iterativelearning

When it comes to academic research, lots of improvement has happened in terms of making more journal articles available in electronic format. But what has lagged behind somewhat is making electronic copies of book chapters. How often have you been in a situation where you only need one chapter from an edited volume, but because that volume is in high demand, there’s a long line of hold requests? I’m not a librarian and so I’m not in the loop on all the developments regarding journal or database pricing, etc., but it would be nice if some kind of arrangement could be worked out so researchers could obtain select copies of chapters with the same ease they now retrieve copies of individual journal articles.

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.

One of the recent Floss Weekly episodes features an interview with Nichole Yankelovich of Open Wonderland. Open Wonderland is an open source, Java-based toolkit for creating virtual or immersive environments, and one of the specific audiences they target is education.

Because it’s a toolkit, instructors or schools can customize it to meet their specific learning needs. Another advantage appeals to those concerned with privacy. Because it runs behind a firewall, teachers don’t really have to worry about cyber-bullying or other sorts of pernicious behavior that students may have to contend with in more open virtual world environments such as Second Life. Shu Schiller has an interesting article on this article when using Second Life within the context of an MBA-Information Systems class. However, that said, schools or educators can work around this issue by getting a Second Life premium account for about $10 and so in the end, I guess it kind of boils down to one of those common software trade-offs: do the development work in-house and reap the benefits of greater customization, etc. or go with what amounts to a hosted option with less flexibility.

TechTrends has a good piece on virtual gaming and instructional design (Atusi Hirumi, Bob Appelman, Lloyd Rieber, and Richard Van Eck). It’s a great and timely article, but one of the more interesting sections is when they get to the design section. With the ADDIE model as their general framework, they bifurcate the design phase where the game designers work on things like side quests, obstacles, challenges, and puzzles and the instructional designers focus on developing Learning Task Maps that specify enabling and prerequisite skills needed to achieve the overall goal.

They move on to discuss how the relationship between goals and objectives can be more fluid than with many traditional design projects because game designers may want to develop a challenge that is directly related to the goal.

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.

Allan Collins and Richard Halvorson recently published Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. Today, Dr. Collins was at Penn State where he gave a great talk that related to some of the points outlined in his book.

One of the many thoughtful points I jotted down was: School will become less important as a venue for education Interesting in this is how it suggests a shift, … a shift, for example, that moves the student more to the center, and more as the one who assumes control over their learning. And as they assume more control, it becomes interesting to see what sorts of creative directions the student can then take it.

Despite Twitter, I’m still a frequent user of RSS, and when it comes to readers, I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire (both the desktop and iPhone versions). It’s got that Mac look-and-feel and the 3-pane capability (folders, titles, posts) that saves me the hassle of launching full posts in a separate browser.

But recently the desktop version has been giving me troubles with what should be a very routine function: deleting folders. For some strange reason, every time I delete one, it magically reappears.

Apparently, there are others who had the same problem and they had good luck with a clean reinstall, so I tried that. But as a likely omen of things to come, quick and easy success was not to be had.

So, on to other options … Because I sync it with Google Reader, I thought that might be the culprit, so I turned off the syncing. But no luck there either. Then I tried unsubscribing on the odd chance that the problem was one of semantics (especially since the current version of the NetNewsWire UI no longer included a simple drop-down menu option for deleting folders). But still, no dice. So that left with me checking out some CTRL-Click options. The Show Info option kind of surprised me with its depth; it displayed five layers: Name, Refreshing, Persistence, Exporting, and Enclosures & Podcasts. Refreshing seemed to be the most relevant to my problem, so I ticked the Don’t Refresh option thinking that maybe the reason the folder kept reappearing was that the system kept wanting to refresh it as long as it had a connection to the Net. But I struck out there as well.

The Columbo-like detail in this puzzle is why they removed the Delete Folder option from their previous UI. It seems like a pretty standard option to me and one that wouldn’t really add much bloat.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, NetNewsWire

There’s been an expanding circle of discussion over the last few years about education delivered in the spirit of an open source model. And beyond the talk, there have been various implementations of it (MIT, Utah State, Tufts).

Perhaps an interesting variation on this trend is a company like Google who is not in the education business (in the traditional sense anyway), but has their Google Code University in which they make programming classes available via a Creative Commons license. So let’s say you have an interest in learning a programming language but aren’t sure you want to register for a full-fledged, traditional course. And let’s also say, you’re interested in learning Python because you’ve read that it’s one of the better languages for newbies to start with (e.g., 1, 2). Well, Google Code University would be a good option.

They organize the material into three categories: explanatory text, video, and applied exercises. The course designers have done a nice job of analyzing their audience as it doesn’t inundate the newbie with every little nuance related to Python, but enough to get the ‘programming hands’ a little dirty. Another interesting detail has to do with the video; it includes captioning, which not only accommodates hearing-impaired learners, but makes it easy for any one who may have missed a certain technical term, or its pronunciation to go back and see exactly what it was.

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Creative Commons, Google_Code_University

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?

Technorati Tags:
PETE&C, Andy_Petroski, Web 2.0