Ed Tech Jobs Wiki

Here is the promised link to the Wiki framework for Ed Tech Jobs. I figure we could use this blog post's comments if you want to communicate to the class or you can email Ben or me about the Wiki. I am also sending out an email that will have the password. I could post it here but who knows how many untold people outside the class are now subscribed to my blog.

Actually I realize I don't have email list for everyone in the class the password is "edtech."

Our words for the Articles

1. Hyped
2. pedagogical ignorance
3. cheap
4. stoicism
5. unrealized
   

Free Culture Presentation

Here are some links to sites related to my prensentation on the book Free Culture.

• Larry Lessig: the author
• Creative Commons: foundation Lessig cofounded
• Google Books Search: source for Public Domain books
  
• Internet Archive: source for public domian everything
• Open Source Shakespeare: Complete works of Shakespeare online
• Eldritch Press: Eric Eldred's site. Reason for Eldron Vs. Ashcroft
• YouTube: As if you didn't know the URL.... Stop watch video's during my presentation
• Robert Frost Poem Read on YouTube: Is this legal?
  
  

Social Networking Article

Candidates hip to online hangouts



A candidate said in the article.

"It turned out to be an almost no-cost way to get the message out, and in a race where my margin was 229 votes, who's to say that didn't make the difference,"

It is interesting considering articles like this:

Study predicts record youth voter turnout

I think besides just having candidates having pages and positng videos on the social networking sites, sites like Youtube provide a new way for people interact with the news. Perhaps being able to post content about elections whether you own or from a news cast makes people feel more involved in the election.

Cool Interactive Display

This not really related to anything we are talking about in class but I thought this video was cool. An interactive multi touch display:



I could see where it could have some pretty cool applications with education software, especially science software. Here is the link to the original page. It is from NYU's computer science department.

Office 2.0 Conference

After reading Bryan's post:

Collaboration and Web 2.0 Applications

I followed some links and found the Office 2.0 Conference. If you are wondering what Office 2.o is hear is quote from the page:

"Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home."

Oh no a computer that follows me wherever I go! My worst fear is realized!

No seriously. It seems pretty cool. If you check out some the site sponsor that have some interesting offerings. I don't see it as an end to desktop applications or free applications for everyone. Maybe the end to desktop office applications.

I would be interest to know if there are any open source "Office 2.0" applications. I could imagine some big organization like UF hosting their own Office 2.0 version on their servers. Then anybody with UF ID could log into to use it .

Camstudio: Free Camtasia Alternative

So I was looking for a program to record a video for my job and I found a free alternive to Camtasia, Camstudio . It is free and open source. I have not tried Camtasia but it seems it might do a lot more than this one. For my purposes though Camstudio was great. It is very easy to use. It records to AVI using different compression codec. I found the MPEG-4 setting was better than the default one.

Also it will export your file to a flash, swf file for the web.

Here is a video I made with it.

Book Review

I am going to review Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity for my book review. I like quote for a book review:

Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us.

I am interested in how the control culture effects society at large and education. I think technology is bringing up a lot of issue about media/cultural control that have been dealt with before. I also believe it is political as the rules of media ownership have been loosened over the last few years. I think the "Net Neutrality" issue will affect online education as it might harder to deliver educational content over the web.

Positioning Topic

I have decided to focus on Computer Mediated Communication in the realm of Second Language Acquisition. I an particularly interest in how this process can connect language learners to native speakers. Most of the studies I have found so far have focused on asynchronous commutation view email or synchronous via text chat. I have found some recent studies that use Voice Over IP technology to connect native and non-native speakers.

I am interested in this topic because I believe the new communication tools of the Internet are opening up new opportunities change how languages are taught. Having lived in Taiwan and picked up some Mandarin Chinese, I believe interaction with native speakers in essential for learning a language.

Here are some the studies that I have found so far:

• Computer-Mediated Negotiated Interaction:
• This study had language learners engage in tasks together online and examined how the used language to solve problems.
• Conversations and negotiated interaction in text and voice chat rooms.
• "REFLECTIVE CONVERSATION" IN THE VIRTUAL LANGUAGE CLASSROOM
• Study of a language class the Open Universtiy in England.
• Task Design for Audiographic Conferencing
• Audiograhic Conferencing meaning audio/video
• Also at the Open Universtiy.

I am interested in what can be done to engage students in meaningful conversations online. Also what task can be created that will allow the students to interact and promote such conversations.

Online Examples of Paradigms

• Objectivism
• Prongo Games. This site mainly has drill games for kids. This is the page I looked at. I checked out the math quiz games. Pretty boring stuff really. Drill and repeat, drill and repeat.
  
• FBI Working Dogs This site by the FBI basically just list information about Service Dogs. Hardly any user involvement here. Just passes on some information.
• Constructivism
• Online Theremin Simulator. This is little flash animation that lets play with a virtual Theremin. You might not know what a Theremin is but you have probably heard one. It gives brief description but the real fun lies in making some weird sounds. It falls under Constructivism because lets to the user interact and explore in there own way. Here is
  another page from the same site, just cool.
  
  Figured how to embed this example on my page
  
  
• Architect 3d Studio. This site guides you through building a house. It give you advice along the way but you are able to built the house as you see fit.
  Here is screen shot of house a made by a 12 year old
  

Postioning in Field: Change of Course

Well if it is not to late I think I am going to change my idea for the "Positioning Yourself in the Field" assignment. I would now like to look into software, particularly online, that is used to teach Second Language Acquisition. I have done some hunting for articles and there seem to be good amount. I particular interested in studies that use online technologies to connect learners to acquire language. I have seen couple of that use online "Virtual Worlds" provide learners with a practice space for learning language.

I am interested in the potential of using Voice over IP in conjunction with "Virtual Worlds" technologies to provide language learning environments. As both these technologies are very young I am finding more information about using the technologies that proceeded them such as text chatting. This could get give me insight to methods the research used and could be used with my goals.

Constructivism & Objectivism

I read Chapter 6 about Epistemology and Design Learning Environments. I made chart comparing the two. Here. I think I would fall into the Constructivism camp myself. But I could see how Objectivism might be better suited to some subjects, such as accounting or history.

Weird is Objectivism totally out of fashion. The Blogger spell checker labels it a mistake.

Professional Development Part I

I was little confused and did PD part I assignment post last week here.

I think more specifically I will focus this semester on PHP skills. I would hope to practice them on something practical and useful for the college like a Moodle Module or some other web app that could be of use.

Skills I need for my Goals

Right now I am thinking I am going be an Educational Software developer. I know that is a pretty board field. Particularly I am interested online educational applications such as games and Learning Management Systems, LMS.
Here are the skills I think I need to work on:

1. For Online Educational Games
• Flash Animation and Action Scripts. I have seen a bunch of educational games out on the web in Flash. I am not sure these people doing this for a living or just for fun. I know that educational software is a huge market and it seems that CD-ROM's days are numbered.
• Java Applets I actually already have about 3 years in experience in Java but not in graphical applications. I figure my experience will make learning it faster.
• Game design and theory. I taking a game design class this semester. I planning on doing a Flash musical game as a project.


2. For Learning Management Systems




• PHP programing. It seems that many Open Source LMS systems are written in PHP . I particularly interested in Moodle which is used by the College of Education. I figure this is the most likely one that I have chance to get some real experience in while I am in school. It also seems to be widely used.
• The Sakai Project. This is another LMS system. It is written in Java so I might have easier time dissecting the code. It also has some pretty big universities using it.
• Blackboard Building Blocks. This is a system that allows you to develop add-ons for the Blackboard LMS system. I do not particularly want to work with their software but they seem to want to be the only player in the LMS area. They have been awarded a ridiculously board patent for Online Learning and suing one of their competitors.

Digital Divide Article

I remember someone mentioned the digital divide the first day in class as reason they were interested in Educational Technology. Here is article on new study about the digital divide. One thing I found interesting:

Overall, 91 percent of students in nursery school through 12th grade use computers; 59 percent use the Internet.

It surprises me that 32% of students are using computers but not the internet. This just makes me think projects like the call to provide free wireless for San Francisco are great . By the way there has been talk of citywide wireless in G'ville.

Are Blogs well suited to the Online Classroom?

In my previous post I asked the question "What makes a good Blog post? ". Now I am wondering if blogs are well suited for the online classroom. Don't get me wrong, I glad that we are using them in class, it's just as someone who is thinking of being an educational software developer I am wondering how this technology could be improved to better suit the educational environment.

Basically it seems that blogs are a technology that can enhance online education but if you were going to design this technology from scratch( or redesign it) for education it might have some different qualities.

Here some things I might add:

• A way for the teacher to have some editorial control over all blogs in a class.(More so for K-12 students)
• Prepackaged page that has feeds and links to all the blogs in the classroom.
• Ability for blogs to be set in class mode were only comments made class students as opposed to all web users show up.
• Ability for the teacher to easily analyze each student's usage of the their blog and their participation in other student's blogs.
• Ability to export all course blogs into one archived file for record keeping.
• Ability for the teacher to make assignments then have simple way to for the students tag a post or group of posts as related to the assignment.

What are some other ways blogs could be tailored for educational purposes.?

Center for Children and Technology

I have been looking around for the job fields in Educational Technology. Found this cool website, the Center for Children and Technology. They are involved in a lot of interesting Ed Tech projects. I look around there staff page to see what kind of background they had. Definitely looks like it would be a cool place to work.

What makes a good Blog post?

I was looking around at our classmates blogs and noticing which postings were getting comments. It made me wonder what makes a good blog post. I think for our purposes it would be different since we are trying to create class discussions on our blogs. Some of the things I am thinking of right off the top of my head would be: brevity, good title, questions to the reader, and a focus on a single topic. What do you think makes a good blog post for our purposes?

Education Technology Definition

Study of best ways to integrate computer and other multimedia technologies into existing learning environments and creation of new learning environments made possible by these technologies. This field concerns how technology can be used to address traditional educational challenges and the challenges that new technologies themselves create.

I think it is important in this field to not only look at the ways that technology can improve the educational experience but also what new problems arise from the use of these new technologies.

Educational Technology Journal

I looked at 2 Educational Technology Journals:

• Educational Technology Research and Development
• I could definitly see the articles in this as being good ideas for clase project for EME5054 or future classes I will take in my Ed Tech degree.
• This Journal is on Ed. Tech website and I was able to the full text or articles on the UF Libary website.
  
• This is an article I found interesting IDEA: Identifying Design Principles in Educational Applets. I might being making educational applet for my Game Design Class.
• International Journal on E-Learning
• Found this journal interesting because I interested in on Course Management systems (CMS) particularly Open Source Options.
• I found a review of the open source CMS Moodle but was not able to find a link to it outside of the UF Library system. The College Education uses Moodle of its online courses I believe.
  

$100 Laptop

So here is a test of posting a posting a youtube video. It's also a video about a project I am interested, "The $100 Laptop". I believe that this is related to Education Technology because it could bring computers into many school rooms in the USA and around the world.

First Blog Message

My first test comment.