The world is open;

This week we had the opportunity to interact over video conference with Dr. Curtis Bonk who is a Professor at Indiana University. It was my first remote learning experience and so quite interesting. Tom at SUSE IT set us up with the Cisco Webex system, using which we could connect to Dr.Bonk. I wish there was a better way to split the screens between the slides and the person you are talking to so that you could see them more clearly. I think it might have been very interesting to use something like ViewXtreme to deliver the content and see how that went ! A couple of the other issues we faced was that the slides didn’t move by themselves so Katy had to do those by hand, and the microphone was too far away for most of us to speak with Dr. Bonk.

All the minor issues aside it was an interesting lecture. Dr. Bonk spoke to us about his new book “The World is Open” and we discussed the open learning world With the help of e-learning, Blogs, Wikis, Discussion forums, Webinars, Course websites, learning world has really opened up to all of us. We saw some examples of archaeology blogs, where in sitting here in the United States you could follow the exploits of archaeologists in Afghanistan. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA offers an interactive research map using which you can easily identify research projects, field programs and internships, and get more information on them. This is really similar to what I envision trying to make for the next iteration of my 391 project, so it was very cool to see an idea that I can build on top of. There are similar programs being run by Earthwatch and Greenpeace which allow you to visualize and follow happenings all around the world from your home.

We also looked up, how we all learn using using different educational websites, online schools, content delivery networks, streaming media etc. Some examples are “cable in the classroom” (, Mahalo, the human powered search and EdTV which guides to to online educational content streams. There is so much information out there, perhaps what we really need is an information processing tool that sorts this for us and gives us what we are looking for.

There is now a massive infusion of e-books on the market, giving us access to reading anytime and anywhere. With open source text books, e-libraries, google book search the global text project, we now have access to an enormous collection of works by different authors and devices that the Sony Reader and the Kindle have really opened up our world and made accessibility much quicker and cheaper. And the Kindle uses a revolutionary E Ink technology which brings us as close to the real world book reading experience as possible.

The existence of open source software and e-learning communities like Moodle and Sourceforge allow us to access, contribute to and customize a host of software and learning solutions out there for our needs. We can add information to websites like wikipedia, customize forums based on Sakai, use open learning initiative programs. And open source does not necessarily mean that the contributors are not making any profits. A lot of the open source projects are supported by larger companies and individual donors, who give them money, and developers who spend the time adding features and fixing bugs, and during the same time learning new skills.

Open courseware in universities like MIT and Yale allow us to access learning materials, online lectures and tutorials from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world. In addition the National Programme for Technology learning in India, NPTEL, started by the 7 IITs tries to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses. Many more universities are gradually starting to open up the coursework and lectures to people outside the university and around the world.

As discussed above open source projects and developer APIs like the iPhone developer API allow users to contribute and create your own applications. Instant Messaging apps like google talk and skype allow you to communicate with people around the world. Websites like Wikipedia, Blogs and forums encourage collaboration, Learning repositories are created every day, Users can customize the information they get using RSS feeds, digg and delicious, Mobile data phones give us access to information instantly and anywhere in the world.

In all, we are moving towards open learning and social software enabling collaborative, real time learning and teaching, and allowing us to expand our boundaries of access immensely to the outside world.

Digital Artifact 2;

It was Artifact Day this week, when we all got to show our digital artifacts for class.

A few of the ideas that stayed back in my head were Mike's "Flashcards" to help dyslexic children, Ashley's "Tune It Up", the website about learning English through stories, and Catherine's game with "Zoo Animals" to help children tackle issues with depression.

Again, it was really interesting to see how we expanded our ideas from Digital Artifact 1, to build something more concrete in a similar direction. Ricardo's visuals about creating a timeline to preserve information about the cultures that have existed through California, from when it was a part of Mexico, to becoming an independent state to a part of the United States was quite fascinating. Paul introduced us to his summer storytelling class, using collaborative storytelling. I looked this up online and an interesting prototype for this is a website called "Storybird" which uses collaborative storytelling to connect kids and families, and is a good base to build off on.

Jacob introduced us to a prototype of his new game to help middle school students understand and learn more about Biology. The visuals were fascinating, especially for me, because I always have had an inherent aversion to blood and internal organs, and it's amazing how beautifully made these games are, and how much more interactive they make learning because you are fully immersed in the environment.

Ashley's "Tune It Up" is a great idea for a website, to allow children in rural villages in India to practice their English writing using storytelling, and then scanning those stories and uploading them to a website for everyone to read. The stories can be organized by themes, and possibly ages? It’s a really low res way to put the stories out there for everyone to read, and give these children a medium of expressing their creativity and thoughts and learning at the same time. It would be great to have an option that would allow a publisher to buy one or more of these stories and compile them into a book, which could then be sold, and the proceeds sent to the children, to give them access to higher resolution tools to work with, and for the website to sustain.

Yaa spoke to us about Languages of Tanzania. I looked this up online, and found a language map listing about 114 languages in the country, of which Swahili and English are most widely spoken. Creating an archive of would be a wonderful way to preserve these languages and related cultural trappings, for generations to come. In India, there are libraries all across the country, which hold ancient documents and scrolls in forgotten cultures and languages, as a way of preserving them, but accessibility to them is very limited.

Christopher outlined the idea of a website to bring together resources to combat bullying, an extension of his first digital artifact. Keith similarly outlined a website to talk about creating employment opportunities for the homeless, and allowing them to build their resume by using the website to learn basic skills, which I thought was a great concept. Katy spoke about using movies to connect to children in the Lucille Packard children's wing who need this outlet to connect to the world. I would love to learn more about her concept, and see a little more detail about how this works with the children. Tony spoke about creating a website to bring together resources for creating a curriculum for and teaching Hip-Hop with some extremely cool apps that exist in the market.

Mike created a web based Flashcard system to teach alphabets to young children who have dyslexia, which was one of the ideas I really liked. It is such a clean simple interface that gives the dyslexic kids exactly what they need in terms of repetition and looking at an alphabet and listening to what it sounds like. There is also a system which allows the parent to rank the understanding of the child, to see how far they have progressed with learning the alphabet. Looking up online, it seems that most of the software that exists for helping people with dyslexia is targeted more towards reading out material to them, or making existing web pages and the computer easy to navigate through. Again, I really liked Mike's concept of helping the children through a flashcard system. It would be great to see an extension of the alphabets to maybe "2 alphabets" or "3 letter words", and perhaps an iPhone application which can be carried around.

Catherine's webpage about teaching children about depression through an "Animal Zoo" game was very creative and inspirational. Catherine is a wonderful artist and her idea about having the child walk through the zoo, and understand the needs of each animal, and help solve them was something I could completely relate to. Each animal signified a specific issue that a child who has depression deals with, and by helping the animal understand and resolve their issue and make them happy, the child can work through their own depression issues. I kept thinking it would be so cool if the animals could actually talk to the child about how they feel, giving the child a deeper sense of connection and understanding!

We also heard from Janelle about her website to help a child with ADD track his or her day and how to get them through their tasks with encouragement and rewards from their parents and teachers throughout the process using "Cookies". Jaehi spoke to us about creating a user friendly phone for the elderly people, to give them information about their medical and health issues and to allow them to contact the provider in need. This was a great idea, and probably the only device idea that any of us had, which is why it stuck in my head. We finally wrapped up with Tanya and Coram's presentations. Coram spoke about creating a social network to bring the elderly and children in the foster network, two groups of people who really need a strong sense of community. And Tanya's was a cool comic book, about teaching basic first aid to Hispanic children who live on the Mexican side of the US/Mexican Border.

Innovative ideas in e-learning;

In today’s class we had the opportunity to meet Aditya and Nemil, the creators of ViewXtreme, a distance learning solution for next generation classrooms. ViewXtreme is probably one of the most innovative distance learning solutions I have seen. As opposed to traditional distance learning which comprises of static video streams, which also requires much more control and management to shoot the videos, require expensive and multiple cameras and most importantly fails to replicate the classroom experience.

From my personal perspective, I think e-learning is a great medium that allows us to participate in classes and lectures held around the world, and learn things we never could otherwise, but the lack of the classroom discussion and interaction experience is what makes it difficult for me to choose an online class over an offline one. The way e-learning is today, it requires a lot of self-discipline from the student, and in addition needs them to participate in what is a technologically innovative environment, but which still lacks the social interaction we have in classrooms even today.

ViewXtreme uses just one HD video camera to record the lecture as the teacher is teaching the class and then delivers it as a high quality video which can then be streamed by remote users who want to view the lecture. In future, the software would like to take the feed directly from the camera and then transmit that to ViewXtreme.

ViewXtreme, allows the user to track the lecture, which is again quite groundbreaking. The lecture is divided into 6 - 8 parts which can be viewed in a thumbnail at the bottom of the video, and the user can either click on the thumbnail of the portion the user wants to move to, or just use the mouse to scroll over to the view of the lecture you want to look at. The movement tracking system tracks the movement of the lecturer and moves the lecture automatically to a different thumbnail corresponding to the movement. Currently the zoom and the movement operates using a functionality similar to google maps. Once you click on a thumbnail, you can also zoom in and have a clearer view of the slides or the blackboard in the lecture. Currently viewing powerpoint slides is not very clear and one alternative is to take the powerpoint slides directly from the computer and then overlay it on the slides in the lecture to give a clearer format, and also try to automatically detect slide changes.

Currently only the lecturer has a mic, from where you can hear the lecture. In future it might be nice to divide the classroom up into sections and place a mic in each section, so that the camera can also record any questions asked by students in the class. In future it may also be possible to have some multiple motion sensitive cameras to record both the lecturer and the students asking questions.

One of the topics we discussed in detail regarding the software apart from trying to increase interactivity amongst the students was a note taking feature. One of the alternatives discussed was to be able to copy and paste screen shots as the video is playing and then add a note or a question to the bottom of the screen shot. These questions can then be transferred to the lecturer, or a note section where the students can share notes with each other. One idea was to have subtitles on the lecture slides so that the screen capture could give you a little more information about the topic at hand. We also discussed having a table of contents and having a timeline for the video, so that the user could directly click on the section they wanted to watch or review without having

In future versions it may also be interesting to see more interaction amongst the students both remote and in class, and interaction between the students and the teacher. Perhaps a discussion forum for students which uses both audio and video. In a future, in an ideal system, there would be seamless interaction where the instructor can teach using their natural style and the students can interact with each other.

We also had the opportunity to hear from Veronica, who is currently a knight scholar at Stanford, and used to be the editor-in-chief of “Catalyst” magazine in Chicago. Veronica during her year at Stanford, is trying to work on designing a solution to bridge the gap for access to educational information about high schools in the city of Chicago.

Catalyst’s mission is “To improve the education of all children through authoritative journalism and leadership of a constructive dialogue among students, parents, educators, community leaders and policy makers”. During her time in working with Catalyst, and the students in the Chicago area, Veronica realized a very real need for students to get timely information about high school admission processes, their deadlines and requirements. And if a student does not get admission at a high school then for him or her to know what are the options they have left at that point so that they do not end up wasting their year or delaying going to school.

We discussed that any web based solution will need to gather all the information about the schools and their application process and deadlines. They will also need to have some kind of a mapping system, in order to tell the students about the schools closest to their homes. In addition building a community support based forum would be useful. The community based tool will facilitate exchange of information within parents. It may also be possible to have a mobile solution for this problem which will provide instant information and feedback to the students and their families.

A few sample websites to look into which operate community based forums and operate based on crowd sourcing are Yelp, Craigslist, Yahoo and Google groups and various other discussion forums. This is a great need based project, and I hope that Catalyst is able to come up with a solution to this problem in a small scope and then expand it to a greater area with the help of school and community co-operation.

Looking at TeachAIDS;

This week we did a brief overview of many different learning principles, and then tried to apply our understanding of the learning principles, the 6 degrees and ABCD to the evaluation of a website.

Our team, Katy, Tanya, Jaehi and myself, took a look at TeachAIDS which is a non-profit organization that works towards improving HIV/AIDS awareness and teaching HIV/AIDS prevention strategies to younger children in a culturally appropriate manner.

When we looked at the website, there were two things we first noticed. One was the tutorial versions below for the different regions like general english, indian english and mandarin. The other was the news feed which highlighted the list of indian celebrities who support the program, and volunteer to help out the organization by spreading the word. This seems like great way to increase awareness about the program, and these endorsements will probably get their audience to pay closer attention to their product and message.

The Audience that TeachAIDS is primarily targeted towards are young learners in countries where the incidence of HIV/AIDS is high and where education about HIV/AIDS presents significant challenges because of the conservative social structures and the stigma attached to discussing sex education openly. The program is currently operating in South Africa, China, United States, Botswana, India, and the United States. TeachAIDS is hoping to increase the aware of HIV through the culturally appropriate learning materials they have created. On a closer look you can see that materials are also gender appropriate, which is very true of India where because of the conservative culture, these learning materials are usually shown in classrooms segregated by gender .

The situation they are dealing with is quite grim in nature. For example in India, currently 2.31 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. The socially conservative culture makes it very difficult to penetrate, and provide appropriate learning materials to children and adults, but much more so to children. Hence the use of interactive applications and animated agents in the video to convey the messages really helps to maximize comfort and efficacy amongst the audience. TeachAIDS also explains that they try to “Minimize stigma associated with discussing sexual practices by combining them with biological aspects of HIV/AIDS with cultural euphemisms."

The videos themselves are designed to induce meta-cognitive thinking in its viewers, to force them to take a closer look at the problem, and think about the disease, its causes and lack of cure. The videos make good use of multimedia principles, and are learner controlled. They allow the user to learn in informal settings which they themselves are comfortable with, use dual-coding. And finally the principle of cognitive apprenticeship can be applied to the videos since once someone in the audience has learned it, they can then transfer the knowledge and the videos themselves to other people.

The content does seems scalable in terms of being able to translate it into different languages and use the series of animations with culturally appropriate characters and stories for a regional context. It is however difficult to decipher if the audience also contains users who live in remote areas in these countries with less or no access to technology. TeachAIDS does offer a Creative Common License available to end user NGOs, but there isn’t much detail about these NGOs and the audiences they have reached using the TeachAIDS videos. In countries like India, there is also the issue of dealing with multiple regional languages. So that is another factor TeachAIDS seems to be currently working on in trying to get the videos dubbed in various languages. Fortunately, in India, they may be able to reuse the original videos and just dub them in different languages.

It wasn’t very clear from the website but it looks like TeachAIDS also has a model where in they get paid for use of some of the tutorials while the others are free. The website goes a little more into the research behind the product, the prototyping and character design process and the team, which is quite impressive.

We discussed a little more about access, sustainability and dealing with the audience who is already HIV/AIDS positive. There were some ideas about distributing the content in areas such as maybe turning the videos into a comic book, or a street play of sorts through NGO partnerships. How do they deal with young learners who are already HIV/AIDS positive ? Or is that dependent on the NGO partner ? It would have been great to see a little more detail about which audiences TeachAIDS has directly targeted and who their partners are and what audiences they have been dealing with. The product is great, and I hope it has the potential to survive in the long run by finding ways to self sustain themselves.

Overall for our team it was a great exercise at being able to look at a website and its associated products closely and apply the theories we have been discussing in class to it. It helped me better understand the considerations that should go into trying to design a learning medium for my audience in the future.