We need an open source educational clicker tool.

Educators have long acknowledged that clickers are a fantastic academic tools. They both engage students through a game-like approach (because participation becomes competitive and therefore more fun) and provide a mechanism for instantaneous assessment across a large student population. Clickers also reduce shyness and fear of failure while simultaneously keeping students awake and engaged. Research in the 2007 Educause Quarterly proves that clickers are an active learning tool that creates positive educational outcomes.

But clickers can be expensive. And most schools - particularly K-12 - are already struggling to provide basic supplies and resources.  Because most classrooms can’t afford to spend money on interactive learning tools, the students and teachers that could benefit most are left out of this engaging educational activity. In response, we need a mobile application that allows students and teachers to use clicker technology without purchasing expensive proprietary hardware.

One cool company, Socrative founded by the Harvard Ed School grads, allows students to participate in virtual learning spaces live in class through smartphones and laptops with polls, games, and exercises. While their technology is fantastic, it still requires a laptop or smartphone. Meanwhile, a cool open source project from the folks at Code for America, called ClassTalk, affords simple messaging and polling via text messaging.

Because most every student in America has an SMS-capable cell phone, the ClassTalk code could be modified to replicate all of the necessary features of clickers.  Best of all, the code would all be open source so ed tech enthusiasts could modify and improve the software for the benefit of everyone.

This Open Source Clicker technology would be useful within and without the classroom. Beyond education, this technology could be used to organize and solicit feedback during political rallies, concerts, or gatherings.  It could even enable crowd-sourced deals like Groupon based on the real-time mood of subscribers!

Without ado, let’s harness the new group-messaging movement for educational purposes and the good of society at large.

We need more online book clubs and social annotation.

More online community: Internet entrepreneurs have recently declared that the social layer of the Web has been built- as in, entirely completed. Though much can be read into that thought, social networks have yet to impact how we read the literature, that CS Lewis extols. Projects such as Infinite Summer and 1book140 have begun to create communities of readers online around common texts. When we call for more social reading, we mean that the reading itself—not just the discussion—should connect our respective, raw, and visceral experience to the printed word.  

Pleasure of the text: When we say printed, we remain aware of the rise and benefits of e-ink. Whether you’re reading on a Kindle, Nook, IPad, or monitor, you should have the same freedom to add margin notes - aka annotations - which you can share with others in your online distributed book club with engaged readers everywhere. Imagine the benefits of social annotations for books by Gogol, Gladwell, or Godin. 

For example, 1book140, which draws over 12,000 readers to a Twitter-based book club, fills its Twitter page with the ultra-brief musings and reflections on topics such as humor, cynicism, and unreliable narrators. A wealth of anotations to the online version of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It makes a good read even better. While social reading network Goodreads doesn’t connect users with annotations, it has attracted over five million users with shared reviews and recommendations. With a recently announced machine learning algorithm, the network will attempt to translate Netlfix’s success with movies to the realm of literature. Goodreads’ success attests to the need for more online book clubs, particularly those that enmesh the best features of online forums with the (digital) page itself.

Implementation: Several e-readers, including licensed hardware and cross-platform apps, offer the rudiments of the social features we’re calling for, but none have yet emerged as clear leaders in the field of social reading. The Nook does not enable social annotation; the Kindle does, though only since 2011. Taking a tip or two from location-based apps, Kobo invites readers to check-in with characters and scenes. Copia offers a cross-platform e-reader and network rolled into none. The latter two, however, have yet to gain widespread popularity.  As all of these services improve, we hope to continue to build online community through the pleasure of the text.

 Citation: Andrew Magliozzi

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

We need a mechanical turk for Educational Services

The genesis of this idea came from this past week, which I spent at the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resources Grantees meeting.  In addition to some great individuals at the cutting edge of open education, there were also a number of teachers there to report on their needs.  Here is some of what I learned.

The Problem

According to many of the teachers in attendance, there are significant needs that the community of non-teachers has the capacity to support.  The most commonly cited need was for IT support in schools.  Others requested help curating or creating multimedia content to share in class - anything from a photo of a cumulonimbus cloud to the perfect video clip. 
Although most citizens care about the academic wellbeing of children, few join PTOs, lobby school boards, or actually volunteer their time.  Though there is a desire to “do something,” most people don’t really know how they can help. 
The Solution

To me, it seems clear that teachers and potential volunteers need a single portal to share their specific needs and desire to help in very clear and deliverable terms.  What we need is a Mechanical Turk-like site for teachers to post small tasks for the crowd of enthusiastic volunteers in their community to complete.  This would operate online - much liked Sparked.com - but have a local geographic component - much like Craigslist.  
This will take some work on the part of teachers to divide their tasks into manageable pieces.  Rather than a dedicated IT person, a teacher will need to identify small tasks that a volunteer could easily complete in five to sixty minutes: setting up a wireless router, donating an old IPod touch, sharing photos, giving a career talk, etc.  Likewise, the community will have to prove its willingness to support education by completing these tasks in a speedy fashion.  
One of the first and most frequent tasks that I’d like to see on a site like that would be to simply find and thank a teacher for doing such an important job.  If teachers have the community support they rightly deserve, every student will benefit.
The Implementation

I get the feeling this needs to launch as a simple site in a single school district.  Here’s looking at you, Cambridge, MA.  Hopefully a proof of concept would encourage additional adoption and support in other communities across the country.  The imperative remains: will someone please steal this idea from me.
Attribution: Andrew Magliozzi

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Top