It is Time to Tweak eLearning

I have to admit that,typos aside, TechCrunch remains one of my favorite sources of information on technology, especially Web technologies. I suppose that unmerciful deadlines and the increasing speed of publication everyone ends up committing some spelling mistakes (I have noticed this especially in academic press). Well, let’s not get into that. TechCrunch and other tech blogs are still a good source of information if you want to stay informed on the latest technologies that can impact you somehow.

All of us that are involved with Instructional Design somehow (instructional designers, teachers, programmer, learners) can benefit from adopting or developing emerging technologies. At least playing with it…

Personal conversations with Thiagi, an expert in training and instructional design, reinforced even more my belief in quick but “quality” development.

Here is the most recent post from Ryan Carson, when invited to post on TechCrunch.com. In this post he discusses the process he and his colleagues from Carsonified Design underwent to design, develop and implement a simple Web application called Matt (a multi-account Twitter Tweeter) in 32 hours. The original post has valuable tips for quick application development such as:

1. The best boost you can give you or your team is to provide the time to be creative. Turning off your phones and email and just focusing on something new and exciting will do wonders for your energy level.
2. It could generate some amazing buzz around you and your company or products.
3. You’ll come back to your current projects with a new perspective and renewed energy.
4. It will push your team to learn new skills. For example, Will, our head of sponsor relationships, spent the whole week doing PR - something new for him.

Can we apply these principles (and others which Ryan’s team experimented with) when developing learning technologies and applications? Have you had a similar experience Let’s share it here.

PS.: you can find a video tour of “Matt” on their main page. If you look for “Matt Carsonified” on Youtube, you will find some videos they created throughout their “Matt 1 week”.

Please visit the link above and give me your feedback in the “comments” below. Thank you.

Interesting post trying to adapt Metcalf’s Law to the Semantic Web context. They are looking for feedback.

http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/rdf_and_metcalf_s_law

The new iPhone 3G is bound to take an incredible new step toward more freedom for the user. While the first versions of the mobile device (I’m hesitant to call it a phone) were pre-loaded with applications and wouldn’t let the users add more unless were willing to risk their device’s “health” to jail-break it and install third party apps, the only official but “crippled” option was to download a link to a Web App (Web Apps are self-explanatory: applications that run on the Web and not on your local machine/phone).

Besides the 3G Wi-Fi speed, the new iPhone will offer the ability to actually download and install new applications. Apple already has a website up explaining that and they have some examples of applications on their website. The release of their Software Development Kit (SDK) is promising to the educational world also for the freedom it gives developers to create learning applications that work natively on the iPhone.

Some examples of applications they highlight on the Apps Store website include Microsoft Exchange capabilities (push mail)

Loops, an application that lets you find your friends on a Google map mash-up.

And the innovative Super Monkey Ball, which responds to your movements by means of the Accelerometer (movement detector on the iPhone) to create a more “interactive” experience. This has a lot of potential for serious games…

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.

Not exactly a post about net-geners, but a post about age and the creative process. The author goes on explaining the differences between some early inventors (Web developers) and some late bloomers.

Very interesting indeed.

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/09/its_not_too_lat.html

Big news: Adobe is giving something away! Might be just while in beta, they don;t really state the latter on their website. But they do say it is FREE.

The first free Adobe product I just discovered is Acrobat Buzzword, an online collaborative text editor or word processor (think Google Docs). While way ahead of the competition in the visual aspect of it with a stunning look and feel (Adobe standards) very intuitive and attractive interface that uses many “transition” effects from screen to screen. It is way behind other products of the kind in the functionality aspect. Some basic options are still missing on Adobe Acrobat Buzzword like being able to organize documents into different folders. Also, the formatting menu doesn’t offer many paragraph edit options and the fonts to choose from aren’t many. While intuitive, like I mentioned before, the user interface doesn’t follow the standards Google Docs and Zoho Office have tried to follow: creating an interface that is as similar to desktop office suites as possible to take advantage of users’ experience in the latter.

Another tool that is available for free right now is Adobe ConnectNow a fully functioning online Web meeting or Web conferencing tool that requires no plugin install and works very smoothly (again, Adobe Standards). Very aesthetically pleasing interface. ConnectNow works seamlessly with Buzzword so you can launch meetings from within a Buzzword document and collaborate on it with meeting participants. For this product Adobe added features present separately in many other web conferencing services into one product:

• Unique meeting room URL
• Screen sharing
• Video conferencing
• Chat pod
• Whiteboard
• Several integrated audio choices
• Remote control (great for technical support, for instance).

These products are excellent opportunities for collaborative authoring, especially for online classes and telecommuters. Again these are products with Adobe’s standards but are free of charge.

Something that has bothered me is that, while the adoption of social media (Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, social networks and so on) depends on a paradigm shift and require a new way of thinking “learning”, how can we assess learner progress in a modality of tools in which user-generated content can be so scattered throughout different tools? I know you might be thinking as you read: “But these are new tools, they require a new way for evaluation, progress tracking and certification…” just like I said above. But the problem is that the adoption of the tools seems to happen at a faster speed than the attitude change toward learning assessment and certification!

Instructional Designers, instructors, learners are using social media more and more to enrich learning experiences and more research is needed concerning assessment and progress tracking in this context.

Well, everyone is talking about Gliffy and I don;t want to be redundant, but I have to give my opinion about it as well. The program lets users collaborate on flowcharts and diagrams online. This is a very good and free (for public documents) alternative to desktop diagramming tools such as Microsoft Visio, OmniGraffle, FreeMind and many others, but with an advantage: besides being online with no extra plugin required, it also allows users to collaborate and co-author flowcharts and diagrams, which comes in handy when participating in some sort of creative process while geographically distant.

Even though the web application is an innovative technology that can not only compare but also outdo desktop applications and is definitely is ahead of everyone else in the online diagramming arena as far as professional look and feel is concerned, Gliffy is still a little glitchy (no pun intended) if not missing features. (I’m sure they will work on this soon.

One of the major flaws in it is the lack of immediate update without attaching a “version number to the file”. There are to bad outcomes of this:

1- If you and a colleague are collaborating AT THE SAME TIME on the same document you won’t immediately see the changes they’ve made to a document. I haven’t tested this on complex flowcharts but I wonder if there will be any conflicts between versions if both save their version simultaneously.

2- If you make any minor change to the document and decide to hit the “save” button, a new version number is attached to the document… So, a freak about saving stuff like me will have a v178 of a document after 20 minutes of editing and saving.

Another catchy thing about Gliffy (and it is part of their business plan) is how they only allow free accounts to create public documents and require users to purchase their premium account for unlimitted documents and the option of making them private.

Competitors can be:

• Bubbl.us
• MindMeister - more focused on “mind mapping”.
  
• Mindomo - same as above.
• Mind42 - Another collaborative mind mapping tool that stands out for the array of features ranging from keywords to speed up the process of creation to assigning icons to process and creating image nodes that import images from URLs.
• Comapping - not free but cost-effective and feature-rich collaborative diagramming solution.

New technologies have made it easy for anyone to be a content author. The webmaster no longer has to be a highly specialized HTML coder. So, if you don’t have much experience in creating websites and need a What You See Is What You Get website creator, here is a list that might help: