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Explosive Turning Point Clickers

Posted on May 25, 2009 by barrydahl

Disclaimer: this is not a rant about the TSA. The TSA representative who searched my bag today was very professional, very courteous, and not a jerk in any way. I think he would also agree that I was totally composed, totally calm, and did not make a single snarky remark. But still …

Today while traveling to Traverse City I attempted to to avoid the hassle of checked baggage since I’m only gone for two nights, and since Delta/Northwest is developing a bad habit of sending my baggage to alternate destinations. I’m heading to an ETOM event and it seemed like a perfect time to bring a small carry-on in addition to my laptop backpack and just breeze through the airports without a care. Wrong.

I will be using the Turning Point clickers during my keynote address about Web 2.0 tomorrow at the Higgins Lake Retreat. I needed about 60 of them for this smallish event, which is mainly hands-on except for the keynote. I couldn’t bring the padded case for them since then I would have 3 carry-ons. So, I put about 10 of them in my backpack and placed the rest of them in two ziplock plastic bags in my other carry-on. Sure enough, those little devices looked like a problem to the bag scanner and my bag was pulled out of the line for a strip search.

After I explained to the TSA agent what they were used for, he determined that they needed to be swiped, much like they will sometimes swipe a laptop with a little white cloth disc that does something (or at least they want you to believe that it does). He determined that they needed to be swiped – INDIVIDUALLY. So, I had the pleasure of standing there while he rubbed the cloth over each and every one of the fifty potential explosives. Oftentimes I travel with anywhere from 250 to 400 of those little plastic pieces of nothing. Better arrive at the airport extra early for that next trip.

Of course, this makes about as much sense as the whole ziplock bags for your carry-on liquid containers. You can’t have a container larger than 3.4 ounces (or thereabouts – it seems to change from time to time). So, you can’t bring a 12-ounce bottle of shampoo on board, but you can bring four of those little 3-ounce bottles of the same shampoo as long as they’re inside the ziplock. BECAUSE THAT MAKES PERFECT SENSE.

Filed under: Computing | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

Kill All the Digital Natives

Posted on April 2, 2009 by barrydahl

I mean, kill all the TALK about digital natives.

The digital natives/immigrants analogy has been around for most of this century. First reference I have seen is an article by Marc Prensky back in October 2001. Wikipedia defines digital natives as “A digital native is a person who has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3.”

With all due respect to Mr. Prensky, I think the analogy was a bit off base from the beginning. The idea that a person born into a world after the creation of the various digital medias has some sort of advantage over older people is a bit of a leap of faith for me to make. Many of us old fogies were there when the personal computer was born. We’ve seen and used every iteration of Windows (or Mac OS, or whatever) that has ever come down the pike – both the good and the bad.

In other words: rather than being born into a world where all these technologies existed – we were there when these technologies were born and learned about them from the start – with all the learning and growing pains that are implied therein.

Just take MS Windows – PLEASE!! No, seriously. Consider a person (such as me) who used the first version of Windows (1.0) back in 1986, then became somewhat familiar with versions 2.0 and 2.1, and then really became a Windows user with versions 3.0 & 3.1. Windows 95 changed my world. Windows 98 seemed like another step forward (at the time). I gladly skipped ME, but jumped on board quickly with XP, and had several months of experience with Vista before upgrading back to XP. Not to mention Windows Mobile on my cellphone (yes, I know). So, you’re telling me that my daughter born in 1995 who has never used anything other than Win98 (briefly) and WinXP has some advantages over me when it comes to dealing with an operating system? Not a chance.

I think the same argument applies to multimedia such as audio, video, and several other digital technologies.  Many of us have gone through countless iterations of software, hardware, and other wares in order to learn how to do these things effectively and efficiently. Not everyone in my generation has done so, or even close to it, but plently of people have. There are certain advantages to experience that puts the noobs at a clear disadvantage, at least for a while.

Another reason to stop talking about digital natives and immigrants was recently articulated by Dr. Michael Wesch. Paraphrasing his recent talk in Tennessee, he said that technology is changing so fast that none of us are natives any more. I take that to mean that we’re all in the same boat of trying to keep from falling too far behind the curve and especially to find productive uses of the technologies that are being created and released on a daily basis.

BTW, I’m totally tired of attending one-hour sessions at conferences about the Digital Natives … err Millennials … err Net Gens … err Screenagers (and about 10 other names). Give it a rest. That dog is tired.

CC photo by cesarastudillo

Filed under: Computing | 9 Comments »

Spam-free Email Linking

Posted on February 18, 2009 by barrydahl

Saw a tweet from Jane Hart about an e-mail address HTML encoder from SiteUp Networks. The idea is to format your e-mail address so that it is NOT readable by an extractor or search engine in an effort to prevent HTML e-mail harvesters from getting your address off your web pages.

LearnTech Newsc4lptnews HTML Encoder will format your E-mail address in a way that IS NOT readable by any E-mail extractor or search engine http://tinyurl.com/zyq9s about 5 hours ago from twitterfeed

I used it (it’s free and very simple) and quickly received some strange-looking (i.e. not easily readable) HTML code that I can use to replace the normal “mailto:” type of an email link.  This is the result.

barrydahl@gmail.com

Filed under: Computing | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

2009 Student Technology Survey – Post 12

Posted on February 17, 2009 by barrydahl

One of my goals with this survey is to inform students about services available as well as gather information from them. The final two questions on the survey fall into this category. Inside Desire2Learn we provide an optional tutorial titled “LSC Online Skills” that new students are encouraged to use to learn about course navigation, technology requirements, word processing expectations, and how to use various tools inside D2L. Question 24 is used to determine how many students have already used the tutorial or are planning to do so (the survey is given at the very beginning of the semester), and also to help inform students that this resource is available.

The survey indicates that only about 27% of the students have gone through the tutorial, that 36% are planning to use the tutorial, and that 36% DON’T plan to use the tutorial.

Question 25 is similar in that we also use a D2L course shell to provide information in each student’s account about academic dishonesty and plagiarism. The tutorial is titled “Academic Honesty at LSC.” Several instructors have included a requirement at the beginning of their courses for the students to go into the utorial and report back in some form about something they learned in there.

Only 25% of the students report that they are NOT planning to visit the academic honesty tutorial, and there are 35% that have already done so. I was initially a little surprised that more students were using this tutorial than the online skills tutorial. Most likely that is attributable to the directions that students are receiving from their faculty members.

That is the end of the questions for the LSC Student Technology Survey for 2009. Hallelujah.

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2009 Student Technology Survey – Post 11

Posted on February 16, 2009 by barrydahl

Question 22 was mainly interesting to me with regard to the percentage of our students who have never used some of the services that we provide them. Below is an approximation of what percentage of our online students have NEVER used these services:

  • Online library services = 59%
  • Online career services = 82%
  • Online tutoring services = 77%
  • e-Campus Help Desk = 76%
  • Student web portal = 33%
  • Online bookstore = 52%
  • Minnesota Online website = 69%

Click image to enlarge

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2009 Student Technology Survey – Post 10

Posted on February 16, 2009 by barrydahl

The results from question 18 indicate that about 30% of our students do not consistently protect their computers with anti-virus software. Granted, a small percentage are not using Windows-based machines and probably don’t have the same concerns as a Windows user, but that percentage is relatively small. This begs the question of how best the college should protect the networks and other users from the (potentially) virus-carrying student users. (Click screenshots to enlarge)

Question 19 indicates that over 94% of our online students have Internet access at home. Clearly, not having access at home would be a disadvantage for most students.

Question 20 below indicates that over 90% of our students access their online courses via a broadband connection. That may be closer to 95% depending on what the “Other” category might include for ways of accessing the Internet.

From question 21 above, you can see that 70% of our online students live within 30 miles from our main cmapus. The percentage of online students who live further away than 30 miles has actualy shrank in the past couple of years. I mainly attribute that shrinkage in the attendance of students at a distance to the greatly increased offerings in similar online learning opportunities from many of our sister institutions within Minnesota.

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2009 Student Technology Survey – Post 9

Posted on February 12, 2009 by barrydahl

Student Uses of Web 2.0 Tools

I added a new question for the first time this year in an effort to get at the level of usage of various Web 2.0 tools by students. Of course some students have used these tools because they were assigned to do so by one of their instructors, although that appears to be a fairly small phenomena at my school. This data helps debunk the theory that some people promote, thinking that all the students (or maybe all of Gen Y) are using these web tools all the time. Wrong again, Kemo Sabe.

This is a big chart, sorry about that. You probably want to view the chart full-size at Flickr so that you can read it better.

Out of 1,080 students, only 14 say they have used Delicious, and only 2 of them use it frequently. About 20% of our students use Gmail, but less than 20 people (17) use Meebo for instant messaging. About 3.5% of our students use Twitter. Only 6 of our students say they have used Second Life occasionally, frequently, or very frequently. By contrast, 73% say they use YouTube – so they’re clearly using some of these tools – butnot many of the tools that are considered more mainstream by the people I hang with. (click chart to enlarge)

The results here remind me of a poster I put together for use in workshops whenever people start thinking that everyone is using these Web 2.0 tools:

Original photo (CC) by ocean.flynn

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2009 Student Technology Survey – Post 8

Posted on February 11, 2009 by barrydahl

Question 14 asks the students about how much they use some of the various web services. I ask them which they use “regularly.” Blogs come in at less than 10%, wikis at 9%, Skype and similar at about 6% and podcasts at only 5%. Social networking sites such as FaceBook (59%) and MySpace (35%) are popular, but not as much as I would have expected. As soon as I can get the individual data report to run (if I can at all), I will be able to slice the data to look for age and gender differences in some of these sites. Instant messaging (28%) will probably also have some interesting data when broken down by age. (Click screenshot to enlarge)

Online shopping and online banking come in at lower percentages than when I ask the same questions of the educator audiences at presentations and workshops. Still, 64% engage in online banking.

For all the talk about electronic portfolios in higher education, our students come in at about 2% usage of this tool. Ouch.

Questions 15 & 16 aren’t interesting enough (to me, at least) to warrant inclusion in the blog. You can see the charts here. Question 15 asks about how many previous online courses they have taken: 28% are newbies but 36% have taken three or more previous online courses. Question 16 asks whether they intend to take more online courses: 14% don’t plan on it, but the majority do expect to.

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2009 Student Technology Survey – Post 7

Posted on February 10, 2009 by barrydahl

Question 13 looks at the technology devices that our students have and use. Digital still cameras top the list at over 78% ownership. Yes, most digital cameras also shoot video which means that the need to have a stand-alone digital video cam is decreasing all the time. Only a little over a quarter of the students report having a video camera. The biggest surprise to me is probably the less than a quarter of the students who have a webcam for their computer – either built-in or attached. Apparently the image of all the young people flirting on Stickam is not all that true. Of course, a lot of our students are not young, but still, a webcam is a great communication tool, IMO. (click screenshot to enlarge)

Laptop ownership exceeds desktop computer ownership, with a fair number of students having both. Less than half the students have a Wii, PS3, Xbox or similar gaming console. Makes a person question all the talk about how we need to develop all kinds of educational video games for our students. Cell phone ownership is high as would be expected, although not all students have one. Also, 16% have a cell phone but don’t have the capability of sending (or receiving, most likely) a text message. That also shows that we wouldn’t be ready to go to a service like Poll Everywhere (which I do like) on an exclusive basis, nor can we rely on text messaging as the major (or only) mode of communication in an emergency situation.

Filed under: Computing, Higher Ed | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

2009 Student Technology Survey – Post 6

Posted on February 9, 2009 by barrydahl

Question 10 asked about which programs students were enrolled in. Nothing too exciting there.

Question 11 looks at Internet browser usage by students. Almost 90% of the students use either IE or Firefox, with IE still leading the way by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Still, the usage of Firefox has increased in the past couple of years; from 3% in 2005, to 9% in 2006 and now 21.6% in 2008 (no survey given in 2007). Me? I use IE only when I absolutely have to. Firefox first choice, use Chrome and Flock quite often as well. In fact, it’s not unusual for me to have all three of those browsers running at the same time. I also use Safari on a MacBook and I use Mozilla SeaMonkey. I also like ATT Pogo, but I’m not sure if it is going to continue or not. Maxthon and Avant Browser have some positive qualities as well. (Click screenshot to enlarge)

Nothing much different about question 11 where students indicate how many online courses they are taking during the current semester. We have lots of students who take only 1 or 2 online courses to fill in their on-ground schedule, plus we also have many students who are attending other colleges and taking one or two courses from us that count toward their degree programs at other schools.

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