Why I Left Eduspaces

I recently moved my blog from Eduspaces to WordPress. Eduspaces is built on the Elgg platform, which enables you to create your own social network. The Eduspaces network is devoted to educators, which is a great idea… but it’s not quite there.

Here’s a few things I’d like to see Elgg improve upon:

• There’s no way to separate quality content from the rest. As I said in a comment on the Internet Time forums, Eduspaces needs a way to recommend content. When you log in, you’re normally greeted with a mountain of blog posts. A recent article on Wired talks about how Daily Kos gets around this issue. Users are able to vote, promote, and rank content created by the community.
• I couldn’t see what my “friends” were doing. When you log in to Facebook, you can see that Friend A added Friend B to their contacts list. Friend C joined Group A. Friend D wrote a new blog post…. and so on. Elgg does allow you to view your “Friends’ Blog”, which compiles all of your friends’ posts into one list. That’s a good start…
• After trying WordPress, adding the WordPress app to Facebook, and joining a few e-learning Facebook groups, I really don’t have much of a need for Eduspaces. Most Eduspaces folks are on Facebook, and they’re much more active there (most likely for some of the reasons I’ve listed above).

I hope this doesn’t sound too critical of Elgg. I think it’s a great idea. I like that it’s open source.  I just think it needs some work.

Wii + Second Life for Training Simulations

Nice article on Wired about a firm who is helping organizations build training simulations using a “Wii-mote” in Second Life.

A few examples were cited:

• a company interested in training workers for its power plants
• a manufacturer of medical devices
• pest-control firm Orkin, who is hoping “…to create training simulations, which might involve inspecting a house for moisture and heat sources or mixing chemicals and loading them onto a truck.

Cool cool cool…

Text Your Own Adventure w/ Spiderman

I stumbled upon this video a few days ago… it’s a Text Your Own Adventure w/ Spiderman! Remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books? Well, this sorta works the same way.

Basically, you watch a video in which Spiderman tries to save the world from the Golden Girls and trans-fats. At the end of the video, you send a text message to choose your ending. Either spiderman uses his power for evil, spiderman loses to the girls, or spiderman wins… you decide. Once you send a text message with the ending of your choice, you get a message in return that includes instructions on viewing your ending. Click the thumbnail below to see an example:

This is a pretty interesting use of text messaging, and it made me curious if e-learning professionals had begun trying something similar. After all, many colleges are already beginning to adopt text messaging as an option for broadcasting announcements to students. I don’t suppose it would be a giant leap for faculty to begin sending pop quizzes, scavenger hunts, hints/tips, reminders, and other messages via text.

Mlearning-world.com recently posted several good examples of using text messaging for education. The first example is a “data burst”:

To improve her team’s sales skills, a sales manager polled her top sales consultants as to key aspects of different products that resulted in sales. She also gathered information from various sales training courses. Gathering all of the information collected, she organized this into 100-200 word chunks like the following two examples:

Sales Tip: Use Examples- ABC corporation saved $100 a month by switching from RDI 750 to 1000.

Did You Know: The RDI 1000 can handle 5 times the users as the 750.

The next example was a scavenger hunt:

The new Customer Service representatives were sent to random retail stores they supported. Challenges were sent to their mobile phones and the students would text back their answers. In one example, the students were challenged to find the price of a specific model of digital camera. The students would search the store to find the camera and either take a picture with their phone and send it or text the answer back. This gave the students a customer experience in searching for products their customers would want to find.

Has anyone out there tried any learning activities via text messaging? If so how’d it go?

Kudos to anyone who can comment using only text messaging abbreviations.

Re-posted from my abandoned Eduspaces blog