iterativelearning

In my technical writing class, my students recently finished a Documentation module by writing instructions for a video creation software (Animoto). In reviewing and testing their instructions, I was reminded of how easy this tool is to use. In a few short steps, you can create a video, add text, and even a soundtrack. It’s also easy to distribute and share across platforms like YouTube.

This kind of tool-simplicity allows students to focus on what they want to do with it, rather than worrying about the intricacies of how to use it. When I think about the future look of learning systems, I’d like to see more attention paid to ease of use and cross-platform sharing. Ideally, learning systems should be able to incorporate an Animoto-like tool where, in the case of my tech writing class, it would be easy for them to create instructional videos. In Alan Cooper’s well-known work on Interaction Design, he mentions that the best interface is none at all, meaning, of course, that the interface is so helpful that the user isn’t even conscious of its presence. Now there’s an ideal worth remembering.

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Alan Cooper, Animoto

Campus Technology has a story on a collaboration between Moodle and Google. Specifically, MoodleRooms will be integrated with Google Apps for Education. So practically this means that,

[t]hrough the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition

Although, it’s been a while since I’ve ventured into the Moodlesphere, I’ve done some informal piloting of Google Apps for Education in some of my classes and anecdotally, students have mentioned that they’ve found it to be fairly intuitive. Another benefit was familiarity: every student knows the Google name/brand; also, the university logo appears at the top of the login page.

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Moodle, Campus Technology

Wiggio has updated its online collaboration space to include capabilities such as group email addresses, real-time file editing, and photo and video sharing. Although there are many other online collaboration tools (e.g., Basecamp, Zoho Projects), Wiggio primarily targets education and academics. Like these others, it has a pretty expansive array of solid features, but a couple that stand out for me are texting and voice notes.

As someone who teaches online, when I think about collaboration, ease of use is an important factor. With most of the traditional LMSs I’m aware of, texting hasn’t yet been built in, so whenever students want to participate they need to login to the site and then navigate through at least a couple of layers until they reach the place where they share thoughts, ideas, feedback, and so forth. Texting leapfrogs these layers.

The voice notes feature offers the potential to enhance the media richness of the collaborative experience. Again, here too, Wiggio makes it easy (i.e., click and record). When collaborators can not only see and read what another person has written, but also hear him or her, it introduces another dimension that expands it from essentially a monochromatic to polychromatic experience.

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Wiggio, Learning Management Systems

In a meeting today, we were talking about ideas for a workshop on DE pedagogy. During one part of our discussion, we were sharing stories about how we use the various tools to support our teaching strategies, when one of the faculty shared an interesting detail about the Announcements tool.

With our LMS tool, WebCT, you can configure an announcement to appear as a pop-up window when the user logs into the site. Of course, this is designed to make it practically impossible for students to miss the announcement, which in theory, is a good thing, especially if you want to alert them to something important like a change in deadline or crucial assignment detail. But here’s the interesting usability angle: this colleague mentioned that some students had indicated to her that they ignore pop-up windows because they view them in the same way they view pop-up ads in all other websites — spam. I wonder if this was really the case or if the students were just using it as an escape hatch for avoiding responsibility for whatever the announcement may have obligated them to. If legit, it would be interesting to know what the rough percentage is out there of student users who ignore them? Has ignoring pop-up windows become such an ingrained user behavior that it’s applied even if they’re in a LMS? Based on a recent study at NC State

students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs.

maybe …

Image credit: Swiss Bones

Sometimes faculty or student groups just need to do super-quick, on-the-spot polls (e.g., should we write about this topic or that?). Yet many conventional LMS systems require faculty or users to click through a cumbersome series of options and approvals in order to do this, and for students, it’s equally difficult if not impossible. Reading Lifehacker’s short post on Google’s Moderator tool got me thinking a little bit about this, and by way of association, how newcomer Wiggio, the collaboration tool geared primarily towards students, makes it quite easy.

A while back, I blogged about a company (Inigral) that was looking to position Facebook as a complement to traditional LMSs rather than as a replacement.

Now, Jeffrey Young over at the CHE Tech blog is reporting on projects that look to integrate platforms like FB with emergency response notification systems for college campuses. One project underway is over at the University of Maryland and is being headed up by HCI visionaries, Ben Shneiderman (Designing the User Interface) and Jenny Preece (Interaction Design; Beyond HCI). Young does a nice job of including those with concerns about how such a system might be abused (e.g., false alarms) as well as those touting its advantages, but the detail that stood out most to me was the description of a former New Orleans resident (now a student at UCLA), who explained that when Katrina hit, she was going to social networking arenas like Facebook for information because the cellphone networks were useless.

Guest e-Literate blogger Michael Statton describes a project in which Facebook is designed to complement rather than compete with the traditional LMS. Developed by Inigral, it offers a “private, secure application on Facebook.” The attention to privacy could nicely address the lingering dilemma of mixing purely social groups with purely academic — domains that perhaps a significant group of students and faculty would prefer to keep separate. He also explains that schools can integrate whatever branding strategy they have by doing things like designing unique skins. It seems to me that this might have some good potential to expand since it moves adoption of instructional software beyond confining binaries.