Prototyping with Facebook Connect

Teachers and administrators have been discussing ways to build on the experience of our Digital Native

Image by SCSpaeth aka k6 via Flickr

students and help them understand issues of digital citizenship. As a district, we have committed ourselves to expanding our use of Web 2.0 tools to support learning and collaboration of students, teachers and administrators. iTeams are prototyping new uses. For example, we have been using a web-based form to collect Activity Logs for iTeams. Middle school iTeam members are using it in some exciting ways: I learned of a spontaneous student-initiated iTeam meeting because they reported it using the Activity Log. So, the process shows great promise but to date, they only use it intermittently. Members also check email at relatively low frequency. But I discovered recently that some students respond to Facebook messages much more reliably than email. I wondered whether we might tap into their engagement with Facebook.

Facebook supports integration of their tools into App providers' sites. Facebook developers have developed a demo application that illustrates some of the potential of this approach. Their app collects running log entries of app users. The Run Around demo also contains several of the elements that Sally and I have discussed. I wondered whether we could prototype the app we have discussed but I know that such development can be time-consuming. I encouraged a group of Stanford students to take an interest in the idea as a project for an e-Challenge project, a social business-plan competition. But they have not responded to my queries. So, what can we do to explore this approach? In the long-run, I hope that iTeam members will be able to take on such a project but we need more time and capacity development.

Since a Facebook development team has developed and tested this app, the learning curve for cloning their app is less demanding than creating an app from scratch. This approach is similar to the process that led to the rapid growth of the Internet in the 90's: copy an html page and revise it to meet your need. Since the approach worked for me during that period, I decided to commit a few hours to trying again with this new capacity.

The screenshot at the top of this entry shows FB tools running on a local host server. While it will require more effort to refine, I got it working with a relatively modest effort on my part. I hope the prototype will help us explain the ideas to colleagues who are less familiar with the abstract ideas and learn better from concrete examples. When we get additional supporters, we can put together the team required to go beyond a simple prototype.

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Tech and Education: It's not rocket science- it's harder

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Sally Loughlin recently recommended Opening Up Education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge by Iyoshi and Kumar (2008). John Seeley Brown endorses the concepts by writing a compelling preface.

Diana Laurillard struck a responsive chord for our work in both the university and the district. She acknowledges in her chapter, Open Teaching: the key to sustainable and effective open education, that "Technology is never the whole solution."

Using technology to improve education is not rocket science. It's much, much harder than that. Change in education is not a matter of a small number of extremely highly educated people moving a collection of obedient atoms form one place to another. It is about large numbers of partially trained people moving minds; millions of them. (p. 320)

The Carnegie Foundation supports open access to two online versions of this book under a Creative Commons License: pdf and ipaper. In providing this access, the authors and publishers have removed a barrier to using this resource for making required changes. What will we do to expand and extend the discussions and actions?

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Stanford Social eChallenge Guidelines

Stanford University runs business plan competitions. The Social e-Challenge is geared toward social entrepreneurship. I suspect that Richard and his team that initiated discussions in the Future of Education network were preparing for this challenge. I wrote to Richard to verify this assumption but did not get a reply.

The university and business communities support students in various ways. These guidelines for proposal development illustrate one pedagogically sound support. Note that they include exemplars of successful submissions.

Executive Summary Guidelines

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Stanford University students want our advice

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Richard, a Stanford University undergraduate student, has joined the Future of Education, a professional learning network, and asks for advice about technology support for teachers. Richard is one of four Stanford students who have formed a group (class project?) to develop useful technology tools for teachers. Ric Barline and other teachers have responded to Richard's request for assistance. I am excited to see this distributed collaboration draw on complementary knowledge, skills and experience, so I add to the discussion:

I second Ric Barline's recommendations and appreciate the thought he has given to the broad range of Best Practice Strategies. I especially value his endorsement of project-based learning:

Project-Based Learning
The benefits of in-depth investigation of real-world topics make this approach ideal for acquiring twenty-first-century skills.
• Project-based learning and technology can go hand in hand. Technology provides the perfect avenue for students to organize and deliver projects. From the research to the delivery, real-world skills can be incorporated with the use of technology.[22] Unfortunately, the emphasis on standardized testing and state standards has caused many schools to drop their efforts to utilize technology in the classroom. Drill and practice, test preparation, direct instruction with a scripted text and pressure to meet all standards has caused teachers to abandon technology-rich projects and assignments.

I work as the iTeams Advisor in a middle school that has been part of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative since its inception (Seven years of one-to-one computing for all Maine 7th and 8th grade students). While teachers may want to use such strategies, project management can be daunting. We use strategies based in part on the TechYES and GenYES models, exemplary evidence-based programs. Boss and Krauss in Reinventing Project-Based Learning and their ReinventingPBL blog also provide useful strategies.

At the high school level, we are using Facebook and Ning to build from students' prior social networking skills and experience to establish learning networks. But at middle school and elementary schools we are constrained by legal and community standards. There, we are investigating Elgg, an open source social network over which we can maintain better control. Unfortunately, Elgg lacks some of the features that would enhance its value for support of learning.

Finally, how can we use these ideas to improve learning for all our students? Suzie Boss describes Bill strickland's approach:

In "Passing Empowerment Down through the Arts," in the current issue of Edutopia, Bill Strickland tells me about the journey he began 40 years ago when an art teacher changed his life. He's been changing lives ever since, first in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pa., and now in other communities across the country (and beyond). His unique vision combines arts and mentoring to keep young people engaged in learning, plus high-powered job training so adults can lift their families out of poverty. It's a potent formula for creating hope in the neighborhoods that need it most.

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Improving iTeam Activity Logs

Mi sistema GTD en Google Docs
by Francesc Esteve via Flickr

Two iTeam members have recently acquired mobile devices. Since such devices seem to have great potential to support learning (Kolb, 2008 Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education), we are encouraging team members to explore and share what they are learning. For example, a member's use during a student initiated iTeam meeting lead to the exemplary discussion of preparation for the MLTI Conference that three members captured on video earlier this week.

One member has been trying to develop a project based on his device. He looked at the app that makes an iTouch into a remote for Keynote presentations. But he discovered it requires newest version of Keynote. Then, Erik encouraged him to look at the iTouch app development site to see whether he could develop a simple app. That seems like a very challenging project.

Google just announced a new feature for mobile access to its Spreadsheets:

Official Google Docs Blog: Add, edit, sort, and filter: Improved mobile access to spreadsheets: "Add, edit, sort, and filter: Improved mobile access to spreadsheets
Friday, February 13, 2009 6:30 AM
Over a year ago, we enabled view-only access to docs from mobile devices. This has come in handy for me because I use Google Docs spreadsheets to keep track of a lot of nerdy and not-so-nerdy things in my life. I've often found myself wanting to access my spreadsheet data on the go, when I'm not near a computer.

Today, I'm happy to announce that we've made mobile access even better by adding new capabilities with List View for spreadsheets. You can quickly view, edit, sort, and filter your spreadsheets on a variety of mobile devices including Android-powered devices like the T-Mobile G1, the iPhone and iPod touch, and the Nokia S60."

The member has been entering his iTeam activities to our Log using his device. So, this new capacity for the tools we are using may make it a more appropriate project for him. It may also serve to remind all of us to use and improve our Activity Log entries. I'll send the link to this post to him and ask if he wants to develop a project based on his prior experience and these resources that Google provides.

Note: The image in this post illustrates use of Google Docs to support the work management strategy called Getting Things Done (GTD). Kerry Gallivan has been looking at it as a way to support our activities.

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