e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Pedagogy

  • If They Build It, Will We Come?

    Cole Camplese has a great post about FaceBook:

    FaceBook is a social networking service that about 85% of the college student population uses. A quick survey of my class this semester showed me that 44 out of 45 students were in the FB. It is amazing how much time and energy students give to their entries and it shows me that with the right mix there are things we can do to design killer experiences:

    • One thing is to make it easy to connect to others. LMS tools do not do this. They are positioned as a teaching tool first and only — that is shame as I would love if it my students spent some real time inside our learning spaces.
    • Make features they want — right now our CMS/LMS has dropboxes, messageboards, quizzes and all the things I want as a teacher but nothing for them. There isn’t a place to connect with others outside of email, you can’t leave quick messages for anyone, and the chat stuff is just so old school.

    And yet, we can’t seem to get ePortfolios off the ground. Clearly, we’re starting from the wrong end of things. Let the students show us how they use online spaces to present themselves, and let us go to them and teach them how to harness what they are already doing for purposes like reflection and job hunting. Applications like FaceBook and MySpace are pretty easy to build these days; we shouldn’t have to invest big bucks into designing ePortfolio apps. They already exist. From the software perspective, what we mainly need is a tool that makes it harder for students to carelessly or accidentally throw out the stuff they did for class that may be important in ways they’re not thinking about yet. We need that Box-‘O-Stuff, where they save their first assignment drafts and where it becomes natural and automagic to keep all subsequent drafts. Then we need easy hooks so they can suck that content out of their boxes and post it on whatever MySpace-like application (whether integral to the LMS or a third-party service) suits their specific portfolio purposes. The main focus then becomes on teaching them what to put in the portfolio and why, rather than on how to build the widgets.

    But are we humble enough to approach it this way?

  • ePort(able)Folios

    Last week I had the pleasure of moderating a conference on ePortfolios at SUNY Brockport. Unfortunately, the audio on WebEX apparently died early on, so there is no online archive available. It’s too bad. It was a great conference.

    Anyway, I’ve said on a number of occasions that ePortfolios are a lot like artificial intelligence in that they will be only a year away for the next ten years. But the conversation at the conference made me realize that I haven’t got it quite right. The real problem is that, for all the many different definitions of ePortfolios out there, we have a bizillion different sets of application requirements which are not being looked at holistically. We’re trying to solve the wrong problems.

    (more…)

  • In Defense of Walled Gardens

    I’ve been seeing the phrase “walled garden” a lot in the edublogosphere, and always with a negative connotation. It is a term that seems to carry over from more general usage referring to either media content or wiki pages that are not open to the public. Of course, Walls are Bad, Open is Good. (“Two legs baaaad, four legs gooood!”) I am a general advocate for Openness, particularly when it comes to education. But I think we are in serious danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (more…)

  • Instructables: step-by-step collaboration

    Here’s a nice little tool, community, and design pattern for creating and sharing how-to learning objects. Basically, it provides a wizard for inputting text step descriptions and illustrative images. Mix in some Flickr-style usability principles and some folksonomic tagging goodness, and you have a nice little instructional confection.

    Here’s their description of their approach: (more…)

  • Time, Ownership, and the VLE

    This is the first of several posts I’ll be making about stuff I learned at yesterday’s conference at FIT–which was excellent. It’s not often that I go to a conference where I find every single speaker to be interesting, but this was certainly the case here. (Raymond Yee apparently live-blogged…er…live-wiki’ed the first part of the day.)

    Anyway, keynote speaker Rachel Smith pointed out a great little project called Dracula Blogged. Basically, the author, noting that Dracula is written as a series of dated journal entries, decided it might be cool to republish the novel as a weblog, posting each entry on the same calendar day (e.g, October 6th) as the dated entry in the novel. I think the success of this experiment underlines a couple of attributes that we need to think about for next-generation VLE’s. (more…)

  • "Signature Pedaogies" = Educational Pattern Languages?

    Chris Correa has a thought-provoking post on something called “signature pedagogies.” Here’s an excerpt:

    Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, shared some of the preliminary results from the foundation’s studies of professional education (including the education of lawyers, doctors, clergy, teachers, and others). He introduced the notion of signature pedagogies, or (as I understood it) the unique and prevalent ‘rules of engagement’ in the education in each of these domains.

    For example, there are certain activities and patterns of discourse that law students engage in that differ from the patterns experienced by medical students. In a law school lecture, a professor might begin a lecture with a “cold call” and ask a student to summarize and analyze some text. This process might be repeated several times so that students are summarizing other students’ contribution and generating their own analysis. This is one element that makes up the ‘signature pedagogy’ in the field of law.

    This sounds an awful lot like educational pattern languages to me. One thing I like about this approach is that it focuses on discipline-specific differences. Disciplinarity is one factor that absolutely should influence the educational patterns employed. (Learning styles/preferences, age level, and skill level are a few other factors that might have an impact.)

    Anyway, good stuff.

  • Small Tools/Big Ideas: Integrating Technologies for Teaching Art and Art History

    FIT will be hosting a great conference this October on teaching visual topics online using tools that afford social learning. The conference is just a bit of a misnomer, since much of the content will be relevant and valuable to a more general audience than just art and art history instructors; it’s really about teaching visually and socially at the same time. Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, the conference coordinators, have done a great job of assembling a stellar program. If you can possibly make it to NYC this Fall, I highly recommend attending.