ari bader-natal January 28, 2010
Just a quick post to let you know that several hundred great new ideas on how we might reimagine learning have just been made public, spurred by the Digital Media and Learning competition. Not only can you read about each of these ideas, but — this week only — you can contribute to the conversation by adding your own comments. Be sure to check out our idea, which is about how we can leverage Grockit’s platform for live collaboration to create a new game that actively engages learners in asking questions and sharing their work with the world (through Grockit and Connexions). We’d love to hear your feedback, so please leave us a comment!
ari bader-natal December 19, 2009
Many of the approaches that we draw on at Grockit — adaptive web-based learning, study group formation, embedded assessment, computer support for collaborative learning, educational applications of data mining and social network analysis, learning in games, and the benefits of practice, feedback, spacing, teaching, discussing — are no longer exclusively discussed in academic journals and conference proceedings. Several of the researchers and practitioners in these areas have hit the blogosphere, where ideas are informally sketched, quickly shared, and freely accessed. Here are 25 such blogs that are currently in my newsreader:
OLDaily
Learning Games Network
Digital Media and Learning
Epistemic Games
Clark Aldrich On Simulations and Serious Games
Confessions of an Aca-Fan
Raph Koster’s website
Learnlets
Will at Work Learning
Informal Learning Blog
CSCL Community
Connectivism: networked and social learning
P2P Foundation
Iterating Towards Openness
Sharing Nicely
TravelinEdMan
Innovate journal
Learning Sciences and Educational Technology
International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
Infinite Thinking Machine
Online Sapiens
Elearnspace
Educational Technology News
Fortnightly Mailing
Virtual Canuck
Have some that we’re missing? Leave a link, and we’ll check it out.
ari bader-natal November 24, 2009
As promised in my previous post about the E-Learn conference, I wanted to share a few thoughts sparked by Terry Anderson’s keynote. The slide that caught my eye — and the one that I’ve been thinking about the most since the conference — mapped out three different types of “many” in social learning environments: the group, the network, and the collective. Based on a set of papers and blog posts by Jon Dron and Terry Anderson over the past few years, the model describes the characteristics of each of these social learning contexts. Here’s a composite reproduction of their illustrations, describing some of the key characteristics of each type of social software:
Dron & Anderson: Groups, Networks, and Collectives
While I’m several years late to the discussion, I think that it’s still worth mentioning why I find it so interesting. At Grockit, we’ve also been thinking about contexts for learning, albeit in different terms: we’ve been thinking in terms of supporting learning from experts, learning with peers, and learning alone. I can’t help but see parallels between these three learning contexts and that of Dron and Anderson’s groups, networks, and collectives.
Grockit: Learning from experts, with peers, and alone
Notice the similarities:
- Expert-led classes in Grockit resemble traditional classroom groups.
- Peer-driven sessions are based on an ever-changing network of participants.
- Self-directed solo learners benefit from the collective behavior of all past Grockit interactions.
Each of these contexts has advantages and disadvantages, so we’ve opted to support all three and leave it up to the student to choose the way in which they wish to interact with others. We’ve noticed that for many, this choice changes from day to day, or even over the course of a single sitting. The choice is yours: How do you want to learn from others today?
ari bader-natal November 9, 2009
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the E-Learn 2009 conference, both to present some of our ongoing work at Grockit and to learn from others in the field. In this post, I’ll describe a bit about our contribution, and in a companion post, I’ll share some highlights from the talks that I heard.
The slides above were prepared to accompany my paper, Interaction synchronicity in web-based collaborative learning systems. Here’s a summary:
In building a web-based platform to support live collaborative learning online, we’ve faced (and continue to face) a variety of technical challenges. One significant challenge has been the mismatch between what the web was designed for — namely, a network of linked documents — and what we’re using it for — a network of live collaborations. Different learning systems deal with this mismatch in different ways. Some systems stick with the web-native document-oriented model, and support asynchronous (i.e. different time) collaborative interactions around “content”, “educational resources”, or “learning objects”. Other systems support live, synchronous (i.e. same time) collaborative interactions by relying on better-suited network protocols, but do not run within a browser. Finally, a growing class of systems, including Grockit, have chosen to engineer a way to support live user interactions on the Web. For us, the motivation for engineering a solution is to enable you to use Grockit from the comfort of most any web browser on most any computer. If you’ve participated in one of our learning games / study groups, you know how convenient this can be.
But just because the “hard” work is done (read: supporting synchronous interactions on the web) doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to pass on doing the “easier” work (read: supporting asynchronous interactions.) If you’ve spent time reviewing your Grockit study sessions and reading through the explanations and discussion threads, you’d probably agree that this, too, can be quite valuable. Here’s where I think that it gets interesting: If we can support both synchronous and asynchronous interactions among learners, how do we know which to use? Which interactions should to be synchronous? Which should be asynchronous? Which should be a mix? What should that mix be?
There are no clear correct (or incorrect) answers here, so it’s been an interesting challenge trying to figure out what seems to work best. In the paper, I share a few lessons that we’ve learned in the course of grappling with this, including:
- implications of question complexity
- implications of activity visibility
- implications of continuous communication
- implications for discussion repurposing
- implications of group size on discussion dynamics
- implications of community size on group formation
If you’re interested in learning more, you can read the full paper.
brian buser October 28, 2009
We’re participating in the E-Learn Conference in Vancouver this week. E-Learn serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for the exchange of information on research, development, and applications of all topics related to e-Learning. Ari presented a paper, “Interaction synchronicity in web-based collaborative learning systems”. Farb will be presenting “How to empower students using AI and a social community of online games”.
In addition, we are learning from the many thought leaders in e-learning that are here. You will see some of this reflected in future Grockit features.
brian buser October 21, 2009
Farb Nivi, Grockit CEO, recently interviewed with Jeff Cobb of Mission to Learn. In Jeff’s words, “In this podcast, I talk with Farb about how the Grockit platform works, his views on teaching and learning, and where Grockit may be headed in the future. If you are interested at all in collaborative learning and adaptive learning systems, this podcast is for you.”
Jump to Mission to Learn’s site to listen to the podcast.
ari bader-natal August 13, 2009
We were lucky to have Angela Tombari join us for the summer as part of the Grockit Graduate Research Internship program. Angela is in the doctoral program in educational psychology at the University of Kentucky, with interests including Item Response Theory (specifically Rasch Models), statistics, and one-to-one tutoring. You’ll see evidence of Angela’s work in several parts of Grockit now and over the next few months: Diagnostics (individual assessments) will soon be rotated from week to week to create a linking pattern, Quests (individually-tailored practice) are already better targeted based on an improved IRT model, a hundred more challenging GMAT Verbal questions are now online, and personalized skill-review recommendations and GMAT score projections are both on the horizon.
I enjoyed spending the past three months working with Angela. She did a great job, and we’ll all miss her. Thanks for all of your hard work, Angela!
brian buser July 30, 2009
Check out Ari’s interview with Politics Daily about Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) and the web. Here is a sample:
Ari explains, “I think the AIED systems of the future will be less about teaching directly, and more about providing guidance: when and how a student would benefit from working with someone else (perhaps a teacher, tutor, or peer.) When I get stuck solving a particular type of problem, who (that’s online and available) can best help me understand it? A good system will have predicted the frustrating challenge, and will have already lined up the person best-suited to explaining it to me in a way that I will understand. After I’ve demonstrated that I mastered the necessary skills, who can I then explain it to, both to help them and to clarify it for myself? A good system will be able to seamlessly coordinate this process.”
Ari’s interview was used in a larger story, which featured Grockit, about web 2.0 technology entering the education industry. We expect you will be hearing a lot more from Ari and his great work in the months to come. Stay tuned!
brian buser July 14, 2009
Grockit games can now be customized by skill tags and difficulty level. This helps you optimize your study time. Custom games are best explained with an example.
They work something like this; Sue is studying for the GMAT and her Grockit analytics indicate she needs the most improvement on Verbal questions. More specifically, Sentence Correction and Idioms give her the most trouble. Knowing this, Sue creates a custom game and selects the Sentence Correction and the Idiom skill tags to include. This creates a game which only contains these two types of questions. You can see the summary that Sue sees when she is creating the game in this picture.
In addition, Sue can adjust the difficulty level of the questions to her level of ability. In short, custom games make it easier than ever for Sue to optimize her study time and concentrate on the areas she needs the most practice.
