Educational Technology and Change Journal

By Lynn Zimmerman
Associate Editor
Editor, Teacher Education

In 1994, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose original mission was to videotape “the testimonies of 50,000 survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust from around the world for educational purposes before it was too late.” In the years since then the foundation’s mission has changed from just archiving to establishing educational uses for the materials that are archived. The education department has developed “educational programs and products for classroom use by students of all ages.”

This year (2013) is the 20^th anniversary of Spielberg’s movie, Schindler’s List, which provided the impetus for the establishment of this foundation. To commemorate this anniversary, an online learning initiative has been set up to engage high school students in a competition that uses IWitness, a website set up for secondary educators and their students. Students participating in IWitness Video Challenge will have access to the 1,300 testimonies available on IWitness and will create their own video-essay.

This project seems to offer opportunities for students and teachers to engage in an assignment that would not be as accessible without modern technology. They can view, copy, and create using multimedia tools to develop a video essay that connects the students with the past and the present. To find out more about IWitness Challenge, I contacted Josh Grossberg of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

LZ: Who do you think will participate?

JG: We certainly hope that all students participate; it is our core belief that one person can make the world a better place and we want to reach as many of them as possible. Although IWitness is still in beta, it has already been accessed by more than 10,000 high-school students and 3,200 educators in 39 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

Continue reading →

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Stefanie Panke, Rob Moore, and Jamar Jones

By Stefanie Panke, Rob Moore, and Jamar Jones

The 10^th Annual Teaching and Learning Conference held on August 15 at Elon University (NC) is a regional event that attracts teachers, instructional designers, curriculum specialists, researchers, and students interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The UNC School of Government instructional support team spent a day of professional development there that proved to be a cornucopia of fresh ideas, concepts and insights.

Morning Plenary Session

R. Michael Paige

The opening keynote featured an inspiringly passionate talk by Michael Paige, Professor Emeritus of International and Intercultural Education at the University of Minnesota. Paige’s keynote raised awareness of the multifaceted and multilayered nature of the concept of intercultural sensitivity. In a nutshell: Every classroom is an intercultural experiment. Learners’ cultural backgrounds, values, and life experiences differ. What does it mean to become intercultural? Diversity and intercultural encounters go beyond different nationalities and include sexual orientations, localities, ethnicities, as well as learning and communication styles. “Who is the role model for us?” asked Paige. “In most societies, this is still really a challenge.” Getting students to transcend ethnocentrism and explore intercultural relations is a demanding pedagogical task. Intercultural sensitivity is not innate but needs to be learned and taught.  It is normal for students to be in denial of cultural patterns and to feel more comfortable in monocultural environments. Paige introduced the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC) as a useful model to help students navigate intercultural experiences.

Concurrent Sessions

After the morning plenary, we split up to attend different sessions: Each of us had a few personal highlights.

Stefanie’s Favorites: Authentic Learning , Motivation, and Big Data

Deandra Little and Paul Anderson

Deandra Little and Paul Anderson from Elon University delivered the next talk I attended. The speakers connected their introduction to the keynote and revealed they both recently moved to North Carolina. They asked the audience, “Well, who else is new?” which led to interesting intercultural discoveries. It turned out that Anderson, academic literacy specialist, had worked as a consultant with the University of Bielefeld (Germany) where I completed my PhD.

Anderson and Little defined authentic assignment as asking students to produce intellectual work (at an appropriate level) that mirrors a typical task that practitioners or scholars in the respective discipline perform. Thus, students are placed in a realistic situation where they use the knowledge and skills they are learning in the course to help someone else outside the classroom – not the instructor.  “Think about it from the student’s perspective – you need to write something for someone who already knows more about the subject than you do,” Anderson said, describing the problem of traditional writing assignments. Little explained in more detail their narrative approach towards authentic assignments. The instructors immerse the students in a story in which they use the subject knowledge to help another person or group. This approach comprises seven components: (1) The learning goal of the assignment, (2) the role the student will play, (3) the person (audience) who asks for the student’s assistance, (4) the problem or question, (5) the reason why the audience seeks the student’s help, (6) what the audience will do with the student’s work, and (7) the type of communication (genre) the student will produce to solve the problem.  Continue reading →

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By Frank B. Withrow

A school facility is too expensive to operate only part of the year; therefore the 21^st century school is designed to operate year round. The school day or time the school is open is at least twelve hours per day. Staff work on different shifts in order to efficiently use resources. Students attend at times scheduled in conjunction with their parents. Students can also access some instruction from their homes.

Obviously individual students do not attend all the hours the school is available. Students, in fact, attend at different times and different lengths of time in order to have the maximum learning take place.

Students, with the help of the school, schedule family vacations when all the members of the family have common vacation windows. Such vacations can happen at any time of the year. In fact, if a family is vacationing at a historical site such as the Grand Canyon, Washington, DC, Europe or Asia, the school can work with the student and family to document the vacation and share such results in the school library of vacation experiences. If the family is attending the Olympics, the student might even report back to the school events from their viewpoint. For example, my ten-year-old granddaughter attended my wife’s burial in Arlington Cemetery. She produced a slide show on the history of Arlington Cemetery and discussed who could be buried there. Her grandmother had been a Navy Corpsman in World War II. The service included a 21-gun salute and a formal Navy internment. She shared this with her class in Pennsylvania when she returned home. Obviously, family vacations can be extended learning experiences.

Dr. Margaret S. Withrow, author of Auditorily Augmented Interactive Three-dimensional Television as an Aid to Language Learning Among Deaf and Hearing Impaired Children: Final Report (1980) and a Navy Corpsman in World War II, is buried at Arlington Cemetery.

The 21^st century school contains a range of learning environments that includes classrooms, small team rooms, laboratories, technology centers and digital libraries as well as gyms and sports fields. In addition, schools have camping facilities that can be used year round. Schools have shops where students can create various projects they have designed. School auditoriums are used for community meetings so that the school becomes a center of community activities.  Continue reading →

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By Jessica Knott
Associate Editor
Editor, Twitter/Facebook

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Sloan Consortium’s Blended Learning Conference (July 8-9) in beautiful Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had attended earlier iterations of this event with mixed satisfaction. But when it comes to their face-to-face events, the planning committees and conference chairs seemingly step up their game every year. This conference, chaired by Tanya Joosten (@tjoosten), was one of the best I have ever attended, in person or virtually.

Tanya Joosten, conference chair.

While there, I had the opportunity to give a workshop entitled Visualizing Your Blended Course Design. Those who know me might be giggling a bit as it is common knowledge that my art skills are somewhat mediocre. One might say that my stick figures belong in the wood chipper. But the point of this workshop is to show people that the art isn’t the important part of the process. It doesn’t matter if you produce the most beautiful picture that ever was. What I want is for you to think a little differently about the design of the experience you provide your students.

Too often, we see the word “design” and zero right in on the elements of graphic design. Indeed, in my past, I’ve had people tell me that I’m not an instructional designer because I’m just not that good at the visual aspects. I vigorously disagree. A well-orchestrated teaching activity, executed in an environment spanning face-to-face environments and the virtual world where everything tangible is only tangible because we make it so, requires careful design and planning. We are all designers, even if our artistic skills more closely resemble third grade art class projects than they do the Mona Lisa. I’m proud of every third grade-level piece I produce because of the thought that goes into it.

Conan Heiselt

Drawing lets us think differently. It gets us away from what we know and allows us to use different parts of our brain. It makes us see our content in new ways. It lets us explore frameworks without the pressure of choosing “the right one.” A former colleague, Conan Heiselt, taught me that when you’re looking at a big, white, blank piece of paper, the first thing you should do is mess it up. This removes even more of the pressure to be perfect. I have incorporated this idea and found that he is absolutely right. Participants laugh and look at me like I’m crazy, but it’s often the point in the workshop where they begin to let go and have fun. This was no different at the blended conference. Workshop participant Brandi Leming (@BMPLearning) documented some of her thinking on Twitter. For me, the coolest part of the whole thing is looking around and seeing inside the brains of 20 – 60 different workshop participants; everyone visualizing differently, different pictures, motion, thoughts and structure.

Of course, for some, this workshop just simply doesn’t connect. Maybe the drawing is too stressful, or I am just unable to make the connections for them. Heck, I’ve been flat out told that drawing your ideas was “stupid and a waste of my time.” That’s okay too. I think this workshop went well, and several people told me so. I’m always curious about what the others thought. Wouldn’t it be awesome to know what the people you’re teaching are thinking as you’re teaching them? The best thing about working in the field of education is that right to explore, question, challenge, and finally settle on what’s best for you and your students. This is one of the things that the Sloan blended conference did really well this year. Continue reading →

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The absolute best conference that I have attended this year is the Esri Educators Conference, San Diego, July 6–9, 2013. Note that the educators also participated in the main conference, Esri International User Conference, also in San Diego, July 8–12, 2013. The big conference is also online.

This photo captures the essence of the Esri Education GIS (geographic information system) Conference.

In the days before the main conference, the educators’ conference is one of many mini-sessions. These groups quietly gather in separate meeting places. They are long enough to be meaningful.

The educator’s conference is different from any other conference I have attended. It is small and intimate. The icing on the cake for this conference was that six educators were picked from their videos to tell their GIS stories. They shared them and freely interacted with the audience. The stories were moving, diverse and informative.

There was plenty of time after the sessions ended for meetings and networking. This conference allows one to meet professors, to network with other teachers, national and international, and to gain practice in GIS skills with hands-on sessions and guidance. We had an un-conference section. There were also educator blogs and skill workshop sessions.  Continue reading →

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By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

Despite plenty of nay-sayers, the textbook is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet and continues on walking about as though alive. Textbooks have evolved considerably over the last fifty years and even somewhat in the previous fifty years. I even have one, A Text-Book of Physics, on my bookshelf beside me that was printed in 1891. It has some line drawings and no color. Its size is about 5”x8”. Today, textbooks have lots of colorful images, plenty of side bars, and lots of engaging questions sprinkled about on their heavy-weight glossy paper stock. They also have tons of advice to teachers on how to use them effectively. They’ve gone about as far as they can go with paper as the medium.

The word “textbook” originated in the 1720s, almost 300 years ago. It’s had a good run and is ready to retire. Those who argue that you cannot learn well without a textbook ignore the centuries prior to 1720 when lots of people, not everyone of course, learned and learned well with no textbooks anywhere.

Some will say that books were around even if they weren’t textbooks. The movable-type printing press was invented around 1439, only 180 years before the word “textbook” was coined. Before that all writing was done by hand or by engraving an entire plate for each page making books very expensive. Yet, people were learning long before 1439 or 1720. Even stone-age tribes passed on learning from generation to generation. Some argue that having a repository of knowledge is one reason that our species evolved longer life spans than chimpanzees and Neanderthals.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and independently developed a movable type system ca. 1439.

You can learn without textbooks. That’s certain. And you can learn well. But why should we bother to change something that’s worked for 300 years? Many deliver the verdict in a single word: technology. That’s way too simplistic.

Continue reading →

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By Muvaffak Gozaydin

[Note: This article was originally posted as comments on Jim Shimabukuro’s “MIT LINC 2013: ‘Consistent but Stupid.’” -Editor]

Muvaffak Gozaydin, Istanbul, Turkey, Tuvalu; President, ONLINE Education Co Non-profit

Here are my forecastings for U.S. higher ed (HE) in the next 10 years:

1. Only 100 or so research universities will survive.

2. They will develop very good online courses for their digital divisions.

3. Digital divisions will provide credits and degrees as MITx, HarvardX, StanfordX, etc.

4. Fees will be $ 1-10 per course so everybody can go to any school they want.

5. More than 60% of the people, 25-65 years old, will have degrees as Obama asks.

6. Graduates will find jobs easily since they graduated from good schools.

7. States will sell the land and buildings of the state schools and will generate funds to retrain the 2 million jobless teachers.

8. There will be no subsidy for higher ed (HE), therefore citizens will pay less State taxes.

9. There will be no subsidy from the Federal Government, therefore there won’t be $1 trillion loans and Federal tax will be less, too.

10. Money will flow into the U.S. from foreign students.

11. The Pentagon will be happy since there will be sufficient students for STEM.

12. Eighty percent of the students in digital divisions will be foreigners.

13. Most nations will be thankful to the U.S. for solving their HE problem.

14. Yes, even good MOOCs will be disrupting the education world but, to me, in a good way. Sure, politicians should advance with very careful steps like edX is doing. I say Coursera is moving too fast.

15. Somewhow GNP will increase, too.

Please comment where I am wrong and right.

Thanks a billion to all.

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By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

[Note: The following article first appeared as a comment on Morgan Sims‘s “Mobile Technology Finding a Place in the Classroom.” -Editor]

I do not desire to rain on anyone’s parade. Every technology has potential usefulness. Tablets with gesture-based interfaces have captured the imagination of very many people, some of them educators. My grandchildren both have iPads and do so much with them that it staggers the imagination. They’re just four and six years of age. Yet, the iPad is not an educational panacea, and neither is any other technology.

iPad mini and iPad with Retina display, retrieved from the Apple Store 7.11.13.

Consumer technology must come under special scrutiny. How well does it adapt to education? How easy is it for education to adopt?  Continue reading →

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ISTE 2013 (San Antonio, June 23-26, 2013) defeated me. It was hot, too hot; it was big, too big — except that I am sure it generated a lot of money. The attendance was huge, national and international and local. The venue was so large that it made for sore feet.

There were busses to take you to the center, but the weather was so hot that you would rather walk to the site than wait 20 minutes for the next bus. Some meetings were so distant from each other that it was time impossible to get to the sessions.

Many people had just a few participants in their sessions. I felt like I do when in the airline lanes. These lanes would be: Vendors, Corporate Sponsors, Officers of ISTE, SIGS, Youth, SETDA. State Affiliates, Distinguished Apple Educators, and so on. Separation by funding, importance. And lost in the mix were new teachers who come to learn, make associations, and to benefit from ISTE membership.

A strand of kids were involved. There are people who think all kids are digital immigrants. I don’t fight them. I tolerate them because they have the microphone and most of the funding. Perhaps ISTE is growing a new audience. The kids were everywhere, too. They did poster sessions and workshops, too.

A number of SIGs were involved. (See photos below.) We are at this time volunteers. We had a SIG open house. That’s a good thing because the meetings all overlap. Significant interest groups work throughout the year and do professional development for ISTE. It was a good thing to see the people you talk to, if only briefly, in the course of the meetings. We networked at an Open House.

There were SETDA meetings, state affinity meetings. There were SIG-sponsored workshops and keynotes and bloggers’ cafes. There were international gatherings… Does it sound like all too much? It was!

There were tourist distractions, but they were crowded too. Very crowded. I walked less steps in Rome. People in San Antonio walk all over the place, not just left or right. I fully expected someone to fall into the San Antonio River.

I think this is the very first time I gave up on the exhibit hall. It was too big, too many exhibitors, and crowded. I tried.

I have a black belt in exhibit halls, but this time I lost.

A disappointment. The first keynote was “entertainment” on gamification

I did not go to Richard Culleta’s keynote. I saw him at SETDA (San Antonio, June 21-24, 2013) and got his message about data. Boring. He did reference that the groups he profiled were funded from Race to the Top.

Twenty thousand people were at ISTE. I guess it was a marketing success.

People in line for Surface tablets. Microsoft gave away 10,000 tablets. I wrote about that event here. There were tears of joy here in the room where they were giving them away.

Continue reading →

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By Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

On May 15, 2013, I had the opportunity to attend the Stone Soup Conference, a professional development event at Meredith College in Raleigh. The day featured three talks by Dr. Curt Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. The day was centered on major themes of Curt’s work: open learning, networking, creative instructional techniques and motivational strategies: “Quality, plagiarism, copyright and assessment are the four topics everyone wants to know about before considering online learning. I am not going to talk about any of these. I am going to talk about pedagogy,” he clarified in the beginning.

Fig.1: Curt Bonk at the Meredith Stone Soup Conference, May 15, 2013.

Curt explored the development of educational technologies over the past decades – which he depicted as a journey toward openness. Central to his credo, “Today, anyone can learn anything from anyone at any time,” is the vast amount of high-quality material available on the web. Ten years ago, the use of open learning, sharing and educational technologies was met with great resistance. Today, educators have access to sites like Merlot, Connexions, World Digital Library and Smithsonian education resources. This allows teachers to explore new roles as curators of learning: “It is our job to mine and mind high quality material – and ignore the rest.” Obviously, this does not mean that teachers merely point students toward online resources. On the contrary, Curt introduced an 80/20 rule of thumb: “Approximately 20% of students are self-directed learners; the others need our guidance.”

Throughout the day, Curt connected current technology trends with the history of education. As one of his role models, he named Charles Wedemeyer, founder of the Open University UK and author of the book “Learning at the Back Door” (1981) that predicts the impact of e-learning on education. Another example of trends prevalent today that were predicted in the 1980s is the video “Apple Knowledge Navigator” (1987).

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By Jessica Knott
Associate Editor
Editor, Twitter

Like Jim and Stefanie, I attended TCC and SLOAN-C. Both conferences left me with big ideas and a lot to take with me into my professional practice (not to mention posts for ETC Journal, which will be rolling out in the coming weeks). But before I dive in, let me take a brief detour to direct your attention to my colleague Stefanie Panke’s write-up of her TCC experiences and state that I agree wholeheartedly with her assertion about badging. As of this year, I am sold on it. Additionally, I encourage you to read Jim’s words on session selection and his call for the flipped conference as a solution to virtual conference overload. Their reviews were amazingly well done, inspiring me to take a trip back to the drawing board for some deeper pondering on themes and my experiences.

Stefanie Panke

Last year, I found the badging experience to be somewhat superficial, but I believe now that I was approaching the whole thing somewhat incorrectly. Watching TCC 2013 unfold and seeing the interactions between attendees, I have a better understanding of the values badging provides. I saw people make personal connections based on the badges they had earned, and I saw their virtual experiences become personal ones. This is not a feeling I had at SLOAN Emerging Technologies, despite a more active Twitter back channel.

Now, as the true focus of this post, I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of the two conference experiences. I am a virtual conference veteran, but found that the close proximity of these two events provides an interesting comparative look at how little touches make attendees feel at home and connected.

Laura Pasquini

The biggest pro of both conferences was by far the people. While I felt lost most of the time in the Emerging Tech experience, with a large, hard to wield PDF of offerings and e-mails from vendors asking me to come visit their booths and thanking me for rich conversations that were never had, the Twitter back channel provided an excellent mechanism for grounding myself and allowing my brain to focus on what I was learning. Laura Pasquini (@laurapasquini) wrote an excellent blog post of her experiences at the conference. Though she attended in person, her perspectives are pertinent for those present and virtual.

Continue reading →

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By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

ET4 Online — Sloan-C’s 6th Annual International Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning, April 9-11, 2013 — was everything you could ask for in a conference. The number of presentations was mind-boggling. I was able to take in just a few. One was by Robbie K. Melton, associate vice chancellor of eLearning and a full tenured professor at Tennessee State University. She talks about “Impact and Transformation of Mobilization in Education: Emerging Smart Phones & Tablets Innovations” (10 Apr. 2013), but I have no doubt that she could probably talk about anything and get her audience to buy in. She strides the floor, mingling with her audience.

Robbie K. Melton

Her voice is vibrant, her presence is compelling. She has you hanging on every word. You know that she probably has outstanding teacher awards covering all four walls of her office. In a debate, you’re sure her opponents would probably end up cheering for her. One of the innovations she mentions allows professors to override the mobile devices that students bring to classrooms. With this gadget, professors can maintain control in their classrooms even in this BYOD era. However, you know she doesn’t need it in her classrooms. She’s that good.

Kim Coon

Another standout speaker was Kim Coon, executive vice-president for strategic partnerships at Comcourse, Inc. While Melton was hot, Coon was, well, cool. His talk was on “Making the Next Big Thing Happen, When Nobody Believes You Can: Moving from Idea, to Consensus, to Implementation” (9 Apr. 2013). He, too, mingles with the audience, carrying an extra mike for audience members to use. He’s a master at engagement. He gets the audience involved. He remembers the names and comments of those who have picked up the mike, and he integrates them into his talk, almost seamlessly, like a magician.  Continue reading →

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By Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

Last week 1000 attendees enjoyed three days packed with information and discussion at the 18th Annual TCC Worldwide Online Conference, held from April 16-18, 2013. The acronym TCC stands for Technology, Colleges and Community. Organized by the University of Hawaii, TCC is the oldest running worldwide online conference designed for university and college practitioners. Addressees include faculty, academic support staff, counselors, student services personnel, students, and administrators.

As usual, my review is by no means an authoritative summary but comprises an eclectic collection of talks and topics I found particularly interesting as well as general observations of the conference’s atmosphere and features.

Day 1 (April 16):  Technical Hiccups, Engaging Presenters

TCC 2013 started with the GAU* for an online event: The conference site was down. Surprisingly, the impact was not as devastating as one would think. The social media team quickly rose to the occasion and posted the link to an alternative entry page on Facebook and Twitter. Social Media saved the day!

The first session I attended dealt with the question of how to approach the challenge of training faculty in using instructional technologies. Sher Downing, Executive Director for Online Academic Services (OAS) in the School of Business at Arizona State University, presented her strategies in the well-received talk “Ways to Train Faculty.” To facilitate online learning, the OAS team developed a comprehensive faculty training package that comprises innovative formats such as “hit the road” one-on-one training in faculty offices, online and interactive training and certification, faculty blogs, faculty roundtables and informal chats “on the dean’s patio.” Especially the latter seem to be an ideal space for discussing ideas, visions and problems among faculty and instructional designers.

Continue reading →

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By Jessica Knott
Associate Editor
Editor, Twitter

Cohort I

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Educause Midwest Regional Conference in Chicago, Illinois. While there, I attended a session by Brian Paige, IT Director of Calvin College, Bo Wandschneider, CIO (Chief Information Officer) of Queen’s University, and Melissa Woo, Vice Provost for Information Services and CIO at the University of Oregon entitled “Creating Peer Mentoring Networks for Leadership Development.” Calling themselves a “cohort,” these three, and others they have picked up since their initial meeting, have become a support group of sorts for each other as they navigate careers in leadership positions in the higher education field.

Bo Wandschneider, Melissa Woo, Pete Hoffswell, and Dan Ewart.

I asked them some questions about their experience, and, in true cohort fashion, they collaborated together in a Google document to answer. The following responses are the collaborative effort of Paige, Wandschneider, and Woo, as well as Pete Hoffswell of Davenport University and Dan Ewart of the University of Idaho.

What drew you to the people you ultimately grouped with?

What drew us to each other were our commonalities. We’re all in a more-or-less similar stage in our career progressions. As such, we face similar challenges and had a lot in common that we wanted to discuss. Currently four of the five of us are CIOs (and the rest of us are encouraging the fifth!). Interestingly only one of us was a CIO at the time of joining the group. Three of us became CIOs during the time we’ve been in the group. An additional motivating factor for one of the group’s members is that he’d seen presentations given by some of the members of the group and was excited about the chance to explore their ideas further. However, what’s probably most important and the one thing that really drew the people in the group to each other was the willingness to share and trust.  Continue reading →

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By Mike Curcio
Student at Kapi’olani Community College
University of Hawai’i

Google Voice (Voice) is a telephony management service offered by Google. Like their other services, Voice is free-of-charge, with the exception of international calls. If you already have a personal Google account, and, with 425 million active Gmail users worldwide, chances are that you do, getting started with Voice can be very easy.

One of the initial steps in the setup process is selecting a phone number. Voice can assign users a phone number from most U.S. area codes (Alaska and Hawaiʻi users cannot currently obtain local phone numbers through Voice). Alternatively, users can choose their own phone number in many area codes. Let’s say you own a pet grooming company. You could check the availability of the number “DOG-WASH” or “364-9274.”

Voice is officially available to users in the U.S. only, but I have successfully used it in Japan with no problems, making and receiving free calls and text messages to and from the U.S. via Voice’s web interface. With the help of a WiFi connection and another free Android App, GrooveIP, I was also able to use my phone to send and receive calls and text messages, just as I would at home, without being charged for data or minutes. U.S.-based international students may want to set up Voice accounts for their families back home.   Continue reading →

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By Lynn Zimmerman
Associate Editor
Editor, Teacher Education

As part of their programming on April 8, 2013, which was Holocaust Remembrance Day, WBUR Here & Now broadcast a story that illustrated a unique approach using technology to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors. World War II and the Holocaust ended in 1945. Therefore, those who survived those years are aging and dying. Over the past 20 years there have been numerous attempts to preserve the stories of those who survived, from films to audio recordings, documentaries to webcasts.

Simulated Holographic Video of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter speaking to a class of students. Published on YouTube, 8 Feb. 2013.

The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation and Institute for Creative Technologies have come up with the most unusual to date — they are creating holographic images of survivors that not only tell the person’s story but can also interact with the audience, answering their questions. When asked how they were able to do this, Paul Debevec, Associate Director of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, answered that they spent about 12 hours with each participating survivor, asking them every conceivable question one might ask a Holocaust survivor to generate a database of answers using artificial intelligence technology. Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation, remarked that the Foundation has 52,000 testimonies and they have a lot of experience in what survivors want to talk about and what questions students ask.

The idea is that this technology is a way to give children of the future a chance to see, hear and interact with a Holocaust survivor long after the last one has gone. The interviewer was concerned that the idea was rather ghoulish. However, Smith, assured her that this was not the case. He explained that is like watching very good quality 3-D TV.

It is expected that the technology will be available for museums within the next year or two. Debevec predicts that this technology will be economically feasible for everyone in the future.

Pinchas Gutter – see his simulacrum.

You can see Pinchas Gutter’s simulacrum at http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/04/08/holocaust-survivor-holograms

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By Jessica Knott
Associate Editor
Editor, Twitter

This week, I had the chance to talk with Dr. Daniel McGee (CV), former middle and high school teacher in Francistown, Botswana, Peace Corps volunteer, and researcher/biostatistician for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. McGee’s work in creating a free, public access online learning system for primary and secondary students in Puerto Rico has gained traction in recent years, becoming the basis for online pre-calculus materials that will now be used in schools throughout Puerto Rico.

As his projects began generating larger and larger data sets, he became interested in exploring the insights they might provide on learning styles, learning types, and learning in general. This interview provides an overview of the motivations behind the study as well as a brief discussion of some of his key findings.

Daniel Lee McGee, Professor, Mathematics, University of Puerto Rico

JK: What did this study find, exactly? Why is this important?

DM: There were two important results of this study.

Result 1: In general, most efforts to define the categories for learning types have been a priori in nature. Researchers will start with a set of learning types and then will categorize students. This study takes an a posteriori approach to student learning types. We gather a great deal of data on a lot of students. The data comes from questionnaires and results on quizzes and exams from an online learning system. Rather than starting with predefined categories for students, we look for natural groups of students based on similar responses to questionnaires and similar results on quizzes and exams. These natural groupings lend insight into the natural learning styles of the students taking the course. The first result of the study was that students were not scattered randomly, they did form natural groupings. So the vast amount of information available with online learning systems does allow us, at least in Puerto Rico, to identify student learning types in an a posteriori manner.

The vast amount of information available with online learning systems does allow us, at least in Puerto Rico, to identify student learning types in an a posteriori manner.

Importance of result 1: Our results indicate that large groups of students seem to organize themselves into distinct clusters. The ability to identify these clusters and their associated strengths and weaknesses will allow professors with large groups of students using online systems to better address the particular needs of the distinct learning types that are in their class at a particular time.  Continue reading →

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By Kathlyen Harrison and Michael Gilmartin

As every teacher knows, there is an overloading number of websites and tools available to educators, some free and others with registration costs. Most of these tools are geared toward specific content, and the trick can often be trying to sift through all of the different types to find the ones that suit your needs, skills, and even your personality. Triptico offers a wide variety of creative, interactive, and visually engaging apps. The best part is that you have access to numerous apps for free. Not to mention that the developer of this program is constantly creating new apps to use for free.

Figure 1 – Triptico App Launch Screen

About Triptico

Triptico.co.uk is a web tool that allows you to create and use various types of activities, tools, and quiz makers to help improve the classroom and engage students. Triptico is a free app available for download with an option to upgrade for a small fee. There are four different categories of programs: tools, timers, selectors, and quizzes. Each has interactive apps that you can use and adapt to your class. The different interactive modes allow you to bring creativity and uniqueness into the classroom, diversifying the ways in which students learn, review, and practice various skills. Triptico is simple to use yet sophisticated in content with apps color coded to denote type and categories.

Continue reading →

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By Frank B. Withrow

The Total Learning Research Institute’s Space Explorers model of team learning emphasizes full participation of all of the members whatever their individual skills or knowledge may be. The five foundation principles of team learning are:

1. Treat others as you wish to be treated.
2. Walk the talk.
3. Respect and value other team members’ ideas and contributions.
4. Be part of the solution and not a part of the problem.
5. Hang together, not separately.

Team Learning can be applied to any educational level from preschool to graduate school and can be used to model principles that are used in many professions and businesses. It is famous for its use in NASA missions. Everyone on the team contributes to the overall objective. Teams often first define the objective or problem to be solved.

“Taking education to new heights…”

Team learning happens when a group of students work together to coordinate their efforts toward meeting a specific goal. The team uses the skills and talents of all its members to reach a specific goal. It not only meets the team goal, but it also meets the personal goals of its members.  Continue reading →

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By Frank B. Withrow

The English language is the most used language in the world. Many of its 1,000,000 words are adapted from other languages. English has 44 sounds that are represented by the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. The 26 letters are combined 196 ways to represent the 44 sounds of English. Therefore, English is only a semi-phonetic language in its written form. English adapts many words from other languages but often retains the spelling of the original language while anglicizing the pronunciation of the word. For example, “bouquet” from the French language is pronounced as “bokay” in English while retaining the French spelling. Spelling bees are thought to have originated in the USA, and the reason is probably because English spelling must often rely on memorization.

Vocal sounds and hearing are used as the warning system for humans and animals. A dog will bark to express its awareness of danger in its environment to alert other dogs. Many animals have vocalizations that are used to warn others of impending dangers. Vocalization superimposed on the eating and breathing systems is the expressive mechanisms used to warn and alert others. Hearing is the receptive sense that alerts individuals to danger.  Continue reading →

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By Jessica Knott
Associate Editor
Editor, Twitter

[Note: ETCJ editors and writers live full lives, and from time to time, we’ll be publishing some of their extracurricular pursuits. See John Adsit’s “The Great Technology Controversy Follows Me into the Caves,” the first in this series. -Editor]

A few weeks ago, Jim asked me why I never wrote about roller derby. My answer to him was that I’d honestly never thought about it. What’s to say? Every day, I wake up, roll over and groan. Sometimes instead of getting out of bed, I roll out of it and onto the floor, somehow miraculously proceeding to my feet from there. Something on my body always hurts. I am 35 years old, but my laugh lines are thankfully all in the right place. I weigh 180 pounds, but I’m happy with my body and what I can do with it.

Addie Mortem (Jess Knott), blocker for the Lansing Derby Vixens. Photo by Jena McShane of McShane Photography.

Last year, I ran a half marathon with very little training due to a bruised kidney. But I did it. (Wait, you bruised your what?) I spend two hours, three days a week smelling seriously terrible (excuse me?), and the rest of them studying hypermedia and online learning. I teach faculty development workshops and laugh so much I should have an abdominal six-pack (a what?). I am a smackademic (smackaHUH?).

I am Addie Mortem, a blocker for the Lansing Derby Vixens roller derby league of Lansing, Michigan. I am also Jessica Knott, instructional designer at Michigan State University and PhD student in MSU’s nationally-ranked PhD program in Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education. Hence, I am a “smackademic,” as coined in a Chronicle of Higher Education article circa 2010 (http://chronicle.com/article/Smackademics-Join-the-Ranks/123670/). And I am not alone in my league as I am joined by criminal justice PhD student in criminal justice Ludacrush, PhD student in English Rue McSlamahan, PhD in music theory PhDemon, PhD in forestry House of Bruise, PhD student in educational administration Krizzy Azzbee, and Juris Doctor Little Hitaly.   Continue reading →

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U.S. Education Dept. Offers Tools for Evaluating Ed. Tech by Sean Cavanagh from Education Week (12.28.12)
The US Dept. of Education has released a draft (Expanding Evidence Approaches) of a proposed framework for administrators and teachers to use in evaluating educational technology. This research-based framework aims at helping educators make economically wise as well as educationally sound choices.

Language-teaching firms: Linguists online: Technology is starting to change language-learning from The Economist (1.5.13)
This article focuses on two language firms and how they are using technology to teach languages. Berlitz, one of the oldest language teaching companies, has sold off its publishing business. Bought out by a Japanese firm a few years ago, it has been a little slow getting into the language teaching technology market. Rosetta Stone, which recently went public, is moving away from the boxed sets of CDs to an online platform which is more expensive to operate but more flexible for learners.

How to Get Parent Support for Tech Use in Class by Jennifer Carey from MindShift (12.31.12) at KQED (original 12.14.12).
Sometimes parents do not understand the role that technology can play in learning. Carey suggests some practical tips on how to engage students and parents in technology-assisted education. Communication is key to this process.

How to promote literacy skills in the digital age by Laura Devaney from eSchool News (12.19.12)
Many apps that are available for teaching literacy and reading skills to younger students fall short in helping them develop strong reading skills. A report (Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West: Empowering Parents and Educators) commissioned by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading looks at a wide range of apps and makes recommendations for educators.

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By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

[Note: This article was prompted by an email exchange initiated by Lynn Zimmerman on 1.13.13. -Editor]

This sort of question seems to be on my desk daily in many different guises. I began writing software in 1960 and never really stopped.

There’s no simple answer. Also, the “philosopher’s stone” of software, a way to create software without programming, has been sought after for decades without result. There are some teaching languages for elementary school that are like that but are too limited to be of much use in the real world. Do not expect to be able to drag-and-drop an “app” soon even though Eclipse for Java, and other GUIs (graphic user interfaces) for other languages, do something like that for the UI part of an application. It takes more to make the software really do useful work for you.

For the novice who’d like to have an application, you can use HTML5 and Javascript as long as your program is relatively short, maybe under 100 lines. For comparison, Smart Science® explorations uses a 20,000-line client-side Java program with around 20,000 lines of Java on the server and a substantial SQL database. Once you exceed 1,000 lines, Javascript begins to break down, and you must use something more robust. (Actually, I’d stay away from Javascript programs longer than two pages, about 150 lines.) The advantage of this approach is that your program will run essentially anywhere, including those tablets.   Continue reading →

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By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

I’m visual when it comes to verbal. With topics that are complex and new, I automatically doodle before actually sitting down at my computer to write sentences and paragraphs. With paper and pencil, I map out the relationships between and among ideas or units of thought. I usually begin with a word that rises to the surface of my mind. I write it down on whatever’s handy. Backs of envelopes or scraps of paper are the usual. I add another word that I associate with the first and position it in a way that reveals their logical relationship.

I add small rectangles around the words and connect them with lines and arrows to suggest causal links, or I use circles that overlap or contain smaller circles to show various set relationships. I continue to construct the picture by dropping in idea words and sketching in their logical connection to the parts and the whole. Some words surface but don’t seem to fit anywhere at the moment so I plop them on the side. Later, I work them into the evolving picture or erase them if they don’t seem to fit in anywhere. As you can imagine, with paper and pencil this means a lot of erasing and redrawing.

My 32-inch desktop screen with Stickies.

In grad school, I found a huge blackboard at a thrift shop a couple blocks away from my apartment. I lugged it back to my small room and screwed it into one of the walls. It filled nearly the entire wall. I was in doodle heaven. This became my thinking pad. I could quickly sketch idea maps with chalk and revise with an eraser as I went along. I could step back at any time to see the whole picture, and step in to futz with the parts. When it was complete, I sat down with my typewriter (no personal computers back then) and wrote the paper.   Continue reading →

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