Here's a cool iPhone app that I just learned about: Poem Flow.
It's quite simple. Mobile poetry. A poem a day (from the public domain), fed to your iPhone, animated (flowing) on your screen (using a technology from TextFlows).
I'm intrigued. I do find that it adds an element to experiencing the poetry, much as hearing poetry read aloud adds to the experience.
What do you think?
Is it multimedia? (I have my own opinions on the matter which I'll share later.) And do you see potential educational uses?
Podcasting may not seem like a very interactive medium. The podcaster plans, creates, and publishes. Listeners ... well, they listen. A podcast could be embedded in a setting that allows for human interaction (e.g. discussion forum, blog), but on its own it's just an audio file.
A company called Waxxi* was promoting interactive podcasting. Essentially, the interaction takes place at the point of recording. Think of a call-in radio show, recorded and put on the web as an mp3 with a feed.
I'm posting this mostly for the idea -- that podcast creation might be done in this way. It's sort of like podcasting a lecture/discussion from a live class. What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses when considering it for instructional purposes?
*Note: The Waxxi stuff all goes back to 2006-07. I can't find more recent info. Not sure what happened to them, didn't really take the time to further investigate.
Voxopop is a web-based audio tool that allows speakers to record their thoughts AND respond to other speakers. I can see some great educational uses for this tool. If you join you can listen to discussions and record on the discussions. You do not have to join in order to listen.
Here is an example: http://www.voxopop.com/topic/822f37a4-0a87-403d-aace-e63dad23ac2a
What are your thoughts about this tool? If anyone wants to start an audio discussion to try out the tool, please feel free and let the rest of us know so we can join.
Yesterday while sitting in the pediatrician's waiting room, baby sleeping in the carrier, iPhone annoyingly not picking up a signal, I played with a game on my phone. I hadn't played the game in a while, and it was reset back at the first level. Thus, I got to experience it fresh (although with some knowledge that I did not have the first time).
The game was Geared. It's a fairly simple game in which you begin with two gears on the edges of the screen, one moving and one not, and a set number of interim gears of various sizes that you drop onto the screen, using virtual gravity as a force, in an attempt to connect the first two gears and create a chain of turning gears.
One thing I was struck by as I contemplated the game yesterday was the way in which the game teaches you how to play along the way. The concepts build slowly. First you drop in one gear, in an obvious (middle) position. As you move through levels you're led to new concepts: connecting multiple gears, dealing with the force of gravity while placing gears, placing big gears along tangents so they can effectively close small gaps, etc.
This is how good self-paced multimedia programs work, I think. They don't overwhelm you with directions up front (and who pays attention to those anyway -- HELLO temporal contiguity), but rather embed them. You learn the system/technology as you learn the content. The cognitive load focused on learning the system is secondary and minimal throughout.
Games in general excel at this type of self-teaching simplicity. Instructional multimedia, not so much. But the fields are merging in many ways (or, perhaps better put, instruction is learning from gaming).
On a closing note, here's a youtube video showing the solutions to the various Geared levels. I'm not watching it (just saw the first few screens) because I'm trying to play the game in my spare moments and I like the challenge. However, it might make this concept of which I speak (write) here a bit more vivid for you.
Char recently posted an example of Jing on the classroom discussion. Her example is under the "Modality" thread under the "Why not more narration in distance learning?" post.
Aside from Char's example, can you think of ways in which this tool can be used for educational and training purposes?
