I’m also trying to put together a quick blog post. I’ve greatly reduced my twitter intake over the summer so maybe I can rechannel some of the half formed thoughts I’d usually put there into a blog post, even if it is a lame “blogging about why I haven’t been blogging” sort of post. Sorry this seems to be heading that way but maybe it’s necessary to break open the creative logjam that I’ve been feeling has kept me from writing.

Uh-oh – only 2 minutes left until the silence is shattered for the day. Putting together a blog post in 15 minutes is way tougher than it ought to be. Time for that last bit of quality time with my cup of coffee.

My friend and mentor (frientor?) Rick Schwier has recently announced the publication of his new book Connections: Virtual Learning Communities. Rick describes it as …

… an eBook that explores how online communities form, who joins them, and how they operate in learning environments. This book is available as an .epub document, suitable for viewing on most mobile devices and desktops.

The book is already on my iPad and in the top three for my summer reading list (and no, Rick, Stieg Larsson is not on my reading list and I certainly wouldn’t put it ahead of your work). I’m impressed with it so far for three reasons.

First, it might be academic in content but it doesn’t read like an academic book. Maybe that’s because Rick and I have talked about these things so often, I recall some of our conversations – I can almost hear him speaking the words as I read. But I’m pretty sure anyone interested in online learning, informal learning or educational technology in general will get a lot out of the book.

Second reason I’m impressed – Rick has released this as a free, creative commons licensed work. This is how all academic work should be released, in my opinion and also in Rick’s:

this book will not be commercial. Ever. It will be free. Forever. If there are any costs associated with its production or distribution, I will eat them. This is more than just a friendly gesture; it is a philosophical position. I am an academic who has been paid generously from public coffers. You shouldn’t have to pay me twice. I also believe, as my friend Dean Shareski once stated, that sharing is a moral imperative— a responsibility we have as educators—not just a nice thing to do.

Yep, he talks the talk and walks the walk.

A third reason I’m impressed is that Rick is publishing the book in a way that transcends time (I’ve always thought of Rick as being slightly time-lordish). I love it when people push some boundaries between different media. My mind is blown by some of the boundaries Rick is pushing and erasing with this book. Along with the book, Rick has put together some videos for an introduction to each chapter. Most books are linear and finite – they are read in a certain order and are done when you reach the end. Connections has many (but not thrown in gratuitously) hyperlinks to web pages, videos and even Elluminate recordings. Rick sees the book as a starting point for an ongoing discussion about virtual learning communities.

I will return to this book when I can to reshape and repair it. And I hope to include some of your stories in the next edition.

If you want to be part of the ongoing conversation and part of future revisions of the book, you can participate at the VLC book wiki.

P.S. I’m trying a bit of an experiment with this blog post, continuing on from my last post. I’m writing in IA Writer on my iPad in markdown format. From here it will be emailed to my posterous blog which should autoforward it to my main personal blog which should then tweet out the new blog post (if this ends up looking like crap, the process broke down somewhere along the line). Although this is perhaps the most convoluted workflow I’ve ever heard of to post to a blog, I’m hoping that being able to start the blogging on my iPad (without a doubt it is my current most favoured way to connect to the digital world) will get me blogging a little more often. Like, maybe three or four times a year. At this rate, I might even get a new podcast out! :–)

Time for some winter cleaning. There are a lot of people who prefer to do spring cleaning, but once spring hits I’d rather be outside. I like this time of year so that it clears out the space I’m going to be in for the next few months. If I don’t need it or use it, it is in danger of being evicted.

I’m looking at the same thing for the RSS feeds in my Google Reader. The current count of unread items is well into the 4 digit range. Some of them are unread news sources and some are unread blog posts. I’m going to clean out the news sources by the standard mark all as read technique but for the blogs I’m going to be more heavy handed. They are all going to be cleared and unsubscribed. I’m not sure yet which ones I’ll resubscribe to or if I’ll bother to resubscribe to any at all.

There was a time when we in the educational technology used our blogs not only to throw our mental spaghetti at the world to see what stuck, but also to stay in touch with each other. It wasn’t just our ideas we put out there, it was also how we stayed in touch by commenting on each others posts and responding via blog posts. RSS was the conduit for finding out what others were saying or thinking. Bloglines, then later Google Reader, became the community gathering place.

Twitter makes a lot of that unnecessary. We can find out what others are saying and thinking in real time. All the small talk that is the social glue holding a community together happens on Twitter. I wouldn’t use a blog post anymore to thank Rick for bringing me back a Cubs baseball from Chicago, I’d use a tweet. Twitter hasn’t replaced blogging, but it has replaced some of what a blog used to be used for because it is a better tool for doing that. Twitter has had the same effect on my blog post reading as well – I usually read posts that I’ve found via Twitter instead of on Google Reader. Maybe I only need Google Reader to keep up with various news sources (although many of those are also broadcasting links on Twitter).

OK – here goes.

Whew – that was easy. In case you felt a disturbance in the force, I might have just unsubscribed from your blog feed. But don’t feel like I’m rejecting you. It’s not you … it’s me. I haven’t given you nearly the time and attention you deserve. I hope that we can still stay in touch and be twitter friends.

Levity aside, I have three questions for you and your comments here or on twitter are truly appreciated. First, did you find out about this blog post from an RSS feed reader or from Twitter? Second, are you finding most of your reading online via twitter or an RSS feed? Third, if I do decide to start subscribing to some blog posts again, who are your “must read” bloggers?

After a few days of research and pondering I’ve put together a set of tools and a workflow that I think will work. The two primary criteria I’m looking for are portability and simplicity. I want to be able to access the information not only on my iPad, but also on my MacBook or from any of the school computers. I’d considered using Google forms, but I’d also like to have the data actually residing on my devices simultaneously, not just accessible through the cloud. I already use Dropbox for syncing/storing many other files on different computers so I’ll be making use of it for this project. I also want my data to be portable in the sense that I can use/edit it between different applications – no proprietary data formats allowed!

By simplicity, I mean that the tools needed to work with the data should be simple tools that I can have on my MacBook, iPad or whatever device I have at hand. Straight ASCII text is the simplest data format for which tools are readily available on multiple platforms so I’ll put all the data into straight text files.

There are a number of iPad apps that edit text, but only a couple that I know of that sync with dropbox – Plain Text (currently free but soon to adopt a freemium model) and Elements ($4.99). (I did a quick google search while writing this post and found that another app called iA Writer ($4.99) also looks promising. There is a Dropbox app directory for various platforms that connect into the Dropbox APIs). Since Plain Text is currently free, I’m using that but if a better alternative comes along, I can easily use transfer over since all the data is in plain text files. I’m storing the records in a separate file for each student.

Usually adding components to a workflow or other system increases the complexity of the system. In this case, however, there is one additional element that makes the system simpler. I already use TextExpander on my MacBook and it is one of my indispensable tools. There is also a version of TextExpander for iOs devices that allows me to create text snippets then assign a text trigger for it. When I type in the text trigger, if I’m in a TextExpander aware app, it is instantly and magically transmogrified into the text snippet. For example, i have a text snippet for the current date in the format YYYY-MM-DD which is triggered using “dymd”. I type in those four characters and today’s date in the desired format appears. I’m creating some text snippets for templates that I will use for creating the records.

So the whole thing basically consists of text files stored/synced with Dropbox. I can create/edit the files with any text editor that can get access to Dropbox. TextExpander helps to save on the typing, which is especially handy when typing on the iPad. The only part that I need to figure out is some way of tweaking data out of the text files in a manageable way, but I think I’ll be able to put together some simple Python scripts to do all the data extraction.

Stay tuned for details as to how this works out.

• Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
  

I’ve been thinking/pondering about how much new tools/technology really change learning since Edubloggercon at ISTE earlier this year in Denver. There were a lot of smart people with interesting ideas there, but the one that created the strongest impression was during a breakout discussion on the use of iPads in schools. There were a lot of iPads at ISTE and they were in especially high concentration at Edubloggercon so this was a discussion that was of interest to many of the folks there. Most of the iPad nation (I was amongst them) were abuzz about how the iPad was going to be a transformative tool that would really change teaching and learning.

But Scott McLeod (or David Jakes – they were both pursuing the same line of thought in the ensuing discussion) asked a question that stuck with me for … well, right up until now actually. He asked if the iPad was truly transformative – that is, would it change the way we approach teaching and learning in the schools – or was it just a better status quo. Was it really going to allow us to get students learning in a different, and hopefully better, way or was it just the same old same old with some bright shiny objects thrown in to get students’ attention. Scott and David made a convincing assertion that it was the latter. I thank them both for provoking some lengthy reflection on my part. The iPad is great at presenting content in fascinating ways, but how does it let students engage in the creation of knowledge differently than the methods that have been used for the past 50 years? Is it just a shiner, better and more expensive textbook?

The question arose again this morning when I followed a tweeted link to a list of alternatives to book reports. It’s an interesting list and some of the techniques/tools mentioned sound like a lot of fun. I’m sure the students would find them to be a welcome change from the written style of book report. (Dare I even call it a noel approach?) But I’m not sure the students would learn anything more about the book or any different cognitive skills from the analysis of a book than a written book report. The change has been the type of assessment but how much of an alternative is that?

I don’t want to come across as condemning the iPad’s usefulness as a tool in education or the value of have alternate methods of assessing student learning. Access to information that is up to date and well presented will, I think, keep students more interested in the information. Alternate methods of assessing learning will provide some students with a better way to communicate their learning instead of assessing how well they take written tests. My concern is that if we see these as being transformative, we’ll give up looking for ways that really get students involved in deep learning.

But in an attempt to avoid being one of “those teachers” that make Alec and Will cringe, and inspired by the discussion on Scott McLeod’s blog post, I have been racking my brain trying to think of a different way to do this so that students are more engaged in the creation of their knowledge. And I thinking have an idea that doesn’t suck. And if it does, I want you to let me know.

One of the ways that I can understand something abstract and complex like a cell, is by analogy. Instead of supplying the analogy, I’m going to ask students to work in pairs or trios develop their own analogies. They’ll start with a couple of days of research about the structure of prokaryotic, plant and animal cells. Then each group will develop an analogy for each of them (I’ll give them some examples to start with – a plant cell is like a city, an animal cell is like a factory, etc.). For a deliverable, I’m going to have them create a representation/explanation of their analogy to share with or present to the class, with bonus marks given for creative analogy and/or presentation.

I’m hoping it doesn’t suck and I’m hoping it helps the students understand the cell and how cell theory is such an important foundation of biology. I hope I’ll have the opportunity to report back on the success of this approach to teaching what could otherwise be another list of stuff to read and regurgitate at test time. And if Alec and Will like the idea, that wouldn’t be too bad either.

• Posted using BlogPress, which so far I’m liking, from my iPad
  

I hadn’t realized that the wordpress app accepts HTML input. Once I did, I thought i could create a link by typing in the good old HREF code. I’ve done a fair bit of coding in raw HTML, but really hoped there was a better solution. There is, but I didn’t find it until I started typing in the HREF tag. A helpful little dialog box opened up asking if I wanted help making a link. Yes, by gosh, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I tapped on “make a link” and yet another little dialog box popped up with fields for me to enter the link text and the URL. After doing that, there appeared a nice little snippet of perfectly formatted HTML for my link.

What I am find lacking is the user interface, which surprises me given the ease of use of the web interface for wordpress. There are a number of features that I needed to look up on the wordpress iPad app website. Adding images also seems less than intuitive. Images can be automagically replaced, but appear only at the end of the post, not anywhere else.

If you are only blogging to a wordpress blog and you generally don’t include images in your blog posts, this is a good app to use. If you do want to add images, this might not meet your needs as your sole blogging tool since you will probably need to touch up your posts in your web browse after the initial writing.

I’ll write up my review of blogpress after I’ve used it for a few days.

PS – WTF? There doesn’t seem to be a post or publish button here. The publishing feature should be obvious, not part of a scavenger hunt.

PPS – The status of the post needs to be changed in the write window. I would never have checked that on my own but found out how by looking at the WP website. Given these problems in the user interface of the app, I would be tempted to use Simplenote or Evernote to write my blog posts then just copy and paste into the web interface. #usabilityfail