With a Q

At the Questionmark User's Conference here in San Antonio. Having some good ed-tech related fun down here. This one is a smaller conference, and I like those as opposed to the biggie ones since you actually get a chance to meet and network with people. Had some good times last night during scavenger hunt where we had to roam around San Antonio (some of us with more margarita in them than others...guilty!). We had to find the cheesiest souvenirs and take pictures from/on/with various landmarks. Over to the left is the "Tower of the Americas." No rules against using Photoshop, I hope.

Heard an excellent keynote from Terry McGinn this morning about organizational culture and how it can be empirically measured. This is an interesting concept, not only because I work at a school where there are multiple cultures (administrators, students, faculty and all the permutations thereof) but also since the speaker stepped through various slides illustrating the evolution of sociology and how the social scientists of yesteryear viewed society, culture, and behavior. This kind of parallels the march of other social sciences and how they all seem to dovetail into each other and run parallel to each other at various points along the timeline.

The point of the keynote was about something entirely different, but the first few slides got me thinking about how "social" thought and research has evolved. In the beginning (being late 19th century for the most part), the dominant focus was on the individual and what was inside their head. Psychology started off with psychoanalysis with its intense study of the self and our hidden impulses. Educational psychology itself started with an early form of behaviorism (Thorndike, 1898) which was eventually reflected in the field of psychology itself as it shifted to a more rote stimulus-response stance, allowing itself only to observe behaviors that can be seen and tracked: teasing rats with levers and food pellets, shocking monkeys when they are bad, etc. (really brutal time if you ask me). Around the 50s and 60s, science backed off a little bit and tried to study internal processing, what was going on inside our heads again...but more focus was placed on how thoughts were formed, judgements made, and how these affected how we view the world. Perception became a big deal. More research on cognition sparked an interest in group dynamics and behavior of individuals when peer pressure or other forms of social engineering are applied. Educational psychology and general psychology research finally seemed to get in synch and the study of education as a science gained some ground.

On our recent project to deploy Sakai at FIDM, I am presenting in biweekly seminars on sharing “Experiences Migrating from an Existing CMS to Sakai” through March.

• Dave Melone Will Share Experiences Migrating from an Existing CMS to Sakai
• CampusEAI Consortium Launches eLearning Solutions iSeminars on Hosted Sakai Implementation Lessons Learned

More press releases:

• FIDM/The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Launches CampusEAI Consortium Hosted Solution for Sakai
• FIDM/The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Selects CampusEAI to Host and Support Sakai

At FIDM we also have done a lot of work utilizing Questionmark Perception for online testing. Getting faculty and student requirements documented before deploying that panacea technology solution is very important. They will be the ones using this app, and your customers will always have a unique perspective on how it should work for them. This is the subject of a presentation I will be giving at the Questionmark 2008 Users Conference in San Antonio.

• The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising empowers instructors with online assessments
• Upcoming conference presentation page

Props to ICHC for the posting title inspiration.

With my recent glut of presentation-giving, I thought reposting this here would be a great idea. Found it on lifehacker

Yes it sounds dirty...

I read this article this morning in the Wall Street Journal, which is odd...primarily because it was the Wall Street Journal, and decidedly paper-based. But anyhow, the author was writing about Facebook, social networking and all that jazz.

I learned a few things:

How sad and how web 2.0y of me to do this, but I thought it would be a nice experiment. Attending the Educause conference in Seattle right now and sitting in on a session about faculty training in learning management systems...most likely annoying the person sitting next to me with my tictacky typing. How many people are reading over my shoulder right now?

I am working on a class project that involves setting up a distributed networking project. We were given broad latitude in the topic of our project, and I have had a particularly recent, long, and painful RFP process in selecting a new LMS platform and hosting vendor for my "work" school. Everywhere I turned it was difficult to get a straight story between flourishing vendor demos and bits and pieces of hear-say at conferences.

Every education technology professional should be mad as hell right now. The Chronicle of Higher Luddites penned an eediot diatribe completely tearing down the very things we hold dear: educational technology. Read the article and email Mr. Rob Jenkins at careers@chronicle.com, email him in outrage. In fact, feel free to cut and paste my own email to him below. You can attack ed-tech in general, but when you attack my own bread and butter too, it's on.

Read on for the cut and paste letter that YOU can send Mr. Jenkins...