iterativelearning

Good sessions today at PSU’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference.

It opened with a keynote by The headliner was Michael Wesch. He, of course, gave us lots to think about, but one detail I’ve been mulling over for the moment is the connection between his early anthropological research in Papua New Guinea and his recent work on the impact of social media in education (Digital Ethnography). More to the point, he explained how when he first traveled to New Guinea he didn’t know the language, was unknown to those who lived there, and generally speaking, had no connection to speak of; and so, he was confronted with the challenge of creating a new identity. He then went on to explain that in a similar way, we are challenged to forge identities in this (comparatively) new and rapidly expanding social media landscape. How will these identities be developed by students in online learning spaces? How will these identities be reflected in personal avatars? Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is doing some interesting work in this area.

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Michael Wesch, Penn State University, Stanford University

There’s been an expanding circle of discussion over the last few years about education delivered in the spirit of an open source model. And beyond the talk, there have been various implementations of it (MIT, Utah State, Tufts).

Perhaps an interesting variation on this trend is a company like Google who is not in the education business (in the traditional sense anyway), but has their Google Code University in which they make programming classes available via a Creative Commons license. So let’s say you have an interest in learning a programming language but aren’t sure you want to register for a full-fledged, traditional course. And let’s also say, you’re interested in learning Python because you’ve read that it’s one of the better languages for newbies to start with (e.g., 1, 2). Well, Google Code University would be a good option.

They organize the material into three categories: explanatory text, video, and applied exercises. The course designers have done a nice job of analyzing their audience as it doesn’t inundate the newbie with every little nuance related to Python, but enough to get the ‘programming hands’ a little dirty. Another interesting detail has to do with the video; it includes captioning, which not only accommodates hearing-impaired learners, but makes it easy for any one who may have missed a certain technical term, or its pronunciation to go back and see exactly what it was.

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Creative Commons, Google_Code_University

At this year’s PETE&C conference, one of the presenters, Andy Petroski mentioned a collaborative writing software called MixedInk. Because I’m almost always interested in new tools like this, I made a note to check it out at a later date.

Today, I finally had a few minutes over lunch to give it a whirl. Quite impressive and definitely has potential for learning/classroom application. In just my short time with it, a couple of real stand-out features were

• Remixing – you can build and easily integrate your work with other group members by searching a pane that sits adjacent to the main writing/editing window
• Browsing & Rating – you can easily browse the drafts of other group members and rate them; in a classroom setting, this could be very handy for more quickly identifying those sections or segments that students consider the most effective; teachers could even ask them to use the comment feature to justify their selection(s).

Again, in my quick exploration of MixedInk, the only limitation I found from a teaching perspective is privacy. It looks as though your group writing projects are publicly visible and many teachers would likely prefer student collaborations to occur behind a password-protected site.

*Update*: found out that MixedInk plans to offer teacher accounts. One package is $11/month and includes password-protection and a feature for pre-registering students that would eliminate the need to send email invitations.

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PETE&C, MixedInk

Was skimming one of the recent editions of the The Scout Report and saw this little Scholarpress gem for using your WordPress blog as a course management tool. Of course this has been happening for a while already, but one kind of feature that’s kind of nifty about this plugin is the assignments feature where you can link multiple assignments to one due date.

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Scholarpress, Scout Report, WordPress

We spent part of the weekend down at the National Museum of American History. We hadn’t been there since its reopening. Typical of most DC museums, it’s got some great exhibits with opportunities to use your cellphone for learning more at your own pace. One of these was the Artifact Wall – Creating Hawai’i that looks at the history of Hawaii from different perspectives (e.g., “perception vs. reality”). When I tried the cellphone option, though, there was so much ambient noise that I could barely make out what the narrator was saying. Maybe it was just my phone, but another part of it was simply the location: it was in an open foyer (where there was lots of foot traffic) rather than one of the dedicated exhibition spaces.

Screencasts are a popular alternative to documentation since most people would rather see how something works than search through a manual. Still, some screencasts can be awfully boring (e.g., monotone); others can go over the top with trying to be too funny or sarcastic. The screencast for the task manager Teudeux strikes a nice balance.

Continuing a bit more from yesterday’s post, another factor that sometimes gets overlooked when it comes to implementing Web 2.0 in education is disparities in bandwidth. It’s probably pretty safe to say that there are a lot of college faculty who enjoy not only high-speed connections at their campus offices, but also at their homes. But this isn’t necessarily the case with students, especially when it comes to those out in the rural areas. And, of course, one of the key reasons students from rural areas enroll in distance ed courses is because of the commute time. Yet, it’s easy to think, in the year 2010, that we’ve conquered the broadband mountain. Not so, says the FCC. Issues related to cost and complexity discourage 93 million Americans from broadband participation.

via TechCrunch – 1/3 Of Americans Don’t Use Fast Internet

Tech is becoming (probably has been now for some time) big business in education. So it’s important to regularly step back and double-check we’re not becoming too bedazzled by the eye candy.

I thought of this once again after seeing Andy Petroski’s presentation at this year’s PETE&C conference. Part of his solid talk involved relaying stories from students’ implementations of Web 2.0 in their K-12 classrooms. Before he got into the details of the stories, though, he emphasized that teachers can’t assume that all kids are highly fluent in 2.0 tools; especially when we’re surrounded with lots of stories that depict kids as hooked on gadgets, it’s an easy stereotype to fall prey to. Yes, okay, most of the Net-Gen’ers know Facebook and Text-ing, but how comfortable are they in other zones (blogs, wikis, and RSS)? And how well do they know more than the surface-level features of these tools? What about using them strategically (e.g., for learning)? How wide is their bandwidth of knowledge?

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PETE&C, Andy_Petroski, Web 2.0

Even though it’s in vogue to beat up on PowerPoint presentations, and of course, there are plenty of cases where this is justified. Yet, the fact remains that they are still widely used. I don’t know, maybe it’s something about those concisely cordoned title boxes and bullets that make it just irresistible. So if it’s going to stick around for a while, why not sprinkle it with a little added value?

SlideRocket has a backchannel feature that incorporates Twitter and polling among other things. In education circles, there’s been more buzz about backchannelling both in terms of supporters and detractors. Supporters like how it accommodates multiple conversations; detractors are turned off for that very same reason (e.g., lack of cohesion). More on this can be found at places such as Educause and the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. I think, as it goes with lots of these sorts of tools, instructors should pay careful attention to the specific context and purpose, and if the backchannel option seems to be a good fit, then start looking for some tools for some sort of best practices that helps to avoid common pitfalls.

There has been lots happening on the education-video games front for quite some time now (James Paul Gee, Marc Prensky, AECT Virtual Educators, Educause Virtual Worlds). While all this research is helpful towards connecting the practice to relevant theory(ies), sometimes, teachers just want to dive in and explore what these games are all about. What are they like from an experiential perspective? Or very simply, what is it like to play the darn things?

Well, one option is Penn State University’s Gaming library that offers quite a few. For example, in the Environmental Science category, there is Operation Climate Control; moving more towards the Humanities end of the spectrum, there is The Playhouse which centers on Shakespeare. The game titles I saw were developed in Flash, so you can experiment with them directly in the browser. They’ve also got a page with additional resources on gaming (e.g., development tools, showcase), plus plenty more if you have the time.