I decided to wait before posting about this tool until it had a few months to mature, and until I had time to really kick the tires.  Now that I’ve done that, I agree that it can be a powerful tool and that faculty in certain fields should be aware that it exists, but I don’t think that it’s going to make homework obsolete.

Since Wolfram Alpha is based on the computation engine of Mathematica, that’s where it does best.  If you enter “integrate x sin^2 x dx”, you get

But a link also appears to “show steps”, which explains each of the steps in the solution, essentially doing the students’ homework for them.  This isn’t really new, since sites like http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ have offered step-by-step solutions for some time, so people who teach courses that assign these types of problems are probably already aware of these resources and take them into account in their teaching.  But so far, mathematical problems are the only type of input that results in a solution with steps, so instructors in other fields need not worry.

On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha employs a wide variety of data sets, so if an instructor thinks that an assignment will send students to the library or to a particular electronic resource where they’ll have to hunt for information and interpret it, they may be surprised.  For example, how did the Consumer Price Index change between June 2008 and June 2009?  Just enter “consumer price index june 2009 / consumer price index june 2008″ and you get the result:  98.57%, or a drop of 1.43%.  And if you have a large data set, Wolfram Alpha will curate it for you – see http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/structureddata.html

There are a million other things that Wolfram Alpha can do, too, like:

• balancing a chemical equation:  enter “C3H8 + O2 —> H2O + CO2″ and you’ll get You’ll get the result, but you won’t get the steps required to get there, so students can check their results but it won’t do the work for them if the assignment requires that you “show your work”.
• calculating the nutritional value of my favorite smoothie recipe (which makes 2 servings):  enter “calories in 1 banana + 3.5 cups strawberries + 0.5 cup milk + 0.5 cup orange juice + 3 teaspoons sugar + 1 teaspoon lemon juice” and you get the full nutrition information in a format that looks very similar to the panel on all packaged food products.  You also get a place to choose what type of milk you want to use and to make other ingredient choices.

I’ve used Wolfram’s Mathematica software for more than 10 years now, and I’m very interested in the ways in which it might make a positive contribution to engaging students with course material.  If you’d like to talk about ways that you might use it in your course, please contact me!

Privacy of student information is a complex topic. Technical, pedagogical, cultural and legal factors will all impact how your students share their work in public forums. Educause published a very helpful guide on one type of public web assignment – student blogging. See http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI8006.pdf

U.C. Berkeley  has a concise and helpful page with suggestions to instructors planning online projects. Please see http://teaching.berkeley.edu/onlineprojects.html

What follows is a very brief overview of some issues you should consider when planning assignments. I’ll be working with privacy experts and other instructional support staff at Penn to provide more detailed guidance in the future.

Be clear about activities and goals. Students are usually enthusiastic about the opportunity to publish their course work on open web sites. They welcome the opportunity to have their work contribute to the community or advance scholarship in their field. Make it clear to your students from the outset what aspects of their work will be posted publicly, and why. Discuss issues of appropriate content and ask your students to let you know if they have concerns about posting their work publicly. If at all possible, review the plan for these activities at the start of the term so students will know what to expect and can decide if they want to continue with the course.

Offer alternatives. Your students have the legal right to control how their academic work is shared. If students express concerns about the privacy of their work, be prepared to offer alternative ways for them to complete the course requirements.

Avoid discussing sensitive personal information. Avoid activities which might lead students to disclose sensitive personal information about themselves or others. Caution them not to post information which could lead to identity theft (home address, date of birth, etc.) or compromise the privacy of their family, friends or classmates. This is especially important when medical or psychological history may be involved. If you have an activity that might lead students to disclose personal information, plan to conduct those activities using Blackboard or other systems provided by your school which will restrict access to students enrolled in the course.

Protect the identityof individual contributors. It may be possible for students to include their work in a course site without publicly disclosing personal identifying information. For example, you may have students composing the contents of a web site in a wiki on Blackboard or another protected system. The wiki will allow you to see and evaluate individual contributions, then export the final draft to a web-ready format which won’t reveal who contributed what. In other cases, you can have your students post to blogs or other forums using pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

Get permission from people who appear in photos or recordings. If your students will be posting pictures or audio/video recordings to publicly viewable sites, they need to get permission from the people who are seen or heard in those pictures or recordings. This is especially important when dealing with telling personal stories or commenting on controversial issues.

Respect copyright and provide citations. Appropriate use of copyrighted material in educational activities is a very complex subject in its own right. If you’re planning activities in which students might want to re-purpose copyrighted materials you need to become familiar with the principals of “fair use” and review those guidelines with your students. Of course, the usual rules about citation for academic work also apply to work posted on the web.

Encourage students to save their work. Commercial services such as Blogger, Wikipedia, Google Sites and others offer great functionality and convenience. But you and your students have little control over what will happen to these sites over time. Whenever possible, students should save personal copies of the materials they post to these sites. This can help protect against possible loss and assure that they will continue to have access to their own intellectual work products.

I encourage instructors of courses in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences to contact me if they have questions about issues concerning privacy of student work, or if they are planning assignments in which students will post their work to publicly viewable web sites.

Instructors at other schools should contact their instructional technology support providers, or school privacy officer.

-John MacDermott

SAS Computing

Common Craft owners Sachi and Lee LeFever are

dedicated to building a library of videos that are focused on helping influencers and educators create change through better explanations. Our videos are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand.

Want to learn more about wikis? blogs? podcasting? social networking? You can find the free, online versions of their videos on The Common Craft Show.

Check out this four-minute video on wikis, for example. Ed Dixon describes how he uses wikis in his classes. How might you use wikis in your instructional practice?

Rock the Academy
Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning
The 12th in the Series of NMC Virtual Symposia

November 4-6, 2008, via the Internet

Proposals for presentations for Rock the Academy: Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning, a special 2-day, live online event to be held November 4-6, 2008, are being solicited through October 17. See http://www.nmc.org/2008-fall-virtual-symposium for full details.

About the Symposium
Rock the Academy, the twelfth in the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia, will explore the kinds of ideas and activities that are changing the shape of education today. Revolutionary practices are breaking apart old models of teaching and learning; students are using new tools to construct meaning and contribute to the design of their own education; teachers are sharing the power that has traditionally been theirs alone.

Examples of unconventional, yet highly effective, methods of teaching and learning may be found in pockets all over the world, at all levels of education. When the multitude of examples are taken together, we begin to sense a profound change in the making that will alter our concept of education itself.

The symposium will take place in both the Adobe Connect 2D web environment and in the 3D virtual world of Second Life.  All events in Second Life will also be streamed into Adobe Connect; participants will also be able to access Adobe Connect from within Second Life.

Proposals are encouraged on any of the following themes, but this list is not exhaustive and selections will not be limited to these categories:

• open education resources and open content
• social networking and global connections
• guerilla learning, games, and activist learning
• the next killer apps for education
• alternatives to course management systems
• real-time data, maps, and mobiles
• backchannels and alternative communication tools
• students who do research in their fields
• any technology or practice that shows promise for engaging students and supporting subversive teaching and learning

Sessions should describe new approaches, illustrate case studies, or address the implications for learning and teaching of themes like those above.

Proposals may be submitted online at http://www.nmc.org/2008-fall-virtual-symposium/proposals

Flat World Knowledge offers a new approach to textbooks: open them up and bundle them with social learning tools. Founded by Jeff Shelstad and  Eric Frank, two former textbook industry executives, Flat World Knowledge’s mission statement reads:

We preserve the best of the old – books by leading experts that are rigorously reviewed and developed to the highest standards. Then we flip it all on its head. Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students – print, audio, by-the-chapter, and more. Our books are open for instructors to mix, mash, and make their own. Our books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.

While the content of their Open Textbooks is free and accessible to all, they charge for convenient ways to consume the Open Textbooks (print, audio, PDF) and efficient ways to study (study aids). Most interesting of all, IMHO is their description the social learning tools:

Students can chat live with other readers, take and share digital notes, set up study groups, and even find partners for cross border projects. They can do all of this at our site or tap into the collaborative features of Facebook using our Facebook app for this. They are part of a global community of learners. Or not. Their call.

To read more about Flat World Knowledge, browse through their website or check out this article from Wired’s blog network. Potential authors can learn more about joining the “little textbook revolution” on Flat World Knowledge’s website.

Wonder if anyone at Penn might like to pilot a project with a Flat World text? LPS Online would be very interested in talking with faculty members about the possibilities. Email me if you’d like to chat.