Yahoo Online has an article describing a new Michigan high school graduation requirement. Students must complete an online course or learning experience to qualify for graduation. The article states “the State Board of Education will approve the basic level of technology and Internet access required for pupils to complete the online course or learning experience.”
I have no idea what problems this will create, but I like the idea. Mandate that students and the educational infrastructure deal with the challenges of online learning. One such experience, blended with traditional experiences, seems a good way to start.
The list of online productivity tools continues to grow. The newest addition in my personal experience is ThinkFree. This site offers a suite of products providing word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation services. A user has 1 gigabyte of storage space. The voluntary social nature of this site allows collaborative authoring, collaborative file searching, and tags. At the low end, access is supported by ads and contextual ads (i.e., the system knows what you are writing and matches ads to this content). A “pay” version is available.
I am becoming interested in Google’s Writely. This product is a very functional online word processor that you operate from within your browser. Writely is free AND it was developed to allow multiple authors to work on a file.
I learned that Writely can be used to author and then send blog posts. So, if you see this post, the blog upload function works.
So, why I would want to author blog entries in this way – the editor in WordPress works great. I suppose there may be some interesting opportunities for several people to co-author a blog entry. Perhaps there would be some advantage in creating a file, inviting specific individuals to work on it with you, and then sending the finished version to your blog.
I must admit that I would be hard pressed to provide a reasonable definition of web 2.0. Perhaps the best way to explain is by way of example – the term applies to services such as ….
The Web 2.0 Awards site provides such a list examples broken down by category. You are provided the added benefit of learning which examples someone feels are the best of class.
During the flight to my recent research conference, I was listening to a randomly selected educational podcast and encountered a description of NUVVO. I made a note to investigate this product when I returned home and had some time. Here is my comment.
I would describe Nuvvo as a CMS (course management system). At the low end, Nuvvo is a free service allowing anyone (a stated goal is to “bring out the teacher in all of us”) to build an online course and offer it to “learners.” The free version limits course authors to 25 MB of content. The free version also contains advertisements. If you wish to explore the capabilities of this service, there is a five minute screencast that explains core features.
I think this is a significant and interesting development. It is probably too early to speculate about broad topics such as what the opportunity to offer a free or inexpensive educational content management service might mean. Will ventures such as this challenge the place of traditional educational institutions in serving nondegree seeking students? Will such services challenges companies such as lynda.com or atomiclearning.com that provide specialized training? Will educators in K-12 settings use such products to extend classroom experiences?
Exposure to this service reminded me of the efforts of some of my University of North Dakota colleagues to develop a CMS product (HTMLeZ). University ventures have contributed much to the field of technology (e.g., the original Mosaic browser), but I wonder if such projects should be approached with a commercial focus. Sometimes a commercial opportunity emerges, but I think this cannot be the reason research and development projects are undertaken. Alternatives to the high end commercial products (e.g., Blackboard) are needed, but it is unclear how such alternatives will emerge. Will new ideas come from small commercial startups, from open source initiatives (e.g., Moodle), or from companies such as Nuvvo.
My local paper carried a wire service story on new problems with NCLB mandated testing. It appears that schools, with state encouragement, are knowingly not submitting test scores generated by 2 million minority students. The exclusions are based on a loophole that allow groups to be excluded when the group is not considered to be statistically significant.
When future teachers consider testing as an academic topic, they learn that tests serve many purposes. Included on such a list are evaluation and information. Problems can occur when attempting to use the same assessment to meet both purposes. The situation with high stakes testing reminds of comments Helen Barrett has made about electronic portfolios. She claims that when colleges use electronic portfolios to evaluate programs and students the value of the portfolio for self reflection is diminished. Students in such a system are reluctant to use the portfolio to explore strengths and weaknesses. The situation with standardized tests seems similar. Once consequences related to performance are in play, the interest in the information value of the tests become secondary.
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