It is Time to Tweak eLearning

It is ridiculous… it seems like all people focus on these days is on coming up with the next stupid “buzzword”… even if all it means is to dress up old concepts in to new clothes… seriously… I feel sorry for those who are still trying to come up with Web 3.0 and such… or should I call them WebPunks? 

The definition of edupunk, as see in Lisa Neal Guatieri’s article on eLearn Magazine from July 2008: “an educational approach that combines creative drive with a maverick attitude…in which the educator—or possibly the student—designs the tools for teaching and learning.” While a valid definition for innovative and creative educators/learners, this creation and re-creation of technology for learning situations, as also stated in the same article, has been happening for quite sometime (if not throughout all of mankind). It is called Instructional Technology, being the people involved innovative or not, being the technology being flawed or not… I, particularly, see no need for such buzzword… But that is just my humble opinion…

From Steven Downes’ blog.

From Wired Campus.

The Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative led by Aaron Walsh from the Boston University has been on the cutting edge of virtual environments experiments for a learning purpose. They hold constant meetings in Second Life, have been experimenting with different virtual worlds and not was Wonderland’ turn for a more “official” educational event run by the Immersive Education participants. 

I’m pasting some of the thoughts fellow bloggers have had on their posts about the event:

First Educational Gathering in Wonderland

By timwang

(…) over 60 avatars gathered on the Sun’s island in Secondlife, cuing up to get a “ticket” for the first experimentation of the Wonderland Project by Sun’s Microsystems. The event was organized by the MediaGrid which is a computational grid platform that promotes 3D virtual learning environment. (…)”

On Tim Wang’s eLearning Blog 

Wonderland Works!

By Katherine W. Prawl:

“Friday was a red-letter day. I attended an event in Second Life for an education group, hosted by Sun Microsystems, which was intended to introduce the group members toProject Wonderland. Especially exciting was the fact that Sun and its partners (which include NMC) are exploring the possibility of allowing avatars to navigate from theEducation Grid running on Wonderland servers.”

On the NewMedia On the Go blog

Sun’s Wonderland & Education Grid Demo

by Chris Collins

“Today the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative launched the Education Grid onSun’s Wonderland platform.

Aaron Walsh from Media Grid launched the initiative from within Second Life and the island quickly filled up with many more avatars waiting to get in to join the demonstration.”

Fleep’s Deep Thoughts blog

There is so much controversy over the term Web 2.0. Some people state that the digits “2.0″ determine a version, and that the Web is continuously evolving without need for a “label”. They claim that the assertion that Web 2.0 is more user-centered and interactive than Web 1.0 is not true. While new technologies (e.g. AJAX, a group of technologies that make possible for so-called Web 2.0 tools to be created) do mke teh Web more interactive, this interction and user-centered content generation was envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee since the beginning of the Wolrd Wide Web, not being a standard for this phaseof the Web only. https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-May/000399.html 

I do believe that the interaction made easy, the collaborative tools and the (normally) cleaner user interface of tools (visual literacy) make it possible for a more learner-centered learning approach mediate by these new tools. 
Vygotsky’s, Piage’s and other contructivist learning frameworks can be easily implemented online by means of the Read/Write Web. 

Resources such as “social bookmarking”, “social networks”, “group blogging”, “video/image/audio sharing”, wikis, tagging, and many other emerging tools enhance interaction on the Web. 

This interaction can bring more meaningful learning into place, learning that happens through social interaction, sharing of knowledge, etc. 

Web 2.0 tools you can try right now: 

create a social network on www.ning.com 
create a blog on www.wordpress.com 
create and share slideshows on www.slideshare.net 
create and share videos on www.youtube.com 
create and share a wiki on www.wetpaint.com 
create a microblog on www.twitter.com 
create microblogs for your classes on www.edmodo.com 
join Second Life on www.secondlife.com 

my blog on http://tweaklearning.wordpress.com 

If you don’t want to join anythign right now, just visit websites like these and you will see how much fun and interactive they can be… 

Educators should care about everything that helps their learners learn in meaningful ways… most teachers agree (or am I wrong) that learnign can be improved with social interaction (or am I wrong?). Research talks about informal learning being the means for most of our learning. Why not give it a try? These new Web tools matter to us because they matter to the learners. 

I finally found at Wii at Target today. I had visited both a Target and a BestBuy yesterday (Saturday) and they said they’d have it this morning, which  I thought was weird for them to get new shipment on a Sunday. Anyway, I don’t know how shipping really works in these retail stores but apparently many Targets got a new set of Wiis since I called another Target closer to where I live and they had it this morning. So, I asked them to reserve it for me as I would be there later this afternoon, they did so. No need for it: apparently no-one was aware of the fact since I only saw one couple buying a console and they seemed to have plenty left to sell. The Wiimotes even came with silicone cases around them, nice!

My wife and I played a bowling match (we got home late and needed to go to bed).

This gaming system is so motivating and fun! Many people are experimenting with new things using the Wii and its accessories (as you could see in a previous post of mine). And here are a couple more examples:

Wii in hospitals.

Wii as a Platform for Learning (Brandon Hall).

An interview with Aaron Walsh, professor of virtual environments and games for learning at Boston University:

What we see happening in school districts, educational institutions and companies all over the world is the urge to adopt technology to manage and deliver better learning experiences. As a result, these entities end up “investing” (sometimes) significant amounts of money without considering free alternatives offered by the open source community.

The open source community has been growing ever since its start around the 70’s early 80’s with MIT AI Labs’ resignation to initialize the  GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. Around the same time the  University of California at Berkeley’s had already started working on their Unix system.

Why don’t the companies and schools save some of that money to invest in good quality open source and free initiatives?

Let’s see some examples of open source software that could offer great service in Education, yet, need more attention from technology adoption decision makers. I’m focusing more on applications that can be intalled on local servers, since one of the biggest concernes is “Who is going to access this resource? How can we keep it clean?” Hosting such services on an institution’s own servers gives them relatively more control than just, lets say, creating a community on Youtube or Ning (we’ll discuss whitelabel social networking suites in another article).

Why is open source better than proprietary software? First of all, it is free with the exception of a few projects that have thrid party companies offer add-ons that are not available in the project’s community. Second of all, the quality of the applications is guaranteed by communities of developers that are always trying to add innovative ideas to the projects because that is what they love to do. Moreover, open source projects are in perpetual beta phase of development.

The goal of this article is to mainly show examples of open source initiatives that try to replicate current mainstream Web 2.0 applications/communities in a way that allows anyone to install and tweak their own version of such services.

PHPMotion - So many schools and companies see the potential in video sharing communities as far as education is concerned. Websites such as Teachertube have become more popular amongst educators. PhpMotion lets you install a free Youtube-like video sharing community on your own server. Think of the possibilities here!

Moodle - Free LMS with several plugins to make it even morfe fun(ctional) and relevant to your needs. Some interesting parallel projects add much more to Moodle.

Sloodle - One of those successful projects that use Moodle to bring LMS functionalities to MUVEs such as Second Life.

ELGG - Create your own collaborative learning environment. Let the learners interact, tag, blog, exchange, pictures, videos, and information of all kinds. Your own social network. Thsi suite was created having educational setting in mind.

WordPress - Create a blogging platform for your organization, let the learners be active and post individually or edit/publish in groups. It is fun, instructive and helps them stay creative.

PLIGG - Add the power of the democratic Read/Write Web voting communities to your learners’ environments, it is all about them anyway, isn’t it? PLIGG was built by the open souorce community to be a Digg “clone”, so its primary focus was on social news. However, many people have used it to rank other websites, to post videos, stories, pictures, etc. [link to examples]

Photos - If the way we share our videos, documents, thoughts has changed, the way we share our photos has not remiained the same. Trying to find an open source clone for the widely acclaimed photos sharing service Flikr was not an easy task. More people have been looking as well. After a google searcb it is possible to see people asking for the service for a while and wishes have been partially granted. I say partially because the open source community has yet been able to replicate the service, nor does it seem to be interested in doing so. Some efforts to create open source photo management systems have been put into motion for quite sometime now.

Some intiatives aim at keeping educators informed and connected with the open source projects that are, for the most part developed for educational settings. Some of which include but not limited to:

SchoolForge’s association whose “mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. SchoolForge is intended to empower member organizations to make open educational resources more effective, efficient, and ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and increasing the transparency of development. SchoolForge members advocate the use of open source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the advancement of education and the betterment of humankind.”

MIT Open Courseware is MIT’s approach to open content for all. ”A free publication of course materials
used at MIT.” Offering lecture notes, problem sets, labs, lecture videos and demonstrations. According to MIT you can get access to a “wide variety of subjects” through this initiative.

Many other institutions, such as Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley offer content on iTunesU, using the open source approach to offer course material to learners all over the world.

In other posts we will discuss other open source initiatives, not exactly trying to “clone” specific Web 2.0 tools, not even Web-based at all.  We will talk about open source alternatives to commercial desktop applications such as Open Office - a productivity suite similar to Microsoft Office that can be downloaded and installed free of charge onto an unlimited number of computers.

More information on how open source can projects can benefit learners and instructors can be found here and all over the internet, taht is now created and updated by common people, in a participatory and democratic way.