This is a story of failure. Not, at first, the good kind of failure, the kind that leads to growth. In this case, it’s the kind of failure that leads you to go back on the trail, to find that tree around which you tied the ribbon, and take the other fork in the road.
For many years, I did all my web stuff myself. This was before a whole lot of software or webware – it was all HTML, which I taught myself from a For Dummies book (Quick Reference, 1997). Oh, and we had Webboard 1 (they’re on 9 now) for threaded discussion. Geeks used IRC and other ways to talk in real time. The sound of the modem was music to my ears.
Then Web 2.0 happened, and it was so exciting and easy to use all the cool stuff. Flickr for photos! Blogger and WordPress.com for blogs! Twitter for microblogging! You could post all your stuff, even create stuff, and there it is, all for free. No need to know HTML!
I should have known better. I’m a historian.
Problems at Pedagogy First!
Most of our participants at Pedagogy First!, at our encouragement, have been using Edublogs or WordPress.com for their blogs. At first, these blogging services provided for free the means to upload the things our participants created as part of the class. But, as time has gone on, fewer features have been enabled for free accounts at these services.
The number of plugins that both services offer has also decreased. We have been exploring workarounds in response to the decline in services like embedding media. First it was Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, where you could just by typing the URL into WordPress.com but Edublogs wasn’t so easy. Then we couldn’t get Edublogs to embed Jing or Slideshare (and WordPress.com could only if we used Vodpod).
Now our intrepid participants are posting audio and sure enough, WordPress.com won’t let them embed audio on the free account using an upload. So the trick here is to upload ones audio “somewhere on the web” and put in a shortcode like [audio http://myserver.net/myaudio.mp3].
To upload “somewhere” means they really should have access to a web folder somewhere and know how to ftp to it, or try a service (I tried yourlisten.com, but it didn’t work). As they helped each other, they discovered Soundcloud could work. But this sort of thing is dicey and inconsistent, and it freaks out the newbies. Come on, everybody, let’s run all over the web looking for ways to do something simple!
Problems for Me
At the same time, I have been experiencing problems with my own free services. Posterous won’t convert my video to embed it, regardless of the codec used. I recorded the weekly message to my students in Eyejot, and it didn’t send it to me for four days. Flickr wants money to share my photos with others.
And then I look at ds106, harbinger of all things self-participatory. Jim Groom at UMW just raised money for a separate server, and they’re giving students domain names and web hosting so everyone can run their own blogs (not, you’ll note, using WordPress.com or Edublogs).
Going Backward
So is it time to go back to that tree? Back up (beep, beep, beep) the road of Web 2.0 “freemium” service providers, who (like insurance companies) are charging us more and delivering less, and get back to that DIY spirit? I always recommend some DIY anyway – keeping your files on your own computer to protect them from loss, never writing anything directly into a system. Now we may have to build learning units around it.
As we revise the syllabus for next year’s Pedagogy First! class, I’m asking my colleagues whether we should recommend some hosting, and teach everyone how purchase hosting space and create their own blog (as ds106 did last year). Our college’s super computer guy is happy to administer some WPMU blogs for MiraCosta participants, which is wonderful, but every plugin will have to be approved and updated, and/or faculty will need to be taught how to use their web folder and upload things, a whole different level of web comprehension. They won’t know why they should make the choice between uploading to their web folder and uploading into WP — too many choices is bad for newbies. And, if this year is anything to go by, 75% of participants won’t be from MiraCosta, or won’t want a MiraCosta-controlled blog. We’ll need to teach them how to not only set up a blog but get a hosting account (likely at Hippie Hosting for $12/year), install WordPress, and then set it up. It’s a year long class, but still…
This was the sort of thing we taught in 1998. Here’s some HTML. Here’s how to ftp. Now have fun. Blog platforms should make it easier, but in their current push toward monetization, they really are adding another layer, something else to be learned, instead of substituting for that back end knowledge. We didn’t whine in 1998 about learning the back end — you had to know some in order to teach online.
Walking away
As for me, I’m creating a new WordPress blog of my own and using Posterous Importer to transfer my ds106 blog. And I’m crawling through those php.ini files trying to fix problems, knowing I cannot expect novices to do that in the fall.
I also know, of course, that you can never really go back….
Some members of the POT certificate class met in a Google Plus Hangout last week to talk about the differences between online and on-site pedagogy, and two of us tried to record it (myself, using Screenflow, and Walter Muryasz, using Snapz Pro).
On Walter’s video, he was never seen in the big window, because it was his computer (I think), and the visual quality wasn’t that good. On my video, I was never seen in the big window, though the video quality was better. On Walter’s video, he could not be heard. On my video, I could not be heard. In my case, I realized this was because I had not checked the button for recording microphone audio, only computer audio. I feared echo.
Which is funny, since the only way to get a full audio recording for this was to use Audacity to combine the audio from both videos. There was echo anyway even before I did that, and loud sounds of people sniffing (including me), clearing throats, rustling papers, but…
What the hell. We got a recording, and it was a damned good discussion. I’m also going to upload it to YouTube to see if I can get it to caption, at least at a rudimentary level.
Oooops. Some of the things we were asking people to do wouldn’t work, even though we tried to be helpful with the how-to. These were things that were second nature to those of us running our own blogs on our own servers, like embedding video, audio and slideshows. We’re used to full access to a myriad of plug-ins for doing fun things. But these just aren’t available on the free services, and we didn’t know.
It’s audio, video and screencast time, and some people can’t embed to show us their stuff.
So I tried things that can’t be embedded that simple way. Vodpod was the answer to two issues:
1) Slideshare, a slidecast with music. Vodpod said it wouldn’t accept the embed code from that site. So I just put in the URL. And it worked.
2) Jing. I used the URL http://www.screencast.com/t/gL1VF7SS2 and no problem. (It wouldn’t work with a Quicktime upload I put in Screencast, but it worked fine with a standard Jing in the Flash format.)
(Vodpod kept saying it was uploading to Facebook instead. But I told it WordPress, and it can’t load to Facebook because it doesn’t have my account.)
For Edublogs
In Edublogs, this Vodpod trick doesn’t work. You get an error code in Vodpod saying you need XML-RPC services, which you can’t enable without Edublogs Pro. That makes Slideshare and Jing a problem for Edublogs. Know any workarounds?
I am going over the mid-year surveys from our Pedagogy First! SMOOC (Small-to-medium open online class), and looking for patterns. It was a Google spreadsheet survey, so the summary isn’t very user-friendly, but here it is because it has pretty pie charts [pdf]. 42 people filled it out.
An overview of what’s up:
93% believe the class so far has been a positive learning experience. This is very high!
In terms of objectives, 62% are taking the class to improve teaching skills, and 21% to increase their knowledge of online tools for teaching.
In terms of goals, 62% intend to earn a POT online teaching certificate, while 24% are following along but intend to post only occasionally.
About the certificate, 38% are earning it to fulfill their own expectations, and 24% to advance their employment options. This is despite the fact that the certificate is an informal badge, issued by the volunteer Program for Online Teaching faculty, not an accredited institution of any kind. 36% are not going for the certificate.
So far, 29% have fulfilled the entire syllabus, and 17% plan to make up missed work.
31% started off well but personal or professional conflicts meant they stopped participating. This is of the 42 answering the survey, but the original number of participants was about 90, so most people have dropped. This was expected given the attrition in other MOOCs.
In terms of community, about a fifth feel strongly connected, and a fifth feel only partly connected. More interestingly, 38% say they feel only partly connected and that’s fine – we have a number of independent learners.
The sticky post we use for each week at the top of the blog is helpful to 76% of those surveyed. 88% felt the weekly email was helpful. So it may be that doing both is a good idea.
57% participated to some extent in the Facebook group, but 36% didn’t by choice. I know that several participants are leery of Facebook because of their horrid privacy policies, but given the 38% that don’t want more community connections, 57% is pretty high!
Although 48% are happy with the colleague connections, 24% want more emphasis on commenting on each other’s blogs. This is interesting, since everyone has been encouraged to do this, and doing so is up to the participants. 21% want a Google group or more formal place for discussion (only 3 people want to use Facebook for this). If we set something up, of course, the risk is fewer blog comments, so….
Mentors have been very or somewhat helpful to 53% of participants, but 21% didn’t get help and didn’t ask for it, and 26% didn’t know who their mentor was. We might want to put out a list so that mentors feel more responsible and participants know who to contact. We relied on mentors to contact their 4 or 5 mentees, but there may have been a communication gap.
45% see online teaching as a mode of delivery, which is probably the most basic definition. 24% see it as a separate discipline. Others didn’t choose either, or believed they were combined. Only 14% saw it as a subset of teaching in general.
74% claim to have gained confidence in selecting tools for online teaching. This is excellent.
81% feel ready to build a class around their own pedagogy instead of being led solely by the technologies they’re using. Also excellent!
Concerning class design, 60% like it the way it is, with assigned readings/viewings, required posts, and participants blogging in their own space. Comments indicate participants want more about designing discussion, building community, and creating assessments, with an emphasis on reflection. 12% (five participants) wanted less work overall.
Participants have enjoyed blogging, reading the Ko and Rossen textbook, trying lots of tools, and interacting with a community. Concerns mostly revolved around participants not having the time they hoped they’d have to participate more fully, and some felt there was just too much, especially too many tools to try. Since one of the things they most enjoyed was trying the tools, and one of the biggest concerns was too many tools, these may cancel each other out.
Seven participants (17%) indicated they would have liked less tool exploration and more emphasis on the reading in the first semester. Although this isn’t very many articulating this, I saw evidence that this was a problem in other ways, including frustration with tools in the first several weeks. This was exacerbated by people needing help and time setting up their own blog. We may need to provide more time for that in the first few weeks.
Today a group of us met in Google Plus Hangout. Everyone from the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class and Facebook Group is always invited, and it’s an open session. Today we had Todd, me, Walter, Norm, Maha, and Ted from POT Cert, and we were joined by Zack and Scott (that’s geographic representation from Arizona, northern and southern California, Dubai, New York, Alabama, and Japan).
Run by our Captain of Synchronous Sessions, Todd Conaway, the sessions have fallen into a Thursday pattern. Although originally envisioned as question and answer sessions for POT Cert Class participants, or maybe even a training or how-to opportunity, the fact that more experienced people tend to join has transformed the format into something more exploratory. The past few times people have shared sites they’re working with, in particular those focused on collaboration, mirroring what we’re doing in the sessions. As a result, we have spent several hour-long sessions following each other into various collaborative environments and trying things out together in real time.
Image cc E. Chris Lynch on Flickr
But sometimes we’re awfully silly. Maybe it’s the Google Hangout moustaches, or the way we all go into somewhere and one (always one) of us can’t get the damn thing to work, or the serendipitous arrival of people we’ve heard of but never met. Maybe it’s how I can say, “I don’t know if this works on a smart phone” and everyone whips out their phones to try. We all have our little foibles (Ted won’t do anything Facebook; I won’t do anything that costs money). Anyhow, it’s quite fun.
Other failed ideas included: FERPA t-shirts that say “It’s OK – I am not doing this in records maintained by the school”, having everyone pitch in for one Livescribe pen and mail it around, and actually reading instructions on a $6 bar of salted chocolate. We were enchanted by Scott’s use of a fancy radio microphone that made him sound wonderful despite the early hour in Japan, and he contributed a site for transcribing mp3 for captioning if used in Chrome.
We’ll do it again — all our distributed activities like this are posted on the … Distributed Activities page at the class site. The class is open, the synchronous sessions are open — won’t you join us?
Here’s my new acronym: FLCP. It stands for Faculty-Led Community of Practice.
I am working my way through the implications of Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice, mostly trying to decide whether the Program for Online Teaching‘s open, online Certificate Class is one, or should be one, or could be the start of one, or isn’t one at all.
As I did this, I began to consider that what makes our class different is that POT itself, our own group that facilitates the class, is led by faculty. Now, I love educational technologists, instructional designers, and people with masters degrees in the technology-oriented areas of education. But these positions are new compared to college faculty (which go back to the Middle Ages). Both are hired by institutions, to be sure. But there are some major differences that I think justify why communities of practice, particularly those relating to online teaching and the use of internet technologies for education, should be led by faculty.
The first and most important is that faculty-led communities can provide a focus on individual pedagogy instead of institutional goals, procedures, and culture. Often IDs and ed techs answer to the computer department heads, or deans of technology. They must keep institutional goals, enterprise systems, and political issues in mind. This can make individual pedagogy a secondary issue. The emphasis is often on enacting college policies (fulfilling transfer requirements,or student learning outcomes) rather than developing an instructor’s own approach. And often these possible approaches can be trapped due to institutional decisions to limit pedagogy through the support of a particular LMS or campus-developed system. I can’t think of a single educational technologist working at a college who has the power to make decisions about which technologies the institution supports. They, and instructional designers, tend to be caught in between the decisions of higher ups who want to invest in enterprise systems and make everyone use them, and the faculty trying to find their way.
Since centralized IT and educational administrative systems tend to focus on standardized systems, the institutional solution to unprepared faculty tends to be an emphasis on “training”. In this case the word is improperly used to define preparation for teaching online. “Training” is designed to bring everyone in the group to the same place, such as a level of skill for using a piece of software — training everyone to use the features of a learning management system would be a primary example. “Preparation” does not carry that connotation of homogeneity. “Education”, which would be even better, might suggest individual goals as the foundation of the work.
So instead of “best practices” (now often the domain of “experts), we could focus on “our practices”, those that best match the instructor’s strengths with the technological possibilities.
Faculty-led projects can also break down hierarchy. If the core group includes adjunct faculty, then barriers are broken down between full-time and part-time faculty. When it comes to teaching with internet technology (or just teaching in general), both groups have exactly the same issues. Folks connected to administration and technical services have to consider the groups differently (one clearly gets more support than the other), but a faculty group doesn’t.
In addition, if faculty are able to lead such a community, it says something in response to a novice’s concerns about being overwhelmed, having too many students, too much work, too much to do. Working with the technology is what educational technologists, administrators, and instructional designers do all day as their regular job. When they try to lead faculty in making changes, there is a feeling that, sure, those guys can do this stuff all the time, because it’s all they do. If a faculty member (or several of them) have made time for this, it must be crucial somehow to our main job, teaching.
Another benefit is that faculty-led communities of practice can act separately from formal evaluation processes, program reviews, curriculum development, etc. They can also work across the disciplines, apart from discipline-specific and department politics, including turf wars and disputes over standards.
I’ve been reading portions of Palloff’s and Pratt’s The Excellent Online Instructor, and at the end of a section they say that if you don’t have a formal process for getting online faculty together, you can make it yourself by hosting brown-bag lunches or hosting a synchronous meeting online. Although this is true (in some ways that’s how POT began) this puts faculty leadership in a backup position, when it should be the main idea. Faculty groups shouldn’t be playing shortstop to what technologists hit — they should be pitching.
But of course there are a couple of caveats. In George Otte’s article on faculty development and blended learning, he warns against “Shock and Awe”, having highly experienced and competent online faculty held up as a model to emulate. He says people admire such faculty (they are shocked by how much time it must have taken and awed by the result), but they think they are exceptional and don’t copy them. He claims that community-building is primary, and suggests an emphasis on hybrid courses as a good middle ground to encourage faculty to build dedication to teaching online.
Whether it emphasizes the hybrid model or one that’s fully online, a community of practice formed and led by faculty should be the place where new faculty are welcomed into a culture that puts teaching first. In this way, they can develop their own online pedagogy in a supportive environment.
Sources:
Otte, G. (2005). Using blended learning to drive faculty development (and vice versa). In J. Bourne and J. Moore (Ed.), Elements of Quality Online Education, Volume 6 in the Sloan-C Series (pp. 71-83).
Palloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2011). The Excellent Online Instructor: Strategies for Professional Development. Jossey-Bass, An Imprint of Wiley.
Wenger, E. (2006). Communities of practice – a brief introduction. Retrieved from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro.htm.
93% believe the class so far has been a positive learning experience. This is very high!
Mentors have been very or somewhat helpful to 53% of participants, but 21% didn’t get help and didn’t ask for it, and 26% didn’t know who their mentor was. We might want to put out a list so that mentors feel more responsible and participants know who to contact. We relied on mentors to contact their 4 or 5 mentees, but there may have been a communication gap.
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