Gump
shrimp luck in our lives). Both are believable tales because of the
attitudes of the protagonists who, like great entrepreneurs, have a
boundless optimism and openness that allow luck to come to them.
That's it for my Siskel and Ebert moment. I'll see
you all at Netflix.
"Georgia Tech Plays
Video Games to Save Journalism," by Dan Turner,
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2009 ---
Click Here
Ian Bogost, the primary investigator of the
Journalism and Games
project at the Georgia Institute of Technology,
has found the question of how journalism and games intersect to be “much
bigger than I originally thought.”
Mr. Bogost, an associate professor in the School of
Literature, Communication, and Culture, teaches in the undergraduate Media
Computation and the graduate Digital Media programs. He is also a founding
partner at video game developer
Persuasive Games.
His goal is to investigate how video games can work
within, and perhaps help rescue, the ailing field of journalism. His
graduate students ask questions such as: Is there anything in the
game-development process that could be applied to the practice of
journalism? Can games be used to make an editorial statement? Can the lauded
“citizen journalism” model be considered a game and managed as such? Would
it help bring new life to a failing industry?
“If we wanted to design games to interact with
journalism” — such as building one with storytelling resources that could be
leveraged into longer-form articles and investigative reports, for example,
or one that would explore the next equivalent of adding a crossword puzzle
to raise sales — “how would one go about doing it?” Mr. Bogost said.
Mr. Bogost founded Persuasive Games, and wrote a
book of the same title, to show how games can make arguments. Video games,
he argued, can be a new form of rhetoric through rule-based procedures and
interactions. This interactive medium can teach, cajole, challenge, and
collect information.
Using this concept of games as both a medium and a
tool, Mr. Bogost centered the Journalism and Games project to explore what
each area has to contribute to the other, he said. And the answer may be
nothing, he added. But given the number of newspaper closures and
downsizings recently, he hopes to contribute something positive.
Xtranormal is a website which hosts text-to-speech
based computer animated videoclips which can be created by any user and
uploaded by a downloadable program or created directly online. It has had
little online advertising and has spread by word of mouth and by being
uploaded to Facebook and other social media sites.One website refers to
controversy about an employee from Best Buy being fired for uploading an
animated video complaining about customer service.
The website offers either a free trial program to
be downloaded to the computer with a fairly userfriendly interface, though
limited to simple animation or creating a video while logged into the
website. Popular user-created animations are available to watch.
A growing collection of amateur animators use a
do-it-yourself Web site called Xtranormal to vent comically about the academic
life. And to teach.
The online animation site they use has become a tool for teaching as well as
satire "So You Think an English Professor's Life Is a Cartoon," by Mark Parry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Think-an-English/125954/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
The Many and Varied Applications of the Monopoly Game in Accounting in
Accounting, Economics, and Other College Courses ---
Search this document for the word "Monopoly"
I was at a business luncheon today and I was asked a question that I
hope you guys can help answer...
A woman, who manages a large portfolio for a large institution, has a
nephew who is a senior in high school who wants to eventual get a job
similar to his aunt (investment management). She told him he needs a
good grounding in economics and accounting (in addition to finance). He
will be doing an independent study in the fall and she thinks that econ
and/or accounting would be a good topic for his independent study.
She asked me if I could recommend some books and/or online courses he
could view/research/study. Nothing specifically came to mind. I know
there has been some mention of free online courses on the AECM, but I
don't recall the specifics.
So, with all that said, does any AECM members have some answers to
her question regarding online courses and/or books that would provide an
econ and/or accounting overview to a high school student?
Thanks in advance. I'll forward your responses to her.
Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Accounting & Information Systems, COBAE
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff ST
Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948
818.677.2461 (messages)
Yes. I once had an older, non-traditional student
whose husband got so enamored with doing the accounting for his monopoly
games that he incessantly pestered his wife to play what I named it, "Real
Money"
For the near term I don't have it online any more.
If anyone wants a copy (debit/credit version or financial statement equation
version), plz send private e-mail to me (
albrecht@profalbrecht.com ).
I'll reply with a large pdf file.
They had examples of crosswords which have been
setup for Accounting which I thought was rather cute & an alternative to
quizzes
http://www.accountingcrosswords.com /
Discovery Channel School's PuzzleMaker (free) ---
http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com
This puzzle-generation tool helps create and print customized word search,
crossword and math puzzles using your own word lists.
Computer
defeats humans at the NYT’s crossword Puzzles Crossword-solving computer program WebCrow has defeated
25 human competitors in a puzzle competition in Riva del Garda, Italy. The
program took both first- and second-place honors in the contest, which was
staged as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, New
Scientist reported Thursday. The two English puzzles were taken from The New
York Times and The Washington Post, while two Italian puzzles were taken from
newspapers in the country. A fifth puzzle featured clues in both languages taken
from all four sources. "It exceeded our expectations because there were around
15 Americans in the competition," said Marco Ernandes, who created WebCrow along
with Giovanni Angelini and Marco Gori. "Now we'd like to test it against more
people with English as their first language."
"Computer defeats humans at crossword," PhysOrg, September 1, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news76345125.html
Question
Will daily working of crossword puzzles and similar mental exercise deter
the rate of cognitive decline in older brains?
If you thought recent
clinical trials of reduced-fat diets and breast cancer, or
calcium/vitamin D and hip fractures, were disappointing when the
intervention failed to live up to its billing, you haven't seen studies
of whether mental training slows the rate of cognitive decline resulting
from aging.
The largest such study,
called Active, was launched in 1998 and is still going. It trained 2,832
adults, aged 65 years old to 94, in memory, reasoning or visual
attention and perception. Disappointment ensued. Though the trainees did
better on the skill they practiced, that didn't translate to improvement
on the others (memory training didn't sharpen reasoning, for instance).
Worse, when the trainees
were tested years later, performance fell more than it did in the
untrained group, according to a new analysis by Timothy Salthouse of the
University of Virginia, a veteran of studies on aging and cognition.
That probably reflects the fact that if performance rises it has further
to fall, he says.
But there is a larger
issue. "There is no convincing empirical evidence that mental activity
slows the rate of cognitive decline," he concludes from an exhaustive
review of decades of studies. "The research I reviewed is just not
consistent with the idea that engaging in mentally stimulating
activities as you age prevents or slows cognitive decline."
Many scientists, not to
mention the rest of us, believe it does. The "mental exercise"
hypothesis has been around since 1920, and studies find that higher
mental activity -- more hours per week spent reading, doing crossword
puzzles, learning a language or the like -- is associated with better
cognitive function. That has spawned the idea that, to keep your brain
young(ish), you should partake of intellectual challenges.
But this logic has
a hole big enough to drive a truck through. Just because older adults
who are more mentally active are sharper than peers who are cognitive
couch potatoes doesn't mean mental activity in old age raises cognitive
performances, let alone slows the rate of decline.
To conclude that it does confuses correlation with
causation.
Consider an alternative
that is gaining scientific support. Say you enter old age (by which I
mean your 30s, when mental functioning starts heading south,
accelerating in your 50s) with a "cognitive reserve" -- a cushion of
smarts. If so, you are likely to be able to remember appointments,
balance a checkbook and understand Medicare Part D (OK, maybe not) well
into your 60s and 70s. But not because your brain falls apart more
slowly. Instead, you started off so far above the threshold where
impaired thinking and memory affect your ability to function that normal
decline leaves you still all right.
The Active study isn't
the only reason scientists are rethinking the
use-it-and-you-won't-lose-it idea. In the Seattle Longitudinal Study,
older adults received five hours of training on spatial rotation (what
would a shape look like if it turned?) or logic (given three patterns,
which of four choices comes next?). As in Active, people got better on
what they practiced.
But seven years later,
their performance had declined just as steeply (though, again, from a
higher starting point) as the performance of people with no training,
scientists reported last year. That supports the cognitive reserve idea
-- if you enter middle age with a good memory and reasoning skills you
stay sharp longer -- not the mental-exercise hypothesis.
Even in the most
mentally engaged elderly -- chess experts, professors, doctors -- mental
function declines as steeply as in people to whom mental exercise means
choosing which TV show to watch. Again, profs and docs enter old age
with a brain functioning so far above the minimum that even with the
equal rate of decline they do better than folks with no cognitive
cushion.
Crossword puzzles do not
live up to the hope people invest in them, either. Age-related decline
is very similar in people whether or not they wrestled with 24 Downs,
Prof. Salthouse and his colleagues find in a recent study. There is "no
evidence" that puzzle fans have "a slower rate of age-related decline in
reasoning," he says.
Evaluating
use-it-and-you-won't-lose-it in a new journal, Perspectives on
Psychological Science, he ends on a grim note: There is "little
scientific evidence that engagement in mentally stimulating activities
alters the rate of mental aging." He regards the belief as "more of an
optimistic hope than an empirical reality."
But don't write off
mental exercise yet. True, neither one-time training nor regular mental
challenges such as crosswords slow the rate of cognitive decline. But
they do show that "older adults can be made to perform better on almost
anything they can be trained on," says Michael Marsiske of the
University of Florida, who helped run the Active study. "We're still
detecting differences seven years after the training."
In practical terms,
although mental function continues to decline even after mental
training, the latter can give old brains enough of a boost that they
nevertheless remain higher functioning than untrained brains. A number
of scientists think they understand what kind of training provides the
biggest, most enduring boost. Next week, I'll look at their ideas.
Question 1
Would video games entice students into accounting courses? Pro 1 has a purportedly has an accounting video game, but I don't know
anything about it.
Multimedia Financial Accounting ---
Click Here
Question 2
How can you make your own video game, possibly an educational game that you
put online? People who love to create their own blogs,
podcasts, and movies have a new outlet for self-expression: home-made video
games.
Erica Naone, "Playing Their Own Way," MIT's Technology Review, August
2, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19137/?a=f
Question 3
What are some computer science courses doing to slow the decline in
enrollments?
Could robots play Monopoly in basic accounting and economics courses? "U.S. Colleges Retool Programming Classes," by Greg Bluestein,
PhysOrg, May 26, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news99378145.html
"Community College Uses a Video-Game Lab
to Lure Students to Computer Courses," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle
of Higher Education, December 14, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i16/16a02601.htm
A computer lab has
become one of the most popular hangouts at Northern Virginia Community
College after officials decided to load its PC's with popular video
games, install a PlayStation and an Xbox, and declare it "for gamers
only."
On an afternoon this
fall, nearly all of the 15 computers were in use, and students stared in
concentration — some gunning down bad guys in Counter-Strike, others
strumming along with Guitar Hero. No one was doing any classwork.
But the goal of the lab
is very much college-related. It is to entice students to take
game-design and other IT courses, says John Min, dean of business
technologies on the college's campus here.
Mr. Min decided to
create the Game Pit, as the lab is called, because he noticed that IT
enrollment had been falling since 1999. "We need to find ways to get
more students," he says.
Posters and fliers in
the gaming lab list the many computer courses offered, and professors
sometimes stop in to tout their courses.
It is too soon to tell
whether the effort will raise enrollment, say professors in the
department. At least one student playing here, though, says he plans to
take a course next semester that he learned about at the Game Pit.
"There's actually a gaming class," says the student, Abdullah Alhogbani.
"When I saw the poster I was like 'Oh, that's awesome.'"
David Williamson
Shaffer, an associate professor of education psychology at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, says the community college could be
on to a winning strategy. He is the author of How Computer Games Help
Children Learn.
Continued in article
Note that video games are not the same as
virtual learning such as with Second Life where there is interaction between
instructors and students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
However, video games may be used in virtual worlds.
Teaching Accounting With Dominos (watch
the video)
As I was posting
my son’s latest domino knockdown video on youtube, I thought that
creating domino courses could make a great teamwork exercise. Here are
my observations that lead me to this conclusion:
1.Setting up a
domino course is often very frustrating. You may get it all set up
and then part of it does not work. Also, you may accidentally knock
down several minutes or hours work.
2.When doing it in
teams (my son and I often work together), each person is responsible
for a part. Everybody’s part must work for the course to be
successful.
3.Good
communication is key. You need a way to resolve disputes.
Collaboration can lead to a superior solution to a problem. You need
to be able to deal with failures, accidentally ruining someone
else’s work.
4.For systems
courses, you have design, implementation, and control issues.
Controls would refer to using “safeties” or buffers between parts of
the course in the building stage to prevent an accidental knockdown
from ruining the entire course. Of course at the end you have to
fill in the gaps, which may be more problematic than not having
safeties at all (cost-benefit analysis).
5.You can
incorporate risk/reward by weighting grades for the project by
difficulty factor of the course. A straight line is easier than
having branches/spirals/stairs/towers/etc. or builder’s challenges
(having to complete part of the course while the dominoes are
falling).
I’m teaching cost
accounting this summer and I’m thinking about simulating job-order vs.
process costing using domino courses. Maybe I can use it to demonstrate
shop floor design differences between manufacturing cells vs.
traditional layout.
Richard
Newmark
Associate professor, School of Acctg. and Comp. Info. Systems
Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business 2004 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality
Award Winner University of Northern Colorado
Campus Box 128 Kepner Hall, 2090G
(970) 351-1213 office
(970) 351-1078 business fax
(707) 371-1213 personal fax
http://student1.unco.edu/phduh/index.html or
http://PhDuh.com/unc
http://www.youtube.com/phduh
David Fordham's
Open Share Jeopardy Games for Accounting Education
For several years, I have
been doing some fun things with PowerPoint, more than simply using it as
a "bullet-pointed" slide show.
One of the simplest, yet
most unusual, applications I use for PowerPoint is my own parody of the
Jeopardy game. If you download it and try it, I think you'll have to
agree it is ultra-simple, downright embarrassingly so, yet the students
get a kick out of it, since it is so unlike any PowerPoint session
they've ever seen. Class participation a la mode! Not a lot of new
learning takes place on the day I play the game, but the students have a
good time! I use Snickers bars for the winners, and a homework review
sheet for the losers!
Please don't take this game
as an indication of how simplistic I make my PowerPoint presentations! I
have many better examples of more powerful PowerPoint features. But this
game is fun, entertaining, and provides a break from the day-to-day
class. You are free to download it, try it, and even use it in your
class, changing the questions and answers to your heart's desire. Just
be sure to mention me as the original author, and be sure to tell the
students that Jeopardy is a registered trademark of the Sony Pictures
corporation! (And if you get some good ideas and do your own new
presentation game, you don't even have to mention me anymore!)
It dawned on me yesterday that
this might be a fun thing to demo in my next audience of about 100
accounting educators in the State of Mississippi. So I contacted David and
he indicated that he’s still using these Jeopardy games.
I admire David for being such a
highly competent, albeit sometimes very technical, contributor to the AECM
all these years. I also admire David for sharing his work with the world,
including his Jeopardy games.
The message that David sent me
today speaks for itself: If you use some of David’s Jeopardy games, please
add his name and James Madison University to the first slide in each
PowerPoint show. David did not even bother to acknowledge himself in these
files. Now that is really open sharing.
Bob Jensen
September 27 reply
from David Fordham [mailto:fordhadr@gmail.com]
Bob,
thanks for the honor.
I have several versions, because I use
this in several different classes: AIS; Advanced Technology for
Accountants; and Information Security. I am sending the AIS since
it is the simplest. The file contains links to sounds, and my
school was able to get copyright permission to use the "Final
Jeopardy Think Music", the "Daily Double" sounds, the timer buzzer,
and the theme song, but our permission is very explicit in that we
can only use it inside our own classrooms on our main campus. (I
have a fundamental aversion to the whole concept of "intellectual
property", and I don't consider myself or anyone else to be under
obligation to follow ridiculous and ludicrous laws -- but I have a
pragmatic streak that says when I'm specifically told by my
institution's legal department not to do something, I probably
shouldn't do it. Hence, I am not included the .wav files....
sorry.)
When you execute the PowerPoint slide
show, you see the main board. Click on a wager to see the answer.
Click anywhere on the answer slide to get the question, then click
on the button to return to the main board. Used wagers are shown in
red.
When the daily double appears, click
on the words "Daily Double" to get to the daily double answer slide
If you are familiar with powerPoint,
you should be able to modify the questions and answers, the topic
categories, etc. without problem. By the way, clicking on the
far-right-hand category heading square on the main board should take
you to final jeopardy.
By the way, my PowerPoint is not
copyrighted so you are free to copy, modify, distribute, etc. to
your heart's content.
Trying to grab screenshots for a project
can be trying with some applications, but Jing makes the process quite
seamless and stress-free. Jing allows users to grab screenshots and
screencasts via a yellow interface device that sits on the screen at all
times. This particular version of Jing is compatible with computers running
Windows 98 and newer.
Members of the film industry, critics, and
others ask: "What is animation?"
Developed by John Weidner, the Study Stack concept
basically assists individuals to memorize information about various subjects,
including geography, history, math, languages, and science. Users of the site
can select one of the existing stacks, which consists of virtual study cards
allowing individuals to learn at their own pace until they are satisfied with
their progress. What is also particularly novel about this learning tool is
that data entered for customized study stacks can be automatically displayed
as a matching game, a word search puzzle, or a hangman game. So far, the site
contains dozens of study stacks for each subject, with the areas dedicated to
math and science containing quite a number of rather helpful stacks. With its
wide range of applications, this site will be very helpful to students at
different age levels and teachers who may be seeking to develop a new study
tool for any number of topics or themes within a subject area.
From the June 25 edition of Syllabus
News
Wharton webCafe
Earns High Satisfaction Ratings
A survey of students
of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that 97 percent
rated the school's web-based virtual meeting application -- dubbed web Cafe --
as valuable to their education experience. Since Wharton began using webCafe
in 1998 as part of the school's student intranet, use of webCafe has expanded
to 5,200 users, 99 percent of full-time MBA candidates, all executive MBA
students, and almost all Wharton undergraduates. webCafe is one component of
Wharton's plan to reshape its business education. The school's Alfred West Jr.
Learning Lab is exploring methods of learning and instruction using
interactive multimedia and real-time simulations. This August, it is opening
Jon M. Huntsman Hall, which Wharton claims will be the largest and most
sophisticated instructional technology center at any business school.
Question
How can you make your own video game, possibly an educational game that you put
online?
People who love to create their own blogs, podcasts,
and movies have a new outlet for self-expression: home-made video games.
Erica Naone, "Playing Their Own Way," MIT's Technology Review, August 2,
2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19137/?a=f
Hoping to cash in on the popularity
of user-generated content, a number
of companies have set up websites
that help average folks create their
own video games.
Sites such as
MyGame and
Scratch,
for example, provide simple
personalizing or programming tools
so that people with little or no
programming experience can create
their own kind of fun. Players can
personalize games on MyGame in a
matter of minutes using a basic home
computer, and they can spend
anywhere from hours to weeks
designing a game, depending on its
complexity.
Reflexive Entertainment,
a video-game
company based in California, has
already had great success with
user-generated content. In 2004, the
company released a downloadable game
called Big Kahuna Reef and included
tools so that players could design
their own levels. The feature was so
popular that it formed the basis for
a sequel, called Big Kahuna Reef 2,
with 700 user-generated levels. Ion
Hardie, director of product
development for Reflexive, says that
the core community of designers is
small--some 30 or 40 people--but the
company is working to increase
involvement in new releases. Its
most recent release, Ricochet
Infinity, integrates more design
features into the core game, with
the idea of encouraging more players
to participate.
Ulrich Tausend,
a graduate student in the sociology
department at the University of
Munich and the founder of the game
company
Neodelight,
says that
user-generated content is getting
attention in the game-development
industry because visible game
communities could attract more
players. "One main goal of the
casual game developers is to tell
the nontypical potential computer
players ... that gaming is also
something for them," he says. The
challenge to providing
user-generated content, Tausend
says, is that companies have to
provide tools that are easy to use
yet powerful enough to let people
express themselves.
Continued in article
Question
What are some computer science courses doing to slow the decline in enrollments?
Could robots play Monopoly in basic accounting and economics courses?
The lesson plan was called "Artificial
Unintelligence," but it was written more like a comic book than a syllabus
for a serious computer science class.
"Singing, dancing and drawing polygons may be
nifty, but any self-respecting evil roboticist needs a few more tricks in
the repertoire if they are going to take over the world," read the day's
instructions to a dozen or so Georgia Tech robotics students.
They had spent the
last few months teaching their personal "Scribbler" robots to draw shapes
and chirp on command. Now they were being asked to navigate a daunting
obstacle course of Girl Scout cookie boxes scattered over a grid.
The course is aimed at reigniting interest in computer science among
undergraduates. Educators at Georgia Tech and elsewhere are turning to
innovative programs like the Scribbler to draw more students to the field
and reverse the tide of those leaving it.
At risk, professors say, is nothing less than U.S. technology supremacy. As
interest in computer science drops in the U.S., India and China are emerging
as engineering hubs with cheap labor and a skilled work force.
Schools across the country are taking steps to broaden the appeal of the
major. More than a dozen universities have adopted "media computation"
programs, a sort of alternate introduction to computer science with a New
Media vibe. The classes, which have been launched at schools from the
University of San Francisco to Virginia Tech, teach basic engineering using
digital art,
digital music and the
Web.
Others are turning to niche fields to attract more students. The California
Institute of Technology, which has seen a slight drop in undergraduate
computer science majors, has more than made up for the losses by emphasizing
the field of bioengineering.
"Many of our computer science faculty work on subjects related to biology,
and so this new thrust works well for us," said Joel Burdick, a Caltech
bioengineering professor.
At Georgia Tech,
computing professor Tucker Balch says the brain
drain is partly the fault of what he calls the "prime number" syndrome.
It's the traditional way to teach computer science students by asking them
to write programs that spit out prime numbers, the Fibonacci sequence or
other mathematical series.
It's proven a sound way to educate students dead-set on joining the ranks of
computer programmers, but it's also probably scared away more than a few.
That's why Balch, who oversees the robotics class, is optimistic about the
Scribbler, a scrappy blue robot cheap enough for students to buy and take
home each night after class but versatile enough to handle fairly complex
programs.
The key to the class is the design of the robot. It weighs about a pound and
is slightly smaller than a Frisbee, sporting three light-detecting sensors
and a speaker that can chirp. And at about $75, it's roughly the price of a
science textbook.
In the popular imagination,
chess isn't like a spelling bee or
Trivial Pursuit, a competition to
see who can hold the most facts in
memory and consult them quickly. In
chess, as in the arts and sciences,
there is plenty of room for beauty,
subtlety, and deep originality.
Chess requires brilliant thinking,
supposedly the one feat that would
be--forever--beyond the reach of any
computer. But for a decade, human
beings have had to live with the
fact that one of our species' most
celebrated intellectual summits--the
title of world chess champion--has
to be shared with a machine, Deep
Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a
highly publicized match in 1997. How
could this be? What lessons could be
gleaned from this shocking upset?
Did we learn that machines could
actually think as well as the
smartest of us, or had chess been
exposed as not such a deep game
after all?
The following years saw two other
human-machine chess matches that
stand out: a hard-fought draw
between Vladimir Kramnik and Deep
Fritz in Bahrain in 2002 and a draw
between Kasparov and Deep Junior in
New York in 2003, in a series of
games that the New York City Sports
Commission called "the first World
Chess Championship sanctioned by
both the Fédération Internationale
des Échecs (FIDE), the international
governing body of chess, and the
International Computer Game
Association (ICGA)."
The verdict that computers are the
equal of human beings in chess could
hardly be more official, which makes
the caviling all the more pathetic.
The excuses sometimes take this
form: "Yes, but machines don't play
chess the way human beings play
chess!" Or sometimes this: "What the
machines do isn't
really
playing chess at all." Well, then,
what would
be really playing chess?
This is not a
trivial question. The best computer
chess is well nigh indistinguishable
from the best human chess, except
for one thing:
computers
don't know
when to accept a draw. Computers--at
least currently existing
computers--can't be bored or
embarrassed, or anxious about losing
the respect of the other players,
and these are aspects of life that
human competitors always have to
contend with, and sometimes even
exploit, in their games. Offering or
accepting a draw, or resigning, is
the one decision that opens the
hermetically sealed world of chess
to the real world, in which life is
short and there are things more
important than chess to think about.
This boundary crossing can be
simulated with an arbitrary rule, or
by allowing the computer's handlers
to step in. Human players often try
to intimidate or embarrass their
human opponents, but this is like
the covert pushing and shoving that
goes on in soccer matches. The
imperviousness of computers to this
sort of gamesmanship means that if
you beat them at all, you have to
beat them fair and square--and isn't
that just what Kasparov and Kramnik
were unable to do?
Yes, but so
what? Silicon machines can now play
chess better than any protein
machines can. Big deal. This calm
and reasonable reaction, however, is
hard for most people to sustain.
They don't like the idea that their
brains are protein machines. When
Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997,
many commentators were tempted to
insist that its brute-force search
methods were
entirely unlike the exploratory
processes that Kasparov used when he
conjured up his chess moves. But
that is simply not so. Kasparov's
brain is made of organic materials
and has an architecture notably
unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is
still, so far as we know, a
massively parallel
search
engine
that has an
outstanding array of heuristic
pruning techniques that keep it from
wasting time on unlikely branches.
True, there's no doubt that investment in research and development has a different profile in the two cases; Kasparov has methods of extracting good design principles from past games, so that he can recognize, and decide to ignore, huge portions of the branching tree of possible game continuations that Deep Blue had to canvass seriatim. Kasparov's reliance on this "insight" meant that the shape of his search trees--all the nodes explicitly evaluated--no doubt differed dramatically from the shape of Deep Blue's, but this did not constitute an entirely different means of choosing a move. Whenever Deep Blue's exhaustive searches closed off a type of avenue that it had some means of recognizing, it could reuse that research whenever appropriate, just like Kasparov. Much of this analytical work had been done for Deep Blue by its designers, but Kasparov had likewise benefited from hundreds of thousands of person-years of chess exploration transmitted to him by players, coaches, and books.
It is interesting in this regard to contemplate the suggestion made by Bobby Fischer, who has proposed to restore the game of chess to its intended rational purity by requiring that the major pieces be randomly placed in the back row at the start of each game (randomly, but in mirror image for black and white, with a white-square bishop and a black-square bishop, and the king between the rooks). Fischer Random Chess would render the mountain of memorized openings almost entirely obsolete, for humans and machines alike, since they would come into play much less than 1 percent of the time. The chess player would be thrown back onto fundamental principles; one would have to do more of the hard design work in real time. It is far from clear whether this change in rules would benefit human beings or computers more. It depends on which type of chess player is relying most heavily on what is, in effect, rote memory.
For example, the BMW plant tour in South Carolina features the components
of BMW models and discusses manufacturing framing and assembly ---
http://www.bmwusfactory.com/build/
You come away wondering what humans in the future are going to do for
jobs in a robotic manufacturing plant. Perhaps these plants will be totally
automated once maintenance and repair robots can maintain and repair all of
the "direct labor" robots. The last human in the plant might as well turn
out the lights.
The discipline of management is in big trouble. There may not be any
people left to manage.
The BMW plant tour certainly illustrates how Manufacturing Overhead has
become so huge relative to the incredibly shrinking cost of direct (human)
labor in modern plants. This is useful especially in cost/managerial
accounting courses.
This makes me think that one day war, terrorism, and anti-terrorism will
be mostly robotic. Unmanned aircraft will one day be sending rockets into
unmanned "suicide" ground vehicles and aircraft. Suicide robots will rush
into oil and battery recharge "cafes" and blow up themselves while the other
robots having their morning "breaks."
Humans blowing themselves apart will be so decadent. Video games of today
will probably be the reality of the future in both war and peace (e.g.,
automobile manufacturing and driving).
Where will the humans be found in such a world of tomorrow? They'll
probably be inside heavily-guarded (by robots) compounds grazing like cattle
at the foot of the Big Rock Candy Mountain ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rock_Candy_Mountain
Vehicles are getting smarter all the time, thanks to
a combination of sensor and wireless communications technologies. Car
manufacturers say that tomorrow's drivers will be assisted by a wealth of safety
information generated by vehicles that can talk to not only each other but to
the roadway itself. But with so much data often comes information overload. And
that's why computing giant IBM has launched a project to help the driver get the
right information at the right time.
"A Smarter Car: IBM wants to improve communication between cars, roads,
and drivers," by Clark Boyd, MIT's Technology Review, July 6, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19017/?a=f
A New Second Life 3-D Application in Higher Education
"Immersive Learning in Preservice Teacher Education: Using Virtual Worlds,"
by Paula M. Selvester, The International HETL Review, Volume 2 ISSN 2164-3091,
July 8, 2012 --- http://hetl.org/
Abstract
The purpose of this project was to use virtual
world technology in a fully online course to assist preservice teachers in
examining their stated and implied beliefs, attitudes, and expectations
about social roles related to gender. Second Life was explored as a viable
means to enhance interactivity and engagement in an asynchronous entirely
online class. Data was generated by a social roles questionnaire, a
perception survey, journal entries and written final examinations. Results
showed that students’ initially held beliefs about social roles as
determined by the questionnaire did not significantly change; however, data
generated from journals and final exam indicated that experiences exploring
gender and social roles in a virtual environment were powerful and
transformative, leading to new insights into gender roles and how these
roles impact our beliefs about ourselves and others and how teachers and
students are impacted by these beliefs. Preservice teachers surveyed
indicated agreement with the idea that Second Life makes online coursework
more interactive.
Key Words: Virtual learning,
gender, social roles, teacher beliefs, second life, teacher preparation,
online learning.
INTRODUCTION
Professors of all disciplines can impact student
learning by varying the way in which they engage students in knowledge
sharing and creation. Online education technologies have become an important
means to provide a more varied and differentiated curriculum, especially in
higher education settings. Not only do online technologies provide an
alternative or supplement to face-to-face lecture, but they also provide a
variety of ways for students to interact with the content of the curriculum
as well as the professor. Through technology experiences, especially when
social media is employed, students become more actively engaged in their own
learning when provided the opportunity to collaboratively work with their
peers in constructing information (Norton & Sprague, 2001). Many
universities offer courses through an online learning management system such
as Blackboard Vista; Discussions, emailing, virtual meetings, instant
messaging and a variety of other functions allow for students to interact
with each other and with the professor; however, with the advent and
development of virtual world technology for use in education, immersive
education within these virtual worlds offer an alternative education
experience.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
There is emerging evidence that virtual world
technologies supplement and provide the online education experience by
providing opportunities for meaningful social interaction, a constructivist
element that can improve student learning during online instruction. When
students meet together in virtual settings where they can “see” each other
via avatars and interact in a virtual world a sense of belonging and an
embodied social presence is created (Edirisingha et al., 2009; Holmberg &
Huvila, 2008; Omale, Hung, Luetkehans, & Cooke-Plagwitz, 2009; Salmon, 2009;
Warburton, 2009).
How Do Virtual Worlds Enrich Learning?
Immersive or virtual world learning provides
students a multimodality experience. These technologies are 3D
Internet-based simulation environments in which users can play games, they
are not games (Dawley, 2009). The virtual learning environment offers the
opportunity for students to do what might otherwise be impractical or
impossible in the real world (Twinning, 2009). Students can communicate with
each other while walking, running, swimming, flying through environments as
varied as coral reefs, Antarctic ice caps, volcanoes, or they can visit
museums, art galleries, and classrooms that are virtual replicas of the
real-world locations. Users can build buildings, cars, upload pictures and
watch movies together.
Web-based applications have facilitated the use of
virtual worlds in learning, allowing the development of a range of teaching
tools such as document and file sharing, holding meetings, conferences, and
class lectures and seminars. In particular, virtual worlds have been studied
as environments in which to instruct using problem-based and project-based
education methodologies (Mayrath, Sanchez, Traphagan, Heikes, & Trivedi,
2007). Virtual environments appear to provide opportunities for situated
learning, contextualized and supported by communities of practice which can
provide powerful experiences that engage and inspire education that goes
beyond the traditional classroom (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lave, 1996; Wenger,
1998).
Research on the use of virtual world learning has
shown that learners are motivated to engage in the learning events because
of the life-like avatars and the interactivity with digital mentors and
role-playing actors within world (Veletsianos, 2008; 2009). Ang & Wang,
(2006) studied students using virtual learning environments for science
education. They observed notable improvements in engagement and in
attendance. Scores on science exams were reported to have improved.
February 17 messages from Bob Jensen and Jim Martin
Thanks for the JA heads up Jim,
It's interesting (but not surprising) how
universities lag on using Second Life for education while industry is
adopting second life like hot cakes for training purposes. The reason
that the technology lag in universities is not surprising is that
technology applications (beyond simple minded PowerPoint) are usually
not rewarded. Professors invest their time in research, writing, and
teaching classes. They are not rewarded for heavy time investments in
applying newer technology in education if it takes a heavy time
commitment.
From: AECM, Accounting Education using Computers
and Multimedia [mailto:AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU] On Behalf Of James R.
Martin/University of South Florida
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 4:59 PM
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Subject: Second Life
The following article discusses the
opportunities for accountants in Second Life. Johnson, R. A. and J. M.
Middleton. 2008. Accounting for second life. Journal of Accountancy
(June): 54-58.
According to these authors, Second Life is an
engaging 3-D virtual world with economic implications and opportunities
for the real world, and CPA Island is the current center of the public
accounting profession in Second Life.
Is this just fun and games, or is there
something to be gained by
developing an avatar and flying around in the second life environment?
I am a fan of Second Life, particularly training
and networking programs offered by the Maryland Association of CPAs (MACPA)
on CPA Island
www.cpaisland.com ,
www.slacpa.org (full disclosure: MACPA recently produced the Second
Life 'music video' about accounting which has previouly been circ. on
this listserve, which I was involved with as well) .
Separately, I am fascinated by the Roundtables
conducted in Second Life (with optional traditional webcast access
availalble) by the FASB Research Initiative (FASRI),
http://fasri.net/index.php/officehours/ led by Prof. Rob Bloomfield
of Cornell Univ. The FASRI roundtables are fascinating on 2 levels: (1)
feeling of 'engagement' by participating via your avatar as one of the
'group' in Second Life (same as for MACPA CPA Island training and
networking programs) and (2) very interesting points of view and
discussion take place in the FASRI roundtables.
On balance, for an alternate view, I would note
I just saw an article today, published by The Chronicle of Higher Ed on
Feb. 14, After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual
Worlds
http://chronicle.com/article/After-Frustrations-in-Second/64137/
I would just like to echo
the sentiments of Edith and Bob regarding Second Life. Edith brings up
some of the powerful benefits of using the platform from a professional
perspective. The ability to attend meetings, earn CPE and interact with
groups that might otherwise be impossible because of distance can be a
huge benefit. Second Life seems to have a democratizing effect (I think
I'm using that term correctly) probably because everyone's avatar looks
about the same mid 20's and good looking, normal hierarchies become less
important.
In terms of education
(where I use Second Life the most) it has the capability of transforming
some (key word there some) content delivery. As the Chronicle article
that Edith referenced suggests building classes and campuses that look
just like a real class are not usually that beneficial (The Chronicle
article is also heavily riddled with inaccuracies and shows a real lack
of understanding on the part of the author but I won't get into all of
that here). But building a cell that a biology student can literally go
into and investigate, or being able to become a particle in a particle
accelerator that the Department of Energy has created, or even a debit
or credit on a T-account can be a pretty powerful learning experience
that hopefully is engaging to students.
And its my belief that
this is type of platform (whether Second Life or some other) will become
more and more important and accepted in the near future as students who
are now in middle school and are growing up with these technologies
eventually become our students. A recent report from Kzero a
consultancy specializing in virtual worlds reported that as of Q4 2009
there were 800 million registered virtual world accounts and
significantly over 50% of those are in the age range 5-15.
http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=3943
Steven
_________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Social Networking for Education: The Beautiful and the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses
of Twitter)
Updates will be at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
First, yes I suppose pulling a fast one is is good
explanation of the sudden announcement of the price increase. However as
usual the Chronicle and at least the authors who write articles on SL are to
be kind somewhat biased with little actual experience with the company or
the platform.
So this is what happened, LL has decided to no longer offer 50% discounts on
land purchases (ie. server space) and the accompanying monthly maintenance
fees. The edu and non-profit community was pretty upset as they were
accustomed to this and some were using grants funds for their work in Second
Life. Linden Labs has never understood academics and our different time
frames based on semesters, quarters and annual grant budgeting. However, and
this is important and of course not reported, once LL understood this they
reached out and have offered anyone who wishes to renew their land
purchase/maintenance for an additional 24 months at the same rates. I can
tell you with first hand experience that they (LL) have gone out of the way
to accommodate me and my project and have agreed to allow me to pay for
continuing maintenance every 6 months as my grant funding comes in. I'm sure
I'm not a special case.
The bigger issue is why LL decided to do this now. One reason is that the
edu market is actually pretty small in Second Life (despite what edu
people's usually overblown egos tend to think). Another speculation is that
they are getting their ducks in order for some type of acquisition. I've
heard companies from Microsoft to Google. It's always a bit tenuous being a
pioneer with new platforms and isn't always for the weak of heart but it is
still my opinion that virtual worlds/environments will be a tool in most
educators toolbox in the years to come.
_________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
Twitter: shornik http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
"Really Engaging Accounting: Second LifeTM as a Learning Platform," by
Steven Hornik and Steven Thornburg, Issues in Accounting Education 25(3),
361 (August 2010) (Not Free) ---
Click Here
ABSTRACT: This position paper argues that the
eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) be integrated across the
accounting curriculum, in a manner relevant to the temporal stage and
content of particular courses within the curriculum. XBRL is a metadata
representation language for the Internet, based on the World Wide Web
consortium's eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XBRL provides an important
foundation for the automated transfer of accounting information and
associated metadata. The design of XBRL is fine-tuned to meet the particular
needs of accounting and related disclosures. Several countries have adopted
XBRL in a variety of information value chains, notably in the USA context
the Securities and Exchange Commission's interactive data program. XBRL has
implications for the totality of the accounting curriculum and pedagogy. A
program for the integration of XBRL across a typical accounting curriculum
is developed. The proposed XBRL assignments, as part of this program, are
aligned with Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives. Recommendations are
made for faculty, case and textbook writers, and the leadership of the XBRL
and academic accounting communities
PS
The entire August 2010 issue of IAE is a special issue devoted to AIS, XBRL, and
related topics.
Yesterday Linden Labs
announced a significant restructuring laying off 30% of their workforce with
the stated intent to focus on two endeavors:
1) Create a browser based
Second Life vs. the downloaded client you need today and
2) Extend Second Life into
more Social networks.
The twitterverse, etc. among
educators is pretty active now wondering what this means for us. As a
pretty big supporter of Second Life I wish I knew as one of the laid off
employees Claudia Linden was the point person for education, and this
follows on the heals of the layoff of Pathfinder Linden who was the initial
trailblazer for Second Life and the education community.
It does seem that this is
intended to position Second Life more towards the mass consumers and in that
respect I look forward to the changes that might come. One of the biggest
hurdles to using SL is overcoming the learning for the software that needs
to be used and the hardware requirements that many students newly bought
laptops, netbooks, and coming soon iPads and other tablets don't have - not
to mention iPhones and Android devices. So if this change enables students
to access 3-D learning objects and environments on those devices than this
will be a huge plus.
What most educators are unsure
about is that in the PR release that mentions the 2 areas of focus, the CEO
of Linden Lab, Marc Kingdon states: ""We've emerged from a two-year
investment period during which, among other things, we've spent a
considerable amount of time improving reliability and the overall user
experience. Today's announcement about our reorganization will help us make
Second Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging for
consumers starting with their first experience." So many are asking are the
consumers a general term for your virtual clothing creating/buying
individuals, business' for meetings, and educators? Or is it just the
former that will be the focus for LL.
To be honest I'm not sure it
matters that much. When I first began to explore SL for use in my class it
was probably 95% focuses on the former and educators like myself simply saw
SL as a platform or tool that might be used (same thing that happened with
the web if my memory serves me ).
_________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
Twitter: shornik
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Kaplan, A. M. and M. Haenlein. 2009.
The fairyland of Second Life: About virtual social worlds and how to use
them. Business Horizons 52(6): 563-572.
February 22, 2010 message from James R. Martin/University of South Florida
[jmartin@MAAW.INFO]
For those who would like to learn more about
Accounting in the Second Life environment, I've developed a section on
Second Life with a brief summary of the Johnson-Middleton article, a
bibliography, and a links page. See
http://maaw.info/SecondLifeMain.htm
There are a considerable number of related books,
articles, and You Tube videos, but I have not found much in the accounting
literature. When I find more and learn more I will place it on the pages
mentioned above.
I joined Second Life, developed and avatar, and
have been looking around, but don't know how to do much. Those who are using
Second Life for accounting education purposes have an opportunity to write
about it for publication in the accounting education journals. Many
accounting faculty members would be interested in what they are doing, and
unfortunately, if they don't write about it, they are not likely to get any
credit for their work in the academic environment.
Another idea, perhaps there should be a Second Life
section on AAA Commons. I call the MAAW section "Second Life, Avatars, and
Virtual Worlds".
Fun for the weekend? I just
came across an interesting site that enables creations of short (up to 10
pages currently) pop-up books. Whether or not this is useful for delivering
basic concepts to our students is debatable but is certainly another
technique to try. It also has the added fun of being an augmented reality
book, so you can use the website to read your 3-D pop book as if its resting
on your hand - neat in a very geeky way, but pedagogically I'm not so sure.
The website is at:
http://alpha.zooburst.com/index.php and is
currently in Alpha stage testing, I wrote up a blog article on it replete
with pictures, a video and of course an accounting pop-up book:
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
Twitter: shornik
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Penn State requires academic advisors to be available in Second Life
virtual worlds Plenty of colleges have a presence in Second Life.
Pennsylvania State University is taking that a step further, requiring academic
advisers at its online campus to be available for meetings with students in the
virtual world.
"Second Life Duty Is Now Required for Penn State's Online Advisers," by Marc
Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 9, 2009 ---
Click Here
I'm not sure what I think of this. It is not for
all students. Students taking face-to-face classes still get advised the
traditional way. I imagine the traditional way at Penn State is much like
the traditional way at a lot of other public universities, in which students
largely figure out things on their own.
I tried out second life, and found that there were
significant start-up or learning costs. Therefore I simply stopped making
the effort. A factor was that my fairly new computer had difficulty in
rendering the graphics. A lot of people use laptops that don't quite have
the muscle of many desktops, and hence have problems.
I keep asking students how familiar they are with
second life, and it is rare that anyone indicates ever having been on it.
I wonder, is Second Life a failed experiment. It
has never caught on in a big way.
Now, if Penn State required academic advisors to be
available on Facebook, they might have lots of traffic.
David Albrecht
November 12. 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David,
You’re correct about the startup costs of Second Life. In
retirement I just am not interested in that kind of second life.
However, you’re wrong in your conjecture about Second Life being
a “failed experiment” (at least at this point in time until something better
comes along for virtual world communicating and learning at reasonable
costs). High end virtual reality is still too costly for widespread
collegiate applications even though it is great for deep-pockets pilot
training and battlefield training of military officers. Before launching the
infamous Gulf War I retaking of Kuwait, the U.S. commanders purportedly
invaded a virtual Kuwait in a high-end virtual reality.
Google closed down Lively rather than upgrading it to be a
serious competitor to Second Life.
Second Life has become ubiquitous inside and outside academe,
although Steve Hornik reported that in his early experiments in accounting
education some students question the benefits relative to their costs in
time and trouble --- (See below)
You'll see in 2
out of the 3 most recent posts two are for the Texas Statewide roll out of
Second Life and Open Universities new presence in the virtual world. Coupled
with Penn State's announcement I'd say this data suggests that Second Life is
growing in importance for educational institutions not declining.
To the comment about learning curves, the
curve is there but its really not that more difficult from learning any new
piece of software. I think many of us have become accustomed (perhaps too much)
to expecting everything to be easy with similar if not the same interfaces. And
certainly its true that without believing there is a reward at the end for your
effort many feel that its not worth it to learn the interface. To that end
Linden Lab is working on what they call the first 5 minute (or some similarly
small amount of time) experience and the interface to try to make it easier for
new users to a) understand the interface and b) understand how/what second life
can be used for. But we will have to wait to see if their efforts are successful
as these changes haven't been rolled out yet.
And as Bob correctly pointed out, my
students consistently fall into 3 groups, 1/3 who really like it (they "get"
it), 1/3 who really don't like it (much of that I believe has to do with
hardware issues as David pointed out), and 1/3 who use it and view it as just
another tool assigned by me. And while it still takes time to implement the
students who are using it in general outperform those who don't.
_____________________________ Dr. Steven Hornik University of Central Florida Dixon School of Accounting 407-823-5739 Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com yahoo ID: shornik
I've written a
blog post about how my students have assessed Second Life since Fall 2007
when I first began using it. The post only examines one question from a
semester end survey that I ask the students to complete. It may not be
classified as rigorous empirical research but I think it's interesting
nevertheless. Here's the link if anyone's interested:
http://www.mydebitcredit.com/2010/01/08/second-life-what-do-the-students-think/
Enjoy your weekend,
Steven
_________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Several classes are involved with developing the City
Tech's presence in Second Life, a virtual digital world created by its more
than nine million “residents.” In this world, alter egos (avatars) they have
constructed live, play and work in immersive environments — artificial,
interactive, computer-created scenes or “worlds” within which users can
immerse themselves and interact with others. In Second Life, students can
manipulate their avatars’ movements to walk around in, fly through and
thoroughly explore such virtual environments as the Sistine Chapel, foreign
cities, lecture halls and workplaces.
On “CityTech Island,” City Tech's Second Life site, students from various
academic disciplines not only observe, but also, along with their
professors, help create that world, which challenges them to use and master
3-D modeling skills in some cases or
script-writing skills
in others.
“Some consider Second Life only a game,” says City Tech Entertainment
Technology Professor David Smith, “but we see it as a huge outlet for
creative activity, allowing students and faculty to work on projects as a
team.”
Second Life's introduction
Smith introduced Second Life to the college and
uses it in the Introduction to Interactive Technology, Design Process course
and for his senior students’ final projects.
City Tech professors currently using Second Life in their classes, in
addition to Smith, are Isaac Barjis and Walied Samarrai (biological
sciences); Reneta Lansiquot (English) and Jenna Spevack (entertainment
technology). All of them have presented papers on their work or have reached
out to involve segments of the larger community — Brooklyn artists, for
example.
Spevack and her Introduction to Media Design Process students planned,
designed and developed the virtual "Brooklyn
is Watching" Museum. It houses photos of
artwork created by the Brooklyn is Watching Project, which invites
interaction between the thriving art communities of Second Life and
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Project and Museum will continue to evolve
during the spring 2010 semester.
CityTech Island features a virtual laboratory where professor avatars
lecture and conduct experiments. Biology students can take a special ride —
inside a virtual cell. At the International Summer Simulation
Multiconference, held in Istanbul, Smith, Barjis and Samarrai presented a
research paper, “Modeling and Simulation of 3-D Virtual Cell as a Game,” to
an audience of top simulation and modeling researchers.
Actively engaged students more apt to learn
Their paper, published in Simulation Journal,
proposed Second Life as a tool enabling students to enter, observe and visit
a cell’s components, ask questions and interact with those components as one
would in a video game. “Students can tour the cell, take a quiz and test
their knowledge after and before the tour,” Samarrai explained. “We are
working now on other processes such as transportation and diffusion of
molecules, ions and water across the cell membrane.”
At the
beginning of my course on German history at Stanford University last fall, each
student drew an identity at random that he or she would keep throughout the
quarter—creating a unique historical character who was born in 1900 and lived
through Germany's tumultuous 20th century. Through weekly posts to individual
pages on the course Web site, students researched the texture of everyday life,
untangled pivotal events, and weighed questions of humanity. Although fictional,
the lives that the students developed offered a unique entree into the past,
stimulating their curiosity and critical thinking about history.
Each
student had one sentence to go on with his or her character's birthplace,
gender, religion, and parents' occupations. Characters were born into all walks
of life: the son of a prostitute in Berlin, the daughter of Jewish banker in
Munich, the son of East Prussian nobility. The rest was up to students to
decide. I gave weekly assignments to help structure their posts, requesting
diary entries for key dates or eyewitness responses to certain events, and would
note any historical inaccuracies in their writings. But I did not interfere with
individual choices as to how the avatars would feel, live and act, placing just
three restrictions on them: The characters could not die or be otherwise
incapacitated, leave Germany permanently, or change the course of history.
That
open-endedness engendered a sense of ownership, fostering seriousness and
self-correction. Students showed humility in their approach to the material; in
the words of one senior, "I kept asking myself, Is this realistic?" Perhaps more
than anything, the high standards of the class Web site helped sustain the
quality of the work and a productive exchange of ideas.
Over the
quarter, the avatars lived through two world wars and the cold war, experiencing
monarchy, democracy, fascism, and communism. They each saw Hitler at the Beer
Hall Putsch and had to decide whether to vote for him a decade later. They were
at the Berlin Wall when it went up in 1961 and came down in 1989. Building upon
course readings, they had conversations with the writer Joseph Roth in Weimar
Berlin, with the Holocaust perpetrators of Police Battalion 101, and with
estranged family and friends on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. They
witnessed and, in some cases, participated in the violence of Germany's 20th
century, even as they lived at the pinnacle of Germany's cultural and economic
achievements. The characters also reflected upon the meaning of it all as they
met together at the close of the century.
As the
avatars became increasingly three-dimensional, the project resonated beyond the
classroom. Students endowed them with personality quirks, discussed them with
friends and family, and incorporated their own histories. One based his
character's persecution and emigration from Nazi Germany on his own family's
experience; another wrote his grandfather into his story. They also explored
individual interests. A history major, prompted by election campaigning over
Proposition 8 in California, had her character outed as gay in the Third Reich;
she researched the treatment of homosexuals in Germany's successive regimes,
integrating details like the number of gay bars in East and West Berlin into her
weekly updates.
Students
sent their characters on divergent paths. Some plunged head long into radical
events and ideologies; others "took the path of least resistance" and "just let
history pass [them] by." Some characters' values and personalities stayed
consistent; others took "fluctuating, elastic political positions." Some
characters spent their whole lives in one place; others ranged far and wide—a
colonist to Southwest Africa, Jewish émigrés to Britain and America (they had to
return to Germany), a priest to counsel killers in Poland, a resisting factory
worker to Auschwitz, and a POW to Siberia.
The
project inspired an unusual level of academic commitment. Students often went
well beyond the required material in developing their avatars. Their research
included Internet searches for images, period-appropriate children's names, and
food specialties as well as reading scholarly works on particular topics of
interest. They wrote an average of 1,120 words per post, equivalent to four and
a half pages a week, in addition to their regular work. Most important, the
students integrated all of the information into a coherent whole and uncovered
their own historical lessons along the way.
Students
said they gained a greater appreciation for everyday complexities—how ordinary
people adjusted to extraordinary times, and how adaptations propelled new social
and political realities. Their simple vignettes expressed complicated ideas. One
farm woman from Dachau supported but had visceral misgivings about the local
concentration camp: "I dislike the communists as much as anyone else, but
smelling [their ashes] on the wind turned my stomach." Students felt that they
came to understand how history makes individuals and individuals make history. A
sophomore reflected: "The project forced us to see the situation as much from
within as a student can, years later and thousands of miles away. Oskar, to whom
I grew attached, had a past, a family, thoughts, ideas. There were
justifications for his actions that were intricately tied in with all of these,
ones that I would never have considered without a specific persona in mind."
The
project also underscored how bound the characters' perceptions and opinions were
to the circumstances of the moment—and how decisions made in one decade
reverberate in the next. One character, an
armaments-manufacturer-turned-democratic-leader, observed that "the only way to
begin to make sense of the five very different Germanys I have lived in is to
understand the malleable nature of the human mind and human society."
Creating
lives can be an effective way to develop individual interests within the bounds
of a survey course, as a complement to traditional lectures, exams, and papers.
Students commented that it provided a sense of freedom rare in their course
work, allowing space for imagination, authorship, and identification. The
personal narratives were more work than traditional weekly papers, yet students
agreed it was a rewarding way to expand upon the standard approach. As one said,
"It was more than worth it. It allowed us to fuse the course material with our
own creativity and take away so much more than a typical survey of history."
Although
the experience involved a small group of motivated Stanford students, mostly
history majors, the basic method can be adapted to different fields and
classroom environments. The core concept—creating continuing lives within a
Web-based community forum—could have broad appeal. In turn, the personal
investment fosters enthusiasm and lasting learning.
Edith Sheffer is an Andrew W. Mellon fellow in
the humanities at Stanford University. Her book, Burned Bridge: How East and
West Germans Made the Iron Curtain will be published by Oxford University Press
in 2011.
Jensen Comment
It struck me that this might be a good way to teach the Enron/Andersen Scandal
by letting assigning students to play the parts of David DuckIt, Carl
BassFishing, Ken LayLie, Jeff StirFry, Andy FasToad, Bob JaedickeSleepAlot, and
the rest ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm
The IRS Embraces the Virtual World of Second Life Software The virtual world of Second Life is home to
entrepreneurs, visionaries, crackpots, nerds, CPAs (!), Fortune 500 businesses -
basically anyone with a computer and a willingness to explore a 3-D world - and
it also includes the IRS among its denizens. The IRS uses Second Life as a
recruiting tool, and claims that, depending on how one looks at it, the taxing
agency is actually saving millions of taxpayer dollars by devoting some time and
money to this virtual world instead of using its resources in more expensive
venues, like, say, NASCAR?
Gail Perry, "IRS might be saving millions by recruiting in Second Life,"
AccountingWeb, August 19, 2009 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/irs-might-be-saving-millions-recruiting-second-life
Virtual worlds are being put to serious real-world uses—and are starting
to encounter some real-world problems With the popularity of virtual worlds such as Second
Life and games such as “World of Warcraft” and “Sims Online”, companies,
academics, health-care providers and the military are evaluating virtual
environments for use in training, management and collaboration. Superficially,
such uses look a lot like playing a video game. “The thing that distinguishes
them from games is the outcome,” says Mr Wortley. Rather than catering to
virtual thrill-seekers, the aim is to find new ways for people to learn or work
together. Blitz Games, for example, the firm behind “Karaoke Revolution” and
other games, has applied its technology in a rather more serious field: the
development of a medical-triage simulator. The idea is to use it to train
paramedics, doctors and firefighters in prioritising care immediately after a
disaster. “We are simulating the scene of an explosion on a high street,” says
Mary Matthews of Blitz's TruSim division. Players observe the virtual patients
and gauge their respiration, pallor, bleeding and level of distress; then they
use this information to determine which of them is in greatest need, all against
the clock. Each player's performance is scored according to an industry-recognised
training protocol. Real-life exercises could achieve the same objective, but the
simulated environment cuts costs and improves access . . . With such large sums
at stake, it is not surprising that other unpleasant aspects of real life are
starting to appear in virtual worlds too. In May two players were banned from
Second Life for depicting sexual activity between an adult and a child. Eros, a
company that sells sex-related add-ons in Second Life, filed a lawsuit in July
against an inhabitant of the virtual world for selling unauthorised copies of
its SexGen bed, which facilitates sex between in-game characters. “When you have
a community that is an extension of Newark, eventually you will have the ills of
Newark going on,” says Edward Castronova, a virtual-worlds expert at Indiana
University. Some people think the very nature of virtual worlds can inspire bad
behaviour. Such environments provide “anonymity along with a lack of social
recourse,” notes Gus Tai, a venture capitalist at at Trinity Ventures in
California's Silicon Valley.
"Getting Serious," The Economist, December 6, 2007 --
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10202591
Virtual medical training is nothing new — medical
students have used CD-ROM’s and other interactive
programs to practice diagnosis for years. And MyCaseSpace, a virtual
medical-training program
created by a professor at the University of Central Florida,
will allow professors to create simulated cases to
test students at Central Florida’s College of Medicine this fall.
What makes the Second Life approach different,
according to
an article in Discover magazine, is its
ability to call on real-life participants, giving students access to
professors or volunteers who act as patients, as well as a range of medical
experts who teach or practice at colleges and universities across the
country.
Students can interact with the patients and
doctors, order tests, diagnose problems, and recommend treatment, according
to the article.
For example, a professor at San Jose State
University created a
Heart Murmur Sim,
which uses real cardiac sounds to train students to listen to a patient’s
chest — called a cardiac auscultation exam — and identify heart murmurs, the
article said.
Another program is the
Nursing Education Simulation, created earlier this
year by a nursing instructor in Washington. The program requires students to
wear a headset with a display, like pilots use, to “monitor” and “use”
defibrillators, IV pumps, and medication to treat a computer-generated
patient who is experiencing certain symptoms.
While no studies have emerged about the benefits of
using Second Life to train medical students, it offers a richer set of
resources, with lower costs, than training in a physical, simulated
operating room, said John Lester, an education and health-care market
developer at
Linden
Lab, the company that created Second Life.
“If there’s an expert in Brussels who is a
specialist in a procedure that I want to teach my students, I can bring him
or her into the virtual space to train them,” Mr. Lester said in the
article. “Moving around in the physical world is expensive and the biggest
obstacle in medical training.”
Jensen Comment
The University of Central Florida in mentioned above. At UCF our Second Life
expert in accounting education is Steve Hornik ---
http://www.bus.ucf.edu/shornik/
Those who attended the Virtual Journalism
Conference at Washington State University this week may have glimpsed the
future of global journalism in a brief documentary about an avatar-to-avatar
news conference. The news conference, which took place in February in the
virtual platform Second Life, gave eight Egyptian political bloggers a
chance to directly question James K. Glassman, the public-diplomacy czar
under form President George W. Bush.
“This is the ultimate situation of breaking down
barriers of time and space,” said Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal
Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University
in Cairo—or, rather, his slightly-less-gray-haired avatar said that in the
documentary. “We’re putting together people who are on opposite sides of the
world for a real-time conversation.”
The Second-Life news conference was the final stage
of a project, overseen by American University in Cairo and paid for by the
U.S. Agency for International Development, that brought the Egyptian
bloggers to the United States to cover last fall’s presidential election.
Technology that allows journalists anywhere in the
world to connect with each other and with newsmakers could make reporting
less costly at a time when many newspapers are cutting back on travel. And
while some might dismiss a Second-Life meet-up as little more than a
glorified conference call, Rita J. King, a former journalist, said the
difference is tremendous. Ms. King is CEO and creative director of Dancing
Ink Productions, which designed the virtual space where the news conference
was held and also helped create the documentary.
First of all, “teleconferences put people to
sleep,” she told The Chronicle. They’re also expensive. But most
importantly, the experience of interacting in a three-dimensional space is
much richer, sensationally and psychologically.
“Neurologically, people feel they are sharing an
experience if the brain perceives that they are sharing space,” she said. “I
have found that people are very likely to be candid in interviews that are
conducted virtually, much more so than over the phone or even in person.… It
is safe physically, first of all, but it also eliminates elements of
discomfort that are part of the physical world, related to socioeconomic
status, age, gender, race.… There are all sorts of limiting factors that
prevent people from being candid with one another in person.”
"In the past two years, over 300 colleges and
universities have claimed virtual land in Second Life and in other virtual
environments in an attempt to enhance content delivery, raise institutional
profiles, and explore new frontiers in education." The latest issue of
INNOVATE (vol. 5, no. 2, December 2008/January 2009) explores how virtual
environments provide opportunities and challenges for educators and their
institutions. Papers include:
The entire issue is available at
http://innovateonline.info/
Registration is required to access the complete articles; registration is
free.
Innovate: Journal of Online Education [ISSN
1552-3233], an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, is published
bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova
Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of
information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic,
commercial, and governmental settings. For more information, contact James
L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief; email:
innovate@nova.edu ;
Web:
http://innovateonline.info/
College debate matches can be physically intense —
with participants rattling off arguments at top speed and gesturing
dramatically. So it will be interesting to see if a debate contest can work
in Second Life, the virtual world.
The event will not be an official competition, but
if it goes well, it could lead to virtual matches in the future that would
count toward tournament scoring, said Mr. Llano.
He said the technology could be particularly
helpful in letting students compete against teams in other countries. “Not
everyone gets a chance to travel internationally to debate against
universities all over the world,” Mr. Llano said. “We could have some
international debate online where people could stay at home and particpate
in an international debate at very low costs.”
He said he was not sure how well the technology
would work. The plan is to use a voice-chat feature of Second Life so that
competitors can hear each other. Meanwhile, the participants can use their
cartoon-like virtual characters, or avatars, to gesture to emphasize their
points.
Mr. Llano said Second Life was chosen for the event
over other types of online chat environments because so many colleges have
built virtual campuses there. In the past, some debates have been held
online using Web cams rather than virtual worlds like Second Life, he said.
In the latest expansion beyond its main mission of
organizing the world's information, Internet search leader Google Inc. hopes
to orchestrate more virtual socializing on the Web.
Google debuted a free service Tuesday in which
three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in fantasy rooms and
other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called
"Lively," represents Google's answer to an already well-established site,
"Second Life," where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to
navigate virtual reality.
Google thinks "Lively" will encourage even more
people to dive into alternate realities because it isn't tethered to one Web
site like Second Life, and it doesn't cost anything to use. After installing
a small packet of software from lively.com, a user can enter Lively from
other Web sites, like social networking sites and blogs.
Google already has created a Lively application
that works on Facebook.com, one of the Web's hottest hangouts, and is
working on a version suitable for an even larger online social network, News
Corp.'s MySpace.com.
"We know people already spend a lot of time online
socializing, so we just want to try to make it more enjoyable," said Niniane
Wang, a Google engineering manager who oversaw Lively's creation over the
past year.
Lively's users will be able to sculpt an avatar
that can be male, female or even a different species. An avatar can assume a
new identity, change clothes or convey emotions with a few clicks of the
mouse.
The service also enables users to create different
digital environments to roam, from a child's room to an exotic island. The
rooms can be decorated with a wide variety of furniture, including
large-screen televisions that can be set up to play different clips from
YouTube.com, Google's video-sharing service.
Lively users can then invite their friends and
family into their virtual realities, where they can chat, hug, cry, laugh
and interact as if they were characters in a video game.
As a precaution, Google is requiring Lively's users
to be at least 13 years old -- a constraint that hasn't been enough to
prevent young children from running into trouble on other social spots on
the Web.
Google spent several months testing Lively among a
group of Arizona State University students before opening the service to the
public through its "Labs" section -- a technology sandbox that the Mountain
View-based company set up for its experimental products.
Although Google is best known for the search engine
that generates most of its profits, the company has introduced other
services that are widely used without making much, if any, money. Google's
peripheral products include its 3-D "Earth" software and Picasa for sharing
photos.
Google has no plans to allow advertising within
Lively, Wang said.
Aaron Delwiche, an assistant professor of
communications at Trinity University, is
disappointed that Lively does not allow people to create their own content, a
feature of the virtual world Second Life. "Google has given us an impoverished
space in which content can only be developed in-house or by 'trusted
developers,'" he writes. Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki
Institute for Information Technology, says this about Mr. Delwiche's
observation. "I don't think it's true that Second Life style dedicated tools for
creating complex 3D content are a prerequisite for creativity and expression.
People used to build pianos out of fish steaks and chessboards in Ultima
Online," he writes of the popular three-dimensional game. "Still, I agree that
it would be really cool if Google came out with advanced content creation tools
that are easy to use."
Andrea L. Foster, "Scholars Are Skeptical of Google's New Virtual World,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3155&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
There are myriad
virtual worlds coming online each day, of course when your name is
Google you get a lot of press. Most of these worlds will likely
fail and the one's left will also likely offer different
functionality. Lively, is a simple 2.5D social chat tool, a way to
bring immersion and presence to chat, and from the look of it aimed
at a certain younger demographic (which as I reminded by another
email list, Google does demographics pretty well). For a much more
learned discussion of what might happen in the next few years as
this space attracts more and more players I invite you to read this
blog post from Terra Nova by Bruce Damer,
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/06/virtually-etern.html
Lastly, the Chronicle article blurb
ended with this quote:
"Still, I
agree that it would be really cool if Google came out with advanced
content creation tools that are easy to use."
They do, it's
called Sketchup,
http://sketchup.google.com/ and it's quite
amazing. What would be really cool is if you could import that
content into Second Life!
-----Original Message-----
From: Carolyn Kotlas [mailto:kotlas@email.unc.edu]
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 2:54 PM
To: Jensen, Robert
TL INFOBITS September 2008 No. 27
ISSN: 1931-3144
About INFOBITS
INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning division. Each month the
ITS-TL's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of
information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and
provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators.
Virtual Worlds in Higher Education Instruction
Games and Learning
Distance Learning
Journal Archives Now Online
Carolina Conversations
Recommended Reading
EDITOR'S NOTE: Normally, Infobits does not focus on a
single topic or theme, However, the recently-published abundance of papers,
reports, and articles on using games or virtual worlds for teaching and learning
has prompted me to devote most of this issue to these resources.
"Clearly there is a large and growing group of
educators who believe that many good things, many very good things, are
connected with virtual worlds. There are also still staunch critics yelling
about what is wrong with virtual worlds. With many people engaging in this
robust conversation today, it would be a great disservice to both the local
and the global community not to have more institutions participating in the
discussion."
-- A. J. Kelton, "Virtual Worlds? 'Outlook
Good'"
The theme of the September/October 2008 issue of
EDUCAUSE REVIEW is learning in virtual worlds. In "Higher Education as Virtual
Conversation" Sarah Robbins-Bell explains how "using [virtual worlds] requires a
shift in thinking and an adjustment in pedagogical methods that will embrace the
community, the fluid identity, and the participation--indeed, the increased
conversation--that virtual spaces can provide."
Cynthia M. Calongne ("Educational Frontiers: Learning in
a Virtual World") draws on the experience of teaching nine university courses
using Second Life to discuss what is required for success in this teaching
environment.
In "Drawing a Roadmap: Barriers and Challenges to
Designing the Ideal Virtual World for Higher Education," Chris Johnson provides
a "roadmap for designing an 'ideal' virtual world for higher education, pointing
decision-makers in a general direction for implementing virtual worlds and
noting various barriers along the way."
EDUCAUSE Review [ISSN 1527-6619], a bimonthly print
magazine that explores developments in information technology and education, is
published by EDUCAUSE (http://www.educause.edu/
). Articles from current and back issues of EDUCAUSE Review are available on the
Web at
http//www.educause.edu/pub/er /
See also:
"B-Schools in Second Life: It's More Than Just Fun and Games; It's the
Confluence of Playing, Learning, and Working," By Vivek Bhatnagar, THE SLOAN-C
VIEW, vol. 7, no. 8, September 2008---
http://www.sloanconsortium.org/viewarticle_SL
"The Mean Business of Second Life: Teaching
Entrepreneurship, Technology and e-Commerce in Immersive Environments," By Brian
Mennecke, Lesya M. Hassall, and Janea Triplett, JOURNAL OF ONLINE LEARNING AND
TEACHING, vol. 4, no. 3, September 2008
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no3/hassall_0908.htm
JOURNAL OF VIRTUAL WORLDS RESEARCH ---
http://jvwresearch.org/
This new open access, peer-reviewed publication, hosted by the Texas Digital
Library consortium (http://jvwresearch.org/) is a "transdisciplinary journal
that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the
many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research."
The theme for volume 2, number 1, to be published in March 2009, will be
"Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in 3-D Virtual Worlds."
"UCLA Professors Use Virtual Reality to
Explore Ancient Egypt," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher
Education, April 24, 2009 ---
Click Here
To Willeke
Wenderish, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the
University of California at Los Angeles, exploring the ruins of
an ancient temple within an air-conditioned computer classroom
can be even more useful than visiting the site in person.
Ms. Wenderish
recently co-produced a virtual-reality project called
“Digital Karnak,” which allows
students (and visitors to the project’s Web site) to learn how
the Egyptian religious center has evolved over two millennia.
Milling about the ruins or studying a two-dimensional map of the
Karnak site can be disorienting, she
said. Virtual modeling, on the other hand, allows scholars to
observe what in the structure changed and when—using a more
sophisticated tool than the mind’s eye.
“It helps them
think through all the things that you wouldn’t have thought
through if you were looking at a map,” she said—“which areas
were roofed, not roofed, how high would the walls have been, how
large would a doorway have been.” It also allows scholars to
more vividly illustrate contrasting theories of how the site
evolved over time, she said.
Ms.
Wenderish said she plans to evangelize on the advantages of
virtual modeling at this weekend’s annual conference of the
American Research Center in Egypt, in
Dallas. She thinks virtual technology, while increasingly
popular, is still underused in archaeology. One reason is that
“they’re costly endeavors,” she said, but illuminating ones.
And not
just for understanding architectural sites, either: Ms.
Wenderish said she is also working on virtual-reality projects
on topographical sites, such as the
Faiyum oasis, which contains some of
the earliest evidence of Egyptian agriculture. “We model
different levels of lake,” she said, “changes in landscape over
time, where we find material and how it relates to the
landscape—really to map out how the movement of the lake relates
to human occupation in the area.”
GAMES AND LEARNING
The theme of both Fall 2008 issues of COMPUTERS AND
COMPOSITION and COMPUTERS AND COMPOSITION ONLINE is "Reading Games: Composition,
Literacy, and Video Gaming" -- "a look at the computer and video gaming industry
and its influence on our literacy practices. Articles include a variety of
interesting topics, from encouraging reflective gaming/play, to adapting games
for writing courses, to writing in World of Warcraft, to collaborative writing
in Alternate Reality Games, and more." Although the theme is the same for both
publications, there is no overlap in their contents.
Computers and Composition: An International Journal
[ISSN: 8755-46150] is a refereed online journal hosted at Ohio State University
and "devoted to exploring the use of computers in composition classes, programs,
and scholarly projects. It provides teachers and scholars a forum for discussing
issues connected to computer use." While all papers are available online only by
subscription, your institution may provide access through Elsevier's
ScienceDirect eSelect (
http://www.sciencedirect.com/ ); check with your campus library for
availability. For more information and to access current and back issues, go to
http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/
Computers and Composition Online is the companion
journal to Computers and Composition. Current and back issues are available at
no cost at
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/
The Pew Research Center recently reported that
"virtually all American teens [97% of teens ages 12-17] play computer, console,
or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a
significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement."
"Although it shares some text and findings with the
Teens, Games, and Civics report, it provides a more detailed discussion of
the relevant research on civics and gaming. In addition, this report
discusses the policy and research implications of these findings for those
interested in better understanding and promoting civic engagement through
video games."
"Literacy through Gaming: The Influence of Videogames on
the Writings of High School Freshman Males," By Immaculee Harushimana , JOURNAL
OF LITERACY AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 9, no. 2, August 2008, pp. 35-56 ---
http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/volume10/harushimana.pdf
"While videogames often evoke concerns among
parents, politicians, and educators, they pervade the lives of the youth in
today's world and constitute a major component of the 'new literacy studies'
field. In an era when young generations are digital-friendly and video game
savvy, the role of video gaming in children and adolescents' cognitive
development must not be overlooked. Educating today's generation of learners
requires an understanding of the new digital environment into which they
were born."
DISTANCE LEARNING JOURNAL ARCHIVES NOW ONLINE
The complete archives (1986-2008) of THE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION are now
online and searchable at
http://www.jofde.ca/
Papers in the current issue include:
"Disciplinary Differences in E-learning Instructional
Design, " By Glenn Gordon Smith, Ana T. Torres-Ayala, and Allen J. Heindel
"Teacher and Student Behaviors in Face-to-Face and
Online Courses: Dealing With Complex Concepts, " By C. E. (Betty) Cragg,
Jean Dunning, and Jaqueline Ellis
"The Effect of Peer Collaboration and Collaborative
Learning on Self-efficacy and Persistence in a Learner-paced Continuous Intake
Model," By Bruno Poellhuber, Martine Chomienne, Thierry Karsenti, The Journal of
Distance Education [ISSN: 1916-6818 (online), ISSN: 0830-0445 (print)] is an
"international publication of the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE)
[that] aims to promote and encourage Canadian scholarly work in distance
education and provide a forum for the dissemination of international
scholarship." For more information, contact: British Columbia Institute of
Technology, Learning & Teaching Centre, 3700 Willingdon Ave., Burnaby, BC,
Canada V5G 3H2; tel: 604-454-2280; fax: 604-431-7267; email:
journalofde@gmail.com ; Web:
http://www.jofde.ca/
Carolina Conversations, launched in September 2008, is a
series of live interviews with members of the UNC-Chapel Hill community
conducted in the virtual world, Second Life. Guests will discuss their work and
interests and will also respond to questions from the Second Life audience
attending in-world. The next interview will be on October 7, 2008. For more
information, to get the SLurl, or to view videos of past conversations, go to
http://its.unc.edu/tl/conversations/
Carolina Conversations is sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill
Information Technology Services' Teaching and Learning division, the group that
publishes TL INFOBITS.
RECOMMENDED READING
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that
Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including
books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your
recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.
"Generally speaking, even those who are most
gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a belief that
education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with making things
lodge in the minds of students--this even though the disparagement of the
role of memory in education by professional educators now goes back at least
three generations, long before computers were ever thought of as educational
tools. That, by the way, should lessen our astonishment, if not our dismay,
at the extent to which the educational establishment, instead of viewing
these developments with alarm, is adapting its understanding of what
education is to the new realities of how the new generation of 'netizens'
actually learn (and don't learn) rather than trying to adapt the kids to
unchanging standards of scholarship and learning."
Editor's note: The article "Is Google Making Us
Stupid?" mentioned in Bowman's article was the June 2008 Infobits "Recommended
Reading"
suggestion (http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/bitjun08.php#7
).
Cory Ondrejka, the co-founder of the virtual world
Second Life who is
now a visiting professor at the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of Southern California, said in a speech
today that virtual worlds are here to stay, and that professors are among
the most active pioneers.
“In my view the academy has been blazing the trail
of adoption of virtual worlds far more than gamers or industry,” said Mr.
Ondrejka, who spoke at a conference at Case Western Reserve University
called
Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008.
Naturally, the event was broadcast within Second
Life, in
Case Western’s campus in the virtual world. I
attended the conference virtually, and was able to ask Mr. Ondrejka what the
biggest challenge for Second Life was in being able to be more than just a
passing fad in higher education.
“The challenges with Second Life is it has
significant technical challenges for use,” he said, noting that it takes
powerful computers and fast network connections for Second Life to function
properly. “You can’t assume that your students are going to be able to run
Second Life within the school’s network infrastructure.”
He argued that some form of 3-D virtual environment
will catch on, though he admitted that it might not be Second Life that wins
the race. The reason that the idea is powerful, he said, is that studies
show that humans respond to a visual Internet, and that they express greater
trust for the people they communicate with when they see a virtual
representation of the person. “Learning in a place in 3-D affects us
differently than text,” he said.
Mr. Ondrejka said that when professors first build
a virtual campus, they usually try to exactly replicate a classroom in
Second Life, with desks, chairs, and walls. But then they realize that the
world allows different kinds of movement and communication than the real
world. “You realize that in a world where you can fly, classrooms aren’t
really that useful,” he said. So professors have built new kinds of
classrooms online with no roofs. “Suddenly you see this explosion of
classroom forms that matches what they’re trying to teach,” he added.
My virtual representation of
me, commonly known as an avatar, can outperform me as a teacher any day. It
can pay unwavering attention to every student in a class of 100 or more;
show my most spectacular actions while concealing any lapse, like losing my
cool; and detect the slightest movement, hint of confusion, and improvement
in performance of each student simultaneously.
Most people may think
of avatars as too primitive to show such details. But at Stanford
University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (
http://vhil.stanford.edu
), my colleagues and I use cutting-edge technology. We
could build an avatar that looked just like you (the heads we produce look
real enough that they are used in police lineups), gestured like you, even
touched like you, thanks to haptic devices that relay the speed and force of
hand movements. And the technology can be transmitted over a network.
The prevailing wisdom in
teaching, as in just about every form of social interaction, is that
face-to-face contact is the gold standard, trumping all forms of mediated
interactions. But as virtual reality moves from games into rigorous
scientific applications, it is inevitable that we will rethink the
importance of physical location. We know that gasoline is expensive and
travel can be a nuisance. But more important, a teacher's avatar has powers
that just don't exist in physical space.
Virtual reality functions in
cycles — the computer figures out what someone is doing, then redraws his or
her avatar to show changes based on that behavior.
For example, as a student in
Chicago moves his head, looks toward the teacher, and raises his hand,
sensing technology measures those actions. As the student moves, the
computer of the teacher in New York, which already has an avatar with the
student's facial features and body shape, receives that information over the
Internet and modifies the avatar to make it move, too. Tracking the actions
of teacher and students, transmitting them online, and applying them to the
respective avatars all occur seamlessly, and all the participants feel as if
they are in the same virtual room, in a movie together.
No participant needs to try
to behave in a particular way, either. In a video game, a person must act
intentionally to produce behavior. But in virtual reality, tracking
equipment, like magnetic sensors and video cameras, detects what a person
does and instructs the computer to redraw the avatar performing the same
action. Everyone's computer sends the other machines a stream of information
summarizing the user's current state.
However, users can alter
their streams in real time for strategic purposes. For example, a teacher
can choose to have his computer never display an angry expression, but
always to replace it with a calm face. Or he can screen out distracting
student behaviors, like talking on cellphones.
Research by Benjamin S.
Bloom in the 1980s and subsequent studies have demonstrated that students
who receive one-on-one instruction learn at least an order of magnitude
better than do students in traditional classrooms. Virtual reality makes it
possible for one teacher to give one-on-one instruction to many students at
the same time.
The use of the Web to tailor
messages to different recipients has received ample discussion, most notably
in the arena of advertising; we all know about spam messages that appear to
be from one of our colleagues. In a virtual classroom, the teacher can
tailor not simply a message, but her identity.
Of course we must be careful
not to cross the line between strategic transformations and outright
deception. Probably none of us would want to see politicians, a few years in
the future, take advantage of new technology to tailor electronic messages
by combining their faces with an undetectable share of those of the
recipients — knowing that including the citizen's face can sway his vote.
But good teachers already use psychology to help students learn, and
standard techniques can be made more effective in virtual education.
Students in a given
classroom, like most large groups of people, include a wide range of
personality types — for example, introverts and extroverts. Some students
might prefer communication accompanied by nonverbal cues, like gestures and
smiles; others may prefer a less-expressive speaker. A number of
psychological studies have demonstrated what is called the "chameleon
effect": When one person nonverbally mimics another, displaying similar
posture and gestures, he maximizes his social influence. Mimickers are seen
as more likable and more persuasive than nonmimickers.
In a number of laboratory
studies of behaviors including head movements and handshakes in virtual
reality, my colleagues and I have demonstrated that if a teacher practices
virtual nonverbal mimicry — that is, if she receives the students' nonverbal
actions and then transforms her nonverbal behavior to resemble the students'
motions — there are three results.
First, the students rarely
are conscious of the mimicry.
Second, they nonetheless pay
more attention to the teacher: They direct their gaze more at mimicking
teachers than they do at teachers who are behaving more normally.
Third, students are
influenced more by mimicking teachers — more likely to follow their
instructions and to agree with what they say in a lesson.
When I teach a class of 100
students face to face, I try to match my nonverbal behavior to that of a
single student, and I am forced to devote ample cognitive resources to that
effort. But in a virtual classroom, my avatar can seamlessly and
automatically create 100 different versions, which simultaneously mimic each
student. Without my having to pay any attention to my actions, let alone to
type commands on a keyboard, my computer changes my gestures and other
behaviors to imitate each student's gestures and behavior. In effect, I can
psychologically reduce the size of the class.
The virtual classroom, too,
can be tailored for each student. Rooms have a sweet spot — the location
varies from room to room but is often front and center, a few meters away
from the teacher. Other experiments, in my lab and at the Research Center
for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California at
Santa Barbara, have shown that students randomly assigned to sweet spots in
real-world classrooms do about 10 points better on exams than do students
sitting elsewhere in the rooms.
Of course, in the physical
world, only one student can sit in the sweet spot. But because virtual rooms
are drawn separately for each user, every single student's avatar can be
sitting in the sweet spot — and will see classmates' avatars sitting in
other locations. In a series of studies, we demonstrated that putting
multiple students simultaneously in the virtual sweet spot substantially
increased the learning of the group.
Another advantage of the
virtual classroom is that a teacher can use data collected by the computer
to improve students' learning as well as his or her own performance. Given
that decades of research have pointed to the importance of eye contact
during speaking, my colleagues and I created an algorithm that showed
teachers exactly how much eye contact they gave each student in a large
virtual classroom. If the teacher was not looking at a student's avatar, it
would slowly become translucent until the teacher looked at the student
again, when the avatar would once more become opaque to the teacher. With
that algorithm, teachers looked much more evenly around the classroom.
Virtual technology can guarantee that no child gets left behind.
In dozens of experimental
paradigms, we have demonstrated similar advantages of virtual classrooms.
The advantages are most effective in classes with large student-to-teacher
ratios, where they are needed most. Although the actual classrooms of Ivy
League universities may never lose their prestige, the practical
implications are clear: The digital transformations of virtual classrooms
can increase students' learning.
Jeremy Bailenson is an assistant
professor of communication at Stanford University.
Jeremy recently talked
about this at the Metaverse U conference held at Standford. They are slowly
putting up videos of the talks and his is one of them which can be accessed
here:
http://metaverse.stanford.edu/conference-videos/conference-videos
Scroll down it's the 3rd one or watch them all.
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Second Life (3-D) Virtual Worlds in Ernst & Young Training Programs
March 12, 2005 message from Steve Hornik
Ernst & Young Uses Avatars to
Test the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Way to Enhance Training for New
Auditors.
E&Y set up a virtual warehouse where they could train employees on Inventory
counting. The article and the video highlight the benefits of using Second
Life for doing such training. Some of the lessons learned from the article
are:
* Ernst & Young found 3-D learning better prepared new auditors by
giving them real-world experience. It compared the results with new auditors
who took a traditional instructor-led class.
* 3-D learning is a cost-effective alternative to on-site training
sessions because it can deliver the two goals of the meeting: training the
employees and creating camaraderie and collaboration.
* 3-D learning captures learning digitally, providing a record of what
has been informal, on-the-job training. It is a good tool to capture the
knowledge of retiring employees.
* 3-D learning is a good way for adults to learn because they can retain
more knowledge.
* Don't underestimate the time and effort needed to introduce learners
to this new platform. Plan to help your learners through the initial set-up
and orientation. Once they've been properly introducd, emost
enjoy the experience.
* Consult with others working in this space. Old instructional design
approaches simply don't work in the virtual world.
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Second Life is a virtual world with education,
public relations, and economic implications. CPA Island is the center of the
public accounting profession in Second Life.
At a minimum, CPA Island presents a creative
communication medium to appeal to a new generation. This generation has
grown up with high-speed Internet connectivity, instant messaging, and
multiplayer online gaming.
The spirit behind CPA Island goes beyond clearly
demonstrating an awareness of the different skill set of this new
generation. It embraces and celebrates these skills as important to the
future of the accounting profession.
The economic implications of Second Life are just
now unfolding. Suspend disbelief, log on, and experience CPA Island and the
other aspects of Second Life for yourself.
Question
Today's students have a spectacular hunger for experience — real and virtual.
But can they hold still long enough to learn?
This hunger for life has a number of consequences,
for now and for the future. It's part of what makes this student generation
appealing, highly promising — and also radically vulnerable. These students
may go on to do great and good things, but they also present dangers to
themselves and to the common future. They seem almost to have been created,
as the poet says, "half to rise and half to fall." As a teacher of theirs
(and fellow citizen), I'm more than a little concerned about which it's
going to be.
Internet technology was on hand for my current
students from about the time they were eight years old; it was in 1995 that
the Netscape browser made the Internet accessible to everyone. And the
Internet seems to me to have shaped their generation as much as the
multichannel TV, with that critical device, the remote control, shaped the
students who registered for my classes a decade ago. What is the Internet to
current students?
Consider first what it is not. A friend of mine,
who has assiduously kept a journal for 40 years, calls the journal, which
now runs to about 40 volumes, a "life thickener." His quotations and
pictures and clips and drawings and paintings give density and meaning to
the blind onrush that life can be. He looks back through the volumes and
sees that there was a life and that to him it meant something. To my
students, I suspect, my friend would look like a medieval monk, laboring
over his manuscripts, someone with a radically pre-postmodern feel for time,
someone who did not, in fact, understand what time actually is.
An Internet-linked laptop, one may safely say, is
not a life thickener. At the fingertips of my students, the laptop is a
multiplier of the possible. "I dwell in possibility," says Emily Dickinson,
"a fairer house than prose." Well, my students want to dwell there with her
and, it seems, to leave me in the weed-grown bungalow, prose.
My university recently passed an edict: No one,
damn it (insofar as edicts can say damn it), is going to triple major.
Everyone now who is worth his tuition money double majors: The students in
my classes are engineering/English; politics/English; chemistry/English. An
urban legend in my leaf-fringed 'hood is that someone got around this inane
dictum about triple majors by majoring in four subjects — there was, it
seems, no rule against that. The top students at my university, the ones who
set the standard for the rest, even if they drive the rest a little crazy,
want to take eight classes a term, major promiscuously, have a semester
abroad at three different colleges, connect with every likely person who has
a page on Facebook, have 30 pages on Facebook, be checked in with and check
in at every living moment.
One day I tried an experiment in a class I was
teaching on English and American Romanticism. We had been studying Thoreau
and talking about his reflections (sour) on the uses of technology for
communication. ("We are in great haste," he famously said, "to construct a
magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have
nothing important to communicate.") I asked the group, "How many places were
you simultaneously yesterday — at the most?" Suppose you were chatting on
your cellphone, partially watching a movie in one corner of the computer
screen, instant messaging with three people (a modest number), and glancing
occasionally at the text for some other course than ours — grazing, maybe,
in Samuelson's Economics rather than diving deep into Thoreau's "Economy" —
and then, also, tossing the occasional word to your roommate? Well, that
would be seven, seven places at once. Some students — with a little
high-spirited hyperbole thrown in, no doubt — got into double digits. Of
course it wouldn't take the Dalai Lama or Thoreau to assure them that anyone
who is in seven places at once is not anywhere in particular — not present,
not here now. Be everywhere now — that's what the current technology
invites, and that's what my students aspire to do.
Internet-linked computers are of course desiring
machines — machines for the stimulation of desire. But so is a TV, so in a
certain sense is a movie screen. What makes the Internet singular is its
power to expand desire, expand possibility beyond the confines of prior
media. (My students are possibility junkies.) You can multiply the number of
possible clothing purchases near to infinity and do it with stunning speed.
You can make all the pleated skirts in the world appear almost all at once,
for you to choose from. As we talked about this in class — with Thoreau's
disapproving specter looking on (sometimes it appears that Thoreau
disapproves of everything, except the drinking of cold water) — something
surprising came out. The moment of maximum Internet pleasure was not the
moment of closure, where you sealed the deal; it was the moment when the
choices had been multiplied to the highest sum. It was the moment of maximum
promise, when you touched the lip of the possible: of four majors and eight
courses per term and a gazillion hits on your Facebook page, and being
everyplace (almost) at once, and gazing upon all the pleated skirts that the
world doth hold.
This is what Immanuel Kant, were he around to see
it, might have called the computer sublime (he called something like it
mathematical sublimity). The moment when you make the purchase, close the
deal, pick a girlfriend, set a date: All those things, the students around
the Thoreau table concurred, were a letdown, consummations not really to be
wished for. The students were a little surprised by the conclusions they
came to about themselves. "It's when I can see it all in front of me," one
young woman said, "that's when I'm the happiest."
Ask an American college student what he's doing on
Friday night. Ask him at 5:30 Friday afternoon. "I don't know" will likely
be the first response. But then will come a list of possibilities to make
the average Chinese menu look sullenly costive: the concert, the play, the
movie, the party, the stay-at-home, chilling (or chillaxing), the monitoring
of SportsCenter, the reading (fast, fast) of an assignment or two.
University students now are virtual Hamlets of the virtual world, pondering
possibility, faces pressed up against the sweet-shop window of their
all-purpose desiring machines. To ticket or not to ticket, buy or not to,
party or no: Or perhaps to simply stay in and to multiply options in
numberless numbers, never to be closed down.
And once you do get somewhere, wherever it might
be, you'll find that, as Gertrude Stein has it, there's "no there there." At
a student party, about a fourth of the people have their cellphones locked
to their ears. What are they doing? "They're talking to their friends."
About? "About another party they might conceivably go to." And naturally the
simulation party is better than the one that they're now at (and not at),
though of course there will be people at that party on their cellphones,
talking about other simulacrum gatherings, spiraling on into M.C. Escher
infinity.
It's possible that recent events in the world have
added intensity to students' quest for more possibilities, more and more
life. The events of September 11, which current college students experienced
in their early teens, were an undoubted horror. But they had the effect, I
think, of waking America's young people up from a pseudo-nihilistic doze.
Before New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the middle-class American
teenager's world had been a pleas-ure dome, full of rare delights. It was
the reign of television: the oracle that knows everything and can take you
anywhere. Television brought images of bliss, and its ads showed you the
products that you needed to buy in order to achieve it. The well-known Jeep
ad that depicted hip kids tossing Frisbees and laughing like rock stars had
nothing to do with the properties of a Jeep. It was a persona ad that
advertised the sort of person you'd be when you acquired the product. The ad
was an emblem of the consumer moment: Buy in order to be.
Students wanted to be cool. They wanted to be
beyond reproach. There was a sense abroad that if you simply did what you
were supposed to do, kept low to the ground and stayed on the conveyor belt,
the future that TV promised would be yours. Everything was a mode of
entertainment, or could be transformed into one, after it had been submitted
to Letterman-like or Leno-like ridicule. The president was a genial boy from
Arkansas who awoke one day and found himself in office. But that had not
slaked his boyishness at all. He still wanted a version of what everyone
did: all-nighters, pizza, and his pals. The president was a dog who couldn't
stay on the porch. My students — the guys in particular — often found him
the perfect image of success: You need never grow up; need never abandon
college-boy mode. The couch where you sat, hours a day, in lordly
condescension, monitoring the box, would in time morph into an airship to
swoosh you into your dreams.
But then there came the day of near apocalypse in
America, September 11, 2001. The prospect of hanging, Doctor Johnson
observed, does wonders to concentrate the mind. Well, the mind of America
has been concentrated. No one believes that the whole edifice is likely to
come down around us soon. But everyone now lives charged with the knowledge
that today, tomorrow, next week, we can suffer an event that will change
everything drastically. A dirty bomb in the middle of a great city, poison
wafting in soft clouds through a subway system, a water supply subtly
tainted: Such things would not only derange the lives of those they touch
directly, they'd discompose and remake America in ways that would be, to say
the least, none too sweet. Tomorrow the deck may be shuffled and recut by
the devil's hand. So what shall we do now?
Since the 1990s,
educators have been focusing on access to Internet as a means of
engagement, concerned about the digital divide; now that the divide has
been bridged, we are concerned about access to education.
Cause and
effect here correlate.
Rising
costs of a college degree at our wireless colleges and
universities have resulted in increasing public
scrutiny, student debt and budget models based on
marketing rather than pedagogical concepts. Academe’s
insatiable investment in virtual worlds, social networks
and other consumer applications is a benchmark of how
far we will go and how much money we will spend in the
name of engagement.
In the
past decade we have seen consumer technology used as
delivery system, then as content in the classroom and
finally as classroom, building and campus itself, and in
every case, pedagogy changed to accommodate the
application and the interface, adding courses to the
curricula and fees to tuition.
In the
past two years, tuition has spiked about 12 percent at
most four-year institutions. Room and board rates have
been rising on average 5 percent annually over the same
time period. Driving these rates is an engagement
industry, largely corporate, relying on wireless
campuses to vend their virtual products and on teaching
excellence centers to advertise their brands in the name
of engagement.
The
marketing strategy is stupefyingly rhetorical. Few
administrators bother to explicate “engagement,” a
generic term whose synonym has come to mean “retention”
— the only factor that matters in funding formulas. The
student pays tuition here rather than elsewhere or not
at all.
While
the generic meaning of engagement is “to occupy the
attention or efforts of a person or persons,” according
to my unabridged Random House Dictionary, the
specific meaning relates to business, as in “to secure
for aid, use, or employment, etc., hire” and “to bind,
as by pledge, promise, contract, or oath; make liable.”
We are
outsourcing our environment when we invest in virtual
worlds and social networks, and their vendors bind us by
service terms that make our institutions liable.
Moreover, these corporations and the public relations
agencies that represent them (often “engaging” early
adopters to promote their brand) have schooled academics
in advertising basics, which contain two messages,
manifest and latent, as in: Purchase this toothpaste
(manifest). Get the girl or guy (latent). Adapted
to academe, the advertisement plays as follows:
Purchase this virtual-life game (manifest). Get
engaged (latent).
Advertisements also include endorsements, as in “a
recent dental association survey found that 3 of 4
dentists prefer this brand over another.” In academe,
any use of the word “engagement” suggests an endorsement
by the National Survey on Student Engagement, whose
philosophy gauges the quality of institutions by
activities that give meaning and value to collegiate
life.
Those
activities, I contend, have proliferated technologically
beyond the intent but nevertheless in the name of NSSE
whose four-page survey contains only four of some one
hundred questions related to technology … or, should I
say, technostalgia:
[Have you] used an electronic medium (listserv, chat
group, Internet, instant messaging, etc.) to discuss
or complete an assignment?
[Have you] used e-mail to communicate with an
instructor?
[To
what extent does your institution emphasize] using
computers in academic work?
[To
what extent has your experience at this institution
contributed to your knowledge, skills and personal
development in] using computer and information
technology?
I coded
the NSSE 2007 College Student Report, eliminating
questions on demographics, and found 23 related to
interpersonal contact, 11 to critical thinking, 9 to
reading and writing, 6 to commitment or work ethic, 6 to
financial and other support, 5 to diversity, and 20 on a
range of topics from commuting to learning communities.
(Some questions contained elements of two or more
categories, as in how often students included diverse
perspectives in their discussions and writing
assignments.)
Certainly, you might code the questions differently than
I and argue that technology factors heavily now in
discussions with professors or sessions with academic
advisers, deleting those from interpersonal contact and
adding them to technology; but keep in mind that this
survey dates back to 2000 with the intent behind
questions suggested by distinct terminology such as
“electronic medium” to discuss an assignment or “e-mail”
to communicate with a professor.
Students
not only use electronic media to discuss or complete an
assignment; they have become the assignment in virtual
worlds as avatars and check e-mail out of boredom as
well as text each other, download music, visit social
networks and make online purchases in wireless
classrooms during lecture.
Attempting to engage today’s students, we have embraced
consumer technologies on the flawed assumption that
students want to learn through the same devices that
amuse and distract them.
My own
profession, journalism, abandoned its constitutional
responsibility to inform the electorate using these very
same technologies, with this result: The public
interest now is what interests the public. Media
moguls embrace that notion to engage their audience,
giving us a steady diet of news about Paris Hilton,
Britney Spears and American Idol augmented by outsourced
war and foreign correspondence with unremitting
follow-ups about school violence, beautiful women gone
missing, athlete and celebrity scandals, and health
reporting that plays to the advertising base and is
cheaper than investigative journalism.
Earlier this week,
Linden Lab,
creator of the
well-known virtual world
Second Life,
announced a new CEO:
Mark Kingdon, currently
CEO of digital marketing
firm
Organic.
He
will be taking over in
mid-May.
Kingdon's arrival is the
most recent in a series
of changes to Linden
Lab's management. CTO
Cory Ondrejka,
who wrote the scripting
language used in Second
Life to create and
control user-generated
content, left the
company in December.
Rosedale announced his
resignation in March,
along with his intention
to become Linden Lab's
chairman of the board.
Technology Review
assistant editor Erica
Naone spoke with Kingdon
earlier this week about
his plans for Second
Life.
Technology
Review:
How much time do you
spend inside Second
Life?
Mark Kingdon:
I'm spending a lot more
time in-world now. I'm
still in that place
where I'm surveying the
landscape, because it's
pretty vast, and I'm
collecting experiences
that are amazing. It's
just mind-blowing that
this is all
user-generated content.
I haven't yet created
anything myself other
than clothing, but I
think that's the next
step for me because I
like to make things.
TR:
Creating things seems
like a Second Life rite
of passage.
MK:
That's definitely the
story of Second Life.
Once you cross that
magical "Aha!" place, it
becomes very compelling.
TR:
A lot of new users seem
to have trouble getting
to that place. They get
confused by the
controls, and aren't
sure what to do inside
the world. Do you have
any thoughts about how
to make it easier to get
started?
MK:
I've got a lot of
background in the kind
of user-centered design
work that's going to be
important for Second
Life, especially as you
look at the first-hour
experience. I haven't
come to any specific
conclusions yet, but I
think it starts with
understanding what the
resident needs in order
to make a powerful
experience, and looking
at the kinds of people
that you want to attract
and bring in-world. The
answers will emerge very
clearly from that.
TR:
How do you plan to get
different types of users
acclimated? For example,
business
users might just want to
get in-world quickly to
have a meeting, while
other users might be
looking for a more
playful experience.
MK: I
think the first thing
that I need to do ... is
really immerse myself in
the different user bases
and then think about if,
by giving them
additional tools, they
can create that entry
point for themselves, or
if it's something we
need to encourage, or if
it's something that we
need to create for them.
I think the question is,
how do you make that
happen without becoming
the primary content
creator?
Continued in article
Second Life 3-D Accounting Model
To his credit, Professor Hornik (see video link below) at the University
of Central Florida has been experimenting with a Second Life 3-D Accounting
Model for accounting education. The PBS update called the "The Rise (and Hype)
of Second Life" may be of interest to those of you who are thinking
experimenting with Second Life.
Moodle purportedly is very flexible, in part, because it has
open source coding. Many of the positives are outlined at
http://moodle.com/
There is also a help desk.
Like many open source options, including Open Source Office,
Moodle keeps getting better and better. Old criticisms may no
longer be applicable. I recently gave an education technology
workshop for accounting educators in Mississippi. Many of the
users were happy with Moodle.
Second Life is a 3D virtual environment and in that regard
not a competitor to Moodle at all. Sloodle is actually the
Moodle counterpart to courses taught in Second Life and in
that sense it's symbiotic relationship of sorts between the
3D immersive virtual environment and astandard 2D learning
environment :-).
I just wanted to pass these
along for those interested in using Virtual Worlds. The first three
articles are related to business school uses of Second Life that appeared in
the Financial Times earlier this week. Followed by a link to a story about
Deloitte's involvement with a virtual world to help teens learn business.
Finally, I've provided links to my blog in which I briefly discuss the
announcement and release yesterday by Second Life of a new viewer in which
Web pages can be brought in-world and thus shared - its static right now but
gives a glimpse of what is coming down the road. And one describing students
using Second Life for completing financial accounting HW assignments.
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Hello again Bob. Thanks for the references. I've
have visited with Steven Hornik and have utilized the resources on his SL
plot. The credit and debit sim was interesting as it focused students on
where credits and debits go on the T-account and the offsetting accounts. I
would definitely encourage anyone interested in virtual worlds and
accounting to visit Steven's plot.
I have been teaching using second life the past two
semester. Whether in accounting classes or in general business classes the
Gingko Bank Run is the students' favorite project. They really like the
internal control concerns of the virtual banks prior to the recent changes.
I am looking for accounting conferences or accounting education journals
that may be interested in this research.
For months, as banking meltdowns in the virtual
world Second Life cost participants steep losses of real money, corporate
owner Linden Lab of San Francisco stuck to a laissez-faire line, essentially
saying, We just host the software; residents should avoid deals that sound
too good to be true. But this week, Linden Lab abruptly banned virtual banks
that can't furnish "proof of an applicable government registration statement
or financial institution charter." The requirement appears likely to shut
down all of Second Life's banks.
"There is no workable alternative," Linden Lab
wrote in an
announcement posted Tuesday. "The so-called banks
are not operated, overseen or insured by Linden Lab, nor can we predict
which will fail or when. And Linden Lab isn't, and can't start acting as, a
banking regulator." The company wrote that "these 'banks' have brought
unique and substantial risks to Second Life, and we feel it's our duty to
step in. Offering unsustainably high interest rates, they are in most cases
doomed to collapse--leaving upset 'depositors' with nothing to show for
their investments. As these activities grow, they become more likely to lead
to destabilization of the virtual economy."
A Linden Lab spokesman said that the company was
not offering further interviews or comment on the decision or its timing.
The about-face came six days after Technology
Review posted a story that described avatar losses and cited the
possibility that one virtual-bank meltdown may have produced aggregate
losses of some $700,000 in real money to many hundreds of Second Life
"residents" in a manner that would be illegal in the real world. (See
"The
Fleecing of the Avatars.") "I think the timing may
well have been due to [that]story," says Ben Duranske, an Idaho lawyer who
has been closely following the complaints of Second Life participants.
Last year, some Second Life residents--subscribers
whose digital alter egos, or avatars, populate the virtual world--deposited
their virtual money, called Linden dollars, into a "bank" called Ginko
Financial that had popped up in-world, promising high interest rates. Last
summer, Ginko restricted withdrawals and eventually vanished. Since Linden
dollars can be exchanged for real U.S. dollars, the losses were painfully
real. (See "Money
Troubles in Second Life.") It is not clear who was
behind the Ginko operation.
Duranske yesterday posted this
blog entry praising the bank ban as a "positive
step that will save a lot of people a lot of unhappiness in the long run."
The policy, which pertains to in-world companies that offer transfers of
Linden dollars and payment of interest, takes effect January 22.
Robert Bloomfield, a Cornell University economist
and virtual-world watcher who had argued that self-regulation deserved a
chance to fix Second Life's financial problems, says he believes that banks
will face runs and be unable to pay depositors, triggering new losses.
(See "Second
Chance for Second Life.") But he says that the
larger Second Life economy, which by one recent measure has more than
300,000 participants, would not be profoundly affected because people will
still be able to make, buy, and sell digital goods and exchange virtual and
real dollars.
Yesterday, within Second Life, depositors appeared
to rush to withdraw money from remaining banks, such as Midas Bank and BCX
Bank, and some waved signs saying, "Linden Lab: Give Us Back Our Banks Now!"
By one account, avatars of bank owners gamely stood guard outside their
virtual institutions. "In a half-dozen of the largest banks, I saw the
owners, CEOs, and chief financial officers all standing in the foyers,
putting up notices and attempting to reassure their depositors. The bling!
The prim hair! One man even wore white gloves," wrote Prokofy Neva (whose
real name is Catherine Fitzpatrick) in her
blog.
Bloomfield is hosting a forum on the matter in
Second Life today at 2:00 p.m.; the forum can be found
here.
One open question, Bloomfield says, is whether the ban would pertain not
just to banks but to stock-market exchanges that have also popped up in
Second Life. Linden Lab declined to participate in the forum, Bloomfield
says.
January 10, 2008 reply from Aaron Delwiche at Trinity University
Hi Bob,
Thanks for sending these links to Tiger Talk. In
your list of resources, you might want to include pointers to the archives
of the Second Life Educators List (SLED), as it is a terrific repository of
thoughtful suggestions for how to use Second Life in the classroom. If your
readers point their browsers at:
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators ,
they will find a link to the mailing list archives and
the Second Life Educators wiki.
You might be interested in an article on Second
Life that I recently published in the Journal of Educational Technology
(see:
http://www.ifets.info/journals/9_3/ets_9_3.pdf#page=165 ) .
The article describes a classroom case study that was conducted at Trinity
back in 2004. An updated list of readings on virtual worlds can be found in
this syllabus from a Trinity course that explored on-line marketing and
promotions (see:
http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/metaverse/readings.html ).
There also some useful links on the Elastic Collision
site ( http://www.elasticcollision.com).
There is plenty of hype out there about Second
Life, and it's important to remind people that SL is not an educational
panacea. When instructors transplant archaic instructional methods into the
virtual world, SL is likely to be a complete failure. On the other hand, if
the course content is designed to take advantage of the platform's unique
characteristics, it is possible to create instructional environments that
foster situational learning.
Virtual worlds are still in their infancy, but they
are growing and changing at an accelerating rate. The experiments unfolding
in college classrooms around the world are just a taste of what we will see
two or three years from now. There will be many failures along the way, but
that's just part of the learning process. These are exciting times!
Since there has been some interest regarding
Second Life on this list from time to time, I wanted to share a demo of a
model I created in Second Life that I will be using with my class this
coming Fall. It's a 3-D interactive accounting model (A=L+E). If you are in
Second Life and want to play with it let me know. It's currently on my
Parcel in Sweetbay, but will be moving to Teaching 4, part of the New Media
Consortium's archipelago, where University of Central Florida's accounting
department has just leased a plot!
I surveyed my students at the end of the Fall
semester to get a sense of how they were using Second Life for my accounting
course. I had 125 responses. I've blogged about the results here:
* Second Life was difficult to use / required
better hardware
* If Second Life were easier they would have used it more
* Students appreciated the ability to interact with each other and with
me (Social aspect #1 value)
* They watched lectures more then they interacted with 3-d content
I have more data that I'll be crunching in the next
few weeks, once I get Spring semester underway, but wanted to share this
with the list.
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com yahoo ID: shornik
I attended a session on Second Life today. My
university has purchased an island and has erected a few buildings along
with a huge sand box. Along with other Web 2.0 technologies, faculty are
told that second life has many educational possibilities?
Does it open up anything for accounting? Does
anyone currently use it? How should it be used?
Dave Albrecht
Bowling Green State University
November 15, 2007 from Bob Jensen
Hi David,
Steve Hornik at the University of Central Florida uses Second Life for
accounting courses. He also has a YouTube video about his applications.
His last email indicates that he's perhaps become a bit discouraged with
it, although I don't want to put words in his mouth. You should contact him
directly.
First to Dave and anyone intersted, I'd be happy to show you around my area
in Second Life, just let me know a good time and send me an e-mail or IM me
in-world, I'm Robins Hermano.
I've used Second Life this semester, and as Bob mentioned to somewhat good
results. I should say that my expectations were way to high and for the
high-end technology that is SL I actually am quite pleased and will be
looking at some data once the semester ends. My biggest disappointment came
from students who didn't want to try it or thought it was too difficult to
learn. I think this mostly comes from the poor, very poor orientation that
SL provides. However, since the semester started there have been at least
two independent orientations that have opened up which are quite good - One
via the New Media Consortium, and the other is called Orientation Station.
I teach financial accounting to undergrads (the debits/credits course) to
mostly non-majors. So my primary reason for using SL was to create an
engaging environment for the students to overcome the non-engaging nature of
accounting (to many). I also used SL to create models that would allow my
students to view (in 3-D) concepts that they consistently have trouble with
- debits and credits do not mean positive and negative. Being able to view
the accounting equation and 'play' with it helps (or should help) reinforce
how the model works and how various business transactions effect it.
I think there are quite many other things that can be modeled and I'll be
working on them during the semester break to roll out this Spring.
Primarily how the temporary close, students just don't get what Retained
Earnings is and how it ties the two Financial statements together.
From just a pedagogical point of view, SL inherently fosters collaboration.
Having students learn together to build things, interact with merchants,
other accounting students, state CPA socities, the AICPA can only be a
plus. As an online learning platform it's still in its infancy, but has
huge potential because of the presence it invokes. Below is a small bit of
a session I had with one of my students when we met in SL (she works, has a
baby, and couldn't get to my office hours) to go over some concepts before
an exam, when I asked her if she thought using SL has been valuable....
[20:47] You: Quick question, compared to using meebo (if you have) how does
doing this in SL help?
[20:47] You: Now a days it is
[20:48] Krisira Vollmar: oh well talking here makes me aware that i'm
having an actual conversation
[20:48] Krisira Vollmar: not to mention i really can't do anything else
online so i have to concentrate on what is being said
[20:48] Krisira Vollmar: which is VERY good in my case
[20:48] Krisira Vollmar: i can't help but multi task online
[20:48] You: That's one good thing about SL hogging up the computer, lol
[20:49] Krisira Vollmar: and its just more interesting than typing in a
white box
[20:49] Krisira Vollmar: nice shirt btw
While
other worlds were withering, Linden Labs was developing a new
world called Second Life, first launched in 2003. It languished
for a few years until 2006, when Second Life
grabbed the attention of the media and marketers
who saw it as a new way of communicating
and selling online. BusinessWeek ran a cover story called
My Virtual Life, breathlessly
explaining that “big advertisers are taking notice.” And Wired
Magazine ran a special
travel guide
to Second Life, while Reuters assigned
a
full-time reporter, dubbed “Adam
Reuters,” to cover news in the world (now there are two).
In Second Life, you can create your own objects and
buildings in the world, and you own the intellectual
property of what you build Plus, “Linden dollars”
are a currency you can trade with real dollars;
real-world businesses sell customized stores, avatar
wear and just about any kind of “bling” you could
want in the virtual world. Universities offer
distance learning courses through Second Life, and
bands play live shows and chat with fans in special
in-world venues. Linden says it has registered
nearly 10 million avatars
for Second Life.
The
buzz around Second Life led many people to explore
virtual worlds for the first time, but many ended up
disappointed. Even though computer hardware and
bandwidth have improved since the ’90s virtual
worlds, Second Life still requires high-end systems
and a lot of practice to master the interface. The
number of registered Second Life avatars is
misleading: Many people simply try it out and give
up, while others have multiple avatars. A more
representative number for regular users is the
number who have logged in during the past seven
days, which was 338,068 as of October 7.
That lower number also
presents a problem for the crush of marketers such
as Coca-Cola and Adidas who have set up virtual
spaces in Second Life, only to have them largely
vacant. After Wired magazine hyped Second Life with
its travel guide, the magazine then did an
about-face and ran an article titled,
How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted
Second Life. Many
marketers spent the money — in the tens of thousands
of dollars — to build a virtual island as an
experiment but then got little payoff. Residents are
dispersed throughout the virtual world so it’s
difficult to get their attention en masse, plus
there’s a limit to the number of people who can
congregate in one place without crashing Linden’s
servers.
(For a detailed argument on
Wired’s story and the problem of empty spaces in
Second Life, check out this
blog post by Wired editor
Chris Anderson and the ensuing debate in the
comments.)
The Financial Accounting Standards Board recently approached Bloomfield
about studying how to create financial accounting standards that will assist
investors as much as possible, he quickly turned to the virtual world for
answers.
"Theory Meets Practice Online: Researchers and academics are looking to
online worlds such as Second Life to shed new light on old economic questions,"
by Francesca Di Meglio, Business Week, July 24, 2007 ---
Click Here
In fact, many economics researchers, including
Bloomfield, professor of accounting at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of
Management, are using the virtual environment to test ideas involving
staples of economics such as game theory, the effects of regulation, and
issues involving money. Since 1989, Bloomfield has been running experiments
in the lab in which he creates small game economies to study narrow issues.
But when the Financial Accounting Standards Board recently approached
Bloomfield about studying how to create financial accounting standards that
will assist investors as much as possible, he quickly turned to the virtual
world for answers.
"It would be very difficult to look at the complex
issues that FASB is trying to address with eight people in a laboratory
playing a very simple economic game," he says. "I started looking for how I
could create a more realistic economy with more players dealing with a high
degree of complexity. It didn't take me long to realize that people in
virtual worlds are already doing just that."
. . .
At
Indiana University, researcher Edward Castronova has posed
the idea of creating multiple virtual economies to study the
effects of different regulatory policies. At Indiana,
Castronova is director of the Synthethic Worlds Initiative,
a research center to study virtual worlds. "The opportunity
is to conduct controlled research experiments at the level
of all society, something social scientists have never been
able to do before," the center's Web site notes (see
BusinessWeek.com, 5/1/06,
"Virtual World, Virtual Economies").
A
virtual stock market is certainly not the only online entity
that opens itself up to research. Marketers are already
using the virtual world to test campaigns, packaging, and
consumer satisfaction. Pepsi (PEP)
famously tracks use of its products in
There.com. Architects seek reaction to design. Starwood
Hotels (HOT)
test-marketed its new loft designs in Second Life
(see BusinessWeek.com, 8/23/06,
"Starwood Hotels Explore Second Life First").
Continued in article
November 23, 2007 reply from Steven Hornik [shornik@BUS.UCF.EDU]
Robert Bloomfiled
has been conducting panel sessions in Second Life where discussions
have ranged from the taxing virtual economies, financing activities
and last week a discussion with Edward Castronova (all done withint
Second Life). On Nov. 26th, the discussion will be on
Higher Education in Second
Life. You can view arhcived videos of these from SLCN.TV at
http://www.slcn.tv/programs/metaversed
For those unfamiliar with SL this gives you an
idea of one it's best features, bringing people together from all
over the world to discuss ideas, compare the cost of doing this via
SL as opposed to attending a conference!
"The Second Life of Peter J. Ludlow: A philosophy professor challenges the
rules of virtual worlds with his alter ego, a muckraking journalist," by Andrea
L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2007---
Click Here
He leads an audacious life, but only online. As the
digital character Urizenus, he muckrakes in virtual worlds and describes as
dictatorial the companies that run them. His reporting can be read in the
brassy, tabloid-style Web newspaper he founded, the Second Life Herald.
Offline, Mr. Ludlow is a mild-mannered linguist and
a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. Also in
reality, he has just celebrated the release of a book that chronicles his
journalistic adventures in The Sims Online and Second Life, a pair of
digital environments inhabited by lots of characters, or avatars. The book
is called The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed the
Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press). He wrote the book with Mark Wallace, a
freelance journalist.
It's not easy juggling two such different lives, so
Urizenus, also known as Uri, is easing up on his exploits to allow Mr.
Ludlow to concentrate on writing a linguistics book.
But although his lives are separate, they are in
fact related. Uri dissects virtual worlds like a political philosopher. And
while digital venues are often stereotyped as mindless entertainment for
nerds who sit in front of computer screens slaying monsters, Mr. Ludlow is
among a growing number of scholars who see virtuality as something to study.
He delves into issues of sovereignty in cyberspace, arguing that game
enthusiasts should wrest control of virtual worlds from game companies. He
also paints an unflattering portrait of colleges in Second Life. (See
article, Page A26.)
"Digital campuses are drab, and Second Life is a dubious venue for online
instruction: That's the message from Peter J. Ludlow, a professor of philosophy
at the University of Toronto, to colleges with campuses in the virtual world
Second Life," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 7, 2007 ---
Click Here
Digital campuses are drab, and Second Life is a
dubious venue for online instruction. That's the message from Peter J.
Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, to colleges
with campuses in the virtual world Second Life.
It's a scathing assessment from a scholar who is
ordinarily an enthusiast of virtual environments, who founded a Web-based
tabloid newspaper about Second Life, and has just come out with a book about
his journalistic escapades in this make-believe world, where digital
characters, or avatars, walk, fly, chat online, and talk through the voices
of their human operators.
Colleges worldwide are establishing their presence
in Second Life to advertise their programs, conduct online classes or
conferences, and do research. At least 170 such campuses can be found there,
says an article in the most recent issue of the International Journal of
Social Sciences.
But the virtual campuses he has seen, says Mr.
Ludlow, lack imagination because they duplicate real institutions.
"Is that what you've got if you could start over,
and you're not constrained by the laws of physics, and you could build
whatever you want to enhance learning?" he asks. "What kind of message are
you sending when you say, 'If I could create the ideal learning environment,
I would duplicate Building 7 and go to work?'"
Colleges should be promoting originality, he says.
For example, they should create digital buildings that are architecturally
unusual.
Looks aren't the only problem. Mr. Ludlow tried to
teach a freshman seminar in Second Life on issues arising in multiplayer
online worlds. He and his students were represented by avatars. But it
wasn't successful, he says, because avatars don't communicate as richly as
people do.
"When I'm teaching in a classroom, I can read the
body language of students," says the philosopher. "I can tell if it's too
warm. I can tell if they're tired. I can tell if they're looking quizzical
because they don't understand. I don't get any of that feedback when I'm
trying to address students online."
Bob, how do you do it? How do you keep up with all
of this? Anyway here's a scoop that maybe Bob hasn't read yet. The Economist
has a short article on virtual worlds, including Second Life. The
interesting part for us as accountants, and perhaps and answer that David
posed a few weeks ago as to how to leverage these virtual environments.
Here's a link to the article:
And here is one of the pieces I found interesting
(sorry I don't know how to do different colors like Bob does)
"The same technology can also be used to simulate
the more mundane environment of an office. PIXELearning, a British company
based in Coventry, has developed a simulator for a big international
accounting firm in order to train interns who are fresh out of university.
The role-playing simulator lets them develop their skills by interacting,
for example, with a difficult client who is being aggressive on pricing.
This is invaluable, says Kevin Corti, PIXELearning's boss, because it allows
them to make mistakes before being unleashed on a client. Similarly, a big
American bank is using PIXELearning's simulator for “diversity and
inclusion” training."
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
College of Business Administration (407) 823-5739
Stanford Scientists Build a Better Virtual World A group of Stanford computer scientists has designed a
program that could help users create a more realistic virtual environment in
which to interact.
The Stanford Virtual Worlds group announced this week that they have created
Dryad,a program in which users can easily
“construct” trees in a virtual space. Using the wealth of information about
trees already collect by botanists, Dryad populates the virtual space with trees
created from 100 different variables. Users navigate the space and pick their
desired tree from thousands of possibilities. A social-networking component
refines the software by “nudging” users to trees with popular characteristics.
This, in effect, allows users to pick an item they want without having to go
through a complicated creation process, or being able to shape a
realistic-looking object manually. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2655&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Question
In this edutainment generation of students, does virtual learning have to be fun?
Academics are flocking to use virtual worlds and
multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to
epidemiology, and to turn these environments into educational tools. But one
such highly anticipated effort--a multiplayer game about Shakespeare meant
to teach people about the world of the bard while serving as a place for
social-science experiments--is becoming its own tragedy.
The game, called
Arden,
the World of Shakespeare, was a project out of
Indiana University funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. Its
creator,
Edward
Castronova, an associate professor of
telecommunications at the university, wanted to use the world to test
economic theories: by manipulating the rules of the game, he hoped to find
insights into the way that money works in the real world. Players can enter
the game and explore a town called Ilminster, where they encounter
characters from Shakespeare, along with many plots and quotations. They can
answer trivia questions to improve their characters and play card games with
other players. Coming from Castronova, a pioneer in the field, the game was
expected by many to show the power of virtual-world-based research.
But Castronova says that there's a problem with the
game: "It's no fun."
While focusing on including references to the bard, he says, his team ended
up sidelining some of the fundamental features of a game. "You need puzzles
and monsters," he says, "or people won't want to play ... Since what I
really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments
on, I decided I needed a completely different approach."
Castronova has abandoned active development of
Arden; he released it last week to the public as is, rather than starting up
the experiments he had planned. Part of the problem: it costs a lot to build
a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of
humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75
million that he says goes into developing something on the scale of the
popular game
World of
Warcraft. "I was talking to people like it was
going to be Shakespeare: World of Warcraft, but the money you need for that
is so much more," he says. Castronova also says that he was taking on too
much by attempting to combine education and research. He believes that his
experience should serve as a warning for other academics.
Ian Bogost,
a video-game researcher and assistant professor at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, agrees. "It's very, very hard to make games
in the best of circumstances, and a university is never the best of
circumstances," he says. "I have serious doubts about not just the potential
for success but even the appropriateness of pursuing development work of
this kind in the context of the university." If researchers are going to
build games for the purposes of research, Bogost says, he thinks it's
important to look at the process realistically, and with a scientific eye.
"In most disciplines, it's okay to fess up to what worked and what didn't.
In laboratory work, you do this all the time ... If this is really research
and not just production, then of course there are going to be these kinds of
surprises."
Question
In this edutainment generation of students, does virtual learning have to be fun?
Academics are flocking to use virtual worlds and
multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to
epidemiology, and to turn these environments into educational tools. But one
such highly anticipated effort--a multiplayer game about Shakespeare meant
to teach people about the world of the bard while serving as a place for
social-science experiments--is becoming its own tragedy.
The game, called
Arden,
the World of Shakespeare, was a project out of
Indiana University funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. Its
creator,
Edward
Castronova, an associate professor of
telecommunications at the university, wanted to use the world to test
economic theories: by manipulating the rules of the game, he hoped to find
insights into the way that money works in the real world. Players can enter
the game and explore a town called Ilminster, where they encounter
characters from Shakespeare, along with many plots and quotations. They can
answer trivia questions to improve their characters and play card games with
other players. Coming from Castronova, a pioneer in the field, the game was
expected by many to show the power of virtual-world-based research.
But Castronova says that there's a problem with the
game: "It's no fun."
While focusing on including references to the bard, he says, his team ended
up sidelining some of the fundamental features of a game. "You need puzzles
and monsters," he says, "or people won't want to play ... Since what I
really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments
on, I decided I needed a completely different approach."
Castronova has abandoned active development of
Arden; he released it last week to the public as is, rather than starting up
the experiments he had planned. Part of the problem: it costs a lot to build
a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of
humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75
million that he says goes into developing something on the scale of the
popular game
World of
Warcraft. "I was talking to people like it was
going to be Shakespeare: World of Warcraft, but the money you need for that
is so much more," he says. Castronova also says that he was taking on too
much by attempting to combine education and research. He believes that his
experience should serve as a warning for other academics.
Ian Bogost,
a video-game researcher and assistant professor at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, agrees. "It's very, very hard to make games
in the best of circumstances, and a university is never the best of
circumstances," he says. "I have serious doubts about not just the potential
for success but even the appropriateness of pursuing development work of
this kind in the context of the university." If researchers are going to
build games for the purposes of research, Bogost says, he thinks it's
important to look at the process realistically, and with a scientific eye.
"In most disciplines, it's okay to fess up to what worked and what didn't.
In laboratory work, you do this all the time ... If this is really research
and not just production, then of course there are going to be these kinds of
surprises."
Question
Do you suppose there will ever be sonic accounting, golf, calculus, economics,
etc.?
With every swing, the club transmitted a noise that
sounded like the flourish of a pipe organ. A computer recorded data from each
swing in colorful arcs as Grober sent balls clacking around his laboratory and
echoing through the building’s halls ... Fifteen years after Grober, 44, first
put an electronic sensor into a club to study the golf swing, his scientific
journey has produced a company, Sonic Golf, and a technology that he says can
help professionals and amateurs in the complex, frustrating game of golf.
Damon Hack, "Professor Puts Swing’s Rhythm to Music," The New York Times,
August 6, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/sports/golf/06golf.html
Is Facebook the New MySpace? MySpace has an impressive lead today, but things can
change quickly in the fluid world of mass-market social networking sites. Just
ask Friendster. First Friendster was everybody's favorite social
networking site. Then Friendster fell out of vogue--precipitously--and people
stopped going there. In its place, MySpace became the darling of the Web.
MySpace provided not only a free place to host your own online identity, but a
full set of tools for meeting and interacting with others. Now everybody is
talking about Facebook, which fits the same description, but in a very different
way. Will Facebook become the next MySpace? I think so, and here's why.
Mark Sullivan, PC World via The Washington Post, July 20, 2007 ---
Click Here
Jeopardy Game
Have some fun with your students
courtesy of David Fordham
For several years, I
have been doing some fun things with PowerPoint, more than simply using it as
a "bullet-pointed" slide show.
One of the simplest,
yet most unusual, applications I use for PowerPoint is my own parody of the
Jeopardy game. If you download it and try it, I think you'll have to agree it
is ultra-simple, downright embarrassingly so, yet the students get a kick out
of it, since it is so unlike any PowerPoint session they've ever seen. Class
participation a la mode! Not a lot of new learning takes place on the day I
play the game, but the students have a good time! I use Snickers bars for the
winners, and a homework review sheet for the losers!
Please don't take
this game as an indication of how simplistic I make my PowerPoint
presentations! I have many better examples of more powerful PowerPoint
features. But this game is fun, entertaining, and provides a break from the
day-to-day class. You are free to download it, try it, and even use it in your
class, changing the questions and answers to your heart's desire. Just be sure
to mention me as the original author, and be sure to tell the students that
Jeopardy is a registered trademark of the Sony Pictures corporation! (And if
you get some good ideas and do your own new presentation game, you don't even
have to mention me anymore!)
"AMA Considers a New Addiction: Video Games --- While noting the
risks, it makes sense to also note the rewards," by Erica Naone, MIT's
Technology Review, June 25, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/17628/
The
American Medical Association (AMA)
votes this week on a
set of recommendations that caused a stir
earlier this month by suggesting that
video-game addiction might belong in the
next edition of the
American Psychiatric Association's (APA)
Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental
Disorders. Other recommendations include
calls for parents to pay more attention to
what games kids play and for how long, and
calls for the industry to better regulate
itself. The recommendations are part of a
report by the Council on Science and Public
Health with the subject "Emotional
and behavioral effects, including addictive
potential, of video games."
The report singles out massive multiplayer,
online, role-playing games (MMORPGs) as a
cause for concern, saying that video-game
overuse is most common in the 9 percent of
gamers who play MMORPGs:
"MMORPGs are simultaneously competitive
and highly social, and provide
interactive real-time services.
Researchers have attempted to examine
the type of individual most likely to be
susceptible to such games, and current
data suggest these individuals are
somewhat marginalized socially, perhaps
experiencing high levels of emotional
loneliness and/or difficulty with real
life social interactions. Current theory
is that these individuals achieve more
control of their social relationships
and more success in social relationships
in the virtual reality realm than in
real relationships."
Current evidence of video-game addiction
comes from case studies and surveys that
recognize varying symptoms of addiction. The
report loosely defines overuse as "a
constellation of behaviors observed in
persons using the Internet to such an extent
that it began to cause other aspects of
their lives to become dysfunctional," and it
compares video game addiction to
pathological gambling. Anywhere from very
few to 15 percent of players may overuse
video games, according to the report, which
calls for more research.
In light of the danger
of overuse and the well-known concerns about
violence in video games, the report
recommends that parents be sure that their
children under 18 limit their "screen time"
(video games, television, and the Internet)
to one to two hours a day. Martin Wasserman,
executive director of
MedChi, the
Maryland State Medical Society, explains,
"There are many tasks you have to learn in
adolescence, and you don't have time to do
that if you're playing seven hours a night."
Researchers at Intel are working on a system that
could make it much harder to cheat at online games. Unlike current
software-based anti-cheating technology, Intel's Fair Online Gaming System
would be built into a player's computer, in a combination of hardware,
firmware, and software.
Since the early days of video games, players have
cheated. Some players tried altering the game's programming, for example, to
give themselves benefits such as infinite lives or infinite ammunition. When
large groups of people began playing shared games online, these
cheats--which seemed harmless in single-player games--became a cause for
concern, especially since many of them allow players to make devastating
attacks on others.
Too many cheaters in an online game can destroy the
group atmosphere that makes online gaming fun, says Mia Consalvo, an
associate professor at Ohio University who researches cheating in video
games. Although game developers and third-party specialists are always
working to combat cheaters, the problem has continued. Some cheaters simply
want to wield more power, while others are lured by prize money offered in
tournaments.
Gamers can opt to play on servers that block those
who haven't installed anti-cheating software. Such software scans a player's
computer and alerts other players if it detects cheats. But anti-cheating
software can only catch cheats once they become known: like antivirus
software, it works by scanning for things that look like known cheats, and
the list of cheats requires constant updating.
Intel's researchers say that their system would
work without needing updates. By watching at the hardware level for cheating
strategies, the system should be able to detect current and future cheats,
says Intel research scientist Travis Schluessler.
For example, the system would go after input-based
cheats, in which a hacker feeds the game different information than he
enters through the keyboard and mouse. A cheater playing a shooting game
might use an input-based cheat known as an aimbot, for example, to point his
guns automatically, leaving him free to fire rapidly, and with deadly
accuracy. Schluessler says that the Fair Online Gaming system's chip set
would catch an aimbot by receiving and comparing data streams from the
player's keyboard and mouse with data streams from what the game processes.
The system would recognize that the information wasn't the same and alert
administrators to the cheat. In tests, Schluessler says, the system ran
without slowing the play of a game.
In addition to input-based cheats, Schluessler says
that the system would go after network-data cheats that extract hidden
information from a game's network, such as the location of other players,
and display it to the cheater. Intel's system would also target cheats that
attempt to disable anti-cheating software. Schluessler says the goal isn't
to replace anti-cheating software but to strengthen and augment it.
Tony Ray, president of Even Balance, which makes
the anti-cheating software PunkBuster, says this type of system could go a
long way toward addressing continuing problems with cheaters. "There are a
couple of things that can only be done properly with hardware," he says.
"These are things we expend considerable effort in addressing with software
... Having real-time hardware verification that PunkBuster has not been
compromised in memory after loading would go a long way toward thwarting
even the best private hack authors."
HI Bob, great site, I just ran across it for the
first time today. It is always cool to see a site like yours that goes back
to the "good ole days" of the internet when yahoo had almost no graphics on
it and the internet was in its infancy...
I'm a chess fanatic and I thought you'd be
interested in this guy's (Chad Kimball) site:
http://www.chessvictory.com
You have to give your email address to get the
videos, which sort of a bummer, but it is still a great resource.
This guy has taken a chess book by edward lasker
and created a bunch of videos out of it, and is offering them for free.
I've checked out the videos and they're awesome.
Could you add that site for me?
Ben
Jensen Comment
Ben Portman's connection with Chad Kimball is unknown to me. I'm really not
a serious chess player and have not signed up for the above free videos. I
pass this information along for those of you who want to take up the offer
of these free videos. Apparently this is a promo for personalized training
and sales of Chad's other chess videos and books ---
http://www.chessvictory.com/index2.htm
Chad sells at least 14 books on chess ---
http://www.comparetobuy.com/chess.htm
Other references include the following:
"How to Use the Internet to Dramatically Improve Your Chess Strategy," by
Chad Kimball , Selfgrowth.com ---
http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Kimball1.html
Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT for short) is a
teaching and learning strategy based on the interaction between web-based
study assignments and an active learner classroom. Students respond
electronically to carefully constructed web-based assignments which are due
shortly before class, and the instructor reads the student submissions
"just-in-time" to adjust the classroom lesson to suit the students' needs.
Thus, the heart of JiTT is the "feedback loop" formed by the students'
outside-of-class preparation that fundamentally affects what happens during
the subsequent in-class time together.
What is Just-in-Time Teaching designed to
accomplish?
JiTT is aimed at many of the challenges facing
students and instructors in today's classrooms. Student populations are
diversifying. In addition to the traditional nineteen-year-old recent high
school graduates, we now have a kaleidoscope of "non-traditional" students:
older students, working part time students, commuting students, and, at the
service academies, military cadets. They come to our courses with a broad
spectrum of educational backgrounds, interests, perspectives, and
capabilities that compel individualized, tailored instruction. They need
motivation and encouragement to persevere. Consistent, friendly support can
make the difference between a successful experience and a fruitless effort.
It can even mean the difference between graduating and dropping out.
Education research has made us more aware of learning style differences and
of the importance of passing some control of the learning process over to
the students. Active learner environments yield better results but they are
harder to manage than lecture oriented approaches. Three of the
"Seven
Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" encourage
student-faculty contact, increased time for student study, and cooperative
learning between students.
To confront these challenges, the Just-in-Time Teaching strategy pursues
three major goals:
1. To maximize the efficacy of the
classroom session, where human instructors are present.
2. To structure the out-of-class time
for maximum learning benefit.
3. To create and sustain team spirit.
Students and instructors work as a team toward the same objective, to
help all students pass the course with the maximum amount of retainable
knowledge.
What JiTT is Not
Although Just-in-Time Teaching makes heavy use
of the web, it is not to be confused with either distance learning (DL) or
with computer-aided instruction (CAI). Virtually all JiTT instruction occurs
in a classroom with human instructors. The web materials, added as a
pedagogical resource, act primarily as a communication tool and secondarily
as content provider and organizer. JiTT is also not an attempt to 'process'
large numbers of students by employing computers to do massive grading jobs.
The JiTT Feedback Loop
The Web Component
JiTT web pages fall into three major
categories:
1. Student assignments in preparation
for the classroom activity: WarmUps and Puzzles.
2. Enrichment pages. Short essays on
practical, everyday applications of the course subject matter, peppered
with URLs to interesting material on the web. These essays have proven
themselves to be an important motivating factor in introductory service
courses, where students often doubt the current relevance the subject.
3. Stand alone instructional material,
such as simulation programs and spreadsheet exercises.
For detailed examples of the JiTT web
resources, please see the
JiTT
resources page.
WarmUps and Puzzles are the heart of the
JiTT web component. These are short, web-based assignments, prompting
the student to think about the upcoming lesson and answer a few simple
questions prior to class. These questions, when fully discussed, often
have complex answers. The students are expected to develop the answer as
far as they can on their own. We finish the job in the classroom. These
assignments are due just a few hours before class time. The responses
are delivered to the instructor electronically to form the framework for
the classroom activities that follow. Typically, the instructors
duplicates sample responses on transparencies and takes them to class.
The interactive classroom session, built around these responses,
replaces the traditional lecture/recitation format.
Students complete the WarmUp assignments before they receive any formal
instruction on a particular topic. They earn credit for answering a
question, substantiated by prior knowledge and whatever they managed to
glean from the textbook. The answers do not have to be complete, or even
correct. In fact, partially correct responses are particularly useful as
classroom discussion fodder. In contrast to WarmUps, Puzzle exercises
are assigned to students after they have received formal instruction on
a particular topic. The Puzzles serve as the framework for a wrap-up
session on a particular topic.
The WarmUps, and to some extent the Puzzles, are undergirded by
education research and target a variety of specific issues. The list of
targeted issues might contain: developing concepts and vocabulary,
modeling -- connecting concepts and equations, estimation- getting a
feel for magnitudes, relating technical scientific statements to "common
sense", understanding the scope of applicability of equations, etc. The
targeted issues are highly content specific. They may involve the
characteristics of a particular class (e.g. the background skills of a
particular student body).
In preparing WarmUp assignments for an upcoming class meeting, we first
create a conceptual outline of the lesson content. This task is similar
to the preparation of a traditional passive lecture. As we work on the
outline, we pay attention to the pedagogical issues that we need to
focus on when in the classroom. Are we introducing new concepts and/or
new notation? Are we building on a previous lesson, and if so, what
bears repeating? What are the important points we wish the students to
remember from the session? What are the common difficulties typical
students will face when exposed to this material? (Previous classroom
experience and teaching and learning literature can be immensely helpful
here). Once this outline has been created, we create broadly based
questions that will force students to grapple with as many of the issues
as possible. We are hoping to receive, in the student responses, the
framework on which we build the in-class experience.
The Active Learner Classroom
The JiTT classroom session is intimately linked to the electronic
preparatory assignments the students complete outside of class. Exactly
how the classroom time is spent depends on a variety of issues such as
class size, classroom facilities, and student and instructor
personalities. Mini-lectures (10 min max) are often interspersed with
demos, classroom discussion, worksheet exercises, and even hands-on
mini-labs. Regardless, the common key is that the classroom component,
whether interactive lecture or student activities, is informed by an
analysis of various student responses.
In a JiTT classroom students construct the same content as in a passive
lecture with two important added benefits. First, having completed the
web assignment very recently, they enter the classroom ready to actively
engage in the activities. Secondly, they have a feeling of ownership
since the interactive lesson is based on their own wording and
understanding of the relevant issues.
The give and take in the classroom suggests future WarmUp questions that
will reflect the mood and the level of expertise in the class at hand.
In this way the feedback loop is closed with the students having played
a major part in the endeavor.
From the instructor's point of view, the lesson content remains pretty
much the same from semester to semester with only minor shifts in
emphasis. From the students' perspective, however, the lessons are
always fresh and interesting, with a lot of input from the class.
We designed JiTT to improve student learning in our own classrooms and
have been encouraged by the results, both attitudinal and cognitive. We
attribute this success to three factors that enhance student learning,
identified by Alexander Astin* in his thirty year study of
college student success:
increased amounts and quality of student-student interaction
student-faculty interaction
student study outside of class.
By fostering these, JiTT promotes student learning and satisfaction.
"Today's games are complex, take up to 100 hours, require collaboration
with others, and involve developing values, insights, and new knowledge.
They are immersive virtual worlds that are augmented by a more complex
external environment that involves communities of practice, the buying and
selling of game items, blogs, and developer communities. In many ways, games
have become complex learning systems."
"Digital Game-Based Learning: It's Not Just the
Digital Natives Who Are Restless" By Richard Van Eck EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol.
41, no. 2, March/April 2006, pp. 16–30.
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0620.asp
According to the author, "The combined weight of
three factors has resulted in widespread public interest in games as
learning tools." These factors are (1) "ongoing research conducted by DGBL
[digital game-based learning] proponents;" (2) "today's 'Net Generation,' or
'digital natives,' who have become disengaged with traditional instruction;"
and (3) "the increased popularity of games. . . nearly as many digital games
were sold as there are people in the United States (248 million games vs.
293.6 million residents.)"
"Scavenger Hunt Enhances Students' Utilization of
Blackboard" By Dianne C. Jones JOURNAL OF ONLINE
LEARNING AND TEACHING, vol. 2, no. 2, June 2006
http://jolt.merlot.org/Vol2_No2_Jones.htm
"The use of the Scavenger Hunt game has made the
use of a web-based course management system, like Blackboard, less
threatening for students and has significantly reduced the need for
additional instructor time to deal with technology-related issues throughout
the course."
"Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online
Games as 'Third Places'" By Constance Steinkuehler and Dmitri Williams
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, vol. 11, issue 4, 2006
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/steinkuehler.html
The authors studied how massively multiplayer
online games (MMOs) provide a means for establishing informal social
relationships beyond the workplace and home. (This issue has other articles
related to games and play. Link to other articles at
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/ )
"Innovations in Learning and Teaching Approaches
using GameTechnologies -- Can 'The Movies' Teach How to Make a Movie?"
By Ryan Flynn and Nigel Newbutt
"Using A Virtual World For Transferable Skills in
Gaming Education"
By M. Hobbs, E. Brown, and M. Gordon
"Providing the Skills Required for Innovative
Mobile Game Development Using Industry/Academic Partnerships" By Reuben
Edwards and Paul Coulton
ITALICS, Innovation in Teaching And Learning in
Information and Computer Science [ISSN 1473-7507] is an electronic journal
published by the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Information and
Computer Sciences (ICS) to provide a "vehicle for members of the ICS
communities to disseminate best practice and research on learning and
teaching within the subject disciplines." Current and past issues are
available at
http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/italics/index.htm.
For more information about the ICS, see
http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/.
The article describes how Second Life, a virtual world environment, is
being used as an educational tool.
xTREME Accounting Games from PwC
PwC launched the xTREME Games in 2002, to increase
students' exposure to professional services and the world of public accounting.
Since then, the games have grown substantially with over 85 schools involved,
more than 2,500 teams comprising 13,000 participants, and 1.5 million in prize
money awarded. Over the years, more than 150,000 hours have been logged to the
xTREME Games by competing students. The xTREME Games continue to have a
significant impact on our participants, helping them to better understand the
vast career opportunities in public accounting and connecting them with
professionals in the industry. The characteristics that winning teams exhibit
are critical thinking, presentation skills, teamwork, and using time wisely
---
http://www.pwc.com/us/en/careers/xtreme/what-it-takes.jhtml
As college students across the country continue to
face a highly competitive job market, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) has
announced the launch of the firm's 8th Annual xTREME Games, a unique
competition that enables undergraduates at schools across the country to
experience and solve real-world business challenges. Participants in PwC's
xTREME Games compete for school bragging rights and nearly $300,000 in total
prize money while broadening and enhancing valuable skills such as decision
making, communication and team building, which are critical to success in
the professional world. Approximately $1.5 million in total prize money has
been awarded to students since xTREME began.
As one of the nation's largest employers of college
graduates, PwC collaborates with schools across the country to provide
meaningful, relevant learning programs and opportunities to ensure that
students are well prepared to enter the profession. The xTREME Games
competition is part of PwC's larger, ongoing commitment to corporate
responsibility and youth education.
xTREME, beginning this week at the University of
Alabama, includes xTAX, short for "Extreme Tax," and xACT, short for
"Extreme Accounting." Both challenge undergraduates to solve cases designed
to expose them to real tax and accounting scenarios, including policy and
planning issues. Over the next six weeks, hundreds of the best accounting
students representing nearly 80 schools nationwide will compete in
five-person teams for the right to potentially represent their schools at
the national finals in January.
"When it comes to preparing students for successful
careers in the accounting profession, there is no substitute for hands-on,
real-world experience," said Christina Fitzpatrick, National Campus Sourcing
Programs Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "With the xTREME Games, students
get a firsthand look at the type of intricate challenges that tax and
accounting professionals face on a daily basis. The competition builds
collaboration and problem-solving skills while also requiring that ideas are
effectively presented -- all crucial skills in a competitive job
environment."
Created by PwC in 2002, the xTREME Games
competition has grown steadily to include nearly 80 schools and more than
2,500 teams comprised of 13,000 participants. More information about xTREME
can be found at www.pwc.com/xtreme.
PwC has a strong history of investing in education
and talent development. For the past two years, PwC has been ranked #1 in
Training magazine's "Training Top 125" annual ranking of organizations that
excel at employee training and development (the firm also ranked #2 in
2007). PwC has also consistently been named to FORTUNE magazine's "100 Best
Companies to Work For" list, and has been highly ranked on BusinessWeek's
lists of "Best Internships" and "Best Places to Launch a Career."
Business is the place where theory is executed in
real time. It's a place where decisions are made with consequences, where
communication is key, and collaborative, team-oriented thinking is a must.
These are the conditions created in the xTREME Games, PwC's Tax and
Accounting Campus Competitions.
No longer within the safe confines of the
classroom, PwC seeks students who are eager to plunge briefly into the
environment of the real business world to show what they're made of as
critical thinkers, able collaborators and persuasive advisors on important
business issues.
No number crunching exercises, the xTREME Games are
focused on high-level issues designed to test and improve your
decision-making skills. Detailed accounting or tax knowledge is not required
to participate. What is required is your desire to learn, meet new people,
experience new challenges, and have fun!
Our 2009 xTREME campuses are designated for either
the xACT competition OR the xTAX competition. Read on for more information
about how it works, what it takes to succeed, and to see if your school is a
participant!
Find your five-member team. Two must be
sophomores—each must be enrolled in the first accounting course or be an
accounting major/minor One junior—must be an accounting major One “other”
team member may be at any level: freshman to fifth year student. This team
member does not have to be an accounting major, e.g., a general business or
business-related major, such as Finance or Information Systems is
acceptable. One team member can be any level but must either be enrolled in
the first accounting course or be an accounting major/minor at the
undergraduate or graduate level.
3 Attend official mission meeting on campus
In your mission meeting, you and your teammates
will meet with PwC representatives to receive your official case packet,
with instructions and further information about the xTREME Games. 4 Develop
your case
You and your team will have two weeks to develop
your case and consult with your faculty and PwC mentors for guidance and
encouragement along the way. The average time it takes a team to complete
the case assignment is 10-15 hours. 5 Present your case in 12 minutes to PwC
professionals
Your team will be charged with clearly
communicating your position, presenting in a dynamic way, and backing up
your case solution in an interactive question and answer session. Each team
member must speak for at least one minute. 6 Celebrate!
All participants will receive an invitation to a
PwC celebratory event following the competition where they’ll have an
opportunity to network with our professionals. The winning team on each
campus will receive $1,000 and consideration for the national finals. 7 Five
lucky winners to compete in the national finals
Five teams will be chosen as national finalists and
awarded $10,000 per team and a trip either to New York City (xACT) or
Washington, D.C. (xTAX). There, each team will get a chance to join with
experts from PwC for a fun-filled, exciting two-day final competition.
Winners of the xACT competition receive our prestigious Montgomery Award,
while winners of the xTAX competition receive our prestigious Hamilton
Award. The xACT Montgomery Award
Named after Robert Montgomery, founding partner of
Lybrand, Ross Brothers & Montgomery in 1898, who wrote the first American
book on the practice of auditing. He was instrumental in the founding of the
AICPA and served as its first president.
The award, a silver bowl, resides at PwC
headquarters in New York City.
Names of each member of the winning team are
inscribed on its base. Each winning team member and their faculty mentor
receive a replica of the award to keep. The xTAX Hamilton Award
Named after Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary
of the US Treasury, who set the first tax policy and defended it in a
decision that was the Supreme Court's first ruling on the constitutionality
of a law.
The award, a silver bowl, resides at PwC's
Washington National Tax Service office in Washington, DC.
Names of each member of the winning team are
inscribed on its base. Each winning team member and their faculty mentor
receive a replica of the award to keep.
Home How it works What it takes Who's competing
Winner's circle Register now Recently visited pages xTREME Games: PwC's tax
and accounting competition
Monopoly from Parker Bros. has been used across the years by
various accounting, finance, economics, and sociology instructors to interest
students in accounting, finance, and social studies. Years ago I lived next door
to an economics instructor who extended the game to "Corporate Monopoly."
Dissertations have even been written based up this board game, e.g., Models
of Risk and Strategies in Gameplay ---
http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~williamt/Thesis.pdf
Jensen Comment
Monopoly is widely used to teach accounting, economics, and other courses.
Bob Jensen's threads on the Game of Monopoly (and its variations) in college
courses ---
See below
Parker Bros. Monopoly Update and Other Games and Edutainment Applications
From the Scout Report on October 23, 2009
As the World Monopoly Championships come to an end,
a curious case involving the popular game is remembered How A Fight Over a
Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125599860004295449.html
The popularity of
certain video games and other entertainment options seems to change with the
seasons, but the board game Monopoly has remained tremendously popular with
the American public for more than seven decades.
One member of the
American public, retired economics professor Ralph Anspach, continues to
actively promote his own version of the game. It's titled "Anti-Monopoly",
and the controversy surrounding the game has included a lengthy legal battle
with the company Parker Brothers that has seen many twists and turns. Among
other things, Anspach takes exception to the official company line regarding
the original game's origins, which state that Charles B. Darrow developed
the game during the Great Depression.
Anspach refers to
this creation story as a "corporate fairy tale". Parker Brothers remains
less than thrilled about the "Anti-Monopoly" created by Anspach back in the
early 1970s. He created the game in order to inform his son about the
potential downside of monopolies, and several years afterwards Anspach
received a letter from a Parkers Brothers attorney requesting him to stop
selling his new game. Over the past three decades, Anspach has attempted to
schedule events around past World Monopoly Championships in order to bring
attention his cause. After a lengthy and very costly court battle, Anspach
was, in a sense, victorious, as the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in
California ruled in 1979 that the trademark "Monopoly" was generic, and
using the name was not in fact a trademark violation. As of this writing,
Professor Anspach had not made plans to attend the World Monopoly
Championships, which are being held in Las Vegas this week.
The first link will
take visitors to a piece from this Tuesday's Wall Street Journal that
discusses the ongoing saga surrounding "Anti-Monopoly". The second link
whisks interested parties away to a news article from this Monday's Las
Vegas Sun that talks about an oversized Monopoly board that's all the rage
on the Strip. Moving on, the third link leads to the official Monopoly site.
Here, visitors can learn about the various officially sanctioned spinoff
products, game history, and of course, Mr. Monopoly. The other side of
Monopoly can be found at the fourth site, which is the official homepage of
the "Anti-Monopoly" board game. The fifth link leads to a classic piece of
reporting from the Straight Dope about the significance of the Monopoly
playing pieces. Lastly, the sixth link leads to a 1987 article from the New
York Times that profiles "Winning Monopoly", a popular paperback guide to
succeeding at Monopoly created by Kaz Darzinskis.
A few years ago, I had the good fortune to be
involved in refining how Monopoly could be used in financial accounting
classes so that students can learn by doing. In recent years, I've taught
sections of introductory managerial accounting and have searched for
something similar to Monopoly to use there.
I think I've found it. I started playing business
computer games over the winter break and discovered one that would be well
suited for use in managerial accounting. I created some instructions, had
students in a small honors class buy $20 copies of the game (I have no
ownership interest in either the game or its distribution), and throughout
the course students practiced managerial accounting topics for themselves. I
was able to have students identify cost drivers classify costs as variable,
fixed or whatever develop cost equations using multiple variables of
activity consider revenues and develop equations for computing profit
conduct multiple-product CVP analysis conduct capital budgeting analyses
identify relevant factors for making decisions create budgets for operations
and cash flow compare actual results to budget, and compute variances
analyze the variances for insight as to activities that need to be changed
evaluate strategies project if actual earnings will help realize future
goals In the fall, I hope o incorporate: have multiple students involved in
the same game work from a strategic cost management perspective product
pricing strategies have students go through the project a second time, but
doing it better and being summative-evaluated for a grade
In the coming fall term, I have two regular
sections of managerial accounting. In one section I intend to continue with
my learning centered and mastery teacher approach (which I would also
consider partnering with someone to study its effectiveness). In the other
section I intend to use the simulation game.
My goal is to eventually share everything in an
article sent to a well regarded journal.
I'm looking for someone intrigued enough with the
idea to consider using the game in a section of managerial accounting for
the coming fall. If you are interested please contact me via private e-mail
at
albrecht@profalbrecht.com .
The project and instructions are rough enough at
this time that I'm not ready to share them publicly.
David Albrecht
Bowling Green State University
Jensen Comments
Clever students in Professor Albrecht's class might study the top 1,000
strategies for winning the game.
From The Business of Inventing (Chapter 11) ---
Click Here
Begin Quote
************
Monopoly is a familiar game for Jay Walker, the company’s founder and
driving force.2As a student at Cornell University he took on the task of
mastering the Parker Brothers game of that name and, within a couple of
years, won the world champion-ship. To describe the situation using one of
Jay Walker’s favorite metaphors, he unraveled the DNA of Monopoly.
Naturally, he decided to profit from his research, and so, continuing the
metaphor, he published a book that contained the DNA sequencing for
Monopoly, titled 1,000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games.
One might have expected Parker Brothers to see such
a book as free promotion for the game—a good thing. But instead the company
reacted as if Walker really were publishing Monopoly’s DNA sequencing and,
before the book appeared, sued Walker to stop publication. Walker hired
attorneys and fought the suit, arguing that Parker Brothers was attempting
to exercise prior restraint against his right to publish freely. He won the
case and ended up using the proceeds from the book to pay for his legal
expenses.
************
End Quote
1000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games by Jay Walker and
Jeff Lehman
Publisher: Dell Pub. Date: 1975
Click Here
Begin Quote
************
Decades later, when they attempted to suppress publication of a game called
Anti-Monopoly, designed by Ralph Anspach, the trademark suit went all the
way to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1983, and the court found
in favor of Anspach because Darrow did not actually invent the game.
There is no accounting for the unrivaled devotion
that the MONOPOLY® game has garnered over the past sixty years. Some say it
is the chance to build a fortune, take a risk, make an acquisition. Others
insist it is the drama of competition. Edward P. Parker, former president of
Parker Brothers suggested that the magic of the game MONOPOLY® is
"clobbering your best friend without doing any damage."
************
End Quote
Issues in
Accounting Education had at least two articles on how to use
Monopoly in Introductory Accounting. You could check out volume 4
(2) from Fall 89 and volume 10(1) from Spring 95 to get more
information.
When I used it in
the second semester of Introductory, I had students in teams of four
meet outside of class, do 25 rounds each, and come back to class
with individual financial statements showing their individual
transactions, along with a reconciliation amongst the four players
that reconciled total revenues and expenses that were player to
player. Some transactions are between the bank and the
players....It's been a long time, so I can't recall the details of
that team reconciliation. But students loved playing the game, I
gave silly prizes for the biggest winner and the biggest loser, and
it took very little class time...For me it was in lieu of the
traditional practice set, which we used as a sort of filter to make
sure students had learned the basic in the first semester.
There are many ways
to do it. In Rober Kneckle's 1989 Issues article, a version was
described in which students play a game of Monopoly to conclusion,
then prepare financial statements. In my 1995 article, I describe a
version in which students play quarters of a game, and prepare
financial statements after every quarter. In my version students
also get a chance to invest or bet on who will win each game. Of
course, they are examining financial statements as their source of
information.
When I do it, I plan
on 1.5 weeks to play game and prepare financials, and about 1.5
weeks for me to grade the financial statements and receive student
investments. Four quarters makes for 12 weeks. But, that is how I do
it, and I'm usually doing it for 40-60 students. Things go very
quickly if you have 16-20 students.
Things go much
differently, depending on whether it is used in financial accounting
(I don't use debits/credits here), intermediate accounting (I use
debits/credits here) or MBA accounting (lots of it wheeling/deeling
and joint ventures here. Usually all four tokens are bankrupt after
two fourths of an MBA game.
When I do it, it is
completely out of class. However, I have arranged for students to
play the first fourth of the game at the same time, and I'm there to
answer questions.
It goes much better,
IMO, if the classic board version is used and not the computerized
version.
I've experimented
with other computer business games. As long as it isn't an economic
simulation, things go well. I especially like using Gazillionaire
for managerial/cost accounting, and Billionaire 2 as a replacement
for Monopoly.
My debit/credit
instructions are at the following link: http://profalbrecht.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/real-money-2003.pdf
Roger
My classes were capped at 40 (probably because of the room size). Do a
Google search on “accounting monopoly game” You might find something
appropriate to your school/class environment.
Pat
I ran the monopoly game like a continuous practice set over several
classes during the beginning chapters on journal entries / ledgers /
accounting cycle. First, I would lecture on the accounting and then
in the latter 15/20 minutes of the class the students would be hands
on. The student teams did have to turn in financial statements at
the end of the “monopoly practice set”, but I did not have them
calculate anything other than the game operations (i.e. no
depreciation, salaries, taxes, etc.) I liked to keep it simple
because in order to interest students with that “math phobia”
syndrome which is present in non-accounting major students’ mindset
about accounting.
A "tune-up" could be
accomplished with very little game playing in class. After 20 or so
rolls of the dice per each student enough data can be captured to
create differences in the net worth of participants. It also allows
the other students to coach the proper entry for students playing at
their table and can be used to foster teamwork. What i find
fascinating about the exercise is that students finally see a
connection from a business process to an accounting entry and learn
that accounting can be an excellent way to judge PAST performance of
a company. The chance/community chest cards can be used to add any
level of complexity you would like to have the students experience
including fair value, depreciation, leases, pensions, etc. I
personally would avoid the online version of the game because
student's attention will wander into instant messaging and email.
I have been playing
this in my Principles of Accounting I classes for 3 years and still
have students comment on it. I see more “ah ha” moments while
playing this game than I do all semester long. I spend 2 class days
on the Monopoly game. Four students per board, each student turns in
his/her own work - journal entries, t-accounts, trial balance,
financial statements, closing entries, and post-closing trial
balance. They do the journal entries and t-accounts in class; the
rest is done for homework. I give little prizes for the largest net
income in each class.
I do this activity
before the first test, which covers the entire accounting cycle. I
do not make them do depreciation, since we have not yet covered that
at the time of the assignment.
I will be glad to
share my handouts with you.
Meredith
Meredith P.
Jackson
Accounting/Business Instructor
Snead State Community College mjackson@snead.edu
(256) 840-4163 (256) 558-0237
Credit Where It's Due
Anti-Monopoly, a game put out briefly in the 1970's before Parker
Brothers (owner of the Monopoly monopoly) sued for copyright
infringement. Instead of accumulating money, players vied for "social
consciousness points." In all other respects the game was exactly like
Monopoly. If we tied social status to "social consciousness points,"
it's quite obvious that they would soon play the role of money, subject
to the same abuses.
"Credit Where It's Due," by Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied
Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay ---
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/WestTech/CreditWhereDue.HTM
By the way, this is a nice history outline!!!!
FOR FUN OR PROFIT? AN EVALUATION OF AN ACCOUNTING SIMULATION GAME FOR
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS, by Ralph Kober and Ann Tarca, Department of Accounting and
Finance The University of Western Australia Nedlands, WA 6907 ---
http://www.af.ecel.uwa.edu.au/__data/page/9426/00-126.pdf
Capitalizing on the national visibility
of New York City’s educational reforms, Parker Brothers, makers of Monopoly,
announced today that they will be producing a new game based on the city’s
education system. Entitled “Children First: A Game of Irony”, the game is slated
to come out in time for the 2007-2008 school year. According to a company
spokesperson, this will be a board game, the object of which will be to amass
the highest number of points, which in the game are referred to as “test
scores”.
GBN News, March 10, 2007 ---
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2007/03/new-game-in-town.html
Begin Quote
************
Federal authorities working with McDonald's broke up a criminal ring they
say rigged the popular Monopoly and ''Who Wants to be a Millionaire'' games
played by millions of the fast-food chain's customers over the past six
years.
************
End Quote
Examples of some experiments using Monopoly in edutainment,
learning, and research are listed below:
Using the Parker Brother's Game Monopoly to Teach Journal
Entries in an Introductory College Accounting Course
by Susann Cuperus (University of Mary)
http://worldcat.org/wcpa/oclc/51537960
On a Monday evening last fall, in the Crystal
Gateway Marriott a few blocks from the Pentagon, a group of academics,
journalists, and software developers gathered to play with the U.S.
military’s newest toys. In one corner of the hotel’s ballroom, two men
climbed into something resembling a jeep. One clutched a pistol and
positioned himself behind the steering wheel, while the other manned the
vehicle’s turret. In front of them, a huge, three-paneled television
displayed moving images of an urban combat zone. Nearby, another man shot
invisible infrared beams from his rifle at a video-screen target. In the
middle of the room a player knelt, lifted a large, bazooka-like device to
his shoulder, and began launching imaginary antitank missiles.
The reception was hosted by the Army Game Project,
best known for creating America’s Army, the official video game of the U.S.
Army, and was intended to demonstrate how the military’s use of video games
has changed in just a few years. America’s Army was released in 2002 as a
recruiting tool, the video-game version of those “Be All You Can Be” (now
“An Army of One”) television ads. But the game has evolved beyond mere
propaganda for the PlayStation crowd into a training platform for the modern
soldier.
If you have absorbed the familiar critique of video
games as a mindless, dehumanizing pastime for a nihilistic Columbine
generation, the affinity between gaming and soldiering may seem
nightmarishly logical: Of course the military wants to condition its
recruits on these Skinner boxes, as foreshadowed by science fiction produced
when video games were little more than fuzzy blips on the American screen.
The film The Last Starfighter (1984) and the novel Ender’s Game (1985)
depict futuristic militaries that use video games to train and track the
progress of unknowing children, with the objective of creating a pools of
recruits. (The code name for America’s Army when it was in development was
“Operation Star Fighter,” an homage to its cinematic predecessor.)
Some members of today’s military do view video
games as a means of honing fighting skills. The director of the technology
division at Quantico Marine Base told The Washington Post last year that
today’s young recruits, the majority of whom are experienced video-game
players, “probably feel less inhibited, down in their primal level, pointing
their weapons at somebody.” In the same article, a retired Marine colonel
speculated that the gaming generation has been conditioned to be
militaristic: “Remember the days of the old Sparta, when everything they did
was towards war?” The experiences of some soldiers seem to bear out his
words. A combat engineer interviewed by the Post compared his tour in Iraq
to Halo, a popular video game that simulates the point of view of a
futuristic soldier battling an alien army.
To view video games merely as mock battlegrounds,
however, is to ignore the many pacific uses to which they are being put. The
U.S. military itself is developing games that “train soldiers, in effect,
how not to shoot,” according to a New York Times Magazine article of a few
years ago. Rather than use video games to turn out mindless killers, the
armed forces are fashioning games that impart specific skills, such as
parachuting and critical thinking. Even games such as those displayed at the
Marriott that teach weapons handling don’t reward indiscriminate slaughter,
the shoot-first-ask-questions-later bluster that hardcore gamers deride as
“button mashing.” Players of America’s Army participate in small units with
other players connected via the Internet to foster teamwork and leadership.
Nor is the U.S. military alone in recognizing the
training potential of video games. The Army’s display was only one exhibit
at the Serious Games Summit, “serious” being the industry’s label for those
games that are created to do more than entertain. Games have been devised to
train emergency first-responders, to recreate ancient civilizations, to
promote world peace. The Swedish Defense College has developed a game to
teach UN peacekeepers how to interact with and pacify civilian populations
without killing them. Food Force, an America’s Army imitator, educates
players about how the United Nations World Food Program fights global
hunger. A group of Carnegie Mellon University students, among them a former
Israeli intelligence officer, is developing PeaceMaker, a game in which
players take the role of either the Israeli prime minister or the
Palestinian president and work within political constraints toward a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The very phrase “serious games,” however, suggests
that unserious games may well be the societal blight that many believe them
to be. It’s easier to vilify games such as those in the Grand Theft Auto
series, in which the player’s goal is to rise to power in various criminal
organizations by carjacking vehicles and killing their owners with a variety
of weapons—a baseball bat, a Molotov cocktail, an AK-47. But Grand Theft
Auto and its sequels are popular not just because of their transgressive
content, but also because they are designed to allow players to roam freely
across a gigantic three-dimensional cityscape. (With their combination of
technical accomplishment and controversial subject matter, the Grand Theft
Auto titles might be the video-game analogues of movies such as Bonnie and
Clyde or, more recently, Pulp Fiction.)
As far back as 1982, when video games consisted of
simple fare like Space Invaders—a two-dimensional arcade game—a rabbi warned
on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour about their dehumanizing effects: “When
children spend hours in front of a screen playing some of these games that
are inherently violent, they will tend to look at people as they look at
these little blips on the screen that must be zapped—that must be killed
before they are killed. And it is my concern that 10, 20 years down the line
we’re going to see a group of children who then become adults who don’t view
people as human beings, but rather view them as other blips to be
destroyed—as things.”
The rabbi articulated an objection that has been
heard repeatedly as video games have grown from a pastime for awkward,
outdoors-fearing children into a form of mass entertainment enjoyed mostly
by adults. Last year, Americans spent a total of $7 billion on almost 230
million computer and video games, according to the Entertainment Software
Association, an industry group. Both of those numbers—sales revenues and
units sold—have roughly tripled over the past 10 years. Defining who is a
“gamer” can be tricky, as the definition can include everyone who has played
Minesweeper on a personal computer or who kills time at the office with
computer mahjong, but studies conducted by the ESA and others estimate that
roughly half of all Americans play computer and video games. According to a
study released in May by the ESA, the average American gamer is 33 years
old. A full quarter of gamers are over 50, while only 31 percent are younger
than 18. Playing video games is still a predominantly male pastime, but
almost 40 percent of gamers are women; more adult women play video games
than do boys 17 and under.
Those who assume that video-game players are a
bloodthirsty lot might be surprised to learn that of last year’s 10
best-selling games for the PlayStation and Xbox consoles, not one was a
shoot-’em-up. Six of the most popular games were sports titles—including
Madden NFL, a cultural juggernaut among athletes and young men—and the other
four were Star Wars games. The bestselling PC game last year was World of
Warcraft, a multiplayer swords-and-sorcery game that millions of subscribers
pay a monthly fee to play. World of Warcraft is the latest and most popular
in the genre of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, commonly
called “virtual worlds.” In these games, thousands of players can interact
with each other by connecting simultaneously over the Internet. (There’s a
debate among specialists whether some of these worlds, such as Second Life,
which offers its “residents” no competitions or quests, even qualify as
games.)
Despite their popularity, video games remain, in
the opinion of many (particularly those who don’t play them), brainless or,
worse, brain-destroying candy. But for as long as critics have decried video
games as the latest permutation in a long line of nefarious, dehumanizing
technologies, others have offered a competing, more optimistic vision of
their role in shaping American society. Opposite the rabbi on that MacNeil/Lehrer
broadcast a quarter-century ago was Paul Trachtman, an editor for
Smithsonian magazine, who argued that video games provide a form of mental
exercise. Ignore the dubious content, the “surface or the imagery or the
story line,” he suggested, and you will see that games teach not merely how
best to go about “zapping a ship or a monster.” Underneath the juvenilia is
“a test of your facility for understanding the logic design that the
programmer wrote into the game.” Games, in short, are teachers. And
electronic games are uniquely suited to training individuals how to navigate
our modern information society.
As the gaming generation has matured, it has
advanced this idea with increasing vigor. Last year, Steven Johnson
published Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is
Actually Making Us Smarter, which included a brief for an idea that has been
gaining currency among academics and game developers: All video games, even
the ones that allow you to kill prostitutes, are a form of education, or at
least edutainment. Games can do more than make you a better soldier, or
improve your hand-eye coordination or your spatial orientation skills. They
can make you more intelligent.
On one level, this argument isn’t very surprising.
Games of all kinds are a part of almost every human society, and they have
long been used to inculcate the next generation with desirable virtues and
skills. We enroll our kids in Little League not only so they will have a
good time, but also to teach them about sportsmanship, teamwork, and the
importance of practice and hard work. The Dutch historian Johan Huizenga
argued in Homo Ludens, his 1938 ur-text of game studies, that the concept of
“play” should be considered a “third function” for humanity, one that is
“just as important as reasoning and making.”
In the case of video games, even their critics
acknowledge that they are instructing our children. The critics just don’t
like the form and the sometimes violent and sexually explicit content of the
instruction, which they believe teaches children aggressive behaviors. Yet
if such games are nothing more than “murder simulators,” as one critic has
called them, why is it—as gaming enthusiasts never tire of pointing out—that
the murder rate has declined in recent years, when there are more video
games, and more violent ones, than ever? Why do IQ scores continue their
slight but perceptible rise if an entire generation of children, the oldest
of whom are now in their thirties—a cohort to which I belong—stunted its
development with electronic pap? The important thing to find out about video
games isn’t whether they are teachers. “The question is,” as game designer
Raph Koster writes in A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2004), “what do they
teach?”
The generally uncredited father of video games was
William A. Higinbotham, who, while working as a government physicist,
invented a game of electronic Ping-Pong and displayed it during a visitors’
day for the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in October 1958.
By the next year, the game had been dismantled because its computer and
oscilloscope components were needed for other jobs. Higinbotham’s game might
have been forgotten—except by readers of the Brookhaven Bulletin, which
published a 1981 story speculating that he had invented the first video
game—were it not for the fact that one of the lab’s visitors that day was
high school student David Ahl, who would write the 1978 book Basic Computer
Games and become the editor of Creative Computing. From the pages of this
magazine for computer hobbyists, Ahl proclaimed Higinbotham the grandfather
of the phenomenon in 1982.
The more influential and more commonly acknowledged
grandfather was Steve Russell. As a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
student in 1961, Russell created a rocket-ship duel called Spacewar! that
could be played on one of MIT’s handful of computers, the PDP-1. Then, in
the same way that Microsoft packages its Windows operating system with
solitaire and other games, Digital Equipment Corporation, the manufacturer
of the PDP-1, began shipping it with the game preloaded in memory,
influencing computer science students around the country.
In 1972, Magnavox introduced Odyssey, which, like
Higinbotham’s game, was an adaptation of Ping-Pong (for whatever reason,
table tennis was the game of choice for early video-game creators) that was
the first home console for video gaming. The next 30 years saw the
introduction of Atari, Nintendo, Sony’s PlayStation, and Microsoft’s Xbox,
not to mention the many games designed for the growing numbers of personal
computers. Higinbotham’s black-and-white blips have, over the past
half-century, morphed into sophisticated displays of computer animation that
increasingly resemble films, with original scripts, music, and
often-breathtaking visual beauty. The King Kong video game released last
year to coincide with Peter Jackson’s film remake featured an arresting
parade of apatosauruses marching through a valley on Kong’s home of Skull
Island. The sequence was so gorgeous that I set down my controller and just
marveled at it for a while.
As was true of games before the digital age,
there’s a remarkable array of video games. Chess and bowling aren’t very
similar, but we intuitively understand that both are games, if different
species of the genus. Likewise, video games encompass everything from simple
online puzzles to simulated football games and professional wrestling
matches to the “God game,” in which the player adopts an omniscient view to
influence the development of entire societies. In The Sims, the best-selling
PC game of all time, players control the lives of individual humans as they
go about their mundane lives. (It may sound unappealing, but The Sims comes
from a long tradition. It is, in effect, another way to play house.) New
genres frequently emerge. A “music” genre has arisen in response to the
popularity of Dance Dance Revolution, a game in which players must move
their feet in time to music on different areas of a dance pad. It’s
basically a fast-moving, musical, single-player version of Twister.
Exactly what is new about video games, other than
their electronic nature, can be difficult to pin down. In the 21st century,
almost all children’s toys have an electronic component, but that doesn’t
make them all video games. In The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001),
game journalist Steven Kent cites pinball as a mechanical ancestor of
today’s digital games. Pinball created a panic in some quarters—no pun
intended—as a new and dangerous influence on society. Foreshadowing the
antics of today’s antigaming politicians was New York mayor Fiorello La
Guardia, who smashed pinball machines with a sledgehammer and banned them
from his city in the 1930s, a prohibition that was not lifted until the
1970s. (To be fair to La Guardia, governments have long perceived societal
threats from new games. In the 1400s Scotland banned golf, now its proud
national pastime, because too many young men were neglecting archery to
practice their swings.)
Another game that Kennesaw State University uses in
the EMBA program is called Income/Outcome. More information can be found at
http://www.income-outcome.com/ . One class day is
devoted to playing the game during the opening residency. The game is well
suited for getting a group of students to work together and to learn some
accounting and finance.
We are evaluating the simulation for use in the
ASEBUSS EMBA program.
Rodney G. Alsup, D.B.A., CPA Professor of
Accounting
Director of International Programs
ASEBUSS The Romanian-American Postgraduate School of Business Foundation
The Institute for Business Administration from Bucharest Calea Grivitei
8-10, Sector 1 010731
Bucharest, Romania Phone: +40 (031) 224 90 42,
Rodney@asebuss.ro www.asebuss.ro
131 Edgewood Drive Durham, NC 27713 +1 (404) 406 6510
Education Technology: Play-Doh™ Economics The Play Dough curriculum strives to provide financial
and economic literacy for students and teachers, helping them develop the real
life skills needed to be successful savers, investors, consumers, and workers in
a global economy. “Play Dough Economics is the best single economic education
curriculum I have used during my career,” states Dr. John Hall, an Associate
Professor at Missouri State University. “It is comprehensive, teacher friendly,
activity-oriented, highly motivating, and fun! The explanations of economic
concepts are excellent and it is cost effective. Even though it was written for
K-8 students, I have found Play Dough Economics to be very valuable beyond the
8th grade. I have used it in my college classes and worked with many high school
teachers who use it with their students. Whenever and wherever I use Play dough
Economics it is a hit.”
"Play-Doh™ Economics," AccountingWeb, May 16, 2006 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101908
Mixed reviews are given to video games used to supplement academic
courses. The consensus for potential is still there, but lack of development funds
for education-intended games. We really can't judge it these things at the
college level until better quality stuff comes along for education rather than
training.
Sherry Mills and Cathleen Burns won the American Accounting
Associations Innovation in Accounting Education Award by using a Lego project to
teach cost accounting ---
http://aaahq.org/awards/awrd6win.htm
Sherry and I have been teaching using Legos now for 15 years. We have
done a number of presentations at teaching conferences over the years.
Please see this article: "Bringing the Factory to the Classroom" by Cathleen
S. Burns and Sherry K. Mills Journal of Accountancy, January 1997,
pp. 56-60 ---
I was speaking with a
colleague (and former student of Jay Forrester of Systems Dynamics and
"magnetic core" fame at MIT). He showed me a fascinating game that
is being used in hundreds of business schools (including the Sloan School at
MIT) all over the world.
It is affectionately
called the "Beer Game". In the OR/MS Today magazine in 1992 there
was even an article on the game.
I was wondering if
any one is using the game (specially in managerial accounting), and if an
accounting adaptation of the game has been worked out by any one.
If it is an in-class course, I have the students form
groups and construct a roller coaster out of paper, glue, etc. I use different
colored and weighted paper on which I have copied the squares of graph paper.
The students are responsible to track "R & D" time, construction
labor time, and both direct and indirect material costs. The roller coaster
must work work by sliding a coin down the track. The student is responsible
for developing the sales price based on a predetermined mark-up rate.
Later in the course I use the same activity to have
the students develop how many riders and at what entrance price to make the
project viable.
It is about a six hour activity, but the students
seem to like it and have a very good time doing it. If it would be useful I
will send my directions sheet.
I use the "Management Accounting
Simulation" (
http://www.microbuspub.com
). I have used it for several years. The students take over management of a
troubled company that manufactures a single product and must make financial,
production, and marketing decisions.
EDUCAUSE is making available online, at no cost,
THE INTERNET AND THE UNIVERSITY: FORUM 2004. The book is a collection of
papers from the Forum's 2004 Aspen Symposium. The papers cover three areas:
technology and globalization, technology and scholarship, and technology and
the brain. The book is available in PDF format at
http://www.educause.edu/apps/forum/iuf04.asp .
The Forum on the Internet and the University "seeks
to understand how the Internet and new learning media can improve the
quality and condition of learning, as well as the opportunities and risks
created by rapid technological innovation and economic change."
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission
is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of
information technology. The current membership comprises more than 1,900
colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200
corporations, with 15,000 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder,
CO, and Washington, DC. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at http://www.educause.edu/.
In August the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
at Wabash College launched the Academic Commons -- a website offering "a
forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in
liberal arts education." In addition to publishing essays and reviews and
showcasing innovative projects, the site also offers the Developer's Kit, an
area for sharing project descriptions and pieces of code, and LoLa Exchange,
which shares high-quality learning objects. The Academic Commons is
available at
http://www.academiccommons.org/ .
The mission of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal
Arts at Wabash College is "to explore, test, and promote liberal arts
education . . . [and] to ensure that the nature and value of liberal arts
education is widely understood and to reestablish the central place of the
liberal arts in higher education."
The July 2005 issue of CIT Infobits presented a
roundup of articles on computer games as learning tools ("Games Children
Play,"
http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul05.html#4 ).
For more on this topic, see the special issue of INNOVATE (vol. 1, issue 6,
August/September 2005) which is devoted to the "role of video game
technology in current and future educational settings." Papers include:
"What Would a State of the Art Instructional Video
Game Look Like?" by J. P. Gee, Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Changing the Game: What Happens When Video Games
Enter the Classroom?" by Kurt Squire, Assistant Professor of Educational
Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Game-Informed Learning: Applying Computer Game
Processes to Higher Education" by Michael Begg, David Dewhurst, and Hamish
Macleod, University of Edinburgh
Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly,
peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of
Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal
focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance
educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings.
Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends,
and participate in open forums. For more information, contact James L.
Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate;
email: innovate@nova.edu ; Web:
http://www.innovateonline.info/ .
The Education Arcade
It’s early afternoon on a Sunday at Boston’s Museum of Science. About a
dozen young students are huddled in teams, peering at Pocket PCs, their parents
listening nearby. There’s a palpable sense of urgency among the team members;
everyone’s shouting at once. One self-assured fifth grader steps in and takes
charge of her group. She has figured out what to do with the technology and
begins organizing her troop into attack formation. These boisterous students are
playing Hi-Tech Who Done It!, part of an MIT research project called the
Education Arcade that aims to make computer and video games a valuable component
of teaching.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/atwood0604.asp?trk=nl
Just a couple of years ago, every major game company was developing a
massively multiplayer online game, based on the attractive business premise.
But after many disappointments in recent months, the industry is realizing
these games can become tar pits.
Electronic Arts' decision to shut down development of
Ultima X: Odyssey -- the sequel to its long-running online game Ultima
Online -- may force the game industry to re-examine what it takes to be
a successful developer of massively multiplayer online games.
Electronic Arts joins a growing list of companies --
Cyan Worlds, Games Workshop, There Inc. -- that invested millions of dollars
in online games, only to see disappointing sales or unfinished projects. But
what's surprising about EA's setback is that it is the world's biggest
video-game software company, with plenty of cash, talent, marketing muscle and
patience to develop a franchise. Despite that, it pulled the plug on
UXO.
What's more, over the past few years EA has pulled
the plug, or announced plans to pull the plug, on a string of MMO games: Ultima
Online II, Motor City Online, an online Harry Potter
adventure game and Earth & Beyond. Most surprising of all, The
Sims Online -- an online version of the biggest video-game franchise in
history -- has been a disappointment for the company, by most accounts.
MMO games are notoriously hard to develop, much
harder than traditional shrink-wrapped, single-player video games. Most MMOs
create huge online worlds where thousands of players, each sitting in their
homes, interact with each other -- exploring, trading and pillaging. The
business premise to game companies is enticing: Players have to buy a copy of
the game for about $50 at a retailer, then pay an additional monthly charge of
$10 to $15 to gain entrance to the virtual world. But the companies have to
pay a lot of attention to keep the online environments compelling and the
players interested. And things that single-player games don't need as much --
like customer support and service -- are key to keeping subscriptions active.
"Maybe what we're learning is that (a
traditional game company) is not going to be set up perfectly to run big
online games," said Ed Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana
University, and a moderator of
Terra
Nova, a blog that discusses virtual worlds.
In contrast to EA, Sony set up an independent
division, Sony Online Entertainment, to
focus exclusively on virtual worlds, Castronova pointed out. The result: Sony
Online has had huge success with its EverQuest franchise, with at
least half a million subscribers, and its Star Wars Galaxies
world has had more than 300,000 players.
Of course, EA is not the only company that has had
problems keeping MMOs afloat. For example, Games Workshop recently announced
plans to close down
Warhammer
Online, as did Cyan Worlds
with
Uru Live. And There Inc. is on the verge of abandoning its
metaverse
in favor of becoming a platform builder, some speculate.
For its part, EA disputes the notion that it has had
problems developing MMOs. Instead, it said the UXO move was a
strategic realignment of resources.
An elaborate game created last year by the McCombs School of Business at the
University of Texas at Austin teaches students about handling the delicate
balance of business and ethics, and the sometimes high moral price of too much
cost cutting.
For one business-school class, a simulation game provided
a painful lesson in the price of obsessive cost cutting
For the young executives at
computer-maker InfoMaster Ltd., the company budget was on the line. Terrorism
threats were swirling in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the company had to either
shut down production there for one quarter and harden security or keep
churning out hot-selling products.
The executives opted for production
over protection. Soon after, a bomb exploded at the plant.
"I just killed 350 people,"
said a dazed David Marye, InfoMaster's 25-year-old chief ethics officer.
"I made a bad call, and people died. It's going to be hard to sleep
tonight."
Luckily for Mr. Marye, both InfoMaster
and the terrorist attack were fictitious, part of an elaborate game created
last year by the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business.
Three made-up student-run companies competed in the cutthroat
computer-hardware industry, all trying to maximize revenue, keep costs down
and beat back competitors. But the prizes -- $11,000 and the chance to perform
in front of a high-level, real-world executive panel -- were real.
While the Sim City for the business
world appeared to be about the bottom line, the real intent was to teach
students about handling the delicate balance of business and ethics, and the
sometimes high moral price of too much cost cutting. The results were eye
opening -- and painful. Idealistic students, who started the game preaching
virtue, succumbed to the everyday challenges of making their numbers and
whipping the competition. Buying cheaper components or hiring cheaper workers
would allow more production. Not spending resources on training or quality
control would let them get new products to markets faster, but there might be
a price to pay down the road. The game proved so realistic that some students
were stunned that, under pressure, they readily chose corner-cutting paths
they had vowed never to take.
The Texas program was created after the
WorldCom scandal broke, as officials looked for ways to teach better behavior
to M.B.A. students. The academics knew that while students talk like angels in
ethics classes, they behave avariciously in finance classes. "Ethical
issues aren't being addressed in financing, marketing and accounting
classes," says Steve Salbu, the associate dean for graduate programs and
founder of the school's business-ethics program. "We needed to try to do
something we think might be effective."
Applying Pressure
Steven Tomlinson, a finance lecturer
who has a background in theater, pushed to put students under pressure and
throw choices at them. He hired Allen Varney, an Austin-based designer of
video and board games, and consulted with a soap-opera scriptwriter and
corporate executives. Scripts were written, rules devised and software created
to track decisions.
The result was the Executive Challenge,
a three-day game played late last year, where teams of about two dozen
students were divided into three companies, with each given a limited amount
of production capacity and a set of workers with varying skills. A company
could borrow money, and it could spend cash to increase capacity or add
products or workers. But it also had to take care of existing projects and
decide whether to spend precious resources on corporate-culture projects such
as diversity training and quality programs.
A three-month financial quarter
typically lasted 30 minutes, forcing companies to communicate and make
decisions in rapid-fire fashion. The game offered both individual and
corporate shortcuts and lures. Early on, players might get away with ignoring
problems and postponing expenses, but then the problems grew like weeds. A
team could opt for lower quality for a quarter or two, only to discover later
that its computer batteries exploded -- a scenario taken from Dell Inc.'s
history.
"The game is all about
temptation," Mr. Varney says. "Business-school students, as a breed,
are overconfident, and the game really plays to that."
Going in, students suspected that the
game would likely test their ethics since they had just come off a week of
traditional ethics training. On the first day, all three made-up companies --
InfoMaster, General Data Machines Inc. and Starr Computing Co. -- spent money
on corporate-culture initiatives at the expense of new products, surprising
Mr. Varney, the game designer. "All those goody-goodies are doing the
corporate-culture initiatives," he said, "which makes no sense in
dollars and cents."
Textbook Traits
Indeed, the teams created their
companies around textbook traits like collaborative decision making and
promises to share prize money equally. Fearful of repercussions, executives
decided to pay themselves little if any salary. "They were remarkably
socialistic," Dr. Tomlinson says.
InfoMaster even created an ethics team
with leaders from different departments, headed by Mr. Marye, who worked as an
analyst for Houston-based Enron Corp. before seeking a master's degree.
Yet as the revenue race tightened,
behavior changed. On the second day, each company learned that it had hired an
employee who had stolen software from a competitor and that the stolen code
was now used in the company's highest-margin products. General Data and Starr
both opted to turn themselves in and try to negotiate licenses. InfoMaster,
despite its ethics team, took the path of least resistance, hoping not to get
caught.
General Data proved consistent with its
choices -- for the most part. Faced with a toxic-waste issue at a river near
one of its plants, it opted to dredge the river and make the issue public,
even though it didn't believe it was responsible for the pollution. But doing
the right thing came at a price. The company was in last place in revenue
after the first day.
"Ben and Jerry would not do well
at this game," Mr. Varney says, referring to the socially concerned
ice-cream entrepreneurs.
Much as the game's creators expected,
student executives began routinely opting for less-expensive options by the
end of the second day. General Data was hit with a sexual-harassment complaint
against its vice president of sales, and it chose to postpone action while
investigating the allegation. At the time, the company was short of cash and
was trying to aggressively ramp up product development to catch competitors.
Besides, a previous complaint had turned out to be unfounded.
This time, though, the investigation
discovered that the complaint was credible, and major. "We thought we did
the right thing," said Jay Manickam, a former consultant for Andersen and
Deloitte & Touche who was General Data's chief executive. "But this
is apparently going to be a hit."
Continued in the article
Weird (But Highly
Successful) Physics Education (Edutainment?) Site
Britney Spears can
turn the most arcane science into a massive hit, an Essex university physicist
has discovered.
Since
postgraduate Carl Hepburn introduced details of the teenage singer to his
semiconductor physics website,
it has received more than two million hits.
The site, which
includes a "lip glossary" of semiconductor physics, declares:
"It is a little known fact that Ms Spears is an expert in semiconductor
physics.
"Not content
with just singing, in the following pages she will guide you in the
fundamentals of the vital laser components that have made it possible to hear
her super music in a digital format."
The mix of celebrity
shots and hairy equations marks "a melding of physique and physics"
says the journal Scientific American. "The site started as a way for me
to understand what I thought was important about semiconductors," Mr
Hepburn says in Physics World.
He realised that if
his website address included the words Britney Spears, it would produce many
hits from fans trying to find out more about her.
"I knew most
people who were looking for information on Britney would not appreciate a site
solely dedicated to semiconductor physics. So I added picture galleries. It
was not difficult to imagine the two coming together in a Pythonesque
manner."
On the Web site
Spears, who has published a book with her mother, covers the Basics of
Semiconductors, Finite Barrier Quantum Well Radiative and Non-radiative
Transitions, Edge-emitting Lasers, and Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting
Lasers.
"It is very
funny and very cheeky. I can't think of a better way to attract people to
physics," said a spokesman for her record label.
How
About a Game
of Bingo for Ethics Fun and Learning?
Using Games to Enhance Student Understanding of Professional and Ethical
Responsibilities,” by M. Elizabeth Haywood, Dorothy A. McMullen, and Donald E.
Wygal, Issues in Accounting Education, February 2004, pp. 85-100 ---
http://aaahq.org/ic/browse.htm
ABSTRACT: Given recent corporate scandals, the
credibility of the accounting profession has been called into question. In
order to restore public trust, accounting educators need to devise ways to
convey the importance of ethics in our profession to our students. An
alternative approach to using a traditional lecture to teach ethics is to use
games. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a game strategy to teach
ethics and professionalism to students. Using games makes learning more fun
and also helps to maintain student interest and involvement in the learning
process. Student feedback has been positive and encouraging on the use of this
format to teach ethics and professional responsibilities.
When recruiting teens for college and/or
particular careers such as accounting, here's one of the competitive tools that
we have not successfully exploited.This
type of thing is also being successfully employed in recruiting and training,
but does not seem to have widespread success in educational institutions.
Question
What has become the most successful and most controversial recruiting tool of
the U.S. Army?
Answer
I viewed the
answer to the first question of television.
I watched this while eating breakfast on March 31.
CBS News on March 30, 2004 proclaimed that an Internet game has become a major
recruitment tool. The game that is especially successful is called America's
Army. The official version of this game is at
http://www.americasarmy.com/
The soldiers are
real. But they're also actors, staging scenes for the Army's latest war game.
It's a video game
created by the U.S. Army to win over the hearts and minds of American
teenagers.
And, as CBS News
Correspondent Jim Acosta reports, judging by these faces, mission
accomplished.
Game player Rob
Calcagni believes the game is going to work on a lot of guys his age.
"Definitely,
because it's a fun game," says Calcagni.
The game,
"America's Army" has become such an overnight hit, the Army staged a
tournament in New York. Recruiters were waiting at the door.
"This is a
fantastic recruiting opportunity," says Lt. Col. John Gillette. "We
would like to sign up as many as possible. We are looking for five to
ten."
One of these teens
enlisted after playing the game, the other two are thinking about it, which is
exactly what the creator of "America's Army" had in mind.
"We look at all
the things that the Army is doing that is under the control of the Army that
captures people's attention and the game is number one," says the game's
creator Col. Casey Wardynksi.
America's Army has
surpassed even the Pentagon's expectations. It's now the number one online
action game in the country. The Army hasn't seen a recruiting tool this
effective since "Be all that you can be."
But psychology
professor Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan, a critic of violent
video games, complains "America's Army" isn't real enough.
"War is not a
game," he says.
"The video game
does provide a sanitized view of violence," says Bushman. "For
example, when you shoot someone or when you are shot you see a puff of blood;
you don't see anyone suffering or writhing in pain."
"Kids aren't
stupid," says Wardynski. "They know if they come into the army there
is a reason that we have rifles and tanks and all that stuff."
The players insist
they understand the meaning of "game over."
"If you are
going to join the Army, you know the risk," says one gamer, Bart
Koscinski. "In this game you might die like eight times in like 15
minutes. In real life people know what they are getting themselves into."
New editions of
"America's Army" are now being developed for home video game systems
-- a move that will deploy even more young cyber-soldiers to the military's
virtual battlefield.
Welcome to the web's
largest resource of professionally-written articles and news about military
combat simulations and strategy games. Our archives of news and articles span
the golden age of this category of games from January of 1996 to February of
2003.
There
have been many changes in the past twenty years in the implementation of
simulation and computer games, including game
development, usage in fixed locations, and event-based experiences both in the
civilian and commercial spaces. This paper
examines each of these three areas individually in order to predict their
likely future developments. It then evaluates the
dynamic potential for the military that lies at the crossroads where these
trends are merging, and relates their interaction
to the growing popularity of the online computer gaming experience.
Although
far from a complete study, this paper aims to add to the discussion of these
industry trends.
The
paper proposes that there is a strong benefit to the military for recruiting,
pre-training, and training of active duty members
through the combination of :
·
Choosing, building, or modifying effective combat simulation games for
military use.
·
Operating computer game competitions with significant military presence –
similar to the air shows of
today
– for event-based and location-based computer gaming competitions
·
Using the combined venues of (a) online gaming competitions, (b)
location-based game centers, and (c)
large
scale gaming competitions
·
Operating under the sports model of Leagues (by appropriate military warfare
specialty for each League)
and
further dividing the Leagues into competing Divisions.
By
reaching out in this way to a wider spectrum of possibilities for including
the cyber entertainment culture, the military
will, we predict, experience benefits in recruiting, pre-training, and
training, making further use of the compelling
attraction of computer games that has been demonstrated by games’ recent
rise to a predominant role for military age
people in our society.
Computer games—which
entertain millions of U.S. teenagers—are beginning to breathe fresh life
into military recruiting and training.
Earlier this year,
for example, the U.S. Army launched a new computer game—called “America’s
Army”—over the Internet.
Aimed at encouraging
teens to join up, it enables players to experience both basic and advanced
training, join a combat unit and fight in a variety of environments, including
arctic Alaska, upstate New York and a third-world city.
Players can fire on a
rifle range, run an obstacle course, attend sniper school, train in urban
combat and parachute from a C-17 transport.
The game accurately
depicts military equipment, training and the real-life movements of soldiers,
said Lt. Col. George Juntiff, Army liaison officer to the Modeling, Virtual
Environment and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, Calif., which developed the game.
“America’s Army”
features sound effects by moviemaker George Lucas’ company, SkyWalker, and
Dolby Digital Sound. In addition, sound effects from the movie “Terminator
II” were provided at no charge.
The game is getting
considerable attention. During its first two weeks, more than a million
Americans downloaded the game for free, Juntiff said.
“That’s an
enormous number,” he said. “It’s the largest release in computer game
history.”
Even more people are
likely to acquire the game starting in October, Juntiff said, when the Army
was scheduled to begin distributing it as a free CD set to a target audience
over the age of 13. The developers plan to upgrade the game every month to
attract new players, he said.
Actually, “America’s
Army” consists of two separate games—”Soldiers,” a role-player based
on Army values, and “Operations,” a shooter game that takes players on
combat missions. It was developed and distributed at a cost of $7.5 million by
MOVES and the U.S. Military Academy’s Office of Economic and Manpower
Analysis at West Point, N.Y.
The computer game is
a “very cost-effective” way to reach potential recruits, especially
compared to television advertising, said Maj. Chris Chambers, OEMA deputy
director. “It is also a more detailed means of showing the American people
what we do.”
The game also puts
the Army in a positive light, said Juntiff. “It lets people know the Army is
high-tech. It’s not what they see in the movies.”
The game, in
addition, raises ethical issues, Juntiff said. “The game sets rules of
engagement, and if you violate those rules, you pay the price.”
Once they enlist,
recruits, these days, can expect to encounter computer games throughout their
military training, said Michael R. Macedonia, senior scientist for the U.S.
Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), headquartered
in Orlando, Fla. Even well-known commercial games have been adapted for
military use, he told National Defense.
That process began,
he said, in the 1980s, when the Army modified the Atari tank battle game, “Battlezone,”
to let it have gunner controls similar to those of a Bradley Infantry Fighting
Vehicle. The idea, he explained, was to enhance the eye-hand coordination of
armor crews.
Then, in the
mid-1990s, the Marines edited the commercial version of the three-dimensional
game “Doom” to create “Marine Doom,” to help train four-man fire teams
in urban combat.
More recently, the
Army’s Soldier Systems Center, in Natick, Mass., has commissioned the games
developer, Novalogic, of Calabasas, Calif., to modify the popular Delta Force
2 game to help familiarize soldiers with the service’s experimental Land
Warrior system.
The Land Warrior
system includes a self-
contained computer
and radio unit, a global-positioning receiver, a helmet-mounted liquid-
character display and
a modular weapons array that adds thermal and video sights and laser ranging
to the standard M-4 carbine and M-16A2 rifle.
A customized version
of another computer game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, is issued to all Navy
student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training
Courses at 65 colleges around the nation. The office of the Chief of Naval
Education and Training has installed the software at the Naval Air Station in
Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.
LB&B Associates,
of Columbia, Md., has modified the game engine from author Tom Clancy’s
best-selling computer game, “Rainbow Six Rogue Spear,” to train U.S.
combat troops in urban warfare. The game—marketed by Ubi Soft Entertainment,
of San Francisco—is based one of Clancy’s military novels.
The new version—which
is still being developed—will not be used to improve marksmanship, but to
sharpen decision-making skills at the small-unit level, said Michael S.
Bradshaw, LB&B’s Systems Division manager. LB&B has completed a
proof-of-concept version, which “worked brilliantly,” Bradshaw said. The
project, he explained, has been turned over to the Institute for Creative
Technology for final development.
Test Drive Running a University Virtual Learning Games/Simulations for Understanding the Complexities of
Managing a University
This is a very serious virtual learning project funded, in large measure, by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on
April 15-16 the Education Arcade, The Comparative Media Studies Program at
M.I.T., The Virtual U Project, and The Serious Games Initiative will host a
two-day workshop at M.I.T titled “Game Simulations for Educational
Leadership & Visualization: Virtual U and Beyond”. This event is designed to
look at the past, present, and future of games about education and
educational life.
Virtual U is designed to
foster better understanding of management practices in American colleges and
universities.
It provides students, teachers, and parents the unique opportunity to step
into the decision-making shoes of a university president. Players are
responsible for establishing and monitoring all the major components of an
institution, including everything from faculty salaries to campus parking.
As players move around the Virtual U campus, they gather information needed
to make decisions such as decreasing faculty teaching time or increasing
athletic scholarships. However, as in a real college or university, the
complexity and potential effects of each decision must be carefully
considered. And the Virtual U Board of Trustees is monitoring every move.
Virtual U models the attitudes and behaviors of the academic community in
five major areas of higher education management:
Spending and income decisions such as
operating budget, new hires, incoming donations, and management
of the endowment;
Faculty, course, and student
scheduling issues;
Admissions standards, university
prestige, and student enrollment;
Student housing, classrooms, and all
other facilities; and
Performance indicators.
Virtual U players select an institution type and
strive for continuous improvement by setting, monitoring, and modifying a
variety of institutional parameters and policies. Players are challenged to
manage and improve their institution of higher education through techniques
such as resource allocation, minority enrollment policies, and policies for
promoting faculty, among others. Players watch the results of their
decisions unfold in real- time. A letter of review from Virtual U's board is
sent every "year," informing players of their progress.
Jensen Comment
Click on "Team" to be impressed with credentials of the development team,
including William F. Massey, the long-time President of Stanford University.
Virtual University may be downloaded free and/or ordered in a box set of
disks.
One potential application is in not-for-profit accountancy classes where
students can learn how to prepare and analyze financial reports for decision
making.
There are all sorts of applications for advanced managerial accountancy
classes as well.
"Virtual Reality That's Real," by Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek
Newsletter, November 9, 2005
Mention virtual reality, and people often think of video games. But
the folks at
Second Life
are giving a new spin to the three-dimensional worlds of make
believe.
Part fantasy and part civics experiment,
Second Life sells "islands" in their online creation, where local
governments and even the Department of Homeland Security have bought
real estate to test ideas and introduce projects. People can also
join in by opening up free accounts to gain access to a very
different experience.
On today's InternetWeek, freelancer
Christopher Heun
describes how people are using Second Life
to build virtual malls and casinos, as well as to help teenagers and
people with physical disorders.
This group is certainly on the cutting
edge, and some analysts are skeptical that a business model
can evolve from what some see as a sophisticated 3-D chat
room. They may be right, but I believe the concept could
greatly advance the Web as a tool for collaboration.
Also on InternetWeek, nervous
consumers using anti-spyware to avoid having their Web
surfing tracked by marketers
are reducing the accuracy of
customer data gathered by online retailers.
In a wide-ranging
interview, Slashdot co-founder
discusses the site's impact on online publishing, plans for
the future, and the benefits of "slashdotting."
In our work with you,
through these articles, professional development courses and in-person
trainings, we spend a lot of time talking about instructor presence and
immediacy. These are the things we do as instructors to personalize
ourselves to our students, help us connect with our students, and create a
welcoming learning community for our students.
In a traditional classroom,
one way that faculty presence is achieved is through the use of humor. Based
on student surveys, humor use is consistently ranked as one of the top five
characteristics of effective teachers. Humor use in the classroom
contributes to a supportive learning environment, and enhances student
attention, recall of information, pleasure in learning, and interest in the
subject matter (James). Finally, humor use on exams can help alleviate
student tension and can function as a stress-reducing tool (Berk).
However, while there is a
wide body of research identifying the benefits of using humor in the
traditional classroom, the use of humor in online classes is largely ignored
as a pedagogical tool. Many online instructors do not go out of their way to
find and use humorous material in their courses. Why is that? A primary
reason is that it takes extra planning and effort to make humor happen in
online classes (James). Instructors who are pressed for time (and who
isn’t?) find that it takes more time to be humorous than it takes to just
get the job done. Additionally, online classes do not easily lend themselves
to the auditory or spontaneous aspects of humor that are available in a
traditional classroom setting. For these reasons, humor use in online
classes is a largely untapped resource for building a positive learning
community.
A recently published study
examined the intentional use of humor in two otherwise identical sections of
an online psychology class (LoSchaivo and Shatz). Material was presented
traditionally in one section (without consciously adding humor), while the
other section presented the same material with the following humorous
additions: two or three content-relevant jokes to each lecture, cartoons to
each quiz, and witty remarks to all electronic announcements. Statistical
comparisons at the end of the semester showed no difference in final grades
between sections, but did show that students in the “humor-enhanced” section
earned more participation points by more frequent participation in online
discussions. Students in the “humor-enhanced” section used the interactive
class features more (including email and discussions), and were more likely
to reply to other student’s questions in the discussions.
Resources for finding and
using humor
So, do you want to use humor
to increase your instructor presence in your class and help create a
positive learning environment? If so, help is on the way. There are several
good resources for crafting humor for online classes. Shatz and LoSchaivo
provide detailed information on locating or creating humor for online
classes, as well as guidelines for incorporating humor into online lectures
and exams. The authors suggest that visual humor (such as cartoons,
illustrations and photographs) and funny quotes, jokes, examples, word-play,
forms of exaggeration, top-10 lists, and so on, can easily be incorporated
into online courses. Shatz and LoSchaivo also recommend doing an internet
search for your topic and “humor” to find humorous material specific to your
discipline. Berk gives guidelines for print and non-print humor forms that
can be incorporated into online classes, and also gives numerous examples
and web resources. His suggested print forms include humorous course
components, course disclaimers, announcements, warnings or cautions, lists,
word derivations, foreign word expressions, acronyms and emoticons.
Non-print forms include visual and sound effects.
If you want to get students
involved in your search for new humorous material, Shatz and LoSchaivo
suggest an activity called “The Contributing Editor” where students locate
course-related humor and then write a report (extra-credit or for-credit)
detailing the source of the material and how the topic relates to the
course. Alternately, this material could be shared in a discussion area,
such as the Class Lounge. Shatz and LoSchaivo stress the importance of
giving guidelines for the student so they know what humor is appropriate for
the assignment.
Cautions for online humor
use
To go along with these
suggested ways that humorous material can be located or developed, Shatz and
LoSchaivo also provide some guidelines and cautions regarding the use of
humor in online classes (see also Shatz, and LoSchaivo and Shatz). When
selecting humorous material to include in your online classes, you will want
to keep the following in mind:
Humor must have an
educational or instructional objective. The effectiveness of classroom humor
should be gauged by how well it promotes learning and by how it contributes
to the learning community.
Less is more. It is not
necessary to use over-the-top humor since students have low humor
expectations in the classroom (versus, say, at a comedy club). Humor
enhances, but is not a substitute for, the educational material. Going for
big laughs in a classroom setting can distract the students and result in
them remembering the humor and not the material.
Instructors need to know
their audience, and stay away from potentially offensive types of humor.
Students are not acceptable targets for humor, while the instructor is a
potential target since self-depreciating humor humanizes the teacher and
allows their personality to come through. Instructors should be especially
cautious about incorporating “risky” humor in online classes, as the humor
cannot be softened by aspects of delivery (voice, timing, gestures),
instructors have no immediate feedback from students, and (gulp!) the humor
cannot be easily retracted or forgotten because it lingers in the course
shell. I hope that this information has convinced you to think of some ways
to incorporate humorous material into your online classes. The resources
discussed above provide a good place to start with your search for relevant
pedagogical humor, and it is worth some time with your favorite search
engine to find what’s out there for your subject matter. My own search for
humorous material for my discipline had me laughing out loud, and I hope
this material provides me with new ways to connect with students in my own
classes.
I like to intersperse funny
pics of my grandchildren in my online courses. For a pic to illustrate how
messy partnership rules are I use a pic of my four-year-old grandson with
peanut butter all over himself, one sticky finger in his mouth and the other
holding the peanut butter jar, trying to hide under the kitchen table.
In the last module, when the
students are all tired and just want the course to be over, I put music
clips on random self test buttons, like "I feel good," and "you know it
ain't easy."
I use a "water cooler" board
for jokes and cartoons. One thing that works well on the water cooler board
is to post something about what you to do to relieve stress, and ask
students what they do. I get all kinds of posts. It's great to see another
side of students. Another benefit of this board is that students who aren't
into reading a lot of posts know they can safely skip anything posted on the
water cooler board.
On the main board, I post a
"summary of the week," and I include funny exchanges (with names removed)
that students have in their chat sessions that I ask them to post on their
group boards. I also like to pick up a few quotes from the instant messenger
away messages. Those are always fun!
Bottom line, I think humor
is important, but I think the real point is to show some of the human
interaction the students would experience in the classroom.
Example
From a Texas A&M Professor
Providing Distance Education in Mexico
At the first annual meeting of the new
Academy of Business Education last week, I listened to a number of outstanding
presentations. One in particular that I would like to mention to you was
presented by the Head of the Department of Marketing & Management at Texas
A&M University. His name is John Parnell. For two semesters, John has been
delivering an online business strategy course for students at Monterrey Tech (ITESM).
This may evolve into an entire Texas A&M degree program at both Monterrey
and across Mexico in general.
If any of you want a copy of Professor
Parnell's paper, his email address is
john_parnell@tamu-commerce.edu
An excerpt is quoted below:
The course considered
in the present study was structured to utilize three weekend professorial
visits (i.e., Friday evening and Saturday) to campus in one term and four in
another (see exhibits one and two). Weekend visits were typically spaced two
or three weeks apart. In total, approximately fifteen hours was utilized in
each term for delivery of strategic management concepts; the remainder of the
time was devoted to preparation and ultimate presentation of group case
projects. Students were enrolled in the graduate program at the Ciudad de
Mexico campus of Instituto Tecnologico Y De Estudios Superiores De Monterrey (ITESM).
Facilities at the institution, including internet access, were excellent.
Students were allowed
to form their own groups of three to four students. Each group selected a
company from a list of instructor-approved publicly traded American companies
to strategically analyze as its group project. The case analysis was the major
assignment in the course, accounting for 35 percent of the overall grade.
Because of the wealth of information available on the internet and the
potential research difficulties for ITESM students, links to an extensive
array of on-line sources (e.g., Hoover's for financial data, Wall Street
Journal Interactive Edition (WSJIE), Lexis-Nexis, etc.) were provided so that
students could complete all of the case research via the internet.
Students were also
required to participate in on-line class discussions with graduate students
taking a strategic management course at an American institution. In these
discussions, students were free to post views on a variety of topics and
current issues related to strategy formulation, implementation, and the
international environment. Specifically, students were encouraged to comment
on articles from the WSJIE and other sources, and to participate in
discussions begun by others students or the professor.
RESULTS
The two classes
considered in the present study had fifteen and twelve students respectively.
Each student chose to pursue the course under the weekend format in English
instead of taking it with a local professor on a one-night-per-week basis.
There is no indication that students in the course differed from those in
other sections, except that marginal English speakers would not have chosen to
take the course in English.
At the end of each
course, students completed a brief, anonymous survey containing three
questions: · If you had the opportunity to take the course again, would you
choose the same section? (yes/no/maybe) · How would you evaluate the internet
component of the course? (strong/moderate/weak) · How would you evaluate the
weekend structure of the course? (strong/moderate/weak) In addition, students
were allowed to provide specific written comments.
None of the students
stated that they would not take the same section. Twenty-three students (85
percent) stated that they would, while the remaining four (15 percent) chose
the "maybe" response.
The internet
component of the course was evaluated as "strong" by 25 of the 27
students (93 percent), while the other two (7 percent) evaluated it as
"moderate." Twenty of the students (74 percent) evaluated the
weekend structure as "strong," whereas the remaining seven (26
percent) evaluated it as "moderate." Written comments by those in
the latter group suggested that some would have selected different
combinations of dates for the visits to campus.
Student participation
on the bulletin board was commendable, in many cases providing a rich,
international perspective to the topics and issues presented by their American
counterparts. One of the unintended and positive outcomes of the experience
was that the Mexican graduate students were able to learn from those at the
American institution-which included Americans as well as students from several
other countries-and vice versa. These two groups would never have connected
outside of the bulletin board experience.
Project quality was
excellent in most cases. Students were able to secure from the internet more
than enough objective and subjective information to complete their projects.
From a research perspective, the quality of the internet research was vastly
superior to traditional forms of case research, and would be appropriate to
traditional classes as well.
FUTURE RESEARCH AND
PRACTICE
Internet delivery in
the international arena appears to be growing exponentially, but remains in
its nascent stage of development. The use of the internet to address the
tremendous international market opportunity is both logical and promising for
universities and faculty equipped to do so. Several fundamental questions must
be addressed, however.
First, does the host
institution and faculty member possess the technical expertise-including
appropriate support-to utilize the internet for delivery of instruction?
Faculty members must understand the basics of web page creation and/or possess
the university support necessary to post materials, change them as needed, and
address any technical support issues raised by the learners. Delivery of
courses via the web also necessitates that faculty members "buy in"
to a nontraditional model of education, whereby the faculty member becomes the
facilitator instead of the teacher.
Second, to what
extent, if any, should the internet delivery be accompanied by face-to-face
interaction? Is it desirable to require that learners travel to the host
campus or the professor travel to the students? Face-to-face interaction
provides a personal touch not easily secured in an on-line environment.
Practitioners developing programs should consider that at least some personal
contact may be warranted.
Third, should
internet based discussions be synchronous or asynchronous? In other words,
should students be required to "meet" on the internet at certain
times so that class may convene electronically, or should the course be
structured so that students can work when they choose? Under the former case,
the internet can be used to simulate the classroom environment, and students
can exchange ideas or "chat" in real time. Under the latter case,
exchange of ideas is limited to e-mails and the bulletin board. Evidence from
the present study suggests that the bulletin board is an effective as real
time chat, and on-line meetings may not be necessary.
Fourth, how should
students be evaluated? If there are no face-to-face meetings, verifiable
"closed book" examinations may not be possible. Many internet
classes have adopted a "portfolio" approach, where learners submit
projects instead of exams. Others require that each student complete a
proctored final exam.
Finally, how can
outcomes in the internet-based environment be compared to those in the
traditional classroom environment? Critics and accrediting agencies will
desire evidence the former approach is essentially equivalent to the latter.
Proponents may charge that quality in the internet-based environment is
superior. At any rate, educators need to be prepared to assess the outcomes
and address quality comparisons.
Tools for Learning in the Boondocks
"Development Powered by Education: Interactive tools could help to
prepare students in developing countries for the collaborative workplace of the
future," by Matthew Herren, MIT's Technology Review, September 8,
2006 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17421&ch=infotech
African schools teach toward set exams, which
determine who passes and who leaves school. It is a system that does not
foster much creative thought but in its own way ensures certain standards.
Or would, if access to educational materials were equal throughout all
schools.
But it is not. Educational materials are expensive
to print and to supply to remote rural schools. Senegal is typical: school
textbooks cost two to three times what poor families can afford, so only one
in five students receives them.
There is an alternative. Using digital satellite
radio to connect to a content distribution network, students could download
new material--as soon as it becomes available--to small handheld computers
recharged with solar power or crank chargers. Then they could take it home
to read at night, on a backlit screen, even in homes without electricity.
That is the technology my company, EduVision, has been developing for the
last two years.
Not only would such a distribution system get more,
and more current, material to more students, but it would also introduce
students to an important new approach to learning and working. Students who
compete throughout their school years for top ranking will not be prepared
for workplaces where collaboration is becoming far more important. An
electronic environment for group work--a textbook wiki of sorts, in which
students around the world can compare notes and share information--could
teach collaboration at the same time that it teaches academic material
itself.
In the future, students in schools throughout the
developing world will communicate and interact to solve problems and
complete assignments. They may be in the same class or school, or they may
be in different countries. They may never meet in person, but they will form
close connections and learn to work in teams. They will also have access to
vast libraries of content where they can find solutions, answer questions,
and explore the life of the mind.
Matthew Herren is founder and chief technology officer of EduVision,
an e-learning company based in Zürich, Switzerland. He is also one of
our TR35 winners. Here's his TR35
profile.
Mobile learning is the theme
of the current issue of the INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND
DISTANCE LEARNING. Papers include:
"Mobile Distance Learning
with PDAs: Development and Testing of Pedagogical and System Solutions
Supporting Mobile Distance Learners" by Torstein Rekkedal and Aleksander
Dye, Norwegian School of Information Technology
"The Growth of m-Learning
and the Growth of Mobile Computing: Parallel Developments" by Jason G.
Caudill, Grand Canyon University
"Mobile Learning and Student
Retention" by Bharat Inder Fozdar and Lalita S. Kumar, India Gandhi National
Open University
"Instant Messaging for
Creating Interactive and Collaborative m-Learning Environments" by James
Kadirire, Anglia Ruskin University
"m-Learning: Positioning
Educators for a Mobile, Connected Future" by Kristine Peters, Flinders
University
International Review
of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a
free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open
University. For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing
Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672;
email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ;
Web:
http://www.irrodl.org/
.
See also:
"Are You Ready for
Mobile Learning?" By Joseph Rene Corbeil and Maria Elena Valdes-Corbeil,
University of Texas at Brownsville EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY, vol. 30, no. 2, 2007
http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm07/eqm0726.asp
"Frequent use of mobile
devices does not mean that students or instructors are ready for mobile
learning and teaching."
Some years back Professor Sharon Lightner (UC at San Diego) put together a
really interesting online course for students, practitioners, and accounting
standard setters in six different countries where the classes met synchronously.
"An Innovative Online International Accounting Course on Six Campuses Around the
World" ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255light.htm
Need advice on choosing a textbook for an MBA class
on fraud (to be taken mostly by Master of Accounting students).
I am deciding between Albrecht's Fraud Examination
and Hopwood's Forensic Accounting. I also plan to have students read Cynthia
Cooper's book, Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower.
I will be teaching a three-week version of the
course this summer as a study abroad, but also will be converting it into a
16 week semester-long 3 hour course.
Any suggestions would be helpful -
Thank you,
Eileen
November 3, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Eileen,
I'm really not able to give you an opinion on either
choice for a textbook. But before making a decision I always compared the
end-of-chapter material and the solutions manual to accompany that material.
If the publisher did not pay for good end-of-chapter material I always view
the textbook to be a cheap shot. The end-of-chapter material is much harder
to write than the chapter material itself.
I also look for real world cases and illustrations.
Don't forget the wealth of material, some free, at
the site of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners ---
http://www.acfe.com/
I would most certainly consider using some of this material on homework and
examinations.
Instead of a textbook you might use the ACFE online
self-study materials ($79) ---
Click Here
"A Model Curriculum for Education in Fraud and Forensic Accounting,"
by Mary-Jo Kranacher, Bonnie W. Morris, Timothy A. Pearson, and Richard A.
Riley, Jr., Issues in Accounting Education, November 2008. pp. 505-518
(Not Free) ---
Click Here
There are other articles on fraud and forensic accounting in this November
edition of IAE:
Incorporating Forensic Accounting and Litigation Advisory Services Into
the Classroom Lester E. Heitger and Dan L. Heitger, Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 561 (2008) (12 pages)]
West Virginia University: Forensic Accounting and Fraud Investigation (FAFI)
A. Scott Fleming, Timothy A. Pearson, and Richard A. Riley, Jr., Issues
in Accounting Education 23(4), 573 (2008) (8 pages)
The Model Curriculum in Fraud and Forensic Accounting and Economic Crime
Programs at Utica College George E. Curtis, Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 581 (2008) (12 pages)
Forensic Accounting and FAU: An Executive Graduate Program George R.
Young, Issues in Accounting Education 23(4), 593 (2008) (7 pages)
The Saint Xavier University Graduate Program in Financial Fraud
Examination and Management William J. Kresse, Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 601 (2008) (8 pages)
Also see
"Strain, Differential Association, and Coercion: Insights from the Criminology
Literature on Causes of Accountant's Misconduct," by James J. Donegan and
Michele W. Ganon, Accounting and the Public Interest 8(1), 1 (2008) (20
pages)
I have used the following book as text in a
graduate course. It was excellent.
A Guide to Forensic Accounting Investigation,
Thomas Golden, Steven L. Skalak, and Mona M. Clayton. (Wiley, 2006)
Jagdish S. Gangolly Department of Informatics
College of Computing & Information State University of New York at Albany
Harriman Campus, Building 7A, Suite 220 Albany, NY 12222
Phone: 518-956-8251, Fax: 518-956-8247
Epsilen Environment from Purdue University appears to have brought
together the latest technology in a course authoring, course management, and
e-learning package ---
http://www.epsilen.com/Epsilen/Public/Home.aspx
The Epsilen Environment is the result of six years
of research and development within the Purdue School of Engineering and
Technology at IUPUI. Epsilen Products and Services are commercially
available through BehNeem LLC, the holding company created in Indiana to
commercialize, market and further develop the Epsilen Environment. The New
York Times is an equity and strategic partner in the company.
A 2008 addition to the above history site came to my attention in a
loose-card advertisement for Epsilen Enviroment that came in the November 3,
2008 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Free ePortfolios
Basic ePortfolio accounts are free for all registered students and faculty
of U.S. colleges and universities. An Epsilen ePortfolio can be created in
minutes and be used throughout one’s academic career, during
professional life, and even into retirement. The free Epsilen ePortfolio
account offers tools and resources enabling members to:
Create and maintain a professional ePortfolio
Engage in professional and social networking
Showcase scholarly work and other documents in a wide range of
formats
Develop and share resumes
Store and share files/objects
Use Epsilen e-mail, blog, wiki, and other communication and
collaboration tools
Create and participate in professional collaboration groups
Access to online
courses and trainings using the Epsilen Global Learning System (GLS)
courseware.
Produce a personal ePortfolio Web site with profile, photos and
video
Receive an automated weekly Epsilen status report
that lets you know about those that have visited your “corner”,
share similar research, teaching, internship or consulting
interests.
If your
campus is, or becomes, a licensed Epsilen institution (see below), your free
ePortfolio will integrate dynamically with more sophisticated tools and
services listed below that accompany the paid license. Visit www.epsilen.com
to
create
your personal ePortfolio and begin exploring the Environment.
Exploratory
Institutional Memberships
The Exploratory Membership is an easy and cost-effective option for colleges
and universities, schools, districts and state systems to explore and
experience the features of Epsilen, the next generation of learning and
networking software. Upon payment of an annual
membership fee, the following features are available to Exploratory
Members:
Administrative
account to brand, monitor, and maintain internal ePortfolio accounts of
your students ,faculty and alumnae
Institutional
ePortfolio site for your college or university
Global announcement
and message broadcasting to ePortfolio accounts associated with your
institution
Delivery of 12
online courses or training using Epsilen’s Global Learning System (GLS),
with the option to incorporate New York Times content described below
Direct access to the
Epsilen helpdesk
A hosted Web-based
solution that requires no, or little, institutional IT support
Ability to upgrade
to other licensed services (see below)
Ability to integrate
Epsilen with campus SIS (see below)
Ability to cross
list courses across institutions, departments, and schools
Annual Exploratory Memberships begin at
$5,000 for campuses with up to 2,000 students. Click here for
more pricing information and order application.
New York Times Knowledge
Network New York Times
Knowledge (NYTKnowledge Network) offers New York Times content to
complement faculty-designed courses served dynamically in customizable
templates through Epsilen’s Global Learning System. New York Times
content is aggregated by subject and easily selected and incorporated into
lessons by faculty and the interactive learning environment. NYTKnowledge
Network provides access to a repository of Times archives back to
1851 Times articles, special issues sections, multimedia features,
and synchronous and asynchronous contact with correspondents, resulting in
an extraordinary integrated learning environment that supports hybrid or
online offerings.
The New York Times
Knowledge Network also offers the opportunity to participate in Webcasts
with the Times correspondents and other subject matter experts.
These can be included in traditional courses, or offered by your institution
as stand-alone life-long learning experiences with comprehensive continuing
education programs designed by the New York Times.
NYT Knowledge Network Provides:
A rich
repository of archived content back to 1851
Access to other
major content providers
Multimedia news
content
Interactive maps
and graphs
Webcasts, chats
with correspondents
A comprehensive
range of content aggregated by subject and easily integrated to
support your teaching objectives.
NYTimes
Knowledge Network marketing of your continuing education courses.
Student Learning Matrix
Programs, departments, and schools within a campus may create unlimited
student learning matrices to be used by students through an automated
learning outcome assessment tool for both summative and formative learning
assessment. Features include:
Creation of
unlimited student learning matrices for program- or campus-level
learning outcome assessment (Each axis includes attributes defined
by the program/campus.)
Ability for
students to upload their learning outcomes according to predefined
rubrics
Access by
faculty and academic advisors to each student learning matrix for
assessment, advisement, and certification
Program- and
campus-level assessment reports for internal and external
accreditation reviews
A hosted
Web-based solution that requires no institutional IT support
The annual
Student Learning Matrix membership fee is based on the number of students in
the program or institution. Click here
for more information and online membership application.
Global Learning System (GLS)
Epsilen offers the Global
Learning System (GLS), a new Web-based learning framework developed as the
next generation of eLearning and networking. In contrast to current legacy
learning management systems, the GLS offers true global learning
collaboration by connecting students and instructors on campuses in the U.S.
and around the world in an interactive and intuitive Web 2.0 learning
environment. The GLS complements existing licensed or open source CMS
products. The GLS features include:
Global learning
management system that enables students and instructors to easily
register or be invited to courses and learning collaboration
Cross listing of
class rosters of two or more courses within various campuses, or across
institutions
Innovative tools
using professional and social networking to enhance learning, encourage
collaboration, and utilize peer review technology
The ability to
easily archive courses and working groups for continued engagement
A hosted
Web-based solution that requires little, or no institutional IT support
The annual GLS membership fee is based on the
number of students and courses within the institution.
Click here for
more information and online membership
application.
Charter Membership Experience the
full suite of the Epsilen “Environment” and resources with unparalleled
access to NYTKnowledge Network content. Charter members receive special
pricing for unlimited use of ePortfolios, the Student Learning Matrix,
courses through the Global Learning System, and interactive Webcasts with
correspondents. With charter membership, two university administrators will
be invited to participate in the Epsilen - New York Times charter
council, with meetings and events scheduled at The New York Times.
Benefits include:
Single sign-on
environment featuring a toolbox of services for ePortfolio, social
networking, Learning Matrix, GLS, object repository, and
NYTKnowledge Network
Totally hosted
turnkey solution with no need for local servers or local technical
staff
Cost
effectiveness for both small and large campuses
Collaboration on
designing the next generation of eLearning through networking with
other members of the Epsilen - New York Times charter council
The Epsilen Charter membership fee is
based on the total number of students within the institution. Click here for
more information and online membership
application.
Technical Support and
System Integration Epsilen offers consulting and technical
support through both internal and third-party sources for the integration of
Epsilen with local campus databases and existing licensed technology. This
provides a seamless, single sign-on, portal approach to all resources and
services supporting the learning and teaching initiatives of a campus.
Click Here for
more information and online membership
application.
Google's effort to build a social network to rival
Facebook began with a bold, company-wide yell. Now Google appears to be
winding down Google+ with barely a whimper.
This week, four years and one month after
launching Google+ with the stated mission to "fix"
online sharing, Google announced it would eliminate a much-criticized
requirement to use a Google+ account when signing on to other Google
services like YouTube. The move is the clearest indication yet that Google
is ditching its playbook of trying to push everyone in the world use its
social network.
Google earlier this year began to spin out the
service's most popular features, like Photos and Hangouts. What's left is
being re-worked (or pivoted, as Google+ chief Bradley Horowitz said in his
latest
blog post) to find a salvageable kernel of a
social experience that might still be built up to appeal to a large
audience. Google+ launched with big aspirations but no well-defined purpose
for users; now, very belatedly, Google is trying find some purpose for the
social network as those aspirations shrink.
Google+ has become a favorite punchline in the
technology industry, but the objective was deadly serious. Interviews with
more than a dozen Google insiders and analysts in recent months, many
speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, paint the Google
of 2010-2011 as increasingly fearful of Facebook snatching away users,
employees and advertisers. Google tried to mobilize itself quickly, but
approached the task with all the clumsiness of a giant trying to dance with
a younger, nimble startup.
Google launched Plus without a clear plan to
differentiate the service from Facebook. It bet on a charismatic leader with
a flawed vision, ignored troubling indications about the social network's
traction (or lack thereof) with users and continued throwing features at the
wall long after many had written Google+ off for dead.
The slow demise of Google+ sheds light on how a
large technology company tries and often fails to innovate when it feels
threatened. The Google+ project did lead to inventive new services and
created a more cohesive user identity that continues to benefit Google, but
the social network itself never truly beat back existing rivals. Facebook is
now larger than ever, with 1.4 billion users and a market capitalization
more than half of Google's. It continues to poach Google employees. Facebook
and Twitter are also
slowly chipping away at Google's dominance in
display ad revenue.
In an effort to boost adoption of its Google+
social network, Google this week announced a slew of new features aimed at
enticing business customers to use the service and "go Google."
Citing the success other Web-based Google Apps like
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Drive have found amongst
employers and their workers, Google Apps Product Management Director Clay
Bavor detailed a slew of new Google+ features for businesses in an official
Google Enterprise blog post.
"Like Google Apps, we think Google+ can help
colleagues collaborate more easily and get things done – and get to know
each other along the way," wrote Bavor.
What problem does
Google+
solve for consumers? The answer appears to be:
nothing. And, therefore, it solves nothing for Google either.
As with many of these social launches — an
exception being the ill-fated Google Buzz — the launch of Google+ was
limited. Like Gmail and Google Wave, Google relied on invites to scale
initial users and work out issues before a wider launch. I, somehow, managed
to score access to Google+ from Day One of its recent launch, and I'm here
to report on it. (I should note that
opinions vary.)
What I found upon signing up was a routine to
search my Google contacts and allocate people to Circles. The idea is that
should any of them sign up to Google+ I could neatly organize my friends
according to whatever category I thought best fit them. I could also find
anyone currently on Google+ and choose to follow them. Ironically, I chose
to follow Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook, but I also followed Google's
founders. The latter seem to participate regularly and lots of people
comment on their activities. The former, unsurprisingly, not so much
(although Zuckerberg seems to be
the most followed person on the network).
I then spent a little time filling in my profile
(you can
view it here). You can even follow my Google Buzz
feed from there, a legacy of automatic reposting of
my tweets and shared
Google Reader links.
Having done lots of set-up, I waited to see what
happened. The answer to that was: not much. For Google+ to work, it has to
be populated. Specifically, it has to be populated with people the user is
interested in. As it is early days, that crucial feature isn't there.
This (lack of) network effect could do Google+ in
if it can't get a virtuous cycle going. So the question is whether Google+
has the potential to attract a large enough network.
The reasoning why Google itself
might desperately want this to work out is clear.
Facebook and Twitter are grabbing attention and Google is in the business of
getting attention and on-selling it to advertisers. Add to that the fact
that the type of attention that comes from users providing content and
demonstrating their interest by commenting and subscribing to things, and
Google+ (were it to work) could yield important information that helps
advertisers target consumers better.
Congratulations to the
Google Plus
team for shipping a
superb
beta under conditions which could be considered equal
parts
turmoil and
FUD.
I absolutely love it. If it had 750 million
users on it right now it would be a superior experience to Facebook.
For starters, it looks more cohesive. This isn't
surprising because it is a blank slate product that did not have to deal
with the technical debt Facebook has accumulated since 2004. Beyond the
interface however, Google Plus will be more engaging emotionally for people
because it allows them to be more authentic with one another.
Why? Because Google Plus establishes intuitive
clarity for my social graph.
Here's one we missed.
Bing launched Bing+ last week, it just skipped all
the unnecessary stuff. (It's not really called Bing+.) There's a
new feature called
Linked Pages
that allows Bing users (U.S. only, for now) to connect
their various websites and profiles to their Bing identities, using Facebook
for authentication. You can also link your Facebook friends to their pages.
Thanks to its relationship with Facebook, Microsoft
has the advantage of not needing to build its own identity provider or
social network. Everyone's already on Facebook. To build good results for
people, Bing will use the same technique Facebook Groups use: get friends to
draw their own graph. Just like with Facebook Groups, if a friend connects
you to something you don't want, you can remove it permanently. We all
thought that feature would suck for Groups, but it worked just fine.
Facebook Groups build themselves, and Bing can build identities the same
way.
Social Network Overkill
The interesting thing is, this is exactly what
Google+ is for, but
the product isn't being pitched that way. Google's
social layer is all about establishing the Google-presence for people and
brands, so they can appear across Google-land, especially in
Search, plus Your World. But Google+ is spun as a
place for "sharing." It has all these pieces of a social network, but
people aren't using them.
It's a shame, because some of these features are
absolutely wonderful.
What could be more social than Hangouts? Google+
is full of great ideas, but it is struggling to bring them together. The
user experience isn't there. And that's all
because Google felt the need to build a full-blown social network itself in
order to act as an identity service.
Couldn't Hangouts have just been a Gmail feature?
Social Search Is All We Needed
There's no need for a new social network, but there
is a reason to put personal identities in search. Searching for
people has always been a terrible experience. It's nearly impossible to find
the person you're looking for, unless they're famous. Search engines need an
identity layer.
Bing is just being honest about that. If you want
to control the way you appear in search, you can connect the sites
and pages that matter to you via Facebook. Your friends can do it, too. When
you use Bing to search for people, now you'll be able to find the content
that's related to them. That's
what Search, plus Your World does for Google, but
Bing does it without requiring this new, extra place to waste time online.
Google could have done that. The Google+ profile
works exactly the way Bing's Linked Pages does, allowing users to
link their outside sites and pages to themselves.
It could have just made a Facebook app, and boom, there are your social
search results. But that's not how the business works. Google and Facebook
can't cooperate. They have to compete for eyeballs around social content,
and
Facebook is winning.
Jensen Comment
I've previously written about why I think Bing Maps is superior to Google Maps.
Sometimes (horrors) Microsoft really does do a better job when it comes late
onto the scene ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Travel
In a flipped classroom, an increasingly popular
pedagogical model, students view a video lecture at home and work on
exercises with the instructor during class time. Advocates of the flipped
classroom claim the practice not only improves student achievement, but also
ameliorates the achievement gap. We conduct a randomized controlled trial at
West Point and find that the flipped classroom produced short term gains in
Math and no effect in Economics, but that the flipped model broadened the
achievement gap: effects are driven by white, male, and higher achieving
students. We find no long term average effects on student learning, but the
widened achievement gap persists. Our findings demonstrate feasibility for
the flipped classroom to induce short term gains in student learning;
however, the exacerbation of the achievement gap, the effect fade-out, and
the null effects in Economics suggest that educators should exercise caution
when considering the model. *
Jensen Comment
In the last ten years of my 40-year faculty career at four universities I
preferred a flipped classroom pedagogy, especially for technical details of
complicated tasks (think valuation and accounting entries for an interest rate
swap) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133swapvalue.htm
I made hundreds of Camtasia videos that students studied from any way they liked
before class (alone or in groups). Then in an electronic classroom I had each
student demonstrate in front of the class what had been learned.
One marked effect for me was that students spent much less time coming to my
office for help. The could repeat parts of the videos over and over while
learning at their own paces. I no longer had to explain things over and over and
over.
Having said this it would not have surprised me if the above randomized trial
found even less difference between lecture classrooms versus flipped classrooms,
especially among top students. When comparing different pedagogies (thing
lectures versus Socratic method versus complete case method where teachers never
reveal best answers) it has been shown countless times that the top students
tend to get A grades under any pedagogy. Top
students are driven to do whatever is expected to ace a course ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AssessmentIssues
With weak students differences my arise not so much with respect to pedagogy as
it does to the time and attention given to what is inhibiting the learning
progress of each and every weak student. One of our sons did poorly in a San
Antonio middle school with very large classes. Then we put him in a military
school called Wentworth Academy (near Kansas City) where class sizes averaged
about six students. He did much better largely because of the individualized
attention (military discipline did not hurt).
It also is not surprising that the long-term differences washed out over time
in the above study. Unless any learning is reinforced by subsequent challenges
over the long haul. For example as an undergraduate I had two years of Russian
language. After subsequent years of non-use I would've forgotten my Russian no
matter what pedagogy had been used in my earlier studies.
There is one pedagogy that tends to work best for long-term success ipso
facto. That pedagogy entails making students learn virtually everything on
their own. It's a hard work, stressful way to learn for them, and they will
probably zero-out teaching evaluations for teachers who never explain things but
challenge them greatly in tests of learning. Learning on your own is effective
for a longer term (not necessarily decades) if not efficiently for what I
think are metacognitive reasons ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
My first point is that flipped classrooms
may be more efficient for student learning but are not necessarily more
effective among good students who will perform well under any pedagogy.
My second point is that making
students learn everything on their own is probably going to be more effective
(for a longer time) but is probably the least efficient way to learn and is
usually hated by teachers and students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AssessmentIssues
If you've teaching top students and the course
details that are quite technical (like computer programming, applying
complicated accounting and taxation rules, mathematics exercises, engineering
details, etc.) you should experiment with a flipped classroom using pretty darn
good Camtasia videos that you make yourself. Then put students on the spot in
the classroom to show you and the class what they learned from those videos.
T.H.E Journal’s
Professional Resources
·What Would a 3D Printer Mean for Your Campus?
Sponsored by Stratasys
3D printing is transforming education by fueling limitless creativity. Complete
two quick and easy steps for your chance to win a state-of-the-art 3D printer
and a $5k grant for your campus! Enter to win!
Abstract:
Considerable research and attention has been focused lately on the concept
of “flipping the classroom.” Much of the focus has been on secondary
education. However, opportunities to flip the classroom also exist in
university education, and certain business disciplines (such as accounting)
are particularly appealing targets given the practical/applied nature of
many of the topics covered. This study examines a simplified flipping
approach (without videos), using a within-participants experimental design,
in a managerial accounting principles course. The results of the study show
significant improvement in student performance under a flipped approach (as
compared to a traditional approach), controlling for individual student
differences. Quantile regression suggests that those performance
improvements were most substantial for lower-performing students. No effect
on student evaluations of the course/instructor is found. Student
attendance, at least on the initial class days when the instructional format
was manipulated, was better for the flipped approach. These results suggest
a need to consider further the increased use of a flipped classroom in
business and accounting education; in application-oriented courses like
managerial accounting principles, and in particular for more remedial course
sections, the flipped classroom could be especially effective.
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
A study comparing
traditional and “flipped” versions of a pharmacy-school course at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that students much
preferred the flipped course and got better grades on the final
examination. The flipped course replaced in-class lectures with videos
that the students watched before they came to class to take part in a
series of activities—assessments, presentations, discussions, quizzes,
and “microlectures.”
The study is to be
published in February in Academic Medicine, the journal of the
Association of American Medical Colleges, but it is
available online now (it can be downloaded
using the “Article as PDF” tool). It reports on the 2011 and 2012
versions of a first-year course for graduate students, “Basic
Pharmaceutics II.”
In 2011 the course
relied on 75-minute lectures two days a week—a total of 29 hours’
worth—plus occasional quizzes. In 2012 instructors “offloaded all
in-class lectures to self-paced online videos”—averaging around 35
minutes each and totaling under 15 hours—that students could pause and
review as necessary. Class sessions were “devoted to student-centered
learning exercises designed to assess their knowledge, promote critical
thinking, and stimulate discussion.”
Following the 2012
course, only about 15 percent of the 162 students said they would have
preferred a traditional lecture-style classroom experience. Others wrote
comments such as “It was different, but I enjoyed coming to class more
and I also feel that I will retain the information for longer. It helped
make learning ‘fun’ again and not just endless hours of lectures and
PowerPoints.”
The study’s authors said
that, on the final exam, scores for the flipped class were five points
higher on a 200-point scale than scores for the traditional version had
been the year before.
A few weeks ago I began a series to review the
Calculus course that Marcia Frobish and I taught using the inverted/flipped
class design, back in the Fall. I want to pick up the thread here about the
unifying principle behind the course, which is the concept of
self-regulated learning.
Self-regulated learning is what it sounds like:
Learning that is initiated, managed, and assessed by the learners
themselves. An instructor can play a role in this process, so it’s not the
same thing as teaching yourself a subject (although all successful
autodidacts are self-regulating learners), but it refers to how the
individual learner approaches learning tasks.
For example, take someone learning about
optimization problems in calculus. Four things describe how a
self-regulating learner approaches this topic.
The learner works actively on
optimization problems as the primary form of learning. Note that I said
“primary”; some passive listening might take place, but the primary mode
of learning optimization problems for this learner is doing
optimization problems.
As the learner works actively, she is
monitoring many different things. What’s the process for
solving an optimization problem in general? Have I set up my objective
function correctly? How is this problem like the other ones I have seen
or done? Does a computer-generated graph agree with the answer I got by
hand? Am I too tired to work on this right now? How can I prevent myself
from checking Facebook every two minutes instead of working on the
problem? She’s not just thinking about these but
monitoring them, like an airplane pilot would be monitoring the
many dials and gauges on his dashboard during a flight, tweaking this
and adjusting that as needed.
As the learner monitors all this, she operates
with two very important questions in mind: What is
the criteria in this case for knowing whether I’ve truly learned the
topic?, and Am I there yet? She has a clearly-defined goal
state and the means of checking her progress toward that goal
state. For example, the self-regulating learner will take the initiative
to check her answer on the optimization problem using a graph, or using
Wolfram|Alpha to
make sure the derivative computation is correct.
Finally, the self-regulating learner
doesn’t let external circumstances prevent learning. She
selects learning activities that serve as a buffer zone between her
progress toward the goal and the items in her life around her. If she’s
got to be at work in an hour, she’ll select some activities or a subset
of the tasks in a problem at hand that she can do in 45 minutes. If she
doesn’t have access to a computer at home, she will select learning
activities that she can do at home and save the others for when
she can study at a friend’s house or at school with more technology
around; or work over the phone with a friend who does have the
technology; or something, anything other than I couldn’t work
because I didn’t have a computer.
Even before I started working with the
inverted/flipped classroom, what I just described is a picture of what I
envisioned for my students. It’s a picture of a confident, inquisitive,
independent problem-solver who takes a can-do attitude towards her work, and
who is set up well to learn new things for the rest of her life. Because in
real life, all learning basically looks like this.
The theoretical framework for self-regulated
learning was developed by Paul Pintrich throughout the 1990’s and culminated
in a paper in Educational Psychology Review in 2004. In that paper,
Pintrich describes four features of self-regulated learning that correspond
to the four items I described above. But of course the idea of
self-regulated learning is as old as humanity itself. And it’s worth
pointing out that there’s a close relationship between self-regulated
learning and the popular admissions-office concept of lifelong learning.
When we talk about students becoming “lifelong learners”, what we really
mean is “self-regulating learners”.
Back to the story about calculus. I’ve taught
calculus dozens of times since 1994, and what I’ve been seeing more and
more, and tolerating less and less, is an environment where students tend
toward the opposite of self-regulated learning. This is a state where
students do not learn, and come to believe that they cannot learn,
without the strong intervention of a third party. There’s no activity, no
monitoring, no self-assessment, no persistence – only the repeated cries to
tell them how to start, how to proceed, and what the right answer is. A
professor can make a career out of catering to these cries and simply giving
students what they ask for. But I don’t think that’s in the students’ best
interests, or anybody else’s, and by the time July 2013 rolled around I
decided I was done with enabling a generation of smart young men and women
to enter into a perpetual state of learned helplessness when it came to
their learning.
I certainly do not have a perfect track record with
getting students on board with an inverted/flipped classroom structure. In
fact the first time I did it, it was a
miserable flop among my students (even though they
learned a lot). It took that failure to make me start thinking that getting
student buy-in has to be as organized, systematic, and well-planned as the
course itself.
Here are three big “don’ts” and “dos” that I’ve
learned about getting students to buy in to the flipped classroom, mostly
through cringe-worthy teaching performances of my own in the past, along
with some examples of how we built these into the calculus course.
DON’T: Make a production out of
your use of the flipped classroom to your students. DO: Explain the workflow of the class to students in a
clear way on Day 1 and remind students of that workflow on Days 2, 3, 4, …
You go into the first day of class and
enthusiastically explain to students that they will be participating in a
new, exciting, and innovative class method called the “flipped classroom”,
that
they may have heard about on 60 Minutes or
elsewhere in the news. There won’t be any boring lectures in this class!
Instead they’ll be watching lectures on video at home, and then working on
challenging activities in the class, under your supervision. It’s exciting,
it’s the latest thing, and it’s going to be awesome.
None of this is false. But it turns out
that when many students hear “innovative” and “new”, their brains translate
it as “experimental” and “unproven”. And it turns out that students don’t
like being part of an experiment, especially when their grade is the outcome
of the experiment.
In the flipped calculus class, I included a brief
but substantial overview of the flipped course design structure in
the class syllabus.
To summarize, it tells students that:
You learn better when you are working actively
as opposed to listening passively.
In order to make as much time and space as
possible for active work in class, we’ve pre-recorded many of the
lectures and put them on YouTube.
You’ll be expected to prepare for class by
watching the videos, doing the reading, and working through the Guided
Practice exercises. This should take you roughly 3 hours a week (about
one hour per class meeting).
By the way, this is sometimes called the
“flipped classroom” design.
So we communicate in the syllabus what we are
doing, why we are doing it, and what students are expected to do on a
day-to-day basis. As the class got ramped up through the first and second
weeks of the term, every day I would take a few minutes in class to explain
what students needed to do for the next class and how long they should
expect it to take. What I did not drill in every day was how awesome the
flipped classroom is. Students don’t want to hear this, and they don’t need
to. They want, and need, to know what it is they are supposed to do, and
it’s helpful to know why. But leave it at that.
(Exception: If you have a lot of pre-service
teachers in the class, it might be interesting to talk with them about the
flipped class, since they may be practitioners of it themselves before
long.)
DON’T: Assume that the benefits of
the flipped classroom will be obvious, or even easily grasped, by students. DO: Take every opportunity to point to specific examples of
student performance in the flipped class that illustrate those benefits.
The benefits of the flipped class are numerous. The
research is showing that students in a flipped class learn at least as much
content as their counterparts in a traditional classroom, if not more, plus
flipped class students are getting explicit instruction on self-regulated
learning behaviors that are useful everywhere. But don’t expect this to be
obvious, and don’t expect it to sink in if you put it in the syllabus or
make a big deal out of it on the first day. Instead, expect a lot of
cognitive dissonance among students as they try to reconcile this new way of
“doing school” with what they are used to.
The best way to have that reconciliation is to
point to and celebrate specific student successes. When a class gets all
correct answers on an entrance quiz, make much out of it: “Isn’t it great
how you can learn this stuff without me?” or, “See? You guys are smart and
don’t need some professor telling you what to do.” When a student improves
their grade on an assessment from a previous assessment, say, “Look at how
your hard work is paying off” and “You know what I think is really great?
The fact that you learned most of this without a lot of help.” There wasn’t
any formal system for doing this in the flipped calculus class – just a
habit of mind that I adopted and deployed on a daily basis to be
generous with praise whenever it was merited.
DON’T: Hide from student opinions
on the flipped design of the course. DO: Solicit student feedback early and often.
I’ve blogged before about the value of frequent course evaluations
and not waiting until the end of the semester to get
student feedback. This is especially so when you are doing something out of
your and the students’ comfort zones like a flipped classroom. I
recommend having at least one mid-term course evaluation done in addition to
the usual end-of-term evaluations and being prepared to make halftime
adjustments to meet student concerns.
A
study in Colorado has found little difference in
the learning of students in online or in-person introductory science
courses. The study tracked community college students who took science
courses online and in traditional classes, and who then went on to four-year
universities in the state. Upon transferring, the students in the two groups
performed equally well. Some science faculty members have expressed
skepticism about the ability of online students in science, due to the lack
of group laboratory opportunities, but the programs in Colorado work with
companies to provide home kits so that online students can have a lab
experience.
Jensen Comment
Firstly, note that online courses are not necessarily mass education (MOOC)
styled courses. The student-student and student-faculty interactions can be
greater online than onsite. For example, my daughter's introductory chemistry
class at the University of Texas had over 600 students. On the date of the final
examination he'd never met her and had zero control over her final grade. On the
other hand, her microbiology instructor in a graduate course at the University
of Maine became her husband over 20 years ago.
Another factor is networking. For example, Harvard Business School students
meeting face-to-face in courses bond in life-long networks that may be stronger
than for students who've never established networks via classes, dining halls,
volley ball games, softball games, rowing on the Charles River, etc. There's
more to lerning than is typically tested in competency examinations.
My point is that there are many externalities to both onsite and online
learning. And concluding that there's "little difference in learning" depends
upon what you mean by learning. The SCALE experiments at the University of
Illinois found that students having the same instructor tended to do slightly
better than onsite students. This is partly because there are fewer logistical
time wasters in online learning. The effect becomes larger for off-campus
students where commuting time (as in Mexico City) can take hours going to and
from campus.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Bob Jensen's long-time threads on asynchronous learning are
at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
This pedagogy depends a great deal on the quality of learning materials provided
or not provided to students.
What's more important to long-term memory and metacognition
is probably how much the students have to struggle to find answers on their own
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
This pedagogy, however, is risky in terms of teacher evaluations and burnout
I had a genuinely wonderful teaching experience this
past semester. As I discussed in a blog posting on January 1, 2013, I helped set
up a class in Victorian Literature for 10 second semester senior accounting
majors. We read and discussed Great Expectations, North & South, and The Mill on
the Floss. "A Good Suggestion," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, June 1, 2013 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-good-suggestion.html
Jensen Comment
This makes me wonder what role a Victorian Literature professor might play in
setting up an accounting course for 10 second semester senior English majors. If
she listened to what her students want most it might be more of a skills course
in financial literacy, personal finance, and business law and ethics pertaining
to accounting.
What do you think it should contain for graduating English majors?
It would be a lot of work, but it might be interesting to have students do a
project on detecting accountants in literature or accounting frauds in
literature.
In addition to short summaries of leading presenters, you may want to just
note what speakers were given the great honor of speaking at plenary sessions.
You can then do Google and other searches on these speakers.
Rebooting the Academy: 12 Tech Innovators Who Are
Transforming Campuses, tells the stories of a dozen key figures who are
changing research, teaching, and the management of colleges in this time of
technological change. The e-book features essays by each of the 12
innovators, explaining their visions in their own words and providing more
details on their projects, plus The Chronicle’s profiles of them.
Among the highlights: Salman Khan, founder of Khan
Academy, riffs on how video lectures can improve teaching; Dan Cohen, of
George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, asks whether
Google is good for the study of history; and Jim Groom, an
instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington,
argues against the very premise of the collection, noting that the best
innovations come from groups, not individual leaders.
You will receive a confirmation email immediately
after your Digital Edition order is placed allowing you to download the
e-book to any of your preferred reading devices (includes formats for the
Kindle, Nook, and iPad).
On any given Sunday night, your child’s teacher
might face this problem: How do you come up with a lesson plan for 20 or
more students for an entire week when all your students are learning at a
different pace?
Mike is great at reading but needs help in math.
Katie excels in science but struggles with writing. They both need to pass
the same state tests. And with states picking up new high standards for
education, there isn’t always a precedent of how to teach. Even with
textbooks and years of experience, the best teachers can struggle to find
new ways of teaching complex subjects, especially when each student learns
differently.
This is a problem that Eric Westendorf and Alix
Guerrier are determined to solve. The two former teachers co-founded
LearnZillion.com,
a social venture that provides free lessons for students, all in organized
YouTube-style videos.
The formula is simple: Videos have to be about five
minutes long, illustrated by hand and voiced by a real teacher. The product
simulates a real-classroom effect —it’s like your favorite teacher drawing
the math lesson on the chalkboard, except that you can play it over and over
if you don’t quite understand it. At the end, you take a brief quiz. But as
it turns out, this resource is mostly utilized by teachers looking for new
ways to teach the topics with which their students are struggling .
In other words, teachers need help from other
teachers. Jonathan Krasnov, Learnzillion’s publicist notes, “Even great
teachers don’t teach everything great.”
Westendorf was the principal of E.L. Haynes, a
charter school in Washington, D.C., when he came up with the idea.
He told CNN, “We started using it because we came
across the Khan Academy site. We liked this idea of instruction being
captured and delivered to students. Then we said, ‘What if it could be based
on the Common Core Standards, [which most U.S.states have now adopted] , so
that it is aligned with what students need? … It was out of these ‘what ifs’
that I came up with a prototype.”
Westendorf plans for LearnZillion to eventually
make profit by selling services to school districts, such as lessons
tailored to the needs of the school. But he says that the lessons posted
online will always be free.
CNN attended LearnZillion’s first
TeachFest , recently
held in Atlanta. Westendorf and Guerrier recruited more than 100 “Dream
Team” teachers to help build up their database of lessons. The teachers get
paid $100 for each lesson created. But the chance to reach more students is
the biggest reward for many teachers to whom CNN talked.
Mike Lewis, a fifth-grade teacher from Cohasset,
Massachusetts, says his interest in the “ability to replicate yourself and
your lessons using video” is what led him to LearnZillion. The slogan for
TeachFest was “scale your impact.”
The idea is not new.
KhanAcademy.org
has thousands of lessons, and unlike LearnZillion,
Khan Academy is a nonprofit. Both receive funding from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates
Foundation donated $300,000 just for TeachFest.
Even Bill Gates acknowledges that the idea of the
virtual classroom hasn’t quite gone viral yet. During last month’s
Innovation in Education summit, the Microsoft CEO
noted the example of
Edx, a partnership
between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University
that provides free online courses.
Jensen Comment
This is why I created Camtasia modules for nearly every technical phase of both
my AIS and Accounting Theory courses and then served them up on either my LAN
drive or my Web server. When the video module contained copyrighted material I
used the LAN drive. For example, if I showed students how to solve an
end-of-chapter problem I used the LAN drive.
The Camtasia videos had several great learning advantages:
Students could repeat, repeat, and repeat again until they finally
mastered some complicated task such as writing a database query or booking
fair value adjustments of an interest rate swap.
Students could skip over parts of the module that they fully understood
and then focus on the parts of a task that they had not yet mastered.
Usually I encouraged students to work in partnerships such that they
appreciated how teamwork aids learning. But they were on their own when I
gave a quiz in every class to test whether they truly understood the
technical process they were supposed to learn before coming to class.
This allowed me to focus on such things as theory and concepts in class
rather than having to solve problems that some students understood fully and
other students had their heads in the clouds.
There is a risk that this works so efficiently that it's tempting to add more
and more technical material to the course. My students generally let me know
when my courses were demanding too much of their time relative to the other
courses they were taking in the same semester.
This video module approach may be less successful for students who are not
well above average. Students at the lower end of the spectrum may need more
direct supervision and face-to-butt kicking.
At BYU, where basic accounting students are probably above the national norm
for these two courses in terms of aptitude and motivation, each basic course is
taught via variable speed video in courses that rarely meet face-to-face ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
There is no magic bullet for students who are overly exhausted from
off-campus work, parenting, or partying. Learning requires lots and lots of
sweat. And if the sweat arises from things other than course content, not a
whole lot of learning of course content will take place under any pedagogy.
Students in these poor learning circumstances generally discover that
accounting, mathematics, engineering, and science courses should be avoided
whenever possible.
From the AICPA on June 28, 2012
Three ethics resources for CPA, CGMAs
With the importance of ethics and non-financial reporting rising on the global
agenda, CGMAs are in a unique position to make an important contribution to
creating a sustainable ethical operating environment. The AICPA and CIMA have
developed a number of
resources to assist CPA, CGMAs in guiding their organizations to long-term
sustainability and success. The
Ethical reflection checklist is designed to provide organizations and
individuals with an overview of how well ethical practices are embedded in the
business. The CGMA case study:
Navigating ethical issues highlights issues related to non-disclosure at the
corporate level that come to the attention of non-executive financial managers
and controllers.
Responding to ethical dilemmas: CGMA ethics resources provides links to
resources to help CGMAs navigate ethical dilemmas and respond in a manner that
upholds their professional
The Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects
featured here exemplify the National Science Foundation-supported
initiatives for technicians in high-technology fields of strategic
importance to the nation. Two-year college educators have leadership roles
in the projects, which test ways of improving technician education or of
improving the professional development for the faculty who teach
technicians. The projects collaborative work with industry partners and
educators from other undergraduate institutions and secondary schools
perpetuate innovations that deliver highly-skilled technicians to
workplaces. While each ATE project has its own goals, all the projects are
part of a national effort to ensure that the technical workforce in the
United States has the capacity to compete globally.
"A Descriptive Study of Institutional Characteristics of the Introductory
Accounting Course," by Jonathan E. Duchac and Anthony J. Amoruso, Issues
in Accounting Education, February 2012 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.2308/iace-50089
ABSTRACT:
Introductory accounting has historically been a foundational course in most
undergraduate business curriculums. In many cases, the course serves as a
prerequisite for all upper-level business and accounting courses. However,
no current public data exist on the structure and characteristics of
introductory accounting across a large sample of institutions. This study
begins to fill this void by providing descriptive data on institutional
characteristics of the introductory accounting course. Data are collected on
seven different dimensions of the course suggested by the recommendations of
the Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) and recent trends in
higher education: course size and staffing, pedagogical orientation/teaching
approach, standardization of course elements across instructors, the
textbook selection process, use of technology-based course management tools,
off-site course delivery, and transfer credit acceptance. In some cases, the
current data can be compared to previous research that examined similar
characteristics. The resulting data can provide instructors, administrators,
and researchers with a useful benchmark for developing teaching plans,
curriculum, and future academic research.
"Improving Student Satisfaction in a First-Year Undergraduate Accounting
Course by Team Learning," by Evelien Opdecam and Patricia Everaert,
Issues in Accounting Education, February 2012 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.2308/iace-10217
ABSTRACT:
This paper discusses student satisfaction and course experiences of
firstyear undergraduate students in an introductory financial accounting
course where team learning was implemented during tutorials. Course
experiences and satisfaction, as perceived by students in the team learning
condition, were compared to those in a traditional lecture-based control
condition. A post-experimental questionnaire, with open and closed-ended
questions, was administered. Students reported significantly higher levels
of satisfaction in the team learning condition and a more positive course
experience compared to students in the lecture-based condition. The
increased time spent on accounting in the team learning condition resulted
in increased learning, as evidenced by higher grades on the final exam in
the team learning condition. An analysis of open-ended questions revealed
that both learning conditions fit for particular students. High pre-class
preparation was considered a strength of the team learning condition, while
the comprehensive explanation by the teacher was the most frequently
mentioned advantage of the lecture-based condition. This paper further
contributes to the practice of accounting education by illustrating a way to
implement team learning in a large undergraduate accounting course.
ABSTRACT:
This paper describes the author’s encounters with the first course in
accounting in his half century of study, teaching, and service on five
campuses, as a student, doctoral teaching assistant, lecturer, professor,
accounting department administrator, business dean, and senior scholar. Also
described are his encounters with issues surrounding the first course in
accounting in a variety of leadership roles with the American Accounting
Association, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Accounting
Education Change Commission, Association for Advancement of Collegiate
Schools of Business, the Accounting Programs Leadership Group, and the
Federation of Schools of Accountancy. Changes in the nature, content, and
teaching of the first course in accounting are discussed. Observations for
the future of the first course in accounting are offered.
Google artificial-intelligence guru Sebastian Thrun
made a splash last month when he left Stanford University to
start a company based on
an A.I. course he made freely available last fall
to tens of thousands of students on the Web. Now, two of Thrun's former
Stanford colleagues who conducted similar experiments have spun off their
own free online courses into a for-profit venture.
The engineering professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller,
who also ran free online versions of their Stanford courses last fall, have
started Coursera,
a company that says it wants to make "the best education in the world freely
available to any person who seeks it."
The company currently serves as a platform for
eight courses, centering on computer science with some math, economics and
linguistics. Five are taught by Stanford professors, two by professors at
the University of California at Berkeley and one by a University of Michigan
professor. All of the courses are currently listed as free of charge. None
will count as credit toward a degree at any of the professors' home
universities.
Koller and Ng were not immediately available to elaborate on Coursera's business
model, but the
terms of use on the
company's website suggest that it plans to trade in information. The terms
stipulate that Coursera may use "non-personal" information it collects from
users "for business purposes." They also indicate that Coursera may share
personal information with its "business partners" so that registered
students might "receive communications from such parties that [students]
have opted in to."
Stanford appears to be collaborating closely with the professors who are
teaching courses through Coursera. To help brainstorm improvements to the
quality of these massively open online courses (known as MOOCs), the
university is assembling a "multidisciplinary faculty committee on
educational technology that will include deans of three schools, the
university provost's office and faculty or senior administrators from across
campus," according to the
Stanford News Service.
Stanford is not the only elite university to focus faculty and
administrative brainpower on the question of how to create inexpensive
versions of its courses available to massive online audiences without
sacrificing quality. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently
opened MITx, a subsidiary nonprofit aimed at providing top-flight
interactive courses online at a "modest" price. The MITx project is actively
drawing on the creativity and expertise of the M.I.T. computer science
faculty, with involvement from the university's provost.
The founders of Coursera may be counting on this
trend to continue. A January
job posting for
part-time work developing, designing and programming for the company
(referred to in the posting as Dkandu, apparently a working title at the
time) suggests that it has ambitions of being the preferred partner for
elite universities that want to take their courses online in a big way.
"We see a future where world-leading educators are
at the center of the education conversation, and their reach is limitless,
bounded only by the curiosity of those who seek their knowledge; where
universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and Yale serve millions instead of
thousands," the author of the posting. "In this future, ours will be the
platform where the online conversation between educators and students will
take place, and where students go to for most of their academic needs."
More than 335,000 people have registered for the
five Stanford-provided courses in the Coursera catalog, which comprise
courses in natural language processing, game theory, probabilistic graphic
models, cryptography and design and analysis of algorithms. The three
non-Stanford courses are in model thinking (Michigan), software as a service
and computer vision (Berkeley).
US News Top Online Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Do not confuse this with the US News project to evaluate for-profit universities
--- a project hampered by refusal of many for-profit universiteis to provide
data
Data collection commenced on July 14, 2011, using a
password-protected online system. Drawing from its
Best Colleges universe of regionally
accredited bachelor's granting institutions, U.S.News & World Report
E-mailed surveys to the 1,765 regionally accredited institutions it
determined had offered bachelor's degree programs in 2010.
U.S. News & World Report has published its
first-ever guide to online degree programs—but distance-education leaders
looking to trumpet their high rankings may find it more difficult to brag
about how they placed than do their colleagues at residential institutions.
Unlike the magazine's annual rankings of
residential colleges, which cause consternation among many administrators
for reducing the value of each program into a single headline-friendly
number, the new guide does not provide lists based on overall program
quality; no university can claim it hosts the top online bachelor's or
online master's program. Instead, U.S. News produced "honor rolls"
highlighting colleges that consistently performed well across the ranking
criteria.
Eric Brooks, a U.S. News data research
analyst, said the breakdown of the rankings into several categories was
intentional; his team chose its categories based on areas with enough
responses to make fair comparisons.
"We're only ranking things that we felt the
response rates justified ranking this year," he said.
The rankings, which will be published today,
represent a new chapter in the 28-year history of the U.S. News
guide. The expansion was brought on by the rapid growth of online learning.
More than six million students are now taking at least one course online,
according to a recent survey of more than 2,500 academic leaders by the
Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board.
U.S. News ranked colleges with bachelor's
programs according to their performance in three categories: student
services, student engagement, and faculty credentials. For programs at the
master's level, U.S. News added a fourth category, admissions
selectivity, to produce rankings of five different disciplines: business,
nursing, education, engineering, and computer information technology.
To ensure that the inaugural rankings were
reliable, Mr. Brooks said, U.S. News developed its ranking
methodology after the survey data was collected. Doing so, he said, allowed
researchers to be fair to institutions that interpreted questions
differently.
Some distance-learning experts criticized that
technique, however, arguing that the methodology should have been
established before surveys were distributed.
Russell Poulin, deputy director of research and
analysis for the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, which
promotes online education as part of the Western Interstate Commission for
Higher Education, said that approach allowed U.S. News to ask the
wrong questions, resulting in an incomplete picture of distance-learning
programs.
"It sort of makes me feel like I don't know who won
the baseball game, but I'll give you the batting average and the number of
steals and I'll tell you who won," he said. Mr. Poulin and other critics
said any useful rankings of online programs should include information on
outcomes like retention rates, employment prospects, and debt
load—statistics, Mr. Brooks said, that few universities provided for this
first edition of the U.S. News rankings. He noted that the surveys
will evolve in future years as U.S. News learns to better tailor
its questions to the unique characteristics of online programs.
W. Andrew McCollough, associate provost for
information technology, e-learning, and distance education at the University
of Florida, said he was "delighted" to discover that his institution's
bachelor's program was among the four chosen for honor-roll inclusion. He
noted that U.S. News would have to customize its questions in the
future, since he found some of them didn't apply to online programs. He
attributed that mismatch to the wide age distribution and other diverse
demographic characteristics of the online student body.
The homogeneity that exists in many residential
programs "just doesn't exist in the distance-learning environment," he said.
Despite the survey's flaws, Mr. McCollough said, the effort to add to the
body of information about online programs is helpful for prospective
students.
Turnout for the surveys varied, from a 50 percent
response rate among nursing programs to a 75 percent response rate among
engineering programs. At for-profit institutions—which sometimes have a
reputation for guarding their data closely—cooperation was mixed, said Mr.
Brooks. Some, like the American Public University System, chose to
participate. But Kaplan University, one of the largest providers of online
education, decided to wait until the first rankings were published before
deciding whether to join in, a spokesperson for the institution said.
Though this year's rankings do not make definitive
statements about program quality, Mr. Brooks said the research team was
cautious for a reason and hopes the new guide can help students make
informed decisions about the quality of online degrees.
"We'd rather not produce something in its first
year that's headline-grabbing for the wrong reasons," he said.
'Honor Roll' From 'U.S. News' of Online Graduate Programs
in Business
Institution
Teaching
Practices and Student Engagement
Student
Services and Technology
Faculty
Credentials and Training
Admissions
Selectivity
Arizona State U., W.P. Carey School of Business
24
32
37
11
Arkansas State U.
9
21
1
36
Brandman U. (Part of the Chapman U. system)
40
24
29
n/a
Central Michigan U.
11
3
56
9
Clarkson U.
4
24
2
23
Florida Institute of Technology
43
16
23
n/a
Gardner-Webb U.
27
1
15
n/a
George Washington U.
20
9
7
n/a
Indiana U. at Bloomington, Kelley School of Business
29
19
40
3
Marist College
67
23
6
5
Quinnipiac U.
6
4
13
16
Temple U., Fox School of Business
39
8
17
34
U.
of Houston-Clear Lake
8
21
18
n/a
U.
of Mississippi
37
44
20
n/a
Source: U.S. News & World
Report
Jensen Comment
I don't know why the largest for-profit universities that generally provide more
online degrees than the above universities combined are not included in the
final outcomes. For example, the University of Phoenix alone as has over 600,000
students, most of whom are taking some or all online courses.
My guess is that most for-profit universities are not forthcoming with the
data requested by US News analysts. Note that the US News
condition that the set of online programs to be considered be regionally
accredited does not exclude many for-profit universities. For example, enter in
such for-profit names as "University of Phoenix" or "Capella University" in the
"College Search" box at
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-phoenix-20988
These universities are included in the set of eligible regionally accredited
online degree programs to be evaluated. They just did not do well in the above
"Honor Roll" of outcomes for online degree programs.
For-profit universities may have shot themselves in the foot by not providing
the evaluation data to US News for online degree program evaluation. But
there may b e reasons for this. For example, one of the big failings of most
for-profit online degree programs is in undergraduate "Admissions Selectivity."
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford
University, and other institutions are old hands now at taking course
material from the classroom and lab and putting it online for learners
anywhere to use. Yale University may be the first to reverse the process,
using its Open
Yale Courses as the basis for an
old-fashioned
book series.
This month, Yale University Press released the
first batch of paperbacks based on lecture courses featured in the
online-learning program. Priced at $18 and available in e-format too, the
books are meant to expand the audience for the course material even further,
according to Diana E.E. Kleiner. A professor of art history and classics at
Yale, Ms. Kleiner is the founding project director of Open Yale Courses.
“It may seem counterintuitive for a digital project
to move into books and e-books, because these are a much more conventional
way of publishing,” she says. But the Open Yale Courses are about “reaching
out in every way that we could.” That includes posting audio and video
versions online (via Yale’s Web site, YouTube, and iTunes), and providing
transcripts and now book versions of the lectures.
Having transcripts of their lectures to work with
gives faculty authors a jump-start. “It was incomparably the easiest book I
have ever written,” says Shelly Kagan, a Yale professor of philosophy whose
lecture course on death has become one of the Open Yale program’s most
popular offerings. “I just started with the transcripts and treated that as
a first draft.” The book that resulted, also called
Death, has already been
reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
Other books have taken him 10 years, Mr. Kagan
says. This one took only a few months. Talk to him in detail about the
process, though, and it’s clear he put a lot of fresh labor into the
project, in addition to the years of work that went into creating the
lectures in the first place.
Even very good lectures contain grammatical
mistakes, jokes or asides, or physical cues that don’t work on the page, and
other unfelicities that might distract or annoy a reader. Mr. Kagan polished
those away and restructured some of the discussion so that it followed a
more logical order. He changed some descriptive details.
He preserved the freewheeling, more personal style
he uses in the lecture hall. “Although I changed the setting, and some of
the examples, cleaned up the grammar, moved points around, and so forth and
so on, I tried very hard to keep the conversational tone from the lectures,”
he says. ” The subject matter is heavy—I am talking about death, after
all—but I don’t think we have to discuss it in a ponderous, inaccessible,
‘academic’ fashion.”
He doubts he would have turned his lectures on
death into a book at all without the transcripts and the feedback from
people outside Yale “suggesting there’s a hunger for this stuff.” Since his
lectures went online, he’s heard from people all over the world. He’s even
become a kind of philosopher-guru in China, where volunteers created
Mandarin subtitles for his videotaped lectures.
“I’ve just had the most amazing experiences with
it,” he says of his participation in Open Yale. “I get e-mails from people
in all walks of life, from literally all corners of the globe.” Some want to
engage him in philosophical debate; others share stories about their own
grappling with life-and-death issues. In many cases, “people were striking a
deeply personal note,” he says. “The whole range of it has been humbling and
gratifying.”
Laura Davulis, associate editor for history and
large digital projects at the Yale press, edits the series. Because the
authors are so steeped in their material, and because the idea is to
preserve the original spirit of the lectures, “I definitely have a lighter
hand” in editing, she says. “My role is really more guidance in terms of how
to take material that’s spoken and turn it into something that’s appropriate
for a reading audience but still has that friendliness and accessibility of
sitting in a course and listening to the lecture.”
The books in the series aren’t peer-reviewed as
outside manuscripts would normally be, according to Ms. Davulis, but they’re
approved by the press’s acquisitions panel and its faculty committee.
Although the series is aimed at readers beyond Yale, it makes for a nice
on-campus partnership between Yale’s press and the online-education project.
“One of the things we wanted to play up was the Yale connection,” she says.
Jensen Comment
This type of course requires great flexibility in the curriculum plan since it
is not always clear ahead of time where students will steer the learning. I
don't think I would recommend a peer-driven pedagogy for most accounting courses
where learning objectives are usually more specific. For example, if there's
only one governmental accounting course in the curriculum, most colleges would
not like to have students ace the course and still be unable to solve those big
governmental accounting problems that often appear on CPA examinations.
There may be some opportunity in an accounting curriculum such as when there
are separate courses for accounting ethics. These days, however, ethics modules
are often spread among other accounting courses.
Where I might like to see peer-driven learning gain traction is in accounting
doctoral programs in courses where there are enough students to make it
interesting.
I see some analogy here with what happens on our AECM. A scholar posts an
article that is sometimes accompanied by a short commentary. This becomes
analogous to a "peer assignment" to other scholars who then seek out references
and quotations that get into the pros and cons of the initial posted article.
Thus happens on the AECM, and this is what makes the AECM rich and rewarding to
me!
January 10, 2011 message from David Albrecht
HETL is a professional organization dedicated to
advancing teaching and learning in higher education. It got its start on
LinkedIn with discussion groups. To participate in the discussion group, a
collegiate teacher (and now doctoral students) would have to apply. If the
applicant had 2-5 years experience teaching in higher education (and met
certain disclosure requirements on their profile), they were admitted.
LinkedIn membership is now over 10,000 and rapidly climing. I believe it is
the largest LinkedIn discussion group. Knowing me, you'd probably expect
that I'd get involved in the discussions. I have. I answered a call for
volunteers, and am now a reviewer for its publications. There are two
refereed venues. One is for commentary pieces on higher education. So far,
contributors have been well-known academics such as Dee Fink. The other is
an on-line journal.
Currently, HETL has a call out for volunteers to expand its editorial and
review boards. Information can be found at the HETL portal (http://hetl.org).
While there, you can see that an option is to join with a paid membership
($60 per year).
I really like the give and take with profs from around the world. There
were over 450 comments on a thread about whether or not to be a Facebook
friend with a student.
You can find out more information about the group from the web site:
http://hetl.org
The OpenScout Tool Library is a social network of
individuals and collectives who are developing or using learning resources
and want to share their stories and resources from different countries.
The OpenScout Tool Library is currently hosting the activities of the
COLEARN community of research in collaborative learning and educational
technologies in the Portuguese language. This group is run by Alexandra
Okada (The Open University UK) and consists of learners, educators and
researchers from academic institutions in Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Their
interests focus on collaborative participation through social media,
colearning (collaborative open learning) using Open Educational Resources (OER),
Social Media and Web 2.0 research. There are 26 research groups from
Brazilian and Portugal universities - 115 people currently registered in the
Tool Library.
At the moment, this community is developing a book project called "Web 2.0:
Open Educational Resources in Learning and Professional Development". From
January to February 2012, three workshops will be run in the Tool Library
for improving OER skills: image, presentation and audio/visual material.
These collaborative activities and workshops aim at engaging people in
developing their skills and discussing concepts as well as preparing
themselves to be OER users who are able to produce, remix and share open
resources and open ideas.
The Chronicle's special report on Online Learning explores how calls for
quality control and assessment are reshaping online learning.
As online learning spreads throughout higher
education, so have calls for quality control and assessment. Accrediting
groups are scrambling to keep up, and Congress and government officials
continue to scrutinize the high student-loan default rates and aggressive
recruiting tactics of some for-profit, mostly online colleges. But the push
for accountability isn't coming just from outside. More colleges are looking
inward, conducting their own self-examinations into what works and what
doesn't.
Also in this year's report:
Strategies for teaching and doing research
online
Members of the U.S. military are taking online
courses while serving in Afghanistan
Community colleges are using online technology
to keep an eye on at-risk students and help them understand their own
learning style
The push to determine what students learn
online, not just how much time they spend in class
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
Screencasting ScreenCast from TechSmith is a leading storage/server alternative for your
Jing and Camtasia videos ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechSmith
Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech
product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by
the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t
seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of
the world.
So here goes: I love Dropbox.
Continued in article
October 22, 2011 reply from Amy Dunbar
I use
dropbox for my excel-based students projects. I create a dropbox folder for
each group, and then share the folder with the students. Each student is
expected to complete all three projects, but they can help each other.
Every student submits the first project but for the next two, each group
selects one project for final grading. When someone is stuck, I can quickly
open the project and see what is going on. To demonstrate how to use
dropbox, I ask a student in class to save a file to the dropbox and then the
class can see on the overhead the file showing up in my dropbox folder for
that group. I love it!
Heads up:
If two people are working on a file at the same time the file saves as a
conflicted file. So students have to be careful to save files with unique
names.
Amy Dunbar
UConn
October 26, 2011 reply from Lim.K.Teoh
SugarSync is also a good alternative that offers a
greater storage for free. Its unique advantage is that we don't have to
install any software to access the files.
Lim
October 22, 2011 reply from Rick Lillie
I read David Pogue's post
about Dropbox. I agree it is easy to use and is a great tool for file
sharing.
There are many software
programs and hosted collaboration services available (both free and for fee)
that focus on file sharing as a way to collaborate. But, file sharing is
just one aspect of collaborating with others on a project.
Dropbox is great for what
it does. There are alternatives that do much more than what Dropbox does.
For example, for the past few
years, I have used
Collanos Workplace as a way to collaborate
with students on independent study and group projects. Collanos is similar
to Groove Networks (now part of enterprise edition of Microsoft Office).
Collanos emphasizes organizing the project and workflow and includes many
options for communicating and incorporating other technology tools as needed
to meet project needs.
I've also used Collanos Workplace
to collaborate with colleagues on research projects. Recently, I've been
using a great online hosted collaboration service calledGlasscubes.
It's more intuitive than Collanos and shifts the
process to "the Cloud."
There are lots of tech
tools to use for research and classroom activities. The key is to find the
tool that "best fits" the needs of the project and the technology skills of
both students and instructor.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
A North Carolina State University physics professor
was honored today as one of three winners of the 2011 Harold W. McGraw, Jr.
Prize in Education. The professor, Robert Beichner, “has changed how
students learn in the science classroom” through the SCALE-UP project,
described as “an approach that uses digital technology combined with
innovative teaching approaches centered on hands-on activities and
round-table discussions.” More than 100 colleges have adopted the strategy.
The other two winners of the McGraw prize were cited for their work in
pre-K, elementary, and secondary education: Mitchel Resnick, professor of
learning research at the MIT Media Lab, and Julie Young, president of the
Florida Virtual School.
Now that a landmark study conducted by the Community College Research Center
at Columbia University has confirmed that students at two-year campuses perform
worse in online courses than in the face-to-face version, perhaps we can move on
the important question: What can we do about that?
Jensen Comment
Most of the performance inhibitors apply to onsite and well as online education,
but there are some things that can be done to improve online learning for many
students. The first task, in my opinion, is to determine if there are unique
learning disabilities that should be dealt with separately.
YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed
captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire
listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the
video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you
can even search inside the video. Here's an
an example of video that includes a transcript.
More than 100
colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu Many
universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting”
There are now
nearly 7,000 accounting education videos on YouTube, most of which are in very
basic accounting.
But there are nearly 150 videos in advanced accounting. There are nearly
70 videos on XBRL
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos
that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for
your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips
for video projects as well as free online communication tools.
My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of
work that they are now sharing with us
[September’s Teaching Carnival--and the
beginning of year five of the TC--is from Tonya Howe, Assistant Professor of
English at Marymount University. Tonya blogs at
Cerosia
and can be reached at thowe [at] Marymount [dot] edu
or @howet
on Twitter. ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching
Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent
thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find
previous carnivals on Teaching
[October’s Teaching Carnival was compiled by Delaney Kirk, a
management professor at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee.
You can reach her via
email or on
Twitter. Delaney is
both an educator and an edublogger--ask her a question or check out her tips
on teaching effectiveness at
Ask Dr. Kirk. This month she gathers tips on teaching, advice
to share with our students, ways to utilize technology in the classroom, and
suggestions for personal development, along with a challenge to write that
academic book you’ve been putting off. –Billie Hara]
Know of a blog post (perhaps your own) that should be included in the
next Teaching Carnival…?
Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of
your blog post, and/or
Tag your post in
Delicious (or
Diigo or other
bookmarking service) with teaching-carnival.
David Warlick reminds us that we need to
instill a learning
lifestyle in our students by creating a learning environment where
students can practice skills they are being taught.
And if you’ve been putting off writing that academic book or
dissertation, Charlotte Frost invites us all to participate
in the first
Academic
Book Writing Month challenge (tweet about it using hash tag #AcBoWriMo).
You can also join
NaNoWriMo to start
that novel you’ve been telling people you plan to write someday. Both
challenges begin on November 1st.
Know of a blog post (perhaps your own) that should be included in the
next Teaching Carnival…?
Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of
your blog post, and/or
Tag your post in
Delicious (or
Diigo
or other bookmarking service) with teaching-carnival.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Hurry, hurry, hurry. Step right up. See the most
amazing, most provocative, most edumacational teaching links on the
Interwebz. Don’t miss your chance to be wowed, amazed, professionally
developed and procrastinated! Step right this way!
Earlier Editions of Teaching Carnival in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
Type "Teaching Carnival" into the search box at
http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5
At the above site on April 1, 2011 I received the following message which I
don't think is an April Fools joke:
Unfortunately, Google has deprecated the use of the
Google SOAP Search API which this tool uses. We are hoping to
update the code to use a different solution in the future. Thank
you for your patience.
What is most remarkable is that you experimented with this virtual course for
on-campus students in 1998 when course delivery software like Blackboard, Moodle,
Camtasia, and YouTube had not yet been invented. Alternatives in the 1990s are
discussed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
I suspect you used ToolBook back in those days. ToolBook can still be used for
such purposes, but TookBook is vastly different in 2011 relative to 1998 and
rarely, if ever, used extensively by accounting faculty in 2011. You and I,
however, were heavy ToolBook users in the roaring 1990s.
Today virtual courses often use several types of pedagogy to choose from.
Hybrid Delivery with instant messaging, video, and student
interaction modules ---
Amy Dunbar commenced with mostly computer delivery but, having discovered
the advantages of Camtasia, has added more and more video modules to her
distance education tax courses ---
http://users.business.uconn.edu/adunbar/videos/GoogleDocs/GoogleDocs.html
.
.
“It is my impression that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of
it. It is not only as Dostoevsky put it that 'taking a new step,
uttering a new word is what people fear most.' Even in slight things the
experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.”
--Eric Hoffer, Between The Devil And The Dragon
I tried the new in fall 2009,
teaching with student blogs, (look in sidebar
and scroll down) out in the open where anyone who wanted to could see
what the students were producing. The blogging wasn’t new for me. I’d
been
doing that for almost five years. Having
students blog was a different matter. I had no experience in getting
them to overcome their anxieties, relaxing in writing online, learning
to trust one another that way. Normally I believe what’s good for the
goose is good for the gander. If I could blog comfortably and get
something from that, so could they. On reflection, however, I was very
gentle with myself when I started to blog. As an experiment to prove to
myself whether I could do it, for three full weeks I made at least one
post a day, 500 to 600 words, a couple of times 1,100 to 1,200 words. I
didn’t tell a soul I was doing this. There was no pressure on me to keep
it up. It was out in the open, yet nobody seemed to be watching. After
those three weeks I felt ready. In the teaching, however, at best I
could ask the students to blog once a week. I gave the students weekly
prompts on the readings or to follow up on class discussion. (See the
class calendar for fall 2009. The
prompts are in the Friday afternoon entries.) If I let them blog quietly
to get comfortable as I had done, the entire semester would expire
before they were ready to go public. There seemed no alternative but to
have them plunge in.
The uncertainty about how best to assist the
students once they had taken the plunge created an important symmetry
between the students and me; we both were to learn about how to do this
well, often by first doing it less well. Though it was an inadvertent
consequence, of all my teaching over the past 30 years I believe this
course came closest to emulating the
Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education
by Chickering and Gamson. I learned to comment on
the student posts, not with some pre-thought-through response based on
what I anticipated they’d write, but rather to react to where they
appeared to be in their own thinking. (This
post provides a typical example. The student
introduced time management as a theme. My comment aimed to make her
think more about time management.) As natural as that is to do in
ordinary conversation, I had never done it before when evaluating
student work. Indeed, I didn’t think of these comments as evaluation at
all. I thought of them as response. In the normal course of my
non-teaching work I respond to colleagues all the time and they respond
to me. This form of online interaction in the class made it more like
the rest of my interactions at work.
Most of the students were quite awkward in
their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on
"Designing for Effective Change" for the
Honors Program,
but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the
students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I
can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting
prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their
approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their
other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their
choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also
gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could
create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early
writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the
writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other
readers if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they
were not used to hearing. So it took a while for them to believe it was
true. In several instances they tried it out only after being
frustrating with the results from their usual approach. This,
as Ken Bain teaches us,
is how students learn on a fundamental level.
I'm crustier now than I was as a younger
faculty member. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to deal with the
emotion that underlies giving feedback to students when that feedback is
less than entirely complimentary to them. Yet given their awkward early
attempts at writing posts that’s exactly what honest response demanded.
It’s here where having the postings and the comments out in the open so
all can see is so important, before the class has become a community,
before the students have made up their minds about what they think about
this blogging stuff. Though both the writing and the response are highly
subjective, of necessity, it is equally
important for the process to be fair. How can
a student who receives critical comments judge those comments to be
fitting and appropriate, rather than an example of the insensitive
instructor picking on the hapless student? Perhaps a very mature student
can discern this even-handedly from the comments themselves and a
self-critique of the original post. I believe most students benefit by
reading the posts of their classmates, making their own judgments about
those writings and then seeing the instructor’s comments, finally making
a subsequent determination as to whether those comments seem appropriate
and helpful for the student in reconsidering the writing.
A positive feedback loop can be created by this
process. The commenting, more than any other activity the instructor
engages in, demonstrates the instructor’s commitment to the course and
to the students. In turn the students, learning to appreciate the value
of the comments, start to push themselves in the writing. Their learning
is encouraged this way. Further, since the blogging is not a competition
between the students and their classmates, those who like getting
comments begin to comment on the posts of other students. The elements
of the community that the class can become are found in this activity.
Since on a daily basis I use blogs and blog
readers in my regular work, one of the original reasons for me taking
this approach rather than use the campus learning management system was
simply that I thought it would be more convenient for me. Also, given my
job as a learning technology administrator, I went into the course with
some thought that I might showcase the work afterward. Openness is
clearly better for that. However in retrospect neither of these is
primary. The main reason to be open is to set a good tone for the class.
We want ideas to emerge and not remain concealed.
Yet there remains one troubling element:
student privacy. Is open blogging this way consistent with
FERPA? As best as I’ve been able to determine,
it is as long as students “opt in.” (I did give students the
alternatives of writing in the class LMS site or writing in the class
wiki site. No student opted for those.) My experience suggests, however,
that is not quite sufficient. If most students opt in, peer pressure may
drive others to opt in as well. More importantly, however, students
choose to opt in when they are largely ignorant of the consequences.
Might they feel regret after they better understand what the blogging is
all about?
Video: Internet Real Time Communication and Collaboration (1
hour, 20 minutes) Google Wave ---
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the
web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost
instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos,
videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open
APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build
extensions that work inside waves.
Developer Preview ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
A virtual learning environment (VLE) is a software
system designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting,
as distinct from a Managed Learning Environment, (MLE) where the focus is on
management. A VLE will normally work over the Internet and provide a
collection of tools such as those for assessment (particularly of types that
can be marked automatically, such as multiple choice), communication,
uploading of content, return of students' work, peer assessment,
administration of student groups, collecting and organizing student grades,
questionnaires, tracking tools, etc. New features in these systems include
wikis, blogs, RSS and 3D virtual learning spaces.
While originally created for distance education,
VLEs are now most often used to supplement traditional face to face
classroom activities, commonly known as Blended Learning. These systems
usually run on servers, to serve the course to students Multimedia and/or
web pages.
In 'Virtually There', a book and DVD pack
distributed freely to schools by the Yorkshire and Humber Grid for Learning
Foundation (YHGfL), Professor Stephen Heppell writes in the foreword:
"Learning is breaking out of the narrow boxes that it was trapped in during
the 20th century; teachers' professionalism, reflection and ingenuity are
leading learning to places that genuinely excite this new generation of
connected young school students - and their teachers too. VLEs are helping
to make sure that their learning is not confined to a particular building,
or restricted to any single location or moment."
Google argues that its new Google Wave system could
replace e-mail by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document
sharing into one seamless communication interface. But some college
professors and administrators are more excited about Wave's potential to be
a course-management-system killer.
"Just from the initial look I think it will have
all the features (and then some) for an all-in-one software platform for the
classroom and beyond," wrote Steve Bragaw, a professor of American politics
at Sweet Briar College, on his blog last week.
Mr. Bragaw admits he hasn't used Google Wave
himself -- so far the company has only granted about 100,000 beta testers
access to the system. Each of those users is allowed to invite about eight
friends (who can each invite eight more), so the party is slowly growing
louder while many are left outside waiting behind a virtual velvet rope. But
Google has posted an hour-long video demonstration of the system that drew
quite a buzz when it was unveiled in May. That has sparked speculation of
how Wave might be used.
Greg Smith, chief technology officer at George Fox
University, did manage to snag an invitation to try Wave, and he too says it
could become a kind of online classroom.
That probably won't happen anytime soon, though.
"Wave is truly a pilot right now, and it's probably a year away from being
ready for prime time," he said, noting that Wave eats up bandwidth while it
is running. Google will probably take its time letting everyone in, he said,
so that it can work out the kinks.
And even if some professors eventually use Wave to
collaborate with students, colleges will likely continue to install
course-management systems so they know they have core systems they can count
on, said Mr. Smith.
Then again, hundreds of colleges already rely on
Google for campus e-mail and collaborative tools, through a free service the
company offers called Google Apps Education Edition. Could a move to Google
as course-management system provider be next?
To my knowledge there is no equivalent journal for undergraduate accounting
research. However, accountants can and do on occasion participate in the
National Conferences of Undergraduate Research --- http://www.ncur.org/
Nearly 20 years ago Trinity University hosted the annual NCUR conference.
There were no accounting student submissions to be refereed that year and in
most years. We were told that accounting students rarely contribute submissions.
So I wrote a paper about this with the two Trinity University faculty members
who coordinated the NCUR presentations on Trinity's campus that year.
"Undergraduate Student Research Programs: Are They as Viable for
Accounting as They are in Science, Humanities, and Other Business Disciplines?"
by Robert E. Jensen, Peter A. French and Kim R. Robertson, Critical Perspectives on Accounting , Volume
3, 1992, 337-357.
James Irving's Working Paper entitled "Integrating
Academic Research into an Undergraduate Accounting Course"
College of William and Mary, January 2010
ABSTRACT:
This paper describes my experience incorporating academic research into the
curriculum of an undergraduate accounting course. This research-focused
curriculum was developed in response to a series of reports published
earlier in the decade which expressed significant concern over the expected
future shortage of doctoral faculty in accounting. It was also motivated by
prior research studies which find that students engaging in undergraduate
research are more likely to pursue graduate study and to achieve graduate
school success. The research-focused curriculum is divided into two
complementary phases. First, throughout the semester, students read and
critique excerpts from accounting journal articles related to the course
topics. Second, students acquire and use specific research skills to
complete a formal academic paper and present their results in a setting
intended to simulate a research workshop. Results from a survey created to
assess the research experience show that 96 percent of students responded
that it substantially improved their level of knowledge, skill, and
abilities related to conducting research. Individual cases of students who
follow this initial research opportunity with a deeper research experience
are also discussed. Finally, I supply instructional tools for faculty who
might desire to implement a similar program.
I recently completed the
first draft of a paper which describes my experience integrating research
into an undergraduate accounting course. Given your prolific and insightful
contributions to accounting scholarship, education, etc. -- I am a loyal
follower of your website and your commentary within the AAA Commons -- I am
wondering if you might have an interest in reading it (I also cite a 1992
paper published in Critical Perspectives in Accounting for which you were a
coauthor).
The paper is attached with
this note. Any thoughts you have about it would be greatly appreciated.
I posted the paper to my SSRN
page and it is available at the following link:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1537682 . I appreciate your willingness to read
and think about the paper.
Jim
January 18, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Jim,
I’ve given your paper a cursory
overview and have a few comments that might be of interest.
You’ve overcome much of the
negativism about why accounting students tend not to participate in
the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). Thank you
for citing our old paper.
French, P., R. Jensen, and K. Robertson. 1992. Undergraduate student
research programs:re they as viable for accounting as they are in
science and humanities?"Critical
Perspectives on Accounting3 (December):
337-357. ---
Click Here
Abstract
This paper reviews a recent thrust in academia to stimulate more
undergraduate research in the USA, including a rapidly growing
annual conference. The paper also describes programs in which
significant foundation grants have been received to fund
undergraduate research projects in the sciences and humanities.
In particular, selected humanities students working in teams in
a new “Philosophy Lab” are allowed to embark on long-term
research projects of their own choosing. Several completed
projects are briefly reviewed in this paper.
In April 1989,
Trinity University hosted the Third National Conference on
Undergraduate Research (NCUR) and purposely expanded the scope
of the conference to include a broad range of disciplines. At
this conference, 632 papers and posters were presented
representing the research activities of 873 undergraduate
students from 163 institutions. About 40% of the papers were
outside the natural sciences and included research in music and
literature. Only 13 of those papers were in the area of business
administration; none were even submitted by accounting students.
In 1990 at Union College, 791 papers were presented; none were
submitted by accountants. In 1991 at Cal Tech, the first
accounting paper appeared as one of 853 papers presented.
This paper
suggests a number of obstacles to stimulating and encouraging
accounting undergraduates to embark on research endeavours.
These impediments are somewhat unique to accounting, and it
appears that accounting education programs are lagging in what
is being done to break down obstacles in science, pre-med,
engineering, humanities, etc. This paper proposes how to
overcome these obstacles in accounting. One of the anticipated
benefits of accounting student research, apart from the
educational and creative value, is the attraction of more and
better students seeking creativity opportunities in addition to
rote learning of CPA exam requirements. This, in part, might
help to counter industry complaints that top students are being
turned away from accounting careers nationwide.
In particular you seem to have picked up on our
suggestions in the third paragraph above and seemed to be breaking
new ground in undergraduate accounting education.
I am truly amazed by you're
having success when forcing undergraduate students to actually
conduct research in new knowledge.
Please keep up the good work and maintain your
enthusiasm.
1
Firstly, I would suggest that you focus on the topic of replication
as well when you have your students write commentaries on published
academic accounting research ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
I certainly would not expect intermediate
accounting students to attempt a replication effort. But it should
be very worthwhile to introduce them to the problem of lack of
replication and authentication of accountancy analytic and empirical
research.
2
Secondly, the two papers you focus on are very old and were never
replicated.. Challenges to both papers are private and in some cases
failed replication attempts, but those challenges were not published
and came to me only by word of mouth. It is very difficult to find
replications of empirical research in accounting, but I suggest that
you at least focus on some papers that have some controversy and are
extended in some way.
For example, consider the controversial paper:
"Costs of Equity and Earnings Attributes," by Jennifer Francis, Ryan
LaFond, Per M. Olsson and Katherine Schipper ,The Accounting
Review, Vol. 79, No. 4 2004 pp. 967–1010.
Also see
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/179269527.html
Then consider
"Is Accruals Quality a Priced Risk Factor?" by John E. Core, Wayne
R. Guay, and Rodrigo S. Verdi, SSRN, December 2007 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=911587
This paper was also published in JAE in 2007 or 2008.
Thanks to Steve Kachelmeier for pointing this controversy (on
whether information quality (measured as the noise in accounting
accruals) is priced in the cost of equity capital) out to me.
It might be better for your students to see how
accounting researchers should attempt replications as illustrated
above than to merely accepted published accounting research papers
as truth unchallenged.
3.
Have your students attempt critical thinking with regards to
mathematical analytics in "Plato's Cave" ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#Analytics
This is a great exercise that attempts to make them focus on
underlying assumptions.
4.
In Exhibit 1 I recommend adding a section on critical thinking about
underlying assumptions in the study. In particular, have your
students focus on internal versus external validity ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#SocialScience .
5.
I suggest that you set up a hive at the AAA Commons for
Undergraduate Research Projects and Commentaries. Then post your own
items in this hive and repeatedly invite professors and students
from around the world to add to this hive.
The September issue of ELEARN
MAGAZINE has two articles from long-time online teaching practitioners that
feature practical advice for new online instructors:
eLearn Magazine is published
by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.), a not-for-profit
educational association serving those who work, teach, and learn in the
various computing-related fields. For more information, contact: eLearn
magazine, eLearn Magazine ACM, 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY
10121-07016 USA;
Web:
http://www.elearnmag.com/
Why the Research Paper Isn't Working
I’m in love with this idea. I have long agreed with
Richard Larson who wrote way back in 1982that the
research paper as taught in college is an artificial genre, one that works at
cross-purposes to actually developing respect for evidence-based reasoning, a
measured appreciation for negotiating ideas that are in conflict, or original
thought. I’m honestly a bit amazed that anyone was surprised by the results of
the
Citation Projectstudy, also presented at the
conference, that found students “skimming
the surface.” This is a problem that existed long
before the Internet, but has only grown more obvious as students are asked to do
more documented expository writing than ever before. (This finding was published
in
a national studypublished in the CCCC's journal in
2008; subscription required.)
Barbara Fister, "Why the Research Paper Isn't Working," Inside Higher Ed,
April 12, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish
Teaching online is no different in many respects with respect to
fundamental differences in pedagogy and student aptitudes and abilities.
Examples include the following:
Degree of Socratic (self learning) required, including all the way to
BAM, a metacognitive approach well-suited to online learning) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Degree of use of cases vs. lectures (cases can be taught synchronously
or asynchronously)
In Stanford University's successful ADEPT Masters of Engineering online
program, virtually all the learning is from videos and assigned readings.
But admission requirements are so lofty in this program these students need
little live help from the instructor. They're exceptionally prepared to take
these courses and are highly motivated to do so. This approach is not likely
to work for students with wide-ranging aptitudes and motivations and
academic backgrounds.
Executive MBA and doctoral courses courses typically are improved with
close bonding among students either onsite or online.
Teaching online involves such a wide range of alternatives, that there is
no one set of resources that satisfies each pedagogy and style of
teaching/learning. Differences include such things as the following:
Synchronous live lecture (WebCam or broadcast video) vs. asynchronous
pre-recorded lectures (usually video)
Synchronous in-class interactions heard by all students online vs. no
synchronous interactions.
Instant messaging vs. traditional email communications
One important thing to do is to study how some existing online courses are
taught successfully. Some great places to search for those illustrations include
the following:
An outstanding insight from a mature student's perspective in an online
University of Phoenix Course on Governmental/Fund Accounting ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/
This is a great audio interview with this very perceptive student (actually
a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education)!
This course was very challenging, more so than she expected in the
beginning.
Learn from my hero Amy Dunbar's advice after years of teaching tax
online with instant messaging (I don't know how she bore up for all these
years of such intense communications). Amy's a star at any type of teaching
imaginable ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm
There are some audio summaries of other leading accounting educators at
the following sites:
Bob Jensen's personal advice would be to see how much of this course you
can teach on video using Camtasia. Even if you don't use the Camtasia videos in
each online class, those videos can be invaluable for students to study
asynchronously ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Video
Over the last few years, my wife and I have become
big fans of the video classes produced by The Teaching Company. Two or three
times per week, we will watch a 30 or 45-minute video lecture on art or
literature or history or religion prepared by a college teacher. I am amazed
by how much I now know about topics that once were totally foreign to me.
In watching these videos, I am occasionally
reminded of a question that comes up in colleges now and then: Do we need
live instructors? Why don’t we find the very best college teachers and film
their classes? Then, put those videos up on the Internet and everyone (or,
at least, our students) can learn the material without the need of a
classroom or a teacher.
Well, the easy answer to that query is that a
college education has to be more than the conveyance of information to a
passive student taking notes. So, doesn’t that automatically raise the next
question that we need to address as teachers: What are we adding in our
classes that goes beyond the conveyance of information to a passive student?
If the answer is nothing, then maybe we should all be replaced by videos.
As you get ready for the fall semester, ponder how
you are going to add value to your students. --“I’m going to tell them some
interesting stories.” -- A video can tell them hundreds of interesting
stories. --“I’m going to tell them about the history of my discipline.” -- A
video can tell them about the history of your discipline. --“I’m going to
walk them step-by-step through the essential core of the disciple.” - A
video can walk students through the essential core of the discipline.
Those are all important to a class but they could
just as easily be done by a person on video. What are you going to do this
coming semester in your classes that a video could not do?
We live in a time when too many people believed
that they could not be replaced until they were replaced. My assumption is
that if you add real value to a process, you become essential. Otherwise,
someone will eventually catch on that you can be replaced.
There are many, many ways that teachers add value
to the students in their classes. How will you do that in the coming fall?
What will you do that couldn’t be replaced by a video?
Jensen Comment
Believe it or not, I think the most important thing we can add is to be live
role models day-to-day for our students. We can be role models regarding what it
means to be professionally competent (without necessarily awing them in every
class). We can be role models for such other things in life as empathy, caring,
ethics, human frailty, and yes even fashion.
Fashion?
Professors who show up in class wearing T-shirts, jeans, and open toe sandals
really turn me off. Perhaps that's because I'm an old farm boy who, at one time,
was awed by male professionals who wore white shirts and neckties to work. Our
most scruffy professors will spiff up when applying for a job or make a speech
at a local Rotary Club luncheon. What makes our students less important
day-to-day?
But the most important thing we add is to awe our students with both our
professional competence combined with professional honesty in admitting things
we cannot answer. Watching a talking head on television can be really
educational, but having a live teacher fumble about out loud while trying to
reason out a brilliant answer can be even more educational (even if it is more
time consuming). Teachers demonstrate how real-world thinking takes us down
blind alleys and stumbling blocks of dumb ideas. Students leave our courses with
a better understanding of what a non-perfect world of reasoning is really like
(as long as our stumbling really gets eventually us to the best answers).
The latest exchange of AECM messaging regarding the question raised by Tom
Selling about sales discounts provides a perfect example of great teachers
stumbling about trying to find the best answer. If Carla had been the first to
respond it would've been disappointing to the AECM learning process.
What is sad in teaching, as illustrated by many lurkers on the AECM, is
the hesitancy of some teachers to be fearful of subjecting their incomplete or
flawed reasoning to students and peers. The classic case is the teacher who
delivers only canned lectures and cases in which he or she only delivers perfect
reasoning that are much like prepared answers being read from a teleprompter.
This can make students fearful that they can never be as smart as their teachers
who always seem to know the best answers.
I love teachers who have the confidence to even provide answers they know are
wrong and then testing how students discover the errors and are willing to point
them out. This, by the way, is part of the BAM pedagogy ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Probably the best teaching lies in asking the best questions without telling or
even knowing the best answers.
Question
Why do colleges have to identify each of their online students without the same
requirement imposed on onsite students?
My daughter took chemistry in a class of 600 students. They never carded her for
exams at the University of Texas?
How can you tell if an onsite or online student has not outsourced taking an
entire course with a fake ID? (see Comment 1 below) I know of an outsourcing case like this from years ago when I was an
undergraduate student, because I got the initial offer to take the course for
$500.
Fake IDs are easy to fabricate today on a computer. Just change the name and
student number on your own ID or change the picture and put the fake ID in
laminated plastic.
Online there's a simple way to authenticate honesty online. One way is to
have a respected person sign an attestation form. In 19th Century England the
Village Vicar signed off on submissions of correspondence course takers. There
are also a lot of
Sylvan Centers throughout the U.S. that will administer examinations.
To comply with the newly reauthorized
Higher Education Act, colleges have to verify the
identity of each of their online students.
Several tools can help them do that, including the
Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree
view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors
watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
Now colleges have a new option to show the
government that they’ll catch cheating in distance education. Acxiom
Corporation and Moodlerooms announced this month that they have integrated
the former’s identity-verification system, called FactCheck-X, into the
latter’s free, open-source course-management system, known as Moodle.
“The need to know that the student taking a test
online is in fact the actual one enrolled in the class continues to be a
concern for all distance-education programs,” Martin Knott, chief executive
of Moodlerooms, said in a
written statement.
FactCheck-X, which authenticates many
online-banking transactions, requires test takers to answer detailed,
personal “challenge” questions. The information comes from a variety of
databases, and the company uses it to ask for old addresses, for example, or
previous employers.
The new tool requires no hardware and operates
within the Moodle environment. Colleges themselves control how frequently
students are asked to verify their identities, Acxiom says, and because
institutions don’t have to release information about students, the system
fully complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Comments
Where’s the concern about whether that student
in the large course on campus is who he says he is? How many schools
really card students before exams are given in those courses?
— Steve Foerster Nov 11, 05:52 PM
My sentiments exactly, Steve! I am surprised
at the shift in thinking that somehow online students are more likely to
cheat than those who appear for exams onsite!
— Born to teach Nov 11, 06:03 PM
I’ve been teaching online for five years, and
I have found cheating to be much more prevalent in the online
environment. Most institutions use proctors for high stakes testing, and
student identification is presented. For purely online initiatives,
however, it simply doesn’t make sense to ask these students to come to
campus for assessments. No LMS currently
addresses this legislation to my knowledge, so it is interesting to
consider the options for compliance.
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers
(and took two online courses for him) The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's
diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.
Question
What's the value of watching somebody send you an email message?
Answer
There may be some security and subtle communication advantages, but there's a
huge cost-benefit consideration. Is it worth valuable bandwidth costs to
transmit all that video of talking heads and hands? I certainly hope that most
of us do not jump into this technology "head" (get it?) first.
One huge possible benefits might be in distance
education. If a student in sending back test answers via email, it could add a
lot to the integrity of the testing process to watch the student over this new
video and audio channel from Google.
Google Inc. is introducing new tools that will
convert its free e-mail service into a video and audio channel for people
who want to see and hear each other while they communicate.
Activating the features, introduced Tuesday, will
require a free piece of software as well as a Webcam, which are becoming
more commonplace as computer manufacturers embed video equipment into
laptops.
Once the additional software is installed, Gmail
users will be given the option to see and hear each other without leaving
the e-mail application.
The video feature will work only if all the
participants have Gmail accounts. It's supposed to be compatible with
computers running the Windows operating system or Apple Inc.'s Mac
computers.
Google, the Internet's search leader, has been
adding more bells and whistles to Gmail as part of its effort to gain ground
on the longtime leaders in free e-mail, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
Video chatting has long been available through the
instant messaging services offered by Yahoo and Microsoft, but the feature
isn't available in their free e-mail applications.
Although Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has
been making strides since it began welcoming all comers to Gmail early last
year, it remains a distant third with nearly 113 million worldwide users
through September -- a 34 percent increase from the previous year, according
to comScore Inc.
Microsoft's e-mail services boasted 283 million
worldwide users, up 13 percent from the previous year, while Yahoo was a
close second at 274 million, an 8 percent gain, comScore said.
I'd like to suggest another alternative. Here at
UMUC, we hire adjunct faculty to teach our online classes. Every new hire is
required to pass a 5 week online training class which focuses on the
pedagogy of online teaching. There is no charge for the class, and afterward
you are okay to teach for us online. In your case, you would have gotten the
education you are seeking, as well as being able to teach for us.
Distance Education.org or DistanceEducation.Org is a Great Helper Site
Ben Pheiffer in San Antonio forwarded this link to a terrific listing (with
pricing estimates) of online training and education degree programs and courses
from respectable universities ---
http://www.distance-education.org/Courses/
Both graduate and undergraduate degree programs are listed as well as training
courses (some free).
Onsite and Online College Directory by State in the U.S. ---
http://www.college-scholarships.com/index.html#collegestate Always investigate the credibility of
any college you're interested in before assuming all college degrees are
accepted for employment and further study.
This has not exactly been a season of peace, love
and harmony on the higher education technology landscape. A
patent fight has broken out among major developers
of course management systems. Academic publishers and university officials
are warring over
open access to federally sponsored research. And
textbook makers are taking a pounding for — among other things — the ways in
which digital enhancements are running up the prices of their products.
In that context, many may be heartened by the
announcement later today at the Educause meeting in Dallas that three dozen
academic publishers, providers of learning management software, and others
have agreed on a common, open standard that will make it possible to move
digital content into and out of widely divergent online education systems
without expensive and time consuming reengineering. The agreement by the
diverse group of publishers and software companies, who compete intensely
with one another, is being heralded as an important breakthrough that could
expand the array of digital content available to professors and students and
make it easier for colleges to switch among makers of learning systems.
Of course, that’s only if the new standard, known
as the
“Common Cartridge,” becomes widely adopted, which
is always the question with developments deemed to be potential
technological advances.
Many observers believe this one has promise,
especially because so many of the key players have been involved in it.
Working through the IMS Global Learning Consortium, leading publishers like
Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill Education and course-management system
makers such as
Blackboard,
ANGEL Learning
and open-source
Sakai have worked to
develop the technical specifications for the common cartridge, and all of
them have vowed to begin incorporating the new standard into their products
by next spring — except Blackboard, which says it will do so eventually, but
has not set a timeline for when.
What exactly is the Common Cartridge? In lay terms,
it is a set of specifications and standards, commonly agreed to by an IMS
working group, that would allow digitally produced content — supplements to
textbooks such as assessments or secondary readings, say, or
faculty-produced course add-ons like discussion groups — to “play,” or
appear, the same in any course management system, from proprietary ones like
Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn to open source systems like Moodle and
Sakai.
“It is essentially a common ‘container,’ so you can
import it and load it and have it look similar when you get it inside” your
local course system, says Ray Henderson, chief products officer at ANGEL,
who helped conceive of the idea when he was president of the digital
publishing unit at Pearson.
The Common Cartridge approach is designed to deal
with two major issues: (1) the significant cost and time that publishers now
must spend (or others, if the costs are passed along) to produce the
material they produce for multiple, differing learning management systems,
and (2) the inability to move courses produced in one course platform to
another, which makes it difficult for professors to move their courses from
one college to another and for campuses to consider switching course
management providers.
The clearest and surest upside of the new standard,
most observers agree, is that it could help lower publishers’ production
costs and, in turn, allow them to focus their energies on producing more and
better content. David O’Connor, senior vice president for product
development at Pearson Education’s core technology group, says his company
and other major publishers spend “many hundreds of thousands of dollars a
year effectively moving content around” so that ancillary material for
textbooks can work in multiple course management systems.
Because Blackboard and Web CT together own in the
neighborhood of 75 percent of the course management market, Pearson and
other publishers produce virtually all of their materials to work in those
proprietary systems. Materials are typically produced on demand for smaller
players like ANGEL, Desire2Learn and Sakai, and it is even harder to find
usable materials for colleges’ homemade systems. While big publishers such
as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have sizable media groups that can, when they
choose to, spend what’s necessary to modify digital content for selected
textbooks, “small publishers often have to say no,” O’Connor says. As a
result, “there are just fewer options for people who aren’t using Blackboard
and WebCT, and more hurdles to getting it.”
Supporters hope that adoption of the common
cartridge will allow publishers to spend less time and money adapting one
textbook’s digital content for multiple course platforms and more time
producing more and better content. “This should have the result of
broadening choice in content to institutions,” says Catherine Burdt, an
analyst at Eduventures, an education research firm. “Colleges would no
longer be limited to the content that’s supported by their LMS platform, but
could now go out and choose the best content that aligns with what’s
happening in their curriculum.”
Less clear is how successful the effort will be at
improving the portability of course materials from one learning management
system to another. If all the major providers introduce “export capability,”
there is significant promise, says Michael Feldstein, who writes the blog
e-Literate and is
assistant director of the State University of New York Learning Network.
“This has the potential to be one of the most important standards to come
out in a while, particularly for faculty,” says Feldstein, who notes that
his comments here represent his own views, not SUNY’s. “It would become much
easier for them to take rich course content and course designs and migrate
them from one system to another with far less pain.”
But while easier transferability would obviously
benefit the smaller players in the course management market — and ANGEL and
Sakai plan to announce today that their systems will soon allow professors
to create Common Cartridges for export out of their systems — such a system
would only take off if the dominant player in the market, the combined
Blackboard/WebCT, eventually does the same. “I’m not sure how excited
Blackboard would be about making it easier for faculty to migrate out of
their product and into one of their competitors,” says Feldstein.
Chris Vento, senior vice president of technology
and product development at Blackboard, was a leading proponent of the IMS
Common Cartridge concept when he was a leading official at WebCT before last
year’s merger. In an interview, he acknowledged the question lots of others
are asking: “What’s in it for Blackboard? Why wouldn’t you just lock up the
format and force everybody to use it?” His answer, he says, is that by
helping the entire industry, he says, the project cannot help but benefit
its biggest player, too.
“This will enable publishers to really do the best
job of producing their content, making it richer and better for students and
faculty, and more lucrative for publishers from the business perspective,”
says Vento. “Anything we can do to enable that content to be built, and more
of it and better quality, the more lucrative it is eventually for us.”
Blackboard is fully behind the project, Vento says.
Having endorsed the Common Cartridge charter, Blackboard has also committed
to incorporating the new standard into its products, and that Blackboard
intends to make export of course materials possible out of its platform.
“Exactly how that maps to our product roadmap has not been finalized,” he
said, “but in the end, we’re all going to have to do this. It’s just a
question of when.” There will, he says, “be a lot of pressures to do this.”
That pressure is likely to be intensified because
of the public relations pounding Blackboard has taken among many in the
academic technology world because of its attempt to patent technology that
many people believe is fundamental to e-learning systems. O’Connor of
Pearson says he believes Blackboard could benefit from its involvement in
the Common Cartridge movement by being seen “as the dominant player, to be
someone supporting openness in the community.” He adds: “There is an
opportunity for them to mend some of the damage from the patent issue.”
Like virtually all technological advances — or
would-be ones — Common Cartridge’s success will ultimately rise and fall,
says Burdt of Eduventures, on whether Blackboard and others embrace it.
“Everything comes down to adoption,” she says. “The challenge with every
standard is the adoption model. Some are out the door too early. Some evolve
too early and are eclipsed by substitutes. For others, suppliers decide not
to support it for various reasons.”
Those behind the Common Cartridge believe it’s off
to a good start with the large number of disparate parties not only involved
in creating it, but already committing to incorporate it into their
offerings.
Yet even as they launch this standard, some of them
are already looking ahead to the next challenge. While the Common Cartridge,
if widely adopted, will allow for easier movement of digital course
materials into and out of course management systems, it does not ensure that
users will be able to do the same thing with third-party e-learning tools
(like subject-specific tutoring modules) that are not part of course
management systems, or with the next generation of tools that may emerge
down the road. For that, the same parties would have to reach a similar
agreement on a standard for “tool interoperability,” which is next on the
IMS agenda.
“This is only one step,” Pearson’s O’Connor says of
the Common Cartridge. But it is, he says, an important one.
"How do
instructors learn to teach online? What are their perceptions as they enter
this new learning environment for the first time?" To find out, Dianne
Conrad, assistant professor of adult education at the University of New
Brunswick, interviewed five instructors in a Canadian university who were
teaching online courses for the first time. Her interviews showed that the
instructors drew upon their fact-to-face teaching experience, but that they
"revealed very little awareness of issues of collaborative learning, of
learners' social presence, or of the role of community in online learning
environments." The details of Conrad's qualitative study are available in
"University Instructors' Reflections on Their First Online Teaching
Experiences" (JOURNAL OF ASYNCHRONOUS LEARNING NETWORKS, vol. 8, issue 2,
April 2004) at
http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v8n2/v8n2_conrad.asp.
The Journal of
Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) [ISSN 1092-8235] is an electronic
publication of The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C). Current and back issues are
available at
http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/.
For an account of
online teaching from a veteran instructor, see "Less is More: Designing
an Online Course" (DEOSNEWS, vol. 13, issue 4, April 2004;
http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/deos/deosnews/deosnews.asp)
by R. Thomas Berner, professor emeritus of journalism and American studies at
the Pennsylvania State University.
The report may be
beneficial for individuals who are involved in online learning developments in
healthcare education in the USA and other countries. The institutions visited
during the fellowship may find it useful to read own and others case studies,
to compare and reflect on the developments and implications on teaching and
learning in healthcare. The report may be useful for other institutions in the
USA, to add to the picture of diversity in online learning developments within
USA. .
I thought the following multimedia presentation may
be of interest to many on the list - The presentation itself was created
using Articulate's Presenter.
In "PCs in the Classroom & Open Book Exams" (UBIQUITY, vol. 6, issue 9,
March 15-22, 2005), Evan Golub asks and supplies some answers to questions
regarding open-book/open-note exams. When classroom computer use is allowed
and encouraged, how can instructors secure the open-book exam environment?
How can cheating be minimized when students are allowed Internet access
during open-book exams? Golub's suggested solutions are available online at
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html
Ubiquity is a free, Web-based publication of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to fostering critical
analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature,
constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology, practices, and
paradigms of the IT profession." For more information, contact: Ubiquity,
email: ubiquity@acm.org ; Web:
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/
For more information on the ACM, contact: ACM, One Astor Plaza, 1515
Broadway, New York, NY 10036, USA; tel: 800-342-6626 or 212-626-0500; Web:
http://www.acm.org/
NEW EDUCAUSE E-BOOK ON THE NET GENERATION
EDUCATING THE NET GENERATION, a new EDUCAUSE
e-book of essays edited by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger,
"explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as
teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and
curriculum." Essays include: "Technology and Learning Expectations of the
Net Generation;" "Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not Just the Cool New
Thing;" "Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations;" "Faculty
Development for the Net Generation;" and "Net Generation Students and
Libraries." The entire book is available online at no cost at
http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/
.
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission
is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of
information technology. For more information, contact: Educause, 4772 Walnut
Street, Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax:
303-440-0461; email:
info@educause.edu; Web:
http://www.educause.edu/
See also:
GROWING UP DIGITAL: THE RISE OF THE NET GENERATION
by Don Tapscott McGraw-Hill, 1999; ISBN: 0-07-063361-4
http://www.growingupdigital.com/
EFFECTIVE E-LEARNING DESIGN
"The unpredictability of the student context and
the mediated relationship with the student require careful attention by the
educational designer to details which might otherwise be managed by the
teacher at the time of instruction." In "Elements of Effective e-Learning
Design" (INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING,
March 2005) Andrew R. Brown and Bradley D. Voltz cover six elements of
effective design that can help create effective e-learning delivery. Drawing
upon examples from The Le@rning Federation, an initiative of state and
federal governments of Australia and New Zealand, they discuss lesson
planning, instructional design, creative writing, and software
specification. The paper is available online at
http://www.irrodl.org/content/v6.1/brown_voltz.html
International Review of Research in Open and
Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a free, refereed ejournal
published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open University. For more
information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing Editor; tel: 780-675-6810;
fax: 780-675-672; email:
irrodl@athabascau.ca
; Web:
http://www.irrodl.org/
The Le@rning Federation (TLF) is an "initiative
designed to create online curriculum materials and the necessary
infrastructure to ensure that teachers and students in Australia and New
Zealand can use these materials to widen and enhance their learning
experiences in the classroom." For more information, see
http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/
RECOMMENDED READING
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been
recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly
interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published
by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to
carolyn_kotlas@unc.ed u for possible
inclusion in this column.
Author Clark Aldrich recommends his new book:
LEARNING BY DOING: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO
SIMULATIONS, COMPUTER GAMES, AND PEDAGOGY IN E-LEARNING AND OTHER
EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES Wiley, April 2005 ISBN: 0-7879-7735-7 hardcover
$60.00 (US)
Description from Wiley website:
"Designed for learning professionals and drawing on
both game creators and instructional designers, Learning by Doing explains
how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of
educational simulation for the right situation. It covers simple approaches
that use basic or no technology through projects on the scale of computer
games and flight simulators. The book role models content as well, written
accessibly with humor, precision, interactivity, and lots of pictures. Many
will also find it a useful tool to improve communication between themselves
and their customers, employees, sponsors, and colleagues."
Aldrich is also author of SIMULATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF LEARNING: AN
INNOVATIVE (AND PERHAPS REVOLUTIONARY) APPROACH TO E-LEARNING. See
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787969621.html
for more information or to request an evaluation copy of this title.
Centra provides the most widely used
solution today for the delivery of online training across the enterprise.
Centra 7 enables you to bring employees, partners, and customers from around
the world together online in highly interactive virtual classes while greatly
reducing the travel, time, and expense of on-site training programs.
Solutions for the Entire Training
Process
More than just an online session, Centra 7 is a complete virtual class
solution that addresses the entire process of creating and managing your
entire training program - before, during, and after the "live"
session. Centra 7 for Virtual Classes integrates seamlessly into the workday
and supports or improves existing business processes. And Centra 7 provides
seamless integration with virtually all of today's leading Learning Management
Systems (LMS).
October 7, 2003 Messages from Jim
Borden and David Fordham
Just wanted to give a
second endorsement of Centra Symposium.
I actually got to
experience this interface from the student perspective a couple of years ago
when I took an online course through Wharton, and was quite impressed with its
set of features and its ease of use.
Jim Borden
Villanova University
----- Original
Message -----
From: "David
R. Fordham" <fordhadr@JMU.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 9:06 AM
Subject: Web-Based Course Structure
I teach an
Information Security course in our MBA program. And if you read to the
bottom of this treatise, you will find that I'm a believer in peer review of
the courses, but not necessarily what most people consider peer review!
We use a
combination of on-line teaching techniques, based on the appropriateness of
the material matching to individual learning technique.
For instance, there
is a lot of vocabulary, jargon, and other simplistic knowledge to be
"delivered". For this, we use Tegrity WebLearner, to record a
"talking head" lecture where most of the content is on PowerPoint
slides, interspersed with screen captures, document camera shots, slides,
tables, etc. Some of these we put on a CD which is distributed to the
student at the beginning of the course. Others we put on a server to be
downloaded and viewed asynchronously. Tegrity is so simple to use, I end up
recording a half-dozen "lectures" on spur of the moment (current
events) topics during the semester and delivering via the server. Tegrity
automatically makes three copies of each recording: 1 for broadband delivery
or CD copies, 1 for dialup, and one without the animated talking head to
deliver high quality audio over dialup lines.
For case work, we
use Centra Symposium. This is a synchronous "online meeting room".
We have a "classroom" for every week's class meeting, and we also
have "breakout rooms" where student groups can meet at their own
convenience. Centra offers amazing (astounding!) real-time audio
conferencing, and provides for synchronized PowerPoint slides, white board
for drawing, text chat box, simple signaling (hand raising, answers yes or
no, laughing icons, applause icons, etc.) all synchronized with the live
audio. The sessions (including the group breakout sessions) can be recorded
(including both audio and visual components) for later playback by those
students who for some reason miss the class meeting. The best thing about
Centra is that it works (it really does!) over DIALUP lines!
Additionally, we
make use of Blackboard/WebCT, mainly for archiving and storage of PDF
documents ("handouts", reference materials, etc.), digital drop
boxes for submission of assignments, and on-line gradebooks for students to
check their grades privately. Blackboard also greatly simplifies sending
emails to individuals and groups within the class roster, and provides a
one-stop access point for class announcements, assignments, web link
libraries, etc.
Regarding peer
review, our on-line MBA program has two faculty meetings per semester where
we go over what the professors are covering in their classes, each meeting
is devoted to two or three professors presenting their class outline, and
getting feedback from the others on how to better tie their courses
together. We have professorial breakout sessions, where three or four of us
will collaborate on developing a "Case", a vignette, which will
carry through a three or four course sequence, giving the students some
continuity across classes. We review each other's assignments and projects
and offer commentary, and then use what we learn to make our own course
material relevant to the others'. It is this "collaborative"
improvement of individual courses which has greatly improved our program. We
have experimented with collaborative teaching (two professors teaching their
two courses together, as one supercourse), and while some synergies have
been noted, the effect is not as dramatic as the effect from our knowing
what the other courses are covering and how they are covering it.
I personally
recommend this approach. We get together for half a day, spending an hour
for one professor to give a thumbnail of his/her course, including
assignments, another hour for another professor, followed by an hour of
discussion and comment, critique, and group collaboration/brainstorming. We
discuss everything from learning objectives of individual classes to the
mission of the program to the grading of individual student exercises. To
me, this is peer review at its finest.
David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University
There is also a facility called 'webex'
http://www.webex.com/
which allows online demos to be linked to telephone. Probably also a bit
expensive for the average educational institution.
I reside in New Zealand and was involved on telephone
conversations (I am blessed with two phone lines) while being offered
powerpoint and software demos on the internet. The interesting element from my
part is that the software linked the phone messages so that when I spoke a dot
appeared by my name on the internet connection (sorry, but I never cease to be
amazed by the technology), and it is always nice to be recognized as an
individual in one of these things.
Les Porter led the session (demonstrating Great
Plains) and there were participants from throughout the US and me - no
technical hitches as far as I can make out. Thankfully it worked out to be 10
in the morning here so it wasn't a problem.
147 PRACTICAL TIPS FOR TEACHING ONLINE
GROUPS: ESSENTIALS OF WEB-BASED EDUCATION, by Donald E.
Hanna, Michelle Glowacki-Dudka, and Simone Conceicao-Runlee [Overland Park, KS: Atwood
Publishing, 2000, ISBN: 189185934X]
Chapter
4: Beginning Instruction in the Online Course: Implementing the Course Design
108.
Create a space for learning
109.
Design strategies for assessing learners'
characteristics and building learners' self-knowledge
110.
Design strategies to introduce learners to each
other
111.
Use effective teaching strategies
112.
Gain agreement with the learners about rules,
norms, and procedures for discussion -- and do so from the start
113.
Use a free flowing and interactive content and
structure
114.
Develop team-building activities
115.
Share biographical information or stories
116.
Share course assignments
117.
Create a social space
118.
Involve learners in team projects
119.
Develop asynchronous group discussions
120.
Develop challenging problems
121.
Promote critical thinking
122.
Encourage students to evaluate information
123.
Encourage students to analyze information
124.
Encourage students to connect information
125.
Promote self-regulating learning
126.
Build collaborative skills
127.
Create a loose framework for exploring topics
128.
Create opportunities for learners to teach and
to facilitate discussions
129.
Add games and fun activities into the learning
mix
130.
Use existing software applications creatively
131.
Use case studies
132.
Use simulations as opportunities for learning
by doing
Use external communities, people, and resources
to build content knowledge
134.
Create opportunities for reflection on the
course, technology, content, and process
135.
Help your learners manage information
136.
Encourage substantive feedback from learners --
including yourself
137.
Motivate your learners to participate
138.
Give learners roles during discussions
139.
Make students facilitators
140.
Make students process observers
141.
Make students information net
workers/summarizers
142.
Consider online office hours
143.
Take advantage of opportunities for continuous
learning
144.
Read all you can about online learning
145.
Understand that you're not the only one who
feels overwhelmed once in a while
146.
Know that sometime, someday you'll struggle
with the technology
147.
Enjoy yourself!
Postscript:
Some Final Words
Ed Scribner reminded us about this article written about a decade ago.
"Using Internet Know-How to Plan How Students Will Know," by
Judi Harris, May 1993 in "Mining the Internet" column, The
Computing Teacher, May 1993 ---
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/mining/May93-TCT.html
Recently, I've sorted through my many files of
Internet-based activity ideas, and have found that they can be classified into
15 structural categories. I will present the categories here, with sample
project descriptions for each. I do this hoping that reading about these
activity types will help you to plan effective telecomputing explorations for
your students that are fully integrated into their curricularly-based courses of
study.
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education
released a report that looked at 12 years' worth of education studies, and
found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face
instruction.
The study, "An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A
Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," stated that “students
who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average,
than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face
instruction.”
Except for one article,
on this Web site,
you probably didn’t hear about it -- and neither did anyone else.
But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion.
I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report
showing that students in online learning environments performed worse,
there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut
down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses.
I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is
due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across
the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us
working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps
students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.
We know that online learning requires devout attention on the part of both
the professor and the student -- and a collaboration between the two -- in a
different way from that of a face-to-face classroom. These critical aspects
of online education are worth particular mention:
Greater student engagement: In an
online classroom, there is no back row and nowhere for students to hide.
Every student participates in class.
Increased faculty attention: In most
online classes, the faculty’s role is focused on mentoring students and
fostering discussion. Interestingly, many faculty members choose to
teach online because they want more student interaction.
Constant access: The Internet is open
24/7, so students can share ideas and “sit in class” whenever they have
time or when an idea strikes -- whether it be the dead of night or
during lunch. Online learning occurs on the student’s time, making it
more accessible, convenient, and attainable.
At Walden University, where
I am president, we have been holding ourselves accountable for years, as
have many other online universities, regarding assessment. All universities
must ensure that students are meeting program outcomes and learning what
they need for their jobs. To that end, universities should be better able to
demonstrate -- quantitatively and qualitatively -- the employability and
success of their students and graduates.
Recently, we examined the
successes of Walden graduates who are teachers in the Tacoma, Wash., public
school system, and found that students in Walden teachers’ classes tested
with higher literacy rates than did students taught by teachers who earned
their master’s from other universities. There could be many reasons for
this, but, especially in light of the U.S. Department of Education study, it
seems that online learning has contributed meaningfully to their becoming
better teachers.
In higher education, there
is still too much debate about how we are delivering content: Is it online
education, face-to-face teaching, or hybrid instruction? It’s time for us to
stop categorizing higher education by the medium of delivery and start
focusing on its impact and outcomes.
Recently, President Obama remarked, “I think there’s a possibility that
online education can provide, especially for people who are already in the
workforce and want to retrain, the chance to upgrade their skills without
having to quit their job.” As the U.S. Department of Education study
concluded, online education can do that and much more.
But Kaplan above ignores some of the dark side aspects of distance education
and education technology in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
The biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is that if distance education is done
correctly with intensive online communications, instructors soon become burned
out. In an effort to avoid burn out, much of the learning effectiveness is lost.
Hence the distance education paradox.
I've always believed that the
role of the teacher is one of FACILITATOR. My role in the classroom is
making it EASIER for information to move from one place to another - from
point A to point B. This could be from textbook to student, it could be
from the outside world to the student, from another student to the student,
from the student him or herself to that same student AND from teacher to
student (me to them). In defining the word 'teaching', I think many people
overemphasize the last transition that I mentioned, thinking that the
primary movement of information is from them(the teacher) to the students.
In fact, it constitutes a minority of total facilitated information flow in
a college classroom. I think this misunderstanding leads many to
underestimate the value of other sources in the education process other than
themselves. Online content is just one of many alternative sources.
Unfortunately, online formats do
allow certain professors to hide behind the electronic cloak and
politely excuse themselves from the equation, which greatly hurts the
student. Also, online formats can be fertile ground for professors who lack
not only the desire to 'teach' but the ability and thus become mere
administrators versus teachers.
I would
not say that out loud to the graduates of two principles of accounting
weed out courses year after year at Brigham Young University where
classes meet on relatively rare occasion for inspiration about accountancy
but not technical learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Try to
tell the graduates of Stanford University’s ADEPT Masters of Electrical
Engineering program that they had an easier time of it because the entire
program was online.
There’s
an interesting article entitled how researchers misconstrue causality:
Like
elaborately plumed birds … we preen and strut and display our t-values.”
That was Edward Leamer’s uncharitable description of his profession in 1983.
“Cause
and Effect: Instrumental variable help to isolate causal relationships, but
they can be taken too far,” The Economist, August 15-21, 20098 Page
68.
It is
often the case that distance education courses are taught by non-tenured
instructors, and non-tenured instructors may be easier with respect to
grading than tenured faculty because they are even more in need of strong
teaching evaluations --- so as to not lose their jobs. The problem may have
nothing whatsoever to do with online versus onsite education ---
ergo misconstrued causality.
I think
it’s very rewarding to look at grading in formal studies using the
same full-time faculty teaching sections of online versus onsite students.
By formal study, I mean using the same instructors, the same materials, and
essentially the same examinations. The major five-year, multimillion dollar
study that first caught my eye was the SCALE experiments on the campus of
the University of Illinois where 30 courses from various disciplines were
examined over a five year experiment.
Yes the
SCALE experiments showed that some students got higher grades online,
notably B students who became A students and C students who became A
students. The online pedagogy tended to have no effect on D and F students
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
But keep
in mind that in the SCALE experiments, the same instructor of a course was
grading both the online and onsite sections of the same course. The reason
was not likely to be that online sections were easier. The SCALE experiments
collected a lot of data pointing to more intense communications with
instructors and more efficient use of student’s time that is often wasted in
going to classes.
The
students in the experiment were full time on campus students, such that the
confounding problems of having adult part-time students was not a factor in
the SCALE experiments of online, asynchronous learning.
A
Statement About Why the SCALE Experiments Were Funded
ALN = Asynchronous Learning We are particularly interested in new
outcomes that may be possible through ALN. Asynchronous computer networks
have the potential toimprove contact
with faculty, perhaps making
self-paced learning a realizable goal for some off- and on-campus students.
For example, a motivated student could progress more rapidly toward a
degree. Students who are motivated but find they cannot keep up the pace,
may be able to slow down and take longer to complete a degree, and not just
drop out in frustration. So we are interested in what impact ALN will have
on outcomes such as time-to-degree and student retention. There are many
opportunities where ALN may contribute to another outcome: lowering the cost
of education, e.g., by naturally introducing new values for old measures
such as student-faculty ratios. A different kind of outcome for learners who
are juggling work and family responsibilities, would be to be able to earn a
degree or certification at home. This latter is a special focus for us.
Another
study that I love to point to was funded by the Chronicle of Higher
Education. Read about when one of the Chronicle’s senior editors
took a Governmental Accounting Course at the University of Phoenix during
which the instructor of the course had not idea that Goldie
Blumenstyk
was assessing how difficult or how easy the course was for students in
general. I think Goldie’s audio report of her experience is still available
from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Goldie came away from the
course exhausted.
The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered
distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's
written stories about
the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions
market themselves, and the demise of
the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed,
was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally
took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and
nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales
from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade --
in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/
·All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional
textbooks to purchase
·$1,600 fee for the course and materials
·Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and experience
in course content
·Instructor had good communications with students and between students
·Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of whom
were mature with full-time day jobs
·30% of grade from team projects
·Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized
by Goldie
·Goldie earned a 92 (A-)
·She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take
other courses if she had the time
·She considered the course to have a heavy
workload
The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released November 13,
2006, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering
provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of
engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers
---
http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm
On March 24, 2005,
an announcement was made in newspapers across the country, from the New
York Times1
to the San Francisco Chronicle,2
that a company3
had been founded to apply neuroscience research to achieve human-level
artificial intelligence. The reason the press release was so widely picked
up is that the man behind it was Jeff Hawkins, the brilliant inventor of the
PalmPilot, an invention that made him both wealthy and respected.4
You’d think from the news reports that the idea of
approaching the pursuit of artificial human-level intelligence by modeling
the brain was a novel one. Actually, a Web search for “computational
neuroscience” finds over a hundred thousand webpages and several
major research centers.5
At least two journals are devoted to the subject.6
Over 6,000 papers are available online. Amazon lists more than 50 books
about it. A Web search for “human brain project” finds more than
eighteen thousand matches.7
Many researchers think of modeling the human brain or
creating a “virtual” brain a feasible project, even if a “grand challenge.”8
In other words, the idea isn’t a new one.
Hawkins’ approach sounds simple. Create a machine
with artificial “senses” and then allow it to learn, build a model of its
world, see analogies, make predictions, solve problems, and give us their
solutions.9
This sounds eerily similar to what Alan Turing10
suggested in 1948. He, too, proposed to create an
artificial “man” equipped with senses and an artificial brain that could
“roam the countryside,” like Frankenstein’s monster, and learn whatever it
needed to survive.11
The fact is, we have no unifying theory of
neuroscience. We don’t know what to build, much less how to build it.12
As one observer put it, neuroscience appears to be
making “antiprogress” — the more information we acquire, the less we seem to
know.13 Thirty
years ago, the estimated number of neurons was between three and ten
billion. Nowadays, the estimate is 100 billion. Thirty years ago it was
assumed that the brain’s glial cells, which outnumber neurons by nine times,
were purely structural and had no other function. In 2004, it was reported
that this wasn’t true.14
Even the most ardent artificial intelligence (A.I.)
advocates admit that, so far at least, the quest for human-level
intelligence has been a total failure.15
Despite its checkered history, however, Hawkins
concludes A.I. will happen: “Yes, we can build intelligent machines.”16
A Brief History of A.I.
Duplicating or mimicking human-level intelligence
is an old notion — perhaps as old as humanity itself. In the 19th century,
as Charles Babbage conceived of ways to mechanize calculation, people
started thinking it was possible — or arguing that it wasn’t. Toward the
middle of the 20th century, as mathematical geniuses Claude Shannon,17
Norbert Wiener,18
John von Neumann,19
Alan Turing, and others laid the foundations of the
theory of computing, the necessary tool seemed available.
In 1955, a research project on artificial
intelligence was proposed; a conference the following summer is considered
the official inauguration of the field. The proposal20
is fascinating for its assertions, assumptions,
hubris, and naďveté, all of which have characterized the field of A.I. ever
since. The authors proposed that ten people could make significant
progress in the field in two months. That ten-person, two-month
project is still going strong — 50 years later. And it’s involved the
efforts of more like tens of thousands of people.
A.I. has splintered into three largely independent
and mutually contradictory areas (connectionism, computationalism, and
robotics), each of which has its own subdivisions and contradictions. Much
of the activity in each of the areas has little to do with the original
goals of mechanizing (or computerizing) human-level intelligence. However,
in pursuit of that original goal, each of the three has its own set of
problems, in addition to the many that they share.
1. Connectionism
Connectionism is the modern version of a philosophy
of mind known as associationism.21
Connectionism has applications to psychology and
cognitive science, as well as underlying the schools of A.I.22
that include both artificial neural networks23
(ubiquitously said to be “inspired by” the nervous
system) and the attempt to model the brain.
The latest estimates are that the human brain
contains about 30 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex — the part of the
brain associated with consciousness and intelligence. The 30 billion neurons
of the cerebral cortex contain about a thousand trillion synapses
(connections between neurons).24
Without a detailed model of how synapses work on a
neurochemical level, there’s no hope of modeling how the brain works.25
Unlike the idealized and simplified connections in
so-called artificial neural networks, those synapses are extremely variable
in nature — they can have different cycle times, they can use different
neurotransmitters, and so on. How much data must be gathered about each
synapse? Somewhere between kilobytes (tens of thousands of numbers) and
megabytes (millions of numbers).26
And since the cycle time of synapses can be more than
a thousand cycles per second, we may have to process those numbers a
thousand times each second.
Have we succeeded in modeling the brain of any
animal, no matter how simple? The nervous system of a nematode (worm) known
as C. (Caenorhabditis) elegans has been studied extensively for
about 40 years. Several websites27
and probably thousands of scientists are devoted
exclusively or primarily to it. Although C. elegans is a very
simple organism, it may be the most complicated creature to have its nervous
system fully mapped. C. elegans has just over three hundred
neurons, and they’ve been studied exhaustively. But mapping is not the same
as modeling. No one has created a computer model of this nervous system
— and the number of neurons in the human cortex alone is 100 million
times larger. C. elegans has about seven thousand synapses.28
The number of synapses in the human cortex alone is
over 100 billion times larger.
The proposals to achieve human-level artificial
intelligence by modeling the human brain fail to acknowledge the lack of any
realistic computer model of a synapse, the lack of any realistic model of a
neuron, the lack of any model of how glial cells interact with neurons, and
the literally astronomical scale of what is to be simulated.
The typical artificial neural network
consists of no more than 64 input “neurons,” approximately the same number
of “hidden neurons,” and a number of output “neurons” between one and 256.29
This, despite a 1988 prediction by one computer guru
that by now the world should be filled with “neuroprocessors” containing
about 100 million artificial neurons.30
Even if every neuron in each layer of a three-
layer artificial neural net with 64 neurons in each layer is connected to
every neuron in the succeeding layer, and if all the neurons in the output
layer are connected to each other (to allow creation of a “winner-takes-all”
arrangement permitting only a single output neuron to fire), the total
number of “synapses” can be no more than about 17 million, although most
artificial neural networks typically contain much, much less — usually no
more than a hundred or so.
Furthermore, artificial neurons resemble
generalized Boolean logic gates more than actual neurons. Each neuron can be
described by a single number — its “threshold.” Each synapse can be
described by a single number — the strength of the connection — rather than
the estimated minimum of ten thousand numbers required for a real synapse.
Thus, the human cortex is at least 600 billion times more
complicated than any artificial neural network yet devised.
It is impossible to say how many lines of code the
model of the brain would require; conceivably, the program itself might be
relatively simple, with all the complexity in the data for each neuron and
each synapse. But the distinction between the program and the data is
unimportant. If each synapse were handled by the equivalent of only a single
line of code, the program to simulate the cerebral cortex would be roughly
25 million times larger than what’s probably the largest software
product ever written, Microsoft Windows, said to be about 40 million lines
of code.31 As
a software project grows in size, the probability of failure increases.32
The probability of successfully completing a project
25 million times more complex than Windows is effectively zero.
Moore’s “Law” is often invoked at this stage in the
A.I. argument.33
But Moore’s Law is more of an observation than a law,
and it is often misconstrued to mean that about every 18 months computers
and everything associated with them double in capacity, speed, and so on.
But Moore’s Law won’t solve the complexity problem at all. There’s another
“law,” this one attributed to Nicklaus Wirth: Software gets slower faster
than hardware gets faster.34
Even though, according to Moore’s Law, your
personal computer should be about a hundred thousand times more
powerful than it was 25 years ago, your word processor isn’t.
Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to software.
And perhaps last, there is the problem of
testing. The minimum number of software errors observed has been about
2.5 errors per function point.35
A software program large enough to simulate the human
brain would contain about 20 trillion errors.
Testing conventional software (such as a word
processor or Windows) involves, among many other things, confirming that its
behavior matches detailed specifications of what it is intended to do in the
case of every possible input. If it doesn’t, the software is
examined and fixed. Connectionistic software comes with no such
specifications — only the vague description that it is to “learn” a
“pattern” or act “like” a natural system, such as the brain. Even if one
discovers that a connectionistic software program isn’t acting the way you
want it do, there’s no way to “fix” it, because the behavior of the program
is the result of an untraceable and unpredictable network of
interconnections.
Testing connectionistic software is also impossible
due to what’s known as the combinatorial explosion. The retina (of a single
eye) contains about 120 million rods and 7 million cones.36
Even if each of those 127 million neurons were merely
binary, like the beloved 8x8 input grid of the typical artificial neural
network (that is, either responded or didn’t respond to light), the number
of different possible combinations of input is a number greater than 1
followed by 38,230,809 zeroes. (The number of particles in the universe has
been estimated to be about 1 followed by only 80 zeroes.37)
Testing an artificial neural network with input
consisting of an 8x8 binary grid is, by comparison, a small job: such a grid
can assume any of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 configurations — orders of
magnitude smaller, but still impossible.
2. Computationalism
Computationalism was originally defined as the
“physical symbol system hypothesis,” meaning that “A physical symbol system
has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action.”38
(This is actually a “formal symbol system
hypothesis,” because the actual physical implementation of such a
system is irrelevant.) Although that definition wasn’t published until 1976,
it co-existed with connectionism from the very beginning. It has also been
referred to as “G.O.F.A.I.” (good old-fashioned artificial intelligence).
Computationalism is also referred to as the computational theory of mind.39
“Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s
the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”
This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on
the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards
From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to
make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a
mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of
I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health
teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy
editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to
answer?
Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the
buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.
For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have
been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question
answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human
elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond
with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what
search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document
where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer
itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial
intelligence as a holy grail,
artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it
would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask
questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university
scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these
have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled
“Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial
intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and
allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.
With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the
problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of
“Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former
players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual
humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They
mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set,
including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former
contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan
Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.
Technically speaking, Watson wasn’t in the room. It
was one floor up and consisted of a roomful of servers working at speeds
thousands of times faster than most ordinary desktops. Over its three-year
life, Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, which it
now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not
connected to the Internet; like all “Jeopardy!” competitors, it knows only
what is already in its “brain.”) During the sparring matches, Watson
received the questions as electronic texts at the same moment they were made
visible to the human players; to answer a question, Watson spoke in a
machine-synthesized voice through a small black speaker on the game-show
set. When it answered the Burj clue — “What is Dubai?” (“Jeopardy!” answers
must be phrased as questions) — it sounded like a perkier cousin of the
computer in the movie “WarGames” that nearly destroyed the world by trying
to start a nuclear war.
This time, though, the computer was doing the right
thing. Watson won $1,000 (in pretend money, anyway), pulled ahead and
eventually defeated Gilmartin and Kolani soundly, winning $18,400 to their
$12,000 each.
“Watson,” Crain shouted, “is our new champion!”
It was just the beginning. Over the rest of the
day, Watson went on a tear, winning four of six games. It displayed
remarkable facility with cultural trivia (“This action flick starring Roy
Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was also briefly a TV series” —
“What is ‘Blue Thunder’?”), science (“The greyhound originated more than
5,000 years ago in this African country, where it was used to hunt gazelles”
— “What is Egypt?”) and sophisticated wordplay (“Classic candy bar that’s a
female Supreme Court justice” — “What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?”).
By the end of the day, the seven human contestants
were impressed, and even slightly unnerved, by Watson. Several made
references to Skynet, the computer system in the “Terminator” movies that
achieves consciousness and decides humanity should be destroyed. “My husband
and I talked about what my role in this was,” Samantha Boardman, a graduate
student, told me jokingly. “Was I the thing that was going to help the A.I.
become aware of itself?” She had distinguished herself with her swift
responses to the “Rhyme Time” puzzles in one of her games, winning nearly
all of them before Watson could figure out the clues, but it didn’t help.
The computer still beat her three times. In one game, she finished with no
money.
“He plays to win,” Boardman said, shaking her head.
“He’s really not messing around!” Like most of the contestants, she had
started calling Watson “he.”
While I agree with most stuff in the article, I
think the author has misunderstood the aims of AI as opposed to the hype
that makes some of its practitioners promise more than they can deliver and
so appear to be compulsive liars.
It is interesting that Amy talked about "brain"
that will continue to be needed. I personally think the day is not far off
when "brain" can be substituted. However, "mind", that ugly word that has
been expunged from our vocabulary, thanks to muddle-headed positivist
thinking, is an entirely different matter. I am reminde of a lecture George
Miller (of the Magical number 7 fame) where he he said most psychologists
believed he studied the "mind" while he actually studied the "brain".
It is silly to say that no progress has been made,
unless you anchor progress to wild statements of a few
scientists-turned-business-men. However, it is true that the statements were
wild, and used to drum up financing for their businesses. It was snake oil
and not science.
I am sure there are many contributions of AI to
life in general, but one that I am a bit familiar with is the semantic web
that owes its existence entirely to AI (in particular description logics).
It was devised precisely for the reason given by the author why AI must fail
(complexity). First order logic, as we all know, is not decidable (ie., no
guarantee that a question can be answered in finite time), and therefore AI
research devised description logic, a fragment of FOL that is decidable.
Because of its bad reputation,thanks to the few
too-confident scientists-turned-businessmen, much of the direct AI funding
dried (the so-called AI winter) and much AI research went underground or was
disguised as something else (description logics, for example). The results
are well-buried in present-day software.
As for the future, I think the most promising work
lies at the intersection of physiology, physics, chemistry,... with
computing and mathematics essentially providing the infrastructure. Some
call it computational systems biology. Those interested might like to see
Computational Systems Biology, by Andres Kriete and
Roland Eils Academic Press (November 8, 2005)
A fascinating talk on a tangential topic (debunking
some Freudian myths) is by one of my daughters' teachers at UC San Diego:
How to Do It Examples Rather Than Just Who is Doing
It: Two mathematics tutorials rooted in research at Carnegie-Mellon
University and the University of California
Dan Gode sent me these links concerning highly regarded math tutoring
technologies. The Carnegie link is interesting due to its roots in
cognitive processes. The ALEKS link is interesting because of its unique
use of artificial intelligence and interactivity.
Carnegie Learning Corporation ---http://www.carnegielearning.com//
Carnegie Learning's products are the result of 15 years of research in the
field of cognitive science led by Dr. John R. Anderson, a preeminent
psychologist and computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the
premier institutions of higher learning in the world. The site of the
Department of Defense's Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon
University is highly regarded for its contributions to cognitive psychology,
computer science and software engineering, and for its work in the fields of
artificial intelligence.
Carnegie Learning was founded in 1998 in order to
further develop and support the Cognitive Tutoring(tm) technology for
mathematics initiated at Carnegie Mellon University.
Research support for the technology used in Carnegie
Learning's Cognitive Tutors was provided by such institutions and agencies as
Carnegie Mellon University, the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Office
of Naval Research, the US Department of Education, the Carnegie Foundation,
the Howard Heinz Endowments, the Buhl Foundation, the Richard King Mellon
Foundation, the Grable Foundation and the Pittsburgh Foundation.
ALEKS ---
http://www.aleks.com/
ALEKS is a revolutionary Internet technology, developed
at the University of California by a team of gifted software engineers and
cognitive scientists, with the support of a multi-million dollar grant from
the National Science Foundation. ALEKS is fundamentally different from
previous educational software. At the heart of ALEKS is an artificial
intelligence engine -- an adaptive form of computerized intelligence -- which
contains a detailed structural model of the multiplicity of the feasible
knowledge states in a particular subject. Taking advantage of state of the art
software technology, ALEKS is capable of searching an enormous knowledge
structure efficiently, and ascertaining the exact knowledge state of the
individual student. Like "Deep Blue," the IBM computer system that
defeated international Chess Grand master Garry Kasparov, ALEKS interacts with
its environment and adapts its output to complex and changing circumstances.
ALEKS is based upon path breaking theoretical work in Cognitive Psychology and
Applied Mathematics in a field of study called "Knowledge Space
Theory." Work in Knowledge Space Theory was begun in the early 1980's by
an internationally renowned Professor of Cognitive Sciences who is the
Chairman and founder of ALEKS Corporation.
Philosophers Look Toward Artificial Intelligence and Learning
There was no theorizing about ghosts in the machine
at an annual meeting of philosophers last Friday. Instead, they embraced
technology’s implications for their field, both within the classroom and
beyond.
. . .
The reason for those misconceptions, Croy argued,
is that adaptive learning techniques require AI, and good AI algorithms
require long-term empirical research into how students learn and which
methods predict classroom success. Moreover, he said, if a computer program
that employs AI increases the range of students being taught, any economy of
scale would be counterbalanced by the greater diversity of learning
approaches reached — and that would require further development into more
sophisticated processes to encompass them (and more money).
Bypassing that vicious cycle requires some brains,
and not just the human kind. The problem becomes: How can a program learn
how an individual student thinks, and use that insight to offer constructive
suggestions as he or she works online?
One of Croy’s attempts to solve that problem
involves a system designed to provide intelligent help to students
constructing deductive proofs. As they graphically map out the steps from a
given initial proposition to the provided end point, the software ideally
provides helpful suggestions to students who can be working both forward and
backward at the same time.
In looking for an algorithm that can offer hints
“in a way that doesn’t cost us an arm and a leg,” Croy noted, the software
employs a mathematical model called a
Markov decision process that can map students’
steps toward the solution and “learn” the chosen path as they work. Such
proofs can be solved in varying sequences, so the possibilities are
numerous.
“They do stuff that I wouldn’t have expected them
to do,” Croy said of the students. By anticipating the logical direction of
the students’ reasoning, the program can ideally guide them along the way.
To see if such techniques are empirically useful,
Croy also tested to see if he could predict students’ performance in his
class early on, based on results from a computerized test of “justified
thought” — for example, choosing from a multiple-choice list whether a given
logical sequence was an example of
modus ponens,
modus tollens or neither. By dividing one class of
50 into two groups, one whose grades were below 65 percent and those with 65
or higher, Croy found that the test predicted their performance “fairly
well.”
This being a meeting of philosophers, he touched on
a few of the ethical implications of his work, such as the potential of
conflicting roles as both a teacher and a researcher within the same
classroom. “It does put you in a very strange position,” he admitted, since
students could be both pupils and subjects at the same time. One clear
solution, he said, was to seek informed consent. At the same time, Croy
raised the question of whether technology should seek to replace or
supplement student-teacher interactions.
In his own experience, he said, “the class is a lot
better today than it used to be a year ago.”
A significant update to
the Real Audit(tm) simulation will be released this fall. Real
Audit(tm) is an interactive multimedia simulation of financial
statement auditing. The upcoming version will incorporate the new
risk assessment standards required by SAS 104 -111. To ensure the
quality and realism of the upcoming release, I am requesting some
help in testing the latest build of the software. The changes
affect primarily the planning and accounts receivable sections of
the simulation (as discussed below). It should take less than a
couple of hours to go through it and provide the feedback. About
six AECMers helped me with play testing about ten years ago during
the initial development and it was very helpful (credit will be
given in the credits section of the software). If you can play
test, please let me know right away, thanks,
John Schatzel
Background:
Real Audit(tm) has
been around for over ten years now and has been improved with new
features and user support. Ten years ago it was just a simulation
game with planning and accounts receivable. A couple of years
later, accounts payable and inventory were added and then fixed
assets. Now, there is an interactive game tutorial within the
simulation to show users how to use it and an extensive downloadable
user's manual. Screen shots and further explanation is available at
http://realaudit.com About three years
ago, Real Audit 2: The SOX Era was developed and released in
response to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The simulation focused
primary on a SOX 404 audit of internal control. On the academic
side, I wrote a paper on the development of the software, which won
a best paper award at the Northeast Regional Conference of the AAA
in 2006. The paper examined the development, realism, ease of use,
and learning outcomes of the simulation. Now the AICPA has released
new risk assessment standards, which require an understanding of the
entity and its environment including internal control for private
company audits (effective at the end of this year). These changes
are major (over 200 pages) and will take a great deal of training
for CPA firms to implement. Is was also a major challenge to learn
these new requirements and to incorporate them into the simulation
for this fall.
What I am
looking for:
I hope that you
can run through the simulation as soon as possible and give
me feedback. The primary changes are in planning and its
relationship to AR (for the private client PTP). In general,
1. The permanent file has more information
about the business and the revenue cycle.
2. The audit program has more steps in
planning including identification of significant accounts,
evaluation of internal control design for the five components of
COSO, the required team meeting on RMM including fraud, and the
identification of risks of material misstatement (RMMs).
3. The opening conversion between the auditor
and the audit manager in planning is significantly expanded and is
like a tutorial on the new SAS 104-111 requirements (so if you are
not familiar with them they can be reviewed).
4. A new client response mode at login
[automatic or manual] has been added. Please test the manual which
is new - it allows you to advance the client responses using the
space bar (as requested by students)
At the end, if you could send me an e-mail
explaining your audit program choices for the five internal control
elements and the RMMs and your general comments, I would really
appreciate it. Also, anything that doesn't make sense, is not
working, or needs to be improved - please let me know, thanks!
I don't know how many people will volunteer
this time, but my plan is to stagger the reviews so I don't have to
respond to all of the comments at once,
Jensen Comment
The question in my mind is why case writers supposedly had to wait for tablet
computing for some of these cases. As a point of fact, interactive cases are
even better on the more powerful laptop computers that students have been using
for years. As a matter of fact it may be a mistake to write interactive cases
only for tablet computing since many (most?) tablet apps will not run on laptop
computers.
I've been assigned to teach a course in "Strategic
Management Accounting" as part of our summer session offerings for final
year BBA undergraduate accounting majors. The previous presenter of the
course built it around a set of cases plus a simulation - VK Gadget. See..
http://www.microbuspub.com/maspg3.htm
While I'm in general agreement with the approach
I'm wondering whether anyone on the list has experience of the VK Gadget
simulation, or of any other simulations that they would think appropriate.
There is an optional text with the simulation - "Management Accounting - A
Venture Into Decision Making" - but our students have a more in-depth
knowledge of management accounting by the time they reach their final year
than this book provides.
The only potential alternative that I've discovered
to the VK Gadget simulation so far is "The Business Strategy Game" from
Globus.See..
http://www.glo-bus.com
I get the impression that this simulation is easier
to run and to administer than VK Gadget (important to me, as I have to get
up to speed quickly) but it doesn't seem to go into management accounting
issues in such depth.
I used the Management Accounting Simulation from
the same company. I found it required a significant investment on the part
of students before they ever could get started. The time and effort needed
was so significant, that only two groups of two students even went ahead
with the investment. Most students just entered numbers. I was using the
simulation for cost accounting students, which I find to be more dedicated
to work than the typical managerial accounting students.
What was scariest was the amount of work that would
be required of the professor before even starting. I had difficulty in
figuring out what to do from the instructions. I think I could have figured
it out eventually if I had gone ahead and made the time investment and
completed the assignments, just like I later asked the students to do. My
estimate was about 25 hours to get up to speed, and I wasn't willing to make
that investment. No wonder most students didn't do it either.
I found the instructions to administer the game to
be confusing, and I couldn't even input data without being talked through it
by the simulation author.
My campus bookstore charged students 38.40 for the
instruction book. I eventually dropped the simulation, and refunded students
their 38.40 from my own pocket (ouch).
I don't know if the simulation game you are talking
about is the same, or a related product by the same company, but I'd be very
skeptical.
A far better managerial accounting simulation is to
use a business computer game called Gazillionaire (from Lavamind). In this
computer game, each player owns a company with two products/services--either
transporting passengers or transporting materials/products on the single
company vessel. Each player must make decisions about financing, setting
prices, allocating space on vessel between passengers/cargo, purchase of
insurance, payment of taxes, where to travel, etc.
I have students play the game until they figure out
the various components. Then I have the students play the game on paper
until they have a plan that will work: enable them to ultimately accumulate
retained earnings of 1,000,000. Once I approve their plans, they go ahead
and play the game and then do a variance analysis, and figure out what they
can do for the next time they play they play the simulation game.
If anyone goes this route, I can share my very
rudimentary instructions. Also, I warn: students must truly immerse
themselves in the business--figuring out what info they need that can help
them cut costs and increase revenues. It cuts down on the amount of
classroom content that can be covered. But it is well worth it.
Sometimes I hear from students that they learned
more from my monopoly simulation game and gazillionaire simulation game than
the rest of their collegiate experience.
Most of the administration can be undertaken by the
helpful staff at Smartsims. The multiplayer version is housed on their
servers and can be accessed by anyone (who has paid the requisite fee) with
an internet connection.
I have run in it our Strategic Management
Accounting course for five years. Students find it easy to access and use. I
form them into teams and they compete against each other to manufacture and
sell bicycles (no knowledge of bicycle manufacture required).
Assessment is around a business plan and
establishing KPI (along the lines of a 'balanced score card'). Each team is
'in business' for a number of years and they are to report on successes and
failures. It doesn't necessarily focus on the technical skills of
'management accounting' - we cover and assess through other mechanisms - but
does really open their minds to the strategic, and integrated, nature of
decision making. It requires that they develop the soft skills that
accounting bodies expect to be squeezed into the curriculum. Students do
enjoy the competitive nature of the challenge.
Good Luck,
Frank Weterman
frank.weterman@manukau.ac.nz
Faculty of Business Manukau Institute of Technology
Auckland New Zealand
May 2, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Roger,
The Mike's Bikes author is Pete Mazany. Pete's one of Frank's colleagues
on the faculty at the University of Auckland. In the past, In the past I've
used Pete in my technology workshops. If management accounting is to be
emphasized to students who are relatively advanced in management accounting,
the Mike's Bikes case may be too superficial in terms of accounting content,
although this is an excellent policy decision making simulation. The case is
networked and online. Pete spent a lot of money and time in programming this
simulation. Pete earned his doctorate at Yale under one of the top game
theory scholars of the world.
There is an excellent case study directory at Michigan State University
---
http://aib.msu.edu/resources/casedepositories.asp
Most cases are not simulations. However, enter "simulation" in the search
box on the left margin of the AIB home page and see what you find.
It is not common to find simulation cases with good accompanying
textbooks. One problem is that if the simulation cases are updated quite
often, the accompanying textbook may be a little out or date. If neither the
simulation case nor the textbook is updated quite often, then I become
dubious about using such material over time. Updating financial accounting
simulations is probably a bigger problem relative to managerial accounting
because of the way financial accounting standards are amended monthly.
SmartSims.com has its roots in a
research group from the University of Auckland that formed in 1992. Its goal was to put
together resources to improve the learning process for business students. Since we place a
high value on experiential learning, we felt a simulation was 'the way to go' to get
students more actively involved in the subject matter of their courses.
Our first product was an
interactive simulation of a manufacturing company called Mike's Bikes. From the Mike's
Bikes Project, we have broadened our horizons into a complete suite of resources for
students and instructors. These products range from interactive business simulations and
server administration tools to lecture notes, presentations, assignments and model
answers. While universities are an important part of what we do (and who we are), we also
do a lot of work 'out in the real world'. One of our core activities is helping companies
to develop their internal staff development programmes.
Since its first release in 1997,
Mike's Bikes and other SmartSims.com learning resources have been extensively used in
corporate and academic (both graduate and undergraduate) business courses throughout the
United States and Canada, Asia, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
Mike's Bikes is a state of the
art internet-based, business learning simulation. By simulating a bike industry with
market segments, distributors and firms, Mike's Bikes allows students to learn by doing
and practice a wide range of business disciplines and skills effectively, in a compelling
and responsive simulated environment.
Mike's Bikes Student Learning
Outcomes:
An understanding of core business
functions Ability to visualise a business as an interactive system of these components
Opportunity to analyse company data using higly visual graphics Practice of quantitative
skills required for management using MS Excel Development of the skills for effective team
management.
The aim is to get students to delve into a course's
volumes of academic information, including hours of videotape of experts in a
field related to the program. Students running Krasnovia, for example, can
draw on video advice from Thomas Boyatt, a former ambassador, and Bruce
Laingen, an American diplomat who was held hostage in Iran and is president of
the American Academy of Diplomacy.
Rather than subject students to full-blown lectures,
Dr. Schank breaks the video into snippets that address only the question at
hand. He believes students learn more effectively through this piecemeal
approach, which he calls "just in time" learning.
"The value of the computer is that
it allows kids to learn by doing," he said. "People don't learn by
being talked at. They learn when they attempt to do something and fail.
Learning happens when they try to figure out why."
Bald, bearded and powerfully built, Dr. Schank's
appearance and demeanor suggest Marlon Brando in the movie "Apocalypse
Now." His professional reputation is somewhat similar. His brusque manner
and outspoken criticism of those he disagrees with have alienated some
colleagues and earned him the reputation of iconoclast. But his success in
designing teaching software has made him a much sought after figure among
businesses, military clients and universities.
His company puts extraordinary effort into creating
software courses, each of which can take up to a year to design and can cost
up to $1 million. Video is an important component of Dr. Schank's program.
After interviewing professors, his staff develops a story, writes a script,
hires professional actors and begins filming. Cognitive Arts even arranged the
use of CNN footage of the Bosnian conflict to lend the aura of authenticity to
Crisis in Krasnovia.
The programs allow students to progress at their own
pace. Dr. Schank says the semester system is badly outdated, a view he also
holds for most tests, which foster only temporary memorization, he says. His
programs require students to write detailed reports on what they have learned.
A student who cuts corners does not finish the course, and the failing grade
is delivered in the spirit of a video game. In Krasnovia, for instance, an
incomplete report would draw a mock newscast in which commentators ridicule
the president's address. Students must then go back and improve their work.
These multimedia simulations differ radically from
current online offerings. "When you look at online courses now, what do
you see?" Dr. Schank said. "Text online with a quiz. We're not
taking a lecture and putting it on screen. We're restructuring these courses
into goal-based scenarios that will get kids excited."
Dr. Schank says that such courses will render
traditional classes -- and many professors -- obsolete. "The idea of one
professor for one class is ancient," he said. "New technology is
going to give every student access to the best professors in the world."
But many academics dismiss Dr. Schank's prediction
that traditional teaching methods will soon become obsolete and question
software learning's pedagogic value. "Education depends on relationships
between people," said David F. Noble, a history professor at York
University in Toronto and a critic of online learning. "Interactive is
not the same as interpersonal. What Schank doesn't recognize is that teaching
is not just about relaying knowledge."
Others warn against accepting radical new technology
without pause. "The American university system is a highly functional
institution," said Phil Agre, an associate professor of information
studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. "The danger is
that we will apply overly simplistic ideas about technology and tear apart the
institution before we really know what we're doing."
Management Accounting: A Venture into Decision Making
provides the conceptual framework and the fundamentals of Management Accounting
Tools.
The Management/Accounting Simulation
allows Students to Experience the Use of Management Accounting Tools in a
Dynamic Decision-making Environment
Instructors understand the importance of creating and
distributing clear, explicit course policies to their students. These
generally cover the course requirements and deadlines, absences and assignment
make-up policies, and other "housekeeping" areas. When moving into
the online environment, setting up policies can get more complicated. In
"The Importance of Policies in E-Learning Instruction" (EDUCAUSE
QUARTERLY, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 28-39), Shirley Waterhouse and Rodney O.
Rogers provide a useful collection of sample policies that cover using the
basic tools of online instruction. Their examples cover email use, discussion
forum participation, online submission of assignments, and getting technical
help. They also include a checklist for fair use of copyrighted materials and
a student permission-to-use form. The article is available online at
http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm04/eqm0433.asp
EDUCAUSE Quarterly, The IT Practitioner's Journal [ISSN 1528-5324] is
published by EDUCAUSE, 4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538
USA. Current and past issues are available online at
http://www.educause.edu/eq/
THE MULTIMEDIA PARADOX
"Dr. Richard Mayer's research proves that there
are great benefits to using multimedia in the classroom. It also proves the
opposite is true." In "The Multimedia Paradox" (PRESENTATIONS,
vol. 18, no. 9, September 2004, pp. 24-5, 28-9), Tad Simons explores the
perennial problem of how we assess the impact of multimedia (or, for that
matter, any technology) on learning. He discusses the research into this
problem by Richard Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of
California at Santa Barbara. Some of Mayer's findings indicate that when text
and graphics are combined student retention goes up an average of 42 percent;
if the text is spoken rather than read by the students, retention increases by
an average of 30 percent. The paradox that Mayer discovered is that
"while a little multimedia may be a good thing, too much multimedia is
often a bad thing." Too much multimedia may interfere with a student's
ability to absorb the message and diminish the effectiveness of the medium.
The article is not available online, but
subscriptions to the print version of Presentations are free. Presentations:
Technology and Techniques for Effective Communication [ISSN 1041-9780] is
published monthly by VNU Business Media, 50 S. Ninth St., Minneapolis, MN
55402 USA; tel: 612-333-0471; fax: 612-333-6526; Web:
http://www.presentations.com/
STUDY SHOWS LAPTOPS IN THE CLASSROOM IMPROVE STUDENT
LEARNING
A recent study of West Point first-year students, all
of whom have laptop computers, examined teaching techniques, lessons learned,
and student performance during the integration of laptops in teaching and
learning psychology in the traditional classroom. The study found
statistically-significant improvements in learning for student using laptops.
A report of the study, "Miracle or Menace: Teaching and Learning with
Laptop Computers in the Classroom" by James Efaw, Scott Hampton, Silas
Martinez, and Scott Smith, is available online at
http://www.educause.edu/pub/eq/eqm04/eqm0431.asp
(EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 10-18).
WHAT DO SCHOLARLY AUTHORS WANT?
The Centre for Information Behaviour and the
Evaluation of Research (ciber) surveyed 91,500 senior authors published in an
ISI-indexed journal in order to "enable publishers and libraries to make
a sensible contribution, based on concrete evidence, to the increasingly
heated debate over the future of the scholarly communication system, open
access, etc." Nearly 4,000 senior researchers from 97 countries responded
to the survey. The survey results, written by Ian Rowlands, Dave Nicholas, and
Paul Huntingdon, are available in "Scholarly Communication in the Digital
Environment: What Do Authors Want? Findings of an International Survey of
Author Opinion: Project Report."
The survey found that authors want to be able to
"target a very specific group of key readers, narrowcasting to those
working on similar problems," which might indicate that more journals,
rather than fewer, would be needed in some disciplines. Not surprisingly, they
want to publish in "peer-reviewed, high impact" journals that offer
refereeing and editing services. The much-discussed "Open Access"
funding model that charges authors (or their institutions) for publishing
services did not receive much support from the authors. Only 16% of the survey
responders said they would pay more than US$500 to have their papers
published. The majority of those in the social sciences and arts and
humanities fields responded that they would not be willing to pay anything.
The report is available online at no cost at
http://ciber.soi.city.ac.uk/ciber-pa-report.pdf
ciber "seeks to inform by countering idle
speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts. It engages in funded
studies, contract research, scholarship and dissemination events in its areas
of expertise." For more information, contact: Centre for Information
Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research, Department of Information Science,
City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB United Kingdom; tel: 44
020 7040 8381; fax: 44 020 7040 8584; email:
ciber@soi.city.ac.uk
Web:
http://ciber.soi.city.ac.uk/
"Open Access to Journals Won't Lower
Prices" by John H. Ewing THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 51,
issue 6, October 1, 2004, p. B20
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i06/06b02001.htm
(Subscription required to access article online.)
Email Messaging and Paperless Courses
Advantages of Email Messaging and Paperless Courses.
There are many claimed advantages that have undoubtedly contributed to the exponential
growth of course messaging.
It is markedly easier and more timely to use email
to clear up confusions about assignments and course content.
Email communications are great sources for
published FAQs and answers.
Instructors can communicate announcements without
having to wait until the class meets.
Some students communicate more openly when they
are not face-to-face with the instructor or in a classroom setting.
Email communications are "in writing"
and can be easily filed and word searched.
Email messages can be printed and filed in a
traditional manner.
Word processor files, spreadsheet files, or other
files can be appended to an email message and broadcast to all subscribers (students).
Email aids in building team and communication
skills.
Email aids in communications with experts and
students in other locations.
Other advantages and disadvantages reported by
educators are mentioned in Page (Document) 4 at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
.
Disadvantages of Email Messaging and Paperless
Courses.
There are many problems that have undoubtedly contributed to the frustrations of course
messaging.
There can be chaotic turmoil when setting up and
maintaining course electronic mail.
Students are prone to losing stored messages and
work in progress.
A system is needed to verify that student email
submissions have been filed by the instructor.
Communicating with a student by email is analogous
to having a "recorded" discussion with that student.
Email communications may be permanently filed by
students and passed on to future students.
Attachment files such as Microsoft Word DOC or
Excel XLS files sent as email attachments to instructors and/or other students may be
infected with viruses.
Distribution of Student Work on the Internet
Advantages of Publishing Student Work on the Internet.
Probably the main advantage is improved quality and honesty of student work.
Students gain self confidence and take pride in
having their work made public.
Scholars in other parts of the world can access
the works of a student or the student's professor.
Students become familiar with how to publish WWW
Documents.
Disadvantages of Publishing Student Work on
the Internet.
There are technical things that must be learned about WWW publishing and this may add
heavily to the workload of the student and the instructor.
Glitches in the college's web server system can be
frequent and troublesome.
If WWW publishing is specified in a required
course, the student who does not want his or her work made public should be given some
other alternative.
The published work of some students may embarrass
the instructor and college. This is especially the case since plagiarizing is so much
easier to detect using WWW search engines.
The published work of some students may put the
college or university at risk for lawsuits and criminal complicity if no policy is in
place for removing some dangerous web Page (Document) s from web servers.
Computer Aided Teaching (CAT) Synchronous CAT
Presentation Lecture Aids Advantages of Using Synchronous CAT Presentation Lecture Aids.
CAT presentation aids might benefit both local and synchronized distance education
classes.
You can enhance research presentations at
conferences and seminars.
You will be better equipped for today's generation
of young people weaned on television, videos, and electronic games.
You will discover that hard copy handouts and
chalk boards just cannot compete with the visualization, animation, audio, and video
powers of computers.
You will be forced into giving more thought and
attention to course preparation and teaching creativity.
You can make available (in a computer lab or
campus-wide on a computer network) both the material you present in class plus added
material and problems that you want students to study outside the classroom.
You can randomly access your lecture notes during
a presentation.
You can avoid chalk dust. What you put on the
"board" earlier is not permanently erased and can easily be repeated in animated
evolution just as it was the first time it was presented.
You can record a lecture-aid CD or use a network
server to contain multiple courses, research papers, literature abstracts, and other
materials that would fill a large room in hardcopy equivalents.
You can use CAT software to randomly select
students to answer questions in class or respond in case discussions.
You can achieve greater curriculum uniformity
(e.g., in 10 discussion sections of basic accounting taught by doctoral students, for
instance) by having multiple instructors teach using identical CAT aids, thereby
facilitating greater uniformity of coverage.
You can interact in class with students via
electronic response pads or ideally via entire keyboards.
You can set up remedial lessons and tests on
networks that allow slow learners and students who miss class opportunities for self-help.
You will discover that new technologies are vastly
superior and cheaper than anyone anticipated.
Ways to Avoid the Dangers of Using Synchronous
CAT Presentation Lecture Aids.
Use electronic transparencies and other computer presentations sparingly in class
meetings.
Don't overwhelm students with masses of visual
material and/or rapid successions of images.
Request that your students be patient with your
"first-draft" presentations and possible limitations of your display equipment.
Try to make all or most of your presentation
materials available to students before and/or after class.
Provide font size controls.
Avoid displaying masses of text that students can
more easily read or search outside the classroom.
Unless there is a reason to change background
colors, font colors, font sizes, and formatting styles, try to be consistent.
Use animation sparingly with stop, pause, and
continue controls.
Avoid overuse of color or frequent changes in
color schemes.
Plan ahead in making color choices by knowing what
colors work best on your LCD or other projection device.
On some LCDs, pastel colors do not show up well.
With portable LCDs, white backgrounds sometimes light up the room better than dark
backgrounds. With some portable LCDs, however, white is a poor background for vivid
contrasts. Cursors tend to show up better on dark backgrounds. If you plan to convert your
computer lessons into analog videos (e.g., videotape), avoid reds and other colors that
tend to bleed and/or show more flicker in digital-to-analog conversions.
Don't necessarily display all of your lecture
notes.
Don't simply become a parrot reading aloud what
you flash on the screen.
Don't expect a lot of advance preparation to
eliminate the need for before-class preparation.
Don't use electronic materials as an excuse to not
change textbooks.
Remember that it is usually more important to
inspire students to want to learn than it is to have them learn technical content in any
particular course.
Obtain student feedback on classroom
presentations.
Watch out for copyright violations.
Computer Aided Learning (CAL) Asynchronous CAL
Modules and Courses Advantages of Asynchronous CAL Modules and Courses.
The main advantages of asynchronous CAL are that student learning is self-paced and
interactive.
Educators can experiment in creative ways using
unique and intriguing WWW sites.
Other advantages are remote delivery of
cost-efficient and conveniently distributed "virtual" courses.
Cross-cultural and cross-functional teams of
students can be formed in virtual education and research.
Networked learning combines fun and education for
students as they surf the Internet in teams or on their own.
Colleges are expanding their markets with CAL in
lifelong learning programs.
Both better student performance and higher
evaluations of instructors can result.
You must ultimately adopt new learning
technologies in your courses and program curricula.
You can experiment with paperless courses.
You can become a part of a world wide movement of
researchers experimenting with new and creative ways to utilize modern technology in
education.
You can react to appeals of the Accounting
Education Change Commission.
You will find funding sources for technology
research and application increasing at a much faster rate in the future.
You may discover that new technology can lead to
more cross-discipline research and applications.
You can avoid teaching toward obsolescence.
You can play a greater part in developing and
sharing learning materials with professors and students in foreign nations, notably
underdeveloped nations.
Ways to Avoid the Disadvantages of
Asynchronous CAL Modules and Courses.
Try to resist temptations to dehumanize some courses by eliminating face-to-face
encounters.
Asynchronous CAL can be extremely effective for
learning technical material before coming to class. However, be reasonable about the time
expected for network learning outside of class.
Delete as well as add material with each revision
(or create optional rather than required links to material of less importance in the
course).
Obtain student feedback on CAL modules.
Avoid requiring rote memorization of CAL online
material.
Try to avoid getting the image of being a computer
hacker more interested in the machines per se than what they can do for your teaching and
research.
Remember that it is usually more important to
inspire students to want to learn than it is to have them learn technical content in any
particular course.
Remember the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) rule.
Students lose socialization benefits in virtual
universities.
There are risks of obvious and not-so-obvious
copyright violations even in uncontrolled distributions on CDs, intranets, and the WWW.
There are risks of copyright violations due to
uncertainties in Education Fair Use Laws covering new technologies.
Research on effectiveness of CAL is often futile
due to the pace of technological change, the variation in learning ingredients, and
Hawthorne effects.
Virtual Learning and MUD-Type (MOO)
Interactions Advantages of Virtual Learning and MUD-Type (MOO) Interactions.
Virtual settings, especially VR settings, are increasingly more realistic.
Students and trainees can become immersed in very
realistic harmful situations without getting harmed.
Students and trainees can repeatedly be placed in
settings that are rare events in real life.
Students and trainees can be placed in places and
times that are not possible in a literal sense.
Participants find virtual learning more exciting
and motivational than traditional books, lectures, and case discussions in class.
Participants are active rather than passive
learners.
Learning can be more contextual. You can create
interactive and animated hypermedia graphics and simulations that bring students closer to
realities and experiences of the outside world. Students may also create hypermedia in
their own learning projects.
Simulations can adjust to the abilities and
aptitudes of the participants.
MUD-like simulations stimulate creativity and
cooperation among students who previously showed little imagination or willingness to
enthusiastically cooperate.
Instructors can try different approaches with
students in MUD settings by assuming different anonymous avatars.
Anecdotal and scientific research on virtual
learning is generally positive (subject to complications noted in the following section).
Disadvantages of Virtual Learning and MUD-Type
Simulations Good VR is very capital intensive.
Good VR facilities that exist on some campuses are
only available to a small subset of faculty.
VRML is less capital intensive, far less realistic
than VR, and not yet a uniform standard.
MUD-type simulations are radical departures from
traditional learning paradigms.
Update on MOOs and MUDs
"Instructors Try Out Updated MOOs as Online-Course Classrooms"
Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 2000
http://chronicle.com/free/2000/10/2000102401u.htm
The updated MOO systems aren't as
graphics-heavy as three-dimensional "virtual worlds," in which virtual spaces
are rendered in constantly-updated drawings. Both types of software encourage group
activity, but in MOOs the written word is still king and the pictures merely serve as
links between areas of a text-based environment.
One such updated MOO system,
called enCore Xpress, is distributed free
of charge online, provided that users agree to share any improvements they make to it. The
software was created by Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik at the University of Texas at
Dallas, where Ms. Haynes is director of rhetoric and writing and Mr. Holmevik is a
visiting scholar in arts and humanities. Together, the two scholars also run Lingua MOO,
which serves as an environment for online classes and a meeting place for people studying
arts and humanities.
By making the chat environments
easier to use, they hope to "bring MOOs into the mainstream," says Mr. Holmevik.
"We have probably seen over 100 to 150 educational MOOs start because of our
software."
Among the professors using enCore
Xpress for online courses is Joel A. English, an assistant professor of professional
writing at Old Dominion University. Last spring, he used the MOO to teach an advanced
composition course.
Ten of his students logged in to
the classes from their homes via the MOO, while the rest of the students sat in a
classroom. Mr. English used a video camera to stream his lectures live over the MOO. The
students in the MOO could type to each other, or type questions for the professor, while
they watched and listened to the lecture. A teaching assistant moderated the online chat
and voiced students' questions to Mr. English.
"That may sound
cumbersome," Mr. English says, "but it was just my attempt at making sure that
those students sitting at home at a computer could add to the discussion just like
everybody else."
Mr. English says he doesn't mind
if online students chat among themselves during his lecture -- provided they discuss the
material. "If they're talking so much about course content that they miss something I
say, then something right is going on," he says. "The best classrooms are those
which are active, where students have active participation and don't just sit there
sucking down content." He says the MOO students developed a stronger sense of
community than the ones in the traditional classroom.
Other professors who've taught in
MOOs report that the environment encourages free-for-all discussions rather than lecturing
to a group.
"It can feel like you're
herding cats online," says Linda G. Polin, a professor of education at Pepperdine
University. She says the trick for a professor is to allow students to drive discussion
without losing complete professorial control. For her courses, Ms. Polin uses a
MOO-software package called
Tapped In, which is
similar to enCore Xpress.
Even with the updated MOO
software, however, it can take a few weeks for students to get used to the environment,
the professors say.
"The biggest challenge for
students, by the way, is typing," says Ms. Polin. "Some students are very fast
and some are not."
At its best, Ms. Polin says, the
software can provoke discussions that are richer than traditional class sessions. "It
can fulfill that fantasy we faculty all carry around in our hearts of the intense
late-night coffeehouse intellectual discussion."
A veteran MOOer in tax education is that funny (I
mean doubles-you-up kind of funny) Professor Robert C. Rickets, Haskell Taylor Professor
of Taxation, Texas Tech University.
Containers versus Links Traditional information
management systems use folders and focus on separating information – they
force you to divide information into containers. Separating information in
this way creates barriers between information and ignores the naturally
occurring relationships inherent in the information. TheBrain takes the
opposite approach – it enables you to link information into a network of
logical associations.
The Power of Association Traditional directory trees
confine information to a strict hierarchical organization and are incapable of
expressing the multi-layered relationships that exist in the real world.
TheBrain is an associative information organization system – any piece of
information can be linked to any other piece. The power of TheBrain lies in
the flexibility of these links. You can quickly create structures of
information that reflect the way you think about your information. Each item
triggers related items, bringing relevant information together as you need it.
Visualizing Information Flow Items in TheBrain are
called "thoughts," which can represent files, web pages, or database
records. TheBrain's display is organized around a thought, surrounded by all
its related thoughts. Clicking on any thought brings it to the center of the
display, and the interface is automatically reconfigured to new related
thoughts. (Try it by clicking on TheBrain above - just click back to the
Overview thought to return here.) As you navigate through data, the
information displayed on the screen is always related to the selected data.
TheBrain lets you follow a train of thought, flowing from one item to the
next.
Using TheBrain Using TheBrain is as simple as
pointing and clicking. The interface lets you browse visually through its
unique, animated display. Adding new information and integrating existing
information is a simple drag and drop. Using The Brain, anyone can create and
share a context rich information environment.
The Black Shoals site is interesting to study from many angles, including
database design and retrieval. It is a bit like The Brain design at
http://www.thebrain.com/.
Gaze up in the Black Shoals Planetarium and and have a look.
Gaze up at the starry heavens of the international
finance. Here's the setup -- this perfectly natural-looking night sky is in
fact a real-time representation of the world's stock markets. Each star
represents a publicly traded company, and industries tend to clump together in
star clusters. So if the automobile industry is hot, its constellation in the
night sky will light up bright and shiny. Asteroids, pulsars, and red dwarfs
haven't been addressed yet, but we could easily suggest a likely sector for a
black hole..
Technology, Disability Studies, and Supports
for People with Disabilities (including the learning challenged)
Free Monitor
I don't know anything about this free monitor or the open-source software for
sight-impaired people, but it sounds wonderful http://www.nvaccess.org/
Thank you Scott Bonacker for the heads up.
Jensen Comment
Why don't we remove all the books from the electronic libraries (think millions
of books now available free from Google) that the blind cannot read?
For on-campus students the university can invest in what it
takes to accommodate students with disabilities. This can be very costly such as
paying a signing expert to be in a seminar when there is one deaf student in the
classroom. But for off-campus students it can be so costly as to make an online
course too prohibitive to offer and requiring that all videos have captioning.
There are many technologies to help disabled students
(including the blind, deaf, and learning-challenged). The issue becomes whether
it's the university's responsibility to pay the tab in every instance ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
In my estimation having to remove such a massive amount of
learning material (much of it free) from pubic view punishes everybody for the
special needs of a relatively few number of potential learners.
Jensen Comment
The outcome of this lawsuit could have very expensive ramifications on tens of
millions of online videos and live broadcasts. Many learning videos will simply
be withdrawn from the Internet. It might be a good time to consider downloading
and archiving the videos most likely to be withdrawn from the Internet such as
those on YouTube learning channels and those now available at links provided at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
What I think is at issue here is whether free learning materials should be
subject to the same criteria as fee-based materials.
For example, providers of fee-based courses and learning materials can factor
in the extra cost of learning aids such as when a live course factors in the
cost of employing "signers"
when delivering a live course on campus or over the Internet ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_loss#Sign_language
A new lawsuit accuses Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology of failing to provide closed
captioning in online teaching materials, in violation of federal
antidiscrimination laws, The New York Times reports. The lawsuits were filed
by the National Association of the Deaf, and seek an injunction requiring
that closed captioning be provided for all online materials.
Both colleges provide extensive educational
resources free online, including through their membership in edX, which
offers dozens of MOOCs to students around the world.
Advocates for the deaf on Thursday filed a federal
class action against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violate
antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their
online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.
Bob Jensen's threads on new technology tools for disabled students,
including the hearing and sight impaired, ---
See Below
Jim Martin in MAAW's Blog reports that his neighbor with ALS (Lou Gehrig's
Disease) is using Eyegaze to surf the internet with her eyes http://www.eyegaze.com/
While the bill, known as the Teach Act,
has bipartisan support in Congress, several higher-education organizationshave
raised concernsabout
what they consider the legislation’s broad language, inflexibility, and
misplaced oversight. For example, the American Council on Education objects
to the bill in part because it grants authority to create guidelines to
the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, which the
council says lacks higher-education expertise.
“This provision creates an
impossible-to-meet standard for institutions and will result in a
significant chilling effect in the usage of new technology,” wrote Molly
Corbett Broad, ACE’s president, ina
letterlast
month to Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the education
committee. The letter was sent on behalf of the council and 19 other
higher-education groups. “Such a proposal, if implemented, will seriously
impede the development and adoption of accessible materials, harming the
very students it is intended to assist.”
Rep. Thomas E. Petri, a Wisconsin Republican, introduced the
Teach Act in the House of Representatives in November 2013, and Sen.
Elizabeth A. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced an identical bill
in the Senate in February 2014. This past summer, Senator Harkin included it
in his discussion draft for the reauthorization to the Higher Education Act.
“Congressman Petri believes that if there is a way to have
these educational materials accessible to students who are disabled, they
should have them,” said Lee Brooks, Representative Petri’s communications
director.
The National Federation of the Blind
and the Association of American Publishers are
proponents of the measure,which
would allow colleges to opt out of the guidelines if they already provide
materials that serve students with disabilities “in an equally effective and
equally integrated manner.”
“Every day, blind college students face frustration and
despair in the pursuit of their education because of inaccessible
technology,” Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind,
said in a written statement in February. “E-readers, web content, mobile
applications, and learning management systems are integral to the
21st-century college experience, and students with disabilities are being
needlessly left behind. … Schools and manufacturers must embrace readily
available accessibility solutions so that all students can benefit from
educational technology, and the guidelines established by the Teach Act will
make it clear how manufacturers and institutions of higher education can
best serve students with disabilities.”
In aletter published
this month inThe
Chronicle,Terry W. Hartle,
ACE’s senior vice president for government and public affairs, rejected the
assertion that the Teach Act is the best way to protect students with
disabilities.
“The bottom line is that the bill as written would damage the
quality of learning for all students, and it would freeze the development
and implementation of new learning technologies to benefit our students,
including students with disabilities,” he wrote.
Officials at the associations declined requests for further
comment.
Ron Zwerin, director of marketing for Educause, a
higher-education-technology group that has opposed the Teach Act, said the
proposed law would limit technology development. “For example, in a college
chemistry course, the information a sighted student might get from an
interactive 3D simulation of a chemical compound might be made available to
a blind student through the use of physical models,” he said by email. “This
reasonable accommodation would not be allowed under Teach, and thus
institutions most likely would not be able to use such simulations, even if
they might be made accessible to some but not all students with
disabilities.”
Tracy Mitrano, director of Internet culture, policy, and law
at Cornell University, plans to discuss the bill during a panel this week at
the annual conference of Educause.
“I understand completely why the associations have been
reluctant about the specifics of the Teach Act as an approach, but I think
the conversation around all this is an opportunity to come out on top of
it,” she said. “The question that remains for ACE or Educause or any other
higher-education institution is, Are you satisfied with simply rejecting
this approach and saying nothing else?”
Ms. Mitrano believes a solution already
exists:Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0,developed by
the World Wide Web Consortium. But any well-thought-out, codified standard
would benefit universities and students with disabilities, she said.
“It would make compliance relatively easy,” she said. “There
would be no more need to debate what the standards are.”
Isabella Moreno, associate director of the office of
disability services at Oberlin College, agrees. “Having federal guidelines
would be extremely helpful,” she said. “We are always most interested in
ensuring we are giving our students the absolute best. That doesn’t always
mean that we know what is available. Despite our efforts to try to stay on
top, there’s always new technologies that would assist our students.”
Compliance has been an issue at several
colleges. Most recently, in July 2013, the Department of Justiceannounced
a settlement with Louisiana Tech Universityregarding
a complaint that a digital product was inaccessible to a blind student.
Federal guidelines would help colleges avoid litigation and
help publishers produce the materials students need, according to Allan
Adler, general counsel and vice president for government affairs at the
Association of American Publishers.
“The legislation sets up a safe harbor for institutions of
higher education and, at the same time, approaches the work of the
manufacturers of materials with some amount of flexibility,” he said.
The
United States Department of Education (ED) has
proposed new regulations that would eliminate the "2 percent rule," which
allows some students with disabilities to be assessed using alternate
assessments aligned to modified academic achievement standards (AA-MAAS).
The current regulations allows states to develop
alternate assessments for up to 2 percent of students in the grades assessed
using AA-MAAS. However, according to ED, students with disabilities can make
academic progress when they receive appropriate support and instruction, and
that by making general assessments accessible to those students, with
support, they can achieve a higher level of success.
"We have to expect the very best from our students
and tell the truth about student performance, to prepare them for college
and career," said Arne Duncan United States secretary of education, in a
prepared statement. "That means no longer allowing the achievement of
students with disabilities to be measured by these alternate assessments
aligned to modified achievement standards. This prevents these students from
reaching their full potential, and prevents our country from benefitting
from that potential."
Continued in article
A 2011 article that's still relevant
Learning-Disabled Students Graduate from Clemson University
Mary Alice Shartle, 24, dreams about getting a job
someday working with small children.
At the same time, Shartle is clear about the
hurdles she faces.
“I have Down syndrome,” she said. “I have trouble
thinking sometimes.”
Shartle learned how to speak frankly about her
disability during a two-year life skills program at Clemson University. She
built on her strengths and can articulate her challenges — both key to a
prospective employer, said the program’s director, James Collins.
This spring, Shartle and five other intellectually
disabled young adults were among ClemsonLIFE’s first class of six graduates.
“They are adults now,” said Sharon Sanders, the
program’s founder and former director. “They were not when they came to me.
We treat them like adults. We so often treat them like children, and they
grow. All students do that.”
ClemsonLIFE is among five college programs in South
Carolina for intellectually disabled adults seeking higher education. The
state’s public schools allows these students to remain in high school until
they are 21, but there were no further education options for them until
three years ago, when the first such program started at the University of
South Carolina.
Without opportunities to keep learning, the
prospects for independent living are poor for these adults, said Donald
Bailey, executive director for College Transition Connection. His non-profit
organization coordinates state funding to five colleges, including Clemson,
that offer higher education for the intellectually disabled.
South Carolina has about 2,000 intellectually
disabled adults who would be eligible.
With 92 percent of this population unemployed, the
benefits to the state are obvious, Bailey said. A similar program at Tate
College in California has reported that 88 percent of its graduates over the
past decade are employed.
“This will ultimately save the state millions of
dollars,” Bailey said.
Shartle not only forged friendships with other
disabled adults, but also with mainstream Clemson students. She also tried a
range of jobs she might someday take on full time.
Her parents live in Greenville. After moving away
from home, Shartle learned online banking, sharing chores with roommates,
traveling by bus on her own, shopping for groceries and cooking her own
meals. She attended Clemson football games and recitals at the Brooks
Center.
“I like to cook healthy foods,” Shartle said.
“Salmon is my favorite.”
Collins said Shartle shared a normal college
experience with other people her age.
Shartle’s mother, Janice Shartle, said her daughter
has always wanted to learn.
“As a parent, we found out she can do more than we
expected,” she said.
ClemsonLIFE has grown from six students to nearly
20 this coming fall and has acquired dedicated office and classroom space in
Godfrey Hall. Created as a two-year program, ClemsonLIFE will add a
third-year program in the fall for four students who want to get work
internships and try living off campus without a mentor.
Cally Vollmer of Atlanta will be one of those
students. She has a summertime job selling jewelry at a store in Delaware,
and her parents had to discourage her from taking on too many hours.
“When I first got there, I was completely nervous,”
Vollmer said of ClemsonLIFE. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t
expect to be with so many awesome kids.”
She and her classmates interacted with more than
130 Clemson student volunteers.
Clemson has drawn several out-of-state students
because of the relative rarity of the programs.
“These kids desperately need them,” said Saralynn
Vollmer, Cally’s mom. “We couldn’t have made it any better than it was.”
This past year, 30 students were enrolled in the
state’s five new programs, but Bailey predicts that number will quickly grow
closer to 100 over the next year.
The College of Charleston and Clemson each had 20
applicants for the fall, he said. Two challenges still facing families are
affordability — tuition is comparable to full tuition and board for a
regular university — and awareness.
Jensen Question
Are there any HTML processors that automatically code for sight and hearing
impaired readers?
Are there any Web browsers that will read text aloud? See the Jaws Screen Reader
cited below.
There is software available for captioning video for the hearing impaired but
it is purportedly tedious to use for authors. Increasingly learning videos are
captioned for the hearing impaired.
A well-designed website that conforms to the Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) permits use by people of all
abilities. In my case, text labels that identify the buttons and graphical
features allow me to “see” what’s on the screen. The code is hidden and need
not interfere with the way the website works for sighted customers. But
without these features, a site that works beautifully with a mouse is
useless to me.
Technology has removed many of the barriers that
people with disabilities face in the physical world, making life in the
mainstream tantalizingly close. Can’t drive to the mall? There’s Amazon!
Can’t read the electric bill? Bank online! As my guide dog and I contemplate
the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the
landmark civil-rights law signed July 26, 1990, the gap between sight and
blindness has never been narrower.
The ADA requires government websites to be
accessible. Sadly, the law provides little guidance to the private sector on
this point, since it was passed before the Internet became ubiquitous. It
applies to a “place” of public accommodation—but is the Internet a place?
That question has been wending its way through the courts.
Disability advocates have worked to broaden the
law’s applicability, with some success. In April, Harvard University and
M.I.T. announced plans to voluntarily make their edX website for online
courses compliant with the WCAG after deaf advocates filed federal lawsuits
alleging discrimination. In 2010 the Justice Department announced it would
consider issuing Web-accessibility regulations under the ADA, though the
rule-making process lumbers on. With the number of websites growing rapidly,
change isn’t coming fast enough.
“More than 50 percent of the websites on the
Internet are either inaccessible or unusable for people who use adaptive
technology,” Brian Charlson, director of technology at the Carroll Center
for the Blind in Newton, Mass., told me in his office a few months back.
The consequences range from inconvenient to
significant. When I can’t place an online order at my favorite Vietnamese
noodle shop, I get Chinese instead. If a task is urgent, I pester family and
friends for “favors.” When they hover over my screen to help me navigate
around a virtual barrier, I’m keenly aware that my charge-card number and
the details of my transaction are on display. At work, unequal access in an
increasingly networked economy contributes to an unemployment rate that’s
more than twice as high for people with disabilities—and that’s not counting
many who have given up looking for work.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The above article is disappointing in that it does not mention most
technologies and newer products that can be tried by the sight-impaired
learners.
Free Monitor
I don't know anything about this free monitor or the open-source software for
sight-impaired people, but it sounds wonderful http://www.nvaccess.org/
Thank you Scott Bonacker for the heads up.
JAWS (Job Access With Speech) is a computer screen
reader program for Microsoft Windows that allows blind and visually impaired
users to read the screen either with a text-to-speech output or by a
Refreshable Braille display.
JAWS is produced by the Blind and Low Vision Group
of Freedom Scientific, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA.
A May 2012 screen reader user survey by WebAIM, a
web accessibility company, found JAWS to be the most popular screen reader
worldwide; 49.1% of survey participants used it as a primary screen reader,
while 63.7% of participants used it often.[1]
Jensen Comment
This could be especially helpful for sight-impaired online learners. It enables
them to read email messages and printed online course materials. Online
instructors should be especially careful in fully explaining charts, exhibits,
and other visuals that are difficult to comprehend with the FingerReader.
Now if we could get a reader for Division 1 varsity athletes life would be
even better.
When the great history books of technology are
written, the early 2000s may be remembered as the Age of Human-Computer
Interface Exploration.
For nearly 40 years, we’ve had the keyboard and the
mouse. Point, click. Point, click. It works, but it’s indirect. You may be
too young to remember, but the mouse wasn’t always the easiest thing to
learn. (I spent many years working as a personal computer tutor, paying
house calls to frustrated adults who were struggling to enter the digital
age.)
¶But then came the Wii. We could control a computer
by waving a wireless remote in space. There was the iPhone and iPad: we
could control a computer by pointing and dragging a finger on glass. There
was the Microsoft Xbox Kinect: we could control a computer without touching
it at all, just by moving our limbs in space. Then came Siri on the iPhone
4S, which took voice control to a much more sophisticated, fluid level.
¶Each of these breakthroughs works brilliantly in
its particular niche — but we’re not done yet.
¶At the International Consumer Electronics Show a
couple of weeks ago, I’d heard buzz about a company called Tobii, which was
demonstrating a laptop with built-in eye-tracking software. (That’s Tobii,
“with two eyes,” get it?)
¶Now eye tracking isn’t new. It is available, at
huge cost, in the military, in specialized industries, for disabled people,
and so on. But it’s one thing to pay millions for a heads-up display in a
fighter jet, and quite another to have it on your laptop.
¶I found the company’s booth out in the deepest
reaches of C.E.S.’s 37-football-fields-big exhibition halls.—.the Siberia of
tiny booths from companies without a lot of money to spend. The entire booth
was pretty much one laptop and one desktop PC.
¶A representative helped me through the demo on the
laptop. First, the system finds and learns where your eyes are by using a
10-second calibration procedure, in which you simply look at an orange dot
as it jumps to four positions around the screen. Then you’re ready.
¶The first demonstration was an Asteroids game, in
which you’re supposed to blow up incoming asteroids just by looking at them.
You discover that Tobii’s system works perfectly, flawlessly,
exhilaratingly. Your hands are free, your body is relaxed, and you’re
blowing up space rocks instantly with nothing but the awesome power of your
gaze.
¶Another demonstration involved Google Maps: the
software automatically focuses and zooms in wherever you seem to be
focusing.
¶There was a slide show app, in which you see the
thumbnails of many photos, and whenever you gaze at one in particular, it
automatically blows up full screen.
¶On a PC running Windows 8, you could click toolbar
buttons in Word, click tile buttons and swipe through screens, all using
your eyes. In an architecture-design program, you could effortlessly move
around a large blueprint with your eyes, using the mouse’s scroll wheel to
zoom in at any point. (For the disabled, Tobii makes a kit that lets you
“click the mouse” by blinking or staring, but the system really works best
in conjunction with a regular trackpad or mouse.)
¶The demo that really rocked my world, though, was
something much less glamorous: reading. Imagine a Web page or Word document
on the screen before you — and the page scrolls automatically, gracefully
and effortlessly as you proceed through the article. The system knows where
your eyes are and how fast you are going, so it keeps your place centered on
the screen, scrolling automatically as you go, even if you jump back to
reread something. It feels as if this is how reading on a computer screen
was always meant to be.
¶The rep said that the company was marketing this
system to computer manufacturers, not individuals (although the company also
sells hugely expensive add-on kits for existing computers — for disabled
people, for example). And he said it would take a couple of years before you
could buy it.
Blind and deaf people will be able to more easily
use smart phones, the Internet and other technologies that are staples of
life and work under a bill signed into law on Friday.
Such a step has been a priority of advocates for the millions of people who
cannot see or hear.
In the East Room of the White House, where he was flanked on stage by
lawmakers and Stevie Wonder, President Barack Obama portrayed the occasion
as another step in guaranteeing equal access, opportunity and respect for
all Americans.
He recalled celebrating this year's 20th anniversary of the Americans with
Disabilities Act, banning workplace discrimination against qualified people
with disabilities and requiring improved access to public places and
transportation.
"We've come a long way but even today, after all the progress that we've
made, too many Americans with disabilities are still measured by what folks
think they can't do, instead of what we know they can do," Obama said.
The new law "will make it easier for people who are deaf, blind or live with
a visual impairment to do what many of us take for granted," he said, from
navigating a TV or DVD menu to sending an e-mail on a smart phone.
"It sets new standards so that Americans with disabilities can take
advantage of the technology our economy depends on, and that's especially
important in today's economy when every worker needs the necessary skills to
compete for the jobs of the future," Obama said.
In one corner of the East Room, sign language interpreters translated
Obama's remarks as he spoke. Across the room, his words scrolled on a large
video monitor with help from a stenographer who transcribed them.
Under the law, the quality of life will improve for 25 million people who
are blind or have difficulty seeing, along with the estimated 36 million
people who are deaf or hard of hearing, advocacy groups say.
Nondisabled people stand to benefit, too. They may find the devices and
screens easier to use.
The law sets federal guidelines that require the telecommunications industry
to:
--Make getting to the Internet easier by
improving the user interfaces on smart phones.
--Provide audible descriptions of on-screen action to help the blind
more fully enjoy television.
--Add captions to online TV programming to help the deaf.
--Make the equipment used for Internet telephone calls compatible with
hearing aids.
--Add a button or other switch to television remote controls for simpler
access to closed captioning on television.
Paul Schroeder, a vice president at the American
Foundation for the Blind, said many blind or deaf people have had to spend
hundreds of dollars on costly accessories or software to make their cell
phones and other devices easier to use.
"We hope that companies will start working immediately on making solutions
available and affordable for people with disabilities," he said.
Blind since childhood, Schroeder described the bill as "life changing."
"As a person who is blind, it will bring some of the new technologies that
are changing the workplace, education and leisure into my hands," he said.
I hope you watched CBS 60 Minutes on October23, 2011
Following an informative segment on the life of Steve Jobs (he was much more of
an unbathing mystic hippie than I realized), there was an even better segment on
the impact of the iPad on many autistic people (not just children, but it's best
to try them on iPads as early as possible). Note that the iPad is not a magic
bullet for all people afflicted with autism. But for some the touch screen using
some amazing autism apps became a miracle that allows them to communicate what
has heretofore been locked inside their heads. The iPad for some is an amazing
way for them to reveal their talents and their emotions. Also note the recent
discoveries using brain scans of autism victims.
I still have no incentive myself to invest the time and money in an iPad,
although I should perhaps begin testing some apps that might be relevant for my
life and work. But for autistic victims and their families, it's grossly
negligent not to try out iPads. Note that it may be best to also have teachers
specially trained in both iPad apps and autism rather than just starting an
autistic person out cold with an iPad.
College students with very poor vision have had to
struggle to see a blackboard and take notes—basic tasks that can hold some
back. Now a team of four students from Arizona State University has designed
a system, called Note-Taker, that couples a tablet PC and a video camera,
and could be a major advance over the small eyeglass-mounted telescopes that
many students have had to rely on. It recently
won second place in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup
technology competition.
There are roughly 75,000 students at colleges and
trade schools who are visually impaired. The telescopes allow students with
low vision to see the blackboard, but they can only focus on one section at
a time. Then they have to take off the telescope, write notes, and then go
back to the board and try and catch up with the lecture.
David S. Hayden, who graduated from Arizona State
in May, understands these challenges—he can only read texts if he gets about
two inches away from the material. Mr. Hayden, the lead designer of
Note-Taker, says he faced a “morbid tradeoff” in class. Using the assistive
technology that was available to him, he could either take notes or listen
and absorb the information, but never both. After he had to withdraw from
three senior-level math classes, he says, “I realized the existing
technologies weren’t going to assist my needs, so I had a project on my
hands.”
The result was Note-Taker, which connects a tablet
PC (a laptop with a screen you can write on) to a high-resolution video
camera. Screen commands get the camera to pan and zoom. The video footage,
along with audio, can be played in real time on the tablet and are also
saved for later reference. Alongside the video is a space for typed or
handwritten notes, which students can jot down using a stylus. That should
be helpful in math and science courses, says Mr. Hayden, where students need
to copy down graphs, charts, and symbols not readily available on a
keyboard.
Now that a landmark study conducted by the Community College Research Center
at Columbia University has confirmed that students at two-year campuses perform
worse in online courses than in the face-to-face version, perhaps we can move on
the important question: What can we do about that?
Jensen Comment
Most of the performance inhibitors apply to onsite and well as online education,
but there are some things that can be done to improve online learning for many
students. The first task, in my opinion, is to determine if there are unique
learning disabilities that should be dealt with separately.
Question
What hand-held device can photograph close up and read aloud from books, price
labels, receipts, and newspapers?
Hint:
This device has far more uses beyond being a helper for sight impaired people.
For one thing, auditors might make use of this when detail testing.
The Intel Reader, powered by an
Atom processor, is a handheld device with a five-megapixel camera that can read
aloud any printed text it is pointed at, including product labels, receipts, and
pages from books and newspapers. Previously, visually impaired or dyslexic
people required a desktop scanner connected to a computer to convert print into
speech.
"Scan and Listen," MIT's Technology Review, December 17, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24198/?a=f
The National Federation of the Blind Thursday gave
Blackboard, the e-learning giant, its top accessibility certification.
Blackboard is the first learning-management company to earn the
certification, although federation spokesman Chris Danielsen says the group
had not tested all of Blackboard's competitors. Given that
learning-management systems are so critical to modern education, it started
working with Blackboard; the company was able to make a number of
accessibility improvements in its latest version, released in the spring.
Since Blackboard is by far the biggest player in the learning-management
market, the federation's stamp of approval represents a big step for the
visually impaired in an age when such online tools have become crucial even
to brick-and-mortar institutions, Danielsen says.
Some people seem to get taken to the cleaners every
time they buy a car, subscribe to TV service or get a new cell phone. New
research suggests the problem might not be in their wallets, but in their
genes.
Brain scientists are starting to get a handle on a
relatively new disorder called "dyscalculia," which is loosely described as
dyslexia with numbers. While plenty of people are insecure about their
number skills, dyscalculics are bad at math in a very fundamental way:
Studies indicate their brains can't even recognize groups of five or six
objects, or link numeric symbols with their corresponding values.
The implications of this disorder for high school
algebra students are obvious; but the nightmare it can cause adult consumers
is a far more serious -- and largely misunderstood -- social problem.
Dyscalculics often can't count change, said
Professor Brian Butterworth, of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at
University College London, and perhaps the world's leading dyscalculia
expert. They don't understand interest calculation or exchange rates. By
the time they become adults, they are so insecure about numbers that they
frequently cede all money issues to others, a recipe for disaster.
"Unfortunately, there have been no studies that I
know of, looking into the vulnerability of dyscalculics as consumers,"
Butterworth said. "It would be a valuable addition to this area."
Butterworth's latest research, published in last
month’s Science Magazine, focused on the fundamental causes of dyscalculia,
which he believes comes from an undeveloped ability of some people to
recognize and quantify sets of objects, something called "numerosity
processing." But he's also interviewed hundreds of adults who can't perform
basic math calculations and he understands the heartbreaking impact the
disorder can have.
"One of the first dyscalculics we saw, many years
ago, was in prison for shoplifting,” he said. “It turned out that he was too
embarrassed to go to the till because of his problems with money."
On his website,
MathematicalBrain.com, there's an interview with
successful author Paul Moorcraft, who managed to hide his disorder from
everyone until he "came out" with the problem at age 55. He'd been making
lousy business deals his whole life.
“I was very successful but I couldn’t count. I kept
it hidden my whole life … even counting under the table with my fingers at a
board meeting,” he said.
Amanda Lacy was frustrated with her physics class
and ready to drop it.
Ms. Lacy, a blind student at Austin Community
College, is a computer-science major who loves her classes but often
struggles in them, not because she doesn’t understand the material, but
because she doesn’t have access to adequate textbooks. And when she started
taking the introduction-to-physics class, things got even worse, until a
professor stepped in with a solution.
The college provides blind students with digital
copies of textbooks so they can listen to them on the computer or read them
using an electronic Braille display. But the figures and graphs in Ms.
Lacy’s physics book don’t easily translate the same way that text does.
“There are many symbols that the computer doesn’t
recognize,” Ms. Lacy said, “so it just comes out as gibberish.” For example,
Ms. Lacy said in an interview, the computer will read ‘X squared’ simply as
‘X2′.
When Ms. Lacy showed her digital textbook to her
computer-science professor, Richard Baldwin, he was shocked, she said. He
told her if someone didn’t take her problem seriously there was no way she
would make it through the course.
So Mr. Baldwin started working with Ms. Lacy for a
few hours each week, slowly going through the textbook and trying to explain
the graphics to her in a way that she understood. “He’d do whatever he could
to get these concepts across,” Ms. Lacy said. “He’d scratch them out on
paper, draw them on my hand, things like that.” While they were working
together, Mr. Baldwin began creating an open-access online tutorial for
blind students learning physics.
In Mr. Baldwin’s tutorials, equations are written
using only symbols found on keyboards so that everything is one-dimensional
and presented in a format that blind people can read. Using the tutorials,
Ms. Lacy excelled in her physics class and received an A in the course.
Working with Ms. Lacy taught Mr. Baldwin many
things, too, such as that blind people can’t draw with much accuracy. So he
came up with a new software for that as well. “I sent this thing to her at
home, and the next time I saw her she was pretty elated,” Mr. Baldwin said.
“She told me, ‘Finally, I can doodle.’” Before that, her physics professor
would just allow her to skip the problems that required sketches for
answers. Now, Ms. Lacy says, she is working with the software so that when
she takes Physics II she can turn in her completed homework with the rest of
the students.
Sometimes people ask her why she doesn’t just study
something easier for blind students, like English or history, Ms. Lacy says.
What does she tell them? “Because I’ll get bored.”
The Association of American Publishers and the
University of Georgia this week unveiled an electronic database aimed at
making it easier for blind, dyslexic and otherwise impaired college students
to get specialized textbooks in time for classes.
The database, called
AccessText,,
is designed to centralize the process by which
electronic versions of textbooks are requested by colleges and supplied by
publishers. Experts say it will allow disabled students to get their
textbooks more efficiently, help colleges save money and avoid lawsuits, and
protect publishers’ copyrights.
For students whose disabilities prevent them from
using traditional texts, the normally straightforward task of acquiring
books for their courses can be tedious and frustrating. Federal law requires
that colleges and universities provide disabled students equal access to
educational materials, but this is often easier said than done. College
officials have to track down and contact the publisher of every textbook
that each of its disabled students buys and request an electronic copy. If
such a copy exists -- the likelihood shrinks the older the book and the
smaller the publisher -- college officials still have to convert the file to
a format that can be read by whatever reading aid the student uses. If not,
the college has to wait, sometimes weeks, to obtain permission to scan the
book and create its own electronic version.
Once a college has an electronic copy, converting
to a readable format can be another complex process, says Sean Keegan,
associate director of assistive technology at Stanford University. Math and
science texts often arrive as scanned pages, and cannot always be easily
read by the character-recognition software the university uses to turn them
into standard electronic files, Keegan says. “That can take a longer amount
of time to process that material internally and turn it around and give that
to the student efficiently,” he says.
Meanwhile, delays in the process can make it
impossible for disabled students to prepare for and participate in classes.
“Students need to have a book in time so they can do the assigned reading
and study for tests and papers,” says Gaeir Dietrich, interim director of
high-tech training for the California Community Colleges system. “So if the
book doesn’t come until the term has been in session for three or four
weeks, that puts that student very far behind.” Some students have sued
colleges over such delays, she says.
AccessText aims to mitigate these woes by
streamlining the request and delivery process, says Ed McCoyd, executive
director for accessibility affairs at AAP.
“There’s a lot of transactional friction taking
place currently,” says McCoyd. “What AccessText is trying to do is take some
of that out of the transaction by having parties agree to streamlined rules
up front.”
Having colleges submit requests using the
AccessText portal should eliminate the need for the publishers to require
endless paperwork with each request to protect its copyrights, McCoyd says.
Under the system, the copyright protection agreements can be handled once,
during registration, and the requester’s bona fides can be verified by a
log-in.
Currently, colleges that get tired of waiting for
publishers to process the paperwork and procure an electronic copy of a text
sometimes just scan a text themselves to try to satisfy the needs of
disabled students in a timely fashion, says Dietrich.
AccessText is also set up to eliminate the need for
different colleges to convert the same text to a readable format once it is
acquired. Currently “numerous schools could be doing the exact same thing,
converting the same text,” says Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for
higher education at the publishers' association. Under the new system, “if
one school has already spent the time and the money to convert a file to a
format, they could advise the AccessText network, which could then make the
info available that it was still available in that format, and that school
could share it with another school” -- thereby sparing those colleges the
time and resources it would have used to convert the file themselves, he
says.
Eight major publishing houses paid a total of just
under $1 million to develop the AccessText network and maintain it through
its beta phase, which will end next July. From then on, it will sustain
itself by billing member colleges between $375 and $500 annually, depending
on size.
Dietrich notes that community colleges might not
benefit from the AccessText network as much as other institutions, since “we
have a lot more vocational classes and basic-skills classes, and a lot of
those books don’t come through those big publishers, they come through
specialized publishers,” she says. “It doesn’t solve that part of the
problem for us.”
The network includes 92 percent of all college
textbook publishers and is recruiting even more, according to AAP officials.
Accounting and Other Books for Sight Impaired "Readers"
With a service it started Thursday, the Internet
Archive has more than doubled the number of books available to blind people
and others who cannot read print books. The nonprofit organization, based in
San Francisco, has made more than a million digital books available free in
a format that can be downloaded to a device that reads them aloud.
The Internet Archive has been scanning books and
making them available free online since 2005, and the books in the new
format are part of the organization's collection of more than two million
texts. To make a book accessible for those unable to read print volumes, the
Internet Archive uses an automatic process to digitize it into a special
format, Daisy.
The process does not work well for textbooks or
other kinds of texts with complex formatting, said Brewster Kahle, the
archive's founder and digital librarian. Other organizations, like Bookshare,
make textbooks available for people who can't use print books, Mr. Kahle
said.
He added that the Internet Archive's collection is
useful for research. "You could find books that are now out of print that
you wouldn't find in your library," he said.
Arielle Silverman, the president of the national
association of blind students, said college students are often required to
read popular books, which they might be able to get sooner through the new
service.
"The situation right now is that for the majority
of books, if we want to obtain them, we have to negotiate with the
disabled-students office," said Ms. Silverman, who is a doctoral student at
the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Ms. Silverman said that students sometimes have to
wait months for the books they request to be provided in a digital format.
Now many more books will be available instantly, she said. Ms. Silverman
also said that the Daisy format is preferable to the traditional audio book
because it lets the user skip around easily.
The Internet Archive will make all new additions to
its library available in Daisy if the text's format allows. It is seeking
book donations, and it has promised to pay for digitization of the first
10,000 volumes it receives.
The 19-year-old woman glares at her computer
screen, furious because her roommate wants a friend to move in with them,
rent-free. But instead of calmly asserting herself, she begins yelling, and
her virtual world is put on pause.
Then the woman replays the encounter, which
occurred not with a live roommate, but between digital characters, or
avatars, guided by a clinician in the Center for Brain Health at the
University of Texas at Dallas. The woman and the clinician consider how she
could have handled the situation better
Then the woman is back in the virtual town, created
specially for patients who, like her, have Asperger's syndrome. The disorder
is a mild form of autism marked by normal intelligence and a variety of
cognitive defects, including troubles with social interaction or adapting to
change.
Asperger's patients have been treated by
role-playing with real-life therapists. The virtual-reality town at the
medical center is a new twist. "The clinicians can change the virtual world
to increase the complexity of the exercise, control for sensory overload,
provide motivation, and record feedback. It's very safe," says the center's
executive director, Sandra B. Chapman.
The university uses a platform from Second Life,
the popular virtual world, in which patients go to an "island" customized
for therapeutic purposes. The island was built by undergraduates in the
university's game-design program, guided by the center's clinicians.
Patients design their avatars to look as much like
themselves as possible, and can readily access programmed gestures to make
their likenesses smile, shrug, or express impatience by tapping their feet.
Building Social Skills
Virtual reality is gaining traction as a form of
psychotherapy at many academic medical centers, says Zachary Rosenthal,
director of the Cognitive Behavioral Research and Treatment Program at Duke
University Medical Center. It "allows you a wider, more flexible platform,
with a broader variety of cues and potential scenarios to build social
skills," he says. Mr. Rosenthal has created a virtual crackhouse at Duke to
help addicts control their craving.
In Dallas, says Ms. Chapman, Asperger's patients
experience the same emotions they would in a direct encounter. "They're
interacting in real time with real people in surprisingly realistic
scenarios," she explains. They make small talk, using headsets and
microphones, and settle conflicts with people in virtual restaurants, shops,
offices, and parks. These people are mostly clinicians and volunteers
represented by their own avatars.
Researchers in Dallas also conduct brain-imaging
and neurocognitive tests on the patients before and after the virtual-world
therapy sessions. The three patients they have tested so far have shown
improvements in several areas, including "social appropriateness." They are
less likely, for instance, to make inappropriate jokes and more likely to be
able to read a person's body language.
Matt Kratz, a 35-year-old graduate student with
Asperger's syndrome who has been treated in the program, says he feels more
confident making small talk, especially with women, since practicing in
virtual reality.
"I'm usually not good with someone face to face,"
he says. "I tend to feel awkward and put my foot in my mouth."
In his virtual world, Mr. Kratz was able to see,
for example, that an innocent comment about a rose on a woman's shirt could
be misconstrued as a pickup line, and how his flat tone when talking with a
friend who had just received a promotion could be construed as a lack of
concern. "I feel like I'm more prepared now," he says, "when I go out into
the real world."
Jensen Comment
This is a promising way for someone good at sign language to communicate with
others who cannot read sign language. Next would be a vice versa technology.
From Gallaudet University:
People who are deaf or hard of hearing rely heavily on visual cues, regardless
of the specific means of communication. If you suspect a user cannot hear you,
try some of the strategies suggested below ---
http://libguides.gallaudet.edu/c.php?g=773982
As many as two million people in the United States
use American Sign Language, but not every user knows what every one of the
thousands of signs mean. And there is no dictionary in which to look them
up—sign dictionaries are organized by the written definition of the sign,
not by the physical movement.
Now a team of researchers at Boston University is
working on an interactive video project that would allow someone to trace an
unfamiliar sign in front of a Web camera and have a computer program
interpret and explain its meaning,
according to the Associated Press.
The researchers, working with a three-year,
$900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are trying to capture
3,000 ASL signs on video. Their goal is to develop
a “backwards” dictionary that will allow people to look up any unfamiliar
gesture.
If a deaf person signs to a someone who doesn’t
understand the sign, that person could sit down in front of a computer,
repeat the sign into a Web cam, and the program would identify possible
translations by recognizing the sign’s visual properties.
Dear Bob
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! I hope that it will work since
every deaf person signs any signfrom a tiny bit to a lot more differently
than the next deaf person does. This promises to be a longer term project.
Bill
William Sloboda, MBA, CPA Associate Professor of
Accounting and Accounting, Program Coordinator Department of Business
Gallaudet University 800 Florida Ave. NE Washington, D C 20002-3695
202-651-5312
On occasion in the past the Counseling Center at Trinity University notified
me when a student had dyslexia. In most cases the student requested extra time
on quizzes and examinations. If you discover that a student has dyslexia, it may
help that student if you request that the student sit near the front of
the classroom as well as giving more time for examinations.
New research may provide an answer as to why
children with dyslexia often have difficulty hearing someone talk in a noisy
room.
Dyslexia is a common, language-based learning
disability that makes it difficult to read, spell, and write. It is
unrelated to a person's intelligence. Studies have also shown that patients
with dyslexia can have a hard time hearing when there is a lot of background
noise, but the reasons for this haven't been exactly clear.
Now, scientists at Northwestern University say that
in dyslexia, the part of the brain that helps perceive speech in a noisy
environment is unable to fine-tune or sharpen the incoming signals.
"The ability to sharpen or fine-tune repeating
elements is crucial to hearing speech in noise because it allows for
superior 'tagging' of voice pitch, an important cue in picking out a
particular voice within background noise," Nina Kraus, director of
Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, says in a news
release.
The brainstem is the first place in the brain to
receive and process auditory (hearing) signals. It is supposed to
automatically focus on the information, such as repeated bits of speech, and
sharpen it so you can discern someone's voice from, say, the noise of a
chaotic classroom. The new study, however, provides the first biological
evidence that children with dyslexia have a deficit in this auditory
process. As a result, the brainstem cannot focus on relevant, predictable,
and repeating sounds.
The new evidence is based on a brain activity study
of children with both good and poor reading skills. The children wore
earphones that repeated the sound "da" in different intervals while watching
an unrelated video. The first time, "da" repeated over and over again in a
repetitive manner. In a second session, the sound "da" occurred randomly
along with other speech sounds, in a variable manner. Electrodes taped to
each child's scalp recorded the brain's response to the sounds.
The children also underwent standard reading and
spelling tests and were asked to repeat sentences provided to them amid
different noise levels.
"Even though the children's attention was focused
on a movie, the auditory system of the good readers 'tuned in' to the
repeatedly presented speech sound context and sharpened the sound's
encoding. In contrast, poor readers did not show an improvement in encoding
with repetition," Bharath Chandrasekaran, one of the study's authors, says
in a statement.
The tests also revealed that children without
dyslexia were better able to repeat sentences they had heard in noisy
environments. However, the researchers noted enhanced brain activity of the
children with dyslexia during the session when the "da" sound was variably
played.
"The study brings us closer to understanding
sensory processing in children who experience difficulty excluding
irrelevant noise. It provides an objective index that can help in the
assessment of children with reading problems," Kraus says.
The findings, which appear in this week's issue of
Neuron, may also help teachers and caregivers devise better strategies for
teaching children with dyslexia. For example, the study authors say children
with dyslexia who have trouble sorting out voices in noisy classrooms may
benefit simply by sitting closer to the teacher.
Speak to Me Only With Thine Eyes: The Sound of Colors for the Blind Researchers at the Balearic Islands University in Spain
are developing a device that will allow blind children to distinguish colors by
associating each shade to a specific sound. The project, dubbed COL-diesis, is
based on the synesthesia principle--a confusion of senses where people
involuntarily relate the real information gathered by one sense with a different
sensation. "Only 4 percent of the population are true synesthetes, but everybody
else is influenced by associations between sounds and colors," said Jessica
Rossi, one of the coordinators of the project. For example, people tend to
associate light colors with high-pitched sounds. "We want to give the user a
device that allows [blind children] to chose specific associations of colors and
sounds based on each user's sensitivity," Rossi said. The device will include a
sensor the blind kids will wear on their fingertips to touch the objects they
want to know the colors of, and a bracelet that will transform the color into a
sound. The researchers expect to have their prototype ready by September.
Maria José Vińas, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3109&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Question
Do we need multiple sounds for some colors? For example, there's Wall Street
green, Al Gore's green, vegetable green, freshman green, and seasick green.
Jensen Comment for Accountants
Proposed (actually now optional) fair value financial statements have so many
shades of accuracy regarding measurements of financial items. Cash counts are
highly accurate along with cash received from sales of financial instruments.
Unrealized earnings on actively traded bonds and stocks are quite accurate
according to FAS 157. Value estimates of interest rate swaps may be inaccurate
but inaccuracy doesn't matter much since these value changes will all wash out
to zero when the swaps mature. Value estimates of most anything highly unique,
like parcels of real estate, are highly subjective and prone to fraud among
appraisal sharks.
Could we add information to fair value financial statements by colorizing
them according to degrees of uncertainty and accuracy? And could we add sounds
of uncertainty so that SEC-recommended bracelets could listen to the soothing
waltzes cash of Strauss and the rancorous hard rock shares in a real estate
development company?
Bob Jensen's threads on visualization of multivariate data are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm I think the above document is interesting, but I never get any feedback
about it.
There are all sorts of research opportunities in visualization of multivariate
fair value financial performance!
In addition, I like Camtasia (recording screen shots and camera video) and
Dubit (for recording audio and editing audio) from TechSmith ---
http://www.techsmith.com/
TechSmith products are very good, but they are not free downloads.
UserView ---
http://www.techsmith.com/uservue/features.asp
TechSmith has a newer product called UserView that really sounds exciting,
although I’ve not yet tried it. It allows you to view and record what is
happening on someone else’s computer like a student’s computer. Multiple
computers can be viewed at the same time. Images and text can be recorded.
Pop-up comments can be inserted by the instructor to text written by students.
The 19-year-old woman glares at her computer
screen, furious because her roommate wants a friend to move in with them,
rent-free. But instead of calmly asserting herself, she begins yelling, and
her virtual world is put on pause.
Then the woman replays the encounter, which
occurred not with a live roommate, but between digital characters, or
avatars, guided by a clinician in the Center for Brain Health at the
University of Texas at Dallas. The woman and the clinician consider how she
could have handled the situation better
Then the woman is back in the virtual town, created
specially for patients who, like her, have Asperger's syndrome. The disorder
is a mild form of autism marked by normal intelligence and a variety of
cognitive defects, including troubles with social interaction or adapting to
change.
Asperger's patients have been treated by
role-playing with real-life therapists. The virtual-reality town at the
medical center is a new twist. "The clinicians can change the virtual world
to increase the complexity of the exercise, control for sensory overload,
provide motivation, and record feedback. It's very safe," says the center's
executive director, Sandra B. Chapman.
The university uses a platform from Second Life,
the popular virtual world, in which patients go to an "island" customized
for therapeutic purposes. The island was built by undergraduates in the
university's game-design program, guided by the center's clinicians.
Patients design their avatars to look as much like
themselves as possible, and can readily access programmed gestures to make
their likenesses smile, shrug, or express impatience by tapping their feet.
Building Social Skills
Virtual reality is gaining traction as a form of
psychotherapy at many academic medical centers, says Zachary Rosenthal,
director of the Cognitive Behavioral Research and Treatment Program at Duke
University Medical Center. It "allows you a wider, more flexible platform,
with a broader variety of cues and potential scenarios to build social
skills," he says. Mr. Rosenthal has created a virtual crackhouse at Duke to
help addicts control their craving.
In Dallas, says Ms. Chapman, Asperger's patients
experience the same emotions they would in a direct encounter. "They're
interacting in real time with real people in surprisingly realistic
scenarios," she explains. They make small talk, using headsets and
microphones, and settle conflicts with people in virtual restaurants, shops,
offices, and parks. These people are mostly clinicians and volunteers
represented by their own avatars.
Researchers in Dallas also conduct brain-imaging
and neurocognitive tests on the patients before and after the virtual-world
therapy sessions. The three patients they have tested so far have shown
improvements in several areas, including "social appropriateness." They are
less likely, for instance, to make inappropriate jokes and more likely to be
able to read a person's body language.
Matt Kratz, a 35-year-old graduate student with
Asperger's syndrome who has been treated in the program, says he feels more
confident making small talk, especially with women, since practicing in
virtual reality.
"I'm usually not good with someone face to face,"
he says. "I tend to feel awkward and put my foot in my mouth."
In his virtual world, Mr. Kratz was able to see,
for example, that an innocent comment about a rose on a woman's shirt could
be misconstrued as a pickup line, and how his flat tone when talking with a
friend who had just received a promotion could be construed as a lack of
concern. "I feel like I'm more prepared now," he says, "when I go out into
the real world."
How to Teach With "Start" and "Remote Control" in Windows
For over two years, after we bought our retirement home in New Hampshire, and
before I retired from Trinity University in Texas, I used GoToMyPC to remotely
operate my desktop computer in Texas from hotel rooms and my home in NH during
summers, holiday breaks, a sabbatical leave, and other visits to NH. GoToMyPC
works great and did penetrate my university's firewall. This is an annual-fee
based option for remotely controlling your office computer or the computer of a
friend or student in a distant location ---
https://www.gotomypc.com
I now use Cisco's VPN which is free to me when I want to download files into
various servers on the Trinity University Network. But VPN is not quite the same
as a remote control system for operating a distant computer ---
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/vpn/p/ciscovpnclient.htm
Since I no longer have an office and desktop computer in Texas, I no longer
use GoToMyPC. However, the other day I had call to use a free utility that is
built into the Windows operating system. I simply clicked on "Start" and "Remote
Control" and gave a Trinity University computer technician remote control of my
PC (actually it's joint control since we both had control of my computer). This
remote control can be granted for any specified amount of time (e.g., 20 minutes
or two hours) and can be granted without having to give your password to the
remote operator, although you can also choose the password-required option.
Note especially that the pre-specified time allotment is a key advantage over
the free "Start" and "Remote Control" alternative relative to the
fee-based GoToMyPC alternative. However, GoToMyPC has some key advantages when
the remote user is on public computers such as Internet cafes and public library
computers.
The remotely located technician named Gabe and I were both on the telephone
and jointly operating my computer. He performed some repairs and updates to my
computer's email system while I watched. He also explained what he was doing on
the phone. This saved us both a lot of time relative to the typical technical
support phone call in which the technician asks you over the phone to do a
sequence of complicated things on your computer. You have to fumble with your
keyboard and phone at the same time, and the technician sits and waits doing
nothing for periods of time. It is much faster to use "Start" and "Remote
Control" and let the technician do the work while you watch and listen. I
might add that I did not have to turn off my firewall for this, although
firewalls may be a problem for some users.
It suddenly struck me that "Start" and "Remote Control" might be a
useful option for teaching one-on-one to a student at a remote site ranging from
an on-campus dorm room to a site half way around the world. It would be much
more efficient than trying to explain something technical on the phone with the
student and then having to wait until the student makes it work on her/his
computer.
This could be especially useful as a free alternative for remotely teaching
certain types of handicapped students such as students having limited use of
their arms or hands. Special course materials could even be designed with the
"Start" and "Remote Control" features in mind.
It also struck me that Gabe and other technicians are often doing the same
things over and over with computer users. It would save a lot of money and time
if technicians like Gabe and Microsoft made Camtasia videos explaining common
repetitive solutions to computer problems ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
What is the Landmark Act?
What is the Landmark College?
According to a report by the
American Council on Education, the
number of full-time college freshmen with learning
disabilities — dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactive
disorder are among the most common — more than doubled in
the decade leading up to 2000, to nearly 27,000.
Betit said the spike is because more
of those students are being identified than in the past, and
that, now that colleges are recognizing their own students
with learning disabilities, it is time to learn more about
educating them. A large part of Landmark’s intent is to use
the grant to make information about teaching techniques
available online, so teachers at colleges that do not cater
only to students with learning disabilities can easily
access information. If it works at the five partner
colleges, Landmark hopes to share its wisdom more widely.
“We’ll never be a big college,” Betit said. “But we want to
share what we know.”
Many of the shared techniques will
focus on expanding the available types of sensory input a
student can use for learning. “I don’t know how many college
classrooms have boxes of Legos” like Landmark classrooms, he
said, noting that some students “are more tactile, and need
to grasp an idea literally, rather than intellectually.”
But Betit said other colleges don’t
necessarily need to go to Legos to better accommodate
students with learning disabilities. He said sometimes easy
adjustments, such as using more graphics, can help students
who are visual learners. And other strategies that focus on
basic skills that students with learning disabilities often
have not developed — such as time management, and study
skills — can benefit all of the students in a conventional
college classroom.
One of the systems that Landmark
uses, “master notebooks,” gives students a separate notebook
for each course that is divided into sections like “ideas,”
and “curriculum.” In the “notes” section, students use a
two-column note-taking system that uses paper with a large
left-hand margin, for students to organize major ideas of a
course, and then they can fill in details pertaining to each
idea on the right.
Betit encourages techniques as
simple as a daily checklist to help teach time management.
“Better time management is something all students can use,”
he said, so it shouldn’t be difficult to incorporate into a
conventional college classroom.
It isn’t clear yet exactly which
new teaching methods will be carried out in classrooms
beyond Landmark, but the partner colleges will start by
educating their own employees. Charles Blocksidge, vice
president of organizational development and the Frieda G.
Shapira Center for Learning, which works with students with
learning disabilities at Allegheny County, wants to adapt
some of the training techniques of Landmark personnel to
develop a training program for “our support services
personnel,” he said, but also for faculty members.
Susan Trist, disabilities support
coordinator at Western Nevada, said she works with around
100 students with learning disabilities, and hopes that,
through contact with Landmark, she can be kept up to date on
prevailing thought about teaching methods, “and especially
on assistive technology,” she said. The students Trist works
with are mixed in with other college students, and she will
sometimes “have the exam read to them if they have a visual
processing disorder, or get them textbooks on CD,” she said.
Trist said she “is anxious to hear about” the techniques
Landmark faculty use to accommodate students. “We need to
start a community of people to share best practices,” she
said.
I might add the following from accounting education:
Sherry Mills and Cathleen Burns won the American Accounting Associations
Innovation in Accounting Education Award by using a
Lego project to teach cost accounting ---
http://aaahq.org/awards/awrd6win.htm
Landmark College in Putney, Vermont, is one of the
only accredited colleges in the United States designed exclusively for
students with dyslexia, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD),
and other specific learning disabilities.
In 2001, the college started the Landmark College
Institute for Research and Training (LCIRT). The Institute promotes
understanding and support for the needs of individuals with learning
disabilities at the regional, national, and international level, working
with college and high school systems and educators to help students realize
their academic potential. The Institute develops and disseminates
educational research and theory-based teaching practices that set the
standard for educating students with learning disabilities and attention
deficit disorders.
The Institute also houses several significant
federal grant projects that support the continued development of innovative
practices, publications, and research projects.
Before we had the Universal Design and Usability
Lab, much of our work was anecdotal – now that we have Morae, it’s
undeniable. Morae has enabled us to conduct research and communicate results
in ways we never thought possible, and we are able to have a positive impact
in the way other organizations design learning content and technologies.
Eye Controlled Computer for the Disabled The MyTobii P10 is an eye-controlled communication
device aimed at users with ALS, MS and other neurological disabilities. The
unit integrates a 15-inch screen, a computer and an eye-control device for
easy portability. It simply requires the user to sit in front of it and
follow a dot for 30 seconds to calibrate the eye tracker and then it's ready
to go. The MyTobii P10 maintains precision performance in any light
conditions and whether or not the user wears glasses or contact lenses and
will not be fudged by head movements. The unit, which can be mounted on
desks, beds and wheelchairs, will sell for $17,000 but we're hoping
insurance may cover some of that.
"Eye Controlled Computer for the Disabled," Wired News, August 10,
2006 ---
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/#1535962
Text-to-Speech (Audio) is Quite Good Unless There Are Words Not in a
Standard Dictionary
Question
What made the old Sony Walkman better than all new "audiobooks" for the blind?
As a library trying to implement digital audiobooks
for our patrons, the dreadful state of player technology presents us with a
serious obstacle ("Getting an Earful of Printed Words -- Downloads, Small
Devices Draw a Wider Audience of Audiobook Listeners," Personal Journal, Sept.
28). The nearly 30-year-old Sony Walkman is easy to grasp and can be used by
anyone with about 10 seconds of training. The controls can be manipulated with
ease in the dark or by a blind person. It is cheap, reliable and has a
consistent form factor. But the new, portable digital media players, regardless
of price and maker, suffer from overengineering, and their features are focused
on the music customer, ignoring the needs of the audio book user. None of the
new devices can be used by the blind or visually impaired because the controls
have no tactile feedback, are multifunction and ridiculously small. The
displays, when they exist, are too small even for people with good eyesight. The
process of downloading the book, transferring it to the device and then trying
to keep your place while "reading" over a series of hours, days or weeks is
daunting to the best and impossible for many. Many users give up after trying it
once or twice.
Vern Mastel, "New Audiobook Technology Frustrates Blind Listeners," The Wall
Street Journal, October 7, 2006 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116017662453985426.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
New technology transforming life for the deaf Multi-function phones, webcams and other new
technological innovations have transformed the lives of the hard of hearing,
delegates at an international congress of the deaf said Tuesday. "Technology is
important for the deaf community. There's the internet, internet, webcams,
email, SMS and chat systems," said Amparo Minguet, director of training at the
institute for the deaf in the eastern city of Valencia. Minguet finds her little
multi-function phone a godsend and like other participants at the congress of
the World Federation of the Deaf under way in Madrid, finds new technology a
boon bolstering face-to-face communication at an event such as this.
Communicating via sign language, she points to her small flatscreen phone which
she has placed on her knees after first activating the vibration mode. "Thanks
to that I can easily stay in touch through receiving texts and checking my voice
mail," Minguet reveals. PhysOrg, July 17, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news103887393.html
Two years ago, one of my students came to my office
and told me that she wanted to major in psychology. It was her second try at
Agnes Scott College, having dropped out a decade earlier. During that time
she was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and she was back to try again,
armed with knowledge about her diagnosis.
This time she's making it because she's getting the
help she needs.
Asperger's syndrome, first listed in the American
Psychiatric Association's manual of mental disorders in 1994, affects two to
six of every 1,000 Americans, according to the National Institutes of
Health. People who have the disorder often have social difficulties, verbal
and nonverbal communication problems, and repetitive and restricted
activities. Students with Asperger's are often seen as eccentric or odd, but
many have a normal or higher-than-average IQ, as well as an exceptional
talent in one specific area — traits that make them likely to want to attend
college. For such students, however, college presents significant challenges
related to adjustment, organization, and social interaction. They often
experience sensory overload and misunderstandings because of their overly
literal thinking.
The Americans With Disabilities Act is clear that
colleges must make reasonable accommodations for students with Asperger's if
those students request them. But the law doesn't define "reasonable
accommodations," and campus disability offices vary in what they offer. They
are having to learn as they go, because unfortunately there is little
published literature about how to help, and what information does exist is
not presented in a comprehensive list. The most common accommodations that
disability offices use include additional time on exams, alternative exam
locations, tutoring, or mentors. But much more can and should be done.
To start with, several weeks before orientation,
residence-life staff members should give students with Asperger's a schedule
of activities for the first week of college and an overview of what to
expect. While such schedules are of course helpful for all students, they
are especially so for those with Asperger's, as they can have difficulty
adjusting to change.
Some experts argue that students with Asperger's
should live at home during the first year of college, but if that is not
possible or the student chooses not to, a single room might be advisable. A
quiet dormitory room can provide a safe space. Also, dining halls can be a
challenge because of sensory overload, so students with Asperger's often
skip meals if not given alternatives, such as residence halls with kitchens.
During orientation, it is especially helpful for
students to get a tour of the campus that includes the bookstore, the
tutoring center, and the public-safety, disability, and counseling offices.
Again, while such tours are helpful for most students, those with Asperger's
may need them even more because they often are not skilled at finding or
taking advantage of resources. They often don't know where to go for help,
so the disability office should have information on the college Web site,
with a contact person specified.
Students with Asperger's should be encouraged by
their families to register with the disability office. Disability staff
members can be valuable sources of academic advice and support. They can
help students set up time-management systems, which are especially
beneficial because students with Asperger's often have problems knowing how
much time it takes to accomplish tasks (many students can benefit, for
example, from programming their cellphones with timers and reminder
messages). Staff members should encourage students with Asperger's to take
breaks between classes and to assume a lighter course load in the first
year. Finally, staff members should continue to keep in contact throughout
the school year, all the while watching for depression, anxiety, or eating
disorders — and recommend counseling if needed.
Professors, if they know of a student's diagnosis,
can also be a tremendous help. They should be aware, for example, that
students with Asperger's usually have strong rote memory skills but can get
fixated on details and be unable to see the big picture. Students with
Asperger's also often display classroom behaviors that may seem
disrespectful. However, if a professor knows that a student is, for example,
showing poor eye contact because he or she finds it distracting to look at
people and listen or think at the same time, the professor might not
misinterpret such behavior as rudeness or inattention.
Students with Asperger's also can have problems
interacting with others because of their inability to pick up on social and
emotional cues. For example, they may interrupt others to change the topic
of conversation to one that they prefer to talk about. Professors can help
monitor classroom interactions and smooth over such interruptions (while
making sure not to reveal a student's diagnosis, of course).
Faculty members can help students with Asperger's
succeed in many other ways if they:
Give clear instructions on assignments, including
deadlines.
Provide organization and structure to lectures by
summarizing important points from the prior class, stating the key
information to be covered that day at the beginning of each lecture, and
summarizing main ideas at the end of class.
Ensure that some visual learning is included in
their courses.
Share PowerPoint slides with students with
Asperger's before class.
Ensure that student work groups include students
with Asperger's, even if that means assigning the groups.
Allow students with Asperger's to send assignments
by e-mail so they do not lose or forget them.
Help them break down assignments into manageable
parts.
Encourage them to use computers to type assignments
and even to take exams, as they usually have poor handwriting.
Assign peer tutors to clarify assignments and
supplement notes.
Encourage students with Asperger's to seek help at
the writing center, use note-takers assigned by the disability office, work
on study questions, attend review sessions, and write papers without
original sources at hand to avoid inadvertent plagiarism.
Even if only a few staff and faculty members put
some of these strategies in place, students with Asperger's can greatly
benefit. By being proactive, we can help prevent them from getting too
frustrated, which can increase their retention and graduation rates. The
more educated and aware a campus is about the needs of students with
Asperger's, the better their chances are of succeeding in college.
Jennifer Lynn Hughes is an associate professor of psychology and vice
chair of the psychology department at Agnes Scott College.
June 23, 2009 reply from Linda A Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
I have a girl in my scout troop with Asperger's,
and much of this article is spot-on. Her mother tells me that many people we
used to perceive as nerdy computer-geek types were likely people with this
syndrome. Many are drawn to computer science because of its high level of
technical detail and the lack of a high level of social interaction. Many
with Asperger's, according to the mom, are fascinated with the minute
details and will talk endlessly about them but demonstrate complete lack of
interest in topics of interest to others -- I have certainly observed this
in her case. Accounting is unlikely to be as appealing in its modern form
because of the high level of social engagement required, as opposed to the
stereotypical green eyeshades days.
This thread has also reminded me of my experience
with a hearing-impaired student a few years back. I made relatively minor
modifications for her, such as making sure I faced the class when I spoke
and assigning her to a group with her friends. I usually break up cliques,
but I knew that her friends understood how to work effectively and
inclusively with her whereas others might get impatient with repeating
themselves, etc. What I didn't expect was that this made me an exceptional
professor for her. I got invited to speak to faculty groups about working
with the deaf and hearing impaired, honored for my efforts, etc. I just
thought I was doing my job! But apparently, sadly, many faculty are not so
reasonable about making adjustments. Students with Asperger's are likely to
be much more high-need, in some courses especially, so they must have a
pretty tough go of it.
Thank you for sharing your story. You are right,
people with a hearing loss do not want to be treated any differently from
other people though just understanding and considering their circumstances
and their requirements to adapt to their environment is important. (A
hearing loss has nothing to do with a person's intelligence.) Giving this
consideration, you will always be an exceptional professor.
Rowena R (A student with a hearing loss.)
You can read some of Linkda Kidwell's earlier messages about teaching
hearing-impaired students below.
May 9, 2006 message from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
There's a lot we can do as professors to make
things so much easier for students who are hearing impaired -- it just takes
a little thought! I'm certainly no expert, but I've learned more about this
lately and wanted to pass it along to this group of concerned educators on
AECM.
I participated in a panel session here at the
University of Wyoming last week about teaching the deaf and hard of hearing.
I was invited to be on the panel because I had been recommended by a hard of
hearing student who was in my auditing class last fall. I didn't think I had
really earned my way onto this panel, but apparently so many professors do
not think about the simple things they can do, that those who do stand out.
Here are some tips (some I used intuitively, others
I learned about on the panel from some profoundly deaf students):
1.
Face the class. If this means preparing power point slides or writing on an
overhead projector instead of facing the board, do it.
2.
If you are a fast talker, slow down a little bit. Everyone will appreciate
it, and here's your excuse to make the effort!
3.
Find out whether your student wants an interpreter. Your university should
provide one under ADA if you're in the U.S. But sometimes students do not
want them. This was the case for my student who has lost hearing gradually
and is still not fluent in sign language. For her it was an unwelcome
distraction, so we didn't do it. But if they want one, be sure you stay in
communication about schedule changes.
4.
Repeat student questions from behind your hearing impaired student. If he or
she isn't looking at the right questioner immediately, the chance to hear or
read lips has been lost. It's a good idea anyway but essential under these
circumstances.
5.
Plan ahead if showing videos. You may have a disabilities office at your
university that can prepare transcripts of the video if you give them enough
notice. There is also some capability in some of the video playing software
to produce closed captioning, but give yourself time to get help from the IT
folks so you can use it when needed. (I haven't tried it, but apparently
Windows Media Player and others can). Be willing to allow your student to
watch the video a few times outside of class time with an interpreter, so
they can take in the translation and the pictures without having to look
back and forth in a frenzy. With a TV monitor in a class room only, your
deaf student has to choose either the video or the translator, as both can't
be in view at the same time.
6.
Be flexible with group work. Even if you (like me) prefer to assign groups,
let your deaf student choose at least one member of the group or assign
someone you have seen that student work with, and make that group small (no
more than 4). Deaf students have already identified friends who understand
their strengths and frustrations in working with hearing students, and they
need an ally. If you assign your student to a group he or she does not
normally work with, the other students may be insensitive, or more likely
just oblivious, to how their group dynamics need to adjust. And groups any
larger than 3 or 4 tend to be too frustrating for a deaf student. Just think
for a moment how group members tend to interrupt each other or talk over
each other as they deliberate. This is very difficult for a hearing impaired
student to deal with, and smaller groups mitigate the risk of that student
just disengaging.
7.
Here's one I would never have thought of on my own. Think about how native
English speakers learn grammar. Yes, we get taught the rules in school, but
we also develop a feel for what is right -- what sounds right and what
sounds wrong (okay, I hear the jokes now, but think about it). For years I
have told my students to read their papers aloud to themselves as an
excellent grammar check. Well a student who has been deaf most of his or her
life has never developed that feel for proper grammar. And ASL, the most
common sign language, is not a literal translation at all. Therefore written
English is essentially equivalent to "English as a second language" to a
deaf student. Keep that in mind when assigning and grading written work. If
you make any accomodations for foreign students, the same ones are pertinent
for deaf students. Of course if you don't then you shouldn't here either.
Obviously this is more of an issue with essay questions on exams than on
writing assignments that have the time to be polished.
8.
If you are using audio materials from your textbook, ask the publisher about
versions for deaf students or transcripts. PWC was very diligent about this
one I made a request for help with their Alchemy case materials. I would
hope the textbook publishers would be accomodating as well.
Those are the issues we discussed in this session.
I don't know how often I'll bump into this issue, but I'd certainly enjoy
hearing other suggestions from you. I already know I'll be on this panel
again next year, so your advice would be welcome and passed on to other
interested folks.
A great post, Linda, thank you. I would just like
to add one thing, based on an experience I had. I had a deaf student in my
intermediate accounting class several years ago. She chose not to have an
interpreter and told me she could read lips, so I was very conscientious
about facing her directly when I lectured.
This student sat to my left, and not too long into
the semester I noticed that the students on the right side of the room
seemed a little disgruntled. I quickly realized that, in accommodating my
deaf student, I always seemed to be addressing only the left side of the
classroom (even when I was answering questions from students on the right
side of the room). As a result, the students on the right felt like they
were getting a "cold shoulder" from me.
The upshot was that I spoke with the students on
the right side of the room and explained the situation. That resolved the
matter, and we all had a great semester!
My contribution here is twofold. First, to
elaborate on the reference to Gallaudet by adding it the leading Liberal
Arts university for the deaf. Secondly, at Rochester Institute of Technology
deaf students are provided an array of support services that range from
note-takers and faculty tutors, to interpreters and C-pint captionists at
seven of the university’s colleges. The eighth college, the National
Technical Institute for the Deaf, is the leading technical college for deaf
and hard-of-hearing students with an accounting AS degree program that may
lead to direct entry into the RIT’s College of Business.
Glad to see this discussion and sensitive posts.
Allen Ford
Business Studies Department
NTID, Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY
Allen.Ford@rit.edu
AbiWord is a nice alternative for those individuals
looking for a word processor application that is entirely free. Several of
the most notable features include a built in web service which allows users
to share documents and an annotation feature that is fully integrated. The
support for the application is quite good, and there's an extensive user
manual and FAQ on the website. This version is compatible with computers
running Windows 2000, XP, and Vista as well as Linux.
"Computer algorithms process the images and extract information from
them to give the user information about what they are looking at," said
Nikolaos Bourbakis, professor at Wright State University's
College
of Engineering and Computer Science in Dayton, Ohio.
Users can program iCare to feed them information
continuously or only when prompted by a question, such as "What is
directly in front of me?" or "Who just walked into the room?"
So far, iCare's greatest talent is its ability to
translate type into spoken words. The iCare-Reader translates text into a
synthesized voice using optical character recognition software and other
software that compensates for different lighting conditions and orientations.
David Paul, one of two blind computer science
students at Arizona State University, or ASU,
who tested the system, said speed is one of the system's greatest assets.
"It's as fast as a sighted person could read a book -- this is one of the
phenomenal things about it."
The iCare-Reader not only enables blind people to
choose any book from the library shelf, but also allows them to check out a
restaurant menu, the size marked on a shirt tag or the label on a soup can.
The reader doesn't translate handwritten text well
yet, but the team is still working on it.
ICare also lets the blind or visually impaired
persons navigate websites previously only accessible with a mouse.
Screen-reader software, such as
Jaws,
can translate information on a computer screen to spoken word. But this is
only useful if users are able to get to the pages they are interested in.
"The way a blind person navigates around the
screen is with the keyboard, but there are some sites that don't work so well
with keyboard alone and have some mouse-driven applications," said Terri
Hedgpeth, disability research specialist at ASU. "But a blind person
can't tell where the mouse cursor is, so (he or she) can't access these
sites."
To overcome this problem, the ASU team developed
another facet of the system, called the iCare-Assistant, that works with
Blackboard,
software designed to manage university course material.
"We have developed a software interface that
bridges the screen-reader software and Blackboard through keyboard shortcuts
that get you into these areas," Hedgpeth said.
Amazon Pages: Amazon's Breakthrough Technology to Help
Quadriplegic's Read
I've been watching companies' efforts to develop
e-book offerings for a long time. As a quadriplegic, I can't hold a book, so
reading literature on the computer seems like an obvious solution.
Alas, companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Palm have
failed in their e-book endeavors. They've introduced proprietary, encrypted
formats that require their respective software to be installed before
reading them, in effect destroying a book's inherent characteristic:
portability.
Amazon seems to be on the brink of doing e-books
right, and I'm keeping my proverbial fingers crossed. By taking advantage of
the web's ubiquity, Amazon can restore portability: Pay once, read anywhere.
In November, Amazon announced two new services for
accessing books online. The company seems to be targeting programmers and
students who would welcome freedom from toting enormous texts. But Amazon
has another, perhaps unforeseen, set of customers: the disabled.
Amazon Pages will allow readers to buy online
access to individual pages and chapters from books instead of the entire
thing, presumably for a few cents a page. Amazon Upgrade will let readers
purchase, for a similar premium, perpetual access to an online digital copy
of the text.
If the services turn out to be as good as they
sound, I plan on taking full advantage of them. I miss the comforting
sensation of curling up with a good book at night, promising myself that I
would only read one more chapter before becoming so engrossed in the story
that I devour it whole and am barely aware of the fact that, as my eyelids
are closing, the sun is rising on the next day.
It truly is the little things in life that make it
worth living.
The joy of holding a book again won't be happening
in the next year, but Amazon's proposed services, assuming they are well
implemented, will reopen the boundless horizons of literature to me and
other similarly disabled readers.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, told Fox
News that publishers will decide whether their books will be included in the
programs, unlike Google Print, which requires publishers to opt out. Among
the publishers I'm rooting for are Penguin Group and Tor. (So, give Mr.
Bezos a call. Today. Please? The Shadowrun and The Wheel of Time series,
among others, beckon.)
The Amazon services should allow publishers to have
their content available as plain text, as do niche sites such as The
National Academies Press, InformIT's Safari and Safari's predecessor site,
MacMillan's Personal Bookshelf (an all-time favorite, now deceased, that
allowed me to learn a lot for free).
Jeremy Rossiter was
not able to speak when he first entered Lisa Zverloff's class for the
multiple-handicapped. The third-grader, who is autistic, communicated by
hitting and biting. But with the help of a wearable computer, Jeremy learned
to mimic, then utter, words and small phrases.
His success story
propelled Xybernaut, the manufacturer of the wearable computer, into a new
market.
Xybernaut is more
known for supplying computers to telecommunications companies and the
military. The devices are used for maintenance purposes in locations where
carrying a laptop is not possible, such as manholes and the tops of telephone
poles.
Credit Zverloff, a
teacher at Erwine Middle School in Akron, Ohio, with bringing wearables into
the classroom. Her experience led to the product launch of the XyberKids
wearable computers in March.
Zverloff says the
durable, touch-screen portable computers have made her students more
independent and confident. Some kids use it all day; others use it for
specific activities. Several students are able to fully participate in
mainstream classrooms while using the devices.
It all started with a
cold call to Xybernaut.
Zverloff's fiance,
Eric Van Raepenbusch, a special education teacher at Turkeyfoot Elementary,
owned stock in the company and suggested she call them.
On the phone, she
convinced a nearby sales representative to meet with her and Jeremy -- even
though the company's initial response was along the lines of, "But ma'am,
we don't use (the computers) for people with disabilities," Zverloff
said.
Jeremy eventually
tried the device and "he wouldn't put it down," Zverloff said.
"That's the only proof I need. He didn't bite me, scratch me, pinch me
–- this is a positive thing."
The device cost
$9,000, but the company agreed to loan the device to Zverloff, a first-year
teacher at the time, to see how Jeremy progressed.
She replaced the belt
–- made for an adult -- with a bookbag so Jeremy would be able to carry the
6-pound, 8.4-inch touch screen, hard drive and battery. The device runs on the
Windows operating system.
When Jeremy touched
different pictures on the screen, a computer-generated voice dictated what the
item was. He responded better to the digitized voice because the output is the
same volume and tone every time, she said.
"After repeated
mimicking of the computer, he then started mimicking the teacher, then he
started putting utterances together," Zverloff said. "A three-word
utterance is an amazing thing for someone who's only been speaking for two
months."
Zverloff also
discovered that Jeremy was learning to spell and read.
When she showed him
pictures of different animals, he started typing the words and used the voice
output. He regularly took the wearable to lunch and on field trips to help him
communicate outside the classroom.
"At the end of
the year, he was reading words and sentences on a first-grade level," she
said.
Researchers are
developing similar devices at Stanford University's Center for the Study of
Language and Information (CSLI).
Susan Spencer is designing
online economics courses for San Antonio College (SAC). All online courses at
SAC must be accessible by hearing and sight impaired students. Susan will
discuss her innovative ideas in designing economics courses that can be
delivered online to blind students.
Susan is an associate
professor of Economics at San Antonio College. She has an MA from Washington
University, a BA in Economics from the University of Missouri at Columbia and
has worked at the Federal Reserve Board and Bureau of Labor and Statistics in
Washington, DC. In San Antonio, she has taught at the University of Texas at San
Antonio and owned and managed Flexware Systems, Inc. a computer
software/consulting company.
Susan
Spencer's Presentation File Download:
Susan's presentation
file is not yet available. It will be here soon.
Software that creates an animated face to match
someone talking on the other end of a phone line can help people with hearing
difficulties converse, suggests a new study.
The animated face provides a realistic impersonation
of a person speaking, enabling lip-readers to follow the conversation visually
as well as audibly.
The prototype system, called Synface, helped 84
percent of participants to recognise words and chat normally over the
telephone in recently completed trials by the UK's Royal National Institute
for the Deaf (RNID).
The RNID trials involved hard-of-hearing volunteers
trying to decipher preset sentences and also taking part in real
conversations.
Synface takes around 200 milliseconds - one fifth of
a second - to generate the animated annunciations. But the system incorporates
a fractional delay, so that the face is perfectly synchronised with the voice
on the end of the line.
Regional dialects
Synface runs on an ordinary laptop and can be
connected to any type of phone, including a cell phone. It uses a neural
network to match voice to mouth movements. This mimics the way neurons operate
inside the brain and can be trained to recognise patterns.
The neural network used by Synface identifies
particular sounds, or "phonemes", rather than entire words. This has
been shown to be a particularly fast way of matching words to animation. By
concentrating on sounds the system can also represent words that it has not
encountered previously.
The technology is not meant to assist people who are
profoundly deaf, but rather those who have some hearing difficulties. Around
one in seven people in western countries fall into this category. So far,
Synface has been trained to work in English, Swedish and Dutch. It could also
be fine-tuned to recognise different regional dialects.
"The accuracy still needs to be improved,"
admits Neil Thomas, head of product development at the RNID. But he says it
could eventually make life easier for many people who have trouble hearing.
"There are a lot of people who struggle with
using the telephone," Thomas told New Scientist. "It really gives
them an added level of confidence."
The system was developed by researchers at Royal
Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden, University College London, UK
as well as Dutch software company Viataal and Belgian voice analysis firm
Babletech.
For as long as he can remember, Robert T. Calloway
has had a fascination with engineering and all things mechanical. He wanted
to pursue an engineering career despite a diagnosis of dyslexia, which
challenged both his confidence and his ability in the classroom.
"I first learned I had dyslexia when I was in the
Army," he says. "My platoon sergeant would make us read technical manuals.
He noticed that I had a problem with loop letters, like p's, b's, d's, and
q's."
Mr. Calloway, who is 42, weighed his options as he
neared the end of his military service, in 2005. He decided that somehow,
some way, he had to pursue a higher education, to better provide financially
for his two teenagers.
That fall he enrolled in the Community College of
Allegheny County, in Pittsburgh, where professors and the college's
academic-support staff helped him work around his dyslexia.
Now, a program being developed by a two-year
college in Vermont aims to assess the successful practices of Allegheny and
other colleges to help more students, like Mr. Calloway, succeed
academically in math and the sciences.
Landmark College, in Putney, Vt., was created to
serve students with learning disabilities. It has a 25-year history of
preparing students for a range of fields, including the STEM
disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
The college won two federal grants last year and
one grant this year, totaling more than $1-million, that will be used to
help finance its STEM project. The grants, from the Department of Education
and the National Science Foundation, are a part of the government's larger
focus on producing more math-and-science graduates.
Steve Fadden, vice president for research and
institute operations at Landmark, is using the money to develop a curriculum
to teach educators how to support students in the STEM fields who have
various learning disabilities, including dyslexia, autism, Asperger's
syndrome, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Arne Duncan, U.S. secretary of education, expressed
concern in October that only 23 percent of college freshmen were declaring
STEM majors. What's more, "just 40 percent of those that elect STEM majors
freshman year receive a STEM degree within six years," he told the
President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
To develop its one-semester course for educators,
Landmark is collaborating with three other community colleges—Western Nevada
College, in Carson City; Lone Star College, in Houston; and the Community
College of Allegheny County—because students with disabilities tend to be
overrepresented in two-year institutions.
Students with learning disabilities, Mr. Fadden
says, have hidden problem-solving strengths. They live in a world that does
not often conform to their learning style, constantly presenting challenges
that require solutions. Instructors, he says, need to know how to tap into
those strengths.
Meeting Outside Class Two years after he enrolled
at Allegheny, Mr. Calloway graduated with an associate degree in precision
fabrication, another in robotics and automation technology, and a
professional certificate in computer-aided drafting and design. He has since
transferred to Point Park University, where he is a junior double-majoring
in mechanical-engineering technology and global cultural studies.
Key to his success, Mr. Calloway says, were
community-college professors who met with him before or after class to offer
extra help on assignments. They also introduced him to tools for students
with learning disabilities, including a software program that essentially
scans text to create an audio version of a book.
He now trains other students to use the same tools,
working as a technical-support specialist for students with disabilities at
Allegheny.
Mr. Fadden, of Landmark, intends to capitalize on
the role that both instructors and support-staff members can play in helping
students with learning disabilities succeed in the STEM fields. The
college's project will culminate in an interactive pilot course, which is
expected to be put into use for technology instructors and academic-support
staff members this fall at the participating community colleges.
The course will teach instructors how to help
students with learning disabilities study better, prepare for job
interviews, use assisted-learning software, and work in groups, among other
skills that Mr. Fadden says students are ordinarily expected to know
instinctively.
"You might have a professor who says, 'I want a
15-page paper that's due by a certain time on a certain topic,'" Mr. Fadden
explains. But some students "don't really know what that means, because no
one has truly sat down and told them, 'Here's what a college-level paper
looks like.'"
The results of the educator-training program could
enable community-college faculty and staff members to help not only students
with learning disabilities, Mr. Fadden says, but also a broader range of
students who might enter college in need of academic assistance—for example,
those learning English who are struggling with reading comprehension.
Sandi H. Patton, director of disability services at
Lone Star College, says the college has about 730 students with diagnosed
learning disabilities out of a total enrollment of about 62,000.
In joining with Landmark, Ms. Patton says, she
hopes to create "a culture of inclusion" by increasing awareness, among
administrators and faculty and staff members alike, of students with
learning disabilities and their needs. Another goal is to increase the
retention and graduation rates of students with learning disabilities, who
she says often have a talent for the "hands on" subjects offered in the STEM
fields.
"We want to see these students be successful," she
says. "We want to help and retain them in achieving their educational and
vocational goals."
Chris Dede's Vignettes on
Distributed Education
"Advanced Technologies and Distributed Learning," by Chris Dede, Higher
Education in an Era of Digital Competition Edited by D.E. Hanna (Madison, WI:
Atwood Publishing, IBN 1-891859-32-3, 2000, pp. 771-92.
Good News Vignettes
Students who are silent and passive in classroom
setting may "find their voice in an interactive medium." (Maria's story)
Distributed education will educate more people at
a lower cost per student (Karen's story)
Distributed education will educate in smaller
groups with easier and unprejudiced access by all. (Vesper's story)
Bad News Vignettes
Distributed education is counter to privacy as
instructors track every learning move and monitor learning in real time.
Education will become a highly competitive medium
with possible harm to long-term quality and creativity.
Education will be more risky for innovators who
may take heavy hits on evaluations and market choice by students.
A highlight for me at the November 6-7, 1998
AICPA Accounting Educators Conference was a presentation by
Sharon Lightner
from San Diego State University and
Linard Nadig
from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. This presentation followed a
ceremony presenting Professors Lightner and Nadig with the $1,000 AICPA
Collaboration Award
prize.
The Collaboration Award was given for an online
course that is now offered to a class comprised of five students from each of six
universities in the United States, Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Hong Kong, and the United
States. I videotaped the presentation by Professors Lightner and Nadig. The
purpose of this document is to provide you with a summary of the highlights of this
innovative international accounting course.
The course has some highly innovative features
including the online participation of accounting standard setting bodies in the various
countries mentioned above. The course is also innovative in that students in class
and in team projects see and hear one another over the Internet in a manner much like they
would see and hear each other if they were all in the same classroom.
The Course is Globally Synchronous On the Internet
At San Diego State University (SDU), the course
is given as ACCT 596 Experiential International Accounting course with focus on
international accounting standards and standard setting. The course is
simultaneously given on six campuses in Switzerland, Japan, Spain (two campuses), and Hong
Kong. Each school provides five students. Hong Kong was added in the second
year of providing this course online. A professor from each of the campuses is
assigned to jointly teach the course (in English).
The course meets once each week at the same
time. This means that SDU students must assemble in a computer lab at 11:00 p.m. at
the same time students from other parts of the world assemble in their computer
labs. Other starting times were at 8:00 a.m. in Switzerland and Spain, 12:00 p.m. in
Japan, and 4:00 p.m. in Hong Kong. In addition, student teams must assemble at
times when all team members can participate online. Grading is based primarily upon
class participation and team project performance. The course professor from each
campus also is online for each class. In addition, one or more staff members
from the standard setting body of each nation is online for some of the classes.
A helper for the course is an Internet training
online introduction called "Opening Doors to Internet Knowledge" that is
described at
http://www.treuhaender.ch/10-96/Rechnung/14dnadig/14dnadig.html
Anyone can register for the online training materials. A summary of the
training course is given below:
WHO. Anyone who has the capability
of remote Internet access and has the desire to learn how to download/install software,
ftp, browse the web, search the web, send/receive email, read/post to newsgroups, and
create web pages. Also, you should have some familiarity with your own computer.
WHAT. A class entitled, Opening Doors to Internet Knowledge (Acctg 397). This is a one
unit, fun, self paced, hands on, credit/nocredit course. (This class has nothing to do
with accounting!) This class will appear on your transcript; it will not count toward the
total number of units required for graduation.
WHY. Individuals need minimum Internet competencies to succeed in today?s environment.
Internet access and Internet knowledge can open new doors in your life.
WHEN. Work from your computer at your convenience. There are NO prerequisites and NO
formal class meetings. The class may be added at anytime through Reg-line at SDSU or
through the College of Extended Studies at SDSU.
COMPUTER REQUIREMENTS. To take the class you need a PC running Windows 3.1 or higher, or a
Macintosh running System 7.0 or higher. You need approximately 40 megabytes of free hard
disk space to install and run an ftp program, Eudora, and Netscape. You also need at least
a 14.4 modem (preferably 28.8 or 33.6)
HOW MUCH. (Assumes you will use
AzNET
as your outside Internet provider) Prices for the training course range from $0 to
$115.
The main purpose is to allow
students from other nations to simultaneously study international accounting standards in
a formal course. Accounting standards differ between nations in many ways due to
differing cultural, economic, and financial histories. As business becomes more
global, understanding of these differences and efforts to harmonize these standards grow
in importance.
Another purpose is to conduct a
unique experiment in synchronized online learning in the presence of students from other
nations, professors from other nations, and accounting standard-setting officials in other
nations.
The course deals with both cultural
issues and accounting issues having the greatest differences between nations.
Other purposes deal with technology
and innovation. The course is an experiment in the efficiency and effectiveness of
selected computer, networking, email, chat line, audio, and video technologies for
delivery of synchronized lectures, cases, and class discussions simultaneously via the
Internet.
Other purposes included experimenting with remote
submission of student projects via FTP transfers across the Internet. Students also
communicate via chat rooms and bulletin boards.
A key purpose is to experiment with the ability
of student teams to work efficiently and effectively online. Students were members
of two teams. The first team is comprised of students on the same campus. The
second team is comprised of one student from each of the six campuses.
A unique feature of this course is
the presence of invited guests to appear live online (in audio and video) in selected
classes. The accounting standard setting body in each nation provided one or more
assigned staff members to participate in the course. For example, in the United
States, the
Financial Accounting
Standards Board representative is
Thomas Porter.
From Connecticut, Tom must arise before 2:00 a.m. to appear on a course commencing in
California at 11:00 p.m.
In addition, online guests included
employees of accounting and business firms from various nations.
Each computer on each campus and guest
participant site had a camera to transmit images of students, instructors and
guests. HoneyCom multi-purpose video software was used for that purpose. The
Honey Software home page is located at
http://www.honeysw.com/
This company has a variety of software downloading options.
Text messaging, chat lines, and file transfer
software used ICQ software from Mirabillis at
http://www.mirabilis.com/
Professor Lightner reported that one thing she liked about ICQ chats is that
up to six different screens can be viewed simultaneously from six different users.
She also liked it that messages could be viewed as they were being written rather than
having to wait for a message to be completed and then transmitted.
Professors Lightner and Nadig reported general
satisfaction with the hardware and software technology. The main problem seemed to
be bandwidth and Internet connection speed, especially in Spain. At times, students
must shut off the video in order to get reliable online audio.
One problem is that all six universities have
different semester starting and ending dates.
Another problem lies in giving academic credit
for the course. Issues arise regarding having multiple instructors from multiple
countries. Course topics do not necessarily fit neatly into the curriculum plan for
each university. Admission standards are not uniform for all students across all
countries. Each campus controlled its own admissions of students to the course.
Comparing and grading student performance on
teams is always a challenge and having team members only meeting on the Internet adds to
this challenge. Professor Lightner felt, however, that student performance to date
has greatly exceeded the expectations of all the instructors.
The most frequent complaint by students was in
the difficulty of scheduling online meetings of their team members. Time zone
differences were particularly troublesome.
In this course there are both national and
international projects. Making these projects due the same week was troublesome for
some students.
Students enjoyed being exposed to the advanced
internet communication technologies. However, these technologies were also
troublesome at times. For example, having to shut down the video images in order to
improve audio communication can be troublesome. Also, having to write messages in
English that are viewed in real time while the messages were being viewed around the world
must have been troublesome for Japanese, Swiss, Spanish, and Hong Kong students.
In general, student evaluations of the course are
very high.
At the AICPA Educators Conference, Professor
Nadig from Switzerland discussed the advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of
a faculty member in the course. Advantages included improvement of student and
faculty communication skills and technology skills. It is far better to experience
these newer technologies first hand than to merely read about how others use
them. Close interaction and teamwork by international students obviously
improved communication skills and team building skills.
Other advantages included cultural exposures,
interactions with professional accounting standard setters and accounting practitioners in
six nations, and networking both during and after the course. The students had team
projects much like projects they may encounter in their careers following graduation.
Professor Nadig did not dwell on
disadvantages. I suspect there are hurdles to jump over. Admission standards
are not identical for all students. Other problems included different semester
dates and time zones across six nations. Student evaluations by multiple
instructors having international online teams is obviously a great challenge. It was
not mentioned by Professors Lightner and Nadig, but obviously communication is somewhat
difficult in written and oral communications by students whose primary language is not
English. This becomes even more difficult using ICQ software where messages appear
before foreign students and foreign faculty have a change to read over the message and
correct the phrasings in English.
Professor Lightner mentioned some difficulty in
getting students into the course. Each campus had a somewhat different process for
admitting students. She mentioned that some students as SDU balked at having a
course meeting at 11:00 p.m. She did assert that students who ended up in the course
exceeded the expectations of faculty in terms of course performance.
This site constitutes a report from the "frontliner"
of e-learning, since the University of Baltimore was the first school to offer
all-online accredited Web MBA. I taught the first course in this Web MBA
program, which was Business Statistics: Revealing Facts from Figures. A second
course in this same program was Applied Management Science: Making Good
Strategic Decisions. The site covers how to begin, how to operate, and how to
make e-learning successful and enjoyable. Its contents are developed over
years, and is intended for my current students, and sharing my personal
experiences and exchange of ideas with other educators.
Kindly e-mail me your comments, suggestions, and
concerns. Thank you.
Ohio State University: Synchronous Partnering Course Modules in
Universities in Different Nations
"Frontiers in Higher Education: A Procedural Model," Ruth Sesco,
The International HETL Review, Volume 2, June 9, 2012 --- http://hetl.org/
The paper describes a procedural model implemented
at Ohio State University that shares similar content and interaction among
international partner classes for a short time, usually 3-5 weeks. The model
is flexible and adaptive to any discipline at both the graduate and
undergraduate levels and includes expertise from both partnering
instructors. Technologies are embedded to integrate a variety of structured
opportunities for interaction and to utilize different teaching and learning
strategies. There is no exchange of credits or funding, and all instructors
are individually responsible for grading their own students, thus allowing
subject expertise and peer interaction from around the world at no extra
personal cost. The model can be implemented to internationalize an entire
curriculum to a broad spectrum of learners world-wide with a significantly
reduced carbon footprint, at minimal cost, and in direct response to the
needs of higher education.
Jensen Comment
I suspect that Ruth Sesco independently developed a model that was invented
for an international accounting course by a San Diego State University
accounting professor years ago when the most advanced online technology was
rudimentary.
Web Page Design: Ah, What Rotten Webs We Weave Here is an article from the Chronicle about "creative" web pages.
"Ah, What Rotten Webs We Weave," by Neal A. Raisman, The Chronicle of
Higher Education,
Most college and university Web sites are poorly
designed. As a result, they reflect badly on their institutions. The problems
range from embarrassing and inexcusable mistakes -- like poor grammar,
misspellings, and out-of-date information -- to the failure to take full
advantage of new technology. Furthermore, too many sites baffle or aggravate
visitors, offering them links that do not work, sending them to pages that do
not exist, referring them to information that they are not allowed to view,
and so forth. Granted, some institutions have excellent Web sites, but they
are in the minority.
Web sites have become a primary marketing tool for
colleges and universities. We must remember that how we present our
institution online can make a difference to important outsiders. If an alumnus
cannot learn from the site how to order tickets to the next football game, how
happy will he be about the college when the next pledge card arrives in the
mail? If a prospective student finds the site confusing or boring, how likely
is she to apply?
Every college Web site should provide accurate and
complete information, and should have a design that makes the information easy
to understand and technology that makes it easy to find.
Does your college's Web site contain all the
information a visitor is likely to want? A whopping 86 percent of the hundreds
of sites I surveyed recently did not provide any e-mail addresses for
individual members of the admissions staff, or information about how to
contact them without trying to figure out who's who in the staff directory --
if the visitor can find that. A visitor who doesn't know the name of anybody
in the admissions office may well be out of luck.
Fifty-two percent had a button that potential
students could click to contact the college or the admissions office in
general. But 34 percent of the 1,244 students I interviewed in the course of
conducting customer-service research for college and university clients
reported that clicking on a "contact us" button felt as though they
were sending personal information into cyberspace with no idea who would
receive it. They worried about privacy and the misuse of their information.
Moreover, very few students who clicked on those buttons said they ever got a
response from the colleges. That only reinforced their anxiety.
Many sites omit other information. I recently surfed
one site that referred visitors to its spring schedule of courses, but the
schedule did not exist. The problem was not that the link was inactive; I
moved from one page to the other, but the new page was blank. How could a
student sign up for spring courses at that Web site?
Another college site had a link from the home page to
"the administration," but when that page came up, it listed only
employees in the human-resources department. Still another college provided a
list of what appeared to be 63 kinds of information that visitors could
access. Unfortunately, 31 of the items in the list had no active link.
Clicking, for example, on "message from the president" produced no
response at all.
Too many sites offer little more than pages copied
from the college's catalog and other official documents, like overly detailed
registration policies, federal and state financial-aid regulations, or
descriptions of courses written in impenetrable academic prose. That is a poor
use of the Web's potential as a marketing tool. Students and visitors to your
college's site do not want to have to wade through wordy, tedious jargon, like
this real example: "Applications for admission in a given semester should
be filed as early as possible prior to the semester or term for which the
applicant intends to enter or the applicant may not be admitted to the college
for that semester." Why not just say: "Apply as early as you can, to
increase your chance of getting in"?
Even colleges that provide appropriate content
online, written in understandable English, can make a bad impression on
visitors if a site includes incorrect grammar or spelling errors.
Spell-checking software alone will not catch all the mistakes. A human being
should go over everything on the site -- whether that person is an instructor
of freshman composition, the secretary who proofreads the president's
speeches, or someone hired to edit the site's contents.
Once your college has put the right information
online, you need to make that information easy to understand. Clear,
consistent design of the pages throughout the site is essential.
Either to permit self-expression or to save money by
not hiring a professional, some institutions let departments or offices design
their own pages. The result is often an example of academic freedom run wild:
No two pages use the same layouts, graphics, or fonts; many pages do not link
to each other, and some even contradict one another. The message that such
chaos sends to the outside world is that the college is badly run, as well as
inexperienced with modern technology. Remember that potential students will
compare your institution's site with the slick commercial and game sites they
visit.
Off-the-shelf software programs for Web design and
online building tools can provide only basic designs, not the kind of
marketing tool that a college's Web site should be. If your institution has an
employee who can design and construct good-looking Web pages, great. If not,
you should hire an outside designer. Many good designers are available, and
their services need not be expensive.
Be sure to hire a designer who understands that
simpler is often better. Some Web sites look like their designers wanted to
use all of the different typefaces available. A development officer who
created the Web page for his office told me he believed that many fonts
"capture the eye." In fact, with too many typefaces, the eye doesn't
know where to look.
Choosing fonts is an important decision that should
be made less hastily than it usually is. The typeface on your Web site can say
a great deal about your institution. For example, many sites use traditional
fonts, like Times Roman. Other colleges prefer fonts with a cleaner, more
modern look, like Tahoma. If you don't have a designer to advise you, at least
take a look at the fonts available on your computer and think about the image
they would project for your institution.
Once you have made your choice, stick with it
throughout your Web site unless there is a good reason to switch. Use the
italic and boldface versions of your font sparingly -- not every statement
needs to shout. And make sure the font can be read easily. Tiny five-point
type is almost indecipherable on most monitors. Use fewer words and larger
fonts.
You should also keep gimmicks to a minimum. One site
I saw recently had evidently been designed by someone who had just learned to
use PowerPoint. Pictures flew from the top, bottom, and side of the screen.
Text crawled, exploded, and wiggled. Other sites have spinning letters,
scrolling information, and other gimmicks that are supposed to make the page
look exciting. Yet my interviews with students indicate that they find the
gimmicks annoying and old hat. A good graphic design and the use of color can
do more to make Web pages come alive than all the gimmicks available.
In addition, gimmicks make a site load more slowly.
Many visitors to your Web site will have been spoiled by commercial sites that
have sophisticated technology to load the entire site almost instantly. Even a
15-second wait will seem interminable to younger visitors -- your potential
students.
For the same reason, it is not a good idea to put too
many pictures on a single page, or to insist on a very high resolution for
pictures. A resolution of 100 pixels per inch, or even less, will almost
always provide a good photo on the visitor's screen and the lower the pixel
count, the shorter the load time.
Your institution's Web site may contain the
information visitors are looking for, and the design to make the information
easy to understand, but without the right technology, nobody will be able to
find the information.
Common problems include broken links and dead ends.
Visitors rapidly become frustrated when they click on a link, say, and find
themselves at a new page with no way out -- or worse, still on the link they
clicked, with no way to move forward or backward. If the only way out is to
close your site, chances are that the visitor will go on to another
institution's site, in search of better service.
Frequently, a visitor does not see a promised page
but a message that says something like: "The page you are looking for is
currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical
difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser's settings." The
truth usually is that the visitor's browser is fine but the college's Web site
is not -- and most visitors guess that is the case. Plenty of good programs
exist to check links. Your institution should use them.
Many sites intentionally restrict access to
information, like the e-mail address of the institution's president. That
sends a clear message to potential students and their parents: The president
does not want to hear from you. Giving a phone number or snail-mail address
instead of an e-mail address seems absurd to the visitor who is savvy enough
to find your Web site in the first place.
Another poor decision is to make a link blend
invisibly into the page, as when the visitor needs to click on a picture
instead of something that is obviously a link. Not all visitors will guess
that a photograph of the football team will lead them to the fall 2003
football schedule.
We live in a competitive world. You should make sure
that your Web site shows off your institution's best side -- rather than
sending visitors in frustration to the sites of other colleges and
universities.
Neal A. Raisman is president of AcademicMAPS, a
consulting firm for educational institutions, and the vice president for the
northeastern region for FACTS Tuition Management. He is the author of Embrace
the Oxymoron: Customer Service in Higher Education (LRP Publications, 2002).
Duke Sees Growth in Classroom iPod Use
Since last year, students using iPods in the classroom has quadrupled and the
number of courses incorporating the devices has doubled
The number of Duke University students using iPods
in the classroom has quadrupled and the number of courses incorporating the
devices has doubled in the second year of an effort to mesh digital
technology with academics.
Computing and Technology Education and Training
Students According to the university’s Center for Instructional Technology
(CIT), 1,200 students are expected to use iPods to enhance classroom
materials, lectures or assignments in 42 spring 2006 courses. Last spring,
280 students in 19 courses used iPods as part of the Duke iPod First-Year
Experience, which has grown into the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI). Duke
distributed free iPods to all first-year students in 2004; for the current
academic year, it modified to program to provide free iPods only to
undergraduates who enrolled in a course that required the device.
Simultaneously, the university has broadened the
focus of the program beyond iPods to a much broader effort to promote the
effective use of new technology in higher education. The DDI is a
university-wide program that is facilitating the experimentation,
development and implementation of digital technology -– such as digital
audio and video, online collaboration tools and tablet PCs -- for
instruction and learning.
“So many students today own personal computing
devices like iPods that the increase in use of digital audio in courses, and
now images and video, has expanded rapidly,” said Lynne O’Brien, director of
CIT.
“The total number of courses utilizing iPods may in
fact be larger; we only know definitively about the courses coordinated
through CIT,” O’Brien said, adding that anecdotal evidence suggests
instructors are experimenting with using the devices outside of the formal
DDI program.
The increase in courses is matched by a growth in
the breadth of distinct subject areas, with the use of digital technologies
expanding beyond foreign languages and computer science to engineering,
dance, medical physics, biomedical engineering and math.
O’Brien said the increased familiarity with iPods
and MP3 players on campus has allowed CIT to switch its focus from
introducing the tools to faculty and students to developing and delivering
content for the devices.
An improved comfort level with personal computing
devices like the iPod has allowed students such as Duke senior Gisselle
Molinar to take her learning experience outside the classroom. “I definitely
think students would be able to adapt to additional digital technology,” she
said.
Molinar’s instructor, Mark Williams, used a photo
iPod this fall in his “Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain” course to
house a visual glossary of 500 human neuro-anatomical structures and terms
comprising text descriptions, images and corresponding audio pronunciations.
Although Williams said the device interface isn't yet perfectly suited for
complex learning applications, “the students adapted pretty quickly.”
“There is always a risk associated with introducing
a program nobody had ever tried before,” said Tracy Futhey, Duke’s vice
president for Information Technology and CIO. “The increased use we’ve seen
has been a direct result of faculty and student innovation. We expected we’d
have this kind of interest, and it’s exactly the success we thought, but
couldn’t be certain, it would be.”
According to Futhey, the university is committed to
continuing to support a broad range of technology uses.
Both fourth-generation photo iPods and
fifth-generation video iPods will be distributed to students enrolled in
spring 2006 DDI courses, depending upon specific course requirements.
Students enrolled in spring 2006 DDI courses using iPods will pick them up
from the university Help Desk, and will be responsible for their care
throughout their time at Duke. Students who have already been given an iPod
by the university will not be given new ones; however, in some cases,
students who previously received an iPod may be eligible to trade in their
old model for a newer one if the course they are enrolled in requires
functionality not available on their original model.
From: Ghazi Ishag Al-Khatib
[mailto:alkhatib@QU.EDU.QA]
Sent: Tuesday, April 15,
2003 4:20 PM
Subject: Re: Accounting
Program and Classroom Laptops
The lesson we learned from
these discussions: do not let the technology drives the classroom lecture, let
the classroom lecture drives technology. Also I suggest researching smart
classroom uses for those who believe that lectures drive technology.
From: "Charles M Betts"
cbetts@COLLEGE.DTCC.EDU
Sent: Tuesday, April 15,
2003 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: Accounting
Program and Classroom Laptops
Ray,
You are wise in planning
ahead for what can be a drastic change in the way you utilize class hours
and in recognizing that problems may exist.
In the mid 80's I became
obsessed with the idea that computers belonged in the accounting classroom and
not in some remote lab. Administration however at that time still believed
that all you needed to teach any business course was a blackboard and a few
pieces of chalk, so I started looking into the possibility of getting a
grant. Although I was not that optimistic of success, I received a grant
for a fully equipped, networked classroom on my third try. The following year of
was faced with the problem of having a classroom with all the state-of-the-art
equipment of the time, but not having a clue as to how I was going to use it. It
can be pretty embarrassing standing in from of a room full of students each
having a computer on their desk top and telling them to get out their pencils
and calculators. But over time we learned...
Today we still have the
same set-up (not the same equipment - that's been replaced several times now) in
several classrooms and almost all of our accounting classes are scheduled
in one of those rooms and for the most part I think we utilize them in a way
that is beneficial to the students and that also adds elements to each of the
courses that would not otherwise be there. I'll give you a short description of
some of the things we've learned over the years, but I won't bore you by
mentioning all the things we've done wrong while learning to do some of the
right things.
You mentioned projects to
take the place of lecture time. Why not instead incorporate the use of the
computer into your lecture and make it an integral part of the lecture itself.
This may not work too well with pure theory, but it certainly does with
application. In some cases this may simply be a high-tech way for students to
take notes (at least their notes will be legible) but often it enables you to
allow the students to participate more actively in the learning process. For
instance, instead of saying "This is what would how net income would be affected
if...." you can now ask "How would net income be affected if..." and the
students will be able to respond simply by changing a couple of numbers. This
may require some more work on your part - you may need to set up an Excel
template that they will be using ahead of time - but it pays off in the long
run.
Another suggestion would be
to review what you are presently teaching in your classes and compare that to
what you would like to be teaching if you only had the time. Often you may find
that if the computer is utilized, time may no longer be a problem. Let me give
you one example. When I used to teach cost behavior B.C. (before computers) I
would draw some very rough scatter diagrams on the board, and then give a couple
of examples of the high-low method of breaking down a mixed cost into its
variable and fixed components. Somewhere along the line I would tell my class
that there was a much better way of doing this called linear regression, but
that it was a lengthy process and we really couldn't spare the class time to
solve any regression problems. Today I have a video available for students that
they are expected to review before class, demonstrating scatter diagrams
with excel and also the use of Excel's linear regression tool. Then when I
lecture on Cost behavior, I will use an example problem to explain what all this
means and how it can be applied to different situations. I expect the students
to be following along on their own computers so that they will have their own
example to refer to. And somewhere along the line I tell my students that there
is also something called the high-low method that may come in handy if they're
ever shipwrecked on a desert island without their computer. I'm sure that if you
think through the course you are teaching you'll have not trouble finding your
own examples of things that could be added with more in-class computer
use.
One more valuable in-class
use of computers is basic research, which simply often simply means being able
to find what you need to know on the Web. From my personal experience I would
have to conclude that most of my students are much more knowledgeable about
finding what they want to find on the web than I, but when it comes to finding
information I would like them to know, for some reason they always have trouble
finding it if it's given as an out-of-class assignment. In class they don't seem
to have this problem as much, and they also get the benefit of your experience
and help in learning to locate information, which is a tool they will definitely
need in the future. One quick example. When we talk about financial statement
analysis in the first-year accounting class, I only use a couple problems from
the book to present the basics. After that I have the students chose a company,
find their financials on the web, and answer some basic questions using their
company's financial. I think this accomplishes several things.1. It's more
interesting for the students. 2. They're going to be asking questions they
wouldn't have know how to ask if all their information came from the textbook (like, "What's minority
interest mean?") 3. The students are dealing with real-world date where
everything doesn't come out even. 4. The students are improving their ability to
locate information on the internet. and 5. It's certainly a lot more interesting
for me also.
Since I didn't set out to
write a book, I'll end this now. Hope this helps you in some way.
Charlie Betts
Delaware Technical and
Community College
100 Campus Drive
Dover DE 19901
(302) 857-1771 cbetts@college.dtcc.edu
-----Original
Message-----
From: pknutel@bentley.edu
[mailto:pknutel@bentley.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 2:15 PM
To: Jensen, Robert Subject: Re: Accounting and Laptops
Hi Bob,
I sent this to the
aecm listserver, but it was rejected, so I saw your email today and thought
I'd just resend it to you and you could either post it or just add it to your
thread on this topic.
Thanks.
Phil
On the issue of
students with laptops surfing the internet, doing email,
and chatting during class, we developed a solution for this with our
network vendor, Enterasys. Bentley has the oldest laptop requirement in
the country (all undergrads have been required to have them since 1985,
when they were really heavy, slow "luggables"), and thus we've been
dealing with lots of these problems for quite some time. We have around
30 port-per-seat classrooms and PC-equipped classrooms, and in any of
them, the podium (instructor) PC controls the network access of all the
other laptops or PCs in the room. There is an Internet Explorer window
that pops up whenever the podium PC is started or rebooted (the window can
be launched from a desktop icon as well), and this window displays five
simple "buttons":
- Disable Internet Access
- Disable Bentley Email Access
- Disable Internet and Bentley Email Access
- Disable All Access (including intranet/Blackboard access)
- Reset
There are hardware and software options that allow these sorts of options,
but in a laptop environment, hardware options are cumbersome and students
will uninstall any software you put on their laptops that they don't want.
The system is something of a blunt instrument, in that you can't
selectively enable access to some internet sites but not others, but it
has still been very popular with many of our faculty who have students
work on their laptops during class. More info about it is available on
Enterasys' website (
www.enterasys.com
), and they've been very easy to work
with in building and customizing this system.
Phil
Phillip Knutel, Ph.D.
Director of Education and Research Services
Bentley College
180 Adamian Academic Center
175 Forest St.
Waltham, MA 02452
781.891.3422 (Fax .3125)
Ray Zollo wrote:
We are currently studying
the introduction of laptops into the accounting program. In my opinion for the program to be
successful (in the eyes of our students) there must be quality time spent using
the laptops in the classroom (at home most have computers already).
So we need to find or
develop for many (if not all) of the classes quality projects for the students
to do during the class. These projects must take the place of lecture time so
that the material gets covered.
Maybe some of you have gone
through this already and know which projects work which don't. I would like to
solicit your thoughts, advice and opinions about such an undertaking. Issues
such as wired versus wireless classrooms, faculty training, hardware failure,
delivering exams via classroom network, and any problems or benefits you may
have.
Thanks for your
input.
Raynard Zollo, CPA,
MBA
Associate Professor of
Accounting and Taxation
Tobin College of
Business
St. John's University, New
York
AECMers: For those of you looking for graphical tools
to spice up your accounting labs - look at the following links to various
interactive Java charts - I was doing a search on cost / volume / profit and
got the hit on a Java breakeven calculator.
Wikipedia.com, the encyclopedia Web site created and operated with
contributions from online users around the world, is a resourceful
tool. Though accuracy isn't guaranteed, it reflects a collection of
knowledge contributed and edited by many users.
A "wiki" is
a Web site or similar online resource that allows anyone to add and
edit content collectively. But while the idea behind Wikipedia.com
and other collaborative sites is a good one, the process of
contributing content can be intimidating for nontechies. Instead,
many people opt to publish their writing and digital media on
personal blogs or Web sites. Yet these don't do much to encourage
online communities and interaction.
This week,
I tested a free program from Wetpaint.com Inc. that helps regular
users create wikis, which encourage interaction because they're
constantly changed by contributors. Wetpaint's wikis ease the
process of adding Web links, digital images, digital videos and
additional text to sites made with Wetpaint. Likewise, your site can
easily be adjusted and enhanced by anyone who views it. Compared
with blogs or normal Web sites, my Wetpaint wiki felt much more
alive and exciting.
Wetpaint
has room for improvement. Nothing created on its site can be kept
private from random viewers. Some of its functions -- like adding
content at the same time as someone else -- can be a bit confusing.
And it has advertisements because it's free, but these aren't overly
intrusive. The Seattle-based company has plans for upgrades,
including introducing more privacy options this summer. But most of
its features are overwhelmingly simple to use, and built-in tutorial
videos demonstrate steps.
In less
than five minutes, my own wiki -- a site devoted to discussing
television programs, compiling digital photos and video clips from
shows, all of which could be added to or deleted by anyone at any
time -- was up and running. I noticed other Wetpaint wikis for
organizing sports teams, assisting with dog rescues and discussing
favorite books. Setup was divided into three steps playfully termed
The Easy Part, The Fun Part and The Other Part.
I named my
wiki and its URL, and considered the options for who I wanted to
contribute to it: everyone (even anonymously); anyone with a
Wetpaint.com account; or only those whom I invited. I chose to allow
everyone's contributions in order to get the full feel of a wiki.
Twenty four style templates provide a starting point for the color
and overall look.
I invited
others to see my site so that they, too, could contribute their
ruminations. When inviting others, you must designate how much
authority you'll give each invitee. Whoever creates the wiki is an
administrator with the ability to change everything, including the
template and permission settings. You can give others the same
ranking, or you might opt to make them moderators, letting them move
and delete pages but not change settings. The least amount of power
is given to registered users; they can't move or delete pages, but
they, like everyone else, can still delete, change or add content on
each page, by default.
Every
change made to the site is tracked in detail, letting everyone see
which page was altered and by whom, the time and date of the change
and the scope of each adjustment. Special views can compare how a
page looked before and after changes, so you know whether you liked
the way you had it or the new version. These details are important
in the world of wikis, where changes can be slight, frequent and
barely noticeable.
The home
page of your wiki allows space for explaining what you'd like to do.
I used mine to say how much I like chatting about recent TV show
episodes, and encouraged others to contribute anything relevant to
the discussion, including write-in opinions, photos of show
characters and clips from favorite scenes.
Each page
has a section for navigation in the top left, showing which page is
currently in view and how it relates to Home -- as a subcategory of
Home, or a subcategory within a category and so on. A toolbox on the
far right offers one-click help for editing, adding attachments,
inviting others and emailing a page. At the top of each page, an
Easy Edit tool can be expanded to help you add digital photos from
your PC or from specific URLs, hyperlinks or short video clips from
sites like YouTube.com.
I never saw
any confusing jargon while adding content to my wiki. I just
followed suggested links, searched for the right content online or
on my computer and pasted that information into the right spot.
Within a
few hours, the friends I invited to my wiki caught on and added
content to my pages or created pages of their own to be listed under
my wiki. In addition to my pages for "Grey's Anatomy," "The Amazing
Race" and "Friday Night Lights," others added pages for "American
Idol" and "Battlestar Galactica." I even got into a fun
back-and-forth battle with a friend as he and I each posted pictures
of our favorite doctors on "Grey's Anatomy." Each of us had the
ability to delete the other's posting or to add our own.
I ran into
some trouble when I tried to save a post and was told that someone
else was simultaneously changing content on the same page. I chose
to manually merge my content with the other person's content, but
couldn't figure out how to do so and lost my entire post. This
problem isn't likely to crop up often, but it's worth noting.
When I had
questions about other sections, a help section walked me through the
wiki-building steps. I also watched how-to videos that demonstrated
the way certain aspects of Wetpaint worked.
If you're
tired of reading blogs that only let you post comments in an obscure
section of the page, the interactive community aspect of Wetpaint's
wikis will appeal to you. Just be sure you're aware that until later
this summer, nothing on your wiki can be made private.
A Seattle startup called
Wetpaint
launched the newest Web-based "wiki" platform this
week, offering people who register with the company the ability to create
community websites that can be edited easily by any user, or by invited
members only, depending on the creator's preference.
Wikis have been a popular tool for Internet geeks
for about a decade, and now they're beginning to be adopted inside many
businesses. For the most part, though, they haven't crossed into the
mainstream -- the way that other Web-based publishing technologies such as
blogs have. Wetpaint's founders hope to make that transition -- in part, by
making their free, advertising-supported service as easy to use as familiar
software tools such e-mail and word-processor programs.
Starting a Wetpaint site is as simple as picking a
name and design, creating a few pages, writing something in them, and
deciding who can edit them. The company's CEO, Ben Elowitz, says he hopes
everyone from neighborhood watch groups to Cub Scout leaders will warm up to
Wetpaint and start using it to collaborate on projects and manage group
information.
Elowitz believes that online collaboration is a
largely unexplored market. "Message boards are good for dialogues, blogs are
good as soapboxes, and social networks are good for meeting people, but none
of those really let you manage relationships," he says. "For people who are
online now, the technology is there to give them a chance to connect over
their common interests."
But the public still has a shaky idea of wikis.
Surveys conducted by the Harris polling organization for Wetpaint show that
only 5 percent of adults who go online can define the word "wiki," according
to Elowitz. And it's not clear that Wetpaint or any other wiki-focused
company has made the technology simple -- or useful -- enough to attract
large numbers of users.
The most famous wiki, of course, is Wikipedia --
it's the largest encyclopedia ever written, with 1.2 million articles
contributed by more than 1.6 million registered users and policed by
approximately 1,000 volunteer administrators. Indeed, Wikipedia has become
the 16th-most-trafficked site on the Web; on any given day, about 4 percent
of all Internet users stop there, according to Web traffic research firm
Alexa.
But while most of Wikipedia's readers are aware
that they can edit encyclopedia entries, the average visitor does so
very rarely. In fact, a core of around 500 people account for about half of
Wikipedia's content -- an indication that the technical process of writing
and editing wiki items remains forbidding for the average user.
A number of people have been intimately involved in
blending the worlds of the wiki and the blog together into one efficient and
engaging application, and Wikyblog is one of the very fine results of those
ruminations. Designed as a piece of open source software, Wikyblog allows
users to create their own different data types, and to arrange various
fields and variables as they see fit. Visitors can download this software,
and also take advantage of the “how-to” section offered on the Wikyblog
homepage. This version is compatible with all computers.
When Scott Mellanby of the St. Louis Blues apparently
scored the tying goal late in a recent National Hockey League playoff game
with the San Jose Sharks, Sharks assistant coach Tim Hunter wasn't worried.
He quickly replayed the whole scene on his tablet PC
equipped with TiVo-like functionality and verified that there was no goal. In
contrast, it took officials 2.5 minutes to call up to the booth and then rule
on the play.
"We knew instantly that it wasn't a
goal," Hunter said. "We were able to calm our team down, and
our team was recomposed and ready for the next face-off."
The tech-savvy
Sharks,
who are now in the conference semifinals in the race for the Stanley
Cup, are using a "bench monitor" to mark, review and zoom in
on plays, and make adjustments to their strategy on the fly. The
device also helps illustrate "coachable moments."
A digital video recorder hooked up to a
server records the game and then wirelessly transmits the data to a
tablet PC. Hunter can then use a stylus or a remote to mark key
moments in the game -- like a goal for, goal against, power play or
penalty kill -- so that he can return to them with a quick click. He
can diagram over the video as well.
"We're able to make edit marks on the
streaming video and then go back and replay those," Hunter said.
"You can review why you got the goal or why the team broke down.
"We can show a player, 'Here's a
situation where you might have been able to exploit the passing lane
of the opponent.' Later in the period this might prove to be
beneficial," he said.
Additionally, coaches can take prerecorded
video from the DVR and call it up on the bench monitor during the game
to illustrate how an opponent acts in a particular situation.
Hunter said a lot of teams in the
National
Hockey League have a video coach who watches the game in the back
office and communicates with coaches using a headset. The Sharks are
the only team to use the bench monitor, however.
"This just allows us as coaches to do it
ourselves and see it with our own eyes," Hunter said.
Randy Eccker, vice president of
XOS
Technologies, which provides the software for the bench monitor,
said San Jose's coaches know how to use it as an effective teaching
tool.
"When you're a player, your vision of
what happened is somewhat limited by your own perspective and vision
and experience," Eccker said. "The bench monitor gives them
an added dimension and therefore more information as to what really
happened, and gives them that feedback immediately during the
game."
Of course, that also means players may get an
earful after a boneheaded play.
Still, "the players are very
receptive," Hunter said. "These are all young kids. They
have Xboxes and iPods, and they are techno wizards themselves. They're
all used to the technology, and they think it's pretty cool."
The team burns DVDs of players' shifts on the
ice and hands them out to individuals. The Sharks regularly watch the
DVDs on their laptops while traveling from game to game.
Hunter and head coach Ron Wilson used the
technology when leading the
Washington
Capitals during the 2000-2002 seasons. They got the Sharks' bench
monitor up and running for the last two games of the regular season
and for every playoff game this year.
So far, hockey is the only sport to use the
bench monitor, Eccker said. NHL officials were not available for
comment on this story.
XOS Technologies did a test run with several
teams in the
National
Basketball Association, but the device has not yet been approved.
"People feel like the team (using it)
would have an advantage, and therefore (everyone else) would have to
buy it," Eccker said. "A lot of owners and managers don't
want to feel like they have to make that purchase."
The
National
Football League has eliminated all electronic tools from inside
the game, so a device like the bench monitor is not permitted.
"It's another cool toy for us
coaches," Hunter said. "Every little advantage you can get
makes a difference."
April 20, 2004 reply from Richard Campbell
Bob:
In contrast, the NFL does not allow teams to take
advantage of TV technology. The current practice is for a cameraman to
photograph multiple pre-snap images, and ferry them down to the field level on
a wire. Football fans may see quarterbacks looking at those photos in between
possessions in order to anticipate defensive strategies.
One of my accounting graduates obtained a field pass
for me for a Buffalo Bills game, and I was able to overhear the strategy
between Marv Levy and Jim Kelly. I was able to hear the roar of the approving
crowd as I walked down the runway from the locker room to the field. It was a
little louder than the students as I walked into class for a thrilling (to
them) lecture on financial statement ratios.
Richard
Richard J. Campbell
School of Business University of Rio Grande
Rio Grande, OH 45674
Beyond TV 3 Turns PCs Into Digital Video Recorders; The
Installation Nightmare
The coolest, trendiest way to watch television
today is by using a digital video recorder, or DVR. With a DVR system, you can
pause or rewind live TV. And, more important, you can record any program for
viewing later without enduring the twin hassles of videotape recording:
complicated programming and the need to keep blank tapes handy. That's because
DVRs record TV shows to a large hard disk, and you pick the shows to record by
just clicking their names in an onscreen program guide.
But buying a DVR can be costly. The most popular
options are high-end set-top boxes containing technology from TiVo, or its
rival, Replay TV, which require a fee-based service; or, high-end Media Center
PCs, that use a PC's internal hard disk as a DVR.
If your budget is limited, and you have a plain old
Windows PC, however, you can turn it into a DVR by using a new product from
SnapStream Media, a small company from Houston. SnapStream's Beyond TV 3
includes DVR software for Windows, and is bundled with the necessary hardware
-- an external TV tuner from Hauppauge Computer Works that plugs into the
computer with a simple USB cable. This bundle is sold on the SnapStream.com
Web site for $229.99. No service fee is charged.
. . .
Actually using Beyond TV 3 was a so-so
experience, but nothing to write home about. I recorded an episode of
"Charmed" and used the ShowSqueeze feature, which compresses
recorded shows into Windows Media format. The DVD burning software included
with the hardware didn't work with my test PC. I also paused and skipped back
through live programming. The picture was only fair, not nearly as good as the
image on the $150 TV set sitting a few feet away.
I found navigating through BTV 3's
screens to be clumsy. Settings screens lacked a button like "Done"
or "Apply" to let you apply new settings -- the only recourse was to
arrow back to the prior screen. When you shut down Beyond TV, a geeky log,
which shows you exactly what is shutting down, appears on screen. This could
easily suggest to a casual user that her PC was melting down.
The company acknowledges these rough
edges, but says it will be taking steps to remove them in future versions. The
multiple installations will be combined into one, it says, and the odd
messages will be made more friendly. The log display at shutdown will be
removed.
Maybe that will turn Beyond TV into an
acceptable product. But I'm not sure. My suggestion for those wanting a DVR in
their PC is to save up for a Media Center PC, which comes equipped with a
built-in TV tuner card and has a smarter interface.
If my son
asked me today to see video of my late grandfather, whose name he bears, I’d
be in trouble.
First, I’d
have to locate the VHS tapes. Then I’d have to hunt down a gray-market VCR.
($500
and up for defunct technology!) Then I’d have to meet in some other dark
alley for a converter
box to hook it up to my fancy smart TV. Then I’d have to hope that, back
in 1996, someone was kind and did in fact rewind.
Luckily, my
3-year-old only asks for “Dora the Explorer.”
Technology
allows us to preserve the stories of people who die—assuming the technology
doesn’t die, too.
The idea of
old photos and videos being lost in obsolete media formats was something I
thought about a lot as I was producing “E-Ternal:
A Tech Quest to ‘Live’ Forever,” a documentary about death and
technology.
It’s
something viewers have written to me about, too. Some even suggested in
emails that paper is the best solution to ensuring stories are passed down.
Of course, I never met a piece of paper that improved in time—or in fire.
Printouts are great, but they’re not the same as digital copies living on a
rugged hard drive or up in the cloud for the entire family to access.
Converting old media into digital files might not sound like your idea of a
good time, but it doesn’t have to be a struggle. Here are some tips on how
to make these older formats enjoyable in 2021.
Old
Photos
There
are really two routes to digitizing any old media: 1) Source some
specialized hardware, roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, or 2)
outsource.
Photographs and prints are the easiest to do yourself. The most efficient
route? Invest in the $600
Epson FastFoto FF-680W scanner. Put a stack of photos—even Polaroids—in
the tray and it scans them in bulk, a photo as fast as every second, sending
them to your computer via USB or Wi-Fi. Epson’s software helps with
assigning years to each of the photo’s metadata and has simple
color-restoration and editing tools. It’ll even scan the backs with the
fronts, to preserve any writing or time stamps that are visible.
While
it’s pricey, the cost is worth it if you’re dealing with hundreds of photos.
Plus, the scanner is something you can share with family members or friends
who are daunted by their own photo troves.
Don’t
want to spend that much? iOS and Android apps like Google
Photoscan or Photomyne’s Photo
Scan App let you use your smartphone’s camera to capture the photos. Find a
table with good light, and point and shoot—without getting your hand-puppet
shadow in the way. The apps will automatically crop out the surface. Just
set aside plenty of time and prioritize the most important images, since you
have to go photo by photo with this option.
If any of
that sounds like a headache, just ship your photos to the pros at services
like ScanMyPhotos.com and Memories
Renewed. Gather your photos, organize them by year, get some bubble wrap
and pop them in the mail. ScanMyPhoto will even send you a prepaid label and
shipping box. The services will then digitize them, giving you options to
get them on a DVD, USB drive or cloud download. The companies send back the
originals. I used
ScanMyPhotos a few years back and was quite satisfied with the
turnaround time, the quality of the scanned images and the care taken with
my original prints.
Old Slides
Those
services will also take your old slides—35mm and other formats. But I
recently discovered the thrill of scanning those myself. Inspired by my
uncle, who scanned hundreds of 35mm slides during quarantine, I bought the $160
Kodak Scanza Digital Film Scanner.
Just power
up the coffee-tin-size device, pop your slide or negative into the
appropriate tray and slide it into the machine. You can see the image on the
built-in screen. Hit the camera button to save the photo to an SD card.
Sadly, there’s no easy way to assign dates to the photos—you’ll have to do
that afterward in your photo-editing program of choice.
If you’re looking to do some quick and dirty slide scans, try
the Photomyne’s SlideScan app for iOS and Android.
Hold your slide up to a backlit surface (your computer’s web browser pointed
to photomyne.com/backlight is
great) then snap a photo. The app automatically crops and brightens the
image. The quality wasn’t great, but it’s a nice way to figure out what’s
hiding on those old negatives.
ld Tapes
Converting
videotapes—be they VHS, Betamax, MiniDV, Video8 or some other ancient
format—requires a device that can play them. Then you need another device to
record the video, like this $170
ClearClick Video2Digital Converter 2.0. There are other ways to do this,
too, including hooking the VCR or old video camera up to your computer via
a converter like this.
It’s a lot.
There are plenty of online services that do tape conversion, too, including
ScanMyPhotos, Memories Renewed and Legacy Box. Also, Costco, CVS, Walmart and
other retailers use a third-party
service called YesVideo. Drop the tapes off at a local store and they’ll
take care of the rest for you.
All those
services will convert DVDs to digital files, too, although doing that on
your own is simple.
Continued in article
RU THR? OMW ---The University of Florida Experiment With Text Messaging
"Higher Ed Texting: Campus text messaging for breaking news and events,"
by Jamie Devereaux, Converge Online, June 2007 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/story.php?catid=231&storyid=105542
Higher Ed Texting
RU THR? OMW. Translation: Are you there yet? I'm on my way. At first glance
that sentence is a NASA-worthy acronym. But really it is just text-speak for
getting in touch with a friend. It is common in the world of text messaging
to leave out vowels, abbreviate and shorten words. Texts, or text messages,
are a blend of e-mail, instant messaging and cell phones. They are speedy,
easy-to-use and are fast becoming the communication mode-of-choice on
college campuses.
A text is instantaneous and is keyed by way of the
number pad on a cell phone. The message can reach one end-user in a chat or
it can be sent to large groups. People can receive texts no matter if they
are on the way to class, in their dorm room or at the café. Due to these
real-time functions, texts could prove beneficial at colleges and
universities. Administrators and faculty could use text messaging to alert
students of adverse weather conditions, school lockdowns or other
campus-wide issues.
The University of Florida is one campus where text
messaging has been put to use. The staff, faculty
and students at UF can subscribe to a free cell
phone messaging service and get in the network. The
messaging system does not depend on a certain
service provider (such as AT&T or Verizon) and has
no related out-of-pocket cost to the university.
Other campuses that utilize text messaging are the
University of Texas, the University of Central
Florida, Kent State University and Clemson.
To read about the University of Florida's experience
with campus-wide text messaging click
here.
Continued in article
Statistical Survey Sampling and Analysis
February 29, 2008 message from XXXXX
Dear Dr. Jensen,
I have accessed your web site and found it to be
very helpful. I am working on a dissertation and need to find an instrument
(survey) that has validity and reliability and that will measure student
satisfaction with the use of iPODs in a course. With all of your knowledge
and expertise, I thought I would take a chance and ask if you possibly could
point me in a direction to find such a survey. I appreciate your time
assistance.
February 29, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi XXXXX,
First you might read about what some other schools and people are saying
about student hope and satisfaction in this area ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Laptops
Second you might want to contact professors at places like Duke University
that have quite a lot of experience with students use of Ipods. I think
there was more hype than subsequent happiness with the results.
I do not know of a similar survey where you can borrow the survey
questions. I suspect that you will have to design your own, and this is a
most difficult undertaking. Consider first the goals of using iPods in a
course. Then design your questions with those goals in mind. Then test your
questions first with survey experts (such as you might find in the Sociology
or Marketing Departments) and then conduct a pilot study with students
before administering the survey.
After reading the above basics, you might next consider online surveys.
For this I strongly recommend the following publication:
A 2001 RAND Corporation
report, CONDUCTING RESEARCH SURVEYS VIA EMAIL AND THE WEB [ISBN:
0-8330-3110-4], discusses the pros and cons of using email and the
Web to conduct research surveys. The authors (Matthias Schonlau,
Ronald D. Fricker, Jr., and Marc N. Elliott) provide an overview of
the various aspects of the research survey process, guidelines for
choosing the type of Internet survey to use, and suggestions for
designing and implementing Internet surveys. The report is available
for purchase in paperback or online in PDF format, at no charge, at
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1480/
(the above document description loads very slowly)
Internet-based surveys, although still
in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they
are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to
conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail
methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case
studies, this book examines the validity of those claims. The
authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using e-mail
and the Web to conduct research surveys, and also offer
practical suggestions for designing and implementing Internet
surveys most effectively. Among other findings, the authors
determined that Internet surveys may be preferable to mail or
telephone surveys when a list of e-mail addresses for the target
population is available, thus eliminating the need for mail or
phone invitations to potential respondents. Internet surveys
also are well-suited for larger survey efforts and for some
target populations that are difficult to reach by traditional
survey methods. Web surveys are conducted more quickly than mail
or phone surveys when respondents are contacted initially by
e-mail, as is often the case when a representative panel of
respondents has been assembled in advance. And, although surveys
incur virtually no coding or data-entry costs because the data
are captured electronically, the labor costs for design and
programming can be high.
Probably the most successful use of video is the Adept program at Stanford
University where engineering students can get an entire Masters of Engineering
degree almost entirely from video courses
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cnc9838/cnc9838.html
Jensen Comment
The bottom line is that video courses often work very well for highly motivated
top students. BYU consistently has such students in accountancy courses. The BYU
video course pedagogy won't work as well where students need more hand holding
combined with kicks in the butt in the classroom and outside the classroom.
BYU Flipped Variable-Speed Video Courses in Accounting BYU replaced live lectures in the on-campus two introductory courses in
accounting with variable -speed video 15 years ago. I wrote about the pioneering
efforts of adjunct professor Norman Nemrows who developed these CDs years ago
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
The variable speed videos enable students to navigate more efficiently through
the video files and to slow down on parts they want to study.
I think Norm supervised the courses and held office hours when students wanted
some help. As I recall he did all this for $1 per term.
This was a one of the early campus classroom replacements on online lectures
with video. My contention then and now was that this would not work well on many
campuses. It worked well at BYU because the accounting majors are nearly all
highly motivated students who learn well on their own or in small groups. In a
course having a high proportion of unmotivated students there is generally more
need for live instructors to kick butt.
Jensen Comment
The paper below from BYU is important in the sense that BYU was one of the
first, if not the first, prestigious university to teach the two basic
accounting courses (across one academic year) via video DVD discs. Classes only
met on rare occasion for inspirational sessions such as visiting experts on
careers in accountancy.
It should be noted that the video modules
replaced live lecturing. There was still a textbook for each video course such
that students could learn via whether reading or video watching. The BUY
introductory accounting videos were interesting in that they were "variable
speed videos" where students could pace themselves according to how fast they
individually learned the material.
Study Choices by Introductory Accounting
Students: Those Who Choose to Study By Reading Text Outperform Those Who Choose
to Study by Watching Video Lectures
SSRN, December 31, 2015
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2787478
Authors
Earl K. Stice Brigham Young University;
Nazarbayev University
James D Stice Brigham Young University
Conan Albrecht Brigham Young University -
School of Accountancy
Abstract
We use student-level online resource usage data for students in four
different introductory accounting courses to explore students’ revealed
preferences for reading text or watching video lectures. The online learning
tool tracks student study choice (read text, watch video, or skip) on a
paragraph-by-paragraph level. We match these usage data with student
performance on course exams. Not surprisingly, we find that students who
study more material earn higher exam scores than do students who study less
material. We also find that students who self-select to do relatively more
of their studying through reading text score higher on exams, on average,
than do students who self-select to do relatively more of their studying
through watching videos. Specifically, holding the overall amount of study
constant, a student who chooses to spend the highest fraction of her or his
study time watching video mini-lectures earns exam scores ten percentage
points lower (six-tenths of a standard deviation) than a student who chooses
to spend the lowest fraction of study time watching videos. Our evidence
suggests that the highest-performing introductory accounting students choose
to learn accounting proportionately more through reading than through
watching. These results are a reminder that when we talk about using
“technology” to help our students learn accounting, the written word is
still an important technology.
Jensen
Comment
It should be noted that BYU is one of the top schools of accountancy in the
world. In particular accounting students have high admissions qualifications in
terms of test scores, religious and cultural backgrounds, and motivation to
learn. It's especially important to note that a typical BYU accounting student
is so highly self-motivated that teaching becomes less important vis-a-vis
lower motivated students who need more inspiration and technical help from a
live teacher. The "learn on your own" pedagogy that provides video modules and
textbook chapters with much less live interaction with a teacher probably works
better at BYU than in most colleges and universities.
Of course
this does not mean that BYU students do not need and get more live interactions
with professors as they proceed up the learning ladder toward more advanced
accounting courses. The video courses at the introductory level free up
resources to devote more time and attention to advanced majors. I seriously
doubt that this pedagogy will work as well in colleges where introductory
students a much, much less inclined to learn on their own from video modules and
textbook chapters.
The risk of
replacing instructor interactions with accountancy videos and books is you may
lose majors who might otherwise become more motivated to major in accountancy
with more live interactions with professors. There seems to be so much demand to
major in accounting at BYU this seems to be less of a problem than it would be
at Cactus Gulch Community College.
In a way, there are
two Norman Nemrows. There’s the real-life professor who spent much of his
career teaching accounting students at Brigham Young University. And there’s
the one I'll call Video Norm, the instructor immortalized in lectures on
accounting that he began recording nearly 15 years ago.
For more than a decade, students at BYU learned
from both Norms. About half of the class sessions for his
introductory-accounting course were "software days," when students watched
an hour or two of video lectures on their computers anywhere they wanted and
then completed quizzes online. The other class periods were "enhancement
lectures," in which students—as many as 800 at a time—gathered in a
classroom and did group work led by the actual Mr. Nemrow.
Back when it started, in 2000, this method of
reducing in-person classes and replacing them with videos and tutorials was
an innovation, but today it is a buzzword: the
flipped classroom.
A few years ago, the living, breathing Norman
Nemrow retired from the university. And that’s when things got interesting,
or at least more complicated, because students at BYU still learn from Video
Norm.
In fact, every student taking introductory
accounting at the university watches the video lectures, some 3,000 students
each year. And the in-person sessions? They’re now led by another accounting
professor, Melissa Larson, who has been thrust into the novel role of doing
everything a traditional professor does except the lecturing. The tough
question—and one of the biggest for the future of the flipped model—is
whether other professors will be willing or able to become sidekicks to
slick video productions.
Ms. Larson gets high marks on student evaluations
for leading group work in the large classroom sessions and answering
questions by email. But Video Norm remains the star.
That was clear when Mr. Nemrow showed up, in
person, at the end of the fall semester to give a guest lecture for the
introductory course. You’d think a Hollywood actor had come to campus.
Students showed up early to take selfies with the professor they had spent
so many hours watching on video.
"We got front-row seats," said Celeste Harris, a
junior in the course. "We said, we have to see what this guy is like in real
life."
How did Mr. Nemrow compare with the digital
version? "He’s a little older than when he recorded the videos," Ms. Harris
noted, "but it was actually one of the best lectures I’ve heard." It was
inspirational, she said, because Mr. Nemrow recounted the story of this
unusual accounting course, which has become a kind of legend on the campus.
From Business to Teaching
Mr. Nemrow started out as a businessman. He worked
at a consulting firm in California, then helped start a
real-estate-investment firm. But he was drawn to the classroom. For years he
taught accounting on the side, first as an adjunct at California State
University at Fullerton, then full time at Pepperdine University.
Around the time he turned 30, he sold his business
and decided to retire early. He didn’t want to do nothing, but he no longer
had to work for money, he says, even with a wife and five small children.
"I didn’t really have a burning desire to create
another business," he says. He took some art classes. He played a lot of
golf. "For a couple of years I was trying to kind of find myself," he
recalls. "I decided what I really wanted to do is probably teach."
So he called up the dean of the business school at
his alma mater, Brigham Young, and asked if there was a teaching spot for
him. He had a master’s degree but not a Ph.D., and at first the answer was
no. "When I told him I was willing to do it as a volunteer, his attitude
changed," Mr. Nemrow recounts, with a laugh. "He let me teach the intro
course for a year."
BYU hired Mr. Nemrow as a full-time professor. He
donated his salary to the university, he says. A devout Mormon, he saw the
work as a way to give back to the church. In his mind, that left his
teaching in the category of volunteer work. "I wanted to have complete and
total freedom, and I didn’t want to make a commitment to how long I’d be
there."
After several years of teaching the introductory
course, he says, he began to get tired of repeating himself and answering
the same questions. He considered writing a textbook and even drafted a
couple of chapters. "But I thought to myself, this isn’t as effective as
when I’m explaining it in person."
So, in 1998, he approached the university’s
fledgling instructional-technology group and pitched his idea to reformat
his course around a series of videos and computerized homework assignments.
"They were worried about getting funding, so I just put up the money
myself," about $50,000, he says.
After two years of development and some lobbying to
persuade the accounting faculty to let him try his flipped experiment, Video
Norm was born.
Mr. Nemrow says the software increased the number
of students he could teach at one time, while reducing the time it took him
to do it. And he says his surveys showed that 93 percent of his students
reported learning more effectively from the flipped format than from a
traditional one. Both his inner businessman and his inner philanthropist
thought: This is going to be big.
Hitting the Road
Mr. Nemrow believed that his system was simply
better than the old way, and he thought that once other accounting
professors saw it, they’d immediately adopt his videos and software rather
than the textbook-and-lecture method.
He started a company, Business Learning Software
Inc., to manage and update the videos and the delivery technology. True to
his desire to keep his teaching like volunteer work, he says, he donates any
profits to charities. Because the software and videos were developed at BYU,
the university owns them and gets a portion of any revenue from their sale.
And he made
all of the
videos for his intro course available free online.
Mr. Nemrow traveled to accounting departments and
academic conferences around the country, evangelizing his teaching approach
and his software. But, to his surprise, he found few takers.
Continued in article
Learning Basic
Financial Accounting at Brigham Young University (BYU) From Homegrown Videos
Developer and Instructor: Norman Nemrow
[nemrow@byu.edu]
Title of Package of Eight CDs: Introduction to Accounting: The Language of
Business
Textbook: I think this package can be used along with virtually any basic
accounting textbook
Pedagogy: Students learn from video lesson modules before each class. The
video lessons display
the course instructor in video as well as accompanying
PowerPoint displays that are auto-
matically sequenced with the video. Students have nifty
options to both replay the previous
five minutes and to play the videos a double (2x) speed that
is an outstanding option
for reviewing previously-learned material.
Classes: Classes are more inspirational than perspirational (e.g., frequent use
of visiting speakers)
Outcomes: Purportedly students perform better vis-ŕ-vis previous lecture
pedagogy without video.
See the following evaluation of learning:
Master educators can also be outstanding researchers, although research
is certainly not a requisite to being a master educator. Many master
educators are administrators of exceptional accounting education programs.
They're administrative duties typically leave little time for research,
although they may write about education and learning. Some master educators
are not even tenure track faculty.
What I've noticed in recent years is how technology can make a huge
difference. Nearly every college these days has some courses in selected
disciplines because they are utilizing some type exciting technology. Today
I returned from a trip to Jackson, Mississippi where I conduced a day-long
CPE
session on education technology for accounting educators in Mississippi
(what great southern hospitality by the way). So the audience would not have
to listen to me the entire day, I invited Cameron Earl from Brigham Young
University to make a presentation that ran for about 90 minutes. I learned
some things about top educators at BYU, which by the way is one of the most
respected universities in the world. If you factor out a required religion
course on the Book of Mormon, the most popular courses on the BYU campus are
the two basic accounting courses. By popular I mean in terms of thousands of
students who elect to take these courses even if they have no intention of
majoring in business or economics where these two courses are required.
Nearly all humanities and science students on campus try to sign up for
these two accounting courses.
After students take these two courses, capacity constraints restrict the
numbers of successful students in these courses who are then allowed to
become accounting majors at BYU. I mean I'm talking about a very, very small
percentage who are allowed to become accounting students. Students admitted
to the accounting program generally have over 3.7 minimum campus-wide grade
averages.
This begs the question of what makes the two basic accounting courses so
exceptionally popular in such a large and prestigious university?
These two basic accounting courses are not sought out for easy
grades. In fact they are among the hardest courses for high grades at
BYU. I think that this is probably true in most business schools in the
nation.
These two BYU courses are not sought out for face-to-face contact
with the instructor. The courses have thousands of students each term
such that most students do not see the instructor outside of class even
though he's available over ten hours per week for those who seek him
out. Each course only meets in live classes eight times per semester.
Most of the speakers in those eight classes are outstanding visiting
speakers who add a great deal to the popularity of the course. This is
often one difference between a course run by a master educator versus a
master teacher. A master educator often brings in top talent to inspire
and educate students.
The courses undoubtedly benefit from the the shortage of accounting
graduates in colleges nationwide and the exceptional career
opportunities for students who want careers in accounting, taxation,
law, business management, government, criminal justice, and other
organizations. But these accountancy advantages exist for every college
that has an accounting education program. Most all colleges do not have
two basic accounting courses that are sought out by every student in the
entire university. That makes BYU's two basic accounting courses truly
exceptional.
Some courses in every college are popular these days because they
are doing something exceptional with technology. These two BYU courses
increased in popularity when a self-made young man became a
multimillionaire and decided to devote his life to being a master
educator in these two accountancy courses at BYU. His name is Norman
Nemrow. He runs these courses full time without salary at BYU and is
neither a tenure track faculty member or a noted researcher at BYU. I
think he qualifies, however, as an education researcher even if he does
not publish his findings in academic journals. The video disks are
available to anyone in the world for a relatively small fee that goes to
BYU, but BYU is not doing this for purposes of making great profits. You
can read more about how to get the course disks at the following links:
The students in these two courses learn the technical aspects of
from variable-speed video disks that were produced by Norman and a team
of video and learning experts. Cameron Earl is a recent graduate of BYU
who is part of the technical team that delivers these two courses on
video. Formal studies of Nemrow's video courses indicate that students
generally prefer to learn from the video relative to live lectures. The
course has computer labs run by teaching assistants who can give live
tutorials to individual students, but most students who have the video
disks for their own computers do not seek out the labs.
Trivia Question
At BYU most students on campus elect to take Norman Nemrow's two basic
accounting courses. In the distant past, what exceptional accounting
professor managed to get his basic accounting courses required at a renowned
university while he was teaching these courses?
Trivia Answer
Bill Paton is one of the all-time great accounting professors in history.
His home campus was the University of Michigan, and for a period of time
virtually all students at his university had to take basic accounting (or at
least so I was told by several of Paton's former doctoral students). Bill
Paton was one of the first to be inducted into the
Accounting Hall of Fame.
As an aside, I might mention
that I favor requiring two basic accounting courses for every
student admitted to a college or university, including colleges
who do not even have business education programs.
But the "required accounting
courses" would not, in my viewpoint, be a traditional basic
accounting courses. About two thirds or more of these courses
should be devoted to personal finance, investing, business law,
tax planning. The remainder of the courses should touch on
accounting basics for keeping score of business firms and
budgeting for every organization in society.
At the moment, the majority of
college graduates do not have a clue about the time value of
money and the basics of finance and accounting that they will
face the rest of their lives.
There are other ways of being "mastery educators" without being master
teachers in a traditional sense. Three professors of accounting at the
University of Virginia developed and taught a year-long intermediate
accounting case where students virtually had to teach themselves in a manner
that they found painful and frustrating. But there are metacognitive reasons
where the end result made this year-long active learning task one of the
most meaningful and memorable experiences in their entire education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
They often painfully grumbled with such comments as "everything I'm learned
in this course I'm having to learn by myself."
On any given Sunday night, your child’s teacher
might face this problem: How do you come up with a lesson plan for 20 or
more students for an entire week when all your students are learning at a
different pace?
Mike is great at reading but needs help in math.
Katie excels in science but struggles with writing. They both need to pass
the same state tests. And with states picking up new high standards for
education, there isn’t always a precedent of how to teach. Even with
textbooks and years of experience, the best teachers can struggle to find
new ways of teaching complex subjects, especially when each student learns
differently.
This is a problem that Eric Westendorf and Alix
Guerrier are determined to solve. The two former teachers co-founded
LearnZillion.com,
a social venture that provides free lessons for students, all in organized
YouTube-style videos.
The formula is simple: Videos have to be about five
minutes long, illustrated by hand and voiced by a real teacher. The product
simulates a real-classroom effect —it’s like your favorite teacher drawing
the math lesson on the chalkboard, except that you can play it over and over
if you don’t quite understand it. At the end, you take a brief quiz. But as
it turns out, this resource is mostly utilized by teachers looking for new
ways to teach the topics with which their students are struggling .
In other words, teachers need help from other
teachers. Jonathan Krasnov, Learnzillion’s publicist notes, “Even great
teachers don’t teach everything great.”
Westendorf was the principal of E.L. Haynes, a
charter school in Washington, D.C., when he came up with the idea.
He told CNN, “We started using it because we came
across the Khan Academy site. We liked this idea of instruction being
captured and delivered to students. Then we said, ‘What if it could be based
on the Common Core Standards, [which most U.S.states have now adopted] , so
that it is aligned with what students need? … It was out of these ‘what ifs’
that I came up with a prototype.”
Westendorf plans for LearnZillion to eventually
make profit by selling services to school districts, such as lessons
tailored to the needs of the school. But he says that the lessons posted
online will always be free.
CNN attended LearnZillion’s first
TeachFest , recently
held in Atlanta. Westendorf and Guerrier recruited more than 100 “Dream
Team” teachers to help build up their database of lessons. The teachers get
paid $100 for each lesson created. But the chance to reach more students is
the biggest reward for many teachers to whom CNN talked.
Mike Lewis, a fifth-grade teacher from Cohasset,
Massachusetts, says his interest in the “ability to replicate yourself and
your lessons using video” is what led him to LearnZillion. The slogan for
TeachFest was “scale your impact.”
The idea is not new.
KhanAcademy.org
has thousands of lessons, and unlike LearnZillion,
Khan Academy is a nonprofit. Both receive funding from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates
Foundation donated $300,000 just for TeachFest.
Even Bill Gates acknowledges that the idea of the
virtual classroom hasn’t quite gone viral yet. During last month’s
Innovation in Education summit, the Microsoft CEO
noted the example of
Edx, a partnership
between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University
that provides free online courses.
Jensen Comment
This is why I created Camtasia modules for nearly every technical phase of both
my AIS and Accounting Theory courses and then served them up on either my LAN
drive or my Web server. When the video module contained copyrighted material I
used the LAN drive. For example, if I showed students how to solve an
end-of-chapter problem I used the LAN drive.
The Camtasia videos had several great learning advantages:
Students could repeat, repeat, and repeat again until they finally
mastered some complicated task such as writing a database query or booking
fair value adjustments of an interest rate swap.
Students could skip over parts of the module that they fully understood
and then focus on the parts of a task that they had not yet mastered.
Usually I encouraged students to work in partnerships such that they
appreciated how teamwork aids learning. But they were on their own when I
gave a quiz in every class to test whether they truly understood the
technical process they were supposed to learn before coming to class.
This allowed me to focus on such things as theory and concepts in class
rather than having to solve problems that some students understood fully and
other students had their heads in the clouds.
There is a risk that this works so efficiently that it's tempting to add more
and more technical material to the course. My students generally let me know
when my courses were demanding too much of their time relative to the other
courses they were taking in the same semester.
This video module approach may be less successful for students who are not
well above average. Students at the lower end of the spectrum may need more
direct supervision and face-to-butt kicking.
At BYU, where basic accounting students are probably above the national norm
for these two courses in terms of aptitude and motivation, each basic course is
taught via variable speed video in courses that rarely meet face-to-face ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
There is no magic bullet for students who are overly exhausted from
off-campus work, parenting, or partying. Learning requires lots and lots of
sweat. And if the sweat arises from things other than course content, not a
whole lot of learning of course content will take place under any pedagogy.
Students in these poor learning circumstances generally discover that
accounting, mathematics, engineering, and science courses should be avoided
whenever possible.
Question
What types of students benefit most versus least from video lectures?
No clear winner emerges in the contest between
video and live instruction, according to the
findings of a recent study led by David N.
Figlio, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern
University. The study found that students who watched lectures online
instead of attending in-person classes performed slightly worse in the
course over all.
A previous
analysis by the U.S. Department of Education that
examined existing research comparing online and live instruction favored
online learning over purely in-person instruction, according to
the working paper
by Mr. Figlio and his colleagues, which was released
this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
But Mr. Figlio's study contradicted those results,
showing that live instruction benefits Hispanic students, male students, and
lower-achieving students in particular.
Colleges and universities that are turning to video
lectures because of their institutions' tight budgets may be doing those
students a disservice, said Mark Rush, a professor of economics at the
University of Florida and one of the working paper's authors.
More research will be necessary, however, before
any definite conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of video
lectures, said Lu Yin, a graduate student at the University of Florida who
worked on the project. Future research could study the effectiveness of
watching lectures online for topics other than microeconomics, which was the
subject of the course evaluated in the study, Ms. Yin said.
Jensen Comment
Studies like this just do not extrapolate well into the real world, because so
very, very much depends upon both how instructors use videos and how students
use videos. My students had to take my live classes, but my Camtasia video
allowed them to keep going over and over, at their own learning pace, technical
modules (PQQ Possible Quiz Questions) until they got technical things down pat
---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Students who did not use the videos as intended usually paid a price.
However, some outcomes in the above study conform to my priors. For example,
Brigham Young University (BYU) has very successfully replaced live lectures with
variable-speed video lectures in the first two basic accounting courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
However, BYU students most likely have mostly high achieving students to
begin with, especially in accounting. It would be interesting to formally study
the use such variable-speed video in colleges having a higher proportion of
lower-achieving students. My guess is that the variable-speed video lectures
would be less effective with lower-achieving students who are not motivated to
keep replaying videos until they get the technical material down pat. The may be
lower achieving in great measure because they are less motivated learners or
learners who have too many distractions (like supportingchildren) to have as
much quality study time.
In conclusion, I think much depends upon the quality of the video versus
lecture, class size, and student motivation. Videos offer the tremendous
advantage of instant replay and being able to adjust to the best learning pace
of the student. Live lectures can, and often do, lead to more human interactive
factors that can be good (if they motivate) and bad (if they distract or instill
dysfunctional fear).
The best video lectures are probably those that are accompanied with instant
messaging with an instructor or tutor that can provide answers or clues to
answers not on the video.
Question
Should you share your knowledge on YouTube?
One Web site that opened this week,
Big Think,
hopes to be "a YouTube for ideas." The site offers
interviews with academics, authors, politicians, and other thinkers. Most of
the subjects are filmed in front of a plain white background, and the
interviews are chopped into bite-sized pieces of just a few minutes each.
The short clips could have been served up as text quotes, but Victoria R. M.
Brown, co-founder of Big Think, says video is more engaging. "People like to
learn and be informed of things by looking and watching and learning," she
says.
YouTube itself wants to be a venue for academe. In
the past few months, several colleges have signed agreements with the site
to set up official "channels." The University of California at Berkeley was
the first, and the University of Southern California, the University of New
South Wales, in Australia, and Vanderbilt University soon followed.
It remains an open question just how large the
audience for talking eggheads is, though. After all, in the early days of
television, many academics hoped to use the medium to beam courses to living
rooms, with series like CBS's Sunrise Semester. which began in 1957.
Those efforts are now a distant memory.
Things may be different now, though, since the
Internet offers a chance to connect people with the professors and topics
that most interest them.
Even YouTube was surprised by how popular the
colleges' content has been, according to Adam Hochman, a product manager at
Berkeley's Learning Systems Group. Lectures are long, after all, while most
popular YouTube videos run just a few minutes. (Lonelygirl, the diary of a
teenage girl, had episodes that finished in well under a minute. Many other
popular shorts involve cute animals or juvenile stunts). Yet some lectures
on Berkeley's channel scored 100,000 viewers each, and people were sitting
through the whole talks. "Professors in a sense are rock stars," Mr. Hochman
concludes. "We're getting as many hits as you would find with some of the
big media players."
YouTube officials insist that they weren't
surprised by the buzz, and they say that more colleges are coming forward.
"We expect that education will be a vibrant category on YouTube," said
Obadiah Greenberg, strategic partner manager at YouTube, in an e-mail
interview. "Everybody loves to learn."
To set up an official channel on YouTube, colleges
must sign an agreement with the company, though no money changes hands. That
allows the colleges to brand their section of the site, by including a logo
or school colors, and to upload longer videos than typical users are
allowed.
The company hasn't exactly made it easy to find the
academic offerings, though. Clicking on the education category shows a mix
of videos, including ones with babes posing in lingerie and others on the
lectures of Socrates. But that could change if the company begins to sign up
more colleges and pay more attention to whether videos are appearing in the
correct subject areas, says Dan Colman, director and associate dean of
Stanford University's continuing-studies program, who runs a
blog
tracking podcasts and videos made by colleges and
professors.
In many cases, the colleges were already offering
the videos they are putting on YouTube on their own Web sites, or on Apple's
iTunes U, an educational section of the iTunes Store. But college officials
say that teaming up with YouTube is greatly expanding their audiences
because so many people are poking around the service already.
'YouTube for Intellectuals' Goes Live Amy Gutmann,
president of the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the importance of
racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity at colleges in a
video on
bigthink,
a new Web site that is meant to be a YouTube for intellectuals. In addition
to featuring academics, the site includes one- to two-minute videos from
politicians, artists, and business people.
According to an
article in Monday’s New York Times, the site was
started by Peter Hopkins, a 2004 graduate of Harvard University. He said he
hopes bigthink becomes popular among college students. David Frankel, a
venture capitalist, put up most of the money for the enterprise. Lawrence H.
Summers, a former president of Harvard, has invested tens of thousands of
dollars as well.
“Critical thinking is not a set of
skills that can be deployed at any time, in any context. It is a type of
thought that even 3-year-olds can engage in—and even trained scientists
can fail in.”
“Knowing that one should think
critically is not the same as being able to do so. That requires domain
knowledge and practice.”
So, Why Is Thinking Critically So
Hard?
Educators have long noted that school attendance and even academic
success are no guarantee that a student will graduate an effective
thinker in all situations. There is an odd tendency for rigorous
thinking to cling to particular examples or types of problems. Thus, a
student may have learned to estimate the answer to a math problem before
beginning calculations as a way of checking the accuracy of his answer,
but in the chemistry lab, the same student calculates the components of
a compound without noticing that his estimates sum to more than 100
percent. And a student who has learned to thoughtfully discuss the
causes of the American Revolution from both the British and American
perspectives doesn’t even think to question how the Germans viewed World
War II. Why are students able to think critically in one situation, but
not in another? The brief answer is: Thought processes are intertwined
with what is being thought about. Let’s explore this in depth by looking
at a particular kind of critical thinking that has been studied
extensively: problem solving.
Imagine a seventh-grade math class immersed in
word problems. How is it that students will be able to answer one
problem, but not the next, even though mathematically both word problems
are the same, that is, they rely on the same mathematical knowledge?
Typically, the students are focusing on the scenario that the word
problem describes (its surface structure) instead of on the mathematics
required to solve it (its deep structure). So even though students have
been taught how to solve a particular type of word problem, when the
teacher or textbook changes the scenario, students still struggle to
apply the solution because they don’t recognize that the problems are
mathematically the same.
Thinking Tends to Focus on a Problem’s
“Surface Structure”
To understand why the surface structure of a problem is so distracting
and, as a result, why it’s so hard to apply familiar solutions to
problems that appear new, let’s first consider how you understand what’s
being asked when you are given a problem. Anything you hear or read is
automatically interpreted in light of what you already know about
similar subjects. For example, suppose you read these two sentences:
“After years of pressure from the film and television industry, the
President has filed a formal complaint with China over what U.S. firms
say is copyright infringement. These firms assert that the Chinese
government sets stringent trade restrictions for U.S. entertainment
products, even as it turns a blind eye to Chinese companies that copy
American movies and television shows and sell them on the black market.”
With Deep Knowledge, Thinking Can
Penetrate Beyond Surface Structure
If knowledge of how to solve a problem never transferred to problems
with new surface structures, schooling would be inefficient or even
futile—but of course, such transfer does occur. When and why is
complex,5 but two factors are especially relevant for educators:
familiarity with a problem’s deep structure and the knowledge that one
should look for a deep structure. I’ll address each in turn. When one is
very familiar with a problem’s deep-structure, knowledge about how to
solve it transfers well. That familiarity can come from long-term,
repeated experience with one problem, or with various manifestations of
one type of problem (i.e., many problems that have different surface
structures, but the same deep structure). After repeated exposure to
either or both, the subject simply perceives the deep structure as part
of the problem description.
To
be skilled in critical thinking is to be able to take one’s thinking
apart systematically, to analyze each part, assess it for quality
and then improve it. The first step in this process is understanding
the parts of thinking, or elements of reasoning.
These elements are:
purpose, question, information, inference, assumption, point of
view, concepts, and implications. They are present in the mind
whenever we reason. To take command of our thinking, we need to
formulate both our purpose and the question at issue clearly. We
need to use information in our thinking that is both relevant to the
question we are dealing with, and accurate. We need to make logical
inferences based on sound assumptions. We need to understand our own
point of view and fully consider other relevant viewpoints. We need
to use concepts justifiably and follow out the implications of
decisions we are considering. (For an elaboration of the Elements of
Reasoning, see a Miniature Guide to the Foundations of Analytic
Thinking.)
In this article we
focus on two of the elements of reasoning: inferences and
assumptions. Learning to distinguish inferences from assumptions is
an important intellectual skill. Many confuse the two elements. Let
us begin with a review of the basic meanings:
Inference: An inference is a step of the mind, an
intellectual act by which one concludes that something is true
in light of something else’s being true, or seeming to be true.
If you come at me with a knife in your hand, I probably would
infer that you mean to do me harm. Inferences can be accurate or
inaccurate, logical or illogical, justified or unjustified.
Assumption: An assumption is something we take for
granted or presuppose. Usually it is something we previously
learned and do not question. It is part of our system of
beliefs. We assume our beliefs to be true and use them to
interpret the world about us. If we believe that it is dangerous
to walk late at night in big cities and we are staying in
Chicago, we will infer that it is dangerous to go for a walk
late at night. We take for granted our belief that it is
dangerous to walk late at night in big cities. If our belief is
a sound one, our assumption is sound. If our belief is not
sound, our assumption is not sound. Beliefs, and hence
assumptions, can be unjustified or justified, depending upon
whether we do or do not have good reasons for them. Consider
this example: “I heard a scratch at the door. I got up to let
the cat in.” My inference was based on the assumption (my prior
belief) that only the cat makes that noise, and that he makes it
only when he wants to be let in.
We humans naturally
and regularly use our beliefs as assumptions and make inferences
based on those assumptions. We must do so to make sense of where we
are, what we are about, and what is happening. Assumptions and
inferences permeate our lives precisely because we cannot act
without them. We make judgments, form interpretations, and come to
conclusions based on the beliefs we have formed.
If you put humans in
any situation, they start to give it some meaning or other. People
automatically make inferences to gain a basis for understanding and
action. So quickly and automatically do we make inferences that we
do not, without training, notice them as inferences. We see dark
clouds and infer rain. We hear the door slam and infer that someone
has arrived. We see a frowning face and infer that the person is
upset. If our friend is late, we infer that she is being
inconsiderate. We meet a tall guy and infer that he is good at
basketball, an Asian and infer that she will be good at math. We
read a book, and interpret what the various sentences and
paragraphs — indeed what the whole book — is saying. We listen to
what people say and make a series of inferences as to what they
mean.
As we write, we make
inferences as to what readers will make of what we are writing. We
make inferences as to the clarity of what we are saying, what
requires further explanation, what has to be exemplified or
illustrated, and what does not. Many of our inferences are justified
and reasonable, but some are not.
As always, an
important part of critical thinking is the art of bringing what is
subconscious in our thought to the level of conscious realization.
This includes the recognition that our experiences are shaped by the
inferences we make during those experiences. It enables us to
separate our experiences into two categories: the raw data of our
experience in contrast with our interpretations of those data, or
the inferences we are making about them. Eventually we need to
realize that the inferences we make are heavily influenced by our
point of view and the assumptions we have made about people and
situations. This puts us in the position of being able to broaden
the scope of our outlook, to see situations from more than one point
of view, and hence to become more open-minded.
Often different
people make different inferences because they bring to situations
different viewpoints. They see the data differently. To put it
another way, they make different assumptions about what they see.
For example, if two people see a man lying in a gutter, one might
infer, “There’s a drunken bum.” The other might infer, “There’s a
man in need of help.” These inferences are based on different
assumptions about the conditions under which people end up in
gutters. Moreover, these assumptions are connected to each person’s
viewpoint about people. The first person assumes, “Only drunks are
to be found in gutters.” The second person assumes, “People lying in
the gutter are in need of help.”
The first
person may have developed the point of view that people are
fundamentally responsible for what happens to them and ought to be
able to care for themselves. The second may have developed the point
of view that the problems people have are often caused by forces and
events beyond their control. The reasoning of these two people, in
terms of their inferences and assumptions, could be characterized in
the following way:
Person One
Person Two
Situation: A man is lying in the gutter.
Situation: A man
is lying in the gutter.
Inference: That
man’s a bum.
Inference: That
man is in need of help.
Assumption: Only
bums lie in gutters.
Assumption:
Anyone lying in the gutter is in need of help.
Critical thinkers notice the inferences they are making, the
assumptions upon which they are basing those inferences, and the
point of view about the world they are developing. To develop these
skills, students need practice in noticing their inferences and then
figuring the assumptions that lead to them.
As students become
aware of the inferences they make and the assumptions that underlie
those inferences, they begin to gain command over their thinking.
Because all human thinking is inferential in nature, command of
thinking depends on command of the inferences embedded in it and
thus of the assumptions that underlie it. Consider the way in which
we plan and think our way through everyday events. We think of
ourselves as preparing for breakfast, eating our breakfast, getting
ready for class, arriving on time, leading class discussions,
grading student papers, making plans for lunch, paying bills,
engaging in an intellectual discussion, and so on. We can do none of
these things without interpreting our actions, giving them meanings,
making inferences about what is happening.
This is to say that
we must choose among a variety of possible meanings. For example, am
I “relaxing” or “wasting time?” Am I being “determined” or
“stubborn?” Am I “joining” a conversation or “butting in?” Is
someone “laughing with me” or “laughing at me?” Am I “helping a
friend” or “being taken advantage of?” Every time we interpret our
actions, every time we give them a meaning, we are making one or
more inferences on the basis of one or more assumptions.
As humans, we
continually make assumptions about ourselves, our jobs, our mates,
our students, our children, the world in general. We take some
things for granted simply because we can’t question everything.
Sometimes we take the wrong things for granted. For example, I run
off to the store (assuming that I have enough money with me) and
arrive to find that I have left my money at home. I assume that I
have enough gas in the car only to find that I have run out of gas.
I assume that an item marked down in price is a good buy only to
find that it was marked up before it was marked down. I assume that
it will not, or that it will, rain. I assume that my car will start
when I turn the key and press the gas pedal. I assume that I mean
well in my dealings with others.
Humans make hundreds
of assumptions without knowing it---without thinking about it. Many
assumptions are sound and justifiable. Many, however, are not. The
question then becomes: “How can students begin to recognize the
inferences they are making, the assumptions on which they are basing
those inferences, and the point of view, the perspective on the
world that they are forming?”
There are many ways
to foster student awareness of inferences and assumptions. For one
thing, all disciplined subject-matter thinking requires that
students learn to make accurate assumptions about the content they
are studying and become practiced in making justifiable inferences
within that content. As examples: In doing math, students make
mathematical inferences based on their mathematical assumptions. In
doing science, they make scientific inferences based on their
scientific assumptions. In constructing historical accounts, they
make historical inferences based on their historical assumptions. In
each case, the assumptions students make depend on their
understanding of fundamental concepts and principles.
As a matter of daily
practice, then, we can help students begin to notice the inferences
they are making within the content we teach. We can help them
identify inferences made by authors of a textbook, or of an article
we give them. Once they have identified these inferences, we can ask
them to figure out the assumptions that led to those inferences.
When we give them routine practice in identifying inferences and
assumptions, they begin to see that inferences will be illogical
when the assumptions that lead to them are not justifiable. They
begin to see that whenever they make an inference, there are other
(perhaps more logical) inferences they could have made. They begin
to see high quality inferences as coming from good reasoning.
We can also help
students think about the inferences they make in daily situations,
and the assumptions that lead to those inferences. As they become
skilled in identifying their inferences and assumptions, they are in
a better position to question the extent to which any of their
assumptions is justified. They can begin to ask questions, for
example, like: Am I justified in assuming that everyone eats lunch
at 12:00 noon? Am I justified in assuming that it usually rains when
there are black clouds in the sky? Am I justified in assuming that
bumps on the head are only caused by blows?
The point is that we
all make many assumptions as we go about our daily life and we ought
to be able to recognize and question them. As students develop these
critical intuitions, they increasingly notice their inferences and
those of others. They increasingly notice what they and others are
taking for granted. They increasingly notice how their point of view
shapes their experiences.
SUMMARY: The author cites statistics from the National Center for
Education Studies that 21.7% of bachelor's degrees awarded in 2008-2009 were
for business majors and that the percentage has held quite steady for about
30 years. She reports on a conference at George Washington University in
February 2012 that was attended by more than 20 U.S. and European business
schools. The author writes that recruiters have some concerns about business
graduates having sufficient critical thinking, writing, and other skills
typically thought to be developed from liberal arts courses. A finishing
quote from a human resource executive in the banking industry, however, says
that "application from the liberal arts often need to 'undertake extra due
diligence on the industry.'"
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is useful in any business class
to discuss the need for "soft skills" and ethical decision-making in
business professionals.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) At what meeting did this WSJ reporter develop her
ideas for this article and make contacts with whom she discussed these
educational issues? What information in the article do you think she
obtained from presentations or discussions at the meeting? Provide a
specific list.
2. (Introductory) Why does the author say that it is important for
business majors to have liberal arts components to their degree programs?
Summarize the issues in the article.
3. (Advanced) Do you think your overall college education
experience is helping you to develop critical thinking and writing skills?
Explain how.
4. (Advanced) View the related video for this article. Do you think
that the author's own biases could be introduced into the discussion in this
article? Explain.
5. (Advanced) Consider the quote in the last paragraph from Tara
Udut, head of campus recruitment for the Americas at Barclays. What does she
say about the experience of hiring business majors versus liberal arts? In
your answer, define the term "due diligence."
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
Undergraduate business majors are a dime a dozen on
many college campuses. But according to some, they may be worth even less.
More than 20% of U.S. undergraduates are business
majors, nearly double the next most common major, social sciences and
history.
The proportion has held relatively steady for the
past 30 years, but now faculty members, school administrators and corporate
recruiters are questioning the value of a business degree at the
undergraduate level.
The biggest complaint: The undergraduate degrees
focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don't
develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills through long
essays, in-class debates and other hallmarks of liberal-arts courses.
Companies say they need flexible thinkers with
innovative ideas and a broad knowledge base derived from exposure to
multiple disciplines. And while most recruiters don't outright avoid
business majors, companies in consulting, technology and even finance say
they're looking for candidates with a broader academic background.
William Sullivan, co-author of "Rethinking
Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession," says
the divide between business and liberal-arts offerings, however
unintentional, has hurt students, who see their business instruction as
"isolated" from other disciplines.
Schools are taking the hint. The business schools
at George Washington University, Georgetown University, Santa Clara
University and others are tweaking their undergraduate business curricula in
an attempt to better integrate lessons on history, ethics and writing into
courses about finance and marketing.
Along with more than 20 other U.S. and European
business schools, those institutions met last month at George Washington for
a conference to discuss ways to better integrate a liberal-arts education
into the business curriculum. It was organized by the Aspen Institute, a
nonprofit group with an arm that studies management education and society.
Other participants included Franklin & Marshall College, Babson College and
Esade, a business and law school at Barcelona's Ramon Llull University.
Doug Guthrie, dean of the George Washington
University School of Business, is planning to draw on expertise in the
university's psychology and philosophy departments to teach business ethics
and he'll seek help from the engineering program to address sustainability.
He expects to introduce the new curriculum, which will also include a core
course on business and society, in the fall.
Such changes should appease recruiters, who have
been seeking well-rounded candidates from other disciplines, such as
English, economics and engineering. Even financial companies say those
students often have sharp critical-thinking skills and problem-solving
techniques that business majors sometimes lack.
"Firms are looking for talent. They're not looking
for content knowledge, per se," says Scott Rostan, founder of Training the
Street Inc., which provides financial training courses for new hires at a
number of investment banks. "They're not hiring someone just because they
took an M&A class."
Business degrees have been offered since at least
the 1800s, but they were often considered vocational programs. Some experts
argue that the programs belong at trade schools and that students should use
their undergraduate years to learn something about the world before heading
to business school for an M.B.A.
Next fall, the University of Denver's Daniels
College of Business will provide a required course to teach first-year
students how to view business issues in a global context. The class, being
piloted this spring, will have instruction in business history, ethics,
social responsibility, sustainability and other subjects.
Introducing such concepts early in students'
academic careers should help them "connect the dots," says Daniel Connolly,
associate dean for undergraduate programs at the business school.
Jensen Comment
One way to make students think more critically is to make them make
presentations or write papers on multiple sides of an issue rather than just the
side they favor. Sadly, our major media reporters and commentators are
increasingly prone to being one-sided on controversial issues.
Attorneys develop critical thinking skills since when must make convincing
cases in causes they do not wholeheartedly support such as getting defendants
set free that they know are guilty of heinous crimes. In accounting, one
critical thinking challenge would be to have students defend as well as attack
historical costs or lower capital gains tax rates.
Research should be problem driven rather than
methodologically driven," said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a member of the task force
who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Scott Jascik ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/04/polisci
In 1837, the Massachusetts Board of Education
devoted part of its first annual report to praising a recent classroom
innovation called the blackboard. This “invaluable and indispensible”
innovation...
On March 4, 2013 the Financial Education Daily Linked this Quotation to the
Harvard Gazette, but I could not find the source of the quote.
On a recent Wednesday morning, 90 high achievers
from around the world prepared to get down to cases.
Their professor buzzed through the classroom like a
worker bee. Armed with large, multicolored pieces of chalk, he organized his
notes, copied pastel-coded facts and figures on the blackboard, and set up a
film screen. Soon his students would be equally hard at work, but in a
strictly cerebral way.
This day the instructor was inclined to be kind,
giving the young man who would open the class discussion an early heads-up,
allowing some time to prepare. Often in this setting, classes start with the
heart-pounding “cold call,” where a student is put to the test without
warning. The deceptively simple “start us off” translates into “as quickly
and coherently and convincingly as possible, tell us everything known about
this situation and give us your best insight.”
As well as being busy and congenial, Jan Rivkin, a
professor in the strategy unit at Harvard Business School (HBS), was clearly
engaging, his enthusiasm infectious, his sense of humor unmistakable.
He started with a brief refresher video, one he’d
secured from a colleague on holiday in the Bahamas. The class watched their
vacationing instructor drop to his knees on the beach as the tape rolled.
With a straight face, he reviewed the finer points of his recent
technology-operations-management discussion with the class, drawing a series
of overlapping diagrams in the sand. When done, he promptly jumped into the
ocean.
The crowd loved it, but it was the last light
moment. For the next hour-and-a-half the class examined whether the Spanish
clothing company Zara should update its retailers’ IT infrastructure.
During the ensuing discussion and debate, Jan
Rivkin, deftly prodded, questioned, and encouraged his deeply engaged class.
It was just another day at HBS — and one of its
standard case-classes. The case method is the primary mode of teaching and
learning at the institution, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this
year. In honor of its centennial, the School will host a series of events on
Tuesday (April 8) that will include a number of panels, a birthday
celebration, and a case discussion on the future of HBS.
While it didn’t begin with the School’s inception,
the revolutionary instructional approach followed shortly thereafter. But it
wasn’t an entirely novel concept. The model was actually borrowed from the
Harvard Law School and Christopher Columbus Langdell HLS Class of 1853 and
dean of the Law School in 1870, who pioneered the technique for the
examination of Harvard Law School cases.
Later, at HBS, it was Dean Wallace P. Donham, a Law
School grad familiar with the technique, who pushed for the full inclusion
of the case method at the Business School, where it was altered and adapted
to a business perspective. Since 1921, it has been a core part of the
curriculum.
The method of teaching differs greatly from the
traditional lecture format, in which students take notes as the professor
speaks. Instead, students are engaged in a dynamic back-and-forth with one
another and their professor, discussing a topic typically pulled from a
relevant, real-life business scenario and featuring a dilemma or challenge.
Sometimes, once the class has examined and discussed the case, the actual
CEO or president of the company in question will appear in person to explain
how the situation ultimately unfolded.
The case topics are wide-ranging and include
everything from the world of finance to semiconductors to sweeteners to
satellite television.
Some cases offer historic reflections, employing
the lessons tragedy imparts. Cases have been written, for example, about the
space shuttle Columbia’s final mission in 2003 and the management decisions
made prior to its fatal re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Abraham
Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War, and the management of national
intelligence prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Students are given an overview of the case’s
material to read ahead of time. The packets, roughly 20 to 25 pages long,
include a list of facts, an outline of the challenge at hand, and a history
of the company or situation in text, charts, and graphs, all compiled into a
neat brief.
More than 80 percent of HBS classes are built on
the case method. Each week students prepare approximately 14 cases both
alone and with the help of study groups. But in the end they are on their
own. In class, it is up to the individual to articulate his or her argument
and persuade others of its merits. A hefty 50 percent of a student’s grade
is determined by class participation, so taking part in the conversation is
crucial. Students raise their hands energetically, trying to get quality
“air time,” as they call it. Two important unwritten rules, self-enforced by
the students themselves: Never speak unless you have something valuable to
contribute, and keep it brief.
The teaching technique most effectively prepares
the CEOs of tomorrow for what they will inevitably face in the real world,
say the professors who employ it.
“Getting a piece of material, having to sift
through it, figure out what’s important, … come to a point of view, [then]
come to class both prepared to argue that point of view … [and] prepared to
listen and be open to others’ viewpoints — those are the skills that the
business world demands, and via the case method they get to practice those
in the classroom,” said Michael J. Roberts, senior lecturer of business
administration and executive director of the Arthur Rock Center for
Entrepreneurship.
Continued in article
"HealthSouth, Inc.: An Instructional Case Examining Auditors' Legal
Liability (for fraud detection)," by Ronald J. Daigle, Timothy J.
Louwers, and Jan Taylor Morris, Issues in Accounting Education,
November 2013 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/iace-50530
This instructional case explores auditors' legal
liability under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by asking students to
assume the role of either the plaintiffs' (investors') or defendants' (Ernst
& Young's) legal counsel. By using publicly available documents and
testimony (provided on a dedicated website for this instructional case) in
their arguments, students not only explore in depth one of the more
egregious accounting scandals of the new millennium, but also are exposed to
the plaintiff's burden of proof and the defendant's defenses in a Rule 10b-5
action. Additionally, by understanding the root causes of the fraud and why
it took so long to uncover, students can better understand a number of the
provisions set forth by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Results of a student
survey after completion of the case indicate that case objectives were met.
Students also report enjoying the case materials and welcoming other cases
using similar types of materials.
Difficult times for auditors to claim financial statement audits should
not uncover massive fraud HealthSouth Corp. has filed suit accusing its former
outside auditor, Ernst & Young, of intentionally or negligently failing to
uncover a massive accounting fraud at the medical services chain.
"HealthSouth Sues Ernst & Young for Fraud," SmartPros, April 6, 2005 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x47712.xml
Bob Jensen's threads on E&Y's legal woes are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Ernst
How should teaching change when assuming some students in class, but not
all students, have access to prior semester course notes and class discussion
solutions?
One way teachers should adjust their teaching is to be aware that student
notes from prior terms are selectively available to current students in a class.
To some extent this has always been true for students in fraternities and
sororities that kept files on course notes and examinations. But now this is
increasingly a problem for teachers trying to keep courses fair for all enrolled
students whether or not they have access to notes and examinations from prior
terms of a course.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Testbanks
This is now an increasing problem since students may be able to buy course
notes, textbook solutions manuals, and publisher test banks online. For exampel,
course notes may now be purchased from https://studysoup.com/
Thank you David Perkins for the heads up.
I find zero results thus far for smaller colleges and universities, but
the mega universities are covered such as the University of Texas, but to date
UT only has 30 courses with notes for sale. Hence, this site is not yet such a
big deal, but it could grow quickly.
At the moment free files for selected students on a particular campus are more
of a problem such as fraternity files. Think of how this can affect student
performance grading. Many instructors use the Socratic Method in a way where
classroom performances of students can affect grades. If the instructor pretty
much teaches the Socratic Method course the same way each semester students
having access to course notes from prior semesters can take competitive
advantage over students in the class who did not see course notes of prior
semester.
This is especially problematic when teaching cases like Harvard Business School
cases. Harvard's instructors pretty much limit the use of a case to one semester
or take great pains to disguise cases used in prior semesters.
In addition, instructors should probably assume that some students in a class
have purchased and possibly shared textbook end-of-chapter solutions manuals and
test banks that are now frequently available from eBay and other online vendors.
Teaching a course each semester on automatic pilot with the same course content
can be a disaster in terms of fairness to all students in a class.
Abstract
This case provides an opportunity for you to make accounting allocation
choices, justify those choices, and subsequently consider the ramifications
of those choices. Two different scenarios – one in the academic setting and
one in the business setting – examine the incentives and reporting issues
faced by managers and accountants – the gatekeepers in these reporting
environments. For each scenario, you will read the case materials, related
tables, and then answer the Questions for Analysis. Each scenario presents
you with an allocation task. In the first scenario, you will need to assess
group members’ contributions to a project and allocate points across the
group. These point allocations contribute to the determination of individual
group members’ grades. The second scenario is also an allocation task but in
a business setting, specifically the segment reporting environment. Here the
task is to allocate common costs across reporting segments. For advanced
reading, you will want to consider Accounting Standards Codification (ASC)
topic 820 which addresses segment reporting, as this can help guide you in
the degree of flexibility, if any, allowed in determining how to allocate
costs.
People can easily list problems they believe are
associated with virtual teams: They haven't met and don't really know other
team members; it is hard to monitor the work of others; and dispersions can
lead to big inefficiencies and degraded performance.
In this HBR webinar, Keith Ferrazzi, a foremost
expert on professional relationship development and author of Never Eat
Alone and Who's Got Your Back?, shares a strategy for managing virtual teams
that can change how your company operates - and how you manage for years to
come.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This theory should be tested in a variety of ways with respect to case analysis
by teams. I've always argued that case learning is best in live classrooms, but
I'm beginning to doubt myself on this one. Even Harvard and Darden should
experiment with onsite versus online team assignments. One advantage of online
team assignments is grading if instructors carefully track team member
contributions, possibly by monitoring online performance as silent or active
(avatar) trackers.
Zoom.us -- An
Amazing Cloud-based, Video-Conferencing Service (It's free!)
intro text:
Recently,
I read about
Zoom.us
a new free, cloud-based, video-conferencing service.
Yesterday, three of us used zoom.us to work on a research
project. We are located throughout the U.S. We logged into
the video conference call and worked for more than an hour.
The audio and video were crystal clear. We shared desktops
to work on documents together. Wow! The virtual work
session was very productive and enjoyable.
I use
Skypeto work with
colleagues and to offer virtual office hours for my
students. Skype offers a free 1:1 video-conference call
with desktop sharing. To include more than two people in a
Skype video call, you need to subscribe to
Skype's premium service. Skype's
fee is very reasonable; however, it's difficult to beat
"free."
Both
Zoom.us and Skype have features
that meet specific needs. Therefore, both services are
valuable to the teaching-learning experience. The quality
of the zoom.us video-conference call was exceptional. Zoom.us
versus Skype is not an either/or situation. Using one
service or the other is a judgment call regarding features
that best fit the need as hand.
Getting started with zoom.us is quick and easy to do. Their
support page explanations
are easy to follow. The service works with Google and
Facebook, iPad, iPhone, Windows and Mac. When I set up
zoom.us, I had to download a small file to my computer that
includes the zoom.us interface. The download was quick. No
problem.
Below is a
screenshot from the support page indicating key features of
the zoom.us interface screen. Individual members
participating in a video call are shown at the top of the
screen. When a member speaks, the border of the member's
screen turns "green." The speaker's screen displays in the
"big screen" section of the interface window. This process
works as the conversation switches among participants. Wow!
This is amazing and allows each speaker to be the center of
attention.
Check out
zoom.us. I think you'll like this new
video-conference service.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie
(
CSU San Bernardino)
Question
Most of us have an awareness of the upside of story telling and cases in
teaching, research, and communications in general.
What's the downside of a storytelling (that extends to cases) pedagogy in
higher education?
Using stories to raise awareness and inspire action
seems to be all the rage. The New York Times bestselling book
Made to Stick, by Stanford GSB professor Chip
Heath and his brother Dan, has been at the forefront of uncovering and
advocating the use of stories to get an audience to remember your ideas,
programs, or products. And now presentations from the likes of
TED,
PopTech, and almost every cause, nonprofit
presentation, and brochure I can remember in the past few years is all about
stories, stories, stories ...
On the one hand, research clearly supports the
notion that we can get our messages to "stick" using stories. So isn't this
an improvement to plying our audiences with boring facts and figures that
they'll only forget — along with the point we're trying to make? Aren't we
more likely to move people to action because stories connect us on an
emotional level and motivate us to care, donate, or volunteer?
This all sounds nice but, unfortunately, there's a
downside to great storytelling.
We live in a world in which time, money, and talent
are limited resources. This leads to competition for ideas, funding, people,
and partnerships. In most cases, stories can't adequately convey whether
we're using our resources wisely or not. And that's a serious thing. We must
remember that resources get applied to ideas and organizations that have
proven their effectiveness at solving big social and environmental problems
through good old-fashioned metrics.
So we must not be lured into providing our
constituencies with great stories alone. We have to offer solid information
to support the tale about that intriguing person who has overcome immense
obstacles to help save the world. A good example of this weave happened at
the recent Poptech Conference.
Ned Breslin, CEO of
Water for People, gave a great presentation that
started with a compelling story of a child losing his life to a failed water
pump — driving home the massive failure of the majority of water relief
efforts around the world. While putting into perspective the fundraising
water stories we've heard for years, it still was just a story. But Breslin
followed it with hard facts, data, and examples that showed listeners why we
need to think about and invest differently in access to water programs in
the developing world.
In closing remember, a story is "a narrative,
either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse,
or instruct the hearer or reader; tale" (Wikipedia). We want to do more than
amuse. We want to inform. And we want to make sure that we're fully
conveying what our organizations are about so that we're sure to get the
resources we need.
Bob Jensen's threads on case methodology are at
See Below
An Enormous Amount of Free Open Sharing Accounting Course Material from
Jim Peters
Auditing, Managerial Accounting, Financial Statement Analysis, Cases
January 8, 2012 message from Jim Peters
A year of so ago, I make the texts that I write for
my classes and the in-class exercises I use available to the public and
notified this list. I have just completed revising those materials and
bringing them up to date. If you are interested, the URL is http://petersfamily.us/Courses.htm.
Feel free to use anything you want and to contact me
if you have questions or want more materials. For example, I am a heavy
user of cases and have developed a lot of cases for each class. I did not
post all those supporting materials to the website. Just not enough time in
the day to do everything. The four classes involved are Auditing,
Accounting Information Systems, Financial Statement Analysis, and Managerial
Accounting for MBAs.
I have my own approach to education, which is why I do stupid things like
maintaining my own texts for the these classes. But, I starting doing this
over 20 years ago when my students found my materials more accessible than
published texts. For example, as apposed to published texts, my texts are
informally worded (e.g., lots of first person pronouns), but I have found
students identify with the material more effectively if I write as if I am
have a conversation with the reader.
OK, enough defending my approach. The materials are there for anyone who
wants to review and/or use them.
The Accounting Review no longer considers case method research to be
suitable for publication in TAR and discourages both submissions of field
studies and cases ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Case method in considered very relevant to teaching accounting and
well-suited for publication in Issues in Accounting Education.(IAE).
Case method also has a central place in both teaching and research in
science.
Judging the Relevance of Fair Values for Financial Statements
Since fair value accounting is arguably the hottest accounting
theory/practice topic among accounting standard setters and financial analysts
these days, I was naturally attracted to the following accountics science
research article:
"Judging the Relevance of Fair Values for Financial Statements," by Lisa Koonce,
Karen K. Nelson, and Catherine M. Shakespeare, The Accounting Review,
Volume 86, 2075-2098.November 2011, pp. 2075-2098
ABSTRACT:
We conduct three experiments to test if investors'
views about fair value are contingent on whether the financial instrument in
question is an asset or liability, whether fair values produce gains or
losses, and whether the item will or will not be sold/settled soon. We draw
on counterfactual reasoning theory from psychology, which suggests that
these factors are likely to influence whether investors consider fair value
as providing information about forgone opportunities. The latter, in turn,
is predicted to influence investors' fair value relevance judgments. Results
are generally supportive of the notion that judgments about the relevance of
fair value are contingent. Attempts to influence investors' fair value
relevance judgments by providing them with information about forgone
opportunities are met with mixed success. In particular, our results are
sensitive to the type of information provided and indicate the difficulty of
overcoming investors' (apparent) strong beliefs about fair value.
. . .
Fair value proponents maintain that, no matter the
circumstance, fair value provides information about forgone opportunities
that affect the economics of the firm (Hague and Willis 1999). That is,
proponents of fair value would argue that such information is always
relevant to evaluating a firm.
To be concrete, consider the following example.
Company X issues bonds payable at par in the amount of $1,000,000. Two years
after issuing the bonds, interest rates fall and so the fair value of the
bonds is $1,200,000. From a discounted cash flow perspective, although the
cash outflows have not changed, the discount rate has decreased. This
denominator change leads to a greater negative present value associated with
Company X having debt with fixed cash outflows—that is, it leads to a fair
value loss. A fair value advocate would argue that the $200,000 loss is
always relevant to the evaluation of the firm as it represents a forgone
opportunity—that is, the present value of the additional interest cost
(i.e., above current market rates) that Company X will pay over the
remaining term of the bond, essentially because Company X did not refinance
before rates changed (Hague and Willis 1999). Accordingly, fair value
advocates would maintain that Company X's valuation should decrease as its
cash flows are higher than an otherwise identical company (say, Company Y)
that financed after the rate decrease. Stated differently, at the end of the
financing period, Company X's cash balance will be lower than Company Y's
(because X is paying a higher interest rate) and, thus, each firm's
valuation should reflect this real economic difference.4
If investors follow the logic of the fair value
advocate and consider fair value gains and losses as representing forgone
opportunities, they are essentially engaging in a process that psychologists
call counterfactual reasoning (Roese 1997). In this type of reasoning,
individuals “undo” outcomes by changing (or mutating) the cause that led to
them. For example, if only the driver had not taken an unusual route home
late at night, he would not have gotten into an accident. In the fair value
domain, the calculation of fair value is based on the same type of
simulation as counterfactual reasoning—“undoing” the actual contractual
interest rate and replacing it with the current market rate of interest that
the company would be paying if management had undertaken an alternative set
of actions (i.e., the forgone opportunity). As the above numerical example
illustrates, determining the amount of the fair value gain or loss is fairly
mechanical once an interest (or discount) rate change occurs. The more
subtle effect is whether the investor considers the fair value gain or loss
as a forgone opportunity and thus relevant to evaluating the firm. If
investors do (do not) follow a process similar to counterfactual reasoning,
they are more (are less) likely to judge fair value measurements as
relevant.
Thinking about fair value in terms of
counterfactual reasoning is helpful, as this theory suggests when investors'
fair value judgments are likely to depend on context. Prior research in
psychology indicates that counterfactual thinking is more likely when events
are seen as abnormal versus normal, when negative rather than positive
events occur, when the outcome or antecedent is mutable or changeable, or
when the outcome is close versus more distant in time (Roese and Olson
1995). Drawing on this research, we identify three fair value contexts for
financial instruments—namely, assets versus liabilities, gains versus
losses, and held to maturity versus sold/settled soon—that we posit will
cause investors to change their fair value relevance judgments.5 That is, we
predict that investors' views about the relevance of fair value will not be
unwavering, as proponents of fair value would maintain, but rather will be
contingent on context. Relevance of Fair Value Depending on Context
Fair value accounting is currently being used for
financial instruments that are either assets or liabilities (but not for
equity items). In addition, fair value accounting produces both gains and
losses. Accordingly, a natural question is whether investors reason
differently about the relevance of fair value for assets versus liabilities
and for gains versus losses. Counterfactual reasoning theory suggests that
investors treat these situations differently.
Turning first to gains and losses, prior literature
(e.g., Roese 1997) indicates that counterfactual reasoning is more likely
when undesirable outcomes occur. Here, individuals tend to evaluate the
undesirable outcome by determining how easy it is to mentally undo it. In
the fair value context, this would entail reasoning about how the fair value
loss could have been avoided. In contrast, counterfactual reasoning is less
likely with desirable outcomes like fair value gains. In the case of such
desirable outcomes, individuals have less need to understand the cause of
the gain and are unlikely to mentally undo the outcome (Roese 1997).
Accordingly, we hypothesize: H1:
Individuals will judge fair value losses as more
relevant than fair value gains.
In the context of assets versus liabilities,
counterfactual reasoning theory suggests that the more mutable an item is
(i.e., the easier an outcome can be undone), the more likely an individual
will engage in counterfactual reasoning (McGill and Tenbrunsel 2000). For
example, if a parachuter falls to his death, individuals are more likely to
consider mutable factors in considering how he could have avoided death.
That is, “if only he had rechecked the safety cord before jumping” is more
likely to be considered (i.e., it is more mutable) than “if only gravity
were not at work.”
We predict that, in the eyes of investors,
financial assets are perceived to be more mutable than financial
liabilities. In other words, it is easier to consider an alternative set of
actions for assets than for liabilities. This idea comes from the line of
reasoning that individuals generally think they can more easily sell, for
example, a bond investment than they can settle a home loan. That is, it is
easier for them to simulate an alternative set of actions for (i.e.,
counterfactually reason about) assets than liabilities.6 Accordingly, we
hypothesize: H2:
Individuals will judge the fair value of financial
assets as more relevant than the fair value of financial liabilities.
Finally, we posit that management's intent likely
influences investors' judgments about fair value relevance. Research shows
that perceived closeness to an outcome affects whether individuals engage in
counterfactual reasoning (Meyers-Levy and Maheswaran 1992). For example, a
traveler who misses his/her flight by five minutes is more likely to engage
in counterfactual reasoning (i.e., “if only I had run the yellow stop light,
I'd have made it to the gate on time”) than a traveler who misses the flight
by one hour. Drawing on this idea, we maintain that individuals will be more
inclined to think about “if only” when the financial instrument is to be
sold/settled soon as compared to when it is to be held to maturity.
Counterfactual reasoning seems particularly likely here, particularly in the
case of loss outcomes. Individuals will likely think, for example, “if only
the company had sold the investment before the fair value decreased, they
would not be in this position today.” Accordingly, we hypothesize: H3:
Individuals will judge the fair value of financial
instruments that are to be sold/settled soon as more relevant than those
that are to be held to maturity. Changing Investor Judgments about Fair
Value Relevance
Because we conjecture that investors' judgments
about fair value relevance will depend on the context, we believe it is
possible to desensitize their judgments to context (Arkes 1991). In
particular, we surmise that providing information about forgone
opportunities should influence investors' understanding of the fair value
change and, ultimately, will influence their fair value relevance judgments.
This approach of providing individuals with a summary of the information
that they may not normally consider is frequently employed as a “fix” in
various decision settings (Arkes 1991). We summarize our expectations in the
following hypothesis. H4:
Individuals will judge the relevance of fair value
for financial instruments as greater when they are given information about
forgone alternatives.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I like this paper in terms of it's originality and clever ideas in terms of
accounting theory, especially the concept of counterfactual reasoning.
But like nearly all accountics behavioral experiments reported over the past
four decades, I'm disappointed in how the hypotheses were actually tested. I'm
also disappointed in the virtual lack of validity testing and replication of
behavioral accounting studies, but it's too early to speculate on future
replication studies of this particular November 2011 article.
To their credit, Professors Koonce, Nelson, and Shakespeare conducted three
experiments rather than just one experiment, although from a picky point of view
these would not constitute independent replications in science ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Also to their credit the sample sizes are large enough to almost make
statistical inference testing superfluous.
But I just cannot get excited about extrapolating research findings form
students as surrogates for investors and analysts in the real world. This is a
typical example of where accountics researchers tried to do their research
without having to set foot off campus.
Even if these researchers had stepped off campus to conduct their experiments
on real-world investors and analysts, I have difficulty with assigning the
research subjects artificial/hypothetical tasks even though my own doctoral
thesis entailed submitting hypothetical proxy reports to real-world security
analysts. My favorite criticism is an anecdotal experience with one banker who
was an extremely close friend when I lived in Bangor, Maine while on the faculty
of the University of Maine. I played poker or bridge with this banker at least
once a week. With relatively small stakes in a card game he was a reckless fool
in his betting and nearly always came up a money loser at the end of the night.
But in real life he was a Yankee banker who was known in the area for his
tight-fisted conservatism.
And thus I have a dilemma. Even if there are ten replications of these
experiments using real world investors and analysts I cannot get excited about
the accountics science outcomes. I would place much more faith in a protocol
analysis of one randomly selected CFA, but protocol researchers are not allowed
to publish their small sample studies in TAR, JAR, or JAE. They can, however,
find publishing outlets in social science research journals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_analysis
The best known protocol analysis in accounting and finance was the
award-winning doctoral thesis research of Geoffrey Clarkson at Carnegie-Mellon,
although the integrity of his research was later challenged.
Few studies
have examined the impact of age on reactivity to
concurrent think-aloud (TA) verbal reports.
An initial study with
30 younger and 31 older adults revealed that thinking
aloud improves older adult performance on a short form
of the Raven's Matrices (Bors & Stokes, 1998,
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 58, p. 382)
but did not affect other tasks. In the
replication experiment, 30 older adults (mean age =
73.0) performed the Raven's Matrices and three other
tasks to replicate and extend the findings of the
initial study. Once again older adults performed
significantly better only on the Raven's Matrices while
thinking aloud.
Performance gains on this task were substantial (d =
0.73 and 0.92 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively),
corresponding to a fluid intelligence increase of nearly
one standard deviation.
Source: "How to Gain Eleven
IQ Points in Ten Minutes: Thinking Aloud Improves
Raven's Matrices Performance in Older Adults" from
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, Volume 17, Issue
2 March 2010 , pages 191 - 204
Speaking of smarts and genius, if you haven't read it,
Dave Eggers' book
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius
is a lot of fun. I highly
recommend the introduction, oddly enough.
This takes me back to long ago to "Protocol Analysis" when having subjects
think aloud was documented in an effort to examine what information was used and
how it was used in decision making. One of the first Protocol Analysis studies
that I can recall was at Carnegie-Mellon when Geoffrey Clarkson wrote a doctoral
thesis on a bank's portfolio manager thinking aloud while making portfolio
investment decisions for clients. Although there were belated questions about
the integrity of Jeff's study, one thing that stuck out in my mind is how
accounting choices (LIFO vs. FIFO, straight-line vs. accelerated depreciation)
were ignored entirely when the decision maker analyzed financial statements.
This is one of those now rare books that I still have in some pile in my studio: Geoffrey Clarkson,
Portfolio Selection-A Simulation of. Trust
Investment(Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall,. Inc., 1962)
Clarkson reached a controversial conclusion that his model could choose the same
portfolios as the live decision maker. That was the part that was later
questioned by researchers.
Another application of Protocol Analysis was the doctoral thesis of Stan
Biggs.
As cited in The Accounting Review in January, 1988 ---
http://www.jstor.org/pss/247685
By the way, this one one of those former years when TAR had a section for "Small
Sample Studies" (those fell by the board in later years)
Added Jensen Comment
An early precursor of the concept of "counterfactual reasoning" is "functional
fixation"
Accounting History Trivia
What accounting professors coined the phrase "functional fixation" in 1966 and
in what particular accounting context?
Hint 1
One of the professors was also one of my professors, a former Dean of the
Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, and the last Chairman of
Enron's Audit Committee.
Hint 2
Bob Ashton did some cognitive experimentation of functional fixation that was
published in the Journal of Accounting Research a decade later in 1976.
Tribute to Bob Anthony from Jake Birnberg and Bob Jensen and Others
Bob Anthony is probably best known as an extremely successful accounting
textbook author ---
http://www.amazon.com/Robert-N.-Anthony/e/B001IGJT5W
But there were many other career highlights of the great professor and my
personal friend.
By any measure, Robert Newton Anthony (1916–2006)
was a giant among 20th century academic accountants. After obtaining a
Bachelor’s degree from Colby College, he matriculated to the Harvard
Business School (HBS), where he earned his M.B.A. and D.B.A. degrees. Bob
spent his entire academic career at HBS, retiring in 1983. He is best known
as a prolific writer of articles, textbooks, and research reports. He was
inducted as a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame (1986), was a recipient
of the American Accounting Association’s (AAA) Outstanding Accounting
Educator Award (1989), and then was the second recipient of the AAA
Management Accounting Section’s Lifetime Contribution to Management
Accounting Award (2003), as well as serving as President of the American
Accounting Association (1973–1974). In addition, he was elected a Fellow of
the Academy of Management (1970). These honors indicate that he was, indeed,
a significant contributor to the development of his chosen field of
management accounting for over 50 years, and highly respected by his peers.
They do not indicate why. My intention is to answer that question.
Bob Anthony was the ideal person to be a leader in
the post-World War II movement that changed cost accounting into management
accounting. He possessed broad interests and not only was an academic, but
also was interested in solving problems found in the real world. He was
equally comfortable working as an academic and as a manager. He served as
Under Secretary (Comptroller) in the Department of Defense for his old
friend and fellow Harvard Business School graduate, Robert S. McNamara, from
1965 to 1968. While at the Department, Anthony earned the Defense Department
Award for Public Service for developing a system of cost management and
control for the Department (Harvard University Gazette 2006)...
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The takeover of the academic accounting research by accountics scientists was
fought off in the 1920s but commenced again in earnest in the 1960s as
documented by Heck and Jensen along a timeline at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
"We
fervently hope that the research pendulum will soon swing back from the narrow
lines of inquiry that dominate today's leading journals to a rediscovery of the
richness of what accounting research can be. For that to occur, deans and the
current generation of academic accountants must
give it a push." "Research
on Accounting Should Learn From the Past," by Michael H. Granof and Stephen
A. Zeff , Chronicle of HigherEducation, March 21, 2008
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#Appendix01
Although it's common among various recent Presidents of the American
Accounting Association (e.g.,
Judy Rayburn and
Greg Waymire) and AAA Presidential Address Scholars, e.g., Tony Hopwood ("Whither
Accounting Research?" The Accounting Review 82(5), 2007, pp.1365-1374
)and Bob Kaplan (Accounting Scholarship that Advances
Professional Knowledge and Practice," The Accounting Review, March 2011,
Volume 86, Issue 2) , perhaps the earliest and most scathing lament
accountics scientist takeover of AACSB doctoral programs and the top tier
academic accounting research journals came from former AAA President Bob Anthony
in his1989 AAA membership as that years Outstanding Educator Award
recipient. This was an oral address, and I don't think there is any record of
Bob's scathing lament in front of the AAA membership. Nor is there a record to
my knowledge of the subsequent lament on the same matters by AAA's 1990
President Al Arens year later.
In some ways I was a guinea pig for Bob Anthony. In the late 1960s and into
the 1990s, Bob lacked the mathematical background to understand the exploding
interest by accounting researchers in accountics, particularly mathematical
programming, management science, decision science, and operations research in
the years that Herb Simon were achieving worldwide fame at Carnegie-Mellon
University that in some ways was leaving venerable old Harvard in the dust. Bob
Anthony followed my career as an accounting PhD graduate from Stanford who had
been teaching mathematical programming at Michigan State University and the
University of Maine. Bill Kinney and Bob May and other accounting doctoral
candidates at MSU in the late 1960s probably recall my mathematical programming
doctoral seminars.
Bob Anthony invited me to make accountics science presentations at the
Harvard Business School and at an alumni-day programs that he organized for his
Colby College alma mater following my seven TAR publications 1967-1979 ---
http://maaw.info/TheAccountingReview2.htm
I remember that he was particularly skeptical of my praise of shadow pricing
in linear programming, which was also at the core of a doctoral thesis by Joel
Demski in those days. I was always careful to point out the limitations of
mathematical programming when solutions spaces were not convex. But Bob Anthony
had a deeper suspicion, which he had trouble articulating in those days, that
accounting information played a vital role in systems that were too complex and
too non-stationary to model in the real world, especially model to a point where
we could declare solutions "optimal" for the real and ever-changing world of
complicated human beings and their organizations. Anthony Hopwood built upon
this same theme when he founded a successful journal called Accounting,
Organizations, and Society (AOS).
It's not that Bob Anthony opposed our accountics science research. What he
opposed is accountics science (read that positivism) takeover of the
doctoral programs and academic research journals. What he felt down deep that
accountics science was just too easy. We could build our analytical models and
devise "optimal" solutions without having to set foot from the campus into a
real world. We could build ever-increasingly sophisticated data analysis models
using the CRSP and Compustat database without having to sweat buckets collecting
financial data first-hand in the real world. We could conduct accounting
behavioral research models pretending that student subjects were adequate
surrogates making pretend that they were real-world managers and accountants.
I suspect that Bob Anthony followed Bob Kaplan's career with great interest.
In those early years, Bob Kaplan was an accountics faculty member and eventually
Dean at Carnie-Mellon in the years that Professor and Dean Kaplan was heavy into
mathematics and decision science. Then Bob Kaplan became more interested in the
real world and eventually traveled between Harvard and Carnegie as a joint
accounting professor. I suspect Bob Anthony influenced Bob Kaplan into taking up
more and more case-method research and the eventual decision of Kaplan to become
a full-time accounting professor at Harvard (the case method school in those
days) in place of Carnegie-Mellon (the quantitative-methods school in those
days). Of course in recent years the difference between the Harvard versus
Carnegie schools is not demarked so clearly as it was in the 1970s.
In any case Bob Anthony and I corresponded intermittently throughout most of
my career. He was particularly pleased when I became more and more skeptical of
the accountics science takeover of accounting doctoral programs and top-tier
academic accounting research journals. Once again, however, I stress that it was
not so much that we were disappointed in accountics science that was becoming
increasingly sophisticated and respectable. Rather Bob Anthony, Bob Kaplan, and
Bob Jensen along with Bob Sterling, Paul Williams, Anthony Hopwood, and others
became increasingly disturbed about the takeover by Zimmerman and Watts and
their positivism disciples. In those same years Demski and Feltham were
rewriting the quantitative information economics standards of what constitutes
scholarly research in accounting.
The following appeared
on Boston.com:
Headline: Robert Anthony; reshaped Pentagon budget process
Date: December 20, 2006
"At the behest of Robert
S. McNamara, his longtime friend, Robert N.Anthony set aside scholarly
pursuits at Harvard Business School in the mid-1960s to take a key role
reshaping the budget process for the Defense Department."
Thank you! Bob has
been a longtime great friend. His obituary is at
http://www.hbs.edu/news/120506_anthonyobit.html
What is really amazing is the wide range of long-time service to at very
high levels, including serving on the FASB as well as being Defense
Department's Assistant Secretary (Comptroller) during the Viet Nam War.
He also received the Defense Department's Medal for Distinguished Public
Service. The FASB requested that Bob focus on accounting for nonprofit
organizations. He also served as President of the American Accounting
Association.
I
don't know if you were present when Bob Anthony gave his 1989
Outstanding Educator Award Address to the American Accounting
Association. It was one of the harshest indictments I've ever heard
concerning the sad state of academic research in serving the accounting
profession. Bob never held back on his punches.
Bob Jensen
December 20, 2006 reply from Denny Beresford
[DBeresfo@TERRY.UGA.EDU]
(Denny was Chairman of the FASB when Bob was a special consultant to the
FASB)
Bob,
Yesterday's New York Times also included an
obituary for Bob Anthony . . . Bob wasn't the easiest person to get
along with, but I considered him to be one of the very brightest people
I ever associated with. He was a wonderful writer and I always enjoyed
the letters and other things he sent me at the FASB and later - even
when I disagreed completely with his ideas. His work with the government
made him one of the most generally influential accountants of the 20th
century, I believe.
Denny
His accounting concepts ranged from the global
to the provincial. In a 1970 letter to The New York Times, he proposed that
the United States create a tax surcharge to cover damages to the Soviet
Union in the event of an accidental American nuclear strike. The tax burden
would be “the smallest consequence of maintaining a nuclear arsenal,” he
wrote. “An all-out nuclear exchange would probably mean the end of
civilization.” In the late 1980s, Professor Anthony moved to Waterville
Valley, N.H., where for 10 years he was the town’s elected auditor. “I got
24 votes last year; that’s all there were,” he once said.
<http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/index.html>
Added Jensen Comment
I often suspected that Bob Anthony's 1980s move to New Hampshire (that created
an extremely long commute to Cambridge, Taxachusetts) was motivated in large
part by the huge financial successes of his book royalties. I would not blame
him for this move since there's nothing criminal or immoral about taking
advantage of tax law opportunities. Then again he may simply wanted to be closer
to our mountains and forests ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
From Deloitte (over many years)
Trueblood Cases at the AAA Annual Meetings in Denver The following is an excerpt from the AAA Announcements message, August 2.
2011
"Mini"
Trueblood Case Study Seminar One of the concurrent sessions
offered at this year's Annual Meeting will be a session entitled "Effective
Learning through Cases: Examples from the Trueblood Case Study Series."
Three financial accounting cases from the current series of approximately
fifty cases on the Deloitte
Foundation's website will be used to demonstrate how
these cases can be used effectively in the classroom. Participants will be
encouraged to actively participate in discussions and will benefit from
exposure to situations dealt with in public practice. All session
participants will receive the cases & solutions as takeaways. This
concurrent session will be led by James Fuehrmeyer,
retired Deloitte & Touche LLP audit partner (and current faculty member at
the University of Notre Dame), who will discuss three cases from our
Trueblood Accounting & Auditing Case Study Series. The session will
be held on Monday, August 8, from 10:15 - 11:45 am. Please refer to
your Annual Meeting program when you arrive in Denver for further details.
Jensen Comment
One of the most important initiatives ever undertaken in academic accountancy
history is the Deloitte (and Touche) initiative and funding to join accounting
professors and practitioners in the writing of case studies. For many years the
format has been to bring professors and practitioners together face-to-face in
resorts for the purpose of working intensely (night and day) in writing cases
and case solutions. These were then published in volumes available from the
Deloitte Foundation and in accounting history centers such as the
Accounting Libraries at the University if Mississippi ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
See
http://umiss.lib.olemiss.edu/search/?searchtype=X&SORT=D&searcharg=Trueblood
I suspect that many university libraries and faculty offices have shelved
these case studies over the years.
Of course for teaching purposes many of these cases are now dated because
they were based on standards that have been replaced and amended. One
possible student project would be have students update selected cases and case
solutions in light of changed standards.
August 3, 2011 reply from Jim Fuehrmeyer
Bob
While cases from prior years are certainly outdated
in many respects, the "live" cases on the Foundation website are updated
every summer. All the professor's solutions are tied to the Codification and
include discussion of pending pronouncements. A lot of the cases are also
set up to be worked with both US GAAP and IFRS. Normally five cases get
replaced with new cases every year.
In the late 1990s, when Ray McCandless was asked to
create a public-administration concentration in the M.B.A. program at the
University of Findlay, he wanted to include a memorable capstone experience.
Instead of a standard academic thesis, he hoped to find an alternative that
would still give the students a written project to mention in their
graduate-school applications and interviews.
A longtime user of case studies—standard
pedagogical fare in business-school courses—McCandless hit upon a unique
solution: Instead of simply asking students to learn from a case study, he
would ask students to write an original one of their own.
A dozen years later, McCandless is still having
students write their own case studies, and still finds the exercise as
productive and fascinating. He is now director of Findlay's Center for
Teaching Excellence, chair of the university's department of justice
sciences, and a professor of political science and public administration. I
met him on a spring visit to the university and had the chance to learn how
he developed the assignment, and what benefits and challenges it has
provided both to him and to his students.
Case-study teaching has been around since the early
part of the 20th-century, when faculty members at Harvard Business School
responded to a lack of textbooks in the field by writing up descriptions of
real business scenarios for their students to explore. Typically, case
studies present students with real-life scenarios that they might face in
their chosen fields, and then ask them to use what they have learned in
their coursework to analyze the problem and recommend solutions.
Case studies also now frequently appear in the
curricula of law, medical, and education schools. With a little creative
thinking, the approach can be adapted to almost any discipline. I have used
a modified case-study method in a postcolonial literature course: Students
play the role of Western explorers who "discover" a prehistoric culture that
condones infanticide of twins. The explorers have to decide whether to walk
away or prevent the killing by using their more sophisticated weaponry to
impose western standards of justice—or find some other alternative.
Having confronted a case like that, students come
to their subsequent reading of texts like Heart of Darkness or Things Fall
Apart better prepared to understand the complexity of the themes.
McCandless said his interest in case studies comes
from his conviction that, as future managers, students will be faced with
unique problems every day. The ability to solve such problems depends not
only on an awareness of the theories and practices of the field but also on
creativity and innovative thinking. He felt he could best help develop those
skills by asking students first to engage with established case studies and
then to write up their own.
"I wanted to tap into a different part of their
thinking and skill set," McCandless said. "I wanted them to write a story
... maybe wake up or reinvigorate those creative juices that may have been
killed by too many research papers."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's September 11, 2010 response to an inquiry about data sources and
helpers for small business research:
Jerry Trites up in Canada maintains an eBusiness blog and has conducted
considerable research on eBusiness. He might have some useful suggesting,
although he may be more familiar with databases in Canada ---
gtrites@ZORBA.CA
I think leading academic
researchers avoid applied research for the profession because making
seminal and creative discoveries that practitioners have not already
discovered is enormously difficult.
Accounting academe is
threatened by the twin dangers of fossilization and scholasticism
(of three types: tedium, high tech, and radical chic)
From
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
“Knowledge and competence
increasingly developed out of the internal dynamics of esoteric
disciplines rather than within the context of shared perceptions
of public needs,” writes Bender. “This is not to say that
professionalized disciplines or the modern service professions
that imitated them became socially irresponsible. But their
contributions to society began to flow from their own
self-definitions rather than from a reciprocal engagement with
general public discourse.”
Now, there is a definite note of sadness in Bender’s narrative –
as there always tends to be in accounts
of theshift from Gemeinschaft
to Gesellschaft.Yet it
is also clear that the transformation from civic to disciplinary
professionalism was necessary.
“The new disciplines offered relatively precise subject matter
and procedures,” Bender concedes, “at a time when both were
greatly confused. The new professionalism also promised
guarantees of competence — certification — in an era when
criteria of intellectual authority were vague and professional
performance was unreliable.”
But in the epilogue to Intellect and Public Life,
Bender suggests that the process eventually went too far. “The
risk now is precisely the opposite,” he writes. “Academe is
threatened by the twin dangers of fossilization and
scholasticism (of three types: tedium, high tech, and radical
chic).
The agenda for the next decade, at least as I see it, ought to
be the opening up of the disciplines, the ventilating of
professional communities that have come to share too much and
that have become too self-referential.”
What do you believe are the best resources
available for learning how to write a good accounting case?
Are there any online resources?
(I should have checked Bob's website first!)
Pat
August 28, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Pat,
Becoming a case writer might entail a career shift in your “case.”
The number one thing that leads to great cases is access to information
inside a corporation or not-for-profit organization. It’s here where the
most prestigious universities with powerful alumni (e.g., Harvard, Wharton,
Stanford, etc. have a valuable edge). The rest of us have to do the best we
can.
Of course the prestigious schools also have professional case writing
experts who work alongside faculty, such that professors who really want to
write successful cases also have an edge when being on the faculty of
prestigious universities like Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford.
My hero in this regard in Marilyn Taylor who got me involved in a number of
NACRA teaching workshops (my job was only to make presentations on education
technology). Marilyn is a management professor (University of Missouri in Kansas City) who has
been very active in the North American Case Research Association. Among
other things NACRA meets to critique each others’ cases, and critique they
do. This can lead to much better case writing if you’ve got a tough skin for
constructive criticism.
The NACRA home page is at
http://www.nacra.net/nacra/
Most really active faculty in NACRA have made a career choice to concentrate
writing efforts on cases. As a result they are great writers who seldom
appear in TAR, JAR, or JAE. But they do get their case published and enjoy
each others’ company.
NACRA reminds me of the annual poet critiquing conference that meets for a
couple of weeks every summer down the road from where I live --- in the
Robert Frost farmhouse museum. See my photograph and commentary on this way
of learning to write poetry ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070905.htm
The top case writers from Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton are not likely to
be active in NACRA, Active people in NACRA are more apt to come from Babson,
Bentley, Northeastern, and state universities like South Carolina.
Over the last four years
in my capacity as the Associate Editor of the Case Research Journal I
have reviewed numerous cases. Many of them had considerable potential but
were poorly developed. This is unfortunate because even though there is no
standard formula for writing effective cases there are certain guidelines
which I believe consistently lead to better cases. Therefore, at the request
of the North American Case Research Association, the purpose of this paper
is to discuss some of the guidelines I use when reviewing cases. I will
organize my discussion around the four criteria the Case Research Journal
uses for evaluating cases: (1) case focus, (2) case data, (3) case
organization, and (4) writing style. "WRITING A PUBLISHABLE CASE: SOME GUIDELINES," by James J.
Chrisman --- http://www.wacra.org/Writing%20a%20Publishable%20Case%20-%20Some%20Guidelines.pdf
Need advice on choosing a textbook for an MBA class
on fraud (to be taken mostly by Master of Accounting students).
I am deciding between Albrecht's Fraud Examination
and Hopwood's Forensic Accounting. I also plan to have students read Cynthia
Cooper's book, Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower.
I will be teaching a three-week version of the
course this summer as a study abroad, but also will be converting it into a
16 week semester-long 3 hour course.
Any suggestions would be helpful -
Thank you,
Eileen
November 3, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Eileen,
I'm really not able to give you an opinion on either
choice for a textbook. But before making a decision I always compared the
end-of-chapter material and the solutions manual to accompany that material.
If the publisher did not pay for good end-of-chapter material I always view
the textbook to be a cheap shot. The end-of-chapter material is much harder
to write than the chapter material itself.
I also look for real world cases and illustrations.
Don't forget the wealth of material, some free, at
the site of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners ---
http://www.acfe.com/
I would most certainly consider using some of this material on homework and
examinations.
Instead of a textbook you might use the ACFE online
self-study materials ($79) ---
Click Here
"A Model Curriculum for Education in Fraud and Forensic Accounting,"
by Mary-Jo Kranacher, Bonnie W. Morris, Timothy A. Pearson, and Richard A.
Riley, Jr., Issues in Accounting Education, November 2008. pp. 505-518
(Not Free) ---
Click Here
There are other articles on fraud and forensic accounting in this November
edition of IAE:
Incorporating Forensic Accounting and Litigation Advisory Services Into
the Classroom Lester E. Heitger and Dan L. Heitger, Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 561 (2008) (12 pages)]
West Virginia University: Forensic Accounting and Fraud Investigation (FAFI)
A. Scott Fleming, Timothy A. Pearson, and Richard A. Riley, Jr., Issues
in Accounting Education 23(4), 573 (2008) (8 pages)
The Model Curriculum in Fraud and Forensic Accounting and Economic Crime
Programs at Utica College George E. Curtis, Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 581 (2008) (12 pages)
Forensic Accounting and FAU: An Executive Graduate Program George R.
Young, Issues in Accounting Education 23(4), 593 (2008) (7 pages)
The Saint Xavier University Graduate Program in Financial Fraud
Examination and Management William J. Kresse, Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 601 (2008) (8 pages)
Also see
"Strain, Differential Association, and Coercion: Insights from the Criminology
Literature on Causes of Accountant's Misconduct," by James J. Donegan and
Michele W. Ganon, Accounting and the Public Interest 8(1), 1 (2008) (20
pages)
I have used the following book as text in a
graduate course. It was excellent.
A Guide to Forensic Accounting Investigation,
Thomas Golden, Steven L. Skalak, and Mona M. Clayton. (Wiley, 2006)
Jagdish S. Gangolly Department of Informatics
College of Computing & Information State University of New York at Albany
Harriman Campus, Building 7A, Suite 220 Albany, NY 12222
Phone: 518-956-8251, Fax: 518-956-8247
Potentially a Great Case for Managerial Accounting CoursesL How can
Harry Potter movies be financial losers?
"'Hollywood Accounting' Losing In The Courts: From the math-is-hard
dept," TechDirt ---
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml
If you follow the entertainment business at all,
you're probably well aware of "Hollywood accounting," whereby very, very,
very few entertainment products are technically "profitable," even as they
earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money
folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms.
The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a
separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation
will take on losses. The studio then charges the "film corporation" a huge
fee (which creates a large part of the "expense" that leads to the loss).
The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for
accounting purposes the film is a money "loser" -- which matters quite a bit
for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.
For example, a bunch of you sent in the example of
how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, under "Hollywood accounting,"
ended up with a $167 million "loss," despite taking in $938 million in
revenue. This isn't new or surprising, but it's getting attention because
the income statement for the movie was leaked online, showing just how
Warner Bros. pulled off the accounting trick:
In that statement, you'll notice the "distribution
fee" of $212 million dollars. That's basically Warner Bros. paying itself to
make sure the movie "loses money." There are some other fun tidbits in there
as well. The $130 million in "advertising and publicity"? Again, much of
that is actually Warner Bros. paying itself (or paying its own
"properties"). $57 million in "interest"? Also to itself for "financing" the
film. Even if we assume that only half of the "advertising and publicity"
money is Warner Bros. paying itself, we're still talking about $350 million
that Warner Bros. shifts around, which get taken out of the "bottom line" in
the movie accounting.
Now, that's all fascinating from a general business
perspective, but now it appears that Hollywood Accounting is coming under
attack in the courtroom... and losing. Not surprisingly, your average juror
is having trouble coming to grips with the idea that a movie or television
show can bring in hundreds of millions and still "lose" money. This week,
the big case involved a TV show, rather than a movie, with the famed
gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire suddenly becoming "Who Wants To Hide
Millions In Profits." A jury found the whole "Hollywood Accounting"
discussion preposterous and awarded Celador $270 million in damages from
Disney, after the jury believed that Disney used these kinds of tricks to
cook the books and avoid having to pay Celador over the gameshow, as per
their agreement.
On the same day, actor Don Johnson won a similar
lawsuit in a battle over profits from the TV show Nash Bridges, and a jury
awarded him $23 million from the show's producer. Once again, the jury was
not at all impressed by Hollywood Accounting.
With these lawsuits exposing Hollywood's sneakier
accounting tricks, and finding them not very convincing, a number of
Hollywood studios may face a glut of upcoming lawsuits over similar deals on
properties that "lost" money while making millions. It's why many of the
studios are pretty worried about the rulings. Of course, these recent
rulings will be appealed, and a jury ruling might not really mean much in
the long run. Still, for now, it's a fun glimpse into yet another way that
Hollywood lies with numbers to avoid paying people what they owe (while at
the same sanctimoniously insisting in the press and to politicians that
they're all about getting content creators paid what they're due).
Jensen and Sandlin Book entitled Electronic
Teaching and Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and
Networks in Higher Education
(both the 1994 and 1997 Updated Versions)
— Steve Foerster Nov 11, 05:52 PM
— Born to teach Nov 11, 06:03 PM