iterativelearning

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.

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

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.

I’m probably missing something, but when I’m scrolling a long web page on my iPhone (like a news article), it would seem that there should be a quick and easy way to jump back to the top (e.g., double-tap). As it is right now, I have to manually scroll, which is kind of a pain when it’s a long news article. But maybe instead of having to tweak the code for double-tapping, there needs to be more commitment to coding for the mobile experience. I was reminded of this when reading a recent post from Six Revisions:

If you’re working on an existing site’s mobile web interface, only the essential elements should be brought over to the mobile web. Mobile users don’t want to have to look for information or scroll through multiple pages to find what they are looking; they want their needs to be met quickly.

TechCrunch has a post post on a company called Time-to-Know that's moving to push school systems in alignment with 21st century learning demands. Of course, the EdTech market has lots of players working on this front, and Time-to-Know looks like they're aiming to do some pretty interesting things, but the part that caught my eye (for writing this post anyway) was the section on infrastructure requirements:

Schools committing to Time To Know's curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after

With the iPad hubbub still fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but substitute the word netbook with iPad. Given Apple's solid track record on platform stability (e.g, no viruses) and ease-of-use, this could be a pretty good scenario for a test run.

Interesting evolution of instructional technology going on over at Bowling Green State University where one of the instructors introduces the course syllabus by way of a video embedded in a blog post. Behind the scenes, it looks like they’ve made this very easy by combining WordPress as the authoring platform and Screenr as the video (screencast) tool. Especially for those teaching online, this offers yet another way to enrich the level of social presence. Of course, the possibilities are more than one-way, since it would be very easy for students to produce creative, engaging posts as part of any assignment.

As a bit of an extension on the previous post, when I think about campus computer labs, one of the most common uses that I’ve seen them serve over the years is printing. My guess is that’s still one of the big functions they serve today. But with the big improvements in screen resolution, wide adoption of handhelds, and emphasis on Going Green I wonder why this trend persists? It seems to me that as ebooks continue to improve and become more mainstream (e.g., Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and the wild vortex of rumors circulating about Apple’s upcoming hardware), will this do anything to reduce the reliance on hard-copy? And is the preference for printouts coming more from students or faculty?

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.

I’ve been using Omni Focus for several months as my project/task manager. It’s a Mac software that nicely covers all the bases such as adding start dates, due dates, reminders, project notes, and multiple sorting configurations. One of my favorite features is its integration with Mac Mail where you can convert email items to tasks by forwarding them to your Focus inbox. However, every once in while, I have problems forwarding through one of my email accounts due to firewalls or some other related security measure. Today, though, I inadvertently discovered a work-around for this. If you highlight part of a message and then press CTRL-Click, you’ll see an option to add it to your Focus inbox. It even gives you the option of adding the due date from within your mail message. Pretty nifty.

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