If you you would like to create Web pages easily, download the free software, exe. You can download it from exelearning.org I have been using it extensively to for creating Web pages that have screencasts for the Anatomy and Physiology class that I am teaching as a hybrid course. Here’s a video describing exe:

If you are an teacher and you would like to use a WordPress blogging site as a site for a course, you can install the Scholarpress plug-in available at ScholarPress Courseware.
Here is the description of what is available with their plug-in:

“As of version 1.0, ScholarPress Courseware gives you the ability to create entries in a schedule in the Schedule page, add items of various media to a bibliography in the Bibliography page, and assign those bibliography items to read (or create other types of assignments) in the Assignments page, and edit your course information in the Course Info page.”

A nice software title that allows you to create tutorials by screencapturing portions of your computer monitor is the software ScreenSteps. With ScreenSteps, you can insert various images of various portions of what is on your screen and insert things like arrows, boxes, and circles. With the Pro version of the software, you can export the tutorial as a PDF or HTML page. Check out the videos on the Web site to learn about some of the other nice features.

For those of you who are like Google Apps, there is a new Missing Manual. You can learn more about it by going to Google Apps: The Missing Manual. You can also download (as a PDF) the Table of Contents and the Introduction.

If you are not already familiar with Google Apps, you can go to the introductory page to learn more about them. One of the really nice apps is Google Docs since it allows a group of individuals to collaborate on a paper.

Probably many of you are familiar with the various Google Apps but may not be familiar with the relatively new Microsoft Live Workspace.

If you need to collaborate with anyone or if your students need to collaborate, these are tools intended for that purpose although, of course, you can use them for your own personal work.

Since Microsoft Live Workspace is a “competitor” to Google Apps, I was interested in the review found at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/office_live_workspace_vs_google_docs_feature_by_feature.php that compares these two.

If you read the comments posted in response to this article, you’ll notice the one particular comment that points out that the article failed to discuss some of the features of Google Apps not found in Microsoft Live Workspace.

So that you don’t have to figure out which comment I am referring to, here it is:

Google Docs is far better than Office Live, especially thanks to its real-time collaboration and mobile access. There are some any other features of Google Docs that should have been presented, such as the chat feature in spreadsheets and presentations or the integration of Google Docs with other apps (you can schedule an event in Google Calendar from a doc, you can integrate a doc in the brand new Google Sites wiki-like application, you can transform a Google Notebook into a doc, you can use a Google Spreadsheet as a web-based bookmark storage thanks to its integration with Google Co-op subscribed links, you can also published in Blogger directly from a doc, you can use a Google Doc spreadsheet template to upload a complex Google Earth map – see Google Earth Outreach, you can access from Gmail a Google shared spreadsheet even if it has been sent as attached email, etc.).

You missed so many advantages of a very web-based workspace, and you seem to ignore that Google is preparing to launch a Google-Gears enable version of their suite that will let you access and EDIT shared docs OFFLINE directly from your Internet Browser. This has been officially announced and is currently tested by Google teams.

MS Office Live is a “workaround” to retain users. To keep Office is to play against the “in the cloud” computing trend, which is the future of collaboration. If you like a continually improved editor, don’t wait years for the next Office version: Google release amazing features every week!

Carnegie Mellon’s Enhancing Education Web site is very well structured and contains separate Web pages for these topics:

• Learning/Teaching Principles
• Design and Teach a Course
• Solve a Teaching Problem
• Use Educational Technology
• Try Something New
• Research Projects
• Other Resources

At the 2007 Educause conference, Diane Zorn described an online course in philosophy that she created.

Here are the main points that I got out of this podcast:

“The goal of distance education, in my experience, is not to replicate the in-class experience but rather to go beyond what is possible in a conventional classroom.”

She used Mediasite which provides a video of the instructor along with the corresponding Powerpoint files but with a little ingenuity, something similar to this could be done using Keynote, Garageband, and iMovie.

Using Video Streaming and Podcasting to Design Rich-Media Online Courses [ 29:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is an interesting podcast – http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/e07podcasttomorrowsstuden/45344

This video is quite impressive. It presents some interesting facts about tomorrow’s world and challenges us to consider what we are doing to prepare students for tomorrow’s world.

I’m becoming more interested in how video can be used in education and how to make it interactive. An interesting application that can be used is VideoPaper Builder, a free program produced by the Concord Consortium.

If there is video on the Web (i.e., You Tube, Google Videos, etc.) and you want to create some text or hyperlinks that relate to certain objects within the video, go to Asterpix to see how easily this can be done.

If you want to learn more about Web 2.0, Atomic Learning has a series of videos on the topic, which can be found at http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/web20/

Zotero is an add-on for Firefox for those who want to keep track of information used in research. Check it out at Zotero.

Hyperstudio has been resurrected and is in version 5.0 now. There are some new features. Years ago, I used Hyperstudio instead of Powerpoint and before Keynote was out.

I wonder if you can still export the Hyperstudio files and put them on the Web? If I remember correctly, a plug-in had to be installed on the server but I don’t think the user (the person wanting to view the Hyperstudio file on the web) had to install anything on their computer. (I know they had to install a Hyperstudio viewer on their computer and I assume that is still the case.)

Unfortunately, the MacKiev website provides some information but I’d like to see a more extensive list of the features.

Kerika “lets you share your ideas, documents and projects with friends and colleagues around the world using Graphical Wikis: a unique approach to team collaboration that makes it easy for everyone to understand what your project is all about.”

This seems like a really good idea and the service is free for educators.

Check out the videos and tutorials at http://www.kerika.com/flash_demos.html

In their article, “Learner differences in distance learning: Finding differences that matter,” Dillon and Greene (2003) point out that although there has been much research conducted in learning styles, it has been difficult to find reliable and valid measures of learning types. They also discuss the notion of field dependence and field independence. But what is particularly interesting in this chapter are two ideas that the authors propose regarding the relationship between learners and instruction. The first has to do with the notion whether distance educators should attempt to provide instruction that matches a learner’s learning style or cognitive style. The second concept is that there are characteristics of learners that are more important to focus on than matching learning style and cognitive style with the instruction in order to help learners achieve. These characteristics will be discussed below.
Dillon and Greene (2003) state that one of the most important goals of education is to help the learner learn how to learn. Rather than spending time attempting to design instruction so as to accommodate the differences among the learners, the authors state that “our ultimate goal should be to help learners learn in a variety of situations and under a variety of conditions, because that is the nature of the learning society in which we live” (Dillon & Greene, 2003, p.238). They go on to suggest that educators should “identify effective approaches to learning and then help students acquire the metacognitive skills needed to adopt those approaches in settings where they have been found to lead to success”(Dillon & Greene, 2003, p.239). They point out that there is large body of empirical research that shows that using different approaches to learning are very good predictors of both effort and achievement. (The authors provide seven references to support this statement.)

According to Dillon and Greene (2003), various approaches to learning are placed into action in terms of three areas: achievement goals, self-efficacy, and reported strategy use.

Achievement goals are the “the reasons students report for trying to learn in a particular setting (Dillon & Greene, 2003, p.239). They indicate that there are three types of achievement goals: learning goals, performance goals, and future goals. Learning goals relate to the desire to increase one’s understanding and skills. Performance goals relate to someone’s desire to do better than others and to protect one’s ego. The authors indicate that there is some research that has shown a negative relationship between performance goals and productive achievement behaviors, while on the other hand, there is a positive relationship between learning goals and self-regulation, strategy use, and effort. Likewise, there is a positive relationship between future goals, those goals that are distant, and productive achievement behaviors.

Self-efficacy refers to a person’s confidence in their ability to accomplish a task. It is not the same as global self-esteem and the confidence level varies with different content.

According to Dillon and Greene (2003), strategy use is influenced by goals and self-efficacy. Various forms of strategy use can be classified as either shallow processing or deep processing. While shallow processing involves processing information separate from existing knowledge, deep processing involves processing new information as it relates to existing knowledge, and attempting to elaborate on new information. This concept of deep processing reminds me David Ausubel’s subsumption theory (http://tip.psychology.org/ausubel.html) and the formation of schemata. The practice of concept mapping popularized by Joseph Novak is based on Ausubel’s subsumption theory and is a technique, which if used by a physical sense and mental sense, could be a strategy that could help learners process information at a deeper level. Novak’s book Learning How to Learn (1984) is a valuable resource on how to use concept mapping as a way of learning. Another book by Novak that is valuable is Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations (1998).
References
Dillon, C. and Greene, B. (2003). Learner differences in distance learning: Finding differences that matter. In M.G. Moore & W.G. Anderson (Eds). Handbook of distance education (pp.235-244). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Novak, J. D. (1984). Learning how to learn. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Novak. J. D. (1998). Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Inc.

What is Web 2.0. Let this video (from You Tube) illustrate it.

In the course “Instructional Design and Development” that I am taking right now (Summer, 2007), we are reading through the book The Systematic Design of Instruction by Dick, Carey, and Carey. In Chapter 8, “Developing An Instructional Strategy,” the authors state that when an instructional designer is designing an instructional strategy for the knowledge domain called Intellectual Skills, that the designer should be aware of how learners have organized their entry knowledge in their memory. My thoughts on this is that maybe one of the ways of determining how a learner has organized their knowledge of a subject is to have them create a concept map of that knowledge.

The authors go on to say that the instructional strategy should provide ways for the learner to link new content to prerequisite knowledge that they have in their memory. They also state that the there should be direct instruction about the links and the relationships between the new knowledge and the existing knowledge. A concept map created by the instructor would be a very good way of illustrating the relationships.

This site illustrates how to subscribe to a podcast using iTunes. It uses Flash so it is very easy to follow.

http://learnoutloud.castpost.com/PodcastItunes2.swf

I just learned about a new site called Gliffy that allows you to create concept maps online. You can also collaborate with others.