March 30, 2012
EnemyGraph. Education. Done. Right.
David Parry,
AcademHack, March 30, 2012.
Great line: "Q:How do you know you are succeeding as a program? A: When you are up at 4:00am watching a project your students and faculty built spread around the globe, being discussed in languages you can’t even identify." I'm not up at 4:00 a.m. much any more these days, but I can certainly identify with the excitement being felt by the creators of EnemyGraph as word of the project spreads. But more interesting than the technology is the thinking behind it: "Facebook has become a private corporate space which dominates our public and civic lives... Facebook is quite literally engineering social relations." EnemyGraph subverts that. And more: it not only subverts new media, it subverts old learning. "Sure we can keep asking our students to write papers for us interpreting some 18th century text, analyze some obscure symbolism, and give them an audience of one, or at most an audience of 20 at some conference. But give me one EnemyGraph as a learning project over 1,000 antiquated research papers any day."
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Culture Jamming, Books, Project Based Learning, New Media, Research]
The New LMS Product: You
http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/03/29/you-are-the-new-lms-product/,
Hack Education, March 30, 2012.
I guess it's a short jump from the idea that 'you are the product' of a social network to 'you are the product' of an LMS. And so it seems Blackboard has made the leap, suggests Audrey Watters. "Blackboard already has an Analytics platform which it launched last year. Its focus isn't on just "learning management" as the LMS has narrowly defined it in the past... Blackboard could have a big head-start on a lot of other newcomers to the learning analytics market. This head-start comes, in no small part, from the data the company already has/has access to."
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Blackboard Inc., Networks, Online Learning]
Paper: the next great iPad app, from the brains behind Courier
Ellis Hamburger,
The Verge, March 30, 2012.
So far, the only thing I really use the iPad for is watching movies on Netflix. I also have the Major League Baseball app to listen to ball games (no video - the entire country of Canada is deemed 'local' to Toronto and blacked out, even though it's a $500 flight to get to a game) (and no recordings - if I want to listen to games completed earlier in the day (or yesterday) I have to listen on my computer; the app doesn't support replays) (this sort of hobbled functionality is typical of the iPad, and why I hardly use it). But a program like Paper could change that, if it lived up to the hype. I have to admit, I'm liking what I see people doing with it. Isw it a pain-free user experience? Um - no. If you look at it more closelt, you have to pay extra for everything: $1.99 to sketch, $1.99 to write, $1.99 for colour. Ouch. Back to Netflix (I'm struggling through season 6 of Xena, episode 117 or 132 - you can see why the series never made it to season 7).
Interactive WhiteBoard/ Common File Format v1.0 Specification Released
Unattributed,
CEN WS-LT LTSO, March 30, 2012.
The specifications community keeps on making specifications. I'm not sure there was a need for a special specification to describe whiteboard contents, but now we have one. I looked into the specifics and the XML file describes basically what you would expect to see in a visual display - layers, shapes, text elements and media. See the full specification here. "The format uses the Scalar Vector Graphic format (SVG) to represent much of the content, with additional attributes outside of the SVG specification being added as IWB specific tags. Much of the SVG parts have been simplified from the full specification to make the IWB format simpler to implement."
World Backup Day - make sure your data and files are backed up!
David Andrade,
Educational Technology Guy, March 30, 2012.
I don't know how many times I've reminded people to back up their data, but every year it seems there's someone who wails, "I've lost everything!" So - tomorrow is World Backup Day - don't wait. Backup your data. And then, backup your backup. Or (as this item suggests) find some online storage.
Is the cloud hastening the demise of the LMS?
Sarah Danzl,
Dawn of Learning, March 30, 2012.
With the recent acquisition by Blackboard of some LMS support companies it may be premature to talk of the demiose of the LMS. But there is no doubt that the cloud (aka, the internet) has hads an impact. As Sarah Danzl says, "Access to learning tools like collaboration spaces, wikis, discussions, and blogs was only available if you created proprietary packages and used the native LMS capabilities.`And she suggests that the completion of IMS LIT (Learning Technologies Interoperability) actually spelled the end of the LMS.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Blackboard Inc., Web Logs, IMS Project]
A parent guide to 21st Century learning
Derek Wenmoth,
Derek’s Blog, March 30, 2012.
Derek Wenmoth reviews Edutopia's Parents Guide to 21st Century Learning. You have to sign up to view the Guide, which is a strike against it. It's hardly worth it; the Guide, focusing on the "four Cs", is mostly a few descriptive links. Here are the Cs:
- Collaboration: Students are able to work effectively with diverse groups and
exercise flexibility in making compromises to achieve common goals.
- Creativity: Students are able to generate and improve on original ideas and also
work creatively with others.
- Communication: Students are able to communicate effectively across multiple
media and for various purposes.
- Critical thinking: Students are able to analyze, evaluate, and understand
complex systems and apply strategies to solve problems.
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