Feb

18

Some thoughts on Del.icio.us

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Liz Davis, who’s part of my del.icio.us network, has put together this video on Del.icio.us networks.

Jan

11

WikiJunior: Online Texts

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WikiJunior is an impressive little site that aims to be online textbooks for classrooms that don’t have them, or don’t want them. It’s written at a much lower level than everyone’s favorite wiki, Wikipedia. This makes it suitable for much younger readers, possible those in junior high.

WikiJunior boasts a dozen “titles” that cover several different subject and an initial look at them suggests to me that the material here is at least as good as many textbooks I’ve seen. Because wikis are built collaboratively, not everything is covered. The topics that have been worked on are those that someone or other found interesting and so chose to do. However, if what you want your students to learn about isn’t there yet, the solution is an easy one: contribute to this wiki yourself.

Jan

9

Travian.us: A Virtual World

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For the past three weeks or so I’ve been playing in a virtual world located at www.travian.us. This is a game you play entirley in your Internet browser - there is nothing to download - where you play the ruler of a Roman, Gaulish, or Teutonic village. You attempt to build up your own village’s resources, form alliances with other villages for mutual self defence or aggression and possibly attack and conquer nearby villages.

Of course, all of this has to be done while conserving and stewarding your resources. You have clay, iron, wheat, and wood, and all seem to be continually in short supply. It takes time to build up a big enough supply to build a military unit, upgrade a field, or build a building. Because of this the game is not played all at once but in short intervals over many, many weeks.

As a simulation, it’s not bad. Each type of village has its own peculiarities. For example, as a Gaulish village I can build a phalanx unit which I understand other civilizaitons cannot. (A phalanx is one of the strongest defensive units the game 0ffers.) As a Gaulish village, I can also build a cranny which is a location where I can hide a portion of my accumulated resources in the event an enemy raids my village to steal my supplies.

I’m tempted to have my Grade 12 Western Civ students play this game but two things are holding me back. One: I’ve been playing for weeks and haven’t made a lot of progress. It’s a very slow game and I only get my students for five months. I’m not sure we’d finish the game (well, you can’t finish, it goes on and on) or at least get to a reasonable point. Two: In the particular game I’m in, there are over 10,000 players. That, of course, can make the game better, but as a teacher I’m not sure who those other people are. I can insist my students interact with each other but I can’t control all those other players. Their conduct may not always be appropriate when they send messages to my students. If I was playing with adults, that would be one thing, but when you’re in charge of underage students you have to be careful where you send them.

It’s an intruging game, none the less. If it interestss you, there are versions available in different languages. If you visit travian.info you can find out some of the national domains (travian.es, travian.cn, etc) that are available.

Dec

20

I went away for a conference. Sort of.

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I spent much of a two week period in October at a conference all about using computers in the classroom. I went to about six different presentations, hearing speakers from all over the world. The cool part is that I never boarded a plane, I never left town, and, in order to do this, I never even left the school where I work.

The K-12 Online Conference was held entirely on the Internet. This was the first time I’ve ever been to a conference like this, and it left me thinking. The format has enormous power, but there are problems, too.

Inexpensive: It didn’t cost me anything to go to this conference. Of course, it did cost money for the organizers. They had to pay for web space to post the presentations, and bandwidth used when everything was downloaded. Yet to fly in one speaker and put him in a hotel for a few nights is hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. You can have an awful lot of people download a presentation for the cost of bringing in one live speaker. If they’d actually had to fly in the more than a dozen presenters who were part of the conference the costs would have been enormous.

Accessible: Thousands of folks from all over the world were able to “go” to this conference. Presenters from right here in Manitoba, over in Alberta, and all over the U.S.A. were able to make it to the conference without ever leaving home. This meeting brought ideas to people who would never normally have been able to hear them

Ready when you are: I’m a dad and a full time teacher. I don’t have the option of going away to a conference for a few days, let alone two weeks. I don’t have that kind of time. I was able to download the presentations when I had time and listen to them on my MP3 player whenever I was ready. That’s convenience.

Personalized: Presenters were able to personalize their presentations in ways that can’t be done face-to-face. Some of the presentations were done in multiple locations as the speakers tried to illustrate different points by videoing themselves outdoors and, later on, in a classroom. The presentations weren’t confined to a lecture hall or a dusty church basement. They could be wherever the speaker could bring his laptop computer. He was limited only by his imagination.

This is only the second time this particular online conference has run, so the opportunity to personalize presentations was not used nearly as well as it might have been. Not all speakers left you sitting on the edge of your seat, but there is a potential there that doesn’t exist with live presentations.

Impersonal: I never met a single person who was at the conference. Make no mistake, I’m a huge fan of Internet collaboration. Over the Internet, I’ve gotten all kind of help with classroom projects from teachers I’ve never me. These people have been an enormous help to me and are collectively a resource that I never would have had access to if I could only have talked to them in person. Yet you do lose something when you can’t talk about the speech with the person who was sitting next to you. It’s fun to have coffee (or tea) with some of the others who heard the same speaker and see if they reacted the same way.

While there were online discussion areas, and places to leave comments for the presenters, somehow that’s just not the same as being there live. It’s the difference between listening to a CD or going to a concert. One is good, the other is better.

The speakers, too, could have benefited from having a live audience. A good teacher, minister, or public speaker watches his audience to see if they’re interested in what he’s saying and changes what he says and how he says it in order to keep his audience engaged. Never seeing their audience, the conference speakers didn’t have this opportunity. Consequently, their material while uniformly interesting, was sometimes a little awkward and clunky in the delivery.

Do-able: The main thing that I fascinated me about these presentations was how easy and inexpensive it would be to duplicate this conference in a different setting. The software you need is cheap or free. The hardware, aside from a computer, consists of a ten dollar mike and a twenty dollar webcam. The hosting, if you were inventive, could be free if you used YouTube or a site like that.

It has potential for Christian churches and educators. In October a local church brought in a speaker from New York to talk about evangelism. He was heard by hundreds of people here in town. He could have stayed home and been heard by those hundreds and thousands more if they had broadcast his message over the Internet.

A group of Reformed Christian principals gathered recently in Washington state. They came from around the world. For the dozens of people who attended and paid conference fees and travel costs, the conference cost them many thousands of dollars in total. Had the convention been held on the Internet, it might have cost only hundreds and could have brought in speakers from around the world. While they would have missed the face-to-face contact, they could’ve benefited from a wider range of speakers and a lower cost.

Churches and independent schools need contact with experts and thinkers outside of their immediate community. Often they don’t get the number of speakers they want, or the quality of presenters they desire because of monetary and distance limitations. This presentation format, while it’s not perfect, could sure help overcome some of those issues.

This was originally published in Reformed Perspective.

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