LearningForward

Kent Chesnut's technology in education blog.

I’ve been attending an online ASTD seminar called Essentials of E-Learning Strategy Development.  The class is mainly made up of training personnel from a variety of industries (I don’t think I saw any K-12 personnel when we did introductions) along with at least one odd engineer who finds eLearning fascinating (FYI, I’m referring to me - not dissing someone else).  The purpose of the seminar is to help the students develop a strategy to move their companies from where they are now (which varies greatly) to where they want to be in eLearning.  Along with discussions on use of the Web 2.0 tools for collaboration, reflection, …, I was surprised to hear about Web 3.0.

Web 3.0 appears to be somewhat speculative at this time.  See the Wikipedia article here.  Probably the most intriguing is the idea of the Symantic or Contextual web.  I’m not too well versed, but as I understand it, the web will be able to apply rules that may be similar to artificial intelligence to help you find things you are looking for.  Sorry this is so vague, I’m just trying to reflect on this at the moment.

When we tried to come up with something currently done on the web that might be an initial peak at this capability, the best (to me) seemed to be Amazon.  After you shop and buy from Amazon, your start page and e-mails from Amazon target your interests.  (This is pretty odd for me, as I buy stuff for my younger kids on Amazon… which leads to some pretty strange groups of stuff being targetted to me.)  Suppose that this linking / targetting was immediate AND web-wide!  What would this be like?  Well, I don’t know, but I can make some speculations:

• It will be annoying if a world of companies immediately try to push their products at you everytime you do a search!  I see an opportunity for some new sort of blocking software here.
• Currently, the web delivers massive amounts of information in response to a search.  The search hits are based on the actual search terms we enter.  Then we have to manually sort through it all to try to find the tidbit we are looking for.  I usually keep trying to refine my search criteria to limit the responses (or I just look at the first few hits to see if I can find what I want).  Web 3.0 will handle this differently - more like our brains.  Instead of returning only hits that match our search criteria, the web will return all kinds of context related stuff drawn from virtually limitless long term memory (think the web, in this case).  In our brains, this information is rapidly sifted through our (very limited) short term memory.  For this context based web to be useful, it’ll have to support us in paring the responses down efficiently. 

So, what does this mean in terms of Educational Technology?  I suspect the following:

• I don’t think that much of this “contextual” processing will be done on our PCs - but will be done on servers - with the results delivered to our PCs.  Therefore, I don’t think there will be major impacts on web connection speeds and computer speeds.
• What will this mean to eLearning for schools or industry?  Will the web be able to build a custom educational experience geared directly to a student’s needs and interests?  Will it essentially obviate the need for objectives’ based instructional design?  I don’t think so - but maybe in Web 5.0!

So much for ramblings about Web 3.0.  I think it’s time to get back to some Scratch! 

Whew!  I’m finally finished with the 2008 update of the Diabetes @ School program - A (school) year in the life of a student with type 1 diabetes.

I’ve attached a screenshot of one of the months.  In this shot, I’m dragging one of the alternatives onto the picture at right.  When dropped, a field will appear labeled “Parent’s Response” providing feedback to the selection.

The project is meant to be completely exploratory.  No tracking is done of the answers.  In the introduction I encourage the user to drag as many of the alternatives to the graphic as they wish.

Access to instructional content is learner controlled.  The instructional content is not presented on its own. 

The content is embedded in the (hopefully) authentic activity of deciding on how to address a range of diabetes related problems.  The user (a teacher, in this case) accesses the instructional content by clicking on one of the resources along the left of the screen.  Tooltips appear when the mouse is over the 3 icons showing them to be the “School Health Plan”, the “Quick Reference Emergency Plan”, and “Call Parents”.  The 2 documents are the same on each screen (and they include the necessary information in a very concise format), whereas the audio feedback associated with the telephone is customized for each month’s situation.  Instructional content is also included in the Parent’s Response feedback text that appears when the user drops an alternative on the graphic. 

See my previous posts on this project at http://g4classes.com/learningforward/?p=50  and http://g4classes.com/learningforward/?p=55 for more information on the design and objectives of this project.  (I have no idea why WordPress is replacing my link text with the URLs today… I wish it would stop!)

The final version of the program is avialable on my Moodle site, http://www.g4classes.com in the Diabetes @ School course.  The course is set for Guest access so you can have a look - if you’d like.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Next time I’ll try to be back to the main theme of this blog - constructive uses of technology in education.