In The Clouds

<a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4746170/Death_Penalty_Info" 
          title="Wordle: Death Penalty Info"><img
          src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/4746170/Death_Penalty_Info"
          alt="Wordle: Death Penalty Info"
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Build Your Own Curriculum
This site is really a fantastic resource for creating and sharing curriculum including ideas for your own curriculum plus the user has the ability to look at other institutions curricula as well. What's more, it is highly customizable in terms of search filtering. Let's say for example that you are a 12th grade history teacher in Toledo and you want to find out about the history curriculum in Chicago at the 12th grade level. Simple drop down menus allow the user to narrow her search and allow her to not only view in this example the Chicago high school curriculum, but also to copy it and then modify it to suit Toledo's specific needs.
Parents can also view the site to keep up on the school's curriculum as well so that they can stay informed. Students can view the site to stay informed of assignments and other course matters.
Build Your Own Curriculum is highly customizable even down to graphic design such as your school's logo!

Soap Box
How many here have taken Dr. Gray's Ed. Psych. courses? He is a great professor but keeping notes in his class can be a challenge at the best of times. Or think about any course you took in high school, undergraduate study, or perhaps a current face to face course you are taking this semester. Did you ever wish that you could simply press a button and the instructor would know that you are confused? Soap Box is your wish come true. This application allows students to ask questions of each other - for example a student may have missed an important point that the instructor made. Students can message anonymously to get this information without interrupting the flow of the lecture. Did you ever get confused on a certain point of discussion in a lecture but felt trepidation in raising your hand? Soap Box actually has a set of two widgets: one states "I get it" and the other states "I am confused." Soap Box runs in real time and can be watched by a GA for instance. If the widgets show that there seems to be quite a bit of confusion, the instructor will be alerted to slow down and clarify. According to the site, Soap Box breaks down the barriers of how students choose to participate in class. I think it is a very spiffy tool (When was the last time you read THAT word!!) but to insert an editorial comment here I sense that such a tool would encounter resistance from instructors; what is the very first rule in a classroom? Turn off cell phones! I envision resistance from some instructors in that they would argue that a tool such as Soap Box may draw students' attention away from the lecture. I would love to know what those of you in the trenches think. Professor Lambert, would you consider such a tool for your graduate recitations?

Study Blue
Study Blue is at least to me a more useful and mature, focused Twitter for educators and students. The tool allows the instructor to create flashcards, create practice exams, create notifications of what the students should study next and a scad of other features. Study Blue also taps into students' love of mobile technology in that studying can be done anywhere at anytime through apps on a Smart Phone for instance. I do think that this tool is far more useful than Twitter in that there are no limitations as to content and every module the instructor chooses to create is essentially self contained whereas with Twitter we know the 140 character limitation. When I worked at Penn State students would ask for past exams as a preparatory tool for an upcoming exam. The library archived these but Study Blue goes much further in that the app can provide immediate feedback for instance on a practice exam.
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This week's work has been a real epiphany for me. Cloud computing is something I have been familiar with in the gaming world with clients such as Steam. I need to reference my time as GIS Specialist at Penn State to illustrate just what an epiphany this has been. When we decided to create a GIS lab at the main library we had to deal with quite expensive site licensing and seat availability from ESRI which is the company that creates the industry standard mapping programs Arc/INFO and ArcView. In addition to the costs of the licenses we also had to constantly maintain our dedicated Unix based server as well as the hassles of getting Microsoft Windows for Workgroups and Novell clients to actually work with each other. ESRI now offers a browser based solution in which institutions no longer need to deal with the challenges I have mentioned. This is a boon to schools that heretofore could never afford a dedicated server let alone site licensing for an expensive GIS program. From an economic standpoint the cost savings to schools rich and poor indicates to me that a school that would not avail itself of such technology would either have a budget larger than Dubai or else actually enjoy tossing money to the winds.

Cloud based computing has effectively done away with the problems of maintaining site licenses and also schools can now hold on to older equipment longer with browser based approaches that allow teachers to create feature rich learning environments on older equipment.

Tags are useful in that they allow for related research on a topic. Tags have actually been around for a long time but many people were not aware of them. Why you ask? I will tell you! Embedded in the HTML code of web sites were these fun things called "metatags." When a website was designed, these metatags contained key words that search engines used to recall websites. I have no idea how many web pages exist today and when one also takes into account the fact that web pages are no longer static as they were in the Internet's infancy, tagging is a necessity to navigate the galaxy of information out there. Tagging allows not only for retrieval of information but also points students and educators to other relevant resources.

Tag clouds have so many uses. They can serve for instance as a tool for students to gauge their own understanding of an article for instance by looking at a graphic representation of words from the article. The most frequent and thus most important words as we have seen from the Wordle exercise are larger and thus attention is drawn to them. I liked the comparison tag cloud that was done to illustrate population comparisons among countries. Tag clouds therefore reinforce traditional textuality by engaging other modes of cognition for the student. As an aside, I would love to see more research comparing the efficacy of tag clouds along with text versus traditional text based learning alone. I would hazard a guess that comprehension rates are much higher when combining the two.

Best,
Joe

Blogging & Twittering

Obviously this first post has nothing to do with my interest in abolishing the death penalty but to our first assignment, so, with that in mind, here I go!

Blogging  represents both a widening and narrowing of news. According to the video "Blogs in Plain English" the approach to news in the 20th century was limited to specialists - in this case journalists - who decided what was news. In addition, news encompassed very broad topics and the watcher/reader/listener had no input. Blogging allows users to become the journalists and decide what news to share in topics that interest the blogger, hence making her/him the new specialist. According to the 2010 Horizon Report collaborative efforts such as blogging allow for commenting, sharing, and idea building in what I would call a constructivist learning environment. The article notes that in the workplace collaboration is highly desired and as such blogging's collaborative nature becomes an invaluable tool to foster collaboration among our students to prepare them for the "real world."

Twittering was always a strange thing to me and frankly still is! I have to admit that I would never have created a Twitter account if it was not a requirement. That said, much of what I commented on in terms of collaboration with blogging also applies to Twitter but in a much more tightly focused arena. The educational value of Twittering (and blogging) is that both take the learning environment out of the traditional learning environment and into a wider collaborative milieu in which students can respond synchronously and asynchronously as noted in the Horizon article, the online communication tools article, as well as the Tweets for Education videos. The video cited and example where, by using Twitter, a number of students collaborated on a story. Because of Twitter's 140 character limit, students had to keep their contributions tightly focused. I cite this because I believe it is central to the constructivist learning environment in that constructivist learning thrives on the very real notion that each member of the learning community is both a teacher and a learner. Study after study reveals that such learning is the most efficient and most rewarding. Twitter also allows for real time updates on courses, perhaps a band one is following, or crucial news events to name a few. Like blogging, Twitter allows sharing of ideas and content and as such promotes constructivist learning as well as the discovery of serendipitous learning moments that systems like Blackboard cannot because Blackboard takes place for the most part - if chat is disabled - in an asynchronous environment. Perhaps a better example of this "asynchronousness" would be WebCT - long may it rest in peace.

In both instances, the real value of blogging, Twittering, and other online tools provide a well rounded educational experience that moves away from what I would term "cultic." Yes I sense eyebrows raising at such a strange term. Allow me to explain please? I would argue that the old traditional classroom was a "cultic" environment in that it was something students participated in at certain times and in specific physical spaces. Think of the notion of mosque on Friday, synagogue on Saturday, and church on Sunday and I think you get the picture: you do these things at a certain time and place. Online learning environments allow and encourage learning to take place at all times possible and feasible which if you really think about it occurs all the time - even when we are fast asleep and dreaming. So it may be that on a Saturday night i have a burning question to ask or perhaps I have found an interest bit of news and I need to share it right then as opposed to waiting for 4th period History of Religion on Monday. I can share that idea as it has occurred at that moment. Obviously, the opposite holds true as well in that someone could tweet me with a question and thus collaboration once again occurs as does its necessary byproduct we call learning.

I chose a number of networks on Twitter partly because I want to see if my involvement in it will change my attitude about it. So the networks I chose reflect my own interests which again has been cited as important in all of the videos and readings. My networks include those for musicians as I am a keyboard player and singer and they include: Korg USA, Roland Corporation, and Kurzweil Music Systems. I am also a sleight of hand artist so I chose a few networks from the nefarious world of legerdemain. As a music listener I chose networks on Twitter devoted to The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Finally and most importantly as a human rights activist I chose The Death Penalty Information Center as it is the definitive clearinghouse for information on the death penalty as it is practiced nationally and globally.