whoever owns it, someone expects you to have it

Being responsible for one's website is our responsibility.  Along with a range of useful and gimicky tools, Blackboard has improved the tool that lets instructors back up their courses.  Not only can you export (not taking some parts of student work -- useful for porting a class to the next semester) and archive (taking the whole thing), instructors can fine tune the archiving, deciding which parts of the course to include.  Once you begin the archiving/exporting, Bb-Learn dutifully performs the function in the background and emails a notice when it is done.  The instructor simply returns to the tool's page and downloads the zip archive.  (There's little point in doing the backup and then leaving it only on the Bb site)

Yes, we could rely on IT's help in rebuilding a course.  I don't know the wait time for that sort of trouble ticket.  And I don't want to find out.  I'd much rather rely on my own backup.

When I am teaching a course, I routinely perform a backup every couple days -- at least once a week.  In between, I always download and save all student submissions.  I avoid using the gradebook for anything more than a way to notify students of their running point totals.  The data exists and is manipulated on my PC using Excel.  So worst case -- the system crashes and we revert to a 2 week old backup.  I'd see what was missing in terms of files and upload them from my computer.  And I'd automatically rebuild the gradebook from the Excel files as I do anyway.

Students don't want to hear excuses about how you lost their grades ... and you don't want to face a Learn-meltdown, especially in the last weeks of a course.

I should add that the worst I've heard of (and it was years ago) was that a patch to the system failed and IT had to bring down the system and run the backup from right before the patch was applied.  These days, we often lag behind the Learn patches because IT uses test systems for almost everything.  By the time we see a patch, it has succeeded on the test machines.  That doesn't help when Bb itself has bugs, but most often, it doesn't cause data loss -- just loss of functionality -- which Bb seldom admits to!

In any case, an important part of using Internet tools is making sure they are stable and you can restore student grades if there are problems.  As instructors we can't rely on or blame others if we don't keep backups.

How do you compose?

Our discussion board comments about working from a script for the podcast got me to thinking about how we compose.  What do we need under our feet to begin writing?  and what habits make us efficient?

On one hand, we could think in terms of location and situation.  Several of the 19th C American writers (Hawthorne comes to mind) wrote standing up.  They mounted a desktop on the wall and created a mechanism that allowed it to be adjusted to various angles.  After seeing Hawthorne's in the 70s, I made one and used it for several years, through my BA and MA.  It's now lost to history.  Hemingway used to compose at a Royal typewriter perched on a dresser bookshelf in his bedroom/study.  Perhaps more significant for Hem was that the whole thing was on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba.

A slightly different approach to the writing situation is the writing ambience: quiet or music, coffee, alcohol, or something more illegal.  Many of my students think this approach is very important.  They must have music playing .... until they are forced to write while sitting on the floor in a hallway in Satterfield.

A variation that I indulge in is handwritten, typed or word-processed.  Who insists on typing any more?  Maybe some of us elders, but many of us have been using a computer for 30 years, that typing is probably reserved for envelopes ... if even then.

Sometimes, my choice is a matter of speed: can I type as fast as I can make notes?  Usually.

If we think about the podcast, there is another option that I don't think many of us use -- dictating to the computer.  Of course you could purchase one of the Dragon Naturally Speaking programs (that lie behind the iPhone's transcription tool)  -- but from then until you tell them to stop, you'll be bothered by monthly calls to upgrade to the next minor release at the special price of $99.  I'm not sure about newer Mac OSs, but since Win7, there has been a similar routine in the OS itself.  Activate it, train it (takes a little longer than Dragon) and you can tell the computer what to to and can compose using Word or a notepad.  If you submitted such an essay, it would be equivalent to podcasting without a script -- one time and you're done. But when I've tried dictating, I find that I have a lot of ideas, but the prose is so rough, I wind up polishing and moving things around.

To fudge a bit, sometimes our composing is not writing: it is organizing.  And for that, I usually draw on paper with a pencil or I use a concept mapping tool such as CMap or VUE.  I've laid out several assignments (especially the website) in CMap so I could see what I was doing.

And, finally, as I begin drafting, I often use Scrivener (available for PCs and Macs) so I can break the piece down into several sections, revise those sections and then pull it all together.  Yes, you could do the same thing with Word or a notepad, but sometimes convenience (all in one file -- or so it appears to the writer), safety (keeps versions and can backup/restore any of them), and flexibility (see ideas as cards on a corkboard, as an outline, or as tect) win out.  At under $60 for the Mac and under $40 for the PC (because it is a newer program with fewer features) it is a bargain if you want to think in terms of sections of your work.

Whatever it is, a favorite keyboard, a special room, a special piece of music, or a special program, we do well to honor our fetishes.  What do you want? vs. what do you need?

Owning your own, part 2

It would be useful if the university changed its priorities for classrooms and labs -- but many of us have had the experience of needing one when our equipment is down.  So eliminating all the labs probably is not advisable, but maybe one per academic building?

And what about faculty refreshes ... in which faculty get the use of a PC or Mac from their first day.  (I don't qualify for one, but I do get to share two with four others in my office.)  Should we expect the university to pay for our equipment?  how about mileage for coming to and from campus? or for those who teach at more than one campus?

The issue of owning-one's-own is larger than that.  Cloud-computing has been gaining adherents over the last couple years.  Why buy Office when there is a cloud version?  How buys a program to store and organize images and video when you have [insert favorite photo website]?  Who owns those images stored on the web?  Pause before answering, "Well, I do!"  Maybe not.  Pity the woman in Cleveland who lost all her photos for the last years when her cell provider discontinued its online albums for non-Smartphone users.

And in our case for our classes, the same cautions apply for our course materials.  If you have materials on your CMS, either keep copies on your personal computer, or backup (and download) the materials from the CMS.  Wiki materials? again, figure out a way to back it up.  You can whack a wiki with Adobe's Acrobat -- not the reader, but the full program -- but then you still have to extract the pages.  There used to be a free program called WebWhacker (not the same as the Blue Squirrel program of the same name); and there's HTTracker (I think that's the name).

If you don't have it in your possession, on your own equipment, it isn't safe; and if you don't have your equipment backed up regularly (every week for me), it also isn't safe.  I backup my server on campus once a year, only because it isn't usually critical -- except the wiki I run for my classes, and that I back up weekly.

More than once (unfortunately) I've had to restore my main machine because I ran something I shouldn't have.  And although I've sometime lost a day's worth of work, it is someone comforting to be able to take 4-5 hours off and come back to the machine as it was on Monday morning at 5AM  (I run the backup overnight on Sunday into Monday.)  It takes some time, but it saves on the Di-Gel®.

Owning and using the means of production in class

5 Reasons Why BYOD is a Bad Idea

Only five reasons?  that doesn't sound like enough to stop what is basically a good idea.  Look what happens when you don't!  Count the number of classrooms and labs at KSU 

• that are filled with aging computers, 
• that have computers of a single platform (PC most often ... Disclosure: I am a PC-user, have used Macs, Linux, VAX, etc. and really don't care as long as the box runs software that gets the job done.)
• that need constant maintenance
• that get/lose software at the whim of the university's license or the wishes of the administrator of the room

Yes, most of the time, the classrooms in Moulton work just fine.  That can't be said for others that are running 3-year-old versions of Firefox, use a program that prevents updating the single-machine's system (a good thing), but that prevents the software from updating itself -- so you lose a couple minutes while Acrobat Reader updates itself, only to have the update lost on the next reboot.  Same with the 2-year-old version of Java that Firefox no longer will use.


And it is all transparent to the student and instructor.  You turn on the box and it just works ... until it doesn't.  And even if you know what the problem is, fixing is only good until the next reboot.


You can't add new programs, so no new CMap or VUE if you want to do concept mapping, no utilities that handle ebooks, etc.  You get what you get.


Versus BYOD -- otherwise known as students owning their own computers.  After a couple weeks in a class that uses a range of software, those who can't or don't want to configure their computers (some students won't take the laptop that Grandma gave them for graduation because it might get dirty or scratched!  yes, I've heard both explanations) ... those who don't want to configure, use the university's aging computers or use portable software.  And their personal computers remain unconfigured.  Fine.  But then they go home for a weekend, for Thanksgiving, or spring break and their haste to leave campus, decide to submit their work when they get to their destination ... only to find that they can't get a connection, or that their hardware/software isn't configured correctly.


And there are some (fewer and fewer ... probably around 5%) who can't afford their own equipment.  We do need to address the truly needy with purchases spread over a couple semesters' of tuition, or encourage the reluctant by charging a per-minute fee to use the university's equipment -- a class-rental system.


Better yet, let's make part of the First-Year Experience course that is always looking for something meaningful to fill 15-weeks of instruction (not difficult to do, but most courses fail to find something and are reduced to what one of my ed students a couple years ago called his three hours of rest each week).  We could get them on Learn and any other software that their majors required.  We could give them basic trouble-shooting instructions or ... heaven forbid, post that information online and keep it up-to-date.  We could teach each student to be responsible for their own technology, just as we expect them to maintain their modes of transportation.  (Who uses the campus bus system in a pinch? especially when you need to get cross-campus in 15-minutes?  We train 'em to walk fast, park at the meters in lots near their classes, or to schedule classes within walking distance.)


We are not doing students a favor by UTMD -- Use the Man's Devices.  Buy your own, use your own, and learn to maintain your own.  And ask the university for a reduction in the technology fees, especially if they don't even provide paper!

Guilty as charged

I've been accused of reading widely -- too widely.  That's how I run across writers such as Dan Ariely author of "Predictably Irrational" and "The Upside of Irrationality," Jonah Lehrer ("How We Decide"), Susan Cain ("Quiet"), et al.  And websites such as http://800ceoread.com, and Seth Godin's http://changethis.com -- monthly epamphlets (at < 25pages, I don't think they qualify as real eBooks -- especially since they are usually snippets of the main ideas from the authors' books.  Many are the usual thing with a little difference.  Others summarize bigger points (Hugh MacLeod's 49-page "How to Be Creative" published in 2004 and still at the top of ChangeThis' list of popular postings.)

And, of course, getting ebooks from the local libraries, especially reading them on my Nook, has been an absolute disaster for any discipline I could claim.  Now I can take my wandering reading habits with me.  (Ariely, Cain and Lehrer are all available through SEO or the Ohio eBook Project)  I had an older 1st-year student this past semester whose buddies kept coming over to borrow his truck and made concentrating on his school work difficult.  Between the Nook and the libraries and ebook services, I've got even more insistent buddies.

On the other hand, there are advantages to this grazing -- or this monkeybrain reading.  I do pull in a lot of information, get exposed to a lot of ideas that don't appear in the composition journals that I supposedly keep up with.  If I don't remember where I've seen a lot of the ideas, the reading habit has encouraged me to try to organize my notes, the stack of pages that come in in print form, and the screenfuls of book marks that I'm supposed going to read.  Linkrot has its benefits: if I don't need to read a link immediately, often the gracious gods of the internet move the material so I can ignore what I can no longer find. (Why was I reading that interview with Elon Musk of Tesla and Space-X?  Insights for my 2nd year comp class?)


And, of course, I have a ready supply of ideas to reflect on -- except when I forget to turn my quasi-leisure reading into satisfying a course assignment.  I've put down the ebooks about web design and am actually ready (forced by time) to finish up the website assignment.

build that website or design the CMS fast

everyone's an ITech web designer! and a couple people think Tom Kuhlman has a rapid protyping method.  He tends to emphasize tools a little too much for my taste, and because his method is generalized, does not spend a lot of time on deep knowledge, the discipline-specific content that most of our university courses should focus on.  That's understandable: he has a background in training, which is not exactly the same as in education.  When he writes about learning being a "process" it seems "sequence" is a more appropriate term, rather than "understanding."  Learning=knowing the steps and why the sequence works, rather than understanding underlying principles and questioning the sequence, the methods, and the material itself.  He's got some nice clip art and the ideas (such as they are) are a little more than the usual.  But I struggle to apply his methods and those of other business-oriented presenters to education.  I often go on to something else, muttering, "when I get more time, I should try to devise a different method".  Standardized (and sanctioned) rubrics such as Quality Matters are ok but hardly earth-shaking.  So, look to Kuhlman to help you build it fast, but not with a lot of invention.

blogging is SO 2010?

With a few weeks more of tinkering, I developed a Lego autopilot that had most of the functionality of a professional device, if not the performance. But it became clear that Mindstorms, for all its charms, was too big and expensive to serve as the ideal platform for homemade drones. Looking for a better way, I decided to conduct my search for answers online in public, sharing what I’d done and found. Instead of setting up a blog, I registered DIYDrones.com and established a social network for people who were experimenting with autonomous aircraft.

That distinction—a site created as a community, not a one-man news and information site like a blog—turned out to make all the difference. Like all good social networks, every participant—not just the creator—has access to the full range of authoring tools. Along with the usual commenting, they can compose their own blog posts, start discussions, upload videos and pictures, create profile pages, and send messages. Community members can be made moderators, encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad. Open to anyone who chose to participate, the site was soon full of people trading ideas and reports of their own projects and research.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/ff_drones/all/

So we should learn Ning? (or a free replacement)  [Those I knew who built in Ning left when they decided they had to make money off it.  Note: the providere of some of these tools are not making the tool available so our classes can be better; the tool is free until they can figure out how to make money off the most users.  So spread the word about that nifty new site and see how long before it goes "pro."]

So if you, like Chris Anderson, want visitors to your corner of the internet, provide a place for them to share, not just to read your thoughts ... and post comments.  We don't want comments; we want code!