Digital Med-Ed: Educational Technology in Medicine

Wiki example: UCLA CMS group

UCLA Course Management Systems Consortium, see Wiki Site section.

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Subject: Re: online groups
From: Mike Franks
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 22:33:05 -0700 (PDT)

Paul Gannon,

This isn't quite at the level you're talking about, but we're using wiki sites, sometimes combined with blogs and pretty html up front for a couple campus groups where we're trying to build communities among staff.

UCLA Programmers Exchange - http://programmers.ucla.edu (though the wiki site is restricted to UCLA IPs)

Course Management Consortium - more of a campus project -
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/classweb/consortium/ open to the world, except you need to login to edit the wiki site or blog.

Instructional Technology Forum - private for those who support course management systems and other instructional technology applications here at UCLA.

And I've been using a wiki for several years with my student programmers to keep track of their projects.

The wiki software we got from the book "The Wiki Way" and adapted heavily. For the blog we use MovableType.

I've been pushing these kinds of tools for the groups I'm in because we're way decentralized here at UCLA and we need to stay in touch without a ton of meetings.

Mike Franks
Social Sciences Computing, UCLA
homepage: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ssc/franks/

Wiki roundup

By James Farmer, in the service of choosing a wiki for an online undergrad course.

Instructional design models

Here's a heady list of instructional design models from Martin Ryder at the University of Colorado at Denver School of Education.

Luna Insight Visual Collections

View maps, fine artwork, photographs and other items from over thirty
renowned collections. Explore these collections using the Insight® Browser
with no download required, or the Insight® Java Client with advanced
functionality, requiring one time download. View the collections individually
with the Insight Browser or Java Client. With the Insight Java Client, combine
several collections from one category, or combine any collection from
the View All tab.

Free ed tech journals for higher ed

Compiled by James Farmer: "This list is specifically journals which relate specifically to education & technology in higher education."

News feeds for universities

Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 10:40:46 -0500
Author: DeWayne Purdy <dewayne.purdy@uni.edu>
Subject: News Feeds
Body: On our News page (http://www.umpr.uni.edu/News.asp) and our portal,
we've been using a news feed from Moreover.com that selects news from
various media outlets around the country that reference UNI and
aggregates them into a list on our site. They had been delivering a
free service and a paid service, but now their free service includes an
advertisement (that looks like the other news links). Ads of that type
are against our university policy. Does anyone know of any other
services, paid or free that we can investigate? The basic cost for the
paid service from Moreover starts at $6,000. Using a Provided by...
link is acceptable under our policy, but not the ad they are slipping
in at the top.

DeWayne

Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 06:00:30 -0400
Author: David Carter-Tod <dcartertod@vccs.edu>
Subject: Re: News Feeds
Body: Yes, Yahoo News Search returns results as RSS, for example:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/usns/ynsearch/categories/news_story_search_rss/index.html?p=%22virginia%20community%20college%22

Or in this case:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/usns/ynsearch/categories/news_story_search_rss/index.html?p=%22university%20of%20northern%20iowa%22

David

Product Review: FeedDemon

Digital Web Magazine
Bradbury Software FeedDemon 1.0
By Paul Scrivens
Published on May 26, 2004

A couple of weeks ago I was in search of an RSS Reader because my ability to visit all my favorite Web sites, to check if they were updated, began to conflict with the mere 24 hours that come in a day. When asking people what RSS Reader to check out, many people immediately said NetNewsWire, but this was ruled out since it was an OSX application and I was running a Windows Desktop. The next most popular choice was FeedDemon, made by Bradbury Software.

Blogs in the workplace

InfoWorld
Blogging behind the firewall
InfoWorld’s internal Weblog started as an experiment. Already, it’s indispensable
By Chad Dickerson
May 21, 2004

What a difference a few Weblogs can make. In January, I wrote about the importance of leveraging the inherent simplicity in technologies such as RSS for enterprise information-sharing, and I mentioned a particular effort I had in mind: experimenting with a simple intranet Weblog. Mentioning a future effort in my column tends to solidify my own commitment, so we set up an internal Weblog system driven by Movable Type. Then, in response to a later column, I got quite a bit of reader e-mail asking me for more details on our use of Weblogs because that anecdote just scratched the surface. Consider this installment a closer peek behind the scenes here at InfoWorld.

Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we’re beginning to see more tangible benefits as we’ve begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month. We also scheduled what we call “fire drills” — our internal term for the intentional failure of a specific key system to test fail-over capabilities in the event of an unexpected outage of that system. Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company.

Wikis in the workplace

BusinessWeek Online
JUNE 7, 2004

Something Wiki This Way Comes
They're Web sites anyone can edit -- and they could transform Corporate America
By Robert D. Hof in San Mateo, Calif.

When software developer Nicholas Pisarro Jr. saw his first wiki late last year, he knew it was unlike any Web site he had ever seen. On the site, a free online encyclopedia called Wikipedia, thousands of volunteers had written a breathtaking 500,000 articles in 50 languages since 2001 -- all thanks to the defining feature of wikis. To contribute, all they had to do to was click on an "edit this page" button and start typing.

Now, Pisarro has wikis transforming the way people work at the company he founded, software maker Aperture Technologies Inc. Two dozen of the Stamford (Conn.) company's 100 employees use them to brainstorm, track projects, write and edit documentation, and coordinate marketing. That has eliminated countless meetings, conference calls, and back-and-forth e-mails. Says Pisarro: "Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster."

The amazing thing is that wikis work at all. Created in 1995 by Oregon programmer Ward Cunningham, who named them for the "Wiki-Wiki," or "quick" shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport, wikis are special Web sites on which anyone can post material without knowing arcane programming languages. Likewise, anyone can edit them. This can lead to mischief: Jokers have posted images of male anatomy on Wikipedia. But graffiti is usually gone within minutes, because the previous version of a page can be restored with a click. In sensitive corporate situations, access can be controlled, too.

Adapting elearning to the learner

This is from the eLearning Guild's email newsletter and is a summary of the full article that's available in the complete journal:

Many e-Learning designers are interested in ways to accommodate the differences between individual learners. Some avenues to do this may exist in human learning styles, if the designer knows about them and can find a way to bring them into the design strategy. In a recent article in The eLearning Developers' Journal, author Bill Brandon explains how designing your e-Learning to accommodate different learner styles will improve their retention and success. The article, "Style Points: Adapting e-Learning to the Learner" begins with a definition of learning styles.

"Learning style" is usually defined as a set of stable characteristics that affect the way a person perceives and interacts with the environment while learning. As such, learning style is an individual difference that can be taken into account when designing the content in any instructional system. There are many learning style models and theories, and many other psychological measures are used by classroom instructors as the basis for adjusting their teaching to individual learners. For example, the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a well-known measure of psychological type frequently mentioned in the literature, as is the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. Gardner's Multiple Intelligences theory is another system that has been used to account for different learning styles.

Apart from these broad theories of intelligence and personality type, theory and formal research on learning style have mainly pursued two other ways to characterize learning preferences. One view is based on understanding the learning process, and the other is based on understanding how people take in, store, and retrieve information. These views are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and they are both important to the designer's understanding. From these two views, three methods have emerged that are designed for the purpose and are in common use world-wide."

He then goes on to describe the three methods. The first he tackles is Kolb:

"The first of the two closely-related learning style theories I'll discuss is David Kolb's learning cycle model. Kolb created the Learning Style Inventory, an instrument that identifies an individual's dominant learning style. The LSI is sometimes called the "KLSI," for "Kolb's Learning Style Inventory" to distinguish it from all the other learning style inventories that have been developed, and it is also sometimes shown with a number following it - e.g., KLSI-3 - to indicate which of Kolb's several revisions it is.

Kolb, probably the best known and most used model in the United States, identified four different ways that people approach learning based on their preferences for the different stages of the learning cycle.

* Diverging: Someone who uses the diverging style (a "diverger") learns by looking at experience from several points of view and by generating lots of ideas. Divergers are imaginative and open-minded, believe they understand people, and are alert to look for and recognize problems. A diverger would benefit from being able to review case studies that don't have "cut and dried" solutions, in order to come up with a number of different ways to solve the problem presented.

* Assimilating: This style relies on inductive reasoning (working from examples in order to derive the "rules"). Assimilators like to come up with theories and models and to do planning. They are very patient, and want detailed background information about theory and practice. Give them a problem where they can apply a theory, or where they can come up with a theory about why there is a problem.

* Converging: Convergers are driven to solve problems and make decisions. They rely on deductive reasoning (applying the "rules" to specific instances). A converger will want "hands-on" examples for which there is only one answer, or where they choose the best answer from several possibilities. Give them a lot of facts to sort out.

* Accommodating: These are the risk-takers and leaders who are compelled to get things done, even if (especially if) it involves taking risks. Accommodators like games, particularly if there is a range of payoffs that depend on the skill with which the game is played. They also do well with exercises that involve multiple scenarios and decisions to be made about allocating or assigning resources.

The article also explains the two other approaches:

1. Peter Honey and Alan Mumford, two researchers in the United Kingdom extended Kolb's model in 1982 by defining individual preferences for each stage of Lewin's cycle. Honey and Mumford's model is best known outside the United States, and is particularly popular in the UK, Europe, and Australia.

2. VAK stands for Visual (seeing), Auditory (hearing), and Kinesthetic (touch and movement). According to this model, one of these senses will tend to dominate the way a learner takes in and processes information, and the way in which that information is represented when stored in memory, with the other senses serving in auxiliary capacities. It is also possible that an individual may use different dominant senses and different combinations of senses for different learning tasks.

Read the article for complete descriptions of each method and a summary of practical ways they can be applied to the design of e-Learning programs. Guild Members, go to www.eLearningGuild.com, log on, and download the complete article now! Guild Associates, we encourage you to Upgrade your membership so you can access this issue of the Journal. Just go to www.eLearningGuild.com and log in, then click "Upgrade Membership" from the main menu on the left, and follow the prompts from there.