Alan Levine, Eric Feinblatt and I were talking over Skype recently about a project that Eric and I are working on (the details of which are soon to be announced) when Alan decided to do an impromptu interview of us regarding how we use our iPods. I’m not sure whether what we had to say was very interesting, but at the very least, it’s a good demonstration of Skype’s fidelity. Check it out if you’re interested.
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Threaded Discussion Interfaces: A Research Challenge
In the past, I have ranted about the fundamental flaws with threaded discussion interfaces as opposed to a simpler flat interface, where all posts in a conversation can be seen on one single, scrolling page. I am going to up the ante by making a more specific claim and challenging the research community to prove me right or wrong.
My hypothesis, based purely on personal experience, is that threaded discussion interfaces lead to far less synthesis in educational conversation than flat interfaces do. (more…)
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Harnessing Autobiographical Memory Through Simulations
The Eide Neurolearning Blog has an interesting post on autobiographical memory. It seems to me that the best way to tap its power from the perspective of online learning is through discovery learning adventure games. Check out, for example, this great little action maze that teaches emergency first aid best practices. It was created using a great (and inexpensive) authoring tool called Quandary. By embedding the learning content into a first-person narrative experience, you should be able to acivate autobiographical memory.
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Del.icio.us Feast
I admit it: Much as del.icio.us has intrigued me, I could never quite figure out how to use the darned thing. Lucky for me, Eric Feinblatt turned me on to a screencast on the topic by John Udell. If you’re like me and you haven’t quite been able to get into del.icio.us, then check out the screencast. And to get a slightly academic overview of folksonomies in general, using del.icio.us and flickr as the primary examples, you might want to read Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata.
Once you’ve done so, then you’ll want to look at a few more resources: (more…)
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Great Blog on Neurolearning
Thanks to George Siemens for calling my attention to a great blog called Eide Neurolearning. Lots of good stuff here about how our brains work.
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Separating Content from Presentation for Pedagogy and Reusability
A post on the OpenACS discussion board clued me in to a neat little technology piece called S5. Basically, it takes a single, simple HTML file and turns it into a cross-browser slide show. No more messy, crufty PowerPoint-exported HTML; this is nice and clean. (Check out the demo to see it in action.)
But the bigger benefit is that you can create a single content file and, using Javascript and CSS, allow students to display it as a slide show, on-screen scrollable lecture notes, or printable lecture notes. I would love to see a simple authoring tool that does this; I don’t think it would take a whole lot of tweaking for this purpose.
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What Version of Yahoo Are You Using?
This great question was posed by Patrick Masson, SUNY Learning Environments’ Director of Technology Projects, to make a point about the next generation of course management systems. The design of the current generation of systems is that of old-fashioned monolitic systems. Blackboard, WebCT, Angel–even Moodle (albeit to a somewhat lesser degree)–they are all built on this model. To improve the system, you have to upgrade to the next version.
But web services such as Yahoo, Jotspot, and Salesforce.com are versionless. We don’t know what version of the product is running and we don’t care. New features are added from time to time, but that all happens seamlessly for the user. There’s no migration…no “flipping of the switch.”
So what does a course management platform need to have in order to support this kind of versionlessness? In a word, “services.” (more…)