sapientia ex machina

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, I’m an enthusiastic user of the free reference manager Zotero; I’m impressed with how such young, open-source product has managed to quickly outshine established, non-free alternatives like EndNote.

One difficulty I (and others) have had with Zotero, though, is in generating reports for a group of articles. Particularly, there’s no way to customize the categories you display in the report. This can be a real problem if you’re trying to share your sources with a co-author; at best, there’s a lot of unneeded metadata cluttering up the document (at worst, your email says you’ve been working on this for weeks, while your articles’ Date Added data tells a different tale…).

Now, I’m told this will be corrected in a later version of Zotero. However, I turned to PHP and a bit o’ regular expression magic to do it now. It turned out to be a good learning project, and I’ve been pleased to see that a few hundred other people (if Google Analytics is to be believed) have gotten some use out of it, too. The tool’s listed in the Zotero documentation, and–by far the most important of all–I got a free Zotero t-shirt out of the deal, which is now my favoritist garment ever.

I’ve also gotten quite a few feature requests from folks, including a request to help localize the script for German (you can find that German-language version here). Since my PHP skills have broadened in the last several months (I’m all the way to “novice” now!), I figured it was time to do an update. So, here is Zotero Report Customizer 2.0. New features include javascript form validation, a bunch of new categories, and the option to specify your own categories to delete if I don’t list ‘em. The script is also a ton easier to modify if you want to customize it to a different language, and can be set up to work in multiple languages at once. (I added a little German support for an example).

Have fun, and if you think of anything else you’d like in this, just let me know.

Has Scott Leslie has written the perfect blog post?  It’s a triple threat: a relevant, interesting topic (personal learning environments), a cool approach (visualizations), and—most importantly, for me—a comprehensive list of similar efforts by other bloggers.

In a data-sodden world, the scarce resource is not access, but organization.  Scott adds organizational value both through visualization of PLE concept, and in linking similar work.  The result: a great resource for anyone interested in PLE’s.  Now all we need is a meta-visualization of all the individual efforts together…

Quick, Google a picture of two seagulls next to a rock, with a woman in a red jacket in the foreground.  Not too easy, is it?  The problem, of course, is that images aren’t indexed by their content; while text is machine-readable (ergo machine-indexable), image indexing still requires the Mark I Eyeball.

One solution: throw automation out the window and crowdsource the tagging task to a bunch of humans.  Amazon has had success in doing this with its Mechanical Turk, which pays a small piece rate to folks in exchange for performance of “human intelligence tasks” like image-labelling.

Google, though, has been pursuing a different strategy, one I’ll call the “fence-painting technique,” after Tom Sawyer’s famous exercise in motivational psychology.  Google lets users play a game in which they try to add more tags to an image than an opponent.  Google keeps the valuable image information, and players get…um, points.  That’s right, users do a  Human Intelligence Task that they’d get paid for over at Amazon, for free.

The power of games to motivate is profound.  It’s this realization (hardly a new one) that’s fueling much of the growing interest (and debates) in educational gaming.  “If we could get Johnny to concentrate on physics the way he does on Guitar Hero…”

The trick, though, is to not stop with motivation.  Sure, there’s some value in a game that makes it fun for Suzie to memorize her multiplication facts.  But I think that educational games have a lot more to offer, particularly when we get into simulations.  While I doubt they’ll replace classrooms entirely, I think open-ended games that move beyond skill practice—”software toys,” to use the great term Will Wright coined to describe his seminal SimCity—do have transformative potential.  When I see projects like the UW’s epistemic games, I see a lot more going on than just motivation—I see critical thinking that transfers accross the curriculum, combined with real subject-area learning.

I like Clark’s thought that games may be a qualitative leap in teaching of a kind that hasn’t been seen in a long time.  I disagree that simulations are entirely revolutionary (there are plenty of pre-computer sims; think martial arts practice with wooden swords, for instance)  but there’s no doubt that computing gives us a great chance to make this more real.  When games exploit the synergies between motivation and simulation, I think we’re going to see exciting things.

photo by musebrarian

Hooray! I recently got a new job as an instructional designer at UF’s Center for Instructional Teaching and Technology.  It looks like most of my work is going to be focused on a big grant to put around twenty undergraduate courses online this year. Hopefully this experience will bolster my resume when I apply to ed tech PhD programs in the fall.

I’ve been a bit remiss in updating, since I’ve been pretty busy trying to learn the ropes, but I think that should change as I gradually get acclimated.  My ed experience to date has been as a classroom teacher, and I’m excited about being able learn and share stuff from this new perspective.