iterativelearning

Sometimes faculty or student groups just need to do super-quick, on-the-spot polls (e.g., should we write about this topic or that?). Yet many conventional LMS systems require faculty or users to click through a cumbersome series of options and approvals in order to do this, and for students, it’s equally difficult if not impossible. Reading Lifehacker’s short post on Google’s Moderator tool got me thinking a little bit about this, and by way of association, how newcomer Wiggio, the collaboration tool geared primarily towards students, makes it quite easy.

Usability popped up in a recent Twit where Jason Calacanis described some interesting findings at the Mahalo usability lab. When using Ask.com, their test users perceived ads as actual content. This genuinely surprised me. Apparently, though, the shading was subtle enough and the font-size of the Sponsored Results was small and far enough out of the way that the distinction was all but invisible. Once again, I guess we see the value of that classic usability mantra: test, test, and test again.

The social bookmarking service, Diigo, enjoyed some good exposure with a Robert Scoble interview this past July. Diigo features quite a few tools and one that I’ve appreciated the most is the annotation tool (e.g., highlighting, sticky notes) and this is one area in which I think they really distinguish themselves from Delicious. Another distinctive feature to Diigo is that one of its target audiences has been educators and this makes sense given the popularity of social bookmarking tools among educators.

Now Diigo is offering special Educator accounts where teachers can create social bookmarking groups for their individual classes. As a complement to this, they offer some helpful privacy features in which preferences can be configured to limit communication to just those in the class. It doesn’t cost anything and the ads that appear are limited to education-related sponsors. Depending on the kind of reception they get with this new move, there might be a significant percentage of educators out there who would be more than willing to pay a small, reasonable fee for an ad-free option.

On the ebook reader front, Plastic Logic unveiled a promising new leap forward at this year’s DEMO conference. Although the device won’t be officially available till next year, they showed off some features that seem to give the Kindle a run for its money. Here are some that caught my attention:

• Instant on (great for those times when you just want to quickly check a document for one small detail)
• Readable in bright daylight
• Plastic rather than glass screen so it’s very durable
• Touch-screen for entering annotations, notes or comments
• Battery life that’s measued in days not hours

Although Plastic Logic is aiming this at a business audience, I certainly see possibilities with education (e.g., students using it to read and mark-up course materials outside on a bright, sunny day). Perhaps textbook publishers are already looking at this. I’m sure there will be lots of coverage by the tech and biz press when this device is officially released next year; it will be interesting to see what the reviewers have to say. Perhaps someone from Educause will get one and write a review through an educator’s prism.

When you read through any primer on web design, there’ll be a fair bit of discussion on making it as easy as possible for the user to get around the site. One common way to do this is, of course, is through breadcrumbs. Just yesterday, I was reminded of the real value behind this design principle, but interestingly enough, it didn’t happen with a website, but with an ordinary cable tv menu. More specifically, we’ve got Comcast’s OnDemand menu and after we would try and guess which category our desired program was under and then drill down several levels to find it, we would inevitably take the wrong path and would then have to slog our way back up through the same levels that we just went through. All too often, we’d run through this back-and-forth cycle several times before finally finding what we were looking for. It would be nice if Comcast would add a simple breadcrumbs trail that that could be activated through the remote control.

In one of the recent UIE podcasts, Jared Spool looks at some history and chats with Bill Verplank of Xerox PARC fame. When talking about some of the differences between then and now, Verplank explains his and Bill Moggridge’s decision to go with user interaction design rather than user interface design as a way to signal a move away from a computer-centric vision of interaction to one that incorporates a wider array of user contexts. Later on in the conversation, Verplank validates that more expansive view by pointing to the Rhode Island School of Design’s move to hire John Maeda as its new president whose background is not only in computer graphics but programming as well.

Wiggio looks like a promising addition to the collaboration software landscape. It uses the web so there’s no worries about platform compatibility and includes core team tools like a calendar, file sharing, meeting forums, message areas, and link libraries.

One way in which it really distinguishes itself, though, is how it capitalizes on a common tool that nearly everyone has — a cellphone. You can set-up cellphone conference calls, record voice notes or messages, and text team members; it’s all integrated with Wiggio.

When educators who teach online look for ways to facilitate collaboration among student groups, it seems that integrating cellphone capabilities is a very big and smart step forward. Also interesting is that Wiggio has been created by students at Cornell. So, unlike other DE tools that generally come from outside campus environments, here we see one springing directly out of a campus context. I wonder if the CHE blog will write anything on this tool?

With Yammer now extending the success of microblogging, it will be interesting to see if a similar sort of app carries over into educational CMS platforms. To be sure, one of the recurrent threads in online learning research has been greater interactivity and so would, for example, a Yammer-like tool help promote a greater sense of spontaneity among groups? And more specifically, could it promote the type of spontaneity that could lead to creative problem-solving? One factor to consider would likely be integration, that is, how well that app could be integrated with the CMS so students could, for example, easily receive updates via their phone or participate without having to be tethered to a laptop or desktop machine.

ProfCast stands out as a nice audio-visual presentation tool that’s especially geared towards those Mac users who just can’t do without their Keynote. It’s very easy to produce (just drag, drop and record). As I see it, one of its best strengths is compression; it does a nice job of keeping the file size manageable. You can also export it in a wide variety of formats (e.g., .mov, .mpeg). You can also upload it to iTunes and configure it for RSS.

You can try it out free for 15 days and then after that it’ll run you $29.95 with the qualified educator’s discount and $59.95 for the regular price; although I think even the $59.95 price tag is more than reasonable if you plan to produce a fairly regular series of presentations for your students.

Anything with a 2.0 suffix has gotten a fair bit of grief recently as nothing more than a passing fad or gimmick. In academic circles, there have been the same types of criticisms thrown at terms such as “new media” and “Literacy 2.0.” Diane Penrod has some thoughtful contributions on this topic. In her brief article, Web 2.0, Meet Literacy 2.0 she lays out a pretty solid case for why it isn’t.

What drives Literacy 2.0 is a robust, enhanced skill
set that requires knowledge of many areas and training
in numerous activities that move beyond the ability to
read and write at a competent level for the print
medium. Academic culture needs to develop a better
awareness that, while important, traditional literacy is
no longer enough to ensure student success. To be
Iiterate in the 21 st Century, educated people must be
proficient in assimilating, transmitting, and transforming
information into new, meaningful units for contexts
and situations that, in some instances, have yet to
occur. (51)

For academics trying to sort out hype from substance, this surfaces as a good sifting tool. This also reminds me of some of Will Richardson’s good work over at Weblogged, e.g., 21st Century Literacies from the NCTE