iterativelearning

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.

There’s been an expanding circle of discussion over the last few years about education delivered in the spirit of an open source model. And beyond the talk, there have been various implementations of it (MIT, Utah State, Tufts).

Perhaps an interesting variation on this trend is a company like Google who is not in the education business (in the traditional sense anyway), but has their Google Code University in which they make programming classes available via a Creative Commons license. So let’s say you have an interest in learning a programming language but aren’t sure you want to register for a full-fledged, traditional course. And let’s also say, you’re interested in learning Python because you’ve read that it’s one of the better languages for newbies to start with (e.g., 1, 2). Well, Google Code University would be a good option.

They organize the material into three categories: explanatory text, video, and applied exercises. The course designers have done a nice job of analyzing their audience as it doesn’t inundate the newbie with every little nuance related to Python, but enough to get the ‘programming hands’ a little dirty. Another interesting detail has to do with the video; it includes captioning, which not only accommodates hearing-impaired learners, but makes it easy for any one who may have missed a certain technical term, or its pronunciation to go back and see exactly what it was.

Technorati Tags:
Creative Commons, Google_Code_University

At this year’s PETE&C conference, one of the presenters, Andy Petroski mentioned a collaborative writing software called MixedInk. Because I’m almost always interested in new tools like this, I made a note to check it out at a later date.

Today, I finally had a few minutes over lunch to give it a whirl. Quite impressive and definitely has potential for learning/classroom application. In just my short time with it, a couple of real stand-out features were

• Remixing – you can build and easily integrate your work with other group members by searching a pane that sits adjacent to the main writing/editing window
• Browsing & Rating – you can easily browse the drafts of other group members and rate them; in a classroom setting, this could be very handy for more quickly identifying those sections or segments that students consider the most effective; teachers could even ask them to use the comment feature to justify their selection(s).

Again, in my quick exploration of MixedInk, the only limitation I found from a teaching perspective is privacy. It looks as though your group writing projects are publicly visible and many teachers would likely prefer student collaborations to occur behind a password-protected site.

*Update*: found out that MixedInk plans to offer teacher accounts. One package is $11/month and includes password-protection and a feature for pre-registering students that would eliminate the need to send email invitations.

Technorati Tags:
PETE&C, MixedInk

Continuing a bit more from yesterday’s post, another factor that sometimes gets overlooked when it comes to implementing Web 2.0 in education is disparities in bandwidth. It’s probably pretty safe to say that there are a lot of college faculty who enjoy not only high-speed connections at their campus offices, but also at their homes. But this isn’t necessarily the case with students, especially when it comes to those out in the rural areas. And, of course, one of the key reasons students from rural areas enroll in distance ed courses is because of the commute time. Yet, it’s easy to think, in the year 2010, that we’ve conquered the broadband mountain. Not so, says the FCC. Issues related to cost and complexity discourage 93 million Americans from broadband participation.

via TechCrunch – 1/3 Of Americans Don’t Use Fast Internet

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

A lot of educators have heard of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig’s brainchild, but fewer are clear on exactly what it actually does and allows. Some mistakenly think it’s a place where anything goes; at the other end of the spectrum, some may find the task of approaching anything that comes close to copyright quicksand as too much of a hassle and just avoid it altogether. For those that fall into either of these two groups, Rod Lucier has a nice presentation specifically tailored towards teachers that breaks down the essentials of how to use it. Although it’s 20 minutes long, it’s a very clear walkthrough, and so if you’re new to Creative Commons, it’s definitely worth watching.

To get you on your way, he also points to some sites that specifically participate in the Creative Commons licensing system – Flickr, Blip, and ccMixter. New to me was the music source, OPsound.

[via: Slideshare.net and The Clever Sheep]

Technorati Tags:
Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, Rod Lucier

The Unofficial Apple Weblog reports that iTunes U has reached 100 million downloads. Given this number, I’m curious as to what’s happening post-download: how many people are researching how iTunes U resources are being used? What kinds of effects do they seem to have on learning, especially in Distance Ed environments? One interesting example is from Dani McKinney of SUNY-Fredonia who found a positive effect when it came to taking an exam.

Technorati Tags:
TUAW, iTunes U