(photo by by Davb)
This weeks reading in The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen includes the concept of the Buying Hierarchy. Products are bought based on four factors in order: functionality, reliability, convenience and price.
I want to apply this to online teaching content. Material that could potentially replace the text book.
Functionality – There is a lot of wonderful content out there and more being produced for free all the time. In addition we know how to get groups of users to collaborate to create content and there are a lot of people in the world who know the basic K-12 curriculum.
Step by Step, live walkthroughs of Web applications [icant.co.uk]
Step by step is a YUI-based tool that builds guided walkthroughs of Web applications. This looks like a great tool to build documentation right into a Web application. A context-sensitive help system could be built with this tool. The script is available under a Creative Commons license.
The positives are it is much more interactive than a video or screencast and the users stay right on the Web site.
The negative is that, at least for now, a programmer has to be involved in creating the experience. A screencast or documentation page can be created by a nonprogrammer. However, we could write a front end if someone wanted to use it extensively.
iPaper, YouTube style conversion of documents to Flash! [www.scribd.com]
Scribd has a new feature they call iPaper. This basically involves converting various document formats, including word and powerpoint into embeddable Flash content with read-only access.
Many of our clients would like to display content originally created in MS Word on their Web sites. In most cases, copy/paste from Word into a WYSIWYG HTML editor like Xinha or TinyMCE is problematic at best. This is especially true if the original document uses tables or other advanced features besides simple paragraphs and fonts. We have worked hard at trying to add documentation on how to do this, but Scribd may offer an easier alternative in some cases.
George Siemens outlined some concrete steps to get started with connectivism/networked learning.
Number 4 is interesting!
"4. To be networked, resources and conversations need a degree of openness. This is one of the drawbacks of an LMS. Learners need to develop comfort with transparency and see the impact. In a recent course on digital literacies, Peter Tittenberger and I found learners can be uncomfortable with posting thoughts in an open public forum. There is something personal (vulnerable?) about learning that certain individuals prefer to keep "secure". To balance openness and privacy, tools exist, such as ELGG, that allow educators to create mini-networks with greater privacy than the open web."
By default, our MEL product configures ELGG as a closed "walled-garden". We made this decision because the target audience includes the 6-12 grade range. One of ELGG's strengths is access control, allowing users to choose to restrict access even within the school community. MEL creates an ELGG community for each Moodle class so students can set blog posts, files, etc. as visible only to one class, or even just for their teacher.
Yahoo UI 2,5 DataTable Control and Accessibility [developer.yahoo.com]
Yahoo UI 2.5.0 was recently released and it looks like they are moving towards a highly functional, accessible data table that could make our Ajax Listbuilder work even better.
The DataTable page says:
"The DataTable control provides a simple yet powerful API to display screen-reader accessible tabular data on a web page. Notable features include sortable columns, pagination, scrolling, row selection, resizeable columns, and inline editing."
The promise of screen-reader accessibility is very encouraging. All along I have seen that Yahoo UI has been working on accessibility with their Javascript toolkit.
Ajax and Accessibility [openacs.org]
As we add Ajax-powered applications for our clients and share the code with others, there is some demand to make these features available within OpenACS and .LRN. .LRN, in particular, has a goal of meeting WAI accessibility guidelines. It is very challenging to meet these guidelines with Ajax-powered systems.
At the latest OpenACS/.LRN conference, we had a discussion on new Ajax applications and accessibility. I created a wiki page to document what we learned, including links to resources and best practices, as well as draft proposals from WAI for accessible rich internet applications.
I got back this week from the OpenACS/.LRN conference in Guatemala. There was a great bunch of interesting people there and there was a lot to learn.
I presented on an AJAX-enhanced data table, known in OpenACS as Listbuilder. The video and slides are available. The user interface was inspired by DabbleDB, which provides a collaborative alternative to spreadsheets for managing data. In our case, we needed to integrate this level of interactive data manipulation with an existing .LRN system. Data privacy was also an issue, so everything must be hosted internally.
Phun learning physics [www.acc.umu.se]
Phun is a 2-D physics modeling environment, Windows only. A Mac OS X version is in the works according to the FAQ. It looks like another tool in the spirit of Squeak Etoys, Scratch. Scratch is generally geared more towards making games, while Etoys can be used for simulation as well as games. Of course, in any programming environment you can create anything with enough imagination.
Search is the life blood of the internet. When you are at a loss and you can not seem to find the web page, file or image that you are looking for, search comes to the rescue.
While search has become faster, more robust and efficient in the back-end, very little has changed in the user interface.
One of Solutiongrove's clients was quite inspired by the UI on AjaxFS that they sent us a mockup that was loosely based on it for use on the search section of their site.
We implemented it on solutiongrove.com and you can see it and try it out in http://www.solutiongrove.com/search/.
Planning an online community [www.idealware.org]
Online communities take planning, care and feeding. If you want one, be sure to read this Idealware article first. Here are some quotes:
do your homework to clarify your community's purpose and composition. If you were building a new residential community, you'd certainly think hard about what sort of people might choose to live there and why.
and
Finally, be sure that you intend to be in it for the long haul. Online communities take time to catch fire. A member's connection with your community grows with each individual small interaction, even those that have no obvious immediate organizational benefit. If you interact with your community members only when you want a favor from them, you may drive people away. Like a friendship, relationships that are only about favors do not stand the test of time.
This is a double learning experience for me. It is a reflective on the reading for this week's class, Chapters 1-3 of The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, and how it relates to my project, which is a business plan for our MEL product. It is also my first video of this type as I continue to try to keep up with the average high school student level of video production!
The end result is a custom e-portfolio block that presents the following user experience:
Brandon Hall Research recently reported average LMS prices. The trend towards hosted LMS systems becoming cheaper than installed ones is new but is very consistent with our experience here at Solution Grove. Hardware is getting cheaper and replication systems are getting more sophisticated. If you control all the hardware and every part of the software stack then it's very easy to create a new instance of the LMS system. However, setting up systems inside another organization's data center remains complex. We do set up systems on-site on the customer's preference of operating system, but each operating system, each firewall, mail server, etc. has its own peculiarities and settings and, of course, new sysadmins to get to know.
Part of our end-user support is to provide helpful tips and documentation matched with training videos and demos to assist clients in their daily applications. Our wiki and other content creation tools uses Xinha, a powerful What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor.
Our latest how to is on editing a table in Xinha. Just like in any other application, creating and editing tables should be quite easy. In Xinha, editing tables is similar to that in windows. This short demo should be able to guide you.
And to provide you with more reference on other related topics, I've organized, in one reference page, all of our company's written documentation and video demos on how to use Xinha and XoWiki. This page contains links to the following topics:
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