Category Archives: Education
Boulder Colorado
Historical Posts representing Adventure Continues: Second Quarter
Boulder, Colorado, was and is a very cool city. Sure it is a college town in a beautiful setting next to the Flatiron foothills, but in the summer of 77 it had its own post Vietnam era independent vibe. Outdoor recreation was a growth industry. Frank Shorter helped to promote Boulder as a Mecca for long distant runners. Celestial Seasonings was evolving as a Tea provider supporting a very popular Red Zinger Classic Bike Race. 
Pearl Street was the place to be. And this is where we ended up soon after marriage. We started out living in an apartment at Lake Tantra but soon ended up as the managers for Hill House Apartments at 10th and Marine. We also got our first pet when we got to Boulder, a cat we named Barney. Steve showed up occasionally and we were spending a lot of time playing frisbee, enough that we decided to enter the Colorado State Frisbee Championships that was held at the cU camp in Boulder. Our specialty was acrobatic throws and catches, which impressed the crowds but we did not have all the other disciplines down well enough to be a contender.
Sometime that summer as I was phasing out of Colorado International and preparing to attend Colorado University, I hooked up with Mock Realty Property Management under Ken Mock, which led to our opportunity to manage Hill House Apartments. This deal gave us an apartment and a small stipend for managing the apartments. The better deal though was working for the contractor who was responsible for reconditioning all of Mock Realty properties when their tenants moved out. 
I got paid a lot of money for throwing on a new coat of paint in these properties. Connie was working at the Penny’s Auto Center and doing some books for our apartments which all translated into a good enough financial situation to enjoy Boulder. Pearl Street was just a short walk, the Walrus became our favorite restaurant and we spent many a night on the Hill typically at Tulagi’s.
Studying with Barney’s help
Of course the reason for being in Boulder was to advance our intellectual and artistic endeavors. I did take the 2 courses I needed to graduate from Indiana University along with a few other very interesting Chemical Engineering classes. It was Igor Gamov’s course on chemical flow dynamics that actually got me interested in computers. The course allocated a nice chunk of computer time in the CU Computer Center to work on some flow dynamics programs. I think I spent 90% of my time focusing on that small component of the course. I even resorted to begging for more computer time even though I had completed all assignments. However, the seed was planted especially when I overheard a grad student talking about accessing the computer from his apartment via a terminal. That same course also offered some great field trips to experience chemical processing. The visit to the Climax Molybdenum Mine in Leadville was way cool and the tour of the Coors Brewery in Golden ending with an extensive tasting session was a fitting way to end my college time at CU.
Connie was pursuing a degree in Theater at Indiana U. but pulled out with a year and a half to go. However, she utilized this Boulder opportunity to study with Samuel Avital at “Le Centre du Silence” mime school and took acting with Robert Benedetti at University of Colorado in association with the Shakespeare Festival. I guess we both participated a few times in the script created for watching the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Boulder Theater. We also did a lot of hiking in and around the Boulder front range and continued to ski as much as possible. We had a few great nights skiing at Eldora Ski Mountain. Overall there always seemed to be plenty going on in Boulder.
Barney the cat was working out for us, so we decided it was time to get a dog. We went to the Boulder Animal Shelter in hopes of finding the right dog in need of adoption. As we walked through the kennel there was a Black/Gold/White Shepard type dog that was sitting in silence amongst a kennel full of barking dogs.
We knew this dog was meant for us, however, he was not available for adoption for at least another week. Connie reminds me that I went back to the kennel everyday to sit with our hopeful new pet. When adoption was finally granted we named our new dog “Rusty”. The animal shelter required that we get him fixed but I felt like he needed to experience his libido so we got him a vasectomy. A few years later after too many runoffs for the smell of a female in heat we decided to get Rusty neutered. Rusty and sometimes Barney joined our walks down to the Boulder Creek parkway.
Falls up Boulder Canyon
I still had a connection to my Christian Ministry roots so when I came across an opportunity for a paid Youth Leadership position at Mt Hope Lutheran Church I talked Connie into the commitment and we were sort of put in charge of the Senior High Youth Group. Maybe this was the initial stimulus which led to Connie becoming a Chaplain in later life. The experience was pretty cool culminating with a major effort to take the group to a youth conference in New Mexico. This was definitely a test for us to be grown-ups and I think we did OK. As the school year was winding down I landed a job at Arapahoe Chemical working as a plant operator. They were not hiring just for a student summer job so I failed to let them know that I was a student. This was also when I bought a Honda 550 motorcycle from a friend with plans to ride to Steamboat Springs for a short get-away. I was not an experienced rider so when I hit loose gravel on a turn coming back from Steamboat Lake, off the road and over the handlebars I went. This was one of those times when I believe God must have been looking over me since I was not wearing a helmet and I could have easily hit my head on the many large rocks in the field where I came to rest. I did, however, rupture a kidney which required a hospital visit and many days of recovery in Steamboat.
Crazy Snow storm in May of 78
Well, Boulder had been great but that Adventure spirit was rising again. We even considered riding that Honda around the country which is what we told the church as the reason for our resignation. But of course a new adventure always presented itself. This time we were headed to Snow Mountain Ranch a YMCA property near Winter Park.
Next Post: Snow Mountain Ranch
Ended up as a maintenance man again at the YMCA Snow Mountain Ranch near Winter Park, CO. This was a brief Adventure in very beautiful part of the Rockies as I was considering how my career needed to get started.
TLT at S&T March 12-13, 2015
Fresh back from the ELI Conference I wanted to compare the agenda for our upcoming Teaching and Learning Technology Conference, TLT, scheduled for March 12-13 here at the Missouri University of Science and Technology campus in Rolla, MO. This conference has matured over the years to be a leading regional conference for Education Technology. Under the direction of Meg Brady, Director, and Angie Hammons, Manager, of Education Technology at Missouri S&T, this conference has an all star lineup with extremely relevant sessions.
Plus: TLT will be hosting a CanvasCon by Instructure on the 12th.
The Keynote Speakers:
Robbie K. Melton, Ph.D. — Associate Vice Chancellor of Mobilization Emerging Technology; Tennessee Board of Regents, “The Emergence of Mobile and Smart Devices: Is Your Device Smarter than You?”
Jeff Schramm, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of History & Political Science; Missouri S&T, “MOOC’s, LMS, ELI, PRR, CB&Q and EMD: What the history of technology can teach us about the future of higher education.”
I love the fact that this conference brings together many innovative professors in higher education along with their Instructional Designers, Developers and Technologists, plus many from K-12 who want to make sure their students are properly prepared for college. TLT does carry some Missouri S&T STEM influence but I believe that it only strengthens how EdTech is applied to the liberal arts community. An exciting area of development in the last year has been with the preparation of virtual labs for chemistry and biology.
OH yes, did I mention that our TLT is FREE….
Return to the One Room Schoolhouse
I have seen a trend with my STEM connected colleagues over the last 6 months wanting to discuss concepts of adaptive or competency based learning, CBL. These discussions evolved for many reasons such as; lack of classroom space, course scheduling problems or issues surrounding non-tenure track faculty. This discussion is right on target when it occurs with younger faculty, however, now older faculty are asking questions and seem to be contemplating how this could work. Generally there is agreement that it is inevitable that education will move in this direction, but then you start talking about the repercussions of what that might look like to the higher education business model and fear returns to the conversation. I guess what is different is that now there seems to be recognition of the value of the learning model and discussions are tending toward how we might implement it.
Personalized Learning
I decided to write this post after a number of discussions yesterday, some stimulated by those who viewed CNN’s airing of the “Ivory Tower” documentary. As we talked about implementing adaptive learning to our STEM courses I was drawn to the vision of the old one room schoolhouse. STEM possibly more then any other academic discipline is based on building blocks or competencies. Math and the sciences dominate this with competency based requirements built into courses as well as with interdependencies between courses. So when I thought of the one room schoolhouse I saw it as similar to the students that we receive. In the one room schoolhouse students have to progress through levels of reading, writing and arithmetic, and they had a built in remediation process. The teacher was there to help at all levels.
How did we get to our current college degree attainment path based on taking a selected number of courses that may or may not actually give you all of the competencies that you or your employer desire? I think we used to have a much more standardized entry path to college. Students from high school, mostly Americans, had very similar competencies due to similar curriculums that could not be supplemented by additional information as is now available via the Internet. The over achievers could go to World Book, but for the most part if a student got accepted to college then they pretty much entered at the same level and the progression through a standard set of courses with a few electives worked fine. That world no longer exists. We have screwed up high school believing that standardized testing validates competencies. Combine that with the financial pressure universities are under to maintain enrollment and you end up with a freshman class that is much more in line with the one room schoolhouse.
Change is coming and it will be heavily influenced by competency based learning and I think STEM may be well positioned to adapt to this. We have been working on this concept in our general ed core curriculums of math and science. At first it was about trying to figure out online or hybrid learning but now we are starting to see how we may need to change the academic business model. The emerging CBL providers such as Western Governors are built upon a personalized learning foundation that allows the student to progress at their own pace. Tuition is based on a period of time not on credit hours, which creates the incentive of “the faster you progress, the more you save”. Maybe there is a hybrid version of this that can work for the traditional residential university.
I’m going to take a stab at what this might look like for STEM degrees. I’m looking at this as realist considering what might be acceptable for our entrenched higher education culture, today’s student and the political and financial forces that will inevitably force the change. The first 2 years of most STEM degrees are fairly similar based on the need to build a foundation of math through calculus, basic concepts for the sciences with English and physics typically being foundational as well. This is true for pre-meds through engineering and it is typically fairly challenging to ensure that we are not wasting our time on the students in the upper level of the degree program. So how about a one room schoolhouse for each STEM discipline complete with a set of competency based learning modules designed with assessments that provide adaptive options to complete each step. We have talented non-tenure track faculty always available and still teaching but not on a fixed lecture circuit. The environment would facilitate collaborative learning along with the necessary lab requirements. The student pays the same tuition, and heck we even keep the semester structure. The advanced students finish early or have more time for extra curricular activities such as undergraduate research or experiential learning options. As the student emerges from this general ed core they enter into the more traditional degree completion with the upper level courses and labs taught by tenure track faculty to complete their STEM program.
I’m going to stop here without digging into the obvious questions and details. But what do you think? I think it might be an improvement.
Providing Technology that Students Actually Use
While eating lunch at my desk I opened up the webcam view of our new Nonavitra 6K Visualization Wall we built for use in the library. Three students jumped on the system and proceeded to spend 15 minutes exploring chemical bonding options starting from some periodic table application. I wouldn’t say that it was utilizing hi-res graphics but what was important is that the students were having such a great time exploring. This brings me to what I feel is one of the most important reasons for giving our students access to this visualization resource. The opportunity to explore and gain experience in working with resolution that is typically reserved for corporate showcases or expensive research facilities.
Nonavitra Visualization Wall
The library had an open house a few weeks ago where they introduced Nonavitra and ever since we have seen the reservation schedule for the resource fill up with student groups especially in the evening. In fact one of the first uses for the wall was the rugby club using it to scout a future opponent. But what I love is that student study groups are reserving it.
In the beginning my Research Support team started bugging me to allow them to build some sort of a visualization facility. They wanted to build an immersion visualization experience reminiscent of CAVE2 at the UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). And yes that would be fabulous but we need to walk before we run, which is why user adoption is the overriding requirement. Last year’s V4DiR focused on 3D data review and the Nonavitra Visualization Wall now allows us to put a powerful visualization resource in the hands of our faculty and students. The one condition that I set was that I would not build a visualization resource that would become relegated to providing campus visitor demos. We seem to be having success with these technology rollouts. The 3D Printer program in the library has been extremely successful. The secret to success is to put your effort into engineering the business process for making the resource available.
Considering Hire Education
I try to discuss innovation and disruption in higher education on my blog. However, it is difficult at best to dig too deep into these areas since I am digging from the inside. That sounds a bit like digging your own grave and I’ll just leave that comment hanging. But I have been accused of being the most innovative and too innovative and because of that I must carefully manage that perception as it relates to disruption. Higher education as it is primarily established today cannot handle the disruption which tends to evolve from innovation. Very sad really, it means that any innovation in higher education must fit into the existing structure which tends to predict its doom. But it is that structure that is predicting higher education’s doom.
My motivation to open up this topic comes from my increased interactions with our corporate partners looking to hire our students. This is a good thing that we have corporate partners who want to build a relationship with us because the trend is not necessarily moving in that direction. Two recent Gallup Polls revealed that although 96 percent of chief academic officers believe that they are doing a good job of preparing students for employment, only 11 percent of business leaders agree that graduates have the requisite skills for success in the workforce. I hear the same concerns but thankfully we do produce graduates that are acceptable to employers but we cannot rest on our reputation. The skill sets needed by employers is changing much faster then our curriculums.
It is commonly accepted that higher education is approaching a bubble of dramatic disruption. Theories on what that might look like range across the spectrum typically dependent upon what role one plays in that industry. But when you step back from personal feelings it is hard to understand how this system designed centuries ago can continue much longer without some serious overhaul. Of course change or innovation rarely occurs from within, it will be outside forces that create the bubble. Those forces evolve from our customers and the options that they explore. I think the most significant force will come from the employers of our graduates. The Christensen Institute has helped alert us to disruptive signals over the years and I think they have produced an excellent review of how our employers are shifting their tactics in their latest publication “Hire Education”.
The publication as mentioned in the video shifts focus to an examination of online competency-based education. Unfortunately for our traditional institutions of higher education online competency-based education would probably have the most disruptive affect imaginable on our current business model. I do sympathize with the overall value proposition that higher education offers and we should not lose what is working in HE, but I think we know that change is coming, so shouldn’t we we planning for it. Read the “Hire Education” report with an open mind and consider how we might adapt our credit hour, semester based approach to conveying a degree. I am fascinated by how we might adapt our ERP systems. I could see year round college campuses where you protect all that is great about a residential and experiential learning college experience. Maybe some of the students are working in a competency based track and given support from subject matter experts and academic staff. It may not be the tenure track dream job but it could still be an extremely rewarding alternative.
Research Support and Student Experiential Learning
The pursuit of a STEM degree has gained significant attention in recent years as we evaluate the ROI for a college degree. A recent article in NerdScholar by Yesenia Rascon, “Top 5 Reasons to Apply to a Research University” highlights the importance of experiential learning, access to research facilities and hands on career development quantifies many of the reasons we allow our IT student workers the opportunity to participate in exploratory projects. This all relates back to a culture that we promote for our very successful IT Research Support Services, RSS, group here at Missouri S&T. I have been fortunate to be in a position to carve out some IT budget to dedicate to research support. However, because some of my funding comes from student tech fees I make sure that the students benefit from our efforts. This translates via the hiring of student workers, but extends beyond tradition tech support jobs. We hire students in RSS who seek out that opportunity and we benefit from important support services that they are able to provide to our university. However, we also reward them with the opportunity to own their own research projects. Our staff does offer advice and support but we also let the students fail.
Our students also earn the right to attend national research conferences such as the annual SuperComputing and Great Plains Network. These opportunities provide them excellent presentation experience which we utilized this summer by having our students conduct a workshop for the CyberMiner camp for high school students. We asked them to present their current projects to about 50 high school juniors and seniors. We designed the workshop to encourage the campers to engage with our students and it was truly an inspiration Geekfest showcasing our future technology leaders.
Here is a quick glimpse of the projects they presented and a sense of the workshop.
MinerBytes or Digital Signage Project
MinerBytes which is a digital signage project based on using the Raspberry PI computer connected to any monitor with access control given to designated administrators. This was a project conceived by a biology student last summer and this summer we are preparing it for version 1 production deployment on campus and in our community. Somewhat of a surprise to us was that this project generated the most interest by the high school students as they were intrigued by the coding behind MinerBytes.
Drone Project in Initial Phase
The Helicopter Drone Project is in its infancy which was good to be able to show the campers how a project gets birthed. We don’t know where this project will go but we believe we should be on top of the explosion in use of drones. We have ideas for using it in creating virtual tours.
First Segway Prototype
The Segway project started out last summer and has proven to be the perfect multi-discipline opportunity for our students. With a heavy electrical, mechanical and software development component we have had many students involved with this one. Our students presenting the Segway gave the campers some excellent advice based on their experience in designing the controller boards which they fried more then once. They told the campers what they appreciate most about their opportunity to work on these projects is that they are allowed to fail, and that has been their greatest learning experience.
Video Wall built by Students
The Segway prototype moved to a production design this summer which offered an excellent opportunity to display how they used SolidWorks design software on the new Video Wall that RSS built this summer. The Video Wall currently named MinerView is built on solid computer video display principles but was built from scratch with special attention given to the structure to mount the 9 55 inch high resolution monitors. The students had just a few hours to assemble the video wall in the classroom used for the workshop.
Using Video Wall for Engineering Design
The Video Wall will be used in the upcoming Research and Technology Development Conference, #RTDatSandT on September 15-16 where representatives from Indiana University and the University of Texas will show off the latest in visualization techniques. RTD2014 is another great opportunity for students at S&T.
Video Wall to look at Mt Everest
Of course the Video Wall has many uses and will be an important addition to our Library where it will be made available to the entire campus for visualization. We already know that it will be instrumental as a foundation for our Business and Information Technology department’s ERP Center.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of what is possible if your Information Technology department combines the needs of the university with an opportunity for experiential learning.
This New RSS website presents the students projects very well.
The Best STEM Graduates in the World
I have been at my new university for about a month trying to assess a constant flow of data about how and why everything is as it is. My overall observation is that it is good, but that has a lot to do with the fact that my world renown science and technology university does not worry about the same challenges facing much of the rest of higher education today. What we deliver is highly valued in our technological world even if we are using a century’s old pedagogical approach.
We do have modern pedagogical teaching and learning success stories here at S&T, but we also have excellent traditional course delivery of science and engineering classes that do not need to be adjusted. So why do we also find ourselves pressured to offer more blended and online courses? Because unfortunately most of us fit into a much larger higher education structure that will be pushed and pulled by many reactions, some of which are “knee jerk” in nature. But that is OK, we must all ultimately be responsible for our own response.
I mention these early observations in my new job as sort of a preview to what I believe will be an amazing journey that I will share will my talented faculty and highly motivated EdTech team as we adapt to the changing world of higher education. Our greatest challenge may be to understand that even though change is not required it is also not bad. If our typical highly motivated STEM students are coming to us from a different culture then maybe changing our pedagogy a bit to compliment their learning preferences could be a way to make our end product even better. The challenge that brought me to S&T was not to save them but to have an opportunity to improve them. On the world stage today I see the real challenge for the United States is not just to produce more STEM graduates but to produce the Best STEM graduates. So maybe I get a chance to help change the world.
Impending Disruption to Higher Education
I have spent a lot of time in the last week thinking about what disruption to Higher Education will really look like. I got to spend some time with Richard DeMillo after I read his book, “Abelard to Apple“. The book is an excellent review of what Higher Ed was and in some cases still is. And Richard offers sound ideas about the obvious need to adapt education to our current information rich world. What struck me was that he identified the significance of MOOCs before they had evolved as we see them today under flags of Coursera, Udacity and edX.
DeMillo was a guest speaker for our NWACC Summit which happened to be our 25th anniversary with a major strategic planning purpose. So it also surprised me that discussion amongst the 30+ CIOs from the Northwest also focused heavily on the ramifications of the MOOCs. You see MOOCs are not the disruption, they are just exposing the problems so that we will finally need to deal with the disruption that is already upon us. Many have chosen to focus on the MOOCs themselves, determining how they will inevitably fail to compete academically and with respect to profitability. But it is not about the MOOCs succeeding in our traditional measures. The MOOCs have been funded by venture capitalists who tend to know when a profit is to be made and the Monetization value of MOOCs is starting to become clear. Exposure brings fame and fortune and access to valuable data or clients does as well. Coursera Career Services is not just about about helping their students find a job. I believed for many years that there was no way Amazon could ever make a profit, now I realize there are bigger forces at play.
The disruption comes from the MOOCs exposing the weakness of our traditional Higher Education course and degree delivery system. An obvious threat comes from the career service aspect. That is a domain that Higher Ed needs to control. Our degrees need to be the preeminent standard for validation that learning has been accomplished. At the foundation of our system is the credit hour. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced this week that it is rethinking the value of the Carnegie Unit for which we have defined the credit hour. Higher Education; we need to respond to this disruption with innovation rather then denial.
Good Look at our iGFU Mobile Portal
Our student News team wanted to do a story on our iGFU Mobile Portal. They tried to video record a demo off of an iPAD which was not going to work so iGFU author, Brian McLaughlin, made them a simple tutorial that we now use on our website. Checkout the tutorial if you have any interest in what a university mobile portal needs to be. Remember, our mobile portal is basically a skunk works project that leverages the flexibility and performance of HTML5 using Java and PHP to access useful data from general data feeds, Moodle and our PeopleSoft ERP.
The tutorial also highlights a couple of other useful tools. Brian made the video by using an App called AirServer that allows him to mirror an IOS device to his MacBook. He then records it with Quicktime and with a little editing on iMovie you get a very real view of a mobile app. Then we upload the video to our new ShareStream video distribution system which gives us total flexiblity to manage and distribute video (especially if we want to manage copyright). We are investigating if AirServer might offer a better path for iPad mirroring to projector in the classroom.
Reason for Learning Analytics
I’m in Austin at the Educause ELI conference. This is an interesting conference, not because I am connecting with my peer CIOs, but instead because I am a CIO minority observing our Higher Education’s world of Tech savvy faculty, Educational Technologists and Instructional Designers. I believe my interest in this area of HE is the reason I was asked to join the ELI Board of Advisors. And I agree, I look at all of this through different eyes, and I believe this community may have to be the change agent that helps Higher Ed deal with the coming disruptional change.
My general observations confirm that Educause’s ELI is putting forth a good effort to support this critical community. The release of NMC’s and ELI’s Horizon Report is a major influence on the conference which is evident from the current trends of Mobility and Pad device utilization. But it is the emergence of Learning Analytics which is moving up the ladder, now expected to be formally adopted within 2-3 years. This topic was also highlighted as the BoA discussed future ELI events. What has caught my attention is that I am seeing a far more varied and complex justification for Learning Analytics then I had previously been aware of. Truth be told, I have avoided Learning Analytics for years. My previous colleague at IUPUI, Ali Jafari, was campaigning for my IT support back in the late 90‘s so that he could develop an E-Portfolio solution. My objection was always that a premiss based on a student’s voluntary submission of coursework would never work. Today we primarily want to mine our LMS data.
I continue to question the justification for investing in Learning Analytics because I still question the validity of the various methods. But I came to this conference with the acceptance that we had to invest in Learning Analytics mostly because of requirements for such data to fulfill various accreditation requirements. I have also noticed that our government appears to be taking a greater interest in some sort of institutional validation that learning is taking place, but I thought that was driven by questions about the quality of the for-profit side of Higher Education.
The ELI conference was kicked off by Adrian Sannier’s talk “If not Now, When?”, Challenges facing American education are formidable and seem to call for change more radical than incremental. Adrian was vintage Adrian with shock and awe. I have heard this talk before but this time I sensed a different undertone of disagreement. Then I took in some sessions focusing on current activity around Learning Analytics and I sensed an elephant in the room. Which was: Learning Analytics was now critical to justify our (Higher Ed) existence. And what was driving that need for justification? I believe it is the emergence of free and massively available access to live open course delivery such as from Stanford, MIT and Harvard. And most importantly the certification that is now available from those courses. If you supplement your education with the Khan Academy and successfully complete some of the advanced courses from these prestigious institutions, you will probably be successful. This can’t really be a concern, can it? It can if you believe that “Disruptive Change” could hit Higher Education and that typically that change comes from where you least expect it. How about the masses of people trying to enter the workforce that are denied an opportunity for a traditional college education?
Higher Education can react to this threat but the first step is admitting that the threat is real.
The Adventure Continues 