Designing Learning Technology

Thu, 25 Jul 2002

Radio post #96
The NY Times talks about the loss of privacy as search engines get better and better. The article raises an interesting question: should K-12 students' work be posted on public web pages, if ten years later those students, now in their 20s, learn that their schoolwork constitutes a significant portion of the web hits on their name? Of course, this is only an issue for students with fairly distinctive names, which raises another interesting question: is it wise to give your newborn child a distinctive name, or is it better, and more private, to blend with the crowd?

@19.05 #

Wed, 24 Jul 2002

Radio post #95
RealBasic 4.5, the latest version of the solid cross-platform development tool, was released last week.

@19.14 #

Fri, 19 Jul 2002

Radio post #94
Apple released QuickTime 6 this week. Judy and Robert have links explaining what's new.

@22.08 #

Radio post #93
Joel on Software rants about how misguided measurement policies lead to terrible business practice. Similar issues arise in educational accountability. We know teachers will teach to the test if the test becomes the main criteria by which their work is evaluated. Unfortunately, these tests often emphasize easily quantified outcome measures. The point of Joel's discussion is that these kinds of accountability measures only make sense when you can actively monitor what workers are doing and ensure that the way they work aligns with the intent of the measure. But as long as you're going to do that, let's look at how teachers teach, not just a limited set of outcomes from their teaching. This way, we can learn more about what works in classrooms, and we can help teachers think about alternative approaches that can help their students.

@20.27 #

Radio post #92
Mary Beth Rosson and John Carroll have published a new undergraduate-level text on Usability Engineering. The press release features praise from Don Norman, Andrew Dillon, and Terry Winograd.

@20.14 #

Fri, 12 Jul 2002

Radio post #91
The early registration deadline for the upcoming American Zoo and Aquarium Association conference (Fort Worth, Sept 10-14) is August 1. I'll be there representing Inquirium and talking about our work with the Brookfield Zoo.

@02.55 #

Sun, 07 Jul 2002

Radio post #90
Educational research is often attacked for not being 'scientific' enough, with critics offering the clinical trials model from medical research as an example of what educators should be doing. But even within medicine, the clinical trials approach is not suitable for all research efforts. Here's an excerpt from a New York Times story on the controversy over the role of fat in our diet.

Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory.

These issues pop up in educational research all the time. Tightly controlled studies are attacked as irrelevent to the real needs of the classroom, while studies that lack such control are attacked as 'not scientific enough'. The problem with educational research isn't a lack of rigor on the part of researchers. It's that educational researchers are trying to understand extremely complex phenomena.

@19.54 #

Tue, 02 Jul 2002

Radio post #89
Researchers have explored alternative publishing venues before, but these efforts have in my experience been centered around a specific field or scholarly community. But print journals are still the main game in town. The Chronicle reports on recent trends away from this, citing a computer science study showing an overwhelming shift towards citing online works over offline works. The report describes recent institutional efforts to develop 'superarchives' of scholarly work. (It will be very cool when, instead of looking for the reverse citation index, you can just check your Google rank to see how influential your research is.)

@18.26 #

Radio post #88
BBC: One billion computers and counting.

@18.20 #

Mon, 01 Jul 2002

Radio post #87
The upcoming International Conference of the Learning Sciences has posted its call for workshop proposals and dissertation consortium applications. Both are due July 31. (ICLS is October 23-26 in Seattle.)

@19.12 #

Radio post #86
TAPPED IN, a real-time meeting space for teachers and educators, is hosting a Summer Carnival on July 17. This is a clever way to learn more about TAPPED IN and the resources it provides.

@19.07 #

Radio post #85
I've been looking for public encryption libraries for Inquirium's software development efforts. (We use encryption in our registration process.) The best resource I've found so far is Crypto++. Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography is recommended companion reading.

@19.04 #

Radio post #84
Last week, the Supreme Court shifted the debate over school vouchers back to states, opening the door to much wider use of vouchers to support public funding of private and religious schools. The NYTimes discusses the pragmatic implications of this ruling. I'm particularly interested to see what kind of accountability measures are put in place. Given the current focus on assessing the heck out of public school students, will private schools accepting public vouchers be held to the same standards?

@18.57 #