Designing Learning Technology

Fri, 30 May 2003

Comment on the Education Technology Plan
From the press release: The U.S. Department of Education today announced that it is calling for broad participation and input from a wide array of education stakeholders in crafting a new National Education Technology Plan, as required by the recently enacted No Child Left Behind law. The department is actively seeking advice from a variety of constituencies in education, especially students, parents, K-12 educators, colleges and university leaders, and business and industry. Individuals and organizations are being asked to identify and communicate to the Department of Education their top issues, priorities, concerns, and barriers that need to be addressed for technology to improve teaching and learning in the 21st century. Interested parties can give their input by visiting the National Education Technology Plan's Web site at http://www.NationalEdTechPlan.org, and clicking on the "Participate in the Plan" link.

@13.47 #

Some Instructional Design pointers
Ed Tech Dev points to a useful reference pages for instructional design theory and practice. My background is in Learning Sciences, not ID, but there is substantial goal overlap between the fields and it's important for me to understand how practitioners in ID approach the design process. It's also the case that some researchers within LS have begun to focus on design principles as a framework for usable knowledge in the field. The ID community has wrestled with design principles for years, and its important that LS learns from their experience.

@13.42 #

More on Florida Testing
Following up on their piece on the impact of Florida's high stakes tests, the NYTimes reports that a decorated kindergarten teacher is stepping down because she feels the pressure of standardized testing reaching all the way down to her classroom.

@13.41 #

Runtime Revolution 2.0 released
Runtime Revolution 2.0, a cross-platform development tool in the HyperCard tradition, is out. This looks like the most promising current xTalk-based development environment, and because it's an accessible, forgiving, interpreted environment, is definitely worth exploring as a platform for project-based ed tech design classes.

@13.41 #

Tue, 27 May 2003

VideoPaper Builder 2 available
The Concord Consortium has released a beta of VideoPaper Builder 2, a tool for creating multimedia web documents. The goal is to support the creation and sharing of richer examples of educational research.

@14.17 #

Florida will hold back 23% of third graders
The NYTimes reports that Florida's high-stakes testing and grade retention policies will result in nearly a quarter of third graders repeating third grade. The Times notes that Florida's legislative policy ignores significant educational research and removes teachers and principals, the educators who are in the best position to know what's best for their students, from the decision-making process.

@14.17 #

Mon, 19 May 2003

Lessig foresees the Death of the Internet
Two main points in this Register interview. First, that the current direction of the FCC will place too much control over content, access, and bandwidth in the hands of too few media companies. Second, that the Internet is suffering the tragedy of the commons, particularly with respect to email use.

@03.13 #

NFB introduces Seal of Approval for Blind-accessible web sites
The National Federation of the Blind has released a formal seal of approval for web sites that make their content easily accessible to the blind. As Nando Times reports, retrofitting sites may be more difficult than simply designing sites correctly the first time. The NFB has published guidelines for designing blind-accessible web sites. The NFB doesn't seem to have any automated validation tools, but Bobby does.

@03.11 #

Farewell to Rob Kling
Rob Kling passed away last week. Mark Warschauer reports that his family has established a "Rob Kling Social Informatics Scholarship Fund." Details on Dr. Kling's passing, and the scholarship fund, are available.

@03.11 #

Thu, 15 May 2003

Scholastic announces 2003 product line
Scholastic has announced its lineup of children's edutainment software for this year, including seven new titles (via Macintouch).

@02.23 #

Tue, 13 May 2003

New Age Toys
Wired reports on the state of toy technology. "Sixty percent of preschool toys have some kind of [computer] chip in them." So toys can be more interactive, although it seems toy makers are still figuring out what kinds of interaction fit best with how children use toys. (I know I'm not their target audience, but the wireless Pooh doll that vibrates when a child shakes its rattle drives me nuts.) And the article notes that technology can go too far if it forces the child to interact with the toy in one specific way.

@12.36 #

Marketing Test Scores
School Sleuth gives families access to information on over 13,000 California public schools. Available data includes test scores, state rank, credentialled teachers, and racial demographics. Presumably the software helps relocating families find a suitable school district. I'm presuming that all of this data is public (for example, the results of the STAR test can be found here) but presumably there's a market for providing easy access to the data. For parents, this is important information to know, but certainly doesn't tell the whole story about a community or a school. If tools like this are successful, I worry that it will place increased pressure on testing, making test scores even more of a high stakes game.

@12.36 #

Thu, 08 May 2003

Technology Counts 2003
Ed Week has released their latest survey of technology use in K-12 education, Technology Counts 2003. The focus this year is on the role of computer-based testing to meet the accountability demands of NCLB.

@12.57 #

Research and the Media: Do Vouchers Work?
The NY Times has a fascinating article about how one flawed study about vouchers was seized by the media during the 2000 presidential campaign as evidence that vouchers work. The final quote in the piece, which is set up as the 'bad guy quote,' nevertheless has a ring of truth. "It's not appropriate," he said, "to talk about complex methodologies in the news media." The issue isn't whether it is appropriate, but that the field of education is still searching for effective ways to talk about methodologies and the applicability of ed research to public policy with the media and the public. Until we nail this down, we're left with the following conclusion from the article. It is scary how many prominent thinkers in this nation of 290 million were ready to make new policy from a single study that appears to have gone from meaningful to meaningless based on whether 292 children's test scores are discounted or included.

@12.57 #

Tue, 06 May 2003

Whyville in the news
The Miami Herald ran a story on Whyville recently. Whyville is an interesting success story in how to create a vibrant online community for young girls, although it wasn't originally intended to serve that demographic. Still, 45 million page views a month for a site that's fundamentally about science education is awfully impressive.

@14.39 #

The evolution of computer languages
Two related stories point to the ways that computer programming languages change over time. Paul Graham discusses what computer languages might be like one hundred years from now, and speculates about which current languages will die out, and which will evolve into something new. He points out how, with ever-increasing hardware performance, languages have become about doing things easily instead of doing things fast. Looking back into languages' evolutionary tree, Robert Glass laments the shift away from domain-specific languages (sorry, you need to be an ACM member to read this one) to the general-purpose, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink languages we use today, and argues that domain-specific languages still have a place in the designer's toolbox.

@14.39 #

Fri, 02 May 2003

W3C Posts Results of XHTML Design Contest
The W3C hosted a contest to redesign its main web page using modern XHTML and style sheets (as opposed to table-based design, which was and still is quite popular). Winning entries, along with judging guidelines, have been posted. What I find interesting about the contest is that the judges explicitly looked at how well the entries looked on a huge variety of platforms and web browsers. So look at these entries not only as examples of good visual design for the web, but also as examples of how to use XHTML to design for legacy browsers, PDA displays, and accessibility demands.

@03.04 #

CFP: Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2004
Paper submissions are due June 23. The conference runs January 18-22, 2004 in San Jose. The conference covers all aspects of visualization and issues affecting successful visualizations.

@03.03 #

Mosiac turns 10
The first web browser was released ten years ago last month. Only ten years! It's amazing that the web has become as pervasive as it has in such a short period of time.

@03.03 #