iterativelearning

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.

Technorati Tags:
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Roger McHaney, Educause

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.

In one of my classes this week we were talking about Rapid Instructional Design. Tom Kuhlmann has a good post on 3 Ways to define it in the context of e-Learning.

1. Design an Interactive Look & Feel
2. Create Exploratory Content
3. Provide a reason to use the information

He makes a compelling case for each of these three definitions, but one that particularly resonates with me is the emphasis on creating exploratory content. He essentially highlights the disconnect between the way some e-learning modules artificially construct the human learning process (i.e., in neat, linear steps) and the way most people actually learn — through nonlinear exploration (In fact, exploration is a critical part of learning).

I like this link that he makes between interactivity being driven by exploratory discovery rather than being driven by the technology.

When it comes to technology and the classroom, it’s hard not to hear at least one person mention Twitter. Among higher ed faculty, you can find your Twitter aficionados and your detractors. Mashaable Mashable reports on Purdue University’s development of their own customized application (Hotseat) that combines both Twitter and Facebook. After looking at the intro video [scroll to the bottom of the post to see it], they’ve configured it with the same 140-character limit, but have added a voting feature. So, for example, a professor could see how voting patterns identify specific content areas that need further elaboration. In theory, this would help faculty more quickly get a read on confusion. Another possible advantage is that unlike clickers, the language and terms of the communication is being determined directly by the students.

What’s interesting from a research standpoint is how this isn’t a story of one early-adopter faculty who has a techie-fondness for Twitter, but rather one of a school and its broader, more systematic effort to see if this technology actually resonates with students.

Technorati Tags:
Instructional Design, Mashable, Purdue, Educational Technology

I like using ebooks. Among other things, it’s easier to do strategic searches (e.g., CMD-F) and most offer a pretty decent variety of annotation tools. But there’s a difference between using a dedicated hardware device (e.g., Kindle) and one delivered exclusively through the web. For example, in the case of the latter, many universities use netLibrary or some variation on that. At my university’s library, one of the ebook publishers made available through the netlibrary portal is the National Academies Press (NAS). In general, the interface is very usable and intuitive, but one feature I think that would improve its user value would be to add a navigate-by-page option. Many times I know the specific page I want to jump to, and even though NAS has a table of contents positioned on the right side of the screen, it only gives page ranges, so even after you navigate to that range, slow page caches make it more time-consuming than it needs to be move to the intended target page.

The design could perhaps be revised by putting the Go To page box where the Search box currently sits and then moving the Search box to one of its more common locations (e.g., upper-right).