Two weeks ago after I read about Club Penguin in the Bonk book, I signed up two eager volunteers. There is not much a player can do if they do not have a subscription. Nothing upsets this little video gamers more than gaining coins and not being able to keep them or buy anything with their "hard earned" money. We enrolled in the $5/month per player subscription. Club Penguin became an instant success, and a topic of conversation in our household. Rules related to school work, sports, household chores, and time limits had to be strictly enforced. For two weeks the volunteers averaged about 45 minutes of play time per day.
After the two week period I asked them if they were enjoying Club Penguin and why. I expected them to give me short and simple answers. Before I knew it, I was running out of paper.
V1 = Volunteer 1
V2 = Volunteer 2
Long Blog Warning!! Penguin Club Madness ahead!!!
V1: My Own House -- I can have a home that looks like I want, and has the things I buy. Like a dance floor, musical instruments and a disco ball.
V2: I like to visit my Sister's house, and look at my friends/buddies houses to see their decorations. I like to do shows in my house. If you go into somebody's house w/o them it is trespassing. I went into my Sister's house, and got in trouble. Like to look at the House Catalog to upgrade your house or get a Halloween scene, with furniture and a disco ball.
V1: Penguin Costumes -- Make my Penguin look nice with different outfits I can buy, when I make money. I collect pins to decorate my Penguin card.
V2: I buy new costumes, and only keep the clothes I like. You can recycle things you do not want at the recycling plant, and get other items. You can also get stuff for free like hats and accessories.
V1: Adopt a Pet (Puffle) -- cute and fun to play with, dance, and walk -- some of them will sing and do goofy things that make you laugh.
V2 -- I like to take care of my Puffles and make them feel at home by feeding, bathing and letting them rest. I go surfing with my Puffle. It makes me sad to see other penguins houses, because sometimes their Puffles are hungry.
V1: Meet new friends and play games with them. You can send letters to friends and invite them to parties. Dance together in Club. Rock with the band at the lighthouse. Do acting theater.
V2: Play with my Sister if I sign up in the same server, and make new friends -- My Sister showed me an Iceberg in the Pacific Ocean.
V1: Read the Newspaper -- I always read the paper when I go into Club Penguin to get the news.
V2: Change of scenery -- I like how the scenes change, like in Halloween. And we carved pumpkins!
Games that V1 and V2 (both) enjoy:
Sled races -- Mankala -- DJ3K and Dance /Puffle -- Dojo Courtyard (To get your belts from Sensei by playing card Jitsu) -- Wave surfing -- Cart surfing -- Fly Jet Pack Rescue (you pay for fuel) -- Dig for coins in the mine
Games that only V1 likes: Elite Penguin Force (EPF Secret Agent goes on missions) -- Write a book and paint pictures -- Thin Ice -- Astro Barrier -- Aquagrabber to get pearl from clam.
Games that only V2 likes: Ice Fishing because you get lots of coins -- Hydro Hooper because you can make a lot of points -- Finding Pins -- Sports Stadium for target snowballs, bean counter in coffee shop and getting face paint -- Puffle Rescue for saving a puffle and open a secret gate at the mine -- Growing plants by filling tube in mine with snowballs to make water -- Dig for coins with jackhammer at the mine -- Look through binoculars at the beach because you always see something different.
Conclusion: After the two-week study, my volunteers do not want to surrender their subscriptions to Club Penguin and will do more chores around the house to pay for their memberships. There is more to Club Penguin than I expected. I am impressed with the ability of this application to suit individual player preferences and values. Animations are simple but colorful, and they stay ahead with the ever changing penguin village. Maintaining a safe but fun society where penguins play and learn from each other, is key to their success with young players (and their parents).
Monday, November 8, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
IdealWare site Comparison Report of Open Source CMS Systems
I am trying to share the Comparison Report with the class because the IdealWare site requires users to register to open/download the report. I placed it on my Moodle Class Site.
https://moodle.lehigh.edu/course/view.php?id=14989&edit=0&sesskey=yERqKNWYHn
https://moodle.lehigh.edu/course/view.php?id=14989&edit=0&sesskey=yERqKNWYHn
idealware
COMPARING OPEN SOURCE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS:
WORDPRESS, JOOMLA, DRUPAL AND PLONE
March 2009
Friday, October 15, 2010
Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Plone, Google, etc.,
By looking at the CMS open source portals, it is amazing the amount of business and providers making a profit out of these applications. Some of them contribute a certain percentage of their charges and profits to the open source portals. How many of them do this? There are large companies using them, besides the non-profits and charitable ones.
A non-profit or a small charity organization would be overwhelmed trying to compare the different platforms. The kind of resources that would be needed, capabilities, vulnerabilities, applicability, weaknesses, maintenance, hosting, framework, and the dozens of acronyms related to all of these. I am acronyms-challenged and this online search was pushing my mental limitations over the edge.
There is a PDF document at the IdealWare.org which compares the most popular CMS portals. Funded by the consultants and agencies that provide support and development services. You can find support from a large number of consulting companies all over the globe. The implementation of a website using these open source portals is not the kind of effort a public school district IT staff could handle or afford. But if schools could form a cooperative and put together their limited budgets, they could share in the implementation of a Content Management System they can all share and maintain.
A non-profit or a small charity organization would be overwhelmed trying to compare the different platforms. The kind of resources that would be needed, capabilities, vulnerabilities, applicability, weaknesses, maintenance, hosting, framework, and the dozens of acronyms related to all of these. I am acronyms-challenged and this online search was pushing my mental limitations over the edge.
There is a PDF document at the IdealWare.org which compares the most popular CMS portals. Funded by the consultants and agencies that provide support and development services. You can find support from a large number of consulting companies all over the globe. The implementation of a website using these open source portals is not the kind of effort a public school district IT staff could handle or afford. But if schools could form a cooperative and put together their limited budgets, they could share in the implementation of a Content Management System they can all share and maintain.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Week 5 WizIQ Session Results and Book Reading
Setting up the WizIQ account ( http://www.wiziq.com/classes/ ) by registering and selecting a date within the 30 free-day trial was very easy. The site offers tutorial and testimonial videos via You Tube. My session partners Cara and Maureen showed up early, and I could not figure out how to force the session to an earlier start. Need to investigate if there is a way to do this or is it just a limitation of the free-trial version. The sound and video setup via a small pop-up window was also straightforward and done in a few seconds.
We had no hiccups from the bandwidth, no delays, or disconnects. There was an echo present for all of us to hear when each of us talked, but we figured it was also convenient in case you did not hear it right the first time! LOL! The video window was small but picture quality was good. All of our Power Points got loaded in a timely fashion and we were ready to present in a few minutes after connecting. I gave moderator privileges to Cara and Maureen and we were able to talk and access the screen controls simultaneously. This worked well because there were just three of us collaborating online. (Disclaimer: You would not do this as an instructor in a live online session full of students). Here is a snapshot of our WizIQ session. Cara and Maureen took one of their presentations after we had them uploaded.
Cara presented first and gave us screen shots of one of her online live class sessions. She uses a licensed application called In Sync? I enjoyed that she made her students present an activity to the other students in the class, giving them the experience of how to teach others using live video from your location. She also discussed the perils of live online classes and what you need to do from a support standpoint and remediation when students have technical problems. Plus we finally got to see the color coordinated and quite fashionable headsets!
Maureen shared with us some of her research using NetLogo's sheep population control application and how she thinks it will help her students. She investigated MIT and their Open Courseware offerings online. We had done some research also, and all of us were surprised at the lack of content. When you dig deeper into some of these open course links, you find course descriptions, or a couple of lectures posted for the subject. We understand what Dr. Bonk is trying to convey in Chapter 5: MIT in Every Home (Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare), but we also need to consider that these open courses, and their content offerings are at the mercy of the faculty member's personal decisions as to how much, or little, gets posted.
Because I spent some time reading Dr. Chen's Education Nation book for this class...my presentation covered http://www.edutopia.org and how they offer (besides a short video) the supporting information and documentation for these school success stories. The kind of information that school administrators and educators can study to better understand the effort that took place behind such favorable outcome. Open Culture is a "pop-culture flavored site"( http://www.openculture.com/category/education ) dedicated to offering content online linked to iTunes educational podcasts, and iTunes University. They have an iPhone application, and a channel of their most popular education-related videos in You Tube. I got sidetracked after this site with the iTunes (http://www.apple.com/iTunes) podcast content of TeachersTV (videos from the UK, and you can not stop watching these...), and iTunes University's participating institutions. I was impressed with the OER Commons site ( http://www.oercommons.org/ ) and their OER materials simple search. The PA Department of Education's SAS Portal, hopefully (fingers crossed) will achieve the level of content sharing found in this site. After looking into the Open Courseware Consortium site ( http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ), I was a little disappointed with the content offered for Education and Technology. Maybe Lehigh University can join the OCW Consortium and make some contributions!!
We had no hiccups from the bandwidth, no delays, or disconnects. There was an echo present for all of us to hear when each of us talked, but we figured it was also convenient in case you did not hear it right the first time! LOL! The video window was small but picture quality was good. All of our Power Points got loaded in a timely fashion and we were ready to present in a few minutes after connecting. I gave moderator privileges to Cara and Maureen and we were able to talk and access the screen controls simultaneously. This worked well because there were just three of us collaborating online. (Disclaimer: You would not do this as an instructor in a live online session full of students). Here is a snapshot of our WizIQ session. Cara and Maureen took one of their presentations after we had them uploaded.
Cara presented first and gave us screen shots of one of her online live class sessions. She uses a licensed application called In Sync? I enjoyed that she made her students present an activity to the other students in the class, giving them the experience of how to teach others using live video from your location. She also discussed the perils of live online classes and what you need to do from a support standpoint and remediation when students have technical problems. Plus we finally got to see the color coordinated and quite fashionable headsets!
Maureen shared with us some of her research using NetLogo's sheep population control application and how she thinks it will help her students. She investigated MIT and their Open Courseware offerings online. We had done some research also, and all of us were surprised at the lack of content. When you dig deeper into some of these open course links, you find course descriptions, or a couple of lectures posted for the subject. We understand what Dr. Bonk is trying to convey in Chapter 5: MIT in Every Home (Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare), but we also need to consider that these open courses, and their content offerings are at the mercy of the faculty member's personal decisions as to how much, or little, gets posted.
Because I spent some time reading Dr. Chen's Education Nation book for this class...my presentation covered http://www.edutopia.org and how they offer (besides a short video) the supporting information and documentation for these school success stories. The kind of information that school administrators and educators can study to better understand the effort that took place behind such favorable outcome. Open Culture is a "pop-culture flavored site"( http://www.openculture.com/category/education ) dedicated to offering content online linked to iTunes educational podcasts, and iTunes University. They have an iPhone application, and a channel of their most popular education-related videos in You Tube. I got sidetracked after this site with the iTunes (http://www.apple.com/iTunes) podcast content of TeachersTV (videos from the UK, and you can not stop watching these...), and iTunes University's participating institutions. I was impressed with the OER Commons site ( http://www.oercommons.org/ ) and their OER materials simple search. The PA Department of Education's SAS Portal, hopefully (fingers crossed) will achieve the level of content sharing found in this site. After looking into the Open Courseware Consortium site ( http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ), I was a little disappointed with the content offered for Education and Technology. Maybe Lehigh University can join the OCW Consortium and make some contributions!!
Thursday, September 23, 2010
TLT450 Esther Karoleski Blog Post - Late Week 3
Since our Pennsylvania young learners are denied the option of "cyberlearning" unless they are home schooled...Open Source software is something to seriously consider when you have young inquisitive children. Tux Paint is a favorite among young learners (and old ones) due to its simple and straightforward design. Just added in my research-to-do list: the Scratch Programming (MIT) application that shows young learners logical and procedural thinking.
AbiWord is an alternative for learners that are just starting to read and write. Also for the ones that can get overwhelmed with all the functionality in MS Word. If young learners write their thoughts using a word processor, readers might pay more attention to the content of their work instead of their penmanship. I just saw this in action last night as a group of parents approached a bulletin board full of students' notes. They were commenting on their writing and spelling. Nobody mentioned the fact that their fourth grader was writing about the personal qualities of one of their classmates. A powerful exercise for a group of students that came together two weeks ago, to know and learn from each other. I was excited to see the second grade teacher giving all the parents a book of poems authored by her students, until she mentioned that she typed them on the computer herself. I was looking at two desktop computers sitting right there in the classroom. Sending her an email with an AbiWord link and talking to her is in the works.
The school being referenced here is a small charter school. Exposing them to the open source applications Dr. Garrigan shared with us in class can deliver some possibilities for the teachers and their students, as they embark on their constructivist learning curriculum.
References:
New Breed Software. Tux Paint [Open Source Drawing Software for Children]. Retrieved from http://www.tuxpaint.org/
Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch [Open Source Programming Animation Software]. Retrieved from http://scratch.mit.edu/
Lachowicz, D. AbiWord [Open Source Word Processing Software]. Retrieved from http://www.abisource.com/
AbiWord is an alternative for learners that are just starting to read and write. Also for the ones that can get overwhelmed with all the functionality in MS Word. If young learners write their thoughts using a word processor, readers might pay more attention to the content of their work instead of their penmanship. I just saw this in action last night as a group of parents approached a bulletin board full of students' notes. They were commenting on their writing and spelling. Nobody mentioned the fact that their fourth grader was writing about the personal qualities of one of their classmates. A powerful exercise for a group of students that came together two weeks ago, to know and learn from each other. I was excited to see the second grade teacher giving all the parents a book of poems authored by her students, until she mentioned that she typed them on the computer herself. I was looking at two desktop computers sitting right there in the classroom. Sending her an email with an AbiWord link and talking to her is in the works.
The school being referenced here is a small charter school. Exposing them to the open source applications Dr. Garrigan shared with us in class can deliver some possibilities for the teachers and their students, as they embark on their constructivist learning curriculum.
References:
New Breed Software. Tux Paint [Open Source Drawing Software for Children]. Retrieved from http://www.tuxpaint.org/
Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch [Open Source Programming Animation Software]. Retrieved from http://scratch.mit.edu/
Lachowicz, D. AbiWord [Open Source Word Processing Software]. Retrieved from http://www.abisource.com/
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
TLT450 Esther Karoleski Blog Post - Week 1 Assignment
My professional background is in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Current and future interests are to minimize the time spent looking for reliable information online by using semantic web tools. Specially by integrating teacher content searches with the requirements from educational and testing standards. Not sure if this falls under Learning Sciences or Engineering.
Course goal is to learn how can technology help instructors and learners increase their virtual memory. Can storage and recall become more efficient when the learner can also rely on virtual storage and retrieval using only partial information stored in our brains.
Course goal is to learn how can technology help instructors and learners increase their virtual memory. Can storage and recall become more efficient when the learner can also rely on virtual storage and retrieval using only partial information stored in our brains.
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