It wasn't long after the first phone calls were made that people wanted to add video to make us seem closer. Bell labs debuted the first videophones at the 1964 World's Fair, yet the technology never really took hold until the past 10 years. Now there's an expectation that what you hear WILL ALSO BE what you see. 

So, pragmatically speaking, what does this mean for education? Is it really worth trying to re-create a classroom in a synchronous digital environment? 

We've all sat passively through online webinars, relishing in the fact the presenter has no idea whether we are playing Angry Birds or wearing pants. I've even heard instructional technologists suggest that the only viable web conferencing utilities are those that completely take over a user's desktop, locking out any other application functionality. When I hear such a suggestion I immediately wonder whether that person could possibly have anything interesting enough to say to warrant such overt narcissism. ~Doubtful. 

Many of us have also taken part in computer-mediated realtime communication that was both intimate and productive. In those cases, was it the technology that effected the productivity? Or was it merely the semblance of intimacy and mutual accountability that allowed the time to be "productive?"

We have been excited by a lot of the data we have pulled during and since the web redesign process. The most recent fun things I have noticed is the striking difference between traffic to our site since the redesign. For example, the following table represents traffic to the site based on the time periods listed in the top row. The periods represent 13 months prior to the the website redesign, and the time since the new site was launched, respectively. 

The site is developed around BuddyPress, and was just in its pre-launch stage in summer 2009. But now it seems like it has grown up in a very big way. 

Cheers!

Dr. Janet Poley will give a presentation entitled "eLearning: Wave of the Future or the New Normal?" at 2:00 pm on Wednesday, September 15 in G001 McCarty as part of a series of seminars on distance education offered by the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS.) The presentation will be live streamed here and will be available as a recording at that URL afterward. If you would like to arrange a meeting with Dr. Poley on the morning of the 15th, please contact Suzi Welch in Dean Rieger's office.

Janet Poley is CEO and President of the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC).  She develops collaborative distance education initiatives and conducts research and education programs related to technology access and applications with more than 60 land-grant university members and international affiliates.  She is a Board member and Treasurer of Sloan-C; is on the APLU Committee on Partnerships between African and U.S. Universities; and is a member of the Board of Advisors for Zamorano University in Honduras.

Having grown up on a farm with little development nearby, MY video was a little confounding. In my youth, 4307 S Goldenrod Road in Orlando, FL, was a rather blank slate for boredom and introspective fantasy. I longed for a neighbor nearer than 2 miles away. And now our old farm has been replaced by a maze of streets, small houses, and retention ponds.

Perhaps more so than any old home movie, this video...um...concept?, really made me think about where I was then and where I am now. If you feel like looking back in time, and forward into the future of web technology, go have a gander.

How 'bout dem apples? I had to add the "uf coe" to get my stuff to bubble to the top. But I chalk that up to having a rather common name, shared with a rather unique senator and a petulant movie character.

This is just the beginning. The more tweaking we do to our applications, and the closer we adhere to Google's "recommendations" for SEO, the better our return will be. According to the Goog, the community.education.ufl.edu domain currently shows up in 182 unique query strings.

How many hits does it take to get to the center of the Google bot?

I recently had a bout with a deranged hacker who found deep satisfaction in breaking down the back door of my Joomla! website. It was my own negligence that allowed it to happen; I hadn't done a security update to the plugins installed on my site in oh...I don't know, 2 years. /shrug

After much frustration and an unsuccessful attempt at recovering my blog posts from the past few years, I decided to throw it out and start from scratch with a fresh install of WordPress on my domain. 

Given that I am more active on the UF COE Community site than my personal domain these days, I thought it would be great to be able to pull the content I post in the Community over to my new WP blog. It looks like the RSS Feeder plugin by a development group called WPXpand might be just the way to do it.

So this post is a go at it. I think I have configured the plugin properly on the WordPress site to pull from this here blog, but I never get anything right the first time.

We are beginning to crack at the SEO aspects of our new system. The rename of the distance.education to community.education sub-domain seems to have knocked our site down in the Google page rank scheme of things. We will need to do some heavy lifting to get it back in place.

Unfortunately, Kampyle no longer offers a free service to any new users. I was hoping to employ a system like Kampyle to glean feedback from users of Purlieu. We'll have to re-think the feedback process; it might just be easier to write a little application that will aggregate user feedback in a database we can manage.

Unfortunately, offering live video content on a production par with the quality of the events commonly occurring at the COE is no small task. These services will likely involve a complex interweaving of various hardware and software technologies. I hope to post a schematic of the proposed technical configurations in the near future...

Though it still lacks content, the Drupal theme it runs on looks pretty slick. Kudos to the designer responsible for the background image and CSS; it definitely reminds me of another political site with a focus on civil service.