Thursday, February 26, 2009
Teaching w/ Technology Face-Off: iPhones vs. PC's
An experiment this semester at Houston Community College compares two sections of the same course, one in which students are given iPhones and another in which students use old-fashioned PC’s to view course materials online. The question: Will students with the smart phones spend more time watching course videos and interacting with peers than those without them?
Read more here.
Read more here.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Google Apps for Education Coming to Moodle
by Dave Nagel
Google Apps Education Edition is coming to an open source learning management system near you. Moodlerooms, a Moodle partner, is launching a new enhancement to the open source LMS in collaboration with search giant Google to provide access to the application suite using a single sign-on.
Google Apps Education Edition is the widely deployed hosted application suite that includes communications tools like as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk; collaboration apps, such as Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Labs (for software code review); and various administration features and APIs for integration with existing systems.
Through the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition, "providing users with Web-based e-mail, document authoring, spreadsheets, presentations and sites, all integrated with their online learning platform," explained Moodlerooms' West Coast Managing Director Michael Penney. "This greatly simplifies the task of implementing a collaborative suite, as well as enables institutions to leverage the work they've already done integrating their platforms with their other systems. From a teacher's perspective, this provides an easy way to assign students to collaborative tasks without having to worry about the students having different operating systems or incompatible software or being unable to access an online system. From an IT staffer or CIO's perspective, this provides an integration tested with large-scale data loads and built on industry standard SAML 2.0 and OAuth protocols for secure single sign on and information transfer."
Google provided funding, direction, guidelines, and certain technologies for the solution, while Moodlerooms handled the coding, according to a Moodlerooms spokesperson.
Two educational organizations are piloting the program before it will be released publicly: Project KNOTtT, a group consisting of universities and colleges from Kansas, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas, and Centro Latino, an adult education organization that provides Spanish-language courses.
Read more here.
Google Apps Education Edition is coming to an open source learning management system near you. Moodlerooms, a Moodle partner, is launching a new enhancement to the open source LMS in collaboration with search giant Google to provide access to the application suite using a single sign-on.
Google Apps Education Edition is the widely deployed hosted application suite that includes communications tools like as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk; collaboration apps, such as Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Labs (for software code review); and various administration features and APIs for integration with existing systems.
Through the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition, "providing users with Web-based e-mail, document authoring, spreadsheets, presentations and sites, all integrated with their online learning platform," explained Moodlerooms' West Coast Managing Director Michael Penney. "This greatly simplifies the task of implementing a collaborative suite, as well as enables institutions to leverage the work they've already done integrating their platforms with their other systems. From a teacher's perspective, this provides an easy way to assign students to collaborative tasks without having to worry about the students having different operating systems or incompatible software or being unable to access an online system. From an IT staffer or CIO's perspective, this provides an integration tested with large-scale data loads and built on industry standard SAML 2.0 and OAuth protocols for secure single sign on and information transfer."
Google provided funding, direction, guidelines, and certain technologies for the solution, while Moodlerooms handled the coding, according to a Moodlerooms spokesperson.
Two educational organizations are piloting the program before it will be released publicly: Project KNOTtT, a group consisting of universities and colleges from Kansas, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas, and Centro Latino, an adult education organization that provides Spanish-language courses.
Read more here.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
eLearning 2009 Tweetup
Monday, February 9, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the Microscope
Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.
Read the full article here.
Read the full article here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)