iterativelearning

As luck would have it, FastCompany reports on a University of Washington study that relates to my previous post. One of the culprits that this study identifies with ebooks is lack of cognitive mapping that would provide cues helpful to navigation (e.g., Where am I?) and retention (How can I make a note of this when I need to remember it for the test?).

So here we’re reminded of what’s become something of an aphorism in the instructional design world: think beyond the tools. And when you’re talking about ebooks in educational contexts, student needs differ from those of the general-purpose, leisure reader. Unlike the leisure reader, students need to exhibit and demonstrate understanding to their teachers (at the very least) and genuine options for interaction can facilitate this.

Flickr image credit: Torley

From a recent issue of Educause Quarterly:

“As an increasing number of states and educational institutions declare their commitment to moving to digital-only platforms for educational texts, it seems wise to consider a fundamental question about the future of educational materials, in terms of both content and delivery:

Why is a book the best metaphor for envisioning this future?”

I think Michael Mayrath, Priya Nihalani, and Scott Perkins nailed it here. This question comes out of a study they ran at Abilene Christian University in which they developed a mobile app for students in a general level Statistics class.

The whole article is worth reading, but I’ll just focus on one part that kind of lingers with me. For designers involved with this kind of work, approaching them as Apps rather than ebooks seems like it could also influence their thinking at a subconscious level, since when you think about it, the word ebook still has a whole lot of analog connotations and as a result, might still constrain their vision for designing something more genuinely innovative.

Whether as part of their formal research agenda or just general curiosity, there’s been a very noticeable trend among educators who are interested in whether Twitter is something more than just sharing what you had for breakfast or similarly superficial topic. Can it, for example, promote student engagement? One of the more memorable launch-points for me on this question was Rey Junco’s presentation via the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

More recently, the March issue of the Journal of Online Learning & Teaching has a piece by Badge, et al., who look at Twitter use among two groups of students (one undergrad, one grad) as a result of loaning them iPod touches. Within the undergrad group, they observe evidence of an emergent community of practice (e.g., Wenger) when they noticed that students continued to use Twitter even after returning the devices. Perhaps this also sparks another line of investigation … when or how do we identify distinctions between emergent communities of practice and sustained CoPs? 6 months? 1 year?

futurelearn has a post on plugin devices from Steelcase called pucks that allow students to connect with whatever devices they brought with them to the classroom. Although it’s not entirely clear from the description in the post, I’m assuming that students could connect their device to a classroom projector via the puck and an hdmi or vga cable. Even better will be the day when students can avoid the extra burden of cables and connect to the projector wirelessly.

We all know the 2.0 buzz words (or clichés depending on your level of cynicism) … blogs, tags, wikis and podcasting. But some of these are easier to execute than others. Podcasting and screencasting can be two that definitely require more time and effort (if you want to do them well, anyway).

For the Mac users out there, it’s looking like the next version of OS X is going to make podcasting quite a bit easier. 9to5Mac gives a glimpse of what may be happening with the upcoming Podcast Publisher. If its final final form surfaces as described, one feature that might especially capture instructors’ attention is the split screen, where students could view demo actions as well as their teacher’s friendly mug. This rich combo could certainly do a lot to boost social presence.

One other thought … added ease of use to this tool also makes it ideal for encouraging more student-generated podcasts. (Who says teachers should have all the fun?) With all that goes into making a good podcast, it seems like there’s plenty of potential for rich, authentic learning experiences.

A friend sent me a presentation by Mike Sharples of the Learning Sciences Research Institute that looks into what teaching will be like in the next 25 years. On one of the slides, Sharples identifies the Widening gap between learning inside and outside school. What’s interesting in this gap is how it suggests how students have used the web to enable more self-directed learning outside the walls of the traditional classroom. But what’s even more interesting is how students are designing their own learning experiences as a result of stitching together those web-based resources they’ve determined to be most relevant to advancing their objectives. To what extent are teachers and/or schools paying attention to this self-directed learning that may not necessarily be visible in the formal assignments the students submit for review? Are there opportunities here for collaboratively designed instruction (between teacher and student)?

Jared Newman of Technologizer has a post on a detective-genre video game that’s scheduled to come out in May called LA Noire. Newman explains that while it’s got the usual shootout scenarios, it also challenges the player to do more than just survive gun fights.

LA Noire promises to emphasize interrogation and critical thinking to solve crimes.

When I watched the trailer, one of the ways the game attempts to do this is for the player to focus on building cases and analyzing behaviors of witnesses or suspects, which are the sorts of situations that can prompt game-players to decipher ambiguities and subtleties (e.g., higher order thinking skills).

Another interesting tidbit in the trailer is when the voice-over quickly explains the underlying Motion Scan technology that makes the behavior analysis more realistic:

Motion-scan … utilizes 32 high definition cameras to capture actors’ faces

This reminded me a little of some of the innovative digital skin rendering graphics work (e.g., Avatar) that I saw during a tour last October of the USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.

With Google’s recent announcement of editing docs on mobile devices, it got me thinking about why I haven’t seen the same for wikis. I use PBWorks and really like it, but one limitation is the lack of mobile editing.

Wikis seem like a good match for mobile because so much of the adding and editing tends to happen in smaller chunks rather than long, winding paragraphs. A mobile option for wikis might also increase levels of interaction and participation – that ongoing goal of DE educators.

Flickr image credit: Diego_3336

DuckDuckGo (my search tool of choice) came out with a new look and so I used the occasion to check out some more offerings under the hood.

One that I hadn’t noticed before was the automatic password generator. For example, enter pw strong in the search box and it automatically generates a strong password for you. Or if you want to drop it down a few levels, enter pw avg for one of average or medium strength.

Spending most of the week at the annual AECT gathering and this morning saw a good session on mobile learning and game design. Chris Blakesley talked about the University of Wisconsin’s Aris project. As I understood it, it’s an open source authoring tool that taps the affordances of narrative – a universal tool for knowing as well as telling. The demo presents a case scenario of reporter covering a protest on the UW-Madison campus in the 60s. Beyond their demo, one other interesting deployment I liked was by some faculty at the University of New Mexico who use it to teach Spanish 101. Essentially students use it to explore the nearby Los Griegos neighborhood, and in doing that, hopefully move their understanding of the language beyond just memorizing verb tenses and vocabulary.