Work

I've been collecting some links to interesting educational simulations to show faculty members. There's some great stuff out there. The list is NOT comprehensive, and I'm not including LOTS of great simulations. This is just the list I give to faculty members asking about effective educational simulations.

• Sharkrunners (a Discovery Channel simulation for biology - tracking sharks using real data)
• Mediated Cultures World Simulator (really cool non-technical geocultural simulation - thanks to Alan Levine for sharing the link to this one!)
• Physics simulations by the University of Colorado at Boulder (thanks to Jennifer Jones for sharing this link!)
• Social Simulator Project (tries to simulate what a person with autism experiences)
• Play2Train (emergency and disaster response simulation built in SecondLife)
• Breathing Earth (displays realtime global demographic data)
• Karma Tycoon (run your own non-profit organization, single- or multi-player)

I was involved with two sessions at this year's Faculty Technology Days conference on campus. The first one was a keynote panel on "Social Networking in the Academy" and the second was "Weblogs as Personal Repositories."

Social Networking in the Academy

When we were planning the Social Networking panel, we realized that some of the faculty members might not be familiar with social networking, or with some of the aspects or implications of it, so we thought it would be a good idea to start the 2-hour panel session with a brief introduction to the topic so we were all on similar pages. Being the geek in the group, I volunteered to take that on. I wound up giving about a wiki-powered 25 minute intro to social networking (what it is, what it means, some samples, etc...).

I'm working on a project that partially involves the development of a website in Drupal to act as a directory of people who have graduated from a given University. Seems easy. I went into the project thinking it would be a trivial application of Taxonomies, or maybe some generic CCK fields.

Nope. Turns out the problem is much more difficult and complex than I initially thought.

Taxonomies won't work, because of the need to tie a number of values together, namely the year the degree was awarded (say, "1992"), the type of degree (say, "BSc"), the specialization of the degree (say, "Zoology"), and the granting institution (say, "University of Calgary").

That could be an easy thing to solve with CCK - just add four text fields. Done.

BUT - people can earn more than one degree. Of different types, in different years, from different institutions.

Taxonomies fail. Generic CCK fields fail.

What I came up with is a new CCK field type, cryptically named "University Degrees", that defines the four values that describe a degree. This solves the problem quite tidily, and supports multiple values, predefined valid sets of values, and can integrate with Views to be used as filters and sorting fields.

In building this module, I leaned heavily on a couple of web pages (CCK Sample and What is the Content Construction Kit?) that describe how parts of the module should work, and provided some sample code. In the spirit of contributing back what I learned, I'm going to document the module to help others needing to do similar things.
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Michael Geist gave a talk at The University of Calgary on April 2, 2008, on the subject of copyright. He talked about the need for Fair Dealings, the dangers of the Canadian DMCA, and even touched on the benefits of open access and even open education.

Dr. Geist's presentation was very compelling, interesting, and engaging. I believe he was able to communicate the benefits of less-restrictive copyright, and am hoping he helped plant some seeds to get an open content movement going here at The University of Calgary.

I just got back from Michael Geist's inspiring presentation "Why Copyright?" - where he laid out some of the issues relating to copyright, open access, sharing, reusing, mashups, and a long list of implications for the potentially pending Canadian DMCA.

It felt like there was much agreement among the faculty and staff who were present for Dr. Geist's presentation. When he was talking about the need for, and the power of, open access, many heads were nodding. People were agreeing, and it felt like we might be about ready to start moving forward on some Open Content (if not all the way to Open Education) initiatives. I've got some ideas that I want to incubate for a bit longer, but I'll be following up with faculty members to see what we can do to move in that direction.

I'm going to be showing some videos to faculty members who have participated in our Inquiry Through Blended Learning program. I get 20-30 minutes, during a wrap-up lunch on Friday. But I'm stumped. I could easily just show a TED talk (or two, if edited for time) but... what you YOU show, considering the audience is made up of faculty members from a wide range of disciplines, but are brought together by a common interest in inquiry and blended learning?

I've been looking for a way to export a Moodle course in a format that can be ingested in another standards-compliant LMS. The obvious choices are SCORM or IMS-CP.

But, neither are supported as export formats from Moodle. Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. It's a one-way trip. Content can check in, but it can never leave.

I just recorded a (very) quick and dirty screencast to demo the EduGlu sandbox prototype that was put together in Drupal. It's a 23 minute session, and clocks in at 28 MB. I probably rambled a bit more than I should have, but you'll get the idea...

(The Anarchy Media Player displays a smallish video embedded on this post, but you can download the video to view at 640x480 if you want to try to read the tiny text in the screencast)

Scott threw a suggestion onto Twitter this morning that has been percolating for a few hours.

It just hit me. CANHEIT is here at UCalgary in June.

I can arrange meeting space here on campus. If anyone's interested in a face-to-face Eduglu/Social:Learn/Web 2.0 in higher ed meetup, how does The University of Calgary in June 2008 sound? Maybe Thursday June 19th? Something during the conference proper? The week before or after? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

I'm not going to post a conference recap, and others have beaten me to the punch with eloquent reflections on the event. It's one of those things that sounds like fanaticism - the sense of wonder usually reserved for such things as the TED conference (aside: could you imagine going to that? how many toes would I gladly trade for a TED pass?) But, Northern Voice has become, or has always been, one of those events that help me form my own thinking, and helps to connect that with the awesome stuff that the really great minds (that I am lucky enough to be allowed to tag along with) are doing.

I've been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept - a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It's getting really close - it can currently suck in all kinds of feeds, auto-tagging items, and even lets students create their own groups and associate feeds with them. There are issues, to be sure, mostly with respect to honouring the original tags in the aggregated items, and with taking advantage of the social rating system added to the website, but it's so close I can taste it.

I was present at a faculty collaboration project meeting today, and one of the profs was showing some of the resources they've built to support their classroom teaching. It was some impressive video work, which the prof admitted could easily have applications in other classes, or institutions, or even other disciplines. He then went on to describe the rigorous steps that he'd had to take in order to prevent that from happening - video being hosted on an internal streaming server so nobody could find it without seeing the video embedded on a course within Blackboard. He was struggling to implement the embedding as effectively as he wanted. When asked why that was necessary, why not just put the video onto YouTube or Google Video? They had actually thought of that initially - it solves the bandwidth, hosting, and embedding problems quite nicely.