You can learn math from Factoring with Mr. Yang in a comic-strip fashion. While I approached this course with cynicism, I found it surprising engaging (knowing that I am not their target audience).
In contrast, I started reading my first online book, The Twitter Book, available through Safari Books Online, a service the ACM provides members at no charge. As I read the book, I wondered how an online book is really any different than the electronic page-turner model of online education. Click, click, click.
Both the comic strip and the book are well-written. And both require you to click to get to the next screen. But the comic strip seemed to unfold in a way that the book did not. While reading the comic strip I never felt the compulsion to click through it like I did with the book and with many self-paced online courses. And I am more interested in expanding my knowledge of Twitter than refreshing my knowledge of factoring!
My conclusion: visual displays make an enormous difference. Do you agree?
Displaying Text on a Computer: Do Comic Strips Have Advantages over Pages of Text?
Doing More with Less and Other Highlights of the CLO Fall 2009 Symposium
Clark Quinn presented this week at the CLO Fall 2009 Symposium. I asked him what the highlights were for him. His response:
There’s a trend towards lifting the CLO game. It’s clearly no longer about meeting training needs; you aren’t seeing a lot of talk about corporate universities. Instead, you’re seeing phrases like “Peak Performance”, “doing more with less”, and session titles that include: smarter, faster, urgent, and impact. The economic climate has clearly had an impact.
It’s good that organizations are looking to get more strategic about learning, because it’s clear that despite that having been under discussion for years, there’s still a lot of room to improve. Rebecca Ray of Mastercard, 2008 CLO of the year, reported that fully 40% of CLOs she surveyed were not tying their metrics to business outcomes. Jay Cross and I, on behalf of TogetherLearn, presented data including that 77% say that their people aren’t developing fast enough to meet the needs of the business and 63% replied to the contrary to the statement “our corporate culture values and encourages transparency and openness” for just two examples of missed opportunities. And they’re not considering, by and large, potential audiences such as supply-chain partners and customers.
There is recognition of the opportunity for technology to start playing a more significant role. For example, there is a lot more interest in technology to reach distributed audiences, though an understanding of tools isn’t widespread. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” For example, 48% said their people can’t locate in-house experts when they need them. Awareness of micro-blogging tools like Twitter and it’s corporate equivalents (e.g. Yammer, Present.ly, & Status.net) is relatively sparse. As an indication, the tweetstream from the conference (#CLOSymposium) is pretty sparse.
That said, the sessions that are presenting on web 2.0 tools and informal learning are well-attended, and awareness of the opportunities is obvious. It’s clear that the audience is recognizing the message that prepared courses aren’t going to be capable of meeting the increasing rate of change and the need for agility. Whether it’s growing awareness, or the economic pressures, change is coming, and e-learning (in the broad sense of the term, including performance support, collaboration tools, social networks, etc.) has an increasing role to play. Here’s hoping it’s well played.
Share Your Web 2.0 Classroom Projects
I connected with Terry Freedman recently when I saw he was working on a project to amass web 2.0 projects for teachers into a free online book.
Actually, he had already done it once and is currently in the process of updating the book to keep current with technology and add new projects, too.
Freedman’s book also addresses barriers to implementing web 2.0 materials and lessons into the classroom. Here’s his call for participation, abridged. The full text is on his site.
Freedman writes:
The free eBook I published about a year ago, 60 Web 2.0 Projects, has been very popular, with around 11,000 downloads to date. However, new applications have become available, some of the links in the book no longer work, and new projects have been undertaken. For these reasons I am hoping to update the book and bring out a second edition.
Would you like to contribute?
The most-valued aspect of the current book is the wealth of ideas it contains. (Teachers, being the creative type, can always adapt the ideas to their own circumstances, such as by making the assignments simpler or harder for a different age group.)
The reason I say this is that many people, especially new teachers, are a bit backward in coming forward when calls for submissions are made, thinking that they have little to contribute. In fact, it is often the case that the newer teachers are the ones who come up with ideas that more established ones wouldn’t have thought of!
In the second edition, I should like to also include information about what barriers there are to implementing Web 2.0 in the classroom, and how people have overcome them; and people’s favorite Web 2.0 applications.
If you would like to contribute, you will find an online form for that purpose. It should take you only a few minutes to complete. The deadline is midnight British Summertime on 30 September 2009.
If your entry is included in the next edition of the projects book, it will be available to anyone who wants it, on the internet.
What are the benefits of contributing to this book?
Your contribution will appear in a publication edited by someone other than yourself. I think that’s quite important: these days, anyone can publish anything, but having someothing published by someone else indicates that, to perhaps state the obvious, someone else thought it worthy of publishing! The thing is, although I am not looking for best practice as such, I’m not going to include poor practice or poorly explained practice.
Your work will come to the attention of a large audience. I don’t know if 11,000 downloads is a lot in the total scheme of things, but it seems a lot to me! Indeed, I know for a fact that some of the people who downloaded the ebook printed it off and distributed it to their colleagues, so I should think that that figure of 11,000 represents a minimum in terms of the number of readers.
You will have the satisfaction of knowing that others will benefit from your experience. It’s quite nice to be told that something you wrote inspired someone else to try the same thing, or a variation of it.
What are the benefits of the book itself?
From what people have told me, and from presentations I’ve given which use the ebook, I’d suggest the following:
It’s nice to have a collection of projects all in one place, that people can quickly browse though and select from. The way I organised the first edition was to put the projects in age groupings, and people seemed to find this quite helpful. Of course, many if not all of the projects can be modified to suit an older or a younger age group.
It becomes very clear very quickly that many of the projects do not require an awful lot of setting up. In fact, one delegate at a conference in which I was presenting put his hand up and said: ‘I could start almost any one of these when I get back into school tomorrow.’ Exactly!
I find that the mere fact of having a collection of ideas in one place is inspirational in itself.
You might argue that a lot of stuff is available on the internet anyway, and you would be right. All I am attempting to do with this ebook is to collate a number of interesting projects together in one place, to save busy teachers having to spend time trawling the web themselves. So by contributing to the book you would be helping others to save precious time.
So what makes for an ‘interesting’ project?
Rather than answer that question directly, I’d like to suggest that what you find interesting and what someone else finds interesting will differ, and will depend on several factors — not least, what you need to achieve with your students. So my definition of ‘interesting’ in the context of this ebook is the following:
-Does it make use of Web 2.0 technology?
-Did it have a clearly-defined aim?
-Is enough description provided to enable others to know what was actually done?
-Have there been any outcomes yet? This is not a deal-breaker by the way: you may have just embarked on the project.
-Is there a URL people can look at? This is not necessarily a deal-breaker either, but it would have to be pretty outstanding for me to include it. If it’s a private URL, perhaps you could create a guest log-in that could be cited in the book?
-Is what you did replicable by other teachers with the minimum of fuss?
I hope that you can see from this list of questions that I’m not looking for earth-shattering research here. If your aim was to see if using a wiki could get boys interested in reading, that’s fine — especially if you can cite evidence that it worked (and ‘evidence’ could be anecodotal, such as what a pupil or her parents said).
Reprinted from Educational Technology: ICT in Education with permission
Can Quizzes Challenge and Inspire?
When I think of quizzes and multiple choice questions, I roll my eyes since they are the ubiquitous end-of-course stumbling blocks to course completion. Larry Chu just spoke at Medicine 2.0 about emailing monthly quizzes to challenge residents at the Stanford University School of Medicine Dept. of Anesthesiology. I was struck by the advantages of quizzes to instead inspire people to learn. A quiz is a great way to see that you don’t know something that you should. It is also a great way to be exposed to the subtleties in a topic. If the quiz then leads to sources of information, it can be very valuable.
Chu didn’t speak much about the quizzes in his talk, but I sat next to Gwyneth Evans, who agrees. “Interesting, students rank quizzes as the lowest area for investment because they don’t like tests. But do they realize the fast potential for learning that the quiz provides? Seconds to validate and correct your perceived knowledge!” Thanks for the insight, Evans!
The Educational Value of Serendipitous Encounters in Second Life
I am listening to John Wiecha, a physician an professor at Boston University Medical Center, talk about teaching continuing Medical education (CME) using Second Life. Second Life’s value was recently debated by Roger Schank and his the people commenting in Must e-Learning be “Cool”. What I was struck by in Wiecha’s talk was the opportunities for serendipitous encounters like the virtual patient who walks in needing help.
With all education and training there can be a problem with the application of what is learned in the classroom, virtual or otherwise, in real life. Second Life, which is clearly not real life (for most people), offers this type of opportunity in a way that is often not possible. Imagine disaster planning. Imagine the irate customer. Imagine the opportunities for expert feedback.
I am blogging live from Medicine 2.0 in Toronto. There is also a Twitter stream (#med2) but it’s hard to say much about a talk in 140 characters!