Web 2.0 and our last "formal" itec 830 class

Today I did class online--too exhausted to make the hour trek each way to and from sfsu. Saddened as well that I wasn't there. It was typically hard to interact with the class via Illuminate. But Adam and I did the best we could. We came up with a screen of web 2.0 and education. I'll post it.

Then Kim challenged us to somehow sell web 2.0 as an educational tool. My vision of my response to this challenge is this.

Take the above drawing and take out all the web 2.0 tools, leaving in the highlighted ideas. Then ask the question, What do YOU want education to be? And I would hazard that all the ideas we used to describe web 2.0 would be appropriate. Then ask the question, "How do you get there?" and fade in all the tools... And say..."Web 2.0, that's how." End of commercial. End of tonight's blog.

website design critique

I critiqued the website School 2.0.
In a nutshell, I thought it was a pretty site, simple with easy-to-use straightforward navigation. The only problem was that it took me a long time to figure who the audiences was and I never quite figured out what the site/organization was for.

The audience for this site are school and district administrators and CTOs. Possibly this is why the site didn't speak to me at all.

The information was well chunked, even though I think it might have been chunked too small. The images were relevant, I suppose--they consisted of teachers and students--although they confused me because at first I thought the site was for teachers.

The labeling is consistent--the fonts are simple sans serif fonts and easy to read.

There is not too much detail on any of the pages. They pretty much fit on the screen.

The navigation is well laid out. There are 5 paths. On the home page you can even rollover the 5 paths and learn about what they are about. But, the explanations were not clear enough for me to really understand what they were, so I had to click and explore them to get what they were for. Navigation seemed to work fine until too many of us were on the site and it slowed way down. The information seems very accessible--there are logical paths and nav bars on every page. As long as you understand where you're going...

I thought the screen design was attractive and simple. White background. Black text primarily with light blue links and purple headers. The rollover highlight colors don't map to anything--although it would have been nice and consistent if they did map somehow to their sections. Layouts seem simple and pleasing, graphics on each page except the resources page. Which could have used a bit more explanatory text. Although the font is kind of small, it is pretty easy to read--probably because it's san serif w/ lots of surrounding white space.

The design of my everyday project and critique of edu 2.0 interface..

So I've been thinking about my final project--the learning mashup platform/portal and the concepts from The Design of Everyday Things.

I've been thinking about perceived affordances, causality, visible constraints, mapping, and conceptual models in relation to this project. Here are the challenges I have:

OK, so this is not a simple interface, it just can't be. There's too much for it to do. Now George Siemens would say it should be simple, to allow different applications to different things. In our class, I felt there were problems with trying to keep together all the different applications we were learning and using. The blog could hold some of it, but certainly not all. iLearn gave us assignments and discussions. Ning and Socialtext afforded us collaborative ability--but frankly I thought that Socialtext was hard to navigate. I didn't know how to set it up, I wasn't sure I had much power to do so. So, I think it's important to have a place or as Siemens would call it "an learning environment" that can enable a class to access and show the products of web 2.0 tools.

I've started drawing pictures and my screens start looking pretty darn complex--especially an instructors dashboard. When I was investigating Edu 2.0 LMS, I was frustrated by the complexity and poor help system. The help system is organized by feature-not process. Even then, I couldn't find the features I was interested. But then if a product is well-designed you shouldn't need help. I'm a great believer in Wizards, actually. Not everyone appreciates them. I like having an application ask me if I want help doing something and then walking me through the process. But is that a design crutch?
Another problem with the Edu 2.0 website is that the tabs don't speak to me. I'm not sure what to do with them and had to go through all them to figure out what they did and which one I should use to just create a course.


Also, there seem to be weird superfluous tabs like friends, family and gifts--which I wonder what these have to do with teaching a class.

I think the issues have to do with affordance and mapping. I can't tell by reading the labels what they're supposed to do or where they're supposed to go. This has something to do my conceptual model or prior schema not matching the designers as well.

So, how do I take this back to my own project...I guess an instructor will come to a screen that contains all the class s/he is teaching and then the instructor clicks to go to each class' "learning environment". That screen will be the dashboard the instructor uses to create, organize, and revise his/her course from. The page needs to provide one-click access to the class webpage design view--so that the instructor can easily create, organize and revise this page as well. One click to his/her students' wiki-sites, etc. What's important is the important tasks an instructor has are visible on that page and that that an instructor recognize where buttons take them and why. Tasks like how to create and make changes to instructor, class, and student pages, how to access the tools the instructor needs, etc. It's about visible affordances and mapping and conceptual models/prior schema--yes and constraints. Although I'm not sure how they play into it, yet.

Project Management speaker

I've been thinking about so many things besides our last class, I forgot to blog about it. I won't go over what our speaker Rodney Dunican, from Rodventures talked about since so many of my classmates have done an ample job. I thought his presentation was a good overview of the project management process. Very corporate-focused.

I believe that project management is a great skillset to have for many jobs. I've found myself managing projects in most jobs I've had. Even though Rodney actually stressed this, I felt like his presentation was so focused on the job of project managing that his talk didn't lend itself to an understanding about how project management skills could be used by people with other kinds of jobs.

The other thing that struck me about his talk was when h talked about the "business of learning being very different than learning." He then went on to talk about the reasons that companies provide training, many of them having little to do with actual learning (such as legal compliance). I have to admit that this made me cringe. I'm glad he can find celebration in working on projects where learning is not the priority. But I know that's not my cup o' tea.

I was interested in the book Brag! that he talked about. I find that I tend to not get credit for work I've done because I don't brag enough. And when I do, I feel awkward and uncomfortable and I think maybe I just don't know how to do this...

iRubric

ClassCentral is a free online LMS--free to individual students, instructors, groups, etc.

They have a feature called iRubric -- it's a free technology that helps you develop rubrics and easily use them. It's available on rCampus as well.

I wanted to note it because it seems like a useful free educational tool.

Community colleges and LMS and So you want to teach online?

This is a cool eCourse about how to teach online:
http://www.designingdigitally.com/clients/bor/

I found it because of an interesting article that Ellen Wagner twitted about use of Learning Management Systems in community colleges: http://tinyurl.com/d4vgwl

my final project proposal/idea

I've been waking in the middle of the night and scribbling notes on this idea (being on corticosteroids helps this process)--I've been so excited by it. But once Kim laid out the parameters of our final project, I realized that this doesn't quite fit. So, here I am, not wanting to let this go...because so many times I've put away my ideas for some reason or another, always good or realistic reasons. So this time, I'm going to go with my dreams and just do it.

My idea is to design what I've been calling an LMP²--which stands for Learning Mashup Platform/Portal. This idea has been percolating through this semester, as we've explored more and more web 2.0 tools and struggled to organize our thoughts, products, links, etc... It also spoke to me because of connectivist criticisms of LMS's--which I think are valid. But similar to the attraction that corporations are having to tools like SocialText, having a learning tool that allows students and instructors one portal to their online learning seems really useful. Anyway, so here's the overview of this application:

The idea of LMP² is to provide for the instructor and the students a truly web 2.0 learning portal. It will be designed to maximize instructor and student interaction, contribution, creativity, exploration, and collaboration.

This platform is a 2.0 alternative to LMSs. It will give instructors web 2.0 tools and resources and allow them to design which features/modules are available for students. It will give students the power to create their own interactive portal, using modules that are web 2.0 tools, that assist them in exploring, recording their thoughts and experiences, interacting via social networking and discussions with their classmates and instructor, collaborating on projects, utilizing web 2.0 tools to express and share their learning,

Another interesting presentation--free web 2.0 applications that are great for education. We've used/seen most of these, but not all...

Top 20 Free Web Applications for Teachers and Librarians

View more presentations from scyuen.

call for papers on learning mashups

I found this call for papers on Learning Mashups for the ICL conference this fall.
http://www.slideshare.net/sandra_slideshare/call-for-papers-mashups-for-learning-mashl2009-1197860

The related presentations are interesting as well. One is a PLE--personal learning environments. Others have to do with online learning..

Reflections on A Whole New Mind

So I just finished reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink tonight. I have a lot of thoughts about this book and they're kind of all over the map. So I'll try to string them together here--don't expect too much coherence.

I want to start out by saying that I'm one of these whole brain people who has never found a niche in the primarily left-brain world of careers. So I was primed for this book. But interestingly, I started out rather skeptical (who's to say I'm still not?).

I read about abundance, Asia, and automation and thought, ok, I can see how abundance in this rich 1st world nation works(althought there are many who still do not have this, even in the u.s), and the automation argument makes sense. But the Asia discussion seemed racist and/or culturalist to me. Why is it that I, a north amerikkan have any more access to being whole-brained than anyone in any other country? And, frankly, this concept still grates. Hell if someone in India can code cheaper than me, can't they create/design cheaper than me? I do know that when I worked at LeapFrog, they outsourced the instructional design of some products to some folks in India. We ended up having to re-design them--due to, what I believed to be, cultural differences. Differences in the culture of kids, what was funny, what was interesting, what was more culturally connected. While at LeapFrog, I also created an English as a 2nd Language product for Korea (to begin with). We re-purposed instructional material that was designed by a British company and already used in Korean schools. We also made some pretty funny mistakes--like creating stories, attitudes for kids that were inappropriate and words too. Like dog. Our one Korean producer once phoned her mom with questions about the appropriateness of our material. I also know that outsourcing, even to folks in North Dakota (which I've done)--can change the quality of the experience of the customer--because of how hard it is to control the quality of people you don't hire and train yourself. Enough about outsourcing. But I still have mixed feelings about this argument.

Ok, so then I went on to read about the high concept/high touch right-brained abilities. And then suddenly, I found my comfort zone. These were aptitudes that I actually feel like I have--not all of 'em, not in abundance at any one time, but many of them. They are aptitudes that I have not found a niche for, a career that would allow me to develop and utilize these aptitudes. They were concepts that I understood and felt were significant to me, and it was nice to see them so clearly expressed.

In the back of my mind, I was thinking of Zak's critique on feeling like all the author was supporting were right-brained aptitudes and realized that I mostly disagreed. I felt like the author was resurrecting these right-brained aptitudes specifically--from the depths of lack-of-respect-basement land. However, potentially there is another book waiting to be born about how to truly integrate these right-brain aptitudes with their left-brain counterparts.

Then, I got to the chapter on Play and games, and I was going along until the author went off into the story on the u.s. army simulation game and how great it was. Boy did I get mad. It angers me that the u.s. army takes the violence of what they do and turn it into a game, make it fun, and something people want to participate in. Frankly to me, making war fun and a game is abhorrent. I remember when a VietNam vet friend of mine took his son to one of the really bloody awful VietNam war movies, because he wanted to somehow make REAL the awfulness of war. And then there's the whole reality that Pink is advocating exploiting many values/aptitudes that I hold dear to basically make profit and manipulate people into consuming. So, as much as I am excited to see a place in the world for folks like me, I feel uncomfortable about it as well.
So, my anti-capitalist (anti-war) roots are showing. Sigh. It's why I keep looking to do something useful, like education, that is not geared toward profit, to making things people don't need, but you have to make them think they do...

So, what do I do with all this? I guess I concentrate on finding work that allows me to be myself and creating instructional products that incorporate design, symphony, story, empathy, humor, and contribute meaningfully to the world.

I'll put up my diagram of Chapter 1 and my uber-diagram of the whole rest of the book...

Talks Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

This video, my friend turned me onto... Talk about right-brain thinking....

web2.0expo...Will Wright, Catalyst, and more sites...

So, I found my notes, so I wanted to continue from my last post.
Curriki is the open curriculum sharing site that Architecture for Humanity is using to share their architecture curriculum. It was started by Sun Microsystems. It's dedicated to sharing world-class curriculum to everyone. It allows you to find, use, create and collaborate on curriculum with its global educational community. Pretty cool site!

AFH also turned me on to the site Global Nomads. I believe its been mentioned before in class--maybe Kim? Anyway, I'm going to quote what they do, "...create interactive educational programs for students about global issues." They provide programs to schools for a price that integrate into curriulum and standards, and provide opportunities for kids to interact with other kids all over the world and a global prospective.

I sat in on an open workshop on developing online un-organizations, led by this fellow from the International Design Association (ixda). The one thought I gleaned from this talk is how similar and related the work of instructional design is to interactive design. There are lots of resources on this site about design, good place to explore!

Disjointed as hell, I will continue...

Keynotes--so many of us missed most or all of them. I got to see about 1.2 of them. They are available online. Excellent recordings! I haven't had time to listen to many of them yet, but I do recommend the talk by Will Wright, who designed Sims..

I walked into the end of a demonstration of Adobe Catalyst (out in Oct 09). It's an application that allows a designer to take a page from photoshop, and add interaction to it without coding. Then those files can be hooked to database back-ends by those techie folks. The thing that is interesting to me is that it furthers peoples accessibility to the powers of flash without having to become a total flash-head (similar to how Captivate uses the flash engine, but creates a somewhat easier and definitely simpler interface). Flash makes very cool, fun stuff. It's just rather deep and complex...nice to see more access to its power and glory for the rest of us...

The one keynote I got to see was Will Wright. He developed the Sim city games. His most recent game is Spore. He called Spore an asynchronous MSPG or a Massively Single Player game. One where you basically play with yourself and you have access to thousands of realities that other people have created--to add to your universe. He feels like Spore is more of a toy than a game. He said that games or toys like Spore become a create expression of players. He also said that similarly to how we craft our identities in the world, people really enjoy crafting identities online--identities that are limited only by imagination...

He thought part of the popularity of Social Networking is how you are the center of your network and your world, that's how people think anyway. I thought...gosh I guess if I was like a kid...do we all still need to think we are the center of the universe (like my 9 year old)? or do we, adults, feel so insignificant so much of the time, that we are drawn to the illusion of being the center...making us feel important at least on facebook with mega-lists of friends, and tweeting with massive followers--who hang on our every tweets..

He likes Wii--because it's not immersive--most of the entertainment is in the room, not on the screen (though that is part of it). It also allows a more intuitive and physical interaction with digital world.

Will is into games that intersect with the Real World--that help us understand complex systems and social trends.

Then, I swear Kim wrote him a question about games and education--or one of my esteemed classmates... He believes that education should be about making people better able to deal with the world. And that part of what people love about game si the education they provide us with. Similar to our speaker, a couple weeks ago, he reiterated that the skills taught by gaming defy standardized testing--although they are important to dealing with the world--skills like scientific thinking, analysis, etc. He sees education as igniting a flame, not filling a pail--and games can do that--motivate kids to learn, ignite their imaginations and curiosity. Finally, he talked about taking the world and leading it into games...like Google Earth. Using games to make our world understandable and enhancing our perceptive abilities...

whew... That's all for now!

first written thoughts on the web2.0 expo conference..

I'm saying "first" because I'm afraid there might be a few of these. What's strange about that statement, is my overall reaction to the web2.0 conference was disappointment. 90% of the companies there were making b2b apps--monetizing tools that are free in one form or another. A few companies were developing open source tools and monetizing them by customizing them for businesses--they were more interesting to me. Dreamface and Mindtouch come to mind--providing mashup kind of platforms. Applications that I'd like to investigate more. I have to admit that I kept thinking of free puppies when I was talking to these folks though;-)

One funny moment...I went to this booth for this mashup company. I thought, I know what a mashup is, I'll see what they're doing. Well the woman started talking about API's and took off from there. Until I said, can we back up and can you say that in English? She and her sales partner laughed and said, ha that's a good question. She launched back into layers between interface and API's. And I smiled blanklye and said thankyou, that I'd read their stuff and maybe come back for more questions... Then I thought if they can't even explain this stuff to me, their sales team is in trouble...
Another wierd thing was that many times you could not tell what a company did by looking at their booth. They had pretty signs and t-shirts, big monitors with lots of digital graphics... So, I asked a lot of times, other times, I thought...who cares.
OK, so the place I found the most information and comfort (frankly) was the little row of nonprofits on the far left side of the expo. I spoke to the women from ISKME. They've created the OER Commons--Open Education Resources. We talked about open source curriculum and the importance of making curricular resources available to everyone and involving both teachers and students in the creation of it.
I also finally connected with the folks from Techsoup.org. They do a lot to connect nonprofits with technology--providing low cost software and equipment and training. They've also created netsquared.org, a program that supports social activist/change oriented web and mobile projects around the globe. They're doing alot of social networking with folks who are doing these kinds of projects. Also, I told the woman in charge of building online communities about my interest in creating technology-based learning for nonprofits and she gave me the names of two women who are very much involved with this stuff. One is Nancy White, Full Circle Associates. Another contact is Janet Salmans, whose company is: Vision2Lead: eLearning eCommunity eLeadership. She's put together an interesting paper called "A Taxonomy of Online Collaboration." Here's a link to the Overview. I will be doing more research around these women and try to contact them. But this experience got me thinking about what eLearning for nonprofits and Social Activism is really all about--aside from teaching, it's about community building and activism/action.

I also talked to some folks from Architecture for Humanity. An interesting project they had done, was to create an open source curriculum for teachers to use with kids--so that the kids could help design their own schools. The curriculum taught architecture and related stuff as well as involved the kids in the process of designing their own learning space. It sounded really cool. I'll try to find the link to the curriculum site, they partnered with.

OK, so this is why I have to do another blog. I got to hear Will Wright speak, he's the creator of Sim City. He had a lot of interesting things to say about gaming. And more...But I will end here..for now.