“…during one presentation at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Boston, Raluca Budiu, a user-experience specialist for the Nielsen Norman Group, asked the audience whether typing in tags for articles would help them remember key concepts. The answer, according to her research, is no. Users remembered less after typing in tags than after simply reading an article online.”
I have never thought much how I use tags; someimte I do and sometimes I just want to be bothered. And since I have never reflecyed about it, I never paid much attention to how useful the act of tagging is.
I was quite surprised to read the outcomes of once researcher’s work in which she discovered that becuase the act of adding tagsreduces the amount of time that the user is paying attention to the actual content of the article itself.
More of Raluca Busiu’s work centers on discovering ways in which to minimize the human cost of participating in social media. She talked about a tagging system that “lets users click words in an article to create tags, rather than typing them in at the end.”
This simple change in workflow supposedly improved a user’s recall ability.
This makes me wonder about the degree of signifigance in the improvement; what exactly was the user able to recall after using this new system called SparTug.us than before.
This has me intrigued enoughto check out the new tagging system. But what is your experience been with respect to tages?
Do you use them?
If so, why?
What are the ways in which you make use of them?
PS – You will notice that I have used tagged this entry with both a Category and a tag…….
What are some student perspectives on podcasting? Carie Windham, former undergraduate student, North Carolina State University, and current graduate student, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland presents her own views and experiences with podcasting as well as views from several students she interviewed in the paper: Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective.
In “Confessions…”, Windham recounts her own introduction to and involvement with podcasting (and how she became a “podcast junkie”) and cites student data and interviews from University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of British Columbia, Bentley College, Duke University, and DePaul University. Some of the conclusions are as follows:
All the students identified the same benefits to podcasting technology:
• The ability to access course content on a 24-hour basis
• The chance to take their learning mobile so that listening can be done on the bus, at the gym, or on a walk between classes
• The creativity factor when making podcasts: they can present the content in a way that they choose
• The ease of access: podcasts can be easily downloaded from the Internet for free
For teaching and learning, the students saw concrete benefits to podcasting projects, especially when compared with standard modes of testing, such as writing a paper or doing a class demonstration:
• They were able to get “intimate” with course material, either by re-listening to course lectures and supplements or by teaching the rest of the class.
• They could showcase their projects to the rest of the community, expanding the reach of
the classroom to their friends or members of the community.
• They had the opportunity to review course material during pertinent moments in the semester, such as before exams or during course projects.
• They learned new technical skills, whether they were downloading files or creating new ones.
Finally, all the students reported that they enjoyed their classes more because of the inclusion of podcasting, and all hoped that more faculty members would use podcasting in the future. Michael Martinez-Mann said it best when he said of podcasting: “The possibilities are absolutely limitless. If there’s an idea, there’s a way to do it.”
Some of the sections of the paper also include:
Podcasting in the Real World: Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology
Notes on the Go: Offering Lectures and Class Notes via Podcasting
In Their Hands: Students as Podcast Creators
A Microphone and an Idea: Nonacademic Podcasting on Campus
If I Were in Charge: Tips for Faculty
Windham’s paper is informative, well-written, and entertaining, and was published in EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 42 (May/June 2007). It also appears on the web in the resource-rich ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Podcasting in the section “What Do Students Think?”
While whitepapers, research, and case studies are certainly useful, it’s definitely refreshing to get student perspectives directly from students in their own voices.
Yet another great video, Institutional Fear, presented at the 2008 ELI Educause Conference in the Fear 2.0 digi-drama session “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS?” Session Abstract:
Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change? (Join us to face this fear together in a multimedia, interactive miniplay).
The four discussion-provoking videos in the session were created and presented by faculty and staff at the University of California, the University of Texas, the University of Mary Washington, Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and Middlebury College.
If we begin to explore the issues and causes of stagnation in education, the students and the student experience are both central to the discussion. What is the student experience of the classical models of education that exist today? In what ways are today’s students unique, different from the past? Where can we get an insider look? How about a group of 200 Kansas State University students who made a YouTube video on the subject…
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Last fall, Professor of Cultural Anthropology Michael Wesh collaborated with 200 students who surveyed themselves and created this video summarizing “some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime”:
Travel back two years in time, way back to 2006. The read/write web, or “Web 2.0” (also synonymous with “connection, collaboration, and individual expression”), had finally attracted enough mainstream attention for Time magazine to name “You” Person of the Year in their year-in-review January ’07 issue. While the explosion of the read/write web has grown quickly from its humble beginnings, this rising tide of innovation (and opportunity) isn’t slowing, isn’t going to go any slower, and certainly shows no signs of stopping.
Have we caught up with Fair Use, the DMCA, and copyright law? Do we understand these changes, or do we fear them? Do we leverage this new revolution? How about inside the “hallowed halls of our institutions of higher education and learning”? Are we adapting? Or are we stagnating? The following short video was presented at the 2008 ELI Educause conference and more poignantly calls attention to some of these issues:
Reading the Digital Natives blog as I usually do, I stumbled on an interesting post regarding a survey the group just completed about student opinions and experiences on the usefulness of instructional technology in college courses.
The survey covers all the latest technologies, from simply posting an interactive digital syllabus (with links to resources) to recorded lectures, podcasting, videos, blogs, wikis, and course websites. The overall responses were largely positive, with students who have actually been exposed to and thus used these technologies in their courses giving higher positive ratings to them than those who have not.
Rather than try to summarize it here, I suggest reading the post and viewing the report they have kindly posted for download at the end.
To learn more about the Digital Natives academic research team, visit their wiki pages.
I’ve been thinking a lot of about digital identities lately and all of the time that goes into crafting and maintaining them. It’s work, that is for sure. And somewhat reluctant to take on more work online than I already have, I have neglected my latest Facebook account that I recently started (again). I just don’t really want to log in to and check another online space at this time, although getting around to updating and maintaining it is inevitable.
Cole Camplese had an interesting post a week or two back about all the time it required to form new identities on new sites and how nice it would be if you could import your identity from one site to another, so you wouldn’t have to constantly recreate it. I am curious what Gen Y’s think of this option. Is it a blessing to be able to recreate yourself on different sites, especially for the younger generations whose identities are still evolving? When should permanent digital identity creation begin? During high school, during college, after both? (Harvard’s Digital Natives group has some interesting posts on this topic: see The Permanent Record and the rebuttal in The Permanent Record Part 2.)
Reading more on Cole’s blog, I stumbled upon Millis High School’s Web 2.0 and 21st Century Learning Wiki. What’s most impressive about this work, aside from the excellent content on the site, is that it was put together and is maintained by students (who also incidentally read Cole’s blog… wow!). Today’s high school students are savvier than ever about social networking, 21st century learning, and digital identities, and the generation after them will likely have a much different, more integrated experience as these technologies continue to overlap, evolve, and make their way into educational settings.
When I poll (informally, on elevator rides and in cafes) our university students here and ask them what they think of social networks and learning networks being on the same platform — say for example, your Blackboard site is located in Facebook — they are vehemently opposed to the idea. They want to keep their online social networks and learning networks separate — that’s they way it has always been for them, and that’s they way they like it. And, you’ve got to understand their point. They were the generation that explored and popularized online social networking before the rest of us even knew what was happening. (And unfortunately, most of these students have yet to experience the benefits of combined social networking and learning, at least in an educational setting.)
But the next generation, the Millennials, will be much more accustomed to learning communities and social networks being one in the same. How will this change their thinking and their creation of online identities? In some ways, Gen Y had the advantage of being able to explore this space and create themselves in their own Gen Y universe, before the rest of us caught up, understood, or could guide them in their interactions. The Millennials will have (and are already having) a much different experience.
Travel back two years in time, way back to 2006. The read/write web, or “Web 2.0” (also synonymous with “connection, collaboration, and individual expression”), had finally attracted enough mainstream attention for Time magazine to name “You” 