CSCL
A desktop-sharing tool that works for desktop-sharing
Monday, July 21st, 2008 | CSCL, tools | No Comments
I have been looking for an online conferencing tool for some time. In my collaboration with Ed Podesta, we’ve often resorted to Skype for meetings - because I’m in Oxford and Ed’s in Reading, and besides I’ve got to attent to my pint-drinking needs. What I’ve been lacking in these conversations, was the ability to do a bit of hand-waving and show what I was talking about. Out work involving concept mapping, I was missing drawing a map of what was supposed to happen in the next lesson, so that we could align our ideas.
I finally found a free online (browser-based) conferencing tool called Vyew, which had a desktop sharing capability that actually worked on my Mac. After celebrating this rare occurence with a little dance of victory, I waited for our next Skype meeting to try it out. It turned out to more or less work - i.e. I could more or less fluently show Ed what was going on on my desktop, so that he could see how I was changing a concept map we were preparing for the lesson. According to me it does help to work on a communal artefact like that in a meeting - especially when you can’t really see each other (or at least not see much of each other above and beyond a murky picture).
What I really like about Vyew is firstly that it is browser based (i.e. no installation), that it is free and that there is no need to set up complicated accounts for all the participants. Even the meeting host needs not have an account - you can just go to the site and start your hand-waving. The directions to the meeting are propagated via email in the shape of a link directly to the meeting room. Very easy indeed.
That said, I never managed to make the voice and webcam functions work. I didn’t devote much time to making them work, on the other hand - after all, Skype would be running anyway. So all in all: a very useful tool to have in the kit!
Breaking caculators
Friday, June 27th, 2008 | CSCL | No Comments
The good idea was to blog from the conference while my impressions were still fresh. As we all know, good ideas often don’t come to fruition - as happened with this one. I found myself frantically looking for a plug socket in between sessions (sockets seem to be the currency here - maybe I should go in to socket-real-estate??) and by the time I found one, it was time to be moving again. Therefore the following post is an amalgamation of bits and pieces of ideas from different talks. I’ll try to integrate them into something vaguely coherent, but may well fail in places. See, there we go, I’ve got to be off again, post still unfinished…
Wednesday afternoon: I am just coming out of a very interesting symposium at the ICSL2008 conference and wanting to share a few thoughts while they are still fresh. The second part of this session was dedicated to discussing Krange & Ludvigsen’s 2008 paper. This paper discusses how a CSCL tool aimed at promoting conceptual understanding in students ended up constraining them to procedural learning. The discussant, Baruch Schwartz, posed a very interesting question: are we making education ‘too smooth’ for the learners? Do we instead need to make it more challenging? Are CSCL tools in fact accentuating this existing problem because they are very good at making things smooth, removing the struggle from the learners’ hands, allowing them to ‘dodge’ the conceptual challenge? Schwarts referred to Alex Bogomolny’s discussion of why a broken calculator is in fact a good calculator in terms of learning. By ‘breaking’ certain functions on the calculator (i.e. removing the multiplication fuction while leaving addition intact) we can force the learner to get to grips with the concepts behind the broken functions. Should educational technologists be dealing in broken calculators?
In a sense I agree that there is a problem in providing students with complex technologies which remove the need for conceptual struggle. The project reported by Krange & Ludvigsen may well be one of those instances where a complex technological wrapping obscures the concepts the students should be paying attention to. But there is another interesting aspect in that paper, which only came out towards the end of the discussion, and that is the role of the learning context in promoting or stifling conceptual struggle. What I found most interesting in the paper when reading it, was the role of the teacher who failed to pick up on the students’ requests for conceptual clarification, and the role of the school as ‘curriculum deliverer’, which set the stage for a particular kind of learning. In my view, the failure of the software to induce a conceptual approach to the material, can as well be ascribed to the context in which it was set, as to the software tool itself. I suppose what I’m trying to say, is that the technological tools are in themselves of little importance. What really matters is what you do with them. There is no substitute for a good teacher and for a curriculum which points that teacher in the right direction. Tools do not operate in a vacuum. They operate in a hurricane, and follow the direction of the wind. This is especially evident in general purpose tools, like for example wikis, where it is not immediately obvious how they should be used. One power of these general purpose technologies is to make practitioners (and researcher) stop and think: how can we use this to promote the kinds of conceptual understanding that we want the students to gain?