Education

At the Turkish Private Schools Association annual symposium in January 2012, I gave a presentation on coordinating mLearning with structured education.

Slides with Turkish translation (if you'd like to help finish translating the last slides, please do!):

Spent some time developing in iBooks author tonight and after having thought about and read about and discussed it all day, it seems right to jot down a few thoughts. Right now it isn't a revolution, but we live in the world of the fast update. I think it could very quickly become a revolution.

When designing educational software, I make sure to consider how it will fit with the learner's life. There are at least two orientations for this sort of exercise. I refer to them as the student's schedule and study life cycles. For canonical points in each, I then consider the educational intent, student-teacher ratio, and person-technology ratio. This helps me plan course components, select their platforms, and design their interaction types.

Social software is not simply "tweeting" or "liking" professionally developed content. Social computing is a mode of human-technology interaction, a use case. We can identify at least three factors that affect "social" in software: the human usage intent, the software features that facilitate it, and the hardware form factors that embody it. Let's work backwards, starting with three hardware form factors often used in education: the desktop computer, the interactive whiteboard, and the mobile phone.

I often serve as a digital ambassador to traditional print leaders. They're very smart people, but they have decades of creating course materials a certain way. Here's a set of 5 differences between the publication of print and digital course materials:

I recently revisited the iTunes App Store with an eye to the state of the educational market. Below is a comparison table of the iTunes App Store Education category in 2011 vs 2009.

I'd like to suggest three dimensions of analysis when categorizing mLearning edugames: content form, activity structure, and topic area.

Let's define "edugame" as a game that intends to increase your skills/knowledge as a result of play. It has common surface elements of games (like chance, movement on a board, players, levels of difficulty) but also has an informational topic focus and is intended to increase player knowledge or skill such that a learning effect is intended in pre-post game comparative measurement. It may be fun, but Angry Birds is not an edugame. You might learn from it, but a classic TOEFL test prep app is also not an edugame.

The Clear Speech iOS apps were authored by Judy Gilbert and developed by Cambridge University Press (iTunes link). As Press employee, I facilitated the software specification with Judy and Editorial, and oversaw the design and development process. The apps provide excellent listening practice for English learners through fun games: Ball Toss, Syllable Ball, Push the Blob, and Stop or Flow.

Last night I was thrilled to see that the iTunes App Store included in its featured apps section a group of "Apps for foreign language learning". When I clicked through, I found an interesting list of apps.