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Catalyst CAMP Recap

Posted on October 27, 2009 by barrydahl

I was a Catalyst CAMP Ranger at the recently concluded WCET09 conference in Denver. Catalyst CAMP is a wrap-around leadership academy that was started by WCET this year. By “wrap-around” I mean that the camp started the day before the annual conference began and concluded with the end of the conference on Saturday.

The CAMP was led by Hae Okimoto of Univ. of Hawaii System and Myk Garn of Southern Regional Education Board. That’s Myk in the Ranger hat when he was welcoming the campers on Day 1. Fellow CAMP Rangers included Maggi Murdock, Muriel Oaks, Mollie McGill, Karen Paulson, Russ Poulin, Philip Cameron, and David Phillips.

I had the pleasure of working directly with three of the fifteen campers; Judith Steed, Reed Scull, and James Russom. Their testimonials are shown below.

“There were three main high points of the camp: 1) meeting others learning their way into the WCET advantage, 2) getting to talk with the keynote speakers in smaller group discussions and 3) connecting with the great rangers who had experience, ideas and encouragement to share so very generously. I especially enjoyed the campers’ willingness to share and explore together with humor and productive intention. I look forward to meeting my camping cohort next time.”

Judith L. Steed, M.S.
Director of Assessment: Promoting Student Learning
University of the Rockies

———–

“There were several very helpful aspects to Catalyst CAMP.  One was the opportunity to discuss issues of common concern with experienced campus distance education leaders.  Secondly, the canoe speech was helpful in seeing how others process and explain challenging distance education topics.  The time constraint of three minutes for this speech was very important in encouraging us to reflect on what elements of our “pitches” were the most salient.  Lastly, the opportunity to interact in small groups with the plenary speakers was very helpful.  Overall, I learned more from the camp than I expected, and I made some nice friendships to boot.”

W. Reed Scull, Ed.D.
Director, Outreach Credit Programs and Associate Dean,
The Outreach School, University of Wyoming

———-

“The Catalyst Camp experience was extremely beneficial.”

“Benefits included:

  • Leadership by the Camp Rangers was personal and relevant – a good learning atmosphere
  • Exposure to folks that are extremely knowledgeable in their field of expertise
  • The fellowship and networking among peers
  • The unique learning experience from being face to face with the keynote speakers
  • The fellowship at meal times”

“The format, food, fellowship with the other campers and the face-to-face with the keynote speakers was invaluable. I cannot imagine not taking part in future camps.”

Dr. James R. Russom
Associate Director of Online Education
Nazarene  Bible College

———-

It was my pleasure to meet these fine leaders and work with them over the four days of CAMP.

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Who the hell is Brian Lamb?

Posted on October 26, 2009 by barrydahl

This video helps answer two burning questions:

  1. Who the hell is Brian Lamb?
  2. Why is he saying all these terrible things about Learning Objects?

Brian is one of my favorite EdTech speakers and thought leaders. He was the closing keynote speaker at the recently concluded WCET conference in Denver. My flight was scheduled to leave at about the same time that Brian’s address was scheduled to begin. I even tried to pay extra to get a seat on a later flight, but alas, none were available so I was destined to miss this event.

As luck (and good planning) would have it, Brian agreed to spend an hour with the Catalyst CAMP attendees on the day prior to his keynote. I was one of the CAMP Rangers (my cabin group was known as the Tweetarondaks) and so was able to be part of the group that spent an hour with Brian in a more informal session. He agreed to let me shoot some video during the chat and this is the first one that I’d like to share.

In this 10 minute video you’ll learn about how Brian got started working in education, and how his first job at UBC was essentially to help them build a closed-system Learning Object Repository with all the SCORM and IMS guidelines and requirements, and all that jazz. Not surprisingly, Brian tells the tale of how open-ness and simple technologies can be used much more effectively for those who truly want to share.

BTW, Brian started this session by asking the question in the title of this post, and wondered why we should care what he had to say. We cared.

(Post edited 3/20/13)

http://www.wcet.info/2.0/

Filed under: Conference, Read/WriteWeb | Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

Catalyst CAMP Begins

Posted on October 20, 2009 by barrydahl

I will be serving as a camp ranger for the WCET higher education leadership academy called CatalystCAMP (Changing Academic Methods & Practices) from Oct. 21-24 in Denver.

The leadership academy is wrapped around the WCET annual conference that starts Oct. 22. Myk Garn of the SREB and I will be leading the group through their paces as we talk about the Articulation step in the process. The five A’s are as follows:

  1. Awareness
  2. Anticipation
  3. Articulation
  4. Action
  5. Assessment

One of the first things we provided to the campers was a suggested reading list. Here are my contributions to the list.

1) The Cluetrain Manifesto by Locke, Searles, Weinberger, Levine

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”  http://www.cluetrain.com/book.html

Barry says: this book is still as informative and relevant as it was 10 years ago when it was first published. Every leader in higher ed should be familiar with the manifesto and how it represents a fundmental change in how we must communicate with the world by speaking with a human voice. BTW, this book can be read in its entirety for free, online.

2) Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen

“According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn’t always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need ‘disruptive innovation.'”  http://disruptingclass.mhprofessional.com/apps/ab/about-the-book/

Barry says: There’s lots of books out there about how we need to reform education or “fix” schools. This book takes a reasoned approach of how we can use technology effectively to create truly individualized instruction that can help students learn at many different levels – where they are and when they need it. Based on the idea of “disruptive innovation.”

3) The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein

“50 Million Minds Diverted, Distracted, Devoured. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their minds had the opposite effect.”  http://www.dumbestgeneration.com/home.html

Barry says: Don’t believe the hype about the “tech-savvy” (quote marks intentional) Millennial generation and most definitely don’t make big strategic plans to change the way you provide education based upon that same hype and drivel. If anything, this generation (and presumably the next one, etc.) will need more of our help to make sense of and productive uses of technology in their educational pursuits.

4) 33,000,000 people in the room – by Juliette Powell

“33 Million People in the Room offers practical tools and advice for optimizing every stage of your own social networking initiative, from planning through measurement. The techniques can help you build your company, introduce new products and services, and strengthen your brands, whatever they are: business or personal.”  http://www.juliettepowell.com/book.php

Barry says: We’ll talk about this idea during the camp; you probably won’t need to read the book after that discussion. It’s an important idea about creating your own network of connections. This book is not specific to education, but the examples allow you to make your own connections to higher education.

Filed under: Conference | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

CIT09 Begins Sunday

Posted on October 9, 2009 by barrydahl

I leave tomorrow for the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology (CIT) in Detroit City. Here is a Wordle made from all the sessions titles for Track II – Teaching and Learning.

wordle2-CIT09

I will be involved with four different presentations during the conference: (full schedule here)

1/2 Day Learning Center Course:
Ensuring Quality in Online Learning: A Primer for Administrators
1:00 PM to 4:00 PM Sunday, October 11, 2009
Barry Dahl & Hanna Erpestad, Lake Superior College

Myths and Realities of Teaching With Technology
8:00 AM to 9:00 AM Tuesday, October 13, 2009

How to Be a Digital Community College Winner
11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Lani Cauthen, Vice President Of Sales, Center for Digital Education
(I will talk briefly about how we made it on the list.)

Special Session:
Users and Uses of Web 2.0 in Higher Education
12:30 PM to 1:30 PM Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Twitter tag for the conference is #CIT09.  I have also created a Twub (Twitter Hub) at http://twubs.com/CIT09

Ensuring Quality in Online Learning: A Primer for Administrators1:00 PM to 4:00 PM Sunday, October 11, 2009Barry Dahl, Vice President, Lake Superior College; Hanna Erpestad, Dean, Lake Superior College;

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Action Analytics Symposium – Day 1

Posted on September 23, 2009 by barrydahl

MnSCU-ActionAnalyticsA two-day symposium on Action Analytics was held in St. Paul on September 22-23, 2009. I took lots of notes via Twitter. I’ll copy and paste several of those tweets from day one and call it a blog post. Twitter hashtag #ActionAnalytics

  • Symposium begins in 1 hour. First up: “Why action analytics for higher education?” My answer: to improve student success
  • Symposium getting started. MnSCU Chancellor states that the people are fed up with the completion problems in higher ed.
  • “I don’t think we can assume that our needs will be funded if we can’t demonstrate high levels of achievement.”
  • The key piece of #ActionAnalytics is not the analytics, it is the ACTION. Use the data to lead us to actions to span the achievement gap.
  • Who’s been invited to #ActionAnalytics ? Trustees, presidents, political leaders, policy makers, national associations (& me?)
  • Donald Norris has a blog titled: Linking Analytics to Lifting Out of Recession http://bit.ly/1TI4s
  • Higher ed has never said “Every student needs to succeed.” We accept failure – non-completers are expected & “normal”
  • Health care & education are similar in the “laying on of hands.” Nationwide discussion about reforming health care, will education be next?
  • Had breakfast this morning with Capella’s president. He told me some surprising things about their student demographics. Very impressed. Capella educates huge numbers of first-generation college students. I don’t think that’s widely know. He tells a great story about access.
  • Higher ed measures lagging indicators (persistence, graduation, etc), should focus on leading indicators (Wk1 engagement)
  • More open education environment will take us from education opportunity (now) to education assurance (future). Bill Graves
  • Getting data out of our systems is hard (costly) – we need better standardization of info systems. Michael Feldstein
  • The data is leaving the LMS for Web 2.0 apps – how do we build connections to all these tools (can we)? Michael Feldstein
  • “Smart Change” is the aggressive application of change management principles to develop institutional capacity (Baer/Duin)
  • Routine change happens everyday, transformative change gets you out of your comfortable box. Academics freak out with that.
  • My take on transformative change – largest barrier is TRADITION (think Topol singing in Fiddler on the Roof). For example: 300 bright minds may agree that we should extend the school year – but 300 million people disagree because of tradition of summer vacation.
  • John Campbell of Purdue. Building capacity for analytics is really about building community – getting buy-in
  • Purdue Signals Program – actionable intelligence – real-time predictions of student success in a course. Try to focus your data analysis – one question leads to another – must make choices and keep it simple. Purdue’s Campbell. Purdue’s info system hasn’t reduced course drops, but they drop earlier. More B/C grades, fewer D/F. Purdue students didn’t think it was Big Brother. They appreciated the info avail to them “thanks for kick in the butt.”
  • Alex Ushveridze – Predictive Modeling Expert at Capella. “How” questions depend on the “who”and the “why.” Persistence? Predictive Modeling is a continue cyclic process- a way of acting rationally. Online education is ideal arena for P.M. Capella – Early alert – how early? FIRST WEEK determines everything!! High predictability of grades at end of first week.
  • Jeff Gran- mgr of assessment at Capella will focus on measurement of learning. How can we collaborate to measure outcomes? Capella has 1,100+ faculty. Outcomes are measured with a fully embedded assessment model (FEAM) in each course.
  • Craig Scheonecker of MnSCU showing MnSCU accountability dashboards. Focus on fewer items and make easy to understand. Check out the MnSCU dashboards – available to the public http://bit.ly/Jq0lb You can even “drill down” (somewhat).
  • Conundrum: as we move to individualized learning models – how can we aggregate/analyze data with small N sizes?
  • Issue: there is a need for info literacy about these analytics – who’s doing something about that? Michael Feldstein
  • Will #ActionAnalytics evolve into a set of open tools that can be shared across institutions? It’s not happening yet.
  • ERP vendors, LMS vendors are all looking at (selling) these types of tools – but is that the direction Higher Ed should go.
  • http://twitpic.com/iq2vj – Lunch keynote speaker at #ActionAnalytics – Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter.
  • During lunch: “When Blackboard is presented a business opportunity – their response is ‘What would the 19th century robber-barons do?'”
  • #ActionAnalytics panel discussion – What info, reports, dashboards are needed? 1st up: Dr. George Boggs, American Assoc. Community Colleges. Dr. Boggs: The old saying was “students have a right to fail.” Luckily, that point of view is changing – but not totally. Spellings Commission concerned with consumer info. That’s not the focus for CCs. We need the data to improve our outcomes. Voluntary system of accountability. One concern is improving the effectiveness of our remedial education programs.
  • Foreign dignitaries come to the US. to study our system of higher education. “Sorry, we don’t have one of those.”
  • 25-30% of the developmental ed is done at universities – but they don’t do remedial education. Name Game: Banana Fanna Fo.
  • Revenue per FTE at public institutions: $7,059 appropriations, $4,004 tuition revenues. (64% – 36% nationally)
  • If academe makes accountability studies without outside oversight, will they be viewed as being less than truthful?
  • “As an educator masquerading as a technologist, I now realize how little I know about what will happen next.” Michael F.
  • http://twitpic.com/iqgyd – From #ActionAnalytics – two bright minds: Mark Milliron and John O’Brien.
  • Data Quality Campaign website: http://bit.ly/e2bMb Using Longitudinal Data Systems to Improve Student Success.
  • We have a greater supply of data than demand for it. People don’t ask for it, don’t trust it, can’t use it effectively.
  • Next generation of analytics – interesting conversation since we are still making baby steps on the current generation. Next gen: move from high-cost business intelligence to value analytics for the masses. Next gen: move from users waiting for results to immediate results with dynamic analysis and changing parameters. Next gen: analytics currently driven by power users, move to end users deploying user-friendly tools. Next gen: move from institutional data sets to cross-institutional analytics and P-20 data sets.
  • Discussing some of the user-generated analytics – RateYourProfessors, PickaProf, CollegeResults dot org, etc.
  • Statistics is THE math that we need to be teaching in high school and college. More important to our future than Calculus.
  • One of the secret sauces for analytics is the predictive model – good place for collaboration. Open-source style. Al Essa
  • Our technical capacity is developing faster than our ability to make constructive use of the output. What does this mean?

Overall, it was a very good day, very long day, spent with very intelligent people. My brain is full.

Filed under: Computing, Higher Ed | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

More Twitter Goodness

Posted on September 3, 2009 by barrydahl

Just passing along a few good links from my Twitter friends. I just add these to my Favorites list as I see them and then post them when the mood strikes.

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Link Love for my Tweople

Posted on August 24, 2009 by barrydahl

twitter-34dSome of my favorite tweets from recent days with links to useful stuff. I learn more things from the people I follow than any other network or learning group or anything else, by far. They’re smart, they’re engaged, they’re connected, and they’re relevant to my day-to-day life. Here’s a baker’s dozen (in no particular order):

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Action Analytics at MnSCU

Posted on August 21, 2009 by barrydahl

During this academic year I will be working on a project called Action Analytics with the Office of the Chancellor at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU). I will still retain my position at Lake Superior College, but part of my time will be devoted to this project.

Dr. Linda Baer of MnSCU was a recent guest blogger on Donald Norris’ blog Linking Analytics to Lifting Out of Recession. Dr. Baer described several data analytics initiatives that are ongoing within MnSCU as serving diverse populations and also the underserved populations. As a more recent step, she describes the following: “Linking Activities and Metrics. The second foundation step is to begin to link these many activities. The technology and infrastructure capacity of the system was supporting a large data warehouse with selected data mining capabilities. The dashboard enabled full display of campus and system accomplishments. Yet, the question remained: What activities were contributing to the most student learning and student success?”

Boosting Analytics and Predictive Modeling. Dr Baer continues with the following: “Realizing that the next big step was to develop analytic and predictive modeling capabilities … using national, state and local data, we could develop student information dashboards so each faculty member could review where the student was academically and then advise the best academic choices for ongoing success. Curricular assessment could be made to see what components of course learning worked for students and what needed more emphasis so tutoring and advising could further align best learning experiences to accomplish successful learning.”

The desired end result is to create an informational system that can be used to provide students with timely advice about how best to succeed in their current courses and in their more long-term programs oif study. To that end, I am working as part of a team to create a proof of concept for this project. We are analyzing sudent engagement data harvested from their activities inside Desire2Learn during the spring 2009 semester. Early results have favorable indications that the student engagement data might indeed be useful as a predictor of success in the course, although that analysis is not complete at this time.

Stage one is to create an advising model where advisors would be able to quickly see which of their advisees might be at risk academically and to help make suggestions as to which type of actions (interventions?) might be useful in bringing the student closer to a successful outcome. This work is ongoing and I expect to have much more to report about it over the next weeks and months.

Filed under: Computing, Desire2Learn | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

BuzzTweet Bingo for EAT-IT 09

Posted on August 11, 2009 by barrydahl

EAT-IT 09 (Emerging Academic Technologies and Instructional Techniques) starts tomorrow at Inver Hills Community College. During the keynote presentations (there are now five of them over two days) I’m going to try out a new game that I hope will be fun for the attendees. I always think it’s pretty funny to play Buzzword Bingo at conference sessions, but that is just a little too low tech for a tech conference. Enter BuzzTweet Bingo (copyright, trademark, patent, DRM, and all licenses and royalties belong to me – Barry Dahl). (You can Google it (I did) and you’ll find no reference to the term except probably this one and all future derivatives from this one.)

Here’s how it works. Prior to the start of the keynote presentation or breakout session, you send a Twitter direct message to the game administrator. In the message, you identify who the speaker is and then you list five buzzwords that you predict the speaker will use during the session. Here’s the catch. One word must start with a B, one word with an I, one with an N, a G, and an O.

During the presentation, you send a tweet immediately after you hear each one of your words, for example:

  • @EATIT09  John O’Brien just said “BillyBob” (which let’s assume was my B word)
  • @EATIT09  John O’Brien just said “Interwebs”
  • @EATIT09  John O’Brien just said “Nervous Nelly”
  • @EATIT09  John O’Brien just said “Giddyup”
  • @EATIT09  John O’Brien just said “”OMG”  – BINGO!!! Hallelujah!! I’ve got a BINGO!

First person to post their five words and Tweet “BINGO!!!” is the grand prize winner (a prize to be named later). NOTE: most of those sample words above are not good tech buzzwords, but were chosen based solely on their first letter for purposes of this demonstration.

Why a direct message? That keeps your predictions private so your cheating neighbors won’t copy your great buzzword ideas. The admin (me) will be able to keep you honest by checking your predictions in the dm, and compare them to your regular tweets during the session.

Rules:

  1. Rule #1, Obey all rules!!!
  2. Admin makes the call on whether something is a good buzzword. No simple words, no conjunctions, don’t use the speakers name, etc. This is BuzzTweet Bingo for rice cakes – USE BUZZWORDS and stupid acronyms and stuff like that.
  3. Admin settles disputes about whether the speaker actually said your buzzword or not. If necessary, the archive of the video stream will be checked and re-checked. Don’t make me pull this car over.
  4. No crying, and check rule #1.

If you’re ready to play – here’s the steps to get started.

  1. Follow the game administrator on Twitter. He needs to follow you back so you can send direct messages to him.
    • If I (barrydahl on Twitter) already follow you, then you’re good to go. Just send me your direct message.
    • If I don’t follow you on Twitter, follow the special account I created for the game (EATIT09 on Twitter) which is set up to automatically follow you back. This should happen very quickly (We’ll see). Otherwise just tell me to follow you so that you can send me direct messages.
  2. Send the dm to the game admin (either barrydahl or EATIT09 on Twitter) prior to the start of the session, or within the first couple of minutes (can’t include buzzwords you’ve already heard). Make sure you identify the speaker’s name in addition to your five buzzwords.
    • Example:  d EATIT09  John O’Brien keynote: BuzzTweets – BillyBob, Interwebs, Nervous Nelly, Giddyup, OMG
  3. Send a regular tweet (@ reply to EATIT09) the first time the speaker uses each of your five buzzwords (see the examples above under the picture).
  4. Feel free to yell out BINGO! during the session when you send your fifth tweet – sort of like a tweet heard round the world.

Finally, if this idea falls flat on its face, then I clearly stole the idea from someone who is far less entertaining (see previous post) than I am.

CC Flickr photo by Annie Mole

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I’m Not as Entertaining as I Think

Posted on July 27, 2009 by barrydahl

People are Cruel.  Don’t be Cruel. Each year I am saddened by the nasty things that people are willing to say in an anonymous evaluation that they would not be willing to say to your face or even in a written evaluation with their name attached to it. I have posted previously about this with regard to my performance evaluation at the college. I have also written about how you can have 19 positive (even glowing) comments but it sticks with you and overrides the other comments when that 20th person says something nasty – at least it does for me.

This came up again last week when we (the ITC Board of Directors) received the conference evaluation results from eLearning 2009. Overall the evals are very, very positive. The conference committee and the Board should take great pride in the overall nature of the comments and ratings.

I participated in the Grand Debate at the conference. The Grand Debate is a conference tradition that occurs after lunch is served on the first full day of the conference, which happens to be a Sunday. Bryan Alexander and Brian Lamb delivered our top two keynote speeches; which is a calculation based on the evaluation scores received. On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, they were rated on the basis of 1) Topic, 2) Content, and 3) Presentation. Both of those keynotes had outstanding scores from the attendees filling out the evaluations. I was surprised to see that the Grand Debate also had a rating that was right in line with these two great keynotes.

136 people rated this session in the conference evaluation. Many positive comments were made and there were many 5’s on the numerical ratings. However, amidst all the glowing comments and ratings, there were a couple of comments that stood out, in particular, this one:

  • “I’m tired of Barry Dahl – he’s just not as entertaining as he thinks he is – get rid of him!”

I don’t care how you slice it, that’s just mean. But for the record, I also think I’m better looking than I really am.

Filed under: Conference | 6 Comments »

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