Last week I had a chance to do a little podcast experiment with Skype. It came about as a result of an EdTec class I’m teaching where I interviewed a guest blogger — fellow ed-tech’er, Andy Petroski from Harrisburg U. Although Mac software like GarageBand makes it pretty easy to produce a podcast if you’re the only person involved, it gets a little more involved if you want to tie it to an interview that you run through VOIP (e.g., Skype).
Fortunately, I came across an excellent resource from the New Media Center at Mary Washington University. It saves you all the tech details and breaks it down to the most essential tools: Soundflower and LineIn – both of which are free.
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.
It opened with a keynote by The headliner was Michael Wesch. He, of course, gave us lots to think about, but one detail I’ve been mulling over for the moment is the connection between his early anthropological research in Papua New Guinea and his recent work on the impact of social media in education (Digital Ethnography). More to the point, he explained how when he first traveled to New Guinea he didn’t know the language, was unknown to those who lived there, and generally speaking, had no connection to speak of; and so, he was confronted with the challenge of creating a new identity. He then went on to explain that in a similar way, we are challenged to forge identities in this (comparatively) new and rapidly expanding social media landscape. How will these identities be developed by students in online learning spaces? How will these identities be reflected in personal avatars? Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is doing some interesting work in this area.
Tech is becoming (probably has been now for some time) big business in education. So it’s important to regularly step back and double-check we’re not becoming too bedazzled by the eye candy.
I thought of this once again after seeing Andy Petroski’s presentation at this year’s PETE&C conference. Part of his solid talk involved relaying stories from students’ implementations of Web 2.0 in their K-12 classrooms. Before he got into the details of the stories, though, he emphasized that teachers can’t assume that all kids are highly fluent in 2.0 tools; especially when we’re surrounded with lots of stories that depict kids as hooked on gadgets, it’s an easy stereotype to fall prey to. Yes, okay, most of the Net-Gen’ers know Facebook and Text-ing, but how comfortable are they in other zones (blogs, wikis, and RSS)? And how well do they know more than the surface-level features of these tools? What about using them strategically (e.g., for learning)? How wide is their bandwidth of knowledge?
There has been lots happening on the education-video games front for quite some time now (James Paul Gee, Marc Prensky, AECT Virtual Educators, Educause Virtual Worlds). While all this research is helpful towards connecting the practice to relevant theory(ies), sometimes, teachers just want to dive in and explore what these games are all about. What are they like from an experiential perspective? Or very simply, what is it like to play the darn things?
Well, one option is Penn State University’s Gaming library that offers quite a few. For example, in the Environmental Science category, there is Operation Climate Control; moving more towards the Humanities end of the spectrum, there is The Playhouse which centers on Shakespeare. The game titles I saw were developed in Flash, so you can experiment with them directly in the browser. They’ve also got a page with additional resources on gaming (e.g., development tools, showcase), plus plenty more if you have the time.
Diigo has gained a pretty significant following among educators as an alternative to Delicious because you can do more with it. If you’re new to Diigo, it’s a free social bookmarking software that comes as an extension to your browser (e.g., Firefox). In addition to tagging and creating groups, you can annotate pages with stickies, find other users via public annotations, tweet bookmarked pages, create lists, as well as various other things. So, if an instructor would like to have students do more than just passively read web pages, a tool like Diigo stands out as a good option.
On the new feature front, I recently found out that they’ve got a WebSlides option that makes it extremely easy to string together a series of web pages and present them to a class or group. One way to quickly create a slideshow is to select a list from your Diigo collection and then click the slides widget. Another option is to create them directly from an RSS feed. In true Web 2.0 fashion, viewers can also become participants by annotating the slides. Especially for people teaching online, this would be another way for both teacher and students to generate interactive discussions about web-based materials. It also has other options which you can check out from Diigo’s intro video.
Journals like Kairos show some very creative approaches to sharing research. Although, it’s primarily an academic research journal, the creativity of its multimodal publications, recently got me thinking again about the different questions that instructors who read this journal must grapple with when they start brainstorming strategies for moving away from using MSWord (or any other conventional word processing application) as the default publication platform. With all the hubbub surrounding Web 2.0, they want to move away from requiring students to submit formal writing assignments as static text, but find a few uneasy questions along the way.
How can I make it easy for students to create engaging multimedia compositions that don’t require them to learn programming?
How can I find a tool that’s affordable?
How can I find a platform that makes it easy for multiple peers to comment and question?
Blogs offer an option, but it’s more diary-like orientation isn’t really compatible with an assignment that has a definite closing date and essentially constitutes a different genre. One option that shows some intriguing possibilities is Sophie. Developed by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Media Literacy, it offers many of the capabilities that make a mono-modal composition into a multimodal one (image, video, sound). It also comes with a timeline and a reply/comment feature so readers can interact with authors. This is ideal for instructors who want peer discussion of a student work to occur in a more closed environment than the web, but not to be relegated to something as brittle as the comment feature in MSWord or a similar word-processing app. Sophie definitely deserves exploration by any faculty looking to move student writing or publication projects into realms more consistent with 21st century expression.
New Media Literacy … What is it? How do you define it? This is one of those terms that’s been used so much that it’s become kind of a generic catch-all for anything that relates to learning environments that incorporate Web 2.0 apps. The New Media Literacies Project has a video that defines it in terms of words such as negotiation (e.g., moving into/across different spaces), appropriation (e.g., remixing), and play (e.g., experimenting with/in surrounding environment).
As they lay out this definition, they tend to peg it to the word skills, which seems to me a little too reductionist and more reminiscent of industrial-age learning environments. Instead, I like the alternative they bring in towards the end, competencies, which, as Henry Jenkins says in the video, doesn’t restrict it to just education and workplace contexts, but citizenship and creative expression.
Was glad to read in Henry Jenkins’ post of a PBS production on New Media and video games that gets away from an old, sky-is-falling perspective, namely one that envisions the relationship between kids and video games as a precipitous downward spiral. I like the way Jenkins puts it in terms of whose power of expression has been the most dominant and how this has reinforced such a belief.
In most cases, a bias towards the adult perspectives offered by parents and teachers over those advanced by young people, who often lacked a language through which to defend experiences which were clearly meaningful to them
I see an an interesting opportunity for instructional designers. Teachers could integrate a writing component where students, perhaps in small groups, draft an argument that lays out the case for the educational benefits they perceive in their interactions with this New Media and/or video game(s). Students could also extend this articulation through oral presentations.
