I co-organized a Nercomp event on Widgets in Education at U. Mass Amherst with Eileen McMahon from U. Mass Boston. In my presentation I sought to define and categorize “web widgets” from simple “RSS containers” to interactive “read/write” widgets.
Eileen gave a great tour of many different widgets used in education including those available in iGoogle and through Google Apps for Education. There were also a number of presentations on using WordPress for courses.
I did a presentation at the Apple AcademiX 2009 conference at MIT on iPods and 2nd Language Acquisitionin the Stata Center. Some of the projects I presented included Beginning Mandarin Chinese, Japanese Vocabulary, French verbs, phonetics and short stories.Vijay Kumar gave one of the keynote presentations focusing on openess in education and discussing projects such as MIT’s OpenCourseware, iLabs (online laboratories) and Lecture Browser.
Paul Hammond and Richard Miller from Rutgers University gave an amazing presentation entitled “The Center Cannot Hold: Living, Learning, and Leading in a Networked World.” They spoke of an “unprecedented crisis in education” and the need for a paradigm shift that involves new forms of composition consisting of less of text and more of composition with ideas (new media composition). Indeed their presentation was an example of such as composition, seamlessly weaving text, images and video with one of them (not sure which) controlling the transitions as they spoke, boucing ideas off each other and the group as a whole.
Charles Severance, the chief architect of Sakai gave the final keynote address on “Evolving Teaching and Learning: Beyond the LMS.” Dr Chuck likened current LMS’s to dinosaurs but did not predict their immediate demise. Rather, he suggested that the LMS can be redesigned to allow new tools to be more easily incorporated. He also gave a demonstration of CloudCollab that allows a “social cloud” activated by javascript to be embedded in any page in any system.
MiddMedia is a media storage and streaming service for the college community. This service allows Middlebury faculty, staff and students to upload audio and video files to college servers via the web and then share those audio and video files in our instances of Segue and WordPress by means of plugins created for these applications.
MiddMedia plugins use web services to access the MiddMedia repository and allow users to browse their MiddMedia directories, delete files, upload new files and embed these in their WordPress or Segue sites.
Adam Franco and Hector Vila attended OpeniWorld in Lyon France. Adam gave a presentation “Outside-In: Application interoperability using an OSID-based framework” which demonstrated real-time software interoperability between the Segue, Concerto, and LibraryFind applications made possible using the O.K.I. OSIDs (Open Service Interface Definitions) and OAI-PMH (Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) standards. Hector presented a paper entitled “Unfinished Business: How Technology Has (Not?) Changed our Relationship(s) to the Humanities“.
The Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) is using Segue v2 to power their new community site. This seems fitting since Segue v2 makes extensive use of many of O.K.I. open service interface definitions (OSIDs). The new site is hosted by CommonNeed.
I attended a NERCOMP event on Mashups in Education last week where I did a presentation on Mashups for the Masses that described tools for creating mashups that don’t require programming such as Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, Popfly, iGoogle and Netvibes. I also attempted to categorize mashups into those by integration and those by aggregation. Finally I discussed various standards such as OpenID, Google’s OpenSocial, the Open Knowledge Initiative’s open service interface definitions (OSIDs) and Netvibes universal widget specifications that should make mashups easier in the future.
There were a number of presentations on Facebook includingH-link, a Face Book application which uses Harvard University course enrollment information to allow students to link directly from Facebook to their course websites and another from Harris Connect that allows alumni to find and communicate with each other on Facebook.
The Middlebury College Communications office recently started to use NetVibes for Middlebury Online. NetVibes is a best known as a personal news aggregator, similar to iGoogle, PageFlakes and myYahoo, that allows users to create their own personalized portal. All of these tools allow users to aggregate and layout content from various sources. All will allow you to include RSS feeds from other sites. Many will also allow you to include views of email accounts, social networks, seach engines and various widgets. Unfortunately, each has their own APIs and terminology (pages, tabs, gadgets, flakes, modules…) for adding content, though this may be changing. NetVibes now has an open widget platform that allows users to make their own widgets that can work on other platforms. More recently, some of these sites (PageFlakes, myYahoo, NetVibes) have started to allow users, individuals or organization, to share their pages/pagecasts/universes, as Middlebury has done with Middlebury Online.
(Segue v2 borrows many UI concepts from these new aggregation sites including the notion of multiple content blocks on a page that can be organized by dragging and dropping them within a customizable layout. As well, the ability to edit and change the settings of a content block inline. Much of this is made possible by the use of asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), that allows changes to be made to be made without reloading the page, resulting in a greater responsiveness and interactivity.)
I gave a presentation on iPods at Middlebury at a NERCOMP event on Teaching and Learning with Mobile Technologies. The day started with an extensive overview of mobile technologies. Other presentations discussed the use of personal digital assistants (PDA’s) and smartphones to provide medical students access to databases and course material and a mobile “lab” used by engineering students in classes on circuits and electronic instrumentation.