Digital Life

Campaign for “Real” Education

Posted on by Jon K.

What a crock. The name of the group itself galls me. Campaign for Real Education. Real education? As if the rest of it is fake?

This UK group popped it’s head up (perhaps out of the sand) at the end of the Telegraph’s article about a group of students who were given iPhones for educational purposes. While the article does a good job of outlining the benefits of using iPhones in the class, and the co-operative nature of the experiment – it ends on this sour note.

Katie Ivens from the Campaign for Real Education said: “Mobile phones have quite rightly been banned from many classrooms as they prove to be a distraction.

“The case for learning by computer has not been proved at all.”

I guess Ms. Ivens has never used Word, PowerPoint, the Internet or been involved with an LMS. Or viewed a how-to video on YouTube. Or did any research using any number of newspapers available online. I guess the Campaign hasn’t read any studies about the widespread use of computers to train millions of workers worldwide.

Sure, mobile phones can be distracting, only if there are no ground rules set out by an instructor, and the instructor is boring or even worse, incompetent. The authoritarian nature preferred by the Campaign though will only allow more instructors to get away with this sort of boring transfer of knowledge, which has been debunked seemingly a billion times over. Looking at the battles the Campaign has fought, including such deal-breakers as uniforms in school, trendy teaching methods and nursery rhymes. Talk about wasted money… if they’re so concerned about not coddling children, perhaps boot camp should be for everyone?

Good little capitalists, and only one person graduates a year – that way it’s really showing those little brats what life’s really about! Only one out of the lot of you will make more money than the rest of you combined!

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Portfolio Based Learning

Posted on by Jon K.

Just finished some ePortfolio training with the fine folks at Desire2Learn. One of the interesting things that came out of the discussion around their product was the use for using ePortfolio as evidence of learning. An extrapolation of this idea might be to replace marks with skills – which would map closer to our learning outcomes and fit nicely with the institution’s skills-based focus for the workplace.

For instance, a mechanical engineer can share his drawings and the feedback from the content expert (teacher/trainer, or in a distributed environment, an external panel of experts) and this can be assessed as a measure of skill. Seeing as that’s what employers want (from a skills-based College), it seems like a natural fit for the College system in Ontario. It would set us apart from Universities now that OAC’s are gone. OAC was the old-old Grade 13, which was a post-graduate year in high school, for people who wished to enter University – you’d get 6 extra credits of High School and take advanced courses that would prepare you for the academic rigor.

I know McMaster University is approaching their medical program with Problem Based Learning which is a similar demonstration of skills that a Portfolio Based Learning program might have.

Anyone out there use a portfolio as a final assessment?

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Content “Curation”

Posted on by Jon K.

From a list of CNN’s 10 Web Trends To Watch in 2010, we see the traditional augmented reality and geolocation trends – the further blending of online and offline life – but the one that really popped off the page for me was the idea of content curation – the sort of expert opinion sorting information for you that traditional education has done. The fact that crowdsourcing isn’t even an option in this brief article is interesting, seeing as crowdsourcing was among the trends of years past. It seems that there’s shaping up to be two ways to think about content curation – by experts and by common thought.

Content curation by experts mimics the “sage on the stage”, teacher at the front of the class, behaviorist. Content curation by common thought (where we agree to the meaning of something by a majority rule) is more constructivist, or connectivist in approach.

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Show Me

Posted on by Jon K.

Just finished reading It’s A Visual Thing: Audio-Visual Technology in Education which is about the unexpected sophisticated visual literacy of young children and how this can be leveraged for better learning environments. One quote really stuck with me:

To his surprise, he found that their search engine of choice was not Google, but YouTube, because it provided them with a clear, visual set of results rather than a series of short paragraphs.

I guess this explains why Google got into the video sharing business in the first place… A counterpoint to this might be that students choose YouTube rather than Google as a simple usability problem – there’s less clicks to get to the information and on a mobile platform such as the iPod Touch, which was used in the assignment, clicks are a painful process.

Google understands this and Google Goggles is an attempt to begin to organize visual data to likeness – acting somewhat like Wolfram Alpha but in a much more visual way. Expanded, Goggles seems to be a computational way to act like the human brain – see something and grab some information about it.

What I get from this is that we can’t bury educational content deep if the users are going to access this from mobile devices. We shouldn’t ask that they click two or more times, and that in and of itself might be damning evidence against a LMS, which can bury content deep under a mass of links.

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What I Learned This Week (Part 6)

Posted on by Jon K.

Google DNS: This can be taken a couple of ways – if you believe the “Do No Harm” mantra of Google, then this is simply a way for you to take a personal control of the Domain Name System, and out of the hands of your ISP. This can be seen as a good thing, especially with ISPs under a lot of pressure to track users to get rid of file sharing.

On the other hand, it could be used for Google’s main money maker, demographic information. In fact, it seems that Google’s pretty transparent about this as they say in the blog post:

As people begin to use Google Public DNS, we plan to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally.

That’s fine, but lets be frank. Once Google shares this information, how can they be sure that the recipient of the information will actually take this and act accordingly? Unless there’s a contract or some sort of binding terms of agreement, perhaps a Creative Commons one, it’s unlikely that a third party will not be tempted to use this data.

In a previous life I was an audio engineer. After discovering that poverty was in my future should I not work a billion hours a week listening to abominations… I went into web design and later teaching to some extent. Clearly, money is not a motivating factor for me. Anyways, this blog post by 10,000 Words brought me back to my previous life – 10 great interactive audio experiences.

To add to their list I would add Hobnox – a good Flash based tool to create anything from atmospheric beats to raging noise. I usually end up at the latter due to adding a chain of 800 distortions filtered through high and low passes. Good fun for a while, but you have to have a decent widescreen monitor to take full benefit of the interface.

I’ve also talked about Aviary Myna Audio Editor before and how it’s a fun, multitrack audio creator/editor in the vein of Garage Band.

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Finally They Get It

Posted on by Jon K.

“Our kids live in a world where they are immersed in content through things like Twitter and Google, so we don’t want them memorizing facts they can access easily, but we want them to think about how to apply that knowledge, and how it affects how they live as citizens and workers,” said Grose.

This is a quote from an article linked from the Toronto Star’s website, written to inform how the Toronto School board is adapting curriculum to reflect our new information gathering abilities. Finally, they get it. We can gather the facts, we need to teach new media skills to critically assess the information we’ve found.

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What I Learned This Week (Part 5)

Posted on by Jon K.

Finally, one of my major pet peeves with Google has been answered. Matt Cutts announced late in October that Google Docs now lets you do a bulk export. I’ve played with Docs a lot, but never considered it a real threat to Word in my workflow as I couldn’t get all of my crap off of the one system in one shot. Now I can. Thank you Google for doing the right thing.

Was listening to Martin Weller’s presentation for CCK09 about the Pedagogy of Abundance, and while Martin’s presentation content was great, the sound was difficult. It wasn’t the quality of sound per se, although it was a bit rough around the edges. I don’t know if it’s just me, or a combination of my background as a sound engineer and sensitive listener, or if it was just my mood, but the sound was off.

It got me thinking about the aesthetics of sound, and how sounds might be pleasurable or distracting, and how that works in a networked learning environment. Clearly, the aesthetics of the new media environments extend further than the visual realm and will have to be considered when developing e-learning courses and environments. With the ubiquity of good sound devices, we still will have to have quiet spaces from which to broadcast, or record.

I also found out about Sherlock, the Codec Detective. I’m not sure how Apple feels about the possible name confusion (although I’m not sure that Apple’s search is called Sherlock anymore either), but this is a great little utility that helps one figure out if they have a video codec installed or not. As everything moves towards Flash video, this sort of tool may not be needed in the future, but in the meantime it’s incredibly useful for me, as I switch between several different machines throughout the day and may need to edit video on any of them.

Visualization of data is a huge trend, and in my opinion only going to get bigger as text literacy declines in favour of visual literacy. I’m not saying text literacy will disappear; just that visual literacy becomes more important in the future. Flowing Data posted an interesting contest, to see if a correlation can be drawn between SAT scores and class size. The contest isn’t about the correlation per se, but it’s about the visualization and what comes of it.

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Open/Shut Tabs?

Posted on by Jon K.

Mozilla’s study of how people use the web recently released the results of the tab open/close study. Some interesting things here related to user experience and how people use the web. The study concludes that most people have 5 or less tabs open at a time. Which means that we probably are multitasking when we are online. Sourcing information and producing content will require a couple of tabs at least (and if you’re like me, probably upwards of 20).  Another interesting finding from the data:

If the default tab is a different site from the closed tab, the user is around 77% likely to stay on the default tab for at least 5 seconds; but if the default tab is on the same site, this probability climbs to about 85%.

Which speaks to stickiness, a concept that web designers and marketers are well aware of – keeping people at your site is key. It would be interesting to see how this relates to e-learning sites alone – what people are leaving LMS’s for (mostly resources like Google I suspect)?

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Blogging as a Continuance of the Oral Tradition?

Posted on by Jon K.

This article, Digital Media: The New Democracy brings up an interesting idea – blogging, and by extension all the social media we engage in (like vernacular video) is continuing the tradition of oral history. Of course, theorists like Ong (secondary orality) and McLuhan (the global village) have talked about these ideas in relation to the democratization of the narrative – as we take control of publication and the content of the publication we also change the way history is recorded and how the future will look at us.  Of course, having the written word overwrite some cultures, and even some people’s existence, what will the digital oral history overwrite?

Certainly it is easy to see “primitive” cultures being overwritten, there is very little Kalahari bushmen websites, or anything other than minutia about what the “cultured” world has done to them (for diamonds, for the land they live on…) from a documentary perspective. While this is progress, and some will argue inevitable, is it right? Do those of us in a privileged position have a moral (oral?) obligation to bring these issues up?

What I Learned This Week (Part 4)

Posted on by Jon K.

I’ve been working on adapting a AODA module for Desire2Learn, changing some minor things, tweaking the navigation and other minor bits. It’s intended to illuminate some of the issues people with disabilities face in daily life at an educational institution. It’s well designed (educationally speaking) but some of the sites I’ve been to in looking at accessibility have been, well, aesthetically challenged. As we all know, content is king, but I have to say, the way things are presented on some of these sites could use some sprucing up to bring it in line with modern web design that is accessible. Certainly CSS could be leveraged to provide different looks depending on what browser/screen reader was being used?

Along a similar line, this article sheds some light on the issue of teacher’s blowing out their voices – one of their main tools in the classroom. Certainly we have seen repetitive stress injuries for athletes and office workers – are we just maybe working too hard? E-learning can assist with this, of course, by recording things that might be said four or five times a week – streamlining teachers to actually get in the trenches and actually work with students to assist in their learning. The end of the article had an interesting thought, “you can’t teach French without speaking.” I think you certainly can – using a blend of native speakers on YouTube or a more community based site like Language Exchange.

Finally, from Reuters, technology doesn’t isolate people. The study doesn’t really reveal much, other than people who are active socially offline are also active in publishing and creating content online. I’ve always believed that technology doesn’t change who we are, but it does change who we communicate with. In many ways, this study and article backs that idea up.

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