Learning Solutions

Discovered this site from a tweet by Wes Fryer:

This Bald Eagle nest cam provides an intimate view of a wild Oklahoma Bald Eagle nest in Sutton County. Children and adults from around the world can observe life in an eagle nest, and scientists can make observations that will help better understand the life history of our national symbol.

This nest is on OG&E (Oklahoma Gas and Electric Company)  property at Sooner Lake near Stillwater, Oklahoma. The original dead nest tree used by this pair of eagles fell down. OG&E, with technical assistance from the Sutton Center and financial assistance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, erected an artificial tower which these eagles have adopted successfully.

The eggs in this nest were laid February 6 and with the first egg hatching March 21.

Quite amazing to see up-close the feeding habits of the parent eagles.  The eagles spend much of the day gathering food and tidying up the nest.

Webcams are a great learning solution to bring the world into the classroom.  Students can observe and document the early life of an eagle, using the same tool as professional scientists.

I see this as a perfect example of Alan November’s idea of homework should be a contribution to the classroom’s repository of learning objects, instead of individual effort.

As seen from webcam

The University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) has developed a Nurse Anesthesia operating room simulation in Second Life for learning the basic induction process.  They identified three major learning solutions for Second Life:

1. For courses dealing with gaming, online communities, and emerging technologies, students can study the Second Life technology itself.
2. Other faculty use Second Life as a communication medium, focusing on delivering in-world lectures, making presentations, and conducting discussions.
3. Finally, faculty can use Second Life as a learning space for in-world learning activities, such as role playing, interactive simulations, and educational games.

The article discusses the history of Second Life on the KUMC campus, and goes into great detail on the development of the nursing simulation.  An audio transcript accompanies the article.

As you get to the end of the article, pictures demonstrate how life-like the environment is in Second Life.  It is hard to tell the real equipment from simulation.

Conclusion from the article:

Training students in the physical space of the operating room was expensive for the Nurse Anesthesia department. They needed a more flexible space for students to learn a complicated process. The Second Life simulation provided the department with a virtual learning space having many interacting objects and without the constraints of a physical space. Furthermore, students could easily access the virtual space without permission or a standing appointment, giving them more flexibility.

The Nurse Anesthesia simulation gave students the opportunity to focus on the steps and the process before learning the tactile use of objects in the basic induction process, which they would learn in the physical operating room. Using Second Life gave us the opportunity to develop a virtual leaning space based on the educational needs of the Nurse Anesthesia department, instead of modifying their needs to fit inside another physical learning space.

Read more from the the EDUCAUSE Quarterly-

Virtual World Learning Spaces: Developing a Second Life Operating Room Simulation

From eSchool News:

High school students are now able to access and download professional Microsoft Corp. software such as Visual Studio and XNA Game Studio for free, a service that has been offered to higher-education students for the past year through DreamSpark.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the expansion to high school students March 26 at the Government Leaders Forum – Americas, which took place in Leesburg, Va.

DreamSpark provides the most advanced programming and development tools that students can use, Gates said, offering all of the capabilities that professionals have. Having access to these tools is intended to inspire students to eventually create companies that could become the next Microsoft, he said.

“Even at a young age, students want to push the limits,” Gates said. “It harkens back to when I was a student and wanted to push the limits. The earlier you get going, the more likely you are to get super, super good at it.”

Microsoft IT Academy Student Pass

The Microsoft IT Academy Student Pass is a special no-cost online learning opportunity for students. IT Academy Student Pass provides free e-learning courses to verified students who are interested in extending their technical skills with Microsoft technologies.

The IT Academy Student Pass offers 12 to 22 hours of FREE e-learning courses, aligned to the first set of topics you need to master for the first Microsoft certification exam within the track. Each track is unique, and most will require you to take additional e-learning courses to complete all of the topics you need to succeed on the certification exam.

The goal of the IT Academy Student Pass is to give you a head start by providing hours and hours of rich, award-winning e-learning content that sets the stage for the learning to come.

Microsoft is also offering free Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist Testing until June 30, 2009.

Learn more at - Microsoft Dreamspark

Issuu, is a tool (in beta) that converts documents into an online format for easy navigation.  Instead of having to download a PDF to read, your visitors can simply open the document online and page through it in a flash application.  I downloaded the ASU Magazine from the Angelo State website, and uploaded it to my Issuu library, and in a few minutes, it converted the magazine into a virtual magazine.  Issuu also provides code in which you can embed the document into your website:

How cool to take students Word documents and make them come alive with this tool.

Features and benefits

• Upload your documents and we turn them into professional online publications.
• Enjoy the best reading experience online (fullscreen with crisp vector graphics).
• Explore a living library with the web’s most interesting publications.
• Post/embed your publications anywhere online (Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, etc.)
• Get a high rank on Google and receive detailed statistics about your readers.
• Create a custom viewer design and integrate your publications on your website.

YouTube has launched a consolidated directory of videos from higher education institutions.  Schools must register to be a part of the directory.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Breaking out the academic channels as a distinct section makes them easier for people to find and exposes scholarly content to a broader audience. “Really what we see as a value in the YouTube partnership is to extend the reach of our content on a platform that millions of people are using every day,” said Ben Hubbard, manager of webcast.berkeley, the University of California, Berkeley’s streaming-video service.

YouTube Edu lets viewers sort clips by school or number of views, and the schools offer content ranging from complete courses to campus events to information for prospective students.

After a  brief scan of all the schools, most have between 50 - 150 videos posted.  MIT has the most with 893.

This seems to be a response to Academic Earth, another repository of educational videos.

The real question is whether this will compete with iTunes U and where schools choose to post their video content.  Or, does the school post videos in several social media areas, to maximize exposure?

Blackboard announced their app for the iPhone last week.  While it seems this is the latest in convenience for students, there seems to be some concern on the security of the BbSync tool that the iPhone uses to communicate with the Blackboard Learning System.  The BbSync tool is what must be enabled to connect with the Blackboard system, and has been in use to allow students to see updated course information in Facebook.

While the user must log in to Blackboard before accessing any course information, the system must be able to connect with the student’s account to know if there is any new items for notification.  The jury is still out whether this is a useful tool.