FIT will be hosting a great conference this October on teaching visual topics online using tools that afford social learning. The conference is just a bit of a misnomer, since much of the content will be relevant and valuable to a more general audience than just art and art history instructors; it’s really about teaching visually and socially at the same time. Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, the conference coordinators, have done a great job of assembling a stellar program. If you can possibly make it to NYC this Fall, I highly recommend attending.
Author: Michael Feldstein
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SUNY's Learning Environments Task Force Report
One of the projects at work that has been keeping me very busy is finally finished and in shape that I can talk about it publicly. The SUNY Learning Network is in the process of planning a transition to a new learning management platform, yet to be identified. We took this opportunity to get some input from the broader SUNY community on their needs, goals, and preferences.
A little background about that community: (more…)
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e-Portfolios and Personal Content Management–Rip, Mix, Burn
Last week I had the pleasure of spending most of my working week at CIT, which is SUNY’s instructional technology conference and also the largest SUNY-wide conference of the year. It was really exciting to see so many folks from all across the system engaged in thinking about how to “teach different” (to steal a phrase from Apple Computer).
Anyway, one of the talks in which I participated was a panel discussion about e-portfolios at SUNY. And I must say, I think that the e-portfolio system designs I have seen so far go about solving the problem in the wrong way. Because the right solution would turn a conventional LMS inside-out. (more…)
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Learning Objects and Stutter Points
A while back I had the opportunity to hear Kevin Harrigan speak about CLOE, an Ontario-based feeder repository system for MERLOT. The group in attendance had just finished a quick rehash of the old and not terribly illuminating “what is a learning object” debate. Kevin (and CLOE) have a refreshing take on the whole mess.
CLOE focuses not so much on defining learning objects as on defining learning objectives. As Kevin put it, every discipline has certain “stutter points”–certain topical areas where students tend to get stuck. In evolutionary biology, for example, students often hold onto Lamarckian ideas (e.g., the giraffe has a long neck because its ancestor stretched to reach leaves in the high trees) long after they have learned the abstract concept of natural selection. Learning objects are simply educational tools that are created to address those particular stutter points. A learning object is a thingie designed to meet a learning objective.
To my mind, this is a crisp and clean way of describing learning objects so that they are obviously useful to faculty members.
Sweet.
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I'm Baaaack!
After several months of being absolutely buried in SUNY work that I couldn’t yet talk about publicly, I am finally re-emerging. Over the next couple of months (starting on this coming Wednesday), I will be able to start talking about the stuff we’ve been working on. And some of it is pretty exciting. I’m also going to get back to blogging more regularly.
It’s good to be (virtually) home again.
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Still Alive
I met somebody at a MERLOT meeting recently who asked me whether I was the Michael Feldstein who runs the e-Literate weblog. And I thought to myself, “Hmm…e-Literate…why does that name ring a bell?”
Seriously I’m sorry I’ve been MIA. Work has been extra-ordinarily busy, and much of what I’m working on is stuff I can’t talk about in public…yet. But I promise that I will be have lots of interesting stuff to post about soon. And in the meantime, I’ll make more of an effort to put up an occasional thought or two here.
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Bloglines: Still Sucky After All These Years
Apparently, Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher replied to June Oshiro’s blog regarding their broken feed reader. June hits the nail on the head with her reply:
But Mark! You don’t address the second fundamental problem. I find this ironic and indicative of the whole issue – I complain that customer support is virtually non-existent, and you seem to pretend I never mentioned it. So let me ask you – do you believe that the issue of tech support not responding is fixed? Are you monitoring that situation as well? Mark, you are the leader of Bloglines – your employees take their cue FROM YOU about company priorities. If you don’t emphasize the importance of responding to customer concerns, who will?
Here are some questions I’d like you to think about. Why doesn’t anyone from support read the discussion forum? Why isn’t there a bulletin board detailing known issues (and estimated time until they’re fixed)? Why did customer support ignore 4 out of 6 attempts to contact them? (I was polite. I even said “pretty please.”) Why couldn’t anyone tell me, over two weeks of emails, that there was nothing wrong with my feed, and that the problem was on the Bloglines end?
The difference in attitude between Bloglines and a company like, say, Jotspot is night and day. Jotspot shows the kind of obsession with good customer service that a web services company needs to have while Bloglines…well…does not.