e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Jon-Udell

  • Educational Technology and the Sources of Innovation

    Based on Jon Udell’s excellent post, I spent the weekend getting reacquainted with work of Eric von Hippel, the researcher who pioneered the study of user-driven innovation.

    What’s interesting about von Hippel is that his research hits on the common themes of the open education movement, but does so in a slightly different key.

    Briefly, there are a number of intersecting debates about MOOCs. There is what Reich frames as the Dewey/Thorndike debate about what learning is. There is the centralized/de-centralized debate about what the web does best. There is the debate about about whether MOOCs are disruptive or innovative or neither, and the discussion over how much ability to remix teachers need to make classroom learning work well (answer, probably, is quite a bit).

    But people on both sides of the debates are often driven by a larger question that we are not naming directly enough: “What are the sources of innovation?”

    User Innovation

    This is the question that von Hippel has been investigating for over thirty years now. And if we see innovation not as something that has happened, but as something we want to continue to happen, this may be the most important question of all.

    (more…)

  • What Intrigues Me About Google Wave

    Now that I’ve had a little while to think about it, I’m ready to distill my initial enthusiastic reaction to Google Wave down to a manageably short (and hopefully non-fanboi) post. Let me say at the outset that I have no idea whether Wave will succeed. I am convinced, however, that something like Wave will succeed, in part because much about it is not new. My initial thought was was, “Hey, somebody finally got Apple’s OpenDoc to work.” Scott Wilson twittered that Google had reinvented ActiveX. In some ways, Wave is, like many great inventions, an old idea with some new twists. This is not to minimize the value of those twists. To the contrary, they are astonishing. My point is simply that the essence of Wave will survive whether ore not Wave itself is a success because many of the core ideas have been proven to be compelling in the past.

    At any rate, there are a number of elements to Wave that are particularly attractive and likely to change practice in the field of e-learning:

    (more…)

  • Teaching Faculty About Wikipedia (and Social Software in General)

    I just discovered Jon Udell’s wonderfully archeological screencast about the evolution of a wikipedia page. In eight and a half minutes, he beautifully demonstrates how a community negotiates knowledge construction when nobody is the boss, anybody can edit, and there are no formal processes. As we know, this is a particularly vexing question to many faculty, who are used to editorial authority being defined by a single blessed and credentialed editor or a small number of blessed and credentialed jurors in highly specialized content domains. In contrast, Udell takes an extremely specialized topic–the history and conventions of using umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands–and shows how entirely different editorial mechanisms can work very effectively.

    If you do share this with your faculty colleagues, I recommend emphasizing the following points: (more…)

  • Video Literacy

    There’s an old joke among instructional designers. In response to a request for “gratuitous” video in a course, we ask, “What moves?” The implication, of course, is that if you are not showing content that is inherently dynamic and in motion then there is no point to video.

    How last millennium can you be?

    The joke betrays a lack of sophistication–of literacy–regarding the expressive power of the moving image. I think we need to take video more seriously and give it a privileged place right beside the written word in freshman composition classes. Because video can express some of the same concepts we ask students to relate using the written word, only more powerfully, more compactly and…well…just differently. (more…)

  • Progress Toward an Offline e-Learning Client?

    One of the most beloved aspects of the SUNY Learning Network’s current Lotus Notes-based homegrown LMS is its offline capabilities. Faculty members can download the current course data–including student discussion posts, tests, etc. They can respond to posts, grade papers and tests, add announcements, and so on, all while offline, and automatically synchronize the next time they have a connection. People who haven’t used this capability (especially those who always have a broadband connection handy) don’t understand the value of this affordance, but I do. It’s for the same reason that, much as I love my GMail, there are times when I really need an email client that can work offline. Or an offline RSS feed reader. Sometimes, it’s really handy to not have to be connected. And that’s doubly true for faculty members who are not gadget freaks, live in rural areas, and are unlikely to have ubiquitous broadband (or any broadband at all).

    Anyway, like it or not, we’re on the hook to reproduce that capability in our next-generation system. This is a somewhat daunting challenge. Not that it’s rocket science; synchronization has been done many times in many different ways, and there are any number of existing code bases that we could draw from. Rather, it’s daunting because it’s a lot of work to do at all and a lot more work to do right. Developing and, even worse, QA testing a cross-platform fat client in an environment where you have no control whatsoever over the profile of the client machines is a pretty large task, even if you draw on an existing cross-platform technology base such as Eclipse RCP or Mozilla Firefox.

    A while back, I wrote a bit about some relatively new possibilities for re-implementing the fat client experience with…er…less fat. At the time, though, I was focusing more on the user experience; I didn’t really get into the whole synchronization issue.

    As of yesterday, it looks like there may be a nice, lightweight solution to offline synchronization on the horizon, courtesy of none other than Ray Ozzie–the original inventor of Lotus Notes and now Microsoft’s CTO. (more…)

  • 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…)

  • JotSpot Initial Impressions: This is Your Source Code on Wiki

    After spending a few hours playing around with the JotSpot beta, I can say that I like what I see very much so far. As a non-programmer who wants to learn a little HTML and doesn’t read manuals very often, I love the “View Source” feature in my browser. I can find a page I like and see how they put it together, learning by example. JotSpot takes this idea and runs with it.

    To begin with, you can not only view the source for a JotSpot page; you can edit it too. OK, that wouldn’t be different from any other wiki if all the software allowed you to do was create free-form HTML pages. But it does a lot more than that. In fact, it does (at least) three new things beyond normal wikis that are pretty huge changes.

    First, it lets you structure data. You can create form fields on a wiki page and make those fields searchable. You can even make form fields on an existing page so that you can cut free-form text and paste it into the form. This makes your data much more usable.

    Second, it lets you access outside data sources. RSS is the easiest, but from what I can tell even with my severely limited markup skills, it looks fairly straightforward to pull in other types of sources too. For example, they give you a page where they use the Google API to pull in search results. Because it’s all in wiki, it’s easy for me to learn by viewing their source code, making a minor change (e.g., the search term), and testing it right there. The code in the example pages is superbly well commented to make learning by doing easy.

    The third impressive thing that JotSpot does is that the accessing of external data sources can be bi-directional. Let’s say I have some data in three different systems that I want to look at. I can pull them all into the same JotSpot wiki page. But now I want to make a change in, say, the data in my CRM app. As long as the app itself allows it, I can change the data in the JotSpot field and have it automatically update in the CRM application. Very slick.

    But the slickest thing of all is how easy it is. As an HTML poser, I regularly get stuck on tables and divs. If actually had to write significant SQL or PHP (or whatever) code to access data…well…forget it. But JotSpot appears to reduce all of this stuff to a simple declarative markup. You can apply CSS, etc., to it, but you don’t have to. I can build a simple but functional application in a few simple lines of code. (And by the way, unlike many wikis I’ve seen, the default result isn’t butt ugly.)

    I’m just scratching the surface of this thing, really, and in some ways I’m not the best person to be testing it. But so far I’m really impressed.

    By the way, Jon Udell has an interesting twenty-odd-minute Flash demo of the product. The demo itself is rough (no VCR controls, kinda blurry, etc.) but the content is highly informative. Some of the stuff I mention in this post I figured out from watching the demo and then going back to JotSpot to play.