[edit] Plenary Panel Discussion: A Conversation with the University Committee on Digital Initiatives

Convener: Jeff McClurken, Chair

Committee Members: Martha Burtis, Gardner Campbell, Teresa Coffman, Tom Fallace, Leanna Giancarlo, Tom McNulty, Brian Rizzo, Carolyn Parsons

At this session, the members of the ad-hoc University Committee on Digital Initiatives will present a preliminary version of their findings and look to the audience for feedback and conversation about the current state and future path of digital initiatives at UMW. This feedback will help influence the final report of the committee to be given to the Provost and, eventually, our new University President.

UMW Digital Resources Wiki. http://umwhistory.org/diginit/.

Preliminary Report of the Committee -- MS Word or PDF

Final Report of the Committee -- MS Word or PDF

[edit] For Further Reading

Primary documents

1. Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure (2003).

2. Follow-up report from the NSF: Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery (March, 2007).

3. Report on cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, Our Cultural Commonwealth (Fall, 2006).

4. ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure.

Commentary
1. The special December, 2007 issue of Academic Commons is entirely devoted to considering “Our Cultural Commonwealth.”

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Notes from FA Q&A

• What if students, faculty, staff want to create their own space using non-UMW spaces? How do we manage and support these kinds of external activities?

Recommendations focused not on putting in place more UMW systems, but developing a deeper understanding.

• How do we get to the vision this report illustrates?
  • What propels us forward is not a machine but us -- a commitment to our own values and this new medium. Mindfulness.
  • Part of the point of YOTDC: start conversations in a wider community (on-campus, off-campus). Just bringing this committee together has been revelatory. We need to widen that conversation.
  • Can we do this on the side? Need full-time commitment.
  • Leadership: President, CIO, Provost
  • Urgency in the form of real leadership
  • Most of our colleagues are closer to being here than we may realize. This is about teaching and our commitment to our students.
  • Bring this to our President.
  • Catalyze the community
  • Pedagogical issue: education as a process/network vs. as a line
  • Teaching aspects of this conversation need to extend beyond year
  • Make the FAAR reflect these values in some way
  • Time needs to be created for faculty to engage with these issues (fellowships, course releases, other procedures)
  • Creating of more media production spaces to capture student activities
• We don't know where "there" is. It's going to keep moving forward. This isn't about manufacturing something but about vision and leadership
• We'll never get everyone involved -- maybe that's not the point.
• Accountability
  • Audit of our internal controls (in terms of technology)
  • Deal with existing vision
• About where we are now
  • shocked when talking to colleagues at other universities by how little technology enters into the conversation
  • happy to have resources we do have
  • also important for recruiting faculty -- how do we initiate them into this culture
• Leapfrog effect--our lack of resources has forced us to think strategically and imaginatively
• In order to get critical mass, we need to embrace both the visionary and the mundane

[edit] Making Movies with Excel: The Sequel

Bob Rycroft (Economics)

A technique valuable in many disciplines is an ability to graph cross-sectional data that changes over time. An example from the discipline of Economics is the Lorenz Curve, a widely-used graphical representation of the extent of income inequality. Annual data on household income can be used to draw a Lorenz Curve for a particular year. The technique to be demonstrated uses Excel to smoothly re-draw the Lorenz Curve year after year so that it looks like a movie showing how the Lorenz Curve has changed over time. An example from demography is to show how the age distribution of the population changes over time. An example from geography is to show how the depth of a river at various places along its width changes over time.

The demonstration will show how Excel can be used to “make a movie” and how it might be used in several disparate disciplines. Printed instructions on how to use the technique will be made available.

Making Movies (Download Excel spreadsheet)

Making Movies

Making Movies (Download directions in Word format)

Making Movies

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[edit] Understanding Relationships between eLearning Website Feature Preferences and Learning Styles

Mukesh Srivastava (Computer Information Systems)

The primary purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between perceived learning styles of the eLearners and their preference of eLearning website features. The secondary purposes of this study was to research various models of learning styles for examining learning styles and eLearning website Systems for studying eLearning website feature preferences of the eLearners. A broad research question was undertaken: What impact (if any) does an eLearner’s learning style have on their preferences for specific features in an eLearning website system? To follow an exploratory line of investigation three research questions were used to examine the broad question: 1) How can an eLearning website system be meaningfully selected to study eLearning website features preference? 2) How can an eLearner’s learning style be meaningfully categorized? 3) How do learning styles impact the eLearner’s preference of eLearning website features? Unlike Research Question 1 and 2 that were examined by mainly literature review, Research Question 3 was studied using a full-fledged empirical cycle involving setting up hypotheses, conducting a survey, and analysing data using statistical methods.

Mostly working undergraduate and graduate adult students, from CGPS at University of Mary Washington, were the participants in the survey study, and they completed three parts of the survey: background information, eLearning website feature preference and learning styles. Data analysis was carried out in four parts: descriptive statistics, relevant hypothesis testing, Cluster Analysis, and Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA.

The descriptive statistical analysis was carried out to provide statistical information about the study participants, eLearning Website Feature Preferences and Learning Styles. Correlation studies and hypotheses testing have been performed to study the direction and magnitude of relationship between learning styles and combinations of learning styles. Cluster analysis executed to investigate how learning styles can be clustered and if there is a possibility of correlation between clusters and website features. Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA of clusters and eLearning website features was done to examine the difference between clusters and eLearning website feature preference.

The results pertaining to correlation studies between learning styles and combinations of learning styles of the participants and eLearning website features preference indicated that largely there were non-significant correlations between the learning styles, combinations of learning styles and website feature preferences. There were few significant, but weak positive and negative correlations between the leaning styles and combinations of learning styles suggesting that a caution should be exercised by the eLearning website system designers and instructional designer in formulating eLearning website features using eLearning students’ learning styles as a consideration.

The association of learning style clusters and eLearning website feature preferences were examined and it revealed that Knowledge Seekers were the dominant group among all four clusters. The results indicated that at least two clusters (Knowledge Cultivator and Knowledge Seeker) have similar characteristics with small difference in the Pragmatist score. Kruskal-Wallis Test was conducted to compare the ranked mean scores on Clusters and eLearning website feature preferences. The results also showed that there is no difference in eLearning website feature preferences - among respondents in four Clusters – Knowledge Seeker, Thinker, Knowledge cultivator and Campaigner.

This research is one of the few studies conducted to provide suggestions for eLearning website system designers and online instructions designers about eLearning website feature preference based on learning styles. The results of this study suggest that there is no association between learning styles, combination of learning styles or clusters of learning styles and eLearning website features. Thus, future research should concentrate on exploring other factors that can be investigated in understanding relationships between learning styles and eLearning website features.

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[edit] Monologue, Dialogue, and the Multiblog

Mara Scanlon (English, Linguistics, and Communication)

Blogs are frequently used as a site for individual reflection, but my interest instead is in the multiuser blog as a tool for collective learning. This presentation will theorize the strengths and weaknesses of the Wordpress course blog in three literature courses and discuss their role in my deepening commitment to the collaborative classroom.

• Contemporary Poetry
• Asian American Literature
• Women and Modernism

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[edit] Personal Blogs The Easy Way

Warren Rochelle (English, Linguistics, and Communication)

If I can do this ... well, so can you. Working with Jim Groom, I learned how to use UMW Blogs to create a space to publicize my work and to make a Web page that is easy to maintain, straight forward, attractive, and did I say easy to maintain? In this space, I can announce upcoming readings and events, share work-in-progress, and maintain a web presence. This presentation will focus on how it was done and can be done, and how easy--did I mention that?--it is.

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[edit] To Blog or Not to Blog? – Pedagogical Implications of Blogging in Foreign Language Education

Marcel Rotter (Modern Foreign Languages)

In my presentation, I investigate the pedagogical and organizational preconditions to make blogging a tool in establishing a successful learning community. Beginning with a quick look back into media history, I compare expectation of new frontiers in learning at the arrival of new technologies and how they were met. I then establish a catalog of possible pedagogical implications based on a survey among students in the MDFL and ELS departments, my own experiences, and on interviews with my colleagues.

Finally, I contrast my theoretical framework with our recently launched blogging platform UMW Blogs. Topics include blogging as process writing, revisions and annotations, anxiety to write in the foreign language, the role of textual and audio-visual prompts for blogging, the role of the instructor and so on.

I would like to conclude my presentation with a discussion on the experiences of others.

Read my blog "The Jotter of Rotter" (in German and English): http://mrotter.umwblogs.org/

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[edit] Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Blogging as an Extension of the Art Studio

Carole Garmon (Art and Art History)

Every studio art major in any university program knows that when they sign on to art, they have committed to much more than the six contact hours per week in each studio. They are well aware of the sleepless nights and the days when the professor cannot give them the individual attention and support that is sometimes needed to press ahead and make work from an informed level of understanding.

The studio major must develop a “support system” comprised of faculty and fellow art students. In upper-level studio art courses the emphasis shifts from basic technical expertise to more advanced conceptual and analytical thinking as students develop a more focused body of work. Fast, Cheap and Out Of Control, is my answer to extending the “physicality” of the studio beyond the limitations of the Melchers building. While students meet at the “mother blog” to speculate about Fast, Cheap and Out Of Control blog and then turn its focus on a student blog/portfolio.

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[edit] The Future of the CMS at UMW

Lisa Ames, Gail Brooks, Martha Burtis (UMW)

Recently, faculty at UMW were invited to participate in an online survey about the University's course management system and other teaching and learning technologies. This session will present the preliminary findings of that survey and provide UMW community members with an opportunity to comment further upon the topics the survey addressed.

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[edit] Plenary Presentation: "Integration, Technology, and the Meaning of Life"

Gene Roche (College of William and Mary)

This presentation was triggered by a series of blog entries and comments written this spring by UMW students and faculty on a wide range of issues. The conversation ranged from existential reflections on the overall purpose of higher education and the philosophy of curriculum design to more pragmatic concerns about the use of little clickers or the value of tablet PC's. The goal of the presentation will be to help us think more clearly and creatively about our personal motivations, perceptions, and beliefs and to better understand how they shape the kind of decisions we make about integrating technology into our curriculum, courses, and classes.

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[edit] Data Collection and Analysis with Computer-Linked Vernier Probes

George Meadows

Co-Presenter: Dr. Marie Sheckels (Education and Math)

Vernier data probes provide a quick and simple way to collect and analyze physical data. The probes can either be connected directly to a computer’s USB port or, in the case of older probes designed for Texas Instrument calculators, to the USB port via an adaptor. Vernier sells a variety of probes including temperature, light, pH, conductivity, motion, and many more. Software, the Logger Lite program, is packaged with the probes that have a direct USB connection and will recognize all other probes as well. A separate program, Logger Pro, must be purchased separately but comes with a “universal” site license. The software includes options for collecting data in spreadsheet form and graphing. Data analysis tools include modeling, curve fitting, and statistics. In this presentation, we will demonstrate the probes and discuss many of the data analysis tools.

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[edit] Web-TNG in Context

George Brett (Internet2)

"The Next Generation of the Web will be different, yet at the same time it will be more of the same." This presentation will provide context for that statement. In the 1980's university faculty were mandated to develop Computer Assisted Instruction with microcomputers when general purpose tools (Wordstar, Multiplan, dBaseII) may have been more appropriate. Later in that decade came HyperCard and ToolBook which introduced educators to hypermedia. Meanwhile, faculty were exploring online bulletin board systems and collaboration with electronic mail lists. In the 1990's, WAIS, Archie, and Gopher emerged to simplify our network access to libraries and information resources. Soon, these tools were sidelined by the World Wide Web. Today we have Social Media of all sorts in text, audio, video, and 3-D formats. It's always a challenge to say where technology for research and education will go next--but I will take that challenge by observing that technology in the future may seem to be different, but it will still fall into the same categories of use and intent that it has for the past twenty years.

I will briefly explore that idea of continuation and change, examining these six functional categories:

• General Purpose Tools - build better tool kits
• Bridging the Gap - new media, but is message still the same?
• Formal versus Informal - when do marginal notes become research?
• One Room Schoolhouse - a model for collaboration and learning
• Story Telling - adding context to content
• The Viral Thing - value of the "word of mouth"

The talk page

Misc Info:

• twitter id: @ghbrett
• olde website: ghb-web
• Flickr: My fotos

[edit] Resources recommended by me for reasons based on lateral thinking

Books

• Early Hypertext 1989 - Robert Horn
  • Robert's books are an amazing resource for shifting one's perspective on information. His hyertext book explores "chunking information" and is amazingly on target about the web even though written before the World Wide Web was around.
  • Mapping Hypertext: The Analysis, Organization, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics
  • Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
• Cyberspace: First Steps - M. Benedikt
  • Some friends feel this is not up to par. I think that it is a useful source of thinking of the etheral cyber / mental space in physical, architectural, directional terms.
  • Amazon
• The Social Life of Information - J.Seely Brown
  • A Classic
  • Google Book version
  • Amazon
• The Hidden Power of Social Networks - Cross & parker
  • Google Book version
  • Amazon
• The Tipping Point - Gladwell
  • When does a fad become mainstream?
  • Book Version
  • Amazon
• Wikinomics - Tapscott & Williams
  • Amazon
• Everything is Miscellaneous - Weinberger
  • Blog
  • Amazon
• Out of Control - Kevin Kelly
  • It's about self organizing systems. Published in 1995 - but still relevant
  • Amazon
• New Rules for a New Economy - Kevin Kelly
  • Pragmatic information. Amazing how scary practical advise can be.
  • Read the book online
• Contextual Design: designing customer-centered systems -Beyer, Holtzblatt
  • Uses a social anthropology approach to design.
  • Google Book
  • Amazon
• Computers as Theater - B.Laurel
  • On one level relationship of computers and users as stage and actors. On anther level 17 years later an thoughtful perspective on virtual environments.
  • Amazon
  • Google Search "Computer as Theater" laurel
• When Old Technologies were new - C. Marvin
  • Farmers placing seed orders by cramming paper notes into telephone cones way back when. So, what are we doing wrong with tech now?
  • Amazon
  • Google Search
• Computer Mediated Communications - M. Rappaport
  • An early survey of computers and computing. Context & History.
  • Amazon
• The Cluetrain Manifesto - Levine, Locke, Searls, Weinberger
  • book online
  • Amazon
• Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
  • Stop and think -- I challenge you to engage Wabi-Sabi for your blogging.
  • Amazon
  • Design philosophy
    • "Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature."
• Timeless Way of Building - C.Alexander
  • Core principles from the physical world of architecture to apply to the virtual worlds of portals, cms's, blogs and of course Second Life.
  • Amazon
• Pattern Language - C.Alexander
  • Amazon
• Everyday Matters -D. Gregory
  • Danny is an artist, journalist, blogger Amazon
  • Blog
• Pedagogical Sketchbook - P.Klee
  • Klee's notebook's about design and art. A language for 2D space of design. Good food for thought.
  • Amazon
  • Google Search
• The RSVP Cycles - L.Halprin
  • Another book about process of using groups to brainstorm, design and make change. Design processes - cycles - happenings
  • page with an illustration from the book
  • Amazon
• How to Make a Journal of Your Life - D.Price
  • Book about creating personal journal which could be applied to thinikng about one's blog.
  • Amazon
  • website
  • flickr

Web Stuff

• The Horizon Report
  • PDF
  • Horizon Project Wiki
• Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points - C.Brogan
  • Blog Entry
• Top 100 Tools for Learning
• Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit - Siemens, Tittenberger, Anderson
  • PDF
  • EDUCAUSE Review Article
• Visionary Videos
  • Sun Microsystems' Starfire -- Bruce Tognazzini
    • Weblink
  • Videos from Apple circa 1987 but still incredible
    • Knowledge Navigator
      • • Wikipedia entry
        • Video Download
    • Future Shock Video
  • There were other videos: classroom, engineering lab, and adult
  • if anyone knows where to find these, please let me know ghbrett@mindspring.com
• Stuff in Plain Engllish from Commoncraft
  • Great Videos about Web 2.0 Apps -- Try it you'll like it.
• TED - Ideas worth sharing
  • web site with videos
  • Podcast versions can be found on iTunes too.
  • Imagine hearing a speech from a neurosurgeon who analyzed her own stroke while she was suffering it. It took 8 years for her to reach this presentation.
• Old files from my past
  • Supper with Richard Perlman ca. 1997 Queen Bee Restaurant, Arlington, VA.
  • "... to demonstrate new paths through olde information"
  • early morning thoughts

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[edit] The CGPS Writing Center: Working with Non-traditional Students via Synchronous Web Conferencing

Cheryl Hawkinson-Melkun (CGPS)

The CGPS Writing Center’s client population consists primarily of non-traditional adult students who live off campus and commute to the university directly from work. These students have long papers and little time during which to conference. The CGPS Writing Center Director will explain why and how the center has adopted and adapted computer technologies to meet the needs of these students, allowing students to submit their papers in advance, meet with a tutor in a synchronous online environment that allows tutor and client to discuss, view, and edit the document online.

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[edit] Any Computer, Any Software, Anywhere: The Virtual Computer Lab

Jerry Slezak, Assistant Director (Division of Teaching and Learning Technology)

Co-presenter: Clay Calvert, Director (Information Technologies Security, UMW)

"Imagine the ability to log into a web site, make a reservation, and remotely access a computer that has the operating system, settings and software that you need to teach a course or perform your own research. Instead of you or your students having to go to a physical machine located in a lab on campus to get to specialized software, this can be done from anywhere they have a fast web connection. This is computer virtualization, and it looks to be the next big thing in setting up computer labs that have much more flexibility and usability for students and faculty.

This presentation will show you the basics of virtualization and how it could have the potential to change everything in the way we think about not just computer lab spaces on campus but how we could ultimately teach and learn by making more tools available in a much more flexible way."

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[edit] Workshop: Teaching Language and Culture with Technology: What Do We Need and Do We “Git-R-Dun?”

Barbara Sawhill, Oberlin College

Co-Presenter: Ryan Brazell (Oberlin College)

Following up on her plenary presentation, "Why Johnny Can't Learn Spanish," Barbara Sawhill will lead a conversation about using digital tools wisely and well in the language curriculum or any place where the teaching of culture is desired. The workshop will begin by prompting attendees to think about what they can't do in their classrooms but wish they could, followed by a brainstorming session about what technologies might be available to fill the void. The workshop will model the way Barbara her colleague, Ryan Brazell, work with their own faculty when discussing the use of technology in teaching, in a collaborative, communicative manner, much like the learning of languages itself! It will also address the cultural transformations that we need to be working on at our institutions to facilitate our use of digital technologies, before we can even begin to address the value or functionality of the tools themselves.

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[edit] Going Boldly: Looking to the Future of Teaching and Learning Technologies

Gardner Campbell, Patrick Gosetti Murray-John, Jerry Slezak (UMW)

The last four years at UMW have seen sea changes in how we think about and use digital technologies to augment teaching and learning at the University. This year's successful launch of UMW Blogs is the latest development in a movement towards thinking boldly and bravely about technology not as merely a helpful "additive" to our pedagogical toolkit but as an integrated (and emergent) force for intellectual and educational transformation. Technology isn't just providing us with methods to improve our classrooms and it is altering the very landscape of those spaces. With these sea changes come both great rewards and great responsibilities. Join us for a discussion of those future directions, as we focus first on specific goals and challenges facing us with UMW Blogs and then, more generally, on the horizons ahead.

Patrick's talk will look at these links:

Preliminary 'Directory'

Preliminary Image Gallery

Central Bank Independence

Visual Arts

Zambia on Wikipedia

Patrick's talk will in large part be a demo of the UMW Amiatinus Sidebar. You can install it in Firefox 2 (not yet ready for Firefox 3) here. If you install it, please add your name to this wiki page and/or otherwise contact me so I can ask you about feature requests and bug reports, and so that I can contact you when feature requests and bug reports have been addressed in a new version.

I've tried the UMW Amiatinus Sidebar: Jeff M.

Other info from Patrick's talk: a University Ontology Two of the core parts of how I'm trying to describe a university course are what the course studies ('studies'), and the tools used in the course of that study ('studiesWith')

'studies' = The texts, people, places, things, concepts, movements, etc. that a course studies. Please help me by contributing possible sub-divisions you imagine to this (e.g. studies-person, studies-place, studies-era, studies-culture, etc.). I would like to follow up, so if you would like please also note who you are.

Suggested subdivisions for 'studies':

'studiesWith' = The editions of texts, software, hardware, online resources, or other tools that you use in pursuing the study of things above -- things like Norton Anthology of Literature, Edirols, iPods, Omeka installations, Mathematica, SPSS, etc. Please help me by contributing possible sub-divisions you imagine to this (e.g. studiesWith-software, studiesWith-device, studiesWith-text, studiesWith-onlineSpace, etc.). I would like to follow up, so if you would like please also note who you are.

Suggested subdivisions for 'studiesWith':

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It started when my friend Eduardo Peirano tweeted a link to me and two others about an article in the May 29th edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “I’ll Never Do It Again,” Elayne Clift laid out her reasons for never teaching online again. Her five reasons included:

1. “Virtual community” is the ultimate oxymoron.
2. The lack of immediacy in communication is maddening.
3. The quality of education is compromised in online learning.
4. Show the money (more work for the same pay)
5. Online teaching can be very punishing (requires more time)

She wrapped up her comments with:

“Weary and obsessed, I began to feel that, despite my best efforts, I was not up to the task, not in control, not meeting my own standards. On top of that, I suspected my students didn’t like me very much. That hurt. I began to break out in rashes and suffer sleepless nights.

That’s when I knew that I would not do it again and would chalk it up to experience — even if that decision meant hanging up my chalk altogether. Try to talk me down. Tell me I didn’t give it enough time. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-date. Just don’t call me to teach online.

I’ll leave that to (younger?) teachers who like living in a virtual world of virtual students with virtual goals, capacities, and ideas. Me? I’ll stick to the virtues of live human interaction — in the classroom and elsewhere — in a world rapidly becoming, as some of my students might say, “totally unreal!””

Eduardo knew that this 59-year-old (younger?) faculty would rise to the bait! He had started a discussion forum around this article in his Ning site for Higher Education - College 2.0. In his post, he noted:

“Aren’t online teachers complicating themselves. At the face to face classes there is nothing similar to forum discussions. So the discussions between the students should be very important for their grade!! They should be allowed to help each other and the teacher’s role is to point them to good resources and to support and facilitate the discussions and learning. If the homework is a collaborative paper each student should be responsible to contribute with some paragraphs (Michael Wesch: A Cultural Anthropologist Looks at Digital Technolog…) or presentation.”

I posted a reply on the College 2.0 forum, but I was fairly certain that Elayne Clift or folks that agreed with her would never see it there. So I posted the same comments in a Chronicle Forum for article discussion (as well as linking this comment out on Twitter). Jon Becker was more eloquent in 140 characters but summed up my feelings pretty well:

My more lengthy comment was:

Elayne Clift certainly had issues with teaching online, but it appeared to me that she attempted this course without changing any of her practices, and teaching online is fundamentally different than teaching face-to-face. I am as old-dog as Clift, but I also have been teaching online for 14 years at a variety of institutions, and see things a little different than she does.

A “virtual community” is only an oxymoron if the faculty does not instill a sense of community through her or his own social presence in the class. Using social media and collaborative activities, a community can not only form but be very strong. Social networking tools can lead to a rich communication not only within just the course but with discipline experts worldwide. We recently held a webconference with our class and guest speakers, and we also opened it up to the world through Twitter. Others in the field from around the country joined the webconference and began interacting with our students in the chat box. You could not duplicate that in a physical classroom.

As to lack of quality, that is more an indictment on the institution and the faculty than on online learning. In my most recent class that I co-taught with another, several students used the term “life-altering” to express their appreciation for the quality of learning they found in our class.

The comments about money and time suggest to me again that Clift attempted to be the single expert on the stage rather than co-opting her students into the learning process. I find the time distributed nature of online learning works well for me, but much of my focus is on helping students learn how to learn and teach each other.

I was lead author of a white paper published by our Center for Teaching Excellence on online teaching> http://bit.ly/11DBMx. It focuses on the practice of teaching online, and may offer an alternative view to the one espoused by Clift. Please add to the conversation - we would be interested in your thoughts.

That was near 1pm today. Another person had started a similar forum called “Teaching Online.” By dinner time, these two comments had been read over three hundred and two-fifty times respectively, and a lengthy exchange was developing in the forum. What I found fascinating was that our comments evoked such strong reaction from two faculty who had never taught online. I respect more the comments from those who had taught online. My Twitter network is biased towards technology but was much more aligned with my own comments.

In several Chronicle comments, there was a note of fear that the “good old days” were gone and that because of online learning, higher education was going to hell in a handbasket. “Beatitude” noted “I hope to God this isn’t the future for all of higher education…”

“Beatitude” raised a number of interesting points. He or she noted that online courses were fine in the summer as long as they did not take resources away from [real] courses in the academic year. (My interpretation). There was a bit of fear about potential loss of jobs due to outsourcing. And a note that many students currently taking online courses live on campus and take these courses from their dorms.

All true.

Yet, there is no real discussion about “learning” or academic success. My simplistic view is that online is simply a mode of delivery, as are large lectures, small classrooms, and even tele-delivery to remote satellite settings. We do not burn down large lecture halls because significant numbers of students fail those classes. We instead look at best means of delivery given the context of large lecture halls. Online should be no different. Castigating online as something to fear for the future seems narrow-sighted.

Recent polls suggest almost 100% of entering students already own a laptop. Given wireless connectivity, there really is no course anymore in which some online learning does not occur. Our students are using Google and Wikipedia, either in class or outside it (not to mention Facebook!). The question is not whether students are online or not but rather whether we faculty are guiding their online lives towards learning that matters.

Lisa Lane had a more positive note in her posting in College 2.0 on this matter:

“Faculty who’ve been teaching online awhile have a responsibility to share their experiences, tips and tricks with those just starting out. Mechanisms need to be in place for them to do that, whether it’s professional development programs, training seminars, or social interaction (online or in person). I could, and have, provided many, many solutions to the overload so many new online instructors experience trying to make their online class as much like their on-site classes as possible. There are indeed ways to design the experience to be easier and better for all.”

I agree with Lisa (and I think our White Paper was an attempt to do just the type of sharing she suggests).

Eduardo hit my hot button today (or more correctly, Elayne did). What are your thoughts? Have we not reached the point where the debate over the efficacy of online learning is past and where we should instead be focusing on the new practices needed to make online learning the success many of us have already seen it to be? As always, I would be interested in your comments and reaction.

{Photo Remixed from Gill Wildman}

Click here to view the embedded video.

After a slight delay, the second video from Faculty Academy 2009 is up and it’s the terrific talk from James Boyle on “Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness”. Lots of good morsels to chew on here. I’ll be putting up more videos on the FA09 website on the webcasts page. It all went by so fast . . .

The delivery of courses online is nearly as old as the web itself, but as with any innovation, some faculty members have been early adopters while others have watched the development with both interest and skepticism. As publishing and managing content on the web has become easier, and as the delivery of online courses has become increasingly more popular, more faculty members have begun exploring ways to offer their courses online.

There is a common perspective that moving a course online is primarily about designing and sequencing course content. While content is important, we also believe that recent changes on the web - toward a more social and interconnected space - have necessitated the rethinking of what it means to make the transition to online teaching and learning. The unprecedented access to information coupled with the ability by anyone to publish online are disrupting how one teaches and learns, raising questions in the minds of faculty as to whether their own practices should change.

Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl, and I at the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Teaching Excellence where I work have authored a white paper, Building from Content to Community: [Re]Thinking the Transition to Online Teaching and Learning, that is intended to serve as a resource for faculty who are teaching online or are considering making a transition. We hope this paper serves as the starting point for conversation, and invite you to share your ideas by leaving a comment at our CTE blog or here.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The best comment about where this “debate” went horribly wrong wins a prize!

This is my third Faculty Academy (I can’t believe it!) and even in the three short years I have seen a progression and trend in thinking.

I see both professors and students thinking even more critically about the integration and intersection of technology and pedagogy. There is classroom implementation of amazing projects and idea in all disciplines and students are responding in awesome ways; it is making my head spin. There is bold experimentation, failures and successes, creativity and numerous other adjectives that can describe the work Mary Washington faculty, staff, and students are doing. This is a wonderful place to be and I feel incredibly lucky and honored I get to learn from and be a part of such a wonderful community.

It gives me great joy to see professors being so thoughtful and innovative. It gives me even greater joy to see students come to a new understanding of their learning and actually caring about it.

This is just a quick post that will be used as an introduction to my New Media Buffet presentation. Actually this is old, new media, but the Video Toaster/Webcam Max/Ustream.tv was put into service once again this year to stream the events. We also recorded the video so that we can post them online for later viewing. As ever, I want to go back and review these sessions as soon as possible. I’ll update/blog/twitter when we get these videos up.

Bud Deihl and I traveled north a few miles to attend the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2009 in Fredericksburg, VA. It was a chance to reconnect face-to-face with some of my Twitter friends like Martha Burtis (see her reflections on this day here), George Brett and Laura Blankenship.

One of the highlights for me was the lunch debate between the Right Reverend Jim Groom and John St. Clair on “Is the CMS Dead?“ In a lively back and forth, the original Edupunk Jim suggested that the course management system was only good for management, not learning, and as such, SHOULD be dead … but appeared to be more undead (I knew zombies would appear at some point in his talk). John countered that he thought the talk was about CMS - conservative mid-sized sedans - and that he thought most people wanted a sensible automobile and not some do-it-yourself hovercraft!

Both gentlemen gave great passionate arguments to their side. I talked to Jim afterward and asked why the question had to be CMS “or” open systems? In the past two semesters, I have used the Blackboard CMS for the things it does well (document and link management, rosters, grade management), but also used blogging, Jing and wikis for collaborative work with my students. In other words, Blackboard served as a portal and launching point for my students into the open web. This seemed to me to be a case of “AND” rather than “or.”

I enjoyed the lunch debate, but in reality, the whole day was fantastic!

James Boyle gave an invigorating keynote on “Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness.” Having just come off the Board of Directors for Creative Commons, he was uniquely qualified to discuss this issue. He started with a history of the internet and how openness was a bug meant to be fixed later, but the internet grew more rapidly than anticipated and openness spawned many wonderful opportunities and profitable enterprises. It definitely caused problems and concerns, but also amazing positives in the business world, entertainment, government, and education. Yet, Boyle stated that education has yet to deal with its concerns and instead simply is biased against openness. He noted that openness meant not only the ability to copy but also the ability to improve.

Thoroughly enjoyed the talk. Jeff Nugent has recently had us at the CTE discussing licensing our Center organizational web material with a Creative Commons license.

I attended a great panel discussion by UMW faculty on their use of blogging in their classes. It was a chance to see a very diverse mix of blogs associated with writing classes, art classes, science classes and math classes. One of the take-aways was that blogs allowed time for students to reflect on critical issues for which there just was not time in 50-minute classes.

Cole Camplese of Penn State University gave an excellent talk on emerging trends impacting teaching and learning. I loved his observation that we view what our students do as “technology,” but that it is only technology to those of us born before technology. To the students raised in a wired world, it is simply a means of communication and connection. I was blown away by the fact he listed that 40% of students at Penn State no longer bring a TV to campus. They get their “TV” and entertainment straight off the web. He noted that our universities are still designed as if our students are going to receive our wisdom and reflect it back to us, when in reality, through their own content and knowledge creation, our students act more as amplifiers than reflectors. At Penn State, they have cast blogs as a form of digital publishing and are exploring ways for students to keep their own digital content. If blogs are viewed as personal content management systems, then digital expression is seen as a form of scholarship that must be systematically supported.

I was also impressed that a third of PSU faculty reported using YouTube instructionally.

The last session of the day was a workshop run by Laura Blankenship on “Creating a Personal Learning Network for Yourself and Your Students.” We will be discussing the same topic at our upcoming Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute in June, so I was interested in seeing how Laura presented this concept. She did a great job by first focusing on problems that needed solving, and then brainstorming from the group web applications that could be used to solve these problems. In the course of the discussion, we discussed RSS feeds, Google Reader, delicious, Jott, and a host of other tools.

One last side thought - Twitter was very active among participants, and the hashtag #umwfa09 made note-taking unnecessary. However, Twitter had scheduled maintenance today which hit right at the end of Cole’s talk, and it was momentarily frustrating to lose it mid-conference (so much so that I complained about it in Facebook!!!)

Great day - looking forward to Day Two tomorrow!

Indeed, it didn’t feel great to read and then report about some of the negative stuff, but if I was going to show them that their voice mattered, and that I would indeed respond to what the majority wanted to have happen, then I had to share that info back with them. I pulled together common threads and strands, and then I asked them if that seemed like an adequate assessment of how they felt. Lots of head nods. And then (as shown in the last post) we re-tooled, we planned a new line of attack, and we turbo-ed back into the course.

But the assessment them was not over yet. Simultaneous with their informal assessments of me, I had prepared informal assessments of each of them and handed them out as they handed me their evaluations of me.

Here was the format I used…

My thoughts on your participation in class conversations:

My thoughts about your participation on the blog:

General comments:

Ball park estimate of what your grade would be right now based on all of the above:

I felt weird about the “grade” part, but I wanted to accomplish two things… acknowledge that they were doing work in a variety of areas for this class… and that there were strengths and weaknesses in all of them (just as they had shown me about my work in the class).

I also wanted to give them a benchmark, a starting point, to see what my grading scale kinda sorta looked like. I come from the school of thought where a C is average and a B-is above average…a sentiment that is NOT shared by my students…insert horrified looks here)

As we will later see, the grade I suggested mattered little, but the assessment and the suggestions I made on their work in their class, for some of them, was like a wake-up call. It demonstrated rather convincingly that I may not be interjecting myself on their blogs (I almost never did) but I was reading (as many of their readers also were) and I was observing… and I was also there to prod, cajol, push, nudge, remind, and celebrate them along the way, both in class, but also in our once a week 15 minute meetings in my office.

The semester is halfway over. And the best is yet to come.

Up next: final projects, setting goals, and the tasks ad the timelines to meet them

This past week, our dear friend and colleague Pete Smith from UT-Arlington invited Barbara and me to take part in his university’s Digital Institute. For two days we caused trouble, asked as many questions as we answered, and had many wonderful discussions with a range of folks, from faculty to campus IT. One of those discussions we recorded and now present to you as Language Lab Unleashed #24:

Download audio file (LanguageLabUnleashed24.mp3)

[02:30] What should language learning and culture learning look like in 2009 and beyond?
[09:45] Promoting Authentic Cultural Understanding
[17:25] Lots and Lots of Work: Digital Literacy
[29:20] Generational Difference, Discomfort, Revolution, and Complexity
[38:20] Informational Technology vs. Educational Technology
[41:35] Tenure and Technology Use by Faculty
[44:15] Linear Learning, Lederhosen, and Creating More Informed Thinkers and Scholars
[54:00] Living with Assessment: Barbara’s 12-Step Approach
[57:20] Formal vs. Informal Standards, Voice, and Register
[72:15] A-ha Moments, and Preparing Students to be Promoted

Thanks again to the wonderful folks at UT-Arlington for participating, and to Pete Smith and his team for being such gracious hosts to a pair of troublemakers!

For their final assignment, we asked our graduate class that Jon Becker and I taught on Educational Technology and School Leadership to reflect on their 15-week journey. Their reflections are captured in the Wordle above. We had twenty-five K-12 teachers who immersed themselves in the Web 2.0 stream for a semester and examined applications to their teaching and to school leadership. The reflections indicated that they thoroughly enjoyed the journey.

The Wordle points out some obvious observations - everyone focused on technology and their students. Many discussed the immediate application of web tools to their teaching in their own classrooms.

I was struck, however, by some of the personal observations that did not emerge in this Wordle. One student noted that she had just been selected as Teacher of the Year for her school, which she attributed to her engagement in our class and her excited reapplication of her learning from our class into her own school. Another student stated that she had originally wanted to move out of the classroom and into administration because she felt burned out in the classroom. Our class had so re-energized her that she now saw that she could have a greater impact on children and learning by remaining in the classroom and helping her digital kids grow. Several students used the same term in their individual reflections - “life-altering”.

While I am both proud and humbled by the impact this course had on many of our students, I suspect much of the impact was similar to the impact I saw in myself this past year. The more I network and connect, the more it impacts me on a personal level. Our students began to see this too. Many reflected that “professional development” had taken on personal aspects that they had never considered before. It was a paradigm shift to move from professional development as something you attend to professional development as something for which you take personal responsibility.

This provides interesting context as we get ready for our week-long institute with seventeen faculty on teaching and learning with technology. Trent Batson lamented yesterday that “life on campus goes on as normal. Faculty members are still expected to publish in traditional journals, still expected to meet their classes in rooms equipped with chalkboards and designed for lectures, and still expected by their students to tell them what they should know so they can write it on paper during a test.” Our hope in the institute is to break that cycle - help faculty see - at a personal level - the impact that the web now has on teaching and learning. Jeff Nugent suggested one way to prepare for this week was for each of us facilitating it to return and update our own notion of our personal learning network. So here is what I came up with:

(Link to full size image)

My PLE contains traditional methods of information gathering like journals, listservs, and even morning coffee sessions. But I am also mindful of and tapped in to numerous web applications, where I hear the conversations taking place worldwide on topics of interest to me. Some of those conversations pop up in Delicious, some through my Google Reader, many from Twitter or Facebook. When I go seeking information, I tend to look in Delicious or Wikipedia, but I also still Google things, though I am increasingly looking to Twiiter as a search engine.

While I tried to collate items in neat areas of “collect, communicate, collaborate, and create/share,” the truth is that the interconnections are numerous and blurry. Twitter is all of the above. Our class wiki was all of the above. Delicious many times is all of the above.

The key for me is that the web now weaves itself into all aspects of my work life at a deeply personal level. In keeping with the interactive nature of the web, it is no longer enough to passively receive information. Personal learning includes actively connecting and communicating with my network across multiple paths.

It seems that the “buzz” about PLEs and PLNs has died down recently, yet I found it illuminating personally to relook at my own concept of my own learning environment and network. I suspect that it will continue to evolve. What do you think? What resonates with you? What seems off base?

I would be interested in your thoughts.

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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.

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}

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.

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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.

Caveat: Much here is based on first impressions -- I hope people will point out where I am going astray.

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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}

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.

HISP 205 students outline their goals, and how they plan to achieve them

[ I apologize: this post has been sitting, completed, in the draft box for far too long...I really don't know why it did not get to see the light of day until right now. Well, actually I do...it's been a busy semester, and around the time this post was meant to appear I was invited to China... and I am not referring to China, Maine...anyway, a wild semester. More to follow, and soon.]

March 6, 2009: We are into week 4 now in HISP 205, and things are beginning to settle into a bit of a cadence now. The class runs on two tracks: the in-class part where we decide upon topics (usually country based, and usually focusing on the countries they have visited or want to visit). We read articles, we see movies we share fotos. Everybody talks, or at least we try to get to that place where everybody talks.

The out-of-class part is where they plan their final project…which, as one student explained to me today isn’t a final but a forever project. Each student establishes a series of 3 personal linguistic goals that s/he wants to accomplish during this semester (one by the end of March, the next by the end of April, the final one might never be accomplished but goals 1 and 2 have helped to set the stage so work can be continued …after the class is over, outside of the classroom, and out there in the real world where this language lives and breathes).

Their final exam with me will have two parts:

A one page essay in Spanish that:
• reviews the goals accomplished,
• explains how we know the goals were met, and
• gives the grade that the student wishes to receive and an explanation as to WHY it should be given based on the work done

A 30 minute oral defense/conversation (in Spanish) that:
• will give an overview of the project
• will defend the grade chosen with concrete examples

There have been some looks of stunned wonderment to be sure. What? you don’t want me to synthesize all of Guatemalan History in a 3-5 page paper? You dont want a thesis statement or a bibliograph ? Huh? I get to chose my own goals in this class, determine how I will get to them and then how I know I have met them? What? I get to determine my own grade and then defend it? Huh?

It might seem like I am giving in, giving away all of the teacher-centric power, acquiescing to the students wants and needs. Indeed, i am putting their learning in their hands. I am asking them what they want to accomplish and how they want to get there. I am offering them my support, my encouragement and a swift kick in the rear if they fall behind. This is a different, and more necessary even, kind of teaching : teaching them that defining realistic goals is hard work and figuring out how to measure whether you realized them is even harder. I am asking them to be accountable for what they learn and how they are learning it. I am asking them to blog about their experiences so others can share in the successes and or your set backs…

In my mind…this is much more language learning (and even meta-learning) than any skit, recording, test, m/c test, video project, 7-10 page paper could ever provide.

So the out-of-class part is underway. The in-class part is still a but rough. Students still expect ME to kick them into gear when they are not speaking, no matter how often I tell them that no, this is your job and your responsibility to yourself as well as the others in the classroom. I feel as if we are getting there…but it’s slow.

If you are interested in seeing what I presented to them as a rubric, an outline, for the final project …I have attached a copy below. Please feel free to download and review it here. Give me feedback. If you do use it, let me know how it went and what I could do (what we could do) to make it an even better experience for all of our students the next time around.

elproyectofinal205_091

I welcome your comments.

It has been an interesting week for me in Facebook. I have reconnected with several colleagues that I had lost touch with in the past few years. Facebook to me is great for connecting with family and friends, but as with any social networking application, a host of questions arise concerning possible uses for instruction. And so far, I have not used it for instruction.

In the past week, Jeff Nugent had a conversation with VCU faculty members Mike Abelson, Melissa Johnson and Stephanie Rizzi who shared their experiences with using Facebook and offered their perspectives on the pros and cons of “friending” students. Their podcast is here. I listened to this podcast while at the gym, and I found myself arguing with them mentally. (I have not yet reached the point where I begin talking to myself while wearing an iPod!)

My colleagues here were nervous about responding to “friend” requests from their students. They seemed to agree that it would be inappropriate for them to friend any of their students. That got me thinking about my use of Facebook and my own students.

For me, my context is different. My podcasting colleagues here at VCU teach college freshmen - I teach graduate students who are also teachers. As such, I already consider my current students as my colleagues. So I would not be adverse to my students friending me, though I do not actively seek them out. Part of my reasoning for not actively seeking them out is that Facebook for me is a social connection, not a professional connection. My friends right now consists of three groups - family, colleagues, and former students. And by former students, I mean students I had 15 years ago at the University of Nebraska. My colleagues span VCU, Gwinnett Tech, and Herkimer County Community College. I use other social avenues professionally, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and the blogs I follow in Google Reader.

I think that one reason people are nervous about Facebook is the negative press it has gotten lately. The Chronicle had a recent article on How Not To Lose Face on Facebook. It noted:

“For years college administrators have warned students to watch their step in online social realms, noting that sharing too much could hurt them later on if future employees saw their drunken party pictures or boorish writings. Now that professors and administrators are catching Facebook fever, they should heed their own advice.”

Good advice, but it underscores that many faculty (and students) do not understand the various settings they can control in Facebook to selectively release their posts to specific friends. Nick O’Neill had a nice explanation in his post “10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.”

But as I thought about Facebook and privacy, I wonder if we are asking the right questions. The whole issue of one’s digital footprint is raising vexing questions. Is anything truly “private” anymore? Maybe I am a little paranoid, but I was blown away by Pattie Maes‘ TED Talk demonstration of wearable technology.

Pretty cool, huh? Yet think about this from the ubiquitous web perspective. If Pattie’s vision becomes the norm, everyone will be walking around wearing a device that constantly scans the environment and through facial recognition potentially pulls up information on every person you meet. Being worried about your cheerleader picture in Facebook might be the least of your worries. “Privacy” will take on new and interesting meanings.

I am still wrestling with whether it would be good or bad to walk in on the first day of class, meet a student, and instantly know that student’s GPA and Facebook profile. As my good friend Kathryn Murphy-Judy noted to me today as we discussed this, would a sound-bite be meaningful if you did not know that underneath a bad GPA was the death of parents or the ending of a relationship. It takes time to build a relationship with people, and would this ubiquitous web presence speed that up or derail it on occasion? I do not know. The only thing I do know is that the world is changing and ignoring that change is not an option.

I would be interested in your thoughts? Do you use Facebook for instruction? Do you friend your students? Do you have conversations with your students and colleagues about their digital footprint? Should we? - is that part of our role as faculty?

What ever else, we certainly live in interesting times!

I probably read too much into this, but it suggests that people are not interested in the conversation about “why” one should or should not blog, they just want to know “how” to do it. And one reason I read too much in to it is that whether we are talking 4 or 12, few faculty in general even consider blogging as part of their professional life.

The issue may not even be blogging per se, but rather “workshops” as a verb. Few faculty in general see a need to change how they do what they do. While workshops remain a necessity to efficiently provide training, those who read this probably have shifted much of their professional development to the social media landscape (as I have). But the majority of faculty do not use social media for their PLE, and if they see no need to change, they probably view workshops as something they do not need.

This was on my mind when I opened the April edition of Tom Peters Times newsletter, which arrived today in my email and contained several interesting articles on customer experience. It linked to the following video of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant rapping his mandatory pre-flight safety announcement.

You have to admit that this person delivered his message in a new and compelling way!

I am not suggesting that I begin singing my workshops…that would definitely drive down participation. But I do think we in faculty development need to [re]examine our approaches in light of social media. Taking a cue from the marketing types, networks like Twitter, Yammer, and Facebook could all be used to announce and draw in participants. But more importantly, I need to look at the total delivery. Would a “conversation” about blogging with faculty here be enhanced if bloggers from around the world joined the conversation by live streaming? Why do I look at workshop format as locked in stone? As the flight attendant noted, maybe I need to shake things up a bit!

And if the “customer experience” was enhanced, would word of mouth spread that news around campus, growing demand?

Be interested in your thoughts.

{Stone Carving from Flaming Text}

Do a search for “download youtube videos” and the results you get will offer up countless websites with instructions, services, tools, and videos dedicated to the subject. You would think that it was popular to download videos from the YouTube site, and you would be right. I’ve written numerous times on the subject of YouTube, outlining the benefits, but mostly I point out what a valuable resource the site is. Want to find a clip from a popular movie? Consult YouTube. Want to view that obscure music video from the 80’s? Consult YouTube. Want to watch your state’s governor deliver the latest information that will affect you? Consult YouTube.

Over the past year and a half I have written a few times on how to take YouTube videos and incorporate them into PowerPoint presentations (here, here, and here). Two of those methods involve downloading the videos and converting them to video formats that PowerPoint will recognize. One of them involves using the YouTube video live in the presentation. I received a comment on my post on Embedding YouTube in PowerPoint 2007 from “John” that was just a republishing of a section of YouTube’s Terms of Service:

5. Your Use of Content on the Site

In addition to the general restrictions above, the following restrictions and conditions apply specifically to your use of content on the YouTube Website.

1. The content on the YouTube Website, except all User Submissions (as defined below), including without limitation, the text, software, scripts, graphics, photos, sounds, music, videos, interactive features and the like (”Content”) and the trademarks, service marks and logos contained therein (”Marks”), are owned by or licensed to YouTube, subject to copyright and other intellectual property rights under the law. Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only and may not be downloaded, copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners. YouTube reserves all rights not expressly granted in and to the Website and the Content.
2. You may access User Submissions for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the YouTube Website. You shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission.

I don’t know whether anonymous John was trying to be helpful, or snotty, but there are several points I want to make about YouTube downloads. First, EVERY TIME you watch a video at YouTube’s site, or even embedded on another site, you are downloading it to your computer! You have no choice. You are not streaming it, you are using a technology known as Progressive download. Here’s proof (screencast “YouTube Video and Progressive Download“) Now if I download a video, then republish it in a PowerPoint video, then OK, you got me. However, if I’m sharing that presentation with students for their further enlightenment, then I have the start of an argument for Fair Use. Then depending on what content it is and how much, I hope to make my argument stronger. John posted his comment on the post that described the ability to embed a live video into PowerPoint, so if there is no live Internet connection, no video appears in the presentation. It is no different than embedding a video on another web page. It makes for a more seamless way of doing a presentation with web video, as opposed to switching out of Powerpoint and opening a web browser, then switching back to PowerPoint and continuing the presentation. Sorry John, the Terms of Service don’t apply here, or at best, it’s extremely muddy.

Which gets me to my next point. YouTube needs to rethink their download terms. Let me reiterate that the technology that YouTube uses to show videos breaks their own Terms of Service. They have begun to allow certain organizations the ability to offer “official” downloads and provide a download button. In an article from February, YouTube announced that they were exploring ways to offer videos offline. They were testing “testing free downloads of YouTube videos from Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV“. An example is “The Role of Creativity at Stanford“, a video from Stanford University that has a button to allow you to download an MPEG4 version of the video. YouTube is even experimenting with Creative Commons licenses, but I can’t see yet where an average YouTube member can implement these licenses. It is only open to approved partners, and the partners program isn’t a program you gain instant access to. YouTube is moving way too slowly for the average producer, and seem to bend over backwards to appease media companies with their shoot first, ask questions later take-down policy.

YouTube needs to catch up with Flickr in offering a streamlined way of licensing through Creative Commons. Instead, I see the monitization train coming on full speed ahead. Here’s an example of one of those partners participating in a test of revenue generation by offering downloads of their video, for $0.99. Copyright infringement is still rampant on YouTube, but I argue that it is good for the most part. If people are watching all ten parts of The Wedding Singer on YouTube, then more power to them. If they are using a program to download the videos and stitch them together again and burn them to DVD, then hire them as a New Media Specialist. Either way they are never going to make a good customer for purchasing the original DVD anyway. Now there are legitimate reasons to take down videos from sources that are already putting their content out on the web for free such as Comedy Central. They want the advertising revenue for their site, that makes sense, but come up with new models for other types of content. A good start is a link to the iTunes store for those obscure 80’s music videos.

Now I’m not saying that YouTube is doomed to fail (they’re obviously wildly sucessful), but they need to take a more balanced approach. YouTube is doing some good things with their YouTube EDU and non-profit sections. Now it’s time to make it easier to get the content out into the hands of the people who can make a difference, change things for the better, and do what the pioneers in this industry did in the first place - build on other people’s work. A little download help, please?!?

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“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:

Laura Blankenship

danah boyd

Martha Burtis

Kim Cofino

Vicki Davis

Gabriela Grosseck

Jane Hart

Gayla Keesee

Jennifer Jones

Michele Martin

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

Sarah Robbins

Barbara Sawhill

Elaine Talbert

Sue Waters

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.

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.

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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}

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.

Had a great first day at the League for Innovation’s 2009 conference. While I work at a wonderful four-year research university, my doctoral dissertation and first ten years in higher education revolved around two-year colleges. So it was refreshing to once again rub elbows with the dedicated faculty and administrators who handle a significant segment of higher education.

Sixteen faculty attended my morning workshop on engaging students through free web tools, which I blogged about yesterday. It was a fast three hours that I thoroughly enjoyed. This group was simultaneously blown away and energized by both the opportunities for learning afforded by these tools, and by the enthusiasm evident as they brainstormed uses for these tools. In a short three hours, I touched on:

• Pandora
• Delicious
• Wayfarer
• Wordle
• Google Reader
• Netvibes
• Blogs
• Slideshare
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Yammer
• Facebook
• Google Docs
• WetPaint
• Wikispaces
• Garage Band
• Audacity
• Jing
• Jott
• Zoho Polls
• PollDaddy

Whew! Seems like a lot of tools, but what we focused on was the practices these tools offered. What was gratifying was the comments by several at the end of the day on how helpful this session was to them personally. Making a difference one faculty at a time!

After a breather, I attended two forums in the afternoon as well as the opening keynote.

Thelma Bushong and Elaine Karls of Delta College (home of my old mentor Jim Steele) did a presentation called “Everyone Grows: Organizational and Professional Development for All Employees.” There premise (and one I agree with) is that it takes engaged faculty and an engaged support staff to develop engaged students. A key question that they asked is how does a college invest in significant learning experiences that result in engagement, empowerment, and leadership development for faculty? Part of their answer is to open leadership and learning opportunities to staff as well as faculty. They have taken the concept of faculty learning communities and expanded it outside faculty to a holistic approach to college leadership and empowerment.

The second session I attended was by Michael Coste, Angelica McMillan and Brandon Berman from Front Range Community College entitled “Personalize Your Class with YouTube.” This was an engaging and exciting session focused on, as they stated, getting the human that is in each of us into classes. They demonstrated how, with the use of inexpensive Flip cameras and free software, they developed some rather sophisticated YouTube videos for:

• Introductions to Classes (Get to know the professor)
• Checking in (quick updates on general status of how class is going)
• Lesson Reviews
• Mini-lessons
• Group critiques (students commenting on each others YouTube presentations)
• Speeches ( faculty commenting on public speaking by students via YouTube)

A good example of one of their videos is here.

The keynote speaker to open Innovations 2009 was Gail Mellow, President of LaGuardia Community College in NYC. She is co-author of the 2008 book Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College. She gave a dynamite speech to the 1500 attendees at this conference. She detailed the different standards American higher education places on two year colleges, noting that there were real differences between institutions that screen out and select their students versus institutions that welcome in students. While noting that community colleges enroll roughly half of the higher ed population, they only receive about twenty percent of the funding. The students are typically much further behind four-year students in terms of entering SAT scores. Two-year and four-year institutions are typically assessed based on IPEDS data, yet that data is only collected for first-year full time students, which make up only 14% of community college students. Yet, given the inequities in funding and assessment, community colleges are surprisingly successful at impacting the percentage of higher education students who complete a four-year degree. She illustrated that if four-year institutions factored out their feeder institutions and reverse-transfer students, many four-year institions would be in trouble. She saw community colleges as integral partners in President Obama’s call that all Americans complete some course work above high school as a means of rebuilding our economy. It was an empassioned keynote that seemed to energize the crowd.

Looking forward to Day Two tomorrow!

After two 3+ hour flights and one flight delay, I have crossed the country to attend Innovations 2009 in Reno NV. Innovations is an annual conference of the League for Innovation in Community Colleges, and this is my fifth or sixth. While I am no longer associated with two-year colleges, I still stay in touch through both the League and the Chair Academy.

About two months ago, Barry Dahl asked if I could step in and take over a pre-conference workshop called “Engaging Students with Free Web Tools” that he had originally submitted. It seemed the missus had obtained some surprise cruise ship tickets without checking dates with her husband. I was only too glad to do so, and have enjoyed putting together the workshop with my own spin on it.

Barry had previously done a similar workshop and used his blog to post his resources. I liked the idea, but I wanted to model the practice of open collaboration. So I went with a Wet Paint wiki for my resources. I am opening it up to anyone to join and improve.

I will be spending three hours with this group…and on the off-chance that the hotel internet is snarky, I created a lot of powerpoint slides to back up my presentation. I am posting parts one and two below. I am trying to be true to Presentation Zen…but I have a long way to go!

Looking forward to tomorrow and the conference! If the wiki is useful to you and your personal learning network, feel free to use it or share it. It is under Creative Commons Sharealike licensing.

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In short, a few bad eggs in classes that surf their eBay bids or FaceBook page during class are causing many faculty to ponder whether they should ban laptops from classes. The University of Chicago Law School, for example, recently removed Internet access in classrooms because of concerns about students surfing the Web during class.

I happen to be taking some Instructional Technology and Educational Psychology classes, and in large part, the Instructional Technology courses are awash in technology…if someone saw something they wanted to share in class but couldn’t remember the details or name, etc., we are usually all online looking the information up. We surf to find opposing views to those offered in class, and quite often perspectives and facts that would have otherwise been left out find place in class discourse due to the instant access to the Internet.On a personal level, my laptop is a trusted note taking tool, in addition to the points made above.

A professor I had last semester had a bad experience with her undergraduates and laptops, banned them, and noticed a dramatic change in her classes. She then decided that she would do the same thing with her Educational Psychology graduate course on CMC, (a course full of 30 and 40-somethings), due to seeing someone in class doing e-mail next to her and her being distracted by the typing sound. Needless to say, I was very upset. I simply cannot keep up when trying to write by hand, and the Internet access allows me to better challenge points raised in class that need challenging. I think I understood her position, but I didn’t agree with the policy.

When I put on my teacher cap, I can understand the urge for faculty to ban everything they can’t control, including the technology of the time. We’ve all heard the stories of the ballpoint pen being banned by faculty in the late 1940’s in favor of the fountain pen and the calculator in the 1950’s in favor of the slide rule. Faculty do have legitimate authority to control the classroom environment, and to eject students from class for anything they choose, including staring at a laptop screen instead of the professor, I guess.

Of course, the first things that come to my mind go something like this: How good of a teacher can you be if your students would rather surf Facebook than pay attention to what’s going on in your class? Why aren’t you looking for ways to have your students use those laptops for legitimate classroom purposes?

We have all ostensibly made the jump from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side”, but I wonder, because some faculty seem to lack the impulse control to stay away from the notion that they are the sage/gatekeeper/dispenser of the wonders of the discipline, and this urge to ban technology from classes is a glaring example of that. If you don’t merit your students’ interest, you certainly won’t get it by banning their laptops.

That brain-dump having been executed, I truly want to see how all of you feel about this, especially those who favor a ban, because I truly want to understand what I apparently don’t now.

I’m begging for your comments!

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Something got in my way of writing this on February 22, 2009. It’s name was Bluehost. Now I don’t really hold a whole lot against Bluehost. I know they are trying to provide a good service, just like many other web hosting companies. No, this is not about what got in the way of that post. It wasn’t ready 11 days ago. Now it is.

Every once in a while an event reinforces what you’ve been feeling for days, weeks, months, or even years. I don’t want to be flippant with this or melodramatic, but I feel like finally someone has recognized the truth and stated it so eloquently (Jon Stewart would humbly disagree). However, it requires an effort. Approximately 21 minutes of your time. Watch this episode of The Daily Show.

Alright, I realize that you probably didn’t just watch this video just because I said so. You might watch it later. You might start to watch it and feel like you should be working instead. You might even watch and say “what’s the big deal”. Hell, you may decide not to watch it at all. Do me a favor and watch at least the first 3 minutes to see where Stewart is going with the show. Then go about your business if you want.

So why should you watch it? Here’s the background. Stewart’s guest was supposed to be Rick Santelli from CNBC. Yeah, the same Santelli I called a “horse’s ass” (twice) in my Feb. 22 post. I felt it was justified because of comments he made about “loser” mortgage holders and bailing them out. “Populist” sentiment that at least got the right-wing riled up. Anyway, Santelli cancelled the Daily Show gig, for reasons that were never made clear. Instead, Joe Nocera, a financial analyst from the New York Times, thankfully took Santelli’s place.

What we get then, is a most glorious send up of the analysis of Santelli and his other colleagues at CNBC. We begin with the comparison of Santelli to Howard Beale, the character in the movie Network who is featured in the video at the top of this post. That’s followed by the predictions of some of CNBC’s most “gifted” analysts such as Jim Kramer. Predictions, as it turns out were laughably (in a sick, pit of your stomach sort of way) wrong. Next, we see a parade of greedy corporate leaders being interviewed with kid gloves. The very people directly responsible for making some of the most disastrous financial decisions this country has ever seen. They get asked questions like, “how much fun were you having at that lavish corporate party?” Analyst after analyst, pontificator after pontificator, gets the financial picture so wrong. Contrast that with the people who Santelli and others believe are the real villains in this economic crisis. The “loser” homeowners, who have the chutzpah of wanting to get ahead, and after being told that they could afford the home, their value only going up, they were the ones who crashed the party. Yes, let’s equivocate the homeowners with the Sir Allen Stanford’s of the world. Stewart says it for us all when he says, “Fuck You!”

In the next segment of the show, Stewart offers his public service message of providing a revolutionary way of telling how well the president is doing - The stock market. Despite his public approval ratings of 60%, the analysts from Fox News say he’s doing terribly, because the stock market knows all. In the final segment, Stewart’s guest Joe Nocera is praised for his article about AIG and its, oh what’s the word? Ah got it - SCAM. AIG’s belief was it wasn’t their fault, they were just serving their customers. Stewart’s analogy of the failing financial industries as a character in a Bruce Willis movie with a bomb around their chest about to push the detonator, is about as dead on as it gets. I guess we don’t have much choice but to negotiate.

So this will now give you a clue as to why I think Rick Santelli and his ilk qualify for the term horse’s ass. Or worse. However, I remain optimistic. That is if we stop listening to the assholes. At a minimum this country has switched from one where our leaders told us what to be afraid of (apparently it wasn’t terrorism, but the economy we were supposed to fear), to one in which our leaders are telling us how we can fix things. We’ve gone from “there’s nothing wrong with the economy” to “there’s something deeply wrong, but I believe we can fix it, if we pull together.” So I’m not going to take their crap any more. I’m behind President Obama (and Jon Stewart). It would be unpatriotic to root for the president and the country to fail. Right?

Cost is the issue. No research to my knowledge documents any learning benefit according to empirical analysis–in this case, raising hands as opposed to clicking keypads in those hands.

Here’s my point:

Unless we stop underwriting any benefit, especially without the above analysis, technology–which promised to democratize academe–will continue to corporatize it, at the expense of the Humanities, I’m afraid.

There is often debate around whether laptops should be allowed in the classroom. While I am no expert, I can share my experience with laptops in the classroom.

So, what have I used my laptop for in class? To take notes. To have readings for class handy. Look up an answer to a professors question. To look up answers to related thoughts that pop in my head.

But that isn’t all, is it? I’ve checked my Facebook. Have Twitter open. Google chat open. Check my Google Reader. Worked on work for other classes.

Do I ever get distracted to the point where I miss what is going on in class? Yes, but that is almost always intentional.

If I am staring at the screen intently am I paying attention to what is going on in the class at all? Yes, of course! I could be doing a myriad of things from taking notes to checking my e-mail. I know that professors hate the whole “I can multi-task” argument, but sometimes it is true.

How would I quickly summarize my experience with laptops in the classroom? It has been a process learning how to use it in a classroom setting and what classes necessitate a laptop and which ones just need a pen and paper. I’ve learned how to not get distracted and how to take notes. Most importantly though, I have learned how to use laptops to expand my learning in the classroom and that has been the toughest and most rewarding part.

Most students have not had guidance on how they can utilize their laptops beyond a FB checking device. My unscientific hypothesis is most students see laptops as a way to get out of the classroom while still being physically present, or, as a way to take notes and do other school work. Maybe students don’t realize the potential they have right at their fingertips because no one has given them the inspiration to see it any other way.

This product is processed on equipment that also processes other students, millenials, and tree nuts.

I think the default reliance on disciplinary justifications for continued support are just as dead. Many humanistic disciplines have long privileged tautological arguments about the value of research and teaching: what they do is important because the discipline deems it important. A good project is a project which advances the work of the discipline. In particular, if you concede some new resource limitations or imperatives, I think the humanities mostly have to give up the disciplinary proposition that what we do is primarily discovery, that we research subjects and information which are unknown and turn them into knowledge.

That we think of even vital signs in this hierarchical way suggests to me the degree to which we are willing to judge, rank and hierarchize based on simplistic measurements and perceptions of bodies that are constructed in complicated and multi-functional and multi-contextual ways strikes me as, at the very least, symptomatic of a cultural conditioning to view the material body as a legible marker of subjectivity, and on a more sinister level, a somewhat more conspicuous and perhaps even vaguely conscious effort on the part of the medical community (and even more, of the medical tchnology and pharmaceutical industries) to transform physical flesh into a value marker, with ideological, moral, and capital value.

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