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

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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)
• Hello, Second Life! (blogs.secondlife.com)
• 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.

Why Mobile? Rick Rasansky and Roy Rosin

Chariot Solutions sat down with Rick Rasansky CEO of Yorn, and Roy Rosin VP at Intuit in their offices to discuss why it is important for web developers to be paying attention to mobile development (in the video below). E-learning developers should take heed as well because mobile technology offers the ability to deliver untethered content that your target audience can use where ever they choose to use it when ever the time is convenient. Offering a user the ability to learn when and where he/she is most comfortable is highly effective.

The limitations of this technology lie in the fact that there is no single platform that is universal. In the smartphone marketplace Blackberry is dominant with business oriented users, but the iPhone is gaining users rapidly, while Windows 7 Mobile, the newly open source Symbian OS, and the revitalized Palm OS are also attempting to gain a piece of the marketplace. Yet the most dominant  demographic is the host of individuals still using text only mobile devices. In developing countries text only mobile technology is sometimes be the primary access users have to the web, so understanding mobile delivery is paramount to companies seeking to deliver content outside of the US. Creating the use cases and understanding the platforms of your user group is vital to develop an effective mobile learning application.  Here are two key players in the mobile industry take a look at the video below to get their perspectives on why you should be considering mobile delivery for your e-learning content.

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Google Labs + News = Living Stories

Google Labs always has something interesting for me to explore. This time the guys at Google in conjunction with the Washington Post and The New York Times are tackling online news. I think this tool has allot of value, and if it is adopted widely it could change the way we discover, read and research news topics, using online news outlets. The fact that they are offering a open source API makes it even more compelling. They came up with a very powerful way to explore a news topic. They used their search algorithms that are already searching out all of the online sources on any given topic to add context and pull together a research hub on the desired news topic.

Here’s how it works. After a search is completed, and a story is selected you are presented with a variety of links of varying importance from any site that has covered the topic. There are a wide variety of ways to filter the content from media type to personalities in the story. It also offers a time line from the stories’ development across the web.

The implications for education are immediately apparent. Students now have a way to do one stop research. If they understand how to validate and attribute sources it can save them allot of time. This is an important factor, as classes in media literacy are not currently taught as a requirement in most school district’s curricula. This API is powerful enough to change the way modern news is interacted with and if newspapers are smart they are already implementing it as part of their online offerings.

Since most “old school” news (and publishers in general) organizations are nowhere near as open minded or nimble as they need to be, we may never see wide spread adoptions of this new delivery method. Most news organizations are too busy building subscription based,  “walled gardens” in the futile effort to protect their content and retain advertisers to consider any innovative open source offering that helps a reader understand a topic better. Especially one that pulls together a variety of sources from around the web to build a re-mixed conglomerate version of the story that is more informative that any single story can ever be. All said, judging by how quickly news papers are folding under this mind set, they may not last long enough to benefit from the increased exposure from this new browsing option. Kudos to the New York Times and Washington post  for their insightful work and Google for pulling them together. Here is an overview of the Living Stories feature set:

Related articles

• Google Open-Sources its Experimental News Format (mashable.com)
• Google Declares “Living Stories” Experiment Success, Offers as Open Source (readwriteweb.com)
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• Google’s news experiment Living Stories to go open source (guardian.co.uk)
• Exclusive: Google News to Share “Fast Flip” Through Open API (beet.tv)
• Read news fast with Google Fast Flip (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google and Top Newspapers Experiment with a New Way to Deliver the News (mashable.com)

Connectivism And Modern Literacy

In the 20th century literacy was simply the “ability to read and write”. The subset of skills necessary to be called literate has changed greatly and the definition has expanded to encompass the, ” …ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) With the advent of the internet and social media students have been challenged to add new resources to their tool set to be prepared to be productive citizens in the information age. Modern literacy in the information age calls for lifetime learners with a set of skills that are constantly evolving and is permeated by dynamic, participatory media (social), and web-based tools that aid collaboration and information sharing.

In the book “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement,” Howard Rheingold wrote: “If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Participatory media include (but aren’t limited to) blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, digital storytelling, virtual communities, social network services, virtual environments, and videoblogs.”

Modern youth multi-task more often, multi-task more effectively and have shorter attention spans than any up to this point in history. This student demands the use of rich multimedia learning environments and, project-based instruction that engages the student and challenges him to use dynamic web-based tools and participatory media. Terms like “Connectivism” and “Networked Learning” are now being used to describe the new processes that are emerging. Here is a excellent video that explains these new paradigms and what they mean for the 21st century classroom.

This is a key reason teaching must change to keep up with the new paradigms called for in the information age. The lecture-based educational model is obsolete and role of the teacher has morphed from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide by a students side”.

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Develop Idea for A Mobile Learning App

Applications for the first Startl Design Boost are now open for budding entrepreneurs and designers interested in developing cutting edge mobile applications for learning.  Developed in conjunction with IDEO, the first Startl Boost, a five day building, hacking, business and human centered design immersion will be held at the Pratt Institute in New York City, March 15-19, 2010.  There is no tuition cost for the workshop.  Details of the workshop:

Day 1: Define the Idea: Participants present ideas and set criteria for their proposed mobile learning application.

Day 2: Validate the Idea: Participants conduct research with end users and get feedback with learning and marketing experts about their mobile learning app.

Day 3: Design the idea: Participants storyboard their refined idea for mobile learning app and begin creating/ modifying their prototype.

Day 4: Share the idea: Participants create presentation deck to “pitch” their mobile learning app and finalize their prototype.

Day 5: Pitch the idea: Participants will present “pitches” and prototypes to an audience that includes a panel of users, industry experts, and market investors.

The top three teams will be invited to present to a larger audience at the Venture Capital in Education Summit in June in NYC.  While the Startl Design Boost is open to mobile learning applications for all ages, teams creating apps for children ages 3-11 can also apply for the inaugural Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children’s Learning, a national competition intended to generate digital educational innovations with prizes up to $50,000, as well as ongoing business planning support from The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop. Startl is a new social enterprise dedicated to bringing digital media and learning innovations to market – from kindergarten to college, inside and outside the classroom.  Startl was incorporated in 2009 with initial funding from the MacArthur, Hewlett, and Gates foundations.  Startl’s mission is to identify talented people with great ideas and new products that will affect the future of learning.  Through relationships with best of breed design, incubation, and investment partners Startl provides an ecology that allows entrepreneurs to mature and products to evolve.  Related articles:

• Sesame Street comes to Google: Improving our education system at the Breakthrough Learning forum (googleblog.blogspot.com)
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Education and Google Buzz…A Match?

It seems, Google has thrown down the gauntlet…Google Buzz is a incredibly powerful attempt to take a piece of Facebook’s market share in social networking. Google Buzz is powerful because if you have a Gmail account you are already a member. Within minutes of logging in to my Gmail account I had followers and I was following a number of people. This is how “friending” and “following” on Google Buzz works. Google has filtered users’ Gmail inboxes and Google Talk IM contacts and used algorithms to determine the users that they communicate with most frequently. Users can then share Buzz posts with the world (and Google search), or they can share privately through their existing Gmail groups or custom-made groups in Buzz. Here are a few a videos that explain the tool in more detail:

When I logged in for the first time with buzz activated, I could not believe my father was instantly among the people I was following. I liked that, no more sending him links… he is not a “first adopter” like me, and if Google can get him to interact with the social stream I am impressed. I’m not sure liked the asymmetric follower/friend model, though, because there were a few people that appeared on my list that I did not want knowing my business… or my whereabouts, so this feature made me a bit uncomfortable.

Augmented Reality and Education

Five Dutch content providers participated in the development of worlds first AR (Augmented Reality) browser. There are a variety of developers working in this area currently and it is the new buzz word in tech circles. Augmented Reality is technology that allow the user to point AR equipped devices at objects to see an additional layer of information about the object. We have seen this in the heads-up displays in the helmet view screens of high tech characters like Robo-cop or Iron Man for years. Now portable, processor and GPS equipped, smart phone devices, like those on the Andriod OS, will allow us to experience this first hand.

Of course, the first versions will focus on consumerism. They will allow you to point your phone to spot real estate for sale and enable easier shopping. But, It is easy to understand the educational extensions of this technology. Imagine a lesson where you can take your students on a tour of a old town and when they point their phones on different areas of the town info from a famous book or books written on the area appears for them to read. Imagine taking a tour of New York and being able to point you phone at each building to see the year it was built, architect, building style, materials, or even sections of the blueprints. As an instructional technologist I see it as a ground breaking utilization of GPS and I can go on and on with the ideas.

Here is press release and video of one of the first successful AR projects to launch:
AMSTERDAM, Tuesday June 16th, 2009. Mobile innovation company SPRXmobile launches Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser, which displays real time digital information on top of reality (of) in the camera screen of the mobile phone. While looking through the phones camera lens, a user can see houses for sale, popular bars and shops, jobs, healthcare providers and ATMs. The first country to launch Layar is The Netherlands. Launching partners are local market leaders ING (bank), funda (realty website), Hyves (social network), Tempo-team (temp agency) and Zekur.nl (healthcare provider).

How it works
Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world.

A Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig, is the foundational voice and an advocate of the free culture movement, Creative Commons and Open Source. The Open Video Allience will present a live webcast of a talk by Lawrence Lessig at the end of Feburary. For more background on his ideas view his speech: Free Culture: What We Need From You (Ogg). This was Prof. Lessig’s keynote speech at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. (via Lessig.Content: Audio/Video ) In this video he discusses the emerging remix culture as both the source and outcome of societies embrace of digital technology. Lessig feels a new literacy has emerged due to these changes which should be embraced and taught because it is the key to preparing society for further innovation into the 21st Century. Last year at Educause 2009 he stated:

The ‘ecology of education and science,’ Mr. Lessig said, is inherently collaborative, and it is being strangled by copyright-law principles based on exclusivity…”Scientists and educators are busy creating,” he continued, “so it is up to chief information officers and other information-technology specialists to devise ways to make those creations both legal and widely accessible.”