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Deborah Keyek-Franssen opened the second day at the Educause Learning Initiative Fall Focus Session on Assessment with her presentation :  Asking Good Questions by Starting with Key Decisions.

The presentation was part of the two day focus session "Supporting Learning with Technology: Assessment's Role"  held Sep 11-12th, 2006.  For more information including proceedings and presentations see the event website below.

http://www.educause.edu/eli063

"Cheap good or fast - pick any two..."

Charles Dziuban (and guests) closed the ELI Fall Focus Session with their presentation: Integrating Assessment into Institutional Culture.

The presentation was part of the two day focus session "Supporting Learning with Technology: Assessment's Role"  held Sep 11-12th, 2006.  For more information including proceedings and presentations see the event website below.

http://www.educause.edu/eli063

Kathy Schmidt challenged the audience at the ELI Fall Focus Session with her presentation: Where to Look for Learning Impact.

The presentation was part of the two day focus session "Supporting Learning with Technology: Assessment's Role"  held Sep 11-12th, 2006.  For more information including proceedings and presentations see the event website below.

http://www.educause.edu/eli063

Patsy Moskel and Joni Spurlin treated the ELI Fall Focus session audience to an overview of  Assessment Methodologies.

The presentation was part of the two day focus session "Supporting Learning with Technology: Assessment's Role"  held Sep 11-12th, 2006.  For more information including proceedings and presentations see the event website below.

http://www.educause.edu/eli063

Karen Swan was the opening plenary at the Educause Learning Initiaive Fall Focus session. Her presentation, How Do You Know if IT is Helping Advance Student Learning, outlined the scope of the two day session.

The presentation was part of thd focus session "Supporting Learning with Technology: Assessment's Role"  held Sep 11-12th, 2006.  For more information including proceedings and presentations see the event website below.

http://www.educause.edu/eli063

Bryan Alexander's talk on Mobile Learning at the ELI Spring Focus session.

Diana Oblinger's talk on Mobile Learning.

Marilyn Lombardi speaks about the Duke iPod Project .

Podcast of Ellen Wagner's plenary on mobile learning.

I had the good luck to attend this session on Learning Objects at the Educause Mid West Regional Conference earlier this year. Jenni Mitchell, Lana Lytle and Nicholas Farha did a fantastic job of introducing an enthusiastic audience to a wide variety of technologies including learning objects, weblogs and wikis. This trio clearly had much more information than they could fit into their hour long session and supplied several references full of links! In true IT (Instructional Technologist) fashion they demonstrated their tech in real time allowing those in the audience with laptops to contribute and critique.

In their presentation, the group noted that the exercise of defining a 'learning object' was certain to end in failure. Instead, they skipped ahead to live demonstrations. Using 'found' items pulled from Merlot and other repositories, the trio tracked the evolution of learning objects. Using text based, movie and interactive learning objects, Mitchell and colleagues outlined the possibilities and charted out potential future tools. Of particular interest was a flash based tool to help faculty create learning objects.

Podcasts have taken off over the last six months. In addition to being within the reach of almost everybody, much work is being done to evolve the field and to create new genres of podcasts.

One of my favourite podcasts to date is Gardner Campbell's L'Allegro by Milton. It has nicely surprised me several times as it comes up on the shuffled playlists of my iPod forcing a quiet moment of bliss. Keep up the good work Gardner!

Of course, many believe that listening to Cliff Lynch is like listening to poetry. If you need proof, check out this MP3 (not quite a podcast, but it could be!).

Are you curious about 'social software'but unsure about how to benefit from a 'social'application? Oneof the best ways to learn about social software is the hands onapproach. Get your hands dirty and play with delicious!

Del.icio.us is an online bookmark manager that bills itself as a social bookmarking tool. Del.icio.us combines the best of referrals, public bookmarks, shared information and descriptive tags.

Thereare a lot of reasons to like delicious, but one of the most compellingis that it allows free form tagging of bookmarks. Any descriptiveword (or words) can be associated with a bookmark entry. Thisallows for great flexibility in classifying resources (in this case websites), but requires some discipline on the part of the user.





Ruben Puentedura recently presented a wonderful session on how to get the most out of effective tagging in delicious for the Horizon Project Virtual Community of Practice. He has posted his slides andan audio transcript. If you want to quickly get up to speed withdelicious and get a feel for social software, set aside 20 minutes andreview the presentation. If you have a little more time, load theaudio onto your iPod :-).

Students using laptop computers are becoming more common in ournetworked classrooms. I carry my Mac laptop with me all the time,using it to take notes and check references in conferencepresentations. I confess that there are times when I am InstantMessaging through 'iChat'.  

While iChat allows me to connect to my buddies back home, perhaps its more powerful feature is its use of Rendezvous to browse the local subnet. Using Rendezvous, I can find and message every other iChat user in the room -evenif I don't know their 'handle'! This feature has proven to be agreat way to identify, meet and ultimately collaborate with othersinthe same classroom.  

The biggest shortcoming to date hasbeen the lack of cross platform support. iChat users can findother iChat users but lack of a Windows client effectively limited thepool to Mac users (not a bad lot though :-)).  

Windowsusers may not have to wait too much longer. I was on iChat todayand was 'buzzed' by a PC user curious about where I had comefrom. It turns out the PC user was using Trillian 3 Pro (beta)and found me on the local subnet. A quick search confirms that Trillian 3 Pro supports chat over Rendezvous!

Given its value in creating ad-hoc connections, this is one of the best discoveries I have made in a while! I can hardly wait for collaboration possibilities!

The South Orange County Commuity College District has put intelligentagents to work fielding questions from students through instantmessaging. Students are able to ask questions about classes,theircollege and resources available to students in a conversationalmanner. The primary interaction is through an AIM chatclient.

Thissetup replaces a standard FAQ sheet. Dozens of standard questionscan be posed any time through 'chat'. Project leaderJim Gastoncomments that the system is very flexible and the content can becustomized with different types of data, including coursematerial. In addition to a chat client, the intelligent agentscan be access through a web interface and through a cellphone. Find out more at http://www.mysiteagent.com.  Get your own advice from the bot through AIM: MySiteAgent.

The Educause meeting in Denver was a great place to learn about initiatives underway on campuses across the continent. One of the projects presented was the iLab project. The iLab project is part of the MIT iCampus initiative.

This project gives students the ability to remotely control lab equipment to conduct real experiments. Students are able to generate and capture raw data by accessing instruments through a web interface. In addition to giving students authentic science experiences, the project helps to overcome the constraints of limited laboratory access. By conducting experiments remotely, students are able to run experiments from the comfort of their dorm rooms,unhampered by the traditional problems of restricted time and physical space.

There are a lot of interesting initiatives on the iCampus Outreach site including the call for proposals for student directed projects.

Did you see something interesting at Educause? Please let me know!