Designing Learning Technology

Wed, 27 Mar 2002

Radio post #51
MSNBC: What digital divide? The argument is that the gap between computer haves and have nots is closing rapidly, so the rhetoric over the digital divide as a national crisis is overblown. Here's the numbers they cite (showing the change in percentage of people that used computers at home or at work from 1997 to 2001): Annual income from 15-25k: 37% (in 1997) to 47% (in 2001); income over 75k: 81-88%. Asian-Americans: 58-71%; whites: 58-70%; blacks: 44-56%; Hispanics: 38-49%.

@20.37 #

Radio post #50
This week, Frontline takes a look at the increased role of high-stakes testing in American schools. Such testing is expensive, and if you're going to do anything other than multiple choice testing, it gets even more expensive. So there's a bias to easily quantified kinds of questions, which themselves tend to focus on regurgitation of knowledge, rather than the ability to think and reason about issues and ideas. It's particularly interesting to note that the SAT is planning to move away from a multiple choice format, in part because that the University of California has decided that it is not a good predictor of performance. So why will K-12 testing be any better?

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Mon, 25 Mar 2002

Radio post #49
Cringely on opportunities for small business technology development. There are niche markets within education; that's what Inquirium targets. We're excited about the possibilities!

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Radio post #48
A List Apart: Accessibility and Authoring Tools. How web development tools are evolving to better support accessibility standards.

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Radio post #47
NY Times: Senate Votes to Require Increase in Use of Wind and Solar Power. "The Senate gave environmentalists a modest victory on wind and solar power, but put off conclusive votes on broader energy policy until next month."

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Radio post #46
Wired: Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders. This bill would be a disaster. In addition to trying to embed copy-protection in everything, this bill would require all software developers to bake copy-protection into their products within three years. Even open source and freeware! I understand that the entertainment industry is scared to death of a post-Napster, high-bandwidth world, but this kind of heavy-handed approach is completely off-base. Look, the problem's not new -- the software industry has dealt with piracy and copying for years. Has anyone in Hollywood noticed that after a flurry of activity in the 80s and early 90s, nobody in the software business uses copy protection anymore? Consumers don't buy broken stuff.

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Radio post #45
Tide Pool is a great resource for tracking issues related to the Northwest coast, from California to British Columbia.

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Fri, 22 Mar 2002

Radio post #44
A listing of Western Washington CSAs, courtesy of Seattle Tilth. Community-supported agriculture provides you with great produce, while you support farms directly.

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Radio post #43
Gates to Create 70 Schools for Disadvantaged. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting up more than $40 million to create high schools that will give disadvantaged students college-level work. By Karen W. Arenson.

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Radio post #42
U.S. Acts to Shrink Endangered Species Habitats. The decision itself might be defensible if there were an alternative plan. But if there is no other plan (beyond "studying the situation") and irreversible development occurs, what are we left with?

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Radio post #41
Here's a nice collection of interaction patterns for the web, graphical interfaces, and mobile technologies. Another case where a community adopts a design pattern approach to community knowledge.

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Wed, 20 Mar 2002

Radio post #40
Next-generation robots: for entertainment or for work?

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Radio post #39
RealBasic 4.0.2 is a maintenance release from Real Software. (For the daring, alpha versions of RealBasic 4.5 are also available; Real Software makes developmental versions available as a general rule.

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Radio post #38
Use AIM? Did you know that there's a fairly smart automated buddy that can tell you lots of things about current events, movies, etc? Try adding "smarterchild" to your Buddy List and ask it some questions. This is interesting since AIM scales well to cell phones and other mobile tech. So rather than trying to build a web browser into a phone in order to use something like Ask Jeeves, someone built a clever 'bot and hooked it directly into AIM. Cute.

@05.49 #

Mon, 18 Mar 2002

Radio post #37
Come to Seattle for the Fifth International Conference of the Learning Sciences! ICLS 2002 will be October 23-26; paper submissions are due May 6.

@22.36 #

Radio post #36
Last week, the Senate voted not to raise CAFE standards. Instead, they copped out and dumped the issue onto the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for a couple of years of study. Doesn't dumping this on a safety agenda immediately bias the debate away from energy efficiency and our national dependence on oil? See how your senator voted on this.

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Radio post #35
Tech Review talks about handhelds of the future. Supposedly, we'll all end up with two devices: one for communication, and one for handling rich media. Not surprisingly, the emphasis on these consumer-targeted devices is a bit different from how researchers think about the use of handheld devices in education.

@22.24 #

Wed, 13 Mar 2002

Radio post #34
It's funny. A guy goes off, does statistical research, and argues that the current state of the environment is better than we think -- not great, mind you, but not so bad -- and he gets hammered by environmentalists. The positive story here is that he's calling bullshit on a few numbers that the environmental community has trumpeted for years, but that lack real data. On the other hand, looking primarily at global statistics may mask very real problems. A good rebuttal is Peter Gleick's, which attacks The Skeptical Environmentalist not on its data, but on its interpretation (and selective omission) of data. Grist also does a good job dissecting the arguments of the book.

@06.34 #

Radio post #33
Salon: Why do we buy? The article focuses more on why we spend in a recessed economy, but one could just as well ask why we buy stuff we don't need.

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Tue, 12 Mar 2002

Radio post #32
The NY Times on the changing economics of recycling.

@18.42 #

Radio post #31
Slow news day (9/11 retrospectives notwithstanding), so let's go take a look at the online program for the upcoming AERA conference. A search for all sessions with the descriptor "technology" results in 123 hits -- more than enough to keep someone busy for a week in New Orleans. (As if there aren't enough ways to stay busy in the Big Easy, but that's another story.) What's interesting to me is the diversity of those 123 sessions. Basically, technology is pervasive enough that it's no longer really useful as a search tag. To some extent, that's a success -- it suggests that the educational research community has moved beyond technology for technology's sake, and is focusing on its use within specific domains. (Unfortunately, the site doesn't let you search using two distinct descriptors, like "technology" and "science education".)

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Thu, 07 Mar 2002

Radio post #30
Wind power grows by 45% in 2001.

@18.46 #

Radio post #29
The Chronicle reviews a new book on the pragmatics of online learning. The ASTD E-Learning Handbook includes case studies of corporate e-learning as well as academic work, and targets learning settings from universities to business to government.

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Wed, 06 Mar 2002

Radio post #28
Rita Lauria reviews Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur. A nice discussion of the nature of design research, interdisciplinary work, and the process of turning good ideas into successful businesses.

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Tue, 05 Mar 2002

Radio post #27
Global Ideas Bank: Cutting edge social innovations. Go. Read. Do.

@17.55 #

Radio post #26
Interested in how handheld devices -- particularly wireless devices -- can be used in education? Jeremy Roschelle has written a nice overview (PDF).

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Radio post #25
OERI's Education Technology Expert Panel reports on two exemplary and five promising technology programs within the Department of Education. Information about the members of the panel and the criteria that they used is provided.

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Radio post #24
InfoWorld identifies its top ten tech innovators. There are several related articles that provide an overview of where tech is going in 2002.

@17.34 #

Mon, 04 Mar 2002

Radio post #23
The Chronicle interviews Nishikant Sonwalkar from MIT on distance learning. The takehome is that distance education, and learning technologies in general, need to account for individuals' personal learning styles. I agree up to a point: you don't want to force students to always learn through means that they aren't comfortable with. On the other hand, always letting someone learn through their preferred style means that they'll never have a chance to get better using other methods. Providing support for a range of learning styles splits the difference.

@18.03 #

Radio post #22
A quick pitch for Project Gutenburg, which has been around for years working on digitizing texts that are no longer copyrighted: works by Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as works by lesser known authors. It's up to volunteers to decide which books should be added to the archive, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that a book by my great-great-grandfather, America through the spectacles of an Oriental diplomat, was on the list. Project Gutenburg texts can be read on handhelds, converted to PDFs, printed... there are lots of ways to read them.

@17.57 #

Sun, 03 Mar 2002

Radio post #21
BYU is planning an online community to support instructional designers, and has posted a short survey form to help them understand what the ID community wants. If you're a designer, or would use such a resource, let them know what you want.

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Radio post #20
The Chronicle: 2 Canadian Colleges to Test the Effectiveness of Wireless Learning. Freshmen will use handhelds from Compaq (iPaqs, I assume) and wireless internet. The focus seems to be on supporting communication and providing electronic course materials, fairly pedestrian uses on a wireless net. Of course, the interesting thing is how having iPaqs 24/7 changes what students do. Folks on the University of Michigan have also been exploring the use of handhelds in middle school science classrooms, and have some papers that discuss their use.

@19.49 #

Fri, 01 Mar 2002

Radio post #19
What to do with old cell phones? The New York Times discusses a Japanese effort to reclaim materials from old cell phones. (Is it just me, or are cell phone going obsolete even faster than computers?) If you're in the US, check out Funding Factory and Collective Good, two organizations that will accept and recycle (or reuse) old cell phones.

@18.55 #