Learning Technologies in Developing Nations

Digital Nations , a project sponsored by the MIT Media Lab, "aims to address major social challenges (improving education, enhancing health care, supporting community development) through the innovative design and use of new technologies.

The consortium's ultimate goal is to empower people in all walks of life to invent new opportunities for themselves and their societies. The consortium focuses especially on populations with the greatest needs — children and seniors, underserved communities, and developing nations."

This is yet another example of the creative and innovative ways technology is being used to empower and change lives through education. Of particular note, is this entry on their "research themes" page:

Transforming Learning and Education — Today’s approaches to learning and education are woefully outmoded. Digital technologies provide an historic opportunity to transform how and what people learn—in schools, in workplaces, and in their everyday lives. We are developing new technologies and new strategies to support a “constructionist” approach to learning, helping people take charge of their own learning throughout the day and throughout their lives.

The BBC News series, Digital Destinations, also explores how web-based Information Communication Technology (ICT) is changing lives in developing nations.

Along with several case studies, the BBC series also includes a web-cast, picture gallery, and radio program on how various organizations are using ICT to provide education opportunities for children as a means to lift their communities out of poverty.

One of the most interesting stories in this series is how the wireless web is being used to provide education for children in Bangladesh and Senegal.

How will the introduction of social software and other Web 2.0 technologies further impact the learning and education of students in developing nations? Will mLearning be the solution? Or will educational podcasts be the most effective and easiest way to distribute elearning content to students in Saipan, Bangladesh, Senegal, or for that matter, Appalacia?



Technorati Tags: learning education education+technology ICT teaching podcast BBC mlearning

Web 2.0 | It's About Community

“The basic idea of the Web is that an information space through which people can communicate, but communicate in a special way: communicate by sharing their knowledge in a pool.

The idea was not just that it should be a big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out.”

Tim Berners-Lee






web+2.0 online+community social+software

Flickr + BlinkList | Dynamic Duo

Do you need to create a technical help sheet or “how to” guide? Here’s an idea that provides an avenue for users with multiple learning styles to utilize two social software programs-- Flickr and BlinkList--to meet their learning or training needs.

The Flickr Part: Use Flickr to create a (private) group, and then place a series of instructional screenshots in your group pool to assist users learn a new software program (for example Dreamweaver MX). Members of your group can use the Flickr group threads to discuss the configuration process, troubleshoot, and leave tips for others.

The BlinkList Part: Tag Dreamweaver MX articles and/or other web-based resources with a specific BlinkList tag, which now becomes an URL of resources related to that software (in this case Dreamweaver MX).

The Social Part: Now post the tag link in your Flickr group and the BlinkList tag list becomes a specialized, organic, shared knowledge pool--a vital component for any online community of practice. Members of the learning community can also search the global BlinkList community tags for additional resources.

The Learning Part: What you have created is an (online) community that is able to draw from multiple social web resources to meet a learner’s intrinsic needs, while still providing opportunities to participate with their peers in a collaborative, social exchange of information. In a variation, you could use both ideas and link to Flickr and BlinkList from a course webpage, weblog, or learning management system (LMS).


tagging, social bookmarking, blinklist , flickr yahoo social software

m-Learning | Literature Review & Case Study

Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning: “Mobile technologies are a familiar part of the lives of most teachers and students in the UK today. The challenge for educators and designers, however, is one of understanding and exploring how best we might use these resources to support learning.

That we need to do this is clear – how much sense does it make to continue to exclude from schools, powerful technologies that are seen as a normal part of everyday life? This review provides a rich vision of the current and potential future developments in this area.” (via )

• view as pdf

web+2.0 mlearning education learning

Blinklist | Learning in the Blink of an Eye

The passionate crew over at MindValley have joined the social software party with a new web-based rapid bookmarking and knowledge-sharing tool named BlinkList. A curious name that accurately describes how quickly and easily you can manage, add, share, tag, or syndicate your links in—well…in the blink of an eye!

BlinkList, like other social bookmarking applications, is based on social networking, tags, folksonomies, and collaborative knowledge sharing. As BlinkList users search the web they can easily save their web searches, tag them with keywords and/or descriptions, and then depending on whether they have marked the links private or public, share their cache of knowledge with the BlinkList community.

Simply stated, MindValley recognizes that online community hinges on the users ability to easily access their information without frustrating them to the point they won’t use the software (a point which is—surprisingly--often overlooked).

Rooted in constructivist theory, BlinkList is designed to act as a facilitator, providing users with the tools to chunk, scaffold, and organize knowledge in a format that best suits them. In a nutshell, BlinkList opens the path to knowledge instead of being a digital pothole on the e-learning super information highway.

Here are just a few of the unique features in BlinkList (with just a twist of learning theory thrown in for good measure!):

Knowledge Tags

As you store and tag more content, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what tag you used for similar content. But don’t fret! MindValley Labs has come up with a slick way to help you to maintain tagging consistency.

Here’s how it works: as you add links and other content to your cache BlinkList auto-magically suggests tags you have already used. This simple step makes it easier to find content at a later date, prevents user frustration with the technology, and allows students to focus on their learning.

Ready for another neat techno-constructivist BlinkList feature? When you click on a tag, BlinkList shows related tags, thereby allowing users to easily find topics and resources related to their search. But wait. There’s more! By using the tag filter you can drill down even deeper into the BlinkList community knowledge reserves to locate the resources most relevant to your particular needs.

Think of it as the MindValley version of Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Social Learning Tool

BlinkList allows users to make notes before they save their links to a list. This feature could be especially useful for a collaborative project wherein groups conduct research on the web, saving, tagging, and organizing their content in a BlinkList, and then adding annotations in the link description field.

In this example, BlinkList not only works as a tool to support project-based learning activities, but simultaneously assists students develop crucial information and technology skills--all in a ‘real world’ context.

The process of collecting research and creating the annotation not only develops writing skills, but also provides the teacher with an opportunity to assess the learner’s level of understanding, and review content with their students.

As neo-millennial, and Generation C students begin to flood classrooms, they will expect activities that allow them to pick and choose multiple types of social media (blogs, wiki, gaming, social bookmarking) to support their digital learning styles. Recent studies in online course design have shown that the integration of web-based communities and collaborative assignments into the course design has a positive influence on learning and student retention.

Save Research in a Blink

Have you ever done research on the web, saved a bunch of links in IE Explorer “Favorites” folders, and then had a heck of a time finding them again? Well, BlinkList simplifies the whole process and lets you focus on your needs instead of spending time scanning those IE folders looking for your content.

By simply (there’s that word again!) adding a tag or two, you have created a list that can be accessed at a later date. Since each tag has its own URL, you can link from your blog, course syllabus, research paper, or even Flickr account to that specific tag list. Now you have a powerful cache of resources that work in tandem with your other social media tools.

What? Not easy enough? After you save a site, just click the star icon and the link will be added to your Favorites list in the tag manager (hold on, that’s up next!), and highlighted with a bright yellow star!

As the Naked Chef would say, “Easy Peasy!”

Tag Manager

The MindValley crew has taken in consideration that end users have differing ways of understanding (multiple intelligences) and organizing information. The ingenious Tag Manager provides users with multiple ways to organize and view their BlinkList.

But who decides which tags to use? BlinkList? No. You!

The BlinkList folks describe tags as “multiple mental notes that might make sense, depending on what it is that you are saving.” Since only you know what tags will help you find your data, you get to decide how to label and organize your content. BlinkList will auto-suggest tags, but ultimately the user (that’s you!) has the final word. In effect, BlinkList starts thinking like you do, making it easier for you to locate your links when you need them!

The BlinkList Tag Manager sorts your links in three categories: Favorites, Most Popular, and Most recent. As you build up a cache of links, Blink List puts your most used tags in a little pile—they call this a tag cloud. As you begin to use your tags, the tag cloud begins to change. Larger font, gradient bolding, and different colors--all to help you quickly scan the tag cloud for your most used tags.

The Social Web

A click on a tag from the community tag cloud or a quick tag search allows you to find others who share common interests. You can then see what resources they are sharing with the BlinkList community and add the ones you find most relevant to your BlinkList. And vice-versa. Because BlinkList is a web-based tool, you can access your links and those of others in the BlinkList community from any web-enabled computer or mobile device.

Just a simple click of the "BlinkRSS" button allows users syndicate tag content to a classroom blog, student portfolio, school website, aggregator--or any other site for that matter! BlinkList even provides the HTML snippet for you to pop into your website.

MindValley vs. The Giants

The MindValley folks are clearly on the verge of something big with BlinkList. To be fair, it’s still in an early beta stage and will require some tweaks. Moreover, at this point, all of the social interchange is asynchronous. It would be nice to see BlinkList integrated with some “real time” synchronous capabilities.

And while they are more than aware of the fight ahead of them, their infectious enthusiasm (in conjunction with their terrific product) is sure to propel them to the front of the pack. By now it should be clear that BlinkList is so feature rich (the “scary” part is that they’re just getting warmed up!), and full of possibilities they can’t all be discussed in one post.

Tag! You’re It!

MindValley has created an impressive product with so many applications that learning communities--from grade school to corporate training—will be looking for ways to integrate BlinkList into their curriculum.

For the last several months there’s been a lot of buzz about a renaissance on the web. And with the arrival of BlinkList, the optimistic, passionate team over at MindValley seems to be shouting, “Enough talk, let’s get this party started!”

Game on.

Update: Be sure check out my new blog: debaird.net

Smithsonian Institution | Online Learning Resources

The Smithsonian Institution is a leading educational resource online for exploring Art & Design, History & Culture, Science & Technology and much, much more.



museum education smithsonian

Educational Podcasting

The lion’s share of buzz at the 2005 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Philadelphia centered on the boundless possibilities of using podcasts in the classroom. In fact, the Apple booth even had loaner iPods and demonstrations on how easy it is to download podcasts.

Another important milestone in educational podcasting is the announcement from Odeo that they are now open for public beta. According to Odeo co-founder Evan Williams (one of the brains behind Blogger) invites are no longer required to try Odeo.

Why is this such an important development for educational podcasting?

Like Blogger, Odeo simplifies and makes podcasting accessible to the masses. Not only will students and teachers will be able to use Odeo to locate and then download audio content, but it will also provide them with the software and tools to be able to create (via Odeo Studio) their own podcasts.

One educational podcast pioneer, Mr. Mayo a sixth grade teacher from suburban Virginia, has already begun integrating student podcasts into his classroom weblog. This is a great example of a teacher using technology in constructivist ways in the classroom.

One of the coolest features about Odeo is that a lot of the audio content is being added to the catalog by the Odeo community. BlendedEdu will also be scouring the web for educational audio content feeds and adding them to the Odeo catalog. We will be tagging our picks “BlendedEDU”, so be sure to look for this tag in Odeo!

Links

• Odeo
• NECC
• BlendedEdu+Podcast

Technorati Tags: educational+podcast odeo podcast ipod podosphere

FlickrEDU | Social Software Goes to School

Flickr, the popular online photo sharing and social networking community, is popping up in lots of classrooms as teachers find interesting and creative ways to integrate its many features into their curriculum.

Why is Flickr so popular in the classroom?

Perhaps the June 2005 Adaptive Path newsletter said it best: “Flickr recognized that people wanted a better way to share their photos. They also recognized that people might have myriad ways of doing that. Flickr lets people derive their own value from sharing photos…Instead of attempting to define your experience, they simply provide a sandbox, and give you the means to create a meaningful experience within that.” Sounds like social constructivism to me.

So how do you use Flickr in your classroom? BlendedEDU has started a Flickr community group where educators can share curriculum ideas, make suggestions, share student Flickr projects, or learn more about using social software in the classroom. So please join the discussion!

And for a more ideas how to use Flickr in your classroom, be sure to look for my article, FlickrEDU in the Nov 2005 issue of TechLearning.

[ 11/05 Update: The article has been published! You can read it here.]

flickr social+software education FlickrEDU online+community yahoo

My Web 2.0 Does Tricks!

As I mentioned last week, Yahoo! Search has released a new “social search” product, dubbed My Web 2.0 (MW2). Some of the nifty features of MW2 include being able to: save and share links with your community, control access to your stored links by assigning one of three access levels (My Web, My Community, Everyone), use tags to organize your data (links), along with the ability to use both synchronous and asynchronous web tools to exchange or discuss any of the content from your MyWeb2 knowledge pool with anyone!

Now the My Web2.0 blog offers the following helpful tips and tricks to make your social search experience even more useful:

• contact: search for content saved by that special somebody in your community (e.g. contact:"john doe")


• tag: search for all content saved with a given tag (e.g. tag:"blogs i read")


• title: search for all content with a given title (e.g. title:ebay)


• note: search for a note you wrote yourself, or remember previously viewing (e.g. note:great)


• url: search for content specific to a given url (e.g. url:ebay.com)


• content: search across the text of all the saved content in your community.


• abstract: search across the abstract (the summary you see in your Web search results) of the saved content in your community

Just remember that there's no space between the colon and the search term. Also, if there are multiple words in the query, you need to put quotes around it. e.g. contact:"john doe.”

Be sure to check in with the My Web 2.0 team blog for more details, tips & tricks!




my+web+2.0 yahoo yahoo+search tags folksonomies flickr social+search

Tire Tracks Education Program

The Tire Tracks Education Program is a global, online learning solution that is based on long term expeditions that explore cultures and societies all over the world.

The program, which is launching in September, provides the opportunity for students and teachers to discover the sights, sounds and stories of 35 African countries during a two year, 50,000 mile overland expedition, while interacting with the team, schools in Africa and others around the world.

This interactive, multi-media educational program reinforces concepts learned in key stage 2 and 3 in a variety of subjects, such as geography, citizenship, history, science, language arts, maths and ICT, and engages students and teachers in an education community that builds on and integrates their feedback.

Curriculum integration and ease of use is ensured by the dedicated team of over 50 co-developing teachers from seven countries, four of which are African.

Any recommendations and/or interested persons in the education-research field, and/or teachers interested in participating as a pilot school are greatly appreciated.

For additional information, please contact Corinne Overman at:

Corinne [at] livingfootsteps [dot] com


Technorati Tags: learning education education+technology ICT africa teaching

My Web 2.0 | The Social Life of Search Engines

In their book, The Social Life of Information, John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid discuss how human social systems shape the way we use technology. To date, it has proven difficult for web-based communities to capture the social exchange of information that occurs in human social systems, while simultaneously providing a way for members to retain a degree of privacy and control within the group.

Released in a limited beta last week, My Web 2.0 is a new Yahoo! Search product based on social networking, tags, folksonomies, and group collaboration. This new "social search" engine allows users to save their links and then share (or not!) them with people they know and trust by placing them in a community knowledge pool dubbed, My Community.

Like its sister product, Yahoo! 360, MW2 allows users to determine who is in their social network, as well as control access to their saved links. A user can save links in one of three formats: Just Me (only you see the links), My Community (you get to share your links with your contacts. And vice versa), and Everyone's Web (wherein your saved links are visible to the entire MW2 community).

Members of a community can search, structure, and self-organize the group pool via tags (keywords). MW2 also provides avenues for members to share resources via synchronous tools, like Yahoo Messenger (IM).

In a nutshell, MW2 is based on three very simple, yet overlooked principles: 1) humans are inherently social creatures; 2) the continued viability of any social system is rooted in an individual's ability to trust the members of the group and control their level of interaction; and 3) social networking should be placed in a situated context or community of practice.

Possible education applications of My Web 2.0:

Constructivist Learning Tool: A teacher can place links in a My Community pool as a jumping off point for students. As students begin to research a topic, they can add content to and search the community pool. In this manner, students are scaffolding their own knowledge and the teacher is working as a facilitator, instead of a sage on the stage. In this way, MW2 also becomes an organic learning tool, evolving with the interests and needs of the community.

Asynchronous Message Board: The discussions/comments feature readily allows members of the group to discuss the article link that has been submitted to the group pool. This is a quick way to set up a newsgroup type experience to foster student collaboration.

Finding the Invisible Threads: Social search and RSS feeds allow users to focus on their specific interest/intrinsic learning goals & may play an important part in online student support, self-regulation, and retention.

Discussion amongst peers can make the often invisible community threads more visible and accessible, and may lead students to find others in the group who share the same interests. As students move towards intrinsic learning goals, they can still contribute to the group knowledge pool.

FlickrEDU: A teacher can also include links from a Flickr group or Yahoo! Audio link to supplement content in a MW2 My Community knowledge pool. For example, this could be particularly useful in a MW2 group for historic preservation, media studies, or botany. And vice versa, wherein a Flickr group could use the MW2 knowledge cache to supplement their group photo pool.

Training Tool: As part of a teacher development tool a trainer could create a cache of articles, or technology "how-to" resources, creating tags to categorize training topics to make them easier for the user to locate information.

Final Thoughts

MW2 is a work in progress with the usual bugs, tweaks and features to be worked out. Moreover, it's clear that Yahoo! is utilizing the recently acquired LudiCorp brain trust to spearhead the development of their new "social search" product.

In many ways, MW2 is leading the way for a new generation of social technology tools wherein the community (online or off) decides how technology will support the social life of their digital information.

MW2 provides users with new tools to effectively organize and retain knowledge in the otherwise leaky ecologies of shared information. In the end, My Web 2.0 will prove to be an important step in the convergence of human social systems, knowledge management, and web-based technology.

My Web 2.0 education social search yahoo

Stewart Butterfield | Gaming & Learning as a Social Activity

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Ludicorp, is a pioneer and visionary when it comes to designing for and understanding the social structure of web-based environments and communities. In this 2003 Mindjack interview, Butterfield discusses how his multiplayer gaming environment, Game Neverending, was a "social space designed to facilitate and enable play."

As Butterfield explains:

"The secret is, even though it's called Game Neverending,it's not really a game at all. It's a social space designed to facilitate and enable play. The game-elements are here to provide both the constraints and the building blocks of interaction - since the thing you'll notice about the kind of play I'm talking about above is that it is the kind of thing that goes on between people."

In other words, a well-designed multiplayer gaming environment should provide users with the tools and leave it to them to construct their own meaning and level of interaction within the (virtual) community.

Moving beyond online gaming, this interview is important because Butterfield hits on a key element of online course design that is often overlooked: designing opportunities (both synchronous and asynchronous) for students to create social bonds (through interaction) is equally as important as the course content.

In short, it's about relationships. Not technology.

Whether it's an online game, or an online course, more attention has to be paid to the social interactions taking place in the online classroom. Social interaction is at the heart of any effective constructivist-based learning environment. This is probably even more important in an online space, where students may have limited opportunities for face-to-face contact.

While Game Neverending is no longer an active product (Ludicorp, along with their photo social network product Flickr, were acquireded by Yahoo! in March 2005), online instructors, course designers, and educators could learn a lot from Stewart Butterfield and should look to the world of online gaming for ways to improve the social architecture of online learning environments.

• Read the entire Stewart Butterfield interview

Technorati Tags: yahoo ludicorp GNE flickr stewart butterfield genius education learning education education+technology ICT online+games video+games

Virtual School

The American School Board Journal (ASBJ) has a special two part report in the July 2005 edition titled, Going Virtual. The first article, High School on the Web, features a story on neo-millennial generation curriculum and user experience design considerations for online courses.

The second article in this series, What's in a Blog?, focuses on how weblog technology has provided parents, students, and school administrators with the ability to collaborate, solve problems, and communicate with each other via blogs.

education blogs virtual learning environments online courses

Gamer Generation

In the July 2005 issue of Spotlight, John Beck talks about how video gaming is shaping the next generation of managers and how businesses are failing to tap their unusually developed skills.

Dr. Beck was Director of International Research at Accenture’s Institute for Strategic Change. His most recent book is Got Game: How a New Generation of Gamers is Reshaping Business Forever (Harvard Business School Press 2004)