About Anything

John Spencer of Sirius Corporation, syndicated on ComputerworldUK rants (his word) about Virtual Learning Environments:

It’s been 8 years now, during which time VLEs have been massively promoted by Becta (the UK education quango) there are now loads of them, the best is the free software called Moodle but hardly anyone uses any VLE at all let alone the best one!

Article: The last VLE ever?

ChildWise a UK-based market research and marketing strategy agency which specializes in research with children has released its 2009 Monitor Report focused on children’s and teenagers’ media consumption, brand attitudes and key behaviour.  This year, almost 1800 children aged 5-16 were interviewed in depth on a range of topics.

An article in the Guardian summarizes one of the results from the report: “Screen time has become so pervasive in the daily lives of five- to 16-year-olds that they are now skilled managers of their free time, juggling technology to fit in on average six hours of TV, playing games and surfing the net, it suggests.”

Guardian  article:  Internet generation leave parents behind

Report purchase information is on the ChildWise website: ChildWise Monitor

Lingo Media Corporation issued a press release summarizing  milestones they achieved during 2008. From the press release:

2008 was an evolutionary year for the Company as we achieved many key milestones and accomplishments, which established Lingo Media into a diversified online and print-based education company. We completed the integration of our newly acquired Speak2Me subsidiary including the conversion of its CD-ROM-based English language learning platform onto a web-based advertising supported platform. We believe our investment has positioned Speak2Me for significant growth through its Conversational Advertising(tm) platform. We expanded our product offerings available through Lingo Learning, our China-based publishing business. We successfully completed an equity financing of $5 million through a private placement of our common stock with Orascom Telecom.

Press release: 2008 A Year in Review

IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education – a course taught at Brigham Young University‘s Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology during the Winter 2009 term by Prof. David Wiley is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. As described by the instructor:

Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures – for talking the talk but failing to walk the walk. Setting positive examples is important for people in every field.

There are two ways to describe the design of this course, and both are equally valid. On the one hand, this course is a mix of direct skills instruction combined with project-based learning and collaborative problem solving. The course employs a progression of increasingly complex problems with supportive information, and requires students to synthesize hundreds of pages of literature, interview data, and their own design intuition to produce meaningful artifacts both individually and as part of highly inter-dependent teams. The idea of teach-reteach (characterized by Gong’s description of the Three Person Problem) is at the heart of the students’ day-to-day learning experiences.

On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student can develop during the course.

Course material: IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education

Terry Anderson, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Distance Education at Athabasca University writes on his blog, the Virtual Canuck that there are many dimensions of openness. He says:

Since these criteria of openness have important implications in many dimensions for both learner and teachers, I tend to use adjectives like distance, unpaced, free cost and other adjectives, rather than ones associated only with the media of delivery.

Blog Post: On Open, distance, e-learning and other name confusion

Jon-Michael Poff, a senior at Batesville High School, in Batesville, Arkansas argues in an article on the Edutoipia Website that severely limiting Internet access does high school students a disservice:

Instead of embracing technology as twenty-first-century schools should, the Batesville, Arkansas, schools — along with many others — have been turning on the firewalls, preventing students from realizing the full opportunity the Internet offers.

Students and teachers need online tools to create projects, dispense information, and deepen their understanding of the subject matter. After more than a year of imposing a strict blockade, it’s high time for the Batesville schools to bulldoze the firewalls and let the light of the Internet shine on students and teachers.

Article: Stop Blocking Online Content

Maya Payne Smart reviews Project IT Girl on the Edutopia website.

Project IT Girl is a program for 60 high school girls throughout Austin to learn how to change the world through the use of Information Technology. Program participants apply technology to a global topic they are passionate about to educate and persuade their peers.

Article:  Project IT Girl Makes Computers Cool

Thomas Bittman, A member of the Gartner Blog Network begins his November 26th post with:

Recently, I started working on a committee developing a technology plan for our school district.This has been a huge eye-opener for me. The web, social software and cloud computing will definitely have an impact on enterprise IT – but the impact on our educational system will be astounding, and many in our educational system don’t see it coming.

The post: Cloud Computing and K-12 Education

Tara Madhyastha, of Facet Innovations and Steven Tanimoto, Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in an article in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education describe “facets”, their use in education and methods for identifying and cataloging them.  A facet is an attempt to categorize the partial understandings that students have in early stages of learning a subject in a way that can be communicated to a teacher. Their paper explains the reasons for using facets, and describes a process for developing a catalog of facets.

The paper abstract (links added):

A number of educational researchers have developed pedagogical approaches that involve the teacher in discovering and helping to correct misconceptions that students bring to their study of their subject matter. During the last decade, several computer systems have been developed to support teaching and learning using this kind of approach. A central conceptual construct used by these systems is the “facet” of understanding: an atomic diagnosable unit of belief. A formidable challenge to applying such pedagogical approaches to new topic areas is the task of discovering and organizing the facets for the new subject area. This paper presents a taxonomy of misconceptions and a methodology for going about the task of preparing a database of facets. Important issues include the generality and diagnosability of facets, granularity of facets, and their placement on a scale of problematicity. Examples are drawn from the subjects of physics and computer science and in the context of two computer systems: the Diagnoser and INFACT.

Article: Faring with Facets: Building and Using Databases of Student Misconceptions

Cathie Norris, Regents Professor at the College of Information, Library Science, & Technology at the University of North Texas and Elliot Soloway,  Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Dept. at the University of Michigan writing in SciTech Today argue that:

Rather than spending a bundle on building a sophisticated wireless infrastructure and another bundle on maintaining it, a school could make use of cell-phone computers and the telecoms’ existing wireless infrastructure for Internet access. Besides connectivity at school, the students would then have wireless access to the Internet at home.”

One computer per student isn’t enough. Schools should emphasize the notion of “continuous, seamless use.” The focus on providing a 1-to-1 ratio of laptops to students should be shifted to how students use technology. The State Education Technology Directors Assn. just published a vision statement that reflects this idea: “Ensure that technology tools and resources are used continuously and seamlessly for instruction, collaboration, and assessment.”

Article on the Sci-Tech website: Getting Mobile Technology into Schools