Daily Bookmarks 03/28/2009

• Cynthia Calongne’s Presentations on SlideShare

  Slideshare presentations by Cynthia Calogne from CTU, who does lots of Second Life work

  tags: slideshare, presentation, education, secondlife

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

On the Horizon

These are my liveblogged notes from Alan Levine,  Rachel Smith, and Cyprien Lomas’  webinar “What’s On Your Horizon?” about the 2009 Horizon Report. This webinar is part of the preview for the TCC 2009 conference. My comments are in italics. Please forgive any typos or awkward phrases; those are mine, not Alan’s, Rachel’s or anyone else’s.

Overview of the Horizon Report from Rachel Smith of NMC. Main focus has been higher ed, but they now do some specific reports: one for Australia/NZ, one for K-12.

Horizon project wiki has resources and shows the process. The goal of the Horizon Project is to look not just at when technology is viable, but when we’ll have about 20% adoption rates.

Process:

• October: open up to the advisory board. Raw data. More than a list; descriptions, links. What time horizon, what’s important.
• Vote for 12 (4 in each time horizon)
• Short list goes to advisory board for “survivor voting” in late November
• Down to 2 for each time horizon
• Writers polish the raw materials
• Distributed with a CC-license

Rachel Smith:  “The report isn’t really about predicting…it’s just a look at what is important at that moment.”

“Horizon Game”

What technology do you see used in some places that most organizations will use less than a year from now?

brainstorming: lots of wikis, blogs, social networking, audio/podcasts.

Also listed: virtual worlds, videoconferencing, voicethreads, geotagging, cell phones, flip cameras, digital storytelling, portfolios, multimedia

Other research questions:

• What technologies are used in other industries and have a solid user base there that learning institutions should be looking at (2-3 years out)?
• What emerging/experimental technologies should learning institutions to take notice of in 4-5 years?

Horizon Report

Trends and Challenges facing education

Trends

• Increasing Globalization
• Collective Intelligence, Ambiguity, Imprecision: With collective intelligence, multiple right answers are possible
• Games as Learning Tools: Kids have always used games, but school hasn’t recognized play for learning
• Visualization: Tools make it easier to understand information and relationships between concepts. Look at financial tools like Mint or Wesabe that make it easy to visualize your spending trends.
• Mobile phones: Fast growth & innovation.

Good points in the chat:

Taylor Willingham [Texas]: More people have access to mobile phones than running water. (from SXSW interactive)

Catherine Green [AIR - Sacramento, CA]: Visualization tools could help move us toward more universal design for learning (UDL), assistive technology, supporting diff. learning preferences, LDs, etc.

Critical Challenges

• So much information
• Gaps between how content is used in school and how it’s used in the real world
• Scholarship and research: how can academic systems reward people doing research in these areas?
• Meaningful assessment & use of data
• More expectation for higher ed to deliver to mobile devices

One Year or Less

Cyprien Lomas presenting on Mobiles.

• If you look at a group of young people, almost all of them will have a phone. Phones are becoming much cheaper too.
• Phone companies are pushing new features like watching TV.
• If everyone has them, how can we get students to use them?
• Phones with cameras can start to identify places in them
• People need training to learn how to interact with everything on their phones when everything is immediately accessible
• Payment systems for SMS are different in different countries–much more expensive in Canada

Rachel Smith on Cloud Computing

• Companies have lots of computers and shift the load among all the computers
• Easy to lease space from others if you can develop an application
• Flickr isn’t on a single group of computers
• Useful for education b/c applications that are comparable to installed software (like Google Docs)

Two to Three Years

Cyprien on “Geo-Everything“

• Like visiting a city after reading a novel set there and reliving the content by visiting the physical locations
• Bring geotagged resources into your classroom
• Effects on research
• Example: sending students out with cameras and sharing geotagged images, mashup images with Google Maps
• Less Serious Example on the iPhone: Urban Spoon that suggests restaurants based on where you are. What could you do for lessons if the content is based on where the student is?

Alan on “The Personal Web“

• The web used to be handed to you and you just looked at it that way. Now you can take it and look at it differently and remix it. We can personalize it to what’s important to us.
• Includes things that make publishing easy (YouTube, Flickr)
• Collaboration authoring tools (Google Docs, Flat World Knowledge)
• Tagging tools
• Pageflakes or Netvibes for project resource pages
• Blogs for specific institutions
• Personal Learning Environments/Personal Learning Networks

Four to Five Years

Rachel on Semantic Aware Applications

• A search for “turkey” right now returns the country, bird, name calling. Semantic web would know which one you want.
• Help people solve big problems by helping make connections
• Easy to figure out that people are connected based on trails on the web
• Right now, there’s a manual process of tagging or have software tag it (still cumbersome)
• Applications that can detect it automatically would be best
• Current applications deal with searching and asking questions (like “how many world leaders are over the age of 60?). Still in development.
• A few applications emerging: TripIt lets you forward a confirmation email for travel and gives you a plain language itinerary with maps, tickets, local weather, etc. Combines all the info from your travel sources into one place and gives you the important parts.

Alan on Smart Objects

• Any object that has a unique id
• Can communicate with other objects
• RFID, QR
• A tire that can recognize when there’s a fault so you can replace it before it goes flat
• Siftables:  http://siftables.com/
  
• HazMat suits that report the conditions experienced
• Open source audio hardware http://www.buglabs.net/

Comparing Horizons

• Australia differs b/c mobile is fairly prevalent already, so next-gen mobile is a long-term trend
• Cloud computing is 2-3 years for K-12, not less than 1
• Mobiles are 2-3 years for K-12, not less than 1
• K-12 is just generally behind a year or two from higher ed
• Think about doing a mini-Horizon report at your own campus/institution. I wonder what would come up with if we did this with PLS. Such a wide range of facilitators–it would be good to see what they think is important. Doing this kind of process would probably get different results than a simple survey. Maybe discussions in the Facilitator Zone?

Report has been translated to Spanish, Catalan, Japanese, Chinese; would like more

How to Participate:

• http://www.nmc.org/horizon/participate
• Comment on the report
• Tag resources hz09 (or hz10 for next year)
• Sign up for the 2010 Advisory Board

Q&A

Q: From a self-described Luddite: What’s the unique pedagogical value of these tools? We’re like kids in a toy store that want one of everything.
A: True that not every technology should be used in every situation. Horizon Report isn’t trying to promote technology, but trying to help people understand without having to do the research by themselves. If technology doesn’t have a good tie to education, it’s whittled out of the process. Helps make people aware of what’s out there.

Image credit:

Is it just me, or is the horizon curved? by Not Quite a Photographr

Daily Bookmarks 03/27/2009

• Inside Higher Ed: The Impact of Dropping the SAT

  Want to improve diversity at a college without spending a lot of money? Drop the requirement for SAT or ACT as part of admissions.

  tags: education, highered, standardizedtests, diversity

  • These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional.
  • The findings appear to confirm what SAT critics have said for years: that reliance on the SAT in college admissions favors applicants who are white and/or wealthier than other applicants.

• Donald Clark Plan B: Brilliant 35 studies in media and learning

  Great summary of research points on our perceptions of media with implications for using media effectively for learning. For example, audio quality matters a lot, but video quality can be low and still effective. Large, wide screens are preferred over higher quality images on smaller screens.

  tags: learning, e-learning, research, multimedia, audio, video, images

  • 35 psychological studies into the human reaction to media all point towards the simple proposition that people react towards media socially even though, at a conscious level, they believe it is not reasonable to do so. They can’t help it. In short, people think that computers are people, which makes e-learning work.
  • As long as a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules, we will accept it. Read that last part again, ‘as long as a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules’. If the media technology fails to conform to these human expectations – we will very much not accept it.

• The Bamboo Project Blog: Twitter Hating

  I’ve resisted Twitter, and it’s nice to see some balance in the discussion. Even if you love Twitter, check out the videos for some laughs.

  tags: humor, twitter

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 03/25/2009

• Role Models in Educational Technology on Ada Lovelace Day | Janet Clarey

  Extensive list of women in educational technology, including many bloggers. A number of new names for me here.

  tags: education, technology, e-learning, instructionaldesign, motivation, diversity

• Share Best Practices – Patterns : eLearning Technology

  Instead of calling them “best practices” maybe they should be “better patterns”; there isn’t just one way to do things. We can try to reproduce patterns or create variations on a theme. For problem solving and critical thinking, this is probably a more accurate description of what we do than “best practices.”

  tags: patterns, problemsolving

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Response to Intervention SME needed

We’re looking for a good subject matter expert for a specific course we’re planning to develop. Prior experience developing online courses is not a requirement for this job.

From our Director:

I am looking for an expert in Response to Intervention to work with an instructional designer to create an online graduate course for in-service teachers.

Is there anyone you would recommend I contact?

I appreciate any help you can give me!

If you know of anyone, could you please pass this along or forward their contact information to me? You can leave a comment below (I’ll be able to see your email, but it won’t be public), email me at tucker.christy AT gmail DOT com, or use the contact form.

Apologies to my readers outside the US; Response to Intervention is related to disability legislation in this country.

Daily Bookmarks 03/24/2009

• AG09 – IDZone: Graphic Resources

  Graphics and graphic design resources for instructional designers

  tags: instructionaldesign, graphicdesign, color, e-learning

• Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

  Recommendations for drop-down navigation menus with big menus grouped with structure

  tags: usability, webdesign

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 03/23/2009

• The WebFooted Booklady: The Animoto English Project

  Introduction to a high school English project using Animoto

  tags: animoto, animation, multimedia, k-12, education

• The WebFooted Booklady: It’s A Wrap

  Review of a high school Animoto project with details on some of the issues students had with account sign-ups, organizing files, and using non-CC-licensed images.

  tags: animoto, animation, multimedia, k-12, education, creativecommons

• Donald Clark Plan B: Amazing learning styles research

  I agree with the commenters who suggested this post would have been better on April 1, but it’s a nice test of information literacy and common sense for people to read it now. How many teachers, trainers, and administrators do you think you could fool with this fake research?

  tags: humor, learningstyles, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 03/21/2009

• Colorblind Web Page Filter

  Enter a URL, see what the webpage looks like for multiple kinds of colorblindness. Easy to switch from one filter to another to see different variations.

  tags: accessibility, color, webdesign

• How to Choose the Right Color Scheme for your e-Learning Project. | LearningChange, Intl – Performance Improvement, Facilitation Training, e-Learning + Instructional Design

  Basic tips for color as a communication tool in e-learning

  tags: color, e-learning, instructionaldesign, communication

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 03/19/2009

• Whatever You Do, Don’t Drop Practice | Tom Werner

  Summary of research which compared courses with the same content but with specific elements of Gagne’s instructional events removed. The strongest correlation with student performance and satisfaction was with practice with feedback.
  (This is an old post, but it’s moved since I originally bookmarked it.)

  tags: gagne, instructionaldesign, learning, research, spia

  • The only instructional element that really matters is practice with feedback.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 03/18/2009

• pivote.info

  A “virtual learning authoring system for virtual worlds” that allows you to create learning activities that are stored independently of the virtual world. Supports Second Life & OpenSim now, could work in other worlds in the future

  tags: secondlife, 3d, virtualworlds, e-learning

• In the Middle of the Curve: Wendy W – Knowledge Gardener

  Tony Karrer suggested we might be known as “management consultants” in the future, but I like Wendy’s “Knowledge Gardener” much better

  tags: instructionaldesign, career, education, training

  • Thinking about the tools I’m building and the programs I’m developing – that seems more akin to the way I want my job to evolve. As a “knowledge gardener.”
  • So I’ve decided that my next 5 years will be spent as a “knowledge gardener.” Helping people get the information they need. Encouraging people within my organization to talk to each other and share what they know. Facilitating learning when they need and want it (preferrably in much smaller chunks than they are getting now).

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.