Monthly Archives: May 2010

HP Lets You Add Any Site to Augmented Reality

Thanks in no small part to the iPhone 3GS, Augmented Reality is starting to grow in leaps and bounds.  Google and others are also helping this growth in many ways.  As I have blogged about in past posts (and many others around the web have also mentioned), the lines between the online world and the offline world are blurring.  Enter into this mix Gloe from HP.

Gloe is a new service that, among other things, allows you to connect any website to a particular location in real life.  When you are at a physical site, your mobile device can then pull up websites that were voted most relevant for that location.  Of course, all of the regular “social” buzz-functions are there – tagging, FaceBook connections, etc. Gloe is still pretty new in some areas, but as this article on ReadWriteWeb points out, even if some function doesn’t work that great – at least the idea behind the function is really interesting.

We may have to wait a good ten years before any educational site or LMS catches on to this, but I like the possibilities of using this for education. I am sure there are more than a few EduPunks that are already using this (if you know of some, please post in the comments).  I love thinking about how one could transfer learning from a desk at home to a mobile device in the real world.  Maybe you could send your students on a scavenger hunt for a place in your city that best relates to your topic, and then they use a mobile blog app to complete an assignment? Or maybe they have to search the tags in the city and find something that relates to the week’s topic? Art students could go paint somewhere, snap a photo of the picture, upload it to a blog, and then tag that blog post to the location.  Humanities students could interview people or take surveys, then post the results online, and then connect the results page to the location where they collected it.  Students could begin connecting research results to locations and maybe even map differences between neighborhoods.

Many possibilities… depending on where the technology takes us.

More Fun Bashing the LMS

Clark Quinn has some great thoughts on “Why Bash the LMS“.  While the article is a bit more balanced than it might sound from the title, I still like that he calls out what needs to change:

“On principle, I want the best tool for each task.  The analogy is to the tradeoffs between a Swiss Army knife and a tool kit.  There will be orgs for which an all-singing all-dancing system make sense, as they can manage it, they can budget for it.  In general, however, I’d want the best tool for each job and a way to knit them together.  So I’d be inclined to couple an LMS with other tools, not assume I can get one that’s best in all it’s capabilities.”

Will The Internet Start Looking More Like the World, or the World Like the Internet?

I was pondering future trends last week while watching the evening weather forecast.  Forecasting while watching a forecast?  Anyways… We were in for a possible round of severe weather that week. The news anchor put up a map of “storm spotters” – a network of people that would call in from their homes and tell what is happening in their area.

In other words, forecasting the weather is starting to incorporate crowd sourcing.

We have seen a giant push to get websites to work intuitively… and to even start thinking for us.  So on one hand – the Internet is starting to look more like the real world.  But I think even more often we are starting to see the world around us looking more and more like the Internet.  The powers that be are starting to see that there is power in crowd sourcing and social networking.  I wonder what real-life social networks we will see spring up next?

The real question for us is – can we use these ideas in education?  What if we took this weather stations ideas and applied them to a class? What if, instead of one large class, we broke that class down into smaller units based on geographic location.  Each smaller group forms a study group of sorts that watches issues related to the class subject in their area.  The small groups are loosely tied to one another in a way to share what they are learning about the subject.  The small groups would study local events or places. In this situation, the LMS would become more like the newscast – aggregating all of the input in one spot for everyone to benefit.

What if time and location became irrelevant for synchronous classes? What if you were grouped with a small group of people that lived near you when you sign up for a class, and then that group decided what day and time to meet for class?  The instructor would then send out assignments each week or maybe record a video for the group to work through. Maybe the instructor even met with each group.  then the groups send in their work to the class and the instructor aggregates all of the information coming in from each group and summarizes them for the entire class (which would essentially include all small groups no matter where they meet in the world).

Potentially, you could ave hundreds of students all meeting in a synchronous fashion, but all still in a way that fits their schedule.  This is, of course, another area where there is technology to do this… but we need one that is more specifically geared for educators.

Digital Institute Spring 2010

This semester for Digital Institute, the Center for Distance Education was pleased to sponsor two presenters on themes of great interest to our group:  Joan Hughes (University of Texas at Austin) spoke on “Diffusion of Transformative Technology Integration: What is transformative technology integration and how can I (meaning you!) support it at UT Arlington?“, and Peggy Semingson (University of Texas, Arlington) shared her research with  “Online Mentoring: Findings from a Case Study“.

 

In a first for this event, Digital Institute Spring 2010 took place entirely online, via Adobe Connect, under the watchful direction of Scott Massey and Erika Beljaars-Harris.  With their preparation and troubleshooting, the event was a splendid success!

 

You can view a recording of this event online as well.  Please do learn from our speakers and discussions from this past event, and we look forward to including even more of the UTA community at a future Digital Institute!

The Enemy is Powerpoint?

Article: “We have met the enemy and he is powerpoint” by Elizabeth Bumiller.

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter. [Click on link above to read the whole article.]