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Googling Wolfram Alpha

May 26, 2009 – 7:19 pm
Where do most people go if they need to learn about a new topic? Google Google is very good at providing quality accurate results for informational searches. An area where Google is a little less helpful is in computational searches. Try searching Google for the GDP of the US compared to Panama. You will receive a list of sites containing various interpretations of the data, but you may not receive an answer to the question you asked. Enter Wolfram|Alpha. The idea behind Wolfram|Alpha is to provide a search based on all the available data and computational techniques that results in consistent and expandable content. The same search would look at data sets for GDP and draw some comparisons based on the search. You would receive the raw GDP, ratios between the countries, a graph of GDP growth over time, and a table indicating other economic properties. You can easily add other countries ...

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PSU TLT Symposium Game

April 7, 2009 – 9:29 pm
The Penn State TLT Symposium is just around the corner. I'm very excited. This will be my first year to attendance. A group at Penn State, the Education Gaming Commons, has sponsored a pre-conference activity which has lead individuals through various technology options at PSU, fostered interaction between attendees, and set off a few landmines in my browser (we used The Nethernet plugin for Firefox). I have very little experience with educational games, but there seems to be great potential with using games. This activity really opened my eyes to how simple it would be to create a game activity in a course. I envisioned building games like Sim City, Halo, or even Excitebike (yeah, I grew up in the 80's) and stopped looking into the educational use because of how resource intensive they would be to build. The PSU TLT game was structured around three short quests which required ...

Posted in Teaching & Learning, Who Needs Categories?, edTech | 1 Comment »

Prezi - A new presentation tool

April 2, 2009 – 4:36 pm
Prezi is a online presentation development/delivery tool and is currently in limited beta, but is scheduled to be released on April 5th. I stood in a virtual line for 3 months before I was able to start creating my first presentations in early February. It has been a great experience so far. Here is a presentation I created on basic Web 2.0 tools. Overall I was extremely impressed with the ease of use and the finished product created by using Prezi. The editing interface is intuitive. It is simple to create and add content. Prezi offers a simple way to visually connect concepts or "main ideas" of a presentation and then visually dive into the details. I'm a big proponent of concept maps to explore topics or ideas; Prezi allows for a presentation to be organized and delivered in concept map fashion. Prezi handles media such as video, audio and images ...

Posted in Teaching & Learning, eLearning, edTech | 3 Comments »

Twitter in Course Design

February 5, 2009 – 2:26 pm
Is it time to consider the knowledge and application of Twitter when developing students information literacy and work literacy skills? During causal conversations when I mention using the social networking tool I receive a familiar smirk. If I could read thoughts I think it would go something like this: "Who cares if people know what you had for breakfast?" If you are unfamiliar with Twitter here is the "quick and dirty" - You can choose to follow people within the network and receive brief (120 characters or less) messages about what is happening in their lives. It is kind of like instant messaging, but within a larger conversation. The logical question is why would I want to do that? Or more importantly: Isn't that a huge waste of time? - The answer is it can be, but only if you let it. The power of social networks rely on who is in those ...

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TED Top Ten

January 1, 2009 – 9:47 pm
Here are 12 (there are too many good talks) TED talks that have influenced my thinking. I would love to hear about any talks you found particularly interesting. Blaise Aguera - Photosynth William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle Brewster Kahle: A digital library, free to the world Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world Ann Cooper: Reinventing the school lunch Brian Cox: An inside tour of the world's biggest supercollider Jeff Han - Touch Screen Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration Jared Diamond: Why societies collapse

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Connectivism and the Networked Learner

December 10, 2008 – 4:35 pm
I have been following an online course discussing the Connectivist Theory for learning. The basic idea behind this theory is that technology has shifted and impacted the way we learn. It allows for more access to information and connections between individuals. A central idea behind connectivism is learning occurs in the connections and as educators we should help students create, explore and evaluate information in this new information age. What would the learning environment look like? I think this video helps visualize how learning would occur, but practical applications still need to be designed, implemented, and evaluated. The main point I took away from the videos is - this "stuff" (blogs, wikis, collaborative tools, content databases) exist and are readily available. How do we effectively utilize it in our courses (no matter what our learning philosophy is)? I don't think you need to "subscribe" to a specific learning theory to utilize ...

Posted in Learning Theory, eLearning | No Comments »

Why Teach Online?

October 2, 2008 – 5:54 pm
Recently, I have been thinking about why someone would want to teach online (or what may prevent them). I found a literature review titled “Faculty Participation in Online Distance Education: Barriers and Motivators” which provides insight into some core factors determining the decision to move into the eLearning environment. As I move forward, the factors noted in this review may provide a good baseline for me to look at existing strengths and potential challenges when working with faculty. Summary: Maguire highlights interesting and familiar factors influencing faculty decisions toward online teaching. The organization of the factors into categories (intrinsic, extrinsic, and institutional) provides insight into the level and types of changes that might need to be made in order to encourage online teaching. I am surprised at how low stipends and monetary incentives rank. Two areas that really stand out are: Recognition: Rank & Tenure, Funding for Projects Technical Support: ...

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PSU Summer Camp Day One

August 13, 2008 – 1:03 pm
I postponed my vacation for a few days in order to attend PSU Learning Design Summer Camp So far it has been worth the decision. Here is what I have learned. The PSU community is: extremely open to sharing and discussing ideas full of interesting, intelligent, and innovative people who do not take themselves too seriouslywilling to take risks to explore new possibilities Personal Takeaways Thanks to Cole and Scott I am progressing across the Twitter life cycle. I plan to use Twitter to help develop team/class communication in a web design course I'm teaching this fall. [caption id="attachment_51" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Twitter Graph from Alan Levine\'s CogDog Blog"][/caption] I thought the lightning round talks were a great way quickly introduce technologies without overwhelming the audience. The ability to search Flickr for works listed under Creative Commons is a great tool. Zotero is one of the best open source educational technologies in the past 2 years. ...

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Facilitating Online Communities [FOC]

August 2, 2008 – 1:34 pm
I joined an online course offered by Otago Polytechnic (New Zealand) and facilitated by Leigh Blackall. This is the first week and the initial assignment was to create blog, develop a few personal objectives for the course, and sign up to other course members RSS feeds. My Learning Objectives for FOC 2008 By the end of the course I would like to: be able to describe global perspectives regarding online communities expand my network of people interested in online learning identify techniques to promote successful communities experiment with new collaborative technologies successfully lead on online community activity consistently write entries for my blog comment on other individuals blogs The course has already helped me expedite my plan to create a new personal blog, which I set out to complete 4 months ago. Here's to a work in progress.

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Multi-Tasking in the Classroom

July 29, 2008 – 6:27 pm
Current Perspective A major question that has accompanied the increased integration of educational technology has been: Are my students paying attention to what is important? It is increasingly difficult to know whether the gadgets are being harnessed to support or distract from education. There have been plenty of papers written about the change in student learning habits. Call them net-generation, millennials, or student 2.0, one of their primary characteristics has been the ability (near necessity) to multi-task. They blog, chat, text, IM, podcast, vodcast, stream, download, upload, surf, and network on an array of tools all during the lecture. How have they evolved into such proficient multi-taskers? Is it the product of being immersed in media and technology from birth? Educational psychologist believe it is impossible for humans to truly multi-task (focus on two or more separate tasks at the same time). Research studies have indicated that our brains switch from one ...

Posted in Learning Theory, Teaching & Learning | 1 Comment »