Reading books about the technologies that you are using is really important. It gives you something that just looking at existing code doesn’t. Over time a code base tends to train developers into doing things “it’s way” and it takes an external influence to help pull the team into better ways of doing things. My Kindle has been an amazing resource, as I can have all of my technical books with me whenever I am on the train or find myself waiting in line. Then, when I’m working at my computer, I can use the Kindle app to pull up relevant sections that I remember. Searching for something that you know exists in a good technical book can be 50 times faster than looking for it on Google.

One important optimization to this is to spend time reading books about the things that you are doing. And not just “oh, I’m writing rails code, so I should read a Ruby on Rails book”. That’s a great place to start, but if you have a specific thing you will be  working on the next day, read that book. So if I was going to spend my next day writing and fixing tests, I read an RSpec book. If the stuff that I’m working on is mainly plain Ruby code, I read a Ruby book. Playing with Routes tomorrow? read the Routes section of a Rails book.

Testing

Unit testing is unit testing, not integration testing. Don’t confuse them. Tightly coupled unit tests where you create factories for 6 objects and rely on pulling in RSS or JSON from an external service make life hell for everyone. Yes, it’s more work and it seems silly to mock everything out when you’re doing it, but being militant is the only way to keep things clean. It also makes the specs a lot faster, something that makes up for the extra time you spend building a mock object instead of just using FactoryGirl.

The other benefit is that if your proper unit tests are hard to write then that’s a pretty clear code smell. Rewriting the code to make the testing easier can lead to much cleaner, less coupled code. When you have to pay attention to everything that your code interacts with (by mocking out each interaction), you become a lot more sensitive to how much it relies on that other stuff that it really shouldn’t be relying on.

I did do my reflections for a week or so after that, but didn’t post them. The reasons for stopping were two-fold:

1) I was running out of “easy” reflections and had to dig deeper to get there.

2) I started Taekwondo. While Taekwondo is awesome (I’m happier and fitter than I have been in a long time) it means that instead of coding till I can’t anymore, then reflecting for a bit and going home, I now work up until practice starts (my Dojang is a block away from Red Rover HQ making it easy to work until the last possible minute). Practice then clears my head of the code (which is great… it stops the nightmares) but it also clears my head of reflective thoughts on that code.

So noting that in the time that I was reflecting my skill level went through the roof, I need to change the system so that reflection once again becomes easy.

The plan is:

1) Instead of reflecting at the end of the day, I will do it at 5pm every day.

2) Instead of making the expectation: “think of all the things you have learnt today” I’m going to reduce the load to: “think of one thing you’ve learnt” and “create shortcut that you could have taken” (taking a cue from Yan).

3) Posts aren’t going to be numbered anymore, but themed. That way I can make each one more self-contained and coherent, while again reducing the pressure to put in too much.

4) I’m going to keep a page of “rules” that I can edit and update as I learn things, to make it easier to quickly review and scan my most importnat learning in the morning.

On the reflection process:

After 15 days of practice, this is really starting to feel like a habit. I’m starting to see the circles get smaller (the Art of Learning is a great book) in my work and when previously I could only think about things in their macro forms, I am discovering even more subtleties.

One way that I am starting  to make the circles smaller in the reflection process is by forming the habit of reflecting immediately when something happens. I think it has to do with what this article suggests, that  the habit of reflecting on mistakes as they happen can greatly increase the speed at which one learns. So instead of spending a long time at the end of the day thinking back on what I did, I am instead reflecting at the point of the mistake (which for me usually means taking too long to find a bug) and trying to find ways to avoid it in the future.

Programming:

Sometimes doing the smallest thing doesn’t mean starting small. Instead of building up to something big piece by piece, it can often be more effective to take a large block of code that currently works (from somewhere else in the code base or the internet) and whittling that down to only the essentials. There is skill required in making sure you got rid of all the non-essentials, but if you’re diligent, it can be really successful.

 
concentrate on differences. When faced with a complex system that works and a simpler one that doesn’t, you can either increase the complexity of the broken system until it works, or decrease the complexity of the working one in order to see what parts are truly necessary for what you need done. An example is that this week I had a component that when given a hash with 10 entries would work, but that wouldn’t work when I fed it my own hash with 3 entries. I then methodically added things to my hash until it was exactly the same as the complex one and the function still didn’t accept it. Finally I went the other way and stripped the 10 item hash down to 3.. and the function still accepted that hash. Now with much less complexity I could look deeper and see that the difference wasn’t in the entries, but in the hash type (the one that worked was a “HashWithIndifferentAccess” instead of a normal Hash)

Look for more than one example. When you are working with a large code base and have to do something that is done somewhere else in the application, look hard for other places where things are used. Remember to check more than one place instead of assuming that the code is DRY and it’s all done the same way throughout the application. If you do find that there is more than one way to do something, be sure to use the best way possible and then go back and update the bad example.

Write things down. The tactic of writing out all the possible causes has been proving really effective. Like super effective! I’m constantly amazed at how well it helps me spot the areas where I should be focusing on. Tracing out the actual flow of a piece of code across functions and source files is way better out in the open than in your head, your mind makes false leaps and assumptions that the cold hard light of a whiteboard marker uncovers easily.

Code in flow state more often. I’ve spent a lot of time building my trigger… now I just need use it more often.

One part of the reflection process that I noted was that reminding yourself of the previous reflections is crucial. Toward the end of the week I found that rereading me reflections from earlier really helped me to not repeat those previous mistakes.

Week 2:

Always make the minimal amount of changes to go from working to not working. Yes, I know i started with this one last week, but it bears repeating. This week I did a lot of building new things and again found myself being slowed down by making too many changes and then having to figure out which one of those changes didn’t work as they were supposed to. Starting with the simplest thing takes discipline. I’m not sure why that is, but our brains seem to want to see big effects and use those to trip us up. In order to practice the simplest thing we need to be continually vigilant.

Pay careful attention to any error trace. Often the answer is buried deeply and even though after making changes it may look like the trace is the same as before, there could be changes in where the error came from a few lines down from the top of the trace.

Write bad code. One problem that I’ve been having (probably magnified by the fact that I’m working  in Ruby on Rails) is that everything I read really concentrates on writing and architecting really good code. The problem with that is that it is really hard to know what the best code is as you go along. As you code you get paralyzed by the different design choices. You then spend hours trying to make what you think may be good design work, only to throw it away because the direction of the code means that another design pattern actually makes more sense. Instead, if you write crappy code that just gets the feature complete as quickly as possible, you end up with a complete feature and time left over to refactor (of course this only works if you’ve written tests to ensure that everything stays working after the refactoring is finished). I think it’s a lot easier to see where to fix bad code than it is to ponder over what the best code is to write. Of course, a big part of this strategy is the commitment to go back and actually do the refactoring. Code review helps a lot as sheer embarrassment can be a great motivator for going back and making sure your code looks good!

 Follow the Law of Demeter. There are many complex aspects to this law, but the heuristic that I’ve been using is thinking about it as “don’t take your toys apart”. If your context has a class, then you can call any of it’s methods or attributes, but you cannot “break the toy apart” and call methods of that toy’s attributes. This article does a good job of explaining why breaking the Law would seem silly in a real world context. When you buy something, when the cashier asks you to pay, they don’t “break you apart” by grabbing your wallet (your attribute) and taking the money straight out. Instead, they ask you for the money and you give it to them. They don’t even have to know about your wallet, maybe you don’t have one and just shove your money into your pockets, that would make a waiter trained to take money from wallets very confused and would be a very awkward end to the evening. Throughout the week I found that code following the law was super easy to debug and refactor, code that didn’t wasn’t, with fun little errors popping up like “you called x on nil”.

Of course, there are many ways to practice “continuous learning”, but the one that I’m going to be attempting is just reflection. Sure, learning “the hard way” and other techniques may be more effective in the short run, but using them while at the same time producing as much good work as possible is hard. Using reflection as a tool for learning has the benefit of not taking time away from other important tasks and is arguably a more sustainable learning habit to create.

So the learning plan is as follows:

Every day after work, I reflect on what happened. Where did I make mistakes, where was I brilliant? what did I learn?

At the end of every week I can review the learning and summarize it. I will try and post these summaries here every week. Some of it will be new learning, some of it will be things I’ve forgotten some will be things I didn’t do because of lack of sleep and some will be pure guesses as to what will help make things better. I will break things into sections, general programming  and language specific learning.

Week 1

General Programming:

Much of this week was spent refactoring old code, in order to make a new set of features easier to implement. The process took me much longer than it should have. Here are some ways that I think can make the process of refactoring less painful.

Always make the minimal amount of changes to go from working to not working. My method was to first change the main attributes to be named correctly, then to watch for where things broke when they called for those attributes. Terrible idea.

The last thing that one should do is rename badly named variables and attributes. The first thing to do should be to DRY up the code as much as possible, only after everything is working and the code is as elegant as possible, should you worry about renaming old bad names. a “rename_column” migration is a hell of a lot cheaper than hunting through bad code for all references to a badly named variable/attribute.

On the subject of renaming attributes never use “find and replace all”. Check each instance of something that gets replaced. If there are too many of them, then it means that you haven’t done the DRY work that you should have first. If you do use “find and replace all” then every bug that you encounter for the next hour should have you thinking… “could this have been because of that find and replace all that I shouldn’t have done?”

Basic debugging:

Resist the temptation to just mindlessly trace variables when there is a problem. After the first or second tweak to try and make things work, stop and take a breath. Start enumerating the things that could be wrong. Don’t trust your brain to hold all of these elements, write the various causes for the error down (yesterday I stuck a large strip of dry-erase roll on my des to help with this). Doing it without looking at the code too much helps as well, it gets you thinking more abstractly and actually allows you to put those years of listening to Computer Science lectures to use. Think of all the different ways that you can actually test to see which one of these causes it is. Once you have a list, rank them by probability and work from there. As Steve Wolfman told me on my very first CS lecture at UBC, “Computer Science is the science of clear thought”. Writing things down is the easiest way to make your thoughts clear.

 Ruby on Rails:

use validates_presence_of to ensure that variables that you need are there. Make sure you actually need those variables.

The before_validation callback can be really useful to consolidate and double-check that everything your model needs is there.

Spend every effort as a team to make the specs fast. Every extra second that a test takes, gets multiplied by the number of developers running tests by the number of times it’s run over it’s lifetime. Those extra seconds can easily add up to hours on a big complex project. Slow specs lead to less testing which leads to broken code.

Single table inheritance in Rails is easy. It can be done simply by making a class a subclass or another ActiveRecord::Base class. The caveat is that that superclass’s table needs to have the “type” attribute, in which Rails will automatically store the type of the subclasses.

When converting a non-ActiveRecord model to an ActiveRecord model pay careful attention to methods that may be overriding ActiveRecord methods. Deal with those first.

Rails AntiPatterns is a really good book. I’ve been trying to force myself to read and watch as much as possible on programming in Rails and this book has been by far the most engaging!

New York Panorama

Take it away, Marina:

Online education is often touted for its convenience and flexibility. Students dream of being able to work on their own timetables under their own direction, and web-based education can make that possible. However, as with everything, there are both good and bad online learning options. Online education is the wave of the future, and as it continues to grow, educators must find ways to make it better.

One common concern is quality. In some cases online classes for college are taught by the same faculty who teach the conventional campus-based versions of the same courses, and are of equal caliber. However, it’s often true that web-based classes, especially in a fully online university, are not taught by full-time teachers. Part-time instructors often work for relatively low pay, without benefits, and sometimes don’t even have their own offices. As a result, it may be difficult to employ quality instructors in such positions, and those who do take the jobs may have to teach an inordinate number of classes simply to survive.
Traditional colleges and universities can address this by actively encouraging full-time faculty to take on online classes as part of their teaching loads, perhaps by offering increased pay or other incentives. Another solution would be to incorporate online components to existing classes, so that students taking an online class simply view lectures and submit assignments remotely, but along with the classroom-based students.

The huge number of for-profit online schools are also a common concern. These schools rely heavily on mass marketing to entice students to enroll, but the quality, adequate academic support, or even fundamental goal of actually providing sound education may simply not be there. Many of these schools are essentially diploma mills, taking tuition from students, providing perfunctory education, and awarding degrees that may or may not be of any real value. Even well-established and relatively well-respected online schools like the University of Phoenix have been accused of predatory recruitment, regardless of quality of education. Kaplan University, for instance, made almost 90% of its 2009 revenue from collecting taxpayer-backed financial aid.

One particular problem has been the targeting of military veterans by the recruiters at such schools, motivated by the lucrative financial aid benefits the veterans bring with them. Donald Overton, Jr., executive director of Veterans of Modern Warfare, claims “These schools are after the monetary gain of a healthy benefits package, not necessarily what’s in the best interest of students.” As it stands, existing online schools that really have this mindset have no incentive to change. One way to correct that would be to have greater regulation of federal education aid funds, particularly those earmarked for veterans, and greater accountability on the part of the schools themselves. Indeed some legislators are calling for just that.

There are, however, positives to web-based for-profit schools. In some cases, they’re on the cutting edge because they’re not limited by topheavy administration, as are many brick-and-mortar schools. As such, they’re better able to be forward-thinking, designing classes and degree programs that more effectively meet the needs of students, as well as providing flexibility in scheduling that many traditional colleges can’t accommodate. Some, like University of the People, aim at the even higher ideal of providing college education freely online. Modern educators who truly wish to provide superior education should see the advantages technology provides, and embrace them by creating new online programs that benefit students, and can compete with schools that may not actually have education as a fundamental ideal.

As technology continues to develop, new options are becoming available in education. Students are no longer content to settle for the limitations of the status quo in higher education, and are looking for schools that meet their needs. Web-based education is increasingly able to entice such students, but may not yet be in the best interests of students. Educators must continue to look toward the future, and avoid being tied down by outdated ideas, while at the same time ensuring education doesn’t simply become another money-making venture.

Marina Salsbury planned on becoming a teacher since high school, but found her way instead into online writing after college. She writes around the Web about everything from education to exercise.

So why am I teaching a course despite the hecticness of my imminent move to New York? 

• Matygo is an awesome company run by awesome people. I think that their model is definitely going to be step in the right direction for education and I want to be a part of that.
• Programming is not a mystical force, it’s just a skill that can be learnt and the world will be better off if more people understood it.
• I’m tired of making websites for people who are smart enough to make them for themselves .
• I spend so much time mouthing off about better ways of teaching and learning that it really is time I put my money where my mouth is and do some teaching myself.

The next question I guess is what is this going to look like?

The course will run for 6 weeks. It will be taught in Matygo, which has some elements of an LMS (without many of the downsides). It will be limited to 9 participants, as the live, interactive parts will happen on Google Hangouts.

Hangouts will happen at  7:30 to 9:00 PM on Tuesday evenings starting on October 27th.

After the 6 weeks, if you complete all the course material that you will be able to build a great website in WordPress and have a deeper understand of how the internet works and be able to write and hack basic programs.

So if you want to learn to code (and hang out with me online over the next 6 weeks) go check out the course page!

 
However, as I watched it, there was a rush of conflicting thoughts and feelings. One part of me was saying, yes he is right, Andre, you need to be better. Work harder, cut out more distractions, become great. The other part was asking, is that really the way? Will I accomplish my goals in life through single-minded perseverance, or is it in the moments of relaxation, in the serendipitous conversations and in allowing the heart and mind to wonder to where it wants to go that will get me there?

Or, is it simply the right balance of both?

The formal instruction that I received at UBC helped to provide me with many of the technical skills and the conceptual knowledge that I will need to be successful in the future. My work for UBC, with the Office of Student Development, Department of Computer Science, Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology and the Library has taught me the value of continuous learning and has  allowed me to develop my passion for education.

Now however, in the spirit of continuous learning I will be moving to New York City to work with Red Rover, helping them to build out their engagement platform. I will be learning how to write code at the highest standards by working alongside some of the top developers in New York City. I will also be learning about what it takes to have a company be successful.

Most importantly though, if we as a company get things right, I will have the opportunity to create software that have an actual impact of the learning and engagement of hundreds of thousands of people.

Goodbye Vancouver, I’m off to continue my learning. Hello New York, I’m coming soon, get ready.

LEARN on Vimeo on Vimeo

via LEARN on Vimeo.

A while ago I wrote a post titled “are we fighting a war” in which I argued that humans being dumber benefited corporations and thus they would fight to make it so. The only way I saw of beating that was to fight back through better education.  Lindsey Wright sent me a great response detailing how the fight may be lost as the corporations are taking over our places of education.

A little bit about Lindsey:

Lindsey Wright is fascinated with the potential of emerging educational technologies, particularly the online school, to transform the landscape of learning. She writes about web-based learning, electronic and mobile learning, and the possible future of education.

Take it away Lindsey:

Education is constantly in the news. Whether it’s spending cuts, cheating scandals, or abysmal standardized test results, it seems that the only news about education is how it’s failing students. However, beneath the headlines there is a truth — one perhaps even more disturbing than poor math scores and falling literacy rates — and it’s one that school districts, governments, and corporations don’t want to acknowledge. While educators work every day to teach their students, they’re battling a system that is, at its heart, a business. A big business for that matter. According to the Encyclopedia of American Education, the for-profit education industry is a $100-billion-a-year behemoth, and with so much money riding on students’ narrow shoulders, it’s hardly a wonder the industry will do anything in its power to hold school districts in its thrall. However, the questions people should be asking are where is this money spent, how does it affect education, and what is the lasting affect of inviting corporations into the classroom on students?

Where’s the $100 Billion Going?

The Encyclopedia of American Education cites four specific divisions in the for-profit education industry. The first, which accounts for nearly 40 percent of the industry’s profits, is educational services. This category encompasses corporate training programs (the seminars educators must attend in order to gain or maintain their certifications), tutoring (generally in the form of after-school tutoring at a for-profit institution), language instructions (including English as a second language materials and reading programs for weak readers), and test preparation (the standardized tests that are re-written every year to reflect the constantly changing district, state, and national curriculum goals).

Next on the docket with 33 percent of the for-profit education pie are for-profit, proprietary schools. These include daycare; private pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools; and for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix. However, this segment also includes education management organizations (EMOs). As highlighted by the National Education Policy Center, there are currently 50 for-profit EMOs operating in the U.S. Their operation method is simple. In exchange for a fee, they manage under-performing schools as charter schools, all the while claiming they bring corporate reforms and market-based solutions to education.

Twelve percent of the money the for-profit education industry makes is dedicated to the production and sale of learning products. This includes textbooks, educational software, and school supplies. Each time a curriculum changes, new textbooks must be purchased. Similarly, each time a new remedial reading or math program is introduced, new learning software must be bought.

Finally, 11 percent is dedicated to electronic services. This includes outsourcing of cloud software (such as Schoolnotes.com), internet education portals (like LexisNexis) and, of course, the ubiquitous online school. It should be noted that, true to the driving push to integrate technology into the classroom, electronic services is the fastest-growing segment of the for-profit education industry.

How Does the Industry Affect Students?

Unsurprisingly, the for-profit education industry affects nearly every aspect of students’ learning experience, from how they learn to take tests as well as what they are taught, right down to textbooks they are allowed to read. Textbooks are tailored to individual state curricula. Those curricula, generally, are decided upon by the state’s board of education, an elected body that does not necessarily have any educational experience. In fact, in 2010 the New York Times ran an article highlighting just what goes into establishing a curriculum and selecting textbooks. In Texas, 100 amendments were passed to the state’s 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, economics, and sociology courses. The amendments followed along party lines and included:

• Changing textbooks to reflect more of the positive contributions of Republicans.

• Eliminating the use of the word “capitalism” in economic textbooks and replacing it with “free-enterprise system” to avoid the negative connotations of capitalism.

• Altering the history of McCarthyism to include the release of the Venona papers (a supposed excuse for McCarthy’s hunt for communist infiltrators that destroyed many lives).

• Cutting Thomas Jefferson’s name from a list of those whose writings inspired revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries.

What these changes reveal, along with the amendments the board refused to adopt (such as acknowledging the contributions of Hispanics in Texas history and the secular roots of the American Revolution), is that the state of the American classroom is a political minefield. Students are subject to the machinations and agendas of political leaders who ignore what’s best for education — in this case, accuracy — for the sake of furthering a political cause and creating a new generation of voters and consumers.

EMOs and standardized tests are another way corporations and politics are infiltrating the classroom. In Duval County in Jacksonville, Florida, four schools that had been dubbed “struggling” by the standardized testing of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), has resulted in a state mandate that they be turned over to an EMO. Yes, a state mandate. According to the article “Duval School Board Delays Vote on ‘Intervene’ Schools” by Topher Sanders appearing in The Florida Times-Union, should the schools, which have been listed as “D” or “F” schools by the state consistently, fail to show adequate gains on private-company funded standardized tests this year they will be turned over to an EMO. Thus far, it doesn’t look good for the schools.

Advocates of educational excellence point out that, if these schools are struggling, something needs to change. Yet the truth is the schools are only struggling when measured by one specific standardized test put forth by a company with a vested interest in ensuring that the state continues to purchase from it. As highlighted in the article “Test Problems: Seven Reasons Why Standardized Tests Are Not Working” by David Miller Sadker, Ph.D., and Karen R. Zittleman, Ph.D., the issues related to standardized testing are myriad.

For instance, at-risk students in ill-funded schools are called upon to demonstrate the same capacity as a student from a well-funded school with a strong socioeconomic background — something that is often not possible. Different learning opportunities are one reason. Another? In Ohio, for instance, 80 percent of students from families with incomes of over $30,000 passed the state’s exams, while only 20 percent of those from families with incomes of under $20,000 passed them. Why? It’s a combination of factors such as educational opportunity and emphasis on education, but it’s also linked to the fact that students from households with low incomes are not targeted consumers. Standardized tests are biased against them.

Another issue related to standardized testing is that higher test scores don’t actually mean more learning. Rather, higher test scores are related to teaching students how to take the test. Students are taught that test-makers rarely will write three questions with the same multiple choice answer bubble in a row. Additionally, they’re taught how to read the question and eliminate the incorrect responses. Yet they’re not taught how to think critically, decipher information, or develop independent thought processes. Instead students learn to spit out the information the test-maker says they should, to the detriment of their worldview. In fact, standardized testing has actually cut the breadth of school curriculum. Teachers spend so much time teaching to the test that the students do not gain the broad knowledge base they should be equipped with before they enter the real world.

Currently, the educational system is beholden to entities that view it as just another way to earn a profit. Students are no longer individuals, but consumers to be generated. As a result they end up  lacking the independent thought and critical thinking skills necessary to decipher positive messages from the negative, strong arguments from their weak counterparts, and consumer-based advertising claims from legitimate studies. It is not the students’ fault. It is that of the system, a system which celebrates mediocrity and doesn’t allow teachers to teach or learners to learn. Instead, the system is designed to indoctrinate students with a particular worldview, the ultimate goal being to turn them into consumers who will continue to fund the corporate machine that made their education, such as it was, possible.

What creates the pull is a problem that I’ve pondered over for a long time. When BuddyPress functionality was being added to UBC Blogs I knew that it would fail to pull students in, but am still not able to articulate exactly why. It may have had to do with the “silent launch”, but I think the biggest problem was the lack of some key features, those features that provide the pull. Now that Google+ has launched (and I’m really enjoying using it), I’m wondering if it will be able to make the dent that will pull all of the people that I want to interact with into it.

Here are the factors that Alex listed in his article.

Alex’s Factors:

In the article he lists 4 ways to create pull:

• Plan around events: People will be going to events, so build something that makes them check in with you first before those events.
• Do something that has an offline analogy: Before Google, people would use phonebooks.
• Answer Recurring questions: Questions like “where am I going” (Google Maps) and how much did I spend (Mint) answer some of life’s recurring questions.
• Build brand and familiarity: People shop at Amazon.com because not only do they know it’s big enough to be trusted, it offers a familiar interface.

While I agree mostly with his list, it got me thinking about the sites that pull me and what it is about those sites that create the pull. I came up with my own list.

Here is my list:

Make not visiting your site something that will cause social harm: 

I check my Gmail and Facebook often because people may have left me messages and if I don’t respond to them I will disappoint or anger them. I will respond to Doodle’s for the same reason. Humans love to be liked, so if by not going to the web service a person will be liked less, they will go to it.

Provide Curated entertainment:

I get pulled to YouTube and TED.com whenever I want to watch an interesting videos, I get pulled to GrooveShark when I want music that everyone in the room will and I get pulled to Flixter and Apple Trailers whenever I want to see what movies are coming out. Although making a service that relies purely on content only works for a lucky few, any successful service needs to have something interesting to show their visitors.

Provide more than one engaging activity:

This is a piece that I have taken from my game design research. All popular recurring networks need more than one pull. This not only provides multiple incentives for any given individual, but also ensures that it provides incentives for a wider segment of the population. Facebook is an obvious example, but so is an LMS like Blackboard. There are discussion boards, course content and grades to check. One’s own blog dashboard is another, there are posts to write, stats to check and comments to moderate. I understand the problems of features creep and the danger of adding “just one more pull”, but I think there definitely is threshold of the number of pulls that one needs and the application should cross that threshold.

Create something that easily fits into a daily workflow:

Facebook’s big statistic is that 50% of its users check in once a day. An essential social app has to have something new to come back to daily. If you can somehow embed a utility in your app (Google Calendar, Dropbox, Basecamp are all examples of this) then users have to come back into your application. One needs to find a way to be on a user’s mind after they have left your application.

Sure, this list mixes up traditional applications with social networking applications, but I think that is a useful exercise. Just having profiles that others can view is not enough (witness Google Profiles before Google+), I truly believe that there have to be some other pulls. As to what those pulls should be… well that’s the hard part.

Below is the article that he wrote, originally published on the Learning Commons site:

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This summer, myself and a team from the Chapman Learning Commons have been working on an epic endeavor; nothing short of a website that helps students learn better. As with any website, the first hurdle is actually getting users to your site, followed by the equal challenge of providing information in a way that is not only engaging but useful.

The current site is a goldmine of resources thats has grown enormously over the years; however, student feedback has shown that this growth has made many of these resources hard to locate or take advantage of. Based on these responses, we focused on three inter-related issues.

Navigation

so many menus! so many layers!

As a result of the large amount growth the site experienced over the years in an attempt to become a one-stop shop on campus, the content outgrew the organizational structure. Due to the challenges that existed in making a website 5-6 years ago, this made perfect sense as there was very little UBC content online. Luckily, by May of this year, many of our partners have developed quality websites themselves, giving us the ability to concentrate on building a solid site centered on the student academic experience.

Remedies

• 2 clicks or less intuitive navigation: done through condensing and renaming menus, reducing the amount of potential pathways down to just a few, very logical ones. The design aspect below was also crucial to this.
• Trim the fat: cut out as much content as possible that does not relate to improving your academic life. For example, if someone happened to be interested in abroad opportunities, they would be referred to Go Global’s own website; as opposed to trying to maintain this content ourselves. This makes the site leaner and more efficient.

Visual

One should also know the point of a website by just glancing at it. If a user likes a site’s main feature, they are more likely to stick around and look into other resources; something seriously lacking in the current site. Text-heavy pages scare away users, overly busy sidebars distract and constrain the content and providing users as many navigational options as possible created too many moving parts and points for confusion – all these needed to be refreshed for 2011 and beyond.

Remedies

• Break up content pages: elimination of large blocks of text and utilization of ample forms of digital media, such as youtube videos, slideshare presentations, podcasts, etc.
• Dropped the sidebar: to free up more digital real estate on the page for content and moved any crucial bits to the bottom.
• App-Like carousel and landing pages: use the front page carousel to highlight the most common reasons someone would visit the website. Currently this is used to highlight current or upcoming events (which confused the mission of the site, according to student feedback); this has been moved to blog-like feed just below the ‘Welcome to the Learning Commons Banner.’ While the landing pages act as visual launchpad to the various resources within the heading.

Engaging and Interactive Content

There are incredibly valuable resources on the site which took an immense amount of work and research to put together. The problem revealed through the navigation and visual aspect, was that this content was both hard to find and hard to get through. Reading lots of text is no fun, but try getting a stressed, time-pressed student to read five pages on time management; much less find the time to do so! Yet, the transfer of these skills is precisely what the site is about, striving to make exceptional accessible content for all students, by students.

Remedies

• Vegetables hidden in the dessert: ‘toolkits’ were designed to be interactive, self-reflective, do-at-your-own-pace tools to learn skills, figure out an action plan and provide connection points to the variety of in-person resources, such as peer-academic coaching or the writing centre.
• Accessible to all students: provide resources that are useful for all types of learners by including relevant videos, podcasts, software, print-outs and interactive activities.

PLEASE HELP US!!

Current Website: http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/

Prototype Website: http://learningcommons-redesign.sites.olt.ubc.ca/

The Learning Commons is meant to be an evolving project, grounded in feedback from our partners and students alike; we need your help! A few issues in particular we are struggling with:

General Navigation:

how do you find it moving between pages, not just navigation from the home page? Does it seem intuitive or confusing?

Headings and Categories:

We have three main categories that most of our content now resides in. Naming has been one of the biggest hangups, as the more popular headers tend to cause the most confusion about what content exists under them.

What we offer, for services and resources available to students, especially those available in the CLC. This has come across as the most solid heading.

Student toolkits for the interactive skill-building tools. Other options include:

1. Become a Better Student
2. Strategies for Students
3. Learning Strategies
4. Learning Secrets

Which option are you drawn to? The issue here as that this needs to come across as helpful without sounding remedial. Meanwhile, it has to be narrow enough of a definition to not confuse users as to where content should exist.

Beyond the Classroom as our main referral page to academically enriching opportunities, such as studying abroad, service learning, student directed seminars, etc. Other options include:

1. Involvement
2. Enhance your degree

Do these names and definitions makes sense? Particularly, are these headings so broad that you would have trouble placing what goes where and is there too much potential overlap?

Building pages around content, not fitting content into pages: this is where the raw information on the site exists. Using the wider pages offered by dropping the sidebar, we have tried to divide up the content that would make the most sense for the subject; instead of a standardized layout across all content pages.

1. Take a look at a few different content pages (link, link & link). does the idea of breaking up content make information easier to find or understand? Or would more standardization in layout be better?
2. Consider how are current site lays out this content (link & link).
3. The end result could be more of a hybrid, selecting one way of dividing up content (question 1), but using that layout arrangement for all the content pages.

Toolkits: go through our prototype time management toolkit. Tip, be sure to hit the print button after you’ve filled in the questions!

1. Do you know where to start?
2. Is the rest of the content on the page below the slideshow / reflective questions useful or necessary?
3. Do you find the toolkit useful? Is this something that could help you manage your time better?

Glaring absences:

is anything missing from our previous site or from what you would expect to be here?

Any and all feedback is welcome in the comments section, on twitter, facebook or by email (peer.assistants@gmail.com)

//Stuff I wrote in 2009:

Coming up with the perfect Communication system:

These are all the avenues I use to communicate with others:

• In person
• Phone
• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live Messenger (video)
• Gtalk
• Skype
• Email
• Twitter
• Blog
• Facebook Chat
• Facebook messages
• Facebook Wall
• SMS (text messages)

How can we classify these though?

Length:
-Short form: SMS, Twitter, Facebook Wall
Medium form: Email, chat, blog, blog comments
-Long form: Email, Chat applications, Phone, Blog

Fidelity:
-Face-to-face: In Person, Video Chat
-Voice: Phone, Skype
-Text: Email, Blog, Chat, Twitter, Facebook Wall

Urgency
-Urgent: SMS, Phone, Chat applications
-Important, but not urgent: Email, Facebook Messages, direct twitter rmessages, in person
-Neither urgent, nor important: blog, twitter, facebook wall.

Audience
-myself: delicious, notes, google tasks, word documents, reminders
-small audience: SMS, Email, Chat, Twitter direct message, phone in person,
-medium audience: Facebook wall, Twitter
-large audience: Blog

Temporal
-Synchronous
-Replies within short time frames
-Whenever
These are my rules for which apps to use, rules that I kind of instinctively obey because they are the most convenient. They are rules that I break all the time. They probably have differences and similarities to your rules. Why is that? Each of the services that we use has different social connotations to us. I might believe a Facebook message is for important things, but you might think it is just for fluff and never check it.

How to fix it?

Here is my proposal for the workflow of my dream communication device:

1. Choose who you want to communicate with, person, group, all your friends, open internet (Which is what Facebook’s privacy changes have just done)
2. Choose the urgency (this should probably be more granular than what I just set up).
3. Choose the fidelity that you require (text, voice or video).
4. Choose how synchronous you want it to be.
5. Specify how long you want the message to be (for text this step could be automatic, just letting you know when you start to cross boundaries).
6. From the receiving side, you specify how you want messages to come to you from certain people.

Now, the critical part of this system is that the receiver gets to define how they are notified about your intent to communicate. These can be rules based on your location, your status, the time, what your calendar says, who is trying to contact you. even who you are with. So for instance, all urgent messages from your close contacts are pushed to your phone which beeps or vibrates. If it is not urgent, it is sent to your desktop, where a popup can appear every hour detailing how many new non-urgent messages are waiting (this stops the smartphone syndrome of constantly checking email, facebook etc jsut to see if something important has come up).

//End of stuff I wrote in 2009.

Now for how Google Plus implements so much of this:

Choosing who:

Circles is 95% of the way there. Between Circles, individual people, people with the link, public, they’ve really made that part super easy.

 Choose the urgency:

Not implemented by Google Plus… here’s hoping they do.

Choose how synchronous you want it to be.

The difference between the chat and the sharing pieces.
 Choose the fidelity that you require (text, voice or video)

All in Google Plus.

Specify how long you want the message to be:

Google Plus just does it automatically. I’m not sure if this one is relevant anymore.
From the receiving side, you specify how you want messages to come to you from certain people:

Google has at least made a start on it

The big thing is that Google Plus does this all in one space. No message box, chat box and email inbox, no separate places to rebuild your community again and again, just all in one application.

I think that’s kind of awesome.

What makes this position fascinating for me is the problem that it poses, namely:  how do I manage/create/frame services in a way that actually leads to them helping students be better at school?

This problem is massively difficult, as at a university level, being better at school requires students to break over 12 years of bad habits and replace them with good habits. As anybody who has tried to pick up good habits knows (especially in the time-constrained university environment), changing habits is very, very hard work that takes time to show results. Anything that one creates to help students do this has to be really, really good (if it is possible at all).

So, for this summer, in order to actually achieve this goal I’ve settled on 4 different principles that will hopefully lead to success.

1. Hire good students. This piece is critical. Having awesome students work on these projects helps keep things in perspective, makes customer development easier and brings a fresh sense of energy and ideas into the field. This piece’s current status is definitely ”mission accomplished”.
2. 1-on-1 peer mentorship is currently the only really feasible solution to this problem. Having a well-trained peer guide you and keep you accountable is a hundred times better than any online resource or workshop that I could create.
3. Solve the pain. Students experience a lot of pain and the whole point of this is to help reduce that. Wording like “learning services” means absolutely nothing to most students, we need to frame things in a way that shows them how we will help them get rid of their pain.
4. Be lean and agile. Concepts like “Do More Faster”, “release early, release often” and all the other techniques that I have learnt around successful software development and entrepreneurship apply in this context too. We are here to actually fix the problem, not just follow through on the requirements document.

Current Learning Commons site

New Learning Commons Site

(if you’re looking for a place to put the feedback, just comment below)

Gamification is one of those words that just sounds dirty. It sounds like (and just could be) a disease that people want to unleash upon school (this could also be due to the fact that “gammy” was a part of my slang vocabulary as a child). To many it is in fact a dirty word, the sentiment of “wait, what, we’re going to use operand conditioning to get students to learn?”… “This is evil and mindless and corporate.” is travelling around.

Of course, if you apply the FourSquare method of just tacking on “achievements” to a course, this sentiment is justified. But what if instead of turning school into a crappy game, we started with the premise that it is already a game and that a way to improve it would be to make it a better game?

In order to test that premise I spent 4 months working with Kimberly Voll to review the current literature around game and course design looking at what good game design was and seeing if we could apply it to course design. The in-depth hectically cited paper and poster are attached below for those who want to read them but here are the cliff notes:

We looked at 7 different elements (these are not the only 7, just the ones we looked at) that designers play with to create good games and looked for places in course design literature where these elements had been looked at. The 7 are:

• Motivations: Designing in a way that complements the reason for playing
• Reward: Providing multiple types of satisfying rewards
• Punishment: Creating punishment that can be enjoyed (games that never punish you suck)
• Challenge: Keeping the game just hard enough to be engaging
• Story: Providing a narrative and sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and gives them a sense of purpose
• Community: Giving players a chance to interact with other people
• Freedom: Giving players as much agency as possible (or at least the illusions of agency) within the game’s structure

By tweaking these 7 different aspects game designers create incredibly engaging games. If we want to make a more engaging course, all we have to do is tweak those elements as well. Notice, we don’t have to add the elements, they are already a part of the course, they just need to be fixed. A key thing to note is that this is not a one-size-fits-all way of looking at things, each course (just like each game) would need to come up with a unique way of improving on these elements.

Paper is below and I will be writing much more about this as I go on to work on it over the summer and study it as a Master’s thesis.

Paper on using game design to influence course design

That being said, in my opinion, one of the greatest weaknesses that Mac OS has is its window management. The operating system believes that it can do a better job than me in arranging and sizing the windows on my screen. This fails drastically once you have more than one screen, or have lots of windows to manage.

To fix this I found a great free tool called “better touch tools“. The app works great for its intended purpose of adding more control over trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts, but it also allows you to add the window-snapping function of Windows 7. This means that setting windows side by side or making them full screen can be done with a flick of the mouse, as opposed to painfully dragging the box in the bottom right corner.

For anybody who’s work entails looking at more than one application at a  time or who uses multiple screens, this app is a must!

After getting frustrated with Windows 7 taking a ton of time to do anything I installed Ubuntu’s Maverick Meerkat and I haven’t looked back. I think the 6-month release cycle has really paid off in a huge way for Ubuntu. All the little improvements over the versions have come together into something that now competes.

So why is it so good?

(Note many of these things have been in previous releases, but this is the first time they are packaged together so well).

Ungodly start up and shut down speeds: After a week, I still get startled when the computer shuts down 5 seconds after I hit the button.

Music Player, IM and Social Network integration: These just all work together so well. My all time favorite feature is to raise or lower the volume by just hovering over the sound icon and scrolling with the mouse wheel.

Ubuntu Software Center

Software center: The original “app store”, it’s always been good on Ubuntu, but it’s so much cleaner now and the fact that you can open that and other software update features at the same time is wonderful.

Wine is easy to use: I can run most of the Windows/Mac only applications I need with Wine. Evernote etc, all install and run, with 0 technical knowledge needed

Compiz: It’s far more than eye candy… it provides the best tools to handle multiple windows available! It lets you make your own user interface.

Stuff just works: The main reason is that finally, things just work. Fingers crossed nothing has messed up and the computer is configured exactly as I want it.

I urge everybody to give Ubuntu 10.10 a try, it is a lovely operating system. I’m not even installing Windows again (at least until my willpower breaks down and I buy Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood).

My story arc was as follows:

In order to create and effective personal learning environment you need to recursively go through the following process:

• Personal: First figure out who/where you want to be (in 5-10 years time) using a visioning exercise, then try and see who you are now and note the differences.
• Learning: In order to get from where you are now to where you want to be, you will have to learn things (skills, knowledge etc), note down what those things are.
• Environment: Learning is a product of your environment. You can adapt your environment to learn better, without adding effort. Identify ways you can change the environment around you.
• Habits: The best way to change your environment is to create good and destroy bad habits. Only way to do this effectively is one at a time and with 30 day trials.

After following that process several times you can slowly start to permanently change your environment in a way that allows you to learn.

Below is the presentation as well as a list of resources and technology tools that can be used to augment your PLE:

Resources and Tools for Personal Learning Environments:

This information can be found (and edited) at http://wiki.ubc.ca/Personal_Learning_Enviroment.

Add stories of your own Personal Learning Environment at http://wiki.ubc.ca/Talk:Personal_Learning_Environment

Tools:

Aggregate

Google Reader: http://reader.google.com
Netvibes: http://netvibes.com
RSS readers let you stay up to date on new information coming in from a variety of blogs and websites. (If you want to test it out try add the sites recommended at the bottom of the page)
Delicious: http://delicious.com
Allows you bookmark things on the internet. It’s more handy than the ones in your browser as it allows you to tag, search and share the bookmarks, as well as access them from any location. Be sure to install the browser extension in order to make adding and searching bookmarks easier.
RefWorks: http://resources.library.ubc.ca/901/
Helps you to do research by collecting and formatting your sources. Integrates with UBC Library.

Collaborate:

Wiki: http://wiki.ubc.ca

A space to openly work on content with others.
Google Docs: http://docs.google.com

An online document editor, lets you collaborate with others and your documents are available wherever you have internet.
Quizlet: http://quizlet.com

Online collaborative flashcards, lets you create flashcards then test yourself and your friends using them, in a very fun way. (Also available on a bunch of SmartPhone apps).

Organize:

Mint: http://mint.com

Automatically tracks how you spend your money and lets you set goals on how you want to spend in future (try it for a month, you will see just how delusional most of us are about where our money goes).
Evernote: http://evernote.com
Create and organize notes on any device that you have. Lets you upload and search pictures.
Google Tasks: http://tasks.google.com
Remember The Milk: http://rememberthemilk.com
There are a ton of free task tracking and managing applications out there. Having all the tasks you need to do out of your head and on paper really helps to relieve a lot of stress.
RescueTime: http://rescuetime.com/
Monitors the applications and websites that you access on your computer, providing a detailed breakdown (also, very scary to see where your time goes) and letting you set goals for how you want to change your browsing behaviour.
Google Calendar: http://calendar.google.com
lets you keep your life organized by keeping a selection of calendars. If used properly, you won’t forget about an assignment, class or meeting again.
Daytum: http://daytum.com/
Allows you to track a selection of different goals that you set for yourself.
MindMapping: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Mind_Mapping_Resources
Allows you to visually organize data in a way that may make more sense to your brain. The resources page has a collection of some of the best tools and resources.

Create

Prezi: http://prezi.com
Allows you to make fun, visually appealing and creative presentations.
Blogs: http://blogs.ubc.ca/wp-admin
Allow you to express yourself and your ideas. Let’s you synthesize and reflect upon you learning.
Creately: http://creately.com/
Gliffy: http://gliffy.com
Drawing tools that allow you to quickly and easily make then share diagrams online. Great for any kind of complex diagram that you need to create.

Connect

Blogs: http://blogs.ubc.ca
Allows you to gain feedback on your thinking as well as engage with others studying in your field of interest.
Twitter: http://twitter.com
Curate a network of people to communicate and connect with over the things that you love.
Forums:
Find or contribute to a community’s body of knowledge.
Linkedin: http://linkedin.com
Connect to people within a work network.

Learning Commons resources:

http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/get-started/the-learning-process/

http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/get-started/study-toolkits/time-management-toolkit/

http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/get-started/study-toolkits/procrastinationconcentration-toolkit/

http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/get-started/coping-with-stress/long-term-solution/

http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/get-started/learning-environments/

Blogs to follow:

Zen Habits: http://zenhabits.net/ A blog dedicated to simplifying and forming good habits.
Scott Young: http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ A student and productivity blogger, has a lot of material on how to successfully form new habits.
Study Hacks: http://calnewport.com/blog/ A student that writes a lot about how to be better at school.

Prezi Presentations on Personal Learning Environments

• Your Personal Learning Environment: http://prezi.com/enwmjoyfmsz-/your-personal-learning-environment/
• Growing your Personal Learning Environment     http://prezi.com/-xhpuupxgjin/
• Use your Leadership Skills to Create a Personal Learning Environment     http://prezi.com/b-vgb6wqwrih/
• Creating Effective Personal Learning Environments     http://prezi.com/cafxkcucjcd3/

Idiocracy poster (via Wikipedia)

Will it happen though?
Is there a possibility that humanity is doomed to get dumber? I think yes. There are many different reasons why this may or may not be so (all of which better suited for a non-wee-hours-of-the-morning post), but I think the largest of those is that in a world of stupid people, the corporations win. Corporations are psychotic entities that would do anything to get us to behave as they want and they have a lot of power (as described in another thought-provoking move, the Corporation). The power is evident everywhere. They are doing their damndest to use all media at their disposal to dumb-down children and make them into perfect buying machines, doing their bidding.

How do we stop it? We fight back in the schools. If education can be revolutionized (and there are many smart people working on it) then we can teach the young how to take back the power from the corporations and to make them do our bidding instead. Eating healthy,  exercising, learning and being compassionate are what smart people do and we need to ensure that despite the corporation’s efforts, everyone is given the tools and motivation to do so.

This is a war, it’s humanity VS. the corporations.We are fighting to see who controls who. If we get real about being flexible and innovative enough to fix education and make it a place where people learn to become smart enough to take back power from our creations.

So after 11 months how do I feel?

My Kiva lender page.

In 11 months I have made 65 loans, to the total value of $1,885. In order to lend that much, I have only put around $650 into the system. This means that over 11  months, every dollar that I have lent has been returned and loaned again, twice.

Every single loan has been paid back in full.

About 4 months ago, I stopped having to put money into the system in order to maintain a pace of 5 loans per month. By the time I am ready to lean my $125 a month, that amount has been paid back in full by other loans. Of course I will have to top up every now and then as I give a small percent of my loans to help keep Kiva going, but in general, the service has become truly free for me, I can lend money to new people every month without having to touch my bank account.

Micro-lending will not end poverty, but it is a start and hopefully it’s use along with other techniques (my favorite of course being education) will help to reverse the direction of the ever-widening rich-poor gap .

Recent Kiva loans

So although I’ve lost a few of the steps along the way, here is a subset of the themes I’ve hacked along the way…

The one thing that really struck me about IE was the concentration on narratives. In the book students are given an arbitrary topic when they start school (for example “leaves” or “wind”) and work on a portfolio around that subject for their entire school school career). They are then guided by portfolio mentors to apply everything they learn to this topic. So for instance, when learning about metaphors, they are asked to find metaphors in literature involving leaves. When learning about area, they can find the best way to estimate the area of different kinds of leaves. This way of teaching serves the duel purpose of not only making students an expert in their topic, but also
gives them something tangible to relate their learning in all areas to. It forces them to develop a habit of applying the things they learn.

Now, I haven’t figured out how I feel about the idea of an “arbitrary” topic (I think students should at least have some influence in the choice of their topics). However, at a university level students like myself should have the power to choose their own topic and follow it through. I chose my topic of improving education (both in method and in distribution) a long time ago but can see many points in my education where I have failed to relate my learning back to that. For instance), why was I bored stiff in my databases class when I could have been finding ways to relate it to my passion? Boring as SQL may be, it can be seen as a powerful upgrade to parts of human language due to its exceptional clarity. The questions I should have been asking myself could have been as follows:

Should everyone learn how database queries work simply in order for them to understand the pure logic that it creates?

Is this type of logic necessary?

Does that kind of thinking make innovation more or less likely to happen?

So many questions could be formed from something as boring as SQL queries. I know that the ones above are very surface level, but that is precisely because I was not thinking deeply about this while they were being taught databases in depth. I have this feeling that I would have been able to draw many deep and meaningful connections.

From now on I intend to try my damnedest to relate everything I learn in school to my central topic and in order to test how powerful this way of thinking can be.

In order to get that perspective I sent out questionnaires and interviewed many of my friends to get some representative opinions. The four main recommendations (inspired by the interviews were as follows):

Help them Communicate and record.

• Students want better ways to communicate with each other/course staff.
• Students want better ways of recording what happens in a lecture.

Provide those two things and you will satisfy most of what students think they need.

Teach them to look.

Students don’t explore technology (as it relates to school on their own). You don’t need to provide/require technology, explaining what’s out there and how it can help make studies easier is a very cost-effective way to help students.

Don’t be annoying.

I described clickers as a new-age punch-card system. Students will rebel against the technology used in class if it is used to keep tabs on them or increase their workload. Integrate the technology, don’t just add it on top.

Let them know why you do what you do.

I think this was the most essential theme from the talk. In general, students don’t think about how technology can help them learn… they just go on doing what they are told. It’s more efficient than experimentation. Educators need to be showing students why they use technology and ask for the student’s help in coming up with the best solution.

In the question and answer section I got asked a lot about how to involve students more in the debate. My answer was to just be more human. Let the students see that you are educating in the best way that you know how and that you are experimenting in the hopes that it will make their learning better. Nobody has figured out the perfect way to teach yet, so why not admit up front that your methods are imperfect and ask for any help to make them better. For the most part your students will be empathetic and caring, you just need to be a little vulnerable to make that happen.

1. It’s a child theme of the new WordPress theme twentyTen.
2. It’s much cleaner than my old theme.
3. It uses the new wp_nav_menu system. The 7 menus that I add are the 7 menu items at the top.

The theme really has a long way to go before it can go up on say WordPress.org. Some changes I still need to make:

1. I need a back-end so that people can add or remove their own images. This needs to completely replace the “change header” function that twentyTen comes with.
2. I need to create a way to let people have more or less than 7 headers.
3. I need to create ways for non-exact matches to leave the header images open (at the moment it’s only open if the URL is exactly the same as defined in the menus.
4. I need to write some documentation.

That being said, below is the theme for anyone who wants to play with it in its current version. Feedback on the look/features that should be added would be great.

twenty-hand 0.5

Update 1: an example of what this site used to look like: http://buddypress.andremalan.org/andre/

Update 2: I didn’t like the theme in the end… am working on another one at the moment.

Simply append /?feed=rss&p=111 to the end of your URL. The 111 in the example should be the ID of the post that you want the feed for.

I had the pleasure of working with 4 absolutely fantastic team-mates, Piam Kiarostami, Gabe Silk, alexandru Totolici, and Jre Sarenac. Each of us intuitively picked a role and we worked like a well-oiled machine.

The project we worked on was a collaborative, tabletop,  multi-touch diagramming tool that we dubbed “collabee”. We compared our interface to the more traditional ways of diagramming collaboratively (whiteboard and computer) then analysed our results. Below are the reports that we wrote, as well as a video on the project that we produced (it’s only 4 minutes and be sure to stick around for the surprise ending).

Final Course Grade: 85%

Milestone 1: Project Proposal

Milestone 2: Initial user survey

Milestone 3: Experiment Proposal

Milestone 4: Experiment Results

How is school like a game?

Both School and Video games are highly repetitive environments where you overcome deliberate obstacles in order to reach a goal. In both cases, you pay money in order to perform work. I’m going to use one of my favorite games of all time, Diablo 2 as an example in some direct comparisons.

Players get rewards for doing tasks:

“Andre attended all his labs and thus has a chance to pass the course” vs. “Andre cleared the Den of Evil and received an extra skill point”.

Bosses have to be overcome at the end of each quest:

“After 4 months of work, Andre’s final task in CPSC 111 is to pass an exam worth 50% of the grade” vs. “In order to complete the first Act, Andre has to defeat the demon queen Andariel”.

There are side quests:

“Andre spoke at the Student Learning Conference and received the Best Returning Presenter Award” vs. “Andre found the Smith’s hammer, as a reward she will imbue one of his items with magical properties”.

Prerequisites:

“In order to do CPSC 314 you have to have taken MATH 121″ vs. “In order to find Tal Rasha’s tomb and finish the act, you need to find the Horadric Staff in the Maggot Lair”.

Reaching final goal grants a status.

“Andre has completed a Bachelor’s of Science and will henceforth be known as Andre Malan, B.SC” vs. “Andre has just slain Diablo, lord of Terror and will henceforth be known as Patriarch Andre”.

Those are just a few examples and there are many, many others out there.

So why is school a crappy game?

There are many things about school that make it worse than modern video game. The reason is obvious. The game of school was designed a very long time ago when there was very little research available on how to engage students. Here are a few things that makes school suck compared to games:

High cost of failure:

In School failing a course closes many doors. In most classes, if you do badly on an assignment, then you don’t have a chance to get a better grade on it. If you fail too many times, you are kicked out of the game.

In Games, if you get killed trying to complete a quest, you respawn and try again. You may have lost some gold, but if you try hard, you can still complete the quest. You do this until you succeed. You are only judged on the end result. The game doesn’t care how long it takes you to get to a certain point or level… all that matters is that you get there in the end.

Side quests can hurt your chance of success.

In school doing too many things outside may help your overall learning, but can also seriously harm your grades. You have to often choose between doing well in the main storyline and side activities.

In Diablo, side quests only ever have positive consequences. You can get more experience points, as well as cool items or rewards. You also learn more about the world. When you are done your side quest, the main storyline is waiting for you exactly where you left off. In university, why are deadline extensions only reserved for those who are sick? What about those speaking or organizing conferences, organizing food drives, or a myriad of other important learning experiences on campus that take time away from academics? Why can’t we replace assignments with appropriate other activities that still demonstrate our learning?

Bad indicators of progress:

In school, you have grades. You start off with the assumption that you can get 100% if you complete everything. For every assignment or test that you loose points on, that 100% gets reduced. Every mistake that you make will be punished.

A good game has many ways to show you how far you have got. Diablo has levels and experience points. Dragon Age has that, as well as badges. You can visibly track your progress and compare it to that of others. I myself have even gone to class, not due to the clicker points that I would get, but because going to that class would have unlocked a new badge for me on FourSquare. Yes, that may say something about my priorities, but I think it says more about the design of the two respective “games”.

Bad storyline:

In school, the storyline is as follows: You are one of thousands of students with nothing special about you. Complete this numbers of classes, some of them requiring other classes. In each class, your mission is to go to class, hand in the assignments and pass the exam. When you’re done, you get your certificate.

In Diablo, you are a hero travelling around the land trying to stop the demon lord Diablo from freeing his brothers and reigning terror over the whole world. There are hundreds of thousands of heroes at different levels, all working together on this. a Along the way you meet many people who you have to save from situations that Diablo has put them in. Each quest is explicitly linked to this storyline.

This isn’t hard in school. UBC’s vision is a great starting example:

“As one of the world’s leading universities, The University of British Columbia creates an exceptional learning environment that fosters global citizenship, advances a civil and sustainable society,and supports outstanding research to serve the people of British Columbia, Canada and the world.”

Our mission as a student is to become a global citizen that advances a civil and sustainable society. We are all individuals who have an opportunity to make a difference. That’s a much better mission that the mission we all think we are on… take X number of courses and get a degree. I know that UBC would like us to consider our mission the mission statement, but there is nothing in the system that makes that happen. Here is a perfect example of a game designer would approach showing students what their mission is:

What’s my mission? from Alchemy on Vimeo.

In the end, video game companies have spent billions in money and in man-hours in order to find ways of keeping people engaged in highly repetitive tasks. I think educators should be looking at how they can rework some of the success that game developers have had into the classroom.

The two videos below are what inspired this line of thinking. Both of them are about making life more like a game, but I see more merit in applying them to school, as school is already a game. Applying their line of thinking is easier when thinking about school than real life. Both are quite mind-blowing and will open minds about the value that games play in our society.

Over the last 6 months I have given two presentations on the ideas of Personal Learning Environments/Networks. The first one was in late August for UBC Jump Start,  a 2 week orientation program for students that I attended in my first year at UBC and that provided me with great friends and learning experiences. The second presentation was give at the 2010 UBC Student Leadership Conference, a conference that I have been heavily involved with over the past few years and this year was co-chaired by two good friends of mine, June Lam and Robert Winson. I had some technical difficulties with the first presentation, but the second one went really well, I even won the “best returning presenter” award for it.

Although neither of the presentations were recorded,  I have both of the presentations on Prezi.

The first presentation:

I started by defining a personal learning environment, very much the same way as I did in this post here, as “everything around you that helps you to learn”. I went on to talk about how you can change your environment in order to change your learning. I then went on to spend a little under half the talk dedicated to different tools that one can add to their learning environment to make it more effective.

The second presentation:

This one was titled “Use your leadership skills to create a personal learning network”.  The idea was that leadership skills are great and all for leading people, but they can also be put to work for enhancing your learning. This time I spent far more time focusing on the network and personal aspects of learning, a good representation of my own learning and growth that has been going on in the last 6 months. The idea was that you can only learn better through hard, personal change, drawing the analogy between what it takes to be a good learner and a good Ice Hockey player (these Canadians are converting me pretty quickly eh?) The second thread was that we are able to be much more effective if we use other people, yet the only way to use people is to not use them. In order to gather an effective network you need to be selfless and compassionate, only then will people offer their help.

I also promised the participants a list of resources which I will publish below.

Resources:

Improving study skills:

Reading speed/comprehension/retention:

Breakthrough Rapid Reading

Memory:
The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory at Work, at School, and at Play

General Study Skills

How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less

Time Management/Productivity:

Getting Things Done

The Power Of Less

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Peace of mind:

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Relationships:

Tribes

That’s just a few, if there is anything anybody would like to know more about, or any other resources someone things may be handy let me know in the comments below.

Why:

Ironically, the catalyst for this change of heart was my blog post on CCK09.Jeff Fong left a comment on that post pointing me to Scott Young’s post on studying. Reading that post (and subsequent posts) sparked something in my mind. It was the created a connection between several recent things that I had learned and not connected before. I decided to do something that was new and exciting for myself, figuring that the concepts and connections in CCK will still be there in a year.  

Basically, the ideas boiled down to the feasibility of personal development. Although I have seen enough crazy “self-help” ideas, money making schemes and development training programs to make me very skeptical of any personal development literature, while reading Scott’s post something clicked. An idea that I can indeed (despite the fact that 22 years of new-years resolutions have proven otherwise) change the things that I do not like about my life. The idea was that finding a way to enact constant improvement would allow me to be far more prepared for school when it starts in January as well as for helping me get my head around the crazy world of ed-tech.

Of course, I am not silly enough to believe that a few months of concentrated effort can “fix” my life, but I thought that maybe I could start to structure things in a way that kick starts a continuous “self-repair mechanism” and enables lifelong learning and improvement. Now of course, to make things work, I came up with a system (seeing as coming up with systems is one of the things I seem to do best). Part of it is explained below:

Planning:

I sat down and brainstormed areas of my life that I wanted to improve. I then categorized those into three categories:

• Quick fixes
• Habits
• Lifelong learning goals

For example, quick fixes included rearranging my Google Reader to make it work better. Habits included keeping my room tidy (the nemesis habit of many university students). Lifelong learning goals included things like learning to read quicker.

Although I did not do it originally, I have since added end points to every learning goal, some way of saying “I’m done”. I know that learning is never over, but there has to be some point where you can switch your main focus to something else and keep whatever you are doing on the periphery.

Preparation:

Now that I had lists of things I wanted to change, I needed to integrate them into my life somehow. To do that, I used the one thing that I check every day, my iGoogle homepage. I deleted everything else off of my homepage. I added a sticky note widget, a Google Calendar widget and then a bunch of Google Tasks widgets (I use Google Tasks because of how quick it is to add emails to tasks and tasks to my calendar). I set each widget to contain a different list (GTD style) and included the lists of the three areas that I outlined above.

In the sticky note I highlight things that I want to concentrate on / accomplish for that work.

Here is what it looks like (quick fixes became merged into projects):

Implementation:

Now that I have my lists, what is the implementation?

Firstly (and this is the first habit I had to learn) is to take 2 minutes to look over the iGoogle page every morning. I look at the weekly goals in my sticky note to make sure that I am still on track to accomplish them.

Every week I take 10 minutes to review my progress and set new goals for the next week.

On a monthly basis, I choose one habit that I want to work on. In that month I move mountains to make sure that I stick to that habit. I add a date to it to say when it should end. If I slip up, I move the date back to 30 days from the slip up.

I choose one lifelong learning goal that I want to concentrate on. I set the goal for when I have acquired that skill/knowledge. Once one goal is completed, I move on to the next one.

Results:

Now, of course I have only been using this system for just over 2 months so I can not say it works completely just yet. What I can say, is that I have definitely had a lot of progress.

The two habits that I have focused on so far (keeping my room tidy and going to the gym regularly) are now firmly ingrained in my life. My current learning goal is also coming along, my reading speed has tripled since I started. I will probably blog my current successes pretty soon.

I also feel like I have so much more control over my environment than I ever had before. When school starts again in January I will be able to tackle the term with far more confidence than ever before and I will also (hopefully) be able to use much of the improvements that I make to myself as a way to develop my ability to learn (both in school and in my goal of helping to fix education).

So what is Connectivism anyway? After reading and watching much of the first week’s content here is my interpretation:

Connectivism is a new learning theory that was developed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. It basically states that knowledge “is” connections. It rejects the notion of knowledge as a physical entity (that can be passed from one person to another), but more as something that grows as we create more connections.

According to Siemens and Downes, this type of knowing exists on three (and perhaps more) levels:

1. The brain: our brains store memories and “knowledge” as a set of distributed pathways and connections.
2. Concepts: We can only know concepts by drawing connections between different nodes.
3. Society: The knowledge that a society has exists in the links between different nodes (people, databases, books, etc).

Now, of course, this is my gross oversimplification. For more thorough insights into the topic here are some links to read:

What connectivism is

The unique idea of connectivism

So here are my questions concerns and thoughts after 1 week:

1. I understand and accept the neurological principle (modern neuroscience has accepted that what we know is stored in the connections between neurons). The question then is: Can we abstract that one level up for our learning in higher level concepts, or should this thinking stay at a neurological level?
2. Even if we can represent learning in the same way our brain stores things, is that the best way to do it? Our brain is a result of evolution and we know, as fundamental as evolution is, it tends to follow the principle of “just good enough”. If our brain’s method of storing information is “just good enough” could we not have developed better ways of doing things? I would argue that even the fact that society is “connectivist” in its knowledge is a result of “just good enough” as the system is too large for a more efficient method to have evolved. Are we smart enough to come up with something better?
3. Assuming I get to the point where I believe fully in connectivism as a learning theory, what technology needs to be created to support it? 3D networking maps? A personal learning framework that allows you to visualise the framework of your connections? How can I apply the principles of connectivism to come up with brilliant pedagogy and the tools needed to support that?

Some related links:

• Learning Leaders Fieldbook (downes.ca)
• Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009 (downes.ca)

But we need to build more lasting channels of communication soon, lest we miss some important connections

So here is my attempt to provide those connections:

WPMU For Education blog

The basic idea is an aggregation blog for “WPMU for education” developers. Jim Groom provided a blog from his WPMUEd domain so that a new channel, dev.wpmued could be created. I used the Add Link Widget with FeedWordPress to turn this blog into an aggregation of content from developers who are working on developing WPMU in education using the method that Jim and I came up with. I seeded it with a few of my often read WordPress MU in education blogs (myself, Jim, D’Arcy, Boone, OLT and CUNY Dev).

But we need more, much more. If you know of any other blogs that write on this subject, please add their feed to the site.  Here is the current master list of institutions that are using WordPress MU. If you have any connections to any of them help the community out by contacting them and asking them to share what they are doing. Also, before you add your feed remember to turn the number of posts up (if you have more than 10 feeds to contribute). If you use WordPress you can include a mutli-tag feed by going “your-url/tag/tag1,tag2,tag3/feed”.

This can be a powerful way to boost our combined development prowess as well as a fantastic demonstration of the power of WordPress to support a community.

the actual conversation happening (photo credit Michelle Lamberson)

Adding your feed is as simple as dropping the URL into the text box on the left sidebar. Add the password (wpmued) and you are done. I’ll be checking for new feeds periodically but you can give me a shout and I’ll activate it ASAP.

Future plans:

I plan to use Wiki Append to pull important content from the wordcamped wiki into pages (it would be done already but wiki-append is having some problems). I think the wiki can act as  a second channel of communication. I will post again as soon as all of that is set up. In the mean time, edit the wiki, give it some much needed love!

I’ve also been playing with a branding idea. A year ago I came up with the idea for the UBC BlogSquad of having badges for contributors. It has worked really well as it reminds everyone of the existence of the aggregated blog (including the blogger themselves). It also immediately identifies you as part of the community. Of course, these were all first and second year students and I am not sure if seasoned bloggers want to pollute their blog with badges. If you do, feel free to grab one below. If you don’t like the design feel free to take your own shot at it (icon design is definitely not my strong suit). If you think the idea is stupid and that something else would work better, let me know in the comments below.

So here it is, 17 August 2009, the Wordle for all my content is:

my Wordle

I treat unread email as to do items. When I check my email I respond to the things I have time to respond to and the rest I mark as unread so that I can respond to them later. This is a very hassle free system. Except, there is one big problem. Gmail does not have a default “show all unread mail” button. This means that it is hard for me to compare my unread mail (to do items) and prioritize this means that some big tasks end up being buried under pages and pages of emails. Of course, with Gmail’s new addons this is very easy to do. Here is how:

1. Go to “settings” then “labs” on the top right menu bar.
2. Scroll down and enable the quick links addon.
   

   enable the add links in settings

3. in the search box type in the following: in:inbox in:unread. Click search mail
   

   search box

4. In the quick links box (middle left of your screen) click “add quick link”.
   

   add quick link

And there we have it, now your Gmail is set up to list all of your unread mail without the interference of stuff that you have already dealt with.

I am currently working at a software company as an intern, writing a program. Now of course, as anybody who has taken Software Engineering knows (don’t worry readers who are not in Computer Science, I promise I will not lose you), when you make software you have to provide different types of documentation about it. Things like, why you made it, how it works, how to use it, who is going to use it… all these things and many more have to be written down formally and saved somewhere in order for your software to live a long and happy life.

Now, Software engineering (CPSC 310) is a class that in part teaches you how to write all of this essential documentation. I took this course with Meghan Allen, one of my favorite professors simply for the fact that she teaches like a human being and not an automaton. This is post is no reflection on her, just on the system that she is pushed into using by those above her . Anyway, in the course she would explain why this documentation was needed and how to do it. She would then provide us with careful examples of what it should look like. We were asked to use her examples as reference when creating our own documentation for our class project.

So far so good, pretty normal learning experience. But, we skip ahead to right now. My little program that I am writing for this big software company needs documentation. I remember why, but am very fuzzy on how. What to do? Of course, I can just go back to the example from class an… but wait. The examples were posted in Blackboard. I can’t see them anymore. They were a great resource… utterly useless as I have no way of applying it to a real life situation.

Ok, Well, not utterly useless. I still have the assignment that I handed in (thanks Google Docs for keeping it safe for me). I could still google the type of documentation and find other examples online, which works, although it takes time (less time of course than writing this post). The thing is, I know that the document is a fantastic resource, why should I have to go and search for others? Shouldn’t the university-provided example be better than most things I can find online anyway? Isn’t that the point of somone spending time writing it up in the first place? Money was used to create that example (mine and the government’s) so why should it be a one-time deal used only to help me complete an assignment? Can anybody come up with a sane reason why it should not be available to me always? I feel ripped off, because I had a resource and it was snatched away from me. If it had been given to me in good old-fashioned paper handouts, I would still have it.

This is just one example amongst a sea of them that I am sure most students experience often. I guess most don’t even realize that they are getting a raw deal for the time effort and money they put into the classroom. In three years of university I have taken well over 10 courses with Blackboard components. What do I have to show for it? See for yourself. Below is my list of blackboard courses. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t it?

My blackboard welcome screen

Related articles on other sites:

• The LMS is So Web 1.5 (ezrasf.com)
• Shall we call it Blackangel? Or Angelboard? (castingoutnines.wordpress.com)

The short explanation (for those who have difficulty reading more than a paragraph):

What is it?

1. Basically, you lend someone in a poor country $25 so that they can use it as capital to grow their business.
2. In a few months you get all of your money back and the borrower has grown their business and are now better able to provide for their family and help revitalize their country’s economy.

It’s that simple.

Why do it?

1. It costs you nothing.
2. You change someone’s life for the better and contribute to the economy of some of the world’s poorest countries.
3. It is a lot of fun! Reading all the descriptions, finding your borrower and tracking your repayments is really enjoyable.
4. For every person who reads this and lends through Kiva (let me know by comments on Facebook, Twitter or preferably this blog) I will contribute $25 dollars myself (so you get to make me eat my words). If you are in UBC, join the UBC group first.

So come on, go to Kiva and just try it, I promise you that you will not be disappointed.

Now the long explanation (for those of you who want some in-depth explanation).

When it comes to aid of any kind, I am a very big skeptic. Too often have I witnessed well meaning money being squandered on useless development projects. My favorite dumb project is one that I learned about one night in Ghana when I was at a bar with some friends. We met some volunteers and after a while they started to describe their project. Basically, they had been sent from Britain to teach computer literacy to people in Ghana. However, they had been assigned to a village that had no electricity, so they had to charge the laptops with car batteries (this was before the days of one laptop per child which can be charged by batteries). The project was laughably unsustainable.

Not only are there dumb projects out there, but there are so many competing theories about development aid. Some say we should donate no-strings attached money, some say we should just leave the poor to develop on their own because it provides the right incentive. There is also the consideration (the one that stops me from giving most) of “where will my money be most effective?” I would like to maximize the impact of my (very limited) funds and doing so is very hard. I am currently reading different development economic works (currently on the End of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs) and will keep on reading until I have a thorough understanding of what I can actually do to maximize my ability to relieve my home continent of the poverty and despair that it faces.

Kiva sidesteps all of these considerations. Who cares if it is not the most efficient way to end poverty?  It costs me nothing. The money is not aid, it is simply a capital loan. I have the capacity to give unlimited funds and if I decide one day that micro-lending does more harm than good (unlikely) then I simply have to wait a few months and I will not have wasted any money as I will have it all back again. From all the famous developmental economists that I have read or listened to: Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, Jeffery Sachs and Stephen Lewis (many of whom as a group contradict each other on most points) none of them say that micro-finance is a bad idea. some argue as to how effective it can be, but none say that it has negative impacts. Until I figure things out I am going to continue to lend on Kiva… it is simply the safest way to go if you want to make a difference.

Finally, for anyone who made their Twitter profile pictures green in support of the Iranians (and do not currently contribute in any other way to those less privileged than themselves), this is one big step up into doing something that can make an actual measurable difference (still at no cost to yourself). Seeing as the action of making your profile green has shown a will to help others, not doing as little as lending money to someone who really needs it shows that you lack any real moral capacity to put that will into action and validates every single sarcastic remark that I and some others have made about the “People’s Twitter Front”.

As for who to loan to, I prefer to loan to Women in Africa, more specifically Women in Ghana. I also like loaning to groups as there is more security. But the nice thing about Kiva is that you have choice. Find someone who’s region/plight/plans strikes a chord in you and help them out. It becomes very personal.

So go ahead, make me, yourself and most importantly a desperately struggling businessperson happy by signing up to Kiva and giving just one loan. As I said above, let me know and I will loan $25 in response.

Related articles By Zemanta

• The Inevitable Anti-U.S. Backlash Has Started On Kiva (techcrunch.com)
• Micro Loans with Kiva (semanticmetadata.net)
• Schneidman: Helping Africa Save Itself (one.org)
• International aid: Help or handout? (guardian.co.uk)

Scott Leslie set up an installation of Social Media Classroom the other day and offered for others to take it for a spin. I gave it a try and here is what I think.

The Social Media Classroom does exactly what it says that it will do. The user interface is quite impressive, making thing really easy to jump into.  Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb said that “its ease-of-use and educational slant make its introduction an impressive and potentially game-changing move for the educational system as we know it”. I think she would be right, if it were not for some big obstacles that the platform faces. These are:

1. It seems to be closed off and private by default (although this may have just been the system I used). If outsiders can participate (as has been shown by Jon Beasley-Murray, Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman) magic can happen. We need to let the world see what students are doing in university.
2. The “Social Media Classroom” is missing one little word in the title. A game changer would rather be a “Social Network Media Classroom”. Although students can edit their own profiles in the Social Media Classroom, there is no way to form groups or to add people to their network. The network is often the most powerful part of any social media applications and it is a terrible oversight to not include it.
3. The training wheels don’t come off. This application is great for students who do not know of, or use social media tools. However, it sucks for those that do. They are not able to use their current networks or applications. Most people who have blogs would want to use their own blogs for a class. Or use their own social bookmarking service. These people (the ones who would be very useful in this environment as they could guide their peers and instructors in the use of social media) will feel alienated and resent having to use the Social Media Classroom. If an education-based social media application is ever to be successful it has to provide an easy way for experienced students to show others the tricks of the trade and for novice students to take the wheels off of the bicycle and use real tools when they are ready for it.

The bright side is that these are relatively easy things for the social media classroom to fix. Jim Groom is already taking care of the training wheel problem at UMW blogs with his BuddyPress, FeedWordPress, WordPress and mediaWiki experiments.  UBC’s OLT also has some of this in the works. I’m sure that Drupal is powerful enough to do the same for the Social Media Classroom. The network part simply takes adding some features and making it open… well that should be just flicking a switch.

The Social Media Classroom is a good service and I really wish that more people had taken Scott Leslie up on his offer of trying it out on his hosted server. If you are in education, check out Social Media Classroom. Despite all of my complaints above, I would still far rather use it than any course website that I have ever used (Blackboard or otherwise).  With a few simple, yet fundamental changes, it could just be a game changer yet.

Related from around the web:

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/08/20/social-media-classroom/

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=45674

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_social_media_classroom_a_new_platform_for_education.php

Screenshot of old theme

Some features to note are:

• Snazzy JavaScript slider. Why? Lets me show pictures without taking up too much space. One of my goals for this year is to learn to actually draw well in Illustrator and as is obvious, I have a long way to go and need a place/reason to practice.
• Proper archives page using the awesome wp_archives plugin. I can’t think of a better way to browse archives (aside from tags maybe). The default WordPress way of dates is stupid… they just have no context. One way in which I might change this page in future is modify the plugin so that I can annotate dates around important events in my life.
• Social Networks page. This has snippets from other places around the web that I haunt. I’m considering changing it in the future to be a bit of a life-stream, but am holding out for someone to come up with an exceptional plugin to make that happen.
• Better fonts.
• More pictures!

Again, let me know what you think in the comments below, any feedback is always welcome.

From sonson on Flickr... click on image to go to source

At CELC 2009 I was part of a panel of students that tried to answer the question: Personal Learning Environments. What do students think? The other students on the panel were Angeli and Zack. Cindy Underhill was the mastermind that brought us all together and did a superb job of directing things.

So what did us, the students have to say about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)? I don’t know how much I can speak for Zack and Angeli (although we did agree on the majority of things), but here are my (heavily supplemented) answers to the core questions that Cindy asked:

1) What do we know about how students define personal learning environments?

For this question I avoided the (arguably defunct) definition of PLEs as an environment that educational technologists create for students to learn in (nobody even brought it up in the session). Instead, I defined it as “the environment in which I learn” (I think a lot of people are starting to agree with this definition as well). This includes a bunch of distributed technologies (a topic that I regularly blog about), but it also includes other things, like my classmates, my roommates and very big pieces of paper. This is important, so everybody in ed-tech listen up: you cannot create an entire PERSONAL learning environment for students! It is impossible. Every student has their own way of learning, every student evolves their environment continuously (look at how my tools have changed) and any one tool will be obsolete as quickly as any other piece of technology. Don’t despair though… there is still plenty of work for you to do. What students really need are small, lightweight tools to help them learn. The process should be as follows:

1. Find out where the gaps are in the student’s learning
2. Fill the gap with an easy to use tool.
3. Let them know it exists and show them how to use it (the part, in my opinion, that professors and educational technologists are worst at).

I didn’t get a chance in the session to really flesh that out… but there you have it. Give me the tools and let me use them to build my own environment.

2) How do PLEs contribute to the development of learning competencies?

With my definition above, this question doesn’t make too much sense. The reality is, that a PLE only really contributes to the development of a student’s “learning competencies” when they know what the hell that means. Or when they care. Students don’t often take the time to think about how their current study techniques are actually helping them to learn. They just study and pray that they pass the exams… which brings me to the next question…

3) Are PLEs effective without educational reform?

The answer is… only a tiny bit. My PLE is helping me to get good grades… not to learn. In fact, because of how education works, most students don’t have PLEs… they have “PGGEs” (Personal Grade Getting Environments)! At the end of the day, that is what most students really care about. Why shouldn’t they? As Cindy said in her follow-up post “We’ve structured the education system this way, it’s not their fault”. I am often way too busy memorizing things to actually learn them.  Learning takes time and effort… it also takes practice and conversation, it is much more efficient to get good grades by memorizing the textbook. This is not only a curriculum problem, it also has to do with the whole way degrees are structured. A Small anecdote for a recent event in my life:

After speaking to someone in Science advising I realized that I will not graduate from University if I do not take the second introductory (1st year) Physics course. I took the honours version of the first course and scored 87%.  I would dearly love to take a 4th year Psychology course on human behaviour instead… but if I do take it, I won’t graduate. The irony is that for me, the Physics course will be a breeze, I will ace it easily.  I find it so easy that it doesn’t interest me at all. If I took the Psychology course I would enjoy it a lot more. It would also be a lot more difficult and I would actually learn something new. It would contribute far more to my plans for the future than the Physics course.

Seems wrong doesn’t it? That same story is being told by countless times hundreds of thousands of students all around the world.  Then professors complain that the students are not interested in the stuff they teach. If you give students the freedom to choose what they will learn and emphasize through proper assessment that they are there to learn and not just there to get good grades, then students will be interested. I would bet my life on it.

Conclusion to that long-winded rant: Without educational reform students don’t care about learning, therefore their “learning environment” is severely neglected, making it ineffective.

4) What’s your role in supporting the development of personal learning environments?

This was kind of a double-edged question… one for us to throw back at the audience. My comment that I threw back out to the audience was this:

You cannot expect students to think about and improve on their learning if you are not modeling the behavior and seeing what works and what does not.

They may all have finished formal education, but in this information age we all have to continually learn and the better we are at it, the more successful we will be. My challenge then, to anyone who reads this post is:

Think about your own personal learning environment. Really dig deep and figure out what contributes most to how you learn. What distracts from that learning? Now, patch, build and experiment with your own environment to try and improve it. You will find yourself much better off for doing it.

If you are involved in education at any level and you cannot do what I have asked above… then you are really incapable of helping students do it as well.

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While attending the 2009 Canadian e-Learning Conference I was suddenly struck by the fact that there were two very different ways that people were trying to better education. There are simply two things that need to be accomplished before education is fixed. These are:

1. Access
2. Reform

Access is an obvious challenge, there are too many people in the world that do not have access to a good education.  Reform on the other hand is less obvious, but also necessary, even the best education that is given to the wealthiest of people is deeply flawed and missing something essential, that education has to be fixed.

Now, here is the problem, where do we devote the most of out attention in order to have the maximum impact possible? On the one hand, giving the uneducated even the most basic education seems to be the most important, but again, do we want to be giving them a deeply flawed education? However, we can’t ignore those that suffer while we slowly chip away at the entrenched problems that education currently faces.

Since both are necessary, the only real course of action is a two-pronged approach. Whenever dealing with one problem we need to constantly be mindful of the other. This can be done as they often go hand in hand. The best example of this has to be the open education movement. By creating open and free educational resources (as well as encouraging their re-use) we not only provide access (by lowering the cost of providing/consuming education) but also help with reform, as we allow (and encourage) educators to build on and refine what others have done… creating something much better, instead of continually reinventing the wheel.

Of course, open education is not the only way that we can marry these two goals. The one laptop per child initiative, efforts to utilize technology in the classroom, project-based learning and a whole host of other movements and projects are capable or bridging the gap between these two fundamental educational goals. All that it takes is some thought, creativity and awareness. I challenge anybody who is working to try and improve education to really think about which one of the problems they are currently addressing and to look for ways to augment their effectiveness by addressing the other problem.

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I was introduced to the phenomenon that is Seth Godin by my friends Rob Winson and Matt Corker. Seth Godin is one of the most revered marketing gurus of our time.

In this TED talk he talks about the importance of creating movements or “tribes”. He says that every now and then “someone stands up and says: this one is important”. This is a cause that I am passionate about and I want to organize people around me to help get something done. He ends with “go out and create a movement”.

Image via Wikipedia

My movement is simple. Let us help to fix education. Education is broken. There has to be a better way to teach human beings to contribute to society than what we are currently doing. Studying textbooks and tests are an incredibly inefficient way of learning. Humans have evolved to rely on education. We have stopped adapting physically and are using education to drive our adaptation. In order to continue to evolve and create the best society that we can, our education system has to evolve. The fact that things are being done the same way that they were done 100 years ago is crazy. Education has to be fixed.

Now of course I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know how to fix education, nobody. I have some ideas, but they are not guaranteed to work. What is needed is for students, educators, parents and anybody else involved in education to experiment openly and to document their successes and failures. For people to realize that things are not working and for them to work to improve them. With critical mass, we can change things.

So, wanna join my tribe?

Related articles (on different sites)

• Seth Godin Talks Tribes (enquiringmimes.com)
• http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/expertise-and-p.html

photo credit: gwydionwilliams

So, it is that time of year again. Exams will rule my life as no thing ever should. Posting will resume on the 28th!

photo credit: Alex France

While studying for my recent test in Artificial Intelligence, I used Quizlet (still an awesome service) to create a deck of flashcards in order to help memorize all of the terms. As I was about to post the link on the class discussion board so that others could use it, I hesitated. The reason for my hesitation? I asked myself, “if the grade for this test gets curved? Would others using this possibly lower my grade?”

The answer to the question is of course yes. If the grade had been curved my helping the rest of the class would have hurt me. I posted the link in the end but am still disgusted by the fact that I even considered not sharing with others just to improve my own grade. I am even more disgusted by the fact that I have to make that choice. What if I was really into getting good grades (although we all know what I really think of grades)? Could I mislead people on discussion boards or during study groups in the hopes of bringing down their grades and increasing my own? How many students do this at the moment? Yuck!

So, the model of curving grades is broken. If it fosters malicious competition then it is not a model that should be used. The model cannot just be thrown out though, as it is very useful.It protects students from professors who have lost touch with just how difficult their material is. It helps to make sure the course grades from year to year are consistent. So how to fix the model?

My one proposal is to give students who work towards increasing the understanding of their fellow students some form of bonus grades. If a student can provide proof of the fact that they helped to increase the understanding of their peers then they should be rewarded in some way. Sharing is a good thing… not a punishable offense!

Update: The actual test that I took was not curved in the end. In fact it was a really well written test with all the questions relating directly to the learning goals of the course and most students in the class did really well. I still have many other courses where grade curving and scaling will be applied this year, but Artificial Intelligence isn’t one of them. 

Having clear learning goals in a course has been a great step forward for education.  In courses where this practise is used (and used well) students know exactly what they will be able to do if they successfully learn the material in the course. There is also a clearer view of what the practical requirements are for what they have to do to prove that they have learnt what they are supposed to learn.

The problem comes when you don’t really agree with the learning outcomes of a course. Now, I know that any course contains core material, but at the same time students should have the freedom to decide what they concentrate on. For example:

I am currently taking a course called “Numerical Approximation and Discretization”. The learning goals boil down to “understanding, selecting, utilizing, assessing and creating” different Numerical Approximation techniques.

Now, I will never have a career in numerical approximation. However, I might find it useful to understand and select techniques of numerical approximation in some future research that I do. I will probably never have to create my own technique so why should I learn how to do it? Or even more importantly, why should I be assessed on my ability to do that? Would it not be possible for us to be provided with a range of possible learning outcomes for a course and let us choose the ones that we want to pursue? Those can then be tested more rigorously. We would still be exposed to the other things, but will be allowed to concentrate on that which we are passionate about. I don’t think that this is that far fetched, for instance I already get to choose the courses in the program that interest me, why not have a choice over the goals within those courses?

I know that any form of granularity makes a professor or curriculum committee’s job much harder. However, in courses where assessment is already based around certain outcomes I feel it would not be too difficult to weight assessments based on the student’s preference in outcomes.

It all really boils down to this: Should students have some kind of input on their goals learning goals for a specific subject, or is that something that should only be decided by a curriculum committee?

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Although, with all the recent layoffs at Microsoft maybe 2019 might be a stretch.

Maybe it’s time to start backing Aubrey de Grey on his quest to help us all live to be 1ooo years old just so that we can all live the the cool future that is sure to come…

photo credit: carboila

While the new theme does still break a whole bunch of rules when it comes to accessibility and usability, I will be fixing those as soon as I can. The theme is chosen for its style and how I identify with it more than anything else. One of the key fixes is going to be a nice (really complex to code) JavaScript navigation. However, due to the fact that school is in crunch mode and due to my impending trip to Mexico, I will not be able to fix things up as early as I would like.

So there it is, new theme with many changes and improvements still to come. Comments, suggestions and all that jazz are welcome (especially as I am still on the fence about some of my ideas).

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It highlights what I hate most about the way the world conducts education.

They don’t show my last slide, but in it is a big shout out to a few people like Brian Lamb, Jon Beasley-Murray, Jim Groom, Scott Leslie, Gardner Campbell, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman, all of who’s presentations, tweets, blog posts, comments and plain old conversations have helped to shape so many of my ideas and beliefs. I think that this stuff really matters and it was your collective influences that helped me to see that.

Here is my talk embedded below:

To see more of the talks you can visit the Terry Talks Website.

I don’t understand how there can even be any validity to the “heuristic multi-touch” patent that Apple was just granted. Why? Here are the facts as I see it:

1. In order to obtain a patent you need to prove that you are the original inventor. To quote Wikipedia:

   Section 101 of Title 35 U.S.C. sets out the subject matter that can be patented:

   Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

   This means that someone has to prove that they are the person who invented the technology. So for instance someone delivering a presentation on that technology to thousands of people means that there is no way that someone else can apply for the patent afterward.

    

    

2. The Apple patent states the following:
   

   A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

    

    

3. The Apple patent was filed on April 11th 2008
4. Jeff Han gave this presentation (in front of thousands) at the TED Conference in February 2006:
     

    

    

5. Jeff Han’s presentation clearly shows all the things listed in Apple’s patent and was produced before the patent application. Therefore the patent is clearly invalid.
   
6. Patents have to be non-obvious.
7. Multi-touch heuristics are obvious. Here is a list posted by Craig Musselman on this post. As you can see multi-touch heuristics are very obvious and have been for a long time (well at least to Hollywood anyway):

   1. gene roddenberry Star trek

   http://www.trekcon.de/fedcon/2006/Intro/console.jpg

   2. Independence day docking tracking screen

   3. jetsons menu system

   4. AI (artificial intelligence) movie

   5. minority report

   6. children of men

   7. Predator

    

    

Am I wrong? This seems to be so patently obvious to me. Have I missed something? If I am not wrong, then I hope that Microsoft, Palm and even maybe Jeff’s lawyers are able to prove this and get the patent taken away.

Watching Jeff’s video about a year ago was a turning point in my life. It opened my eyes to the world of possibility that research into human-computer interaction can provide. My life’s goal is now to be a part of that, to be someone who helps to discovers new and intuitive ways to interact with computers. It is such a shame to see his inventions stolen by Apple. I agree that patents are necessary, but   really only for non-obvious things and only when you really, truly invented something yourself. Advances in any field are hampered if people and corporations do not play fair and I really feel that Apple is playing this one really dirty.

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photo credit: psd

Last week I attended a talk given at the Vancouver User Experience Group (VanUE). The speaker was Greg Bell and he was talking about how in order for really good software to be developed, everyone in the development process needs to have a good understanding of usability. It was a decent talk, although the 3rd year UBC human-computer interaction course had already taught me most of what Greg was trying to get across.

photo credit: impresa.mccabe

This lecture coincided with me installing Windows 7 on both of my computers and really loving it. Now, Windows 7 is not much different to Vista, except that it is faster and addresses quite a few usability problems. I enjoy it so much in fact, that I will not go back to using the current release of Ubuntu.  Of course, this realization has upsets as it hits home the realization that as Apple and Microsoft (and indeed any big tech company) are starting to see the great importance of usability and putting it at the forefront of their design process, open source solutions (which have just started to catch up to the big boys) might be left in the dust once again. This Article from the University of  Waikato highlights a few of the challenges faced by open source projects when it comes to usability, including (and in my opinion the most important) “Design for usability really ought to take place in advance of any coding”. This leads us back to Greg’s talk at VanUE. I feel that if usability and the importance of design is pushed more heavily in the introductory parts of Computer Science then open source projects can benefit from that usability knowledge being pooled. Until then though, I think that many open source projects are going to start falling even further behind their proprietary counterparts.

This however, does not apply to all open source projects. Those with enough corporate backing (like WordPress with Automattic and Ubuntu with Canonical) are able to forcibly steer their developers towards more usable interfaces. This kind of work has already payed off for WordPress, however, we will have to await another Ubuntu release or two to see whether their efforts to change the way that a much larger (and more traditionally minded) community of open source programmers will actually pay off.

photo credit: 4_EveR_YounG

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This term things are much better. I know people in every one of my classes and it has truly made a huge difference to the way I feel about school. I want to be in every class, not just because of what I will be learning, but also because of the great social interactions that I will be having. I am so excited for an academic term filled with social-academic connections that will do wonders for my grades as well as for my overall happiness!

My team from CPSC 344

photo credit: bionicteaching

At OLT we have decided to make our steps to develop the WordPress Multi-user platform into a university content publishing platform more prominent, so as to encourage sharing and collaboration. Before this we were all writing about our development on different blogs dispursed around the internet, but now we will all be putting our thoughts, ideas and code in one place. OLT WordPress Development  now lives on the UBC Blogs site at blogs.ubc.ca/development. It is sparse at the moment, but once all of the developers are contributing their work it should fill out quite quickly.

Now if only WordPress.com would get back to us on allowing us to put our plugins in the WordPress repository so they will all be on the main WordPress plugins page…

So what is the problem?

Swurl doesn’t give you a way to take things out of Swurl. Yes there is an RSS feed… but any lifestreaming app has that. What makes Swurl brilliant is not its ability  to aggregate your life… it is Swurl’s ability to make it visually stunning. Swurl provides no mechanism for taking that great visual feast and putting it in your own space. I guess their intension is for you to turn your Swurl into your primary web presence… but for those with established blogs (which is something that is highly likely for their primary audience of early adopters) the idea is laughable. 

I think that in order for Swurl to not get lost in the infinity that is the Internet it needs to provide a way for users to bring their beautful Swurl content into their own spaces, through embed code, or badges… or anything that works really.

Until that day comes though I guess I will have to be happy with links and being the only person who ever really sees my Swurl.

My Swurl: http://andremalan.swurl.com/timeline

1)  OneNote has failed me. It worked so well in my previous classes, but I am finding it useless at the moment. Why? Well the lectures are carried out differently. In my previous classes the PDFs required a lot of diagrams and annotations… OneNote handled that perfectly. However, at the moment all the PDFs that I get are pretty self-contained, the only thing I need to do is summarize and organize the material in them.

2) So in order to replace OneNote, I am using FreeMind  again. I think the reason that I didn’t enjoy FreeMind when I used it last year was that I didn’t have a system for icons and decoration. Now that I have a system (and another mindmap to remind me what my system is)! I am really enjoying taking notes on FreeMind. Below are some pictures of the start of my maps:

Here is my “cheatsheet” map telling what all the icons mean (as I come accross a new type of content I just choose and icon and add it to this sheet so that  don’t forget the mapping).

3)I’m probably not going to use the map on my wall, just due to the fact that I have the FreeMInd maps now. I might start printing them though and stick them up!

Fickle… I know. But hey, in order to succeed we need to try new things!

Microsoft Office OneNote:

I cannot find any note-taking software that comes even close to OneNote’s ability to keep notes for school. The three levels of navigation and ease of printing PDFs straight to OneNote (seeing as almost all professors insist on delivering their notes in PDF and note HTML) puts OneNote ahead of everything else. I would desperately like to use EverNote (because I can use it from more places than my personal computers with OneNote installed), but it doesn’t let me scribble all over course PDFs like OneNote does.

Mind Mapping:

 

Last year I tried out FreeMind as a means of organizing notes after they were taken. It was great software and worked pretty well, but I just didn’t enjoy using it. I think that the limits of current screen sizes is what makes virtual mind maps so difficult. I just felt like I could never see the full picture and the detail at the same time (which, I believe is something mind maps should let you do). So instead I went lo-tech and have taped a giant white piece of paper to my wall that I will use to map and connect all of my courses on. It is a new experiment, let’s see if it works! I might also resort to using FreeMind again especially for the guest lecturers that are going to be coming in to my Software Engineering Course as there won’t be any predefined lecture notes that I can annotate in OneNote.

To-do lists:

I tried Remember the Milk a few months ago and for some reason it just didn’t stick. I revisited it about three weeks ago and now find it invaluable. The big change I think is that you can embed your to-do lists everywhere! I have my list in my gMail, my iGoogle, my Google Calendar my iPhone and on my desktop. I can send tasks to it using Jott. I find that if my to-do lists are not in my face I forget to look at them. With Remember the Milk I can have a constant reminder.

Remember the milk lets you categorize items, add recurring items (a great one is “pay bills”) and lets you know when things are overdue. Remembering to hand in an assignment, or study for a midterm will be a whole lot easier with Remember the Milk.

Flashcards:

Most courses require some degree of memorization. Quizlet is so much better than any other online flashcard app that I have tried. It gained me plenty of marks last year and everyone that I know who uses Quizlet swears by it. It is easy and fun to use. It is collaborative. It has tests. It will soon have an iPhone app. Enough said.

Time Management:

Google Calendar is possibly the greatest tool ever. My life would be incomplete without it. I actually have over 15 calendars in there that I use to organize my life and keep track of the people around me.

Collaborative Projects:

I’m already using Google Apps for my work on the Student Leadership Conference, so I will probably use that (if my team agrees that is) in my Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interfacing projects. I’m still looking for a good collaborative way to do UML diagrams, seeing as how expensive Gliffy has become.

Pen and Paper:

For my Math courses I’m going the old fashioned notebook route. I really don’t see any other way (seeing as I don’t have a tablet PC). Hopefully the big mind map will compliment it nicely though and maybe help to make some connections between the three Math courses that I am taking.

I will monitor the effectiveness of all of these tools and update depending on what works and what doesn’t (or if I find something around the internet that blows one of these out of the water).

photo credit: drustar

One of the things that is starting to happen at OLT is that we are creating an increasing number of WordPress based websites. Using WordPress as a content management system is not a new idea at all, there are a ton of examples out there of WordPress blogs out there that have been turned into sites. There is however, a dearth of information out there on how to do it (there are some out there… including some in amazing detail from Alan Levine).

One of the things that I couldn’t find was a stable way to create a second level navigation that stays constant for every top level section. The problem with most of the solutions on the forums and sites around is that as soon as you drill down to the third level of navigation the second level disappears. As you can see at aboriginal.ubc.ca I was able to come up with a way to keep the navigation constant. Here is the loop that I had to create:

<?php
$secondAncestor = count($post->ancestors) -1; //figure out what level of navigation we are on, subtract one because we don't want to consider the top-level
if($post->post_parent!=0) //if the page is not a top-level category
{
echo '<h2 class="widgettitle">In this section:</h2><li class="sidebarlist">';
//the following lists children of second level ancestor of the current page.
wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ancestors[$secondAncestor]."&    sort_column=menu_order&echo=1");
echo '</li>';
}
else //if the page is a top-level category
{
//listing only the child pages of the current section
$children= wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&  sort_column=menu_order&echo=0");
if($children) //this will stop it from displaying a section heading if there are   no elements in the section (for example on the home page)
{
echo '<h2 class="widgettitle">In this section:</h2><li>';
echo $children;

echo '</li>';

}
}
?>

This is the first time I’ve blogged code, I’m not even sure if it is readable… but here’s hoping. Basically I figure out what level of navigation the user is on and then list the pages of the current page’s ancestor… that many levels up (subtracting one for the top level navigation.

I am currently doing a lot of work on using WordPress as a content management system including coming up with plugins and modifications for using WordPress MU as a multi-site manager used purely for websites and not for blogs. Will blog it all once everything is stable and working.

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I was invited to attend a ceremony to celebrate Don Wehrung’s contribution to the International Student Initiative at UBC. It was an incredible ceremony and all the speakers did a fantastic job of highlighting what a great man Don truly is.

Don is the person who was asked to head the International Student Initiative when it started back in 1996. The goals of the program was to increase the number of international students at UBC. Don has been incredibly successful, around 10 percent of UBC students at the moment being international. One of the most important contributions that Don made (at least as it applies to me) is starting the International Leader of Tomorrow (ILOT) Award . He lobbied the university for money to provide what has become the most generous international scholarship program in Canada. At the ceremony Karen McKellin the Associate Director of the International Student Initiative told the Audience that Don risked his job to provide international scholarships at UBC. Some of the most important people at UBC including the Dean of Arts and VP Academic both told stories of how Don personally fought for funding on a case by case basis for ILOT winners. The dedication, care and selflessness that he has shown concerning less privileged international students is remarkable.

Don’s actions and initiatives have shaped almost every aspect of my life. The staff that he hired and the recruitment program that he developed have directly influenced how I see the university and what I have experienced. Damara Klaassen who came to my school in Ghana and showed me all the pretty pictures that sold me on UBC. Badre Hassani, who on my first day at UBC made me feel so completely at home, taking me into his office, serving me tea and even giving me an international calling card so that I could contact my parents. Karen McKellin who on my third day alone in this strange country/city/campus helped me to transport all of my possessions from one side of campus to the other. All these people, Don’s staff, their kindness and caring created a love and awe for UBC that lingers with me still.

The ILOT award that I was lucky enough to receive has allowed me to come here, to form this great life that I have. At UBC I have found new passions, friends and interests, all of which are incredibly dear to me. Everything that I own, everything that I do, all the relationships that I have made would not have been possible without Don, his staff and their never-ending commitment to my success. I lack the  necessary eloquence to truly describe just how grateful I  am to them for all that I have. That gratitude is there though, in overwhelming amounts for not only me, but also for the many other students that he has helped.

Thank you Don.

The first new development of my Summer was moving out of traditional dormitory style residence into Suite style residence… aka… an apartment. I now have a kitchen to cook in (an activity that I really need a lot more practice with), a lounge and bathrooms all to myself and my two roommates instead of an entire floor of 22 people. I also get to share this apartment with the lovely Miss Amy Tipton, one of my favorite people in the whole wide world.

The other great part about summer is that you just get to do more of the stuff that you should be doing during the year. I’ve got to spend a lot of time with so many friends that I never had time to hang out with while advising in Place Vanier.

I’ve been rock climbing and reading and watching movies (MacKenzie left me a great list of must watch movies that I am slowly making my way through). Being able to read for pleasure again is something that I am particularly happy about. I went to the second hand bookstore and bought an armful of books that I will soon add to my LibraryThing.

My Summer work term at OLT is also kicking into gear. All the students for this term have been hired and we are in the process of finalizing what everyone will be working on. I think my main focus will be on using WordPress Mu as a content management system… so expect some cool hacks and plugins to be written as a result. It is so exciting to think that when I start school again in the summer that there will be a number of UBC web services out there that I have helped to create.

A few weeks ago, I was asked by Julie Mitchel if I would be able to speak at the opening of the Irving K. Barber Learning Center. She wanted me to give a student’s perspective of what the Learning Center means to the students of UBC. I accepted, not really understanding what I was getting myself into. As the weeks went by subsequent meetings with Julie made me see that the ceremony was a lot more important than I ever could have imagined. For a great description of what the ceremony was actually about, Phillip Jeffrey wrote an excellent post here. I am still unable to express just how terrifying it was to speak after people like Professor Stephen Toope and Gordon Campbell. It went off pretty well though and I think my speech was well received. Pictures of the event (courtesy of Philip Jeffrey) can be found here. A video of it can also be found here (I talk right at the end).

It was an amazing experience and I feel so honored to have been a part of it.

Interests:

Running

Swimming

Hiking

Hockey

Ciara even adds breaks using dashes. I did the same and now my profile is no longer a jumbled mess… yay!

In fact it looks so good I’ll just include it on my about page on this site.

Most content will be stored in a wiki. Our wiki will be extended so that we can lock more sensetive pages for certain users.
In order to make our content semantic and to allow it to be remixed in ways that make sense we would use the SemanticMediaWiki plugin for our MediaWiki. A working example of this kind of wiki can be found here.This plugin allows users to define relationships between the article and its content. This data is then Collected and can be navigated in a semantic way. Lists are then also generated and dynamically maintained. For instance in Chemistry someone could define the property “has boiling point” for a certain element. The page for “is metal” will then contain all the elements that have a boiling point (like this example).

Once we have the Semantic MediaWiki the next step is to republish content from the wiki into other contexts. We are still working on exactly how to do this (what tools to use etc) but the basic concept is simple: Use some kind of feed to publish the content in another context (we will probably use WordPress as the new context for most of our services). Then periodically check the feed to see if it has been updated. If it has been updated, then update the republished content. This ensures that not only is content dynamic (like it should be) but it also means that it is searchable and that the server-breaking parsing of hundreds of feeds doesn’t happen all the time. Another step would be to build in a system whereby people who take feeds from the wiki are notified when the content changes (I know the watch page function does that already, but one time users that just wanted to quickly grab and republish some content would need to be informed of major changes to their content). This would create communities of watchdogs around more used content to ensure that vandalism is quickly curbed.

So that is the start. Content is dynamic and open on the wiki. It will be easy to grab content and republish it in other places. It will also have meta data that can used in the immediate term to navigate data and in the long term to drive applications like those created by the MIT simile project.

FriendFeed: Allows me to publish my life stream on my Facebook profile

Boost: Boost is a Firefox add on that allows you to change the look and feel of Facebook. Adds a bunch of cool functionality like “download whole album” and showing full size images when you mouse over them.

Nexus: Creates a graph of your network. Really interesting to see how you are connected to other people and how connected they are to your friends.

FBcal: Generates an iCal file of your upcoming Facebook events and/or upcoming birthdays. Seeing as my Google Calendar plans my life, I don’t know how I’ve lived without this application for so long!

from digitalbazaar

Still have no idea how. We will figure it out though.

So here’s how:

Now for where!

1) Content changes, therefore the content stored in repositories has to change and be updated when the source is updated. This is overcome by using a wiki (this has been Novak’s vision of content management for a while) that produces RSS feeds along with an aggregator like Feed WordPress that updates the repository when a feed gets updated (that feature is still buggy at the moment, but I will get to fixing that ASAP).

2) The second obstacle is the fact that RSS and JavaScript are not easily searchable (a must for a content repository or even an end user site). Republishing is a must until we find an easy way to index and search RSS and JSON.

So here is what it looks like (click on it for larger view):

This plugin eliminates the question that I’ve been asked plenty of times “what if a student who is not in the class adds themselves to a course blog?”. I think the answer is simple (and I think Jim and Brian would agree with me)… just delete and/or ban the user. However, in order to eliminate this barrier on implementing course blogs I modified the plugin to allow professors to enter a list of student emails. If the student’s email is in the list they can then add themselves to the list. This means that in conjunction with my Add to BDP RSS widget that Professors or institutions can decide whether anyone can add themselves, subscribers to the WordPress Mu system or only users that are in a specific list. This will now work for all three of the course blog types that I created.

Final, final update:

WordPress. org has started to show OLT some love and we are now rapidly publishing all of our plugins there. The new direct link to download sidebar add user widget is here and the plugin page is here.

Final Update:

Now that OLT has a place to house its plugins I will no longer be maintaining add user widget on this site. Instead it will live on blogs.ubc.ca. The direct link is here.

Update: V1.2.4

Fixed the problem with the plugin not reloading user’s status when they first add themselves.

Update: V1.2

Changed the way restricting users works. Now the admin can simply set a password in the widget control menu and users who know the password can add themselves to the blog.

Download V1.2.4

Download V1.2.1

Download V1.0

Installation:

Just drop into the mu-plugins folder.

Any problems/suggestions just leave a comment

Here is the Jist of it:

I have spoken to so many people who tell me that “Facebook is creepy”. One of the biggest taboos here is to say “oh, I saw it on your mini-feed”. People get all weirded out as if they didn’t know that one of the key reasons of Facebook’s success is the fact that it is so good at distributing your information to those who know you.

Jocelyn and Ciara (my resident Facebook experts) were lamenting that fact with me and we came up with the idea that maybe the problem is just the language that has evolved around Facebook. We put information on Facebook for people to see. We have complete control over who can see that information. It’s like creating a poster about yourself. It isn’t creepy looking at someone’s poster. Jocelyn and Ciara came up with some alternative names. They suggested something like “exploring” or “learning”. I think of it as “researching your personal social network”. Someone reading your profile is a good thing… it helps them to know you better. Someone reading your wall-to-wall with someone else is also a good thing. It’s flattering. Someone cares enough to read about you. If there is something that you don’t want people to read about you… you shouldn’t publish it and if you have to tell somebody something private… that’s what private messages are for.

So here goes, my attempt at a bit of helping out:

I’ve noticed that many of you haven’t changed your blogroll yet (although I see that Genevieve has added a bunch of things to her one). Your blogroll can really complement your blog, by telling people at a glance what you are interested in. It shows people what you are reading and gives background for your own writing. It also doesn’t have to simply be one long list. If you go to the “blogroll” tab in WordPress you will see that you can add categories.
You can then add specific blogs to each category. Here is a quick example of what this would look like:

There is also a link at the bottom of the “add to blogroll” section that you can drag into your browser so that when you see a site that you really like you can add it to your blogroll very quickly.

P.S. My actual blogroll is a terrible example. Seeing as I am not using WordPress at the moment changing it is a lot harder for me to do than for all of you!

Ghost Course Blog

This blog uses BDPRSS to output the content of an aggregated feed of the class. I created a widget to add to the list in BDPRSS so students can auto-populate themselves into the course. The other feature that I developed for this blog is an auto-populating class list (with the heading our class). The class list is the reason that I took so long to get these examples up and running. I spent a good chunk of this week working on an “add to blogroll” widget so that students could add links to their blogs in the sidebar. I tried many methods, but just couldn’t get the plugin to work. Gardner Campbell was paying a visit to UBC and while he was showing me some of the successes and issues that he has been having with his course blog Rock soul Progressive I saw that he was using the BDP RSS widget to display comments. A light bulb went on and I realized that I could simply tweak the widget to show a list of blogs in the course. Here is what you have to do:

1. Create and output format in BDP RSS that contains the same blogs as the one that is being used to display entries in the course.
2. In the “output format types” section select the radio button that says “list by sites alphabetically”
3. In “about the items” set “maximum items per site” to 1, check “print site names” and “only display item’s title”. Uncheck “print the item’s age”

in the “XHTML formatting” section, add list tags around “title for each site” and comment tags around “each item’s title”. (see picture )

If you add the BDP RSS widget for the output to the sidebar then you create a class list.

Spam Course Blog

This blog uses a spamblogger (I’m using feedWordPress because it actually updates posts if they are changed in the original feed) combined with BDP RSS to quickly create the course. Basically what happens is a feed aggregated by BDP RSS is fed into the spamblogger and feedWordPress republishes it. I have three reasons why I run the feeds through BDP RSS before I feed them to the feedWordPress:

1. I’ve already created my Add to BDPRSS widget to add feeds to BDPRSS. If I wanted students to add their own feeds to the spamblogger I would have to create another widget (and the widget would have to be specific to the spamblogger).
2. BDP works really well with a large range of feeds as well as with a large number of feeds. It acts as a kind of normalizing process, ensuring that each entry is parsed in the same way.
3. It allows for the auto-generation of a class list as described for the ghost course blog.

Communal Course Blog

This Blog is the simplest to set up and is probably closer to what most faculty members will imagine when they think of a course blog. I simply use the sidebar add user widget to add authors and the Wp-Authors widget to display the class list. Quick and simple. My example isn’t as good as the others simply because all of the content had to be written from scratch (or copy pasted from Wikipedia). K1, one of the work study students at OLT was kind enough to post a few items under different authors to show how this kind of course blog would look.

If there is anything that I am missing in my thinking here, please let me know.

Some notes on policy and where I’m going from here: As I have been making these ways for students to self-populate a course, the question keeps on coming up “what if people who don’t belong to the course add themselves”? At the moment the sidebar add to BDP widget gives three levels of permission, global (anyone), system (on the same MU system) and blog (subscribers to the blog). I will be working on changing the “add user” plugin to accept a list of people (I’m thinking student numbers or emails?) and check those against people who are trying to add themselves to a blog. This would mean that a professor could just paste a list in the control of the widget and not have to worry about people who are not in the class adding themselves. Then to close off the spam and ghost course blogs one would set the sidebar add to bdp widget permissions to “blog” and display the add user widget forcing students to add themselves as subscribers to the blog first so that they can be checked off against the class list before adding their feed.

Please let me know what you think.

Installation:

Just download, unzip, then drop the plugin into your plugins->BDPRSS folder and activate in the plugins menu.

Update: For some reason the control is not saving the options properly. I’ll fix it on Saturday morning.

Update: Version 1.2 released.

Changed the way that permissions work.

• Simplified things by only allowing registers users of the community to add their feeds.
• Gave admin the option of password protecting a blog so that only users who know the password can add feeds

Download V1.2

As always, let me know what you think of the changed.

Update: Version 1.1 released.

• Fixed subtitle bug
• Added control over what type of user can add feeds.
  • Global: Anyone can add a feed
  • System: Anyone on the Mu System can add a feed.
  • Blog: Only a subscriber to the specific blog that the widget is on can add a feed.
• Made it so that if a user cannot add a feed, they don’t even see the text box.

Download V1.1

That is the rub, when you open up a system like this, there are a number of ways of going at it, and having the ability to meet as many of them easily makes your life simpler.

I agree whole-heartedly with Jim. My judgment has been clouded lately by the Wp-o-matic’s ability lack of to update posts on the fly and the lack of a “delete all” button on any of WordPress’ pages. Today though, I saw the light. I now have a clear vision of three simple, definable, student driven course blog structures.

1. The ghost blog:

This blog is for the professor who doesn’t want to be confused by hundreds of student posts knocking around his/her blog. The blog simply uses BDPRSS and my add-to-BDPRSS widget (source code coming soon I promise) to populate a WordPress page with aggregated student entries. When another year of students comes, the old posts will still be there (or not, or in another blog that that the new blog links to), but as newer posts come in, the old posts will fall off of the bottom of the feed and the blog will have just new fresh content. No having to delete anything!

2. The Communal blog:

This blog is for the professor who wants to get stuck into the blogging experience with the students. This also probably the easiest (although I used to think it was the hardest) to implement. Jim reminded me of the “Add Sidebar Users” widget, which I will tweak slightly to make setting up this kind of blog super easy. Our new blogging service will allow students to sign up as just subscribers if they want to and with Campus Wide Login they won’t even have to remember their username. Zero work for the professor!

3. The spam blog:

Jim did great things with WP-o-matic. I found a tool that works even better for what we want to do (in fact, it is the one thing that I can now do better than the current incarnation of eduglu). FeedWordPress by Charles Johnson is another spamblogger that updates entries if they change in the feed. The biggest problem that I had with other versions of spam blogging tools was that they took dynamic content, republished it and then made it static. This might work for blog posts (which don’t generally change very much after they have been written)… but for something like a course syllabus or wiki feed (I’ll save that discussion for a later day) the content in the repository has to be continually updated. Otherwise we just have old junk entries lying around. FeedWordPress fixes that. FeedWordPress also has a nice “delete all” button that will get rid of feed entries that are marked for deletion. Best of all, the author has provided an excellent API and a bunch of hooks so that I can massage this plugin into doing my complete bidding.

I will be finalizing and testing these methods tomorrow and over the weekend and will hopefully have some concrete examples by early next week.

One last thing. These structures do not have to be independent. the communal blog can be combined with the spam blog (giving students the option). A ghost page can then be created in a different tab, feeding in content from other sources as examples and even points of discussion for future posts by the students. A ghost blog can be archived by simply feeding it into a spam blog and so on.

A year ago I didn’t care about education and technology at all. I really didn’t. One day I realized that UBC was missing some kind of events calendar. so many great things happen on campus that are under-attended because people simply don’t know about them. I contacted Tlell Elviss (one of the most awesome people I know) and she told me that she had just been contacted by a student who was also interested in the same thing. We got together and talked about it (along the way she taught me about this obscure piece of technology called RSS). Things evolved and now the University is in the midst of creating a usable tool.

In the second term of my first year I became immensely annoyed with the fact that WebCT locked away all the examples from CPSC 111 that I had used in the first term. Those examples could have helped me immensely in CPSC 211. I felt so utterly cheated, nobody told me when I came here that all the resources that I am given at University are equivalent to trial software… you can use them for a few months and then suddenly it gets taken away from you. I was angry.

Shortly after that I decided that UBC was missing something else. A simple way to plan your degree. Thousands of students do it every year using sheets and sheets of paper, crossing things out becoming really confused ending up spending an extra semester or year in university. I decided to build something in Java (the only programming language I knew back then) and after obtaining a quasi-working model I realized that the job was too big for just me. Instead, I created a simple template in excel that provided a clear way for students to map out their future.

That was what got the ball rolling. Over the Summer I work at UBC Student Development on LEAP and there learned the I am truly interested in educational technology. I can see so much potential for them to make student’s lives better. I started Get Teched Up as a result.

I spent my last term at school using as many learning technologies as I could get my hands on and following the exploits of many of the edubloggers. That is why I am really not deserving at all of Jim’s praise… I’m not new to this, I don’t understand eduglue because of some innate ability, I understand it because I’ve been thinking about it for almost half a year now.

On a more fun note, if anybody wants to play with my latest plugin, go here and add your feed into the box. Give BDP a few seconds to poll your feed(don’t worry about any error messages… it’s still in production) refresh and then look for your posts in the featured blogs list.
Enjoy…

Cheers

So here is the deal:

I wrote that we would allow professors who so wished to republish all of the student’s blogs into a class blog using wp-o-matic. I’m not sure if we should do that anymore. My reservations come from that fact that if it is republished in the Professor’s blog then I feel that the students loose ownership and that rings strange to my sense of morality.

Let’s consider a few hypothetical situations where a student writes for a class and his blog entries are republished in a class blog :

• A year down the road the student realized that what he wrote does not represent him and he wants to get rid of it. He can delete the entries in his blog, but they will still be saved in the class blog. He could of course ask the professor to take his posts off, but what if it is 10 years down the line? What if there were a lot of other students who feel the same way?
• The student decides to delete his blog. If the professor decides to publish the class posts (without attribution), the student has no way of claiming authorship over the post.

There are also hangups for the professor:

• If the professor accidentally resets wp-o-matic It will recreate all of the entries. WordPress doesn’t have automatic mass deleting of entries (I mean we could write a plugin for it… but plugins take time).
• If the student updates their blog then those updates are not automatically reflected on the class blog.
• If a student adds a strange feed (one with say 150 items regarding unsavoury topics) then if those are republished, it is a nightmare to get rid of them. If we just use BDP RSS, all it takes to undo the damage is delete the feed in the BDP RSS options menu

There are probably many more reasons why actually republishing would not be a good idea.

So it comes down to figuring out why we wanted to republish the posts and finding alternatives.

• Creating a repository: I don’t think at this point we are wanting to create a repository, this isn’t eduglu (as I may have wrongly alluded to in my previous post), it is a blog based course platform where student input is used. A repository of teacher resources should be done in an entirely a slightly different way.
• Keeping examples of what students did previously: Why not just leave the blog active and create a new blog for every year that links back to previous years. Not only would this give the students an opportunity of pulling out if they don’t want their work published anymore, but it would also allow them to continually update what they have and allows the course to have a history. Using templates and import/export It would be much easier to create a new blog than to get rid of everything from the old blog.

I’m wondering does this make sense? Or are we missing something? We will probably change our minds a hundred times between now and October, but for now I think this model is the most sustainable and easy to implement approach, for us and for the professors.

I’ve just come back from Northern Voice 2008, an absolutely phenomenal experience that I learned a ton of great things from (and will blog about it as soon as I have got the important stuff off of my chest…).

Probably the most important thing that I learned is that the work that Vince and I are doing for UBC Blogs matters to others outside of UBC. From reading posts on Brian Lamb Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman’s blogs I knew that a lot of people were struggling with the implementation of a free, easy to use “course management system” based on blogs, but for some reason it just didn’t click that I could (and should) be helping everyone out by describing what we are doing. It was only when Jim Groom and Lloyd Budd both on seperate occasions excitedly asked the question “where are you blogging this stuff” that I realized that I have been neglecting my duty to the community by not outlining our solutions to the problems of implementing a university-wide blogging platform.

So here it is, my plan for using WordPress as a University wide blogging platform:

To start off, I’ve been mentally breaking the problem down into two parts. We are in a sense providing two completely different services. One part is that we are providing a platform and community for student bloggers. The other part is that we are providing a course management system for professors. Although both services are interlinked, they each have their own fundamental challenges.

1. Challenges in providing blogs for students:

   We want to provide students with a way to easily tell their story and with a way to find other students who are interested in their story. The second part is a little easier to do (seeing as umwblogs has already successfully done it), using plugins like muTags, List All widget and BDP RSS we are hopefully going to be able to provide enough ways for students to connect with each other when blogging and help them to easily form that community that so many bloggers crave. for a sneak peek here is the link to one of our many dev sites (warning., it is a dev site, so don’t expect it to look the same every time you stop by).

   the “easy” storytelling part is the true challenge. Despite what many professors might think, many students are scared of technology and the thought of having to learn an HTML tag or two sends many students running away screaming. Students are also scared of registering for too many services online, I know that we all have that fear… but many students find it crippling. Solving the “no HTML” problem was easy… we used WordPress. Solving the “signup” problem was a bit more difficult. We (and when I say “we” I mean Enej and John and Vince, with me shouting out ideas and debugging from the sidelines) created a plugin that integrates UBC’s Campus Wide Login (CWL) with the WordPress login. The process is a bit intricate so I will dedicate a full entry to it tomorrow.

   

2. Challenges in providing course blogs:

   .

   How to use WordPress to create a versatile, easy to use eduGlue blog? At Northern Voice, Vince, Jim, Brian and I met to try and figure it out. Here is what we came up with:

   The first step is to create a widget plugin that can be embedded in the sidebar of the course blog. That widget would have fields for students to paste their name, RSS feed and blog URL. The name and blog URL would be added to the course blogroll and the RSS feed would be added to the BDP RSS aggregator. BDP allows one to aggregate blog posts and display them in a fully customizable way (and touch wood… we haven’t been able to break it yet). A professor who wants a ghost blog (one that doesn’t keep the student’s entries when they leave) would simply output the BDP feed into the course blog and everything would work well. If the professor wants to keep a repository of all the posts written for the class by students, the BDP aggregated feed could just be fed into wp-o-matic the spamblogger that Jim has been experimenting with. Professors want this kind of flexibility and this solution provides it quite elegantly, only requiring a few simple plugins.

   This solution allows students to post in whatever medium they feel comfortable with, it allows students to keep their content and it stops professors from having to do anything technical when setting up a blog, aside from applying the course theme that we create that lets professors choose whether or not they want to keep their student’s content.

Whew… so that is what we are doing… in a very general nutshell.I will be elaborating in weeks to come, but for now if there are any questions, comments, suggestions, pieces that I can elaborate on etc let me have them and I will be sure to act on it.

I guess I should provide some background on why WordPress and I have any relationship at all. At the moment I am developing a blogging platform for UBC to replace weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca. This project will hopefully allow bloggers at UBC to connect with each other and inspire the creation of some rich academic and personal content. We are trying to do this all with WordPress.

At this year’s Northern Voice Conference Jim Groom (a true expert on WordPress who’s blog and creation have helped me solve so many problems with my own blogs) is thinking of hosting a WordPress anonymous session that welcomes all WordPress lovers as well as “haterz”. I am neither, but I have started dreaming about WordPress so I guess I should really attend.

I do have one big complaint about WordPress that I need to get off of my chest now (and will probably continue to rant about at NorthernVoice):

I’m bitterly upset over the fact that WordPress trusts nobody! Without heavy plugins and hacking you just can’t do anything fun… no matter who you are. Admin has no ability to upload theme files and page templates. I know that security is an issue (especially in WPMU) but I just wish there was a simple way for an admin to say: “Ok, WordPress… I trust this user and his blog, why don’t you go ahead and let him use a tiny little embed tag…?”I know that there are probably plugins or hacks to do that… but they are not easy to find. Assigning “superuser” roles that don’t strip you of any advanced coding or limit you to pre-installed themes and templates would be such a great addition to wordpress… and would probably convert many of the “haterz” out there. I mean think about it… with that kind of functionality… who needs Movable Type?

My current project is recreating weblogs@ubc. It’s going to be based on WordPress, with a lot of cool features, including CWL login. Soon I will also be working on UBC wikis so look out for posts about this in the future. I might even need some help from some UBC students in order to get some of the community based initiatives off of the ground.

My grades say no. According to my grades, I’m almost exactly in the same place that I was a before I got involved in LEAP and experimenting with learning technologies. However, I don’t think my grades tell the whole story. One has to remember that in addition to the fact that my courses were a lot harder this term, I am also a Residence Advisor, which seriously reduced the amount of time I that have to study. In fact, my grades staying the same speaks volumes about the tools that I have been using. I have used different technologies and techniques to make my learning more efficient and organized… and me keeping my A average is proof of that.

As for what was the most useful… here is a small synopsis of some of the things that I felt helped me most:

• Google Calendar:

  Due to all of my involvement outside of school, I would never have been able to survive without this. Google Calendar is super easy to use and maintain. I can plan my days and weeks, look back at what I have done and coordinate with other people in my team. Google Calendar takes paper agendas, chews them up and spits them out… it really, really does.

• Quizlet

  I raved about quizlet earlier… but using quizlet for exams blew my mind. There were literally pages on some of my exams which I just flew through… all the time saying to myself “Thank God for quizlet!” Quizlet is easy to use, collaborative… and above all… just a little bit fun. Of course flashcards can’t be used for all subjects, but for those in which it can be used… you would be a fool to not use quizlet.

• Microsoft Office OneNote:

  This was indispensable this year. It does such a good job of keeping all your notes in one place and eliminating the need to print out pages and pages of course notes. It would make your life almost paperless if you have a tablet pc, but even if you don’t have one… there is no better way to organize you school life.

Those were the “super useful” technologies. I used others like electronic mindmapping, but I feel like those still need a lot of work before the concept can revolutionize the way one studies. As far as mind mapping goes… next year I plan to just put up massive sheets of poster paper around my room and map in my courses as they go. Electronic mindmaps just don’t have the dynamic interface yet that would make them revolutionary.

So there we go, experiment over for now. School is done so I have eight months to find a whole new set of tools to help me get through it all again in September. I am on coop now at the Office of Learning Technology, so even though I can’t really test them… I can still write about the great technologies that I will be finding/building in my work.

The first change that may have been noticed is the different look of the site. No, it’s not permanent, it is just to replaced the mangled disaster that was my attempt to modify the “blue crush” theme in Movable Type. The current three column layout has to go… and probably the new theme too… but I will wait until December when I have time to breath and just play around with the CSS.

The second change I’m going to make is to actually start blogging regularly again and reenter the “blogosphere”. How could I not, seeing as my job now entails creating a UBC blog platform. I’m also working with Brian Lamb at the moment and if you take a look at his blog, you will see that one can’t really work with Brian and not blog. I’m also working with the UBC blog squad (as a mentor), yet have been completely shamed by the likes of Mackenzie, Lillienne and Genevieve who are all phenomenal bloggers.

I am also going to be broadening the scope of my blog, writing a bit more about residence life and life at UBC as well. I know it will look strange at the moment under the heading of “Learning and Technology”, but once I have the new UBC blogs up and running, I will be moving my whole site over to wordpress and with then do an even more massive overhaul. For now though, enjoy the new visuals and also the new content!

I find all that is said true… but how to fix it? It also makes no mention of random irrelevant assignments, one of which stops me from fully reflecting on this video. Hopefully I will have some time soon to actually delve deeper into what it means…

The answer has to be that I am not studying at home. The problem with me and studying at home is not that home has too many distractions (although it does have a lot), it’s more like I have found ways to use those distractions. Here at the coffee lounge the only distraction that my mind (aching to think of something other than statistics and chemistry) can find is to order more coffee or go and draw some money from the bank. However, if I had to do this regularly my mind would probably find many more ways to distract itself. I’m sure if I came here another 5 times, by the 5th time I would probably get very little work done. The moral of the story for me is… change it up! Having a selection of different study environments and using them is critical. Of course this is difficult for me, a person who is being paid to be in my room 4/7 evenings of the week. For those of you at UBC who do have more freedom, here is great list of places to go study! For those living on campus, remember the study caf is open every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (with AMS tutoring being available on Tuesdays and Thursdays).

For any students at UBC (living in Totem or Vanier) that are interested in getting a leg up before the exam season starts, Rebecca and I will be giving a presentation on how to use LEAP this upcoming Wednesday at 7pm in the Vanier commons block. We will also be handing out some great study packages. All are welcome to attend.

Will post later on how it goes.

Finally, here is the doodling of a kid who types all his notes out (me) and has no paper to draw on. I will probably bring ut a whole series once I get my graphic table that I will use to write down equations into oneNote.

Cheers,
Andre

1. Study what you’re interested in and if you don’t have a choice about what you study… become interested in what you are doing. At the moment I am doing fantastically in all of my hard subjects, but poorly in all the easy ones. Why? Because I am interested in the hard ones and don’t care about the others. I spend time thinking about algorithm efficiency and the way CPUs translate code… I don’t spend time thinking about redox reactions. One of the hardest things for me this term is going to be to forge an interest in Chemistry and Statistics.
2. Your tools are only as good as the way you work with them. I’ve been using things like mindmapping software and OneNote and they have really helped me assimilate information. Only however, when I worked at it. Just making a mindmap on statistics is not going to help you learn it. You have to interact with that mindmap (something the software lets you do) move things around, create new links etc. Without this extra effort you are never going to learn anything.
3. Go to class. I can’t tell you how much I have lost by just not being in the class (or not paying attention when in class). The amount of information that one learns in class is honestly a lot more than you would ever imagine.

Ok, agreed, that was not the most interesting post of all times, as soon as I get out of this midterm storm I will be able to write more riveting stuff.

Cheer,

Andre

P.S. More XKCD for your enjoyment:

xkcd has to be the best webcomic that I have seen (if you find better let me know). I’ve spent hours reading everything he has and laughing myself stupid!
That’s it for now, more to come from me after midterms this week…

Quizlet is an online flashcard program that allows one to input matching data and test yourself. After using it to study for my Chemistry midterm I fell in love. The reason? It makes remembering long lists (like the names of chemicals in my case) much more enjoyable than anything else that I have ever tried.

Sure, there are probably better ways to ensure that you learn the data for life than flashcards. However, when you find yourself as a student in the situation where you have to learn a long list that you are really not going to need for life, then flashcards can really help.

Some of the benefits that I found from Quizlet are as follows:

• You have to type the answers in, this means that unlike flashcards you get a better sense of the spelling, as well as better interaction with each word pair.
• It records the percentage of times you get things right, allowing you to see immediately if you are improving or not.
• It keeps a continuous record of the words that you missed the most.



• You can combine sets of cards. So for instance if you have to study 3 different sets of material for midterms and then all of it for the exam, you can create one set before each midterm and then combine them at the end to make one massive deck of cards.



• Quizlet is collaborative so other people in your class can help to create decks of flashcards.
• You can discuss the data with others in quizlet.
• You can be tested on either the word or the definition.
• You can be quizzed in more than one way, there is a match the card game, a test mode (including fill in the blanks, multiple choice and match the columns).

All in all Quizlet makes the traditional flashcard redundant. No more shuffling, no more trying to make sure all the cards are the right way up, no more wondering if you actually know the things, Quizlet takes care of all of that for you.

So, you think you know your basic chemistry? Try out the set I made for my midterm…

Below is the flyer that I handed out and that I’ve had a few requests for from people who weren’t there:

Get Teched up:

• Online Academic Resources:
  leap.ubc.ca
• Homepages:
  www.netvibes.com
• Calendar:
  calendar.google.com
• Online Flashcards:
  www.quizlet.com
• Mindmaps:
  www.freemind.com
• OneNote (Check out MS Office 2007)
• Wikis
  wiki.elearning.ubc.ca/
• Google Docs
  docs.google.com
• Online Office software:
  www.zoho.com
• More videos on how to do tech stuff:
  www.commoncraft.com/show
• More Tech stuff (including stop wasting time online)
  leap.ubc.ca/get_teched_up/

There are some things that I left off like del.ico.us…but I’m keeping that in my arsenal for later on in the year when I start getting questions on how to do research.

Midterms are coming up soon, so stay tuned to hear how some of the tools that I have been testing are working out.

Update 1: Podcasting

I failed miserably, I really just wasn’t interested in listening to lectures again and thus just didn’t remember to record lectures. Also I felt uncomfortable sitting in the front. It’s funny how that is actually… it seems that the third row in any lecture theatre is dynamite!

Update 2: Google Calendar

Right, on this one I succeeded. Not only has it become essential in my life… but I have converted some other people around me! Being able to layer calendars on and off is amazing. I still need to work on making my use of Google Calendar efficient (there is an art to creating the right amount of calendars and dealing with stuff like deadlines) but for now, my life has been changed. Once I have all the kinks in my system worked out I will post some handy tips for Google Calendar users.

Update 3: Netvibes wins!

Yes that’s right… I’ve chosen Netvibes… and I’m not looking back. Why is that? Firstly they have fixed many of the issues that I had with them, like not allowing me to access my Live Hotmail. As of yesterday they completely upgraded their widgets and widget browsing. It is so much easier and all my widgets just look better. Plus they have a new Google Calendar module which works amazingly! Well done Netvibes, you are my winner!

Update 4: I’m giving a “get Teched up” presentation

It is on Wednesday at 8PM in the 1st floor lounge of Sherwood Lett in Vanier. If you want to come check it out please do. One of the best things to come out of this is that I will be able to monitor my success because I will be presenting to people in my house and can thus actually track how “Teched up” they become. Exciting times!

Cheers,

Andre.

Well no, they aren’t really fighting over me, I guess they are fighting over the world, but still they are making it very hard for me to organize me life. But let me start at the beginning.

After starting with iGoogle, I moved on to Netvibes and loved it. Then one day after reading a post by Novak I tried pageflakes… and loved it even more. I switched… well… half switched… and have been milling around in the middle ever since.

Here are a few of the reasons I can’t decide between the two of them (in the form of what I love/hate about one which automatically implies the opposite for the other:

1. I love the “change layout” option of Pageflakes
2. I love the little falling snowflakes in Pageflakes!
3. I love that you can just embed a Javascript version of a Pageflakes “flake”
4. I love the huge amount of options that Pageflakes gives for displaying a feed
5. I hate how I can’t read my hotmail in Netvibes
6. I love the way you add modules/widgets in Pageflakes
7. I love that you can share a single page in pageflakes

• I love/hate Pageflake’s RSS reader mode

1. I love that Netvibes lets you change the feed location within the module
2. I love that you will be able to keep and share an entire alternate universe in Netvibes
3. I love the greater range of OPM modules in Netvibes, like Rugby World Cup 2007 and Facebook
4. I hate the way you add basic feeds in Pageflakes
5. I hate how the default in Pageflakes is “summery view” and “read in original site”
6. I hate how Pageflakes takes longer to load
7. I love the fact that clicking on the title of a feed takes you to that site

Great! My list ends up being completely even! What do I do?

For now I think I’ll switch back to Netvibes (seeing that the Rugby world cup is my priority)… but I’m still up in the air and waiting for a truly compelling argument one way or the other. I long for the day when I can just choose one and just forget completely about the other!

Update:
I just figured out how to share a whole page in Netvibes. Now Netvibes is really winning!

So here goes, my grand master plan for tackling all of my courses:

Microsoft Office OneNote:

To organize everything and take notes. Its ability to keep information fluid, yet organized should be invaluable for all of my classes.

Mind Mapping:

I’ve toyed with using online mind mapping applications, but FreeMind is the best package that I can get for free. Plus the ability to copy and paste from OneNote will make connecting the things that I take notes on a breeze. I know there are varied results on the effectiveness of mindmaps… but lets give them a whirl and see where I get. This should at least be essential for Statistics where many of the things that you do is looking at the same problem in a different way and figuring out how those ways fit together is incredibly important.

Podcasting:

I’m going to record one of my Computer Science Lectures to test podcasting lectures. I’m still not convinces that re-listening to a lecture is the best way to spend your study time (a lot is said in a typical lecture that really doesn’t need to be memorized). I’m also thinking of recording myself reading my notes so that I have short 10 minute snippets to listen to whilst walking from A to B on this huge campus.

Time Management:

As I said in the previous post, I’m going with Google calendar, using the layers for my timetable, due dates for assignments, Residence Advising in and out nights etc.

Flashcards:

For all those times when there is a long list of things and they just need to be drilled into my head. I’m going to go with Quizlet, it’s collaborative and super easy to use. The added feature of creating neat little tests is a nice bonus.

Collaborative Projects:

Zoho Wikis and documents (very soon Zoho docs will work on and offline… pure awesomeness!) For Programming Projects I’m thinking of using Gliffy, just because of their ability to do UML diagrams.

Well that’s a start, we will see how these work for keeping my schoolwork together for the next few weeks. If they don’t work… I try something else.

Cheers,
Andre

The first thing that I am doing is testing Google calendar (and yes those of you with macs, I know that iCal is probably better… but not all of us are rich enough to afford those sexy MacBook Pros) for arranging things with my advising team and scheduling house events. I have admittedly never used an online calendar (gasp, shock, awe) simply because I’ve never had that many people to collaborate with. I also have a massive 4 month calendar sitting on my wall displaying the details of my life to be in all its glory). The 4 month calendar works perfectly as that is how many months there are in a term. I will however give Google calendar its fair chance… so stay tuned for news of what I find.

Sorry for the lack of depth this time… as soon as my feet get back on the ground I can commence with the groundbreaking blogging.

Cheers,

Andre.

If you are a UBC student and ever get the chance to work for anybody in Student Development grab that chance. It is amazing how everyone in the office is completely dedicated to your success as a student and as a person. Working there You just feel… safe! You know that if anything goes wrong that everyone you work with is there to support you. I would like to thank Tlell and Margot for being such great supervisors, and for taking every opportunity to let me grow in my work at UBC. I don’t know if I will ever find a better boss (I cringe at using that word… that’s how good they are) than Tlell or Margot. I’d also like to thank Angeli, Darryl and Mariana for being such great co-workers and for putting up with my constant stream of crazy ideas. Angeli especially has been very patient with me and my penchant for using different little technological tools to get things done. Collaborating with her on projects was an absolute pleasure and her music keep up a great mood in the office. Although I didn’t work with them directly, Kim, Chad, Shagufta (working at AMS) and Cindy (who works at OLT) have been a wealth of knowledge and I can think of a few times when they have each taken time out of their day to help me.

I have gained so much from this job, I have learnt how to work in a team and collaborate. I have also learnt how to organize myself and to increase my own productivity. I guess perhaps the most important thing that I gained was a passion for learning (hence the title of my site and blog). Although I am sad to leave, I am also excited to get studying again! I want to start applying all that I have learnt at LEAP about learning and technology. I just can’t wait to find some academic knowledge and see if I am better at ingesting it! I will be testing everything I learnt and featured on LEAP (and of course blogging about it afterwards).

So off I go to be and advisor and a student once again, LEAPing, learning and blogging my way through life. It has been a great summer and I just want to say one more great big THANK YOU to all of you who have made it so.

Cheers,

Andre.

OK, yes, I know, that was foolish, I now know that blogs are about far more. That they allow us to get our ideas out to the world at large, to be part of an academic community… bloggers are the new scholars who discuss their topics of interest on a far broader scale than anyone could have imagined before. Of course… that’s supposed to be only if you’re good! The best that someone like me, a lowly undergraduate blogger with poor writing skills could hope for was that some of my friends and fellow students read it right?

Wrong! After three entries my blog has already been quoted! By Zoho, my hero in web application building!(you can read it here). To know that an international company with some of the best computer engineers in India has been reading my blog… that I have the power to reach that far with what I say… oh that power feels so good. I guess any seasoned blogger must have gone through this already… that exhilarating rush, that spark that galvanizes you to keep going and to make sure that what you write is good. Because if it’s not good… then it’s not read by anybody, then that delicious power disappears.

(A zoho homepage screen shot… just because everybody should look at it!)

The first event was discovering that Zoho now has a Facebook App. Imagine, students can find their classmates on Facebook using the courses feature (and if Facebook takes that away I might just disown it again!) and then work collaboratively with them using Zoho. Apps like this truly have potential. Now it’s up to Facebook to stop pandering to the MySpace crowd and block apps that are completely useless and choose the best from apps that do the same thing… I mean we really don’t need super poke, pro poke, ultimate poke and extended poke… one kind of poke is quite enough.

The second event was catalyzed by UBC housing and Conferences releasing telling us where we would be living. However, they did not let Residence advisors know who they would be working with. So, using a Facebook group we got together and were able to map 80% of the advisors locations. Now that Facebook had allowed us to know who our teammates where, we then used it to join our house groups and connect with our residents before they even came to live in residence. Facebook has allowed me to find and help people that I will be living with in the coming year. It’s power as a social networking application is truly unrivaled.

Facebook is great because it combines all the useful new aspects of web 2.0 without students even realizing it. Facebook has:

• Blogs (in the form of notes)
• Discussion boards
• RSS (mini-feed)
• Twitter (in the “status ” section)
• Comments
• Quick communication without commitment… for all those who groan when their IM pops up with a “hey”.
• Events (replacing iCal and Google Calendar)
• Marketplace (goodbye Craigslist)
• Picture sharing (no more Flicker)
• Forums (in the form of groups)
• Users (it is becoming nearly universal on some university campuses)

Most Facebook users don’t even know that some of the technologies that Facebook replaces exist. Well done Facebook (now if only you could get rid of useless apps… I suppose nothing is perfect).

Cheers,
Andre.

One place that commenting isn’t that effective is Facebook! Unless your comment is exactly the same as that of the masses… you’re not going to get a thing done (and even then Facebook tends to ignore the masses). My new pet hate (the thing that I dearly wish my comments would have an effect on) is Facebook apps! It was the worst move that Facebook could ever have made. It has turned Facebook into mySpace (and we all know how much we hate mySpace). It has shifted the focus of Facebook… it has fundamentally changed what Facebook is about. Facebook used to be a Social Networking tool. Time on facebook was spent solidifying or making connections with people. We looked at each others photos, kept abreast of our friend’s news… all that good stuff. Time “wasted” on Facebook was less wasted than we thought it was… it brought us closer to people. Now however, time on Facebook for many people has become turning others into werewolves or zombies or vampires. People now spend their Facebook time playing with apps… and forgetting about the people. It has also lowered the maturity of the site. It makes me angry because Facebook really should have seen this coming. There are two things that they could have done if they really wanted to add apps… without killing Facebook:

1. Rigorously screen apps and only include the very best (probably only keeping those offered by legitimate providers like picnik and iLike).
2. Put apps in a separate place. Instead of having them on the wall… and making them an intricate part of a user’s profile… they could have easily made a separate page where apps go… thus keeping the clean and crisp (so different to mySpace) interface that Facebook has always had.

Now I know you’re questioning the academic context of this entry… I mean as far as academics go… who cares about Facebook? Not true. With web 2.0 and the explosion of social software, social networking tools could become an essential part of a student’s success. “Knowing who” is becoming more and more important and Facebook was helping to streamline that process. Just check out Diana Oblinger’s presentation from the UBC e-Learning conference or the brilliant commoncraft show below.

Click To Play

Cheers,
Andre

Right, here goes, the first post in blog section of my new site. As of yet I have no idea what the tone of this blog will be, nor am decided on what content it will deal with, but I guess starting off aimlessly is better than not starting off at all. I’ve exaggerated a bit, I have sort of a direction for this blog. I’m going to be posting a selection of entries on the LEAP (UBC’s academic resources site) and those posts are going to have an academic focus. If I do run out of time for regular posting, then that might be the whole focus of this blog, but hopefully once I get into the swing of things I will have other more interesting tidbits to write here.

Ok, on to the main topic of this post… do it yourself learning (starting with the whole academic theme right…)

Teaching yourself to do something is so much harder than having someone else teach it to you. I never used to think that, I was always one of the people who sat in class going “I really don’t need to hear some idiot regurgitate the textbook to me”, or grumbling “why do I have to do his silly assignments… I could make much better ones”. I was wrong! The thing is, the difficulty doesn’t lie in understanding…no, no, no… The difficulty lies in motivation.

OK, let me track back and give you some context for this story. Being a Computer Science Major and wanting to do web design for CO-OP I decided that over the summer I would teach myself PHP and JavaScript (internet programming languages). It didn’t seem like too big a task. I mean it is summer, I’m not taking courses (you know how I feel about summer courses) and they are really some of the easiest programming languages to learn. Things have not been working out and it’s the fault of motivation!

I guess the problem is that we like to be able to do interesting things. Advanced genetic research is cool… you could spend hours doing it out of your own enjoyment (or is it just me?) However, in order to do advanced genetic research you have to know all about how genes work. To know about how genes work you need to become familiar with them. Just reading that A and T nucleotides match (I’m not even sure if that is right) is not enough, you will forget it. Thus you have to do examples, matching A and T nucleotides yourself. That is a very, very boring exercise. It’s hard enough to do when you have it on an assignment, or have to do it on an exam… but doing it without those incentives… approaches impossibility.

Ok, so what to do? If it approaches impossibility (Ok, Ok, I know that is a bit of hyperbole… but it’s still very hard) how do we learn anything by ourselves. I guess the way that I have found most helpful is to do the teacher’s job first. Don’t start by just trying to learn something… create a syllabus. Include a timeline, assignments and big projects. Make it look all formal and stick to it. I know it takes a bit of extra work, but if you think it is really important to pick up that skill, then it’s worth it.

Cheers for now,
Andre.