October 2005 Archives

Thank you teachers for listening to my (boring) sharing. As mentioned, the slides that I have used are available here.

The softcopy of the Weblogs in Education lit review is available in the IT Litereature Review page of ETD's EduMall. Check out EduMall for the wealth of resources related to IT in education.

We are unable to allow hands-on during the sharing, and creating a blog is really fast and easy on a usual day. If you would like to this moment create your own blog, first grab this Blogger.com user guide (~4.4MB) (which I have created for use during my workshops). Next, surf to Blogger.com and within 5-10 minutes, you will be a member of the blogger's community. Yup, congratulations in advance :)

Hope the sharing has triggered your thoughts and you will consider to use blogs in your teaching and learning. Cheers!

If you are exploring/considering which blogging platform to deploy/embark on, James Farmer has put up the abovementioed review. Check it out, it may speed up your decision cycle :)

This Guide is the result of 350 hrs of learning and experimentation to test the boundaries of blog functionality, scope and capabilities. I myself began this process as a total newbie about six months ago � which likely shows in gaps and na�vet� � but I have been aggressive in documenting as I have gone. The learning from my professional blog journey, still ongoing, is reflected in these pages.

This Guide addresses about 100 individual �how to� blogging topics and lessons, all geared to the content-focused and not occasional blogger. More than 140 citations from more than 80 experts provide additional guidance. The Guide itself occupies 80 pages. It is all free.

-- Michael K. Bergman, �Comprehensive Guide to a Professional Blog Site: A WordPress Example,� A Guide Book from the AI3 Blog Site, September 2005, 80 pp.

Yet another article on iPods, from The Seattle Times.
Teachers in this article are using the portable players to "make podcasts, practice their vocabulary words, English as a Second Language students are using them to practice English, getting the best possible sound quality from the youngsters, which sometimes meant doing it over and over."

In addition, busy parents too are capitalising on the technology to "keep in touch with the world their children inhabit all day at school" by programming their computers "to capture the broadcasts".

This article off neighbornewspapers.com writes about how a teacher gives her student a voice through blogging.

Loved the ending paragraph:

"She responds beautifully to teacher needs and student needs," Ms. Hooper said. "She has the heart of a teacher."

makes me wonder if we were slow in responding to our students' needs at times *hmm*

edugadget published this post on putting ppt presentations to the latest ipods.

Being a Creative fan who supports the Singapore's own innovation, my mind's working on similar possibilities for the Zen Vision/Zen Microphoto *hmm*

Alan Levine has posted a MT podcast publishing guide. Indexing it, try it later.

Read CNET's Blogging 101--Web logs go to school article for the current edublogging scene.

MSNBC's iPods become music to teachers� ears article wrties about how school children are picking portable MP3 players and bringing them into classrooms.

EPNweb.org - The Education Podcast Network, "is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century."

E-learning has been around for 10 years(?) and where are we heading from here? This article by Stephen Downes writes about just that. Trends such as changing demographics of learners (operating at "twitch speed," expecting instant responses and feedback), the "read/write web" (where learning is created instead of just content delivery) are touched on in the article.

Check it out now :)

1. Ask: �Why are we doing this?�
* What do we need to know?
* Why do we need to know it?
* What do we hope to do when we find out?
* What are the objectives of the survey?

2. Ask: �What are we measuring?�
In training evaluation, what you measure can be influenced by the learning objectives of the course or curriculum you are measuring:

* Knowledge
* Skills
* Attitudes
* Intentions
* Behaviours
* Performance
* Perceptions of any of the above

Your questions, and possibly your survey methods, will differ accordingly.

3. Be aware of respondent limitations.
* Where possible, pilot your questionnaire with a sub-group of your target audience.
* The complexity of your questionnaire and its language should take into account the age, education, competence, culture, and language abilities of respondents.

4. Guarantee anonymity or confidentiality.
* Confidentiality lets you follow up with non-responders, and match pre- and post studies.
* Confidentiality must be guaranteed within a stated policy.
* Anonymity prevents you from doing follow-ups or pre-post studies.

5. Select a data collection method that is appropriate.
Consider the speed and timing of your study, the complexity and nature of what you are measuring, and the willingness of respondents to make time for you. Options:

* E-mail � fast, inexpensive, not anonymous, requires all respondents have e-mail.
* Telephone � time consuming, not anonymous, may require skill, has to be short.
* Face-to-face interview � slow, expensive, requires skill, best for small samples, qualitative studies.
* Web-based � fast, inexpensive (if you use services like Zoomerang), can be anonymous, best for large surveys.

6. Write a compelling cover note.
Where appropriate introduce your questionnaire with a brief but compelling cover note that clarifies:

* The purpose of study and why it is worth giving time to.
* The sponsor or authority behind it.
* Why you value the respondent�s input.
* The confidentiality or anonymity of the study.
* The deadline for completion.
* How to get clarification if necessary.
* A personal �thank you� for participating.
* The signature or e-mail signature of the survey manager (or, ideally, of the sponsor).
* If sending an e-mail, have it come from someone in authority who will be recognised, use a strong subject line that cannot easily be ignored, and time it to arrive early in the week.

7. Explain how to return responses.
If not obvious, make it clear how and by when responses must be returned.

8. Put a heading on the questionnaire.
State simply what the purpose is, what the study is about, and who is running it.

9. Keep it short.
* State how long completion should take and make sure that it does.
* Make questionnaires as brief as possible within the time and attention constraints of your respondents (personal interviews can go longer than self-completion studies).
* Avoid asking questions that deviate from your survey purpose.
* Avoid nice-to-know questions that will not lead to actionable data.

10. Use logical structure.
* Group questions by topic.
* Grouping questions by type can get boring and cause respondents to skim through.
* Number every question.
* Where possible, in web-based surveys put all questions on one screen, or allow respondents to skip ahead and back track.

11. Start with engaging questions.
Many questionnaires are abandoned after the respondent answers the first few questions.

* Try to make the first questions non-intimidating, easy, and engaging, to pull the respondent into the body of the piece.
* Try to start with an open question that calls for a very short answer, and ties in to the purpose of the questionnaire.

12. Explain what to do.
Provide simple instructions, if not obvious, on how to complete a section or how to answer questions (circle the number, put a check mark in the box, click the button etc.)

13. Use simple language.
* Avoid buzz words and acronyms.
* Use simple sentences to avoid ambiguity or confusion.
* If necessary, provide definitions and context for a question.

14. Place important questions at the beginning.
* If a question requires thought or should not be hurried, put it at the beginning. Respondents often rush through later questions.
* Leave non-critical or off-topic questions, such as demographics, to the end.

15. Select scales for responses.
* Keep response options simple.
* Use scales that provide useable granularity.
* Make response options meaningful to respondents.
* Make it obvious if open-ended responses should be brief or substantial by using an appropriate answer-box size.

16. Fine-tune questions and answer options.
* Keep response options consistent where possible - don�t use a 5-point scale in one question and a 7-point in the next unless absolutely necessary; don�t put negative options on the left in one question and on the right in another.
* Be precise and specific � avoid words that have fuzzy meanings (�rarely� or �often� or �recently�).
* Do not overlap response options (use 11-20 and 21-30, not 10-20 and 20-30).
* If you use a continuum scale with numbers for answer options, use a clear concept at the top and bottom of the scale (instead of �on a scale of 1 to 5, how good is it? : 1-2-3-4-5, use 1=very bad -2-3-4-5=very good).
* Use scales that are centred� don�t have one �bad� answer option and four shades of �good�.
* Don�t force respondents into either/or answers if a neutral position is possible
* Allow for �not applicable� or �don�t know� responses.
* Edit and proofread to make sure that answer choices flow naturally from the question.

17. Avoid leading or ambiguous questions.
* Don�t sequence your questions to lead respondents to answer in a certain way.
* Avoid questions that contain too much detail or may force respondents to answer �yes� to one part while wanting to answer �no� to another (e.g. �How confident do you feel singing and dancing?�).
* Minimise bias by piloting your questionnaire before it goes live.

18. Use open-ended questions with care.
* Open responses are difficult to consolidate, so use them sparingly.
* They often provide really useful data, so don�t avoid them completely.
* Doing a pilot or running a focus group before rolling out a survey can provide useful insight for creating more structured closed questions.
* Provide at least one open question so respondents can express what is important to them.

19. Thank the respondent.
* Thank the respondent once again. Reiterate why you value the input.
* If you intend to feed back results, emphasize when and how they can expect to get them.
* If you have offered an incentive, specify what the respondent has to do to claim or be eligible for it.

[Source: Parkin's Lot]

If you love Physics, you'll love these songs; if you dislike Physics, you may like it after listening to these songs *hmm*

WHAT IS FUZZMAIL? Fuzzmail records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter.

Read on. Try it.

On GMail ...if you prefer keyboard more than using mouse for manipulation, you'll love this tutorial on shortcuts for GMail by ExtremeTech.

Brian Lamb of abject learning put together this screencast on educational blogging. His words on what the quicktime movie is about:

I ended up reviewing a few of the cooler educational weblogs we are hosting at UBC, briefly demonstrating supplementary technologies such as RSS and social bookmarks, and pointing toward all too few peers out in the ed tech weblog community. The minutes and the megabytes just flew by. Of course, once I was done I thought of all sorts of things I should have added -- like referring people to Stephen Downes's definitive treatise on Educational Blogging, but such is the nature of these things...

Interested to view, grab the movie from the original source or the local mirror. Enjoy :)

Read this off Professional-Lurker post, downloaded my own to spice up this lifeless page a bit. To adopt your own, click on my _useless_ Blob below :)

Klik and Play is an object oriented programming environment, free for use in school activities. Simple games can be easily created by absolute beginners. With more experience and by devoting some time to studying the manual, quite elaborate shoot-the-badguys or destroy-the-aliens type of games can be created. [extracted from Introduction@Klik & Play Home.

The developer's home page (Clickteam) goes here, and for comprehensive user guides, visit the Klik & Play Home.

Download your own copy and create some interactive games today :)

Off-topic. We are into maths for this post. Gotten this URL from Weisiong. Extracting the interesting beginning:

Start with any natural number, such as 69534891. Count the number of even digits, the number of odd digits, and the total number of digits. In this case, there are three evens, five odds, and a total of eight digits. Use these three numbers as digits to form a new number: 358.

Repeat the steps with the new number, counting evens, odds, and the total number of digits. You get 123. If you perform the same set of operations on 123, you get 123 again.

Try another number: 141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974. Counting 0 as even, there are 24 evens, 33 odds, and 57 digits in total. Applying the process to 243357 gives 246, then 303, then 123.

In fact, no matter what number you start with, this iterative process always leads to 123.

Michael W. Ecker describes the number 123 as a "mathemagical black hole" with respect to this particular process. "Once you hit 123, you never get out," he says, "just as reaching a black hole of physics implies no escape."

Graham Attwell shared the abovementioned paper which he is going to present at a conference.

Abstract:

The paper, entitled Recognising Learning: Educational and pedagogic issues in e-Portfolios, is based on developing and implementing e-portfolios in three different European projects. It is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to the pedagogy of e-portfolio development and that existing applications and implementations tend to be overly dominated by the requirements of assessment. The paper looks at the different pedagogic processes involved in the development of an e-portfolio. It considers the competences required for developing and maintaining an e-portfolio. The final section considers the challenges in developing e-portfolio applications.

The Blog Herald has updated the count, grab the full report here.

Yahoo! Podcasts has gone beta and you can start your search and plug in for a treat.

If your question is "What the heck is podcast?", Yahoo provides an introduction too.

If you are keen on becoming a podcaster, check out the comprehensive step-by-step guide.

James juz shared with us a site where he found some Chinese fonts that can be downloaded for use.

If you are "Sick of Writing Research Papers?", then "Have the Wikipedia Community Do It!"

and the steps are:

1. Write a craptacular draft full of factual errors, incredible sources, and grammatical/mechanical mistakes.
2. Post it to Wikipedia.
3. Wait a few days and let the community clean it up for you.
4. Turn it in!

*pengz*

[source: kaironews]

The little thumb/flash drive has become an indispensable item to many of us nowadays. But are all thumb drives born the same? In any case, check out this article on AnadTech and you may be in for some surprises.

after reading this post off eide neurolearning blog, just occurred to me that how many of these mathmetical theorems that we have truly learnt, besides the formula itself *hmm*

found this set of slides at Alex Halavais's blog, gives a comprehensive overview of blogs and wikis. mirrored a copy of the slides pdf for future reference :)

Learning to program a computer is hard.
Alice makes learning to program easier. And it's fun.
Alice makes programming more accessible to girls as well as boys.

This is what Alice is about. A wordy version of the about goes here.

The focus of the Alice project is now to provide the best possible first exposure to programming for students ranging from middle schoolers to college students.

You may want to check out the demo videos to see what Alice is capable of before downloading the software :)

If you want the ability to edit MS Office documents (word, ppt, xls) or to create PDF files on any computer that is connected to the Internet but without the software installed, try ThinkFree Office Online by signing up for a basic/trial account that offers 30MB of online storage.

As this utilises java applet(s) that need to be downloaded, hence the first time you access it on a computer can take quite some time. Subsequent use should be faster as the applet has been previously cached.