Month: September 2007

As expected, Google have included Google Presentations into their Google Apps suite – including Google Apps for Education. Clicking on ‘New’from the Google Docs home interface brings up the following:

At first, it looks disappointing. There are a limited range of templates (see below), no transitions and rudimentary formatting options. Some people are disappointed. Some, however, have recognised that this is Presentations 2.0… 🙂

(click to enlarge)

Comparing Google Presentations to Powerpoint or Keynote is like comparing a train to a plane. They’re both methods of transport, but serve completely different purposes. As with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, it is simple to collaborate in creating presentations in Google Presentations. But look what happens when you press Start presentation:

That section to the right-hand side is a live chat window. I should imagine that communication via Google Talk will also be possible soon. This could be a fantastic peer assessment tool, or even a way for students to present to their compatriots all over the world!

If you would like to explore the possibilities Google Apps for Education might be able to offer your educational institution with edte.ch, get in touch! 😀

(via Ewan McIntosh)

The OLPC laptop, the machine which promised to bring cheap educational computing to Third World countries, is set to come in almost twice the $100 guide price. According to most recent estimates the Children’s Machine XO will be available at $188. Whilst some have expressed disappointment at this, I see no real reason to worry. Yes, initially it may be more expensive – but when these are being produced in huge quantities the component price should plummet. Also, the US dollar, the currency in which most of the components are being bought, is at almost a record low.The really important thing about the OLPC project is the pedagogy and the thinking behind it. A visit to laptop.org demonstrates how innovative this actually is.

Schools feel obliged to play a catch-up game to cutting-edge use of technology by industry. This is something that will lead ultimately to frustration, money being wasted on unused (or underused) equipment, and disillusionment. Instead what should be happening – and hopefully will happen with the widespread adoption of machines such as the XO – is that laptop built from the ground up to be in line with sound pedagogical principles will be used instead.

I’m all for the XO to be used in Third World countries, where the antennas of the laptop create a ‘mesh network’ sharing the nearest Internet connection. However, on a practical level, I’m very much looking forward to the pedagogic possibilities of transforming my own classroom. The XO is ‘about the size of a textbook and lighter than a lunchbox’ and can has a hinge meaning it can be used as a standard laptop, or flipped back on itself like an ebook. Within the classroom this would mean the end of textbooks and the dawn of wikibooks, something I’ve discussed over at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk on a number of occasions.*

It would also mean students developing digital literacy skills – the subject of my Ed.D. thesis. :)There are a number of competitors to the XO, including the ASUS Eee laptop. Like the XO, the Eee runs Linux, has Flash-based storage, and is cheap ($199). Some are betting on existing laptop manufacturers to beat the OLPC team at their own game. I’m not so sure. Whilst the Eee and similar devices may be cheap, they haven’t been built from the ground-up with children in mind: they are not so robust, the corners to the device aren’t so rounded, the battery doesn’t last so long, there’s is no reversible hinge, and the interface is slightly more technical.** What is good, however, is that the educational part of the Linux community is likely to grow stronger and more focused, and laptops within education are likely to become as commonplace as textbooks.

* See, for example, ‘Wiki’ textbooks and Do textbooks hamper 21st-century learning?

** If you’re interested in some of the innovative features of the XO – for example how it can boast a 13-hour battery life – you might want to check out this BBC page, amongst others.

(via Slashdot)

From the dawn of civilization until the 21st century to be ‘literate’ has basically meant ‘to be adept at reading and writing’. What it means to be digitally literate is the subject of my upcoming Ed.D. thesis which I’m currently planning. One of the reasons that literacy is changing is that knowledge, or at least our relationship to it, is changing. Check out George Siemens’ Connectivism blog for more on learners as ‘nodes on a network’ and his excellent (wiki) book Knowing Knowledge.

What people have called Web 2.0 is where users of the Internet can create and share content easily. Each user is like a node on the network. For today’s students to be ‘literate’ in this type of digital environment, therefore, they need to be able to use the tools available in an appropriate and effective manner.

The step beyond Web 2.0, what some have understandably dubbed Web 3.0, involves the Semantic Web. This, to quote Wikipedia (as of today) means, ‘an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.’ This means human and machine – theoretically – working in harmony with two-way ‘understanding’.

Two web applications I’ve come across recently move us towards the Semantic Web for everyday use. The first is Freebase, ‘an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge’. Although it’s not fully ‘open’ yet, I’ve got a login to be able to add content. It’s still readable by anyone and the content is released under a Creative Commons license. Whereas Wikipedia‘s pages are very similar in layout, style, etc., pages on Freebase differ according to content. The latter automatically pulls in data from relevant sources and ‘mashes it up’ to form either new or insightful content for users. Applications can be created with the Freebase API for various purposes. Try Cinespin, for example – a graphical database of everything film-related.

The second web application I’ve come across is oSkope, a visual search engine. Given the dominance of Google, search engines trying to offer something unique come and go. oSkope, however, does look genuinely useful. From the list of supported websites, I selected Amazon UK and typed in the name of one of my favourite authors. I was given a choice of how to display my results. First of all I selected ‘pile’:

Then I selected a graph based on price:

The importance is not how pretty the interface is; the importance here is that students have to become literate in dealing with these types of digital environments. In the past it might have gone under the name ‘data mining’. But it’s so much more than that, isn’t it? 🙂