Point/Counterpoint: Disrespectful and Time-Wasting, or Engaged and Transformative? The Mile-High Twitter Debate

Point/Counterpoint: Disrespectful and Time-Wasting, or Engaged and Transformative? The Mile-High Twitter Debate.

Interesting discussion of Twitter in terms of passion for a new and open tool vs. concern for privacy and firewalls. The debate took place at EDUCAUSE 09: http://www.educause.edu/E09+Hybrid/EDUCAUSE2009FacetoFaceConferen/DisrespectfulandTimeWastingorE/175838

You may need to download Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin to view the video.

Filed under: communication, digital literacy, education , EDUCAUSE, microblogging, twitter

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

twitter experiment makes the rounds

An interesting experiment I heard about on Twitter, of course, from Gardner Campbell at Baylor (http://www.twitter.com/GardnerCampbell). Here’s his blog commentary and a few other responses to the experiment:
“Twitter in the history class, and the ‘uni’ in ‘university’”: http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=840

“The Twitter Experiment: Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas”: http://kesmit3.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-experiment-bringing-twitter-to.html

Comments on the experiment from Monica Rankin: http://www.utdallas.edu/~mrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm

Derek Bruff’s discussion of the project on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=250

Filed under: blogging, communication, digital literacy, education, free stuff, instant messsaging, social network, teaching, technology

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

Do you agree with this list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies? The table shows former rankings of items from 2007 and 2008, providing an interesting view of how some have jumped radically into prominence and others have fallen away. PowerPoint still ranks high at #10–I was surprised by that. Look through the list and notice how many of the tools are free and web-based, even though a number of proprietary software tools, like Adobe Connect, Camtasia Studio, and Photoshop are still indispensible.

Filed under: digital literacy, document delivery, education, free stuff, learning, open source, software, teaching, 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

“Social Media in Film Class”

Twitter Film Festival in Duke Film Studies Class from Jeff Cohen on Vimeo.

Hear about a class project that utilizes Twitter for student commentary on films.

The original post and video is here: http://digitalpapercuts.com/video/social-media-in-film-class/

You can read about the project in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus.

A lot of people, recently, are making fun of Twitter or dismissing it very angrily, but any sort of new tool is apt to meet with derision until we see some innovative uses and are inspired to use it ourselves. Any sort of situation that asks students for commentary and discussion could make use of Twitter. Or have you ever required students to attend college presentations by visiting speakers or campus performances? Why not ask them to Twitter about it as they are hearing/seeing it, instead of asking for a report?

What else can you think of?

Filed under: blogging, communication, digital literacy, education, technology , film, twitter

2009 Horizon Report

Download the 2009 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and let’s talk about it tomorrow.

[Sorry, got sidetracked by office visitors and I'm a day late with my response to the new Horizon Report.] Here are the six topics covered this year:

• mobiles
• cloud computing
• geo-everything
• personal web
• semantic-aware applications
• smart objects

I have some comments about three of them, but feel free to add your own comments about those or any on the list.

1. Mobiles carries over last year’s topic of Mobile Broadband, and I won’t be surprised to see it again until we all have mobile devices that have access to broadband and data plans. I think there are still too many people wearing blinders about our students’ access to both broadband and devices that can access the web. Many students are lucky to have laptops with which they can access our wireless on campus. So, I always take with a grain of salt ways of using cell phones in the classroom that require Web and email connectivity. So many recommended classroom uses are based on the iPhone, possibly the most expensive of the smart phones, without consideration of students’ actual devices, that I am wary of the success of such projects. I do agree, however, that we are moving closer to a time when the mobile device is commonplace and ubiquitous.
2. Geo-Everything: Again, the ability to use geo-location/GPS to tag locations, depends on mobile devices to a great extent, if you are in the field. And the report’s examples do illustrate that field work, particularly in the sciences, makes good use of geo-tagging. I’m grateful that they also include a use in literary studies of mapping out geographical locations in literary works. They use the example of The Travels of Marco Polo, and provide a link to an idea using Google Earth to explore literature. Much like recreating a virtual literary space in Second Life, this kind of visualization is engaging as it inspires students to think creatively in imagining more fully the author’s depictions.
3. Personal Web. This is particularly interesting to me, as I am thoroughly invested in having access to information at my fingertips and publishing my ideas, whether it be here on this blog, in Twitter or Facebook, on my personal Website, or my ePortfolio. The customization of personal Web space through widgets, for example, is a step in creating your own Personal Learning Network (PLN), part of the ability to educate yourself. Combined with tools like Zotero and Delicious that let you aggregate resources in links or bibliographic entries, and that let you have access to the collected resources of others, today’s students participate in their own development in ways we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago. Read a previous post about do-it-yourself sites, like PageFlakes for an example.

What I like about the Horizon Report is that is prods us to look to the future, says it’s okay to wonder about how technology might advance and how educators might use it. I think it can often have us thinking about what’s available now, as well, which is good, because now is where we are.

Filed under: digital literacy, education, innovation, learning, technology

writing, revising, and a record of it

Thanks to Gardner Campbell for recommending this short, but fascinating, video about one Wikipedia page transformation over time: Jon Udell: Heavy metal umlaut (temporary link until the original one becomes available again). The evolution from single sentence to accepted full page is a good example of how what Udell calls “a loose federation of worldwide volunteers” can commit to creating an honest and valid record of cultural history.

Why would this be interesting to you? Well, it would be a great example to students of the value of editing to produce good quality writing (and Campbell echoes this idea). What if your students were assigned, alone or in groups, to work in a wiki to create a report or write a paper that showed all their revising history? It would be a terrific record for students who generally write over existing text when revising in a word-processing program and lose those previous passages. In one sense, the wiki space allows us to return to that world of manuscripts and handwritten notes that have thrilled students of textual studies for decades. More importantly, it would give today’s digital students a deeper connection to their writing processes and make them better writers and thinkers.

I’d love to hear about your experiments with wikis in your courses.

Filed under: digital literacy, learning, peer review, student-centered learning, wiki

technology for whom?

It’s encouraging to hear that the new administration is calling for “an investment in technology” in education, but what are you thinking when you hear that and how do you put it into action? Too often, as faculty, we don’t go far enough in exploring and utilizing new technologies. Too often we learn new technologies to employ in the classroom–f2f or online–but we don’t look into technologies that our students can work in and learn from, whether they are discipline-specific technologies they will use in their professions or technologies that will sharpen their skills and general comfort level with technology.

That’s why you always hear instructional technologists pushing technologies that require collaboration and interaction among students, and why we encourage the use of what we all may think are everyday technologies. Even if you can’t find a technology that pertains to your field of study, you can use ones that will make students into good digital citizens. What are some of the skills all our students need to sharpen?

• Email etiquette and development. Students need to know good practices for communicating by email, since that is the standard for professional communication today. Did you know that the youngest of our students think of email as a tool for old people? That usually translates into poor writing habits, particularly when students start using SMS shorthand in emails–not appropriate. Such components as subject lines, greetings, closings, and signatures can be addressed in your syllabus–if it sounds like an exercise in letter writing, it is.
• Uploading and downloading documents and all that goes with it. Our students need a good understanding of how to handle document exchange. They are wrong if they think it’s only a process needed at school. You can offer a variety of opportunities to work with documents, particularly if you use Blackboard. Use the Assignments feature and the Digital Dropbox to require uploading; use email to require attachments. Educate your students on how to avoid problems when others view their files, from file formats to good filenaming conventions.
• Make sure that your students have had instruction on how to search effectively and how to evaluate information for validity. Here’s a short video explaining that: 

The next time you are adopting a technology, think about whether it helps you or your students. That’s fine if it’s a tool to improve your teaching, but do you also have enough uses of technology to help improve your studetns’ skills?

Filed under: Web 2.0, digital literacy, student-centered learning, teaching, technology

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

internet searching and brain function

This study is making the rounds as evidence that there are new ways of thinking for those experienced on the web:

UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.

I’m not hoping that anytime soon the inexperienced will stop pooh-poohing the web as evidence of a lost attention span, but it’s a start. Change is hard to accept because it’s hard to see as it happens, but I think we are developing new ways of thinking/reading/analyzing information.

Of course, the study was for middle-aged+ users, and the intended results seem to be more about how to keep our minds active and healthy as we age, but the evidence of brain stimulation and improved brain function (or the possibility for it) will surely be studied on a broader range of ages. Interesting stuff for educators.

You can download UCLA’s image of the brains here.

Filed under: digital literacy, online learning

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