ProfHacker has been tracking the Mozilla Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge since its announcement. (See previous entries: the call for participants; the announcement of Rubrick; plus two subsequent updates [one, two].] 

This weekend, at Mozilla’s SXSW party, the winners were announced:

Three projects of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge were awarded special prizes at the Mozilla SXSW party today. Ten projects already selected as Design Challenge winners participated in a design camp in Austin, TX over the past three days. Today three of these projects were chosen for special awards: ClozeFox was selected as “best use case”; the project leader of Mupple received the prize for “sharing knowledge with others”; Expression Widgets was chosen as the “best web hack”. You can find more information about them and download all Jetpacks-based add-ons from the Design ...

Happy Pi Day, everyone! Why not celebrate with a song?

Here’s what you may have missed on ProfHacker this week:

• Guest author Ryan Cordell returned to explain Scrivener, the Mac word processing app. Julie introduced the microblogging tool Status.net, discussing along the way the difference between teaching a concept and a tool.  Brian noted “How To Google Yourself Effectively.”
• I learned about the value of lectures by learning about forthcoming toys. Alex and I considered the “Creepy Treehouse Problem.” Alex wondered how to motivate attendance at training workshops.  George observed that the rhetoric around “digital natives” continues to be overblown.
• I urged people to call, not simply e-mail, their legislators about higher education funding. Guest author Heather Munro Prescott pointed out that, trendy contrarians notwithstanding, there really is a “Downside to...

At my school, we’re a week away from spring break, which couldn’t come at a better time. 

Of course, this year spring break means “taking 18 students to London as part of a course with a colleague.” It should be fun (and educational!), but it doesn’t sound like a break! 

(Pro tip for London in March: Make sure everything’s waterproof!) 

But that’s a week away still.

• David Wiley’s posted his notes from his recent TEDxNYED talk on openness in education: Education has to some degree lost its way; forgotten its identity. We’ve allowed ourselves and our institutions to be led away from our core value of openness – away from generosity, sharing, and giving, and toward selfishness, concealment, and withholding. To the degree that we have deserted openness, learning has suffered. (The slides are available, too!)
• Jim Groom draws on The Wire to explain what any child...

One of my favorite WordPress plug-ins is Search Meter, which tracks what visitors to your site are searching for.  What’s handy about it is that you also get a list of things your readers have searched for but haven’t found, which helps you learn what your readers want to know more about.  (Or, at least, what they can’t spell!)  You also find out things that you didn’t know, which gets me to the point of this morning’s post: the “creepy treehouse” phenomenon.

I’d never heard of the phrase, which seems to be a good two years old, and refers to a nexus of problems: the attempts to duplicate social online spaces in an institutionally constrained format (hi, Blackboard!); the requirement, enforced by someone in authority, that others interact socially with them (“follow me on Twitter / friend me on Facebook); and the affect that these practices give off.

Official...

A few weeks ago, I had an odd pedagogical moment.  I was at a media event for Hasbro, where they were rolling out their upcoming Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers, and GI Joe toys collectibles. The event was divided into 3 parts: there were 2 hours of PowerPoint-style lectures about the toys.  (“Here’s what’s coming; here’s how it’s different; here’s what we think about X.”)  Then, there was a period of about an hour or 75 minutes, when we could photograph the toys and put questions to the designers, but we couldn’t play with them. (It was an event pitched at collectors–that is, adults who buy the toys. Um, not that I am one, but I do write for GeekDad.)  And then, immediately after the event was over, they gave us all access to an FTP area with–what else?–the PowerPoint decks, and publication-quality images of every single toy we’d just spent an hour...

Who doesn’t hate phone calls?  I’m not talking about calling your Beloved Parent, or your old roommate, or whatever–people you’d like to catch up with, but can’t because of distance.  Those phone calls are often ok.  I’m talking about the other sorts of calls: Calls to organize meetings.  Calls to ask for favors.  Calls to do favors.  They’re all bad.

(We’ll pause here to reflect ruefully on the fact that I now spend all day on the phone: Union stuff often goes better on the phone, and then, now that it’s once again youth sports season, I call people I don’t know all night long.  “Don’t you want to register your kid? Coach?” Then there’s the parents on my team: “Don’t forget, practice is . . .”  If it weren’t for Phonevite, I’d be lost.  I thought that the iPhone would help, in that a device that’s fun to use would make me like...

Here’s what you might’ve missed last week:

• Jeff showed how his students develop contracts for digital projects.  Guest author Abby Knoblauch pointed out that one rarely learns how to teach a graduate class. Nels discussed how one might prepare for letting a colleague substitute in your classes. Guest author Derek Bruff explained how multiple choice questions can address conceptual learning.  I called for experiences with advice that seemed both sincere and evil.
• For those in need of relaxation, Billie suggested green tea as a ritual.  Natalie asserted that it is in fact possible to exercise at conferences!  In lieu of such sage practices as these, I talked about napping.
• Speaking of travel, Erin strategized about the on-campus interview.
• Julie pointed out “A Few Ways to Back Up your Website.” George offered “5 Easy Speech-to-Text Solutions,” and wondered about �...

The crazy hedonism of the weekends: Apparently I signed up to spend two hours tonight receiving last-minute Little League registrations. 

There’s a ProfHacker pro tip for you: Don’t go to Little League board meetings if you’re susceptible to guilt!

• Matthew J. Newcomb and Amy Nimon have written an article about choose-your-own-adventure stories as an analogue for wiki interfaces . . . in the form of a CYOA story: The CYOA emphasizes issues of addressing the audience and audience’s choices, and it allows students to become more conscious of their rhetorical and narrative decisions, precisely because they have to think like readers who will directing the narrative within the writer’s scheme. Unlike traditional CYOA stories, in this assignment, choices given to readers do not have to be entirely plot-driven; students can branch into different voices, viewpoints, or styles in...

This morning a colleague asked for advice on a grant proposal, which I was of course happy to give.  His question: if you loan everyone a mobile device, how do make sure you get ‘em back in decent working order.  I explained that we’d assigned a number to each iPod, and the students and I had countersigned receipts when I distributed them.  (For those keeping score at home, this worked reasonably well.)

What I didn’t tell my colleague, because I didn’t do it, is that a friend had encouraged taking an additional step: Telling the students that the university had installed a keystroke logger on each iPod, to track whether they were using the device for pedagogical purposes.  That seemed like a terrible idea, both because the practice would be evil, and because telling students that it was true would imply that I went along with it.

I’ve talked before about the most Machiavellian...

If you’re looking for an afternoon pick-me-up, the answer is probably a nap, rather than a caramel latte.  Sleep researcher Matthew Walker puts this in terms that will be familiar to ProfHacker readers:

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker said in a release.

Of course, the ProfHacker-endorsed best e-mail practices are fewer e-mail folders, and deleting as much as humanly possible, but Walker’s point remains: if you’re doing lots of brain-work during the day, a nap is a good thing. (Natalie’s one minute-refresh strategy is based on a similar idea.)

Walker’s research is based on the cognitive benefits of a 90-minute nap.  Now, you might not have time in...