Designing Learning Technology

Mon, 24 Mar 2003

Radio post #175
I've been working with Magpie to subtitle some QuickTime movies. However, Magpie doesn't seem capable of generating a standalone movie containing both the text track and the audiovisual tracks; instead, it likes to spit out a SMIL file that links the subtitling file to the movie file. WebAIM talks about the missing steps: how to take that Magpie transcript and cram it into a standalone movie using Movie Player.

@23.38 #

Radio post #174
EdWeek delves into the educational research to practice challenge. What does usable knowledge look like?

@23.34 #

Tue, 18 Mar 2003

Radio post #173
Speaking out on the costs of war. How did we come to this?

@07.00 #

Mon, 17 Mar 2003

Radio post #172
Kuro5hin writes about the problems with using building construction as an analogy for the software development process. We're always looking for better analogies for software design and development, and it's often tempting to use architecture analogies to help clients understand the design process. However, as this article points out, there are a number of problems with that model. I'd add another concern that the article doesn't address: with structural engineering, there's the concept of overengineering things. Say you're estimating the load bearing strength of a span. The design constraints say the span needs to hold 1000 kg. But to be safe, you can overengineer the span so that it will hold 2000, or even 10000, kg. Software tolerances don't scale in the same way. A slight defect within this span won't cause it fail completely, where a slight defect in code could bring down the entire program. So overengineering isn't as viable a strategy for ensuring robustness in software as it is in structures.

@19.17 #

Radio post #171
We've begun to use a weblog to support Inquirium's internal communications and knowledge management. Our primary goal is to augment the design and development interactions that occur between face to face meetings of designers within the company. Within small groups, email works for addressing many issues, but also suffers in many ways: discussion threads are lost in the noise of the rest of your email, and it's too easy to omit a key project participant from a reply. So, we've installed SquishDot on top of Zope. So far, it looks very promising. It's fairly straightforward to automatically send email to the project team when new items are posted, which is important, because we're not yet in the habit of checking the weblog regularly. There's a decent search function, and support for viewing posts chronologically and by subject. This essentially gives us a dynamic knowledge base that will augment our existing design practices. Most of my experience with weblogs has been with Radio, so to me one of the neatest things about SquishDot is its object-oriented nature. As it runs as a Zope product, it's incredibly easy to create multiple weblogs within one Zope installation. I'm also able to use discussion threads. Radio can do this via Userland's hosted server (or if you run your own server), but our public bandwidth is hosted by pair, which means my Radio weblog is a static site and I can't support discussions.

@19.04 #

Mon, 10 Mar 2003

Radio post #170
The NY Times on attempts to use a standardized reading curriculum in many New York elementary schools, and the challenges of making that curriculum work when each schools represents a very different learning context, with varied teacher experience, class size, parental expectations, etc. This issue of trying to scale curriculum has been a problem for a long time; Cuban and Cohen, among others, have written about many past curriculum reforms that have not been successful.

@18.26 #

Radio post #169
Here's an interesting article discussing the similarities between the open source movement and an "open content" process for developing shared online courses. It's written from the perspective on African universities, which are more resource-strapped than schools in the States and presumably have an even greater incentive to make this approach work.

@17.51 #

Wed, 05 Mar 2003

Radio post #168
The AERA online program is now available. EdTechDev has highlighted several of the technology-related presentations.

@21.15 #

Radio post #167
The NY Times has an update on the state of Maine's commitment to place laptops in the hands of all middle school students. Overall, it looks like a positive investment.

@21.12 #