PW The new issue of AAC&U News is now available.

PW The new issue of Diversity & Democracy, is now available. This is of particular interest to my colleagues in Houston because our city will host the AAC&U-sponsored conference entitled Facing the Divides: Diversity, Learning, and Pathways to Inclusive Excellence next October. Conference info and the call for proposals are now available online.

Tom Krieglstein We're excited to partner with The Student Affairs Collaborative for an upcoming webinar on Leveraging Social Media for Increased Student Engagement. This webinar is an updated version of our last webinar in December on the same topic. The biggest update...

Tom Krieglstein Kansas State University's "Students Helping Students" campaign has the potential to be a national theme for peer-to-peer learning. For those who've had us on campus working with your student leaders, you should recognize the Blender Events and Flash Mobs throughout...

Τμήμα Α3 - 3ου Γυμνασίου Ρόδου

• Toshio Mochizuki , Senshu University
• Hiroki Oura , The University of Tokyo
• Tomomi Sato , The University of Tokyo
• Toshihisa Nishimori , The University of Tokyo
• Mio Tsubakimoto , The University of Tokyo
• Jun Nakahara , The University of Tokyo
• Yuhei Yamauchi , The University of Tokyo
• Johannson Henrik , SGI Japan, Ltd.
• Ken-ichiro Matsumoto , SGI Japan, Ltd.
• Shin-ichi Watanabe , Microsoft Development, Co.,Ltd.

Best Technology Design Nominee

The authors developed reading support software “eJournalPlus” designed to assist learners in not only reading texts but also constructing their own opinions from it. Since it is difficult for learners to reach a sufficient level of critical reading skills through reading only by themselves, a collaborative learning function was added to allow learners to share their ideas and facilitate discussion in order to assist learners in considering their own opinion more critically and promoting their critical thinking.
Full text in PDF

Τμήμα Α3 - 3ου Γυμνασίου Ρόδου

• Sarah Lewis , Stanford University
• Roy Pea , Stanford University
• Joe Rosen , Stanford University

We describe the design of a mobile media application for informal learning. Mobltz supports multimedia conversations and digital storytelling using mobile phones. Designed to be accessible in places in which a mobile phone may be the only Internet access, it facilitates shared understanding by privileging the “telling” of the story over the final story itself. Stories can be remixed and retold. The application is a work in progress; in the poster session at CSCL we will report on patterns of use from three informal learning situations.
Full text in PDF

Earlier this week, we released DyKnow 5.3 (in case you've missed it, I've collected the posts about 5.3 here), and the past two weeks I have spent way more of my time in the lab testing the product than I have making coding changes at my desk.  This is a good thing as it means we've finished up development on features and known issues for the release.  It's also been good, though, to get reacquainted with some older features that I don't commonly see or hear about.

An interesting theme I see in DyKnow Vision has been one of providing students a way to participate anonymously.  In many ways, this feels like a terrible idea.  We've all seen what anonymity on the Internet has done to people, and introducing a veil in between you and between your students feel counterproductive to engaging.  However, someone must have realized and communicated to us that sometimes embarrassment can stifle engagement even more.  And I'll admit maybe I'm reading too much of this narrative into some of these features, but once I started seeing it, I saw it everywhere.

When testing you tend to identify a particular feature and spend a lot of time ensuring that all aspects of that feature are working, and the place I started this past week was in the Options dialog.  Perhaps the most obvious and most discussed of the "anonymous" features I recognized is the "Allow Anonymous Panel Submission" feature in the "Session" section of the Options dialog.  I mentioned this last week, but by checking this checkbox, students will be able to submit panels anonymously.  I recall back in 5.1 when discussing feature usage and importance (when trying to determine how to group and position features), several users called the feature indispensable when discussing sensitive topics.

Continuing my testing of the Options, I noticed on the "Popular" section options for the Session List.  

For those that don't know, the Session List is a list of all the students in your Vision Session.  The list displays their name as well as other additional information such as their status (how well they understand the topic), their submitted panels, their current work group number, and whether you have shared control (letting students demonstrate how to work out problems for the rest of the class).  When students have submitted panels, you can just click on the panel beside the student and it will open up the panel for you to see.  If you want to virtually bring a student up to the board, you click the students name in the Session List and click the Share Control button and they're in control.  

Back to the options, I noticed that there were all these checked options that said "Show Name/UserID on Session List," "Show Participant status on Session List," "Show submitted panels on Session List," etc.  Of course by default these were checked because it doesn't seem like it'd be much of a list if it didn't show anything.  But when I thought about it, if you're running DyKnow on a projector in front of the class (and not using projector mode), all your students would be able to see that Johnny's just not getting it.  Sometimes, this is what you want as it may encourage your students to help Johnny.  Other times, this will embarrass Johnny to where he shuts off or just stops updating his status.  So then there's an option to hide the different fields.  You can hide the user's name so you'll see that the students who haven't submitted panels don't get it.  If students are in work groups you can see Group 4 is having trouble.  If you want the names, you can hide the status (you still have the pie chart at the bottom to let you know if students are having problems.  

Continuing on, right above Session List options, you've got an option to Identify Users on Panels.  This is useful when students have submitted panels, but if you don't want it to show, there you go.  Later on in the day, I was running a session and sent a quick poll.  In 5.1 you were suddenly able to know how each individual student responded to the poll, but if you felt that would censor the responses, you can make the answers "anonymous."

So there's been this big theme throughout the product that I never noticed till now.  Only took me 7 years to see it.  So given my track record, is there something I missed for promoting anonymous conversation?

For DyKnow 5.2, as I often mention, we totally rewrote the DyKnow panel to be more stable and more WYSIWYG (specifically the rendering of text).  Because of a few of the technology choices we made along the way, we also saw an increase in performance.  In fact we saw a major increase in performance.  As promised (last year) I ran through some benchmark tests for drawing notebooks to share just how much performance we've gained in 5.2.  In my benchmark ink test, DyKnow 5.1 drew the panel in an average of 4.3 seconds.  DyKnow 5.2 however, drew the panel in an average of 1.7 seconds.  In my benchmark text and images test, DyKnow 5.1 drew the panel in an average of 4.6 seconds with a standard deviation of 3.1 (the range was 2.8 to 11.8 seconds).  DyKnow 5.2, however, averaged 0.3 seconds with a standard deviation of 0.1 seconds (the range was 0.2 to 0.6).



Additionally, 5.1 was much less responsive when performing actions such as zooming and scrolling around panels.  So 5.2 came out and we developers felt very good about the increased performance.  And then something very interesting happened.  Now that the client was running so much faster when dealing with lots of ink, we noticed notebooks that contained lots of ink.  Significantly more ink than what we'd seen in the past.  We're talking zooming the client to 250% zoom and writing as small as you can to cram in as much as possible.  These were not the usage patterns we'd seen before.  

Now we started looking at the time it took to save all this ink when saving your notebooks.  Based on some of your feedback and this new usage data, we found a few ways that really sped up save times and put out a server patch with these improvements.  But we haven't stopped there.  Following our initial stress test for DyKnow 5.3, we implemented changes to improve performance when submitting or retrieving very large panels in a Session.  We're also working on ensuring institution-wide scalability for our new file request feature (speaking of pushing lots of data).  For the past few weeks, it has been all about squeezing out as much performance as possible, especially under these high load situations.  And this is how DyKnow can be used to engage an entire lecture hall with hundreds of students.  It's a continual push but so worth it.