Week 5 (June 12, 2006)

I spent most of week 5 working out of ITS. It was great to work amongst those with all that knowledge and information flying around. The focus of this week was organizing the content of 1 module and rough scripting the narration which took much longer than I expected.

I am seeing a pattern here. There are a lot of meetings and things in this field seem to take longer to get done than what I am used to in my organization. This is not a bad thing though, because in my organization, we often don’t take the time we need to think and process information to make sure we do things right the first time. A lot of what we do is on the spot and trial-and-error. That sometimes leads to unending frustration when you know there are better solutions, but are not provided the time to research them.

Once Marc and I had our modules scripted (we didn’t get to the 3rd one because we didn’t have access to it until the end of the week) we met with Dr. Allen to go over the narration and identify next steps. After making a few changes, it was decided that my module would be the first one narrated with a pre-production meeting scheduled for next week. Unfortunately I won’t be there because I will be in VA buying a house. But, I will be there the following week, which is when the recording is scheduled. So far, it looks like we are on schedule to complete phase 1 by the middle of August.

I attended a Horizon Wimba meeting to determine what support will be available for faculty and staff once everyone is online and using it. It looks pretty slim to none right now. This is something that concerns Suzanne and Jim a lot. ITS is deploying a new tool and not providing much support. Due to an impending support problem, the focus of the meeting was on Horizon Wimba workshops that the pICT and ITS would like to hold during the summer and what level of content would be appropriate. It was determined that an assessment to see what level of comfort faculty have using new technology would be important. Oh, the joys of new systems.

I also sat in on a few more Horizon Wimba practice sessions with faculty and staff. The focus of these sessions were to practice the use of polling. Because so many of us had high level access, the presenter was unable to fully run the show – so the lesson here is that for now, it is probably wise to minimize presenter capabilities to no more than 2 or three for a live classroom session. It was also decided that a good practice when pushing our pools or surveys is to have the students use the yes/no buttons when prompted by the teacher and that the teacher should also let the students know when polls are pushed out how long they have to answer the question before the teacher plans on moving on to the next question.

I really enjoyed this week. Working at ITS was a fun environment and I had opportunities to evaluate some of the projects they were working on such as Captivate movies for M/S Word tutorials and to engage in stimulating conversations related to this field. I also enjoyed spending a lot of time trouble shooting different features of Horizon Wimba and feel there are potential uses for this in my organization. Though it wouldn’t be useful for all the technical training we do, it would certainly be useful for annual organizational training, such as Ethics or Sexual Harassment, etc…Instead of squeezing everyone into a little room, or holding 10 sessions over two days, just have everyone sit at their computer. O.K., so not everyone has a computer in my organization (especially those assigned to boats), but for those ashore, this concept could certainly work.

Week 4 (June 5, 2006)

This week I began working on the newsletter with Suzanne to identify the content, some of which might include a calendar of events, new events of interest to the fellows, Webinars (mostly relate to Horizon Wimba or Blackboard), what’s new at ITS, and getting the most from your fellowship. Now that we have identified potential content area, we need to decide, in some cases, the focus of the content. We are also trying to decide the frequency of distribution, which is important due to PICT staffing. Too frequent a newsletter may fizzle out because it might become too cumbersome for the limited staff, and not frequent enough may cause the Fellows to ask “what is this?”

During the PowerPoint pedagogy module meeting with Dr. Allen and Marc Pastor, we prioritized the development of the modules into 3 phases, with phase one focusing more on pedagogy than how to use PowerPoint.

Phase 1
1. Engage Students with Presentations
2. Using Frame Based Animation
3. Animation for Content Building
4. Predict Observe Explain
5. Guidelines and Directions for Group Activity

Phase 2
6. Use PowerPoint to Enhance Learning
7. Close Inspection and Comprehension of Text

Phase 3
8. Using an Interactive Syllabus
9. Grouping and Timing in PowerPoint
10. Worked Examples – Increasing Transfer and Learning Efficiency
11. Learning through Student Experimentation
12. Using Audio and Video to Enhance your Power Point
13. Organizing and Managing Resources – Providing Structure with concept maps

For phase 1 of this project, Dr Allen is responsible for drafting the narration and finding someone to narrate modules 3 & 4 and Marc Pastor and I will take care of 1, 2, and 5. It was decided to have easily recognizable SDSU faculty and staff narrate and provide personal examples so all the other teachers can relate. I thought it was interesting that when we were discussing who should narrate the first five modules that it was important for them to have at least one or two women in the mix so that female faculty wouldn’t feel as though only men could be capable of learning these tools. I never thought of it from that perspective. Normally when I think of having mixed gender represented, it is for equality only – not because a women would relate her competency or capability to the voice behind the screen.

With that said, Marc intends on having James Frazee and Jim Julius narrate 2 of the modules and will find someone else for the 3rd. Marc and I will work through one of the modules together and rough script it and then we will each do a module by ourselves. We decided that rough scripting the narration instead of scripting verbatim narration will not restrict the narrator, who in most cases for the modules in phase 1, will have a great understanding of the content and tools. The goal is to complete all five modules in this phase narrated with the files uploaded and accessible through Horizon Wimba by the middle of August. Phases 2 & 3 will be complete at a later time – as these are deemed more labor intensive to complete.

I also sat in on a few Horizon Wimba live chats to test functionality and realized that some of the content of the PowerPoint pedagogy modules will not work properly in this system. All animation and interactivity will be lost unless the narrator does a screen share and demonstrates the interactivity initially intended for the learner. I uploaded a few modules and confirmed this, so we will have to take this into consideration when developing them for Horizon Wimba.

Week 3 (May 29, 2006)

This week I began work on the power point pedagogy modules with Dr. Brock Allen in CTL and on the Fellows grant to support the publication of research conducted by the Fellows.

Power Point Pedagogy Modules – The power point pedagogy modules are lessons of instruction on how to use power point to enhance instruction and student learning. Its focus is not on the bells and whistles, but on the ways in which power point can be used to demonstrate different ideas such as using transparencies or highlights to focus attention on scanned text, etc…

I attended a meeting with Dr. Allen (CTL), Marc Pastore (ITS) and Suzanne (pICT) to discuss the evolution of how the development of these modules will unfold. We identified five things that must happen to get this process started.

• Select five (of 12) modules for development and testing, with testing to be complete by August 14th. The date for this is next Tuesday, June 7th.
• Edit modules and ensure consistency (mostly for formatting)
• Script the narration
• Recruit authors/narrators
• Schedule author production
• Testing

I spent a few days watching the student presentations archived in breeze and also on high level analysis of the hard files. The content is rich and mostly developed, but the overall development, through collaborative efforts will need to be planned and executed.

Some of the developmental tactics discussed in the meeting were to consider using Microsoft’s help system for the script and creating captivate movies for those concepts and actions that might be enhanced through the use of video – but we need to check into potential copyright issues.

Grant Program – The purpose of the grant is to promote SDSU in the Science of Technology and Learning while provided pICT Fellows opportunities to develop their research project and to present it at either a conference or in a published journal. I did some research on grant proposal requests and on grant programs in general and concluded that most grants are unique to the situation in which they were created, therefore there is no right or wrong way to write an announcement on grant availability.

I met with both the Director and assistant Director of the pICT to discuss the grant. My biggest holdup was if the stipend was an award for publishing research or if it was to defray costs associated with research and publication. Due to limited funding, this was necessary to identify, because it would drive the procedures required for applicants as well as the grant awardee selection process.

We decided against journal publication because of the minimal stipends available and the difficulty in a selection process. After publication or before publication? At what point would stipends become available if the budget allows for only $2000.00? Through the meeting with the pICT, we decided to provide stipends in two categories for Fellows who submitted a proposal to present their research at a conference and subsequently received an invitation to present. The two categories are:

1. An individual presentation at a discipline specific or education & training related conference.

2. An individual presentation at the ELI conference in January. This one was originally going to be a panel proposal (1-Fellow, ITS, CTL, pICT), but then was decided it should be an individual presentation so the Fellow recipient would have the entire time frame to present their project, instead of 10 minutes if they were part of a panel.

The goal is to complete the grant announcement by the end of next week and distribute it to the Fellows so they can begin the project proposals, if interested.

Week 2 (May 22, 2006)

This week I attended the four day pICT Emerging Trends Summer Symposium with the pICT Fellows and other SDSU Faculty. The first two days focused on learning new tools while the last two days focused on the projects the Fellows will be working on this summer.

Day 1: I took the opportunity to expose myself to tools I was either unfamiliar with or had never used before. Though I spent a lot of time in workshops for tools I am currently familiar with, I also spent a lot of time observing faculty experiences with these tools. I don’t consider myself technologically advanced, but I realize I can’t take for granted what I know and others do not.

One of the topics covered during the first day was tags and social software and it immediately reminded me of the Knowledge Management System (KMS) I created in ED795B. I used Tag World, which is basically a version of My Space with tagging capabilities. While I don’t necessarily consider myself a totally private person, I don’t like exposing myself on social forums where people can look me up and invite me to be their friend. I discovered Delicious.com this week, a tagging system that allows you to establish a network so you can access your network’s tags. Though it is similar to inviting people to be your “friend” on My Space, there is little if any socializing in Delicious.com and is much more suited for professional use.
I had plenty of time to think about the different KMSs presented last semester and the biggest change I would make to mine would be to make my internet home page my KMS with links to tagging systems, rss feeds, weather, and all the other sources of information I seek out daily. Knowledge Management Systems are so much more than stored documents on your hard drive or the location of a book in your personal library. A personalized home page where you access the different elements of your KMS is the way to go.

Day 2: I spent most of this day learning new tools. I attended the Technology and Diverse Learners workshop and learned how to use Inspiration for concept mapping. What a simple piece of software that allows you to communicate relationships on so many levels. I’ll be buying this one sometime in the near future…….

I also attended a workshop on Blackboard and wondered why my organization is not using something similar to this. We use PoepleSoft to manage our Human Resources and to provide members with test scores for correspondence courses required for promotion, but an LMS like Blackboard might offer up some other management opportunities. My organization provides numerous types of training that could be exported and taught in either a blended learning environment or through distance education. If all the course materials were made available on Blackboard, it would minimize travel expenses associates with certain training.

I attended the Digital Storytelling workshop and though I have been briefly exposed to this before, It was amazing to see some of the projects created by former students. I learned that I am a “digital immigrant with an accent”, otherwise referred to as someone who prints out their email. Though I don’t print everything out, anything over half a page will likely come to me via my printer. One of the things we talked about is how children are multi-tasking learners and how digital storytelling speaks to this generation. Children have a difficult time focusing on one thing, such as just reading, and must read, chat, listen to music, and blog – all at the same time. I have a difficult time with this. If children are so good at multi-tasking, then why can’t they shut everything down to focus on one thing? Why do kids expect teachers to change their style of teaching? If they are so advanced, then why don’t they meet the teachers half way? Are we letting this generation walk all over us? Who is in charge?

Days 3 & 4: I spent these two days with the Fellows as they worked through identifying learning outcomes and tools to use for their projects. Though I connected with a few Faculty, I really connected with Jacki Leak, a lecturer of Women’s Psychology. I shared a podcast/blog I co-created in EDTEC 671 as an informal learning system on Balancing Family and Careers for Women in the Coast Guard, and she asked to use it in her class http://cgworklife1.blogspot.com/. I hope it works for her. The podcast is accessible via the blog, so if she wants her students to provided thought on the content, the medium is already established.

Week 1 (May 15, 2006)

This week I attended meetings in preparation for the pICT Emerging Trends Summer Symposium. The symposium will be attended by pICT Fellows along with Department of Education faculty. I also attended a workshop on Horizon Wimba, a new learning management system with great potential. Suzanne, the CTL, and ITS are doing a great job of making me feel part of the team!


I began research on grant writing and met with Suzanne to discuss the overall goal of the grant program, which right now, is to provide up to $2000.00 worth of stipends to fellows to incite them to conduct and write about their research. My initial research is focused on how other institutions and organizations write and develop similar grant programs and on journals that would be acceptable for Fellows to publish their research in. As I look at what others are doing, I have to ask myself if the grant is an award for published work, or if it is a stipend to help defray the costs associated with research and publication. The purpose of the stipend will drive the direction of the grant proposal. I have written my questions down in a Writely document so Suzanne can look at them at her convenience, and I must say, I love the Writely application as a source of online collaboration. I will definitely be using this when I return to work full time and will insist that others do the same.