(The late) Friday Review

So for the first time this semester I missed the Friday review. Hope you didn't notice. :)

What knocked me off my schedule (and this is not an excuse) is that I spent the day in Salt Lake at the CES Academic Technology meeting. I was invited at the last minute and it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up, although now I'm paying the price for missing the last statistics class before our midterm.

The conference itself was very interesting. For me personally the most exciting parts were the updates from Seminaries and Institutes about ways they are working to use technology to increase impact and exposure. Good things are happnening and it was fun to meet Tyler and Christopher. A couple of side conversations I had that were very interesting concerned some of the logistics of building community amongst LDS youth (Stephanie) using the "Express Book Machine" at the BYU Bookstore to increase the "long tail" of books (Roger), and the possibility of getting help from the BYU Library to scan out of print LDS books (Randy).

With that introduction, here is the roundup of what I learned this past week:

Research:

Tentative approval has been given to the "open book" project that will develop into my dissertation. That is super exciting. Currently, I'm working with David on a paper that describes the current status of the Flat World Knowledge Beta test.

Distance Education:

Dr. Howell came and visited our class. We discussed the role of assessment in distance education; one thing that surprised me is that some schools are moving away from having frequent proctored exams because of the difficulty people have in scheduling time to take such an exam. We also discussed how the family is a perfect "instructional" setting (another post on that issue is forthcoming). I also got IRB approval and have sent out the survey regarding David Wiley's class. The analysis of blogs is now complete.

Open Education:

It was a heady week as a lot of good things came to fruition. BYU appears to be considering joining the OCW Consortium and if one counts up the "good" things that have occured in part because of our class it is surprising.

Assessment:

Digging into reliability and validity. Although I have covered these concepts in other classes we're digging a little deeper which promises to push my brain this next week.

Stats:

I have completed all the data collection for my research paper on the effects of BYU religion classes on scripture study and now simply need to analyze it. I re-read chapters 7-12 of the textbook in preparation for the test this week, but still feel like I'm lacking a bit. I can do all the SPSS calculations, but I don't think my conceptual understandings are yet where they need to be.

With 3 weeks left in the semester it looks like there is a 50-50 chance I will finish with success!