Monet's Early Life

Image Uploaded from a URL

Not exactly sure how to get a better resolution here. I've already cut the width in 1/2. It was originally 320 pixels; i cut it to 160 pixels by editing the html code. Interesting that the image I "sent" from flickr directly to the blog is a much better resolution. I used the same very boring image on the wiki, the widget, blogging from flickr, and inserting from a URL.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Test post: will this appear in Google Reader

Lah di dah.

View of the Boston Skyline

For all you out-of-towners, this is the Boston Skyline seen from the waterfront. The only relevance this has to elearning is that I took it with my Blackberry while attending a Web 2.0 conference.

Search Engine Test on "Ellen Foust"

Ellen Foust

PS It worked. I did a search on Ellen Foust in Google Blog search engine and it found this blog.

INSDSG 605 Web 2.0 Class

Hi Everyone!

This new post is the assignment for our Web 2.0 tools class. The big question I have is once I know how to use the tools, what do I do with them? How do I incorporate them into the courses I design? I have lots of ideas, but I wonder about you. Please post comments with thoughts on how you will use these tools.

I like to post pictures, so here is one I took yesterday on the UMB campus. Its a view out of a window in the Healey Library. I'm calling it Study in Triangles. How many triangles do you see? There are way more than 10. You never know what you will see if you keep your eyes open. I had no idea this image contained so many triangles until I started counting them now. Good photography and good instruction are all about design.

8 am Class

Poor guy. He dragged himself out of bed to get to an 8 am class. He ought to try an online class next semester! He could be sleeping in his bed, not on the trolly at 7 am every Monday and Wednesday. He'll probably sleep through the class too.

Photo taken with my Blackberry. elearning Ellen is a stealth photographer.

Good ID is Good Composition

Once again, I post the image and then I figure out why I posted it. This photograph is compositionally interesting because of the patterns, the repitition of shapes, colors, lines, and textures. Similarly, good instructional design depends on good "composition," the organizing of course elements into simple and repetitive patterns so that students can easily follow the structure and know what to do.

VERY tangentally, I'm noticing how different the mood is between this image and the image in my prior post. The masks in both images are the same. But the morose maniquins in the prior post's image sets a disaffected, lonely tone, while the smiley face of the biggest mask [cut off in the prior image] and the colorful patterns and textures in this image make me happy.

I'm Feeling Creative Again

I took this photograph with my Blackberry yesterday at the Lowell Folk Festival. We were heading back to the car after an afternoon of music, crafts, seeing friends, and people watching when this store window caught my eye. The maniquins are inside the window. The African masks are on a table in front of the window, outside the store. I love the juxtaposition of the mask-like faces with the face-like masks.

I love taking pictures and putting words to them. I feels sizzlingly creative. The juices flow. I had no idea of what I was going to write when I decided to post this picture. All I wanted to do was to share the picture with you. And no, the stolid expressions on the masks and manequins do NOT reflect my current mood. Like I said, I'm feeling creative again. No lonely, expressionless face any more.

Online Learning Communities: For Visual Learners

Two pictures: The first one is my husband, Jeff, and me last January in Boulder. You can see our smiles, the twinkle in our eyes. Something of our personality shows through.

The second one is my husband in the Minneapolis airport on the way home from Boulder. This image is "flat," even though I like its stark beauty [I enhanced it with Photoshop, taking out extraneous details and darkening the sillouette]. You can't see the twinkle in Jeff's eyes or anything about his personality, age, style. This is how I feel about the people in the online learning community. We are engaged with other in an intellectual, cerebral, and very limited way. We are sillouettes to each other, flat.

Online Learning Communities: A Down Hill Slope

At first I was very gung ho about the idea of collaborative learning communities. This is my fourth online course, and I’ve enjoyed them so far, although the two I've enjoyed the most were the one's in which I met colleagues [who I am still friends with] in person to work on projects. I’ve also been working for UMASS for about a year doing online Wimba support. I’ve loved that too. I’ve thought, “how cool is this getting online in real time with people all over the planet.”

Recently, though, I feel different. I’m getting lonely. Working on a virtual team with people I’ve never met is getting old. I would like to know who my colleagues are. They feel very one dimensional. I have a vague idea of what they look like, what their hobbies are, where they live, what their voices sound like, whether they are reliable workers or not, but that’s about it. I long to invite them to my back yard to shoot the breeze and eat watermelon.

I’m feeling the same about this course—somewhat disconnected, lonely, wondering who all of the people behind the posts are, and at the same time, wondering if I even care. Yes, other people’s feedback has influenced, even changed, my opinions on some of the course content, which is good. But the loneliness is getting to me, and I’m loosing motivation. I find myself distracted by other things I want to learn [this week it’s Web 2.0] and less able to focus on this class.

Brenda is doing all of the “right” things, structuring in collaborative activities, giving us lots of feedback, keeping the interaction between us going, but for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, its not working well enough to keep me as motivated as I was at the beginning of the course.

I’m starting to think that I would do better with a cohort model where students in the program started at the same time and met in person [the Nantucket thing, but as a cohort all starting and going through the program together]. I would also like to try a hybrid course. I have a hunch I would feel more part of a learning community if the other members were more 3-D than I experience my colleagues in this course to be.

Interesting elearning Graphic

This is an interesting grid. The question mark in the middle invites us to add to this framework. What's missing from this list of subsets of elearning?

Source: http://mivanova.blogspot.com/2007/10/elearning-branches.html

Eureka! A Course is a Constructivist Classroom

According to the definition of "classroom" on dictionary.com [based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary], a classroom is either (1) a room, as in a school or college, in which classes are held, or (2) any place where one learns or gains experience.

This may sound silly, but I just realized that online courses are "classrooms." Since I work with Wimba, I had conceptualized a classroom as something that happens in real time. Wimba is officially called "Wimba Classroom," and people refer to it as a classroom. It used to be called "Wimba Live Classroom." I figured the course was the course, and Wimba was the classroom.

Last night I had a light bulb moment. I finally "got it" that the entire course is a "constructivist classroom" [I can't remember where I read that term, but I did not make it up.]. The Learning Management System doesn't just deliver content, it creates a space in which one learns, a classroom. Conceptualizing the course as a constructivist classroom makes all of the pieces fit together. The emphasis on communication, the group projects, the instructor presence, the works. It also jives with the adult learning theory we learned about in Canice's class--the anti-lecture instructional strategies of group work, dyads, having people work on projects they choose based on their interests, etc.

It’s nice to finally have all the material I’ve been gobbling up since last September make sense! Eureka!

Blackboard Does NOT Affect Learning

We have been looking at online learning in general and discussing whether the technology affects learning. I will look more specifically at whether Blackboard affects student learning or just transmits content. (Note: In my Wimba support work at UMASS Boston, I am able to view ALL online courses offered every semester. This means I have seen at least 300 courses, all delivered in Blackboard, since last September.)

The Assessment tool enables the following types of questions: calculation, combination, fill in the blank, jumbled sentence, matching, multiple choice, paragraph, short answer, true/false. This does not affect learning. The strategy of HOW to use assessments affects learning, not the tool itself.

The Assignment tool does not affect learning, it merely collects student work.

The Announcement, Mail, Calendar, the Roster, Who’s Online with instant messenger, and Chat tools enable a learning community. This does not enhance learning; it just makes communication possible. Of course, communication DOES affect learning (Constructivist theory). In this context, however, I view communication as a means of overcoming the time/place disconnect of virtual learning. Communication "normalizes" online learning, rather than enhances it. Lack of communication would have a greater affect on learning. It would detract from it.

Learning modules deliver content: Assessments, Assignments, Chat, Discussions, Media Collections, SCORM modules, web links, and content in files. This does not affect learning, just delivers the content.

The Discussion tool (threaded, blogs, journals) DOES affect learning, as it enables deep reflection (Cognitive theory)

The Goals tool, quite frankly, is useless. Goals (objectives) are better stated in the syllabus and at the beginning of each learning module.

Hence, as far as Blackboard goes, I agree with Clark (2001) quoted in Mohamed Ally, in Foundations of Educational Theory for Online Learning (http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/) that [at least for Blackboard] “technologies are merely vehicles that deliver instruction, but do not themselves influence student achievement.”

Maybe the real point is that Blackboard needs an overhaul. Maybe the developers of Blackboard should study learning theory and create a new learning enviornment (I don't know what that would look like). Maybe emerging technologies should some how be incorporated into this old-fashioned LMS.

Horse Travel, Anyone?

I took this image in the Minneapolis airport with a two-megapixel point & shoot (talk about old technology!). It's a series of colored lights hanging from the ceiling. The notable thing here is that it took turning the image on its head to make it worth looking at.

Comments on the web article, "Student Frustration with a Web-Based Distance Education Course (http://www.firstmonday.dk \/issues/issue4_12/hara/index.html#author)

I find it interesting that a research project about the isolation of online learners turned into a study about frustrations—a lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions, and technical problems. I can totally relate to all three frustrations, as I have experienced them myself.

Yet, let’s remember that this article was written in the early 90s, before most of us were socialized to use email, web browsers, search engines, social bookmarking, and the other web and web 2.0 tools we take for granted. Also, the course in question was presented as a website, not via a learning management system, and the teacher had never taught online before.

We’re in a transition period, folks. Prensky (http://www.marcprensky.com/) talks about this when he conceptualizes people into two camps, digital natives and digital immigrants. It’s probably like the transition from horses to cars, or from working on the farm to working in a factory, or even adopting telephone technology. (Hello Central, connect me to Joe, please.)

Give it ??? years. By that time, instructors will know how to teach online (there will still be good and bad teachers), students will know how to learn online (it will work for some and not for others), and everyone will be as fluent with the technology as we are with driving cars. And when email fails, we can pick up the phone and call each other. Imagine that!

Introducing Me

Hi Everyone,

I am very excited about taking this course. For the past year I have been studying on my own everything I can get my hands on about eLearning. I've been surfing the net, reading books, taking workshops, and more. Its been a lot of fun. I'm glad to finally have the opportunity to put it all together in one course to get it firmly planted in my head.

Three things to know about me. (1) I enjoy having fun. In fact, I have been a hospital clown, as you can see in my photo. (2) I love snorkeling, especially in warm water where there are fish and coral to see. The hairballs I see in the local YMCA don't quite cut it. (3) I have been a professional photographer.

Ellen