iterativelearning

Continuing yesterday’s theme, here’s another little nugget from Wolfram Alpha; this one is primarily aimed towards web writers, designers, and coders. If you’re coding colors, you can quickly find hexadecimal values just by entering names of colors in the search box with a + interspersed between each. So for example, if you enter the color combo

• purple+yellow
• you’ll see, #BF8040

It also outputs a color swatch, the nearest html color values, and complimentary colors among other things. As I see it, this allows for quick experimentation, and probably gives more information, than going to one of your favorite hex-index sites stored inside your bookmarks. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, you can see this and other features in Wolfram’s introductory screencast.

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Wolfram Alpha, hexadecimal

I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that numbers geeks, engineers, and scientists have been flocking to Wolfram Alpha ever since its release on May 18. But after watching their introductory screencast, I found that it’s got offerings for word and language enthusiasts as well.

For example, let’s say you need to write a paper in the range of 15000 words. If you enter that figure into Wolfram Alpha it computes the number into both single-spaced and double-spaced page equivalents;

… or … if you were writing a paper on the history of the English language (a standard course offering in English Dept graduate programs) and needed to know the background on prepositions; if you entered prepositions into Wolfram Alpha, one of the results you’d see would be its first recorded use: 1388 or 621 years ago. To check the credibility of this data, you could also click the Source Information link and see that Princeton University’s WordNet, among others, was one of the references.

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Wolfram Alpha, WordNet

In a recent issue of First Monday, Scott Reid shares results of a study he conducted of faculty shifting traditional, face-to-face classes to an online context (Online courses and how they change the nature of class). Part of this discussion centers on faculty experiences in using the discussion board feature and the challenges of building successful online learning communities. This vexing question, of course, represents a big component of distance education research. Nevertheless, in one of the more interesting excerpts, one of his respondents speculates that part of the problem may relate to cueing:

One professor … thought some students were holding back on participating because they didn’t have cues such as body language to help determine the receptiveness of other people in the course.

What I find interesting in this relationship between cueing and the level of receptiveness is its implications for spontaneity. Spontaneity can lead to promising insights and creative ideas, but if a student is overly concerned with the degree of receptiveness, then it seems likely that the potential for that kind of stimulating environment is reduced. One way faculty lay the groundwork for better receptiveness or -cueing participation- is through a variety of orientation activities that focus on building interpersonal connections rather than immediately launching into the business-side of the course. Learning communities can’t be built without recognizing the time it takes to build the trust and understanding of different students’ communication styles.

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First Monday, Scott Reid

The user-friendliness of Ubuntu has certainly helped widened the popularity of open source options. Dell, for example, now offers computers bundled with Ubuntu. Sun’s Open Office is the office suite that comes with Ubuntu and they’ve recently released the latest version (3.1). One particularly nice addition to their word processing app, Writer, is the ability to quickly add a reply to a comment. You can check out more details here.

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Open Office, Dell, Ubuntu

Earlier I blogged about the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s modular learning space – the Learning Studio. At a recent Educause conference, some faculty from the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences described a similar setup. (They’ve also produced a short video to give you an idea of what it looks like.) A similar feature to both of these learning space designs is IT being freed up from having to provide the computers; instead, the focus is on creating dynamic, modular spaces that can be adapted to course-specific learning needs and encourage small-group collaboration. Essentially, the space becomes a kind of plug-in-play architecture where the students’ computing devices are plugged into the network and corresponding display screens.

This perhaps plays into what the University of Virginia found, where many students already had their own laptops and presumably preferred to use their own machines rather than the university’s. Now, with the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks and expanding power of mobile handhelds, we could see more universities transitioning traditional computer labs to modular learning spaces.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

GoogleDocs is one of the tools I like to use in my online classes. Students know the name (i.e., Google), the interface is easy for them to intuit, they can share documents via simple URLs, and it’s integrated with the Google Apps for Education.

Today, the Google Docs blog announced an improvement to the collaboration feature, so it’s easier to create groups. Previously, you had to manually add email addresses each time you wanted to share a document; now you can simplify the process by using the contact manager to create groups.

With the massive adoption of microblogging platforms like Twitter, there’s been talk about whether or not RSS readers are dead (1, 2, 3) . One of the recent threads in this discussion happened over at Mashable in which one of the commenters (Eric McGinnis) mentioned feedmil — something that isn’t an RSS reader or a microblogging platform. Essentially, with feedmil, you can search blogs, microblogs, and news sites. But that simplicity belies its power (at least as far as I’m concerned). It’s got numerous features, but here’s just a little smattering of what I found beneath the surface.

• Interface:
  It sports an interface that foregrounds simplicity and clear visual cueing. Both of these make it very intuitive.
• Sorting:
  You can sort feeds by blogs, microblogs, podcasts, and others. You can also sort by feedmil rank, relevance, or quality. It also has multi-lingual capabilities.
• The Slider: customizing search results —
  One of its more distinctive options is a set of sliders that allow you to customize related keywords (what they call Topic Significance). For, for example, if I enter the term instructional technology, one of the related keywords that will appear in the Topic Significance slider column is university. If I then move the slider to the right to increase its significance, then my search results are automatically tailored towards higher education. (UI gift = No need to click a confirmation [OK] button.)

• The Slider: skipping through history —
  When you click on a specific search hit or result, not only does it display a brief synopsis and relevant urls, but it gives you another slider tool to quickly explore the chronology of a blog without even going to the site itself. So, for example, when you move the slider to the left, it moves back through the previous entries and displays the entries for those dates. Pretty slick for doing quick historical searches.

So in my initial fooling around with it, the Slider seems to be where its real potential power lies; it pushes beyond basic keyword searches.

Am I going to toss my RSS reader? Not likely. For me, my reader (currently NetNewsWire) is still an optimum way to keep up with my favorite observers and analysts. But I definitely plan to use this as a research tool and would suggest it to students.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Jeff_Rice, Doug_Belshaw, Literacy