valence

Digital Marginalia 3 – Connective Tissue is Key

Posted on by Jon K.

I ran across a scrap of paper that I had scrawled two ideas on:

“Aesthetics help inform people of the usual cues for identity. They identify a person as as a participant of a culture”.

The whole idea that aesthetics are a cultural artifact that I haven’t thought about for probably ten years. So it lead me down a rabbit hole of thinking about aesthetics as a white thing – as in a racist artefact of a dominating culture. Then I ran across a Washington Post article about film and the inherent racist qualities of the technological process (film and lights calibrated for white skin rather  than a multitude of tones).

I started thinking about how we (and by that I mean white people) end up designing software, websites and apps from that privileged perspective. I haven’t really dug deep enough to think about it more than a passing thought, but I wonder about these things when I have some moments alone. It’s not a comfortable space as I’ve always prided myself as being an anti-racist sort of fellow.

“There is only one literacy – the one item that you need to be literate is just in different forms.”

I think this is from Stephen Downes, or it could be from someone else. Whoever said it, that resonates with me right about now.

I’ve been working on using D2L’s Valence API to extract an entire course’s discussions for network analysis, and found Philip Larsen’s Presentation from Fusion 2014 (which I attended, but not that session, dammit!) which will pull the data out, and then I’ll use PHP to create a CSV for input into the network analysis tool. There’s not that much more to write about as I’m basically using the existing project carte blanche and do some heavy lifting after the fact.

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Fusion 2014 – Day Two Recap

Posted on by Jon K.

So anyone who has gone to a conference before will recognize, it’s a bit more like a marathon than a sprint – you really have to try to pace yourself to get everything in and pay attention to the things you want to. I will say, that for the second year in a row, the food at the Fusion conferences were really good. Ended up talking with Paul Janzen of D2L about our impending PeopleSoft integration and the summer of integrations (Blackboard Collaborate, Pearson, maybe McGraw Hill, iClicker and Top Hat) we’re doing at McMaster. Ken Chapman also joined us at breakfast and asked a little bit about what we’d like to see out of e-mail. Frankly, I hadn’t thought about e-mail in years, because we’ve been mired in hell with IT and us trying to get the Google Mail integration working (not that it doesn’t functionally work, but IT has stalled us for admin level access since we asked a year and a half ago). I said that I’d personally prefer the system to not do e-mail at all, but that would be a difficult task considering we have people who segment their academic teaching e-mail on the LMS rather than their institutional e-mail. The problem for us is that we’re currently not configured to allow external e-mail.  It will be interesting to see if IMAP/POP3 support comes to Brightside sometime in the future – which makes a lot more sense.

Insights Focus Group

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be of any help in this but I  thought that seeing as we’ve run some reports with the Insights tool maybe I could glean better ways to deal with it. Basically, people had concerns with the large data not being able to run org-level reports (which is one of ours as well), the interface needs some improvement, and the time it takes to create ad hoc reports is too long. So those issues were at least noted. Let’s see how they get addressed going forward.

Blended Learning, Learning Portfolios and Portfolio Evaluation

Wendy Lawson and I co-presented this – however it was mostly a Wendy show. She lived it, so she should have the floor. Basically this presentation outlines what we collaborated on for Wendy in her Med Rad Sci 1F03 course – which is a professional development course for first semester, first year science students going into the Medical Radiation Sciences (X Ray, Sonography, etc).

We used the ePortfolio tool as a presentation mechanism – which I think worked well, I’m not sure if we had a good flow of what we were going to show on each page, but other than that, it was a risk that we felt was not big enough to impede our presentation.

We talked about how this redesigned course could use the Learning Portfolio to deliver the course in a blended manner (using ePortfolio/Learning Portfolio activities as the one-hour blended component) and how the students did with it. After working with Wendy on this presentation, the stuff her students did were miles above what we saw on average and I think next year, the weaknesses she acknowledged in the course will be addressed.

Vendor Sessions

I honestly skipped these because, well, I’m not interested in getting more spam in my work e-mail. Plus, my wife was having surgery (everything’s good!) at this time so I wanted to call and make sure we connected before surgery began.

Connecting Learning Tools to the Desire2Learn Platform: Models and Approaches

Attending this session was particularly self-serving – I wanted to say hi to the presenter, George Kroner, who I’ve followed on twitter for what seems like a million years, and the Valence stuff is stuff I feel I should know. I have a decent enough programming background – I can hack together things. So why am I not actually building this stuff?

George walked through UMUC’s process for integrating a new learning tool which can be broken down into three steps:

  1. Evaluate tool fit
  2. Determine level of effort to integrate
  3. Do it/Don’t do it

It seems so simple when I re-write out my notes, but it’s a really interesting set of steps – for instance, in the determine the level of effort to integrate – you also have to think of post-integration support, who supports what when you integrate? Is it the vendor? Or your support desk? What’s the protocol for resolving issues – do people put in a ticket with you, then you chase the vendor? Is the tool a one-time configuration and does it import/export nicely, or does it need to be configured every time it’s deployed in a course?

We did a Valence exercise next, and I want to merely link two tools that when I circle back to doing some Valence work (soon, I swear!) I’ll need:

https://apitesttool.desire2learnvalence.com/ and http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/. The API test tool is a no brainer really, and I knew about it before but never knew where it was – incredibly helpful for debugging your calls and what you might get back. JSON editor online is new to me, and something that I really, really needed. I’m a JSON idiot – for some reason, Javascript never resonated with me. I’ve always preferred Python or PHP as web scripts, despite the power of Javascript. Guess I’ll have to put on my big boy pants and learn it all over again. Maybe Dr. Chuck will do a JSON course like he’s done with Python?

Social Event at the Country Music Hall of Fame

The evening social event was great – the Hatch Show print is actually something I might just hang in my office. There was some shop talk, some fun stuff, a drone… Oh yeah, this happened:

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Fusion 2014 – Unconference and Day One Recap

Posted on by Jon K.

Instead of a big post I’m going to break my experiences up into three distinct posts because a) it’ll get me to post more frequently, b) that’s something I want to do and c) no one wants to read a monolithic block of text.

So I flew out of Buffalo, and it was an interesting time crossing the border where I got the fifth degree about where I was going and what I was doing. I think they thought I was being paid to speak at a conference, next time I’ll have to change the language I use to say something like attending a conference. After the border and the pornoscanners at the airport. I arrive in Nashville. Now, I’m not that worldly, but I’ve been to a few places. Nashville is not one of my favourites, not because the city is particularly terrible, it’s not particularly walkable, and it has well, public transportation issues. Outside of those quibbles (which are big problems for me) it’s a fine city with some fine people.

The Unconference

One of the best things that happens at Fusion for the last 5 or 6 years is the Unconference. I missed the first few because I was never able to actually get to Fusion, but the last couple of years I’ve been able to go, this was the event kick-off that was fun, social, and often leads to previously undiscovered ideas and new ways to break D2L. I didn’t stick around for the full discussion because I was a bit tired, but the one thing that I did learn was that VHS (Virtual High School) use Javascript to develop interactive elements of courses. Now that’s not a particularly shocking example, but combine that with the Valence API and maybe you could do some in situ testing and push results to the gradebook. Later a few of us went out for a nightcap and a good time was had by all.

Fusion Day One

Typically the first day has a ton of beginners and introduction sessions in the morning, so I ended up meeting with my co-presenter to go over our session the next day. The sessions I did attend were incredibly useful for me and I learned a ton about how other places develop in-house solutions. In fact most of my attendance was in sessions that were around External Learning Tools or the Valence API.

Keynote

So John Baker’s keynote threw the audience a little, the big takeaway was that Desire2Learn is now D2L, and the Learning Environment, or the LMS, is now called Brightside Brightspace. I guess there’s a thinly veiled jab at the competitors being the dark side, but I can’t say that I understand the need to change names. Lots of people at the conference have suggested that Desire2Learn seems a very 1990’s thing, reminiscent of the dot com boom/bust. I can’t say that they’re wrong. However, it would’ve been nice to have been told that officially. I’m a bit of a smartass when it comes to names, so my immediate nature is to shorten this to it’s logical shortform, BS. Not necessarily flattering. I don’t think D2L is big enough to have gotten out in front of it to shorten it to B, which in and of itself is not a good acronym either (B product? B movie?).

I’m not the only person who’s looking for a short form for it either. Considering I don’t know the difference between Brightspace and the LE (so is the new version called Brightspace version 1?) or if the existing products are called the LE 10.3 still… so many questions. None of them answered.

I’m sure many will talk about Chris Hadfield’s inspirational speech, it was great and all, and I certainly appreciate what he’s done. I just don’t see the connection to the conference that he brings.

Integrating Neat Tools and Activities into your Course through LTI

This session was all about External Learning Tools – which we’ve had a summer of dealing with so far. This particular session talked about integrations between SoftChalk, SWoRD and TitanPad. I’m familiar with SoftChalk through a series of courses I’m taking at Brock University and I can say that I’ve never been particularly impressed with the product – perhaps that’s the way that Brock is using it, or the way the course was developed, or a limitation of Sakai, Brock’s LMS. Either way, this session demonstrated the connection between SoftChalk activities hosted in Content then connecting to add grades into the Gradebook – certainly a more interesting way to deal with whatever you design in SoftChalk.

SWoRD was a particularly an interesting case – although I don’ t know how robust or deep the integration was (I suspect D2Lwas merely passing enrollment data to SWoRD). SWoRD is a peer assessment tool that might be an alternative to something like PeerScholar.

I’m always happy to see Etherpad clones, and TitanPad was used as an example, but if you’ve hosted an Etherpad clone at your institution you can pass user names to the Etherpad for auto tracking in the document. I’m not sure how robust Etherpad is for say, classes of 600+, but that would be an interesting experiment.

One thing the D2L presenter said was that in the configuration of the external tools, when you check the option to send User ID, it means sending the anonymized version of the username, which is interesting because the language used in the external tools dialog would benefit from adding this tidbit – we’ve turned it off in most cases (and seem to have no issue with students/instructors logging into the external tool) because we thought it would violate our University privacy rules.

The Secret to APIs

The second session of the day for me was around the use of Valence (D2L’s API) to create personal discussions in a course with enrollment of one student and the instructor. The big takeaway for this was that in courses that have enrollments set, you can save a ton of time by writing a script to do the repetitive boring stuff like create a group of one, enroll a student in it, then create a discussion topic and restrict it to that group. Was interesting to see C# used as the middleware programming language – I thought that C# was out of favor but maybe not? PHP would’ve been easier, and PERL/Python might’ve been faster to complete the task. Either way, this is the work that earned Ryan Mistura the Desire2Excel award in the student category. Cool stuff

Solution Spotlight/D2L Year Recap

Nick Oddson and Ken Chapman handled the recap of the D2L year, focusing on the extensibility of the platform. They did point out that there is a 40% faster time to resolution because they’ve increased their support and SAAS service teams. Which is good, because their service was slow before. I have noticed that their support turnaround is probably the best it’s been in years.

The looking forward part of their talk was interesting – it seems like they talked a lot about either 10.3 improvements (that were already announced last year, and available now), or stuff that we can’t see yet. Perhaps a chart:

10.3 Feature Unreleased to the Public
  • Wiggio
  • Discussions (Grid View restore)
  • Binder – Windows 8 support
  • Quizzing UI/UX improvements
  • Content Notifications
  • Student Success System
  • LEaP – Adaptive Path learning
  • Course Catalog (currently being used on Open Courses)
  • Visual Course Widgets (customization, I presume at a cost)
  • Built-in practice questions in Content (contextualized learning)
  • Gamification built into the Learning Environment (I assume 10.4/LSOne/Brightspace)

I suspect that the amount of talk about predictive modelling is something they want to build primarily for remedial use, and for online courses primarily. As a market strategy, that makes some sense. Some of D2L’s bigger clients are primarily online universities.

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