Designing Learning Technology

Mon, 03 Nov 2003

Shareware vs. "Indie software"
Brent Simmons muses on how the term "shareware" seems no longer relevant, when large software companies use the same kinds of mechanisms (free download, online purchasing, no actual retail box) to allow prospective buyers to try software before they purchase it. Yet there are still distinctions between large corporate developers like Adobe and small companies like Brent's (and, as we start moving some internal projects out the door, Inquirium). One of the comments on Brent's post uses the term "indie software," which I like.

@13.46 #

Sat, 01 Nov 2003

Maps as indices
Another Boing Boing link: using maps as a means to navigate a series of travel photos. This exposes a problem I've run into with GIS-style representations -- they're very good for showing location, not so good at showing chronological relations between the data points.

@21.34 #

Discount stereoscopic imagery
Boing Boing points to a clever approach to approximating stereoscopic images via GIF animation. It's worth looking at the sample image to see how this works. (Note that the photos come from Burning Man, where folks are known to walk around in their skivvies.)

@21.30 #

Sun, 26 Oct 2003

Eckel on Programmers
Bruce Eckel writes about what makes a programmer. This is one of those "new to me, maybe old to you" finds, but his main point -- that code should be communicative because, ultimately, code is fluid and someone's going to have to adapt what you've done -- is right on. (And as a bonus, he links to a nice article by Bill Venners about interviewing programmers.)

@21.58 #

EduBlogging at UW: KidTech
Here's a link to a class blog for a course Phil Bell taught earlier this year on New Technology and Child Development. Although it's dormant now, blogs like this offer a nice perspective into the course, as well as providing a valuable source of articles on kids and technology. It's kind of like a syllabus come to life.

@21.52 #

Tue, 21 Oct 2003

Free trade
Hey, it's not just prescription drugs that are cheaper elsewhere. College students have discovered textbooks are cheaper as well.

@09.51 #

Mon, 20 Oct 2003

iPod voice recording... sort of.
Belkin has announced a digital voice recorder accessory for the iPod, which almost turns the little white box into a great alternative for classroom research. Unfortunately, the DVR unit uses a built-in mic optimized for close-up interviews, and doesn't support other kinds of mikes. So you could still use the iPod for interviews, but not for capturing class discussion or small group interaction. (As an alternative, Macintouch points to the Archos Jukebox as a MP3 player with generalized stereo mic input.)

@10.24 #

Wed, 08 Oct 2003

Falling through the cracks
Michael Winerip writes in the NYTimes about the inflexibility of NCLB's school assessments.

@21.13 #

Wed, 01 Oct 2003

Wesley Clark on Education
Josh Marshall interviews Wesley Clark. The interview includes Clark's views on the current administration's education policy, and why he believes that successful business models don't apply to public education.

@12.43 #

Tue, 23 Sep 2003

ICLS 2004 Information Posted
Information about the 2004 International Conference of the Learning Sciences is now online. The conference will run June 22-26, 2004 in Santa Monica, California. Submissions are due November 15.

@13.31 #

Dartmouth students get VoIP
The NYTimes reports that Dartmouth College is providing free voice over IP across campus. Note that this is, in part, a decision driven by surprising economics.

The roll out of voice over Internet protocol is closely coupled with Dartmouth's recent decision to stop charging students, faculty and staff for long-distance phone calls. The college made that decision when administrators discovered that the billing function was costing more than the calls themselves.

@11.37 #

Wed, 20 Aug 2003

RBScript language module for BBEdit
This note will be of interest to RealBasic developers making use of RealBasic's scripting support. RealBasic's ability to interpret scripts at runtime is an extremely powerful feature. It opens up RealBasic applications by allowing end users to write scripts to accomplish all kinds of tasks that the developer did not anticipate.

At Inquirium, we've used RBScript for several projects. However, composing and editing RBScript primarily occurs outside the RealBasic IDE (which provides very nice syntax coloring, auto-indent and auto-complete) and suffers in comparison.

As usual, it's BBEdit to the rescue. BBEdit's Language Module interface enables BBEdit plugins to provide language-specific syntax coloring within BBEdit. Thanks to Christopher Stern's source code for his Python Language Module, I was able to quickly whip together a RealBasic Language Module for BBEdit. You can download the module here. Specific release notes are contained within the archive.

@11.08 #

Sat, 16 Aug 2003

Visualizing a Blackout
Via Slashdot: NOAA satellite images (before and after) show the extent of the East Coast blackout.

@12.13 #

Wed, 13 Aug 2003

Go iBot Go!
Yeah, the Segway is cute. But before Segway, Dean Kamen invented the iBot, which has much more potential to have a positive impact in people's lives. And the FDA finally approved it.

@21.09 #

NYTimes: Writing on the Web
The Times writes about web publishing as a means to motivate students to write, but misses the boat on the use of weblog technology to support the process. In either case, however, technology is providing leverage because it's automating the publish/subscribe process. It used to be to publish on the web, you had to know and care about HTML. And after you'd gone through the trouble of getting something online, who would come and read it? Now, content management systems let writers focus on writing, not HTML, and syndication technologies like RSS provide ways to broadcast new content and establish an audience.

@20.57 #

Fri, 08 Aug 2003

Telementoring Orchestrator 1.0
Kevin O'Neill has been researching online mentoring for years. His lab at Simon Fraser has developed Telemontoring Orchestrator, a web app that supports mentoring at a distance. It's a free download, but requires you host your own server.

Telementoring Orchestrator is a server-side web application, designed to aid any sort of organization (a corporation, university, school or nonprofit society) in efficiently organizing and monitoring on-line mentoring relationships. Because Telementoring Orchestrator works on the web, mentors and mentees do not need to be in the same location. Wherever expertise is and wherever it is needed, Telementoring Orchestrator can work with you to maximize its potential. Meanwhile, the system reduces administrative overhead so that organizations can afford to provide the oversight necessary to make their programs effective.

@10.06 #

Thu, 07 Aug 2003

QuickTopic supports design review
Continuing on the async design review thread, one of the big challenges for design review is finding tools that support collaborative, fine-grained review of documents. We can get collaborative online, via a discussion group, but then posts are disconnected from the content that they refer to in the main document. We can also annotate the document in Word, but then the author has to collate everyone's comments (unless you pass the document around serially, which costs time) and reviewers don't get to see others' comments. QuickTopic seems to nicely address this issue for HTML documents, allowing paragraph-specific commentary from multiple users that appears within the source document itself. (I found out about QT via a post on Social Fisking, which is a different use entirely, but the connection seems clear.)

@10.50 #

Design collaboration with Plone
We've begun to explore using Plone as a design collaboration support tool. At Inquirium, we do a lot of distributed design work, and have been looking for a means to coordinate asynchronous design conversations and design reviews. At a minimum, we needed the ability to post documents and allow asychronous review and comment on those documents. Email works fine for small groups but makes it hard to archive the design process; with Plone, there is a persistent record of the conversation. Plone was the first candidate because it's built on Zope, leveraging technology we're already familiar with, provided deep functionality "out of the box," and appeared to be highly customizable. My guess is we'll use Plone as is for a few months until we really understand its workflow model and how it relates to ours, and then target a few specific adaptations to align the two.

@10.37 #

Wed, 06 Aug 2003

Moving to Blosxom 2.0
One of the pleasant surprises of my recent baby-imposed hiatus was returning to find that Blosxom 2.0 has been officially released. Version 2.0 adds tons of customizable power to this little weblog engine. After updating, I'm now able to host comments and better control the publication dates of my posts. (I normally write from Seattle, but this server sits near Pittsburgh, so post dates were always in Eastern time and it looked like I was writing three hours in the future!) In terms of features, I feel like I'm back to the power of Radio, but with the (for me) simpler and more transparent workflow model.

@13.50 #

Mon, 04 Aug 2003

And baby makes three!
I try to avoid personal notes in this blog, but it's hard to explain a one-month absence of posts unless I mention that my wife and I welcomed our first child, Grace, into the world in early July. I hope to resume regular posting from here on out, but the New World Order seems to have a way of shifting priorities.

@16.32 #

Thu, 31 Jul 2003

Paternity leave
Yep, a whole month without posts.

@23.59 #

Fri, 27 Jun 2003

NAEP Reading Results Released
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the 2002 reading results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The Monitor calls the results mixed: 4th graders made slight improvements, while 12th graders slipped. Want to see the results yourself? Go to NAEP's site.

@12.45 #

Bluetooth in Denmark: Possibilities for Informal Education
A Danish zoo is using Bluetooth and a distributed set of base stations to track the location of children within the zoo. Parents can register their cell phones and access their kids' location via text messaging. If this catches on (for safety reasons) it creates some interesting potential. For one, it gives educational researchers working in informal settings access to much broader data about where visitors go and how much time they spend in any given location. While adults don't typically wear a tag, it puts the infrastructure in place for these researchers to easily support tracking, instead of having to dream up their own system. (Anyone else think it's ironic that within the zoo, the species being tracked is homo sapiens?) Finally, if we've got a handle on visitors and can track them through a zoo (or museum, aquarium, or any other similar facility) it opens up lots of possibilities for customized educational support. Currently, lots of facilities provide electronic guides that can tell the visitor about a specific exhibit, but the guides don't necessarily know what else the visitor has already seen. Now, the context of the visitor's ongoing learning experience can be taken into account.

@12.38 #

TAPPED IN 2 launches in July
Actually, the transition process for this online community has been ongoing, but the project is planning a launch festival for July 16.

@12.25 #

Mon, 23 Jun 2003

Weblogs at NECC
Tim Lauer points out that there is a gathering of educational webloggers at NECC on June 30. A good place to continue the discussion started by the Harrsch article.

@14.09 #

RSS and Education: The Current Hype
The educational weblog community has been hyping a recent Technology Source article by Mary Harrsch that touts RSS, a protocol that enables weblog syndication and aggregation, as "the next killer app for education". Given that the weblog community is intimately familiar with RSS as a technology, it's not surprising that a number of people think that RSS will somehow revolutionize the education world. But the hype is a bit overblown. In my mind, RSS is an interesting technology in search of a killer educational application. But Harrsch's article has served to start a discussion within the community about these issues, one that will hopefully continue.

The main problem is that RSS is not an application. RSS is a low level technology, a data exchange protocol like XML. Forget about RSS. The specific protocol doesn't matter. Let's look at specific applications in more depth. The Technology Source article focuses on four potential applications for RSS-type technology.

Enable teachers to easily share information they find on the web.
Provide topic-specific news aggregation sites for teachers to use in their curricular research.
Create a district-wide news aggregation site to make it easier for a widespread community to keep tabs on one another.
Support pre-publication sharing of research data and questions.

These are all fine goals, but none strike me as earth-shattering. Depending on context, all of these goals might be better served via email and listservs. When assessing RSS (based on how it's used in the weblog community), it's important to look at its strengths and weaknesses compared with alternative solutions. For example, email has the advantage of being a push technology and is better suited to well-defined audiences. A district that create a email listserv for all science teachers in the district knows that they've reached 100% of their audience. By contrast, RSS and weblogs are pull technologies, better designed for unknown, changing audiences, in that they deliver a chronological archive of information for whoever asks.

Ultimately, I think weblogs may have some use in education, but not necessarily along the lines of the examples above. I think discussions of specific applications of RSS in education need to be informed by a closer examination of the context of use: who is the audience, what is the goal, and how would the new technology fit into existing patterns of use.

Currently I have three small thoughts. First, web-based news aggregators would be incredibly useful as a way to inform parents and the community about school events. Forget the superintendent, who will have plenty of ways to track what's going on in the district. Instead, enable students and educators to publish information that better connects the school to its community.

Second, find ways to connect educators into communities that span physical locations. This is not a new goal, and varying technologies (email listservs, real time communities like TAPPED-IN, etc.) have been used to try to achieve this. Web-based community tools offer some affordances in this area; RSS has value a part of a larger toolset. Community-authored weblogs might work here; for example, as a way to tie together all social studies teachers within a district who share many of the same goals and concerns.

Third, build on weblogs' strength as maven enablers. I can say from experience that maintaining a weblog with regular updates takes a substantial amount of time... and my site doesn't update anywhere near daily. (I'm astounded that someone like John Rakestraw could run a daily feed on education for as long as he did.) And what's the reward for taking the time to publish a weblog? Not much, I'd say... unless you're a maven. Mavens (using Gladwell's definition) are those people who are experts within a field and who closely monitor information within the field. In other words, the ideal people to run topic-related weblogs. Weblogs benefit mavens by affirming their reputation within the field. I'm sure that, like me, the weblogs you read most are maintained by mavens. Dave Winer is a weblog maven. Rakestraw was an ed tech maven (probably still is, we just don't have access to him anymore). Dave Barry is a humor maven. And on and on.

The cool thing about being a maven is that, once you've established your rep and your readership, your readers start sending you content. This is the tipping point for weblogs: the content flow has reached a point where it becomes (relatively speaking) self-sustaining. Look at Barry's humor log. Most of his links are sent to him by his readers.

All this reinforces the value of maven sites: they're updated frequently, they have a strong editorial voice, and they're likely to know about significant events in their field first. So what's the point for education, where we envision teachers posting to weblogs? Teachers by and large don't have time to become weblog mavens. But they stand to benefit from maven sites maintained by that rare educator who has the time and experience to edit a valuable weblog.

@14.09 #

Tue, 10 Jun 2003

The Paradox of Reusability
The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe at Utah State is exploring ways to build and reuse educational 'learning objects.' The group has posted an interesting article on what they call the reuseability paradox: that it is not possible to automate the assembly of certain kinds of learning objects into a coherent whole.

I'm not particularly interested in automating the assembly of learning objects -- I think educators of various stripes will do this, and the important thing is to be sure that such designers understand the intent and contextual contraints of the materials -- but the article is a really interesting exploration of educational reuse in the abstract. This would be an interesting paper to assign in a curriculum design course because it sticks its neck out and makes makes several provocative propositions that would launch interesting discussions about the nature of educational 'objects' and the various dependencies that the use of such objects would entail.

@13.47 #

Leveraging QuickTime VR
Here's a great example (the lost city of Petra) of using QTVR to convey a sense of place that couldn't be conveyed through conventional images (via Boing Boing). Lots of other QTVR examples in the gallery at this site.

@13.47 #

Brenda Laurel in Syllabus
The current issue of Syllabus has an interview with Brenda Laurel on interactive media in higher education.

@13.47 #

Wed, 04 Jun 2003

"Productive" Video Game News
Everyone's in a tizzy over the recent report that shows that first-person video games can dramatically improve visual attention skills. Finding one benefit to first-person shooters, while interesting, hardly tips the balance: if you played the games already, you can feel mildly better about yourself; if you didn't, you probably won't start now. An important question is whether the first-person game actually has to be violent, or graphically violent, to contribute to the attention gain. My guess is it doesn't, but researchers haven't done those tests (not surprising, since there aren't a lot of non-violent first-person games out there). So for now, the news reports are conflating the violent, socially negative qualities of the game with the fast-moving, first person perspective, which is more likely what's contributing to the effect.

A much more interesting (to me) recent game announcement is The Wild Divine, which is slated to be released this fall. This (quite peaceful) game challenges players to develop better control of their own body. By using biofeedback sensors, players can control actions in the game by mastering their own physiological responses (galvanic skin response and heart rate variability). Hopefully some studies will explore whether proficiency within the game transfers into meditative expertise outside the game.

@02.16 #

First Glance at Revolution 2.0
Follow-up on Runtime Revolution 2.0, a nice cross-platform development tool in the HyperCard tradition. The price tag's pretty high, but the product is worth a closer look. The developers have done a very good job providing basic functionality for free. The free version of the tool lets you build whatever you want, with the single restriction that no individual object script can contain more than 10 lines of Transcript code. The documentation takes pains to explain exactly what this means (and what counts as a "line of code") and even suggests a number of strategies for maximizing use of Revolution, given this restriction. The bottom line is that this makes the free version of Revolution highly useful for a variety of tasks, including prototyping, bolting a front end on various command line tools, and simple information management applications (something HyperCard excelled at, in my view), among other tasks.

@01.44 #

NECC in Seattle
NECC, a major computing in education conference, is coming up in Seattle, June 28 to July 2. Register online.

@01.44 #

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 #

Wed, 30 Apr 2003

Tinkerplots: Dynamic Plotting and Data Analysis
Tinkerplots is a NSF-sponsored project to create a K-12 software construction set of basic operations that allow students to build their own plots to analyze data. In some respects, Tinkerplots reminds me of TableTop, which used a similar approach to dynamically rearrange data items based on learner actions. Both tools support a more inquiry-driven approach to investigation, compared to standard Excel- or AppleWorks- style graphing and charting tools.

@13.52 #

NetLogo 1.2 Released
In slightly older news, the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling at Northwestern has released NetLogo 1.2. The update includes "a faster engine, improved support for Mac OS X, more models, alpha support for HubNet using networked laptop and desktop clients, and other enhancements."

@13.52 #

Mon, 28 Apr 2003

TAPPED IN moves to Version 2
The TAPPED IN project, a great real-time resource for teacher professional development, has begun to transition its user base to its next-generation system called TI2. Old TAPPED IN accounts are not automatically converted, so you need to go to TI2 and sign up.

@13.47 #

Upcoming Colloquium: Mapping Knowledge Domains
The National Academy of Sciences is hosting a Sackler colloquium on Mapping Knowledge Domains. The focus is on the growing research, resources, and techniques for exploring and mapping electronic knowledge bases. The colloquium runs from May 9 to 11, 2003, in Irvine, California.

@13.46 #

Comment on California's Education Master Plan
California has invested significant time and effort drawing up an education master plan, and is hosting an online dialogue, from May 19 to 23, to discuss the plan. Since the plan is extremely far-reaching, aiming to impact K-16 education for the next two decades, state education stakeholders are strongly encouraged to participate.

@13.46 #

Forest Management Simulation Software
The SimForest project has developed a simulation-based software prototype and associated curriculum materials to support inquiry learning in biology and ecology classes for grades 7-12 and college level. Students can plant trees from a pool of over 30 regional species, set environmental parameters such as rain fall, temperature, and soil conditions, and watch the forest plot grow and evolve over many years. The project has developed both a "black box" model and a "glass box" model, where students may inspect and modify the underlying simulation engine.

@13.46 #

Sun, 20 Apr 2003

A change of blogging tools
It took a while, but I've finished migrating Designing Learning Technology from Userland Radio to Blosxom. The migration should be seamless, in spite of the current rough appearance of this page. I've tried to follow good web practice and not break existing links. To that end, the main URL for DLT is the same. The old RSS feed is aliased to the new RSS feed, so existing syndication links (so precious to us bottom-feeders) don't break. Finally, I've left the old Radio archive online, so any links into the old posts still work. Of course, the old posts have also been imported into Blosxom, so you can get to them via the new weblog as well.

So why Blosxom? What's wrong with Radio? The problem I had with Radio is that the obstacles to posting were too high, given my work style. I didn't run Radio all the time, because it stole a significant amount of cycles on my iBook. That meant that, when I wanted to post, I'd have to launch it, wait for it to open a browser window, enter my post, and then wait for it to upload my post to this server.

That's a lot of steps, took time, and meant sending our logon to this host server via plain text, since Radio uploads via ftp. For people who can use Radio as their weblog server, Radio works great. But the combination of time-to-post and ftp security issues eventually got to be too much.

Now, with Blosxom, all I have to do when I want to post is edit a new text file. I almost always have some kind of text editor up and running, so there's virtually no obstacle to posting. I still have to upload that text file to the weblog server, but that's a task I can batch once a day or so, and I can use secure FTP to make the connection.

There are aspects of Radio I'm sure I'll miss, like the automatic ping to weblogs.com when I post, but overall, I think this change will mean that I post more. Hopefully that's a good thing...

@02.57 #

Fri, 04 Apr 2003

Radio post #176
Posting has dropped off as I deal with a work crunch and explore a weblog transition from Radio to Blosxom.

@21.01 #

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 #

Mon, 24 Feb 2003

Radio post #166
Sherry Hsi and Carolyn Gale are planning a one-day eLearning tutorial at CHI 2003. Both have significant experience designing and managing eLearning environments.

@20.00 #

Radio post #165
AgentSheets 1.5 is out for Macintosh platforms (The Windows version is at 2.2). AgentSheets is a Java-based visual modeling environment with a number of educational applications.

@19.58 #

Fri, 14 Feb 2003

Radio post #164
Doug's running a very nice blog on educational technology development issues. (And updating way more frequently than I do.)

@18.11 #

Radio post #163
Wired reports on the upcoming death of the PT3 (Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology) program. A strength of PT3 was that it encourages collaboration between research institutions and state teacher education efforts. The programs proposed to replace PT3 don't seem to offer as strong a connection.

@18.10 #

Fri, 07 Feb 2003

Radio post #162
One of the major issue I deal with designing cross-platform educational applications is trying to resolve the inconsistencies between human interface guidelines on Windows and Mac platforms. What looks right on one platform often looks a little off on the other, and an occasion there are flat out inconsistencies between the two. Even trying to design for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, or for Win 98 and Win XP, reveals basic inconsistencies in default button size, system font, etc. As a result, we often end up using purely graphic buttons, much like javascript-driven rollovers on the web, simply because it allows us to standardize across platforms, and also gives our graphic artists greater control over the visual theme of the window. Of course, this means our apps don't have native platform look-and-feel, but given the heterogenous nature of the educational market, that's a tradeoff we're willing to accept. Some specific links: I'm more familiar with Apple's HI guidelines, which are fairly explicit about the layout of interface elements. Microsoft's guidelines were a little harder to find, and interesting in that they abstract design away from the pixel, at least in terms of dialogs (you lay things out in terms of DLUs -- dialog layout units. Finally, a good general collection of interface links is at Mackido.

@07.26 #

Radio post #161
Upcoming ubiquitous technology conference: the 5th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems & Applications, October 9-10, 2003 in Santa Cruz, California. Submissions due May 23.

@07.14 #

Radio post #160
So does leaving no child behind mean that future Americans will understand the difference between means and medians well enough to send Bush's tax plan arguments packing? This NY Times editorial from just prior to the state of the union address picks this nit.

@07.12 #

Radio post #159
Apple's come up with a way to control non-scriptable applications from AppleScript. It's OS X only, but it opens up all sort of possibilities.

@07.03 #

Radio post #158
Blogs were made for links like this. Which Sesame Street Muppet Are You?

@07.00 #

Mon, 27 Jan 2003

Radio post #157
The special issue of ER on the role of design in educational research is out. This includes a piece on design-based research (pdf) by the Design-based Research Collective, of which I am part.

@18.47 #

Radio post #156
Gregg Easterbrook reviews Keith Bradsher's book on SUVs. The review is a very good argument for why SUVs are dangerous to own -- dangerous to the environment, dangerous to other drivers, and dangerous to the SUV driver. What's nice about this article is that it doesn't resort to insulting the character of SUV owners. Instead, it comprehensively deconstructs the major arguments for owning an SUV and shows what none of them hold water.

@18.42 #

Radio post #155
Here is a nice summary of the state of five popular scripting languages. Perl, Python and Tcl are well known. Ruby is a fairly new language. Lua is designed to be embedded within a larger application.

@18.37 #

Tue, 14 Jan 2003

Radio post #154
Here in Seattle everyone is patting themselves on the back (or the rock hard abs) since Men's Fitness ranked Seattle the second fittest city in the country, behind Honolulu. That's nice, but let's take it with a grain of salt: the US is the fattest nation on earth. I'm not sure I'll brag too hard about being the second fastest turtle in the race...

@00.19 #

Radio post #153
Tomorrow is the day that Washington state teachers go to Olympia to push the legislature to take education funding seriously. Washington, like the rest of the country, is in recession, and so it may not be the best time to ask for increasing funding for teachers. But is there ever a good time? As a state, Washington ranks in the mid-30s in teacher salaries, but when you adjust for the cost of living around Puget Sound, the numbers get much worse. According to Mike Riley, superintendent for the Bellevue district, Seattle teacher pay, when adjusted for cost of living, ranks dead last among 100 cities in the US.

@00.14 #

Radio post #152
Here's a clever idea! Pay phones aren't used much anymore, thanks to the fact that everyone on the planet seems to have 2.5 cell phones these days. That's disturbing because it means pay phones no longer make money for telcos, so the phones get taken out of service, which is a problem for those who either can't afford to own a cell phone, or who choose not to own a cell phone. But what if pay phones could double as wireless access points? DSL support is straightforward, and the strategic use of pay phones as WAPs could go a long way toward providing wireless coverage in urban areas. With the increased revenue, telcos might be able to keep the pay phone on the streets. Fortune reports on Bell Canada's pilot project to do just that.

@00.09 #

Fri, 10 Jan 2003

Radio post #151
EdWeek's Quality Counts 2003 is a report on the condition of public education, state by state. This year focuses on the challenges to recruiting and retaining experienced teachers.

@18.57 #

Radio post #150
BETT is a British conference on educational technology, and they have announced 2003 winners of their BETT Awards. There are several categories of software and hardware; many of the nominees are new to me.

@18.55 #

Radio post #149
It's nice to see Apple injecting new life into web browsers with "Safari". For now, I'm sticking with "Chimera" as my default OS X browser. Safari seems about one release away from being really usable. In a few days testing, I've found that Safari renders over 95% of the web sites I visit properly. Unfortunately, I browse enough that even "less than 5%" is significant. It seems Apple is committed to rapidly fixing rendering errors, so I expect that I'll be using Safari regularly within a few months. I wonder if web designers are concerned about having to support Yet Another Browser, particularly one limited to a non-Windows platform? In educational settings, Apple is still enough of a presence that web-based projects like "WISE" will have to pay attention.

@03.11 #

Tue, 07 Jan 2003

Radio post #148
Tidbits writes about a new approach to reducing spam, custom mail headers that are verified and policed by Habeas.

@18.44 #

Radio post #147
In praise of clutter. There's knowledge in the mess around your desk.

@17.53 #

Fri, 03 Jan 2003

Radio post #146
The January edition of the Technology Source is out. Technology Source is an online, peer-reviewed journal focusing on technology integration into educational organizations. Lots of stuff on course management tools and distance ed.

@17.39 #

Thu, 02 Jan 2003

Radio post #145
The Times also reports on a study that suggests that high stakes testing, as it is currently implemented, may lower academic performance because of a heightened focus on narrow testing goals, and may also increase dropout rates. One disturbing suggestion, for which the study does not provide direct evidence, is that administrators may pressure failing students to drop out, in order to improve the school's overall score.

@19.12 #

Radio post #144
Wireless changes the learning environment. The NYTimes reports how college students now have other things to do in lecture. So much for the captive audience...

@19.06 #

Radio post #143
It's been a long, crazy holiday season, which included a business trip to Chicago, jury duty, and time off for family. I wish everyone a healthy, happy 2003, as we get back to the business of helping people learn.

@19.02 #