26 June 2012

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.

23 June 2012

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.

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!

19 June 2012

Reinventing the wheel or making it local?

I noticed an NYTimes article about the AFT's plans to develop a lesson-sharing site.  Good idea?  After all, if we are just copying from a textbook's teacher's guide, wouldn't lessons from a live colleague be just as beneficial?  We might not teach either the lesson from the textbook (what makes us think that the textbook author -- not an especially respected role in academia ... see its role in tenure decisions -- has special insight?) or the lesson share by a colleague would meet our needs.  Chances are we will use the lessons as a springboard to something of our own, or if we are just beginning to teach or new to a course, we may use the lesson until we can develop something on our own.

In my department, some folks are working with ITec people to develop courses that will pass the muster of the Quality Matters rubric and its evaluators.  Any borrowed course would probably need to be reconfigured to meet that rubric.

All of which seems to be a narrowing of the role of the individual instructor.  Even tenure doesn't protect one from having to conform to a lesson design that someone else has approved -- which is not to say that our beloved course that we've taught for years was well-designed.  We liked to teach it and enough students wanted to take it, so we didn't have to redesign it.

Many of us have had professors who not only didn't share or borrow, they simply reused.  One of my favorites (a Harvard grad, no less) used to photocopy his legal pad notes each time he taught his courses, freezing the original in amber.

Ultimately, it isn't the particular lesson that we share, but collegiality, a sharing of how we teach.  As many of us know, the classroom can be a lonely place, with little feedback from our peers.  Does everyone cause students to panic and withdraw?  Does everyone reach out to students in difficulty, only to be ignored?  Does everyone have problems teaching the x-number of uses for a comma?  We sometimes need to be reminded that we are not alone, and that no matter what the outward and institution show to the contrary, we really operate from a position of experimenting, not from a position of certainty.  That's what makes teaching so stressful ... and fun.

16 June 2012

patterns of engagement ... and dis

With all the tools available to a modern instructor, I wonder if anyone has plotted out patterns of engagement by successful students.  (Too little time to do the research, but a moment to reflect.)  By that I mean, is there a pattern to how students begin a course (slowly with intervals of neglect, quick bursts of energy that can't be sustained, or ... pick your preferred pattern).  And when things go well in a class, do the engagement patterns of categories of students synchronize; do we encourage each other to rise to the occasion?  or when things don't go well, do we take cues from each other and leave at the same time?  Google can track when feeds see activity, but as far as I know, there is record-keeping, but no plotting of participation in CMSs.

And what could you do about it anyway?  Would more instructor posts encourage more student posts?

As I hear the whoosh of approaching deadlines, I am persuading myself that much of how (well) we learn is about time ... and attention.

Not complaining, just noticing

An author of a book on technology and teaching has an impossible task: keeping up with the technology and with the pedagogy.  Keeping up with the pedagogy is what 2nd edtions are for: pulse on the listservs of some academic disciplines, some key bloggers, a couple print resources, and teach a couple courses from time-to-time, and you can usually find out about the major directions within a couple months, especially if you add in some conferences for f2f contact.

But how to keep up with educational technology, especially applications?  Slogger that Will Richardson mentions in the blogging chapter is long gone, replaced by a internal form in Word 2010.  Unless it has something to do with my privacy settings, none of the addons work with Blogger anymore.  Google wants my eyeballs on their site so I see their ad.

GoogleGears are gone; so too are countless apps that Richardson mentions in passing.  And, rest in peach, Google Wave, replaced by Google+ whether we like it or not.

It would be easy to argue that when you deal with a company like Google, it chooses the profitable tools and discards the rest.  And to some extent, profitable means "tools the audience uses."  But in many cases, it takes the audience (especially educators who can't turn a course upside down in the middle of a semester just because they'd like to investigate a new bit of code), it takes an audience time to find an application and find its affordances: what the program allows the user to do that the user needed or now wants to do.

One of the usual ways that authors keep their books updated is with webpages, and Richardson is no exception.  A similar text from a college publisher might have an extensive online presence, complete with a quiz bank, instructor notes, and an errata page.

Richardson includes a list on his blog that he keeps up-to-date.  But he (probably not his publisher) might provide links to such updated materials in the book itself and provide a specific location (not just blog comments) where readers could add materials, sort of a Richardson-pedia.  True, there are mechanisms in ereaders to record and share our thoughts, and there are sites where we can share bookmarks and notes, but a concerted effort by the author to consolidate reader comments and link them to specific pages might easily improve the book and keep it fresh.  It has been done before: use the web in a concerted way to update and revise the book.

We experience every day the situation of information that is not linked or is not linked as prominently as celebrity "news."  If the internet dies, or needs refurbing, it may be in large part due to having good information that is not easily discoverable by an audience that could use it.  Certainly Vannevar Bush's and Ted Nelson's models of data structures that influenced Berniers-Lee's webdesign paid more attention to links (URLs) and not just nodes (sites).  We'd do our readers and students a service by having them learn not just about consuming the culture (the "read" part of the read-write web) and produce it (the "write" part) to connect information, but also to link it to other parts of the web.

13 June 2012

Designing and Pacing based on the slightly-better-than-good-enough student

Many times when we design a large assignment, module, or entire course, we focus (as we should) on goals and objectives.  We make sure they both align with programmatic or district mandates.  Often, we try to see all the things we can do, but sometimes we don't prioritize the "can" from the "must" do.  In fact, we often forget is what it feels like to be a student who obediently tries to go through our carefully designed steps.  Too often our pace is not sustainable with their skills.  If the internet has affected learning in many useful ways, it has also encouraged us to try to do too much and too fast.

What I do rely on are students with skills that I have accurately anticipated.  A diligent student should be able to complete this assignment in class; keeping in mind their other courses, they should be able to do this much work outside of class.  The old measure of two hours work outside of class for every one hour in class has long ago been discounted, though many people still offer it as a guideline, especially for college students who claim to only work on courses an hour or so a day outside of class.

I tell my students that they need to work as long and as hard as they need to, to learn the necessary skills ... i.e. the skills they will need to use to get the grade they want.  No, I can't easily get them to get out of the grade-centered mentality.  After more than a dozen years of school, they come to college and to my class with a set of protocols and expectations.  If I work this long, I'll get an A.  Far too many tell me at the beginning that they are in the course to get an A.  To them, that sounds like an expression of dedication to the grade-winning task; to me it sounds like a student who is signaling me that s/he has been rewarded for effort and expects me to agree. 
This would-be over-achiever will knock herself out to be perfect, and whether s/he achieves perfection or not, s/he'll always think s/he's fallen short.

Often, it is this take-no-prisoners student who crumples first because they are only well suited to "do school," and when the tasks are more complex or take longer, s/he lacks the perseverence that another student of less accomplishment learned long ago.  That student has long ago settled for less than perfection, either because s/he knows it is unattainable or a fiction, or s/he knows her skills aren't adequate to achieving perfection.  Instead, s/he tries to be just a little bit better than good enough; s/he doesn't slack, but s/he knows when s/he has learned the skills and that another four sleepless hours are not going to result in mastery.  And so it is this student whom we must use to pace our instruction, and the one we keep in mind when we design a course.

Our just-a-little-better-than-good-enough student will prod the sluggard to some effort and show the perfectionist that there should be some joy in learning or a parallel social life.  It is with this student in mind that we need to find the course bottlenecks, prioritizing the high-order skills, and sequencing tasks so that this student who wants to do all right can succeed.

Brint, Steven, and Allison M. Cantwell. "Portrait of the Disengaged."Web. 6/13/2012 <http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=413>.

06 June 2012

the uses of blogs, tweets, chat, and discussion boards

As I scurry from one tool to another these last days, I wonder if there isn't a better way, or a more unified way to interact, at the cost of the uniqueness of each tool.  For example, what are appropriate discussions to initiate on twitter? on the course discussion board? in our personal blogs?

What is an appropriate use of twitter, for example?  I write this 11 min. into the Campustech twitter session (https://twitter.com/search/NextGenLearn) that seems to be nothing more than a venue for us to preach to the choir
  • Where do you think most education will take place over the next 3 to 5 years? Brick and mortar? Online?
Engaging in any fora? probably not.  But a "webinar" might make the hour's content a little more visible.  i.e. will this twitter get any more substantive?  are they trying to sell us something.

There's supposed to be a study back in here somewhere.  I see a lot of assertions by the audience and anecdotal comments, and some scattered comments from McGraw-Hill HigherEd and CampusTech.  But nothing coherent so far.

05 June 2012

What I'm reading: a shared folder in RefWorks

No attempt to enter all the documentation data, but enough for anyone to find the resource.

RefWorks shared folder

The link to the shared folder is tricky because RefWorks want to put a session code in the link.  I think this works.

Half an Hour: Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and wha...

Half an Hour: Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and wha...: Presented to EdgeX2012 , Delhi, India, March 12, 2012. My name is Stephen Downes, I'm from Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. New Brunswick is...

Having just completed Dr. Curtis Bonk (U of Indiana)'s MOOC last week, I was very interested in Downes perspective.  While the waves of readings and peer posts sweep over you (well, as many posts as 10% of the 4000 students in the MOOC can sweep), you wonder whether all of this will get some focus.  For me, it never did.  If education is a platform (as Downes has argued), then I was left on the edge.  It was difficult for me to judge the MOOC by what it said it would do (that was never clear) and judge it by the experiences that I was having.  I got my badge for the minimal participation that was required; I got a couple readings; but most of all, I got a glimpse of what a high-octane instructor looks like when he is performing.  ("Is that your hyperactive instructor?" my wife would ask as she walked behind my screen and saw Bonk jumping up and down ("Women in Asia, jump up!")

But, tedious as Bonk could sometimes be -- not getting to the gist of our weekly 1 hour (stretching into 2 hours) live video performance, I had to admire the sheer energy the man expended on catching our attention.  Sure he had his groupies from past courses to bounce off of (an aspect Downes notes in his critique of the attempts of the MOOC to create a group experience), but a lot of it was unvarnished Bonk.  By the end, I not only had a question ("Am I that energetic? and is the hope for calmer instructors like me?"), I had answers ("Not at all" and "maybe there is a space online that is for me.")

I admired the live contact Bonk provided, and I am going to try to incorporate a weekly online live session -- not a podcast or vidcast, but instead of time when I sit at my computer (doing other work), waiting for students to pop in and ask questions, I'm going to try to develop materials I can deliver live that relate to how the students makes her way through the course.  No jumping up and down, but some visual connection with students I see on other days face-to-face.  And probably via a Google+ hangout.  So I'm game this summer for using hangouts to meet in small groups to get used to the media.

beginning a course, making habits

At this time in a course, I'm reminded how important it is for me to establish habits.

The theme of these days is ORGANIZATION --
  1. curation (where)
  2. content (what, how)
  3. time (when) 
  4. communication/collaboration (with whom)
As I work on each item, I think about the "why."

Anal, yes, but I usually avoid getting caught up short, and working through all the materials at the beginning, gives me an overview of the course -- skimming so I notice where the bottlenecks might be, major assignments and more challenging skills.

CURATION
In addition to folders on my computer, I usually select an online repository: GoogleDocs, SkyDrive, or DropBox (only if there is no private or sensitive information).

Most often, I choose GoogleDocs because I use it for other aspects of the course (see below).  I use the same username (ksuengerssu12 for this summer's courses) for everything I do in connection with the course (subscriptions to webtools, RefWorks, GoogleDocs, etc.)

I set up folders for any course contents that I want to have online, a couple places where I'll compose, share, or save online materials.

Side note: why create a Google address for each semester?
  1. the campus implementation of Docs does not include several tools (especially iGoogle, Voice, and Google+) that I want to use.  Without giving out my home phone number, I can get student phone calls via GoogleVoice and then discard the number at the end of the term.
  2. at the end of the semester, I often delete the address so I don't have a lot of addresses to check.  (I forward all email from these addresses to my campus address, so I don't miss anything and I let Google archive in-coming mail so I can keep my campus mailbox pretty empty)

CONTENT
Usually when I get access to the course site, I scan the materials and then begin downloading what I can: structure of the course (I capture screens of menus and such) and the files.

Why? I guess because I am concerned that I won't be able to access them from various locations (though I don't have anything as a Lake Erie sailboat ;)

Also, I eventually compile those files (sequenced as they were on the website) into a PDF that I can annotate and link.

TIME
And ... something I haven't begun yet ... I put the course due dates and activities into a calendar.  These days, I use a couple Google Calendars: one for readings, one for assignments, one for my schedule of when I'll start work on the assignments, etc.  I could use a single calendar and color-code each type of activity, but it is easier for me to use separate calendars in the same Google account and color each calendar differently.

COMMUNICATION
Finally, I set up any email addresses and chat methods that I may use to communicate with others in the course.  Again, Google seems to be easiest because it gives me a email address, a chat area, and, now, Google+ that will let me chat (text, audio, and group video)

Today's tasks: create and complete the calendars and read some of the course materials.

04 June 2012

Course goals and tools

Personal Course Goals: try integrating a range of tools to improve collaboration; reorganize/streamline Learn site based on calendar organization; provide students archives of all significant instructor materials (syllabus, class slides, tech how-tos, etc.)  Design alternative instruction modules described in terms of Quality Matters rubric.

Contacts

  • Email
  • LMS
    • campus Learn 8.1 practice course
  • Twitter
    • ksuengerssu12

Tools

blog
  • Blogger.com 
    • I was going to use W.Bloggar as a desktop client until I discovered it not only is out of production, but that (even though I have the most recent version) it no longer works with Blogger.

RSS Reader 
  • Online: Google Reader
  • Desktop client: RSSOwl
  • Aggregator: Calibre -- turns feed entries into an epub file for easy reading and

CMS
  • KSU Learn practice course

Research curation and citation generation
  • RefWorks 2.0

Extended composing
  • Online
    • GoogleDocs
    • Windows Live Word
  • Offline
    • Scrivener for Windows
    • Word
Visual Thinking
  • CMap
  • VUE 
Twitter
  • TweetDeck for PC
  • TweetDeck for Chrome browser
  • username: ksuengerssu12