iterativelearning

I’ve seen or heard quite a few new stories over the last couple of days on the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program (e.g., Education Week, NPR, Washington Post, Daily Caller ), and then today I saw in the Pennsylvania Independent that PA has qualified for the final round of 19.

In reading the details, it looks like not all the PA school districts chose to participate in the application process and apparently if PA receives funding it would only go to those schools who did.

From the ed tech angle, I’m assuming that the recipients will be able to allot a percentage towards hardware and software needs, but I haven’t read anything yet that states that.

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.

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’ve been spending some time perusing the empirical research related to social media and learning, and courtesy of Henry Jenkins blog I came across the 2010 Digital Media & Learning Conference They’ve posted videos from the plenary and keynote sessions, and I’m hoping to write some more detailed posts on these later this week. For example, Brigid Barron (well known for her work in Problem-Based & Project-Based Learning) is one of the panel participants.

Allan Collins and Richard Halvorson recently published Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. Today, Dr. Collins was at Penn State where he gave a great talk that related to some of the points outlined in his book.

One of the many thoughtful points I jotted down was: School will become less important as a venue for education Interesting in this is how it suggests a shift, … a shift, for example, that moves the student more to the center, and more as the one who assumes control over their learning. And as they assume more control, it becomes interesting to see what sorts of creative directions the student can then take it.

Good sessions today at PSU’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference.

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.

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Michael Wesch, Penn State University, Stanford University

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

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.

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PETE&C, MixedInk

Was skimming one of the recent editions of the The Scout Report and saw this little Scholarpress gem for using your WordPress blog as a course management tool. Of course this has been happening for a while already, but one kind of feature that’s kind of nifty about this plugin is the assignments feature where you can link multiple assignments to one due date.

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Scholarpress, Scout Report, WordPress

We spent part of the weekend down at the National Museum of American History. We hadn’t been there since its reopening. Typical of most DC museums, it’s got some great exhibits with opportunities to use your cellphone for learning more at your own pace. One of these was the Artifact Wall – Creating Hawai’i that looks at the history of Hawaii from different perspectives (e.g., “perception vs. reality”). When I tried the cellphone option, though, there was so much ambient noise that I could barely make out what the narrator was saying. Maybe it was just my phone, but another part of it was simply the location: it was in an open foyer (where there was lots of foot traffic) rather than one of the dedicated exhibition spaces.