The Maricopa Community College has access to some wonderful content developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s iCampus project. Covering a wide variety of subjects, MIT has made available this material for incorporation into the classroom.
What I would like to do is recruit at least one faculty member per campus who would volunteer to use iCampus material in the Spring 2006 semester. I’d also ask you to give me feedback on how you used the material, how effective it was, and what your students thought of the material.
If you are still interested, read on!
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=1579Contains important information on the Maricopa and MIT iCampus Collaboration including hot links.
http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/emerging/wiki?MITiCampus
Go here to find out how to become involved in iCampus at the Maricopas. There are some ideas on what projects you can take on. After reviewing these sites, suggest your own!
http://icampus.mit.eduThis is the main site of the M.I.T. iCampus project.
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/ Here is the place to browse on the iCampus page to find appropriate projects you can use in your classes! My suggestion is browse the titles and look for themes within your teaching area, then drill down and take a look. Look at the bottom of the page for more links and content that you can use.
http://icampus.mit.edu/themes/classroomtransform.shtml Here is another place to browse on the iCampus page to find projects.
If you have interest in incorporating an iCampus project in your classroom, please contact me (Jim Patterson) at jim.patterson@pvmail.maricopa.edu by the end of October by the latest. Again, I am looking for at LEAST one faculty member per campus who will agree to use one of the projects in his or her classroom. Evaluation is an important aspect of this project. I will be working with the MIT iCampus people in coming up with suitable evaluation instruments for the project.
Thanks and Good Luck,
Jim Patterson
PVCC Faculty, Information Technology
Coming up this Friday is our large Ocotillo event, Learning Spaces Day.EDUCAUSE is holding an ELI Focus Session on Informal Learning Space Design September 14-15 at Estrella Mountain Community College, and we decided to plan this to take advantage of national experts who were willing to stay over an extra day to participate in our Maricopa event.
Roger Yohe and his Estrella Mountain team did a lot of leg work over the summer to do the planning for this event and coordinate not only the speakers, but to arrange participation of design experts from Herman Miller and local Goodman's Interiors. Not only are they participating in the event, they have brought in their materials to redesign 4 Estrella existing spaces to showcase possibilities of new learning space designs.
Part of our design was to not make this a wide open event, but to ask each college to assemble a diverse team of 10 individuals representing faculty, technology, student services, library, administration, facilities. Our colleges responded well as you can see by our list of participants.
It is a full agenda! The morning will start with a visual oriented activity-- we have asked the college teams to use a special online tool we developed to upload at least 10 (and some colleges have sent 30) digital images of learning spaces, and provide annotated information. We created a few types of space categories they assigned to their images:
* formal -- "formal" learning spaces, e.g. typical general classrooms
* special -- specialized learning spaces, e.g. science labs, rooms with special technology
* social -- places where students/employees gather to socialize, e.g. picnic areas, student centers
* study -- informal places where students informally gather to study, e.g. library study rooms, lounges, tutoring centers
* outdoor -- exterior spaces where students navigate or pass through e.g. entry ways, walkways, landscaped areas, gardens
* office -- places that are faculty or staff work/office areas
* other -- spaces you are planning, e.g. sketches, architectural diagrams, spaces seen elsewhere you would like to emulate
And we have a learning space image browser that at the time of writing as almost 200 different images. During the activity, they will be asked to look across Maricopa at the elements of similar types of space, and then to drill across in terms of site. Each displayed thumbnail links to a full size image, and a web form where they will be asked to attach comments to the images. The idea is to start with an engaging, visually oriented activity.
We then have a presentation by on Flexible Spaces for Flexible Learning by Terry Hajduk, ARX Design, followed by a group activity on Planning Framework led by Chris Johnson (University of Arizona).
Over lunch, Lori Gee from Herman Miller will talk about Spaces to Learn followed by Phil Long (MIT) talking on Breaking Out of the Box.
For the afternoon activity, participants are divided into 4 groups, and will follow a rotation of 25 minutes each in one of the experimental designed rooms where each has a specific discussion theme led by our guest experts. We want to talk about the spaces themselves and the issues of Learning Spaces and Deep Learning, Designing Learning Spaces, Informal Learning Spaces, and Learning Space Design: What Works (and we are using the ELT wiki to record notes from the sessions).
We close with some college team time for reflection and discussion next plans. At the close, we will have a prize drawing for an Aeron chair donated by Herman Miller.
FYI, we are actively adding relevant resources using social bookamarking service del.icio.us -- the collection tagged at http://del.icio.us/cogdog/learningspace that automatically updates the sidebar resources on the Learning Spaces Day site, and the longer list of resources.
One resource I just found is a fabulous presentation on User Experience Design Frameworks [7.5 Mb PDF]- it is not only visually engaging and information rich, there are some wonderful design strategies we ought to look at.
It is a full and exciting program, but this is just a beginning. This is a huge issue, bigger than Ocotillo, and we need a bunch of Maricopa people to get involved, take some leadership, and tackle the challenge of designing spaces and buildings for the next 20-30 years that we will not hate inside 2 years. What might be the next steps? How will we get more involved? How will we collaborate?
In a bit of reflection, we look back 15 years to the 1990 Ocotillo Retreat how participants then saw the Classroom of the Future -- how did those predictions/ideas pan out? What can we visualize for the next 15?
And we also look at the Technology Visioning Forum with Philip Parsons in 2001 -- it was a spike of interest and enthusiasm, but how much have we followed through on his suggestions?
We anticipate seeing a long series of blog reflections from ELT co-chair Roger Yohe-- his reprieve expires at midnight, Sept 16, 2005 ;-)
Donald Hall from GateWay Community College is very interested in doing some work with the XMAS iCampus Project (Cross Media Annotation System). We highlighted Donald's multimedia work and approaches to teaching with DVDs in the Spring 2003 mcli Forum article on Technology In The Humanities: PowerPointing the Renaissance and More.
Donald's enthusiastic response for XMAS:
I'm interested in experimenting with this. We bought a DVD on ancient Greece from which I show many clips. This might be good for a cultural humanities class HUM 250/251.
I hope to meet with Donald and video wizard Senadz Lubovac in mid October to brainstorm some XMAS ideas.
I spoke briefly today with Belinda Yung, Manager of the MIT Shakespeare Project, about the capability and uses of their video annotation and hypermedia creation project called XMAS, one of the MIT iCampus projects we are hoping to pilot. XMAS is described as a Cross Media Annotation System:
The application is comprised of a multimedia essay editor, an online discussion component, and an annotation workspace for various media (DVDs, images, texts, streaming video). We hope to distribute the software to partner institutions who will provide us with feedback and help to build new courseware and explore the uses in other disciplines beyond the Humanities.
Primarily at MIT, it has been used by students to annotate DVD works of Shakespeare videos and in an online discussion board format about clips from the disks. because the system merely reference time code segments from DVDs, it is not violating copyright (a legal version of a title must be available to insert into a computer when a clip is requested). Apparently the usage of linked web images and selections from text have not been used as much. For an ide of the content that can be created, see the illustrated tutorial.
The good news is that XMAS is by no means limited to Shakespeare content, so as long as we have a DVD title that can be registered in their database, we can create content for other disciplines. Web images are linked directly via URL, but text media is available for upload only as plain text files.
A new version of the software will be out shortly that has new features (and a few less bugs!).. I have a current version and am hoping to explore some examples of the current existing content provided as examples. The software works through a server at MIT, and I was assured that we can request accounts for faculty and students as we develop some content.
For the immediate future, I hope to work with Susan Miller at Mesa Community College, who teaches Shakespeare and has a collection of several of the registered DVD titles (we have ordered a few more she did not own). We are interested in finding some faculty from other disciplines who may have a need to author hypermedia documents/discussion boards that can reference clips from DVDs and/or web images. Our lines are open for volunteers...
Maricopa is working with MIT on an interesting collaborative project called iCampus. The projects developed at MIT can be used by our instructors NOW.
More information on this can be found at http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/emerging/wiki?MITiCampus There is also an interesting PowerPoint presentation done by Dr. Phil Long located at http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/emerging/media/iCampus_presentation.ppt that you should take a look at.
Our goal during 2005-2006 is to identify faculty from each of the ten campuses who would be willing to incorporate iCampus material into their classrooms and then be willing to provide instructor feedback on the usefulness of the material and to get student feedback on the same. I will be the point of contact for this project.
Projects available are listed at http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/ There is material for about any subject matter; some of it may not be at the Maricopa level, however.
Jim Patterson
Paradise Valley Community College