Designing Learning Technology

Mon, 29 Apr 2002

Radio post #68
Seattle struggles to deal with diversity in the schools. The principal of Ballard High School recently resigned in protest over the decision to remove race as a tiebreaker in deciding which school students will attend. He argues that learning to interact with people different from yourself is an essential life skill.

@22.38 #

Radio post #67
UW screened Davis Guggenheim's The First Year last week. Lots of interest and energy in the room -- people were sitting in the aisles and lined up against the walls. After that film ended, Guggenheim was introduced: loud ovation. Then Maurice Rabb, one of the teachers from the film, was introduced: deafening cheers. TFY is a good documentary portraying the first year of teaching for five LA teachers. If you haven't been in a classroom since your own schooling, it's a wonderful glimpse of challenges and rewards of the teaching profession. For those of us who spend time in classrooms, as teachers or researchers, it's a reminder that the issues faced by education all come down, eventually, to individuals. The subtext of TFY is to raise the status of teachers in the community and inspire new teachers to join the profession. PBS' web site for the film contains more information about this outreach effort.

@22.35 #

Radio post #66
Apple announces the eMac, a new flavor of iMac targeted at education. It's nice to see Apple bring back a sub-$1000 machine. However, their description of the "learning" software that comes with the machine is, as Ben Loh points out, rather absurd. iMovie, iTunes, and iPhoto are fine applications, but what about them supports or contributes to learning?

@22.26 #

Wed, 24 Apr 2002

Radio post #65
Mass transit and the West: Vegas builds a monorail.

@21.40 #

Tue, 23 Apr 2002

Radio post #64
NYTimes: Towards a national plan for computer recycling. It's important to make manufacturers responsible for this, so that the true cost of technology becomes more apparant. On a related note, don't forget that recycle comes after reduce (do you really need to upgrade now?) and reuse (you can buy or sell a PIII 500MHz desktop for around US$300 on eBay).

@03.39 #

Radio post #63
NYTimes: E-Books: An Idea Whose Time Hasn't Come. Real books don't need power, don't crash, travel well, blah blah blah. Where e-books may be useful is to read older texts that are out of copyright or no longer available, like those published by Project Gutenberg, or for ephemeral, time-sensitive data (e.g. using Palms to read news). But when e-books compete against real books, it's no contest.

@03.32 #

Radio post #62
Measuring what matters. In the northwest, "residents consume, on average, their body weight in natural resources each day."

@01.12 #

Mon, 22 Apr 2002

Radio post #61
Happy Earth Day!

@18.30 #

Radio post #60
Today is the day Washington state students begin taking the WASL: our state's standardized test for 4th, 7th, and 10th graders. There is an interesting dip in past performance for 7th graders, particularly around reading, that suggests that the "standard" established via the test needs to be refined; otherwise, it's hard to argue why over 60% of 4th and 10th grade students pass the test, but only 40% of 7th graders pass. It's important to remember that these standards are often set in a somewhat arbitrary way, and that simply raising expectations isn't a viable strategy for educational reform. Expectations must be attainable, and significant support structures need to be in place to help students, teachers, and parents to achieve these standards. EdWeek reports on some successes with raised standards, where these supports have been put into place.

@18.29 #

Mon, 15 Apr 2002

Radio post #59
Here's a nice article in the Atlantic about how scientific modeling is driving research in the social sciences. There's been some interesting research around bringing these modeling techniques into K-12 classrooms and allowing kids to conduct these kinds of investigations. Good pointers to see the learning technology efforts are the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-based Modeling at Northwestern, Mitch Resnick's work at MIT, and AgentSheets, a commercial effort to provide a general-purpose programmable modeling environment for learning.

@07.35 #

Sat, 13 Apr 2002

Radio post #58
Mozilla rumbles towards 1.0. Do we care? I think the days of do-everything web browsers are over. There's no user interface continuity, maintaining user state is a hassle, undo and intermediate saving are virtually impossible, and when your net connection goes down, you have absolutely no recourse. (Try working with a teacher using a web-based curriculum and watch the net connection drop. In many cases like this, you simply cannot risk hanging users out to dry.) Much more interesting to me is watching how applications have been growing more and more web-enabled over time. It used to be an app might have a link to its company's web site. Then, apps started being able to check to see if newer versions were available. Now, we're seeing applications that are designed to harvest data off the web -- news feeds, webcam images, real-time data, etc. -- and present the information is ways that offer the user far more flexibility and control than they would have within a web browser. And the flow's moving both directions: weblog software sits in the middle of the flow, offering broadcasting as well as consumption, and new standards like SOAP are making it possible for a variety of web services to make themselves available to anything that can talk XML and HTTP. This is exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing more and more web-enabled applications that integrate the user interface and representational affordances of desktop apps with the rich and dynamic nature of the web.

@20.58 #

Radio post #57
Portals or services? The Chronicle reports that the University of Michigan is shutting down my.umich.edu, its ongoing effort to provide its students with a customized portal to University information and services. U of M cites the extensive cost of development and maintenance as the main factor. I find it interesting that at the same time we see centralized portal development waning, interest and availability of weblogs is on the rise, and there's a lot of effort being placed on finding ways to allow bloggers to integrate content from other sources. Now, not everyone wants to broadcast a weblog, but many of the technologies for harvesting information from web services are being developed within the weblog community. Perhaps we'll see institutions like U of M starting to provide discrete, maintainable web services to their students, who choose themselves what to subscribe to. For example, I wonder what would happen if U of M, or another university, adopted a model more like the Radio Community Server. This would maintain the central, always-available nature of the portal approach, but distribute customization (and add significant broadcast capability) to the students. The down side is that right now, the learning curve for a tool like Radio is a bit higher than a portal site, and (of course) it's not free. But in two to five years, as web services and personal blogging environments mature, this could become the dominant model. And universities could be interesting community testbeds.

@20.43 #

Thu, 11 Apr 2002

Radio post #56
One of the effective strategies socially responsible mutual funds can employ is to seek change from within companies via shareholder resolutions. USA Today reports on Calvert's efforts to do just this to encourage computer makers to study how used computer materials can be better recycled.

@04.26 #

Radio post #55
The Senate's considering arctic drilling -- talk to your Senator while there's still time.

@03.52 #

Radio post #54
Derek Reiber on the promise of cradle-to-cradle innovation: how we can design products that will not generate waste.

@03.50 #

Mon, 08 Apr 2002

Radio post #53
I'm back from a busy week at AERA. Summing up AERA is always difficult -- it's just too large of a conference to really pick up on trends that cut across the entire field. For me, the most interesting session happened Wednesday morning, and summed up the challenges that I see within the field: how can educational research speak to public policy and how can researchers move from small, one-classroom studies to broader interventions that have a greater impact. The session was organized by the Design-based Research Collective (I'm a member); the discussants critiqued the work for alternatively not being scientific enough (a need for principled design of learning materials) and claiming to be overly scientific (from a statistician's perspective, the small-N studies done via this work are too susceptible to error to make strong claims about educational practice). There's a lot at stake here. On the one hand, proponents of design-based research argue that educational change happens when educators and researchers on the ground iteratively refine innovations based on specific classroom studies. On the other hand, advocates of widespread reform efforts see the results of design-based research as too idiosyncratic to be the basis for broader reform, and advocate a methodological approach more similar to the medical field's clinical trials model as a means to decide "what works" for learning. This debate is likely to go on for some time. What's exciting about this AERA session is that the debate went public and has begun to engage the broader educational community.

@19.41 #

Radio post #52
Sam Parry at the Sierra Club is accepting nominations for the North American recipient of the Goldman Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in an environmental issue.

@19.26 #