iterativelearning

I’ve been working through David McFarland’s book on JavaScript and jQuery the last week or so and while the book itself is great (e.g., clear explanations, good tutorials), I’ve got a usability quibble with it.

I bought the digital version from Amazon. However, with no Kindle Reader, that meant the experience would be delivered through Amazon’s Kindle-for-Mac tool. But when I got to the sample code snippets, the font size was so small that it rendered it practically invisible.

From a learning standpoint, the code samples seem just about as important as the explanations that surround them. I guess in this sense, maybe it’s more than just a (usability) quibble.

Perhaps this is just a Kindle-for-Mac issue, but it would be nice to at least have a toolbar option for modifying point-size.

When it comes to finding stories of educators in higher ed who’ve tried Twitter in their classrooms, the Chronicle’s Wired Campus is typically a good place to look. However, every once in a while something will bubble up via rss and a few days ago it pointed me to acagamic who shares some reflections on his experiment with Twitter in his AI and HCI-Games courses. The post is rich and worth reading in its entirety, but the design nugget most interesting to me is his use of weekly pie charts to show students’ Twitter activity. Early on, the activity wasn’t quite what he had hoped for, but once he started doing this, the activity went up not only in volume but in consistency as well. Of course, it’s not easy to see if there’s any kind of causal argument that can be made here, but interesting nonetheless.

Creative Commons image credit: lefortune

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

Educause has an interview with William Rankin of Abilene Christian University who talks a bit about their mobile learning initiative, part of which involves distributing an iPhone or iPod Touch to incoming students. When they move into discussing how the device supports learning, he mentions some good ones

• Lowering barriers to participation (e.g., by using WordPress widgets such as postie, students can contribute all kinds of media by simply sending an email)
• Polling
• Extending learning outside the physical classroom context (e.g., field work, lab)

The last one, extending the classroom, is one that I’m most interested in following because of its implications for pushing learning opportunities into many different contexts. For example, because their university is located in Texas, he describes students using mobile devices for Range Management projects.

TechTrends has a good piece on virtual gaming and instructional design (Atusi Hirumi, Bob Appelman, Lloyd Rieber, and Richard Van Eck). It’s a great and timely article, but one of the more interesting sections is when they get to the design section. With the ADDIE model as their general framework, they bifurcate the design phase where the game designers work on things like side quests, obstacles, challenges, and puzzles and the instructional designers focus on developing Learning Task Maps that specify enabling and prerequisite skills needed to achieve the overall goal.

They move on to discuss how the relationship between goals and objectives can be more fluid than with many traditional design projects because game designers may want to develop a challenge that is directly related to the goal.