Neat web resources

There is a wealth of material readily available on the web that can be used in the classroom. I came across this video demonstrating gyroscopic forces:



This is a great video that can be used as part of the physics lessons on angular momentum. I know that this video would have been a big help to me -- I struggled to understand torque and angular momentum until I actually saw some physical demonstrations.

There are countless such on-line resources that can be used in science, history, geography, art, music and literature classes at every grade level in school. So, how often are such resources actually used? It must take time and effort to find these types of resources. And, even after finding cool resources, there are no guarantees that the resource will be available in the future. Some may be pulled because the sponsor either relocates them, or stops supporting them. Environmental factors can also effect availability. Volcano-cams are a case in point. For instance, the volcano-cam aimed at Mt. St. Helens allowed anyone in the world to view the most recent dome-building episode. Except when it was foggy or rainy, or except in the winter when the facility got snowed in. The Hawaii Volcanic Observatory has a few volcano-cams, one of them is pointed at Pu`u `O`o, the current vent that has been actively erupting since 1983, and another one that is aimed at Halema`uma`u, the vent in the main caldera of Kilauea, one of the volcanoes on the big island. In 2007, about a year before Halema`uma`a became visibly active, this volcano-cam in a location to capture activity associated with a brief lava outbreak along the Upper East Rift Zone.

Another problem with demonstrations -- as technology changes, students may not be familiar with the objects shown. In the olden days (before, say, 2005) most of your students would have recognized a personal CD player, and understood that when turned on, the CD is spinning rapidly. I wonder how much longer that this will be the case. I can imagine showing this to middle schooler students even today (2009), and having them look at the curious pieces the astronaut was pushing around the way we view hand tools used in the 19th century:



(Source: Violin Making, by Walter H. Mayson, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.)

Robotics Camp

For the past few summers, ASU has been running a summer robotics camp. I have been part of the staff for the last two summers. (See my post about last year's camp here). The camp lasts for two weeks, and introduces students to programming concepts. The tools used are used were Alice (an introductory programming environment created by CMU), LEGO Mindstorm NXT robot kits, and Microsoft Robotics Studio. This year we added a web publication component. This consisted of team pages (hosted on Google sites) and YouTube videos.

The first session, "Camp7up", was open to students 7th grade and up. In the first learning activity, the students created videos and games using Alice. 11 of the 15 teams managed to post videos of their efforts to YouTube. After that, they went on to program the robots using the NXT-G programming environment. Games consisted of a maze and their favorite, SumoBots.

The second session was geared towards high school students. The students learned to program robots using Visual Programming Language (VPL), supported by Robotics Studio. There were four competitions, automatic maze navigation, collecting balls in a maze, SumoBots, and a game where students controlled robots against each other in an arena to see whose robot could collect the most balls. In this session, we provided students with videos collected over the space of the two week camp and asked them create and post their own videos. 11 of the 16 teams in the high school camp did just that.

The videos (well, most of them) created by the students are very entertaining to watch. You can see them on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/AsuRobots09

The instructors (including me) also helped the students set up their sites and publish some videos. Our efforts are not nearly as creative as the students, but help document the various activities. You can see our efforts in the team pages as well --

The team pages for the first session: https://sites.google.com/a/asu.edu/asu-summer-robotics-camp-7up/

The team pages for the second session: https://sites.google.com/a/asu.edu/asu-summer-robotics-camp-2009-session-2/

All in all, these camps (and the many others like them run across the country) are a lot of fun to organize and run, and the students seem to enjoy these activities.

The Science of Collaboration

I just came across a couple of recent blog posts by Carlos Nepomuceno (http://nepo.com.br/):

The difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom, and
The difference between a volcano and a mountain.

As far as data, information, knowledge and wisdom are concerned, the internet provides overwhelming doses of data and information, some knowledge and almost no wisdom (except for occasional gems).

About mountains and volcanoes -- the observation is that volcanoes are studied in much more intensely than are non-volcanic mountains. (His metaphor is a bit off. Most volcanoes are mountains, and non-volcanic mountains are studied also. Mountain range formation can be every bit as cataclysmic as volcanoes are. For instance, the recent earthquakes in Pakistan and China are related to the ongoing formation of the Himalayas.) But the main point of this post -- study things that are active and can affect you the most by their changes and their impacts, and maybe you can come to an understanding of the forces that drive the change and start predicting impacts.

This is the case with volcanoes. There have been many recent successes in predicting violent eruptions in time to evacuate people and save lives. See:

http://volcanoworld.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/how-do-volcanologists-predict-volcanic-eruptions/

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_of_volcanic_activity

So, what does this have to do with web-based education? Well, I suspect that there are some basic principles of collaboration, communication, and social networking that the current set of web-based applications (Web 2.0) is enabling. By understanding and applying these principles, we can use this technology to our benefit.

There are three elements of web-based education at play --
1. The use of web-based technology in education can improve the educational process.
2. Using web-based technology in education will enable students to understand how to use and apply this technology in their personal and business lives.
3. Understanding underlying principles of how collaboration works can be used to make improvements in how we use it, and can help predict impacts of its use.

ePortfolios and the AAEEBL

One benefit that can come from teaching students (the earlier the better) about using Web 2.0 collaboration is that this technology can be used to create electronic portfolios. A brand new organization with an acronym that has way too many vowels to ever show up in Wheel of Fortune has been created -- AAEEBL (Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning). Their goal seems to be to create standards for ePortfolios.

There apparently many view of what these are and how they can be used (http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2009/03/04/No-There-There-in-ePortfolio.aspx?Page=1). Even before digital technology, portfolios were used in many professions. For example most photographers, models and graphic artists have portfolios containing samples of their work. Many contractors specializing in landscaping, remodeling or redecorating have notebooks containing their work as well. A good ePortfolio can be used in a similar manner. It can enhance existing physical portfolios in many ways. Consider a photographer -- she might have a portfolio containing recent work that she can take with her on interviews. These photographs might also be displayed on a web site that contains her ePortfolio. Her ePortfolio can also contain her blog where she has written articles about composing photographs, etc.

Digital technoloy and Web 2.0 publishing tools open up new possibilities for ePortfolios. It is now possible for anyone to create and publish a collection of articles to showcase their talents. Items that can publish include term papers and projects from school, and items from other activities such as internships, part time jobs and hobbies. In addition to the traditional arts professions, ePortfolios can be used to many other professions as well. Teachers can showcase lessons and learning activities that they create or improve. Software engineers can showcase open source contributions and web sites they contributed to. Lawyers can display writing samples and significant court cases they participated in. Brewmasters can showcase beer recipes they have crafted. And so on.

One of the keys to all this publication is education -- students need to understand web-based publication, social networking and collaboration. But this education should not be in place of other learning activities. That is, we should not replace chemistry and geography with Web 2.0 technologies. It should be possible to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies as part of the learning activities themselves -- that way, students learn the subject matter, and learning about the technoloigy of the day (in this case Web 2.0) comes along for the ride.

Using Web 2.0 type tools could make for some fun assignments

I just came across this http://historicaltweets.com/

and this http://home.comcast.net/~fuuchan/aeneidonfacebookfinal.png

Which got me thinking -- this type of activity could be used to make some fun assignments for almost any subject.

History -- assign roles, have students tweet and react to other tweets for interesting historical incidents. Or set up social networks (you can create one on ning.com), with students creating accounts representing various historical figures. Recognize especially creative remarks, and obscure but interesting posts. In addition, students could create a wiki around the event integrated into the activity.

Literature -- These types of activities can be used to help students understand works of literature as well. If Ismael could tweet, what would his tweets say? How about the whale? If they were on a social network together, how would the characters interact?

Art -- Take a tour through an art museum (real or virtual: http://www.artrenewal.org/) students can tweet about the various works, or, what if the students pretended they were artists using a social network to make comments on each others' paintings -- what would they say, what types of questions would they ask? Students who do some additional research about the artists could have a lot of fun with this type of activity.

Welcome to Web Based Education

This blog is a collection of notes about web-based education resources and research into web based education.

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