lodeStar Learning Web Journal

As educators, we are hopeful that technology can help make meaningful connections between the subjects that we teach and the relevance to students' lives. We look for students to be inspired and to inquire into the historical, political, geographical, scientific, literary, technological, artful, physical world around them. We look for students to be motivated, civic minded and connected and on and on.

Lately, in that pursuit, we are the beneficiaries of a frenzy of development around the concept of Web 2.0. On a daily basis we redefine what is possible based on a new tool that has popped up on the web and that has a different take on collaborating, cataloguing, referencing, presenting, and storing. Web 2.0 tools are often free or inexpensive, easy to use and what they produce can be publicly accessible and can help our students.

The bonanza of Web 2.0 tools is like the Wild Wild West, a rapidly changing and expanding frontier. We look onto these tools from the relative comfort of our 'East Coast' establishments -- our learning management and content management systems, our authoring tools …our pedagogy.

Of course, this is not an either-or proposition. Learning Management Systems serve a very powerful function. They afford privacy and protection. Faculty can submit their intellectual property and not fear having their rights vanish into the public domain (although, of course, there is Creative Commons). Faculty can use material copyrighted by others and be, to a greater degree, protected by an LMS that gives students a look at that material for a finite period of time and a passworded log in. Students are guided through material by design. The sequence of the material, how it is 'chunked', how the students are assessed -- are all part of that design.

But LMS and authoring systems that contribute to LMS's can be rather stagnant compared to the daily new opportunity that Web 2.0 affords. Moodle and Blackboard offer a handful of approaches to presenting and collaborating on content. The wild wild web 2.0 offers dozens.
LodeStar Learning has long had its eye on Web 2.0 technologies. A little background is helpful here to show that our commitment to harnessing the power of Web 2.0 didn't happen overnight. You may be interested in some of the milestones.

In May 2004, we first began using the Google Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable instructors to query the Google databases from within our LodeStar eLearning authoring tool. We used a powerful technology called Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services to enable the LodeStar client to leverage the power of Google for the benefit of teachers and students. We still use Web Services, and it’s at the heart of a powerful new collaboration between LodeStar Learning and a major Learning Object Repository vendor. (But that's the subject of another article.)

In September 2005, we began using Representational State Transfer (REST) through services provided by companies such as Yahoo. From the teacher's point of view, he/she simply typed in a word and got a tray of images - whether we were using SOAP or REST was of no consequence to the teacher.
The point of introducing this alphabet soup is to make one point clear. Teachers were interested in efficiently finding resources across the web. We were interested in using available technologies to make that happen. In the very near future, we will once again implement a powerful new approach to making this happen more efficiently.

In the spring of 2008, we introduced Mapper, which enabled instructors to match their instructional content to points on a Google Map using latitude, longitude and zoom level. Students could navigate a Google Map and see matching content in the form of images, text, animations, video, audio and quiz items or they could navigate through content and watch the Google Map pan, zoom and display the appropriate location markers.
In the summer of 2008, we introduced Syncher, which enabled instructors to synch up an audio podcast (streamed in from any source) with instructional content that either resides in a learning object or in external services such as Blip.TV and TeacherTube videos.

For the past year, LodeStar has had the capability of embedding Web 2.0 applications, but we have not built the needed easy-to-use interfaces for instructors to leverage these resources. Our plan for LodeStar 5.8 (summer 2009) is to make these interfaces available so that an instructor can easily embed a Web 2.0 application into a SCORM object using LodeStar and upload the object to a learning management system or learning object repository.

The following link displays a LodeStar object that walks the viewer through several embedded Web 2.0 resources. (This was made possible with LodeStar 5.7 - but the next iteration will be huge improvement.) We discuss the purpose of the resources and what we perceive as the value proposition for instructors and their students.

We'll then follow up with a discussion in our Creative Educators Using LodeStar group in Curriki. Our goal is to arrive at an interface that makes sense to instructors and that helps them to use Web 2.0 applications easily and effectively.

So here is the link to the learning object:

http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Coll_bbilyk/Web20Apps/BrancherWeb20.zip/Web_2_0/index.htm

And, if you want to participate in our CEUL group discussion in Curriki, here is how to join:

Join the LodeStar Community

If you know of some terrific Web 2.0 apps, please share by adding your comments to this blog.