Re: Educational uses of Rev
On Oct 10, 2004, at 11:08 PM, Erik Hansen wrote: i got an Adobe download at this library computer and was unable to walk through the calculation These were just selected screenshots. There would have been too many to include an entire case. looks like fun, though! Thanks. ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses of Rev
i got an Adobe download at this library computer and was unable to walk through the calculation looks like fun, though! --- Marian Petrides [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A while back someone asked me to upload screen shots from my transfusion medicine software (Transfusion Medicine Interactive) but I never got a chance. However, the screen shots can now be found on AABB's website at: https://portal.aabb.org/apps/marketplace/product.aspx?id=042020 under: sample pages and table of contents. There is a problem with the screen shots in that numbers 1 and 2 are duplicated as 3 and 4 and the last pair of shots inadvertently got left off. Hopefully they will correct the error sometime soon. = [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.erikhansen.org __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Sorry to answer so late, but there are so much messages on the RR List ;-) Dave Cragg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.corporate-english.com ... both products were developed in Metacard/Revolution, including all the current server-side CGI scripts for the Corporate English product.) Too bad for a cross platform product, you state: Installation You require a Windows PC (not a Mac). ;-( -- ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
On 30 Sep 2004, at 13:39, Dom wrote: Sorry to answer so late, but there are so much messages on the RR List ;-) Dave Cragg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.corporate-english.com ... both products were developed in Metacard/Revolution, including all the current server-side CGI scripts for the Corporate English product.) Too bad for a cross platform product, you state: Correction: *they* state. I was just drawing attention to it. Installation You require a Windows PC (not a Mac). ;-( I agree. It's disappointing they haven't released versions for other platforms. Cheers Dave ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Dave Cragg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Correction: *they* state. I was just drawing attention to it. Point noted ;-) -- ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
On Saturday, August 14, 2004, at 03:42 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Marc, Did you ever receive any mails from Rev education mail list? I bet that you will feel at home in that list. I don't see the education mailing list mentioned on the Rev web site. Where can I subscribe to it? For about 7 years my students have been using computers to learn through games that I have designed, and they have made presentations that include variable dependent animation. For instance, one student made a stack that painted a picture randomly in one of a dozen color schemes and the player had to click on the type of color scheme. Another made a graph under the normal curve (for Stat class) that animated according to three different variables, all entered by the user. There are scores more. Did you have a link to see these projects? :-) I don't. I develop them at home, or my students make them in class, to be used on the lab computers at school. There never was a need to make them available on the Web. I don't have a personal web site. In the past I have either emailed the stacks to interested people or sent them through regular mail if they were too large for email. All my Rev stacks fit on one CD, and I'd be glad to send them to anyone who is interested if they contact me off-list. They are teaching-game stacks mostly for the high school level. Some of the stacks described in my original post are not Rev stacks, but HyperStudio stacks scripted in HyperLogo. Mark Greenberg English Teacher ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
on Mon, 16 Aug 2004 Mark Greenberg wrote: I don't see the education mailing list mentioned on the Rev web site. Where can I subscribe to it? Ask to RunRev support. In this way they could measure the interest of participants, and install the list again. ;-) Did you have a link to see these projects? :-) I don't. I develop them at home, or my students make them in class, to be used on the lab computers at school. There never was a need to make them available on the Web. I don't have a personal web site. Geocities provides you with 15 mb of free space. In the past I have either emailed the stacks to interested people or sent them through regular mail if they were too large for email. All my Rev stacks fit on one CD, and I'd be glad to send them to anyone who is interested if they contact me off-list. Web distribution is faster and cheaper. How much space take them? Almost 700 MB? I have space in my website if it could help. You could upload your compressed zip files via ftp and left them in the server for a week to anyone interested. They are teaching-game stacks mostly for the high school level. Some of the stacks described in my original post are not Rev stacks, but HyperStudio stacks scripted in HyperLogo. HyperStudio has a player for both platform. I'll really like to see these educational stacks. If you had a fast connection to upload these files, write me off-list to send you a password to ftp the files to my webspace. al = Visit my site: http://www.geocities.com/capellan2000/ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Alejandro Tejada wrote: on Mon, 16 Aug 2004 Mark Greenberg wrote: I don't see the education mailing list mentioned on the Rev web site. Where can I subscribe to it? Ask to RunRev support. In this way they could measure the interest of participants, and install the list again. ;-) Educators were the single biggest audience for HyperCard, so it would seem reasonable that we can expect the same with Dreamcard. If there is a separate list for Dreamcard I have no doubt it will organically evolve to have education issues be a regular part of the discussion there. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
On Sat, 14 Aug 2004, Richard Gaskin wrote: As for some of them being 'authorities', well, remember that two of them claimed that Hypercard was 'a cheap rip-off' or 'knock-off' of Visual Basic... If you need to embarass 'em you can wait till they say that at a meeting and point out that Visual Basic was prototyped on a Mac using SuperCard (heard it from a Microsoft employee). --well, actually, I already committed that faux pas... on the very first meeting of my master's group, where the individual did indeed make that grand, sweeping pronouncement. For my astonished stammering to the contrary, I was kinda blacklisted for the full two years of the program. And Mike Swain sending the offending individuals a very, shall we say, *pointed* email advising them of their inaccuracies probably didn't help my social standing, either ;-) and that VBA = Visual Basic Analogue... Frightening. And sad, considering how many knowledgeable and talented people have trouble finding work in these tough times, while people like that have anti-jobs (in which they get paid to provide the opposite of useful goods and services g). Yup. Judy ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
On 15.08.2004, at 04:19, Richard Gaskin wrote: If you need to embarass 'em you can wait till they say that at a meeting and point out that Visual Basic was prototyped on a Mac using SuperCard (heard it from a Microsoft employee). Is that true? regards Wolfgang M. Bereuter Trainingsmaps© -- speedlearning with Mindmaps! INTERNETTRAINER Wolfgang M. Bereuter Edelhofg. 17/11, A-1180 Wien, Austria ... http://www.internettrainer.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Tel: ++43/1/ 961 0418 Fax: ++43/1/ 479 2539 ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Hallo Wolfgang, On 15.08.2004, at 04:19, Richard Gaskin wrote: If you need to embarass 'em you can wait till they say that at a meeting and point out that Visual Basic was prototyped on a Mac using SuperCard (heard it from a Microsoft employee). Is that true? JA!!! :-) YES!!! :-) Cool, isn't it... ;-) regards Wolfgang M. Bereuter Trainingsmaps© -- speedlearning with Mindmaps! INTERNETTRAINER Wolfgang M. Bereuter Edelhofg. 17/11, A-1180 Wien, Austria ... http://www.internettrainer.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Tel: ++43/1/ 961 0418 Fax: ++43/1/ 479 2539 Regards Klaus Major [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.major-k.de ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
In June our university hosted an international conference about E-Learning. The new buzzword coming up in almost all plenary presentations was blended learning, meaning a mix of online and offline learning, but still with widely varying accentuations concerning the role of the offline part. Additionally, 23 projects developed at our institution were presented in booths during the duration of the two-day conference. I think the most important project going on here is Winfoline, developed by my colleague Prof. Winand. It can be called important as it has been accepted as a learning platform by a couple of other universities and because it get parts of the funding from our federal government. You can look up information about it under http://winfoline.wirtschaft.uni-kassel.de http://www.winfoline.de This project also favors some blended learning; there are English parts of the websites.- Although I sometimes cooperate very closely with Prof. Winand - having been jointly responsible for theses dealing with aspects of information sciences and educational technology and also conducting oral examinations - I have not yet been able to convince him of the benefits of XTalk languages.- Our own booth presentation focused on our project Language Suite developed with Metacard, but offered samples of other educational materials. A short description of the Language Suite project is to be found - still in German - on page Projects: Language Suite of my website http://www.sanke.org, English version. The stacks themselves will be publicly available soon as demo versions. The most frequently asked questions from participants of the conference at our booth was Where is the browser? and the feedback that apparently impressed them most was - our indication that there was no need for a HTML browser, and - demonstrating the ability of Metacard/Revolution to start programs online without browser assistance and being connected to five different websites simultaneously (RevNet, California; Metacard-Site, Colorado; Himalayan Academy, Hawaii; Tactile Media, California; FTP-Server Uni Kassel, Germany). We also tried to convince them of the higher degree of interactivity possible with XTalk languages as compared to browser-based languages. I addressed such questions some years ago in an article about Interaktives Lernen im Internet? - Fragen zum Design und zur möglichen Nutzung von Lernmaterialien über das World Wide Web, 1997, which at some points raises issues similar to those in Richard Gaskin's Beyond the Browser. The German version of my article is available on page Texte, website http://www.sanke.org, German version.- Interestingly, one of the other booth presentations was about about a project originally developed with Metacard (Simulation Handelsvorteile, page Student Samples of my website), but re-programmed with Flash. The student had developed this simulation using Metacard in a few days. He attracted the attention of a colleague from Computational Mathematics who however persuaded him to re-program it with Flash as a real programming tool by offering him a one-year and well-paid contract as a research assistant. It took the student two months - so he told me - to achieve with Flash (he had to learn Flash from scratch) what he alrady had achieved using Metacard; the results of his efforts look very much identical, the biggest difference being that resizing - and adapting the simulation to screen size - is much easier in Flash than with Revolution/Metacard. -- Wilhelm Sanke, Prof. University Media Center University of Kassel, Germany http://www.sanke.org ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
On 15.08.2004, at 22:10, Klaus Major wrote: Is that true? JA!!! :-) YES!!! :-) Cool, isn't it... ;-) unpackbar! untakable;) regards Wolfgang M. Bereuter Trainingsmaps© -- speedlearning with Mindmaps! INTERNETTRAINER Wolfgang M. Bereuter Edelhofg. 17/11, A-1180 Wien, Austria ... http://www.internettrainer.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Tel: ++43/1/ 961 0418 Fax: ++43/1/ 479 2539 ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Wolfgang M.Bereuter wrote: On 15.08.2004, at 04:19, Richard Gaskin wrote: If you need to embarass 'em you can wait till they say that at a meeting and point out that Visual Basic was prototyped on a Mac using SuperCard (heard it from a Microsoft employee). Is that true? I heard it from a Microsoft employee. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Judy Perry wrote: On Sat, 14 Aug 2004, Richard Gaskin wrote: As for some of them being 'authorities', well, remember that two of them claimed that Hypercard was 'a cheap rip-off' or 'knock-off' of Visual Basic... If you need to embarass 'em you can wait till they say that at a meeting and point out that Visual Basic was prototyped on a Mac using SuperCard (heard it from a Microsoft employee). --well, actually, I already committed that faux pas... on the very first meeting of my master's group, where the individual did indeed make that grand, sweeping pronouncement. For my astonished stammering to the contrary, I was kinda blacklisted for the full two years of the program. And Mike Swain sending the offending individuals a very, shall we say, *pointed* email advising them of their inaccuracies probably didn't help my social standing, either ;-) H... if that passes for rational process I think there are positions open in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for minds like that: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storyu=/ap/20040815/ap_on_sc/bush_scientists_4 ;) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Richard and All, I heard exactly the same, including the Visual Interdev framework... Best, Le 16 août 04, à 00:11, Richard Gaskin a écrit : Wolfgang M.Bereuter wrote: On 15.08.2004, at 04:19, Richard Gaskin wrote: If you need to embarass 'em you can wait till they say that at a meeting and point out that Visual Basic was prototyped on a Mac using SuperCard (heard it from a Microsoft employee). Is that true? I heard it from a Microsoft employee. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution -- Bien cordialement, Pierre Sahores 100, rue de Paris F - 77140 Nemours [EMAIL PROTECTED] GSM: +33 6 03 95 77 70 Pro: +33 1 64 45 05 33 Fax: +33 1 64 45 05 33 WEB/EAI services ACID DB over IP Mutualiser les deltas de productivité ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Marian Petrides wrote: That s*cks! On the other hand, Discovery Systems who used to market Course Builder (not to be confused with the Adobe product of the same name) had my undying loyalty because whenever you asked them a tech support question, not only did they answer it they often also included a sample snippet of code. Kinda like what folks do on this list. More small world xTalk trivia: Course Builder was what Bill Appleton made before he made SuperCard. What I found most interesting about talking with him on that was his disappointment with iconic programming: he felt it was ultimately too limited to be very useful for anything but the simplest of tasks. That disappointment with iconic programming became a big part of his motivation for making a scripting product. I've been looking into iconic and other visual programming tools as a possible answer for education tool, a la KidSim. But the more I look into it, the more I've noticed one salient oddity about visual programming languages as a whole: most papers published about such things span from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with almost no new developments in the last decade. Indeed, commercial tools like Cocoa (the original SK8-based sim-building tool which later became KidSim), Prograph, Icon Author, and Authorware are either dead or dying. So is it the case that all of the truly visual programming languages are gone? Or have I just missed some really cool work going on out there? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
RE: Educational uses for Rev
But the more I look into it, the more I've noticed one salient oddity about visual programming languages as a whole: most papers published about such things span from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with almost no new developments in the last decade. Indeed, commercial tools like Cocoa (the original SK8-based sim-building tool which later became KidSim), Prograph, Icon Author, and Authorware are either dead or dying. So is it the case that all of the truly visual programming languages are gone? Or have I just missed some really cool work going on out there? I tried prograph but it got quite confusing and tedious to dig through a hierachy of objects to click. Soon enough you had 20 million windows opened! But the concept is superb. Too bad it didn't work so well after all. I tried also VIP-C from Mainstay. Half-C IDE and a HyperCard-like gui builder but with the ugly c code. It had 3D, all the right stuff but it came back again to C debugging and using yet another product to compile the app if all went well after the build. Not to bad, I developped C codecs with it for a while. What was nice was the segmentation of the different application parts much like Flash does now. The script editor has a nice logical graphic of your code too which was clickeable to jump to the code. I think it still runs and sells and could be used to create xcmds for macs. You could use metroworks or other compilers to make the apps. RR is still better IMOHO. Im trying to compare Rev graphics with graphics in Flash and see how that works... It seems like a nice environment but much more confusing than RR... so far... ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
On 13.08.2004, at 19:36, Jan Schenkel wrote: A friend of mine is a professional documentation writer, and he told me once that a number of companies explicitly tell him to not make the docs too clear, as they want customers to pay for support questions. We call that microsoftionising of the world...=;( regards Wolfgang M. Bereuter Trainingsmaps© -- speelearning with Mindmaps! INTERNETTRAINER Wolfgang M. Bereuter Edelhofg. 17/11, A-1180 Wien, Austria ... http://www.internettrainer.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Tel: ++43/1/ 961 0418 Fax: ++43/1/ 479 2539 ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
MisterX- Saturday, August 14, 2004, 12:47:09 AM, you wrote: M I tried prograph but it got quite confusing and tedious to dig through M a hierachy of objects to click. Soon enough you had 20 million windows M opened! But the concept is superb. Too bad it didn't work so well after all. I keep going back and looking at the Prograph model and wishing it would work better. I think they had an excellent idea. I can't quite bring myself to throw out the old CDs or either that or VIP-C. My main problem with VIP-C was that it was buggy - like you I would end up doing the initial design work in VIP-C, then throwing it over to CodeWarrior for the heavy lifting. M your code too which was clickeable to jump to the code. I think it still M runs and sells and could be used to create xcmds for macs. You could use Well, that's *technically* true... VIP-C v2.5 was the last version that shipped. And while it's still listed as available in the legacy section of their website, the note says Updated for System 8. http://www.mstay.com//legacy.html -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
visual programming tools was ( Re: Educational uses for Rev)
On 14.08.2004, at 09:01, Richard Gaskin wrote: sim-building tool which later became KidSim), Prograph, Icon Author, and Authorware are either dead or dying. So is it the case that all of the truly visual programming languages are gone? Or have I just missed some really cool work going on out there? You have missed them, Richard! let me give you a small list ezedia QT - QT-Tool mov very easy eZedia MX - QT-Tool player very easy Qarbon great succes with Flash format (unfortunaltly now WIN only) MistralMove (the smaller brothers of QuickMedia) - the mTropolis idea, Mac only QuickMedia Mac and Win MistralMove with scripting X-Builder Mac only - a lot for 20 Bucks! AgentSheets a simulation idea - intersting! - - Hyperstudio as we know it more powerfull ones: Norpath Elements Studio - The Authorware-idea with SQL connection, deploy for OSX, Win, Linux and Solaris iShell (you know) QT at steroids a bit slow - the Outliner GUI! Magik its called now(?): Java Studio Creator (bought from Sun) visviva - some like that Win-thing Anark - impressiv and easy 3D labview - for laboratories I cant say and I m sure, there are a lot more in the net. regards Wolfgang M. Bereuter Trainingsmaps© -- speelearning with Mindmaps! INTERNETTRAINER Wolfgang M. Bereuter Edelhofg. 17/11, A-1180 Wien, Austria ... http://www.internettrainer.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Tel: ++43/1/ 961 0418 Fax: ++43/1/ 479 2539 ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev -- profs talk to gamers?
Actually, Erik, on the face of it I would have to side with the biologist; although, as I wrote previously, my question would have been, why a web site? Animations do have educational value, some more than others, but generally marginal. There isn't enough bang for the buck unless a lot more is done to entice students to explore. Students will appreciate a sine function much more by tabulating its values, writing those on a piece of paper, and then graphing them on a piece of paper. They are actively engaged, with knowledge running up the pencil, through the arm, up into the brain, and then hopefully back down again to the pencil. A spreadsheet is a good second-best. Animations, on the other hand, can be viewed passively, like television. Gregory On Aug 14, 2004, at 2:23 AM, Erik Hansen wrote: perhaps because they don't see computers as more than a gimmicky folder file? when i suggested to a biologist that her plant growth website could do even more with animation showing incremental progress, the reaction was a defensive oh yes, and i could add some waving arms! no, she was not a programmer. a math prof felt that animating the progress of a mathematical function was a cop-out, not real thought. a class in neural networking i once took had step-wise representation of a function's progress in a Variable Watcher and in a graph. i never would have gotten the idea from the prose. many get the concept of a sine wave only after seeing a visual representation. maybe the profs should talk to the game writers? Erik Hansen ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
RE: Educational uses for Rev
on Sat, 14 Aug 2004 Mark Greenberg wrote: I usually don't pipe up in this list, feeling somewhat like a meerkat among lions and elephants, but now we're talking about my field. Marc, Did you ever receive any mails from Rev education mail list? I bet that you will feel at home in that list. For about 7 years my students have been using computers to learn through games that I have designed, and they have made presentations that include variable dependent animation. For instance, one student made a stack that painted a picture randomly in one of a dozen color schemes and the player had to click on the type of color scheme. Another made a graph under the normal curve (for Stat class) that animated according to three different variables, all entered by the user. There are scores more. Did you have a link to see these projects? :-) One interesting site that advances the view of using video-game metaphor as an educational design for programming is http://www.marcprensky.com/. This is the second time that Marc Prensky in mentioned in this thread. ;-) on Sat, 14 Aug 2004 Marian Petrides wrote: I agree. I have always contended that adventure games are more than toys, for they teach the scientific method: try something, if it doesn't work, modify a variable and try again. Yet, from the student's perspective it feels like play. Isn't that what learning SHOULD be: FUN? Interesting enough, the creators of Hot Potatoes,are promoting a new interactive learning tool: Quandary http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary.php _http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary.php_ Quandary is an application for creating Web-based Action Mazes. An Action Maze is a kind of interactive case-study; the user is presented with a situation, and a number of choices as to a course of action to deal with it. On choosing one of the options, the resulting situation is then presented, again with a set of options. Working through this branching tree is like negotiating a maze, hence the name Action Maze. Action mazes can be used for many purposes, including problem-solving, diagnosis, procedural training, and surveys/questionnaires. All of these types of use are easier to understand by example than they are to explain, so here are some example exercises. Tell me if i'm wrong, but how different is this from a very simple text Role game playing: http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Games/Text_Role_Playing_Games/index.html _http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Games/Text_Role_Playing_Games/index.html_ al = Visit my site: http://www.geocities.com/capellan2000/ __ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
--- Gregory Lypny [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It was at least a couple of years ago that I posted to the MC list that I thought that the (not sure of the exact titles --- my copies are at work) HyperCard Users Manual and Language Reference from the original boxed version were two of the most elegant and well written software manuals I had every read. I am surprised that so few software companies have adopted Apple's style and format or insist on good writing from their manual writers. Online help in general does not come close to the usefulness of a well written manual in traditional print. Gregory A friend of mine is a professional documentation writer, and he told me once that a number of companies explicitly tell him to not make the docs too clear, as they want customers to pay for support questions. Companies that are not looking to turn their tech support into a profit center, will do their best to provide good manuals ; now if you look at the vast amount of information in the Revolution docs, all you can say is : I wish I knew where to start looking. But that is just one of the many items that are being addressed with Rev 2.5 Jan Schenkel. = As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time. (La Rochefoucauld) __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Jan- Friday, August 13, 2004, 10:36:16 AM, you wrote: JS writer, and he told me once that a number of companies JS explicitly tell him to not make the docs too clear, as JS they want customers to pay for support questions. I had the experience once in putting together an sdk where I was told not to put in too many source code examples. -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev -- profs talk to gamers?
--- Gregory Lypny [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unfortunately, most of what I see from academics who mess around with technology in teaching, amounts to simplistic web-based animations. perhaps because they don't see computers as more than a gimmicky folder file? when i suggested to a biologist that her plant growth website could do even more with animation showing incremental progress, the reaction was a defensive oh yes, and i could add some waving arms! no, she was not a programmer. a math prof felt that animating the progress of a mathematical function was a cop-out, not real thought. a class in neural networking i once took had step-wise representation of a function's progress in a Variable Watcher and in a graph. i never would have gotten the idea from the prose. many get the concept of a sine wave only after seeing a visual representation. maybe the profs should talk to the game writers? Erik Hansen = [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.erikhansen.org __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
That s*cks! On the other hand, Discovery Systems who used to market Course Builder (not to be confused with the Adobe product of the same name) had my undying loyalty because whenever you asked them a tech support question, not only did they answer it they often also included a sample snippet of code. Kinda like what folks do on this list. M On Aug 13, 2004, at 5:29 PM, Mark Wieder wrote: Jan- Friday, August 13, 2004, 10:36:16 AM, you wrote: JS writer, and he told me once that a number of companies JS explicitly tell him to not make the docs too clear, as JS they want customers to pay for support questions. I had the experience once in putting together an sdk where I was told not to put in too many source code examples. -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Hello everyone, Hope I'm not taking this too far off topic. Shout me down if I am. I agree with Richard. I would go considerably further and say that web-based interactive learning materials have not lived up to their hype. My rule of thumb is to use the Internet to (1) make getting and sharing information convenient for students and (2) deploy learning vehicles only if they involve interactions among them. After fifteen years of tinkering with this at the University of Toronto, McGill, and Concordia, this is what I've found (based on responses from thousands of students) for (1) and (2): (1) Biggest bang for the buck comes from having an web site or FTP site where they have access to well-written and well-designed PDF notes, exercises, and timely feedback on their progress, which they can actually print on old fashioned paper, take to the coffee shop, discuss with classmates, and especially grapple with. They use the Internet to go in, get the stuff, and get out as quickly as possible. No muss, no fuss, no being tied to a throbbing screen that may precipitate an epileptic seizure. (2) Another big bang comes from an online experimental stock market I run called Borsa. Here interaction is the essence of it as students are trading with one another. Their actions yield feedback, data is collected, and this can be downloaded and explored at the end of each market session. I would like to port it from FileMaker to Rev, but I haven't found enough time yet to play with Rev as a CGI, to learn how to create tokens, etc. Other examples include things like the Ultimatum game, auctions, surveys, and anything where the decision, choice, or action of one is viewed and reacted to by others, and where the resulting data can be shared and explored. My rule: if it can be done as a solitary activity as simulations, interactive tutorials, presentations, data analysis (including tapping into the Internet to gather data via web services or some other way), then make standalone courseware that can be used on the desktop; if it involves interactions among people, then use the Internet (you pretty much have to!). All this, in my mind, bodes well for Rev as a courseware design tool. Unfortunately, most of what I see from academics who mess around with technology in teaching, amounts to simplistic web-based animations. To get an idea of the prevalence of this, simply google any topic topic, for example, normal distribution, and you will find many professor-run sites that offer simulations of bell curves: click a button, generate random numbers, graph them. Similar examples can be found for junior and secondary education. The question is not whether there is educational merit in simulating the distributions (although I would submit that it is marginal unless the student is required to participate a good deal more than just clicking a button repeatedly), it is whether it could be done better on the desktop in the form of standalone courseware. I contend that the answer is almost always yes. Gregory __ Associate Professor of Finance John Molson School of Business Concordia University Montreal, Quebec Canada On Aug 11, 2004, at 8:50 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote: The Web can be fine for relatively simple presentations, but is limited for more sophisticated interactions. ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Now THAT is an excellent summary. Thanks, Greg. M On Aug 12, 2004, at 9:39 AM, Gregory Lypny wrote: My rule: if it can be done as a solitary activity as simulations, interactive tutorials, presentations, data analysis (including tapping into the Internet to gather data via web services or some other way), then make standalone courseware that can be used on the desktop; if it involves interactions among people, then use the Internet (you pretty much have to!). ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Thanks, Gregory, for this insight. I find it particularly interesting given that I just finished a master's in instructional design technology... in which the mantra seemed to be web uber alles. And, like you, I tended to disagree. I think the problem with the web uber alles folks is that they do not possess the ability (much less the interest, I guess) of producing standalone interactive courseware. So what we get is alot of form trumping function. A pity... Judy On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Gregory Lypny wrote: Hello everyone, Hope I'm not taking this too far off topic. Shout me down if I am. I agree with Richard. I would go considerably further and say that web-based interactive learning materials have not lived up to their hype. My rule of thumb is to use the Internet to (1) make getting and sharing information convenient for students and (2) deploy learning vehicles only if they involve interactions among them. ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
Devin Asay wrote: At the same time Rev provided us a way to migrate our older HyperCard and Toolbook custom apps to a new, single-track code base. When Chipp and I were manning the Rev booth at WWDC we had a chance to do real-time HyperCard conversion: a fella came by the booth with questions about conversion, I told him how easy it was, he came back a few hours later and brought his stack (a really cool simulation of genetic mutations) and we were able to convert it on the spot in just a few minutes, handing him back the converted stack and an OS X standalone. :) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
You're most welcome, Judy. In fact, I've opposed the development of online courses at Concordia, not only because the professor as communicator of his or her own research and art is removed from the equation (that online forums do not fill the gap is another story we could get into) and student interaction becomes marginal (it need not, but it does), but because web stuff is almost always more form than content and is generally not even developed by the educator. I haven't seen many online courses that are not fluff. The potential benefits of standalone courseware, created with HyperCard-like languages, as complements to traditional lectures is, in my opinion, mind boggling. It would be trivial, for example, to create a Revolution stack that selects random excerpts of prose by authors who are considered to write in the same genre and present these to the student for comparison. But better still, have the professor use the stack in the class as a presentation vehicle so that he or she is also in the dark as to the prose that will be pulled up for comparison, and therefore would not benefit from the perfect foresight of dusty old critiques that otherwise could be used as a weapon of mass smugness (nasty, eh?). Make the profs earn their keep. I have long stopped evangelizing courseware because the response I get from colleagues is that they do not want to be involved with its development. The incentive to do the work is simply not there. I make my stuff freely available to my colleagues, but their enthusiasm quickly peters when I explained that some work is required to get it to do what they want it to do. They'll only give it a spin if it's ready to go right off the shelf. But what is right off the shelf often wasn't developed with the direct and ongoing involvement of the educator and is unlikely to have the educational depth that it otherwise could. (In deference to everyone on this list, I'm not saying that you have to be an educator to create something educational. Quite the contrary: some of the fluffiest stuff I've seen was created by educators who don't have a particular speciality in any discipline. What I am saying is that courseware will be meatier if it is created by a scholar, which is someone who has a speciality and has produced original work in the sciences, humanities or art.) Of course, the dilemma faced by companies such as Runtime Revolution is that they can never make their software easy enough to use to appeal to a big enough market of individual educators because of the incentive problem. Some hope does lie with the many consultants and free-lance developers who have a scholarly bent, or have formed close collaborations with those who do. But I think that many of them would agree that the education market is not particularly lucrative, and we're back to where we started. I should leave this with a positive spin: courseware = cool, untapped potential. We just need more impressive examples of it in use. Gregory On Aug 12, 2004, at 2:57 PM, Judy Perry wrote: Thanks, Gregory, for this insight. I find it particularly interesting given that I just finished a master's in instructional design technology... in which the mantra seemed to be web uber alles. And, like you, I tended to disagree. I think the problem with the web uber alles folks is that they do not possess the ability (much less the interest, I guess) of producing standalone interactive courseware. So what we get is alot of form trumping function. A pity... Judy ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
on Thu, 12 Aug 2004 Kaj Schwermer wrote: The English language education market is a multibillion dollar market in this country alone, but decent software (language teaching in Asia) is few and far between. I would be very interested in hearing more about what you have to say about potential applications in this field. You might want to take a look here, http://www.corporate-english.com and for something different here, http://www.eigotown.com/p_news/fred/index.shtml I'm not saying these are great pieces of language education software (like everyone else, I have my own opinions on what good educational software should do), but I think they illustrate some of the scope of Revolution. (It isn't mentioned on the sites, but both products were developed in Metacard/Revolution, including all the current server-side CGI scripts for the Corporate English product.) Cheers Dave ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Hi Gregory, Thanks for your interesting posting, and to everyone else who has contributed to this thread I've been involved in developing educational media software for over 10 years, at a University here in NZ until a few years ago when I went out on my own. A lot of my early work was in the area of computer assisted learning, using HyperCard. Later I branched out into other academic disciplines, particularly medical teaching. I'm also convinced of the potential of applications like Revolution to contribute to meaningful, constructivist, student-centred online learning spaces. Over the last two years I've been trying to put these ideas into practice in a commercial form. I've just released the results of this work, an application called OceanBrowser (PC/OSX) to my first customers. Developed in Revolution it combines a set of learning objects, a backend database on the internet for collaborative data, and a content management system for course data distributed on CD-ROM. It's designed to allow people to start out with what they have and feel comfortable with, and to gradually increase the interactivity/scope of learning activities as time and resources allow. It's important to the business model that the software is practical out of the box. For those of you who are interested in the detail of the current product, here's a little more information. My initial customers are all involved in online postgraduate medical education. They have a well defined set of requirements, which include the ability to work with complex multimedia such as VR movies, audio, and large numbers of high resolution images. They also have a lot of documents that need distribution, typically Acrobat documents and Powerpoints. We converted the latter to Flash in order to more seamlessly display them in OceanBrowser. The product uses Altuit's excellent Altbrowser dll (on the Windows platform) to show web content. OceanBrowser supports a custom protocol (ocb://) which allows academics to embed links in web pages or emails to point to specific learning resources in OceanBrowser. When the student clicks on this link, OceanBrowser will open, retrieve the resource (typically from a database stored on the local computer) and display. Next to every resource displayed in the system is a comments area that tracks the content being showed. Users can post comments to this area, which may also embed appropriate metadata (e.g. posting to an audio item includes link to the timepoint the user was at in the audio file, posting to Flash powerpoint links to slide). Resource can be anything ranging form a document (pdf, webpage), multimedia (image, movie) to an application (Flash player, Director projector, etc). The foregoing list may seem to be overly orientated around document distribution, as I said though, my users have a large body of existing content they need to work with, so stage one is to address these problems. One of the more interesting learning objects in the system at the moment is an image annotation tool, which allows the user to view or create multimedia annotations to an image (by drawing a region on the image, recording an audio commentary, and providing additional information such as name, description etc). This has been based on some research I've been doing over the last year or so, and I hope to extend these annotation features to support true, distributed, collaborative image annotation. With OceanBrowser I'm hoping that by creating a sustainable business model I'll be able to afford to invest the time into interaction design, prototyping, and research (review of educational literature/other products) that will be required to implement some of the more exciting educational ideas that I want to see in the product over time. The new website for Oceanbrowser.com will be going up in a couple of weeks, now that the software product is complete. I hope then that we can put some demo content up for everyone to have a look at. Regards, Rodney On 13/08/2004, at 9:14 AM, Gregory Lypny wrote: You're most welcome, Judy. In fact, I've opposed the development of online courses at Concordia, not only because the professor as communicator of his or her own research and art is removed from the equation (that online forums do not fill the gap is another story we could get into) and student interaction becomes marginal (it need not, but it does), but because web stuff is almost always more form than content and is generally not even developed by the educator. I haven't seen many online courses that are not fluff. The potential benefits of standalone courseware, created with HyperCard-like languages, as complements to traditional lectures is, in my opinion, mind boggling. It would be trivial, for example, to create a Revolution stack that selects random excerpts of prose by authors who are considered to write in the same genre and present these to the
Re: Educational uses for Rev
It was at least a couple of years ago that I posted to the MC list that I thought that the (not sure of the exact titles --- my copies are at work) HyperCard Users Manual and Language Reference from the original boxed version were two of the most elegant and well written software manuals I had every read. I am surprised that so few software companies have adopted Apple's style and format or insist on good writing from their manual writers. Online help in general does not come close to the usefulness of a well written manual in traditional print. Gregory On Aug 12, 2004, at 6:06 PM, Marty Billingsley wrote: Introductory programming was one of the best uses of HyperCard, I thought, and have been trying to promote this with Rev. We switched over from HC a year ago with our 8th grade programming class, and have been very happy with it. Rev has, of course, several advantages over HC; two biggies are its use of color and the ability to save apps for any platform so students can take their work home to show their folks. I know of other schools that are hanging on with HC, who would probably make the switch if readable documentation were available. I used to be able to hand my students Danny Goodman's book and let them look up things in the index. My students can navigate Rev's online help, but since they often don't know what keywords to look for it isn't that useful. There should be an index of concepts, rather than keywords. I'm thinking of creating a recipe book that teachers could use with kids; there were several such for HC that got a lot of teachers started. ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
on Thu, 12 Aug 2004 Nicolas Cueto wrote: Alejandro Tejada asked: What's the main operating systems of PC in Japan? Windows, hands down. So XBox still had a chance to displace Sony in their own market! ;-) I've read somewhere that NEC computers are a majority in Japan, or it was long ago? Long ago, there's a good chance NEC were dominant. All the schools of all the schoolboards I taught at 15 years ago, for example, had installed top-of-the-line CALL rooms (40+ PC's, projector screen, printers, all networked, though no internet), and everything had the NEC brand. (Incidentally, those rooms also collected a lot of dust.) And, knowing bureaucracies, if two or three schoolboards went NEC then the likelihood is also high that many (most? all??) other schoolboards nationwide went NEC too. Similar to the motto: Nobody gets fired for buying from Microsoft Things now, though, may have changed. This comment, too, is just a guess from experience. For example, the private jr/sr high I was at most recently was originally NEC based, but this year they re-did one of the CALL room's with Dell machines. Must be the economy and everyone's efforts to cut down on costs. Dell? Not Sony or Toshiba? :-( Talking with some japanese people, i learned that relatively few japanese could speak english with fluency. This was a surprise for me. Sadly, that's still probably true. But, then again, coming from Canada, I can't speak with pride about the general French ability of Anglo-Canadians despite years of education and, more importanly, despite the fact that it's one of our official languages. I believed that French is mostly speaked in Quebec... (Y ademas, Alejandro, me imagino que en tu mente estaras haciendo una comparacion entre el nivel de ingles aqui y ese nivel tan alto que existe por casi toda Europa. Si es asi, yo pienso que no es una comparacion razonable. Por ejemplo, como ya sabras, los sistemas de letras y la gramatica son bastantes diferentes, y, ademas, el ingles forma parte tanto de la historia europeana como la de sus paises coloniales. Pero pensando positivamente, me parece que a lo mejor despues de una o dos generaciones mas, la abilidad en ingles aqui tambien se vera significadamente mejorada. Por ejemplo, en una de los high-schools que enseno, casi todos los maestros de ingles hablan el ingles pera-pera. Interesting, indeed! I had to look in google for pera-pera: From this page: http://www.jalt-publications.org/tlt/articles/2002/08/mieuli Pera-pera is a great Japanese word that means fluent or talkative. En contraste, hace quince anos antes que, de las dozenas de maestros de ingles que yo conocia en las escuelas publicas, solamente dos o tres hablaban o entendian el ingles suficientemente. Puesto que, espero que las cosas esten cambiando veramente.) Do you think that RunRev and Transcript have a chance to get introduced to english students and japanese english teachers? Are you able to type EASILY Japanese with unicode characters within RunRev fields? Now, if only I could draw, I'd be all set. g If you could take photos, and control Photoshop or another image editing application then you are almost ready! ;-)) Enjoying and benefitting from this education thread! Actually, RunRev could benefit from opening the educators list, but this time by sending an invitation to suscribe. :-) http://kweto.com Your image Still under construction wins my laugh for today! :-)) al = Visit my site: http://www.geocities.com/capellan2000/ __ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev / typing Japanese
On Friday 13 Aug 2004
(BAlejandro Tejada asked:
(B
(B Do you think that RunRev and Transcript have
(B a chance to get introduced to english students
(B and japanese english teachers?
(B
(BI have no idea. I hope so! And I think there's a Japan-based RunRev users
(Bgroup?
(B
(B Are you able to type EASILY Japanese with unicode
(B characters within RunRev fields?
(B
(BI don't know? From my experience with MC, I've been assuming that with
(BRunRev too I'd have to cut'n'paste Japanese text into fields. So, after
(BAlejandro Tejada asked I checked out and, yes!, I can not only type but also
(Bedit Japanese text directly within a field. Wow!
(B
(BBut, there's still a mismatch between some shift-key and punctuation
(Bcharacters on my keyboard and how these characters actually appear onscreen
(Bwithin a script field or the message box. For example, if I type these
(Bcharacters in a script field...
(B
(B'():]+*}
(B
(Bthe corresponding result onscreen is...
(B
(B^*('\:"|
(B
(BOh well...
(B
(BCheers,
(BNicolas Cueto
(B___
(Buse-revolution mailing list
(B[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Bhttp://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Actually, Richard, they would have had to have worked hard NOT to have stumbled across it, as I posted it as ammo in one or more class discussion threads ;-) As for some of them being 'authorities', well, remember that two of them claimed that Hypercard was 'a cheap rip-off' or 'knock-off' of Visual Basic... and that VBA = Visual Basic Analogue... you get the drift I'm sure. Judy On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Richard Gaskin wrote: One sadly pervasive problem is that too many self-described authorities on e-learning mistake the Internet for the Web. I can understand why they didn't stumble across my Beyond the Browser article: http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/netapps.html snip I'd like to think any authority would be able to connect the dots here. :) ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
Marian Petrides wrote: Not only in teaching programming but in designing custom educational courseware. Who wants the student to have ONLY simple multiple-guess questions to work with? Life doesn't come with a series of four exclusive-or questions tattooed across it, so why give student this unrealistic view of the real world, when a little work in Rev will permit far more challenging interactivity? Agreed wholeheartedly. Education-related work was the largest single set of tasks folks did with HyperCard, and for all the tools that have come out since there remains an unaddressed gap which may be an ideal focus for DreamCard. But moving beyond simple questions models like multiple choice is difficult. The AICC courseware interoperability standard describes almost a dozen question models, but most are variants of choose one, choose many, closest match, etc., sometimes enlived by using drag-and-drop as the mechanism for applying the answer but not substantially different from what gets tested with a simple multiple choice in terms of truer assessment of what's been learned. The challenge is to find more open-ended question models which can still be assessed by the computer. For example, the most open-ended question is an essay, but I sure don't want to write the routine that scores essays. :) What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for computer-based learning? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
It would seem courseware in this context implies primarily evaluation, not teaching/learning. Students would need to have control of the reins in Revolution to create content that would show learning had occurred. But then you have the PowerPoint multimedia slide show model as a result, most likely. But on the testing end of things, perhaps the models provided by the AICC are the best easy models available. Expository writing, interviewing is the only real way I know of to test the depth of retention and comprehension of what a student has learned. Perhaps an answer is to create the tools by which the student must create the test themselves, rather than take it, using the models you cite. Then you will be assured they have at least known that material long enough to create it, and in contradiction to the wrong answers they provide, which should provide a context that would imply some real comprehension. How to evaluate this would pose another problem. Mark On Aug 11, 2004, at 9:53 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote: Marian Petrides wrote: Not only in teaching programming but in designing custom educational courseware. Who wants the student to have ONLY simple multiple-guess questions to work with? Life doesn't come with a series of four exclusive-or questions tattooed across it, so why give student this unrealistic view of the real world, when a little work in Rev will permit far more challenging interactivity? Agreed wholeheartedly. Education-related work was the largest single set of tasks folks did with HyperCard, and for all the tools that have come out since there remains an unaddressed gap which may be an ideal focus for DreamCard. But moving beyond simple questions models like multiple choice is difficult. The AICC courseware interoperability standard describes almost a dozen question models, but most are variants of choose one, choose many, closest match, etc., sometimes enlived by using drag-and-drop as the mechanism for applying the answer but not substantially different from what gets tested with a simple multiple choice in terms of truer assessment of what's been learned. The challenge is to find more open-ended question models which can still be assessed by the computer. For example, the most open-ended question is an essay, but I sure don't want to write the routine that scores essays. :) What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for computer-based learning? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
Indeed! Perhaps another educational use of Rev-based products would be exploratory learning... then assessed, perhaps, by the dreaded m/c questions Judy On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Richard Gaskin wrote: Marian Petrides wrote: Not only in teaching programming but in designing custom educational courseware. Who wants the student to have ONLY simple multiple-guess questions to work with? Life doesn't come with a series of four exclusive-or questions tattooed across it, so why give student this unrealistic view of the real world, when a little work in Rev will permit far more challenging interactivity? Agreed wholeheartedly. Education-related work was the largest single set of tasks folks did with HyperCard, and for all the tools that have come out since there remains an unaddressed gap which may be an ideal focus for DreamCard. But moving beyond simple questions models like multiple choice is difficult. The AICC courseware interoperability standard describes almost a dozen question models, but most are variants of choose one, choose many, closest match, etc., sometimes enlived by using drag-and-drop as the mechanism for applying the answer but not substantially different from what gets tested with a simple multiple choice in terms of truer assessment of what's been learned. The challenge is to find more open-ended question models which can still be assessed by the computer. For example, the most open-ended question is an essay, but I sure don't want to write the routine that scores essays. :) What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for computer-based learning? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
One thing I make extensive use of is check boxes. This allows you to ask relatively open-ended fact questions. For example, present a clinical vignette and ask out of this list of 9 diagnoses which could cause this clinical picture (ie what is your differential diagnosis at this point); student needs to get all correct diagnoses and no incorrect diagnoses. If you are programming the parser yourself, you can even set up permissive rules. Using the above example, say 4 of the responses are the ones sought after, but there are 2 others that might be viewed as correct in certain circumstances. You could then allow all of the following to proceed to the card for correct answer: correct 4, (correct 4 + one other), (correct 4 + the other possibly correct), (correct 4 + both others). The answer card then tells the student what the sought after answer was and why, then explains the permissive answers. The other thing which can be done is to simulate real-world tasks. I've put together a module that simulates the way a bench tech goes about interpreting an antibody identification panel. The programming for this was actually quite easy. What was difficult was figuring out the graphical display--once I created the graphics for a hardcopy book I wrote, the programming solution made itself apparent. For those who are curious, I'll describe what I did (ignore if you like). If you envision a grid consisting of 10 rows and 25 columns, the first step the student needs to do is to highlight the correct rows (on-off toggle using unhighlighted graphic vs highlighted one (both created in Photoshop). Then the student needs to toggle one of the following 3 (no image, slash, or X) at the top of each column. Eventually, the parser needs to see whether the correct rows are highlighted and whether the correct mark appears at the top of each column. Again, there are permissive rules covering circumstances in which both a slash or an X could be correct. M On Aug 11, 2004, at 12:53 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote: What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for computer-based learning? ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Actually, I am talking about self-paced instruction (see my earlier reply), in which the student is presented with a question, has to commit to an answer, the answer is parsed, and the student given feedback on the answer. Frankly, while it would not be hard to score responses in this setting, I have resisted doing so because then the goal becomes to get the best score, not to learn the material. Since what I do is medical education, there is a mix of science (fact) and art (clinical judgment) involved in answering the questions--see my comment on permissive answers in my earlier post. Giving a numeric score penalizes the student who thinks outside the box. And, because the ultimate goal of medical education is to teach students how to think like a doctor NOT how to memorize these 10 million factoids, creative thinking should not be penalized--or even appear to be. M On Aug 11, 2004, at 1:14 PM, Mark Swindell wrote: It would seem courseware in this context implies primarily evaluation, not teaching/learning. Students would need to have control of the reins in Revolution to create content that would show learning had occurred. ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
Not only in teaching programming but in designing custom educational courseware. Who wants the student to have ONLY simple multiple-guess questions to work with? Life doesn't come with a series of four exclusive-or questions tattooed across it, so why give student this unrealistic view of the real world, when a little work in Rev will permit far more challenging interactivity? Agreed wholeheartedly. Education-related work was the largest single set of tasks folks did with HyperCard, and for all the tools that have come out since there remains an unaddressed gap which may be an ideal focus for DreamCard. But moving beyond simple questions models like multiple choice is difficult. The AICC courseware interoperability standard describes almost a dozen question models, but most are variants of choose one, choose many, closest match, etc., sometimes enlived by using drag-and-drop as the mechanism for applying the answer but not substantially different from what gets tested with a simple multiple choice in terms of truer assessment of what's been learned. The challenge is to find more open-ended question models which can still be assessed by the computer. For example, the most open-ended question is an essay, but I sure don't want to write the routine that scores essays. :) What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for computer-based learning? Richard, Marian, General information on computer-based assessment can be found on the CAA website (Computer assisted assessment centre, UK, University of Luton), http://www.caacentre.ac.uk/ or on the Pass-it Scotland website, http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/projects/passit/. The later considers a wide range of activities, from situations where candidates word process short answer responses or essays and submit these to markers by e-mail, to those where candidates take computer-delivered tests online and their responses are marked through automated marking systems. I have a (long) list of references that I am ready to share, if you are interested. Yes, I agree that Revolution could be the ideal tool to let teachers easily develop complex formative exercises with no requirement of technical skills. At least, it's what I argue in a grant I submitted recently. You can find the full description at : http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/Elearning/. Unfortunately, that project did not get funded (at this stage, Universities are more concerned about speeding up the exam process with automatized summative -- multiple choices -- assessment)... This means I will have to find other ways to get me a full license for revolution. Damn, I want it so badly, Revolution is the programming language of my dreams. It's ideal for persons like me who have zillions of (small) projects to realize, but do not have enough spare time to juggle with complex computer languages. So easy to use and program, and yet so powerful! I tried to convince my university to buy a site license, but no luck there (the person I contacted said that she did not find the time to try the product one month later after my request). If you have a selling portfolio, I would be more than happy to forward it to them. Otherwise, no chance to get an HE education price? Yes, I agree, revolution is worth more than its current price... but HE people often have no plan to sell the products they develop. Selling it to a lower price to HE individuals may have them ask their university to buy a site or university-wide license. Also, HE people are creative, productive, often happy to make their codes public and may contribute to the development of a gallery of small programs. Seriously, the product, Revolution, is great, but the shop-window is currently of little appeal. Do you know of konfabulator (http://www.konfabulator.com/)? They are highly succesfull despite the fact that they are exactly the opposite... limited potential but dramatic shop-window full of jaw dropping little time-savers or friendly desktop fillers (yes, most of them are useless, but Konfabulator lets you develop small applications, in one or two days and proudly show it on the net, which apparently appeals customers). I suspect that your decision to develop a less expensive player is a step in that direction. But its not a good option for a lecturer who cannot ask each one of his students to buy a player to benefit from the courseware material he has developed. I should maybe take this opportunity to add that the university lecturer I am is seriously considering moving to a career of developing tools for teachers (so many university teachers do not even know about HTML, believe me, there is a HUGE market for tools that let them easily develop courseware material and put it on the web, as encouraged more and more by Universities) and courseware for students (believe me, there is a HUGE market there too... even more when small tablets/ebooks will begin to appear). If
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
Marielle wrote: I suspect that your decision to develop a less expensive player is a step in that direction. But its not a good option for a lecturer who cannot ask each one of his students to buy a player to benefit from the courseware material he has developed. I have not paid very close attention to this since the player does not interest me, but it is my understanding that the player (as in the executable file that plays your stacks) will be like HyperCard Player--free to distribute with your stacks. Or am I misspeaking? Yes, I agree, revolution is worth more than its current price... but HE people often have no plan to sell the products they develop. Selling it to a lower price to HE individuals may have them ask their university to buy a site or university-wide license. Again, I bought a Professional license (now Enterprise) when Rev first came out and have continued with same, so I have not kept up with the cost/features of other versions. However, if you are simply developing applications for your students to use, couldn't you simply get by with an Express license at $149 (makes standalones that exit with made with Revolution)? Or, if you need to create cross-platform apps but are OK with doing your creation on one platform, a Studio license at $299 (no made with Rev on exit)? Finally, it sounds like Dreamcard, which I think will cost $100 will be exactly what you need, assuming that you are permitted to distribute the player with your stacks at no extra charge. If anybody is interested in an association or has a job to propose, I would be delighted to hear from them. I don't have a job (not even for myself ;-) but would be glad to talk off list. I am in Vermont, USA. Marian ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
Marielle Lange wrote: Do you know of konfabulator (http://www.konfabulator.com/)? They are highly succesfull despite the fact that they are exactly the opposite... limited potential but dramatic shop-window full of jaw dropping little time-savers or friendly desktop fillers (yes, most of them are useless, but Konfabulator lets you develop small applications, in one or two days and proudly show it on the net, which apparently appeals customers). While it generated a fair amount of buzz when it came out, it's worth noting that according to the Support page there the two folks who make Konfab never left their day jobs. In the dot-bomb era mindshare was more important than revenue, but now that we've had a roadside sobriety check on the information superhighway we've returned to more traditional definitions of success. :) But where Konfab's eye-candy-over-utility is an inherent part of their security model, Rev's greater flexibility has no such limitation. With user-definable security options, the Rev Player can be used for net-only apps with no file I/O or full applications. I suspect that your decision to develop a less expensive player is a step in that direction. But its not a good option for a lecturer who cannot ask each one of his students to buy a player to benefit from the courseware material he has developed. The Rev Player is free. And for more than a decade the engine has had the ability to create standalones that can run other stacks, so one can make their own learning tool to run any number and variety of courseware, royalty-free. I should maybe take this opportunity to add that the university lecturer I am is seriously considering moving to a career of developing tools for teachers (so many university teachers do not even know about HTML, believe me, there is a HUGE market for tools that let them easily develop courseware material and put it on the web, as encouraged more and more by Universities) and courseware for students (believe me, there is a HUGE market there too... even more when small tablets/ebooks will begin to appear). The Web can be fine for relatively simple presentations, but is limited for more sophisticated interactions. Send the lecturer to: http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/netapps.html There are links there to many other resources as well. This is not to suggest that using the Web for distance learning is necessarily a bad idea, but that most of its strengths are equally applicable to custom client software such as one can make in Revolution, Director, or REBOL, and many of the unique benefits are largely based on misconceptions (such as helper apps being somehow more trouble than dealing with the limitations of a browser plugin). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev -- ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)
At 4:31 PM -0400 11/8/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Perhaps another educational use of Rev-based products would be exploratory learning... then assessed, perhaps, by the dreaded m/c questions Judy Exactly! While assessment can drive learning, there is more to teaching and learning than tests ;-) I use simulations that I've written with Rev to first allow (university) students to conduct experiments and learn from the results, but then to design and conduct their own experiments to answer questions. The learning objectives of the two stages are different, but obviously synergistic. At the moment most of the use of the simulations is in supervised conditions, but I am planning a kit of simulations that students will use as part of self-directed projects. At the moment I toying with the idea that students will be required to make reports that can be distributed to the class as learning resources; having to teach something is a terrific incentive for learning it first! On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Richard Gaskin wrote: Marian Petrides wrote: Not only in teaching programming but in designing custom educational courseware. Who wants the student to have ONLY simple multiple-guess questions to work with? Life doesn't come with a series of four exclusive-or questions tattooed across it, so why give student this unrealistic view of the real world, when a little work in Rev will permit far more challenging interactivity? Agreed wholeheartedly. Education-related work was the largest single set of tasks folks did with HyperCard, and for all the tools that have come out since there remains an unaddressed gap which may be an ideal focus for DreamCard. But moving beyond simple questions models like multiple choice is difficult. The AICC courseware interoperability standard describes almost a dozen question models, but most are variants of choose one, choose many, closest match, etc., sometimes enlived by using drag-and-drop as the mechanism for applying the answer but not substantially different from what gets tested with a simple multiple choice in terms of truer assessment of what's been learned. The challenge is to find more open-ended question models which can still be assessed by the computer. For example, the most open-ended question is an essay, but I sure don't want to write the routine that scores essays. :) What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for computer-based learning? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation -- Michael J. Lew Senior Lecturer Department of Pharmacology The University of Melbourne Parkville 3010 Victoria Australia Phone +613 8344 8304 ** New email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ** ___ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Educational uses for Rev
Alejandro Tejanda asked: (B (B What's the main operating systems of PC in Japan? (B (BWindows, hands down. (B (B I've read somewhere that NEC computers are (B a majority in Japan, or it was long ago? (B (BLong ago, there's a good chance NEC were dominant. All the schools of all (Bthe schoolboards I taught at 15 years ago, for example, had installed (B"top-of-the-line" CALL rooms (40+ PC's, projector screen, printers, all (Bnetworked, though no internet), and everything had the NEC brand. (B(Incidentally, those rooms also collected a lot of dust.) And, knowing (Bbureaucracies, if two or three schoolboards went NEC then the likelihood is (Balso high that many (most? all??) other schoolboards nationwide went NEC (Btoo. (B (BThings now, though, may have changed. This comment, too, is just a guess (Bfrom experience. For example, the private jr/sr high I was at most recently (Bwas originally NEC based, but this year they re-did one of the CALL room's (Bwith Dell machines. Must be the economy and everyone's efforts to cut down (Bon costs. (B (B Talking with some japanese people, i learned (B that relatively few japanese could speak (B english with fluency. This was a surprise for me. (B (BSadly, that's still probably true. But, then again, coming from Canada, I (Bcan't speak with pride about the general French ability of Anglo-Canadians (Bdespite years of education and, more importanly, despite the fact that it's (Bone of our official languages. (B (B(Y ademas, Alejandro, me imagino que en tu mente estaras haciendo una (Bcomparacion entre el nivel de ingles aqui y ese nivel tan alto que existe (Bpor casi toda Europa. Si es asi, yo pienso que no es una comparacion (Brazonable. Por ejemplo, como ya sabras, los sistemas de letras y la (Bgramatica son bastantes diferentes, y, ademas, el ingles forma parte tanto (Bde la historia europeana como la de sus paises coloniales. Pero pensando (Bpositivamente, me parece que a lo mejor despues de una o dos generaciones (Bmas, la abilidad en ingles aqui tambien se vera significadamente mejorada. (BPor ejemplo, en una de los high-schools que enseno, casi todos los maestros (Bde ingles hablan el ingles "pera-pera". En contraste, hace quince anos antes (Bque, de las dozenas de maestros de ingles que yo conocia en las escuelas (Bpublicas, solamente dos o tres hablaban o entendian el ingles (Bsuficientemente. Puesto que, espero que las cosas esten cambiando (Bveramente.) (B (B (B I would be very interested in (B hearing more about what (B you have to say about potential applications (B in this field. (B (BKaj Schwermer asked that (Hello, Kaj! Nicolas Cueto here, in (BTochigi-ken/Japan for 15 -- or more?! -- years, and running just one (B"eikaiwa" school), and, of course, the potential for RunRev or MC is near (Binfinite. Myself, I've made applications for in-class use or online; some of (Bit for making little doohickeys that just add fun to the class, some of it (Bfor language analysis (part of my MSc involved corpora analysis of sr high (Bentrance exams), some of it for testing (and, horrors!, that includes (Bmultiple-choice testing), some of it for generating classroom materials, and (Bsome of it to handle repetitive tasks (like spitting out the html code for a (Blarge table of photos). And, I agree with Kaj about the dearth of quality (BCALL materials here. Hence why I roll my own. Now, if only I could draw, I'd (Bbe all set. g (B (BEnjoying and benefitting from this education thread! (B (BCheers, (BNicolas Cueto (Bniconiko language school (Japan) (Bhttp://kweto.com (B___ (Buse-revolution mailing list (B[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bhttp://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
