I put all my deadlines for each class into its own Google Calendar. This was relatively simple, since I could duplicate entries and move them easily. Since Google insists on both start and end times, I just made them within a minute: something due at midnight runs 11:59pm-12:00am, for example. It took me about 90 minutes to do three full classes.

I then followed the instructions at the Google Calendar page for letting people save all the events on a calendar. I wanted a button that students could click to load my calendar into theirs. Next to this button I put a link to instructions on how to get Google Calendar to send you txt message notifications. It looks like this, pasted into an HTML block in Moodle:

We’ll see if it works.

Notes from Sloan-C’s Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, which I attended as a live virtual participant:

From Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 as a 21st-century LMS with Linda Wallace of Pepperdine: Idea of Google Apps as a mid-point between an LMS and a PLE was briefly mentioned but I think was a valuable perspective.

From Engaging online dialogue: The pedagogy of annotation-enhanced discussion forums with Cindy Xin of Simon Fraser University, Canada: need to try Marginalia in Moodle, which allows students to add comments and annotations to each other’s forum posts.

From eScholars: Encouraging the Use of Emerging Educational Technologies Through a Collaborative Faculty Development Program, the idea that everyone offering cool faculty development tracks gives stipends to faculty participants and are run by instructional designers instead of faculty. Very depressing.

From Enhancing Moodle to Engage Students; Powerful Teaching that Makes Moodle More Effective, a combination of tools embedded in Moodle for interaction, including free tools like VoiceThread and Xtranormal (and paid-to-adapt WizIQ, AuthorLive) in a great web page to demo these.

From How 2 Lrn W Ur iPod: Using a fully online Moodle course to teach students how to be better learners with technology with the brilliant Kevin Kelly of SFSU: the idea of an “online flex hybrid” where students can choose whether to come to on-site class and participate or view the class live or recorded online and participate asynchronously.

From MERLOT classic award winners on Brief Hybrid Workshops: University of North Carolina, support for the idea we are already developing at POT for faculty development of creating brief under-5-minute learning objects (oh, that term!) surrounded by support materials and synchronous or asynchronous community discussion for various topics. Excellent webpage resource as an example.

From Beyond Grades—Comprehensive Student Assessment Using Common Desktop Tools with Rebecca Peet of UCSC: the old-style workaround gradebook: using Microsoft Excel as a rubric-styled gradebook with a template to fill in the blanks, and Word’s Mail Merge to send individual grade reports to students via email.

Buzzwords and jargon were rampant! This bingo card would have been useful. Also I kept hearing turn key. But some jargon was helpful. Somewhere I picked up the concept/jargon of “iterative development” — I think we need to consider this perspective for both Blackboard and Moodle instead of just “buying” them.

From Educational Networking: Building Models for Social Networking in Education with Steve Hargadon: Social networking + LMS + live collaboration is his future model. Hargadon seemed somewhat enamored of Blackboard’s recent aquisition of Elluminate as fulfilling this model. I don’t like social networking tools (blogs, wikis) inside closed systems that disappear when the class is over — I think this undermines the broader learning goals of those tools. Instead of seeing social networking under an educational umbrella, I’m seeing education happening under a social networking umbrella. Let’s deal with that.

From Where’s My Stuff? Are your students content with your content? with Sherry Lindquist: techniques to control what students see. I agreed with this in terms of preventing confusion and having students feel overwhelmed. I did not agree in terms of controlling release of forum responses until a student has responded. If you have to do that, you’re writing a lousy prompt. Disconnected students will drop if forced to put themselves forward like that. Connected students will contact each other in Facebook. I’d rather see them learn!

My biggest disappointment was the fact that few (if any) emergent technologies were introduced (Voicethread is not at all new), and virtual participants had to rely on Twitter (hashtag #et4online) to participate in real time becauase Mediasite’s commenting was not really that synchronous. Also, many of the cool techniques were based on individualized activities and feedback impossible for me to implement with 200 students each semester.

Connections were great, though. My favorite co-participants included Kelvin Thompson, with whom I hope to be writing an article called “Linking Out and Widgeting In: Leveraging Your LMS with a Crowbar”.

I don’t feel dirty, but I would like an edupunk virtual conference to clear my palate…

1. Commercial LMSs will allow the disaggregation of the parts of their systems, so that faculty can mix, match, combine and remove any element easily.
2. They will provide options of open or closed for any of these elements (so that, for example, student blogs can be open on the web but assignments closed).
3. LMSs will standardize code (XML? HTML5?) to provide seamless import, export and integration among systems and outside of a system, for example to create a separate e-portfolio.
4. LMSs will have the ability to integrate any app on the open web.
5. They will be programmed properly to work on a wide variety of mobile devices and platforms.

What I heard instead:

1. LMSs are enterprise systems, period.
2. Their best use is for student tracking, content aggregation, outcomes assessment, and systemization.
3. They are and should be used in order to provide accessibility, FERPA and other legal compliance for the institution.
4. They should get better at tracking and using their own internal data.
5. Faculty aren’t that innovative and so they need an LMS.
6. Students get upset when the LMS is changed.
7. Faculty shouldn’t use Web 2.0 apps to cobble together their own LMS because it’s too hard to support and doesn’t have the tracking, aggregation, outcomes assessment, legal protections, etc. (Nor do we have any of this for classroom teaching, but that seemed to not be recognized as a disconnect.)

Suffice it to say I was very disappointed. Didn’t sound very emergent to me.

Let’s try this:

1. Envision a world where the LMS is a collection of detachable, useful, independent tools that can be open or closed.
2. Envision instructors selecting on an opt-in basis which of these elements they would like to use.
3. Envision students being exposed to many different tools, learning experiences, and web elements as appropriate to their various classes, which would increase the skills of sorting, aggregating and evaluating information they will need in their future careers.
4. Envision choice and academic freedom as the two great values in distant education decision making.

I’m sure there’s more. Add your own.

And our culture values extreme experience, even with vicarious experience. I notice this particularly in the visceral violence of popular films, theatre and art, because I personally cannot handle that level of violence, be it physical or psychological. But it is also the case in real life, where a Catholic priest on the radio did not shy from blaming social networking for the extent of rioting following the Orange demonstrations in Belfast this week, which involved large numbers of young people and children.

Creative Commons from xkcd webcomic

In the case of education, accuracy has long been a complaint of using the web for finding factual information, and here also the tendency to magnification causes progblems. There is an assumption that mob wisdom pays off at some point.

I experienced a cultural example today, as I heard a very famous piece of music. I know it’s been used in movies, and I wanted to know what it was. I thought maybe it was from the Mission, so I looked up the sountrack on Amazon, but no. So I thought maybe Excalibur? Sure enough,
I found it – music from Excalibur, the famous song, called O Fortuna, by Richard Wagner. Made sense — it’s very Ring cycle-ish. I cannot tell you why I scrolled down to see the “Shouts” where people commented it wasn’t Wagner at all, but Carl Orff. So I did another Google search (this time for O Fortuna), and ended up here. Both Wagner’s and Orff’s name are there, but a person voted for the Wagner answer, so that put it at the top with 100% rating. That makes it look like it’s correct.

Minor, I know, but it’s like another old adage: you always find something in the last place you look. Why? Because once you’ve found it, you stop looking, of course. Once you’ve learned that it’s Wagner, why continue? The camera adds ten pounds and the web adds truthiness through popular acclaim (even if it’s only one person acclaiming). It magnifies ignorance as well as, if the priest is right, violence as social recreation.

When people say it is a professor’s job to be a guide rather than a source of information (because information is so readily available via the web), I used to nod. Now I look confused. We need to guide through false information just as we did before, when printed texts were examined and finding multiple sources was required to prove a point. This involves a skill, not only of research but of temperament. To not be content with what you’re told is a foundation of democracy, and essential to becoming an educated person instead of a twisted subscriber to a terrorist blog. Learning cannot simply be subject to the whims of fortune, substituting a single search for actual thinking, curiosity and research. At a minimum, Carl Orff would appreciate that.

But to me captioning is not about disability accommodation. It is simply another way of relaying the information, regardless of ability. While not being a very good listener, or very good at English, may not be a “disability”, in such cases captioning can provide better comprehension. Reading the captions while listening engages two parts of the brain and provides reinforcement. Seeing a visual representation next to text provides two inputs. Multiple inputs work. I did an experiment once where I put on period music, flashed period images on the screen, and lectured about the period all at the same time. Retention of the information was much better.

So I am annoyed by the treadmills that automatically turn off the captions. My Spanish is lousy, so if I’m watching a soccer game it helps to see the Spanish in print. If the gym is loud that day, or the audio track of the movie on TCM isn’t so hot, or the characters use accents or intonations my brain is too tired to translate while pretending I’m not walking for 2 miles, the captions are nice. It should be up to me to turn them on or off, using the remote control.

Michael Hirschorn’s The Closing of the Digital Frontier (Atlantic Monthly, July/Aug 2010) has one major premise and a few historical analogies, none of which I see as workable.

Hirschorn begins by discussing the long-standing cultural trend (represented by groups like the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and individuals like Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly) toward a free web. Here the word “free” is used as the opposite of “expensive”. Having toured the “futurism past”, he gets to the main point:

The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995.

Hischorn then describes Apple as “swimming with the tide” in promoting a pay-per-app model that closes the “frontier” of the web, where presumably cowboys like Google will try to keep the range free. The “Wild Digital West” will be no more. It has been “colonized” and is no longer “free” (by this point he seems to mean “open” rather than “not expensive”).

I thought I agreed at first. I am very unhappy with Apple. Business Week’s look at Steve Jobs as marketer extraordinare reminded me how the vision of Apple has changed over the years, and I came to the conclusion that my favorite Apple years were those between Jobs’ stints as head of the company (1985-1995). I recognize Apple now as focusing primarily on the consumer of goods for which one pays (movies, books, etc) instead of on creators. I find that very sad, and annoying to me personally, since I don’t do Windows and like to create my work as well as “consume” that of others’.

But Hirschorn’s historical parallels don’t work, and Apple’s toys are not, I think, changing the model of freedom so much as indicating where it isn’t (despite Jobs trying to characterize the new iPad as a “freeing” device). Apple does not have a “free” business model, and the “transfer” to mobile apps isn’t a transfer, but an addition. The article points out that very young people aren’t getting into this app stuff as much as expected. I can assure you the older set won’t either, if only because (iPad excepted) the screens are too small.

There is no digital frontier being fought over or colonized. The word frontier suggests an edge and the imposition of limits beyond the limits, and saying that this is a “land grab” on the order of Manifest Destiny, complete with victimized Indians (bloggers? open sourcers?) is specious. The Turner thesis of 1893, which is alluded to, did panic people and may have influenced imperial expansion, but it doesn’t provide a model for what’s happening today. I read the article three times and I can’t even figure out who the “colonizers” are supposed to be.

What’s happening as I see it is two marketplaces. One is considered “closed”, except it isn’t because you can buy anything you like. You can pay for “content”, and consume information, entertainment, the products of professional writers and artists. If we do not pay for this, there would BE no professional writers and artists. I buy my subscriptions to magazines and purchase printed books because I want their work on paper, but I can easily see the need to pay for it on the web. I pay gladly for Netflix, because I could not make a movie like “Nine” and I want the people who did to be paid somehow, even though I’m not happy at buying the DVD product itself that costs 99 cents to produce but is marketed to me at $15.

The other marketplace is one of free ideas, open source software, blogging, etc. Open exchange of ideas. The ancient Greek agora, the medieval faire, the 18th century coffeehouse. It’s a place, not a “store”. It’s where you can create and try things out before creating them for sale, as bloggers do who develop their professional writing online. It’s where you upload that stop-motion Lego animation you made yourself, or that cool Star Trek mashup.

It’s not Apple vs Google (Hatfield and McCoy?), as Hirschorn suggests — Google is ultimately a store, it’s just that it’s “product” right now is navigational with ads attached. It is not the guardian of the open web defending against Apple incursions. We are the guardians of freedom. The incursions on openness come not from Apple’s business model (however much I don’t like it) but from ISPs limiting bandwidth, privacy violations a la Facebook, and Patriot Act subpeonas. These threats to freedom (and the ongoing fight against them) suggest not so much a frontier as a cosmopolitan city, with ideas interacting everyday. That’s something I think we can keep.

It’s gorgeous. The scholarship is marvelously up-to-date. The illustrations are stunning.

But it is not a typical textbook. It is really more like an atlas with lots of cool text. It’s arranged in two-page spreads rather than chapters.

History is a complex subject. It can be learned and taught from many different perspectives: economic (my field, with technology), political, social, cultural, etc. It is possible to teach an entire class from one perspective and make it deeply analytical, or from several perspectives and make it broad.

My first decent textbook for this class was Asa Brigg’s A Social History of England, which focused on social history (demographics, lives of ordinary people, etc.). It went out of print a number of years ago (then, apparently, back in and out again – the “current” one seems to be 1999). I had it photocopied (officially, with copyright clearance) for a year or two before I gave up. My most recent text has been Roy Strong’s The Story of Britain. Its focus is cultural (he’s into art). It’s also hard to find. The bookstore loves me.

When I switched to Strong I couldn’t commit to the book mentally, but I loved the images and felt they would be useful, plus it was very well-written. The problem was that the content distribution didn’t match my class organization. This meant that sometimes students would read three short chapters a week, other times twelve (he was really into the 18th century, for example). This annoyed the students. Since I couldn’t commit, I didn’t right many test questions related to the text. Rather I considered it background.

I’ve had to examine what I want the textbook for. I kept thinking “background”. So I looked at things that could substitute. But when this book arrived, it clearly couldn’t be used as just background. It’s a work that demands commitment and engagement.

So I’m changing my pedagogy to work better with worthwhile material. The focus of this Penguin book is clearly geography, which I really only focus on periodically in the class (initial settlements, trade expansion, industrialization). The book also has two types of spreads: chronological narrative pages with white background, and thematic features with colored background. I plan to write test questions for the white pages and work the thematic feature pages into discussion by having them be a foundation for primary source collection. I have already designed a page to help students with it, called “How to use the textbook“.

This is a strange shift for me. I have always been quite reticent to let a textbook of any kind shape my pedagogy. I know what I want to do and I go out and look for materials to support that vision (textbook reps like me almost as much as the bookstore). But I think that here, as in my work on the web, it’s good to let a better idea cause change, seed a transformation. This may be bizarre thinking to those who have always taught out of the textbook, or taught to the textbook — of course the text shapes what you do. But it never has for me, and the idea of allowing material to guide pedagogy is a bit scary.

Is it the same sort of thing I hope for with web applications for learning, that maybe some cool web stuff will cause people to rethink their pedagogy? does this deny my emphasis on Pedagogy First, which, though not a rule, is a mantra for me?

It is, in the end, a matter of interplay, mutual influence, rather than determinism. This book does not determine my pedagogy, rather it allows me to play with it in a new way. I can use it to create a different focus for my course, and I know that new focus is just as appropriate as the old one. Diigo or Blackboard or Wordpress does not determine what you do with them, but they guide in a particular direction that needs to be determined suitable or not by the instructor or the learner. Perhaps it is a matter of experience, enough experience to create a conversation beween content and method to create something new. We’ll see how it goes.

Normally I don’t post at all about my personal life, but my husband got me something very special for our anniversary — a thumb drive:

The handles turn and the guage face lights up when it’s plugged in! It holds 8 GB and is referred to as a Portable Information Cabinet which “extends the powers of analytical engines by maintaining a library of algorithmic and documentary files which may be accessed in an instant”. Even the instructions to not get it wet nor drop it from a great height are written this way.

Ordered from England, it was made by Shipton Bellinger’s Steampunk Engineering. It’s absolutely enchanting. I cannot imagine a more perfect anniversary gift.

But then, the “need” hit. Some students have trouble finding primary sources (or even recognizing them, as I’ve noted). And I enjoy looking for English primary sources as much as the next person… well, ok, more.

I’m so frustrated with my textbook for the class that in looking for a better one, I was of course considering not using one at all. I went to a site that has a huge book-type thing (Britannia.com) but it now has so many flashing ads it could induce seizure. So I checked out the BBC history site, and there was so much good stuff. But they’ve already told me on the evals, they really want a printed textbook.

In looking at the cool sites, however, I came across some good collections of primary sources, Adding such sources is the half of the whole discussion idea, since last fall. Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to collect all the cool sites I was finding? I started to bookmark them in Firefox and thought, that’s dumb. So I began collecting them in Diigo. First I tagged them “hist105″, as I do everything related to that class.

Then I started adding a “hist105resources” tag. I went into my Diigo bookmarks, confined the list to that tag, and copied the RSS button’s code (right click, copy link location).

Then I went into Moodle, and added a Remote RSS Feed block to the main course page, pasting in the RSS code. I called it “A few primary source sites”.

I realize I could go even further. I searched on Diigo and no one else uses the tag. I could have students use Diigo and tag what they find, and it will be automatically added to the block so long as I change to the RSS button code on the page referencing everyone’s tag, not just mine. That would take 2 seconds to do.

But…one step at a time. If I have them use the tag and collect, I’ll have to teach them Diigo and bookmarking and tagging as well as how to identify a primary source. That on top of a textbook, my lectures, seven quizzes, a weekly discussion requiring posting and thesis writing seems like to much. For me, if not for them!

But at least now, I’m not just talking RSS — I’m using it for an actual class.

Some surprises:

Dump the mp3 files?
For every weekly written lecture, I have audio of me reading it, with embedded Quicktime buttons on the web page, plus a download link for the whole mp3 file. I ask students whether they use the Quicktime buttons embedded in the lecture, download the mp3 file provided, or don’t use the audio at all. The amount of students who download the full mp3 file was far lower than in previous years (only 6%), and the amount using the embedded buttons much higher (62%). 32% rarely or never use the audio.

The mp3 option is time-consuming for me. Each lecture in each class is divided into sections, and each sections has its own audio file. To get the mp3, I have to convert the whole set of .mov files, then zip them all together, and post the zip file’s link. So every time I change one little thing in one little section, I have to go through all this after re-recording the .mov file. Perhaps it’s not necessary. Students used to do it so they could listen in their cars or on iPods. Maybe they don’t anymore?

They are reading my comments on their quizzes!
For the first time I asked whether they were reading the comments I put on the quizzes, not because doing this is time-consuming but because so many students seemed to make the same mistakes in essay after essay. Almost all the students read them, and only 2 out of 85 didn’t know the comments were there (I tell them how to access the comments in an announcement and email after each quiz).

They are also reading the sample essays.
While grading quiz essays, I copy and paste a few of the best into a file, which I then post (without students’ names) as sample essays. Because this is a separate link, and again, because many students continued with poor essays, I asked whether the samples were helpful. Only 11 of the 85 didn’t use them, and almost all the rest found them helpful. So I’ll keep doing that.

Not surprising:

They understand why they’re getting the grade they’re getting.
One of my most important questions tries to balance out their expectations with their performance. If I don’t have high marks on this one, there is a disconnect between grading and perceived achievement. Only 3 out of 85 students disagreed with the statement “I understand why I’m getting the grades I’m getting”.

There are still no good History of England textbooks.
My England class had a particularly high (50%) percentage of people not using the textbook extensively, and it was the only class where there were open comments on the textbook. England is impossible. There is only one true textbook (Roberts and Roberts, Prentice Hall) and it is two full volumes, for a two-semester course (mine is one semester). I am currently using Roy Strong’s The Story of Britain, but may have to switch to something, anything else.

They don’t want an e-book.
Given the preponderance of internet talk about e-books and open source texts, I had a hunch that students wanted to keep their old, boring, expensive printed text book. 58% want to keep that printed textbook. 21% would prefer an e-text, and only 14% want free stuff on the open web instead of a textbook. (Well, OK, this last was a little surprising!)

Good students do the survey.
By their own report, the overwhelming majority of students doing the survey were earning As (51%) or Bs (39%) in the class. I ask this (and a question about how much effort they put into the class) to determine the scholastic level and dedication of the students responding to the survey. I find this most useful!

And my favorite question:

This one is about instructor presence: “I felt that Lisa was really present and visible during this class”. 68% strongly agreed and 29% agreed. Only 4% didn’t think so.

Their comments:

Regarding the comments, I have instituted several changes in response. A few students noted that it was hard to find the primary sources during a quiz, because they have to go back to the forums to look for them. One comment suggested they be somehow linked from the quiz area, but it doesn’t look like I can do that in Moodle, so I’ve added a “Search Forums” box to the main page, and added instructions in the FAQ on using it, and opening another tab or window during a quiz.

Another comment was frustrated with the long, long forum. I use a nested format as the default, but students can change to view to flat or threaded view if they wish — it’s right at the top of each forum. I’ve also added this to the FAQ, with a screenshot.

Yet another complained about not being allowed to add their own sources, which I actually encouraged every week! Another note in the FAQ. (You’ll notice the FAQ has internal links, so I can point them from anywhere to one particular issue.)

I also noted they tended to rate the quality of interaction with other students — they recognized that as part of the design. However, there was no consensus about what I’d done. One student raved about getting to know his/her classmates so well, while another said s/he never really got to know the other students.

Some bemoaned the repetition of the pattern of posting sources, then writing historical theses. Yet in the forums themselves, I saw enthusiasm for the former, and deep improvement over time on the latter. I’m sorry if they find it repetitive. Another word for that is practice!

I may regret this, but in the interest of openness, I’m sharing the whole spreadsheet of results, objective polling only (no comments). Since I’m not being formally evaluated this semester, the only person’s privacy being violated here is my own!