iterativelearning

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb has a good post on another player in the ebook market – CafeScribe. A couple of important contextual points he includes are

• ebook adoption among students is still pretty low
• iPads are too pricey for most students, so little inroads there

In skimming some of the features he describes, one place where CafeScribe seems to have done its homework is making it easier to create opportunities for collaboration. Students can see others who bought the same book, and so, in theory, I could see organically-generated groups forming to work on difficult concepts, problems, etc. What I like about this, pedagogically, is that it doesn’t restrict collaboration to specific courses or even semesters. It could also encourage more student-based scaffolding where perhaps upper-division students who are majors in a given area (e.g., accounting, engineering) could assist struggling students. Faculty can also use CafeScribe to create collaborations within specific courses.

From the research corner … Weston & Bain have a good article in the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment – The End of Techno-Critique: The Naked Truth about 1:1 Laptop Initiatives and Educational Change.

They agree with the Techno-Critics that there’s been a lot of exaggeration when it comes to describing the link between tech and learning improvement; they agree because of the conspicuous lack of empirical data. But rather than throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, as the Techno Critics are prone to do, they suggest six extensions of Jonassen, et al.’s notion of tech as cognitive tools. For example, one of the six recommends not only involving all members of the school community but positioning each as an active agent in assisting with defining … clearly articulated roles, responsibilities, and performance measures. This emphasis on specific roles for stakeholders is one way to keep the focus on concerns related to learning rather than technology.

Educause has an interview with William Rankin of Abilene Christian University who talks a bit about their mobile learning initiative, part of which involves distributing an iPhone or iPod Touch to incoming students. When they move into discussing how the device supports learning, he mentions some good ones

• Lowering barriers to participation (e.g., by using WordPress widgets such as postie, students can contribute all kinds of media by simply sending an email)
• Polling
• Extending learning outside the physical classroom context (e.g., field work, lab)

The last one, extending the classroom, is one that I’m most interested in following because of its implications for pushing learning opportunities into many different contexts. For example, because their university is located in Texas, he describes students using mobile devices for Range Management projects.

I haven’t had much of a need to read up on international cell phone plans, but recently, I began collaborating with another grad student who’s in Namibia, Africa, and unfortunately, there’s no AT&T coverage, and so using our iPhones to call and text is an impossibility on a student budget (at least as far as my Googling as been able to uncover). Ideally, it sure would be nice if there would be a special ‘international researcher rate.’ Maybe this could happen through some sort of cooperative pool of universities from around the world? I guess today I’m feeling infused with optimism.

I’ve been spending some time perusing the empirical research related to social media and learning, and courtesy of Henry Jenkins blog I came across the 2010 Digital Media & Learning Conference They’ve posted videos from the plenary and keynote sessions, and I’m hoping to write some more detailed posts on these later this week. For example, Brigid Barron (well known for her work in Problem-Based & Project-Based Learning) is one of the panel participants.

Zotero is a great research tool for students and academics. I find it immensely easier and more intuitive to use than EndNote, RefWorks, and other sorts of similar packages. If by chance you’ve been missing out on all the fun, you can get a quick overview here. Their latest and greatest effort is a standalone version that would work with browsers beyond the ever-extensible Firefox.

One thing Zotero makes easy to do is sharing. It’s drop-dead easy to create groups ( essentially, click the group folder icon and send email invitations). One thing I’ve noticed with Group libraries though is the lack of a search function within a specific group’s bibliographic library. This isn’t a big deal if the group doesn’t have a lot of cites that they’re sharing, but if there are a bunch of cites being stored there (e.g., more than 50), searching for them becomes a little unwieldy because you’re going to have manually click through multiple screens. I don’t know how widely the Groups feature is used among the Zotero community, but if it’s a feature under consideration, I’d vote for it in a heartbeat.

Looking for a list of qualitative research tools? Looking for a tool to collect data? Analyze data? Dynamic mapping? Transcribing? The Digital Research Tools wiki (DiRT) is definitely a good addition to the academic researcher’s toolbox. In my web perusals, I haven’t been able to find anything that comes close to its scope and comprehensiveness – kind of a research tool headquarters. Lisa Spiro of Rice University does an excellent job as the wiki’s editor, and true to the wiki spirit, it thrives on contributions from others. Check out the guidelines for the details.

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Rice University, Lisa Spiro

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

The Creative Commons has an interesting interview with the Brooklyn Museum where they discuss openness, sharing, and how this ties into a broader goal of using technology to expand their community and enhance the experience of the visitor. One of their approaches for doing this is a pretty unique program called 1stfans

1stfans Membership is an interactive relationship with the Museum that will happen in the building and online. We call it a “socially networked” Museum Membership, but what does that mean? The word has two meanings, which is why we picked it: it means developing face-to-face relationship with Museum staff and other Museum Members (literal social networking), and a strong, exclusive online relationship through social networking sites (you know them as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter).

I like how this allows people to engage with and participate in the (community) life of the museum in multiple ways. Traditionally, there were only two: as a visitor or a staff member. 1stfans explodes those old boundaries.

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.