[Fle3-dev] Thinking Tools on the WebTop

[Teemu Leinonen]

Hi,

I just met a guy called Bob from South Africa and had an interesting 
conversation with him about e-learning and "learning objects". He made 
many good points about education and learning. He also told me that he 
is often talking himself - aren't we all? :-).

Actually he made an argument that "talking yourself" is crucial in 
learning process and often under estimated. I think he has a point in 
here. He  also made a point that talking yourself takes often place with 
a pen and a paper: you draw diagrams, tables, mind maps, write down key 
words etc.

In the first version of FLE we use to have on WebTops a folder called 
"Thinking Tools". It was automatically in all WebTops and contained some 
 "instructional material" about progressive inquiry. The idea was that 
this content - called a little bit misleading a tool - would help 
students to think and solve problems in the learning process.

Now I thought that we could maybe try to call back to life the idea of 
"Thinking Tools". The new set of thinking tools should be a real tools 
(small software) with some features helping the "talking yourself". For 
instance there could be tools for:

1) doing cross-classifications in a table / category analysis
2) drawing mindmaps
3) +/- decision making tool / table
4) Bisociation Tool (http://www2.uiah.fi/~tleinone/papanek.html)

These are just examples. I am sure you can come up with other tools.

The thinking tools should be something like the Apple's mini 
applications called "Widgets" (see: 
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html). Nothing big, 
but simple and usable in the process of thinking yourself. AS Fle3 is an 
online tool there could also be some Google hacks for learning purposes 
(see: http://douweosinga.com/projects/googlehacks or for example: 
http://www.researchbuzz.org/cookin_with_google.shtml).

The thinking tools should be Java applets or equivalent - usable inside 
your web browser. Saving the results of "talking with yourself" is of 
course important - at least you should be able to print them out.

Let me know what do you think about this idea?

        - Teemu

____________________________
Teemu Leinonen
http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/
Office: + 358 9 756 30 296
GSM: +358 50 351 6796
Media Lab, UIAH Helsinki
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi
Future Learning Environment 3
http://fle3.uiah.fi