Audrey Waters has a thoughtful post on opening up LMSs for API development.

Educational data is stuck in silos, something fostered by educational software – administrative and instructional – that makes it cumbersome at best and impossible at worst to move data in and out of systems. As a result, there’s lots of extra clerical work that educators and administrators have to do – recreating rosters, copying grades, downloading CSVs, copying-and-pasting, and so on. All because educational apps and software do not, as a rule, talk to one another.

What’s the hurdle here? FERPA? Simple resistance to change? Exploring this issue I think would make for a great panel at a conference like AECT.

I’ve been working through David McFarland’s book on JavaScript and jQuery the last week or so and while the book itself is great (e.g., clear explanations, good tutorials), I’ve got a usability quibble with it.

I bought the digital version from Amazon. However, with no Kindle Reader, that meant the experience would be delivered through Amazon’s Kindle-for-Mac tool. But when I got to the sample code snippets, the font size was so small that it rendered it practically invisible.

From a learning standpoint, the code samples seem just about as important as the explanations that surround them. I guess in this sense, maybe it’s more than just a (usability) quibble.

Perhaps this is just a Kindle-for-Mac issue, but it would be nice to at least have a toolbar option for modifying point-size.

When it comes to finding stories of educators in higher ed who’ve tried Twitter in their classrooms, the Chronicle’s Wired Campus is typically a good place to look. However, every once in a while something will bubble up via rss and a few days ago it pointed me to acagamic who shares some reflections on his experiment with Twitter in his AI and HCI-Games courses. The post is rich and worth reading in its entirety, but the design nugget most interesting to me is his use of weekly pie charts to show students’ Twitter activity. Early on, the activity wasn’t quite what he had hoped for, but once he started doing this, the activity went up not only in volume but in consistency as well. Of course, it’s not easy to see if there’s any kind of causal argument that can be made here, but interesting nonetheless.

Creative Commons image credit: lefortune

… innovative thinking has less to do with original creations and more to do with creatively combining existing resources (p. 23)

via: (2010) Design Literacies, Learning and Innovation in the Digital Age

Via Not[Trivial]

You can find more info here.

As anyone who has taught online already knows, blogs certainly have solid potential as a platform for facilitating discussions, but as blogs mature, students can perceive them as just another assignment-box to check. Aware of this reality, teachers then don their creativity caps with the hope of designing blog assignments that encourage discussions to flow more organically, where students are participating in more self-directed styles. Who knows, maybe a more topically organized interface would allow for better usability, and therefore help faculty with meeting this goal? Perhaps the topics could be arranged in one or more circles with each topic being click-able. And to add a little more usability sugar to the mix, maybe topics could be named (e.g., folksonomy) and managed by assigned student-facilitators. Perhaps it’s time to think about alternative designs for the education blog.

Flickr image credit: cogdogblog

Last Christmas, I had a little time to catch up on some novels and so I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to my iPhone. Unfortunately life intervened and I didn’t have a chance to finish it, but it jumped back to the top of my To-Read list after just finishing Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U. Part of her book describes how people use social networks (or social networking practices) to hack their own educational experiences and in the process of doing this, she gives a shout-out to Doctorow’s Magic Kingdom.

Cory Doctorow described an entire economy that ran on whuffie, a reputation-based currency.

With this Sci-Fi vision in mind, Kamenetz then follows this up with an interesting question that relates to motivation and the design of online learning contexts:

What if there was a way for students to start building whuffie from their first class, freshman year?

I like this more incremental and holistic approach, because especially when I think about collaboration in online learning, it’s often difficult to expect students to form and establish cohesive groups with people they’ve likely never met and more significantly, for projects that are confined to a traditional 16-week term. If students began building online identities and reputations (whuffie) early on in their collegiate experience, then ideally, teachers could think about how collaborative designs could be linked to that existing network.

Wikispaces is definitely distinguishing itself here. While lots of wiki platforms have comment features, the comments aren’t contextualized; instead, they’re typically aggregated at the bottom of the page which requires the user to first scroll down the page to the comments section and then to scroll back up and then carefully search for that section of text that the comment corresponds to (and hoping not to forget the gist of that comment while hunting down that specific piece of text). This requires too much work. Wikis are well known for their ease of use and the process of commenting should be just as easy.

Do not appoint a group leader. In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group’s thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction.

In theory, this makes a lot of sense, but within the frame of my own teaching experience, I’ve usually found that most students prefer a group leader. They typically prefer somebody to function as the leader (unless of course that person is engaging in tyrannical behaviors). Anecdotally, I’ve heard how they like the leader as an arbiter of more complex decisions and one who reminds members of overall group goals. So where does this predilection for leaders spring from? Is it conditioning? Lack of evidence or compelling stories of successful implementation? Is change more likely by teachers assuming a greater role? Have teachers expected too much from students when it comes to building their own capacity for designing leader-less groups?