Just a little north of my hometown, Seattle, was this year’s OpenEd conference in Vancouver BC and if you weren’t able to make it (like me), they assembled a montage of different attendees’ impressions that include some folks well known in the Open Education community such as Stephen Downes and David Wiley. One interesting detail that was new to me was the Peer-to-Peer University.
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OER, Open Education, conference
In an earlier post, I mentioned that I would try and jot down some more thoughts on the very writer-friendly tool, Scrivener.
Today, I had an opportunity to try out the Compilation feature and was very pleased with the results. Essentially, the Compilation feature functions like a publication tool where you can select all sorts of finishing options, and Scrivener makes it really easy. It gives the feeling of a major desktop publishing platform without all the layers of complexity; it’s just a matter of checking or unchecking boxes.
One hidden gem I noticed in today’s initial run was the Load button. With this, you can save your publishing settings by simply clicking it. Very handy if you need or plan to publish with a very specific set of formatting options more than once.
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Scrivener
In a couple of my classes, we’ve been surveying different learning theories and one we’ve been focusing on recently is Behaviorism and its predilection for measuring only that which can be observed (e.g., stimuli and response). In an interesting coincidence, I came across one of Daniel Pink’s recent TED talks where he argues against what amounts to a kind of behaviorist (i.e., Carrot & Stick) approach to managing the workplace. More specifically, he references some studies by well-known economists who found that when managers assigned workers to projects that involved “even rudimentary cognitive skill” that rewarding them (read: Behaviorism) with more money didn’t improve performance, and in fact even lowered it. The emphasis, he argues, should be more focused on intrinsic motivators such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In terms of educational contexts, an easy analog to this would be an undue focus on grades as an incentive. What can we educators learn here? I think this talk by Daniel Pink would be a good one to use in ed-psych classes.
[Credit: Presentation Zen]
I was using netLibrary a couple of days ago in preparation for one of my instructional design classes and thought about how nice it would be if there were more robust annotation tools (e.g., text highlighting). It appears that there might be a version that allows for this, but I’m guessing that this option comes with a pretty hefty price tag. There’s also no date on this press release so it’s not clear how current (i.e., applicable) this information is. Along these same lines, it would be even better if the ebooks could be published in the open ePub standard so students could read it on all different kinds of mobile devices.
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netLibrary, ePub, Kindle
As a pretty dedicated Mac guy, I’m planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Still, I’ve been reading different bloggers’ takes on it and David Pogue identifies a couple of nifty features I hadn’t yet heard about:
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Snow Leopard, Apple, David Pogue