Month: May 2010

From Students to Teachers

Today, Cindy’s tech colleagues are giving her a retirement party. As these things seem to go, a photo of Cindy appeared in today’s local paper recognizing one of the final projects she has worked on (GF Herald article on Books of Hope – free registration required). Cindy thought the article focused too much on her comments and not enough on the teachers who executed the project. Possibly – but Cindy is quotable and has a nice way of framing what the students accomplished.

Books of Hope

BTW – the title of the newspaper article, “From Students to Teachers”, could serve as a summary for a what we think may be one of the more productive models of project based learning – technology projects that are essentially peer tutoring.

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SoundPaper

Offering comment or tutorials for iPad apps would be almost too easy. One could offer several such posts a week for about as long as you could stay motivated. I don’t own an iPad, but I can borrow Cindy’s iPad and I will offer an occasional post when an app seems unique and relevant to my interests.

One of the research topics I pursue concerns college study note taking and how note taking and note using can be improved with technology. About 6 months ago, I described a laptop program (Pear Note) that allowed note taking and simultaneously recorded audio. The idea is that the user would record to a lecture or presentation and simultaneously take notes. The unique feature was the the text notes were linked to the audio. So, the user could click on a location with the text and hear the corresponding audio. In other words, the program time stamped the audio each time the user entered a new segment of text. If the value of this is approach is not apparent, consider that a student probably does not want to listen to a lecture she has already heard repeatedly. What she wants to hear is the parts of the lecture that correspond to a section of notes that do not make sense.

It turns out there are similar apps for the Ipad. SoundPaper does exactly the same thing.

In addition, once the presentation is completed the user can email the audio and text to an email account. I translated the audio I recorded (generated by playing a segment of a recorded lecture from this semester through my desktop machine) from the mpeg4 format to mp3 format to insert below.

Demonstration_1

BTW – the clicks you sometimes hear results from my keyboarding. Actually, I am not certain what you call it when you use the screen keyboard.

This app on and iPad would seem quite useful for college students. The cost – $5.

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Simple is good – Posterous is simple

I became familiar with Posterous by accident. I was reading a series of complaints identifying security concerns in Facebook and came across a Wired article by Ryan Singel. The article addressed the issue of controlling your content and I interpreted the author to indicate that the flexible and simple blogging platform Posterous would serve as an alternative to Facebook allowing control of which users could see what. For some reason, I understood Posterous to be a way to aggregate content from multiple sites and then control who could see what. At present I appear to be wrong about the aggregation part, but in the process of discovering this I became a Posterous fan.

Posterous may be one of the first online services I have encountered that requires very little explanation. The simple version in this case is actually very simple.

Email stuff to post@posterous.com and it will add the “stuff” to a blog. Really, that is it. The heading for the email becomes the “subject” of the blog post and the stuff contained in the email (plus attachments) becomes the content of the post. The attachments can be images, video, sound files, etc.

The first time you do this Posterous will respond to your email and ask you to provide a few details (e.g., password, blog title, ) and if you want you can enter this information and proceed as a blogger.

Explore a little more and you will learn that you can customize the blog in ways that may make it a useful educational tool. The settings below establish my blog name and the address for the site (grabe.posterous.com). You note I can also select a theme for the site and control who can post. Near the bottom of this captured image, you will note the possibility of assigning a password to the site. Control/privacy are important considerations in any online educational site.

I have my Posterous site set up so that only “contributors” can post and I have control over who qualifies as a contributors. I generate a list of email addresses the site will accept input from and these individuals become contributors.

I am coming to believe that SIMPLE is an important key to effective online educational tools. Efficiency is important. Tools that are difficult to learn reduce the time available to learn “content”. Tools that are cumbersome to use once learned reduce the time available to learn other things. So much about learning in a group setting comes down to time and efficiency. Successful learning on an individual level also depends on the availability of sufficient cognitive resources to think and reflect. Tools and tasks that are too complex simply overpower the cognitive resources of many students.

BTW – it turns out Posterous works in pretty much the opposite way than I had originally hoped. It is a great tool for saving content and then passing that content on to designated social sites. It is an efficient way to add content to another blog or Facebook or to tweet. Once one or more outlets have been identified, you can even control what goes where – twitter@posterous.com – adds the comment to Posterous and forwards to Twitter.

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THINKING about privacy within Facebook

I do have a Facebook account. I guess I have this account because people I know make heavy use of Facebook and having an account connects me with them. I spend very little time in Facebook, but I send excerpts from the content I generate elsewhere to Facebook so “Facebook only” acquaintances see this content.

Facebook initially annoyed me because of a personal bias. The phrase “digital native” and the unique qualities ascribed to those who happen to fall within this group by function of their birth date seemed elitist and simply wrong. Perhaps I was jealous of an attribution that was beyond my control. To me, Facebook became the face of the digital native. Facebook as a place where many spend great amounts of time often doing things that seemed frivolous. I did not argue the generational difference in the time spent, but I did contest the value of spending this amount of time.

I have been following issues related to user privacy on Facebook for some time. The problem of control has long been an issue with naive users failing to appreciate the longevity of inappropriate content shared online. After listening and reading about recent developments, I have additional concerns.

We drove 500+ miles last Friday and that means that Cindy and I listen to many hours of podcasts (when the Twins are not playing). We happened to listen to a TWIG program (This Week in Google – and the cloud) that got heavily into an analysis of Facebook privacy challenges AND what appears to be a strategy of collecting user data of several categories within the Facebook environment. Part of the conspiracy theory is that these two issues are inter-related; i.e., Facebook is purposefully making it difficult for users to control who can view their data in order to increase the amount of data Facebook can collect and organize.

If such issues interest you, the following resources may be helpful.

The issues with Facebook are evolving beyond whether instructors should friend their students or whether educational organizations should maintain a Facebook presence. I admit to distrusting consolidation, but I am trying to decide if this is something more.

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