Last Christmas, I had a little time to catch up on some novels and so I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to my iPhone. Unfortunately life intervened and I didn’t have a chance to finish it, but it jumped back to the top of my To-Read list after just finishing Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U. Part of her book describes how people use social networks (or social networking practices) to hack their own educational experiences and in the process of doing this, she gives a shout-out to Doctorow’s Magic Kingdom.
Cory Doctorow described an entire economy that ran on whuffie, a reputation-based currency.
With this Sci-Fi vision in mind, Kamenetz then follows this up with an interesting question that relates to motivation and the design of online learning contexts:
What if there was a way for students to start building whuffie from their first class, freshman year?
I like this more incremental and holistic approach, because especially when I think about collaboration in online learning, it’s often difficult to expect students to form and establish cohesive groups with people they’ve likely never met and more significantly, for projects that are confined to a traditional 16-week term. If students began building online identities and reputations (whuffie) early on in their collegiate experience, then ideally, teachers could think about how collaborative designs could be linked to that existing network.
This semester I’m using Atlassian-Confluence as my wiki for EdTec 498 and before that I used PBWorks. Both are great tools that offer a wide array of impressive features, but one that I’ve always wanted to see was inline commenting. Yes, of course, wikis make it a breeze to make corrections to a page, but especially as a teacher, I’m frequently more interested in asking a question than making a correction; I’m interested in comparing my interpretation to their intent and seeing what learning emerges from the juxtaposition between the two. Given the wide popularity of wikis in the education community, I’ve been surprised that such a capability hasn’t been available (at least based on my research); in fact, I hadn’t seen it all until Wikispaces announced they were adding it.
Wikispaces is definitely distinguishing itself here. While lots of wiki platforms have comment features, the comments aren’t contextualized; instead, they’re typically aggregated at the bottom of the page which requires the user to first scroll down the page to the comments section and then to scroll back up and then carefully search for that section of text that the comment corresponds to (and hoping not to forget the gist of that comment while hunting down that specific piece of text). This requires too much work. Wikis are well known for their ease of use and the process of commenting should be just as easy.
Was working with a student on troubleshooting a software-related problem today over Google Chat and wanted to send a file. Apparently this isn’t possible (most likely due to security issues) and so I thought about emailing the file, but didn’t really want to deal with the hassle of launching my client and filling in all the email fields and so I launched a nifty little Mac App simply called Cloud and dragged the file into the icon on my Finder window and it instantly gave me a url which I dropped into the chat. The student then simply clicked the link and grabbed the file. It couldn’t have been easier.
In the process of catching up on some of Will Richardson’s recent posts, I read one where he refers to Kevin Washburn’s Using Groups Effectively: 10 Principles. (Aside: Washburn has recently published a book called The Architecture of Learning that I’ve heard many good things about). Anyway, in principle 5, Washburn urges
Do not appoint a group leader. In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group’s thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction.
In theory, this makes a lot of sense, but within the frame of my own teaching experience, I’ve usually found that most students prefer a group leader. They typically prefer somebody to function as the leader (unless of course that person is engaging in tyrannical behaviors). Anecdotally, I’ve heard how they like the leader as an arbiter of more complex decisions and one who reminds members of overall group goals. So where does this predilection for leaders spring from? Is it conditioning? Lack of evidence or compelling stories of successful implementation? Is change more likely by teachers assuming a greater role? Have teachers expected too much from students when it comes to building their own capacity for designing leader-less groups?
As luck would have it, FastCompany reports on a University of Washington study that relates to my previous post. One of the culprits that this study identifies with ebooks is lack of cognitive mapping that would provide cues helpful to navigation (e.g., Where am I?) and retention (How can I make a note of this when I need to remember it for the test?).
So here we’re reminded of what’s become something of an aphorism in the instructional design world: think beyond the tools. And when you’re talking about ebooks in educational contexts, student needs differ from those of the general-purpose, leisure reader. Unlike the leisure reader, students need to exhibit and demonstrate understanding to their teachers (at the very least) and genuine options for interaction can facilitate this.
“As an increasing number of states and educational institutions declare their commitment to moving to digital-only platforms for educational texts, it seems wise to consider a fundamental question about the future of educational materials, in terms of both content and delivery:
Why is a book the best metaphor for envisioning this future?”
I think Michael Mayrath, Priya Nihalani, and Scott Perkins nailed it here. This question comes out of a study they ran at Abilene Christian University in which they developed a mobile app for students in a general level Statistics class.
The whole article is worth reading, but I’ll just focus on one part that kind of lingers with me. For designers involved with this kind of work, approaching them as Apps rather than ebooks seems like it could also influence their thinking at a subconscious level, since when you think about it, the word ebook still has a whole lot of analog connotations and as a result, might still constrain their vision for designing something more genuinely innovative.
When educators assemble and debate the pros and cons of integrating social networking tools or models into the curriculum, it’s often centered around questions of value and fidelity to instructional objectives and the like. That of course is completely understandable and appropriate. But sometimes it’s important to step back a bit and look at them through other lenses. Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir does that for me. It shows an inspiring aesthetic value to social networks.
Whether as part of their formal research agenda or just general curiosity, there’s been a very noticeable trend among educators who are interested in whether Twitter is something more than just sharing what you had for breakfast or similarly superficial topic. Can it, for example, promote student engagement? One of the more memorable launch-points for me on this question was Rey Junco’s presentation via the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
More recently, the March issue of the Journal of Online Learning & Teaching has a piece by Badge, et al., who look at Twitter use among two groups of students (one undergrad, one grad) as a result of loaning them iPod touches. Within the undergrad group, they observe evidence of an emergent community of practice (e.g., Wenger) when they noticed that students continued to use Twitter even after returning the devices. Perhaps this also sparks another line of investigation … when or how do we identify distinctions between emergent communities of practice and sustained CoPs? 6 months? 1 year?
futurelearn has a post on plugin devices from Steelcase called pucks that allow students to connect with whatever devices they brought with them to the classroom. Although it’s not entirely clear from the description in the post, I’m assuming that students could connect their device to a classroom projector via the puck and an hdmi or vga cable. Even better will be the day when students can avoid the extra burden of cables and connect to the projector wirelessly.
We all know the 2.0 buzz words (or clichés depending on your level of cynicism) … blogs, tags, wikis and podcasting. But some of these are easier to execute than others. Podcasting and screencasting can be two that definitely require more time and effort (if you want to do them well, anyway).
For the Mac users out there, it’s looking like the next version of OS X is going to make podcasting quite a bit easier. 9to5Mac gives a glimpse of what may be happening with the upcoming Podcast Publisher. If its final final form surfaces as described, one feature that might especially capture instructors’ attention is the split screen, where students could view demo actions as well as their teacher’s friendly mug. This rich combo could certainly do a lot to boost social presence.
One other thought … added ease of use to this tool also makes it ideal for encouraging more student-generated podcasts. (Who says teachers should have all the fun?) With all that goes into making a good podcast, it seems like there’s plenty of potential for rich, authentic learning experiences.
As luck would have it,