Is Google good for education? Take a LitTrip or explore an Art Museum thanks to Google

Ben Daley, Chief Academic Officer and COO at High Tech High, has recently posted a lovely list of 24 Google products that have an application to the field of education. I knew about the educational applications of some of these products already: YouTube (1, 2, 3), Google Scholar, Body Browser. However, there are many on this list that are new to me. Here are two products that caught my eye in particular:

1. GoogleLitTrips. Basically, it leverages the Google Earth platform to intertwine geography with reading novels. Check out this recent article in the National Post on the subject.
   Also, have a look at this video featuring Jerome Burg as he describes the GoogleLitTrip concept. It won a Microsoft Education Award in 2010!

2. Google Art Project. Google has partnered with some world class museums to bring their artwork to students anytime and anywhere. Using the Google Street View technology, students can explore museums and access high resolution images of artwork. They can even listen to audio tours while exploring paintings. Check out this video below introducing the Art Project.

Do you have a favourite Google product that is a great fit with education? If so let us know by leaving a comment.

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Re-thinking assignment late penalties in distance courses? Is it time to think outside the box or not?

David Truss recently posted a fantastic commentary on a blog post by Tom Schimmer entitled: Enough with the Late Penalties. The subject is about late penalties in school. Essentially the argument they both make is that if you examine the objectives of most courses, rarely is there an objective that relates to punctuality or ability to meet deadlines. If this is the case then why do the large majority of courses issue marks (i.e. penalties!) to students based on when they hand in their work? It's a fantastic argument that I feel is very thought provoking.

I can think of three reasons for late penalties in distance courses:

1. Most assignments are formative assessments and in order for them to have a chance to function as such they need to be submitted and graded prior to the student beginning work on subsequent assignments. Removing late penalties and theoretically allowing students to hand in their material anytime during the course may circumvent the benefits of the formative assessment-feedback cycle.


2. Cheating. Students that hand their assignments in ‘early’ and receive their feedback can share the feedback with other students who have not yet submitted their work. For assignments that have specific answers (unlike large essay assignments) this opens a large potential avenue for cheating. Some people may argue that the instructor could simply delay giving feedback on this assignment until all submissions have been received but I think that’s equally dangerous. Students these days want prompt feedback – not delayed feedback.


3. How about instructor marking? As an instructor I can be more efficient, objective and consistent if I mark all related assignments in the same condensed timeframe (preferably on the same day). By allowing students to hand in their material anytime, then the instructor will be marking the same assignments on various days and consistency may falter.

Are there more reasons that I have missed? While I like the noble idea of not penalizing students for the date at which they submit their assignments if the course objectives do not address aspects related to punctuality, etc., I think the three reasons I have presented above are important enough that I would not want to ignore them.

What do you think about late penalties? Should they be abolished or not? Why? Is the only possible penalty 'marks'? Leave a comment below.

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eLearning – do we know what the heck we are doing? Are we in a rut?

Trent Batson, executive director of The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning, has just published a thought provoking article in Campus Technology (dated 19 Jan 2011). As a practitioner in the field of eLearning I read Trent’s article with great interest. Many of the points he touched upon really rang true to me. For example, he writes: “The shift in education is away from learning autonomously to learning collaboratively.” This statement applies broadly to education and I feel it is important to highlight this concept in an eLearning and distance education context. When I am a member of a Course Development Team that develops web-enabled courses, too often I slip into the rut of placing the academic content first in my priority list while placing student-to-student collaborating and interaction as a much lower priority. Why do I do this? I think there are several reasons:

1. It’s easier (and faster) to put together content then it is to put together meaningful student-to-student collaboration experiences. Content is easily sourced with the maturation of the Internet and professors do not have unlimited amounts of time to devote to course development activities.


2. Most professors have more experience putting together content than designing meaningful student-to-student collaboration experiences. Professors are content experts and many lack the specialized training in educational design.


3. Some members of academic departments still believe that content is king! The perception exists that allocating some student energy towards collaboration only decreases the amount of time they have to spend learning the content and that this is a non-desirable effect. Some of these same people believe that teaching and learning is exclusively about lectures and textbooks. Some of those same professors build assessment schemes that test only a student's ability to regurgitate content. In the end what does the degree mean? That the student is good at memorizing? Does the workplace need the majority of staff to be good at memorizing?


4. There is some student push-back to collaboration and interaction especially at a distance. Many provide the all too familiar complaints such as “it’s too hard”, “I hate group work”, etc. Well – being a productive person in the workplace REQUIRES interaction and group work with other staff (some of which are not geographically co-located). So despite being perceived as “difficult or hard”, collaboration is a required skill to master early in all disciplines.

Reading articles, like Trent’s, help situate and realign myself better in the big picture of education. Have a look his article and let us know if any points ring true to you. Leave a comment below

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Should I buy books about technology in education? Answer: NO!

This post is not intended to offend Barnes & Noble or any other book seller. I received a great question over the weekend asking if I could “help finding a good book about technology in post secondary education” and I had to take a couple of days to think about it. I have some fantastic books on the shelf about Instructional Design but I have very few about Educational Technology. Why? Well, I think it is difficult to find a one-stop resource book that describes the best practices in using technology in post-secondary education. There are a few factors that come into play that make this challenging:

• Technology is an enabler, not a driver when it comes to sound instructional design and course delivery. So the front end design analysis must be done to identify the objectives that you want to accomplish in your course. Once the objectives are clearly articulated then the best pedagogical tool and strategies can be selected to meet the specific objective. So you see the selection of pedagogical tools/strategies (including technological tools) comes second – not first. So it’s challenging to write a book with a chapter called ‘Virtual Worlds’ because in my view that’s putting technological tools first!


• Pedagogical/technological tools and strategies can be used in the classroom and out of the classroom, and the same tool and strategy may not produce the same results under those two different conditions. Approaches need to be customized according to the setting and also according to the types of students involved.


• Technological tools and strategies change faster than print. So the large majority of information and knowledge about this topic is not found in books – it’s found on the Internet in Personal Learning Networks (PLNs).

So the permutations provided by combining the three points above together contribute to why a good comprehensive book on the subject is difficult to find. If you are a teacher, where does that leave you? How are you supposed to learn about how to select pedagogical tools to meet the needs of you course and your students? Do you just give up?

No you don’t give up silly. You work smarter and you make a commitment to go and learn about what’s out there, and more importantly, you find out how it's being used effectively and in what contexts. Here are some strategies that you can personally adopt:

1. Examine your PLN and make sure it is working well for you. The goal of the PLN is to provide you with a support system of like-minded people asking like-minded questions and together you can act as a large professional development resource for each other. Invest time to perfect your PLN - the return on the investment will be measurable. If you need more info about PLNs, I’ve written about them before.


2. There’s an implication in point 1 above: that you do not have to re-invent the wheel. Just use someone else’s wheel IF it meets the needs of the course and the needs of the students. So the challenge is in sharing ideas with your PLN. There are some very effective ‘tricks’ for sharring ideas on the Internet. For example, Twitter has this thing called hashtags which allow users to tag their postings using keywords. For example, the hashtag “#edtech” is a key word that you can imagine might be useful to follow to learn about the topic of educational technology. Well, you can follow it directly using your favourite twitter client (like Tweetdeck for example), or you can follow it indirectly by using a hashtag aggregating service like paper.li. This service can display a selection of Twitter postings from the last 24 hours having any specific hashtag and as a bonus the postings are presented in a nice tabloid newspaper style. Check out the paper.li newspaper for the hashtag #edtech. This link refreshes with all new content filtered off the Twitter stream every 24 hours. Other hashtags like #elearning, #education, #teaching may also be interesting to look at regularly.


3. Points 1 and 2 above are great but there is a critical piece missing: you need to give back. Start telling the world (i.e. your PLN) about your successes and your failures in your teaching. By taking the time to articulate your experiences you will be amazed at what benefits can come to you directly. In my view, being reflective of your practice as a teacher is a requirements for growth in your proficiency. So write a blog, contribute to a wiki, post to twitter or update your status on Facebook. It doesn’t matter how you do it – it just matters that you DO it.

If you have any other strategies for learning about best practices in educational technology, feel free to share them by clicking the comment link below.

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Lookout Google Maps – Here comes Google Body!

Is there anything Google can’t do? That’s the question I asked myself yesterday after my first experience with Google Body. What Google has done for street maps, it is now beginning to do for the human body. Google Body is a virtual system that involves an anatomical human model where you can peel back the layers of the body to visualize everything from muscles, to organs, to nerves to bones (all labelled and all searchable!) – and the entire thing is web-based! Granted you have to install the most up to date version of Firefox or Chrome which supports the WebGL standard but that’s a very small price to pay to get a glimpse of this FREE tool. I learned about it from my friend Katia Hamati. She’s an Instructional Designer with Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean. In fact, she has gone on to create a short video that demonstrates some of the features of Google Body – so you can view this video before you dive into Google Body yourself.



For a first release, they have done a very respectable job. Some detail is missing and I really hope that Google continues to develop this tool to add more detail to it. I would love to see it slowly morph into a very robust and complete depiction of the physical structures in the human body. The fact that it is FREE for everyone to use is just fantastic. Do you teach Biology, Anatomy, Physiology, etc? If so, please leave a comment below about how you feel about this resource.

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Transform YouTube into an ACTIVE learning tool for your students

Nina Arjarasumpun, from Knewton Inc., was kind enough to write me an email out of the blue earlier this week. In her email she wanted to introduce me to a novel way in which the GMAT Prep team at Knewton was leveraging YouTube’s free video hosting service. She likened their work to the classic ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books that are popular with kids. In fact, it is simple branching logic where the system presents different content based on the decisions made by the user. The staff at Knewton are translating this simple idea into practice in the context of multiple choice questions using video segments. It’s awesome. I tried a few of their questions while wearing my student hat and the logical branching system coupled with the videos really makes the learning active and fun. Next term I am teaching a distance course in chemistry, and I will try to make a few of these types of learning objects to try out on my students. I’m excited to see how it works for me.


Chris Black at Knewton has prepared a great blog post that describes how to make these interactive logical branching videos. It’s a great posting that explains all the details. Very cool! If you currently use a similar strategy in one of your courses or if you end up trying this out in your course, let us know about it by leaving a comment below.

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No, No, NO! People remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see? It’s ALL wrong!

This is old news but it is news that some people in education still have not grasped. I was having a casual conversation with a professor on the weekend and he explained to me that people learn by doing and that well established research supports that people remember more about the task when they do it as compared to when the simply read or hear about it. The first part of his statement sat well with me. I fully understand that people learn by doing. However, the second part made alarm bells go off in my head. I know that this part of his statement is controversial. How many educators believe this statement to be gospel? Well, if you are one of them, then you have to read this great debunking article on the subject by Will Thalheimer written over 4 years ago. It’s the story of how non-existent research can change the world ;-)

Go read it now.

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5(+1) Biggest Mistakes in Online Education

Guillermo Ramirez from Politecnico Grancolombiano in Bogota Columbia has shared a provocative presentation on SlideShare that attempts to bring us back to the basics of what education is and what education is not. His presentation highlights that the primordial essence of the concept of education is strongly rooted in a relationship between teacher and learner. He goes on to caution us that 21st century technology should not replace the requirement for student-instructor interaction. The presentation is a good reminder that educational models that put the learner first, the instructor second, and the technology third are models that are congruent with long proven educational concepts. Conversely, models that put technology higher than 3rd on that list are in danger of producing unwanted outcomes. Have a look at the slides below. Do you agree with Guillermo’s argument? Why or why not? Leave a comment below.

The 5 big mistakes in virtual education

View more presentations from guiramirez.

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Use Twitter to Increase your GPA!

Rey Junco, a professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, recently communicated the results of a research study where he showed that judicious use of Twitter infused into face-to-face classes in the Pre-Health Professional Program resulted in an increase in student GPA from 2.3 (Non-Twitter control group) to 2.8 (Twitter experimental group). Also, he showed a significant increase in student engagement (as measured by the National Survey of Student Engagement tool) in the Twitter experimental group when compared to the non-Twitter control group. Together these findings suggest that social media and technological supports for the classroom student may be beneficial to junior students. Check out his video summary of his study below. What do you think about these conclusions? Leave a comment below.

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Distance instructors need to be more Responsive!!!

Have you ever wondered about what instructor behaviours were considered valuable by post-secondary students? Have you ever wondered if the expectations are different between in-class students and online distance students? I think these are good questions. I have wondered about this issue and the possible differences based on the delivery mode of the course as well. I was fortunate to attend a good presentation by Albert Johnson, a Senior instructional Designer at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he described the findings of just such a study that was undertaken with data collected in 2008. The top 9 instructor behaviour characteristics actually matched in both in-class and online distance delivery modes; however, the order of priority is different. Here's a summary of the rankings as indentified by both in-class and distance online students:

Rank	In-class	Distance Online
1	Respectful	Respectful
2	Knowledgeable	Responsive
3	Approachable	Knowledgeable
4	Engaging	Approachable
5	Communicative	Communicative
6	Organized	Organized
7	Responsive	Engaging
8	Professsional	Professional
9	Humorous	Humorous

When I examine the rankings and compare the two groups, I note that one instructor behaviour skyrockets from 7th place in-class to 2nd place in distance online courses: responsiveness. Shown below are four key quotations from distance online students which provide insights into their expectations on the subject of instructor responsiveness:

"If you have to wait WEEKS to get a response from a professor, it can be highly frustrating. Also helps gain trust between the student and instructor. After all, if I can never get a response, it leaves me with little faith that if I ever had a problem with something in the course, the professor would be of any use."

"Responding to postings and questions in a timely fashion is important for students in web courses. Waiting for days or sometimes even weeks to get a response or even worse no response is extremely frustrating. Thankfully there are sometimes other students that can help out."

"Students are online at different times and are completing course material at different rates. Receiving timely feedback on email requires that a professor be available more often than an on-campus professor would be."

". . . it is important that profs make themselves available for students to be able to contact them especially in key points of a term such as midterms, finals and papers. When it comes to web based courses e-mail and telephone comes in to play."

After attending this presentation and examining the study paper (found here), I think most of this is common sense. However, it serves to underline that responsiveness is a sensitive issue with distance students. The successful distance instructor will strive to be responsive and available to students in an above average fashion (and, possibly, in increasingly non-traditional timeframes such as weekends) when compared to the in-class instructor. With the popularity of online distance courses steadily rising, clearly, this will have long-term inplications for instructor work-load and work-balance. What do you think?

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Try Teaching Science at a Distance

The October 2010 issue of International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning is out and what I like about this publication is that the full-text of the articles are completely open and accessible. You are not required to pay a membership fee for access. What is also interesting about this publication is that is does book reviews as well and in many cases it tries to choose books that are also completely open and accessible.

This issue has one particular book that is available in PDF format by a Creative Commons License: Accessible elements - Teaching science online and at a distance edited by Dietmar Kennpohl and Lawton Shaw of Athabasca University.

It is a topic near and dear to my heart because I teach post-secondary science courses in class and at a distance. I have written some blog posts in the past relating to this subject (here, here, here).

This online book is fantastic and covers several important issues: the student-centered aspects of learning science at a distance; hands-on laboratories at a distance whether they be ‘kitchen chemistry’ or remote control labs, or anything in between; the institutional logistics of offering science programs at a distance. This is all fantastic and relevant material to colleges and universities today.

If you get a chance to look at this document, let us know what you think about the subject by posting a comment below.

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Take your students back in time with video!

In September 2010, the YouTube Time Machine (YTTM) was born. The concept is simple. Select a year anywhere from 1860 to today and this service cues up videos found on YouTube pertaining to that year. Everything from TV commercials, to news reports, to music videos, to sports and movies. It’s quite the trip down memory lane to dial in the year you were born for example. I was born in 1969, and the first thing that the YTTM played for me was a very disturbing TV Commercial for the International House of Pancakes. I can’t imagine what the marketing geniuses were thinking when they made that! Anyway, this fantastically simple service can have some very interesting applications to teaching and learning. The obvious examples of history or sociology courses come to mind. Want to know a bit about the culture of a particular year? Well then YTTM is a great place to spend 15 minutes of time. Check it out and let us know if you integrate this tool into your teaching or learning by leaving us a comment below.

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Conversation starters with your students online?

Are you an online teacher in a sociology or psychology class? Do you sometimes scour the web for multimedia tidbits that you can use with your students to start a discussion? I think many teachers online are searching for those lovely tidbits that are inspirational, interesting and moving so as to spark learning and ultimately to fuel communication and discussion between students online.

Well, today I came across a neat website: StoryCorps. If you visit their About Us page, this is the first sentence:

"StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives."

I learned a long time ago that truth is often stranger than fiction so real life accounts of people’s lives can be a great spark for discussions in any humanities field. StoryCorps has conducted over 30,000 interviews many of which are available in audio files on their website. They are short stories which makes them digestible easily. Many are VERY interesting.

One of the latest ventures by StoryCorp is to create animated shorts from a small selection of their stories. Directed by Mike and Tim Raush, the first five shorts are fantastic. Check them all out! Humanities teachers will have a field day with these animated shorts. I am sure. Enjoy.

If you have an interesting way to integrate an animated short video into your online class, leave a comment below and let us know your tips and tricks!

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PLEs, Networks and Knowledge - FREE Course!

Building on the successes of the massive Connectivism course that Stephen Downes and George Seimens mounted in 2008 and 2009, PLENK2010 will be launching on Sept 15th. Sponsored and organized by the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University, PLENK stands for: Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge. Find out more here. If you want to learn more about the current trends and the bleeding edge of PLEs / PLNs / group-based learning then this will be the place to be in Fall 2010. It promises to be jammed packed with all kinds of progressive educators as well. So the connections you can make while participating in the group will be very valuable to your practice whether you are a teacher, instructional designer or educational administrator.

Given that Professional Development funds are scarce in almost every jurisdiction, this free opportunity is very attractive. See you there!

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Interview me!

Last month, the kind folks at Udemy: The Academy of U asked me if I they could interview me for their blog. Of course I said 'yes'. They asked me some interesting questions about what inspired me to start this educational technology blog, about how the current generation of students differs from previous generations, about how technology can impact education, about obstacles in integrating technology in education, and about the possibilities of having 100% online classrooms. All great questions that we have all thought about at one point or another. If you are interested in my answers, please see their blog post here.
If you have any comments or your own answers about these same questions, please take a moment to post a comment below.

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Online Social Networks Will Never Die!

Have you ever sat down and given some thought about using an online social network in your teaching? Or have you ever thought about adding one of your students as your Facebook friend? Or better yet, the parent of one of your students invites you to be their Facebook friend – do you Accept or Ignore?

Before online social networks were created questions like this really never came up. Humans have had non-online social networks since the beginning of time – many of these network relied upon face-to-face communication and the information shared within them was not ‘persistent’ (i.e. the information shared in the face-to-face exchanges were not archived so that they could be accessed 5 or 10 years later). Another feature of common human social networks is that one person could belong to multiple social networks and these network were independant of each other and rarely mixed/overlapped. For example, I have many non-online social networks that I belong to where the memberships do not overlap. My work friends rarely meet my road hockey friends, or my university buddies, or my neighbours on my street. Each of my social networks is separated from the other with very infrequent overlaps. Most humans have lived their social lives like this. It has an interesting side effect. You can represent your image differently in each social network. That’s a good thing. To my road hockey buddies I would like to appear like an immature blood thirsty puck-loving daredevil; however, naturally I would like to display a different image of myself to my work friends. Non-online social networks allow me to safely have different ‘persona’ in a socially-acceptable way while still making honest and genuine social contact with individuals in the multiple social-networks that I belong.

Now go back to the questions in the first paragraph of this blog post. Can you see the problem? For example, Facebook lumps all your friends together into one bucket so now the image I portray to my university buddies on Facebook will be the same image I will portray to the parents of my students. In addition, the image I portray online is ‘persistent’. Theoretically, my status updates on Facebook may be searchable for years into the future. So online comments like – “Boy those first year chemistry students are stupid this year. I hate teaching Thursday mornings!” could really haunt me in the long run. This is very different than most non-online social networks where that comment only lives as long as someone can remember it. These differences could be dangerous – they are yellow-flags. The increased efficiency and effectiveness of online social networking brings with it this negative side effect.

Research is being undertaken right now to build more sophisticated online social networking concepts that mimic more closely non-online social networking phenomena while still providing the efficiency and effectiveness that we have come to expect of the Internet cloud. The Internet guarantees that as long as there are humans on Earth that online social networks will never die; however, how they are structured and how they operate will evolve.

Recently Paul Adams, a User Experience Researcher for Google in San Francisco, has published a useful presentation on SlideShare that outlines the problems and opportunities in designing the future of the online social network. Check out his presentation and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below. Also look for Paul Adams’ new book called Social Circles: How Offline Relationships Influence Online Behavior and What it Means for Design and Marketing. It’s due out in late summer 2010.

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Dissection: What's a PLN?

Have you heard this term - PLN? Personal Learning Network. It's becomming a mainstream word in the field of education. Skip Via, an Instructional Technology professor at the University of Alaska, has createda nice 5 minute video that thoroughly explains the purpose of a PLN, what a PLN is, and he outlines exactly the tools he uses to make his PLN. Watch the video and then scroll down afterwards and I will describe how I make my PLN.



So Skip did a great job of disssecting his PLN and showing us the components. I'll do the same for you here. At the heart of my PLN are 2 aggregating tools for bringing information to me, 3 communication tools for interacting with my colleagues and 3 archiving tools for saving information. They are:

Aggregators

1. Pageflakes. I use this to aggregage RRS feeds for my favourite blogs and news feeds. I set it as my Firefox homepage; therefore, I have one stop shopping of all my news everytime I open up Forefox. It's all there for me and I no longer go out to look for it.(I've written about Pageflakes a few times before.)

2. TweetDeck. It's my Twitter client. I have a dual display computer system and the background of one monitor is full-screen Tweetdeck. I try to follow as many isntructional designers and educators as I can, I also filter out for useful hastags like *edtech and #elearning. The result is that my Tweetdeck is constantly filled with a steady stream of great tidbits of topics that interest me.

Communication

3. My primary email client (Thunderbird). Email is a must.

4. Facebook. Facebook is my secondary email client and a great way to keep tabs on what my colleagues are doing.

5. Meebo. An instant messenger client that aggregates all my instant messenger accounts into a one-stop-shop for MSN, GTalk, YahooMessenger, (even facebook chat), etc. So chatting live with any of my colleagues is easy.

Archiving

6. Delicious social bookmarking. Saves my bookmarks and makes them available anywhere I go (library, friend's house, work, home, iPhone, etc.)

7. Evernote. It's just flat out fantastic for saving anything on the web and for taking notes. All my notes are available to me everywhere including my iPhone.

8. Blogger. I write this blog, eLearning Acupuncture, as a way of archiving my thoughts and at the same time giving back to my PLN.

What does your PLN look like? Share its components with us by writting a comment below.

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Transform BORING into FANTASTIC: the death of talking-head videos

Have you ever tried to watch a 10 minute talking head video online? It’s boring. The challenge is to resist checking your email or Facebook while faced with the speaker’s droning voice for the entire 10 minutes. It’s a challenge I usually lose.
Yesterday, I came across a 10 minute ‘talking head’ video that employed a clever technique to transform the experience from boring to Fantastic! I weathered the entire 10 minute experience without losing focus, without checking my email or Facebook, and I retained the material as well! I want you to check it out.
Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA) has produced this fantastic animation that overlay’s a recent talk from Dan Pink on the subject of Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us. The animation has several strengths that I feel really contribute to its ability to hold the viewer’s attention for the entire 10 minutes.

1. The animation is hand drawn with the artist’s hand visible. Most people can appreciate craftsmanship when they see it and watching the animator draw out the material by hand is truly spectacular.


2. Many people are visual. Watching an animated visual landscape unfold during the 10 minute talk instead of a ‘talking-head’ at a podium has far more attention grabbing power. It has impact.


3. The animation frequently embeds words and phrases into the visual drawings. This serves as a pseudo-closed captioning method and it allows the viewer to integrate images, written words and spoken words together during the presentation. I feel that because these multiple methods of information as so tightly linked in this case that it contributes positively to the degree of comprehension, and retention, of this material by the viewer.

Can you think of any other aspects of this presentation that contribute to its success? If so, leave a comment below.

PS: the message in this video is also fantastic. If you want to build a great organization then be sure to set it up such that you treat people like people instead of horses. Give them autonomy and self direction. Be sure they can challenge themselves and cultivate the urge to get better at stuff (i.e. mastery). Ensure there is a purpose behind their work and foster the idea that they are making a contribution - preferably a contribution that is publicly visible. Great stuff!

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The power of Voice in online classrooms

Consider this scenario.

You are an art history teacher and you are assigned with teaching a distance course. In the classroom, you have had great success with a teaching approach that involves showing photos on the big screen and building teaching moments by discussing with students the important elements of the image. You want to translate this teaching method to the distance realm. Of course, you have several challenges:

1. The students are geographically distributed and, therefore, using an audio-enabled online synchronous presentation room (such as Elluminate Live!) would be difficult for scheduling reasons.


2. You could write down an accompanying piece of text to go with an image where you describe the concepts and then you can ask students to engage in a text-based discussion around the concepts. But somehow the mechanics of this activity sound so ‘artificial’. It lacks that intangible quality of a face-to-face discussion while being able to point to parts of the image. It’s a poor substitute for what you have become accustomed to in the classroom: exchanging ideas both student-to-instructor and student-to-student while talking together, etc.


3. Your department has given a very small budget to help with the creation of your course – $100.

Does this sound like a daunting scenario?

Welcome to Voicethread. It’s a tool for having conversations around media. It’s a way to share with a group of people one or more images placed into a VoiceBook. Together you can make a series of audio comments on the images that everyone can hear and playback more than once. These voice comments can also be augmented with annotations to the images that highlight areas of interest – much like pointing to a section of a slide while talking in class. The power of this service becomes fantastic when you realize that students *and* instructors can both leave audio comments on the same image. So assembling together the audio commentary from a group of students is a great thing to experience. You can definitely feel the collective energy of the class much more intensely than you can with a written discussion forum. It gets much closer to providing that intangible feeling of face-to-face discussion while being completely asynchronous. For about $100 you can use it with a class of 50 students and it's entirely online with no software to install.

Do you want to see it in action? Michelle Pacansky-Brock, an Educational Consultant, has put together a few demonstration images into a Voicebook so you can experience the power of this tool.

If you want more info on Voicethread be sure to watch the intro video from the makers of Voicethread themselves. Also, visit (and contribute to) the Voicethread page on the classroom 2.0 wiki for additional resource related to Voicethread.

Do you have any exeprience with Voicethread or do you see an application for it in your field? Share your ideas with everyone by leaving a comment below.

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Do you care about Web 3.0?

Have you heard the buzzwords: Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web? Are you clueless as to what exactly these are? Do you even care? Well, if you don't care then you can stop reading now (*smile*).

If you have continued reading then I must share with you a little tidbit I recently found. A mini-documentary by Kate Ray called A Story about the Semantic Web. It will give you some glimpses into the 'bleeding edge' of this idea and how the experts are struggling to make the Semantic Web become a reality.

Do they know what it will look like? No.
Do they know what is will require to build? No.
Do they know what it will do? No.
Do they know what we will be able to do with it? No.
Do they invest a lot of time thinking about it because they can sense the potential? YES!

Take look into their world by watching this 14 minute video.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

What do you think about this video? Leave a comment below.

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