Posts Tagged ‘review’

Book Review: Using Moodle

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Jason Cole and Helen Foster have written the second edition of their book Using Moodle. As I wrote in the first review of this series, if you’re out to get a book on moodle, this might just be the one. While it does not get into the details of installation, it does have a comprehensive overview of moodle version 1.8 and its many components. And, because it is based on a later version of moodle, it details more of its current features.

Cole and Foster start off with an explanation of what moodle is and the philosophy behind both its software development and its educational design. The book moves on to setting up moodle accounts and courses; then it adds information on adding course content and managing a moodle course. The major modules are discussed, most of these have their own chapters with detailed information on setting them up and creating effective activities. Unlike the Rice volumes, however, Cole and Foster include separate chapters for the assignment, blog, and database modules.

If I had to choose one out of the three books (obviously I didn’t have to ;-) ), I would get this one. It has a good balance of the basic for new users and solid suggestions for more advanced users to create useful activities. Unfortunately, with last week’s release of 1.9, it’s time for a third edition of Using Moodle.

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Book Review: Moodle Teaching Techniques

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Rice’s Moodle Teaching Techniques is the next logical step for someone who knows his way around the Moodle LMS. While Rice’s first book gives a good overview on getting started with moodle, this book helps users to create many interesting learning activities. The chapters are based on some of Moodle’s included modules. If you’re looking at a blank moodle course page and having trouble figuring out what to do, this book can take you through adding an activity and tweaking the settings to create learning tasks for your students.

There is a complete run-down of how forums can be used to open up dialogues with individual students or bring students together in relevant course discussions. Chats, extremely processor-intensive in my own experience, can be used to bring a ‘guest speaker’ to a course or help students with course questions. Quizzes can be used for self-assessment of course material or checking learning under timed conditions. Lessons can introduce new content, check understanding, and provide remediation. Wikis can be created and uploaded before class time with course outlines which students can then augment with their own notes, a process Rice calls “guided note taking.” Several other modules are discussed and each one has at least one clever approach to the teaching/learning issue. All in all, this could be a very useful book for someone who needs some ideas for their moodle installation. Check it out.

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Book Review: Moodle

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

I’ve been using the learning management system (LMS) moodle since 2003. I’ve created some of my own ways to work with students in blended- or hybrid-course formats, and I’ve been peeking in on presentations at various conferences. Since I started down that road, at least three books on moodle have been written. This post is the first of three reviews.

Rice’s Moodle from 2006 is a good overview of what moodle is, how you can get it and set it up, and how you can add some useful activities for your students or clients. If you have never used open source software or if you have never set a package up, it can seem a daunting task. One dangerous mistake in the section on setting moodle up is to have your data directory in the moodle directory itself. Doing so opens the data up for others to read and/or alter in some way. The recommended location for this directory is above your public_html directory, so please make careful note of this for your own reference.

The rest of the book is a fairly thorough run-down of setting up courses of different kinds, adding course content relevant for your courses, creating activities that are appropriate for the types of learning you seek, and accessing user and evaluation data from courses as they progress. The final chapter has an overview of adding modules and plug-ins to enhance moodle’s features; it also runs through some of the essential maintenance tasks that will keep your data safe in cases of trouble or moving on to the next school term.

Overall, if you have access to this book at a library or on a colleague’s desk, this book will go a long way towards getting you up and running with your own moodle system. Moodle is currently at version 1.9, and the version used in the book is moodle 1.4. The upgrade in features and changes in several moodle components require a major revision in the book. If you need to buy something, you might do better with the Cole and Foster book (review on the way), although this latter volume does not include the installation information of the Rice book. As always, the Moodle Documentation and online help forums may help with any questions you may have along the way.

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NeoOffice (OpenOffice.org for Macs)

Monday, February 25th, 2008

For most of the past 10 months or so I have been doing my best to use NeoOffice for my word processing and spreadsheet needs. I have to say that, with only one notable exception (a bug in an earlier version caused some characters to display strangely; that was cleared up quickly), it is both solid in its stability and robust in features.

NeoOffice is an Open Source package for Mac designed to work with the same (and possible more) kinds of documents as Microsoft Office. NeoOffice’s origins come from OpenOffice.org (if you’re a Windows or Linux user, that’s the place to go). Here’s the blurb from the NeoOffice site:

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.

Released as free, open source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL), NeoOffice is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use. The software is actively developed, so improvements and small updates are made available on a regular basis.

I’ll write up some more on this great package. In the meantime, check it out…

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Book Review: Dispatches from Blogistan

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Is your blog getting you down? Does your blog suffer from bloglessness? Have you been blogging for a while now, but haven’t quite found your blogging mojo? If any of the above includes you, you may want to check out Dispatches from Blogistan by Suzanne Stefanac. While it may sound a bit strange to write a book about blogs, I thought it was honest of her to acknowledge that. Personally, I appreciated having the tome so I could read it wherever I wanted.

The book starts off with an interesting overview of how people have communicated their ideas through the ages (I’d like to have the timeline, printed over several pages, of the history of discourse in a poster in my office). Stefanac then describes several of the main genre types of blogs: blogs with links to important sites, online diaries (I would have to say El Viajero fits best in this category), meeting places for particular topics (otaku comes to mind), places to get news, and blogs for those with some kind of agenda. These chapters include copious example sites and have some interesting interviews with major bloggers.

The eighth chapter is a must-read section for anyone who has not yet started a blog or wants to make a move to another system. Relevant topics include free or paid services, sharing your (or following others’) posts, and trying to make some money with your blog (easier said than done).

Chapter nine runs down some of the important elements to include, configure, tweak, set, upload, write, cut, tag, archive, show, copyright, license, design, plan, broadcast, arrange, edit, entice with, link to, syndicate, make searchable, and, finally, test. Chapter 10 has a good overview of what to consider when you are actually writing your blog entries. The tips include getting started with the white screen in front of you, writing eye-catching ledes, adding useful tags, and managing the overall content on your pages.

Chapter 11 (not the bankrupcy law) provides some useful tips for getting the most out of your blog (if you’ve been here before, you may have already noticed some changes here and there). Tips include carefully choosing keywords to use in most of your entries; Stefanac notes that planning ahead will allow you to place the keywords in such critical places as your domain name and title bar (I’ve missed out on those). Being active in other blogs and blogging in general are helpful as well. By reading and commenting on other blogs and adding links to important posts in yours, you can raise your ranking. Other tips are registering your domain with various blog search engines, adding key posts to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and subscribing to your own feed(s).

The next chapter gives an overview of some of the online legal issues to consider. Copyright, fair use, intellectual property, creative commons, and parody are all given varying degrees of coverage. Defamation and libel are given space; anyone covering news or people should know this information as a minimum. There are also guidelines on writing about work and how to get journalists’ credentials to get your foot in the door of serious reporting. The final chapter is on some of sites in the second wave of the web: Web 2.0 (you know who you are :-) )

Interspersed amongst each chapter are links to example blogs and useful sites. All in all, this is a great book. My only gripe is that there is a lot of redundancy in places, as if each chapter was written separately with no thought to what has been or what will be in the rest of the book. A little more thought during the editing process would help to give this book’s readers a little more credit for being able to remember what they have read.

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Book Review: Thinking about teaching and learning: Developing habits of learning with first year college and university students

Friday, March 18th, 2005

Leamnson (1999) was recommended to me by a former colleague and good friend. We both work with first-year university students, and I have never read a book aimed specifically at this unique population. Overall, the book is very well written, and the arguments are presented carefully. Let me start off by writing that if you work with such students, this book is a must-read!

I chose this chapter (Leamnson, 1999, chap. 5) because I have had several Aha! moments in reading it. Leamnson starts off the chapter with an unorthodox definition of teaching: “any activity that has the conscious intention of, and potential for, facilitating learning in another” (p. 51). He wants to separate teaching from learning because this chapter is about the behavior of teaching itself.

Critical concepts from this chapter (Leamnson, 1999, chap. 5) include the fact that we should be persuading our young college students to have the motivation to learn. We should be exposing and inspiring (he also uses the word seduction for lack of a better term) our students because learning is internal. We also should be encouraging our students to make notes (as opposed to take notes, like it is something we give our students) and organize the material they are working with. He stresses language is a key for our students; they should be talking and writing about their work.

Leamnson (1999, chap. 5) summarizes the chapter with five of the techniques he discussed:
1. Use ten minutes of class time to talk with different students about course material (for example, material from the previous class).
2. Give the concept first, then the term which defines it (we usually do it the other way around). This way the students will listen better.
3. Have the students do the cognitive work. Do not give them pre-packaged notes, outlines or organized material!
4. Teachers should be “inspiring and persuasive” (p. 81).
5. Cooperative learning is important. Students should work in groups to check their knowledge and share ideas.

Reference

Leamnson, R. (1999). Thinking about teaching and learning: Developing habits of learning with first year college and university students. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

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Book Review: The Adult Learner

Tuesday, March 15th, 2005

Knowles, Holton, and Swanson (2001) is the latest version of a book on andragogy, or adult learning. Chapter Four (Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, chap four) starts by noting that many of the great educators known throughout the world (Confucious, Lao Tse, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Cisero, Evelid, and Quintillian) were known as teachers of adults. However, many of the dominant theories of teaching are directed towards children (pedagogy). The concept of andragogy, or the teaching of adults, was first mentioned in Germany in 1833, but did not come into its own until it was developed in Yugoslavia and Hungary in the 20th Century. The chapter gives a very detailed history of this development and andragogy’s introduction to the U.S.

The points of main interest to me were the major differences in how education could be different for children and adults. Children need to know because they need to get through school; adults do because they want to improve their lives. Children’s self-concept is that they are dependent on someone (like their teachers); adults’ is they are responsible for themselves and can do whatever that takes. Children’s role of experience is that the teacher has the experience to impart to the learners; adults have experience, and they want to build on it. Children’s readiness to learn comes from their teachers telling them what to study in order to pass whatever goals lie before them; adults want situations they can use in real life. The orientation to learning for children is the material (or subjects) they need to pass; adults need and want life/task/problem-centered foci. Finally, the motivation for children is external (their parents’ pressure, their teachers and the resulting grades); adults’ is internal. They want to improve the quality of life and get better jobs.

It is important to note that these concepts are not black and white. Sometimes issues such as grading plays a part in the education of adults. Some of the andragogical concepts are finding their way into pedagogical environments. Maybe our goal is to find the best of both worlds.

Let me finish by saying that if you work with adults, then you should know the material in this (or earlier versions) of this book.

Reference

Knowles, M. S., Holton III, E. F., & Swanson, R. A. (2001). The adult learner: The definitive classic in adult education and human resource development (6th ed.). Burlington, MA: Elsevier.

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Book Review: Working with Objectives

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruikshank, Mayer, Pintrich, et al. (2001) is the state of the art concerning Bloom’s Taxonomy. I found the second chapter particularly helpful putting together a recent online “mini-course” for my Instruction Delivery Systems course.

The taxonomy has been revised to two dimensions: knowledge and cognitive processes. The knowledge dimension (KD) incorporates four areas: factual, conceptual, procedural, and meta-cognitive. The cognitive processes dimension (CPD) includes remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Notice that the KD is all nouns and the CPD is verbs. The KD is basically the material that is to be taught/learned and the CPD is how that material is to be taught/learned. The chapter continues with a discussion of types of objectives: global, educational, and instructional. The global ones may take months or even years to learn. Educational objectives are the global objectives broken down into more manageable chunks. The instructional objectives are the day-to-day activities that are designed to help reach the educational objectives. One thing the authors (Anderson et al., 2001) stress is that we should not be using phrases like “be able to” or “learn to” when we create our objectives (p. 17). These are implicit in our preparation of our objectives.

There is also a section on the problems with using objectives. Personally, I think there are going to be many problems using these objectives with my main work, namely teaching English to Japanese university science students. Language is not a set of skills that can be taught like math, etc. (although it is often taught that way in this country). We also have to be careful heading into the meta-cognitive areas because too much grammatical and lexical information can cause another set of problems. I will have to look into this more later.

Reference

Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., et al. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.

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Review: xoops

Saturday, February 19th, 2005

I’ve been using moodle for more than a year now in my courses. It’s an excellent package for putting together online and/or hybrid courses. I am comfortable using it and thought I would explore other options out there for the next semester starting in April. Coincidentally, today I was talking with one of the teachers in the Information Science section of the Administration faculty about getting a course management system (CMS) running for our university. It turns out the costs are too high to put one in place at the moment (that’s why I started my own domain–to run a CMS). He heard me talk about moodle and suggested I try zoops. I had seen a presentation at the JALTCALL conference in Mito, Japan in June, 2004 and did not see anything that could make it compete with moodle.

Anyway, I downloaded the package and uploaded it to the domain here. I needed to upload just one part of the package, which was a bit unintuitive, but the rest of the installation went very smoothly. For this, it earns very high marks. xoops can install modules very easily and comes with about ten ready to go. All you have to do is choose the ones you want and install them one at a time. You can also go to the xoops modules repository and choose others to install. At this writing there were 297!

The sole reason I tried xoops was because I was told there is a quiz module available. I installed that one and was facing a serious user interface problem. Unlike moodle, which gives you many kinds of quiz question types, I had to work my way through an interface that had only ‘create a category’ and ‘delete a category.’ I created one and went to the next screen filled with more of the same. I never did find a place to write a quiz question. In contrast, moodle asks what kind of question and even has several formats with which to write quiz questions and upload them. Until xoops has this kind of module, it will never have the utility of moodle.

Clearly, xoops is a CMS, but it is a content management system. It cannot be used to do the same kinds of things moodle does without a major amount of customization. To make a course, for example, I see having to create groups and using permissions for each student. I did that with phpbb (a great dedicated discussion board package, by the way) for a couple of semesters, but I had mostly the same students all the way through. Most of the work setting it up was just in the beginning.

If you want courses which are easy to set up, go with moodle.

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