Evernote

The Evernote tagline is "Remember Everything" and it really does help to deliver on that promise.  Evernote is a combination note-taking and storing application with some great features to help categorize your notes using either notebooks and / or tags that are then easily searched.  You can quickly and easily add images, web pages, emails, and whatever you can think of in addition to basic text editing functionality.  Evernote will even scan through the images and other documents (if you want) so that everything is searchable.  As a bonus, Evernote is available on most platforms (including the Mac, web, and iPhone which are the ones that I use) and synchronizes between them all.  You can also share your Evernote libraries selectively with other folks who need to see or edit them.

I use Evernote for almost everything at this point.  On the work front, I'm using it to keep track of design decisions and brainstorming (including images of the whiteboards), take notes in meetings, track my to-do lists for everything, and keep a list of readings and technologies to follow up with (to name a few).  On the personal side of things, I keep track of other to-do lists, travel information, recipes, and my grocery list.

Evernote is also Free, though there are some bonuses for those willing to get the premium account, and I find it is well worth it.

Evernote is also extensible, and a number of 3rd party developers have put together some pretty neat solutions.  My favorite at the moment is EgretList for the iPhone.  EgretList is a to-do list manager that pulls in anything that has a checkbox from your Evernote library into a set of easily organized to-do lists that can be grouped by urgency, location, project, or whatever you can think of. 

Writing, Identity, and Web 2.0, 2010

For this representation to make any sense, you will definitely want to click on the image and see it enlarged.

This week we read about digital storytelling (Hull and Katz, 2006), fanfiction (Black, 2006), and some of the tensions with applying Web 2.0 practices in education (Dohn, 2009). While there are a number of incredibly important issues being raised by each of these authors, there were three big ideas that struck me that I wanted to include in this response: 1) the role of these various tools in helping individuals to express and shape their identity; 2) the relative absence of discussion of specific tools; and 3) the different relationships with other individuals that were suggested by each of these. In looking at these, I have intentionally simplified the 3 models in ways that some viewers may take issue with (if so, I hope you will comment!). I have also made some potentially contentious choices about when to give individuals complex identities or not. Those choices reflect what I perceived as the relative importance of discussing those identities in the various papers, not a belief on anyone’s part that individuals in certain contexts lose or flatten their identities.

More than ever, given this week’s theme, I hope you will all post comments, suggestions, and critiques below.

• Black, R. W. (2006). Language, Culture, and Identity in Online Fanfiction. E-Learning, 3(2), 170-170.
• Dohn, N. B. (2009). Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(3), 343–363.
• Hull, G. A., & Katz, M.-L. (2006). Creating an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling. Research in the Teaching of English, 41(1), 43-81.

Virtual Worlds, 2010

This week we talked about Virtual Worlds. The content of this image is related primarily to a paper about the spread of the WhyPox outbreak in Whyville (you can see a host of Whyville-related research at http://kafai-whyville.blogspot.com). However, I think that all of the papers that we read this and in the previous unit on games discuss both the power of virtual experiences to situate learning, and also raise a question about how and when that learning moves out of the virtual world.

Computational Literacy, 2010

I’m struggling this week with how to make the full range and scope of a literacy visible to students in the context of computational literacy as inspired by diSessa’s (2000) book, Changing Minds. It seems that most people either “get it” and therefore don’t need a description, or would need quite a bit of exposure to truly grasp the implications. It feels similar to trying to explain to a 5 year-old why literacy is so much more powerful than their understanding the storybook in front of them, long before they have even begun to appreciate all of the powerful ways that the ability to read and write can transform their daily life. This drawing, therefore, attempts to sidestep the issue by focusing on some of the underlying assumptions of what it might mean to reach a point where computational literacy is accessible to all, as Wing (2008) and diSessa (2000) would encourage us to strive for.

CIP, 2010

This post is in response to the chapter on Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) theories of learning. There were many directions this could have gone, but a lot of the forum discussions this year seem to be about memory with a focus on encoding and recall. That inspired the library theme. The references to radiation and General are a nod to the famous Glick and Holyoak transfer study. For some reason, they came to mind when I was trying to think about a topic to search for in memory. If you are wondering why… ask the librarian!

Participatory Simulations, 2010

This dtg is a response to:
Colella, V. (2000). Participatory simulations: Building collaborative understanding through immersive dynamic modeling. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(4), 471-500.

Simulation and Modeling Software, 2010

This was inspired by several of this week’s readings that all focused on how various kinds of computational software can make complex science concepts more accessible to students of all ages. Notably:

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“The Class”

Just saw this video linked on Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography Blog which includes a brief discussion of its origins as a class project in Lynn Schofield Clark’s Innovation in Mass Communications class at the University of Denver, and some of the benefits of doing such a project. It’s a really nice framing of a few of the common problems that arise when people try to integrate technology in the classroom, and even has the Office theme song which is always a bonus.

Intelligence in Technology, 2010

The dtg this week was designed for two purposes. First, I was responding to Koedinger & Corbett (2006) and Schwartz, Biswas, Leelawong & Davis (2007). These two book chapters discuss technologies that were modeled in very different but interesting ways on the success of human tutors and interactions, as well as a rich understanding of the content domain. Second, we have been drawing and refining models of how technology can support educational ecosystems in class. This is my attempt to infer a general model from the two readings so that we can discuss the limitations of my inference and the underlying models in class. My goal is that this will serve as the center for an interesting conversation about both the readings and the modeling process in general.

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Google PigeonRank™; Skinner would be proud

I don't think any discussion of behaviorism is complete without this old April Fool's joke from google: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html