Google Docs is great and certainly has achieved its fair share of fans and positive press (Wired Campus, SquaredPeg) in higher education. Not only does it benefit from high name recognition and a very familiar interface, but it saves faculty from the tedious cycle of downloading and uploading MS Word docs. One of the few features where I find MS Word still wins, though, is when it comes to annotations. Periodically, I want to use the scribble or arrow tool to call a student’s attention to something in their draft (e.g., recommend organizational revisions) and MSW’s tools for doing this are quite handy. I’d love to see the big G add this sometime in the not-too-distant future.
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Google_Docs, Microsoft, Word
Filed under: Design, Distance Education, software
This summer I’m teaching a technical writing class and as I’ve done in previous semesters with this online class, I’m using a wiki. One of the collaborative writing assignments is an FAQ and although I don’t require them to use the class wiki for this particular assignment, I encourage them to do so (and for any other similar sort of group work).
In order to get some sense of the collaborative dynamics, I ask them to write a reflection memo that they usually submit a day or two after they’ve submitted the assignment. Today while I was reading their reflection memos I noticed an interesting pattern: heavy reliance on email. They describe how they used email to exchange drafts, delegate responsibilities, and coordinate other related project management details. Now on its face, this doesn’t seem all that remarkable, but rather entirely predictable; however, with this particular class, I aim to make the wiki a more central feature. And even though I’ve posted various materials that describe the ways in which wikis typically work better than email for group projects, their memos document a gravitation towards that ol’ stand-by.
In mulling over this hesitation to adopt the wiki as their workspace, a couple of thoughts come to mind. Maybe it’s not just out of habit, but also an anxiety of working on projects in a more public space. Working in the wiki not only makes their group processes available to the members, but the other students in the class as well. Another speculation is that they perceive it as another kind of LMS or stratified space that should be managed and maintained by me, the instructor. Or maybe it’s just inertia: email works well enough and the evidence for migrating to a wiki needs to be more dramatically displayed when they’ve got busy schedules and a myriad of responsibilities.
Filed under: Design, Distance Education, Teaching
Like many universities, mine uses WebCT for its LMS. Today, I was working a bit on the home page for the course and while arranging some icons, I was thinking how Ajax could speed up the process. I’m not sure if it’s an accessibility issue (e.g., W3C), but ever since I spent some time with 37signals’ products back in 2006, I’ve been hooked on how it creates a desktop-like experience. Perhaps with Blackboard/WebCT’s recent acquisition of Angel, developers will begin to build it in.
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WebCT, Blackboard, Angel, 37signals, LMS
Filed under: Design, Distance Education, software
Like traditional academic departments, writing and tutoring centers have been exploring and implementing digital options. One of the best known among writing centers is Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab. In last month’s issue of Innovate Online, Mark Rabinovich, of Queensborough Community College, shares some insights about iPass – an online tutoring system that they’ve been working with since 2006.
One of the iPass features is a Writing Clinic. In relaying some details on the design history, he points out that it accommodates visual and auditory learning styles, as well as, of course, textual/verbal. The visual component includes capabilities for both image and video; even more intriguing is the audio integration.
The Writing Clinic includes an audio component that allows students to highlight a part of the text, select a voice type (according to pitch and speed), and click a “Read” button. An advanced text-to-speech engine converts the text to an audio recording, compresses it as an MP3 file (as the compact format greatly improves system response time), and sends the file to an embedded audio player in the student’s browser window.
Providing multiple access points seems particularly relevant for tutoring contexts where students typically struggle with the material, and especially for those whose life and work schedules make it difficult to coordinate face-to-face sessions.
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Innovate_Online, iPass
Filed under: Design, Online learning, Teaching, software
From Wired’s Gadgets Lab column, Priya Ganapati has an interesting piece on Why E-Books Look So Ugly. Despite the advances in screen reader technology that make text resolution nearly as good as what appears in regular hard-copy, various industry reps believe that ebook sales would increase if they ramped up their efforts on aesthetic details such as typography.
But it’s not just a matter of design. Apparently, a big part of the problem stems from competing standards; Amazon uses a proprietary format (.mobi) whereas Apple uses ePub. This sounds a lot like the battles over web (browser) standards. Considering the possible connection, I checked to see if the W3C had weighed in on this yet, but after a quick search, I didn’t find any sort of definitive statement. However, TeleRead, which covers ebook developments, wrote a post last month on a Barnes & Noble subsidiary, Fictionwise, going with the ePub format. I don’t know if the ebook industry is looking to the W3C for guidance, but it would be nice to see it, or a similar sort of organization step in soon so we can see ebooks achieve aesthetic elegance.
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Amazon, Apple, Wired, Priya Ganapati, iPhone, e-Book
Fictionwise
Filed under: Design, Tech
Earlier I blogged about the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s modular learning space – the Learning Studio. At a recent Educause conference, some faculty from the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences described a similar setup. (They’ve also produced a short video to give you an idea of what it looks like.) A similar feature to both of these learning space designs is IT being freed up from having to provide the computers; instead, the focus is on creating dynamic, modular spaces that can be adapted to course-specific learning needs and encourage small-group collaboration. Essentially, the space becomes a kind of plug-in-play architecture where the students’ computing devices are plugged into the network and corresponding display screens.
This perhaps plays into what the University of Virginia found, where many students already had their own laptops and presumably preferred to use their own machines rather than the university’s. Now, with the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks and expanding power of mobile handhelds, we could see more universities transitioning traditional computer labs to modular learning spaces.
Filed under: Collaboration, Design
With the massive adoption of microblogging platforms like Twitter, there’s been talk about whether or not RSS readers are dead (1, 2, 3) . One of the recent threads in this discussion happened over at Mashable in which one of the commenters (Eric McGinnis) mentioned feedmil — something that isn’t an RSS reader or a microblogging platform. Essentially, with feedmil, you can search blogs, microblogs, and news sites. But that simplicity belies its power (at least as far as I’m concerned). It’s got numerous features, but here’s just a little smattering of what I found beneath the surface.
- Interface:
It sports an interface that foregrounds simplicity and clear visual cueing. Both of these make it very intuitive.
- Sorting:
You can sort feeds by blogs, microblogs, podcasts, and others. You can also sort by feedmil rank, relevance, or quality. It also has multi-lingual capabilities.
- The Slider: customizing search results —
One of its more distinctive options is a set of sliders that allow you to customize related keywords (what they call Topic Significance). For, for example, if I enter the term instructional technology
, one of the related keywords that will appear in the Topic Significance slider column is university
. If I then move the slider to the right to increase its significance, then my search results are automatically tailored towards higher education. (UI gift = No need to click a confirmation [OK] button.)
- The Slider: skipping through history —
When you click on a specific search hit or result, not only does it display a brief synopsis and relevant urls, but it gives you another slider tool to quickly explore the chronology of a blog without even going to the site itself. So, for example, when you move the slider to the left, it moves back through the previous entries and displays the entries for those dates. Pretty slick for doing quick historical searches.
So in my initial fooling around with it, the Slider seems to be where its real potential power lies; it pushes beyond basic keyword searches.
Am I going to toss my RSS reader? Not likely. For me, my reader (currently NetNewsWire) is still an optimum way to keep up with my favorite observers and analysts. But I definitely plan to use this as a research tool and would suggest it to students.
Filed under: Design, Research
There’s been a fair amount of press coverage lately (CHE Wired Campus Blog Ars Technica) on the University of Virginia’s decision to begin phasing out its computer labs. Generally, the reason has been attributed to cost and the fact that most students already have their own laptops and use those more than the machines in the lab.
While this situation obviously doesn’t apply to all schools, (at mine for instance I see the labs enjoy regular use) but what I think will be a more interesting trend to follow will be the impact of students with mobile devices. As has been frequently reported, mobile devices have much wider adoption than laptops and so the interesting question for those in the educational technology arena is how that will shape the configuration of learning spaces that integrate a spectrum of computing devices. Also, aside from the gadgets, how will it impact the design of more mundane things like tables and chairs? With this in mind, I don’t see labs being replaced, but reconfigured to accommodate changing circumstances. Schools like the University of St. Louis-Missouri seem to be moving in this direction already.
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Chronicle of Higher Education, University Missouri-St. Louis, University of Virginia
Filed under: Design, Teaching, Tech
