Dear all,
A few months ago (back in Oct 2004), there was an interesting thread on educational use for revolution .
Several things emerged from this discussion:
1. A number of metacard or revolution stacks have been produced that cannot be found anywhere on the web or in the "user".
2. There is a group of enthusiastic teachers on this list who see revolution as having the potential to benefit their teaching.
3. Most of them have difficulties sharing their enthusiasm with colleagues in their institution.
This was for instance, nicely expressed by Gregory [Gregory Lypny gregory.lypny at videotron.ca]
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. [...]
I have similar difficulties. I work in a department (psychology) where most of the staff is, simply put, technologically inept. Whenever I try to advocate the use of Revolution I only cause fear and apprehension. As Judy had expressed in some of her emails, my skills and my tendency to aim for better than what is achieved by current practices leads to isolation rather than admiration. The more I try to persuade my HoD to use existing eLearning tools to remedy some *inefficient* teaching practices they currently have, the more I can feel myself being very negatively noticed (change is a cause of discomfort for some people). I can see me loosing courage, gradually, and I feel the need for a place where I can discuss some ideas with like-minded persons.
As Gregory mentioned:
I should leave this with a positive spin: courseware = cool, untapped potential. We just need more impressive examples of it in use.
However, if it is left to me alone, in between my teaching, research, admin duties, I do not have the time to develop an impressive example of Revolution's use for education. Not that I am not trying. To address the problem identified by Gregory, I have a project in gestation of a GUI editor for a large range of web-based exercises. The idea is to select exercises written in java, javascript, Flash, with a content that can be defined in a text file attached to the application (see usinaquiz for examples [in French] or formator demo [quizz section] for a working demo [enhanced for Safari and Firefox, not tested yet with Internet Explorer Windows] and http:// revolution.lexicall.org/eLearning/AccompanyingDocs-sm.pdf fro textual explanations). This will be developed over next summer. (See, John Mathewson for a similar project, for a public of school teachers, at http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html). I have another project of an revolution application to access an on-line database of learning objects. Another one of a database of images, for lecture illustration (I already have on my hard disk a well organized archive of 100MB of pictures), where lecturers could share and access their resources (see viperlib, http://viperlib.york.ac.uk/, for such a project, in the very restricted context of visual perception).
Still, alone, there is only so little I can do and it tends to take quite a long time to get anything done as I do not have much time to spend on this project. I have given a lot of thought to becoming a freelance instructional designer, but I really doubt I would be able to make a living from it. So, I will probably have to keep my revolution coding as a captivating hobby, to do outside of my (already long) working hours.
Recently, in the context of a course on "teaching in digital environment" I had been enrolled in, this time as a student, I got to write an assignment, on using Wiki-web for collaborative learning. Obviously, my assignment partner and I decided to write this assignment collaboratively, on a wiki-web medium. I really enjoyed the experience. There is so much more in 2 brains than in one... there is so much benefit of having another person's perspective on the issue. This got me thinking... why not try something similar with the nice people from the revolution community, this time on the use of revolution for student-centered learning?
It happens that I recently created a website, that I use in a research context. I could easily create a revolution subdomain to host a "revolution-education" resource center with : (1) an archive of stacks relevant to education ( I can provide up to 200MB), (2) a forum or even better, a wiki for the discussion of ideas and guidelines (I have recently set-up a wiki to support one of my course and it wouldn't be difficult to set-up another one for discussion on the them of revolution-education). I really believe that Wikis are better than forums to organize thoughts.
Who knows, this could lead to a book "Instructional Design with Revolution"... with the word order that suggests that reaching teaching goals and the provision of well-thought exercises would be more important than technical aspects (though, both could probably be reconciled with a section on teaching (to teachers) programming with revolution). After all, the reluctance of colleagues to be involved in e-Learning does not come from the fact that they do not care about the quality of their teaching. It rather has for origin the lack of resource printed or digital resource that would let them realize something useful without having to spend too much time acquiring new skills. If we want to encourage our colleagues to adopt better practices, maybe we need to be concerned about creating resources that facilitate their efforts.
In fact, I already gave it a start:
http://revolution.lexicall.org/
You will find there a list of links and information related to eLearning (http://revolution.lexicall.org/eLearning/) as well as a listing of the stacks I have already produced (under a share alike license), at http://revolution.lexicall.org/listing.php. I will add a wiki next week-end.
Educators and non educators alike may be interested to know that this listing is automatically produced thanks to the provision of a text file joined to the revolution file, with the following metadata.
<resource_description>
<name>RSS reader</name>
<description>Still another exploration of widgets. Simple RSS reader.</description>
<author>Marielle Lange</author>
<author_contact_details>N/A</author_contact_details>
<license>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/</ license>
<url_image>mystacks/rss_reader.gif</url_image>
<url_information>N/A</url_information>
<url_download>http://revolution.lexicall.org/mystacks/ rss_reader.rev</url_download>
</resource_description>
This means that information about the file is separate from the file itself... It is possible to create a directory that lists stacks hosted in the archive as well as stacks hosted elsewhere. I can give away the php script to anybody interested (written so to understand any metadata, organized in any number of sections (details at: http:// lexicall.org/repository/standards.php, when used in another context).
Let me know if you are interested in taking advantage of any of this... but please, be patient, my day job does not involve programming with revolution, I may take a few days (i.e., next week- end) to answer your emails.
Best, Marielle
------------------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------------------------
Marielle Lange (PhD), Psycholinguistics, Lecturer in Psychology and Informatics
University of Edinburgh, UK
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/
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