Science Teaching and Learning in Virtual Learning Environments

Brian Murfin
Queens College, City University of New York

SEYS Brown Bag Seminar for the Fall Semester
Wednesday October 31, 2007
Powdermaker Hall 004

(Please note: You can use the arrow keys and spacebar, along with the menu in the lower left corner, to navigate through this presentation.)

Current State of Technology

Click here for definitions of technology and information technology from nysed.gov

Explosive, rapid

Unrelenting, inexorable

Radiating, Converging

Evolving

Empowering

Collaborative Virtual Learning Environments

Click here for a nice paper describing the characteristics of virtual learning environments.

ScienceMOO

Croquet

Second Life
SL Science School

Useful Chemistry Project in SL (wiki) (blog)

Course Management Systems

Click here for a definition of a Course (Learning) Management System

Blackboard, WebCT

Moodle (Science Moodle)

Sloodle

Sloodle

Sakai

Pyuple.com

Why Open Source Software?

Click here for a definition of open source

Better quality	Equity
A great place to get open source software: Sourceforge.net An example of an excellent open source science application: Stellarium
The Open Source Challenge: For every proprietary software program, there exists, (or will in the very near future), an equivalent open source software application.

New Developments - Web 2.0

Wikis

Blogs

Web 2.0 defined

Back to School with Web 2.0

Web 2.0 for teachers

Science Education Blog using a Web 2X semantic publishing

New Platforms and Operating Systems

Listed below are some popular Linux distributions. These are open source alternatives to the Windows and Mac operating systems. They can be installed on older computers to make them more usable.

Ubuntu	Kubuntu	Xubuntu
Edubuntu

New Software Development Tools and Techniques

Mashups	Ruby on Rails	LAMP
Javascript	Java	Ajax
Python	Smalltalk	Google apps

Projects

Online Science Internship and Research Project (OSIR)

Open Source Electronic Lab Notebook

Development of a Social Networking Site to Enhance the Science Education Community at Queens College

Science Education Space

Center for Open Source Science Education Software

Slidy

This presentation was prepared using Slidy, a nice little application from the W3C. An article from Edward Tufte, "PowerPoint is Evil", prompted me to look for alternatives to PowerPoint, and Slidy turned up along with a few others.

OpenOffice Impress

Zoho Show at zoho.com