CITations

Stephen Downes and his guest author (who's handling the blog while Downes is on vacation), highlighted two e-books which may be of interest to educators who want to incorporate technology in their lessons.

The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (2nd Ed.). Editied by Terry Anderson. Athabasca University Press.
Available under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.5 license.

• PART I: Role and Function of Theory in Online Education Development and Delivery


• PART II: Infrastructure and Support for Content Development


• PART III: Design and Development of Online Courses


• PART IV: Delivery, Quality Control, and Student Support of Online Courses

• Part 1: The Impact of Instructional Technologies


• Part 2: Preparing Online Courses


• Part 3: Implementing Technology


• Part 4: E-learning in Action


• Part 5: Engagement and Communication

Together, the two books cover a wide range of issues in educational technology. Quite coincidentally, the two books add up to 1,000 pages to sink your teeth into.

That's quite a bit to read on screen, so CIT has requested that The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (2nd Ed.) be made available in the Central Library. We will also look into requesting a copy of Education for a Digital World.

YouTube recently introduced a beta feature in YouTube: video annotation. You can add notes, links, highlight specific areas within a video and more. Quite nifty, if you ask me.

Annotation in YouTube is limited to the video uploader. There used to be a collaborative video annotation service, Mojiti. Unfortunately, this service, which was previously featured here, has shut down.

Another related service is dotSUB. This one allows people to collaboratively add subtitles to videos. Terrific for educators, especially those in language education.

Via Digital-Lifestyles, Hat tip to Vantan, who highlighted this in her Google Reader shared items.

The librarians have gone all Web 2.0 now. First, they started a blog. Now, they've got a Flickr account.

So far, just a few photos from the recent Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Open Day. It's a nice outreach tool. Hopefully, we can see what's going on in the different libraries, such as exhibitions and events, on their Flickr account.

Very nice to see our friendly librarians putting their best smiles forward in the photos!

Wiki guru Stewart Mader provides pertinent advice on success strategies for wiki adoption.

In summary, he lists five points:

• Start with what you already do


• Go viral


• Invite senior leadership


• Find the champions


• Practice what you preach

As CIT looks for a wiki engine for the university community, we hope that we do not fall into the trap of "build it and they will come".

For academics who are keen to use wikis in the classroom, here are some case studies. Also, check out The Science of Spectroscopy's Using Wiki in Education.

| View | Upload your own

Wikipedia is often vilified for its accuracy (rather, the lack thereof), but it is still a very useful starting point for research. Uber-geek and PhD candidate Kevin Lim, who researches online communities, talks to high school students about how to use Wikipedia in the classroom.

He gives terrific advice, talking about Wikipedia clearly and accessibly. While the talk was tailored for the equivalent of Junior College students here, it's useful for undergraduates too.

You can view the video* at the top and follow with the slides (above).

Read Kevin's post at theory.isthereason.com.

* A pity it gets cut off during an interesting question at the end.

Microsoft has taken the plunge into the end-user eLearning market, where there is a perceived need for a pedagogically sound and easy to use eLearning course creation tool. Their effort is the Learning Content Development System (LCDS). Hat tip to Stephen Downes, who higlighted Jorge Goncalves' post about this.

Let's take a look at LCDS.

Walkthrough
LCDS is a free download. However, you must have a Windows Live account to do so. Installation was a cinch. Do note the minimum system requirements in the FAQ. While IE7 is supposed to be a requirement, LCDS works on the test system which had IE6 installed. Speaking of Internet Explorer, Mac and Linux users might want to check out eXe - the eLearning XHTML editor instead.

The interface is divided into a horizontal toolbar and three functional columns - course structure, templates and page.

The Course Structure column highlights the outline of the course. There are four levels in the hierrachy - Course, Module, Lesson and Topic. A toolbar allows you to add Modules, Lessons and Topics as well as enabling you to rearrange these.

The Templates column allows you to choose various presets from five categories - Interact, Watch, Play, Read, Try - for the Modules and Topics. These range from informational text and mixed media pages to interactive activities and games. Descriptions of these templates can be found in the help file.

The Page column displays the fields for each template. These will differ based on the chosen template. The screenshot shows the Introduction template (under the Read category). This template includes fields for instructor's photo, voice-of-expert (VOE) summary, ability to add an audio file and an accompanying transcript and two text fields.

You can preview your work by clicking the Preview button (on the right side of horizontal toolbar, indicated with a magnifying glass icon). An IE screen will pop up with the preview. You might have to allow the ActiveX control first.

Reviewer's Impressions
While LCDS seems simple to use at first, non-technical users will immediately embark on a steep learning curve. The general layout of the programme is intuitive. However, it stops short there as users have to figure out several things for themselves e.g. Templates only apply to Modules and Topics, not Courses and Lessons; the functions of each template is not explained, neither are the fields within each template.

Possible areas of improvement
- Cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility. Not everyone uses Windows and IE.
- Remove the Windows Live account requirement.
- Contextual help where possible. Perhaps the text fields should not be empty but have explanatory notes, which go away once the user clicks the field.
- Re-categorise templates for better consistency.
- Automate the publication process.
- Improve publishing options for those who do not have access to a SCORM-compliant Leaning Management System.

Conclusion
LCDS seems to be early in its development. Still, there is a solid enough base to build upon. In the mean time, as mentioned earlier in this post, there is the Open Source and pluggable, eXe, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Uber-blogger and Lecturer N. Sivasothi (a.k.a Otterman), over at the Department of Biological Sciences, shared his lecture preparation methods with NUS librarians last Wednesday.

With his trusty Mac, he gathers information and materials from readily accessible, reconfigurable and redistributable content via del.icio.us, Flickr and numerous video sites such as YouTube.

You can check out the slides from his presentation above and he's created a Google Document with the links mentioned during the talk.

Siva also briefly touched on his use of NUS Module Blogs for a student assignment. You can read the students' blog posts about animal behaviour. He also runs a module blog for LSM1303 Animal Behaviour, which is where a lot of the online material he gathers gets featured after lectures.

P.S. And if you really want to know why he is an uber-blogger, check out this video at theory.isthereason.com. (Just skip a little past the first bit.)

Let it not be said that our librarians are stuffy. NUS Librarians now blog at LINUSonline, the online version of their newsletter. Calling it the online version does not do it justice though. The blog is more of an extension of the regular print version.

The posts, written by several librarians, run from the humdrum but important library announcements to the entertaining yet informative encounters with students.

Alvin Trusty gives a presentation about PowerPoint and copyright. He starts off with some questions about copyright, dives into his PowerPoint tips and then talks about copyright in the United States.

I suggest watching this from start to end. Some of the PowerPoint tips are not new to the savvy but he has some nice ones about the use of colour and about transitions. He sprinkles his tips throughout the entire presentation, so look out for them!

While the copyright portion is about United States law, it is interesting to view, if only to get a feel for copyright issues educators face there. He also touches briefly on Creative Commons.

The presentation is 45 minutes long, but worth the watch.

Via Stephen Downes.

Recently, a lecturer asked us if it is possible to limit forum access to specific students. This is possible though a multi-step process. You will have to assign students to a group, then assign the group to the respective forum. Here's how to do it:

Preliminaries

• Your Module has already been created in IVLE.


• Create a Discussion Forum if you have not done so. Workspace > Discussion Forum > Create Forum > Choose Parent Module, Title the Forum > Choose number of Forums depending on number of groups (Two groups in the following example) > Create (Remember to publish the forums once you've set everything up.)

Setting up the limited-access forums

1. From Workspace, click Class Management on the left sidebar.

2. Click Edit.

3. Click Groups, under Management on the sidebar.

4. Click Create Class Groups.

5. Set preferences: Name the group(s). (Numbers will be automatically added to multiple groups.) Describe the group. Decide group enrolment - student or your choice. Choose number of groups. Click Apply.

6. Click Assign Students.

7. Choose how to assign students. If you assign students manually, click on the student's name (Ctrl-click to select multiple students), then click the corresponding arrow button to move the student to the respective group. Click Apply.

8. Click Discussion Forums from the Tools drop menu.

9. Click Edit of the respective Forum.

10. Click Edit.

11. In Accessible To, under Security, uncheck all items except for the group that should have access to this particular Forum.

Voila! Select students now have access to the chosen Forum.