Okay, I know I said I'd stop. I'll look into getting professional help.
Archive for March, 2009
“We’ve got information in the information age. But do we know what life is outside of our convenient lexus cages?”
-Switchfoot ‘Gone’
All of this is a plea, a desire, a timid question, and confession.
Why has it taken so long for school to teach me meaning making? The how of pulling at information and weaving it together in a deeper understanding.
I have grown up in a world that is over-flowing with information and has taught me few skills on how to filter it all. Maybe I was born at an inconvenient time, a point in history where the world is working out what it means to have almost the whole world at our fingertips.
Through years of excessive information I’ve grown an intolerance and my palate for the rich taste of knowledge has grown dull. Yes, there can be too much of a “good thing”. Even when information is served in a unique way I’m often too jaded to savor it or care. This is not intended to be an excuse or a whining cry of a “net-gen” student, but an attempt at an honest confession by one 21 year old. I’ll admit to being an under-achieving student, the bane of some professors existence and yes I do regret not working harder in some classes. I’ll also admit I often don’t care when a professor tests me on pure information, on my ability to regurgitate, because those tests are almost always easier than other options and require little engagement from me.
How do I reconcile my belief in education and real school and my praxis that seems to rarely reflect that? Why do I even care when I could slide by? Why do I want to take the “long way around”? It makes no logical sense in the setting of school. I do not play by the rules of the game and suffer for it.
I do not want to conform to the patterns of this world, I want to be transformed through the renewing of my mind through a different model of thinking and learning. Teach me meaning making and I can go forth and do more than just be a passive observer. I can’t do this on my own though, this adventure was never meant to be a solitary journey. I am meant to be a caravanista traveling through time with you, measuring time and being measured by it. I want to do something of value in this short time span we call life. Is that too much to ask for?
Ada Lovelace (per Wikipedia) “is today appreciated as the ‘first programmer’ since she was writing programs-that is, manipulating symbols according to rules-for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.” Wikipedia goes on to explain:
“During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G) in complete detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, recognized by historians as the world’s first computer program.”
I first became aware of Ada Lovelace while in the Navy. The Department of Defense computer program “Ada” was named for her. Ada Lovelace Day, March 24th, was created by Suw Charman-Anderson to “to draw attention to women excelling in technology” by having everyone publish a post on this day about a woman in technology she or he admires.
I certainly have some fantastic role models in my PLE, so thought I would highlight them:
Then again, being surrounded by women who excell at technology is old hat with me. My twin daughters grew up digital and continue to this day to use technology. Melissa Frail is at MathWorks and Stephanie Watwood works out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Ada would have been proud of them…and all the women listed above. They all will serve as wonderful role models for my two granddaughters, Molly and Marin.
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Today, many across the blogosphere are making posts in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, a day filled with blog posts featuring women excelling in technology. Why Ada Lovelace? She is considered to be the worlds’ first computer programmer, designing programs for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.
While some are focusing their posts on great women role models in history, I’ve decided to stay more contemporary, and local. Since we can post about whomever we like in the area of women and technology, I have decided to not just limit myself to one person. I work with some pretty amazing and inspiring role models right here at UMW, so the choice to focus on my colleagues was easy.
First off, Martha Burtis. As a colleague in DTLT, she is always inspiring, challenging, and pushing those around her to use technology in innovative ways for teaching and learning. Her tenacity in chasing down WordPress plugin issues, or thinking through new initiatives here in DTLT are equally important to the work we do. Martha is a rare combination of a person with vision and technical chops to turn vision into reality. Not only that, she is a gifted strategic thinker - many times that is more valuable in getting the vision to reality. Plus, she puts up with the rest of us in DTLT - this is not an insignificant point.
Cathy Finn Derecki is a person with much knowledge, depth and wit in the work that she does. And what is that work? You name it. The thing I admire most about Cathy is her ability to learn new things, and then apply them in interesting and innovative ways. If she doesn’t know a new system, give her a week - she will. Give her two weeks and the wild stuff starts happening.
Words to describe another UMW colleague, Dana German: trust, excellence, leadership, compassion, and humor. She is able to organize, communicate, and move a team through IT projects so big you don’t even know where to start, and she does it in a way that is all at once demanding, inspiring, and successful. Dana has a rare gift: she inspires you to WANT to do ridiculous amounts of work on short time lines. Plus, she is someone that always has your back.
Pam Lowery, a colleague and friend and one of the people who hired me here at UMW almost 10 years ago is a person who can get more done in one 24 hour period than most can in a week. Her ability to help almost anyone with anything tech related, and to do it with grace and good humor is inspiring indeed. How she is able to say “yes” when everyone else says “no” is a testimonial to the size of the heart she has.
I have two other colleagues here in DTLT that also are worthy of mention as role models, our student aides Serena Epstein and Shannon Hauser. They both work with DTLT staff to help us implement our crazy ideas while at the same time having some pretty interesting ideas themselves. Having two students of the caliber of Serena and Shannon help DTLT to do better, more interesting, and more relevant work aimed at student audiences. Plus, they are just plain fun to be around.
Each of these women give me something to aspire to, they show me a way to approach work and life that goes beyond doing what is expected, what is ordinary. I’m grateful to know them all as colleagues, but more importantly, as friends.
If you are interested in reading further posts from Ada Lovelace Day, you can see a list of others who have posted here: http://ada.pint.org.uk/list.php.
Yesterday I wrote about why university bookstores should get out of the bookselling business, and Zach Whalen chimed in with some much needed details that I'd completely overlooked.
I've been thinking through some of the real implications of what a Giant EduGraph might do. If a GiantEduGraph includes open data about all the books used in a course, then students would know what books they'll need next semester ahead of time. The consequence -- university bookstores should get out of the business of selling books.
Click here to view the embedded video.
After our presentation at ACCS 2009, I’ve had a couple of “Wedding Singer” moments where it would have been nice to know that developers were working on new versions of plugins, like WPTouch for the iPhone. Another one popped on my radar today, thanks to my office-mate Patrick. The web service Slideshare has enabled, in a beta form, a way to view presentations on mobile phones. Since there is no Flash plugin for the iPhone, you can’t view the slideshows as they are presented on the standard Slideshare site. However, by going to m.slideshare.com, you can browse on your phone all of the presentations at the site, including your own. It works on most smartphones, including the iPhone, and it works pretty well.
If you didn’t know, a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation can be downloaded to an iPhone, but viewing it is not a visually rich experience since there is no “player”. It simply allows you to scroll vertically through the slides. With Slideshare Mobile, you have previous and next buttons to advance the show, along with other options to offer feedback, mark as a “favorite”, view the slides in a “sorter” view, and a download link.
Another “small piece” delivered.
By the way, downloading Keynote presentations (the Apple presentation program) from Slideshare doesn’t work on the iPhone’s Safari browser. Since Slideshare doesn’t use a direct link to the file, but instead links to a Zip archive, Safari won’t allow the download because of security issues.
My final day at the League for Innovation’s 2009 conference was just as informative as the first. The conference goes on for another two days but too much going on at home for me to stay. Besides, jet lag is finally kicking in. I woke up at 3am today and then crashed at 4pm local time! Of course, it will probably be worse when I fly back to the East Coast!
So after a delightful breakfast at 6am with another East Coaster who could not sleep, I headed to my first session of the day at 8am with Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt. Aaron Parecki had set up a Twitter feed using the hashtag #lfi09, so I tweeted through this and subsequent sessions.
I was familiar with Palloff and Pratt’s earlier work Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom (2007). My review of that work is here. Now they have followed that work with a new book - Assessing the Online Learner: Resources and Strategies for Faculty (2008).
Their session this morning was on Assessment and Academic Honesty in the Online Learning Community. They mapped typical question types to Bloom’s Taxonomy, suggesting that most lecture and reading based multiple choice or True-False questions only tested lower levels of the Taxonomy. There was some pushback from some of the licensure disciplines (like nursing) that their national license exam was vetted. Rena said maybe for nursing, but most discipline license exams were poorly written and did not test the application of knowledge. Their point was too many tests online are written for faculty convenience (self-grading by Blackboard or Angel, for instance), as opposed to aligning with the course learning objectives and mode of instruction. They do like using tests and quizzes in formative ways, such as self-evaluation practice exams. They were surprised (as was I) that some faculty develop comprehensive rubrics for grading essays or discussions online and then do not give those rubrics to the students. They showed their rubric, which aligns well with one I use for online discussions. Summarizing general knowledge is C-level work while (and I like this) “Making me the professor think” is A-level work. Their bottom line is that assessment needs to be authentic. They suggested multiple forms of assessment including e-portfolios, student-completed rubrics, and demonstration of knowledge through case studies and simulations. I was particularly taken with the concept of turning rubrics into assessment instruments that are completed by the students, demonstrating back to the professor how they mastered a principle or outcome.
The general session at 9:15 had two highlights. First, Carol Twigg was given the annual ETS / Terry O’Banion Prize. Her focus on course redesign has had a significant impact on higher education. The second highlight was the keynote address, delivered by Wes Jackson, President of The Land Institute. It was sort of An Inconvenient Truth but scarier. Jackson discussed the crisis that has been building for 3.5 billion years, where organisms consume their resources until they fall off the petri dish. He noted that the 22-year-old in our classes has lived during a period in which 54% of all oil ever consumed was consumed in his lifetime. Our ancestor who died in 1930 never saw population doubling in a lifetime…and those born in 2050 probably will not either. He noted that the new president is still following the growth model, but that growth cannot be sustained even with renewable energy sources. He suggested that the growth dogma was not being seriously questioned by anyone and the it should be.
Two comments resonated with me. First, he said that the role of education was not to train but to educate…and educate meant developing critical thinking skills. Second, he said that if you were working on something that could be completed in your lifetime, you were not thinking big enough!
Needless to say, a thought-provoking session!
I then attended Steve Holland’s session on Scanners and Readers: Designing Online Content to Promote Learning. Steve was in my workshop yesterday, and today unfortunately was plagued with internet problems (and I had no wireless signal). In spite of these setbacks, he did an excellent job of leading a rich conversation around content online. His background was in journalism, and he discussed page layout in the USA TODAY newspaper with online content. The newspaper is designed with scanners in mind, so that they can “enter” the paper from multiple sources. In the same way, Steve uses LessonBuilder to craft online content that can be entered from the top or from sidebars, and then uses multimedia to pull readers deeper into the content. One faculty stated that he was worried that facilitating scanning inhibited students from learning how to actually read deeply. I countered that it was our job to create the environment where the scanning led to relevant reading, and if the students understood the relevance, they would in fact read deeper.
I took a break and a walk outside to enjoy the snow capped mountains on the horizon and walk along the Truckee River. The picture at left shows the lovely location in which the Grand Sierra Resort is set in Reno.
I then returned for my final session with Judy Baker and Martha Kanter of Foothill-De Anza Community College District. They discussed their efforts to establish at the community college level the same concept as the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative: The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. They have identified about 250 textbooks so far under a grant funded Community College Open Textbook Project. The biggest benefit is lower costs for students, but there are challenges as well, such as faculty and student resistance to online books, limited availability (so far), and questions about articulation and assessibility.
By this point, I was wiped out, so I gave in to jet lag and took a nap! But I did go back down to the reception where I once again got a chance to talk to Rena Palloff, Keith Pratt, Jim Bailey and Tamara Pinkas of Lane Community College, and Steven Saltzberg of SoftChalk. It was a nice finish to a super conference.
{Photo Credit: Grand Sierra Resort}
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An interesting thing happened on the way to, and from, our presentation on “Small Pieces To-Go” at the ACCS 2009 conference. Change. Alright, change isn’t a big deal in our world, but it’s one that I found very exciting and it’s a pretty good indication of where things are going in the mobile computing environment. Mr. Groom and I focused our presentation on how the WordPress platform is ready now for the iPhone ecosystem. By ready, we meant that there are plugins that exist today that will give you an iPhone friendly view of a given web page. For example, the photo above is a screenshot from the iPhone version of the UMW New Media Center site that I’m working on. This view of the site is (actually, was) the way that users of the iPhone would see the site. Users with a traditional computer laptop or desktop would see the standard view, as shown below:
The disadvantage of the first iPhone view (using the iWPhone plugin) was that it was take it or leave it. To see the original version of the site the owner would have to turn the plugin off, then you could view the page in the traditional way. While I was putting together the presentation, a plugin that wasn’t working under WordPress 2.7, got an update. MobilePress had a bit more functionality, like adding page links and a search field. It also offered a much needed link labeled “View Full Version”. Here’s an example of the MobilePress version:
Overall, it was a nice experience, with more content on display and those extra added features. So that’s what we went with, knowing full well that somewhere down the road, a better solution would be available. Jump ahead just two days and a tweet from ijohnpederson reminding me of another option that days ago was not working. The latest version of WPTouch was released the day Jim and I presented, and it does indeed kick the iPhone web page look and feel up several notches.
The backend of the WPTouch plugin has lots of knobs and dials to play with as well. It even provides you with a Photoshop template that will assist you with creating your own custom icons. Way cool! Another advantage of WPTouch over the other iPhone theme plugins is that it will work on Android phones.
The last little gem of an announcement came from Blackboard. Their iPhone enabled view is coming soon. I’m sure it will be as open and flexible as any of the WordPress plugins.
Jim “The Reverend” Groom and I gave a presentation at the 2009 Association of Collegiate Computing Services (ACCS) of Virginia Conference on March 12. Despite the usual anxiety of it all coming together and sounding coherent, I think it turned out pretty well. The main theme of the presentation was taking the idea of “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” and applying it to mobile devices, specifically the iPhone/iPod Touch.
I’ll have more to say in a separate post about some interesting discoveries on way to present mobile content, but for now here is the resource page for the Small Pieces To-Go presentation.
