(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

iTunes U: Case Study Panel
Kate James, Open Course Ware, Production Mgr., Video Coordinator, MIT
Jim Marko, New Media Producer, NJIT

Kate James:
In 2000, questions abt how internet would impact education, what to do about it.

Faculty conclusion wasn’t about money, but because of nature of MIT education (collaboration, etc), they recommended putting materials online for free—because it isn’t degree-granting, representative of interactive classroom environment, no contact with faculty. (Occasionally compelling requests are passed to faculty, but not often.)

OCW is free, will continue to be perm at MIT.

Voluntary contribs from ~80% faculty.

Various stats abt OCW. Creative Commons non-com/attrib/share alike audience.
Permitted to mix math lectures with dance beats

Translations happening

60% of access is from outside North America

Every six months entire site burned to drive and shipped to places like Nigeria where bandwidth and connectivity are issues

Inspiring movement—250 institutions in OCW consortium

Production process

Recruiting faculty
diff ways—superstar faculty, durable content, core curriculum, MIT-unique, distinct pedagogy, more and more fac submitting info

Preparation
wardrobe (no white or checked shirts), props and other things to focus on, third-party materials (can’t have NY-er cartoons), student privacy, not Hollywood (mistakes okay)

Capture
Sony HDR-SR11 10.2mp 60gig hi def hard drive handycam
Wireless mics

Scrub and review
every minute reviewed for IP and 3rd party stuff, student privacy etc.
look for actual start and end
create edit sheet if necessary

Edit & Compress
final cut, iMovie, MetaX (neurotic about metadata)
Sorenson media squeeze for compression

(can email KJ for notes)

Publishing
Moving from (couldn’t catch name) to four different models,
iTunes U,
Loves that iTunes supports PDF notes downloads, but it doesn’t support captioning
YouTube enhanced channel with 893 videos 21,000 subscribers
Will put smaller pieces on YouTube, but not iTunes U
Internet Archive for “pesky Linux users”, old stuff, small stuff (files check in at IA, but don’t check out)
Also video lectures.net

Transcribing
as much as they can
recent addition to process
human transcribes, student reviews
increases discoverability
popular with non-native English speakers
need to find way to bring cost down (lecture browser)

Example of finished course page:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-02Fall-2007/VideoLectures/detai...

Jim Marko:
NJIT has tons of legacy materials – started pilot podcasting project in 2005.

iTunes U at NJIT collaboration between Uni Web Services, Uni IS, ??

UWS goal: manage and establish a greater web presence for the university
redesign, embrace Web 2.0, etc.

How do you get from here to there?

Challenge of populating site with quality material? Convert preexisting content, faculty recording , student reporters

Web content writer helped create podcasts to complement stories

Prof on video talking about essay as sole way students report is antiquated. New ways (podcasting, etc.) help them sharpen thinking.

Technical challenges for faculty not such a big deal now.

iTunes compared to network TV, website as premium cable, YouTube as all of the above + public access tv.

iTunes U provided good exposure for early adopters

5 year faculty plan has inspired podcasting.

Take-away tips:
Be a collector, not a curator—you never know what will appeal
Curate for quality and accuracy, but not interest.
Fences make good neighbors—one dept should have keys rather than profs uploading

Convince a professor of podcasting value- that person will get three more profs involved

Things to think about:
• Who will assume ownership
• Technical resources are required to establish a private face
• Getting faculty and university buy-in
(some profs will still think iTunes is only for Mac-using students!)

KJ: value of iTunes U is album unit creation. In YouTube, most lectures are found by other means than the channel—frequent comments from ppl wondering where other material is. YouTube announcing education channels maybe tomorrow.

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

[This particular presentation was the highlight of the day--very inspiring.]

The Center Cannot Hold: Living, Learning, and Leading in a Networked World
Dr. Paul D. Hammond, Director of Digital Initiatives, Department of English and Dr. Richard E. Miller Chair, Department of English and Executive Director, Plangere Writing Center Rutgers University

Very exciting for English teachers to speak at MIT.

Explanation of title – Yeats, advent of WW2 [I don't know why, but it's weird to see Yeats in Keynote template]

Hammond’s work on American apocalypticism.

Unprecedented economy, environment, government

We need to begin to imagine how to teach differently – not squeeze same old thought into new tube of toothpaste, but fundamentally different.

Miller notes that change is unprecedented because it is global. But wait: crisis or opportunity? That’s what we in education are asking ourselves.

Leopard screenshot: this is the machine of our age. But computers won’t solve our problems. Education experiences with unkept promises of tech. “If we can just get our students to Twitter about WoW in Second Life, we’ll be set.”

Turning off everything doesn’t work any better.

Hammond notes spent 8-12 hrs in lib in graduate school, but hasn’t been back yet…but reads more than ever.

Our info access is unprecedented, as is ability to get work out there. Beginning of a closing of a circle.

Teaching of writing has always been bedeviled by audience being untrue. Teacher says “think of your audience” Student says “I do…it’s you”

Ability to transform passive experience

Printing Press got us out of oral mode, but not into interactivity.

Getting students to engage with problems with our times—problems that don’t have solutions, but ways of being understood.

Enabling ways to drill down deeply beyond superficial aspects. Understanding of not only complexity but depth.

Books are not the main vehicle for people communicating the most important issues at this time. Books great tech for thinking, allowing for extended thought that is clearly endangered by (youtube example). Lends itself of grotesque triviality.

Best news we can get on Comedy Central.

Enabling students to see how things are put together, how do they take access to info and work on it themselves.

Our responsibility as humanists, compositionists is to teach our students to use this stuff. We haven’t done it well.

Designed a controlled experiment. Writers House.

• Access to ubiquitous computing
• Pedagogies that foster creativity and collaboration
• inspiring teachers of new media composition
• spaces that foster collaborative learning

We won’t be teaching keyboarding, MS Word—likely Final Cut, whatever it’s called then.

Delayed reaction to joke about ubiquitous computing in US.

Encourages us to spend time going to local high schools. Stories from comm. college professor abt what our nation has done to public education were shocking.

Education has always been designed first/foremost for convenience of teachers. Student-centered ed isn’t about petting Bobby, but putting him face to face with fundamental experience of learning--frustration, challenge, pushing through that.

How do we transform learning space from 100 years ago to create learning spaces for now?

There’s a diff btw computer labs and experimental labs

Need to teach students to think with tech the way we teach them to think with writing. Vast majority of use for tech right now is for goofing around.

Q: how hard is it to get teachers (on board)?
A: (Hammond) Central stumbling point is acknowledgment that 20 yo mimeographed notes don’t cut it. [Yes. I had some easily 20 year old overhead sheets that had been poorly transferred to PowerPoint in one of my library school classes just over three years ago. Not Cool.]

A: (Miller) When we say center cannot hold, need to move from 1.0 [sage on stage] to 2.0. How many PhD programs have changed in light of all this? Answering questions doesn’t mean we can think. We need to be experts not at content management but at facing the unknown – how do we fix the economy? [possibly I have really mangled this answer]

A: (Hammond) Notes that we don’t know what the implications for this are.

Q: What’s the role of Shakespeare in these kinds of projects?
A: (Miller) New bucket for carrying info to students, have to realize this (Keynote, PPT) is NOT like the slide projector. You don’t get from Ptolemy to Copernicus just by moving a few words around. Does not mean Shakespeare is not relevant. We will never have anything to say if we don’t know something deeply. Universities need to stand for knowing something in depth and complexity.

Q: [missed it]
A: Loss of newspapers, disappearance of snail mail are not modest changes. People say “sure, GM can go out of business…but why is my research budget cut?” These ppl have no center to their world. [extreme paraphrase]

Young people’s facility with technology grossly oversold. We don’t find curiosity, despite having access to everything. Creativity also missing. Collaboration may take place only in WoW.

[how does the library inspire curiosity at HLS?]

They are trying to invent genre of idea-driven visual essay.

We're missing the idea that you can think in these media (but we know you can entertain and sell crap)

Miller admits that they have taught a lot of terrible classes…new pedagogy, creativity needs failure. Hammond: like in science, there’s a lot of screwing up, doing over

Miller: question he asks sometimes: how many of you work in English departments with 5 IT people? (He does, but it took 12 years)

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

Open: The New Deal for Education
Dr Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean & Director,
Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT), MIT

Gathering storm of open ed movement and it’s potential for transformation

Movement characterized by open content, open tech, open knowledge

Shout-out to Social Life of Info [my favorite library school read]

Open courseware – almost 2000 at MIT. Two remarkable things when initiative announced: first: whoa, this is big. Second: none of us knew what it meant.

(Side benefit: figuring out how many courses they had.)

Benefit for educators: saving time and lowering stress

Benefit for students: students elsewhere can check out notes for better understanding
Open courses also serve as model, benchmark

We typically think of higher ed with this stuff, but there are notable K-12 efforts

MIT has “highlights for high school” open courseware channel featuring material that might be of use/interest to that group.

(the preceding section is “Metaversity Part I”, more about content, stand alone stuff)

Metaversity Part II: Harvesting the Collective Advantage

Examples in this section launched from MIT, but involve other players

MIT Online Laboratories
iLab provides access to actual labs via internet—not simulations

Communities form to discuss results

Transformative dimension: iLabs not just about making equipment available, alters econ of lab instruction—equipment is expensive (equipment, time, etc). iLab provides potential for 24/7 access. You must believe first-hand lab instruction important to education experience

MIT students have access to labs elsewhere too

Research tools for learning

Spoken lecture browser (lecture browser – spoken language systems)
idea is to search lectures to get relevant snippets

Shakespeare performance in Asia video presentations is another app of this

MIT Visualizing Cultures - http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html

Wonderful to have various apps, many repositories, but need to bring them together

This isn’t just about e-learning, but also national efforts.
India National Knowledge Commission Recommendations for Open Education Resources (OER)
http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/oer.asp

Open ed movement offers way around problem in India of insufficient schools (could build a school a day and not catch up)

Indo-US Collaboration of Engineering Education (IUCEE)
http://www.iucee.org/

OER value proposition
• open high quality digitized content, tools, communities
• available anytime, anywhere, free
• localizable and remixable
• allows for collective improvement and feedback
• alternate way to learn: accelerate/deepen learning
• scaling excellence
(also allows a lot of feedback to improve on what you do)

“We know how to share our research, but not how to share our pedagogy”

Open Ed vision elements – two important dimensions it enables
1. Blended learning - intelligent combination of physical and virtual
2. Boundary-less ed – beyond geo-political, off campus, research teaching, disciplines, etc.

This is not a pipe dream--however you interpret pipe!

MIT Council on Ed Tech Strategic thrust
promote active learning
bolster… [missed catching this slide, but it was good]

Collectivity culture expressed by what we see (web 2.0 logos slide)

Group of Gen Y students who want to work for NASA, belief about the NASA culture they want to work with, their set of slides. (Why isn’t a whole generation connecting to NASA?)

Q: Are there opportunities for open learning coming out of stimulus bill? A: we think so – variety of responses from institutions. (tongue in cheek – tell your legislators!) Q followup: any particular leaders supporting this? A: great awareness of possibilities, industry leaders, people of influence serving on various boards, Hewlett and Carnegie foundations as champions of open education.

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

Welcome and Opening Comments
Scott Morris, Learning Services & Communities,
Strategic Education Solutions, Apple Inc.

Four AcademiX sessions happening around the country - not Apple marketing, abt learning what ed customers are doing.

Digital learning environment: create, access, distribute - held together by collaboration. Innovation happening outside LMS

People of the Book v. Digital Natives. – we here today are mainly former

What would we know if none of us had ever read a book.

We can’t predict what big things are happening, but we can be involved

Distribution:
In oral cultures, edu required proximity – now it’s everywhere at all times.

Literacy enables other rational discourses

What are time/space constraints, biases of digital world?

Access:
Mobility changes this. (No parking app joke)

Wikinomics quote: new promise of collaboration is that with peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively…

How do we create next gen of professionals/citizens, getting them to stand on shoulders of giants.

The ABA Journal's Question of the Week last week was an interesting one for this former orchestra nerd--we're the lesser known companion to the more common band nerd. Mentioning guitarist and actor Steven van Zandt's protest to cutting of arts education funding and a correlation between those with higher incomes and musical inclination, the Journal asked

Did you take music lessons in school? And if so, how did participation in that garage band, glee club or orchestra influence your career and outlook on life?

The answers (scroll past "related stories" to read them) from lawyers with backgrounds ranging from amateur to professional musician are really great. Some talk about how music keeps them sane while dealing with the pressure of the billable hour, and others tell how the lessons they learned as musicians have been directly useful in the practice of law. This answer cracked me up:

Well, this one time, at Baptist School, we learned that all rock music uses “back-masking” and preaches satanism when played backwards. I didn’t heed their warnings though and I turned into a lawyer!

Music teachers love this kind of article for sharing with principals and parents; I just sent a link to my sister!

(Cross-posted to Novalawcity.)

From the creator of The Machine is Us/Using Us, comes A Vision of Students Today. The production values and camera work leave something to be desired, but the concept is brilliant.



The first thing it brought to mind for me was the difference between the AALL Gen X/Gen Y Caucus meetings and the rest of the annual meeting events: we immediately, instinctively (I've never heard the suggestion for arrangement made out loud) re-arrange the chairs into an enormous circle. Granted, circles are impractical for many conference activities, but it's still interesting.

Expect to see this one circulating wildly. For more from this professor and his students, check out Kansas State University's Digital Ethnography site. (This is the URL that appears near the end of the video.)

Thanks to Chronicles of Bean for the tip.

From my colleague Rob Hudson comes this weekly Chronicle "brown bag" live discussion transcript. Merrill Johnson, associate dean of the University of New Orleans's College of Liberal Arts, discusses UNO's Second Life presence along with issues like presence and distance learning, disclaimers and university policies, building, time commitment, and helping faculty and students through the learning curve. It's a great introduction to many of the issues involved in setting up an institutional presence in a virtual world.

Keeping up with news relating to Second Life is a near impossible feat, but here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the past week or so:

Lawyers Find Real Revenue in Virtual World
Law.com has a great report on lawyers in Second Life, what they're doing there, what they think of virtual practice, their extra-curricular activities in Second Life, and virtual legal systems.

Go Get a (Virtual) Life
Ira Flatow and company at NPR's Science Friday along with callers discuss Second Life. (thanks for the tip to Second Life Insider)

Online Gamers Become Guinea Pigs
Thanks to Betsy McKenzie at Out of the Jungle for pointing to this Boston Globe article about how scientists are using virtual worlds and MMORPGs to study the spread of infectious disease and how people react to it, altruistically and otherwise.

Cornell to Study Business and Oversight in Second Life
Second Life Insider reports that Cornell business professor Robert J. Bloomfield is offering a 1 to 3 credit course for students to study business and regulatory oversight in SL that clearly has some strong law crossover. As the article points out

Second Life is a fertile ground for studying free market business in an unregulated environment - either because regulations do not exist, or the regulations that do exist for bodies claiming to be banks and stock-exchanges are not observed by proprietors - who may be dismissive or ignorant of the applicability of physical world regulations on their virtual businesses.

Script Me!
Finally, for those of us building in Second Life, Script Me! is an amazing tool developed by a computer science professor. Need a custom script? Fill in the form and there it is. Did I say amazing? I meant AMAZING. For me, scripting is the most challenging part of working in SL--I'm all about taking existing scripts and customizing them. Script Me! is going to make that even easier. Many thanks to JJ Drinkwater, esteemed Librarian of Caledon, for sending this link to the Alliance Second Life Google group.

If you're interested in the intersection of legal education and technology, and curious about what it's like to attend an event in Second Life, mark your calendar for Tuesday May 22, 12:30-1:30pm Eastern time.

Gene Koo, fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, will be presenting his research "examining how changing practice needs are affecting what, and how, law schools should teach." He'll be live in Cambridge, but the proceedings will also be broadcast live in Second Life. Presumably, the Second Life broadcast will be at Harvard's Berkman Island (use this link to teleport there if you've got a SL account).

If Koo's talk is anything like a previous legal education event hosted by Harvard, Charles Nesson's (un)Common Knowledge: Legal Education in a Networked World panel, expect a lively back-channel conversation among Second Life attendees. I'm looking forward to it.

(Oh, and yes, it will be webcast as well. But where's the fun in that?)

Photo by Monocle.

A variety of news from the virtual world:

• Sculptable prims

Linden Lab is introducing a new feature called sculpted prims. Unlike the current prims, their shapes are determined by the texture applied to them. This development promises more natural looking objects in SL with fewer prims needed to create detailed items with curves. However, it appears that some skill in 3D modeling may be required to create the textures for these prims, which means not everyone will be able to take direct advantage of the feature--we'll be paying vendors.

Still, those model apples and bananas at the link look good enough to eat.

• Fix It, Already

Speaking of Second Life developments, News.com reports on an open letter to Linden Lab from many Second life users requesting that they work on fixes to many of the existing problems--inventory loss, teleport failures, grid stability, and a number of others--before implementing new features.

I'm skeptical about online petitions, but Anne Idler, who has lost major pieces of inventory and come out of a teleport with her hair attached to her behind more times than she cares to count, has signed on.

• Fizzy's Second Life

Fizzy Soderburg is the avatar being used by Seattle University law professor Elizabeth Townsend Gard's first year property class to explore "the connection of modern property to virtual property." Groups of students take turns taking Fizzy on adventures in Second Life, then report back with a screencast. Screencasts posted so far include issues like adverse possession; landlord-tenant issues; real estate and chattel; and marriage, divorce, and kids. Pretty cool!

• International Spaceflight Museum expansion

Finally, Eloise Pasteur reports that the International Spaceflight Museum, my favorite non-library exhibit in Second Life, is expanding with the creation of Spaceport Beta, featuring models of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Model, the space shuttle, and NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building.

I wonder if the VAB will include clouds, which are said to sometimes form in the real VAB? The week-long grand opening festivities begin May 5. Visit the ISM website for more details.