Hmm...from various conversations both on- and off-line about my post about HASTAC III, methinks I touched a nerve or two, or at the very least might have had the opposite effect of what I was shooting for. Either way, it's all prompted some additional reflections.
Archive for April, 2009
One of the most frustrating things about blogging is that fact that unless someone actually takes the time to comment on your posts, you never have any tangible evidence of being read and what your readership thinks about what you have written. Unless you know how to look under the hood.
My students express their frustration about the lack of comments frequently. And yet, it never cesases to amaze them that there are hits, and that those hits come from all over, and that they keep coming.
No this isn’t the Huffington Post nor do we have any delusions of similar grandeur. But these numbers are important. Even when you weed out the spambots, the facts are telling: People are searching, people are finding us, and some people are even staying and commenting.
It’s the getting those visitors to stay and comment that’s the hard part. It’s learning to write (in a second language) so that others feel their comments are useful, that they are welcome to comment. Those are difficult things to do in English. It is wonderful to see some of my students accomplish that very subtle and yet important skill when they blog in Spanish.
But still, we are glad people are visiting. Very glad. We are even happier when they stop and engage. Ecstatic even.
I heard on the mainstream media news tonight that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Sunday declared a “public health emergency” for the current swine flu outbreak, which while mild so far in the United States, has taken 86 lives in Mexico. Secretary Napolitano liked the current emergency call to preps for a pending hurricane.
Health officials’ advice is to follow common-sense precautions: Wash your hands, stay home if you’re sick and listen to your local health authorities.
Mirrored I am sure by my colleagues in ed tech, I have been wondering about that fourth piece of advice not mentioned above - practice online teaching and learning so that one can shift online if a state of emergency is declared.
There is nothing new to this train of thought. Ask Valley CIty State University. As reported by Inside Higher Ed:
Valley City … announced it would move all instruction online for the remainder of the semester, as the Sheyenne River rose to record levels and officials called for an evacuation of the city’s flood plain (where much of the university is located). According to Mayor Mary Lee Nielson’s statement, the river’s elevation had never before exceeded 20 feet; a crest at 22 feet or higher is expected and, “additionally, the Corps of Engineers also predicts that we will likely remain at this elevated level for up to two weeks, adding additional strain to our dike system.”
“There are simply too many unknowns at this time, and with a two-week expected evacuation we do not have the ability to expect students back on campus. It has been agreed that we will continue with classes and finish the semester in whatever manner possible utilizing technology,” Shirley wrote in a Wednesday message to Valley City State’s 1,000 students. Classes are to resume next week and Shirley urged faculty “to be as flexible and creative as possible,” adding: “We all realize there will be decisions that need to be made on a class-by-class basis, and recognize some classes are more suited to online delivery than others.”
I wonder what my institution would do if faced with an emergency of the scale Valley City faced - one requiring the complete shut down of the physical plant? I am sure that my institution is like many nationally, in that we have many faculty who are using Blackboard to web enhance their classes. We also have a minority of faculty who either teach fully online or use a hybrid approach for teaching. Would we be ready to move online like Valley City did?
The news about the swine flu came out of no where and in the space of a few days has moved to a public health emergency level. A few years back, avian flu was the concern and institutions drafted contingency plans for dealing with this flu. I would hazard a guess that few institutions actively trained faculty and students to implement these contingencies.
If one believes that emergencies such as the high water issues faced by Valley City or the potential shut-down of institutions due to influenza are more than concepts, then prudence would suggest that we prepare for them. One possible way would be for institutions to require all faculty to routinely “teach” one week of their semester online. The week would be at their choice. Some may say that this violates their academic freedom, but one week would not impose too harsh a requirement on faculty or students. I have never heard anyone suggest that moving out of a building when the fire alarm rings violates their academic freedom. Rather than impede academic freedom, moving online for a week each semester would instead facilitate campus safety for faculty and students. Faculty would have an exercise in meeting learning objectives online, and students would likewise be held accountable for attending and meeting those objectives online. More importantly, all would have a conceptual framework around online learning that could be rapidly implemented if safety needs required it.
A radical thought? I wonder … and I wonder what you - my colleagues - think?
{Photo Credit: Eneas}
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March 20, 2009: Midterm assessment time.
The College wants to know whether students are in peril of failing. No surprise: no one is failing. How -well- they pass remains to be seen.
But something is not gelling…something seems a bit off. Something needs to be fixed. The time has come for disruption, and hopefully some much needed repair.
Let me explain:
Outside of class, the students have been working on their blogs, trying to articulate realistic, reachable goals to be accomplished (mostly) by the end of the term. We meet once a week to talk about
There’s been a bit of juggling going on during class time, and I don’t feel as if I am handling it as well as I should. I had originally intended (in the published course description) for my students to anticipate a weekly tech drop in help session to try and handle questions that might emerge about the tools we use in class. The best I could do was tell them it would be expected, and highly encouraged, but I could not mandate it. I tried finding a common time when everyone could meet using “When is Good”. Nothing meshed. And yet it would have been irresponsible of me to -assume- that everyone could negotiate the blog tool, that everyone would know how to use the Mixxer site, or Skype, or be able to get themselves out of Orientation Island in Second Life without needing to be tele-ported to safety.
I’m torn and it shows. This class isn’t about the technology. It is about how the technology can help make connections outside of the classroom conversation. They need to know the basics of each item, and make them work for their purposes. I have been struggling to keep them informed, to answer their questions in a timely and efficient way, and yet doing so without using up class time.
I had thought about dedicating a class to doing tech training, in the lab, and doing it entirely in Spanish, but then it dawned on me that this, again, would shift the focus from the learning that could happen via to tools to the tools themselves. They would have to know special words for the tools, and that in the end could make the technology seem more distant, more unapproachable.
Despite the hand outs, the info pages on the blog, etc…they were struggling with getting things to work. I had never presumed that it would be -easy- for them to adopt the blog (much less Second life or even Skype) but I also did not anticipate it would take so long for them to become acclimated once they started. So, alas, I did use class time in the lab to review the tools, answer questions, troubleshoot. I did not like doing it…and as my informal, anonymous mid term assessments revealed, my students did not like it either.
I forget, and then quickly remember, that blogging is hard work. Expressing one’s thoughts and opinions is hard to do in one’s L2…much harder, I belive, than learning the formulas for writing a report in an objective, academic, disinterested voice in one’s L2.
Blogging asks its writers to write to an invisible audience that might read what you have to say, but you may not ever know what they think or feel. That is really hard for students, especially when as an academic community are used to getting prompt feedback, and when the majority of their writing online for other classes is behind a password and a closed CMS (and where they are read by people they can identify vs people they may never know)…
It is hard for me too. I forget how much longer it takes me to blog in Spanish vs in English. There’s a reason this blog (LLU) sometimes goes silent when I am teaching…it is because it takes me more time to write in Spanish -and- because I am concerned about English interference (word order, false cognates etc) when I am doing the two languages together. It’s hard for me, and I have spoken Spanish for 25+ years longer than my students, so I acknowledge and appreciate how hard this is for them as well. And yes, it is humbling when some of them take off and start writing in torrents. It is as if they have connected with something and they need to express it, no matter what the obstacles, no matter what the audience may (or may not) say. They have thoughts, and they are ready to defend them. In my mind, those are the students that will go far in the Real World…they are intrepid, they are passionate, they do whatever it takes to learn, and they put their thoughts out there and hope for feedback.
I am a big believer in short, informal, anonymous assessments. Even when you think things are going swimmingly, there is always something in the class that can be improved, tweaked, reconsidered. There are always people in the class who have an opinion and want it to be heard… and this is how it an happen. I believe that these informal assessments are a highly effective and powerful means of giving students a voice in the organization and pace of the class, as well as an invaluable window into what your students might not be willing to tell you in the open about how the class is gelling thus far. In these assessments –which have 4 questions, take 5 minutes to complete, and are handed out at the end of class– I asked my students to be honest, and I promised them that if there were a majority asking for change in one area, I would work it make happen. I also knew that this would be seen as a test. Would I –really– disrupt my lesson plan if enough of them felt something had to change? hmmm.
The questions are simple:
1) What do you want to do more of in this class?
2) What do you want to do less of in this class?
3) What can -the teacher- do to help you meet your goals in this class?
4) What can you do to make sure you meet your goals?
5) Additional comments.
Not knowing what would emerge from this survey, but feeling a little out of sorts myself about the class, I waited to see the results. And here they were:
As I expected, 80% chafed at the lab/class sessions that were in English and about the technology (exclusively). Duly noted.
The students wanted more opportunities to work in small groups, especially before a full class discussion of a topic. They wanted to talk about movies (movies in Spanish with Spanish subtitles if possible). I agree. Would that I could find relevant films in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. English? no problem? Spanish..not so much. And oy, the remote for the DVD player: one piece of technology that totally befuddles me. Consistently. But yes, point well taken.
They asked games that would enforce vocabulary and make them use the language in context. Seeping through here in their comments was the idea that community building did not have to be a serious enterprise, and the games could have a purpose, a focus. The stduents recognized they not be just idle entertainment. It was becoming quite clear that they wanted to have fun, they did not want anyone to waste their time, and content-focused games would be a welcome infusion of fun & challenge for the class.
One student wanted the class to review grammar. Sigh. That is -so- not what this class is about.
My favorite: “Talk less about what we are going to do…and just do it” Amen. And here we go:
Above is the calendar, the syllabus for the upcoming 4 weeks of the class. I knew I had to travel (China!) and I wanted to make sure they were in contact with the language, and that they were covering material that (according to their responses) made sense to them. There were opportunities created for both student led discussions (something they liked after a recent series of conversations led by students re: the elections in El Salvador) and large group discussions.
They expressed their opinions, I compiled them, I reviewed them with the class, they accepted them, and I responded.
Up next: the effects of these changes.
An interesting thing popped up several times while talking with some folks about the soon-to-be-opened-up Giant EduGraph interface. Just for the purposes of having an image for slideshows, I slapped this together:
A while ago, I had a little play-time with data released from the University of Huddersfield Library by Dave Pattern, which led to a Talking With Talis podcast with Dave (see
Red2Blu website pic
Here’s a deal from Warner Bros. Studios that is intriguing. In their effort to get me started on my Blu-ray library, they are offering to let me buy the Blu-ray version of movies that I have purchased on HD-DVD format. You remember HD-DVD right? Their “upgrade” (teehee) program works pretty simply. I Select the HD-DVD’s that I own and want to upgrade, mail in just the cover art from the original, pay $4.95 for each HD-DVD (though some titles, like Blade Runner are $14.95) and wait for 4 weeks to recieve the Blu-ray discs.
You can upgrade up to 25 discs. I have about 10 discs that need the upgrade ( I just love that term in this context. Imagine if the same deal occurred when VHS beat Beta and they called it an upgrade). I’m estimating that I’ll spend about $75 with shipping costs (which is $6.95 for the entire order), so it’s relatively reasonable. However, I’m somewhat reluctant. Spending $75 isn’t trivial these days, especially when I’ve got the movies and the player and I can even rip them to my hard drive. I haven’t purchased a dedicated Blu-ray player yet. I own three Blu-ray movies and to play them I use a Blu-ray drive in my PC hooked up to my HDTV. Switching to the Blu-ray versions of the movies will only encourage me to purchase a dedicated player sooner.
What this will do is get me thinking about my movie collection, and specifically the future of my collection. Not that I haven’t been trying to figure that out for the last several years. Where do physical discs fit into the future? I’m still working on that one. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
HASTAC Thoughts: Let's Do Prospective Criticism
Caveat: Much here is based on first impressions -- I hope people will point out where I am going astray.
As I checked my Facebook account last night, a chat box popped up from a colleague from a former institution, Gwinnett Technical College, where I worked in Georgia. We chatted for a few minutes, and she relayed a nice complement. She had stopped by our old college to visit with friends and discussion turned to some frustrations with their moving to Angel from Blackboard. One faculty said, “I wish Britt was still here. He would never tell you ‘I don’t know.’ Instead, he would tell you ‘I bet so and so knows so let’s both go and learn together how to do it.’ That brought a smile to my face, as I remember doing that many times.
Forty years ago when I was a plebe at the U. S. Naval Academy, I learned quickly that naval officers never said “I don’t know.” The correct response if you did not know the answer was “I’ll Find Out, Sir!” And then you had better find out! It is a little thing, and yet, from an attitude perspective, huge. “I don’t know” is a passive response requiring no action. “I’ll find out” is a proactive response requiring action.
As I said goodnight to Michele, I was reflecting on her comment about my not saying “I don’t know.” That is a personal attitude, but could it not also be transferred to our students? After all, it is simply an expectation that students will take responsibility for their own learning.
We have been debating the efficacy of allowing laptops in classrooms here on campus. At the risk of calling them old-schoolers, there is a segment here that flatly bans the use of laptops or mobile devices in their classes. To me, that is inviting a passive student to your class. Luckily there are faculty here who feel the opposite.
The alternative as these other faculty have found is to tap in to the natural curiosity of students and set the expectation of “I’ll Find Out!” At a brown bag lunch last week, one faculty talked about the excitement of having students in his History class fact-check him during lectures and pull their impromptu research into the class discussion. I totally agree, and I think the attitude applies whether you are talking face-to-face or online classes.
In my online classes at both the undergraduate and graduate level, I have tried to set the expectation of student-generated content to add to the learning process. My current class is a good example. I have enjoyed co-teaching Educational Technology and School Leadership this semester with Jon Becker. Over the past twelve weeks, we and our students have collaboratively explored the integration of Web 2.0 in K-12 programs. At the start of class, we had a group of self-described technophobes who were very worried about taking an online class. Through the use of active learning and collaboration in a wiki, they have grown comfortable working and sharing online. Now, they wonder why their colleagues are not doing the same. During the past week, the online discussion was rich with commentary about the professional development of K-12 teachers. It was interesting to see my students moving from a former expectation that it was the administrator’s job to provide professional development to one that espoused personal learning in a networked world as the key to professional development.
“I’ll Find Out!” may be the heart and soul of learning-centered teaching, but I am coming to the realization that it also is the heart and soul of faculty development as well. Of course, it requires action on the part of each individual. A personal learning environment or network does not materialize overnight. It requires time and conscious thought to develop a learning network that works for you.
Trying to figure out how to facilitate that process will tug at me for the next few weeks. In June, Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I will be guiding our annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute. Our theme this year is Teaching and Learning in a Networked World. Our challenge will be to introduce faculty to the power of networked learning and to assist them in developing their own networks. I have had the luxury of a full semester with my class, so this is a tall task to attempt in one week. It will be interesting to see how we do. Will we succeed?
I’ll find out.
{Photo Credit: Ezalis, Chrisfreeland2002}
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I have this strange idea in my head and I’m throwing it out there to hear what you guys think and too see if you have any ideas.
Ever since I watched the movie Hard Promises (a bad 90s romance film) I identified with the male lead, Joey, who can’t deal with doing just one thing and his wander lust takes him to jobs all over the country. I knew that was how I felt about doing jobs. I’ve always been interested in learning a mile wide and an inch deep; I always wanted to move on to the next adventure.
In order to quench my insatiable urge to learn about a wide variety of things. I am instituting for myself the week long experiments experiment. I will spend a week learning about something and learning about it through what ever methods necessary. For example what is it like to be a vegetarian? I would probably spend the week as a vegetarian and researching the history of vegetarianism and asking all sorts of other question too. Naturally I would blog during the week about my experiment. There are a myriad of possibilities here and I want you to help me think of more ideas. Hopefully once this project gets off the ground you could also help me form my research into each subject. I would also encourage anyone who would want to participate to try it out too, the more the merrier right?
So as of right now I have a few ideas for week long experiments, but I’d love to hear from you. So leave a comment (or multiple comments!) this experiment depends on help from you guys. If everything works out I would start this project during the summer when I have a little more free time to experiment.
Here are some ideas are I have so far: Learning about photography, Buddhism, week as a mute (crazy I know), practice parkour. Again anything and everything that you think would be worth investigating or maybe something that is just wacky and would make for an interesting week.
