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doug woods

ICT in Education Consultant and Trainer

Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category

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Web Apps for Education (in a Time of Financial Constraint)

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Person with PDA handheld device.
Image via Wikipedia

Web Apps for Education (in a Time of Financial Constraint)

There always has, or should have, been a desire among schools to get value for money from their ICT purchases. I guess this is even more important nowadays in a climate of financial constraint. There has always been the desire though to balance financial commitment with getting the best for the learners. The best has not always proven to be the most expensive, or perhaps I should say that the most expensive services on offer have not always been the best.

We work in the world of education and I’m sure we would all appreciate suppliers offering their products and services, recognising this. Schools are not generally industries or services that utilise software and hardware to make money or to enable them to run more efficiently. Schools use software and ICT services to enable learning to take place. Whilst we do not object to people and companies making money, if they are offering their products within the education market, I think it only reasonable that we expect them to offer them in the spirit of education and not simply for the purpose of making a quick buck.

Recent years have witnessed the increase in services and products offered via the web. Not all of these have been aimed at schools but many are certainly useful for schools to use. Many of these products are free or have a free service, often with restrictions. Schools have certainly been looking at these and many are making use of them; that is where they are not blocked by overzealous filtering.

Where increasing bandwidth and download speeds are available, these web applications are proving very useful. Though, where connectivity remains poor the use of web tools can be problematic especially for large files such as video or music.

One major problem with web based applications has been that you cannot always rely upon them remaining available. There have been numerous instances of useful applications appearing but later being withdrawn and, more commonly, of applications starting out as ‘free’ but later becoming a paid-for or subscription service. An application may be withdrawn if development funding is insufficient, if development work proves too difficult or if it fails to attract sufficient users. In some cases, a company developing and offering a free service might be bought up by another company, which no longer wishes to offer the free service. Even where a service develops from a free one to a paid one, there is often, though not always, a basic free service which users may be able to continue using.

Users of free web-based services should always be aware of the possibility of the service changing in its nature and should ensure that critical work is not vulnerable to loss or future charges. Of course, there is always the possibility that the usefulness of the free service is clearly demonstrated to the school and that you may wish to take full advantage of the service by moving to the paid for service at a later date. In this way, the web based services might be seen as a form of ‘shareware’ in which you are allowed a free trial before parting with any money. In this way, web based apps may have an economic advantage for schools compared to commercial software packages.

Another aspect of web based applications is that they are usually available to users from any location. Pupils can use the application in school and continue their work at home. This is useful for a teacher setting course work in that they know the pupils each have equality of access to the same tools, provided they have a computer and connectivity at home. Web based applications are usually device independent, some will also work on handheld devices, so a teacher need not be concerned if a pupil has a Mac or even a Linux device at home or school rather than a PC.

Not only is location independence significant for work between school and home, it can also be significant globally in that pupils from across the world can work on the same web based application. This can lead to work being shared with other users around the world and be used to support collaborative projects across cultures and time barriers.

This collaborative aspect is an important one for it demonstrates that even in times of financial constraint, we are still able to extend education across new boundaries by using educational technology.

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Posted in Classroom Technology, Home Access, Online Resources, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Four Twitter Services You May Not have Seen

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - SEPTEMBER 30: A stack of news...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Just recently I have been playing around with a few twitter services which some of you may not have seen. Most of them are quite new services and I thought it was time to give you my first impressions of them.

TwitterTim.es and Paper.li

Two of the services are quite similar. They take the tweets of you and your followers and present them as a ‘twitter’ type newspaper.  I have been using Paper.li for a while and have tweeted it a few times in my twitter stream. Twittertim.es is one I have only recently begun using and have not yet tweeted it. The reason I have not yet tweeted Twittertim.es is that they do not let me know when a new story is published, whereas Paper.li sends me an email.

Of the two services, Paper.li looks the more innovative and more appealing on screen. I like its inclusion of photos, videos and text pieces. It is published only once a day and, as I mentioned before, they send me an email when each new edition is published. Generally the service has been very good and I have been pleasantly surprised at the relevancy of most of the items they publish. There have been a few slip ups, they did publish an article about the film Avatar, in which I have absolutely no interest whatsoever and I wouldn’t like anyone reading my paper to think I had. Okay, this is a trivial thing and one that I can put down to early trial glitches.

Twittertim.es appears a bit more traditional in its on-screen appearance. There does, though, appear to be more stories in it and, again, they are usually very relevant to my interests. The newspaper seems to be updated more frequently than paper.li but they don’t let me know when a new item appears, though they do have an rss feed. So I have to past that into a reader if I want to know when a new item is published.

While both these services are interesting, I’m not really sure who they are aimed at. Are they aimed at me, so that I can read in depth more about the stories or news items that I and my followers have visited or are they aimed at my followers? In some way, at the present, they seem to be a solution in search of a problem.

Newzfor.me

At first I thought newzfor.me  was going to be a similar service but which worked in a slightly different way. On its website it presents a number of categories and in each category it has a number of news stories which it will publish into your twitter stream at regular intervals (you can choose what interval). What you do is to simply choose which category you want to publish and the service does the rest, it even automatically shortens the url using your bit.ly service. It seemed like a good idea and I signed up to give it a try.

That was my first mistake. I chose the technology category as that seemed to be the closest to the educational technology that I usually tweet about, that was my second mistake. I set the tweet interval to be once every two hours which, I thought, seemed reasonable; third mistake. Finally, I linked the service to my bit.ly account,.. you guessed it!

For a few days, every couple of hours, my twitter stream was punctuated with tweets about some breaking technology story. All seemed okay at first but soon the items seemed to have less relevance to education technology and it seemed more like I was spamming my own stream. I also found that an interval of every two hours was far too frequent and again made it look more like spam. I could have changed the category of the items but no other category (and there weren’t many) seemed at all relevant.

So I decided to end the service but on returning to their homepage I found there was no way to login to my account to delete or cancel it. So I took the step of denying the service access to my twitter stream, that at least stopped the tweets appearing. However, the posts were still appearing in my bit.ly account, with a new one every two hours! I had to send an email to the newfor.me team to try to find out how to stop the account. It turned out that I couldn’t, they could only do it, for now, at their end. That meant letting them know my twitter ID, which I was a bit reluctant to do. Eventually, they did remove my account and the posts no longer appear in my twitter stream or my bit.ly account.

So the newzfor.me experience turned out to be a bit of a disaster but it needn’t have been. If there had been a user-panel on the home page which gave me full control of the service, I could have made any changes including cancelling at any time. Yet, I think the service would have been made better had they opted, instead of automatically tweeting articles on my behalf, to send me a link to an article and then let me decide whether to tweet it or not.

Reportage

The fourth service is one I have been using for a while now. It is not a web service but an iphone app but I really wish there was a web service as well! The app is called reportage and it is a twitter client that works in a slightly different way. It automatically groups tweets by twitter ID. So when I select the app, it first shows me the avatar of every person I follow (and that takes quite a while to load now). By selecting an avatar, I can then read every tweet made by that person over a recent timespan, say 1 day. This is great, especially if I have been away or busy during the day; it means that I can easily catch up with what people have been saying/doing. Another feature is that certain people I follow I can mark out as special and these people will be displayed on a separate screen, which makes it a bit easier to catch up with tweets from people I feel are important or influential.

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A Second Look at Second Life

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

3766460866 f8e7dae3cc m A Second Look at Second Life

image by Learn4Life

A few years ago I first tried out Second Life and, to be honest, I didn’t like it at the time. Nevertheless I decided to give it a second look recently to see if things have changed.

Let me try to explain what it was that I didn’t like the first time. At that time I had a Pentium processor in my machine, a good deal of memory and, for the time, a top range graphics card. Even so, I found Second Life to be quite unusable. The graphics were very crude (rough not rude!) and took a long time to display on the screen. Moving your avatar appeared tricky and cumbersome, in fact doing anything with your avatar appeared tricky and cumbersome, even getting him to look right. As for the flying option, well that just cheesed me off … I wanted to walk properly before I learned to fly!

What I really didn’t like was that you were very restricted in the way you could name your avatar. Although you could give yourself any first name you wanted, your surname was either chosen for you or you could pick from a limited choice. Consequently, I ended up with a name I could never remember and that was not particularly useful when you had to type this in to login each time! Besides, I really wanted the option to use my real name!

When I did get Second Life working (slowly) I found that there wasn’t much you could do with it. Okay, you could meet people but I really just wanted to explore and find out things, after all I don’t talk to people I bump into on the street in real life, except perhaps to say ‘sorry’.

Finally, what really hacked me off was the need to buy virtual currency. You had to pay real money to buy virtual money that you used to buy virtual goods; I’m sorry but that just seemed like a scam to me!

Anyway, that was then and recently I’ve decided to take a second look at Second Life. So what has prompted me to do so? Firstly, I had hoped there would be more to see or do now, I had, in particular, heard about the Learn4Life island which seemed more relevant to my work. I also now have a much more powerful computer and graphics card. I hoped also that many of my other niggles may have been resolved by now.

There certainly have been improvements. I found that Second Life remembered my original Avatar name, which was good because I had long forgotten it, even so, I decided to create a new one from scratch. You still cannot use your real name or even one you completely make up yourself. This is a shame but I did find the choice of surnames a bit more usable than previously, so I was able to come up with a name that sounded a bit sensible!

I still found a problem with the graphics in that they didn’t always render quickly, despite the much faster graphics card. Perhaps my slow urban broadband connection is the problem here (but don’t get me started on that issue). I was also surprised that some of the graphics seemed very poor, almost 1990s style, particularly in the landscape, textures and objects such as trees, but maybe that is a legacy issue.

I still found creating a reasonable Avatar to be tricky, the limited options really didn’t quite match what I wanted to produce. However, it did seem quicker this time around. Moving the avatar was also much easier than before, flying also seemed easier, though I found less need for that.

Second Life has recently introduced a new ‘viewer’ interface tool, which makes it quite easy to use and navigate around the virtual world.

There did seem, however, to be far fewer people in the virtual world than I experienced in the past. I don’t know if Second Life is losing popularity or if more people were now spread over a much larger world.

I did venture a few times over to the Learn4life island and there are certainly a lot of interesting things going on there, except that I didn’t find anyone else on the island. I guess it is the place people visit only when they know something is planned. Even so, I’m quite intrigued by the possibilities on offer there.

The virtual currency still exists and even has a variable exchange rate! My membership to Second Life is still the free level and, I hope, you can do a lot with that. There is a premium level which gives you a few (it seems) more features such as a virtual house, virtual money each week, online help and access to virtual adult facilities (no thank you!). Of course you have to pay real money to get these virtual features which you can only use in the virtual world, which still seems like a scam to me but then, on the other hand, if you can earn virtual money and convert that to real money, it may be more useful. Of course the services offered by Second Life and its developers do cost them money and nobody should begrudge them earning a living; perhaps I just wish there was something more tangible on offer for your real money.

Overall, my second experience of Second Life has been much more positive, the recent changes to the viewer are a great improvement over what went before. I do feel there is a steep learning curve to be gone through before you can fully use Second Life but that is part of the fun of it. There are still a few niggles with the choice of names and avatar design but they do seem more flexible than in my previous experience. Second Life still appears very ‘resource hungry’ and you may find you need a high end machine to make best use of it,m you also appear to need a good broadband connection and I guess some of my problems may lie in my poor urban broadband connection (I told you not to get me started on that…)

If you’ve been put off by earlier experiences of Second Life or not looked at it for a while, I would suggest having another look at it.

If you are on Second Life and see a sullen overweight avatar walking around in a denim shirt and shoulder bag, please say ‘hi’ but don’t be offended if I don ‘t reply; I’m either shy or haven’t yet mastered the speak options!

If you are interested in the Learn4Life island on Second Life, there is a short video introduction here http://blip.tv/file/3404585/

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