Blogger SFTP Permission Denied Error

This would be of interest to those who use blogger with custom hosting. I recently started switching from FTP to SFTP when publishing in blogger. I kept getting a permission denied error despite the same publishing settings as FTP. Apparently there is a difference, and as Walken would shrug, "Whaddo I know?!"

Continued: Solution

A file space path: /mydomain.com/ works in ftp but will give you trouble while sftping.
I removed the leading slash: mydomain.com/ and it works like a charm.
BTW, Blogger help mentions the need for the trailing slash, which I already had.

Trends in Content Dev: Invited Talk (Margaret Driscoll)

Margaret Driscoll, IBM Global Services, USA

Evolution of Corporate Training Models: Course Centric > Knowldge Centric >> D-I-Y

D-I-Y model is similar to the library model of learning. Train the learner to learn, then aide the learning with a librarian (informatician).

Corporate training spends 2/3rds of the dollar on administrative purposes alone. The new DIY model, per the presenter, eliminates the need for instructional design. It sounds shocking, but makes sense because when the learner is the explorer who stitches knowledge together, there is no need to make the courseware userfriendly and effective. I disagree, instructional design, in the sense of usability will be essential to use the resources.

Role Playing in Education

Rohan Miller presented his findings on using Virtual Worlds/ Role Playing in Marketing education. An interesting conclusion:

-- Maybe foriegn students like RP more than locals. Likely because of the flattening of the field, by elimination of spoken communication?

-- Must have a detailed plan of activities and plots going into the exercises.

-- Industry engagement could be a future direction.

A Preliminary Review of Online Role-plays as a Tool for Experiential Learning in Marketing Education
ID: 24129
Type: Full Paper Topic: Content Development
Room: 17
Wed, Nov. 19 2:00 PM-2:30 PM
Authors:
Rohan Miller, The University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract:
Compared to marketing practitioners, marketing educators often lag in the adoption of e-learning technology. This paper explores the use of online role-plays to present learners with enhanced opportunities for interactive and experimental learning through active and immersive learning (Feinstein, Mann and Corsun 2002) to evoke higher order cognitive abilities in areas such as problem solving and judgement (Feinstein 2001). Student feedback suggests that adding online role-plays to the traditional lecture-tutorial model enables students to experientially apply theoretical applications to enhance learning. Possible future directions for role-plays in marketing communications are then discussed.

Quality: Everyday

Apply for a NIST award for Quality:

http://www.quality.nist.gov/index.html

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was created by Public Law 100-107, signed into law on August 20, 1987. The Award Program, responsive to the purposes of Public Law 100-107, led to the creation of a new public-private partnership. Principal support for the program comes from the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, established in 1988.

Diversity of recpts:

The 2007 Baldrige Award recipients—listed with their category—are:

PRO-TEC Coating Co., Leipsic, Ohio (small business)
Mercy Health System, Janesville, Wisc. (health care)
Sharp HealthCare, San Diego, Calif. (health care)
City of Coral Springs, Coral Springs, Fla. (nonprofit)
U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), Picatinny Arsenal, N.J. (nonprofit)

Concept to Reality in One Week: Building a Computer Lab in Cambodia via a Facebook Application

This sounds fun, ambitious and so silicon valley: "This presentation will discuss show parts of the creation of a video blog that documented how a team of Seattle’s top developers and designers were given just one week to take the idea of building a computer lab for kids in Cambodia from concept to reality."

Relevance: Rapid Program / Team Development

Take Aways:
-- Building Apps in Facebook to fund-raise, awareness-raise, virally spread
-- ... ...

Take Aways:
-- Building Apps in Facebook to fund-raise, awareness-raise, virally spread
--
http://apps.facebook.com/labbuilder
-- Author's blog & web reality show: "A Startup A Week" profiles such rapid development projects

-- Microsoft Dreamspark: Free MS Licensed S/W for Students:

Developing and marketing graduate-level certificate programs

What: How Institutions Market Online Certificate Programs

Relevance: Aiding and improving marketing and positioning of CFPH in collaboration with program managers.

Take Away Points:

-- A framework available for evaluation of certificate program positioning
-- Who is NOT using cert. courses as a hook? No one! But they do not explicitly state that.
-- Burrell and Grizzel, 2008 and Gibbs 2008 say that program positioning quality is not as good as department positioning within universities.
-- Usability Testing of Cert Course Public Websites is Important: Most cert course program sites took the presenters 45 minutes to comprehend.
Caveat: The research scope is certificate programs for teaching eLearning / online learning / distance. But some points relevant because the study focussed on professional grad cert programs.

Positioning e-learning graduate certificate programs: Higher education and the development of a profession
Authors:
Shahron Williams van Rooij, George Mason University, USA
Larissa Lemp, George Mason University, USA
Abstract:
Institutions of higher education are developing and marketing graduate-level certificate programs aimed at individuals seeking to enter or advance in the e-learning profession. This presentation reports the results of a content analysis of 43 higher education e-learning certificate program Web sites to determine what audiences they target, how they describe their programs and what they state differentiates their programs from the competition. Results of the study indicate that both U.S. and international institutions marketing an e-learning graduate certificate program in the U.S. are clear and explicit about who they are, what they are offering, and what target audience they are seeking to reach. However, most programs sites do not include differentiators. This suggests that the providers have yet to identify what distinguishes their certificate programs from the competition, or that they have not yet found a way to articulate those differentiators

E-Learn - Sessions of Interest Today (Wed 11/19)

9:30 - 10:30
Sky 208
Capri 115

11:15 - 12:15
Skybox 210
11:15 AM
Concept to Reality in One Week: Building a Computer Lab in Cambodia via a Facebook Application
Kevin Leneway, Microsoft, USA

11:55
Capri 112:
Consider Your Style ~ A Customized Self-assessment Tool for Teaching Effectiveness in Online Environments
Natalie Abell, Corey Lee, Melissa Cain, Heather Wulff, The University of Findlay, USA


Capri 115
11:35 AM
Making Thinking Visible in Online Learning Environments
Pearl Chen, California State University, Los Angeles, USA


1:30 PM: Skybox 209
Knowledge Management applied to the SMART-COP based on the Criteria for Performance Excellence from the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for Education
Warren Moseley, Brian Campbell, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, USA

1:30 PM: Skybox 206
Integrating Interaction in Distance Learning: A Comparative Analysis of Five Design Frameworks
Yoany Beldarrain, Florida Virtual School, USA

1:30 PM Capri 112 / Full Paper
Secondary Students Perceptions of Web-Based Learning
Michael Barbour, Angelene McLaren, Lin Zhang, Wayne State University, USA


2:00 PM Sky 209
A Preliminary Review of Online Role-plays as a Tool for Experiential Learning in Marketing Education
Rohan Miller, The University of Sydney, Australia


2:00 PM Capri 112 / Full Paper
What are they doing and how are they doing it? Rural student experiences in virtual schooling
Michael Barbour, Wayne State University, USA


Royale 3 / Panel
2:45 PM
Strategies for Successful Community-Building in Online Courses
Kris Parsons, Ashland University, USA; Gail Miles, Lenoir-Rhyne College, USA; Jackie Owens, Ashland University, USA; Susan Friguglietti, Lenoir-Rhyne College, USA



4:00 PM Royale Skybox 208 / Brief Paper

Does Intelligent Teachable Agent Enhance Interest and Task Performance?-The effects of Peer Tutoring/ KORI(KORea university intelligent agent) and Self-efficacy-
Yeonhee So, Kyungnam University, Korea (South); Sungkim Kim, Korea University, Korea (South)

4:20 PM Sky 210
Raising the Bar in Rich Media Creation and Deployment – a Technical Perspective.
John Morris, Drexel University, USA

Royale 5/6 / Research/Technical Showcase

Armaiti Island: A Virtual Environment for Educational Entrepreneurs
Carla Mathison, San Diego State University, USA

5:30 PM
IBM Virtual Education Center
Kristine Berry, IBM, STG User Technologies, USA; David Moore, IBM, USA

5:30 PM
Human-Video vs. Comics Character as Pedagogical Agents
Aphinan Jitjaroen, Rajamangala University of Technology, Lanna, Thailand

5:30 PM
The Effects of a Computer Simulated Animal on Children's Empathy and Humane Attitude
Yueh-Feng Lily Tsai, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Video Games Do NOT Traing the Brain

DOES playing computer games boost your brainpower? Not necessarily, seems to be the answer.

Walter Boot and colleagues at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, found that non-gamers showed no improvement in memory skills or the ability to multitask after spending more than 20 hours on one of three video games. This appears to contradict previous studies which detected superior mental aptitudes among habitual gamers.

PamFax Plugin for Skype

This would be useful. Never used it but worth trying as it can use your Skype credit to pay per page

http://www.pamfax.biz/

eLearning by Numbers: The Sloodle Effect

16%

Increase in student Retention*

---

50%

Reduction in administrative workload on faculty

---

80%

Improvement in Persistency**

---

Schaffhauser (2008) writes:

Huntington Junior College (HJC) in West Virginia has gone public with its year-long early-adopter use of Campus Management's CampusLearning, a suite of services that provides for real-time, two-way integration between proprietary portals and student information systems and the Moodle open source course management systems. Campus Technology Article

Definition of Terms (from Martinez 2003):

*Retention:

Retention refers to the number of
learners or students who progress from
one part of an educational program to
the next. In higher education, this is normally
measured as enrollment from academic
year to academic year. In other
settings, retention may simply be the
inverse of the attrition rate. It may be
defined as the number of learners who
progress from one module to the next, or
from one certification to the next.

**Persistance:

Persistence relates to the act of continuing
toward an educational goal. In
higher education, a “persister� is simply
one who achieves a degree or certificate
and graduates “on time.� In other institutions,
persistence may not be the term
of choice, and instead the issue is simply
the number of individuals who complete
the required course, modules, or
criterion tests.

---

Dian Schaffhauser, "Second Life Mashup Helps Boost Distance Ed Retention at Huntington JC," Campus Technology, 9/30/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=68040

Martinez, Margaret. "High Attrition Rates in e-Learning: Challenges, Predictors, and Solutions." ELearning Developer's Journal June-July 2003: 1-9. Http://www.elearningguild.com. 14 July 2003. 30 Sept. 2008 .

How often does this happen

to you? This is a once in a millenium moment:



However, thats just work email. Personal email is another story:

Writing Successful Conference Proposal - 7 min podcast on educause

This is a helpful resource:

Web 2.0 Powerpoint like Presentation Services: Evaluation Criteria

This is a post about selection of presentation technology and what are the criteria for selecting them, beyond the common features we have come to expect. Here are the criteria to evaluate on:



-free/paid
-ability to import from common file formats
-sharing ability (synchronous control)
--can you control slide progress for viewers?
--can you share desktop? (yes in zohoshow)
--live annotations (digital highligting, digital ink, digital laserpointer)
-asynchronous sharing
--embedding customization control
--embedding cleanliness (zohoshow is a a clear winner here)
--slidecasting (sync with mp3) (slideshare)
-transition ability etc.
-authoring ease
--fidelity of import from existing
--authoring from an RSS feed
--stringing together existing webpages
-ease of use
--interface design
--intuitive distribution of menu items
--sluggishness of the interface
I have not done a comprehensive survey, but found zohoshow come out on top in the case of live sharing and desktop sharing. Google Docs had lovely themes. 280 slides has a nice interface, just like Keynote. Slideroll will create an mpeg for authoring a DVD! Tagslides shows are vulnerable to javascript on pages it shows, which kill the slideshow. If the pages shown on a Tagslide show has javascript to remove the page from frames on another site, that is the end of the slideshow there.

Baraka: An example of sociocultural learning approach

I recently brushed up on the learning theories through the video series at https://masielearning.pbwiki.com/theory . As a followup to my own adult learning experience, I wanted to encourage my own higher level functions of assimilation, observation and integration to play with the concepts under the three theories: Behaviorism, Cognitivism and Socioculturism as laid out by Stanton Wortham of UPenn.

Tonight we had a family over for dinner and we watched the silent movie Baraka. If you dont know Baraka, you wont need to do much searching before finding more about this thought provoking, visual treat spanning 24 countries. It has no dialog, no narration, no captions or subtitles. Just rousing music and moving images.

As the camera showed up scenes from Brazilian slums, Indian scavenging grounds and Grand Central station, all the four adults engaged each other in a learning experience where everyone came out richer.

Two of us had lightly better general information about the context in which the scenes were shown. In a silent documentary, all four of us became narrators and educators. The scenes ranged from common sterotypes to rare nooks of earth which tested our knowledge. The air was thick with interpretation and the experience more interactive than any other before.

At the end, I strongly felt that this experience qualifies as a top notch sociocultural learning experience marked by the following characteristics:
1. Contextual interpretation
2. Richness of symbolism through noises, patters and color
3. Body of knowledge depending on the sum of the mings of us four viewers, the sum being greater than anything we could accomplish in isolation.
4. Guiding each other through blond spots and working like a team of sailors who are collectively responsible for positioning a battleship on the waters (to use Wortham's metaphor).

I could clearly see that the most efficient adult learning can happen under the flag of sociocultural active learning.

Good night!

Virtual Worlds: An imagineer fulfills a 20th century dream

What is common between Prof. Randy Pauch of Carnegie Mellon and CS Lewis, author of the Narnia books?

The force that drives innovation in technology is human sensitivity, perception and enlightened thoughts. As we herald a new age of vLearning or learning within Virtual Worlds like Second Life, we face a wild and wide open domain of alternate reality. But alternate reality in itself is nothing new. 'Virtual Worlds' is our answer to the question posed above.

The extended entry follows:

C. S. Lewis, the author of the seven Narnia books can be easily said to be a pioneer of Virtual Worlds, along with contemporaries like JRR Tolkien (Lord of the Rings). Yes, what they built was virtual worlds in within the computing resources of the reader's brain. And what a fascinating way! One would expect the worlds they created to be inaccessible to adults who cannot learn through reading. And in part that is true. Children absorbed Narnian concepts more easily than a distracted busy adult would. The child's mind would do the necessary computing with relative ease to create the virtual worlds in the mind... rendering imagery more vivid than any computer can generate. If you have the right imagination and experience. I would like to quote two paragraphs from Lewis's biographical worl, "Surprised by Joy" to illustrate the genuis' process of conjuring virtual worlds. This was way before he created Narnia. In his childhood he created "Animal-Land" and "India". He later combined them into a single world with but still, two administrative divisions: Boxen.

"And now that I have opened the gate, all the Boxonians, like the ghosts in Homer, come clamoring for mention. But they must be denied it. Readers who have built a world would rather tell of their own than hear of mine; those who have not would peraps be bewildered and repelled." (Chapter V, Suprised by Joy, Lewis).

Lewis says a lot above with reference to creation of virtual worlds: Virtual worlds, once created, need to address the individual stories of all and any creatures within it. This is impossible to address in the written word. But if he were alive to see that every resident of Second Life can live and experience their own storyline within the virtual world, that would have greatly amazed him.
Yesterday I stumbled upon the "Last Lecture of a Dying Professor", Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon, who could be called a pioneer, not just of building virtual worlds, but more importantly an educator who has helped many others learn this craft in the best way possible. Through a course in virtual world, taught for ten years, Randy has addressed the eternal child within all his students who shared that timeless urge with writers like Lewis and Tolkien. That intense desire to tell a story in their own world, not in this disorderly and fate-controlled real reality. Here is the video that tells all, famously titled "Last Lecture of a Dying Professor":

Randy's accomplishments include being an imagineer who created the Alladin virtual reality ride for Disney. With the advent of Virtual Worlds, the time has come to pay tribute into that 20th century tradition of fantasy and rededicate it to learning objectives.
Vic Divecha
April 12th, 2008
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnote:
My introduction to virtual reality was through Michael Crichton's book, 'Disclosure' which was later made into a hit movie starring Michael Doughlas and Demi Moore. It was a fascinating but not an awe inspiring presentation of the basic capabilities of augmented reality and relied heavily on a virtual guide within the world. This remains true today in Second Life, with the difference that the helper avatars are for most parts driven by real people, self-driven and localized to their parts of the world.

Adobe Brio (Connect / Breeze)

BRIO is the codename for the next version of Adobe Connect (Breeze) being developed using the revolutionary Adobe Flex framework. It is easy to signup for the beta and use the Beta hosted on Adobe's servers to conduct web-meetings with upto 3 people.

I tried the tools in isolation and it has all the features one would imagine and the look and feel are more enamouring than Centra or WebEx. The UI elements are Flash and the requirements are Flash Player 9. Not bad at all in terms of a solo flight. Now I will see if some folks might be interested in going for a short test drive.


(Image from RIAPedia

Spresent: Powerpoint-like Flex application for the web

Stumbled across Spresent while browsing the Adobe Flex Gallery of applications (PHP technology). This web application allows building Flash presentations and is being projected as the free alternative to PowerPoint:

eLearning Gold-standard: Rosetta Stone Language Learning

Rosetta Stone Language Learning in Hindi made a great gift this Christmas for my wife, who has been scraping internet websites and "multimedia" courses to learn basic Hindi. There are a few early observations I allow to make myself as a witness:

1. Instructional Design is very important. Developing a good script for learning modules has no substitute. A good design here means lots of direct, relevant, performance based feedback.

2. Terrific content: Good teaching strategy, in the sense that the knowledge transfer is both organic and telescopic. Because the knowledge builds in the learning like a seed planted, sprouted, stemming, branching etc. towards the end goal. This holds true for the Pimsler approach too, which I am using to learn Portuguese.

3. USB Headset enforcement: This strategy validates, for me, the recommendation I strongly make to all our distance learners: use USB mic/headsets rather than rely on on-board sound cards. Rosetta Stone CD version ships with a USB headset and I am happy to have found a validation to my tech recommendation; especially because it has been challenged as a tech superstition on my part. I rest my case.

However, the downside is, if I go on to buy another Rosetta product, I will pay for another USB headset. Por Que?!

I already have one from my previous purchase. They will make me buy it, no matter if you already own the $30 USB headset they sold you with your previous purchase. Bad? Terrible.