New Blog Focused on Open Education, Electronic Textbooks, and Social Media

I have been very quiet on this blog recently, but it doesn't mean I haven't been busy...

I have created a new blog centered on open education, electronic textbooks, and the use of social media in education, so you're encouraged to follow it if those topics are of interest to you. I'm also gathering faculty stories around these topics to showcase on the blog, so if you have juicy examples, please let me know!

The blog is located at http://sites.udel.edu/open/

Hope to see your avatar in the comment section ;-)

Marketing in the Social Age

On December 7, 2010, I am meeting with student’s in Sherry Kitto’s class to discuss marketing and social media. I’m using this post to keep a running list of resources for them to explore further after our discussion.

• Making your Corporate Website Relevant, Jeremiah Owyang
• Saxbys Newark Facebook Presence
• Multi-Channel Social Strategy, Jeff Bullas
• Googlenomics, Wired Magazine
• Location-Aware Technologies, Mashable (infographic)
• Owner Credits Facebook for Saving His Business, Bay News 9
• Branding in the Digital Age, Harvard Business Review

Some of the topics I think will be addressed:

• Trust
• Transactional vs. relational economies
• Indexing for better web findability
• Location-aware technologies

Please leave comments!

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Short URL to this page: http://bit.ly/eed4TG

Branded to Learn: Leveraging Social Media Conversations

On October 5, 2010, I have presented at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Delaware about the use of social media for learning. I don't think I'm an expert in this (anyone who claims to be a social media guru is a poser, in my opinion), but some might see some of the things I have experienced in the past as "social media micro-successes", for lack of finding a better term...

Before I dig into a laundry list of slides, videos, and resources, I'd like to use a quote from Clay Shirky's most recent book, Cognitive Surplus. Describing the ever-widening gap between him and his NYU students...

They can understand the shift from scarcity to abundance, since the process is still going on today. A much harder thing to explain to them is this: if you were a citizen of that world [before the Internet], and you had something you needed to say in public, you couldn't. Period. Media content wasn't produced by consumers; if you had the wherewithal to say something in public, you weren't a consumer anymore, by definition. Movie reviews came from movie reviewers. Public opinions came from opinion columnists. Reporting came from reporters. (page 61)

Now that any cellphone becomes a means of self-expression and a public conversation device, it's hard to imagine what it was like, even 10 years ago.

This presentation is a mix of my personal experience with social media, how I got introduced to it, used it, and tailored it to make me aware of the world and make the world aware of me. Social media is a weird new space, where you need to brag a little to get noticed, and where it's not always frowned upon to do so (see Self-Service: The Delicate Dance of Online Bragging for more on this subject).

10-5-2010 Branded to Learn

View more presentations from Mathieu Plourde.

• List of tools I use
• Pics from the event

Below is a list of links pointing to tools I referred to in my presentation. Have fun exploring! 

Personal Productivity Tools

• Diigo (social bookmarking)
• Delicious (social bookmarking)
• Evernote (note taking)
• Dropbox (file storage)
• Google Alerts (awareness)
• Pageflakes (startpage)

Social Networking Tools

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• SocialOomph

Enhanced Reality Tools

• QR codes and barcode readers
• Foursquare (geo-location)

Content Hosting and Creation

• Youtube
• Slideshare
• Flickr
• Google tools
• Creative Commons

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Short URL to this page: http://bit.ly/branded2learn

Intro to Social Media and Web 2.0 Tools Through Faculty Practices - Workshop

On April 15, 2010, at 1:30 p.m. EDT, I moderated for the first time my new training session on the use of social media and web 2.0 tools in higher education. I have spent a considerable amount of time preparing for this and hoped to be able to draw some people in from my personal learning network during the event, which did happen.

On June 4, during the Summer Faculty Institute, I will moderate it again, but this time on a tighter schedule (only 30 minutes). The live stream will be available on Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ud-workshops

This TinyURL will point to this workshop gateway page (this page you're reading right now):

http://tinyurl.com/smpractices0410

I had to use a date stamp at the end because I used /smpractices before for my dry run... A downside of URL shortening...

Please monitor the #smpractices hashtag on my Twitter account (@mathplourde) for more details. Since this will be a one man show, I probably will not be able to monitor Twitter during the presentation but will try to take pauses to discuss when appropriate. I will also prepare tweetbites in advance using SocialOomph to send automated timely updates during the presentation.

As I work on which practices to showcase and on the flow of the presentation, I will edit this blog post to add links and embeds to specific resources.

6-4-2010-SM Web20 Practices

View more presentations from Mathieu Plourde.

Session Support Links

• Ustream (Live Video) Channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ud-workshops
• #smpractices hashtag search on Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=smpractices
• #smpractices search on TwitterFall: http://twitterfall.com/?trend=%23smpractices%21%231F3547
• Mathieu's Twitter account: http://twitter.com/mathplourde

Faculty Practices

• List of all practices on Wallwisher: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/ws8lLJK63z

In no particular order, here's the list of practices that might be used during the presentation:

• TwHistory, Twitter Reenactments: http://twhistory.org/
• Learning activity in Second Life for diagnosing and treating virtual patients (Imperial College London): http://www.healthwithbyte.net/2008/08/game-based-learning-for-virtual_13.html
• Ning vs. Learning Management Systems: http://connecting2theworld.blogspot.com/2009/02/ning-vs-learning-management-systems-lms.html
• Use of Blogs in IT Applications in Marketing Class: http://ats.udel.edu/community/node/615
• Googles, Tweets, and Pods: Social Media and the Millennial Learning: http://anythinginstructional.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-tweets-and-pods-social-media.html
• The Twitter Experiment at UT Dallas: http://www.utdallas.edu/~mar046000/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm
• Lynnette Claire on Student Entrepreneurship Videos: http://itech.ups.edu/showcase/lynette-claire-film
• Tutoring via Instant Messaging: http://leap.ubc.ca/get-study-help/online-tutoring-how-tos/
• Professor Textblaster: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Professor-Textblaster/21451
• Course Twitter Feed: http://www.joshuadanish.com/courses/course-twitter-feed/
• Class Delicious Tag in Computer Science: http://delicious.com/tag/cisc367ud
• 7th Grader Personal Learning Environment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEls3tq5wIY
• Richard Gordon- Supplementing Sakai to Increase Student Engagement: http://udcapture.udel.edu/events/sfi2010/Presentation%20Recordings/Effective%20Instruction%20Online/?t=a4dfec06ffc65dc9ca096357579d6a87

Comment from Stéphane Gauvin, Professor of Marketing, Université Laval, about his use of Facebook as a LMS:

For me, as a teacher, it turned out to be the best environment, by a mile. More and better interaction. It may not provide the easiest way to manage some chores, though, as culling assignments and integrating graded activities is not as easy as it is in a customized [LMS]. Many students were skeptical at first. Most liked it. Some were overwhelmed by the amount of information; some were uneasy with the friends/colleagues mix. I'll very probably use it again next year (keep in mind that this is for an eMarketing [graduate] course -- my assessment is less enthusiastic for support to regular courses).

Professor Gauvin also uses Dropbox to share files and have students drop their assignments.

Still Didn't Get Enough?

• Bookmarks tagged with SMPracticesTraining on Delicious: http://delicious.com/mathplourde/SMPracticesTraining

Using Social Media and Web 2.0 for Higher Education

I'll be doing a dry run this Friday for a new training session I am working on for faculty at the University of Delaware. I'm trying to collect as many faculty practices around the use of social media, including free web 2.0 tools like social bookmarking, video streaming, etc., in the context of course support, in-class, hybrid, or pure distance.

I have already found some examples, but it seems like I have a hard time finding higher education ones (or at least education ones in general). So here's my current list:

• Hotseat at Purdue University. This Twitter-like application lets students ask questions and vote for the ones that the Instructor should answer.
• The Twitter Experiment at UT Dallas. An experiment by Monica Rankin, Professor of History at UT Dallas.
• Roosevelt High School's Use of Social Media. The focus of this video is to demonstrate how student engagement is key to success.
• Diigo - 21st Century Tool for Research, Reading and Collaboration. A post about why Diigo is a good tool for education.
• Ustream for sick student: Just a Tweet I saw today that made me realize how easy it is to let an external audience attend your live event.
• Lynnette Claire on Student Entrepreneurship Videos. Students film a short documentary about a local business and share it with other students and community members at the end of the semester.
• Using a Flip Video Camera in the Classroom. This instructional video explains ways to take advantage of a low-end video camera for use in the classroom.

I will modify this post to add relevant examples, but basically, I think social media and web 2.0 resources can be used in multiple ways to enhance student learning. Different tools will serve different purposes, like collecting, commenting, discussing, doing mashups and remixes, immersing, creating, archiving, etc.

Please share any good examples I should consider for my workshop as comments below, and I will share them back in this post. Make me proud of my personal learning network so I can brag about how you guys rock! ;-)

UPDATE: I have created a tag in Diigo/Delicious to keep track of these examples and the new ones I will find: http://delicious.com/mathplourde/SMPracticesTraining

I also recorded the video of a brainstorming session about the content of the final workshop and used Wallwisher to move stuff around.

A Serendipitous Social Media Story.

You know how we always think of the Internet as a web of facts that are interconnected to one another? Well, here's a story of random interconnected stuff that led me to step out of my comfort zone. Warning: This blog post jumps from one thing to the other a lot.

About 2 months ago, I finally got rid of my dino-phone (circa 2007) to make a leap into 2009 and bought a Motorola Droid (I know, the Droid is SOOOOO 2009). I have been enjoying my new smartphone a lot since I got it. I don't usually play around with computers and social media, preferring to do productive stuff with them (I have a PS3 at home to play after all), but one silly thing I have been playing around with is Foursquare, a new location-based social application.

I must admit that I don't really use Foursquare for anything serious, and definitely not to meet drinking buddies (although I would have enjoyed that back in my college days). I just like tagging my surroundings and racking up stats about my whereabouts. I aspire to become the Uber-Mayor of Newark, DE, but some local users are taking this way too seriously for me to be a contender...

Since I don't know many local folks using Foursquare, I became friend with my various conference geeks. Foursquare has a feature to see where your friends have recently checked in, but I rarely pay any attention to it.

On a Thursday night, finding myself slightly bored because my wife just left for Europe (she recruits international students to come learn English in Delaware), I took a look at my friends' list, just for fun. I noticed the following information next to Alec C's avatar:

Alec C. @ Fogo De Chao

... which got me thinking. Alec C. is Alec Couros, a Professor of Education at the University of Regina who's social media expertise is so deep that he's making a living out of it. Alec was our keynote presenter at our last Summer Faculty Institute.

Since my wife travels so much for her work, she racks up frequent flyer miles like crazy, so I accompanied her last September for one of her student fairs in Brazil. Brazilians are very big on fire-grilled beef, and they have all-you-can-eat restaurants called Churrascarias, where the meat comes to you until your belly explodes. Anyway, I went to Fogo De Chao in Sao Paulo, so I got even more curious. Could Alec be in Brazil?

Then I clicked on his avatar and figured out he was at the Philadelphia's Fogo de Chao. So I direct messaged Alec on Twitter to understand why the heck he was in Philly and not freezing his butt in the Canadian Great Prairies.

He told me he was in Philly to attend Educon starting on the Friday night. Having no idea what Educon was, I googled it and found out about it. It seemed like a decent education conference, but with a strong focus on K12. After a couple of back and forth messages on Twitter, Alec said he would keep me in touch of any social events so I could join him to catch up.

Friday night arrived, and I left work pretty late. I saw that the opening panel discussion was streamed, and I didn't pay too much attention to it, but Twitter was on fire! Tweets tagged with #educon kept coming left, right, and center, so I guess I did know a lot of people attending this conference after all. I thought to myself: "Who's crazy enough to attend a conference that happens during a weekend anyway?"

My Saturdays are always extremely lazy and unproductive. This one was not exception. I kept an uninterested eye on Twitter to see if Alec would send me a message about the plans for Saturday night. We finally figured out that Educon folks were to gather at a place called Rembrandt's in Philly at night, so I decided to just drive there for the evening, packing the bare essentials just in case I had to spend the night anywhere, since it was snowing and i would need to drive back pretty late (Philly is 45 minutes from my house on a clear day).

So I drove to Philly to meet Alec, and ended up meeting a bunch of my friends on Twitter, bumping contact information and bouncing ideas about education and technology. At that point, I realized that even thought educon was K12-focused, the people there made the conference, and spending my Sunday there would not only be beneficial, but also fairly entertaining!

So I made sure I could register with Chris Lehmann, the conference organizer and driving force behind the Science Leadership Academy, a kick-a** high school in Philly where students are actually motivated and learning real-life skills, and then checked in the Windsor Hotel to spend the night.

The next morning, I showed up and registered for the conference's last day.

So what's the lesson in all of this anyway?

I think the lesson in this chain of events is that surprising stuff can happen now that we have a location-based layer over social media. Beyond only being aware a conference was happening somewhere, I now knew where it was, and could manage to get to it for some awesome spontaneous conferencing.

The other lesson is that technology and real-life are now so interconnected that they are becoming harder and harder to decouple. Is that a good or a bad thing? I believe it is a good thing, since social media is opt-in all the way. Alec decided to share his location and to friend me, I made a conscious decision to have a look at Foursquare. It just seems to me that my serendipitous discovery potential has now gone up significantly, and expanded to the meatspace!

And, of course, I found a use for Foursquare ;-)

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As a follow-up from Educon, I will blog at least twice after this post, so be sure to subscribe!

Citizen Journalism Follow-Up From Sakai Boston

For those who didn't know, I was involved with the organization of the 2009 Sakai Conference. I participated in the weekly conference call from the beginning. I had been to two Sakai conferences in the past, and I always learned a lot at them, and now wanted to get involved in some way.

Since the conference was in Boston, I thought that a lot of people from Delaware would be able to make it. After all, it was only a 6 hour drive... But then, a certain "economic meltdown" happened, and my colleagues ended up staying home. As the LMS Project Leader, I was the only one lucky enough to get my trip approved.

The Sakai community builds up a lot of energy during the now annual international conference, so I took upon myself to champion the idea (people on the weekly conference call could hardly stop me from yapping... sorry about that!) of getting as much information out of the conference to the rest of the community who could not make it, including my UD colleagues. It all started with a call for volunteer Citizen Journalists about a week before the conference (if you know nothing about citizen journalism, see this ELI 7 things you need to know file).

Conference Preparation: Building-Up Awareness

One aspect that needed some attention was building-up awareness about the use of social technologies during the conference. Like every decent conference, we needed an easy and short hashtag. #Sakai09 was selected and promoted, along with prefered social media sites and technologies. After debating what should be done, the following technologies were targeted for the conference:

• Confluence: The Sakai community wiki space is a blessing the during the whole year, but seems to have a limited role to play during the conferences. Past conferences have shown us that when a lot of people try to use it at the same time, it tends to crash and leave us hanging, so we used it a lot before the conference to promote it, and used a lot of other sites during the conference to "spread the load".
  
  
• Facebook, LinkedIn: Events were created on social and profesional networking sites to invite people to register for the conference.
  
  
• Twitter: Since a lot of people in the Sakai community are tech-savvy and heavy Twitterers, we knew that Twitter would be a very efficient way to direct people's attention to interesting stuff in real time.
  
  
• Youtube: The Mecca of free video could not be ignored. We created a channel called Sakaivideo where Citizen Journalists would upload short videos throughout and after the conference.
  
  
• Slideshare: Slides as attachments on the Sakai Confluence wiki are nice, but it seems like they don't get enough attention. Slideshare is a premium free slide sharing service that let users tag, favorite, comment on, and embed slide deck, which was exactly what was needed to spread the knowledge a bit more. A slideshare event was also created to centralize all the slides in one place.
  
  
• Vimeo: For longer videos, since they don't impose a lenght limit like Youtube.
  
  
• Ustream: The Ustream channel was created in advance and linked from the social media page.
  
  
• Yahoo!Pipes: I built a Pipe to gather stuff tagged with Sakai09 from different sources (Diigo, Delicious, Youtube, Flickr, etc.) and embedded the results on the home page of the conference Confluence page. This way, attendees could get a sense of live social presence. The pipe was also a great way to aggregate all these knowledge chunks from different sources in one comprehensive stream.
  

Short Videos

The biggest problem with conference videos in general is that they are usually too long. Another one is that the audio is not that great, and you lose a lot of questions from the audience most of the time. As one of my ex-colleague used to say: all bad movies are too long.

So instead of taking a capture everything approach, we decided to let Citizen Journalists decide on what to record, while trying to capture summaries of key sessions through one-on-one interviews. A lot of people signed-up, and Flip cameras were distributed to most of these people in order to gather short stories about the most interesting projects, opinions, visions, and people. A lot of folks also brought their own high-end video hardware and expertise, including Kim from UNC Chapel Hill (see the pic below).



As of today (July 23, 2009), 40 short videos have been uploaded to the Youtube channel, some of which have been viewed more that 100 times. Below are two samples from these videos.





Longer videos were uploaded to Vimeo, which contains 7 videos, including the keynote address of the two winners on the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA), Andrea Crampton and Edith Sheffer. Only the TWSIA winners and Vijay Kumar's keynote address were "professionally" recorded by the hotel crew (you be the judge of the quality), since we really wanted to make sure to capture those because of their usefulness to the teaching and learning community.

Andrea Crampton (CSU), First Place Winner 2009 TWSIA from sakaivideo on Vimeo.

Edith Sheffer (Stanford), Second Place Winner 2009 TWSIA from sakaivideo on Vimeo.

Financial facts: the Sakai Foundation spent around $600 on 3 Flip Ultra HD cameras, and around $5,000 on the hotel crew to record two sessions... You do the math.

Streaming Video

Without realizing the full extend of the workload involved, I volunteered to UStream and record some sessions I was to attend. Strong of the expertise of our Summer Faculty Institute experience with Alec Couros a couple of weeks prior, I decided to try to replicate UD's video guru Paul Rickards' on a shoestring budget, and without the help of a cameraman sidekick. My main concerns were capturing decent audio, connectivity, and power. Below is the diagram of what I envisioned as a one-man band streaming video kit.



I ended bringing all that stuff to the conference.











After testing out the external microphones and webcams, I realized during the pre-conference that the internal microphone on my MacBook Pro did a good enough job to avoid carrying the audio recorder with external microphones. Also, the wireless signal was strong enough in session rooms to allow me to avoid being hard-wired. Still, carrying all that stuff around was a challenge, especially since I needed to change rooms, boot-up, get set to stream and record, all of that without slowing down the pace of the conference.

When slides had been uploaded to Ustream prior to the presentation, I was able to switch from the webcams to my shared screen displaying the slides through a free software called CamTwist, which ended up as a way better streaming experience.



A lot of people at the conference and abroad were thrilled to see that some sessions were streamed, and thanked me profusely for doing this. Attendees also invited at home colleagues to follow the live stream, amplifying the reach of the stream.

Some key stats: more than 22 hours of live streaming, 266 unique viewers, 449 viewers, average of 7.6 viewers at any time, 173 viewer hours, and around 1,000 views of the recordings.



Remember the TWSIA videos? You can compare the quality with the Ustream of the same event.

Lessons Learned

Some lessons learned from this whole experience

• Short videos created enough of a buzz to avoid recording every sessions.
  
  
• Ustreaming equipment should be left in the rooms that are to be recorded. Moving all this equipement is too cumbersome for a single person.
  
  
• Twitter is good for real time social buzz, but sucks at keeping a archive of an event. Search results on Twitter are purged too fast nowadays, Tweets from the conference are not even availble anymore, two weeks after the event. You need to copy the tweets somewhere to make live blogging efficient in the long run, or use a live-blogging tool like CoverItLive during the event.
  
  
• When slides are shared in advance, the live streaming experience becomes so much better, because you can switch video sources from webcams to screen sharing, making sure the text and graphics are readable.
  
  
• You can't do it alone. It takes a team effort to make something like this happen. More than ten official Citizen Journalists were a part of this initiative, and I personally want to thank them for their support and enthusiasm. See you all next year!
  

Googles, Tweets, and Pods: Social Media and the Millennial Learning

I finally completed the 4th part of the presentation Chris Penna, Dawn Fallik, and I gave at the Lilly-East conference back in April 2009. Our topic revolved around using web 2.0 tools in the classroom. We used the Student Multimedia Design Center at the University of Delaware to make the presentation more of a workshop.

We created a Google Doc with links to all of our presentation material.



Part 1 is the introduction and a quick review of the use of Twitter in the classroom.

Lilly-East 2009 - Googles, Tweets, and Pods: Social Media and the Millennial Learning - Part 1 - Mathieu Plourde from Mathieu Plourde on Vimeo.

In part 2, Dawn Fallik explains how she gets her students to create podcasts through their cellphones.

Lilly-East 2009 - Googles, Tweets, and Pods: Social Media and the Millennial Learning - Part 2 - Dawn Fallik from Mathieu Plourde on Vimeo.

Chris Penna explains his use of Google Docs to stimulate collaborative writing in his class in part 3.

Lilly-East 2009 - Googles, Tweets, and Pods: Social Media and the Millennial Learning - Part 3 - Chris Penna from Mathieu Plourde on Vimeo.

I created the part 4 after the event since we ran short on time (we spent too much time getting people started using the tools). As the Sakai Project Leader, I had to shamelessly plug my LMS in there, of course ;-)

4-17-2009 Googles, Tweets, and Pods: Social Media and the Millennial Learning - Part4

View more Microsoft Word documents from Mathieu Plourde.

I think Dawn and Chris did an excellent job at explaining the value of using web 2.0 tools in for their courses. If you have encountered faculty practices that are worth replicating (the new term for "best practices"), please add URLs to the comments below!

Social Media: What's In It For Me?

I have just completed something I should have done a long time ago... I have created a slidecast of a presentation I gave to the CHEP teaching with technology community of practice back in March 2009.

It's a little long (30 minutes), but it explain the process I have been through and the benefits of constructing a personal learning network (PLN). I hope my story will convince other people to give it a try.

3-9-2009 WIIFM Preso - CHEP

View more Microsoft Word documents from Mathieu Plourde.

One of the reason why I publish this now is because of Alec Couros' keynote address we had last week at the Summer Faculty Institute. He did a splendid job at exposing what a connected teacher should now be. The video of his presentation is embedded below.



Please share your personal learning network stories in the comments, because the more you share, the more you get back!