By Lisa, on December 8th, 2011%
We’ve been working at finding places for synchronous meetings of various kinds for the POT Certificate Class. Sure, we can do the usual things, like meet up in Collaborate/Elluminate (we have installations at several of our jobs), but we kinda like free and we kinda like different so lately we’ve been looking at:
Web conferencing or video/audio conversation
Google Plus hangouts
The advantage is that many people already are in Google for something, and it’s pretty easy to find Plus now, and everyone can now access it since it’s out of alpha stage. Great video and audio quality, and the camera can automatically shift to whoever is speaking, putting them in the main frame. But the maximum is 10 for talking – anyone after 10 can only watch. We liked it especially for quick meetings, kind of like Google Talk with video. One interesting thing is that if it’s public, anyone may drop by. The “with extras” option slows down the system, but lets you add viewing a YouTube together (this didn’t always work) or embedding a collaborative Google Doc, which would make presentations possible.
Big Marker
Kind of like Collaborate Lite, this one let us be on camera with microphones, but we had to have headsets upon entering the room or we got awful audio feedback. We only had four cameras on at once, but quality was good. All panels (participants, individual cameras, whiteboard) were in separate frames that could be resized. A presentation ppt could be loaded, and the presenter could zoom in or mark on it with simple drawing tools (line, box). Only one person could present at a time, and a newly uploaded presentation replaced the old one. Sessions cannot be archived with a free account.
 Facebook HOOT
We began with just Facebook group chat, which is only text chat, but then decided to try this. Hoot is an FB application that you add, and the idea is to allow students to meet up together with video and audio. We tried it with five or six people, and as we were talking the creator of the app came in and spoke with us. Spooky but cool. Created by students for students.
Second Life
Here you need a “place” in SL to meet, so it’s like Collaborate only in that sense, and there are colleges and various organizations that will let you use their space. Audio is kind of new, and the application is pretty heavy (Cris Crissman pointed me to a different viewer, called Phoenix, that worked better than the new SL viewer). Learning curve is high, but the learning experience is rich because of the simulation of an actual meeting in a simulated space. Hard to explain unless you’ve done it.
Skype group video calling
For this, one person in the group must have a Pro account.
Alternate formats for “talking” while working together
Slideshare (Zipcast)
The idea here is that the presenter schedule a session where s/he can show him/herself on video and audio while touring through a slideshare slideshow, and you can see who is attending with their icons, and they can text chat during the session. Looks like you need a Pro account to do audio conferencing.
Inside a Google Doc
We meet inside a Google Doc just by putting some text in a Doc, then making it public and letting everyone know the URL. No audio, but real time edits and chat once you open the side window, plus you can annotate. If you were logged in to Google, sometimes it would still show you in the room as Anonymous, which was annoying. The other problem is that the synchronous chat isn’t saved. But it was a great way to create a document in real time.
I’ve heard Etherpad is good for this too, but it’s been bought by Google anyway; Crocodoc is also good for annotating together.
Hall.com
We recently also tried hall.com, which sets up a room where you can do polls, to do lists, and instant message chat — it seemed to work very well.
MindMeister Brainstorming
Lets you text chat while you create a mind map together.
Qikpad
Like Google docs, but better in a way because you can change your name from anonymous instantly, and everyone’s contributions are instantly highlighted in a different color.
Shut up and collaborate
You don’t always need to be able to see and/or hear and/or text chat with each other — sometimes you just need to work at the same time. The collaborative documents can do this, and so can:
Stroome
Video collaboration, but we haven’t tried it in real time, though it says it can. 500 MB free. Lets you add clips, transitions, do cuts, etc. A little slow in rendering. Another recent option is wevideo, which we’ll try also, although it only lets 5 people work on one project in its free version.
Prezi Meeting
We haven’t yet tried it, but you can meet in Prezi to collaborate on making a presentation. Icons represent each participant, and move around showing who’s editing what.
Watch a video together
Not quite ready for prime time, or at least not any better than putting a link in a chat and telling people to go watch.
We tried YouTube itself, which now has a link in the Share options that sets up a Google hangout for watching — we have tried to watch videos together in Google Hangout and it doesn’t usually work. We often all get bounced to a generic YouTube page instead of whatever the participant is trying to load in.
We also tried Chill.com (you have to use Facebook for this), and Synchtube, which didn’t really. We were all able to watch the same video, but speed varied widely. One of our members called it “Asynchtube”. Watchittoo.com made you pay.
Your question: where and when are you guys testing all this? more in the next post!
My question: What else should we check out?
By Lisa, on November 27th, 2011%
This question goes way back to the first online class I ever saw demonstrated. The instructor, instead of using our one and only technology (Webboard) as a separate discussion, had embedded her lecture and instructions into the lead post for each week. And at the time (1998) I thought, “oh wow! the whole class is inside the discussion! This is great.”.
But I didn’t do it. Blackboard encourages you to put the discussion board in separate area, and even now that you can make a separate discussion forum for each unit, people still put discussion all together as one course menu item. In Moodle, I have a separate, nested discussion board (simple format) for each week/topic.
In my struggle to determine whether it’s a good idea to switch from forum post/reply to blog/comment format for clases with students, I have assumed that I would continue to integrate discussion as I do now, by week. But in my post about using One Blog, Brandon Davis-Shannon commented on his own difficulties with the format, and noted greater depth in the Blackboard forum than on blogs with comments. It occurred to me this might be because if the whole thing was together, students would feel less awkward posting on a previous topic.
But we all acknowledge it depends on how it’s designed, and what (pedagogically speaking) we’re looking for.
So I created a Google Doc and invited Brandon to help create a chart showing some of the options, and here’s what we’ve done so far:
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One big forum |
Weekly/topical forums |
One big blog |
Individual blogs |
| Advantages |
- May reward students posting on previous topics, deepening conversation, especially if design of the discussion encourages them to do so
- Easy to use
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- Ties discussion to one topic, prevents tangents
- Organizes posts and replies easily
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- Combines course info and activities in one place
- Easy to track student activity
- Easy for students to keep up with peers’ work
- Requires a single log-in to participate
- Possible feeling of collective student ownership of class blog.
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- Student ownership of their own learning space
- Acquisition of some “just in time” technical skills within the context of actual use
- Aggregating blogs can pull whole class together
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| Disadvantages |
- Artificially separates discussion and interactivity from the presented or informational content of the class
- May overwhelm students with number of topics, as class continues.
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- Format doesn’t encourage students to go back to a previous topic, leading to a more superficial discussion.
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- Student ownership is not individual
- Format may lead student posts to be lost in the shuffle
- Blog may disappear if instructor takes it down, loses account, etc[a].
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- Unless commenting takes place on an aggregated blog (thus removing ownership advantage), the inconvenience of commenting on different blogs may be a problem
- Diffuses the conversation too much
- Discourages return to previous topics because of the nature of blog posting
- Tends to require multiple log-ins to participate in commenting unless single system use (for example, Discus)
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| Pedagogy |
May be best suited for:
- classes where themes run throughout
- assignments that allow students to participate in several topics at once
- pedagogies that want to place the information and content directly into the forum to emphasize discussion
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May be best suited for:
- topics that need to be separate
- assignments where everyone has a similar task, such as posting a particular link
- classes where topics have a definite progression or need to move on
- pedagogies that want to place the information and content directly into the forum to emphasize discussion
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May be best suited for:
- keeping the class at one main website or page
- having students experience creation of one artifact with individual contributions
- pedagogies emphasizing collective development of the class
- situations where individual blogs may be of concern for any reason
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May be best suited for:
- student ownership of their work
- pedagogies that encourage student exploration and development of their own topics or focus
- if the instructor has a blog also and content is aggregated, embeds instructor’s content into class
- a course with centralized complementary activities
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| Variations |
- All class materials can be available as posts
- Can choose between threaded and nested in some applications
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- All class materials can be available as posts
- Can choose between threaded and nested in some applications
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Theme (Layout?) |
Theme (Layout?) |
Maybe this can help us make decisions on which discussion format is best for a particular class.
By Lisa, on October 27th, 2011%
I have now been a student in three separate classes where I ran my own blog to do the class assignments (CCK08, EC&I831 and ds106). My classes for students are all designed with an LMS-based forum, within which outcomes have been achieved well thus far (I implemented the basic format in 2009).
So now, as I consider departing from an LMS for at least one of my classes for spring, the question is: should I have each student create his/her own blog, then aggregate them, and have them comment on each others’ blogs for discussion? That’s been the model in all three classes I’ve taken, and is the model for Pedagogy First!, where we’ve been using 90 individual blogs for the POT Certificate Class, aggregated to one central website.
But is this the best way for my own classes?
In a more typical online class, discussion takes place in a forum. This keeps things focused and in one place. People are used to forums. All the classes I’ve seen with distributed activities instead of forums have students begging for a forum, whether it’s a threaded forum in an LMS, a Google group, or a Ning. People want a central place to talk, and an aggregated blog made of up all their disparate posts can become just an information center, not a coffee house.
My brilliant colleague Jim Sullivan teaches English composition using a class blog. Students are all authors on it, and they blog there, not on their own blogs. We’ve discussed this many times, and I’ve rejected it because students don’t control their own space. I think they should, but I’m aware that the idea of helping hundreds of students with their technical problems has been a major hurdle to moving ahead. Now it occurs to me that Jim’s approach may be the pedagogically middle ground rather than just easier and more convenient for me (I like pedagogical middle grounds).
A traditional forum in an LMS is set in its pattern and closed in its format (once the class is over, you usually can’t access it). Having everyone create their own blog lets students have their own permanent space, but really doesn’t encourage discussion (as I’ve discovered running Pedagogy First!). Is the One Blog approach the middle ground?
 Is it open and available?
It can be open and as loose as I want, and since I run my own WordPress I can promise it will stay open (Jim runs his own Typepad).
Is there a sense of student ownership?
While students don’t run their own space, students may feel that the One Blog is their space collectively, rather than individually (a classroom they can help create). This could subconsciously create a feeling of community.
Does it provide a good place for discussion?
Yes — not as much as a traditional forum, but more than individual blogs, because it is in one place and everyone is signed in just once, rather than being a guest on other people’s blogs. Plus, WordPress comments are nested. I have searched long and hard and have been unable to find forum software that is free, nests the comments so you can see which comments reply to which, and will tolerate multimedia.
Isn’t Ning a middle ground?
Ning is a social networking platform, a damned good one (nested! multimedia!), but to use it for free you have to advertise for Pearson. That isn’t middle ground — if there’s any advertising in my class at all (and I think there shouldn’t be) it should be incidental, not deliberate and appearing as if I am a spokesperson sponsoring a product (in many ways, this includes Blackboard and Moodle). And I don’t have time right now to figure out how to use an open source social networking platform (such as Oxwall) on my own service.
Although until now I’ve only used blogging for class as a student, I do use the blog platforms for my History 103 and History 104 at San Elijo. They’re not actually blogging on these (in terms of reflection or graded items), but rather posting theses for papers they turn in, and working together to create collections for class presentations. I could start by expanding this set-up into the One Blog format.
Sooooo…..
what am I not thinking of here as I make this decision?
By Lisa, on September 19th, 2011%
Over the last few years of developing a technique I’m happy with in discussion forums (see Discussion Goodness from 2009), I’ve also been experimenting with something similar in the classroom at San Elijo. I’ve done it for three semesters now, and I’m happy with it too.
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| Image by permission and copyrighted Lisa M Lane 2011 |
The idea is that every two weeks, we have “Lab Day”. On that day, everyone who has a laptop has to bring one (a smartphone is OK, just not as good for searching images), and Media Services brings me a batch of old clunker PCs without batteries for everyone else. There are cords all over the floor, and students arranged in small groups.
The task, during our 75 minute class, is to create a collection of three primary sources related to that week’s era, then develop athesis and present it to the class with the evidence. All work is posted on the class website.
Students search the web for primary sources related to, say, the French Revolution. They have to be sure that they really are primary sources (not a drawing of a guillotine from 1947), and the sources can be visual or textual (I usually prefer visual). They post them with citations and create a thesis for which their sources are evidence.
The class website (here’s the one from last spring) is on a WordPress platform, and the students have basic accounts. During the semester, they work on the website in two ways: by posting their homework thesis every Monday (after reading the textbook chapter) and by creating these source collections on Lab Day. I use several plugins to make it easy for students to post the media they find (mostly plugins that create a toolbar for a comment, since they’re all posting as comments). My student Nick asked me to add a “Like” button so they could rate each others’ theses, so I did that too.
Each group has their own space to work (these are Categories in WordPress), and they use comments so that all their sources appear on the same page.
At the beginning of the semester, each group just collects three sources, and talks about how they related to each other at the end of the period. Since it’s early, I often create topics for them (i.e. “find portrait paintings from the 18th century” for Group 1, and “find examples of residential architecture during the Enlightenment” for Group 2). But as the class progresses, we move from more factual discussions of sources into interpretations and theses. Near the end of the semester, they are able to analyze the sources to say something meaningful as a historical theme, with examples from many eras.
Near the end of the period, the group s present (I let them decide if they want a spokesperson or the whole group to come up — interestingly, about 80% of the time the entire group stands up front together). We have a projector that shows the website on the front screen s they present. Again, after the first time (when things are very new and strange), six groups of students can manage all this during one class period.
What’s interesting is that, as with my online classes, the students have some freedom to select the sources they want, so the focus of the presentation often reflects the interest of group members. As we get into broader theses, some groups develop a “specialty area” (say, war propaganda or women’s fashions). I also notice that there are hardly any absences on Lab Day! Students from home log in with TinyChat to talk to their group and participate because they don’t want to miss it. This is even though Lab Day is not graded directly, but rather just counts as part of Contribution.
The benefits of the exercise are several. The main one is affective: students enjoy working in groups and finding things on the internet, and they like having a self-contained class session where everything is immediate. Another benefit is that they get comfortable presenting early on – sharing becomes second-nature instead of something scary. They also get practice with the central historical skills (also our Student Learning Outcomes) of identifying primary sources, developing a historical thesis, and using the evidence to support the thesis. And they do it an environment that is quickly seen as non-threatening (I evaluate sometimes, we have peer evaluations sometimes, and sometimes we just do what we do). I can also provide in-person help as I walk around, with the website, with finding sources, with identifying sources, with whatever.
The drawbacks? I can’t really think of any, except when the network goes down or the technology gets funky. Or when there aren’t enough devices. But, in an emergency, we can do something similar with images from our textbook, or from collections I can bring up on the screen. It’s just not as cool that way.
By Lisa, on September 12th, 2011%
We don’t have a forum at our POT Certificate Class SMOOC (Small-to-Medium Open Online Class). Nor a Google Group (though that’s been suggested and may appear), nor a Moodle forum, nor a Ning.
When I took EC&I 831 from Alec Couros last fall, I felt we needed a forum, and he and I looked for one we liked, but nothing we found had the particular combination we wanted (no ads, free, nested comments and the ability to post multimedia), so we gave it up. On his current page for this semester, he’s listed many types of communication, but not a forum.
And now I notice that the Change MOOC, co-hosted by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, has a forum, but it’s kinda awkward. Not like a full-featured thing at all. On the main page, there are three Participating links for blogs, two for the newsletter, one for the backchannel, and one for threads. The class starts tomorrow and there are three posts for a class of hundreds.
And yet, all my college history classes feature forums as the heart of the action. I couldn’t do without them.
So why no forums for these classes? I think because the idea of distributed communication has become something we’re all taking seriously.
If we’re going to focus on the wonders of learning on the web as our topic, it makes sense that our participants should be communicating there rather than in a central location. We not only want them communicating via blogs, wikis and Facebook, but we also want them creating their own places and spaces (which is why the potcert11 class may yet have a Google Group, because the participants may be creating it — and they’re starting the Twitter thing, not me).
I also think there’s more staying power to a distributed community. If you have one space, as we all know from using learning management systems, the course seems finite. Even if the space is available after the class is over, the feeling is still that the class is over. But if the conversation is distributed (our class has a very active Facebook group, which surprised the heck out me), there’s a feeling of perpetuity. The river continues and you step in and out when you wish.
As Rick Schwier has noted, informal communities have higher levels of engagement over time. I wonder whether de-emphasizing a formal location for conversation makes these classes lean more toward informal learning, even though they are organized as classes, with set timeframes.
So come on, hit me with the research. Do distributed communities last longer? Are we right to “force” them instead of offering a rich place for a single discussion?
By Lisa, on May 13th, 2011%
My students have been searching for primary sources for weekly discussion, and I have a small collection of websites that have them. So I put those sites in Diigo, tagged them by class (i.e. “hist104resources”) then used the rss feed from my account to post them in an Remote RSS block in Moodle.
No problem.
But a couple of weeks ago I decided to offer extra credit if students found similar sites full of sources, and posted them in Diigo. The I would take the public feed of all bookmarks tagged “hist104resources”, and the Moodle block would show everyone’s contributions.
My policy is if I’m trying something new, it’s for extra credit, in case it doesn’t work.
It didn’t work.
 it should look like this Two students tried right away, in two different classes. They found sites, bookmarked them, tagged them “hist104resources” and “hist111resources”. They never showed up in the Moodle RSS block. They also didn’t show up in a search for either tag at the Diigo website (I saved 10 bookmarks with the tag hist104resources – the site shows one).The students were frustrated. So was I.
So I read up a bit at the Diigo forums, and the workaround seemed to be to form a group, except that folks said that groups plus tags don’t work. I tried it, with a group “mcchistory” then using the tags. Pasted the rss feed. No go.
So I made three groups, one for each class. Forget the tags, students, just share to the Hist111 group or the Hist104 group.
This seems to be working better, although my first student tried to resave her bookmarks and Diigo made me moderate them (without emailing me, and despite the settings that say anyone can join and add things, and despite me having “immediate alert” set – I wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t been writing this blog post).
We’ll see how it goes but this seems bizarre to me. I’ve used Diigo for years (I switched from Delicious, though I have it set up to save there too). I love the annotation feature. But once I tried to turn the social bookmarking truly social, bad things happened. And no response to my @diigo tweets, either.
So Alexandra Pickett, who runs a class in teaching online at SUNY (which I didn’t know about and looks great judging from the website and bookmarks!), wondered why I was unhappy with Diigo. This is why. But her interest and success with it encourages me to give it another chance.
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