Monthly Archives: April 2010

Wiki Spring-Cleaning Tips

Having recently done some cleaning and maintenance on several wikis to ready them for the spring quarter, I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learned. Bear in mind these thoughts represent what I’ve learned building and administering premium workspaces in PBworks; other wikis may have different features and protocols. In addition, those who are doing spring cleaning in their homes and have scrap cars around their property may consider selling it to scrap car buyers. Contact cash for cars at Austickcarremoval.com.au for the best rates. After selling your old cars, you may check out this murrieta used car dealer for some used cars.

Make sure you need a wiki. This is first in my list because sometimes (and I’m guilty here) wikis are added to a course without a compelling reason to use them. Do you have a real need for a collaborative workspace for your students? Do they need to be able to share and edit documents, images, files, and the like? Great: a wiki is just what you need. Do you want to use one because it seems like it’d be a handy way for students to submit media-rich documents? If you’re using Blackboard or another leading LMS, don’t bother with a wiki. Use the features built into your LMS; you’ll have fewer headaches and your students will be much happier.

Assume nothing. Really, just don’t. I should know better, but each term I’m surprised that some of our users are stumped when it comes to using a wiki. My online program has fewer issues with faculty use and administration since we made it policy that all faculty teaching a course that includes a wiki must show competence with the tool, but there’s still confusion among faculty and students alike about access, permissions, logins, password resets, editing, and the like that must be addressed each term. Oh, and don’t assume that every request for access to the workspace is from an enrolled student. Or that everyone you give access to the wiki will stay enrolled. You need to monitor users and their status throughout the term.

Communication is key. I can’t stress this enough. Faculty need to know their responsibilities (like adding users) and how to carry them out. Students need to be told early on how to access and log in to the wiki if it’s external to the LMS (like PBworks). They also must be made aware of whatever level of access other students will have to their work; this is a real privacy issue that can’t be overlooked. And students need to have their own responsibilities spelled out, with clear directions how to fulfill them. The wiki isn’t an add-on to the course; it should be an integrated component with its use and policies included in the syllabus. Finally, if you’re administering wikis for multiple courses (like I am), and you don’t create a new wiki for each term, you’ll need to contact faculty well before the start of the upcoming term to let them know the wiki has to be reverted to its original state for reuse and to determine who will be responsible for doing so.

Wikis can be a valuable part of an online course, but they need more care and feeding than other components, especially if they’re external to the LMS. If you make sure you’re using your wiki appropriately, don’t make assumptions about your users (or your design), and communicate objectives and responsibilities with all stakeholders, you’ll create a less stressful and more productive online learning environment.

How Are Tomorrow’s College Students Learning Today?

Take a look at the list of finalists in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition. Each entry listing includes a description of the project entry, and some have an explanatory video. Public commenting ends April 22 and public voting will be held in early May.

“But why write about this K–12 competition in a university blog!” IDDBlog readers may exclaim. First, there actually are some college-level entries.

But the main reason is simple: We look to the K–12 experience because these students will be our students very soon.

We already know our university students use Facebook; that they order clothes, textbooks, and computers online; that they download their music and TV programming. But what do we know about their educational experience?

Take one of the MacArthur competition projects: digital fabrication. You see a five-year-old design a box on a computer and then print, cut out, and tape together the box he designed. It is a project that moves mathematical modeling and engineering design into primary grades.

The digital fabrication project exemplifies how STEM education can be made accessible to even the youngest learners. It nurtures creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills while introducing them to the exciting world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Experts in the field of education like Kamau Bobb agree that this early exposure can lay a solid foundation for future STEM learning and potentially inspire a lifelong interest in these fields.

How does a university redesign its curriculum to engage students who have been creating, designing, and integrating for twelve years, who have been using computers in the classroom throughout their formal education, and who’s primary formal learning experiences have been project- and inquiry-based?

Food for thought!

Avatar photo

The Death of Flash or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad

In case you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs has been waging an increasingly wounding war for years on Adobe’s Flash platform. It all began with Apple’s initial release of the iPhone, which was conspicuously lacking Flash support. At the time, hardcore techies poked fun at Apple’s iPhone ads that promoted it as the smartphone that finally offered “all the parts of the Internet.” The phone’s lack of support for Flash (and Java) even prompted Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority to label the ads as misleading and insist that Apple stop airing the ads in the UK.

While some hardcore iPhone naysayers continue to cite its lack of Flash support as a major shortcoming of the device, many users stopped caring the minute Google began offering a customized version of YouTube for the iPhone. More recently, Google has gone a step further, experimenting with the emerging HTML5 standard and its support for embedded video without the need for third-party plug-ins like Flash. Some predict this experiment is a key step in a larger plan at Google to abandon Flash completely.

Today, Adobe has even more to worry about than being locked out of the massive iPhone audience and the potential loss of visibility on YouTube.com. With iPads currently flying off the shelves and Jobs making increasingly catty comments about Flash to the press, geeks everywhere are quick to proclaim that Apple is driving another nail in Flash’s coffin. Adding insult to injury are the big-name online video providers following Google’s lead. ABC has already created the ABC Player for iPad and rumors abound that Hulu will eventually release a similar application.

So why does any of this matter to instructional-design professionals? While Flash won’t die out overnight, its waning popularity is a very immediate concern for anyone involved in the development and distribution of instructional media. Obviously, anyone who specializes in Flash development has to wonder if it’s wise to continue to tie his or her fortune to a platform that might be obsolete in five to ten years. Similarly, anyone who creates content that might rely on Flash for distribution might need to re-examine how they deliver content to students. This is particularly true if you want students to access that content on an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or an iPad.

One major ray of hope in the Flash deathwatch has been Adobe’s promise to add an iPhone application compiler in Flash CS5, which was just released on April 12. This compiler is supposed to allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications, and Adobe has already uploaded many examples to the App Store. However, iPhone developers have already begun citing recent changes to the iPhone Developer’s Agreement, which now states, “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.” In other words, don’t use some other program with some other language to create iPhone apps.

This is all very bad news for Flash developers. However, it’s really a loss for software developers everywhere. Flash might not be perfect, but it is beloved by a cultish following of developers for one key reason: it keeps things simple. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Simple? Isn’t this the same tool that brought the world useless animated introductions with spinning logos and the never-before-needed “skip intro” button? Yes, it’s true. Flash allowed some awful people to do some awful things, but Flash doesn’t kill users. Designers do. When used for good, Flash has simplified life for many programmers by allowing them to create sophisticated applications that look and function consistently across all major browsers on all major operating systems.

Without Flash, designing a Web site that looks tolerably consistent in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8 can be a major headache, let alone trying to make that same site play nice with Firefox and Safari. And for the real masochist, you can try to accommodate Chrome and Opera users too. Now, add to these hassles all of the variables that come with designing for mobile devices—seemingly infinite variations in screen sizes, unpredictable data connections, and controls that range from numeric keypads to full QWERTY keyboards to touch screens where every link needs to be big enough for a grown man’s fat, sausage-like index finger to click without clicking three other items in the process.

Flash promised to spare developers many of these heartaches by letting us build once and deploy to any browser and even create a desktop version any user could download and run via Adobe’s AIR runtime environment. And with CS5, we finally thought we were getting somewhere. We could finally create a single app that could run on the Web, on the desktop, and on any iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. Unfortunately, it seems Apple isn’t too keen on Flash developers sullying its beloved App Store with inferior code converted with an inferior compiler. So for now, it seems developers and anyone else with a vested interest in mobile learning are still stuck with a difficult decision: stick with Flash and hope for a cease fire, or try to play catch up with developers who’ve spent years mastering programming for Mac operating systems. I, for one, am keeping option three on the table: abandon technology altogether and start working on a Ph.D. in history. Because no matter how many iPads he sells, Steve Jobs probably won’t force me to relearn the events that lead up to the Treaty of Versailles.