Our colleague David Wicks from Seattle Pacific University, is a leader in helping develop, dream, and implement relevant teaching and learning using Online tools.  He recently made an incredible screencast of the Blackboard Grade Center and I asked if we could share it.  A gracious collaborator, he accepted.  I think this is one of many amazing resources from SPU and Professor Wicks.

• Full Post:  http://dwicksspu.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/blackboard-9-grade-center-workshop/
• Follow David on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/dwicksspu

The Challenge of Project & Task Management

Our micro-organization consists of instructional designers, media designers, and management.  We interface with faculty, staff, and administration.  As expectations rise, so do our use of time.  We all know it’s hard to prioritize work as well as manage expectations.  Couple this with competing interests and an overwhelming amount of tools available and you’ve got a potential mess.  You either have a less-than-optimal adoption rate or chaos.  Every group consists of people who are highly organized as well as those who are disorganized.  There is no one tool to rule them all.  No game changer.  There are too many good options.

Settling on Teamwork

Our organization settled on a tool called Teamwork.  It’s not free.  But it met the needs of both our micro and macro organization for both task and project management.  Teamwork is Web-based, so there’s no software needed to install.  It is integrated (not well) with Exchange as well as Twitter.  It’s as simple as well as complex.

A Few Examples

Our instructional designers use Teamwork to walk faculty through a course development timeline.  This includes developments and redevelopments of courses.  They identified benchmarks and put together an appropriate timeline.  Our marketing and communications department is implementing this as a firm within our university to manage projects and clients.  Networking and software services are using it for project management in their team across disciplines.  Another more granular way to manage tasks is by defining them as “issues”.

Managing Tasks as Issues

One simple way Teamwork helps manage work is by tracking time with associated tags.  This is helpful to quantify what we are doing and what kind of work we’re doing.  One key component for our office is to use this tool to help keep focus on work based on mission/vision/purpose.  If not, we have metrics in place for supervisors to assist us in refocusing work.  It also provides hard data to drive additional staffing if possible.

Managing Time in Teamwork

Summary

Teamwork is not a game changer.  It doesn’t have a mobile version for workers not consistently at a desk.  It can be overly complex if not used properly.  Teamwork isn’t really geared for higher education.  It has more of a business base.  However, with help from architects on our staff who adopted Teamwork and developed some taxonomies, Teamwork is becoming a very serviceable project and time management tool.

• Three-part series on integrating Wordpress MU across an entire campus as a blog/portfolio/CMS engine
• A Google Wave case study
• Three-part series on Leopard Server 2 and Podcast Composer/Producer integration
• Turning Point clicker integration

We will also be reviewing research journals as well as telling more stories of integrating technology into teaching.  This is just a tease of a few features.  We have a lot of stories to tell.  We’d love to tell your stories as well.  Contact me if you’d like to be a guest contributor.

Ingredients

- Computer with access to the Internet

- Instructor access to a Blackboard course (the screencast features BB Enterprise 8 )

- The website at http://feed2js.org

- A website with an active RSS feed to be used in Blackboard

Directions

1. Navigate to the website that has an RSS feed.
2. Look for an icon on the page that looks like this:
3. If you don’t see that icon, look for some text that mentions “subscribe to feed” or “RSS“. Linked text that reads “Entries (RSS)” is a common way the feed for a WordPress blog is encountered, usually near the bottom of the screen.
4. You can right-click on the icon or text link and choose either Copy Link Location (Firefox), or Copy Shortcut (Internet Explorer).
5. Alternatively, you can click on the icon or the text and it should lead you to a page with a few options to subscribe to the RSS feed. What’s important is that the feed URL is now in the web browser’s address bar. Copy the URL so that you can paste it into the appropriate field in the Feed2JS website.
6. Navigate to the Feed2JS website.
7. Click on the tab labeled “Build” and paste the RSS feed URL into the box labeled URL.
8. Optionally, you can change the options for how the feed is displayed.
9. Click on the button labeled “Generate Javascript”
10. This will display code in the field labeled “Get Your Code Here”
11. Copy the entire contents of this field. This is the code we’ll place in Blackboard.
12. Navigate to the area in your Blackboard course where you would like to place the RSS information.
13. Click on the Add (+) Item button to create a new content item.
14. Provide a name for the content item (required)
15. In the Text editor click on the “Toggle HTML Source Mode” button
16. Paste the code generated from the Feed2JS website into the text field (overwrite any existing text that’s in that field to start)
17. Click on the Submit button

Information derived from the Digital Media Cookbook Website

LectureTools started as a framework to investigate new methods for adding to class discourse by engaging students in text-based, image-based and simulation based responder questions. It was tested in a few classes last semester according to the university and it will soon be made available to their faculty at large. Developed by a professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences named Arthur F. Thurnau for use in a large lecture class, the tool is designed to create greater student engagement with lecture materials and discourse.

In a statement put out by Samson on behalf of the university at large, “Students learn better by being actively engaged in the lecture, offering their own feedback and discussing with their peers, as LectureTools allows them to do. We’re utilizing all the students’ propensities and abilities to multitask.”

In your experience, can you speak to either the validity of this statement or its unsoundness?

Effort is a Good Start

Blackboard is trying.  Let’s start with that.  They are making an effort to stay up with the times.  We’ll review the new Blackboard 9 next month.  Great effort.  And because they are basically buying up their competition, they can afford to sit on their laurels.  But we know from Microsoft what happens when the big dog doesn’t innovate.  People get restless.  And look elsewhere.  Blackboard has made a great effort to become more relevant by creating two synapses to some of the most relevant Web 2.0 tools:  Facebook and the iPhone.  Official Wiki for Bb Sync & Bb Learn

Blackboard Learn

I had been waiting for this app ever since I had heard rumblings it was being developed.  Once it was released, I immediately downloaded it and began pleading with our network admin to make the magic happen to enable the service.  Once enabled, I was elated to try it out.

The first sync went through flawlessly.  I connected to Bb on my Mac, punched in the code to authorize the app, and watched it sync pretty quickly.  Upon logging in, I discovered that the app does connect me to my courses, but not really.  I can see announcements posted, which is very convenient.  I can look to see if any forums (DB) posts have been made in my courses.  But that and a few other “Feeds” are all this app can do.  I can read that there are new posts.  But I can’t read the posts.  I can see that grades were posted.  But I can’t actually see the grades.  I can read there were updates to the course.  But I can’t see them.  All of these require me to login to Blackboard and authenticate.  Which I don’t ncessisarily want to do.  Once more, I don’t know if I should.  More on that later.  On the iPhone 3G, the app has crashed a few times for me and sometimes is sluggish in the sync.  Eventually, it does get there.

Blackboard Sync

Blackboard Sync for Facebook is another great attempt at connecting students where they are most comfortable and familiar.  Facebook.  It’s a good app.  Again, once things were configured on the server side, the connection to Bb Sync was fairly easy.  The GUI is straight-forward.  It mirrors Bb Learn for the iPhone.  You get the same tabs to access and feed information and links to the actual authenticated Bb content.  The same princples hold true for Bb Sync as for Bb Learn.  Same tools and accessibility.

Conclusion

These tools are a good start.  A few of us have been having conversations lately surrounding mobile learning and what it looks like.  Sure, we could create an iPhone app that would allow us to post on the DB, but should we?  Yes, we could create a mobile version of Bb that would allow us to write on the blog or wiki, but should we?  These apps are a good first blush into connecting our learning to popular devices.  They don’t really do much other than serve as a glorifed RSS feed.  But the bigger and better question is, should they?  Should we really be learning on an iPhone?  Blackberry?  Facebook?  And do we/can we/should we be feeding content to Facebook.  Even if we could feed everything Bb offers to FB and still keep the content authenticated and secure, should we?

Because of what I do, I’m always on the front end of evaluating new things.  I’m a classic early adopter.  I love gadgets.  But as I am growing and learning with these technologies, I’m also learning to ask better questions.  One of the best questions I believe we should ask as educational technologists is not “Can we?”, but “Should we?”  My stance today is we shouln’t really be learning on mobile devices.  Learning in this post today defined as engaging Blackboard on mobile devices like discussion boards, blogs, wikis, etc.  I’m seeing mobile devices really prompting us or keeping us connected to the learning, but not necessarily becoming the primary tool we use to engage.  The same for Web 2.0 tools like FB or any Web 2.0 mash up service that can feed all of our “stuff” into one place.  Yes, we could have our learning mashed into our Google reader, Friend Feed, or whatever tool we choose.  But is that an appropriate place for our learning?

We use iTunes U to deliver rich media content to students, but we know the majority of them do not listen or watch the content on their mobile devices.  They consume the content on their desktop/laptop.  It’s nice to have.  It’s a good “can”.  But not necessarily a “should”.  This principle is definitely something we need to look at as many of us are gatekeepers for these tools.

So, Bb Learn.  Bb Sync.  Good?  Yes.  Great?  TBD.  Keep in mind this is a review with Blackboard 7.3.230.0.  We are currently testing Bb 9.  When we put 9 into production, I’ll revisit the review and post an update then.  Irregarless of the tool, what about the principle?  Where do you side?  Any reserach to back it up?  Would love to hear comments on either your evaluation of these tools and/or your views on how mobile devices and Web 2.0 services should be used in teaching and learning.

It is here that Batson expounds on the tensions between the demands of institutional legacy and the demands of innovation. He really speaks to what I would explain to be a shift that our society is experiencing as a whole. The ramifications specifically within the field of education are no less painful than other sectors, but also no less opportune to capitalize on such a time as this.

What are your reactions to this article? How does the picture that Batson paints here contribute to a fair assessment of your educational experience or in what ways does it clash with it?

We’ve been getting lots of activity from our posts on mobile Web.

Mobile Learning:  A Springboard Discussion |  Fear of Mobile Learning |  ML Podcast (iTunes)

It’s something that higher education is already behind in.  The best Web sites have created mobile versions for a group of users growing at an over 100% rate each year.  Look at the big guns:  ESPN, CNN, Yahoo and Google.  Even social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.  There are very few higher education sites with mobile versions.  Try it.  Search for m.harvard.edu.  m.um.edu.  m.berkley.edu.  The best site I can find today is Duke.  Check it out:  m.duke.edu

Traditional Web sites are not going to be cutting the mustard any longer.  The business world moved from HTML to XHTML/CSS, to CMS, and now mobile with custom applications.  Higher education is probably at the XHTML/CSS and/or CMS stage.  Conclusion?  Higher education is behind the curve on this trend.  Unfortunately, the rate that technology grows, we don’t have much time to catch up.

The Experts

Cameron Moll wrote a great book titled, “Mobile Web Design“ that addresses some of the basics.  Brian Fling has also been evangelizing the mobile Web for over five years back when the Motorola Razr was cool.  There are tons of resources from his presentations as well as links from fellow mobile evangelists.  In looking at those sites, the conclusion will be that these developers are not involved in higher education.  True.  They are building for business.  True.  Should I read what they have to say because I work in higher ed?  Yes.  Why?  Because what they are talking about in the business world in real time is happening quicker in higher education than we give credit to.  Case in point:  Do a focus group of ten students on campus.  See what kind of devices they use.  Find out if they have data plans attached to their devices.  You may be surprised at what you find.

The Web is moving at a fantastically quick pace.  We need to keep up.

Migration

Our university has a Jenzabar portal.  We switched from IBM a few years ago.  The portal is fully integrated with our database and systems.  The university has been going through a business process redesign for a number of years to integrate and streamline all services to the portal.  It’s been mildly successful.  Our network and software teams have been working hard to create custom portlets and Web services to serve a number of sub-groups in the institution.  However, one gap in service is the concept of moving the site to mobile devices.

There are a few developers who are building plug-ins and testing for ways to make Jenzabar portals mobile.  But nobody has one working yet that I am aware of.  Wordpress has some developers who have created mobile plugins (Carrington Mobile) and others.  Many sites write a custom CSS file for mobile and print versions.  Higher ed is still catching up with what cutting edge Web developers have known for a few years.  We have to build sites that are standards-compliant with clean validated code.  If higher ed is building these huge monolithic sites, shouldn’t they be accessible to any device?  Not just IE, Firefox, and Safari?  Not just 1024 or 800?

Next Step

I’m going to write next week on higher education’s pattern of innovation (or lack thereof) and how it relates to leadership.  Our PLC had a great discussion on this (which we should have recorded).  I’ll bring some hightlights and ask for your feedback.  But for now, where are your sites?  Do you have mobile versions?  Is there a plan?  Who’s asking the questions?  Post feedback.  Get into the discussion.

Random Resources

• Megan Fisher :: Designing Web Interfaces from Future of Web Design, May 2009  |  Presentation
• Brian Fling :: Mobile Design Blog |  Visit
• W3C ::  Mobile Web Design  |  Download PDF
• Jakob Neilsen :: Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998  |  Visit
• Cameron Moll:  Mobile Web Design  |  Visit

New WP Plugins

I thought I’d report back on a few tweaks to TTF I’ve made this past week.  You’ll notice that the tag cloud on the sidebar is now reformatted to a nice, clean, bulleted list thanks to the Reciprocity Wordpress Configurable Tag Cloud Plugin .  It’s a simple and highly-customizable plug-in that helps display tags in a more friendly light.  You probably also noted we’ve added a “Share This” link on all of our posts to allow you to share to whatever source you wish.  Thanks to Crowd Favorite and Alex King.  |  Plug-in Homepage

Twitter

We’ve added a Twitter feed thanks to Alex King’s twitter feed plugin.  This will allow us to post updates and tweets to the home page.  You can follow TTF on Twitter @academictech.

Feel free to follow us and also post comments on your use of Twitter.  One of our faculty (@wallymetts) noted that literally less than an hour after he created his Twitter account, he had about 100 people following him.  He was curious about the effect of Twitter on his academic blog, so he watched his Google Analytics as he posted tweets to see how it affected traffic.  Everytime he tweeted, he saw a spike in pageviews of this blog.  We can see evidence of this as Twitter has become a marketing tool.  We’ve written briefly on Twitter and will do some more next week to review a pretty compelling article.

Feedback

How do you use Twitter?  Do you use it?  If so, how?  Any pedagogical uses?  Feel free to post your twitter feed and we’ll follow you.

As our office has been researching mobile learning, we decided to discuss it and record the discussion to see what happened.  What we discovered sounds like a typical reserach paper at the end.  The whole “additional research is needed in order for us to …” statement.  From our initial reading, we discovered that the definition of mobile learning is still not solid.  Mobile learning could mean a mobile device like a Palm or clicker.  It could also mean a mobile phone.  Different schools are using the term “Mobile Learning” to mean different things.

As we investigated those pathways, we began to notice that there are very few academic articles or research that are pointing to one particular pathway to success in mobile learning.  We also began to notice a trend that mobile learning, because it’s a relatively unknown technology in education, can cause fear and backlash in faculty.  However, students are asking for it.  The landscape is changing.  And it’s up to us to read, research, discuss, and figure this out.  Sooner rather than later.

Listen

We decided to record the conversation with our iPhones.  The audio was recorded wtih the Bias iPro Recorder for the iPhone.  Read review.  Download App.  Feel free to listen to the 1:04:17 podcast in iTunes U.  |  Podcast

Recources

Here is a list of some of what we’re currently reading about mobile learning:

• Baird, D. E., & Fisher, M. (2006). Neomillennial user experience design strategies: utilizing social networking media to support “always on” learning styles. Journal of educational technology systems. 34(1), 5.
• Huang, Y.M., Kuo, Y.H., Lin, Y.T., Cheng, S.C. (2007).  Toward interactive mobile synchronous learning environment with context-awareness service.  Computers & Education. 51(2008), 1205-1226.
• Kaufman, R.  (2005).  Defining and delivering measurable value:   a mega thinking and planning primer.  Performance Improvement Quarterly.  18(3), 6-16.
• Park, Y. & Brill, J. (2007). Emerging Technologies to Support Engaged Learning in the Interaction Age: Taking a Pedagogically Disciplined Approach to Innovation. In T. Bastiaens & S. Carliner (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2007 (pp. 1748-1756). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
• Prensky, M (2009). What Can You Learn from a Cell Phone?  Almost Anything!  Retrieved April 4, 2009, from http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=83
• Trotter, A.  (2009). Students turn their cellphones on for classroom lessons.  Retrieved April 17, 2009 from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/01/07/16cellphone.h28.html

Feedback

What do you think about mobile learning?  Are you implementing any solutions, pilots, or tools?  Read any good reserach?  If so, what are you reading?  What are you implementing/testing?  Post comments below.