When I worked as director of publications at the Soil and Water Conservation Society, I set up the SWCS network. Within minutes of invitations being sent out, people started joining, posting information, and forming groups on a variety of topics of interest to them—conservation photography, water quality monitoring, cover crops, etc.

The networking technology was a necessary component, but one of the most interesting aspects of the network was the social experience. Members of the network began voluntarily taking on the responsibility of welcoming other new members. Old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years, separated by geography, “bumped into each other” in forums in which they shared an interest.

The content generated in the network was user-centered. The old model of experts delivering information to audiences was, in this context, replaced by a network of individuals sharing information according to the needs of the network members.

So, I started thinking, social networks are social and technological, but are they educational? To answer that question, I had to start to understand the concept of social learning.

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Popularity: 68% [?]

Flip Videos. You either love ’em or hate ’em. These remarkably compact and easy-to-use Flip Video cameras are a natural result of what has been called the “democratization” of video.

Many professional video producers are skeptical of these little cameras and the power of instantly distributing video around the world using the camera’s built-in USB connection. They quickly point out the limitations of the technology and the mistakes often made by amateurs who post their productions for the world to see.

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Popularity: 62% [?]

Don’t look now, but perhaps the next industry to be undone by robots is education. OK, maybe not.  After watching a video clip of the HRP-4C’s Frankenstein-like ambulation, you can more easily conjure up images of terrorized children running out of their classroom when the new substitute teacher shows up with lesson in head.

OK, so visions of robot faculty may seem fanciful and far-fetched, but virtual “mediators” of E-learning or web-based environments have become more prominent as the technology behind avatars has become more powerful and affordable for the average user (US News story).

So, why the initial hesitation and angst when you hear “avatar”?  Perhaps it’s Clippy, the talking paperclip.

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Popularity: 78% [?]

In future postings on this blog, I will talk about new frontiers in science education publishing. But today I’d like to take you back to an earlier era to celebrate a previous revolution in thinking made possible by science publishing.

This year marks the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the famous English naturalist.

I’m not talking about On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s breakthrough work on natural selection.

Instead, I draw your attention to a lesser known work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. In this, his final book, Darwin presented his observations on the role earthworms play in forming fertile topsoil.

The book on such a small subject met with a large reception in 1881. Thousands of copies were sold.

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We recently began a project called, “Mastery of Aging Well: A Program for Healthy Living”.  The funding for this project came from the USDA and the principle investigator and content provider is a very well-respected associate professor tied to OSU Extension.  From a very pragmatic standpoint, the PI’s stated goal at the beginning of the project was to take her content and represent it in a more compelling, web-based format that would incorporate multimedia.  This was an exciting prospect for our group as we have graphic artists, photographers, videographers, journalists, editors and a few instructional designers.  We chose to develop two separate tracks for the content: One option was what was termed “Tier 1″ and would represent a pared down version of the content and very little user interaction. “Tier 2″ would reside within OSU’s E-campus site and would cost the user a fee for access to this more robust set of media assets, i.e. videos, interactive games and other user-centric tasks that focused on knowledge retention and assessment.

So, after selecting Adobe Presenter as the most appropriate (and efficient) authoring tool to port the content into a web-based format, we began to think through some of the instructional design considerations for our baby boomer target audience:

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Popularity: 71% [?]