Group items tagged

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best:

Vander Ark was the first Executive Director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From his post: "There are plenty of theories about how to improve education. Most focus on what appear to be big levers--a point of entry and system intervention that appears to provide some improvement leverage. These theories usually involve 'if-then' statements: 'if we improve this, then other good stuff will happen.'" "One problem not addressed by these theories is the lack of innovation diffusion in education--a good idea won't cross the street. Weak improvement incentives and strong bureaucracy have created a lousy marketplace for products and ideas." "Key assumption: teacher effectiveness is the key variable; more good teachers will improve student achievement" "I'm betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement."

"Key assumption: teacher effectiveness is the key variable; more good teachers will improve student achievement" Vander Ark was the first Executive Director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From his post:"There are plenty of theories about how to improve education. Most focus on what appear to be big levers--a point of entry and system intervention that appears to provide some improvement leverage. These theories usually involve 'if-then' statements: 'if we improve this, then other good stuff will happen.'" "One problem not addressed by these theories is the lack of innovation diffusion in education--a good idea won't cross the street. Weak improvement incentives and strong bureaucracy have created a lousy marketplace for products and ideas." "I'm betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement."\n\n\n

The We Are Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.\nCurated by NTEN, the community will work in a networked way to help identify the best existing resources, people, and case studies that will give nonprofit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to be the media. The community will help identify and point to the best how-to guides and useful resources that cover all aspects of creating, aggregating, and distributing social media. The resulting curriculum which will live on this wiki and will also cover important organizational adoption issues, strategy, ROI analysis, as well as the tools.

Thanks Stephen, great bookmark. We are thinking about Change.gov right now. Wondering how we make it less broadcast and more 2.0.

Jon said "I wrote a post last year exploring the spider-starfish tension between Personal Learning Environments and institutionally run CMSs. This is a fundamental challenge that institutions of higher learning need to resolve. On the one hand, we should promote open, flexible, learner-centric activities and tools that support them. On the other hand, legal, ethical and business constraints prevent us from opening up student information systems, online assessment tools, and online gradebooks. These tools have to be secure and, at least from a data management and integration perspective, proprietary. So what would an open learning network look like if facilitated and orchestrated by an institution? Is it possible to create a hybrid spider-starfish learning environment for faculty and students?"

CLA debunking, but the best item may be the forthcoming book on "limited learning on College Campuses."

"Micheal Scriven and I spent more than a few years trying to apply his multiple-ranking item tool (a very robust and creative tool, I recommend it to others when the alternative is multiple-choice items) to the assessment of critical thinking in health care professionals. The result might be deemed partially successful, at best. I eventually abandoned the test after about 10,000 administrations because the scoring was so complex we could not place it in non-technical hands."

In comments on an article about CLA, Scriven's name comes up...

SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets. Learn more about the SIMILE project.

SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets. Learn more about the SIMILE project.

Peg found this but had trouble adding it to our list.

Developer / Debug Tool for Internet Explorer. This doesn't work for IE8. Internet Explorer 8 includes its own developer tool though.

Joshua and others have requested this in the past. I'm throwing it here in Diigo so others can benefit as well. It isn't Firebug by a longshot, but it is much better than nothing at all. I prefer to use this over Microsoft Script Debugger when debugging in IE. As noted though, it doesn't work with IE8. IE does however include its own developer tools. -- Matthew

"Google has unveiled plans today to allow Google Docs to store any type of files, and revealed a new tool from Memeo to enable users to access, migrate, and synchronize files between their desktop and Google Docs. " (Snc tool is for Google Apps Premium only). Getting to be a more attractive option...

Yes.. That is something I'd really like to use. My laptop warranty is out, they won't sell me any more extensions, one hard disk is loosing more and more sectors (and Maylee pulled off the right ALT key last night). Now only if Google Mail enabled me to build a number of views (filters) of my email (not just one), and Docs had inline revision viewing, I'd be ready to use it more. As it is, I use a variety of office apps because each seems to have strengths in different areas. I sometimes even move between apps with the same document. Mostly, I use OpenOffice, Google Docs, Microsoft Office, and LyX. LyX is the most philosophically advanced, I think.... but none escape the subjectivity of the matter. LyX removes any concern for how the document looks. You tell it what each information element is, not how it should look. Then you export to various formats and styles. Information search is vastly more powerful when all information elements are tagged according to what they are. And it produces just very beautiful content. OpenOffice has the broadest set of import/export capabilities and also with the best quality results, I'd say. All tables in all document types being accessible as database tables is also sometimes useful, as well as a variety of other capabilities. Google Docs is obviously best at collaboration but I find it sometimes frustrating to get formatting I want or working with revisions from others and myself. Microsoft Office is pretty high quality and full featured, as most realize, but lacks in import/export quality in comparison with some alternatives.

worth exploring

The Evolution of a Digital Repository and Social Networking Tool for Inorganic Chemistry From Post: "It is said that teaching is a lonely profession. In higher education, a sense of isolation can permeate both teaching and research, especially for academics at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). In these times of doing more with less, new digital communication tools may greatly attenuate this problem--for free. Our group of inorganic chemists from PUIs, together with technologist partners, have built the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource Web site (VIPEr, http://www.ionicviper.org) to share teaching materials and ideas and build a sense of community among inorganic chemistry educators. As members of the leadership council of VIPEr, we develop and administer the Web site and reach out to potential users. "

lots to explore linked from this post that I found linked from Downes

QuickTopic free message boards and the Quick Doc Review collaborative online document review service are excellent tools for all kinds of teachers. Below are a few examples of citations by teaching resource sites that we've found. * "...this amazingly easy site will also send you emails of newly posted messages. ... Also check out the Document Review tool for posting text and eliciting feedback generously provided by QuickTopic" NC State University - Teaching Literature for Young Adults - Resources for teachers.

perhaps these sum to utility, but number 5---generativity- would benefit from some unpacking.-

Although experts in the social media space have been talking about how businesses might adopt microblogging tools like Twitter and Plurk, only recently have we started to see a series of new vendors cropping up in the enterprise microblogging space. This has been due in part to businesses needing to figure out how Twitter can benefit the enterprise.

This article is deeper than it sounds.

3 Lemons: Corporate website, Intranet, Groupware, and how they can be fixed. Also, social networking R&D, and 8 Web 2.0 tools ("Dave's Faves") to consider for your organization.

Michael Wesch updates Machine is Us/ing us. 30 min video His point, our tools are changing us. Worth thinking about by us greybeards are his statistics about the number of hours of video uploaded to You Tube per day. For someone who remembers what a byte is, this is a paradigm shifting amount of data being moved and stored for free.

Michael Wesch updates Machine is Us/ing us. His point, our tools are changing us. Worth thinking about by us greybeards are his statistics about the number of hours of video uploaded to You Tube per day. For someone who remembers what a byte is, this is a paradigm shifting amount of data being moved and stored for free.

"Free web parts and other SharePoint tools"

"An official transcript shows how well a student did in class, but universities have long recognized that a lot of learning takes place outside the classroom. Now a growing number of schools are developing ways of tracking, measuring and authenticating that learning. Some are giving official sanction to a student's involvement in campus activities - student council or campus clubs, for example - through what's called a co-curricular transcript. Others have developed web-based self-assessment tools that students can use to understand their own knowledge, values and strengths."

The challenge--not the control study this person calls for, but the perception that outcomes assessment produces outcomes....