iterativelearning

We spent part of the weekend down at the National Museum of American History. We hadn’t been there since its reopening. Typical of most DC museums, it’s got some great exhibits with opportunities to use your cellphone for learning more at your own pace. One of these was the Artifact Wall – Creating Hawai’i that looks at the history of Hawaii from different perspectives (e.g., “perception vs. reality”). When I tried the cellphone option, though, there was so much ambient noise that I could barely make out what the narrator was saying. Maybe it was just my phone, but another part of it was simply the location: it was in an open foyer (where there was lots of foot traffic) rather than one of the dedicated exhibition spaces.

Screencasts are a popular alternative to documentation since most people would rather see how something works than search through a manual. Still, some screencasts can be awfully boring (e.g., monotone); others can go over the top with trying to be too funny or sarcastic. The screencast for the task manager Teudeux strikes a nice balance.

Continuing a bit more from yesterday’s post, another factor that sometimes gets overlooked when it comes to implementing Web 2.0 in education is disparities in bandwidth. It’s probably pretty safe to say that there are a lot of college faculty who enjoy not only high-speed connections at their campus offices, but also at their homes. But this isn’t necessarily the case with students, especially when it comes to those out in the rural areas. And, of course, one of the key reasons students from rural areas enroll in distance ed courses is because of the commute time. Yet, it’s easy to think, in the year 2010, that we’ve conquered the broadband mountain. Not so, says the FCC. Issues related to cost and complexity discourage 93 million Americans from broadband participation.

via TechCrunch – 1/3 Of Americans Don’t Use Fast Internet

Tech is becoming (probably has been now for some time) big business in education. So it’s important to regularly step back and double-check we’re not becoming too bedazzled by the eye candy.

I thought of this once again after seeing Andy Petroski’s presentation at this year’s PETE&C conference. Part of his solid talk involved relaying stories from students’ implementations of Web 2.0 in their K-12 classrooms. Before he got into the details of the stories, though, he emphasized that teachers can’t assume that all kids are highly fluent in 2.0 tools; especially when we’re surrounded with lots of stories that depict kids as hooked on gadgets, it’s an easy stereotype to fall prey to. Yes, okay, most of the Net-Gen’ers know Facebook and Text-ing, but how comfortable are they in other zones (blogs, wikis, and RSS)? And how well do they know more than the surface-level features of these tools? What about using them strategically (e.g., for learning)? How wide is their bandwidth of knowledge?

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Even though it’s in vogue to beat up on PowerPoint presentations, and of course, there are plenty of cases where this is justified. Yet, the fact remains that they are still widely used. I don’t know, maybe it’s something about those concisely cordoned title boxes and bullets that make it just irresistible. So if it’s going to stick around for a while, why not sprinkle it with a little added value?

SlideRocket has a backchannel feature that incorporates Twitter and polling among other things. In education circles, there’s been more buzz about backchannelling both in terms of supporters and detractors. Supporters like how it accommodates multiple conversations; detractors are turned off for that very same reason (e.g., lack of cohesion). More on this can be found at places such as Educause and the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. I think, as it goes with lots of these sorts of tools, instructors should pay careful attention to the specific context and purpose, and if the backchannel option seems to be a good fit, then start looking for some tools for some sort of best practices that helps to avoid common pitfalls.

There has been lots happening on the education-video games front for quite some time now (James Paul Gee, Marc Prensky, AECT Virtual Educators, Educause Virtual Worlds). While all this research is helpful towards connecting the practice to relevant theory(ies), sometimes, teachers just want to dive in and explore what these games are all about. What are they like from an experiential perspective? Or very simply, what is it like to play the darn things?

Well, one option is Penn State University’s Gaming library that offers quite a few. For example, in the Environmental Science category, there is Operation Climate Control; moving more towards the Humanities end of the spectrum, there is The Playhouse which centers on Shakespeare. The game titles I saw were developed in Flash, so you can experiment with them directly in the browser. They’ve also got a page with additional resources on gaming (e.g., development tools, showcase), plus plenty more if you have the time.

The Creative Commons has an interesting interview with the Brooklyn Museum where they discuss openness, sharing, and how this ties into a broader goal of using technology to expand their community and enhance the experience of the visitor. One of their approaches for doing this is a pretty unique program called 1stfans

1stfans Membership is an interactive relationship with the Museum that will happen in the building and online. We call it a “socially networked” Museum Membership, but what does that mean? The word has two meanings, which is why we picked it: it means developing face-to-face relationship with Museum staff and other Museum Members (literal social networking), and a strong, exclusive online relationship through social networking sites (you know them as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter).

I like how this allows people to engage with and participate in the (community) life of the museum in multiple ways. Traditionally, there were only two: as a visitor or a staff member. 1stfans explodes those old boundaries.

I’m probably missing something, but when I’m scrolling a long web page on my iPhone (like a news article), it would seem that there should be a quick and easy way to jump back to the top (e.g., double-tap). As it is right now, I have to manually scroll, which is kind of a pain when it’s a long news article. But maybe instead of having to tweak the code for double-tapping, there needs to be more commitment to coding for the mobile experience. I was reminded of this when reading a recent post from Six Revisions:

If you’re working on an existing site’s mobile web interface, only the essential elements should be brought over to the mobile web. Mobile users don’t want to have to look for information or scroll through multiple pages to find what they are looking; they want their needs to be met quickly.

TechCrunch has a post post on a company called Time-to-Know that's moving to push school systems in alignment with 21st century learning demands. Of course, the EdTech market has lots of players working on this front, and Time-to-Know looks like they're aiming to do some pretty interesting things, but the part that caught my eye (for writing this post anyway) was the section on infrastructure requirements:

Schools committing to Time To Know's curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after

With the iPad hubbub still fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but substitute the word netbook with iPad. Given Apple's solid track record on platform stability (e.g, no viruses) and ease-of-use, this could be a pretty good scenario for a test run.

Interesting evolution of instructional technology going on over at Bowling Green State University where one of the instructors introduces the course syllabus by way of a video embedded in a blog post. Behind the scenes, it looks like they’ve made this very easy by combining WordPress as the authoring platform and Screenr as the video (screencast) tool. Especially for those teaching online, this offers yet another way to enrich the level of social presence. Of course, the possibilities are more than one-way, since it would be very easy for students to produce creative, engaging posts as part of any assignment.