elearning2.0 – Page 2

‘Blog Uses in Education’ Drag and Drop Exercise

http://www.ldu.leeds.ac.uk/dragndrop/bloguse/

Back in 2003 I created what’s become one of the more popular things on the EdTechPost site, the ‘matrix of blog uses in education.’ For whatever reason it’s gotten lots of links and traffic over the last 3 years, but what has been especially gratifying is when people have picked it up and actually done something new with it (like, you know, re-used/re-mixed it!)

The first example I found a year or so ago was the Dutch site Frankwatching, which took the original sketchy document and translated it into Dutch, along the way making it much more fetching to the eye.

But I was really blown away by a recent example emailed to me by its creator, Tony Lowe. Tony, through a company called Webducate, has developed a number of flash-based tools for creating learning content. Using one of those tools, Dragster, he created an interactive version of the ‘matrix of blog uses in education’ with a cool innovation – in addition to a pre-existing list of “uses,” which the user can drag and drop into their chosen quadrant of the matrix, it allows you to create new ones on the fly to then be placed there.

In an email Tony writes that in future versions people will be able to save completed exercises and look at a gallery of others’ work, but even as it is now I can see this being a useful tool to use with faculty or others in workshops to brainstorm different uses they can make of blogs and blogging and help them see it as an activity and process, not an end product (which was a main goal of the ‘matrix’). – SWL

University of Washington’s Catalyst team releases Solstice Perl Framework

http://solstice.eplt.washington.edu/Say_Hello_to_Solstice

Oren Sreeby wrote me today to let me know about the recent open sourcing of Solstice, a Web application development framework for Perl which the University of Washington has developed to power their suite of Catalyst tools. Solstice itself is just the framework used in the development, but the team is also apparently at work to open source the actual web tools themselves. This is exciting news as people who have seen the Catalyst tools will know that they represented an early and quite innovative approach to providing teaching and learning tools (including a much lauded eportfolio tool) that wasn’t simply replicating the same CMS over and over again. Ed Tech Perl developers, are you listening? – SWL

Plex project beta

http://www.reload.ac.uk/plex/index.html

Exciting stuff, the first beta of the Plex tool is available for download now. The Plex tool is being developed at the University of Bolton by Phillip Beauvoir, Mark Johnson, Oleg Liber, Colin Milligan, Paul Sharples and Scott Wilson and is the output of the JISC-funded Personal Learning Environments project. Scott Wilson has also posted a powerpoint presentation on the new tool as well. – SWL

Downes Hiatus FAQ

http://www.downes.ca/hiatusfaq.htm

Just had to chuckle at this – given Stephen’s readership I can easily understand the need for this, as his abrupt announcement likely triggered an avalanche of concerned emails, but I’m not sure that Gandalf issued an FAQ (this now being my new mantra, not “What would Sun Ra do?” but instead “What would Gandalf do?“) Although if he had, it would likely be as cryptic as this one 😉 – SWL

Postgenomic – Life Science Community Aggregator and Review Engine

http://www.postgenomic.com/

Scott Wilson’s recent presentation on “SOA and web 2.0 things” is well worth it even for you grizzled remix veterans of the blogosphere, if only for the most succinct and helpful explanation of the e-Framework I’ve yet to read (“A collaborative effort by JISC, DEST, SURF, NZ MoE and others to make sense of web services in education“).

But what really blew my mind was the link to the above service, Postgenomic. If I understand it correctly, in essence it is a service which provides a registry for, and then search across, academic blogs dedicated to life sciences topics. It does so in order to give users a view on what topics are being talked about in those communities, what sites are being linked to, and what academic articles are being reviewed. And the only effort required to participate, as far as I can tell, is the use of a small ‘review’ microformat (that’s right, isn’t it?) that helps the service identify which posts are ‘reviews’ of specific academic papers.

What this means is that researchers, academics and students in a variety of life science areas can follow which stories their community is finding important, what tags members of their community are using most, (this is a lot closer to what I was writing about last week, though not search based), and get feeds of papers reviewed in their community.

This isn’t the mythical eduglu, and maybe this is something that a system like aggrssive could facilitate for other communities or maybe I’m confused and this is duplicating something already there in more general systems like technorati (though I think not). But hot damn was this exciting for me to see. – SWL

Good luck, “Gandalf”

I love that both Rob Wall and D’Arcy referenced Gandalf descending into the mines in regards to Stephen’s announcement that he is on hiatus. It brought to mind a Gandalf quote:

“You can only come to the morning through the shadows.”

(Though my favourite Gandalf quote still remains “He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.” I wonder if our Gandalf feels that way.)

See you on the other side Stephen. – SWL

Paper – “Personal Publishing and Media Literacy”

http://infodesign.no/artikler/
personal_%20publishing_media_literacy.pdf

Are the Norse known for being terse? The only reason I ask is that my one complaint about this paper from Jon Hoem and Ture Schwebs is that it is too short! (which to be honest, is usually not the problem with academic papers!)

Even if you feel you’ve had your fill of papers on “why to use blogs and wikis in education” please do yourself a favour and read this one. In seven short, packed pages they lay out a number of strong rationales for using blogs and wikis in the classroom (in this case mostly the K-12 classroom), introduce for me the interesting concept of “personal publishing as ‘staging‘.� They also show off their own, in-house blogging tool called ELOGG (no, not that one), very recognizable as a blogging tool but which also contains some sensible additions like “assignments, projects, friends & favourites, selected works, and media archives” that make the tool even more affable to a school setting.

I expect this paper to become one of the regularly cited as we move into the ‘early majority’ and onwards adopting these technologies and practices into their classrooms. It is passionate without being dogmatic, and informed by more than the blogosphere’s intelligentsia. – SWL

Great post on “Educational Social Overlay Networks”

http://terrya.edublogs.org/2005/11/28/hello-world/

The only post so far in this new edublogs.org blog (oh the marvels of Technorati, like it or not here come your readers, Terry A. ;-). Not so much a response to my posting on the false dichotomy that is being set up between Moodle and ELGG, instead it just takes that as its starting point for an extended musing on what the relationship could and should be between institutional provided systems and the users social networks, which by definition can and do cross all sorts of boundries. Personally, I find this approach a lot more palatable and mature than a lot of the all-or-nothing-it-must-all-be-open diatribes I come across these days, but maybe that’s just me being a good Canadian, trying to mediate between poles, and be a reformer, not a revolutionary. – SWL

Next Generation Foundation’s ‘Map of Creativity’

http://www.ngf.org.uk/map/map.html

While you will likely find some useful educational sites through this Flash-based app, I’m pointing to it more because of the very nifty interface. It may seem disconcerting at first, but stick with it for a few more seconds. Mousing over the filters on the right-hand side will let you actually see how many sites will remain as a result (click the filter to then apply it), and clicking multiple filters will apply them one on top of the other. Thanks Trevor for pointing this out. – SWL

http://www.educause.edu/pub/
eq/eqm04/eqm0421.asp

Given that the idea of perpetual email accounts is enough to make most IT administrators packup and run, the innovations in offering lifelong learning environments presented in this Educause Quarterly article by Ellen R. Cohn are likely to fall on similarly unreceptive ears in many IT departments. Still, the ideas are worth considering. But are they worth considering because the technology seems to enable this, or would the value proposition behind them still be there without the technology? Via Ray Schroeder’s Online Learning Update. – SWL