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.
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
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.