BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

M I L D M A N N E R E D

Connection EdTech JUNE 2014

Ohhh, for the fun days of summer! ETC peeks into EdTech’s

robotics camp for kids

I’m pleased to congratulate

Stacie Barker and Kellie Taylor

for recently winning $500 Con-

stance Wyzard memorial schol-

arships, and Richard Jones for

winning the $600 Ellenburger

scholarship.

Taylor does a great job with

robotics and other tech applications at the

STEM academy where she works.

Jones has transformed his alternative high

school classes to student-centered hubs,

where students choose how they will learn

content competencies.

And Barker, wow, what a job she did at a

reservation school, where children literally had

no concept of life beyond the reservation, so

they had trouble understanding things most of

us take for granted—until she took them on

virtual field trips in which they got to see and

interact with the unknown world around them.

Jerry.

EdTech Connection

Published three times a year by the Department of Educational Technology

at Boise State University

Jerry Foster Editor and academic adviser

208-426-4008 jfoster@boisestate.edu

LETTERS WELCOME

Congratulations to . . .

2 Boise State EdTech Connection

Round trip

EdTech grad returns to teach ROTC at Boise State

By JERRY FOSTER

N ate Patrick has covered a lot of ground since joining the Idaho Army

National Guard, then ROTC at Boise State, and, later, graduating from

the EdTech program in 2007.

Idaho National Guard BlackHawk helicopters on a training exercise south of Boise. Nate Patrick Photo

He saw ROTC

and the EdTech

master’s program as

steps up the career

ladder, so he joined both programs—and

then he called one day and said he had a

chance to go to Army flight school.

Could he resume his master’s program

when he got back, he asked.

Sure, I said.

He called me a year or so later and we talked

about flight school, his family, and restarting his

graduate studies. He finished in 2007 and is now an

Army major and an instructor in the same ROTC

program that he’d joined years ago.

He’s used his ed-tech skills to improve estab-

lished Idaho National Guard and Army programs.

For example, while deployed during Opera-

tion Iraqi Freedom, he was assigned to receive,

schedule, and track missions and VIPs within

the aviation task force’s area of operation, which

covered southern Iraq and all of Kuwait. He had

to figure out how to accommodate the various

schedules of VIPs with the availability of aircraft

Boise State EdTech Connection 3

and flight personnel, and provide real-time data

regardless of their location.

So, he customized an Excel spreadsheet to track

all aircraft, personnel, including VIPs, and sched-

ules to ensure that no missions were dropped. In

more than 3000 flight

hours, not one mission

was cancelled in his

battalion due to sched-

uling error. He received

a commendation for that ed-tech-inspired effi-

ciency, one of several earned during deployment.

But the word technology in his graduate degree

landed additional duties that required him to act

more as an I.T. guy because it was assumed that he

knew how to fix computers and software issues.

Army officers do not say they can’t, so he taught

himself how to fix computer problems and, as he

got better at it, more was asked of him.

Back in Boise, he reminisced about Kuwait’s

desert extremes—the 60-degree winter nights, for

example, that felt frigid because his body was ac-

climated to 110-degree daytime temps.

And when those

overnight lows collided with

warm, moist air from the

nearby Persian Gulf, Patrick

and other Idaho National Guardsmen at Camp

Buehring, Kuwait, experienced the most terrifying

and exhilarating electrical storms imaginable.

Now, as an ROTC instructor at Boise State,

he’s integrating his educational technology skills

into his classroom curricula to enhance his stu-

dents’ learning with the vast digital resources

available.

He received a commendation for that

ed-tech-inspired efficiency.

Student health insurance now an option

The Boise State University Student Health

Services Office is now allowing degree seeking

online students in self-support programs to en-

roll in the Student Health Insurance Program

(SHIP) during the 2014-2015 year, according to

Kelley Brandt, associate director of eCampus

Center, a Boise State department that advocates

for online programs.

Online degree seeking graduate students in

self-support programs, such as Educational

Technology, enrolled in nine or more graduate

credits will pay $1,254 per semester or $2,508 for

12 months, which works out to $209 monthly.

Students taking six credits are also eligible

for SHIP, but the rate is slightly higher.

Out-of-state students pay the same as instate

students, but they have to access First Health

Network (myfirstheath.com) to find service pro-

viders who work with this insurance program.

Ninety-nine percent of EdTech students work

fulltime, so most do not need insurance. Those who

do need insurance will have to pay a slightly higher

rate than that published on the university’s health

insurance website.

Students must contact the Health Insurance

and Billing Office at healthinsur-

ance@boisestate.edu or (208) 426-2158 no later

than the 10th day of classes each semester to have

the fees added to their student account. The same

contact information should be used when students

have questions about SHIP.

Additional information about SHIP is located at

http://healthservices.boisestate.edu/services/

insurance/ship/benefits/ .

4 Boise State EdTech Connection

“Clamp” the robot is ready

to perform the task he was

built for. Clamp is just one of

the robots created by kids

from fourth through ninth

grades engaged in educational

technology professor Young

Baek’s robotics summer camp

at Boise State.

The camp is one of dozens

taking place on campus this

summer. Besides robotics,

camps include activities such

as football, soccer, engineer-

ing, chamber music, dancing,

literacy and many more.

In the robotics camp, each

student made his or her own

robot using Lego NXT kits.

The students learned how

Boise State EdTech Connection 5

to write programs that

made the robots move,

make sounds and say

some words.

The robots have an

onboard computer that

can quickly be pro-

grammed with limited

motions. For more

complicated move-

ments, the students

had to write a program

on a computer and

then download it to

their robots.

After students be-

came accustomed to

manipulating their ro-

bots, they used them in

mathematical and en-

tertaining activities. In

a robot version of Pic-

tionary, one student

would drive his or her

robot to draw letters as

the other students

guessed the words.

EdTech assistant professor Patrick

Lowenthal presented three times at

the annual meeting of the American

Educational Research Association in

Philadelphia last April.

The first presentation focused on

measuring social presence in the class-

room.

The second, co-authored with Ed-

Tech’s Ross Perkins, focused on sam-

pling trends in online learning re-

search, and the third, which was co-

authored with Joanna Dunlap of the

University of Colorado at Denver, fo-

cused on the influence of graphic de-

sign on instructional design.

6 Boise State EdTech Connection

Co-edited a book

Friesen also

teamed up this spring

with Stacey Irwin

of Millersville Uni-

versity to edit a new

special issue of Phe-

nomenology & Prac-

tice, a human science

journal dedicated to

the study of the lived

experience of a broad

range of human prac-

tices.

The special issue

about “Being Online” is devoted

to the phenomenological de-

scription and exploration of the

experience of being online in

educational contexts. Articles

address questions such as:

How, for example, might one

be “called” by the voiceless

words of another online?

How is appropriate receptiv-

ity, passivity or attuned peda-

gogical action manifest in the

asynchronous world of words of

the online class discussion?

How might a glance of recog-

nition of another be directed via

a Webcam?

It has been a busy late-spring for EdTech Asso-

ciate Professor Norm Friesen.

He made a presentation on technology in educa-

tion and training at the annual meeting of the In-

ternational Standards Organization in Olso, Nor-

way.

Edited a book

Friessen has ed-

ited a forthcoming

book called Media

TransAtlantic:

Media Theory be-

tween Canada and

German-Speaking

Europe.

The work of

Marshall McLuhan

and the Toronto

School has recently

been reinvigorated

in the nascent field

of media studies

(Medienwissenschaften) in

German-speaking Europe.

These continental philosophical

and cultural studies of media

often are associated with the

path-breaking texts of Friedrich

Kittler (1943- 2011).

Written by an international

roster of major practitioners in

the field, the chapters in this

collection take media theorists

from either side of the Atlantic

as a central point of reference,

and show how their influence

has recurrently converged and

diverged in a cultural geography

increasingly global in scope.

These meetings involved the development of

technical specifications for common educational

technologies worldwide.

He’s been developing tech standards for collabo-

rative online learning with Toshio Okamoto of

Japan’s University of Electro-Communications.

EdTech’s Yu-Hui Ching and Yu-Chang Hsu presented their research on “Collaborative learn-ing with Wikis: A critical research in higher education,” at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) convention in Philadelphia.

Hsu also presented a paper on mobile augmented-reality artifact design with Fengfeng Ke of Flor-ida State University.

In addition, Hsu was elected treasurer of the Instructional Technology special interest group. His one-year term began in April.

Boise State EdTech Connection 7

EdTech’s Kerry Rice returned to Poland this

spring, accompanied by LiteracyProfessor Diane

Boothe, who was at the time dean of the College

of Education, to sign a cooperation agreement with

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun and to

discuss future exchange opportunities.

Rice wants to get Polish students into Boise

State’s online EdTech program because Poland has

no equivalent. If students and university officials

are impressed with the vigor and value of online

programs, she believes they can begin their own.

But Rice faces two major challenges.

For starters, her university partnership plans re-

main in legal limbo.

Further, university attendance in Poland is free

for all students, so finding a way for Polish stu-

dents to pay Boise State’s tuition is the other hur-

dle. She asks, “Are we willing to pay for interna-

tionalization?”

Rice spent fall 2012 in Torun as a Fullbright

Scholar to lecture and explore the use of new tech-

nology in education at Nicolaus Copernicus.

Julie Young, a pioneering

leader in global online schools,

has joined the advisory board of

GoGo Labs, the company

founded by EdTech assistant

professor Chris Haskell and

former EdTech professor and

chair Lisa Dawley.

Dawley said she was honored

to have Young’s “strong history

of leadership” on the board.

Young served for 17 years as

president and CEO of Florida

Virtual School, founded in 1997

as the nation’s first statewide

high school, eventually becom-

ing one of the world’s largest

online K-12 schools.

Young recently retired from

FLVS, which also created the

first-ever fully online video-

game-based course.

GoGo Labs is the creator of

the Rezzly brand of gamified

learning technologies, training

and digital content.

The company offers an SaaS

learning platform, 3D GameLab,

which uses game mechanics,

content creation and an online

learning community to keep

learners engaged and successful.

GoGo Labs serves educators

and students in more than 16

countries with the only quest-

based learning platform that

sells directly to educators. For

more information, visit 3dgame-

lab.com .

EdTech assistant professor Patrick Lowenthal

has co-edited a book titled Online Learning:

Common Misconceptions, Benefits, and Chal-

lenges, published by Nova Science Publishers.

His two collaborative editors were Cindy York

of Northern Illinois University and Jennifer

Richardson of Purdue University.

8 Boise State EdTech Connection