• Neuropsychology - (To check my mood during my treatment. I think I did okay with this as it was but it’s part of the program for just about everyone)
• Occupational Therapy (To be sure my day-to-day activities and responsiblities could be maximized and potential compensations for any supposed or indentified deficiencies be brought forth)
• Physical Therapy (To be sure my energy level and my body was performing as normally as possible)
• Speech and Language Therapy (To help in areas related to visual scanning, language processing, and deductive reasoning) In actuality my OT and SLT sessions sometimes overlapped and my therapists threw several curve balls my way to be sure I could reach my fullest potential. As self-revealing as that was, it was very effective

There were other experiences that led up to this point in time, but suffice it to say, I’ve been performing well. My supervisor and co-workers have been very supportive. My clientele routinely tell me they can’t tell me any difference in my personality. That’s an inside-the-box, vs. outside-the-box perspective issue. The charts and graphs of my cognitive rehabilitation exercises show that considerable progress was made. In order to justify considerable, the tasks that patients in this program all go through include doing paper-pencil exercises and other tasks that stretch and bend your mind so that new neural pathways can be made and if not, what compensations could be made.

As part of all this, one of my new side-projects I’m taking on is to take some of the assessment tools and exercises I was given as paper-pencil tests and try to digitize them into programs that anyone can do online at home. My platform of choice is likely going to be Adobe Flex/AIR as that is what I’m most familiar with. I’ll keep everyone updated as I progress.

Well, my intent of edumacating (yes that’s a made-up word) readers on how a grown man deals with life post major brain surgery hasn’t been all that exciting enough to warrant a new post (just yet), so I’m filling a gap with some stuff that went on my other blogs that other friends and family have been keeping tabs on (http://www.spiritualslideshows.ws). Feel free to bury your nose in that blogpile if you really want the history of what’s going on medically with me. If you want the short version, here it is:

• The surgery was successful and now I’m missing a chunk of my right frontal lobe about the size of my fist (about the size of an orange–my fists are under the average size)
• Not only was the surgery successful, but there was too much fluid of the cerebrospinal variety being generated to compensate for the lost tissue and was causing massive killer headaches. A week later I went back to have a shunt installed and that was successful as well, so headaches no more. Injuries caused at the surgical locations where the shunt-work (ha-ha sort of rhymes with stunt-work) was performed now remain as my #1 enemies at this point in time. They aren’t bad but I’m learning to live with them. Soon they will be gone
• Doctor follow-up visits have been positive and further treatments will include radiation but NOT chemo-therapy–thank goodness.
• I’m excited about an upcoming visit to a neuro-psychologist this week. They will help determine what I’m capable of and will hopefully affix a time for me to be able to return to work and resume my normal duties. However, in MY humble, unprofessional opinion, my brain has already been re-wiring itself since it’s been receiving sensory input. Obviously I can still operate a computer because I’m updating my websites, I can hold a conversation and hopefully still sound intelligent (I think so), and I haven’t forgotten how to write code or manipulate media which is important for my profession. What I suppose might be worrisome is my ability to stay on task given longer periods of time sitting down at a desk job, design and architecht software the way I’m used to, and meeting my personal goals of accomplishing helping people learn some of the things I’ve learned over the years so they can be self-sufficient in their approach to computing.

  Now the really exciting thing here is (and I’m not blushing too much hopefully when I say this) is that if I’m able to do all this with part of my brain missing, then that points to lots and LOTS of potential for individuals who have all of their brain tissue intact. As soon as I have my hands on the scans of my brain I’ll post them so that the world can see what I’m missing and what I’m now going to be dealing with for the rest of my life. My neurosurgeon might even let me observe a future brain surgery if I meet the right sort of criteria. That would be WAY cool. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

My take on it is that for instruction we have to take into effect the philosophy that the best determining factor of what a person will learn can depend on what they already know. If a person is situated and surrounded by technology, they likely expect technology to be the medium by which they receive instruction.

With that said, I was having a conversation with a faculty member yesterday about the most important role that technology places in curriculum. I go back to my own learning experiences, both self-directed and instructor-led, classroom or "life experience" and realize that the human factor has always been a big part of it. If I was the last person on earth and all I had left were the technology left behind, I wonder how I might go about continuing to learn all that I could about various subjects?

My take on it is that if students have an expectation of how best they learn we should be aware of that fact. At the same time, I like going back into history before the advances of technology that we have currently were available. My assessment is that some of the greatest teachers and learners still succeeded without it. Why? It could be a number of factors, but having proper motivation of self or of instructor was likely a factor.

Most of my colleagues in the field would agree that by nature human beings are built to learn all that they can. Whether or not they are successful in that aspect of their life largely depends on their environment. Therefore, there is still a great need for people who can be mentors, encouraging entities, tutors, coaches, and most importantly good parents. I think it’s useless to point fingers at things or people or place blame when it comes to poor learning outcomes. Rather we should work towards correcting and improving learning opportunities. Technology is a big portion of that, but being an influence and role model for successful living is priceless in a world filled with teaching and learning opportunities.

May we choose our technology wisely and seek the success of our students accordingly!

In all these cases, the content producer provides the experience, and the content consumer walks away with a desire to return. Specific to education, we are to engage our students in a good learning experience and we want them to desire to learn based on that experience. The overall outcome is a student who leaves our instruction feeling like they got their return on investment (time, money, effort, etc.) and we as instructors know we have helped someone to learn and to grow.

As far as technology is concerned, we should be looking for ways to appropriately select/design/implement technology that increases this rather than overwhelms someone with new technology that is difficult to learn and/or cumbersome to set up.

For the web, a big buzzword being pushed by content developers/designers is what is being called RIA’s or Rich Internet Applications. What this means is that we can use technology to enhance a web site to the point where it becomes more usable than just a static page of text. It becomes alive and responsive, with minimal impact on the hardware/software requirements and prior user knowledge/experience. For a while now we’ve been seeing this with Web 2.0 (a term I still don’t like using, but will anyway for the sake of communicating with others who do understand and use it), and social networking concepts.

I’ve been experimenting with Adobe’s Flex platform which allows a software developer to create a single-frame Flash application using traditional programming methods rather than the Flash authoring tool which has an animator/designer perspective. The types of things that can be created with this are endless and Adobe is very quick to push this into the mainstream. Adobe sees it as the best thing since sliced bread was invented, and for the time being I agree with them. If enough developers get behind it, I can see it influencing desktop educational software development for quite some time.

One of the recent products developed on the Adobe Flex RIA mindset is a tool called Scrapblog. It’s a tool that allows anyone to create a rich engaging multimedia presentation that is shareable across computing platforms for free.

I’m going to try and create something cool and post it here later this week so stay tuned. Check out some things that others have done: (I haven’t seen many educational focused presentations yet, but intend to change that soon!)

http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=31324

I’m also about to finish up my final paper for my EDT591 class, and I need some typing to get in the writer’s mood.

As part of my experience being away from MCC for the semester, I was somewhat worried that I would have too much time on my hands. Quite the contrary; it has been just the right amount of time and every day there was something new to learn.

One of the things I did was contribute to an e-learning project using an Adobe Flex project, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought at the start of it. Dr. Brian Nelson’s area of focus is interactive multi-user virtual educational environments or MUVEE’s. Many of people who are practitioners in Ed Tech seem to always going for the latest tactic or invention. Given past experience, I’m always willing to try things out for the sake of trying, but I don’t always agree with how effective they are in the end. I’m speaking about SecondLife by Linden Labs. Many universities are opening up virtual campuses and allowing users to participate in those environment for a slew of educational experiences. The value of learning this way has merits, but as for myself I refuse to go in there and prefer to watch others. Reality as far as education is concerned as challenging as it is, is my best friend.

What I do like about Dr. Nelson’s MUVEE’s project(s) is that they are actually lab-tested and verified means of whether or not learning is achieved by way of learner participation using a virtual environment as a tool.

When I was picking the classes I would need to graduate, one of them fell through. I was already pursuing the idea of a graduate assistantship since I thought I would need to fill up the time. In the end, Dr. Nelson was able to get me to work on his project as a volunteer and have it count towards my final credit for graduation, so I got involved with his Simlandia project, which is using the ActiveWorlds browser retooled as an educational environment.

What this environment does is allow participants to collaboratively work together to solve a scientific problem. Other graduate students have been running sessions where participants involved are observed while they interact in small teams and communicate with each other using several modes. This semeseter, the mode of communication was VoIP using Skype.

Where I got to really help out was the way that the participants interact with the Bots (non player computer controlled characters) who gave out clues and hints to solving the problem. Dr. Nelson and the other grad students want to investigate the proximity effect with learning, buy putting all relevant learning content in one browser pane window. Right now the only way to interact with a bot character is to right-click on them using your mouse, and choosing from a menu of possible interactions.

What is better in our eyes is single left clicking on the bot character in question and you get a new page designed solely for interacting with the Bot.

In the end you get a page with a Flex application (which I built from scratch), and provides a learner with a new interface to interact with the bot.

In the process of doing so, (I was teaching myself the ins and outs of Flex integration using a proprietary environment) I learned some good do’s and dont’s when it comes to writing Flex code. For the sake of containment and usability, my next post will contain the common procedures that will be of most use to other people learning Flex.

Here’s a version with some overlays to indicate those learning activities that are active and passive:

Active learning would include those activities that charge our brains and capacities to remember what we are experiencing. Passive learning would include those activities that people can still learn from, but not generally as effective as active learning.

Given this, we should realize that every human being is different. We as instructors and educators should be flexible to adapt to every person’s learning style and seek out their needs

As stated, I’m releasing this under a Creative Commons License under a variety of animated media presentation formats:

• MS PowerPoint (version 2003 or greater) Cone of Experience Media PowerPoint
• Adobe Captivate (version 1 or later) Cone of Experience Media Captivate
• Adobe Flash (version 8 or greater) Cone of Learning (Adobe Flash)
• Adobe Fireworks as an unflattened PNG file (still images only) Cone of Learning (Adobe Fireworks PNG)

Here’s the link to download them all as a zipped archive: Cone of Experience Media

As mentioned, anyone can use this stuff to their heart’s content as per the creative commons license below:

Edgar Dale Cone of Experience Media by Jeffrey Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.edutechie.ws