This is not news since I just stumbled on this, and it turns out that this has been going on this whole year: the Flickr Commons. It’s a way to obtain references or use of images that have no copyright restrictions or at least been put into the public domain. This is an example of one from the WWII era (a period I’m really starting to enjoy learning about).

This is Sarah Outwater, a young woman who has been blind since she was 3 years old. She’s a cancer survivor (metastatic retinoblastoma) and has been in her condition ever since she had surgery on her eyes to protect her from the deadly disease.

I was invited to participate in a charity project for a little girl she had heard of on the news who was in a similar condition as she was at her age, except technology has advanced and this little girl (last I heard) was free of her cancer and still able to see.

Sarah is an extremely intelligent girl and can play several different musical instruments and uses technology to support her education and professional career goals. In her charity project, she was compiling a music album and asking for donations to help the family of the girl who was receiving cancer treatments. As part of my donation, I offered to build a web site and create/donate some multimedia presentations for benefit concerts and post them on the website (This was before I heard of YouTube). Sarah brought her laptop to my workplace and we cut some video interviews together and I showed her how to edit content for the website. Later we were joking together in a group meeting about how people and technology interact. I made the quip that people who talk to their technology to get it to do obscure things are borderline bonkers, and she retorted "well that’s nothing. My technology talks to me!"

Of course it was true. In our interactions for her laptop was equipped with screen reading technology that allowed her to complete her work for school and work on her music projects. This is a prime example of adaptive use of technology for a population that predominantly gets their work done despite the fact that they can’t see what they are doing.

However, that’s not the only way people who can’t make use of their eyes to do their work continue to survive. They must be able to use their other senses. Audio alone in my humble opinion is not the savior of interaction with technology. People must be able to use their other senses too. Which of the remaining  4 senses makes the most sense for HCI for blind people? Touch or tactile surfaces is what’s coming to mind.

Here is something that Macrodobia (Adobe the company and Macromedia‘s Technology) have been pushing for a while…the idea that consistent technology for authoring multimedia content be available on a multitude of devices. What this means is that soon someday we will be seeing flash on tons of personal handheld devices.

I also suspect we will see flash interfaces on other devices too such as kitchen appliances and home entertainment center components. Even more sobering would be to see it in public facilities and transportation devices such as elevators.

Adobe is really pushing their flash platform which is really good for people like me who enjoy learning about their platform. What I would really like to see is an concerted effort to research what accessibility options exist for persons who can’t use their eyes to interact with interfaces that will potentially be flat and non-tactile.

Even Apple’s iPhone with all its glitz and glory has its issues. How does a person who can’t see be excited about an iPhone for their communication needs? Sarah had no problem using her cell phone to communicate, and could very easily find the buttons to push because she could feel them with her fingers. Voice activation is probably on the horizon and may become mandatory for devices using these interfaces, and I will be waiting to see what advances are on their way with Adobe’s technology.

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

This is an interesting perspective as a preface to this: http://www.adobe.com/solutions/broadcast/pdfs/forrester_report.pdf

 

We (at work) have made a concerted effort to comply to the TEACH act for fair use rights in digitizing media for educational purposes. Under the TEACH act, an accredited institution must take measures to ensure that digitized dramatic content must not be able to be replicated or archived by those who would consume it.

 

 

"11. While the transmission of distance education content may be conducted by diverse technological means, an institution deploying "digital transmissions" must apply technical measures to prevent "retention of the work in accessible form by recipients of the transmission . . . for longer than the class session." The statute offers no clarification about the meaning of a "class session," but language throughout the statute suggests that any given transmission would require a finite amount of time, and students would be unable to access it after a designated time. Also, in the case of "digital transmissions," the institution must apply "technological measures" to prevent recipients of the content from engaging in "unauthorized further dissemination of the work in accessible form." Both of these restrictions address concerns from copyright owners that students might receive, store, and share the copyrighted content. Both of these provisions of the statute call upon the institution to implement technological controls on methods for delivery, terms of accessibility, and realistic abilities for students to download or share copyrighted content. These provisions specifically demand application of "technological measures" that would restrict uses of the content "in the ordinary course of their operations." In other words, when the restrictive controls are used in an "ordinary" manner, they will safeguard against unauthorized reproduction and dissemination. This language apparently protects the institution, should someone "hack" the controls and circumvent imperfect technology." (Source: http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/teach_summary.htm)

 

The reason I ask this is that our campus has made use of the Helix Community Streaming server and has been delivering content using RealNetworks’ proprietary streaming format. Because at the time the decision was made it seemed to work and in our minds we were doing our best to deliver a good learning medium via online video and protecting ourselves in the process. Also, from a usability standpoint, many instructors who deploy media on the server encourage their students to download the latest free version of RealPlayer. I’ll refrain from the criticism of the annoyances that deploying the software creates (I’ll trust anyone replying to this message will do likewise)

 

I’ve not delved into it too much but the Windows version has a blatant feature embedded into the client that allows the user to save streamed media directly to their computer. It is painfully obvious that once installed, any of our instructors and media developers who have gone to great strides to protect content because the technology at the time was originally invented to protect it, is now left with a big problem to fix.  While our streaming media initiative is still very young (we aren’t delivering much copyrighted work at this time), I would like to address it before it gets blown out of proportion.  I have some ideas already but I’d like to ask what everyone else is doing for reference.

 

It seems like media technology companies have failed to address the impact that their ‘bowing’ to the trend of the general community of media consumers finding a way to download video content anyway shouldn’t affect education in the least bit, but if I’m reading into this correctly it seems like they’ve left educators out of the loop on their decision.

 

So I guess my point is three-fold: 1. Am I reading into this correctly given our circumstance, that we aren’t covered under the TEACH act anymore? 2. Is anyone else aware of this and affected by it? 3. Since RealMedia is a proprietary format, it isn’t easily convertable into another more desireable format. What would you be able to offer as a suggestion what to do with our instructors’ content?

 

Any insights would be appreciated.

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.

The instructor in this news story used Wikipedia in a whole different way by making an assignment for her students to contribute articles to Wikipedia; thereby having the experience of not just writing for their professor but for the whole world.

Sales Engineers have hounded us for money with it…

Conference presenters have put us to sleep with it…

Its inventors insist that it exist in our computing environments…all in hopes that we pay them money just for the privilege…

So what is this ghastly beast? And how can we stop it? Of course this is in jest. Any presentation software to be used to inform, educate, motivate an audience, etc. eventually MUST possess the capabilities that PowerPoint has. The principles of using a large screen to do this isn’t necessarily evil. So who is the true killer of the true intent and power of PowerPoint and its competitors? Most likely its users. Because it is relatively pervasive and so easy to get a presentation going educators and other informers often fall back on it to be the sole source of instruction. Keeping this in mind, my opinion that removing the human element from instruction is almost always detrimental to content that is by nature already dry. The solution? Develop talents of presentation style in the human first, and then focus on improving the human’s use of technology.

Given all this, what is the best software that will allow teachers to do this? Google now offers an online knockoff of PowerPoint in its Docs suite that has already revolutionized word processing and spreadsheet use. Here’s a recent comparison review from Slate.com. I’ll let you be the judge:

Our staple is Mount Royal College’s FAST (Free Assessment Summary Tool) at http://getfast.ca . Some of the things that are noteworthy about the tool are:

• It not only collects data but also aggregates it so that you can see things in summary forms such as charting and graphing
• It supports short-answer feedback as well as likert and paragraph-style feedback.
• You can download a special MS-Excel Spreadsheet that contains a special feedback connection link that will download collected data directly into the spreadsheet. This is great if you like to have an offline version of the data all ready to print.

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