Especially in the context of EdTech and online learning, there’s lots of talk about ramping up innovation and creativity. But what exactly do these terms mean in practice? When we, as instructors, ask our students to do this, how do we define this for them? Mary Sheridan and Jennifer Roswell have a nice take on the term,
… innovative thinking has less to do with original creations and more to do with creatively combining existing resources (p. 23)
“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.
One of the many interesting educational trends that has attracted a fair bit of attention as a result of Web 2.0 tools is what’s simply referred to as, Informal learning. Despite the rather generic term, it’s generated interest among learning researchers because it looks at what drives people to learn without the formal structure of a class or training session.
Lifehacker has a nice example of this with their Lifehacker Night School series. In this series (which is free), they’re reaching out to people who want to know what’s happening under the software hood, but feel a little overwhelmed about exactly where to begin. Beyond the videos, Adam Dachis (the author of the tutorial) has corresponding posts that expand on some of the major points and define key terms. So if you’re feeling the need to release the inner nerd in you, go check it out.
Originally, it piqued my interest because it uses Ubuntu packages — my favorite Linux distro. Later on, I learned that it has plugins for Moodle and WordPress (among others). Of course, Moodle is well-known among ed tech’ers. And while WordPress is known more for blogging, you can find a good post over at ProfHacker on scaling it into a better LMS.
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.
Connectivist learning happens through the building of networks of information, contacts, and resources that are applied to real problems … Rather than formal and structured classes, connectivist learning is bursty (occurs in short, uneven spurts), driven by need and interest and is carried on beyond episodic classes, lectures and course
The part of this definition that interests me the most is bursty because of the way it envisions interaction and knowledge building outside the traditional boundaries of classes and lectures. When I think about tools like Facebook, Twitter, and the like, part of their appeal seems to be this episodic nature that perhaps presents interaction requirements as less burdensome and time-consuming, and therefore more likely to be engaged. From the research angle, the challenge is how to capture and analyze these episodic learning bursts. What about the interaction that students take outside the confines of the LMS? I can easily remember conversations I’ve had with students over the years who divulged how they created work spaces outside of the formal learning space (e.g., IM, Google Apps). A big part of this had to do with ease-of-use; these external tools were easier to use than those bundled with the LMS. Nevertheless, this still seems something worth following.
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.
I haven’t had much of a need to read up on international cell phone plans, but recently, I began collaborating with another grad student who’s in Namibia, Africa, and unfortunately, there’s no AT&T coverage, and so using our iPhones to call and text is an impossibility on a student budget (at least as far as my Googling as been able to uncover). Ideally, it sure would be nice if there would be a special ‘international researcher rate.’ Maybe this could happen through some sort of cooperative pool of universities from around the world? I guess today I’m feeling infused with optimism.
Edmodo seems like an interesting alternative to the traditional LMS. It has a Facebook-like interface, so most students should be able to intuit the UI pretty quickly. Another plus is the integration with mobile platforms. Although I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (you can try it for free), I’m definitely thinking about doing some small-scale pilots.
With Google’s