Face book use by Gloucestershire College “says social networking is used to keep students informed and in touch with staff.” interesting, mobile, current, time consuming for staff, plays to the teenager in us all
If you want to read it all the link to the BBC site is above, in an age of VLE/MLE and a proliferation of online data which needs our attention is this not just a huge distraction
I have started looking at Google wave (http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html)
Part conversation part document (from the blurb) sounds great, i can see an application for student collaboration, get them to break it down into waves, comment and create, in real time then….ah that is where i get stuck, but still worth looking at.
In the development blog they started with the folowing questions:
My biggest worry is that it just becomes another communication channel to monitor, another list of posts to monitor and respond to. On the other hand could i dump my other channels and just use wave, i suspect that will depend on uptake, i have work on exchange, gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, talktalk, google talk, aol, blog, skype, i am starting to look like NASA mission control when i start up the computer, oh did i mention face book.
i have never been so well connected, or so popular if the time spent checking and replying to all these different channels, each with its different set of associations and friendships. There are aggregators the most recent being life IO (https://www.lifeio.com/login.cgi) this is great, well good, a real start at bringing it all together, trouble for me is with 4 email accounts that are live the mail aggregator gets a little full, and it all gets a bit panicky. I will persevere, and see what happens in the near future. what i do need this aggregator to do is update all my accounts after i have read and answered my emails, it is a real pain having to clear accounts down by visiting them.
I suffer from to much information, coming at me far to fast, once you put it all in one space such as Life IO it becomes a little unmanageable, now we are being pushed to use the clouds, this scares me, i have been using Microsoft Mesh now for over a year, and its great, all my most important documents stored in the cloud, and synchronized with 4 different desktops so where ever i am it is the most recent. Brilliant, i can share them (as long as you have a mesh account, ah but here we go again another channel which i need others to buy in, and with a lot of people i work with still locked into analogue communication and document editing, well the cloud has yet to come of age.
This is work in progress, just the start of an emerging study, would anyone like to comment
Assessment lies at the heart of teaching. Summative Assessment is carried out to quantify what has been learnt and help students to assess their past learning strategies. This points to “what has happened and the learning opportunities which have passed”.
It could be argued that summative assessment can act as a motivator for student learning but it can also act as a constrictor for learning with students only learning strategically and thus missing out learning and understanding the breadth of the subject area.
Formative assessment concentrates on what learning has happened and is happening at a particular point in time. This has more value over summative assessment as a teaching tool, for the teacher it allows the teacher to gauge how well the learning is progressing, also true for the student it also allows the student to look at the areas of learning where further study is needed. Formative assessment tools can also act as a valuable memory aid, to illustrate this an understanding of memory and encoding are needed.
One of the core reasons for memory is learning, where the gathering of facts, emotions, sensory inputs and experiences are gathered linked and coded for recall and use.
Memory structure is still an area of hot debate, centring around a single or distributed multiple state system.
The structure of human memory and some educational implications V.K Kumar, University of Wisconsin, http://rev.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf-extract/41/5/379 Review of educational research vol.41, no5, 379-471 (1971)
Panchella 1974 (Panchella R.G 1974 The interpretation of reaction time in Information Processing Research. In Kantowhz (Ed.) Human information processing: Tutorials in performance and cognition. New York Wiley) would suggest only one structure of memory though Rubin, Hinton and Wenzel (1999) strongly suggest at least two structures (Rubin D.C, Hinton V and Wenzel A (1999), the precise time course of retention, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, Vo; 25 No.5 1161 – 1176). This de3bate impinges only partially on the area of this paper, but does have implications in the movement of memory from short term to long and its implications in how students recall and what kind of learning environment we should provide for our students.
The new trend for M-Learning, where materials are available 24/7 and on small mobile devices may actually be a retrograde step in learning, teaching and technology. If the information provided does not need any reaction, or any construct to be formed it is both passive in the student’s life and unlikely to be absorbed or worse still may actually interfere with the encoding of correct information if not understood properly
Well i have been trying to raise awarness and get people enthusiastic, my first attempt about a year ago now had some sucess, i introduced blogging and got 3 staff members blogging their teaching. Now i know this is not a wiki but it was a result. The wrong one but a result.
So this year i am having another go, from a different angle. the brief was for a web site full of text and links to act as a guide for students on how to run an event. web sites are ok but….and this is often a big but, they are very difficult to maintain and keep fresh, but i created 3 pages then got the Uni to load up some wiki software and authored the same 3 pages as an alternative.
Now i prefered the wiki, the site looked great, but the never ending updates to what was to be an emerging project would fall to me, and that is not good. Webmasters were great when we only had web pages, but these days the web is far more flxible, and communication and information processing should notbe the domain of the few.
So i got the wiki, and it was good, staff could add, edit, and be creative as they wish, and the whole package could become far more organic. My whole pitch to them was the Monoluge and Dialouge metaphore and communication, the wiki in its first incarnation would use the idea of a monolouge metaphore on the subject, and once they felt comfortable with it all, we would use the idea of a dialouge metaphore, where students could add and create entries, and staff could be the guardian editors. Not realy a dialouge, but i am working on the phrasiology.
One of the first problem i have is to help staff to understand the web (spiders web) nature of the information on a wiki, it is not linier and setm as in a web site. the information contained in the wiki grows, and is at times almost organic in structure growing in direction as well as amount of content.
Looking around the web sites like Psychology Wiki have opted for the metaphore of a book and though it is easily navigated it still trys to replicate traditional communication methods like books. The Maths Wiki
Is also actualy fairly traditional in its approach listing content by Educational level and then by Concentration, the first catogary being easiliy understoodthe second being a little more prosaic and unintelible.
What i would like to continue exploring is the idea of the wiki as a monoluge or dialouge, a conversation about or perhapse better in a subject. Where the basics are laid out as a monoulouge but the unpacking and understanding and linkigaes within the subject are defined and redefined over time in an information dialouge between student and teacher.
i use the word teacher rather than lecture because in the sence of social learning, all that is traditional about a subject becomes only the starting point not the end of the journey (if that can ever be reached) the organic nature of linkes in pages using single words or short phrases to define and redefine or perhaps better to refine the understanding of the subject.
Not finished here but it is enough to start, pelease comment.
Well i am off at the Microsoft TAP event for Siliverlight, and asking the question why. Its not i have anything against Microsoft working on a cross platform, cross language development and deployment package, or the fact that “Flash” can do much of this already, its just that the moving between what is avalible and what hypothetically will be avalible in some distant future, or the this is version 1 and well in version 2……. this is exactly what giver Microsoft a checkered name.
Having said that the first speaker (key note address) was great and it was exciting to hear and see some of the possibilities. i get so frustrated though that yes i want tools, but no i am not a programmer, i am a designer, so how do i visualize and integrate my thoughts and visions into the programming cycle. I use Mind-manager, a pencil,Paper (the original Laptop) but not a computer. so with all these new(?) tools i now need to build in movement, scale and color guess i need to break out the crayons and take a tip from my 3 year old in the visualisation stakes.
XAML the new programming language looks good but it does look a lot like XML, and how does this all fit into the W3C world of the net, is it SENDA compatible. No answers yet.
In the cut and thrust of the market lead world i do feel flash needs a good competitor, to help regulate price, but flash is a fairly independent tool and it could be 4 or 5 years before there are enough dot net programmers to really take advantage of this whole new set of tools. That could mean losing 2 years good marketing ground to what i am sure will start to become a developing market, and we all know ADOBE will not sit still, and will start to mobalise the huge Flash programming market to stay ahead.
Having said this there are some neat tools, and stand alone apps such as Photosynth which could provide some off the shelf out of box solutions to data (pictorial) visualization and manipulation problems, and this could force ahead the silverlight agenda.
Where will we see this new(ish) technology first aired to the Nets populous at large, well the commercial sector (Hard Rock have already got a silverlight site) the big players first, including the US economies biggest net player…….the porn industry, i am sure this will be a good economic indicator of market penetration, or
am i just being old and synical?
This is a net marketing inteligence site, i like it, i have just come out of a “webinar” with them on one of there reports into social networking. Loads of useful information on whats going on.
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I think this is a great idea, a campus wide VLE built around a blog rather than compartmentalized subjects, opening up a view across subjects and allowing alignment.
the students get a reflective blog and access from school and home,web 3 or web 2?
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Europe remains a vibrant centre for web technology development, a conference in Paris is hearing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7139175.stm
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