iterativelearning

I’ve been on the hunt for a Mac-friendly notifier for Google Wave and stumbled across one today called Waveboard. Conveniently, it’s also got an iPhone version at a very reasonable 1.99.

Diigo has gained a pretty significant following among educators as an alternative to Delicious because you can do more with it. If you’re new to Diigo, it’s a free social bookmarking software that comes as an extension to your browser (e.g., Firefox). In addition to tagging and creating groups, you can annotate pages with stickies, find other users via public annotations, tweet bookmarked pages, create lists, as well as various other things. So, if an instructor would like to have students do more than just passively read web pages, a tool like Diigo stands out as a good option.

On the new feature front, I recently found out that they’ve got a WebSlides option that makes it extremely easy to string together a series of web pages and present them to a class or group. One way to quickly create a slideshow is to select a list from your Diigo collection and then click the slides widget. Another option is to create them directly from an RSS feed. In true Web 2.0 fashion, viewers can also become participants by annotating the slides. Especially for people teaching online, this would be another way for both teacher and students to generate interactive discussions about web-based materials. It also has other options which you can check out from Diigo’s intro video.

Educause Quarterly has a piece by Roger McHaney on a relatively new wiki implementation called the Electronic Learning and Teaching Exchange (ELATE). Produced by Kansas State University, it’s a wiki that offers a wide variety of information divided into four categories: Course Issues, Instructors, Students, and Tools. It’s got an inviting UI and has entries that cover both the practitioner (Updating an Online Course) and theoretical (Building Mental Models) ends of the spectrum

A couple of standout points in the EQ article for me are the ANYSITE tool

… the ANYSITE extension, which allows embedding a live website within a wiki page. This feature enables a preview of a related website or distribution of digital artifacts such as e-books.

and the acknowledgement of the challenges associated with keeping a wiki community vibrant and participatory. On the latter, McHaney references Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and his three elements for facilitating success – promise, tools, and bargain.

The bargain is the most complex aspect of the balance because it involves user behaviors in response to the promise and tools. For ELATEwiki, the bargain becomes that contributions will be maintained, improved, policed, and used by a community of peers.

The direct reference to Shirky I think shows how much we’ve learned about what makes online communities work than in the early days where there was much more of a preoccupation with the tools.

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Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Roger McHaney, Educause

A quick follow-up on my previous post: I regularly read Doug Belshaw’s blog because he covers a variety of things related to educational technology and teaching. On top of that good stuff, he also shares some of what he’s doing in terms of his graduate thesis (dissertation). In many ways, I find the informal sharing of research through blog posts to be more valuable than what I’d get from a conventional academic conference. At the typical conference, I get the highlights, which can be valuable in certain situations, but with blogs, I get more insights into processes that led to the highlights.

Jeffrey Keefer has an interesting post on doc students using the blog to share or chronicle their academic/research journey (e.g., Why do this via a blog? How does it feel to be public with your thinking?). At the end of his post asks, I wonder if there is a research problem and question in here?.

I think there is. One angle might be reluctance. Blogs often represent a person’s fragmented, truncated, rough-hewn thinking on something. They’re not something that’s polished and subjected to numerous R&R cycles as is the case with traditional journal publishing. But I think that precisely because the research journal has been the dominant model in higher ed for so many years that it’s difficult for some to bring the messy, fragmentary thinking that leads into those more polished journal pieces out into the open. For the reluctant doc student, there is the question of value: what value do I get by sharing my fragmented, iterative thinking? Will it go into a community? How active will the community be in reciprocal sharing?

As we roll towards final exams, I’ve been noticing the usual up-tick in library use by students. Not necessarily for books, but for group work and study spaces. And this got me thinking about some previous posts I wrote on some interesting modular design experiments at the University of Minnesota and the University of Missouri-St. Louis where it’s less about the institution providing lots of desktop computers and individual work stations, which massive adoption of mobile devices has essentially made obsolete, and more about a space that accommodates the need to present and share.

I think one of the emerging trends, if not already, among university libraries is that it’s going to be more about open spaces than stacks. With the expanding number of journals being ported to online databases, the growing presence of e-books, and of course, the ubiquitous, general-purpose search engine, students will have ready access to high-quality materials. What seems to be more of a need though is a greater number of spaces where students can informally organize group meetings to hash out a project or find a quiet alcove for concentrated study.

Just a little north of my hometown, Seattle, was this year’s OpenEd conference in Vancouver BC and if you weren’t able to make it (like me), they assembled a montage of different attendees’ impressions that include some folks well known in the Open Education community such as Stephen Downes and David Wiley. One interesting detail that was new to me was the Peer-to-Peer University.

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OER, Open Education, conference

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

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.

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Since reading about Yammer in a higher ed environment, I’ve been experimenting a bit with it myself. It’s basically an enterprise, Twitter-like client. One thing I like about it is that, ideally anyway, it kind of emulates spontaneous hallway conversation – that potentially rich seed bed of great ideas. Because Twitter has achieved so much popularity of late and faculty are busy juggling the classic tripartite (teaching+research+service), it seems that now might be a good time to give this thing a whirl. It’s as easy as Twitter and so the barrier to entry is all but nonexistent (e.g., 5-minute demo in a department meeting).

In classes, especially online, students could use it as a complement to traditional LMSs; it would be another way to promote interaction and collaboration.

When Twitter was first being discussed among academics as a potential learning tool, I remember David Parry was one of the first I read who shared his experiences with using Twitter as an educational tool. (If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend reading his Twitter for Academia.) I wonder if he’s done the same with Yammer?

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Chronicle of Higher Education, Twitter, Yammer, David Parry