How?  Here are three ideas:

Cell phones and internet-capable phones can be used as polling devices, like clickers, to engage students during class. Poll Everywhere will supply an easy to use interface for small classes for free, or large classes for a fee.

Students could access information during class, to contribute to discussions or to inform critical thinking. How? Students could query Google or Google Scholar, access the library or librarian, use news sources, or specific applications for your topic.

Leverage student interest in texting to learn about their thinking during class, by setting up a backchannel, like Hotseat at Purdue University. A teaching assistant or other instructor can monitor the backchannel, and alert you to questions, problems, and student interest at appropriate points in the class.

Come to a discussion of using mobile devices for education, both in and out of class, on the second Tuesday of each month.

At a previous meeting, participants discussed using these devices in class to engage students and foster interaction.  Owen Astrachan demonstrated how he used Poll Everywhere with his class of 344 students.  Poll Everywhere allows students to use their own devices as personal response systems, to give answers electronically in class.

Other participants discussed using applications that provide information relevant to the course, like Epocrates for accessing drug information, Labs 360 as a medical laboratory guide, or other applications for medical students.  Other examples might be using the mobile version of the Wall Street Journal in a business class,  flash cards for organic chemistry reactions, or spreadsheet applications for laboratories.

We discussed how instructors could incorporate the social networking and connectedness of applications like Smule’s Ocarina to engage students, and how Twitter could be used to build a community of students in an educational program.

Join us:

• Register for our next discussion at 10 am on October 13.
• E-mail Andrea Novicki to suggest topics.

On Tuesday, September 8th at 10 am, we’ll discuss topics and ideas for this semester.  In addition, Owen Astrachan will talk about his plans for using Poll Everywhere, a simple polling system that uses student cell phones as “clickers” to gather student responses.  We’ll try it out.  Sign up to join us!

Read more from the Duke Digital Initiative.

Get more ideas and share the future of education.

Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, but I discovered it takes slightly more than 140 characters to convince colleagues of Twitter’s value. I’ll try to make my argument for why professionals should use Twitter, and I’ll do it in just 14 tweets. Here we go.

#1) Professional use of Twitter 1 of 3: Post URLs for blogs, articles, & events that you want to make public to a larger audience

• #2) To promote publications, ex: “When Communicating with Diverse Audiences, Use Velcro to Make Science Stick http://bit.ly/4GD4fX“
• #3) To publicize students’ work, ex: “#DukeEngage interns turn dung into fuel in India http://bit.ly/c3u1a”
• #4) To publicize events, ex: “Citizen Science Training Opportunity July 19, 2009 http://bit.ly/16NYgc”

#5) Professional use of Twitter 2 of 3: Network w/folks who share interests or are using similar pedagogy/technology/research method

• #6) Networking tip: be sure your Twitter profile has a descriptive bio so people can find you, ex: http://bit.ly/Vqepp
• #7) Twitter can be like a virtual business card. Be sure your profile bio and webpage are up-to-date and informative
• #8) Join a twibe to find similarly-minded people. Visit http://twibes.com/ to search and join twibes
• #9) Add yourself to http://wefollow.com twitter directory so people can find you (I use #scientist #conservation #educator)
• #10) I posted ex of students’ use of edu software, was contacted by software maker to ask if they could showcase my students’ work!
• #11) Retweet to share info & build community, ex: “RT @saprasanna: Our DukeEngage project is on Duke News: http://tinyurl.com/nmuxkz”
• #12) Search for keywords http://search.twitter.com/ (or via Tweetdeck, my fav Twitr app) & follow people who have interesting tweets

#13) Professional use of Twitter 3 of 3: Back-channel conversation at conferences for feedback on talks & updates on things you missed

• #14) Ex: search for #NECC09 for examples of rich conversation and information resulting from back-channel conversations at a conference

You can follow this conversation on Twitter by searching for #TwitValue. For professional updates, follow Julie at http://twitter.com/JulieReynolds88.

The initial purpose of this mapping toolkit is for Duke Engage students in partnership with WISER (Women’s Institute of Secondary Education and Research) to produce useful maps to facilitate the planning of community facilities and ways to impact gender disparities in health and education in Muhuru Bay, Kenya.

Students produced a helpful website:

The mission of ISISmapping.org is to help you map your world. We believe that maps are power, a power that should be shared by everyone.

During this course, students investigated mapping technology and devices, and decided which ones should go to Kenya as part of the toolkit, based on the needs of the project and the conditions in Kenya. They produced documentation and worked out best practices for mapping, in consultation with researchers in Kenya. The recommendations and documentation they produced can be used by anyone who’d like to map their world.

Watch Victoria Szabo, Sherryl Broverman and students in the course talk about the project.

At the final presentation of the project, students were asked about the challenges they faced when exploring the technology and creating the project. They described the challenges of coming together as a team, keeping up with rapidly changing technology to determine the best way to map, and creating a way for people in Kenya to make maps with their data despite intermittent electricity and rare access to the internet.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can browse and search twenty collections that range from advertisements and documentary photography to sheet music. You can save and download images to an album, and access all descriptive information.

Making digital image collections viewable on mobile devices is part of the library’s ongoing efforts to make its resources available whenever and wherever researchers need them.

DukeMobile, introduced in March 2009, currently serves about 50,000 users, providing mobile access to the campus directory, sports scores, interactive maps, event listings, the course catalog, and Duke videos on YouTube.

Talk with Julie Reynolds about using video to teach writing, Julie Perco about teaching with Second Life, Len White or Lucy Haagen about mobile devices, Victoria Szabo or Alex Glass or Peter Haff about using mapping in your course and student Jennifer Kim about effective blog assignments.

Talk with people who have been teaching in the Link (Liliana Paredes, Laura Florand, Sandra Valnes Quammen, Hugh Crumley, Susan Wynn and Deb Reisinger) and find out how to use the flexible spaces.

Learn how your colleagues have used VoiceThread or iTunesU (or find out what these are).  And more!

Register now to reserve your space.

In this series of posts, I’ve discussed blogs being used as personal web publishing systems and explored ways educators might use Web2.0 tools, originally designed for ‘personal’ use, to instead work with students to build knowledge together. It probably goes without saying that one of the key aspects of the World Wide Web is that it’s all (potentially) connected – but until a few years ago, these ‘connections’ were at best accomplished by creating hyperlinks to other sites and content, and later by smarter search engines. With technologies like RSS feeds, however, the Web 2.0 world has made it easier to link, share, and re-purpose content. We have increasing ability to view and publish content in any style/format/design we choose.

The web is continuing to spill over from our computers to all of our other everyday gadgets, including our music players, televisions, and radios – in some cases, even our refrigerators. On the Map of Future Forces Affecting Education (created by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Institute for the Future) this concept is described as ‘The End of Cyberspace’ and is listed as one of of the key ‘Drivers of Change’ in the coming years:

“Places and objects are becoming increasingly embedded with digital information and linked through connective media into social networks. The result is the end of the distinction between cyberspace and real space.”

Cellphones+laptops = ‘mobile devices’

We’ve all heard the hype about the growing number of cellphones being used worldwide. Recent statistics for China, for example, show 616 million mobile phone users vs. 253 million Internet users. The web is huge, to be sure, but the costs associated with bringing ‘computers’, as we think about them in the traditional sense, to the world’s populations are significant [see, for example the troubles related to the One Laptop per Child project]. No doubt given the need for such devices to be mobile, have longer battery life, and be more affordable, small mobile devices, in particular cellphones, have become the main and/or only access tool for the web and web-based data for many people.

As cellphones continue to get ’smarter’, recent laptop trends suggest that mobility, connectivity and price are more important to consumers than actual processing power. New, ‘mini’ laptops – commonly called ‘netbooks’ are often small enough to fit into a large purse or small bookbag – they’re extremely light, have longer than average battery life, and are fairly powerful. They’re also extremely popular – according to Gartner, netbooks will move nearly 21 million units in 2009, even as sales of full-size laptops and particularly desktop computers continue to decline. Netbooks generally have smaller hard drive space than we might be used to – that’s because they’re intended to be used to pull and access content from the ‘cloud’. Want to write a document? Connect to the web and use Google Docs. Update your Facebook profile or Twitter status. Use Pandora to listen to music, or YouTube to watch video (or access a site like Hulu to watch ‘television’ instead of turning on a TV – a growing trend in itself). Access your files and notes using an online service like Evernote or Dropbox. For more info on the netbook revolution, see Clive Thompson’s informative article in Wired.

iPhones and eReaders: the web – reshuffled

The iPhone represents a milestone in this connection between the web and mobile devices. The iPhone is known for its web-accessing ‘apps’, and the mobile phone market has reacted by focusing less on voice communications devices that simply enable email or simple text, and more on devices that can access and accommodate all the content that the ‘real’ web has to offer. Just this week, Duke released an iPhone app that enables searching course info, contacts, maps and more.

Here’s an example of how an iPhone app leverages info from the web. Remember the Milk (RTM) is a small ‘to do list’ or ‘getting things done’ application that I use to create checklists for myself to better manage tasks. I can access RTM on the web (see #1 below), but I can also email tasks to RTM, use Twitter to send, receive and manage tasks [see #2 below), or, better yet, use my iPhone to access the info stored on the RTM website via the iPhone RTM app (see #3 and #4 below). In many ways, I actually prefer the iPhone app, in that its somewhat more uncluttered, and focuses on the task (no pun intended) at hand rather than ‘wowing’ me with excessive design elements.

Another recently hyped technology – the Amazon developed ‘eReader’ device known as the Kindle (recently updated) was originally marketed as a sort of ‘iPod’ for books. The Kindle’s real appeal is that it can pull in text from the web – stretching well beyond books. You can now read the NY Times on the Kindle, on the web, on paper (which, by the way, apparently costs more – much more - than sending every reader a Kindle), or even on the iPhone or another mobile device that can pull in an RSS feed. Because the Kindle caters first to the most traditional of media consumers, good old school ‘readers’, it tends to legitimize content from the web for the non-web user. You wouldn’t pay $2 a month to read Gizmodo on the computer, but you might to get it downloaded conveniently to your Kindle every day. (Pesonally, I find the cost of these subscriptions excessive – but Amazon has the corner on the eReader market right now. The point is that many people are willing to pay for access, convenience, and format even if it’s for a convenience or access that already exists in other forms that they perhaps just don’t know about and/or understand).

Conclusion: (re)Educating the Networked World

The implications of some of these trends and technologies, for those of us working in education, are pretty obvious. The Kindle, and recent developments such as Google Book Search for mobile devices, bring up larger questions about the future of textbook publishing – and publishing in general. Beyond text, there’s also a growing world of photos, video and other audio/visual artifacts that practically demand the ability to be viewed, shared and/or re-purposed.

For all the hype attributed to social networking sites like Facebook – the real hype is that people want to be connected and re-connected – that people want the ability to quickly share, discuss, and update. An awareness of these technologies – and of the cultural shifts that social networking technologies create – is really what’s required to leverage them for learning. It’s not a question of “how do we pipe syllabi and course lists into Facebook” as much as: what can be learned and done with all of these people so complexly connected?

Mimi Ito, writing about the MacArthur sponsored report “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project,” looks at how networked life might trigger a shift in education where the personal and the public continue to blur:

Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What, the authors ask, would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? What would it mean to reach beyond traditional education and civic institutions and enlist the help of others in young people’s learning? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, they question what it would mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally. (via Ito’s blog)

Michael Blanding’s article “Thanks for the Add. Now Help Me with My Homework,” also explores this concept of social participation:

“Educators studying social networking sites are just beginning to develop ways to use them to teach social issues. Indeed, the biggest gift of social networking sites is the same thing that makes them such a danger — the immediate ability to interact with so many strangers so different from themselves. “A lot of social justice depends on acknowledging the legitimacy of someone else having the same rights as you do,” says Dede. “If it turns out that, gee, people very different than me are also very like me in some ways, that doesn’t automatically lead to a respect for others, but it can help with that and with a skilled teacher building those connections.”

The following Common Craft-style video, “The Networked Student” (created by Wendy Drexler’s high school class), does a great job illustrating several ways social networking sites and tools might be (and in many cases, currently are) used for education.

Link to Educause conference archive (videos, ppts, etc): http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/eliannual09

The conference: the meta-experience

ANDREA: ELI is attended by people who are excited about using technology in teaching. The attendees (faculty, learning center folks, instructional technologists) may also be excited about technology in general, but the focus is on the possibilities that technology provides for education.  The organizers and attendees are the sort of people who are willing to try things to find out what works. Therefore, there are many experiments at this conference: types of sessions, varieties of activities, and how people learn at the conference (which is the most interesting to me). It’s like being able to see into the future, or, even better, getting to play in the future.  

There are hands-on sessions, round table discussions, activities with name tags (see below), post it notes used to gather information (think-stops), a conference-wide alternative reality game, faculty innovation showcase with demonstrations, online social networks, citizen journalists, and twitter. The individual sessions range from demonstrating rubrics for grading online discussions, to using mobile devices to teach, to learning space design, to how to best help faculty, to using gaming in teaching and learning. And more.

SHAWN: The ELI conference planners practice what they preach. To better illustrate the rapidly expanding role of social networking in education, they provided a Twitter feed, instructions for tagging media and posts on the web (EDUCAUSE_ELIAnnual09 or simply eli2009), and even a way to physically add ‘tags’ to one’s conference badge.

The conference: about the Twitter feed

The conference once again supported Twitter as the conference ‘backchannel’. From the conference program:

“Share your conference experience by tweeting messages regarding the conference with the hashtag #ELI09. If you have a Twitter account, select the “Follow” button at http://twitter.com/ELI2009.”

ANDREA: I’m most interested in watching how people chose to learn at this conference. The featured speakers, interestingly, lecture with PowerPoint (and it’s a tough crowd for PowerPoint – people critique the design before listening to the speaker).  So, at first glance, it looks like it’s the same old lecture format. It’s not.  Many of the participants are actively twittering or at least watching the twitter stream. This back channel communication is an important part of the conference. I took notes the old fashioned way, by typing on my computer and fighting for space at electrical outlets between sessions, but I also watched the twitter channel throughout the conference.

Here’s a sample search for #eli09 in Twitter.

Note that the twitter stream contains tweets from several different sessions, all mixed together. I could watch tweets from my sessions as well as those from the other sessions simultaneously. Some people used twitter to take notes on the main take-homes from the session. Some people who were the sessions I was attending were tweeting really good, concise notes – I either copied their tweets or noted their names in my notes, and could think about their ideas at the same time I was thinking about mine.  Instead of being distracting, the twitter stream helped me focus on the session I was in. Other people would tweet additional information, as a supplement to what the presenters were saying, and sometimes included URLs for more information. People (like Shawn) who were prolific twitters seemed to be using hand-held devices (like the iPhone) rather than computers.

SHAWN: Attendees used Twitter to rapidly share notes and thoughts during sessions. These tweets could be read and replied to by other conference attendees – or by anyone following any of the attendees Twitter streams.

Here’s an example of the way this works. During a session I would post notes or thoughts about a session to Twitter via my iPhone (using an app called Tweetie). Every time I would post, I would also add the hashtag #ElI09 to my post.

Twitter also supports a way to ‘favorite’ Tweets that you might want to save outside of the Twitter stream. I found it useful to ‘favorite’ any tweets (including my own) that I might want to use later, or view as notes. I ended up with eleven pages of ‘favorites’ that formed the basis for all my conference notes, links, and other things I wanted to remember.

ANDREA: I could also see what was going on in other concurrent sessions – and could ask questions about that session even if I wasn’t in the session, by sending a direct message to someone in the session.  I learned more about things that I couldn’t attend this way, and then was able to more fully participate in conversations after the sessions.

Some people used twitter to take notes.  Shawn was tweeting prolifically (see above), and he “favorited” his and other tweets as his notes.  I think this works if you were there in the first place for context.

Twitter for learning.  I’m won over.

SHAWN: The Twitter feed was also displayed in various places throughout the conference, so others could a) better see and understand what Twitter is and does, and b) just get an ‘ambient’ understanding of what’s currently going on.

Theme: Social networking and social learning

ANDREA:  What were the main themes? Here’s the twitter tag cloud:

The other observation about the conference as a whole is that it seems the consensus is that social learning is how to learn.  This was an underlying theme that supported most if not all of the sessions.  In fact, it seemed as though some activities tried to take ways of doing things from online social networking tools and bring them into the classroom.  Social construction of knowledge was crucial to the design of the conference and the individual presentations within the conference..

Theme: blogging as an open platform

SHAWN: Building on what Andrea wrote above (social networking and social learning), it seemed that the more substantial themes of the conference aligned quite nicely with the 2009 NMC Horizon Report, which premiered at the conference as well. I’ve been writing a series of blog posts about this, called ‘Getting Personal’ – where I’m working with the idea that personal technologies (blogs, social networks, mobile devices) can be leveraged to become powerful learning technologies. My first post detailed a presentation regarding blogging:

For this first post, I’m specifically interested in addressing these “easy-to-use publishing tools.” Perhaps this is the best example of what a ‘blog’ really is. For many of us, we tend to think of blogs as a web-based journaling device, or maybe as a way to keep an online diary of the daily adventures of our cat. Others have come to recognize the power of easy self-publishing, and we now, as a culture, are much more aware of folks who are ‘bloggers.’ No doubt the term ‘blogger’ carries several political and cultural connotations in recent years that has perhaps cast even some negative views on the idea of a blog itself. But the blog, the tool itself, is really a powerful tool for bringing text, photos, video and other multimedia together into a form that feels more presentable and ‘published’ than simply the sum of those parts alone.

In a recent presentation at the annual EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference, Jim Groom (UMW), Alan Levine (NMC), and Cole Camplese (PSU) explored the idea that the blog could be much more than just “a blog.” All three gentlemen co-created a blog just for the presentation, and gave each piece of their presentation via the same blog (in lieu of yet another PowerPoint): Eli2009.wordpress.com.

Read more of this blog post here: Getting Personal (part 1): When blogs are more than blogs

Theme: Web2.0 tools as teaching tools

SHAWN: My second public blog post in this series also used info from ELI2009. This time from Michael Wesch’s presentation. Wesch is ‘famous’ (in instructional technology circles, anyway) for several things, but primarily for his impressive use of social networking tools (YouTube, wikis, blogs, diigo, delicious, Netvibes, etc) for his courses.

Wesch’s presentation brings home a few key points:

• you don’t need a CMS to make learning happen
• students should be learning online openly and publicly as much as possible
• the technology will keep changing – don’t get hung up on the tools

Read more of this blog post here: Getting Personal (part 2): Michael Wesch and the ‘Just in Time’ personal web

Theme: Mobile devices

SHAWN: This year, I didn’t take a laptop with me. I sent emails, wrote notes, took photos and used Twitter – all through the iPhone. I managed more battery life than my laptop (close to 7 hours one day – my laptop only gets 1.5 hrs at best these days), and a much more comfortable experience overall. No doubt using Twitter (see above) helped quite a bit – as I didn’t have to ‘thumb-type’ all my notes – I could just collect them off of Twitter, but I still managed to do quite a bit more with my phone than most folks did with their laptops at the conference (ex: it’s difficult to take photos with your laptop or type a note while standing around having coffee).

In a forthcoming blog post (Getting Personal – part 3…coming soon!), I’m going to try to tackle what some of the new mobile technologies may mean for educators. At ELI2009, we heard more about the Kindle, about geolocation, and about mobile devices in general than I’ve heard at any previous conference. I also noticed more folks using mobile devices and netbooks.

The ARG: Alternative Reality Game

ELI2009 also featured an ARG – Alternate Reality Game. Here’s how ELI describes what happened:

“At the 2009 Annual Meeting, attendees were plunged into the world of alternate reality gaming by a common challenge: to save Professor Rufus Bluth, a marine biologist whose controversial research into pink salmon populations put him in the crosshairs of a local petroleum company.

Attendees were first introduced to Professor Bluth during a video interruption at the opening general session. A hidden URL led to Bluth’s research site, which included a series of hidden clues and puzzles to find his research. Clues throughout the meeting space helped fill in the details behind Bluth’s findings, his pursuers, and his “story.””

A group of conference planners devised the story, the setup, and created a few basic video clips and websites. Then, they sat back and watched attendees try to ’save Bluth’. Clues would also appear on conference tables, hidden on the walls, or even in the restrooms.

Photo via Flickr by educausestaff

Some of the clues used QR-Codes (sort of like bar codes) that basically hide a URL. The only way to get to the URL is to take a photo using an application such as BeeTagg, which then decodes the image and returns the website.

Photo via Flickr by educausestaff

Some attendees created a wiki to keep track of clues and then got the info out about the wiki in much the same way we were getting clues about Bluth.

Photo via Flickr by educausestaff

Planners also provided a webcast presentation a few weeks after the conference, where they fully ‘unpacked’ the entire process that went into setting up the ARG.

What is it?

Geolocation (geocoding or geotagging) means using data about location, whether it’s where you are or where a photo or other data was taken.  Every place on earth has a unique set of coordinates (longitude, latitude and altitude) that can be detected by GPS receivers.  These receivers are now being included in many devices.

Geolocation is not new; people have been tracking their movements (and the movements of animals) for years. I’ve used a GPS device to record and create tracks of where I’ve been and to tag photos to map on Google Earth for several years. What is new are small, multifunctional devices like the iPhone that have GPS built in,  so it is easier to record or use location information. For example, students could be investigating the distribution of a plant species, or investigating medical care in an underdeveloped country.  Students can take pictures, video and record notes, while the device automatically records the location and displays it on a map. The new devices eliminate the need for a separate GPS unit while simplifying the steps to create annotated, precise maps.  The devices also allow communication based on location.  For example, imagine a student waiting for the C2 bus, worried about her German class.  The device in her pocket may let her know that someone within a few feet of her is also taking German and would like to practice German as they wait for the bus.

What are these devices?  Some are pictured here.  Wired has a comparison of 5 currently available devices, including the iPhone; it’s likely more will be available soon.

People are already using geolocation here at Duke.  For example,

• Victoria Szabo, and Richard Lucic (ISIS) are exploring devices for creating multimedia maps creating multimedia maps with their research capstone course and Duke Engage
• Julie Reynolds‘ (Biology) citizen scientist project maps the location of invasive plants
• Trudy Abel (History) has collected historical information, including maps for Digital Durham
• Peter Haff’s students (NSOE) mapped their field trip to the southwest desert using Google Earth
• Pat Halpin’s Marine Geospatial Ecology lab uses mapping to look at marine ecology, resource management and ocean conservation issues
• Alex Glass’s (NSOE) course mapped the location of virtual oil field
• Gary Gereffi (Sociology) has created maps demonstrating North Carolina’s role in the Global Economy
• Ken Glander (Evolutionary Anthropology) is working on tracking the daily activity of lemurs

For a more frivolous, but more concrete view of current possibilities, see Wired’s description of 10 applications that make the most of location.

For a short description of how geolocation works and how it can be used in teaching, see the pdf “7 things you should know about geolocation”, or read more in the Horizon Report (pdf).