Mashup

I think my blog may be an example of a mashup blog with various third party applications APIs (such as fleck it, answer tips, 3 column blog layout etc) integrated into the blog. This is done with the help of html editing in blogger. Therefore, mashup is basically programmable web for you to have a hybrid of web applications in one site.

Adobe Bridge for Bill and Melissa Sabo's fle learning task

Batch processing of images using Adobe Bridge can be useful in creating multimodal presentation for your social documentary. View the video below for some ways you can do this.

Audacity and "Where The Wild Things Are" podcast

Yesterday, I had some fun in using audacity in remixing music and my classmates Andrew's narration of "Where The Wild Things Are", a well-known children's story by Maurice Sendak. This is done for the purpose of our fle learning task. The development of the finalized podcast was actually not so easy as Andrew's narration was done independently of my music story board. It was an emerging and creative process as I split, cut, overlap and remix it to the appropriate tempo of the music accompaniment. The other way of doing it will be to get the story board out first. This approach may however impede the narration flow of Andrew. I guess each method of producing a podcast has its own merits and difficulties, you just have to know which works better for you.

Have a listen to it, or try the learning task at the podcast site with your students.

Answer Tips for learning

To illustrate the potential of Answer Tips for learning, here's 2 suggestions:

1. Design an interdisciplinary (language and Science) performance task where groups of students work on producing stories about Science and technology for their Science Blog. As students peer review each other's Science Blog, Answer Tips can then serve as effective tools to bridge student’s understanding of complex Science and technology phenomena, which students typically have difficulty understanding because such concepts are ultimately language-based (Gregory, 1988). Here's an abstract from one of my paper for you to try out Answer Tips. Don't know what avascular is, just double click on the word to find out. It is hoped that Answer Tips.com can improve the technology by incorporating flash-based/Virtual Reality simulations to its explanations of scientific/technical concepts.
   
   "We develop and calibrate a mathematical model for avascular tumour growth. The model is formulated as a set of partial differential equations describing the spatio-temporal changes in cell concentrations based on reaction-diffusion dynamics and the law of mass conservation. Unlike existing models, the current model takes into account the dependence of the cell proliferation rate on the growth inhibiting factors secreted by necrotic cells; furthermore, the model incorporates an element of random variation to the mitotic rate and nutrient supply. The model is solved using standard finite difference techniques. Results obtained from the simulation compare well with published experimental data. The biological and clinical implications of these results are also discussed."
   
   
2. For language teachers designing online journaling tasks around students' areas of interests and yet catering to the special learning needs of students of mixed ability (such as those students with reading comprehension difficulties), you may consider integrating Answer Tips with text to speech applications for firefox (you can download the text to speech applicaton from my fletls files, it's called clickspeech_bundle_v1.3. You then must open the file from firefox browser and restart firefox after installation). In this way, students with special learning needs for reading comprehension can listen to any part of their classmates blog post read to them as well as double click on any word to understand its meaning in the context of the post entry.
   

You may view the video file for Answer Tips and text to speech illustrations.

Reference:
Gregory, B. (1988). Inventing Reality: Physics as Language. NY: Wiley.

AnswerTips

Ever wonder what the AnswerTips icon means? Just double click on any word in my posts to find out. Will discuss about its potential to teaching and learning in my next post.

Learning Objects and Adaptive e-learning

Have those with experience in Computer Adaptive Testing (e.g. SAT) where each examinee receives a different sequence of items depending on which items are answered correctly ever wonder if e-learning environment may also adapt to the learner with regards to his learning styles and course attempt characteristics? This means the e-learning course will adapt and react dynamically to learner's domain-specific and background knowledge, cognitive and affective abilities, interests and learning targets in the process of interacting with the course. Hence if a learner has got prior experience and interests in game based learning, the course will dish out the relevant game based learning context to him/her. Or if through initial interaction of the course materials, learner's lack of prequisite knowledge is detected, the course will adjust the pace of delivery to strenghthen the learner's foundational knowledge base. Although fully adaptive e-learning is still under development, its success will depend to a large extent on the designed structure of learning objects.

Learnign Objects (LO) are digital resources/content that meet e-learning curricula design requirements and have particular structures pertaining to the learning objectives, subject domains in which the content is relevant in etc. These structures in the form of meta-tags enable e-learning course developer to search and aggregate various LO according to the intended course design into an IMS (some content packaging specification) course package in the learning management system (LMS). In this sense, LO may be analogous to a can of coke. The coke being the content; the can is a standard way of packaging the content. The can’s label is the Metadata, which tells us what the contents are, who produced it, how much it costs, how much sugar and fat it contains, and it has a unique identifier – a barcode.

Whilst LO may be useful for recycling and repackaging various configurations of e-learning courses for reusable and collaborative purposes, the LO the teachers have built up over the years may be limited to a specific LMS if that LMS is not SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) compliant. SCORM is a detailed technical framework with the aim of ensuring that content is interoperable, accessible and reusable across different platforms of LMS.

For e-learning system to adapt automatically to user preferences and needs, it would be logical to map a learning object to learner's characteristics, subject domain and context/task. This would also mean that the LMS must be equipped with learner profiling functions. Future SCORM specification may have the potential of fulfiling such requirements as providing different sequencing types (linear, divergent/convergent) to combine the learning objects and mapping these sequences to the learner's characteristics, subject domain or context/task.

Personally, I've been following on this area of adaptive e-learning and have some experience of developing SCORM e-learning courses that is partially adaptive. By that I mean learner's progession to the next topic of the course is prerequisited by his performance in the prior topic. May the day of fully adaptive SCORM courses be available for our students as they will surely be more motivated and efficient to learn according to their own styles and interests.

A Web 2.0 tool to enhance formative assessment

How do we integrate formative assessment for learning (i.e. providing timely and constructive feedback to help students bridge their learning gap) in Web 2.0 designed experiences (eg, a wiki, blog or podcast performance task. Check out this possibility HERE.

You are most welcome to click on the annotate button to comment on any particular part of my blog posting, then add this annotated page as a link in your comment. This can be done by clicking on account after you are done with the annotation, then click on the annotated link to get the public link of the annotated page.

One possible application for this is annotating comments as feedback for learning in students' design or art e-portfolio (may be based on blog platform), because it is so difficult to use words to describe the comments to specific location of the piece of design or art work. Although Fleck.com is in its beta version, there's so much potential for educational purposes in this piece of social software. Hope this Web 2.0 tool can be useful to you educators out there.

Virginia Tech Shooting: Amazing news coverage in Wiki

Within a short span of 4 days, the collective effort by a group of keen followers of the unfortunate and heart wrenching incident have amassed an impressive amount of news and report coverage in this wiki page. The coverage of the event in the wiki page is very comprehensive and includes perspectives from geopolitical to socio-historic considerations. The reports are also referenced to various news agencies and sources.

This to me is another testament to the working of Web 2.0 where people of similar interest are networked together in constructing group knowledge that is more effective if the incident is to be reported by individual news agencies.

Kiwi video for lifeskills lesson

This video from youtube can be an excellent resource for character and leadership education. The lesson can be based on the theme of knowing your goals in life and pursuing them with dogged determination, resilience and innovation (COZ KIWIS CAN'T FLY). As we can see, with careful searching and evaluation, some of the video resources in youtube can be excellent for educational purposes. An idea would be to organize a community of practice for a group of educators to contribute video resources (cleared of IP regulations) for teaching and learning, especially in areas of social studies, history, character and leadership education. In that way, we'll be leveraging on the spirit and working principles of web 2.0 for the advancement of education globally.

Video on Kiwi

Second Life for Education, a discussion part II

In part I of this discussion, we have seen the potential of SL for education in terms of its interactivity and openness in designing and building possible learning experiences, abeit with certain limitations in net safety, demographics and technical constraints. In this section, I'll offer my views for discussion on how SL can be leveraged upon for engaged learning experiences in a virtual environment.

Engagement in SL is a thoroughly multimodal activity involving manipulation of texts, audio, visual, gestural (see Video 1) and spatial modes for meaning making and achieving particular ends. These modes of meaning constitute the metalanguage for the design elements in multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). These design elements of multiliteracies can help users in SL to describe and explain social and cultural patterns of meaning in the increasingly pluralistic and globalized virtual community. In such a world, users will need the necessary skills for working within social networks, for negotiating across cultural differences that shape the governing assumptions in different communities, and for reconciling multimodal data to form a coherent picture of the world around them.

Video 1: Tutorial on creating and using gesture in SL

According to the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 239-248), there are four factors that need to be considered for literacy pedagogy. These are Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing and Transformed Practice. Ina learning context, Situated Practice means using available Designs of meaning, including students own lifeworld experiences to immerse in meaningful practices in a given context. The goal of Overt Instruction is to facilitate conscious awareness and systematic understanding of what is being learned. Critical Framing involves students reviewing the designs critcially in its social and cultural context of meaning. Finally, Transformed Practice means applying the available designs of meaning in a different context, or making a new design of meaning. The four elements of the multiliteracies can be used to provide the necessary ideas and angles with which to design multiliteracies learning experiences in SL.

In designing multiliteracies learning experiences for students in TSL educational land, one may consider situating learners as apprentice journalists, scientists, doctors, engineers or creative artists in real world problem solving contexts inside the virtual environment. For example, students can take on the roles of Crime Scene Investigators to work as a mixed race team (via schools tweening programmes that cross states, national boundaries). The team will go about the virtual crime scene piecing together traces of evidences planted all over the island and suspect character avartars. In the process of trying to solve the crime case, students will be employing and innovating upon their curriculum based scientific thinking and communication skills and concepts, resulting in socially and culturally mediated construction of group knowledge. The learning goals of such activities are twofold, one for students to develop an epistemic frame (Shaffer, 2006) to think, act, communicate, collaborate and innovate like professionals (this requires deep learning in situated practice); two for students to interact efficiently using multiple languages and communication patterns that cross cultural, community and national boundaries. These goals are essential in preparing our learners to face the challenges of the 21st century.

For such situated learning experiences in SL, one would need expertise in linden scripting languages to develop the designed learning environment. Unfortunately, Linden Lab in my opinion, has not provided sufficient technical support in this area. There is also not enough interests generated in the education industries to venture into SL learning packages business model. These are not helped by the lack of a critical mass of communities of practice in SL learning pedagogy. I'm still searching for solution to this, if anyone out there has some answers, will appreciate your comments.

For Mathematics educators, I think you will agree with me that SL offers so much potential in the teaching and learning of geometrical and vector concepts with the construction module (see Video 2 on the construction of a prism).

Video 2: Tutorial on creating a prism

References:

Cope, B. & M. Kalantzis (eds.) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge.

Shaffer, D. W. (2006). Epistemic frames for epistemic games. Computers and Education, 46(3), 223-234.

Second Life for Education, a discussion part I

Second Life (SL), a program from San Francisco-based company Linden Lab, immerses participants in a virtual world of their own making and allows users to create everything within their virtual world. Users are able to buy and sell plots of land, objects they have created themselves, and so on. The world itself and its economy closely resemble that of everyday society. The quality of interaction and expression in SL are attracting people with various agenda to it. In my brief visits to it, various commercial entities are using it for marketing purposes to good effect. There are also people creating and selling objects in SL and exchanging them for US currency in real life.

SL has its potential in education due to its open environment and undetermined state. The ability to design and create object, building, character within the virtual world can be adapted and extended into teaching and learning. This will be discussed in part II.

Notwithstanding SL's immense popularity, there is a serious issue with the appropriateness of its content. There is a range of seedy activity available to users: Gambling, stripping, and virtual prostitution. To address this concern for SL to have a stake in the educational market sector, Teen Second Life (TSL) is developed.

TSL, is arranged in the same fashion as the adult version, although there is only PG-rated material available in it. The world is restricted to teens aged 13-17, and all adults other than Linden Lab employees are banned from entering the main island in TSL.

Recently, private islands in TSL have been set up as the only place where educators can set foot if they decide to participate in the program. The purchased island can be limited to students in their class or program, or open to any teen using Teen Second Life.

Ironically, even though it's free to get in Teen Second Life, you will still need a credit card to register. That's how Linden Lab manage and maintain a youth-only space, but this makes registering a challenge for teens internationally. Another possible access issue is the requirement for a relatively new computer with the necessary graphic card support and broadband network speed.

Collective Intelligence

Participating and mediating in social software learning environment is closely related to the social construction of knowledge that Levy (2000) calls “collective intelligence”. Levy argues that in such an environment, the group as a whole can tap what any one person knows. Writing is as Bakhtin claims, “the product of the whole complex social situation in which it has occurred” (quotd in Todorov, 1984). The dialogical design of writing tasks in blogs and wiki or podcast production in the networked community allows conversations to fuel these writing and vice versa. Concepts and ideas can be amplified in such collective participation. This form of learning design hence requires a shift from the personalized media that was central to the idea of the digital revolution toward socialized media that is central to the culture of media convergence (H.Jenkins,2006a).

References:

Jenkins, H. (2006a). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Todorov, T., (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bridging the Participation Gap

My first encounter with a PC was during my undergraduate days in the computer lab, and that was just trying to finish up assignments using wordpad. I still remember the experience of feeling so inadequate at it in comparison with some of my classmates (from more well off background) who's got previous exposure to the technology.

In retrospect, my teaching experiences (5 years ago) involving multiliteracies mirrors to some extent the kind of participation gap we had 10 years ago. I had been to two schools with very different student demorgraphics. One school had students from very good family background and students seem to take to multiliteracies well and participate meaningfully and engagingly in social software learning environment. On the other hand, students from the other school had to struggle with after school part-time jobs just to have their daily allowances. For these students, social software learning tasks remain narrow and unengaging. In addition, these students' informal learning experiences with social software pales in comparison with that of the former school students.

In bridging this participation gap, our ministry of education in Singapore has done well in implementing master plans for IT in education. For the initial master plan, the focus was in equipping schools with ICT infrastructure. Having recognized that it is insufficient to just provide access to ICT infrastructure in bridging the participation gap, the master plan was refined in 1997 to focus "...less on technology and more on providing the skills and content that is most beneficial...(pg 8)" (Wartella, O'Keefe and Scantlin 2000). One of the key strategies for the plan is then to equip our students with thinking, learning and communication skills through IT based teaching and learning. The master plan gained impetus later on as the education system move towards integrating IT for engaged learning with the "Teach Less Learn More" (Engaged Learning) movement. This speaks importantly on the interdependence of IT use and strong pedagogies, for the full potential of IT for teaching and learning can't be tapped if it is used based on didactic teaching.

With the emergence of web 2.0 tools and increased access to higher bandwidth, more innovations in such tools integration for engaged learning are taking place in some of our schools. In these schools, students are not just consumers of technology but creators and participants of it. They may be producing and hosting podcasts on some social issues or engaging in process writing for some themes using wiki engines. Such participatory learning is characterized by students' artistic expression and engagement in communities of learning, where creations are shared, peer critiqued and peer learnt. It is of interest to note that these schools also have strong programs for their teaching and learning, adopting new teaching approaches such as inquiry based learning, problem based learning or alternative assessment. Such programs have successfully leverage on the web 2.0 tools to situate students' learning to real world contexts as well as real world processes in the creation of solution or ideas.

The goal here is to extend such participatory learning opportunties to all students in all schools. One may argue that students are already informally engaged in such participatory culture through their own peers outside school hours. This assumption holds true only to students where lots of such informal learning opportunities avail to them; it does not stand when considered against students from lower socio-economic background.

I believe that this can be achieved to a great part by coupling effective pedagogically sound learning programs with web 2.0 technologies. Having said that, we note that students can only engage in the new participatory learning activites only if they can read and write. Students must expand their basic literacy competencies in order to develop the new social and cultural skills in web 2.0 participatory literacies. We may build these skills into their daily activities in ways appropriate to the curriculum to be learnt. Whilst implementing new approaches to learning through problem based learning or alternative assessment, teachers can leverage on emerging web 2.0 media tools to design social and cultural learning activities for students.

Through such particpatory activities, school can start to equip students with just not essential learning, thinking and communication skills, but much more with the social and cultural skills necessary to participate fully in 21st century learning and working. This can and will be done in the hope that all our students can be equal participants in the dynamic and changing world of tomorrow. Notwithstanding this optimism, more developmental and empirical evidence is needed to affirm this belief.


Reference:
Wartella, E., O'Keffe, B., & Scantlin R. (2000). "Children and Interactive Media: A Compendium of Current Research and Directions for the future," New York: Markle Foundation. Available online at http://www.markle.org/downloadable_assets/cimcompendium.pdf

A Day in the Life of Web 2.0

Found this very interesting article by David Warlick in techLEARNING. David has described the possible integration of web 2.0 tools into the teaching, learning and administration of a school 2.0. What is also useful is he's aggregated a list of web 2.0 tools usage explanations and its corresponding url sources. The best way to learn about web 2.0 tools will be to play and experiment with some of the suggested tools.

Notwithstanding the pedagogically sound and innovative design of the learning approaches suggested in this article, we need to be in cognizant of two implementation factors.

1. Be sure to bridge the participation gap of some students in terms of technological access and more importantly, the necessary learning, social and cultural skills required to be engaged meaningfully and appropriately in these web 2.0 environments. Some students who are more well exposed and educated due to social class factors may be at the forefront whilst the rest may be well left behind on the other side of the particpation gap.
   
2. Be sensitive to the adoption readiness of teachers as not all teachers are vanguards of technology in schools, what's more web 2.0 (you may like to view the video below). Many teachers will feel as helpless as the medieval man in the video below when they feel new experiences. We need to provide the necessary professional development support that is contextualized to their own familiar teaching practices and make it the tone as safe as possible.

I'll like to suggest an ecological approach to web 2.0 integration in schools. Let it be a bottom up implementation from a subject department, integrating the used case success stories into the professional development of teachers from the other departments in parallel. Evolve the system to an ecological stage by having inter-department collaboration in projects such as performance assessment tasks across various subjects areas which leverage on web 2.0 tools to develop 21st century literacies. This approach can be applied similarly to collaborations in teaching and administration resources. The school model can then be cascaded up to inter-school/district level.

This is my 2 cents worth of the matter and all comments are most welcomed.

Web 2.0 and the implications of social software to education

After reading the discussion of Web
2.0 on Wikipedia, and following many of the links, this is what I gathered.

Web 2.0 is sometimes called the "Participatory Web" based on an architecture for interaction. Where Web 1.0 is represented by traditional static pages; Web 2.0 is represented by server-side software that is more interactive and made for content sharing which is free from the hassle of formating issues. This is made possible by XML as compared to HTML technology. It encompasses a social phenomenon of creating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority and freedom to share and re-use.

I especially like the description based on the article by Tim O'Reilly where he described

"Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core."

Figure 1 shows a "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O'Reilly Media.

As for the article on social software (Dalsgaard C. 2006 Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning - EURODL), this is my reflection for it.

As schools implement e-learning, it will be important to do more than replicate their paper-based predecessors on a data-base-type Learning Management System. We need to consider the individuality, creativity, and ownership of students in these e-learning tasks. We may want to consider incoporating emerging Web 2.0-type technologies to motivate and engage students.

Having said this, we as educators need to be aware of the issues related to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in our teaching. Below are some comments to the use of a common Web 2.0 application in wiki.

The last 20 lines of the transcript from the video Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
is as follows:

"...

The Web is no longer just linking information…

The Web is linking people…

Web 2.0 is linking people…

…people sharing, tracing, and collaborating…

Wikipedia

Web 2.0

edit this page

We’ll need to rethink a few things…

We’ll need to rethink copyright

We’ll need to rethink authorship

We’ll need to rethink identity

We’ll need to rethink ethics

We’ll need to rethink aesthetics

We’ll need to rethink rhetorics

We’ll need to rethink governance

We’ll need to rethink privacy

We’ll need to rethink commerce

We’ll need to rethink love

We’ll need to rethink family

We’ll need to rethink ourselves"

One common application of Web 2.0 is Wikipedia, or online encyclopedia. Based on the design architecture principles of Web 2.0, any user, be it identified or anonymous, can edit the resource. The key issue then lies in the anonymity and frequency of these edits. The reliability and reality of these resources are determined not by factual truths of its sources but by the online collective concurrence of a group of users. We may be reminded that certian realities are socially and culturally constructed, but that does not necessary mean that they are true.

With the reliability issue of Wiki at the foreground, some schools are prohibiting or banning the use of Wiki as a citation source. The eSchool news article quotes Neil Waters as saying that Wikipedia is a great place to start your research, but a terrible place to end it. Hence, until Citizendium is ready to replace Wiki, we need to prepare our students to possess the necessary information literacy skills to evaluate the different truths in any resource they encounter, even Wikipedia, lest they be blinded to the social and cultural biases that shape those resources they find.