iterativelearning

Journals like Kairos show some very creative approaches to sharing research. Although, it’s primarily an academic research journal, the creativity of its multimodal publications, recently got me thinking again about the different questions that instructors who read this journal must grapple with when they start brainstorming strategies for moving away from using MSWord (or any other conventional word processing application) as the default publication platform. With all the hubbub surrounding Web 2.0, they want to move away from requiring students to submit formal writing assignments as static text, but find a few uneasy questions along the way.

• How can I make it easy for students to create engaging multimedia compositions that don’t require them to learn programming?
• How can I find a tool that’s affordable?
• How can I find a platform that makes it easy for multiple peers to comment and question?

Blogs offer an option, but it’s more diary-like orientation isn’t really compatible with an assignment that has a definite closing date and essentially constitutes a different genre. One option that shows some intriguing possibilities is Sophie. Developed by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Media Literacy, it offers many of the capabilities that make a mono-modal composition into a multimodal one (image, video, sound). It also comes with a timeline and a reply/comment feature so readers can interact with authors. This is ideal for instructors who want peer discussion of a student work to occur in a more closed environment than the web, but not to be relegated to something as brittle as the comment feature in MSWord or a similar word-processing app. Sophie definitely deserves exploration by any faculty looking to move student writing or publication projects into realms more consistent with 21st century expression.

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Kairos, Institute for Media Literacy

The Unofficial Apple Weblog reports that iTunes U has reached 100 million downloads. Given this number, I’m curious as to what’s happening post-download: how many people are researching how iTunes U resources are being used? What kinds of effects do they seem to have on learning, especially in Distance Ed environments? One interesting example is from Dani McKinney of SUNY-Fredonia who found a positive effect when it came to taking an exam.

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TUAW, iTunes U

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

Like traditional academic departments, writing and tutoring centers have been exploring and implementing digital options. One of the best known among writing centers is Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab. In last month’s issue of Innovate Online, Mark Rabinovich, of Queensborough Community College, shares some insights about iPass – an online tutoring system that they’ve been working with since 2006.

One of the iPass features is a Writing Clinic. In relaying some details on the design history, he points out that it accommodates visual and auditory learning styles, as well as, of course, textual/verbal. The visual component includes capabilities for both image and video; even more intriguing is the audio integration.

The Writing Clinic includes an audio component that allows students to highlight a part of the text, select a voice type (according to pitch and speed), and click a “Read” button. An advanced text-to-speech engine converts the text to an audio recording, compresses it as an MP3 file (as the compact format greatly improves system response time), and sends the file to an embedded audio player in the student’s browser window.

Providing multiple access points seems particularly relevant for tutoring contexts where students typically struggle with the material, and especially for those whose life and work schedules make it difficult to coordinate face-to-face sessions.

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Innovate_Online, iPass

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

A while back, a colleague and I did a workshop on wikis. Although we’ve sampled other wiki tools, we like PBWiki for educational purposes because it’s easy to use and offers quite a solid variety of functions.

Since we wanted to practice what we were preaching, we wanted to display our presentation in the browser-based wiki space, rather than through the traditional, offline route of PowerPoint. This would also answer a question that we anticipated some of those who came to the workshop would likely have (i.e., How do I or my students embed presentation files?). After all, if the student is required to download it to their local drive, then this kind of works against the philosophy of working within the wiki space since this can already be done very easily with any standard LMS.

PBWiki makes embedding pretty easy to do via either one of two third-party applications (Slideshare or Google Docs/Presentation). Essentially, all you need to do is upload your presentation file (e.g., PPT), publish it, and copy the embed code into your PBWiki page.

Here are a couple of places where you can find more detailed instructions: Slideshare and Google Docs/Presentation.

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GoogleDocs, PBwiki, Slideshare

This year was my first year at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture & American Culture Association (SW TX PCA) conference. I heard about their Technical Writing area through a posting on the ATTW listserv. In the panel I was on, the focus was primarily pedagogical issues and enjoyed some really solid papers on using wikis in the classroom, measuring the time commitment for online teaching, and mine, which looked at scaffolding digital learning environments. Another track I really enjoyed was one that explored genre theory in video games and community building with micro-blogging tools such as Twitter. An added bonus was that the conference was right here in Albuquerque and the weather was wonderfully cooperative (sunny, high 60s, low 70s).

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ATTW, SWTXPCA

Some interesting sessions at the Southern California Linux Expo this weekend

• Open Source Textbooks
• Open Source Software in Education
• College and Open Source

The current economic crisis perhaps accelerates the interest level in the whole sphere of textbook economics. (From the abstract, it looks like there is some philosophical overlap with Negroponte’s well-known One Laptop Per Child Initiative. Since I teach tech writing, I like the inclusion of FLOSS Manuals — the documentation that ideally makes open source software intelligible to more than just those who speak the language of command line. The other two look good for keeping up on changes related to developments in rapidly maturing alternative learning management systems such as Moodle and Drupal.

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Learning Management Systems, Linux, Open Source, One Laptop Per Child

Wiggio has updated its online collaboration space to include capabilities such as group email addresses, real-time file editing, and photo and video sharing. Although there are many other online collaboration tools (e.g., Basecamp, Zoho Projects), Wiggio primarily targets education and academics. Like these others, it has a pretty expansive array of solid features, but a couple that stand out for me are texting and voice notes.

As someone who teaches online, when I think about collaboration, ease of use is an important factor. With most of the traditional LMSs I’m aware of, texting hasn’t yet been built in, so whenever students want to participate they need to login to the site and then navigate through at least a couple of layers until they reach the place where they share thoughts, ideas, feedback, and so forth. Texting leapfrogs these layers.

The voice notes feature offers the potential to enhance the media richness of the collaborative experience. Again, here too, Wiggio makes it easy (i.e., click and record). When collaborators can not only see and read what another person has written, but also hear him or her, it introduces another dimension that expands it from essentially a monochromatic to polychromatic experience.

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Wiggio, Learning Management Systems

One of my favorite blogs, Web Worker Daily summarizes an interview they recently did with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. While the occasion was for the launch of 3.0, the general focus of the conversation is on collaborative networks and how they relate to enterprise-level wikis.

In laying the groundwork for talking about the specific details of Socialtext, he emphasizes the value of weak ties or dynamic peripheries. Traditionally, old-school groupware mostly served the needs of the core (e.g., the group’s executive leadership ranks) or the strong ties, but Mayfield’s Socialtext focuses on activating those dynamic peripheries.

Mayfield also explained how Socialtext allows workers to customize their dashboards similar to the way in which they would customize a Facebook page (e.g., images, audio, video, slides, personal info). He goes on to point out that this can be very useful for giving people a greater sense of connectedness especially in those virtual team contexts where members can be spread out widely across time zones and continents with very little, if any, opportunity for F2F interaction. This emphasis on personalizing or customizing virtual work spaces intersects with research such as that by Sarah Hurlburt in the Journal of Online Learning & Teaching where she discusses it in the context of using blogs in her online courses — Personalization of the blog environment is necessary to create the private space effect …).

For anyone interested in reading more about collaboration/network theory and distributed cognition, there’s a hefty volume out there (Latour’s Reassembling the Social; Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild). One of the more recent entries is Clay Spinuzzi’s Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. I haven’t had a chance to read Spinuzzi’s but definitely plan to add it to the ever-expanding reading list.

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wiki, Socialtext, Ross Mayfield, Web Worker Daily