It’s about time: Purpose, methods and challenges of temporal analyses of multiple data streams
Recent studies of learning have involved concurrent collection of multiple types of data such as computer activity logs and online discussion, or have applied multi-dimensional coding, resulting in related data streams, which highlight the dynamic nature of learning and require analyses from a temporal perspective. This workshop will explore issues emerging from integrating data streams by identifying a set of analytic difficulties researchers face and illustrating the application of specific methods that address these challenges.

There’s a fairly obvious connection here to InqScribe; we’ve had some feature requests that touch on ways to make sense of multiple videos of the same event. The theme also touches on some work we’ve done with Nichole Pinkard trying to figure out how students in 1:1 computing environments use their laptops. I’ll be curious to see what comes out of this.

Workshop happens on June 28 in Chicago. Deadline for applications is March 15th 2010. Get cracking!

Oh, you want it done in 3 months?

Both of them?

After a very frantic 3 months, we are happy to announce the launch of Inquirium’s latest creations, a pair of web-based investigation tools for teaching high school students about evolution.

On the surface, these interactives look like just another database and animated diagram. But we’ve designed the interactives around an activity context which draws students into data-driven investigations.

* “Bones of Contention“ has students playing the role of a physical anthropologist trying to identify and classify “mystery” fossils using a database of most of the significant hominid fossil finds.

* “Regulating Genes“ introduces students to the evolutionary processes at work during development (and technically, at conception) by having them explore how mutations in both coding and non-coding areas of genes lead to different morphological features in a fictional creature.

Cramming what could easily have been two year-long research and development projects into a single 3-month timeframe was an interesting challenge. We sharpened our teeth building similar software for longer term grant-funded projects, which afforded more opportunity for background research, formative evaluation, and design iteration. For this project, we had to adapt our design process to fit a new sort of timeline, forcing us to commit to certain design decisions very early in the process and leaving very little wiggle room to explore emergent ideas. There’s nothing like a short timeframe to make us reflect on our design process and pare down our cycles only to the bare essentials.

While the interactives are simple by necessity and by design (both are scoped to work within 1-2 class periods), they draw upon models of inquiry and investigation that, unfortunately, still do not see much light beyond the realm of academic research and school reform projects. Kudos to NOVA for bringing this approach to a wider audience.

Both tools were created to accompany NOVA episodes commemorating the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species. One episode, “Becoming Human,” explores human origins, and the other one, “What Darwin Never Knew,” explores the emerging science of evo-devo.

We conceived, designed, and produced both tools. We also created a complete set of classroom materials that include background essays, student worksheets, and teacher guides.

Joel also suggests an alternative repository scheme to the more complex git model I described last month. That’s one of those issues that are often not mentioned in introductory tutorials, but since you establish a repository structure early, it’s actually quite important to get it right the first time.

The other thing about this tutorial that I liked was the way that Joel is monetizing his own mistakes. He kicks off the tutorial like this:

When the programmers at my company decided to switch from Subversion to Mercurial, boy was I confused. First, I came up with all kinds of stupid reasons why we shouldn’t switch.

And all the kool kids think: that Spolsky guy. Of course he wouldn’t get hg. What would you expect from a Microsoft stooge?

But look at what he’s got us reading. He’s leveraged his experience learning hg not just into an entertaining tutorial, but into something that’s valuable to his business. This is not a typical half-assed web tutorial. It has its own domain. He’s getting folks excited about using hg and switching away from svn. And what’s that funny looking bird in the corner? Oh, Fog Creek happens to be launching a commercial version control system based on hg? Gee, you don’t say…

We are happy to announce that AppJet Inc. has been acquired by Google. The EtherPad team will continue its work on realtime collaboration by joining the Google Wave team.

Congratulations to the AppJet team. EtherPad is great; seeing similar functionality in Wave will probably also be great. What may be frustrating is if there’s a doughnut hole of no service from the point at which EtherPad shuts down…

The EtherPad site will stay online through March 2010 with some restrictions.

If you are a user of the Free Edition or Professional Edition, you can continue to use and edit your existing pads until March 31, 2010. No new free public pads may be created. Your pads will no longer be accessible after March 31, 2010, at which time your pads and any associated personally identifiable information will be deleted.

We have added a feature to the Professional Edition that allows you to export all of your pads as one ZIP file archive. You can find a link to the zip archive at the bottom of the pad list after signing in to your Professional Edition account.

…and whenever it is that similar functionality emerges in Wave. In the meantime, EtherPad users take note and save your pad data locally. (You were doing that already, right? Or did you trust a free service with your data?)

Then again, falling back on SubEthaEdit is not that shabby.

Update: There are plans to open source EtherPad and maintain service until it is open sourced.

Generally we update the calendar with events as they’re announced via mailing lists and weblogs. If you have a learning sciences event you’d like to us to include, please let us know.

The space affords many types of interaction from casual hangout, to media production, to presentation. The program makes good use of mentors too.

YouMedia is a collaboration between the Chicago Public Library and Digital Youth Network (founded by Inquirium Alum Nichole Pinkard). Check out this spotlight from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative:

YouMedia from Spotlight on Vimeo.

Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.