This is a list of the works I produced for the Educational Technlogies class at Harvard Extension School.
I signed up for this course even though I'm not a professional teacher because I wanted to develoop better understanding of the topic to guide me in my work on the Sugar Learning Platform. The course was very challenging for me, but I the things I learned certainly exceed my initial expectations.
I created an profile in The Yard, the online community portal of the Educational Technologies course.
My profile page acts as a hub from which I can link to my online resources. It also lets me join the E-102 group, which is the main vehicle of online interaction with my instructors and classmates.
I created a Top Ten List using del.icio.us bookmarks to help answer my research question:
"What technologies can be used for measuring knowledge acquisition of learners in a constructionist environment?"
This assignment turned out to be extremely hard for me to carry on because the question I had chosen, expecially in its original formulation, was truly a reserch question with no well established answer.
This concept-map was supposed to drive me through my research.
The suggested software package to carry on this assignment was Inspiration. However, due to my personal preference of using FreeSoftware whenever possible, I opted for another software package for Linux called Labyrinth, which also exists as a Sugar Activity.
Labyrinth has very few features, but its interaction model is nice and minimalistic, which is what you generally want mind-mapping software to be.
TODO
Using the Pecha Kucha format, I gave a quick presentation of 10 slides, 10 seconds each.
The presentation is available in several formats:
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike. The individual images contained within the presentation are the property of their respective authors and may be subject to different licensing policies.
I recommend people to use open formats and open web standards when creating presentations. As you can see, they do not detract from the quality of the result and let you share the result of your work with more people, regardless of what computer platform they have.
My Web Portfolio an online resource summarizing all the work done during the course, which is what you're reading right now.
I chose to carry on this assignment using my personal web site, powered by my own minimalistic wiki engine called GeekiGeeki. Anonymous changes are allowed, you can edit this page by clicking on the EditPage button in the navbar.
For our final presentation project, we were asked to learn about a specific teaching technology, become experts in it and then write a review appropriate for an educational magazine.
Because picking Sugar would have been way too obvious for me, I chose to review Alice instead. This is the result:
Blah blah blah open standards will rule the world
Blogging was the biggest opportunity for us to interact with our classmates and reflect about our learning experience. It did indeed bind us together as an online learning community.
A few years ago, before blogs became popular, I taught a class of GameProgramming, in which I made all my students subscribe to a mailing-list to discuss the project. Students spontaneusly took the habit to post reflections and proposals to the list, creating a very dynamic interaction. At the end of the semester, the archives contained over 500 posts.
My favorite blog posts: