Monthly Archives: August 2008

Seven Principles and an LMS

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How does a Learning Management System relate to established principles of good practice in undergraduate education? De Anza College has an entire online course answering this question.

Here are some easy examples:

Good practice: How Moodle supports good practice
1. Encourages student-faculty contact. Students can double-click the teacher’s name, anywhere it appears, and send a short message. It will be delivered by email if it cannot be displayed immediately.Easy-to-create forums can allow students to start a discussion within a course context, visible to the course faculty and students.
2. Encourages cooperation among students. Easy-to-create forums, wikis and glossaries can allow students to start a discussion or document or collection within a course context, visible to the course faculty and students.
3. Encourages active learning. Forums, wikis, glossaries and many other activities excite and track the level of contribution of individual students.
4. Gives prompt feedback. Automated marking and feedback can easily be set up in quizzes, choice, various game components, hotpotatoes.Peer ratings (voting) and comments can be invited in activities such as forums and glossaries.
5. Emphasizes time on task. The collaborative activities can become large projects. For feedback, students can view their own machine logs and contribution history in their profile.
6. Communicates high expectations. Gradebook collects teacher feedback and scores from all activities, both automarked and manual, in a course. Quizzes can permit repeated attempts to encourage mastery. Projects (workshops) support iterative improvement subject to review by teachers.
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning. Moodle supports a wide variety of activity types.

References:

  1. Chickering, A.W. et al., 1987. Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, Johnson Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.uis.edu/liberalstudies/students/documents/sevenprinciples.pdf
  2. Taylor, V., 2008. Technology Supported Learning and Retention (TSLR). Available at: http://faculty.deanza.edu/taylorvalerie/stories/storyReader$524
  3. 2008. Technology Supported Learning & Retention Course Evaluation Checklist. Wikibooks. Available at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Technology_Supported_Learning_%26_Retention/Course_Evaluation_Checklist
  4. McHutchins, H., 2003. Instructional Immediacy and the Seven Principles: Strategies for Facilitating Online Courses. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, VI(III). Available at: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall63/hutchins63.html

Outsourcing a school mailserver

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On a MITIE forum, Sam explained how his school weighed up the benefits and risks and chose to adopt Gmail throughout.

Sandor preempted this in June with a compilation of articles highlighting the school’s vulnerability when a critical service is outsourced to an organisation subject to foreign law such as the US PATRIOT Act, whose product roadmap is not public, and whose viability depends on a relatively new business model that has already undergone dramatic technology-triggered changes.

Now, how to weigh up this risk? And what about the threat of sniffers on the internet between your school and your correspondents?

Whatever mail system we use, we do need an Exit Plan: what to do if our licence suddenly is revoked, and how to prepare for that day. That said, I can see how own-your-own mail-server is no longer compelling.

Attractions of having your own mail-server on site: The benefit may be illusory because:
Sniffing outside the site will not capture any communication between onsite users; All users will access email from home or away, through unknown computers and ISPs;
There is little opportunity for sniffing between your mail-server and your ISP; It is only one hop from most major ISPs to a Google server;
Sniffing only captures messages that are still in transit at the time of the attack, so is less rewarding than an attack against a mail-server; Google has stronger commitment and resources (legal and technical) to protecting their data store than any school;
Users can choose to never put their password into an offsite (i.e. untrustworthy) browser. All users will access email from home and away, through unknown computers and ISPs.
The school controls the spam-filter rules; Gmail filters are magically good;
Any subpoena for mail must be served directly on the school, and will be known to the school. Planning for and complying with a subpoena on a school server is disruptive and costly.
School mail is unlikely to be caught up in a discovery process related to a vendor/provider. Investigation of copyright compliance or child protection is relatively more frequent.
Internal mail may still work on-site even when cut off from the internet. Gmail is still accessible externally, even when the school internet trunk is cut, and on-site, dozens of users are carrying browser-equipped mobiles phones.
The school holds the backup tapes and controls the archival policy, independent of Google’s commercial interest or fortunes. As long as Google offers the service (BIG GOTCHA THERE!) they continuously replicate to international data centres and automatically restore corrupted data.
The school can set mail quotas as high as it likes – given sufficient HDD space. Many schools cannot afford to match Google’s 7 GB mail per user.
On-site, attachments are joined to messages at LAN speed. Off-site, attachments are joined to messages at a fraction of the WAN link speed. Google’s trunk is bigger than any school’s.
All on-site users can use the Outlook client and everyone can use the the outlook web interface off-site. Gmail interface excels.

Vygotsky

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Where to go for an introduction to Vygotsky’s Proximity Learning ideas?

vygotsky

Vygotsky worked with children in schools in Russia before World War II. His publications were translated into English in the 1970s, and have been fundamental in teacher training for most current primary and many secondary school teachers in Australia.  He is famous for contributing the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), but it is only a part of his model of Problem-Based Learning and theory of Social-constructivism.

TIP is a good starting point for an overview of psychological theories, but their article on Vygotsky is brief.

NewFoundations has a broader overview of Vygotsky’s thought.

MyRead gives a better outline of how to use the ZPD concept as a teacher, with this illustration:

scaffolding diagram

References:

  • Kearsley, G. 2008, Theory Into Practice, http://tip.psychology.org/index.html
  • Kearsley, G. (no date) ‘Social Development Theory (L. Vygotsky)’, in TIP: Theories, http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html
  • Dahms, M., Geonnotti, K., Passalacqua. D., Schilk, J. N., Wetzel, A. and M. Zulkowsky, 2007, The Educational Theory of Lev Vygotsky:an analysis, in Clabaugh, G.K. (ed), New Foundations, http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Vygotsky.html
  • 2002, ‘My Read – Scaffolding Learning’, in MyRead: Strategies for learning and reading in the middle years, Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training, http://www.myread.org/scaffolding.htm

Helpfile for your LMS

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MoodleMoodle

The most authoritative guide on Moodle implementation is Using Moodle, available in print from Amazon or in PDF by download. (This focuses on usage rather than technology.)

Moodle.org has a forum devoted to Hardware and Performance ; reviewing this is an excellent way to develop a realistic perspective.

http://web.wm.edu/it/images/Bblogo_Gateway.gif?&=&svr=wwwBlackBoard

Laura Milligan has compiled The Ultimate Guide to BlackBoard, linking to resources from a broad spread of organisations.

Feature comparisons and reviews

With EduTools‘ neat tool you can compare a selection of the most popular CMS, weighting the features that matter, and see users’ review comments under each point.

References:

  1. Amazon 2008, Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System (Using), http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059652918X?ie=UTF8&tag=httpmoodlcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=059652918X
  2. Cole, J. and Foster, H., Using Moodle, second edition, O’Reilly, online at http://download.moodle.org/download.php/docs/en/using_moodle_2e.zip
  3. Moodle.org 2008, Using Moodle: Hardware and Performance, http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=596
  4. Milligan, L. 2008, The Ultimate Guide to BlackBoard: 100 Tips and Tutorials, in Smart Teaching, http://www.smartteaching.org/blog/2008/08/the-ultimate-guide-to-blackboard-100-tips-tutorials/
  5. EduTools 2008, CMS: CMS Home. Retrieved August 26, 2008 from http://www.edutools.info/static.jsp?pj=4&page=HOME

Pandemic 2

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Pandemic 2Years 6 and Year 9 grabbed me today to make me play Pandemic 2

Traditional learning areas

  • Geography (country names, locations)
  • Biology (disease transmission patterns)

Pandemic IIPlay

A player takes on the role of a Virus, Bacterium or Parasite, and aims to infect and kill the whole world!!!! by judiciously tuning symptoms, transmission and resistance as time progresses. A world-map gradually changes colour and hospitals, airports, etc., wink out of existence as the disease spreads. Breaking news flashes in the margin announce country-by-country closure of ports, schools, hospitals, etc., martial law, curfews. In 65 game days I infected 5,800,000 people, shut down all but 3 hospitals and killed millions!

One game typically lasts under half an hour, and two or three games would probably be enough for most people. A player and a buddy conferring about tactics (e.g. to buy drug resistance or a more fatal symptom?) would learn more and achieve more. The game has a good background document built in, but it is not necessary.

Messages that players are likely to pick up within one or two games:

  • disease vectors include insects, rodents, air and water
  • visible symptoms lead to earlier detection, treatment and prevention
  • rapid lethality lowers the rate of transmission of a disease
  • infection control measures are irrelevant once the majority of population are infected, so governments need to suspend civil rights (association, movement) early in a suspected epidemic
  • water quality is crucial
  • species change, and some combinations of traits are more likely to lead to extinction.

Resources

Flash-player in a browser. Free.

Distractors

There are dozens of other games on the kongregate.com website.

Acknowledgements

  1. Dark Realm Studios, 2008, Pandemic 2, version 1.16, CrazyMonkeyGames.com, http://www.crazymonkeygames.com/Pandemic-2.html#game
  2. Adobe, 2008, Flash Player 9 download centre, http://flashplayer.9-download-center.com/