Online Learning Consortium Accelerate 2016 - Day 1

OLC

Day 1 in Orlando's Swan and Dolphin Resort brought some interesting and new ideas for technologies and digital content.

Emerging Technologies for Student-Centered Learning (University of Illinois Springfield)

 

My understanding is that this workshop has been a popular one for quite a few years - this was my first year, and the takeaways were a mixed bag or affirmation and new discoveries.  

Some of the affirmations:  use Todaysmeet, Notability, ExplainEverything, Kaltura, give faculty space to experiment and fail without repercussions.

Some of the new tools and insights:  most of us pick up our phone first thing in the morning -- before we get anything else -- to see what is new in the world.  That would be the moment to have a note waiting for me that something is going on with my learning. Use orientation courses to prepare students for online learning and online tools that your institution is using -- so a revamping of Camp War Eagle.  Get frequent student feedback on how the technology and learning is working.

 Here is one version of the iOS wheel of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Teachthought.com has an annual list of best apps.

And some of the technologies, both software and hardware, that folks may find interesting:

• Liquidtext for annotation on iPad 
• MyScript Nebo for iOS and Windows 10 for annotation
• Trello looked liked a version of Pinterest for project-based online learning
• Paper pile may be an alternative for Endnote or Zotero
• Polaroid cube is a small versatile inexpensive camera cube
• Bored panda translation in your ear -- moving towards the babelfish -- may revolutionize how we interact with folks whose language we don't speak -- and could have an interesting impact on language learning.  Not quite here yet, but they are building the prototype
• Leap motion-- use your hand movements in air to interact with your computer -- this is getting better
• Any of the virtual reality viewers and creators:  Google cardboard, Occulus Rift:  remember that folks with motion sickness will have a real problem with this.
• Microsofts Hololens and the concept of holoportation -- Startrek, here we come...
• The concept of Blockchain Architecture and how we need to figure out what effect it may have on what and how we teach

Talking Texts:  Making Textbooks and Instructional Materials Interactive with Augmented Reality

In contrast to virtual reality, where we immerse ourselves into a virtual environment and interact with it, somewhat isolated from the real world, augmented reality overlays digital content onto the real world.  Think Pokemon Go as the most popular example.  Farah Vallera is doing this for the Sociology textbooks and content she is using.
She is using a combination of Aurasma, an app that allows to overlay such contents and then view them, Audacity for the audio recordings and simple animation through Blabberize to create 19th century talking heads of Marx, Weber, Comte and other, potentially boring, social theorists.  https://sites.google.com/site/sociologyparadigms/ gives the instructions and examples on how this would work.

Keynote:  Goodbye, College as We Know it (Michelle Weise)

Weise reminded us that disruptive innovation as a force in higher education is something to be reckoned with, and that we need to have a plan on how to give the vast majority of non-traditional students the opportunity to get a higher education knowledge and skill sets without wasting their time and money.  So, no longer 4-year degrees but carefully selected and limited new skills that we may have not even thought of yet, but that companies like Nanodegrees, hack reactor, flatiron school, coursera, Minerva, openbadges,udemy, general assembly, pluralsight, Devbootcamps are already working through, with "graduates" who have honed a skill that can immediately be used.
Her talk was punctuated by a poetry performance by Jamila Lyiscott who reminded us of tangible hope.
And, no, this is not the performance we saw tonight, but I hope that you will still enjoy this performance piece: