Social Networking Technologies in Education

Social Networking Technologies in Education
I like ithis article about social networking. Its one of the first ones I've seen to take it seriously. While there is no vision as to its role or application in education (how it fits in), it does discuss objectively from a more abstract almost sociological point of view, extoling the requirement of education to be 'liberator from the shackles of ignorance as well as steward of the common culture' and hence take on technology as it arrives.

Teaching & Practice Experts prompt E-learning Questions

Anatomy of a Lesson - Group Work and Feedback | Teachers TV

Nice video showing claimed teaching and practice experts critiquing a young teachers lesson. They have some interesting comments to make regarding lesson planning, instruction, feedback, knowledge banking. These experts seem to be very clear on what a good lesson entails. I think its a useful question to ask, are the qualities of a good reality classroom lesson applicable to virtual/electronic lessons? Group feedback, criticism and knowledge banking? What roles do these have to play? Real interaction with authoritive/knowledgeable figure, fact-to-face discussion & negotiation. Clearly not all the important skills that are learned in classrooms and schools can be learned by a child interacting with a computer. What skills is there cross-over? For what skills can better learning be facilitated by technology?

Dubious Name

Adaptive Curriculum - Video: Introduction to a Science Lesson

Not sure whats adaptive or curricular about this. The interactive content is at least pretty, has some nice functionality and integrated if not innovative or new. I'd be interested to know how the content they publicise on the website is authored and if they have a tool which partly automates the process of their glossaries, questions, content etc.

Online Highschool

Welcome to The American Academy, an accredited online high school. | The American Academy

Seemingly an accredited online highschool in America. Their site has some impressive publicity references and looks fairly professional. Unfortunately and a deal-breaker in terms of offering positive feedback is that they don't seem to offer any up-front course content previews. Accordingly this post just records their existence as interesting but not much more. Also I didn't see any clear figures as to numbers of registered students.

Kindle 2

E-book readers, although a great idea, have not yet been customised for educational purposes in my opinion. Their set of features does not really allow for any interaction between the content and the student or a teacher and the student. PC's are still the tech-ed tool of choice.

Here is a video from Comedy Central (via gizmodo.com) about the Kindle 2 - an 'interview' between Jeff Bezos and Jon Stewart. The Kindle gets badly slated by the host in a funny way but in many ways the Kindle's prior success speaks for itself. On the other hand it is obviously not for everyone (yet..?).

Publish Post

Turnitin.com

Turnitin is a web-app with useful classroom enhancement functionality. It is a tool that doesn't really do anything that isn't already done by teachers & students but probably makes a number of processes a lot easier. It is not a catch all VLE but is nicely put together and does claim integration with other VLEs (Moodle, Blackboard, ANGEL). It lacks a few features that should be easy to implement and that would complement what they already have quite nicely (customisations of certain data fields for example) but overall I have a positive impression of the tool's capibilities and potential for adoption.

One of the most innovative features that turnitin provides is that of plagiarism detection. Impressively turnitin keeps its own database of online sources against which it checks submitted papers. One of their videos claims the addition of 50000 to 100000 papers a day and 200 webpages a second to the database. They also claim some pretty impressive plagiarism detection times for the student submissions but they don't talk at all about detecting plagiarism within a class - are we to take it as granted that the system does this?

The marking system is pretty standard functionality wise. However what is nice is that the papers can be viewed online and marked up using highlighting and annotation tools. They have a 'QuickMark' library which the instructor can customize that contains any number of keywords/phrases and descriptions of them. The instructor can quickly insert any keyphrase into the paper and the students can then access the full description of these annotation when they are reviewing their corrections. The only problem with this correction system is that the onine view is not in the original submitted format, just a plain text listing. Charts, tables and formatting are missing. To view the original the teachers must download the files and review them on their system before making corrections. There is also a customizable 'Rubric Library' in their correction system which allows for efficient marking of papers. Again the students can have access to the rubric so that they can see where they went wrong.

The calendar feature gives account holders nice overal views of submission, correction, review & other event dates. There are also discussion forums & peer review with the at least some of the appropriate safety measures.

There is a lot of information on turnitin.com including some nice demo videos. I only took a look at the instructor perspective when looking over the tool so I may have missed a lot.

turnitin.com

Tele-school

First College UK: Online School for the 21st Century
This site shows you don't have to be flashy to get noticed. The original BBC article was written back in 2006 though and it doesn't look like they've done any work on their site or expanded much on their subject matter since then. Interesting concept which I haven't come across before. Perhaps more research needs to be done into First College and any competitors that may exist.