Virtual Classrooms with Facebook enabled Skype 5

I was reading a mashable.com post about Skype 5 that integrates your Facebook timeline.

This means that now you have all the elements that you normally get from a commercial solution for an online classroom session:

• A chat stream for the participants to converse while a session is in progress
• Video based (conference)/interaction (Skype 5 allows 10 people video conferencing)
• Ability to white-board 
• Ability to "dial-in" using VoIP and normal telephones
• Ability to SMS and interact
• Social media interaction (Facebook integration in this case) 

It will be a good thing to use this and setup teaching interfaces. Since Skype can now deal with dropped calls
(auto reconnection is a new feature), low bandwidth users how the option of joining with the Facebook timeline,  SMS, chat, or audio.

Here's how the new interface looks in Skype 5.0 looks

Here are some links that describe the new Skype features:

• The mashable.com article
• Skype's own blog

Google is targeting the K12 audience

Just spotted a week old Google blog post that talks about how Google is targeting the K12 segment.
It is an interesting move to get teachers to use Google technologies (a modified version of Google apps) to teach.
The blog post mentions that they pan to launch a Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share tips and ideas for using Google Apps in their classrooms, as well as the Search Education Curriculum and a Google Apps Education resource center with 20 classroom-ready lesson plans for teachers.

This will be interesting to track and see how it helps collaborative learning among young people in classroom situations.

Read the rest of the post at:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-heads-to-grade-school-new.html

UK Government seems to recognize that learners work differently

Although we hear more about the US education system, it seems that the UK government is building policy that recognizes that children learn using different mediums and in different ways.

Here is an interesting article about how UK proposes to teach children how to Twitter, use Wikipedia, and how to blog as a learning process. All that in primary schools.

Have a look at:

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/please-sir-how-do-you-re-tweet-twitter-to-be-taught-in-uk-primary-schools/

Once such collaboration is taught at primary schools it will rapidly change how an entire generation learns.

Blogs & Wikis for Learning — a few resources…

, Sharing. Collaboration. Community. Expression. These are all buzz words which dominate the 'learning' scene these days.

Blogs and wikis are essentially similar since they allow you to concentrate on creating content by letting you quickly create or update a website without the hassle of learning the technology or the programming which makes it possible. While a blog is, almost always, a tool of personal expression, a wiki is a more collective expression of information.

The Google For Educators page summarizes several real-world applications of these learning tools:

1. They make "it easy for teachers and students to share work, class notes, and pictures online."
2. From a teacher's perspective blogs and wikis lets one " stay connected to your students, their parents, and the rest of the school…", and perform several functions like "updating parents about their children's progress" and keeping "them posted on upcoming events; publishing a class or school newsletter; sharing photos and student work; posting course documents, projects and results;…" et al.
3. A teacher could also use a blog to "…assign collaborative group projects online with an easy way to track students’ progress…"
4. Among a host of other things, students can use blogs and wikis to:
1. "…Communicate ideas, photos and class notes…"
2. "…Create hubs for collecting information for both long and short-term projects…"
3. "…Store information as unpublished drafts…"
4. "…Collect feedback on their work from classmates, teachers and parents…:
5. Participate in "…collaborative projects where multiple students can work and comment…"

A few good resources mentioned in the same place has a number of resources which make for very interesting reading:

• The Teaching Today tips section
  
• The eMINTS section about blogs and wikis
• Examples of how blogs are being used for learning on my-ecoach.com

Interesting Ways to Use Twitter for Learning

I found an interesting blogpost from Sarda's twitter about how people can use Twitter for learning stuff. The examples are quite interesting.

P2P in your Flash Player? - Possible impact on learning

Just read a blog entry (http://gigaom.com/2008/05/15/flash-p2p-now-thats-disruptive/ ) about the new Flash Player (10). It appears that they have built in a P2P (peer-to-peer) capability right into the player.

Reading on the internet is akin to swimming in a whirlpool of information. Soon I was reading about Microsoft’s own plans for P2P. Not within the SilverLight scheme of things but as LiveMesh (http://mmwp.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/live-mesh-the-ultimate-p2p-platform/ )

Having something like Napster, Kazaa, and eMule in-built into something like the Flash Player is super cool. Sure it rocks not having to install another application and just using a RIA (Rich Internet Application) to share files without the dependency of a server. The question which started ticking in my brain is WHAT could be the possible impact on learning systems and applications?

Here are some possibilities which spring to mind, most of them relate to collaborative learning:

1. Turbo-charged eLearning with:
1. File sharing as a part of the learning experience for:

i. Distributing and collecting assessment responses. (Most P2P stacks inherently allow control over who can see, use, and access your shared data)

ii. VoIP and Video sharing interactions as a part of designed activity

iii. Team activities which have dependencies (e.g. a live elearning activity on film making where the script, storyboard, music, video clips all do the rounds and end up as a film which is assessed)

2. Richer gaming environments using Flash (or even SilverLight linked to Live Mesh) which allows team activities based on VoIP communication and collaboration.
3. Knowledge management extensions which make it easier to gather inputs using RIAs and connected crossover desktop applications. It is not like this does not happen already. It just means that it will now become easier yet.

Learning ideas apart, I was thinking of the advantages which translate into immediate advantages:

1. Learning applications built using these advantages will become easier to port and use across platforms, OSs (Operating Systems), and devices (for example http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/04/microsoft-mesh.html says “Live Mesh synchronizes and shares data across multiple machines — currently that means Windows PCs, but look for Windows Mobile as well as Mac OS X support to be added later this year.” )
2. An organization will not need to invest in an expensive server (Like Flash Communication Server) just to use simple features which can be used by the P2P in-built. This will be a significant contributor to it’s spread
3. Both Adobe’s Flash Player (by virtue of it’s almost absolute presence across browsers) and the Windows platforms (by virtue of it’s operating system market domination) have enormous and almost immediate reach.

Like most new technologies it may seem interesting but it remains to be seen if we can USE it to some learning advantage.