Prezi and Anatomy of Course Design

NOTE: Use the arrows to click through the Prezi. You can click "play" to watch the YouTube videos embedded in the Prezi; however, please click "pause" if you want to move forward before the video has completed.


Earlier in the week, I conducted a workshop in CTLT's Summer Blitz Series entitled "Anatomy of Course Design." We had a great turnout and an excellent discussion of several factors associated with the design and redesign of courses (face-to-face, hybrid, online). I used an online presentation option, Prezi (www.prezi.com), to organize the flow of the workshop (see my Prezi above). Prezi is an alternative to using PowerPoint and uses a unique philosophy in presentation design and delivery. Instead of a linear flow of slides, as in PowerPoint, your Prezi is constructed on a "canvas" and a path is created through various parts of the Prezi. This is an excellent way to demonstrate the integrated nature of the topics you are discussing and YouTube (and other flash-based videos) can be easily integrated into the Prezi. I invite you to visit the Prezi site to see some examples of very good Prezis (unlike my initial attempt above) and to reflect on how you could use this technology in your courses. An excellent use of this technology could be student-generated Prezi presentations that cover specific topics. The workshop earlier in the week touched on issues, in Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind, such as design and symphony. Constructing a Prezi may allow students' to use their creativity to design a Prezi that synthesizes various elements of a topic in unique ways using text, images and video.

Please note that at the end of the Prezi above, entitled ANATOMY of Course Design, a stick figure can be seen in the background (this is the type of creativity that will take me places!)


If you have any thoughts on Prezi, please click comments and share them with us.

The Khan Academy: A Game Changer?

According to its web site, The Khan Academy "is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere." The driving force behind this academy is Salman (Sal) Khan (see clip above). According to his bio, Sal has BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS degree in mathematics and a MBA from Harvard Business School. More recently, he was senior research analyst at a Bay Area investment fund. Sal has generated over a thousand instructional videos (available on YouTube) in areas such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, and various areas of finance. The vision of the academy outlines its goal of providing high-quality instruction that can be delivered online (and offline) and at the pace of individual students.

I have watched several of the chemistry videos and generally found them to be of high quality and engaging. Many of the videos at the Academy web site are appropriate for college-level classes and raise important questions about how these videos (or similar videos found on the web) should or could be used in our courses. I invite you, if possible, to view a few videos in your discipline, or a related discipline, and consider the questions below. If you have any comments, please click the link below and give us your thoughts.


1. What are your thoughts on having these types of instructional videos available on YouTube? Can they make an impact on K-12 or higher education?

2. Is there a place for these videos in your courses at Murray State?

3. Should we be thinking about how to design our courses around the availability of these and other quality instructional materials available on the web?

Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning

A recent article in the Wired Campus section of the Chronicle of Higher Education (March 19, 2009) described a new web-based guide entitled the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. The authors (George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger) of this guide are at the University of Manitoba's Learning Technologies Centre.

This handbook is quite detailed and combines a nice mix of learning theory with descriptions of new technology-based teaching tools/methods. One reason for this post is to make you aware of this new resource and to highlight two excerpts from the Wired Campus article that describes the handbook:

Excerpt #1:

While colleges and universities have been "fairly aggressive" in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, "What we haven't done very well in the last few years is altering our pedagogy."

Excerpt #2:

In its introduction, the handbook declares the old pedagogical model-where the students draw their information primarily from textbooks, newspapers, and their professors-dead.


I invite you to read the entire Wired Campus article and click COMMENTS below to give us your thoughts on the article, excerpts above and/or the new Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

A Vision of Students Today (by Michael Wesch)

Dr. Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University. His work in digital ethnography has gained national and international attention. The most visible project is his work on YouTube and a video entitled "A Vision of Students Today" that was a collaborative project with 200 of his students. According to YouTube, this video has been viewed close to 3 million times and certainly raised the visibility of Dr. Wesch's work. In fact, he was recently named the US Professor of the Year for Doctoral Universities by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Support and Advancement of Education.

The point of this blog post is to call your attention to the work of Dr. Wesch as I do feel it has a great deal of relevance in the current environment of higher education. After watching the video above, or visiting links to the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State, I hope you will click "COMMENTS" below this post and give us your thoughts on this work and describe how it does or does not impact your teaching.


A VISION OF STUDENTS TODAY (also see above):
YouTube Video

Digital Ethnography Blog:
Visit Blog

Article written by Dr. Wesch at Academic Commons:
From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments