iterativelearning

From the research corner … Weston & Bain have a good article in the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment – The End of Techno-Critique: The Naked Truth about 1:1 Laptop Initiatives and Educational Change.

They agree with the Techno-Critics that there’s been a lot of exaggeration when it comes to describing the link between tech and learning improvement; they agree because of the conspicuous lack of empirical data. But rather than throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, as the Techno Critics are prone to do, they suggest six extensions of Jonassen, et al.’s notion of tech as cognitive tools. For example, one of the six recommends not only involving all members of the school community but positioning each as an active agent in assisting with defining … clearly articulated roles, responsibilities, and performance measures. This emphasis on specific roles for stakeholders is one way to keep the focus on concerns related to learning rather than technology.

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.

Edmodo seems like an interesting alternative to the traditional LMS. It has a Facebook-like interface, so most students should be able to intuit the UI pretty quickly. Another plus is the integration with mobile platforms. Although I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (you can try it for free), I’m definitely thinking about doing some small-scale pilots.

Continuing a bit more from yesterday’s post, another factor that sometimes gets overlooked when it comes to implementing Web 2.0 in education is disparities in bandwidth. It’s probably pretty safe to say that there are a lot of college faculty who enjoy not only high-speed connections at their campus offices, but also at their homes. But this isn’t necessarily the case with students, especially when it comes to those out in the rural areas. And, of course, one of the key reasons students from rural areas enroll in distance ed courses is because of the commute time. Yet, it’s easy to think, in the year 2010, that we’ve conquered the broadband mountain. Not so, says the FCC. Issues related to cost and complexity discourage 93 million Americans from broadband participation.

via TechCrunch – 1/3 Of Americans Don’t Use Fast Internet

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?

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PETE&C, Andy_Petroski, Web 2.0

TechCrunch has a post post on a company called Time-to-Know that's moving to push school systems in alignment with 21st century learning demands. Of course, the EdTech market has lots of players working on this front, and Time-to-Know looks like they're aiming to do some pretty interesting things, but the part that caught my eye (for writing this post anyway) was the section on infrastructure requirements:

Schools committing to Time To Know's curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after

With the iPad hubbub still fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but substitute the word netbook with iPad. Given Apple's solid track record on platform stability (e.g, no viruses) and ease-of-use, this could be a pretty good scenario for a test run.

I’ve been on the hunt for a Mac-friendly notifier for Google Wave and stumbled across one today called Waveboard. Conveniently, it’s also got an iPhone version at a very reasonable 1.99.

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.

I’ve been experimenting with another one of those highly addictive Firefox extensions; this one is called Feedly and I like it quite a bit. It’s got a snazzy, light UI and makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of some of the most active feeds in your news aggregator by pulling from your Google Reader and Twitter accounts. It also comes with various modules that allow you to configure Twitter posts, YouTube, and Flickr. You can even enter hexadecimal values if you want to customize the background color and link colors (read and unread). There are, of course, lots more options under the Preferences section.

Feedly is also Safari and Chrome-friendly.

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Feedly

Very interesting post in the Programmable Web by Daniel Jacobson on Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE). Two big standouts for me are how it foregrounds portability (e.g., to mobile platforms) and feasibility for organizations with limited staff and money (e.g., schools). He also includes a presentation on it.