centreforelearning

A web-based tool to create videos. Something I thought would be a good resource for the video team to explore. :)

Thanks Kartini.

For the video team

Pretty good for videos that required no editing. Btw that supporting rig on the tripod for the iphone is good stuff !

Something the IDs might like to chew on. Also for any and all who interact with staff and might find the taxonomies useful for educating our clients.

You will need to go to the NIE library for this. They may have already subscribed to it or they can find it for you.

Dear all, I've downloaded the article already. If anyone of you is interested (unfortunately, it's not available in the NIE library but the NTU library internal network only), please feel free to approach me for a copy.

MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

What if I could link my e-portfolio to Flipboard? And even view others' e-portfolios for a given topic on my Flipboard - all automagically arranged to look like a glossy magazine? How would that inspire our teachers to update their e-portfolios accordingly?

"Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world." I think most of you might already be aware of TED, but thought I'd share it here anyway. It's one of the most interesting and famous websites that have speakers from all over the world to share "ideas worth spreading" speaking for a max. of 20 minutes. Do take a look around in TED and be inspired by all the great ideas in here.

Pragmatic tips for developing mLearning projects...

While what the author suggested is a simple start, it is a bad one for the long run. Why? It replicates exactly what you can already do more logically and perhaps more easily in other platforms. It's best to have the change in pedagogy or strategy in mind when designing apps or creating an m-learning system. Our mission is to leverage on learning outside the classroom, on the move or in more meaningful contexts.

Thanks for the tip, Dr Ashley!

Browse apps that work with dropbox. Since some of them uses dropbox, perhaps you might want to find out more of which apps integrate with dropbox too.  

Nice find!

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"On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it had partnered with Skype to let Facebook users call one another from their camera-enabled computers, simply by clicking on a button on a friend's Facebook profile or from the chat window. After a one-time download of Skype's technology, the video calls look to be painless and simple for anyone to use. Compare that to Hangout, Google's new video chat in its still invite-only social network Google+. Hangout is designed as a group chat application for impromptu socializing with friends. To start one, you press a button declaring you are open to hanging out, choose which circle(s) of friends to send the invite to, and up to 10 people can be in the room at any one time. The loudest talker gets the big space up top - and the group can collectively talk or even watch YouTube videos together. As young Marty McFly once said in a different context, your kids are going to love it."

Thanks Kartini! I strongly agree too. To add on to your point, I think for the Gen-Yers, social media tools also facilitate on-going collaboration by engaging the emotive power of relational bonds to help bring everyone onto the same page. I remember reading this in my Media Theories module: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory... hope you find it relevant! "Agenda-setting theory is the theory that the news media have a large influence on audiences by their choice of what stories to consider newsworthy and how much prominence and space to give them. Agenda-setting theory's main postulate is salience transfer. Salience transfer is the ability of the news media to transfer issues of importance from their news media agendas to public agendas. Through their day-by-day selection and display of the news, editors and news directors focus our attention and influence our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day. This ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda has come to be called the agenda setting role of the news media."

When I think about "infrastructure", I normally think about roads, wires, sewerage and so on. But how about educational technology and instructional design? From reading Don Norman's musings about infrastructure, I realized that if we want our technological implementations to be successfully adopted, very often it's essential to also consider the infrastructure needed to support our tech designs and implementations. Personally, I think infrastructure for education and instructional design need not always be physical things. They could be intangibles such as having to update a database, notify the relevant people in charge, call this person or that to come unlock the computer lab, etc. My mum's been a teacher for 40+ years. She's great. But she really hates the computer. Not because of the learning needed to use Microsoft Word. She's quite fine with it. But it's all the non-Microsoft Word things that she has to do - reboot, turn the computer on, manage the files, etc... - that makes her scream.  "It is time to work on infrastructure. It threatens to dominate our lives with ugliness, frustration, and work. We need to spend more time on the designs for infrastructure. We need to make it more attractive, more accessible, and easier to maintain. Infrastructure is intended to be hidden, to provide the foundation for everyday life. If we do not respond, it will dominate our lives, preventing us attending to our priory concerns and interests and instead, just keeping ahead of the maintenance demands." - Don Norman Food for thought: What are some underlying "infrastructure" (tangible and intangible) that I may encounter in an educational technology project? Are there existing infrastructure that I can take advantage of to minimize time and $? How can we minimize the amount of infrastructure maintenance needed?

I just happened to think: Imagine if this pattern-recognition tech concept could be adapted to mobile phones in the near future, it might make for a very powerful blended learning / augmented reality tool. :) According to the researcher, implementation for mobile devices is feasible. Possible applications for m-learning could be: gestural recognition, dynamic object association and the like. E.g. If we could use an iPhone/Kinect to track a student's movements and remotely control an external apparatus halfway across the globe (maybe explore an Amazonian jungle to study biodiversity first-hand), or help disabled students (maybe cerebral palsy sufferers) communicate their thoughts more clearly... or perhaps get the students to "air-sketch" Chinese/Tamil characters to produce music on the go... For more info: http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/

Oh yes, did I mention Predator is open source too? http://goo.gl/Kj95y

Like your comment about how the iPads don't become the focus of the learning. That's a thought that's been on my mind recently - the importance of the perception of "seamlessness" in tech usage. That's probably one of the most important reasons a technology gets adapted - no matter how cumbersome it seems at first (e.g. learning how to drive a car) - because the normal usage of the technology doesn't hinder the intended task at hand. (That's why once you learn to ride a bike, you don't think so much about the bicycle itself as you think about moving faster.) Think Donald Norman in "The Design of Everyday Things" has a term for this: affordability. So I guess, my thought on the usage of the iPad (and any new tech at hand): The learning of the new tech need not be intuitive. But the everyday usage has to seamlessly flow with the given task at hand - so that the tool and the user become "one" with the task. (Just like how a user fumbles with a pair of chopsticks at first, but once he masters it, his chopsticks "become" part of his fingers.) Then such seamless technologies get seamlessly adopted as "cognitive-multipliers".

I am truly sorry guys. Can't help it. It's hilarious. Just sharing with you guys. :)