iterativelearning

Continuing to sit in on a grad Comp/Rhet class as a guest panelist/speaker…

Today, we spent some time talking about a piece in the NY Times that has attracted quite a bit of attention. In fact, I just checked the Times and it sits as #1 in their Most Popular listing.

Glossing the details, the author, Mark Taylor (a professor in Columbia’s Religion Dept.), argues that higher ed needs to be modernized to meet 21st century demands. While the argument isn’t new, one of his recommendations that I like is his call for more cross-disciplinary collaboration. Historically, colleges such as Evergreen and UC-Santa Cruz have made this a centerpiece of their curricular model since the 70s, but increasingly, more universities have moved in this direction (e.g., MIT Media Lab, Penn State’s Information Sciences & Technology, Stanford’s H-Star, Maryland’s iSchool). I’m somewhat surprised, he didn’t briefly allude to this relatively established trend, but still, it certainly can’t hurt to advocate for more of it.

Technorati Tags:
Penn State, Stanford University, Evergreen State College, UC Santa Cruz, MIT Media Lab

Undoubtedly, reading constitutes a big part of the academic life. While journal articles distributed as pdfs are easy enough to organize into local research folders, websites present a little bit more of a challenge. Zotero is certainly an excellent and free tool, but for those sites you only want to read once and not have to worry about storing, then the Firefox extension, Read It Later, is a good option to consider. After you’ve installed it, you simply click the check-mark that appears in the address bar to identify it for later reading.

To access any websites you’ve checked, you click the book icon in the upper-right corner of your Firefox browser. When you do that, you can also see other options such as syncing with another computer and creating RSS feeds.

Technorati Tags:
Zotero, Read It Later

Beginning this week and continuing for the next couple, I’ve been participating in a colleague’s class whose students are discussing one of those terms that has become so popular and widely used (or overused in the eyes of some) that it’s come to mean all different kinds of things for all different kinds of people. And what is this slippery term? New Media. In this class, we’re discussing it in the context of Jeff Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool.

Not surprisingly, it’s raised the question of what exactly do we mean by the term literacy. By coincidence, while catching up on a recent batch of RSS feeds, I happened to come across Doug Belshaw’s post in which, just a couple of weeks ago, he created a discussion forum dedicated to this very topic. One of the threads is labeled Hannon on literacy and after reading through the various posts, I noticed two dominant concerns: annotatability and findability.

In educational environments, teachers encourage students to annotate texts because it promotes better comprehension, which ideally leads to more informed, critical analysis. Similarly, when students write about these texts, it can be a real bear sometimes when they butt up against that all-too-common hurdle: finding that particularly poignant quote or passage that they remember reading, but just can’t seem to find. One of the posters in Belshaw’s forum connects it to a recent class session-

Last Thursday I had a Y11 English class finishing coursework on ‘Of Mice and Men.’ One of the students remembered the gist of a quotation he wanted to use. He’d been flicking through the book for ages looking for it before he asked me. I brought all my skills of memory recall, scanning and skimming to bear. And couldn’t find it. Suddenly the solution dawned on me: I found a copy of the text on Google books; a quick keyword search and a few seconds later we had the exact quotation he needed.

Learning doesn’t happen through a tedious cycle of flicking pages for ages. Digital texts ease the search burden. Just press CTRL-F.

Technorati Tags:
Jeff_Rice, Doug_Belshaw, Literacy

I first became familiar with Sakai when I was at Virginia Tech, and at that time (around 2004-05), they were doing some very good work with their instance of it. Sakai now has a screencast that previews some upcoming features planned for its next release – version 3.

It’s got a dashboard that runs on Ajax (or something very similar) so you can move around various elements in a way that suits your needs. You can also completely customize your home page by starting with a blank page, or if you like the visual suggestions of templates, you can choose from various options there too. One key component of this next version is widgets (e.g., create a poll). Traditional LMSs can do this too, but what Sakai seems to be stressing is a better user experience — it’s easier, more intuitive and quicker.

Technorati Tags:
Sakai

I was cruising through TechMeme this afternoon and caught Tim O’Reilly’s post on Obama making history by appointing the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. He nicely lays out the case why Aneesh Chopra is a good choice (as a kind of rebuttal to TechCrunch), but the part that really caught my attention was Chopra’s work in using technology as an enabler in education during his most recent stint as Secretary for Technology for the state of Virginia. Very briefly, O’Reilly lists three,

the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country, the Physics Flexbook

integrating iTunes U with Virginia’s state education assessment framework

the Learning Apps Development Challenge, a competition for the best iPhone and iPod Touch applications for middle-school math teaching

Intrigued by Flexbook, I took a quick look at the demo and it offers some nice customization options, and because, it’s on the web, there’s none of the lag time that happens with traditional textbook publication cycles. Customization and modularity are key when it comes to web-based learning tools and I think that these needs partly explain why there’s been synergy between open source and education (e.g., Sakai, Connexions, MIT Open Courseware).

Technorati Tags:
Aneesh Chopra, Tim O’Reilly, MIT, Sakai, Connexions

A couple of days ago, I was skimming the headlines in Fast Company, and read about a new search engine called Duck Duck Go. So I gave it a try and after a few successful preliminary searches was impressed enough to try it out as my default engine for a couple of days.

Here are just a few, initial impressions …

• Clean, simple interface
• Easy one-click step for adding it to your favorite browser (e.g., Firefox, Flock)
• A Zero-click Info box that gives you a concise description of your search term at the top of your search results. For example, if you entered the search term Bioinformatics, you would see a concise, one-sentence description set off at the top of the page inside a red border.
• A clever and very simple way to filter your search results (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Twitter) by clustering all your options as tight box of more than 25 icons in the upper-right of the page.

So after two solid days of Duck Duck Go as my default, I’m leaning towards Fast Company’s conclusion. Okay, maybe it’s got a bit of a silly name, but maybe that’s what people thought when they first heard the name Google way back in the 90s.

Technorati Tags:
Flock, Duck Duck Go, Fast Company

A while back, a colleague and I did a workshop on wikis. Although we’ve sampled other wiki tools, we like PBWiki for educational purposes because it’s easy to use and offers quite a solid variety of functions.

Since we wanted to practice what we were preaching, we wanted to display our presentation in the browser-based wiki space, rather than through the traditional, offline route of PowerPoint. This would also answer a question that we anticipated some of those who came to the workshop would likely have (i.e., How do I or my students embed presentation files?). After all, if the student is required to download it to their local drive, then this kind of works against the philosophy of working within the wiki space since this can already be done very easily with any standard LMS.

PBWiki makes embedding pretty easy to do via either one of two third-party applications (Slideshare or Google Docs/Presentation). Essentially, all you need to do is upload your presentation file (e.g., PPT), publish it, and copy the embed code into your PBWiki page.

Here are a couple of places where you can find more detailed instructions: Slideshare and Google Docs/Presentation.

Technorati Tags:
GoogleDocs, PBwiki, Slideshare

In my technical writing class, my students recently finished a Documentation module by writing instructions for a video creation software (Animoto). In reviewing and testing their instructions, I was reminded of how easy this tool is to use. In a few short steps, you can create a video, add text, and even a soundtrack. It’s also easy to distribute and share across platforms like YouTube.

This kind of tool-simplicity allows students to focus on what they want to do with it, rather than worrying about the intricacies of how to use it. When I think about the future look of learning systems, I’d like to see more attention paid to ease of use and cross-platform sharing. Ideally, learning systems should be able to incorporate an Animoto-like tool where, in the case of my tech writing class, it would be easy for them to create instructional videos. In Alan Cooper’s well-known work on Interaction Design, he mentions that the best interface is none at all, meaning, of course, that the interface is so helpful that the user isn’t even conscious of its presence. Now there’s an ideal worth remembering.

Technorati Tags:
Alan Cooper, Animoto

There’s been a fair amount of press coverage lately (CHE Wired Campus Blog Ars Technica) on the University of Virginia’s decision to begin phasing out its computer labs. Generally, the reason has been attributed to cost and the fact that most students already have their own laptops and use those more than the machines in the lab.

While this situation obviously doesn’t apply to all schools, (at mine for instance I see the labs enjoy regular use) but what I think will be a more interesting trend to follow will be the impact of students with mobile devices. As has been frequently reported, mobile devices have much wider adoption than laptops and so the interesting question for those in the educational technology arena is how that will shape the configuration of learning spaces that integrate a spectrum of computing devices. Also, aside from the gadgets, how will it impact the design of more mundane things like tables and chairs? With this in mind, I don’t see labs being replaced, but reconfigured to accommodate changing circumstances. Schools like the University of St. Louis-Missouri seem to be moving in this direction already.

Technorati Tags:
Chronicle of Higher Education, University Missouri-St. Louis, University of Virginia

As more faculty use Twitter, it would be interesting to begin looking at changes in email practice. For example, would faculty begin to encourage their students to Tweet (Twitter) them for certain categories of messages (e.g., have you finished grading the assignment yet?)? Would faculty find it a helpful tool for better managing information flow or just another responsibility to incorporate into their daily routine?

Technorati Tags:
Twitter