The article is entitled, "Analysis: How multimedia can improve learning - New research sheds light on students' ability to process multiple modes of learning" and provides a nice, easy summary of the research in this area.
Highlights include a quick summary of the learning theory:
Student preconceptions of a curriculum must be engaged in learning process. Only when the student has the opportunity to correct misconceptions, build on prior knowledge, and create schemas of understanding a topic will learning be optimized.
I attended the National Science Teachers Association conference here in Boston and saw many wonderful things. One thing that puzzled me was a multitude of vendors selling "clickers" for students to key in a multiple choice response to a question. I asked all those vendors if they had competition from people using mobile phones to do the same thing. They all claimed to have never heard of it.
It struck me as pretty easy to build so when I returned home I, of course, checked the wonderful blog From Toy to Tool and sure enough there is a post about a free (for less then 100 responses) service. Liz, you rock!
Are you looking for polls that can be embedded into your page? One of our clients wanted to have polls embedded into their Web site. So I had the chance to search the Internet for free embeddable poll softwares and, I must say, there are a lot. My list was quite long at the end of my search but evaluating and reviewing the features of the softwares that I found cut my long list. I ended up with 4 choices. Let me refer to them for now as the Magic Four.
The Magic Four offer almost the same features and capabilities. I signed up for free accounts and tried them myself. Using any of them, surveys and polls are quite easy to create. You don't need to have programmer knowledge and skills to come up with one. Just drag and drop, type in your questions and choices, and click. You can also choose the theme or skin of your choice. You may even customize your own theme so your polls will have a look that matches you page. You may opt for a single choice or multiple choice polls. The polls can be embedded into your Web site, blog, emails, and what have you. This answers the need of our client. All you have to do is copy the code, which will be given at the end of your survey/poll creation, paste it into your Web page editor, and voila! Your poll is embedded into your site. Another feature is the survey or poll analysis. Voters can see the poll results, if the poll is made public by the author. Also, you, as the author, can export your data in csv, xml, or excel. Vizu and Polldaddy allows you to insert photos and videos into your polls. This adds more fun to your polls.
We love to use pictures in our blogs. My personal favorite is Flickr creative commons search, but thanks to TechSoup we now have a dozen more places we can look for free images.
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page5977.cfm
News Flash: Design Requires Effort [www.useit.com]
Jakob Nielson writes about the issues facing designers who want to design Web user interfaces that are easy to use. He promotes user testing and defines 3 levels of a designer-user continuum. The first is where the user is the designer; the second, where the designer understands the product or domain; and the third, where the designer is unfamiliar with the domain. He then gives some examples of projects and problems that could occur.
There is one example that I did not quite understand. He mentions a Web site selling suits and says the designers were too close to the people who make the suits, instead of the people who wear suits. It seems to me, you could probably find a designer who could, at least, pretend he wanted to buy a suit while designing the user interface. Of course, you have to remember to do this.
Accessibility, Google Reader Example of WAI-RIA [googleblog.blogspot.com]
I know lots of people saw the interactive white board from the Immersive Education post and wanted one. Here are instructions on how to make your own from Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon University
Detailed how to:
Clickpass, simplified OpenID [www.clickpass.com]
Clickpass is a new service that helps you manage OpenIDs. Once you signup you can use one click login on sites that support it. By default it will generate a unqiue OpenID address for every site you sign up on, so you are anonymous unless you choose to share your information with that site.
In addition they have developer tools to add Clickpass support to your web site. This looks like a good step to making OpenID easier to use.
I am interested in how games can be used in learning. Pablo recently announced the release of the e-Adventure engine. This is an adventure game authoring environment and engine for building educational games or simulations. It includes an assessment component and can integrate with an LMS that supports IMS-LD. It also supports adaptive learning and it is Open Source.
Another interesting project I just discovered is Platinum Arts Sandbox. The goal of this project is focused on using the platform to teach kids how to make games. This is a fully 3D game engine and again it is Open Source.
Distributed Social Networks [opencontent.org]
David Wiley posts about fully distributing the social network. This basically means empowering blogs or other personal Web sites to make the connections directly, without a centralized service such as Facebook. One of the ideas that makes this work is URLs are people, too.
Standards like OpenID, XFN, and hCard can be used to tie all of this together. The DISO-Project is working on the code to make this happen now. They are starting by building on Wordpress, but any Web platform should be able to support these formats.
I have been quite busy these past two weeks with a front-end project for a client. I can't say who yet but the "user-agent" matrix they had tells me that they maybe sticklers, making sure the Web pages we are developing for them work and look good across different browsers.
So, in the last two weeks I was transported back to the year 2000 when I was developing Web pages for IE5.5, IE6, and Netscape. Trust me, those were not the greatest times to be front-end developers.
Internet Explorer, in particular, was the bane of Web developers who happen to be working on projects where Web pages need to look consistent across different browsers. If the little annoying differences between IE and Netscape don't kill you, then the little annoying differences between IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 will.
OERCommons, social netowrking around Open Educational Resources [www.oercommons.org]
OERCommons is a site organized around searching and sharing open educational resources. They have partnered with major open education resource providers to build one community around sharing and reusing these resources.
Update: Annorate is a web service for sharing ratings and annotations of web pages. The source code is available so you can run your own annorate service.
There is often a need to take content from the web and share it in a different format. For one client, we built a web based report. The client also wanted the report to be able to be downloaded and viewed using Microsoft Word. To do this we decided to export the HTML results of the report as an RTF document.
A quick search of the web will show there aren't too many options to convert HTML into an RTF document that will work with modern CSS based HTML. One program that can do this is OpenOffice. Of course, OpenOffice can convert from any format it can read in, and can convert to any format it can save ,so this technique is useful for many file format conversions.
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- thanks
- Using clickpass
- Should we put this on Solutiongrove.com, .net, .info??
- How about redirecting users to setup password for elgg
- Great job!
- Bandwidth (the human kind)
- ns_zlib on OpenACS
- Thanks Mark
- svnmerge.py saves you the pain
- Mosio, Yahoo Answers on Mobile ?