Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly

Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly.

Follow the link to read about the addition of math equation tools to Google Docs. In addition to enabling students to write with these tools, this gives faculty another tool for grading online–gotta save those trees and the printer ink!

Here’s my lame English major attempt to use the equation editor:

google equation editor

Filed under: Web 2.0, free stuff, hypertext, online learning, open source, technology , google

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

Do you agree with this list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies? The table shows former rankings of items from 2007 and 2008, providing an interesting view of how some have jumped radically into prominence and others have fallen away. PowerPoint still ranks high at #10–I was surprised by that. Look through the list and notice how many of the tools are free and web-based, even though a number of proprietary software tools, like Adobe Connect, Camtasia Studio, and Photoshop are still indispensible.

Filed under: digital literacy, document delivery, education, free stuff, learning, open source, software, teaching, technology

there are Pilots and pilots

You’re all familiar with college pilots of technologies that are being considered for campus-wide adoption–those are the pilots with a capital P that seem to drag out over a good portion of a year, all with the best intentions, not necessarily in this order:

• arrange with a company for a pilot
• recruit volunteer faculty to participate
• form a committee
• train faculty
• troubleshoot the technology
• gather feedback from faculty and students
• evaluate the technology
• decide whether or not to commit to the technology

I’m surely leaving something out, but you know the process. Such a process is necessary for contracted technologies that are going to cost a pretty penny to implement.

Then there are the pilots that you might be implementing on your own from a wide choice of free Web 2.0 or Open Source tools. Certainly, it’s not necessary for a college to go through a formal adoption strategy for a free tool–no money changes hands, and what works in your discipline and class might not be the best tool for the next person’s class. We’re missing the point of teaching creatively if we try to stifle creative experimentation with free tools.

That said, Ruth Reynard suggests that you can run your own pilot in your own classroom with these free tools, and that it becomes a good learning experience for your students to be involved in evaluating the effectiveness of the pilot with the small p. In “6 Ways not to become Rote Using Technology,” Reynard suggests using a pattern of implementation similar to the one above, but more tailored to your course:

1. Get your hands dirty;
2. Set up the “pilot” parameters and criteria;
3. Involve the students in your reflective evaluation;
4. Always survey students about the technology specifically;
5. Always identify the connection with learning outcomes; and
6. Modify your use and adjust when needed (remain open to change).

I’m reminded of the EDUCAUSE surveys of students that reveal student preferences for technology that faculty know how to use well, and think this approach strikes a balance between the creative innovator and the expert. Capital P pilots aim for achieving a standard of expertise before implementation and lower-case p pilots engage students in innovation and evaluation of technology and learning. There is good cause for both to be happening.

What Web 2.0 tools have you tried out in your courses and to what success?

Image Author: Luca Cremonini Source: http://www.railsonwave.it/railsonwave/2007/1/2/web-2-0-map Original Source: Markus Angermeier Source: http://kosmar.de/archives/2005/11/11/the-huge-cloud-lens-bubble-map-web20/
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5

Filed under: Web 2.0, free stuff, learning, open source, pedagogy, pilots, teaching, technology

a nod to the peanut gallery

From the comment on my recent post “yes yes, of course, the desk!” a homegrown innovation of the new touchscreen developments:

Filed under: Web 2.0, free stuff, innovation, open source, software, technology

"whose technology is it anyway?"

The last session I attended at the SUNY CIT 2008 conference in May was conducted by three terrifically interesting scholars from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Steven Zucker, Beth Harris, and Eric Feinblatt. [read about my poster presentation on my Second Life blog].

Titled “Whose Technology is it Anyway?” they blew me away with the concept of opening up the source code of our institutions to allow the kinds of collaboration we see in open source software that lets the larger community of software developers, professional and amateur, work to create better tools. The open source movement attempts to harness “the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in” (http://www.opensource.org/).

What would it mean to open the source code of our institutions? Here are a few thoughts on that topic. Pardon the randomness and the thinking out loud:

• first we would have to identify what that concept means in terms of an organization instead of software. I guess we could start with an organizational chart, but those seem to me more like the friendly user interfaces that mask code. What lies beneath the organizational chart?
• what community would we be inviting to join in development? The session moderators suggested students as the primary users of the technology tools we deploy. I agree, but would add faculty who may use a tool for research, in which case, are we also inviting faculty peers in their disciplines, wherever they may be?
• are we inviting chaos and dumbing down a high level of sophistication for a low and common result? That’s the old highbrow/lowbrow argument, as well as the argument against such collaborative enterprises as Wikipedia. Are we inviting the end of expertise in favor of consensus?

I don’t know any of these answers, but I’m fascinated by them, partly because the question of why students need traditional education in a world where so much information and collaboration is just a click away keeps nagging me. So the big question in my mind is “what would students build or modify if they could get their hands on the source code of our institutions?”

Filed under: administration, collaboration, education, open source, peer review