Month: March 2018

Diversify your social media presence

Present awareness of the collection of user private data by social media giants has increased public awareness of security concerns and led some to look for alternatives. While I do make some use of Twitter and Facebook, I have been exploring alternative services for several years. I have a mixed reaction to the present concerns. On one hand, I am bothered by my data being used in ways I did not anticipate. On the other hand, I understand that the companies providing these services have expenses and are expected to be profitable. I agreed to the use of my data, but to a lesser degree than I understood.

Simply put, I use the social media giants because this is where people spend their time. This is a present reality. My concession to what I consider the limitations of these services is that I limit my use to specific purposes. I use Facebook mostly to argue my political views. I use Twitter to discover educational resources being promoted by others and I automatically post notices when I add something to one of my blogs.

One of the dark realities of social media is that it seems to encourage a winner take all process. People are attracted by people rather than be superior experiences. Taking this into account, my recommendation is that people cross-post. Encourage innovation by supporting new services while you continue posting to popular existing services. It is your content so put it as many places as you want.

My present recommendations would be Mastodon as an alternative to  Twitter and Diaspora for Facebook. One innovation of these alternatives is that they use an approach called federation. Rather than relying on one source, both services combine access provided by multiple instances. You join an instance, but can also explore content added to all instances in the federation. I am a member of diasp.org and mastodon.social.

Growing alternate social media requires more than adding content. The process of making connections takes some time. I make the effort to star and share content each time I connect. Using hashtags is important with diaspora as the use of hashtags offers a way to identify other users who post on a common interest. Use hashtags and learn how to follow a hashtag (e.g., education).

So, if you are interested in innovative uses of social media I encourage your exploration of alternative social media services. My motivation for my activation is part technological interests, but also the belief that fostering alternatives is a way to encourage companies to be more responsive to consumers.

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HyperCard rising from the ashes?

Maybe, just maybe, the best learning to code environment still has life. HyperCard, the Apple project that launched hypermedia, is the focus of an open source project called ViperCard.

Vipercard is web-based and you can do many of the same things you could do in HyperCard. The scripting language originally called Hypertalk seems to work as I remember it.

The developer is looking for support to fund his planned additions to the project. The developer has written an explanation of his efforts.

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More on layering services

Why is it I see an emerging category of educational technology few others seem to notice? Maybe they are looking in the wrong place or I only notice what matches my particular view of the world.

The emerging category I have noticed I describe as “layering services”. These are online services that allow educators/designers to add annotations of various types (notes, questions, highlights) to existing online content (web pages, video) and direct learners to the composite of the annotations and the original material. I see this as a way to provide the learners that are the responsibility of these educators/designers with educational content in comparison to information (see my previous post). I have written about this category of service in great detail and I see the category growing rapidly.

I have provided some examples with tutorials online and I should now add new examples I have discovered (Timeline.ly, Wakelet, ReClipped).

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Reading is not studying

I think professionals find shorthand ways to identify key ideas that they use frequently. Reading versus studying is one such key idea for me. Even though I worked with college students, I know that many of them I encountered did not understand this distinction. They would assume that reading was enough or they read several times and assume they were studying. I try to explain this key idea to educators in the hopes it will be a way they can use concepts I assume are familiar to guide their own thinking and practice. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not. Perhaps what is important here is coming up with your own ways to understand important issues. Perhaps teachers are using a concept such as “deep reading” in the same way I use studying.

If exposure to ideas is not enough (reading, lecture, videos, hands-on tasks), what can educators do to facilitate learners learning. How can educators facilitate studying and perhaps help learners learn to studying without facilitation? Yes, you did notice that I went beyond reading to list other versions of information exposure. In doing so, I may have gored some of your own sacred cows by implying these other learner experiences are equivalent to the information exposure involved in reading. I do think the magic of making and other forms of experiential learning is nothing more than information exposure. Like reading, these experiences with content expose learners to information, but the tactics without more cognitive activity on the part of learners do not do enough. Students need to study, process deeply, think or whatever concept you will accept in order to learn.

This has been a lengthy way to introduce you to a second distinction I find helpful – information vs educational content. I find this distinction relevant in thinking about the “abandon the textbook” tactic some find meaningful. I can argue each side of this tactic. I do think it important to consider why anyone thinks this is a good thing to do. Textbooks are costly? Textbooks are easily dated? Textbooks are not how adults learn? These pronouncements may be accurate, but textbooks are also produced from a single perspective, written in an integrated fashion, carefully vetted, and developed purposefully as educational content rather than information. If you are willing to move beyond the textbooks, there are unique challenges when making this transition.

As a textbook author, I have thought about the limitations and advantages of a textbook. My own efforts as an author have encouraged me to move beyond the traditional textbooks I once wrote to more of a hybrid product that addresses some of the weaknesses I and others have identified. As a cognitive psychologist interested in learning challenges and technology, I have also explored options for how information content might be transformed into educational content.

 In many ways attempting to help learners bridge the gap is what textbook authors and teachers try to do. They try to help learners study. A distinction I often draw between secondary education and higher education is that in secondary education teachers often study with their students. In higher education, teachers assume students will study on their own. As I mentioned above, the assumptions of college teachers are not always appropriate. We expect the skills of studying to have been developed from the shared activities of secondary teachers and students and this has not always happened. So, if we can acknowledge that exposure to content is not enough, where along the line and whom will help learners move from educator facilitated studying to learner guided studying?
I sense a way to get educators to understand this issue and to provide learners opportunities to acquire study skills. In a way, moving beyond the textbook should encourage educators to carefully consider their roles as the designers of learning experiences because they cannot assume this role is the responsibility of the textbook author. I like to describe this expanded role as teacher as designer. Of course, this is what educators have always done intuitively and perhaps mindfully. Because the process is so tangible, MODIFYING CONTENT TO CREATE A LEARNNG RESOURCE is a great exercise in thinking about helping students study and perhaps passing on tactics for studying to students.
I have identified a category of tools intended to be applied to online information resources suited to this purpose. I describe the design process as “layering for learning” because the educator as designer accepts the online information as it exists and “layers” activities/tasks/prompts on this information to encourage deeper thinking and specific forms of cognitive processing (studying).
You can gain a feel for some of these services by taking a look at product tutorials I describe online. This post has already grown too lengthy so I will generate a related followup description of these services and how I see them being used by educators.

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Heart in your hand

AR and VR are supposed to be the next big thing. Augmented reality has always made sense to me. Most of the examples of VR I have seen to this point I would describe as “early days”. You can see the potential, but the experience was still pretty crude.

The Merge Cube will likely change the minds of many educators. We purchased some at Walmart (this is another story and I will explain at the end of this post). The Cube is a soft cube you hold in your hand and the cube interacts with apps on your smartphone (both iOS and Android) when you point the phone’s camera at the cube.

A few apps are free, but most likely to be of interest for classroom application cost a dollar or so. We have tried an anatomy app and a space app so far. Here are some screen captures from the phone from the anatomy app. You can insert your phone in a viewer for a 3D perspective, but just the phone works and that approach is less expensive.

Brain showing brain stem.

Heart external and internal views. The heart is beating. You can see the cube through the transparency of the internal view. A given view is manipulated by rotating and turning the cube. Moving between layers is manipulated from the screen of the phone.

The Walmart story

The Merge Cube and viewers are/were available at Walmart. Cindy learned from the Leslie Fischer blog that the cubes were being sold at Walmart for $1. We happen to be taking a winter break on the island of Kauai. This island has one Walmart. We made the trip to the store and purchased every cube they had (the stock for the entire island). The workers in the electronics department were completely mystified. We tried to explain these would be used in classrooms, the desire for all of their stock was perplexing. They asked where we were from and explained that there were probably Walmart stores were we live. We said it would be a while before we got home and the cubes might all be sold by then. We had a great time with the store staff.

Now to figure out how to get all of this stuff back to the mainland.

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