Friday, December 10, 2010

InterroBang ?! - A network for student-centered learning?

We need infrastructure to support project- and challenge-based learning that we are doing in both MAMS ITeam and MTA Capstone. We have been exploring and doing action research using AppInventor to control NXT robotics as they roll out new features. We want to share our work with others who might be interested in it.

I learned about ?! (InterroBang: http://playinterrobang.com/) through a message that Jim Matthews posted on the ARISgames group (http://groups.google.com/group/arisgames). I investigated, created an account, selected a mission, created an entry based on current work, invited Ariel, one of our experienced ITeam members, to contribute and help evaluate the system. After we submitted our entry to the system, I wrote the following reflection on the wall of of my user page at InterroBang.
Stephen Spaeth [Note that this link will not take most users to the right page because you need to have an account to get access to this page.] Ariel joined our team and contributed to documenting the deed. She took the picture, wrote the caption, and added text to describe the continuing work we did today. She decided that we were ready to submit the mission and hit the button. Apparently, it takes the deed out of our hands and we no longer have access to the deed. I can understand the need to freeze it during the approval process but I'd still like to be able to see the preview. It is unnerving to loose control over our own creation.
about 18 hours ago
As more time elapses, it becomes clearer that providers of this service need to:
  • Make the time-frame for approval process clearer
  • Make it clear to users that they will loose access to their own creations
  • Add the option to cross-post entries to other venues (e. g. to this blog for me) or at least the option to make the entry publicly accessible
Ariel thought that we should encourage ITeam members to use this service. I'm pretty sure that we don't want to do that until we resolve some of the outstanding issues.

Update: AppInventor developers and beta users are cranking out useful resources almost every day. For example, Liz Looney shared ShinyLegoNxt, a new source file to demonstrate the new NXT resources.

2 comments:

SC Spaeth said...

I sent the following request to the support forum:

Please provide more insight in the submission and approval process:
http://scspaeth.blogspot.com/2010/12/interrobang-network-for-student.html

SC Spaeth said...

Still waiting for feedback/approval of a deed submitted more than 48 hours ago. Still no response to a support request submitted a day and a half ago.