12/1: time without the ThinkPad
December 4, 2006
Friday was a pretty hectic day, and I forgot to bring my powercord home for the ThinkPad! It was nice, though, to have one evening where I wasn’t totally devoted to Learning Objects. I spent about 45 minutes working on the ThinkPad until I didn’t feel safe running on such low batteries, then I used my personal laptop to read a little about how to use ActionScript 2 to work with user-entered text.
I suspected, at the time, that this would be challenging. I had no idea that the “Truncation Feud” game would be as challenging as it was. Luckily, I found several discussion boards that discussed different problems and solutions people had for various text issues, and it was very good research to have for working in Flash once I had power again.
If I were to do Friday over again, though, I would have brought home the powercord!
miscellaneous tasks
November 30, 2006
There have been a number of tasks that have been piling up that are unrelated to the actual design and creation of the Learning Objects. I have a little bit of time, so I’m finding a few of the answers now:
- Is it okay to use Microsoft clipart?
- According to the Microsoft copyright site, it looks like it’s fine for me to use clipart for my class and practicum, but it’s unclear if it’s okay for us to use the clipart for LIB100 use. It distinctly says you can’t use clipart for your business or to make a profit, but it doesn’t say academic institutions are able to use it. I think that if we really want to use the games for classes, we might want to take a few hours to design original artwork.
- What quality assurance standards are there for shared Learning Objects?
- The Merlot website has a short list of things that their peer reviewers are supposed to look for. However, they’re pretty general and appear to lack objective standards by which to measure a given Learning Object.
- All other sites I found were even less general, though, so I’m not sure there are any community-defined objective standards.
reading
November 24, 2006
In the car on the way to Hertford, NC, in the post-Thanksgiving lunch stupor, and before bed, I was able to get in four hours of reading. My biggest accomplishment was scanning and reading sections from Susan Smith’s Web-Based Instruction: A Guide for Libraries 2nd addition. I also read through several articles I printed out before leaving town.
I feel like this has been enough to become familiar with some of what is being said about online pedagogy. I’ll talk with Susan next week to see if she’s accomplished this course goal.
Susan’s book was useful. It provided a really good context for the project, and I wished I had read it when I got it. Some chapters are a bit techyier than my role in the project (chapter 4), but others are extremely useful such as chapter 5, on design and interface, chapter 6, on multimedia, and on chapter 7, on interactivity. There’s a discussion of teamwork on page 51 that helped me think about my role in this project, and the role I’d like to have eventually in a professional position. My coursework has prepared me to participate as an instructional designer and as a content specialist. These are areas of interest for me, and combined with technology, are real professional interests.
The general take-away points for Boolean Slots that it’s good that we’re focusing on interactivity and a focus on concepts. I think we should probably make the objectives clearer in the beginning and review the outcomes at the end. I should also look through the tutorial and remove as much text as possible and work to improve the scannability. I’d also like to add the ability to email or IM the reference librarians during or after the tutorial.
Several of the articles that I printed were not applicable after all. It turns out that much of what is written about online pedagogy focuses on online classes, and not on learning objects.
Articles I read:
The Pedagogy of On-Line Learning: A Report from the University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute by Bernard Scott
To Boldly GLO-Towards the Next Generation of Learning Objects Panel—submission to eLearn 2004 (mostly a bibliography, but good information, too)
Constructivism and Emerging Online Learning Pedagogy: A Discussion for Formal to Acknowledge and Promote the Informal by Shalni Gulati
Online Pedagogy–Online/On-ground: What’s the Same
There were several themes that arose from these articles. One was that online learning is non-linear and self-directed. Our game is a little this way, but not really. The user can choose the way they play the game, but there is a definite start, finish, and a limited number of paths between. I also feel like our game doesn’t meet the nature of “non-linear,” but I think that might be okay. Boolean Slots is a short module, designed to help students learn one specific concept, and in such a limited role, I don’t know that it needs to be presented in a fancier way.
Most of the articles focused on the importance of discussion, too. Discussion was described as a way to meet the need for online collaboration and informal learning. Since our learning objects are being designed to be asynchronous objects to be used as a very small part of a class, there isn’t really a good way to add conversation or discussion to the modules. I think the best approach we perhaps could take is to add an opportunity for reflection. Perhaps instead of a specific statement, it could be phrased as a leading question. This is something to think about in the context of the Boolean Slots game we’ve worked on as well as the games we haven’t worked on yet.
Reuse was mentioned again and again. Boolean Slots was designed to be used in a number of contexts at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, but not outside of our university. It has our branding all over it. Should we remove this identifying information from the slides in order to make the games universally useful? If we are interested in sharing the games with other universities, we probably need to look into quality assurance standards (and I need to know this anyway) so that we can meet the level of expectation.
Next Actions:
- Add slide: Why is Boolean searching useful?
- Add email or IM to Boolean Slots game.
- Change some specific statement slides to be phrased as a leading question.
- Look into quality assurance standards.
more for gen y
May 30, 2006
Kate Manuel’s “Teaching Information Literacy to Generation Y” has proven to be an interesting lens through which to examine our LIB100 class. Here are some related links:
- Learning Style Preferences of Generation Y from CSU-Hayward
- Fall 2004 course website with syllabus and readings (taught by Kate Manuel)
notes on tutorials
May 29, 2006
In planning for a tutorial on the catalog, here are some notes on what others are doing:
UNC-G’s FIRST: Finding It! a Research Skills Tutorial
- primarily text: some dialog and some use of bold for effect
- in explaination: there are several opportunities to enter text, but no feedback on answers
- after explaination: there are opportunities to enter text and get feedback on answer
- follows this pattern for author, title, and keyword
NCSU’s LOBO: Library Online Basic Orientation
- includes books, articles, call numbers, and websites in same section
- each includes a “Show Me an Example” and a “Let Me Search the Catalog Myself”
- “Show Me an Example” is a video; the catalog video is subject searching only
- Let me Search the Catalog Myself” opens the catalog in a second window for students to try out
- Students are then asked to fill in a form with three good titles for their topic to “add to worksheet”
UT’s TILT: Texas Information Literacy Tutorial
- includes music and moving graphics
- asks users to interact with images (ex. “click search” on image of computer with catalog up, click correct place on shelf for call number order, etc)
- immediate feedback for correct & incorrect answers
- not a lot of detailed instruction for catalog, but most interactive
- interaction tended to be in a multiple-choice kind of way… very unlike “gaming” in education
University of Calgary’s Finding Full Text Journals using the U of C Library Catalogue
- video, shows exact time before you click on the link (1.58)
- video a lot like LOBO’s… silent, but makes good use of text bubbles and showing where the mouse needs to point
CMU’s Off Campus Library Service
- text on left, video on right
- the videos sometimes are of students talking about the library, sometimes screenshots with explainatory audio
UW-Parkside’s Information Literacy Tutorial
- LOTS of text followed by a quiz
- arrows to move between pages are at the top of the page. perhaps if we used this much text we’d move the arrows to the bottom to at least encourage scrolling through the pages?
Austin Community College’s The Info Game
- flashy, colorful, and sound
- primarily text (but interesting to look at) with no background sound
- some short videos (like boolean circles moving together) throughout the presentation
- a few opportunities to try things out with non-specific feedback (like entering information into a text box, then clicking “ask an expert” to see what a librarian would have entered
- follow up with quizzes, no feedback on specific answers, though you do find out how many you got right vs. wrong
- MUST take tutorial in order
UW-Madison’s Tutorials
- includes videos, tutorials, and PDF print outs
- video includes audio
St. John’s University’s Information Literacy Tutorial
- entirely in flash!
- uses car traveling analogy
- no sound, but images of people with text next to them to indicate speaking
- pictures of catalog, no screencasting
- very end: interactive quiz with immediate feedback
