“NITLE Moodle Exchange” by Mark Pearson of Earlham, Barry Bandstra of Hope, and Barron Koralesky of Macalester

[I have no specific notes at all about this session. From what I remember it was three somewhat divergent ideas all grouped together under the general heading of Moodle.

The three ideas as I remember them are:

• a technical support group, so people can help each other with getting (and keeping) moodle up and running
• a technical development group, so people can collaborate on creating customizations and extensions
• a pedagogical support/development group, so people can help each other figure out the best ways to use all the new tools that are available

I don't have a whole lot to say about this other than it seems like a fine idea and would probably be worth getting involved for any schools that's using or considering moodle.

The latter point is interesting in that it's not necessarily moodle specific. Many of the LMS have the same functionality and differ largely 'only' in UI and extensibility. So, probably worth getting involved there for anyone using any LMS.]

[I really need to finish off this NITLE series so I can get to more recent stuff. I completely see why people do their conference blogging in situ - it's way to easy to get caught up in other work afterwards and never get to the writing one so meant to do. Blogging has some good effect as a way to force me to review my notes afterwards, but that's lost if I never get around to it. Conversely, it's handy as a snapshot of the moment when used as the talk is happening, but then I may not go back and read it over. I've tried at a recent conference taking notes in a text editor with the idea that it's then pretty easy to convert to a post later, and so I'll hopefully get the best of both worlds. We'll see how that goes...]

“Implementing Sakai in a Liberal Arts College” by Mike Osterman of Whitman

[this talk was all about Sakai and its implementation process at Whitman, but there was a lot of generally useful info and ideas tucked into an otherwise very focused presentation.]

• why Sakai
  • had all needed features
  • sustainable, community sourced
  • good timeline
  • on a platform they already knew
  • cost is ‘free’
    • servers
    • conference/meeting attendance
    • project participation fees [I think Sakai may have ended that part...]
    • bribes to get people to use/learn the system (meals, workshop attendance stipend, prizes, etc.)
    • 1/4 to 1/2 FTE for project implementation
    • 1/10 to 1/4 person for ongoing admin
    • docs/support of 40 hrs / term
    • developer/designer of 8/hrs
    • contribute to the community (citizenship, not necessarily code)
    • NOTE: costs are fixed, not scaling!
• the process
  1. survey to identify needed features
  2. test instance
  3. attend tech meetings for the product
  4. pilot program
     1. install
     2. present to users
     3. recruit volunteers
     4. CMS admin does docs and training
     5. solicit incoming faculty for using new LMS
     6. NOTE: it’s a long term process
  5. regular (1/term) survey of both fac and students [I really like this - so much of what we end up doing is implementation with out any real review/feedback to know what's working and what's not and what adjustments are needed.]
• key points of the process
  • get buy in from the administration
  • lots of communication work
  • build a community
  • get faculty support (official, not just informal and individual)
  • don’t add useless features, and document well what you do need
  • ask the open source community for help
  • lobby the development community for the features you want

[Notes to self for Williams (not tied to any particular LMS):

• Brand the CMS for our institution
• look and feel is very, very important - a good tool that doesn't get used is not actually a good tool
• We should have an advisory / steering group (IT, admin, faculty, and student reps) for our LMS, whatever it happens to be
• Sakai specific:
  • What tech skills are needed?
  • Research the Rutgers link tool - good for Sakai, maybe a good model for others]

“Extending Your Learning Management System: Stretching Blackboard to Meet the Needs of a Liberal Arts Campus” by Christina Finneran of Bowdoin

• Prior to implementing a LMS they used a content mangement system and HTML and case-by-case tools
• Chose to use a LMS because it lowers the threshold for adoption and it centralizes services
• Extended the base LMS (using Blackboard’s Building Blocks system) to add single signon for their library services, facebooks for their courses [for them as wll as us, this is the 'killer app' of the LMS], and to add blogs and wikis to courses [they use the same tools for this Williams does, Building Blocks sold by Learning Objects, Inc.]
• Notes that the faculty, student, and CMS view of ‘course’ are all different
• “What does it mean to teach a course in the digital age?”
  • check out Jung and Suzuki, 2006
  • consider an 2-D set of axes, one is open interaction to efficient class management, the other is information dissemination to knowledge creation
  • consider a table where the columns are ‘in class’, ‘online’, and ‘out of class’, where the rows are ‘Professor’, ‘Student’, and ‘Content’
• Blackboard is most useful for information dissemination, BUT not all the time
• BB has a closed community model
  • limited accessibility
  • no self-joining

[at this point my notes are a mix of info from Christina and ideas inspired by the talk. I need to get better about distinguishing the two... anyway, here they are intermixed and I'm very sorry to say I don't know which is which. If anyone knows something here which should be attributed to her, please let me know and I'll update this.

• a BB advisory group, with representatives from the library, deans, faculty, technologists, and perhaps students
• make use of BB organizations - encourages whider acceptance/use of it
  • official programs the include students (committees, tutoring, sports, etc.)
  • official organizations of students (college council, etc.)
  • student clubs of various degrees of formality (movie club, music groups, etc.)
• focus on peer-to-peer learning
  • there are different approaches and best-uses for different communities, consider BB for the sciences, BB for foreign studies, BB for creative writing, BB for.... - create a user group around each major group
• Site design is important! It's worth it to take the time to try to make BB look good and have decent UI
• NOTE TO SELF- try to get a copy of the powerpoint for this talk! (and for Bryan's)]

“Connecting Study Abroad with the CMS” Harry Velez of University of Puget Sound

[Again, very little in the way of specific notes.

The problem he was trying to solve is that study abroad is a big, life-changing experience, but it's very hard to communicate it both while the student is away and after they return. In short, a CMS can be a useful/powerful tool for this, but only if you have the time and energy to really work on it. He had some web 2.0/777 aspects, but it was still largely top down.

It seemed to me that the CMS was not the ideal tool for this job - he had to do quite a bit of work to make it fit. Might have been better off collecting a best-of-breed set of tools.

Some free tools:

• Flickr - photo sharing and commenting / community
• Blogger, WordPress, etc. - blog hosting
• Various wiki hosts
• MySpace / Facebook - online presense, 'puire' social sites
• Del.icio.us  - link sharing and tagging
• Gmail, Hotmail - web based email
• Google Groups, YahooGroups - simple group systems (email lists, file sharing, etc.)
• Google Calendar - calendaring system
• Survey Monkey - simple surveys (and quizzes)
• YouTube - video sharing
• ITunes - audio sharing, podcasting

Using a sub-set of the above tools might be more effective that making a CMS try to fulfill those functions.

One interesting note, there is no free CMS tool out there. (free meaning hosted / managed by a third party and all you have to do is use it, a la Gmail; not 'free' as in you can download it and install it and run the service without any licensing fees, a la Moodle, but you still have to host it and maintain it and support it.)  That probably says something about something, but I don't know what about what. Perhaps it's an opportunity for some one...]

Karl Wirth of Macalester, Paul Miller of Davidson, Ryan Tansey (recent alum)of University of Puget Sound, and Alex Wales (current student) of Davidson

[I don't have any specific notes for this, but luckily Bryan Alexander blogged it.

The professors are both ones that make good use of LMS. The students had mixed-but-over-all-positive feelings about LMS.

The professors seemed excited about the potential of new tools from LMS (discussion forums, quick quizzes, journals, etc.). The students seemed especially pleased with the persistence and availability of course materials. The students found course where professors made good use of the LMS good, but  manyprofessors use it inconsistently, badly, or both, not to mention the poor UI of LMS.]