http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/02/top-1

Top 100 Education Blogs | OEDb - Not wanting to come back to work after a great holiday - it was really good to find this in my in box

Hmm….. Guess I should stop taking things on face value. Oh well. Back to reality.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/02/does-

Does Your Blog Have a Gender? Seems that it thinks I’m male. I wonder if it’s the fact that it’s a factual, work related blog. Perhaps the personal blog (that I don’t have) would have a more feminine side.

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/08/olpc-

Interface Guidelines for OLPC . A wiki, that’s clearly still being worked on, as some areas are just notes. Though still very much in note stages, I like the idea of the Journal - and I can see it tying in well with the “PLE” computer use I’d like to get students to move towards.

The Zoom Metaphor is nice and easy to understand, and I love the look of the example bulletin board, though clearly it might have to be adapted for older users.

The interface is called “Sugar” - and it’s possible to emulate it - or you can just watch a video.

Via: Yishay Mor who comments:

OLPC guidelines work out of the assumption that people use computers to *do stuff* and they do it in a *social context*. Vygotsky is dancing a foxtrot in his grave

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http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/10/read-

ReadPal is an interesting looking piece of software. It claims that it lets you read faster than you might otherwise on screen.

I’ve had a look, and I think that it could have some uses - the first problem I ran into was the fact that it only integrates with IE, not with Firefox (didn’t even bother trying with Flock). I also wasn’t keen on the fact that it wanted to run at start up - though I can see that would be useful if you decided to use it a lot. Images don’t get incorporated - which could be an issue if they are vital to the text. Another big problem is that it doesn’t currently work with .pdf files. I’ve also found another issue - they’ve supplied it with several files; but no way of bookmarking where you have got to. So, though I have started Huckleberry Finn, I can’t get back to the same point again, without remembering where I got to (you can zoom to say 23% - but you’d have to remember where you’d got to).

I tested it with a Word Document - and I can see the powers that it could have.

If it worked with Firefox, and .pdf - and, ideally allowed the user to select chunks of text (as ReadPlease does for example) - then I think that it would be a very powerful tool. I’d also be interested (long term) to see if they have a version that works with a PDA.

So, in summary - good idea, but needs further work.

Via: Lisa Valentine

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/11/offli

Socialtext Enterprise Wiki is a wiki that can be synchronised, so that it can be worked on offline. I can see quite a few uses of this - and of other offline software. I’m currently also looking at a discussion board that VSO have for volunteers, both before they go, and while they are in placement. One of the issues is clearly that some volunteers may well have very limited internet access - both through financial constraints & practical issues.

I could see that something like this would have uses. Clearly there could be the issue of someone else having changed something between you downloading it, and reconnecting, but there are uses. I’ve also pondered the thought of synchronisable discussion boards. One of the great points about email is that it’s possible to read & write offline. Bulletin boards, on the other hand, offer a structure that it can be hard to get in email - and an archiving potential. But, downloading a bulletin board for later use would lead to issues re. versions. I’m still not sure; I feel though that a tool that’s between email & a bulletin board could be really powerful; I just can’t think how you’d do it!

Some boards (e.g. Moodle) will send you all the messages, but you still have to go online to compose & upload answers (unless you want to reply just to the sender). I guess though that’s better than having to read online as well.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/18/perio

Visual Literacy have developed a “periodic table” of visualisation methods. I’m not entirely sure if there’s the same sort of linking down the columns as there is in the “real” periodic table. In some cases I could see links, but in others I wasn’t so sure.

Via: Scott Mcleod., who comments

yet another example of the power of the Web over print

I think (hope!) he’s referring to the way that there are the popups over each cell - as to me, in order to *really* benefit from the power of the web, each popup would be a link to an interactive tool to help you build that sort of diagram. I guess you could do quite a few in Gliffy, but not all of them.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/19/prese

Presentation Zen: Film explores the omnipresent PowerPoint culture in search of its philosophical potential. I’ve only just found this blog, via Christian Long. The short video is well worth looking at - to realise what could be done with bulletpoints & other delights of powerpoint.

The rest of the blog, though, is a wealth of information about presentations - and how one can use Powerpoint effectively.

I found, once, a .pdf about using Powerpoint - one of the things that it raised was the power of using images. They’d got an image & I *think* that it was of a graveyard (possibly in Normandy), being used to demonstrate the futility of war. It pointed out the power of that, compared to raw data. I just wish I could find that .pdf again!

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/19/edubl

The results are in! Scott Mcleod has published the results of the edublogger survey that he carried out at the start of the month (a slight problem - all our antipodean colleagues are still on their summer breaks - wonder if they’d have altered the results at all?)

Christopher Sessums has just put up a set of 5 questions, for teachers who blog. It will be interesting to see how the two surveys compare - and, there’s also the survey that Lilia Efimova did towards the end of last year.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/19/ratio

Anne Davis has a long list of points that are very relevant to all anyone who is encouraging their students to blog, or, indeed, to anyone who wants to blog for their own learning.

All points are so true, though at the moment the two that particularly strike me are:

• Blogs help learners to see knowledge as interconnected as opposed to a set of discrete facts.


• Blogs foster ownership and choice. They help lead us away from students trying to find what the teacher wants in terms of an answer.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/23/did-y

Scott McLeod has uploaded several versions of Karl Fisch’s presentation “Did you know?”. I’m currently using a PC that’s not got sound, I’m not sure what extra you’d get with sound, but the Powerpoint slides have the main information on (and, they’ve done it with limited text on each slide ).

It’s US-centric, (though England gets an honorary mention) - but makes the point about what’s facing our current and future students in terms of information & competition from places like China well.

It’s pretty obvious that the UK education system is going to have to look more and more at language learning (not just French) - and how to information use, rather than learning facts.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/23/wordp

I saw the links & off I went. Not quite as successful as upgrading to 2.0.7 - as we’ve not got MySQL 4.anything on this server. So I had to uninstall. As I’d not properly backed up the most recent version, and I’m not in my Office, I’ve had to revert to 2.0.5 (the most recent version I’d got backed up to my Network drive), and was able to get a working blog back up. Tomorrow it’s going to be a case of re-updating to 2.0.7 & also requesting a MySQL update. That might take time…

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/25/bbc-p

The BBC have plans for a virtual world, aimed at 7-12 year olds.

“It will give children a chance to move around a safe, secure world where they can not only interact with familiar characters but have an opportunity to make that world a more fascinating place with their own imaginations.”

Those building CBBC World said the emphasis would be on safety and responsibility, with no chatrooms or facilities for building new parts of the virtual world.

I think that it could be interesting to see what children think of it; I suspect that of the younger group they are aiming at, many may well not have really used chatrooms, so won’t miss them. I suspect that the older users will have used them, and thus may well not like it due to the lack of them. However, I assume that the avatars will be able to communicate in some way - so perhaps they’ll have a situation where all conversation is open. (Will those that can’t read / write well use “real” speech?)

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/25/effec

Scott Leslie comments on a report by Margaret Lohman, looking at student performance when material was delivered to the students via a VLE (available pre-class), or handed out in class. Though the numbers involved are small, and they are all graduate students, the results are interesting.

First, the study’s findings provide little evidence to warrant continuing the conventional practice of using a CMS as a alternative way of presenting course materials and information. CMSs cost millions of dollars to purchase and maintain. Instructors must spend countless hours learning how to use the technology, preparing materials for CMSs, and monitoring student use of course websites. And, for what benefit? No evidence was found in this study to indicate that on-line access to course materials yields any positive dividend in terms of student learning or satisfaction. (Lohman)

She goes on to add:

Instead, CMSs should be used to conduct learning activities, such as facilitated group discussions and problem-based learning experiences, that supplement in-class activities as well as to provide additional learning resources that are not available in class.

More research needs to be done, particularly as we, in common with many universities, have a policy of encouraging staff to use WebCT to support face to face teaching. The default is, as this report also finds, as a repository (some may even say “dumping ground”) for handouts, course books etc. What should we be doing to better utilise it?

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/26/socia

Tim Hoogenbooms presents a long blog post (more of a paper really) looking at social learning through the use of Social software (Web2.0). He looks at some of the difficulties inherent in the use of social software for social learning. Long, but well worth reading.

(It is in English!)

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/01/29/the-g

FAscinating! From the Google labs. There are a number of variables that can be graphed against each other (e.g. Child mortality, population, Internet Users) - scales can be linear or logarithmic. The size of dot for each country can also be related to one of the statistical measures & finally the colour can be set to either an indicator (I couldn’t get that to work though), or a category (region/income group). If you prefer to have the dots on a map, rather than as a scatter diagram, then you can.

Finally - you can either select a single year, or see the changes between 1975 & 2004 as an amination.

Informative & fun!

There’s more information and downloads etc on the Gapminder website.

Via: Tim Lauer