Project Exelente: Video Resources for Using eXe in Training and Distance Education

Here's the link to the Exe-Lente channel: http://www.youtube.com/myexelente Last November 2008 my teacher in EDDE 221: Design and Evaluation of Multimedia Educational Materials at UPOU, Prof. Alejo J. Espinosa assigned our class to create a project called "Exelente". It aimed to produce video tutorials on how to apply the elearning XHTML editor (eXe) to the following target audience:

1. Basic Education (Private School) Audience
2. Basic Education (Public School) Audience
3. Higher Education (Private School) Audience
4. Corporate Communications
5. NGO or Cause-Oriented Communications

Here is Prof. Santos' introduction to the project: eXe is available at http://exelearning.org/. My classmates really worked hard on the project and our work is now published for everyone at http://www.youtube.com/myexelente. Here is a sample from mabelcand: Please visit our channel and give us some feedback. TIA :-)

In loco parentis & distance education

There was a time when education was believed to have its roots from the family.  The relationship between the institution, its teachers and the students were like parent and child.  That is the principle of "in loco parentis" or "in place of a parent".  The values of educational institutions were familial.

Today, in higher education in particular, there had been a shift towards rooting those values and that relationship in business.  Wherein the student is no longer treated as a child but a customer.  Parents do not sell learning services to their children; they do not think of making profit from their children.  But businesses do to their customers.

It is in this context that I wish educational institutions will return to the concept of "in loco parentis".  But not with regards to its narrow emphasis on policing student's mores.  I would rather emphasize the values of parents in relation to how, why, and what they want their children to learn.  "In loco parentis" applies to the academic activities as well.  And those values can be summed up in terms of giving the best education to their children regardless of cost and sacrifices.

Of course parents cannot teach everything their children want to learn.  It is the reason "apprenticeship" had been the second best option but not better than parental guidance.  But I believe that in earlier times, the relation between master and apprentice was like parent and child.  This appears to be implied even with for instance the relation between Joshua and Moses.  When masters (craftsmen, artists, philosophers, prophets etc.) were accessible in villages,  candidate apprentices can just walk in and learn what they wish to learn.  With industrialization, the masters had disappeared inside the secured walls of factories and research laboratories.  The knowledge had been dispersed among so many people involved in the production process that eventually the masters had been diminished if not disappeared all together.

In the suburban community where I live, when one goes out you would not find any artists, craftsmen, or philosophers.  You'll find retail stores and malls.  Generations after generations had lost an opportunity to learn.  And so we go to schools that cannot teach us the knowledge that are locked away in the factories, ateliers, and research laboratories.  Schools cannot attain the totality of learning that a culture with learned parents and learned masters can provide, such that one achieve his/her highest potentiality.

Now with technology, I am hoping masters would again be accessible to would be apprentices.  But can this be achieved with distance education?  Is it really possible to connect to essential expert actors in a social network threaded by the Internet?  Are the masters even out there?

Dana Boyd's advice on choosing the right grad school

I like what Dana Boyd said about choosing a graduate school. She said NOT to choose the best but the place that will "allow you to explore the questions you're interested in in a way that works best for you." I also think she correctly pointed out the importance of an advisor in a graduate students success. For the full artilcle read: http://www.danah.org/GradSchoolAdvice.html

Funny but true PHD comics (also applies to Masters)

He-he-he. To lighten the depression from post-graduate burn out. PhD Comics.

How to install the OpenMovie Editor effects plugin in Ubuntu Intrepid

OpenMovie Editor is probably the easiest non-linear video editor available in Ubuntu. It is available at http://www.openmovieeditor.org/.

Here's a quick video tutorial about it from oracle2025:



Unfortunately, the effects shown on the video above cannot be done with Ubuntu out-of-the-box because the effects plugin package frei0r is not installed.

You'll need the libgavl1 library from here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/libgavl1
or get the libgavl1 and frei0r plugins from Darwin Bautista's archive here: https://launchpad.net/~baudm/+archive/ppa

Install the relevant .deb packages for your architecture (e.g. i386 or amd64) with Gdebi. Voila! You can now play with OME's effects. Later on I'll explore it's application in teaching.

Reuse, Remix and Mashup Instructional Materials

Teachers always have too much to do, and too little time to do it. We find it hard to find enough time to create new instructional materials. Most of the time we rely on old textbooks. But at times we find it's content too old, or out of sync with our method of teaching, and even dissatisfying to our learning objectives.

We need a faster approach to developing and deploying flexible instructional materials. And we need it cheap but high quality. What should we do?

Reuse, remix and mashup instructional materials freely available in the world wide web with what we have locally in the school.




Reuse Free Content

Where do we find free content? And in what form? There are two types, reusable resources could just be images and text from Wikipedia, or it could come in the form of SCORM and IMS packages. Learning objects (LO) packaged in SCORM and IMS can be thought of as video game cartridges or even CD's. You know they have a lot of information in them but you'll never know until you have a player. So LOs need players. Here is an example of a SCORM module that I have made: http://matangdilis.moodle4free.com/mod/scorm/view.php?id=12 . You might need to login as guest and check preview than hit the enter button to play it.

The difference between Learning Resources and Learning Objects, is that the former are simple static things like pdf files, images, sound, etc.; while LOs are more interactive, they may contain activities and quizzes to name a few.

You may also download whole courses or parts of it from sites like Merlot, MITOpenCourseWare, or for higher education courses like engineering at Stanford. Some of the best schools in the world are offering free stuff out there you wouldn't believe. It's just a google away.

Just make sure you read the license of what you're using.

Mashup

Once you have your free content, you can use free or opensource software to mix it with what you have. You can download for free a set of tools from Edubuntu. Or if you're into multimedia IM you may want to use UbuntuStudio tools.

If your teaching via distance education you may want to mashup with free online services. You would be familiar with mashup if you'd ever embedded a YouTube video in your site before. Now even quizzes can be embedded for free, like this great example from MySTudiyo.




Can you can imagine what you can do with Picassa Web Albums, YouTube and a lot more.

Some of the great software featured in my video project at UPOU above can be found here:

Creating a Planet: Blender 3d http://www.blender.org
Solar system demo: Celestia http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Constellations: Stellarium http://stellarium.org/
Geometry - Geobra http://www.geogebra.org/cms/
Chemistry - Kalzium http://edu.kde.org/kalzium/

Open & Free Educational Tools: A micro pamphlet

What is Open Educational Resources?

"OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge." (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation)

What is OpenCourseWare?

OCW is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. (Wikipedia)

According to the website of the OCW Consortium, an OCW project (Wikipedia):

• is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
• is available for use and adaptation under an open license.
• does not typically provide certification or access to instructors.

What is Open Source Software?

Generally it is a software that allows access to the source code. But according to the "Open Source Initiative" it also has criteria for distribution which can be found here: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

What is Free Software?

“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”. (Free Software Foundation)

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. (Free Software Foundation)

What is Open Access Publishing

Open Access is relevant to accessing scholarly journals. Open access publishing is the publication of material in such a way that it is available to all potential users without financial or other barriers. (Wikipedia)

What is Open Instruction?

The term is not common, but the idea was tested in the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course opened to the public by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The course can be found here http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/.

What is Copyright?

I am not a lawyer so the following is for information only. Each country has it's own copyright laws so see your lawyer for any real case.

Copyright has no definition. (Amador, p.2) Generally it includes five exclusive rights with respect to the copyrighted work (Amador, 367):

1. reproduce
2. distribute
3. perform
4. display
5. prepare derivative works

What is a Copyright License?

A license is a written document, a contract assigning or transferring the above rights to others. These rights may be transferred separately or assigned individually (Amador, 368). There are two types of licenses, exclusive and non-exclusive.

In an exclusive license, the copyright holder permits the licensee to use the protected material for a specific use and further promises that the same permission will not be given to others. (Amador, p.371) It has to be granted in the form of writing.

A nonexclusive license permits the use of a copyrighted work in a particular manner but the same may also be granted to others. (Amador, 372)

Some popular licenses that give teachers and students access to free and open educational tools and resources include: GNU GPL, GNU GFDL, and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.


The terms above are the fundamental principles underlying open educational tools that will be commented on in this blog.



Ref:

Amador, V.B. (1998). Copyright under the Intellectual Property Code. Philippines: Rex.

Coar, K. (2006). The Open source definition. Retrieved March 14, 2009, from http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd.

Open access (publishing). (2009, March 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 04:04, March 14, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_access_(publishing)&oldid=274912273

Open educational resources (OER) - making high quality educational content and tools freely available on the web. (2009). The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Retrieved March 14, 2009 from http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER.

OpenCourseWare. (2009, March 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:40, March 14, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OpenCourseWare&oldid=276484840

Free Software Foundation. (2009) The GNU operating system. Retrieved March 14, 2009, from http://www.gnu.org/.

Tinkering with Student Assessment Tools

I grew up in a town that was lo-tech, a rural place where there were no public libraries nor bookstores. Information was not only not open and free, but there was just no information available for further study of the world. The only source of reading materials was the newsstand that sells tabloids, local comics and magazines. This was a place where a teen's leisure hours are spent swimming in the river, playing pool or watching the mango trees bear fruit.1

And that was during the 1980's!

When I was a child, I've never seen computers. They were the stuff found in comics and sci-fi television. School's didn't have them either. The first time I got to touch one was in the late eighties. My cousin's had an 8086 clone, and we played games with it.

When I was in college I wanted to be a physicist or an engineer. But destructively experimenting with atoms was too expensive. After shifting courses, and majors I ended up being an education student. During that time the major educational technology used in the classroom was the photocopier i.e. teachers would hand out copies of their readings. But we did have some "introduction to computers" courses and I was introduced to the Apple 1. The one with a wooden case, single sided 51/2 inches floppy, and green monochrome monitors.

My first computer was a used Korean 80286 clone. Which I destroyed within a few months and swapped with a used 80386. With the 286 I was able to program in Pascal a very simple program to compute my grades because I hated using the calculator. The program is text based and would ask the user to simply input a series of numbers and when the last grade is typed, it sums it up and multiply the weights. After showing the output on the screen I manually copied the grades to my class record.

I probably went through all the major models of the Intel PC except the Pentium 2. And all of them were junk. And all of them were what I would call "Frankenstein" computers, with surplus parts sourced from here and there. With a P3 I programmed in VB macro my excel sheet to automatically calculate grades while I was sick for two weeks in the early 2000's. This was one of my first attempts at creating a distributable GPL'ed tool for my collegues. Unfortunately no one was interested in using it, except me.

Later on I used a program called WebGrades by Rasul Shafikov which seems no longer available on the Net. It was written in PHP and I used it to display my student's grades in my former site timawa.org. It is not a tracker or calculator but simply displayed manually calculated grades to a specific logged-in student.

In 2005 I managed to put up Moodle at my defunct site tagalog.ws (which is now at http://matangdilis.moodle4free.com) and used it's automated Gradebook. With it, computation was automated but the output did not match the grading system of my school. And because I am the only one running Moodle in my school I am not that motivated to customize it.

I am currently thinking of porting my VB excel code to Openoffice Macros but I still don't have enough time to sit down and study that language.

I am not a programmer nor a computer scientist. But because I'm a teacher who creates his own tools, in a sense a tool maker I tinker a lot with educational technology. This is possible because bits are cheaper than atoms. Looking back, my current student assessment tools are a far cry from my Pascal program. It made my work a little bit easier.