Emerging Technologies Consulting

Mike Bogle argues that social media creates a better environment for learning than a Learning Management System does.  He goes through each learning goal set by his university and examines which set of tools does a better job at meeting those goals, and each time social media wins.  Mostly, I agree with him.  I do think that social media does a better job of encouraging reflection, collaboration, and personal responsibility for learning than most LMS’s do.  What I think the issue is is the default settings for each set of tools.  I’ve seen faculty create great environments for learning within course management systems, but it’s taken a lot of work and it often requires doing some serious outside the box thinking.  And it still has the drawback of not being open.  On the flip side, I’ve seen faculty do a blog “all wrong.”  They’ve worked hard to recreate a closed, non-interactive environment that’s on a blog instead of within an LMS.  In both cases, they’ve worked against the default.  The thing that I like about starting with social media is how stripped down it is and how it forces faculty to think pretty hard about the environment they want to create.  They may have to use different tools and connect them together using RSS or embedding it within a blog or wiki or other tool.  In an LMS, you can forgo thinking about the environment too much. First, there’s a default that looks familiar–a place for documents, a place for grades, a roster, etc.  Second, there’s little one can do to change the look and feel of the site, so that one often feels trapped.  You can add a discussion board, but you can’t change what it looks like or how it’s laid out.  Often the course exists within a frame where the school’s chosen banner and colors show up, overpowering any customization one might do. If a faculty member feels like they don’t have control over the site, imagine how students must feel.

The default for social media can usually be changed quite readily.  There are themes for blogs, changing its look to fit with the theme of the class or lay it out in a way that facilitates student work and learning.  Widgets that can incorporate Twitter feeds, video feeds or del.ici.ous links can be easily added.  There’s also the larger option of having a class site versus having each individual student set up their own site.  Either way, it’s easy to get student input and/or let students be responsible for what gets included and what tools will benefit them in their learning.  Links to wikis or other tools can easily be added to the site.  Learning needs to be flexible and the learning context needs to responsive to student needs.  It seems to me that social media offers that flexibility and responsiveness in a way that LMS’s just don’t.

I just spent the last hour listening to a presentation I gave with my colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill. What most amazed me was the conversation that took place between the participants. They had some amazing things to say, good questions and good potential solutions. It makes me really appreciate the crowdsourcing we do for our presentations. Many minds are always better than one or three. I learned a lot, and more importantly, I think the participants learned more than they would have if they’d just heard from the three of us.  Check out the video, and if you have examples, we’d love to hear from you at our wiki. Links appreciated.

So, remember back a week or so ago, when I was reviewing in alphabetical order all the social software on the eHub site?  Well, I got a little bored with it, so I decided to switch strategies and just look at things that would be useful for education, but even that got boring.  It is overwhelming how many tools there are out there, many of which will be gone before the proverbial ink has dried on the review.  But I’m still going to try to sort through a few of them, interspersed with more interesting, I hope, content.

Today’s installment is more cute than useful, but I thought most people would appreciate the cuteness. Addictionary is a site for creating and adding new words to the English language.  People vote on whether the word is a good one or not.  For example, there is the word “autoquette” to describe the unspoken rules of the road, or Feng “Schwii” to describe the careful arranging of furniture for safe and optimal Wii playing.  They also issue challenges to come up with words for things we don’t yet have words for.  The current challenge is to come up with a word to describe the act of warming your feet on someone else.  So maybe the site isn’t full of intellectual heft, but it’s creative and might even be used to launch a discussion about how language develops (hint: it’s not usually by issuing challenges to come up with new words).

The blog inadvertantly went on hiatus thanks to a lovely trip to Monterey, CA for the New Media Consortium’s summer conference.  There, my colleagues Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill and myself presented on Fear 2.0.  We’ve been thinking about this for several years now and have presented various versions of it.  We’ve now turned the”presentation” entirely into a discussion format.  We began the conversation by asking participants to draw pictures of what the education system looks like to them.  So, we got images of ivory towers with people falling off and chipping away at it, of factories spitting out things, of funnels, and of crutches.  We then had a discussion around those images.  Because we wanted to move past the negative and on to the positive, we asked people to name a problem, either specific to their institution or related to education as a whole, and then the group was to propose solutions to it.  We ended up with a document listing the problems and proposed solutions.  The last item, the fear that higher ed will be irrelevant proposed by Bryan Alexander, came near the end and has very few bullets beneath it as proposed solutions.  But indeed, I think this is the fear that many of us in the room struggle with.  Sometimes that fear is directed toward a specific discipline and sometimes a specific institution, but I think there’s a general fear that higher ed might become a dinosaur, at least in its current form.  After contemplating that giant fear for a few minutes, we turned to thinking about an ideal form of education.  Most people came up with more collaborative models and of models that allow different ways of approaching learning.  It seems that we all felt that education now was a one-size-fits-all proposition and that wasn’t working for everyone, teacher and student alike.

Since we started talking about fear a couple of years ago, it’s morphed quite a bit.  People are no longer terrified of blogs and wikis and Twitter, but they’re anxious about them and skeptical of them.  I think many people understand that even if they don’t use any social media at all, social media has changed the landscape quite a bit.  People expect to connect, respond, interact.  They expect to have access to more information.  They expect a slightly faster pace to many things.  And that changes expectations for education.  People know this, but acting on that knowledge is hard.  There are structures in place that make it hard and even students, with their social networking prowess, come with industrial education style baggage that is hard to get rid of.  What we hope facing these anxieties does for people is allow them to take that first step to get past them or to help students or faculty get past them.  Healthy skepticism is fine; ignoring the new landscape leads to extinction.

Today collection of tools is of a much higher quality than anything I looked at last week.  I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to find anything worthwhile out there.  But today we have an annotation tool, a huge collection of delicious (social bookmarking) tools, and Academic Earth, the educational video collection.

• A.nnotate is a prouduct that lets you upload documents in many different formats and put “stickies” on them.  Those documents can then be shared with others so that you can collaborate on projects with others.  There are a number of different pricing plans, including one specifically for academic institutions that also includes a way to integrate with Learning Management Systems.  They tout the ability to integrate with Moodle and also say they can integrate with other systems.  This will cost you a fair amount of money–around $3000 for unlimited usage–but it might save you your own server costs in some areas.  They also have a free version for individuals to use that looks like it will suit most peoples needs.  Although both Diigo and Google docs allow for some commenting and collaboration, this product allows multiple formats from pdfs to web pages and the notes are intuitive to make and read.  This definitely looks like a product worth investigating and I’m thinking it would be great for commenting on student work.  I’ve often used the comment feature in various word processors and although that works, there could be compatibility problems and it just feels a little clunky to me.
• Absolutely Delicious is really a web page with a list of links to a wide variety of delicious tools.  I’m a big fan of delicious so it’s nice to see a list of resources that can help me take advantage of that tool better.  There are tools that help you manage, retag, post, and search you bookmarks.  Some are web based and some are desktop tools.  There are also instructions for posting delicious links to your blog and simply how to get started using delicious.  I highly recommend adding *this* site to your bookmarks and try out some of the tools on the site.
• Academic Earth is a site I looked at and wrote a bit about before.  I really do like the look an feel of this site.  It’s uncluttered and very easy to navigate.  I had said earlier that compared to YouTube, the site had less material, but it’s definitely growing, and I think the way it’s organized by subject matter makes a lot of sense.  The YouTube EDU site is organized by school and many of the videos listed under the school are more promotional than educational.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, but if you’re looking for physics lectures, you’ll have to do a search.  Once you click a video, you’re out of the EDU portal and getting back isn’t easy.  While there are 691 videos on YouTube’s EDU site labelled physics compared to AE’s 4, I still think that AE is going to win out–at least it should.  While YouTube fell into being used for education, AE was built for it and there are features that make it a better tool for that reason.  In addition to the listing by topic or subject, there are also playlists organized by editors.  Those playlists include “Understanding the Economic Crisis” and “Wars Throughout History.”  I’m planning to use those with my kids–at least my high schooler–this summer.  There just seems to be more potential for building out an entire learning unit from AE lectures than from YouTube materials.

These are definitely must check out tools.  Let me know what you think of them or how you’re using them!

I suspect there are 40 million project management software apps out there.  Considering how many people do freelance web work, plus almost every institution has projects and needs a way to track them.  While these won’t be particularly useful for faculty in non-business related disciplines, these tend to be the most professional looking sites.

• 5pm is our project management product for today.  I have to say I was struck by the art on the site.  Rather than just a few screenshots at the top of the page, they have cartoon people at an after-work party, emphasizing that the point of project management is to complete the projects and celebrate! The product itself looks slick and contains many features.  It looks more complex than the other products I reviewed earlier this week, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you need.  It actually looks like a good replacement for Microsoft’s Project Management software.  Like the other products, there’s a monthly fee for using the product.
• 8tracks is a music sharing site, allowing users to build playlists of, you guessed it, 8 tracks.  It’s a much simpler site than Last.fm.  The philosophy of the site is that people create better mixes than algorithms.  In that way, it fits in perfectly with the social software philosophy.  As for educational uses, you could certainly create a list of music for a class.  The list generates an RSS feed, plus a unique url so it can be linked from a course blog, website or CMS.
• 9cays is a group email viewing site.  I don’t really get it, I must admit.  Is reading group email so complicated it needs its own application?  That’s all I’m going to say.

Tomorrow I’ll pick a couple of the apps that I’ve already reviewed that stand out as particularly good or useful for education.  And Monday, we’ll begin with the As!

Today got off to an auspicious start as many of the sites I initially clicked on gave me an error or a 404 or had morphed into something else entirely.  That is the problem with many social software tools; they disappear quickly, especially in this economy. Two of today’s sites are from Robot Co-op, a group I ran into via their All-Consuming site, which many academic bloggers used to keep track of and share their reading lists.  They have 3 “43″ sites: 43 Things, 43 Places, and 43 People.  Today we’ll be looking at the first two.  In addition, we’ll look at a “file sharing” site, 4shared.com.

• 43 Things is a site where you can set goals for yourself.  I’ve used this site a couple of times.  One goal I set was to read all the books on my Amazon recommendation list.  No, it hasn’t happened.  Basically, you enter goals for yourself and often see that other people share those goals and you can share strategies and the ups and downs of meeting those goals.  There are a few educationally oriented goals.  One is “get a 3.75 gpa” and another is “get As on all my exams.”  Learning a new language is a popular goal as is writing a book and traveling.  There are also plenty of people who want to further their education–get a degree of some kind or get a GED.  The idea behind the site is to get support from others with similar goals, and that may be something students would be interested in having.  I find the site a little fluffy, though.  Cute, but without a lot of seriousness to the pursuit of goals.
• 43 Places is similar to 43 Things except that the goal is to travel to a specific place.  The interesting thing about the site is the photos and information that people post after they’ve visited.  If you want to visit a place, you can ask questions about where to eat, what to do, etc.  Generally, people do respond to these questions with good information.
• 4shared.com provides space for file storage, but in addition, allows you to share those files publicly.  I must admit, I find the site a little sketchy.  Browsing around available files, I found music, software, and video, and I’m not sure all of it is legitimate.  This is another thing to watch out for in social software–sites that might be operating in a gray area of the law.  Big sites like YouTube obviously end up with some content that is copyrighted, but in general, most of the content is truly user generated and free to distribute.

Today’s collection brings one of the most unusual sites I’ve seen–a genome tracking and sharing site.

• 23andMe is a site that allows you to have your genes analyzed.  I’m not kidding.  They send you a kit.  You spit and send your spit back.  They analyze your genes. You can see who has similar genes by choosing to share your information with others who’ve participated.  In addition, your genetic code may advance genetic research, so you’re not only doing something of interest to you, you might also help forward medical science.   Participating in the site costs money, as one might expect.  They charge $399 for the kit and analysis, a small cost really when you think about all the information that might be gleaned from the process.
• 23 is a photo-sharing site–very similar to Flickr.  In searching the site, it seems that it has a much more international user base than Flickr does.  I use Flickr all the time and I seem to rarely run into photos by international users, though I know they’re there.  Like Flickr, one can upload photos, friend people, create albums, and join groups.  They also allow you to style your albums and photo area a bit more, choosing background and font styles.  There are also story areas for blog post-like creations and in fact, the company makes photo blogging software called visual blog.  The site is not as slick as Flickr.  I didn’t find it all that easy to navigate either, but there definitely seems to be a fairly vibrant community there that does find the site useful.  For educators, this site might be a nice alternative to Flickr, especially for finding international photos.
• Finally, we have 280Slides, a site for creating PowerPoint-like presentations.  Once you log in, you’ll see an editing screen very similar to PowerPoint’s.  There are very few themes to choose from, so you’re kind of stuck there.  But you can search the web for images and video on the fly and embed them quickly into your presentation.  Once your presentation is complete, you can embed it in a web page, upload it to SlideShare, or email it to someone.  It’s pretty straightforward and simple to use.  If you don’t have PowerPoint, this might be a good tool to use.

Once again a rather random assortment of applications and we’re sticking with the number theme, a theme that was popular among Web 2.0 projects a couple of years ago.

• 16Bugs is a bug tracking site.  Believe it or not, just the other day, my husband asked me if I knew of a bug-tracking site that didn’t require software installation.  Well, I do now.  This site allows you to set up a project or company with multiple projects and track the progress.  Although it has some of the qualities of a project management site, it’s geared specifically toward software development and coding.  Also, the site follows the Web 2.0 style of using bright colors and large, friendly icons.  It’s pleasing to look at, as well as practical, a big plus in my mind.  In fact, their motto is “We make bugs pretty.”  To get the most use out of it will cost you, however.  There is a free version, but you can get almost all the features for just $8/month, very reasonable.  Obviously, the use of this in education would be primarily for computer science or for other on-site programmers.
• 1Time is project management/billing software.  I’m sure we’ll be running into more of these as there’s a huge demand for finding ways to track employee and project time.  Like 14dayz that I reviewed on Friday, the benefit of this software is to centralize the management of project and employee time.  It touts the benefit of reducing unbilled time.  They offer several different reports and the ability for clients to see how much time has been put into their project.  There is a free option, but to get the most out of it, you’ll need to pay up.  Like 16Bugs, the cost is on a per month basis and for US buyers, depends on the Euro exchange rate, but starts around $18/month.  Again, this might be useful in some way on the administrative side, but probably not for academic purposes.
• The final application is 22Books.  The name of the site comes from the number of books by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which makes the site endearing already.  It’s a simple site compared to something like Library Thing, the go-to site for online book collecting and sharing.  All you do is make a list of books and give it a title, kind of like Listmania on Amazon. But I did see a school that was using it to list new books in the library.  Lists can be embedded in web sites or linked to directly.  Although the lists show who created them, you can’t click on the user and see other lists they created or anything else about them.  One of the tenets of social software is connecting people and this site doesn’t appear to have any way to do that.  However, this might be a simple way to create a reading list and embed it in a web site.

I’ll continue looking at sites tomorrow and on Friday, I promise a roundup of all the sites, with some picks of sites that I think are keepers.

There are so many social software applications out there, it’s almost impossible to keep up.  Even me, social software guru that I call myself, have trouble keeping up with what’s out there.  Worse, it’s hard to tell what will be useful, what will stick around for the long haul, and especially, what might be effectively leveraged for either teaching or research.  Many of these applications are built not with education but business in mind.  So, I’m officially challenging myself to try out as many applications as possible and review them here.  I’m going to start with Emily Chang’s list at Ehub, which is huge.  There are, I believe, over 2000 items on that list.  Let’s see, 3 months of summer, that’s roughly 90 days, um, yeah, not going to get through them all.  I’m counting on a few being gone, a few being obviously not useful, too cumbersome to get going with, etc.  If there’s something you’ve been wanting to try, let me know, and I’ll try it out.  Or something you are using that you love and I’m not using it, let me know that too and I’ll try it out myself.

All this testing is in an effort to build up a good toolbox for creating a personal learning network/environment and for helping faculty do so as well.  More on that soon!