Whether as part of their formal research agenda or just general curiosity, there’s been a very noticeable trend among educators who are interested in whether Twitter is something more than just sharing what you had for breakfast or similarly superficial topic. Can it, for example, promote student engagement? One of the more memorable launch-points for me on this question was Rey Junco’s presentation via the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
More recently, the March issue of the Journal of Online Learning & Teaching has a piece by Badge, et al., who look at Twitter use among two groups of students (one undergrad, one grad) as a result of loaning them iPod touches. Within the undergrad group, they observe evidence of an emergent community of practice (e.g., Wenger) when they noticed that students continued to use Twitter even after returning the devices. Perhaps this also sparks another line of investigation … when or how do we identify distinctions between emergent communities of practice and sustained CoPs? 6 months? 1 year?
futurelearn has a post on plugin devices from Steelcase called pucks that allow students to connect with whatever devices they brought with them to the classroom. Although it’s not entirely clear from the description in the post, I’m assuming that students could connect their device to a classroom projector via the puck and an hdmi or vga cable. Even better will be the day when students can avoid the extra burden of cables and connect to the projector wirelessly.
A friend sent me a presentation by Mike Sharples of the Learning Sciences Research Institute that looks into what teaching will be like in the next 25 years. On one of the slides, Sharples identifies the Widening gap between learning inside and outside school. What’s interesting in this gap is how it suggests how students have used the web to enable more self-directed learning outside the walls of the traditional classroom. But what’s even more interesting is how students are designing their own learning experiences as a result of stitching together those web-based resources they’ve determined to be most relevant to advancing their objectives. To what extent are teachers and/or schools paying attention to this self-directed learning that may not necessarily be visible in the formal assignments the students submit for review? Are there opportunities here for collaboratively designed instruction (between teacher and student)?
Originally, it piqued my interest because it uses Ubuntu packages — my favorite Linux distro. Later on, I learned that it has plugins for Moodle and WordPress (among others). Of course, Moodle is well-known among ed tech’ers. And while WordPress is known more for blogging, you can find a good post over at ProfHacker on scaling it into a better LMS.
Lots of teachers like the idea of blogs as a tool for learning and reflection, but sometimes find that students tend to be more hesitant when their posts live in such an open environment. Setting up a private blog is an option with many web-publishing platforms but it can also impose limits in terms of usability or functionality.
Posterous recently announced a private groups option. Like a lot of people, I really like the ease and simplicity of Posterous (writing a post is as easy as sending an email). One of the best advantages of this new feature is that it doesn’t require individual group members to sign up because all the posts can be sent via a simple email. In an educational setting this is a big help because one of the more time-consuming logistical tasks instructors encounter is getting all the students either registered with the main class blog or helping them set up their own. All too often valuable class time is lost with keeping track of who’s signed up and who hasn’t.
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.
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.
