Revolution and Education... website proposed

Mon May 2 19:47:19 EDT 2005

Dear all,

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 most of the staff is, simply put, technologically inept.  
Whenever I try to advocate the use of Revolution I only cause 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. The more  
I try to persuade my HoD to use existing eLearning tools to remedy  
some *inefficient* teaching practices they currently have, the more I  
can feel myself being very negatively noticed (change is a cause of  
discomfort for some people). 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.  
Obviously, my assignment partner and I decided to write this  
assignment 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/