Anyway, here comes the final post for Education 2.0.

Unlike our previous generation, we are ” Digital Natives”, not “Digital Immigrants”. (Well, these terms are rarely used but they do describe us well) We does not need to learn how to use a mobile other electrical device with instruction manual. We just pick it up and try how to use directly.

However, there are not many tools for effective learning, at least not creative ones.

You may take past papers’ database, online dictionary or ebooks as a learning tool, but let me introduce you some of the greatest learning tools for Web2.0.

Having problem to remember putting presentation PowerPoint into your UBS thumb driver? Why don’t you just upload it and share the powerpoint with others?

Take a look of slideshare and you will find many people sharing their own PowerPoint presentations.

You may wonder it is kind of stupid to have an application with features like “next slide”, “share with friends” only.

Actually it can be embedded like youtube video and it is very powerful to combine with youtube video.

Instant-VCASMO

*Instant-VCASMO is a free and quick (no need register/login as member) service.
*You can just input a YouTube embed code and SlideShare embed code, then input the slides change timing.
*You will get a HTML code for embed the presentation in your website/blog.

(It is so sad that the testing for how to use the system without registration is disable now)

(Just find something interesting…I would defintely start learning JavaScript after exam.)

It has been a while for “Presentation”. Let’s back to learning.

Here comes another online application for having draft and brainstorming.

http://www.twiddla.com/

Twiddla is useful for sharing graphical ideas like draft or brainstorming. Take a look of the official preview image. You can also play the (without sign up!)

http://www.textflow.com/

This web application actually have a quite good video presentation about what it does. I would better leave it to the 2-minute demo

There a lot of potential for Educational tools. Looking forward to any new ideas and innovation~!

* Please noted that I have added a reference for the PSP platform in the Education 2.0 – Game (Hong Kong students bring PSP to school, compete in exams)

This time I am going to talk about daily basis.

We know practice makes perfect. Just like our Chinese saying – 「日省其身，有則改之，無則加勉」. Actually learning should be done daily, instead of rushing a night for everything before the examination.

We had several references here.

http://eng12.eng-class.com/ENG/login

http://www.prof-ho.com/reading/

(If you are really interested in trying/testing the platform, you can ask me for the user name and password.)

People prefer learning to be funny or they may just want to exercise their brain a bit everyday. That is why Sudoku and Rubik’s cube are so popular.

Take a look of Biggest Brain.

http://www.playfish.com/?page=game_braingame

It also has a version specific for iphone.
http://www.playfish.com/press_releases/?release=14_03_2009

This application should be useful for primary school students.
http://www.mathsisfun.com/quiz/mixtimes.html

If you are going to implement Education 2.0, the most significant advantage is that it is the easiest to implement (among game, platform or educational tools). People would prefer easy and manageable test instead of hard-solving game, and they use it everyday! (Huge audience size!)

Anyway, it is a short article about Daily Basis for Education. Hope it is useful.

Educational Game is a hot topic in education research area. How do we optimize the efficiency for children to learn from game?

Simply change the learning tools and interface? Well, switching from reading books to interactive eBooks? Or teaching children how to play sports with a Wiimote?

This is about the learning tools and user interface. You can take a look of this reference, yet it is not new – a year ago…

(Dated 08 July 2008)
Mobile Learning Platform to Enhance Quality of Learning and Teaching

港大「無線學習平台啟用禮」暨「校際奧運常識問答比賽」

Hong Kong students bring PSP to school, compete in exams

What should we include in the game? Learning English words? Or learning mathematics / history / decision making?

The content comes again. I would show some games which are web-based, to narrow down the scope we are discussing.

http://www.playfish.com/?page=game_geochallenge

http://www.playfish.com/?page=game_wordchallenge

http://www.farmtasia.com/

There are a few difficulties that educational games have –
1)    Hardly can we measure the effect for playing the Games. (Do you really learn more words when playing Word Challenge?)
2)    Sometimes, games are time-consuming. (Especially the Farmtasia designed by CUHK)
3)    Again, back to our first question, how does game improve learning efficiency?

To answer the first question, I would say we cannot have a clear definition for improvement in learning. Do parents really think academic result is all a child has? Education is not business, we do not need to have sales accomplishment.

For the second question, willing to spend more time on something means they are interested in it. Why can we treat playing computer games like playing the piano? Playing with Educational Games should be better than watching anime.

Finally, the learning efficiency. I have onced chatted with Prof. Wong Po Choi about learning with Games. He said people playing games simply enjoy one thing – finding regular pattern in the game, practice it and repeat it.

Playing first-person shooter game has the simple rules. If you get used to the physical rules in the virtual world (well, it is engine-dependent for different 3D games), you can predict the enemy movement. Instead of aiming at enemy’s header, you are aiming to an empty space.

One of my favorite – Quake 3

So, making games somehow outline and regular is useful in learning.

Why did Word Challenge offer 6 characters only at a time for a quiz?

Simplicity. Regular. Nothing unexpected.

Coming next – Education 2.0 – Daily basis.

Well, here I am to offer some inspiration. Not only for myself or schoolmates, but also for a special team that I am going to work with. They found me for advice but hardly could I have time to write something about the project. Never mind, just let me write this to kill two birds with one stone.

Basically for every single project we have, I suggest to have an analysis on the target audience first.

Who are the target audience?

Primary? Secondary? or Kindergarten?

How about stakeholders?

I would say Teachers and Parents are stakeholders. (If your system is implemented to suit teachers’ need, it should be able to save them affords, maybe help marking paper, preparing materials for classes etc.)

Take a look of the following examples for kids:

http://www.kidthing.com/

http://www.friv.com/

http://www.kerpoof.com/

I would say that One uses the professionals as gimmick, providing a platform to learn and play, One for fun(basically fun of games),  One act as baby sitter (consuming kids’ time).

From my point of view, using Technology in Education can be classified into 4 different types.

1) A Learning Platform (for students, parents and teachers)

2) Game (having fun and learning from games, have question or quiz after quiz)

3) Daily basis, Short and Easy task (Practice makes Perfect.)

4) Tools (for effecitve learning, e.g. online dictionary, online slideshow for presentation etc.)

Different types has different characteristic.

For the Platform, be reminded that content provider is a great consider.
Are you going to buy the content? or preparing the content yourself? Preparing content would be very complicated as you have to dig into the syllabus of schools.

You may have a look of the open source that many are using now :
http://moodle.org/

http://www.hkedcity.net/

Teachers here act like an administer to manage the content for users.

You may also like to have more reference -

http://www.mynoteit.com/

http://www.schooltool.org/

http://www.engrade.com/

Maybe I should stop here, so much information/reference to read
I will continue the remaining type : Game, Daily basis and Tools in the following posts.

Just want to explain a bit from my point of view.

Internet Content Aggregator refers to the user interface that enable users to capture a specific part of a website and put those pieces together to form one single page. Of course, after capturing, the content of the specific block will automatically update. The idea is somehow like the RSS reader, gathering all the useful feeds and blogs to one single place for easier management and review.

You may take a look of the following website. They are already in use.

http://www.pageflakes.com/

http://www.netvibes.com/

Each blocks of content can be easily modify by users. The position can be easily changed by drag and drop.

But somehow Pageflakes does not support Pages Aggregation.

(Page Aggregation – Just image you can crop all of the News or Announcement from different courses Website as a block, then paste those blocks in one single page)

Pageflakes now only support preset Blocks. (Anyway, I have not played with pageflakes for years…don’t know much about its progress.)

Why do we have Content Aggregation then? It enhances negativation.

Search Engine is already a kind of content aggregator, you can search the keyword and find the contents.

You can then directly access the useful pages, instead of clicking links from index/front page, to categories and then to another sub-categories…

But somehow the aggregation is done by machine, NOT human.

RSS, Blog and the Internet Content Aggregation is made by explict choice of human. This is the true value of the processing.

The information gathered can be shared much efficiently under an online social network. Using the previous example of having all News of course website in a single page. Imagine you can post the page on facebook and let others to subscribe. You will find which schoolmates is taking the same courses as you, and that’s how you make use of “social networking” to meet more people.

Then How? How do we update and get a specific location of a webpage?

Each html webpage can be regarded as a tree. The HTML Document Object Model (HTML DOM) defines a standard way for accessing and manipulating HTML documents.

Image from w3schools.com

When a user want to capture a specific location of the webpage, he/she is selecting which object want to saved and save the path for accessing that particular object.

It is kind of complicated. Not to include the involvement of AJAX.

Special thanks to Rocky, which bring the inspiration to me for this article.

Please leave a message or comments to see if how much this article could bring you. Thanks