Thursday, January 31, 2008

Web 2.0 in Plain English

I indulged in a brief mental break tonight from staring at accreditation documents to find a few resources for sharing at Andy's Teaching and Learning discussions this week. A while back, I found this site link on the Bamboo Project blog, and thought it was fun. The Common Craft folks have created short little videos that demystify all kinds of techie-stuff. It's worth cruising the site. Corey reminded me about this site yesterday when he told me that he used the "Blogs in Plain English" at a meeting with the Redmond Fire Department and they really enjoyed it. He is helping the fire department explore ways in which Web 2.0 technologies can be used in fire prevention education and improving communications between fire fighters in the field. Interesting stuff! A reminder that the importance of these tools for education goes way beyond academia!

What I like about these little videos is that they are very elegantly done, and there is clearly some thought about pedagogy put into them. As they say on their site, "Our product is explanation." (Hmm, that would be a nice mission statement for some teachers as well...) Their 3 to 4 minute "Paperworks Videos" introduce the viewer to concepts by using familiar metaphors. The images they use are non-intimidating things like post-it notes, whiteboards, stick figures and notepads. They are brief, providing snippets that our brains can grasp, without overwhelming them with information. Although these may look simple, it's clear that a lot of work must go into creating each video. For ambitious teachers who want to create their own content, these are great examples. For the rest of us, we can leave the "explanation" to other experts, and just link to the wonderful content that is out there to use!

Here are links to my favorites:
Enough fun. Now back to the accreditation report!

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Monday, January 21, 2008

More Twittering with Teachable Moments

Since I've been connecting to other blogs, I'm finding there is an active community of edubloggers out there on cyberspace, and am beginning to recognize the same folks trying out some of these things. It seems there is a community growing on Twitter.  Right after my previous post, Corey (my husband) sent me a link to Langwitches blog entry about the Teachable Moments Shoutout.  I'm a little shy about committing to this, but I think I'll follow this twitter account and see what happens.  Sometimes you just have to jump right in and try stuff! :)

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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Twittering

Well, I have to admit that at first I didn't see what in the world I would do with a tool like Twitter. It's a "mini-blog" and social networking tool that is centered around very short messages, sent into the blogosphere from your computer or cell phone. It's like instant messaging with the world. A "tweet" is a 140 character answer to the central question: "What are you doing?" at any given moment. The whole thing seemed a little egotistical to me - why would anyone else care about my random thoughts about nothing important? (That, of course, is my age showing again... younger folk have no problem with this concept.) However, this phenomenon seems to be catching on, and there are all kinds of references to twittering now. So, I decided to try it (with some encouragement from my Web 2.0 savvy husband, who is already twittering).

What first got me hooked in was twittervision. This is a map of the world (a "mash up"), where twitter messages pop up randomly about every second. It gives you a glimpse of the mundane and random thoughts that twitterers have chosen to share about their lives at that given moment. It's hypnotic to watch, but otherwise totally useless information. However, I'm sure it would be a fascinating sociology or anthropology study!

Why is Twitter a social networking tool?
It starts to make sense when you add in the concept of "following" other people who are twittering. When you add someone to follow, they become part of your community and you are notified whenever they post a tweet. By following someone's tweets, you show that you care enough about their thoughts to "listen", and vice versa. So, those who have similar interests as I do can be immediately notified when I find new interesting blogs or information to share, or have a random thought that I want to capture, or if I just want to let people know what I'm doing right now. It takes me just seconds to broadcast this information to anyone who's following me. By doing this, I also automatically save it in my twitter archives for my own reference later.

How can this be used for teaching and learning?
I'm still thinking about this -- but I decided to brainstorm. I could envision following students on twitter, and asking them to follow me. If someone is working on homework and has a question, it can be "twittered" to the community. If someone has an "aha" moment (including me) it can be shared with others, while standing in line for the movies, or sitting at a coffee shop. This type of mobile blogging makes learning transparent, public, and virtually anytime/anywhere. Even more interesting might be the ability to "take the pulse" of a learning community or assess understanding of a concept quickly using nothing but cell phones. As a teacher, I could give an assignment to observe certain behavior in the world for a day and have students reflect on it by twittering - in this way, I'd be able see learning as it's happening, in bits and pieces. In the classroom, what if I could pose a question, and students could answer it by plugging a text message into their cell phones? I'd be able to view the results of my "pop quiz" immediately on Twitter. I can just imagine their faces when I announce... "Students, please make sure your cell phones are turned ON for this class!"

I doubt that these ideas will catch on with teachers in the near future, but I do think this is another social networking technology to keep an eye on. In the meantime, I'm willing to try to use it. At least, for now, it gives me another way to keep track of my husband (and vice versa)!

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Playing with WetPaint

I'm enthralled with WetPaint. The WetPaint wiki that is. This quarter I decided to dive into using Web 2.0 tools, and involve my CWU class (IT 461 Systems Analysis) in a wiki project called Systems Analyst Toolkit. Although we use Blackboard, my rationale for using a wiki was that students could build a learning community and information resource that would endure beyond the 10 week constraints of our contracted time together as a class. I chose WetPaint as the online platform because it seemed easy to use without much experience required. It has been a fun journey as the students and I discover features of this tool together.

My first discovery was that I could get an ad-free site for my class, just by emailing Wetpaint and requesting it. (Check out http://www.wetpaint.com/category/Education--Ad-Free for more information). They responded within 24 hours by taking the google ads off my site. Not that I mind the ads normally, but they can be a bit distracting for students...

My second discovery was the "To Do and Activities" list. Actually, a student went in and added a "To Do," so I investigated and found that there is a special place where you can post ideas for work to be done on site pages. Aha! A place to post assignments! It also helps you to promote a sense of community by organizing the work to be done, and anyone can post items in this list. Then, you can send messages and compliments directly to contributors by clicking on their names. A good community-building tool.

Another nice feature is the "Top Contributor" icons. At a glance, you can see who the current top contributors are, and you can view all contributors, along with details about their contributions. This helps tremendously with grading assignments! It's also kind of motivating to see your name/avatar as top contributor. It's amazing how these little things can make you feel good. As an instructor, it can be tempting to contribute a lot of the content, but after your initial set-up of the site, the top contributor feature encourages the class members to strive for center stage. :)

There's also an easy-to-use discussion board. I keep finding more thoughtful little community-building features every day. It would be easy to use this as a primary learning management platform. I'll blog more on this more as the wiki evolves.

Check out the WetPaint Wikis for Education site for more ideas from their educator community: http://www.wetpaint.com/category/Education