iterativelearning

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.

Zotero is a great research tool for students and academics. I find it immensely easier and more intuitive to use than EndNote, RefWorks, and other sorts of similar packages. If by chance you’ve been missing out on all the fun, you can get a quick overview here. Their latest and greatest effort is a standalone version that would work with browsers beyond the ever-extensible Firefox.

One thing Zotero makes easy to do is sharing. It’s drop-dead easy to create groups ( essentially, click the group folder icon and send email invitations). One thing I’ve noticed with Group libraries though is the lack of a search function within a specific group’s bibliographic library. This isn’t a big deal if the group doesn’t have a lot of cites that they’re sharing, but if there are a bunch of cites being stored there (e.g., more than 50), searching for them becomes a little unwieldy because you’re going to have manually click through multiple screens. I don’t know how widely the Groups feature is used among the Zotero community, but if it’s a feature under consideration, I’d vote for it in a heartbeat.

Despite Twitter, I’m still a frequent user of RSS, and when it comes to readers, I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire (both the desktop and iPhone versions). It’s got that Mac look-and-feel and the 3-pane capability (folders, titles, posts) that saves me the hassle of launching full posts in a separate browser.

But recently the desktop version has been giving me troubles with what should be a very routine function: deleting folders. For some strange reason, every time I delete one, it magically reappears.

Apparently, there are others who had the same problem and they had good luck with a clean reinstall, so I tried that. But as a likely omen of things to come, quick and easy success was not to be had.

So, on to other options … Because I sync it with Google Reader, I thought that might be the culprit, so I turned off the syncing. But no luck there either. Then I tried unsubscribing on the odd chance that the problem was one of semantics (especially since the current version of the NetNewsWire UI no longer included a simple drop-down menu option for deleting folders). But still, no dice. So that left with me checking out some CTRL-Click options. The Show Info option kind of surprised me with its depth; it displayed five layers: Name, Refreshing, Persistence, Exporting, and Enclosures & Podcasts. Refreshing seemed to be the most relevant to my problem, so I ticked the Don’t Refresh option thinking that maybe the reason the folder kept reappearing was that the system kept wanting to refresh it as long as it had a connection to the Net. But I struck out there as well.

The Columbo-like detail in this puzzle is why they removed the Delete Folder option from their previous UI. It seems like a pretty standard option to me and one that wouldn’t really add much bloat.

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Apple, NetNewsWire

Looking for a list of qualitative research tools? Looking for a tool to collect data? Analyze data? Dynamic mapping? Transcribing? The Digital Research Tools wiki (DiRT) is definitely a good addition to the academic researcher’s toolbox. In my web perusals, I haven’t been able to find anything that comes close to its scope and comprehensiveness – kind of a research tool headquarters. Lisa Spiro of Rice University does an excellent job as the wiki’s editor, and true to the wiki spirit, it thrives on contributions from others. Check out the guidelines for the details.

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Rice University, Lisa Spiro

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.

Screencasts are a popular alternative to documentation since most people would rather see how something works than search through a manual. Still, some screencasts can be awfully boring (e.g., monotone); others can go over the top with trying to be too funny or sarcastic. The screencast for the task manager Teudeux strikes a nice balance.