Audrey Waters has a thoughtful post on opening up LMSs for API development.
Educational data is stuck in silos, something fostered by educational software – administrative and instructional – that makes it cumbersome at best and impossible at worst to move data in and out of systems. As a result, there’s lots of extra clerical work that educators and administrators have to do – recreating rosters, copying grades, downloading CSVs, copying-and-pasting, and so on. All because educational apps and software do not, as a rule, talk to one another.
What’s the hurdle here? FERPA? Simple resistance to change? Exploring this issue I think would make for a great panel at a conference like AECT.
Especially in the context of EdTech and online learning, there’s lots of talk about ramping up innovation and creativity. But what exactly do these terms mean in practice? When we, as instructors, ask our students to do this, how do we define this for them? Mary Sheridan and Jennifer Roswell have a nice take on the term,
… innovative thinking has less to do with original creations and more to do with creatively combining existing resources (p. 23)
The New York Times has a piece that renews the debate over whether or not ed tech software really makes a positive difference on learning outcomes. One of the people they talk to is a representative from the Software and Information Industry Association who argues that the problem is not the software but the lack of adequate training.
… the problem was not that companies overpromise, but that schools often do not properly deploy the products or train teachers to use them.
Finger-pointing aside, I think there would be many teachers who would actually agree that one of the factors is the lack of training (and lack of money to make that training possible). Of course, training also has its detractors who argue over ROI. But where I think training gets a bad reputation is its short-sightedness. Instead of a quick one or two-day workshop to learn the basic functionalities of the software, why not also complement it with a more sustained learning initiative designed to facilitate creative strategies for engaging students? Why not have the teachers work with the tool on a regular basis and collaborate with their colleagues on different approaches to using it in their classrooms? Instead of setting it up as a workshop, perhaps a studio concept might be more appropriate?
The O’Reilly Tools of Change site has an interview with Matt McInnis of Inkling who talks about what they see going on in the digital-textbook market. For instance, McInnis mentions students’ preference for downloading specific chapters rather than entire books. Feature-wise, he mentions they integrate Google Search and Wikipedia. On this latter point, it seems like another good addition would be Wolfram Alpha. What student wouldn’t want a quick, reliable reference for checking anything that can be quantified?
If you’re not familiar with it yet, ds106 has been doing all kinds of innovative and creative things when it comes to extending the online learning space. And today, I spotted another one of their creative samplings — this one for sparking student interest in one of their future learning adventures.
Ed-Tech: the established thinking is that pedagogy should precede technology. But in a review of Cathy Davidson’s new book Now You See It, we see an instance of the reverse:
She and her Duke colleagues worked with Apple to give every entering freshmen an iPod, and then they sat back and watched as students and teachers developed innovate [sic] and collaborative ways to incorporate iPods into their work … No one could have predicted all the ways the iPods enhanced learning once they were in the hands of students and teachers — and that’s a central point of Cathy Davidson’s new book Now You See It.
So what was the key ingredient to this deviation from the established line of thought? Was it the demographic (e.g., college-aged students as opposed to a younger, K-12 crowd)? Were students asked to take more active roles in the instructional designs? Or was it just an outlier? I’m curious to know if Davidson elaborates on this in her book.
I’m using VoiceThread in the EdTec class I’m teaching this summer and was curious about students’ perceptions of this tool versus the more text-oriented medium of the blog. I wasn’t looking for anything scientific, just some informal, preliminary feedback, but one of the more interesting comments had to do with how our blog was organized. For this student, she found the standard chronological sequence problematic because it didn’t allow her to follow a thread by topic, which made reviewing the conversation that took place there a more disjointed experience.
As anyone who has taught online already knows, blogs certainly have solid potential as a platform for facilitating discussions, but as blogs mature, students can perceive them as just another assignment-box to check. Aware of this reality, teachers then don their creativity caps with the hope of designing blog assignments that encourage discussions to flow more organically, where students are participating in more self-directed styles. Who knows, maybe a more topically organized interface would allow for better usability, and therefore help faculty with meeting this goal? Perhaps the topics could be arranged in one or more circles with each topic being click-able. And to add a little more usability sugar to the mix, maybe topics could be named (e.g., folksonomy) and managed by assigned student-facilitators. Perhaps it’s time to think about alternative designs for the education blog.
This semester I’m using Atlassian-Confluence as my wiki for EdTec 498 and before that I used PBWorks. Both are great tools that offer a wide array of impressive features, but one that I’ve always wanted to see was inline commenting. Yes, of course, wikis make it a breeze to make corrections to a page, but especially as a teacher, I’m frequently more interested in asking a question than making a correction; I’m interested in comparing my interpretation to their intent and seeing what learning emerges from the juxtaposition between the two. Given the wide popularity of wikis in the education community, I’ve been surprised that such a capability hasn’t been available (at least based on my research); in fact, I hadn’t seen it all until Wikispaces announced they were adding it.
Wikispaces is definitely distinguishing itself here. While lots of wiki platforms have comment features, the comments aren’t contextualized; instead, they’re typically aggregated at the bottom of the page which requires the user to first scroll down the page to the comments section and then to scroll back up and then carefully search for that section of text that the comment corresponds to (and hoping not to forget the gist of that comment while hunting down that specific piece of text). This requires too much work. Wikis are well known for their ease of use and the process of commenting should be just as easy.
Was working with a student on troubleshooting a software-related problem today over Google Chat and wanted to send a file. Apparently this isn’t possible (most likely due to security issues) and so I thought about emailing the file, but didn’t really want to deal with the hassle of launching my client and filling in all the email fields and so I launched a nifty little Mac App simply called Cloud and dragged the file into the icon on my Finder window and it instantly gave me a url which I dropped into the chat. The student then simply clicked the link and grabbed the file. It couldn’t have been easier.
When educators assemble and debate the pros and cons of integrating social networking tools or models into the curriculum, it’s often centered around questions of value and fidelity to instructional objectives and the like. That of course is completely understandable and appropriate. But sometimes it’s important to step back a bit and look at them through other lenses. Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir does that for me. It shows an inspiring aesthetic value to social networks.
