Archive for October, 2006

Smartphone-Assisted Remote Proctoring: Resolving an E-Learning Dilemma

Published by Susan Smith Nash on October 30, 2006 in Online Learning. 0 Comments

“How do I know that the person taking the course is the one who is doing the work and taking the tests?” That’s the first question people have when they think about e-learning. A possible solution comes from an unexpected place — from the student’s own cell phone or smartphone that has built-in video capabilities.

Older Solutions: Going to a proctored testing center

Distance learners are not surprised when they hear they have to take their mid-term and final exam at a proctored testing center. The “assessment center” can be very informal. The location of the testing center might be a room at the local library, that one enters after giving their photo identification to the proctor. Alternatively, students could take their test onboard a ship with a designated person functioning as a proctor, or in an education center on a military base.

Some colleges and universities have their own testing centers on branch campuses. Others may have contracts with Thomson’s Thomson-Prometric testing centers (http://www.prometric.com) . With more than 3,000 centers across the world, using a Prometric center provides a convenient on-site solution to testing and assessment.

Technology-Assisted Remote Proctoring

Various strategies for remote proctoring have been implemented, which include having a room with a camera streaming to a control center where people are monitoring the behaviors of the individuals after identities have been confirmed.

Remotely confirming the individual’s identity can also be done in different ways, ranging from pin numbers, thumbprint scan, photo / camera, and voice recognition.

The underlying assumption that individuals are bad and will seek to cheat and subvert the system has been questioned by many. The people who really want to cheat will do so, and the barriers will not deter them. If anything, they represent a challenge.

Smartphone-Assisted Remote Proctoring

In the future, it will be simple to ask students to use their smartphones to authenticate their identity and to provide a remote camera for proctoring. The beauty of this approach is that the learner can take the test anywhere he or she has a signal. Just dial a number, place the camera so that it follows you, and the smartphone will function as a security camera.

The Role of the Virtual Library in Academic Honesty

This may seem fairly self-evident, but if a student feels comfortable with researching his or her ideas, and becomes interested in the topic to the point that the research process itself feels like discovery (and hence, is fun), it is more likely that the student will write his or her own ideas, and not plagiarize.

The role of the virtual library can be more than that of a repository of information. It can also assume the role of the Panopticon. Here’s a great set of articles about Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon — the guard tower in the prison that provided surveillance and enforced discipline. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/journalv1i3.htm

The virtual library makes a perfect Panopticon for the assessments and exams for an online course. The fact that there are numerous kinds of electronic resources makes the psychological impact feel “all knowing” as well as “all seeing.” The psychological impact is compounded by a sense that one’s privacy has been somehow compromised by the all-seeing smartphone, and that while one is taking a test, the cache and address book in one’s smartphone could be raided and mined for future database marketing. Personal data can be collected and sold. Images can be taken from the camera’s memory and mailed back to the student to let him or her know that “the smartphone knows” (and cannot keep its secrets)…


videographer: dave feiden If you’ve read this far, you realize that by discussing some of the security issues with smartphone-assisted proctoring, it’s clear that I believe that there are a few bugs to be worked out.

Nevertheless, where proctoring is required, we owe it to our students to make the process as painless and easy to do as possible. Otherwise, we run the risk of reducing access to education — precisely the problem we sought to correct by offering online courses in the first place (!)

Using Video Clips in an Online Literature Course – Edgar Allan Poe

Published by Susan Smith Nash on October 16, 2006 in Online Learning. 0 Comments

Podcast

Here’s one way that one can use video clips in conjunction with creative investigation of the author’s life and life work. It is a good way to engage the students, and to provide creative opportunities for the instructor. This example uses Edgar Allan Poe.

Greetings, I’m Edgar Allan Poe. This is what I have to say about my life and my life’s work…. History has betrayed me. People think I was drug fiend, an alcoholic, a laudanum-addled madman. That is simply untrue. I am a man of extremes. My mind explores the limits. I am interested in the limits of the irrational as well as the limits of the rational. If you accept that about me, you will be able to understand my writing, and you will see how I blend the two extremes together. So, if you read my detective novels, you see a rational, logical, deductive individual confronted by crimes of passion, and by irrational, bizarre forces. The rational and the irrational come together, and the blend fascinates and disturbs.

Videography – Dave FeidenI exist at the confluence of two streams of thought and influence. On the one hand, I am the aesthetic extension of the opium-addicted poet in the British writer DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I come from the gothic tradition of Ann Radcliffe and Sheridan LeFanu, who wrote highly popular gothic tales of vampyres, mad monks, and ghoulish forces. I also echo the romanticism of German authors such as Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann’s tales mesh the fantastic with the real world, and they admit the possibility that our consciousness transcends the body, and that there are states of mind that explore boundary regions between madness and sanity, life and death.

On the other hand, I am known as the father of the detective novel. I am a scientist of the human mind, and of human motivation. I observe signs, symbols, and patterns, and I seek to place events in logical sequences, and to locate them within their causal chains. I was writing my fiction at the same time that Charles Darwin was developing his theory of natural selection. Natural selection, as you know, is process that is fundamentally based on cause and effect. If the climate is cold, the species with thick fur coats will survive. The species evolves in response to causal forces and environmental triggers. My detective, Auguste Dupin, who appears in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” uses deductive logic. He is a careful observer of evidence and he avoids the emotional excesses that one finds percolating through my gothic tales and my poems.

If you think about it, it is not surprising that I am caught in cross-currents of divergent thinking. I am the dark counter to the bright, optimistic mainstream approach to life that came to be known as an American vision. While the Americans around me gloried in the feats of engineering such as the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, which would provide a passage through waterways from New York City to the Great Lakes, and they spoke of “Manifest Destiny,” which suggested that it was the Europeans’ destiny to find America and to “civilize” it, I wondered where those technologies would really take us. I am a classicist at heart, and I studied work in its original Greek and Latin. There was something about the culturally philistine jocularity of the expansionists that troubled me. We assume our travels are to a destination of our liking. I question that assumption when I find myself traveling roads constructed in the service of conquest.

The American writers I meet in Baltimore, New York, and in Boston often trouble me. They adhere to a new philosophy of life, an aesthetic code, a philosophy which seems too good to be true. They are transcendentalists. They believe in a “self-reliant” neo-platonism. What do I mean by that? They pull themselves up to heaven, to unity with God and the heavens, by their own bootstraps. When I read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially his essay, “Circles”), Henry David Thoreau, or Walt Whitman, I recoil. Their boundlessness, their enthusiastic belief in interconnectedness, and their self-assured belief that mix, merge, and become all of humanity, strike me as distressingly invasive. Emerson thinks he envelopes and that he includes all of humanity when he thinks about himself and the world. To the contrary, I think he invades and engulfs. His energy is, to me, essentially violating and transgressive (but masked as virtue). Emerson frightens me. Manifest Destiny seems to somehow emerge from a transcendentalist ideal, and seems morally wrong to me. My characters live the antithesis of boundlessness. They experience the dark side of expansion. They have been engulfed, possessed, and controlled by forces larger than themselves. In my American psyche, I counter the cheery optimism that the Erie Canal and Westward Expansion engender with zombies, ghosts, demonic forces, and people possessed by the spirits of houses and the past.

I am known for things I was never guilty of. My real vices are less well-known. I was expelled from college for unpaid gambling debts. I enlisted in the military, did well and was promoted. But later, I was dishonorably discharged from West Point. Even my death has been used against me. No one really knows how or why I died. It remains a mystery. And yet, posterity has it that I died from extreme intemperance. That was just not true.

first published at the fringe journal http://fringejournal.blogspot.com

The Moodle Manual

Published by Susan Smith Nash on October 5, 2006 in Online Learning. 0 Comments

Packt Publishing has just released Moodle: E-Learning Course Development — A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle, by William H. Rice, IV. Moodle is the highly popular open-source learning management software that was recently thrust into the spotlight as Blackboard took legal action against D2L in an attempt to restrict and /or limit the way that educational software companies develop learning management systems.

Packt’s Moodle is a fantastic resource, although the title is a bit misleading. It is, in reality, a technical manual for using Moodle. It has very little to say about e-learning, except in the sense that it is implicit that learning via Moodle is e-learning. Its major deficiency is that it does not include any elements of instructional design that would allow a user to start developing courses that are pedagogically sound in terms of commonly accepted best practices for e-learning. Further, it does not contain templates for typical courses, which would also be quite valuable for institutions that would be most likely to be interested in open-source learning management systems.

mood.png
Link to the book and information: http://www.packtpub.com/moodle/book

The book begins by discussion how and why the Moodle e-learning paradigm emphasizes collaborative, interactive, engagemement — with the content, with other students, and with the instructor. Moodle is serious about this. It allows discussion boards, but also contains the capability of incorporating a wiki.

The book contains a step-by-step guide for installing, configuring, creating courses, and managing content.

Because Moodle is open-source, the weak link is almost always the documentation and the training. Documentation support that is clear, well laid out, understandable, and supported with screen shots and graphics is a lifesaver. I would imagine that every institution that is using Moodle (or considering it) will want to buy a copy of this manual for every person on their tech team.

Thoughts on e-learning / mobile learning: E-Learning Queen

Image repositories: Flickr.
Custom images: click here for more information.

Thoughts on learning management systems, e-learning, and more. Viva open source! (videography by dave feiden)

Instantly Turn Your Image Files Into a PowerPoint: Full Version Available Now

Published by Susan Smith Nash on October 3, 2006 in Tech Trends. 0 Comments

The full version of GLTImager, an amazing time-saving program for anyone who has to make a presentation that includes lots of graphics, is available for sale. GLTImager takes your image files, and in a one-click process, populates a PowerPoint presentation. The graphic files do not have to be the kinds you’d use on a web page (jpg or gif). GLTImager is much more flexible and can use the files that engineers, scientists, geologists, geophysicists, doctors, nurses, health professionals, professors, students, designers, architects, accountants, strategic planners, marketing consultants use. The application is perfect for business, education, technology, medicine, and more. This program has other powerful features as well. It can organize image files, catalogue them, and either import or extract from Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, or Powerpoint.

Prefer to listen to the description? Here’s a downloadable mp3 file. http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/dogandponybot.mp3

For a limited time, the a limited function demo version of the program is available for download.
For demo version (”lite” version – many features not functional), click here: http://www.zenzebra.net/dogandponybot/GLTImager_demo.exe

The full version is available for purchase on a CD for $29.99, here http://www.cafepress.com/gltimager

The GLTImager is perfect for use with social networking groups and communities that share images such a Flickr (www.flickr.com), myspace.com, and Live Journal. (http://www.livejournal.com).

Presentation for Conference or Work: You can upload all the charts and graphs that represent your unit’s financial data, marketing and demographics, financial performance, human resources breakdown, and more. Alternatively, you may wish to provide graphic support for the business decisions you are recommending. Create great charts and graphs, put them in a separate folder, organize them in the order you’d like them to appear in the presentation, and boom! You’re in business. Expect a raise and a promotion.

http://www.dogandponybot.com
Click link for of scanning electron microscopy by Roger Slatt, Ph.D.

Photos from the Field on Digital Camera: For people who do outdoor photography or videos for profession (geology, botany, etc) or hobby (flowers, scenary), glt imager is ideal for quickly converting jpegs from digital cameras into powerpoints or presentations using Corel Draw. It is also good for downloading directly into an application program such as Adobe Illustrator.


Video by Dave Feiden. http://www.davefeiden.comSelling Your Car: Ever wish you could show more of what you’re trying to sell than just a collection of flat images? Take great shots of your car, then create a powerpoint instantly. Add text, even music. You’ll be amazed at how effective your presentation is.
Video by Dave Feiden. http://www.davefeiden.comVictoria’s Wedding: If your social network community (xanga.com, livejournal, yahoo360, myspace) allows sharing, you can save your new files into a separate folder, and then with one click, create a powerpoint! Here is specifically what to do if you want to send your family members a digital keepsake of your cousin Victoria’s wedding. Download your cousin Victoria’s wedding pictures from Flickr or Yahoo360 (http://360.yahoo.com) into a file folder on your desktop, hard drive, or on your flash drive, then with one click, presto! you’ve got a powerpoint presentation. Then, you can even write captions, add animations, and add music.School Presentations with Stunning and Provocative Photos: Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone from YahooNews is one example. You may wish to make a presentation for your class and incorporate photojournalism, travel shots, or nature photography. For example, if you’re doing a paper and a presentation on Costa Rica, you might want to include a photograph of the sculptures of cherubim and seruphim found on the face of a gothic cathedral in San Jose.

Or, alternatively, you may enjoy the photos from the Great Barrier Reef taken by Flickr member CharltonB and posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlton_b/24577309/

Here are features of the GLTImager program.

Features – What GLTImager currently does…
) Reads native image formats of JPG, GIF, WMF, EMF, BMP.
) Reads application COM images using Corel Draw 10 & 12, Adobe Illustrator 10, MS-Powerpoint 2000 & XP & 2003 if said applications are installed
) Has a Library of Images
) Has a Project of Images
) Create a Project from the Library
) Always creates a 200 pixel resolution image (JPG or GIF) for each image for both the Library and Project.
) Can view Image Properties
) Can import and save caches of the images at specified sizes and types
) Can set a Rotation flag (90, 180, 270 degrees) for an Image (of type JPG, BMP or GIF) in either the Library or Project and that setting is applied for each cache loaded
) Can set a Flip flag (top to bottom, left to right) for an Image (of type JPG, BMP or GIF) in either the Library or Project and that setting is applied for each cache loaded
) Internal support for exporting a Project of images to MS-Powerpoint
) Printing of an Index of images (either from Library or Project)
) Exporting a set of Images (either from Library or Project) to PDF format without use of external drivers
) Open an image (if original is available) in the image’s native application
) Viewing the Library or Project of images as a multi-column list
) Viewing the Library or Project of images as a full-screen multi-column list
) Saving a Library or Project of images to a single compressed file (.GLI file) with samples and cached images (if used) for opening on other systems with GLTImager
) Opening of a GLT Imager file format to the Library or Project.
) History of opened GLT Imager (.GLI) files for the Library and Project
) Fully integrated Help System with text, images, animated images and links (requires Internet Explorer 4.0 and above to function)
) “Search for Images” capability along with advanced options for caching different versions of an image
) “Drag and Drop” capability to quickly and easily load images into the application

The GLTImager program was developed by Andrew Slatt. All rights reserved.

video by Dave Feiden. http://www.davefeiden.comUseful Resources:
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.mystikmedia.com/autoimager.asp perfect with GLTImager.