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i am one of the select few individuals working this summer to revamp and update our teacher education program. i get to help figure out how to best provide our future teachers with the strategies, skills, and know-how to use technology in their future classrooms. wow. currently, we have a single technology course for preservice educators that is required. it is a prerequisite for getting into the College of Education and is taken before any students can apply to the COE. i hate this model. getting a college sophomore in ED 205 who doesn’t have experience with lesson plans and who doesn’t have teaching experiences to draw makes much that is taught in ED 205 seem like an abstract concept. so, i have much higher expectations for the new model we create.

in the best case scenario, the various classes and professors in the COE would work together to teach all of the ISTE NETS-T (that’s the standards for teachers with regard to technology in education) and a technology course wouldn’t be necessary. i spent much time reading up on things in the Journal of Computing in Teacher Education. the bottom line is what i already knew . . . that most college of education faculty are not prepared to teach their students the various technology standards or even a decent sized nugget of the standards. thus, an educational technology course is still fairly necessary. but, i am going to push for some of the easier standards to be transferred to other courses. i am going to make a case that other professors should be modeling the use of technology in their teaching and some standards rely on access to classrooms, so they are more ideal for student teaching.

we had our initial committee meeting and i think (still early) that our technology course is going to be moved away from being a prerequisite. in fact, the course might now be moved to occur in the semester before student teaching. this is also the semester that will occur after a semester where students go into the classroom for a field experience called student assisting (not as interactive as student teaching, but not a passive experience either). i am quite pleased with the potential of this model. our students will have actual classroom experiences to draw on when doing the ED 205 requirements. i am keeping my fingers crossed the end model turns out this well. but, our whole College of Education is just now being emailed the minutes and results from our initial meeting. hmmm.

Technorati Tags: ed tech, undergraduate, teacher, preservice, technology in education

i am back on my blog after a few weeks of intensive teaching. the next 2 months are devoted to writing materials for use in an undergraduate educational technology course for education majors. i have dibbled and dabbled with various iterations of this “textbook” in the past. i am currently an author for the textbook that been used previously in this course. i get 50 cents a copy when the textbook is bought new. we have between 400 - 500 students take this course per semester, but most buy the book used as my royalty check is typically just over $100/year. given the time i put into writing the textbook, i think that works out to about 2 cents an hour (kidding). seriously though, the profit i make is meaningless. i see no reason to help a publisher and a college book store rake in well over $20 off of my students so that i can get enough money to buy my students pizza once per semester. this is the thrust of why i want to bypass the publisher and the bookstore. my contract with the publisher will not allow me to write another textbook for profit to compete with the current textbook so i have no intention of doing so. i do have the intent to have a new product for our students this fall. moreover, i have no intent of claiming authorship, so i think it would be hard for McGraw-Hill to come after me.

i wrote an article last year called, “wiki . . . wiki . . . wiki textbook?” i argued that wiki-based textbook should be replacing the paper textbooks most educational institutions are using. i really liked the open source nature of the wiki engines. well, after time to reflect and test things out and hold many conversations (including a conference presentation in March of 2007) i have come to a new conclusion — i am abandoning my wiki-based textbook ideas. instead, i am going with the open source CMS tool called Drupal. Drupal has a module I’ve installed called, “Books.” my experience is that the Drupal book module will help to produce a much better product for learning. Much like a wiki engine, Drupal can allow for anyone to edit and contribute content. however, i have no intention of being that open with my textbook. for one, i had a wiki-based textbook started and after more than a year, i am dealing with spammers signing up and adding spam far too often. i’ve forced users to register to make changes and they even jump through this hoop. i am going to be trying some strategies with the Drupal book tool, but I still am planning on allowing anyone to potentially contribute material and everyone will encouraged to add comments to various material pages. but a textbook cannot be edited during a school semester, so taking advantage of the technology is somewhat limited. i do plan to have a mechanism in place to allow for content to be added and edited but it will be in a queue waiting for the appropriate time. while in queue, folks who are interested can view this text/edit/revisions, etc. and discuss, etc.

i will spend more time on this new textbook over the next month, but this is where i am right now. i am not ready to give the web address to the new book yet, but i will post it soon enough with another link to the older wiki-based version so that folks can see the differences back to back. stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: drupal, ed tech, technology, wikis, wikitext

well, my first spring/summer class begins tonight and it’s a Computer in Education course for undergraduates who hope to become teachers. in the past, i have used various tools to teach this course and i take great care to try and choose the best tools for my students each semester. when i last taught this course, i used Drupal for all course content and student blogs and I used phpBB forums for my class discussions. this setup worked well for me.

i was content to try these tools again; however, i ran into some snags. first, my previous installation of Drupal somehow got corrupted when i was fiddling, so i couldn’t even get logged in to see all of the settings and modification i had made. my spring course is only 6 weeks long and i didn’t think it was fair to myself to start over using Drupal. i am going to get this straightened out for the fall semester and get back to using Drupal, which is also in version 5.x now — i used 4.x previously. Instead, i have reverted back to using Dreamweaver and CSS/HMTL for all course content. this is slightly disappointing, but i work very quickly using Dreamweaver and this was really the sensible choice for me for this course at this time.

since i no longer have easy to use student blogs like i would when i use Drupal, i received a recommendation from a teaching colleague who suggested wordpress.com. i checked it out and decided to give it a whirl. i like the thought of using wordpress even though it’s a bit more high end than blogger and drupal-based blogs. for students who are willing to put in extra effort, the wordpress blogs can pay off bunches.

and, my biggest change this semester also comes from a recommendation . . . this time from a former student. i have been using phpBB forums for all class discussions for about 5 - 6 years. i finally got around to checking out the competition and decided that i liked SMF forums better. i was actually excited about the upcoming phpBB version 3.0 forums, but these are currently in beta and i am not going to use a beta that hasn’t even reached a release candidate stage in my classes. i could use the current stable release — version 2.22 or something like that, but i honestly felt like the SMF forums were better. who knows if i’ll stick with SMF when phpBB 3.0 comes out, but that needs to happen before mid August or i’ll stick with SMF again. here’s a snapshot into how the forums look for my class (from the perspective of my account):

(click for a larger view)

when i add items to a news feed, they are constantly cycled on the front page of the forums. i like that my announcements are so prominent. previously, i had to request students to visit an announcements forum when there were new messages (announcements) therein.

so, i have made some big changes and reverted back to some old methods, but i hope the end results is a quality learning experience for my students. time will tell . . .

Technorati Tags: blogs, drupal, ed tech, phpBB, dreamweaver, students, teachers, SMF

I am taking a blog vacation until the spring semester starts on May 5th (or 7th) — that Monday. I’ll then try and get back to a twice a week schedule. I am currently upgrading all of my tools to the latest versions — e.g., Drupal, phpBB, etc. i have much customization to do and then there will be much testing to ensure that things work the way i hope.

this is the last full week of classes at GVSU and i am bombarded with theses from students trying to wrap the semester up. nothing new there, but i have neglected my blog. blogs are an interesting development the past many years. my family blog started in about 2000; though, i didn’t call it a blog at the time . . . it was called our journal back then. i used HTML to update entries. 2000 is when our first child was born, so most entries were required to include photos to keep grandparents happy. i eventually (later 2001ish) moved from HTML to postnuke or phpnuke (a CMS tool) and continued the “blog” running. once blogging took off, i decided to convert my family journal to a blog, but i kept it in the tool i was using . . . mostly because i didn’t understand MySQL stuff enough to export the database and import it into a new tool. actually, i still don’t. but i finally moved it all to Wordpress and i’ve spent the past 1.5 years trying to copy-and-paste old entries from HTML and from the CMS into Wordpress. i think i only have about a year gap left to transfer. it’s one of those back-burner projects that always comes after everything else. we update our family blog about once a month these days. a little more when bigger things happen. but the blog serves a purpose and the audience is consistent and fairly static.

this blog, however, serves an entirely different purpose. sometimes i tend to forget why i started this blog and i often feel like it’s a chore to do. on the other hand, writing for the blog forces me to try and follow the ed tech blogging community to see what’s going on, so i still enjoy the blog as a motivation for staying active. but, i thought it would be nice to evaluate my blog up to this point nearly 2 years after i started it. in my second post here i wrote, “i will use this blog to help trace my steps as i try and improve my online teaching and as i test out new tools along the way.” if i look back, i can clearly see many blog entries that highlight tools i’ve tried and strategies i’ve used in my online teaching. i have had a fairly light semester this semester with a weekend class (Jan./Feb.) and thesis students, so i haven’t had much to experiment with lately. in a few weeks, our spring/summer semester starts and i will be back in the saddle as i am scheduled to teach an online undergrad ed tech course and a 2 week long grad course in ed tech. i plan to upgrade to the new phpBB 3.0 forums, which you can see here; though, the beta has been out since January (beta 5) and there’s no sign of the final release, so i have to decide whether to use a near finished beta (#5) if i don’t hear anything in the next 2 weeks. i am also going to upgrade my course to the latest Drupal (5.1), so i have new tools to learn. as i finish more preparations for the course, i want to come back and explain some of the curricular changes that i am going to try in my undergraduate course. i have much to say, but i just didn’t have the best semester to write about the kinds of things that were the reason for making this blog in the first place. hopefully that’s about to change. whew! ;~)

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, drupal, CMS, phpBB, drupal

i spent the latter part of this week at the MACUL conference in Detroit. i had a presentation on wiki-based textbooks. i have been disappointed at MACUL the past two times i’ve gone. this is a technology in education conference and i have had spotty internet connectivity both times. last year, they placed me in a large room off of the beaten path. their wireless network just didn’t reach me. i suppose i wasn’t the only person who complained because this year i received a letter explaining that speakers would have their own wireless network so we wouldn’t have to share bandwidth with the conference attendees. great, i thought. well i arrived to do my presentation and went to the speaker room to request access to the special wireless network. the volunteers in there looked at me quizzically. finally they tracked down a techie-guy who explained that there was no special network after all. doh.

my internet-based presentation had to run on the regular network. and, it was SSLLLLLOOOOOWWWWWWWW. i’d click a link to demonstrate something (e.g., Lulu.com) and i ended up just describing what folks should be seeing if the internet was working. many links appeared just as i finished and was ready to move on and many never appeared at all. very crummy. i don’t think my presentation suffered too much because of it, but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth and i am sure the technology-laden session would have benefited by having working technology.

i did have a chance to catch up with some of my peers around Michigan, which is always nice. i am in my 7th year living in Michigan and i am finally feeling like i belong here. i even met some new folks who teach ed tech at other universities here in michigan. in fact, one professor even offered to donate much content related to the NETS that could be worked into the wiki-based textbook i am working on. if it happens, i’ll identify the individual and give him much credit and thanks. stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: MACUL, wikitextbook, puppy, textbook, wiki

the MACUL Conference — the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning — is coming up and i’ve been accepted as a presenter. My presentation occurs on March 15 (a Thursday) at 4:00 PM and is titled, “Wiki, Wiki, Wiki . . . Textbook!” i can’t find my notes of what i submitted, so i’ll have to wait and read the description in the conference manual. but i believe i am going to talking about the wiki-based textbook i am writing with others for the ed tech course our preservice educators take here at GVSU and explaining how to set up a wiki for textbook writing — the nuts and bolts, if i am remembering correctly.

i am going to put my agenda and notes into a wiki just like i said i wasn’t ready to do in blog entry just a month ago. doh! my concerns back then were that i feared things would get changed prior to when i used my materials. this time around, i will make a wiki and just keep it private until i present. if someone wants to borrow it or modify after i use it then i’ll have no problem. a win-win, eh?

it’s a bit funny that i am presenting on a wiki-based textbook when i have seriously been considering taking all of my materials thus far and moving them from the wiki and using Drupal instead. i originally liked how the wiki allowed such an ease of connecting various different content together. but, the non-linear navigation inherent in the wiki makes it much more difficult for an instructor to assign readings and for author’s to write a meaningful narrative. there’s something to be said of a linear document and Drupal has a core module called Book. just like a wiki, many users can work together to write and create content. one of the appealing aspects of the Drupal book is the following:

You can also let users generate a printer-friendly display of a book page and all its subsections. They do this by selecting the link for printer-friendly version at the bottom of any book page.

as much as i like to push a paperless classroom, the truth of the matter is that not everyone wants to always get online to read a textbook. some people might want a paper copy that they can highlight and annotate, etc. the Drupal solution would allow students to print the textbook using an online printer like Lulu.com for under $10. it’s not free, but is certainly appealing versus the cost of the average college textbook these days. and this model has no 30% markup by the bookstores.

but, i need to continue my work in the wiki and act enthusiastic at least until after MACUL. ;~)

if you’re going to MACUL, i hope you can stop by and say hello.

Technorati Tags: drupal, MACUL, Lulu.com, wiki, wikitext

while i don’t like talking about my blog because that seems so vain, i also realize that my blog is part of my teaching and i like to document much about my teaching on the blog . . . so a blog-related post is sometimes okay, especially when the talk involved something in my blog breaking.

i recently upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.1. i have upgraded just fine since version 1.x many times with no problem. unfortunately, this time around my custom theme didn’t like the upgrade. actually, the blog worked just swell after upgrading, but my side menu where i had a list of the blogs that i visit and all that jazz was showing a database error. i couldn’t fix the code, but i could delete the offending code — except that i was left with no links to the sites i visit and all that. that wasn’t worth it to me so i decided to upgrade my theme.

i read not too long ago about a neat new feature in Drupal 5.0 where the user can customize the current theme’s colors to suit their preferences (and customizable content as well on some themes like http://www.google.com/ig). i fiddled with this on a demo somewhere and it was pretty neat using the eye dropper and all that to change colors. i searched a bit more and found the same type theme available for WordPress 2.1. so here it is. if you click the Options link far above, you too can customize the theme here. and who said that web 2.0 was worthless? ;~)

i learned much about virtual reality recently and i’ll want to write things up, but i’ll have to wait until i have more time as i am teaching a long weekend class this weekend.

Technorati Tags: drupal, wordpress, blog, blogging

email is important for just about anyone who works in an online world. many of us consider many email applications before settling on the best of the bunch but often a solution lacking all of what we’d want. the browser is another important application for internet geeks (e.g., is there really a choice beyond Firefox?). but for me, two of the more important uses of my computer are for scheduling needs and for my to do lists. i am a Macintosh user, so i am pretty happy with iCal — it comes free with the Mac OS. unfortunately, iCal is not great for a person who has to sync calendars with others and for a person who often uses lab computers, etc. so i switched to Google’s calendars back in April of ‘06. at the time, i noted that Google worked well with iCal. i was wrong. while Google’s calendar can import iCal calendars, it’s not a two way street and thus it is worthless to even try it. so i gave up on iCal. i missed the quickness of using iCal when i am on my main computer. i can make quick edits and additions when using iCal that take a bit longer on Google’s calendars. and Google is fast. however, i recently discovered Spanning Sync (SS). SS is a tool that will work on your Mac to automatically (or manually) sync Google’s calendars with your iCal calendars and visa versa. they have a demo here and it looks just beautiful. i have grabbed the public beta but unfortunately i just discovered that the DIGG effect is in full force. this little application had made the digg front page and the servers at SS couldn’t handle the load, so they closed down their beta offering for now. shucks. on the other hand, i find it interesting that the application will reside on your computer, yet it uses the SS servers to perform the sync. imagine the amount of data that SS will have access to (insert evil laugh here). ;~)

as far as my to do list . . . i’ll have to save that for another day, but suffice to say i’ve moved beyond a simple text document and i am still searching for the ideal solution.

Technorati Tags: iCal, calendar, scheduling, digg, Google, Spanning Sync

so, my experience with the knowledge tree is now done and was quite a fun experience. but, now i have some free time to focus on some projects that were on the back burner. and, perhaps my number 1 project is a wiki based textbook for educational technology (preservice teachers). in fact, i will be presenting on wikitextbooks early next year and hope to have a draft to show off at that time. i have spoken with other instructors who will use this textbook and they helped me conceptualize the project. my vision was to have many folks contributing, but i don’t think that will be the case as much as i had hoped. one of the things i won’t do is just open the writing process to anyone. since we’re writing this textbook to meet Michigan ed tech standards (closely aligned to the national standards, fwiw), i want to have some control. i am probably not using the wiki nature of the tool to the best of its abilities, but i have liked the look and feel of wikitextbooks that i’ve perused thus far. one of the first items that our little group decided was whether to write a textbook that could be read from beginning to end (similar to most textbooks now) or whether we would stick to topics. the group thought that topics would be best and that each instructor could piece together various topics to form assigned readings. this is much easier than writing a textbook, but it also loses some of the cohesion that can be had when a formal chapter is written. somehow i need to find a bit of a happy medium. i am also considering scrapping the wiki altogether and just using the book module in Drupal; though, that sure wouldn’t bode well for my presentation on wikitextbooks, eh? ;~)

so, i think i will take a few weeks to view many textbooks and to try and get a better sense of why i want to use a wiki over Drupal (or visa versa) and then choose the best took. i think i want students to have the ability to print the book that is online in case they want a hard copy (perhaps using Lulu.com, which is a cheap way to publish books — perhaps under $10 for a textbook).

please note that the image above shows a screen shot from Lulu.com when i selected a 200 page book that is perfectly bound like many books you find on bookshelves. compare this price ($8.54) to just about any textbook that is published by a publisher and you can immediately see the benefit of using this service over traditional companies. and, students wouldn’t have to get a printed version, but they should probably have the option available. unfortunately, i still get students who don’t own a computer and have to rely on campus computer labs for classwork. i am not sure that printing from a wiki environment would be easy, but that’s something i need to explore. same with the Drupal book option. there’s much to learn, but i am full steam ahead.

Technorati Tags: drupal, education, online learning, wikitext