Category: General

I’ve been testing a new Web 2.0 application on the Scripting News website called Firefly. It allows visitors to the site the option of turning on a “chat layer”, where anything they type will show up for other site visitors in a bubble at their cursor position. The bubble is displayed for a few seconds, then fades out — hence the name of the application. Avatars are supported, and web addresses are automatically converted into links.
I have absolutely no idea whether the startup behind Firefly will make it — the application has been out in the wild for less than a day, as of this writing. It is also clearly an early beta: server delays and other bugs are definitely present, and some important features (e.g., spam prevention) are currently missing. Nonetheless, I would encourage educators to give it a try, and potentially consider signing up for the beta. Why?
Well, first of all, Firefly is one of the few Web 2.0 projects out there that emphasizes ephemerality, a valuable property for certain types of learning interactions that is frequently overlooked. True, the current version of Firefly stores a full log of all chat entries, but I have no doubt that this could be easily turned off. Even if it cannot be turned off, I suspect that — much as is the case with Twitter — the appearance of ephemerality will encourage types of interactions that are not seen in other forms of social software.
Additionally, I can imagine uses for Firefly that, while they can be accomplished otherwise, can be carried out in a particularly easy and lightweight fashion using this tool — here are two that occurred to me in the first five minutes of using the application:

• Image/text commentary: participants in a discussion can point at portions of a photograph (e.g., a microscope slide) or a text passage, and type questions, answers, descriptions, comments, etc. next to it;
• “Spatialized” text chats: a common complaint about chat tools is that, even with avatars and threads, it can be difficult for many people to follow the overall discussion. However, Firefly allows for using a picture as a “room backdrop” for text interactions: people can “move about” the room by changing their cursor position, so that they are typing in the vicinity of other people who are following that particular thread in the conversation. Even if this doesn’t happen, the addition of spatial cues should help people better follow the discussion, much as they do in the physical world. Of course, the spatial backdrop need not be an overhead photograph of a traditional meeting room: it would be both fun and productive to experiment with nature settings, maps, diagrams, etc.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this Firefly makes it past the end of summer…

Having been active in Second Life since early 2005, I have found it to be an exciting environment, with huge potential for educational applications. Part of my interest In Second Life is related to my research into Third Places; part of it is related to new approaches to learning made possible by virtual worlds; and part of it, to be perfectly honest, is related to the fact that Second Life is a lot of fun.
As part of this work, I have been helping newcomers to Second Life dive into the world as quickly as possible. One item that I have designed as part of this process is a “cheatsheet” containing keyboard shortcuts for the features of Second Life most useful to beginners. All the shortcut lists I could find online were both incomplete (missing important shortcuts), and over-detailed (containing shortcuts that only the most advanced and specialized users would ever need.) More importantly, the lists were generally not organized in a manner that would be helpful to a Second Life beginner.
Which is where this cheatsheet comes in. I’ve refined it over a series of training sessions so that it:

• contains the commands that newcomers (and not-so-newcomers) will likely need;
• groups together commands according to the task to be accomplished;
• organizes the groups so that more fundamental commands are encountered in the first column, more advanced commands in the second column;
• and works equally well for Windows or Macintosh.

The cheatsheet is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

One of my research interests is cooperation in human societies: how it comes to exist, when and how it breaks down, and how to leverage it within the context of education. Of late, I’ve been looking at some of the structures of place that are intertwined with the functioning of cooperation, and how those structures translate into the online world. In particular, I’ve been interested in how “third places” are constructed in the online world, and how they connect to educational institutions.
I have uploaded the slides and audio for a talk I gave on this subject at the 2006 NMC Regional Conference. I will be interested to hear all feedback and comments that people might have, as well as links to relevant research.

Every now and then, a book comes out that is so good, that I can only view it as a gift from its author. Two books of this caliber have recently come out: Edward Tufte‘s Beautiful Evidence, and Scott McCloud‘s Making Comics. I’ll save the Tufte for another day, and talk about the McCloud for now.

I’ve been working on projects using Digital Storytelling techniques since the nineties, and McCloud’s books have been a key tool in that work. Why? Well, first of all, digital comics are one of the many possible manifestations of digital storytelling. Setting that aside for a moment, though, there’s a deeper reason that McCloud’s work is important: his analysis of the craft is so rich and deep that it provides both a guide to broader topics in communication and the visual arts, as well as an exemplar for how to communicate about the workings of these fields.

All of McCloud’s books analyzing comics have been written as comics. His first book, Understanding Comics, dealt with the core syntactic and semantic elements that make comics work; the followup, Reinventing Comics, covered the potential for change and new directions in comics, including their transformation as they entered the digital sphere. Sounds pretty thorough — so why is this third book needed?

Making Comics fills in the gap between the general theory covered in Understanding Comics and the translation of that theory into actual comics-making practice. In other words, what is covered here is how the elements of comics are harnessed in the process of actually making them. This does not refer to the “here’s how artist X draws character Y” approach taken by a million dreary “You can draw comics too!” tutorials, but rather refers to how symbolic elements and aspects of person and place are chosen and translated into an actual rendering for the purpose of telling a story.

The audience for this book is most emphatically not just budding comics artists and comics enthusiasts — McCloud’s analysis of process in comics creation sheds light on a broad range of topics in the study of media and communication. In particular, any educators who are serious about these issues in the context of their own practice should definitely consider picking up this book — and its two predecessors. Me, I think I’ll try to make it to one of McCloud’s talks to thank him in person for his wonderful gift…

For the past few years, I have had the good fortune to work closely on a number of projects with the Maine Learning Technologies Initiative. The MLTI has provided all middle school students in the state of Maine with one-to-one access to laptops and software. The software bundle is rather interesting, since it encompasses far more than the traditional office suite, including software for music composition, systems modeling, digital storytelling, lab data acquisition, and structured information processing and sharing.

In recent weeks, I have had several people ask me about the current status of the project and its future directions. In particular, there has been considerable interest in how schools involved in the project plan to keep “pushing forward” to significantly enhance the quality of education that children receive. One part of the answer to this question is described in my slides and audio from a series of workshops conducted with Maine superintendents, which outline a model currently being used for this purpose. This same model has also been used in sessions with school principals throughout the state — the goal is to make sure that all schools use the laptops as an engine for educational transformation, rather than just a fancy textbook or typewriter.

As always, I welcome all questions and feedback.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving here in the US — usually called “Black Friday“, but which I’ve heard better described as “Sleep Off The Turkey Day” — and it seems as good a day as any other to get back in the blogging saddle.

I was looking over the New York Times’ coverage of the Thanksgiving Day Macy’s parade, and noticed that their slide show, while competently shot, was, well, somewhat lacking in the narration and emotion departments. I decided to try an experiment: what would happen if I ran a Flickr search for photos of the parade?

The results were astounding — not only were many photos far more interesting and compelling than the Times’ slide show, many were better composed and executed in formal terms as well. Compare this photo to the Times’ photo of Garfield — which do you think does a better job of telling a story?

What’s more, the Flickr search will only get better as time goes by — more people will post their photos of the parade, and more people will comment on them, pushing the interesting/unusual/powerful ones to the top of the stack.

Now, I am not suggesting that the Times should get rid of their photographers, nor that the quality of their work is subpar — but I am suggesting that something very interesting happens when a community (and Flickr is most definitely a community) shares its creative work in an open social space. And since this blog focuses on education, I would like to gently urge educators to overcome some long-held prejudices about work that takes place in informal spaces, and think about how these mechanisms can be harnessed for learning.

I have posted the slides and audio for my Horizon Project VCOP talk on the subject of expectation effects. If you are interested in finding out how to separate a new technology’s true pedagogical merits from other factors that might influence its reception in the classroom, this talk may be of use to you.

As always, I’ll be happy to hear any comments or feedback people might have.

Several people have asked me how I constructed the visualizations that I used in my talk on del.icio.us. My own approach involved a fair amount of hand-rolled custom code – not fun for people unaccustomed to writing their own software and working from the command line. So as to give non-programming-savvy researchers a chance to explore del.icio.us – or other online systems with implicit network structures – for themselves, I have put together a short guide on using two Mac OS X applications, Anthracite and OmniGraffle, for this purpose.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

I have added to the resources page a talk on del.icio.us, presented within the context of the Horizon Project VCOP. If you’ve heard about del.icio.us, but aren’t quite sure what the fuss is all about, or if you’ve already tried it out, but would like to know how to get the most out of it, this talk is for you.

As always, I’m interested in any comments or feedback people might have.

The results from the OECD PISA 2003 study of learning skills among 15-year-olds are now out. As could be expected from last year’s coverage of the PISA 2000 results, news reports have tended to misrepresent the information contained in the new report. I have already covered these misrepresentations in two previous posts, so I will not rehash that material here; however, I will spend some time looking at the new data conveyed by the report.

PISA 2003 incorporates a new (very welcome) category for student evaluation in the form of a set of questions covering Problem Solving. An analysis of this category would be worth a separate post unto itself; since my main goal here is to update the results I had obtained for PISA 2000, I will omit it from consideration in the discussion that follows.

A statistical analysis similar to that from my previous post yields, as before, four main groups with the labels shown in the table below. A new classification resulting from the PISA 2003 analysis is the subdivision of the “Substantially Below Average” group into a better-performing “High Group”, and a lower-performing “Low Group”. Countries that did not participate in PISA 2000 are highlighted in gray; countries that improved their results sufficiently to be promoted from one group to the next higher group are highlighted in green. The United Kingdom, which participated in PISA 2000, was excluded from PISA 2003 due to noncompliance with OECD response rate standards. The following table, with countries arranged in alphabetical order within groups, summarizes these results:

Performance of 15-Year-Old Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science
Better than Average	Average	Below Average	Substantially Below Average
Australia	Austria	Greece	High Group
Canada	Belgium	Italy	Serbia
Finland	Czech Republic	Portugal	Thailand
Hong Kong – China	Denmark	Russian Federation	Turkey
Japan	France		Uruguay
Korea	Germany		Low Group
Liechtenstein	Hungary		Brazil
Netherlands	Iceland		Indonesia
New Zealand	Ireland		Mexico
	Latvia		Tunisia
	Luxembourg
	Macao – China
	Norway
	Poland
	Slovak Republic
	Spain
	Sweden
	Switzerland
	United States

As we can see, only four countries (Liechtenstein, Latvia, Luxembourg, and Poland) improved their results substantially from 2000. Of these, the result for Luxembourg has to be discarded from consideration, since (as noted on page 30 of the OECD report) assessment conditions in this country were changed significantly between 2000 and 2003. In the case of Liechtenstein, only 332 students were assessed, due to the small size of the country. Because of this small sample size, changes at the individual school level are just as likely to affect the final results as national policy decisions. Hence, it is difficult to ascertain the cause of the observed improvement. Finally, in the cases of Latvia and Poland, it is tempting to attribute the improvement to their respective large-scale educational reforms, which started in 1998. However, data that would allow for the determination of cause-and-effect relationships in these two cases is currently lacking.

It is unsurprising that little has changed between PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 – after all, only three years have elapsed between the two studies. However, news reports – and, I fear, some public officials – have made much of minor increases or decreases in scores that are not significant. What still stands is my conclusion from my previous post: no country can be said to have provided a solid educational floor in these categories for all of its citizens. Getting to the point where this educational floor can be guaranteed will require more than slight changes to expenditures, school year duration, or class sizes – it will require a significant rethinking of how the educational process occurs at all levels.