iterativelearning

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.

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.

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Creative Commons, Google_Code_University

Just a little north of my hometown, Seattle, was this year’s OpenEd conference in Vancouver BC and if you weren’t able to make it (like me), they assembled a montage of different attendees’ impressions that include some folks well known in the Open Education community such as Stephen Downes and David Wiley. One interesting detail that was new to me was the Peer-to-Peer University.

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OER, Open Education, conference

As with other professional groups, many educators have integrated Twitter into their digital lifestream and in some cases, their classrooms. But Paul Hudson’s article in techradar makes a good case (as part of a larger argument urging more thought and caution about ostensibly free web apps) for considering Identi.ca as your microblogging platform. In addition to cloning your Twitter stream, he explains that it operates on the OpenMicroBlogging standard and supports OpenID. Essentially, this openness gives you access to your data whenever you need it.

Like Twitter, you can use Identi.ca through the web or a dedicated client. As a Mac user, I like Nambu.

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Identi.ca, Nambu, techradar, Paul Hudson

The user-friendliness of Ubuntu has certainly helped widened the popularity of open source options. Dell, for example, now offers computers bundled with Ubuntu. Sun’s Open Office is the office suite that comes with Ubuntu and they’ve recently released the latest version (3.1). One particularly nice addition to their word processing app, Writer, is the ability to quickly add a reply to a comment. You can check out more details here.

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Open Office, Dell, Ubuntu

I first became familiar with Sakai when I was at Virginia Tech, and at that time (around 2004-05), they were doing some very good work with their instance of it. Sakai now has a screencast that previews some upcoming features planned for its next release – version 3.

It’s got a dashboard that runs on Ajax (or something very similar) so you can move around various elements in a way that suits your needs. You can also completely customize your home page by starting with a blank page, or if you like the visual suggestions of templates, you can choose from various options there too. One key component of this next version is widgets (e.g., create a poll). Traditional LMSs can do this too, but what Sakai seems to be stressing is a better user experience — it’s easier, more intuitive and quicker.

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Sakai

I was cruising through TechMeme this afternoon and caught Tim O’Reilly’s post on Obama making history by appointing the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. He nicely lays out the case why Aneesh Chopra is a good choice (as a kind of rebuttal to TechCrunch), but the part that really caught my attention was Chopra’s work in using technology as an enabler in education during his most recent stint as Secretary for Technology for the state of Virginia. Very briefly, O’Reilly lists three,

the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country, the Physics Flexbook

integrating iTunes U with Virginia’s state education assessment framework

the Learning Apps Development Challenge, a competition for the best iPhone and iPod Touch applications for middle-school math teaching

Intrigued by Flexbook, I took a quick look at the demo and it offers some nice customization options, and because, it’s on the web, there’s none of the lag time that happens with traditional textbook publication cycles. Customization and modularity are key when it comes to web-based learning tools and I think that these needs partly explain why there’s been synergy between open source and education (e.g., Sakai, Connexions, MIT Open Courseware).

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Aneesh Chopra, Tim O’Reilly, MIT, Sakai, Connexions

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

The Open Education Conference has its Call for Papers available. It’s set up around what they call three broad strands: Startup Camp; Sustaining Steps; and The Future. Under the sustainability thread, one sub-topic that looks interesting is their exploration of the link between the level of participation and the choice of tech tool (How can technology choices foster architectures of participation?).

Credit: Creative Commons blog

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Open Education, Conference

In my Writing for the Web class, I typically suggest GIMP as an alternative to Illustrator. It’s free and doesn’t restrict students to one of the campus labs. But getting acquainted with the interface and learning the GIMP-specific terminology can present a bit of a challenge for some. So where to go? The GIMP has a good set of layered tutorials, but Six Revisions has also recently posted some good tutorials. Visually-oriented learners might want to head over to Meet the Gimp.

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GIMP, Six Revisions