With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K-12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerful suite of free communication and collaboration tools like GMail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, Groups, Sites, and others. While many of these productivity-focused apps have helped modernize the classroom toolset, schools have been secretly pining for a tool to help students, teachers, families, and administrators stay in constant contact the way we’re getting used to doing in Facebook. Several small players have offered Facebook-style social classroom apps– tools like Edmodo, Schoology, and HootSuite have grown up to fill the need for a full featured social network for schools. If Google gets this right, the socially linked classroom with be a reality before the year is out! This is exciting for me, as someone who has been looking at enterprise-level microblogging tools like SocialCast and Yammer as a way to make campus communications easier and more free-flowing. I think this type of technology can revolutionize organizations by making it easier for stakeholders to hold sustained, data-informed conversations with asynchronous tools.

Most social classroom apps I’ve seen organize course activities (like commenting on discussion questions or sharing relevant links) into a Facebook-style activity feed where recent events appear near the top of the home screen. Photos, videos, and links to outside websites are automatically previewed inline, making it easy for people to see where they’re being linked to. Users can send private messages or public ones, deciding how they want to communicate and with whom. Discussions can be formed around any kind of posting, from a quick status update to a long-form blog post or multimedia artifact. These conversations can last long after the original posting, only drawing attention to themselves when a new comment is added. Users can form friendships, groups, and organization pages to support the many different types of interactions that people have.

These features will come as no surprise to Facebook users– the social network has so thoroughly revolutionized the way we think of online collaboration that  its influence is felt in every tool in this category. Google Plus is no exception, but it also advances the form in a few key ways:

• It gives simple and precise controls to help users share information only with the people they want to reach. No more accidental overshares.
• It provides an integrated interface where chat, video conferencing, and RSS news reading intermingle with social status updates.
• Google has stated its commitment to integrate its many diverse services into G+, and it will continue to grow into a central hub for communication and collaboration.
• It remains to be seen, but a G+ for Apps could very likely help schools to keep communications inside the school community instead of defaulting to public status. This may allay privacy- and copyright-related concerns caused by the wide-open nature of Twitter and Facebook. This is a prime selling-point of these education-focused social learning apps as well as the enterprise microblogging apps.

Even this week’s announcement of Pearson’s OpenClass Learning Management System may be disrupted by a G+ for Apps, as it looks to be little more than a social “glue” to organize students and teachers into courses so they can share documents in Google’s suite of free services. If G+ provides simple tools for schools to organize students and teachers into courses, cohorts, programs, organizations and the like (maybe by interfacing with Student Information Systems?), it may give the LMS a serious run for its money.

What are your thoughts on Google Plus for Education? Please let us know in the comments.

Related articles

• Pearson adds free learning management tools to Google Apps for Education (betanews.com)
• North Carolina A&T State University goes Google (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)
• New Presentation Options in Google Docs (freetech4teachers.com)
• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google in Education and Chromebooks (Sept 2011) (speedofcreativity.org)
• Back to School with Google Chromebooks (hackeducation.com)
• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)

Just enter the username you want in the search bar and it will give you a graphic visualization to let you know if that name is available on your favorite social networks. If you see your name is available, just go to that site and sign up!

This is also great if you’re picking baby names and want to make sure that your future offspring has reserved the very best usernames on all the hot services. For example, young Genghis Curran will not have to worry about adding a “1″ to the end of his Twitter handle (though he may get picked on a lot!)

Thanks, NameChk!

Related articles

• Identity and Internet Social Networking IDs (thorowit.wordpress.com)
• I Am Fragmented – A Look Into Online Identity (kylelacy.com)
• Tim Devane: Online Identity: Alone in the Car (huffingtonpost.com)
• Check Username Availability (bloggingtips.com)
• “A Lean, Mean, Social Media Fighting Machine.” (sweettomato.wordpress.com)

Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay for access to the many awesome online communication and collaboration tools they provide.

In this talk, I learned that sites like Google and Facebook actually skew your search results to show you different information based on what they think you’ll like. The speaker shows how different people got different Google results when searching for “Egypt” in the wake of the politial protests there this spring. Rather than giving you an accurate view of hits relevant to your search, these sites favor certain sites over others in an attempt to show you content it thinks you’ll like.

Seeing this talk reminded me of the billboard I recently saw near the Bay Bridge in SF, loudly proclaiming:

The Experiment

I decided to go Google-free for a week and use DuckDuckGo for all my searching needs to see how different the search results would be.

I did a very interesting little experiment: I searched “income inequality” in DuckDuckGo vs Google (see links for results). I didn’t see much difference in the search results until I noticed a search result in DDG that I don’t agree with– that Income  Inequality “doesn’t matter“. Anyone who knows me (and who knows me better than Google?) would take it for granted that I think income inequality is a problem. Of all the different things one could say about income inequality– I thought we (as a society) were all on the same page that it’s not a good thing. I probably fit squarely inside some Google framework of a Bay Area, liberal educated white middle-class NPR listener who would be shocked and horrified by such callous libertarian thought. I think this is part of what the speaker in the TED talk was getting at– that internet filtering removes viewpoints that challenge our own. My time with DDG is making me wonder if my search results help reinforce my certainty that my view of reality is the correct one.

This little revelation led me to try the mother of all divisive search terms: “Abortion”.

If I had any uncertainty at all about this important decision, I would rather be looking at search pages that don’t make that decision for me ahead of time, wouldn’t you? Now of course abortion is an extreme example, but the fact that DDG returns such diverse search results gives you an appreciation for how many different perspectives there are on reality, and how that diversity can look in search results.

So What?

Like me, you may not worry much about the profiles that companies are amassing about you. It does seem to be a small price to pay for the incredibly useful tools like Google Docs, Facebook, and Google search. However, these services are making lots of money collecting and selling your personal data to advertisers– Lifehacker aptly puts it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“. While I have (so far) felt ok opening myself to this kind of vulnerability, it gives me pause to think that I’ve been recommending that my students do the same. Is this responsible for teachers to do when the real-world consequences of exposing personal data are not fully understood? Will we one day find ourselves regretting that we gave up so much of our personal data to cloud companies, and when we do, will we feel responsible that our students did it too? Should teachers seeking students’ liberation and empowerment be on the vanguard of software efforts that preserve and enhance user liberty and control such as Diaspora, FreedomBox, LockerProject, and Free/Libre Open Source software?

Aside from privacy issues though, the Orwellian issue of how our experience on the web is distorted has implications for students’ development of critical thinking skills. Central to critical thinking is the idea that reality can be viewed from very different lenses and perspectives. If our search engines and social networks (for many, their web portal on the world) provide us with a distorted view of reality, do we lose the ability and the desire to consider divergent viewpoints from our own? If students’ online experience can be tailored to their tastes like an iTunes Genius playlist, what are they missing out on? Where is the chance to see the unexpected, the infuriating, and the serendipitous? Don’t we have a right to steer them towards experiences that push them out of their comfort zones? And if so, should we be starting with the search engines and software tools that they will depend on after they’ve left our classes?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

Related articles

• DuckDuckGo Brings Private Searching And Zero Click Results To Android (androidpolice.com)
• Should Google and Facebook Be Filtering Our Content For Us? (webpronews.com)
• DuckDuckGo Questions Quality, Accuracy Of Search Engine Traffic Numbers (searchenginewatch.com)
• Google’s New Search Layout Test: Borrowing From Blekko & DuckDuckGo? (searchenginewatch.com)
• DuckDuckGo: popular search engines don’t offer true search results (geek.com)
• DuckDuckGo Zero-click Info API (mashape.com)

Image via Wikipedia

If you haven’t heard of Chrome OS, it’s Google’s attempt to do away with the desktop altogether and have everything that happens on your computer happen inside the browser. This means that instead of opening Outlook for your email, you go to Gmail or Hotmail on the web. Instead of opening Photoshop to resize that photo, you use Aviary.com. Instead of desktop apps, you switch to web apps. After Google’s recent announcement that schools would be able to lease Chromebooks for $20/student/month, educators have been wondering if they could depend on a laptop that doesn’t come with its own desktop, has the internal storage of a mid-range smartphone, and only works when it’s connected to the Internet.

Yaysaying

Some people are excited at the prospects of moving completely into the cloud and leaving expensive, slow desktop computers behind. After all, Educause has been warning us since 2009 that cloud computing was on the horizon. Chromebooks boot up instantly, run lightning fast, and cost less than half of what you can expect to pay for a Macbook. It truly is possible to keep up with most common computing tasks using only web-based apps. For the Chromebook to exist, there has to be a full suite of web apps that enable you to do most common computing tasks in a browser with no (or few) compromises. That suite of apps exists. Email, office docs, audio creation, image manipulation, vector drawing, video editing, productivity apps, social media– all of these can happen in a browser now. Don’t believe me? Type your favorite piece of desktop software into Alternativeto.net and find the many cloud alternatives that can take its place. For free. In a browser. If you’re the type of person who spends most of your time in a browser, these devices might be perfect for you. If you’re not, you probably fall into the next category….

Naysaying

Others think that we are simply not ready to cut our ties to the trusty desktop and plant our feet firmly in the Cloud. A netbook minus the ‘net is not much of anything at all, IMHO. If you often find yourself outside the reach of WiFi or 3G data connections (which many of us often do) then you know just how important it is to be able to work offline. If you depend on a certain piece of software that only comes on your chosen OS, you might be loath to leave it behind for a cloud alternative. Add this to the increased responsiveness and power of desktop apps over webapps (we’re seeing people’s clear preference for apps in the world of smartphones) and the wealth of free and open source desktop applications available and it feels premature to kiss our old friend the Desktop goodbye.

The Way Forward

I think the best thing about Chrome OS is that you don’t have to actually use it to get the benefits it offers– you can choose to go “all webapps” in whichever OS you happen to prefer.  This fact also means that you don’t need a CR-48…. you can still get a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer (or build your own!), install Chrome browser, and enjoy all of the pleasures that Chrome offers PLUS the offline desktop apps you love and depend on. I’ve long been a proponent of software that has online/offline syncing capabilities like my beloved Evernote, the amazing Dropbox, or the venerable Thunderbird email from Mozilla. I’ve also been patiently waiting for a day when I could get a powerful laptop for under $400 that does everything I want it to do. The fact that Google has been working so hard to bring us a computing experience that doesn’t depend on the OS you’re running means that these dreams are becoming a reality.

Now, you can get a cheap, powerful laptop computer, install the free open source Ubuntu Linux OS on it (to get all the goodies that a true desktop OS with real apps brings), and then run all the webapps I want– right there in the browser.  The fact that we have viable choices on the desktop and the cloud changes the conversation from an “either/or” to an “also/and”.

For schools trying to offer a high quality- modern computing experience to students on a budget, this represents a viable vision of how to make that happen.

Related articles

• Chrome OS Launches in June, Only on Notebooks (pamil-visions.net)
• How to install Google’s Chrome OS (zdnet.com)
• Meet The New Chromebooks (appreaders.com)
• So.. Chrome OS has no Desktop? (thechromesource.com)
• Chromebooks Take Us Closest So Far to a Post-PC Era (customerthink.com)
• Will the Google Chromebook Replace Your Laptop? (pcworld.com)
• Google Chromebook, Do You Consider Buying One? (ghacks.net)
• Google Chrome OS: Too secure to need security? (go.theregister.com)

John Ward, RIP

This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place….

This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Ward, who recently passed away after a long career of distinguished service at Bishop Diego High School in Santa Barbara. He took me from being a hopelessly poor math student to a very capable one in three years of instruction, despite my deep and abiding dislike of the subject. He did this by consistently providing me with high quality materials, challenging problems to solve, and then expecting me to put in the work– or “plug and chug” as he would say.

Think of your favorite teachers over the years– they presented you with challenging, thought-provoking material and then asked you to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. By the time we’re in college, we get used to writing thoughtful essays about challenging ideas several times a week. When we leave formal education, many of us get out of this familiar rhythm, and instead focus on “getting things done”. When we’re in this frenzied state, we are not taking the time to reflect on new information and experiences we get from our work.

The process of taking information in, meshing it with what you know, and breathing it out again forms something of a “learning loop” that fits with a Constructivist idea (ed theory, sorry laypeople) of what high quality learning looks like.

You can think of building your own Personal Learning Network as an attempt to create this “learning loop” for yourself using the tools at your disposal. Instead of a bunch of teachers selecting challenging information for you, the Internet gives you access to a world of bloggers, tweeters, speakers, photographers, videographers, and colleagues who will teach you anything you want for nothing more than the price of your time and attention. All they ask of you is to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. You can participate in this conversation by writing your own blog, tweeting, organizing sources, speaking, and teaching others in the way that works best for you. This is all part of what we educators call “Life-Wide Learning”, where you are continuously gaining knowledge and building skills that help you stay professionally competitive, personally empowered, and connected with a community of people who share your interests– even after you leave formal education.

A Game of Inputs and Outputs

You can think of building your PLN as a game of Inputs and Outputs. You need to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. You also need to get in the habit of “adding value” to the information that comes in to you in whatever way works for you. That could mean writing your reactions to an interesting article you read, making lists of bookmarks you find to make it easier for others to find relevant information, video yourself demonstrating a skill you learned, or sharing resources with people you think could benefit from them. What you do is as unique as your skills and interests are, but the focus should be on sharing your learning with others who could benefit from it. Though this practice can benefit you and your business, think of it as doing well by doing good first. Most people don’t like being marketed to, but everybody likes getting free, relevant information about things they care about.

My Inputs and Outputs

To give you an idea of what my PLN looks like, I included an incomplete list of my inputs and outputs. Take a look. Next, I’ll show you how information flows from my inputs, through my brain, and out my outputs.

Inputs

• Social Media
  • Google Reader
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
  • Google Alerts
  • Twitter
  • Recommendation Engines
    • GReader Recommendations
    • Twitter Recommendations
• IRL (“in real life”)
  • Meetups
  • In-Person Connections
  • Conferences & Trade Shows
  • Professional Organizations
  • Events/Parties

• Outputs
  • Your Blog
  • Tumblelog/ Buzz
  • Status Updates
  • Bookmark!
  • Videoblogging
  • SlideShare
  • Present in Conferences or Trade Shows
  • Podcasts

Inputs and Outputs: A Workflow

Inputs

A first step towards forming a PLN is to start getting good quality information flowing in to you in an organized way so you can easily consume it at your convenience. My favorite tool for this job is Google’s free RSS reader, titled simple “Google Reader“. Reader allows me to collect RSS feeds (think of them as real-time updates from several different news sites, blogs, and other continuously updated websites) in a simple digest format. It enables me to quickly scan over headlines about anything I’m interested in, read what I feel like reading, and skip the rest. It takes the place of a newspaper for me– in fact, it’s a paperless newspaper where I’m the managing editor who decides what I’ll see! You can choose to include a mixture of “established” news sites (like the New York Times or the BBC) alongside updates from less established sites like your neighborhood activities committee, an industry-insider blog, or vegandad.blogspot.com. You can also organize them into folders like I have so you can switch between your many interests quickly.

Over the years I have collected RSS feeds from major thought leaders, news blogs, and even wiki site updates about information in my field, and this makes sure that if it’s happening in education technology, I’ll see an update in my Reader. I can honestly say that the time I have spent building my Reader into a well-rounded reflection of my interests has made me a more marketable and able worker, and a more empowered individual.

Enough sales pitch– let’s get started!

1. Get a Google Account.
2. Go to Google Reader.
3. follow the steps in the video “Welcome to Google Reader“.

After those steps, you should have a Google Reader with at least a few feeds in it. You might also want to check out these celebrity GReader reading lists by popular bloggers and intelligentsia types that you can simply add to your Reader.

From this point, you can be on the lookout for RSS feeds on your favorite websites, blogs and wikis. The RSS symbol

will appear in your browser’s address bar whenever you are on a website that features RSS feeds. Just click it and it will help you add updates from that page to your Google Reader!

Podcasts

Podcasts are basically RSS-powered blogs which contain audio and video files and are usually consumed on an iPod or smartphone. They are another very important part of my information intake every week. Just like my blogs, I line them up in a podcast player for when I’m ready to hear them (driving, walking the dog, etc.) and I don’t worry about it if I miss them. It’s like a DVR for interesting audio and video shows on a whole range of topics.

Most people subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, and then let iTunes sync the media to their player. I recently discovered that my Android phone’s Google Listen podcast player can actually use a Google Reader folder as its podcast subscriptions folder and download podcasts over the air! Here’s my list of favorite podcasts– all organized by Google Reader. If you prefer listening to news rather than reading it (or a mix of both), check into the top 50 podcasts on PodCast Alley.

Twitter

Twitter is another very valuable place where I can queue up challenging and entertaining ideas from the world’s best and brightest until I’m ready to read them. Some people dismiss Twitter as a frivolous medium– saying “it’s only people talking about what they had for lunch”. I’ve found it to be a vibrant community of smart people in my field giving real-time updates and discussions about newsworthy links, reactions to the news, and thoughtful quotes.

If you’re interested in Twitter, don’t concern yourself with what you’ll write first. Unfortunately, people do tend to write about lunch before they’ve had a chance to see what can be done in Twitter. The best thing to do with Twitter (at first) is to search it. Ask Twitter what’s going on with a topic you care about, and I think you’ll be surprised to find a compelling mix of formal and informal perspectives that you can’t find anywhere else. I watched Obama’s 2008 election on Twitter, and I saw a mix of people from all over the world giving their reactions to that historic event.

As you start to find people whose perspectives and voices you get some benefit from, follow them. It’s a great way to form relationships with people you can learn a lot from. (It might also inspire you to contribute your own voice to the conversation!)

Twitter organizes conversations around topic tags called #hashtags. You can make any word into a hashtag by adding a pound sign to the beginning. Twitter turns these into links to all of the postings on that topic. Website Whatthetrend.com can help you find conversation topics that are relevant to your interests.

To learn more about Twitter, check out the great Twitter Guide Book from Mashable.

It’s worth noting that Google Buzz, the Twitter-like thingy from Google, can subscribe you to updates from your friends in Twitter and/or Google Reader so you can see both in one stream. After you get to this point, take a look in Google Buzz and see if it shows a good mix of news for you.

Next Step: Outputs

In Part II of this post, I will discuss the “Outputs” stage, where you can show off your learning and use it to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Related articles

• Using Twitter and Other Social Media for Professional Development (shawnurban.wordpress.com)
• Twitterers To Follow (gfulibrarian.wordpress.com)
• Professional Learning Network Plans (maysayparn.wordpress.com)
• Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt) (weblogg-ed.com)
• Tearing Down Your Classroom Walls (freetech4teachers.com)
• The Downtime Learner theory (deangroom.wordpress.com)

As part of our LMS Evaluation, we’ve investigated concerns around Instructure’s viability and longevity as a business. Recent events surrounding Blackboard should lead us to question its viability with equal diligence.

First there was last week’s report that Blackboard had retained a financial services firm to help them respond to non-binding buyout offers.

Today, Michael Feldstein discusses a spate of Freedom of Information Act requests sent last week to universities who have recently switched from Bb to Moodle. The anonymous requestors wanted as much information as they could get about the process of switching LMSs– procurement notes, evaluation materials, communications with vendors, trouble tickets, and more.

Feldstein (while admitting he has no inside knowledge of the requestors or their motives) dispels fears that Blackboard is behind the requests as a means of attacking universities who switch. He says it’s more likely that these requests are coming from potential investors who are trying to understand the reasons for the erosion of Bb’s market share before purchasing the company.

He refers to the excellent summary of the Bb buyout drama by Kenneth Green in saying that, though the potential investors are unknown, they are most likely investment firms– not other large players in the education technology market (like Sungard, Pearson, Google, and others). If this is indeed the case, Feldstein speculates two possible motives which have future ramifications for Bb users:

In general, there are two types of approaches that private equity takes to companies that they acquire. One possibility is that they milk the company for cash as much as they can and then sell off the parts. That’s the kind of approach that became infamous during the big leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s. But often private equity will buy a company because, for whatever reason, they think that company is under-performing and that they can turn it around relatively quickly. In that case, their goal is to build up the company and sell it at a profit, either to another private investor or through an offering on the stock market. It’s a bit like flipping a house. I make no judgment here about what the likely impact of private equity purchasing Blackboard might be. My point is simply that there is no particular reason to believe they would automatically do a worse job for customers than, for example, Google might simply because they are a financial services company.

(Feldstein, 2011)

Green puts this all in context of a general downward pressure on prices in the higher ed. tech marketplace as open source and low cost LMS alternatives mature to match/exceed Bb’s feature-richness and stability. He also notes that 700 universities currently on Blackboard’s Angel & WebCT versions are forced to make a choice to upgrade to 9.x or transition out to another system. As these schools are looking at the value propositions offered by the various competitors, “some current Blackboard LMS clients will move to Desire2Learn, Moodle, or Sakai, LMS applications that have gained market share in recent years. And still others may opt for one the newer LMS platforms such as Epsilon or Instructure that are beginning to gain attention and traction.” (Green, 2011)

This all shows that the higher ed. LMS market is in the midst of a massive transition from a state of hegemonic domination by a few vendors to a marketplace of vigorous competition by the many. Open source systems are reaching maturity and feature parity with proprietary ones, and budget-conscious universities are finding equal or greater value in lower-cost alternatives to Blackboard. This competition is only going to be good for consumers, but it comes at the cost of increased short-term uncertainty.

It is in the midst of this uncertainty that the wisdom of open web standards really shines through. These standards guide the development of websites, browsers, applications, and file formats throughout the internet to ensure interoperability between sites and services without proprietary restrictions and incompatibility issues. In a volatile market like the higher ed. LMS market ca. 2011, one refuge is the fact that open standards like HTML, XML, SQL, and others will allow us to freely move our data with us, whichever LMS we choose to adopt down the road. This will make it so we can attach our institution’s viability to open standard technologies themselves instead of on the changing fortunes of LMS vendors.

Related articles

• Blackboard considering buyout offers (teleread.com)
• Instructure Canvas LMS: Go open source, get serious investment capital (zdnet.com)
• Blackboard May be the Target of a Takeover (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• Blackboard Shares Popped: What You Need to Know (fool.com)
• Instructure Aims to Knock Down the Learning Management System Walled Garden (readwriteweb.com)
• Interview With Desire2Learn CEO John Baker (downes.ca)
• VLE Review Survey (ilsmatters.wordpress.com)

When I’m doing a creative project (or just working on a presentation) I am always looking for large, beautiful photos bearing a Creative Commons license. Works released in the Creative Commons can be reused, remixed, redistributed, and revised for free– this makes it easy for me to share this excellent work in my own work. My favorite search engine for this task is Yahoo Image search because they have access to the whole Flickr.com library (probably the biggest repository of Creative Commons images in the world).

Searching this treasure trove of images usually involves several steps of setting up an Advanced Image search, selecting all the options I need, and finally searching away.

Thanks to this great tutorial from MakeUseOf.com, I learned how to dial in my ideal Creative Commons Image Search and save it as a simple keyword, so I can invoke it quickly. I just type “YI” and My Chrome Omnibar becomes a Yahoo Image Search for Large and Wallpaper sized Creative Commons photos. AWESOME!

Follow the directions in the MakeUseOf article to make your ideal custom image search (or whatever you need!)

Related articles

• Google Chrome Cheat Sheet: 10 Tips and Tricks (nsclive.wordpress.com)
• Get Around Chrome Custom Search Engines with a Forward Slash [Annoyances] (lifehacker.com)
• Quickmarks for Google Chrome makes bookmark keyword launching easy (downloadsquad.switched.com)
• How does a Creative Commons Share-Alike license on an image affect a web design that image is used in? (ask.metafilter.com)
• How to Use Creative Commons to Add Images to Your Blog (hubspot.com)
• CC News: Creative Commons for Japan Relief (creativecommons.org)
• Honing My Digital Storytelling Projects (lanceriley.wordpress.com)

A popular reason for exploring gamification in online learning is because we want to increase student engagement with the content. Games are nothing if not engaging, and the very best games can give educators deep insights into how to get and keep users’ attention. After all, video game makers have been resarching what makes a computer game fun much longer than educators have been putting instruction online.

As I was playing Angry Birds on my Android smartphone, I started to recognize the excellent pedagogy at work in the design of the game. This article attempts to identify and apply the best practices evident in Angry Birds to tie together a few strands of current instructional design concepts. Ready? Let’s get smashing!

What is Angry Birds?

At this point, it would help if you, dear reader, had a basic understanding of how Angry Birds works. The object of the game sounds utterly moronic when you write it out, but here goes:

Angry Birds is a game where you aim a giant slingshot to catapult various colored birds towards a castle filled with green pigs. The object is to destroy the building and crush all the pigs.

No matter how dumb it sounds, Angry Birds has become a worldwide phenomenon because the gameplay is so engaging. Here is a video of a few typical levels:

If at all possible, I highly recommend you play Angry Birds for yourself so you can get a sense of what follows. It’s available for pretty much any computer and smartphone you have, and/or Chrome users can play it right in their browser for free.

So What Does This Have to do with Course Design?

The study of gamification in online learning provides an excellent blueprint for online course design, as successful video games strike the perfect balance of motivation, skill building, and assessment. The runaway success of Rovio’s Angry Birds could be expressed in light of the above criteria for an effective online course.

Online courses (and the software that power them) needs to help teachers and students keep the end goals (read: learning outcomes) in view at all times. A good learning management system needs to support good lesson design by providng an integrated interface for

• Defining intended outcomes based on content standards or other explicit professional proficiencies
• Identifying what mastery looks like– what can students “make” or “do” that will show they have mastered the desired content outcome?
• Breaking the task of mastery into discrete, daily skills that can be taught over the course of one lesson.
• Scaffold the discrete skills to keep students in the zone of proximal development and progressing towards greater and greater mastery of the content.
• Communicating the expected outcomes to students so they can take ownership of their progress towards mastery.
• Assessing students often on the mastery of discrete skills.
• Not allowing progress beyond one skill if it has not been mastered.
• Promoting synthesis and transference of discrete skills into general proficiencies.
• Assessing students based solely on their mastery of explicitly stated skills.

Many of these activities do not need graphics-intensive software (like a video game) to work– they are a lot more about sequencing information and structuring learning activities so students are assessed on the exact skills and knowledge they’re being taught. In other words, they require good instructional design.

Defining intended outcomes:

In the game, the object  goal is to effectively destroy all of the pigs and their buildings by mastering the destructive capabilities of the various angry birds. Each level is a scaffolded mini-lesson that moves the learner a step closer to that ultimate goal.  In your course, the intended outcome might be something like “be able to write a five paragraph essay” or “know and communicate how osmosis works”. Without clearly defined outcomes, you will have a hard time measuring whether students are learning. Once you have a clear idea where you’re going, you can backwards-plan individual learning activities that help students get closer to the intended outcomes every day.

Identifying what mastery looks like:

Each new level introduces one new skill at a time, and the player cannot pass the level until they have mastered that skill. You might ask– what “skills” am I learning playing Angry Birds?

Some of the skills and knowledge required include…

• learn the unique destructive properties of each type of bird
• learn  these properties can be used to destroy the various building materials and structural configurations in each level
• analyze each new structure to develop a strategy for destroying it with the given quiver of birds
• master the relationship between the force and angle of slingshot pull to the flight trajectory of the birds
• to achieve true mastery, users must destroy the structures using as few birds as possible. Users are encouraged to earn extra points for “above par” achievement.

Each level is designed to teach and assess one specific skill along the path to mastery.

Breaking the task of mastery into discrete skills lessons, and scaffolding lessons to keep users in the Zone of Proximal Development:

Each level constitutes its own “lesson” where the user learns (at least) one new skill towards the intended outcomes in each level. The very first lesson concentrates on basic launching with a simplified target and the simplest avian projectile in the game: the red bird. This helps the user get a feel for the game’s controls and environment because, at that point in the game, that’s what the new user needs to feel oriented.

As the levels progress, new kinds of birds are introduced, each with different flight trajectories, destructive properties, and mass characteristics. The skills build upon one another– the player develops a repertoire of choices that they could apply to the challenge of demolishing the buildings. The user must use his/her creativity and recall of the various mastered skills to effectively pass each level. This ensures that users are at an appropriate level of challenge at all times throughout the game’s progress, and have authentic motivation for recalling previously-learned material.

The path towards mastery is a series of tests, not a series of “tells”.

Lecturing is one of the most common activities that a teacher does, no matter how much evidence mounts that lecturing is

• an ineffective use of the teacher’s time and expertise
• not correlated with mastery of material
• a task that can be just as effectively performed by a video recording

In Angry Birds, you may noticed that the skills are not explicitly “taught” to us by the game. Instead, we are set free to explore, try, fail, re-assess, and try again. The idea is that the learner is not able to pass the lesson until they have mastered the (targeted and well defined) skill, but that they can keep trying until they do. The game (unlike most classrooms) is a safe place to fail. There are no punishments for not having the right answer the first time or being the fastest. Instead, video games reward users who keep trying, experimenting with alternative strategies, and even cheating looking up the correct answer.

This brings up a good point that I’ll paraphrase from David Wiley‘s talk “If the Book Didn’t Change Education, How Could the Computer?“. Traditional education grew up in a world where access to high-quality information was not available to everyone, so very few people could possibly become experts. In other words, we have been living in a world of “information scarcity” for most of human history.

This is the first time in history that students are living in a world of “information abundance”. Students are able to find high-quality, accurate information to answer any question imaginable– AND they can search for exactly the form of information (text, video, tutorial, encyclopedia, expert article, etc) that will most effectively help them meet the challenge.

In this world of abundant information, we do not need to spend our time telling students what the book says– we need to present them with targeted tests that reflect real world problems and applications of knowledge, and we need to coach/guide them in harnessing abundant information towards the task of solving these problems.

Back to Angry Birds, it is not uncommon to get “stuck” on a level the same way students get “stuck” in the classroom. You may try every trick you can think of to knock down those blocks and the right answer still eludes you– what do you do next? This is where many students give up because we have put such a taboo on researching information when we need it!

At this point, I can Google “Angry Birds Level 10-3″ and decide whether I’d like my answers in the form of a video tutorial, a written description of the problem, or some other format. The point is that “the answers are out there” and I just need the stimulation to search them out. That stimulation comes in the form of a tantalizing challenge that I know I could master if I had just one more bit of information.

I’d be very interested to hear your reactions to this theory, and to continue to explore the lessons that video games have for online educators. I believe that “gamifying” education does not mean that we have to turn learning into a video game, but that we continue to see what makes video games so engaging in the first place.

Related articles

• Faculty Require Mastery of Content and Skills – Not Just Technology Use (speedofcreativity.org)
• Giving and Receiving Peer Feedback in the Online Classroom (brighthub.com)
• Preparing for the Future: Improving College Readiness (learning.blogs.nytimes.com)
• A Guide to Authentic Assessments (brighthub.com)
• Play Angry Birds on any page with this add-on (thenextweb.com)

Image via CrunchBase

The recent explosion of great tools that simply run in a web browser has been amazing. From tools like Google Docs, Evernote, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Prezi, and Rememberthemilk and the venerable Gmail– you can access powerful tools for free wherever you are. However, sometimes a web browser is not the best interface for the kind of work you want to do. This is where desktop clients for webapps really shine. Here is a great article from Mac.AppStorm.net about 60 great Web apps with strong desktop clients. Am I missing any? Let me know in the comments.

Related articles

• Milkify – Desktop application for Remember The Milk (milkify.com)
• Get Instant Desktop Notifications From Your Web Apps With Notify.io (makeuseof.com)
• Google Brings Bug Bounty To Web Apps (informationweek.com)
• Coming Soon in Google Docs: Third Party Apps, Cloud Printing and Sync (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• 5 Great Reasons To Use Seesmic Desktop 2 As Your Twitter Client (makeuseof.com)
• Twitter Client For Your Browser – TicknTalk (mindjumpers.com)
• Ditch Desktop Apps for Webapps, Free Up RAM, and Enjoy the Best of Both Worlds [Webapps] (lifehacker.com)

Update!

What began as a pie-in-the-sky idea was actually put into production as Google Body Browser, a 3D WebGL powered app that showed the major features of the anatomy in a browser. As Google has focused their energy around their core products they have discontinued Body Browser and open sourced the code under the name Zygote Body. While the project never incorporated the more advanced features I imagine below, I have hope that such an application will one day be available.

This is an idea I had for a new kind of computer program– an idea I call “Google Human” because I imagine it to be like Google Earth but for the human body. To be exact, it’s a biomechanically, biochemically, anatomically and physiologically correct 3D model of the human body that responds to user inputs.

It’s predicated on the idea that, at any given time, we are made up of various levels/ values of biochemicals, risk factors, perceived states– and that these can be quantified and modeled in 3d.

It could become a platform to collect huge sets of data on individual biological processes and phenomena related to health and show clearly how they interrelate with one another.

Imagine our Google Human–

We give her an aspirin tablet. Then we watch as her vitals change (as viewed by a facebook-style status update stream)

* her corticosteroids drop by 24%
* her perceived pain drops 56%
* inflammation of her stomach lining increases 9%
* her expected lifespan increases .00327%
* heart rate increases 12%

We can see her bones and muscles, and how they would interact if we moved them this way and that. We can take a virtual tour of the structures of the body and see a brief description of their function.

Imagine showing junior high kids what happens when they drink a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew right before their eyes! They would be able to watch as their blood sugar spikes, their attention scatters, and their empty calories increase.

Imagine being able to explain HIV transmission and AIDS to pre-literate people in sub-Saharan Africa, where a large part of the disease’s spread is caused by persistent attitudes and behaviors based on false information.

This could be a boon to medical science, as well as to public health, making it possible for the world to have a shared central repository for medical information that could drive medical science forward.

Technological Underpinnings

I imagine this to be a MUCH MORE COMPLEX version of the old virtual life simulations like the Creatures series from the 1990s. At the time, these programs were revolutionary for imbuing virtual-pets (for lack of a better word) with computer modeled DNA, nervous systems, digestive systems, and so on. According to Wikipedia:

“The program was significant as it was one of the first commercial titles to code alife organisms from the genetic level upwards using a sophisticated biochemistry and neural network brains. This meant that the Norns and their DNA could develop and “evolve” in increasingly diverse ways, unpredicted by the makers. By breeding certain Norns with others, some traits could be passed on to following generations. Most interestingly, the Norns turned out to behave similarly to living creatures. This was seen as an important insight into how real world organisms may function and evolve. “

The goal with Creatures’ norns was to make cute and interesting virtual pets for people to play with on their desktop. Imagine using the same technology to create working models of human beings, using everything we know about medicine (western, eastern, and otherwise), health science, and so forth. The engine that powered this program was made open source and is now available here.

I imagine that, like GEarth, the graphics can improve with time if the human is made up of inter-stitched patches of photos. As higher resolutions of photography become possible, the “grid” of photos can be replaced with better ones.

Cool– what’s next?

It’s probably obvious that this is just an idea– and I do not have the technical ability to make it anything more than that. Please use the comments to discuss the idea, build on it, and bring it closer to fruition. Please and thank you.