Revolution and Education... website proposed

Tue May 3 09:04:49 EDT 2005

Dear all,

(Many of you will take me for a newcommer... I have bought my license long ago
and lurked on the list... I hadn't much chance to participate simply because
the questions usually get answered before I get a chance to give my 5 cents).

A few months ago (back in Oct 2004), there was an interesting thread on
educational use for revolution.

Several things emerged from this discussion:

1. A number of metacard or revolution stacks have been produced that cannot be
found anywhere on the web or in the "user".
2. There is a group of enthusiastic teachers on this list who see revolution as
having the potential to benefit their teaching.
3. Most of them have difficulties sharing their enthusiasm with colleagues in
their institution.

This was for instance, nicely expressed by Gregory [Gregory Lypny gregory.lypny
at videotron.ca]

>I have long stopped evangelizing courseware because the response I get
>from colleagues is that they do not want to be involved with its
>development.  The incentive to do the work is simply not there.  I make
>my stuff freely available to my colleagues, but their enthusiasm
>quickly peters when I explained that some work is required to get it to
>do what they want it to do.  They'll only give it a spin if it's ready
>to go right off the shelf.  [...]

I have similar difficulties. I work in a department (psychology) where
technnology causes fear and apprehension. As Judy had expressed in some of her
emails, my skills and my tendency to aim for better than what is achieved by
current practices leads to isolation rather than admiration. I can see me
loosing courage, gradually, and I feel the need for a place where I can discuss
some ideas with like-minded persons.

As Gregory mentioned:

>I should leave this with a positive spin:  courseware = cool,
>untapped potential.  We just need more impressive examples of it in
>use.

However, if it is left to me alone, in between my teaching, research, admin
duties, I do not have the time to develop an impressive example of Revolution's
use for education. Not that I am not trying. To address the problem identified
by Gregory, I have a project in gestation of a GUI editor for a large range of
web-based exercises. The idea is to select exercises written in java,
javascript, Flash, with a content that can be defined in a text file attached
to the application (see usinaquiz for examples [in French] or formator demo
[quizz section] for a working demo [enhanced for Safari and Firefox, not tested
yet with Internet Explorer Windows] and
http://revolution.lexicall.org/eLearning/AccompanyingDocs-sm.pdf fro textual
explanations). This will be developed over next summer. (See, John Mathewson
for a similar project, for a public of school teachers, at
http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html). I have another project of
an revolution application to access an on-line database of learning objects.
Another one of a database of images, for lecture illustration (I already have
on my hard disk a well organized archive of 100MB of pictures), where lecturers
could share and access their resources (see viperlib,
http://viperlib.york.ac.uk/, for such a project, in the very restricted context
of visual perception).

Still, alone, there is only so little I can do and it tends to take quite a long
time to get anything done as I do not have much time to spend on this project. I
have given a lot of thought to becoming a freelance instructional designer, but
I really doubt I would be able to make a living from it. So, I will probably
have to keep my revolution coding as a captivating hobby, to do outside of my
(already long) working hours.

Recently, in the context of a course on "teaching in digital environment" I had
been enrolled in, this time as a student, I got to write an assignment,  on
using Wiki-web for collaborative learning (my own choosing). Obviously, my
assignment partner and I decided to write it collaboratively, on a wiki-web
medium. I really enjoyed the experience. There is so much more in 2 brains than
in one... there is so much benefit of having another person's perspective on the
issue. This got me thinking... why not try something similar with the nice
people from the revolution community, this time on the use of revolution for
student-centered learning?

It happens that I recently created a website, that I use in a research context.
I could easily create a revolution subdomain to host a "revolution-education"
resource center with : (1) an archive of stacks relevant to education ( I can
provide up to 200MB), (2) a forum or even better, a wiki for the discussion of
ideas and guidelines (I have recently set-up a wiki to support one of my course
and it wouldn't be difficult to set-up another one for discussion on the them of
revolution-education). I really believe that Wikis are better than forums to
organize thoughts.

Who knows, this could lead to a book "Instructional Design with Revolution"...
with the word order that suggests that reaching teaching goals and the
provision of well-thought exercises would be more important than technical
aspects (though, both could probably be reconciled with a section on teaching
(to teachers) programming with revolution).  After all, the reluctance of
colleagues to be involved in e-Learning does not come from the fact that they
do not care about the quality of their teaching. It rather has for origin the
lack of resource printed or digital resource that would let them realize
something useful without having to spend too much time acquiring new skills. If
we want to encourage our colleagues to adopt better practices, maybe we need to
be concerned about creating resources that facilitate their efforts.

In fact, I already gave it a start:

    http://revolution.lexicall.org/

You will find there a list of links and information related to eLearning
(http://revolution.lexicall.org/eLearning/) as well as a listing of the stacks
I have already produced (under a share alike license), at
http://revolution.lexicall.org/listing.php. I will add a wiki next week-end.

Educators and non educators alike may be interested to know that this listing is
automatically produced thanks to the provision of a text file joined to the
revolution file, with the following metadata.

<resource_description>
    <name>RSS reader</name>
    <description>Still another exploration of widgets. Simple RSS
reader.</description>
     <author>Marielle Lange</author>
     <author_contact_details>N/A</author_contact_details>
     <license>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/</license>
    <url_image>mystacks/rss_reader.gif</url_image>
    <url_information>N/A</url_information>

<url_download>http://revolution.lexicall.org/mystacks/rss_reader.rev</url_download>
</resource_description>

This means that information about the file is separate from the file itself...
It is possible to create a directory that lists stacks  hosted in the archive
as well as stacks hosted elsewhere. I can give away the php script to anybody
interested (written so to understand any metadata, organized in any number of
sections (details at: http://lexicall.org/repository/standards.php, when used
in another context).

Let me know if you are interested in taking advantage of any of this... but
please, be patient, my day job does not involve programming with revolution, I
may take a few days (i.e., next week-end) to answer your emails.

Best,
Marielle

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marielle Lange (PhD),  Psycholinguistics, Lecturer in Psychology and Informatics
University of Edinburgh, UK
Email:        M.Lange at ed.ac.uk
Homepage:  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/