XplanaBook

XplanaBook is a Flash-based media book that transforms traditional textbooks into interactive learning experiences for students.

XplanaBook is a Flash-based media book platform that transforms traditional textbooks into integrated learning experiences for students. XplanaBook not only has advanced “book” tools such as index and glossary, but also boasts a unique user interface that affords readers ultimate flexibility in terms of their experience. All media and assessment types can be embedded seamlessly into XplanaBook, and the platform integrates seamlessly with our XplanaCourse LMS platform.

XplanaVoice

XplanaVoice is a voice-based communication and collaboration tool that can function as a stand-alone application or as an integrated module to other Xplana products such as XplanaCourse and XplanaWorkbook. It can be integrated to support existing publisher and instructor websites, and delivers full-featured asynchronous voice communication options over low and high bandwidth connections. XplanaVoice utilizes Macromedia Flash Communication Server technology to provide the most dynamic yet flexible feature set possible for the education market.

Xplana Course

XplanaCourse is a standards-based LMS platform designed to deliver the highest quality online learning experience. XplanaCourse is unique in its collection of collaboration and communication tools as well as in its assortment of content management functionality. It is a system designed to reinforce best-practices instructional design and foster active reflection and sharing within student communities. XplanaCourse allows instructors to create both traditional and more extensive activities and assessments that can be exported for use with other LMS platforms.

Addressing Content Portability Issues with Learning Albums

Some of the problems we are addressing with the platform are content portability and obsolescence. We do this primarily through our concept of the learning album. Xplana albums are sequenced collections of learning assets and can contain any combination of the different file or content types supported in Xplana. This includes, documents — Word, Excel, PowerPoint — notes, video, audio, images, Web pages, and interactivities. In this way, users can easily create lessons, units, or courses from scratch or by mashing up other public content from the Xplana content library.

Albums in Xplana have a number of qualities that make them easy to share and distribute. They also function as a type of universal player for learning content that guards against the obsolescence often resulting from being created inside a proprietary platform.

Permalinks — Each album in the Xplana system has a dedicated permalink that can be shared with others. Provided the Album is marked as public content, the album can be viewed by anyone with a browser and Internet access.
Embed codes — Albums also have embed codes, like YouTube videos. This allows them to be embedded in external Web sites or learning systems and have the album player and content called remotely from the Xplana platform.
SCORM exports — Albums can also be exported as SCORM packages and then imported into SCORM compliant LMS platforms. All interactivities in the Xplana platform follow the QTI standard and, when imported into a supporting platform, can report results to a gradebook.
Downloading — Xplana albums can also be downloaded and played offline on a user’s desktop.
Comments, sharing, and ratings — Creators determine the privacy settings of their content, and albums marked as public can be commented on or shared and edited with/by other users. Like all content in the Xplana platform, albums can also be rated by users.
Public annotations — Albums made available to the Xplana public support public annotations and markup that can be seen by other users.
Mobile access — As part of our commitment to content distribution, we will also make albums available to our users via their iPhones, iPads, and Android smart phones

One thing to keep in mind is that, unlike traditional LMS platforms, we are creating our authoring tools for all users — learners and instructors alike — and our philosophy is to encourage productivity and sharing
through those tools. Albums can make excellent study guides, slide shows or presentations, lessons, and multi-part experiential learning sequences. For a little more context, I am sharing a prototype screen that is
representative of the Xplana albums launching with our platform this summer.

Fear of Failure in the World of Online Learning

So, back to the problem of jibber-jabber. What is it that students are complaining about with the jibber-jabber? It is not the jibber-jabber itself, clearly: just take a look at ICQ and chat messaging abbreviations – talk about jibber-jabber! The problem is instead the students’ failure to understand the computer jargon or computer procedures, and the deep-seated fear of failure that haunts the school environment.Many students still think their primary goal in school is to avoid failure. To never make a mistake. There are not many students who can regard their purpose in school as learning (including learning through their mistakes)… and you cannot blame them. You almost always get graded on what you know, which is not necessarily the same as being graded on what you have learned. And there are all kinds of things that students have to learn about in order to succeed when using online courseware – things that they did not need to know for school before.Think about the typical classroom experience. You have to show up on time: that’s about the only thing you can fail at. You are not going to fail at getting into the building, opening the classroom door, sitting in your seat, and maintaining a more or less vertical posture for the next 50 or 75 minutes. If you can physically set yourself in motion (i.e., get out of bed), the odds of success are high! Admittedly, we do not offer a lot of overt praise for students’ success in arriving at the classroom, but it is at least a small kind of success. It is certainly not a failure. Imagine if at least four or five times a semester, you went to sit down in your chair in the classroom and the chair broke into pieces and you were left sitting on your ass in the middle of the classroom. Failure. In public. Awful!Yet that public failure is just what happens with computer-based course management systems. At least that is what happens at my school, where we use Blackboard as our course management system. Several times a semester, the students go to take their seat in Blackboard and something horrible happens. Sometimes it is a result of their own technical error, sometimes it is a system error. In any case, there are technical difficulties, and you need some technical knowledge to sort out and respond to those difficulties when they arise.But instead, the students often react to those problems with a sense of personal failure. “I can’t do anything on the computer.” “I did something wrong.” “I broke Blackboard.”Instead of saying, “What is wrong here?”, they ask – sometimes explicitly – “What is wrong with me?”Then, in a natural reaction to this sense of failure, they push the experience away. The computer is “jibber-jabber”, it is meaningless, it is dangerous, stay away, or you might fail. As the student said in the fairy tale he wrote for class yesterday: “If you can�t code the button, you fail.” (Interestingly, this student, who is clearly very hard on himself when it comes to computing, is also extremely hard on other students in the class, making the most harsh comments about the other students’ projects, chastising them very strongly for any technical difficulties they are having with their webpages.)The threat of failure… or at least of the feeling of failure. It is a risk that comes with the use of any computer-based course management systems. By using a CMS to supplement, or even replace, the traditional classroom, we have to be aware that we are asking students to do more. And that means we are asking them to risk more: to risk failure. And that is a risk that many students have learned – through years of schooling – to avoid at all costs. Why take risks? The most important thing is to avoid failing…So how can we justify asking students to do more, to risk more? Well, we have to offer them greater rewards! Unfortunately, the only kind of reward that we officially recognize in school is usually grades. For some students, a course management system might offer a way to get better grades: because it adapts to a wider range of cognitive learning styles and can offer different kinds of learning activities, students might embrace a computer-based course management system in the hopes of getting higher grades.But I doubt it.And that’s the wrong game to play, after all. Those of us who are committed to computer-based course management systems need to have loftier goals than higher grades: we need to challenge ourselves as teachers to use these new tools to offer our students much more than that. We need to offer them real learning opportunities, different and better than the learning opportunities that they had before… learning opportunities that will give students the same sense of intrinsic satisfaction and self-motivated pleasure that they feel when using cell phones and video games and online chat, which students clearly enjoy despite the jibber-jabber.The next question: what kinds of things can students do online that will lead that sense of intrinsic satisfaction? how can we make online learning worth the risk?
 

Building a Learning Framework Focused on Individual Learners

It sounds so simple when you say it or write it down the first time. “We’re going to build a framework that begins with the student/individual and that doesn’t require any institution, class, or teacher to be relevant.”

In making that statement, we weren’t saying that those formal containers weren’t useful in the learning process, simply that our framework needed to have a different center of gravity.

And that, quite frankly, has been the most challenging principle to implement in Xplana.com. Focusing on the student, the individual, has challenged all of us at Xplana to re-think our own learning experiences and to re-evaluate how learning takes place in personal, informal, and formal environments. We asked lots of questions:

How do learners create networks for learning naturally in the real world? Have we provided the right tools? Have we identified the essential paths and made it easy for users to access those. Are we allowing users to chart their own, new territories?
How do we create a framework that encourages learning productivity at an individual level? We are strong advocates of learning through/by experience and doing. We make no distinction between students and teachers when it comes to tools and productivity. This creates certain challenges both in terms of product design and in terms of translating our platform to the current roles engrained in educational thinking.
How do we provide a meaningful structure or context for learning without really controlling learners or preventing from learning in individual ways? We want to bring Web resources and open content into meaningful learning contexts and to enhance those with framework tools for productivity. At the same tine, we don’t want learners to feel too directed or constrained. The essential feeling we want them to have is one of freedom to learn and grow however they want to.
How do we allow learners to create their own learning networks and control those? In other words, how do we focus first on learner-generated networks and make formal networks (classes/institutions) secondary?
How do we map the power of a learner-centric workflow back to formal, container-based models such as institutional portals and LMS platforms? This isn’t as hard as it might seem for us because in our design, these are just extensions of a learner’s personal learning networks(s). The key, from a framework design perspective, has been to allow the individual learner to always maintain control over his/her experience, and to make the formal container a child/extension of the learner-focused workflow/rules as opposed to letting the formal learning environment dictate the user’s overall workflow and options.
I’ve included a screenshot of our user Home space below. It may seem like a small thing, but the fact the the “Home” tab in our framework is really the individual learner’s home, and that it is a space completely controlled by the learner, is particularly significant. The learner can belong to groups, join institutional courses, etc., but always maintains an identity independent of those groups. In addition, the learner’s identity is ultimately determined by the complete, unique set of content and connections represented in this Home space.

Nine Questions for Jeffrey Hangst

Today the Xplanation presents an interview with physicist Jeffrey Hangst. In November 2010, Hangst was a member of an international team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that not only trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms but managed to keep them around for more than a tenth of a second, which, when it comes to antimatter, is apparently a pretty long time.

jeff_hangst_102

  1. What’s your favorite physics and/or mathematical law, and why?

I couldn’t possibly choose a favorite. The law’s the law. My favorite rock song about the law is “I Fought the Law” – The Clash version. You know, “I fought the law, and the law won.” Sums up many a failed physics experiment.

  1. At what age did you realize your mind worked differently than the other kids?

I’d say at about 34; that’s when I heard about and became interested in antihydrogen. Many of the other kids thought it would be impossible to make antihydrogen, let alone trap and study it. But here we are.

  1. If you could invite to a dinner party any five people from throughout history until present day, who would you invite?

I won’t name names – they would be politicians and founders of religions – but I can tell you the question I would ask: “What the hell were you thinking?” I have a secret fear that many historical figures would be deathly boring, like you would be embarrassed to take them to your local pub with you.

  1. Who’s the bigger genius – Newton or Einstein, and why?

Guys like that – we must include Dirac – have one or two extra gears the rest of us simply don’t have, so I am not even qualified to judge. It is best to know your place here in the grand scheme of things. People who invent whole new ways of thinking don’t need to be ranked. Okay, let’s do it anyway. I would say Newton, because there was much less in the way of a scientific framework in place for him.

  1. What’s the last novel you read?

I spend a lot of time in airplanes, so I read a steady stream of popular fiction, purchased in airports. I have no delusions about being an intellectual. The last one was “Lustrum” by Robert Harris. It is a historical novel about the Roman orator and consul Cicero. Ancient Rome has always fascinated me; I even studied Latin in high school. The last important book I read was “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris. I only read books by guys named Harris.

  1. What’s your favorite movie?

The original “Alien.” I love horror movies and science fiction. This movie is the best example of how to combine the two. I can still remember being terrified when seeing this for the first time in the cinema.

  1. If you had a career outside the sciences, what would you do?

I would probably be a musician. I play acoustic blues and electric rock guitar and even get paid for it sometimes. Or maybe I would work on a Formula One racing team. I like working on cars, and I have a Lotus Esprit that I completely dismantled and restored. But not a modern team – one before fuel injection, computers, and telemetry. Eight or twelve cylinder engines with big Weber carbs; those were cool.

  1. Are there some things scientists will not be able to figure out, or, given enough time, will the human mind eventually have answers to all its really big questions?

The best way to embarrass yourself in science is to rule out something that seems unlikely in your time. I do this regularly when I tell reporters that we will never have enough antimatter to make a weapon or a rocket fuel. I hope that there is an endless supply of big questions. I often think the worst thing that could happen would be if a superior alien race showed up and explained all of physics to us. Maybe this is just because I like to publish first. The question of what happened before the Big Bang is one that can drive you crazy – science can only address things through observation.

  1. What’s so fascinating about antimatter?

Its absence. Why do we have matter instead of antimatter? Obviously, it also fascinates me that you can get paid to worry about this.

Xplana.com is Live and Moving Forward

I would like to take a brief moment to thank everyone who has worked with us over recent months to make Xplana.com a reality. In particular, I want to express my appreciation for all of you who made kind and helpful recommendations last week while we were in our “soft launch” mode.

Now that we are live, I also want to address some of the broader questions that some have asked, as well as discuss how Xplana.com will evolve in the coming months.

We want everyone to know that this first version represents only the beginning of our platform vision. Every product has to be pushed from the nest into the public eye, and we felt that this fall was the appropriate time to make our debut. As with any product launch, we were forced to make thoughtful decisions about what would not be included.

Some of you have asked about specific features you would like to see or about items you felt were missing. The good news is that all of these are already on our current list of upcoming enhancements or module development.

While we will be publishing our official roadmap in a few weeks, I thought it might be helpful to share some specific gaps that we are aware of, and enhancements that we plan to make.

RSS Feeds — Yes, we will be adding RSS feeds. This means that we will feature news feeds as part of our content library, and also provide feeds for user and community journals.
Journal Enhancements — We are also excited about our journals, and look forward to extending this tool with: named URLs, full rich text editor, and a robust portfolio theme.

Communities — We will be introducing more granular administrative controls, better customization, group authorship capabilities, and named URLs.
Flashcards — We will make this a richer activity with a basic template and faster authoring capabilities.

Embed Codes and Content Exports – We are committed to supporting various distributed models for content access. To that end, we will be adding embed codes for albums, as well as content export capabilities.

Creative Commons — We understand the importance of Creative Commons licensing, and are working to map our baseline permissions to different CC licenses. In a future release, we will roll out an advanced option that allows users to select a CC license and have that badge placed with their content.
In addition to these enhancements of our current features, there are also some larger projects on our radar. I am listing a few of them here as I believe this will help everyone gain a deeper insight into our product purpose and vision.

Mobile — We will launch our mobile applications for iPhone and Android in October and continue evolving our mobile options from that initial foundation.
LMS Integration — Xplana.com is designed a a complementary platform to traditional, formal learning solutions like the LMS. We are already working on our LMS integration strategy and will begin piloting options with university partners this year. Our goal is to join the content and student-focused informal learning options of Xplana.com with the other facets of the student’s learning life.
E-book Integrations – Students will be able to access purchased e-books in our platform this fall, but we plan to extent our e-book integration over the next year so that content can flow more freely between the e-book container and the other content and tools within our larger paltform.
Chat and Discussion — We certainly understand the importance of this element with regards to social interactivity, and are looking at a variety of alternatives. This will be something we add in the coming year, and we plan to use it to extend both individual and community interactions.
Expanded Support for Content Types — Much of our vision for Xplana.com is around our content library. To that end, we will continually expand the types of content that we support, both for physical upload as well as for virtual integration. In the coming year we will be expanding our support for file types, and also developing support for key content platforms such as Flickr and Slideshare.
Most important in all this is the fact that Xplana.com is a platform designed for you

— the student, the teacher, the educational technologist, the institutional administrator. And, as we continue to grow and evolve, there is one ingredient for success that outweighs all others — your feedback.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. I want to thank all who have offered suggestions and criticisms here at the beginning of our journey. Our hope is that you will find great value in our platform and that you will continue sending us your comments and suggestions so that we can make Xplana.com what it needs to be in order to serve you best.

Xplana Launch Announcement — Xplana Announces a Major Innovation in Student Learning

Here is the press release that went out today regarding the public launch of Xplana.com. I’ll be posting more about the launch later this week, but I thought I would re-post this in the meanwhile.

This August, Xplana, a division of MBS Service Company, Inc., will launch the first ever platform that bridges social networking and traditional elements of student learning to transform the way students manage their academic lives.

“Xplana is best described as the social network for learning,” Dennis Flanagan, Chief Executive Officer of Xplana, said. “It’s the first ever ’social learning’ platform designed to bring the entire student learning life into a single location.”

Xplana is completely free to any learner and contains a number of embedded tools that allow students to create study guides, upload documents and media, and connect with other students to help focus and organize their studies. Xplana also provides students access to their purchased e-textbooks and enables them to synchronize their notes and annotations.

In addition, Xplana delivers open academic resources that are collected from across the Web directly to students, further simplifying the learning experience.

“Xplana removes difficulty and complexity from the studying equation by giving students the resources they’re looking for,” Rob Reynolds, Director of Product Design and Research, said. “No longer will they be punished for not being able to find the needle in the haystack.”

According to its corporate office, Xplana has already indexed more than 200,000 resources and is expected to have more than a million in the coming year.

The initial Xplana launch will also offer a mobile application for the iPhone and Android devices. With the mobile application, students can access their materials, take notes, and make annotations anywhere, anytime. Any updates they make will automatically sync up with the online version the next time they log in.

Flanagan said another benefit of the Xplana platform is that students will have access to their resources long after they’ve completed their coursework.

“We’ve designed this platform to encourage lifelong learning among students,” Flanagan said. “That’s why student content never expires, so they can reference materials days, months, or years down the road.”

Xplana also plans to expand its platform to offer full integration with popular Learning Management System (LMS) platforms and institutional information systems later this fall.

“It is our goal to help revitalize the learning experience for students,” Reynolds said. “Students will learn more efficiently, stay connected to their peers more easily, and have new avenues for collaboration at their finger tips.”

How to Build a Social Network

In Part 1 of this post, I reviewed some of our company’s history with learning products and how we traveled the circuitous path to arrive at the launch of Xplana.com. I also talked about three elements that have contributed into our general product design foundation.

Don’t Work in a Vacuum — Be aware of the work and thinking done by others, as well as the strengths of similar products and markets.
Develop a Core Product Philosophy — Before you create a single design document or even start your wish list, make sure you have a clear and firm core product philosophy. Ours is simple — connect individual learners to content and communities.
Be Aware of Your Product Principles — There are three fundamental principles that guide our decision making with regards to product design: 1) the shift from group to individual; 2) the shift from building to integrating; 3) the shift from controlling to granting freedom.
These guiding principles are mostly useful to us when we get into “gray areas” or tight spots and can’t decide which direction to take with out product design. They are concepts we can refer to in order to help us re-ground our thinking and re-focus or purpose.

Once you have a basic product design foundation, you have to establish key areas of focus that will determine what features and functionality to prioritize, as well as how you architect and deliver those things to your users. With regards to Xplana.com, we have four general areas of such focus. These are what really form the boundaries of our vision and direct us to our end goal of a rich social learning platform.

  1. Focus on the individual learner (any kind — student or master learner/teacher) — This goes back to our core philosophy of connecting individual learners to content and community. Our belief is that in an ideal social learning network, each individual learner should maintain control of where he/she goes, as well as with whom or what he/she connects. In traditional learning systems, like an LMS, the design is intentionally around the concept of a group or container. These systems have not real purpose, in fact, without a formal learning community of some kind. While a social learning platform like ours can certainly support groups — informal and formal — they are not the center of gravity. This should and does guide our decisions about features, workflows, roles and permissions.
  2. Focus on connections and aggregation — We always start with the individual learner, and then begin asking how we can facilitate connections, our goal being to encourage individuals to create a certain amount of network/learning complexity through these connections. This desire for connection means bringing in as much content as possible through as many channels as we can integrate. In our initial launch, for example, we will feature direct integration with YouTube and Photobucket for publishing and aggregating content. we will pre-aggregate and categorize news and blog feeds and also allow/encourage learners to add new ones and share them. In addition, we will pre-populate our digital content library with as many open educational resources as possible. Any of this content, along with the content created by our learners can be shared in multiple ways, not only with users within Xplana.com but also with friends and connections via Facebook and/or Twitter.

With every feature and design element, we ask ourselves “how can this be used to connect?” This focus helps drive a number of other product design pieces as well. For example, we believe strongly that we shouldn’t re-invent any wheels. People already have tons of content all over the Web. We want to encourage them to keep using and adding to that content while we provide a convenient, single location for bringing it all together. Also, our drive to connect people to content means that we spend a significant portion of our energies on information management — personal tags, taxonomies, and search. We believe that our success, in part, is directly related to the ease with which people can find what they want.

  1. Focus on the disaggregation of content — Overall, we view our product concept as one that is “containerless” — rather than begin with pre-conceived notions of how learners want to collect or organize their experience, we focus on providing and open arena in which they can explore and work, along with the tools to build the containers of their own design and choice. With regards to content, this means breaking content down into as many disaggregated pieces as possible so that users can have the greatest flexibility possible in building their own resources.
  2. Focus on distribution — Connecting, at least in our view of a social learning platforms, means connecting wherever or whenever a learner happens to be. This means providing a framework for mobile distribution that allows learners to create and connect (content and people) with a wide variety of devices and options. To that end, we will launch our platform with apps designed specifically for the iPhone and Android OS platforms. We will begin by focusing on the individual students and their learning lives, and then extend the framework to support master learners/teachers and a more distributed notion of our platform itself. Ultimately, we believe that learners should be able to choose, at a granular level, which pieces of our platform they want to use at any time (as well as how they use it).