EdTech @ ADW

This article by Chris Brogan details the advantages of Social Media. I’ve pared down his list to include those that most apply to education settings. However, his original list is definitely worth a read.

• Podcasts (video and audio) encourage different types of learning, and in portable formats.
• Social networks encourage collaboration,  and can promote non-email conversation channels.
• Social networks can amass like-minded people around shared interest.
• Social bookmarking means that entire groups can learn of new articles and tools.
• Blogs and wikis encourage conversations, sharing, creation.
• Social software, promote human-mediated information sharing.
• Online versions of your materials and media are searchable.
• Podcasts are a way to build intimacy with information.
• Tagging and sharing and all the other activities common on the social Web mean that information gets passed around much faster.
• Human aggregation and mediation improves the quality of data you find, and gives you more “exactly what I was looking for” help.
• Innovation works much faster in a social software environment.

 Here’s a nice article from TimesOnline that refers to differences in the way Digital-age youngsters process information differently from parents.

A short summary in points:

1. According to researchers digitally native children have wonderfully flexible minds. They absorb information quickly, adapt to changes and are adept at culling from multiple sources. But they are also suffering from internet-induced attention deficit disorder.

2.  A worrying view coming through is that students are lacking in reflective awareness. Technology makes it easy for them to collate information, but not to analyse and understand it -  that what is going on out there is quite superficial.

3.  Younger people expect more variety, so their boredom threshold is falling. Some teaching is adapting to that and becoming more dynamic, some is not.

4.  Because they have been using digital technology all their lives, young people feel they have authority over it. But technology cannot teach them to reflect upon and evaluate the information they are gathering online. For that, the role of teachers and parents remains fundamentally important.

DIGITAL NATIVES v DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS

Digital natives (Those who have grown up in the digital age)
Like receiving information quickly from multiple media sources.
Like parallel processing and multi-tasking.
Like processing pictures, sounds and video before text.
Like random access to hyperlinked multimedia information.
Like to network with others.
Like to learn “just in time”.

Digital immigrants (Older people who are learning to assimilate to this age)
Like slow and controlled release of information from limited sources.
Like singular processing and single or limited tasking.
Like processing text before pictures, sounds and video.
Like to receive information linearly, logically and sequentially.
Like to work independently.
Like to learn “just in case”.

The internet, in addition to allowing us easy access to business documents, research papers, free encyclopedias and some great books, also provides us with tutorials to absolutely anything.

Want to learn how to grill a great hamburger, or how to program in PHP?

This web page posted on dumblittleman.com details 15 such super-useful sites, which aim to provide you with all the tutorials you’d ever need.

Here’s a site called teachingtips.com, which lists some great blogs written by teachers for teachers. Click here to read.

These blogs are categorized under the following headings:

General
These blogs cover a wide range of subjects from current events to ideas for lessons and instruction.

Subject Specific
Secondary school teachers and others who are focused on one subject can find some interesting reading related to their work in these blogs.

Tips and Tools
Find supplements to your lessons and helpful tips on teaching in these blogs.

International
If you are teaching abroad, or have ever dreamed of doing it, these blogs can give you some fun and informative reading material.

Technology
These days technology and teaching are nearly inseparable, so stay on the cutting edge with some help from these blogs.

Here’s an article posted on Techdirt Blog claiming that some teachers and professors blame Wikipedia for mistakes students make, and even demand that the entire Wikipedia be blocked in schools.

This report out of Scotland blames Wikipedia for kids getting failing grades.

However, other teachers see value in embracing Wikipedia, but understand its necessary to teach students what it is and how to use it reliably.

This report out of Australia describes a course on how to use Wikipedia. That seems a lot smarter than just blaming Wikipedia.

“For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” - (Famous 6-word short story winner)

Here’s a guide to writing in 140 characters or less. With the advent of Twitter and SMS, the ability to express yourself succinctly and with brevity is becoming all the more important Click here to read this article

For those who want the article in summary form:

• Use strong verbs and a minimum of adverbs
• Avoid “university words”
• Forget about breaking your thoughts into two posts
• Write first, then trim
• Cut out the words “that” and “which”. “The toy train that my sister got for Christmas” can be “The toy train my sister got for Christmas.”
• Eliminate personal pronouns. “I am going to the Apple store” can be “Going to the Apple Store”.
• Write short sentences
• Use punctuation!
• Be personal
• Get to the point.

Here’s a very good article containing tips for achieving cross browser compatibility: Click here

For those of you who don’t want to read the whole article, here’s a summary:

1. Always use strict doctype and standards-compliant HTML/CSS
2. Always use a reset at the start of your css
3. Use -moz-opacity:0.99 on text elements to clean up rendering in Firefox, and text-shadow: #000 0 0 0 in Safari
4. Never resize images in the CSS or HTML
5. Check font rendering in every browser. Don’t use Lucida
6. Size text as a % in the body, and as em’s throughout
7. All layout divs that are floated should include display:inline and overflow:hidden
8. Containers should have overflow:auto and trigger hasLayout via a width or height
9. Don’t use any fancy CSS3 selectors
10. Don’t use transparent PNG’s unless you have loaded the alpha

Here’s a nice compilation of 60 useful tools for bloggers or web site designers. Click here to view

• Articles, Spelling / Translation
• Design & Color
• Forms
• Hosting, Domainname, DNS
• Programming and Coding (particularly CSS)
• Social Bookmarking
• Web 2.0 & Logo’s

Here’s a great article about how we read online. This article provides serious food for thought for any e-learning materials designer. Click here to read this article

A quick excerpt:

“That’s Jakob Nielsen’s theory. He’s a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)

Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an “information scent.” We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.”

I was asked by the faculty at the Enhanced Learning Centre (ELC) to modify a previous application I was working on that provides writing feedback which indicates for students those aspects of writing that require further learning and practice (i.e. communication, grammar, vocabulary, mechanics).

In this new incarnation of the application, no band scores are to be given for each writing aspect. This was decided because the ELC faculty felt it would be difficult to accurately specify bandscores for the wide range of students (i.e. Diploma to Bachelor-level) who come to the ELC for help to remediate their writing problems.

The ELC faculty recognize the usefulness of automatically being able to generate detailed comments regarding the different writing aspects specified in the application. They have also said they will use these aspects as the basis for categories under which to organize supplementary learning materials, which the feedback generator will be able to point students towards - generated as a result of the particular writing feedback these teachers provide to students using this application.