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.
A friend sent me a presentation by Mike Sharples of the Learning Sciences Research Institute that looks into what teaching will be like in the next 25 years. On one of the slides, Sharples identifies the Widening gap between learning inside and outside school. What’s interesting in this gap is how it suggests how students have used the web to enable more self-directed learning outside the walls of the traditional classroom. But what’s even more interesting is how students are designing their own learning experiences as a result of stitching together those web-based resources they’ve determined to be most relevant to advancing their objectives. To what extent are teachers and/or schools paying attention to this self-directed learning that may not necessarily be visible in the formal assignments the students submit for review? Are there opportunities here for collaboratively designed instruction (between teacher and student)?
Jared Newman of Technologizer has a post on a detective-genre video game that’s scheduled to come out in May called LA Noire. Newman explains that while it’s got the usual shootout scenarios, it also challenges the player to do more than just survive gun fights.
LA Noire promises to emphasize interrogation and critical thinking to solve crimes.
When I watched the trailer, one of the ways the game attempts to do this is for the player to focus on building cases and analyzing behaviors of witnesses or suspects, which are the sorts of situations that can prompt game-players to decipher ambiguities and subtleties (e.g., higher order thinking skills).
Another interesting tidbit in the trailer is when the voice-over quickly explains the underlying Motion Scan technology that makes the behavior analysis more realistic:
Motion-scan … utilizes 32 high definition cameras to capture actors’ faces
As I blogged earlier, Scrivener did a major overhaul of its splendid writing tool. Since making the jump up to their new version, I’ve gradually been uncovering new little gems. One of the latest that I’ve uncovered is how it syncs any highlights I’ve made in pdfs.
Click on the Application icon to launch the pdf in Acrobat
Make whatever highlights desired
Toggle back to Scrivener and click the Reload icon
So if I’ve added a pdf to my Scrivener Research folder (e.g., research article), it will automatically sync any highlights I make while reading that article in Acrobat. Pretty nifty.
One of the many interesting educational trends that has attracted a fair bit of attention as a result of Web 2.0 tools is what’s simply referred to as, Informal learning. Despite the rather generic term, it’s generated interest among learning researchers because it looks at what drives people to learn without the formal structure of a class or training session.
Lifehacker has a nice example of this with their Lifehacker Night School series. In this series (which is free), they’re reaching out to people who want to know what’s happening under the software hood, but feel a little overwhelmed about exactly where to begin. Beyond the videos, Adam Dachis (the author of the tutorial) has corresponding posts that expand on some of the major points and define key terms. So if you’re feeling the need to release the inner nerd in you, go check it out.
Originally, it piqued my interest because it uses Ubuntu packages — my favorite Linux distro. Later on, I learned that it has plugins for Moodle and WordPress (among others). Of course, Moodle is well-known among ed tech’ers. And while WordPress is known more for blogging, you can find a good post over at ProfHacker on scaling it into a better LMS.
On the research front, 2011 marked the introduction of a new version of ProQuest; unfortunately, I recently found out that it doesn’t play friendly with Macs.
Here’s a quick synopsis of my experience.
After doing my usual university-credential login, I went to download a pdf and was greeted with a message to install missing plugins.
Initially, I tried skipping over the plugin-install prompt (figuring it was to install Adobe Reader which I already had), but ran into a dead end. So even though I have the full Adobe CS Suite, I went ahead and complied on the second go-round and clicked the button to install the plugin. I was hoping my plugin acquiescence would solve the problem, but that was not to be the case as I was then greeted with this sad output:
Feeling it was time to take it to the next level, I shot off a quick email query to my university library and got a very prompt and helpful reply explaining that the problem was with ProQuest, and they were aware of it, but didn’t have a timeline for fixing it.
So what’s a Mac-research-geek to do? Start a support group? (Marginalized Macs?) I thought that with all the massive popularity of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad that this compatibility problem would disappear. But apparently not. Up until now, I’ve had no problem with ProQuest whatsoever. I understand that these things take time, but it would be nice if they at least gave us Mac users the option of using an older, more compatible version. They could even spice it up with a clever little marketing tagline: Old School.
Lots of teachers like the idea of blogs as a tool for learning and reflection, but sometimes find that students tend to be more hesitant when their posts live in such an open environment. Setting up a private blog is an option with many web-publishing platforms but it can also impose limits in terms of usability or functionality.
Posterous recently announced a private groups option. Like a lot of people, I really like the ease and simplicity of Posterous (writing a post is as easy as sending an email). One of the best advantages of this new feature is that it doesn’t require individual group members to sign up because all the posts can be sent via a simple email. In an educational setting this is a big help because one of the more time-consuming logistical tasks instructors encounter is getting all the students either registered with the main class blog or helping them set up their own. All too often valuable class time is lost with keeping track of who’s signed up and who hasn’t.
