Welcome to Zon! | Enter Zon: “By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way. Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China. Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.”

(Via OLDaily.)

PlayCrafter Lets You Play and Create Casual Games (The Startup Review): “PlayCrafter is a Flash-based website that lets users easily create a variety of 2D games. The games use physics and are created by dragging and dropping customizable game pieces. Users can upload their own graphics for all of a game’s pieces, including the background of the game. Creators can build upon the ideas of others by editing or personalizing existing games and discussing their games with the community. Games can easily be shared and posted to MySpace, Facebook or embedded on any website. Creators earn a share of revenues generated by their games.”

(Via Mashable.)

So as much of a gearhead as I find myself becoming over the years, I have not yet become fully sold on the iPod Touch. The new OS is totally sweet, and some of the new apps are mindblowing, but I just can’t seem to fall in like with the text entry methods. I type quite well, so the decrease in speed and accuracy is just totally frustrating. Sometimes the auto-correct feature works great, but it isn’t consistent enough to work it’s way into a working pattern. I’ve used a Blackberry and a Treo for several years now, and the little chiclet buttons provide just enough tactile context to allow me to get going at a pretty good clip. I am getting faster with the iTouch, but I am not there yet. We’ll see.

Knol: a unit of knowledge: “Welcome to Knol.
A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.”

(Via TechCrunch.)

Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds – ReadWriteWeb: “How would you feel if you spent more than $1 million throwing a party and less than 100 or even 1,000 people showed up? That sinking feeling is spreading over corporate boardrooms around the nation, according to study performed by Ed Moran, a director at consulting mega-firm Deloitte.”

(Via OLDaily.)

As always, the folks at UBC did a bang-up job in providing a stimulating conversation. Today’s focus was the use of social software tools (primarily weblogs) to extend/replace ePortfolio software.

• Generally: An overview of some basic tools and models used to create electronic portfolios.
• Specifically: A conversation about social software as a concept and its appropriateness for the generation of electronic portfolios (or the extension of electronic portfolios).

Issues
There are common challenges to the effective implementation of an electronic portfolio initiative.

• lack of common descriptive language
• varying requirements by potential user groups
• difficulty in customization/contextualization
• Privacy (walled garden) vs. open access (public park)
• Social aspect of blog requires open commenting/access
• what would it mean to offer commenting on all eportfolio entries?
• comment from audience: value of social software "personal, local and fleeting"?

The University of British Columbia has funded pilot projects for the use of weblogs by faculty, staff, and students. These projects have led, among other things, to the creation of weblog templates specifically focused on portfolio-related needs.

Students desire ease of use and flexibility of delivery.

• Centralization vs. decentralization

• integration with CMS
• standardization
• rubrics
• "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" vs "?"

Blogfolios

• OSPI/iWebfolio = too structured = too constricting for students = no sense of ownership
• wanted to help students see value
• can create more social structures within eportfolios
• moving target / fine balance / flexibility vs structure
• can’t please everybody
• user and support perspective -> how to help people understand tools that exist and how we can adapt them to meet current and future needs

–

In her reflective post, Michelle does a great job of summarizing what she would have said if she had more time. At one point, she talks about her belief regarding the purspose of electronic portfolios:

"Portfolios for the **end user**. I don’t know if I’m down with the e-Portfolios for the Institution. I like the idea of them benefitting the user more (i.e. portfolios for personal development) rather than using portfolios for institutional purposes, like grading)."

I, too, think that the most powerful implementations of portfolios will come when the individual student is the focal point. I do not believe, however, that we can dismiss the other uses of portfolios out of hand. Institutional portfolios such as those employed by colleges of Education are a reality and aren’t going anywhere. The biggest problem with the status quo is our lack of common vocabulary to effectively describe the obviously different uses for electronic portfolios. Articles like "Portfolios to Webfolios and Beyond: Levels of Maturation"  in the Educause Quarterly and initiatives such as the IMS ePortfolio Best Practice and Implementation Guide make attempts to establish such a vocabulary/schema, but they don’t seem to be as far reaching as they should be.

Much to think about.

cross posted on Educause blog