Serendipity35

Data literacy is just one of the many literacies that have become part of the curriculum, especially in high schools.

MIT's Civic Data Design Lab is collaborating with New York City Public Schools on a data literacy project called City Digits. They have a on a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation "to think
about how to create a mapping tool that could teach youth about a civic
topic while supporting their mathematics education."

The City Digits project is part of the grant which aims to promote civic engagement while teaching data collection and analysis skills. The first module of the project is "Local Lotto" which started last fall and has students interviewing buyers and sellers of lottery tickets to collect "both quantitative and qualitative data. The students are studying sales volume, purchasing habits and community opinions about the lottery.

On the tech side, students use geo-spatial technologies on tablets to collect and analyze the data. They do data analysis and have to present an argument using multimedia based on the data collected.

http://www.citydigits.org

I was pleased to see a post on chronicle.com that focuses on one reason I have been promoting the idea that colleges should offer free online courses of any size: Alumni Engagement.

The article by Casey Fabris talks about a Colgate University course, "The Advent of the Atomic Bomb," taught by Karen Harpp. She plans to offer the course for a second time. It is technically not a MOOC because it is not "open" being that is available only to alumni.

They have found that although the atomic bomb doesn't have much resonance with today's traditionally-aged college students, it has a Baby Boomer appeal. 

Colgate's term for these offerings is that they are Fusion Courses. The courses are offered as in-person courses for Colgate students with an additional online component that brings in alumni.

This is Colgate's entry into free online courses of any type or size.

Professor Harpp must have seemed like a natural for this because she had already been alumni, including a few World War II veterans, involved in her course by including them in discussion boards. The Fusion Course pushes that further by involving them in a Twitter re-enactment, a timeline project, and videoconference calls.

I like that Colgate had set their enrollment goal at 238 students (the atomic mass of uranium) and ended up with 380 alumni. A second course on "Living Writers" had 800 participants that included about 678 alumni plus participants from the community and book clubs that were allowed to enroll.

Colgate is not the first to offer courses to alumni and many of the truly massive MOOCs with 100k+ participants probably had alumni enrolling in their alma mater's offerings.  Harvard University began offering such courses to graduates last year and the article notes that the University of Wisconsin at Madison plans to offer six courses.

These course offerings are a good way to have alumni and the local community connect to the campus and its current life. I have retired friends in North Carolina and Florida who regularly take courses and sit in on lectures face-to-face and online with their local colleges. The often mentioned and less often offered "lifelong learning" opportunities at colleges needs to increase.

More about the Colgate course at colgate.edu/alumni/atomic

According to Amber Macarthur, these will be the "5 Life Changing Tech Trends for 2015." These lists are always arguable and rarely accurate, but still interesting.

1. Connected Cars - Are you ready to get out of your car and then let it drive on and find a parking space, park and wait for you to call it so that it will come back to you?

2. Wearable Technology - Eager to wear technology? Forget about the time and your steps - check your bank account on your wrist.

3. Consumer Robots - Vacuuming the house? Hah, that's baby steps.

4. Smart Homes - Yes, your NEST thermostat controlled from your smartphone is cool. Now it is time for your washing machine to tell you at work that a load is finished.

5. Visual Social - Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and whatever pops up this year is all about visual. Instagram has 300 million monthly active users with approximately 70 million photos shared every day.

Do I sound a bit sarcastic and doubtful?  You bet.

As I write this post, Prezi is bragging they have over 50 million users and lots of higher education presentations. I'm still not a Prezi user and I've seen presentations using it that made me dizzy with all the movement. But I understand why people are looking to get out of PowerPoint which is so often criticized.



Honestly, I think the criticism of almost all bad PowerPoint presentations should be directed at its creator and/or the presenter rather than the software. "Death by PowerPoint" doesn't occur because of the program.



Web apps like Haiku Deck and Canva are getting some attention now and some people say this is the beginning of the end of PowerPoint as the main tool for slidedecks. Apple has always tried to make their Keynote program the other choice, but it was initially limited to Mac users. They have introduced other app versions and an iCloud version for the web.

Microsoft has also recently launched its Prezi competitor called Sway.

Do you remember the early days of PowerPoint? Did you know that it was originally designed for the Macintosh computer? The initial release was called "Presenter", but in 1987 it was renamed to "PowerPoint" due to problems with trademarks.

The idea of slides comes from what the program was designed to replace - 35 mm photo slides.

Back then, and still today, many of the best presentations using slidedecks focus on images rather than slides full of text.

When I started working at NJIT in 2000, professors were still bringing 35 mm slides to media services to be converted to .jpgs so that they could use them in PowerPoint. As you might imagine, the College of Architecture and Design had many tray of beautiful slides that they used in lectures.

There are plenty of online articles, tutorials and posts about how to make a good presentation, but I don't think that PowerPoint (or some web or app version of it) is going away.

That old phrase GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out) that came from computer science applies to presentations too. Input bad data ("garbage in") and produce bad  output ("garbage out"). Just add the presenter to the GIGO mix.