dominating your CMS

Here’s an article to make you think about whether you are conforming to your Course Management System (CMS) or whether you are making it conform to your pedagogy. Lane suggests that novice Web instructors who learn the basics of their institution’s system before they think about the principles of teaching their course are working backwards and risk forgetting what they know about teaching well. The CMS dominates their course organization and, consequently, their teaching.

As someone who supports faculty use of Blackboard, and who is involved in the ritual training in its features, this article has me thinking. As an online instructor, it has me wondering how to evaluate what I’ve been doing. I think I started with the course and course objectives, and then moved into how it could be expressed within Blackboard, but we’ll see when I get a chance to reflect at the end of the semester.

If you have recently been trained to use Blackboard, do you think it has been dominating your pedagogy?

Lane, Lisa M. “Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching.” First Monday 14.10 (5 October 2009).

Filed under: course design, online learning, pedagogy, teaching, technology

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

clicker report

Remember all the practicing with online polling options and thinking about clickers? Well, here is the report I worked up on the current state of classroom response systems:

View this document on Scribd

Class Response Systems

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Reports Academic Work audience response sy classroom response s

Filed under: software, teaching, technology

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

slide it or write it?

Posting early, because I’ll be in the outdoors tomorrow, inclement weather or not. Count this one for Monday.

I’ve been reading slide:ology, a book about creating great presentations with PowerPoint, instead of the presentations we dread. Created by Nancy Duarte, of Duarte Design, the book has an engaging visual emphasis, and while most of the slide visuals would require a graphic designer, there is an interesting section on organizing elements to indicate the flow of information–with many, many graphic illustrations for just about any organization you can think of: process, hierarchy, flow, data, etc.

The argument is that our listeners are there to hear what we have to say, not to read it on or hear us read it from a slide. I couldn’t agree more, yet, surely there is a difference between an educational lecture and a business speech.

I think we often create PPT slides to replicate what we would write on a board, saving that writing time to discuss the content. We might even have lines of text fly in one by one to simulate how we might have written and stopped to discuss each line. I liked and still like that kind of action in the classroom, because as I’m moving around, writing, pointing to key terms, I serve as a point of reference in the presentation of material, and I think it’s easier to draw in responses from students, maybe because they are not intimidated as by a formally-prepared slide that seems to make pronouncements that students dutifully write down.

How can we recreate that kind of informal, thinking-on-the-fly dynamic of writing on the board in a PPT that is created and edited and beautified long before that moment in the classroom? I’m still looking for that kind of advice.

Filed under: student-centered learning, teaching

there are Pilots and pilots

You’re all familiar with college pilots of technologies that are being considered for campus-wide adoption–those are the pilots with a capital P that seem to drag out over a good portion of a year, all with the best intentions, not necessarily in this order:

• arrange with a company for a pilot
• recruit volunteer faculty to participate
• form a committee
• train faculty
• troubleshoot the technology
• gather feedback from faculty and students
• evaluate the technology
• decide whether or not to commit to the technology

I’m surely leaving something out, but you know the process. Such a process is necessary for contracted technologies that are going to cost a pretty penny to implement.

Then there are the pilots that you might be implementing on your own from a wide choice of free Web 2.0 or Open Source tools. Certainly, it’s not necessary for a college to go through a formal adoption strategy for a free tool–no money changes hands, and what works in your discipline and class might not be the best tool for the next person’s class. We’re missing the point of teaching creatively if we try to stifle creative experimentation with free tools.

That said, Ruth Reynard suggests that you can run your own pilot in your own classroom with these free tools, and that it becomes a good learning experience for your students to be involved in evaluating the effectiveness of the pilot with the small p. In “6 Ways not to become Rote Using Technology,” Reynard suggests using a pattern of implementation similar to the one above, but more tailored to your course:

1. Get your hands dirty;
2. Set up the “pilot” parameters and criteria;
3. Involve the students in your reflective evaluation;
4. Always survey students about the technology specifically;
5. Always identify the connection with learning outcomes; and
6. Modify your use and adjust when needed (remain open to change).

I’m reminded of the EDUCAUSE surveys of students that reveal student preferences for technology that faculty know how to use well, and think this approach strikes a balance between the creative innovator and the expert. Capital P pilots aim for achieving a standard of expertise before implementation and lower-case p pilots engage students in innovation and evaluation of technology and learning. There is good cause for both to be happening.

What Web 2.0 tools have you tried out in your courses and to what success?

Image Author: Luca Cremonini Source: http://www.railsonwave.it/railsonwave/2007/1/2/web-2-0-map Original Source: Markus Angermeier Source: http://kosmar.de/archives/2005/11/11/the-huge-cloud-lens-bubble-map-web20/
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5

Filed under: Web 2.0, free stuff, learning, open source, pedagogy, pilots, teaching, technology

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

read about Labor Day

If you’re not at a picnic this weekend, read up on the history of Labor Day and think about the role of technology in all our work. Watch the 6 videos on the site, too.

Filed under: teaching, technology, work