TLC Announces Three New Clients

The Learning Collective announces three new clients.   We are acting as the “in-house” online educational experts for Ketchum and their account with a leading provider of online classes to middle and high school students.  We’re advising UCLA on the potential development of an online emergency preparedness tool for developmentally disabled adults.  And we’re overseeing Mojo Markeing & Media’s Jamaican charitable programs, and related digital promotions, stemming from The Mojo 6 LPGA/CBS golf tournament.  Learn more about what we do.

UNICEF Rapid Prototyping Lessons

Interesting lessons learned excerpted from UNICEF’s Stories of Innovation …

This video is a synopsis of the projects, themes and trouble-shooting expressed at the Design Days event on May 10-11 at UNICEF NYHQ.

We have edited down a conversation between UNICEF sponsored rapid design prototypers to profile what they have created in order to respond to and alleviate actual needs of families and children. This video is intended to help make transparent the iterative process that development must undergo in order to create a new device that can respond to global concerns. Also touched on are ways for the organization to make the process of creating prototypes more streamlined, and the best method to take what is developed and to make it open source in order to create a sustainable and beneficial outcome to those that need it.

For Design Days we invited designers and engineers who have worked with us to discuss UNICEF, the design process, and recommendations for future design collaborations.

Lessons Learned:

UNICEF needs methods for iterative and flexible design contracting; we can’t always know what the end result will look like.

UNICEF would benefit from understanding and discussion of the design process before embarking on projects.

We need to work with open-source designers and engineers so that whatever we pay to have produced is public domain.

“Research” and “development” need to happen with end users, in the field.

Related article:

• UNICEF to Offer Free SMS to Nepalese Youth (appscout.com)

Digital Playground Inspires Slumdog

Earlier this month, the MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of the third annual Digital Media and Learning competition.  There are some great projects, especially the Learning Lab Awardees which won up to $200,000 to further their initiatives.

A project that particularly caught our eye is Hole-in-the-Wall, the inspiration for the book “Q&A” which inspired the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  Bridging the digital divide by reaching previously underserved youth in the developing world … urban slums and remote-rural populations, ethnic minorities, juvenile home detainees, and children with special needs … Hole-in-the-Wall has installed over 700 internet-enabled public Playground Learning Stations across India, Bhutan, Cambodia and countries in the African continent.  Game-activities promote experiential learning that is mapped to prescribed primary grade curricula across various subjects, Hole-in-the-Wall’s Activity Based E-Learning Solution imparts a playful learning environment by encouraging learning through self and group exploration beyond the classroom.

Related articles:

• Teaching: Inspiring British children, Slumdog style (telegraph.co.uk)
• Slumdog reveals learning treasures (guardian.co.uk)
• Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (debaird.net)
• Reimagining Learning: Vote in a Digital Media Competition (wired.com)
• Fiji Reef- From The West Side To West Pacific. (stuckinfijimud.blogspot.com)
• Guest Post: Four Insights for Youth Marketers from DML 2010 (ypulse.com)

Thought Leaders vs Company Bloggers

Now that businesses have all rushed to have Twitter and Facebook profiles and to maintain company blogs, has the onslaught of information made it actually more difficult to get your message heard?

Business strategy and information technology consultant Stowe Boyd wrote a blog post on Thursday entitled “Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing” in which he suggests that the rise of social media might be making us immune to marketing. Boyd suggests that startups might benefit from rethinking how they position themselves online to land on the side of that signal-to-noise ratio so that they’re actually heard.

Boyd observes that “Even in a time of great noise, people are still looking for guidance: they still need to make informed decisions, and to take action on their own behalf or on behalf of their companies. To do so, they look more than ever to those individuals and organizations that they trust, those that have credibility and hard-won reputations.” In order to capitalize on this search for expertise, Boyd suggests that companies try to situate their online presence less in terms of marketing and more in terms of thought leadership.

Boyd says there are three obvious ways to do this: Hire a thought leader. Ally your company with innovative, leading-edge programs. And actively participate in the community discourse in your field, either through written publications or through speaking events.

But these might not be viable options for startups. Hiring a thought leader is likely to be cost-prohibitive. As Boyd notes, “A startup wondering how it can stand out in a crowded field may just punt, and go down the classic social media route: the CEO and/or marketing folks will blog on the company website, and hope that people read the posts; they pay to attend conferences, and hope that they can get a speaking slot; and they try to make the company and its various spokespeople seem to be highly regarded in the community. This is the path that all companies seem to head down, so it comes as no great surprise that it generally doesn’t lead to outstanding results.”

Boyd suggests some alternatives… Read them via Read, Write Web

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• Recommended read: Stowe Boyd – /Message – Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
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The Emotional Web

Online communities and resources focused on peoples’ emotional health have been around for a while.  This includes the youth space through efforts like icouldbe.org’s online mentoring community which has been around for the past 10 years.  And other resources tailored to help youth deal with particular issues, such as thesafespace.org to help prevent and cope with teen dating violence, have been adding value for a while.

But online functionalities, coupled with sourced content, designed to help folks deal with emotional issues represent a new direction for the web … an emotional rather than factual web.

Consider pepfly.  Currently in beta, Pepfly is built on the scientifically supported idea that changing your everyday feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in small ways can have a powerful effect over time.  Pepfly is an app that connects people to emotional experiences using the web.  Pepfly uses a psychology recommendation engine to recognize the words you use to describe yourself and make sense of them in psychological terms.  It uses a matching algorithm to connect your psychological state to a piece of media that might work for you. It uses a learning system to find patterns in your ratings so that it can deliver more of what works for you and less of what does not.  Check out their FAQs.

Related Stuff

• New Study Proves Jealousy Blinds and Distracts (beliefnet.com)
• 2005 Just in time coaching emotional intelligence (slideshare.net)
• Emotional Intelligence: Learning To Roll With The Punches (peterhbrown.wordpress.com)
• Psychology Professor to Examine Relationship Between Music and Emotions Using Moodagent (indiemusictech.com)

Mobile Learning Growing in Africa

Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in learning in Africa.  The following are excerpts from a recent article in Education Week entitled “Mobile Devices Deliver Learning in Africa,” by Michelle Davis.

School-age children across Africa often don’t have access to a formal education. They may live in remote rural areas or in violence-plagued regions too dangerous for teachers to visit. Others can’t spend a full day in the classroom: They have to work or are heading households left without adults because of the ravages of AIDS.

But educators are finding increasingly innovative ways to bring education to such students in various countries in Africa, using mobile technologies to deliver curricula in ways that go beyond what many school districts are doing with portable devices in the United States …

Areas of Africa are “ripe for the use of mobile technology, even more so than in the U.S. because technology—particularly mobile-phone technology—leapfrogs a frayed and ineffective land-line system,” says Matt Keller, the director of global advocacy for the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child initiative based in Cambridge, Mass.

“It can also leapfrog a frayed and ineffective education system,” he says. “Technology will take this generation of kids to a level that is unprecedented there, in terms of thinking critically and analytically.”

The use of cellphones has been particularly prevalent in many African countries throughout the general population. According to a 2009 report issued by the United Nations-affiliated International Telecommunications Union, based in Geneva, 28 percent of Africans now have a mobile-phone subscription …

In Mali, sub-Saharan Africa’s sixth-largest country, with a population of more than 12 million, 10,000 schools are spread over what is often desolate land, says Rebecca Rhodes, the deputy director for student learning for the country’s Road to Reading program, implemented by the Boston-based Education Development Center, a global nonprofit organization. The program is part of a five-year, $30 million reform plan funded the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Rhodes says cellphone use in Mali is widespread, but it’s nearly impossible to visit the often-isolated schools. As part of the Road to Reading program, lesson plans are posted on a blog site, and teachers use their own cellphones to access the Internet for online curricula to use in their classrooms. The EDC also asks the teachers to provide feedback on the lessons by responding to a text-message survey …

Currently, the Mali cellphone program reaches 500 schools, but soon it will go nationwide. The EDC is also seeking to improve data collection and analyze the information. In addition, the group is looking beyond lesson plans toward the possibility of posting sample tests for teachers to download or to provide standard criteria for teacher evaluations …

A variety of other projects involving cellphones are fanning out across the continent.

In March, the Washington-based World Bank Institute launched a new type of problem-solving video game called Evoke, which is designed to empower young people in Africa to come up with creative solutions to social problems.

Students can play the game by accessing the Web, typically through a cellphone or laptop. Students in South Africa can also sign up to receive weekly text bursts updating them on the latest storyline or mission. Those playing the game may collect videos or photos with their cellphones and can submit them using mobile e-mail, according to the game’s blog.

Players are faced with such problems as environmental degradation, lack of food and water, and poverty and violence and are challenged to find ways to solve them. The game ends May 12, and top players who complete 10 game challenges will earn certification as Evoke social innovators, plus a chance at earning online mentorships, seed funding for new ventures, travel scholarships, and a trip to Washington …

A number of factors have coalesced in Africa making it ready for the use of mobile technology for education, says Robert Spielvogel, the chief technology officer at the EDC. With huge numbers of children lacking any kind of formal education, many ministries of education are focusing on the problem.

“There’s a built-in enormous need, and economically there’s almost no way in a timely fashion that enough schools can be built or teachers found,” Spielvogel says. “There’s an openness here because there’s a sense of crisis that you don’t see in the U.S.” …

In addition, a small pilot project in Zambia used cellphones to improve teacher training. Groups of teacher trainees received cellphones and sent text messages to college lecturers asking questions about assignments or social issues.

The EDC also distributed iPods loaded with training videos to help teachers improve their teaching skills. For example, a survey showed teachers struggling with 6th grade concepts, so the videos highlight how to teach topics like congruency in math or the concept of a magnet, Easterbrooks says …

Related articles

• Going Mobile: Debating and Using Cellphones in School (learning.blogs.nytimes.com)
• SMS Fights Malaria Scourge in Africa (wired.com)

Vernacular Video Culture in Education

This video by Howard Rheingold discusses vernacular video, video created by non-professionals for the purpose of communicating casual ideas. It then looks at ways education can use this newly democratized tool to educate collaboratively.

Related articles

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• New Media Literacies Skills For The 21st Century Digital Citizen (masternewmedia.org)
• Meeting Yourself on ChatRoulette (laughingsquid.com)
• J.D. Lasica on 21st Century Media Literacies with Howard Rheingold (howardgreenstein.com)

Cloud-Based, Open-Source For Teachers?

A computing device for every teacher and student so they can access the Internet at school or at home? That, along with an embrace of cloud computing, Creative Commons, and open-source technologies is part of a new set of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education.

On March 5, the department released an 80-page draft of its National Educational Technology Plan entitled Transforming Education: Learning Powered by Technology. The plan lays out an ambitious agenda for transforming teaching and learning through technology.

Much of the NETP emphasizes “21st Century learning” as the path to transforming education: “engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners… and leveraging the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits all curriculum.” The plan seeks to challenge the traditional model of the isolated teacher in a classroom, promoting the idea of “always on” learning resources and online communities for both educators and students.

In addition to changes to the US education model, there are some bold technology recommendations in the plan.

• Adequate broadband and wireless access inside and outside of school
• At least one Internet access device for every student and educator inside and outside of school
• R&D into the use of gaming, simulations, and virtual worlds for instruction and assessment
• Encouragement of cloud computing for school districts
• Use of Creative Commons and Open Education licenses
• Changes to FERPA (Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act) to open access to student data
• Changes to CIPA (Children’s Internet Protection Act) to open access to the Internet and rethink how filtering works in schools.

Continue reading via Read Write Web

Related articles

• Cloud-Based, Open-Source Future For Teachers? (readwriteweb.com)
• Should School be Taught in the Cloud? (chris.pirillo.com)
• Free Classroom Management Software Now Supports Mixed Platform Environments (prweb.com)
• Tom Vander Ark: The 3×5 Learning Revolution (huffingtonpost.com)
• Debunking the Myth of Isolated and Inaccessible Learning: 3 Resources (conversationagent.com)

Virtual Worlds as Scientific Tools

Building Up Social Sciences in Synthetic Spaces

Virtual worlds as modifiable simulation tools are finding a foothold in all levels of academia and professional research, and the names and organizations being linked to virtual world research are no longer unknown fringe researchers. This is because the mechanics behind virtual worlds are evolving with emerging technology, and because institutions like the University of Texas are making virtual worlds a research priority instead of a secondary or tertiary concern.

The great visual effects community blog Vizworld has some excellent reporting on just how expansive virtual world-based research has become. Among Vizworld’s best points? The emergence of virtual therapy – something we covered a week or so ago – and the potential ethical questions raised as an old discipline adapts to the shifting and nebulous rules of a virtual landscape:

Several psychologists and sociologists view SecondLife as a rare sandbox of human behavior.  The open nature of the system removes several of the restrictions found in online games, allowing more natural interaction between avatars, but also allows people to assume whole new personalities.  The distinctions between the user’s real persona and their chosen avatar has been the subject of many psychological studies and books.

Books like John Suler’s ‘Psychology of Cyberspace’ is a great resource that discusses the observed group dynamics and psychological behaviors monitored inside virtual worlds, and lays out possibilities for psychotherapy and clinical work inworld.

Vizworld writer Randall Hand notes that, disconcertingly, little ‘hard’ science is conducted in Second Life. This is a legitimate criticism of virtual world research as it stands – the great palaces of research organizations seem to serve as libraries of completed and pending research instead of virtual field labs for virtual experimentation. But as more open-source and behind-the-firewall worlds come about, that paradigm is changing. As it turns out, getting researchers in front of virtual worlds may yield a long-term dividend for applied science.

Putting students and researchers in front of virtual world technology – be it Second Life or something else – creates familiarity, and with familiarity comes the confidence to create ever more refined social and scientific experiments. In time, graduates with research experience in virtual worlds could develop their own virtual worlds – an interactive laboratory of indefinite size and scope, suitable for any number of experiments that real-world limitations may render impossible. UT Dallas made a name for itself building virtual laboratories in Second Life. The future of virtual research will be much more ambitious.

The standards for this kind of in-world research are already being debated in academic circles. A recent conference session over at the New Media Consortium focused on best practices in respecting the privacy of researchers and research subjects in virtual social experiments. The presentation’s PowerPoint notes are available at the aforementioned link, and they make for fascinating reading. When universities begin looking at virtual world research in earnest, they’ll lean on the best practices developed by forward-thinking organizations like NMC.  Continue reading…Via Pixel and Policy

Related articles

• Where virtual worlds once ruled, Farmville dominates (news.cnet.com)
• Social Week End off Second Life & Links review (makemyworlds.blogspot.com)
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• Reaction creates attraction (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds (tc.eserver.org)
• Considering Virtual Worlds (weber.k12.ut.us)
• Shouldn’t Schools Have Embraced Second Life By Now? (readwriteweb.com)

Web 2.0 Expo Keynote with Chris Brogan

The most recent Web 2.0 Expo in the Javits Center in Manhattan was excellent. It was an event that was not to be missed if your company was willing to shell out the fees to attend. In a recession you would think the fees for these conferences could be cut down a bit, but that is just wishful thinking because it will probably never happen.

Anyway, the event I enjoyed most was Chris Brogan’s keynote speech. Chris did a great job of breaking down some the barriers that have been erected around Social Media topics to make them very straight-forward. I thought his philosophy in relation to social media advertising campaigns was very insightful, and his insights on Twitter were were exceptional. He proposed, listening and info sharing are more important than narcissistic tweets about one’s self or one’s brand. He proposed that your “re-tweet”(RT) to tweet’s of your own of your own ratio should be about 12 to 1. Ultimately, this quote, resonated with me the most: “…what is more sad than creating electric sheep.” In other words, genuine information sharing is much more important than updating people on every mundane moment of your day.

View the video (below) of his keynote for the specifics– it is defiantly worth the 10 minutes if you are interested in social media, online marketing or web 2.0.