Digital Beards

This past week at the Alaska Society for Education (ASTE) conference in Anchorage, I met a whole lot of great people with interesting ideas about education. Two of those people were Nicole Fuerst and Matthew Turner, who collaborated on a set of presentations at ASTE exhibiting their experience with and the promise in using badges and gamification for K-12 education. Their practice, as well as their proposals, were grounded in the works of Sebastian Deterding and Richard Bartle, both of whom come up in the podcast.

I spoke with UAF eLearning & Distance Education’s Program Manager about the future of online education, the debate surrounding online education’s quality, and, MOOCs. During the interview, we make distinctions between MOOCs and the online courses we design, following what some call the “boutique” model. When we talk about the classes we design, we’re referring to classes which are meant to live up to the following values: Student-to-teacher ratios basically matching those fo face-to-face classes; semester-based with clear, regular deadlines; with a stress on discussion and collaborative learning; led by an instructor who is inherently available consistently involving him or herself in students’ classroom experience; utilizing a wide array of communication/presentation tools which are available online.

Nick Sousanis joined Brooke and I to discuss comicbooks in the classroom; Nick, the fantastic subject of our inaugural podcast, was an even better guest. Due to the length at which we talked and the amount of content that we covered, it is likely that we will be returning to the interview for another podcast in the future. For this podcast, however, I isolated the points of our discussion where we engaged the question of how comic books can help students of all different fields in both their intellectual and professional lives.

UAF Department of Ed faculty-member Skip Via joined me to talk about technology in the classroom. He makes the case for K-12 schools to be more open to using technology in classroom and encouraging students to be creators. He feels that schools may be too protective of their students, and that restrictions put upon use of technology in classrooms renders those classrooms unlike the real world they are supposedly preparing students for.

Our question for the day, “Why can’t my dissertation have pictures too?” discussed by Brooke Sheridan and I in our studio in Fairbanks, AK. Inspired by the work of Nick Sousanis, Brooke has been championing the use of sequential artwork in education. Our discussion deals primarily with the challenges that form faces if it is to eventually be more accepted in academia, using Sousanis’s example as a talking point.

iTeach is a regularly delivered, Faculty Development program developed here at eLearning and Distance Education. Primarily we serve UA faculty, leading them through sessions on the various technologies which are coming to education and cultivating discussions about the ramifications of tech coming to education. We really want to spread the word about iTeach, because it’s a great experience, so if you’re interested in applying for one please go to iteach.uaf.edu and do so. In order to discuss iTeach, I spoke with the program’s developer, Madara Mason. In addition to talking up our next iTeach, May 20th to 24th, the two of us discuss education’s technological shift, the responsibility of faculty to initiate their own introductions to online and hybrid education, and the eternal fundamentals of good teaching. It’s a good talk, a little longer than the other podcasts have been, and I’m glad you could join us.

spoke with my friend and colleague, Jennifer Moss, about Augmented Reality because she recently produced the Captain Cook Augmented Reality Experience for ASTE (the Alaska Society for Technology in Education), at the Captain Cook Hotel, this last February. CCARE involved the augmentation of 17 of the hotel’s paintings and prints, each augmentation supplementing the content with additional information and context curated and created by our eLearning design team. Each painting also came with a quiz, which drew its questions from the provided, supplemental info.