Month: November 2011

Explain Everything

Here is an iPad app recommendation.

Keeping college students in town the day before a holiday break is tough. It is a tough call on holding class – many will skip and then you have to decide what to do with the half that stay. The class in question for me was Educational Psychology and since the topic of educational technology was to be covered during this part of the course, I decided to use tech to learn about tech. I created a presentation that students would be required to view and posted it to Blackboard. As popular as online courses are, most students who attend classes FTF have never had the experience of trying to learn from online experiences.

I decided to create this presentation using tech tools that would be new to me. Instead of PowerPoint, I used the Google docs Presentation tool, downloaded the slides as PowerPoint slides, uploaded this content to DropBox, and then downloaded the file to my iPad. I decided to create the presentation on the iPad using an app my wife has been raving about – Explain Everything.

I admit learning as you attempt to accomplish actual tasks has some drawbacks. The “eat your own dog food” approach assumes you can think about the project and figure out the tool at the same time. I did take a few tries (an hour + each), but most failures were my own fault. A couple of hints from my experience – remember to save (everyone should know this, but I thought saving individual slides as you go was the same as saving the project) and understand the iPad is kind of funny about exporting large files. It turns out, you cannot upload a large video file from the iPad to Dropbox (this one was not my fault). My iPad is starting to fade from use – I am still using the iPad I – and the USB method of transferring file does not work from my machine because it appears I have worn the power/USB connector out. Wifi and bluetooth are challenging. My wife is one of those tech people who just assumes there is a way and then makes it work. She was aware of this obscure Goodreader hack that turns the iPad into a server (as close as I can come to describing what she did), loaded the video file into Goodreader, and then ask me to connect to this ip number and load the file to my desktop machine. I mean really – who knows this kind of stuff.

I have attached a short demo I created using Explain Everything. I am ordering a mike I can use with the iPad, but this approach (remember $3) is impressive compared to how I might have done this same thing in other ways (remember you can annotate, show images, etc.). One final note – I did convert the mp4 file to mov and resized the movie for this demonstation using Quicktime (the old version 7).

explaineverything1 (demo)

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Here are a couple of ways in which you can support content creation and infrastructure development

I am kind of like Public Radio – every so often I lay this guilt trip on people reminding them that the content they appreciate costs someone some money.

The notion of free content is mostly an illusion – you pay, you tolerate ads, you tolerate a provider’s self promotion, someone else pays, or you trade personal information for content. I like the idea of “we trade”, but I wonder how well this has worked. I can tolerate any of these options as long as I can determine the motivation and I do not have to listen to someone claim that “information just wants to be free”.

Here are a couple of ideas I endorse and have subsidized. My contributions were modest, $60 and $25 if I remember correctly, so this is about encouraging lots of people to accept responsibility rather than assuming big donors will step forward.

Readability offers users an option that gives 70% of fees (30% to Readability) to registered publishers with a Readability user stores the text from a web site for later review. This seems fair to me since this system also does not display the ads that might have originally accompanied the content. I decided to give this a try – I am in for $5 a month.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My latest investment is in the open source project “Disaspora“.  The idea here is to create an open source and unaffiliated social networking site very similar to Google +. The site is now hosted, but the long term goal would allow organizations to host their own “node” (I think that is the term). I like the idea of a more diverse environment not so narrowly linked to a few commercial providers.

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The relative value of social contributions

I tell my class that while they may not be personally interested in the research process they should appreciate that researchers perform a valuable service. Whatever the outcome of their studies,  researchers take the vague terms that we all use and throw around and translate (operationalize) these terms in a form that can be measured. It is not necessary that we agree with how this is done. Whatever is offered gives others a starting point for conversation because they can agree or disagree.

Educators must do a similar thing. They present students a task and then evaluate performance on this task in order to indicate the degree to which the performance meets expectations. Typically, educators must be able to communicate the system that has been used.

In both cases, externalizing something vague in a concrete form is challenging, but necessary.

So, as an instructor, I have asked myself how I would evaluate the contributions to a social learning community over a two week period. For what contributions would I give points and how many for each contribution. I am assuming the purpose of this social learning community is to promote personal learning and the learning of others in the group. Remember – this assumes a two week time period.

  • Membership – 1 point a day for being a member of the community. Why – membership encourages the participation of others.
  • Valuing – +1, like, etc. – 1 point for each selection with a 5 point per day limit. Why – valuing encourages the contributions of others. While valuing is more active than membership, it requires little time once involved and can be applied multiple times during a short session. Valuing has less generative value for the individual offering recognition.
  • Share link (content created by someone else) – 5-10 points each – sharing the work of others does bring important content to the attention of others. The range of points here would relate to the “value added” of additional personal comments. Sharing a link – 5 points. Sharing a link with reaction – up to 10. I think there should also be maximum value on this variable. There is a diminishing return to a group if many only share. So max of 10 points a day.
  • Comment – 5-10 points each – comments encourage the contribution of others and engage both the contributor and the commenter in generative activity. 5-10 points per comment depending on the depth of the analysis. Max of 20 points a day.
  • Share original content – 10-15 points – original content provides benefits to both the audience and the author. 10-15 points depending on the quality. Max of 30 points a day.

So, I see the maximum benefit when content is generated and discussed within a group. A group that simply shares work created elsewhere without comment looks active but accomplishes little.

 

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