How to “crop” the long URL?
It happens often to me… When referring to a link to some news, document or video, the URL is extremely long. This applies especially to twitter limiting the message to a specific number of characters.
Google URL Shortener is an online service that reduces the internet address to 20 characters. Interesting?
steps:
- Login to http://goo.gl/
- Enter the URL you want to shorten and click the Shorten URL button
- The service will provide a short URL that can be used instead the original URL
The Horizon Report 2012: Higher Education Edition – some reflections…
Reading the Horizon Report 2012: Higher Education Edition, I found interesting the identification and description of the 6 emerging technologies with a high probability to have an impact over the coming 5 years in higher education:
- Mobile Apps: Smartphones including the iPhone and Android have redefined what we mean by mobile computing
- Tablet Computing: Led by the incredible success of the iPad, the advances in table computers have captured the imagination of educators around the world.
- Game-Based Learning: Role-playing, collaborative problem solving, and other forms of simulated experiences are recognized for having broad applicability across a wide range of disciplines.
- Learning Analytics: it refers to the interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of students in order to assess academic progress, predict future performance, and spot potential issues.
- Gesture-Based Computing: Gesture-based computing allows users to engage in virtual activities with motions and movements similar to what they would use in the real world, manipulating content intuitively.
- Internet of Things: it’s about network-aware smart objects that connect the physical world with the world of information, by using TCP/IP as the means to convey the information, thus making objects addressable (and findable) on the Internet.
Very interesting emerging technologies!
But there are other aspects of this report that attracted my attention: The Key Trends and Challenges associated with educational technology adoptions for the period 2012 through 2017.
Key Trends
- People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
- The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
- The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.
- The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
- Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models.
- There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.
Challenges
- Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of higher education.
- Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
- Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
- Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies.
- New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities.
Do you recognize some of these trends and challenges in your university?
Reference: Horizon Report – 2012 Higher Education Edition http://www.nmc.org/publications/horizon-report-2012-higher-ed-edition
Bring your slides to life… with voice
In my explorations on the web to find and experience web 2.0 applications, I found HelloSlide.com, which allows you to upload presentations (as do SlideShare.net, scribd.com and Prezi.com).
The novelty is that it integrates voice up to 20 languages.
It allows you to upload a presentation, type the speech (instead of recording it), and play it using a synthesized (but quite realistic) voice. Also, you can effortlessly make your talks available in multiple languages.
Currently the service is available FREE for up to 50 presentations. Additional features are available in their premium services, but the free version is definitely enough to give you an idea what it’s all about. Simply upload your presentation (as a .PDF), add your text and press translate.
Look at the 2 presentations I uploaded (License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike , You can use freely)
What do you think?, Could this site be beneficial for you and your students?
Write your opinion and if you have any suggestions.
Web 2.0 (English)
http://www.helloslide.com/presentations/1415/web2learning2-v3
Concept Mapping (Spanish)
http://www.helloslide.com/presentations/1422/mapasconceptuales-2012
Computational Thinking
Which skills do you need?…
- to solve an equation,
- to plan a project
- to develop an outline for a writting assignment
All these activities need similar skills.
Computational thinking builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine.
Often we are confronted to problems we are not capable of tackling alone. We need often computational methods and models to help us to solve problems and to design systems.
This discussion always raises questions like:
- What can humans do better than computers?
- What can computers do better than humans?
- What is computable?
Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists.
ISTE and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) are collaborating on a project to prepare young learners to become computational thinkers who understand how today’s digital tools can help solve tomorrow’s problems. Download the Computational Thinking Teacher Resources.
Social Networks and New Forms of Government
Us Now is a video produced in England which tells stories of online networks that challenge the common notion of hierarchy. This video includes interesting thoughts about a future form of government.
Cases are varied: from a football club owned and run by its fans, a bank in which everyone is the manager, and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers. These examples show how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. You will see stories of online networks, with a radical self-organizing structure that questions the usual conception of government.
It’s worth spending 60 minutes, with good examples and additional motivation.
Week 12: Mid-year post
I must admit that I really enjoy learning and discovering new things, as is the case with Pedagogy First course.
Although the 4-5 hours a week workload sounded reasonable for me, I didn’t realize how much more time I’d expend in my readings and researches. Often, when you are working searching about a specific topic, you find new approaches or new perspectives of great attraction and must keep a huge discipline not to deviate from the assigned task.
Week 1: My presentation to Pedagogy First!-course
I started, slowly I must admit, by presenting myself. When I look back to the first weeks, I feel it was a slow start. As this course has progressed, I was able to participate more by reading the classmate’s blogs, reading the comments to my own blog and sometimes replaying some comments. It’s a process…
- I created the Diigo account and start my learning process by experimenting. I used a blog created before with WordPress with some few comments.
- I opened for the first time the book: Ko and Rossen, Teaching Online by reading the first chapter.
4 comments to my first port were my welcome!
Week 2: Teaching and Learning Online. RSS
The recommended reading blogs allowed me to discover interesting input on the advantages of using social networking in education.
- During this week I read the last part of the chapter 1: Teaching Online: An Overview.
- I got 2 comments this week.
Week 3: Pedagogy and Course Design
I started with the questionnaire, which shows my tendency toward a constructivist formula.
I was able to check the importance of designing a course placing the student at the center. This reflection highlights one of the factors that distinguishes online learning and face-to-face. There is NOT just a difference in methodology; it is much more than that.
- During this week I read the beginning of the chapter 3, about course design and development.
- The chart and the video for “Getting Started Chart” show a very good path structure.
I posted my reflexions about my pedagogical goals and objectives for a possible or current class:
- Encourage the creation of content created by the students, both for the current course content to use as future versions of the of course.
- Reinforce the active participation of students, by using tools like wiki, blogs, social bookmarking, etc.
- Create relevant application Assessment of Proposals to assess skills (easy to say, hard to do).
I got 3 comments: really motivating!
Week 4: Materials for Online
I was really impressed by many of the Pedagogy First participant’s presentations. Although I made a preliminary experience with Prezi, a suitable tool for presentations, I think I must go further with it, because it is an advisable way to present ideas and concept maps.
This week the reading of the Chapter 3: Course Design and Development, started with the presentation of two different approaches regarding the conversion of the course content to an online shape. The cases described are similar in general term to real situations in several educational institutions.
In this week I wrote one of my longest posts (otherwise, I’ve to recognize it: my posts use to be just one to two paragraphs long).
2 comments expressed interest in the written summary about the Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Week 5: The Online Syllabus
Starting with the recommendations of this chapter, I highlighted the two objectives of the syllabus discussion:
- As a reflection of course content (the reading gives a clear idea of the course, expectations, requirements and methodology).
- As a practical guide for the student.
On the other hand I found particularly interesting the “Checklist for Online Syllabus” and the clear separate proposal for the online respective blended course syllabus.
The recording of Lisa and Jim gave me good advice to implement a Blackboard course based on a perspective of an Interactive Syllabus, easier to implement in Moodle.
This post received 1 comment about the mentioned different types of courses (sequential instruction, critical analysis and project based).
During this week I started reading the chapter 5: Creating an Effective Online Syllabus.
After week 5, I kept thinking of the syllabus, not only as a descriptive document, but as a tool to support students in their educational adventure. So I wrote an additional post: … still talking about Syllabus…
I think it was an interesting exercise!
Week 6: Creating a “slidecast” presentation with Slideshare
I uploaded a presentation to Slideshare about Web 2.0 posted on “Slideshare” a few months ago. In this week I tryed to update this presentation with the voice produced by an text-to-speech web service: iSpeech
As I expressed before, I wasn’t impressed with the result but the experiment was worth… (I received a comment with applause)
During this week I read the last part of the chapter 5: Creating an Effective Online Syllabus.
Week 7: The Online Classroom-Teaching Concept Mapping
The post of this week describes the content of the introduction to Concept Mapping, both with a Slideshare presentation and the material included on a Moodle course. I’m satisfied with this post.
I got 7 comments! All of these comment received my replay.
I joined to Twitter and got interesting tips from the Pilar’s Video: Building Community in Your Online Class.
Week 8: Creating Community
- In this week, I joined to the Elluminate session on October 20.
- I already have set up a Google+ account but I didn’t join to the Google+ hangout.
- I posted a comment to Pilar’s Voicethread and continued replaying to others comments.
- During this week I read the final part of Chapter 6: Building an Online Classroom.
Probably the weakest week…
Week 9: Student Activities
I had already tested Second Life before. I do not reach the expected results with Second Life this week, among other things, because my computer had difficulty maintaining SL stable for long periods of time. I think, on the other hand, SL is old and heavy software, although I must admit I don’t known an alternative with the features SL has today.
- I posted a list with the advantages and disadvantages I see in Second Life.
- During this week I read part of the Chapter 7: Student Activities in the Online Environment
Week 10: Open Platforms for Teaching and Learning
This week coincided with a blended course for newly admitted students to the career of teaching in the university where I teach now. This week we started by creating a group wiki (sorry… just in Spanish) and an individual blog and a social bookmarking site.
I didn’t Post about this week’s topics. What might be the advantages and disadvantages of using a class blog or student blogs for your class?. But I can express my opinion now: I prefer using a class blog, because it provides a more interactive environment.
- I watched Lisa’s slidecast on Blogging.
- During this week I read the last part of the Chapter 7: Student Activities in the Online Environment.
Week 11: Intellectual Property and Accessibility
The main disadvantage of the reading of this week (Chapter 8: Copyright, Intellectual Property) is that applies to the United States only.
In relation with the accessibility issues, I ported a really good introduction to Accessibility by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) describing policies, resources and tools to make the Web accessible.
- I viewed a good video: How creativity is being strangled by the law
Week 12: Resources Online
This topic is not new to me. I use to access Open Educational Resources to recommend content to teachers who are building online courses or are adapting their face-to-face courses to a blended methodology. I use to explore Open Educational Resources both in Spanish as in English.
Some of the OER sites I use to explore didactic materials:
- Free Online Course Materials, MIT OpenCourseWare
- The OpenCourseWare Consortium
- 250 Free Online Courses from Top Universities | Open Culture
- Tufts OER – Tufts OpenCourseWare
- Intute – Virtual Training Suite – Home
- Connexions – Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities
- Netskills: BCE Training Online
- OCW – Tecnológico de Monterrey (Spanish)
- OPENCOURSEWARE universia (Spanish)
I read the chapter 8: Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Open Educational Resources.
Usually, I do not review the previously publishes posts, so this effort was new, it helped me to recognize my own progress during these weeks and the conclusion is positive…
See you back in February!
Intellectual Property and Accessibility (w11)
The Ko and Rossen, Chapter 8: Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Open Educational Resources, to p. 241, makes a clear description of the topic but it applies to the United States only.
The Creative Commons Licensing
An interesting perspective!
When teachers or students want to use content created by another teacher or student, they need contact the content creator to obtain the permission. A Creative Commons license makes this process easier, because the creator identifies the use rights before the publishing.
Creative Commons – Wanna Work Together?
Accessibility issues
A really good introduction to this issue by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) describing policies, resources and tools to make the Web accessible.
Visitors
