Auburn University's Learning Glass

Using the Learning Glass

You may have admired folks who can work magic with green screens -- pointing at hurricanes or making weather fronts move.
And you may have admired touch screens that allow for on the fly content creation and modification.

Both of these technologies are somewhat pulled together in the Learning Glass.

Imagine you want to capture a process in a video -- drawing it on a white board is awkward because your back is to your audience.  The learning glass allows you to talk to your audience while drawing the process.

Auburn University now has this capability, organized through Auburn Online, starting out in the Biggio Center.  For starters, you can check out http://wp.auburn.edu/auburnonline/media-services/ with additional information at

01-    Introduction –https://goo.gl/YbOMkc

02-    Overlay Examples / Image Standards –  https://goo.gl/lht7sA

03-    Examples of Best Practices - https://goo.gl/uOnvi5
I
I I tried it during their open house recently and came up with this video to show you how the learning board works

What do you think you can do with this technology for your class?  Be mindful that the work flow is a complex one that can take quite a bit of time for larger undertakings.  Alternatives that are most certainly less fancy would be using a tablet device with a whiteboard app that allows for recording.  You would lose the coolness factor but may still be able to get the same point across.

Impressions from ALATEC 2016

This year's ALATEC (Alabama Assistive Technology Expo & Conference) happened last week at Auburn University.  I had the opportunity to attend a couple of the sessions and learned some useful insights and tips for working with students who may need special accommodations -- insights and tips that will help a lot of other students as well.

I had the chance to listen to Luis Perez show off features in iOS 10 that may make lives easier for a range of users.  Luis Perez focuses in his research on inclusion and universal design, and his web site contains a number of interesting tools and strategies.

Here some of the takeaways from his session that focused on iOS devices:
If you have visibility issues that can be corrected through changes in color schemes, go to
Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations.  Here you can

• invert colors (note that this also inverts colors of images)
• turn on Color Filters to see your device in Gray scale or in a different tint that may help you with different types of color blindness -- Protanopia, Dueternaopia or Trianopia -- or you can set a Color Tint to create less of an emotional turmoil if certain colors increase your stress level.

Under Accessibility, you will also find your Magnifier that allows you to turn your camera into a magnifying glass -- if you ever needed to read serial numbers, you will love this feature.

Under Speech, you can turn on Speak Selection -- this allows you to have written text that you select read to you - -and this can happen in any language.

You will also see your options of Voices here, the speed you want text read to you (turtle or hare) - imagine using this feature for students who are learning a new language.

Typing Feedback allows you to hear the last letter or word you typed -- very useful for dyslexia

And, finally, this is for all of you out there who cannot call me through Siri:  you can train your phone for a particular pronunciation, Speech > Pronunciation where you type in the word, type in an approximation of the phonetic word and then save this for future references.

Of course you can also turn your iOS device into a full braille-capable device and have apps that recognize currency so that you don't have to figure out what a bill is, not to mention the app Tap tap See that takes a picture of an object and then tells you what the object is.

The other session I was at discussed working with students who are diagnosed with ADD/ADHD.  Jessi Wright from UAB gave a passionate presentation on different ways we need to rethink what we do with students -- but most importantly, that we need to help students be stronger advocates for themselves.

As I am sure you know, ADD and ADHD are the number one reason students need accommodation in college, with constantly increasing numbers.  If we get such memos, we know what we have to do to help, but here are some other ideas and these ideas may help all students.

1.  During exams have timers available

2.  During exams and individual activities allow students to wear noise cancelling headsets that may play music of white noise

3.  Have fidget tools at hand

4.  Allow for movement breaks

5.  Provide all students with resources on note taking, focused learning, recognizing when their best time for learning is

6.  use mid mapping or brain storming tools for students to collect an outcome of their thinking

Students can use tools to cut down on distraction -- for example the Readibility extension for Chrome that cuts out all the advertisement and just shows text.  Students need to choose to sit close to the action

Finally -- teaching your courses in EASL spaces makes it easier for students with ADD/ADHD to focus, so they will be more successful as students.

Data & Analytics Summit, elearning guild, September 2016

word cloud:  learning analytics

Last week, I participated in the elearning guild's Data & Analytics Summit, a two-day series of sessions focusing on different kinds of data, collection of data, analysis of data, and what the future may hold in store.

Here some takeaways from the sessions:

Analytics means:   simultaneous use of statistics, software, operations research to quantify performance, meaningful pattern recognition, use of data visualization

How are we using the data: for description (what is happening?) or for diagnosis (why did x happen?) or for prediction (what is going to happen?) or for prescription (how can we make x happen?)

How do we get trusted data?  Not only do we pull in data from multiple sources, but we need to establish relationships with stake holders, so that we can trust the data they provide -- and we need to add to this data governance and quality assurance, a common language, visible data integrity and formal accountability.

A lot of the discussion was not focused on higher education but education in the workforce, which raises a very different set of questions -- still, these questions apply to our university community just as much as we have about 6,000 employees at the university, excluding student workers and graduate assistants.  This substantial number of people deserve serious though on how professional development can help them improve their lives and their jobs -- what areas might benefit from repeating micro-lessons to improve performance?

How is our workforce shifting and what does this mean for higher education:  We know we are moving more and more into a service-based society, and we have see that artificial intelligence (AI) can outperform humans already in a number of jobs.
The key is to self-regulated, self-directed, self-selected learning.  I was learning the other day about Chicago and how its museums, art galleries, and other public educational institutions focus on informal learning with elements of gamification.

Looking for a job?  Think Learning Analytics -- this is a growing field tha tneeds careful thinkers to make sense of the gobs and gobs of data.
Worried about your data?  You should be -- we need policies and governance to assure that all that data that is collected right now and that soon will include data collected through the Internet of Things is managed responsibly.
Finally:  Wanting to try something new? https://h5p.org/ for interaction. This web site makes it easy to develop interactive exercises that can be embedded into any web page, including your LMS.

Ok, I will stop rambling now...