Howard Rheingold’s Vlog

more about "Howard Rheingold’s Vlog", posted with vodpod

I think you will find this discussion of 21st Century Literacies very interesting–they might not be what you think they are. Note the section on attention and think about how you feel when your students are seemingly distracted by the technologies at hand. Now imagine what your online students might be doing as you are teaching an online course. How will you deal with the issue of attention in that situation?

Filed under: cognition, collaboration, computers, digital literacy, learning, learning styles, literacy, technology

eportfolio tools

Creating eportfolios as a course project is a good way to engage students in their coursework, if you present the eportfolio as an exercise in digital storytelling–specifically the story of their work and progress. If your institution has a campus-wide deployment of an eportfolio system, such as Epsilen or the Carnegie Foundation’s KEEP Toolkit (see comment below about availability), you can draw on common resources with which to introduce and support your students’ work.

There are a variety of free tools on the web, though, with which you and your students can be creative in crafting eportfolios to suit your course situation. Yours might be an essay-driven course, or perhaps yours requires students to create a lot of graphs and data-driven material. Or yours might focus on research and collaboration. Sometimes its easier to find the tools that work best for you than to reconfigure a template-based system.

Helen Barrett is a name you will run across in your research on eportfolios, and she not only provides expertise on the purpose of such work and lots of links to resources, she puts her money where her mouth is and has created a staggering list of eportfolios using all sorts of tools and methods, so that you have good models to view. Here are some of her resources:

Online Portfolio Tools (with links to models): http://electronicportfolios.org/web20portfolios.html

Portfolio and How-To on WordPress: http://hbarrett.wordpress.com/my-portfolio/

• Dr. Barrett’s Portfolio in a blog format with a special tab on how to create a portfolio in a WordPress blog.

Electronic Portfolios.org: http://electronicportfolios.org/

• This is a gateway site to many of her pages. She’s been at this for almost two decades and her examples are well worth visiting

I have used course portfolios in composition courses, in which students select drafts and graded papers, reflect on the process of creating them, and evaluate their own writing process and progress in a course. It is the truth that I find some of their best writing in their reflections and in their presentation of the portfolio. I have not asked students to use online tools for such a project, but look forward to doing it soon. Now that we can take advantage of more methods of telling stories, using audio, video, and photos, I think the results could be very interesting.

How would you use today’s tools to suggest creating an eportfolio?

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, computers, digital literacy, education, grading, innovation, online learning, presentation , eportfolio

new crowd

This blog is about to be teamed. I’ve been working on this blog for almost four years, and now that I’m part of an AEC team, I think it’s time to get social and share the writing with my counterparts (as we like to refer to ourselves) at the West and Metro campuses.

Will it be hard to let go of the controls, so to speak? Yes. I’ll admit to thinking of this blog as my space, and I have put a lot of work into the writing–trying to vary the content, researching topics, creating an appropriate tone of writing that is both informative and playful. And maybe what doesn’t show is all the thinking behind the writing. I have tried to address a real audience of faculty, assuming that I have readers, even if they are not commenting, which brings me to my philosophy of blogging.

I know I’ve said it before on this blog, but blogs are not discussion boards. Yes, there are times on professional blogs when a great thread of comments becomes a valuable discussion, but that is more rare than typical. Blogs are spaces for publishing on the Web; some bloggers write news-length posts, some write long posts that approach short article length, some write actual scholarly articles broken up into a series of posts. My point is that bloggers write for audiences, regardless of whether the audience responds in a comment. In fact, in my case, I hope that my Tri-C audience responds by dropping in the AEC for a f2f discussion.

So what will happen in a team-driven blog? Generally, members agree to a set of goals and approaches that maintain an identity that represents the overall purpose. On the other hand, team blogs create a situation in which team members develop their own identity through their writing styles and their choices of topics. I hope our personalities show through in our posts and that you look forward to that variety.

So, in the spirit of this new move forward, I have moved all my posts to this new blog on WordPress. Nothing against Blogger, where I still keep my Second Life blog, just a fresh start.

–Barbara

Filed under: blogging, collaboration

crowdsourcing, smart mobs, ideagoras: more collaboration or something else?

First a few terms.

crowdsourcing: from Wikipedia, “a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.” Other terms for this act: “community-based design” and “distributed participatory design.” Some also call it spec work because members of the community can bid on doing the job or hope to be chosen for the job, instead of going through normal hiring methods. crowdSPRING is an online company that facilitates crowdsourcing for its members.

smart mobs: From Wikipedia, “A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior. The concept was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.” Such mobs can physically gather just to create a scene, or they might have some social/political motivation, as in Meetups (remember how popular those were a few elections ago?). Are these virtual entities examples of the smart mob/crowdsourcing phenomenon: eBay (business built and powered by users), Second Life (a virtual world built by users), and Wikipedia, itself (an encyclopedia built and maintained by users)?

ideagoras: Depending on the context, a place/space/network/marketplace for ideas. Drawing on the popular concept of crowdsourcing, the focus is on innovation. Take the Innovate-Ideagora, related to the journal Innovate, it describes itself as “an open agora, where problems seek solutions, new visions are explored, and the status quo is challenged.” Or there’s this take on ideagoras in business that sounds a lot like any crowdsourcing article, but the concept in business often leans toward consulting services. I suppose the old think-tank is an instance of an ideagora.

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What’s in it for education?

Here’s an interesting section of the blog Education Innovation on Crowdsourcing. It’s more than one post, so scroll down through all. The first post looks forward to a crowdsourced type of wikipedia of video content that is that is educational and research driven. More likely to happen in the near future are the crowdsourced textbooks envisioned in the second post, and I expect that they would also take advantage of the participatory wiki format. Can you imagine a wikipedia-like site with tones of content on one subject? Let’s say you need course material (no longer called a textbook) for a course in Nursing and there’s a comprehensive and searchable wiki on the topic that allows you to pick and choose where to send students for readings and resources, like videos and images with Creative Commons licenses, links to professional organizations and journal articles. And you might even ask your students to work on editing a page or topic in the wiki as a way to both contribute to the profession and learn more through research.

You could have students experiment with crowdsourcing an idea on Twitter or some other microblogging service and reporting the results. Or introduce a group project using the concept of crowdsourcing to give students a fresh approach to the old group project that so many students dread. Have them create a wiki for the project or use Twitter to discuss it or let them decide what tool to use.

Lastly, as a professional concept, how do you feel about crowdsourcing a solution to a problem in teaching? Have you built a professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter that could respond to your questions? Does your institution or department have a wiki or blog that can serve as an ideagora? Maybe if college committees were called Smart Mobs and allowed to behave like them, they would be more productive and would be more interested in meeting.

I knew there was one good example of using Twitter as a crowdsourcing tool for a library project: http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php/2008/12/05/crowdsourcing_ideas_about_libraries_in_2

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, communication, crowdsourcing, ideagora, innovation, smart mobs, wiki

why Twitter?

It’s been a year since I first posted about Twitter. I was harsh, unkind, suggesting that we were twits, me included. Yet, I gave it a long chance to become part of my daily technology-reading routine, alongside reading RSS blog feeds, online news, email, calendar agenda.

During that time, I thought a lot about whether it could usefully be an educational tool, and I think that it has developed into one, not limited to a prescribed use, but open to your imagination.

Twitter is a tool for microblogging. Micro, because you are limited to 140 characters. Go over and get a warning, meet the 140 exactly and you’ve created a twoosh. Blogging, because you are publishing, and if I must remind you again, a blog is not a discussion board. You publish for your own reasons and replies are gravy. On Twitter, you may get a reply, a re-tweet when someone wants to let more people know what you said, a direct message that is not public, or you may get nothing at all. On occasion, your tweet will create a ruckus and it will spread like a virus, but virality is not something you can control.

I use it personally and professionally by carefully picking people to follow whom I know personally and/or professionally or would like to know. I follow around a hundred and that’s plenty for me, because I like to keep up with what they are saying, and that’s not as hard as it sounds because there are a host of applications and plugins that make it easy to stay connected. I often have both Tweetdeck and Twhirl open, or might go to the Twitter web page, using the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, because it shows pix and videos inline. Another Firefox plugin, Twitterfox, pops up with new Tweets from the browser status bar. You can have Twitter update your Facebook status through a Facebook app, and you can install a Twitter gadget alongside your Gmail.

Professionally, I benefit from hearing about new technology, following links to neat blogs and articles and videos about technology, as well as hearing appeals for answers to complicated technology problems, or news about successes. And along the way, these professional voices become a community I belong to, not one that is all work and no play.

What can you use it for in your classes? Well, I hear that it can work as a classroom response system if all your students are equipped with computers or web-enabled mobiles. You would “collect” the responses on the Twitter web page if you wanted to display it.

Although I’m not a fan of using Twitter to create threads, hash-mark tagging (#your keyword) allows you to see all the comments with the same tag. So, you can create a tag for your group or class and then see them all on the Twitter search page. You might allow students to create what’s referred to as a backchannel in the class, an ongoing Twitter discussion of participants (students)–such use of Twitter is now common at conferences and large meetings, or at national events like the recent election or last night’s Grammy Awards.

I’ve gone way over my 140 character limit. Give it a try, a good long try, and let me know what you think.

Filed under: blogging, collaboration, communication, free stuff, social network

voicethread–create a conversation

After an interesting Second Life session yesterday, I heard about VoiceThread, a free technology that lets you create a conversation around a photo or video or text document. You could create a public conversation or have students use it to create a presentation. Feel free to comment on mine, and notice that even though the tool is called voicethread, you can choose to write a text comment [there is no embed code that works for WordPress, so follow the link]:

http://voicethread.com/share/305552/

Filed under: Web 2.0, collaboration, communication, digital literacy, discussion board, peer review

you must write a blog in this course: here’s why

Yesterday’s Campus Technology article, “Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students,” is a terrific reminder that we cannot just throw technology at students and expect them to accept it blindly or use it intelligently or learn from its use.

Here are Ruth Reynard’s list of mistakes in brief:

1. ineffective contextualization
2. unclear learning outcomes
3. misuse of the environment
4. illusive grading practices
5. inadequate time allocation

I have used both group and individual blog assignments with undergraduate and graduate students. For my purposes, I found the group blogs more effective, but in either case, I made certain to tie the assignment to my course learning outcomes, and I explained in writing how to develop a blog, what I would be looking for, and how the blog would be graded, for example:

Course outcomes that could be achieved through a blog assignment: In a graduate course on information technology for leaders, a few things I wanted students to be able to do by the end of the course were (1) Develop a personal perspective on innovation and the future of information technology, (2) Work collaboratively on a topic related to information technology, and (3) Think critically about and report on issues in scholarly articles related to information technology. As you might see in these desired outcomes, students need to develop a voice on the course general topic, and a published blog is a great place to develop your voice.

Stating clearly what you want from the students and from the assignment: I informed students that  the blogs should “peak readers’ interest in a way that would make them want to comment.” I told them that I wanted “interesting and serious posts on their topic.” Finally, I told them that the “blogs should show that they are becoming well read in the area of their topic.”

Teaching how to blog: Don’t assume that students who have read or created blogs have thought much about the blog as a genre of writing or that their experience has been productive. Teach students how to blog and their learning will be better accomplished.

• I offered examples of group blogs so that students could see how team members might complement each other or how they might write opposing views on a topic without becoming a public fight.
• I suggested that “contributors on group blogs develop their own identity or personality, and that readers might look forward to hearing from one particular member of a group blog if they exhibit diverse opinions.”
• I suggested places where they might look for resources to write about, particularly news items or professional articles related to their topics, and how they could integrate their own voice and opinion into posts that cite resources.

Be clear about how the project will be graded: In addition to a required number of posts, usually 3 per week from the group, however they divided that among members, I would grade the blogs on the following elements:

• Quality and interest of posts.
• Interest to educated general readers.
• Interest of linked articles.

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Reynard makes a point in her articles that I second strongly–blogs are not discussion boards. In a workshop once, a faculty member wondered why I didn’t comment on every post and expect students to do the same with each other’s blogs, because he saw them as a public discussion board. As Reynard notes, one’s blog post is a published statement, and whether or not readers write comments is not really a concern of the blogger. Readers may carry on their own conversations, as desired, but I wouldn’t suggest that the blogger get involved, unless desired. Comments can certainly tell you if your ideas are conveyed as you meant, and you may get good ideas from readers, but the purpose of the blog, as I see it, is to polish your voice and learn to articulate your subject.

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, communication, digital literacy, grading, learning, teaching, technology

yes, yes, of course, the desk!

I’ve mentioned many times in this blog that the traditional classroom technology configuration offers a glorified show and tell for the instructor. Generally, there is a computer and projector, maybe a smart board, a DVD player at the head of the classroom in the instructor’s control. The layout of the classroom is still by and large in the old lecture-format layout: rows of desks facing the instructor. So, now instructors can visit website content in class in addition to showing films; they can open documents for whatever reason, perhaps to mark them up as examples of writing; if they have a document camera, they can show details of objects. Where are the students? Still sitting at desks watching the instructor interact with content, still taking notes or dozing off.

I often try to imagine the classroom of the future, and I see moveable desks and chairs, modular arrangements of computers and projection screens, video conferencing equipment that allows for live communication with distant resources. It’s a flexible and changing vision of a classroom.

The Chronicle reports on an innovation I hadn’t envisioned: smart desks! Yes, of course, interactive desks with interactive screens ready to receive tasks for collaborative work. Great idea in the search for effective learning environments.

Some say the classroom of the future is not a physical space at all, but the concept of anytime, anywhere education writ large–it’s everywhere. I see that as a viable concept, but also don’t think that physical space is going away anytime soon. For a while, I think we will be trying to adapt physical spaces to this new world through trial and error, letting in the new and moving around the desks and changing the content of the classroom experience.

In the meantime, if you are dealing with a teacher-centered arrangement of tools, think about how you can collaborate with students, creating tasks that get them up to the front, alone or in groups, to run the show and tell for a while.

Filed under: Web 2.0, collaboration, innovation, student-centered learning, technology

subway lines and random paths of meaning

Don’t know how long this interactive map of subway ends-of-line images will be up on the NYTimes online, so go see it soon.

I find this to be a perfect example of setting up material–in this case images of what you would find at the ends of subway lines in New York–that does not suggest sequential choices, but allows the user to choose random paths in the content, and allows for revisiting the material as desired. One of my interests is in how users make meaning out of content this way and how they reinforce their interpretations based on the paths they choose. For example, does it make a difference to one’s constructed meaning whether one image is viewed before another, and so on? In another example, does it make a difference in what order one reads about historical events to how one determines larger meanings and attitudes about history?

In what sort of controlled environment could we study such questions?

Filed under: cognition, collaboration, communication, computers, digital literacy, hypertext, student-centered learning, technology

what principles drive your use of technology?

Having been an assistant professor or instructor for many years before moving into instructional technology, I am guided by the same principles that guided my instructional pedagogy in the classroom. Here’s what motivated my technology-enabled teaching projects:

• understanding that my role as guide or facilitator would redirect the center of the class toward students
• wanting to shift the work responsibility and choices of action to students through collaborative design
• appreciating the power of ownership students could achieve in their work
• incorporating moments for reflection and feedback
• getting students out of their comfort zones–which is generally the tired research essay
• providing new tools and situations in which students could apply knowledge
• providing projects that were directed at real audiences of readers or users
• respecting and valuing students’ self-evaluation

This is not a new revelation to me, and perhaps not to you; I just wanted to state it. By pigeon-holing instructional technology off in some corner as an unnecessary bells-and-whistles office, institutions stifle innovative pedagogy.

What I hope you see in this list is that we all have the same goals in education, whether teaching face-to-face or online, whether we use technology in the classroom, or out of the classroom, or not at all.

Filed under: Web 2.0, collaboration, education, pedagogy, student-centered learning

"whose technology is it anyway?"

The last session I attended at the SUNY CIT 2008 conference in May was conducted by three terrifically interesting scholars from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Steven Zucker, Beth Harris, and Eric Feinblatt. [read about my poster presentation on my Second Life blog].

Titled “Whose Technology is it Anyway?” they blew me away with the concept of opening up the source code of our institutions to allow the kinds of collaboration we see in open source software that lets the larger community of software developers, professional and amateur, work to create better tools. The open source movement attempts to harness “the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in” (http://www.opensource.org/).

What would it mean to open the source code of our institutions? Here are a few thoughts on that topic. Pardon the randomness and the thinking out loud:

• first we would have to identify what that concept means in terms of an organization instead of software. I guess we could start with an organizational chart, but those seem to me more like the friendly user interfaces that mask code. What lies beneath the organizational chart?
• what community would we be inviting to join in development? The session moderators suggested students as the primary users of the technology tools we deploy. I agree, but would add faculty who may use a tool for research, in which case, are we also inviting faculty peers in their disciplines, wherever they may be?
• are we inviting chaos and dumbing down a high level of sophistication for a low and common result? That’s the old highbrow/lowbrow argument, as well as the argument against such collaborative enterprises as Wikipedia. Are we inviting the end of expertise in favor of consensus?

I don’t know any of these answers, but I’m fascinated by them, partly because the question of why students need traditional education in a world where so much information and collaboration is just a click away keeps nagging me. So the big question in my mind is “what would students build or modify if they could get their hands on the source code of our institutions?”

Filed under: administration, collaboration, education, open source, peer review