Educational Technology

By Justin Marquis Ph.D., Online Universities

Yesterday’s post, Utilizing Game Mechanics in Online Learning, contained an overview of game mechanics and the ways in which these broad concepts can inform online course design in order to make virtual learning more interactive and engaging. Today I examine some specific strategies for fine-tuning the balance of the various game mechanics in order to create a learning experience that has the right blend of space, objects, actions, rules, skill, and chance. According to game designer Jesse Schell it is not enough to have all of the necessary elements in a game in order to make it successful – you must also strike an artful balance between them (2008). There are a variety of ways to achieve the necessary blend of components. In his book The Art of Game Design (2008), Schell outlines the most common strategies for achieving balance in game mechanics. Here are his 12 strategies and a brief overview of how each can be applied to online course design.

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/02/game-design-strategies-for-balancing-the-online-classroom/

by PHILIP PETRUNAK, Daily American Staff Writer

Conversations about how to better integrate emerging technologies into the classroom are taking place in school board meetings across Somerset County. Whether to utilize mobile devices alongside textbooks, for example, is becoming a normal topic of discussion. Administrators in the Windber Area School District are looking to stay ahead of the curve. The school district plans to break ground in the fall on a course that not only uses mobile devices, but exists solely because of the technology. Windber is scheduled to pilot a nine-week elective course that introduces students to the engineering of mobile applications. If “Introduction to App Engineering” goes well, the school district plans to create a series of course levels aimed at teaching students how to build functioning mobile apps from start to finish.

http://www.dailyamerican.com/news/somerset/da-ot-windber-to-introduce-students-to-the-art-of-app-making-20120224,0,762363.story

by Kristin Rushowy, Toronto Star

At this Aurora school, the students use technology as much inside the classroom as they do outside of it. In fact, it’s a part of everything they do. St. Andrew’s College was among the first — about a decade ago — to move to laptops for all teachers, then for students. Now it has all students using tablets for all of their work. The tablets, which are laptops with a touch screen that can flip sideways, can contain many of their textbooks and notebooks, and also allow teachers to check their work.

http://www.thestar.com/specialsections/article/1136700–st-andrew-s-college-leads-with-technology-in-its-classrooms

By DANIEL P. BADER, Observer-Dispatch

If you think of a classroom and have visions of chalk boards, erasers and textbooks, you’ve been out of school for a long time. The modern classroom doesn’t have chalk dust in the air, but does have bits of data flying overhead in Wi-Fi networks. Gone are the television carts and overhead projectors. Students now watch instructional movies on interactive, touch sensitive SMART boards, and teachers give lessons built with powerful software.

http://www.uticaod.com/business_review/x1353887340/From-chalk-boards-to-SMART-boards-Local-schools-2-0

by Tom Vander Ark, Huffington Post

Innosight Institute’s seminal report, “The Rise of Blended Learning,” outlines several emerging school models that combine the best of onsite and online learning. Besides students taking online courses when possible, there are basically two emerging school models:

Rotation: Students spend 20 to 50 percent of their time online.

Flex: Core instruction is conducted online with on-site academic support and guidance, integration and application opportunities, and extracurricular activities.

Students in flex schools progress as they demonstrate mastery in most courses. In some courses, particularly those with teachers at a distance, they may remain part of a virtual cohort.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-vander-ark/flex-schools-personalize-_b_1264829.html

by the Toronto Star

Ontario universities need to cut undergraduate degrees from four to three years, offer classes year-round and allow students to earn more than half their credits online, says a government paper obtained by the Star. The proposals would get students through university or college cheaper and faster — the report says college diplomas should be two years at most — while still offering a quality post-secondary education. “The ultimate goal of this strategy is to improve student choice, maintain the quality of the system and to refocus the system on a flexible and forward-looking set of teaching and learning options,” says the paper, which is to be sent out for discussion in March. “(It) will improve the existing productivity of publicly funded resources.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1135296–ontario-universities-should-offer-three-year-degrees-classes-year-round-and-more-online-learning-says-provincial-report

by mbjerede, e-Mergents

Well into the 21st century, we are still trying to get a handle on what a 21st century education really is – both the question of what young adults really need to know and be able to do and the question of the best way to help them get there. In his book, The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner lays out seven “survival skills” that are needed in a modern workplace: Critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration across networks and leading by influence; agility and adaptability; initiative and leadership; effective oral and written communication; accessing and analyzing information; and curiosity and imagination. There are many ways to slice and categorize modern skills, but this is a pretty good description of what young adults need to know and be able to do in today’s workplace.

http://e-mergents.com/2012/02/wanted-a-21st-century-education/

BY JASON PONTIN, Technology Review

A bewildering number of services let computer and smart-phone users store and share files in the Internet’s cloud. But one file-hosting service in particular has evoked the kind of devotion ordinarily accorded social-networking services or beloved hardware manufacturers: Dropbox, the product of a startup founded in 2007 by MIT computer science students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. The service lets people use almost any computing device to store files in folders in the cloud as thoughtlessly as they store files in folders in their device’s memory. Achieving that simplicity of use—something Houston calls “an illusion”—is very difficult, because it forces the company to wrestle with all the variants of the major operating systems, four Internet browsers, and any number of network file systems. No other service supports so many different systems. More than 50 million people around the world have been beguiled by Dropbox, which is free to many users. The company’s robust growth, together with revenue from the fraction who pay for extra storage and options, has been rewarded by a valuation that various reports place as high as $4 billion.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/39653/?mod=chfeatured

BY DAVID TALBOT, Technology Review

Imagine Wi-Fi that spans two kilometers; or a car safety system that beams news of an accident, vehicle to vehicle, from far ahead on a lightly traveled road; or a mobile phone whose calls almost never drop. These and other new communications technologies could be helped along by a deal announced in Washington last week that permits the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to sell off unused TV spectrum in two years. The agreement covers lower frequencies—previously set aside for analog TV broadcasts—that allow for longer-range, higher-capacity communications. But making use of the frequencies will require technology capable of flitting rapidly between different frequencies at high speed. “This will absolutely open up new innovation,” says Dipankar Raychauduri, director of Rutgers University’s WinLab, a leading wireless research lab. “It’s really quite a breakthrough, because the U.S. would be the first country to allocate such spectrum.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39773/?p1=A4

by DAVID ZAX, Technology Review

Nick Bilton at the Times’s Bits Blog, hardly a site for speculation on vaporware, tells us to expect something remarkable from Google by the year’s end: heads-up display glasses “that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.” That’s right. Google’s going to turn us all into the Terminator. Minus the wanton killing, of course. The Times post builds on the reporting of Seth Weintraub, who blogs at 9 to 5 Google. He had written about the glasses project in December, as well as this month. Weintraub had one tipster, who told him the glasses would look something like Oakley Thumps. Bilton cites “several Google employees familiar with the project,” who said the devices would cost between $250 and $600. The device is reportedly being built in Google’s “X offices,” a top-secret lab that is nonetheless not-top-secret-enough that you and I and other readers of the Times know about it. (X is favored letter for Google of late, when it comes to blue sky projects.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27600/