Learning Solutions

We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected. Social networking tools have taken the place of US Postal mail and telephones as communication devices. The problem is not what tool to use, it is how to get your information to the people who need it. Should you create and send your message through e-mail, post to Facebook, Twitter, then post to your blog? If you have 28 hours in the day, maybe. The solution is to use your blogging tool as a single point of entry, and leverage the RSS capabilities to give your readers flexibility in how they wish to view your content. RSS is the feature that provides a standard way many social networking tools use to display your information. Take a look at this from Common Craft for an RSS primer:

So, where does it go? Take a look at this presentation to get a feel about how one message on campus can be delivered to multiple outlets immediately:

This post is the first one since I installed the Twitter Tools. This should enable me to post this article, and then it will be placed on my Twitter account. We will see.

Aviary is a great, free suite of graphic tools for your classroom. The beauty of these tools is that they are all accessed through a web browser, with nothing to install on your desktops. The image editor, Phoenix, is comparable to Photoshop with a rich editing toolset and layering, with the ability to import to photo-sharing sites.

Why just read about it? The Aviary site has videos detailing each tool.

Phoenix Image Editor Preview:

The real reason to use this is the developer’s philoshphy.  As stated in their FAQ:

Through our interactions with the artists on Worth1000.com, we realized that while many people wanted to use digital editing software, it was very inaccessible:

• The costs were prohibitive (and many people didn’t want to risk installing a virus by pirating).
• The interface was too bloated with rarely-used features to make learning it easy.
• You actually needed to install the programs on a machine with specifications that complied with the program and suffer through any unwanted DRM malware that might also come with the software.

We have our roots in the grassroots hobbyists community. We are artists ourselves and know that there are so many other potential creators out there like us… all they need are accessible tools.

Testing the Qik service to have a live stream from the JB iPhone:

Google has revealed a new way of combining common communication tools, Google Wave.

The team behind google maps,  Jens and Lars Rasmussen,  focused on the following questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

E-mail has not changed much since it was invented and accepted into the mainstream culture.

From the google blog:

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The real question is how this learning solution may be incorporated into schools.  eSchool News reports about the educational impact:

For instance, an online teacher could add his or her students to a class Wave, update class information and assignments, hold discussions with students, and view the Wave’s history to see which students contribute to class discussions the most and which students might need extra help.

Instead of receiving 25 separate eMail messages from students, a teacher could use a class Wave to answer common questions or to hold weekly question-and-answer sessions.

A blogging feature will publish all content from a Wave onto a blog; the blog embeds the Wave, so users can still respond to the Wave. But students who might not use Google or who might be unable to participate in a Wave can still see and participate in class discussions through the blog

Google Wave is still in development, without a specific timeline for release, so you may want to go to the Wave site and sign up for alerts.

Wiggio is a free learning solution that allows people, mainly students, to easily set up group areas for study, socializing, or community involvement.  A simple process sets up the site in a few minutes.  All you have to do is invite people to join, and you are ready to chat, share calendar and documents, conduct polls and even set up a phone conference.

From the website:

Wiggio was created in January 2008 by two Cornell graduates looking for a better way to manage the responsibilities of working in groups. The project secured funding in August of 2008 and was officially released to the public as of September 15, 2008. Our mission is to continuously develop an application that eliminates the frustration of working in groups by providing the powerful, straightforward functionality that you need to work effectively.

I have set up groups for my office area, family, and church group.

Wiggio uses Scribd for displaying documents, and Zoho Writer to edit.  Versioning can be enabled to keep track of any changes made to documents.

Many other tools are out there, so it will be interesting to see if Wiggio can stand the test of time.

From Campus Technology:

Bryant & Stratton College graduates will receive their degrees where they earned them–online. In what may be a first, the college will host a fully online, Second Life college graduation ceremony June 10, 2009. About 40 graduates from Bryant & Stratton’s online degree programs have committed to receive their hard-earned degrees in their avatar form on the college’s virtual campus.

Second Life is becoming ubiquitious in higher education, as more schools are understanding the potential.  Schools like Bryant and Stratton College are pushing the boundaries, trying to fully understand the promise of these types of 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

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?