With that said, I’m gearing up for a new project that will involve my commitment to the Adobe Education Champions group (E-Champions) to utilize their ‘gift’ of a Connect Pro account so I can begin sharing with the ed tech developer community some of the techy things that apply to what they might be learning theory-wise.

I’m calling this my edutechie corner and someday soon I will have a series of screencasts that showcase some of the Adobe Creative Tecnology software suites.

Details will be forthcoming…

In the meantime, here’s an idea using some of the methods that Adobe itself is pushing in the next generation of designer and developer workflows using one of my more favorite tools: Fireworks:

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.

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!

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.

One of the things we came to a conclusion upon was the fact that it is EXTREMELY time-consuming to put together a good, engaging, and pedagogically sound audio presentation. Apple computer is putting together several tools to hopefully make that easier.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/podcasts.html

Given Apple’s success in making difficult things easier for people who are intimidated by technology, hopefully this would put this in the hands of instructors who can make good use of it.

Here’s another alternative: Buzzword

Here’s a presentation about it and demo.

http://adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com/p91904463/

What I like about buzzword over Google Docs is the ability to insert images. It’s possible in Google Docs, but very difficult. This is so much easier.

Inside is an interesting reference on how technology is affecting instruction today. I like the fact that it focuses back on the teacher: (note that in the following quote, IT is referring to Information Technology and NOT Instructional Technology, but I think in the end it applies to both)

“IT is not a good substitute for good teaching. Good teachers are good with or without IT and students learn a great deal from them. Poor teachers are poor with or without IT and students learn little from them.”

Here’s the link: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/17/it

Here’s a picture of the class experience: (sorry it was taken with my camera phone and it’s not the best)

The actual demo of the unit was interesting to see. It has its use in many different arenas. Primarily in the research of HCI and software usage. However, we had a discussion about how it could be used in other educational venues as well. Some of those are:

• Seeing how individuals with reading disorders move their eyes as they scan and try to cognitively process text
• Accurately diagnosing individuals with ADHD
• Seeing how learners trained to read languages using a Romanized font (i.e. for English or Spanish) move to be able to cognitively process other written languages that use different symbols or are more symbolic in nature. (Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or modern Asian languages such as Chinese or Japanese)

Eye tracking works by bouncing infared beams of light off a user’s eyes so that the reflections get fed into a sensor. The special software and hardware can then record and track where someone is looking on a software interface or has their eye focused on instructional media.

It was interesting to see that it didn’t quite work 100% successfully. One of our classmates is Japanese and for some reason her dark eyes couldn’t register on the system. However for everyone else it provided great insight on how software testing can be done using the system. It generated a heat map that showed where subjects focused their gazes on the most.

This sort of reminds me of the heat maps that we used at the CTL to help us in our website. We used a trial of Clickdensity, and it worked just great.

Adobe announced early last week that they are extending new capabilities into their acquired Flash technology:

Adobe Extends Web Video Leadership with H.264 Support

Basically what this means is that traditionally fat-client-like video technology is coming to the desktop via a primarily thin-client channel. For a discussion or definition of fat vs. thin video client technology, please see my article on CTLPedia

Adobe’s official Labs page describes it here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

A very thorough techie discussion about what this does in terms of this upcoming video technology available to users of the web is posted here: http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

My takes, and its implications on what will happen to online education?

• In terms of a video technology that will give us a great out of the box experience and just work, if it catches on and doesn’t succumb to the competition by not restricting it to a proprietary platform, it has the potential to be a ubiquitous media platform for the web. If this is the case, learners will become unaware of the technology and just use it without worrying about configuring their computer.
• Educational media producers could potentially target both HD television displays AND the web at the same time using similar production workflows. Especially with the advent of services like YouTube and AppleTV becoming integrated.