• Donald Clark Plan B: Moodle: e-learning’s Frankenstein
  Educationalists love to talk about learner-centric, constructivist models of learning but usually default back into a didactic, lecture-driven, ‘I teach-you learn’, behaviour. Stray too far from the current model and any LMS will collapse into a soup of collaborative connectivity.
• Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management
  18 Use Cases That Show Business How to Finally Put Customers First.
  
  Customers continue to adopt social technologies at a blinding speed – yet organizations are unable to keep up. Why? Rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, increasingly leaving organizations out of the conversation. Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as consumers and their new channels will always outnumber employees. As a result, companies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web – giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.
• YouTube - DimensionM NYC Tournament
  December 14, 2007 Tabula Digita Multiplayer Educational Gaming Tournament in New York City
• Bridgewater Primary School » About Us
  Primary school website built on Wordpress
• Creating Value on the Vine: A [yellow tail] Case Study by William Kimbrell
  Innovation and Identifying Blue Oceans
  
  Instead of giving up, they sought to learn from experience. They rented a car and drove across America. They did not tour wine country in California, nor did they visit different wineries and vineyards.
  Instead, they went the unconventional route—going to honky-tonks, beer halls, drive-through liquor stores, mom-and-pop liquor stores, as well as big-box outlets, nightclubs and drugstores. They actually observed beer drinkers.
  
  Casella Wines found that the mass of American adults saw wine as a turnoff. It was intimidating and pretentious and required cultivating a discerning taste. With these insights, they were ready to explore how to redraw the strategic profile of the U.S. wine industry. This is what we call a Blue Ocean Framework.

Posted: March 12th, 2010 under Education.
Comments: none

I was fortunate enough today to have been part of a panel discussion at the PASBO conference in Hershey, PA. The topic dealt with AUP's and how to have them work for everyone. On the panel were an attorney, a well-respected local tech director, and myself.

A couple items of note from that discussion. First, it was pointed out by the attorney that the CIPA laws have only to do with money. Failure to meet CIPA requirements means only that your Federal funds are in jeopardy. There are no punitive consequences associated with it. He also said that the CIPA laws are very clear about their intentions (although I wouldn't necessarily agree with them being clear) in that they deal specifically with material that would be deemed pornographic. So, those folks who cite CIPA as a reason for blocking wikis and blogs and Google docs are, at best, mistaken.

The attorney also reminded those in attendance that some of the issues that they voiced concern about fell under the category of disciplinary issues and NOT legal issues. (Did you hear me cheering?) OH, how I wish several school administrators and tech directors I know could have been there to hear that. It was very clear to me, at least, that he was saying that many of their fears were unfounded.

We had a good discussion about students bringing in their own equipment to school and using their data phones in school, etc. One person even wondered if that would, in fact, further worsen the digital divide between the have's and have not's. I suggested that a district could furnish laptops to those who didn't have one at home to make it a one-to-one district and do it for a LOT less than what they're currently spending to put enough computers in the schools. And, the fact that they weren't replaced more than every 5 or 6 years wasn't an issue, since they're not typically doing heavy processor work. Web browsing, word processing, etc. I'm certainly not the first to suggest that, but I do agree with it.

My final comment was (something like) this: "What we're doing in our schools is of monumental importance. I believe that our very global status as a nation is at stake. We ALL want our students to be able to compete in a global marketplace and to be digitally literate. Our own children are in these schools. There is a difference between the mindsets that would use CIPA as an excuse NOT to do something, and working aggressively - and that's the key word, AGGRESSIVELY, WITH the CIPA laws to provide the network, the tools, and the environment in which we can create digitally literate citizens. Our students and our nation deserve nothing less."

Well, at least that's what I had written down to say. How it came out may have been a little different. You know how that goes when you hold a mic to your face. :-)

Posted: March 12th, 2010 under Education.
Comments: none

Here is one of my private assumptions about education innovation that could use some public criticism:

If [x] is going to change teaching practice at scale, then [x] needs to be easy, fun, and free for both the teacher and her students. [x] needs to be all three of those things at the same time.

Realize that if you're a teacher and you're reading a blog post, you're automatically seeded in the top 10% of innovative educators. You'll try anything once. Let's also go with Jack Welch and assume that 10% of educators are hopelessly and/or willfully incompetent.

Convince yourself, then, that 80% of teachers exist on a sliding scale of innovation and are basically up for grabs. Those who don't want to try [x] aren't necessarily bad educators. They may have made a rational calculation that [x] isn't easy enough, fun enough, or free enough to adopt.

There are implications here, some obvious, some subtle:

• "Good" doesn't matter. This is a little sad. But most of those 80% already have [y], which they consider "good enough." They won't pick up [x], however superior it is to [y], unless it is easier or more fun. This puts the burden on the reformer to make something easy, fun, and free that is also good. Good is the Trojan horse of education innovation.
• You'll have to package [x] for Internet distribution. Because it's the only way to distribute at scale for (nearly) free.
• Learning should always be fun, though I'm not talking about "fun" as it exists in "unlimited rides and deep-fried Oreos at Six Flags." Rather I'm talking about the profound sense of satisfaction and accomplishment inherent to good learning. Just to be clear.
• Learning isn't always easy but learning tools should be. Just for instance, last week, I saw groups of students clicking the same download link over and over again in Safari not realizing that they had already downloaded the attachment. The download window was open but obscured by the browser. Anecdotes like this make me skeptical of Scott McLeod's argument that computers are to teachers what checkout registers are to grocers. Many of you have vastly overrated the ease of educational computing.

The field of easy, fun, and free innovations that are also good for students isn't exactly crowded but, for the record, I have bet on two horses. I expect these picks to strike certain readers as simultaneously naive, deranged, or self-obsessed but these innovations, more than any other I've used or observed, are ones that sell themselves:

1. Google Reader.
2. What Can You Do With This.

No further comment.

Posted: March 11th, 2010 under Education, Uncategorized.
Comments: none

Here’s an interesting (and unusually high production value) video of an iPhone mobile interface for Moodle:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Moodle also has a Java-based cross-platform mobile client which is not as pretty but seems to have decent functionality. (My impression is that this is fairly similar to the state of affairs with Blackboard’s mobile clients.) You can see screen shots here.

In the long run, we’re going to need to think seriously about creating more teaching and learning affordances that are mobile-specific rather than just creating mobile interfaces to existing LMS capabilities, but this is still a good step down the road.

Related posts:

1. Blackboard vs. Moodle: North Carolina Community Colleges Assessment
2. Moodle, Wave, and Widgets (Oh my!)
3. Understanding Single Sign-On

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© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: iPhone, Java, Moodle

Posted: March 11th, 2010 under Education.
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Posted: March 11th, 2010 under Education.
Comments: none

• Slowcoast - Soundslide - Paul Smith, Clothes designer
  My fave
• Twitter / Ross C Brown: If you didn't know already ...
  If you didn't know already, @mikecoulter and @ewanmcintosh are top blokes. Thanks for your help guys :-)
• Where goes the river?
  Arts and Culture Education is important. Prof Anne Bamford:
  
  * Fashion is the 2nd biggest industry in the UK.
  * You pay £4.00 for a coffee in a posh coffee house, but only £1.50 for the same coffee in a polystyrene cup on a train. That's over a 150% mark up because of design.
  * Children who are taught arts and culture have better brains.
  * An Arts-rich 26 year old is 5 times less likely to be dependant on state assistance than a non-arts-rich person of the same age.
  * Schools with an arts rich education have better standards. They have a shared identity and ethos and perform better in the 'soft measures' that are increasingly being measured.
  * Teaching arts badly actually stifles creativity. It's better to not teach arts at all than to pay lip service to it and do it badly - this places the teacher as the person of primary importance.
• Evilini Quest
  Online book publishing from an English Primary school: http://year4atwroxham.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/another-brilliant-book/
• One of the first learning videos « Year 4 Blog
  Learning logs, by video, form an English Primary School
• FilmG
  Gaelic film production featuring this from Islay High
• Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte: TeachmeetNe09-2 - Pedagogical paradise!
  Once again, I am overwhelmed to be part of something amazing. I have, in the past, spent hundreds of pounds going to a conference and walked away poorer both in cash as well as in ideas. Somehow, some (not all!) professionally oprganised conferences actually mangage to suck ideas out of me rather than filling me with inspiration This was not the case with the second North East of England teachmeet this year! In fact...

Posted: March 11th, 2010 under Education.
Comments: none

One of our first graders looks at the book "Too Much Junk Food!" from the Berenstain Bears series.

Posted: March 10th, 2010 under Education.
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This is one our second graders discussing the book "Love Stinks" for the Storytubes contest

Posted: March 10th, 2010 under Education.
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Nutrition and Web 2.0 is a new collection of resources on Webicina.com that features selected nutrition blogs, news sites, podcasts, Youtube channels, mobile applications and slideshows, among others. As the number of nutrition resources is huge, it was a challenge to find the most relevant content.

We also help you follow news, journals, blogs and Twitter users on PeRSSonalized Nutrition which is an easy-to-use, free aggregator of quality medical information that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place.

Many thanks to Keith Grimaldi and the Health and Nutrition 2.0 blog for the great help!

Posted: March 10th, 2010 under Education.
Comments: none

Posted: March 10th, 2010 under Education.
Comments: none