Awesome blog! Definitely with your IT background you have done above and beyond my expectations. Appreciate it and can tell you have a passion and strength that you can build upon in the future. Many thanks for taking this course.

As for Moodle 2.1, we haven’t upgraded yet. I was waiting for 2.1 (which barely came out) since full course migration wasn’t fully/officially supported before then, and I’m not going to make our teachers redo everything. Honestly, I don’t see us migrating until next school year, as I simply don’t have time to do it this summer…which is fine with me…except I also don’t want to have to do a lot of work to upgrade the custom course format we come up with to be compatible with 2.x. I don’t think it would be a ton of extra effort, especially if it’s designed for cross-compatibility. We’re still weighing the options, and I’d like to avoid having to postpone the new course format implementation until summer 2012 if at all possible.

Thanks for your post and participation!

Dr. Werth

i have not used a kinect type interface but have been in vws for 5 years now and can see that it would not have much of an impact

to me, it seems that the relationships are more dependent on the textual chat element than anything else

even as a tinie furry, you can develop deep trust based mainly on chat

well done and thanks! =)

Excellent post. I agree that in the context of pure entertainment too much gaming can be unhealthy, but I also believe that we need to consider the type and form of gaming a person engages in rather than caution against excessive gaming across the board. The Immersive  Education Initiative, for example, advocates the use of learning games for teachers and students. With thousands of academic members this non-profit consortium now has over half a million students “playing”  learning games that are freely available and actively promoted by teachers as opposed to discouraged. They also utilize traditional video games as incentives for students to complete homework, in a more controlled fashion than you might imagine. Last month they also began education teachers and parents about video game addiction and violence, providing guidelines to identify students and children who do have legitimate issues with gaming. Interestingly, a wide range of Immersive Education members have developed modern learning games that are similar to traditional video games, specifically to engage the student. From Harvard to Temple to the Smithsonian you’ll find a range of game like learning environments that the organization promotes, some of which can be seen in the videos at their website   http://members.ImmersiveEducation.org where you can also find a wide array of peer-reviewed literature that supports the value of games (all types of games, even World of Warcraft and its ilk). And so although I am deeply concerned about the amount of pure entertainment-based gaming our youth (and let’s face it, adults) engage in I believe that we are on the verge of seeing a different form of game compete for our time: the learning game. In the near future I would not be surprised if high-quality learning games are competing directly with video games for users attention, and that would not be a bad thing. In fact it might be a quantum leap forward for education and society. Thanks again for a thought-provoking article, which I had intended only to scan and ended up reading in detail and being motivated to reply to.

With Linden Lab’s recent announcement of Teen Second Life closing down, they also stated they wanted to work directly with educators in figuring out how to make the Second Life adult grid a suitable and safe environment for classroom use. I think we’ll only see progress in that direction.

I would love to see Second Life being used in our schools, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways to do it. Our filter isn’t sophisticated enough to filter by region. One way I can think of is to edit the SL Viewer code (it’s open source) and provide a whitelist of approved regions. It would simply disallow access to any region NOT in the list. That way, a student can only choose from a very limited list of destinations while they’re exploring the virtual worlds…unless, of course, they install another viewer.

I want to let you know that we released a new version of Freepath a couple of weeks back. To refresh your memory, you can drag-and-drop PowerPoint slides, documents, videos, audio, and web sites into Freepath. This is a great tool for those who want to give engaging media-rich presentations, but want to avoid the hassle of embedding media inside their PowerPoint slides.

I invite you to give the new version a test drive: https://www.freepath.com/Store/GetTrial

Also, I do a weekly webinar every Wednesday at 9am PST where I go over features and answer questions. Visit the following web page 10 minutes before 9am and there will be a link to join the webinar: http://www.freepath.com/Live If this time doesn’t work for you, let me know a good time and I can set up a demo for you.

Best regards,

Dave Giusti
Office 916.504.2510 ext. 115

Also, we went with osTube rather than phpMotion, mainly because when I first started experimenting with setting up a media sharing site, phpMotion was still pretty much an alpha product. I kind of want to migrate back to phpMotion now, but osTube has worked quite well for us anyway, plus we’re adding a ton of new features that will pretty much solidify our use of osTube.

I will admit, I like osTube’s media player better than phpMotion’s, though I think phpMotion has cleaner code, and I later found out that osTube requires that you purchase an “open source license” fee (who ever heard of such a thing?) before modifying the source code. It was only a few hundred bucks, but still an inconvenience. Lesson learned: Always read the Terms of Service carefully before using a new “free” product.

Glad to see the PHP Motion did the trick for your teachers as well !!!

I do love Google Squared. Incidentally, I used it only yesterday to help my 1st grade daughter create a chart for a school project on cockroaches. In only a few minutes, we had a nice table filled with information she wanted: http://www.google.com/squared/table/agIkSdot_vDV7VERNSpIIejA So powerful and easy!

Thanks again for your positive contributions to the field of education.

Your blog is inspiring, useful, and darn good looking too. I will learn a lot from you this semester. Thanks!

One limitation of the free community version of osTube, though, is that even though they call it “open source,” they don’t let you change the source code unless you buy a license for an enterprise version — it’s just a one-time payment.

An alternative to osTube which you might like is phpMotion: http://www.phpmotion.com — pretty similar, but 100% open source. Adding LDAP to that would be similar: just modify the login routines. I’d check the PHPMotion forums — I think some of the users have actually posted sample code for LDAP integration on there.

Thanks, Phil Howard
Elgin Community College

Frankly, I am getting a Déjà vu effect while going through the “Google Squared” application because it appears to be very similar in function to my United States patent application which was filed on April 12, 2007 and as publicly disclosed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 16, 2008, when the patent application was published.

My patent application is titled as “Method And System For Research Using Computer Based Simultaneous Comparison And Contrasting Of A Multiplicity Of Subjects Having Specific Attributes Within Specific Contexts” bearing Document Number “20080256023” and Inventor name “Nair Satheesh” which may be viewed at http://patft.uspto.gov/ upon Patent Applications: Quick Search.

Google Squared appears to be using at least some if not many of the same methods and systems as set forth by me more than two years ago in my patent application. In fact there are many more methods and systems disclosed in my patent application which I believe will help resolve certain inaccuracies found in current Google Squared application.

I have issued legal notices to Google through my Patent Attorney in the US but Google has not responded yet to any of my notices.

What a great idea, about creating an interdistrict student teaching network! I was still thinking inside the box, and just proposing we let our own district’s students do the teaching, but if we could develop a system that’s open to students in other districts, that would REALLY be something.

Facebook does have quite a few educational applications that would be suited to this, but as long as we’re blocking Myspace and Facebook here it won’t be the best option. However, the Moodle Network feature might be a viable alternative, though I haven’t really had a chance to mess around with that before. I’ll have to give it some thought, but ultimately it would be up to our upper management whether or not we’ll be able to do any of this, especially joint projects with other districts.

Thanks for the comments!

Enjoyed talking with you today! Sorry I had to step out for a minute or so. I look forward to working with you guys more in the future.

This lines up really well with what Alan November talks about when he discusses the six jobs for students in a class (http://novemberlearning.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=290&Itemid=85). I can see Moodle, or another LMS, covering the jobs of: Tutorial Designer, Official Scribe, Researcher, Collaboration Coordinator, and Curriculum Reviewers.

What is really exciting is to see how students really start to get involved and start to push themselves. For many years teachers have used similar strategies in the classroom, it is only a question of when it moves online.

Tim
El Paso

One technological focus in our school district this year will largely be on student applications, and how we can engage students to use these tools for learning. I think this could be a great means to an end.

Thanks for sharing.

I’m not sure how many spaces will be available in 2009. That will be a decision left up to the BrainBlast management (I’m just a humble peon). I certainly want to see BrainBlast getting bigger each year. Again, keep in mind it’s still early and things are subject to change.

Another thought I had was on the registration. The first year it was easy to register, plenty of space. This year, even though I registered the day it opened up, I still couldn’t get into all of the classes I wanted. I’m just concerned that if you only have 2 days for everyone, it will be impossible!

I think enough people know about Brain Blast now, that you could offer 2-3 sessions and have them all fill up. Maybe you could have BrainBlast in June, July, or August so that more people could have the opportunity to attend.

Your statistics actually give me some hope, and it’s really too early to tell just how much this will take off. I am quite sure, though, our numbers won’t improve much without some measures being taken, but I think we’re doing the right things. We just started a new program in our district called E-volve which offers individualized training classes for groups of teachers right at their schools, and Moodle is one of the classes offered. I’m hoping more teachers and administrators take advantage of this. I have a few other ideas which I’m still trying to hammer out in my brain, too.

Thanks for the comment!

Many of our teachers use Moodle only for their class web site while others do the full meal deal with online assessments, forums, assignments etc… On the administrative side we use it for numerous professional learning communities and many of our committees use Moodle for all of their committee work. We have found a huge number of ways to use this resource both in simple and complex scenarios. Good luck on the roll out this year.

And you know not what you speak of when you ask to see my awesome Kung Fu moves. I might inadvertently do the Golden Lotus Bullfrog Stare into the camera and unleash temporary blindness or insanity upon all my viewers.

Well thought out observations in your post.

I’m sorry you weren’t at NECC. I hope you know how your efforts and those of others helped to make everyone’s experience better, whether they were in San Antonio or not.

PLNs helped to keep us all in the loop and allowed me to checkout some sessions from outside the closed doors of the lecture rooms. Thanks for all you did to help spread the word.

I hope to meet you f2f at a future conference!

Jabber feed is currently disabled until Twitter figures out what’s up. So for now, tweets will be few and far between. It sucks but what can you do?
Oh well– great idea for an app, maybe one day it will actually work.