iterativelearning

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.

As a bit of an extension on the previous post, when I think about campus computer labs, one of the most common uses that I’ve seen them serve over the years is printing. My guess is that’s still one of the big functions they serve today. But with the big improvements in screen resolution, wide adoption of handhelds, and emphasis on Going Green I wonder why this trend persists? It seems to me that as ebooks continue to improve and become more mainstream (e.g., Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and the wild vortex of rumors circulating about Apple’s upcoming hardware), will this do anything to reduce the reliance on hard-copy? And is the preference for printouts coming more from students or faculty?

It’s pretty clear that the space for mobile learning platforms is only going to increase in 2010 and beyond. Of course, as this happens, it forces a reevaluation of the traditional campus computer lab. How much is it still needed if most students have plenty of computing power in their hand(held)?

Although all these things require careful research, time, and money, schools such as the University of St. Louis-Missouri and the University of Minnesota are recognizing and acting on this change. And today, there’s a post on a similar effort going on at Penn State.

Looking at it broadly, traditional pc labs emulate a common classroom design: fixed rows and assigned seating where each student works in isolation from those sitting around him. Mobile-informed learning, on the other hand, re-alters that to a space that more explicitly encourages sharing and collaboration. I think two of the more interesting details in this new PSU collaboration space are those that seem rather unremarkable: flexible furniture and a viewing area.

Flexible furniture configuration: All tables and chairs are on wheels, allowing users to reconfigure the space based on their needs. … Viewing area: A couch and 40″ LCD display provides a comfortable space for students to collaborate and share their work.

In this learning design, the computing less visible; it’s there, of course, but it’s not the conspicuous center of attention.

I’ve been on the hunt for a Mac-friendly notifier for Google Wave and stumbled across one today called Waveboard. Conveniently, it’s also got an iPhone version at a very reasonable 1.99.

Diigo has gained a pretty significant following among educators as an alternative to Delicious because you can do more with it. If you’re new to Diigo, it’s a free social bookmarking software that comes as an extension to your browser (e.g., Firefox). In addition to tagging and creating groups, you can annotate pages with stickies, find other users via public annotations, tweet bookmarked pages, create lists, as well as various other things. So, if an instructor would like to have students do more than just passively read web pages, a tool like Diigo stands out as a good option.

On the new feature front, I recently found out that they’ve got a WebSlides option that makes it extremely easy to string together a series of web pages and present them to a class or group. One way to quickly create a slideshow is to select a list from your Diigo collection and then click the slides widget. Another option is to create them directly from an RSS feed. In true Web 2.0 fashion, viewers can also become participants by annotating the slides. Especially for people teaching online, this would be another way for both teacher and students to generate interactive discussions about web-based materials. It also has other options which you can check out from Diigo’s intro video.

I’ve been using Omni Focus for several months as my project/task manager. It’s a Mac software that nicely covers all the bases such as adding start dates, due dates, reminders, project notes, and multiple sorting configurations. One of my favorite features is its integration with Mac Mail where you can convert email items to tasks by forwarding them to your Focus inbox. However, every once in while, I have problems forwarding through one of my email accounts due to firewalls or some other related security measure. Today, though, I inadvertently discovered a work-around for this. If you highlight part of a message and then press CTRL-Click, you’ll see an option to add it to your Focus inbox. It even gives you the option of adding the due date from within your mail message. Pretty nifty.

Educause Quarterly has a piece by Roger McHaney on a relatively new wiki implementation called the Electronic Learning and Teaching Exchange (ELATE). Produced by Kansas State University, it’s a wiki that offers a wide variety of information divided into four categories: Course Issues, Instructors, Students, and Tools. It’s got an inviting UI and has entries that cover both the practitioner (Updating an Online Course) and theoretical (Building Mental Models) ends of the spectrum

A couple of standout points in the EQ article for me are the ANYSITE tool

… the ANYSITE extension, which allows embedding a live website within a wiki page. This feature enables a preview of a related website or distribution of digital artifacts such as e-books.

and the acknowledgement of the challenges associated with keeping a wiki community vibrant and participatory. On the latter, McHaney references Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and his three elements for facilitating success – promise, tools, and bargain.

The bargain is the most complex aspect of the balance because it involves user behaviors in response to the promise and tools. For ELATEwiki, the bargain becomes that contributions will be maintained, improved, policed, and used by a community of peers.

The direct reference to Shirky I think shows how much we’ve learned about what makes online communities work than in the early days where there was much more of a preoccupation with the tools.

Technorati Tags:
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Roger McHaney, Educause

Journals like Kairos show some very creative approaches to sharing research. Although, it’s primarily an academic research journal, the creativity of its multimodal publications, recently got me thinking again about the different questions that instructors who read this journal must grapple with when they start brainstorming strategies for moving away from using MSWord (or any other conventional word processing application) as the default publication platform. With all the hubbub surrounding Web 2.0, they want to move away from requiring students to submit formal writing assignments as static text, but find a few uneasy questions along the way.

• How can I make it easy for students to create engaging multimedia compositions that don’t require them to learn programming?
• How can I find a tool that’s affordable?
• How can I find a platform that makes it easy for multiple peers to comment and question?

Blogs offer an option, but it’s more diary-like orientation isn’t really compatible with an assignment that has a definite closing date and essentially constitutes a different genre. One option that shows some intriguing possibilities is Sophie. Developed by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Media Literacy, it offers many of the capabilities that make a mono-modal composition into a multimodal one (image, video, sound). It also comes with a timeline and a reply/comment feature so readers can interact with authors. This is ideal for instructors who want peer discussion of a student work to occur in a more closed environment than the web, but not to be relegated to something as brittle as the comment feature in MSWord or a similar word-processing app. Sophie definitely deserves exploration by any faculty looking to move student writing or publication projects into realms more consistent with 21st century expression.

Technorati Tags:
Kairos, Institute for Media Literacy