Public LMS Evaluations | Mark Smithers

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Public LMS Evaluations | Mark Smithers.

This is an interesting post on decisions made by some universities regarding which LMS to choose.

Thanks to Rod Corbett for putting this in my path.

I must say that I found Moodle pretty easy to install, set up, and maintain. Since I did this on my own with NO funding, an enterprise system was not even a possibility.

 

I STILL think that a school could hire several full-time people dedicated to maintaining Moodle and still spend less money than they would for something like BlackBoard.

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What discourages girls from math and science?

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It is true that fewer women than men break into science and engineering careers today because they do not choose such careers. What isn’t true is that those choices are truly “free.”

Does hidden sexism discourage girls from math and science? – By Shankar Vedantam – Slate Magazine.

I KNEW it! Although, I’m still not comfortable with the notion that this is necessarily sexism. It might be, but I really think we should look at this more. Still,

subtle and unconscious factors skew the “free choices” we make.

Some interesting results reported in the article:

when Stout and Dasgupta evaluated how much the students identified with mathematics, they found that women ended up with less confidence in their mathematical abilities when their teachers were men rather than women. This happened even when women outperformed men on actual tests of math performance.

Even though girls are increasingly outperforming their male counterparts in math and science in school, they STILL don’t choose careers in STEM fields. Why? This article points at the fact that there aren’t enough women faculty in these fields at university.

HAH! I KNEW I was making a difference. I’d love to know the numbers on how many women in STEM fields get driven out by incompetent department heads and their sycophant sidekicks, like I did. In may case, the better I got at working with my students, the more I was attacked.

From the article:

They measured, for instance, how often each student responded to questions posed by professors to the classroom as a whole. At the start of the semester, 11 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was male, and 7 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was female. By the end of the semester, the number of female students who attempted to answer questions posed by a male professor had not changed significantly: Only 7 percent of the women tried to answer such questions. But when classes were taught by a woman, the percentage of female students who attempted to answer questions by the semester’s end rose to 46.

The researchers also measured how often students approached professors for help after class. Around 12 percent of the female students approached both male and female professors for help at the start of the semester. The number of female students approaching female professors was 14 percent at the end of the semester. But the number of female students asking for help from a male professor dropped to zero.

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Serious Game Classification : The online classification of Serious Games

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This came across the Serious Games list today and I thought it was worth sharing:

Serious Game Classification : The online classification of Serious Games.

This just came across the serious games list and may be of interest.

This is a new site that catalogs and classifies serious games on the net. This site includes all Serious Games though, and not just educational games. There are currently 2225 games listed.

People are forever looking for examples of serious games they can show to people and describe.

 

After a very superficial look, this site seems quite promising.

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The Decorative Media Principle in Action

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There are thousands (maybe even millions) of examples of the Decorative Media Principle out there in the Internets. The Decorative Media Principle involves creating a visually pleasing background and other decorations for a worksheet, website, etc. that is usually thematically connected with the instruction. The principle, although unproven is that the decoration helps to increase interest and may also increase the conceptual coherence of the learning object.

I came across this one today (this one isn’t even thematically connected):

Thinkuknow – home.

It looks fine. With the exception of the fact that it isn’t obvious how I find out who these people are and what they’re about (I suppose they assume we will just know), as a web page, it works OK.

So, what’s the problem?

Well, now that you asked……

  1. It’s NOT a game. Unless we start calling all multiple choice questions games. Sure, this one wraps the questions and answers with visually pleasing backgrounds and graphics. It even gives you sound effects when you click on something, but to call it a ‘shooting gallery’ is really stretching it. I didn’t get to shoot anything. I got to click on buttons. Somebody should tell these people that shooting games involve aiming and firing something (guns and bullets, or slingshots and hamsters, or some such). Shooting games also involve a chance (that really should be greater than zero) that you might MISS. It’s hard to miss clicking a button.
  2. I assume that this is supposed to be EDUCATIONAL. If I get a question wrong, TELL ME WHAT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. I don’t actually learn anything for the answers I get right. If I get on wrong, and you don’t tell me what is was supposed to be, I learn almost nothing. And really, this is not fun enough that I would play it just to get a high score.
  3. Newsflash: Edutainment is DEAD. Wrapping boring content inside a game failed as a strategy in the 1980’s and it continues to fail now.

And to think, I could have told my first-year computer science students that they weren’t writing a final exam at all – they were playing a game. Who knew that all I needed to do was hide the scantron sheet under some pictures and make noises when they fill in a bubble. I coulda done that!

Decorative Media does NOT make anything a game.

Mark my words:

We have a limited amount of time to demonstrate that games are effective as instructional technology. LOTS of people in industry get it. The military gets it. Healthcare gets it. Social change organizations get it too. Why can’t formal education figure it out?

If we screw this up like we did in the 1980’s, we will NOT get a third chance. Formal educational institutions will reject games as a viable instructional technology and the growing chasm between 21-st century learning and early 20th-century schools will widen.

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Facebook gives up on Social Media and goes all-in for marketing…

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Facebook Like button takes over Share button – CNN.com.

“it should ultimately increase traffic to publishers’ websites”

There’s the money line.

In spite of what FB says, FB is no longer about social ANYTHING, it’s all about the marketing.

It should really be called Marketing Media, not Social Media. What we want is really far far less important than what advertisers and marketers want.

I think I will start being very careful about what I ‘like’. I apologize in advance to all my actual friends. I used to use ‘like’ as a way to make brief contact and to be supportive. Maybe I’ll just start sending little emails. Anybody have a quick-mail app for browsers?

But WAIT, there’s MORE….
order now and get TWICE as much junk.
All for one LOW, LOW price
(your soul?)

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Are Household Bugs A Risk To Human Health?

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Are Household Bugs A Risk To Human Health?.

Date: 26 Jan 2011 – 4:00 PST

Well, DUH! Of COURSE they are!

Do they really not think that feeding antibiotics to farm animals as if they were regular feed is going to have NO effect on the ecology of everything that comes in contact with those animals?

Are they really that stupid, or are they just hoping WE are?
Given the widespread ignorance of how our animals are raised these days, I suspect the answer is the latter. Even many small scale farmers seem to think it’s OK to treat with antibiotics without even diagnosing the problem. Your rabbit feeling a bit off? Give it some penicillin – just for a day of two though -till it seems better. Your goats having some issues? Don’t bother calling the vet or figuring out why they are off, just get out the terramycin and give ‘er!

The ignorance of the general population about how their food is produced is FAR more dangerous to our survival than playing violent video games. Oh, and don’t think that being a vegetarian, or even a vegan lets you off the hook. Claiming purity simply because you don’t eat meat, will NOT protect you from the kind of plague that could hit the planet once 99.9% of all germs have been eliminated.

You can’t expect the bull not to charge simply because you don’t eat beef.

I have news for you guys, it’s not the 99.9% of the bugs you can kill with your hand sanitizer that are going to kill you – it’s the 0.1% that SURVIVES!

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Generation Y women losing ‘female’ skills? That’s only the half of it…

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Generation Y women losing ‘female’ skills such as cooking, ironing and sewing | Courier Mail.

I think the story should really be “People losing life skills”.
Most men don’t have many ‘male’ skills left either – repairing things, building things, yard work,….

This shouldn’t be about gender – it should be about the fact that most urbanites would not be able to survive if they couldn’t buy a new one or pay someone to fix it.

Whatever happened to taking a bit of pride in being self-sufficient? I don’t mean wacko survivalist stuff, but come ON.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Sadly, people are becoming insects.

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Social Login and FB Celebrities

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Facebook Launches Social Login & HTTPS To Protect Your Privacy.

I’ve had occasion to try this social login thing – FB has been using this when you download all your FB stuff. It has potential – but like everything else, it’s not fool-proof. It won’t stop a jealous spouse from getting into your stuff, for example. Chances are they know most if not all of your friends.

The group that is likely to have problems with this are those people who use FB as a broadcast tool. I know a few people who have reached the 5000 friend limit – I know quite a few who have several thousand ‘friends’ (NOBODY really has that many friends). I also know a few people who use it as a personal advertising channel (that one really bugs me).

Do you suppose these people will be able to identify enough people by their pictures to get past the wall? You only get to ‘pass’ on two people. They use profile pictures and there are a lot of people (including me) who use something other than traditional portraits for their profiles.

Could you identify me from either of these images? In my profile I have used pictures of my critters, surroundings, even snow. If you actually know me, you might recognize these, but if you ‘friended’ me without really knowing me, or if you have so many friends that you don’t ever look at what THEY post (in other words you only look at what people post to your own wall), then you are unlikely to be able to identify me from a good number of my profile pictures.

Maybe we will soon see different classifications of friends, or of FB accounts. Commercial accounts or Celebrity accounts (I also sometimes refer to these as FB tramps).

How many people would still friend them if they knew for sure these people didn’t really want to be friends at all – that they were only connected because they are one of hundreds (or thousands) of ‘followers’. I imagine a lot would still want to, but not all.

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