Experiential eLearning

H20 Free Online Classroom Tools from Harvard’s Berkman Center

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is an “entrepreneurial nonprofit” whose mission is to “explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.”  Basically, they study the relationship between the Internet, law, and society through a number of fascinating initiatives, many of which involve some of the celebrated intellectuals and authors in fellowship at the center.  Some of these initiatives involve tools that better enable educators to utilize, and be supported by, online and technology-based platforms.  We invited Kendra Albert, research assistant at the Berkman Center and assistant to noted Berkman steward and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain, to visit with us at Harvard Business Publishing and give an overview of some of the free tools and platforms they’ve developed for education.

Technology and the Future of Higher Education

I recently attended a forum entitled "Technology and the Future of Higher Education" with Diana Oblinger, CEO of EDUCAUSE.  The seminar was part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Askwith Forum series.  Many of us involved in educational technology have been familiar with Ms. Oblinger's writings -- she was one of the first to articulate the evolving learning styles of Gen X'ers and Milennials and was also an early advocate of games and learning. She was formerly Vice President for Information Resources and the Chief Information Officer for the University of North Carolina system, Executive Director of Higher Education for Microsoft, and IBM Director of the Institute for Academic Technology. She was also on the faculty at the University of Missouri-Columbia and at Michigan State University and an associate dean at the University of Missouri. Her presentation (and this blog entry) was based in part on the recent EDUCAUSE report "The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus".

Negotiation Role Play Simulations & the RolePlanner Platform

Much of our work developing new eProducts at Harvard Business Publishing has focused on our web-based business simulations.  But we also have a catalog of paper-based role plays in the areas of negotiation, organizational behavior, etc.  These are face-to-face activities where students are paired up, allowing them to experiment with negotiation and decision-making skills under the guidance of an instructor and their peers. We knew that these role plays were also powerful examples of experiential learning that extended the power of the case method of teaching.  But these paper-based, face-to-face role play simulations are hard to administer -- they require breaking the class into the appropriate roles ("landlord" and "tenant", for instance), segmenting the class into teams or pairs (landlord 1 vs. tenant 1, landlord 2 vs. tenant 2), then organizing the distribution of role-specific and step-specific instructions (step 1 - landlords read their unique, confidential instructions and tentants read their unique, confidential instructions; step 2 - pairs negotiate; step 3 - class debrief).  We developed the RolePlanner online platform to facilitate the administration of these multi-step, multi-role activities.

Social Tagging for Library Science

Our next Brain Gain session will investigate the use of social tagging technology for library science.  We briefly investigated social tagging in an earlier post on social software.  Popularized by sites such as del.icio.us, which offers users the ability to share their web bookmarks by labeling them with a personalized set of descriptor "tags", and Flickr, which allows users to share and find photos via tagging, this phenomenon is part of a larger "social software" movement that empowers users to organize information via a bottom-up "folksonomy".  That's fine for bookmarks and photos, but could this type of social tagging allow users to organize library content?  And if so, why would libraries sanction such a system?

Social Annotation

Our next "Brain Gain" meeting of the Harvard Business School IT Group's Educational Technology & Multimedia team will focus on exploring Social Annotation and the trends and technologies surrounding it.  Our guest will be Robert Lucas.  I've cited many items on this blog from Rob in the past -- Rob is a Harvard University graduate and current master's student in the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he has received a Reynolds Fellowship in Social Entrepreneurship.  With interests lying at the interesection of education and social software, he has recently been researching social annotation and is working to start an online community for teacher collaboration.  You can view Rob's Teachers' Lounge blog for more info.

Columbia University's use of Wikis in the classroom

This week the Harvard Business School IT Group's Educational Technology & Multimedia team invites our peers at the Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) to show us the work they've been doing with Wiki technology in the classroom.  Educational Technologist Jonathan Hall and his teammates will give us an overview of their Wiki platform and discuss some of the projects they have that involve the use of Wikis.

Toyota & Linux: The Benefits of Collaborative Networks

This past summer an issue of Harvard Business Review contained an article entitled Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf (Senior Vice President and Manager, respectively, of the Boston office of the Boston Consulting Group). The article explores how businesses seeking innovation and growth should take note of how the Linux open-source software development community operates. I’d like to summarize some of the article here because it illuminates the convergence of a number of the topics covered here including collaboration trends and software development methodologies.

Wikis and Blogs at HBS

Larry Bouthillier, head of Educational Technologies at Harvard Business School, and Dave Streiff ,who heads up our R&D, are already evaluating blog and wiki software for use at HBS.  Unlike the issue of iPods at HBS, where the group struggled to find a killer application worthy of significant investment, we literally could employ wikis and blogs tomorrow.  The challenge will not be finding worthy applications for these technologies but rather ensuring that the processes surrounding their proper use are in place.

Co-worker Dave Lieberman sent this article on issues concerning faculty use of blogs, and Jon Defriese, Director of Software Development at HBS, sent this great article on ways that USC is using wikis for academic use.  The USC article is written by Jude Higdon, former TIE graduate and now project manager at USC's Center for Scholarly Technology.

Social Software exploration at ETMM

A group of us in the Educational Technology & Multimedia Group at Harvard Business School's IT Group have been meeting to discuss new technologies and try and brainstorm creative ways to explore them and integrate them, if appropriate, into our portfolio.

It's hard to consider how to incorporate bottom-up, "social software" technologies (software that supports group interaction) into a pedagogical framework that is historically hierarchical and top-down.  Here's an oversimplified view of just a few of the trends and thinking points for our group to chat about, hopefully allowing us to better devise ways to leverage them appropriately for educational use. As usual, lots of help on this list from my classmate Rob Lucas and from co-worker Dave Goodrich.

Social software, Web 2.0

With the help of Rob Lucas and my co-worker Dave Goodrich, I'm starting to investigate the myriad new technologies and products that fall under the umbrella of "social software".

Del.icio.us was the first one I explored, a social bookmarks site that allows you to create lists of favorite links (via a bookmarklet plug-in for your browser), categorize those links with tags, search your links or others' links, and subscribe to the lists of other users whom you find interesting.