Graham Glass, etc.

Video: Project Based Learning

Here is a really interesting video about a school that is using project-based learning. It was made by a student who is learning using this approach, and it's inspiring to see schools that are thinking out the box. I'm a big fan of project-based learning, and hope to support it in edu 2.0.

Destiny: Illustrations

Thanks to the hard work of the talented Lee Moyer, the pitchbook illustrations for my movie concept "Destiny" are now complete.

The next step is to create a website that showcases the illustrated plot and start promoting it to potential partners. This should be ready by mid January.

Click on the image below to see the scene where the Mars colonists are being destructively digitized.

Two weeks after launch: Christmas Update

This is a duplicate of the latest news item from the edu 2.0 news feed. Once the site has been live for a little longer, I'll stop cross-posting to avoid long-term pollution of this blog with pure business stuff.

The edu 2.0 website has been live for two weeks so far and we've had some very useful feedback from our early user base. In response to this feedback, we've added the following new features:

Subject Q&A communities

Each subject area now has its own Q&A section where users can ask a question and select the best answer from those contributed by the community.

Subject discussion forums

Each subject area now has its own discussion forum where users can engage in online conversations with other users who are interested in the subject.

Subject RSS feeds

Each subject area has an RSS feed that allows you to keep track of new materials, Q&A activity and discussion activity. If you subscribe to a high-level category like Science, you automatically receive updates from its subcategories like Astronomy and Physics.

Quiz upgrades

We added a new "fill in the blanks" question type. We also give students the option of seeing all the questions in a quiz on a single page instead of one-at-a-time.

New material types

Books, references and factoids may now be contributed by the community.

Our feature list is still a mile long, and once we've added a few more important items we'll begin to evangelize the site to various education communities.

Flash Audio Capture

We're interested in allowing teachers to record audio snippets directly from their PCs for things like lesson annotation and vocabulary practice.

The Macromedia Flash Player has the ability to directly access a PC's microphone, thereby enabling users to record voice easily without any 3rd party software. However, you need special software running on the server to capture and decode the sound for later playback.

The Macromedia Flash Media Server is about $5,000 per server. There's also a free open source alternative called Red5. Does anyone have any experience of using it? If it does the job, it seems like a great choice!

Solo Piano by David Rivera

The brother of my friend Pilar has recently released a CD of his piano music. If you're interested in hearing a sample, check it out.

What is the goal of school?

Here's a great and thought-provoking post from Roger Schank about the purpose the schools. I tend to agree with Roger; the most valuable skill you can develop at school is the ability to think well.

This doesn't just mean solving problems. It means:

• looking for opportunities to improve the world, both big and small
• knowing how to break big problems down into small chunks which can be solved more easily
• the ability to think independently and draw your own conclusions
• being self-aware enough to not let your emotions cloud your judgement
• being able to skillfully debate an issue

There are most things I could add to this list, but hopefully this conveys the basic idea. One of the reasons I founded edu 2.0 was to build a system that could help students to consciously and systematically develop these kinds of skills.

EDU 2.0: First Week

The first week was pretty good for edu 2.0. The forum was fairly busy, with some good suggestions that we were able to implement quickly. Today we:

• added support for fill-in-the-blanks questions
• added some more features to the prototype Q&A site
• improved the printing of materials
• allowed instructions to be added to any quiz
• added scrolling quotes to the home page
• organized the main subjects page to ease navigation

One of the most interesting bits of feedback was requests for information about books. Not just for a searchable database of good books, but also the ability to indicate that particular materials correlate with the contents of various books.

Next week we're planning on adding RSS subject subscriptions, user avatars, releasing the community Q&A feature, plus whatever other cool features our early users suggest!

   

EDU 2.0: Community Q&A

After a couple of mammoth coding sessions, we've released an early version of community Q&A for our edu 2.0 site. The idea is that anyone can ask a question about a particular subject, such as Math, and others can contribute answers over a period of a few days. Users can vote on answers and ideally the best answer wins.

We're hoping that students will use this as a learning resource, and that teachers (plus enthusiastic & well-informed students) will use this as a means to help the community and capture their knowledge so that they don't have to answer the same question again.

There are still a few features to add, such as automatic email and RSS updates of a question's status, but the basics seem to work well. We'll also make it a little prettier ;-)

We haven't integrated into fully into the site because it's still in testing, but if you click here you can try out the Math community Q&A (I posted a single question as a demo).

Toolbars

We're going to create an edu 2.0 toolbar for IE and FF that simplifies publishing and subscribing to educational materials. It will communicate via a REST API with the main edu 2.0 site.

We looked around at a few toolbar vendors and decided to try the toolbar studio from BestToolbars. I'll post our experience using their toolset after we've given it a spin.

EDU 2.0: Early Feedback

The edu 2.0 web site has been live now for a few days and today we got a really nice blog posting that I couldn't resist linking to.

The post was written by a Latin teacher who is uploading her teaching materials to our site so that they can be used worldwide. She's quite prolific, and has already uploaded about 100 questions which are assembled into several quizzes. I took one of the quizzes but sadly didn't do too well!

Work on the community question-and-answer system has been going very well, and a beta should be available in a couple of days. Each subject will get its own Q&A community; for example, Latin students can post their Latin questions to the community and get answers from other Latin enthusiasts. Unlike Yahoo Q&A, the questions and answers are automatically integrated into the larger picture so that educational materials, quizzes, questions and answers all mesh together seamlessly.