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

more predictions of online class increases

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/10/28/most-college-students-to-take-classes-online-by-2014.aspx

Filed under: education, learning, online learning

technology and a different kind of virus

Mention virus anywhere near a technology professional and the response is likely to be a cringe, followed by a series of questions: “Is your anti-virus software up to date?” “Are you playing safe on the Web?” “You’re not clicking on links in emails, are you?” Recently, though, higher education has been worried about a virus of the biological kind–H1N1.

I’ve overheard (on one listserv) more than a dozen colleges and universities discussing plans of how to keep their semesters going if droves of students are unable to make it to class, or told not to come to class to prevent the spread of swine flu.

One solution, or emergency response has technology coming to the rescue, sort of. No, your computer won’t make you better, but it might allow you to continue to conduct your classes at a distance. Here’s one example of a readiness strategy from the University of Oregon: <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/cmet/fluedtech.html>. They try to cover all the bases, from changing your syllabus, to widening the use of Blackboard, to re-thinking your face-to-face course as a hybrid.

In some cases, faculty will still be able to hold their classes and accommodate only a few students too ill to attend, but there just might be areas of the country that are so hard hit as to seriously affect semester completion. Are we (you) ready for that? Can you imagine how you might change your course organization and delivery to meet what the U of Oregon calls “radical adaptation,” particularly if you get sick? Perhaps the pandemic won’t materialize. After all, we remember the Y2K dud. But maybe we were safe, rather than sorry, because we were prepared. I’d start packing that teaching first-aid kit now.

Filed under: administration, communication, computers, document delivery, education, online learning, teaching, technology

here it is, again

Here’s that new semester, the fall renewal, even though it’s still pretty hot outside. We are all excited about starting up again, before the complexity of courses, grading, student conferences, and committee work start to fill up all those moments we had planned to learn about new innovations in teaching and learning. Some of us have new ideas we’d like to try out in the classroom, whether on ground or online, and hope to keep up our excitement long enough to put the ideas in motion.

Pardon a personal note: I’ve been reading about online teaching, since I’ll be teaching online for the first time, reading about translating face-to-face practices into online experiences, all the while trying to keep three areas in mind–student/content interaction, student/faculty interaction, and student/student interaction. That doesn’t seem like a difficult organizational plan, until you start to fill in the blanks. Assignments and due dates are easy enough, but creating experiences that engage students as they work through those assignments is the hard part. All of a sudden I feel like an orchestra conductor waiting for the sheet music, and discover that I am the composer, too. I know that if I feel overwhelmed, students may have the same reaction, so my first order of business has been to retreat from displaying all the content of the semester at once. In a f2f course, I would never hand out all the assignments on day one, so why would I try to make them all available on our LMS? I’m giving myself permission to slow down and judge how the course is going in the first few weeks, leaving room for adjustment. I’m sure it would be nice to have the whole course and its content created on day one and just turn it on, but for this first time around, I need to test the waters a little. I’ll be busy in the evenings and on weekends.

Here are a few of the things I’ve been reading online:

Instructional Design for Online Learning: http://www.ibritt.com/resources/dc_instructionaldesign.htm

Getting Started Online: http://vfc.project.mnscu.edu/index.asp

Principles of Online Design: http://www.fgcu.edu/onlinedesign/index.html

Instructional Design Handbook: http://www.psuonline.pdx.edu/docs/id_handbook.htm

Guidelines for Teaching an Online Course: http://tltc.findlay.edu/onlinesupport/Guidelines/index.html

Teaching Strategies: Online Teaching: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tsot.php

Send me your favorites to post, whether about online teaching or not.

Filed under: 7 principles, course design, education, learning, online learning, pedagogy, student-centered learning, teaching, technology

persuasive (not gratuitous) technologies

Can you use technology this well to ignite your students? Well, it certainly is inspiring, and it shows that visuals really can illuminate ideas. It is a mashup of technologies, including even PowerPoint, but not gratuitous technologies added just to show that Rosling is hip or clever–the combination is as persuasive as the speaker, and I know that’s how you really want to use technology, too.

Filed under: aesthetics, cognition, communication, education, learning, presentation, teaching, 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

should you remove your talking head?

My, that sounds a little painful, but it might be in your students’ best interest.

There’s been an interesting thread on the NMC (New Media Consortium) listserv (please read this post about our membership in the NMC) about whether a talking head in an online presentation–think Presenter or Connect–is a distraction to students/attendees.

[Removed a video of my own talking head for vanity reasons--bad lighting, etc. I was just musing about the value of my talking head in this post. Next time, I'll have my avatar speak.]

One argument cites this research on the eye movement of online viewers: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/video.html If the article research is true that watching is a passive mode, then we should think hard about whether the presence of the speaker’s talking head creates a passive response instead of an active engagement with the presentation content. Of course, if the presentation is recorded, we have to work hard to make it interactive, but at the least, taking notes during the presentation, even if the slides are being copied, is active.

Anecdotally, I have, myself, been mesmerized by a talking head in a recorded presentation and missed some slide material, having to go back once I shook off the trance.

The counterargument refers to lecturers whose dynamic presence positively influences learning, but are we capturing that kind of presence with only a small talking head in a corner module? One post cites Richard Mayer’s The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2005) as supporting little effect from the small head image. Another post cites and attaches one of Mayer’s articles, “Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning” (Educational Psychologist 38(1): 43-52. © 2003, Erlbaum.), which discusses the possibility of cognitive overload in processing material in multimedia environments.

What do you think about all this as you struggle to create presentations? I’m wondering if we can have the talking head come in at appropriate moments–those moments when we might pause in the material and ask viewers a question to make them stop and think. In a recorded session, this could be during a poll or quiz. Or it could be a moment when you ask viewers to write a short response, one of several, all to be submitted to you after the entire presentation.

I’m not ready to say “off with their heads” yet, but neither do I think we should use them without due consideration of their effect.

Filed under: cognition, communication, education, pedagogy, 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