Google gears? He thinks that these might be interesting for developers, but I don't know what they are.
Someone asked the question about what needs to change on the back end to deal with the changes that we want on our front end?
There are different ways of thinking this. Mobile devices allow us to do something completely differently. The mobile devices are smart and they can do very interesting things, and that may change what we care about.
Has anyone thought about how these things might be used in academics? To help students do novel and innovative things.
]]>Louis Hammond, Infrastructure and Operations Director, OIT. Mobile devices need to connect to the infrastructure. The infrastructure that we need is not stable. He is concerned with issues of bandwidth and capabilities and what happens when people switch between different types of connections. 2G - 4G (but not real 4G devices yet.)
Pat Haggerty, trainer, makes the case that mobile is important because our audience is now mobile (and he insists, are distracted). He's discussing the basics of separating content from form, and semantics, which is fine. I'm wondering if OIT is going to offer any tools to assist with this. Creating a system that allows us to create XSL transformations on top of XML, and an XML academic content data standard, would be very cool, but I sense that this is mostly just a pitch for separating content from design, which is sort of an old idea.
]]>They have developed a suite of other applications that can be used across other course instances.
//QUESTION: They have many different views of the data across classifications, history, etc. Can instructors create that for themselves, or do they have to create them?
Instructors can create them if they can create these with Google Earth, because they are just KML files.
]]>They have developed a suite of other applications that can be used across other course instances.
//QUESTION: They have many different views of the data across classifications, history, etc. Can instructors create that for themselves, or do they have to create them?
Instructors can create them if they can create these with Google Earth, because they are just KML files.
]]>They focus on:
• Different learning styles (ugh, get over this pseudo-science please)
• Learning spaces
• Informal learning
• Learning from others
Oy, they are doing an online game so people can look for "clues". Oy vay.
Discussion by Constance Steinkuehler from U-W Madision, from the games+learning+society initiative. The punch-line is that online virtual worlds are naturally occurring. She studies mmogs. She particularly studies WOW.
13.5 million people are playing the 4 most popular games. There is a significant population and amount of activities and times they are playing. She thinks they are culturally significant -- people know what these things are and meet one another on there. The "new golf" -- business transactions happen here.
She thinks these games are also intellectually significant. She thinks that building a repository of knowledge in the game and ways to achieve complex results in the game is very like the scientific model of collecting facts and then putting them into models that explain what they've observed.
//NOTE: This may be so -- but does it actually translate to an understanding of what is happening in the world?
They focused on three things:
1. Discursive practice -- do you know how to make an argument based on facts and data and how to argue with others?
2. Model based reasoning -- can they translate facts into predictive models? Can they adjust based on new information?
3. Tacit epistomology -- wanted to make sure that she wasn't seeing backward engineering and calling it science.
She decided that talk was actually productive. Overwhelmingly, talk on game sites is problem-solving rather than social banter (87%).
People built on each others' ideas, used counter arguments, lots of people used data to back claims, etc.
Most people (65%) were evaluative in their analysis of the problems in the game -- which is much higher than national averages (Kuhn, 1991) which is at about 15%. Evaluative says "Hmmm...I understand that theory, but I think the data suggest something else is at play. Let's figure it out?"
She is pushing the idea of collective problem solving rather than collaborative problem solving. Lots and lots of people are making small, incremental contributions. The ratio of posts to members is 1.8/1 -- so everyone averages about 1.8 posts. That's awesome, not one person posting 1000 posts and everyone watching.
//NOTE: I wonder if this is because people find contributing to this environment and being wrong to be low-cost. Its OK to theorize and be right or wrong. There is lower performance-avoidance orientation.
She coins the term "pop cosmopolitanism", a willingness to navigate this globalized, diverse world. It is fostered in digital technologies, very much in WOW.
There are social norms and practices that are being pushed out into homes.
//NOTE: It is very interesting that she is not interested in the content of the game, but rather the discussion *about* the game. She is very interested in what the game is about, but rather in the meta-analysis of the what people are discussing.
]]>They wanted to ask the basic question what's the most important challenge facing the U.S.?
They used a sampling company. He makes the case that you need to only make sure that the questions are uncorrelated to the questions you ask -- not a true representative sample.
The only demographic data that they selected for was gender.
They used an analytic theory based on Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory.
The InfoTrend software, which is what he's pushing, focuses on ways to write sophisticated text analysis, allowing us to determine the frequency with which words and phrases show up in a text response or document.
]]>"Man Computer Symbiosis", by Lichleiter -- cognition, information literacy.
Mitch brought up the idea of access to information online vs. analysis. The really interesting thing, according to Google, is whether or not computers can start to do analysis for us.
Is there a value to unanswerable questions?
Dawn says, let's define analysis in a broader way, and she thinks that students are really synthesizing information in a very nice way that we should be proud of and learn to understand. She also suggests that Google is overly-represented by white men in the silicon valley.
Muriel says that students should be taught to understand authenticity, and to understand.
Dawn suggests that we should learn to write for newly literate media students, who are really looking for the meat and potatoes of the article.
Jian suggests that he agrees; a new form of writing.
Linda indicates that this may be more of a phenomenon of being able to document what we're doing, rather than an actual shift from what we're doing. That is, that people have always surfed and skimmed, but now we can *demonstrate* what they are doing and record them through the web.
Kate says that she fears that students aren't very good at the questioning piece of this.
Alisa asks if students' confidence in writing comes from the proliferation of user-generated content -- basically, they see a range of online writing, good and poor, and they see that they are better than some of that.
Pam asks if our ideas about what makes something credible.
Phil asks if we are making Google Stupid, rather than just is Google making *us* stupid? He says that Google gathers a lot of data from us and that's what makes Google what Google is.
Kirsten asks if the commercialization of the web will determine what is credible? Mitch says that these things are very important, but that the open-source community offers an alternative.
Session 2: JoAnna O'Connell, Spanish and Portuguese
Session 3: Integrating Digital Writing Tools, Rick Beach, Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Types of digital writing:
1. Collaborative writing (a la Google docs or iChat screensharing)
2. Aggregated writing (a la RSS feeds)
3. Community writing (a la wikis)
4. Individual writing (a la MS Word)
5. Non-linear writing (a la HTML web sites or wikis)
6. Media-based storytelling (a la YouTube or podcasts)
These *can* be very different -- the affordances of the web allow for us to do some things online that can be quite difficult.
He outlines a few characteristic questions of online writing:
1. Is the product fixed or evolving?
2. Who is the audience?
3. Does the technology require expertise to use?
4. Is authorship individual or collaborative?
5. What is the level of incorporation of others?
He outlines the following comparison/contrast:
Type || Is the product dynamic? || Audience? || Authorship?
Wiki || Yes || world || group
Bulletin board || somewhat || group or world || group
Blog || no? || group || individual
Google docs || yes || group || individual or group
Web pages || somewhat || world || individual or group
Non-digital || no || group || individual
SESSION 2: JoAnna O'Connell, Spanish and Portuguese
Using technology for writing -- she's making a pragmatics argument that people often adopt technology when it becomes germane for them. She argues for teaching language and writing in context, so they actually *do* things first, then actually integrate these ideas into their teaching. She makes a learning styles argument -- "Some people are parrots, and can repeat anything you say back to you. For others, its just noise until they see it written down."
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/FacultyAdoptionofEducatio/40010
SESSION 3: Rick Beach, Curriculum & Instruction
He spends most of his time talking about tools. Bubbl.us is a concept mapping tool. He uses Ning.com for a CMS. He also demonstrates voicethread.com.
Their project is called mytoons.com. They had students add their projects to mytoons and then used the social networking opportunities therein to have them review one anothers work. Its very similar to the project we did at USC in YouTube. Their big finding was that usability is important, and unusable sites are not that useful, which is fairly expected, I imagine.
]]>