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Welcome to EduTechWiki

EduTechWiki is about Educational Technology (instructional technology) and related fields. It is hosted by TECFA - an educational technology research and teaching unit at University of Geneva.

It is a resource kit for educational technology teaching and research, e.g. a note taking tool for researchers; a literature review tool or a writing-to-learn environment for students. It also includes some (technical) tutorials that may be used in classes around the world or for self-learning.

Many articles also can be useful to teachers, instructional designers and e-learning consultants. Read more about our objectives.

EduTechWiki currently contains 1,182 articles. The french version has less and different contents. Send questions to Daniel K. Schneider (he "owns" this wiki and is to blame for most contents). Other major contributors are/were Kalli Benetos, Marielle Lange, Stéphane Lattion. We also get help from people out of cyberspace, thanx to you all !

Status and authoring guidelines

This wiki is a long term project: Most articles still lack content, depth, style, authority or all four together and will be improved over the years. We also use the wiki as an e-learning platform (mostly the french version).

Anybody is welcome to participate, but please read the editing rules and the copyright notice. You may sign your contributions and express opinions. This is not Wikipedia. We also very much appreciate people fixing little mistakes (spelling, grammar, references,...) !
Other university teachers may bring classes to EduTechWiki for writing activities (please read this if you plan to do so).
If you are new to wiki technology, please browse through help and then make some tests in our SandBox.

News (all wikilogs/old news )

Subscribe to the Atom or RSS feed for Daniel K. Schneider's wikilog/bliki. If you are interested in Mediawiki blikis, there is some help.

Informal talk about our Mediawiki design experiments
— by Daniel K. Schneider (talk) - 3 February 2012 - updated:3 February 2012

PPT Slide about evolution of TEL (Click to enlarge)

Today, in an internal research symposium at Webster University Geneva, I gave a short talk about our various MediaWiki design experiments. Basically just a remix of EdMedia '09 and EdMedia '11 talks. The Mediawikis for research, teaching and learning article is a wiki version of the published 2011 EdMedia paper.

Title: Integrating research, teaching and learning through wikis
Slides: download PPT or PDF

Admire the slide to the right with a drawing made for conference embroidery

Jan 2012 news
— by Daniel K. Schneider (talk) - 24 January 2012 - updated:24 January 2012

I wish you an exciting new year (it's never too late for that ...)

Some small news:

Upgraded this wiki to MediaWiki 18.1. Most extensions should work.
Became interested in Citizen science (I'll add more over the next few month)
Ordered a Silhouette Cameo for our micro fablab. This easy to use cutting/plotting machine is probably the entry-level thing to have.
3D printing is now something that consumers are supposed to do, there was even talk in our local newspapers. 3DSystems announced its first "consumer" device and other "big" players may follow.
I probably will try to find/test wiki metrics, rubrics and collaboration tools and use Semantic Forms for some real project, e.g. update educational modeling languages.

Holiday greetings
— by Daniel K. Schneider (talk) - 23 December 2011 - updated:23 December 2011

I wish everyone a nice holiday break :)

Also, since I deserve one, EduTechWiki login creation is disabled until early January. I now have to deal with a spammer per day on average. That's way too much in any case and I may have to adopt another participation scheme next year.

- Daniel

Moodle 2.2 is out and it includes grading rubrics
— by Daniel K. Schneider (talk) - 8 December 2011 - updated:9 January 2012

Draft example grid (in french)

Upgraded to Moodle 2.2 yesterday. The LAMS and Mahara integration still work and the rest too :)

The grading tool is usable, although I find Moodle and other LMSs culturally biased and have to cope with this. Efficient people like the Swiss don't distinguish between grades and scores. I.e. we just define the min and max of the total performance indicators as grade. E.g. a score of 5.75 is the grade of 5.57 on our 0 to 6 grading scheme. Americans and Australians love to go through various stages like scores -> percentages -> grades. In addition they assume that good grading is done with respect to a mean score and standard deviation. I grade with respect to what I expect. E.g. for the very same class across years I could have a grade average of 5.75 out of 6 or 3 out of 6. I usually have a high 5.5 since the weak and lazy ones just give up our degree program before the classes end. Of course, an assignment or exam may turn out to be too hard. In that case I just adjust the rubric, e.g. add a linear coefficient or something. In other words: I really would like future implementations allowing teachers to define how the score is computed, e.g. "their way" or with simple formula like:

sum (indicator_i)
sum (indicator_i) * 10 + 0.5
sum (indicator_i) / sum (max_score_i)

Since it's much easier for a student to understand a grade he gets for each performance criterion, one also ought to be able to add a weight to each. Right now you add weight just by choosing different performance indicator values.

Anyhow, this percentage/distribution thing makes using Moodle a pain for people who think simple. I much prefer the simple BlackBoard rubric system and I don't care much for either LMS with respect to anything else since I only use LMSs for assignment management, grading and occasionally running a LAMS sequence. However, I do teach Moodle since, overall, it's one of the better systems around and since in Moodle 2.x even document management somewhat works (that's what most teachers do with an LMS).

Read Grilles d'évaluation dans Moodle if you understand french. It tells how to get grading work done with a minimum of hassle. The bottom line is the following:

Theoretical max of the grading rubric has to be equal to the max of the grading scale.
Use a fine grained ascending grading scale since the score is computed from a normalized score multiplied with the max of your grading scale and then rounded.
Each performance criterion and your grading scale must have a min value of 0. This is to cancel out the normalization effect that seems to be dear to our Australian friends.

Design and fabrication and schools - 3D printers news
— by Daniel K. Schneider (talk) - 26 November 2011 - updated:8 December 2011

I started looking at educational issues and other conceptual aspects of digital design and fabrication and this will take some time before I am done. In the meantime, I suggest reading the British Design and Technology association's Response to the National Curriculum Review. It's a form, but there is a lot of information that I will exploit, e.g. its very good bibliography. In particular, there is a growing literature suggesting that design and fabrication is both highly motivating and that students learn something.

Right now, I just started taking notes, e.g. here:

Design and technology in England's national curriculum
Fab labs in education
3D printers in education
Computerized embroidery in education
A synthesis may appear by the end of december 2011 in Digital design and fabrication in education

Also, the first easy to assemble European 3D printer is out. The designer has a good background in mechatronics and that's the only evaluation criteria I found for now.

Felix 1.0. Also shortly described in my list in 3D printing.

The Netherlands now seems to have become the leading nation in low cost 3D printing (other companies include Mendel Parts and Ultimaker). This isn't a big surprise given that the Dutch also had the first European FabLab and that Universities are open to change and new fields.