Most educators would agree with the constructivism model. Thus we have in our minds a model to explain what we have experienced and every time we have a new experience, we modify the model. Educators believe in "active learning" where the process of aquiring and assimilating the information is an active process that helps with the process of modifying the model. The phrase "PowerPoint presentation" conjures up images of a dark room with a speaker hidden behind a podium droning away at a large audience that is nodding off. The exact opposite of what we would want education to be. Still PowerPoint is one of the most popular tools of teachers and lecturers. But it is quite possible to use PowerPoint to make fun and interactive presentations. Some examples are: 1. Audience Response systems 2. Using a tablet PC to annotate the slides during the presentation 3. Imaginative use of Action buttons and hyperlinnks to customize the presentation to the learning needs of the audience 4. Making invisible hot spots on images 5. Use of templates like the Jeopardy Templates. When I do a workshop for faculty re' use of PowerPoint in teaching I like to leave them with a web page that I put together so they can go back and practice some of these skills. I also show them a web site that has some great examples of PowerPoint educational games. While made by a young child for other kids, it has a couple of examples worth looking at. These are PowerPoint presentation saved a "single Web Pages" i.e. in .mht format and require enabling ActiveX... a. Example of a Jeopardy Game b. Example of a invisible hotspot, hyperlinks and action buttons for Candian geography and history!

With the introduction of smartphones and wireless enabled handheld devices (many educational institutions have WiFi), I have been thinking about how we can easily design blogs for the PDA/Smartphone. If the process is easy, then the next step is to see if this has value in the educational workflow (A bit like an application looking for a use). Searching the web I came upon a tutorial for creating a PDA friendly blog. Template converts the blog to a PDA friendly version. The next step would be to create a RSS feed page that would point to the items in the blog. That is easy enough to do with numerous tutorials on the web ( for example). The problem is - who has the time to create a blog and then also remember to update the feed page? To be something that the average non-geek educator can use the process needs to be perfectly simple and the more automated the better. A simpler solution would be to use one of the default templates on the blog site but stick to simple HTML code (HTML 3.2) and use images that are suitable for PDA screens (i.e. 150 X 150 for Palms) and then use the built in RSS feed features of the blog site. The student would have to use an aggretator for the PDA to access this content. Some of these would allow the students to browse the content offline. Some blog sites now have a special PDA version ( Bloglines Mobile) but at least at this site there does not appear to be any instructions or even a FAQ. Seems like it is a PDA friendly feedreader. Thus one can access this if the PDA/Smartphone is online. It did not appear at first glance that it had a offline solution i.e. it did not grab all the feeds while online and store the content for offline browsing. The simpler alternative appears to be Avantgo for RSS. Avantgo converts regular web pages to a format suitable for PDAs. Creating a personal channel in Avantgo for >8 students requires a cost of 1000 dollars or more. The alternative is to just maintain a regular blog at any site, and have the students create a free Avantgo account and create an RSS channel that points to that blog. Avanto for RSS works both online and offline (Offline browsing of content is what Avantgo is well known for). This may be the ideal solution if students are already using Avantgo for other reasons.

Have been reading about eLearning 2.0 - a term proposed by Stephen Downes- and started thinking about this topic all over again. It seems I had a very limited concept of how blogs could be used in education and somehow my searching did not bring up the work of elearning theorists like Stephen. So now will go back to the basics and rethink tools like MediaWiki Blogs RSS TrackBack and how they all can be put together into a model for medical education. The matrix created by Scott Leslie may be very helpful.

We are all inundated with the torrent of information that flows into our inboxes or we find as we surf the Web. While the more organized amongst us probably keep folders and sub-folders to store all the information they accumulate I find myself drowning at times.. But there is hope, a life jacket called Furl. A simple concept, long overdue. This site allows 5 GB of free webspace (wonder how long before they start charging?) to store a copy of web pages that you encounter during your surf sessions. You can add a (Furl it) button to your browser IE or Firefox or download a toolbar. When ever you come to a page that you would want to save for later reference you click the Furl it button. This brings up a pop-up window where you can categorize the web page, add key words and comments and save/e-mail the page. This adds the page to your Furl archive and you can access this from any web-enabled computer. The page can be kept private or shared with others. This can be a mechanism for students to collect information on an assignment and then share with other students or teachers creating a rich education experience while creating an educational portfolio.

Having read some thoughts on use of RSS in education with some practical scenarios am wondering why there is so little information about this. Some potential hurdles/barriers/issues: Educators don't know about RSS and Blogs. I talked to a few programmers, some undergrad students and none of them had heard of RSS. Seeing that most medical faculty are way behind the technology adoption curve, doubt they would have heard of this either. Have to consider some way of disseminating this information - which means using traditional methods like poster sessions, workshops or journal articles. Setting up appropriate techological models to make this easy i.e. using some shelfware or building some templates. Found Owen's Blogware comparison chart. Will have to spend some time finding the ideal solution. Training the faculty to use anything new can be a bear. The best way to get them to adopt a new technology is to let them see the benefits immediately. Nothing like positive reinforcements. Most of them will be attracted to getting control back over the content (decentralization of the curriculum distribution process) so them can change/update stuff and automatically let the students know about it. Also seeing how simple this process is, could be the clincher. Copyright concerns can be a problem for some faculty. We can let them post their content behind the firewall (does RSS work on the Intranet?) and let the students subscribe to RSS feeds. For those who are willing to eventually to publish to the Web would have to look into copyright issues and whether something like the Creative Commons license would suffice? Once the process gets started, there needs to be some mechanism for quality control, regular updating etc. (the main reason why the adminstrators like to centralize this process). Maybe the feedback from the students would be reason enough to maintian this? Organization of the various feeds into a format that would let the Students find the feeds they need. Ideally would hope the software would let the feeds be organized in the form of year>>course>>faculty? As we develop these newsfeeds from each faculty's class how can we keep the content on the education portal synchronized with their updated content? Possible solution, since our portal is developed in .NET is at the msdn site. Will have to get the programmers take a look at this as we develop a model for using RSS and faculty blogs in our medical school.

Started looking for some more information on the topic of using RSS and Blogs for education. Found two really good succint and practical sites, one from Michigan Virtual University and the other from Weblogg-ed. " RSS the new killer app for education" by Mary Harrsch " RSS a quick start guide for education" by Will Richardson Seems like Bloglines.com might be the ideal RSS reader for students as they tend to use various different computers and so they can see their RSS feed from anywhere they can access the Web. Of course if the students are using their own laptops in a Wi-Fi setting a downloadable RSS feed reader like Feedreader may be better. I found a lot of energy in Anne Davis's use of blogs by elementary school children. Since my interests are in medical education looked for "RSS" and "Blogs" in pub med and found nothing relevant. I did find an abstract of a Journal article "Blogs? and? Wikis? Are Valuable Software Tools for Communication Within Research Groups." by Igor et al in Artificial Organs; Jan2005, Vol. 29 Issue 1, p82, 8p by searching in Ohio Link.

Reading up about RSS and Blogs got me thinking about how these would be perfect for higher education. We have spent many hours of programming time creating education portals and then spent even more hours training "keystrokers" to publish content to these portals and thus created a centralized system for dissemination of content to students. The Faculty get disenfranchised with this system as they cannot rapidly update their own content but have to send the updates to the "keystrokers". The portal adminstrators have to try and keep track of all the content and who needs to see it. Well what if we give each faculty a blogging site to upload their content and a way to create an RSS feed to inform the students about new content. The students select the feeds they want and the portal adminstrators can put their feet up and watch as the satisfaction ratings go up! Thinking that others must have thought of this and probably even implemented blog/RSS based higher education portals did a quick Google search and found the Weblogs in Higher education and the e-Learning Center's Guide to e-Learning. Will have to spend some time to search for any evaluation of this methodology and how to use it best.