Problems with the monolithic LMS

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The LMS Product – limitations and alternative « The Weblog of (a) David Jones:

Another characteristic of an integrated system is that the quality of the tools available is limited to those provided by a single vendor or community.

I resonate with many of the points he brings up about the weaknesses of a monolithic LMS, and the discussion on the post is also top-notch, highlighting the requisition process and its influence on the vendors’ offerings.

When I really stop to think about it, all we (as faculty) would need is a more federated identity system, so that we could choose the tool we wanted and our students wouldn’t have to create a new account to manage on whatever platform we selected. The only real down side to my using Canvas last spring was this need to register and create an account. The students told me they didn’t mind doing that at all, but it still feels a bit out-of-bounds to have their identity managed by a non-institutional entity. I’d guess there are FERPA rules against it that I’ve probably violated, but oh well.

Gravitropism goes mainstream

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How Do Plants Know Which Way Is Up And Which Way Is Down?:

Think of a seed buried in a pot (…) It’s dark down there in the potting soil. There’s no light, no sunshine. So how does it know which way is up and which way is down? It does know. Seeds routinely send shoots up toward the sky, and roots the other way. Darkness doesn’t confuse them. Somehow, they get it right…

As the resident expert on gravitropism, I had several friends send me this link, excited that they “knew all about this”. Krulwich takes this example from David Chamovitz’s new book, What a Plant Knows. He goes on to explain in words and drawings the concept of the starch-statolith theory of gravity sensing in plants. It’s an old concept that continues bearing fruitful research, as demonstrated by our recent work studying gravitropism in a starchless mutant.

Switching to an online-only biology textbook

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 2 Comments

Now that summer session is behind me, I’m looking forward to starting to work on my Intro Cell Biology class for the fall. This year I’ve adopted a new textbook that is completely online, Principles of Biology. It is published by Nature Education as part of their Principles of Science series of textbooks. I’ve taught the class three times now, each time using the massive Raven Biology textbook. So why switch?

The short answer is, so that my students will read the text. With the encyclopedic Raven text, I found that the material for any given class topic was spread across a large swath of the book, with plenty of distraction that I had to ask the students to skip or ignore temporarily. With the Principles book, it is broken down into modules, each of which seems to be much more digestible at a single sitting. My hope is to be able to assign a module per class session, sometimes two, and expect that the students will arrive having read it already. That way, we can spend our time together discussing the topic in small groups and attempting to apply it to a real-life problem or question in biology rather than plowing through the material and introducing everything.

I do have some hesitations though, the first of which is that students really like to have a physical textbook. No matter how much they complain about cost and weight, they feel secure just holding their book. With an online-only text, I worry they will feel like they still need to buy a “real” book. I plan to discourage them from this as much as possible, but they may still buy it. Which brings me to my second concern, that our other introductory course is still using the Raven text. For the past 3 years, students who’ve taken both intro courses have been able to use the same text for both. Given that it costs nearly $US200, that was at least some consolation. I was unable to convince any of my colleagues who teach the other course to adopt the Nature Principles text yet, although many expressed interest in it for the future.

Why this text, though, and not just the eText version of Raven? I’ve addressed that at length in previous posts, but suffice to say I’m not a big fan of most of the eText versions I’ve seen, with the exception of the Inkling version. The others are poor quality, difficult to read, and have a strict time limit (they expire). I’ve provided links to the etext versions the past two years, but none of the students have opted for it. With the Principles book, the students are buying lifelong access to a quality text (and other ancillary tools) from a highly reputable source, and the cost is far cheaper than the others. It just seems like a better deal all around. I’ll be writing here about the process of customization as I build my course, so check back as the summer wears on.

The links between food, water, and climate change

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By 2030, the gap between global water supply and demand is projected to be 40%, with much of the excess need due to agriculture. World population is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050, demanding greater yields in crop productivity than the current trends project. The water problem and the food problem are both occurring against the backdrop of global climate change, which exacerbates both problems and demands radical new approaches to solve these problems because of the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

This unholy trio of factors was highlighted in a talk by Sir John Beddington, UK Chief Scientific Adviser, at the UK Plant Sciences 2012 meeting, which he used as a point of departure for discussing the vital need for plant science research. If I had to boil down his talk into a concise summary, it would be that we need to produce more food with less greenhouse gas emission and less water on the same acreage within the next two decades. Of course none of this is news, but this talk brings all the pieces together in a single place nicely. In addition to pointing out the dangerous position humanity is in, Beddington suggests a few areas of plant science research that could address some of these issues. The rest of the conference was presumably concerned with a more detailed look at solutions, from what I can glean from the list of titles available. I’m embedding the video below and plan to write more about the areas of plant science involved in the future.

First reactions to my new HP 24-inch monitor

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I’ve been a notebook computer user since 2002 when I got a decked-out Titanium PowerBook. I’ve tried a couple of external displays to get a little more desktop space, but was never happy enough with them to warrant all the fiddling it required. A few weeks ago I came across a Macworld review of 24-inch displays and, on a whim, decided to try again with the HP ZR2440w. It arrived yesterday and I’ve been using it for a few hours now, so I thought I’d write about a few first impressions while they’re fresh.

First, it’s big (duh). I’ve been on an 11-inch MacBook Air for about six months, and 15-inch screens for years before that, so this is obviously a whole different experience. I love the Air’s display quality, but it is cramped for some things, not surprisingly. The biggest gain so far with the external display is with vertical real estate, which makes scrolling less of a full-time job than it can be on the Air. It’s also nice to have two full-width windows open at a time, side-by-side.

I’m connecting the HP to the Air via an HDMI adapter which also carries audio. This display does not have speakers, but it does have an audio jack that passes the signal along. The only trick was to select the display to receive audio output in System Preferences on my Mac. The only other connection (besides power) I need to make to the Air is a USB cable when I need it. The display is acting more or less as a hub, then, for audio and USB peripherals, similar (though not with the single-cable elegance) to the Apple Thunderbolt Display. Apple’s display is bigger, supplies power via a MagSafe connector, has built-in speakers and a camera, and a Thunderbolt port. All of those additional features might be worth an additional $600 for some, but I decided I could do without them.

When I first plugged the display in, I found the colors to be too something, which was probably just different than what I was used to. Nonetheless, I ran through the color calibration and toned the something down to a more familiar level. The other annoyance was with the huge bar code sticker wrapped around the end of the USB cable. It was just close enough to the display that I could see it peeking out and found it distracting, so I cut it off and it left a sticky adhesive goo behind. Sure, I’m a freak for noticing, but what use does the customer have for an inventory sticker in plain sight? I suppose if that’s the worst thing I have to say about this display over its lifetime it’s money well spent — here’s to hoping it is so.

An experiment with Pearson’s OpenClass ends badly

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 2 Comments

I’ve written several times before about my LMS anxiety disorder, and this summer it lead me to experiment with yet another LMS, OpenClass. This one is built by the textbook publishing house Pearson, and has some integration with Google Apps. OWU is a Google Apps for Education campus, so I thought this would make certain aspects more familiar to the students.

I really only rely on the LMS for two things: a private gradebook and the ability to accept electronic assignments. I created a new course shell in OpenClass and used their form-based tool to create a syllabus. One nice thing about OpenClass is the (relative) simplicity of organizational tools. I didn’t struggle with the nagging sense of “Where should I put this thing” in it like I do with Blackboard. There doesn’t appear to be a way to create pages of content in OpenClass like there is in other LMS tools, there is just an ‘Announcement’ feature that posts short messages to the main page. Unfortunately, the character limit for these posts is too small to make it useful for anything other than to point someplace else. This is where the integration with Google Apps comes in – when you do need to share more than a few words, you just create a Google Doc and it can be shared automatically with the appropriate users by virtue of their enrollment in the course.

The issue of enrollment brings me to my first complaint about OpenClass, at least for my situation: I couldn’t add students to my course directly, but had to rely on our Technology folks to do it. I’m sure this issue would go away if OWU adopts OpenClass and we build the integrations necessary with our enrollment system, but it was still a pain to make sure my roster matched the OpenClass roster. Once students were enrolled in the class though, they could access everything already shared with the class.

Electronic submissions

One of the two key functions I need in an LMS is the ability to accept student work, grade it, and return comments. This is one area where Canvas really shines, and I was eager to see how OpenClass handled it. The short answer is, not well. Students experienced all kinds of problems submitting their work, mostly related to the lack of any feedback on their end about whether the submission worked. As a result, they emailed their files to me, too. I hate this so hard. But they were justified in doing it, because I didn’t end up with many duplicate submissions, which means OpenClass just failed silently for them.

For those students whose work was uploaded successfully to OpenClass, there were two more problems. There does not appear to be any way to view a Word doc in place, which means I had to download each file and open it in Word to read it. Canvas really spoiled me on this count – I could fly through student writing assignments right from my iPad because their built-in viewer was so good. The second huge problem is that the student submission is not connected to a grade entry form, only a form to comment and ‘return’ the work to the student. So I had to keep one tab open to download the assignment and another with the gradebook loaded to enter scores. This is a far cry from the ease of grading in Canvas, and not even up to par with Blackboard.

Gradebook

The other key function I need in an LMS is the gradebook, and OpenClass disappointed me here, too. One minor complaint is that assignments don’t seem to have a way to show an average score. Another more significant weakness is that grade entry does not have a spreadsheet-like mode where I can arrow through the column to a student’s entry for an assignment. When you click on an entry for a student, a modal dialog window opens and floats over the page. After entering a score, you have to use the mouse to click OK, as pressing Return won’t do it. This gets old for data entry really fast. But not nearly as fast as losing all the quiz scores from your gradebook.

Wait, what?

That’s right, lost scores. I entered scores for quizzes one day, came back the next day to score some writing submissions, and the quiz scores were missing for all but 3 students. Obviously this is a whole different category of bad. I would’ve thought that some software engineer somewhere had the job of ensuring that, even if everything else fails, save the gradebook data. Guess not. So it was at this point that I jumped ship and moved everything into Blackboard for the rest of the term. And sheepishly requested that my students return their most recent quiz to me for grade re-entry.

Final thoughts

OpenClass is certainly garnering lots of attention in ed tech circles (it says ‘open’ right in the name, so it must be good, right?), so I was excited to try it. For obvious reasons, I found it less than acceptable. Even without the loss of data though, I wasn’t all that impressed and probably wouldn’t recommend it to a colleague unless they already made heavy use of Google Docs, with which it stands out. I’m still optimistic about progress in LMS development thanks to the growing competition, and that’s a great thing for everyone.

iBooks, HyperCard, and creating beautiful things

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 2 Comments

Back in January I wrote about using iBooks Author to create a companion “textbook” for a course I teach regularly. The term textbook is in quotes because I don’t really think of this as a true textbook, but something new – smaller, more focused, less encyclopedic, targeted to my class. I somehow managed to (mostly) keep up with writing a summary of each topic we discussed as the semester progressed, publishing them on the web for students to use as study aids. At the end of the term they told me these overviews were very helpful, which I found satisfying. My plan was to compile these into a single stand-alone iBook for next year’s class, and probably also produce an ePub and/or PDF.

Then something awful happened. I downloaded an iBook called Paperless by David Sparks, of MacSparky fame, and it made me realize I’m doing it wrong.

Paperless is so beautiful. Sparks has paid so much attention to every single detail that he has succeeded in setting the bar incredibly high for self-publishing in this new form. This would be easy to dismiss as the work of a full-time freelance writer/publisher, but Sparks has a full-time job – he’s done all this in his spare time. You would never know this, though, given the exquisite care he’s taken to create something that communicates his points powerfully and effectively.

Last week I came across this article about HyperCard that reminded me of my time as a HyperCard enthusiast when I was a kid, experimenting with creating adventure stories and encyclopedia-like reference works, complete with hyperlinked text. The obvious descendent of HyperCard of course is the web itself, and it far exceeds the possibilities of the original HyperCard concept in many ways: it’s distributed, cross-platform, and world-wide, to name a few. But I can also see iBooks as a kind of spiritual descendant of HyperCard in that the combination of the iPad + iBooks app acts as a viewer for a package that includes rich media, images, interactive elements, and text. This fulfills the promise of HyperCard in a way even the web doesn’t because everything is bundled into a single, portable, stand-alone package. It has no external dependencies on web servers or even network access, which is, unfortunately, still questionable in many schools.

Thinking about iBooks as the descendant of HyperCard is a powerful motivator for me personally. At the same time, seeing an example like the Paperless book opened my eyes to the possibility of using iBooks Author to make a beautiful thing. There is a real payoff to investing in the capabilities of the platform instead of just treating it like a digital replica of a previous form.

Using the Marked app in class

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 2 Comments

While teaching class today, I discovered another great use for one of my favorite Mac apps, Marked. What is Marked, you ask? It is a way to preview plain text files formatted with the lightweight text markup syntax called Markdown. Markdown lets you keep all of your writing in plain text but still apply formatting like emphasis and bold text. It really shines in writing destined for the web by making the text much easier to write and read by removing all the normal HTML cruft from the file, replacing them with an easy-to-learn shorthand markup that accomplishes the same thing.

Even though text written with Markdown is easy to read, sometimes you want to make sure everything looks and works right before publishing it, which is where something like Marked comes in. Even though several of the editors I use include a preview mode, I prefer using Marked because of its rich set of features and output options. I typically write in iA Writer or Byword and open the file in Marked as I write to preview links and formatting as I go. Then I can either output it from Marked as a PDF or copy/paste the HTML to publish to the web.

Before heading to class this morning, I wrote a list of questions for discussion and opened them in Marked on the screen of the projector to share with the class and guide discussion. That’s when it occurred to me that as the class discussed the questions, I could take notes in my original text file on my screen, and Marked would auto-update with the new bullet points on the projected screen for the class to see. After class, I copied the text from Marked in rich text format and pasted it into a new Google doc for the class to use. Nice.

First steps with the lab TV

~ Chris Wolverton ~ 1 Comment

Last week saw the installation of a large LCD monitor in my teaching lab, and now that finals and grading are winding down and research is gearing up, it’s time to start tinkering with how best to use this beast. In the interest of sharing and recording the various approaches I try, I’ll be blogging it all right here using the “LCDelight” tag. Below is a recap of my first week with the setup, including a description of what has worked well and what has not.

LCD video monitor mounted in my teaching lab
LCD video monitor mounted in my teaching lab

The first issue came up while the guys were mounting the panel to the wall bracket. They had the bracket centered on the monitor such that it would hang at a good height, but this would not allow the VGA cable to fit because of a cross-support on the bracket. The guys made an adjustment and all was well – the monitor hangs just a bit lower, but still fine.

Once they hung it on the wall, I plugged in the AppleTV and… no joy, or at least no networking. It said something to the effect that the AppleTV does not support “enterprise security”, meaning it could not log on to our fancy campus wi-fi network. Big problem. So the short-term solution I’ve come up with is to plug in an old AirPort Express and create a rogue wireless network for the AppleTV and my iPad when I’m in the lab (shh, don’t tell Information Services). This works perfectly, but means I need to manually change wireless networks when I want to AirPlay to the TV – not a big deal, but not 100% ideal.

As far as AirPlay goes, it is all that and a bag of chips. Really. A simple flick in multi-tasking mode on the iPad and a tap to switch it on, and you’re suddenly sharing any app on your iPad to the big screen. This is one of those features that seems so natural and obvious once you use it, you wonder how you could have gone without it, or how you could go back to being tethered with a cable.

Even though I don’t imagine myself presenting a lot of slides in the lab, I wanted to try Keynote with the iPad and TV to see how it looks and works. There is a choice of presentation modes in a Keynote slide show, including a presenter mode that displays notes and the next slide on the iPad while keeping the output on the TV clean. I was surprised and disappointed that I can’t present a slide show with a resolution native to the TV (1920 x 1080). I tried to create one on my Mac and open it on the iPad, but Keynote on the iPad complains and resamples it to fit its own screen.

Next up, I want to find a way to cycle through a series of informational slides without needing to tether my iPad or a computer, so that when students are first coming in to the lab, they can see what to start working on. I’m thinking I might create a Flickr lab account for this, that is available on the AppleTV without the need for another device to drive it.