One Laptop per Child

You may have heard about OLPC founded by Nicolas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab) several years ago. This is a wonderful vision where technology may bring hope to children in developing countries. As it appears now, there have been less "takers" than Negroponte had hoped and now US and Canada natives can purchase one of these innovative laptops for $400 in a 1 for 2 option where your purchase will provide a laptop to another child somewhere else. Maybe a good seasonal gift for someone you love and someone you don't know but could love...

I am intrigued by this laptop for several reasons (actually knowing very little about them...)

• does not need electricity - or can be "charged up" by hand
• unique operating system (not windows based)
• original idea was to have this cost $100 - now it is $188
• Provides most of the productivity tools in this simple operating system

Now it turns out Intel has come up with their own option for low cost computers (windows based) that are around $200. Funny that now Intel can make a system cheaper if there is a tangible alternative - hum...

• How about cars who get 200 miles per gallon of fuel,
  
• Provide enough electricity from wind and sun for every home,
  
• the list could go on.

What are your wishes for technology advances that do not impact the world's resources at the current levels?

Social Networking - Language acquisition

Just discovered LiveMocha - a social network for learning languages. You can meet online and practice language with native speakers, enroll in courses (game like?), make friends, and other things that social network sites are good at. I like it - nice idea that has recently gone live and is still in beta.

It will be really interesting to see what happens with these tools in the next several years. I am also curious about how this effects formal structures of education. What do you think - is this a style that could work for you or learners that you interact with regularly?

Interface design example

Techlearning highlighted a site entitled Inside the Brain: An Interactive Tour. I thought the tour was informative and wondered what others reactions might be to the design (and the content) of this site. We are not spending time focusing on interface design during the class however this site reminded me of some of the issues we talked about as we focused on web site design. What audience do you think this tour is designed for? The end asks for donations for the Alzheimer's Association so that kind of flavors it, but could you use this in classroom settings as an introduction to brain functioning and stimulate increased learning on the topic?

Well I will tell you that one of the dreaded fears that I have is that others will have to take care of me in my later years. I hope that those close to me are not saddled with this. One of the earlier practices of the Blackfeet Nation (Jane and I lived in Browning Montana for 2 years - late 70s) is that older persons would go on a final vision quest to the mountains. They would end up in the "sand hills" - a place many of us white folks refer to as heaven. So I tell my children when I am too old, drop me off somewhere in the mountains with a small pack of essentials for my final vision quest - seems like a fitting last journey!

Social Networking Services

I ran across an article on the Journal of Educational Technology Systems called "Preparing for the Real Web Generation" (link may only work when you have access to JMU's databases) by Harry Pence (SUNY - Oneonta) that caught my attention. While this article mainly focuses on college students as a population of learners, it has import on what we might discuss further in our course.

Wikipedia uses the phrase Social Networking Service as the term that I was thinking of as I proposed this general topic for this week. Pence talks refers to globalization (one of our own speaks to this regularly) and agrees with Thomas Friedman that we need to be preparing our learners for a world that is "flat" in the sense that the potential access to information is much more level than in the past. Friedman's push for a USA audience is that we are "falling behind" and so we better look at our educational system with an attempt to update our schools to meet the needs of a changing world. (Don't get me going on the idea that fear is a good motivator...)

As I read these questions surfaced:

1. Knowledge - where is this housed, individually or socially? If communities are how we find knowledge, what does that say about how we view knowledge?
2. If every student in your class is on a social network, how should this phenomena be used (or not used) in the classroom?
3. Who are the most resistant (think afraid) to this new social networking world we live in? Why are they? (think gatekeepers, or one's in the middle from author to audience...)
   
4. Who are the "authors" in a collaborative endeavor?
5. What is trustworthy? - How do we build skills of our learners to distinguish between information of worth and those of less value?
6. What about the social networking user who believes this environment is safe to self-disclose personal or potentially embarrassing or damaging information?
7. Categorizing - Hence refers to a term folksonomy - one which was new to me, and suggests that tagging might be more user friendly in some circumstances rather than be limited by what others have created as correct tags.
8. How about wiki textbooks - students can create and update information in the text as they study in your classroom. Contribute to the field as 6th graders!?!
9. What is important in learning - product or process?

That is enough questions for one blog and one article! Looking forward to more discussions and your ideas!

Back to School (Bus 2.0)

There is a pilot program in (a) school bus in Arkansas where students are "given" video ipods or laptops on a bus that has a wireless router. Students can access podcasts and online instructional materials while riding the bus. It happens that there are students who ride up to 1.5 hours to and from school! The article goes on to talk more about other online resources that schools are using (think social networking), but I thought this "connected bus" was an example of a novel approach and opportunity for learning and discovery through technology.

At least the students are not driving the bus while downloading a UnitedStreaming video ! I wonder if the driver has online music streamed into the bus? (maybe satellite radio...) I can see students creating daily podcasts for the "ride home".

Web Design Guidelines

There are many sites that someone could point toward as examples and non-examples - Denise and Jeremy already pointed us toward some. Kevin speaks from current experience of building a site for his church.

One site that I found (actually I believe that some other site pointed me toward this - as is usually the case) is University of Texas at Austin's page on Web Guidelines. Much of this site is geared toward web publishing on UT-Austin servers, however it points toward many issues that seem important for web publishing. I particularly like the Site Architecture and Navigation page that points toward issues for every would-be designer.

Questions worth asking:

• Who is your audience? (might be the foundational question)
  
• What does your audience want to learn from your site?
• Can they get there from here?
• What kind of technology or capabilities does your audience possess (bandwidth, computing power, plug-ins, etc.)?
• Is the site consistent? (across pages, language, organization, page location, link actions)

Another thought that I have is about web Page Personality. Keeping it simple might appeal to certain designers or audience types, but maybe there is a web personality who likes as many links as possible on a page. Although information overload is certainly a term that many have associated with this point in time - maybe human cognitive abilities will evolve with increased abilities to process more information without becoming mired in a virtual quagmire.

Well, happy designing - or happy designing well - or happy well designing (now this is getting too deep)

Sharing tools and sites

OK - what are the most frequented Educational (technology) web sites that you find yourself going to? One of the listed intentions this semester is share our resources (along with ideas and experiences) regarding the discovery, design, development and implementation (evaluation is on-going) of educational technology in places of learning.

I already mentioned in class that I use netvibes as a place to aggregate RSS news feed sources. Some of the sites I read include:

• Edutopia
• eSchool News
• CNet News
• WIRED News
• TechLearning

All of these sites have RSS news feeds and so I can easily see current headlines using netvibes. What are some of the sites that you have found to be helpful?